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.

Book Review: Kathy Sue Loudermilk I Love You

I'm sorry, Gentle Readers. Microsoft ate up my reading time today. You get reviews of vintage books this weekend. I hope to bring in some reviews of new nonfiction next week.

Title: Kathy Sue Loudermilk I Love You

Author: Lewis Grizzard

Date: 1979

Publisher: Warner / Peachtree

ISBN: none

Length: 336 pages

Quote: “There was something special about Kathy Sue Loudermilk. Even at eight, she made a tight sweater seem much more than a woolen garment.”

Fun fact about this book: “Loudermilk” is a family name actually used by real people. Not all of them live in Georgia.

Kathy Sue Loudermilk I Love You introduces several repeating characters Grizzard caricatured in his comic columns over the years, giving them unlikely names like Weyman Qanamaker and Cordie Lou Poovey. It also introduces real people, some of whom are known to history only through Grizzard’s serious columns. For many readers, the publication of this book also introduced Grizzard.

At the time of writing, Grizzard was still supporting the railroad industry against the trucking industry, supporting Jimmy Carter against anybody, and, he claimed, sincerely shocked that anyone could question anything General Lee ever did.

Women were extremely touchy about anything that sounded sexist. Grizzard wrote some columns that deliberately stated, exaggerated, an unenlightened point of view, apparently to generate controversy, attention, and sales. (Women who worked with him said he didn’t act that way in the office, nor did he write that way in his serious columns.) On the other hand, his ex, Kathy Lewis, wrote a comic expose about “life with Lewis” called How to Tame a Wild Bore. The book did not portray Grizzard as either especially wild or as especially boring, but as your basic selfish, immature young man who is not really ready for a serious relationship.

Whereupon women who feel that there’s nothing wrong with being an immature young man—only with sharing any serious activities with one—took Grizzard’s books to our bosoms. The books, not the aging boy who wrote them. He died young, apparently without a bosom on which to lean.

In Kathy Sue Loudermilk, Grizzard claims that he was threatened with bodily harm after writing a column that blamed refrigerated biscuit dough for divorce and suggested that wives should get up in time to mix biscuits from scratch. Bodily harm? Well, yes...you see, it was still 1977; due to discrimination, women did not yet have the more feminine and empowering option of writing their own syndicated newspaper columns suggesting that husbands who wanted to stay married should get up in time to mix biscuits from scratch too.

And Southern Ladies, even those of us who were only ten years old at the time, just laughed and laughed. I mean, biscuits, people. Baking-powder biscuits were invented by people who didn’t have time to cook,. Baking-powder biscuits do not require the cook to have his or her eyes completely open. Just dump a reasonable amount of self-rising flour into a bowl, add milk until it feels like biscuit dough, press it onto a pan, cut out biscuit shapes, and bake it for fifteen minutes in a hot oven. Making biscuits from scratch is actually quicker than making them from refrigerated dough, since by making biscuits from scratch you can avoid getting biscuit dough on your fingers and taking the time to wash it off. Men can make biscuits. If you have a gas or electric oven, biscuits take no more energy or intelligence than cereal.

It’s this kind of confusion that makes Kathy Sue Loudermilk more than a nostalgia trip. Oh yes, there’s plenty of nostalgia in this book, with detailed inventories of the kind of traditional Southern-fried convenience store that still exists, in some communities, even now, and columns about the great ball games and Nashville songs of yesteryear, and bleeps. Does anybody over age 35 not miss bleeps? (Bleeps were electronic sounds used to protect the ears of the upper class from any trashy language uttered within range of a live broadcast; hence “bleep” could be, as on three pages of this book it is, substituted for any rude word.) Part of 1970s pop culture was missing 1950s pop culture. But Kathy Sue Loudermilk is not merely a sentimental look at the 1950s; it’s the way the 1970s actually were. Some things were nicer back then, and some were not.

This book is fondly recommended to anyone who’s not already read it.

Book Review: The Darling Buds of May

Title: The Darling Buds of May

Author: H.E. Bates

Date: 1958

Publisher: Curtis / Atlantic Monthly

ISBN: none

Length: 219 pages

Quote: “After distributing the eight ice creams—they were the largest vanilla, chocolate and raspberry super-bumpers, each in yellow, brown and almost purple stripes—Pop Larkin climbed up into the cab of the gentian-blue, home-painted thirty-hundredweight truck, laughing happily. ‘Perfick wevver!’”

It was often claimed in the 1950s that British Humour was too obscure and topical to be funny in other countries. The Darling Buds of May appears to be an example. I think the gross-outs grossly outweigh the laughs, but this is not a novel in which characters develop; it’s a rather violent satire on the changes in the British class system after the war. The Larkins don’t have to be tacky in a funny way. The mere idea of these tacky people emerging from the London slums to earn and spend obscene amounts of money, in tacky ways, is the joke.

There’s a plot, sort of. Mariette, the eldest of the six Larkin children, reports that she’s going to have a baby and has no idea who the father might be. This may just possibly be a trick, because an attractive young man, Sidney Charlton, tax collector, is in the neighborhood…and sure enough, he’s due to call on the Larkins, who never pay any taxes. The Larkins are migrant laborers, but they’re well paid. The landed gentry among whom they work are impoverished by having to pay income and property taxes, while the Larkins are paid cash every day, keep no records, spend their money as fast as they get it, and think their life is “perfick” if people just “use [their] loaf” (head) and live irresponsibly from day to day. The landed gentry might resent Pop Larkin enough to turn him in if he weren’t constantly treating them to party foods, cocktails, and in some cases illicit erotic thrills that their “background” would not allow them to get for themselves. Charlton is supposed to gather evidence for the prosecution of Pop Larkin, but instead he lets the Larkins seduce him into their lifestyle of carnality.

If you were one of the people who resented people like Larkin it’s probably terribly, caustically funny. If you think the blame belongs to the Welfare State for not allowing the gentry their chance to teach Larkin about the benefits of temperance, it’s sort of funny, too; I chortled. If you like the kind of escape fiction where everybody has fun and nobody gets badly hurt, you might enjoy The Darling Buds of May. If you believe that fictional sinners ought to be punished, you won’t like this novel at all…in fact I acquired it because a censorious library-goer in North Carolina hated it enough to damage my copy. Let’s just say that the Larkins, father and daughter, get off much, much easier than moralists would say they deserve.

Book Review: The Pink Motel

I searched the Internet. Today a row of six little pink cabins on the beach is hard to find in Florida, because so much of the beach has been filled with big expensive hotel buildings...and yes, some of the big ones are pink! In real life, a pink motel has turned out to be a viable idea.

Photo from Google.

Title: The Pink Motel

Author: Carol Ryrie Brink

Date: 1959

Publisher: Macmillan

ISBN: none

Length: 183 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Sheila Greenwald

Quote: “Although they had been warned in advance, the Mellens were also astonished by the color of the motel...It was pink, pink, PINK.”

There’s plenty of nonsense in this tale of the bland Northern family who inherit the flamingo-pink motel building. There’s even a fictional motif I usually hate—the plot where the ten-year-old is the only one who notices or understands something any competent adult would have noticed or understood first—which becomes tolerable, in this book, because it’s deliberately exaggerated for comedy purposes. But it’s not pure nonsense; The Pink Motel is also a satire about conformity, and probably also about McCarthyism.

This is a comic satire about people who try to be sensible, inconspicuous, and predictable at all times, and therefore either fail to see what’s right under their noses, or else use their own superficial conformity to take advantage of anyone who believes conformity is good. Children and eccentric senior citizens have to rescue people like the Mellen parents from crimes, even though the crimes are both preposterously petty and preposterously obvious, because the Mellen parents have mental blind spots for anything unexpected. Kirby and Bitsy Mellen want to consult their parents when things look suspicious to them, but their parents keep telling them not to be silly—well-dressed, icily polite men with bulges under their coats can’t be carrying concealed weapons, and so on.

Kirby, Bitsy, and their parents have inherited the motel and its guests from an eccentric uncle. Kirby’s buddy, nicknamed “Big” because he’s the smallest in his family, speaks an outdated dialect but knows more about living in Florida than any other character in the book. Bitsy’s buddy, Sandra, has been trained to sit still “with her nose in the air” by her rich conformist parents, but the other children liven her up.

Then there’s Miss Ferry, whose shrewdness and ability to produce snacks out of nowhere suggest that she may be a “fairy” or wizard, and Mr. Carver, a very wise penniless eccentric wood carver, and Marvello, a depressed stage magician, and Miss DeGree, who will become the damsel in distress, and Mr. Black and Mr. Locke, who ooze criminality to such an extent that only conformists like the children’s parents would trust them for a second. Then there’s the baby alligator...

Carol Ryrie Brink is best known for realistic family stories that were based on facts, like Family Grandstand, Mademoiselle Misfortune, Two Are Better than One, and most of all the Newbery Award story of Caddie Woodlawn. Not all readers who liked those books appreciated The Pink Motel. Brink had written other whimsical stories in the doesn’t-have-to-make-sense-as-long-as-it’s-funny mode, however, like Baby Island and The Highly Trained Dogs of Professor Petit; and some of her readers liked her in both modes.

Today, The Pink Motel is an obscure children’s classic...and my copy definitely shows the effects of fifty years of enjoyment by children. 

Book Review: Donna Parker

Book Review: Donna Parker Special Agent and sequels

Author: Marcia Martin

Date: 1957

Publisher: Whitman

ISBN: none

Length: 282 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Jon Nielsen

Quote: “I haven’t even walked into the school yet, and my problems are beginning already.”

Donna Parker was the heroine of six mystery novels for children. On the assumption that children like to read stories whose characters are a few years older than they are, the stories were written on a fourth or fifth grade reading level. In volume one Donna and Ricky, her best girl friend, enter grade nine. The series spans a year or two of adventures, all of which are similar enough to be reviewed at once (I’m selling the books as a set).

The whole series was a real period piece. In Donna Parker Special Agent, the Cold War was at its icy depth; paranoia about spies was everywhere. A boy at school sees that his blueprint for a model plane has been tampered with and, before even suspecting that another kid might have wanted to build a similar model plane, begins to suspect that the new janitor at school might be a spy. Donna and Ricky will of course find out who the janitor is...but I won’t spoil the story here.

Instead I’ll ramble on about the delicious 1950s touches, like those little white gloves the girls wear even when it’s not cold enough to bother with jackets. There’s a socioeconomic history behind those images. Before running water was widely available, educated people had started wearing gloves everywhere to keep the germs off their hands. A glove industry developed. By the 1930s, most North Americans were happily discarding their white cloth gloves, which were a considerable expense and nuisance. The glove industry was threatened, and the fashion industry came to the rescue. Back then “real ladies,” even in America, were supposed to take some interest in alleviating other people’s poverty, so even into the 1960s, if you were a “real lady” or the daughter of one, you would wear those silly little gloves. Men weren’t expected to go back to wearing gloves everywhere, but women were. Without the white gloves, a well-to-do female would have looked, not avant-garde, but selfish and mean...my mother still recalls being openly ridiculed by other women because, on a hot day in California, she wasn’t wearing gloves! White gloves were even part of Girl Scout uniforms, after age twelve. So on the cover of this book clean-faced, flat-chested Donna wears only a light jacket, but she wears white gloves.

The Donna Parker books were meant to be bestsellers for a few years and then become obscure collectibles, so they’re as indelibly date-stamped as today’s paperback TV tie-ins. They can be used as guides to 1950s fashions in clothes and decor, as long as you remember that 1950s fashions included some options; Donna Parker’s look was meant to tell us something about the Parkers’ socioeconomic level (affluent), their politics (conservative), and Donna’s image at school (wholesome, cheerful, reasonably popular). If your goal is to set a scene for characters who really did like Ike and exhorted kids to “Be Straight! Be Square!”, by all means let Nielsen’s illustrations inspire you. 

Book Review: Donna's Detour

Title: Donna's Detour 

Author: Jo Huddleston

Date: 2016

Publisher: Forget Me Not

Quote: "It was definitely the perfect guy she feasted her eyes on."

Donna's always had a crush on Tommy, but never made herself a pest about it, because he was her brother's best friend. Tommy's always felt sweet on Donna, but never wanted to intimidate her with his feelings, because he was her brother's best friend. Donna has moved to the town of Needles, California, which can still be perceived as a wild and dangerous place with all those riffraff driving through on the highway, because it's 1956. Can this couple get together?

Well, it's 1956, so the first step is to move Donna back to the town where Tommy works. Of course, Tommy asks her paternalistic employer for permission first, promising to take care of her. Then Tommy finds her a job in the company where he works. They are officially "just" friends, but co-workers buzz about the erotic tension between them. Distracting, barks the boss. One of them has to go and, this being 1956, it has to be the woman who's fired. On a Friday the boss orders Tommy to tell Donna not to come to work on the Monday. But of course, this being 1956, this only speeds up their romance.

When young women express ingratitude for the feminist movement (pointing to the extremists in the movement), this book may serve as a corrective. It's cringe, cringe, cringe, but it's historically accurate. If anything Donna is less harmed by 1950s misogyny than the average girl was/

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: Life Among the Savages

Title: Life Among the Savages

Author: Shirley Jackson

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (hardcover); Scholastic Book Services (paperback)

Date: 1953 (hardoover), 1968 (paperback)

Length: 236 pages

Quote: “We don’t have any Charrles in the kindergarten.”

This was, of course, the punch line to the section in which Shirley Jackson's first little "savage" went to kindergarten. Day after day, Laurie described the bad behavior of Charles, who behaved so badly that, when he was kept after school as a punishment, others stayed to watch him. Over time Charles settled down; the teacher said he was her helper. At the first P.T.A. meeting, the teacher reported that Laurie had had some problems at first, but now he was a fine little helper. The teacher must have had her hands full with that Charles, Shirley Jackson said sociably...

Of coure, even "Charles" was more naughty than bad. In most of the stories in this book the children aren't even naughty so much as they're seen through the tension and anxiety that were part of Shirley Jackson's cardiovascular disease. Jackson felt tense about interactions with adults and objects too. When she interviewed prospective cooks, for instance, one of them overplayed the interview: "Dishes. I love to wash dishes. If I didn't stop myself I could wash dishes all day long." 

Looking at the familiar Scholastic edition of my childhood, I remember noticing, even then, the oddly (it was meant to be comic) ambivalence the older generation displayed toward mine. The back jacket shrieks in all capitals, "Don't let kids get their hands on this book!" But it was a Scholastic book, marketed directly to children, at school...

I wasn't much older than Laurie when I first read the 1968 editions of Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, but I knew Laurie was nowhere close to "delinquency,' even when he was pretending to die from the effects of eating candy off the coffee table. The generation gap was exploited. In most families I knew, parents and children saw each other as allies. It was the commercial media that insisted we were all enemies. 

Shirley Jackson, even then, came across as prone to exaggerate her anxieties. I didn't know in 1968 that she had already died, "old," from what was considered an old person's disease, not even close to age fifty. Cardiovascular disease was poorly understood, often unrecognized in women back then. In the 1970s I had a relative, who wasn't much fun to visit but who bribed my parents to leave the siblings and me at her house some days, who had an aneurysm. I look back and can't remember much that she said that was not a textbook symptom of atherosclerosis. Nobody, not even Grandma Bonnie Peters, recognized her disease, though about the only she could have made it easier to recognize would have been to hang a sandwich board reading "I have atherosclerosis and will die before age 70" around her neck. Shirley Jackson was similar. People who had met her remembered her by her cardiovascular symptoms but apparently nobody ever thought that more exercise and less smoking might have increased her lifespan. 

What happened to the copies of her books I read when they were new? I don't remember. Thirty years later I found the same editions at a book sale. The "Charles" sequence had lsot all suspense and comic value for me because it was reprinted so many times. I'd found it in at least one anthology every year since 1972. The rest of the book was as funny as ever. I understood, now, what was really going on when such mundane events were described in such ominous terms. I thought Jackson had been awfully brave, not realizing how ill she was, writing out her anxiety and laughing at herself.

Book Review: Godzilla

Title: Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again

Author: Shigeru Kayama (or Kayama Shigeru)

Translator: Jeffrey Angles

Date: 1955 (Japanese), 2023 (English)

Publisher: University of Minnesota

ISBN: TBA

Quote: "Right before their astonished eyes, the whirlpool seemed to rise up when suddenly, flash! An intense burst of white-hot light illuminated the surface of the water."

Godzilla was one of the classic horror movies; the first really successful one made in Japan. Its "horror" figure has proved as memorable as Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, or the Pod People. It was based on a book that was written before the movie. So why was that book never available in English?

One reason is that it's hard for English-speaking people to learn to read Japanese well enough to translate Japanese books, and Godzilla, though popular, wasn't Great Literature in the sense that the works of Basho and Murasaki are. Funding was not available to translate genre fiction until that genre fiction had proved itself to be a classic in the genre.

But another reason was that, although pacifist in intention, Godzilla inevitably touched on feelings that still ran high in 1955. 

The monster's origin and name were straightforward enough. Japanese folklore has always regarded the appearance of "monster" fish as ominous. Gojira, from gorira, "gorilla," plus kajira, "whale," described the monster aptly as a whale-sized gorilla. While most of the "monsters" fished up around Japan are dead and merely frighten people who wonder what they're sent as warnings of, Gojira was specifically created by radioactive fallout from the bombing of Hiroshima; his name was translated the way it was because he was seen, by people who don't necessarily believe in One God, as something like the Wrath of God. Played by a man in a costume, spliced into scenes where he seemed so enormous that he couldn't actually exist, the gorilla-whale stomped out of the sea forming whirlpools that engulfed boats and smashed buildings with his massive paws, but his real weapon was that white-hot light of radioactivity. 

The Japanese people were well aware that in joining the Axis of Fascism in the 1940s they'd bitten off a great deal more than they could chew. Their army was tough. The little island kingdom really had overpowered the drug-addicted men and foot-bound women in China, seemed able to conquer Korea, and might have looked to itself as if it were ready to take over the world. The people had found out otherwise fairly early in the war. Now what were they going to do? Kayama has a character admit in the story that "We Japanese made a lot of trouble." He also admits that people still admired their war veterans as brave men, however misguided; in one scene a twentyish heroine, while focussed on a young man who has not admitted he's in love with her, is even more excited by seeing him in a group of war veterans. Possibly Godzilla symbolizes the desire for revenge that would indeed have destroyed Japan.

Godzilla has only one thing in common with the giant ape of American folklore, the Sasquatch: Both are spoken of as if they were imagined to be singular characters, but are also described as an entire species. There were two movies. Godzilla was killed at the end of the first one but a new Godzilla, this one pursued by another sea monster, threatened Tokyo all over again in the second movie.

Neither novella seems to have aspired to a reputation for literary greatness. They're written in simple, accessible language with minimal description, lots of action, no subplots or comments on life. Angles translates several onomatopoeic words ("grawr!" and "rattat" and so on) and observes in an afterword that Kayama used more of them; when it seemed more natural in the English version to have a character look surprised, Kayama had the character say "ha!". The plot of each novella is a standard horror plot: the horrible monster appears, and the hero has to destroy it, at considerable risk to himself, before it kills any more humans. The heroes are characterized just enough to indicate that they'll be missed if they don't survive; older ones have families, younger ones have sweethearts; those relationships are presented almost entirely through mentioning that the heroes' friends and relatives are concerned-but-supportive.

In 1955 there was no hint, in the books or the movies, that the author even guessed what kind of audience would make up the "cult" for the "cult classics" his movies were going to become. Horror movies appealed primarily to teenagers who wanted to show that they were, or to become, brave enough to think about frightening things. Movies generally, however, become the obsession of homosexual men. To this audience Angles observes that he felt some temptation to "queer" Godzilla, just for them; in Japanese the pronoun used for the monster wasn't gender-specific, yet no word used to describe the monster hinted that it could be seen as female or non-binary. While our Sasquatch is usually imagined as mellow enough that the male ape people always imagine first can be imagined as having a mate and young, Godzilla seems altogether destructive with no softer side. Godzilla might embody thanatos so completely that he doesn't even reproduce, fish-fashion, but only mutates from some natural animal into a bloodthirsty monster. That's a "he" thing, whether the homosexual men like it or not.

Can the human urge to use nuclear weapons be defeated by force? Kayama seems to suggest that it can, and it must. So, build something even deadlier to destroy the bomb, or bury the bomb deep in the Earth, or...? Reading Godzilla today may raise fresh questions...well,. that's how fresh science fiction is produced, anyway. And, once in a while, real science problems are solved by speculating about solutions in fiction.

Book Review: Billy Had a System

Title: Billy Had a System

Author: Marion Holland

Date: 1952

Publisher; Knopf

ISBN: none

Length: 184 pages

Illustrations: drawings by the author

Quote: "There was always a prize, but no matter how good you were, somebody else was likely to come along and be better. But then, there was always a booby prize, too, for the poor dope that was the very worst...Billy just specialized in being that poor dope."

That was Billy's system for winning prizes at those children's parties that were a fad in the early 1950s. In the other eleven of these twelve independently published short stories, Billy and his friend Fats circumvent grownups' attempt to put Fats ona diet, trade Billy's little-kid bicycle for a smaller boy's too-big bicycle, stay with Billy's nervous cousin, go to the county fair, baby-sit, play Santa Claus, find a bee tree, re-home an abandoned pet raccoon, and so on.

With a strong 1950s flavor, here are wholesome, mildly funny stories adults can share with children in grades between two and eight. Let's just say that, when I was a girl of the age for which these stories were written, I didn't like the way publishers pushed stories about boys on the assumption that girls would read stories about boys while boys wouldn't read stories about girls, and I didn't voluntarily read most stories about boys. I did reread Little Men, My Friend Flicka, Henry Huggins, the adventures of Rupert Piper, and Billy Had a System. It's not a book publishers chose to reprint, but it's well above average.

Book Review: Go Set a Watchman

Title: Go Set a Watchman

Author: Harper Lee

Publisher: Harper Collins

Date: 2015

ISBN: 978-0-06-240985-0

Length: 278 pages

Quote: “It could be, might be, still was, a horrible mistake. Her mind refused to register what her eyes and ears told it.”

That’s Jean Louise Finch, physically sickened by the cognitive dissonance as her mind wraps itself around the sight of her father seeming to support local political activities she expects him to despise as heartily as she does. Jean Louise was the little “Scout” who watched her father—not “Daddy,” but “Atticus” to his children—defend a Black man from false accusations of crime. Now he’s sitting there nodding his head as outsiders try to stir up race hate in their relatively peaceful town.

And that’s not the only surprise on this poor little girl’s plate in this her twenty-sixth summer. (It's the early 1950s; single women of twenty-six are supposed to think of themselves as little girls, but Jean Louise Finch has managed to keep on thinking like one.) Her aunt, who she thought would naturally agree that her boyfriend was one of her “own kind,” insists that her boyfriend is socially beneath her. And her boyfriend is nodding along with the haters, too. And the housekeeper who cared for Jean Louise and her brother, when they were little, is now a Black woman who sees Jean Louise as a White woman, nothing more. Jean Louise thinks she’s become a New Yorker but, to her surprise, she cherishes her memories of her sleepy little home town and hates the thought of its being torn up by race hate. Oh, it’s just one surprise after another, and all of them are awfully upsetting. Jean Louise spends so much time feeling sick, in this book, that a question arises to what extent it may also be describing the effects of pesticides sprayed on local cotton fields.

By now I suspect most readers have read this book and know the back-story. The book Harper Lee published only at the end of a long life, when she knew she wouldn't have to deal with audience reactions for long, was the one she wrote first. A publisher suggested she write a prequel about what Jean Louise and her brother admired about their father. That was To Kill s Mockingbird,

What more is there to say? A disagreement, of course. You have very likely read that this book exposes Atticus as "a vicious racist." It would be easy to say that that's an out-and-out lie, but I think it's more of an illumination of how confused the young have become about history, how little they know about vicious racists. Vicious racists are moving into peaceful little Maycomb, Alabama, but though Jean Louise's father and boyfriend are blandly failing to oppose them--which is bad enough--they, themselves, are not vicious racists. This book is a study of what led up to the violence of the 1960s. It is principled and nuanced. Anyone who thinks Atticus is a vicious racist is failing to perceive either the principles or the nuances, and was not redy to have read this book.

None of the characters in this book is vicious, although they are about to encounter social pressure to become so. None is a hater. All of them are based on real people, believably presented. This is a true (as true as it could decently be) memoir of a place and time that would later be oversimplified into a commercial media stereotype. 

The pressure to hate has started with the most vulnerable. The housekeeper does not hate Jean Louise; she still has a job, probably better than most of her friends' jobs; she's still a decent woman who knows a child can't really be blamed for the racist system. But she's been being sensitized to the evils of the racist system, probably encouraged to feel that she deserved a "better" job all these years, and she's been encouraged to blame and resent White women. She remembers having been kind to Jean Louise because little "Scout" was a child. She has put that kindness and behind her. Jean Louise can still want to trust the housekeeper as a friend, but the housekeeper has been influenced to cut off that possibility and, with it, any possibility of a nonviolent, reconciliatory resolution to her legitimate resentments.

This summer, the pressure is reaching the White working class. Atticus and other educated ladies and gentlemen are still bland, objective, and principled. More aggrieved people will be ready to blame Black people for their being left behind the wave of economic growth, their being despised by families like the Finches, some incident of bullying or harassment. The haters aren't having much effect on Atticus, actually; he's too old and too smart. All they need is his tolerance while they prepare his social inferiors to start burning crosses the next time a Black teenager says a rude word, or uses the one door or water fountain or toilet available, or wants to register to vote. People whose real grievance is with attitudes like Jean Louise's aunt's will be ready to transfer their emotions to an easier target.

Atticus, who probably has few days left to live, is impartial. No, he couldn't sit and watch a man be punished for a crime the man didn't commit. No, he doesn't believe the Black population in Maycomb, as a group, is ready for equal treatment with the White population, either.

He has a point. In objective fact, the gap has narrowed, but the fact is that people are not created social equals. Societies that cling to class distinctions rear people who are not prepared to be social equals. In towns like Maycomb in the 1950s, very likely no Black person had been trained for any job but labor, though they might have been by nature capable of being physicists. The infrastructure for "progress" even in the crassest consumerist sense had not been built. Black students might have been capable of going to top universities, but they had hardly been prepared to go to high school. Even the "wonder drugs" that ended the plagues in the early twentieth century were less available to poorer neighborhoods; Black people might have actually been more likely to have tuberculosis. It was convenient to blame that infamous gap in I.Q. test scores rather than recognizing it as yet another part of the problem that Maycomb was not prepared to accept upward social mobility among Black people.

The problem could perhaps have been addressed without hate, blame, or bitterness--but unfortunately, in many places, those reaching out to aggrieve Black victims of bigotry were "revolutionaries" who wanted to increase hate, blame, and bitterness. 

There are documented cases of Southern White people and communities of good will taking various initiatives to help improve the social status and quality of life for Black youth they recognized as deserving. Joycelyn Elders' education was sponsored by White neighbors, for one. There are documented cases of people who worked together to organize integrated schools like Berea College, or all-Black towns where race prejudice would not hold anyone back from any positions like Zora Neale Hurston's home town. 

Those calmer stories weren't told because "revolutionaries" kept screaming out the story that fit their agenda: Southern White people were all "vicious racists," Black people were always and only and ever victims, and Northern interference was necessary to save Alabama from itself. Northern interference meant a bigger, more intrusive federal government, which suited the "revolutionary" agenda. 

Atticus would probably have been more alert than Jean Louise to the "revolutionary" point of view, though in the 1950s he might have felt no need to explain it to her, or might not have felt that he understood it well enough. He considers the haters' point of view too. Both are alien to him. He is developing the detachment that comes with extreme old age, the sense that the social problems around him are for the young to solve and not for him. There's not a vicious bone in Atticus's body, but Atticus is passive. His passivity enables viciousness. He won't live to realize how much viciousness he is likely to have enabled. 

In the 1950s it could truly be said that "Black people weren't ready" for many things they had been told they ought to want, for which they had not in fact prepared. They were in fact not ready./Technological change was sweeping (or running) everyone off their feet, at best. Maycomb's Black population hadn't even set their feet in the way of it. The children may have wanted Cadillacs; the parents might have been happier with wagons. There could have been more honest discussion of just what the Black people in Maycomb did want, why they wanted it instead of having it, what to do about it.

Probably every earnest twelfth grade student reading Go Set a Watchman would agree, for example, that Black people deserve equal access to education at big-name universities. Well, so would I; they do. And in fact, if not in 1950, certainly by 1990 the university professors and deans and presidents agreed with that statement. 

So what happened in the 1990s? Black students were admitted to big-name universities, and some of them stayed through one midterm exam, and several left before that. I remember watching it happen at Berea, the school that had started out with integration as its raison d'etre. Berea also advertised the ideal of a good liberal arts education for youth of all ethnic types. More Black students was actually a goal, but in practice, too many of those Black students were intelligent enough for the quality of education Berea offers but unprepared to do the work it entailed. The "research" schools, like Berea, are set up to accommodate students with high school records including two or three years of math, science, foreign languages, at least a year of history, preferably some "classics" in the sense of Greek or Latin, a computer course or two, some fine arts, and at least one year of independent study projects. High school students who majored in being cool and popular, with one year of math, one year of science, no languages, lots of study hall and "fun" classes like Current Events Seminar or Family Life Education, arrive at college not even knowing how to study and their first few quizzes warn them that they are not in a place where they are likely to succeed. That the attrition of Black students is not caused by racism is shown by the fact that a minority of Black freshmen do stay in school and graduate, but the percentage of Black students decreases from more than proportionate in September to less than proportionate by November.

Anger, yelling, picketing, holding deans hostage, has been tried and has not fixed this. Crybullying and calling everything and everybody "racist" won't work either. What's not been tried nearly enough, but has helped when it was tried, has been systematically teaching bright but lazy sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds, of all ethnic types, how to study. Giving them a clue: "You are no longer in high school. You are expected to do some reading on your own before and after class, as well as reviewing your notes on class discussions and lectures. You will be expected to do independent projects. You are responsible for being a good citizen of the college and its town." 

That, plus a few good basic courses, bridges the gap between some intelligent Black students--and other types of students coming out of second-rate high schools--and their academic superiors at colleges and universities. Screaming "racist" does not help Black students succeed at university. Good community colleges do.

Atticus's objective, detached approach is the one that actually works, if it can be separated from the detachment and fatalism Atticus shows in Go Set a Watchman. The fact is that all students are not equally prepared to succeed at universities. When people detach from emotionality enough to observe the fact, but retain enough attachment to care about helping a student or group of students succeed, the problem is easily solved. The students' fundamental relationship to their school needs to shift from "School is a place where I am forced to spend time, although I hate the school and either already knew, or don't believe, everything teachers ever tell me" to "This school is a place where I want to spend time and can use the information teachers offer." This change is unlikely to be made overnight but it is what levels the field when students from "Hogwash High" join students from "Pride Prep" and "State Trophy High" and "St. Oldmoney's." 

Screaming "They're vicious racists!" is aggravating the problem if the students from the second-rate high school view themselves as a "race" minority. Analyzing, "This is the style, these are the standards they expect from students" gives disadvantaged students an actual chance to succeed.

Are the standards "racist" because they come from one culture rather than others? Possibly. The question is how well the cultural standards serve the culture. Cultural norms like coming to meetings on time, drinking alcohol at parties or not at all, maintaining a healthy interpersonal distance, respecting women, and composting rather than wearing out soil, are useful ones for other cultures to adopt, even if other cultural norms from the same part of the world seem to be less valuable

In Go Set a Watchman Atticus Finch's integrity in being himself, an imperfect but decent member of a dying generation, upsets his daughter; so does her own abiding love for her home town despite other people there not sharing the new ideas she's embraced with youthful zeal. After her own little fit of screaming "racist, racist" in her own way, Jean Louise is prepared to think, though the novel doesn't show her thinking, about what--besides "Just vote for our party!"--might actually help address the patterns of racism and elitism in Maycomb. Harper Lee never did take her protagonist that far, and now she never will. She left it to readers to consider how we can intelligently address the issues of racism, sexism, and elitism.

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: Debbie Jones

Title: Debbie Jones

Author: Laura Cooper Rendina

Publisher: Little Brown

Date: 1950

ISBN: none

Length: 244 pages

Illustraition: full-color frontispiece by Ruth King

Quote: “Without much hope she glanced over toward her new roommate…What a fiendish beginning for a new year!”

Though it’s a freestanding novel in its own right Debbie Jones is apparently the sequel to a story called Roommates about the previous school year, in which Debbie got into some sort of trouble with her roommate that caused them to be separated, turned the dorm manager against them, and got Debbie assigned to a different dorm for this year. In Debbie Jones we see Debbie anticipating trouble with “Peach Fuzz” for no other reason.

But this is the story of Debbie confronting some of her own personal problems. Basically Debbie is an extrovert. Though bright and talented, she scatters her energies, fails to carry through on commitments, disappoints everybody, tries being nice to her roommate but just doesn’t seem to understand her, and risks being expelled at the end of the term.

Still, everything is going to be all right, we know, even as we wait with Debbie to find out whether she’ll have to spend the rest of the year at a different school. How do we know everything is going to be all right? Because this is 1950. Whatever else young people, especially girls, do or don’t accomplish the important thing is to get them paired off and breeding “happy little dollar signs” to feed the economy. Debbie is the still-favored type, a tall blonde. She’s pairing off with a tall blond boy from her home town. They will produce beautiful blond dollar signs. If they don’t like feeding their days, and their little dollar signs, into the Waste Age economy, it’ll be easy for them to get tranquillizers. In 1950 nobody anticipates that those tranquillizers will produce the stereotypical harmless-psychotic homeless people found in shelters across North America. Anyway lots of tall blond middle-class Americans liked bringing up little dollar signs in the 1950s.

I can’t say I liked this specimen of the 1950s “girls’ novel,” though I found it well written and credible. Rendina had observed her students. The roommate who seems like “a fiendish beginning” isn’t bad, just not the one who’s become Debbie’s friend and not the type to hem the curtains Debbie can’t be bothered to hem; she’s just throwing herself into her studies because she’s had bad early experiences with the dating game. Were these experiences only the repeated bores and disappointments she describes to Debbie, as Heaven knows most teenagers’ dates still are, or has Mary been date-raped? Debbie will never know; nor will readers. The roommate, whose name is Mary, nicknames herself Shelley to sound more literary, though she’s not as serious a writer as Debbie—who’s not a serious writer.

Debbie is told she has a talent for writing, but she doesn’t. People who have a talent for writing write. Debbie spends her time hanging out and chattering with her favorite teacher instead of writing the essay her favorite teacher wants her to submit to the essay contest to represent the school, or listening to smarmy 1950s songs of Teen Romance on another dorm mate’s record player and thinking about her favorite teacher from last year. That would be Mr. Bingham, who’s moved up to a teaching job at the university. Debbie has a bad crush on him for most of the term, though she has enough sense not to talk about it. At first she plans to hate the new teacher, Marsha Merrill, just for taking “Bingie’s” place, but soon “Marsha” seems like her and Shelley’s other best buddy and Debbie neglects her old friends for the long serious talks about politics into which Marsha draws them.

Lacking memories of the political climate of 1950, I have to take Rendina’s word for it that this sort of thing went on at schools like Pine Ridge Prep: Everyone is blandly, trendily “liberal” in the 1950 sense, rehearsing the politically correct things to say about laborers’ right to strike. Marsha is just a bit more radically left-wing than the other teachers or the students. Some of the other teachers don’t like her for that reason. Debbie and Shelley convince themselves that an indignant parent can get Marsha fired for persuading a student to want to make a career of being a union organizer. The headmistress resents that, because she just knows Marsha will outgrow being so radical in a few years, and because she makes her own decisions.

I deeply disliked the fundamental assumption of this whole genre of novels—that what every girl needed was a boyfriend, soon to become a husband and the father of at least three little dollar signs, even if the girl had had some success on a job—when I was a teenager. I still do. That good writers worked within the rules of this genre, as with any other, didn’t salvage a genre that rested on a lie. Now that most people recognize that few Teen Romances lead to marriage and probably most of the ones that do shouldn’t, and although it’s splendid to find a Partner For Life a woman can’t afford to plan to depend on her husband’s money forever any more than a man can plan to depend on his wife’s money, and girls need to think more about work and less about sex, I suppose the 1950s girls’ novels have some historical interest. This one is more wholesome and better written than many of them were. I think it’s even possible that the character of Shelley is a sort of protest against the obligatory built-in falsehood of the genre, a warning that was tolerated in 1950 because so few people let themselves notice it.

The character of Debbie Jones is another warning that probably can’t be heeded. Much more than Shelley needs Debbie’s guidance to join more activities and have more dates, Debbie needs Shelley’s guidance to settle down and study—but Debbie’s not wired to do that anyway. If she’d been a real person she would have been promising to eat less, exercise more, quit smoking and drinking, and stop picking fights with her third husband, a few days before the fatal heart attack, probably in the 1970s. We see her feeling guilty and promising to improve. We don’t see her actually improving, because the Debbies of this world never do.

Book Review: Eighth Moon

Title: Eighth Moon

Author: “Sansan” with Bette Bao Lord

Date: 1964, 1984

Publisher: Hale (U.K.), Sphere / Harper (U.S.)

ISBN: none

Length: 183 pages

Quote: “I wondered about America, where my family was living...I knew little about America except for political theories.”

Bette Bao Lord is the author of two bestselling novels: In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, based on the Chinese-American immigrant experience of her childhood, and Spring Moon, based on her family stories of Old China. Eighth Moon is a first-person narrative, told to Lord as true, about the experience of her sister who was left behind to grow up in Mao's China.

In 1964, when Eighth Moon was first published, “Sansan” was still a young student and her story basically ends with her defection to the United States.

It's not the kind of big splashy novel American consumers of China-based fiction have learned to expect. Here is none of the red-and-gold exoticism of Spring Moon. Sansan, about the same age as the Clintons and W Bush, grows up in a thoroughly modern “Communist” China, feet unbound but education rigidly limited, eating bran muffins rather than rice, kowtowing to “criticism and confession” sessions rather than quaint rituals of ancestor-worship. She travels by trains, reads strictly censored newspapers, goes to a modern coeducational school where assignments include scooping up fresh horse manure from the streets (for agriculture class, the students cultivate mushrooms on it).

In 1964 “the new miracle antibiotics” were a hot topic in the English-speaking world. China, Sansan reports, didn't have the benefit of them. People sweated out fevers for weeks or even years. One of her friends developed tuberculosis and continued to go to school, wearing a face mask, until the end.

The Chinese government had recognized the dangers of overpopulation, and traditional Chinese parents had always frowned on teen romance...and Sansan's story is 99% sex-free. There is a mention of her having squelched a corrupt inspector with the suggestion that he was trying to peek at her blouse. There is a school friend with whom Sansan at first engaged in honest, spontaneous, idealistic-early-teenager-type self-criticism (“Please, don't steal any more”), but before they're full-grown this mutual self-improvement leads the boy to blurt out criticisms of Sansan to adults, where the criticism will be used against her in her job; this, of course, is unforgivable.

Among the ickiest things Sansan reports about Mao's China is the extremely ambiguous benefits of having family members in Hong Kong and America. Good “Communists” with relatives in capitalist countries get more of certain rationed goods so their letters will sound less dreary. They also come in for closer, harsher scrutiny. Sansan grows up calling other relatives her parents, calling her grandmother “Grandmother” but believing it's an empty courtesy title for a distant relative. Then as a teenager she learns that her real family structure is the reverse of what she's always thought it was.

And why was she always called Sansan, anyway? This was a nickname, not her official given name. It was heard as “Three-Three,” and another child taunted her, “[W]here are children number one and two?” Sansan accepted the unlikely story that she was called “Three-Three” because she was born on the sixth of the month, as a child, rather than dig for the truth that children number one and two had escaped to America with their natural parents. How people long to believe what we'd prefer to be the truth...

Is it possible that Sansan is emphasizing the worst things about her life in China for immigration purposes? It's probable. Then again, why would she want to do that? I think of a TV sitcom of which I remember only ever watching one episode, where the characters overhear a man pleading with immigration officials that he had to escape from the oppressive regime--“Mr. Wossname, our records show that you're from Canada,” an official says severely, and Mr. Wossname whines, “It was cold!” Any possibility that anyone from Canada ever complains about any temperature being too cold is good for a laugh in the warmer half of the continent and yet, if people want to live in a whole different country to get away from cold weather, it seems to me we have to admit that, for them, cold weather is oppressive. Maybe they're on anti-hypertensive medication. Sansan claims no special vocation to practice any form of medicine, admittedly wants to go to medical school to qualify for the highest-paid job she thinks she can qualify for, does not present herself as someone you want to see become a doctor, but in a real democracy she would at least have been allowed enough training to steer her into medical research writing rather than told she had to be a primary school teacher.

Book Review: On the Road

Title: On the Road

(This is not the edition I physically own; it's the edition Amazon wants you to see first. Lots of reprints of this book are available.)

Author: Jack Kerouac

Date: 1957

Publisher: Viking

ISBN: 0-14-24-3725-5

Length: 307 pages

Quote: “In the month of July 1947, having saved about fifty dollars from old veteran benefits, I was ready to go to the West Coast.”

Was this a novel or a memoir? Kerouac said it was a novel, that he was more like the character he calls Sal (who “shambled after” the character he calls Dean) than like the adventure-seeking Dean, but he had been in the merchant marine, experimented with drugs, and taken road trips. He changes names, places, and identifying details in this book, and probably cleans up the more embarrassing details of his alcoholism, which was going to kill him twelve years later. According to Ann Charters, who wrote the introduction to the reprint I have, “Carlo Marx” was based on Allen Ginsberg, “Bull Lee” on William Burroughs, “Tom” on John Clellon Holmes, “Elmo” on Herbert Huncke, and “Dean” on Neal Cassady. Kerouac stopped road-tripping, though, and went home and wrote books from his mother’s house.

Dean, in the story, “spent a third of his time in the poolhall, a third in jail, and a third in the public library.” Dean was “the holy con-man with the shining mind,” and Carlo was “the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind,” and narrator Sal “couldn’t keep up with them.” Still, Sal says, “the only people for me are the mad ones...mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved...who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.”

So they all drive across the continent, east to west and south to north, in search of adventures. And they have a few, narrated in a terse, student’s-letter-to-parents style that captivates the attention by how much it leaves to the imagination.

“I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the station masters threw me out.”

“Damion’s girl suddenly socked Damion on the jaw with a roundhouse right. He stood reeling. She carried him home.”

“He talked about how bad a driver Old Bull Lee was and to demonstrate...hurled the Plymouth head-on at the truck roaring our way...and swung away at the last moment...The people in the back seat were speechless. In fact they were afraid to complain.”

“It is only seldom that you find a long Nebraskan straightaway in Iowa, and when we finally hit one Dean made his usual 110.”

“Judge said, ‘Did you know what you were doing when you attacked your friend?’ ‘Yessir, Your Honor, I did, I wanted to kill the [BLEEP] and still do.”

Kerouac didn't type "[BLEEP]." Kerouac was not writing a Google-hosted blog. He and his friends were former sailors, and he wrote the way they talked.

The happy-go-lucky road-trippers are of course drinkers, occasional stoners, racists, sexists, and selfish jerks; you’d probably prefer other companions for a road trip you were planning in real life. Nevertheless most readers enjoy On the Road. Baby-boomers liked it so much in youth that we prefer to forget that the characters belonged to the Greatest Generation, not ours.

Of the literally dozens of editions of this book that are available, several contain additions--like Kerouac's other autobiographical novels--that you may prefer to Ann Charters' commentary. Amazon has eighty, count them, eighty pages of results for a search for On the Road, although some of those results are garbage. If you want a specific edition, please specify; otherwise you'll get whichever is available at the best price at the time of mailing, for $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment. Reprints of On the Road vary in size; there are small-print pocket-sized editions, standard-sized editions, and bulky omnibus editions where other novels are bound in. Generally four standard-sized books ship in one $5 package.