West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge

West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge is a really good work of historical fiction that begins with 105-year-old Woodrow Wilson Nickel furiously writing down a story, one from his life in 1938.

Nickel is an Okie, a farmboy from the Dust Bowl, making the book reminiscent of The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. He came to the east coast after the deaths of his baby sister and both parents, and made it through the Great Hurricane of 1938, which killed seven hundred, including the only family he had left, his cousin. Also surviving the storm were two giraffes who crossed the Atlantic, slated to go to the San Diego Zoo. 

The giraffes were to traverse the country in the care of Riley Jones, who Nickel would know as the Old Man, and Nickel after learning of their destination saw the giraffes as a way to get him to California. Nickel also came across Augusta Red, a young women he finds himself smitten with, who states she's taking pictures of the giraffes for Life Magazine. He in a stolen motorbike tailed the truck with the giraffes, then conned his way into driving they and the Old Man, and she tailed them in a green Packard. 

They embarked on the twelve-day road trip across the country to the San Diego Zoo, and zoo director Mrs. Belle Benchley. The Old Man was a lover of animals, treating the hurricane giraffes that he referred to as the darlings with great care, and grew to see how well Nickel worked with the two, who he knew as Boy and Girl. Red continued following them, spending time with Nickel and telling him of her heart trouble. When passing through Texas, they wound up at Nickel's burned down home, and he told the Old Man what happened there with his father after his mother and baby sister died. A flash flood then hit them and Red saved the rig from falling over with the giraffes in it, ruining her car, camera, and the photos she hoped would be in Life. 

Boy then saved Nickel and Red when someone tried to steal the giraffes, the second person to do so, and the book is a compelling adventure tale. Also interesting is the newspaper headlines included that cover Europe and what the Nazis are doing. There's also so much poverty, with the cross-country trip coming across Hoovervilles, scores of people living in shanties. At the beginning, it wasn't entirely where the book going, but it winds up being a history lesson, travelogue, and story of love and animals and unexpected endings. It's told first-person by Nickel and at the start it notes that the story he writing in notepads was to someone, and it comes out at the end who it was. Lovely book.

Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

Culpability by Bruce Holsinger is an excellent novel that's a work of suspense, family dynamics, and the consequences of AI, including moral and ethical responsibility around artificial intelligence.

Detailed is the Cassidy-Shaw family, with seventeen-year-old Charlie, fourteen-year-old Alice, eleven-year-old Izzy, father Noah, and mother Lorelai. The book starts with them on the road in their autonomous minivan, with Charlie behind the wheel and Noah in the passenger seat, as the adult responsible for Charlie's actions. There's an accident that leaves dead a retired couple from the other car involved.

Several weeks after, the family goes to a house on Chesapeake Bay and come across technology mogul Daniel Monet there with his teenage daughter, Eurydice, and people that work for him. While Charlie and the daughter develop a relationship, Alice and Izzy start exhibiting odd behavior, and it comes out that Lorelai and Monet know each other. She's a star in the field of AI and it's ramifications, with a dual doctorate in engineering and philosophy, and received a MacArthur Fellowship. 

Police wanted to interview the family about the accident, and it was interesting the way things progressed, with each person playing, and revealing their part in what happened. While he was behind the wheel of the minivan driving on autopilot, Charlie was texting with Izzy about Alice, and Alice screamed, causing him to jerk the wheel, taking control of the car away from the autonomous driving system. The question of fault in the car accident is very up in the air given the autonomous vehicle, and revealed is that Lorelai created the autonomous driving system, on behalf of Monet. Charlie and Eurydice go missing and the ending is unexpected, and circles back to autonomous systems and responsibility for their actions. It's a compelling read.

The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer

The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer is a lovely debut novel about thirty-six-year-old Clover Brooks, who lives in New York and is a death doula, spending time with people at the end of their lives.

Clover's parents died when she was six, and lives with her dog and two cats in the apartment that she was raised in by her grandfather. He passed away in his office at work thirteen years ago and Clover kept many of his things, as if he still there. She had never been in a relationship and was a loner, with her best friend her eighty-seven-year-old neighbor Leo that she played mahjong with. 

Clover met her new neighbor and eventual friend Sylvie, and then Sebastian, who she met at a death cafe meeting. Sebastian's grandmother Claudia was terminally ill and he hired Clover to spend time with her. Claudia had been a photojournalist in the 1950s, and was to marry someone in the U.S. after returning from holiday in France. She met a local, Hugo Beaufort, and sailed to Corsica with him for ten days. She then still came back to the U.S. and got married, largely because she was expected to. 

Clover and her new friend Sylvie researched and found there a Hugo Beaufort born in France in 1931, listed as a resident of Maine. She went to try to find him, only to discover he had passed away a couple of months prior, but she met his grandson, Hugo. Upon hearing about Sebastian's grandmother, Hugo guessed that she Claudia, who his grandfather had talked about her right before he died, and said she was the reason he moved to America. He and Claudia each requested their ashes be scattered in Corsica, where they were together. 

Hugo found letters his grandfather had written to Claudia but not sent, the last one saying he had seen her with her husband and she looked happy, so he's going to leave her be. Clover gave to Claudia the letter, and others Hugo wrote which said Claudia the love of his life. She died content and her final words to Clover were "learn from my mistakes, my darling. Don't let the best parts of life pass you by because you're took scared of the unknown. Be cautiously reckless." Clover then came upon her neighbor Leo in the last moments of his life after a heart attack and he said to her "the secret to having a beautiful death is to live a beautiful life. Promise me, kid, that you'll let yourself live."

Clover received a package that Claudia had arranged to be sent, with a digital camera and several lenses. She embarked on a three-month trip traveling the world, documenting her time in a notebook from Hugo. The two then met in Corsica and scattered together in the sea Claudia's ashes and Hugo's grandfather's ashes. 

It's a nice read and Brammer closes with "you can find meaning in anything if you look hard enough; if you want to believe that everything happens for a reason. But if we completely understood one another, if every even made sense, none of us would ever learn or grow. Our days might be pleasant, but prosaic. So maybe we just need to appreciate that many aspects of life - and the people we love - will always be a mystery. Because without mystery, there is no magic. And instead if constantly asking ourselves the question of why we're here, maybe we should be savoring a simpler truth: we are here."

The Uncool by Cameron Crowe

The Uncool by Cameron Crowe is an interesting memoir by the writer and director of movies including Say Anything, Singles, Jerry McGuire, and Almost Famous. Additionally, Crowe wrote the book Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and then won an Oscar for the movie screenplay he adapted.

Crowe was born in 1957 and in The Uncool, writes about heavily about his teen years in San Diego in the 1970s. He had a supportive mother and father, older sister Cindy, and oldest sister Cathy who committed suicide. He began writing music reviews for an alternative weekly newspaper, The Door, at the age of fourteen and at fifteen both graduated high school and became Rolling Stone's youngest-ever contributor.

The movie Almost Famous is about his youth, and before long he was interviewing Ozzy Osbourne at a Black Sabbath show, the Eagles, Kris Kristofferson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the Allman Brothers Band. Later there was Led Zeppelin, who he was flying with on their plane, and significant time with David Bowie, who told eighteen-year-old Crowe, "ask me anything, hold up a mirror and show me what you see." 

Bowie also told Crowe he "young enough to be honest," perhaps part of why other musicians spent time with Crowe. Later Crowe recounts the story of bringing from Jamaica back to the U.S. marijuana seeds he pulled out of Bob Marley's stash. At twenty-one, Crowe wrote about everyday high school kids, with his book Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The Uncool closes around the time Almost Famous: The Musical came out in 2019, with the ending centered around Crowe's mom. It's a revealing and solid book.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a lovely novel that tells the story of Sybil Van Antwerp, done entirely through letters she writes and receives. The book begins with seventy-three year old Sybil in 2012 writing to her brother Felix, and goes up to letters from 2021. Sybil corresponds as well with people including: 

• Fiona, Sybil's at times estranged daughter
• Theodore Lubeck, her neighbor that cares for her
• Melissa Genet, a local college Dean who refuses her request to audit classes
• Harry Landy, the troubled high-achieving student son of a former colleague 
• Dezi Martinelli, the son of someone she played a role in sending to jail
• Basam Mansour, a customer service agent with a DNA testing company
• Henrietta Gleason, her recently learned of biological sister in Scotland 
• Gilbert, her son who died young and with whom she regularly writes missives to
• Authors like Ann Patchett, Joan Didion, and Larry McMurtry that she writes with
• People that she wrote in the 1950s when her letter writing began

Evans writes an originally constructed book, spinning the story together letter by letter. They're lovely pictures of relationships progressing over time and the wrap up to the book is kind of great.

Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe

Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe is a solid collection of a dozen The New Yorker pieces. The collection is subtitled True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, with those below ones that stood out:

The Jefferson Bottles (2007) - Noteworthy was how Bill Koch, whose father founded Koch Industries, collected wines, and sued people.

The Avenger (2015) - Details Ken Dornstein, whose brother died in the Pam Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. Interesting from this piece is the level of obsession that it shows Dornstein had to find those responsible.

The Empire of Edge (2014) - About New York Mets owner Steven Cohen and his hedge fund SAC Capital. Covers his scant punishment for wrongdoings, especially in relation to how much he profited from them.

Journeyman (2017) On Anthony Bourdain and his CNN show No Reservations that would travel the world to authentic places. Bourdain then took his life in 2018.

The Worst of the Worst (2015) - Details defense attorney Judy Clarke, who has represented a number of extremely high-profile guilty people that she's attempted to keep off death row, seeking life imprisonment sentences instead. Plaintiffs she's represented include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Ted Kaczynski, Zacarias Moussaoui, Eric Rudolph, Susan Smith, Robert Bowers, and Jared Loughner.

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Syrian Canadian Zoulfa Katouh is a lovely debut novel about eighteen-year-old pharmacy student Salama Kassab, who volunteers at a hospital in Homs, Syria, caring for those injured, including six-year-old Ahmad who died of internal bleeding, at the hands of the Syrian military.

Salama's father and her brother Hamza were imprisoned by the government the year before after going to a protest, and her mother killed a week later by a bomb. Salama hopes to escape the country with her pregnant sister-in-law, Layla, an artist. 

Salama has PTSD, which takes the form of an imagined companion, Khawf, who frequently tells her what she must do to survive, even if it's a painful, and potentially horrific, choice. She finds love with Kenan, who has two younger siblings, thirteen-year-old Yusuf and nine-year-old Lama. She secures passage, eventually for all of them, out of Syria, with it to be via boat across the Mediterranean to Italy, from Am, whose sister she treated in the hospital. Salama finds out her father died and brother still held in prison, counter to her hope that they both no longer being tortured.

The book takes a unexpected turn as it comes out that Layla being alive was imagined by Salama, just like Khawf a figment of her PTSD. Layla had been killed by a sniper five months before. Salama then is told in her head by Khawf that the hospital about to be bombed, rushes there and tells Dr. Ziad to evacuate, saving many. Salama, Kenan, Yusuf, and Lama take the boat and jump overboard, leading to the Kenan's siblings safely in Germany with family, and Salama and Kenan in Toronto. It's an excellent book, with many events taken from real atrocities suffered by Syrians and inflicted by the dictatorship.

Joyride by Susan Orlean

Joyride by Susan Orlean is a memoir on her life and career as a nonfiction writer, with books including The Orchid Thief, The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, On Animals, and her first, Saturday Night. 

Orlean starts with her path as a writer. She graduated from the University of Michigan, then moved to Portland and worked at Willamette Week as her second writing job there. She went to Boston and worked at the Boston Globe, also as her second writing job there, and then New York City. She eventually wound up at The New Yorker, first doing freelance pieces before she became a staff writer there. 

There's fascinating anecdotes about journalism in years past, with large expense accounts, frequent travel to write stories, and often open-ended timeframes for time to complete them and how frequently staff writers had to publish. She also covers how access as a writer was different in the past, she wanted to write about working in missile silos, asked the military if she could visit, and did so with little difficulty.

Orlean describes her book Saturday Night as a wild experience of being passed to different editors, some of whom were interested in the book and others who were simply assigned to it. She twenty-five years ago wrote The Orchid Thief, expanded from a magazine article into her second book, which became the basis for the movie Adaptation, with the Charlie Kaufman-written screenplay about making the movie from the book. In researching Rin Tin Tin, she notes finding late in the research process a volume of material that expanded the scope of the book. When she wrote The Library Book, it coincided with her moving from a country home in Hudson Valley, New York to Los Angeles. 

The "writer on writing" content she provides is fantastic. On subjects, she writes:

• Writers fall into two categories, those who have something they want to say to the world, and those who believe the world has something to tell them, with her in the second camp. 
• Two categories of story subjects she loves are "hiding in place sight" and "who knew?" 
• She likes to write about subjects that are passionate about something, especially if it likely wouldn't be covered by other writers.
• Every person has an unimaginably rich world inside of them. She loves the idea of describing a world, it may not be a celebrity world, but it's a world nonetheless. 
• When you pick a topic, you declare it matters. Writing is then learning about that topic and sharing it, including your thoughts on it, with others.
• Editors or bosses she worked with said that her stories being about obscure topics made them require great execution to be successful.
• Subjects at times would feel an attachment with her, she's asking in depth about their lives.

On her writing process, she notes that:

• She reads her work aloud, listening for the cadence of the words.
• A lesson taught to her about writing that it involves reporting, then thinking, then writing. 
• Her work is something that anyone could do, putting in the research and reading the archives to be able to describe something, but they don't. 
• It was her job to do the research, think about it, and then tell the story.
• Another lesson she was taught is stories don't need a huge conclusion, they should leave readers falling forward, finishing the tale in their heads.
• The engine of her stories is the drive from ignorance to knowledge. 
• To manage the volume of material from researching books, she put information on index cards and spread it all out, then grouped them together. It's assembling a coherent whole. 
• She doesn't use a tape recorder, rather takes notes. 
• Writing a book is about fulfilling a daily word quota. 

It's an informative and compelling book and Orlean also covers being a speech coach for the Democratic National Convention, including trying to convince Senate candidate Barack Obama to tweak a speech.

Frostlines by Neil Shea

Frostlines by Neil Shea is a work of nonfiction subtitled A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic. Shea writes a series of chapters with each on his time in an area north of the Arctic Circle.

 The book starts with him watching narwhals talk with each other, or tusking, in Canada's Admiralty Inlet. In a a chapter about wolves on Canada's Ellesmere Island, he notes how the animals were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park in the mid-1990s. 

He writes of the Northwest Passage, and how forty-one ships made the voyage through the Passage in 2023 and thirty-eight in 2024. Covered in one chapter is the decline in caribou herds across the top of North America. In another, he shows a  classroom in Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska, where a freshly killed caribou is butchered for the students to see, and the parts all parceled out to the Nunamiut people. 

Shea as well covers Greenland and the Norse people who vanished from there in the mid-fifteenth century. The last chapter is on the border between Russia and Norway, stretching 120 miles, stopping at the Barents Sea. He writes about the Norwegian town of Kirkenes and how people used to cross the border in both directions, but now after the invasion of Crimea, then Covid-19, then the invasion of Ukraine, traffic has largely stopped.

Where the Lost Wander by Amy Harmon

Where the Lost Wander by Amy Harmon is a work of historical fiction that tells the story of John Lowry and Naomi May on the Oregon Trail. She's a young widower from a white family, he's half-Pawnee, raised by his white father, without his mother.

John was retained to travel the first part of the journey west by Naomi's travelling party, which included her immediate family of mother and father Winifred and William May and brothers Warren, Will, Webb, and Wyatt. Also part of the group was the Bingham family and Caldwell family, whose son Naomi had been married to. 

The group set out in 1853, and people that made the trip west were in search of a better life, and found many hardships along the way, and encounters with both Indian and illness sometimes fatal. John and headstrong Naomi, who draws and paints, fall in love and John and Naomi marry. At the start of the book, Naomi's mother, father, older brother Warren, and the Binghams are killed by Indians, and Naomi and her youngest brother Wolfe, who was born during the trip, are taken by the tribe. 

John comes across the massacre, sees that Naomi has likely been taken, and goes in pursuit of her. He comes across a group of Shoshoni, including his sister, Hanabi and the chief, Washakie. John learns about a different group of Shoshoni, led by Pocatello, with a reputation for killing white people. Washakie tells of a coming meetup of tribes and there Washakie and John state their case for the release of Naomi and Wolfe, but a vote of the various leaders results in Naomi being released and Wolfe kept, to be raised by a woman, Weda, in Pocatello's band who lost her own baby.

Naomi goes with John and Washakie and his people, but from the death of her parents and brother, and taking of Wolfe, she retreats into herself, lost in grief, hence the Where the Lost Wander book title. Wolfe is brought back to them by Weda as he's sick and she hopes they can heal him. Instead, Wolfe dies in Naomi's arms. He had been loved by many and Naomi and John left Washakie and his people and rejoined Webb, Will, and Wyatt and formed a life. It's a solid book and while still fiction, it's interesting how it based on real people.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

The Wedding People by Alison Espach is a lovely novel that tells a story about Phoebe Stone, who arrives at a Newport, Rhode Island resort hotel with the intention to take her life.

Phoebe had been left by her husband, was going nowhere at work, and found her cat dead, leaving her in a broken state. Upon arrival at the hotel, she finds herself the only guest not part of a week-long wedding party, and becomes quickly intertwined with Lila and Gary, the respective bride and groom to be.

Lila is used to being the center of attention and Gary older, and has a daughter, Juice, from his wife who got cancer and died. Espach writes of how people have a part to play at the wedding, and that includes telling the bride how perfect everything is. Phoebe comes in and doesn't feel a compunction to lie given that she was going to take her own life. She forms relationships that matter with Lila, Gary, and Juice.

Events wind up having Phoebe be tapped as the maid of honor, and the toast she writes is lovely. She was going to say, "a wedding is a huge waste of money, but it's also true that this wedding will never be a waste. Because I came here to die. And now look at me. Lila, every day this week, you gave me a reason to get up in the morning, to put on a beautiful dress and be part of something, and for that I will always be grateful."

At the end, Espach writes this about Phoebe, to be alive, she must leave this hotel, despite the uncertainties of everything. Walk down the long hallway of that mansion come winter, not knowing what will become of her, which is a thing that does scare her. But she also feels a thrill imagining the candles she'll light at night. Frank, the nineteenth-century yellow dog, who will sleep on her bed as she writes. The snow dusting the ocean.

It's a lovely story of someone falling into a situation and then how the characters lives touch each other. The book is immensely entertaining, but most of all has heart.

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrick Backman

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman is a novel that tells the story of seven-year-old Elsa, who is different than other kids and often picked on at school. 

Her best, and only, friend is her grandmother, seventy-seven years old and crazy—as in standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-strangers crazy. At night, Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas, where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.

When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s adventure begins. Her grandmother’s instructions lead her to an apartment building full of drunks, monsters, attack dogs, and old crones but also to the truth about fairy tales and kingdoms, and new friends from her grandmother's world, including Wolfheart. The story is an odd one, but finishes nicely, and is about being different, having family, friends, and protectors.

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy is an engrossing novel about a woman, Inti Flynn, trying to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands after hundreds of years of them not being there. Her belief is that wolves will help the entire ecosystem come back to life. 

There with her twin sister, Aggie, Inti has mirror-touch synesthesia, where she feels in her mind sensations, including pain, that she sees happen to others. Aggie is a shell of her former self, communicating only with Inti, and often just barely, afraid to leave the house after the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband. 

The locals in Scotland are generally against Inti's efforts to introduce the wolves, believing them a threat to their sheep and way of life. One of them, Stuart Burns, who had been beating his wife, Lainey, is found dead by Inti and she buries his body to try to prevent retribution against the wolves. She had developed a relationship with the chief of police, Duncan, becomes pregnant, and goes from believing it was Duncan who killed Stuart to thinking a wolf did it after Duncan gets attacked. 

Inti goes to try to find and kill the wolf and gives birth in the forest, with she and the baby almost dying from exposure, but wolves curled around them for warmth. Her sister then finds them in the forest, and after Aggie takes the baby to get her help, one of Inti's adversary locals comes and saves her. She later learns it was Aggie who killed Stuart, and almost killed Duncan, in an effort to protect her. 

The book feels very unique, with it wild, raw, and visceral, containing a huge connection with the natural world. It's also about love and loss and finding your way through pain in your world, and contains lovely language, with Inti "halved and doubled at once" after the birth of her child.

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry is a novel that chronicles the story of Alice Scott, Hayden Anderson, and Margaret Ives. Ives is a reclusive heiress from a media family who lives on a small island in Georgia and engages both Henry and Anderson as potential writers of her biography. 

The book is told first person through the eyes of Alice, who develops a romance with Hayden, and they both see that there's more to Margaret's story, and why she brought them into her life, than she's revealing to them. 

Margaret tells Alice and Hayden that she'll meet with each separately over a 30-day period, and then decide who she wants to tell her story. During those thirty days, she speaks of family secrets, but it doesn't come out till the end that one of the secrets is that Hayden is her grandson. He doesn't know, as Margaret gave Hayden's mom for adoption. Rather than being about writing a biography, Margaret's plan was to get to know Hayden, and Henry's book about the two of them and Alice finishes nicely.

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy tells the set in the future story of Franny Stone, who arrives in Greenland with the purpose of tracking the world's last flock of Arctic terns (deer, wolves, and bears are already extinct). 

The book is McConaghy's debut novel and seems to hit on many of the same themes and emotional constructs that she covers a few years later in her novel Wild Dark Shore, with the more recent book a bit tighter of a read. It felt as if McConaghy developed further her craft as a writer, something both logical and kind of inspiring.

Franny joins with the crew of the Saghani, and the boat travels to the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. Her quest is revealed as an attempt to fulfill a desire of her late husband, Niall, and it's a nice ending to the book. 

Paper Girl by Beth Macy

Paper Girl by Beth Macy is a good book subtitled A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America. Macys grew up in Urbana, Ohio, graduating in 1982 from Urbana High School. There was a healthy economy, thriving schools, and middle class, that Macys, one of the poorer kids in her class, could aspire to. 

A Pell Grant, spearheaded by Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, enabled Macys to attend college. She graduated from Bowling Green State University in 1986, the tail end of the time a Pell Grant would cover tuition, housing, and books for a poor kid. Now the average Pell grant pays less than 30% of a public university education, an amount that could well have shut out Macys, who later was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, from college. The gutting of Pell Grants began under Ronald Reagan and continued under Bill Clinton. Reagan’s Secretary of Education derided the notion of education helping people recover from poverty, and Reagan compared Pell recipients to welfare moms. Clinton then cratered financial aid for poor kids, at the same time he brought the U.S. into the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, predicting that offshoring would be a win-win for American workers. NAFTA took a million jobs, and subsequent free trade agreements and globalization another four million jobs. 

Free trade, and anger over it, was cited in presidential election exit polls as a reason for Trump flipping Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan red in 2016. Macys writes that Democrats should have embraced unionism, a la Bernie Sanders, but instead, rural communities have been abandoned by the Democratic Party, leaving small town America available for the Republican Party to feed on. Local news, particularly in rural America, has been decimated, so people get their information from Facebook posts and press releases. This leads to a split of society, where people aren’t given real information and can easily descend into tribalism. Quoted is the philosopher Richard Rorty who in 1998 predicted that globalization and inequality would lead to class resentment, and someone would tap into it and be elected as a strongman, proclaiming that he’ll make the elites pay. Trump in 2024 won 91% of the counties lacking a professional news source.

Macys with her book went back to Urbana to write on what had become of the town. She notes that just 37% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, and only 16% in Urbana. The mayor, Bill Bean, who took over his dad’s successful insurance business that started in 1866, says college is overrated and the town’s 16% college graduation rate doesn’t bother him. Also noted is how someone who ran against Bean and lost now runs a youth center that Urbana’s establishment blocked from receiving a $2M grant from the state. 

When you’re working class, good schools and social connections are sustenance. However, the Urbana that Macys returned to featured schools with large numbers of parents yelling at teachers, and take their kids out, professing to homeschool them, but just not wanting to be responsible for their truancy when kids just weren’t showing up for school. It’s noted that homeschooling is now the fastest growing form of education in the country, with the gutting of public schools creating separate educational systems. When people lose faith in their schools, and what they can do for their kids, it's a crisis. If kids don’t see a way out, and low-income kids aren’t exposed to normal and good while at school, it’s too easy for them to become stuck. 

Factories shut down, union jobs go away, leaving low paying jobs, and when there are good jobs, it can be hard for employers to be get good workers. Enough people couldn’t be found for skilled manufacturing jobs that the Biden Administration was subsidizing. The few who go away to college don’t return, so there’s no models for kids, leaving Urbana what Macys describes as a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place. She tells the story of recent Urbana High graduate Silas James and covers how something as basic as reliable transportation to a job or school can be so vital to someone's efforts. Macys also writes about how her older sister denied sexual abuse allegations by her daughter Liza, against her stepdad. It’s heartbreaking reading and while Paper Girl is a good book, it’s also a tough one.

Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren

Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren is a solid novel, one with heart, that features as its lead one of the secondary characters from Huckleberry Finn. It was interesting reading in the postscript of the work that Jahren put into getting characters and historical details right, creating a fictional work grounded in facts.

The book is an adventure tale, starting with fourteen-year-old Mary Jane in 1846 being sent 400 miles down the Mississippi River by her mother Ida to go help her aunt Evelyn, who is caring for her injured husband George and raising daughters Susan and Joanna. She took the steamboat Minnesota Belle down the Mississippi, and then went about the Galenian, helmed by Mrs. Captain, who would become Mary Jane's good friend. The Galenian was coal-powered, with the boiler known as Robert Fulton, and Mary Jane worked while aboard, helping Mrs. Captain run the ship. She was then met by the Schmidt family, Mormons who took Mary Jane to her aunt, uncle, and cousins, where she discovered that her extended family had little, but she could help. George had suffered a head injury and wasn't able to work, and Evelyn was caring for he and the two girls, and the Schmidts giving provisions every Sunday. 

Mary Jane was a worker and tirelessly helped the family. Things were going well, with Uncle George improving, until he had a seizure, developing paralysis, then Evelyn got sick. Mary Jane had been exposed to the illness, but quickly recovered, and the Schmidt family took in Susan and Joanna so that they wouldn't catch it while Mary Jane tried to nurse Aunt Evelyn back to health. It turned out to be unsuccessful and Evelyn died, with George dying shortly after. Mary Jane decided to be responsible for her cousins and planned to take them back to her family, but a judge decided that they, including Mary Jane who said that she their sister, should go live with a relative of their father, Peter Wilks of Greenville, MS. 

For the trip to Greenville, the girls wound up back on the Galenian, with Mrs. Captain. Also onboard the ship was a boy not yet ten-years-old, Rooster, who Mrs. Captain had befriended and was working in the ship. Mrs. Captain noted that he "didn't have a good start," but was doing a great job working and living on the ship as first mate. Mrs. Captain would speak of others by saying "it doesn't cost anything to be kind" and her plan was to give the Galenian to Rooster in a few years when she retires. Peter Wilks, Susan and Joanna's uncle, was not a good man. The three girls befriended a dog, that they named Cherry, who never left their side. Wilks fell ill and died and into the picture came two people who pretended to be his brothers, and with them was a young man who Mary Jane became taken with. Peter Wilks' actual brothers showed up, were good men, and Susan and Joanna decided to go back to London with them. Once more the girls spent time on the Galenian with Mrs. Captain and Rooster, and Mary Jane went and found the young man, who turned out to be Huck Finn. 

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy is a compelling, dark, and lovely novel set on Shearwater, a fictional island based on Macquarie Island halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica. The book features the characters of widower Dominic Salt, his three children Fen, Raff, and Orly, and a woman, Rowan, who washes ashore while coming to try to aid her husband, who was the lead botanist on Shearwater.

The Salts had been on the island eight years, with Fen seventeen-years-old, Raff eighteen, and Orly nine. Dominic is caretaker of Shearwater, in charge of fixing things broken, but the people on it a bit broken inside. Dom would speak to his wife, who died of cancer at the time of Orly's birth. Fen sleeps at the boathouse to create space for herself, and Raff's boyfriend Alex committed suicide on the island. 

Shearwater is a fascinating setting in the book, with it housing an enormous seed bank containing some three million varieties of seeds. It's there to preserve plants from going extinct, especially in the fact of climate disaster threatening the global food supply. Reference is made throughout the book to deteriorating conditions in the outside world, with fires, floods, and food scarcity. The island is also natively home to plants that don't grow in other regions and the kids' connection to the animals of Shearwater, particularly the whales and seals, is great reading. 

Weather conditions on the island deteriorated, and the Salts and Rowan are waiting for the scheduled boat to come six weeks off to evacuate them and the seeds they deem most vital to be saved. It comes out that Rowan's husband Hank had an affair with Fen, thirty years his junior, then wanted to drown all the seeds as he wouldn't have been able to take them off the island and couldn't bear to pick some, but not others. He then tried to drown Fen when she told him she might be pregnant. Around this same time, Alex's brother Tom and his research partner Naija drowned, Alex killed himself, and then Rowan washed ashore. The Salts told her that Hank had left the island, not that he was being held in advance of the rescue ship coming to Shearwater.

The book hops back and forth between first-person narration by the various characters ands that makes it a somewhat disquieting read, but it pays off at the devastatingly beautiful end, with the seed vault starting to flood and Rowan giving Orly her last breaths so that he can live. In the afterword, McConaghy notes having been on Macquarie with her sixteen-month-old son, and how awe-inspiring the island was. 

All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert is a heavy, but also beautiful nonfiction subtitled Love, Loss, and Liberation. Gilbert writes about her late soulmate, Rayya Elias, the drug and alcohol addition she had, and Rayya's death from liver cancer. Also, Gilbert writes about her own sex and love addiction, how her story with Rayya was one of friendship, romance, beauty, rage, and pain, and Gilbert's recovery from her addiction.

Gilbert had to be involved in the dramas of other people, always checking in, helping them recover, being the savior. She would also become wrapped up in relationships, them turning immediately all-consuming. She was a romantic obsessive, an enabler, and codependent. Having money from her book Eat Pray Love gave fuel to the fire, she could afford to gift huge amounts, trying to save others from their problems. 

When Gilbert and Rayya didn't know each other well, Gilbert gave the gift of free lodging to Rayya after a mutual friend said that Rayya going through a hard time from a breakup. They became close friends and after Rayya's cancer diagnosis, with a six-month life expectancy, they fell into one another and started a relationship. They went everywhere, doing everything, including drugs and alcohol. For a time it was great, then it wasn't, as Rayya had experience as a drug addict, and had returned to it.

Rayya had a horrible decline back into addiction and covered in the book is how when someone an addict, the things they do and say are said and done by someone else entirely. Rayya herself had years prior told someone that when dealing with a family member who was an addict, they were no longer dealing with them, but with a vampire. They might come back to being a person, but that was up to them alone. People have to want to get clean, they can't because someone else wants them to. Rayya lived twenty months after her diagnosis and Gilbert had to leave Rayya to save herself. She had hit caregiver collapse, with Rayya's drug and alcohol addiction and Gilbert's sex and love addiction supercharging the dysfunction and then collapse.

At the end of Rayya's life, Gilbert was there, and Gilbert in her pain spun into her sex and love addiction, and then confronted it. She notes recovery from addiction of all kinds is possible, but it's hard, and requires constant effort and vigilance. The twelve steps work as long as they're worked at and the rooms of recovery, meetings, sponsors, and check ins are all needed. Gilbert went first a day, then thirty days clean from her addiction, then added on giving up alcohol and then drugs, then a year clean, then five years clean at the time of writing. The book notes that addiction is insidious, and addicts can't do normal things like normal people. Gilbert recounts a story about how an addict will always reach a point where they might relapse, and then have thirty seconds to save their life, and decide to either go to the addiction or run the other way. 

It's a beautiful story about both Rayya and Gilbert, but also a rough one, not a story that's puppies and rainbows during someone's final magical, mystical days left on earth. Gilbert includes drawings, poems, and sayings between chapters, including about her recovery from addiction, Give in. Give up. Give over. Towards the very end, Gilbert writes as part of "A Poem for Rayya, Six Years Gone" the statement I had to stay because I'm just beginning. You had to leave because you're done.

Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard

Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard is a solid work of nonfiction about the 1881 murder of President James Garfield. Millard in the book delves into Garfield's rise to the presidency, his shooting, and attempts to save his life, including the medical quackery practiced by his doctor that made the attack a fatal one.

Garfield was shot four months after his inauguration, by Charles Guiteau. He had been rebuffed in his attempts to be named ambassador to France, and believed that he would receive great acclaim for killing Garfield. Right after the shooting, doctors were sticking unsterilized fingers into the wound, probing unsuccessfully for the bullet and introducing infection more lethal than the bullet. Garfield then went under the care of Dr. Willard Bliss, who tightly controlled access to the president, keeping himself solely in charge of treatment. Bliss was a proponent of allopathy, or administering large doses of harsh medicines to counteract the original ailment. Joseph Lister at the same time was attempting to convince American doctors of the importance of antisepsis, preventing infection by destroying germs. Antisepsis means anything coming into the contact with the patient is sterilized, and was already applied with great success in Europe, but largely rejected in America, including by Bliss.

Millard also covers Alexander Graham Bell and his attempts to use his induction balance invention, a precursor to the x-ray machine, to find the bullet in Garfield. Bell was unsuccessful in part because Bliss commanded him to only search the part of the body where he incorrectly believed the bullet to be. Had Garfield been shot fifteen years later, x-rays would have found the bullet, and he would have been treated with antiseptic surgery, certainly surviving. Or, if he had been simply left alone after being shot, he would likely have survived, with the bullet remaining in his body, but without infection. It was noted how many injured during the Civil War just decades prior would miraculously survive seemingly cataclysmic injuries. They often didn't have access to care, so weren't treated by doctors who introduced germs and ultimately infection into their systems. 

Garfield spent two months at the White House, with his body wracked by infection and additionally shoddy care from Bliss, and when gravely ill, demanded to be moved to the coast, where he died two weeks later. Chester Arthur was sworn in as president, and Guiteau then hanged for murder.