American Girl by Mary Cantwell

Born in 1930, Mary Cantwell developed her powers of observation growing up a bit of an outsider in Bristol, Rhode Island, during the Great Depression and War years. Catholic in a mainly Protestant neighborhood and school, she grew up in a close-knit, three-generation family. Her experiences were ordinary for the time and place, but her writing ability makes even mundane aspects of small town life vital and interesting: sharing a bedroom with a sister, having a glamorous aunt, attending school, surviving a polio epidemic, being a Girl Scout, celebrating the Fourth of July, going to the movies, the library, the park, church. Life was slower then and people seemed to do things in a more leisurely way. Today’s shopping experience will stand in stark contrast to a shopping trip with grandma to The Bluebird Shoppe where the ladies of Bristol bought their support garments. Each corset, slip and other unmentionable was removed from its own slender box and tissue paper for examination and fitting and then carefully replaced. With good humor and sincere affection, the author exposes the strengths and weaknesses of small-town homogeneous society, complete with its prejudices, bullying, and sense of safety and generosity of spirit.  American Girl: Scenes from a Small-Town Childhood shows us a world lost to progress. For everything gained, something is lost. 

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Bird Skinner by Alice Greenaway

Jim Kennoway is a curmudgeon, an angry seventy year old loner. In the summer of 1973, after losing a leg to disease and unhealthy living, he decides to live alone at his family’s beach house on Fox Island off the coast of Maine. Here his lack of mobility and heavy drinking make him even angrier. He relishes a solitary life until August when a young woman from the Solomon Islands arrives for a visit. Cadillac is the daughter of Tosca Baketi, who was Jim’s native scout and guide when he fought in the South Pacific during World War II. She is on her way to study at Yale’s medical school. A state department agency has decided she should spend a month with Jim to get accustomed to life in the United States. Jim, who was unaware of her existence and never really thought of Tosca since the war, is not happy about her presence. Sensing and respecting his aversion to company, she keeps her distance. He does his best to be hospitable. Over the course of time he comes to like and admire Cadillac. He also mulls over his life story, not just the time spent with Tosca during the war but also his childhood, marriage and academic career studying birds. All his life Jim had been a loner and passionate about his likes and dislikes. He had been a world traveler, familiar with Southeast Asia and the islands of the South Pacific before the onset of the war. But now, having lost his wife, his leg and his profession, his world has shrunk to Fox Island. His likes have narrowed to liquor, cigarettes, birds, Hemingway and Treasure Island. Human nature is complicated. Cadillac, descended from headhunters and cannibals, is sweet-natured and accommodating. Jim, whose father was a doctor and grandfather an industrialist, has been cruel and even savage during his lifetime. Bird Skinner by Alice Greenaway examines the emotional lives of people caught in the web of history and their own weaknesses. 

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The English Passengers by Matthew Kneale

For a time in history the sun never set on the British Empire and the penal colonies in Australia and Tasmania were as far away from England as one could get. The English Passengers by Matthew Kneale begins in England in 1857. Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley, a rum smuggler who is experiencing financial difficulties, is forced to charter his ship to missionaries who want to go to Tasmania. Reverend Geoffrey Wilson hopes to refute Darwinism by his proving his theory that the Garden of Eden is located on Tasmania. His fellow traveler, Dr. Thomas Potter, secretly plans to collect aboriginal skulls to prove his theory of the superiority of the white race.

            

Alternating chapters begin in 1820 and move forward in time. In these chapters the suffering of the aborigine people is told by Peavay, a young mixed-race child whose tribe is eventually decimated by the English, both those who mean well and those who don’t.

As the smugglers’ ship sails toward Tasmania, the aborigines’ story moves forward to 1857. Until the ship docks in Tasmania, the reader is reading two separate and equally engrossing books, one humorous, one tragic. Once the two stories merge, the characters, humor and tragedy also merge. Reverend Wilson becomes suspicious of Dr. Potter’s motives and fights to maintain control of his project. An Eden-searching trek into the jungle drives Dr. Potter power-mad and Reverend Wilson simply mad. Peavay, renamed Cromwell by missionary teachers, agrees to guide the search.  Using Potter’s and Wilson’s own weaknesses, hubris and treachery, he manages to turn the two men against each other and abandons them in the bush. Consumed by the hatred that has been building in him for thirty-seven years, he plots his revenge.

The missionaries eventually find their way back to the ship and when the ship departs Tasmania, the party is in disarray. When Dr. Potter, consumed by a sense of power, engineers a mutiny and takes control of the ship, he brings about both disaster and one of the most satisfying story conclusions in modern literature.

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The Great War by Joe Sacco

World War I is a now a distant event in the American collective consciousness. Armistice Day has become Veteran’s Day, honoring all veterans rather than the end of The Great War which erupted in Europe one hundred years ago. All of its veterans are now deceased. We can only get our information from books and photographs. Graphic artist Joe Sacco has given us a detailed picture of what the war was like for 120,000 British soldiers who fought on one particular day in 1916.

July 1, 1916 was the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The Great War by Joe Sacco is a twenty-four foot accordion-page book illustrating that day. It begins peacefully with the British General Haig attending church, taking his usual walk and going for a ride on his horse. Meanwhile, guns and ammunition and troops are being moved into place for the battle. As the book unfolds, the battle begins. The artillery fires, the soldiers leave their trenches, advance and incur horrendous casualties. The battle rages on as the book opens up to a continuous twenty-four foot panorama of illustrations, showing the various aspects of the battle. An accompanying pamphlet annotates the major points of the drawing. An essay by Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars, explains the decisions that led to this disaster.  General Haig had prepared his troops for this battle as if it were to be fought in a previous century.  He underestimated the strength and resolve of the Germans and expected his infantry and cavalry to eventually fight the enemy in the open. But the Germans were not driven from their trenches and did not come into the open to engage the British troops as they advanced across no man’s land. Instead they picked off the advancing soldiers with machine gun fire. By the end of this first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British had suffered 57,000 casualties.

For history buffs, graphic art fans, fans of Downton Abbey and curious readers of all ages, The Great War illustrates a day in a battle in the first modern war. The black and white drawings are detailed but not graphic in their portrayal of the horror of war.

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Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick

In a series of letters to Richard Gere, Bartholomew Neil tells us his story of what happened after the death of his mother. He was her primary caretaker during her life, and now his life feels a bit empty. He has few friends, most prominently Father McNamee the local priest. With his therapist he has made a few goals including having a beer with a friend at a bar, and more privately talking to the Girlbrarian who he watches work at the library.

While working towards his own new normal, things quickly spiral out of control when Father McNamee renounces his priesthood and moves in with Bartholomew. As his mother told him, one persons bad luck is another person's good luck, and he sees no reason not to let Father McNamee move in. In another therapy session Bartholomew meets Max, and Max just might be the key to Bartholomew meeting some of his goals.

Matthew Quick is a master of quirky characters dealing with dark issues. Bartholomew is an insightful, unintentionally hysterical and slightly unreliable narrator who looks at the world a bit differently than expected. Like his other adult novel, Silver Linings Playbook, The Good Luck of Right Now is going to be made into a movie, so pick up the book before it hits the big screen!

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Love, Loss and What I Wore by Ilene Beckerman

Love, Loss and What I Wore, is an unusual memoir in which Ilene Beckerman examines her life in the context of her wardrobe. Growing up in New York City, she was a girl in the 1940’s, a teen in the 1950’s and a wife, mother, grandmother and career woman during the next four decades. On each page of the book, the author draws a picture of a dress and writes a short essay about her life when she (or her sister, mother, grandmother, or friend) wore it. The very first drawing is her Brownie uniform. She was a Brownie, her mother a Brownie leader, and her older sister was a Girl Scout. With each new page comes a new item of clothing and a memory to go with it. Her mother made most of her clothes but occasionally she draws a store-bought item such as a winter coat with leggings. Through the forties we read about many home-made dresses and skirts for school, for dance class, for parties, for family weddings. In the 1950’s we see dresses she and her friends wore to school and parties and weekend trips. Included are shoes, underwear, makeup and her wedding dress. She details her wardrobe for over five decades and readers get so caught up in the “What I Wore” aspect of the book that the “loss” (mentioned off-handedly) takes us by surprise. References to death, separation and divorce are few but shocking when the fact is unexpectedly snuck into a description of a dress or coat or shoes. Love, Loss and What I Wore may appear to be a superficial book at first glance, but it is a good social history, recounting the life of an ordinary person with ordinary experiences. We all experience love and loss but life goes on, just as it has for Ilene Beckerman. 

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Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler

In Butler’s debut novel, we find the tale of a small town called Little Wing in rural Wisconsin.  The story is told by a group of life-long friends and alternates between five points of view: Hank (the nice guy who stayed to take over the family farm), Lee (the now ridiculously successful rock star who always comes back to Wisconsin to recharge), Kip (the friend who never really felt at home in Little Wing who has now moved back from Chicago in an attempt to resurrect a decrepit local business), Ronny (a former professional rodeo who is now a bit slower than normal after an unfortunate alcohol induced accident) and Beth (Hank’s wife and friend to Lee, Kip and Ronny).  As the book unfolds, we find that Lee has returned home early from an international tour in order to sing at Kip’s wedding.  But old habits die hard and soon the group of friends is wondering why they were ever close to begin with. 

Shotgun Lovesongs is as much a love song in honor of Wisconsin as it is a tale of friends who struggle to stay close years after they go their separate ways in life.  Descriptions of the land and seasons connect all of the stories in a way that almost makes the thread appear stronger than the fabric it is sewn onto.  Butler’s love for Wisconsin is clearly channeled through that of Lee’s character; his prose lush and inviting.  A longtime fan of Kent Haruf’s depictions of small town life in the Colorado plains, this book invoked for me a similar heartfelt ode to Wisconsin in its treatment of people and place.  Those looking for a book about life in a small Midwestern town or even a story about life-long friends will find plenty to enjoy in Wisconsin novelist Nickolas Butler’s Shotgun Lovesongs.

Uganda Be Kidding Me by Chelsea Handler

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel the world thanks to a benevolent benefactor who wants nothing more than your company, and for you to experience new things? Comedian Chelsea Handler might be a friend you want to make. In Uganda Be Kidding Me Chelsea shares her adventures on an African Safari, European ski trip, state-side ski trip among other stories. She always takes along with her family and friends to both be there for her, and to have the experience whether they want to or not.

Fans familiar with Chelsea's brand of comedy will not be disappointed in the things she does, forces others to do, and in all honesty her generosity. This is a fun fast read that might just have you booking your next trip somewhere a bit more exotic. Adding a bit of extra fun are travel tips as only Chelsea Handler give. This may not be the travelogue you are used to, but you will be laughing.

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So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

An older book and a well-written classic, So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell paints a picture of life in the Midwest in the 1920s. It is the story of two thirteen-year old boys who become friends when each is drawn to spend time at a home-construction site after school. Each boy is experiencing upheaval in his life and seeks a release from family distress at the half-built home.  The house is to be the home of the story’s narrator, a middle-class town boy.  He had lost his mother to the flu epidemic of 1919. His father, after remarrying, wanted a new home for his new wife and so contracts for the building of the new house. The other boy, Cletus, is the son of a tenant farmer. He spends time at the house to escape the palpable tension between his mother and father. Every afternoon the boys meet and climb on the frame of the house. They become friends although they scarcely exchange a word. Then Cletus’s world is destroyed by a murder and he disappears from the narrator’s life. The power of this book lies in the author’s ability to create a sympathetic inner life for each of his characters. Although the book is peopled with stoic, taciturn Midwesterners, the reader is easily able to empathize with everyone in this book as they deal with pain, confusion and loss, even the family dog. 

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