Nightwoods by Charles Frazier

Courage:

A Stolen Life, by Jaycee Dugard

Phillip Garrido, the low-life who kidnapped eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard and held her prisoner for 18 years, was sentenced to 431 years in prison for his unspeakable crimes.  Nancy, his wife, got 36 years.  A Stolen Life, written by Jaycee Dugard, is the story of what happened during…

Crime:

The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi

Amanda Knox, the honor student from Seattle, Washington, has been imprisoned in Perugia, Italy, since November, 2007. This book, The Monster of Florence…

Courage:

“The Long Walk,” by Slavomir Rawicz, and “The Way Back,” the film version

To escape from a Soviet gulag in 1941 and walk across Siberia, Mongolia, the Gobi desert, the Himalayas, to British-controlled India, a distance of four thousand miles, is an impossible feat…

Memoir:

My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, Meredith Mara

A hundred years from now, will the mass hysteria that gripped the nation in the 1980s and early 1990s regarding child sexual abuse and satanic rituals be remembered in the way the Salem Witch Trials of the 1600s are remembered? The insanity of McCarthyism in the 1950s…

Eagles:

Bird Cloud, Annie Proulx

Heart Songs and Other Stories was the first Proulx book I read, and I was hooked. Then came Postcards, The Shipping News, Accordion Crimes, three collections of Wyoming Stories, and now, Bird Cloud: A Memoir. It’s not a memoir in the traditional sense, but no matter…

Family Feuds:

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson

They drink a lot of tea in this novel.  So much tea, I’m reminded of the beer-swilling characters in a Larry Brown novel.  But where a Brown character will grab a can from the cooler, drink it down and toss the can on the floor of his…

Crime:

Mr. Peanut, by Adam Ross

Adam Ross, author of the acclaimed novel, Mr. Peanut, and former teacher at the prestigious Harpeth Hall Girls’ School in Nashville, Tennessee, has been nominated for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.  Presented annually by the British magazine Literary Review, the judges hope “to draw attention to…

Courage:

Within My Heart, Tamera Alexander

Within my Heart by Tamera Alexander is many things:  a historical novel, a romance novel, a romance novel that fits nicely into the subcategory Christian romance.  Central to the story is the developing relationship between the the beautiful young widow, Rachel Boyd, and the town physician, Dr.…

Adoption:

A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore is a wonderful writer.  I’ve read her short stories and love them.  But this novel, A Gate at the Stairs, I did not love. Tassie Keltjin is a student at a mid-western college in need of a job.  She signs on as a nanny for…

Abandonment:

Dog Boy: A Novel, by Eva Hornung

Set in Moscow, this is the story of a 4-year-old boy, Romochka, who is abandoned by his mother and uncle. He leaves the empty apartment and goes out into the city, hungry, cold, and desperate.  He is not alone; there are millions of homeless children and adults…

“Never Let Me Go,” Kazuo Ishiguro

You go gently along in this novel, loving the voice, the details, the sense of peace that pervades the lives of the three main characters.  At the same time you’re aware there’s something beneath the surface.  The children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy,  are “told, but they are…

cancer:

My Sister’s Keeper, Jody Picoult

If you like dark and dreary, cancer reoccurring and reoccurring and reoccurring, this is an okay book. Thirteen year old Anna Fitzgerald, conceived to be a donor for her dying sister Kate, scrapes up $168 to hire a lawyer.  In her short life she’s donated stem cells,…

racism:

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander

I can’t finish this book.  It’s too heartbreaking.  I’ll take it back to the library and in a month or two I’ll check it out again.  I’ve been known to do that, once with a book called The Worst Hard Times, by Timothy Egan.  Set in the…

Depression:

Serena, Ron Rash

The protagonist of this novel, Serena Pemberton, is evil, ruthless, loathsome,  amoral, murderous, greedy, savage, vengeful… what else can I say about her?  That she’s ambitious?   She’s that.  One other thing:  she cannot bear a child.  We can, at least, be thankful for that. This is the…

Christianity:

Same Kind of Different As Me, by Ron Hall & Denver Moore

If this book is a “New York Times Bestseller and Amazing True Story,” as we are so informed on the cover, what have we come to?  Have our institutions failed us this badly?  Has Thomas Nelson, preeminent publisher of bibles, fired all their editors? I hated this…

Political Campaigns:

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

Wow.  What a book.  Who knew that Bill Clinton continued his sexual escapades after he left the White House, and it was fear of another Lewinsky-type scandal that kept many loyal Clintonites from supporting Hillary in the Democratic primary.  Better to go with Obama, they reasoned.  If…

Murder mystery:

Sworn to Silence, Linda Castillo

Has anyone bought screen rights to this story yet?  If they haven’t, they should. Linda Castillo sets the story in Amish Country in the dead of winter:  a brutal murderer is on loose, preying on young women.  Kate Burkholder, shunned by the Amish community years before, is…

Mail Order Bride:

Reliable Wife & The End of the World As We know It, Robert Goolrick

Robert Goolrick has written two books:  a memoir, The End of the World as We Know It, and a novel, Reliable Wife. Blurbs on the back of Goolrick’s memoir talk about the evils of alcoholism, but I think what happened to Goolrick at the hands of his…

Women in the White House:

American Lion, Jon Meacham

To read Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson requires that you immerse yourself in “the Petticoat wars” more deeply than I care to.  It goes on for so long, the women of Washington allied against Margaret Eaton, wife of the Secretary of War. The pettiness and silliness of…

Stalingrad:

War of the Rats, David L. Robbins

If this book were required reading for our military, maybe our nation would finally swear off war.  The battle of Stalingrad was horrendous.  Can anyone really conceive of nearly two million casualties?   What does that look like?  David L. Robbins visited Stalingrad before he wrote this book.  He…

racism:

Scorched Earth, David L. Robbins

This is the story of a black man whose multi-racial child is dug up from her resting place by the good deacons of the Victory Baptist Church in order that the infant might be reburied in the more appropriate “black” cemetery.  When the white church is subsequently…

Memoir:

Elizabeth Edwards, Resilience

The Maytag plant in Newton, Iowa, closed its doors in October, 2007.  On the last day, “some of the Maytagers unlaced their work boots, placed them neatly side by side, and walked to their cars in their socks, their boots symbolizing what they were leaving behind, the…

Tank Wars:

The Last Citadel: A Novel of the Battle of Kursk

Somewhere in the far recesses of my mind I knew there was a battle between the Russians and the Germans, after Stalingrad, and that it was a battle of tanks.    Now I know a lot more.  The battle took place in Kursk, a city in southwestern Russia, and it pitted…

Famous Criminals:

More on Bonnie and Clyde

Could it be that the infamous J. Edgar Hoover, when questioning Blanche Barrow in the Des Moines jail in 1933, threatened to put out her other eye  if she didn’t rat on the Barrow Gang?  (She’d been blinded in one eye by flying glass.) Does this sound like…

Nature takes back:

Fox Killed on Highway 70

A baby fox was killed on Highway 70 sometime Sunday night.  I saw him there on Monday morning when I drove up Nine Mile hill.  His head was so chiseled, his nose so pointed, his fur so distinctively red, he could have been sleeping.  Except that he wasn’t. On Tuesday he was still there, but there…

Famous Criminals:

Bonnie And Clyde, Summer of 1932

Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is reputed to be a student of the Great Depression.  I hope he’s read Jeff Guinn’s book, Bonnie and Clyde. In 1932, Texas was hit with dust storms that choked people and animals alike.  Women put wet sheets over windows and doors to try…

Famous Criminals:

Bonnie and Clyde

I’m reading Jeff Guinn’s book, Go Down Together, the untold story of Bonnie and Clyde.  When you realize they went on their crime spree during the depths of the Great Depression, that Clyde’s parents lived for years in a tent in West Dallas, that Bonnie could barely walk because…