While out and about doing Game Warden-type things, Joe Pickett notices something odd. There’s a movable building of some sort hidden away on a ranch property, and a man who appears to be stuck with his head in the window. When Joe approaches to see what sort of mischief is being carried out here, he realizes to his horror that the window is a fan, and the man’s upper body has been shoved into it. When he calls it in to the property owner, the man can’t seem to decide whether he’s more outraged over a trespasser, or tight-lipped about the utility of the building. At the same time, a bad winter blizzard is moving in, and there’s not much that can be done. There’s an air of mystery around the body, one that thickens with the snow as the sheriff and governor both tell Joe to lay off and mind his business – and the man proves to be a Chinese national who was teaching at the University of Wyoming. At the same time, Nate Romanowski, everybody’s favorite falconer and libertarian crank, is approached by a man who intimates he’d like Nate to join him in a little conspiracy-type thing with fellow-minded men. Unfortunately for Mystery Man, Nate hasn’t survived as long or as much as he has by being a gullible naif. Improbably, these stories converge into a fairly wild story that involves geopolitics and Chinese conspiracies. While the premise of this one bordered on far fetched, the delivery was solid as usual, and I continue to like Sheridan’s increasing presence in the novels: unlike April and Lucy, at this point she’s more of an actor than supporting cast.
I’m going to short-round a bunch of Paul Doiron books and just comment on them in general, since the quality is fairly consistent from book to book. But first, on Willie Nelson’s birthday, I searched his name in Audible just to see what was there, and to my delight saw that he’d not only narrated a few Louis L’Amour short stories, he’d been joined by Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson. The Highwaymen! Nelson and Cash doing a western would have been amazing alone, but together? Wow. The first volume of “Trail Mix” was only a few hours long, and I listened with delight while playing..er, Stardew Valley. (There’s some mood whiplash for you.) The Audible presentation is more of an audio drama, since not only are there multple voice actors, but there are direct and ambient sound effects, so the listener is hearing the rumble of hooves, dogs barking outside a ranch, etc. The Highwaymen don’t appear in full on all of the short stories, though they are in the first and longest one, “Riding for the Brand”. Here, a man named Jed Ashbury assumes the identity of a murdered heir to a ranch to protect it from the man whose men committed the murder. Although the ranch’s people (we learn later ) have an idea that this vigorous outsider is not, in fact, the young heir, he’s such a good man and boss that they prefer his well-intended deceit to the villain of the piece. In another, a group of six men travel the plains to get vengeance on a man who killed one of their own in a bar brawl, and are outraged by the fact that their pursuee seems to be playing with them — preparing campsites for them to use, in fact! When they crest the ridge, they realize things are not what they seem. Willie Nelson has a great voice for reading westerns.
And now, for a few Paul Doiron short rounds! I should note these are not order of publication. My library doesn’t have all of his books, so some I’m getting in the library, some via ebook etc. I’m approaching the end of what’s available to me, so aside from a few posts next week this will probably be it. Paul Doiron’s game warden books are set in Maine, which is not a state I knew much about beyond it being a bunch of woods and mountains perilously close to Canada. While I found this via the warden connection to my Joe Pickett obsession of the last two months, they’re very different series: Doiron keeps things much more closely grounded to game warden business, with nary a Mexican cartel or government conspiracy to be had. Despite that, there’s no lack of interest, and in fact I’ve enjoyed the more character-focused storytelling. Mitch is no Joe Pickett: while they both came from an unstable familial background, Mitch begins the series younger than Joe and has a lot of growing up to to, evidence by a series of poor decisions like sleeping with the sister of a murder suspect, or pursuing law and order while under the influence of painkillers and whiskey. He does, however, mature. Although I mentioned in The Poacher’s Son that the Maine setting wasn’t as interesting to me as Wyoming, it has grown on me because of some of the later books I’ve read — one of which used islands and fog to superb dramatic effect, and another of which had Mitch commenting on different types of now and making the stuff come alive for me in a way I wouldn’t think possible, given that my only experience with snow involves weekend dustings that melt within 24 hours.
Game Warden Mike Bowditch just got a call about some dead moose on a lady’s property. Moose is a confusing word: it can be singular or plural. In this case, it’s plural. Four dead moose, an entire family. A dead moose is something, but four dead moose is a real inconvenience. When Mike arrives at the scene, he realizes that someone has shot these moose not for meat, but purely for the joy of killing – or for spite. It turns out there are ten dead moose on the property, and the property in question is owned by a woman who bought up half the county with the intention of turning it into a national park – loggers, hunters, and recreationists be damned. Although Mike is first on the scene, his local lieutenant is not a fan of this whippersnapper who keeps getting himself involved in murder investigations and decides to relegate him to the sidelines. Fortunately, that keeps Mike from getting stuck on the railroad the LT and his investigator pursue – down the wrong track. The property owner decides to use Mike as her liaison to the investigators, since she witnesses the slight acrimony between him and the lead investigator and suspects Mike will be more straightforward than diplomatic with her. Whoever killed the moose isn’t satisfied, though: not only is the woman’s lakeside home sprayed with gunfire, but her young daughter is frequently harassed. This book demonstrates Mike’s ability to bond with people who are not his supervisors, as well as his inability to let go of something that’s bugging him — rather like Joe Pickett!
Game Warden Mike Bowditch just got a call about a young woman striking a deer. When he arrives at the scene, he finds blood – but no deer, and no woman. Although he does due diligence and searches the site for clues, it’s a miserable night and he doesn’t resist it when a state trooper arrives and orders him to shove off. (Having a cop-killing father does not make someone especially popular with other LEOs.) The mystery continues to haunt Mike, though: something about it seems sketchy as hell, nevermind the state trooper’s assertion that the woman must have called for a friend to pick her up and fled the scene. He keeps getting in trouble with his superiors for butting in to areas where he’s not wanted — he’s a game warden, not a detective — but his momentary lapse in pursuing his gut is something he’ll regret all book long, as the missing woman is eventually discovered brutally murdered, in ways that recall another murder a few years before.
Two recent college grads, a pair of young women, have gone missing on the Appalachian Trail. Game Warden Mike Bowditch and his kinda-sorta girlfriend Stacey (the daughter of his mentor, that’s not weird or anything) are both called in to help with the search. This area of the AT is particularly treacherous, with narrow trails along rims that lead directly into the drink, and the increasing rumor of aggressive coyote activity. It’s also peopled by some odd characters, like an intense and unfriendly man named Nissen who holds the record for fast-trekking the AT. Although everyone’s nerves are on edge from the prospect of finding two dead students, Stacey is especially erratic and disappears halfway through the story to pursue her own lead, effectively ghosting Mike and causing both him and her retired warden father no end of worry. With multiple suspects emerging, this one is a thriller to the end.
A bayou bistro in the North Woods? The idea wasn’t so far out. The Appalachian Trail serves as a natural conduit for southern culture to the wilds of New England. And Mainers have a deep love of country music, which always surprises visitors who expect—I don’t know—sea chanteys. The way I had always thought of it was that we were just hillbillies with a different accent.
Of the Mike Bowditch novels I’ve yet read, Stay Hidden is fairly easily my favorite. Its one of the later ones, when Mike’s habit of putting his nose too far into the case has been recognized as a talent rather than a nusiance: he’s been promoted to warden-investigator, and this is his first case. It’s set on an island off of Maine, rather than maineland proper (yuk yuk yuk yuk): the island is rather insular, referring to the continent as America, and dominated by two families. A visiting tourist, a writer-in-residence, has gotten herself shot while hanging white laundry too close to the treeline during deer season. (The predominant American deer is the whitetail, which ‘flags’ when it’s on the run.) The case should be pretty open and shut: take the statement of the kid who said he accidentally shot her and see what the prosecutors have to say. Only, when Mike arrives, everyone on the island has changed their story: now the kid didn’t shoot the woman, he found her on accident. Because of the island’s location and Maine’s weather, Mike is quickly isolated — alone on the island, left to his own resources. His partner, a detective with the state police, is trapped by a court case but will arrive by ferry in a few days, but with every moment that goes by the case gets weirder. The dead woman, for instance, arrives on a ferry — still alive and kicking. Turns out someone was impersonating her, and doing a rather good job of it. There’s also the fact that Mike is staying in a home where he never sees the host, but communicates with them only through hand-written letters — and one of the people signing the letters is dead. This was a great thriller, using the fog and island setting to great effect and further bolstered by memorable characters.
This book is set earlier in the series when Mitch is still in impulsive bad-decision mode. Mike has been remanded to Downeast, a poor area of Maine largely populated by drug addicts. His mentor suggested he check in with a local professor, and after having dinner with the man — an environmentalist who is known for his obsession with primitive skills — Mitch is called to help with a man who has just stumbled to a cabin amid a growing blizzard, already frost-bitten. The man manages to communicate that there’s someone else still out there, and so Mitch and the other local authorities risk literal life and limb (and noses and ears) to find the guy. Mitch realizes that these two yokels were two trouble-makers he saw earlier in the day, accused drug-runners who were giving a distractedly cute McDonalds clerk a hard time. Frostbit Man happens to be her brother, and Mike falls into an incredibly ill-conceived relationship with her at the same time that they both fall off the AA wagon. It was entertaining enough, but boy is Mike a bonehead in this one.
Game Warden Joe Pickett has been told about a dead moose on someone’s property, and has gone to investigate to see if it’s natural causes or someone winging a moose out of season and then living the poor creature to die in flight. When he arrives at the location, though, he’s horrified to learn that the corpse is not a moose, but a human being: a fly fisherman guide who has a shack not too far away. When he investigates the man’s cabin, he discovers evidence that the poor man was tortured with ordinary house tools before being set alight, and our horrified warden has to wonder what on earth could have transpired. At the same time, Mary-Beth has discovered a bizarre donation at the library: a photo album from the year 1937 belonging to a senior Nazi official, one who collected shots of himself hob-nobbing with Hitler and other Nazi elites, along with his activities in the Reich that year. How on Earth did a top Nazi’s private photos find their way not only to America, but to a little town library in the middle of Wyoming? When suspicious sorts are spotted in town, Joe and Mary-Beth realize their two discoveries are linked: someone wants that album, and they’ll kill to get it. Meanwhile, Nate Romanowski’s wife was beaten and his falcons stolen by an amoral cretin who is using falcon sales to Saudi emirs to bankroll evil – and, as it turns out, the cretin is going to be a villain with some staying power.
Well, this is as strange a Thanksgiving novel as anyone could ask! While Joe and Marybeth are looking forward to the return of their daughters to the new family home – Joe’s last one was burnt by a vengeful ex-con and the state dragged their feet on building a new “game station” – discovering another murder just down the road throws a pall over Turkey Day, as does the fact that Nate, who was supposed to be at the table with his wife Liv and their daughter Kestrel, is instead involved in hunting down a former special operative who is now embittered against DC and wants to foment riots using antifa as his useful (and newly armed) idiots. Fortunately, Nate – who is just as close to fifty as Joe is now – has backup in the form of another falconer named “Geronimo”, and the two will make their way through metropolises filled with sons and daughters of privilege LARPing as black-clad social justice warriors chasing a villain with the appropriately memorable name of Axel Soledad. The central mystery to this one was very interesting to a WW2 history fan, and I enjoyed Nate having a ‘wingman’ for a change.
Joe Pickett has been asked by the governor to do something he’d….really, really, rather not do. The governor wants him to take Elon Musk hunting. Well, not really: the character’s name is Steve-Two, and he’s an eccentric techbro who has decided that he needs to know what it’s like to hunt, kill, dress, and cook his own meat. While the embattled governor doesn’t like Joe – he wants a bootlicker and Joe is 100% Western American Male – the Game and Fish head knows Joe is solid, reliable, and will keep the techbro out of trouble, whether that involves game laws or grizzly mouths. And so into the mountains they go, but there’s someone waiting for them who has a beef with Steve-Two, and Joe may get himself caught in the crossfire of a hashtag war. Dark Sky combines discussion over the morality of social media platforms – their responsibility in hosting or amplifying poor behavior – and combines it with an action-survival story in the mountains, as Joe is thrown to the wolves and elements.
Dark Sky is….strangely prescient in that its awkward tech bro Steve-Two, who styles himself such because he regards himself as the second coming of Steve Jobs, owns an up-and-coming social media network, “ConFab” – despite this book being published a year before Elon Musk bought twitter. Steve-Two arrives in an air of wild idealism and arrogance, shadowed by a gruff security-type and his business partner, and Joe and another local who have been recruited to help with this hunting trip can only look at each other in befuddlement as they listen to the breathtaking naiveté that these silicon boys are bringing into the wilderness. Despite being there for hunting, for instance, Steve-Two is aghast at the presence of Joe’s guns: he brought a bow that he intends to take his quarry with, and he’s been practicing. Nevermind that the technical ability to shoot a bow is only part of bow-hunting, and one overshadowed by the ability to read the land and the animal behavior to maneuver into a spot where using the bow is actually practical. (As someone who is only familiar with white-tail bowhunters, I was surprised to learn that yes, there are people who hunt elk with bows.)
It turns out that an Area Man’s daughter was driven to suicide after being bullied relentlessly on ConFab, despite Area Man’s attempts at contacting ConFab so they could put a stop to it by squelching hashtags or whatever. He blames ConFab and TwoSteve for the amount of social antagonism their platform facilitates and allows to accelerate and target the social media mob’s bete noir of the day. And…he’s not exactly mentally stable. Soon, Joe is ambushed and fleeing for his life through the mountain wilderness and a bitterly cold mountain night, being hunted himself. Fortunately, Marybeth has gotten concerned about Joe’s radio silence (his phone was sabotaged) and sicced Nate Romanowski – and Nate is bringing Sheridan, who is now his 24 year old coworker who is riding shotgun.
This was, as ever, a solid thriller, one in which I used my Good Friday day off to read in one sitting — under a perfect blue sky amid the smell of honeysuckle. Not quite the musk of elk or mountain pines, but close enough! There was one bit of humor in this I especially appreciated: when Mary Beth (Joe’s wife, a librarian) confronts the sheriff, she encounters him in flagranti delicto: in the awkwardness that ensues she can only comment to the sheriff’s paramour that she has three overdue books at the library.
Leeds, Alabama. Hand-painted rockers and a Little Free Library. There’s a bookstore nearby called The Burrow!
Well, that was certainly an unusual April. It’s not the first time Read of England has been waylaid by a cowboy, though. Although I did start the month with some English-type reads, by and large it was Joe Pickett Month again. I did finish the series, though, and have freed myself from the hostage situation. In other news, I paid a visit to the oldest government archives in the United States — the Alabama Department of Archives and History, thank you very much — and spent a day doing research on a passion project (some would call it a morbid obsession) of mine, the history of the Hotel Albert.
The Albert was a ridiculously beautiful hotel standing in the center of my hometown, Selma, modeled after the palaces of the Doges in Venice, and was torn down in 1968 because the landowners thought they could make more money on the property selling it to the City. I’ve written a four page history of the hotel, but the ending was always soft and now I’ve gained enough to wrap things up more solidly. I’ll share that once it’s in better shape, for those who might be interested. (I did share some thoughts on the ADAR research here, but that’s an unfinished site — something I want to flesh out during the summer when I have more time.) I want to finish going through the boxes, first. One of the more interesting discoveries in ADAR’s collection was a one hundred and thirty page letter from one of the Albert’s managers about drama that happened on his watch in the late fifties and early sixties. It was quite scandalous and involved carbon monoxide poisoning, a distracted manager, a jilted wife, and a beauty salon owner whose feminine wiles, seductive charisma, and social influence appear to have made her have more say over what went on at the hotel than the manager or the controlling board! I probably could have gotten more research done, but I was fascinated by the letter-manuscript, and it offered some insight as to how the hotel operation was entirely different from the building management — and how the Albert Hotel Company board’s interests were very different from the interests of the Hotel Albert itself.
This is page 2, and no one’s even died yet!
Unreviewed
While the What I’ve Read This Year page makes it look like I have a pile of unread titles, in reality all but the Doiron books have scheduled reviews, and I have half-finished reviews for the Doiron titles.
Moviewatch
Another quiet movie-watching month, as my cinema friend was again running around in Atlanta looking at houses and making offers. Once he actually moves to Atlanta my movie-watching probably crater, but we’ll see. Posting this is slightly premature as we’ll probably watch something tonight, but I’ll just add it to May.
Cabaret, 1970. An English writer arrives in 1931 Germany and befriends a cabaret performer named Sally. Although it’s a bit of a Breakfast at Tiffany’s situation, soon they become an item, but this is interrupted when Sally becomes infatuated with a posh baron. This is a musical directed and arranged by Bob Fosse (making it my fourth or fifth Fosse), so there’s repeated cuts to the cabaret where Sally performs, and the music is connected to the plot: Sally’s social-climbing is mocked by a song about money, and there’s a piece at the end whose final line has distinct relevance for Germany circa 1931.
Snatch. 2000. British crime drama about ….different criminal groups trying to get ahold of a diamond? Brad Pitt is in it with a dialect even more obscure than whatever that attempt at Appalachian was in Inglourious Basterds.
La Cage aux Folles, 1978. A drag night club owner’s son decides he wants to get married: his intended is the daughter of a prominent conservative French politician. Said club owner must somehow convince the politician that he’s quite respectable, thank you, nevermind the shrieking in the background. I’ve seen The Birdcage before but had forgotten most of the plot and so was able to thoroughly enjoy the French original. Quite the comedy.
Marty, 1955. An aging butcher named Marty is shot down by the dames so much at the dances that these days he spend his weekends sitting in a park listening to his fellow chronic bachelors grouse about girls while they drink, listen to the ball game, or talk about Mickey Spillane’s novels. One night he encounters a school teacher who has likewise given up on finding someone, and they hit it off. But Mickey’s mom and friends are jealous of the girl and tell Marty he should dump her for being a “dog”. Fortunately, he stands up for her — and himself.
The Trouble with Angels, 1966. Teenage cloister hijinks
Showgirls, 1995. A young woman hitchhikes to Vegas to be become a dancer and does what she needs to do, including sleeping with her boss and kicking his current girlfriend down the stairs, to make it to the top.
Serial Mom, 1994. A…comedy/horror about a family who realizes that their June Cleaver mom might be more of a literal cleaver…..
Hannah and her Sisters, 1986. Character drama about three sisters and the men who love them;’ Woody Allen has an existential crisis. Lots of stars in this: Woody himself, Mia Farrow, Michael Caine, and Carrie Fisher for starters.
“I don’t know if you remember me, but we had the worst night of my life together.”
Going in Style, 2017. Michael Caine, Alan Arkin, and Morgan Freeman are in dire financial straits and about to hit eighty. The obvious solution is to rob the bank that’s robbed them. Solid comedy. A remake, I think.
Coming up in May…
I read so many Pickett books that they’ll continue posting themselves all the way to May 6, but I’m hoping it will be a return to normalcy here — or , whatever approximates normalcy.
Joe Pickett is back on the job riding the ranges, documenting wolf expansion into the Bighorns, and trying to figure out who is using a large drone to frighten elk and deer herds around. He doesn’t just find the drone annoying, it’s also criminal: the stress is causing members of the herds who were weakened by winter to collapse from exhaustion and die. He’s working with the lady warden across the mountain, Katelynn, since the drone appears to be working in her district but retreating to someplace in his. Suddenly, though, both he and Katelynn are confronted separately by two goonie boys who try to threaten and intimidate them into laying off their chief suspect, some strange man who lives on an isolated retreat outside of Saddlestring and who has public records only going back two years. While Katelynn – a young warden still learning the job – is overwhelmed with shock and fear at being threatened by feds simply for doing her duty, this ain’t Joe’s first rodeo. He recorded their threats, and while they might’ve sweet-talked him into more ready cooperation, their suited thuggery leaves a bad taste in his mouth and he has no intention of helping them whatsoever. But lo! Then came the Mexican hit squad.
Wolf Pack begins with a game warden lead before quickly accelerating into DC vs Cartel warfare, with the small town of Saddlestring and Joe caught in the middle – and in more ways than one, because it seems his youngest daughter Lucy has been dating a boy who lives from within the mysterious compound. This is a particularly bloody book in the Pickett series, as the presence of a hit sq uad would hint at: the members include three generic killers and one femme female, a beautiful woman who smiles and flirts alllllll the way until she jabs a stiletto into her victim’s heart. Unfortunately for the people of Saddlestring, these operatives are increasingly desperate and likewise unhinged, and as they make mistakes their pool of “People we have to kill because they saw us killing people we had to kill because they saw us trying to kill our original targets” broadens and things get sloppy. Unfortunately, we lose some characters.
Another enjoyable thriller, though I liked it more when it was still about the jerk with a drone than the assassin psychos. Villains are better when we know more about them from previous stories: with these guys (y chica) I was just waiting for them to get themselves killed.
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)
Reading Freely 
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