In the midst of the Blitz in London in 1943, an extraordinary event took place in Bethnal Green, an event so extraordinary that it is not understood completely even to this day. On March 3, 1943, when the air raid warning sirens went off, thousands of people headed, as usual, toward the nearest bomb shelter, the local Tube station, a one-entrance location which could accommodate up to ten thousand people within a few minutes of their arrival. On this night, something unique happened. One hundred seventy-three people died of asphyxia within a minute of their arrival at the station, all suffocated in the crush on the first twenty stairs of the entrance. Not one of the victims had managed to reach the landing at the bottom, only a few feet away, from which another seven stairs down would have guaranteed their safety. Ironically, “not a single bomb had fallen in the city that night.” All these deaths were accidental. A fine novel which deals with major ethical and moral issues within a context which every reader will appreciate and understand, The Report offers a different way of looking at historical events—rationally, but with a kindness toward the participants which protects their integrity and their future lives.
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Recreating the events which led to the catastrophic battles for power which engulfed Liberia from 1980 – 1996, author Russell Banks shows how four different home-grown armies, each with their own goals, aggressively engaged in atrocities to ensure victory for their own side. Employing child soldiers, and killing and maiming anyone who stood in their way, including women and tiny children who simply had the misfortune to belong to the wrong, rural tribe, these armies massacred a quarter of a million people and displaced a million others. Forcing the American reader to pay more attention to the full scale of these horrors, Banks describes this turmoil through the eyes of a radical American anti-war activist named Hannah Musgrove who arrives in Liberia from Ghana in 1976 on a passport which identifies her as Dawn Carrington. Musgrove is on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for her activities as a member of the Weather Underground. Though she suffers from a maddening anomie as a character, one which often makes her fate irrelevant to the reader, the novel vividly depicts the brutal history of Liberia, from the seemingly lofty goals of its founding to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
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How long has it been since you have read a novel with a thematic line so unusual and so well explicated that reading the book changed your way of seeing the world? This novel was one such experience for me. Metaphysical, historical, and utterly different from anything I have ever read, Giles Foden’s TURBULENCE kept me (neither a mathematician nor a student of physics) turning the pages, no matter how theoretical and dense the novel sometimes became with its science. Fascinating personal stories are interwoven with the scientific plot, giving the novel immediacy, even for a devout non-scientist. Set in London and Scotland from January through June, 1944, the novel is a study of weather forecasting and all the factors which must be considered in making long-range predictions. Henry Meadows must focus on the idea of turbulence and other complex flows, which move constantly, are difficult to quantify, and have unpredictable effects on other physical measurements as he observes and eventually helps forecast weather patterns over a five-day period for fifty miles of German-occupied French coastline so that an invasion can be planned and a window of opportunity identified for D-Day.
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In this energetic, sometimes raucous, and always surprising novel, Le describes the lives of three other young Vietnamese women who are also living in France—now totally assimilated after twenty years of living there. Two sisters, known as Elder Cousin, or Potbelly, who is pregnant, and her younger sister, Long Legs, a “cutie” who is living with someone she hopes is a ticket to wealth, have decided to invite their estranged father, King Lear, to come from Saigon to Paris for a three-week visit. Potbelly will pay for the trip. The story, such as it is, is told primarily through Southpaw, but it switches, without warning, to other characters, sometimes in succeeding sentences. Since the author has chosen not to include any paragraphing (which leads to many pages of gray, margin-to-margin text), the reader has few visual clues regarding shifts in voice and changes in speakers, a challenge for the reader who must depend on context clues. Despite this, the story is relatively easy to follow at the beginning of the novel. As the scenes become a bit more complex, and the author conveys dream sequences, memories, and imagined events, however, the novel begins to resemble a long, symbolic poem rather than a novel.
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In this extraordinary memoir from 1932-1934, Kitty Crockett Robertson describes her life on the North Shore of Massachusetts during the Depression, a time when she, a Harvard graduate, became a hard-working apple farmer to save the family farm in Ipswich. Her physician father had died, and Kitty, wanting to keep the farm from being sold for development, which her Boston-based brothers favored, decided to give up her job working at the Harvard Library to try to make the orchard profitable enough to save the land. Working almost single-handedly, she spent the next two years doing all the dirty work, learning in the process that “The Depression was that time of leveling when she and her neighbors kept going on the strength they learned from each other.”
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