Saturday Good Reads - Oct. 15, 2022

For those of us who remember the 1960s, it was something of a crazy time, with the Vietnam war and it protests, free speech movements, widespread use of drugs on college campuses, “free love,” and other developments and events. One movie seemed to catch it all in 1968 – ‘Wild in the Streets.” Michael Gonzales at CrimeReads talks about the movie and its director.  

Last week, PayPal announced a new user agreement. If a user engaged in “restricted activities” or spread “misinformation,” the account could be debited up to $2500. Once again, a corporation shows what can happen when it blunders into the culture wars. The reaction, including from one of the company’s founders, was so severe that PayPal backtracked and claimed the new agreement had been posted “in error.” They made changes but kept some provisions in place. Helen Raleigh at The Federalist discusses PayPal and the rise of the digital gulag.

 

Do you know who the bestselling American poet of all time is? Do you know what happened to him? Dan Kois at Slate has the story on the poetry phenom of the 1960s and 1970s – Rod McKuen. (I dated a girl in the late 1960s who thought McKuen’s Listen to the Warm the best poetry ever written. I read it, just to placate her. She was wrong. And I was canceled.)

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

What we owe the dead – Brendon Sylvester at The Critic Magazine.

 

Human Monogamy Has Deep Roots – Blake Edgar at Scientific American.

 

The Role Reversal – Hannah Sanders at Story Warren.

 

Book bans: Are these fights about a Christian nationalist plot or something else entirely? – Julia Duin at Get Religion. 

 

The 10 Best Hats in Crime Movies – Olivia Rutigliano at CrimeReads.

 

American Stuff

 

In Search of the American Myth – Wilfred McClay at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

An Extraordinary Life: Mohammad Ali Nicholas Sa’id, Polyglot Genius of the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts – David Dixon at Emerging Civil War.

 

Eric Foner on the Life of Southern Historian C. Vann Woodward Who Helped Change How We View the Civil War and Reconstruction – Patrick Young at The Reconstruction Era.

 

Ukraine

 

Had enough war? – David Warren at Essays in Idleness.

 

Russia’s brutal strategy of war is failing – Charles Lipson at The Spectator.

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Cake of Many Layers: Walking a City through Time – Nadya Williams at Front Porch Republic.

 

Discovering Charles Dickens’ ‘The Signalman’ – Laurie Lowenstein at CrimeReads.

 

Faith

 

The Reformation Ideal of Marriage – Michael Haykin at Ligonier.

 

News Media

 

“Every four years we shoot ourselves in the foot”: Should news outlets still endorse political candidates? – Gregory Perreault & Volha Kanonovich at Nieman Lab.

 

The Internet Can Protest and Overthrow, But It Can Never Govern – Chris Martin at Terms of Service.

 

Art

 

The Waning Years of Edward Hopper – Richard Lacayo at Literary Hub.

 

Walk by Faith – Aaron Williams

 Painting: Man Reading the Newspaper, oil on canvas by Albert Anker (1831-1910).

Wheels on fire

After Daniel 7:9-14

After the four beasts,

I looked to see,

and what I saw was

no game of thrones, 

but thrones being placed

in deadly earnest,

arranged to allow him

to take his seat, him

with his electric-white hair,

the ancient one, of days,

the wheels of his throne

on fire, fire streaming

before him, him served

by millions, him now

facing billions standing

before him, awaiting

judgment. 

 

Court is now in session,

the Ancient of Days presiding,

The books are opened;

judgment is on the menu.

First to fall is the beast,

killed, destroyed, consumed

by fire. The other beasts are

stripped of authority, of power,

to await the judgment to come.

 

Photograph by Monil Andharia via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"The Crimes of Clearwell Castle" by Benedict Brown

It’s May of 1926, and Christopher Prentiss can now say goodbye – forever – to his studies at the Oakton Classical and Commercial Academy for Distinguished Young Gentlemen. In other words, he’s graduated, and he will soon be turning 18. Lord Edgington, his 75-year-old grandfather, throws a party in his honor and quickly whisks him off to yet another adventure. With a flock of servants and Delilah the golden retriever in tow, of course.  

After a brief stop in Bath, they eventually land at Clearwell Castle in Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean (the place where the adders congregate). It’s the home of distant relatives, the Wyndhams, and Christopher and his grandfather walk right into a feud. The 200-year-old conflict between the Wyndhams and the Morduants in a neighboring village is one to rival the Montagues and Capulets. 

 

Two people end up as murder victim, and neither is a Wyndham nor a Mordaunt. One is the singing Clearwell town drunk; the other is the much-loved owner of the Wyndham Arms pub. 

 

Lord Edgington, with Christopher in tow, is on the case. And The Crimes of Clearwell Castle is another madcap adventure of the detecting duo by British author Benedict Brown.

 

Benedict Brown

I’m trying to remember when I had so much fun – and laughed – reading about murder, revenge, and secret passions. But that’s what the Lord Edgington mysteries are – pure fun.

 

In addition to the six published Lord Edgington stories, Brown has written seven Izzy Palmer mystery novels and three novellas. A native of south London, he lives with his family in Spain. The Lord Edgington mysteries are likely aimed at both the general reader as well as the young adult audience. And they’re well-researched stories, full of information about the mid-1920s.

 

Clearwell Castle, by the way, is a real place with a distinguished history. Brown advertised for locations for his next mystery, and the owners of the castle, now primarily a wedding venue, stepped forward. 

 

Related:

 

Murder at the Spring Ball by Benedict Brown.

 

A Body at a Boarding School by Benedict Brown.

 

The Mystery of Mistletoe Hall by Benedict Brown.

 

 Death on a Summer’s Day by Benedict Brown.

 

The Tangled Treasure Trail by Benedict Brown.

 

The Curious Case of the Templeton-Swifts by Benedict Brown.

"Raw Material" by JJ Marsh

Scotland Yard detective Beatrice Stubbs is on a weekend break in Wales. She and her long-term love interest Matthew wake early one morning and head to the beach, where they snap pictures of themselves at sunrise with Matthew’s camera. They’re barely there for any length of time when Beatrice’s purse is snatched. It’s found intact by the police. That night, a burglar breaks into their holiday rental and steals the camera. The police have no leads and no suspects. But, Beatrice realizes, the thief was specifically after the pictures they took, and it must have been what was in the beach background. But what was it? 

What the thief doesn’t know is that Beatrice already uploaded the photos to a thumb drive. Back in London, she turns the drive over to her friend and neighbor Adrian, who’s already thinking of himself as the next Sherlock Holmes. When Beatrice gets assigned to an urgent case of finding a flasher and sexual predator, Adrian convinces Matthew to do their own investigation of the stolen photos. They may have stumbled into a drug ring. 

 

JJ Marsh

In Raw Material, the second Beatrice Stubbs mystery novel by JJ Marsh, Beatrice and her friends are investigating two different crimes, both of which could lead to danger and physical peril. Author Marsh adds on a good helping of police politics and personal issues to the story, nicely layering the personal with the primary narrative.

 

In addition to the Beatrice Stubbs series, Marsh has also published three novels in the Run and Hide series and three standalone novels. She has degrees in English Literature and Theatre Studies, and has worked as an actor, teacher, writer, director, editor, journalist, and Cultural trainer. She lives in Switzerland and also blogs at her web site.

 

Related:

 

Behind Closed Doors by JJ Marsh.

Poets and Poems: David Russell and "Quadrilateral: Utterances"

The first thing you notice about the poems of Quadrilateral: Utterances by David Russell is the language. It is a language of word pictures and images that cascade one after the other in a virtual torrent of imagination.  

The first poem, “Hard Times of Old England,” is the first of 47 poems and is a good example. It’s a poem about Brexit, and you think, oh, no, more politics. And it is political. But it presents images of trucks choking ports as they crowd to gain entry, rotting fish, services straining for workers, and a government content to bumble its way through. Russell floods the reader’s mind with pictures that, regardless of what you might think about Brexit, force you to confront what it means.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front" by Timothy Smith

In high school and college, when we read about or study the American Civil War, we learn primarily about the political and military figures and the battles and campaigns. When I attended LSU, the school’s history department had a national reputation, with professors like T. Harry Williams, who was not only a highly regarded Civil War historian but also wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Huey Long. Williams published several books on Abraham Lincoln, P.G.T. Beauregard, Civil War generals, and related topics. 

In recent years, more attention has been paid to the war and how it affected civilians. When Union armies invaded the Southern states, they civilians they encountered were largely women, children, and older men beyond military age. And it is this group, and their lives in towns, cities, and farms, that Timothy Smith considers in Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Pressing on

After Philippians 3:12-14

It’s the one thing, 

pressing on, pressing

forward. It doesn’t

mean the past is

useless or lacks

meaning; the past

is what has shaped

me, it’s where I

come from, and what

happened there 

shaped the present

and the future. But

the point here is

not the past but

pressing on toward

the goal, the wreath

of laurel, the prize

for hearing and

heeding the call

upward. It’s

the one thing,

the one thing that

matters, the thing

that’s life itself.

 

Photograph by Chan via Unsplash. Used with permission.