Anna Faktorovich
Speculative Fiction
A Bloodsucker Book without Blood Sucking
Fred Van Lente, Bloodshot (New York: Black Stone Publishing, 2025). EBook. 256pp. ISBN: 979-8-212708-30-2.
*
“An all-new origin story and a heart-pounding adventure featuring the popular comic book character from Valiant Entertainment. He wakes up in the middle of the woods with chalk-white skin, the ability to heal from any injury, and no memory of who or what he is. He is Bloodshot, and now he’s caught between the shadowy defense contractor that wants to capture him, and the underground network of dangerous psychics that want to destroy him. Now, Kalea, the young woman who found him, has a target on her back just for trying to help. To save himself and his friends, Bloodshot must stay alive long enough to unravel the mystery of his own identity—and deal with the real possibility that his own family are the ones who most want him dead.” This is a relatively good pitch for a fantasy book. The premise is original, as it overlays the fantasy of vampirism over realistic struggles with people one might encounter while trying to survive in the modern world. There is also a psychological tension and curiosity inserted with the savior-woman-complex in this main plot: though it is a bummer that the woman’s power of saving is taken away by the leading-man then mostly saving himself and her. And it is pretty over-done to have a hero who does not know who he is: this allows the author to not need to give a background, or to color a character’s actions by his unique identity, instead having a blank sheet onto which any type of actions, or dialogue can be tossed without contradicting the anti-heroes stated biography.
The cover of this book is a unique painting. I have seen a few titles of films and books being written with blood-like elements, but this one looks more realistically like blood-stains. The figure is posterized, and is grammatically digitally drawn. I recently obtained my first drawing tablet, and I am tempted to attempt a similar design to understand how it is achieved. The cover is apparently mostly what sells books today, based on data on NetGalley I reviewed recently. Though the cover began to disturb and annoy me as I kept looking at it in my ebook library. There’s just a bit too much blood, and horror in it.
There is a long list of graphic and comic novels by Lente in the front-pages: apparently, he is a best-selling author. He founded a comic publishing business with which he self-published some of his books.
While the blurb, and my previous enjoyment of Anne-Rice-novels convinced me to request this title, the first page proves this is not for me. There is no gripping opening incident. The dialogue is full of generalities, such as “are you okay” and cliches like “Don’t call me a dummy, dummy”. And we are told that it was not only a girl that found this Bloodshot, but also her brother, breaking the gender-based angle that interested me.
There is a brief mention of the first-person narrator (who has just been found) being ghostly white: this is the only fantastical thing so far. On the second page, we learn he also has red eyes: explaining the cover.
A search for the word “bite” leads to the traditional vampiric ponderings about the “pang of hunger” after the narrator has been hit with the weapon of “nanosword” that hurts, and is making him “bite both halves of my tongue to keep from crying out”. There are basically no biting scenes that I could easily find. This indicates that the realism in this book includes not having the vampire do what formulaic vampires usually do: bite people to drink their blood. Searching for “suck” also doesn’t turn up much but mosquitoes sucking blood. In one scene, for some reason, the narrator starts eating animal-feed… I thought he might have been drinking the animals’ blood that are feeding on it: no, just the animal-feed. He is eating eggs and juice later. This could have been a radical take on people who believe they are vampires as a delusion, but the text around these references is very dull, and unreadable.
I do not recommend reading this book. The ultra-horrific cover does not represent the dull, casual, chatty attitude in what the text of the book relates.
A Witch Digresses About All the Evil Men She Killed
Ava Morgyn, The Bane Witch: A Novel (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, March 18, 2025). Softcover: $19. 384pp. ISBN: 978-1-250835-45-1.
**
“Piers Corbin has always had an affinity for poisonous things—plants and men. From the pokeweed berries she consumed at age five that led to the accidental death of a stranger, to the husband whose dark proclivities have become… concerning, poison has been at the heart of her story. But when she fakes her own death in an attempt to escape her volatile marriage and goes to stay with her estranged great aunt in the mountains, she realizes her predilection is more than a hunger—it’s a birthright. Piers comes from a long line of poison eaters—Bane Witches—women who ingest deadly plants and use their magic to rid the world of evil men. Piers sets out to earn her place in her family’s gritty but distinguished legacy, all while working at her Aunt Myrtle’s cafe and perpetuating a flirtation with the local, well-meaning sheriff to allay his suspicions on the body count she’s been leaving in her wake. But soon she catches the attention of someone else, a serial killer operating in the area. And that only means one thing—it’s time to feed.” Another unique premise. There are many books and shows about witches that show them murdering evil or monstrous men, but usually it is done with swords or other violent weapons that put the witch in danger of death (even if she instigates an attack). In this case, the witch secretly poisons men to death who she judges to be evil, acting as the unappointed judge over them. There is hardly anything more “evil” than poisoning people one perceives as “evil”; so this revenge for the sake of humanity plotline is one that I think is overdone give its moral irrationality.
This is another case where the cover interested me in this novel because of my current explorations in digital art. This artist uses a curious combination of realism and cartoonish simplicity that also makes a curious case in need of imitation. The hallucinogenic mushrooms at the bottom of the cover are especially well-done, with great lighting, and detail. The dripping blood of a top flower leads the eye to the title. Just a masterly design.
The first chapter opens with a poetic rhythm. Modern literary fiction frequently uses this trick: rhythm is used to make the words seem more highbrow and intense. Rhythm is achieved through repetition, such as starting two sentences with the same phrase: “A well-designed…” Another element is using vague descriptions that confuse the reader, before offering explanations that seem to reveal something mystical. A character is crossing the Cooper River, noting, “It dazzles, this bridge, like something from a spaceship…” The “it” is clarified to be a “bridge” in rhythmically matching two-syllable phrases. There are also many similes, and relatively detailed descriptions of juice seeping into the “white crescents of my nails.” There is a fuzzy line between the attempt to be highbrow succeeds in achieving well-written prose. So, these are good elements.
Another trick this opening semi-succeeds with is introducing a dramatic incident that was mentioned in the blurb: the narrator as a child of five eats poisoned black berries. The description focuses on her own hallucinogenic trip, but ends with the note: “leaving the dead man behind.” There was no clear explanation or mention of who this guy could have been or why he would die from the kid eating berries. But this is the mystery that readers are invited to be curious about as they start reading this novel. Ah, the next paragraph explains that this guy had given her the berries: this clarifies things a bit. If there was no further mention of this dead guy until the middle of the book, when this mystery was “solved”, it would not have been good.
After describing the painful parts of the poisoning, she mentions eating these berries again willingly at nine. Instead of explaining why she became suicidal at nine. The narrator then moves on to how her husband believes she is a drama-queen: “He always found my reactions exaggerated, even comical.” These hops between times, places, events, and traumas are too difficult to stay interested in. I must leave this book here. Stream-of-consciousness books are rather common today. It must be freeing for a writer to just write about this-and-that, as thoughts appear, and you just write them down, with a bit of poeticizing to make it all sound artsy. But for the reader, a writer’s lack of self-control, or careful pre-plotting means they probably cannot sink into the story: it is like an abandoned house with a half-fallen ceiling: you don’t want to go in there even if there is a witch beckoning you in with hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Mythological Women on Top Still Damn the World
Maren Uthaug; Caroline Waight, tr., Eleven Percent: A Novel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2025). Hardcover: $25.06; Dystopian Fiction. 304pp. ISBN: 978-1-250329-64-6.
***
“An inverse The Handmaid’s Tale that asks: What if women took over the world? It is the New Time, a time not so different from our own except that the men are gone. All but eleven percent of them, that is, the minimum required to avoid inbreeding. But they are safely under lock and key in ‘spa’ centers for women’s pleasure (trained by amazons to fulfill all desires) and procreation. A few women protest that the males should be treated better—more space, better food, but all agree that testosterone cannot be allowed to roam free. The old patriarchal cities are crumbling, becoming overgrown; people now live in “round communities.” But if you prefer the slum, that’s okay too. Religion has survived, sort of: women priestesses speak in tongues, inspired by snake venom, as apples are passed around to the congregation. But all social engineering has its costs… Four different lives intersect: Medea, a tiny, long-haired witch and snake whisperer; Wicca, a young priestess who excelled at the ‘self-pleasuring’ curriculum in school and has lost her pregnant lover; Eva, a doctor working in a spa center, and Silence, who lives in an almost abandoned convent. Each will discover the cracks in this women’s paradise. The first novel to appear in English by celebrated Danish author Maren Uthaug.”
The concluding section keeps readers’ interest by introducing a curing syringe of blood to Medea to cure her of drowsiness, or a potentially deadly illness. Though there are grotesque notes of using a dog’s semen and repeat dog-mating references: these are a bit amusing because they are unique, but also repelling. It is also curious and grotesque that she makes an amulet out of a cobra’s tongue before eating the snake.
The opening scene describes a fictional version of Lilith’s conflict with Adam where she refuses to be inferior to him, and so God creates Eve out of Adam’s rib, so she would “obey” him. Lilith was punished for her ambition of equality by being “persecuted, loathed, and mocked”. And the premise of this story is that the balance of power now suddenly tipped towards the “Liliths of the world” who could now “decide who would be on top.” I previously wrote a version of the Lilith story, so I sympathize with using this mythology as inspiration.
Though the intro promises too much, as it suggests it is going to show womankind getting on top of men, and becoming more powerful. But then the content that follows mostly shows Medea’s obsession with her looks, and her attempts to live forever by using blood-magic. How exactly is this empowering? The first mention of “women” appears in derisive comments against “manladies” that Medea fails to understand, as they “weren’t real men, only women with silicone fakes.” Meanwhile Medea is followed by “ratgirls”: this might be something supernatural, or just an insult against ratty girls. The main feminist thing about Medea seems to be that she keeps using the blood of boys, possibly killing them. I guess a murderous woman is on top, but this is hardly radical. I guess the “boys” are still around, and only grown “men” are missing. There is no explanation in the first pages of the novel that men are missing or why they are missing. Some pages later there is a note that “men” had been “wrecking everything” and “nature” had redressed “the balance”. There is almost no action at all, as Medea just keeps worrying about some boy, some dogs, her beauty, looking pretty or not, waking, sleeping. And the lack of men has not really fixed much, as there are “rats” in “huge numbers” running around, “Only females.” What about the “boy” rats? This is all very absurdly confusing, and nonsensical.
There is nothing here that attracts interest to keep reading, and Lilith is my favorite mythological character. There might be interesting things here and there for readers seeking amusement.
Formulaic Vampire Romance
Jamie D’Amato, The Good Vampire’s Guide to Blood and Boyfriends: A Novel (New York: Wednesday Books, August 26, 2025). Hardcover: $20; Young Adult Fantasy. 336pp. ISBN: 979-8-212708-30-2.
**
“…Queer paranormal rom-com where a college sophomore must navigate suddenly becoming a vampire, the underground society he’s now part of, and the cute boy who discovers his secret.” The “discovery” tends to be a requirement element in fantasies: it is too forced here, as this “boy” just walks in on Brennan doing research on the floor of the college’s library, and happens to guess he is probably a vampire on the first page, before a more obvious revelation later when Cole also sees Brennan drinking blood. “It’s only natural nineteen-year-old Brennan’s life would be upended by something as ridiculous and unexpected as turning into a vampire. But if there’s one thing Brennan can do, it’s pretend everything’s fine when he’s close to losing his mind. Brennan has just clawed his way back to Sturbridge University after recovering from a suicide attempt, and this is not the new life he was hoping for. Brennan’s newly bloodthirsty existence gets way more complicated when Cole, the super cute librarian and everyone’s campus crush, stumbles on Brennan drinking from a stolen blood bag. Luckily, adorable Cole is happy to keep Brennan’s secret, and even seems to maybe like him? Navigating a new relationship is hard enough without the added struggles of vampire puberty, an eclectic clan of self-proclaimed ‘good’ vampires, and growing feelings for the one person who makes Brennan feel normal. With swirling rumors of a missing student and a rise in strange ‘animal attacks’ near campus, Brennan must uncover the secrets of the clan and figure out how to balance vampirism and humanity, or risk losing the first real friends he’s ever had… A gentle bite.”
This novel opens with a relatively humorous exploration of who this amnesiac patient is, as he is ruffling through a pile of books trying to figure out the nature of vampires, and himself. He notes that he is testing if vampires need sleep or a shower by refraining from either: a pretty funny intro. Brennan begins the narrative by asking questions about his vampiric nature that he is trying to discover through library research. These questions lead readers directly into speculating about potential answers. They include: “Who turned me?” If he should drink “animal” or “human” blood? If he, as a vampire sleeps, or is immortal. The point regarding “sleep” is immediately addressed, as Brennan notes he has been avoiding sleep to test if he can go without it, and seemingly he is. Before Brennan progresses any further, he is distracted by the entry of a beautiful boy, who redirects him towards the “boyfriends” theme in this story. The light attempt for this amnesiac to address some questions about just what magic is, and what its rules are is thus interrupted by formulaic romance. The rest of the plot can then progress without research, or philosophy, as general love struggles replace such ponderings.
The conclusion at least indicates that Brennan regained his memory and now recalls who he is. Apparently, the surprise of the plot is that he might have killed his sister, or the like. References are too unclear. The main tension left is that Brennan now knows he will live forever, and he wonders what it would be like for Cole and him to try a relationship that will either end when Brennan dumps Cole, or when Cole dies as a human from old age, while Brennan remains immortal. The tension between long-living vampires, and short-living humans in relationship is a common trope that seems to appear in most formulaic vampire stories. The first few times I saw it, it did give me room to fantasize, as I added content missing from such stories. But this is one time too many: the author is taking an easy way out in this resolution by using this age-tension, instead of saying something more meaningful regarding vampirism beyond: “Forever is a long time.”
The homosexual-passion theme is a bit dully handled here. Brennan is struggling, as usual, between viewing Cole as food, or a sex-object as he smells him when near-by.
The use of the suicide theme is also poorly handled, as it seems to be inserted to solicit sympathy for the central vampire. But he does not really explain just what prompted him to want to kill himself, as he notes he has not “processed his own feelings about” it, and so seemingly does not know why he did it, or how he feels about this attempt. He is “good”: is his one conclusion. Though psychology is at fault for leaving no clear explanation regarding why those who are suicidal need to share “how” they “feel” about their attempts. This really shouldn’t be the question that needs to be answered, but rather what drove them to wanting to die. The answer is probably not a feeling, but rather specific tragic events, or circumstances that made life unbearable. Just inserting these references without exploring the “feelings” is deeply depressing because of the lack of effort invested in researching a most consequential topic.
A Winding Imperial Magical Fantasy
Kate Elliott, The Witch Roads (New York: Tor Publishing Group, June 10, 2025). Hardcover: $29.99; Fantasy. 448pp. ISBN: 978-1-250338-61-7.
***
“Book 1 in the Witch Roads duology, the latest epic novel. Status is hereditary, class is bestowed, trust must be earned. When an arrogant prince (and his equally arrogant entourage) gets stuck in Orledder Halt as part of brutal political intrigue, competent and sunny deputy courier Elen—once a child slave meant to shield noblemen from the poisonous Pall—is assigned to guide him through the hills to reach his destination. When she warns him not to enter the haunted Spires, the prince doesn’t heed her advice, and the man who emerges from the towers isn’t the same man who entered. The journey that follows is fraught with danger. Can a group taught to ignore and despise the lower classes survive with a mere deputy courier as their guide?”
This is the best speculative opening out of this set of reviews (so far). Chapter 1 “On Ordinary Lanes and Behind Unprotected Walls” offers some backstory about the rules and regulations of magic in this Tranquil Empire. It explains that witches were burned and sealed into roads and have since began causing trouble from the afterlife. The section ends with a humorous note that it was “censored” by the Empire. Reading this would help readers orient in this story to gain some interest in the rest of the narrative. An absolute lack of exposition at the start, and jumping right into the action tends to be poorly done, as readers do not know who to cheer for in a battle between two unknown characters, in a world that seems to be indistinguishable from our primary world.
The conclusion also includes at least some details about what happened to this secondary world during the narrative. Though many of the details are given as potential things that might be believed, instead of facts of what is. A line Is described as seeming to be “the end of the empire, the end of the inhabitable world”, when it is not really this. The rest of this conclusion is an overly stretched discussion between a mother and a son, who are telling each other cliché phrases such as the concluding note: “we’re together. For now, that is enough.” Too many novels end with such empty, re-fabricated platitudes.
While the blurb proposes to be a philosophically political, the interior’s first mention of “status” merely states that a protagonist is handed a single pair of boots that “would follow throughout” his life, while he is mostly concerned about wearing them because he has a “blister”. Since I have been wearing the same pair of sneakers for several years, this is less of a secondary-world shocking idea than the wealthy author might believe. A second mention of status appears in a section about “princes” competing for it in the “palace hierarchy”. The rest of the paragraph does not explore this further, but rather digresses into discussing “shadow wardens” and spies. The next mention notes that a “badge” marks a prince’s status, as does his jacket and other fineries. Basically, only surface matters regarding politics are explored, and not as-promised the economic or political nature of class-difference, or class-conflict.
This is a pretty good novel, with some curious, or fantastic details. But there is too much empty description, and dialogue. For example, a 10-line paragraph lives various titles of a single character: “His Highness Gevulin, Prince-Warden of the Imperial Order of Wardens…” This is a bit funny, but there are too many confusing digressions across the text. Readers who have the time to slowly read through a fantasy can attempt it.
Ambitious Siren Plot Fails to Be Realized
Kalie Cassidy, In the Veins of the Drowning (New York: Little, Brown and Company, July 1, 2025). Paperback: $19.99; Romantasy. 384pp, 5.5X8.25”. ISBN: 979-0-316587-60-0.
**
“…Romantasy about a threatened Siren who forges a bond with a brooding, self-righteous king in order to flee the king who raised her… The monster is always slain… Imogen Nel is in hiding. Hiding from a cruel kingdom that believes Sirens are monstrous, blood-hungry creatures. Hiding from a king and his captain who viciously hunt her kind. Hiding from her own alluring abilities. By keeping herself from the sea, Imogen’s bloodlust is dulled, and her black wings remain concealed beneath her skin. When a neighboring king comes to visit, Imogen can no longer hide. He knows precisely what she is, and he believes she can save their kingdoms from an even greater monster. But Imogen’s power threatens to violently reveal itself, and the two form a blood bond that protects them both. They flee together, traversing waters teeming with the undead. As the lines between duty to their people and desire for each other begin to blur, Imogen worries her ancestral powers may not be enough to kill what hunts her—the only way to defeat a monster may be to become one herself.” This premise is dramatic and invites readers. There was a way to execute this story to make it interesting, and multi-layered, but the author has not succeeded in delivering on this ambitious promise.
This title has another great cover-design that I am rather jealous of. The central image is of a falling angel. The figure seems to be based on a photo or a statue, but parts of it are single-color or line-only in black or gray. This combination of line-sketching and dimmed photo-art is curious, and original. The drawing of splashing water at the top of the water-body this figure is penetrating is also both realistic, and artistically elegant. And the gold doodles around the edges with leaves and snakes are a good mix of sketchy and simple. I am still working on learning how to bring drawn elements to cover some letters in the text: this is probably done by mixing layers in a program and erasing parts of one of the layers in the over-lapping sections. Sections are also introduced with gray drawings of figures, feathers, and the like: this is an appealing way to start sections to draw readers’ interest.
The opening section is a free-verse poem that describes a powerful woman waiting in the water: it concludes by saying this woman is more of a symbol for “want” as opposed to simply a drowned woman.
The first chapter in the first part begins with a mystical reference to a magical scent of the sea being felt like a “tentacle”. But then the story digresses into mundane chatter about an unsuitable dress between a girl and her previous “teenage governess”.
The book ends with the protagonist pushing herself to stand up and heal her own wounds to jump back into the water for it to carry her towards her goal to kill an enemy, find one friend, and save another friend. This is a formulaic counter-resolution, as the character comes very close to death in the preceding climax, and still struggles forward. The determination at the end is either a suicide, or a death, or an invitation for readers to proceed to the next book in the series. And it is rather cheap to use the threat of death to encourage a publisher, or readers to feel sympathy for this character to revive her by paying for the next part of a series.
The first mention of this story being about a “siren” is made a fourth into this book, when an emotional response (swooning) is portrayed in young ladies as this revelation is made: “The large feathers were stretched wide; bolts through the bone held it to its wooden plague…” The description continues: this is apparently a siren’s wing that has been strung onto the wall with a plaque under it. Since this book describes “real” sirens: this is like having a human mummified severed hand hanging on a wall: very grotesque. Apparently, this is strung up in the quarters of somebody who has been “hunting divine Sirens.” It seems nonsensical that anything “divine” can be “hunted” and hung up for sport, but the author seems to be borrowing from human-hunting habits, and mixing these notions with mystical ideas about mythology. Similar mistakes and confusion appear in most fantasy novels.
This book has flashes where it seems to have been polished by a competent editor, who added some details. But most of it is very hollow and unreadable.
Good Humorous Hard Science Fiction About Trip to Mars
Mason Coile, Exiles: A Novel (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, September 16, 2025). Hardcover: $28. 224pp, 5-3/16X7-5/8”; Science Fiction. ISBN: 978-0-593851-63-0.
****
“A… locked-room mystery…this time set on a remote outpost on Mars. The human crew sent to prepare the first colony on Mars arrives to find the new base half-destroyed and the three robots sent to set it up in disarray—the machines have formed alliances, chosen their own names, and picked up some disturbing beliefs. Each must be interrogated. But one of them is missing. In this barren, hostile landscape where even machines have nightmares, the astronauts will need to examine all the stories–especially their own–to get to the truth… A terrifying, taut, one-sitting read, and Mason Coile once again blends science fiction and psychological horror to engage some of humanity’s deepest questions.”
The cover of this novel is well-executed, with a red glow that focuses on a dark astronaut in the center. Such simple designs are popular now, and I think with good reason. Readers want a cover that is pleasing, but not too crowded. The attention should be on what is inside a novel, as opposed to leading the gaze to stare at elaborate details on the cover: though I do enjoy the latter activity.
The first section starts rather painfully with a poem about non-stopping “beeping”. Such disturbing loud noises are annoying in films, and are apparently also annoying in novels. The point seems to be to jar or horrify readers with a piercing or disturbing noise. People probably prefer reading horror because they enjoy being frightened. But I tend to like horror for the science, or the fantastic dystopias it presents, so the horrifying, or terror-triggering parts repel me. This poem ends with a note that the “beeping” awakens from “the longest sleep”. I guess sleepy readers might need to be awakened to start focusing on the story.
The next section is a casual chat about turning of the beeping, with some foreshadowing of “reciting from the Bible of Terrifying Worst-Cast Scenarios”, as the astronauts seem to be preparing to land on Mars, and are worrying they have not been told in training what to be worried about. The section does not really communicate anything useful aside for building anticipation for what these worst-possible things are that can happen during space-travel.
The next section does introduce some specifics: “A bathroom the size of a mini-fridge”. And also public-masturbation in a “coffin” because “there’s zero privacy”. It is unclear why the pods don’t have covers for some privacy though…
Then, there’s a claim that the crew was chosen from thousands because of superior skills, but really because they were likely to “get along”. The character is already trying to avoid thinking about murdering others on this journey, so he is clearly not the get-along type.
The promised robots appear in chapter 4, with a note they have lost contact with them. And the blurb delivers when robots are said to have left a “transport buggy” in the wrong place, without assembling it into a part of the compound. There is a lot of cursing, and empty chatter. When the first robot speaks, it seems to be very polite. It helps them in the door and to get their helmets off. In chapter 8, they learn they “lost the enclosed greenhouse”.
The conclusion dampens some of these positive elements, as it shows the protagonist’s mind altered by an alien who is eating him, while making him believe he is being embraced by his mother. This is at least better than a simple prolonged friendly scene between an actual mother and son. But this is an unpleasant digression into nonsense from the curious realistic details about playful robots, and the business of space-travel.
Most of this story is not really horrifying, as the narrator leans towards dark humor, and silly sayings. The humor does help readers to move forward in this reading without the obstacles that appear in most of these other novels. I think a reader could get through most of this book, and have a pretty pleasant time being amused, and also learn a bit about the realities of space travel. This is thus a pretty good choice for somebody looking for hard science fiction.
Horrid Bit of Unexplained Magic
Juno Dawson, Her Majesty’s Royal Coven: Book 1 of the HMRC Trilogy (New York: Penguin Books, May 31, 2022). Paperback: $17. 448pp, 5.5X8.25”. ISBN: 978-0-143137-14-6.
**
“…Epic fantasy about a group of childhood friends who are also witches. If you look hard enough at old photographs, we’re there in the background: healers in the trenches; Suffragettes; Bletchley Park oracles; land girls and resistance fighters. Why is it we help in times of crisis? We have a gift. We are stronger than Mundanes, plain and simple. At the dawn of their adolescence, on the eve of the summer solstice, four young girls–Helena, Leonie, Niamh and Elle–took the oath to join Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, established by Queen Elizabeth I as a covert government department. Now, decades later, the witch community is still reeling from a civil war and Helena is the reigning High Priestess of the organization. Yet Helena is the only one of her friend group still enmeshed in the stale bureaucracy of HMRC. Elle is trying to pretend she’s a normal housewife, and Niamh has become a country vet, using her powers to heal sick animals. In what Helena perceives as the deepest betrayal, Leonie has defected to start her own more inclusive and intersectional coven, Diaspora. And now Helena has a bigger problem. A young warlock of extraordinary capabilities has been captured by authorities and seems to threaten the very existence of HMRC. With conflicting beliefs over the best course of action, the four friends must decide where their loyalties lie: with preserving tradition, or doing what is right. Juno Dawson explores gender and the corrupting nature of power in a delightful and provocative story of magic and matriarchy, friendship and feminism. Dealing with all the aspects of contemporary womanhood, as well as being phenomenally powerful witches, Niamh, Helena, Leonie and Elle may have grown apart but they will always be bound by the sisterhood of the coven.”
Formulaic novels tend to use characters’ life-choices to build the drama that propels the plotline. The jobs of the four central witches serve this purpose. One of them becomes the High Priestess of HMRC, and so she is in conflict with her friend, who starts her own coven, and also with another friend, who has opted to focus on her family life, and the friend who chose an unambitious veterinary profession. Each of the characters is designed as an archetype of “womanhood” that adjusts the Tripple-Goddess, Maiden, Mother, and Crone, archetypes of a woman’s nature in Wicca. By selecting a statistically wide range of common choices for women (ambitious or unambitious career, motherhood, rebelliousness) the author has maximized the odds of high sales to these different markets. However, the quality of the content has been neglected, as descriptions are lacking, and tension relies too heavily on repeating these character-defining elements.
There is a lot of cursing sprinkled in seemingly to intensify a relative lack of direct action even in the important opening and closing scenes.
The standard approach in pop-fantasy is to just describe common “magical” activities without scientific or mythical build-up to give them intensity. Writers tend to just have characters make magic with their minds, without explaining how it is done, as the narrative instead focuses on psychological tensions between characters. In this novel: “Niamh’s mind seized the house and, viper-like, it struck out. She wrapped it around Ciara’s neck and, at the same instant, dragged her off the end of the diving board. Down she fell.” This is a response to a failure to “let” this witch “be”, and instead staging a non-intervention. Prior to this “Niamh jumped through the gap, levitating all the way down”. A healing attempt is done by merely placing “her hands on Helena’s forehead” (178). There is no attempt to even describe the sensation of a healing energy traveling between the hand and the forehead, or a mention of how a character felt as she floated into the air. The fantasy of achieving such magic is typically in ravishing these empowering moments, and yet they are skipped for the sake of mostly inserting dialogue full of curses and otherwise hateful-talk that still fails to clearly explain why these characters are battling to-the-death.
The cover designs for the 3 books in this trilogy are well-executed and explain its strong sales. The artist responsible is Holly Macdonald, whose website lists several other great designs, which tend to include single-color drawings that weave into elaborate lettering. Her strategy is to draw things such as birds, houses, a tiger, and the like with simplified shapes, add repeating elements in simple-line-drawings-filled-in (lines, snowflakes) and build stencil-like prints for repeating backgrounds (flowers and leaves, mosaics, lines of hair). I am especially riveted by these designs as a writer just sponsored my purchase of a drawing-tablet, and I am attempting to experiment with more complex cover drawings. Making simple drawings tends to be more difficult technically to do while making the whole look appealing. For example, one of Macdonald’s past covers, for Games for Dead Girls, has a stitch running through the center of the cover: she probably had to print out this cover and physically stitch through leather over it, as I am unsure if it would be possible to do original stitching like this in a painting program.
The Anti-Narrative Continues with Detail-lacking Government References
Juno Dawson, The Shadow Cabinet: A Novel: Book 2 of the HMRC Trilogy (New York: Penguin Books, June 20, 2023). EBook: $11.99. Paperback: $17. 528pp. ISBN: 979-0-593511-14-5.
**
This is the second book from the HMRC Trilogy: “a group of childhood friends and witches must choose between what is right and what is easy if they have any hope of keeping their coven—and their world—from tearing apart forever.” These platitudes are absurdly abstract, and can apply to any book in any genre. There are almost 200 appearances of the word “right” across this volume, but most are as vague as they are predicted to be in this summary. For example, after a character is reported to be “with child”, Miranda says, “Something isn’t right.” She is worried her twins are in danger, but her friends are saying these worries mean she is “mad”. Biddy insists that as the mother Miranda’s intuition is lightly to be right. In this context, “right” is used as a synonym for positive, or non-deadly, so almost anything can be “right”: this is why this term is too vague to clarify just what the broad story is about. In another place “right” is used to note that “mourners” wearing “black… didn’t feel right” because the characters used to play happily in the place where they are now mourning. This is just absurd, as mourning a death should not be done in bright outfits just because a character was once happy as a child.
The blurb continues: “Niamh Kelly is dead. Her troubled twin, Ciara, now masquerades as the benevolent witch as HMRC prepares to crown her High Priestess. Suffering from amnesia, Ciara can’t remember what she’s done—but if she wants to survive, she must fool Niamh’s adopted family and friends; the coven; and the murky Shadow Cabinet—a secret group of mundane civil servants who are already suspicious of witches.”
It is a common mistake of formulaic fantasy to use amnesia or other reasons for a lack of knowledge to explain why magical rules, or character details are not offered not only at the beginning of a novel, but frequently not even at the end. Ciara still has amnesia near the end of the narrative, as she has taken over as the High Priestess of the HMRC coven. Ciara is even unable to “speak” despite continuing to say empty phrases, such as: “Nothing. I don’t remember anything.” Though as she says the latter, she is conscious that the man she is speaking with is threatening to hurt her, if she confesses that she remembers something negative about her. Before this point, Ciara keeps trying to “learn the why of all this. Why she was resurrected, why Niamh and Irina had to perish, why, why, why?” The lack of these simple answers is used to drive anticipation in readers to figure out what is going on. The amnesia or lack of knowledge is the driver of the mystery and the plot. Returning to the fact of a lack-of-knowledge becomes repetitive the more it is used through the narrative, instead of offering some new or exciting events, or dialogue that would have been more difficult for a writer to develop.
“While she tries to rebuild her past, she realizes none of her past has forgotten her, including her former lover, renegade warlock Dabney Hale. On the other end of the continent, Leonie Jackman is in search of Hale, rumored to be seeking a dark object of ultimate power somehow connected to the upper echelons of the British government.” Hinting at malevolent involvement of the government probably attracted some readers, but the body of the text offers almost no specifics about this. For example, a letter from an Assistant to the High Priestess mentions: “We’ve also had a formal summons from our government liaison in the Shadow Cabinet” in connection with an upcoming coronation, but no details are given as to why the government has any connection with witchcraft. In the middle of the novel, there is an explanation that this Cabinet contains “mundanes” who are “briefed on the existence of witches”, after an 1869 treaty that required this information-sharing. The “truths” revealed apparently include those “about Diana, Lord Lucan, UFOs, BPV—oh, the so-called ‘vampire virus’…” This is pretty curious, but none of these things are mentioned again. There is a note about a “vampire book” elsewhere, but no repeat of just what this vampire-virus was about. This means the author did not have to elaborate on just what witches could have had to do with the “Loch Ness experiment”. Obviously, it would have been very difficult to explain why witches were needed to place a giant strange fish in a lake and then breed it magically, or some other deep nonsense. Thus, this rare reference to specifics is non-informative, or offers details that suggest a coverup without any rational reason for it, or an explanation for the relation between science-fiction concepts and witchcraft.
The blurb continues: “If the witches can’t figure out Hale’s machinations, and fast, all of witchkind will be in grave danger—along with the fate of all (wo)mankind.” This sequel supposedly: “reimagines everything you think you knew about her coven and her witches”, but it really does not give enough new information, unless it must reimagine because the first volume failed to imagine. Though it is likely that this “story… spans continents”, it clearly does not “dive deep into the roots of England and its witchcraft…”
This is a very poorly written fantasy that is not recommended for readers who want to be entertained, amused, or excited.
Anti-Climatic Conclusion of a Regressively Anti-Feminist Witch Story
Juno Dawson, Human Rites: Book 3 of the HMRC Trilogy (New York: Penguin Books, July 1, 2025). Paperback: $19. 464pp, 5.5X8.25”. ISBN: 978-0-143137-16-0.
**
“With HMRC in shambles and the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the sisterhood of friends and witches must find a new way of putting together the pieces if (wo)mankind is to stand a chance, in this final chapter… Niamh, Ciara, Leonie, Elle and Theo. Five very different witches with one thing in common: they were unwittingly chosen by the dangerously charming Lucifer, the demon king of desire, to fulfil a dark prophecy: Satanis will rise and the daughters of Gaia will fall. The coven is reunited—but broken. Niamh is back from the dead…but she hasn’t come back alone. Elle mourns a son she never had. Ciara languishes in a prison for witches, and Leonie reels from a very unexpected surprise.” Referring to an unstated “surprise” is a common trope in fantasies, as it refers to a mystery without giving any details: given room to keep referring to it in foreshadowing and never really deliver a significant “surprise”. This set up of having something strange happening to the plotlines of the lead characters sets up these surprise-carrots for all. “Meanwhile, Lucifer offers fledgling witch Theo a deal: if she helps him, her coven—her family—will be spared. But the magic he asks for will take her out of London—out of time, entirely. The final confrontation between good and evil…”
The conclusion of this novel highlights the problems with this trilogy. The lead character is shown to just be realizing that avenging the deaths of some, or all her friends would be against the set rules of magic, so she learns she cannot do anything other than raise a few “gray clouds” to storm out her rage against the perpetrators of the murders. There is a bunch of empty dialogue that explains this non-action, and talk about this desire to enact vengeance without any need to insert dramatic actions that would have resulted from going ahead with vengeance.
The final note in the blurb refers to a struggle between “good and evil”. There are a few mentions of “evil” across the text itself, but mostly these are to the “devil” or the character of Lucifer who is driving these women to commit “evil” in exchange for keeping friends safe. This exchange of safety for murder or other evil act doing is a common trope in fiction, and films. Though this trade is an absurd one, as in reality no rational person would opt to commit crimes in exchange for safety, as contacting the authorities to unravel this plot would be the rational solution. It is an easy plot-setup that forces lead characters to carry the violent actions in the plot, while the Devil can remain in the shadows. Otherwise, the leads might have had nothing to do, as the villain would be the one doing various evil things, and they could not kill this villain (at least not until the end of a series). The goal of “evil” is to birth “him” or an evil-spawn, while good’s goals seem to be to stop whatever evil wants: at which they keep failing because they end up helping these plans. This birth-of-Satan scheme is too common in fantasy and horror to be interesting. The women are accused of allowing themselves “to be the vessel of the devil himself”. This idea of a witch as witchy because she is sleeping with the Devil comes from Medieval European narratives, and has not progressed since. This plot is certainly not progressively feminist, as it suggests sex and procreation are themselves sinful, and worthy of being condemned to death for thus sinning.
Anti-Romantic and Anti-Scientific Pop Fiction
Brendan Deneen, Tracer (Ashland: Black Stone Publishing, September 2, 2025). Hardcover: $25.20. 280pp. ISBN: 979-8-200965-02-1.
**
“…Sci-fi romance adventure that sends one mercenary on a dangerous mission across a postapocalyptic landscape.” It’s basically Earth now: with drug addicts, debt-collectors, garbage, and the like. Many novels make this mistake of just describing the problems we are currently having, and pretending they are futuristic by stressing how dire they are. “In the near future—after a virus has swept the globe and the oil has run dry—what’s left of humanity has created a new technology, one that turns plastic back into oil. A mad scramble for resources ensues, with new cities being built on the seven largest landfills in the world. Plastic is the new gold. Tracer is the adopted daughter and hired gun for the president of PH City—built outside of what used to be Los Angeles, atop the Puente Hills landfill. When a distress call comes from the landfill city outside of Las Vegas, the president of PH sends Tracer to answer it. But Trace soon discovers this mission is more than she bargained for, and that a dangerous deal has been struck without her knowledge, sending her further down a complex and violent path…”
This novel starts with a detailed description of a kicking and punching fight over a failure to collect on an outstanding debt by a muscle for a debt-collector. There is a lack of details about where the characters are, or why this is the future. Later in the novel, there are scattered mentions of “mountains of garbage”, and “plastic… brokers”. Instead of explaining these strange references, the author focuses on a character looking at parents “and feeling safe, like nothing could ever hurt her”. This is a cliché phrase that is basically a non-saying that does not explain anything.
The novel ends with a general hugging scene, while characters are chatting about nothing in particular, and deciding on some random place to drive to next. There are absolutely no details, of a futuristic type, or otherwise: events can be taking place in any “desert” on Earth at any time.
There is some kissing and cuddling at the end, when the narrator notes he is finally “falling in love”. If he was not in love before, how can this be a “romance”? The first mention of a kiss occurs in the second half of the book (page 170-1): “Trace kissed him, and though she had seen people do it, had heard people talk about it, the sensation was unlike anything…” This girl is apparently so happy with this strange new experience that “she grabbed him” to do it again. No details are given to explain just what was so special about this experience of swapping saliva, or a description of how they did this, other than she wrapped “her arms around his body”. Such make-out scenes seem to always be written by dudes, as they express an extreme level of excitement and stimulation from a simple kiss, where the female actors are likely to be far less excited than the men who might be sufficiently aroused by this contact. Since this is the first mention of kissing in this novel, this means there was no earlier explanation about why these dystopian people lack sexual education classes that would have taught them about kissing. The first mention of “homeschooling” appears on page 53, in a description of a character “making” their daughter “finish her lessons at night when I get home in time. Jenna is too tired to enforce the rules after homeschooling her all day”. This does not explain why homeschooling lacks sex-ed.
There is even no mention of a “virus” or “viral” across this novel, despite the blurb stating this is the trigger for the central dystopia. The first mention of “oil” appears on page 15: “the giant pyrolysis machines chugged and belched, turning plastic back into oil, the lifeblood of Puente Hills”. The blurb had set up that oil had run out, and that now people have come up with strategies of recycling to make more oil despite nature showing it was outmoded by ending its sources in the ground. This is indeed a dystopic or depressing vision of people continuing to pollute the planet even after the easy or cheap access to oil in the ground runs out. This mention of garbage-cities is also too unclear in the text itself, as the explanation is clearer in the blurb. The dialogue and actions within the novel are too vague for these oil-processing plants to be of clear relevance to the plot.
Readers who chose this novel because they are interested in epidemiology would be disappointed, and frustrated at not having their curiosity repaid. This blurb also promises to describe a dystopia where “oil” has run out in the ground, so people build cities on garbage-dumps to recycle plastic back into oil: “the giant pyrolysis machines chugged and belched, turning plastic back into oil, the lifeblood of Puente Hills” (15). There are a few later mentions of “oi”, but typically with almost no specifics about the “machine” making it, but rather with insult-laden empty dialogue around these references that avoid any scientific research (28-9).
This is a poorly-written novel that is mislabeled as “science fiction”, when it is a lightly-structured romance with spicy insults that make it rather anti-romantic.
An Empty Rescue Plot
Daniel M. Ford, Advocate: Book Three of the Warden Series (New York: Tor Publishing Group, April 22, 2025). EBook: $19.99: Fantasy. 368pp. ISBN: 978-1-250815-73-6.
**
“Wineshops on every corner. Assassins in every alley. It’s good to be home. Aelis de Lenti is back on her home turf, but it’s not quite as welcoming as she remembered…. Recalled from Lone Pine to investigate claims of murder by magic against her mentor—legendary Warden Bardun Jacques—Aelis takes to the streets of the grand city of Lascenise, and plumbs the deepest secrets of the Lyceum to clear his name.” Not much more than this is said about this Jacques in the body of this novel. It is unclear what made him “legendary”. It is instead the lead character who is said to have “cracked barrack-crypts full of undead,” who “matched wits with a woodshade, commanded the power of the most sought-after artifact of my primary school…” Though from there the description becomes nonsensical with a reference to riding “an undead construct made entirely of teeth”. Basically, the hero needs somebody to rescue, and the rescued party has to be significant for some reason to catch the reader’s interest. “Certain of her success, she doesn’t count on thieves, subterranean labyrinths, or the assassins that dog her steps from the moment she leaves her tower. Behind all of it lurks a ring of unknown wizards who can seemingly reach anyone with their magic. Without knowing who she can trust, Aelis must gather what allies she can to unravel the web of intrigue, murder, smuggling, and theft originating in the halls of magic power. With an old friend from her college days, a war-haunted gnome thief-catcher, and the advice of her imprisoned advisor, Aelis races to save lives and expose a conspiracy that seeks to change the face of the world.” This summary overlays several archetypes (helpers, hero, person-in-need) over a world-saving formulaic plot. Though the interior does not really explain why the world is in trouble in this plot. What evil spirit is behind it? What exactly is this evil spirit’s goal in doing general evil?
This is my first introduction to this series, but other readers might also be entering this world at this late stage.
The opening scene includes difficult to picture description, such as a character feeling “a fist squeeze her heart” before she slips out of a saddle and grabs her two “animals’” reins. It’s unclear if there is a magical grab of the heart, or if this is metaphorical before the story moves on to some voice from the darkness asking if they are about to be rescued, and being told that this is instead just a visit to cheer him up. This seems to be foreshadowing a future adventurous rescue, without actually delivering this action right at the beginning where at least the promise of action is needed. This seems to foreshadow that the author has a very limited rescue plot that they cannot just unravel at the start without running out of other stuff to do in the plotline.
As this intro promised, the concluding page shows that the imprisoned character has finally just been liberated after the plot has run its full course. As a resolution this rescued character promises to go “wherever”, as there is a fake “smile” and “tears” coming to the rescuer’s face. They awkwardly and pointlessly kiss, before the female character goes into her “tower”, considers “breakfast” but decides she is “not hungry”. This woman is just trying to avoid showing weakness as she is crying, while she is called to do medicine, and this call to new action terminates the narrative. If this was the first time in this story when a character started crying to elicit an emotional response from readers, it would be somewhat powerful. But in the middle of this story, Aelis had already broken into “unexpected tears”, and had already apologized for “getting emotional” because: “A dozen or so thieves tried to kill him; I gut-stuck one, cut the hand off another, dealt wounds to four or five more, almost died.” She tells herself: “wardens don’t cry”. The point of this digression seems to be to remind readers that the lead-hero is a weak woman, who is fighting against this nature as she goes on a violent rampage.
This is an unreadable novel, as it blends absurdity, with hard-hitting action. There is some engaging action scenes, and some description, but there is so much hot empty air between these sparks of clarity that readers are unlikely to make it through this reading.
Absurd Sexist Commentary on the Fragility of the Mad Womankind
Christopher Moore, Anima Rising: A Novel: Klimt, Freud, and Jung Meet the Bride of Frankenstein (New York: William Morrow: HarperCollins Publishers, May 13, 2025). EBook, 6X9”. 400pp: Fantasy; Humorous Fiction. ISBN: 978-0-062434-15-9.
**
“…Deranged tale of a mad scientist, a famous painter, and an undead woman’s electrifying journey of self-discovery. Vienna, 1911. Gustav Klimt, the most famous painter in the Austrian Empire, the darling of Viennese society, spots a woman’s nude body in the Danube canal. He knows he should summon a policeman, but he can’t resist stopping to make a sketch first. And as he draws, the woman coughs. She’s alive! Back at his studio, Klimt and his model-turned-muse Wally tend to the formerly-drowned girl. She’s nearly feral and doesn’t remember who she is, or how she came to be floating in the canal. Klimt names her Judith, after one of his most famous paintings, and resolves to help her find her memory. With a little help from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Judith recalls being stranded in the arctic one hundred years ago, locked in a crate by a man named Victor Frankenstein, and visiting the Underworld. So how did she get here? And why are so many people chasing her, including Geoff, the giant croissant-eating devil dog of the North?”
The cover of this novel is one of the best in this set. It satirizes a canonical painting’s style, while adding amusing touches that include a pair of simplified hands drawing the scene, a black cat grabbing onto a character in the title, and a swampy flower-and-grass in water background. The mix of realistic details, glittering gold paint, and abstraction and simplification is skillfully executed. The name of the artist is not mentioned in this review copy.
The opening scene is certainly descriptively dense, as it draws a detail painting of what it is like for a painter to discover the body of a naked deceased woman floating: he stops to draw her instead of calling the police because he is mystified by her figure. This is a curious commentary about our cell-phone-video-catching culture that tends to stop at accidents, murders and the like to film it, instead of helping those in trouble. It is more important to make yourself important by catching a captivating image than to become a hero by helping those in need. But apparently this woman turns out to still be alive, and the painter proceeds to get to know her. Though once again the amnesia device is used to explain why no explanation is given for the nature of this central mystical character. She does not remember who she is.
Freud is first mentioned in a quote that refers to “young” women’s “despair” that he labeled as “hysteria”. This is a sexist psychological theory. And it is followed by a description of somebody jumping “naked”. In the next mention of Freud, he appears as a character, who is “reading from a brief and diligently not talking to his companion at the table”: probably Jung, though the next named character is Klimt.
Jung is quoted for his theory of the “shadow personality” before a question is raised if a character has exposed his privates to Judith.
Mentions of the Underworld are absurdist: in one there is a note that Judith was hungrier than others in the Underworld, so that she could “eat a whole walrus”, and so Sedna “healed her, gave her all the food she wanted.” The character this is related to asks: “Who is Sedna?” Apparently, no previous backstory had been offered. Instead of answering this simple question the character who mentioned Sedna asks several questions in return that avoid doing research into who Sedna is, or generally continuing the narrative in a logical, or readable way.
The reference to Geoff, the croissant-eating devil-dog in the blurb caught my interest. But the first mention of somebody eating a croissant refers to Wally, which deflates the symbolic significance of this particular snack as it relates to this special devil-dog. Later there are several references to croissants as payments that are being brought to a character who likes them. This reads like an ad for this snack, without any meaning overlayed over these dozens of references.
An unusually large part of this book is consumed by the “Afterword” that describes the author’s research into the historical alterations across the plot, including places where Freud, and Jung are mentioned.
While the blurb explains that amnesia prevents the initially naked female subject from explaining what happened to her, exposition is instead provided in lengthy, detailed letters, especially Letter #2 addressed to Margaret in 1799 from the “Far North”, which describes a thawing out male friend called Victor Frankenstein. But details such as that he is from the “landed gentry” are diverted with a paragraph about women being lucky not to “inherit… property” or to worry about “destiny”. Though the next paragraph notes Victor “studied… ancient alchemists at university”, specializing in “the Elixir of Life”, or “philosopher’s stone”. It is common in pop fiction to confuse alchemy (turning metals into gold), with life-extending sciences, as thus stones tend to be claimed to be life-giving, whereas the “elixir” was fluid in the early unreferenced texts.
The novel ends with a nonsense conversation where characters do not understand each other, as one of them is suggesting sexual things that are misread by another, and everybody just seems to be saying nonsense. For example, one of them asks if they should “be a talking squirrel”.
While the opening scene promised this will be a dark but literary mystical novel, the interior proves it is mostly full of nonsensical hot air. This novel should not be read. It will frustrate and confuse anybody who attempts reading it despite this warning.
Magical Corporate Fraud with Grumpy Reflections
Olivie Blake, Gifted & Talented (New York: Tor Publishing, April 1, 2025). Fantasy: EBook. 512pp. ISBN: 978-1-250883-40-7.
***
“…The story of three siblings who, upon the death of their father, are forced to reckon with their long-festering rivalries, dangerous abilities, and the crushing weight of all their unrealized adolescent potential. Where there’s a will, there’s a war. Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne. Or at least, so they like to think. Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness.”
This is an especially ridiculous premise. The term refers broadly to “health conditions involving changes in emotion, thinking or behavior”. Thus, it would mean stopping people from experiencing any emotional change, even after they experience a death in the family, natural disasters, and the like. It seems this author is just having fun by suggesting whatever speculative ideas come to mind without reflecting, or weighing if they are nonsensical. The author must have realized this is an absurd notion as in chapter 10, this concept is explained as a device that “monitors brain chemistry. It delivers the appropriate SSRI subcutaneously in response to whatever your brain chemistry is doing. It takes the guesswork out of treating mental illness.” This absurd claim is followed by the explanation that the device mostly triggers people to buy Demeter’s products by pushing “serotonin” when they are in Demeter’s stores “regardless of their actual mood.” If the author had stopped at claiming all mental illness is indeed curable; this would be a poorly-conceived opinion. But the short added explanation of its subversive application turns it into a potentially “right opinion” without pages of scientific evidence to support its assertions.
The blurb continues in reference to the mental-illness cure: “You’re welcome! If only her father’s fortune wasn’t her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing what she really is: a total fraud. Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. And yet, his wife might be leaving him, and he’s losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around. Eilidh, once the world’s most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth—by confirming she’d been his favorite all along. On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins—but which Wren will come out on top?”
Chapter 1 begins in an unusual way for this genre: the CEO has random negative thoughts about the various people she is facing in an audience as she prepares to give a speech. She calls several names without explaining why they offend her. Some she specifies are a “traitor”, or “dorks and despots”. Not much is clarified between the overflow of hate-talk. It is clear that she would prefer to eat “a whole sleeve of pistachio macarons” and to “never rise again” from bed. Some of this commentary is a bit funny or amusing. It is better than just using some cliches, or having empty dialogue.
There is only a single direct mention of the term “telepathy” in the body of the novel: in the second half. This mention appears after half-a-page is spent on going back and force to answer repeat of the question “And then?” Jamie finally complains: “You’re not answering my question”. To which the telepath replies absurdly: “Actually, I am. You’re just not listening”. Apparently, she is forcing this guy to love her with “telepathy”, as she is not letting him “love someone better”. If she can communicate telepathically, why would he be unable to hear what she is saying telepathically: this seems nonsensical.
In the first half, there is a mention of Arthur “being an electrokinetic menace”. There are a couple dozen mentions of “electricity”, such as the “pulse of faltering electricity” that “is jarring and epileptic”, as Meredith attempts to communicate with her sister despite Arthur’s “warning” by apparently electrocuting her.
This latter discussion and electric conflict take place in chapter 59, which is set as a play with blank lines between lines of dialogue, action paragraphs, and a list of “The Players” at the beginning. This seems to be an artistic experiment that reframes empty dialogue as artsy by changing for structural formula for how these same conflicts are presented on the page.
The note that the lead considers herself to be a “fraud” interested me. But little is explained about this, beside her generally being incompetent based on a lack of knowledge expressed in what she said throughout. There is a mention that she is guilty of “around a dozen counts of felony corporate fraud”. The preceding content does not really explain what exactly she did. There are brief mentions of semi-blackmail because she has been doing improper things with “clinical patients” that contradict published claims. She acknowledges the mental-illness-curing scam was “never actually meant to work.” Instead of explaining just what kind of research this blackmailer has done, and how the fraudster went wrong, the conversation focuses on Meredith swooning or worrying about avoiding being outed for whatever this set of frauds are.
The conclusion is absurd and nonsensical. Once again, the mother-son bond is exploited as a resolution to the emotional tensions in the novel. But this time, the child is called the Monster. It is portrayed as an animal (possibly non-verbal), and the Mother is in pain, but cannot escape due to love. It is very confusing just what is supposed to be happening: this is hardly the way to entice readers to enter this book. A reader might find some amusement, so one can try it if there is enough time.
Random Thoughts About Earth’s Death in the Past, and Mars in the Future
Joe Mungo Reed, Terrestrial History: A Novel (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, April 2025). Hardcover: $29.99; Literary Science Fiction. 272pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 979-1-324-10680-7.
***
“A family saga following four generations on a time-bending journey from coastal Scotland to a colony on Mars. Hannah is a fusion scientist working alone at a remote cottage off the coast of Scotland when she sees a figure making his way from the sea. It is a visitor from the future, a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backwards through time to try to make a crucial intervention in the fate of our dying planet, and he needs Hannah’s help. Laboring in the warmth of a Scottish summer, Hannah and the stranger are on the path towards a breakthrough—and then things go terribly wrong.” It “expands from this extraordinary event, drawing together the stories of four lives reckoning with what it means to take fate into their own hands, moving from the last days of civilization on Earth through the birth of another on Mars. Roban lives in the Colony, one of the first generation born to this sterile new outpost, where he is consumed by longing for the lost wonders of a home planet he never knew. Between Hannah and Roban, two generations, a father and a daughter, face an uncertain future in a world that is falling apart. Andrew is a politician running to be Scotland’s First Minister. Andrew believes there is still time for the human spirit to triumph, if only he can persuade people to band together. For his starkly rationalist daughter Kenzie, this idealism doesn’t offer the hard tools needed to keep the rising floods at bay. And so, she signs on to work for a company that would abandon Earth for the promise of a world beyond—in contravention of all Andrew stands for. In considering which concerns should guide us in a time of crisis—social, technological, or familial—and reckoning with the question of whether there is meaning to be found in the pursuit of salvation beyond success itself…”
This book has a pretty strong start. It opens with a meeting with the time-traveling stranger. Then, a section speaks in second-person with “you”, the reader, regarding the narrator also being a non-believer, or difficult to convince about supernatural or scientifically unlikely things, such as speaking with the dead, or travel “across time and space”. There are few philosophical asides like this in science fiction, and so this is rather original. Anticipating readers disbelieve, and sympathizing with this disbelief helps to keep readers interested. Such reflections are necessary in a literary non-fiction, as this book falls into this category having been published by the highbrow Norton.
The conclusion is also philosophical. But it is too digressive, and too full of laziness. The narrator just lies down in a place where she can feel the grass, the wind and other natural bits, and wants to stay there, instead of heading out to prevent the apocalypse she knows is coming because she is from the future where it has already happened. The notes that she “can hear the bird” and “the moving grass too” is too cliché for a common nature-description. If the point was to really make the reader appreciate the nature that we still have, or that has not yet died, far more unique details were needed.
Things do not improve in the middle, which is full of general thoughts about “retreating to space” or to Mars being a surrender. There are platitudes such as that we should be “saving ourselves” (23). Why would being on Earth or on Mars change if humans are saving themselves or not?
Chapter “3: Roban: 2098” starts with pondering about the necessity or frivolity of the narrator’s “phrasal dictionary”. Generalities about a mom worrying “for me” are suddenly interrupted by the introduction of the fact that this “Mum died in a mine collapse when I was three”. There is apparently a second mum who is described as missing this first mum, and was taking the narrator to therapy to help both cope (25). What does any of this have to do with the planet dying, or going to Mars?
There is not enough in this book so far to keep me reading. I doubt readers would be happy if they went further. It is difficult to imagine what kind of a reader might be more interested than I am.
Eating Poison and Whatever…
T. Kingfisher, Hemlock & Silver (New York: Tor Books, August 19, 2025). Hardcover: $28.99. 368pp, Fantasy. ISBN: 978-1-250342-03-4.
**
“A… hardcover edition featuring bright green sprayed edges, a foil stamp on the casing, and custom endpapers illustrated by the author. From Hugo Award-winning author… a dark reimagining of ‘Snow White’ steeped in poison, intrigue, and treason of the most magical kind. Healer Anja regularly drinks poison. Not to die, but to save—seeking cures for those everyone else has given up on.” This same witchy tendency to habitually drink poison also appeared in this set of reviews in Ava Morgyn’s The Bane Witch. “But a summons from the King interrupts her quiet, herb-obsessed life. His daughter, Snow, is dying, and he hopes Anja’s unorthodox methods can save her. Aided by a taciturn guard, a narcissistic cat, and a passion for the scientific method, Anja rushes to treat Snow, but nothing seems to work. That is, until she finds a secret world, hidden inside a magic mirror. This dark realm may hold the key to what is making Snow sick. Or it might be the thing that kills them all.”
The book opens with a readable, but not informative or interesting dialogue the character is having in her head as she is contemplating the correct manner of speaking with a king, after insulting him. He confesses that he indeed, as the rumors state, killed his wife. And the tension is if the witch heroine is supposed to congratulate him on this, or say something else that is more appropriate. This is an example of a mix of reverence for and puffery of the monarchy, but with a hint of uncertainty regarding why this short guy is supposed to be met reverentially just because he is a king. There is a bit of information about the character’s father being a merchant, and that she regularly consumes poison. She seems to be reacting to this poison as if it is a light shot of alcohol, as her mind is slightly clouded, but she is having rather deep philosophical reflections. The book concludes with digressive and empty dialogue that is harder to read than the opening. The discussion is about if somebody is familiar with some fairy tales, instead of on resolving the plot. There is an absurd mention that Anja had not visited a rooster on the other side of a magical mirror, and so the rooster might be running out of water. Then there is an attempt at an emotional appear, as she hints Grayling, the magical cat, might “get lonely… like the beasts of fairy tales”. Grayling denies being lonely, but agrees to perhaps visit to help Anja out. Othan than empty pining, there is a strange mention that cats never go “when he was called”. It seems this author just decided to say whatever reflections came to mind, as they worked out, while it is happening, what would “happen… after that.” It is not an absolutely horrid book, but this is the most relaxed and non-trying bit of fiction in this set.
Literary Fiction and Nonfiction
Why Women Hate Marriage
Peter Geye, A Lesser Light: A Novel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, April 15, 2025). EBook. 512pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 978-1-517916-37-4.
*
“It’s 1910, and Theodulf Sauer has finally achieved a position befitting his ego: master lighthouse keeper at a newly commissioned station towering above Lake Superior. When his new wife, Willa, arrives on the first spring ferry, it’s clear her life has taken the opposite turn: after being summoned home from college to Duluth when her father dies, she and her scheming mother find themselves destitute, and Willa is rushed into this ill-suited arranged marriage before she can comprehend her fate. As the lighthouse station establishes, the new relationship teeters between tense and hostile, with little mutual understanding or tenderness. Willa takes solace in her learned fascination with the cosmos, especially (despite her husband’s suspicion of the event) in viewing the imminent Halley’s Comet. Under ominous night skies, Theodulf stands sentry over the lake, clinging to long-ago and faraway memories of happiness that fill him with longing and shame. Into this impasse, a clairvoyant girl and her resolute uncle emerge from across the cove. They see through the Sauers’ thin façade and, by turns and in different ways, convey promise, sympathy, and insight that counter Willa’s despair. Armed with renewed self-determination, Willa forges a path to happiness. But before she can grasp it, tragedy comes to their remote beacon, and her future plunges toward a dark unknown… A story about industry and calamity, science versus superstition, inner desire countered with societal expectations—and the consequences when these forces collide in the wilderness of rapid social change.”
The book’s summary is full of generalizations that typically appear in literary romances. I requested this book because I wanted to check the type of novels the University of Minnesota Press usually publishes. I have written several novels, and I, like probably many of my writerly readers, want to know if they are open to new novel submissions, and if so what type of novel they are looking for. The blurb would not have convinced me to purchase this book out of other options, if I did not have this separate motive to be curious what type of book this is on the inside. There are a few other novels in this set of book reviews from university presses I have rarely reviewed, and did not even know they also publish some contemporary fiction. University presses should be publishing the best modern novels, if their goal was finding literary marvels, but I almost never see top literary awards won by books released by this category of publishers. The Big Five probably win in this competition because they have bigger budgets, but I wonder if they win because their marketing budgets and sales records is what drives who wins literary awards. Surely, the best writers in America should be college professors, since they should know what great writing is, and should be able to execute this greatness in practice. This author, Peter Geye, has won the Minnesota Book Award, had a PhD, and worked as an editor of the Third Coast.
The chapter titles are rather dramatic: “Queen of the Highway”, and “The Serpent’s Tail.” The first chapter opens with a stanza of long-lined poetry about a “lighthouse” in the moonlight. There is not credit-line for this poem, and I could not find a source for it online; so, it seems to be an original poem, which is not attributed as written by one of the characters, as it should have been if it is supposed to be a first-person poem. The poem is proceeded by the chapter title, and the date, April 20, 1910. It is followed by a third-person description of an unnamed female character. The blurb includes only a single name of a significant female character, so it can be assumed this is about her, but if there are no other major female characters it is strange that she is not named. This type of a lack of specificity seems to be designed to leave things mysterious to place a reader in a sense of curiosity to learn these basic things about what is happening in a narrative. I think such omissions prevent a reader from becoming interested in a story.
The first narrative paragraph opens with the character attempting to “grasp… fog” in her “clenched… fist”. The irrationality of this image further distances the reader from their attempt to find interest in this story. Then, a purser comes up. It is unclear where the woman was standing, as she seems to be in some locked away space. There is no description if she’s in a compartment, a closet… The purser starts talking to her, and she’s non-responsive to the first three things he says. This seems to be the usual way female characters are handled in literary novels: they are mostly non-verbal, or have to be forced to talk by forcing them out-of-their-shell. The first thing she says is that she has “two trunks”, which seems to suggest she is confused, or semi-verbal because the question she was asked is if she can give the purser the tickets for them. She does not give him the tickets, as he moves on to giving her instructions on where to go. Then, this unnamed woman contemplates killing herself by humping over the railing of the ship to avoid a “trial before it began”. In the next paragraph, she is thinking about holding the “music” of some howls coming from the shore. At least there is no new description of her clenching the sound of music. Then without a warning the purser returns and starts telling her stuff again. He had previously “hustled” away to do work, and it is only moments later, and there is no mention that he even returned before a line is attributed to him. She again does not respond to his question about if some howling dog on the shore belongs to the woman’s (absent?) mother. And then he points out that the sound is coming from “wolves”, and not from a dog…. So why did he ask her if it is her mother’s dog?
I cannot carry on reading this book. It is absurdly bad. I cannot imagine what kind of a reader would be capable of sticking with this book beyond this second page. I do not recommend it.
A Reframing of Racism to Protect the Racists as Frightened Victims
Andrew C. Isenberg, The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, April 2025). EBook. 304pp, 6X9”, 6 halftones, 4 maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-1-4696-8384-3.
**
“A new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. Isenberg takes readers to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that the architects of American expansion faced significant challenges from the diverse groups of people inhabiting each region. In other words, while the manifest destiny paradigm begins with an assumption of US strength, the government and the agents it dispatched to settle and control the frontier had only a weak presence. Tracing the interconnected histories of Indians, slaves, antislavery reformers, missionaries, federal agents, and physicians, Isenberg shows that the United States was repeatedly forced to accommodate the presence of other colonial empires and powerful Indigenous societies. Anti-expansionists in the borderlands welcomed the precarity of the government’s power: the land on which they dwelled was a grand laboratory where they could experiment with their alternative visions for American society. Examining the borderlands offers an understanding not just about frontier spaces but about the nature of the early American state—ambitiously expansionist but challenged by its native and imperial competitors.”
A new perspective on stealing land from Native Americans during America’s “expansion” is needed, as I was taught the propagandist version across my high school and college years a couple of decades ago, and history textbooks still sell the fictitious grand-narrative. Though this book does not focus on the theft, but rather on the weakness of the Americans, describing the natives as “challenges”. The use of the outdated “Indians” term also hints this is not a progressive book. “Indigenous” people are portrayed as aggressors, instead of as defenders of their homes. Settlers are described as experimenters, as if they were scientists and not just taking somebody else’s land, and reselling it to whites before making it safe for settlement by making sure past residents did not violently object to having their land confiscated without compensation or cause. And the blurb keeps repeating these ideas, unashamedly…
The chapter that attracted my attention first is “Vaccinators”. The chapter begins with a description of a European who sets out to vaccinate a few hundred Lakotas. There’s a description of past mass-deaths from Old World diseases among Natives. There’s a mention that the Lakotas were a dominant people in the region. And then there’s a strange paragraph about “Swedes and Japanese” specifically regarding “the Saami and Ainu… as savages”, while “white Americans… considered Indigenous people” in general “to be an inferior race”. This is a strangely racist and irrelevant point to insert here. This seems to be to claim that “Martin” seemed like an “isolated do-gooder… operating outside of government authority”, but was indeed a “government agent”. An 1832 law had required agents like Martin to go out there and issue vaccinations. Still more absurdly the following paragraph asks why the American government was bothering to vaccinate natives as they were fighting wars to exterminate them. That’s not something I was asking myself… There was a law that required them to vaccinate, as they just stated. And it was illegal for them to be slaughtering and relocating all those natives off their land… The usual narrative is that most natives died of infectious diseases to “clear the land” for the invading whites, but this is presented here as if its some kind of a new scientific discovery. Then, it’s argued that the whites were just trying to stop smallpox from killing themselves and that’s why they were also vaccinating natives. And the small number of vaccinations technically meant these were token vaccines to meet the law, when the law required them to have vaccinated millions. A point is raised that the Americans deliberately “withheld the vaccine from Indigenous people who resisted removal”. But this rational argument is immediately countered as untrue with a few isolated cases of vaccination, as if a propaganda needs to be defended (98-105).
I cannot continue to read this book. It is disturbing, and terrifying because it is brushing over abuses, while excusing them. There might be interesting content in parts of it, but it is too poorly researched to be believable, and too contentiously worded to be readable.
Corruption and Prostitution at the Russian Ballet
Joy Womack, as told by Elizabeth Shockman, Behind the Red Velvet Curtain: An American Ballerina in Russia (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2025). EBook: $26. 320pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 978-1-5381-9938-1.
*****
“In 2012 Joy Womack made history when she became the first American ballerina to sign a contract with the Bolshoi Ballet Theater in Moscow, Russia. Dancing in Moscow was not the Onion Dome fairy tale she’d hoped for. The Bolshoi and its school were filled with cutthroat competition, acts of violence, and coaches who encouraged obsessive devotion. They sent her on stage with broken bones, helped her forge immigration paperwork, and encouraged her to toe a dangerous political line—all for the privilege of dancing on one of the world’s most storied stages. As Joy’s career took off and she made a name for herself in the Russian ballet world, she had to face a hard choice. Were the growing dangers of a professional lifestyle descending into corruption worth the realization of her life’s dream?”
I saw the film version of this story: The American (2023). The film is a powerful drama in part because the actors are in fact in the type of shape that Bolshoi would have allowed into their company. The lead dancer’s skills are reasonably acceptable as well. Though she does too few of the sort of tall-leaps that distinguish top-level ballet. Though as I watched the film, I questioned why this was the only story of this type I have heard about. Ballet dancers, like models, and film and music stars are likely to be systematically exploited as an industry. Yet there are only a few stories about those like Harvey Weinstein asking starlets to sleep with him in exchange for roles, or the ex-Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries being charged with trafficking for selecting models for his shoots based on who was willing to sleep with him at orgies. Whenever I have tried to sell a screenplay, or to enter acting, there have always been propositions for sex, and then no roles etc. offered when these requests were rejected by me. I recall auditioning for a ballet program in Moscow when I was a child. There were some hints of harassment by the audition when I was around 10. Surely, nobody could reach their twenties and make it to the top in ballet without having consented to most such offers. And the plot of this story is that she got married for the sake of entering a company, but then stopped short of sleeping with a wealthy investor after just stopping by his place to contemplate his offer up-close? And the drama of this story is that this woman thinks she is having a tough time because she is an American and she is discriminated against, while she can just quit at any time and move back to America with her wealthy parents? Her psychotically violent rivals would in fact have to do the type of menial cleaning work etc. that she does for a living, if they refuse to sleep with the dude she rejects. They are still in there undergoing this abuse, and the tragedy of this story is the one American who disclosed this corruption went on to make several profitable films about it? She started working at Bolshoi in 2009 at 14, and worked there until 2013. I want to sympathize with her as a survivor of trauma. But how could anybody have entered ballet without knowing from the start that it is an extremely painful profession that pretty much sees most careers end by around 18. How else would the Russian dancers be consistently stronger than competitors from around the world if they were not suffering through pain that nobody else is willing to tolerate? There have been accusations of steroid and amphetamine use at the Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2016.
I searched this book for some of these points to figure out what this memoir is stating happened that the film might have mis-portrayed. Joy Womack reports that she told her mother over the phone that she was throwing up to fit in the bone-thin maximum weight she had to maintain to keep her new contract with the Bolshoi. Her mother recommends entering an “eating disorder program”. This idea is rather ridiculous. By the time Joy joined the Bolshoi she would have had to vomit for several years across the preceding years to be in the shape that was obligatory at all these top programs. Going into a program immediately after getting to the top would be throwing away all that work to spend money on a therapist. So, after Joy tells her mother she is going to lose her contract if she signs into food-rehab, her mother instead participates in her regiment. Her mother and Oleg’s parents finalize plans on her “injections… to keep from vomiting, the vitamin supplements and omega 3”, including “forced feedings and water intake recorded every two hours” (143). This is very confusing. She would logically have started taking steroid injections that would be mislabeled as “vitamins” when she first joined the Bolshoi. And instead, she is insisting that she was seriously taking “vitamin” injections and was forced-fed to increase her weight, instead of bringing it down to a minimum to be presentable on stage?
A hundred pages later, it is 3 weeks since she left Russia, she reports that she lost an unexpected amount of weight in those 3 weeks (without being on the “vitamin” protocol). This American doctor sends Joy to a mental institution because she has a “dearth of electrolytes, vitamins, and minerals”. Seriously? She had to have had a serious steroids addiction that she would have needed a detox from… But, no… she had too many vitamins in her system 3 weeks after returning to the US. Her kidneys were going to “fail” because of excess vitamins… After being forced-fed, she is admitted into “an inpatient clinic” for suicidal girls, who are refusing to eat. She accuses these other girls of throwing tiny bits of food under the table… but does not mention doing anything of the sort (235-6).
Joy does mention being abused as a child, before she moved to Russia, back in Santa Monica. She reports feeling repulsed by her husband as she is haunted by those early memories (136-7). This early abuse would explain why she would have tolerated abuse across her ballerina career in Russia, but she seems to be saying that there was abuse in early childhood, and then only again near the end of her time at Bolshoi. She mentions childhood abuse again when she explains why she decided to ask Oleg for a divorce: she feels incapable of happiness because of her haunting memories, for which she does not have help from a counselor (192). After asking for a divorce, she tells her mother about her abuse, and her mother does nothing, and leaves her alone again in Moscow 3 days later (194).
The scene where she first learns about the “rich Russian businessman” or “politicians” ballerinas must be dating for “dancers” to have “succeeded in Russia”. She frames this as something she overhears other dancers talking about, while she is innocent of being involved in this dirty business. She does clarify more in this text than what the film shows. She explains that the businessman she came close to sleeping with for money had paid her a significant sum in the previous months for “the work” she did for him “The designs I’d sent his team, the modeling I’d done for this factory’s shoes and skirts and warm-up gear”. She says “no” to visiting his house, as opposed to arriving there and near-completing-the-deed (as in the film). Then, her perspective changes, and she realizes all other ballerinas are prostituting themselves in exchange for fine dining, “expensive gifts and money”. She leaves this topic there, and moves on to describing one of her male friends, Dmitrichenko, being charged with throwing acid and scarring a “director”, without intending to do as much harm as ended up happening. The ballerinas sign a petition in his defense, and the narrative focuses on this new tragedy abandoning the businessmen etc. (158-60). She returns to the topic a few pages later, when she explains to a friend that her own father is an actual “businessman” and is “not rich… he’s not in the mafia”, like all the businessmen in Russia… A friend tells her she must “become friends with some Bolshoi donors” to be “dancing” (167-8). The next mention of “donors” is in reference to a guy Joy is dating, Andrew, in Boston, who “followed” her “to work galas” and “events for wealthy donors” (240). Another mention of donors comes earlier in the text. Joy speaks with Pat, who “served on the boards of many foundations”, and had introduced her to “people with an interest in the arts”. Pat is confused why Bolshoi is asking Joy to find sponsors, since they “just spent more than $680 million on a huge renovation”. She then asks an employer how much money she needs to bring in to get a dancing part as a “minor soloist role in Don Quixote”, and is told a minimum of $10,000. A friend flatly points out: “They’re trying to get you to pay for roles.” She defends her quest for donors by saying it is “fundraising” for a “foundation” (164-5). She drops the subject and does not mention it again. But since she danced in several shows, she is clearly hinting that she got American donors, such as perhaps her own father, to pay thousands to win these roles.
It is great that this book is disclosing corruption in ballet. But it is doing a disservice to this industry by claiming things are markedly worth in Russia than anywhere else. Joy is still performing in ballet companies, and has experience dancing internationally. She surely experienced similar requests for money, or sexual favors everywhere, starting with her studies in the States. Though this book and films on this topic were clearly sponsored by anti-Russian advocates who were only interested in blaming Russian villains. And this book probably would not have been accepted if Joy had been confessing directly of her own steroid use, life-long vomiting/starvation to be accepted into dance troupes and schools, and of prostituting or bribing her way into roles. I would really have preferred reading a frank version of this narrative. But despite the double-speak, it does clearly explain what happened.
Anybody considering becoming a professional dancer, or another profession where looks are the chief qualification should read this book first to measure their tolerance for abuse, and corruption. Ideally, such books would convince oversight agencies to prevent such things from happening in the future. But since this is unlikely, such books can at least stop girls and boys from being surprised.
The Origin of Critic-Silencing Abstract Art Marketing
Wassily Kandinsky; Rurth Ahmedzai Kemp, tr., Concerning the Spiritual in Art (with a Focus on Painting) and The Question of Form (London: Penguin Classics, May 13, 2025). Paperback: $16. 192pp, 5-1/16X7-3/4”. ISBN: 978-0-24138-48-0.
*****
“Wassily Kandinsky, one of the most famous abstract painters of all time, urges the reader to free themselves from art’s traditional bonds to material reality.” I would usually subtract puffery from a blurb, but in this case the puffery is the main premise: explaining why this book was deemed worthy of publication by Penguin Classics. “In this radical theoretical work, he calls for a spiritual revolution in painting, arguing that artists, much like musicians, should be allowed to express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Investigating form and color, spirituality and tradition, Kandinsky explores art’s resonance with the soul, its purpose and nature, and its power to inspire us, to stir our emotions and to help us see beyond the limits of our world. A… contribution to the understanding of non-objectivism in art…”
The “Introduction” explains that the first edition of this book appeared in German in 1912, and was first translated into English in 1914. Without a biography, the editor then dives into the covered theory. And it is mostly nonsense talk. Kandinsky argues for art “radiating” an artist’s “subtler experience” in their “soul”, baking a “spiritual bread to feed this… spiritual awakening”. Since a “soul” is unreal, unseen, and otherwise fictional, this argument is for critics to imagine art has unseen value even when the reality of what it is valueless (22-4). The parts that do make sense are plagiarizing or echoing Hegel’s Aesthetics, which argued art was “a vehicle for the developing self-consciousness of spirit”. Specifically: “The opening phrase of Concerning… ‘every work of art is the child of its time’—is lifted almost verbatim from the Aesthetics”. This is also the source of frequent references to “inner necessity”. It is a reproduction of Hegel that substitutes Hegel’s economics with references to Kandinsky’s own “abstract or non-representational paintings” (ix-x). Though oddly “in 1911 Kandinsky had not yet made any wholly non-representational paintings”, so this work is a “theoretical defense” of future work “in advance of its actual production” (xiii). This book’s success is why Kandinsky’s later paintings sold well as well. So, this work was a marketing tool that prepared the art market for buying nonsensical, or visually empty of complex content art before artists were contracted to execute this degraded vision. Curiously, this work also echoes “Viennese composer” Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony (1911), on which Schoenberg was working when Kandinsky wrote to him and formed a friendship. Kandinsky argues that Schoenberger has been “dismissed ‘as a ‘swindler’ and a charlatan’”. The one insult I found about Schoenberg appeared in peter Gay’s Schnitzler’s Century (2002): in December 1908, Arthur Schnitzler listened to Schoenberg’s “second quartet, opus 10” and wrote that during the show the audience had screamed: “Scandal!” Then, in 1912, he wrote that “Schenberg” was talked about as one of the known “swindle[s]” (221-2). Either way, Kandinsky borrows Schoenberg’s distinction between “dissonance” and “consonance” in music without much clarity regarding what relevance these musical terms have to art (xvi). In one section, Kandinsky objects to the use of echoing colors in a painting. He finds that “combining… two adjacent colors… to construct the chromatic harmony” is “inappropriate for the complex times in which we live” when “contrasts and contradictions—this is the harmony of our times” (81). This is a simplification. Surely, there are some subjects that require harmony, and some that require disharmony. Banning all color-harmony is clearly an absurd exercise that is contrary to achieving some authentic interpretation of reality in art. Though even this seemingly original note was not Kandinsky, but rather borrowed from Ewald Hering’s 1870s “opponent-process” theory that recommended simplifying colors to four, and preferring to use “oppositional pairs (green versus red, blue versus yellow)” because the eyes tend to notice opposition because of how “sensory responses” work (xviii). Kandinsky really should have cited these sources if his work almost entirely borrows from them with some nonsensical overlayed comments. While I am growing more and more annoyed with Kandinsky, the author of these introductory comments is doing a great job with explaining the artistic theory behind the convoluted phraseology that Kandinsky turned relatively simply ideas into. The translator has inserted annotative markets across the text to explain some of these citations missing in the original to make Kandinsky seem to be inventing this artistic science entirely on his own. One note explains a Biblical “Parable of the Talents” is being referred to, and explains what this parable is to clarify the reference (146).
The interior of the translated book is divided into sections on “Art in General”, and “Painting”.
I searched for what Kandinsky writes about the abstract. Kandinsky claims that the “urge” to derive a “pure composition” has turned people towards “what is most regular and also most abstract”, such as a triangle, or in more complex “numerical formulas” as seen in “Cubism” (squarism?). Kandinsky demands artists be given complete control over the degree of abstraction or “representation” in their work. “The lay person” is instructed to avoid questioning or describing: “What has the artist not done?” In other words, abstract artists who simply draw a triangle should not be asked why they have been lazy, and failed to present a more complex creation. The propagandistically allowed question is: “What has the artist done here? In what way has the artist expressed his own inner intention?” (133-4). He derides “critics” for “seeking out what is negative and deficient” and pressures them to be “conveying what is positive and proficient”, serving as puffers of art-dealers, and artists. Noting the logical question “regarding abstract art” critics raise: “How can we even distinguish between deficiency and proficiency? How does one identify a flaw?” He claims that while a negative and a positive would devalue a horse, in an “artwork… one important positive quality outweighs all the negatives, lending it value” (134-5). “The strong abstract resonance of physical forms does not necessarily mean the destruction of the representational…” as “component elements… become independently resonant abstract forms adding up to a holistic, abstract predominant sound” (135). In combination, this explains how most modern art critics still puff “abstract” art as superior, or sell for millions works with extremely simple shapes.
The non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is a recent reenactment of this trend, as the market cap worth of the “global NFT market”, according to Forbes, on May 14, 2025, is $77.43 billion. The NFTs are almost entirely abstract, cartoonish, nonsensical, and otherwise artistically horrid creations, and yet this is the category of art that seems to be worth more than the entirety of the serious “global art market that is only worth $57.5 billion” based on transactions carried out in 2024 (The Art Market).
The main point of art has become for crooks to launder money, or engage in tax-evasion, or other financial frauds. It is not to sponsor great artists in achieving heights of artistic excellence. And apparently, Kandinsky’s book was instrumental in driving the art market towards this increasingly trashy end. Given this, artists, critics, and art sellers absolutely must read this book to understand just what they are arguing for when they argue for “abstract” art that allows the artist to be as horrid as he wants to be, without allowing for critical objections.
Lesser Known History of Pre-Cleopatra Ancient Egypt
Toby Wilkinson, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, April 8, 2025). EBook. 384pp, 6.3X9.3”, 8 pages of full color illustrations, 20 illustrations. ISBN: 978-1-324052-03-6.
****
“…Story of ancient Egypt’s last dynasty. Alexander the Great and Cleopatra may be two of the most famous figures from the ancient world, but the Egyptian era bookended by their lives—the Ptolemaic period (305-30 BC)—is little known… Three centuries’ worth of extraordinary moments and charismatic figures. Macedonian in origin and Greek-speaking, the Ptolemies presided over the final flourishing of pharaonic civilization.” A “cultural reach” was “displayed at the height of their power: how they founded new cities, including Alexandria, their great seaside residence and commercial capital; mined gold in the furthest reaches of Nubia; built spectacular new temples that are among the foremost architectural wonders of the Nile Valley; and created a dazzling civilization that produced astonishing works of sculpture, architecture, and literature. Stunningly, he also shows how such expansionist ambitions led to the era’s downfall. The Ptolemaic period was a time when ancient Egypt turned its gaze westward—in the process becoming the unwitting handmaid to the inexorable rise of Rome and the consequent loss of Egyptian independence.”
The “Contents” divide the history chronologically by shifts in the dynasty’s standing: its rise, crisis, neurosis, and then the arrival of a “nemesis” (Rome). There is a helpful table listing “Macedonian and Ptolemaic Rulers of Egypt”, and a “Timeline” orienting readers in this distant historic narrative. And there is a chart that shows relationships between the main players in the dynasty: who birthed whom and the like. Researchers will also benefit from maps, including a map of the necropolis that was designed just for this book. I was surprised it had a huge “Jewish Quarter” next to the gymnasium in Ptolemaic Alexandria. I have been researching ancient Jews in the Middle East, and this is a curious bit of evidence that fills in this part of their history. The interior explains that when Ptolemy seized in 301 this region on the “coastal strip” one of the things he gained was “Jewish mercenaries and administrators from the formerly independent kingdom of Judaea.” They apparently played an “important part” in Egypt across the following centuries (49). Ptolemy II then probably performed “the first Greek translation of the Torah” (87). There were times when Jews were prosecuted over disloyalty, but they mostly had their “own quarter” where Ptolemy VI “granted them their own self-governing community”. He appears to have patronized Jewish writers as “an exegesis of the book of Moses by the philosopher Aristoboulos “was dedicated to” him (150-1). Hardships included Cleopatra “refusing ‘to distribute the necessary grains to the Jews” (263). This is pretty much all that is told about this massive Jewish settlement. Because the Torah is believed to have been first-written just before the 323-221 BC period where this story opens, and the first Greek translation was apparently made in the middle of this action, it seems very likely that this was the place where Jewish scholars first crafted their theology. Only a single copy of the Torah seems to be dated to before the period covered in this book. It has probably been inaccurately dated. And if Judaism was a major religion starting in the 7th century BC or earlier, there would have been many more copies of it. A book just focusing on what the Jews were up to in the final centuries of Egypt’s independence is clearly needed to explore the likely true origin of Judaism.
The “Introduction: Questions of Identity” starts with a picturesque description of what Queen Cleopatra would have seen from her chamber in the palace. Then, her suicide is dramatically described due to her failure to keep Egypt independent. The next section also travels to a time outside the focus of this study. Then chapter “1: Rise of a Dynasty” begins with Ptolemy’s birth in 367 BC.
I have not seen many books that explore the history of this distant time, so I believe it would be very helpful for researchers who specialize in this period, who will now have a compact and dramatically-written source to consult. There are too few citation notes for my taste to explain the sources for these various details. But there are summaries of “Sources” at the back of the book for each chapter. The sources seem to be not numerous enough to have warranted in-text citations. For example, much of “Chapter 13: Dangerous Liaisons” comes out of a few cited books: Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, and Alexandrian War, with a few citations of research on this period published somewhat recently between 1988 and 2020. I guess there would have been too many “Ibid., 1, 2, 3” etc. notes in the text is these few sources were cited throughout.
This is a thoroughly researched, and energetically told story that scholars are likely to enjoy as they benefit from it. So, academic libraries should purchase a copy for their collections to make it available for specialists, or enthusiasts.
Puffery of Colonialism over the Rights of Indigenous People to their Mountains
Lynn Galvin, Legacy of the Blue Mountain: A Novel (Reno: University of Nevada Press, February 11, 2025). Paperback. 442pp, 5.5X8.5”. ISBN: 978-1-647791-93-3.
***
“During the last century, strange tales have drifted from the Sierra Madre Mountains; rumors of battles, murders, robberies, and kidnappings between Mexicans and a mysterious, wild people. Recovering from double amputations, US Marine Nick Diaz returns from Afghanistan seeking healing at his family’s border ranch in Cochise County, Arizona. He finds the ranch renamed and declared a new nation by one cousin; another cousin is missing; the family’s cattle herd has been sold off; and smugglers roam the hills. As Nick attempts to adjust to his own physical challenges and to changes on the ranch, he discovers a people who may need more help than he does. What might happen to a group of Apache children, born in present times, yet living as if in the past and marooned in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico when their last renegade adult dies? As they attempt to reach their nearest, last known family members, they embark on a journey to a place none of them has ever seen or visited before. Will they be able to remain undetected while following a memorized path laid out in previous centuries that will lead them into the modern world? As the last remaining Apache children confront the challenges of survival in unfamiliar lands, will they endure long enough to reunite with their remaining relatives?”
This is a very strange summary. What does the marine have to do with the Apache children? The first half seems to be an anti-immigrant dystopia that imagines American lands confiscated by foreigners. Then, the journey of the children from wild isolation into “civilization” seems to echo Tarzan-like adventure. I have no idea what this author was thinking combining these concepts. I am currently writing a book that encourages combining unique plotlines to avoid formulaic ones, but combinations should be congruent, or should logically fit together.
I dive into this novel’s problematic structure in a section of my forthcoming book on speculative writing.
There are many other problems aside for the overall pro-colonial message. For example, the “wild” native children are presented as following abstract ideas, such as: “Look like what you are not” (5). In a realistic portrayal, these kids would have intricate knowledge of plants, and how to survive in the forested mountains. They either would have died immediately on losing a guardian, or if they could make it through a long journey to “civilization”, they would not have needed to find any relatives there, but rather could have continued being self-sufficient in the mountains. The rescue-narrative is a falsehood. Before colonizers came, these kids lived in top-quality farm land, probably did some farming on that same land, and probably in the same crops that the settlers later planted after confiscating the land from them. The othering of natives, and making them seem less intelligent or superstitious is a negative exercise.
I would rather not read further into this novel.
Dramatic Historical-Fiction on a Mass-Murdering Fraudster
Jerry Jamison, Vanishing Act: A Crashed Airliner, Faked Death, and Backroom Abortions (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2025). Hardback: $36; True Crime. 336pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 979-8-8818-0293-6.
***
“Over a span of 39 years, 23 aliases, 28 arrests in 20 cities, and nearly a dozen imprisonments, Robert Spears had lived a con artists’ life of unparalleled adventure and intrigue. This is his story. Shortly before Thanksgiving Day in 1959, a plane exploded in mid-air, killing all 42 passengers and crew and leaving scattered debris and bodies across the otherwise tranquil Gulf waters. Listed on the manifest was Dr. Robert Spears—once the highly regarded president of the Texas Naturopathic Association. Father of two small children with a lovely, society-minded wife and an elegant home in an exclusive neighborhood, it was a monumental tragedy for them as it was for all the souls lost that day. Less than two months later, Robert Spears miraculously ‘rose from the dead’ in Phoenix where he was promptly arrested. Headlining newspapers nationwide—’Man Downs Airliner to Fake Death’—Spears was discovered to have cleverly switched identities, persuaded his friend, Al Taylor, to fly with his plane ticket, asked him to carry ‘a package’ on board, and drove away in his buddy’s car with his wallet and driver’s license. As the FBI began to investigate, they uncovered a stunning, mind-bending tale of murder, abortion rings, and false identities—more than 25 aliases for Spears alone—as well as insurance scams and investment fraud that stretched over decades. But that was far from the end of the story.” This blurb certainly promises a fun read.
The opening paragraph of “Chapter 1: One Spectacular Flying Leap” dated “November 7, 1941” uses novelistic description that must be partly fictional because there is no way the researcher can know details such as that “gravel and dust” were spewing “in every direction as onlookers dived for cover”. Even if the author drove this road, and saw gravel flying: was this what the road was composed of nearly a century earlier? And was there an onlooker who reported jumping out of the way? Why isn’t a quote of what they said about this included? If not, then this is a fiction, and not a historic narrative. In the review of the Mountain hoax, I mentioned the blurred line between history and fiction: and this crosses it.
After describing a slow-motion chase with a gun going off and people vomiting (the proper way to start a high-tension novel in the middle of the action), the story goes into exposition about “College classmates… who had been president of his Student Council and was a promising engineering student”. Dr. Robert Spears is in the back seat of this car. It is a bit confusing what these people are doing together: apparently just ride-sharing, while some know each other (2). Spears is said to be moody, even before he discovers $485 of his cash is missing and accuses the group of stealing it, pulling out the gun. There are no citation marks over the quotes across this text: as Spears is threatening the group. They end up giving him what money they have: so it seems to be a robbery that ends with Spears stealing their car and “disappear[ing] into the Oklahoma horizon” (4). But apparently the others are still with him, as threats and intimidation with the gun continue (5). While this might be a climatic incident in other books, this is just an early-criminal-career high for this guy who later amassed “26 aliases in 20 different U.S. cities and Canada” across the following “two decades”, which concluded with the mass-homicide of the passengers on the plain in an attempt to fake his death, as mentioned in the blurb (7).
This is a pretty good read. But only as a historic-fiction, as opposed to a thoroughly researched analysis of the facts of this case. There are no standard notes to verify where the quotes, dialogue, or descriptions throughout are from. The bibliography starts with a “Note About Sourcing” that puffs the author as a great researcher, instead of explaining precisely what sources were behind what bits of otherwise fictional details throughout. This is very troubling for a book that covers an investigation into extreme fraud, murder, and other misdeeds that affected families, some of whom are still living.
Digressive Travelogue with a Bit of History About an Evil Belgian King’s Elephant Failure
Sophy Roberts, A Training School for Elephants (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025). Hardcover: $30. 432pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 978-0-8021-6486-5.
***
“Out of a sidelined, colonial-era expedition in Africa comes a new history of cruelty, deception and adventure. In 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa’s resources. The key to cracking open the continent, or so he thought, was its elephants—if only he could train them. And so he commissioned the charismatic Irish adventurer Frederick Carter to ship four tamed Asian elephants from India to the East African coast, where they were marched inland towards Congo. The ultimate aim was to establish a training school for African elephants… Pieces together the story of this long-forgotten expedition, in travels that take her to Belgium, Iraq, India, Tanzania, and Congo… A compelling cast of historic characters and modern voices, from ivory dealers to Catholic nuns… Story of colonial greed, hypocrisy, and folly.”
On reviewing this blurb, I am speechless. Why would they bring these elephants all this way. Why not just ship them to a coastal city, and try training them there? The frontmatter does not answer this question, as it ponders about racist literature of the time, and general questions of the evils of colonialism. The “Prologue” meanders into being stuck at home during the pandemic lockdown (2). The author and friends then gradually deicide on a trip and digress about trip-planning (5). There is a picture of “Elephants ploughing in Congo during the colonial period” (10). This suggests that the elephant plan was not a rabid fantasy, but rather was an applied attempt to farm, or colonize with elephants. So why is this story only about the four elephants that did not go too well? By the middle of the 20th century it was common to ride “captive elephants… at Gangala-na-Bodio”. There were “twenty to thirty times” more “African elephants” in “1879” than “now” (14). The point of focusing on Belgians seems to be to distract attention away from Britain’s colonial role. Even the next chapter “2: Shopping for an Elephant” begins with the author’s first-person reflections on his travels: to Brussels and Flanders… (22). Then, the fault is more narrowly focused on a single villain: King Leopold II, who from “1885 to 1908… held Congo as his private possession… before he was reluctantly forced to sell it to the Belgian state in 1908” (22). Instead of just presenting the history, this author explains how he conducted the research, and keeps refocusing on his travelogue that makes this an unreadable narrative for historians who just want to understand the facts.
There are some good photos in this book, and some curious descriptions of travel through Africa and elsewhere. The descriptions of elephants, or philosophizing is at times interesting. But this book cannot be easily used by a historian, unless they know what terms they are looking for, and they search the ebook for them. Reading this thing cover-to-cover would be nightmarish. I do not recommend researchers try unless they must.
Attempt to Archeologically Build a History for Greek Women
Emily Hauser, Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, June 2025). Cloth: $30. 496pp, 6X9”, 30 color plates, 70 halftones. ISBN: 978-0-226-83969-1.
****
“Weaving together literary and archaeological evidence, Emily Hauser illuminates the rich, intriguing lives of the real women behind Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Achilles. Agamemnon. Odysseus. Hector. The lives of these and many other men in the greatest epics of ancient Greece have been pored over endlessly in the past three millennia. But these are not just tales about heroic men. There are scores of women as well—complex, fascinating women whose stories have gone unexplored for far too long. In Penelope’s Bones, award-winning classicist and historian Emily Hauser pieces together compelling evidence from archaeological excavations and scientific discoveries to unearth the richly textured lives of women in Bronze Age Greece—the era of Homer’s heroes. Here, for the first time, we come to understand the everyday lives and experiences of the real women who stand behind the legends of Helen, Briseis, Cassandra, Aphrodite, Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso, Penelope, and more. In this captivating journey through Homer’s world, Hauser explains era-defining discoveries, such as the excavation of Troy and the decipherment of Linear B tablets that reveal thousands of captive women and their children; more recent finds like the tomb of the Griffin Warrior at Pylos, whose tomb contents challenge traditional gender attributes; DNA evidence showing that groups of warriors buried near the Black Sea with their weapons and steeds were, in fact, Amazon-like female fighters; a prehistoric dye workshop on Crete that casts fresh light on ‘women’s work’ of dyeing, spinning, and weaving textiles; and a superbly preserved shipwreck off the coast of Turkey whose contents tell of the economic and diplomatic networks crisscrossing the Bronze Age Mediterranean.”
The preface and introduction are not very well handled. They chat about the author’s childhood introduction to Homer, and about generally why so little has been written about ancient women. This was already stated in the blurb. Something more interesting, or new was needed in these sections. The first interesting fact appears on page 5, when the author comes across a magazine about a DNA finding from the Harvard Medical School. They have found DNA of “Four Mycenaeans” who were women in Greece between 1700-1200 BC “buried in a royal cemetery”, or at approximately the date and place described by Homer, who omits explaining what women’s lives were like, and thus such archeological evidence is needed.
There is a lot of speculation and hot air in this book. But there are some revelations about archeological fraud. For example, Schliemann smuggled a “hoard” of treasure he dug up “on a ship out of Turkey and into Greece” to avoid paying a share, or surrendering the historical pieces to the “Ottoman government”, and instead selling it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where it was displayed between 1877-80. These were jewels described as belonging to “Helen” and the city found was claimed to be Troy because of the cultural value placed on the myth of the Trojan War (30). To verify this claim, the author summarizes parts of Homer’s fiction, which mostly just has her be “silent” in a world seemingly controlled by men (34). The possibility is considered that Helen was merely “a Homeric fantasy” and never existed. In fact, the Trojan War and Troy might have been fantasies designed by Greeks to claim ancient ownership of an enormous territory with mere historic-fiction, instead of warfare. One piece of evidence noted that suggests this possibility is: “At Hisarlik, the circuit wall that Schliemann thought belonged to Homer’s Troy was just one layer in a site… these remains were far too deep to date to Homer’s Troy: one a thousand years too deep. “Priam’s Treasure’ dates to a layer of the city known to archaeologists as Troy II, to around 2400 BCE—more than a millennium before the Trojan War should have taken place” (36). This confirms my own speculations that most of ancient history is pure-fiction. But while there are no jewels at the correct Trojan War level there is evidence of a war there with: “Skeletons of unburied bodies… in the streets… Bronze arrowheads are scattered everywhere. Houses, their carcasses blackened by fire.” Thus, there are layers that show wealth, and a layer that shows complete destruction by war, but not the two of them together: indicating events could not have happened as Homer described. The author does not draw this latter conclusion (37-8). And the dating of the destruction is incongruent with an attack by Mycenaeans because their “palaces on the Greek mainland had already gone up in flames” (39).
The section on Linear B tablets describes financial records that had been kept and preserved by a central authority. These indicate there were many female “highly specialized textile workers operating in the heart of the palace at Pylos, experts at decorating a finely ornamented cloth border known as o-nu-ka. They’ve been allocated two female supervisors to oversee the work, one ‘TA’ (a supervisor for the group) and one ‘DA’ (a highly-ranked supervisor)”. The female workers’ children are also noted to receive a portion of “food” (59-60). While these records do not indicate these women were enslaved. The author assumes that they were because Homer described women from their area (Chian) in his portrayal of “Briseis—an enslaved woman who first appears at the opening of the Iliad, captive in the Greek camp in the hut of Achilles, who has claimed her as his war prize” (60). This projection is problematic because it claims slavery existed in ancient Greece based on a text with clearly false information about this period. Homer was a propagandist who would have been paid to normalize the use of slavery by the emperor of his time with the claim that this was an ancient practice. Trusting his opinion on this matter is thus historically frivolous. The author then argues that there is archeological evidence in Linear B to support they were enslaved because they were reliant on the palace for food, their children were fed and then some were put to work on reaching maturity, and they were segregated into a woman’s quarters. This is an absurd reasoning. Living in the palace would have been the most luxurious housing in the region. Children would have gained an education by working on-the-job and gaining skills from the highly trained craftsmen at the palace. Being segregated into a woman’s quarters would have given these women special safety from harm: they certainly would not have been sold off as prizes to soldiers to dwell in their huts (64-5). The author seems intent on supporting the traditional version of history, even as archeology fights against its accuracy.
This is a pretty good book, as it introduces some reality into history that tends to just repeat myths or fictions of old without overlaying it with the reality of what the dug-up evidence has been saying. Searching for evidence of what women were up to is certainly a worthy effort, as it can help change modern perceptions about what the “natural” or ancient role of woman has been. It certainly could not have been true that women spent their lives in total leisure while the men worked. Housework became extremely time-consuming at one point: it included laboring as a cook, launderer, plumber, cleaner, woodworker, teacher, farmer, gatherer, and several other tasks. There is much that books have been distorting with sexist subversions of truths. This is a good step towards reality. It should be helpful to researchers of ancient Greece, no matter if they are feminists or masculists.
A Hoax on the Profit-Drive to America’s Endless Wars
Phil Tinline, Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today (New York: Scribner, March 25, 2025). EBook: $29.99. 352pp. ISBN: 978-1-668050-49-1.
*****
“Investigative journalism that explores the surprising origins and hidden ramifications of an epic late 1960s hoax, perpetrated by cultural luminaries, including Victor Navasky and E.L. Doctorow. For readers curious about the surprising connections between John F. Kennedy, Oliver Stone, Timothy McVeigh, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump. Delve into the labyrinth of America’s conspiracy culture… unearths the roots of our era’s most potent myths. In 1966, amid unrest over the Vietnam War and the alarming growth of the military-industrial complex, little-known writer Leonard Lewin was approached by a group of ingenious satirists on the Left to concoct a document that would pretend to ratify everyone’s fears that the government was deceiving the public. Devoting more than a year to the project, Lewin constructed a fiction (passed off as the honest truth) that a government-run Study Group had been charged with examining the ‘cost of peace,’ setting its first meetings in the very real Iron Mountain nuclear bunker in upstate New York (which lent the resulting book, Report from Iron Mountain, its name). In Lewin’s telling, this gathering of the nation’s academic elite concluded that suspending war would be disastrous, forcing all sorts of bizarre measures to compensate. Lewin didn’t realize it at the time, but he’d created a narrative that fed the interests of both ends of the political spectrum—by promoting the idea that the government uses centralized power for evil… It explodes into America’s consciousness, dominates media reports, and sends government officials scrambling. And then, subsequently, how Lewin’s fabrication is adopted by a seemingly endless string of extremist organizations which view it as supporting their ideology. In this riveting—and, at times, chilling—tale of a deception that refuses to die is an unsettling warning about how, in contemporary times, a hoax may no longer be a hoax if it can be used to recruit followers to a cause.”
A common application in writing of believable lies is in hoaxes: either a humorous or a malicious deception. In 1966, Leonard Lewin was contracted by leftist satirists to write a report that described with theory, and some established facts that the Vietnam War had to be continued indefinitely because the “cost of peace” was greater than its benefits. This report was attributed as an official political document that resulted from secret meetings of a “government-run Study Group”. In other words, Lewin “masterly” created “a false document that would be taken for the truth.” Though only details regarding who designed this strategy and where were false, whereas the believable truth was that Johnson’s government was churning out similar reports to convince themselves war was necessary. This concept was inspired by the box-office success of Dr. Strangelove in 1964, which satirically exaggerated the insane desire to see nuclear annihilation among “men controlling America’s nuclear weapons”. This led to unfunny satires that were “logically extending a premise to its totally insane conclusion, thus forcing onto an audience… unwelcome awareness”.[1] Exaggerating and twisting the simple truth that America’s elite have been profiteering from endless wars creates appealing entertainment that seems to be designed to convince the audience such profiteering is mad, while also glorifying the desire for violence. There is a wide range of activities that can be classified as hoaxes. For example, calling the Institute for Historical Review by this innocuous name is a “hoax” because it “wasn’t a scholarly institution”, but rather “America’s primary promoters of Holocaust Denial”. The inaccurate application of names can trick readers into believing sources that sound scholarly, but are instead hostile propagandistic falsehood generators. One defense such hoaxers tend to use when cornered is to “falsely accuse” their “opponent of lying before they can truthfully accuse” them. There is a blurred line between hoaxes that maliciously deceive and crimes of deception, such as forging false identifications, or printing false currency. And a hoax is frequently both a deception and criminal. A fiction writer should avoid selling their fiction as true reports because this is where they cross into libel, treason, fabrication of official documents, or other charges. On the other hand, some fantastic fiction can be generated by following these same techniques to imagine a hoax, while labeling it honestly as a lie on its cover. One of the promoters of the Report was E. L. Doctorow who defended his later history-fiction blending novel, Ragtime (1975) with an essay on “False Documents”. Doctorow argued that what is labeled as factual-writing, including journalism and history, is a type of “regime language” because history is “a kind of fiction” generated by the regime for its propagation. Both fiction and nonfiction were on the “narrative” spectrum without a clearly definable line between them. History is frequently fictional either because a writer invents details regarding things nobody knows the truth about (such as things that happened before writing was invented), or propagandists spin the little that is known to make it seem as if their side is “good” and “won” a conflict. Thus, historic-fiction writers might be doing as much lie-telling as the original newspaper reporters who might have described events without in fact observing what happened, or having documented facts to rely on. Fiction is “the language of freedom” by which the mind must be “shocked, seduced, and otherwise provoked out of its habitual stupor”.[2] Well-written history tends to be as shocking and seductive as well-written fiction. Exaggeration and distortion are what turn the mundane into the exciting.
There are many interesting revelations across this book. There are sections about the guy who shot JFK (with notes that he faked his ID, and committed other petty frauds in his youth; the unlikelihood of Lee Harvey Oswald having been helped by others, and not acting alone has been equated as a hoax to this Iron Mountain hoax), and about the Oklahoma City Bomber (with explanations about how he was helped by radio-program wielding propagandists to direct the narrative of what this bombing meant).
This is just a very intense book with a lot of enticing side-stories. I did not notice any pointless digressions. Though there is a lot of theory, and quotes from people discussing the nature of lying. This helped me because I am writing a book about lying. Those who are similarly interested in the theory behind propaganda will be similarly interested. This is a good book for libraries of different types to have to allow readers access to its insights.
A New Version of an Artist’s Difficult Life: Paul Gauguin
Sue Prideaux, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2025). Hardcover: $39.99. 416pp. ISBN: 978-1-324-02042-4.
*****
A “portrait of the misunderstood French Post-Impressionist artist. Paul Gauguin’s legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this gorgeously illustrated, myth-busting work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved. Self-taught, Gauguin became a towering artist in his brief life, not just in painting but in ceramics and graphics. He fled the bustle of Paris for the beauty of Tahiti, where he lived simply and worked consistently to expose the tragic results of French Colonialism. Gauguin fought for the rights of Indigenous people, exposing French injustices and corruption in the local newspaper and acting as advocate for the Tahitian people in the French colonial courts. His unconventional career and bold, breathtaking art influenced not only Vincent van Gogh, but Matisse and Picasso… Upends much of what we thought we knew about Gauguin through new primary research, including the resurfaced manuscript of Gauguin’s most important writing, the untranslated memoir of Gauguin’s son, and a sample of Gauguin’s teeth that disproves the pernicious myth of his syphilis. In the first full biography of Paul Gauguin in thirty years, Sue Prideaux illuminates the extraordinary oeuvre of a visionary artist vital to the French avant-garde.”
The first point that drew my attention was just how they figured out Gauguin did not have syphilis. This is first addressed in the “Preface”. “Forensic examination by the Human Genome Project at Cambridge proved the teeth were Gauguin’s. Further tests carried out for cadmium, mercury and arsenic, the standard treatment for syphilis at the time. All leave mineral traces in the teeth and Gauguin’s teeth showed no trace of any of them”. In contrast, no attempt is made to disprove that Theo van Gogh suffered from syphilis, which led to his death shortly after Vincent (175). Later in the narrative there is a note that the doctor in Papeete’s hospital who treated Gauguin diagnosed him with “eczema complicated by erysipelas and with rupture of the little varicose veins”. Instead of being a villain who infected his subjects with syphilis, Gauguin is presented as a type of Thoreau who “built himself a hut of traditional materials… on the tiny island of Hiva Oa” before he died in 1903. This site of the hut was where in 2000 Gauguin’s four teeth were found, allowing for the testing (288). This is a great way to explain these facts. I feel as if I already know more about Gauguin than I did before. Knowing the truth about artists’ lives is very important for somebody with the ambition to also be an artist because it helps to understand what worked in the past to achieve eventual greatness.
The next thing that drew my attention are they many color illustrations of Gauguin’s paintings included in this book. I have seen a few of his drawings of native women, but have not seen the vast variety of what he created. For example, commonly-seen pieces show women in nature, while “Nevermore” (1897) shows a woman inside a public house, with dark shading in contrast with typical bright colors (296). Another novelty is Gauguin’s “Self-Portray (Near Golgotha) (1896). The author explains that the two thieves in the background, and the blank look in Gauguin’s face reflect his despair over developing “conjunctivitis in both eyes” that led to “difficulties seeing”. This disease seems to have been cured, but then the man from whom he purchased the land for his hut died, and his heir demanded he “move out” (298-9). As I prepare to move out of my tiny house after 8 years in semi-retirement, this note strikes a chord. I am moving for a good job, and will probably sell this house. But being forced out because of a land-dispute without an artistic job ahead, or a payment sounds terrifying. He took a spectacular risk of borrowing “1,000 francs at 10 per cent interest, repayable within the year” to buy “two and a half acres” of neighboring land. He decided to this time build a sound house, instead of merely a hut with a “plaited roof” that could be blown away by “a gust of wind” or walls that could be drenched “between the bamboos” (299). Obviously, his ambitious project failed when he soon owed “1,500 francs” but had no completed house because the cost of construction outstripped what he could borrow. And meanwhile his agent cancelled their contract. Though he still had a second agent, who had sold “1,035… for works”. He tried finding a patron, or winning a grant from the French state. Very little materialized from these hopes, as he was getting sicker, and was escaping into philosophical or theological writings. Apparently, he “suffered a series of heart attacks”, while drawing darker paintings of girls in mythic (apple-picking) settings (305). Then, he could not even afford “canvas” (306).
There is a curious photo of a girl with a fan, and echoing drawing from 1902 of the same subject. The photo was taken by “Louis Grelet, a Swiss-born professional photographer who was visiting the island at the time” (343). It seems there were several similar images circling in photos and paintings. Otherwise, I would be confused why Gauguin was not taking his own photos.
I usually dislike simplified art. But Van Gogh and Gauguin have always appealed to my desire to see a combination of quality-painting and emotional intensity. For example, “Clovis Asleep” (1884) shows a realistic container with intricately-painted details, but the girl in front of it is made with simple strokes. The girl is sleeping, so this lack of detail seems to evoke her unconsciousness (76). Or “Mette in Evening Dress” (1884): this is as elegant as any classical painter would have executed this theme, and yet it is simple, with thick daggered lines cutting across patches of paint (73). It seems simple, but replicating this combination of simplicity and complexity, with symbolic and emotional significance is very difficult in practice. Many have copied such paintings identically, but designing new ideas of this sort takes more than formulaic mimicry.
This is a great book that introduces readers to a biography of an artist in a way that makes it seem never-before-heard-of. Any library would benefit from adding it to their collection.
A First-of-a-Kind Collection of Greco-Latin Lyrics
Christopher Childers, Ed., The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse (London: Penguin: Random House: Penguin Classic, February 27, 2025). EBook: £16.99. 1008pp. ISBN: 979-0-141-39213-4.
*****
“The poets in this book are philosophers and statesmen; priestesses and warriors; teenage girls, concerned for their birthday celebrations; drunkards and brawlers; grumpy old men and chic young things. They speak of hopes, fears, loves, losses, triumphs and humiliations. Every one of them lived and died between 1,900 and 2,800 years ago. A volume without precedent. It brings together the best of two traditions normally treated in isolation, and in doing so tells a captivating story about how literary book culture emerged out of a society structured by song. The classical vision of lyric poetry as practiced by the greatest ancient poets—Sappho and Horace, Bacchylides and Catullus—mingles and interacts with our expansive modern understanding of the lyric as the brief, personal, emotional poetry of a human soul laid bare… What ancient poets were up to when they weren’t composing national epics, manuals in verse or pieces for the tragic or comic stage—when they were instead singing to the gods, or to their friends, or otherwise opening little verbal windows into their life and times…”
The introductory “Note on Lyric” defines it as “a song sung to the accompaniment of a lyre—and a set of meters associated with it.” But this volume includes “material that falls outside the strict definition of lyric” by expanding this definition to the more general “anglophone” usage of this term to refer to a short poem, even expanding it further to also include long or epic verse. Though later in the text there is a note that epics are not included, and thus Homer and other lengthy poets do not appear (5).
The “Translator’s Preface” notes that composing this book took the translator “ten years” because he did it himself, without involving “many hands”. The translation was complicated by needing to apply “meter, stanza and rhyme” to the texts that have not been previously translated (xv).
“Note on Meters” offers the much-needed definitions and explanations for the intricate categories of meter covered. The definitions for basic and complex terms such as “dactylic”, “iambic” and “aeolic” make this a good book for poetry professors to use in classes. The textbook that explains verse is accompanying an anthology of examples. Too often these components are separated into different books. I wish I could permanently save this ebook in my files, as I will probably need it if I teach poetry in my classes in the future. There are few equivalently thorough explanations of the science of measured verse. Sections are needed to note the many examples in this anthology of each meter. For example, the “Minor Ionic” is described with its “scansion” or meter pattern, its “Associations”, manner how it was translated consistently in this collection, and examples of poems where it is used, such as “Corinna” and Horace’s Odes.
Some of these translations have been previously published in different reviews and periodicals.
After these extensive notes and introductions, the book is organized chronologically. This is certainly necessary for a book with over 1,000 pages that spans different historic ages. The first section covers the “Archaic Period”. I just learned that “archaic” can refer to a specific age, as opposed to simply something antique. This “archaic” period began when the “Dark” period ended, and writing first appeared in 800 BCE (1). The introduction offers a good amount of needed details to understand what sort of poetry was written, and what was happening during these centuries.
Each author is also helpfully introduced with a biography and a note on their literary style and formulas.
There are elaborate and specific notes on each of the poems at the back of the book, with explanations for cross-references to other poets’ work, cultural references, history and the like. For example, there is an explanation that one poem “is a fine example of what pre-rhetorical’ Archaic oratory (that is, before the techniques introduced by the fifth-century sophists) could achieve” (596). This is useful to me because I have been thinking about rhetoric in my current research project.
This is a very enjoyable and useful book to review. I am tempted to keep reading more of it to insert additional evidence into my study of genres. These early poetic genres serve as foundations of modern genres, so there is much that they explain about our current fictional and poetic landscape. Anybody similarly interested in these subjects would be delighted to browse, or read through this collection. It would be a great additional to any library.
Police’s Bribery of Media to Profit from Bad Policing
Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News (New York: The New Press, April 15, 2025). Hardcover: $25.32. 432pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 978-1-620978-53-5.
*****
A “warning about how the media manipulates public perception, fueling fear and inequality, while distracting us from what truly matters.” It helps with “understanding the rising authoritarian mindset… He defines Copaganda as a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media that stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. Every day, mass media manipulates our perception of what keeps us safe and contributes to a culture fearful of poor people, strangers, immigrants, unhoused people, and people of color. The result is more and more authoritarian state repression, more inequality, and huge profits for the massive public and private punishment bureaucracy… How modern news coverage fuels insecurity against these groups and shifts our focus away from the policies that would help us improve people’s lives—things like affordable housing, adequate healthcare, early childhood education, and climate-friendly city planning. These false narratives in turn fuel surveillance, punishment, inequality, injustice, and mass incarceration. Copaganda is often hidden in plain sight, such as: When your local TV station obsessively focuses on shoplifting by poor people while ignoring crimes of wage theft, tax evasion, and environmental pollution. When you hear on your daily podcast that there is a ‘shortage’ of prison guards rather than too many people in prison. When your newspaper quotes an ‘expert’ saying that more money for police and prisons is the answer to violence despite scientific evidence to the contrary.”
For a book about propaganda, this blurb sounds very propagandistic. It repeats common talking-points of the left, without introducing new ideas to explain what this book will introduce that is new to this discussion.
The “Introduction” does start with a point I did not know before: “The U.S. and the Philippines are the only two countries that use for-profit cash bail companies” (1). This is followed by information that free in-person visits have been replaced with paid “phone and video call” visits to profit companies. More revelations follow, such as that a sheriff who declared he was hug-loving (and being celebrated by DNC for this) was in the process of banning in-person visits (2-3). I think the blurb of this book could have been improved by inserting some of these little-known facts to explain this book provides original content. Also interesting: there were six other “fatal Houston police shootings over a six-week period” running up to Floyd’s death that Houston’s sheriff was refusing to release to the public, probably to avoid uproars about those as well. The public tends to get more excited to video, versus the text that somebody was shot by police.
The author explains that in 2013 he received a grant from the Harvard Law School that allowed him to start a nonprofit for civil rights injustices, after he had been practicing public-defense law (7).
Though the problem I hope the rest of this book avoids is the one that “copaganda” tends to commit, as it “leaves the public in a vague state of fear” (13). The lack of specifics regarding who is propagandizing and for what and why and how would make this a horror-nonfiction. The recommendation to stop viewing “punishment as the solution” seems absurd, as without any legal punishments for crime, things can hardly improve. Yes, it would be logical to address “poverty; lack of affordable housing” and the like, but how would focusing on these other projects help decrease copaganda, or solve criminal problems?
Just as I started to have doubts, I found some more new information. “Cultural copaganda” has apparently been practiced by the CIA “starting in the 1950s, funding projects like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop or fronting literary magazines to influence modern journalism and fiction writing”. As a publisher of a couple of journals, and somebody who just tried to start a writer’s residency, I should know if the CIA is funding my rivals. They are likely to be funding science fiction magazines (which tend to publicize spy-gadgets etc.), and that’s an area I have just been trying to enter. And this would explain why I have struggled with entering the film industry as it might be monopolized by “the DEA paying Hollywood in the 1990s to insert drug war propaganda into popular television shows”, including arguing that prosecutors are performing “God’s work”, as opposed to flawed humans who occasionally make mistakes (15-6).
Based on my research into publishing (media is a type of publishing), most news/ publications must have a sponsor, or somebody who is profiting from sharing a type of press-release that is marked as editor-checked “news”. There is likely to be only a tiny percentage of books published without any sponsorship from the person whose byline, or brand is being advertised. The overwhelming use of ghostwriters, and the lack of disclosures about how books or stories are chosen for publication allows this system to continue. It started in the earliest days of print. So, this author is taking on this enormous problem as he attempts to track coverage of “shootings” that coincide with election periods. The latest US presidential election saw the loser spend around a billion. On what? On purchasing coverage in the news etc. that portrayed her side as in the right. The author notices that after a story manages to go viral, echoing stories tend to “contain… the same quotes, sources, turns of phrase, and suggestions of more surveillance” (37). This is because the publicist paid for placement in these various sources, and this payment (in ads or indirectly) is not mentioned as the reason for the reposting. If editors/writers had been researching the press release by doing original work instead of using the publicist-provided content, we would be in a very different country. Such bribery is explained as “marketing teams” at “news outlets” having impact on “editorial decisions”, as opposed to having all power over what is allowed in print (42). There is evidence offered for how this corruption works, such as that police spend millions on their propaganda units, and occasionally appoint reporters who publish “false information that” cities like “San Francisco police fed the reporter” to “fill a vacant spot on the Board of Supervisors, which controls the police budget” (65). All these problems mean that nobody who is non-corrupt, and is simply the best candidate for a given job in the media, or for public departments can be hired, as only those in on these schemes can be let in, to avoid the whole system collapsing over such misdeeds.
There are sections of this book that are too repetitive, and too vague. But there are many revelations that will help those who are trying to understand how the public is being manipulated into believing falsehoods with government funds. This book should help anybody who is researching these topics, as well as members of the public who want to understand what has been happening to them as they consume the media, or encounter policing.
Useful Anthology of Elegies from Across Human History
Andrew Motion, and Stephen Regan, eds., The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of Memory, Mourning and Consolation (New York: Penguin Classics, April 1, 2025). Paperback: $22. 688pp, 5-1/6X7-3/4”. ISBN: 979-0-241-26962-6.
****
“The comprehensive guide to a deeply human tradition of memory, mourning, and consolation through poetry. Elegy is among the world’s oldest forms of literature. Born in Ancient Greece, practiced by the Romans, revitalized by the poets of the Renaissance, and continuing down to the present day, it speaks eloquently and affectingly of the experience of loss and the yearning for consolation. It gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp.” Traces “the history of this tradition, from its Classical roots in the work of Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid down to modern compositions exploring personal tragedy and collective grief by such celebrated voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Terrance Hayes and Alice Oswald. The only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language,” it “is a… compendium of the fundamentally human urges to remember and honor the dead, and to give comfort to those who survive them.”
The organization of this book is alphabetic. I think a chronologic order would have been more useful for scholars. As is, excerpts from the King James Bible are between John Berryman’s 20th century and Laurence Binyon’s 19th century poems. But researchers who are more interested in the famous bylines covered than in the history of this genre would probably find this order more useful.
The elegy genre is problematic because it tends to be made up of paid-for pufferies that glorify wealthy patrons of the authors after their deaths. Many wealthy widows, siblings and the like can be convinced to sponsor the authorship of verse celebrating the deceased as they also spend money on a fancy funeral, or a tombstone. Poems about deceased also tend to illicit sympathy in readers, as is the case with the poem to “Milton’s… dead wife”, whom he sees in a vision as a “saint”: this allows equation between a deceased and sainthood that would have been sacrilegious in other contexts.
The “Introduction” explains that the Greek elegy initially referred to the “elegiac couplet—which consisted of alternating hexameter and pentameter lines” on any subject. Then, Romans turned to sorrowful reflections in elegies (xxvi). The early Christian “pastoral elegies” were highly formulaic: opening “with” a repeating “invocation to the Muses, calls on listeners to mourn the death of a young shepherd”, and other echoes. Then, during the Renaissance these became most capitalistically sponsored projects flattering the rich (xxvii). In this context, Wordsworth’s poem about an “unknown” woman called “Lucy” who “few” noticed died, but makes “The difference to me!” is thus a dark satire about such expressions of fake sorrow to elicit sympathy. Or ending with platitudes in a poem about William Wordsworth’s brother John at sea in 1805: “A power is gone, which nothing can restore; / A deep distress has humanized my Soul”.
There are some short summaries of the origin of the covered poems at the back of the book, in the “Notes” section. There are too few notes for a scholarly edition in the body of this book. Some of the older elegies are likely to need more explanation. For example, the “Introduction” mentions that Bion’s antique “Lament for Adonis” is “an important influence on Shelley’s Adonais”, but only that it’s about a shepherd, and a classical pastoral elegy is mentioned here, and then at the end there is a paragraph that explains Bion was “an Ancient Greek poet from Phlossa…” Then, there’s a note about when it was written, what it is like, and who translated it. There’s nothing about the historical context to explain what’s happening in this text (538). The poem includes references to characters such as Love (deity) and Nymphs, and Cypris, and places like Acheron’s shore populated with kings. Many things here can benefit from some annotation (38).
This is a pretty good collection in that it helps researchers in this field by collecting in one place a variety of elegies that are all translated into English. Researchers can then generate parallels and comparisons between these works for their unique research by searching for words, or themes across these, instead of having to search separately across these different writers’ texts, or various previous anthologies that included some elegies. The elegy genre is one that deserves closer study especially because of the problems with this genre I previously mentioned. The way humans mourn, or profit from expressing sadness over death needs to be studied as most canonical tragedies, and most pop modern movies rely on showcasing death, and convincing readers or viewers to feel sympathy over it. For these reasons this is a worthy endeavor. But I expect more of Penguin Classics: one of my favorite sources for classical literature.
Great Collection of Barely-Read Dramatic Stories of Tennessee Williams’
Tom Mitchell, Ed., Early Stories by Tennessee Williams (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, April 15, 2025). Paperback: $20. 328pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 979-1-68597-004-8.
*****
“An edited collection of thirty-one previously unpublished short stories written in the 1930s, when Tennessee Williams” (1911-1983) “was living in the Midwest during a tumultuous period for the nation and himself. The stories highlight aspects of the writer’s biography relative to his young adult years in St. Louis, Columbia, and the Missouri Ozarks, offering insight into the relationships between the author, his family, and close friends.” It is a bad idea for biographers to base interpretations of an author’s life on what he or she states in their fiction. One problem comes up if work was ghostwritten by somebody else, who is describing their own relations, and not the contractors. “The influence of proletarian fiction and leftist ideas are evident in Williams’s stories of the Great Depression, as are themes of sexual turmoil and inner passions inspired by authors like D. H. Lawrence. In notes for each story, additional context is provided regarding locations, occupations, and individuals. All of this enriches a critical understanding of Tennessee Williams’s major works such as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Night of the Iguana, and Suddenly Last Summer.” I recall reading Streetcar (1951) in school: it’s a play about a wealthy socialite leaving wealth to live in a cheap apartment in New Orleans. He is mostly known for his plays, and for turning them into screenplays or popular movies. The art of finding high-drama in ordinary conflict between characters is certainly something modern writers can learn from. In the 1930s, Williams was entirely unknown, working menial jobs until his LA agent helped him win a major play grant in 1939, after which he took off. Thus, it is certainly important to go back to what he was writing during these early years, as his work declined post-fame, so maybe it was better before it.
Looking inside “Stair to the Roof (or Episodes from the Life of a Clerk)” does prove Williams knows how to handle a suicide. The story starts with a body dropping to “the concrete. One limb, amputated by the cornice, slid several feet along the walk. It splashed the black skirts of a candy vendor. She screamed and fainted” (233). This opening meets the requirement that a story must start in the middle of the action or at the climax. It also examines and draws the details of how this scene looks unflinchingly. If an author is going to describe a suicide, they really must be willing to look at the body, just as a coroner might. The emotional appeal is also succinctly handled as the woman merely screams and faints at this truly gruesome sight. It would be less impactful if more details regarding her reaction, or what she said about it interrupted this heightened-emotionally action scene. Then, the crowd is shown to be gawking at the corpse to stress it is an interesting sight for the public. And some reflections are offered about the struggle between looking and averting gazes at the sight of death. Then, a traffic-cop is introduced to pressure the crowd away, thus inviting readers to look closer because this is a forbidden sight. Then, somebody asks simply “What happened?” The simply answer is that somebody jumped off the roof, but then the rest of the story offers the exposition regarding what led this guy to take his own life. Readers have seen the climax, and have been encouraged to read on to receive the detailed answer regarding what motivated this violent conclusion. Then, the story picks up with an exposition about the Atlantic Shoemakers company, with back-shadowing mentions of it having “a short flight of steps” to a chamber that controls “the freight elevators” (234). This helps explain the title, and clarifies that the clerk works in this space and has negative feelings about this claustrophobic setup. An intricately detailed drawing of the rest of the space follows before a note that the “roof is no longer accessible” because it is locked with “chains”, with a joke foreshadowing: “It is probably an unnecessary precaution.” Then a clerk called Edward Schiller is described climbing in secret to this roof to enjoy “a brief illusion of escape”, as he took in the view of the “ocean” and a sense of “flight” this height inspired (235). The lack of social mobility for this clerk is explained is a single succinct paragraph that describes his childhood, family, and a sense of staleness (236). Then, abuse is mentioned, and reprimands from teachers to stop writing about “things” that “don’t exist”, as he senses he is beginning to go mad by seeing a “blue ghost” (237). The rest of the story opens up with more casual chatter, and conversations”, before the psychology or thinking that led to the jump are summarized, and then we are taken back to the scene after the body is seen falling (249). Most of the story’s interior when a reader might be tempted to skim is full of relevant details that add further explanations for the jump, and so somebody who skimmed to the end would be tempted to go back and read the rest. And after the jump there is a brief half-page resolution where the officer asks about witnesses, and the scene is cleaned up: “The show was over” (249). This combination of detail and choppy dialogue seems to be the style most popular fiction writers are imitating, but they tend to digress within paragraphs that promise in their opening to cover a single topic, or they tend to have irrelevant dialogue, instead of focusing the conversation on the body or even under scrutiny. And the structure of this story is appealing because it is surprising, as opposed to the standard way of handling a suicide-narrative. By contrast, another story in this collection about a suicide, “Grenada to West Plains”, the narrative starts with a salesman having a difficult time selling shoes from Novelty Footwear in the city of Grenada: “He had talked himself hoarse, passed out fifteen-cent cigars” and paid for a “dinner”, having to sit through an annoying conversation (39). It is not even clear at the end if somebody has died, as the shoe-selling carries on. The theme of deadly depressing and pointless jobs and marriages is extremely common among American canonical fiction and drama; it seems the Americans picked up on this realism in a wave after the Brits abandoned naturalism by 1900. Curiously, “Grenada” ends with a scribbled note from the author, who gives himself the pseudonym “Thomas Lanier Williams” while accurately reporting the year he was born, where he studied, and where he was published.
This is a great book for writers to buy to learn about the craft of short fiction from somebody known to be great, and yet whose short stories have had almost no exposure, and thus they will surprise and delight readers for the first time. The thorough commentary would also help teachers who want to teach this book in their classes, in place of common novels or plays that too many students probably read before.
Imaginings About What a Shared Language’s Origin Could Have Been, While Avoiding Crediting India for the Indo-European Branch
Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (Dublin: William Collins, April 24, 2025). Hardback: £22.00. 336pp. ISBN: 979-0-00-862652-5.
***
“One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story. As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia. This ancient tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, soon exploded out of its cradle, changing and fragmenting as it went, until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today those descendants constitute the world’s largest language family, the thread that connects disparate cultures: Dante’s Inferno to the Rig Veda, The Lord of the Rings to the love poetry of Rumi. Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity. How did this happen? Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the silk roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings—the ancient peoples who spread these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve those lost languages: the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed this ancient diaspora. What they have learned has vital implications for our modern world, as people and their languages are on the move again.”
I have been working with linguistics recently, and have been wondering about why humans tend to borrow or steal other peoples’ ideas versus developing something new. The relationship between Indian and European languages is also one that needs to be explored further to bring cultures that seem desperate to the proximity where they started on the Silk Road whereby shippers began to move languages and goods around the globe long before some parts were “discovered” by European authors.
The preface begins by wondering at the amazing feats of modern archeology that can “determine the hair, skin and eye color of the people who we buried” long ago. Then, finding some prehistoric people played a “ball game” is said to have led the author to the study of prehistoric language. This is an especially difficult field because “prehistory” is defined as a time before written language, so it’s a contradiction of terms.
The Introduction also has an interesting opening in a section on “Ariomania”. It reminds readers that it was not only languages that Europeans borrowed from India, but also religion, as India’s “most powerful god” was Father Sky, Dyauh pita, in Sanskrit, who was borrowed by Greeks in Zeus pater, and then by Romans in Iuppiter, and in Old Norse Vikings variant of Tyr, or Old English Tiu. My own research into Renaissance ghostwriters suggested that some of the echoes during the Renaissance resulted because authors were forging manuscripts they were assigning to earlier times, and thus compressing the speed of borrowing, or editing of such names from one culture to the next. European historians deliberately confused the source of these borrowings by insisting pagan or Old Norse or Indian religions were strange and different, whereas Greco-Roman religions were founding for European culture. Thus, it is important for books like this one to review the lineage of these theologies and languages to remind us where our culture is borrowed from.
The uncertainty about just when things were written or forged does make me question how this book could have arrived at any clear findings regarding the Lingua obscura that is discussed at the start of the first chapter: “Genesis”. The chapter begins with theological speculations about a great-flood that turn into geological evidence of merging of seas. Then, a history is given of early farmers coming out of hunter-gatherers. The clash between “herders and farmers” moving into each other’s territories is said to have been a clash in the Black Sea and Caucasus region that was likely to generate a first murder, or violent clashes that apparently generated the first “Indo-European languages” (40-1). This is too abstract for my taste. Why would these fighters need to write each other letters? Why is this happening in the Caucasus and not on the border with India?
After a digression about some archeologist or gold digger, there is finally a mention of a giant gold find in a grave in 1974 with “bracelets, rings, a sceptre, a penis sheath, even a gold-spangled hat”: this suggests to the author it was “a chief or priest” (43). These artifacts are attributed to the Hamangia: European farmers. But there is no mention yet of signs of a language in these finds. Some pages later, the author argues that across “recorded history” humans have usually been “trading in high-value goods” with “an effective means of communication”, with a shared language-of-commerce (50). The rational argument here is to note that Indian traders must have traveled by-ship or by land into Europe and brought Indian languages with them, which were bastardized by Europeans when they were away. But this is not the argument given, as Europeans are claimed to have possessed unique languages before a common language was introduced by merchants (51-2). This whole chapter is basically a fiction, without any factual evidence in the remains to prove where this common language came from, or when. This lack of certainty is not acknowledged but rather is covered with speculations that are presented as history, without citations.
The second chapter again begins with dreamy geographic description, instead of with facts about languages. There are digressive descriptions of trips taken over the steppe, or to museums: all irrelevant.
This book is another example of unreadable history. The author seems to have deliberately coated the few inserted facts with flighty digressions, and barely founded speculations. Too many historical fictions have been written on this subject for us to need another one. I do not recommend diving into this book unless a reader is closely familiar with this subject and searches precisely for what they are looking for to help their unique research: so probably a searchable ebook version would be best.
Digressive Chat About Carpets
Dorothy Armstrong, Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets (New York: St. Martin’s Press, June 17, 2025). Hardcover: $33. 368pp; Nonfiction. ISBN: 978-1-250321-43-5.
***
“…The stories surrounding twelve of the world’s most fascinating carpets. Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world’s 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibers from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots…. Tells the histories of some of the world’s most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world’s powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers’ lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop. In its wide-ranging examination of these dazzling objects, from the 5th century BCE contents of the tombs of Scythian chieftains, to the carpets under the boots of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Peace Conference,” it “uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet.”
I have been thinking about crafts lately. There have been many great television series about glass-blowers, sword-shapers and the like. This is a current topic especially because of ongoing discussions about putting enormous tariffs on foreign goods to make American products more sellable. This type of research into just how much extraordinary cheap work goes into making great artistic crafted objects, such as carpets. It would be absurd for Americans to compete with people who have spent generations in such practice. It is also refreshing that history is being cut up into these curious segments. And there have not been enough histories published in English about topics about the East and the Middle East. Our misunderstanding of these places is what’s driving current military wars in the Middle East, and trade ward with the East. So a bit more understanding is useful.
The preface explains that the author has “sometimes” been “referred” to as “the carpet woman” because she has returned to school to focus on studying this subject.
The introduction explains that the first part of this book considers the “movement west of nomadic tribespeople out of the Petri dish of Central Asia from around 500 BCE.” They brough with them “the carpet-weaving practice” of nomads. Then, she refuses “the Eurasia-wide resurgence of the” 15-17th centuries. Then, a look at the “Age of Empire, the peak of Western colonialism” in the 19-20th centuries, when they were guilty of “cultural appropriation” of carpets. This is a useful introduction as it helps readers orient themselves, and find the content relevant to their interests. The “Contents” page just breaks these down by the name of the carpet, their period, without explaining this broader grouping.
“Chapter One: Chieftain” describes a “knotted-pile carpet” from the 3-4th century BCE in Siberia. Some negative things begin to be apparent here, as the chapter begins with a description of animal-herding without a clear explanation why this is relevant to carpets. A couple of pages in, there’s the first note about a “rug with ancient religious systems” with “dots” that are “dating back to the Neolithic” that “may represent the sun”. It is frustrating when historians assume circles stand for the sun or religion because I am sure that ancient people were mostly atheists, and only religious colonists convinced the world they were worshipping strange gods to turn them into “others”. Then there’s talk about this “old carpet” having faded colors. If it’s thousands of years old, it would be very strange if it was not faded. Then the author keeps returning to how she is feeling about this carpet and its “strange and archaic” look. Only in the next section are some details offered about this place being high above sea-level in Siberia, but then there are new digressions about it being “remote”.
This is not a good book. It is conversational, and too fluffy for a history. The blurb makes a lot of promises and got me pretty excited about what this book could have been, but it’s just not what actually appears in these pages. This is not a recommended read.
Horrid Book on How Not to Teach
James W. Loewen; Nicholas Loewen and Michael Dawson, eds., How to Teach College: Inspiring Diverse Students in Challenging Times (New York: The New Press, April 22, 2025). Hardcover: $24.36. 256pp, 5.5X8.5”. ISBN: 978-1-620979-20-4.
*
“Full of strategies and secrets to inspire and invigorate students, this is a must-read for educational leaders at every level looking to deepen the impact of their teaching and inspire students to stay curious, vigilant, and engaged… A resource for professors teaching in increasingly fraught American classrooms. With a special emphasis on teaching students from diverse backgrounds and potentially controversial subjects”, a “posthumously published book… Offers advice on: How to make content come alive with vibrancy, leading to knowledge retention, comprehension, and student engagement. How to convey a love of one’s topic and motivate students to become lifelong learners—both in the classroom and outside of it. How to efficiently design a syllabus, manage the classroom, and optimize testing and grading. The importance of ethics and open-mindedness when it comes to shaping young minds, and how to incorporate freedom of thought into each and every lesson. As a leading sociologist of race relations and a prizewinning college educator with a teaching career spanning over half a century at Tougaloo College, Harvard University, University of Vermont, and Catholic University, Loewen taught the way he wrote: with creativity, humor, and a high expectation that students can handle the truth. Edited by Loewen’s son… longtime high school teacher, as well as sociology professor Michael Dawson…”
I just accepted a job offer to teach English as an Assistant Professor, so I hope to find some inspiration in these pages. Most of the interviews I had asked about how I would handle conflict, and diversity. Many schools require a diversity statement as part of an application. I am unsure what the correct answers to these questions are. I have mostly taught diverse students across the years when I was teaching. Though the “Contents” page started hinting that the advice here is contrary to my standard preferences because there’s a section “On (Not Lecturing)”. I can’t imagine failing to lecture. The Introduction clarifies that the author is “not against lecturing”, but rather shows how to minimize lecture time, and encourages use of media to fill the time instead. This is not really a good idea, in my experience. Showing video content tends to distract students, instead of focusing them on a subject. And they seem to conceive such insertions as filler-time. This chapter begins in the first-person with digressive commentary on talking being “not good enough”. Then, there’s an example that one professor was only lecturing to a single student until the author intervened by recommending seeing “each student in the dorm” to forcefully “get them all to come to the next class, and start over.” This is a very, very bad idea. The closest I came to this was when I lived on-campus at Shantou University, and asked to hold counseling sessions with students in my apartment, instead of dirty, dusty, over-filled office. The students seemed to be frightened by the setting into silence. It would be absolutely terrifying for them if I had found out where each of them live, and come by to insist they had to come to the next class. And then, “start over”? As in beginning teaching the same stuff I already covered? This is not a helpful book, so far.
Chapter 2 apparently recommends including “trigger warnings” for risky topics. I believe it is best to avoid introducing topics that need a trigger warning… Though I might be thinking about sex and violence, and this author might have less triggering things in mind. Inside the chapter, it is explained that “college should trigger some kinds of anxiety”, including when discussing race, sexual orientation, patriotism, religion. But even if these topics are said to not be off limits. The warnings are explained to be needed so those suffering from PTSD can receive special permission “to avoid a certain reading” etc. This strange recommendation is immediately contradicted with the note that students should not be allowed to skip assignments because of discomfort because they are “adults” (31). As an example, he cites a student coming home in tears after a “unit of the Holocaust” (32-3). A discussion on if this means the Holocaust should never be covered follows. One time, my students started yelling the Holocaust wasn’t real, and when I noted my relatives died in the Holocaust, they started questioning how I could know they died if I wasn’t there. That was pretty triggering. But I don’t think it’s legal to ask teachers to put trigger warnings about the Holocaust, or any of these other topics on a syllabus. Race? Imagine having a paragraph in a syllabus that explains which books in the syllabus mention people of other races? That is absolutely illegal. The question of race resurfaces across this book. In one section there is a note: “the massive traumas of American racial slavery disconnected enslaved African Americans from African cultural ways…” The enslavers are said to possibly be right, in that they left the Africans some “cultural habits” (129).
I’m out on this book. This might be the worst book ever written about teaching. Just to check I skimmed to the end and found questions from “Southern Democrats… about the capacity of African American citizens to vote responsibly” (197). What on earth does some blatant racism have to do with a book about how to enhance teaching strategy. I don’t even think I have to explain what’s wrong with all this. No useful information is given. The text is conversational, and rambling. And the things that are being babbled about are offensive and triggering to most self-conscious students as well as teachers. Don’t read this book. Nonsense is excusable in fiction: that’s pretty much what pop fiction is usually. But it is inexcusable in a title designed for teachers.
A Fiction About Roman Emperors Interpreted as History
Suetonius; Tom Holland, translator, The Lives of the Caesars (New York: Penguin Books, April 29, 2025). Hardcover: $35. 432pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 979-0-143107-70-5.
****
“A… new translation of Suetonius’ renowned biography of the twelve Caesars, bringing to life a portrait of the first Roman emperors in stunning detail.” The term “Caesar” in this context refers to Roman emperors. The emperors covered here start with Julius and stretch to Domitian. “The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, to thrill, to dazzle. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biographies invite us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than those by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, written from the center of Rome and power, in the early 2nd century AD. By placing each Caesar in the context of the generations that had gone before, and connecting personality with policy, Suetonius succeeded in painting Rome’s ultimate portraits of power. The shortfalls, foreign policy crises and sex scandals of the emperors are laid bare; we are shown their tastes, their foibles, their eccentricities; we sit at their tables and enter their bedrooms. The result is perhaps the most influential series of biographies ever written.” They were employed to convince much of the world in the idea that empirical conquest was glorious and heroic, as opposed to a barbaric massacre of “others” with the goal of enslaving them, and confiscating their lands. Such conquest was mostly achieved through such historic and biographic fictions, as opposed to by seriously fighting each tribe across regions being dominated. It is important to study this foundational text, but to do so with the realization that it is propaganda, as opposed to accepting it as a set of “historical facts”. “That Rome lives more vividly in people’s imagination than any other ancient empire owes an inordinate amount to Suetonius…”
The “Contents” explains that this book is logically divided into sections by the names of the emperors. There are helpful appendices summarizing the many different covered “Names and Dates” and the “Principal Characters”. The frontmatter also includes a useful family-tree of Augustus, and maps of the Roman regions. These are standard parts of Penguin classics, and the reason I prefer them over other editions of canonical texts. There are 30 pages of notes at the back of this book. These notes explain parts of the text, such as that a strange place-name refers to “what is now Switzerland” or that a given event took place on “17 November AD 9”.
The “Introduction” suggests (without meaning to) that this set of biographies might have been ghostwritten between 800-14 by a Frankish scholar called Einhard or by a still later forger who also forged Einhard’s” echoing biography of Charlemagne. This is because this Frankish scholar claims his far-from-Rome church has the sole surviving copy of this Caesars manuscript. If there had only been one copy of an authentic text; it would have only survived by being stored in a volt in a castle that is still standing from Roman times (even if revitalized). But the editor of this edition does not reach these conclusions, as this is contrary to the mainstream propaganda about Roman exceptionalism and the truthfulness of such “histories”.
How could any writer at the end of the period of hundreds of years of covered history have written anything but fiction when adding so much detail for biographies about which there were no primary sources that had made these descriptive claims earlier? Imagine if there were no history books in the library and you set out to write a history of the previous ten Popes. Suetonius is claimed to have written this work in 121AD, and describes a period between 49BC and 96AD, or equivalent to a modern author writing about a period dating back to 170 years ago (or 1855) with only living-memory dating back to under 90 years ago, and only rudimentary government and financial records as evidence. And if, as is more logical, the biographies were ghostwritten hundreds of years later: they must be echoing earlier falsehoods while imagining whatever suited current propagandistic needs, such as European expansionism and feudalism. The translator claims that “Suetonius’… sources” must have been “multiple and various” to write such extensive biographies. For example, he includes claims such as, “I quote them verbatim” (xxxi). Such quoting is a very recent scholarly device, so it is very unlikely an ancient author would have used such scholarly references. And the likely ghostwriter deliberately inserts the note that “3,000 bronze tablets” were destroyed in “AD 69” because of supposedly “fighting between supporters of Vitellius and Vespasian on the Capitol resulted in a devastating fire” (302). The lack of such evidence is the reason this work is likely to be fictitious. More recent Renaissance scholars might have cared about adding claims that evidence that could have proven them to be liars has been destroyed, as opposed to never having existed; but it is improbable that an ancient scholar would have understood such concerns. He simply would not have known about the existence of documents that were in the Capitol before his time of authorship. Suetonius writes: “these tablets—which covered alliances, treaties, and special privileges granted to individuals—were the oldest and most precious records of Rome’s empire in existence, featuring as they did decrees of the senate and resolutions of the people that dated back almost to the foundation of the city” (302). Why would he have such a detailed account of what was lost in the year when he was born: 69AD? The translator focuses on Suetonius’ grief over this loss, instead of the likelihood that this need to protest-too-much about missing confirming evidence indicates a fraud that is pulling on the readers’ emotions to distract from the missing facts. Other mentions of evidence in tablets in the body of Suetonius’ text include a note that “inside the tomb… in which Capys, the founder of Capua, was said to have been buried… they found a tablet of bronze, on which the following message, inscribed in Greek words and characters was written: ‘When the bones of Capys are disturbed, then shall one of his descendants be slain at the hands of a kinsman, and soon afterwards be avenged, at terrible cost to Italy.’ (The source for this, by the way, should anyone suppose it mere fantasy or fabrication, was Cornelius Balbus, a man who knew Caesar extremely well.)” (42). It is difficult to imagine a phrasing that is more self-accusatory. The note that disturbing the bones of a corpse will bring a curse is clearly intended to keep readers from researching the “fabrication” or fantastic untruthfulness of this direct quote from a non-existent or imagined source. The self-reflective parenthetical note that credits Cornelius Balbus is absurd because no books by this claimed author survive, and so this claim cannot be verified. Such references to non-surviving sources is typical across ancient “histories”.
Another tablet-mention appears in a passage where an emperor serving as a judge is said to have presided over a case where “all the signatories to a forged will were liable to be punished under the provisions of the Cornelian law, he distributed to the jury not just two tablets—one to register guilt, the other acquittal—but a third as well, for the pardon of those shown to have been induced to sign by fraudulent means or as a result of misunderstanding” (68). This suggests people back in Rome were capable of the intricate art of forgery and were managing to provide multiple forgeries with conflicting claims. A ghostwriter who was a forger would know about such details, but not an ancient author describing distant legal proceedings.
The rest of the intro tends towards puffery, only returning to the facts in a biography of Tranquillus. References to taking a trip to “the most barbarous outpost of the Roman Empire: Britain” by Hadrian in 122 suggests that a European author probably ghostwrote these biographies, as most of Europe was indeed entirely untouched by Romans, and certainly not the hard-to-reach British Isles, other than perhaps a few Roman forts that might have been instead built by later settlers (xvi).
This book is a necessary source for anybody who tends to cite Greco-Roman history, or is interesting in understanding this primary source. Researchers at all levels, students, teachers and libraries need to have access to it. Though we really should categorize this work into the fiction category. Many modern warlords (including in Israel, Palestine, Ukraine and Russian) are using Roman “historical conquests” as factual evidence to support their own expansionism. If these Roman “histories” are indeed fictions; then, they are fighting unwinnable wars inspired by fantasists.
If You Hear the Gods Talking; You Are the Problem
Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, June 2025). Hardcover. 256pp. ISBN: 979-1-009-58657-3.
***
“The formal conversion to Christianity in 1387 of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania seemingly marked the end of Europe’s last ‘pagan’ peoples. But the reality was different. At the margins, often under the radar, around the dusky edgelands, pre-Christian religions endured and indeed continued to flourish for an astonishing five centuries.” It “tells, for the first time, the remarkable story of these forgotten peoples: belated adopters of Christian belief on the outer periphery of Christendom, from the Sámi of the frozen north to the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians around the Baltic, as well as the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia’s Volga-Ural Plain. These communities, Dr Young reveals, responded creatively to Christianity’s challenge, but for centuries stopped short of embracing it. His book addresses why this was so, uncovering stories of fierce resistance, unlikely survival and considerable ingenuity.”
I am puzzled how this book can “revolutionize” the study of European pagans? Has new DNA been found that proves a new narrative? Manuscripts? I turned to the section on “Sources and Hermeneutics”: “The principal sources for the study of pre-Christian religions in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries include chronicles, hagiographies of missionaries, ethnographic (or proto-ethnographic) and antiquarian writings, catechisms, ecclesiastical records dealing with discipline such as episcopal visitations, missionary reports, deeds of foundation of churches, judicial proceedings (for example, trials for witchcraft and sorcery), and, at a later date, the work of lexicographers” (42). These are not trustworthy sources. Books about “witchcraft” used fiction to justify the murder of people in this society. Their authors were not recording honest information about the religion of persecuted people, but rather generating imaginary crimes to accuse them of to not need to have any real evidence for killing them, or confiscating the land of entire “other” groups by invaders such as “missionaries”. And the author adds that these were mostly “second- or third-hand reports”, as opposed to based “on personal experience.” Here is the revealing point: “In the nineteenth century, amateur and professional collectors began gathering, editing, and publishing tales, songs, dances, and customs from rural people all over Europe, resulting in a vast expansion in the body of apparent evidence for popular beliefs” (45). My research into ghostwriting, propaganda, and monopolization of publishing by a few hands has indicated that most such history-changing tales (at least definitely in Britain) were forged by people in European cities who wrote fantasies about what outsiders believed to accuse them of being heretics, and thus to justify confiscating either pieces of land, or colonizing entire countries. Describing a pagan “traditional” belief system turned a country that might have already Christianized, or might have no reason to rebel against Christianization into one that was an “enemy” of Christendom. This enemy-label allowed for a “legal” Inquisition or encroachment on foreign land. Most humans are likely to have been atheists before the Abrahamic religions inserted the God-given rights of kings and popes to own countries and their people. It was only in the 19th and 20th centuries when extensive myth-ghostwriting for these people claimed they were “pagan” idol-worshippers, who thus needed to be rescued by colonialization. This book does not seem to be saying anything radical, but rather it is changing the focus from the propaganda that most of Europe was Christian by the 19th century to one that acknowledges just how many “others” there were on the periphery who had been demonized for Europe to be colonized by Christians. At least the author adds: “the idea that folklore collected in the nineteenth century (and later) constitutes a body of historical evidence for ancient belief systems has been largely discredited” (46).
The source cited for this important finding is: Ronald Hutton’s “How Pagan Were Medieval English Peasants?”, Folklore, Vol. 122, No. 3 (Taylor & Francis, December 2011), 235-49. This source refers to a point I raised in BRRAM’s Verstegan volume: Verstegan (in the Renaissance) appears to have invented much of what was later echoed regarding pagans by altering Greco-Roman and ancient Indo-European theologies just a bit to make them seem foreign and assigning these to Germanic people (by which he meant most Europeans). Most Europeans worshipped the Greco-Roman theology before Christianity. They had altered the names of Greco-Roman gods when they translated these into their languages. Verstegan used this to claim they had an entirely distinct “pagan” theology: which he and previous Catholic ghostwriters designed themselves by inserting fantastic characters and narratives attributed to these forged antique religions. Hutton explains that “folklorists” had claimed “sheela-na-gigs” or Irish “naked women with spread legs” and “foliate heads” were proof those convicted of witchcraft were practitioners of paganism. “Nobody associated the foliate heads in medieval churches with paganism before the twentieth century.” And this theory was disproven by showing an absence of evidence for it by the 1970s. These symbols had made a “first appearance… in manuscripts produced in tenth-century monasteries”, and they only appeared “in churches” afterwards supposedly in the “twelfth century”. One of the churches that had both a “sheela-na-gig” and a “foliate head” on it had been “built by the Norman lord of the village” as part of “a deliberate imposition of Continental culture on that part of England”. In other words, the Normans were creating these images as a warning against carnal-urges, as opposed to a celebration of any alternative religion. Verstegan is likely to have been behind forging manuscripts that have been used of evidence of paganism “in the English Middle Ages”, such as “Canons of Egbert, Archbishop of York”, claimed to be “from around 740” that is the only manuscript from this period that expressed concern about “superstitions or operative magic”, though still not a fear of a “former religion”. “Bede’s” History is one that Verstegan is especially likely to have forged to insert the false-narrative that “paganism… was defunct by that time”. DNA evidence indicates that the English people first migrated to the British Isles from Germany and neighboring regions in the 9th century, so all “Old English” manuscripts that claim somebody Old German speaking was living in Britain before the 9th century must be forgeries, as are their claims regarding what religions were practiced there. Hutton summarizes the evidence as containing only two cases that hint there might have been “pagan cults”, which break apart on closer examination. In 1313, there is a case of Stephen le Pope who was a lunatic who worshipped “images of gods that he had fashioned and set up himself in his garden” amidst a murder of “his maidservant”. And in 1351, there was “an actual cult… at Frithelstock Priory” where monks set up “a chapel” with an unchaste version of the image of “Virgin Mary”. It was torn down in part because the priests were using the image to attract visitors to sell fortunetelling. There were a few such sects of Christians that were the victims of early Inquisitions, in addition to these who are not mentioned by Hutton. He does mention that there were variants of Christianity, including the polytheistic workshop of multiple Christian saints. And there is a mention of the divine feminine appearing in the workshop of the Virgin Mary. He concludes there was no “active paganism… after the early eleventh century”.
While this essay seems to firmly contradict the existence of pagan British cults, Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon is claimed by Young to have contradictorily argued that there is documentation “in Britain” of “‘diabolist’ rural secret societies like the Society of the Horseman’s Word perpetuated folk cults” (361). The point seems to be that this was a later fake society, as opposed to a Medieval or a Renaissance one. Young is arguing the opposite of Hutton’s conclusion as he is asserting there were some cults in Europe, such as the Peko cult, and he is claiming to have found some other sources that argue this, after Hutton had disproven this possibility. Again, the mentioned manuscripts are not credible without archeologic evidence. I found a mention of “Stones with cup marks in Finland, Karelia, Estonia, and Latvia” from as far back as the “Bronze Age” to the “twentieth century” used as “ritual offerings” claim to be “Europe’s longest continuously functioning ritual sites”. This is not evidence, as these “cup marks” seem too general to even be a spiritual reference (371). In the summary, he adds that the main examples demonstrated are: “The Sámi veneration of unusual rock formations, the Lithuanians’ attraction to large and ancient trees, the Estonian interest in cup-marked stones, and the Maris’ love for worshipping in the forest” (372). Rocks, trees, and marked stone cups cannot be serious evidence for alternative religions. The change between Hutton and Young is that Young once again accepts late 19th and 20th century folklore-writing, as well as earlier fantasies starting from the Renaissance ghostwritten by Christians in propaganda as sufficient evidence to believe in pagan religions’ existence, despite this same evidence having been previously firmly countered as false by Hutton and other skeptics. This field seems to be propagandizing for whatever message fits the Christian establishment, instead of arriving at a single knowable truth.
This has been a useful book for adding to my criticism of the field of folklore studies. I disagree with most of its claims. And too much of it is spent on empty propaganda, instead of delivering any new, and certainly no “revolutionary” evidence. It basically repeats antique claims about Christianity as being a fight against an onslaught of Pagan Villains. Those seeking the truth will not find clarity here. But it is good that this book has taken on this subject that is a total blind spot as an academic field nearly-fully made up of fiction, instead of fact.
Disturbing and Incredible Story of a Gangster-Cop
Mike Moy, Bad to Blue: The True Story of a Chinatown Gangster Turned NYPD Detective (Ashland: Blackstone Publishing, July 1, 2025). Hardcover: $27.99. 350pp.
**
“A former Chinese gang member tells the story of how he went from ‘bad to blue’ by leaving the gang behind and becoming a New York City police detective. Nestled in the warm embrace of his immigrant grandmother, Mike Moy was raised hearing bloodcurdling tales of the brutal life she escaped in China. But growing up on the mean streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown, Mike also faced shocking violence coupled with destructive racism. In a tightknit community besieged with fear and alienation, teenage Mike took refuge in one of Chinatown’s notorious gangs, tattooing his membership in Fuk Ching on his body. The gangs’ fearsome reputations are warranted. Frequenting gambling dens and poolhalls, Mike and a boisterous band of gangmates run amok: selling and shooting guns, stealing, and running protection schemes. But the fast pace takes a terrible toll, with friends being killed or sent to prison. But vexing questions are raised for young Mike after he learns the extraordinary story of a cop who forgave the young shooter who made him a paraplegic. NYPD Officer Steven MacDonald’s morality and compassion arouse a longing deep within Mike to be one of the ‘good guys.’ In a world-changing turnaround expected by no one, Mike joins the NYPD. By donning that blue uniform, he gets the adrenaline-driven lifestyle he craves while staying on the right side of the law. But coming clean is not so easy. Patrolling the streets he once terrorized, he fears the exposure of his secret past. Anyone identifying him as a former gang member could lead to investigations, expulsion from the NYPD, media scandal, and legal charges for past crimes. Packed with violence, heartbreak, and love, Mike tells the triumphant story of one man’s transformation—even as bullets fly just above his head.”
I figured out this was non-fiction in the middle of this blurb. I could not figure out how a gang-member with visible gang-affiliation-confessing tattoos was hired in the same precinct where he is doing extortion now as a cop. By the end of the blurb, I knew this was supposed to be non-fiction, but I just don’t believe this story. Cops have public changing-rooms. Everybody would see his affiliation-confessing tattoos. There’s no way anybody working with him did not know he was a gang member. And wouldn’t he have been a plant in the police by the gang, sent there to gather intelligence to help fellow gang members escape arrest? The usual story-arch for such cases is that the gang-member would submit info on looming arrests, and the like to help his own gang, while busting rival gangs, and stealing money and drugs from busts to benefit fellow gang members. But this is seriously sold as a redemption story where a gangster who has killed innocent people before joins cops who have also killed innocent people before because he has noticed that too many of his gang friends are being arrested and killed without help by being inside the police? He must have been discovered to now be publicizing his past crimes in print.
The “Introduction: Good Cop/Bad Cop” stresses that the author was indeed guilty of at least one past “homicide” because when he is told about a case, he worries a “cold case” will reveal his “dark secret”. He must have killed a few people for there to be enough potential cold cases to implicate him. And the latest case this dude seems to be confessing to be guilty of is the murder of his “former business partner, Keith”. But then he claims to be surprised by this news. Since this Keith died after this cop joined the force, this would not be a “cold” case. He goes on to deny being responsible. This is a shocking way to start a book: it certainly grabs attention. But if the reader does not believe in the narrator’s innocence; this is a horrifying confession of extreme brutality that is being puffed as a heroic tale…
He then explains that his “police uniform” covered his “dragon tattoo” (3). And how would he keep it secret from his gang that he joined the police, if he is patrolling his home-turn in a uniform? And he later adds that he has more than one “dragon tattoo” (76). Again, there’s no chance such tattoos would not have been noticed during training or during the screening process. And he explains that “no Chinese person would have a tattoo unless they were a gang member.” So, cops who spotted his tattoos would not even have to decipher if they were official gang markings; their mere presence proved he was gang-affiliated. He stresses that he deliberately exposes his “tattoo on my upper arm” when he is “strolling down East Broadway”, and just before a fellow Chinese police officer confronts him despite knowing he was “a cop”. This guy lets him go after the author confronts him with his status as a cop. This is exactly how a criminal would get away with crime, as he is caught doing shady things (201).
Meanwhile, the 3rd note in this book appears on page 200. There are only 3 notes that offer a bit of evidence regarding the claims made throughout. The rest can be pure fiction. There are 7 notes all together, as the note on page 321 is numbered 7. He explains that he is confessing because after 26 years as an NYPD officer, he “retired in July 2021”, and is now apparently trying to make a bit of extra money from (non)-fiction.
I cannot read further into this book because I do not believe most of what is being stated. And what is stated is disturbing me. If you have read this far, and would like to learn more about how gang-members can become police officers, and the like; then, you would benefit from reading further. Just, please, do not suspend your disbelief simply because the author seems trustworthy because he used to be a cop.
The Story of a Dog? Where Is the Fox?
Joyce Carol Oates, Fox: A Novel (New York: Hogarth: Random House, June 17, 2025). Hardcover: $32. 672pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 978-0-593978-08-5.
**
“Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be. A… galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written” with “interweaving multiple points of view…”
I chose this book for review because Joyce Carol Oates’ name sounded familiar. It reminded me of a canonical literary author, but I think I was thinking of somebody else. Oates’ novels have been finalists for the Pulitzer, but she has not won it. But she has won other awards, especially for Them (novel about connections between three American-dreaming characters seeking marriage and money). She spent most of her life teaching at Princeton before recently transferring to Rutgers. Apparently, she succeeded in academia because of the success of her novels without finishing her PhD at Rice that she started some time after 1961. Though she published her first book, short-story collection By the North Gate in 1963, or two years after finishing her MA. So, she was not yet a “full-time writer” when she quit her PhD program. A few stories in this collection had previously appeared between 1959-62. But the collection did not do especially well. And Oates did not sell her first novel until 1964. I do not know why I recall her name, but I think I heard it a few times during my literary studies. So, it is important to review what Oates has been up to recently.
The cover is very well designed. I especially like the simplified and yet three-dimensional-suggesting artistry in the trees. I have seen similar simple-fuzzy tree designs on other covers recently. I tried imitating this style, and it turned out to be more difficult than I imagined to make them realistic yet simple in this manner. The cover also employes the torn-cover design: it looks like a cover was printed, torn and then overlayed over a front page with a simplifying drawing technique. The specks of red ink are a delicate touch. It is just an attractive design overall.
The contents list promises this will be a literary novel by the originality of the chapter titles: “Mystery-Journal”, “Good-Luck Piece”, or “Wet-Whiskered Kiss”. This high standard is also set by quotes from classics in the frontmatter.
This expectation is contradicted by the “Prologue” that is written in a juvenile style, starting with: “There was never a time when I was not in love with Mr. Fox.” This seems to be intended to interest readers by starting to explain what the title is about, and by appealing to their emotions. But the rest of the prologue babbles about this love, with only a mention of their “secret” as a new point raised.
The first chapter, “The Trophy: Wieland Pond: 29 October 2013” begins with a dull attempt to raise suspense: “It will be no ordinary morning.” The term “ordinary” deflates the promise, as it merely promises the events will be slightly better than totally dull. General or stock descriptions of “rain” and the “sky” follow. Then, a truck drives into grotesque water. Then, a bit of excitement: a barking dog is displayed as it jumps out of the truck. There is a dull conversation with this dog, where the owner attempts to convince the dog not to “run wild”. Since the leash is “released”, I assume the owner should be a bit more confident the dog is not going to run away, or do something “wild”. Then, a description of the daily urine and poop (mention of the rhyming “loop”) walks between this human and dog. A bunch of birds appear. This description could not be any more boring… Or could it? The next section finally introduces something happening outside what is extremely mundane: there is a “splash” in the water. Readers are asked to guess what might be splashing. Then, the dog wanders off following a smell. While these relatively short paragraphs are at least easy to read, then a page-long paragraph follows from the dog’s perspective: “a carrion-cloak in which to wrap herself, myriad drunken smells swarming into her brain, overcharged as an electric socket…” Why would the dog be overcharged by many smells? A dog can process the different smells without being overwhelmed: this is why dogs are used to find stuff. If dogs got overwhelmed from different smells, they would just stand there in deep confusion. And then there’s pondering about “her doggy soul”, where she is certain, “She is not a rebel.” There’s loyalty expressed to her human as a “savior” after she was tossed by a highway. From the dog’s perspective, it would not remember what happened when it was a baby. And it probably does not care it has been “saved”.
What is happening? Why is this happening? Why is this author using personification to assign biologically unnatural ideas to this dog? Why is the psychology focusing on a dog, instead of exploring the murder promised at the center of this plot? The author seems to have been carried away by an unrelated plotline in a digressive series of random thoughts. This probably means this novel is unreadable unless it is assigned-reading in a class or the like. There are moments that are kind of interesting, but then platitudes, generalizations, or repeating phrases fill most of the story with hot-air. I do not recommend attempting to read this book. It’s just generally pretty bad. Maybe if the intro was from the perspective of a fox, it would have made sense.
Horrid Bit of Irrational Fiction
John Boyne, The Elements: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt and Company, September 9, 2025). EBook: $29.99. 496 pp; Literary Fiction. ISBN: 978-1-250410-36-8.
*
An “exploration of guilt, blame, trauma, and the human capacity for redemption… An epic saga that weaves together four interconnected narratives, each representing a different perspective on crime: the enabler, the accomplice, the perpetrator, and the victim. The narrative follows a mother on the run from her past, a young soccer star facing a trial, a successful surgeon grappling with childhood trauma, and a father on a transformative journey with his son. Each is somehow connected to the next, and as the story unfolds, their lives intersect in unimaginable ways. Both an engrossing drama and a moving investigation of why and how we allow crime to occur… Challenging readers to confront their own conceptions of guilt and innocence at every step… The book ultimately asks: What would you do when faced with the unthinkable?”
I do not understand what this story is about from this blurb. It is all over the place. What is the “past” the mother is running from? What trial would a soccer star face? Why would it be relevant to mention that a random surgeon has childhood trauma? What does a father have to do with a transformation his son is going through? Why would these be connected? Is the soccer start the son who is transforming? It is indeed “unimaginable” how they would connect. But this is not a good thing. “We allow crime to occur”? Why would “we” be responsible from stopping crime from generally occurring? I’m pretty sure all readers have the same “conceptions of guilt”… That’s what the law says is criminal or not… And so, this book asks if readers would do crime? I forget why I requested this novel. I think I was trying to figure out the type of novels Henry Holt (a major publisher) is currently interested in. If this is it… I don’t think any literary author can manage to fit their interests.
The first chapter opens with a character changing her name, while complaining the original was her “birthright”, and noting she only did it because she is guilty of being “complicit in a crime”. Then, she says she changed it again “a few minutes later”. She goes into the explanation for the new name, without clarifying if she has made yet another fake ID, or just how or why she keeps spending thousands, or however much on these name-changes. Then, she worries about her blonde hair, whiling shaving it off. There’s a mention of being in somebody else’s cottage… Or maybe it’s the character’s, and they are just checking it out right after arriving. A paragraph is spent on empty chatter about drinking some water.
I cannot continue review this novel. It is just unreadable. I do not recommend others try. For example, the first mention of “trauma” (anticipated in the blurb), appears some pages in when a female character is refusing foods and is screaming with “earth-shattering sounds”. It is not this child that is traumatized, but rather the narrator who is traumatized by the child’s starvation, and extreme distress: “this nightly ritual soon became so traumatic that I assigned the job to Brendan, refusing to have anything more to do with it.” What on earth? There is a baby in distress. The mother cannot figure out a strategy to pacify or feed it. And is complaining that she is traumatized because the baby is at fault for causing a raucous. This abandonment of a child by a mother who hates screaming is hardly emotionally insightful. Unless maybe this is why women go through post-partem depression. The baby just drives them “mad” by being exceedingly needy, and taking attention from what the mothers need? This is not good writing. Keep away.
Forbidden Homosexual Love Amidst Renaissance History
Phil Melanson, Florenzer: A Novel (New York: Black Stone Publishing, June 2025). Hardback: $29.99. 368pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 979-1-324-09503-3.
****
“Set in Renaissance-era Florence, this ravishing debut reimagines the intersecting lives of three ambitious young men—a banker, a priest, and a gay painter named Leonardo. Leonardo da Vinci, twelve years old and a bastard, leaves the Tuscan countryside to join his father in Florence with dreams of becoming a painter. Francesco Salviati, also a bastard and scorned for his too-dark skin, dedicates himself to the Catholic Church with grand hopes of salvation. Towering above them both is Lorenzo de’ Medici, barely a man, yet soon to be the patriarch of the world’s wealthiest and most influential bank. Each of these young men harbors profound ambition, anxious to prove their potential to their superiors—and to themselves. Each is, in his own way, a son of Florence. Each will, when their paths cross, shed blood on Florence’s streets. Fifteenth-century Florence flourishes as a haven of breathtaking artistic, cultural, and technological innovation, but discord churns below the surface: the Medici’s bank exacerbates the city’s staggering wealth inequality, and rumors swirl of a rift between Lorenzo and the new pope. Meanwhile, the city has become Europe’s preeminent destination for gay men—or ‘florenzers,’ as they come to be crudely called. For Leonardo, an astonishingly gifted painter’s apprentice, being a florenzer might feel like personal liberation—but risk lingers around every corner… Historical drama unfolds the machinations of a city on the brink of a new age as it contends with the tensions between public and private lives, the entanglement of erotic and creative impulse, the sacrifices of the determinedly pious, and the risks of fantastic power.”
The cover of this novel is striking. If the topic was something other than the “florenzers”; it would be a shocking choice. But given the subject, it is the only logical choice. The added purple lines radiating from the central figures rear end seem to be suggesting a holiness in that region. The cut-off of the image to block out the eyes of this boy seems to suggest a need for anonymity, or embarrassment. Since it was illegal to bugger in Europe (punishable by death), there was certainly a need to hide your identity if you were a “florenzer”. And the designer probably had to cover the groin area to avoid censorship. But why was it covered with a purple-bluish pen-drawing of a church’s dome? Why not a color painting of a church-dome, at least? The line drawing does match the purple lines in the background. It is certainly a striking cover, perhaps because it is so strange.
As I started reading the blurb, I was sure this was a non-fiction. So, I was surprised by the mention of fiction near the end.
Even a quote at the beginning is strange: “You are a Tuscan, and Tuscans love cock” (Antonio Meccadelli, 1425-6). This is rather direct.
There is a “Cast of Characters” list: always helpful in a complex plot. In this case, there are a few families, or groups, who are listed in separate blocks. Though the fact that most of the characters are “children” or fathers, wives, mothers, and other relations suggests this narrative has too much empty dialogue about family-connections, instead of on the political, financial and cultural points that probably attract readers to this book from the blurb.
The “Prologue” opens on August 3, 1464, with an unnamed character, probably Leonardo, who has left his farmhouse in Tuscany and has just arrived in Florence. The description is just detailed enough to be specific, but not repetitive. And interest is grabbed by the explanation by the end of the first page that this guy is old beyond his 20 years because he is already gathering “secrets” in scraps of paper carried on his person, while also engaging in recording everything he sees for his art.
Though the story of self-making is interrupted by this boy being led by his father. There is a struggle between father and son. There must be tension or disagreement, according to the formulaic standard. But it is absurd that Leonardo is telling his father that he does not want to join a workshop, or expresses he would rather sketch leisurely in the streets. If this kid was not the sort of workaholic who was set on being educated in a workshop; he would not have been afforded the trip to the city.
The next section focuses on the young Medici. The description is now on people inside a church, so no new details are offered at first related to banking. A page later this part starts with a note that Lorenzo is “being educated in the methods of the family bank. How they keep half this city—half the world, even—in debt” (1-4). There is some philosophical rhetoric here that explains the significance of banking during this early-banking period. Before, lending was an illegal usury. Usury laws allowed a few to monopolize the earliest lending institutions and to charge extreme rates because they were the only legal lenders around.
This is a great, intellectual opening with a detailed and literary introduction to this place, time, and characters. By page 12, the florenzers’ sexual activities commence. Oh, no, wait: Leonardo has been aroused by joining the workshop, and the excitement of stripping off his tunic and standing for the drawings in a collective, where he is “the oldest apprentice”, with young beautiful boys around him. He has not yet engaged with them.
At the back, there is a “Historical Note” that promises the author has done his research to be accurate on the history. It also mentions Iac Saltarelli, “a goldsmith’s apprentice; also, a prostitute”. Iac is introduced on page 94, in a seduction in which Leonardo hires him and they engage in intercourse in a room. The description is a combination of literary detail and romance-novel-level explicit specifics. I was hoping to find an explanation regarding why Iac must prostitute in addition to goldsmithing. Instead, Leonardo is mostly concerned with drawing this guy after they do their business. There is a brief note on Iac’s situation: “he’s trying to save every soldo until he finishes his apprenticeship and can register as a goldsmith” (114).
The opening pages promised a much higher literary quality to this work than the interior delivers. But this is still one of the stronger novels in this set. While there is too much explicit details, at least these specifics are written with some creativity. The reader who would enjoy this novel are those who are interested in homosexual romances. Literature professors are likely to judge it rather harshly. Though perhaps it will win an award given the difficult subjects it handles. This book is designed for casual readers who are sophisticated, and enjoy a bit of history with their romance.
Secreting Away Vatican Crimes
Yvonnick Denoel, Vatican Spies: From the Second World War to Pope Francis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, February 3, 2025). Hardcover: $29.99. 384pp. ISBN: 978-0-197692-72-1.
*****
“‘Officially’ the Vatican has no espionage service; but does no one carry out intelligence operations on its behalf? During the Second World War and Cold War, Rome was teeming with spies. A band of undercover monsignors and priests hunted for Vatican ‘moles’, led clandestine diplomacy, investigated assassinations of priests and other scandals threatening the Church, and conducted high-risk missions behind the Iron Curtain. Drawing on freshly released archives of foreign services that worked with or against the Holy See,” it “reveals eighty years of shadow wars and dirty tricks. These include infiltrating Russian-speaking priests into the Soviet Union; secret negotiations between John XXIII and Khrushchev; the future Paul VI’s close relationship with the CIA; the Vatican’s infiltration by Eastern Bloc intelligence; the battles between the Jesuits and Opus Dei; and the secret bank funds channeled first to fight communism in South America, then to support Solidarity in Poland. This… book journeys right to the present, uncovering startling machinations under Benedict XVI and, today, Pope Francis.”
The Contents are divided logically by the names of the Popes. Though their original pre-pope names are used so they are not as easily recognizable. “Pacelli” is referring to Pope Pius XII (1939-58).
The “Introduction” begins with a description of a delegation associated with the American CIA coming to inspect equipment in the Vatican, and in the process searching most of it. Apparently, they found several listening devices from Russian and American spy agencies. What exactly is there to spy on in the Vatican? And why are Americans finding and criticizing their own espionage equipment?
The next section mentions some motives: “its taste for secrecy, the exceptional concentration of powers in the hands of the Supreme Pontiff”. It is a “microstate and… one of the world’s largest religious communities, numbering some 1.3 billion faithful.” The priests and nuns apparently act as spies in their different countries, as well as being spied on by armies of spies from different states. “The idea of an omnipresent, if not all-powerful, intelligence service” was apparently shared by “Hitler…, Mussolini, Stalin and Roosevelt”. Right after mentioning that priests are themselves involved in espionage, there is a note that this should be impossible in theory since priests are not supposed to disclose what might be sensitive that is disclosed during confession. But it seems this is exactly what this whole intro is saying the Church is doing (1-4).
Then, a section addresses the origin of espionage, claiming it dates to Queen Elizabeth’s rebellion through her separation from the Church and establishment of a separate English Church (4). My BRRAM series explained that Richard Verstegan was behind both sides of this conflict between Catholics and Protestants during this earlier period near the start of Elizabeth’s reign and afterwards. He directly worked for the Pope as a spy, and also previously and later worked as a publisher and propagandist for England, but mostly he used pseudonyms to make it seem as if there were many Catholic and Protestant propagandists. He also ghostwrote texts that bolstered other sects. The Restitution for Decayed Intelligence volume of BRRAM explains how his espionage worked, how he forged many of the Church of England’s antique manuscripts, and other interesting facts. Under his “Monday” or “Munday” byline Verstegan outed fellow Catholic priests, leading to their executions in England, and Verstegan’s following official exile from England from 1581. Verstegan easily found espionage contracts in Rome because Ghislieri had set up a torturing espionage network to stop “heresy” across the preceding decades, as this intro explains. Direct mass-torture proved unpopular, so they diversified into pseudonymous publicity campaigns that rephrased their intimidation tactics into a public good: this is what they needed a few ghostwriters like Verstegan for. Basically, the Church has managed to force a tenth of the world’s population into worshipping themselves, or their fictional deity by employing this “espionage” network that really manipulates history or politics through the media, and other covert means. Over a billion Catholics are paying a type of tax to the Church through their membership, and all this income is generated for a tiny set of Catholic leaders (“princes”) in castles by puffing a fiction, and threatening those who leave it with damnation, or during Inquisitions etc. with real torture, or executions for “heresy”.
Under Pope Pius X, the Church’s spies were “intercepting mail, tailing suspects, transcribing sermons and conferences”. The post office collaborated in monitoring “all mail belonging to priests and bishops suspected of political or theological liberalism”. So not only communist, or pro-social ideologies, but also a theology that allowed for minor changes in the doctrine. As punishment for misbehavior: “Professors in Catholic universities lost their jobs”, priests who failed “to comply… were transferred to distant parishes, or even suspended; authors were put on the blacklist”, and excommunicated “the most rebellious” (5). While these tactics are said to have taken place at the beginning of the 20th century, they are still how the Church manages to remain unchanged and powerful today. And similar tactics are still used today throughout society and the world, as corporate whistleblowers have reported. This intro attempts to claim that such policies were the work of rogue individuals that were stopped, but this is only the intro and this book says some kind of spying is still going on over a hundred years later, so nothing really changed.
In the “Conclusion”, instead of focusing on these negatives, there is a puffery that Vatican spies have been doing good in the world by bringing “Kennedy and Khrushchev together to solve their Cuban differences peacefully… led the Reagan administration to put the assistance of the NSA and the CIA at the disposal of the pope in respect of the Eastern block…” Apparently, in response to the Vatican’s help in bringing down communism (through espionage), the “Soviets leaders had no serious plan for an assassination attempt on John Paul II.” I guess it was a joke-like assassination try… If an assassination fails, is it funny? And apparently after communism collapsed, “the influence of the Vatican seemed to fall off”. Well, this was probably because they won. The USSR had an anti-religious policy that prevented the Church from collecting taxes from people across the Soviet region. When they fell, up to 75% of the population in former USSR countries is now Catholic. The Church was only expressing their discontent with the anti-religious “communist” system while it was in place as a strategy to fight against it. Now, they are still manipulating events, but have no reason to do so openly (429).
In the center of this book, there is far more specifics, and less generalizations. For example, the Vatican is said to have been “fascinated by Sindona”, who was “the owner of banks in Switzerland and Italy… who assisted people in tax evasion.” He taught the Vatican how to combine “religious faith and irreproachable anti-communism” with financial fraud. They applied these principals to manipulating people in the USSR in their anti-communist campaign to help those in the USSR avoid anti-capitalist rules of the communist regime (206-7). This clarifies that the Church is directly involved in illegalities that need to be secreted, as opposed to using spies to uncover for the world others’ crimes.
There must be an enormous wealth of useful information in this book. Those who are involved in espionage anywhere in the world will benefit from reading it. And just those who have enjoyed fictional films about church-spies will find it far more thrilling to learn the details of just what such spies do. If they have any secret relics: they are only secret because they are forgeries that were created much later than claimed, and so disclosing their location, or allowing testing would be self-implicating. The reality of what kind of espionage the Vatican is involved in is surprising, and thus a dramatic read. All libraries should have a copy of this book for the curious and serious readers.
Anti-Logical and Anti-Truthful Treatise
Ludwig Wittgenstein; Alexander Boot, translator, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Logical-Philosophical Treatise (New York: Penguin Book, May 13, 2025). EBook: $16. 144pp, 5-1/16X7-3/4. ISBN: 979-0-241-48417-3.
****
“One of the greatest philosophical works of all time, in a new translation for the twenty-first century… A succinct yet wide-ranging exploration of language and logic, science and mysticism, which has inspired generations of thinkers, artists and poets. In a series of short, bold statements, Wittgenstein seeks to define the limits of language, its relation to logic, its power and its inherent failings. Originally published in the early 1920s, it is the only book-length work the renowned philosopher published in his lifetime… Wittgenstein’s gem-like prose—at once specialist and, often, remarkably plain-spoken—considering his background in mechanical engineering, while highlighting the underlying poetry of this seminal text.”
It is impossible for me not to mention that my recent research into ghostwriters has proven that most writers who only mention to write a single book in a lifetime are likely to have purchased this text from a ghostwriter. A professional writer is incapable of writing a single book, and then remaining silent for the rest of their life. Ludwig Wittgenstein lived to be 62 (1889-1951). Apparently, he also published two short pieces during his life. And the rest was published posthumously from manuscripts attributed to this guy. Again, texts that are attributed to “authors” for the first time after their deaths are very likely to be ghostwritten. When somebody dies this generates sympathy for them from the public, so assigning new books to their now famous byline tends to generate more sales. And the dead do not collect royalties, leaving more money for an editor, or ghostwriter.
This book is rather short for a Penguin classic: under 100 pages in the main theoretical text. The “Introduction” argues that Ludwig sold this text to a publisher, Der Brenner, in 1919 by claiming he finished it in the “previous year, just before being captured and interned as a prisoner of war”, having worked on it across the previous “seven years”. It seems likely that the editor of Der Brenner was involved in a potential ghostwriting because its editor, Ficker, “assisted Wittgenstein earlier, in 1914, with the distribution of a sizeable portion of his inheritance among artists ‘in need’.” In other words, Wittgenstein seems to have bribed Ficker 5 years earlier by sponsoring his ghostwriting for other “artists”, and then when he was in need, he asked for Ficker to bolster his reputation after a capture by probably ghostwriting, and publishing this philosophical work. But then, readers are informed that Ficker sent a leading response, but still refused to publish, along with many other rejections. Oddly, after seemingly 2 years of sending out an unedited manuscript to numerous publishers, when it was published with “misprints and typographic errors… he disowned it.” This is yet another strong piece of evidence for ghostwriting (though perhaps not by Ficker) because those who deny authorship of a text when it is criticized are very likely to indeed not have written it. This text only gained fame in 1922 when an English translation smoothed out its glitches in a rewriting (vi-viii). More evidence of ghostwriting is that Wittgenstein was “reclusive” (ix): those who have others write their intellectual labors are not likely to want to discuss their potential ignorance with reporters, or scholars seeking them out.
“A sentence that is true will correspond to a way the world actually is; one that is false will correspond to a way that it could be but isn’t; a meaningless, or sense-less, use of language will sketch a combination of model-elements that isn’t possible” (x).
The rest of the introduction is less clear. There is a straightforward biography of the author. But sections explaining his theory are too convoluted to explain things to a reader coming to this author for the first time. From what is stated, it seems that Wittgenstein championed nonsense theory, such as: “the logic of facts does not allow itself to be represented”. In a 1919 letter he elaborated that the “cardinal problem of philosophy” is that there are some propositions that can be expressed through “language” and “thought”, while others can “only” be “shown”. The editor comments this means that philosophical models use propositions with “form” that can be displayed, but not represented. In other words, this philosopher cannot explain in words what he is trying to say, and this is his point (xxiii-xxiv).
A section on “Truth-Function Notation” explains one aspect of Wittgenstein’s theory. The letters p and q represent two different propositions in the following set of logicians’ possible thought structures: 1. Combination (or conjunction): p and q; 2. Alternation (or disjunction): p or q; 3. Negation not p (that is, it is not the case that p); or, 4. Material implication: if p, then q. When these p and q values are assigned either true or false, the combination of these possible values derive what Wittgenstein refers to as the “truth-functional”. One of them can be true, and the other false, both can be false, or both can be true; then, in combination 3 of them together would be false and only one true. These standard logical rules are subverted to ask if even nonsensical “thought” is by “its essence… logical”. A “necessary truth” is a concept that mathematicians believe they have proven is undeniably true. Euclid has proven that “there are infinitely many primes.” If the mathematical concept of a “necessary truth” if faulty; then one can instead begin by assuming the contrary or that “the number of primes is finite.” Working through a proof with this new anti-rule in place is shown to lead to the logical conclusion that indeed the anti-rule “must be false.” Thus, there is indeed such a thing as a mathematically “necessary” or undeniably true truth. Curiously the editor then addresses the very point that struck my interest. He imagines that it might not be true that “Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus”, while Euclid’s proof can never be proven false. Wittgenstein argues that logic is the “essence of thought” that acts by “resisting attempts to formulate meaningless expressions” (xxv-xxvii). Wittgenstein’s “Foreword” summaries the point more clearly: “what can be said at all can be said clearly; and whatever cannot be said must be left to silence.” He attempts to find a boundary between “thought” and non-thought or “nonsense”. He confesses that he does not offer sources, and merely thanks the influence of Frege and Bertrand Russell. Wittgenstein frequently refers to this Frege, disagreeing with his opinions, but the “Notes” section states that it is unclear just who this person or the referred to work is, as it is probably Gottlob Frege who might have published something like this in “Der Gedanke: Eine Logische Untersuchung” (“Thought: A Logical Inquiry”, 1918), in the Beitrage zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus. Wittgenstein argues: “What makes” a picture’s “truth or falsehood is the agreement or disagreement of its sense with reality” (2.222). “To find out whether a picture is true or false, we must compare it to reality” (2.223). “From the picture alone it is impossible to find out whether it is true or false” (2.224). “A logical picture of facts is a thought” (3). “The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world” (3.01). The conclusion is drawn that nonsense is impossible because it is impossible to “think illogically”, and thus anything stated (even if nonsensical) must be “logical” (3.02-.03). It is possible to “represent a state of affairs that contradicts the laws of physics, but not one that contradicts the laws of geometry.” This is why there are many science fiction concepts that break physical laws, but few (if any) that debate geometric logic. And then the argument digresses into nonsense, as it circles around the concept of a “proposition”. He derives that “a proposition has no sense” when “nothing corresponds to it” because “it does not designate a thing (a truth-value) whose properties are called ‘false’ or ‘true’” (4.063). With this definition, he claims: “Every proposition must already have a sense. It cannot be given one by affirmation” because “what is affirmed is its sense” (4.064). This is an attempt to prove “nonsense” is impossible, while writing nonsense. “The whole modern worldview is based on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena” (6.371). “And so people stop at the laws of nature as at something unquestionable, just as in the past they once did at God and fate.” Problematically, the “modern… system attempts to make it seem as if everything were explained” (6.372). Something might be happening that could prove a given “law of nature” false. This is what speculative fiction does when it imagines a scenario where a given “law of nature” is disproven in a picture, even if insufficient evidence is given to make it logically or scientifically true.
While I do not agree with Wittgenstein about nonsense, and other points, this is a great book that helped me develop some arguments in a book I am working on. It should similarly help other logicians, and literary or film theorists understand some of the common concepts in this field that go unexplained in other texts. Classics like this one must be read to enter a field such as logic, or theory because so many others are familiar with them, and so their language is the dictionary required to enter. The editor should have done a better job explaining the theory in the intro. Otherwise, most libraries and specialists would benefit from having access to this book.
Attempt to Keep Interest by Giving Readers a Detective Job
Antony Johnston, Can You Solve the Murder? An Interactive Crime Novel (New York: Penguin Books, July 1, 2025). Paperback: $18. 304pp, 5-1/16X7-3/4”. ISBN: 978-0-143138-88-4.
***
“One murder. Six suspects. One truth for YOU to uncover. YOU are the lead detective and it’s your job to investigate the most mysterious crime of your career. There’s been a murder at Elysium, a wellness retreat set in an English country manor. You arrive to find the body of a local businessman on the lawn—with a rose placed in his mouth. It appears he was stabbed with a gardening fork and fell to his death from the balcony above. You quickly realize that balcony can only be accessed through a locked door, the key is missing, and everyone in Elysium is now a suspect… Who did it and why? It’s up to you to figure it out. YOU gather the evidence and examine the clues. YOU choose who to interview next, and who to accuse as your prime suspect. But remember that every decision YOU make has consequences—and some of them will prove fatal… Do you have what it takes? Can YOU solve the murder? Put your sleuthing skills to the test!”
The second-voice is underutilized in in fiction. Thus, this is a curious experiment. Though an experiment is just as likely to prove its new technique faulty, as correct. There are 200 chapters in this novel: this must be part of the mystery-solving process. Part of this experiment is a clue scoring table that measures the accuracy or “bravery” of the reader’s sleuthing abilities. Another section gives the answers to the class for the puzzle of encoded text messages in the body. An introductory section, “How to Solve the Murder”, explains that readers should not read these 200 chapters linearly, but rather jumping to the sections that reflect who they believe should be interviewed, or investigated next. This gets a bit silly. An example given is to either “examine the body” by turning to section 35 next, to “to search the murder scene” (143). Obviously both tasks must be completed at the scene in succession one-after-the-other before leaving this scene to continue with the narrative. Does this mean that in one option the reader abandons either checking the body or the scene? I flipped to “35”. This is supposed to be an investigation of the corpse, but instead the lead-investigator pulls over a suspect. Section 143 starts with the investigator decides to read through emails next. It seems that these references are hypothetical, as opposed to reflecting a specific situation in the novel. This is unhelpful for those who, like me, are trying to figure out how this novel works. Most chapters end with only one option: “turn to 100, and skip to the end of that section” (at the end of 105), or “Turn to 196” (after 106). At least one section has several options. 109 ends with 5 options, such as, “If you have T5 written down, turn to 22”. This is referring to clues investigators should have written in their notebooks that tell them if they have the evidence to suspect somebody like a “tech mogul” of murder. These number clues are merely given to readers to be written down, if they reach the “correct” sections. Readers do not have to do anything to figure out these numbers other than choosing whoever seems most suspicious, or the best approach to a solution.
The first section begins by telling you that your partner’s driving is so horrid, you are terrified. This is a pretty good approach because it is relatable and should help readers enter the second-person perspective. It is also a good idea that the first chapter is a few pages long, or longer than most pop-fiction chapters. This should help to leave enough clues to whodunnit to make a choice at the end. The options are to either question the receptionist, or go to the manager’s office. This is indeed a curious approach to fiction because the reader has a motive to pay attention to what is happening in the otherwise rather mundane narrative. Only those who read most of the text will have any idea where to go next, or what choice is more likely to lead to an answer. Though there is not enough interesting content in this first section to keep a reader caring about the characters, or intrigued by a suspenseful event, or by especially detailed and engaging description to keep reading.
If what I have reported sounds interesting, you are the intended reader for this novel.
On Purchasing and Manipulating Fame
Laurence Leamer, Warhol’s Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, May 6, 2025). EBook: $32. 336pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 978-0-593716-66-3.
***
“…An astonishing account of the revolutionary artist Andy Warhol and his scandalous relationships with the ten women he deemed his ‘Superstars’. ‘Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil,’ Andy Warhol confessed, ‘of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them.’ Obsessed with celebrity, the silver-wigged artistic icon created an ever-evolving entourage of stunning women he dubbed his ‘Superstars’—Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Ultra Violet, Viva, Brigid Berlin, Ingrid Superstar, International Velvet, Mary Woronov, and Candy Darling. He gave several of them new names and manipulated their beauty and talent for his art and social status with no regard for their safety, their dignity, or their lives… Shines a spotlight on the complex women who inspired and starred in Warhol’s legendary underground films—The Chelsea Girls, The Nude Restaurant, and Blue Movie, among others. Drawn by the siren call of Manhattan life in the sixties, they each left their protected enclaves and ventured to a new world, Warhol’s famed Factory, having no sense that they would never be able to return to their old homes and familiar ways again. Sex was casual, drugs were ubiquitous, parties were wild, and to Warhol, everyone was transient, temporary, and replaceable. It was a dangerous game he played with the women around him, and on a warm June day in 1968, someone entered the Factory and shot him, changing his life forever…”
Given the weight of what this book promises to deliver, the “Prologue” set in the tense period of “June 3, 1968” has a very slow and uninformative start. There is chatter about a woman with a baby being encountered by somebody who is trying to sell a play to her about sexual abuse and women ruling over men in a “feminist paradise”. Finally, at the end of the second page tension rises as this pitcher brings out a gun and threatens to kill Warhol unless her play is produced. The play turns out to be called Up Your Ass. This producer makes some calls trying to warn Warhol, but apparently not to those who could have actually informed him of the brewing trouble. A lot of time passes, and then the woman who made the threat, Solanas, did shoot the 39-year-old Warhol as he just arrived at his Factory in the afternoon. There is a lot of irrelevant information in this spacy intro.
Then, the first chapter begins by explaining that Warhol is now posthumously one of the artists with the highest prices on his paintings, and that he gained this fame in part by showing up in society with beautiful women “on his arm”. He had apparently finished making his great art by the time he started relying on these marketing props, and instead just focused on marketing. Oddly, these women came from “upper-class families”, so they did not desperately need Warhol’s help, but rather might have been his sponsors. So, what was the point of: “christen[ing] them into their new lives” with “new names”. Their parents were mostly wealthy lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. Warhol needed them to hide his homosexuality. And if they were constantly around him, why didn’t he paint their pictures and instead focused on hyper-famous women such as Monroe? He must have done it because he knew that the more famous the subject was the more auto-puffed and priced the work would be.
While the intro and the blurb include several mentions of “new names”, there are few actual explanations of how or why Warhol gave these girls new names. In one section, there is a note that Jane Holzer was renamed by columnist Carol Bjorkman as “Baby Jane”, in an echo of a horror film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Warhol was hanging on to this Baby Jane, but her fame in the press (for no reason other than her beauty) was not rubbing off on him at first in the fall of 1964. So, this is a case where somebody else might have given Warhol the idea of giving women new nicknames to increase their fame with something easier to remember. Then, Isabel was given a role in Warhol’s film, The Life of Juanita Castro (March 1965), an anti-Castro farce. She only played a background role, and was, at 29, over 5 years older than Warhol’s other Superstars, but she was also added to the list and renamed “Ultra Violet”. To fit his name, she colored her hair purple, and “picked out” with Warhol a single “vintage purple dress” from “an East Village thrift shop”. She pushed her way into photos with Warhol and Dali to also be mentioned in a photo. I don’t understand why any of this is problematic? This is not a tragedy. This is a story about how all rich women want to be famous. This is why social media is the billions-generating business it is now. In another case it is Tobias who renames another Superstar as Nico (not Warhol). In another case, a Superstar, Mary Woronov, refused to be assigned any “new name” by Warhol.
The back bios summary explains that Solanas was “released from prison in 1971”, and then died in a “welfare hotel” of “pneumonia”.
So, these women were using (probably free) drugs at the Factory, and having a lot of sex, and this was sinful for Warhol because he should have protected these youths from such social ills? For example, “Ingrid Superstar left the Factory with a drug problem”, so she ended up working in a “sweater factory” before disappearing, or perhaps taking up yet another “new name”. Ultra Violet did well, publishing a memoir, and becoming a “successful artist”. In fact, a few others also cashed in on their proximity to Warhol by publishing memoirs, including Viva, and Mary Woronov. The assassination attempt made Warhol extremely paranoid, on top of recovering from the injuries. It seems that Solanas was not personally wronged by Warhol (he did not give her any drugs, or invited her to any sex parties). She just wanted to be famous, and members of Warhol’s Factory were refusing to make her famous.
While this book did not deliver the accusations against Warhol as a manipulator of vulnerable women that the blurb promised, it has a lot of curious information about how artists and others have historically gained extreme fame. There is much to learn from these pages. Though it is written with too few details, too many simplifications, and too much empty-air where more research could have filled in more revelatory information. The bibliography is only 3 pages long. And less than half-a-page covers all the notes per-chapter, with most notes referring to the same sources, such as AWT. This is not a well-researched book, or one that is written with enough scholarly care, but it uses the techniques pop novelists tend to use, and so readers who like these genres should be entertained.
Insider Lightly Describes Pig-Pharma Corruptions
Lisa Pratta, False Claims: One Insider’s Impossible Battle Against Big Pharma Corruption (New York: William Morrow: HarperCollins Publishers, June 3, 2025). Hardcover: $30. 288pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 978-0-063371-10-1.
***
“…Lives are secondary to profit margins. But Lisa Pratta stood her ground—risking everything to expose the lies of a billion-dollar pharmaceutical business mired in deception, greed, and the systemic abuse of both patients and employees. As a rising star in pharmaceutical sales, Lisa Pratta wanted to believe that she was helping improve the lives of people who suffered from illness. But as she climbed the corporate ladder, she uncovered a sinister world of bribery, fraud, and sexual harassment—all papered over with a thin veneer of corporate respectability. At Questcor Pharmaceuticals, Lisa found herself at a small company with a blockbuster drug that could have been a lifeline for patients suffering from multiple sclerosis—that is, if it was prescribed properly. But instead, Questcor chose profits over patients, training its sales force to push untested treatment regimens with the sole purpose of beating its competition. Lisa recognized this as not only dangerous but highly illegal. In the midst of this controversy, Questcor arbitrarily inflated the drug’s price to a jaw-dropping $28,000 per vial. Torn between her morals and the financial stability the job provided for her special-needs son, Lisa made a decision that would change her life forever: she reported the fraudulent practices of the company to the federal government. For nearly a decade, she led a double life—feeding insider information to the Department of Justice while enduring the relentless demands of her company to sell their drug using illegal marketing tactics.” The slowness of such investigations into misconduct (a decade!) is one of the reasons they keep committing corporate maleficence. Is the government blackmailing corporations during this interim by pocketing a portion of their ill-gotten profits? If not, why would they let these problems continue mostly unchanged for this long? “She faced constant fear of exposure, knowing that the government offered her no protection if her secrets were revealed.” Why exactly is there no protection from the government? Most thrillers tend to offer “protection” with a paid-for mansion, new life, and the like. But in reality, it seems somebody must bribe somebody to receive this special “protection” package. In my experience, reporting on corporate misdeeds usually goes entirely ignored at agencies. They standard is to do nothing. This woman probably forced their hand by sticking with these reports of new misdeeds for a decade until some new guy came in, and asked why nobody was doing anything about this ancient case. “Nonetheless, Lisa pressed on, determined to hold Questcor accountable for the laws they were breaking and the lives they were endangering. This incredible true story offers a sobering look at the unscrupulous sales methods used by America’s corrupt pharmaceutical industry, spotlights the levers they pull to extract ludicrous profits from the sick and dying…”
The cover catches attention. The yellow against gray color scheme is perfect for the subject. The crack in the bottle over a title printed as if it is a medicine-label is original. The strange bottle-type used, instead of a standard plastic pill-bottle is also curious. Overall, a successful cover-design.
The “Prologue: Merchants of Hope” begins by explaining that the “hero” of this story is also its author. This was not clear in the third-person book summary. While this is a curious surprise, then she puffs her ability as a “listener” and a talker, instead of getting on with the story. She notes she is worried about her busy schedule selling the wrong prescription quantities, as she contemplates a first report. She insists a colleague at this company nearly-forced her to do it, as opposed to her having a heroic urge to proceed. When she describes a meeting, she focuses on the many meetings she had in restaurants for pharma-sales. This is pretty much a horrid start. And why is this section called “Merchants of Hope”: given how she says she liked her job for most of it, it seems to be a puffery, rather than a criticism. A lot of hot-air content follows that does not really say anything substantial.
A quarter into this book, “bribe” is mentioned for the first time: “We had an unlimited budget to hand out gift cards to the desk staff to get us in to see the doctor. It wasn’t a bribe—it’s a gift card…” She clarifies she was aware it was illegal to “buy” her “way into medical practices”, but this was the only way for her to land sales. The surrounding text includes empty dialogue around this general theme, without clear new details on how this scheme worked. A few more general accusations appear in the following pages about being “neck-deep in bribes, kickbacks, and off-label prescriptions”. These are not supported with explanations either. Basically the idea related is that “reps who gave gift cards and paid speakers fees had the high sales numbers.” Pages later, an investigator asks Lisa to be more specific, so she said that “when a patient has a flare-up or an attack, the call goes to a nurse. They get ahold of the electronic medical records of the physical char and see what the patient has been taking…. Usually a nurse recommends what to prescribe.” So, they would bribe nurses instead of the “doctors themselves”.
One point that interested me in the blurb was the spike of the price to $28,000. I assumed there would be an explanation of the reasoning that went into this. Instead, Lisa simply reports that in 2000 they were charging $50, then in 2007 they went up to $1,650, and “by the time I got to Questcor, the price was $28,000 per prescription.” She notes that she felt this extreme price was a “liability” because it is likely to hurt sales, and does not explain anything about how this decision was reached, as the blurb seemed to promise it would.
This is basically an unreadable book on a very important topic. This author probably should have hired an editor to chop out most of this, and add some serious research that explains what Lisa’s personal anecdotes are vaguely describing. There are some good moments when some information is related about how corruption in this industry works. But serious researchers on this topic are unlikely to make it cover-to-cover to learn from it, and those who are seeking a thrill might find it too lacking in real action. Those in law enforcement should certainly read this book to understand what is happening. And also, pharma salespeople should be familiar with these tactics, so they cannot use ignorance as an excuse for sticking in places that favor such practices.
An Unfocused Anti-Thriller About Terrorist-Pirates
Ammar Merchant, The Palace of Sinners and Saints: A Thriller (New York: Simon & Schuster, May 20, 2025). EBook: $28.99. 352pp; Thriller. ISBN: 978-1-668067-58-1.
**
“In this action-packed thrill ride, a small band of mercenaries must infiltrate a 12th-century Middle Eastern castle turned black-site prison, where the life of a hero of democracy hangs in the balance. Irfan Mirza is the ultimate killing machine. Kidnapped as a child and forced to train to become an elite gun for hire at an orphanage, he is now a ruthless freelance mercenary. In a wealthy Middle Eastern kingdom, despotic King Nimir is determined to quash all dissidents calling for free elections. Billionaires, clerics, influencers, and journalists who dared challenge King Nimir’s regime have vanished without a trace. The most recent person Nimir has had ‘disappeared’ is Renata Bardales, a trained fighter raised alongside Mirza—his sister, of sorts. Now things are personal, and Irfan Mirza doesn’t like it when things get personal.” These types of novels or action-movies always must make it “personal” by inserting a relationship between the Hero and the kidnapped Victim he is rescuing. I have started skilling watching many action-films about such relative-kidnappings because they are so repetitive, and unrealistic. A personal connection gives a lazy author platitudes to insert in an echo-chamber, instead of researching or developing innovative scenes, settings, or plot conflicts. “Assembling a ragtag team of specialists, Mirza sets off on a wild rescue mission, determined to save his sister from a medieval fortress that has now been transformed into a heavily fortified blacksite. The prison is surrounded by endless stretches of uninhabited sand, making it difficult to approach and impossible to escape from… Where courage and loyalty reign and anyone who wants freedom must pay a price.”
The cover is well designed. The fire sparks and rain falling in the background and foreground are stylish. The building at the bottom, the figure in the center and the helicopters at the top are a good combination that has been artistically simplified. The fiery theme catches attention, while being a pleasant composition for the viewer.
The “Prologue” oddly starts with a character who is not named in the blurb, Ahmad Haikal, and with the note that this guy is “afraid of wolves”. This note seems irrelevant at this point: as he has never encountered wolves in his past life. Instead of explaining why wolves are relevant, the narrative digresses into another new character’s looks: this new guy enters the restaurant. Instead of getting to the point of why Ahmad is afraid of this newcomer the narrative refocuses on still other characters in this restaurant: “part terrorists, part pirates.” What? How can somebody be both a terrorist and pirate, or if they are both why not call them terrorist-pirates? And why would there be terrorist pirates in this part of Philippines… This seems to be the only country mentioned on this page. On looking this up, I learned that there is indeed piracy in Philippines today on the Sulu and Celebes Seas, with the Abu Sayyaf group engaging in kidnappings. Cases where pirates hijack ships turn into terrorist acts. Southeast Asia has a problem with overlapping political piracy and maritime terrorism. It would have been helpful for readers to explain this instead of the much empty-air content on these opening pages.
The first relevant action appears at the end of the second page: a foreign stranger pulls out a picture of a woman the cook recognizes: “Cilek Osman”, a “foreigner” who “disappeared” after coming to the region to “snorkel”.
This narrative is not easily readable. There is some clarity. It seems to be heading somewhere. But not enough care has been taken to start with a high-tension scene, or to tie paragraphs together logically. Readers searching for action, are likely to be frustrated by its relative lack. And those who hope for literary sophistication will not find it. I do not recommend this book.
Dramatic History: Murdering Slaves Because of Poor Trip Planning
Siddharth Kara, The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, October 14, 2025). EBook: $26.99; Nonfiction. ISBN: 978-1-250415-95-0.
*****
“…A notorious slave ship incident that led to the abolition of slavery in the UK and sparked the US abolitionist movement. In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning ‘care’) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique. After reaching Africa, the Zorg was captured by a privateer and came under British command. With a new captain and crew, the ship was crammed with 442 slaves and departed in 1781 for Jamaica. But a series of unpredictable weather events and mistakes in navigation left the ship drastically off course and running out of water. So a proposition was put forth: Save the crew and the most valuable of the slaves—by throwing dozens of people, starting with women and children, overboard. What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history—sparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States. Siddharth Kara utilizes primary-source research… and painstaking investigation to uncover the Zorg’s journey, the lives and fates of the slaves on board, and the mysterious identity of the abolitionist who finally revealed the truth of what happened on the ship.”
As I glanced through this book, it seemed to be hinting that Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) was the anonymous abolitionist behind outing this ship’s disaster-story. Clarkson was determined in my 18-19th century British re-attribution study to be a ghostwriter who wrote both pro- and anti-slavery manuscripts to encourage his pro-slavery sponsors to invest more into the pro-slavery propaganda. Clarkson semi succeeded in delaying the abolition of slavery’s stages after he started ghostwriting rather late in life in 1808. He probably started this work in 1808 after transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807. And his work is likely to have kept slavery legal within the British Empire until 1833, and delayed full emancipation until 1838, and then he probably helped to avoid legalizing in the US through the time of his death, after which a sincere abolitionist movement finally started in the US. So, if Clarkson was behind publicizing the Zorg narrative, he probably did it to scare the public with a worst-case scenario to make milder abuses (short of mass-killing) seem not-too-bad. The “Prologue” explains that modern readers tend to have an erroneous version of the story, such as mistakenly thinking this ship was British and not Dutch. Clarkson would have introduced such simplifications, exaggerations, and misinformation into the narrative while repeating it in multiple publications under different bylines.
The first chapter opens with preparations to depart on a sea voyage. Sea travelogues are generally delightful to read. A lot of exciting events tend to happen, and descriptions of the open sea, and places encountered tend to be great reading.
The next element I questioned is where the details in this narrative come from. This ebook has hyperlinked notes that led to the “Notes” section that includes a thorough list of sources related to the lives described. There are even precise page numbers for sources: this is frequently missing in some poorly-sourced narratives.
The story includes relevant data on the survival rates for British seamen, “one-fifth”. Each paragraph offers relevant new information and moves forward in a logical manner (there are smooth transitions, and the narrative is linear). Even the amount Collingwood was making as the ship’s doctor ($900-1,200 in today’s money) is specified with an explanation of what this meant.
This is the right way to handle this narrative. It would have been wasteful to focus on the inhumanity of the slave trade. Many books insert too much philosophy into books that are histories or biographies that promise informative stories. It is better to get to the facts of what the realities of the slave-trade were, as opposed to doing so much moralizing about it that the book is mostly hot-air. For example, there is data on the 8.6 mortality rate on one trip to Jamaica. Then, when a new character is introduced, such as Liverpool, a brief biography is given for him as well. Researchers who are using this book as a main source to leap into their own research on this subject will find much of the relevant surrounding information compressed here, without needing to seek out the other sources (which are cited in “Notes”, in case they want to explore more of what these sources stated).
Glancing across the rest of the book, the author maintains a thoroughly researched, dramatic, and well-described pace. This is a good way to dramatize history without turning it into fiction. There are few lines of imagined dialogue (perhaps none). And descriptions are of nature, architecture, records, and the like that could logically be learned from reviewing primary sources. For example, one passage describes how slaves were “oiled head to toe, and given citrus to treat their scurvy.” The narrator describes “mangroves” that “teemed with hummingbirds, boas, and crocodiles. Beyond the settlement, verdant mountains rolled gently toward the powder-blue sky.” This is an example of romantic description without too much romance, and without too much repetitive description.
I did not notice any mistakes in this book. It should be a pleasant read for those who just want to read about adventures at sea, as well as members of the public who are passionate about the subject of how the slave trade was abolished. And advanced researchers will find much in this book that has not been written in past accounts of this on-the-surface popular story. All sorts of libraries would benefit from adding it to their collection.
The Structure and Contents of the Medieval Love Letters Genre
Myra Stokes, and Ad Putter, eds., Medieval Love Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, November 2024). EBook. 502pp. ISBN: 978-1-009398-09-1.
****
“In the Middle Ages, educated people communicated their love in verse letters that revealed at once their personal commitments and their commitments to an established form of literary art.” It “reveals the fascinating duality of the medieval love letter as literary art and as life-writing by exploring a wide variety of remarkable texts in English, French, German and Latin. These rich texts are made accessible both linguistically, in new editions and translations, and conceptually, by discussing them in a way intelligible to non-specialists. Edited and translated texts include model letters from instructional manuals and fictional verse and actual letters from clerics and lay people, men and women. A substantial introduction explores the interchange and overlap between fact and literary art with reference to wide range of examples.”
The “Contents” are divided into sections by theme or genre. The first section describes “The Art of the Love Letter”, the next “Fictional and Instructional Models”, and finally a collection of “Actual Letters (Drafts, Copies, Missives)”. The “Preface” corrects my assumption that this would be an anthology collection of letters. These are just excerpts and quotes that explain the genre.
“Chapter 1: Art and Actuality: An Overview” explains that few “actual letters” followed the prescribed five parts in letter-manuals: “salutation, captatio benevolentie” or “explanation of reason for writing” (170), “narration, petition” or “what is asked from the addressee”, “conclusion” (3). After looking up what some of these terms meant, I ended up glancing across this section’s different books searching for terms that are mentioned in the index or that came up in the opening pages that spiked my interest: chivalric, Aristotelian, symbolism (animals, dreams, stars), lament, mythological, narratives, soliloquy, Venus, rhetoric (ars dictaminis, classical), and secrecy. I found some interesting quotes to use in my book-in-progress. Thus, this was a profitable search through a scholarly study of this narrow genre. I learned several curious things. But this book is extremely difficult to read linearly. It is dense with obscure references, and jumps between different authors, themes, rhetorical or verse strategies, and the history of these times. The primary subject is the nature of authorship, or who and why would have professionally or passionately written love letters during this period. If readers are prepared to have to dig through a lot of complexities, digressions, and the like, researchers of Medieval letters would certainly benefit from browsing through this book.
A Dull Semi-Literary Thriller About Some Crimes
Michael Connelly, Nightshade: A Novel (New York: Little, Brown and Company, May 20, 2025). Hardcover: $30; Thriller. 352pp. ISBN: 979-0-316588-48-5.
**
“Introducing Detective Stilwell: a cop relentlessly following his mission in the seemingly idyllic setting of Catalina Island. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been ‘exiled’ to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a homicide desk on the mainland. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor—a Jane Doe identifiable at first only by a streak of purple dye in her hair. At the same time, a report of poaching on a protected reserve turns into a case fraught with violence and danger as Stilwell digs into the shady past of an island bigwig. Crossing all lines of protocol and jurisdiction, Stilwell doggedly works both cases. Though hampered by an old beef with an ex-colleague determined to thwart him at every turn, he is convinced he is the only one who can bring justice to the woman known as ‘Nightshade.’ Soon, his investigation uncovers closely guarded secrets and a dark heart to the serene island that was meant to be his escape from the evils of the big city. Propulsive and atmospheric… launches a brand new character into the Connelly universe…”
The cover is appealing: with a two-color (blue and yellow) theme. The photograph used is intensified with high contrast to stress the water as a major actor.
The summary of this novel is clear. The detective attempts to solve a couple of crimes while struggling with office-politics, and with being in a remote post. This is a strong combination of plotlines that should fit a novel-length nicely.
Though as I looked at the first page of this novel, I realized this is not a text I want to read much into. There is a bit of exposition explaining the tourist season is about to begin. And then an empty dialogue starts. At least the conversation here is about a criminal case: “a mutilation”. The conflict is about if there were several “mutilations” or just the one. Then a ship arrives, and more empty chatter. This is the most anti-tension opening scene I have reviewed in action or thriller novels. The author seemed to be unconcerned if readers stick with this story. Nothing immediately urgent happens. The detective is lounging about rather aimlessly, as he contemplates maybe doing something productive. The descriptions of the state of a ship, or its maintenance is a bit literary. It is probably possible for a pre-interested in this famous author reader to stick with this narrative. But I just can’t read any further. I do not recommend this novel for anybody but committed fans, or those who enjoy literary fiction mixed with a thriller with neither of these sides winning the day, and both kind of losing a good deal of what makes each good.
Polished Modern Realism American Fiction
John Counts, Bear County, Michigan: Stories (Evanson: TriQuarterly Books: Northwestern University Press, February 2025). Paperback: $24. 232pp. ISBN: 979-0-8101-4801-7.
****
“Following desperate characters in desperate circumstances in the rural Midwest. In these colorful, darkly comic stories, veteran journalist and crime reporter John Counts takes readers to an often-ignored part of the country: a fictional Great Lakes coastal town in northern Michigan defined by beauty and bleakness. The cast of characters in these connected stories ranges from addicts to backwoods misfits to ruined lumber families, all bound together by their desire to obtain something just out of reach. Big Frank breaks out of a rehab facility trying to outrun grief. The women in the village of Brotherhood grapple with sterility resulting from an environmental calamity. A local politician must convince her mother to leave a nudist colony. And in the final, sweeping story, a splinter group from the local tribe attempts to reclaim its ancestral land by force. The people of Bear County and their predicaments encompass the wildly original and yet totally ordinary truths about American life off the beaten track.”
This collection reminds me of The Peasants in its setup: stories about a bunch of interesting mostly poor people in a single fictional town. This is a good approach. There is usually only a short story or a collection of fragments of information to succinctly report a fictional biography. When a biography is stretched across an entire novel it tends to be diluted with empty dialogue, instead of concrete facts about what happens to this character daily, or hourly.
The opening story, “Big Frank”, is about a “three-hundred-plus pounds” man who escapes from jail, or a drug-facility that is kept like a jail. He only has three weeks left on his mandatory stay. There is clear exposition about who Frank is, who his girlfriend is, and their tensions, as well as a third who is interrupting their relationship. There is some lack of clear narrative-purpose. Other than wanting to use drugs, it is unclear why Frank is escaping, or what he is trying to achieve. The first clear conflict is when Frank stumbles into somebody else’s house, and starts exploring it: setting up a tension about him potentially being discovered by the hunters who inhabit this place. Though this tension soon ends when he leaves an apology note for drinking their booze and leaves. Though the rest of the story proves that the boozing is the point. It is refreshing to read a story that is just about a strong urge and fulfillment of the urge to drink. Many humans just pursue this singular purpose across their lives, and their voices should be represented in modern fiction.
The story that grabbed my attention from the blurb is about “The Nudists”. It starts off in a funny way: “Shelly Bowman had to save her mother from the nudists.” Her father pushes her into this savior-complex by complaining the mother is “disagreeable” and has joined “some sex camp”. The name of the camp is also funny: “Captain Al’s Nudist Resort.” Shelly id described as a representative of the “most rural district on the Bear County Commission”. Descriptions of the drive and the scenery are logical and clear in their lengthy, multi-phrases. She hopes she can run for higher offices in the future, and for this she needs to stop her mother from embarrassing her future chances. There is a clear explanation about how this would be a political liability (117-9).
This is a great collection of stories for those who want to learn a bit about our modern reality, as opposed to about fantastic things that could never happen. It is dramatically and descriptively written to attract both mainstream and academic readers. School and college libraries should have a copy. And researchers of modern fiction would enjoy this work more than most alternatives in this literary genre.
A Realistic Portrayal of Paramilitary Conflict Over Oil
Tom Clancy, by M. P. Woodward, Line of Demarcation: A Jack Ryan Jr. Novel (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, May 20, 2025). Hardcover: $32. 400pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 979-0-593718-00-1.
***
“The discovery of an oil field off the coast of Guyana plunges Jack Ryan, Jr into a cauldron of lies in the latest entry in this… series. It starts with the destruction of a US Coast Guard cutter and the loss of her entire crew. But the USCG Claiborne was on an innocuous mission to open a sea lane between an oil field off the coast of South America and the refineries of southern Louisiana. The destruction of the ship, tragic as it is, won’t stop that mission from continuing. So, who would sacrifice twenty-two men and women just to slow down the plan? That’s the question plaguing Jack Ryan Jr. He’s in Guyana to work a deal to get his company, Hendley Associates, in on the ground floor of this new discovery, but Russia’s Wagner Group and a pack of Venezuelan narco-terrorists have other ideas—and will risk war with the United States to see them through. It’s up to Jack to identify the killers before they draw a bead on him, but how can he do that when the line of demarcation between friend and foe is constantly shifting?”
I do not understand what this blurb is saying. I will try to break it down. There is a new oil field discovered in Guyana. The Clairborne is blown up while it was trying to open a sea-lane that stretches between Guyana, South America and its neighboring Venezuela where there was previously military conflict. The Guyana-Venezuela conflict is indeed a long-standing territorial dispute about the Essequibo region. When Venezuela started holding elections in this disputed region, it sparked new tensions. But the two countries have not had a military engagement about this dispute (it dates to 1899, and has mostly been handled by the courts). Venezuela merely started building up military operations on the border with Guyana recently, and Guyana responded in kind. So, this novel imagines that the existing territorial tensions, and over the real oil-discoveries in the disputed region led to a military conflict in a fictional future.
Hendley was first to invest in this oil field, but a Russian paramilitary business wants to make a rival bid? Why do the Russians need help from Venezuelans, or rather the reverse since Venezuelans are pretty much on their own (perhaps disputed) territory? Is Hendley also a paramilitary group? Are both trying to be paid by the South Americans for “protection” from themselves and rival paramilitary groups? This seems to be echoing the historic conflict over Colombia, where paramilitary groups have been defending oil-interests with funding and military training from US oil companies (Occidental, British Petroleum, Texas Petroleum) and the U.S. military. Who are Hendley’s friends in this scenario? A lot more clarity is needed, and it is not really provided in this blurb, or in the first pages. And later in the novel, the ships are swimming all over the Atlantic, instead of fighting some clear conflict over these oil-fields.
When these types of ideas are presented in action films, I tend to be too distracted by the action scenes to stop the tape to figure out what is happening. But this is a novel with this summary plastered on the back of it. Another book in this list of reviews explained that cops (and the military) purchase good press, and positive representations in films and other types of media. This seems to be a standard propaganda that is placing America as the Hero, and is labeling the same type of paramilitary groups from Russia and Venezuela as the Villains. I doubt there will be an explanation for these questions inside these pages.
The cover is curiously designed. There is a web of black-white-red-yellow lines over the image to make it more abstract, or to dim its photographic elements. A bright cover, with a dramatic exposition, and helicopter-flying scene.
I was confused by the double-byline. On looking this up, it turns out that Tom Clancy died in 2013. The series has continued to be published under “Tom Clancy’s” famous name, but with second bylines in small letters of the authors who are in fact writing new books in this series, or in this case M.P. Woodward. Woodward served as a naval intelligence officer, and then he worked in distribution-marketing for Amazon. This partly explains the naval espionage angle in this book. Though it is not really about agents of the navy spying on rival states, but rather businesses spying or sabotaging their competition.
The “Principal Characters” list includes many “former” intelligence (FBI, SEAL, SWAT, CIA) officers, as well as current politicians. And apparently there is a Russian oil company CEO, and a Captain of a navy ship.
The “Prologue” opens with a reasonably detailed exposition about the Claiborne’s shabby appearance and past achievements. The Claiborne is renamed Dirty Harry in the second paragraph, and then this name is used. But why does the blurb call it the Claiborne?
The mentions of the Atlantic Ocean throughout describe travel back and forth through this ocean, and some military exercises, such as a missile launch at their own mid-ocean “Russian trawler”. There was apparently a “terrorist cell” in the “freezing North Atlantic” that was taken down by the protagonist previously. Terrorist swimming mid-ocean? There is a note that during this novel’s plotline the “Tiburonistas attacked one of” the “Coast Guard vessels at sea”… Why would a vessel ever be outside of the sea? And this seems to be a fictional name. The Colectivo are a far-left Venezuelan paramilitary group. This Colectivo has been blamed for blocking military aid from getting into the country in 2019 by firing at the vehicles carrying aid. But aid did seem to get through despite this interruption. It would make sense if such paramilitary groups were blocking a narrow passage, or roadway. The novel claims that these Tiburonistas are attacking the Coast Guard with help from “senior elements in our government”. They seem to be stating that Venezuela’s government is involved, as opposed to the US. So, their military is attaching their Coast Guard? And these guys are also working with the Russians to “unload weapons”… And apparently it was a “U.S. Coast Guard cutter” that was sunk in “Georgetown Bay”, Guyana. Apparently, the US. Coast Guard does patrol in South America, but mostly in the high seas off the coast of Peru. It seems unlikely they would have any business being in the middle of a military conflict in South America. There’s an explanation that this ship was “installing the buoys… near the oil platforms”. Meanwhile, the commander of the Guyanese paramilitary is thinking about who he should “trust, bribe, or avoid”.
I cannot decide if this is pure nonsense, or if this is historically-based and explains just what kind of illegal stuff the US government, and its oil and paramilitary corporations are involved with. Anybody who wants to read more about this, would enjoy browsing through the rest of this book. It is a good fit for public libraries, and private collections of those who enjoy casually reading action stories.
Polish Realism Classical Novel Revitalized
Wladyslaw Reymont; Anna Zaranko, tr., The Peasants (Dublin: Penguin Books, June 10, 2025). Paperback: $30; Historical Fiction. 976pp, 5-1/16X8-3/4”. ISBN: 979-0-241-52424-4.
****
“One of Poland’s most significant twentieth-century epics, by the 1924 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the village of Lipce, scandal, romance and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village’s wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride—but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over the course of four seasons—Autumn to Summer—the tangled skein of their story unravels, watched eagerly by the other peasants: the gossip Jagustynka, pious Roch, hot-blooded Mateusz, gentle Witek… Richly lyrical and thrillingly realist, at turns comic, tragic and reflective, Wladyslaw Reymont’s magnum opus is a love song to a lasting dream of rural Poland, and to the eternal, timeless matters of the heart.”
The “Introduction” offers the needed background. Poland had a turbulent history as this kingdom was captured, or split among its neighbors. When the author was born in 1867, Poland was still fresh from the end of serfdom in the Austrian partition in 1848, 1850 under Prusia, and 1864 under Russia. Poles were trying to gain independence but had been failing before 1867. Reymont’s father was a church organist. Reymont trained as a tailor, before joining a traveling theater as an actor, and then working for the railway, as he started publishing short stories. He experimented with popular fiction in works such as the horror The Vampire (1911). Reymont’s The Peasants was inspired by the naturalism/realism movement led by Emile Zola (i.e. The Earth, 1887). This work was written curiously after Reymont won “35,000 rubbles” from a “railway accident on 13 July 1900” that left him with “a number of injuries”. The novel was serialized between 1901 and 1908. Reymont was so ill with heart-disease that he could not receive his Noble Prize for Literature in 1924 in person, and died a year later in 1925 (i-xi).
The philosophical significance for this “epic novel” has been described as proving “the primacy of the naturalistic myth over history”. Protagonists are driven by primal drives for “biological survival, the sexual drive, conflict over land, familial and individual egoism”. The lack of details about the focal village makes it into, as Franciszek Ziejka stated, “a tale of every village”.
These are enormous pufferies that promise a lot for any single novel.
“Chapter 1” opens with the mythic exclamation: “Praised by Jesus Christ!” After this, apriest questions Agata about where she is heading. She says she is going away from the village to beg for “alms” despite the winter being “afoot”. The priest gives her a coin, and she thanks him on her knees in tears (3).
The priest then watches a few mares, and other animals in the village around him.
The description is indeed worthy of erudite literary standing: “like a red-and-yellow caterpillar curled upon a grey burdock leaf from which a long and tangled thread of plots stretched to the forest, strips of grey fields with baulks roping through, full of pear trees and stone heaps.” Some dense description in modern novels is nonsensical when one stops to read it closely, as the authors seem to be deliberately repelling readers from these dense sections. In contrast, this author follows this caterpillar to the leap, and then out to the forest, and the fields covered by pear trees (5). A lengthy film can be pictured by closely reading these lines: a painting of a place long-gone, but perhaps not too unlike modern villages, at least those like among the Amish where technology is avoided.
Then the priest encounters another girl, who is heading with a cow to have it mate with “the miller’s bull”. The cow rebels and drags the girl onwards “in a cloud of dust” (5).
This book is nearly a thousand pages, and it just carries on like this describing the simple, mundane, but somehow dramatic life of simple “peasants” in a single village in the course of a single year. This is indeed a great example of a realistic novel. It just presents the reality of this narrow time and place. It is probably easier to read this novel about peasants than Tolstoy’s War and Peace because the latter’s descriptions of conversations among rich people tend to be about petty and repetitive subjects of love, or death, whereas here the intricacies of what peasants suffered in Poland at this moment are examined in their strange uniqueness. While I once made it through the War, I cannot indulge in reading this masterpiece further.
Those who are searching for little-known classics will be delighted to spend some time with this polished new translation. Though the “Notes” section is only a few pages per-section. This is far too short for a novel of this size that is exploring many historical elements that modern readers must be clueless about. There is a “Guide to Polish Pronunciation”, which is needed. And there is a helpful list of the dozens of characters for those who might be researching specific themes or characters, or job-types. It should be as logical to add Russian classics to world-literature as Polish ones, and this certainly is a strong rival for these spots. Though it would be extremely difficult for a student to pass a reading quiz about this novel because so many events happen at any single page that nobody could remember much of it after reading hundreds of pages. So, it probably is not a practical book to add to a syllabus unless the lecturer is understanding, and asks for students to discuss themes in this book, as opposed to memorizing what happened to which characters.
Biography of a Designer, and Possible Ghost-Artist Behind Surrealism
Michele Gerber Klein, Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dali (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, April 1, 2025). Hardcover: $25.60, 6X9”. 336pp. ISBN: 979-0-06-322057-7.
*****
“…The long-awaited, definitive biography of Gala Dalí, unmasks this famous yet little-known queen of the twentieth-century art world, who graced the canvases, inspired the poetry, and influenced the careers of her illustrious lovers and husbands with tenderness, courage, and agency. Using previously undiscovered material… tells the riveting story of Gala Dalí, (1894-1982) who broke away from her cultured but penurious background in pre-Revolutionary Russia to live in Paris with both France’s most famous poet Paul Éluard and Max Ernst. By the time she met the budding artist Salvador Dalí in 1929, Gala was known as the Mother of Surrealism. She rapidly became his mentor and protector, marrying him in 1934 and subsequently engineering their vast fortune. At a time when artists were celebrities, Gala acted as the ambassador of the Surrealist movement, spreading its popularity across the globe. She was the survivor of two world wars, the Russian revolution and the Spanish Civil War, and lived between France, Spain and the U.S. Gala was a heroine whose originality captivated people wherever she went, and her life story has everything: size; glamour; drama; true love, twisted love; ambition; money; art; defiance; daring and sweeping social unrest.”
As I glanced this blurb in the catalog, I was split between curiosity regarding the biography of one of my favorite painters (Dali), and why a wife or lover of this and other artists was relevant. But after reviewing the abstract-manifesto in this set of reviews, I think I understand that Gala was the marketer, or the seller who popularized the surrealist movement, and made it into the canonical bestseller it still is. Though the prologue adds that Gala was credited as a co-designer with Dali of projects such as the Dream of Venus pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair” in NY. This suggested Gala might have been a ghost-painter behind the surrealist movement. So, I searched for “design” across this book. Gala “designed… fabrics for dresses”, a wedding dress for herself in 1917, sewed “her own clothes”, the cover and interior of a poetry collection or Eluard’s Defense de Savoir (Forbidden to Know, 1928), the clothing and speech Dali gave in NY that strengthened his connection to Freud and elevated Dali, jewelry (with Dali) to be showcased alongside new art at the Julien Levy’s gallery, an “opulent catalog” as “a mini-advertisement for Salvador’s upcoming autobiography, The Secret Life”, and then in the mid-1930s a broad array of things with Dali: “clothing, furniture, accessories, and decorative objects.” Though Gala’s primary interest throughout was on selling this art, she negotiated enormous sums for the reuse of Dali’s art in an ad, book illustrations, and a reproduction of a painting. These deals and the product designs etc. Gala “encouraged Salvador” to “design”, or perhaps designed herself is what pushed Dali into the canon of popular knowledge.
Gala was credited as a co-author on Dali’s Paranoiac-Critical Method (1931), “which expands Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, and was famous for stating that illusion is real.” Before this work was written, Gala and Dali attended the “inauguration of the Bureau des Rocherches Surrealistes” at the “15 rue de Grenelle” town house where it was then written. “Unlike Impressionism or Cubism, which are recognized by their painterly technique, Surrealism did not endorse any one style”, or genre, stretching between literature, art, music, and other fields. The Surrealist Manifesto “advocated” for “fantasy and intuition. It denounced logic, capitalism… colonialism” and “organized religion”. Breton argued that for “civilization and progress” humanity had banished “from the mind” that is “superstition or fancy. Any form of search for the truth which does not conform to the traditions of our civilization has been forbidden.” He insists now is the time for “creativity and inspiration” to reemerge. The search for “untruths” is hardly a glorious enterprise worthy of a special manifesto… Breton argued for trusting the “omnipotence of dreams”, and “automatic writing” as an authentic unedited “expression”. Breton wrote a famous book called Nadja that was interpreted as a fictional version of Gala, and this reference helped define Gala “in intellectual circles as ‘the mother of Surrealism.’” Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto added that a “special function of Surrealism is to examine the notions of reality and unreality, reason and irrationality”. But in this pursuit, it is materialistic, whereas art should strive to provoke in viewers a total “crisis of consciousness”. While they declared themselves to be antimaterial, they were advertising the members of the Surrealist movement in publications such as the Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution journal.
While I learned I find much of Surrealism to be critically nonsensical, and profit-driven, this was a great introduction to the origins of this genre. It helped me fill in a section on Surrealism in my study. It should similarly help all researchers of Surrealism. There are many sections that are written for amusement, and those who want to be entertained by the adventures of socialites will also find this content here. There is also much about the business of selling art, as opposed to merely making art-for-art’s-sake. A close reading should uncover many more useful lessons for artists and researchers. So, any library, and some private collections (especially of ambitious artists) can benefit from including this book.
Anti-Story About the Author’s Mental Troubles… and a Bit About Submarines
Matthew Gavin Frank, Submersed: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines (New York: Pantheon Books, June 3, 2025). Hardcover: $28. 320pp. ISBN: 978-0-593700-95-2.
*
“…Into the world of deep-sea divers, the obsession and madness that oceans inspire in us, and the story of submarine inventor Peter Madsen’s murder of journalist Kim Wall—a captivating blend of literary prose, science writing, and true crime… Begins with an investigation into the beguiling subculture of DIY submersible obsessives: men and women—but mostly men—who are so compelled to sink into the deep sea that they become amateur backyard submarine-builders. Should they succeed in fashioning a craft in their garage or driveway and set sail, they do so at great personal risk—as the 2023 fatal implosion of Stockton Rush’s much more highly funded submarine, Titan, proved to the world. Matthew Gavin Frank explores the origins of the human compulsion to sink to depth, from the diving bells of Aristotle and Alexander the Great to the Confederate H. L. Hunley, which became the first submersible to sink an enemy warship before itself being sunk during the Civil War.” If this book just described this history, it would be what I had been hoping to find in it. But as the mutilated or twisted cover image suggests, this text instead spends most of its contents on exploring the madness of its author. “Frank finds himself reckoning with obsession’s darkest extremes.” It explores the “physical and mental side effects of sinking to great depth,” as “Frank attempts to get to the bottom of this niche compulsion to chase the extreme in our planet’s bodies of water and in our own bodies” by driving himself mad. “What he comes to discover, and interrogate, are the odd and unexpected overlaps between the unquenchable human desire to descend into deep water, and a penchant for unspeakable violence.”
Frank is “a professor of creative writing in the Masters of Fine Arts Program at Northern Michigan University”. This suggests that this is going to be a creative, as opposed to a historic or non-fiction project. The chapters are numbered without headings, so this book is a bit difficult to navigate. Calling the chapters by periods, or inventors covered would seem to have been more logical, unless the narrative is too disjointed for such simply classifications.
As the frontmatter predicted, the “Prologue” begins with Frank’s personal fear “of the ocean”. He lays other mental illnesses on top of this, including accusing his predecessors of being “OCD”.
In the next section, he begins by reminding readers of the dramatic murder of a journalist by an “amateur submersible builder”. But then Frank complains that he did not “want to write about the murder of Kim…” but rather about the “obsessions” of these “DIY… enthusiasts” to explain through them the “human condition” of “longing”.
Chapter 1 begins in Copenhagen by noting that “eccentric engineers” have “found” here ‘components” such as “shards of glass, conveyor belt ramps, oil cans…” What is this dude even talking about. This is just completely nonsensical.
I am out. There are too many books in my reading list for this set for me to spend any more time trying to figure out why Frank decided to hold a counseling session with a world of readers. I do not recommend this book to any reader, unless you have come this far, and want to look inside to figure out just how Frank managed to sell this thing to a publisher.
Claims of Moral Iranian Corruption without Documented Facts
Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (New York: Doubleday, August 5, 2025). Hardcover: $35, 6X9”. 512pp. ISBN: 978-0-385548-07-6.
***
“…History of one of the most momentous events in modern times, the jaw-dropping stupidity of the American government, and the dawn of the age of religious nationalism. On New Year’s Eve, 1977, on a state visit to Iran, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, praising Iran as ‘an island of stability… due to your leadership and the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you.’ Iran had the world’s fifth largest army and was awash in billions of dollars in oil revenues. Construction cranes dotted the skyline of its booming capital, Tehran. The regime’s feared secret police force SAVAK had crushed communist opposition, and the Shah had bought off the conservative Muslim clergy inside the country. He seemed invulnerable, and invaluable to the United States as an ally in the Cold War. Fourteen months later the Shah fled Iran into exile, forced from the throne by a volcanic religious revolution led by a fiery cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. The ensuing hostage crisis forever damaged America’s standing in the world. How could the United States, which had one of the largest CIA stations in the world and thousands of military personnel in Iran, have been so blind?… A dictator blind to the disdain of his subjects and a superpower blundering into disaster. The Iranian Revolution, Anderson convincingly argues, was as world-shattering an event as the French and Russian revolutions. In the Middle East, in India, in Southeast Asia, in Europe, and now in the United States, the hatred of economically-marginalized, religiously-fervent masses for a wealthy secular elite has led to violence and upheaval—and Iran was the template.”
This incident is not a strange isolated case of stupidity, but rather the normal recurring incident-type in world-history across its span. Political speech is all propaganda. Speeches are ghostwritten for leaders by those who can be bought to argue for a cause that is entirely contrary to the interests of the country the leader speaking is from. This is exemplified in the near-identical pufferies of Middle Eastern dictators Trump has been spewing on his Middle East trip this May 2025, as he is accepting billions in bribes from the monarchs of these same countries. American politicians have been puffing the British monarchy every time they visit the Mother Country since shortly before US’ split from Britain.
This book is divided into sections by dramatic stages: incline in “civilization”, “the unraveling”, and the “downfall”. The “Preface” starts with a misprediction by the CIA in 1977 that in the upcoming decade “there will be no radical change in Iranian political behavior”, just before the revolution. This is a good intro into just what “catastrophe” the blurb is referring to. The blunder is in predicting upcoming political turmoil, as opposed to puffing a dictator, as I assumed. Absurdly, apparently the president puffing the Shah before the revolution was Carter, who “had campaigned on a reformist, clean-government platform.” Though the top rule of politics seems to be to always lie about everything, so in this sense this is the norm. Instead of focusing on these problems, the narrative turns to the protests in Washington of this visit. Then, the author mentions that he was there on the Ellipse on this day among reporters between the protesters and counter-protestors. Then, gunfire is mentioned to heighten tensions: stressing that the celebratory firing was taken as a threat and prompted anti-shah demonstrators to rush forward at the pro-shah folks who fled. While this intro is reasonably informative and dramatic, “Chapter Eight: The Unholy Alliance” starts with a rather dull description of “a seemingly unending stream of buses and cars” in Iran, and other dull details. This dullness is unsuitable because it is describing “300,000 men, women and children… one-quarter of the population” had gathered to protest in Tabriz. Yet again the focus is on the protesters instead of on the corruption. When corruption is mentioned throughout it tends to be noted as a generalization about “an entrenched system of payoffs and sinecures and favor trading” from previous “centuries” in the police and government. Pages later a few more details are noted that there was a “culture” in Tehran of “corruption, the scramble of defense contractors to ‘win over’ the right government minister or palace courtier with bribes and fixer fees. So brazen was this ‘5 percent’ trade that even very senior Western diplomats were brought in on the act.” What? I had assumed the blurb was saying that it was Carter and the Americans who were corrupt because they were puffing a monarch and willingly ignoring his misdeeds and a chance that he might be overthrown because of having been corrupted. But throughout this book the claim is that Middle Eastern countries are uniquely corrupt, while British and American corruption is a rare occurrence. For example, Peter Ramsbotham is said to have recalled that he was regularly asked what the “going rate” was for corruption”, but no evidence is given for just what corruption this British ambassador was involved in. There is a mention that the “American defense industry” was bribing “American admirals and generals”: they were “taking kickbacks from defense companies”. Then, a hypothetical example is given of how this worked, instead of a documented case of corruption. Perhaps, such corruption is never outed or prosecuted, and that is why a document case cannot be named. The closest to a specific is the mention that the “1972 Nixon-Kissinger weapons pact” meant that “congressional approval” was no longer needed, and now corrupt weapons deals could be “sealed on a mere handshake from the shah.” Then, the narrative returns to vaguely accusing Iran’s government of unspecified corruptions. It is especially important to figure out just how corruption works in the Middle East and American at this moment, while Trump is working on his “corruption-trip” there to collect bribes such as an over-billion-dollar-plane.
This is not a good book. There are some decent bits of narrative, but most of it is empty words that keep repeating talking-points without explaining much of anything regarding just what happened, or why. A reader who reads this book throughout might figure this out, but they will be very sad about their reading-experience by the time they reach the end.
[1] “Playboy Interview: Jules Feiffer”, Playboy (September 1971), 92.
[2] E. L. Doctorow, “False Documents”, E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations, Richard Trenner, Ed. (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1983), 16-17, 25-6.
