Reader’s Diary

Harry Turtledove

Harry Turtledove can write a plodding book in which the characters deliver speeches to each other in place of conversation. Because his alternate histories are so interesting, I have forced myself to overlook his faults as a writer. Happily, with this novel I didn’t have to overlook a thing. This book continues the story told in the “Great War” series - Turtledove’s tale of World War One fought in North America between the United States and Confederate States of America. It takes place after the war and is about the series characters’ adjustment to peacetime. Some, like the Canadian farmer mourning the son executed for resisting the US invaders, continue to fight. Others rebuild their lives, variously taking part in politics or trying to promote new technologies like tanks and aircraft carriers in a war-weary land.

There’s not a lot of action in the book. Despite this I found it hard to put down. About half way through, I thought I could see how Turtledove was using the rise of a Nazi-like movement in the defeated and impoverished South as a setup for the next book in the series. However, a surprising plot twist left me wondering where Turtledove will be taking his readers next: I’m looking forward to finding out.

Michael Martone (Editor), David Plowden (Photographer)

This collections of essays is a bit uneven. There isn’t much of a unifying theme, though several authors touch on the importance of story. The best essay in the book is George Hamilton’s thirty page memoir of growing up in an Iowa town. The other pieces in the book are pleasant enough, but none really stand out.

A portfolio of David Plowden’s photographs graces the book. The little-known Plowden is the Ansel Adams of manmade America, though the reproduction here doesn’t do his pictures justice. I would have loved to see some of his writing included in the book. It’s a real shame that he was left out of “notes on contributors” section.

John E. Miller

This is a series of pieces on history, especially local history, and the people who preserve it. A chapter is devoted to each town in South Dakota (and Mt. Rushmore) on Highway 14. The seemingly random cross section of the country includes the home towns of a once nationally-known artist and a Nobel Pize winning economist along with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little Town on the Prairie”. Less well-known are the towns’ shop-keepers and history-keepers - who are often the same people.

This is not a travelogue, not a “Blue Highways” drive-by look at its subject. Miller researched it on numerous trips that included extended stays but the east-to-west organization and occasional personal comment give it the flavor of a travel book and tie the chapters together. Geography and history, past and present, research and journalism are skillfully woven into a whole greater than the sum of the book’s modest parts.

We’ve become used to the idea that rural America is in decline, especially in the Great Plains states. It’s surprising to learn that this decline started in the 1920’s, when the automobile began to undermine small-town culture, a culture that had been strengthened by the fact that people couldn’t travel far from home to conduct business or find entertainment. The automobile, good highways, mass media, and the decline of rail service made some of these towns - founded with such high hopes - redundant in the span of one lifetime. This book is not a sentimental elegy, however, but an extended meditation on history, its meaning, how it is preserved, and how it is portrayed.

Dorothy Cantor with Andrea Thompson

This is billed as a guide to mid-life career change, but its real focus is on planning for life after retirement. The advice amounts to “look back on your life and figure out what you loved and what fulfilled you in the past, choose activities based on those insights”. It would be a fair magazine article, but it’s a pretty weak book, padded out with life stories of people whose lives aren’t especially inspiring.

Chad Millman

This is a superficial treatment of some shallow people. The theme of the book is the movement of sports gambling money from the Vegas books to the offshore online operations, but the “one season, three gamblers” story doesn’t support the theme. The inside look at the operation of a Vegas sports book is mildly interesting, but Millman never gets into his subjects and they remain sketches, not portraits.

Julian Stockwin

Royal Navy, Napoleonic wars, Geoff Hunt jacket painting - have we been here before? Happily, the answer is “not quite”, for this novel of a wig maker pressed into service in a line-of-battle ship takes us to the gundeck, not the quarterdeck. Tom Kydd learns the ropes - literally - while engaging in Sharpe-like adventures. The seaman’s life is dangerous, hard, and unexpectedly technical: as Stockwin says in the author’s note, “the mighty ship-of-the-line was as complex in its day as the moon rocket today.”

Officers are the conventional focus of “fighting sail” books. It’s great to get a fresh view of an environment familiar to loyal fans of the genre. This is Stockwin’s first novel, and it’s a successful maiden voyage. His writing sails along nicely, though he is sometimes unclear as to how much time has passed between scenes. He’s working on more stories in the series and I can’t wait to read them.