I’ve been reading stories and novels by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) to understand what the popular culture of the 1860s,1870s, and 1880s was like. I could call it research for my historical work-in-progress, and it is that, but it’s also become something more.
Alcott first gained literary notice during the Civil War. In 1863, she published Hospital Sketches, a collection of stories about a volunteer’s experiences in a Washington, D.C., convalescent hospital for wounded Union soldiers. As serious as the subject was, Alcott also treated it with sympathetic humor, and she did it the right way by making herself the object of the jokes and comical situations.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
When she’s old enough to leave, Isabel Gibson flees from her family on Brinkley Island. She was 10 when her mother died, and she was so overwhelmed by her father’s and sister’s grief, not to mention her own, she determined to leave and block herself from love. She eventually married, but it ended in divorce.
She not only left her family behind; she also left her best friend, Johnny Lenox, the boy she loved and who loved her since they were children. Her mother’s bookstore, which her father tried to operate but couldn’t get through his grief, has been run by Isabel’s sister Sophie.
Alice Hoffman
Isabel and Johnny reconnect; they never really disconnected. And they decide to marry, but something always seems to be getting in the way.
The Bookstore Wedding by Alice Hoffman is a short story (related to the author’s Once Upon a Time Bookstore series) that isn’t as much about romance as it is about love – love for family, love for others, and love for community. It’s a simple story, told well, that ends in an unexpected but satisfying way.
Hoffman is the bestselling author of more than 30 novels, three books of short stories, and eight books for children and young adults. Her work has received a number of significant recognitions, including movie versions, Oprah Book Club selections, and Publishers Weekly honors. Her novel about Anne Frank, When We Flew Away, will be published in September. A native of New York City, she lives in Boston.
Detective Inspector Declan Walsh must think his world has turned upside down. That's because it has.
His boss in the cold case unit, DCI Alexander Monroe, has been brutally attacked and left for dead in the office, by someone who’s disguised to look like Walsh and even drive a similar car. And then Kendis Taylor, who was Walsh’s girlfriend when they were teenagers and now a reporter, is murdered while investigating a big story. She was killed right after she’d seen Walsh to tell him about the bigger-than-big story she was working on.
A supposed file is leaked, saying Taylor was a terrorist, and Walsh is suddenly in the crosshairs for being one himself. And now he’s on the run and trying to solve the case at the same time. And time is running out.
Jack Gatland
Hunter Hunted is the third DI Declan Walsh novel by British author Jack Gatland. I have to admit I almost stopped reading what it appeared that it was going to be just another political thriller. Fortunately, I read one more chapter, and I was hooked. Seriously hooked. Can’t-put-it-down hooked.
Gatland is the pen name for bestselling writer Tony Lee, who’s written comics, graphic novels, audio drama, TV and film series, the BBC and ITV, and a host of publishers. In addition to the Declan Walsh series, he’s also published four novels in the Ellie Reckless series, six in the Tom Marlowe series, and several others.
Hunter Hunter is an edge-of-your-seat roller coaster ride and a terrific read. I had to remind myself several times that there are several other books in the series, so I knew DI Walsh was going to survive. Somehow.
We’ve been to England so many times that it’s often difficult to square what we see while we’re there and what’s reported on the news, like the riots in Leeds and the protest marches in London. We did, however, experience a protest march last September that involved the prime minister of Bangladesh, who happened to be staying at our hotel (we had to enter and leave through a guarded gate and work our way through the crowds outside). Leslie Westall at The Critic Magazine takes a brief look on what has happened in communities like Leeds, and it’s not good.
Our federal security organizations failed rather spectacularly on July 13, when former President Trump was nearly killed. The problem is deeper than the head of the Secret Service more focused on ticking off boxes on the HR chart than on keeping candidates and the President safe. Michael Ard at Discourse consider the Secret Service and why it’s long overdue for major reforms.
At one time, do you know which academic institution was so well known for training for overseas missions that it was known as the “nursery for missionaries”? Brooks Buser at Desiring God tells the story.
You read a book likeA Place on Earth by Wendell Berry, and you’re reminded of your own family and where you came from. Characters like Burley Coulter and Uncle Jack seem to be almost lifted wholesale from what I remember of many of the “characters” I knew as a child.
My father’s family lived mostly in the Shreveport, Louisiana, area, with a much larger group in Brookhaven, Mississippi (it was my grandfather who would wander away from Brookhaven and settle first in central Louisiana, in a town called Jena. He was working as a surveyor for a railroad company, and he lived in a boarding house operated by my great-grandmother and his eventual mother-in-law.
My father and his three sisters were all born in Jena but had moved to Shreveport by the late 1920s. Rubye was the oldest, followed by my Aunt Myrtle, my father, and my Aunt Ruth. There would have been an Aunt Elouise, born two years before my father, but she died the same year my father as born.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Photograph: My father and my Aunt Ruth about 1923.
It’s early 1945 in Port William, Kentucky. The war has been dragging on, but U.S. forces have survived the Battle of the Bulge. With a number of men involved in the fight in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, residents keep a close ear on the news.
Mat and Margaret Feltner receive a telegram. Their son Virgil is missing in action. That’s all that’s known. Virgil’s pregnant wife Hannah, who lives with the Feltners, gets the news at the same time. The not knowing is a kind of limbo state, and the family somehow has to come to terms with it. It will become even harder for Mat than it does for Hannah or Margaret.
The Feltner family is at the heart of A Place on Earth, the fifth of the Port William novels by Wendell Berry. First published in 1967 (with a new, edited version issued in 1983), the novel is in turn funny, tragic, moving, and exhilarating. It contains laugh-out-loud moments, and it has moments when you’re reaching for the tissues. It’s about family, fathers and sons, the land, community, and the people who are the community.
Wendell Berry as a young man
Berry has created some memorable characters. Uncle Jack Beechum had me laughing with his stories about funerals at the church. Burley Coulter is the steadfast friend. Ernest Finley, wounded in World War I, is the carpenter who gives his heart. Mat is a man of nobility and steadfastness who begins to crack. Ida and Gideon Crop experience and struggle to overcome great tragedy. As individual as they are, they’re recognizable. They are people you know; some are you own kinfolk.
The author also shows himself capable of throwing a curve ball when you least expect it. And once it’s thrown, you realize just how right it is and how well it fits into the story.
Berry is a poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist, and social critic. His fiction, both novels and stories, are centered in the area he calls Port William, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. He’s won a rather astounding number of awards, prizes, fellowships, and recognitions. He lives on a farm in Kentucky.
A Place on Earth is a profound story, one that changes you when you read it. It’s also one worth reading over and over again.
Last Saturday, July 13, a man attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at the Butler County, Pennsylvania, county fair. Many – too many – newspapers didn’t report it the next day, not because they hate Trump but because they print Sunday newspapers early, and production was well underway. It’s a function of what’s happening in the newspaper business – early printing deadlines, pared down editorial and production staff, advertisers preferring other sources, declining newspaper readership, and more. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently announced it would no longer publish a print edition on holidays, supposedly to give its carriers the day off but really because it’s in retreat toward publishing online only for cost reasons. Rick Edmonds at the Poynter Institute has the story on the July 13 news, or lack thereof.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the darling of the Western news media in the early 1970s, because he was resisting the Soviet regime and embarrassing to Richard Nixon as he pursued détente with Brezhnev and friends. And then the writer gave a speech at Harvard in 1978, and suddenly he’d become, in the news media’s eyes at least, a right-wing fundamentalist wacko. But as Gary Saul Morson writes in Commentary, Solzhenitsyn clearly saw what was coming with Western culture.
If I had to pick a favorite gospel, it would likely be the Gospel of John. It was the first book of the Bible I read after becoming a Christian. It’s also different from those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; for one thing, John skips the entire birth narrative of Jesus. (And my ESV Study Bible reminds me that not one of the gospels has a stated author; their associated names come from tradition and early church history.) Theologian Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder has a favorite gospel, too, and he explains why.
DI Hillary Greene, who’s been working cold cases as a civilian advisor to the Thames Valley Police in Kidlington / Oxford, is on the brink of major life changes. Her boss and love interest, soon to be promoted Stephen Krayle, has proposed. She’s leaning toward living together. Whatever she decides, it will mean leaving the Mollern, her canal boat home, or perhaps just tying it up on the canal by Stephen’s house.
Things are also coming to a head with her team member Jake, the police department’s fair-haired boy who’s also a tech millionaire. He’s been snooping around Hillary’s computer and meeting with local crime figures. What he wants is to find his missing stepsister, whose life spiraled downward into drugs and prostitution.
As Krayle’s new job involves going after organized crime, a plan emerges: use Jake and his missing stepsister to go after one of the bigger crime figures in the area. And the cover will be a public announcement that Hillary’s team is reinvestigating a number of missing women cold cases.
Faith Martin
Hillary’s Final Case by British author Faith Martin isn’t, as it turns out, Hillary Greene’s final case. Four novels remain. And there’s nothing in the story to suggest it’s the last case she’ll work on. All we know is that she’s changing home addresses, but she’s still in the same Kidlington / Oxford area.
But it is a classic Hillary Greene story. Martin comes up with more twists that only Greene can see coming. And it’s a cracking good story, filled with a number of tension-filled scenes.
In addition to the DI Hillary Greene novels, Martin (a pen name for Jacquie Walton) has also published the Ryder and Loveday novels as well as the Jenny Sterling mysteries. Under the name Joyce Cato, she has published several non-series detective stories. Both Cato and Martin are also pen names for Walton. (Walton has another pen name as well – Maxine Barry, under which she wrote 14 romance novels.) A native of Oxford, she lives in a village in Oxfordshire.
