Saturday Good Reads – August 1, 2026

My parents were both profoundly affected by the Great Depression. My father, graduating from high school, saw his hopes for college and a medical career disappear. My mother, whose family had been relatively well-to-do, was a child, her family reduced to a father hunting for food, her mother scrubbing floors in movie theaters, and days when there was nothing to eat in the house. You don’t “get over” an experience like that; you can come to terms with it, deal with it, and overcome it, but it leaves a deep impression. At the Coolidge Review, Alexander Field writes that the Great Depression did have a hidden economic miracle that almost no one realized at the time. 

Most of us watched or read about the testimony of Dr. Anthony Facui before a Senate committee on Wednesday. Or the non-testimony. My own Missouri senator asked if Dr. Fauci could tell them the color of his tie or of the rug in the room. Both questions were met with Fauci pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. The fact is, he was caught. Even with the pardon he received from former President Joe Biden, answering any question truthfully about the COVID-19 issue would be setting off multiple grenades, including for his own reputation. The general news media, almost on cue, circled the wagons; they’re as culpable as Dr. Fauci is, and the insistence that he “did the right thing” is almost beyond belief. Reporters who dared to question the received wisdom paid the price. By the way, Racket News has unlocked all its articles on Dr. Fauci; it’s providing the coverage that our mainstream media should be.

 

The mayor of New York City released the names of all the properties the city was defining as “second homes” which would result in an additional annual property tax. Except the list was never quality-checked or, apparently, reality-checked. It turns out that a lot of the listings are not what the city thought they were, as a reporter for The Free Press discovered when his 81-year-old mother was socked with an additional $55,000 assessment on her house. It’s not a second home. She owns no second home. But someone in the city decided her property qualified. But never fear; there’s an appeal process – dense, opaque, and all online, almost especially designed to mystify elderly people. She navigated it, or actually, her son did it for her (article unlocked).

 

More Good Reads

 

Writing and Literature

 

Old-Souled Stories – Scott Bradford at Story Warren.

 

Narnia: There is no “Problem” of Susan – Jeremy Rios. 

 

The Good Death of Kate Montclair – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Life and Culture 

 

A Liturgy with a Pause – for the Killing – George Sinclair at The Gospel Coalition Canada.

 

Who Benefits the Most from AI Data Centers? – Georgia Tech at Futurity.

 

25 Movies That Actually Reflect the American Spirit – Around the Parnassus Campfire.

 

Twenty-One Years, by the Numbers – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

America 250

 

Samuel Brady: A Future Legend Goes to War – Eric Sterner at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

The Southern Pivot and the Battle of Camden in the Revolutionary War – Keli Holt at Just Enough History.

 

The Tombstone Edition that Helped Galvanize American Independence – Neely Tucker at Library of Congress Blogs.

 

American Stuff

 

Katherine Lee Bates and the American Mythos – Tim Milosch at Front Porch Republic.

 

America’s Museum Erased Christianity – Lauren Cooley at the Institute for Faith & Culture.

 

Music

 

How Antonio Vivaldi Died in Obscurity and Conquered the World Two Centuries Later – Jason Clark at This Is the Day.

 

Poetry

 

“My Dearest Dust,” poem by Lady Catherine Dyer – Katie Hartsock and Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“Narcissus and Adonis,” Sonnet 3 by William Shakespeare – K.S. Bernstein at Apple Blossoms in a Mournful Wood.

 

The Outsider’s Blessing – poem by Jack Baumgartner at The School for the Transfer of Energy.

 

“Upon Julia’s Clothes,” poem by Robert Herrick – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Falling Slowly – Glen Hansard (1970-2026) and Marketa Irglova

Illustration: The Book Hunters (1907) by Gordon Grant (1875-1962), printed in Collier’s Magazine in 1909.

"The Only Way Home" by Jeanette Minniti

It’s 1933, the pit of the Great Depression. Fifteen-year-old Robert has left his home with his best friend Johnny in Elmhurst, Illinois, near Chicago, to try to find work to earn money for their families. Robert’s father had died from cancer; his mother is struggling to make ends meet for herself and the rest of the children. They’ve had to leave their home and live in a much smaller place, and only then through the generosity of others. Robert’s mother has even sold his beloved violin to buy food. 

Robert’s transportation from Chicago to points south is what it was for thousands of others during the Depression – hopping a train boxcar. He and Johnny move from state to state, city to city, always watching out for railroad detectives and other people searching for work; many of the people they’d meet couldn’t be trusted. It’s a discouraging time. Johnny decides to return home, while Robert continues to look for work.

 

Jeanette Minniti

The Only Way Home by Jeanette Minniti is Robert’s story and the story of the people he meets and the places he goes. It’s a dark time in America; hunger stalks the land. People are suspicious, often with good reason, of itinerants and hoboes. But what Robert also finds are people who help, even if they can’t offer work. And he meets a new friend, Tucker, who’s beent old by his father they can no longer afford to feed him.

 

Minniti received a M.A. degree on journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Only Way Home is her first novel. She lives in Monument, Colorado.

 

The Only Way Home tells a well-researched story of what happens in a crisis or disaster, how it affects individual people and families, and how crises bring out the best and the worst in people.

"This Tender Land" by William Kent Krueger

It’s 1932, and American society is moving toward the pit of the Great Depression. Odie and Albert O’Banion are brothers, sent as orphans to the Lincoln Indian Training School in Minnesota after the death of their father. Odie is 12 and Albert is 16, and they are the only white faces in a sea of Indian children at the school, removed from their parents for “reeducation.” 

The school is a nasty place, run by a nasty headmistress and her husband. Punishment is meted out by a sadistic worker, who’s rumored to do more than punish disobedient children. Odie has a particular problem with following the school’s rules, and he often finds himself in “the quiet room,” a tiny, unheated cell that more than resembles solitary confinement in a prison. The best thing about the cell is the rat, nicknamed Faria, which visits looking for crumbs. When not in the quiet room, boys will find themselves hired out to local farmers, with their pay going to the school.

The school situation isn’t entirely bleak; a young teacher finds ways to ease the harsh conditions and a janitor befriends Albert and watches out for Odie and their Indian friend Mose, at least until she dies in a tornado and leaves her young daughter an orphan. And then, one night, Odie is sent to the quiet room, and the sadistic worker decides the boy will finally get what’s coming to him. Odie has to fight for his life, and the worker will end up dead from a fall. Odie, Albert, and Mose decide to leave; they take Emmy, the teacher’s daughter, with them and head for the Gilead River. 

Soon they’re canoeing, with the vague plan of finding Odie and Albert’s aunt in St. Louis. In what becomes a kind of Huckleberry Finn story, the group will discover the good and evil in people and the evil of the times. Odie, in particular, will be fleeing from what he calls the Tornado God, the deity that seems only interested in punishment and destruction. The river, in addition to a highway, becomes a place of safety; the group learns that they are only really safe when they’re in the canoe, paddling for St. Louis.

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger is the story of Odie, Albert, Mose, and Emmy. It’s a coming-of-age story set in harsh economic climate of the 1930s, with its Hoovervilles, desperate people, con men, faith healers, and revivalists like Aimee Semple McPherson. Because it’s a time of extremes, we also see the goodness that exists. Most of all, it’s a story about a boy named Odie, who will learn things about himself he never knew and find ways to survive in what seems a dark, capricious world.

William Kent Krueger

Krueger has published 18 mystery novels in the Cork O’Connor series, set in the North Woods of Minnesota, and three standalone novels: Ordinary Grace, The Devil’s Bed, and This Tender Land. He’s received a number of awards and recognitions, including the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, the Friends of American Writers Prize, and the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His last nine novels were all New York Times bestsellers. Krueger lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

This Tender Land is a moving, engaging novel, even as the narrative hurries a bit too fast toward the end. You find yourself urging Odie and his band to get back to the river to safety, as they’re chased by both villains along the way and the long arm of the school’s headmistress. It’s a story of goodness surviving in the midst of evil, told through the eyes of a young boy. 

Top photograph: Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School in Michigan, similar to the fictional school in Krueger's novel.