Book Review: The Saturdays

Title: The Saturdays

Author: Elizabeth Enright

Date: 1941

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

ISBN: 0-03-035760-8

Length: 175 pages

Illustrations: drawings by the author

Quote: "Why don't we put all our allowances together once a week and let one of us spend them?"

In 1941, children who were ten, twelve, and thirteen were considered old enough to spend $1.60 all by themselves in New York City, doing "something really good...something we've always wanted to do." Although they later decide it might be even better fun to take these outings as a family, their father finds this "An excellent idea...I was going to suggest it myself but I much prefer having it come from you."

Mercy. Why does a book as old and quaint as this one even have an ISBN? Because it's a good book; because children liked it, and kept it in print up into the 1980s.

One of the kids goes to an art museum where she bonds, for the first time, with an old family acquaintance who grew up in France and once ran off with Gypsies. One goes to the opera and, on the way home, adopts a dog. (Both the dog and the old lady reappear in the three sequels to this book.) One gets her hair professionally "styled" and meets a woman who ran away from an abusive home at thirteen. Their younger brother goes to the circus, gets lost, and makes himself sick on junkfood. During one of their shared adventures they explore Central Park, where one of them falls out of a boat.

Then their Saturday adventures take a more alarming turn, with a furnace disaster and an unrelated fire. After that they really are "luckier than other people," as one of them observes in a sequel, because the old lady comes to their rescue and they'll never have to live in New York City again.

When I was eight, ten, twelve, I thought the four "Melendy Family" books were the best series ever written for children. I still do. (Tom Sawyer and its sequels have child characters, but the books were written for adults.)

One thing I enjoyed was that Enright refused to write down to the child reader. I first read her books, stretching my mind around the unfamiliar words, at age eight. My brother made me read them aloud to him when he was six. We thought a good story was worth learning to understand phrases like "rust-colored buds on the ailanthus trees" and "prickling of camphory fur" and "leaping and pirouetting." Actually, I thought that was a major part of the pleasure these books offered.

Enright did this even in Thimble Summer, the one of her books that won the Newbery Award--possibly because it was about normal children. The Melendys, and the children in Gone-Away Lake, are definitely gifted and talented. I think my brother and I enjoyed these books so much more than Thimble Summer because we appreciated the message that there were other talented freaks like us in the world. In The Saturdays the children are merely interested in the "classical" arts; in sequels one becomes a professional actress, one a church musician, one a dancer, and there's never any doubt that even the baby brother will eventually be a brilliant engineer. More refreshingly, there's never any hint that a talent for engineering rather than the arts makes him inferior to or different from his artsy siblings, either.

The Saturdays is recommended to all fans and collectors of this author, and to all gifted and talented children.

Book Review for 5.11.26: Love's Harvest

Title: Love's Harvest

Author: Linda Shenton Matchett

Date: 2018

Quote: "[Y]ou will lose your family's farm if you don't bring the outstanding loan up to date in sixty days."

Basil Quincey's father died and left Basil a mortgaged farm. Basil accepts the 1940s wartime offer of employing a bunkhouse full of "Land Girls," women who were sent around to do the chores of farmers who had gone to war. At their best the women are less efficient laborers than men. A Mrs. Hirsch is the slowest of all. Basil considers sending the whole troop back but there's something about Mrs. Hirsch...

What I received breaks off there. It's meant to be a trailer for a longer novel. This web site officially disapproves of the practice of sending people fragments of books. This book is not so delightfully written that anyone would want to linger over every word of Basil's impending romance with the widowed Mrs. Hirsch.

Book Review: Young King

Title: Young King

Author: Lerone Martin

Date: May 5, 2026

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 978-0-06-334094-7

Quote: "This book...asks us to strip [the] Reverend Dr. King of the iconic status that adorns him today and allow him to simply be an adolescent."

Fair Disclosure: This review is based on an advance review copy of the manuscript I received in February 2026. Though advance review copies are sent to reviewers in good faith, occasionally reviewers mention things in advance review copies that are changed when the final edition is published for everyone else to read. 

Before there was a Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, there was a boy, smaller than his younger brother and sometimes bullied by same, originally called Michael, then M.L., sometimes Tweed for the suits he liked to wear in the years when high school boys were required to wear suits, sometimes Will Shoot for the way he played basketball. This book is about that boy. It is a real, thoroughly researched, "Childhood of Famous Americans" story. 

Because Martin Luther King himself never told us much about his childhood, this book is based on other people's memories and written records. It's not as intimate a record, nor in some ways as accurate, as memoirs like Helen Keller's Story of My Life or even memory-based novels, where other people's identities are blurred in order to let the author/character speak frankly, like Little Town on the Prairie. It probably contains all that is known about the early life of Martin Luther King.

Lerone Martin raises the question that the future Dr. King showed both introvert and extrovert behavior; he did seem to have a strong internal conscience. He was nonviolent as a little boy and as a man, despite a conscious plan to develop the ability to fight like a man of his time in his teen years; he was also one of those "outgoing" children who want to "make friends" of every other child they meet. I've suspected that this mix occurs when a healthy introvert brain sustains some minor damage. The baby later to be known as Martin Luther King didn't start breathing easily; his mother had been ill and there was some question whether he was going to survive. Just a data point, for whatever it may turn out to be worth.

"ML," as Martin calls his subject, was not the best student, either. To some extent this may have been due to competitiveness. Children and some parents admired a student who was able to skip through school and graduate earlier than others. Little ML King wanted to start kindergarten before he was old enough, then wanted to skip through high school and start college before he was even sixteen years old. He was bright enough to get into those classes with older students but not bright enough to do very well in them; he was mostly a C stream student who could sometimes pour on the effort to achieve a B. What he learned as an undergraduate at Morehouse was mostly public speaking; he entered Morehouse unsure about whether he wanted to be a preacher, and emerged as one of the greatest preachers of all time. But he didn't write much and his sermons borrowed heavily from other people's words, notably those of the poet Langston Hughes. 

And was he really a Christian? Warning: the reviewer is about to say something "liberal" here. In the history of Christianity there have always been people who naturally love "religious language" and contemplative prayer and thoughts about Heaven. They can look, especially when young, alarmingly similar to people with certain kinds of mental illness, though they are not mentally ill and can have effective ministries. Then there are people who may believe Heaven is real and even wish we could spend hours in contemplative prayer, but whose idea of being Christians is essentially practical, firmly rooted in this earthly life. There have always been tendencies for people with these different types of approaches to our religion to question whether both types really are Christian. Some people think the other kind of believers aren't doing Christianity right--they are "trying to be holier than God," or "all about people rather than God." Some people think the other kind may be doing Christianity better than they are, and wish they had the ability to express their faith in the other way. I think both kinds are at least capable of serving Christ. He did, after all, call both John and Peter.

As a young ministerial student Martin Luther King was a good match for Morehouse. He had quarrelled with his father, asserting that many things in the Bible were "fairy tales." Morehouse's teachers met young men who felt that way where they were and challenged them to discover the spiritual truth behind the "fairy tales." They took the "Of course Jonah wasn't really swallowed by a whale, so what can we learn from the allegorical story about him?" approach, and, as a university for young Black men, turned out preachers prepared to take their place in the Black American tradition. White churches could afford to have pensive, contemplative spiritual sons of St John in the pulpit. Black churches demanded active, practical sons of St Peter, which happened to be what King had aspired to be--to the extent that he'd dreamed of being a doctor or lawyer before he considered being a minister. 

Martin shows evidence that ML really was the idealist people wanted to believe he was after he'd become a martyr. Not in all ways, of course. On jobs that involved physical work he was voted the laziest student laborer in the crew. In his social life he was the typical selfish young man, coolheadedly pursuing the right combination of charm, beauty, talent, and altruism necessary to an ideal pastor's wife (or unpaid minister) in a series of three girls he seriously considered marrying, joking with friends about seeking treatment from young women of lower social background as "doctors" who cured all a fellow's problems so long as he made sure to wear his "shoes," and planning to go on exploiting and betraying women similarly after marriage. But he really did hate race prejudice and segregation with such a passion that, given opportunities to put it behind him and live in a place where segregation was not the law, he preferred to live in a place where segregation was the law and work to change that law. He really did know that working for change might shorten his life expectancy. He really did seem to think that ending segregation was a cause worth being a martyr for. 

So, although this book is not a hagiography, although it mentions ML's moments of rebellion and indiscretion and even quotes teachers who gave him low grades, it will still leave activists who read it feeling humbled. None of us will ever, at least not for several more generations, escape comparison with Dr. King. Few if any of us will ever accomplish as much as he did. Knowing that he had his moments of insecurity, frustration, and being-a-bad-example may at least reduce any resentment the comparisons make us feel. Nothing will ever change his status as the "King" of all activists.

Vintage Book Review: Holiday Mountain

Title: Holiday Mountain

Author: Lloid and Juanita Jones

Date: 1949

Publisher: Westminster

ISBN: none

Length: 200 pages

Quote: “There’ll be no shortage of fun at the Campbell place...Get in thirty-five cords of wood, clear half a mile of timber for a ski trail, finish eight cabins, harvest a few hundred sacks of kinnikinnick, wind a ton or so of evergreen wreaths, and wait on the tourists in our spare time.”

That’s pretty much the plot of this story. Mr. Campbell is injured, so instead of only helping him with the “fun” of running the dude ranch as they usually do, the children have to do it all. They go to school, too. They have fun along the way. And although no 1950s novel about teenagers would have been allowed to go on for 200 pages without a Teen Romance, this was still 1949, and Holiday Mountain manages to reach a cheerful ending without a single smooch.

Is this a wild parental fantasy? I don’t think so. I remember the summer my brother and I got involved in helping relatives rebuild a house that had burned down the previous winter. His first construction job, my first teaching job, real money, plus our usual gardens to tend, errands to run, pets, chores, and of course we still wanted to be in the Summer Reading Club, in which we were competing against each other for the grand prize...best vacation we ever had. I remember, too, the special form of chronic fatigue that permeates the body of an adolescent who’s been ordered to do something for the convenience of other people...but mostly I remember the energy that surges through the same body when the same adolescent gets a chance to do real, rewarding, challenging work. We put in eighteen-hour days of what most people would have called work, and loved it. 

To balance the joy the Campbell children find in hard work, the Joneses give their characters a friend who doesn’t enjoy the work his hard-bitten aunt demands from him. Poor Les has so much “less” that he’s not even sent to school! The parents try not to be judgmental; the children use their surplus energy to help Les.

It’s not hard to see why so few libraries have kept copies of Holiday Mountain. The Campbell kids’ division of labor might be considered sexist, and it’s realistic, but not politically correct, that everyone in their neighborhood is Anglo-American. More importantly, lazy people don’t want to read about how much teenagers can accomplish, and how much they can enjoy doing it, if their time is not being consumed by TV, computers, endless chatter, “hanging out,” and Teen Romance.

If you want inspiration to unplug yourself and your family, and get things done, Holiday Mountain may still supply it. 

Book Review: The Steep Ascent

Title: The Steep Ascent

Author: Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Date: 1944

Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company (hardcover), Dell (paperback)

ISBN: none

Length: 122 pages

Quote: “There are in the world today not only men fighting in planes but women behind them...My story is for them.”

Although Anne Morrow and Charles Lindbergh’s adventures in aviation made them heroes to the world, their political opposition to the Roosevelts, as well as Mrs. Lindbergh’s gender, grounded the couple during the war. At this time Mrs. Lindbergh wrote a novel loosely based on some of the flights she remembered, feeling that the women worrying about their Air Force men could relate to a fictional heroine who worries while sitting with her husband in their plane.

Personally, I liked her memoirs better. The Steep Ascent is a description of a flight made when aviation was still a dangerous adventure; it didn’t need to be cluttered with natter about the personal lives of fictional characters. Presumably the Lindberghs’ hordes of fans felt the way I do, because Gift from the Sea is still popular and The Steep Ascent has become hard to find.

Anyway, this book is recommended to fans of Mrs. Lindbergh who want to complete their collection, or who just want to read a vivid adventure story written by someone who’d had similar adventures. 

Book Review: Mariana

Book Review: Mariana

Author: Monica Dickens

Date: 1940 (U.K.), 1968 (U.S.)

Publisher: Michael Joseph (U.K.), Penguin (U.S.)

ISBN: none

Length: 283 pages

Quote: “Mary sometimes heard people say: ‘I can’t bear to be alone.’”

The heroine of Monica Dickens’ Mariana is called Mary. There’s a reason: people her age were not actually named Mariana. The name was well known, but it was considered unlucky, associated with the lovelorn character in Tennyson’s poem: “‘He will not come!’ she said...‘I am a-weary, weary, I wish that I were dead.’” Just in case anybody didn’t recall the poem, it’s quoted in the novel.

Mary is alone. Her husband, an officer in the British navy, was on a ship that has just sunk. She’s never minded being alone while he was out, but this is a real crisis, and her whole life flashes before her eyes...forming a novel in the biographical mode. My feeling is that Mary’s life has been commonplace, but somebody out there may find her interesting.

Although Charles Dickens’ great-granddaughter was young at the time of writing, Mariana was not autobiography. Her husband was an officer in the U.S. navy. (Interestingly, the preface to the 1968 edition calls her “Mrs. Dickens” before mentioning, further down the same page, that she was actually Mrs. Stratton, formerly Miss Dickens.)

Book Review for 8.4.24: God in the Dock

Title: God in the Dock

Author: C.S. Lewis

Date: 1970

Publisher: Eerdmans

ISBN: 0-8028-1456-5

Length: 340 pages plus index

Quote: “The young people today are un-Christian because their teachers have been either unwilling or unable to transmit Christianity to them.”

Most of “the young people” of whom Lewis was writing, in 1946, have died of old age by now. Lewis, who wasn’t young when he died in 1963, never became really rich but left enough of an estate to provide his secretary with a lifelong career of curating his writings. The secretary, Walter Hooper, compiled several collections of Lewis’s short stories, articles, and poems. God in the Dock was the most successful of those.

What readers didn’t like about this collection is that it contains, for their historical value, some of the earlier versions, discussions, and explanations-of-revisions of chapters in Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. Not only have we read some of these thoughts before, we’ve read them better written. The articles that were improved into Lewis’s books are valuable, though, to a certain type of reader.

Lewis was one of a whole generation of writers whose superbly rhythmic, readable, quotable prose style was shaped by frequent early exposure to the Bible—though some of them rejected the Bible, as adults, and Lewis himself deadpanned that he didn’t hear anything about the rhythm of “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” that wasn’t in “At the regatta, Madge avoided the water and the boats.” But that was the point. If Lewis, or contemporaries like H.G. Wells, Dorothy Sayers, or J.R.R. Tolkien, or the older generation from whom they learned, George Bernard Shaw, G.K. Chesterton, or Mark Twain, wouldn’t have automatically chosen the phrasing “At the regatta, Madge avoided the water and the boats,” they would have chosen one that sounded even better. The tin-eared writer of a previous generation might have wrought, “The regatta commencing, Madge, fair daughter Of Bill and likewise Betty, themselves sprung Of Jones’s lineage,” and so on for a few pages of genealogy, “Glanc’d on the sparkling waves, and then retreated To Brownleys’ inn...” The tone-deaf writer of today might report, “In boating news, Joe Smith and crew of the Madge winning the Club Silver Cup; Madeleine ‘Madge’ Jones reported missing earlier, since found at Brownleys’ Tourist Haven, citing nausea as reason for not attending...” Or any number of other things compared to which, yes, although it’s not an especially poetic line, “At the regatta, Madge avoided the water and the boats” is better.

That trained ear, plus a demand for exposition of the basic doctrines of Christianity worldwide, made several writers successful and made Lewis the “giant” among them. He expounded Christian doctrine so well that some of my generation mistook his excellent prose style for direct inspiration from God. It wasn’t. It was the work of a gifted but thoroughly mortal writer who also wrote shorter, hastier articles that he later revised into great books. Lewis did write lines that weren’t the best lines that could possibly have expressed the thoughts in his writing. God in the Dock is a collection of some things he wrote that made readers, or even Lewis himself, turn back to them saying “You can do better than this.” And so he could and so he did.

In God in the Dock we learn that some things that no one else had written, or at least not nearly so well as Lewis so memorably wrote them, were fresh in English because they’d been familiar to older audiences in Latin. We see that there were times, too, when his arguments were logical but wrong; his argument against “priestesses in the Church of England” accurately observes that there is no room for “priestesses” or Goddess cults in Christianity, but overlooks the corollary that, in the apostolic tradition, there was no room for “priests” or male-god cults either. In the great biblical tradition Lewis saw romantic love as an illustration of God’s love for humanity; he accurately accused the majority of men of being “insufficiently masculine” to relate to their wives as God does to the Church, but failed to follow that thought to its logical conclusion that, if the majority of men don’t relate to their wives as God does to the Church, then an appropriate description of God’s love for the Church might be something other than “masculine,” just as it is other than “maternal.” (Could the best word for God’s love be simply “loving”?)

We also get some fresh thoughts that might have been worked up into chapters in books Lewis might have written if he’d lived a great deal longer, but they weren’t; some thoughts and articles are found only here. The title essay is one of them. Lewis was a teacher not a preacher, so he was only occasionally invited to teach ministerial students (“ordinands”) anything about preaching, and wrote relatively little about the problem of evangelical preaching to people who saw themselves as the judges and God as the accused on trial—“in the dock.”

We see that Lewis was more prescient than he knew. Assessing his own Christian writing, he said that his literary and intellectual books might have a function analogous to that of John the Baptist; that Lewis felt unable to write or preach “emotional ‘Come to Jesus’” messages, and thought Britain was due for a visit from someone who could do those well. Lewis, who wasn’t especially fond of Americans as a group (his American wife was unique), had met then-young Billy Graham and liked him, but did not recognize him as the great evangelist of their century.

We learn almost as much about Lewis’s political views as we do from Present Concerns, and although they’re not identical with the views of this web site, we believe Lewis would have approved of this web site’s political strategy. (I don't think anyone at this web site would have liked Lewis much in the flesh, but oh, what an e-friend he would have been!)

Book Review: Secret Lives

Title: Secret Lives 

Author: Anna Jensen

Date: 2022

Publisher: Anna Jensen

ISBN: 978-0-6897-3769-0

Quote: "Alice wondered what she had let herself in for this time."

She had won a crossword puzzle contest. In the early twentieth century British crossword puzzle clues sometimes became a separate art form with elaborate codes, references, and puns; no simple "Knot" for TIE or "Poet Edgar" for POE. Winners of contests to solve these puzzles had displayed special talents and qualified for a special miitary draft, in the 1940s, to become military cryptographers. Alice has just been drafted.

Fast-forward to the 1990s, when young Rosie notices for the first time that her grandparents may not last forever, and becomes interested in their stories. What tales old grandmother Alice can tell, now that it's no longer, literally, as much as her life's worth to tell them...

This is the frame for the kind of novel I might enjoy but, unfortunately, all Anna Jensen has chosen to send out free of charge are three chapters, so I can't tell you whether the novel is as good as its frame. But it is a Christian novel; the characters quote from the Bible and pray about their problems. 

No writer gets five or even four stars for sending out an "excerpt" or a "sample." If you're interested in a novel based on what Anna Jensen was able to learn about the cryptographers, though, you might want to read this one.  

Book Review: Wise Blood

Book Review: Wise Blood

Author: Flannery O’Connor

Date: 1949, 1983

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (1949), Signet (1983)

ISBN: none

Length: 232 pages (1949), 120 pages (1983)

Quote: “Do you think I believe in Jesus? Well I wouldn’t even if He existed.”

The Bible says, “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” Wise Blood (which exists in a bulky, eye-friendly form and in a compressed, closely printed form) is an expanded variation on this theme. Whether you have the original 232 pages or the unabridged packed-down 120 pages, what you have is the tragic history of a young fool.

The word “fool” has always included the ideas of genuine stupidity, of sickness, and of wrongheadedness, or any combination of all three. Hazel Motes, a shell­shocked veteran, seems to be both sick and wrongheaded. He is also ignorant. He probably would never have been at the head of any class in any school, and he didn’t spend much time in school, but he’s not stupid enough to be easily written off. He is not more than twenty-three years old, apparently attractive to women, very serious, very sensitive, and very confused. Deeply religious before the war, he comes home determined to be an atheist, but he’s not cynical enough to be a good one. He gives up his attempt to organize a “Church of the Truth Without Jesus Christ” when his followers fail to keep his doctrine pure.

Before he dies—and there’s no room for doubt that he wants to die—Haze is determined to commit some Major Sins, and he commits some, in the laughable way that’s probably only possible for a very young and very goodhearted ex-Christian. He offers his virginity to a sleazy woman. That’s not bad enough. He rents a room from a decent woman, preaches atheism, is revulsed by his followers, and decides to seduce an old blind preacher’s daughter. To his disgust, the preacher is neither really blind nor really a Christian; it’s not clear whether his partner-in-fraud is really related to him, but being seduced is nothing new to her. The landlady steps in to help Haze get rid of this pair of scam artists, tries mothering him and even gets her hopes up about marrying him, but by this time Haze is walking around with barbed wire wrapped around his chest and gravel in his shoes, trying to die of pneumonia.

O’Connor was a Catholic, looking down on the Protestant peasantry of North Georgia. It’s hard to imagine her ever thinking of Haze as someone that God, as O’Connor understood God, wasn’t actively trying to redeem, through the grotesque days of his decline; but she couldn’t quite bring her antihero to salvation. And Wise Blood is probably easier to take if the reader is also Catholic, or Buddhist, or something that allows some hope for Haze’s posthumous redemption.

It’s also an anti-war tract. Men like Haze are still floundering around the streets of our cities today. As I read I found myself thinking, “Not true: friends and relatives of mine who saw horrible things, not even in Germany where they were told they could feel good about them, but in Korea and Vietnam, came home and were okay, as long as they hadn’t taken drugs.” Yes, but they had homes to come back to. Haze doesn’t. Haze, as fictional character, represents all the guys who joined the Army because their parents were homeless or on welfare or dead, or because they’d stomped or been kicked out of their parents’ or wives’ homes, or because they’d done something stupid and needed to get out of town fast. These were not the soldiers to whom we sent food treats in Vietnam. They were the ones to whom nobody wrote letters. I used to see them, and some of them were as old as Haze but were still alive, at soup kitchens in Washington. They were still visibly deranged. Most of them had, at some point between 1945 and 1985, taken some sort of drugs or “medication.” Mostly it hadn’t helped. Most of them were still carrying heavy loads of hate, grief, and guilt; many were also twitching. This is one of the things wars have always done to young men, and, these days, to young women.

O’Connor’s way of writing stories like Wise Blood is not for everyone. How can this tragic story be told as if it were a satirical comedy? O'Connor probably intended that most readers would want to rescue, if not to adopt, Haze. She intended to kill him by torture, anyway, and part of the torture is setting him in a scene like a Hogarth painting. These things exist, O’Connor tells us, and you, who are almost certainly stronger than I am, can do something about them, now that I’ve forced you to see that they’re there. Go and do it.

Book Review: I Found God in Soviet Russia

Title: I Found God in Soviet Russia

Author: John Noble

Publisher: St Martin’s

Date: 1959

ISBN: none

Length: 192 pages

John Noble, a German-American living in Germany, had trouble getting back to the United States when the war broke out. When the Russian army invaded, he and his father were arrested, apparently for having tried to leave Germany. Such official excuses were made, he tells us, when either of the two cash-strapped governments coveted someone’s wealth—his father had a thriving camera factory, which, unfortunately, had been damaged in the war.

Believing that God had allowed this to happen to them because they had not been practicing their Christian faith, father and son resolved to pray and testify in prison. The eventual result was this story of ecumenical Christian services in a Soviet labor camp. “Inspiring”? Maybe, but when Noble finally got back to the States, he expressed no interest in going back.

In addition to their persistence in prayer, this book gives a sketch of the cultural diversity the Soviets tried to flatten out. We meet people from several different ethnic groups and religious traditions. Unfortunately, due to the circumstances, we learn little more about them, but this memoir does affirm that good (and bad) people are found in all ethnic groups.

Old Book Review: Call Me Charley

Book Review: Call Me Charley

Author: Jesse Jackson

Date: 1945

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: none

Length: 183 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Doris Spiegel

Quote: “You’ve got to see my workshop and maybe you will get to see the hideout if we initiate you into the club.”

Once upon a time, when the United States was not so badly overcrowded, there were whole neighborhoods in which children had never seen a person whose ancestors came from a different part of the world, and so there was a need for storybooks about the first and only child from various minority groups in a school. As a rule these storybooks were nicer than some of the actual memories of people who were the only one of their ethnic group in their schools, and nastier than others. There was always an obnoxious child, or a few obnoxious children, who didn’t want to be friendly to someone they saw as different (in real life this was not always the case) and there was always a nice child who did want to be friendly, and by the end of the story they were all playing together.

In real life, there were and still neighborhoods where the new kid at school has to fight his way up to his position in the hierarchy of physical or social bullying. The first member of a minority group would have faced the same overt challenges that a new member of the majority group faced. The key was to be tough enough, if not to win all the fights, at least not to show fear. Children's book publishers at this period very seldom wanted to discuss that kind of schools or neighborhoods. Denial ruled. At schools worth reading about that kind of social life didn't happen.

So children’s books in this genre stuck to the relatively non-controversial issue of playing with other children at recess. Adults did not think children needed to bother their little heads about more controversial issues like job and housing discrimination, religious practice, interfaith or interethnic marriage, the fact that some members of minorities were not always conceded their civil rights, or the fact that sometimes it was the newcomer or minority person who didn’t want to be friendly. Children were supposed to be so innocent that all they needed was an occasional nudge about the benefits of always acting friendly.

Call Me Charley is that sort of book. Charley is the only African-American in his neighborhood. And his story was likely to be the only book in the middle school library—if the school was prosperous enough to have a library, which wasn’t necessarily the case, either, in 1945—about a little boy who really was “a Negro.” In the first scene in the book Charley has to remind his new school friends that his name is not Sambo, which was the name of the protagonist in a sillier story, for younger children, about a little boy in India.

Times have changed more than that. In Charley’s first conversation with his new pals Tom and George, the story they tell him is about how the little boy whom Charley will of course replace in the club got his leg cut off by slipping on the railroad tracks, trying to dodge an oncoming train, when all the boys were picking up coal around the tracks. None of these children is considered poor and desperate. They live in nice houses, with cooks who can afford to let them “steal” an occasional cookie between meals, and scraps of building materials to use in their hideout. Picking up bits of coal that fall off railroad cars was just something “smart, thrifty” adults encouraged kids to do in those days. Call it an early form of recycling.

By the time I was old enough to read books like Call Me Charley, or like Melindy’s Medal or Mary Jane, African-American adults were saying that the need for these books had passed. Libraries could afford to discard surviving copies and give us books by Langston Hughes or Lucille Clifton, unless these older storybooks were loved--and sometimes they were. Another very trendy genre of storybooks by Euro-American authors didn’t mention anybody’s ethnicity in an old-fashioned way, but were illustrated with pictures of ethnically integrated groups of children. Our generation weren’t supposed to be oldfashioned enough to think about where our friends’ parents came from. Some of us perversely and rebelliously persisted in thinking our ethnic roots were interesting.

Our local libraries preserved old books for their historical value for a good long time, so I was allowed to grow up with books about children who would, if real, have been as old as my parents; Charley would be about the age of my mother. On the whole I think those books were valuable, and should be kept available for the rising generation. Call Me Charley was not a favorite of mine, because it’s about boys. Nor was it a favorite of my brother’s, because it’s about city boys; none of the main characters is a horse, or a dog, or even a devoted dog owner. It’s a nice, cheerful story about boys who overlook their differences and play as a group. It’s still worth reading, once, especially by children who have grandparents who might appreciate an opportunity to tell the children about what they were doing in 1945.

Personally, I'd like to see libraries discard only a few really bad books that they shouldn't have acquired in the first place, and keep books that were terribly timely when printed and are historical curiosities now. A library should be a place where people who like historical curiosities can find them. How do we make history interesting for children? If the children like stories, as I did, what works is to let them read stories of other times and places, and let them be attracted to the facts of history by curiosity about how and why things were so different. Children need to know that although most houses had been connected to the electrical grid by 1945, the mad scramble to replace oldfashioned things that still worked hadn't started; many people used electric lights but still cooked with gas and heated their homes with coal. A book from the 1940s, like Call Me Charley or The Melendy Family or Meet the Malones, painlessly installs that fact in their minds and may encourage them to fill in more facts about the period.

Yes, some may fret, but what about the outdated language? Call Me Charley was written by a Black author (the Jesse Jackson who's famous today may have been named after him) and presents Charley's Blackness in the way Black Americans who were born in 1908 preferred to talk about it. I wouldn't worry unless the children in question are fighting a real race war. In a normal modern integrated school, one can hope the giggling about outdated word choices will be mutual, and one can squelch any attempts to revive it with "Are you trying to talk like someone in 1945? Why don't you look up some more about that time? What about 'ration tickets'? What kind of song would you expect to hear played by a 'big band'? Where were people still using animals for transportation, and where were the streets full of cars, and what kind of cars?" When my parents used to do things like that, they really made the historical study projects interesting. They found a 1940s radio comedy rerun broadcast on radio; today you might find recordings on the Internet. You can find recipes, schoolbooks, even newspapers and magazines from the 1940s if you look hard enough, and while children's clothes that old are hard to find, hand-sewn clothes were cool in the 1940s and you might find patterns. 

Book Review: The Little World of Don Camillo

Title: The Little World of Don Camillo

Author: Giovanni Guareschi

Translator: Una Vincenzo Trowbridge

Publisher: Farrar Straus

Date: 1950

ISBN: none

Length: 205 pages

Illustrations: cartoons by the author

Quote: “‘And anyway it was not as God’s priest that I beat you up but as my political adversary. Anyhow I did it in a moment of weakness.’ ‘Besides this and your activities in that devilish party, have you any other sins to confess?’ Peppone spilled them out, but all in all Don Camillo found nothing very serious.”

The little world of Don Camillo and his frenemy Peppone, Guareschi said in one of many reprints of his best known book, was a fictional village similar to his home town. People would quarrel and fight as if they could settle their differences in a trial by combat, but they fought “fairly, without hate,” held few grudges, and were generally goodhearted and generous. So Camillo, the priest, and Peppone, the Communist (but he hadn’t gone far enough in his studies of Marx to give up being Catholic), constantly disagreed about local politics, but never forgot that they’d been friends when younger.

In the late 1940s, Guareschi said, the incidents that suggested these stories were news items. Sometimes he’d think of a variation on a news story that would be funnier, then decide that it couldn’t happen, then read another news story in which it did happen. Would Peppone really shoot at a plane while someone in it was dropping anti-Communist leaflets? Peppone wasn’t quite mean enough to do that, but Guareschi went ahead and wrote a story about such an incident after reading that a local Communist demagogue had indeed shot down a plane from which anti-Communist leaflets were being dropped.

Are these characters stereotypical Italians? Perhaps, but few Italians seemed to mind. After all, the stereotype of Italians includes being cheerful and goodhearted, and Camillo and Peppone are portrayed as brave, honorable veterans who had each other's backs during the war.

“If there is a priest anywhere who feels offended by my treatment of Don Camillo,” Guareschi wrote, “he is welcome to break the biggest candle available over my head. And if there is a Communist who feels offended by Peppone, he is welcome to break a hammer and sickle on my back. But if there is anyone who is offended by the conversations of Christ, I can’t help it; for the one who speaks in this story is not Christ but my Christ…the voice of my conscience.” In later volumes he said that the Christ with whom Don Camillo has long imaginary conversations is to be imagined as the one in Don Camillo’s head, but of course a fictional character’s “self-talk” is his author’s too.

This was the first collection of Don Camillo stories to be printed as one volume. Though the stories were printed separately, not as a serial story, the last few can be said to give the book a climax and a denouement.

 

Book Review: All Honorable Men

Title: All Honorable Men

Author: James Stewart Martin

Date: 1950

Publisher: Little Brown

ISBN: none

Length: 300 pages plus index

Quote: “In mid-March 1939, when a group of some of the largest British and German industrialists gathered at Düsseldorf to map plans for the economic collaboration between their two countries, the press barely reported the meetings.”

James Stewart Martin was a Maryland lawyer whose opposition to monopolies got him appointed to a wartime job investigating precisely how multinational corporations helped the Nazis begin their attacks on the U.S. and U.K.:

“In 1940, 1941 and 1942, ships leaving American seaports had had the same security measures to protect their departure. Yet many of their broken hulls and water-soaked cargoes had washed up…German submarines had spotted them within sight on shore…every man on board had been marked before the captain opened his orders. Though they may not have known it, the cargoes they carried were insured with Munich. The routine system of placing insurance had put precise information on their sailing date and destination in the hands of the Germans before the ship left port.”

All Honorable Men is an old, dusty, musty book, my copy discarded by a library because after years of wear and tear it’s fallen into neglect. This is unfortunate. Despite the author’s inability to predict which names would still be familiar today (Bayer and Monsanto are mentioned, though neither was yet seen as a very important factor in the war) and the need to keep an encyclopedia handy while reading, it’s a well-told true story illuminating just how the international good feeling of the early twentieth century would cost American lives in the next generation. International good feeling, in the sense of greed for international money and grabs for international power, subsided only slightly in the 1950s and have resurged to even more cancerous levels of corporate “growth” since the Internet has developed. Huge corporations still reach out for those international mergers that gobble up the locally owned enterprises. Today even more than in the 1930s, multinational corporations stand ready to be drafted into the service of any hotheaded demagogue who can get himself into an influential position in some desperate little country that wants to challenge the English-speaking nations for world leadership.

Once again, most of us think nothing of using the Internet to document what we’re shipping, where, at what price, whether and for how much insured, or even when we’re travelling ourselves. That information is available all over the world and the main thing protecting most of us from theft, sabotage, or worse is that most of our affairs aren’t the most enticing to criminals. For now, criminals are more interested in drugs, gold, or explosives than they are in the mundane consumer goods most of us ship and receive. Today, as in the 1930s, it seems that nobody cares about such boring data as shipping receipts and airline tickets. Tomorrow, as in the 1940s, that data could cost American lives.

So y’might say I think All Honorable Men is worth reading again, yes.

Book Review: A Reporter's Life

Title: A Reporter’s Life

Author: Walter Cronkite

Publisher: Knopf

Date: 1996

ISBN: 0-394-57879-1

Length: 384 pages plus photo insert

Illustrations: black-and-white photos

Quote: “By the time I was six I already was taking to instant news analysis. The event was the death of President Harding.”

Walter Cronkite saw, remembered, and reported a lot of things. In this book he shares his personal take on many stories he did and did not report on radio or television, including those industries, themselves, and the production of his shows. Lots of mini-stories, many of them funny and heartwarming, some more “exciting.” As a war reporter he was allowed to fly in a fighter plane and taught to use a spare gun: “I don’t think I hit any, but I like to think I scared…those German pilots.”

He came to know many famous people well. In this book he shares a story about a former President’s marital relations just as, he claims, the former First Lady told it to him. (Hint: this was the First Lady whose hopeless voice was almost never allowed to spoil the lovely picture she always made.) Another President used to watch Cronkite’s news broadcasts and call to demand what he considered improvements. Cronkite quarrelled civilly with a sitting Prime Minister, triggered a career crisis by joking that a colleague might “already have” died in his TV show, went to Kennebunkport with the Bushes.

He'd learned early in his career to report the news in a way that seemed neutral and objective while he was biased. In this book Cronkite reveals some personal opinions: he was “conservative” about 1960s pop culture, but when it came to politics, why deny that supporters of global totalitarianism exist? Cronkite admits he was one. He still was one while writing this book.

Whether or not you agree with Cronkite’s opinions, even while airing his opinions he was still expert at finding good, inoffensive stories and telling them tersely. So his memoir is still fun to read. My guess is that, the more of the twentieth century you remember, the more you’ll enjoy reliving it with a TV icon who dominated an important part of pop culture for half of it.

Book Review: Will of a Tiger

Title: Will of a Tiger

Author: Iris Yang

Date: 2019

Publisher: Open Books

ISBN: 978-1948598132

Length: 295 pages

Quote: “He’d heard two horrible stories on the same night— one friend had been beaten to death by the Communists, and the other had lost everything and almost starved to death under the Nationalist government.[Iris Yang. Will of a Tiger (Kindle Locations 2880-2881). Open Books.]”

Trigger warnings: Although this is a classic Moral Tale about how a good person survives bad things, it’s full of horrible stories. As with Wings of a Flying Tiger, a simple English vocabulary does not indicate a book suitable for children. Will of a Tiger contains graphic sex and violence and period-appropriate hate.

Iris Yang says she didn’t plan to write a sequel after writing Wings of a Flying Tiger, a novel about China in the early 1940s, but then she became interested in what happened to the pilots known as the Flying Tigers after 1945. It wasn’t pretty. The Chinese people achieved some unity during the urgent need to fight Japan, then used up their remaining resources and energy fighting each other. There were no pensions for the veterans who’d done their bit toward winning one war. There was another war, without supplies, and often without the spirit of brotherhood that had alleviated their suffering during their first war.

In Wings we met the tragic heroine Bai Moli, White Jasmine, who was too good for this world. Fleeing the Rape of Nanking, this art student found a wounded American pilot who’d been left for dead and rallied the people in an obscure (fictional) mountain village to rescue him. Because they already knew and admired Jasmine’s cousin Bai Hua, White Birch, who was also a fighter pilot, the village adopted Danny Hardy. When Birch came back to the village, he and Danny took a formal vow of brotherhood.

Will is the pilots' story. Birch and Danny have visited each other’s countries, learned each other’s languages, and piloted fighter planes as a team, before they’re shot down and taken prisoner by the Japanese enemy. Danny has begun reading a Chinese novel about brotherhood by which Birch was impressed. After some months in a prison camp, the nastiest Japanese soldier tells fourteen prisoners to choose which seven of them are going to die in the morning; if seven don’t volunteer he’ll kill all fourteen. Birch and Danny argue about which of them should die for the other. Danny’s wound may have been aggravated beyond all hope of real healing, but he still has a family. Birch is healthier, but has lost most of his close relatives. A relatively kind Japanese soldier has been giving Danny painkillers. Later Birch wakes up with a headache, a hung-over feeling, and a sinking feeling that if Danny had escaped somebody would have noticed him.

Then Birch is shot, knocked down into a trench, and left for dead. He loses a leg and spends months in a coma. His passionate, very modern, U.S.-educated “girlfriend” has rich parents who tell her that couples always separate after a disaster. His father, General Bai, is still alive to tend Birch, and so is his late mother’s half-grown housemaid, who is, in old China, legally a slave—“bought” from other people, not paid wages.

Desperate parents could sell their children as slaves; “luck” determined whether such children were abused, prostituted, starved, or brought up like adoptive children of rich families. Being kind and well educated, Birch’s parents have even taught the slave Xiao Mei, “Little Sister,” literacy along with cooking and nursing, and in due time General Bai planned to arrange a respectable marriage for her, as if she'd really been Birch's little sister.

Though custom dictates that after some years of faithful service a slave was considered to have earned her freedom, Xiao Mei asks nothing more in life than to go on working for Birch’s family, because she’s always adored Birch. She nurses him night and day, until his eyes start to open, with traditional Chinese medicines—including “yang enhancers.” Her status is so much lower than his that she can’t hope to become his wife, but she’s always hoped to be sexually exploited by Birch, who is too nice to exploit anybody and wants to be an ideal husband...if he can be a husband, at all, now. 

One of the most pleasant parts of this novel is watching Xiao Mei, whose crush on Birch was a joke between him and Danny, mature into a fine “modern” woman anyone would want to claim as a sister, or wife, or daughter.

However, the will of a tiger seeks goals beyond romance, or even fatherhood. Before they were tortured in the prison camp, Birch was teaching Danny to read a Chinese novel about the virtue of brotherhood. Birch and his father believe in brotherhood. The civil war disgusts them; they advocate for the new idea that government, as well as fellow soldiers, should support veterans. This idea is unpopular as many Chinese people prefer to vent their leftover hostility toward the Japanese on their political opponents. Some hate General Bai for being a Nationalist; Birch is arrested and tortured for giving money to the aged parents of another Flying Tiger who was a Communist.

U.S. readers have read about the self-destructive "ideological purges" and partisan hysteria among Mao’s Communist Party; we’ve read less about similar excesses among the survivors of Chiang’s Nationalist Party. Yang’s point is that when people lose the ideal of brotherhood, it hardly matters whether they’re Chinese Nationalists, Chinese Communists, Japanese enemy troops, or common thieves. In this book we see people in all four categories behaving badly. Birch’s purpose in life, as a disabled veteran, is to live out his beliefs about brotherhood, consistently giving people a good example whether he’s admired or beaten up for it. That’s what loyalty to his father (and to Jasmine’s memory) requires, so that’s what he does.

In the nineteenth century moral tales were an overworked genre. (The best nineteenth century moral tales in English survived as “children’s classics,” like Deerslayer or Little Women.) In the twentieth century many U.S. editors turned against the whole genre. It became fashionable to believe that nobody really does choose to act according to an ideal of human virtue, or, if someone did, the virtue wouldn’t be rewarded. Nobody is perfect! (Even Birch smokes, as most men of his generation did, and grows old at an early age.) Nevertheless in real life most of us do meet a few people who live according to their ideals, and we find that sometimes diligence does lead to prosperity, courage to victory, and kindness to love. Will of a Tiger is a fine example of a moral tale with adult content. If you admire President Kennedy or Senator Dole, you’ll love Birch and wish history had made it possible for his story to end even more happily than it does.

Though I’ve read very little about the civil war between the followers of Mao and Chiang, I guessed the answers to most of the questions the characters raised. Nevertheless I, who usually take two or three pages of a novel to put myself to sleep at night, did sit up till two o’clock in the morning finding out how the story ends. On a computer screen, yet. I’d like to spare others that experience. Buy the book—your eyes will be glad you did.

Book Review: Wings of a Flying Tiger

Title: Wings of a Flying Tiger 



Amazon will try to steer you to the Kindle edition of this novel. If you have the money it's worth buying the real book.

Author: Iris Yang

Publisher: Open Books

Date: 2018

Length: 254 pages

ISBN: 978-1948598064

Quote:

"
"A war zone isn’t a place for anyone, let alone a beautiful girl like you. Those horrible things… You must have heard about some of them.”

“That’s why I have to go."

Iris Yang. Wings of a Flying Tiger (Kindle Locations 191-193). Open Books.
"

Trigger warnings: JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING that might activate anxiety, depression, guilt, rage, or grief is in this novel. It is a classical tragedy about the horrors of war. Read it when you feel ready to deal with any and all the unpleasant emotions known to humankind. Then feel cleansed, strong, and motivated to work for peace.

Wings of a Flying Tiger begins and ends with Danny, the American pilot who's taken out twelve other Japanese fighter planes before one of them takes him down too. In between chapters of Danny's story, we read mostly about Bai Moli, White Jasmine, the "tall" (five feet six!) and beautiful art student who "has to" make the trip to rescue her parents from the Rape of Nanking. Arriving just as her murdered parents' bodies begin to decompose, Jasmine becomes a sort of symbol of the city: brave and generous, tortured and violated, heroic to the end.

By a mistake the publisher sent me the second volume of a two-volume story first, so I knew that the first volume does not have a happy-ever-after ending for Jasmine. I did not guess how her story was going to end. The author has chosen to spare Danny, whom she rescues and promises to marry, and White Birch, her favorite cousin, from knowing all the details of Jasmine's story.

The year the young men really get to know Jasmine is in some ways a heartwarming one. Everyone is hiding from the war in a peaceful mountain village, full of old people and children who project their feelings for the young soldiers in their families onto the wounded soldier Danny. (Until Birch visits, the closest thing the village has to young men are two teenagers, an ordinary empty-headed kid called "Rock" and a slightly older but even dumber one called "Wood.") Most Chinese women have no formal education, a luxury only a few rich families can consider; Jasmine, Birch, and Birch's little sister Daisy speak English and Japanese as well as Chinese and are greatly respected, even though Jasmine is a shockingly modern girl who has actually touched Danny, once or twice even when he was conscious, before promising to marry him. Everyone likes their pet American "Flying Tiger." The children love his war stories, and Birch and Danny formally adopt each other as brothers. Most of the villagers have managed not to know much about what happened in faraway Nanking.

For those in my part of the world who have devoured all those stories of old China by Amy Tan, Gus Lee, Bette Bao Lord, and Carolyn See, here is that next part of the story where our favorite novelists usually tell us "And then the main characters came to America." Here is the part of Chinese history they left behind. It is not quaint and strange and very far away from the real world. It is real and dark and bitter and foul, and not something for the faint of heart to think about--except that it's what war is really like. Jasmine stays pure at heart; her fatal flaw is her unmitigated niceness; she's too good for this world. Danny accepts Birch in place of his lost buddy Jack, and might be able to accept Daisy in place of Jasmine when Daisy grows up, if Danny lives so long...what becomes of the young men is the other story readers will get in Will of a Tiger. The other characters, the nice old people, the adorable little children, poor clueless Rock and Wood...that's war, Gentle Readers. That's why war is never a good thing.

These stories are simply told, if not in "words of one syllable" at least in the commonly used words that put the books at a fifth grade reading level. That's because English is not Iris Yang's first language, not because the Flying Tiger stories are suitable for children. They're not. They contain explicit sex and graphic violence and the hatred that is part of war. Adults should read these novels if they dare, and renew their commitment to practice peace.

Buy them as new books, now, to show respect. This web site may offer them as Fair Trade Books if this web site lasts another ten years.

Book Review: The MacLeod Place

Title: The MacLeod Place

Author: William H. Armstrong

Date: 1972

Publisher: Coward McCann

ISBN: none

Length: 188 pages

Quote: “If they ever decide to finish that highway along the mountaintop, all these cussed up-and-down roads will be straightened out.”

And the home of seven generations of MacLeods will be destroyed. The active generation of MacLeods, Torm and Logan, were killed in The War. The grandfather, Angus, who is bringing up young Tor MacLeod, won’t have much left...

William H. Armstrong had just achieved fame with a novel called Sounder, about a Mississippi sharecropper’s son and dog waiting grimly while the sharecropper serves time in jail for having stolen the Christmas ham they enjoyed. One can imagine his friends in Virginia asking, “Why don’t you write about our poor people?” So in The MacLeod Place he documented how the federal land-grabbing that built the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, and specifically the Skyline Drive, caused as much pain to as many children as unequal pay and sentencing did in Mississippi.

The story naturally includes a lot of Virginia history. Angus’s explanation of “new ground” is much nicer than the way my elders described the Clearing of the Forests, though believable. His oral history of his ancestors' experience of slavery rings true. His sheep-keeping lore is informed by Armstrong’s own sheep farming experience. Angus’s history includes the often overlooked Mennonites, too; in the end the MacLeods’ friendly relations with a nearby Mennonite settlement are what save their family from emotional collapse.

As in Sounder, Armstrong’s voice can be oldfashioned and ornate. Angus feels that “time was running a fast race even at the snail’s pace of a man trailing behind a plow.” Not all of his generation agreed that Hemingway’s style was better than Bryant’s. Since my grandparents could sound like Angus, I find Armstrong’s style quaint but pleasant. It does remind me, though, that although the publishers tried to blur it into a could-be-happening-somewhere-now kind of story, this story is taking place in the 1940s; Angus’s “Pa” was running the family farm in 1859; Angus was probably born in the 1870s or 1880s, Torm around the turn of the century, young Tor about 1930.

What hurt this novel’s sales was not the perfectly appropriate oldfashionedness of Angus MacLeod, but the fact that it’s not a feel-good story. Like Sounder, it’s a protest against social injustice. Characters suffer, survive, and achieve a reasonably happy ending, but the point of the story is that the things that cause them to suffer ought not to have happened. Sounder’s Human shouldn’t have gone to jail and Tor MacLeod shouldn’t have had to give up a single corner of the MacLeod Place. The reaction of our chattering class is instructive. Sounder called out people it was fashionable to blame: those racist trash Virginians prefer to imagine living only in places like Mississippi or Alabama or big cities up North. More, more, the (mostly left-wing) chattering class cried. So Armstrong gave them a novel that calls out the greedy federal government, specifically the Roosevelt Administration so many older Virginians so loathed because stories like The MacLeod Place were true. The silence of the Literary Left was deafening.

Armstrong admits that Angus made mistakes too. Profoundly introverted and self-directed, Angus is too busy with his own work to verify that his farm is scheduled for destruction, to talk with other farmers who do or don’t want to sell their farms and determine whether a reasonable compromise would satisfy everyone (as it probably would have done). Tor, young and optimistic, wants to imagine that adults will naturally reach a happy compromise; he thinks his grandfather’s dislike of noisy motors  is oldfashioned, and secretly looks forward to the day when he’ll have the right to farm the MacLeod Place with tractors. Nevertheless the greedheads in the federal government completely ignore the protests of Angus and likeminded farmers, claiming that “many” (how many?) want a highway to run all the way along the mountaintop, all through the most valued farms, where litter and petrochemical residues will wash down into all the towns below.

A different novelist might have written a longer, richer, more densely textured story with some insights into the lives of the people who didn’t join Angus’s first protest in time to make a difference. I suspect there was a good bit of Armstrong’s personality in Angus. Armstrong prefers to focus on only the one man and the one boy, with only cameo roles even for their closest friends. It works, as it worked in Sounder, because these novels were written for self-absorbed teenagers. We see why even Tor thought his grandfather’s activism was too much, too soon, right up to the moment when he realizes that in historical fact it’s been too little, too late. We’re left to fill in from our own store of understanding not only why some of the neighbors didn’t join Angus’s petition, but how Tor would have been studying at school how this whole story was exactly the sort of thing his ancestors came to America and put all that work into farms like the MacLeod Place to avoid.

Our ancestors didn’t want to be either victims or profiteers from any “law of eminent domain.” The melodrama to which that evil “law” leads should never have been dramatized in an American story. It has already been written in the history of ancient Israel (see 1 Kings 21 through 2 Kings 9, inclusive), where King Ahab, the definitive coward, having mortgaged his wealth to boost The Economy, offended God and humankind by seizing just one little vineyard, and how this led to the violent deaths of his whole family and the ultimate collapse of his country. We failed to purge “eminent domain” out of our law in the United States, and it may yet destroy our civilization.

Ironically, because The MacLeod Place is a grim wake-up call that too many left-wingers ignored, Sounder now reads like something long ago and far away, but The MacLeod Place is remarkably similar to contemporary stories like Little Pink House. If you’re going to read one of Armstrong’s books, The MacLeod Place should be the one. White Americans particularly need to know that, although cultural misunderstandings and racist bigotry were real too, everything that greedheads like Martin Van Buren were allowed to do to Native Americans is something that the current incarnations of their greed would be delighted to do to fellow White, English-speaking, nominally Christian Americans. Without improving our federal law with a provision like, “Government may claim the right of first refusal when private property is sold, but may never under any circumstances seize the homes of law-abiding citizens,” none of us is really secure in our own homes.

Never a big seller, The MacLeod Place is now a collector's item. To buy it here, send $10 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address. (Postal money orders to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322; Paypal payments to the address you get by writing to Salolianigodagewi @ yahoo; or use the Paypal button below, if you see one.) Shipping charges are separate because packages may contain more than one book. For example, Sounder, Sour Land, and The Mills of God would fit into the same package with The MacLeod Place; or, alternatively, you could scroll down and find books by living authors you might want to support.

Actually, buying a book from this web site gives you the right to pick other books from Amazon, of which this web site may not have been aware, and order them and post your own reviews of them here...within reason. (You could order Fifty Shades of Grey or The Turner Diaries and post favorable comments about those non-Google-approved titles here, but I'd have to edit out extended quotes or graphic details.) You could add all kinds of things to the package when you buy one vintage book from this web site.

Book Review: Blitzcat

Title: Blitzcat

Author: Robert Westall

Date: 1989

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-590-42771-7

Length: 230 pages

Quote: “Lord Gort’s a cat...The BEF was going to France, and everyone was talking about Lord Gort. So Geoff called her Lord Gort.”

Robert Westall claimed that there was a “real Lord Gort.” The cat’s adventures begin when she doesn’t want to be evacuated and tries to go home, prompting her humans to send a telegram of “false news, creating alarm and despondency” by asking neighbors to keep a look out for the missing cat, who happens to share the name of a military leader. That happens in the first six pages of Blitzcat.

After that Westall, who liked animals, gives this fictional cat one adventure after another. I suppose it’s possible that one cat could have had all these adventures. Real cats have similar ones. Westall had lived through the Blitz himself and written other stories about what England’s Greatest Generation went through, and here are some more, also having the ring of real survivors’ stories, from the point of view of a stray cat. Lord Gort (also known as Hawkins) irritates a widow out of what’s becoming unhealthy grief, helps refugees find shelter, finds a cat friend to help her nurse kittens and human friends to adopt the kittens, goes flying in a fighter plane, survives a crash in France, and finds her way back to England.

How credible is this story? Real cats and dogs have traced their humans through longer journeys. Then again, anyone who’s ever lost a pet can only wish it were true that dogs and cats were equipped with mysterious magnetic senses of where their humans are.

My experiences with cats suggest a different explanation of how pets do occasionally manage to track their humans for hundreds of miles, through flood and fire and, as in this story, war. Rather than postulating “psychic trailing,” I postulate blind luck. The animal and human miss each other. Things that may or may not be actual clues, distant scents, half-heard sounds, suggest guesses about where the missing friend might be. Some guesses are all wrong, and many animals die every year in hopeless searches for the humans or homes from which they’ve been separated. But once in a while the animal really is on the scent and can find its human. This explanation fits the outline of Blitzcat better than the “psychic trailing” theory Westall seems to favor. Lord Gort sets off in the general direction of home, following sounds and scents that lead to food when she’s hungry, sounds and scents that suggest home when she’s fed.

Beyond that she is, of course, an unusually clever cat. Unusual, but not impossible. The only thing she does that I’ve not seen a real cat do is go up in a bomber plane—and I have seen cats hop into cars and trucks with a clear expectation that the driver would take them where they wanted to go.

Toward the end there’s a suggestion that Westall had thought of a few more adventures and been advised to cut them out and end the story quickly, as it was long enough already.

Well...the stories people bother telling and writing are the ones that don’t happen every day. Blitzcat is one.

The final sequence in Blitzcat, about how arbitrary and unreasonable “humane” people can be when making decisions for other animals, is meant to be harrowing. I’ve seen petitions on Change.org indicating that similar insanities happen—every few months—even today. Nevertheless, trigger warnings: Lord Gort is so much smarter and nicer than the humans who decide her fate in the end, it’s disgusting.

What I physically have is actually the first Scholastic edition (the first pocket-sized U.S. reprint), which is not currently available from Amazon. What you see above is the currently available reprint, which is widely distributed and what you'll get for $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment, as discussed in the "Greeting" post. At least five more books of this size will fit into one $5 package.