We jave added a mix of books to the Deering Library. Some popular fiction for young adults and adults, some history and political science and memoirs written New Hampshireites.
MEMOIRS BY NEW HAMPSHIRE WRITERS
A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety by Donald Hall, 2018
Donald Hall lived a remarkable life of letters, one capped most recently by the New York Times bestseller Essays After Eighty, a “treasure” of a book in which he “balance[s] frankness about losses with humor and gratitude” (Washington Post).
Before his passing in 2018, nearing ninety, Hall delivered this new
collection of self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the
pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising
from both. He intersperses memories of exuberant days—as in Paris,
1951, with a French girl memorably inclined to say, “I couldn’t care
less”—with writing, visceral and hilarious, on what he has called the
“unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of extreme old age.
Child of War: A Memoir of World War II Internment in the Philippines by Curtis Whitfield Tong, 2011
The author is not exactly a New Hampshire writer, but the Tongs lived in Hillsborough, Deering and Weare in retirement. The Tongs were missionaries in the Philippines before WW II,when they were interned by the Japanese. This is is the story of their internment.
Hours after attacking
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japanese bombers stormed across the
Philippine city of Baguio, where seven-year-old Curt Tong, the son of
American missionaries, hid with his classmates in the woods near his
school. Three weeks later, Curt, his mother, and two sisters were among
the nearly five hundred Americans who surrendered to the Japanese army
in Baguio. Child of War is Tong's touching story of the next three years
of his childhood as he endured fear, starvation, sickness, and
separation from his father while interned in three different Japanese
prison camps on the island of Luzon. Written by the adult Tong looking
back on his wartime ordeal, it offers a rich trove of memories about
internment life and camp experiences.
Relegated first to the
men's barracks at Camp John Hay, Curt is taken under the wing of a close
family friend who is also the camp's civilian leader. From this vantage
point, he is able to observe the running of the camp firsthand as the
war continues and increasing numbers of Americans are imprisoned. Curt's
days are occupied with work detail, baseball, and childhood adventures.
Along with his mother and sisters, he experiences daily life under a
series of camp commandants, some ruling with intimidation and cruelty
but one, memorably, with compassion. In the last months of the war the
entire family is finally reunited, and their ordeal ends when they are
liberated from Manila's Bilibid Prison by American troops.
Child
of War is an engaging and thoughtful memoir that presents an unusual
view of life as a World War II internee--that of a young boy. It is a
valuable addition to existing wartime autobiographies and diaries and
contributes significantly to a greater understanding of the Pacific War
and its impact on American civilians in Asia
HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. 2018
The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era.
In this remarkable
biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private
collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently
discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. Blight tells the fascinating
story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family.
Douglass was not only an astonish by ing man of words, but a thinker steeped
in Biblical story and theology. There has not been a major biography of
Douglass in a quarter century. David Blight’s Frederick Douglass affords this important American the distinguished biography he deserves.
Fear. Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, 2018
With authoritative
reporting honed through eight presidencies from Nixon to Obama, author
Bob Woodward reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside
President Donald Trump’s White House and precisely how he makes
decisions on major foreign and domestic policies. Woodward draws from
hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes,
personal diaries, files and documents. The focus is on the explosive
debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room,
Air Force One and the White House residence.
FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, 2018
This is a story of West Africa, and magic is real but reserved to a group called 'the maji.' Before the story opened the maji lived among those who did not have magical powers. Apparently (this unfortunate fact is glossed over) at least some of the maji were actually evil because they caused the deaths of member's of the king's family. This caused the king to unleash a brutal suppression of the maji, killing many and driving the rest underground. In Children of Blood and Bone the teen-aged daughter of a maji sets out to restore magic with the help of her teen-aged brother. To restore magic, young maji Zélie must take three objects to a magical place on the far side of the country. The king and his son try to prevent that. Zélie and her brother are variously adversaries and allies and even romantic partners of the two teen-aged chilidren of the king, a girl and a boy. It's an exciting story with chases and battles, magic, balls of fire and earthquakes, love and perfidy as Zélie races to the magical place. On another level, the story is an allegory for race in America: the king has all the physical power and he is unscrupulous in the use of that power to suppress the maji. The maji have no physical power, but they have magic, bug only if they can recover it, they will be restored.
This story is an introduction to Yoruba folklore and language. At 500 ages, this is a very long book. It could have benefited from some heavy editing. I found it difficult to be completely unsympathetic to the king, given what the maji had done to him and his family. He probably did not have to have been so ruthless in suppressing magic. I could root for Zélie until i learned the scope of the 'magic,' which included skin-rotting disease. We could do without that. Zélie herself seems to question the wisdom of her mission - - of restoring all magic to all the maji - - and that left the story pretty muddled as far as I was concerned.
Children of Blood and Bone has received fabulous reviews, and there was a lot of hype around its publication. Our Deering book group was not so taken by the book.
ADULT FICTION
The Witch Elm by Tana French, 2018
Toby is a happy-go-lucky
charmer who's dodged a scrape at work and is celebrating with friends
when the night takes a turn that will change his life: he surprises two
burglars who beat him and leave him for dead. Struggling to recover from
his injuries, beginning to understand that he might never be the same
man again, he takes refuge at his family's ancestral home to care for
his dying uncle Hugo. Then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree
in the garden - and as detectives close in, Toby is forced to face the
possibility that his past may not be what he has always believed.
The Witch Elm asks what we become, and what we're capable of, when we no longer know who we are.
The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason, 2018
Early in WW I, Lucius - - a rich Austrian medical student - - is assigned to a forsaken outpost in the
Carpathian Mountains. His little team comprises a nurse/nun and a couple of helpers. For Lucius this is on the job training, but sister Margarete is a patient and apt teacher. Together they perform amputations
and treat soldiers who suffer from the whole range of war trauma, along with battling vermin, lice and sadistic officers. For two years.
The
central character—the one for which the novel is named—is a man brought in by
wheelbarrow from the field. He doesn’t talk, and he is in a quasi-fetal
position. There are no visible wounds. This one will not be cured by an amputation.
This new patient and how to treat him consume Lucius and Margarete. Lucius determines
that the patient has “nerve shock.” These were the years before PTSD and shell
shock diagnoses; however, these kinds of patients had been observed
during wartime, with a unique and specific set of symptoms. The nexus of doctor, nurse, and especially this patient - - and a sadistic officer -- propels a
large part of the story.
Of course Lucius and Margarete fall in love but then immediately become separated - - and only midway through the book. The rest of the story revolves around how this young doctor tries to refind himself and the woman he loves.
It's not a big book, around 300 pages. The writer, a doctor himself, has clearly undertaken a lot of research to produce the medical detail - - both of the physical body and of the traumatized mind - found in this novel.
The Reckoning by John Grisham, 2018
Pete Banning was
Clanton, Mississippi's favorite son--a decorated World War II hero, the
patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a
faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning
he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot
and killed his pastor and friend, the Reverend Dexter Bell. As if the
murder weren't shocking enough, it was even more baffling that Pete's
only statement about it--to the sheriff, to his lawyers, to the judge,
to the jury, and to his family--was: "I have nothing to say." He was not
afraid of death and was willing to take his motive to the grave.
In
a major novel unlike anything he has written before, John Grisham takes
us on an incredible journey, from the Jim Crow South to the jungles of
the Philippines during World War II; from an insane asylum filled with
secrets to the Clanton courtroom where Pete's defense attorney tries
desperately to save him.
Reminiscent of the finest tradition of Southern Gothic storytelling, The Reckoning would not be complete without Grisham's signature layers of legal suspense, and he delivers on every page
