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Martha, thanks but I just ordered off Amazon for a penny!

Kathy

My husband, two sons and I have all read all of James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels. We all believe that he is one of the best living American writers. The first Robicheaux book was Neon Rain. The most recent was The Tin Roof Blowdown about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I think it's his best yet. I think that Robicheaux was originally with the NO police department, and went back to New Iberia after some problems there as well as his own alcoholism.

I bet you can find them all in the library.

EmmaG

At times I found Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America to be alternately tedious and obvious, but by the end it turned scary. I did, however, dog-ear a lot of pages so let's see what all I thought about while reading it.

1) "… the Christian Right and radical Islamists, although locked in a holy war, increasingly mirror each other. They share the same obsessions. They do not tolerate other forms of belief or disbelief. They are at war with artistic and cultural expression. They seek to silence the media. They call for the subjugation of women. They promote severe sexual repression, and they seek to express themselves through violence." (page 24) All right. Maybe the book gets scary before the end. But are any of the above statements a surprise to anyone already looking askance at the direction some Christian churches are taking? (NOTE TO SCOUTGAL: neither the book nor I claim the above is true for all Christian churches, only those far right ones who are nibbling away at American freedoms. Besides, as we'll see later, these guys don't even consider the Catholic Church to be a Christian church.)

2) "The use of elaborate spectacle to channel and shape the passions of mass followers is a staple of totalitarian movements. … They give to adherents a permissiveness, a rhetorical license to engage in acts of violence that are normally taboo in a democratic society. It becomes permissible to hate." (page 34) SARCASM ALERT: Yeah. Let's give American people another reason to break through our already tattered veneer of civilized behavior.

3) "Hypermasculinity becomes a way to compensate, especially when the unspoken truth is that Christian men are required to have a personal, loving relationship with a male deity and surrender their will to a male-dominated authoritarian church." (page 83) Interesting concept, particularly in connection with 1) the advice that parents "spank their children with 'sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely'" (page 85) or 2) an explanation that "the use of control or force is also designed to raise unquestioning and fearful children, children who as adults will not be tempted to challenge powerful male figures" (page 90) or 3) the Christian Right's stance on homosexuality.

OOPS!!! Now I have to stop this review. Why? I started to save it and discovered another file called American fascists. Seems I've read and reviewed this one before. (No wonder so much of it seemed obvious.) And to think I started my book diary and reviews to keep from rereading books. Obviously the system has suffered a major malfunction. Well, the reviews will continue, but right now I better head into the bathroom and scrape a lot of egg off my face.

Okay. I seem to be surrounded by well-written books at the moment; the one I mentioned earlier, to be described when I finished it, has been shoved aside for the one I picked up this evening.

It is The Seventh Well, by Fred Wander.

From the book jacket:

"Fred Wander, who died in Vienna in 2006 at the age of ninety, was a survivor of some twenty concentration camps, but it was not until the death of his only daughter in 1970 that his recollections finally poured forth in this harrowing work of fiction, first published in East Germany."

The blurb calls the novel "a mezmerizing dance of death filled with eerily haunting melodies," and "one of our finest Holocast novels."

The first character/story is about Mendel the storyteller, and the young man who has asked to be taught how to tell stories.

'Mendel looked at me in alarm. "I see you didn't understand anything. I talk and talk, and you understand nothing. I never was in the place where he lived. Is that so important, the house, the particular house...There are hidden strengths in people, but the people don't know it. They wither away, and become crippled, but still life is pressing within them. And since their pores are blocked and their eyes are blind, and they don't know what to do with all their strength, they break out. They break out, and yes, they lash out as well..."'

Twenty pages on:

'From a farm across the street, a little girl watched the spectacle. The door was open behind her, and swathes of steam cam wafting out. Half hidden behind a tree, the girl watched the long column. She had her sleeves rolled up, her healthy red arms were steaming, the trough full of laundry was steaming at her feet. For an instant I was overcome by memories of the various smells of soap and clean shirts, bread and onions and barley coffee. It was good to know they still existed somewhere.'

But Wander does not mince words.

'That morning Bertrand Lederer from Charleroi died and Abram Larbaud from Montpelier, Efraim Bunzel from Prague died and Samuel Wechsberg from Lodz, and others died in the cars on either side of ours, whose names we never learned..The sky became steel-blue and deep, and only scattered little pink clouds smiled down, like innocent children.'

This is, very simply, an incredibly beautiful book.

Mellow,
Its on my list.

PS My '/" key is working only sporadically. Add ' or " if needed.

The major problem with Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here isn’t that it’s a long 381 pages; the real problem, IMHO, is that the protagonist isn’t touched by any of the horror surrounding him until close to page 200. Before that point the book is pure political satire as the United States elects and becomes controlled by a fascist government. And that's a problem because? OK, it's my fault. Satire works better when the reader recognizes the names being used. Frequently I didn't know, the novel being set in the 1930s. Still, It Can't Happen Here eerily relates to events here and now, and that makes it interesting. Parallels, oh-nos and boy-he-got-that-wrongs:

1) World War I has ended and parades of soldiers—injured or not—were common. Doremus, the protagonist, mulls, "When Buzz (the fascist) gets elected, he won't be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That'll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he'll hide away in institutions …" (page 55) Advice from George W. Bush: don't let the public see the coffins, either.

2) Buzz is elected and promptly puts into effect his 15-point plan. The last point: "(15) Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiate amendments to the Constitution providing, (a), that the President shall have the authority to initiate and execute all necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this critical epoch, (b), the Congress shall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President and his aides and Cabinet any needed legislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the President to act, and (c), the Supreme Court shall have immediately removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of the President, his duly appointed aides, or Congress." (page 64) OK. Our executive leader is sneakier. He's not calling it point 15.

3) "… those spirituals in which Negroes express their desire to go to heaven, to St. Louis, or almost any place distant from the romantic old plantations …" (page 72) I laughed.

4) Buzz's advice to speakers: Speakers "will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks—it just confuses them—to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people." (page 181) Now I understand why Bush and his cronies are secretive. They don't want to confuse us. And here I thought they might be hiding something. Silly Martha!

5) Of course under Buzz's rule education changes. And his administration handles those changes much better than Germany and other fascist regimes. "Where these amateurs in re-civilization had merely kicked out all treacherous 'intellectuals' who mulishly declined to teach physics, cookery, and geography according to the principles and facts laid down by the political bureaus, and the Nazis had merely added the sound measure of discharging Jews who dared attempt to teach medicine, the Americans were the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very start of any taint of 'intellectualism.'" (page 208) But, boy, could (can?) those institutions train CEOs!

6) About a highly regarded learning institution: "And no scholastic institution, even West Point, had ever so richly recognized sport as not a subsidiary but a primary department of scholarship." (page 209) Go, 'Bama!

7) Doremus, our protagonist reads the newspapers, but "could find no authentic news even in the papers from New York or Boston, in both of which the morning papers had been combined by the government into one sheet, rich in comics, in syndicated gossip from Hollywood, and, indeed, lacking only any news." (page 210) And what is Brittany up to these days?

8) Regarding continuation of the race: "But if people have gone so soft and turned the world over to stuffed shirts and dictators, they needn't expect any decent woman to bring children into such an insane asylum! Why, the more you really do love children, the more you'll want 'em not to be born, now!" (page 214) Things that make you go "hmmm."

9) Doremus thinks about editors, publishers and their employees who have vanished, probably into concentration camps. Then: "Few writers for Hearst were arrested, however." (page 219) Guess Hearst was the Fox News of the day. Buh-bye, Rosebud.

10) After Doremus's experience, he believes there'll be no return to "government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits." (page 366) hahahahahahahaha

11) No quote on this one, but by the end of the book the government has declared war on Mexico based on manufactured events. For real.

How can some writers just know?

I'm not sure reading Upton Sinclair's Oil right after reading Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here was all that great an idea. Besides feeling overwhelmed with the political issues of 1930's America, my grasp on which Sinclair is which is rapidly loosening.

But putting all that aside, I'll take a look at specifics in Oil I liked or didn't like.

1) A character declares "that the text of these treaties (secret treaties between the tsar and the allies), the most important news of the day, had been suppressed by the American newspapers." (page 220) I remain amazed at the similarities between the 1930s and now.

2) Czecho-Slovaks "was a German word, and just as we had changed hamburger into liberty steak and sauerkraut into liberty cabbage …" (page 227) You mean the idea behind freedom fries had been around before?

3) "Each (news)paper wants to beat the others, so they get everything ready in advance—speeches that have not yet been delivered, …" (page 233) As of 1969, they were still doing that. I was working for the NY offices of The London Daily Express in July of that year and had to type into the feed that went to the main offices an article expressing regret that the moon shot had gone wrong and everyone was dead. Imagine my surprise.

4) Midway through Oil, a teacher is accused of teaching politics and his office is ransacked. The most damning evidence was that for a typing exercise, he left the quick brown fox alone and chose instead the phrase "give me liberty or give me death." (page 284) Yep. Them words be scary stuff.

5) The protagonist offers his son some advice. "You listen to these Socialists and Bolsheviks, but my God, imagine if the government was to start buying oil-fields and developing them—there'd be more graft than all the wealth of America could pay for." (page 300) We sure are working hard to prove that true.

6) One of the protagonist's friends is ready to celebrate. "We've got a businessman for president, and we're going to run this country on business lines." (page 384) And we've got a failed businessman for president. Take it from there.

7) "Men and women are not bodies only, and cannot be satisfied with delights of the body only. Men and women are minds, and have to have harmony of ideas." (page 413) Didn't much like reading that. Wish I didn't agree with it.

8) "The radio is a one-sided institution; you can listen, but you cannot answer back. In that lies its enormous usefulness to the capitalist system. The householder sits at home and takes in what is handed to him, like an infant being fed through a tube. It is a basis upon which to build the greatest slave empire in history." (page 539) And it works even better with pictures!

Overall I think Mr. Sinclair could have made his point in less than 548 pages. I could say I now know more about drilling for oil than I ever wanted to know, but it'd be a lie. At best I only scanned those all-too-frequent sections. Actually, my next foray into the 1930s is to give There Will Be Blood another try. It made no sense the first time, but now I've read what it was based on. Bet I'll wind up liking the book better.

Now I'm starting to wonder: do we have any muckraker novelists today or are they all writing nonfiction? Anyone know?

Martha, you are a wonder. I didn't think anyone could ever make reading Sinclair Lewis sound like a good idea.

However, as I'm 8-10 books behind right now, I think I'll put this one on hold.

I have a dandy book and movie to recommend. I finished the 200 pages of "Into the Woods" while I was treking in Alaska. I became fascinated with the story of Chris McCandless (sp) when I took a jeep ride down the Stampede Trail (near Denali Mountain) for a cookout in the deep woods. I had no idea at that time I was near the abandoned bus where the young man from a wealthy family died of starvation.

The book has some wonderful references that I will share as soon as I can locate the thing in my suitcase!

Kathy

I have recommended that book for my "book club."