WHAT have you finished reading recently? Selma’s Mayor, Jenny Egertson; Tresspasser, Paul Doiron. A mystery with a missing deer….and a missing woman!
WHAT are you currently reading? How to Survive Modernity, Alain de Botton. Also, another Doiron. The Precipice, or somesuch.
WHAT are you reading next? Your guess is as good as mine. Tune in next week and we’ll ALL be surprised!
Like most, if not all, Selmians, I was surprised and saddened by the sudden death of former Mayor George Evans. The mayor had been a figure in my life since I was a child, as he was the school superintendent and periodically addressed our classes through the years. Later on, when he served on city council and then as mayor, he was a breath of fresh air — serving as he did between two self-obsessed preachers whose egos brought them into constant conflict with the city council. Selma’s Mayor is part biography, part memoir: Egertson met the mayor during a tourist trip to Selma and was immediately taken with his graciousness, and put aside her disinterest in biography after he asked if she might be willing to aid him in writing his own memoirs. They worked together through coronamania, but he passed away unexpectedly before the book could be finalized. The book is thus a memoir by Eggertson about her collaboration with the mayor, their evolving friendship, and his life in service. When the book is focused on its subject — the Mayor — it’s a wonderful tribute to a man who embodied the motto “service before self”. It is slightly marred, however, by the author’s intruding self-consciousness: she’s so nervous about being a white woman writing a book about a black man that her feelings frequently get in the way of the subject.
George Evans grew up in the segregated South in a time when Selma’s black and white kids effectively lived in two worlds that only rarely bumped into one another. Raised well by a strong set of parents, the future mayor took even greater strength from his high school mentors, particularly coaches. He was a distinguished enough athlete that a Catholic university in Kansas offered him a full scholarship, which took him from the Gulf to the plains — and, for the first time, he was living and working with whites. Perhaps it owed to the Catholic university, or the fact that Kansas was 90% white and had never had enough inter-racial contact to produce conflict*, but Evans found that getting along with his classmates and teammates was easy — frictionless. It made him realize that racial conflict at home was not a preordained fact of life, but something that could be overcome. When he began entering into the workforce as a teacher, school integration was becoming the norm, and he would make good the lessons his teachers and coaches taught him to become a mentor to multiple generations of young people — rising through the ranks of school administration, and following the prementioned path of serving his city on the city council and then as mayor. One of the young people he mentored was Terri Sewell, one of Alabama’s future state representatives.
As a Selmian, I enjoyed most of this book enormously. I was fond of the mayor, not only from my school days but from his relationship with the library: even after he’d left office, Mayor Evans came to the library to read stories to children. His love for the city and its people, regardless of their race or politics, was obvious to me, and I liked seeing how it manifested itself in various ways throughout his long career here. Before the book was released, I had no idea that his education had been in Kansas, of all places, let alone a Catholic university. I also didn’t know that he was both a teacher and a referee, and drew on athletic mentoring his entire life to help foster senses of teamwork. I knew he was a force behind trying to revitalize the Riverwalk/Water Avenue area of town, but the book reveals even more interesting ambitions for the city. As much as I enjoyed the parts about Mayor Evans, though, the parts that were more author-centric were…tedious, and unfortunately this is not unique to the books I attended a booktalk by her last year, and far too much time was consumed with her biography when every one in the room was there to hear about Mayor Evans. It didn’t help that — being a local — I knew some of the people she was talking to and found her naive. She blithely accepts one lady’s claim to being the youngest person to be “attacked on the Bridge on Bloody Sunday”, which is false on two grounds: one, the woman in question was a teenager in the third march, and two, no one was attacked on the bridge in the first “Bloody Sunday” march. The attack happened when marchers attempted to begin marching on the state highway after a judge denied them the permit, but somehow “being attacked across the bridge” has become some a potent myth in the last thirty years. Similarly, she accepts the assertion that Selma’s incoming manchild mayor unseated Evans because of the “young white vote”, which is absurd given Selma’s demographics. (Selma’s white population is ~16%, and I’d venture to say the average age of white persons is between 50 and 60.) She does at least mention the economic factor, but not Manchild’s youth, charisma, and status as an attractive newcomer in a race filled with aging men who had either been mayor or been running for mayor for decades.
I wound up rating this 4 stars on goodreads, more of Mayor Evans’ sake than the books.
[*] With the somewhat obvious exception of Indian wars, of course…
In One No, Many Yeses, journalist and green activist Paul Kingsnorth detailed his journeys across the world, spending time with people who were actively resisting globalization — or rather, the disruptions that globalization caused in their local communities. Real England: Battle against the Bland does something similar, but much closer to home for Kingsnorth. So much closer to home that he visits the community his ancestors came from, Kingsnorth. The deep local connections people had to their places and how richly their place-cultures enveloped these peoples’ lives, enraptured Kingsnorth, and he explores that aspect here. Kingsnorth travels around England visiting people who are fighting government bureaucracy for the control of their canals, trad pub owners who are being displaced by pub corporations, and farmers who are being displaced by the English version of agribiz. The result is something like Berry’s Unsettling of America, or The Small Mart Revolution — a celebration of common folk finding ways to resist the corporate colonization of their villages and the homogeneous cookie-cooker offerings it makes predominant. Jim Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere also strongly applies, Reading this book as an American means sailing into territory that is both familiar and alien: while I have firm notions of pub culture in England, for instance, they’re almost wholly informed by CS Lewis and the Inklings — and the culture of canalways was wholly unfamiliar.
Relatedly, sort of, I stumbled upon Joan Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook while prepping for a Teaser Tuesday. The book is based on her observations traveling through several Gulf states in 1970, though the narrative often breaks for scattered observations without comment. The locations chosen strike me as very haphazard: she begins in New Orleans, strikes out for Biloxi but wind up on Meridian instead, then wanders over to Tuscaloosa and Birmingham before returning back to Mississippi. There is no program or agenda at work, only her desire to experience the south and get an idea for what was on people’s minds in 1970. This is an interesting period to experience the South, only five years after the high watermark of the Civil Rights movement — and I was amused to see that Didion was touring the Gulf South during the worst part of the year for tourism — late summer, when the sunny south is at its hottest and stickiest. It’s a time of the year that explains some of the culture of the South — the way older homes were constructed, for instance, with high ceilings and dogtrot planning, and some would argue it’s why we’re so violent. (Jim Webb would argue that Scots-Irish blood and culture had more to do with that.) Not surprisingly, Didion finds a bit of summer lethargy — people sitting on porches, rocking and waiting for the long day to close and the night to bring some relief from the heat, and Sunday lunches that seem to fill the entire span between morning church and evening service. I’ve never read Didion before, but she has a wonderful talent for description that drew me in. There was surprisingly little about race relations in this, aside from her conversation with a municipal booster who said that people were starting to make peace with one another after the activists and reactionaries had gone away. The biggest remaining issue was forced bussing and integration. Didion also remarks on a strong sense of ambiguity about indutrialism and progress: people wanted growth, but were wary about the character of their places being lost. (I can sympathize: I remain grateful that Atlanta, not Birmingham, netted an international airport because the resulting sprawl would have overwhelmed the bucolic university town I’ve spent some of my happiest years in!) I’ll have to look into Didion’s works to try more of her writing style.
Today’s treble T is top ten books with ____________ in the title, so I chose to go with South, or Southern. Given that I’m a librarian in a southern river town, I really should read more southern literature…
But first, the tease!
“See what happens when good people spend too much time around you? They kidnap their local sheriff.” (Battle Mountain, CJ Box)
The Square Deal Diner, in Sennebec Center, was owned by a plump and hyperactive widow named Dot Libby who also ran a motel and gift shop out on the highway, served as chair of the school board, organized the municipal Fourth of July picnic, and played the organ every Sunday morning at the Congregational Church. She was the mother of six (four living) and grandmother of twenty-two. I knew all this within five minutes of meeting her. Dot liked to talk. (The Poacher’s Son, Adam Doiron)
Modern societies exacted a far crueller toll on those who judged themselves to have failed. No longer could these unfortunates blame bad luck; no longer could they hope for redemption in a next world. It seemed as if there was only one person responsible and only one fitting response. As Durkheim showed, in perhaps the largest single indictment of modernity, suicide rates of advanced societies are up to ten times as high as those in traditional ones. Moderns aren’t only more in love with success, they are far more likely to kill themselves when they fail. (How to Survive the Modern World, Alain de Botton)
To be modern is to be robbed of any sustained capacity for calm. It is to be assailed at all times with news of every latest beheading, bank run, government fiasco, film premiere, mass shooting, guerrilla movement, nuclear mishap and sexual indiscretion to have occurred anywhere on the planet in the preceding minutes. We are always connected and always aware. The average twelve-year-old has access to 200 million more books than Shakespeare had. The last person who could theoretically have read everything died in around 1450. We know so much and understand so little. (Ibid)
(1) Away down South: A History of Southern Identity, James C Cobb
(2) The Burden of Southern History, C. Vann Woodward
(3) Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class, Bill Malone
(4) Drivin’ with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the birth of NASCAR, Neil Thompson
(5) Travels with Foxfire: Peoples, Passions, and Practices from Southern Appalachia, Phil Hudgins
(6) Dixie’s Forgotten People: the South’s Poor Whites, Wayne Flynt
(7) The South Since the War, Sidney Andrews
That’s it for reviewed titles: now for a few I’ve not read:
(8) Deep South, Paul Theroux
(9) South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Discover the Soul of a Nation, Imani Perry
(10) Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, Tony Horwitz
Joe Pickett has a problem. The new governor, who is a bully and an ass, has discovered that Joe used to do a little investigating for the former governor on the sly, especially when local authorities were regarded as corrupt and the governor wanted eyes and ears on the ground he could trust. The new governor seems to think Joe could be his own hatchet-man, intimidating those he wants to shut up and get out of the way, but that’s not the kind of man Joe is. So, he’s dispatched well out of his district to the middle of nowhere to look for some English woman who’s gone missing after a week spent at a ranch for rich people who like pretending to play cowboy. Fortunately, the last game warden has gone missing, giving Joe a credible reason for being there. Unfortunately, Joe seems to have been setup for failure. He doesn’t have access to the information he needs, the original investigators of the case have been removed, and someone knows Joe is there because they break into his room and remove all of the notes and research he does manage to accumulate. The chicanery here is strong. The story here is mostly Joe being used and abused by the governor and his staff, who are exemplars of why Americans used to tar and feather politicians: I’m fairly certain that if they’d ever shown their faces instead of hurling orders and abuse over the phone, at least two noses would’ve gotten broken. There’s an interesting sideplot that – surprise! – feeds into the main plot, involving Nate Romanowski and eagle permits, since our nature boy is now a successful businessman, using his falcons as pest mitigation. My favorite part of this novel was the role played by Sheridan Pickett, who is working on the very dude ranch the English lass hailed from: she’s an active part of the story throughout. The best part of this novel, though, was the line that I used as the caption for the cover. Nate Romanowski is…something else. (I think it helps that I always hear Joe as Roger Clark’s “western” voice used in Red Dead Redemption 2, so the mental delivery is hilarious.)
Game Warden Joe Pickett Mike Bowditch just got a call about a bear attacking a man’s prized pig. Mike’s just a rookie serving the Game and Fish department of the State of Maine in the middle of nowhere, so taking on a bear on his lonesome isn’t exactly an attractive prospect. But, it beats the hell out of learning a few hours later that a car was ambushed, killing two men that included a sheriff’s deputy, and that the chief suspect is Mike’s own dad. Mike doesn’t think much of his father: the man was a drunk and ne’er do well whom women were inexplicably drawn to and who more or less abandoned his family when Mike was just a youngun’. But both men are drawn toward the life of the outdoors, and there are certain bonds that even the Olympian gods can’t shake – like that of a father and son. Against wisdom, against the advice of his superiors – against anyone who might occasion to offer advice, in fact – Mike holds to the idea that his father Jack, while being a bar-brawling SOB, would never murder in cold blood. In this, he is partially aided by a retired warden with an airplane, who thinks Jack could very well be guilty, but thinks there’s more to the story than is currently known. The result is both an action-thriller, a mystery, and a compelling character drama about a man who stands to lose everything…and very well might. This is an interesting story in part because it deals with how we deal with failure — that of those we look up to, and of ourselves, since Mike doesn’t necessarily make the best calls here. The reader gets to enjoy his venturing out on an extreme limb, though, holding fast to what he believes and pursuing the truth even though everyone is telling him to rein it in.
I’ve since read another in this series, and I don’t think I’ll take it it as obsessively as Joe Pickett: first, my library doesn’t have all of the collection, and while Maine is interesting it’s not…..Wyoming interesting. I mean, it’s woods. I have woods at home. Granted, these have moose in them, but hills and woods aren’t exactly an escape for me, even with the addition of a coast. Also, I really want to read some nonfiction despite the current scheduled reviews being 100% nonfiction Characterization is so far the strong suit: I liked Mike well enough, but especially enjoyed his sergeant and the retired warden who appears to have a more mentor-role in later books, judging by what I’ve read since.
Warning: this review contains substantial spoilers for Endangered.
Two years ago, rodeo star and all-around-terrible-human being Dallas Cates was imprisoned for multiple accounts of wanton elk destruction, an almost anticlimactic end to his family’s war against the state of Wyoming that saw almost off of the family killed, save for Dallas himself and his mother. Now Dallas is out of prison: meaner than ever, but now a lot more criminally savvy thanks to his two years with hardened human predators – and he is out for revenge against the family of Joe Pickett, the man he blames for the loss of his own. Although there’s some game warden business happening in the background here, it’s deep in the background: instead, the Joe vs Dallas show is front and center. Though I was surprised by the ending, the stakes and sheer hate-ability of Dallas made for yet another gripping Box read.
The story kicks off when Joe, riding in a search & rescue helo, spots through night-vision cameras the death of a man: the figure is surrounded by three others, there’s a muzzle place, and suddenly the body goes cold. The deceased is one Dave Farkus, who has bumbled through several of the Box books and nearly gotten himself killed through his Forrest Gump ability to be in the thick of things.(Of course, Joe is always in the thick of things, but that’s usually because he’s in pursuit of answers to a mystery.) Shortly before he met a sad death in the deep woods, Farkus called Joe and said he’d just heard three goons, including Dallas Cates, talking about Joe’s family and planning something. Now Farkus is dead. Although the evidence stacks up quickly against Dallas, Joe’s hunch that things are a little too good to be true proves on the nose, and soon the wife and kids are reduced to hiding in another county after a series of threats and direct attacks – and Joe himself realizes, after a confrontation with Dallas outside his own home, that the man is bitter, evil, and possessed by an inexorable urge to hurt and destroy Joe.
While I’m going to range far and wide of spoiler territory, I will say that the ending surprised me. Joe’s a far better man than me, that’s for sure. There’s a lot of good character work here, and I liked seeing Sheridan and April start emerging as adult characters in their own right – April, especially, since she’s had a tumultuous journey through this series and finally seems to be leveling out a bit. When she learns that Dallas is on the loose, she promptly buys a handgun – and the more Dallas appears in this novel, the more hopeful I was about his prospects for serving as her target practice. (He’s loathsome.) Given how intensely personal the story is, and how attached readers are to Joe at this point, the story roared by.
“Good evening, Game Warden! I’m Dave Farkus, an’ you should know — I voted for YOU in the last election.”
“……the game warden’s not an elected post, Mr. Farkus…..”
Alas, poor Farkus! I knew him well, warden
Warning: This review contains partial/mild spoilers for Endangered.
While attending a rally for a governor’s race on behalf of his wife-the-librarian who needs the presumed gubernatorial winner’s support to renovate her library, Game Warden Joe Pickett bumps into the current governor – a man who has used Joe as a special agent, of sorts, investigating things on the sly. With a twinkle in his eye and only months left to serve, Governor Rulon gives Joe one final mission. Seems a remote rancher friendly to the governor had been letting one Nate Romanowski hide within his acreage until late, but four G-men came and forced the rancher to lead them to Nate: the feds and Nate all disappeared together. Governor Rulon hates feds, but he hates, double-hates, loathes entirely feds who run around his state without giving notice, especially when they’re accosting his citizenry. He wants Joe to employ his special talent for “bumbling around until a situation explodes into a bloodbath or a debacle” and head up there and investigate.
Off the Grid is appropriately named, as it takes Joe deep into the Wyoming wilderness, into the Red Desert, far from both civilization and help from above. What the reader knows and Joe doesn’t – since we’re also getting Nate’s perspective – is that the g-men were not from any one knock-knock-oh-no-we-shot-your-dog agency, but from a shadow cabal of likeminded agents across multiple levels of government and law enforcement who seek to preserve American interests regardless of the law. If you’re a Star Trek fan, they’re basically Section 31 but without the weird black leather fetish. Section 31 has offered Nate a deal: help us find a terrorist hiding out in the wilderness, and your criminal history – your entire paperwork existence in the federal bureaucracy – will disappear. For a man obsessed with staying off the grid and out of society, it’s a promising offer, especially since it also means his new girlfriend’s criminal record (acquired helping him escape) will disappear. He doesn’t trust him, but he has to go along for the moment.
Off the Grid is a straight-up action thriller, and unique in that while there are three storylines, they converge fairly quickly in the red desert, though the involved parties don’t realize it immediately. Readers used to this series will suspect Joe and Nate are the ‘interested parties’ roaming around the desert not knowing the other is there, but I’ll keep the third under my hat for spoiler reasons. The gist of the story is that there’s an Arab fella hanging out in an old sheep ranch who Section 31 thinks is up to no good, and they’re mostly right. We get to encounter the Arab (“Ibby”) through Nate, who bonds with him over falconry, and learn that he’s the son of an diplomat who was raised in the US and evidently likes its Constitution more than the government does, as he’s plotting to take action against an NSA data center to strike a blow for the Fourth Amendment. He’s building a movement, but he also has a standard-issue Islamic terrorist-type friend who the reader will immediately begin giving the side-eye, and wondering if Ibby is just an extremely talented salesman who is selling Nate Saudi terrorism disguised by libertarian wrapping paper. This is especially the case given that both Nate and Joe are attacked by parties who obviously want whatever’s going on in the ranch to remain a secret.
I remember a time when people were still concerned about the amount of data hoovered up and analyzed by the government: Ed Snowden was writing articles, Rand Paul was denouncing it in speeches, etc, and there was some talk of states indirectly undermining big brother by denying water to their data centers, which they need to keep the computers cool. This connects to that era, but having a diplomat’s son so passionate about civil libertarianism was an immersion breaker for me: granted, by the grace of God I live in neither DC nor NYC and have never encountered a pompous diplomat, but it’s hard to believe that an outsider’s child would care so much about the Constitution. Perhaps if we had more time to get to know the character, like Nate: it’s not helped by the fact that every moment the reader spends with Ibby, Achmed the Aching to be Dead Terrorist is standing right next to him looking all suspicious-like.
Although the premise is again a little suspect – Muslim terrists in Wyoming? – the execution and humor were superb. I will sorely miss the Governor when he leaves, and I enjoyed Joe and Nate’ reunion here: they’ve been separated by Nate’s promise to the feds to avoid contact with the Pickett family, given the amound of bloodshed and explosions that appear to happen around Joe & Nate. (Off the Grid has no shortage of both.) The third angle also heightened the stakes considerably.
Quotes:
“I’m not your man. I’m not political. I just want to live my life and be left alone.
“Then you’re political. Welcome aboard.”“You’re kind of a homicidal libertarian folk hero.”
“It’s odd seeing someone sitting on a stool not checking their phone,” he said. He realized he’d assumed that’s what she’d been doing with her back to them.
“It’s known as a book,” she said.
“I remember them.”
“Edward Abbey,” she said. “Desert Solitaire. I just finished The Monkey Wrench Gang.”
“This does seem like a place where George Washington Hayduke might show up.” He’d read the novel in college. Her eyes widened with recognition and surprise.
“I guess all game wardens aren’t the same,” she said.“I’ve got to take this call. It’s important state business and I’m still the governor. It doesn’t concern you people”—he was now addressing someone else in his office—“even though you think everything concerns you. So why don’t you folks go out and wander around town and target some people to fine and regulate? There should be some honest, hardworking citizens you can find to shake down. Maybe someone has an oversized toilet tank or they’re using the wrong kind of dishwasher soap. That’s what you do, right?”
“How about we worry about that later?” Joe said. “Right now we’ve got six people, three falcons, and a dog, and we need to try and get out of here in one Jeep. Not to mention, there are trucks out there filled with killers on the way to the interstate highway system.” Nate laughed grimly. Without looking over his shoulder, he said,
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Today at lunch, I finished Battle Mountain and am therefore caught up with the Joe Pickett series. While it’s partially a relief to be able to read something else, I have rather enjoyed my habit in the last two months of settling in to a lawn chair after work and reading Pickett books for two hours or so before the twilight and bugs drive me back indoors — reading about Joe on the ranges as the wind blows the smell of honeysuckle all around me, birds and squirrels start winding things down, and the sun slowly sinks below the treeline. It’s one of those “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is” scenarios Kurt Vonnegut liked to write about. Since I am ‘finished’ with the series for now — at least until next year — I wanted to spotlight some of my favorite things about the series. Reviews of the series will roll out daily (save for Sundays) until May 6th.
Shots Fired is a bit of a stray on the CJ Box book ranch, a collection of short stories rather than a Pickett novel – and some of the stories don’t even involve Joe! Interestingly, there’s also a bit of historical fiction in here. The stories appear set a bit later in Joe’s career – say, ten years or so into the series. One of the stories features Nate, and in his commentary Box writes that the story set the stage for the later Nate-focused novel and his connection to Arab falconers. {He also writes that this story allowed him to vent his contempt for the murderous Saud family and the American favor they continue to hold (corporate and government) despite their direct complicity with 9/11.} The stories are mostly set in Wyoming, with the exception of one that follows two Northern Arapaho to Paris. That one is cringey, and intentionally so, playing off how Native Americans are fetishized by elite whites – on both sides of the pond, evidently. While the Pickett stories are written and can be read as standalones, they’re nevertheless connected to the novels: one antagonist was originally arrested by Joe, and here attempts to get revenge after escaping from prison. The best title in the collection is “Pronghorns of the Third Reich”. and nope, I’m not explaining it There were a couple of soft apples in the bunch, especially “No Bad Day on the River”, in a man who is planning on a little human deep-sixing inexplicably brings along a guest. It made for easier narration, but it complicates the ‘execution’, shall we say. The most memorable will be the historical fiction, set as it is in a cabin overwhelmed by winter and two trappers who are driving each other insane.
To fish when it was twenty-two below took a particular kind of dedication, or madness. Joe often thought that if he caught an ice fisherman without a license, the violator should be sentenced to more ice fishing for punishment.
“Hey, White Buffalo,” Joe said. “A real Indian would know not to run across a frozen river naked, I think.”
Reading Freely 
