A+ #AudioBookReview: The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon

Posted on November 4, 2024November 3, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement by Sharon McMahon
Narrator: Sharon mcMahon
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: American History, biography, history, politics, U.S. history
Pages: 320
Length: 10 hours and 13 minutes
on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From America’s favorite government teacher, a heartfelt, inspiring portrait of twelve ordinary Americans whose courage formed the character of our country.

In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn’t make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers. Through meticulous research, she discovers history’s unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time.

You’ll meet a woman astride a white horse riding down Pennsylvania Ave, a young boy detained at a Japanese incarceration camp, a formerly enslaved woman on a mission to reunite with her daughter, a poet on a train, and a teacher who learns to work with her enemies. More than one thing is bombed, and multiple people surprisingly become rich. Some rich with money, and some wealthy with things that matter more.

This is a book about what really made America–and Americans–great. McMahon’s cast of improbable champions will become familiar friends, lighting the path we journey in our quest to make the world more just, peaceful, good, and free.

My Review:

There are more than twelve. Not just in general, but specifically, in THIS book. Because there are WAY MORE than twelve unsung heroes of American history. And that seems both unfortunate and appropriately fitting at the same time. Because the sweep of history is vast, it’s not possible for every single person who is worthy of being highlighted in history to actually receive that acknowledgement. At the same time, it’s telling that the majority of these unsung heroes are from groups that history, as written by the powers that be, deliberately sweeps to the side because by their deeds and sometimes even their very existence, they challenge the narrative those powers-that-be promote so that they may remain and retain those very powers.

What those unsung heroes were often – but not always – singing their own hearts out FOR, is what makes this book appropriate for this particular week. Because many of the people whose stories are told herein fought for not just the right to vote, as was the case of the female suffragists, but also for the practical ability to exercise that right freely, as many of the teachers and civil rights workers fought.

These are the stories of just a few – not nearly enough – of the ‘hidden figures’ in U.S. history. Each and every one of them, in their own ways, did their very best and occasionally their very damndest – and the newspapers of their time frequently claimed it was the latter and not the former – to figure out and most importantly DO – the next needful thing to make progress.

When a mountain is crested, when a challenge is overcome, when a pinnacle is reached, a few are credited with the accomplishment – no matter how long the journey or how many contributed to achieve the goal. Those are the people whose names finally do end up in the history books.

These are the stories of the unsung heroes, those giants – small but mighty – on whose shoulders those in the history books stood.

Reality Rating A+: I loved this book a whole lot. I was expecting to like it, but I was genuinely surprised by how much I really, truly loved the hell out of it. I was looking for something that had a connection to American history for this week, came across this and thought, “Why not?”

Serendipity for the win because this was marvelous from beginning to end.

This is history, but it’s not history told as a dry recitation of facts. In style, it reminded me a lot of Erik Larson’s style of narrative nonfiction, in that the research is solid but that research is pulled together into an actual STORY that draws the reader into its web.

At the same time, it’s easy to see the book’s antecedents as the author’s podcasts about these and other ‘unsung heroes’ of history, as the book reads as more of a collection of short stories that occasionally intersect rather than a single narrative of history.

The way that the individual stories worked also held shades of Paul Harvey’s radio series, The Rest of the Story, which also told stories of unsung heroes, of people on the sidelines of better known stories, and of quirky bits of history.

While it will drive some readers crazy that the stories don’t link up into a single overarching thing, I found the way that things wove in and out of each other to be a whole lot of fun. Listening to the author read her own work, it felt like she was telling me a story, and that sometimes that story went on tangents to other stories with occasional sidebars into yet another story – with more than a few forays into the author’s opinions and even a few questions about what on Earth some people were either thinking or drinking.

The use of the language of the 21st century to tell this history to a 21st century audience just made it all that much more accessible. Which was marvelous because the stories were already heart tugging, heartbreaking and heart attack inducing by turns, and just filled with crowning moments of both awesome and despair – sometimes at the same time.

Any reader – or listener – looking for true stories of American history that they may not have heard before, or who would like to take a trip down some of the historical roads less well traveled by the history books, will have a grand time with The Small and the Mighty. And may even be inspired to do something a bit ‘mighty’ of their own.

Or even just a small but needful thing. Tomorrow, November 5, 2024, is Election Day in the United States. If you are a U.S. citizen who is eligible to vote, it is your RIGHT to do so. Please exercise that right. A single vote may be a small thing, but it is also a mighty power that many of the unsung heroes in this book fought to their utmost to gain.

#AudioBookReview: The Most Human by Adam Nimoy

Posted on June 21, 2024June 20, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews

The Most Human: Reconciling with My Father, Leonard Nimoy by Adam Nimoy
Narrator: Adam Nimoy
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: autobiography, biography, memoir, Star Trek
Pages: 272
Length: 9 hours and 18 minutes
Published by Chicago Review Press on June 4, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Living with Dad was like living with a stranger—as a kid I often had trouble connecting and relating to him. But I was always proud of him.
Even before Star Trek I'd see him popping up in bit roles on some of my favorite TV shows like Get Smart, Sea Hunt, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. And then one night he brought home Polaroids of himself in makeup and wardrobe for a pilot he was working on. It was December 1964 and nobody had heard of Star Trek. Still, the eight-year-old me had watched enough Outer Limits and My Favorite Martian to understand exactly what I was looking at.
Spock's popularity happened quickly, and soon the fan magazines were writing about dad's personal life, characterizing us as a "close family." But the awkwardness that defined our early relationship blossomed into conflict, sometimes smoldering, sometimes open and intense. There were occasional flashes of warmth between the arguments and hurt feelings—even something akin to love—especially when we were celebrating my father's many successes. The rest of the time, things between us were often strained.
My resentment towards my father kept building through the years. I wasn't blameless, I know that now, but my bitterness blinded me to any thought of my own contribution to the problem.
I wanted things to be different for my children. I wanted to be the father I never had, so I coached Maddy's soccer, drove Jonah to music lessons, helped them with their homework—all the things dads are supposed to do. All the things I wanted to do. So what if my Dad and I had been estranged for years? I was living one day at a time.
And then I got his letter.
That marked a turning point in our lives, a moment that cleared the way for a new relationship between us.

My Review:

It’s an iconic line, isn’t it? “Of all the souls I’ve encountered in my travels, his was the most human.” In my head, I still hear it with all of the Shatnerian pauses, and it still brings a tear to my eye, even though Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan came out more than 40 years ago – and we all know that wasn’t the end for either Spock or the man who made that ‘pointy-eared Vulcan’ a cultural icon.

But Spock was a fictional character, played by a very human man, filled with all of the virtues and flaws that are part and parcel of that human condition. This is a bit of the story of that humanity, as seen through the eyes of someone who was up close and personal with the virtues, and caught – or at least held onto – the brunt of entirely too many of the flaws.

And in this introduction, I’m doing exactly what the author has done – used the memory of his famous father to get at the story of his son. A role reversal of something that Leonard Nimoy once alluded to, that someone – actually someone looking for money in particular – would use his son to get at him.

So this isn’t a Star Trek story. And it explicitly isn’t a biography of Leonard Nimoy. Rather, it tells the story of the family that lived in, as the author referred to it, ‘the house that Star Trek bought’ in LA’s Westwood Village in 1968, how they got there, where they came from, and especially what happened after to the boy pictured on the book’s cover, Leonard Nimoy’s son Adam.

This is Adam’s journey, not Leonard’s. But, as with all families, the lives of the parents – who they were, where they came from, their reactions to the ways that their own parents raised them, and how they internalized that upbringing – reflect on their children, for better and for worse.

This is THAT story.

Reality Rating B: If you come to this book expecting a ‘Making of Star Trek’ story, you’re going to be disappointed. If you’re expecting a ‘warts and all’ biography, you’re not actually going to get that either. Not that both the father and the son didn’t have plenty of those.

This is, admittedly, a story about a man who was a hero and/or a touchstone for more than one generation of fans that shows that he had feet of clay up to the knees – but then so do most humans, which is kind of the point.

Circling back around again – because it is irresistible to talk about the father when this is a book by and about the son – it’s about a dad’s impact, both good and bad, on the life of one man who just so happens to be the son of someone famous.

Once one throws out the preconceived notions about what one expected in this autobiography, it’s something entirely different. At first, I had a bit of a difficult time connecting to the story and the author, but then it started to feel a whole lot more familiar than I expected.

His story resonated with me because our fathers were both products of the same Eastern European, Jewish immigrant, Depression-era generation. Both were workaholics who financially supported their families but weren’t physically around, were often in their own heads when they were, and as a result had strained relationships with their children. Adam Nimoy is my age, so we were viewing the world of the 1970s and 1980s from similar ages and from familiar backgrounds and expectations.

There are times when I wonder if ‘daddy issues’ are what makes the world go around, but I digress, just a bit.

I’m saying that once I found a way into his perspective a little, it made the whole thing work better for me. I listened to the audio, and even his speech cadences felt familiar – not because he sounds like his famous father – he doesn’t – but because those cadences arise from a similar time and place and culture. It was kind of like listening to a cousin.

His story is very much, at points, a walk through dark places, of taking heavy blows from sometimes self-inflicted wounds, and then walking a hard and frequently lonely path through recovery. It becomes a story about what happens after a person stops medicating their emotional pain away and starts feeling their feelings.

Which was something that resonated a hell of a lot more than I expected – as did the parts about how easy it is to hold onto old hurts and older grudges and how difficult it is to let them go.

Rating an autobiography feels different from rating a work of fiction, because even though I’m rating the story as it’s told, that can’t help but feel a bit like rating the life of the person telling it – no matter how much I try not to. And rating someone else’s life is just wrong. It was what it was and it is what it is and what needs to matter here is how good a job the author AS AN AUTHOR does of telling the story they decided to tell – even though it’s theirs.

Which is where that B rating comes in. It did take me awhile to get into this book, and there were times when it felt like he was kind of whiney in a way that came out in the audio as well. The story is way more about the author’s recovery from addiction than it is about anything else in a way that’s good and important and feels real in its length and its details but also felt a bit long and repetitive as he had to repeat some of the steps – as one so frequently does. It also reads as a kind of ‘slice of life’ story that mostly hits the highlights – and lowlights – but doesn’t dwell on the everyday too much, but a little went a long way when it came to dealing with the family dysfunction – of which there was plenty.

Coming into this expecting one thing and getting another may throw off more than a few readers – although if they stick with it they’ll find a whole lot more than they originally expected. Anyone looking for a story that personalizes the ‘Twelve Steps of Recovery’ will likely find this fascinating, inspiring and helpful as he pulls it down to earth and makes it very real even as he’s invoking a ‘Higher Power’. And in the end, the audio works better than the text because the audio helps to make the story feel authentic. It’s him, and he’s telling his story – warts and all.

Review: Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater by Peggy Orenstein

Posted on April 20, 2023April 19, 2023 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> book reviews

Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater by Peggy Orenstein
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: autobiography, biography, history, memoir, women's history
Pages: 224
Published by Harper on January 24, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this lively, funny memoir, Peggy Orenstein sets out to make a sweater from scratch--shearing, spinning, dyeing wool--and in the process discovers how we find our deepest selves through craft. Orenstein spins a yarn that will appeal to everyone.
The Covid pandemic propelled many people to change their lives in ways large and small. Some adopted puppies. Others stress-baked. Peggy Orenstein, a lifelong knitter, went just a little further. To keep herself engaged and cope with a series of seismic shifts in family life, she set out to make a garment from the ground up: learning to shear sheep, spin and dye yarn, then knitting herself a sweater.
Orenstein hoped the project would help her process not just wool but her grief over the recent death of her mother and the decline of her dad, the impending departure of her college-bound daughter, and other thorny issues of aging as a woman in a culture that by turns ignores and disdains them. What she didn't expect was a journey into some of the major issues of our time: climate anxiety, racial justice, women's rights, the impact of technology, sustainability, and, ultimately, the meaning of home.
With her wry voice, sharp intelligence, and exuberant honesty, Orenstein shares her year-long journey as daughter, wife, mother, writer, and maker--and teaches us all something about creativity and connection.

My Review:

Looking back – and oh how happy I am to be able to do that – we all unraveled a bit during COVID. At its simplest, Unraveling is one author’s story of how she dealt with that “Great Unraveling” by, well, raveling. Technically by knitting, but if the sheep baas, shear it.

So the framework of Unraveling is centered on what turned out to be the author’s pandemic project. People did all sorts of things to help them through the lockdown, or to provide structure while doing so, or perhaps a bit of both.

The author, who was an author in the Before Times whose in-progress book tour dissolved in the lockdowns, did not adopt a new pet as many people did. Although her project did involve animals – just not in any of the usual ways.

As a lifelong knitter, she decided to go deeper into a hobby she learned from her mother. SLFHM for short, as she learned that many, many fiber artists learned their craft from their mothers.

Orenstein went very deep, even though her shears often didn’t go nearly deep enough. She decided to experience the entire process of knitting from the first stage of the work to its final product by learning how to shear sheep, take the sheared wood through cleaning and carding, spin it into yarn, dye it using natural dyes and last but not least, knitting a sweater from the fruits of her labor. Which was also, naturally (pun intended) a fruit of her labor.

The steps of her project, frustrating, messy, aching and all too often colorful – whether from bruises or yarn going through the color spectrum, form the backbone of the book.

But each step and stumble along that way turned the author’s mind, and followed by the reader’s, down the myriad byways of history, science, sociology, ecology and pretty much anywhere and everywhere else that the human experience takes us.

Spinning thread leads to thoughts about the rise of civilization, the development of language and the independence generated by women’s work along with excoriations about the patriarchy that all too often suppresses it. Dyeing leads to the history of the chemical industry. The handwork – and hard work – of producing one’s own clothing gets into a discussion of the rapaciousness of the clothing industry and its effects on the environment.

One thought leads to another. Inevitably. As humans do.

Mixed in with a fascinating meander through history and sociology are personal elements, as Unraveling is kind of a journal of one woman past midlife dealing with all that life throws at us when we realize that there are more days behind us than in front of us. That our parents are going or gone. That our children – if we have them – are moving out and away. And all of that in the midst of quarantines where the rituals that usually surround those milestones are out of reach, as are the loved ones who are leaving us behind, one way or another.

Reality (and Escape) Rating A-: I’m calling it both, as this is a nonfiction book about the author’s way of escaping from the unstructured, amorphous nature of life under lockdown. Sometimes, finding purpose is the best thing we can do for ourselves as humans, and Unraveling is one person’s story about that journey.

Unraveling turns out to be a thoughtful book combining a lightness of heart with the heaviness of a sweater produced by hands filled with a lot of love and no small measure of grief. The exploration of the process of creating the sweater and all of the sweat equity that went into each step will draw in many readers – particularly those with some interest or experience in any of the fiber arts – whether they were taught by their mothers or not.

The explorations into history, culture and science will remind readers of some of Mary Roach’s work, or even Caitlin Doughty’s work about the death industry (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes), that same idea of using a process to explore a concept and its history in depth. Whether the depth of the research in Unraveling goes as far or as deep is a question that this reader can’t answer, but I found it all utterly fascinating – even though I’m not a knitter.

I suspect there will be some mixed feelings among readers about the more personal issues the author brings to this work, especially her grief over the final loss of her mother and the everyday loss of little pieces of her father as he succumbs to Alzheimer’s. As someone in the same age cohort, her thoughts about her losses resonated with me, as did her considerations – and still considering – the inevitable changes coming to her own life as she and her husband face retirement and what lies beyond. That part of her story may not work for every reader, but it certainly did for this one.

Review: Her Lost Words by Stephanie Marie Thornton

Posted on March 28, 2023March 27, 2023 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

Her Lost Words: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Stephanie Marie Thornton
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: biography, historical fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 448
Published by Berkley Books on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to Frankenstein, a tale of two literary legends--a mother and daughter--discovering each other and finding themselves along the way, from USA Today bestselling author Stephanie Marie Thornton.
1792. As a child, Mary Wollstonecraft longed to disappear during her father's violent rages. Instead, she transforms herself into the radical author of the landmark volume A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she dares to propose that women are equal to men. From conservative England to the blood-drenched streets of revolutionary France, Mary refuses to bow to society's conventions and instead supports herself with her pen until an illicit love affair challenges her every belief about romance and marriage. When she gives birth to a daughter and is stricken with childbed fever, Mary fears it will be her many critics who recount her life's extraordinary odyssey...
1818. The daughter of infamous political philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, passionate Mary Shelley learned to read by tracing the letters of her mother's tombstone. As a young woman, she desperately misses her mother's guidance, especially following her scandalous elopement with dashing poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary struggles to balance an ever-complicated marriage with motherhood while nursing twin hopes that she might write something of her own one day and also discover the truth of her mother's unconventional life. Mary's journey will unlock her mother's secrets, all while leading to her own destiny as the groundbreaking author of Frankenstein.
A riveting and inspiring novel about a firebrand feminist, her visionary daughter, and the many ways their words transformed our world.

My Review:

As a young woman, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (the future Mary Shelley) must have felt as if she would always live in the shadow of her scandalous, reviled, radical mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of the famous – or infamous – philosophical treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

After all, even when the younger Mary first met the love of her life, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, even he confessed to being a fan of her mother’s work.

But the tides of history turn, and for more than a century after Mary Shelley’s death it was HER great work that captured the limelight – and much of the popular imagination – while her mother’s achievements were covered in the shadows cast by her daughter’s monster, the doctor who made him and the literary genre they started.

Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein gave birth to modern science fiction at the age of 19, an achievement for which she is celebrated every bit as much as both mother and daughter were reviled in their own times.

The story in Her Lost Words takes the lives of this pair of literary giants and tells them in alternating first-person chapters. So we read about the mother’s life from her not-early-enough escape from her abusive father’s house to her death alternating with her daughter’s life from learning to read using the letters of her mother’s tombstone to her return to England after the publication of Frankenstein, the birth of her own child and Shelley’s tragic early death as she navigates her own storied life.

Their stories are intertwined – but also entirely different. The older Mary was always in search of a life of the mind – even though women were supposed to be incapable of such a thing. The younger Mary expected to have such a life but devoted more of her passion to her relationships, particularly with Shelley, until her monster took over her literary ambitions.

One was thought, one was feeling. Each was a towering genius in their own way. Her Lost Words does its best to set them both in their times, showing their influence on each other and their respective legacies while doing its best to see them each outside the long shadow that the other cast.

Escape Rating B: Someone needs to do a literary survey of just how many fictional and even non-fictional biographies of famous women in history begin with a dramatic scene of parental or spousal abuse. Not that I do not believe it’s true in the case of the older Mary, more that it should be telling in a profound way that it happened so damn frequently but somehow that message never seems to penetrate the male psyche. Which is a part of what made A Vindication of the Rights of Women such a radical document, not just in its day but still. Because we haven’t achieved all the rights she set out in the late 1700s even to this day.

If behind every successful man there stands his mother-in-law, quite surprised – or more likely a supportive woman in one or many roles in his life, in historical fiction, at least, it does seem as if behind every successful woman stands a male authority figure, generally a spouse or parent, with his hand still raised to deliver yet another blow as she runs away as far and as fast as she can.

(I’ll climb down off my soapbox now but considering the general opprobrium both of the subjects of this dual fictional biography faced in their lifetimes, if there was ever a book to make that soapbox germane, this is it. I digress, but not as much as usual.)

I ended up with mixed feelings about Her Lost Words. I really enjoyed the history, and I liked the dueling dual portraits of these two incredible women. I think where it didn’t work quite well for me was in those first-person singular voices, because this story was told as women’s fiction, centering their personal lives as much as their professional lives, and dealing as much with their emotions as it did with their written thoughts and words.

First-person narratives can be excellent in drawing a reader into the mind of a character, but Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley weren’t fictional characters, they were real women who each left behind a considerable body of literary work. I was more interested in what they actually said and wrote and what they actually did than anything else. The book was very well done for what it was, but the presentation of historical figures as characters in women’s fiction didn’t quite work for this reader.

I wanted to be all in on this one and I just wasn’t. I’m still interested in Wollstonecraft and Shelley, and will probably refer myself to Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon, a nonfiction dual biography that covers much of the same ground as Her Lost Words, and features in the author’s references the next time my towering TBR pile catches its breath.

So if you’re looking for more of a factual biographical presentation, this may not be the book for you, as it was not for me. But if you are searching for a fictionalized history, Her Lost Words is a well-written exploration of these towering literary figures told from a personal and even intimate point of view.

Review: An Indiscreet Princess by Georgie Blalock

Posted on October 12, 2022October 15, 2022 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> book reviews

An Indiscreet Princess: A Novel of Queen Victoria's Defiant Daughter by Georgie Blalock
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: biography, historical fiction
Pages: 400
Published by William Morrow & Company on September 27, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the acclaimed author of The Other Windsor Girl and The Last Debutantes comes a brilliant novel about Queen Victoria’s most rebellious and artistically talented daughter, Princess Louise, showcasing her rich life in Georgie Blalock’s signature flair.
Before Princes Margaret, before Duchess Meghan, there was Princess Louise: royal rebel.
As the fourth daughter of the perpetually in-mourning Queen Victoria, Princess Louise’s life is more a gilded prison than a fairy tale. Expected to sit quietly next to her mother with downcast eyes, Louise vows to escape the stultifying royal court. Blessed with beauty, artistic talent, and a common touch, she creates a life outside the walled-in existence of the palace grounds by attending the National Art Training School—where she shockingly learns to sculpt nude models while falling passionately in love with famed sculptor Joseph Edgar Boehm.
Although Louise cultivates artist friends, artistic success, and a life outside the palace, she quickly learns that even royal rebels must heed the call of duty. For twenty years, Louise fights to maintain her relationship with Joseph and what freedom she can glean within the strict requirements of Queen Victoria’s court. When a near fatal accident forces her back under Queen Victoria’s iron rule, Louise must choose between surrendering to the all-consuming grief of lost love and dreams that plagued her mother or finding the strength to keep fighting for her unconventional life.

My Review:

An Indiscreet Princess is the second book this season to present a fictionalized biography of Queen Victoria’s artistic, iconoclastic daughter Louise. Considering the life that she led, it’s not surprising that Louise has become the focus of more than one such book Instead it’s a wonder why her story hasn’t been told before.

Louise’s mother may have reigned over the sexually repressive regime that bears her name, but even the contemporary rumors about Louise’s behavior give the impression that Louise was anything but repressed – no matter how much her royal mother may have tried to make her toe the line of the straight and narrow.

But Louise, who managed to become known in her own right and in her own time as a talented and even successful sculptor, still had to fight that repression from, at the very least, the day her father Prince Albert died until Victoria herself either mellowed or died – whichever came first.

By all accounts, even though Queen Victoria’s power over her empire had been waning throughout her reign – in part due to her own actions or inactions – her rule over her family was nearly absolute. Especially over the lives of her daughters, who she expected to serve as her personal secretaries until she deigned to decide upon and preside over their marriages. And whose world she still expected to be the very center of for the rest of her – or their – lives.

But the center of Louise’s life was her art. No matter how much her imperial – and imperious – mother tried to restrict every aspect of her life – including how much training she would receive and how much – or how little – space she would be given to practice it. So she rebelled where she could and toed the line when she absolutely had to.

And managed to succeed – if not on her own terms at least on terms that both she and her mother could live with. At least some of the time.

Escape Rating B: Both In the Shadow of a Queen and An Indiscreet Princess fictionalize the life of the very same person. Meaning that the outlines of both stories are pretty much the same. But the way that those outlines are filled in is quite a bit different.

It’s as if the two Princesses Louise are twins who are living out the all-too-common scenario of a “good” twin and a “bad” twin. A scenario that occurs in many families, where one child is rewarded for being dutiful and obedient while the other gets attention the only way that remains to them – by acting out at every turn.

In the Shadow of a Queen told the story of the “good” twin. That Louise pursued her art relentlessly – and did clash with her mother because of it. But she was portrayed as a dutiful if reluctant personal secretary, and more distinctly in comparison with this book, her marriage to Lord Lorne was described as a love match between two people who liked and respected each other and expected to be as happy as their circumstances would allow. That version of Louise’s story also dismissed all of the rumors about her many reputed affairs and never even touched on the rumors that Lord Lorne was homosexual. That book ended just as they married, leaving open the possibility of a happy ever after that did not happen in real life.

An Indiscreet Princess, very much on the other hand, leans into all the salacious gossip and leans into so hard it falls over into more than a few pre- and post-marital beds. (It also explicitly reinforces the worst of the rumors about Queen Victoria’s behavior with her Scottish manservant John Brown) It is, admittedly, a much more fun account of Louise’s life than the other, a feeling that is helped by starting her story later, as she is inveigling her mother to let her attend art school, and a point where Louise has a bit more agency – or at least more awareness of just how little she has – than in Shadow which begins with Prince Albert’s death and glums its way through the worst of Victoria’s mourning years.

While the Princess in Indiscreet is more interesting to read about, because she thinks more and does more, this is also a story about a lot of privileged people being privileged and selfish and generally behaving fairly badly to each other while not considering ANY of the effects on anybody else. What seem like more frank portraits of everyone in the royal orbits is more interesting to read – as tell-all gossips often are – but doesn’t leave the reader with a whole lot of sympathy for much of anyone involved.

All of which is a very different reaction than I had to the author’s previous book about one of the royal family’s other notorious scapegraces, The Other Windsor Girl about the life of Princess Margaret. Which I liked quite a bit better because while the focus in that book was on Margaret, the story is told from an outsider’s perspective which lets us see, perhaps, a bit more clearly than Louise is able to see herself.

Review: A Dress of Violet Taffeta by Tessa Arlen

Posted on July 6, 2022July 5, 2022 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

A Dress of Violet Taffeta by Tessa Arlen
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: biography, historical fiction
Pages: 352
Published by Berkley Books on July 5, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A sumptuous novel based on the fascinating true story of Belle Epoque icon Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon, a woman determined to shatter the boundaries of the fashion world and support herself and her young daughter with her magnificent designs.
Lucy Duff Gordon knows she is talented. She sees color, light, fabric, and texture in ways few other people do. But is the world ready for her? A world dominated by men who would try to control her and use her art for their own gain?
After being deserted by her wealthy husband, Lucy is desperate to survive. She turns to her one true talent to make a living. As a little girl, the dresses she made for her dolls were the envy of her group of playmates. Now, she uses her courageous innovations in Belle Époque fashion to support her own little girl. Lucile knows it is an uphill battle, and a single woman is not supposed to succeed on her own, but she refuses to give up. She will claim her place in the fashion world; failure simply is not an option.
Then, on a frigid night in 1912, Lucy’s life changes once more, when she becomes one of 706 people to survive the sinking of the Titanic. She could never have imagined the effects the disaster would have on her career, her marriage to her second husband, and her legacy. But no matter what life throws at her, Lucile will live on as a trailblazing and fearless fashion icon, never letting go of what she worked so hard to earn. This is her story.

My Review:

In historical fiction it seems as if behind every successful woman there’s either a rotten first husband, a harridan of a mother, or both. In A Dress of Violet Taffeta, this fictionalized biography of groundbreaking British couturier Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, there’s both.

(Historically, we’re certain about the rotten first husband. She divorced him for multiple infidelities and her divorce was granted in 1895. Whether her mother was quite the harridan portrayed in this fictional account of her life is not so certain – but it makes for an even better story.)

What made Lucy special, and fascinating enough for her to be portrayed more than once in both fiction and biography, are the choices she made and the life that she led. She’s famous, not for who she married or who she knew – although she absolutely married better the second time around and certainly knew the rich and famous of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but because of what she did.

She had a dream, and she worked for decades to achieve it. And succeed – which she certainly did. To support herself, her daughter, and her widowed mother (see harridan above) Lucy took her talent for not just dressmaking but dress designing and turned it into a worldwide brand of haute couture at a time when all the famous fashion houses were headed by men.

Lucile dress designed by Lucy Duff-Gordon

Her company, her brand, Lucile, Ltd, was an innovator both as a business and as a design studio, inventing trends that became the foundation of the modern fashion industry. She was the first to train models and use shows to display her creations. And that was only one of her “firsts”.

She was a pioneer and a trailblazer in a world that may have been changing but still expected women like her to sit and look pretty. She chose to make a life, a business and a career out of making other women look pretty instead.

In some ways, her story is a “rags to riches” tale. Lucy pulled herself up – and as many women as she could take with her – by her own shoebuttons if not bootstraps – going from wondering whether she could pay the rent and feed her family to opening shops in Paris and New York in addition to her signature London shop and studio.

But that wealth and fame bought her – along with her second husband, Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a first-class cabin on the maiden voyage of the ill-fated RMS Titanic. Both Lucy and Cosmo survived their harrowing ordeal – only for them to lose their reputations in the relentless search for scapegoats in the aftermath.

Whatever the ratio of facts to conjecture in this particular fictionalized biography, the life of Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon makes for a fascinating read.

Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon

Escape Rating A-: Lucy Duff-Gordon led a great big huge storied life. Hers would have been a larger-than-life story even without the misadventure of the Titanic. With it, she becomes an English version of the “Unsinkable Molly Brown”, another famous female entrepreneur – albeit American – who survived that disaster. (And they did meet afterwards!)

Lucy’s story as written here is utterly compelling. She starts with nothing but a dream and the barebones of a plan. With a bit of help from her sister (who also became famous as the novelist Elinor Glyn and creator of the concept of the “It girl”) Lucy turned that dream into, a somewhat more realistic plan that was going to take all of her time, effort and attention for years to turn into a success. Which she eventually did.

This was the part of the story I loved best, where Lucy is working flat-out all the hours of the day and entirely too many of the hours of the night to turn her dream into something that will keep them all afloat. This was also the part of the story where the second perspective, that of Celia Franklin, her once scullery maid turned right hand woman was best presented alongside Lucy’s own. We see what Lucy is thinking and feeling but also get a glimpse into what an opportunity it was and how many opportunities it, in turn, provided to others.

(Celia was not a real historical person, but rather a combination of two separate people. Her perspective on Lucy sheds a lot of light, but certainly made me wonder how much of that perspective was fabricated rather than based on history. Lucy’s insistence on bringing other women up in her studio by providing them with good jobs at decent wages under excellent working conditions reads well in 21st century terms but may or may not reflect her actual views. I wish we knew.)

But as much as I loved the part about building her business, once it was built the story shifted to her second marriage (a bit, as much as Lucy seems to have) and to her higher and higher rise into the upper echelons of society – at least in New York City. The parts about the business are a case of the journey being more interesting than the destination, but if her relationship with Cosmo was meant to portray a grand romance I’ll admit that I wasn’t feeling it.

Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t an excellent choice for Lucy. As her husband, he could have forced her back into the kind of life that women were expected to have. Instead, he was as much of an iconoclast as she was and they were a good match. I bought that their marriage was successful but not the romance of it. And that may have been an accurate impression after all.

There are things in Lucy’s life that are either left out or elided over, and the biggest of these was in the manner and timing of its ending. The aftermath of the Titanic disaster was disastrous in an entirely different way for Cosmo Duff-Gordon. He was one of the scapegoats of the inquiries and his reputation was ruined in the press. While he was eventually exonerated, the public and the press never forgot, and the loss of his reputation cast a pall over his remaining years. That the author chose to end Lucy’s story on a note of recovery made sense fictionally – we want stories to end happily, after all – but probably didn’t reflect the reality of the rest of their lives.

I’ve written a LOT about this particular book. Obviously I was caught up in it and it gave me a lot to think about. Also, there always seem to be two issues in historical fiction that is based this closely on real history. One is the question of how it reads, while the other is the question about how much it does or does not match the historical facts that are known.

In the case of A Dress of Violet Taffeta, it reads very well indeed. And most of the variations from history make sense in the course of the story’s narrative, even though they niggle a bit as the amateur historian in this reader. All in all, a compelling read about a woman whose achievements made her larger-than-life.

Review: The Patriots by Winston Groom

Posted on November 5, 2020November 4, 2020 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

The Patriots: Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the Making of America by Winston Groom
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: biography, history, U.S. history
Pages: 464
Published by National Geographic on September 8, 2020
Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

In this masterful narrative, Winston Groom brings his signature storytelling panache to the intricately crafted tale of three of our nation's most fascinating founding fathers--Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams--and paints a vivid picture of the improbable events, bold ideas, and extraordinary characters who created the United States of America.
When the Revolutionary War ended in victory, there remained the stupendous problem of how to establish a workable democratic government in the vast, newly independent country. Three key founding fathers played significant roles: John Adams, the brilliant, dour, thin-skinned New Englander; Thomas Jefferson, the aristocratic Southern renaissance man; and Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from the Caribbean island of Nevis. In this complex and riveting narrative, best-selling author Winston Groom tells the story of these men--all of whom served in George Washington's first cabinet--as the patriots fundamentally responsible for the ideas that shaped the foundation of the United States. Their lives and policies could not have been more different; their relationships with each other were complex, and often rife with animosity. And yet these three men led the charge--two of them creating and signing the Declaration of Independence, and the third establishing a national treasury and the earliest delineation of a Republican party. The time in which they lived was fraught with danger; the smell of liberty was in the air, though their excitement was strained by vast antagonisms that recall the intense political polarization of today. But through it all, they managed to shoulder the heavy mantle of creating the United States of America, putting aside their differences to make a great country, once and always. Drawing on extensive correspondence, epic tales of war, and rich histories of their day-to-day interactions, best-selling author Winston Groom shares the remarkable story of the beginnings of our great nation.

My Review:

One thing the play Hamilton got right – these three men really didn’t like each other much, although Adams and Jefferson did reconcile in old age. Which doesn’t mean that they didn’t manage to work together for the good of the country they helped to create.

There’s definitely a lesson in there. Maybe we’ll start acting upon that lesson again.

It’s clear from this book – unlike the U.S. History classes most of us took in school – that there was nothing inevitable about the American Experiment in general or the American Revolution in particular.

Every other country on the planet thought that the ragtag army of the fledgling country was going to lose. And by rights it should have. The British Army was the premier fighting force in the entire world in the late 18th century. They had us outgunned, outmanned, and out pretty much everything else.

But they also had a very long supply line in a war that was expensive to prosecute. A war over territory that their own people didn’t think much about or care much about. And we had George Washington, who knew that he just had to keep himself and some kind of army out of the hands of the British for the tide to turn.

Not the tide of war, but the tide of British willingness to prosecute that war.

But the country that the Revolution gave birth to was every bit as fractured as the country we live in today – if not more so. And along some of the same lines. Lines that were baked into the compromises made by the three men profiled in this book, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

They kicked the can down the road, in the sure and certain knowledge – from their perspective – that the most important thing was having that can to kick. They compromised to keep the American Experiment alive.

It’s time for us to do our parts.

Escape Rating A-: I read this on Election Day and Ballot Counting Day (11/3 and 11/4) and it is impossible to separate my reading from real life events, going on in real time, that are the direct result of the actions and compromises that fill this book and our history.

So this is a book that made me think and feel a lot about this country and where it currently stands. About the work the Founders left for us to do, and about the difficulties involved in doing it.

But I need to talk about the book. First, it is imminently readable. It was so easy to just get sucked in and stay sucked, making it a perfect read for the occasion in multiple ways.

It probably helps that the story begins with Hamilton, and does so in such a way that it puts flesh on the bones of a story that we are now so familiar with. At this moment in time, Hamilton feels like the most accessible of the “founding fathers” so starting with him doesn’t just make sense but draws the reader right into the narrative.

So even though this book is heavily researched and has lots of footnotes and an extensive bibliography, it NEVER gets bogged down by that research. Instead it illuminates it in a way that brings these men, with all their flaws as well as their virtues, to life.

Although, speaking of illustrations, the print edition of this book is undoubtedly heavily illustrated. However, the eARC does not include the pictures. This is one of those times when I really, really wish I’d gotten a print copy to review, because the illustrations I have seen in various promotional materials for the book are both illustrative and gorgeous.

As I said, I’m writing this review on November 4, which is Ballot Counting Day or Obsessive Doomscrolling Day or a nauseating combination of the two. That we have a country to vote in and vote for is the legacy of these three men among many others both sung and unsung. The compromises that they enshrined in the U.S. Constitution in order to get both abolitionists and slaveholders, industrial states and farming states, those who feared the government would be overwhelmed by masses of urban voters and those who feared that lower-population rural voters would hold back progress brought us the U.S. Senate as it is currently configured and the Electoral College.

They respected each other – whether they could stand each other or not – and they compromised so that we’d have a country to improve upon. Their work is done. Our work continues. After all, they didn’t leave us “a more perfect union” – only the tools with which to achieve it.

This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews and features.

Review: The Brothers of Auschwitz by Malka Adler

Posted on September 4, 2020September 3, 2020 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

The Brothers of Auschwitz by Malka Adler, Noel Canin
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: biography, historical fiction, Holocaust, World War II
Pages: 464
Published by One More Chapter on September 1, 2020
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

An extraordinary novel of hope and heartbreak, this is a story about a family separated by the Holocaust and their harrowing journey back to each other.
My brother’s tears left a delicate, clean line on his face. I stroked his cheek, whispered, it’s really you…
Dov and Yitzhak live in a small village in the mountains of Hungary, isolated both from the world and from the horrors of the war. But one day in 1944, everything changes. The Nazis storm the homes of the Jewish villagers and inform them they have one hour. One hour before the train will take them to Auschwitz.
Six decades later, from the safety of their living rooms at home in Israel, the brothers finally break their silence to a friend who will never let their stories be forgotten.
Told in a poetic style reminiscent of Atwood and Salinger, Malka Adler has penned a visceral yet essential read for those who have found strength, solace and above all, hope, in books like The Choice, The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
This paperback includes an exclusive 14-page P.S. section with an author Q, an Author’s Note and a reading group guide.
Praise for The Brothers of Auschwitz
‘I sat down and read this within a few hours, my wife is now reading it and it is bringing tears to her eyes’ Amazon reviewer
‘The story is so incredible and the author writes so beautifully that it is impossible to stay indifferent. I gave the book to my mom and she called me after she finished crying and telling me how much she loved it’ Amazon reviewer
‘It is a book we all must read, read in order to know … It is harsh, enthralling, earth-shattering, rattling – but we must. And nothing less’ Aliza Ziegler, Editor-in-Chief at Proza Books, Yedioth Ahronoth Publishing House
‘Great courage is needed to write as Adler does – without softening, without beautifying, without leaving any room to imagination’ Yehudith Rotem, Haaretz newspaper
‘This is a book we are not allowed not to read’ Leah Roditi, At Magazine

My Review:

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, as it does in this biographical novel about two brothers’ harrowing experiences as prisoners in Auschwitz in 1944-45 and their long journey to find each other again. And what happened after.

The story is searing in its intensity, all the more so because so much of it is based on interviews that the author conducted with its protagonists. Even though this is labeled as a “biographical novel”, it feels true in all of its horror.

Although there is a framing story of the author going to visit Dov and Yitzhak to interview them, the power in this narrative comes from the two men telling what feels like the unvarnished and unwhitewashed truth about not just what happened to them during the war, but also what they did to keep themselves alive. And how both shaped the men they became and lingered for the rest of their lives.

It’s a compelling story in its harsh treatment of its subjects, or perhaps it’s better to describe it as harsh in the way that its subjects treat themselves. Death would have been easy to find. Survival was hard and brutal, a desperate struggle every single day for one mouthful of food and precious few hours of sleep. The conditions they existed under were designed to eliminate as many Jews as possible, and succeeded all too well. Even after the Germans knew that the war was lost, they were still doing their utmost to march as many as possible until they died.

But this set of multiple first-person accounts of what barely constituted life under the thumb of the Nazi SS – seemingly even more deadly when not in an actual concentration camp – spares no one in its telling, not the Nazis, not the Christians who were so willing to see the Jews carted away so they could claim their homes and possessions, and not the survivors who saw and felt themselves as barely human when the Nazis were finally gone.

I’m not saying liberated, because that doesn’t seem to be the right word. Long after the war, but particularly in its immediate aftermath, the brothers make it clear that they carried their oppressors and their experiences with them into rehabilitation camps and forever after.

This is a book that compels the reader to stay with it, even as you want to turn your eyes away. Or perhaps especially because of that. It’s worse than war in all its horror, it’s bigger than man’s inhumanity to man, and it needs to be read because this is a story that needs to be remembered.

Escape Rating A: This book felt personal to me in ways even beyond my expectations. The area that Dov and Yitzhak are taken from is the area my own grandmother came from. The man they meet briefly in their first camp, the one who is a landowner, could have been my great-grandfather, who was the same, although as far as is known, he didn’t even make it to one of the concentration camps.

So this story feels true for me because it matches what little history I have from my own family. Most of my relatives were already in the U.S. when the Nazis came, and only one who was not survived the camps. He didn’t talk about it and neither did his wife, my great aunt, who was also a survivor. So that Yitzhak and Dov don’t want to talk about it also rang true.

This is obviously a book that got me in the feels. It reads as raw, and brutal, and honest about not just the hardship they faced – and that’s not nearly a strong enough word – but also the desperate acts they committed themselves in order to just live one more day. Nothing is left to the imagination and it’s a story of horror after horror.

And yet, they survived. They left Europe, went to Israel and became part of the foundation of a country whose odds were desperately stacked against it, but survived anyway. And there’s hope in that. The hope that we can make the cry of “Never Again” stick. If we commit ourselves to remember. Read this book, remember, and weep.

This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews and features.

Review: Becoming Superman by J. Michael Straczynski

Posted on July 23, 2019July 22, 2019 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: autobiography, biography, science fiction
Pages: 460
Published by Harper Voyager on July 23, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

With an introduction by Neil Gaiman!

In this dazzling memoir, the acclaimed writer behind Babylon 5, Sense8, Clint Eastwood's Changeling and Marvel's Thor reveals how the power of creativity and imagination enabled him to overcome the horrors of his youth and a dysfunctional family haunted by madness, murder and a terrible secret.

For four decades, J. Michael Straczynski has been one of the most successful writers in Hollywood, one of the few to forge multiple careers in movies, television and comics. Yet there's one story he's never told before: his own.

Joe's early life nearly defies belief. Raised by damaged adults--a con-man grandfather and a manipulative grandmother, a violent, drunken father and a mother who was repeatedly institutionalized--Joe grew up in abject poverty, living in slums and projects when not on the road, crisscrossing the country in his father's desperate attempts to escape the consequences of his past.

To survive his abusive environment Joe found refuge in his beloved comics and his dreams, immersing himself in imaginary worlds populated by superheroes whose amazing powers allowed them to overcome any adversity. The deeper he read, the more he came to realize that he, too, had a superpower: the ability to tell stories and make everything come out the way he wanted it. But even as he found success, he could not escape a dark and shocking secret that hung over his family's past, a violent truth that he uncovered over the course of decades involving mass murder.

Straczynski's personal history has always been shrouded in mystery. Becoming Superman lays bare the facts of his life: a story of creation and darkness, hope and success, a larger-than-life villain and a little boy who became the hero of his own life. It is also a compelling behind-the-scenes look at some of the most successful TV series and movies recognized around the world.

My Review:

I jumped at the chance to read this book and be on this tour because, well, basically because Babylon 5. Which I’ve watched more than once, and have frequently cited in regards to its treatment of chaos vs. order in the Shadow War. Because that dichotomy rears its head, over and over, in SF, in Fantasy, in life.

It’s what makes Loki such a fascinating character, because he represents chaos. While the MCU may equate chaos with evil, it ain’t necessarily so. There’s a reason why seemingly every mythology has a chaos avatar – because chaos and the response to it pushes us forward.

It’s what makes Ben Franklin’s quote about sacrificing freedom to obtain security so powerful, as freedom is generally a bit chaotic, while security generally aligns with order. But too much of either, no matter how well intentioned, is always a bad thing.

The surprising thing about this autobiography is just how much chaos swirled around the author’s early life. And that his adult response seems to have been, not to fight against the chaos, but to embrace it. To grow stronger from the fight – no matter how much it hurt.

And it’s a fascinating journey from beginning to end – even if – or especially because – it (and the author) took a very long walk through some very dark places.

Reality Rating A+: I opened this book, fell completely into it, and didn’t emerge until I turned the last page. Sort of like the first time I watched Babylon 5, somewhere in Season 3, and got so deeply entranced – or entrenched – that I went back to the beginning to catch up then waited with the proverbial bated breath for each episode thereafter.

One of the fascinating things about the author’s life is the way that he knows and addresses the fact that he might not be the most reliable narrator of the early parts of it. Not because of lies or embellishments – or at least not because of his own lies or embellishments. Rather because the people whose memories he is forced to rely on for the parts that take place before his birth or during his early childhood were themselves far from reliable. His family’s story is a story of lies and coverups hiding multiple essential and nasty truths.

All families have secrets. All families centered around any kind of abuse have particular kinds of secrets designed to protect the abuser from the consequences of their actions. All of that is in this life story.

But the dark heart hidden underneath all of that is even more rotten than most people have to deal with in one lifetime. And it left the kind of damage that makes all too many people not merely dysfunctional, but sets them up for a lifetime of perpetuating their abuse.

What makes this story so special? For one, the book is compulsively readable. I started and absolutely couldn’t put it down until about 2:30 in the morning – and not just because I wanted to get to the good parts. I felt so compelled because the man is a consummate storyteller, no matter how painful the story is. I was hooked and I stayed that way for 5 hours of reading, just as I stayed that way for 5 years of B5.

The story begins as a shitshow of epic proportions, travels inexorably from endless defeats to seeming victories to yet more defeats, only to rise and fall again and again, until the end is, not so much a triumph as a paean of gratitude for all the chances that came, and for all of the million-to-one shots that surprisingly and delightfully paid off.

And it’s an absolutely marvelous read every step of the way. Even the hard parts. Especially the hard parts. Because the author spares no one, particularly not himself.

My one and only regret about this book is that I didn’t have time to listen to the audio, which is read by the actor who played the clown-turned-emperor Londo Mollari on Babylon 5. The only way that could have been better would be if G’Kar were still with us to participate. And now, I think it’s time for a rewatch.

This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews and features.

Review: Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee

Posted on October 12, 2018October 11, 2018 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> book reviews

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: biography, history, science fiction
Pages: 544
Published by Dey Street Books on October 23, 2018
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

“[Astounding] is a major work of popular culture scholarship that science fiction fans will devour.” — Publishers Weekly

"Alec Nevala-Lee has brilliantly recreated the era. . . . A remarkable work of literary history." — Robert Silverberg

"Science fiction has been awaiting this history/biography for more than half a century. . . . Here it is. This is the most important historical and critical work my field has ever seen. Alec Nevala-Lee’s superb scholarship and insight have made the seemingly impossible a radiant and irreplaceable gift."—Barry N. Malzberg, author of Beyond Apollo

Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary partnership between four controversial writers—John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard—who set off a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world.

This remarkable cultural narrative centers on the figure of John W. Campbell, Jr., whom Asimov called “the most powerful force in science fiction ever.” Campbell, who has never been the subject of a biography until now, was both a visionary author—he wrote the story that was later filmed as The Thing—and the editor of the groundbreaking magazine best known as Astounding Science Fiction, in which he discovered countless legendary writers and published classic works ranging from the I, Robot series to Dune. Over a period of more than thirty years, from the rise of the pulps to the debut of Star Trek, he dominated the genre, and his three closest collaborators reached unimaginable heights. Asimov became the most prolific author in American history; Heinlein emerged as the leading science fiction writer of his generation with the novels Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land; and Hubbard achieved lasting fame—and infamy—as the founder of the Church of Scientology.

Drawing on unexplored archives, thousands of unpublished letters, and dozens of interviews, Alec Nevala-Lee offers a riveting portrait of this circle of authors, their work, and their tumultuous private lives. With unprecedented scope, drama, and detail, Astounding describes how fan culture was born in the depths of the Great Depression; follows these four friends and rivals through World War II and the dawn of the atomic era; and honors such exceptional women as Doña Campbell and Leslyn Heinlein, whose pivotal roles in the history of the genre have gone largely unacknowledged. For the first time, it reveals the startling extent of Campbell’s influence on the ideas that evolved into Scientology, which prompted Asimov to observe: “I knew Campbell and I knew Hubbard, and no movement can have two Messiahs.” It looks unsparingly at the tragic final act that estranged the others from Campbell, bringing the golden age of science fiction to a close, and it illuminates how their complicated legacy continues to shape the imaginations of millions and our vision of the future itself.

My Review:

They were the men who sold the moon – as well as the rest of the universe. Together they were the Golden Age of science fiction – in some ways both the quip that says that the golden age of SF is 12 and in the historical sense.

John W. Campbell, Jr. was the editor of what became the premiere outlet for science fiction writing during its and his heyday, from 1937 through 1946. Back in the days before SF became mainstream, the pulps were all there were, and Campbell’s Astounding was the top of the pulps as far as SF was concerned.

That golden age was when he found, mentored, developed or at least published two writers who became synonymous with SF, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, and the one who nearly broke it, L. Ron Hubbard.

While Astounding and Campbell both went on after 1946 – Astounding exists today as Analog – and all three writers’ careers flourished in their very different trajectories after that period, SF as we know it today was significantly influenced by them and/or their writing, and they, in turn, were significantly influenced by Campbell’s editorial direction. And in one significant case, vice-versa.

Together, they made the genre as we now know it. And the children who grew up reading science fiction, their particular brand of science fiction, changed the world.

Reality Rating A: First things first, this is surprisingly readable. There’s a lot of information packed in here, and it flows fairly smoothly from one page into the next. I was surprised at how completely I was drawn in and held over a very long flight. I expected to bounce in and out, and I just didn’t.

(That the book is only about ⅔ as long as it appears to be is probably a help. The final ⅓ consists of extensive notes. It is blissfully not necessary to flip back and forth between the text and the notes in order to get the story or the context. The author certainly did his homework, but it’s not required that one read it for the book to make sense.)

While Heinlein, Asimov and Hubbard have all been written about before, and in depth, Campbell really hasn’t. And certainly should have been. For the period when Astounding was at the top of the pulps, and for some time beyond, Campbell wasn’t just the editor of a magazine – he WAS science fiction in a way that just isn’t possible now that SF has gone mainstream. His role hasn’t been recognized, possibly because there is no real equivalent today.

This multi-biography attempts to set all four men in their time as well as their relationships to each other. And while on the one hand it feels both loving and respectful, on the other it doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the darker side of all four – even though much of what we now consider that dark side generally passed social muster at the time it happened.

The book does a good job of giving context for why much of what we would consider bad behavior occurred, without ever minimizing it or apologizing for it. I’m thinking particularly of Asimov’s well-known propensity for pinching women’s bottoms and other places without their consent or even seeming to acknowledge that he needed their consent. That all the women in his various editors’ and publishers’ offices literally cleared the building whenever he had an appointment seems to be a message he just never got – and certainly should have.

All of them except Asimov seemed to have drunk to considerable excess. Towards the end of their lives both Campbell and Heinlein crossed the line from conservative to reactionary. None of them gave the credit to any of their wives that was certainly due.

Campbell’s racism undoubtedly affected his gatekeeping of the genre throughout his tenure at Astounding, and is in at least some part responsible for the whiteness of SF through his era and beyond. When some 21st century fans cry out for a “Campbellian Revolution” this is part and parcel of what they are looking back to and wanting to recreate.

And everyone was way more involved in the beginning of Scientology than seems to be widely known. Only Asimov steered clear, and even he got stuck arguing with Campbell about it on multiple occasions.

But we certainly see the hand of Campbell in the underpinnings of Hubbard’s Scientology – and we see a number of promising careers get sidetracked by it. Hubbard’s most of all.

These men were the giants upon whose shoulders the genre now stands, whether their influence was mostly positive, or in Hubbard’s case mostly negative. The author does a deft job of giving them their rightful place in SF history while showing that they all had feet of clay up to the knees. If not higher.

In the end, this is a fascinating study of a group of men who made this most popular genre what it became. And it’s a great read from beginning to end.

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