Last Books of the Year

My last books of the year were not review books, but personal choices from my TBR shelf.

When I bought my first Kindle I went wild with 99 cent book sales. It was unbelievable that I could own a book for under a dollar! I discovered some of my favorite books this way, like John William's Stoner. Another was Ward Just's An Unfinished Season, a coming-of-age story about politics and journalism. Later I reviewed Just's last novel, The Eastern Shore, a retired journalist reviews the uses and abuses of journalists and the news.

Learning of Just's passing I pulled his Rodin's Debutante off my physical TBR shelf.

"Tell me this, she said. Has your life worked out the way you thought it would?"~from Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just

A small town is shocked by the violent attack of a teenage girl in the local school and the leaders of society convince the local newspaper editor to bury the story.

Teenage Lee's mother convinces his father to leave the town of his ancestors for a safer neighborhood.

Odgen Hall School of Boys is Lee's chosen school, housed in the private home of Tommy Odgen whose wealth allowed him the luxury of pursuing his love of shooting--and his love of the local cathouse. One of the most chilling scenes I have ever read occurs when a young Tommy, hunting on his father's grounds, sees an interloper hunting. He gets the man in his sights, justifying his intended action. Tommy establishes the school to spite his wife. His lawyer Bert Marks handles the business for him.

Lee helps the school team to have a winning season and is noticed by Tommy, who upon meeting the boy warns that "you don't learn a damned thing by defeat." Tommy then goes on a rage about newspapermen, "They'll take everything if you let them," he growls.

In the house remained a sculpture by Rodin of a Chicago debutante. Lee was enchanted by the sculpture and it impels him to pursue the art of working in stone.

Lee goes to university, renting a South Chicago room for his studio. Resisting a knife attack leaves him with a scar. Lee meets a girl, he becomes successful.

The victim of the attack that drove Lee's family from their home returns, seeking answers. She has no memory of what happened and hopes Lee will prompt her memory.

You mean a thing's better not known than known. 
It depends on what you fear most, the known or the unknown. 
She offered a ghost of a smile. Do you have to choose? I imagine it's chosen for you, Lee said.~from Rodin's Debutante

I love Ward's writing.

When I read the beginning pages of The Secrets We Kept on the First Look Book Club I was enchanted by the narrative voice. I put in a hold on Overdrive and waited patiently. The audiobook was the first available copy.

I wanted to read the book for several reasons: First, because I had read Cold Warriors by Duncan White this year in which I learned how books and ideas were weapons in the Cold War. Second, because I had read Doctor Zhivago in 1968 and was interested in how the novel was secreted out of the Soviet Union.

my 1968 copy of Doctor Zhivago

Preston divides the novel into two fronts--East and West. In the West, female secretaries working for the government face sexism even when some become spies; one helps to clandestinely disseminate Pasternack's novel to Russian readers at the World's Fair in Belgium. In the East sections, we learn the story of Boris Pasternack and his lover Olga who was sent to Siberia for not informing on Pasternack when the government feared what Pasternack's novel contained.

The secrets kept are multiple on both fronts.

I enjoyed the audiobook and the story, but I still prefer to read a book. I could have read the novel in half the time it took to listen to it!

Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold Wary by Duncan White

Duncan White's Cold Warriors is an engrossing history of the writers who wielded their pen for political ends and how their governments promoted or silenced them during the Cold War. 

The war was a conflict of ideas and books were used as weapons to attack political ideologies by writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Some authors were spies while others unknowingly worked for CIA-funded publications. Writers resistant to government policy and programs were silenced, punished, imprisoned or killed. 

Dense with information, the book has the impetus of a thriller filled with shocking twists and multilayered characters. The story begins with the Spanish Civil War and the disenchantment of George Orwell, spurring him to write his greatest novels. White follows the Cold Was to the end of the Berlin Wall, Glasnost, and the Prague Spring with stories like that of the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel who was found guilty of subversion and imprisoned yet became president.

I grew up seeing these writer's names on the bookshelves at the stores where I spent my allowance on paperbacks. I had no idea of their political stance or that some were spies!

• George Orwell, whose Animal Farm I bought and read as a teen 
• Arthur Koestler, whose Darkness at Noon I had erringly thought was a science fiction book 
• Boris Pasternak, whose Dr. Zhivago I read after seeing the movie
•  Alexander Solzhenitsyn's books were published when I was a young adult and at one time I owned all his books in hardcover 
• Graham Greene I thought was a Catholic Writer.
• Mary McCarthy's The Group was a best seller
•  Stephen Spender, who signed my copy of his book of selected poems at a poetry reading
• John le Carre, pen name of David Cornwall, an M16 spy whose fictionalized spy-talk became adopted in real life

Plus

• Andrei Sinyavsky
• Richard Wright
• Ernest Hemingway 
• Gioconda Belli
• Vaclav Havel,
• Joan Didion
• Isaac Babel
• Howard Fast
• Lillian Hellman 
• Mikhail Sholokhov

Duncan concludes that the battle between Communism and Capitalism has morphed into a war between forms of democracy and authoritarianism and populist nationalism. 

Today's writers still resist and condemn and create bring visions of the kind of country and world we must become to flourish and, very possibly, to survive. One lesson I learned from this book is that regardless of how I personally feel about a writer's ideas, the rights of freedom of speech and a free press is precious and integral to the preservation of a free society.

quilt by Nancy A. Bekofske

I was given access to a free egalley by the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Cold Warriors
by Duncan White
Custom House
On Sale: 08/27/2019
List Price: 32.50 USD
ISBN: 9780062449818
ISBN 10: 0062449818

We Shall Not All Sleep by Estep Nagy

In 1965 two families, the Quicks and the Hillsingers, gather on an idyllic Maine island. They are preparing for Migration Day when the sheep are gathered and transported to the rich clover fields of a neighboring island, a time of feasting and celebration.

Seven Island and its archipelago of islands have belonged to the families for seven generations; their ancestors had made their fortunes as privateers. The Blackwell sisters Lila and Hannah married into the families: Lila marrying Jim Hilsinger, a CIA operative, and Hannah marrying successful financier Billy Quick.

This year, Jim Hillsinger has invited a man from their past, John Wilkie, to join them.

Activist teacher Hannah's idealism led her to the Communist Party until she saw its irrelevance to the problems of her Harlem students. She couldn't escape the notice of the government agencies looking sniffing out Red spies, leading her to commit a desperate act.

Lila's husband has been falsely accused of treason and ousted from the CIA after an illustrious career; in Warsaw he had been feared by the KGB as The Black Prince.

As the adults struggle with their crisis of family and country, Jim Hilsinger is determined to harden his twelve-year-old son Catta in preparation for his survival in the vicious Cold War world as he knows it--by stranding the boy alone on an island overnight.

"Majestic cliffs rose up behind him. Birds called. A flock of sheep tumbled down the hill, and the smell of cut grass and smoke ran alongside the ethereal salt. The sun was hot and the wind cool. He had never, in all his life, been anywhere so beautiful. Someday, he thought, you will have to leave this place." 

John Wilkie's first sight of the Maine island made me nostalgic. We had camped in Maine for seven or more trips, in love with those woods rising from the ocean, the islands rimmed with granite shores, the lobster boats bobbing from trap to trap in the sunshine. We climbed the mountains and gazed upon the green islands that arose abruptly from the intense blue sea. We sought out the rock-bound tidal pools, the sweep of sand beach in its bowl of cliff, and the inland tarn with its beaver and Siberian Iris.

"Among the rock and penury of Northern Maine, it was a geological freak that there existed here a mile-long white-sand beach in a crescent shape, in a protected harbor facing the open sea."

The families make thick pancakes spread with local orange butter, gather around fireplaces in the evening; to Wilkie they are "moments of perfection" that "often come toward the end of something rather than its beginning, that the light of every supernova comes from an explosion."

The children's world parallels their parent's. Fairy houses are made and baby lambs are born, there are days wandering the island with homemade biscuits secreted in pockets for lunch. Then there is James who covertly bullies new arrivals and leads the boys in brutal games.

Catta is victim of both worlds, abused by his older, jealous brother James, and abandoned, unprepared, by his father on Baffin Island, expected to prove he is 'a man.' It is the end of innocence, a realization that the adult world is corrupt and that children are reared to be warriors "for the slaughter."

We Shall Not All Sleep is an intriguing Cold War family drama with elements of a spy thriller and mystery. The complicated and convoluted thread that snares the Quicks, Hilsingers, and Wilkies is slowly unraveled. I was riveted.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

We Shall Not All Sleep
Estep Nagy
Bloomsbury
Publication July 4, 2017
$26 hardcover
ISBN: 9781632868411