Jackie Adams
Kent County Public Librarian
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
In the small village of Edgecombe St. Mary in the English countryside lives Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson’s wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, the Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother’s death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and regarding her as the permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?
(All book notes courtesy of Amazon.com)
Gerard Cataldo
Owner, Chestertown Old Book Store
Confessions of a Young Novelist by Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in 1980, when he was nearly fifty. In these “confessions,” the author, now in his late seventies, looks back on his long career as a theorist and his more recent work as a novelist, and explores their fruitful conjunction.
He begins by exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction—playfully, seriously, brilliantly roaming across this frontier. Good nonfiction, he believes, is crafted like a whodunnit, and a skilled novelist builds precisely detailed worlds through observation and research. Taking us on a tour of his own creative method, Eco recalls how he designed his fictional realms. He began with specific images, made choices of period, location, and voice, composed stories that would appeal to both sophisticated and popular readers. The blending of the real and the fictive extends to the inhabitants of such invented worlds. Why are we moved to tears by a character’s plight? In what sense do Anna Karenina, Gregor Samsa, and Leopold Bloom “exist”?
At once a medievalist, philosopher, and scholar of modern literature, Eco astonishes above all when he considers the pleasures of enumeration. He shows that the humble list, the potentially endless series, enables us to glimpse the infinite and approach the ineffable. This “young novelist” is a master who has wise things to impart about the art of fiction and the power of words.
Marc Castelli
Artist
The Oyster Question by Christine Keiner
In The Oyster Question, Christine Keiner applies perspectives of environmental, agricultural, political, and social history to examine the decline of Maryland’s iconic Chesapeake Bay oyster industry.
Oystermen have held on to traditional ways of life, and some continue to use preindustrial methods, tonging oysters by hand from small boats. Others use more intensive tools, and thus it is commonly believed that a lack of regulation enabled oystermen to exploit the bay to the point of ruin.
But Keiner offers an opposing view in which state officials, scientists, and oystermen created a regulated commons that sustained tidewater communities for decades. Not until the 1980s did a confluence of natural and unnatural disasters weaken the bay’s resilience enough to endanger the oyster resource. Keiner examines conflicts that pitted scientists in favor of privatization against watermen who used their power in the statehouse to stave off the forces of rural change. Her study breaks new ground regarding the evolution of environmental politics at the state rather than the federal level.
The Oyster Question concludes with the impassioned ongoing debate over introducing nonnative oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and how that proposal might affect the struggling watermen and their identity as the last hunter-gatherers of the industrialized world.
Chris Cerino
Education Director, Sultana Projects
Mickey Elsberg
Board Member, Mid Shore Community Foundation
Matthew Tobriner
Consultant, Chestertown Marina Study Chair
Mary Wood
Writer, Spy Contributor
1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart
As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of our defining national drama, 1861 presents a gripping and original account of how the Civil War began.
1861 is an epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields. Early in that fateful year, a second American revolution unfolded, inspiring a new generation to reject their parents’ faith in compromise and appeasement, to do the unthinkable in the name of an ideal. It set Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom.
The book introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes—among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become president. Adam Goodheart takes us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the mouth of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at this moment of ultimate crisis and decision.
Meredith Davies Hadaway
Poet, Vice President for College Relations, Washington College
Rough Cradle by Betsy Sholl
Solid, moving and thoughtful, this eighth collection from the Maine poet laureate follows the real lives of real people: stanzaic lyrics, most unrhymed and most in quiet American language, depict the poet, her son, her daughter, her friends, her ailing or deceased parents, her kind stepfather and the locales and vistas that enter their lives, from the Atlantic shoreline to the California coast. Careful poems depict air travel; a fine elegy, Twentieth Century Limited, laments the heyday of rail travel while its tracklike couplets mourn a traveling father. Songbirds, migratory birds and bird-watching resonate throughout Sholl’s pages: a bird/ flying off doesn’t have to mean gone,/ it could mean: look at that bright going. Sholl also listens to blues and jazz. A lively, long-lined poem imitates scat singing; another, in more typical language, questions the lost giants of Delta blues: You who were not recorded to be touched up/ and played back later, did you love the raw world more,/ love the shy songbird’s refusal to be seen? Sholl’s lesser poems grow predictable or dated, with the same consoling epiphanies each time. At her best, though, Sholl (Late Psalm) represents patience, affection and generous attention to whoever she loves and to what she hears and sees.
Joan Horsey
Chestertown Civic Leader
Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic, Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor by Hugo Vickers
Writing about Hugo Vickers’ last book for Hutchinson, “Elizabeth, The Queen Mother”, a succession of fellow biographers applauded Vickers’ unique skill. “Masterly …Hugo Vickers’ long immersion in the history and dramatic personae of the Royal Family has certainly paid off”. (Selina Hastings). ‘A bulging plum pudding of insider snippets’, commented Robert Lacey. ‘An overall portrait which may well be as close as anyone will ever get to the truth’, said Craig Brown. And A.N. Wilson added admiringly, ‘There is a small handful of British royal biographies which have acquired classic status …It is a truly magnificent book. Hugo Vickers knows his subject through and through’. Hugo Vickers has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Royal Family, and has had a fascination with the story of the Duchess of Windsor since he was a young man. There have been a number of books about this doomed couple (and Channel 4 is very interested in doing a programme based on Hugo’s text), but this book brings a new perspective on the story by focussing on the later years of exile. While Vickers has his own theories about the Abdication itself, and he makes it very clear that Mrs Simpson did not lure the King from the throne, the drama of this narrative comes from the criminal exploitation of an old sick woman after the death of her husband. She was ruthlessly exploited by a French lawyer called Suzanne Blum. Some members of the Royal Family, like Mountbatten and the Queen Mother, don’t emerge with much credit either. Using previously unpublished papers and other personal testaments, Hugo Vickers relates a tragic story which has lost none of its resonance over the years since the Duchess died in 1986.
David LaMotte
President, LaMotte Chemical
Matt Weir
Partner, Cross Street Development
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.
The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.
Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.
In her long-awaited new book, Laura Hillenbrand writes with the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in Seabiscuit. Telling an unforgettable story of a man’s journey into extremity, Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.
Richard Kalter
Vice President, Kent County Public Library Foundation
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.
But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.
True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.
Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.
Simon Kelly
Chestertown Spy Features Writer
Cosmopolis: A Novel by Don DeLillo
It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end — those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments.
Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town.
His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol’s funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors — his experts on security, technology, currency, finance and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn’t have to.
Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo’s thirteenth novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of a spectacular downfall.
Andrew McCown
Associate Director, Echo Hill Outdoor School
The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg
In spring of 2001, a community of people in the Appalachian foothills came to the edge of all they had ever been. Across the South, padlocks and logging chains bound the doors of silent mills, and it seemed a miracle to blue-collar people in Jacksonville, Alabama, that their mill survived. The century-old hardwood floors still trembled under whirling steel, and people worked on in a mist of white air. The mill had become almost a living thing, rewarding the hard-working and careful with the best payday they ever had, but punishing the careless and clumsy, taking a finger, a hand, more. The mill preceded the automobile, the airplane, and they served it even as it filled their lungs with lint and shortened their lives. In return, it let them live in stiff-necked dignity in the hills of their fathers. In these real-life stories, Rick Bragg brilliantly evokes the hardscrabble lives of those who lived and died by an American cotton mill.
Mary McCoy
Artist, Chestertown Spy Contributing Writer
The Magic Mystery Sawn by Mary Wood
The Magic Mystery Swan is a tale of enchantment, waterfowl and avarice set on an unspecified river in the Chesapeake countryside. Surely this is the Chester, as the book was written by Chestertown’s own Mary Wood, who I’m proud to say is my aunt. The disclaimer aside, this is a captivating story about a girl and her swan. The very villainous villain is a greed-ridden witch who feeds her habit as a snappy dresser (with a taste for the glitter of real diamonds, rubies and emeralds) by selling decoys magicked from the real thing. It’s a beautiful little book with exquisitely sensitive illustrations by Dutch artist Hans Sprangers.
Cynthia McGinnes
Owner, Thormar Farms
Annapolis by William Martin
From the days of pirate raids on the Chesapeake to swift-boat actions in Vietnam, the Staffords and their traditional rivals, the Parrishes, struggle with foreign enemies and each other to build a navy and a nation. They march across the deserts of Tripoli, sail into the South Seas to battle the British and dally with the native girls, fight aboard the Merrimac and the Monitor, fly into the battle of Midway, and look into the living faces of all four men on Mount Rushmore.
When Stafford descendant Susan Browne sets out to film a documentary about her famous ancestry, her work sweeps her into the past, to celebrate Stafford victories, mourn their losses, and confront their secrets. Annapolis is William Martin’s most ambitious novel, a tale of romance and courage, honor and patriotism, an ode to the men and women who have made the proud traditions of the United States Navy.
Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of The Mayan Book of The Dawn of Life and The Glories of Gods and Kings
Popol Vuh, the Quiché Mayan book of creation, is not only the most important text in the native languages of the Americas, it is also an extraordinary document of the human imagination. It begins with the deeds of Mayan gods in the darkness of a primeval sea and ends with the radiant splendor of the Mayan lords who founded the Quiché kingdom in the Guatemalan highlands. Originally written in Mayan hieroglyphs, it was transcribed into the Roman alphabet in the sixteenth century.
Theresa Mycek
Manager, Colchester Farms CSA
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations” by David R. Montgomery
Dirt, soil, call it what you want–it’s everywhere we go. It is the root of our existence, supporting our feet, our farms, our cities. This fascinating yet disquieting book finds, however, that we are running out of dirt, and it’s no laughing matter. An engaging natural and cultural history of soil that sweeps from ancient civilizations to modern times, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations explores the compelling idea that we are–and have long been–using up Earth’s soil. Once bare of protective vegetation and exposed to wind and rain, cultivated soils erode bit by bit, slowly enough to be ignored in a single lifetime but fast enough over centuries to limit the lifespan of civilizations. A rich mix of history, archaeology and geology, Dirt traces the role of soil use and abuse in the history of Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, China, European colonialism, Central America, and the American push westward. We see how soil has shaped us and we have shaped soil–as society after society has risen, prospered, and plowed through a natural endowment of fertile dirt. David R. Montgomery sees in the recent rise of organic and no-till farming the hope for a new agricultural revolution that might help us avoid the fate of previous civilizations.
Doug Rae
Owner, Against the Grain Bread Company
Blood, Bones, & Butter By Gabrielle Hamilton
Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty fierce, hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Above all she sought family, particularly the thrill and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that, in her adult years, eluded her. Hamilton’s ease and comfort in a kitchen were instilled in her at an early age when her parents hosted grand parties, often for more than one hundred friends and neighbors. The smells of spit-roasted lamb, apple wood smoke, and rosemary garlic marinade became as necessary to her as her own skin.
Blood, Bones & Butter follows an unconventional journey through the many kitchens Hamilton has inhabited through the years: the rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with an oily wooden spoon in hand; the kitchens of France, Greece, and Turkey, where she was often fed by complete strangers and learned the essence of hospitality; the soulless catering factories that helped pay the rent; Hamilton’s own kitchen at Prune, with its many unexpected challenges; and the kitchen of her Italian mother-in-law, who serves as the link between Hamilton’s idyllic past and her own future family—the result of a difficult and prickly marriage that nonetheless yields rich and lasting dividends.
Jim Ross
President, Chester River Health System
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.
It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age—and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it—who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism—and an unexpected connection between themselves. It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives.
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance–and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition. Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming–yet wholly sinister–Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.
“Larson is a marvelous writer…superb at creating characters with a few short strokes.”—New York Times Book Review
David Bruce Smith
Chestertown Spy Book Critic
Correspondence: An Adventure in Letters by N. John Hall
Suppose that a retired bank clerk from New Jersey has inherited a mass of valuable letters to his great-great-grandfather. Let’s imagine this ancestor was a book-seller in Victorian London who had corresponded at length with the leading writers of his generation. To Dickens and Thackeray, Eliot and Trollope, Butler and Hardy, he put such questions as Why did you write? How do you write? From what sources did you get their characters and ideas? What do you see as the purpose or usefulness of illustrations to your novel? What do you think of the books of your peers and competitors?
An intriguing conceit, no? But John Hall brings it off convincingly in this series of contemporary letters (mostly emails) between Larry Dickerson, the bank worker, bent on getting as much money as he can from this stash, and Stephen Nicholls, the patient and helpful head of Christie’s manuscript department in London. Nicholls leads Dickerson through the intricacies of the auction process but also helps him enter into the Victorian mind, a domain Dickerson eventually embraces with enthusiasm. That result is a book that is part suspense novel, because we wonder if Dickerson will finally decide to sell the letters or keep them for himself; part literary tour de force, because the old letters lead us into the thoughts of the foremost novelists of the period; and part humorous tale, because of Dickerson’s personality. He is a character such as the department of heads at Christie’s have seldom encountered, and we watch as this unschooled, bluff, blunt man emerges into a self-education Victorianist.
This is a book for lovers of Victorian literature, but it is also a bracing antidote for those less enthusiastic readers who may have found Dickens a little too melodramatic, Thackeray too allusive, Trollope too protean, and Hardy too pessimistic. For both kinds of readers Hall’s book offers the hope of redemption, a thoroughly engrossing ramble through the literature of the enduring Victorian galaxy.
Gren Whitman
Friends of Eastern Neck Island
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.
Book notes cortuensey of Amazon.com
Susan Reinsch says
Thanks. This article came just in time for some last minute shopping.
Andrew Thomas says
For those who enjoyed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, try the Dexter series by Jeff Lindsey. The first book was the basis for the television series. But the series and the show differ entirely. I enjoy the show but the book series provides a deeper more analytical approach to the characters. The newest book, Double Dexter, is so far a great read and a great thriller for those that enjoy the genre. If you haven’t read the books before, start at the beginning, Dearly Devoted Dexter. Great read for fans of thrillers or of the series.