INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL by HARRIET JACOBS (1861)

This is the memoir of a former slave, written after she had escaped to the North and gained her freedom. It highlights the female experience of the master-slave relationship and its sexual component. This is a very short account, and it unfortunately does not have the ring of authenticity of Twelve Years a Slave and other first-person slave accounts. It was edited and prefaced by a white woman, and I'm afraid she may have altered the content while she was correcting the grammar.

Even if this story is embellished, it does add another dimension to the aspect of the degradation inherent in slavery.

SEVEN SHORT REVIEWS

It is my habit when I finish a book to stack it on the corner of my desk until I complete a review. Right now I have seven books there, and I keep getting further behind, so I have decided to just write these very short review all in one post.

STONER by JOHN WILLIAMS (1965)
William Stoner is a college professor who passively allows others to determine the course of his life, except in matters of intellectual and academic integrity. This would first appear to be a very sad story, because Stoner dies alone and unremembered, but it refuses to be sad because the title character is not regretful about his life. This novel is deceptively simple and affected me deeply, and I'm not really sure why.

TOM JONES by HENRY FIELDING (1749)
A re-reading, first read in the '60s. A rollicking adventure about a young scamp whose amorous lusts and high spirits get him into all sorts of scrapes. In spite of his faults, he has a sweet nature and a good heart and wins fortune and true love in the end. This is a very amusing novel, with many laugh-out-loud bits. Like its hero, it is sweet and good-hearted.

THE FORGETTING TIME by SHARON GUSKIN (2016)
A page-turner novel about reincarnation and remembering a past life, along with a companion story about dementia and forgetting a life in progress. It's an interesting scenario and competently written, but is ultimately forgettable. I had to refresh my memory about it and I only finished it a couple of weeks ago.

BLONDE by JOYCE CAROL OATES (2000)
A novelized biography of Marilyn Monroe. Oates is very sympathetic to her subject, and what emerges is a tragic picture of a little girl lost who was abused and taken advantage of all through life. This account is intriguing and reasonably well done, but I don't think it should be taken as an accurate assessment. And at 700+ pages, it drags on too long.

RISE OF THE ROCKET GIRLS by NATHALIA HOLT (2016)
The non-fiction account of the women hired by the Jet Propulsion Lab from the 1940s through today, first as human computers and later as computer machine operators. While it is important to recognize the contributions of women to the history of space flight, this book could have been much better if the author had concentrated on personalizing only a few of the women instead of fleetingly glancing at so many. None end up being memorable.

ANCILLARY JUSTICE by ANN LECKIE (2013)
This novel won both the premier science fiction honors, the Hugo and Nebula, as well as the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Locus Award, and the BSFA Award. I was thus convinced I would really like it. But no. I found it unimaginative and boring. The hero, who is an Artificial Intelligence in a human body, might as well have been a fully human former soldier bent on vengeance for an act of treachery. It would have made no difference. I am not a fan of the kind of political/military action adventure that seems to be the popular trend for sci-fi these days.

DESCENT INTO HELL by CHARLES WILLIAMS (1937)
I expected something quite different from this novel, which is billed as a "supernatural thriller." It is barely a novel, with only a spare framework of a plot, and the supernatural bits are of the mystical, religious kind. It follows one character's ascent into salvation and another's descent into perdition. According to Williams' philosophy, salvation is achieved through the assumption of the burdens of others, and the descent into hell is caused by the total preoccupation with self. This is a book to be read seriously for enlightenment rather than lightly for entertainment.

NEWS OF THE WORLD by PAULETTE JILES (2016)

News of the World is a deceptively simple story of an old man's journey to return a young girl to her relatives after she has been ransomed from her Kiowa Indian captors. Their travels through dangers in Reconstruction era Texas would seem almost a cliche, somewhat reminiscent of the plot of True Grit. It is rescued, however, by the depth of characterization, the authenticity of the dialogue, and, most of all, by the poetic language of the telling.

Captain Jefferson Kidd is a 71-year-old war veteran who rides from one small Texas town to another to read the newspapers of the day to audiences willing to pay to be transported outside their troubled lives. He stays away from political news to concentrate on the wonders taking place around the world. He reluctantly takes on the task of transporting 10-year-old Johanna from Wichita Falls to her relatives near San Antonio, even though she has forgotten her language and life as a white girl and is trying to escape to rejoin her Kiowa "family." Beset by dangers from nature and from the lawless elements which have flourished, nurtured by a lack of government stability, the old man and the frightened girl form a bond of trust and love.

As a native Texan, I am particularly aware of the inaccurate pictures of the state often found in novels. Jiles has the vernacular of its uneducated populace just right. Her landscape description, which are woven seamlessly into the narrative, depict an accurate picture of the regions passed through, in language which is original and beautiful. This is one of those books which are easily visualized and heard, not just appreciated intellectually.

Of course, my appreciation of this novel is helped immeasurably by my inclination to like books that convey that simple dignity and goodness are values which receive their rewards.

This is a lovely book. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2017. I highly recommended it.

AMERICAN PSYCHO by BRET EASTON ELLIS (1991)

American Psycho is one of those books that are either considered ultra-cool and cutting edge or disgusting and pornographic, depending on the reader.

Parts of the book are very, very funny, in a darkly satiric way. The narrator is a young Wall Street executive who is obsessed with wearing the most stylish and expensive clothing, having the most well-toned and groomed body, buying the most exclusive furnishings, dining at the newest and most fashionable restaurants and dancing at the current "in" clubs. He and his male friends are so similar in all ways that they frequently mistake one for another. They constantly play one-upmanship, always striving to have the best, the most fashionable, the most expensive. One of the hilarious episodes involves their comparison of business cards to see whose is most elegant.

Along with being conspicuous consumers, they are all without empathy. They tease the homeless on the street by offering them money and then snatching it away. They are mysogynistic, valuing women only for their physical appearance. One says, "A good personality consists of a chick who has a little hardbody and who will satisfy all sexual demands without being too slutty about things and who will essentially keep her dumb fucking mouth shut."

The humor comes from the very banality and sameness of the men's personas and from the narrator's obsessive observations of the brand names of every item of clothing worn and every grooming aid and every restaurant and club. All this is clever, if a little repetitious, but then........

Gradually the narrator's reporting extends to his sexual encounters and his forays into torture and murder. Just as the narration of the yuppy lifestyle is detailed and specific, so too are the more disturbing aspects. Ellis elaborates in great detail about who puts what appendage where in the sex acts, which almost always veer into the convoluted and perverse, particularly in the threesomes. Even more disturbing, the sex often descends into torture and ultimately murder, also recounted in specific detail. Maybe I am showing my age and uncoolness, but I think Ellis goes too far. He could have preserved his theme and style of obsessive behavior without being so graphic. I personally was not titulated, but I believe some sick individuals might be. Truly, these scenes of torture and murder would be the verbal equivalent of snuff films, and those are outlawed, aren't they?

I would be hesitant to recommend this book to anyone, even though it does have something to say about the state of our culture and is often very clever. It is possible to interpret the book in such a way that the disturbing parts didn't really happen, but were instead in the narrator's imagination. Whatever? It is just too much.

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Here is the most disturbing thing about this book, to me. The psycho narrator's hero throughout, the man he most admires and wants to emulate, is Donald Trump. This was written in 1991. Now what does this tell us about our President?

MARY BARTON by ELIZABETH GASKELL (1848)

This novel by Elizabeth Gaskell tells a story that is surprisingly relevant today about the tensions between the have and have-nots, in this case between rich mill owners and poor workers, some who are just barely getting by and some who are actually starving after being laid off. Her heroine, Mary Barton. the daughter of a trade union activist, has rejected a working class suitor because she is also being courted (in secret) by the son of the mill owner. In the midst of a stormy labor dispute, in which the trade unionists are humiliated and disregarded by the mill owners, her secret sweetheart is found murdered. Mary is then torn in two because her rejected suitor is accused yet she suspects that her father actually committed the murder.

Gaskell's plot is intricate, suspenseful, and not what one usually expects from a Victorian writer. She is realistic rather than melodramatic, as Dickens was. Some of her descriptive writing is beautiful. The one disappointing aspect of the book is that she pulls back somewhat in casting the rich mills owners as unfeeling villains. She was herself of upper middle class, as were most of her readers. I imagine that is why she hedged her bets somewhat in her criticisms.

Gaskell is often relegated to a second tier of importance in the rankings of Victorian writers. I believe that this book, and others of hers, should place her in first-tier status.

AMERICAN SPHINX -- THE CHARACTER OF THOMAS JEFFERSON by JOSEPH J. ELLIS (1996)

After reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, which was highly critical of Thomas Jefferson, I searched on-line for the best and most impartial biography of Thomas Jefferson, and this one seemed to be the pick of the list. Even though Joseph Ellis strives to be impartial about Jefferson and even is somewhat apologetic on his behalf, I finished this book more convinced than ever that this Founding Father does not deserve the level of respect now accorded him.

Rather than writing a conventional biography, Ellis has chosen instead to reveal Jefferson's character by examining five periods of his adult life: 1775-76 in Philadelphia (writing the Declaration of Independence), 1784-89 in Paris (as a diplomat), 1794-977 in Monticello (retreat to private life), 1801-04 in Washington, D.C. (his Presidency), and 1816-26 in Monticello (his retirement from politics). Ellis writes, "The Jefferson who emerges . . . is a flawed creature, a man who combined massive learning, piercing insights into others with daunting powers of self-deception, utter devotion to great principles with a highly indulged presumption that his own conduct was not answerable to them." I would call this being a hypocrite. Jefferson seems to be a man who habitually said one thing and did another, who could write that "all men are created equal" and own 200 slaves at the same time. He could advocate for limiting executive power and during his term as President take advantage of that power more than his predecessors had. He could express his admiration for Native American culture and then require the deportation of massive segments of that population to western lands. He could expressed opposite opinions to different people at the same time. He told people what they wanted to hear.

As ignorant as I am of American history, I previously knew only that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and purchased Louisiana. I found that those two things were actually the only noteworthy things he did. I ignorantly assumed he fought in the Revolutionary War. I found out that he did not, and that as governor of Virginia at that time he failed to organize the state militia and when the British approached his home, he fled on horseback. I ignorantly thought he was involved in writing the Constitution. He was not. I ignorantly thought he deserved to be memorialized on the side of a mountain. Now I think not.

Of course the most egregious example of Jefferson's hypocrisy is the now-proven fact that he fathered the children of one of his slaves, while expressing the opinion that when the slaves were freed they should be removed to another country because of the "certain danger, if there were nothing else, of seeing blood mixed without means of preventing it." He never freed Sally Hemmings, the mother of his mixed-blood children, not even in his will when he died.

What a jerk.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON by RON CHERNOW (2004)

I know so little about American history that I probably shouldn't even be allowed to vote. It's shameful. Despite being exposed to American history classes in elementary school, high school, and college, all that stuck with me was the high points. In my defense, I'm pretty sure all I was exposed to in elementary and high school was the high points. I can't even remember my one American history class in college (except that I took it in summer school).

This book taught me so much and proved to be so interesting that I am inspired to read more history-related books instead of a steady diet of escapist literature. Before I read it, I only know that Hamilton was one of the "important guys" at the start and that he was not one of the presidents. I'm not sure if I even remembered that he was the first Secretary of the Treasury. I certainly did not know that he was responsible for most of the framework of our national financial system and was second only to George Washington is assuring the survival of the new country.

Hamilton's life story sounds like a Dickens' novel. His parents were never married, so he was accounted a bastard. His father deserted the family. His mother died. The relative who assumed guardianship soon committed suicide. He was then sheltered by a well-to-do merchant, who may or may not have been his biological father. He was largely self-educated. When he left his boyhood home of St. Croix in the West Indies and came to America, his writing skill and genius at organization soon earned him a place of prominence among the adherents of revolution. And all that happened before he was 21.

Hamilton died at age 49, killed by Aaron Burr in a duel. (That's the only other thing I knew about him before this book.) In between the accounts of his youth and his death, Rom Chernow provides a comprehensive overview of the founding of a new nation. I found out so many things I did not know about my country. For example:

*I did not know that friction between the northern states and southern states was present from the very beginning.
*I did not know that, even then, slavery was a major issue.
*I did not know how close the new country came to falling apart.
*I did not know that "fake news" was an issue back then. (People actually read newspapers and pamphlets, some of which contained downright fabrications.)
*I did not know what a conniving and hypocritical SOB Thomas Jefferson was. (At least from Chernow's point of view. Next up for me will be a biography of Jefferson from another author.)
*I did not know that Hamilton was involved in the nation's first governmental sex scandal. (When he was called out, Hamilton admitted everything rather than lying about it.)

All of that is only a fraction of what I learned.

Chernow supports all his assertions with primary sources. This is definitely a scholarly history, but it is so skillfully woven together that it reads like fiction. Of course it helps that Hamilton's life story and the events that brought together a new nation were almost too unlikely to be believable.

This history makes events in the here and now more understandable. Hamilton was a believer in strong central government powers, and Jefferson believed that most power should rest with the individual states. That debate still rages on.