Glory Road, by Bruce Catton*****

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gloryroadBruce Catton was known as a popular historian when he first published books about the American Civil War, because of his narrative nonfiction format. All of the books being released digitally now are ones previously published in a non-digital age. This reviewer hunted down Catton’s three volume Centennial History of the Civil War at a used bookstore some time back, and although they were among the best I have ever read by anyone on this topic, I was convinced that anything he had published earlier on the subject was probably repackaged in this trilogy, and so I stopped reading Catton, thinking I was done. Thank goodness Net Galley and Open Road Integrated Media posted the galley for this second volume of Catton’s Army of the Potomac trilogy. Now that I am disabused, I will have to find the first and third volumes also, because Catton is so eloquent that he can spin ordinarily dry-sounding military history into as good a read as the most compelling fiction.

Although his Civil War books are not written in academic format, there is no denying Catton’s research or his credentials. He was one of the founders of American Heritage Magazine, and served as its senior editor until his death. During World War II, he was the US government’s Director of Information for the War Production Board, then later worked in a similar capacity for the Department of the Interior and Department of Commerce.

Frankly, in order to spin the story of the three battles that comprise most of this volume out in such a conversational manner, dropping anecdotes in at just the right moments and then carrying on so as to make us feel as if he is a journalist traveling with the Union forces and we are concealed cleverly in his knapsack, bespeaks a remarkable amount of research. Only after reading the whole thing, spellbound, did it occur to me that for every vignette he included to make the telling more personal and more interesting, he must have edited out ten or twenty. The result is a masterpiece.

I came to this work as a former instructor in the field, and wished I had read his work in time to make use of it in the classroom. At the same time, it is sufficiently accessible that someone with no prior knowledge of the Civil War should be able to keep up just fine as long as they are able to read at the level of a high school senior or community college student. There is a definite bias toward the Union, which frankly is a requisite to my enjoyment of Civil War history. (Those that feel otherwise can go find Shelby Foote’s work.)

I never in a thousand years thought I would even consider rereading some of this war’s most painful battles—the battle of Fredericksburg being perhaps the most prominent in this regard—but Catton has some little-told things to say about these battles, and in particular about Burnside and that Tammany Hall political general, Sickles, that I hadn’t seen before. I had viewed Burnside as a failure from start to finish, but he makes a case that a lot of the mishandling of this situation was due to an ungainly Federal bureaucracy that wasn’t good at receiving information and passing it along in a prompt, useful manner. It gave me pause, and reminded me that we should never assume we know enough about something to call ourselves experts.

The Battle of Chancellorsville is likewise told in a manner fresh and readable, but the bulk of the text deals with that decisive, costly three day fight at Gettysburg. He gives an even-handed assessment of both Hooker and Meade, and again I learned some things I didn’t know before.

Catton’s writing is so engaging that it is destined to live for a long, long time after he is gone, educating subsequent generations. I found myself resolved, at the end of this volume, to look for other galleys of his work to read and review, and when there are no more left, to track down those still missing on my next pilgrimage to Powell’s City of Books.

For you, however, it is fortunate that Open Road is releasing this work digitally, so you won’t have to turn out the shelves of every used bookstore in the US in order to locate it. It will be available for purchase November 3, 2015 for your phone, computer, or e-reader, and is highly recommended to anyone with even a passing interest in the American Civil War.

Simply brilliant.

W.E.B. DuBois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, by WEB DuBois*****

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WEB DuBois SpeaksI read this book about 2 years ago, and then found I was intimidated by the 60 multicolored sticky notes that I had used to flag all the brilliant passages, and so I told myself I would review it…later. I didn’t have a DRC this time; I bought that book fair and square at full jacket price from Pathfinder Press many years ago, and then my life was too hectic for me to find time for it. And make no mistake, this is not a collection you want to take on while multitasking. This is deep, serious, articulate writing from one of the most brilliant civil rights leaders the world has yet known. And so although he has been dead for a long time, like Dr. Martin Luther King, his words have made him immortal. I recently read and reviewed another title about this luminary scholar and class fighter, and that reminded me that I had some unfinished reviewing to do for him…or maybe for me. Here we go.

It was DuBois that wrote The Souls of Black Folk, a wrenching reminder that even those Caucasian folks up north that think they have no racial biases, often have some issues they haven’t yet faced. It was true when he wrote it, and I’m sorry to say it is largely true today as well. In the letters and speeches, he takes the pain laid bare in that famous book and explains what the source of racism is, and what we can do about it.

Dr. King wrote the intro to this series of speeches and letters, and I actually liked that introduction better than I like the Dream speech. It has more substance. When you get this book, for heaven’s sake, don’t skip the introduction. In fact, the book is worth having just for the introduction.

Because it is a collection rather than a memoir, it isn’t linear. The opening text is a short overview of his own life, and so when we come to the second piece in the book, the reader steps backwards in time. Although it’s harsh and hard to read in some places because of the writer’s capacity to convey the pain that he and other Black folk have endured so that everyone can at least taste it for a moment, there is more to it than that. This volume is singularly useful, because in addition to laying America’s problem out bare and plain, DuBois has concrete recommendations for change. They are radical, but then we’ve seen what band-aid measures and the electoral process has done for Black folk, and anyone that regards the matter with any degree of seriousness has to recognize that what’s happened so far is a train wreck, primarily for African-Americans and other people of color, but also for all Americans, because those of us that have lived here for our entire lives have been denied the capacity to find out what it’s like to live without racism.

Is that asking too much?

DuBois became a deeply political individual, a Marxist that founded the NAACP, and eventually left that same organization because of political disagreement. He provides a thorough explanation of his experiences and reasoning. When he presents the problem as an economic one, it provides a path forward, and although he is gone now, it isn’t too late for the rest of us to climb on board, if we care deeply enough to do so.

DuBois’s speeches and letters reflect the progress of his thinking, and so some of what he says toward the end is very different from the ideas set forth earlier. It’s a good idea to read it in order, even though it’s a collection, because then the reader can see his personal and political evolution. I don’t think there has ever been anyone more articulate, more brilliant as a writer and speaker, than DuBois.

If you agree that the USA needs big change in order to end the institutions and practices that have created second-class citizenship for African-Americans, and if you want to see justice done for the families of all the men, women, and children that have lost their lives at the hands of racist cops and vigilantes even during the tenure of America’s first Black president, then you ought to get this book. It’s radical, but maybe it’s time to consider radical measures. Because the government and the elected officials that run it won’t correct this problem for us. We can’t leave it in the hands of others; we have to do this ourselves.

And DuBois explains it better than anyone else.

Mot, by Sarah Einstein*****

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This title, a real humdinger by a promising new writer, was recently released, so I’m running it one more time.

seattlebookmama's avatarSeattle Book Mama

Einstein_Mot.inddSarah is forty, and she’s floundering. Her life’s work, like her mother’s, has been to try to make the world a better place, and so she works at a homeless shelter as its director. But things are falling apart there; whereas once upon a time most of the mentally ill homeless were passive, now meth and other addictions have created so much anger and violence that she isn’t even safe there. She’s been physically attacked three times, one of which was sexual, and her life has been threatened on an ongoing basis. Too often she is the only staff member present, and it’s getting scary out there.

Many thanks to Net Galley and University of Georgia Press for the DRC. This title goes up for sale September 15.

In addition, her marriage, which was predicated upon a mutual dedication to social justice issues and the understanding that neither she nor…

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The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, by Aldon Morris*****

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thescholardeniedMorris considers DuBois the father of American sociology, and Morris is right. This is, of course, not the first time a Black man was robbed of credit for an accomplishment that was instead credited to a Caucasian American. It happens all the time. But until I ran across this scholarly study, I hadn’t thought about DuBois and sociology because I had never studied the latter. As an admirer of DuBois’ historical and political role, I was drawn to this book when I found it on Net Galley. Thank you to that excellent site as well as University of California Press for the DRC, which I was given in exchange for an honest review.
It is available for purchase now.

DuBois was a venerable intellectual, an academic light years ahead of most Americans of any racial or ethnic background. He was the first Black man to graduate from Harvard University, and in addition to his graduate work there, he also studied in Berlin under such luminaries as Max Weber and others. In Europe, he was treated as an equal by those he studied with, and I found myself wondering a trifle sadly—for him, not for us in the USA—why he chose to return here. And the answer is so poignant, so sweetly naïve, that I wanted to sit down and cry when I found it. Because once he had the empirical facts with which to debunk the whole US-Negro-inferiority mis-school of mis-thought, he genuinely believed he would be able to elevate African-Americans to a state of equality in the USA by laying out the facts. The racists that created Jim Crow laws in the south and an unofficial state of cold racism that let Black folk in the Northern states know where they were welcome and where they were not, would surely roll away, he thought, if he could reasonably haul out his charts, his graphs, his statistics, and demonstrate flawlessly, once and for all, that discrimination against Black people was based on incorrect information.

See what I mean? I could just cry for him.

So although DuBois was the first American to go to Europe, study sociology, and return with more and better credentials than any American academic, he could not persuade anyone with authority to bring about change, was not even allowed to present his findings to anybody except Black people in traditional Black colleges, because another school of sociologists, the Chicago school, were busy promoting armchair theories based on little data, or bogus data, all showing that Black people simply were not smart enough to become professionals or take on anything above and beyond manual labor, and of course, he was Black, so he must not be that smart, right?

Pause to allow your primal scream. It’s galling stuff.

Caucasian professors in Chicago had done a bit of reading, and with regard to Black people, decided that their craniums were too small to hold enough brain-iums. And just as there is one reactionary in every crowd that the newspapers will flock to in order to show that there is across-the-board agreement, so did Booker T Washington stand before any crowd that would listen to him (and the white academics just loved him), in order to say that it was the truth, that it was going to be a long time before the Negro was “ready” to do the difficult tasks involving critical thinking that had been so long denied him. Tiny steps; patience; tiny steps. Meanwhile, he extolled his fellow Black Americans to enroll their sons and daughters in programs teaching “industrial education”, so that they would be ready to do manual labor and put food on their families’ tables.

All of the studies that backed this line of thinking were deductive, starting with the answer (inferior beings, manual labor) and then finding the questions to fit that answer. DuBois had done inductive research because he was searching for information rather than looking for a rational-sounding way to keep a group of people entrenched in an economic underclass.

DuBois made the connection between the socialist theory he had studied and the material evidence before him: there were people getting rich off the backs of dark-skinned people, and they had a vested interest in maintaining Black folk as an underclass. Ultimately, he turned to political struggle, and that is how I knew about him, not as a sociologist, but as a Marxist. He also became the father of the interdisciplinary field of African-American studies. He helped found the NAACP.

This scholarly work, like just about anything produced by a university press, is not light reading. Rather, the author presents his thesis and synopsis, and then carefully, brick by brick, starts back at the beginning to build his case. His documentation is flawless, and his sources are diverse and strong. There is some repetition in the text, but that is appropriate in this type of writing. He is not there to entertain the reader, but to provide an authentic piece of research that will stand the test of time, so there is a little bit of a house-that-jack-built quality to the prose.

For serious admirers of DuBois’s work, this will be an excellent addition to your library. For those interested in sociology as a field, this is for you, too. And to those with a literacy level that permits you to access college-level material and who have a strong interest in African-American history and/or civil rights, this is a must-read.

For these readers, I recommend, in addition, The Souls of Black Folk, which I had not regarded as sociology-based material until now, though I have read it twice; and a collection of speeches by DuBois, which I have been intending to review for some time, and which will soon grace this page of my blog.

Morris has done outstanding work, and I like to think that if DuBois were here, he would be proud to see it.

A People’s History of the Civil War, by David Williams***

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With an introduction scribed by the late great Howard Zinn (and the book edited by same), I figured I just had to add this book to my collection. It bills itself as a history of the marginalized groups of this era, those seldom represented in traditional history. I found it at my favorite local used bookstore, Magus Books, which is near University of Washington, and I scooped it immediately.

The tome sat in the upstairs powder room for months, but we didn’t look at it all that often. I had trouble climbing on board. Eventually I realized there were two things bothering me here. One is that it treats both Union and Confederate governments, along with the powerful moneyed interests backing the two sides of the conflict, as equally wrong and equally culpable. With this I sharply disagree. Whereas no doubt plenty of war profiteers made a great deal of money, and no doubt working people on both sides deserved better pay and greater prosperity, this was not an equally-wrong war. In fact, the first Marxist to live in the USA came here from Europe to fight for the Union, because that was the way to move history forward. So in a sense I disagreed with the premise of the whole book.

That much done, I noted that the overall tone was more cynical than I consider warranted. For me, the American Civil War was the last truly heroic conflict in which US forces fought. It also distinguished itself by producing an unusually high number of casualties where high ranking officers were concerned. You didn’t see American generals get dead in these proportions in either of the world wars, nor Korea, Vietnam, or any of the conflicts in the Middle East. So the snarky manner in which Williams refers to the disparity between Union brass and foot soldiers is not well placed. I found it abrasive.

In addition, if we’re talking about marginalized peoples, excuse me Mr. Williams, but where are the Black folk? The author seems to have mislaid some four million former slaves. I kept flipping through this volume trying to find some, but they are underrepresented quite badly; one might even say the author has marginalized them.

The one worthwhile thing here, the thing that kept that third star in its place, is the extensive attention paid to Native peoples during this time. I was aware of the role of the Cherokees and that was the sole extent of my knowledge of which way American Indians chose to side, when they chose a side at all. I got something for my money other than frustration and regret; I really had to look hard to find it, though.

Consequently, those doing specific research having to do with the role of Native Americans during the American Civil War should get this book. I recommend it for that niche audience only.

The Last Good Place, by Robin Burcell****

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thelastgoodplaceWhat a treat! They say all stories have already been told once, but I’m telling you, this one hasn’t. Oh, trust me! And my thanks go to Net Galley and Brash Books for a wonderful DRC. This one will be up for sale November 3.

Some may recall the TV series “The Streets of San Francisco”; the show was based on a set of police procedurals by Carolyn Weston. Characters Casey Kellog and Al Krug became TV characters Steve Keller and Mike Stone. In bringing the series back to us in the twenty-first century, new co-author Robin Burcell was asked to update it, since some of the over-the-top methods used originally could get a cop fired these days, and the old methods would not resonate with the public. Burcell has a lengthy background in law enforcement, and now I know that she is also a capable novelist. The pages flew by, and I enjoyed her improvement of the old series.

As the story commences, there have been a series of murders at famous landmarks in San Francisco, and it has been inferred by the media that tourists are at risk. While sometimes life may be cheap, the tourist industry is key to the local economy, and there’s heavy political pressure set to find someone and solve this crime, preferably accurately, but if not…just get someone, haul them in, and charge them.

So when Marcie’s neighbor and good friend Trudy turns up dead, there is speculation. Has she been a victim of this killer, or is it a copycat killing?

We find out right at the get go that Marcie knows a thing or two. For example, she knows that Trudy and her husband are getting a divorce; they are no longer in love. And Marcie also knows that her buddy has been spending some private time with Marcie’s husband. And so while Trudy and her soon-to-be-ex are going to sell their house as part of dividing the spoils of a marriage gone bad, Marcie won’t sell her house. Because it is her house, along with the eucalyptus grove out in the backyard. Her grandfather left her the house, and he left her the trees. He used to tell her that this humble, quiet spot out back was “the last good place”, and Marcie won’t part with it. Not ever. Not even to increase the property’s value—for herself and also for friend Trudy—by making their homes bay view property. Her grandfather preferred the trees to the water view, and so does Marcie.

It’s time to go jogging with Trudy, but Marcie hangs back and hides for a bit. We aren’t quite sure why, apart from the fact that she is suspicious that things are not what they seem to be. Trudy’s been a little strange toward her lately. And what do you know…Trudy dies on the morning jog before Marcie catches up to her.

This is a really accessible story, and I thought I ought to be able to solve the mystery. Goodness knows I read enough of them! And yet, I really didn’t get it. The author doesn’t pull the rug from beneath the reader by introducing a lot of new information at the end, or any of the other unfair devices writers occasionally use in order to make their story’s ending a certain surprise; I had a reasonable shot at it, but I didn’t get it. And I loved the ending!

The characters—the experienced, fatherly, crafty interrogator Al Krug, and his ambitious partner, Casey Kellog, are well developed and personable, but their personal lives don’t distract from the problems at hand. There are a couple of red herrings, but the plot is essentially linear and easy to follow.

All told, this one is a humdinger, and you should read it!

Unlocking Minds in Lockup: Prison Education Opens Doors, by Jan Walker*****

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unlockingmindsinlockupJan Walker has spent a large part of her life developing and implementing educational programs, primarily parenting programs, for inmates, and the textbook she has written for these classes is used in prisons around the USA. This book is her account of her work with prisoners of both genders in Washington State. Most of her material addresses her work with serious offenders housed on McNeil Island, a place with a notorious reputation locally because it houses sex offenders. Thank you, Net Galley and Picata Press for allowing me to access the DRC. This book is hot off the presses, and you should read it.

The primary purpose of Walker’s memoir is to let us know that 95% of those currently incarcerated will be released to their families at some point in their lives. A small percentage have their parental rights terminated, and a small percentage are in prison–really and truly–for their whole lives. Almost everybody gets out, and almost everyone goes back to their family. Wasn’t it Robert Frost who wrote that “Home is the place that when you get there, they have to take you in?” And so it is with former inmates. They’re going back to those kids. It’s in everyone’s best interest that they know how to talk to them and how to treat them when they return, as well as while they are incarcerated. She points time and again–and there is so much information and so many anecdotes in between, that it’s a good idea to bring her point back to us–to the fact that most domestic abusers were themselves abused as kids. The only way to break the cycle is to teach inmates how to take responsibility for what they have done; and how to let their children know that they have made a mistake; that prison is the consequence; and that it is not the child’s fault.

Some of this may seem obvious to you, reader, but the woman knows a tremendous amount. And as a former educator in a low income middle school, I can personally attest to the way that children internalize the things that happen to them. Some of them regard themselves as responsible for their parents’ divorces; I’ve had those kids in my classrooms. And when my first husband died in a manner both sudden and tragic, our children didn’t just think it was their faults; they knew it. They were absolutely sure. It took years of therapy to pull them out of that dark place.

Inmates are frequently semi-literate, and literacy skills are crucial to the ability to think critically. So the community college classes that seem like an absurd perk for inmates to receive free of charge, the tab paid by the tax-paying public, are actually beneficial, not only to the inmates and the children that we hope will not repeat their mistakes; they also benefit society in the long run. Better readers are better thinkers; better thinkers make better choices, and they’re better parents in most cases.

Walker has seen and heard plenty of the ugly underbelly of serious offenders’ lives, attitudes, and habits. There was more than one moment when she questioned her personal safety when the prison was short-staffed and she was alone with her classes, no one to help even within range of a good holler. She chose not to wear the gear that guards have because she wanted to differentiate her own role in her students’ minds. The gamble paid off more often than not. But she knew there were some mean, tremendously hard people there. This isn’t about that.

So don’t think she is some namby-pamby bleeding-heart enabler, because she is far from it. We know that she has seen plenty of ugly more from the way she avoids telling us the most shocking material, rather than because she flings it at us (which she doesn’t). But the anecdotes she chooses to share–with names changed for the purpose of privacy, of course–underscore her talking points, and the work is also painstakingly documented. Do you read the sources and end notes in nonfiction? I do. That part of the book says a lot about whether a writer is just referencing other writers, writing up their own opinions, or speaking as an expert. Walker is an expert.

The book starts out dry. Fight your way through that initial fifteen percent; by the time you hit the twenty percent mark, you will be really glad you stuck to it. Although I recommend this outstanding work to everyone, I recommend it especially to public school teachers, particularly those that teach at high poverty schools with large numbers of children of color. I did that for twenty years, and I have seen how deeply affecting it is for children and adolescents to have a parent in prison. Some are ashamed; a lot of them are angry or confused. Some go for a visit that involves a stiff weekend commute, sleeping in the car, and then they fall asleep at their desks on Monday. But the ones that suffer most are those that were promised a visit they didn’t get; that were expecting their parent to be released, and then the parent wasn’t; and those that are convinced their parent is innocent.

And here, though you may roll your eyes, I have to address the one little nugget that ricochets inside my brain when Walker discusses teaching inmates to own what they did and tell their children that they made a mistake; prison is their consequence, it’s not your fault. I understand the rationale, because probably 99.9% of those incarcerated (primarily on McNeil Island, which is near Tacoma, Washington, about an hour from my Seattle home) are not only guilty of what they are in prison for having done, but more offenses for which they weren’t caught. It’s also true that there are no millionaires on death row, and anyone that has read Michelle Alexander’s study of the racial disparity in The New Jim Crow, or who has followed the data produced by the NAACP and other organizations centered on #BlackLivesMatter, knows that Caucasians serve hard time far less often than people of color that commit the same crimes.  But that does not mean that those that are there didn’t do the crime; they did….most of them.

At the same time, my mind kept going back to exceptional people–none of them on McNeil–that I am convinced are innocent. Should Leonard Peltier tell his children that he made a mistake, when he was framed? What about Mumia Abu Jamal? What about the lesser-known Mark Curtis, whose rape case was so clearly bogus that the local chapter of NOW endorsed his case? I know that in the last case, parole was denied over, and over, and over again because he refused to sit down and be rehabilitated for a crime he did not, did not, did not commit and would rot in prison for his entire life before he would crumble and confess to a lie just to get out of that place. He’s out now, but he sat through his whole sentence because he could not have parole by maintaining his innocence.

So although these cases are exceptions rather than rules, and I actually think Walker’s program is both strong and essential, it’s worth bearing in mind that once in awhile, someone that says they didn’t do it, really didn’t do it.

I have so many outstanding passages I flagged, so many poignant anecdotes, so much compelling evidence. I finished reading this book a week ago, but it is the really excellent ones like this that I have to mull over for awhile before I can write the review. I had 187 notes, and it was impossible to select some over others. I went back and reread them, and apart from a few paraphrased instances mentioned above, I think you’ll do better to read them in context, the way she wrote them.

The heartbreaking thing is that now that her classes and text have been adopted around the nation, they have been canceled at McNeil. Some wise ass somewhere decided that volunteers could be found to do this work. Sure, maybe once. Really sturdy do-gooders might last six months, even. But the work has to be done consistently, and you can’t fire a volunteer who phones in sick all the time, or just doesn’t show up, and those that are incarcerated need to develop a relationship with a single reliable professional instructor. I hope the Washington State legislature will reconsider this critical, valuable part of rehabilitation in our prisons. If we can’t raze those prisons to the ground, as the old folk song suggests, then let us at least make a difference for the children of those that are in them.

Highly recommended for all educators, for Civil Rights activists, and for anyone concerned about social justice. Actually, I recommend it to everyone. You can get it right now.

The Strasbourg Legacy, by William Craig *

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ThestrausburglegacyWhoa now! The times, they have a-changed, and isn’t that a great thing? Thus this once-socially-acceptable novel, a spy thriller steeped in the Cold War politics of the mid-20th century, no longer works. But thank you for the invitation to review, friends at Net Galley and Open Road Integrated Media; I know you meant well.

The author presents a situation in which escaped Nazis are developing plans to foment a second fascist government, developed abroad till the time is right. The ones we visit are sequestered in Egypt. At the same time, Israel’s equivalent of the CIA is out hunting for escaped Nazis, who will die quietly and unofficially so as to avoid international incidents. The writer knows his craft well, and shows considerable skill in building suspense by jumping us from one group to the other at critical, cliff-hanging moments.

One single sentence caused me to climb off Craig’s bus, so to speak:

“It was the brandy that triggered them to drag the girl off the streets and rape her for two days.”

Had this been the perspective of a deranged psychopath, a mindset clearly different from that of the good guys, I would have been more generous with my rating and review, but this guy is supposed to be the marshmallow among his set, the old softy who gets himself into trouble by trying to save the suffering damsels.

Give me a fucking break.

For this novel: no, no, and one more time: no!

Treasure Coast, by Tom Kakonis*****

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TreasureCoastHugely imaginative, terribly funny, and utterly tasteless, Kakonis delivers the chortles with Treasure Coast, a comic caper that juggles numerous entertaining characters with surprising deftness. Thank you twice, first to Brash Books and second to Net Galley, for providing me with the DRC to review. This title will be available September 14, 2015 to the book-buying public.

Our tale begins with Uncle Jim Merriman, a professional gambler who can’t even manage to break even these days, and “his numbnuts nephew”, Leon Cody, “…this kid with the crop of wild hair and Magoo glasses and dippy grin”, who is in debt to loan sharks. Leon’s mother has died and left not only her body, but also her foolish son, to Uncle Jim’s care and keeping. And of course we have the shark’s collection agents, Morris “Junior” Biggs and “your badass Hector Pasadena”.

On the other hand, we have Bryce Bott, hustler of gravestones that once purchased, will never arrive and “séances” delivered with the help of his hillbilly sidekick, Waneta Jean, who feigns nearness to death as a part of the séance scam.

Of course, ultimately, the characters wind up in a messy pile trying out-scam each other. “Circles inside of circles, games within games.”

But oh, that’s not enough! We also have trophy bride Billie Swett, who within my mental movie soon became Bernadette Peters, and her obnoxious, porcine, but almost infinitely wealthy spouse, Big Lonnie Swett. Eventually we add Cheetah, to whom Reverend Bott referred as “that other intrusive fellow”. Their roles in all of this, you will have to find out on your own.

“And how do you count the ways of weird?”

This was a story worthy of patience. There were so many nasty racist comments made about almost everyone you can think of; however, they are used within the context of Junior’s vapor-brained, “Aryan” sensibilities. There are several horribly ugly sexist remarks using the worst possible terms you can imagine, but again, it is only the bad guys that use them…and a reckoning comes down in a manner I found deeply satisfying.

To put it another way: we were halfway through before I was even sure I liked this novel, but once I was on board, I was in it for keeps, flagging one clever passage after another, most of which I can’t share here. I can share this YouTube promotional clip, though:

So although I was ultimately dumbstruck by the creativity with which Kakonis wove all of the complicated strands of this story together without dropping a single one, I also caution the reader. There are some really crass, fairly specific references to corpses in this book. If you have just lost someone and the wound is still raw, this is probably not the title with which you should escape. There are repeated references to the joys of rape. If you or someone near to you has been down that brutal path, maybe this is not your story, either. And one more caveat before I can go back to singing praises: if your mother tongue is not English, you may not want to embrace this challenging novel, which despite its Keystone Cops-like atmosphere requires exceedingly strong vocabulary skills. For those that enjoy word play, it’s a real treat, but any time you have to look up more than 3 words per page, the effort will outweigh the enjoyment you receive.

With the above caveats in mind, this new release comes highly recommended by this reviewer. The only real question is how you will wait until Monday to get your copy!

Nirvana, by J.R. Stewart****

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NirvanaNew rating and review based on updated DRC:

Larissa Kenders is a musician living in a post-apocalyptic world; her lover Andrew is missing. This newly revised young adult novel is a winner, and it will be published  November 10. Thank you to Blue Moon Press, Net Galley, and Adam Mawer at DigiWriting Book Marketing Agency for including me on the second spin. It was time well spent.

The problem on Earth began when the bees began to die. How can anyone grow food, flowers, or anything else if pollen can’t be transferred? And indeed, how does pollen get from one plant to another without the bees? Corporate giant Hexagon has created an alternate world, and humans are dependent upon the company for their sustenance. Nirvana is a virtual world that workers can visit, for a hefty price, on their days off. The question Larissa has, then, is whether the Andrew she sees in Nirvana is the virtual Andrew of her memories, or whether he may in fact still be living, hiding out from those that may wish him gone.

Various topics are explored, from alienation and the question of whom to trust—one that will resonate with teenage readers—as well as environmental issues such as GMOs, and more futuristic philosophical questions. Edward Snowden comes up, and why should he not, in a story in which many researchers have uploaded their brains to the Cloud so that their work will remain once they are gone?

I was one of a handful of reviewers that read the first draft of this book. I reported that it was dreadful because it lacked character development. This new and vastly improved version creates a Larissa Kenders that is believable, a character to whom we can bond. The remaining stereotypes, such as the jealous female that is our main villain, along with the preponderance of males rather than the usual fifty percent of the population, are problems that are so rife within the genres of science fiction and fantasy that it’s hard to hang the whole problem on this one writer, who has created a truly original and interesting plot .

Teachers considering its classroom use should be forewarned that there are a couple of sexual situations; the porn industry, a pet project of one of the villains, also gets multiple mentions. I should emphasize that this reviewer sees no problem with today’s teenagers reading the book, since most of them have seen far more explicit material on their own. But those that teach in school districts so conservative that the villagers bring everything but flaming torches to the school board meeting may want the information ahead of time prior to going out of pocket for a classroom set.

In revising his story, Stewart has plucked victory from the ashes; a job well done.