What Scots are Reading: The Consequences of Fear, a Maisie Dobbs Novel

We ask fellow Scots to tell us about a book they've recently enjoyed. Hewes Library welcomes contributions from students, faculty, staff and alumni. If you would like to contribute a review, drop a note to: reference@monmouthcollege.edu. 

Jacqueline Winspear.  The Consequences of Fear: A Maisie Dobbs Novel. Harper, 2021.
Reviewed by James L. De Young, Professor Emeritus of Theatre and Communication Arts  

Run don’t walk to find a copy of Jacqueline Winspear’s new Maisie Dobbs adventure THE CONSEQUENCES OF FEAR.  I and many of my friends have been a fan for several years.

It is 1941 and the bombs are fast producing a reign of terror on London. A young message runner views what appears to be a brutal murder and then thinks the killer is the same man he has just delivered a dispatch to. He reports his experience to the police, but they seem less than interested. Frustrated, the troubled young man turns to a woman he has delivered messages to before. Maisie Dobbs is a private investigator, a forensic psychologist, and also an intelligence operator for Churchill's newly formed SOE (Special Operations Executive). Dobbs takes the boy’s story seriously and then quickly discovers that there are dangerous intersections with the Free French, the French Resistance, and the insertion of British spies into occupied France.    

There is, as per usual with Winspear, a seamless conjunction of London and British geography that pairs up in this book with the historical context of the Blitz and the beginnings of  World War II. Her style is spare and direct, yet manages to convey complexity without sacrificing simplicity.

Masie’s personal romantic life, the lives of her daughter and her family and friends are also given full play in the narrative. They add a sense of the personal emotions and deadly consequences that lurk just under the surface in any wartime. It is this element that takes Maise’s trials outside of and above the level of standard detective fiction. 

You can start with this adventure and be well satisfied, but picking up Maise’s life from the scullery, to WW I nurse, to detective, to secret agent adds oceans of depth to a complex female character whose growth seems to parallel the women’s movement itself. She survives the battlefield, tragic love losses, and narrow scrapes that make her as unsinkable as Molly Brown. She is a character you will comfortably live with over time and love more with each new episode. 

The Consequences of Fear is available to borrow via I-Share, as are others from the Molly Dobbs series. 

What Scots are Reading: Poetry

We ask fellow Scots to tell us about a book they've recently enjoyed. Hewes Library welcomes contributions from students, faculty, staff and alumni. If you would like to contribute a review, drop a note to: reference@monmouthcollege.edu. 

Miho Nonaka. The Museum of Small Bones. Ashland, 2020.
Kerrin McCadden. American Wake. Black Sparrow, 2021.
Reviewed by David Wright, Associate Professor of English

During the Fall 2020 semester, I was on sabbatical leave, writing and revising poems for a new poetry collection. But the central rejuvenating activity of my sabbatical was the chance to read: books on writing and reading, works of literary criticism, essay collections, memoirs, studies on teaching/pedagogy, and considerations of the current crisis in higher education. All of the writing I was able to accomplish above would’ve been impossible to imagine if I had not been able to immerse myself in these works, along with, nearly every day, a chance to read individual poems, essays, studies, and discussions via social media. See the attached photo for a visual of what it looks like when professors finally have the freedom to read work we are not necessarily preparing to teach in a classroom (and send me a note if you’d like the full bibliography!)

 

What you might notice most from this photo is how many individual collections of poetry I was able to slow down and enjoy. If you are not a regular reader of  poetry, I invite you to consider picking up a full collection by a single writer, taking the risk of a slow, patient encounter with one poet’s imagination, language, and experience, the way some of us used to listen to full albums, one side of the record and one song at a time. Simply have the experience you have of the work, not worrying about “hidden meanings” or “solving” the poem. 

Here are two recent collections, both by poets I know, that I would recommend:

Miho Nonaka’s The Museum of Small Bones is a study in paying attention to the world through and within language. A bilingual writer, her poems attend to both her Japanese heritage and language and her experience of life in the West. In the collection’s title poem, she describes both a trip to an actual Tokyo museum with a friend and gives away her hope for what poetry might do. She writes, 

God must know why our lives are

so illogical. I dreamed of a power

to make small, imperceptible things

perceptible, like the pattern of bones of a bat

in flight. The power to stave off despair. 

To make “imperceptible things /perceptible” is one of a poet’s powers in our human quest to push back against despair, and Nonaka is an expert in this art. In “The Production of Silk,” a series of some thirty prose poems, Nonaka considers her family's heritage as skilled artisans or shokunin. “Of all the ways I reassure myself,” she writes in one poem, “I am most comforted to remember that I come from a family of shokunin. I never believed that the self is a project of one’s own making, and having a specific role assigned to me is, paradoxically, a form of freedom.” We are saved from ourselves, or from despair, not by “magical encounters” or “charisma but by “small works I am equipped to do, tasks that require faithful use of my hands, shaping things for someone beyond my immediate reality.” 

Those small tasks ground the poet/shokunin both in her body and in her community, the people beyond us. Each of these poems is such an attentive act of care and creation, not merely for the writer but for readers, as the collection’s last poem ends: “It’s you, waiting to be translated.”

In American Wake, Kerrin McCadden also calls for us to pay attention--to place, to loss, to abundance--and then enacts just how hard it can be to see any one thing, person, experience, word as only itself. The poems shuttle back and forth between Ireland and Vermont, between the time before and after her brother’s death. As the book’s publisher reminds us, “an American wake is what the Irish call a farewell to those emigrating to the United States.” It is of course also what we call a mourning party for the dead when we share tales of the dead. And a wake is also what we can be caught up in when we are in the water and a ship passes by, or when life’s circumstances catch us up and set us down someplace unexpected.

What I admire most about McCadden’s poems is the sheer energy and abundance of them, as well as her endless playfulness with structures and forms. Some poems are sonnets while others are lists, or dictionary definitions, or even a choose your own adventure riff. In each case, she is pressing on all the possible meanings of any given word, as in “Passerines”, where she returns again and again to the phrase “I want to tell you” while she considers this name for a kind of bird. But of course that desire to pin down meaning is as impossible as holding a bird in one’s hand forever, or of knowing the future:

Passerine, I thought, Passerine—

                a more future verb tense for to pass, a tense I can’t

                know yet—a passing I can’t understand.

At the heart of any wake is loss, a deep reckoning with a passing too hard to understand. And McCadden’s poems about her brother’s death show all the ranges of anger, grief, celebration, incomprehension, clarity, and consequence that come from a loved one’s death by drug overdose. In “When My Brother Dies,” McCadden realizes in the first few lines: “It happened already. It has happened five times / and will happen again.” Death from addiction, the poem shows us, happens many times before it happens:

“Which death are my parents crying about /now? I wonder if it’s motorcycle death, or locked / in jail death.” And so on goes the list. And so on go the poems, including one titled “reverse overdose.”

If you read McCadden’s collection, you will also come to know that “wake” also means coming into consciousness, to awaken, and that is another gift of her poems’ relentless refusal to accept easy comfort: “This morning I bramble toward waking,” she writers in a poem that also includes these lines:

Somewhere, 

someone finds me phenomenal--I stand 

so tall and keep the future as a pet. Together we swim 

the headwaters like children who don’t know 

the rules. 

Someone, somewhere does find us phenomenal, invites us all to awaken to the layered possibilities of attending our worlds through language, swimming together until we are fully aware of what we know and what we don’t, a waking that McCadden and Nonaka both offer us in their poems if we’ll take the risk of reading them.

The Museum of Small Bones by Miho Nonaka (2020) is available to borrow via interlibrary loan and for purchase via Ashland Poetry Press.

American Wake by Kerrin McCadden (2021) is available for purchase via Godine.com.

What Scots Are Reading: The Tango War

We ask fellow Scots to tell us about a book they've recently enjoyed. If you would like to contribute a book review, drop a note to: reference@monmouthcollege.edu. 

The Tango War: the struggle for the hearts, minds and riches of Latin American during World War II 

by Mary Jo McConahay

St. Martins Press, 2018
Reviewed by Tom Prince, Lecturer, Business and Economics

The gift of a book, “Happy Birthday, Dad”, inscribed from my daughters inside the front cover of The Tango War.  A history documenting the struggle for the hearts and minds of Latin America during World War II.  Also a thrilling account of the campaigns for the wealth of natural resources all needed for the war efforts.  Rival spy networks, negotiations for captured prisoners of war, and the flow of natural resources as a key to Allied victory. Camps in Texas holding “Enemy Aliens” from Latin America and a war waged to win the support of Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, Columbia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Chile, Panama, and Cuba.  Campaigns waged outside of national attention, but crucial to the war effort. These true accounts are brought to life in a historical context that reads, as described on the inside cover, “Like a Thriller”.  And it does not disappoint. 

Part One:  The Prizes. Oil wells and production for the war effort were critical.  Petroleum for electricity, for asphalt to cover roads and to fuel automobiles, busses, and even trains.  Oil became a necessary resource as wartime fleets were converted from coal power to oil.  The thirty-three countries in Latin America became critical to production, distribution, and victory.  But other prizes were also critical.  Rubber, ports, resupply depots, and even airmen such as the Aztec Eagles from Mexico.

Part Two:  The Undesirables.  Jewish refugees turned away, German nationals who had transitioned to Latin America, Japanese families who had resettled in Latin America all considered threats to the Allied effort.  The stories of families and national interest all in conflict.  Each page offering historical insight to issues still faced today.

Part Three:  The Illusionists.  Spy masters and espionage in South America.

Part Four:  The Warriors.  The Battle for the Atlantic and Southern Seas fought from the shores of our southern neighbors.

Part Five:  The End without an End.  Prelude to the Cold War

Each part wound together with intrigue and historical lessons that keep the reader engaged as this historical account becomes very real. Truth is sometimes more thrilling then fiction.

Spoiler Alert:  Skip to the end of the book, the Allies won the war.  But what about Latin America?  Why was Walt Disney sent there?  Walt and El Grupo, the untold adventures. Down Argentine Way starring Don Ameche, Betty Grable, and Carmen Miranda and why was Carmen Miranda the highest-paid woman in the United States by the war’s end?  What influence did oil companies and Pan-American Airlines have over policy decisions? Germany had established the first airline in the Americas in 1921, in Columbia.  This was three years before Delta, the oldest operating U.S. airline. All part of the Tango War and the securing of Latin America.  

This does not read like a history lesson but rather it is a story of cultures, propaganda, and a spy thriller all combining to bring a true story to life. As I turned each page I was surprised with the events and history I was not aware of.  But, it also became personal in the most unexpected way.  Disruptive technology developed at Camp X, forty miles from Toronto, where men and women trained as spies.  Over a dozen countries were represented.  Five future directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and its predecessor, the OSS, trained there.  And it was also where set directors from Hollywood would recreate locations so operatives could train for secret missions, such as the assentation of SS General Reinhard Heydrich, who was one of the architects of the Final Solution carried out by Hitler.  It was just a mention in the book. But, Heydrich was killed outside a Czech village in 1942 by operatives who trained in England with assistance from Camp X.  Just a mention, a quick fact. The Czech village is called Lidice.  When General Heydrich’s death was reported to Hitler he ordered the village destroyed and all the men of the village killed.  The women and children were taken to camps. Most perished there. My grandmother was born in that village and she was the only one in her family to travel to the United States when she was just 18, prior to the war. She married and lived in Northern Wisconsin. She lost her entire family in Lidice.   

A book, a history lesson, and suddenly a very personal association with the events and descriptions of the Tango War.  

A book on Latin America and one well worth reading. Clear evidence of the joys of reading and discovering the unexpected. I wrote my daughters at the conclusion: “Thank you for the book, it taught me so much and I appreciated every page.  Love, Dad”

Tango War is available to borrow via I-Share.

What Scots are Reading: Sing, Unburied, Sing

We ask fellow Scots to tell us about a recent book they enjoyed and the result is this series "What Scots are Reading."  If you would like to contribute a book review, drop a note to: reference@monmouthcollege.edu.

Review of Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Anne Giffey, Public Services Librarian

I had not read Jesmyn Ward’s work prior to this novel and frankly, I chose this book because of the renown it earned - a 2017 National Book Award and a finalist for almost every other major award.

Spoiler: it lived up to its accolades and I give it five tartan stars.

A story of three generations of a Mississippi family, the themes of racism, poverty, and trauma remain a constant thread, manifesting in each generation in uniquely tragic ways. Grandfather "Pop" holds his young teenaged grandson, JoJo, captivated by recollections of his time in prison where conditions were not far removed from the horrors of slavery.  Pop's daughter and JoJo's mother, Leonie, is haunted by a lost brother and an addiction she can't shake. JoJo, a smart and sensitive boy, mediates between the generations, intent on protecting himself and his baby sister.

The supernatural elements of this novel sneak up on you; a ghost emerges from

pop's tale, and although not as destructive as in Morrison’s Beloved, its presence represents the persistent haunting of cultural trauma.

Touching moments of sibling tenderness and fierce protective love between Jojo and his young sister are some of the most visceral moments of the novel. It was a book I had to put down often, but kept returning to. 

For future reads, I definitely have Ward’s acclaimed novel, Salvage the Bones, her edited collection, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, and her memoir, Men We Reaped, in my sights. 

Sing, Unburied, Sing is available for checkout from Hewes Library: PS3623.A7323 S56 2017

What Scots are Reading: The Goldfinch

We asked a fellow Monmouth College Scot to tell us about a recent book they enjoyed. The result is what we hope will be a regular series, "What Scots are Reading."  If you would like to contribute a book review, drop us a note: reference@monmouthcollege.edu.

Review of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

By Barry McNamara, Associate Director of College Communications

 

Some of my first experiences with reviews came while watching American Bandstand. A new song would be played, and the youngster that Dick Clark interviewed for their fresh take would inevitably say something like, “It had a good beat. I could dance to it. I give it a 98.”

I’m going to try to be a little more original with my first book review for Hewes Library – on Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch – but there’s also a very similar, short and sweet, Bandstand-esque way of communicating my thoughts about it: It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. You should probably check it out.

When I sat down to start reading The Goldfinch, that’s all I knew about it and, in keeping with that limited prior knowledge, I won’t reveal much about the plot in this review. But it’s not too big of a spoiler alert to say that the title comes from the famous 1654 painting by Dutch artist Carel Fabritius.

I did know one other thing about the book, which I learned upon receiving it from the helpful staff member at Hewes Library who’d gone upstairs to retrieve it – it’s L-O-N-G. Not long as in tedious, by any means. But it’s a hefty 771 pages, and one is not likely to breeze through it in a weekend, unless one has been trapped inside by the latest round of snow and/or freezing cold to hit western Illinois.

But that length figures into the main thing I want readers to know about The Goldfinch. I made steady progress through it, and I found myself on the weekend before it was due back at Hewes with pages 699-771 to read. I read them in one sitting, and my fresh take on it is this: if Tartt wrote most of those pages in a relatively short amount of time, it has to go down as one of the great “hot streaks” by an author in modern times.

In those final 72 pages, she revealed so many deep truths and produced so many emotional goosebumps for me that I vowed to transcribe some of them before I returned the book. In the process of doing so, I stumbled across a website that boasted the 25 top quotations from The Goldfinch. Fifteen of those 25 excerpts came from those final 72 pages.

(Here’s one that didn’t make the cut – but I enjoyed it just the same – from page 724: “So – maybe when Andy washed up spitting and coughing into the country on the far side of the water, maybe my mother was the very one who knelt down by his side to greet him on the foreign shore. Maybe it’s stupid to even articulate such hopes. But then again, maybe it’s more stupid not to.”)

So, should the reader just flip ahead to page 699 and start from there? Of course not! I’m a sports guy, and doing so would be like a Chicago Cubs fan only watching the last out of Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. The entire game was an all-time classic – the highs and lows, the doubts and ecstasy.

So read the first 699 pages of The Goldfinch. Ride the highs and lows with Theo Decker.

But also read them for all the “Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you” moments in the book – the moments when Tartt seems to be speaking directly to you about some very personal aspect of your life. The parts where, as it says in the book, “It’ll never strike anybody in the same way.”

And then savor pages 699-771. Those pages are like the finale to a fireworks show on the Fourth of July – what leads up to them are a steady barrage of singular colorful explosions in the sky, some of them lingering in your mind long after you’ve seen them (like the weeping willow tree one always does for me). And then the rapid-fire flurry at the ending – almost more colors and light and sound than you can process at one time. Sensory overload.

That’s what the ending of the book was like for me, and I hope it strikes you that way, too. Overall, I’ll give The Goldfinch two points more than a 98 and, of course, five tartan stars.

The Goldfinch is available for checkout from Hewes Library: PS3570.A657 G65 2013