Cameron Ballack is back. And he’s traipsing all over where I used to bike.
Ballack is the fictional wheelchair-bound detective created by St. Louis-based writer Luke H. Davis. In previous books (and there’s been a gap of some years), he and his team were based in St. Charles County, Missouri, part of metropolitan St. Louis. In his new outing, entitled The Burning Glow, Ballack is now the lead detective for the Special Investigating Department, which operates across the metro St. Louis region. (St. Louis actually does have something similar that operates across jurisdictional lines called the Major Case Squad.)
What Ballack and his team are pulled into is a car bombing in the part of the city of St. Louis known as “Little Bosnia,” home to numerous immigrants who fled the war in the 1990s.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
More than 40 years ago, I discovered the stories and novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991). I don’t remember how I came across his work, but I found myself reading stories about a culture that had largely vanished, not long before I was born.
My understanding, if I had one of the Yiddish culture, had been shaped by a play that became a movie, Fiddler on the Roof, the story of Tevye, his wife Golda, and their daughters as they navigate the forces of modernism and anti-Semitism changing their lives. It’s set in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia, around the turn of the 20th century. And then I read Singer’s stories, which not only provided a richer context than the movie but also made the culture seem more real. As much as I enjoyed the movie, it was Singer’s stories that showed the reality without the Hollywood framing.
As I started reading The Broken Heart is the Master Key: Poems by Baruch November, I was almost catapulted back to Singer’s stories. November’s poems aren’t about a culture that had almost disappeared; instead, they reflect the echoes of that culture, two generations after Nazi Germany destroyed it in Poland, eastern Europe, and western Russia.
The closer we get to July 4, the flood of articles relating to America’s 250th anniversary is becoming a tsunami. Emerging Revolutionary War Era is starting a new video series. One of America’s founders chronicled the beginning in sonnets. Benedict Arnold, whose name became synonymous with treason, was first a hero on more than one occasion. The U.S. Army Museum at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, is using “augmented reality” to bring the revolution to life. And there are more links below.
I think I was 10 or 11 when I started stamp collecting, a hobby that lasted off and on right up to now. One stamp that also seemed financially out of reach was the very first one – the “Penny Black” issued by Great Britain in 1840. It’s still financially out of reach, at least for most of us. But it transformed how letters were mailed, and it made postal management possible on a national and international scale.
Some 40 years ago, when I was in a graduate seminar on the Latin American novel, I was trying to tackle Conversations in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa for my seminar research paper and oral presentation. About 100 pages in (it’s a 600-page novel), I almost gave up in despair. I couldn’t figure out what the story was about. Instead, I started over, but this time I briefly outlined each chapter. After the first five chapters, I cracked the code. It was actually a narrative of four interrelated stories, each one told in successive chapters. So the story in chapter one picked up in chapter five, nine, and so on. Maybe it was the work I put into it, but Conversation in the Cathedral remains one of my favorite novels. Henry Oliver at The Common Reader has some observations about difficult writing and difficult novels and poems.
In her 2021 poetry collection, To Shatter Glass, Sr. Sharon Hunter explored childhood and memory, an interior pilgrimage toward understanding and forgiveness. Her new collection, Light Before the Sun, continues that pilgrimage, but it goes beyond, toward something that is more like acceptance and resolution.
“Life is a stained-glass window,” she writes, using the metaphor to suggest light, color, and brokenness. She will be looking back before she looks forward, and she will the brokenness and dysfunction of the relationships that shaped a childhood, but she will also see the beauty and the purpose within it.
