Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family by David Kaczynski

Posted on February 15, 2016 by pagesofjulia

David Kaczynski’s contemplation of his brother’s life and crimes is sensitive and skillfully composed, with broad appeal.

every last tie

David Kaczynski is a poet, a former English teacher, an impassioned opponent of the death penalty and the younger brother of Ted Kaczynski, better known to the world as the Unabomber. In Every Last Tie, he contemplates “loving memories and painful outcomes,” hoping to illuminate his brother’s and his own experiences.

Some of David’s message involves correcting misconceptions. For example, he says it was not his heroism but his wife Linda’s compassionate and principled actions that identified the Unabomber. He relates the process of recognizing Ted’s voice in the Unabomber’s manifesto: Linda’s concern, David’s denial, the careful considerations they conducted together and the final decision–betrayal of his brother or betrayal of yet more innocent lives. David often contemplates such difficult questions as how to explain Ted Kaczynski’s illness and actions, coming from a family that David portrays as caring, close and committed to education and integrity. He characterizes Ted as a loving older brother increasingly withdrawn from society, a tortured genius and, finally, a mentally ill man David no longer understands. The decision to identify his brother still prickles. “Ted’s cruelty stigmatizes my good name; but my reputation for goodness comes at his expense. Like all contrived opposites, we reinforce one another.”

Every Last Tie is beautifully written, searingly honest, in no way the sensational tell-all it might have been, but a careful exercise–sometimes emotional, sometimes intellectual–in self-examination. David clearly wants to pile praise on his beloved parents, but chooses to consider their complexities, seeking truth over comfort. The result contains a certain amount of psychological analysis (especially in a thorough afterword by James L. Knoll IV, a forensic psychiatrist who has both studied Ted Kaczynski’s case and come to know David well), but the book is also a meditation on notions of family, “the premise that a brother shows you who you are–and who you are not.” David struggles to reconcile the brother he loved and the serial killer he turned in, but does not belabor the point, choosing instead to remember and share what he knows, and acknowledge the mystery. Knoll’s afterword makes a more pointed criticism of the United States’ “nonsystem” of mental health care.

This slim, intriguing book is the story of a family whose two sons lead different lives. David Kaczynski’s voice is quietly thoughtful, and his writing is lovely; he ranges from family anecdote to psychological puzzle to philosophical musing while retaining an even tone. Every Last Tie is both a straightforward story and a complex consideration of an extremely difficult one.

This review originally ran in the January 26, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 letters.

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guest review: Seed by Michael Edelson, from Andy

Posted on February 12, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Andy is my #1 bartender. I have joked to Husband that by doing him the favor of posting this review, I have probably just bought myself another shot or two of Fernet. I don’t even like Fernet.

But I’m always glad to spread the word about a worthwhile book! So here’s Andy.

seedI should probably say up front that I know the author. We’re not good friends, but he’s a familiar name in the HEMA community and when I heard he had written a book, I was curious.

And I’m very glad I was. Seed isn’t in my usual genre area, as I turn more towards fantasy than sci-fi or militaria. But at the same time, the writing was fantastic, the story unpredictable, and the characters, generally, create an emotive reaction from you – whether it’s wanting to punch Max in the face, or slap a little sense into Alex!

The story keeps you going, until you realize that hours have gone by. That’s the greatest craft of an author – total escapism – and that it’s achieved here from a first time author is very impressive.

No spoilers, but just as I thought the book was going down a formulaic route, the tale takes a turn that I wasn’t expecting. Which makes it very readable.

Congratulations, Michael Edelson. You should be very, very proud of your creation. And I’m now stalking you on Amazon for the next books to come out.

Thanks, Andy.

I’ve got a couple of Seed myself now and will be reviewing it in the next couple of months.

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The Iceberg by Marion Coutts

Posted on February 11, 2016 by pagesofjulia

An artist reflects in a variety of ways on the end of her writer husband’s life.

iceberg

Tom Lubbock was an art critic for the Independent and the father of an 18-month-old boy, when he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2008. In The Iceberg, his wife, Marion Coutts, a versatile and prolific artist and writer, recalls his final years. The resulting memoir is musing, lyrical, ambling and sometimes digressive. The range of emotions she expresses is startling and real.

Coutts begins with “a diagnosis that has the status of an event” as she introduces her husband and their son, Ev. Tom works with words and concepts, meticulously and thoughtfully constructing the writings that are his livelihood and passion. When he has a seizure, a tumor is discovered in the speech and language part of his brain: Tom and Marion must reinvent communication. They practice and make lists: of names of friends, of ideas for outings, of opposing word pairs (big/small, light/heavy). They play a game of yes/no questions when Tom has something to discuss: Is it about your work? Is it about us? Is it food or clothing? These coping mechanisms are an interesting intellectual exercise, but are also central to this family’s experiences. Coutts writes: “I have lost the second consciousness that powers mine. Lost my sounding board, my echo, my check, my stop and finisher. I am down to one.”

The Iceberg neatly captures the events of diagnosis and death, with a stark attention to what comes in between, and little reference to the rest of life. Tom’s medical conditions are described with varying levels of detail, as Coutts often has only a vague understanding of them. Her encounters with the British National Health Service are frequently frustrating. These physical realities are less than central, however. The Iceberg is a forthright emotional account, often celebratory, even exultant: Tom especially often finds joy late in his life. Of course, Coutts is also destitute, bereft, undone. Such feelings alternate with a cerebral, even detached perspective. These jarring intersections are at the center of her story. She writes unflinchingly of her short temper with Ev, and occasionally with Tom; she relates both anguish and resolve, resignation and anger, often with a striking sense of remove. “There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part.” Or of sitting at his deathbed: “I love being in position here. It is perfectly correct.”

Coutts’s prose is layered, textured, dense with meaning and interjected with brief e-mails to loved ones about Tom’s status along the way. As a consideration of art, life, death and love, the full impact of The Iceberg is deeply moving and intelligent, a worthy elegy.

This review originally ran in the January 22, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 words.

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did not finish: Ripper by Isabel Allende (audio)

Posted on February 10, 2016 by pagesofjulia

ripperAll right, I give up, a little bit, on Allende. The Japanese Lover was stronger on language than on character, and Maya’s Notebook even more so. Not since Inés of My Soul have I been bowled over by the whole package of story, character and language.

Ripper starts out intriguingly, as noted. But I only made it about 10% through the book before finding myself frustrated by the characters. The voluptuous, beautiful blonde with a heart of gold who is blind to people’s flaws; the materialistic rich guy she dates; the obnoxious teen (really, I find this one a lot. I know they can be difficult – I was – but they have to be more complex than this); etc. And then the unrealistic details (which I noted in Maya’s Notebook), as when our teenaged sleuth demands all the details of an ongoing murder investigation, because “it’s public record”: not so.* This kind of disregard for facts, in an otherwise realistic setting, bugs me; and combined with the flat characters, I couldn’t keep going.

Allende is one of the best when it comes to description and language. But that’s not always enough, for me at least. I’ll hold out for her next critically acclaimed work before I come back.

Unrated.

*I felt like I knew this from watching crime shows on television. Obviously not a strong source, so I found some stronger ones, below. The gist of it is, specific details of a crime whose investigation is ongoing are exempt from public records legislation, where the release of those details might jeopardize the investigation. For example, the details of specifically what was done to a murder victim might be held back so that the police can distinguish real confessions from fake ones. This is classic crime fiction stuff, but also fact. “Most states exempt from disclosure law enforcement investigatory records,” from the Connecticut General Assembly’s Office of Legislative Research, reporting on states’ laws. The LA Times refers to “investigative records exempt from public release under California’s public records law.” “Specified facts from investigatory or security records, without disclosure of the records themselves, must be disclosed unless disclosure would endanger the successful completion of an investigation, or related investigation, or endanger a person involved in the investigation. Cal. Gov’t Code §§ 6254(f)(1), (f)(2) and (f)(3),” from Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “Information that may jeopardize an investigation, related investigation or law enforcement proceeding” are exempt from public records access, according to the LAPD. “Law enforcement investigative files may be withheld, but not the basic facts.” Californians Aware, The Center for Public Forum Rights. Etc.

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War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad by Christopher Logue

Posted on February 9, 2016 by pagesofjulia

This epic retelling in verse of Homer’s Iliad is worthy of the classic.

war music

Upon his death, poet Christopher Logue left unfinished a full-length reimagining of Homer’s Iliad. His fellow poet and friend Christopher Reid applies a careful editorial hand to the papers Logue left behind to release War Music, which includes both previously published works and new material.

The result is as epic and evocative, as emotional and resounding as the original, yet also surprisingly novel. Logue employs memorable images, as when the two armies meet “like a forest making its way through a forest.” He is unafraid of wild anachronisms: “As many arrows on [Hector’s] posy shield/ As microphones on politicians’ stands”; “Blood like a car-wash.” But this is no attempt to modernize; the rage of Achilles, Helen’s beauty, capricious gods and customs of battle remain set in Homer’s Greece. Rather, it is an enrichment of a well-known and loved story, in swelling verse and with the same clever eye for tragedy and sly humor of its model.

Reid finds Logue’s “capacity for the grand conception dashingly and convincingly executed,” as near “pure Logue” as possible. His preface and comments in the appendix (where the manuscripts were roughest) offer insight for readers unfamiliar with Logue, who references Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Keats and Tennyson, as well as Homer. Expertise with the original is unnecessary to enjoy this version; although such knowledge will increase the impact, the grandeur of War Music is gripping and suspenseful regardless of the reader’s background. No fan of Homer will want to miss Logue’s contribution.

This review originally ran in the January 19, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 8 topaz saucers heaped with nectarine jelly.

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The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth by Karen Branan

Posted on February 8, 2016 by pagesofjulia

A journalist’s research uncovers her own family history and connections to a horrifying hate crime.

family tree

In researching her family history in the little town of Hamilton, Ga., investigative journalist Karen Branan was surprised to find connections to a 1912 lynching. A nephew of her great-grandfather, the sheriff, was murdered. Days later, a local mob killed three black men and a black woman. Branan digs deeper, expecting to find her forebears innocent of violence. The evidence is far more complex in The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth.

In a town where nearly everyone has been related by blood or marriage for generations, Branan’s family variously turned a blind eye to the murders, or directly participated. She finds herself related not only to the white mob, but to at least one of the black victims as well. Every new piece of information complicates the story and startles her further, until she has to address her most basic understanding of the world. “I began this journey believing myself to be an unflinching investigative reporter and a nonracist,” Branan writes, but must confront a bias in favor of her own family. Admirably, she examines herself and the preconceptions she brings, even to the pursuit of racial justice.

The Family Tree offers an in-depth study of the history of Southern race relations, particularly in Georgia. The narrative of the lynching is told thrillingly, the background more dryly, but it is Branan’s personal perspective and soul-searching that makes this history insightful, relevant and memorable.

This review originally ran in the January 19, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 6 liaisons.

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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (audio)

Posted on February 2, 2016 by pagesofjulia

I said I was laying off the audiobooks, because my present life & schedule don’t allow for enough listening time. But then I picked up another, and another. Among other things, I’ve hurt my knee again and am back in the gym. But you’re not here to hear about my knee.

year of magical thinkingI’m so glad I tuned into The Year of Magical Thinking. It’s not a feel-good story: it tracks the year in Joan Didion’s life following her husband’s death, and maps her experience with grief. It’s almost New Year’s, and Joan and husband John have been visiting their daughter in the hospital, where she is unconscious with a life-threatening case of pneumonia and septic shock. On December 30, 2003, he collapses at the dinner table, is rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead that night. John is John Gregory Dunne, also an accomplished writer, and their lifestyle has always kept them very close: working from home, together, consulting on every aspect of their lives, from work, food, family and world events to the most insignificant details. Didion is of course, obviously, shocked and unmoored. During the year that follows she experiences different types of grief, shock and bafflement. This book is a little like a diary of that time, which it charts chronologically, ending one year and one day after John’s death.

Along the way, she nimbly weaves in the research she performs on related subjects within psychology, medicine and anthropology: research on grief, on cultural relationships with death and dying, and on medical issues, as she tries to understand when, how and why John died. This last is a surprisingly opaque question, covering the time between his collapse and the doctor’s pronouncement about an hour and a half later. What had been done in the interim? What could have been done? She examines the reports of the ambulance team, the nurses and the ER doctor.

And to compound the complicated and tragic story, daughter Quintana spends most of this year in and out of hospitals, near death on multiple occasions. What we know, although Didion at the time of writing does not, is that Quintana died within the year after the book’s timeline closes. Her later memoir, Blue Nights, covers that personal loss. I haven’t read that one – yet.

The difficulty of this book, then, is obvious: it is filled with sad stuff. Didion is a deft and clever writer, though. We see more than a little joy, although much of it is remembered. We see a strong family, and we see good times. The entwining of personal experience (past and present) and research is beautifully done. Didion uses repeated phrases to draw her reader along the book’s line, to tie everything together. It’s a lovely piece of work, although I did have to turn away when I had a particularly bad day. The subject matter is what it is.

My one criticism is that Didion fails to recognize and acknowledge a certain privilege: that her life is set against the Ritz, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, the fancy home in Malibu, Chanel, Brooks Brothers, an endless parade of the food, clothing, and scenery of her choice and at her command. This privilege, compounded by her failure to acknowledge it (is it possible she is unaware?), distanced me from her. She is both a fine writer and a complex and sympathetic person; it is my instinct to identify with her, and that is where this memoir shines; but that effect is lessened by her experience of the world to which she is apparently blind. Near the end, she describes a difficulty early in her marriage, when she and John had made a $50,000 down payment on a house in an L.A. suburb but hadn’t yet sold their home in Malibu: where would the money come from? They go to a luxury resort in Hawaii to think it out, then find that the Malibu home has an acceptable offer. She does speak briefly to the irony of the Hawaiian brainstorming session. We could call this a partial exception to my complaint. The episode still comes off a little tone-deaf, though.

This is a fairly small criticism. Because of this privileged position, Didion lost a few degrees of identification with her reader. On the whole, though, she is a sympathetic and fully realized character. Her story is shocking but true; it is beautifully structured and well written, and I will definitely read more Didion.

Barbara Caruso’s narration felt spot-on to me.

Rating: 7 leis.

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The Children’s Home by Charles Lambert

Posted on January 29, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Wonderful, eccentric stray children fill a decaying country estate in this strikingly dark fairy tale.

children's home

Charles Lambert (With a Zero at Its Heart) offers a startling and adept blend of realism and frightening fantasy in The Children’s Home.

Morgan Fletcher lives alone, served by a housekeeper and a skeleton staff he purposefully never sees, on a sizable estate of fading opulence. He has been disfigured by a mysterious accident; his inherited fortune has equally enigmatic origins. His family history is only hinted at, but apparently contains ugly secrets. His housekeeper, Engel, seems comfortably wise to these difficulties, and when the country doctor, a “sunlike man,” befriends Morgan, he feels a little like himself again. The real difference, however, is the children, who show up one by one as if out of the air, some of them mere babies on the stoop. Morgan is wonderingly delighted to find himself surrounded by youngsters, whose playful noises echo often through the house, but who are strangely silent when he wishes for silence. These are not ordinary children, but Morgan has had no contact with the wider world for many years and is slow to question their behavior. They seem to seek something within his house and simultaneously seem to know his past already.

Lambert opens with plausibly lifelike scenarios and proceeds with careful pacing through the Fletcher family story. The line between reality and illusion is as imperceptible to the reader as it is to Morgan, until the final, otherworldly action accelerates with glittering vividness both lovely and grotesque. The Children’s Home is unforgettable: fanciful, chilling and poignant.

This review originally ran in the January 15, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 questions.

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Lizards on the Mantel, Burros at the Door: A Big Bend Memoir by Etta Koch with June Cooper Price

Posted on January 28, 2016 by pagesofjulia

lizards burrosThanks to Fil for another hit. (Still don’t give me any more books, though, I tell you I’m swamped.) Reading this memoir about a place I love was engaging, amusing and comforting.

Etta Lindeman was born in Ohio in 1904. She was an active youngster but sickly in her young adulthood, when she married Peter Koch. One recommendation to help her breathing troubles was to move to a warm, dry climate. This, combined with Peter’s professional ambitions, took them on a trip cross-country that was to wind up in Arizona, where they would settle and continue to raise their three daughters. Peter was a newspaper photographer who wanted to make nature films and travel the country giving accompanying lectures; the National Parks Service helped by engaging him to promote several parks, including the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and eventually… Big Bend. The Kochs drove their 23-foot trailer (“Porky the Road Hog”) from Ohio to the Smokies, through Louisiana, where Peter filmed the wetlands’ water birds, and into Big Bend through Marathon, Texas. As Etta relates in this journal-like memoir, her family’s adjustment to the West Texas desert near the Mexican border was not without challenges. She was initially leery: “Texas had always been for me a movie set… A place of flimsy barrooms people by six-footers with six-shooters.” But eventually it wins their hearts and they settle permanently. The three Koch daughters have remained in Texas. The eldest, June, is co-author here, having done her own research, pulled together her mother’s papers and a first draft and seen them through to publication.

Etta’s voice is charming. She is not a professional writer, and her prose is perhaps not artful; I think of the term “outsider art” – but surprisingly lovely in moments, too. I liked her evocative descriptions, and these lines:

Nearby is a weeping juniper that is so strange. At first I thought the tree was wilting and perhaps ready to die but was told it is a dejected tree by nature.

Her style is mostly reportorial, but with a brisk, conversational tone. The chapters generally cover episodes or events: the surprise birthday party Pete throws her; a trip to Hot Springs; Pete’s trip down the Santa Elena canyon in a homemade boat. She has a sense of humor, too, a sense of fun (despite describing herself as the scaredy-cat of this active family). My favorite part must have been the final chapter, “Kaufman’s Draw,” which describes an adventure driving across the desert: it reminded me of Abbey’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” that story in The Journey Home that I loved so much.

I found the Big Bend I know and love in this book, although earlier, cleaner. When Etta writes,

I didn’t know the sky was so big… so blue… but as we traveled west I discovered that although the earth grew whiter and vegetation sparser, the sky grew more intense, more brilliantly blue.

I recognize this precisely. I have yet to find the scientific explanation for it, but the light out there is different: sharper, brighter.

Lizards on the Mantel, Burros at the Door is also a fine primary source on the work of community building, which is part of what it means to pioneer or homestead: as the Park Service’s settlement (in the Basin of the Chisos Mountains) grows in population, Etta – who had home-schooled her children since arriving in Big Bend – teamed up with other wives and mothers to provide schooling and cultural activities. The community puts on dances, has potluck dinners and cooperates in living and raising kids in such a remote spot.

Simply told but with unmistakable personality, this first-person account of roughing it in far West Texas won my heart. It will get extra points with readers who love the place, like I do, but there is certainly something here for everyone who likes history, memoir, and the romance of simple living.

Rating: 7 murals.

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Posted on January 27, 2016 by pagesofjulia

fun homeFun Home won awards and got more attention than Bechdel’s later Are You My Mother?, which I loved, so this was an obvious choice and yes, I will add my praise to the chorus.

This is a memoir centering around Bechdel’s father Bruce, her own discovery that she is a lesbian and her coming out to her parents, which is immediately followed by the discovery that her father is gay, too, shortly before he kills himself just weeks later. (The evidence is inconclusive, but she makes a good argument for her conviction, that it was suicide.) The title is a reference to the family business, which is a small-town funeral home that they call ‘Fun Home.’ That’s a lot, right? It is also a memoir in graphic form, and I am crazy about Bechdel’s technique, which combines dialog (speech boxes for the characters in her panels) with a voiceover-style narrative in different boxes that sort of caption those same panels. It’s astonishing how much can be communicated in pictorial form.

Despite the often heavy subject matter, Bechdel is often laugh-out-loud funny, while also taking her material seriously. She beautifully evokes the absurdity of many different elements of her story. Bruce is a passionate restorer of historic homes, down to all the details, the bizarrely frothy, lacy, heavy decor. This is both hilarious and pathological. He “treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.” Bechdel and her father are most intimate when they share books and reading (note that this is an intimacy with decided remove). Bruce works as an English teacher as well as a funeral director; and two thematic elements of the book are death and books. Bechdel is best able to understand and characterize her parents when viewing them through the lens of literature: her father as Icarus, then Daedalus, then a character from Fitzgerald; her mother one from Henry James. “I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms.” On the other end of the cultural spectrum, as a child Bechdel confused her family with the Addams family.

The reader has a different experience of the story than she does, because we find out earlier than she does the big reveal – that her father has had relationships with men and boys. But she still has us share in mixed feelings of relief, shock, perplexity.

The story is weird, fascinating, and moving; Bechdel has a gimlet eye for the psychological struggle in each chapter of it; the structure of this book – the disordered chronology and release of facts – is a smart puzzle. But the art is what completes the perfection: I’m still reeling from, and trying to comprehend, how precisely she uses visual images (with those careful text additions) to communicate. I can’t adequately articulate it, but this is a special, a uniquely wonderful way to tell a uniquely interesting story. One to study.

Rating: 9 books, of course.

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