The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner

For several years my husband's department secretary was a Japanese American who came of age in a WWII internment camp. Her stories were the first I had encountered. Later I learned that German Americans were also identified as suspect hostile aliens and sent to internment camps. But before reading The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner I had not heard of the repatriation program, exchanging interned families for POWs held by Germany and Japan.

The Last Year of the War is Elise's life story. Her parents were born in Germany and love their homeland but embraced America wholeheartedly. Elise is a typical American girl.

Mariko is another American born child of immigrant parents. Her Japanese parents have held to their heritage and identity.

Circumstantial evidence flag their fathers as potential alien enemies, their goods and money confiscated, and the fathers interned. At Crystal City their families can join them, but with the agreement that they may be repatriated to their homelands.

Elise is lost and angry until she meets Mariko. They bond and become best friends, sharing dreams of turning eighteen and moving to New York City together to pursue careers.

Through these sympathetic characters, readers learn about life at the internment camps, and, when Elise's family is sent to Germany, life in war-torn Germany.

Elise struggles with being an American in the land of her enemies, while to her parents it is their homeland. Mariko's America dreams are shattered by her traditional parents' expectations.

Readers of Historical Fiction will love this book. I commend Meissner for bringing this aspect of American history to light, especially in the context of America's current distrust of immigrants.

Meissner sidesteps vilification of the German people, noting that Elise's German family were required to hang a portrait of Adolph Hitler on the wall and describing the destruction of German cities and civilian losses and hardships. The perils of war are addressed, including the harassment and rape of German girls by the occupation army after the war.

Elise does find her place in the world, not the life she dreamt of as a teenager, and she finds love.

Learn more about Crystal City here.

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

The Last Year of the War
by Susan Meissner
Berkley Publishing Group
Pub Date: 19 Mar 2019
Hardcover $26.00 (USD
ISBN: 9780451492159

Thomas Cole's Refrain: The Paintings of Catskill Creek by H. Daniel Peck

In 1825 the artist Thomas Cole visited the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains. Within a few years, he had set up a studio in Catskill and married a local woman. By 1836 he wrote in his journal that it's "quietness & solitude is gone."

It was his Catskill paintings that led to his discovery by John Trumbull, who brought his work to the attention of the New York City art world, propelling him to fame. He was inspired by the Catskills, even painting his favorite scene from memory while studying abroad.

Thomas Cole's Refrain by H. Daniel Peck considers  Cole's Catskill Creek paintings, probing deep into the subtleties Cole hid in plain sight--images of the human relationship to nature, the tension between civilization and nature, and the human experience as we journey through life.

Thomas Cole always intrigued me because of his use of art to convey his vision of life in his painting series The Course of Civilization and The Voyage of Life. I was interested in this book as an exploration of Cole's vision through the landscape he painted over and over, the application of his "deeply literary imagination" to create a narrative in his art.

Viewers may puzzle over just how different each version of the Catskill Creek is from another. He painted one scene ten times! The creek and the trees and the misty mountains on the horizon are seen in various lights, time of day, and seasons. There is often a man rowing and human and animal figures, sometimes barely seen. Peck zeros in on the details, looking for themes and interpreting Cole's intentions.

The paintings are reproduced in whole and in detail. There are fascinating maps showing Cole's vantage point from which he sketched.

Readers learn about Cole's theories, his Essay on American Art as it applies to his art, his career and personal life, and his travels across America and Europe.

From the vantage point of a time when we are under threat of climate change and in the throes of the struggle between industry and business and environmental protection, even our national parks unprotected from commerce, it might surprise that two centuries ago Cole was already mourning the loss of America's pristine natural abundance.

Born in Lancashire, England, a hotbed of textile mills, Cole understood America's future under the relentless industrial growth powered by capitalistic greed. Cole's art reacted to the changing American landscape under the Industrial Revolution. He deeply felt men's "insensibility" to the sublime "beauty of nature" which "commerce" was destroying. Forests were cut down, Native American burial grounds desiccated, and train tracks altered pastoral scenes and rattled the foundations of early colonial homes.

In some of the paintings, dark storms are rushing toward the sun-filled scenes, only stumps remain of once splendid primal trees, or vultures hover.

Wild nature, the agrarian life, and industry's impending alteration are part of the cycle of civilization. But not all "civilization" is welcome. Case in point: Niagara Falls, my girlhood Sunday afternoon jaunt--oh, to have seen it before the forest was torn down and the cement and shops grew to the very water's edge!

Cole was one of the first American artists to portray the American landscape, inspiring and influencing the artists of the Hudson River School and Luminists such as his student Frederick Church. I enjoyed this deeper look into Cole's art.

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

Thomas Cole's Refrain: The Paintings of Catskill Creek
by H. Daniel Peck
Cornell University Press
Pub Date 15 Mar 2019
ISBN 9781501733079
PRICE $34.95 (USD)

Learn more about Thomas Cole at
The Thomas Cole National Historic Site

from the publisher:
Thomas Cole, an internationally renowned artist, centered his art and life in Catskill, New York.  From his vantage point near the village, he cast his eyes on the wonders of the Catskill Mountains and the swiftly flowing Catskill Creek.  These landscapes were sources of enduring inspiration for him.

Over twenty years, Cole painted one view of the Catskill Mountains at least ten times. Each work represents the mountains from the perspective of a wide river bend near Catskill, New York. No other scene commanded this much of the artist's attention. Cole's Catskill Creek paintings, which include works central to American nineteenth-century landscape art, are an integral series. In Thomas Cole's Refrain, H. Daniel Peck explores the patterns of change and permanence in the artist's depiction of a scene he knew first-hand. Peck shows how the paintings express the artist's deep attachment to place and region while illuminating his expansive imagination.

Thomas Cole's Refrain shows how Cole's Catskill Creek paintings, while reflecting concepts such as the stages of life, opened a more capacious vision of experience than his narrative-driven series, such as The Voyage of Life. Relying on rich visual evidence provided by paintings, topographic maps, and contemporary photographs, Peck argues that human experience is conveyed through Cole's embedding into a stable, recurring landscape key motifs that tell stories of their own. The motifs include enigmatic human figures, mysterious architectural forms, and particular trees and plants. Peck finds significant continuities—personal and conceptual—running throughout the Catskill Creek paintings, continuities that cast new light on familiar works and bring significance to ones never before seen by many viewers.

Helen Korngold Diary: March 10-16, 1919

This year I am sharing the 1919 diary of Helen Korngold of St. Louis, MO.

Helen Korngold, Dec. 1919, New York City

March

Monday 10

School- Delightful conversation with Dr. Usher. He told me I was a joy to him as a pupil! Gee, I was so puffed up. I didn’t see how I was to squeeze out o the door, but I did. Home – rested–letter from Ida. Study.

Tuesday 11

Class. Study. Home. Lecture Langsdorf – good

Seniors won basketball championship.

Wednesday 12

Wellston – School – Home- Study.

Thursday 13

Exam Ed.14. Not so bad. Basketball party. Had a fine time. Judy & Barbara were presented with “W”. All star game. Greens won. I won game of Jerusalem – “slick fingers” that’s me – was presented with grand candy prize.

Friday 14

Downtown – School

Sunday 16

Study Shakespeare. Sleep in afternoon. Bonnie Youngs entertained in the evening, so we went there after we visited Jennie Goldstein who is engaged to a Sen. boy.

March 1919 Kroger Ad

Notes:

March 11

Dr. Langsforf

Dr. Alexander Suss Langsdorf lectured on “Industry, Research and the Engineer.” He was Dean of the Schools of Engineering and Architecture. He graduated from Central High in St. Louis, attended Washington University, Cornell University and Harvard. He became a physics instructor at W.U. in 1898 and in 1904 advanced to Asst. Professor teaching electrical engineering. He appears in the 1943 Hatchet still as active Dean. He is in the Book of Louisans, which shows he was born in 1877 to Adoph and Sara Suss Langsdorf.

March 13

 A Barbara Carper was on the Women’s Athletic Council in 1917.

“W” presentation for Women’s Sports started in 1901 and ended in 1947, awarded for sports participation. Women earned 100 points for each participation in a major sport, including basketball, hockey, and soccer. 50 points were earned for minor sports like swimming, hiking, rowing and archery. http://artsci.wustl.edu/~whhep/WomeninAthletics.html

Jeruselum is short for Trip to Jerusalem, another name for musical chairs.

March 16

Bonnie Gaylord Young's WWI Draft Card shows he was a produce merchant born October 28, 1890, and was married. He was of medium build and height, with dark blue eyes and black hair. His death certificate shows he died on September 4, 1921, at age 30 of pulmonary tuberculosis.

Jeanette Helen Goldstein of Beaumont, Texas, appears in the 1918-1919 Washington University Freshman class.

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

As a girl in the 1950s, I grew up watching my grandmother bowl. It came about like this:

The fire department burned down the house across the street from us, an early 19th c house like ours, one built by a founding family in the area. It was scheduled to be demolished and the volunteer fire department decided to burn it as a training exercise.

My parents and I watched from our second-floor windows as the house became enveloped in orange flames that lit our faces, the heat nearly too much to stand. My father recorded it all on the home movie camera, bought at my brother's birth, so I know it was around 1960 when the house was burned down.

In front of our house was the gas station built by my grandfather. What were they thinking of, starting a fire so close to gas pumps?

And on that newly vacated land, a bowling alley was built. My grandmother, who lived with us, joined a league and bowled with her lady friends. I would go with her to watch the games. I remember having to put on special shoes that always smelled funny. I recall the snack bar, the bright lights, the balls rolling back to us, and especially the noise of the balls knocking down the pins.

Once there was another kid at the alley with his grandmother. He talked about baseball the entire time. I don't know why I listened, I had no interest in Little League or baseball--or in even boys.

Reading Elizabeth McCracken's novel Bowlaway brought back those bowling alley memories. But the novel's bowling is of a different sort than the nine pin I grew up watching.

Our subject is love because our subject is bowling. Candlepin bowling. This is New England, and even the violence is cunning and subtle. It still could kill you. A candlepin ball is small, two and a half pounds, four and a half inches in diameter, a grapefruit, an operable tumor. You heft it in your palm.

Our subject is love. Unrequited love, you might think, the heedless headstrong ball that hurtles nearsighted down the alley to get close before it can pick out which pin it loves the most, the pin it longs to set spinning. Then I love you! Then Blammo.  

from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

There is it! In the first pages of the novel, the theme laid out for the observant reader to see. We become addicted to the very act that knocks us off our pins--Love--which can even kill us. Bowling as metaphor.

I loved this novel for the many lovely tricks of language and quirky descriptions.

Joe sat down on the bed and pulled the animal close, one of those accordion cats that got longer when you picked it up by the middle. from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

And how McCracken sums up things that knock you over with unexpected truthfullness--why didn't I think of that? you wonder.

But sorrow doesn't shape your life. It knocks the shape out. from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

McCracken tells us that this is a story about genealogy. We read about generations of the Truitt family and the people whose lives they touched.

Just before the turn of the century, a century ago, Bertha Truitt is discovered in a cemetery by Joe Wear, an orphan boy who works as a pin setter in a bowling alley.  Bertha is attended to by another visitor to the cemetery, Dr. Sprague, an African American doctor with a penchant for deep thought--and drink.

Bertha has arrived with a candlestick bowling ball and pin and a pile of gold. She builds a candlestick bowling alley, hires Joe, and marries the doctor. The local women come to bowl. Bertha builds an octagonal house for her and the doctor and their daughter Minna.

But tragedy strikes (pun intended) in the form of a molasses flood. The doctor sends Minna away to his people and he slowly lets grief consume him. First, he and Joe fashion a Bertha doll with carved candlepin appendages and a stuffed body.

Joe had hoped to inherit the bowling alley, as Bertha once promised. It is assumed that everything goes to Minna, but she never returns. When a Mr. Truitt comes along saying he is Bertha's heir, showing a family bible with the handwritten family births, he takes the alley over, banning females and marrying a local woman. Their children are yoked to the alley unwillingly.

When he was a young man the mysteries of the world seemed like generosity--you can think anything you want! Now the universe withheld things. from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

It is a story of revelations, sudden deaths, marriages, love, and how life slams lovers apart. The characters and plot may be Dickensian, but the truths are spot-on. As one character says, "Lady, lady. All sorts of things happen in this world. This is only one of them."

I purchased the book from the publisher.

Bowlaway
by Elizabeth McCracken
Ecco
ISBN: 9780062862853
ISBN 10: 0062862855
On Sale: 02/05/2019

WIP, TBR, News

It has been a hard few weeks. I haven't been able to see properly! I have had cataract surgery and decided to pay extra for fancy lenses to correct my astigmatism. So for two weeks, my 'new' eye has 20-20 vision but was farsighted, and my 'old' eye was nearsighted and needed correction for astigmatism. I couldn't see with glasses or without them, or with reading glasses.

As you can imagine, this has put a crimp on what I have been able to do.

I have done some reading on my tablet, enlarging the typeface so I can see it--blurred without glasses or with readers--but I could still do some reading. I have watched some movies but it tires my eyes. I tried to listen to audio books but I fell asleep or my attention wandered.

I took a lot of unnecessary naps! I couldn't trust myself walking in the snow. I couldn't judge distance very well and I was clumsy. I have been BORED.

Because my new sewing machine is self-threading, I tried making some blocks for my Winter Houses quilt. The pattern is from Bunny Hill.

Things went fine until I accidentally hit the computer controls and changed the settings. Then I struggled to read the small print in my manual to correct it. And when I ran out of thread I didn't notice. I managed to make a half dozen star blocks.

Quilt in progress!

And no way could I see to thread a needle! No hand work. I have the applique block ready for when my surgeries are done.

The Winter Flurries fabric line I am using was from Connecting Threads and is on clearance now.

Thankfully, I could listen to the Detroit Symphony--in person at the Berman Center for the wonderful Vivaldi Four Seasons concert with conductor, violinist, and contratenor Dimitry Sinkovsky. And also I listen to the webcasts.

Now the surgeries are over and I am ready to hit the ground running! Books and quilts are waiting!

Today we see our grandpuppy Ellie. Here she is at my son's house with her sister Hazel, looking out the back door at squirrels.

My surgeries were on Tuesdays so I missed my weekly quilt group, but in between surgeries I was able to go and show my finished Fiona Block quilt, which I hand quilted before my surgery.

The Bird King by G. WIllow Wilson

I spend through G. Willow Wilson's The Bird King in a few days, enchanted by its exotic setting and well-drawn characters.

Fatima was one of the least powerful in the Sultan's household, a slave whose beauty made her a favorite concubine. Fatima lived a life of luxury, dining on sweetmeats and dressing in the finest clothes, always indoors and barefoot, even while outside the palace walls the Moorish Empire was falling to the Catholic Spanish army. What she lacked was self-determination and the power to say no to authority.

Her childhood friend is the slave Hassam whose red hair spoke of his Breton ancestry. The royal mapmaker, Hassam has the ability to create maps that alter reality. And while devote, Hassam's sexual preference is against religious law. They have shared secret trists, embroidering the story of the Bird King, whose story they learned from a partial manuscript.

The once great Moorish empire on the Iberian Penninsula is vanquished. The victor Spain is willing to be magnanimous, as long as the Sultan agrees to its terms: hand over the sorcerer Hassam to be made an example. Convert to Catholicism. And the Moors will be allowed to live, subjects of Spain.

The love Fatima holds for her only friend emboldens her; she will not lose the one person who loves her and not her beauty. She insists that Hassam flees for his life. With the help of a jinn, pursued by the army of the Holy Order, these naive and unprepared refugees discover that freedom has its costs.

Fatima's love and faith, and her willingness to lose what had once been her one power--beauty--supports this unlikely heroine as she seeks to find the Bird King's realm, where she hopes to find a refuge for her and Hassam.

Themes touched on are relevant: the nature and responsibility of power, the cost of freedom, true faith versus religious power, refugees seeking their place in the world.

I received an ARC from through Bookist First in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Bird King
by G. Willow Wilson
Grove Atlantic
Pub: March 12, 2019
$26
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2903-1

from the publisher:
Set in 1491 during the reign of the last sultanate in the Iberian peninsula, The Bird King is the story of Fatima, the only remaining Circassian concubine to the sultan, and her dearest friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker. Hassan has a secret—he can make maps of places he’s never seen and bend the shape of reality with his pen and paper. His magical gift has proven useful to the sultan’s armies in wartime and entertained a bored Fatima who has never stepped foot outside the palace walls.

When a party representing the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrives to negotiate the terms of the sultan’s surrender, Fatima befriends one of the women, little realizing that her new friend Luz represents the Inquisition, and will see Hassan’s gift as sorcery, and a threat to Christian Spanish rule. With everything on the line, what will Fatima risk to save Hassan, and taste the freedom she has never known?

Fatima and Hassan traverse Iberia to the port, helped along the way by a jinn who has taken a liking to them—Vikram the Vampire, who readers may remember from Alif the Unseen. Pursued all the while by Luz, who somehow always seems to know where they will end up, they narrowly escape from her generals by commandeering a ship, and accidentally also the snoozing Breton monk belowdecks. Though they are unsure whether to trust him, because he is a member of the very same faith they are running from, they nevertheless set about learning from him how to crew a ship. And as it becomes clearer both that there is no place on the mainland that they will be safe, and that the three of them are destined to stay together, they set out to do something they never thought possible—to find the mysterious, possibly mythic island of The Bird King, whose shifting boundaries will hopefully keep them safe.

An epic adventure to find safety in a mythical realm, The Bird King challenges us to consider what true love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate.

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis

This isn’t a book about fish, though they play a leading role: it’s a book about us and our reaction to the latest invasive species threatening to become a permanent fixture of the landscape. It’s a book about what winning and losing looks like in the uphill struggle to manage invasive species. And it’s a book about how a fish’s extraordinary jumping ability propelled it onto the nightly news and the nation’s Most Wanted list. Andrew Reeves on Overrun

My brother, who enjoys kayaking, told me about a video showing a man in a boat armed with a baseball bat, ready to strike the giant leaping fish that fly out of the water. We may laugh, but the reality isn't funny. Those fish are foreign species from Asia. And they are taking over.

We Michiganders fear those fish as the next wave of invasive species ready to decimate our already degraded Great Lakes ecosystems. That crystal clear Lake Michigan water? It isn't a good sign, even if vacationers think it is great. It is the sign of a dying lake, with already nothing much left for the fish to eat. 

And Asian carp are really, really good at eating microscopic organisms, thus competing with native fish. Plus, their waste promotes the growth of toxic algae, already a problem in Lake Erie thanks to farm fertilizer runoff--and the destruction of the wetlands that once filtered the water.

If--or rather, when--the carp reach the Great Lakes, we expect a further decline in sport fish, boaters attacked by leaping fish, and an increase in water toxicity. Goodbye, recreational and fishing industries--and pure drinking water. 

How and why bighead carp were introduced in 1955 and the consequences are presented in the highly readable Overrun. 

Environmental journalist Andrew Reeves takes readers on a journey, beginning with the first person to explore the use of Asian carp as a natural and non-chemical way to control aquatic weeds, part of the reaction to Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring warning of the harm from pesticides. 

I read Carson in the 1960s. I remember the first Earth Day. I was a senior in high school when I bought a"Give Earth a Chance" pin.  I took ecology in college. I learned organic gardening. Sure, I too would have supported a natural control over chemicals. I am all in for anything that limits the chemical profusion that once seemed the panacea for all our ills before it was revealed as a source of new ills. 

Asian carp, the aquatic-weed-eater par excellence, was introduced to clogged waterways in the South as a natural alternative to pesticides. It seemed like a great idea.

One thing we humans are good at is forgetting that when we tweak an ecosystem there are consequences. As the carp found their way into the environment the consequences became manifest. Such as competing with native species. 

Reeves visited the people who think that we should sterilize the carp to limit their population, and the people who think barriers will keep the carp where we want them, and those who believe closing down the Chicago Canal will stop them, and the people who think that fishing the carp (and introducing them to the American dinner plate) will control their numbers.  Reeves discovered that the political and environmental realities are so complex there is no easy answer. 

There is no way we are going to stop the carp. Decisions made generations ago set up a domino effect that we can't stop.

Can we restore the Great Lakes--America's--ecosystems? If the will is there, perhaps a whole-ecosystem approach can make a difference. 

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

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis

by Andrew Reeves

ECW Press

Pub Date 12 Mar 2019  

Paperback $22.95 (CAD)

ISBN: 9781770414761