Book Review: The Pryce of Delusion

Title: The Pryce of Delusion

Author: Kari Bovee

Date: 2023

Publisher: Bosque

ISBN: 978-1-947905-22-1

Quote: "The gold, heart-shaped ring...never let me down, and I was never without it."

Arabella Pryce is a successful actress. She gives the credit to a lucky ring her missing father sent her as a souvenir. People have told her she'd be just as good an actress without it; Arabella doesn't want to believe them. 

Then her ring is stolen...and someone threatens her husband. A police detective seems helpful, finding clues that her mother-and-manager stole the ring, but the pieces don't quite fit...

If you like a mystery where nobody dies, you'll like this one. People are in danger but they escape. Even the ring will be found at the end, before Arabella and her husband go out to their next adventure. There's a series about these characters. 

Book Review for 8.5.24: Mojave Crossing

Any time it rains, not even to mention any more dramatic form of Weather, my part of the world is subject to power outages. We really need to break up the whole idea of an electric power grid, to have each household tapping into its own battery storage system rather than frying people's computers all over the county when one pole collapses in one mudslide. I currently have a sad little queue of five electronic devices waiting for the right sort of vehicle to drive up so they can go off to see the wizards, the wonderful wizards of Compuworld. Anyway, during one of these power outages, in July, there was enough sunshine for me to be able to read a paperback novel. Here's the review.

Title: Mojave Crossing 

Author: Louis L'Amour

Date: 1964

Publisher: Bantam

ISBN: 0-553-27690-8 (2001 reprint)

Length: 148 pages

Quote: "Seemed like trouble dogged my tracks wherever I put a foot down, and here was I, heading into strange country, running into a black-eyed woman."

Tell Sackett doesn't tell us his whole story all at once. He left Tennessee to join the Union Army and continued going west. His aversion to the black-eyed woman, travelling under the name Dorinda Robiseau, at first seems to spring from his self-identification as "tall and homely." Later he mentions a woman called Ange who's waiting for him. He doesn't think Dorinda Robiseau is using her original name, he tells us, but he's heard names that sounded stranger than that.

Dorinda is not the ideal trail buddy. She doesn't tell a party of men from town that Tell has gone for water, or that the horses and gold she's watching are his. When they get to a settlement, Dorinda considerably ahead of Tell for obvious reasons, Dorinda seems to be close to an older cousin of Tell's, who tells Tell that she's one of "the great courtesans" who have no feelings about men, who are all about money, but he doesn't care. In one scene Dorinda begs Tell to travel further with her, and "I will love you as you've never been loved." In her next scene she points Tell out to his enemies. She's not a sex worker; she's not even the sort of adventuress "courtesan" was being used to imply. She is a Piece Of Work. 

And Tell's another. Only at the end of the book does he reveal why Dorinda, adventuress though she is, has such intense and mixed feelings about him. I don't want to spoil all the suspense, but let's just say that Tell deserves the sort of trail buddy Dorinda's shown herself to be. 

There are the obligatory number of bad men who have to be killed. However, the challenges of travelling across Southern California at this period gets more attention than the fight scenes. Louis L'Amour tells readers what fun he had tracing Tell's course across what became Beverly Hills and Hollywood. If you've ever wanted to visualize that part of California free of its "people-lution," you'll enjoy Mojave Crossing.

Book Review: Harriet Tubman

Reclaimed from Associated Content...What Google doesn't like about an award-winning classic biography from Harper Collins, I don't know. I have never liked the kind of face images that fill up all the space with face, cutting out even the sides of the head; it always looks like a caricature.

Title: Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad

Buy it

Buy it

Author: Ann Petry

Publisher: Harper Collins

Date: 1955 (first edition), 1996 (paperback edition reviewed here)

Number of pages :242, plus index

Illustrations: none

Quote: “I never run my train off the track, and I never lost a single passenger.”

Harriet Ross Tubman was one of those people whose true stories are too unlikely to be printed as fiction. Going by the statistical odds, nobody could do what they did. Possibly things have been left out of their stories as we know the stories today. Nevertheless, the impossible thing was done.

Born a slave in Maryland in 1821, the girl Harriet Ross was marked for life by a head injury. It left her witha  scar, a lifelong tendency toward narcolepsy, and apparently an unusual manner of speaking. She was a small, restless, hyperactive girl who preferred jobs usually done by boys or men. When she wore boys' clothes to suit the job, people thought she was a boy. Her intelligence would have been startling even if she hadn't been expected to die from her head injury. In 1840 men were supposed to hate strong, tough-minded women, but John Tubman, a free Black man, chose to marry Harriet although she was a slave who might have been sold away from him.

By this time the slave system was falling apart. In what were then western states, like Tennessee, there were still "wilderness" areas where ex-slaves could disappear in the untracked swamps or forests. Maryland was not one of those areas. An elaborate patrol system had developed to keep slaves from escaping. The country was well settled, over-farmed, populated by a decaying upper class who thought it was their neighborly duty to keep slaves in their places.

Virginia had outlawed all free citizens of African descent, actually banishing such people to places like, well, Maryland, with the express purpose of keeping men like John Tubman from marrying, buying, and emancipating women like Harriet. Maryland tolerated couples like the Tubmans but when Harriet worried about being sold and urged her husband to take her further north, John laughed, threatened to help bring her back to slavery if she tried to escape,, and shamelessly selected his next wife.

Harriet Tubman made her way to Philadelphia. We know the names of some of the abolitionists who helped her. John Tubman was probably more concerned with courting his second wife, presumably convincing her he wouldn't betray her as he'd threatened to do to Harriet, than with tracking Harriet down.

What will never be fully explained is how this unusual, surely conspicuous fugitive slave was able to spend the next twenty years repeatedly sneaking back into Maryland and leading other slaves out. Mostly she rescued members of her extended family, taking them first to Pennsylvania, later to Canada. She was both illiterate and narcoleptic. Something had to have been wrong with her head for her even to think of trying what she did. Well, something was. And she succeeded. Those who whispered about her being a supernatural spirit, perhaps a reincarnation of Moses, trusted that they'd be safe with her even if she collapsed and lay "sleeping" for hours while they were being pursued. Somehow they always were.

By the time the Civil War broke out, other women of Harriet Tubman's age were considered "old" and expected to act like grandmothers, rocking and knitting. Perhaps because she was already a legend, Mrs. Tubman was not allowed to act "old." She served in the U.S. Army as both a spy and a nurse.

She never received even the pathetic wages regular (male) soldiers got, and never retired. She had bought a house and some land; she raised vegetables and sold them on the streets to make the house payments. She received some money for talking about her experiences. Her stories were collected and published as books, which she was never able to read. John Tubman died first, and Mrs. Tubman married a fellow veteran. He was already dying; he never collected his wages either, and had nothing of material value to give his wife. Harriet Tubman and her parents depended on neighbors' donations of food to balance their own diet.

Novelist Ann Petry fleshes out these facts with fictional details that show some of the ways Harriet Tubman's adventures might have been pulled off. Her version of the story is generally accepted as fact-based enough that some libraries classify this book as nonfiction. Petry's matter-of-fact narrative style, full of color, conversation, and even menus, brings the story to life for young readers, even if it is fictional life.

The books that were based on transcriptions of Harriet Tubman's own stories are no longer in print, though they ought to be. This book is still in print.

 

Book Review: The Tall Woman

Title: The Tall Woman 

Author: Wilma Dykeman

Date: 1962

Publisher: Wakestone (and others)

ISBN: 0-9613859-1-X

Length: 315 pages

Quote: "Lydia said softly, 'I never asked for easy, Mama.'"

Trigger warning: This classic of American Women's Literature is not a comedy, in form, but a biography. When a novel has the form of a biography the character may succeed, and her or his successes may be both satisfactory and laughable, but the happy ending is often "Then the character died old, regretted by all, and his or her heir was..." The time frame of the story simply exceeds that of the main character. The time frame of The Tall Woman exceeds that of its protagonist, Lydia McQueen.

In 1962 books that emphasized women's height often addressed baby-boomers who had been so unladylike as to grow taller than their fathers were, and after assuring those girls that there were enough overgrown young men out there to go around, they spent most of the space available talking about how to look shorter (stripes, shirts and skirts in different colors, skirts that reached exactly to the knee). The Tall Woman broke that rule; though Lydia is apparently the tall skinny type, according to the jacket drawing, the story is not about how she copes with her body shape but about how she copes with crises, brings up children, appreciates the differences among most of her neighbors and eventually beats the one really unlikable neighbor she has in a political dispute. It's a feel-good story.

One of the things I've regretted in life was that, though Wilma Dykeman Stokely was still teaching at Berea when I was there, I didn't demand to be admitted to her class. However, apart from the history in this novel about the late nineteenth century, there's not all that much to discuss about The Tall Woman; the story is easy to follow. It reads like a family legend and, going by its dedication, probably is one. Lydia is as lovable as Elvira Ware in Jubilee, as admirable as Mary Peters. 

Despite its appearance on some school reading lists, this is a novel that can be read for pleasure. It's almost sex-free (we read about the children, not about their begetting) and less violent than many novels about this period (Lydia does kill a bear). It won't embarrass adults if the children read it, at all. It will repay attentive reading; Lydia's relationships with each of her neighbors have their own nuances, and the pleasure of the irony rests on your willingness to remember those nuances.

Book Review: Ambush of the Mountain Man

Title: Ambush of the Mountain Man

Author: William W. Johnstone

Date: 2003

Publisher: Kensington / Pinnacle

ISBN: 0-7860-1439-3

Length: 242 pages

Quote: “Uh, by the way, was that man I just saw getting on the train named Smoke Jensen?”

Uh, actually, he wasn’t. Even in the fictive reality of William W. Johnstone’s “Mountain Man” novels, “Smoke” is a nickname. Smoke Jensen is one big anachronism; people with names like “Jensen” came to the United States after the Civil War and clustered in the north-central plains, but this black-haired hero comes from Missouri, where his father (Emmitt Jensen) was a Confederate soldier, and his given name was Kirby.

After an adventure that qualified as a “baptism by fire,” young Smoke went to the Rocky Mountains and lived by his wits. He never wanted to kill anybody. He just had to kill—oh dozens of baddies, sometimes in one single novel!

He has, by this point in the series, outlived one wife and married another one, Sarah. She believes he’s as kind and gentle as he can be. Let us leave the poor girl her illusions. Smoke Jensen is a fictional hero intended to appeal to readers who like a good fight. Though satisfied with boxing, wrestling, and football in real life, they quietly enjoy reading how Jensen finds it necessary to kill all those people. He may regret all the notches on all his guns but he’s not about to move to a less violent part of the world.

People who like “westerns” rate the Mountain Man stories high. They’re schoolboys’ adventure stories. The plot is that a lot of baddies want to kill Jensen, and Jensen has to kill a few of them. As the blurb on the back say, “One man has a knife. Twenty men have guns. And the odds are just about even.” Actually fan knew the odds were still in Jensen’s favor, because Johnstone was making money on these books. But if you like that kind of adventure, even printed on a page where your mind’s eye has to fill in the beautiful Rocky Mountain landscapes without help from a screen, then the odds are that you’ll enjoy this book.

Johnstone was sometimes acclaimed as the true heir to Zane Grey and Louis Lamour who might have revived “westerns” as a genre. I don’t know to what extent that’s possible. True baby-boomers, who came along while Rogers & Evans & Trigger & Buttermilk were making “western” movies, loved “westerns.” Late baby-boomers remember “westerns” as a fad that was so over. If “westerns” don’t become a fad again, though, it won’t be because Johnstone didn’t try, or because his son’s not still trying. In 2003 thirty more books about Smoke Jensen, and several books in two additional “western” series by William W. Johnstone, were in print.

This one is rising in value, but still available under this web site's usual terms: Buy it online for $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment. If you add the ten or eleven more books of this size that could fit into the $5 package, it's a better deal than buying the books directly from Amazon.

Book Review: To Know Her by Name

A Fair Trade Book

Title: To Know Her by Name

Author: Lori Wick

Date: 1997

Publisher: Harvest House

ISBN: 1-56507-574-9

Length: 432 pages

Quote: “To him she was every inch a female, but he realized that none of these people—neither the bank employees nor the customers—had seen her as he had.”

What you'll like about this extraordinary “Christian romance” is that it's different. It's a sweet, clean romance, but is it ever different.

What you might not like is that, instead of preaching against something the Bible forbids, Wick lets her heroine find out why the Bible forbids what she's doing.

In the nineteenth century, Anglo-American culture was besotted with a (non-Biblical, non-Christian, actually French Socialist) belief that extremely rigid definitions of sex roles would help build an orderly, Christian-influenced society. Everything people did was to be identified as either masculine or feminine, not both. If men were not allowed to learn how to do women's jobs, and especially if women were not allowed to learn how to do men's jobs, then everybody would see the advantages of living as half of a nice stable male-female pair, even if they didn't want and didn't have a real marriage. And collegial relationships would be possible only between people of the same sex, and this would prevent adultery. And if business, politics, industry, and finances were defined as men's work, and women's work was limited as much as possible to being “angels in the home,” at least (rich) women could be spared from the misery the Industrial Revolution was bringing to many workplaces...

Like the other exciting new ideas the French Socialists promulgated, including Socialism itself, this did not work. In fact, when we look back on the history of the cheese-eating, wine-bibbing, never successfully married, confused young men who promulgated these ideas, it's a wonder that anybody ever took any of their ideas seriously for five minutes. But many people seem to find ways to believe things they want to believe, and in the nineteenth century, as Europeans realized that it was possible for nations to exist without monarchs, a lot of people wanted to believe that humans were going to bring the Kingdom of God into existence, all by themselves, right here in this world. Maybe “the hereafter” had only ever meant the “negative lives” of the remembered dead. Maybe God had no interest in relationships with created beings, and collective humankind, working through democratic self-government, was what was really meant to build Paradise right here on Earth. Maybe some very smart, if confused, young men were the prophets of a new order. If nations could survive without feudal hierarchies, who knew what else might happen.

Anyway, when women were told that the only “feminine” thing to do was stay home and be like little vines clinging parasitically to sturdy trees, i.e. men, and then they didn't happen to have men to cling to, what did they do? As a matter of historical fact--they cross-dressed. Rather than agitate for "Louise's" right to work and travel as she needed to do, it was easier for Louise to be "Louis." Most men, even if they had been interested in seeing for themselves whether small, soft-spoken Louis was really male, were highly motivated not to be caught looking at Louis--so quite a few women who didn't look mannish at all were able to pass as baby-faced young men even in Army boot camp.

Men cross-dressed, too, for a variety of reasons. Some same-sex couples were able to live together because one of them cross-dressed, but in many cases of cross-dressing sexuality was not a factor at all. Cross-dressing was the safest, cheapest, easiest way to get around all those silly gender rules. It was also the safest, cheapest, easiest way for fugitives and criminals to conceal their identities. All through the English-speaking world, in nineteenth century fiction people cross-dressed whenever they wanted to get away with anything...because in fact it often worked.

Whole-Bible Christians were a minority in this period. Humanists and Socialists were usually drawn to a revisionist form of Christianity that wanted to ignore the Hebrew Bible of which Jesus was a teacher, while still claiming to follow the teachings of Jesus. There were "Red Letter" Christians who wanted to ignore everything in the Bible not represented as a direct quote from Jesus. Quite a lot of people never really learned to read, knew only as much about the Bible as they'd heard someone preach, and were not aware that the Law of Moses forbids cross-dressing.

Why? Well...To Know Her by Name is a novel about a cross-dressing, heterosexual, Christian young woman of the nineteenth century. Nobody in this novel tells Miss Andrea Mae Hackett that cross-dressing is all about lying, even when the lying is done in the service of a good cause, or that it may result in her being beaten up by men who would not knowingly have hit a woman but don't mind beating up a smaller man, or that some poor desperate female may "fall in love" with one of the male characters our heroine has such a good time playing. The plot, apart from the romance, is about how those things happen.

Historical evidence indicates that hundreds of women actually enlisted in the "all-male" Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. The best known case was exposed when one of those women liked "being" an apparently celibate man long after the war ended, and spent more of her life earning her own living as "Albert" than she'd spent as "Jennie." In historical fact, when a visit to a doctor exposed Albert Cashier or Cashire as a woman, "his" employers and friends turned on "him," and "he" was hospitalized as a mental patient and forcibly re-feminized.

In To Know Her by Name, Lori Wick imagines that out West, where people were less bound by convention, tall, skinny "Pup" Hackett might have served under a commanding officer who liked her acting talent and continued to employ her as a spy for the Treasury Department, investigating corrupt banks, after the Civil War...and that a man who's fallen in love with "Pup" while she's dressed as the woman she really is will appreciate the work she does while undercover as a man.

The closest thing we have to an historical precedent for this kind of thing was Harriet Tubman. There was a tiny bit more understanding that an ex-slave helping to rescue other slaves might have a valid reason for cross-dressing than, in historical fact, there ever was that a young lady might have such reasons. In historical fact, when White women were caught doing "men's jobs," "just like a man, and better than some," everyone seems to have scrambled to brand them insane. And Tubman was a slave, so nobody cared that she had been married. A single White woman, whose marriageability was supposed to depend on her being not only a virgin but "innocent" even of how babies are made, might have been considered unfit for marriage if it were known that she'd ever travelled alone. Could any Victorian employer have lived with the idea that he was allowing a single woman to have adventures? To become an adventuress?

Harriet Tubman had, in historical fact, just a tiny bit of brain damage; though certainly intelligent--some said a genius, some said a prophet inspired by God--she was subject to narcolepsy. Perhaps that's why Wick gives Pup a different kind of minor brain damage. Her immediate family have always called her Pup, as in "clumsy little...," because her physical clumsiness is continuous and conspicuous enough to constitute a disability. (Psychology tells us that this sort of thing can be a mild form of cerebral palsy in which only a few muscles are consistently spastic, or an extreme form of dyslexic-type brain overactivity in which neurological messages are occasionally transmitted across the wrong synapses.) Oddly, when pretending to be someone else Pup is able to activate different neurological circuits that seem unaffected by her disability. When she's at home she spills things at every meal; when she's undercover, whether as a man or as a woman, she's not a conspicuously messy eater.

In this novel, Pup's boss, his motherly wife, and her admirer McKay, are all completely sympathetic to the peculiar brainquirk, unhappy home life, and poor prospects for conventional marriage that seem to justify Pup's cross-dressing, play-acting, and spying. And she's good at it; she catches a lot of crooks, and her boss really hates the idea that she might find someone to marry and give up being an undercover T-man--although Pup seems the type who can pass as a very young man but will become less plausible after age thirty.

For me it was hard to suspend disbelief in this fictional premise. I've read too many factual accounts of women whose rejection of rigid, silly gender roles was construed as "insanity" to believe that even three Victorian Americans would conspire to help Pup Hackett infiltrate the "men's world" of banking. The silly gender roles and rules, like "Women as an entire half of humankind are too math-challenged to be competent bank employees," had to be made very rigid--and any flexibility had to be made dangerous or at least expensive for a lot of people--in order to work for even one or two generations. In real life women like Mrs. Wallace were aware that their own comfortable unemployment was endangered if any female admitted that even counting the pennies she was paid for sewing was less than a fearful burden on her feeble brain; they were the ones who enforced the social rules that said a girl who was known to have cut off her hair, much less appeared in public in trousers, was socially ruined for life. In real life Pup's generation was the one in which a lot of women agreed that voting for school board members would have put an unbearable strain on their fragile minds...

In real life Wyoming was the home of the women who first successfully exposed sexism as the biggest, most glaring flaw in the Socialist dogma. Before women's votes were counted in national elections, they were counted in Wyoming. Maybe, just maybe, in Wyoming Pup's story could have been a romantic comedy rather than an unmitigated tragedy. But I'm skeptical...and anyway the story is set in Colorado.

Harvest House, I suspect, was banking on the belief that many readers don't care whether it's historically plausible or not. They just want a clean, chaste romance in which a Nice Girl attracts True Love by developing a good character rather than merely flirting and looking cute. To Know Her by Name qualifies. In the course of the story Pup's merely nominal or cultural Christianity matures into the serious kind that makes her reconsider her undercover activity. Before letting themselves blather about being "in love" she and McKay go through some decorous Victorian stalling displays. Everyone needs to know that Pup is sincerely concerned about the people mourning the untimely deaths of the fictional men she pretended to be, in different towns, on different jobs.

Have I given away the plot by now? I have not. "Christian romance" presupposes that romance is part of the plot, and ought to presuppose (although sometimes it doesn't) that a character's or characters' moral or spiritual growth is another part. How Pup and McKay go after those crooked bankers, I've left readers to find out.

To find out and also help this web site encourage living writers, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address from the bottom of the screen. (Salolianigodagewi is a mail-sorting account not a Paypal account; when you e-mail "Saloli the Message Squirrel" about a book or other product advertised here, "she" will reply with the current correct Paypal address.) From this total cash price we'll send 10%, or $1, to Wick or a charity of her choice. Two of Wick's longish, wholesome romances will fit into one package, for a total cost of $15 (or e-$16), from which Wick or her charity will get $2.

Book Review: Cunning of the Mountain Man

Title: Cunning of the Mountain Man

Author: William W. Johnstone

Date: 1996

Publisher: Kensington

ISBN: none

Length: 315 pages

Quote: “‘Smoke Jensen camped here last night...Then he rode out to the west early this morning.’ He was wrong, but he didn’t know it yet.”

Ah, the code of the Old West as enshrined in paperback novels, where nice guys are always having to shoot it out with bad guys and somehow the nice guys always win.

In this installment of the Mountain Man series, a whole gang of evil land speculators want to blame the improbable Smoke Jensen for the murders of as many as possible of some ranchers who just happened to have signed deeds transferring property rights to them. To get those signatures the baddies think nothing of torturing or killing children; one sub-gang of them are pedophiles as well. Jensen has found it necessary to kill enough evildoers, in earlier books, that he doesn’t even bother carving notches on his .44, although he likes being kind when he can. Many baddies will bite the dust in this story. Jensen will even personally beat up an especially despicable baddie before killing him. However this book differs from some other books in the series by featuring more pranks Jensen plays to stall for time, improve the odds, and give readers a laugh at his enemies’ expense.

Whether he vents another sort of feelings is left to the reader’s imagination. A young, pretty widow, who just happens to have enough sense of justice to challenge the claim that Jensen killed her husband, frankly lusts after his body. Jensen heads her off with a very proper speech about his love for his wife. An ideal nineteenth century hero would have actually slept alone and remained faithful to his wife. Far too many real nineteenth century people slept together, in situations like this, and never mentioned it. The novel can be read either way.

Few women ever liked this kind of thing. I’m not among the few. I’m too conscious that The West Was Won by an unjust, immoral war. Never mind that several Cherokee and Iroquois people agreed with European immigrants that the native population of the West were inferior, degenerate barbarians. Never mind that some aspects of some of all of the cultures involved were degenerate. And never mind that, in Cunning of the Mountain Man, Johnstone tries to ameliorate the ugly facts by confiding to us that Jensen privately admires the Apaches’ “harmony with the land.” Jensen is an anachronism anyway, but warbling about “harmony with the land” was a twentieth century thing. I enjoy the scenery in "western" movies and TV shows, but the stories? Strictly for guys.

However, those who like paperback “westerns” agree that Johnstone writes them well. If you’re willing to suspend disbelief in Jensen’s luck and grant Jensen a right to kill about twenty (I’m not inclined to go back and count) bad guys, in this book, you’ll probably enjoy Cunning of the Mountain Man.

This book has gone into the collector price zone. To buy it here, send $10 per copy + $5 per package + $1 if paying online to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen. (The post office collects its own "surcharge" on U.S. postal money orders and envelopes; Paypal makes online sellers do it.) You can get copies cheaper on Amazon, or (maybe) at a charity sale organized by people who don't look up the market value of "westerns," but if you buy it here you could probably add seven more paperbacks of this size to one $5 package, which might make our price more competitive. 

Book Review: Washington Square

Title: Washington Square

(I don't agree that this jacket picture suits this book at all, and it's not the one on the cover of the book I have. Click here to see Amazon's selection of other editions with different covers. The one I physically own isn't shown, and the one I'd like to recommend, the Dover Thrift edition, has one of those interactive images that can't be pasted onto Amazon Associate sites.)

Author: Henry James

Date: 1881, 1959

Publisher: Bantam (1959)

ISBN: none

Length: 162 pages

Quote: “A dull, plain girl she was called by rigorous critics—a quiet, lady-like girl, by those of the more imaginative sort.”

One of the harder fictional plots to write is the Antiromance, the story of how two young people met, felt attracted to each other, and then, for whatever reason, left each other alone. To remember or imagine the hormonal attraction is to want it to be an indicator of True Love. It is much easier for a writer who wants to affirm the completeness of a character's uncoupled life to kill off the Person the Protagonist Didn't Marry, rather than to admit that carnal commotion has nothing in particular to do with True Love, that it's possible to feel intensely attracted to someone you never for a minute imagine you'd really want to live with.

I recently commended the novel Avalon for portraying, to those willing to let themselves see it, two young people whose attraction to each other makes them lifelong friends but never a couple; they feel stronger physical attractions to other people, and act on those, and they have other interests and adventures as well, yet their friendship is part of their story. They separate, love other people, and live happily ever after. It is hard to write a novel that way. Anya Seton pulls it off by making her two characters interesting people—the sort of people who wouldn't be truly compatible with each other for very long, but whom readers would like to know, if not to marry.

In Washington Square Henry James sets himself the more difficult task of portraying two unattractive characters, selfish bores who can't be imagined as good spouses for anybody, and communicating that their not marrying is a Good Thing. James' audience were interested in the idea of eugenics, the idea that at least unhealthy people—and, some thought, unattractive or non-White people—should never have children. James gave them a pair who couldn't really be called “defective” but whom no innocent child deserved to have for parents.

It is possible to follow the story because the other two main characters are interesting, albeit flawed. Catherine, the anti-heroine, is a “large,” “plain,” badly dressed, inarticulate, but sincerely devoted child-at-heart, who happens to have inherited a substantial income from her long-dead mother. Morris, the anti-hero, is “in love” with Catherine's money but not “in love” enough to invest a little time in winning the respect of her overbearing father. Dr. Sloper, the father, is at least intelligent—enough to keep Morris at bay long enough for Catherine to realize how false Morris is, though not (as he thinks) intelligent enough to keep Catherine from realizing how much he underrates her. Mrs. Penniman, the doctor's widowed sister, is selfish as she can be, a steady source of bad advice that she hopes will make the young people miserable in such a way that they'll be emotionally dependent on her and thus furnish entertainment through her prosperous but empty old age. Dr. Sloper wants to keep Catherine from marrying Morris, even though he correctly guesses that Morris is the only man who'll ever propose to her. Mrs. Penniman wants to “help” them achieve an unhappy marriage.

Of these four characters it's possible to say (as Mark Van Doren did) that Catherine is the only one who shows any sincerity or unselfishness at all, and thus the only one who deserves a happy ending. Perhaps it's not possible for male readers to admit that she gets one. Women can make that admission. Catherine is one of those truly unfortunate people whose intelligence, probably in the normal range, is constantly overshadowed by their “brilliant” relatives'. James shows us that she's not really stupid but that, if she did have any kind of talent, she has no idea what it might be. The only sort of career for which she's been allowed any preparation at all is as a “society lady”; for this she has no talent, and it's probably a good thing that being single at thirty allows her to support the arts and charities in peace. It's hard to imagine anyone being a good husband to Catherine—Morris wouldn't be—and, therefore, easy to say that her happy ending consists of not needing a husband's money.

Among novelists whose work has been published long enough to have been rated by more than one or two generations, Henry James rates high. Among novelists in that category who rate high, he's the one I've always enjoyed least. But lots of people like his style, and even I like Washington Square. If it's not possible for James to understand how happy it's possible for a woman to be when she freely chooses to reject a man about whom her late father was right, it's certainly possible for women readers to enjoy the irony of a man recognizing that a woman may be better off without a man.

This book is not at all hard to find. To buy it here, send a U.S. postal order for $5 per book plus $5 per package to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, or send a Paypal payment for $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment to the e-mail address you get by e-mailing salolianigodagewi that you'd like to buy this book. At least five and possibly seven books of this size will fit into one $5 package, so please feel free to add other books to the package...you're not actually limited to books reviewed at this site, although, if you do choose from the (by now quite long) list of books labelled "A Fair Trade Book" at this site, you'll be encouraging a living writer, or writers. You can add any real book Amazon offers, as long as the books can be squeezed into the package.

Book Review: Many a Voyage

Title: Many a Voyage

Author: Loula Grace Erdman

Date: 1960

Publisher: Dodd Mead & Co.

ISBN: none

Length: 311 pages

Quote: “I was able to find only three recorded facts about Fannie Lathrop Ross, my heroine. These were the date of her birth, the date of her marriage, and the date of her death...There is no doubt in my mind, however, that she must have been an extraordinary woman. She would have needed to be to have lived with...Edmund Gibson Ross, past their golden wedding anniversary. Through him, in one way or another, her life was touched by almost every great national event during those tumultuous years, 1848-1889...”

I've observed more than once, in recent years, that his refusal to take sides in the American Civil War makes John Ross, of Oklahoma, one of my heroes. Enough things in east Tennessee have been named after him to show that others share this feeling. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century another man was making the name of Ross even more famous.

Edmund Ross, of Kansas, was Horace Greeley's ideal young man. Rather than waiting for a job on Greeley's newspaper he bought his own little printing press and “went west to grow up with the country.” Abolitionist, frontiersman, “Indian fighter,” he was twice appointed territorial governor and even elected U.S. Senator. As a Senator he acted out the ambivalence many Americans felt about the Civil War at the time. Although he'd started fighting for the Northern side, in Kansas, long before the actual war started, and showed no particular admiration for Andrew Johnson's frantic efforts to show disloyalty to Tennessee, Ross didn't blame Johnson for President Lincoln's death or think Johnson needed to be removed from office. Thanks to the rules of procedure in use at the time, some blamed or credited Ross for President Johnson's opportunity to finish his term. Later, President Kennedy would list Edmund Ross among his Profiles in Courage.

Should any of the “Indian fighters” be regarded as heroes? Can that question be taken up some other day? In their own minds, by the standards of their own culture, the men who slaughtered the buffalo and the Plains people were brave. Certainly they were tough. Arguably their culture was wicked and they, individually, were its fools—the late Vine Deloria used to argue that position—but Erdman completely ignores arguments about the morality of North American immigrants' unofficial war on their host ethnic groups (and, in some cases, their cousins in those groups) in the nineteenth century. Her focus, like Kennedy's, is on Senator Ross's voting for conscience over constituents.

Loula Grace Erdman was an historical novelist popular with school librarians and book clubs in the pre-feminist mid-twentieth century. The story of Senator Edmund Ross moved her to invent a fictional character for his obscure wife. Although the fictional Fannie whose mock-biography this novel is cannot be positively identified with the real Mrs. Ross, as Erdman admitted in the endnote quoted above, history made it easy for Erdman to spin a story in which fictional Fannie comes through as a plausible, likable character. The endnote explains which of fictional Fannie's adventures seem likely and unlikely to have been similar to the real Mrs. Ross's.

But the writer can never not communicate...even when a writer like Gertrude Stein or Kim Kardashian publishes a book that communicates mainly “I'm so rich and famous that I don't have to write anything coherent to get people to buy my book.” What Erdman put into her fictional Fannie Lathrop Ross was an ideal of sanely submissive wifehood...that worked, because there are sanely submissive, passionately monogamous wives, and they behave like fictional Fannie.

Fictional Fannie is hardly docile, although she always wishes people could calm down and live in peace and harmony. She stands up to slave catchers, Civil War guerrillas, plagues, famines, and riots; after a battle she charges out to help the wounded, soothe the dying, and dispose of the dead. She's “in love” with her husband even into their old age, thanks to a generous supply of hormones (the real Mrs. Ross aged rather slowly, by nineteenth century standards, and died fairly old) and the romantic tension created by his constantly going off on adventures of his own. When tempted to disagree with her husband she's not afraid to do that, but she seems to ask herself “Do I want my own way, or do I want to be with him?” and decide she wants to be with him.

In the 1950s many wanted to believe that that was the way all women were, or ought to have been, or needed to be in order to be really happy in life...and we don't even know that it's the way the real Fannie Lathrop Ross was. The real Mrs. Ross may have been a teacher—Senator Ross went on record supporting women's rights to be fairly paid and recognized as teachers—but fictional Fannie is never employed in that profession. (The old French Socialist ideal of never-employed women being “innocent” of money was still kicking in 1960.) The real Mrs. Ross may have enjoyed travel and “frontier” living as much as Senator Ross did, but fictional Fannie is a homebody who has lost her home. As explained in the endnote, Erdman didn't even really know whether the real Mrs. Ross originally had brown hair, or whether she'd always been short; only one old, bad photo of her in her sixties survived. (In her sixties the real Mrs. Ross was short; in the nineteenth century brown hair was considered as suitable for romantic heroines as blonde, red, or black hair, and in the twentieth century many women wished that were still the case.)

So bah, humbug, I remember thinking when I read Erdman's little propaganda studies of “femi-ninny-ty” in high school. Fannie was admittedly fictional. Girls who wanted to be like fictional Fannie married early, generally got divorced early, and grew up miserable. Girls who wanted to be happy in life went to college, got jobs, and didn't let ourselves need men, even if we did eventually yield to a really choice admirer's really determined pursuit—and never allowed ourselves even to consider marriage with anyone whose life goals were different from ours. I wanted to live in my home town and not have babies; into my thirties I expected that to mean I'd never be married at all. And yet...in my early thirties, when I was finding it possible and even pleasant to live on two of the three corners of Virginia at one time, I started asking myself “Do I want to do my own thing, or do I want to be with him?” and deciding I wanted to be with my husband...in Maryland. Rereading Many a Voyage, I now find fictional Fannie believable. If not based on the real Mrs. Ross, fictional Fannie is based on some real women.

Lots of school libraries stocked Erdman's books in the mid-twentieth century. Lots of libraries have discarded them since; the copy of Many a Voyage I just reread is a discarded library book. But it may be time to reconsider whether Erdman's heroines deserve to be considered heroines after all. Maybe the real Fannie Lathrop Ross never met Jesse James, but then again the fictional encounter between those characters may have something to say to modern readers. Read or reread this book and tell me what you think.

To buy it here will cost $5 per book, $5 per package (four books of this size would fit into one package), plus $1 per online payment. The story is too long, the print too small, to appeal to most children who play with dolls, but adult doll collectors may commission a doll dressed like Fannie for an additional $10. 

Book Review: Ordeal by Fire

A Fair Trade Book

Happy Independence Day, Gentle Readers. (No, I'm not online; this is a pre-scheduled post.) There are more jubilant ways to celebrate the history of the United States than a consideration of the American Civil War, but in some ways today's book pick can be considered cheerful conservative reading: as a nation we have survived being much more bitterly divided than we are now.

Title: Ordeal by Fire

Author: James M. McPherson

Date: 2010

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

ISBN: 978-0-07-743035-1

Length: 671 pages

Illustrations: black and white reproductions of photographs and other documents

Quote: “Many [non-slave-owners]... aspired to become slaveholders, and...achieved this goal. Moreover, given the traditional patterns of kinship...a nonslaveholder was quite likely to be a cousin or a nephew of the planter down the road. The big planter was in the habit of treating his poorer neighbors once or twice a year to a barbecue—especially if he happened to be running for the legislature.”

If you’re interested in the social history of the United States in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, more than the details of military history or the horrors of war, this is the Civil War history book for you. What you’ll like: lots of detailed documentation of the political countercurrents within the North and South, the historical anomalies of Northern districts that seriously debated secession and Southern districts that declared their “secession” from Confederate States and loyalty to the Union, and how the political thought of the mid-nineteenth century could be considered to have shaped more recent or current thought.

What you’ll not like: in order to get high school or college credit for reading the history of the Civil War, you’ll probably still have to read some other book that goes into more detail about the battles and the horrors. Ordeal by Fire was written by historians who’d already written that sort of books, for people who’d already read them. In this book McPherson can talk about economic conditions within a state or region without taking the time to explain the order in which battles were fought there; he can mention Gettysburg, Corinth, and Cold Harbor in one sentence if he feels like it, and occasionally he does.

Ordeal by Fire is particularly concerned with providing facts for those who want to try to understand race relations in the nineteenth century. For that purpose, it’s not perfect. It’s all too literally Black and White; McPherson’s “West” is Arkansas and Illinois, not Kansas and Oklahoma. This is understandable, since little was published about what was then the far-western territory, but a major weakness. McPherson also overlooks one of the grimmer realities of the Trail of Tears—the number of biracial, triracial, or even apparently “full blood ‘Indian’” people who identified with Christian churches and White, Black, or occasionally multiethnic communities, but retained some loyalty to the ruined Native American communities from which their relatives were banished. According to the old story, at least, no Real Cherokee would shed tears in the presence of the enemy, so it was those multiethnic types who stayed behind who watered the Trail with their tears. Arguably this minority group was enough of a true minority to have no impact on the outcome of the War, although the fact that McPherson doesn’t choose to mention Stand Watie, the most rebellious Rebel of all, or John Ross, who I think made the best of all contemporary comments on the War, does not alter the fact that they existed. The Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, like the border States of Maryland and Missouri, had its own peculiar sort of Civil War in which those who favored the Northern or Southern causes did some damage to each other while contributing relatively little to either cause.

In order to have a War Between the States people had to think of each State as a solid bloc of people committed to one side or the other. This was, of course, inaccurate; states, counties, towns, and families had their own Civil Wars. Often overlooked in elementary school history books is the fact that none of the Confederate States had a 100% secessionist population. Several Southern counties and congressional districts declared themselves to have seceded from their States and remained part of the United States; their Congressmen stayed in Washington, and the U.S. Congress continued to recognize their votes. (In Virginia, notably, those dissident loyalists were the ones who agreed to allow West Virginia to be counted as a separate State.)

But if you want to understand the various kinds of race tension that were operating between Black and White Americans, and different demographic groups within each of those categories, Ordeal by Fire excels. Among other things it contains President Lincoln’s relatively less popular First Inaugural Address, in which Old Abe affirmed that ending slavery was neither his intention nor (as he then believed) his right, and the passage from the Confederate  Constitution specifying that slavery would not be abolished by the Confederate government (although the Confederate government would later recruit Black soldiers with the promise of freedom). It also discusses the people nicknamed “Butternuts” and “Copperheads,” found especially in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois (where a lot of poor relations of Virginia families had settled), who couldn’t be called Southerners but whose political opinions and personal loyalties could often be identified as “Southern.” (“Butternuts,” the rare but tasty fruit of a native American tree, described the culture; “Copperheads,” the venomous snake, described Northerners who actively supported the Confederacy.)

McPherson also presents lots of quotes from the leaders of various organizations and movements, including but not limited to the Federal and Confederate army leaders, that bring their (sometimes distinctly strange) personalities to life. You knew that President Lincoln and General Lee failed to command more aggressive, decisive strategies, which might have been more humane in the long run, because both of them were just too decent human beings and both were sort of partial to the Washington area; any map of the military movement of the Civil War is enough to illustrate that. You might not have known that, although General Grant was a tacky guy who had sometimes been a drunkard, Vice-President Johnson was capable of embarrassing even him.  (The Southern-born future President was obviously very conflicted...McPherson shows how he acted out his conflictedness.) Readers also get to know Generals Bragg and McClellan especially well, and President Davis, another study in conflictedness.

The technology of nineteenth-century warfare makes any study of a nineteenth-century war particularly gruesome reading. Though Ordeal by Fire is mostly about the cross-currents of opinion, there’s no getting around the barbarities and atrocities. Among the barbarities and atrocities was the use of ex-slave soldiers. The North, at least, was concerned about not obviously putting all the Black soldiers where they would immediately be killed...although nearly all of them were; the reason why veterans of the “Colored Troops” were easily overlooked was that almost none of those “Colored Troops” lived to become a veteran.

Descendants of Union soldiers like to think of their ancestors as humanitarians who wanted to emancipate all the slaves and give them their rights. In fact a handful of Northerners—mostly in the Peace Churches—really did want that; General Howard, rare among Northerners, actually wanted "freedmen" to have jobs, schools, hospitals and suchlike, and succeeded in founding Howard University. More Northerners, like Lincoln, really wanted to resolve the socioeconomic problem of slavery by sending all the “freedmen” somewhere else. A truth unpalatable to many Northerners is that many of the “Butternuts” had chosen to live in “Free States” not because they hated to see human beings oppressed by slavery, but because they hated Black people, whom they didn’t recognize as fully human, and didn’t want to see any of them at all. In the absence of clear orders to exploit the slaves for war purposes, which was what the Emancipation Proclamation really was, Billy Yank was probably more inclined to kill slaves than to recruit them onto his side.

Johnny Reb, of course, had had to accept the idea that Black people were a different and inferior sort of life form in order to live with the slave system. This did not keep him from relating to Black people as individuals. He probably recognized a few as friends or even as poor relations, some as what Zora Neale Hurston called pets, most as “brothers to the ox” who deserved just enough good treatment to keep them fit and willing to work, and just an occasional specimen who had “gone crazy” or “turned vicious” who deserved harsh punishment. Slaves and slavemasters could not coexist in either real love, trust, and good will, or a total absence of those things. To a severely limited extent they learned to trust each other. So when the Confederates promised freedom to slaves who joined their army, there was no plan to send masses of those ex-slaves to be massacred, but also no particular intention that enough black veterans would live to form a parade unit, nor any plan for allowing any great number of them to live as “freedmen” in the Southern States. There was some vague, idealistic talk about sending the “freedmen” to the Western territories and letting them fight the war with the native people in which General Custer famously died.

In practice...there were a lot of Black soldiers on both sides, and very few Black veterans. The plain fact was that Confederates dropped like flies. The faithful slave who enlisted to serve beside Johnny Reb wasn’t likely to come home. Neither was Johnny. Nineteenth-century hygiene, the Southern climate, and the exigencies of a war that had gone on longer than the country could afford, killed thousands of men, and also horses.

There was some practical consideration of encouraging “freedmen” to organize separate-but-equal all-Black towns and schools, an idea that quickly lost popular support...partly because, in some cases, it worked. The historically Black schools were badly exploited in many ways, including pressure to lower their standards, but they were better schools than the extreme racists in the North wanted to have to recognize. The Roosevelt Administration tolerated Zora Neale Hurston’s documentation of the survival of a viable all-Black town—hers—under the heading of “folklore,” but the twentieth century was almost over before most Americans got around to reading Hurston or admitting that her own story was not only a “good story,” but also historically true. If thinking about this kind of thing raises your blood pressure—in either an infuriating or an inspiring way!—then Ordeal by Fire will raise your blood pressure.

Also discussed in Ordeal by Fire was Sherman’s famous, though unofficial and unworkable and therefore worthless, promise to give all the ex-slaves “forty acres and a mule.” Most history books in the twentieth century tried to skim over the whole history of the debate about re-allocating farmland to break up the big plantations and make slaves into small farmers...because in fact that history was relevant, and unsatisfactory, for both sides in the Cold War. In practice, if a thousand acres had been worked by five hundred laborers, even if the owner wanted to divide the land among those laborers and the laborers wanted that overworked played-out land, there obviously aren’t going to be enough small farms for each couple. Nature did not intend farming to become “large-scale”; whenever it does, although machines and poisons and bioengineered crops can’t demand civil rights, the large-scale farm is always forced to rely on short-term strategies that become unsustainable and counterproductive in a few years. McPherson does not discuss the implications of the facts of the 1870s for modern farmers and “social planners”—that’s beyond the scope of Ordeal by Fire—but he deserves kudos for presenting the facts, fairly and in enough detail to be useful to modern farmers and “planners.”

James McPherson (born in 1936) is still alive at the time of posting, so this is a Fair Trade Book, even though, ouch, those prices! The Amazon link to the cover of the copy I physically own will try to sell you the Kindle version; if you're using the book for a college class your teacher may order you to get the Kindle version for online class exercises, in which case you're just stuck paying the full price. For a real book, if you're willing to read one of the older editions, this web site can go as low as $15 per book + $5 per package (only one copy of this book per package, but you could squeeze in a thin paperback or picture book along with it) + $1 per online payment, from which this web site would send $2 to McPherson or a charity of his choice. For the current edition, we can offer $75 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment, from which we'll send $8 to McPherson or his charity.

Book Review: Far From the Madding Crowd

Title: Far from the Madding Crowd 

(This review is dedicated to the subscriber with whom I watched part of the video based on this novel last week. I didn't want to spoil the story for you, and I enjoyed the pictures and music as much as you did.)

Author: Thomas Hardy

Date: 1874, 1984

Publisher: Signet

ISBN: none

Length: 384 pages including preface, afterword, bibliography, and map of fictional setting

Quote: “Farmer Everdene’s niece; took on Weatherbury Upper Farm; turned away the baily, and swears she’ll do everything herself.”

You could say that the rest of the story is about how life punishes Bathsheba Everdene for being so independent. Or you could say that life rewards her for being independent and punishes her for being frivolous.

Pretty and popular, Bathsheba claims to have passed age twenty without ever having been in love. Before she came into her inheritance, Gabriel Oak loved her for herself alone, without knowing or caring what she might inherit; Bathsheba said she wasn’t in love with him. Shortly after coming into her inheritance, she sent the neighborhood grouch a Valentine card, having let chance decide whether she’d address the pretty card to him or to a child. He also proposed; Bathsheba wasn’t in love with him either. Then she met Frank Troy, who had planned to marry Fanny, the mother of his child, but lost patience when Fanny wasn’t intelligent enough to meet him at the right church. Bathsheba liked him. And, like many of the first guys young women like, he wasn’t good enough for her to wipe her boots on.

Readers will guess that Gabriel is the man for Bathsheba, but they won’t guess the thoroughly nineteenth-century way Hardy brings the two together. In a twentieth-century novel it wouldn’t have been considered credible. Gabriel’s and Bathsheba’s love of farm life, willingness to work hard, and fundamental integrity are unusual but not incredible; for me they make this couple much more enjoyable than most fictional couples.

Readers have, unfortunately, probably chosen this book from a high school reading list. Readers probably wonder why they have to spend so much time reading about “Wessex,” a fictional county in England. Hardy’s Wessex novels are a fine example of what used to be called "regionalism" in writing, which makes them excellent escape reading, but since your teachers probably aren’t trying to encourage your appreciation of escape reading I suggest reading this book with an eye to what Hardy was trying to tell young women.

Not that that was all Hardy had to say. When not writing, he did building and landscaping work. Places interested him as much as people. He invented Wessex by rearranging the towns and buildings of Dorsetshire. The maps of Wessex that his fans have lovingly created show what fun several generations of readers have had, comparing Hardy’s novels with the historical reality of the place where he lived. Tours of Dorsetshire are still organized specifically for this purpose.

Another interesting topic for term papers would be the peculiar history of Hardy’s fiction-writing career. Hardy’s novels were bestsellers in their day. Publishers wanted more. Hardy decided to stop writing novels because some critics thought his characters were too real. Bathsheba Everdene wasn’t the most harshly criticized of his characters. The interesting thing from a modern point or view is that the Victorians were less disturbed by The Mayor of Casterbridge, who exploits an old Anglo-Saxon law and sells his wife (as a slave, not a prostitute), than they were by Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Comparing these characters could provide material for an impressive paper on the value system of the Victorian critics as compared to your own value system.

Then there’s Hardy’s view of mental illness. One character in this novel is recognized by the others as insane. How many of the characters would you consider sane or competent? At what point do they lose their sanity, and how can you tell? What about characters in other Hardy novels?

Whatever your purpose in reading Far from the Madding Crowd, it’s a lively and readable story, with a good deal of romance that never turns into mere erotica and a good deal of conflict that never turns into mere violence. It’s an excellent choice for fast readers who want to write thoughtful, scholarly term papers. And it’s worth reading merely as a sweet, but not insipid, oldfashioned romance.

Regular readers can probably recite this paragraph along with me...Far from the Madding Crowd is not a Fair Trade Book, because Thomas Hardy no longer needs a dollar. It can be added to a package with other books, which can be Fair Trade Books, for $5 per package (for shipping). The price per copy is $5, so if you buy one copy, you send a total of $10 to either of the addresses at the very bottom of your screen, with the pertinent information about which book(s) you want and where to mail it/them.