A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

Each story in A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth is a masterpiece that vividly conveys a historical person's grappling with life's big questions. Each story transported me into a specific time and place. The characters are unforgettable.

Mason's background as a physician and psychiatry inform these stories, each character grappling with challenges biological or mental.

A reluctant pugilist, the product of the "cursed Gemini of Poverty and Fertility," dwells on the moral aspect of his trade. "You boys go out and think you are fighting a boxer but really you're fighting the world," a philosophical man shares.

Alfred Russel Wallace is driven to search for new species, imperiling his health, and independently developing a theory of evolution. I had read about his collection of birds in The Feather Thief by by Kirk Wallace Johnson. 

An immigrant demonstrates extreme patriotism, chagrined that he was unable to join the army and die for his adopted country.

In the smoke-filled city of London, a mother desperately seeks a remedy for her son's asthma.

A doctor's temporary lapses in memory appears to be caused by an alternate and more appealing personality.

An agent of the telegraph line lives in isolation in the jungle, forming deep attachments to other agents along the line. This was one of my favorite stories.

A female aeronaute investigates a dark line in the upper atmosphere.

A mental patient is obsessed with collecting data--recording the history of the mundane--which he stitches onto cloth. The story is inspired by the art created by Bispo do Rosario. Voices instructed him to catalog all things on earth. His over 800 works of found art are now celebrated.

I had read Daniel Mason's novel The Winter Soldier and the story stayed in my head, a sure sign of a well-written novel.
Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner and A Far Country.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth: Stories
by Daniel Mason
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date May 5, 2020
ISBN 9780316477635
PRICE $27.00 (USD)

from the publisher:

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner, a collection of interlaced tales of men and women facing the mysteries and magic of the world. 

On a fateful flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son. 

At times funny and irreverent, always moving and deeply urgent, these stories -- among them a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize winner -- cap a fifteen-year project. 

From the Nile's depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-racked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are tales of ecstasy, epiphany, and what the New York Times Magazine called the "struggle for survival . . . hand to hand, word to word," by "one of the finest prose stylists in American fiction."

Pelosi by Mary Ball

Today I finished Molly Ball's fantastic biography of Nancy Pelosi then watched the Speaker of the House being interviewed about the Senate hashing out the COVID-19 stimulus package. I kinda had chills watching.

Pelosi covers the life and career of the Speaker, set against the tumultuous series of challenges and division America has endured. I always appreciate a book that offers perspective and insight into events I have lived through, which Ball accomplishes.

I love a good biography, especially of remarkable women.

But perhaps what I appreciated most from Ball's book is an understanding of how power works in Washington.

Sometimes--rarely, anymore--there is compromise. Other times a party digs in its heels and won't budge. How does anything get done, especially in the hostile political climate of the last several decades?

Pelosi is a study in the use of power. How one gains it and loses or keeps it. Pelosi has endured while others have failed, given up, faded away. Pelosi is pragmatic, determined, organized, and workaholic, with a hefty dose of Mom-sense and faith.

Pelosi was a volunteer for Democrats in San Francisco and a mother and wife. How she became a force who could stand up to Washington's most powerful men is a riveting story. Pelosi learned from her failures, only becoming stronger.

Ball's respect for Pelosi is evident, but she has no political slant. She isn't afraid to show the weaknesses of Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Trump, well, he gets the treatment he deserves.

"If this book has a thesis, it is that you needn't agree with Nancy Pelosi's politics to repsect her accomplishments and appreciate her historic career," Ball writes in the "Afterward". "I didn't expect to find her particularly compelling," she admits. In a compelling narrative, Ball's book achieves making Pelosi an iconic heroine.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Pelosi
Molly Ball
Henry Holt and Co.
Publication Date May 5, 2020
ISBN: 9781250754974 $26.99 digital audio
ISBN: 9781250252852 $14.99 ebook
ISBN: 9781250252869 $27.99 hardcover

from the publisher

An intimate, fresh perspective on the most powerful woman in American political history, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, by award-winning political journalist Molly Ball. 

She’s the iconic leader who puts Donald Trump in his place, the woman with the toughness to take on a lawless president and defend American democracy. Ever since the Democrats took back the House in the 2018 midterm elections, Nancy Pelosi has led the opposition with strategic mastery and inimitable elan. It’s a remarkable comeback for the veteran politician who for years was demonized by the right and taken for granted by many in her own party—even though, as speaker under President Barack Obama, she deserves much of the credit for epochal liberal accomplishments from universal access to health care to saving the US economy from collapse, from reforming Wall Street to allowing gay people to serve openly in the military. How did an Italian grandmother in four-inch heels become the greatest legislator since LBJ? 

Ball’s nuanced, page-turning portrait takes readers inside the life and times of this historic and underappreciated figure. Based on exclusive interviews with the Speaker and deep background reporting, Ball shows Pelosi through a thoroughly modern lens to explain how this extraordinary woman has met her moment.

about the author

Molly Ball is TIME Magazine's national political correspondent and appears regularly as an analyst on NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, PBS’s Washington Week, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR. She formerly covered U.S. politics for The Atlantic and Politico. She is the winner of the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize and the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, among others, and lives in Washington, D.C.

The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

I first came across Nguyen Phan Que Mai when she hosted The American Historical Fiction Facebook Club for a week to introduce The Mountains Sing, her first novel written in English. Administrator Kari Bovee interviewed Nguyen.

" I researched for this novel my whole life: first by listening to the elderly Vietnamese people. A lot of Vietnamese history is untold (due to censorship reasons) and I wanted to document it. I spent a lot of time at my parents’ villages talking to people about their personal experiences. I interviewed countless people who fought on different sides of the war. I grounded my research through reading fiction and non-fiction books, watching movies and documentaries as well as visiting museums, libraries, special document archives…"~Nguyen Phan Que Mai

I was quite charmed by Nguyen and I ordered her novel from Algonquin Books.

Through her fictional family, the author takes us into the history of Vietnam across the 20th c. Tragic and heartbreaking losses pile one upon another. At the heart of the story is a woman of infinite courage and resilience who, against all odds, gathers her scattered family home.

"The challenges faced by Vietnamese people throughout history are as tall as the tallest mountain..." Grandma tells her granddaughter Huong. "The war might destroy our houses, but it can't extinguish our spirit."

Grandma is an educated, progressive thinker who is horrified by the extremists and their propaganda. Born to an enlightened land-owning family, under Land Reform she and her children flee for their lives. On the road, Grandma finds places to shelter her children, vowing she will return once she establishes a safe haven.

For Huong and her Grandma, books offer companionship, escape, and enlightenment. From American books Huong learns that Americans were "just like us," people who loved their families and worked hard to earn their food. To understand why the Japanese were so brutal toward her people, Grandma turned to books. "The more I read, the more I became afraid of wars. Wars have the power to turn graceful and cultured people into monsters." She has seen how citizens were "nothing but leaves that would fall in the thousands or millions in the surge of a single storm."

The novel's family are North Vietnamese. This perspective will shake some American readers with references to "American imperialism" and America's Southern Regime.

"I had hated the American and their allies so much before that day. I hated them for dropping bombs on our people, killing innocent civilians," Uncle Dat tells Huong. But after witnessing the massacre of teenaged American soldiers who were bathing and playing in a stream, Dat's hatred turned toward war.

After hearing her uncle's war experiences, Huong thinks, "Somehow I was sure that if people were willing to read each other, and see the light of other cultures, there would be no war on earth."

Nature can also save. The rice plants "rustling their tiny, green hands," the perfume of a rice straw bed, the song of a bird.

The Mountain Sings is the name of a bird whose song can reach heaven and return the souls of the dead through its song. Huong's father and uncle had heard these birds traveling to the front lines, and her father carved a wood bird which her uncle gives her.

It is a lovely image, centering the novel. The novel is a song, an ode to the memory of the millions who died, and a bridge that connects our cultural gap.

Read an excerpt at
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_be.pdf?1584638143

Read the author's essay at
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_ae.pdf?1584637834

Resources are available to help reader, including
The family tree
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_ft.pdf?1587145622

Historical timeline
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_ht.pdf?1587146238

A book club kit is available
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_dg.pdf?1582824144

Little Family by Ishmael Beah

Khoudi was invisible in her beanie and boy's clothes. Elimane was the intellectual, always with a book, his past life a secret; he is also street-smart, a hustler. Young Namsa suffers sleep terrors rooted in some unspoken past while Khoudi watches over her. Ndevui and Kpindi play marbles for ganja.

These bright young people have been dealt horrible blows. They have banded together as a little family to survive life on the streets. They know how to blend into the crowd, tag along with a family to pass, and pocket food which they share at their secret hideout.

This makeshift family will break your heart.

Through these characters, Ishmael Beah's novel Little Family paints a picture of the social and economic disparity in an African country..

Eliname assists a stranger who then employs him and the family for undercover operations. The money they earn changes their lives.

Khoudi is a beautiful girl blossoming into womanhood. She uses her money at a hair salon and steals clothes from the beach. Self-contained and independent, her beauty attracts the attention of a wealthy girl who unknowingly helps her pass into the upper echelons of society.

A line had been crossed. Something had come to an end.~ from Little Family by Ishmael Beah

Survival comes at a cost. Feelings make you weak. When the family allows jealousy in, a series of events destroys the family and Khoudi's fantasy of a different life.

The setting is specific and foreign, full of local color, the exotic foods and the red caps daily inventing another "exercise in dehumanization."

Yet this is a story that is repeated across the world, in every city. How many children are unprotected, how many fine minds are untapped, what beauty lies hidden beneath rags? Every state holds these lost children.

I will be haunted by this little family.

I received a free book through Goodreads. My review is fair and unbiased.

About the author:

Ishmael Beah is the Sierra Leonean and American author of the novel Radiance of Tomorrow and the memoir A Long Way Gone, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller and has been published in more than forty languages. A UNICEF Ambassador and Advocate for Children Affected by War, and a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Advisory Committee, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their children.

Little Family
Ishmael Beah
Riverhead Books
Publication Date April 28, 2020
$27 hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1177-3

Covid19 Life: Week Six of Lockdown

When this photo showed up on my Facebook Memories I thought it was the perfect illustration for lockdown: it's a dangerous world out there. I don't even want to leave the house. Our two-square mile city of 11, 980 people has 54 known COVID-19 cases and 8 deaths.

So we have stayed at home. For six weeks. And we are to remain in social isolation into May.

Well, the battery lawn mower was broke and my husband had to arm himself with a mask and, in fear and trembling, enter the local ACE Hardware to bring home a new one.

We do take daily walks early in the day, 30-40 minutes.

I have been working on my Emily Dickinson quilt. I need to find more fabrics to add to the collages. Just before lockdown the quilters had planned a three stop quilt shop hop and I thought I would find what I wanted then. It didn't happen.

The idea behind the quilt is that Emily Dickinson has many faces.

The woman who avoided visitors and stayed at home and dressed in white.

 The poet who wrote about passionate and dark subjects.

The author of poems filled with images of flowers and bees and birds, the woman who loved to garden.

And the writer of valentine poems, love poetry and letters, a closet romantic. This is the block I most need to develop.

I also am working on embroidering a set of blocks I printed off some time ago featuring Brutus, the cat.

Book mail included Estelle by Linda Steward Henley. The story involves a woman who discovers forgotten history about the artist Edgar Degas.

I purchased Perfume River Nights by Michael P. Mauer set during the Vietnam War.

I am currently reading The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai, a multigenerational story that takes us into 20th c Vietnamese history.

On the shelf to be read:

• In Search for Safety: Voices of Refugees by Susan Kuklin, a LibraryThing win 
• Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic by Eric Eyre, a Goodreads win
• The Party Upstairs by Lee Conell is set in a NYC apartment house
• A Heart Lost in Wonder by Catharine Randil, a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Superman is Not Coming to Save You by Erin Brockovitch on water safety
• The Last American Aristocrat by David S. Brown, about Henry Adams
• Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman, another Owens family prequel
• Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan by Deborah Reed, fiction about a painter
• The Brother Years by Shannon Burke, family drama set in 1970s Chicago
• How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, set in Africa, by the author of Behold the Dreamers
• Vesper Flights by Helen MacDonald, essays on nature
• The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts traces pianos from Siberia
• Bronte's Mistress by Fiona Austin imagines Bronson Bronte's love affair
• Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions by Annik LaFarge
• The Truth About Baked Beans: An Edible New England History by Meg Muckenhoupt

My brother continues to seek out the quiet places. These photos are from his early morning kayaking on the canal behind his home.

We had a social distancing visit with our son, his girl, and the grandpups and Hazel the cat.

Little Sunny wanted so bad to give us kisses! She is about full grown now.

And, I finally found a mask pattern to adapt my way that I can feel good about. I left some with our son and will take some to my brother. In a few weeks my brother will be recalled from working at home to working in Dearborn. 

We also drove to my brother's house and left him some masks and some homemade bread. We stood in the yard, ten feet apart, and caught up.

We watched Star Trek Picard on CBS All Access on a free month trial. And every day I was Sir Patrick Stewart read a Shakespeare sonnet. I enjoy the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's free streaming of past concerts. This month I have enjoyed poetry shared across social media. 

I keep awfully busy!

And of course, we are cooking up a storm.

We don't have many meals with whole chicken, but this version with a honey curry glaze is wonderful.

This French Bean Vegetable Stew from Moosewood is a favorite.

 A simple dinner is gnocchi with white beans, tomatoes and spinach. topped with parmesan cheese.

Chicken and noodles with dumplings is the perfect comfort food.

I hope you are staying home and staying safe.

Ingredients by George Zaidan

"Ok, buckle up: it's going to be a bumpy ride."

~from Ingredients by George Zaidan

The cover art alone clued me in that George Zaidan's book Ingredients would be an entertaining approach to science.

I must confess, I did not do well in high school chemistry. The class met at 2 pm in the afternoon; the classroom was too warm, the subject too dry, and I was not the only student who dozed off. Mr. Heald would kick the metal trash can to wake us up.

Zaidan is a 'science communicator' who understands people like me and knows how to make chemistry understandable. He draws pictures and diagrams and talks us through. He is our personal decoder, translating the language of scientific research into English "as accurately and entertainingly as possible."

In the Preface, Zaidan admits that his readings surprised him. 

Facts are shifty things. Because science, we learn, is not exact. There are so many ways to set up and twist results, so many variables, that we can't trust all the trial results that we read about.

You know the ones I am talking about. Wait five minutes and you will hear a study from Podunk U that reverses yesterday's study from Wossamotta U.

Caffeine is good for you, caffeine is bad for you. Eggs are good sources of nutrition, eggs are bad for your heart. Butter is bad for you, butter is better than margarine, olive oil is better than anything and its used in the Mediterranean Diet which will extend your life.

Life's big questions are the center of Zaidan's quest for knowledge:

• How much life does every additional Cheeto suck from your body?
• Are e-cigarettes really a healthier choice?
• Is coffee the elixir of life of blood of the devil?
• Does chlorine create that public pool smell?
• Does sunscreen absorb photons like Whitney Houston's bodyguard absorbs bullets in The Bodyguard?
• Should we pay attention to newspaper headlines about food and health
• How can I add three years to my life expectancy
• Does prayer reduce the risk of death?

His conclusions are not as conclusive as we would like. The biggies are still there: Don't smoke. Be active. Eat reasonably well.

I appreciated how Zaidan broke down the way tests and studies are carried out. It was the most interesting aspect of the book for me.

I was given a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What we Put in Us and on Us
George Zaidan
Dutton
Publication Date Apr 14, 2020
Hardcover  $27.00
ISBN 9781524744274


Listen to an excerpt from the book here

About the author:George Zaidan is a science communicator, television and web host, and producer. He created National Geographic’s webseries Ingredients, and he cowrote and directed MIT’s webseries Science Out Loud. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Boston Globe, National Geographic Magazine, NPR’s The Salt, NBC’s Cosmic Log, Science, Business Insider, and Gizmodo. He is currently executive producer at the American Chemical Society. Ingredients is his first book.

Country by Michael Hughes

Fury. Pure fury. The blood was up. Lost the head completely.~from Country by Michael Hughes

Hughes begins his story in the middle of a conflict between two members of an rogue IRA terrorist cell group.

Achill and Pig, the 'trigger man' who killed eight Brits and the Officer Commander of a terrorist cell, clash over a girl whose father wants her back home. She had willingly come to Achill and he won't give her up. Pig insists the teenager will return to her da.

Achill capitulates but throws in the towel. He knows it is his reputation that keep the Brits scared. Let them see what happens without him. He was done. He was going home.

And that was the start of it. A terrible business altogether...Wait now till you hear the rest.~from Country by Michael Hughes

A tenuous truce has brought temporary peace, but the cell group won't give up the fight. This time, they are sure they have the upper hand with inside information about British plans. Independence is theirs, if they have the heart for it.

The tale is violent, gritty, filled with passion and tears. It is an engrossing read, a timeless and compelling story.

I was attracted to the novel as a retelling of The Iliad, Homer's story of the falling out between Achilles and King Agamemnon during the Trojan War. It's been a very long time since I last read Homer. The plotline and themes are there to be found, but readers will enjoy this novel if you don't know Homer.

Hughes novel has the feel of the epic in the narrative voice, the high passions, the rhythm of the language.

I won an ARC from LibraryThing a year ago. After it didn't arrive, I contacted the publisher in the fall and they sent me the published edition.

It was worth waiting for.

from the publisher:

Northern Ireland, 1996. 

After twenty-five years of vicious conflict, the IRA and the British have agreed to an uneasy ceasefire as a first step towards lasting peace. But, faced with the prospect that decades of savage violence and loss have led only to smiles and handshakes, those on the ground in the border country question whether it really is time to pull back—or quite the opposite. 

When an IRA man’s wife turns informer, he and his brother gather their comrades for an assault on the local army base. But old grudges boil over, and the squad's feared sniper, Achill, refuses to risk his life to defend another man’s pride. As the gang plots without him, the British SAS are sent to crush the rogue terror cell before it can wreck the fragile truce and drag the region back to the darkest days of the Troubles. Meanwhile, Achill’s young protégé grabs his chance to join the fray in his place… 

Inspired by the oldest war story of them all, Michael Hughes’s virtuoso novel explores the brutal glory of armed conflict, the cost of Ireland’s most uncivil war, and the bitter tragedy of those on both sides who offer their lives to defend the dream of country.