Twenty-year-old Celia Garth is in a rut. Tired of being the poor relation, tired of being assigned the most menial tasks by the senior dressmakers in the Charleston shop where she's apprenticing, Celia makes a bold move in seeking an introduction to Vivian Lacy, one of the most demanding ladies in Charleston. Quickly, Vivian's fortunes change: she becomes Vivian's trusted friend and confidante, in addition to her dressmaker, and has a front row seat to the battles of Revolutionary War that is creeping ever-closer to the stately rowhouses and outlying plantations that comprise Celia's world. Still, nothing could prepare Celia for the tragedies the war will bring - nor for being asked to undertake some of the most dangerous work in Charleston, as a spy for Francis Marion.
I thoroughly enjoyed every page of Celia Garth. Admittedly, there were times I felt a *tiny* bit too sure of what was coming next, but Gwen Bristow's writing, and her gift for capturing both her characters and their surroundings is never in doubt. As in her Plantation Road trilogy, the characters aren't particularly subtle or complex, but the overall effect is a pleasant book to cozy up with. As an aside, it was amusing to me that much of the action took place on Tradd Street, the same street that occupies a central place in the life of John Jakes's Main Family.
Three-and-a-half stars.
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Heaven and Hell
Heaven and Hell is the third and final volume in John Jakes's Civil War trilogy. Like the first and second books (North and South and Love and War, respectively), Heaven and Hell follows the Main and Hazard families, each member now navigating the turbulent , post-war years.
Unfortunately, Heaven and Hell doesn't hold a candle to the first two books. For starters, some of the most interesting and colorful characters met their end during the war. Others are essentially and, in my mind, rather inexplicably written out early in this book, reappearing briefly, and with little effect, in the closing chapters. I have a particular beef with Jakes's reintroduction of one character 11 years and seven children after last appearing in the book! )
The greatest crime, though, is that Heaven and Hell, for lack of a better term, has simply jumped the shark. There's just too much here that is too improbable. Rather than racing to the end to learn what happened, I found myself racing through it just to finish. I wasn't giving up after 2500 pages, with the finish line only a few hundred more pages away! Although many of the events seemed possible in and of themselves (many, but not all), it strained credulity too far to think that a small handful of individuals could be party to them all. Furthermore, after 2800 pages, I was disappointed that a few of the characters more or less disappeared.
In the end, Heaven and Hell was a disappointing finish to an otherwise excellent trilogy. To that end, I give the entire trilogy three-and-a-half stars, but the final installment receives but two.
Unfortunately, Heaven and Hell doesn't hold a candle to the first two books. For starters, some of the most interesting and colorful characters met their end during the war. Others are essentially and, in my mind, rather inexplicably written out early in this book, reappearing briefly, and with little effect, in the closing chapters. I have a particular beef with Jakes's reintroduction of one character 11 years and seven children after last appearing in the book! )
The greatest crime, though, is that Heaven and Hell, for lack of a better term, has simply jumped the shark. There's just too much here that is too improbable. Rather than racing to the end to learn what happened, I found myself racing through it just to finish. I wasn't giving up after 2500 pages, with the finish line only a few hundred more pages away! Although many of the events seemed possible in and of themselves (many, but not all), it strained credulity too far to think that a small handful of individuals could be party to them all. Furthermore, after 2800 pages, I was disappointed that a few of the characters more or less disappeared.
In the end, Heaven and Hell was a disappointing finish to an otherwise excellent trilogy. To that end, I give the entire trilogy three-and-a-half stars, but the final installment receives but two.
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Earthquake Storms: The Fascinating History and Volatile Future of the San Andreas Fault
Earthquake Storms: The Fascinating History and Volatile Future of the San Andreas Fault covers the known history of the San Andreas fault and, perhaps to a lesser extent, of California earthquakes write large. John Dvorak also analyzes the evolution of earthquake science, from plate tectonics to the Richter scale. This part of the book is interesting, but not as strong as the historical background, which is well-constructed and, if not quite riveting, highly readable.
Other than the chapter on Richter and the eponymously-named scale, the theoretical and scientific aspects of the book suffer from being a bit too technical and devoid of color. The result is that I often felt I was on the literary equivalent of a see saw, alternating between the highs of historical quakes and scientists and the lows of overly-cumbersome scientific writing. And I like science! It's just that, as occurs too frequently in scientific writing that purports to be popular press (see Paper: Paging Through History, for example), Dvorak's knowledge, interest, and related vocabulary is broader than that of most readers. Additionally, and perhaps unfairly, I was hoping Earthquake Storms, which does touch on earthquakes in China, Turkey, Italy, and points near and far between, would be part-science, part-travelogue, in the style of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind or Spillover.
Ultimately, I did enjoy Earthquake Storms for the portrayal of San Francisco's 1906 quake, and for deepening my knowledge concerning the challenges around earthquake forecasting. Final verdict: On the dry side, but informative. Science-minded readers will likely enjoy it, but the casual reader will likely find it a bit too deep in the weeds.
Other than the chapter on Richter and the eponymously-named scale, the theoretical and scientific aspects of the book suffer from being a bit too technical and devoid of color. The result is that I often felt I was on the literary equivalent of a see saw, alternating between the highs of historical quakes and scientists and the lows of overly-cumbersome scientific writing. And I like science! It's just that, as occurs too frequently in scientific writing that purports to be popular press (see Paper: Paging Through History, for example), Dvorak's knowledge, interest, and related vocabulary is broader than that of most readers. Additionally, and perhaps unfairly, I was hoping Earthquake Storms, which does touch on earthquakes in China, Turkey, Italy, and points near and far between, would be part-science, part-travelogue, in the style of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind or Spillover.
Ultimately, I did enjoy Earthquake Storms for the portrayal of San Francisco's 1906 quake, and for deepening my knowledge concerning the challenges around earthquake forecasting. Final verdict: On the dry side, but informative. Science-minded readers will likely enjoy it, but the casual reader will likely find it a bit too deep in the weeds.
Friday, November 10, 2017
Love and War
Love and War is the second volume of John Jakes's Civil War trilogy. It picks up where the first, North and South, left off, in the early days of the Civil War. Despite the outbreak of hostilities that has left them on opposing sides, the Pennsylvania Hazards and the South Carolina Mains are determined to maintain their friendship, which now spans two generations.
The book begins rather slowly, with significant rehashing of events from North and South. (This made more sense to me after I learned that the two books were originally published three years apart.) Quickly, though, two things became apparent to me.
1) Jakes is not interested in writing another "traditional" Civil War book. There are actually very few battles in the entire 1100+ pages. Jakes explains his approach and rationale beautifully in an afterward where he outlines the lengths he went to to place his characters in some of the lesser covered but equally important venues, from bureaucratic offices in Richmond and Washington, to Liverpool and the Hunley.
2) Jakes has mastered the perspective switch. Over the course of 147 chapters, rarely do consecutive chapters tell the same character's story. The effect is to keep the story moving quickly but also, perhaps oddly, to prevent the reader from becoming too emotionally invested in any particular individual. And what individuals they are, the heroes and the villains (of whom there are plenty) alike.
Instead of focusing on individual angst and suffering, the impact of Jakes's approach is to make the reader feel the extent of the national angst and suffering, the collective injuries borne by both north and south, along with the uncertainty that so dominated the mood on both sides. It's this generalized uncertainly that lends the dimension so often missing from other Civil War fiction from I Shall Be Near You to Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker.
The book begins rather slowly, with significant rehashing of events from North and South. (This made more sense to me after I learned that the two books were originally published three years apart.) Quickly, though, two things became apparent to me.
1) Jakes is not interested in writing another "traditional" Civil War book. There are actually very few battles in the entire 1100+ pages. Jakes explains his approach and rationale beautifully in an afterward where he outlines the lengths he went to to place his characters in some of the lesser covered but equally important venues, from bureaucratic offices in Richmond and Washington, to Liverpool and the Hunley.
2) Jakes has mastered the perspective switch. Over the course of 147 chapters, rarely do consecutive chapters tell the same character's story. The effect is to keep the story moving quickly but also, perhaps oddly, to prevent the reader from becoming too emotionally invested in any particular individual. And what individuals they are, the heroes and the villains (of whom there are plenty) alike.
Instead of focusing on individual angst and suffering, the impact of Jakes's approach is to make the reader feel the extent of the national angst and suffering, the collective injuries borne by both north and south, along with the uncertainty that so dominated the mood on both sides. It's this generalized uncertainly that lends the dimension so often missing from other Civil War fiction from I Shall Be Near You to Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker.
Saturday, November 4, 2017
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back
Janice Nimura's Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back is the non-fiction account of three girls who were chosen by the Japanese government to travel to the United States in 1871 to study for 10 years. They were then to return to Japan, bringing their new cultural knowledge back to a rapidly-westernizing Japan.The girls, Ume, Shige, and Sutematsu, ranged in age from 6-11 when they were plucked from the bosom of their (recently defeated) samurai families, placed aboard a ship, and sent to America for 10 (and in the cases of Ume and Sutematsu, extended to 11) years.
The women's families, generally suffering the privations of having been on the losing side of the conflict between the shogun and the emperor, were only too glad of a tangible way to demonstrate their support for the new, government, and also to have one less mouth to feed. So it is that the girls (originally five in number but reduced to three by the premature, health-related return of two girls after less than a year) travel across the sea and then, perhaps even more remarkably to them, by train across the U.S., passing through the still-wild West, en route to the East Coast.
Shige and Sutematsu are placed in host families in Connecticut, while Ume becomes the beloved only daughter of an older, wealthy Georgetown couple. There they stay, Ume for 11 years until she graduate from high school, and Shige and Sutematsu until they enroll at Vassar and become the first Japanese women to earn a college degree, ever. And then they return to a home they hardly remember and where, until recently, it was a literal crime to leave - for whatever reason, including storm-induced shipwreck - and attempt to return.
In their absence, the feudal land of their youth had disappeared, replaced by a rapidly modernizing society still uncertain of how it felt about the changes - and the west. Into this environment, the three women must re-assimilate; none of them can read or write Japanese any longer, and Ume can no longer speak it. The oldest of them, Sutematsu, is twenty-two. Choosing wildly differing paths, the young women set out to do their duty and fulfill their debt to the government, slowly, quietly changing the Japanese view of education, and perhaps even women's place in society, definitively.
Nimura's work spans the Meiji era, from its bloody dawn, depicted in the early chapters (where life appears exactly as depicted in the hundreds-of-years-earlier Shogun), to its end on the eve of World War I. Briefly, Nimura reaches into the 1920s and the end of the women's lives. In covering the birth of modern Japan, Nimura focuses on many of the events that set the stage for World War II (I could not help but feel a bit of relief that all died before the build up to the war) - events which are central to the opening of James Bradley's Flyboys, which follows naturally for anyone interested in Japan's progression from pro-West to ambivalent-about-the-West to anti-West. It's certainly no stretch to see Ume, Shige, and Sutematsu as the forbears to Harry Fukuhara and his family.
Four stars.
The women's families, generally suffering the privations of having been on the losing side of the conflict between the shogun and the emperor, were only too glad of a tangible way to demonstrate their support for the new, government, and also to have one less mouth to feed. So it is that the girls (originally five in number but reduced to three by the premature, health-related return of two girls after less than a year) travel across the sea and then, perhaps even more remarkably to them, by train across the U.S., passing through the still-wild West, en route to the East Coast.
Shige and Sutematsu are placed in host families in Connecticut, while Ume becomes the beloved only daughter of an older, wealthy Georgetown couple. There they stay, Ume for 11 years until she graduate from high school, and Shige and Sutematsu until they enroll at Vassar and become the first Japanese women to earn a college degree, ever. And then they return to a home they hardly remember and where, until recently, it was a literal crime to leave - for whatever reason, including storm-induced shipwreck - and attempt to return.
In their absence, the feudal land of their youth had disappeared, replaced by a rapidly modernizing society still uncertain of how it felt about the changes - and the west. Into this environment, the three women must re-assimilate; none of them can read or write Japanese any longer, and Ume can no longer speak it. The oldest of them, Sutematsu, is twenty-two. Choosing wildly differing paths, the young women set out to do their duty and fulfill their debt to the government, slowly, quietly changing the Japanese view of education, and perhaps even women's place in society, definitively.
Nimura's work spans the Meiji era, from its bloody dawn, depicted in the early chapters (where life appears exactly as depicted in the hundreds-of-years-earlier Shogun), to its end on the eve of World War I. Briefly, Nimura reaches into the 1920s and the end of the women's lives. In covering the birth of modern Japan, Nimura focuses on many of the events that set the stage for World War II (I could not help but feel a bit of relief that all died before the build up to the war) - events which are central to the opening of James Bradley's Flyboys, which follows naturally for anyone interested in Japan's progression from pro-West to ambivalent-about-the-West to anti-West. It's certainly no stretch to see Ume, Shige, and Sutematsu as the forbears to Harry Fukuhara and his family.
Four stars.
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