Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

I think in part motivated by my aborted attempt at American Ulysses last month, I have been determined to work my way through Keith Lowe's Savage Continent. Similar to American Ulysses, the topic is interesting, and unlike my chief complete with the former, that White simply included far too many details for the average reader to wade through, Lowe's writing is on point. 

A few years ago, in fact, looking back, I see it was even this same time of year, I began a review as follows: "I blame Shogun. Luncheon of the Boating Party isn't bad, it just pales in comparison to Shogun, which leaves Susan Vreeland's work seeming a bit washed out." Today's context is completely different, but all I can say is: I blame covid. And Trump. Try as I might, I'm simply not in the mood to read about the ravages and savages that followed on the heels of World War II. 

From the opening sentences, Lowe is clear about what the reader will encounter: "Imagine a world without institutions. It is a world where borders between countries seem to have dissolved, leaving a single, endless landscape over which people travel in search of communities that no longer exist. ... There are no banks...Nothing is made here. ... There is no food. Law and order are virtually non-existent, because there is no police force and no judiciary. ... There is no morality. There is only survival." (p. xiii) 

I should have stopped then, right? I mean, it sounds like Lowe is writing to prepare me for the coming electoral apocalypse, rather than merely recounting the experience of a bombed out continent after a half-decade of war. I soldiered on though, no pun intended, through the typhus in the DP camps, through the bones poking through the rubble, through the carnage of 12 chapters. And then I decided enough. It's not that the story shouldn't be told. God knows, we need every reminder we can conjure as to how such periods have ended before. But for me, personally, Savage Continent does not serve the purpose of thou-shalt-not. It merely brought me a lower. 

Perhaps in a few years, I'll revisit this book. It is, as I said, well-written, and despite myself, I am interested in the topic. Just not this year.

Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

Helen Zia's phenomenal Last Boat Out of Shanghai focuses on the personal stories of four Shanghainese who fled from Mao. Annuo, Benny, Bing, and Ho came from vastly different circumstances - Benny, the scion of a comprador family and WWII collaborator; Ho, the second-son of a land-owning family whose greatest aspiration is an advanced education; Annuo, the disdained daughter of a Nationalist general; and Bing, a spunky orphan who must learn at the knee of Elder Sister how to watch out for herself - and how the game is played.

In the late 40s all were faced with the same decision: stay or go. Their choices would ripple through the years, impacting their lives and the lives of their descendants. All of this Zia presents in eminently readable prose, retelling their lives such that the reader cannot help but root for all of them. More than capturing their personal histories and the logistics of fleeing Mao's army, Zia also draws an astonishing portrait of China through the ages, of the corruption and incompetence of the Nationalist government, of the wavering support of the United States, of Shanghai at a time when it was known as the Paris of the East. (Side note: Shanghai is everything I love about Asia and some of the things I don't. It is glitz, and grit, and glam, high tech as all get out and inefficient as hell. It's futuristic skyscrapers along side alleys that were once opium dens. Laundry hanging from trees next to hotels whose marble lobbies gleam. Enough neon to turn daylight to night, and the mingling scents of incense and cigarette smoke. Food that is to die for and water that will literally kill you. Pollution thick enough to leave a layer on your tongue, but the sunsets sure are gorgeous. Millions and millions of people living and laughing and loving and also shouting, frequently shouting, cheek by jowl. It is awesome in the original sense of the word. My experience in Shanghai is obviously many decades after Benny, Annuo, Bing, and Ho haunted the international concession, but the essence of the city must remain largely unchanged even as the topography dances on, for I recognize in her words this city that is so magical.)

Like The Long Way Home and 97 Orchard, Zia also captures the broader immigrant experience, tinged, of course, with the massive dose of racism that Chinese encountered in the era of McCarthyism and a quote of 105 per year. In doing so, she also brings to life the Embarcadero, Times Square, and points in between (such as Ho's time at Michigan - Go Blue!) circa 1950. Every aspect of this book is top notch, and I cannot recommend it enough.

5 stars.

Pachinko

As a child, I was fascinated by the Pachinko machine in my grandparent's basement, with its pinging balls, steady rhythms, and mysterious writing (kanji, I learned much, much later). No doubt, these memories drew me to Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, whose title caught my eye immediately.

I am embarrassed to say, I initially thought Pachinko was a foreign book. As is true of many foreign books, it starts a bit slowly, meandering through an unfamiliar landscape, the language close and the characters lilting. The National Book Award designation might have clued me in, but sadly I didn't notice it until I was nearly finished. No matter. The "foreign" feeling that infuses Pachinko is a testament to Lee's writing, that she so captures her characters and their environs that I truly *believed* they were foreign.

So who are these characters? Pachinko begins with the story of Hoonie and Yangjin, boardinghouse owners eking out an existence for themselves and their young daughter, Sunja, in the early years of the Japanese occupation of Korea. Over the course of nearly a century, and across the generations, Lee traces the triumphs and trials of their progeny, who leave Korea early to work menial jobs in Japan. Through their eyes, the reader experiences the Depression, World War II, the Korean War and subsequent cleaving of the country, on through Japan's emergence as one of the world's dominant economies.

To say "triumphs and trials" sounds trite, but Lee imbues her characters with such humanity that Pachinko is anything but. Additionally, I was fascinated by the plight of ethnic Koreans in Japan, a topic about which I was completely ignorant. (And for good reason as Lee explains int he afterward, in which she describes the lengths to which Koreans go to hide their ethnicity, even those whose families have lived in Japan for four or five generations.)

Another aspect of the book I loved was the evolution of Japan over the course of almost the entire twentieth century. From being encouraged to fight the Americans with bamboo spears and grappling with the fallout from the atomic bombs, to the role of women and the rules around Japanese identity and citizenship, and even the place and power of the yakuza, Lee captures the disparate sensibilities that make Japan Japan even today.

Pachinko is an outstanding read, whether one has an interest in Japan or not. For those who do, Pachinko is simply that much more rewarding.

The Married Girls

It's difficult to remember a more disappointing read. For most of The Married Girls, I debated whether to keep reading or call it quits. The story itself was rather meh for much of the book, plodding along, not so terrible or offensive that I felt compelled to give up, but barely holding my interest. Finally, some three-quarters of the way through, I was rewarded for my persistence: we had a truly interesting story! Only for Diney Costeloe to deliver one of the most frustrating, irritating endings I can think of. I nearly threw my Nook.

The set-up is this: Britain is finally emerging from the long shadows of World War II, with the war over, the blackouts done, rationing on its way out. Against this backdrop we meet Charlotte and Daphne, married respectively to Billy and Felix, and building new lives post-war.

Charlotte is a German Jew who arrived as a refugee on the Kindertransport and whose past threatens to overtake her in the form of Harry, who - somewhat confusingly - has an outsize presence in the first half of the book as the mouthpiece of an ailing mob boss, before Costeloe seemingly tires of him and sends him packing, quite literally. Although the set-up is that this is all hush-hush, none of this seems to be a secret from Charlotte's husband. Her story takes a turn for the dramatic, which improves the entire book...until the end. More on that in a minute.

Daphne, on the other hand, is a piece of work, with more secrets than I can count, but one big one that, if revealed, will clearly cause he neatly constructed life as the Squire's wife to unravel. For in Felix Bellinger, she has found a man with a title who can take her away from her beginnings in the East End, both literally and figuratively. Very early it's clear that Daphne has no affection, let alone love, for her husband, and it's this, as much as her secrets that threatens to overwhelm her at every turn.

Once events really begin to unfold, the story improves and does so until the final chapter which, instead of allowing the story to progress winds it up quickly, unsatisfactorily, and perhaps with an eye to a sequel. And although I liked Charlotte and don't mind the idea of knowing how her story concludes, it's not a sequel I'll be reading.

Two-and-a-half stars.

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

I can’t recall when I first read about the Mitfords. (Evelyn Waugh? In the Garden of Beasts?) And although their name was highly familiar, and some aspects of their story somewhat familiar (one of them was a Hitler groupie, if not quite his girlfriend), I couldn’t have accurately stated so much as their names or that there were, in fact, six of them. I did have a sense that the sisters were famous for being famous, and when I laid eyes on the lengthy tome at the library for the first time, I had second thoughts. I can only say that I am very happy that I shushed them and read The Sisters.

As the title suggests, The Sisters is a biography of the six Mitford sisters (Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah) whose politics, antics, and scandalous behavior rendered them household names in 1930s Britain. There was Diana, who married one of the richest men in Britain, the heir to the Guinness fortune, only to run off with Sir Oswald Mosley (yes, the fascist) when her children were toddlers. Unity was the Hitler groupie who had so convinced herself of the impossibility of war that she simply shot herself at the outbreak, while Jessica ran off to Spain with a black-sheep cousin in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. Nancy and Jessica would late become bestselling authors; Deborah became a Duchess who, together with her husband, restored one of England’s most important country houses. (It's no wonder that The Washington Post wrote in Deborah’s obituary – she died in 2014 at 94 – that the Mitfords’ real life squabbles and drama made Downton Abbey look “uneventful.”)

Although in some ways, this is just another romp through the bad behavior of the English Upper Class (see Daughter of Empire or White Mischief for other examples of this genre), Mary Lovell has crafted this biography so that the British Empire, first strong and then rather crumbling, shines through. In that way, this is a book about Old England and England-in-Transition as much as about the Mitford family. The trauma of the King’s abdication is there, as well as the pain and confusion of the years immediately after World War I and then again during the Blitz. For these reasons alone, The Sisters is worth reading, and anyone with an interest in British history will surely enjoy it.

Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France

Several years ago I read Julia Child's memoir of her time in France in the immediate post-war years, My Life in France, which is one of the finest memoirs I've read to date. Naturally, then, Finding Fontainebleau, jumped out at me from the pages of a recent Publisher's Weekly. So first:

Thad Carhart was four-years-old when his father was stationed in France as part of the NATO command. The entire family lived in Fontainebleau for three years, during which Thad started school (becoming "Ted" in the process, as Thad proved impossible to render, as he explains in a humorous anecdote), a good, but naughty, student. In Finding Fontainebleau, Carhart looks back on those three years - a giant Chevy station wagon, a brood of five rambunctious children, and a France still awakening from the nightmare that was World War II - while also weaving in the history of Fontainebleau, and by extension the kings and emperors of France. (Side note: it is to my great regret that I have not yet visited Fontainebleau. If this book convinced me of anything, it is that I really must do so at the next opportunity.)

I enjoyed Carhart's style very much, although I found the steady stream of inserted French to be distracting. For me, it was distracting because I could read it, and so the translations served only to repeat what had read in the previous line. I'm not sure if it would be more or less distracting to a non-French speaker. And, while I enjoyed both the memoir aspect as well as the French history lessons, I felt these were often each so short as to be quite choppy. Carhart's interjections about his life in France since returning to live with his own in the late 1980s further served to heighten this sense for me. And, unfairly, I couldn't help but compare it to the incomparable My Life in France. This is entirely unreasonable, as one memoir is told from the perspective of an adult, while the other is a child's memories, but given the time and place, I couldn't help myself.

Francophiles will still, no doubt, enjoy this book. Carhart provides a particularly interesting look at the work of renovation in France and the work that goes into maintaining the country's patrimoine - the churches, chateaux, palaces, and even parks that make France, well, France. He does a great job distilling the cultural quirks of the French and capturing the old Paris of berets, pissotières, and baguettes.

The Fifties

Truman. Ike. McCarthy. Elvis. Marilyn. MLK. Brown v. Board. McDonald's.

David Halberstam takes all the touchpoints of that most-famous decade and weaves them together in a narrative that explores how technology upended so much of American life, how the consumer culture was born, the first mega-stars created, and so many truths sugar coated.  

Indeed, The Fifties is a heroic work, for its breadth, if not its depth. Some chapters - such as those on the evolution of sports and the creation of the first mega corporations (the aforementioned McDonald's, along with Holiday Inn and the now-defunct E. J. Korvette) - left me wanting more. Others, particularly on literature and the Soviet menace, saw me skimming.

Taken together, though, this is a very well-done book that provides the reader with a true sense of the zeitgeist. Volumes have been written about any one of the individuals and events Halberstam includes. Halberstam does not give the impression that The Fifties is intended as the authoritative text on any one event, but rather that the book provides background and context for the decade and how, taken together, the events of the decade shaped all that came after. (Not least the entire generation that came of age during this time.)

Well-research, well-constructed, and well-written, The Fifties is still a bit of a slog. Let's face it: 700 pages on a very narrow period in American history can't help but verge into textbook territory. Ultimately, Halberstam's work is probably best left to history enthusiasts.

In the Unlikely Event

When I think of Judy Blume, I think of long, lazy childhood afternoons filled with Fudge and her Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and a bit later, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret? I didn't include Judy Blume on my somewhat recent list of books that matter, but I probably should have. She, Roald Dahl, and Ann M. Martin (Babysitter's Club, anyone?) were probably the only authors I could really name when I was 10 years old. But I digress.

In the Unlikely Event is the adult version of Judy Blume at her finest. The novel is set in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in the winter of 1951-52 when three commercial airplanes crashed in town on their way in or out of Newark airport. The thought of this is so horrifying that I thought Blume created these circumstances to test her characters, but it turns out that this part is not fiction. (And Elizabeth, New Jersey, is Blume's home town and Blume was 13-going-on-14 that winter, so it's fair to wonder how much of an autobiographical element In the Unlikely Event contains.)

The story is about how individuals are affected by the crash, people whose lives might never have intersected, and some that would have intersected differently. It's about how humans cope with crisis, but more than that, it's about how messy life can be, and how so often, it takes only one quick pull of a thread for everything to unravel. In this way, it reminds me very much of When the World Was Young, Elizabeth Gaffney's fine novel of innocence lost set, perhaps not coincidentally, in the same heady, post-war years that Blume mines here.

These are Blume's people. In Miri Ammerman, I felt the presence of Margaret Simon, she of Are You There God fame. What Blume does so well is to create the story. Each chapter is told in the voice of a different character - I'd hazard to guess close to 20 in all - and for the first third of the book, it's a guessing game for the reader how these lives fit together. Blume creates dramatic plot twists in places the reader least expects, and she does all of it with an authentic voice, or in this case, voices.

Ultimately, this is a book to make the reader think. About family. About love. About choices and happiness and random luck, both good and bad. About the influence of strangers and strange events on our lives. If you read nothing else this summer, read this.

A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana

A Girl Named Zippy is the sweet and funny memoir of Haven Kimmel, born in Mooreland, Indiana, (population 300) in 1965. Her memories are told with a lighthearted and self-deprecating tone, and the many quirky characters come to life in her telling. Zippy ends on Christmas Eve, which I did not know when I began, of course, but which seems entirely fitting.

I was reminded more than once not so much of my own Midwestern birthplace, but that of my grandmother and great-grandparents, a place which still looms large in my memories. I imagine that such towns did not change much between, say 1965 and 1985, which is why reading this often felt like slipping into something familiar and well-worn. And, although the better part of several decades passed between the two memoirs, I was reminded again and again of Edmund Love's wonderful The Situation in Flushing, which still ranks as my favorite memoir. (It is also worth noting that Kimmel's life and early experiences could not be farther from the life and times of Lady Pamela Hicks, whose Daughter of Empire is the last memoir I read.)

I picked this up at the library after seeing it on BookBub - still one of my favorite web finds in 2014 - and read it in a matter of hours. Time well spent - and easily recommended for anyone who loves memoirs or small town America.

Merry Christmas!

The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream (DNF)

I have been slogging my way through Thomas Dyja's The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream for the past two weeks. The premise drew me in - in the middle of the 20th century, Chicago was the American city. And Dyja forcefully and eloquently makes the case that Chicago was the American city for better (art and architecture) or for worse (corruption and racism). Still, after 200 pages (our of 412), I decided to end the slog.

The trouble is that this reader, at least, couldn't see the forest - Chicago - for the trees - all of the individuals who contributed to the city's rise in one way or another. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy certainly made important contributions, as did each of the dozens of other characters, but the story of the city got lost in their biographical details. I would have loved a less detailed history that focused more heavily on the events, rather than the people behind the events.

When the World Was Young

Elizabeth Gaffney's When the World Was Young defies easy categorization. Essentially, it is the coming of age of Wally Baker. After the death of her glamorous mother, Stella, Wally, lives with her grandparents, but is largely raised by their black maid, Loretta, in the years after World War II. Gradually, Wally comes to see the complexities unfairness of life in a gradual stripping away of innocence.

When the World Was Young is beautifully written, with prose that transports the reader into Wally's world: Brooklyn, circa 1950. The characters, too, are distinct and sympathetic, even the wildly unstable Stella whose life has been marred by a series of disappointments and tragedies. This is a lovely read, a book that is hard to put down, and one that any lover of fiction should enjoy.

Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End

Farewell to the East End is the last of the three books chronicling nurse Jenny Lee's time as an East End midwife in 1950s London. (It is also the basis for almost all of season two of the show Call the Midwife on BBC/PBS.) It follows the same structure as the first memoir, Call the Midwife, with each chapter detailing the story of a patient - usually, but not always, a woman in labor. Jenny Worth (nee Lee), the author, also does a commendable job of providing background chapters on some of the issues, both social and medical, that nurses faced in 1950s Poplar, such as tuberculosis and access - or lack thereof - to safe, legal abortions.

In many ways, Farewell to the East End reads like a continuation of the original book, making the placement of Shadows of the Workhouse, the second book of the series, seem awkward or ill-considered. In total, though, the trilogy is very well-written and informative, both humorous and heartrending, and well wroth the read for anyone with an interest in Cockney history or even British social policy from the Victorian age forward.

Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse

Last fall, I got hooked on the BBC/PBS series Call the Midwife, which is based on a series of memoirs by Jennifer Worth (formerly Jenny Lee) of the same name. In December, I reviewed the first book (titled simply Call the Midwife). A few weeks ago, after discovering I would be something like number 57 or 58 on the library's waitlist, I broke down and bought a copy of volume two, Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse. This volume, which is written in the same clear prose that manages to be both lively and nostalgic as the first book, focuses on Jenny's work as a district nurse, as opposed to focusing on her work as a midwife.

In this volume, the reader encounters siblings Peggy and Frank as well as the old soldier Joe and the painfully shy Jane, a nursing assistant-type character introduced in season two. The story of Sister Monica Joan's light fingers and inheritance of jewels is also revealed. Since Jennifer makes clear in book one that she did not see Jimmy for decades after they parted, it's not surprising that he had nothing to do with helping prove she had not stolen the jewelry, but otherwise I was impressed with how closely the show hewed to the book (and I should say this is the case for almost all episodes and characters, with the notable exception of Jimmy).

As the title implies, the common theme running through the lives of the characters in volume two is the scars left by the workhouse, whether having spent time in one or simply harboring the fear of ending up in one. As in the first volume, Worth captures the speech patterns of her patients perfectly; their Cockney accents dance across the chapters and into the readers ears with an ease that belies the difficulty Worth described of trying to put the dialect into writing.

In addition to the next episodes of Call the Midwife, I'm also looking forward to reading the third (and final) volume of memoirs, Farewell to the East End.

P.S. Given that the three books were originally published in England in a single volume, I think anyone doing, say, a 400+ page challenge this year could read all three together, if she were interested, and not be cheating on the challenge. Individually each book runs to about 300 pages. 

The Midwife

The Midwife (which I also saw in a bookstore this past weekend with the title Call the Midwife), is the basis for my latest British television obsession, Call the Midwife. It's a seriously good show, and I was impressed how closely a great number of the plot lines hewed to the original book by Jennifer Worth, nee Lee. Although I admit to skimming some of the most, uh, detailed chapters on the art and science of midwifery (and nursing, generally), I found this book absolutely fascinating. Worth does a bang-up job of capturing life in London's East End, not only during the 1950s, when she lived there as a nurse and midwife, but - through her own research and the stories she learns from patients - of life there through the end of the 19th century and entire first half of the 20th.

It is this history that really sets the book apart from the television show. The show cannot capture the scope of the War World II destruction that still litters the landscape: entire city blocks that have been fenced off, the jagged remains of war - and the stench of a decade of filth therein deposited - filling the senses of all who live there. She takes a hard look at workhouses (the description of the workhouse howl is one of the most haunting passages I have read in a very long time), prostitution (often involuntary), and absolute, grinding poverty. As in the television show, most of the individuals who give this book life have dignity and humor that belies their circumstances.

Throughout the book, Worth captures not only the spirit of her patients, but their speech: the Cockney accents seem to leap off the pages and into the reader's ears with ease. Her appendix on the dialect is fascinating, and well worth reading.

The book, like the show, is absolutely fantastic, and I can recommend both without reservations. Four stars.