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My Top Books of 2023

12/12/2023

So many good books! As usual, I’ll list the best books I read this year, not necessarily books that were published this year. I’ll start with novels, which are usually my favorites.

Belle City by Penny Mickelbury is the chronicle of a Black Georgia family throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. The characterization is deep. I learned history that I didn’t know, such as white racists’ particular hatred of Black families who painted their houses and planted flower gardens.

I’m going to break my rule and mention a book I haven’t read yet. Mickelbury’s Two Wings to Hide My Face, the sequel to Two Wings to Fly Away (a book I love), was released December 5. This story tells of Black people fleeing to Canada after the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision proclaimed that Black people could never become US citizens. The book is certain to be excellent.

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, Lisa See’s novel based on a 15th century Chinese woman trained in traditional medicine by her grandmother, is a superb historical novel that highlights connections among women.

Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark is the story of two women, lifelong friends, who have homes in a Quaker community on the Maine coast. One woman is a writer who has remained single, while the other is devoted to her husband and family.

I almost think I shouldn’t mention Geraldine Brooks’ excellent novel Horse because almost everyone I know has already read it. This is the remarkable story of a famous racehorse, from his training by an enslaved young Black man to his discovery by 20th century equestrian art historians.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad is the story of a Palestinian woman actor like Hammad who lives in England but goes home to visit her sister and meets a charismatic Palestinian woman director. They decide to produce Hamlet in Classical Arabic in the West Bank. What could go wrong?

Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov is about a Ukrainian man living in the “grey zone” in eastern Ukraine, caught between the Ukrainian and Russian armies. The main character, who is a beekeeper, stays in this dangerous situation because he can’t imagine leaving the house where he was born. It’s a grim, moving story about people caught up in war who just want to keep living their accustomed lives.

Stolen by Ann-Helen Laestadius tells about Sami reindeer herders living above the Arctic Circle. Swedes who despise the indigenous Sami persecute the herders. The story starts with a thug’s killing of a young girl’s reindeer.

Lesbian Novels

Emma Donaghue has returned to writing about lesbians in her novel Learned by Heart, a fascinating fiction about nineteenth century lesbian Anne Lister as a teenager in a girls’ boarding school who becomes involved with a mixed-race girl born in India, Eliza Raine.
Say Their Names by Karen D. Badger is the story of a contemporary Black lesbian couple who buy a house in Upstate new York and discover it once sheltered two Black women fleeing from slavery. The novel shifts in time between the two eras.

Integrity by E.J. Noyes is an adventure novel about a lesbian working for the CIA who is recruited by a secret organization that monitors government agencies, including the CIA. She discovers corruption and has to flee from Washington.
Extended Capacity by Elena Graf is part of her Hobbs series about lesbians living in a small town in Maine. This novel focuses on a school shooting and its effect on the town.

Once in Berlin by Jo Havens is a novel about an English lesbian who a British government representative has asked to lure a brilliant German lesbian scientist to defect in the beginning of World War II. I’m particularly impressed with the believable portrayal of a scientific genius who cares only about her work.

The Ada Decades by Paula Martinac is the well-told story of an unusual lesbian character: a religious, white, small-town librarian in the South who learns slowly about the need for integration.

KC Luck’s Darkness Series, beginning with Darkness Falls, tells about lesbians in the Pacific Northwest surviving after solar events make every sort of electrical power unavailable. Chaos ensues, but brave lesbians find ways to cope. There are adventures, romances, and ethical choices in every volume of this six-volume (so far) series.

Mysteries

One of my favorite contemporary detective story writers, Ausma Zehanat Khan, has launched a new series with an Afghan-Pakistani American woman police detective, Inaya Rahman. Rahman is based in Denver but in Blackwater Falls she’s assigned to a small, racist town. She has to investigate a hate crime against a Muslim young woman.

In Time’s Undoing by Cheryl A. Head, a Detroit reporter travels to Birmingham, Alabama, to learn what happened to her great-grandfather, who she believes was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. The story moves deftly between the two time periods.

This year I reread the superb mystery series written by Batya Gur, an Israeli writer who died in 2005. The stories are just as outstanding as I remembered. In the six-volume series, Gur became increasingly critical of aspects of Israel. My favorite of her books is Literary Murder, set in a university’s Hebrew Literature Department, where questions about what is good poetry and what are readers’ responsibility to poetry are the focus. The detective is a male police officer who is rather sympathetic.

I discovered a fun mystery series—fun for me because it’s about Ireland in the years after independenc--the Mother Superior Mysteries by Cora Harrison. Yes, the detective is the mother superior of a convent.

Another interesting series, by Susan Elia MacNeal, presents a woman detective who winds up working for political leaders like Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt. The first book is The Prime Minister’s Secretary.

Memoirs

Still Alive: A Holocaust Childhood Remembered by Ruth Kluger is one of the finest books about the Holocaust I’ve read. Her thoughtfulness is reminiscent of Elie Wiesel’s. Kluger was born in Vienna and arrested there. Now living in the US, she hears Americans tell her that she was lucky to have come from such a beautiful, cultured city. People even suggest that she should cover up her number from Auschwitz. When she was eleven, she and her mother were sent to the concentration camp Theresienstadt. They were moved on to other camps. She tells how she and her mother fought each other constantly but saved each other’s lives. Her account also describes how prejudiced and insensitive their Allied rescuers could be.

Castles Burning: A Child’s Experience in War by Magda Denes is the story of a brilliant young Jewish girl in Hungary who survived isolation, starvation, persecution, the loss of her beloved brother, and relentless fights with her mother during World War II.

Viktor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning is the story of a psychologist who examines how he managed to survive in Nazi concentration camps by searching for meaning. He believes that human beings’ attempt to find meaning in their lives is more fundamental than the search for pleasure or any other drive. He therefore believes that there is some element of free will, at least in thoughts, even in inhuman conditions.

Memoir of a Race Traitor by Mab Segrest was published in the ‘90s and has been reissued after going out of print. Segrest, who was a lesbian feminist who worked on the journal Feminary, changed her focus in the ‘80s to fighting racism. That choice was dangerous. The Ku Klux Klan was very active in North Carolina, where she was living, and she took many risks.

Nonfiction

Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, edited by Evelyn Torton Beck, a ground-breaking book that emerged in 1982 but went out of print, reemerged in a new edition in 2023 and now is available as an eBook for the first time. Jewish women, including Beck, Adrienne Rich, and Irena Klepfisz, tell diverse stories about their experiences of being Jewish, including revealing anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement and some lesbian novels.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs by Heather McGhee presents a detailed calculation of the economic effects of systemic racism. Chapters look at racism’s effects on housing, wages, education, health, and the environmental quality.

King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild is the horror story of King Leopold of Belgium’s ownership of what used to be called the Belgian Congo. Yes, he “owned” it personally. He felt deprived because his country didn’t have any colonies, so he searched for one he could acquire. Colonialism there was even more vicious than in some other countries.

War Came to Us by Christopher Miller is an American reporter’s first-hand account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Miller had spent many years in Ukraine and provides a context for his account.

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies by Elizabeth Winkler persuaded me to change my mind about my adamant defense of Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays and sonnets that bear his name. I had read and believed many scholars’ defense of WS, but now I accept that he probably wasn’t the author. Winkler doesn’t have a dogmatic position on who wrote the plays, but she says there very likely were multiple authors, and likely one of them was a woman.

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My 2022 Book List

12/27/2022

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I read so many fine books in 2022 that it’s hard to limit them. As usual, these are books I read during the year, not necessarily published that year. First, I’ll cover the fiction since I suspect more readers will pick up those books.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste NG is a tale that feels all too true set in a United States that is so frightened of China that everything Chinese, including Chinese Americans, is demonized. Children of any ethnicity are taken away from parents who aren’t considered patriotic enough and sent to other families who try to erase their identities.

Mecca by Susan Straight is a fine story about POC characters, mostly descendants of early Californians or people who hail from Mexico or countries further south, living in inland Southern California. I grew up in Los Angeles, and this was a side of California I didn’t know.

Yara Zgheib’s No Land to Light On is a beautifully written novel about a Syrian man who is a US resident caught up in Trump’s Muslim ban after he visits his parents in Jordan. The viewpoints shift between him and his pregnant wife, a scholar living in the US.

Go, Went, Gone by German author Jenny Erpenbeck is a story about African refugees stiving to stay in Germany and get jobs there from the viewpoint of a retired German intellectual who tries to befriend them.

Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman is my favorite of her many books. It’s a novel based on her grandfather’s attempt to keep Congress from delisting her tribe, the Chippewa, which would have led to a loss of federal aid for education and health. The book also is the story of a young woman looking for her sister who has been kidnapped.

Indian author Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us is the story of a friendship of sorts between an upper-caste and upper-class woman in Calcutta and a poor woman who works for her. Unsurprisingly, the differences undercut the friendship.

Bisi Adjapon’s The Teller of Secrets is the story of a Nigerian-Ghanaian young woman who keeps secrets about her father’s adultery but faces punishment for her own sexuality as she tries desperately to get a college education.

Ngugi wa Th’iongo’s novel A Grain of Wheat takes place in the 1950s during Kenyans’ struggle against the British occupation. As the country achieves independence in 1963, a village looks back to the killing of its leading warrior in the struggle and tries to learn who betrayed him to the British.

Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao is about a domineering Chinese restauranteur who has emigrated to the United States and how he bullies his wife and his three sons. It’s a brilliant retelling of The Brothers Karamazov (one of my favorite books) in a Chinese-American setting.

Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu is the story of a mother and young son facing danger in Japanese-occupied China and later in the war between the Communists and the Nationalists. They flee to Taiwan but they are still afraid, afraid of Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Tragically, the son will always fear everyone Chinese.

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris is a story of two formerly enslaved brothers working on a plantation towards the end of the Civil War. It’s beautifully written.

Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds tells about suffering during the Dust Bowl winds in the Southwest in the 1930s. A girl from a privileged family winds up living with a farming family that is later hit by extreme winds that destroy almost everything. Eventually some of them move to California to survive and meet with intense discrimination.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler is the story of a science professor who brings a chimpanzee to live in his home and tries to raise her as a sister to his young daughter. Everyone suffers as a result, especially Fern, the chimpanzee.

Lesbian Fiction

Sheree L. Greer’s A Return to Arms is about a young woman who joins a Black activist group and falls in love with another activist. Problems, including homophobia, in the group affect their relationship.

Caren J. Werlinger’s Turning for Home tells about a woman who dreads going home to a Kansas small town. She has never told anyone what happened there, and that affects her lesbian relationships. Her partner strives to reach her emotionally.

Testimony by Paula Martinac is the story of lesbians working for a university in Virginia around 1960 who hide their relationships to keep their jobs. The characters are complex. Martinac’s Dear Miss Cushman is about a nineteenth century young lesbian who is inspired by actor Charlotte Cushman to try to become an actor playing male parts.

Sue Graham is a South African author. Her novel For the Love of Life takes place in a reserve where wild animals are supposed to be protected. But poaching is a problem. A believable love story takes place there.

Aimee’s As War Goes By is a well-told story of British lesbians and other young women working with the British government against Nazi Germany.

Osprey Calling by Ellen Hoil is about a woman who is a successful wildlife photographer, but pain has left her awkward in social relationships. An assignment takes her to her hometown in Maine, a place she never wanted to see again. This is a good depiction of a troubled woman and efforts to help her.

Nonfiction

I read some fine nonfiction this year. Only a little was history, but that was my priority.

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by scholar Serghi Plokhy is a long history that gave me a much better sense of Ukraine’s history, how and why Russia claims it. Ukrainians have gone through many periods when they sided with some outside power—the Ottoman Empire, Poland, Russia, and even Lithuania—to protect them from being dominated by another power. Things never worked the way they wanted: the country they turned to for partnership always took more than it gave. That certainly happened with Russia. One point I learned was that Ukrainian peasants weren’t serfs (people bound to stay on the estate of the landowner they worked for) until Russia dominated them. That’s why many of those peasants flocked to the factories that Russia started to build in Ukraine’s East.

Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire by British scholar David Anderson is a long, detailed study of the British dispossession of Kenyans and suppression of any resistance. In addition to the hangings mentioned in the title, the British built concentration camps and forced many Kenyans to live in them, including many thousands of Kikuyus from Nairobi. The Kikuyus led the rebellion because they were the people who lost the most land when the British seized it.

Born After: Reckoning with the German Past by Angelika Bammer tells how Bammer, who was born in Germany after World War II and now lives in the United States, went back to Germany to learn what her parents and grandparents did during Hitler’s reign; she tries to determine their degree of guilt.

Unbowed: A Memoir by Wangari Maathai is the autobiography of the incredible woman who started the green spaces movement in Kenya to preserve and restore the natural environment despite facing much sexist pressure to desist because she was a woman.

I Laugh So I Won’t Cry: Kenya’s Women Tell the Story of Their Lives by Helen Halperin is a book in which Halperin, an American sociologist, interviews more than a hundred Kenyan women. After a few years, she came back and did follow-up interviews with as many of them as she could. Although she concluded the book in 2003, I suspect that conditions haven’t totally altered. The saddest thing is that most women said their mothers taught them that they have to accept beatings from their husbands and the women accepted that.

Leftover Women by American journalist Leta Hong Fincher, who lived for several years in China, is also based on many interviews as well as research of Chinese media. She recounts how the transition to private property since the 2000s has left most property in the hands of men. Only one person has title to a property, and that person is almost always the man. Moreover, a government-backed media campaign that began in the 2000s says women who haven’t married by 27 are “leftover” and will lead miserable lives. The reason is that many men are actually leftover because the ratio of men to women increased greatly during the one-child campaign. There are now many educated women. The media ridicules educated, independent women and tells them they shouldn’t wait for a partner who’s as successful as they are.

Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, also by Leta Hong Fischer, tells how feminists in China in the 2110s began demonstrating against discrimination, sexual harassment and other abuse of women and how the state has punished them.

We Don’t Know Ourselves by Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole looks at corruption in modern Irish history and the dramatic changes in Ireland in recent years, especially regarding its adoption of laws allowing lesbians and gays to marry and permitting abortion.

Free by Lea Ypi is the memoir of a young Albanian woman who grew up under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Her parents were marginalized and scrutinized because they came from middle-class backgrounds, but she was taught in school that everything good comes from Uncle Enver. The dissolution of authoritarian rule leaves her confused and searching for meaning.

The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams by gay historian Jonathan Katz tells the story of Eve Adams, a Jewish immigrant who came from Poland to the US in 1912. She was a radical who knew Emma Goldman and wrote a book titled Lesbian Love. The novel is included in Katz’s book. Adams was deported for being “immoral” and perished in the Holocaust.

Coming of Age With Elephants by Joyce Poole and Elephant Memories by Cynthia Moss tell about African elephants’ lives and the struggle to protect Kenya’s elephants from poaching.

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My Favorite Books of 2021

11/29/2021

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I read mostly novels this year. Some of the books I include were published earlier, but I read them in 2021.

The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr. is a dazzling novel, the first about enslaved African American gay men. The two protagonists share a deep love and try to be true to each other in a plantation where the owner breeds slaves for sale. The portraits of African American women are sympathetic.

The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen is a worthy successor to his novel The Sympathizer, which is about a Vietnamese Communist who pretends to be an anti-Communist so he can spy on other Vietnamese and is sent to the United States. But the main character, an intellectual, develops many doubts. In The Committed, he is ordered to go to France, where the book sends up French intellectuals who think revolution is cool the way the previous book showed the flaws of Americans. The writing is filled with sharp humor.

Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man also looks at the complexities of war and its aftermath. It’s set in Croatia, where a clueless English couple buy a vacation home in a small town without realizing that the town was the scene of bloodshed in the 1990s war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. But the Croatian man who helps them restore their house to its former beauty is still haunted by the war.

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak deals with the fighting between Cypriots of Greek descent and Turkish descent and its effects on the love between a Turkish young woman and a Greek young man. But the focal point is their daughter, who has been raised in England and is traumatized by her mother’s death. She gradually learns about her parents’ past. Shafak brilliantly intersects the story with a tale showing the point of view of the fig tree they brought from Cyprus that tells how war affects creatures who aren’t human.

Abigail by Magda Szabo is the story of a Hungarian girl during World War II. Her father, a general who is secretly working against his country’s fascist government, sends her to an incredibly rigid Calvinist school in a remote area. She loathes the school’s rigidity, has difficulty making friends, and only gradually learns what is happening in the world.

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue tells about the people of a small village in a nameless African country where an American oil company, with the collaboration of the nation’s government, has polluted the land and the water. When the people realize that the contamination is killing their children, they go to the capital to try to get help. Such things have been happening in Nigeria, and doubtless other countries as well.

Dust by Yvonne Adiambo Owuor is set in post-independence Kenya. It begins with the police shooting of a young man, Odidi, during a robbery. But we soon learn that Odidi was much more than a robber. He was brilliant and idealistic. His death shatters his father, a herdsman in dry northern Kenya, and his mother, a woman of great presence. His sister, an artist who has been living in Brazil, seeks to discover more about her brother’s life and learns about his resistance to post-colonial corruption.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a prominent Kenyan writer living in exile. His four-volume memoirs--Dreams in a Time of War, In the House of the Interpreter, Birth of a Dream Weaver, and Wrestling With the Devil--tell the story of Kenya from his life as a poor boy in a small village that the British destroyed, forcing its people to relocate in an attempt to separate them from liberation fighters, to his imprisonment for socialist views by a corrupt post-colonial government that accepted too many of false values and practices of the colonizers. I learned so much from these books.

Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature, tells of Salim, a youth growing up in Zanzibar. He was puzzled as a child when his father moved out of their home to live in a small room in someone else’s house, where he read and stared at the walls all day. Salim eventually learns that his mother has become the mistress of a powerful man, the son of the country’s vice president. She sends Salim to his uncle in England to continue his education.

Dancing in the Mosque by Homeira Qaderi is an autobiographical novel about an Afghan woman whose family made her marry a neighbor so she wouldn’t be forced to become the wife of a Talib who is attracted to her. She and her husband spent some years in Iran, which she found incredibly liberating compared to Afghanistan. She was able to go to college and graduate school and become a writer, but her husband decided to move back to Afghanistan and everything changed. She lost custody of her young son. This book is a letter written to him.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert surprised me. I had been uninterested in Eat, Pray, Love, so I hadn’t read anything else she wrote. But this novel about a nineteenth century girl who grows up lonely on an estate outside Philadelphia and becomes an expert on mosses thrilled the naturalist in me. I was less thrilled that she is portrayed as so ugly that her hopes to love a man are all thwarted. She’s a flawed character, but she develops a theory of evolution parallel to Darwin’s. I think the characters, including her father, who made a fortune the hard way and despises most other people, are true for the times.

The lesbian novel I liked best this year is Breaking Jae by S. Renee Bess, the story of Jae, a young Black intellectual woman who is trying desperately to get a fellowship. Along the way Jae changes from being a flirt to falling in love.

I also very much enjoyed Cheryl A. Head’s series about a Black lesbian detective who starts her own firm in Detroit. Her stories are rather hard-boiled, but her detective is soft-hearted. The racially mixed detective office with a Black woman very much in charge is always interesting.

I’m fond of books about lesbian nuns, so I really liked Caren Werlinger’s novels In a Small Space and An Unlit Candle. The characters are deeply religious, so falling in love poses a dilemma for them.

One of the best nonfiction books I read this year is Hillary Holladay’s The Power of Adrienne Rich, a very detailed biography of Rich’s life and her development as a poet, with an emphasis on the life. I hadn’t realized that Rich became a renowned poet while she was still in college at Radcliffe. I learned a great deal, but I thought there was more information about some intimate relationships with women than Rich would have wanted made public.

The most amazing nonfiction book I read is Judy Batalion’s The Light of Days, a painstakingly detailed account of Jewish women’s resistance to the Holocaust in Poland. The book’s scope is incredible. Batalion follows specific young women leaders and tells what happened to them. A few survived. The depth of Batalion’s research is staggering, almost as staggering as the heroism of these young women.

I review almost every book I read on Goodreads. I’m inviting you to follow me there.

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My Favorite Books of 2020

11/24/2020

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Like many other people, I think Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste is the finest new book of 2020. Wilkerson demonstrates that caste is best term to understand the complex race and class stratification in the United States. She has been to India and studied caste in that society. She also compares caste in the United States to Nazi Germany and shows that the Nazis used the U.S. South’s Jim Crow codes as a model for restrictions on Jews. The Nazis thought the South’s definition of the percentage of blood needed to fall in the despised caste was too strict. Let that sink in.
As usual, this is a list of my favorite reads of the year, many of which were not published this year.
Also as usual, most of them are novels.

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates is an outstanding book about enslaved people trying to escape. The writing is luminous. Coates shows women with full agency. The viewpoint character is a man who comes to appreciate that women want to make their own decisions even more than they want love. Coates’ treatment of white characters is generous, showing some flawed but earnest abolitionists as well as slaveholders. The protagonist is the son of the man who owned and sold his mother. The father puts him in charge of his mentally deficient white half-brother, who has all the privileges of a white man and is supposed to inherit the estate.

Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis is a wonderful novel about lesbians living in Uruguay under a dictatorship in the 1970s and 80s. It is the story of a group of women, not just individuals. Books about groups of lesbians are rare, and this has believable, interesting characters. Life under the dictatorship is chilling. Everyone must live with great caution, lesbians particularly. Some of the characters suffer more than others. But they buy and refurbish a house on a deserted beach as a refuge. Their love relationships come and go, but the women ultimately have ties of friendship.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman considers the lives of young Black women who came North during the Great Migration. Some were met by scheming madams and pimps the minute they got off the train. Most went into grinding domestic work. Hartman celebrates those who tried to find joy in sex and love. She excoriates the social workers who forced them into “reform” institutions for being in relationships out of wedlock, to be followed by slave-like live-in domestic work. She tells how Billy Holiday, arrested for prostitution, pretended to be older than she was so she would be sent to prison rather than a “reform” institution because the prison terms were only three months while the other terms were three years. Hartman also celebrates Black lesbian, dyke, and bisexual women entertainers who enjoyed sexual freedom. She is a scholar who writes exuberantly.

The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai is the story of a Vietnamese family living through the end of colonialism and the successive wars against it. At first, the characters sympathize with the liberation struggle, but they learn that some of the Communists can be as cruel as the people they opposed. The author grew up in Vietnam and now lives in Indonesia.

Jack is the fourth novel in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series and is my favorite in the series, partly because it has much more dialogue than some of the other books. Jack, a character mentioned in earlier books, is the ne’er-do-well son of a white small-town Presbyterian preacher. Jack is an alcoholic compulsive thief who has served time in prison, but he is deeply intellectual and keeps thinking of theology though he isn’t sure he believes in it. He meets an African-American woman, a brilliant high school teacher, who also has a preacher father. They fall in love, but this is the 1940s and interracial marriage is illegal. Their relationship is believable and moving.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng is so popular that it has already been made a television series, but this was my first encounter with it. It is a tale of two families, one privileged and the other on the run. A single mother who is an artist flees from place to place, not telling her daughter why. The daughter is attracted to the sons and daughters of the privileged family, while one of the daughters of the privileged family is drawn to the single mother.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi is the story of a young Ghanaian-American woman is doing research in neuroscience. She went into the field because she wants to understand drug addiction, which killed her brother, and whether the brain can learn to resist it. She is also taking care of her mother, who had a permanent breakdown after her son’s death. The viewpoint character grew up in a Pentecostal church in Alabama and has difficulty with other science students who find it ridiculous that she is trying to reconcile religion and science.

The Door by Hungarian author Magda Szabo tells about a woman writer who was blacklisted under Communism and whose work is starting to become acceptable again. Nevertheless, she fears the authorities. She hires a housekeeper who is enigmatic and insists on controlling many aspects of the household. The writer, who is a little intimidated by her, is shocked to learn that the housekeeper saved both Jews from Nazis and right-wing people from Communists. The relationship between the writer and the housekeeper becomes devastating.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is a novel very loosely based on William Shakespeare’s family. Some critics and writers have claimed, based on little evidence, that Shakespeare had an unhappy marriage. This book, which features his wife, here called Agnes rather than Anne, suggests that the couple did love each other. Agnes is portrayed as knowledgeable about herbs, and so much of a child of nature that she insists on giving birth to their first child alone in the woods. But the death of their son, Hamnet (which really happened), greatly stresses the family’s bonds and makes William’s life in London more problematic for Agnes than it had been.

The History of Loneliness by John Boyne is the story of an Irish priest who is content with being celibate and for a long time fails to understand the abuse of boys by other priests. The son of a murderously abusive father, he tries to act the prescribed role of a good priest but begins to unravel as he discovers horrors in the Church.

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Boyhood by Trevor Noah feels like an authentic experience of struggling communities in South Africa and growing up mixed race there. I had never seen Trevor Noah when I read the book, so it’s not just for fans.

Jimmy Bluefeather by Kim Heacox takes the reader to southeast Alaska, where an old Tlingit-Norwegian man who is the last canoe carver in his community tries to help his grandson cope with a serious injury and other difficulties. The old man is facing death and longs to go to a beloved glacial bay.

Light on Altered Land by Becky Bohan (admission—she’s a friend of mine) is a well-wrought love story about two women in early old age. One is a lesbian feminist; the other is woman who has been married to a man and has fallen in love with a woman. They learn how to communicate and develop their relationship.

Three by Anne Marie Monahan is one of the most lesbian feminist novels I have ever read. Well, perhaps lesbian separatist would be more accurate. Several lesbians decide to build a community on an abandoned human structure offshore. The community goes through several phases, moving toward deciding to become totally self-sufficient with no supplies from outside. Right. I found it interesting and believable.

I have to add the book I am currently reading, A Promised Land, a memoir by Barack Obama. If you love President Obama, it’s a must read. He narrates the Audible version and I enjoy hearing him.

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My Favorite Nonfiction in 2019

12/18/2019

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The nonfiction I read this year is an eclectic group of books.
     The Silk Roads by Peter Frangopan is a study of history from a perspective that is new for most Westerners: It sees Central Asia as the place where "civilization" developed. I thought China and India had the only important Asian ancient history east of the Tigris and Euphrates. I never thought of the cultural heritage of the ancient cities of Uzbekistan. I didn't know that Samarkand had been important. This is a detailed and interesting history from a nonwestern, and also non-Chinese, perspective.
     Say Nothing by Patrick Keefe is a remarkable history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, when the Protestant majority violently suppressed the Catholics and the IRA waged war on them. Both sides killed innocent bystanders. The book focuses on a few characters, among them Dolours Price and Gerry Adams. Don't know about Dolours Price? She and her sister Marian grew up in a family of Northern Irish Catholic resisters. Their father and grandfather went to prison for attacks on English people and their property. Dolours and Marian were involved in the killing and disposing of the body of a Catholic widow and mother of ten who the IRA believed was an informer. The book also includes a great deal of information about Gerry Adams, often seen as a hero of the Good Friday peace accord, but who the books says ordered foot soldiers like the Prices to carry out bombings and killings.
     An Autobiography of Ireland, edited by John Bowman, is a fascinating set of writings by 20th Century Irish people, many nonfamous and some famous. The subjects range widely from the account of a priest who was asked to go behind the barricades and minister to Irish rebels during the 1916 Easter Uprising, to the feminists who publicly brought contraceptives from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland, where they were banned. It tells how bitterly Catholic fought Catholic after a peace treaty with England that some opposed, and how the Church opposed state-provided help for women and children.
     Our Ice Is Vanishing by Shelly Wright is about much more than the effects of climate change in the arctic. It tells the story of Canada's mistreatment of First Nations people in the arctic and subarctic. One aspect that particularly struck me is that in the 1950s, the Canadian government became anxious about its claim to the Far North. To maintain its claim, it sent groups of Inuits to land farther north than their traditional home land: That is, it sent people who had never experienced 24-hour-a-day darkness to a land where they would have to spend months in it. Wright is not a First Nations person, but she has been a teacher in the arctic and quotes many First Nations people.
     Being Caribou by Karsten Heuer is the amazing autobiographical story of a newly married young man and woman who followed the migration of the Porcupine caribou herd all the way from its winter home in Canada to its breeding grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the United States. The couple made this long journey on foot. Keeping up with the caribou was difficult, because they ran for long distance but the humans couldn't. The couple encountered hunger, cold, and bears, many of which were indifferent to them but some that were aggressive. The most difficult part was losing the caribou for days at a time and worrying about finding them again.
     Liao Yiwu, who was imprisoned after the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre, spent years interviewing nonstudents who supported the students and were arrested as a consequence. Liao says there hasn't been enough publicity about what happened to nonstudents and passersby. The result is Bullets and Opium. Everyone he interviewed (all men, because that's who would talk to him) spent a long time in prison, was tortured, and faced a dreadful life after being released. They have been unable to get work, and friends and even family have shunned them for fear of guilt by association. The stories are painful but important.
     The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman and Displaced People, edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen and collections of autobiographical stories by immigrants about their mostly difficult experiences, mostly in the United States, although some were about immigrants in other countries.
     How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram Kendi is a thoughtful book by a scholar who draws on his own experience in his discussion of racism. Kendi says the most important aspect of being an anti-racist is supporting anti-racist policies.
     If you are working in or have worked in a social movement, Berenice Fisher's Unhappy Silences is a fine meditation on silencing oneself or feeling silenced in political groups. Fisher gives many examples and tries to come up with solutions.
     I've read many other fine books. I have to depart from the theme of this blog to mention a novel that I've read since I posted a blog on my favorite fiction of the year. The Overstory by Richard Powers is an amazing saga about people's lives intertwined with trees. He follows a number of characters from childhood to adulthood and discusses their relationship with trees. Some become tree defenders who try to save ancient redwoods. The book is lyrical and full of insights. The characters are very diverse, except that there are no African American characters, which is a pity since the book is saga of these times.

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My Best Novel List for 2019

11/18/2019

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  Milkman by Anna Burns has to be high on my list of the best novels I read in 2019. This book, which won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, takes the reader into the war zone that was Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the 1970s. It is told in the first person by an 18-year-old Catholic girl who is being stalked by the Milkman, a high-ranking Renouncer or member of the Catholic paramilitary who defend Catholic neighborhoods from Protestant police and paramilitaries. Fear of informers is so great that Catholics aren't supposed to go to a hospital because they might be coerced into informing. This is truly a woman's perspective on that time.
    Margaret Attwood's The Testaments, a book that's only slightly more dystopian than Milkman, is a worthy sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. It gives an interesting perspective on the Aunts, the highest-ranking women in Gilead. I want to avoid spoilers.
    Lisa See's The Island of Sea Women tells about the Korean island of Jeju, where women divers who collected shellfish were the main breadwinners until recent decades. The divers form a close-knit community of women responsible for each other's lives in dangerous dives. Girls and women develop close friendships. The main characters go through World War II, the Korean War, and anti-Communist witch hunts. As usual, See's work feels authentic.
    Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads sing is the beautifully wrought story of a poor white girl in a small coastal town in the South. Everyone abandons her except an old African American couple who buy the shellfish she collects. She is brilliant, and nature is her refuge.
    What is goodness? That's one of the questions in Ann Patchett's The Dutch House. It's the story of how a girl and boy in Pennsylvania grew up after their mother left them without saying goodbye so she could work with the destitute in India. Her friends keep saying that she is such a good person. The son, who never knew his mother, begs to differ. He is the narrator. His older sister, who devotes herself to him, is the one who their mother's departure hurts the most. I don't always like family dramas, but this one moved me greatly.
    The nature of goodness, happiness, and suffering are the subjects of Aminatta Forna's Happiness: A Novel. Forna is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. The book is set in London. The main characters are an American woman who is studying urban foxes and a Ghanaian psychiatrist who has spent much of his life working with war refugees. His perspective on suffering is well worth reading. The characters are as interesting as they are deep.
    Canadian writer Sharon Bala's The Boat People is a tale about Tamils persecuted in Sri Lanka who escape to Canada but are received with suspicion and confined for long periods of time. It's fiction: In recent years, Canada hasn't treated migrants this badly, though Canadians have mistreated Asian migrants in the past. I wish I could say the same about the United States.
    A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza is the story of an Indian Muslim family that has migrated to the midwestern United States. The older daughter, who longs for education, is hampered by her strict father and frustrated because she can't do what other girls her age are doing. There are strong ties between her and her brother, who also does not want to conform.
    There, There by Tommy Orange is the story of Indians (the term he chooses rather than Native American) who live in Oakland and struggle with poverty, abuse, alcoholism, and drugs. Many characters struggle successfully and affirm the value of being Indian. One character says that Urban Indians have been ignored and misunderstand by white people who believe that "real Indians" live on the land, meaning reservations and other rural areas. Indians in cities are living on the land: Cities, too, are part of the land, Orange's characters assert.

Lesbian Novels

    I also discovered some fine lesbian novelists. Penny Mickelbury has written a number of books, including Wings to Fly Away, a moving novel about a woman escaped from slavery who has come to Philadelphia and the community she finds there. Death's Echoes is a good detective story set in Washington, DC, that begins with white supremacists murdering a group of African American Muslim women. The detectives are a white lesbian cop and her partner, an African American lesbian top reporter.
    Cheryl A. Head writes detective stories set in Detroit. In Catch Me When I'm Falling, her African American lesbian detective investigates a series of murders of homeless people. The book feels authentic: Head clearly has learned a great deal about the lives of homeless people.
    Elena Graf has written a well-researched series set in Weimar Germany, then moving into the Nazi era. Her main character is a lesbian aristocrat who falls in love with a nun. The first novel is called Occasions of Sin. The aristocrat is believable, which means that she is snobbish, somewhat like Gentleman Jack. The depictions of nuns are sensitive and realistic.
    Ann McMan writes truly humorous lesbian novels. Her most recent, Beowulf for Cretins, is about a college English professor.

    I am writing a separate review of the nonfiction I have read this year.

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My Best Reads of 2018

12/10/2018

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This year saw the almost-a-century-delayed publication of a major work by Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon, an account of Hurston's devastating conversations with Cudjo Lewis, one of last Africans brought to the United States to be forced into slavery. He somehow came to terms with his terribly difficult life and became a kind, giving person. It's shocking that it took so long for this excellent book to be published.

Some of my favorite authors wrote new books in 2018. Barbara Kingsolver wrote Unsheltered, a novel about U.S. intellectuals whose lives are not what they expected. It's set in a town in New Jersey and moves between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. In the nineteenth century, the town is closely controlled by its founding family. A man who wants to teach real science in a public school finds himself blocked by that century's version of the Christian Right. But a brilliant woman makes scientific discoveries in her own home. That part is based on real people. The twenty-first century focus on a fictional family living in the same house. The parents are intellectuals who lost their professional niches when the husband's college folded. The wife, much against her wishes, has become an in-home caregiver for her right=wing father-law. The book looks at the problem with focusing on middle-class dreams in today's resource-depleted world.

Rosellen Brown, a favorite author who hasn't published a new book in 18 years, came out with The Lake on Fire, a novel about the travails of a nineteenth century family of poor Jewish immigrants who were given land in Wisconsin even though they had never farmed before. The daughter, who has been allowed only a short time in school, is determined to find the wider world. She runs away, and her younger brother follows her. They wind up in Chicago, which gives the author an opportunity to show the lives of the poor who work in sweatshops, contrasted with the lives of the Gilded Age rich.

Yet another favorite author, Elif Shafak, brought out Three Daughters of Eve, the story of a Turkish woman who grew up with an extremely pious Muslim mother and an almost atheist father. She lives her father's dream of going to Oxford, where she meets a professor who teaches about God as an idea without reference to religion. She is enchanted. The story moves between her college years and her later life as the wife of a businessman.

Syria

Some excellent books about Syria tore at my heart. English reporter Deborah Campbell wrote A Disappearance in Damascus, a memoir about the terrifying disappearance of a friend who was taken to one President Bashir Assad's prisons. A Syrian woman in exile, Samar Yazbek, wrote A Crossing, a memoir about going back to her hometown in Syria to help in the resistance against Assad. The account of town after town being bombed day after day is searing. Ausma Zehanat Kahn, one of the mystery authors whose work I most admire, produced A Dangerous Crossing, in which her Muslim and Jewish Canadian inspectors go to a refugee camp in Greece and learn about Syrian refugees and the smugglers who ferry them from Turkey to Greece.

Less-Publicized Wars

I rediscovered novelist Mary Gordon and was deeply impressed by There Your Heart Lies, a novel in which an American girl discovers her great aunt's life in Spain during its Civil War. The book is quite an indictment of the Roman Catholic Church's role in backing Franco. I hadn't realized how interconnected the Church and his regime were.

Arundhati Roy's new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is an indictment of right-wing, anti-Muslim Hindus and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government. Not enough Americans understand how dangerous that government is. The finest writing in the book is in her section about the struggle for independence in Kashmir, a Muslim-majority area that India has never allowed to vote on whether to join Pakistan.

Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dagarembga's first novel in decades, The Mournable Body, is the story of Tambudzai, a woman who tries to escape life in her village and the traumas of her country's war of liberation. Her sister was crippled fighting in that war. Many people saw the women who fought not as heroes, but as witches. Tambudzai managed to get a college education, but she learned that even in postwar Zimbabwe, white people with the same education as she got the best jobs. She has to struggle desperately to stay afloat.

Fascist England and Trees as Protagonists

The alternative reality series I most enjoyed this year was Jo Walton's trilogy--Farthing, Ha'Penny, and Half a Crown—about a Britain that signed a peace with Hitler and slid into fascism as people didn't understand what was happening. The books are compelling and all-too-timely reading.

Another superb fantasy I read is N.K. Jemison's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, in which humans enslave the gods. A mixed- race girl whose grandfather is the planet's ruler is summoned to his court, where she meets the dangerous gods and just as dangerous humans.

I found relief in reading about trees. The Hidden Life of Trees, a wonderful book by German forester Peter Wohleben, tells how trees communicate with each other. American Canopy by Eric Rustow, a sadder book, tells the history of trees in the United States, which in many cases is the story of our destruction of trees, though it also looks at attempts to stop the destruction.

Amazing Autobiography

I recommend Sandra Lambert's autobiography, A Certain Loneliness. Lambert, a lesbian, has struggled with polio all her life. She loves nature and has learned to kayak, going alone into the Everglades and the Okefenokee Swamp. She has coped with major physical challenges, but some of the biggest challenges come from other people's insensitivity and inconsiderateness.

One more pitch (well, two more): For the story of a unique figure in lesbian history, read Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier by Joanne Passet. Grier was an editor of The Ladder and founded Naiad Press. For a truly scary, psychological lesbian mystery, read Alison R. Solomon's Along Came the Rain.

If you are on Goodreads, please follow my reviews there.

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My Best Reads of 2017

12/15/2017

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So many books, so little time! I want to tell about my favorites of the novels I read this year. My favorite nonfiction books were the books about Russia that I discussed in my previous blog.

Kamila Shamsie, one of my favorite authors, has written another superb book. Home Fires is the story of a family who, like Shamsie, are Pakistani British. The father was a jihadist who died in American custody. He had spent his time fighting and had no connection to his children. Their mother raised them to be moderates, but she has died. One of the two sisters is quiet and scholarly. The other cares more about her brother than about anything else in the world. The brother, the only one who does not excel in school, is recruited by the so-called Islamic State. The book is complex and compelling.

Miss Burma, written by Charmaine Craig, who is part Káren, one of Myanmar’s minority peoples, is another illuminating book. It tells how Burmans, not quite the country’s majority, had abused the other peoples in the territory so much that many minorities supported the British colonialists, who treated them more fairly. Both during World War II and after the British left, the Burmans massacred other peoples. This book focuses on the history of one Káren family, especially of the daughter who loves a rebel fighter but winds up unwillingly as a token Miss Burma. The book is excellent as a novel, not to mention as background on a country that most of us know little about. Knowing that Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, an independence leader, violently oppressed minority peoples makes today’s news easier to understand.

Pachinko by Korean-American author Min Jin Lee is another book about a people whose troubles most Americans know little about: people of Korean ancestry living in Japan. Like Miss Burma, this books shows history through the story of one family. For several decades until the end of World War II, Japan controlled Korea. Some Koreans went to Japan to get an education. The Korean War also led many Koreans to leave for Japan. But Japan did not accept them as full citizens. It has been, and still is, difficult for them to be able live in areas with decent housing and to get jobs. Hence many have worked in pachinko parlors, gambling houses where gangsters held sway. That gave rise to the stereotype that Koreans are gangsters. This book is successful both in creating a moving family saga and in illustrating the history.

Lisa See has long been one of my favorite authors. Her latest book, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, is about a girl of the Yao minority in China’s Yunnan province. Harvesting and marketing tea is the people’s livelihood. Women do the hardest work, the harvesting of sharp leaves that cut their hands. Premarital sex is encouraged, but pregnancy before marriage is a life-ruining disgrace. Li-yan, the protagonist, becomes pregnant. The father has gone away to earn money so they can marry. She gives birth to her baby in secret, then takes the baby girl to an orphanage. When Li-yan comes back later to retrieve her daughter, the girl has been adopted by an American couple. The story then goes back and forth between the mother’s life and the daughter’s.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Vietnamese-American author of the brilliant novel The Sympathizer, brought out a short story collection, The Refugees. I found it not quite as dazzling as the novel, but full of moving stories of Vietnamese refugees trying to adjust to life in the United States. There’s also an interesting story about an African-American Vietnam veteran whose daughter is dedicating her life to help the Vietnamese in reparation for his fighting there.

Leila Aboulela, a woman of Egyptian-Sudanese heritage who lives in Scotland, wrote The Kindness of Enemies, a book about cultural clashes that shifts between being a historical novel and a contemporary novel. The historical tale is about the clash between Chechens and Russians; the contemporary is about a British Muslim woman’s friendship for a student of hers who is accused of terrorism. Both stories are filled with nuances, ambivalence, and possible betrayals.

A Russian novel in translation, Ludmilla Ulitskaya’s The Big Green Tent, is reminiscent of Tolstoy. It is the story of several intelligent boys and girls growing up in Moscow. They meet in the 1950s and maintain their friendships, but find their lives shaped by bureaucratic repression. If you like good Russian novels, do read this one.

Noted Israeli author Amos Oz has written a new book, Judas. Its protagonist is an Israeli graduate student who is fascinated by the intellectual history of how Jews have written about Jesus of Nazareth. He’s no Christian, but he thinks Jesus should be discussed as a prophet. He meets old men who were involved in the founding of Israel who regret the ways the founders treated the Palestinians. This book is very interesting, but I found the protagonist’s story of a passion for a mysterious woman pretty tedious.

Stay With Me by Nigerian author Ayobami Adebayo is a unique and moving novel. Yejide, a girl whose mother died giving birth to her, grew up in a family where her father had several wives, but none of them were motherly to her. When she’s in college, she meets Akin, and they fall in love. They marry, but are unable to have a child. Akin’s family demands that he marry a second wife so he can have children. Yejide is distraught. What happens after that is very different from what I expected. You can’t predict what’s going to happen in this unusual story.

Salt Houses, a novel by Palestinian-American author Haya Alyan, who is a poet and a psychologist, tells the story of a Palestinian family that has to move to several different countries. The family matriarch, Salma, has to leave her home after the Six-Day War. Her son becomes involved in politics and disappears. Her daughter Alia has to move to Kuwait because her husband wants to live there, though she hates the desert and feels trapped. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, the family has to leave. They are scattered to Beirut, Paris, and Boston.

Emma Donohue has long been one of my favorite authors. An Irish lesbian who now lives in Canada, she has written several historical novels as well as more contemporary ones. Her latest novel, The Wonder, is set in rural Ireland in the 19th century, just a few years after the great famine. An 11-year-old girl is refusing to eat. She says that Jesus is feeding her manna from heaven. The people of her town believe that’s a miracle. To authenticate or disprove the miracle, the town’s leading people engage an English nurse and an Irish nun to watch to see whether the girl eats. The story seems extreme to some, but if you grow up as a Catholic girl who wanted to make sacrifices, as I did, the book resonates deeply.

If We Were Villains, a novel by M.L. Rio, a woman who studied Shakespeare at King’s College London and the Globe, is a must for anyone who is crazy about Shakespeare and a good read for anyone who enjoys psychological novels. It’s the story of a group of students who specialize in Shakespeare at a college that focuses on the arts. It’s comparable to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History as a fascinating study of a small group of students. The characters are obsessed with Shakespeare and tend to play out their roles in real life.

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It's Time to Learn More About Russia

12/5/2017

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We’re now constantly focused on what’s happening in Washington, but it’s important to understand the rest of the world as well. There are all too many reasons why we should know more about Russia, not least Vladimir Putin’s predilection for backing the right wing in western countries and interfering in our elections.

Why Putin Is Really a Bad Guy

Yes, you know that Putin is dangerous. But how much do you know about him?

To learn more about Putin, I read The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by journalist Masha Gessen, who reported on Russia from the end of the USSR to 2013. This book covers Putin’s life to 2012. I then read The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, her book that covers Russia to 2017, showing the rest of Putin’s regime; the beginning of independent academic inquiry, which he squelched; and the lives of several young people who came of age in the post-Communist years.

Gessen is brilliant, and I am proud to say that she is a lesbian. She was born in Russia, brought by her dissident parents to the United States when she was 11, and in her 20s went back to Russia to report on it, which she did for two decades. She left Russia because she and her partner have three children, one of whom is adopted. In 2013, Russia passed a law saying that the state had the right to take away the adopted children of gay and lesbian parents. Gessen now lives in New York City.

Putin was always a bully. Since he has been in the public eye, he has bragged that he was a “thug” when he was young, beating up other boys when he chose. He joined the KGB, the secret service, where he undoubtedly continued to bully people in a more intimidating way. He wanted to be a spy and was disappointed in being assigned to Dresden, East Germany, where the most he could do was look for dissidents. He was furious when in 1989 a group of civilians tried to break into the KGB office in Dresden where he was stationed. The civilians were persuaded to withdraw. But when the KGB asked the Red Army for help, the army said it could do nothing without orders from Moscow. Moscow was silent, and Putin was enraged that his country seemed impotent.

But how did Putin come to the public eye? He became a deputy to mayor of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). There, Gessen learned, he took millions of dollars’ worth of food that was supposed to go to the hungry city, sold it, and kept the money. That sort of profiteering helped him accumulate a fortune. Some say he is now the world’s richest man.

From that not particularly central post in Russia’s second city, he caught the attention of people like billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who recommended him to Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first elected president, as a good head for the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB. (Khodorovsky later decided to support Putin’s critics, and Putin jailed him – and took over his oil company.)

Yeltsin was democratic by Russian standards. He engaged in electoral politics and supported free speech. But he had alienated the people by letting profiteers become wealthy through taking over businesses that had been state owned in the Soviet Union. He did nothing to ease the sudden loss of people’s life savings when the Soviet Union collapsed. Yeltsin also was frequently drunk and disorderly.

The people at the top liked Putin because he seemed rational and compliant. Yeltsin’s alcoholism and sometimes erratic behavior caused him to lose popularity. An election was coming up in 2000, and reformers were going to contest the presidency.

In Russia, the head of the government (it used to be the head of the Communist Party) goes on television on New Year’s Eve to greet the nation. On the cusp of the new millennium, Yeltsin went on TV and resigned, telling people that Putin was their new president, even though there was no legal basis for Yeltsin to hand over his job to his choice of successor. Once Putin held the office, he was poised to win the election in March 2000.

Why did people accept Putin, a man scarcely known at that point? The public had already become disillusioned by the sense of chaos and the collapse of the economy. Moreover, there had been a series of bombings destroying apartment buildings, and the government said the Chechens, who had rebelled against Moscow a few years earlier, were to blame.

Gessen investigated the bombings as much as she could and is convinced that the FSB, not the Chechens, was to blame. The bombings set the stage for people to want a strong leader, and Putin was portrayed as strong.

Many people had lost their life savings under Yeltsin’s move to capitalism, which in turn made many distrust democracy, which has had almost no history in Russia. Rule by a strong man was more familiar.

Gessen suggests that Putin’s rise might have been stage-managed starting years before his presidency.

Analysts in the West and those few independent academics in Russia long believed that Putin was an authoritarian ruler, not a totalitarian one. Authoritarianism could be seen as a political system that controls the public arena but doesn’t care much about people’s lives as long as they are compliant. Totalitarian regimes try to control people’s thoughts as well as the public sector.

In her second book, Gessen says that totalitarianism is authoritarianism plus an ideology. Putin’s regime now has an ideology: supposed support of “traditional values.” The government has conflated homosexuality with pederasty and convinced the population that “western values” like democracy and acceptance of lesbians and gays are destroying the West and have no place in Russia. His government has formed links with right-wing groups in the United States and Europe to promote that ideology.

In the early 1990s, college social science departments, long bastions of Communist ideology that discouraged research, began embracing intellectual inquiry. But that has been squelched in recent years.

Polls by the Levada Institute, an independent organization in Russia, show that in the early 1990s Russians were much more accepting of people who different from them, such as rock enthusiasts and “sexual minorities,” than they are now. When Russians are asked who was the greatest person in history, the choice is often Stalin, with Putin coming in second.

When the Soviet Union had few consumer goods for its citizens, Russians prided themselves on their country’s size and importance in the world. When it lost its empire, Russians felt a sense of loss. For many, their country’s hard-won victory in the Great War (their name for World War II) is still its proudest hour. The government and media focus on nostalgia for those times, so even children today look to the victory over the Nazis as their country’s greatest achievement. Books and movies still celebrate KGB agents as heroes, and young people fall into believing that.

The young people whom Gessen followed through the past two decades have either become protesters or dropped out of society. All were disillusioned and believe that Russia has no future.

The government has not only moved to imprison more dissidents in recent years, but also is clearly behind the murder of some, most notably Boris Nemtsov, the most well known of them. I suspect that dissident Alexei Navalny, who has had acid thrown in his face, won’t live to be old. He plans to run for president in 2018, but is barred because of probably false charges of embezzlement.

I strongly urge you to read Gessen’s books. She also writes for U.S. magazines such as The New Yorker, including articles looking at the Trump administration, which she sees as dangerous.

Gorbachev

One of Russia’s paradoxes is that the people detest their finest leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev: His Life and Times, a new biography by Amherst College political science professor William Taubman, tells the story of Gorbachev’s life from childhood to the present. Taubman was able to interview Gorbachev and many people who have known him.

From childhood on, Gorbachev was the antithesis of Putin. Whereas young Vladimir distinguished himself as someone to fear, young Mikhail distinguished himself by feats of farm labor with his father that gained them both medals. Gorbachev became a popular student leader in school and in the Komsomol (Communist youth group) and loved to act in plays.

At Moscow State University, he met his wife Raisa, a philosophy student who became his closest companion until her death in 1999. The men who worked with and for him often resented his listening to her so much. People made fun of the fact that she often appeared in public with him, which was far different from the position of other Soviet leaders’ wives.

He was known for being incorruptible and for drinking little. His squeaky clean persona contributed as much as his intelligence to his rise in the Communist Party. He believed in Communism and acceded to the Party line.

But when Gorbachev became first secretary of the Supreme Soviet in the 1970s, he was able to take several trips to Western Europe, which transformed him. He visited the Communist parties in Italy and France and saw that they operated within a democratic political system. He wanted democracy for his country and began his transition to a social democrat, though at first he wanted democratic competition to take place inside the Party for a lengthy transition period before other parties were included.

When he became leader of the Communist Party in 1985, he tried to democratize it. His mistake apparently was not realizing that trying to bring democracy to his country before enabling people to purchase more material goods was a recipe for failure. (The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping thought Gorbachev was stupid for putting democracy ahead of economic development.)

One of the first reforms Gorbachev tried was greatly reducing the availability of alcohol because he saw how badly alcoholism affected people’s health and their work. That plan worked as well as Prohibition did in the United States: It made people angry at him.

He made many other mistakes, particularly in trying to keep a balance between old Party hacks who detested him and the reformers who initially supported him, which made it seem that he championed neither.

Though Russians blame him for the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book shows that Yeltsin was the one whose moves led to its dissolution.

The book tells how much Gorbachev hated violence. Even when the USSR was losing its grip on Eastern Europe, he refused to resort to it (except for some repression in Lithuania). He was opposed to nuclear weapons, and he, not Ronald Reagan, was the one we have to thank for ending the Cold War. Reagan’s advisers and Bush’s advisers after him had trouble believing that Gorbachev was sincere, but he was.

I came away from the book convinced that Gorbachev was one of the heroes of the 20th century.

Ordinary Russians

I’ve just read Bears in the Streets: Three Journeys Across a Changing Russia, a book by writer Liza Dickey, who traveled across Russia from Vladivostock to Moscow in 1995, 2005, and 2015. She tried to talk with the same people each time.

Of course she found changes. In some places, like Vladivostock, a Pacific Coast city, the people she met were much more affluent in 2015 than they had been 20 years earlier. The young people were health conscious and fashion conscious. But in rural areas like Buryatia (north of Mongolia), once prosperous farmers had lost much of what they had when they bought land after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Dickey visited the “Jewish Autonomous Homeland” of Birobidzhan set up by Stalin in the Russian Far East, and learned that by 2015 most of the Jews had gone to Israel. A history of harsh discrimination had made them fearful. There wasn’t a real functioning synagogue in 1995, but there is a large one now, and schools now teach Yiddish and Jewish history. Hebrew is being phased out of secondary schools because teachers see it as the language of those who want to emigrate, but it is taught at the university. Now there are large statues of menorahs and shofars in the streets.

Dickey is intrepid, and I’m proud to say that she’s a lesbian. She worried about disclosing her lesbian identity, but by 2015 she came out to a number of the people she met. Many said, “I’m all right with it, but don’t tell anyone else.”

She learned that attitudes toward the United States had hardened by 2015, mirroring the hardening of political relations between the nations after Russia annexed Crimea. Many people said they loved Putin, and they asserted that what Russia does is none of America’s business. They pointed out that Russia has no bases near the United States, but the United States has bases almost surrounding Russia. (They didn’t say that the nations where the bases are located for the most part asked for the bases because they were afraid of Russia, some of them having been occupied by Russia. Dickey didn’t mention that because she didn’t want to get into arguments.) She learned that Russians distrust the United States as much as Americans distrust Russia, although they were willing to make an exception for individual Americans and were friendly to Dickey. People across Russia used the same phrase, claiming that Americans see Russia as a primitive place where “bears run in the streets,” so that must be what their press tells them Americans think.

The Russians also like products from the U.S., though they don’t always know where the products are made. Some Russian friends of Dickey’s were stunned to hear that Coca-Cola was an American brand.

Almost everyone she met said that even though they have far more material goods now, they thought life was better under the Soviet Union because they felt more secure about jobs, education, healthcare, and pensions. One affluent couple who didn’t say life was better then said it was just as good, only different.

The gay men and the one lesbian that Dickey met did not share the nostalgia for the old regime, and neither did the one performer she knows.

I recommend these books to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of Russia.

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Books of 2016

12/16/2016

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It was a terrible year in politics. What an understatement! But 2016 was a good year for books, when I was able to tear myself away from Facebook and the newspapers (not television—leaving that is never difficult for me, and I'll watch less than ever now).
     I read more than sixty books this year, but I won't burden you with details of them all. I'll mention many fine ones, mostly new or newish.

From Saigon to Beijing
     No one of my generation can forget the war in Vietnam, where our country fought an “enemy” that hadn't threatened us in the slightest. The Sympathizer, by Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. The prize was well deserved. The book's narrator is Vietnamese, the illegitimate son of a priest, who grows up deprived. Not surprisingly, he joins the Communists. He has two close friends from school, one of whom is a more dedicated Communist and the other who abhors Communism. The Party gives the narrator a mission: pretend to support the South Vietnamese government and spy on it. When that government is airlifted from Saigon, he is told to go to the United States and continue spying on South Vietnamese who have gone to live there. The narrator is an intellectual, constantly reexamining his opinions about Vietnam and the United States.
     Another great book by an Asian North American is Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien, a Chinese-Canadian. Learned in mathematics and music, she tells about the fate of Chinese musicians who loved western music during the Cultural Revolution, when western music was banned. The characters are complex and the story is compelling.

Today's Wars
     Another mathematician-turned-author, Zia Haider Rahman, wrote an intricate novel, In the Light of What We Know, which looks at his native Bangladesh as well as Britain, the United States, and Afghanistan. This is a tale of corruption, and Rahman knows of what he speaks. He has worked with international organizations, including Transparency International, which fights corruption. His conclusion seems to be that western intervention, even by human rights workers, does more harm than good.
     I also read other books about the ongoing wars in that part of the world. Kim Barker's Taliban Shuffle is a more serious book than the movie Whiskey Tango Foxtrot would indicate. It tells a great deal about Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan, which is crucial to understanding the war. Fariba Nawa, who was born in Afghanistan but raised in the United States, went back to the country of her birth and, in Opium Nation, tells how drug trafficking has changed Afghanistan as much as war and how both government and Taliban forces are involved in drug trafficking. Both these authors think that a western withdrawal might be best for Afghanistan.
     But Christina Lamb, a British reporter who spent many years in Pakistan and Afghanistan, produced an even more in-depth study of the war, Farewell Kabul. I strongly recommend reading it to see how Pakistan has manipulated the Taliban and pushed it to continue fighting even when it didn't want to. She believes that westerners should continue to be involved in trying to counter the Taliban and other radical Islamists in that area of the world.
     Socialist feminist Meredith Tax produced a more hopeful book, A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State, which is about Kurdish women. She recounts how Syria, Iraq, and especially Turkey, have long oppressed the Kurds with pogroms and suppression of their language and culture. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against them. After that, the West began to recognize their oppression, but was reluctant to anger Turkey.
     The Kurd separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan at first called himself a Marxist-Leninist and waged an extremely violent struggle, including killing subordinates who opposed him. But while imprisoned by Turkey he underwent a conversion to anarchism and to the idea that women, not the proletariat, are the leading revolutionary class. As a result of that theory, Kurdish women in the struggle joined the army, including a separate women's army, and now have more power, especially in the region of Rojava in Syria. The “Islamic State” (IS) fights them, and they fight it.
    But the PKK, Ocalan's party, is still carrying out suicide bombings, including one on December 10 outside a soccer stadium in Istanbul that killed 39 people. How admirable is that?
     Tax does not gloss over the possibility that if the Kurds' liberation struggle succeeds, women may no longer hold a high position in their society. That has happened so often after revolutions.
     Then there's the tragedy of Syria. In The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria, journalist Janine di Giovanni interviews a wide range of people living in Syria who have been brutalized by Assad's government and paramilitary forces, including women who were raped and tortured in Assad's prisons. She also spoke with people who were brutalized by jihadists opposing Assad, including IS. She found that many people feared Islamist insurgents more than Assad. Christians and other minority religious groups have strongly supported Assad because they fear suppression. She says Syria was a melting pot, like Bosnia, where people of different religions and ethnicities had lived together. And then violence and hatred drove them apart.
     Di Giovanni had started war reporting in Bosnia. She has worked in refugee camps. Somehow she has managed to often witness mass graves and people who had been tortured. She almost despairs over the difficulty of stopping, much less preventing, wars. After years of watching the United Nations and other groups try to end or mitigate the wars in Syria and other countries, she says, “ceasefire is a synonym for buying time to kill more civilians,” as both sides try to get themselves in the most advantageous position before the official start of the ceasefire. She feels that war is simply not worth the cost in human suffering. Reading her book left me with that feeling.
     I also recommend Yasmine El Rashidi's Chronicle of a Last Summer, an upper-middle-class young woman's account of the deterioration of life in Egypt since the Arab Spring; Laila Lashimi's The Moor's Account, a historical novel about an educated man from Morocco who sells himself as a slave to feed his family and winds up dragged through North America in a brutal Spanish expedition to find gold; and Izzeldin Abuelish's autobiography, I Shall Not Hate, the story of a doctor from Gaza who has worked to heal Israelis as well as Palestinians though some of his daughters were killed in their home by an Israeli bombing.

War in Europe
     In trying to understand war, I also read novels about wars in Europe. Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot Not See is a sensitive novel about a blind French girl who tries to fend for herself alone when the Nazis occupy her city. A poor German boy who never wanted to be a soldier is also a major character. It's problematic to feel sympathy for a German soldier in World War II, but this character is punished for opposing brutality as he is forced into the military system because he is brilliant at making mechanical devices.
     After a long period in which few writers dealt with the genocidal war waged by Serbs in the 1990s, more novels about the genocide are being published. Some Croatian fighters also engaged in genocide. Girl at War by Sara Novic is a powerful novel about a Croatian girl's terrifying war experiences. Irish writer Edna O'Brien's The Little Red Chairs takes a traditional Irish theme--a stranger coming to a small town--and turns it to horror because the stranger is a Serb leader guilty of genocide who pretends to be a healer. Horribly, an unhappy Irish woman falls in love with the disguised killer.
     Scottish mystery writer Val McDermid also wrote about the Bosnian War in The Skeleton Road, which focuses on how hard war crimes are to investigate because people try to block information about them. An even finer crime novel about cover-ups of the genocide is Pakistani-Canadian Ausma Zehnat Khan's The Unquiet Dead, which I mentioned last year.
     Not all horror comes in wars. John Vaillant's The Jaguar's Children tells the story of a young Mexican man's tragic attempt to cross the border to the United States because he fears for his life.

U.S. Novelists
     Colson Whitehead's intricate novel The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award, and it deserved to win. Its chronicle of a young woman's attempt to escape from slavery describes the horrors of the slave system. Whitehead also uses magical realism to make the Underground Railroad an actual railroad and to paint systems of slavery in different states that are not as they actually were but are illustrations of the manifestations that racism can take.
     I read two insightful books by Chickasaw author Linda Hogan. Power is the story of a girl growing up in a tribe in the Florida swamps that mostly escapes the attention of the white world. But a hurricane changes her life. This is a tale of the power and mystery of nature. The Woman Who Watches Over the World, Hogan's autobiography, tells of learning to survive many heartbreaks, including trying to adopt children who have been abused.
     I also read Raising Ourselves, the autobiography of Alaska Native Velma Wallis, of Gwich'in Athabascan descent. Growing up 200 miles north of Fairbanks, she learned to trap and hunt and moved to a cabin in the wilderness to escape the alcoholism and fatalism in her village and to try to help her mother escape also.
     Elizabeth Strout's novel My Name Is Lucy Barton tells the story of a white woman who comes from extreme poverty. When Lucy was a child, her family lived in a garage. It is hard for her parents to express emotion. Lucy has difficulty navigating a world where people assume that she has had experiences she never had, such as owning a television when she was growing up. In later life, when Lucy is hospitalized and her mother comes to New York City to be with her, communication is strained.
     Nathan Hill's The Nix is an intricately spun tale. It's the story of a boy abandoned by his mother. He becomes an English professor but is so disgusted by students he perceives as banal that he immerses himself in video games. Then a woman is arrested for throwing rocks at a right-wing politician. It turns out that she is his long-lost mother. And that's just the beginning. It's quite a story, but there is a strain of resentment of autonomous women. One '60s radical woman has an unbelievable affair with a policeman whom she begs to be violent with her.
     I also read three Willa Cather novels that I had never read before and like better than some that are more famous. One of Ours is the story of a young Nebraskan man whose struggle to learn reminds me of Jude the Obscure. He winds up in World War I. Song of the Lark, a rare Cather book with a female protagonist, tells about a girl whose life is focused on becoming a great singer. The Professor's House includes a segment about a young man who tries unsuccessfully to negotiate the Washington bureaucracy.

You'll Always Have Shakespeare
     For comfort, I turn to Louise Penny's sensitive but not heartbreaking mysteries, Jo Walton's excellent fantasy about a world based on an attempt to create a world like Plato's Republic (the final novel of the trilogy being Necessity), and Shakespeare.
     Hogarth Press is publishing a series of novels based on Shakespeare's plays. The latest and so far the best is Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed, which is based on The Tempest. A theater director forced out of his position by a wicked rival retreats to a remote town where his only companion is his fantasy of his daughter who died. He begins to direct plays in a prison, and builds up to staging his version of The Tempest, with actual revenge included. There's a need to suspend disbelief, but the story is great.
     I am delighted by a new book by a Shakespeare scholar, Andrew Dickon: Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe. Dickon went to Poland, Germany, the United States, India, South Africa, and China to learn how directors and actors in those countries interpret Shakespeare. For instance, the Germans have long called the poet “our Shakespeare” and claim him as really Germanic. In World War I, while England produced Henry V to inspire its soldiers, Germany produced the same play to urge on German soldiers. Dickon searched for missing Nazi era archives of the German Shakespeare Society and learned how it collaborated.
     I also learned, among many other things, that Shakespearean plays like Coriolanus and Cymbeline are far more popular in some other countries than they are in the United States. (I do not recommend Cymbeline unless one wants to see every play that Shakespeare wrote.)
     British imperialist education played a large role in spreading Shakespeare, but Shakespeare has outlasted the empire even as many excellent writers emerge everywhere. Different translations have become adaptations that vary from the original plays. Dickon sees that as a sign of Shakespeare's vitality.
     Read, read, read. If only everyone did.

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