The Free Press hosted an essay contest for seniors (you had to be over 70 to enter), and the results were rather stunning. The winner selected was Michael Tobin, 77, who told a marvelous story about his brilliant wife. Read “A Love Song for Deborah.”
The Advent 2023 edition of An Unexpected Journal has been posted, and it’s (almost) all things Dostoevsky. Under the general theme of “Sober Hope: Finding Faith in the Bleak Midwinter,” included are some 21 articles on the Russian writer’s novels, short stories, his faith, adaptations of his novels into film, poetry and a story about him, a biography review, his place in literature, and more. It’s a smashingly good edition.
It's not a word I would associate with Hamas, the terrorist organization, but Matti Friedman at The Free Press does. The word is wisdom. He writes that Hamas has wisdom because it’s figured out what it’s fighting for, and the West hasn’t. Hamas also understood how western elites would likely respond to its attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
For those who think the reports of rapes and sexual violence were an exaggeration or Israel was to blame, or for those who turned their backs on what really happened on Oct. 7, The New York Times published a story that provides the details.
The controversy continues to swirl around Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard. The debate has shifted, though, from equivocating remarks about genocide to her use of others’ work, which we used to call plagiarism but renamed by the Harvard Board of Governors as “duplicative language,” and questions about her research data. Peter Wood at The Spectator explains that plagiarism matters, for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is how you can discipline students or faculty for plagiarism when all they have to do is claim “duplicative language”?
Attorney Benedicta O’Keeffe’s friend Phyllis is hosting a literary festival in Glendara on the Inishowen Peninsula of Ireland. Somehow, she’s managed to lure Gavin Featherstone, the reclusive Booker Award winner, to appear and speak at the event. The author is as famous for his reclusiveness as for the first novel that won the award – a first novel never equaled by its successors.
O’Keeffe is worried about her parents, who live in Dublin. A man they met at a grief counseling organization has managed to move into their house, and to their daughter’s eye, acts as if he owns the property. Her significant other, Sgt. Tom Molloy of the Glendara Garda, puts a word in to have the man watched and checked out. That O’Keeffe has managed to convince her parents to stay with her for a few days – and attend the festival – is temporary comfort.
During the event, Featherstone is paired with a short story writer for an on-stage discussion. And not long into it, he keels over and is soon pronounced dead. O’Keeffe is drawn into what becomes a murder investigation, as she represents Featherstone’s estranged wife and grown children. A second, newer will appears. And so do a long line of potential suspects, including O’Keeffe’s friend Phyllis.
Andrea Carter
Death Writes is the sixth of the Inishowen mysteries by Irish writer Andrea Carter. It’s a veritable Agatha Christie-like story, minus the big country house, with a host of suspects, plenty of motives, and characters who don’t like telling the police, or even their friends and attorneys, everything they know.
And wending its way through the main plot is the sub-plot of the man in the home of O’Keefe’s parents. She suspects he’s mispresented himself from the beginning and is something of a grief con artist, and she won’t be far wrong.
Carter studied law at Trinity College Dublin and managed the most northerly solicitor’s practice in the Republic of Ireland. In 2006, she moved to Dublin to work as a barrister and then turned to writing crime novels. She’s published five previous Inishowen mysteries featuring solicitor Benedicta “Ben” O’Keeffe: Death at Whitewater Church, Treacherous Strand, The Well of Ice, Murder at Greysbridge, and The Body Falls.
It didn’t change the course of world history, or even the Civil War. It didn’t even end in success. But the Andrews Raid, sometimes called the Great Locomotive Chase, was certainly notable in its daring and how it almost succeeded.
In 1862, with the blessing of Union military commanders, recruited 20 soldiers. Their mission: capture a Confederate locomotive called The General not far from Atlanta and take it all the way to safety behind Union lines in Tennessee. Along the way, they would tear up track, burn bridges, and do whatever they could to disrupt the Western & Atlantic Railroad Line from Atlanta to Chattanooga. That line was a key supply line for Confederate armies in Tennessee.
It almost worked.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
This week, a Missouri state representative from suburban St. Louis was expelled from her political caucus. She’d been running for state attorney general in the primary election. Her problem was being photographed with an alt-right conspiracy theorist and then with a Holocaust denier, and spreading a rumor that her primary opponent, who is Jewish, was an agent for the Israeli government. Lest you think she was a supporter of the man with orange hair, she’s actually a longstanding member of the opposite political party.
Speaking of the man with the orange hair, of whom I am not a fan, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled this week that the United States should become the Venezuela of the northern hemisphere, with California hot on Colorado’s heels. In the name of democracy, a state supreme court tries to destroy it, achieving exactly the opposite of what was intended. Reportedly, Republicans are already planning to return the favor and sue to strike President Biden from the ballot in Arizona, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Remember: you no longer have to be charged, tried and convicted of a crime; you just have to be deemed a “threat to democracy.”
I’ve been reading fictional treatments of the Civil War lately: Shelby Foote’s Novel Shiloh; Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem John Brown’s Body; Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage; and Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott. I’ve tried to get into E.L. Doctorow’s novel The March, which should be a slam dunk given the subject is Sherman’s march through Georgia, but I’ve started and stopped three times. I’ll give it another go and either succeed or admit defeat.
The Battle of Franklin: A Tale of a House Divided is a stage play script by A.S. Peterson. With songs (even though it’s not a musical) Patrick Thomas, the play was commissioned by Studio Tenn and produced in 2016. It was a challenge rather admirably met; depicting a battle on the theatrical stage is a difficult feat to pull off, but Peterson does it.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
The great-grandfather of Pauline Baer de Perignon was well known for his art collection, including his eye for the Impressionists. But his artistic tastes extended to other periods and movements, including the Renaissance and furniture. The man, Jules Strauss, reportedly sold his collection in 1932, to help a relative who’d been ruined by depression. He died in 1943. Pauline had heard the family stories about the great collection of art. But it was something in the long-buried past.
It was an almost offhand remark by a cousin, whom Pauline didn’t know very well, that sent her into a years-long passionate treasure hunt. “Did you know there was something shady about the Strauss sale?”
What could have been shady about the Strauss sale in 1932? Pauline starts talking with other relatives. She learns that Jules’s wife, her great-grandmother, had instituted a claim for stolen artworks during the time when the Germans occupied Paris (1940-1944). The more she looks and studies, the deeper and more plentiful the mysteries become.
Jules and his wife remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation. They were Jewish; friends and relatives, including their son-in-law, were sent to Auschwitz. How did the old couple survive, since Jules died of natural causes in 1943 during the occupation? Why did they change apartments? What happened to their furniture? Why would her great-grandmother file a claim if the collection had been sold off in 1932? And what happened to the artworks?
Pauline Baer de Perignon
Baer de Perignon tells this story in The Vanished Collection, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer. It’s a tale of great art; vanished warehouses; the Nazis’ wholesale theft of art collections, especially those owned by Jews; veiled references; obstinate museum workers almost desperate to hold on to artworks they shouldn’t have; art dealers and auction houses; old ledgers and lists; and meeting and working with people on the same journey that she is. As her investigations continue and go deeper into the past, she slowly gathers a picture of who her great-grandfather was. Her work is both tantalizing and extraordinarily frustrating, helped by a sympathetic and supportive husband.
Baer de Perignon has worked in the film industry, co-authoring several scripts. She’s also conducted writing workshops. She lives with her family in Paris.
This kind of effort that produces The Vanished Collection requires dogged determination and an almost addictive obsession, and the author demonstrates both in the story. As the book shows, the quest to return artworks stolen by the Nazis continues 80 years after it happened. That quest is not always successful, but it does have it victories.
