Book Review: On and Off the Ice

Title: On & Off the Ice

Author: Dorothy Hamill (with Elva Clairmont)

Date: 1983

Publisher: Knopf

ISBN: 0-394-85610-4

Length: 181 pages

Quote: "I felt that in a sense I was no longer Dorothy Hamill--I was the United States."

Dorothy Hamill started skating when she was eight years old. At nine, she decided to make it a career. Practice and more practice, working through pain, solid legs, a quiet and disciplined personality, and a beautiful face, can do a lot for a person. In just ten short years, Hamill was the world's champion skater, with an Olympic gold medal and dozens of other prizes in her collection.

This book is about skating, and that's about all. In between 1976 and 1983 Hamill found time to get married, help her mother recover from surgery for cancer, raise money for the American Cancer Society, and bury her grandmother; in the book she also mentions plans to have children. Those parts of her story touch on other people's stories, so we're not told much about them. There's not much about Hamill's education in the book, although she went to school; not much about friends or family; no mention of religion or politics. This is intentional. Part of Hamill's charm was a quiet, reserved manner. In this book, at least, she didn't tell people more than they were interested in knowing.

This quality makes On & Off the Ice a good, tasteful, family-friendly story that nine-year-old girls can share with their brothers without embarrassment. The personal memories Hamill shares are the ones that may be helpful to other young athletes: having to say no to other sports and concentrate on skating, having to "advance at a snail's pace" and perfect simple moves before doing fancy ones, being forbidden to chew gum while skating.

The vocabulary of this book is also accessible to nine-year-olds. Figure skating does have its own vocabulary, but if primary school readers want to learn about skating, they'll learn words like "axel," "camel," and "mohawk."

Later, after the other characters in the story were past embarrassment, Hamill published a more personal memoir for adult readers. Not "adult" in the sense of sex; "adult" in the sense that there's a lot of reminiscence about her parents' declining years. Buy the one that's more relevant to where you are in life. There is, of course, no reason not to read both.

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: Counting Sheep

Book Review: Counting Sheep: The Log and Complete Play of Sheep on the Runway

Author: Art Buchwald

Date: 1970

Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons

ISBN: none

Length: 219 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white photo insert

Quote: “Writing plays is pretty tough in Washington. Writing about anything except politics is pretty tough.”

So he wrote a play about how the American embassy destroys a small mythical Asian kingdom, not so much because the ambassador’s bratty kid wants to protest everything, nor because the embassy’s butler is a spy, but most visibly because a planeload of American “experts” want to sell the country a lot of things nobody really needs. Before the audience’s eyes, the peaceful kingdom is reduced to a banana republic whose prince has declared the whole embassy persona non grata.

Any resemblance to any small Asian countries our government was trying to help, at the time, is of course purely intentional, and the ethical acceptability of producing this play in 1970 was very questionable...but Buchwald’s light touch apparently made Sheep on the Runway acceptable. We all know the sequel: Buchwald became one of America’s best known and best loved syndicated satirists.

Sheep on the Runway, however, did not become a classic play. It went the way of almost all modern plays: it was protected by copyright laws, so while the author was waiting to sell it to Hollywood (or in this case writing witty newspaper columns) the student drama groups that keep live theatre alive, in most of the United States, were saying “We can’t afford it” and doing something by Shakespeare, or else by Gilbert & Sullivan, again. Too bad. Sheep on the Runway is quite funny.

Anyway, the book is now somewhat obscure. Many people became Buchwald fans only after Counting Sheep went off the market...Buchwald has fans who are younger than the book is. This means that, for Buchwald collectors, the book is a Rare Find.

Book Review: Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit

Book Review: Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit

Author: Harry Crews

Date:  1971

Publisher: Morrow

ISBN: none

Length: 206 pages

Quote: “She taught killing techniques gently.”

She’s a blonde who’s outgrown winning beauty pageants and gone on to win karate competitions. She’s willing to strip before fighting men in order to distract and defeat them. thing of the spirit or not, this is a novel of sex and violence...well, in 1971 Norman Mailer was considered an excellent writer. It is possible to analyze the sex and violence as expressing a conflict of ideas, and feel that that conflict is resolved in the story...but how many people really care?

Two of the many, many guys who want the blonde Brown Belt make conflicting claims on her. One wants her to live for karate alone; one wants her to give up karate and have a baby. If you’re in any doubt as to which decision the blonde will eventually adopt, remember, once again: it was 1971.

I didn’t like this book. Some people, probably all male, do like it. I’m not trying to shame those people; I’ll even concede the possibility that, while reading it, they thought about the ideas that are being played out in the almost continuous fights and numerous sexual acts. I’ll concede this point because debating it was also a thing of 1971, and I have a life.

Book Review: Better Homes & Gardens Calorie Counter's Cookbook

Title: Better Homes & Gardens Calorie Counter’s Cookbook

Author: Better Homes & Gardens magazine staff

Date: 1970

Publisher: Meredith Corporation

ISBN: none

Length: 96 pages

Illustrations: photos, some in color

Quote: “Good food, attractively prepared, is a boon to the calorie-conscious dieter.”

Some of the recipes in this book are good food. Still, this is a slick magazine’s production, designed to please corporate sponsors, so a lot of recipes call for pre-packaged foods. This is not the place to look for tips on reducing calories by learning to appreciate salads or sandwiches without the oil-and-vinegar glop.

Unlike some other Better Homes & Gardens collections, this one offers almost two whole pages of vegetarian “main dishes,” and lots of vegetable dishes, salads, and sandwiches that could be served as “main dishes” and aren’t made with meat. There’s also a dessert section, which consists mainly of ways to dress up poor-quality fruit if you don’t have any fruit that is sweet, juicy, and beautiful all by itself.

It’s also easy, in this collection, to find recipes that don’t use the common allergy-trigger foods (milk, egg, yeast, corn, wheat, soy, nuts).

This is a nice companion to the Family Circle cookbook reviewed here yesterday.  Same historical era, same simplistic belief that reducing the calorie content of food would make everyone slim, fit, and full of energy. It won't, but reducing fat in the diet is a step in the right direction toward having the thyroid metabolic rate of a slim, fit, energetic person.

Book Review: Family Circle's Creative Low-Calorie Cooking

Apologies are in order, Gentle Readers. I apologize. I've been too busy in real life to keep up with reading a book a day; that's no reason to deny representation to the writers and publishers of books I have for sale. Here, fresh from the can, is a lovely period piece for the cookbook collectors:

Title: Family Circle’s Creative Low-Calorie Cooking

Author: Barbara Gibbons

Date: 1971, 1976

Publisher: Family Circle / New York Times

ISBN: 0-405-06684-8

Length: 159 pages including index

Illustrations: many color photos

Quote: “It was really a matter of learning how to duplicate the taste and texture of my favorite foods, without the unneeded extra calories.”

Some of the ideas discussed in this book have stood the test of time; they actually modernize these recipes. The oil in baked goods can usually be minimized—you can safely substitute teaspoons for tablespoons in most recipes from before 1970. Fresh fruit can replace syrup on pancakes or replace any butter-and-sugar confection as “dessert.” When meat is cooked on a rack in a pan, most fat will drip into the pan; it can be burned (not poured down the drain) or buried (not composted), or used to make pet treats. When meat is cut fine and heated in water, most fat, blood, and other impurities will rise to the top, where they can be skimmed off and disposed of. Pork-free processed meats are less oily than pork-based processed meat; soy-based processed “meats” are the lowest in fat of all. Cornstarch and arrowroot starch thicken gravies more efficiently, and add fewer calories, than white wheat flour. Chicken skin is best discarded with the wrapping.

Gibbons does not challenge all the myths of cookery that thin people have successfully debunked. She never disputes the claim that sandwiches have to be slathered with butter or mayonnaise. (They don’t; bread and lean meat might be dry, but fresh, juicy vegetables add lubrication, flavor, nutrition, fibre, and virtually no calories.) She clings to the delusion that salads need “dressings.” She has also formed the bad habit of always frying onions in butter, or even in “diet margarine.”

I can think of no reason why any onion would deserve to be smothered in “diet margarine.” If you live in an area where naturally sweet and mellow onions, such as Vidalia, Walla Walla, or Maui onions, are available, you may find that your favorite way to ingest allicin doesn’t require cooking the onions at all, which saves some energy and cooking time. If you have to use a painfully pungent onion, try baking it (dry) or boiling it to mellow the flavor.

Then there are a few ideas that have not stood the test of time. “Low-calorie sweeteners” are seldom worth the bother. Some “reduced-calorie” or “low-fat” pre­packaged foods are so called because less fat was added to the recipe, which is great; others are made with bizarre chemicals that may trigger allergies or build up toxicity. And the body does need some oil, especially the “essential” omega-3 found in fish and omega-5 found in grains...but why waste time with expensive creamy or mayonnaise-y “dips” when yogurt and salsa have already been discovered.

Some ideas Gibbons accepts are controversial. Cooking food in wine, rather than oil or water, is traditional in some countries—usually countries, like France and Italy , where most of the water is unfit to drink—and can add an authentic flavor to recipes that came from those countries. On the other hand, many people hate that flavor, and many are sensitive to chemicals found in wine even after the alcohol cooks out. Why not just use broth?

Then there’s the old granola-era trick of trying to make sweet desserts without using sugar. Some people actually enjoy these bogus desserts. I have fond memories of making all kinds of granola-era cookies: “Take two tablespoons of oil, two tablespoons of honey, one egg, two cups of oatmeal, two cups of flour...” Making these “cookies” was fun. Children enjoy stirring and shaping mud “pies” too. As an adult, I’m not inclined to bother with many desserts, but when I do make or eat a dessert I don’t try to reduce the sugar. To those who think every meal needs a dessert, but who want to lose weight, I recommend after-dinner mints.

Low-calorie recipes won’t make every family thin, all by themselves, but learning to enjoy low-calorie options that work for us is part of what helps some people stay slim throughout life. This is a good cookbook for anyone who is still new to the idea of low-calorie cooking. It's also a classic cookbook from the early 1970s, when people believed that just eliminating surplus calories in food would make everyone slim and fit. (It won't, because most people who need to watch their weight need to rev up their metabolism, but it can't hurt. In fact reducing calories from fat is one of the steps hypothyroid patients use to normalize their metabolism.) 

Book Review: Summer of the Barshinskeys

Title: The Summer of the Barshinskeys

Author: Diane Pearson

Date: 1984

Publisher: Crown

ISBN: none

Length: 431 pages

Quote: “[T]he story of the Barshinskeys, which became our story, too, stretched over many summers and winters.”

The “Summer of the Barshinskeys” is 1902, when Mr. Barshinskey, a Russian emigrant fiddler, is hired to tend Mr. Hayward’s cattle in a rural English village, and arrives with his wife, an English Quaker, pushing all of their furniture in a hand cart. Behind the come three children, “two girls and a boy, the same as us,” notes young Sophie Willoughby eagerly.

The Willoughbys are “peasant gentry”—a family who have to work for their livings, but have been working in the same place long enough to be established and prosperous. The children are Sophie, age eleven, destined to be a domestic servant, and Edwin, a bit older, planning a career of railroad work, and Lillian, the pretty teenager studying to become a dressmaker.

\The Barshinskey children (Pearson artlessly notes that they spell their name “with c’s and h’s and s’s and z’s,”as if at least the U.S. half of her audience weren’t familiar with the name Brzezinski in 1984) are Daisy Mae, Ivan, and Galina, approximately the same ages as the Willoughbys. Naturally each boy has a crush on the other boy’s older sister. Naturally each girl has a crush on the other girl’s older brother.

Older sisters don’t come off too well in this book, probably because who ever heard of a fifteen-year-old girl having a crush on the thirteen-year-old boy next door? Lillian is pretty and too obsessed with her own prettiness to love anyone back. Galina is pretty and, in Sophie’s narrative, “sensual.” In the third-person parts of the book, people who aren’t Nice English Girls use the W-word.

Neither Sophie nor Daisy Mae is considered pretty, even by the men they eventually marry, but both of them have the fortitude of character their showier older siblings lack. Edwin is at least a good hard worker. About all that makes Ivan attractive, even to Sophie, is that he’s more than eleven years old and is not Sophie’s brother or cousin; he achieves a sort of hero status later on, in the war.

During the “Summer of the Barshinskeys” the younger children become friends (Galina and Lillian are already too old to be interested in school friends). In the autumn life events separate the two families again. Nevertheless,fifteen years later, when even Sophie and Daisy Mae are adults, they reconnect—in war-torn Russia, yet, where Edwin is wasting his money on Galina and getting beaten up for her sake, and tough little Daisy Mae is working on a Quaker humanitarian mission. Daisy Mae has always dreamed of being rescued by Edwin, from something, and eventually she is, even if she and her friends do more of the rescuing. Willoughbys and Barshinskeys remain friends as adults, they share adventures, and at least some of them marry each other.

Of this story Pearson says that “most of it” is fiction, but “it could well and truly have happened. Indeed, some of the personal experiences that were related to me were far stranger than my tale.” Her motive seems to be not so much to give the two younger sisters happy-ever-after endings, although she does, nor even to write a novel about “Russians As People,” although that’s the title of a nonfiction book she cites in the endnotes to this novel, as to write an adventure story about the Quaker mission in Russia.

Needling U.S. audiences might have been a secondary motive. The Cold War was still on—although everyone was thoroughly tired of it—and some American readers might have needed the reminder that at first the U.S. was officially sympathetic to the brand-new U.S.S.R.

I personally think most novels written for adults are, at best, froth on the stream of life, and this is one of the frothier kind, but I’ll forgive its frivolous plot since it does highlight an interesting bit of history that U.S. writers often forgot during the Cold War years. It’s harder to forgive Pearson for switching without warning from first to third person, and back, than it is to forgive all this novel’s other defects together. While keeping the Quakers in the background, focussing mainly on people they’ve helped in some way, it makes a statement of support for the Quakers.

Who should read it? Adults only. There’s a good deal of extramarital sex in the book, not all of it even involving Galina; children won’t learn any details here but they will see adults acting irrational under its influence. This is one of those novels where most of the characters are Christians but they don’t spell out a Christian message for the reader. Violence, like sex, is more implicit than explicit. Pearson does spell out one scene of mild torture and a few gruesome deaths, including one character readers might have been hoping to see reform. 

In the end it’s a life-affirming story that weaves Pearson’s elders’ memories of real adventures into its sweet-romance fantasy. If you like a romance with international glamour and intrigue and battles and so on in the background, you’ll enjoy this one.

New Book Review: Humphrey and Me

Title: Humphrey and Me 

Author: Stuart H. Brody

Date: 2023

Publisher: Santa Monica Press

ISBN: 978-1-59580-766-3

Quote: "EVENTS IN THIS NOVEL were drawn from my real-life relationship with Hubert Humphrey or otherwise documented by credible historical accounts. Certain events, dialogue, and characters were fictionalized in service of the story, but might well have occurred as depicted."

In real life Stuart Brody was a student volunteer with Hubert Humphrey's campaigns. He still maintains that "Hubert Humphrey was an eminently good man" today. He wrote this novel, which has an authentic 1960s romance in it too, as a study of the role of hero worship, real fathers and ideal fathers and father-figures, in the life of a young man. The fictional Ray Elias has some conflicts with his real father, who dies first, and some with his father-substitute Hubert Humphrey, for whom he works and whom, of course, he also outlives. 

I think the novel shows, especially in chapters told from the fictional vice-president's point of view, that Brody is still projecting a lot of his feelings for his father onto the memory of Vice-President Humphrey. The question I would most like to ask the author is, "So, did the sitting Vice-President ever actually visit you in your dorm room, or is that the part you only wished had happened?" 

President Lyndon Johnson was...shall we say a very polarizing man? I find him utterly repulsive, but my husband, whose memories of his career were clearer, said "But he was a charmer. I can't say why, but people did seem to like him." Since I was just learning to read during the Johnson Administration, and my husband was an undergraduate at McGill, I have to give some value to his insights. Certainly the image of LBJ and his relationships with Humphrey, and other people, found in this book was a widespread one--thanks in part to Stuart Brody! The soap opera villain, J.R. Ewing, was also based largely on tis characterization of Johnson. The President who got us into Vietnam was hated in the way President Trump was hated. Like Trump, Johnson gave the nation a follow-up administration of unbelievable blunders--including allowing the price of rice to exceed the common man's ability to pay!--because some people would have voted for a dog if the other major party had nominated a dog to run against that awful person. 

Anyway, it's historical fiction about the lives of the non-voting but politically active students of the 1960s. A man would be better qualified to judge how well it's written. If you are a baby-boomer who wants a good long nostalgia trip, or a younger reader who wants to know what older people may be comparing you to when they say your generation is clueless and apathetic, you will want to read this book.

For others, it may be comforting to remember how endangered our civilization seemed to be during the Johnson Administration. That evil passed. So also may this.

Book Review: Memoirs of an Unfit Mother

Title: Memoirs of an Unfit Mother

Author: Anne Robinson

Date: 2001

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ISBN: 0-7434-4896-0

Length: 325 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white photo insert

Quote: “[T]his book...is meant for all women who have struggled with moth­erhood, with a career, with trying to do the right thing.”

Sigh. It’s not that television has stopped exploiting women’s talents and energy to cater to men’s sexual fantasies. It’s merely that television has expanded and made room for more different ones. Modern television offers not only Doris Day, Liz Taylor, and Maureen O’Hara, but more unusual fantasy figures. There was a market for fifty-year-old British redheads in black leather. Who knew? Anyway, some readers probably remember a game show called “The Weakest Link.” Anne Robinson was the British redhead who told somebody after each show, “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.”

It was, she said in her memoir, the reward for a lifetime of putting up with sexist bigotry, at first in the traditional well-off British manner of drinking self-destructive quantities of alcohol, then by getting sober and enjoying the benefits of Britain’s quiet and gradual movement toward enlightenment. I think it’s because Robinson never was a militant feminist that reading her memoirs made me feel like one.

The aggressive, angry party within feminism always got attention but, as Robinson both explains and demonstrates, it has not in fact represented “women” very often or very well. The appeals to a popular model of “biology” that’s always leaped to embrace gender stereotypes based on incredibly weak evidence, that does not in fact fit either animal behavior or human behavior as well as its enthusiasts want to think it does, reflect a basic human tendency that’s not actually all that well correlated with gender. While a few feminist theorists still bewail the process of socialization by which women are “feminized” into accepting a little denial of our aggressive instincts as the price for a cozy domestic life, in observed fact it doesn’t take any really heavy or systematic oppression to sell that deal to men, either. When disappointed by her first husband’s sexist, judgmental immaturity, Anne Robinson had no trouble finding a sweet, supportive man who didn’t mind a bit letting her climb higher up the corporate ladder than he did and support his financial irresponsibility, and in fact, she tells us, her first husband and their child appreciated good old Johnny’s just-love-me-cos-I’m-cute personality too.

While baby-boomer women were quietly sailing past men in school and on almost every kind of performance-based measurement of promotability, the commercial media were squalling at us, “But...but...but...you don’t waaant to be smart, competent, hardworking, promoted, and rich! You’ll be looonely! A biological clock” (remember those purely theoretical biological clocks?) “will go off and one day when you’re thirty-five you’ll run out of the office screaming ‘I want to stay home and have babies!’ You’ll all come down with chronic fatigue syndrome!” (I am not making this up. When a “chronic” form of mononucleosis spread through measles vaccine affected a large group of young adults in the Northern States and Canada, a short-lived theory that the men at the vaccine companies must have loved was that more women than men got the disease because women just weren’t built to take the stress of competing with men in offices or universities.)

And the majority response, the most truly “feminine” response if “feminine” means “characteristic of women, or of a majority of women,” was: Anne Robinson’s. Yes, she says, of course most women would rather have a husband than not, would prefer a husband who can support them while they stay home with at least one baby through at least five “wonder years,” probably do care more about their success as mothers and grandmothers than about their successes in work or school. And they’re still good enough at work and school to move past most of the men. And they might even be just loyal and loving enough to stay with sweet, supportive, less successful husbands. Albeit, if he’s less successful because he’s less careful with money, in separate homes where he can’t jeopardize her investments...

I expected this book to be funny. It’s not, particularly. I think I chortled audibly once while reading it. But it’s true to the way so many women seem to feel, however different from Anne Robinson we may be and however different our careers may be. I suspect that for a lot of Robinson’s generation the best laugh is going to come at the end, where she mentions the fans who fantasize about her “with a whip.” Is that not the way it goes? When you hit fifty, if you’re still trim and healthy and therefore attractive to young men, but they do notice that you’re “a little older” than they are, their fantasies kink up. They want you to be the sexually abusive nanny or teacher they did not actually have. Many of us are willing to spank a silly boy for a price, because that scenario is not sexually interesting to us...

But if you remember the history, it’s worth adding another voice to the chorus. Robinson was told she was “not actually an unfit mother,” just not fit enough to get custody of the child, because she worked (fewer hours than her first husband) and was unfaithful to their marriage (less blatantly than her first husband)—but not because she was an Irish-type genetic alcoholic rapidly developing a “drink problem,” although she was. With Alcoholics Anonymous-level candor, no bitterness or denial of responsibility, she revels in the irony that during the child’s wonder years she did give up full-time work. By being unfit to do it. She coped with sexist exploitation while young and depended on the very imperfect loyalty it spawned to keep a job during her descent to “the bottom” of self-induced physical disability. The years when she was sobering up, recovering her health, and enjoying her seniority as corporate doors opened to more women, were the years when the daughter was in school and was tactful enough not to want to hurt Daddy’s feelings by spending too much more time with Mommy.

One section of the story I did not like was Robinson’s memories of the 1980s, when she was getting paid to be frankly bitchy and she—and her employers—overdid it. Even making allowances for the defective conscience that seems to cause extroversion, someone should have told her...People can respect, even admire, news commentary that jabs and slashes at the weak points in policies and those who impose them. Robinson was a dare-to-be-trendy left-winger who provided loyal opposition for Mrs Thatcher. When the Prime Minister blithely told young people (many of whom were unemployed welfare dependents) “to buy a BIG house at the very beginning. Then they won’t have to move when they have a family,” and Robinson was the “hound” who retorted that “not everyone can afford a big house” and Mrs Thatcher replied “You’ve made some money out of houses,” that was a fair “game, set and match.” British audiences loved it. Robinson did not share the mainstream British adoration of the royal family. Well, if she didn’t she didn’t; Americans generally think it’s adorably British that most Brits like having a royal family and peers, although this web site keeps a wary eye on some U.S. citizens whose taste for things British embraces any tendencies toward British elitism. The question of how much the Queen ought to be paid just for being an admirable old lady was fair game. Robinson had a right to score whatever points she could score off that...but a half-grown girl who married too young, whose late-adolescent hormones were raging in a physically dangerous imbalance, going through all that and being a mother too, was not fair game. Robinson of all people should’ve known enough to leave Diana Spencer alone. When she confessed just a few of the things she’d said about the Princess, I wanted to take a whip to Robinson. Yes, most humans of both sexes do have some degree of mean-spiritedness, but we should all be helping one another to repress it.

So...Robinson's talent for cheerful verbal cruelty was transferred first to daytime TV talk shows and then, as she had a talent for television, to the game show that made her an international TV star. And I will say for Robinson that she does recognize that the men who steered her newspaper career the wrong way didn’t get to enjoy that piece of luck and compensation, as she did. She had to smash her way through appalling amounts of bigotry, but she avoided the trap of thinking that everything was all about bigotry, that women always get the short end...Robinson, as an individual, just happened to be able to make a demotion into a promotion. Cheers.

Book Review: Time Traveling to 1973

Title: Time Traveling to 1973 

Author: Robert E. Miller

Date: 2023

ISBN: 9798365608351

Length: 94 pages

Quote:  "The Watergate Scandal began in June of 1972."

Here's another volume in a series of souvenir books collecting the news and pop culture from specific years, intended as gifts for people born in the chosen year or inspiration to authors writing fiction set in that year. There's a full chapter of memorable photo advertisements that appeared in magazines, along with chapters summarizing the big world news stories, bestselling songs, movies, books, statistics about prices and employment, sports events, fashions in clothes and cars and decor, and more. 

Wholesome, frivolous fun, these books take up enough memory to create problems in uploading them as e-books. Order printed copies. You'll want to pass them around and reminisce--everybody knows somebody who remembers 1973. 

While the top of the pop songs of 1973 aren't remembered as favorites (and, other than Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," the top LP's were mostly retrospective collections), some things that started in 1973 have lingered in our culture today. Nobody remembers, because they were not instantly popular, but 1973 was the year mobile phones were invented...

Youtube Videos

This week's Long And Short Reviews link-up invites people to share a favorite YouTube video. 

I tend to think my first favorite music video was Pink Floyd's "We Don't Need No Education," but despite growing up in a TV-free home, I am older than that. I liked "Sesame Street," for which my parents thought I ought to have been too old, but it was cute. I liked "The Electric Company." And even before that I have fond, though vague, memories of having chickenpox in a dreary little motel on the Pacific coast, watching cartoon versions of the Beatles flounder about in a "sea of holes" before they reached the "sea of green." 

YouTube has  some videos but the ones I watched weren't great, so let's move forward in time . I don't usually watch the video on YouTube but people have posted some old favorite LP albums to YouTube, with or without animated video accompaniments. On the assumption that everyone knows where to find their favorite rock, jazz, and country albums, here are some things that are harder to classify and may be more interesting to listen to. 

1. Mannheim Steamroller's "Fresh Aire" used to be heard all over my church college campus: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u81lqZm9aZg&t=4s

2. The Primitive Quartet's "Breaking of Day," by itself...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUsvX7gzgJs

and an early "Best Of" album, if you like their sound. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMeJ7Wsj94M

3. John McCutcheon's "Wry Straw" album, the first record I bought with my own hard-earned money:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3uVfkCBv9g

4. John Michael and Terry Talbot's "Painter" album was posted to YouTube in two halves, including the rough beginning that made everyone think something was wrong with their record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIWPW3AVXfo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKzXNu70QYc

5. Vintage Steeleye Span: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTjirjLLx7Y

Granted, when music is recorded commercially and "branded" and copyrighted, it's not folk music. Also granted, some people's "brand" of music that "plain folk" liked was pretty amateurish. You may not have been a fan of these musicians when these albums were new. You may not become one after hearing them. Then again, you might. And if you turn away from the computer and dance (or exercise) when you hear music, you'll have a wonderfully aerobic day. 

Book Review: Complete Book of Roasts Boasts and Toasts

Title: Complete Book of Roasts, Boasts, and Toasts

Author: Elmer Pasta

Author’s web site: http://quotepixel.com/author/elmer_pasta

Date: 1982

Publisher: Parker Publishing Company

ISBN: 0-13-158329-8

Length: 375 pages

Quote: “Say you’ve been forewarned that you will be the subject of a roast. List all your own personal characteristics and look them up here. Jot down the Boasts under each category.”

Elmer Pasta’s claim to fame was that he supplied simple one-liners like these to comedians, including Phyllis Diller and Art Linkletter, who worked his jokes into their famous performances. If you liked the sort of jokes that can still be heard on endlessly rerun TV comedies from the early 1960s, here are 375 pages of them.

Each “characteristic” (job title, hobby, relationship to the joker, feature of appearance) that could safely be ridiculed, under the rules of 1980s etiquette, here receives four comic insults (the roasts), one comic comeback line (the boasts), and one joke that may be insulting or may be a neutral silly pun (the toasts). Thus:

“APARTMENT MANAGER: ROASTS. She said she has a lush apartment for rent. I believed her when I tripped over a drunk!…” (To read the other three roasts, you’ll have to buy the book.)

“BOAST. All my apartments have nice views but there’s no overlooking the rent!

“TOAST. Here’s a toast to our apartment manager—the only way you can get her to paint your apartment is to move out!”

With a few obvious exceptions (mostly in the relationships category), the jokes are unisex, alternating between “he” and “she”; two of the other roasts cast the apartment manager as a “he.” Most of them are generic, silly, and harmless.

To anyone over age 40 (or anyone who has spent a lot of weekends watching one of the Reruns Channels with Grandma) these jokes will have a vaguely familiar ring. A few may even be too old to make sense to younger people. Do young people still recognize “a tomato with lots of lettuce” as slang for “a young woman with lots of money”? (People my age understood it, but didn’t say it—we had newer words.) Then again, if you want to participate in a “roast” and exchange comic insults with a friend, the age and familiarity of these jokes may make them safe.

According to Google, Elmer Pasta is alive and well, although his Facebook and Linked In pages are visible only to visitors who are logged in through one of those sites, which annoys me so much I’m not even willing to bother logging in to Linked In. He’s still a writer and advertiser, and some of his toasts are now available as reusable graphics. Right. Here’s the kind of e-friend I want to be to Pasta:

And to other writers whose early works I resell as Fair Trade Books. To buy the Complete Book of Roasts, Boasts, and Toasts, send $5 per book + $5 per package to either address in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. From this $10, Pasta or a charity of his choice will receive $1. If you buy four copies, send me $25, and Pasta or his charity will receive $4.

Posted on September 24, 2015 Categories A Fair Trade Book, Humor Tags pop culture

Book Review: Ms Goose

Title: Ms Goose: A Lib-retta

Author: Tamar Hoffs

Date: 1973

Publisher: Avondale

ISBN: none

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: two-color (blue and yellow) cartoons by the author

Quote: “Rapping her new freedom, / Crying that it’s lewd / Cause his wife’s not safe in bed, / When he’s in the mood.”

In 1973 a lot of people thought a married woman should not have a job outside the home. Their main concern was that if married women stayed in the workforce there wouldn’t be enough jobs for men. This was true, actually, and the problem of underemployment has only grown worse ever since. Women who thought they should have a fair chance to do the jobs that were available taunted the opposition with suggestions that they really wanted to behave badly toward their wives and daughters. Since most of them did not actually want that the 1970s feminist movement spent a lot of time arguing something that most Americans now accept as axiomatic.

Hoffs set her feminist barbs to the tunes of “Mother Goose” nursery rhymes.

“Mrs. Beau Peep just could not sleep,
No one could diagnose this;
Doctors were glib, but Women’s Lib.
Gave her a new prognosis!”

In 1973 active feminists had not yet turned against the breezy expressions “Women’s Lib” and “male chauvinism.” Hoffs used both in this short book.

Though she was a wife and mother herself, and her vision for other couples was that financial equality would help them be “loving-partners,” Hoffs also liked the idea that young women who slept around with “fair-weather friends” would have a free “choice to have or have not” the resulting babies, and unhappy wives would be able to use instructions from library books to get themselves divorced. Anti-feminists were free to taunt women like Hoffs with the claim that they were the ones telling or wanting women to leave their husbands.

Er. Um. Was there ever a women’s shelter somewhere that took in a woman whose story was “I just wanted to leave my husband and children because some obscure writer in California wrote a jingle that made it sound like fun”? Didn’t women who left for unworthy reasons run off with their other men, or go directly to jails or drug treatment clinics? Leaving a spouse and children for unworthy reasons was far more often something husbands did. Feminists argued successfully that more financial independence would help women who’d been abandoned by Deadbeat Dads. While the media stereotyped men in the 1970s bellowing that they wanted to be the sole breadwinners in their families, the reality was that a lot of men felt overwhelmed and gave up trying to be breadwinners at all.

Anyway this litle book contains a few dozen excellent examples of Bad Poetry, by which I mean the art of playing with patterns of word sounds without any pretense that the result rises higher, on the scale of Great Art, than “fun.” Good Bad Poetry is not painful to read in the way that poetry that aspires to be something more than fun often is. Good Bad Poetry can include stretches of the rules of poetry, like rhyming “Modern Ms Muffet / Reads and gets tough-it ,” that make some readers scream “You can’t do that in poetry,” but it’s not pretentious want-to-be-profound, it’s not humorless, and it’s not prose. It’s not written to be declaimed on formal occasions. It’s usually written to be sung.

Ms Goose didn’t make Hoffs rich and famous, nor did it make most of the population endorse the idea of the time to make a choice about motherhood coming after a woman is noticeably pregnant, nor are these ditties the feminist songs pop singers recorded and baby-boomer women remember...but it’s an appealing sample of the style of its period, and it’s still good for a chortle.

Also, even on the acrimonious baby-choice issue, Hoffs does spell out the more liberating choice: “Early to wed, we don’t advise...” and “There was a young woman who knew what to do. / She had two little children, spaced just like she wanted to.”

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: Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

Book Review: Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

Author: Susan Jane Gilman

Date: 2005

Publisher: Warner Books

ISBN: 0-446-67949-6

Length: 352 pages

Quote: “I love hearing about other people’s romantic and sexual ineptitude as much as the next person. Yet ulti­mately, there’s so much more to women’s lives that’s worthy of atten­tion and ridicule.”

Possibly this quote will arouse false expectations. There are, although publishers don’t seem to want to believe it, people in this world who would like to read the memoirs of someone who was able to omit any mention of his or her sex life. That is: instead of a chapter about losing her virginity, Gilman could have left us to wonder whether she might have managed to keep it. Instead of a warm and witty story about wondering when to stop passing for a lesbian, Gilman could have left it to our imaginations whether she was one, or had ever met one, or not. She doesn’t give us quite enough sex-free adventures to convince us that she could, at that point in her life, have written 352 pages of hilarious autobiography without mentioning a single sexual act, part, or passion, but we suspect that she might have achieved that if she’d tried.

As things are...if I were meeting this woman in real life, I would still prefer not to know that she’d given her virginity to someone other than her husband (someone, according to page 152, chosen partly for his commitment-phobia). If I had to share an office with her, I’d also just as soon have heard a few more stories about the political activism and not so much about the teenaged drinking parties. It’s not that I can’t forgive Gilman or the other fifty or a hundred writers whose coming-of-age stories involve sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. It’s that all those stories sound so much alike.

Fortunately, Gilman keeps her promise to tell us more than her idiot-girl moments. She remembers girly-girl moments from childhood: without giving any thought to the actual job descriptions of an airline stewardess versus a marine biologist, she thought she wanted to be a stewardess just because it had that princessly feminine ending...why hadn’t the English language offered her the dream of being a biologess? She warned herself that meeting a celebrity she admired would probably be disappointing, embarrassing...and it wasn’t. She declared herself a Communist while working at a proletarian food-service job, then morphed into something like a conservative after seeing what taxes did to a minimum-wage paycheque. She got long-term jobs through connections...and, with delightful modesty and good humor, leaves readers to raise the question of whether the charm, wit, and candor of her writing might have been considered, after all.

After spending her formative years in the North, Gilman transplanted easily to Washington...and continued to be so provincial it hurt. The wild road trip story, an obligatory part of coming of age in her day, derives most of its excitement from Gilman’s paralyzing fear of the stereotypes of country people, and of “The South,” that she never really questions. Gilman, herself, eventually does a little better with her provincial attitudes when she gets an opportunity to go to Switzerland, but most of her friends seemed to have their stereotypes of Switzerland mixed up with their stereotypes of Sweden.

So who’s the hypocrite in the pouffy white dress? The title of this book is explained toward the end. Gilman does not come across as a hypocrite. She’s not ashamed to admit that she discovered tthe magic of anti-fashion clothing only as a bride. That does take fortitude...I made that discovery in junior high school, but being south of the Mason-Dixon Line helps.

Who should read this book? Women who were (or weren’t) feminists in 1970, who may want to know what growing up with high feminist consciousness was like. Women who were born in the 1950s, 1960s, or even 1970s, who may want to compare notes. Mick Jagger fans, and people who’ve never liked Mick Jagger much but are willing to be persuaded that he’s had moments of niceness. Men who want to read about the sex lives of idiot girls. And anybody who enjoys witty memoirs. I could do without the inflated praise blurb writers have heaped on this book (“If you don’t absolutely love this book, you are simply dead inside,” Laurie Notaro gushed); nobody likes reviews that “sound like advertisements”...but Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress is, in the most modest, restrained, temperamentally conservative terms, a delightful read.

Book Review: Wasp Where Is Thy Sting

Title: Wasp Where Is Thy Sting

Author: Florence King

Date: 1977

Publisher: Stein and Day

ISBN: 0-8128-2166-1

Length: 214 pages

Quote: "The only thing more Wasp than owning horses is riding horses."

Ethnicity was "in" in the 1970s. "Ethnic" was sometimes used in opposition to "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" but, as King observed, Anglo-Saxons were an ethnic group too weren't they? So she set out to study them from within. The result was hilarious. It would have been even funnier if it hadn't started out with some short articles written for Cosmopolitan and Playgirl, where the dirty jokes were encouraged. As it is, readers should pick a place where they feel free to laugh out loud, especially as they may be asked to share the jokes.

The difficulty about studying Wasps was not that many of the Eastern States' "Waspiest" families are in fact of Irish and German descent. (Irish and German people who reached North America early enough were Protestants, often attracted to radical denominations, and registered English family names. You have to trace an individual family name like "Williams" back to find out whether it was originally Williams or Wilhelms or MacUlliam.) No, it was that those who immigrated from other countries were almost all from the working class, at least at the time of immigration, whereas Americans of English (and Scotch, and Native American) descent are a nice cross-section of every social class. Most immigrants from continental Europe, and those Irish Catholics who came during the potato famine, inherited one basic family story about being poor and oppressed in the old country and coming to America for the opportunity to get rich. With "Wasps," especially in the Southern States, there are family stories just like that, and then there are the stories about the ancestors who were rich but were banished from the peerage for political reasons, or became rich in the nation's early days but lost fortunes in the Great Depression and/or the Civil War and/or the collapse of the market for Great-Grandfather's product. You find rich Wasps, upwardly mobile Wasps, downwardly mobile Wasps, upper-middle-class Wasps, lower-middle-class wasps, and also welfare-class Wasps, although King doesn't seem to have studied them. She has, however, studied the financially viable Wasp types and written a little story about a few fictional Wasp families of different socioeconomic types. Being written to illustrate points in a nonfiction book, it's not a very dramatic story, but it's an entertaining read.

Wasps of different types don't always hate each other, as King suggests, but they don't understand or relate to each other very well either, because within a single culture they manage to maintain different family subcultures. If your British ancestors were aristocrats, there is a high probability that you wash with a rag, hang a roll of toilet paper on the wall, at least pay close attention to the studs or bitches with whom your pets breed, and will think people who object to those words are not very bright until they haul you away in a coffin. If they were servants or shopkeepers, you just might wash with a cloth, tuck your bathroom tissue under some sort of silly piece of "decor," have your male or female dog or cat fixed (and if you ever did own a mare and allow her to mate it'd be with a horse), and will think people who use the other words are not very nice until you're laid to rest in a casket. That's a starting point--referred to but not spelled out in this book, because the Mitfords had listed the most typical "U and Non-U" words in Britain and the subject was familiar to readers of this book.

We follow the typical different Wasp families through the different behaviors their word usage connotes: the Jonesboroughs don't have to belong to an Episcopal church, since they travel a good deal, but "Piscop" is where they're most at home; the Baileys are "Baptodisterians" (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or a similar denomination), and Sister Effie Lee Pringle steals Bibles from bookstores and donates them to Brother Bascom, the founder and sole minister of the Holier Than Thou Reformed Church, so he can give them to people he thinks need them. Mrs. Jonesborough, who did charitable work only, in the 1970s, drank a lot of alcohol and was a sloppy cook and housekeeper. Mrs. Bailey, who didn't think married women should work outside the home, made cooking and housekeeping into a full-time job but never learned to do them according to Mrs. Jonesborough's standard of taste.

These things have been elaborated further...for instance, in Deborah Tannen's elaborate study of how Mrs. Bailey's upwardly mobile daughter (Norma Dean, in the 1970s; Jennifer, in the 1980s; Brandi or Brytanni or Brooke, in the 1990s) could spend hours talking with other young women without stating a solid fact or dissenting opinion. Tannen went so far as to imagine that Norma's yuppie conformism reflected femininity, for pity's sake. Nobody who knew Mrs. Jonesborough would have made that mistake. Mrs. Jonesborough learned to swear, yell, argue, and very likely shoot ducks and play poker, from her father, and if, like Elaine Risley in Cat's Eye, she never quite fit in with a little group of girls, she tells herself her husband and (when she went back to work in the 1980s) the stockholders are more important than a lot of girl friends in any case. Mrs. Jonesborough is popular because she sponsors charities and throws expensive parties.

 Obviously the women Florence King knew and generalized about, in this book, belonged to the generation that's disappearing now. Baby-boomer Wasps, younger adult Wasps, and teen Wasps have their own subcultures. Cultural change had taken place between the years, 1600 to 1800, when most Wasps' ancestors were immigrating, and 1971, too. King knew her Wasp friends and, afaics, sketched them with great accuracy and elan. Similar generalizations about their baby-boomer children and Generation X grandchildren were published, mostly in the 1980s, as the "official handbooks" and "official style guides" that were marketed strictly as humor; the genre started with The Official Preppy Handbook and went on from there.I have seen a "Hipster Handbook" but, otherwise, the field for studies of distinctive millennial styles remains open. 

Book Review: Love and Laughter

I'm pre-scheduling some book reviews. If I get online within 24 hours of the time they go live, each will be presented by an adorable adoptable animal who has an especially appealing picture posted at its Petfinder page. So here is Scarlett, a five-year-old untrained hound, looking for someone who wants to teach her basic house-pet skills: 

I can't say much for the nannyish approach this organization takes to rescuing dogs who are at risk of being euthanized, or used in gruesome medical experiments by somebody like Anthony Fauci...but if you want to rescue this dog from a group that sound as if they're getting a lot of dogs killed in the name of "rescuing" them, paste https://www.petfinder.com/dog/scarlett-54096655/dc/washington/rural-dog-rescue-md384/ into your browser.

Title: Love and Laughter

Author: Marjorie Holmes

Date: 1967, 1972

Publisher: Doubleday (1967), Bantam (1972)

ISBN: none

Length: 239 pages

Quote: “It doesn’t take money to achieve an atmosphere of charm and quiet. It merely takes time, efficient management, and the little artistic touches...”

And also, as Holmes goes on to show on pages 9 and 10, a family who want the same kind of charm and quiet for which Mother envies her single friends, which is probably a family where all the children are over age twelve. When Grandma wanted an “atmosphere” at dinner, she had the children fed somewhere else. Which probably involved paying someone money.

The writer known as Marjorie Holmes (a pen name) wrote a successful book called I’ve Got to Talk to Somebody, God. Seeing that the book had sold well, the old Washington Star newspaper started printing regular short columns by Holmes. These columns were secular, and dealt with the brand-new, made-for-TV “traditional” family lifestyle in which all husbands were full-time breadwinners, all wives were full-time homemakers, all sons went into the Army, all daughters moved away to wherever their husbands had come from or gone, and everybody was happy-happy-happy because they had the latest expensive toys.

Although a full-scale industry grew out of publishing the complaints of people for whom this lifestyle pattern didn’t work, it was working pretty well for Holmes. Here and there we find a gentle murmur of dissatisfaction...but Holmes did seem to have a nice life, with the income from a big-city newspaper to help support her “cabin” at a posh lakeside community in suburban Virginia. She wrote short pieces about her children’s love of water, about holding a child’s hand, about letting neighbors’ children visit her home, about squirrels, about catalogue paper dolls, about the joys of helping her husband with some of their home improvement projects and watching all the neighbors pitch in to help with others. Being a Total Woman, Full-Time Wife and Mother and Part-Time Writer was a truly plushy job for those who could get it; what all those other women (and men) were complaining about was that they couldn’t get it, that simply finding a husband (if female) or a full-time job (if male) wouldn’t put you straight into a family life like Holmes’s, even in 1967.

Holmes was grateful. Her way of showing gratitude was to write these pieces, with occasional touches of humor, but more often with heartfelt sentimental bliss. This is a volume of Blessings being Counted: baby carriages, suitcases, even a ticket for fishing without a license (it was legal to fish from the pier, but not from their own boat, at the lake)—and even the children. Not everyone had them, Holmes knew. She herself might not have them forever. Best to write down what she loved about them, in case she needed to remember it someday.

The result was what 1970s pre-feminist literary circles dismissed as calendar art. Some pundits even claimed that in a good story somebody had to die, and of course there were, at the time, the Radical Red Writers clamoring for revolutionary work that would make people fighting mad, like Richard Wright or Allen Ginsberg, or at least thoroughly dissatisfied, like all those depressing Europeans you had to read for college credit. Meanwhile, ordinary unpretentious people were buying more copies of books like Holmes’ than of books like Wright’s. When one wasn’t trying to impress other artsy types with one’s tolerance for the ugly, depressing, or positively psychotic avant-garde, whether or not one had a house by the lake or even had children, it was nice to remember the good things about being a mother. Or a father. If a book like Love and Laughter didn’t make you glad to be a parent, it might at least make you glad to have one.

Anybody who can construct sentences on paper could write a book similar to Love and Laughter, and these days dozens, if not hundreds, of bloggers are doing it. If you enjoy the filtered reality, as distinct from fiction, found by reading blogs, you’ll enjoy having one of the best collections of this kind of writing bound in a nice little feel-good book.

Book Review with Photos: A Cluster of Separate Sparks

Title: A Cluster of Separate Sparks

Author: Joan Aiken

Date: 1972

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 231 pages

Quote: “It had been a long, hot, and upsetting day, but the violent death of my cousin Sweden was unquestionably the most upsetting occurrence.”

Though generally “irked by her bossy, patronising ways, and the undoubted fact that she bore a strong resemblance to Garbo,”

Greta Garbo: Photo donated to Wikipedia By MGM - ebay, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43023094

Sweden’s cousin Georgia comes to the fabulous Greek island of Dendros to apply for a job at the school where Sweden works, and she stays. Not only because she’s the right woman for the job. Not even because the men on Dendros react to Georgia in ways that ought to reconcile any young woman to any number of cousins’ resemblance to any number of movie stars. No; because on Dendros Georgia can carry out her final obligation to her dead lover, lay him to rest, and marry a living man.While eligible bachelors keep plopping at Georgia’s feet, her story never deteriorates into a mere romance—although “unlikely adventures of glamorous people in exotic places” is the classical definition of Romantic fiction, and that this book certainly offers.

Even for Greek readers Dendros, the Lost Island of Nice, must qualify as an exotic place. Even the criminals and corrupt policemen are terribly charming when they’re not actually committing crimes or refusing to investigate them; the murderers are glamorous and the hijackers are fully qualified to teach school when they’re not hijacking planes. Dendros is also the home of a fabulous species of butterflies, like monarchs only bigger and gaudier. Some of the Greek islands do harbor interesting animals, and many of them can claim scenic beauty and nice people, but the butterflies of Dendros may be unique. They look like giant silk moths and save some of the nicest characters’ lives.

Scientifically, the butterflies of Dendros appear to be a fictional hybrid of half a dozen real moths and butterflies...

Probably the butterflies of Dendros were inspired by the "butterflies," actually a species of day-flying moths, that flock to a "Valley of Butterflies" on Rhodes in summer. If not huge, they can be well camouflaged and startle people with a sudden display of bright red wings. Only adults flock to Rhodes; eggs and caterpillars are scattered around other parts of Europe including Britain. Photo donated By Jean-Pol GRANDMONT - Self-photographed, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27859459

Their large size might have been inspired by the Emperor Moth, the biggest moth typically found in Europe. Like other big silk moths, they don't flock, and the caterpillar "six inches from tail to tail" was undoubtedly exaggerated--four inches is more likely. They're basically brown, but can be a brighter red-brown than this individual. Photo By Velela - Tuscany, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=726843

Big, pretty butterflies that form huge flocks sound more like the mostly American Monarch butterflies, which cross the ocean and occasionally stray into Europe. Photo By Kenneth Dwain Harrelson, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14917505

If not quite as big or as interesting, the "Two-Tailed Pasha" (Charaxes jasius) is about as colorful as these. It's considered the biggest butterfly normally found in Greece, with wingspreads over three inches. Photo donated By https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Charlesjsharp

Although this Asian silk moth, Attacus atlas, can have a wingspread up to 11" across, even its caterpillars seldom exceed five inches long. Photo By Maghdp - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63807932

Two North American silk moths, Eacles imperialis (shown) and Citheronia regalis, are much smaller than Attacus atlas as moths but may grow bigger as caterpillars; living specimens over 5.5 inches long have been confirmed. Photo By I, Joelmills, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2382830

However, despite the unlikely adventures, glamorous people, exotic places, and marriage proposals, A Cluster of Separate Sparks is not what comes to mind when readers ask for a romance. It meets the requirements to be described as a murder mystery with spies, but it’s hardly even a mystery in the ordinary sense of the term. It’s a lively adventure story with enough character development in it to qualify as a novel, like Dorothy Sayers' or Jane Langton's detective stories.

Joan Aiken’s fictional signature is a pair of especially clever and lovable children, found in every novel. In this novel Paul and Suzanne, the ones Georgia most wants to adopt, are only the most adorable of a whole class of lovable children. Not all the children even get speaking parts, but all of them might have been inspired by an Adoptive Parents Recruitment Drive. The very, very private school where Sweden and Georgia work specializes in finding clever scholarship children in the world’s slums and orphanages to serve as doubles for the brain-damaged offspring of rich celebrities—and the bright children like the dim ones.

Such cheerfulness might seem false, even Gilbert-and-Sullivan, if it weren’t being presented by a narrator who wills herself to be fearfully cheerful to hide a broken heart. Georgia has obviously spent her whole life reminding herself, “I am Greek-Chinese on my father’s side and Russian-French on my mother’s. Anyway I was born in England,” and in order to fit into the country her parents chose for her she must “always behave with proper British sang-froid and presence of mind” even though she’s “not proper British.” She manages to be flippant about the fact that “I didn’t value my life above an expired season ticket” after her boyfriend’s suicide. The Age of Therapy had not yet convinced people that such detachment is a bad thing. What Georgia is about to get, in the way of attempted murders, philosophical discussions, and startling revelations, is the psychological equivalent of ten years in therapy.

All her emotional problems will resolve themselves in the end. When the ability to talk flippantly about your own grief is the worst of your emotional problems, and you have money, you simply pay to have everything but death arranged to suit you, which is very comforting and does much to reconcile you to mortality. Georgia will live happily ever after.

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