A Miracle of Catfish

By Larry Brown

First a word about the author and this book. The book was published posthumously, as Larry Brown died before the book was finished. It was decided to publish the book anyway, with the author's brief notes about the ending chapters.
I was not familiar with this author's works so didn't know what to expect from it. I must say I really enjoyed reading this book to as far as it went, which was not to any kind of conclusion. The characters are interesting and varied and engaging. A mystery is hinted at concerning one of the main characters, an old farmer named Cortez Sharp. As the novel moves along, you discover that Cortez is a man of mixed motives, often times cruel and cold and rather repellent. Yet, somehow, one cares about him and about the new pond he had just had stocked with thousands of baby catfish. And about the other persons in the story, Jimmy, a little boy, and his sad, angry family that live in a trailer near the old farmer's place, and the old man's daughter, a plus size model who lives with her boyfriend, an artist who has Tourettes.
One thing I didn't like about the story was the author's love for lists. He just loves making long lists which are a pain to read. One of the worse was his description of all the stuff for sale at a big flea market: "...guns, chickens, chicken cages, chicken grit, pottery, tractors, toys, ponies, mules, donkeys, burros, horses, dogs, quilts, homemade jellies and jams and preserves, ribbon cane syrup, tomato relish to put on your peas, cookware of all types, including rusty castiron skillets and dutch ovens, candles, musical instruments, ironwork, new tools, old tools, trailers, antiques of every kind, furniture, knick-knacks, rabbits, rabbit cages, rabbit feed, rabbit feeders, rabbit waterers, frozen pen-raised quail, fishing equipment, tillers, lawn mowers, chain saws, stump grinders, portable sheds, portable water pumps..." And the list goes on and on. Too much for me!
Anyway, although I enjoyed the story, the fact that it is unfinished was off-putting. If you are a huge fan of Larry Brown, you probably won't be bothered by this. If not, you might want to give this one a skip.

Review by Mary McCoy on Pop Matters:   https://www.popmatters.com/a-miracle-of-catfish-by-larry-brown-2496217813.html.

The Old Man and the Sea

By Ernest Hemingway

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953.

Santiago is having a string of bad luck. In all his many years, only once has he gone this long without catching a fish, 84 days. So he decides to take his boat out farther than most fishermen go and try to catch a really big fish. If he is successful, he will make enough money to live off of all winter.
So off he goes to catch his big fish and he does hook a big one. This is one monster marlin, maybe 18 feet long, longer than Santiago's little fishing boat. He fights to keep the marlin on the line, keep the fish from breaking the line and getting away. It is a battle that goes on for several days and nights, with the fish towing the fisherman further and further out to sea. Santiago suffers terribly in the battle, but he is determined he will have that beautiful fish. Finally he manages to harpoon the marlin and he ties the huge fish to the side of his boat because it is just too huge and too heavy for him to haul it in. He hoists his sail and heads back home, tired and worn out. But then the sharks show up...
I didn't want to read this story. I was afraid it would be too butch for me. I don't like fish and I don't like fishing and I especially don't like stories about fishing. In fact, I checked the book out and it sat around and I finally had to take it back without reading it. So I checked it out again and decided I would just sit down and plunge in. To my surprise, I read the book in one sitting. It really is an engrossing and surprising read, although a bit of a morality tale, which I don't generally care for. If this is Hemingway, then maybe I will try reading more of his works. (Probably not.)

Review by The Guardian.

Catch-22

By Joseph Heller

Bombardier Yossarian has a problem...people are trying to kill him! He is determined that they will not succeed. Who is trying to kill him? The Germans and the US Army.
Yossarian is a bombardier flying out of a small island off the coast of Italy during World War II. He has flown the maximum allowable number of combat missions several times and should have been sent home months ago. But every time he gets close to reaching the maximum number, his superiors increase the number. They want to earn brownie points with the big brass, even if it means sacrificing their troops. But Yossarian knows he can't continue to cheat death and so he flatly refuses to fly any more missions. He is determined to get out of the war alive.

This is a kind of hard novel to read. The story jumps around a lot, from the past to the present and sometimes it is rather hard to follow. Also, it is filled with a kind of double talk, where just accusing someone of doing something wrong is as good as a conviction. A sample of the sort of double talk the novel is filled with:

"I'm sorry, sir. But I don't know how to answer it. I never said you couldn't punish me."
"Now you're telling us when you did say it. I'm asking you to tell us when you didn't say it."
Clevinger took a deep breath. "I always didn't say you couldn't punish me."

This kind of nonsense is the basis of most of the humor found in the novel, if you can call it humor. Mostly, I would say the perspective of the book is like this, to quote from the book:

'Nothing warped seemed bizarre any more in his strange, distorted surroundings. The tops of the sheer buildings slanted in a weird, surrealistic perspective, and the street seemed tilted.'

Which pretty much describes the book: warped, bizarre, strange, distorted, weird and surrealistic.
Did I like this story? Yes and no. As much as it is hard to follow and as much as the twisted perspective is rather irritating and oft times frankly unbelievable, still, somehow, this book tells the truth about us. And it is unforgettable.

A Border Passage

By Leila Ahmed

This is a memoir of Muslim woman, Leila Ahmed, about growing up in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s. I really enjoyed reading about Leila's early life in Egypt and I was frankly astonished at the commonalities we shared as girls of a similar era, even though we lived in two far distant cultures, she in Egypt and I in the USA. She grew up reading and speaking and being educated in English, attending school run by the British until the troubles that forced the British out of Egypt. We played similar games, enjoyed similar friendships, family outings, sports: she did things that I had never pictured an Islamic female doing.
But still, she acknowledges that her culture is one that is hostile to and dangerous to women and that life as an Islamic woman is one of restrictions and limitations for most women. She escaped these restrictions by moving first to Britain then ultimately to America.
I was struck by how angry she is at the racism she faced upon coming to Britain. She mentions how she was spit on when riding on a bus by a fellow passenger when he realized she was not Israeli but was Egyptian. Her resentment of being classified as "colored" and therefore less human than whites appears throughout the book. But this is completely understandable.
She goes into some detail on the transition of Egypt from being Egyptian (as she was raised to think of herself) to being Arab and part of the whole Middle Eastern situation and not really African anymore. She also, towards the end of the book, traces Egypt's transformation from support of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine to being totally against the new country of Israel. This part was particularly surprising for me for I didn't know of Egypt's early support for the Jews. She also discusses how this change from pro to anti-Jew has changed Egypt's formerly tolerant pluralistic & multicultural society to an Islamic-only society where non-Islamics are openly hated and persecuted. It is a story well worth reading.

The Caine Mutiny

By Herman Wouk

Winner of Pulitzer Prize in fiction for 1952.

This story centers on young Willie Keith who enlists in the Navy because he doesn't want to end up in the Army. Willie is a dilettante. A smart, well-educated man from a background of wealth and privilege, Willie prefers to spend his time playing piano in seedy New York night clubs than hold down a real job. But with the war, Willie has to face the facts that he could be drafted and end up in the Army. To escape that fate, he joins the Navy. His first assignment is at headquarters on Hawaii, a cushy, easy job that enables Willie to take up, once again, playing piano and amusing the local admiral. But then the fun ends and Willie is assigned to a minesweeper, an old World War I battleship called the Caine.
The Caine is pretty much a rust bucket and on its last legs but the Navy still has some use for the old battleship. Whether it is hauling targets for practice shots, providing escort service, moving troops around, or minesweeping, the old ship has a vital role to play in the war. Willie is not to happy with his new assignment and he especially doesn't approve of the ship's captain whom he regards as lax and sloppy and on whom he blames the dilapidated condition of the vessel and the ragtag appearance of the crew.
So when the captain is assigned to a new post, Willie is pleased to see the new captain, Queeg, believes in running a tight ship. But as time passes and the new captain seems less than competent, some of the crew begin to believe their captain is not playing with a full deck.
I am not a fan of war stories but this is not really a war story. It is more a study of bad leader and the effect of his poor decisions upon the people who depended on his leadership. It is kind of a long story, but very readable. An interesting side note to the story is the on again, off again romance between Willie and a young night club singer from the wrong side of the tracks (as Willie's mom sees it).

This is another time and another place and people then were perhaps not as aware of mental illness as most people are today. They were too quick to label Queeg as mentally ill when he was probably just stupid, cowardly, nitpicking and rigid. Even at the point where the mutiny occurred, Queeg was not raving or irrational. At most, one could say he was petrified with fear as the ship faced raging seas during a typhoon. I guess the worse one could say about Queeg was that he was incompetent and one wonders how such a poor seaman rose to the position of captain.
This is an interesting and engaging story and a fascinating picture of life on a Navy ship and is well worth reading.

Review from Kirkus Reviews.

Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy

By Shlomo Ben-Ami

This is a look at the history of the Arab Israeli conflict starting with the early days before the Zionists had managed to make a state of Israel. Right from the start both sides refused to consider their opponents views as valid. To the Arabs, the Israelis are Zionist, western crusaders and invaders who have taken over what is rightfully Arab territory. To the Israelis the Arabs are backward, religious fanatics who refuse to accept the reality of the state of Israel.
The state of Israel was founded by the United Nations in 1947. The Israelis immediately found themselves under seige by their Arab neighbors who had voted against the formation of Israel and who refused to accept the presence of the Jews on Arab land, i.e., Palestine. The Israelis held on to the land and even expanded the borders beyond that stated for them in 1947. Then in the Six Day War in 1967, they acquired even more territory, including the jewel in their crown, Jerusalem.
What do the Israelis want? They want security. They want to survive. And they want the holy places that are mentioned in their holy writings. They especially want Jerusalem. What do the Arabs and Palestinians want? Well, what they really want is for the Jews to get out of the Middle East and go back where they came from. But Israel is staying put. So, what do the Arabs want if they can't get rid of Israel? They want a state for the Palestinians, a place where they can live in safety and security on their traditional homelands. They also want the right to bring back the Palestinian refuges who fled during the wars, about 5,000,000 people. And they want Jerusalem.
Back in 2000, President Clinton and his team put together the best compromise that was workable for both sides. Israel was willing to accept the terms, even to sharing Jerusalem with the Palestinians and accepting Palestinian statehood. But Arafat could not accept them. He knew if he went back to his people and told them they would have to share Jerusalem, that Israel would not go back to the 1947 borders and that the refugees would not have the right to return that his ass would be grass and that civil war would be likely between the more moderate & practical Palestinians and the Islamics like Hamas and Jihad. Since then, Israel has built themselves a safety barrier to try to stop the Palestinian terrorist attacks. The Palestinians are in a state of chaos as Hamas and Fatah wrangle over who is going to lead their people. And it is still a huge mess. But as Ben-Ami points out, if responsible and brave leaders would be willing to sit down and work out a compromise, then there is still hope.
Ben-Ami takes a close look at the process of trying to bring about peace between Israel, its neighbors and the Palestinians. He shows where leadership failed on both sides, not only because of mistakes and miscalculations, but also because the respective populations of both sides would not accept the compromises required for peace.
In the last chapter of the book, Ben-Ami reccommends that an international effort must be made and a protectorate set up in the Palestinian territory that will give them the peace, security and stability that is so desperately needed in the Middle East.

Review by Ian Black from The Guardian:    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/feb/11/highereducation.news.

The Awakening Land

By Conrad Richter

The Awakening Land is the name given to a trilogy of novels written by Richter, The Trees, The Fields, and The Town. The Town won the Pulitzer Prize for 1951.
The novels follow Sayward Luckett and her family as settlers in the then wilderness of the Ohio valley, an area of deep, immense forest. In the first novel, The Trees, the Lucketts build themselves a cabin in a forest so dense and tall that the forest floor rarely gets any direct sunlight. They survive mainly on the game that abounds in the area. The forest is filled with giant trees, trees that have never been logged or known the effects of forest fires. These huge trees become the enemy of the people trying to settle there, trying to clear them away to make room for fields and pastures.
Worth, the patriarch of the family, isn't really a farmer. He's a hunter, a woodsman and loves to be out on the prowl, exploring new territory. After his wife dies and after his young daughter Sulie is lost forever in the forest, he becomes tired of the responsibility of taking care of his children and he just walks off into the forest, leaving his kids to be raised by his daughter, Sayward.
She does the best she can, but her brothers and sisters often don't acknowledge her authority and the family suffers for it. Her brother Wyitt follows in his father's footsteps into the wilderness. Her sister Genny marries a lowlife and her other sister Achsa runs off with him.
Through it all, Sayward stays strong. She hopes for the best for her siblings but accepts the fact that they have to live their own lives and make their own mistakes.
In The Fields, Sayward is married and has a family of her own. She and her husband, Portius Wheeler, live in the Luckett family's original cabin. With their own two hands, they cut the big trees and cleared fields to grow crops and raise livestock. Portius is an educated man and a lawyer and their children are taught to read and write. However, most of the money earned is produced through Sayward's farm and from her land. Life is still very hard and requires massive amounts of sheer labor just to survive.
The last book, The Town switches focus from Sayward to her youngest child, an ailing boy named Chancey. A town has grown up on Sayward's land and as the largest landowner in the area, Sayward has become wealthy. Portius even insisted on building them a large, new house although Sayward wanted to stay in the little Luckett cabin that she had lived in for so many years.
Chancey suffered from a rheumatic fever as a tot and had a weak heart as a result. In their fear for his health, his parents restricted his activity severely and he spent most of his days just quietly sitting and dreaming. When a doctor recommends to Sayward that Chancey start to take some exercise, Chancey finds his quiet world turned upside down, much to his displeasure. He has become so accustomed to think of himself as an invalid that his mother's insistence that he get off his stool convinces him that she doesn't care about him. He decides that Sayward and Portius are not his real parents and he invents a long lost family for himself, a family who will love and pamper and cater to him.

These three books are a wonderful look back at an era that is hard to envision now. What suffering they endured and what back-breaking labor! These books are almost as good as a trip back in time. They really immerse the reader in the culture and life of the people of that time and place and their language where cougars are called "painters" and wolves are "night dogs." It is hard, though, to read of the destruction of that grand old forest that used to cover so much of the eastern United States and of the destruction of the wildlife that dwelt in those shaded, ferny depths.
When I first started to read The Trees I immediately recognized the name Sayward Luckett. I remembered her from the miniseries starring Elizabeth Montgomery as Sayward and Hal Holbrook as Portius which aired in 1978. It must have made quite an impression on me that I could still remember the name and I can picture Elizabeth's face even now. I remember at the end of the show, when Sayward was an old woman, the people going and getting little trees from the forest to plant in their town at Sayward's instigation. For by then she had stopped hating the trees and had begun to appreciate how much trees add to the landscape. Ain't it the truth, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."

The Dead Beat

By Marilyn Johnson

An interesting look at the obituary, written by a fan of the art of writing obituaries.
Who hasn't read an obituary? Reading the lives of strangers in an idle moment, or reading about a headline maker who has recently died? Or reading the obituary of someone you knew and loved. It's something virtually everyone has or will do at sometime or another. Apparently it is something that a lot of people like to do regularly. They are connoisseurs of the obits. They even have their own newsgroup: alt.obituaries.
Marilyn Johnson is one such connoisseur. She has not only written many obituaries, but she makes a point of searching out and reading the fascinating and striking little histories of those passing out of time and into eternity. She loves obituaries and this book displays her love of this special and unsung form of reporting. Well worth reading even if you aren't one who is normally given to perusing the obit page.

Review by Simon Garfield from The Guardian:     https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/19/biography.features1.

The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club

By Laurie Notaro

Laurie Notaro is a humor columnist from the Phoenix, Arizona area. I was not familiar with her work till I read this book. She writes a pretty funny story if you don't mind that most of her humor is based on her escapades while being three sheets to the wind.
As I was reading these stories, I couldn't help but think that Laurie Notaro is either an alcoholic or well on her way to being one. The things she writes about were very similar to what I had read in the writings of admitted alcoholic, Augusten Burroughs. The difference is that Burroughs became aware that alcohol was ruining his life, while Notaro still seems to believe that alcohol is just a good way to have fun.
This attitude bothered me. I hope that she has matured since then and now realizes that alcohol is best enjoyed in moderation and that getting drunk off your ass is never a good idea. Not even when you are young and foolish.
The "idiot girls" mentioned in the title are only dealt with very briefly, the stories mostly center on the author herself.

If you enjoy stories about stupid young women getting even more stupid abusing liquor, then you'll probably like this book. As for me, I just hope that Laurie Notaro is now clean and sober. Living life as a drunk is no life at all.

Review from Publishers Weekly:    https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-375-76091-4.

What's So Funny?

By Donald Westlake

John Dortmunder is one of life's failures. First off he is a career criminal. Secondly he is cursed with bad luck. It's too bad, because he is pretty good at what he does: he's a burglar. If it weren't for his bad luck, he would be a wealthy man. As I have followed his dubious career as told in the Dortmunder novels, I have seen him come so close to the big score only to have it all slip through his fingers, usually do to some unexpected twist of fate.
In What's So Funny, Dortmunder and gang have the opportunity to steal an extremely valuable gold and jeweled chess set that had been originally made for the last czar of Russia. But the revolution ended the czar and the chess set ended up in a warehouse where it was discovered by a group of American soldiers during World War I. They smuggled the chess set back to the USA only to have it stolen by one of their confederates.
At the start of the story, the descendants of one of the soldiers, Mr. Hemlow and his granddaughter, have finally tracked the chess set down and they come to Dortmunder to get him to grab it for them. But the chess set is being fought over by the thieving soldier's descendants and has been locked in a very secure bank vault pending litigation. Dortmunder knows he can't bust into a bank vault, but Johnny Eppick, the ex-cop who is working for Mr. Hemlow, has compromising photos of Dortmunder pulling a heist, and Dortmunder is forced to do the impossible.
Helped by his usual pals, Andy the lock man, Stan the driver, Tiny the muscle and others, Dortmunder comes up with a brilliant plan. Breaking into the bank vault is out. But what if he can arrange for the chess set to be brought out of the vault? This is a surefire, can't fail plan...or will another fortune slip through Dortmunder's sticky fingers?

I enjoyed this novel, just like I have enjoyed the previous Dortmunder stories. If you are a fan of the series, you won't be disappointed in this new installment. But I keep hoping that one day Dortmunder will finally pull off the fabulous score that will set him and his gal May and the rest of the gang up for life. But knowing poor, doomed Dortmunder...

Review from Curled Up with a Good Book:    http://www.curledup.com/whsofuny.htm.

The Way West

By Alfred B. Guthrie, Jr.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 1950.

This is the story of a wagon train headed west on the Oregon Trail in 1846, starting off in Independence, Missouri and headed for the Columbia River and Fort Vancouver in the Oregon Territory. This is story of hardy pioneers, determined to reach their goal, despite hardship, accidents, sickness and death. People do die on the trail, one to fever, one to snakebite and one to premature birth. But the pioneers keep on trucking, looking for the gold at the end of the rainbow. At one point, the wagon train splits apart, as one group decides to head for California as they have heard the trail is easier than the one to Oregon. The pilot of the train, Dick Summers, is an old mountain man, trail wise and eager to get away from civilization and farming and back to his roots. His great wisdom and sound advice are the key to the success of the effort as he guides the pioneers through treacherous river crossings, across burning deserts, and on steep, nearly impassible mountain tracks. It's a pretty good story, engrossing and easy to read.
This novel was made into a movie in 1967 starring Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark and Sally Field.
A word about the way the native peoples are portrayed in this book. Guthrie doesn't have a much sympathy for the people who will end up being pushed off the land by his doughty settlers. He most often describes them as dirty, smelly, naked, thieving, lousy and shiftless, with their hands out for whatever they can beg or steal from the settlers passing through their country. At one point, one of the characters is describing an Indian cemetery, saying, "You'll never set your eye on more good Injuns than right there," meaning all the dead Indians. I wouldn't call it an even handed or fair portrait but certainly typical of the times in which it was written.

Review by The Pulitzer Project.

Tales of the South Pacific

By James A. Michener

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 1948

This is a collection of related fiction stories about the Pacific Theater of World War II. It stretches in time from about 1942 to 1944. It follows the adventures of the narrator of the stories, a Navy officer. To quote from a defunct web page from MiraCosta College, "Nineteen interwoven stories about World War II in the South Pacific are told by a serviceman who, from 1941-1943, island hopped from Tulagi to Tarawa to Bougainville and places in between. He tells of Joe Cable, for example, who falls madly in love with Liat, a Tonkinese woman of color. Nellie Forbush, a young nurse from the American South, has to deal with her feelings for a French planter, Emile De Becque, who has fathered many children with various island women. Luther Billis, covered with many tattoos and jewelry, works his way around the islands finding and providing what is wanted and needed—including shrunken heads. And Tony Fry, who seems to be everywhere, tries to make Christmas a memorable day by flying from island to island, scrounging out whiskey from what appears to be the whole South Pacific. These adventures all take place as Seebees, Navy, and Marines prepare for a massive assault on the island of Kuralei, a step away from Guadalcanal. The novel touches on war, love, race, gender, friendship, values, and understanding."
Some of the stories were pretty good, especially "A Boar's Tooth" about pig tusk bracelets and the ceremonial sacrifice of several pigs by the local people. The next to the last story, "The Landing on Kuralei", puts the reader into the thick of the assault on the fictional island of Kuralei.

Generally speaking, I am not a one who enjoys reading war stories (or even short stories). This is not to say that I don't appreciate the sacrifices made to protect the world from overbearing bullies like Hitler and Hirohito. Like I said before some of the stories were good, some OK. There is quite a bit of racism in the book that makes one realize how much things have changed since then.
If you like war memoirs, you'll probably enjoy this collection of stories.

Review by Kata Chimes In.

Nature Girl

By Carl Hiaasen

This books starts off wrong and keeps going wrong. At the start, a young Seminole is taking a man on a tour through the swamp. Somehow a snake falls on the man and he dies of a heart attack. So instead of reporting it to the authorities, he takes the man's body and sinks it in the ocean. So right off, the book makes no sense.
The main character, Honey Santana, is a nutcase. She hears music that isn't there and she has an over-developed sense of right and wrong that keeps landing her in trouble as she charges about on one-woman crusades to make the world safe for her son, Fry. She is supposed to be on medication but she doesn't take it and then lies about it. This headcase has custody of Fry which makes no sense. I wouldn't want this woman in charge of a baby turtle, much less a human child.
One evening, Honey gets a call from a telemarketer, Boyd Shreave. She gets upset at him because the guy calls right at the supper hour and he responds rudely. So she concocts a plan to lure this guy to Florida and teach him a lesson.
He takes the bait and travels to Florida with his lover, Eugenie Fonda, a woman with a dubious past. Honey takes Boyd and Eugenie on a camping trip in the swamp.
Meanwhile, the Seminole, Sammy Tigertail, is being haunted by the guy he dumped in the ocean. The dead man is unhappy and complains about being nibbled on by crabs and fish. To clear his head, Sammy too goes camping in the swamp. He also has a guilty conscience, and fears the cops are after him to question him about the man's disappearance. Somehow Sammy ends up sort of kidnapping a college girl who was in the area with some friends. That part of the plot didn't make any sense to me. If Sammy is trying to hide out and avoid trouble, why would he saddle himself with this loopy girl? (Just like Honey, this girl seems to live in a world of her own creation.)
Also in the swamp is a detective hired by Boyd's wife to get the goods on her errant husband. And Honey's horny ex-boss is there too, chasing after Honey. He tried to cop a feel and ended up with his fingers bitten off by crabs set on him by Honey's ex, who is still very protective of her. Another bit of stupidity in the book has the surgeon operating to reattach the digits during a power shortage and the ex-boss ends up with his pinky where his thumb should be and his thumb where a finger should be. This premise stretches credibility too far for me. No surgeon would do that, I pretty sure.
Somehow all these people, including Honey's ex and her son, Fry, end up on the same little island. Another point in the story that made no sense to me: Fry gets hurt and has a concussion and busted ribs. His father, instead of placing Fry with some responsible person to look after him, hauls him out in a boat into the swamp looking for Honey. This is just nuts. No responsible father would do that to a child suffering from a concussion and broken ribs. Anyways, people get hurt, people die, and Boyd remains a conceited ass.

Usually I really enjoy Hiaasen's stories but this one just had too many illogical events and too many coincidences. I didn't like the main character, Honey, because she is portrayed as a loving mom, but still endangers her child by refusing to take the medication that keeps her from losing touch with reality. That doesn't make her a good mom, that makes her a selfish and careless mom. Neither Honey or her ex-husband seemed to act like real parents. I just found a lot of the story unbelievable and too unrealistic and finally, uninteresting.

Review by W.R. Greer on Reviews of Books. com:   http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/nature_girl/review/.

Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature

By Linda Lear

A new biography of the children's author and artist, Beatrix Potter.
Helen Beatrix Potter was born in a wealthy family in the Britain in 1866. Growing up, she was avidly interested in nature and spent many hours studying and drawing plants, animals, mushrooms, and fossils. She was especially fond of rural England and hated every minute she had to spend in London with her parents. Her parents wanted Beatrix to marry well and become a part of high society. But Beatrix was never interested in that. Her heart belonged to the country life, farming, gardening, raising sheep and livestock; these are the things she valued. Society and city life never held any attraction for her. But as the dutiful daughter of Victorian era parents, her choices were really limited. In a different time, she might has followed her interests into a career as a scientist, but instead she spent most of her time in attendance on her parents.
She used to amuse herself & her friends and children friends with little tales and drawings she wrote in letters. Eventually she worked one of these tales into a little book for kids and tried to find a publisher. The book was The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published in 1902. The book did well and Potter was on her way to financial independence with the subsequent publishing of many more of her little tales.
With the royalties pouring in, Beatrix started to take her first steps away from the life she hated in London, tied to her parents. She bought herself a sheep farm, Hill Top Farm, in England's beautiful lake district. This was the start of her lifelong quest to preserve and protect not only a landscape but a way of life, sheep farming on the fells of the lake district.
Beatrix married late in life at age 47 to William Heelis, a solicitor who lived in the Lake District. They never had children. Throughout their life together, she and William continued to buy property in the district, setting aside quaint old cottages and farms to protect them from the development that was just starting to affect the beautiful landscape of the Lake District. Many farms were being sold and broken up into lots for housing and Beatrix and William wanted to protect a way of life and a landscape that was in danger of disappearing.
Beatrix died in 1943 and William followed her a year and a half latter. Their property, comprising about 4000 acres, went to the National Trust and is now encompassed within Lake District National Park.
In the latter years of her life, Beatrix became less interested in writing and drawing and totally immersed in being the owner and manager of her many acres. She confessed she was puzzled by the abiding popularity of Peter Rabbit and often complained she was sick of drawing and writing about rabbits. But Peter Rabbit was her passport to freedom and independence and the story has become one of the best known children's' stories ever written.

If you were ever a fan of Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle or any of the many animal characters Beatrix invented, then you might be interested in this illuminating biography of the famous artist and author, Beatrix Potter.

Review from Publishers Weekly:    https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-312-36934-7.

Journey in the Dark

By Martin Flavin

Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction, 1947.

Sam Braden grew up poor. When he was a little boy, he desperately wanted a cool, new sled. He couldn't understand why the other kids got to have nice sleds and he couldn't until his sister explained that they were poor and didn't have the money to buy stuff like new sleds.
Sam's whole life was defined by a single incident. One day he was delivering a package to a rich client of his mother's. (His mother was a seamstress.) He took the package to the front door of the house and the rich old guy who lived there yelled at him and told to take it around to the back door. On his way there, Sam tripped and fell down, right in front of Eileen, the little girl he had a secret crush on. Poor Sam felt humiliated. He made up his mind that he wasn't going to be poor for the rest of his life.
When he became a young teen, he quit high school to go to work. His mother died and the loss of the income she brought in with her sewing was really hard on the family so Sam got a job as a clerk in a store. But he knew this is a dead end job that will never amount to anything. He studied telegraphy and got a job with the railroad. The money was a lot better but after awhile he found it boring and restrictive.
His next job was as a salesman for a paper company. This job lead him into a partnership with a man who made wallpaper. Sam did the sales and the man handled the factory. The business was going good, mostly thanks to Sam, who understood what the customers want. It got into trouble when the workers go out on strike. Sam's partner refused to negotiate with the strikers and he hired underage kids to work as scabs. One of the kids got killed in a accident in the factory and still the partner wouldn't negotiate. So Sam just chucked it and joined the military. (It's World War I.) With Sam gone, the business was too much for the partner and he had a stroke. Sam came back and started running the business the way he wanted and he prospered. Pretty soon he had factories all over the nation. He even married his crush from boyhood, Eileen. (The marriage didn't last long though.)
Sam wanted to buy his partner out but offered him only $50,000. This was a very low offer, but what could the partner do? He was left incapacitated by the stroke and unable to run the business himself. The partner died and his wife agreed to accept the $50,000.
Sam got married again and he and his wife had a son, Hathaway. Sam took the wallpaper company public. He made a fortune and unloaded all his stock shortly before the big stock market crash of 1929. He moved back to his home town where he opened a bank and built himself a big house on a huge estate, 2000 acres.
Sam is the very picture of the successful man. He doesn't ever have to be that little poor boy ever again. Or is he? Why is his son estranged from him? Why does Hathaway urge his mother to leave Sam? Why does Sam feel that he has no real friends? He is pretty sure most of the people in town hate him. Are they just jealous? Or is there something more going on?
This novel is told in kind of an odd style, with some chapters starting with a conclusion then filling in the rest of the story. Like Chapter III, which starts out, "Sam was fifteen when his mother died." Then it proceeds to tell about that summer before she died. The author uses this device several times: Chapter IV ends with Sam at fourteen and then Chapter V starts out, "It took Sam nearly twenty years to acquire his first million."
It's kind of a strange and disconcerting way to tell a story.
So I guess the moral of the story is that money isn't as important as family and friends and being a good, kind person. This is true. But money is very, very nice.

Review from Kirkus Reviews.

The Haunted Omnibus

Edited by Alexander Laing

Well, this is just a dandy book of horror stories and ghost stories published in 1937. It has a lot of the old classic stories: "The Yellow Wall Paper", "Perez", "The Wendigo" ("Oh,oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!"), "The Monkey's Paw", "The Beast with Five Fingers", "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", and "The Tell-Tale Heart" along with many others.
I first read the above-mentioned stories in school so I guess they must have been considered literature. I wonder if students now days are given these stories to read? If so, they probably find them rather tame compared to the gruesome slasher movies that are so popular today.
I enjoyed reading this collection of stories and since it is a long book, about 800 pages, I was enveloped by a solemn and gloomy atmosphere for more than a week, which was rather fun. A couple of the stories are quite amusing, namely, "The Ghost Ship" and "Green Thoughts". In "Ghost Ship" a ghost ship (naturally) gets blown into a town that has a lot of ghosts and ends up corrupting the local ghosts with its supply of excellent ghost rum, much to the disapproval of the town elders. In "Green Thoughts" a fussy old man and his old maid companion get eaten by a rare orchid the man raises in his green house, along with the cat and a mouse. They find themselves reconstituted in the carnivorous orchid as huge blossoms that look just like them.
It really is a marvelous collection of not so scary stories and it was fun revisiting those old stories from my childhood. (Of course, they were a lot scarier back then!)

Sister Carrie

By Theodore Dreiser

This novel, published in 1900, is the story of a young, naive girl from a small town who moves to Chicago to make her way in the world. Carrie (she is called Sister Carrie by her family) moves in with her older sister and her family and looks for work in the big city. Too bad for her that she has no skills and no experience. The only job she can find is in a factory, and it is exhausting and boring work and Carrie finds her fellow workers crude and unruly. She sticks it out but soon becomes ill and loses the job. She decides to move back home but doesn't have enough money for the train ticket and she doesn't want to ask her sister. She happens to run into a man that she had met on the train on her way to Chicago and they go out to eat. The man, Drouet, is a traveling salesman and a bit of a ladies man and he talks Carrie into moving into a little apartment with him. Somehow, Carrie forgets all her scruples and moves in with this man. (I found that part rather unbelievable, that this nice girl would set up house with a virtual stranger.) Carrie doesn't love Drouet, but he buys her nice clothes and things.
Drouet introduces Carrie to a friend of his, Hurstwood, who falls for Carrie.
Drouet has to go back on the road for a few weeks and in his absence, Hurstwood goes after Carrie. Carrie, in turn, is fascinated by Hurstwood, who she perceives as being of a much better class than Drouet. Hurstwood is the well paid manager of a resort.
Hurstwood is bored with his marriage and being with Carrie makes him feel young again (he's in his 40's). But Drouet finds out what has been going on and confronts Carrie. She admits she has been dating Hurstwood and that she has hopes he will marry her. Drouet informs Carrie that Hurstwood is already married and then he moves out. Carrie is enraged at Hurstwood's duplicity and breaks it off.
Poor Hurstwood is desperate to get her back. One night, as he is locking up at work, he discovers the bookkeeper didn't shut the safe before he left. Hurstwood finds $10,000 cash in the safe and takes it out. He thinks about taking the money and leaving town with Carrie and going to Canada. He realizes this would be a terrible mistake and thinks he'll put the money back. But then he accidentally (or not) shuts the safe and decides to burn his bridges behind him. He contacts Carrie and tricks her into getting on the train with him, heading to Canada.
When Carrie realizes she's been tricked she gets very angry. The only way Hurstwood can placate her is by promising to marry her. They get married under an assumed name in Canada and this makes Carrie happy, which means she must be the world's biggest dope. Anyways, they head off to New York.
Hurstwood regrets taking the money and contacts his former employer and makes arrangements to return the money. He keeps a little of it to start their new life together in New York City.
Things don't go well for Hurstwood. The business he invests in closes. He tries to find work but fails. Finally, they are down to their last $100. Carrie finds a job on a chorus line, and tired of Hurstwood's failure, moves in with another chorus girl. Hurstwood ends up on the street. Carrie goes on to a career in show biz.

This is not the most exciting story that was ever written. It was pretty slow going and I almost gave up on it about a third into it. I didn't find the characters believable, except for Drouet. Carrie didn't make any sense at all, changing from a good girl to a slut in the course of one afternoon. Hurstwood threw away everything chasing after Carrie, smitten by a pretty face and a nice figure. That wasn't too believable either, especially his theft of the $10,000.
When this book was first published, it was heavily edited to make it more acceptable. Even so, it was banned in some communities. But a new, unabridged version is now available, which may be more interesting than the 1900 edition.

If you want to read a funny review of this book, check out Bookslut.

A History of the Arab Peoples

By Albert Hourani

This is a long book, about 450 pages. Yet somehow, despite the lengthy text, it seemed rather short on the kind of details that can bring a culture to life on the written page. It was pretty dry reading and I would describe it as more of an overview of Arab history. It was published in 1991 so is a tiny bit dated, but I understand there is a new, updated second edition available published in 2003. The new section was written by someone else, as Hourani died in 1993.
Hourani was born in 1915 in England of Lebanese parents. His parents were Greek Orthodox and converted to Presbyterian but Hourani became Roman Catholic as an adult. He was a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford University and later became the Director of St. Antony's College Middle East Centre, Oxford University.
The book does not focus on personalities and instead describes demographic, economical, ideological and other processes. For example, Suleyman the Magnificent and Salah ad-Din are mentioned only fleetingly. Still, I suppose it is quite an outstanding work of scholarship, covering as it does a span of more than 1200 years. It is a good place to start if, like me, you are a little fuzzy on the history of a part of the world that seems to be in the news every day.

Review by Brandon Robshaw on the Independent:    http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/paperback-review-a-history-of-the-arab-peoples-by-albert-hourani-8458677.html.

Dragon's Teeth

By Upton Sinclair

This novel was published in 1942 and won the Pulitzer for Novels in 1943. It is the story of one man's experience with Nazism in Germany in the early 1930s.
Lanny Budd is a fortunate man. He has married a beautiful and very wealthy young woman. Her wealth is secure enough to withstand even the effects of the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting depression that blighted most of the 1930s. He has a brand new baby daughter and he is friends with the best of society, both in Europe and America. He need never work for a living, if he so chooses. Along with his wife, Irma, he travels around Europe, staying at this fancy hotel or in this stately mansion, playing music, attending plays, buying & selling the occasional art work, and fooling around with socialism. For Lanny Budd, living in affluence, is an ardent socialist. This bothers his wife, naturally, as the socialists would prefer that wealth be taken from people like Irma and redistributed to the working class.
Lanny and Irma, after the birth of their first child, are invited to travel on the yacht of the wealthy German Jew, Johannes Robin. Lanny's sister is married to Johannes' son, Hansi. Hansi and Bess are both strident communists, as is Hansi's brother Freddi, much to their parents' distress.
Lanny, through his political contacts, is aware that things are not good in Germany. He understands just how vile the Nazis are and tries to tell people to no avail. No one is willing to believe that the Nazis could possibly be that horrible. Lanny warns the Robin family to get out of Germany, but Johannes is sure that he can handle the situation there because he has so many German friends.
Things go from bad to worse in Germany and people are disappearing. Even Johannes finally begins to see that maybe it would be better to get away. He arranges a trip on his yacht, only to be arrested just as the Robin family is leaving. Freddi and his wife and son and Johannes's wife are not arrested and they all split up and go into hiding. The other son, Hansi, and his wife, are luckily not in Germany at this time.
Lanny Budd and his wife and other family members & friends were supposed to join the yacht. They are waiting for it to show up but it never does. So Lanny and Irma travel to Germany to find out what has happened. Lanny manages to get in touch with the Robins and hears about the arrest. He finally gets to see Johannes where he is being held, accused of trying to smuggle money out of Germany. Johannes swears he had all the proper papers and permits. The Germans offer a deal...if Johannes signs over all his property and funds to them he will be allowed to leave if he will promise to keep silent about it. Johannes willingly signs everything over and Lanny arranges to transport him and the rest of the Robins out of Germany. But Freddi has disappeared.
Lanny and Irma get Johannes and the others out of Germany and Lanny decides he has to go back and try to find Freddi. Irma is to stay behind because it is getting too dangerous to be in Germany. Lanny is pretty sure the Germans are holding Freddi as a way to guarantee that Johannes stay silent about how he was tortured, beaten and his fortune extorted from him.
During their travels in Germany, Lanny and Irma rubbed elbows with some of the worse criminals of the Nazi terror, including that scum of the earth, Hitler. They had to make nice and be all friendly and cozy with some of the worse villains the world has ever seen. Meanwhile, Irma started to buy into their Nazi propaganda and started to wonder if maybe the Jews, and the Reds and the Socialists are enemies of the Fatherland and deserved the punishment being meted out to them. This was distressing to Lanny as he started to realize that he can no longer trust Irma as much as he would like.
So Lanny heads back alone into the hell that Germany has become, much against Irma's wishes as she is frightened for his safety. He discovers that Freddi is being held in Dachau, one of the notorious concentration camps.

This novel has a very strong socialist slant. I found it pretty dull until the part where Lanny and Irma go to Germany looking for the Robin family. Sinclair's portraits of Goebbels, Goring and Hitler are an interesting part of the story. Reading this story is like watching a train speeding towards an unavoidable collision. You can see it coming and there isn't a damn thing you can do to stop it. You feel like screaming at the Robins, "Get out! Get out while you can! Now!" But of course they don't. You feel like screaming at the German people, "Don't believe Hitler's lies! Don't give him the power! He's a monster!" But of course they do.

Review by Joshua Riley on The Pulitizer Blog:    https://thepulitzerblog.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/upton-sinclair-dragons-teeth/.

In This Our Life

By Ellen Glasgow

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Novels, 1942.

It is the story of a few crucial years in the life of the Timberlake family. The story starts with the week before the wedding of one of the daughters, Stanley. (One odd thing about this story, both the daughters have what are usually considered men's names, Stanley and Roy.) The first hint of trouble comes when the father, Asa, sees Stanley riding in a car with Roy's husband, Peter. Then Stanley and Peter are seen sharing an intimate glance.
Roy senses that Peter is troubled and she tries to mend it but Peter brushes her off and claims he has been called out of town on an emergency. (He's a surgeon.) He packs a few things and hurries away. Then Stanley shortly disappears. Pretty soon everyone realizes that the two have run off together. Naturally, Roy and Stanley's fiancee, Craig, are devastated.
Roy feels like she has been cut off at the knees. She feels like she has been betrayed not only by her husband but by love itself. But she puts on a brave face and immediately goes out and buys herself a new, red hat.
Asa, the dad, loves Roy best. His heart bleeds for his wounded daughter, but Roy is not the kind of person you can cuddle and comfort. She rejects all his sympathy and tries to resume her normal life. She goes to work and does her job and goes through the motions, but she often cries herself to sleep at night.
The other sister, Stanley, is the pretty, spoiled one, the favorite of her mother and of the rich uncle who plies her with gifts, including a fancy roadster. The uncle is angry at what Stanley has done, but not so angry that he refuses to have the roadster sent to where she is living with Peter.
Things begin to look up for Roy when she and Craig turn to each other for comfort and find that they are falling in love. Although it is not the grand passion Roy felt for Peter, she is perfectly happy to move on to a more mature and considered love affair.
Peter discovers that life with Stanley is not quite what he expected. Stanley wants to be supported in a style beyond his means, and she doesn't care that they are getting deep into debt. Peter can't deal with the impending financial crisis they are headed for nor can he deal with his new wife's consummate selfishness and shallowness. He ends up blowing his head off and Stanley hurries home to the comfort and indulgence of her family.
Roy accepts Stanley's homecoming with grace and forgiveness. But Stanley finds life at home after marriage boring and flat. She starts spending a lot of time out driving around in her roadster. Stanley is headed for trouble but her family is so indulgent that they seem powerless to stop her.
Sure enough, Stanley finds herself in serious trouble and Roy finds out that her new love isn't all she thought it was. The family rallies around Stanley, all except for Asa, and poor Roy is left on the outside trying to make sense of the tatters of her life.

This novel is like reading a soap opera. Maybe because soap operas are such familiar fare that it is easy to see where the story of Stanley and Roy is headed. There is a lot of talk in the novel about the differences between the old and the new generation, what used to be called the generation gap. Stanley and Roy were born about the same time as my grandmother. It is funny to think of Granny as part of a rebellious generation. Hey, I guess nothing ever changes. Every generation thinks the succeeding generation has no respect for tradition and no respect for the ways of their elders.
All in all, though it covers familiar ground, this is an enjoyable and engrossing story, and for its day, surprisingly liberal in attitude. One of the characters even has a sort of a one night stand. I found it fun to read about the naughty doings of my grandmother's generation.

This novel was made into a movie in 1942, starring Bette Davis as Stanley and Olivia de Havilland as Roy. However, the movie changed the ending and portrayed the Stanley character as much more evil than she was in the novel. In the novel, Stanley is mainly just stupid, spoiled and careless.

Review from Reading the Pulitzer Prize Winners for Fiction.