This is the first in a planned, irregularly appearing series
that is intended to announce and at the same time introduce new, newly
accessioned, topical, or just plain interesting books held n the Deering Public
Library. At the outset, I encourage Deering residents or other interested souls
to chime in, either about the subject of individual blog posts or with reviews
of their own books. The Trustees encourage you to come to Town Hall and check
out these and other books.
The books discussed in the current post were all
donated anonymously. The Trustees encourage book donations but PLEASE don’t
just drop off bags of books in the library. Rather, contact one of the trustees
before hand, or hold on to them for a while because we plan a book drive for
early spring.
Gary Samuels
Oliver Pötzsch, Hangman’s Daughter series: The Hangman’s
Daughter, The Poisoned Pilgrim, The Beggar King, The Dark Monk
These mystery novels are set in the German state of Bavaria
in the mid 17th Century, soon after the end of the bloody Thirty
Years War (1618‑1648). The Thirty Years War began as conflict between Catholic
and Protestant monarchies but transformed into a battle for European dominance
between the German Habsburgs and the French Burbons. The effect of the protracted
war was little short of physical and spiritual destruction of the countryside
and inhabitants of Europe. In the aftermath of the war groups of men, well schooled
in the atrocities of the war, wandered the countryside indiscriminately pillaging
and all that. The Hangman’s Daughter
series, then, is set in a small Bavarian town at this time. The town’s Hangman,
Jakob Kuisl, is also a healer who, it turns out, is far more effective than the
town’s one doctor. His daughter, Magdalena, is one tough cookie – quick to
notice and act on Wrongs – has learned the healing craft from her father and the
town’s midwife. The young son of the town’s doctor, falls in love with and over
the course of the series marries and has children with Magdalena. The series is rich in nefarious doings,
witchcraft, Knights Templar, lost treasure and brutal murder. In the first book
of the series, the Hangman’s Daughter, the town’s midwife is accused of
witchcraft as several children are murdered. In the second book, The Dark Monk,
a parish priest is murdered and the resolution of that crime involves lots of
snow and lost treasure of the Knights Templar. In the third book, The Beggar
King, Jakob Kuisl is called to Regensburg by a letter from his sister only to
find that somebody had slit her throat and her husband’s throat in a plot that
involves a king of beggars, a beer-brewing monk, crooked clerics and a scheme
to endanger the German empire. In The Poisoned Pilgrim, the hangman and his
extended family make a pilgrimage to a monastery where two monks experiment
with cutting edge technology, including a method of deflecting the lighting
that has previously set the monastery ablaze. When one of the monks disappears
and his lab is destroyed, foul play is suspected. Who better to investigate
than the famed hangman Jakob Kuisl? But as the hangman and his family attempt
to solve the mystery of the missing monk, they must deal with both the
eccentric denizens of the monastery and villagers who view the monks’
inventions as witchcraft that must be destroyed at all costs. In all four books the mysteries are all
resolved when Kuisl, Magdalena and Simon together apply reason and logic to dispel
the witchcraft and superstition used by the principal bad guys to hide their
doings and in the process the Hangman pursues his Day Job of thumb-screwing and
so on…. but with a heart. The author of the books, Oliver Pötzsch, is in fact a
descendent of Hangman Kuisl and a native of the region in which the books are
set. At the end of each of the books the
author provides a tour guide for anybody inclined to visit his part of the
world. These are quick, engaging reads. While the motivations are not especially
original (greed for money, power and so on), the plots are filled with historical
detail and laced with 17th Century superstition and prejudice; the
characters – the good and the bad – are all interesting.
James McBride: The Good Lord Bird, Song Yet Sung. Edward
P Jones: The Known World
These three books, written by
African-American writers, put a different face to slavery than I have been
exposed to. Here is another face of America’s on-going disgrace known as
Slavery. Each of these books is written from the perspective of the enslaved
and it’s not noble. In The Known World black
farmers owned slaves. In Song Yet Sung slaves collude with slave catchers to
bring in escaped slaves. The Good Lord Bird is a recounting by a young freed
slave of John Brown’s brief flame and the failure of the enslaved to support
him at his last stand at Harper’s Ferry.
These authors, McBride and Jones are powerful writers for their use of
English and for their views of history.
The Good Lord Bird is
described as rollicking, good fun; a kind of burlesque. In her review for the
Washington Post Marie Arana wrote:
In The Good
Lord Bird Brown and his men, the Pottawatome Rifles, liberate a young black Henry
Shackelford from his owner in Kansas Territory; Brown who believes Henry to be
a Henrietta and throughout the book Henrietta passes as a young mulatto girl. Brown gives his ‘Little Onion’ a gift, “a
feather of a bird so beautiful that when a man sees it, he can’t help but say,
“good Lord.” The feather will be the symbol of understanding between Henry/Henrietta
and Brown to the end. And so, for the next three years, Little Onion takes us
from adventure to misadventure; from riding the plains with Brown’s
Bible-thumping roughnecks to falling in love with a mulatto harlot; from
guzzling “giddy juice” with the randy Frederick Douglass to palavering with
Harriet Tubman; from the Pottawatomie Massacre to the bloodier, more infamously
terrible events of Harpers Ferry. Against the grim grid of history, we see a bumptious American story, and McBride’s use of the vernacular throughout makes for a comical ride. Henrietta is sent off to “hive the bees,” to raise up a mighty swarm of blacks willing to take up arms against slavery. Since she is but a girl, she will hardly be suspected. But we all know how this story ends. Douglass bows out. Tubman meets with the Old Man and wishes him her best. But the bees never do hive. A terrible climax will come to pass, and we hurtle toward it, laughing. “
McBride humanizes Brown; who is constantly
fulminating and sermonizing. He mistakenly puts faith in Frederick Douglass and
Harriett Tubman, both of whom disappoint him. He assumes that the ‘bees will
hive’ to precipitate the war against slavery only to find the truth that most
people are not going to bet unless it’s a sure thing. In this case, failure
meant the lash and being ‘sold south.’ Could you blame those bees for not
hiving?
Song Yet Sung The following
review by Nancy Oakes is copied from Good Reads:
Set
on the east coast of Maryland, in the mid 1800s, Song Yet Sung's main character
is Liz Spocott a runaway slave, running away from the attentions of her
sexually abusive master. When we first meet her, she's been shot, and ends up
chained in an attic of a tavern belonging to Miss Patty Cannon, a notorious
slave stealer who also picks up runaways and sells them to slaveowners in the
south. (as an aside, Miss Patty was a real person.) Liz comes to be known as
"the dreamer," because she has prophetic visions of the future (G.J.S.
that create a freedom-seeking furor among the complacent Eastern Shore slave
community). While in the attic, an older slave woman tells her bits and pieces
of "the code," an intricate set of signals and words by which slaves
can communicate and which also may offer the way to freedom. Eventually, all of
the captives break away from the attic, and Patty Cannon decides to go after
them to recoup her monetary losses. But there's also another person who is
hired by Liz's owner to track her down, so the stakes become higher for Liz and
for the slaves that help her after her escape. It is only while she is on the
run that she begins to understand the code, and she realizes, with the help of
her dreams (visions of what freedom - or the lack of it - means in the future
for slavery's descendants) that it is not yet complete.
What really sticks out in this novel is the notion that no one even remotely connected with slavery was free. For example, Denwood, the white slave tracker hired by Liz's owner has his own reasons for doing what he does; Miss Kathleen, the owner of slaves that help Liz is tied to her land and wholly dependent on her slaves after the death of her husband; even the villainous Miss Patty is dependent on slavery to make her living.
What really sticks out in this novel is the notion that no one even remotely connected with slavery was free. For example, Denwood, the white slave tracker hired by Liz's owner has his own reasons for doing what he does; Miss Kathleen, the owner of slaves that help Liz is tied to her land and wholly dependent on her slaves after the death of her husband; even the villainous Miss Patty is dependent on slavery to make her living.
The Known World. Excerpted from the review by Valerie
Martin in The Guardian
One great achievement of Edward Jones's Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Known World is the circumscription of its moral vision, which locates the struggle between good and evil not in the vicissitudes of the diabolical slaveholding system of the American south, but inside the consciousness of each person, black or white, slave or free, who attempts to flourish within that soul-deadening system. There are no real heroes or heroines in the populous world of this novel, nor are there unmitigated villains, though there are many who fail to live honourably despite the best intentions.
In some ways The Known World is a 19th-century concoction, rich in character and plot, comprised of chapters with ironic titles (in "A Modest Proposal", free black slaveholders at a tea party discuss the provocations of abolitionist pamphlets) and narrated by an omniscient voice that can penetrate into the souls of the characters even as they leave their bodies behind. It's a hothouse world, thickly settled, endlessly policed, characterised by cruelty, brutality, and the same preoccupation with "propriety" that makes the works of Edith Wharton and Henry James so deeply frightening. Loyalties are byzantine and constantly shifting.
In the Garden of Beasts is a factual account of the American Ambassador to Berlin, William Dodd from 1933 to 1937. The subject might sound dull but this book is anything but dull! The academic Dodd was selected to be our ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in the early days of that particular terror. The following is excerpted from Janet Maslin’s review in the New York Times. “Unlike many of his wealthy, socially connected fellow diplomats, Dodd was a relatively impecunious historian, the chairman of the department at the University of Chicago, who dreaded the obligations that came with an ambassadorship. But he was 64, felt morosely elderly and thought that Germany might be a safe, quiet place for him to complete his writing project. His book was to be a study of the antebellum American South. Dodd did not arrive in Germany predisposed to notice the way a regime might mistreat certain segments of its population.” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). Larson writes of the Dodd family’s interaction with their German hosts. It took Dodd a while to understand what was happening, for example how did they find such a lovely residence at such a reasonable price? Simple, the residence came with their Jewish landlord-family, who were supposedly in exile, in residence on the top floor. Dispatches sent back to Washington about seeing the Gestapo at work, the displays of the Storm Troopers, rising anti-Semitism were largely dismissed by the US based diplomats who themselves were anti semitic, saw in Dodd a socially inferior bumbler and discounted his reports. His daughter, Martha, had a considerably easier time of it in Berlin. Maybe because she was young and on an adventure, but that girl was at best indiscriminate, having affairs with leading Nazis and, finally, became a Soviet agent controlled by her Soviet/diplomat/lover (who, I think, ended up in Siberia).
“The Dodds’
story is rich with incident, populated by fascinating secondary characters,
tinged with rising peril and pityingly persuasive about the futility of Dodd’s
mission. In his time, he was taunted, undercut and called “Ambassador Dud.”
Hitler would refer to him in retrospect as “an imbecile.” Yet Dodd spent four
years, from 1933 to 1937, in what was arguably the worst job of that era. And
he ultimately recognized enough reality, and clung to enough dignity, to make
Mr. Larson’s powerful, poignant historical narrative a transportingly true
story. (Janet Maslin, The New York
Times).”
