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I like biographies best as an entry into history. It helps me to have a person to track through the thickets of
event and war.
Catherine the Great by
Robert Massie, which I borrowed as an e-book from the library, took me
into central Europe and Russia in the eighteenth century. Massie
became a popular historian of the Romanov family of Russian royalty
because his own child was a hemophiliac, and he started reading about
the hemophiliac son of Nicholas and Alexandra.
Catherine the Great strove to be an
enlightened autocrat: half her life she struggled to hold a precarious
place as the unloved wife of a psychological mess, the great nephew of
Peter the Great. Often out of favor, she read and studied. Never able to
have enough of a relationship with her husband to get pregnant, she
finally had a son almost certainly with a lover. This, however, appears
to have fulfilled the dynastic requirement.
Then, when she was 33, she participated in a
coup that overthrew her husband. He was quickly assassinated by her
friends, although apparently not at her orders. She subsequently lived
thirty some years as empress, trying to rule by convincing and building
public agreement, yet always in the end turning to autocracy. She and
Peter the Great (according the Massie) were the only really successful
enlightened autocrats in Russia.
Catherine was smart and well-read, and had diplomatic
skills. She also started wars, raised her favorites to government
positions and made them rich. She censored writers and anyone else she
was afraid of-- especially after the French Revolution which terrified
her and every other crowned head of Europe. Yet she abandoned torture
as a method of getting information, and early in her reign made a
serious but abortive effort to rewrite the laws of Russia along
Enlightenment principles. This would have included the slow emancipation
of the serfs. She may have been as good as it got in 18th century
Russia, but it was never very good, at least not for those not born in
the upper classes.
Which is where most of us living today would have been.
It was, by the way, Catherine who seized the Crimea
from the Ottoman Empire-- Crimea of the Crimean War and the present
crisis in the Ukraine.
An extraordinary woman of a very different
position in life was Clara Barton, whose given name was "Clarissa
Harlowe" Barton, presumably after the heroine of the gargantuan novel by
Samuel Richardson. I read
A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War by Stephen B. Oates with
deep engagement. 2013 was the 150th birthday of my home state of West
Virginia, split from Virginia during the Civil War, and one of the
earliest historical books I ever read was about Andersonville, the
horrific prison camp in Georgia where union
prisoners of war were kept.
What is best about Oates' book is first his
focus on Barton's part in the war. He summarizes her other
accomplishments (founding a school, breaking the gender barrier at the
patent office in Washington, D.C., making a living on the lecture
circuit, founding the American Red Cross and more), but mostly he writes
about her struggles to participate in the war.
He also makes a serious effort at portraying
Barton's complexity. She went through major depressions and was not
always easy to work with– she had major disagreements, for example, with
Dorothea Dix, who organized nursing at large hospitals behind the
lines of battle. Barton was a freelance during the war, giving succor
to soldiers with shells falling around her. She was hugely brave, vastly
energetic and enormously capable, and she was met with opposition at
every turn by individuals, bureaucracy, and culture.
She based her right to go into the war zone on being
single yet having a large family, so she was not needed at home. Indeed,
when her father was dying and later when her older brother and her
nephew were ill, she stopped public work for months in order to nurse
them. This, of course, was how nineteenth century women learned
nursing, and where their first allegiance was supposed to lie.
At the age of nearly 40, she determined that she was going to be a
part of the union effort in the Civil War. She wrote appeals, she
collected supplies--and finally broke through her own scruples about
women's role as well as official opposition and went to the
battlefields: She was at Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg,
and others, almost always working under fire
I said she overcame great opposition, but she also never lacked
friends and admirers in government. She was also hugely popular among
the rank-and-file, and for a whole generation man named their daughters
after her. She went through periods of round-the-clock nursing and
cooking and letter writing for the soldiers, then periods of inaction,
depression, and sometimes near-paranoia. She spent four years at the
great eastern theater battles, and also on the sea islands outside
Charleston SC where she witnessed the brutal charge of the first
"colored" regiment, the Massachusetts 54th, as it charged in what was
essentially a suicide mission. Admiring these heroic fighters and
getting to know other men and women, she became increasingly less
racist and more abolitionist. When the war was over, she began
systematizing the efforts of families to find missing soldiers. Her
final war project was to get names on the graves at the notorious
Andersonville.
Clara Barton made up her life's work as she went along, and
witnessed and wrote about things that still freeze your mind: the
amputations and the dysentery and malaria that killed more of the
soldiers than battle. I can only admire how Oates used his
historian's tools to bring me this foray into the Civil War following
the trail of a great woman.
Meredith Sue Willis
A Word from the Sponsor:
SHORT TAKES (by MSW Unless Otherwise Noted)
Voicework By Edith Poor
This is a small book, now available as an e-book, that works like a Montaigne essai,alternating
short passages of quotation with the author's deeper examinations and
arguments. Edith Poor looks at traditional perceptions of women's and
men's voices, carefully delineating what is physiological from the
cultural and psychological. She shows us how perceptions have shaped our
public speaking and, in the case of many women in leadership positions,
kept them from reaching their potential. In too many situations, the
"masculine" style of speaking remains the ideal, even if women are the
speakers. Edith Poor suggests that we can all– men and women– expand the
range of our voices and make them more flexible for communicating what
is important to us. She also suggests that we would do well to expand
our hearing skills as well.
Write Something by Mitch Levenberg
This is a surprisingly engaging trip into the life and mind of a
Brooklyn writer, particularly his public readings and his relationship
to the other readers, the audience, and to his own stories. He calls
the pieces, in his introduction, a collection of short essays, and they
come mostly from his blog (http://mitchlevenberg.com/blog/).
The truth is that 
I
don't usually read prose about writing and the writing process: it's
what I do and what I teach, so I like to read about cooks and
bricklayers, or just about everything except writers. But this one is
delightfully different, and I can't exactly say why. Partly it's that
even though it appears on the surface to be self-referential (it's a
writer writing about times he has read his writing), the sensation is of
a deep sharp tunnel into a special world. There are hilarious
passages about the other readers, who arrive late, spend too long
flipping through their manuscripts, and the audiences who don't respond
to a story that other audiences have always responded to. There are
foods eaten and drinks drunk, and the delightful honesty of how the
writer is sometimes moved by his own writing– and why shouldn't he be?
If he isn't moved, how on earth could we be? Anyhow, Mitch Levenberg is
clearly someone who can take absolutely anything his eye lights on and
make that thing light up.
Small, sharp, and wonderful. An e-book only, so far.
Here's my review of Levenberg's short story collection in Principles of Uncertainty and Other Constants in Issue # 150.
Dear Life By Alice Munro
I don't feel much need to praise Alice Munro. She just won the freaking Nobel Prize.
I read this collection over a number of months, and I intend to
reread a couple of the stories just to learn from her incredible
ability to move a story from here to there and give the delight of
surprise.
The book seems structured more or less from young main characters to
older ones, and I liked the aged stories best. One, a nightmare of
dementia, is called "In Sight of the Lake," a real chiller, at least
once you are old enough to start imagining losing your mind. Another,
"Dolly," also an aging story, is about a long time couple and a
resurgence of jealousy and a slight resettling of the rules of
engagement. Both brilliant.
Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
This was pretty neat: as usual with Melville in my experience, you
have to get over the slow, tedious listings of names and information
and documents-- probably fake but in this case based on a real incident.
The novel works by having a rather naive point-of-view character tell
most of the story. He is faintly uncomfortable with what's going on
around him, but forces himself to ignore his discomfort.
And of course the real story is exactly what is under the surface.
It was published a few years after Uncle Tom's Cabin, but
still pre-civil war, and it has always caused controversy over
whether it was pro-slavery and/or anti-black-- or actually
abolitionist. There is a powerful cultural racism at work-- but Melville
isn't unaware of this as his rebelling slaves depend totally on the
belief of those they interact with that they are incapable of what
they've done.
Nothing is ever said explicitly in the rebelling slaves' defense– no
monologue on the gibbet, no hint of the enormous despair they must have
felt– yet the novella ends not with the first narrator, and not with
the eponymous Benito Cereno, but with the slave revolt ringleader
Babo, who, once caught-- after a constant, articulate running of the
show, pulling the strings, asking the questions through Benito Cereno's
mouth, signalling the other ex-slaves– clams up and refuses to speak
again. He is silent on the gibbet, and his head is put on a stake and
displayed, also in silence.
Ending with him was an exquisite narrative choice.
The Dangerous Husband By Jane Shapiro
This is a hyperbolic tale of mutual assured destruction
in a marriage: the klutz husband expanded and expounded to the nth
degree. He kills pets inadvertently, breaks the narrator's toe and arm.
She plans to have him assassinated but it doesn't quite work out. She
tries to run away from him and fails. It has some sketchy plot points
(like how does she find that hit man?) but it is unlike anything else
I've ever read.
I read it soon after pushing the Sisyphean boulder of Underworld
up the hill, so the narrative momentum alone was a great pleasure.
Part of the fun of the novel is its incredibly claustrophobic world of
Brooklyn brownstones where everyone is a writer or other creative type–
even the hit man only lives as far from their Brooklyn Heights place as
Park Slope, and he's a novelist too. For more, here's the New York Times review.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
A much shorter novel than I remembered, and I had also forgotten how much it was science fiction. It was a 
favorite
novel of the nineteen sixties, not nearly as popular now. The best
parts are the parts to me are the ones that were closest to Vonnegut's
actual experience as a prisoner of war during the fire bombing of
Dresden. All the meta stuff where he plays with "that was me," setting
himself up as one of the prisoners of war, part of the frame story but
also part of the protagonist Billy Pilgrim's story– all that seemed to
work extremely well. Given the horrors Vonnegut experienced personally,
the meta fiction indirection seems eminently reasonable. And he does
set up some lovely characters, Billy Pilgrim sweet and passive everyman,
Kilgore Trout the failed commercial science fiction writer, etc. Nasty
little Paul Lazarro with revenge on his mind– many many good
characters, and all the horror of the randomness of war is imitated
nicely.
But then come the Tralfamadorians (and I see on Wikipedia
that their planet reappears in Vonnegut books but with different
details each time) shaped like plumber's helpers. Then comes the wet
dream of Billy Pilgrim caged with a gorgeous actress and asked to mate
with her– all that feels a little silly, as if he didn't work very
hard. I think that mix of of real and crazy and lazy may be what
delighted a certain generation of young people.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
This novel has an interesting premise: a group of war
heroes, the Bravos, get a celebration before being whisked back to fight
and probably die in Iraq. The satire is heavy handed (I'm sure it was
meant to be), and also it seems to be skewering the same thing over and
over. The novel has a well drawn "present time"-- the day of a big
Cowboys football game, with full flashbacks to protagonist Billy Lynn's
visit to his family. All the war material is done as bits and pieces
of memories. It is the novelist's reconstruction of how war is
remembered by one poor schmoo-- and it seems to work pretty well. There
is a slipping and sliding around who is telling the story: is it Billy
(19 and someone who barely made it out of high school), or is it the
implied author with elaborate imagery and deep understanding of what is
happening? It's a trick that allows the author to go full tilt with all
his skills. It's his conscious choice, and a case can be made that
it's just fine, but I felt a little manipulated by it: it makes Billy
feel smarter and wiser than the other Bravos (let alone all the venal
publicity people and top brass of the Dallas Cowboys). It makes him a
brilliant prize winning writer, in fact. On the other hand– it's
entertaining, and sure makes this hillbilly want to stay the heck out
of Texas.
THE E-READER REPORT WITH JOHN BIRCH: All's Not Well in the World of E-Books
All is not entirely well in the world of e-books. Amazon is holding
the fort, but one or two casualties are appearing on the scene. You're
probably aware of the decline and uncertain future of the Nook, Barnes
& Noble's response to Kindle, following the recent layoff of a
significant number or workers at B&N's Nook division. Then there's
the shrinking of Barnes & Noble itself, which is closing 15 to 20
stores a year.
Recently, Sony has announced that it's retreating from its US e-book
business, and has inked a deal for a handover to Kobo, a big
international Japanese company that has 18 million customers, and access
to 4 million e-books. And now there's another barely noticeable
development – the fact that public libraries now have many, many more
e-books available on loan. The website PublicLibraries.org reports
"massive growth in e-book checkouts," adding that the number of e-books
loaned by public libraries is growing by at least 100% every year. It
remains to be seen how this increased availability of free e-books from
public libraries will affect the sales of even Amazon, Kobo and their
ilk..
See: www.JohnBirchLive.blogspot.com
-- a growing collection of nearly 30 short stories, articles and
essays. Most recent is a poem about a ten year old boy living in Kent in
England when the German bombers were crossing over on their way to
London.
BACKCHANNEL REPORT
Backchannel draws our attention to a Guardian article, On
Liberty: Edward Snowden and top writers on what freedom means to them,
at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/21/on-liberty-edward-snowden-freedom .
Backchannel notes an article on books about the first World War, which has the centennial of its beginning this year.
TO READ ONLINE
Laura Treacy Bentley features writers on her excellent blog. The current one has wonderful Cat Pleska. Here's a 2011 photo of me, Lee Maynard, and Cat when she was the president of West Virginia Writers.
A funny-sad cartoon blog called Depression Part Two:
It begins: "I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of
my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days
they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons.... "
Singapore Poetry
is a site about all things Singaporean, run by a Singapore poet living
in New York. It is called "a curated gallery of poetry by Singaporeans,
and of all things poetic about Singapore....Though the spotlight is on
Singapore poetry, this website will also showcase all things poetic
about Singapore," says Jee Leong Koh, defining poetic s not just
"beautiful or lyrical... [but] some quality that cannot be measured in
economic terms, but is pursued for its own sake. These other forms of
poetry may be found in the performing and fine arts, music, film,
design, landscape, people and, yes, food. Singapore Poetry is especially
interested in news of doings, happenings, and beings that travel off
the beaten track, fly under the radar, and break new ground. Things not
already supported by government agencies or public institutions."
ANNOUNCEMENTS, NEWS, CONTESTS, WORKSHOPS, READINGS ETC.
The Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee has chosen Linda Elovitz Marshall's The Passover Lamb (Random
House, 2013) as a Notable Book in the Younger Readers category for 2014!
Hour of Writes is
conducting some research for a series of articles about creative
writing, and how people relate creative writing practice to their
private, work and social lives. Much of the material for these pieces
comes from a big survey they're conducting. They're looking for
participants (they say it's anonymous): https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HourOfWritesWriters001 .
Don't forget this list for regular notices about open submissions at various literary journals and presses: CRWROPPS-B@yahoogroups.com
If you are in Northern New Jersey, learn about regular, excellent, free
programs and peer workshops, many at the Montclair Library and
environs. To get the monthly announcements, send an e-mail request to
Carl Selinger at selinger99@aol.com .
ABOUT AMAZON.COM
The largest unionized bookstore in America has a webstore at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund.
For a discussion of Amazon and organized labor and small presses, see the comments of Jonathan Greene and others in Issues #97 and #98 .
WHERE TO FIND BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER
If a book discussed in this newsletter has
no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from
your public library as either a hard copy or a digital copy. You may
also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. To buy books
online, I often go first to Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can compare what you’re really going to have to pay.
A lot of people whose political instincts I
respect prefer the unionized bricks-and-mortar bookstore Powells (see
"About Amazon.com" above) that sells online at http://powellsbooks.com.
Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores. Also consider Paperback Book Swap, a postage only way to trade books with other readers.
If you are using an electronic reader like Kindle, Nook, or Kobo, don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics, but other things as well.
Kobobooks.com sells books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.
RESPONSES TO THIS NEWSLETTER
Please send responses to this newsletter and suggestions directly to Meredith Sue Willis . Unless you instruct otherwise, your responses may be edited for length and published in this newsletter.
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Barbara Crooker's Zen bird poem from Little Pauxtent Review. Also see her "Ode to Chocolate" at http://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2014/02/12/8-chocolate-poems-love-chocolate/ (it's the last of seven).
Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.meredithsuewillis.com. Some individual contributors may have other licenses.
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