Fall reading

Happy Halloween, everybody.  For some reason we stopped posting the book blurbs almost as soon as we started it over the summer.  Let's correct that now.

The Missing Season by Gillian French (2019)

Actually, this YA novel is the reason I'm posting these on Halloween in the first place. Clara's family moves from town to town as her father chases the next demolition job. The latest move is to the fictional town of Pender, Maine where the paper mill that had been the economic heart of the town has closed. For Clara it means adjusting to a new school and new friends again. But it also means a possible encounter with the town's urban legend.  Every year around Halloween, at least one young person seems to turn up dead in the woods around Pender.  Officially the deaths are violent accidents or drug overdoses. But others say a mysterious figure known as "The Mumbler" is to blame.   Clara's family has arrived at Pender in mid-October. Could she become the next victim?

This is a terrific novel for young adults. French's treatment of teenagers, their problems and relationships is realistic and thoughtful. It's also the best kind of horror writing in that it relies on the characters' real life sense of dread rather than shocking imagery or situations.  The fading town and diminishing prospects for its children is a major component in that as well.  I would have liked the ending to have resonated with those themes a bit better.  This one seemed abrupt and just a little out of synch.  Otherwise, a good little Halloween story.

White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War by John Gans (2019)

This keeps the Halloween theme a little bit in a banality of evil sort of way. This dry and anodyne account surveys the evolving role of the National Security Council in generating and executing US foreign policy. Gans focuses on individual staff members serving under each President since the NSC's inception to describe major events (the bombing of Cambodia, the Lebanon intervention, Iran/Contra, the Iraq troop surge, etc) through the eyes of these somewhat behind the scenes actors. The NSC is either an unaccountable "common law" deep state or a flawed but necessary crutch that serves Presidents who would otherwise be overwhelmed by the bureaucracies at DOD and State. Is any of this a good thing or a bad thing? Gans says it's a little bit of both, although the suggestion is it's gotten to be more of the former over time. Either way we're left trying to decide if the sprawling American empire is more chaotic than it is legalistic. All of which causes us to wonder what difference that really makes.

Chaucer's People : Every day lives in Medieval England by Liza Picard (2019)

Picard uses Chaucer's archetypal characters as entry points to brief essays about the lives of the real sorts of people they represented. For example, the Wife of Bath describes what it was like for wealthy travelers of the Middle Ages to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land. (They had to buy Rick Steves videos on VHS back then.) The Ploughman chapter talks about how labor conditions in the wake of the Plague led to official wage suppression, a more rigidly controlled economy and a peasant's revolt.  The Cook's chapter has lots of odd recipes.  The Physician chapter describes the horrifying state of medieval medicine... which I guess is a good place for us to land on our Halloween theme again.  Anyway, you get the idea.

Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity edited by Thomas Jessen Adams,  and  Matt Sakakeeny (2019)

Actually I want to write more about this later.  It's difficult to sum up in a paragraph without simplifying. It's a collection of essays intended to dispel certain myths about the history and culture of New Orleans that have been commodified by the tourism industry while elevating ignored facets of our story that emphasize the city's working class and what has been done to it in various ways over the centuries. Again, that is an extreme simplification but it's what I would say is the gist of this very eclectic assemblage of topics by various authors. It's one of the most original and important books about New Orleans I've read in a while. At the same time I've noticed a few negative reactions from certain corners that have me confused. The common criticism I've noticed, that the book is for and by "gentrifiers," seems to me 180 degrees contrary to the book's actual purpose. It's so surprising, in fact, that I've wondered if it is even offered in good faith (or if some of these critics have actually read the book.)  But, like I said, this is all a subject for a longer thing I want to write.  For now, just know that this exists and that more people should give it a look.