Jane Austen. Lady Susan. 1794?; Amazon Digital Service, 16 May 2012. Ebook.

According to the fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, Lady Susan was written by Jane Austen when she was about eighteen years old and not published until 1871, long after she had died in 1817. The short novel is really very well done—its only weakness is the manner in which its conclusion was written. I will explain. Otherwise, it is fun to read and well under a hundred pages in printed form.

Lady Susan Vernon is quite different from any of Jane Austen’s heroines. She is really more like Vanity Fair‘s Becky Sharp. Lady Susan is calculating, manipulative, selfish, and probably more intelligent than any of the upper class people she associates with.

Widowed, she is carrying on an adulterous affair but manages to deftly cover things up. She is able to persuade nearly anyone who listens that she has been unfairly accused.

Similar to some other upper class women of any era, her daughter is an annoyance and a burden, but in the course of the story, we find out that Frederica is not only older than Lady Susan would like to admit but really quite sweet. The one thing about this story that is like the older Jane Austen is that Frederica does end up marrying the nice young man she deserves. Still, Lady Susan continues to get away with her behavior. She is no fool.

The story is told in epistolary form, that is, through a series of letters. In them we see how the siblings and in-laws of the late Lord Vernon do not really trust Lady Susan. We see how Reginald de Soucy becomes smitten and then repelled by Lady Susan. And we see how Lady Susan reveals herself in the letters back and forth between her and her best friend Alicia Johnson.

The weakness which I alluded to earlier is that the conclusion to the novel is a mere wrap-up. No more letters. It is an epilogue which includes the climax. It is as if young Miss Austen simply lost interest or energy; or, more likely, the people she had been entertaining were about to depart. Either way, she summarizes the ending. Because of that, Lady Susan is not the developed work that Emma or Pride and Prejudice are, but Lady Susan (the lady, not the story) is quite a character!

I read this after having seen the recent film Love and Friendship which is based on Lady Susan. (Austen did write another early short piece she called Love and Freindship [sic], but that is a different story.)

The film is very well done. It was perhaps superior in one important aspect other than fleshing out the ending better. Since the Lady Susan book is a collection of letters, there is a minimum amount of dialogue. However, the dialogue in the film is quite clever and captures the personalities of the book’s main characters quite well.

One slight difference is that in Lady Susan the Johnsons are English, and Mrs. Alicia Johnson worries that her husband wants to move back to the country away from the London social scene. In the film, the Johnsons are American Tories who left Connecticut after the Revolution, and Mrs. Johnson is afraid that her husband’s work will take him back to America. There are a couple of lines about the horrors of Connecticut which got a lot of laughs in the theater where I saw it—in Connecticut!

Ally Carter. See How They Run. New York: Scholastic, 2016. Print.

See How They Run is part two in the Embassy Row series. This is going to be at least a trilogy. If it imitates the author’s Gallagher Girl series, expect five or six volumes. Be patient.

See How They Run continues the adventures of Grace Blakely, granddaughter to the American ambassador to Adria. This appears to follow more closely the formula of the Gallagher Girls stories except that it is slightly more believable. This episode is an improvement over the first in the series, All Fall Down.

In this episode, Grace’s brother Jamie is visiting. He is on semester break from West Point. Grace and most of her acquaintances we have met in part one join her brother and his army friend, another cadet, at an outdoor party. Spence, Jamie’s friend, gets in a fight with Alexei, Jamie and Grace’s Russian friend. The next day Spence’s body is found with a broken neck. Alexei is immediately blamed as multiple cell phone videos of the fight at the party are posted on the Internet.

Much of the story this time involves the group of friends trying to prove Alexei’s innocence. In doing so, of course, they get involved in both international intrigue and Adrian politics. This is a better paced and overall more effective novel than the first. There are two things that help its execution: (1) We have a lot of the background history of Adria and its capital Valancia as well as of the various embassy brats from part one, so we do not have to re-hash those things; (2) Grace is beginning to deal with her past and happy to have her brother around, so she is learning to get along better with others. She is becoming a more sympathetic character.

Although both books so far get their titles from nursery rhymes, there does not appear to be much of a connection between the rhymes and the novels. In fact, in See How They Run there is an Adrian kids’ song that is repeated throughout the story because it is set during a two week festival similar to the French Bastille Day when the people of Adria celebrate the overthrow of the royal family that ruled in the 1700s—although the actual celebration sounds more like Guy Fawkes’ Day with bonfires, masks, costumes, and general mayhem. The song is sung during the celebration but has a connection with the drama at Embassy Row.

Do NOT spoil the book and read the last page until you have read it all. The last page nearly wrecks the book. I have written in the past that even though the lead characters are female in Ally Carter’s books, guys would probably like them because of the suspense and adventure. That is true of See How They Run until the last page. I suspect that boys reading it will come to the last page and groan, “Is it chick lit after all?”

Yevgeny Zamyatin. We. Trans. Natasha Randall. 1923; New York: Modern Library, 2006. Print.

I have seen We billed as the original dystopian novel. As best I can tell, it is. E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” was published in 1909, but this is the first novel with such a theme.

Orwell wrote a review of We in 1946 while he was working on 1984. He would later suggest, probably correctly, that Aldous Huxley had read We before writing Brave New World.

I recommend this edition of the book. Not only is it a lively translation, but the Foreword by Bruce Sterling and the translator’s Introduction are very helpful.

Prior to We, futuristic novels about planned societies and socialist utopias were propaganda novels like House’s Philip Dru: Administrator, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, or even Jack London’s The Iron Heel. They all imagined a happy, peaceful future with superior minds and governments in charge. We was one of the first to suggest that such a society might operate as a well-oiled machine might, but true humanity would be stifled.

Zamyatin (spelled various ways in the Roman alphabet) had been a relatively early adopter of Russian Communism. He was imprisoned and exiled to the provinces in 1905. He sneaked back and was exiled again in 1911.

He went to England where, among other things, he studied the socialist writings of H. G. Wells. He returned to Russia to join the revolution, but it seemed that Lenin did not like him any more than the Tsar had. He was arrested in 1919 and 1922 in spite of his friendship with Maxim Gorky. He was allowed to leave the U.S.S.R. in 1931 and settled in France where he died in 1937. He wrote some short stories, but We is his only novel.

We takes place in the distant future where the world is ruled by the One State whose leader, the Benefactor, has been unanimously elected for each of the last 48 years. The story is told by D-503—the people are ciphers, literally—who is a scientist working on the Integral, a space ship whose ultimate goal is to bring the One State ideology to the rest of the universe, “to make your life as divinely rational and exact as ours.” (61)

What is most striking about We is not the plot but narrative technique. Zamyatin was applying avant-garde art techniques to writing. It reads more like a contemporary postmodern piece out of Eastern Europe than something written nearly a century ago.

Each chapter presents itself as a short, hastily written diary entry of D-503. He discovers a lost humanity in his mind: He falls in love; he begins having dreams; he discovers a band of uncivilized people in the wilderness not unlike the Indian reservation of John the Savage in Brave New World. What he has been taught about humanity and happiness has been turned on its ear. How can he know what is really true?

D-503 is a mathematician, so there are many mathematical references. He describes faces and objects in nature as geometric figures. Since emotions are no longer accepted in the culture, he uses colors and shapes when he is trying to express an emotion. His chapters have keywords as though he were putting together a math text. If We draws from any previous work of literature, it is probably closer to Euclid’s Elements than anything.

Zamyatin clearly kept up with the science of his day, hinting at space travel as hypothesized by Einstein. Still, the telephones still have dials, and how much more could D-503 had rapturously meditated on shapes if he had known about fractals!

We is the grandfather of the dystopian novels. It is a challenge to read—but a delight as well.

As Lenin envisioned, children are immediately taken up by the state. We implies that a woman who has a child is then killed to insure that no emotional connection is maintained. “Pure reason,” as Kant would say. The One State culture admires Taylor and Ford who promoted efficiency. Thoreau wrote in “On Civil Disobedience” that the state is an expedient. Socialism turns his critique on its ear and claims a totally planned society is superior because it is the most expedient.

“Our poets don’t soar in the empyrean any more; they came down to earth; they keep step with us…” (61)

Here is something the United States Supreme Court should take to heart. The court seems to be granting “rights” because it can, it is supreme after all. But is that what the true meaning of a right is? This dystopian definition sounds a lot like the Court’s definition in recent years:

Even the most adult of the Ancients knew: the source of a right is power, a right is a function of power [rex lex anyone?]. Take two trays of a weighing scale: put a gram on one, and on the other, put a ton. On the one side is the “I,” on the other is the “WE,” the one state. Isn’t that clear? Assuming that “I” has the same “rights” compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming a gram can counterbalance a ton.(103)

Pure Hume or Hegel! Definitely not Locke or Jefferson!

The reader can recognize some of the above as elements of Brave New World. But the temptations of the subversive I-330 are precursors to those of Winston’s girlfriend Julia in 1984. And the ending? Well, you will have to see for yourselves.

We is well worth reading! When we take a look at the world today, it is probably closer to We than any of the other novels be they utopian or dystopian. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Gordon Korman. Masterminds: Criminal Destiny. New York: Harper, 2016. Print.

This is part two of Gordon Korman’s Masterminds series. While it could be read on its own, Criminal Minds is meant to be read in order. The title suggests the main psychological conflict.

Four young teens have escaped the treacly-nice pseudo-Utopia of Serenity. They discovered that they were cloned from four different notorious criminals. The question is simple—are they genetically programmed to be bad or does it depend on their upbringing? As they say, Nature or Nurture? (The humorous answer is simply, “Either way, it’s your parents’ fault!”)

In this volume of the story, the question is somewhat moot. Technically, they are runaways. Yes, they are the subjects of a cruel science experiment, but to escape they have to steal cars and do other things to evade the Purple People Eaters—a.k.a. the Serenity Security Force.

Gordon Korman’s humorous adventure stories often involve break-ins or break-outs. Most of his Swindle stories had one or the other or both: break into the store of a crooked sports card dealer, break out of a cabin in the woods while being held hostage.

A lot of Korman’s humor comes from fish out of water situations his characters find themselves in such as Born to Rock or the hilarious Gifted. Here is one example.

Remember that our four escapees have been misled so much about the real world that they really do not know a lot about how things work or how they are perceived. For example, the Serenity school taught them that the Boston Tea Party was a literal British tea time where American and English officials cordially negotiated American independence.

When the kids get to a big city, they discover that cloning humans is illegal worldwide. So Amber walks up to a policeman and tells him that she and three of her friends are clones that have recently escaped from a cloning experiment in the New Mexico desert. The next thing she knows, she is being taken in for psychiatric observation.

What does that mean? Another breakout , of course!

The biggest breakout is yet to come. That will involve one of the criminal master minds whom one of the kids is cloned from. There will be no spoilers here!

Criminal Minds is wild and entertaining. One could argue that the novel is not only raising a question about nature vs. nurture but also questions about just government and even just war. The characters themselves are all twelve and thirteen, right around the age that most of us discover that the world can be a pretty unfair and unforgiving place.

Ally Carter. All Fall Down. New York: Scholastic, 2015. Print. An Embassy Row Novel.

All Fall Down is the first in what looks like will be another Young Adult series by Gallagher Girls author Ally Carter. This resembles the books in that first series because All Fall Down also involves international intrigue. Only, this time instead of straight espionage like the Gallagher Girls who attended a school for spies, this novel is set in an embassy.

Sixteen year old Grace (I do not believe her last name is given) witnessed her mother’s death three years ago. She saw the man whom she is certain killed her mother. However, everyone tells her that her mother died when a fire burned her antique shop down. Grace spent nearly a year under mental observation complete with drugs and cuffs because she insisted she saw her mother die at the hands of a man with a distinctive scar on his face.

When her Army major father gets sent into a battle zone, she is sent to the American Embassy in the nation of Adria (think Croatia or Slovenia) where her grandfather has been the American ambassador for twenty-five years. This is where her mother grew up and, because she was an Army brat, the closest place she has to a home. The problem is that her grandfather and others at the embassy treat her like damaged goods. “I am not crazy,” she says to virtually everyone she talks to.

When she discovers the man with the scar in Adria and overhears him talking about an assassination, she gets very scared. This story is a teen thriller and keeps the pages turning.

Grace is not necessarily a terribly likeable character, but we do understand her paranoia. She is still recovering from watching her mother die the way she did, especially when no one believes her. The story is told in the first person, so we do understand what Grace is thinking, and we certainly can sympathize with her situation.

She does make some friends on the Adria Embassy Row including Rosie, a tiny German ex-gymnast; Noah, son of a Brazilian soccer star and an Israeli diplomat; Megan, another girl who has lived at the American Embassy most of her life; and Alexi, a Russian friend of her older brother who is at West Point. Together they do have an array of skills and contacts, but Grace’s defensive personality tends to push everyone away.

The conflict is not just due to the mystery and the accusations about Grace, but also those teen interpersonal conflicts aggravated by serious trauma. Like Cold Fury, this is not teen chick lit. It is an easy thriller on a number of levels. Not only is there the sinister man with the scar, but catacombs from Roman times and strange happenings at the abandoned Iranian Embassy. There is a lot going on.

One warning, like Carter’s Gallagher Girls books, it is clear that Grace’s story is meant to continue. I am sure a part two is in the works. Indeed it is already labeled as An Embassy Row Novel. While one of the main mysteries is solved, there are a lot of dangling loose ends. I suspect that it may take a few volumes to tie them all up.

John Taylor Gatto. An Underground History of American Education. Rev. Ed. Michael H. Keehn, 2003. E-book.

I had a friend who would share articles he copied with others. Many times he would highlight passages with a yellow highlighter. Occasionally he’d say, “This one is so good, I just wanted to dip the whole page in a bucket of yellow ink.” An Underground History of American Education is a book that ought to be soaked in yellow highlighter ink. This is one powerful book.

Gatto’s thesis, which he exhaustively documents, is that American education in the twentieth century has accomplished precisely what people a hundred years ago were hoping to accomplish. Yes, that includes a dumbing-down and increasing dependency. Here is Woodrow Wilson:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. (1280) [All references are Kindle locations, not page numbers].

The author was for many years a middle school teacher in Harlem. He was recognized twice as a teacher of the year for New York City and once for the whole State of New York. He eventually resigned out of frustration. His resignation letter was published in The Wall Street Journal. As much as he would do things to improve his students’ abilities, the powers that be would ultimately thwart his plans and ideas. Why? he would ask. His conclusion was that the problem was systemic.

He began researching the origins of the modern public school system, starting with Horace Mann and focusing on the first four or five decades of the Twentieth Century. Things were pretty much in place by World War II and have not changed that much since.

Interestingly, part of his thesis is reminiscent of complaints we are hearing during the 2016 election cycle. Big business and big government have scratched each other’s backs for so long, and the ordinary citizen loses his rights and is forgotten. A National Education Association (NEA) director said government and business together would “accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.” (1325) This was not a complaint. This was an announcement made by the NEA in 1933 about what it hoped to do.

Gatto goes into great detail that this planning was understood to be “scientific.” As he puts it, “The entire academic community here and abroad had been Darwinized and Galtonized by this time [1930] and to this contingent [the NEA] school seemed an instrument for managing evolutionary destiny.” (1431) This included “selective breeding” and outright racism like Darwin’s Descent of Man. We are reminded this was not only a time of eugenics, but even forced sterilization, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927.

I recall being told by David Bradshaw, Oxford don and expert on Aldous Huxley, that Brave New World was not originally meant as a dystopia, but to give an idea of what a planned society might look like. Like many intellectuals in the 1930s, Huxley was an advocate of central planning and at the time was sympathetic to both Germany and the Soviet Union. (In fairness to Huxley, he would change, as we know both from the 1946 introduction he wrote for Brave New World as well as his 1958 Brave New World Revisited.)

One quotation from Arnold Gesell, who as early as 1909 was calling for schools to advance racial purity, was so blatantly racist that he would have been kicked off the Yale faculty if he were still there today. Yet many schools still use his techniques for screening and tracking students. Gatto puts it this way:

What gradually began to emerge form this was a Darwinian caste-based American version of institutional schooling remote-controlled at long distance, administered through a growing army of hired hands, layered into intricate pedagogical hierarchies on the old Roman principle of divide and conquer. (1500,1501)

Even since 1960, the number of elected local school boards had shrunk from over 40,000 to about 15,000 in 1998. (1688) He notes that in 1991 the New York City school system had more school administrators than the entire continent of Europe. (9037) In most places today, parents have little input or connection to their children’s education.

By 1944, a repudiation of Jefferson’s idea that mankind had natural rights was resonating in every corner of academic life. Any professor who expected free money from foundations, corporations, or government agencies had to play the scientific management string on his lute. (1506)

By 1996 Time magazine would editorialize that democracy was outmoded: “The modern world is too complex to allow the man or woman in the street to interfere in its management.” (1512)

Despite the century-long harangue that school was the cure for unevenly spread wealth, exactly the reverse occurred—wealth was 250 percent more concentrated at century’s end than at its beginning…it’s as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community. (1522-28)

Gatto is an English teacher, and what he shares about literature, it sounds like he was exciting in the classroom. “I always knew school books and real books were different. Most kids do.” (1535) “Real books demand that people actively participate by asking their own questions. Books that show you best questions to ask aren’t just stupid, they hurt the mind under the guise of helping it.” (1570)

Preach it, brother!

There is so much more. This book helped me understand things that have happened in my teaching experience. Now, all except for one year, I taught in private schools, so the students were generally treated with more respect than Gatto’s Harlem experience. Still, nearly everyone had to go through some teacher education program, and some teachers and administrators and most education professors have partaken of the elitist Kool-Aid to some degree.

An Underground History of American Education is not a conspiracy theory text. The author cites hundreds of sources. Yes, including Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and many others. He lets the founders of the system speak for themselves. The one problem with the book is that the author often does not give the references. Many times when he does, they are only partial. I recognized a few because I had read them before and knew his attribution was correct. That is a technical problem that will turn off some readers.

Gatto suggests that teachers who really motivate their students and get their students to advance are going against the grain. They may have to be subversive—in a word, the true underground. Indeed, among other recommendations that he makes, he encourages parents to try home schooling. His last chapter is worth reading to get an idea of what can work. Social engineers are not going to like it, but do we want a Brave New World or a one that respects life, liberty, and property?

I cannot help making a connection between An Underground History of American Education and C. S. Lewis’s lectures which became known as The Abolition of Man. Lewis was expressing a philosopher’s concern that many materialistic ideas rooted in speculative teachers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Carnegie, and others would result in the abolition of man. He did not mean an extinction of the human race; he meant people with no feelings or moral awareness—an awareness, for example, that they are made in the image of God, that hey have consciences, and that God has put eternity in their hearts. (See Ecclesiastes 3:11) Lewis was speaking philosophically and from history. Read Gatto and see how it is being done, how the powers that be are turning mankind into mere automata and how mankind is coming to be abolished.

O. S. Hawkins. The Jesus Code. Nashville: Nelson, 2014. Print.

A few years back there was a book called The Bible Code, which purported to find all kinds of prophetic historical facts embedded in the Hebrew Scriptures. Then, of course, there was The Da Vinci Code, which claimed to reveal a secret life of Jesus on earth after his ministry. Of course, there were numerous knock-offs of both books.

Well, The Jesus Code is nothing like either of those “code” books. To be honest, the title may be a bit misleading because of titles like those just mentioned. Having said that, this is a concept book worth reading.

There are numerous books out there asking questions about Christianity and the Bible—”If God is good, why is there evil” sort of thing. This is different. The Jesus Code asks fifty-two questions from the Bible for the reader to answer. The author then gives his answer to each—mostly based on other things the Bible says.

The reader is certainly free to disagree with Hawkins’ answers, but he picked some very good questions. Here are a few:

        Has God indeed said?
        Who am I?
        How long will you falter between two opinions?
        If a man dies, shall he live again?
        Who can find a virtuous wife?
        Is it right for you to be angry?
        Lord, what do you want me to do?
        What must I do to be saved?

Two questions and answers in this book are done especially well. They are both questions that Jesus asked His disciples:

        Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?
        Who do you say that I am?

Even when He walked the earth, people had a lot of theories about who Jesus was. They still do. Then, more important for the individual reader is to answer that question for him or herself: Who do you say Jesus is?

For the most part The Jesus Code does a direct and clear job answering those tough questions. God asks these questions in the Bible to challenge our thinking. Hawkins does a nice job for the reader of pointing them out and getting us to think.

One slight caveat—the author is a cessationist. He believes God seldom, if ever, performs miracles these days. That is too bad for him, I suppose, but most Bible-believing Christian in most parts of the world understand both the necessity and the power of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps there is one more question from the Bible to ask:

        Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?
        (Acts 19:2 KJV)

Even so, The Jesus Code is well worth reading. The chapters are short, so you can read them quickly or, perhaps, spend some time yourself meditating on each question.

Who do you say Jesus is?

Brandilyn Collins. Double Blind. Nashville TN: B and H, 2012. Print.

Double Blind is a curious thriller. It is marketed, as it should be, as a plot-driven suspense story like those of Danielle Steele. It even refers to Jason Bourne. However, its main plot element is straight out of science fiction—not outer space sci-fi, but high-tech sci-fi like Cory Doctorow. Like his Little Brother, it is even set in the San Francisco Bay area in the very near future.

Lisa Newberry has been battling depression since her husband died about a year ago. A tech startup called Cognoscenti has developed a microchip known as the Empowerment Chip that is implanted in the brain to cure depression. Lisa is looking for anything that will take her out of her melancholia, so she volunteers to be a beta tester for this procedure.

After some minimally invasive brain surgery, her chip kicks in. The depression is gone! It is a miracle for Lisa.

Then something weird happens. She starts remembering something that never happened to her. She replays in her mind over and over a murder that she commits. But it is not her memory. Indeed, she sees everything from the perspective of a tall man who strangles his girlfriend , hides the body in a zippered suitcase, drives to a body of water, and tosses the suitcase into the water.

It is as though the chip has planted the memory of someone else in her head.

With the help of a police sketch artist whom she hires, she is able to actually identify the victim. From the details of the house and the automobile in her memory, she identifies the man, too. He is Dr. Hilderbrand, the rich and powerful CEO of Cognoscenti.

Clearly, I do not want this review to be a spoiler, but Double Blind‘s plot is clever. There are numerous twists, and things are not as they seem. Frankly, it could make a decent film.

There are surprises right to the very end. Still, it is not too much to say that the first few chapters very effectively describe what it is like to be depressed. We understand why our protagonist would even consider such a procedure: anything to get rid of this hopelessness…

As I was talking about this book to another person who had read Double Blind, she thought it was a cautionary tale about the mark of the Beast from the Bible’s Book of Revelation. Implanted chips could be used to keep track of financial transactions but also keep track of people. The name Cognoscenti does have Latin roots and similar meaning to—dare I say it—Illuminati. Beware and be wise. Enjoy the tale.

Steven R. Schirripa and Charles Fleming. Nicky Deuce: Welcome to the Family. Perf. Joe Grifasi. New York: Random, 2005. Audio CD.

Twelve-year-old Nicholas Borelli, Jr., was supposed to go to a posh summer camp for three weeks while his parents went on a cruise. A sudden health emergency closed the camp right before Nicholas’s session was to begin. His parents asked Nicholas Sr.’s widowed mother if she would be willing to take her only grandson for that time. Of course, she would.

What she did not tell Nicholas’s parents was that her other son Francis (Frankie) was living with her after his divorce. Frankie and Nicholas, Sr., had not spoken in years.

For the first time in his life, Nicholas discovers his father’s roots—roots his father never mentioned and seems to want to avoid. His grandmother still lives in the same Brooklyn apartment where she and Nicholas’s grandfather raised his father and his uncle.

When Nicholas pulls up in a chauffeured Lincoln and kids in the neighborhood start pounding on the car, he knows it is going to be a lot different from the tony New Jersey suburb where he lives. “Open up!” “Hey, Richie Rich!”

Immediately, Nicholas’s Uncle Frankie tries to educate him in the ways of urban Italian-Americans. No one is going to respect an Italian who goes by the name of Nicholas. He’s got to be Nick or Nicky. His father was already Nicky, so he’ll be Nicky the Second or, better yet, Nicky Deuce.

So that is how Nicky (formerly Nicholas) is introduced to the goombas at Frankie’s social club. The guys all have nicknames like Sallie the Butcher, Jimmy the Iceman, and Oscar the Undertaker. When Nicky sneaks a look into the gym bag Frankie always carries to work, he finds a Kevlar vest and some pistols. As they say, welcome to the family.

It seems that Nicky’s parents still want his life structured, so they tell his grandmother to send him to summer school. Nicky is an A student at an exclusive prep school. He does not need summer school. That is for kids who flunk. But he goes.

Yes, he does get picked on some, but he also learns to hold his own. He bails out a classmate named Tommy on what is to Tommy a tricky math question. Still, Nicky learns that while Tommy claims that he cannot do math formulas, he has discovered cheats for the great Dark Planet video game on his own. In other words, he is not stupid.

Nicky also develops a crush on a girl in that math class. He thinks Donna is the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. Tommy warns him, though, that her ex-boyfriend Conrad is a bully whom Nicky has already met. He just might be looking for an excuse to cause “Richie Rich” more pain.

He goes to the movies with Tommy (short for Tomasino), and Tommy includes Nicky in on a deal to make some easy money. A man who has a makeshift office in the back of a dry cleaner’s gives the boys $100 in twenties and tells them to spend as much as they want and bring back $50.00 to him in tens or smaller bills. Is this counterfeit? Traceable serial numbers from a robbery? Who makes money in such an easy way? It reminded this reader of the way Jay Gatsby may have made money off stolen bonds.

The bully Conrad becomes the least of Nicky’s worries when another of Tommy’s contacts—Frankie would call him a real wiseguy or goodfella—offers the boys $80.00 each to deliver two small packages wrapped like shirts from a cleaner. Nicky can’t sleep that night. Why hasn’t Frankie returned in three days? Why can’t the guy deliver the packages himself? Why was his uncle’s name in a newspaper article about a building blown up in a gang war that is on the same block as the warehouse where they are to deliver the packages?

Two men are missing and presumed dead from that explosion. Is Frankie one of them? Or is he responsible for their deaths? None of the other men in the social club have been around either. How did those guys get nicknames like Butcher and Undertaker anyhow?

Welcome to the family, Nicky. And keep smiling.

P.S. The recorded audio version of this story is great. Mr. Grifasi is an effective story teller and does the voices in authentic Brooklynese. He must be a goomba himself.