Monday, February 29, 2016

The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

James Green sets out to shed light on the history of the labor movement in West Virginia, particularly in the coalfields, but he accomplishes much more than that. What Green does instead - or in addition - is to craft a portrait of the poorest citizens of the poorest state in the years before and then during the Great Depression.

In places, Green's writing affirms long-held stereotypes of the Mountain State. Describing one trial, Green writes, "Deputies traveled deep into the hollows to find potential jurors who were not related to any of the defendants." Nearly every third character is a Hatfield, in one way or another descended from or related to the  Hatfields. And the number of guns, amount of liquor, propensity for violence, and preponderance of barefoot brides and babes do not help the state's case. Also, mining is hard and dirty work.

The Devil Is Here in These Hills, though, is much more than a soliloquy on West Virginia. Green has comprehensively compiled the history of the mine wars, and in many ways, the entire Labor Movement. I am embarrassed to admit, but before reading this book, I knew Mother Jones only as left-leaning journalism site; I had not a clue that the real Mother Jones was a fearsome fighter for the union movement for decades, and throughout the country.

The topic is necessarily narrow, and for that reason may appeal to a somewhat limited audience. Those who do decide to read this should not be disappointed, though, for the characters and events both border on the unbelievable and the book (not unlike Ashes Under Water), sheds light on a forgotten and shameful episode in American history.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Japanese Tales from Times Past

In olden times, Japan was filled with wily individuals who could transform themselves into snakes and foxes, as well as a tremendous number of demons, devils, and sundry evil spirits. Believing in, and reciting, the Lotus Sutra with all your heart was of utmost importance. And Buddha regularly - almost unfailingly - swooped in to save those of pure heart, whatever their trouble might be. (And the trouble was usually snakes, foxes, or evil spirits/demons.) Or so this collection of fantasy and folklore proclaims.

Clearly, these stories, such as they have been handed down, are not meant to be taken literally. Most are moral lessons; a few are simply confusing. All speak to the Japanese virtues of honor and humility that so define the culture today. Most readers, frankly, will not be interested in Japanese Tales from Times Past. At best they are repetitive, a sort of Japanese Aesop's fables. At worst, they are mind bending puzzles, filled with too many monks to count. They are each Japanese to the core, though, from the virtues they proclaim to the word choice and cadence of the translation, courtesy of Naoshi Koriyama and Bruce Allen.

This is a book for a niche, niche audience. It is exactly as the cover states, a collection of folkloric tales, and offers an unusual window into Japanese culture.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Murder Most Malicious

Murder Most Malicious is a lighthearted murder mystery set at one of England's great manor houses just as the first World War has drawn to a close. It's not often that I would describe a murder mystery as "lighthearted" but Alyssa Maxwell writes with a breeziness that seems to convey to the reader to not become too overwrought.

So. It's Christmas, 1918, the war has finally ended, the men are finally home - those who do not lie in Flanders field, at least - and all is merry and bright. The Renshaws - Lord and Lady and the like - are hosting a large gathering at their estate, Foxwood Hall, when one of the guests is discovered missing in a most unpleasant manner. The local constable believes he has the case sewn up neatly, but 19-year-old Lady Phoebe is certain he has the wrong man. It's up to her and her ladies maid, Anna...er, Eva, to catch the real culprit before anyone else is hurt.

As you may have guessed from the paragraph above, Murder Most Malicious put me in the Downton Abbey frame of mind almost from the opening page. The Renshaws, like the Crawleys, have three daughters, the oldest of whom is a bit of a cold fish. The middle daughter, Lady Phoebe, is the most sympathetic, so she's no Edith, but Mr. Giles could easily be Mr. Carson. In many ways, the similarities are not surprising, given that M3 was published in late 2015, well into Downton's run as the definitive source on Britain's WWI experience. I should add, too, that the similarities with Downton in no way take away from Maxwell's writing or the mystery at the heart of the book.

Murder Most Malicious is no Agatha Christie, where the reader is blindsided by the developments and can rarely guess the outcome. It's in the same class as the Kalorama Shakedown or M.C. Beaton: good, fun, quick, and certainly not too dark.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Ashes Under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America

In 1915, the SS Eastland capsized while tied to its dock in the Chicago River. Over 800 people died.

Michael McCarthy hypothesizes that virtually no one in America today has heard of this disaster. I certainly hadn't, and my first reaction upon learning of it was to think that Chicago saw more than its share of bizarre disasters in the early twentieth century. But, I digress.

Ashes Under Water is the story of the Lake Michigan steamships, and of one in particular - the Eastland - that was beset by trouble from its earliest days. Although McCarthy focuses on other aspects of the story, I was most stunned by the fact that someone who had never built a boat before built one big enough to hold 2,500 people...and it took more than a decade for anything truly terrible to happen.

The second half of the book focuses on the trial that followed, and how the clearly guilty owners tried to pin the blame on the most competent and least guilty man on the boat, Chief Engineer Joseph Erickson. Erickson was defended by none other than the wily Clarence Darrow, he of later Monkey fame.

All told, I found the first half of Ashes Under Water, which covered the Lake Michigan steamship business, Erickson's biography, and the Eastland accident itself, more interesting than the second half, which focused on the trial. From beginning to end, though, McCarthy is detailed and thorough and offers a remarkable reconstruction of a disaster that has otherwise long been forgotten.

Friday, February 12, 2016

The Son

Philipp Meyer's The Son was featured in a 2015 "best books our staff read" round-up. The Son was described as an "old-fashioned epic of the American West" that "imagines the rise to power of the McCulloughs, one of Texas’s most dominant oil and ranching families." It sounded a bit too much like Leila Meacham to pass up.

The Son is actually three narratives, told me members of three different generations of the McCullough family, that together create the family's narrative. The most compelling is that of Eli, the patriarch, whose family is murdered and who is himself abducted by Comanche Indians in early adolescence. To say the experience left an impression that remained for the rest of his 100 years is an understatement if ever there was one. This was the formative experience of his life - which says a lot for a many who then rode with the Rangers, served with the Confederates, and basically settled his part of Texas.

His son, Peter, is cut of a different cloth. He is marked much later in life, as an adult, when violence erupts between the Anglos and the Mexicans, pitting neighbor-against-neighbor and, in his case, father-against-son. From the elderly Jeanne Anne, Eli's great-granddaughter, we receive a contemporary account of her family's legacy, and especially the weight she feels to continue building what her forebears began.

By far, the strongest parts of the book are those narrated by Eli, particularly the early chapters with the Comanches. Meyer's description of the tribe being slowly decimated by disease and war are hauntingly beautiful and at the end of the day, it was the Comanches who left the strongest impression of all on me.

I'm not sure I would go so far as to peg this the best book I read all year, but that it is a good book - even a great book - there can be no doubt. This is a portrait of the American West in all of its violent glory. The McCulloughs, all of them, are secondary.

Monday, February 8, 2016

She Rode with the Generals, but her regiment thought she was a man. : The True and Incredible Story of Sarah Emma Seelye, Alias Franklin Thompson

I actually finished this book, which has probably the longest full title of any book I've ever read, over a week ago. I've been too sick since then to properly write about it, which - given the subject matter - is probably case-in-point about how soft we have gone as a people.

So, Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds was the youngest daughter of a real misogynist. God mustn't like misogynists much, or at least not this one, as he had a crop of girls and a single, epileptic son (whom he hated more than the daughters). The long and short is that Miss Edmonds grew up riding, hunting, cording word, and doing all of the other work of a boy, either in a (misguided) attempt to win her father's affection or simply because sons or no, the work still needed doing.

Fast forward until she's 16 and her father wants to marry her off. Sarah runs away from the family farm in New Brunswick, eventually settling in Flint, Michigan. As Franklin Thomson. As author Sylvia Dannett points out, Sarah could not have left home as a single girl and made a go of things on her own in that era. Living as a man was her only option.

When Lincoln calls for volunteers, Franklin enlists with his Flint friends in the Second Michigan. Within the regiment, they laugh at her tiny feet and refer to her alternately as the Beardless Boy and Our Woman, but given that she is the best rider by far, one of the best shooters, and can generally work twice as hard - drilling, marching, chopping firewood, you name - as any other man, no one seriously thinks she is anything other than a man.

Franklin Thompson's Civil War days are awe-inspiring. In addition to serving as a nurse and a postmaster, he is present at many of the major early actions - Bull Run (first and second), Antietam, Seven Days, Fredericksburg - crosses and re-crosses enemy lines as a spy, and serves as an orderly (a role only given to the best riders with the most stamina) to a top general at Fredericksburg. Also, Franklin contracts malaria, suffers fairly massive internal injuries when thrown from a horse, and is never actually hospitalized since that would involve the revelation that Franklin was more Frances than Frank.

When Franklin eventually does desert - due to medical conditions that cannot be treated without real medical care - and melts back into civilian life as Sarah Emma Edmonds, it is as a young lady only three months past her 21st birthday. (So she certainly wouldn't have been laid low by a little bronchitis.) She then goes on to a live several most fascinating decades that see her successfully take on Congress to be awarded a veteran's pension and also be made the only woman member of the GAR.

Edmonds story is humbling, and Dannett does her credit. That said, the full picture of women in the Civil War, as opposed to the biography of one of them women who did so, is best told by De Anne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook in They Fought Like Demons.