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On Growing Up, Summer and Secrets
I know a Good Story / April 30, 2015

Adolescent friendships are unique: The close friends we make as children almost become part of our family, watched over equally by supervising parents, teased or ignored by resident siblings.  Glad to be included, they become part of the whole and accept conditions without thought or judgement.  On the other hand, our adult friends find us as self-sufficient beings, with loosened family ties.  Only the friends of our adolescent years perceive the context of our family’s past and the adults we will become. More observant than young children, they witness the stresses in these families they know and, being teenagers, they sometimes judge, although they rarely blab about what they learn.  Self-conscious and plagued by hormones, most teenagers prefer to keep secrets. These are the undercurrent themes of Bittersweet, Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s new novel about identity and lies.  Mabel Dagmar is her narrator, a working-class girl dependent on  scholarships for her college education and the opposite of her roommate Genevra Winslow, the assured descendent of a wealthy, Eastern family.  To Mabel, the Winslows exist in rarefied existence of Ivy League schools, named summer cottages and the kind of confidence that only comes from generations of independent wealth and she joins Ginevra for…

The Lessons of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler
I know a Good Story / April 26, 2015

Every adult who was once a kid reader has some books tucked away in his/her soul.  These stories are usually hidden quite well but they still guide the adult.  The history professor won’t talk about the book of ghost stories that got his attention in grade school but it stimulated his first interest in the past.  The attorney may speak of hornbooks and precedents instead of the copy of Katie John that stayed with her through fourth grade but the fictional heroine is still there.  And the old woman dozing in nursing home’s day room listens as child read about Pooh and Piglet and reacquaints herself with the citizens of Hundred Acre Wood who led her to a lifetime of reading.  The books we love as children incorporate themselves into our being and we carry their ideas with us through life.  I realized that today when I found an old friend, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  Decades had lapsed since I last read the story but I wasn’t just seeing something familiar.  I found the lessons I’ve been living by for years. A little background:  Claudia Kincaid makes the ultra-sensible decision to run away from home,…

There’s a story that needs to be told

Me, I’m a fool for history.  Show me a place where something really happened and tell me the story so I can see it in my mind and I’ll be your friend forever, even if the story is sad.  So much has happened where I live that I’ve always got plenty to read but there’s one bit of regional history that I haven’t found captured in books.  It’s time someone wrote about the Rhythm Club Fire. It happened seventy-five years ago today, in Natchez, Mississippi.  Natchez was a medium-sized county seat then of about fifteen thousand people, sixty percent of whom were African-American.  Because this was during the cruel and moronic Jim Crow period, the town was effectively split along racial lines and white and black people co-existed with a minimum of interaction.  The divide was so deep, I’ll bet that almost half of Natchez had no idea their town was known as a place for great music. A few years before, a group of African-American entrepreneurs (self named, The Money-Wasters Social Club) had turned a long narrow building in the business section of town into a nightspot called The Rhythm Club.  The place may not have looked like much…

To Breathe the Air of Books

I have a condition I think of as “The Book Bug.”  Whenever I approach a large collection of books  or I get my hands on a new one, my pulse jumps, my heartbeat quickens and I seem to get  a slight fever.  I’ve had the condition for decades.  It hit me as a kid whenever Scholastic Books distributed their lists of new paperbacks and I was allowed to purchase two. (My attempts to increase the order provided early lessons in negotiation and the Bug returned when the books were delivered.)  The air around books is rarefied to me and I’ve been known to get a book rush when I enter a big library, a good book store or a list of new book reviews.  I’ll probably need a defibrillator if I ever visit the Library of Congress.  Up till now, I’ve assumed I’m the only one with this silly malady and I’ve been too embarrassed to admit it. Thanks to My Reading Life, I now know it’s a condition I share with the writer, Pat Conroy. Conroy is, of course, one of the novelists whose stories are a combination of  imagination and autobiography and he is the first to admit…

A Sabbatical on Duma Key
I know a Good Story / April 19, 2015

It’s easy to get lost in a good book.  Not every book has this power but some stories can pull you in like the undertow and as long as the book continues, your consciousness is split between your familiar world and the narrative of the story, where you live fully and completely in its pages.  I love getting sucked into a story but, between you and me, it’s painful when it happens because I always finish these books with a sense of bereavement.  The consciousness I’ve been tuned into since the early pages slips away with the ending and leaves me back in this existence, a bit breathless and diminished by the loss.  It takes a while to get used to this life again.  So, be warned if you pick up a copy of Duma Key: despite the loss, evil and horror in its pages, you won’t want this story to end. It’s the confession of Edgar Freemantle, a man learning some Americans have more than one act in their lives.  The first act of his ended when a work accident stole his arm, the ability to communicate and, in the end, his marriage.  Stuck and unhappy, Edgar decides to…