April Booknotes

 

"The only thing you absolutely have to know is the way to the library." - Albert Einstein

Audiobook Nonfiction: Memoir, Biography

From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley, Riley Keough

This was a fantastic audiobook which includes Lisa Marie Presley narrating her memoir, her daughter, Riley Keough, adding details to Lisa Marie’s narrative, and Julia Roberts providing the bulk of the narration.

From Here to the Great Unknown is a very open and honest memoir, based on audiotapes recorded by Lisa Marie. She had been working on her memoir for years accumulating her life story and recording it on audiotapes. In 2022, Lisa Marie asked her daughter, Riley, to help her finish her memoir. Sadly, a month later, Lisa Marie was dead.

From Here to the Great Unknown is raw and unflinching in its depiction of life as the daughter of Elvis Presley. There is no sugar-coating the hard times and poor choices of Lisa Marie and her father. You can hear Lisa Marie’s life-long grief and, at other times, emotional numbness in her voice as she describes her life. In particular, the retelling of Lisa Marie’s son, Ben's, suicide is devastating while her marriage to Michael Jackson is described with frank, almost apathetic detail.

It's not a long audiobook, but it covers everything most people will want to know and then some. This is not a celebrity memoir in the traditional gossipy sense, though. Mainly it is about the grief and trauma experienced by the daughter of “The King of Rock and Roll.” Don’t look for proposed solutions to the many difficult topics described, instead this memoir simply documents honest recognition of their existence.

It is too late to help Elvis, Michael Jackson, Lisa Marie, or her son Ben—all died too soon. But I think honest books like From Here to the Great Unknown may help to reduce the stigma around addiction and mental health. I heard Lisa Marie describing herself as a flawed person searching for human connection, resulting in a heart-rending audiobook.

Fiction: Mystery

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

The God of the Woods is about the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl in 1975. Barbara Van Laar, the daughter of the prominent Van Laar family of Albany, New York, disappeared from her cabin one morning in the summer camp founded by her family and located on the family’s estate. This mystery also includes a parallel plot about the disappearance, years previously, of Barbara’s brother. He was never found.

The God of the Woods starts out compelling and then turns into a meandering mystery. The longer the story went on, the more unfocused it seemed. There are seven different perspectives, and every time something was about to happen, the plot immediately switched to a different perspective, effectively losing momentum. When the plot returned to the original climatic event, the exciting scene had already happened off-page and it's mostly glossed over. There were also moments where I could not believe yet another character had disappeared or that some characters were acting so dumb and weak. I would sigh and roll my eyes in exasperation.

But I kept reading, so that says at least this is a well-written book. There were many moments when I was totally immersed in this book, and the pages just melted away. At almost 500 pages, and with the plot shifting from the past to the present and between narration of different characters, it held my interest but at the end I was disappointed. Still, for all my complaints, I did find this to be an okay mystery and interesting enough to distract me from current events.

Fiction: Mystery, Thriller

Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins

Publisher’s Description: “When the eight-year-old daughter of an Oxford College Master vanishes in the middle of the night, police turn to the Scottish nanny, Dee, for answers. As Dee looks back over her time in the Master's Lodging—an eerie and ancient house—a picture of a high achieving but dysfunctional family emerges: Nick, the fiercely intelligent and powerful father; his beautiful Danish wife Mariah, pregnant with their child; and the lost little girl, Felicity, almost mute, seeing ghosts, grieving her dead mother.

But is Dee telling the whole story? Is her growing friendship with the eccentric house historian, Linklater, any cause for concern? And most of all, why was Felicity silent?

Roaming Oxford's secret passages and hidden graveyards, Magpie Lane explores the true meaning of family—and what it is to be denied one.”

There are plenty of creepy and ghostly moments in this novel. Magpie Lane is engaging to read, both in terms of its setting and characters. The centuries old Masters Lodging has a long and unsettling history, it plays a pivotal role in unfolding events. The well-developed characters drew me into the mystery since I could sense they all some secret that needed to be exposed. Felicity’s parents were especially appalling! Of course, their narcissism appalled me immensely, which is evidence of the author’s skill.

Overall, I was totally captivated by the story that unfolded. As a bonus, I also learned about the history of Oxford, a little about mathematics, and there were frequent literary and musical references that I appreciated. The ending is intriguing because it’s ambiguous, which I like. Magpie Lane was worth reading!

Nonfiction: Essays

Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love by Haruki Murakami

Super light, easy reading! Haruki Murakami wrote a series of short essays about his T-shirt collection for the Japanese men’s fashion magazine, Popeye, over the course of a year and a half, Then his essays were all collected in this short book. Photographs of his extensive and personal T-shirt collection are included. The essays and photographs reveal much about Murakami's multifaceted and wonderfully eccentric personality.

I made this quilt from some of my T-shirts.
It basically reveals that I couldn’t think of anything else to do with the T-shirts!

The essays are divided into categories, creating a flow to his random musings. I think Murakami seems to enjoy talking about how his T-shirt collecting hobby intermixes with his life and experiences. There are plenty of charming little anecdotes about his habits and interests, such as restaurants he enjoys, his extensive LP collection or his dedication to running (which he talks about at length in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a book I recommend).

One of my favorite running books!

While Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love is probably only of interest to avid Murakami fans, it is a cute little coffee table book that allows you to spend some time with this famous Japanese author as he shares his T-shirt stories. This was another book that gave me a much needed “break” from current events!

There is a sampling of my current T-shirt “collection.” I have reduced it down to 27.

I read this book in one sitting and thoroughly enjoyed every minute!  Plus, it has made me want to document my own T-shirt "collection" – just don’t expect me to write a book about it.

Nonfiction: History, True Crime

Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation by Bruce Dorsey

I viewed a talk by Bruce Dorsey on C-Span and had to read his book. Dorsey became interested in this case while a history graduate student. His advisor assigned him this case for research to demonstrate how history isn’t one singular event – it has multiple ripples throughout time and culture.

Publisher’s Description: “In December 1832 a farmer found the body of a young, pregnant woman hanging near a haystack outside a New England mill town. When news spread that Methodist preacher Ephraim Avery was accused of murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, a factory worker, the case gave the public everything they found sexually charged violence, adultery, the hypocrisy of a church leader, secrecy and mystery, and suspicions of insanity. Murder in a Mill Town tells the story of how a local crime quickly turned into a national scandal that became America's first ‘trial of the century’.

After her death--after she became the country's most notorious ‘factory girl’ - Cornell's choices about work, survival, and personal freedom became enmeshed in stories that Americans told themselves about their new world of industry and women's labor and the power of religion in the early republic. Writers penned seduction tales, true-crime narratives, detective stories, political screeds, songs, poems, and melodramatic plays about the lurid scandal. As trial witnesses, ordinary people gave testimony that revealed rapidly changing times. As the controversy of Cornell's murder spread beyond the courtroom, the public eagerly devoured narratives of moral deviance, abortion, suicide, mobs, ‘fake news,’ and conspiracy politics. Long after the jury's verdict, the nation refused to let the scandal go.”

What makes this case so compelling, beyond the tensions of a married religious leader accused of murdering his pregnant lover, is its recorded details that exemplify a time of transition during the early 1800s. In the workplace, the measuring of time was transitioning from approximation by daylight to the mechanical measure through watches and clocks. Meanwhile, the more traditional barriers of gender roles were eroding as women were beginning to enter the workforce to earn their own money, and male doctors were overtaking the traditional role of female “healers” and midwives. Murder in a Mill Town describes how the rise of capitalism transformed the most intimate aspects of American life.

Somewhat tedious at times due to the attention given to detailed explanations, I still found Murder in a Mill Town to be surprisingly prophetic. As a quote attributed to Mark Twain says, “History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.”

Nonfiction: History, True Crime

Scotland Yard: A History of the London Police Force's Most Infamous Murder Cases by Simon Read

The London Metropolitan Police, established in 1829, was the world’s first professional, centrally organized police department. The name, in case you were wondering, comes from the fact that its headquarters were built on a piece of land facing a small street called Great Scotland Yard. The Yard grew into a respected organization employing new professionals, known as detectives, who were eventually armed with revolutionary crime solving skills like fingerprinting, blood splatter analysis, and firearm ballistics.

In addition to the history of The Yard, I learned about the gory details of 19 notable cases that span the course of a century. The author utilized official case files, newspaper reports, trial transcripts, and detectives’ notes to write evocatively. He gets right to the heart of the matter, which is usually bloody and includes foggy nights as well as a cavalcade of shady characters. There are a surprising number of dismembered bodies, many discovered in trunks. And, of course, the Jack the Ripper case is discussed.

Scotland Yard describes some of the bloodiest crimes I could ever have imagined. For a nation that was not bristling with firearms, criminals found some creative ways to carve up their enemies and to dispose of the evidence. This book is perfect for fans of true crime, especially because it shows a world before modern systems were in place. It’s hard to picture a crime scene where every little detail isn’t scrutinized, or that no one is wearing gloves, testing blood types or searching a database. But what’s so great about this book is you see how and why all those forensic and detective skills evolved. A must read for fans of true crime!

Reading Across the Seas Book Club: Singapore, Contemporary Fiction

Sugarbread by Balli Kaur Jaswal

Sugarbread is the story of a 10-year-old Sikh girl, Parveen 'Pin' Kaur, living in 1990s Singapore. She grapples with growing up in the multicultural city-state while uncovering the secrets kept from her by her mother's family. The book flips back and forth between Pin's perspective and the perspective of her mother in the 1960s.

At its heart Sugarbread is a coming-of-age tale about family secrets, religion, tradition, and the mother-daughter relationship. The key to understanding Pin’s relationship with her mother and grandmother is a family tragedy from the past which still casts a shadow on the family. The author aptly portrays dysfunctional relationships in the context of the family’s traditions and customs. Within this family’s story there are important issues that afflict people around the world.

I was not familiar with the unique melting pot of people that make up Singapore. It's a multicultural place, with Chinese, Malay, Indian and other ethnic groups living together. Sugarbread is an insightful depiction of how various religions can live in proximity and harmony. Jaswal’s descriptive writing made Singapore real, with its smells, colors and the ever-present activity of people. She breathes life into the city - from the crowded markets to the sticky heat and the smells of different cuisines mixing in the air. This is a life-affirming novel.

Nonfiction: History, Conspiracy Theories

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch

I know people, seemingly sane, who believe in conspiracy theories. Voodoo Histories describes and then dismantles several of the most well-known Western conspiracy theories from the last 100 years. Who killed JFK, RFK, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana? Were the mob, the CIA, and the Royal Family responsible? Did astronauts visit us 10,000 years ago and is the DaVinci Code true history? Did Jesus screw up faking his own death? (I hadn't heard that one before.)  All these questions and more are answered in painstaking detail.

The book starts with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and its role in launching the age of the modern conspiracy theory that is still believed today. This conspiracy theory states that Jews had planned and caused WWI as war profiteers and to disrupt world governance. Even though there was undeniable proof at the time (1919) that the book was a forgery (it was originally a French satire about Napoleon's lust for power that was later edited to implicate Jews instead), the fact that it seemed to make sense of the devastating war made it irresistible. This acceptance of shadowy theories despite proof to the contrary is a recurring theme in Voodoo Histories.

“Conspiracy theory may be one way of reclaiming power and disclaiming responsibility.”

People believe in conspiracies for a variety of reasons, namely how they help explain their worldview. People find it easier to believe in a conspiratorial social media post or meme to justify their worldview rather than researching to discover the facts themselves. Revisionist history, people believing what they want to believe, rather than what is documented also plays a role in conspiracy theories. When presented with evidence and documents, conspiracy believers refuse to accept the truth. Conspiracy theorists still believe that 9/11 was “an inside job” and that President Obama “wasn’t born in the USA.” No matter how much, even mountains of evidence, they will refuse to acknowledge the truth.

“The believer in a conspiracy theory or theories becomes, in his own mind, the one in proper communion with the underlying universe, the one who understands the true ordering of things.”

Even long after conspiracy theories are exposed as the nonsense they are, believers cannot accept the truth because it doesn't make sense the way they want it to – it doesn’t fit their worldview. Conspiracy theory believers believe because they want to believe, neither facts nor the truth matter!

Does it matter if people believe in false conspiracy theories? Do conspiracies influence politics? Aaronovitch says yes. Specifically, he says "the belief in conspiracy theories is harmful in itself. It distorts our view of history and therefore of the present and - if widespread enough - leads to disastrous decisions." This is the core theme of the book, and it is argued very well.

Persuasive and detailed, Voodoo Histories requires a great deal of concentration. It is a thorough and thoughtful book that is great for those who want to examine history and current events in a more thoughtful way. Unfortunately, those who really need this book will not give it a second glance and Aaronovitch explains why that is true too.

They Thought They Were Free

 

Nonfiction: History, Politics, Germany

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 by Milton Sanford Mayer

Seven years after Hitler committed suicide and World War II ended, Mayer moved from Chicago, Illinois to Germany with his young family. There he had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small German town. He developed friendships with ten German men to gain an understanding of their lives under Nazism.

“These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but “they were sufficiently different from each other in background, character, intellect, and temperament to represent, among them, some millions or tens of millions of Germans and sufficiently like unto one another to have been Nazis.” Of particular interest to Mayer was how they were able to be silent about and even become complicit in the targeting of groups of people for persecution and murder.

When Mayer asked one man how Christians in Germany could accept the persecution of Jews, the man answered, “Others may have other reasons for destroying the Jews, but we Christians had a Christian duty to.” Hatred motivated them to take the name of Christ and attach it to the ruling political party’s agenda. The Nazis, in turn, exploited their hatred and fear which made it “easier” to rationalize immoral behaviors.

For followers of Christ in Nazi Germany life consisted of many spiritual challenges. One of the Germans, who was a Catholic, worshipped regularly and led his children in bedtime prayers every night. His boss told him that he had to take a Nazi loyalty oath to keep his job. The Catholic man refused but his boss gave him 24 hours to “rethink” his choice. He struggled with his decision; he knew his only loyalty was to Christ. However, fearing what would happen if he lost his job, he relented and took the oath. Deeply ashamed, he told Mayer, “Through National Socialism I lost my soul. I blasphemed. I myself had denied Jesus Christ.”

Fear of being an “Untermensch” (subhuman) also led Germans to ignore immoral acts committed by the Nazi regime, their fellow Germans, and themselves. One man explained Germans just wanted to reassure themselves that they were Germans, that they were not one of “them.” If the Nazi government targeted certain persons or groups of people as “Untermensch” that meant it was acceptable to ignore and rationalize the persecutions because you weren’t one of “them.” As one German astutely observed, all that was (and is!) required of “us” in an authoritarian regime – “is that we do nothing,”

Rosenstrasse Protest, 1943. Notice how many of the protesters linked their arms together.

Some Germans did do something. There was one notable protest in Nazi Germany. In February and March 1943 non-Jewish wives and relatives of Jewish men who had been arrested for simply being Jewish by the Gestapo staged a nonviolent protest in Rosenstrasse (Rose Street) in Berlin. The small group grew to a crowd of thousands. The Nazis threatened them with gunfire, but the protesters remained yelling and chanting on the street. News of the demonstration spread quickly throughout the country and even to the international press. To dispel potentially damaging international attention and to prevent further protest, German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels ordered the release of the prisoners at Rosenstrasse on 6 March 1943.

Seven years had passed since the end of Nazism, how did the ten men feel about what happened? Here Mayer distinguishes between collective shame and the notion of guilt. The latter can never be collective. - "Collective shame may be possible, but it cannot be compelled. Shame is a state of being while guilt is a juridical fact.”  Some of the Nazi leaders were found guilty as a juridical fact during the Nuremberg Trails while eight out of the ten German men Mayer interviewed expressed shame over their actions during the Nazi regime. However, all ten men expressed regret and “felt bad about the torture and slaughter of innocent people" – not however about the “resettlement, relocation” (concentration and killing camps). One of the men who had participated in the burning of a synagogue said of the Holocaust, “If it happened, it was wrong. But I don’t believe it happened.”

Mayer, clearly frustrated, writes, “That they, or some of their countrymen and their country’s government, violated the precepts of Christian, civilized, lawful life was bad enough; that they won’t see it, or say it, is what really rowels … They did not care enough.”

One of the closing chapters, "Peoria Uber Alles," is prophetic. It's the story of how what happened in Germany could just as easily happen in Peoria, Illinois, if the city were to experience some type of “emergency,” become isolationistic, and identify who would be "us" and who would be “them.”  Mayer describes how people fell into the warm but deadly embrace of authoritarianism. Resistance, protest, criticism, complaint all carried with them the likelihood of retaliation – they would be “dealt” with sooner or later. Just like Goebbels who continually promised a “victory orgy” to “take care” of those who thought that their “treasonable attitude” had escaped notice. “Uber Alles” can happen anywhere!

The author concludes: ""What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret … I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt—and feel—that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I."

This is the best book I have read about “regular” people living in Nazi Germany. The ten German men sound like people that live in the United States today. What Germans thought then and what we still think about today are ourselves, our families, having enough money, and being treated fairly. “The indictment of the ordinary German is powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune” to authoritarianism. The lessons are here if we only take the time to learn!