Book Review: Shadows Walking

When I received Shadows Walking in the mail to review, I knew immediately that this is one that my Dad would be much more qualified to review. My father is a voracious reader and a historian. And as a World War II veteran, my father was there—he has seen those shadows walking. He was extremely moved by Shadows Walking, read it thoroughly once and skimmed it another time. And here is what he has to say:

"...out brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow... " Macbeth

When the world was still young and bright and innocent, two twelve-year-old boys solemnly performed the blood brother ritual. Johann pricked Philip’s finger, Philip cut Johan’s; they mixed their blood and swore eternal friendship. Johann is gentile, Philip Jewish. In 1914, their schooling complete, Johann, Philip and all their school class enlist in the Wehrmacht and go off to World War I.

Forty years later, Germany is a shambles. Millions upon millions of Germans are dead, Russians in their millions; Frenchmen, Britons, Italians, even Americans. Six million Jews have been murdered; like so many others, Philip is dead at Auschwitz.

In Nuremburg’s Palace of Justice, Johann is a janitor watching the trials of The Doctors—the German physicians who led the medical atrocities of the Nazis in the name of “science." What happened to those golden days before WW1? How did the horrors of Hitler’s Nazism capture the German nation? How could the Holocaust erupt and then overcome Deutschland?

Historian Douglas Skopp uses Johann Brenner, the gentile boy from Bavaria to approach these questions. How did Hitler’s Nazism capture Germany? How did Hitler’s Nazism capture Johann Brenner? How did the Holocaust engulf the Jews of all Europe? Ask Johann Brenner how he contributed to Holocaust!

Perhaps for Johann Brenner, it began in Munich in 1923. Waiting to have a beer with Philip, Johann chances on a street preacher, haranguing a little crowd of ragged veterans. The haranger is a short, nondescript little man, sporting a ridiculous mustache and a shrill, penetrating voice. But this little man speaks eloquently of the times— hard times, and all the fault of die Juden!

—Why did we lost the war? Die Juden!
—Why Versailles? Die Juden!
—Who keeps Germany from her destiny? Die Juden! Die Juden! Juden! Die Juden!

Germany was a fertile soil in 1923, a soil waiting to be planted with all the hatred, the venom that Adolph Hitler could spew. But Hitler was persuasive, if illogical – Johann (and Germany) are seduced. Hitler’s theme of der Volk and “blood purity” of course formed the basic rationale for the removals – removals of Jews and gypsies, homosexuals and mentally ill and handicapped, and, later, of Poles and Russians and other inferiors.

Hitler is not the only seducer. For Johann, a "great” physician, Brandt, reinforces Johann’s disquiet and his growing contempt for Jews and other undesirables. Brandt is part of the driving force that leads to Holocaust.

Johann is not corrupted in one fell swoop; his corruption is gradual, so gradual that he cannot see his entrapment. He participates in compulsory sterilization procedures, framed in the concept of eugenics and for the good of the Volk. Eventually we find Johann working in Auschwitz, carrying out medical “research.” His particular specialty was castrations – mass castrations to produce docile slaves who could not reproduce and so spoil the sacred blood of the Volk.

We pity Johann as he carries out his assault on humanity, we pity him because he is not able to see the depth of evil to which he is contributing. Only when his boyhood friend, his blood brother Philip the Jew arrives at Auschwitz via cattle car does Johann begin to recognize his own evil.

Johann finds shadows walking in Munich – men with no present, no future. Men from the trenches, men who will always be soldiers, old soldiers, shadows walking in the past.

And the question for the reader lurks at the end: what evil lies in all of us just below the surface?

***
Many thanks to my Dad, Dr. James Cummins, for taking the time to read and thoughtfully review Shadows Walking. The book is on a virtual tour for the month of November. Be sure to visit these other blogs for more reviews!

Monday, November 7th
Review at Impressions in Ink

Monday, November 14th
Review at A Bookish Affair

Thursday, November 17th
Review at The Book Garden

Monday, November 21st
Author Interview at A Bookish Affair

Thursday, November 24th
Review at Confessions of a Book Hoarder

Monday, November 28th
Author Guest Post at Confessions of a Book Hoarder

The Sunday Salon: October in Review

Books Read in October (click for reviews)
One Second After by William Forstchen
The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom
Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman

Best Book of the Month
The Kitchen House. Oh my goodness! Loved it!

Read Alouds
The Phantom Tollbooth

Currently Reading
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Added to My Ever-Growing TBR List
Proof of Heaven by Mary Curran Hackett
The Time Between by Mary Duenas
A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (recommended at Rebecca Reads)
The First Wife by Emily Barr (recommended by Fleur Fisher)
The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian
A Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah
Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Top 3 Most Visited Reviews This Month on SmallWorld Reads
Frankenstein
The Great Gilly Hopkins
Snowflower and the Secret Fan

Book Review: One Second After

One Second After by William Forstchen is our November book club choice. This is not a book I would normally pick out to read, and that's just one of the many things I love about book club.

This novel is set in Black Mountain, NC, not too far from where I live. The main character is a history professor and retired military man with two daughters. One afternoon they notice a strange silence and discover that the cars on the interstate aren't moving. Eventually they discover that absolutely no electrical devices are working. The professor soon figures out that a nuclear bomb contained an electromagnetic pulse that destroyed anything electrical. I wasn't terribly interested in all that, but I'm sure some readers would find that discussion fascinating.

The rest of the novel focuses on how a town survives when it's thrust back hundreds of years. I really appreciated how Forstchen tackled the town bit by bit: what happens in the nursing homes, to people who rely on medicines, to the mentally unstable. How parents starve themselves so their children can have a bit of food. How inevitably, bands of terrorists form and roam the countryside, killing for food.

The writing itself was aggravating but I managed to get through it as a plot read. Way too much dreadfully forced, cheesy dialogue. Stiff action. Bad editing. But again, it was a great plot read. It doesn't hold a candle to Stephen King's The Stand or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but it was interesting.

Linked up with Semicolon's Saturday Review of Books

Book Review: The Kitchen House

Oh my goodness. Have you read Kathleen Grissom's The Kitchen House? If not, go quickly and buy it, borrow it, or take it off your TBR pile. I wish I had another book guaranteed this good to anticipate!

The Kitchen House is the story of Lavinia, a little Irish immigrant orphan who becomes an indentured servant on a Virginia plantation, and the family that raises her—and the family that owns her. What Lavinia doesn't understand is that she is white and her adopted family is the property of the master: the slaves of the big house.

As she grows into womanhood, she is forced to acknowledge that she is a white girl, and her family is black. What she refuses to deny, however, is that they are, indeed, her family. She has to learn to carefully straddle the two worlds, to protect those she loves, and to simply survive a brutal introduction into adulthood.

I know. It sounds like a "been there, done that" kind of novel. The plot line I've given merely scratches the surface. There is nothing sentimental or trite about this novel. Grissom is a master storyteller. Told from the perspectives of both Lavinia as well as Belle, her adoptive mother who is the master's illegitimate daughter, the novel is fast-paced, beautifully written, and absolutely compelling.

In an interview, author Grissom hints that she may be writing more on some of the characters in this novel. I can only hope!

Linked up on Semicolon's Saturday Review of Books

The Sunday Salon: September in Review

Books Read in September (click for my reviews)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Song of the Lark by Willa Cather

(Pretty sure that is an all time low for my monthly reading. Yikes!!)

Special Event
I got to hear Amy Greene, author of the fabulous Bloodroot, read at our local college! She was so wonderful and inspiring. I can hardly wait for her next book!

Added to My Ever-Growing TBR List
Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman
Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage
Carved in Bone by Jefferson Bass
Coming Up for Air by Patti Callahan Henry
Close Your Eyes by Amanda Eye Ward

Read Aloud to 10-Year-Old
The Master Puppeteer
The Indian in the Cupboard

Currently Reading
One Second After by William Forstchen

Top 3 Most Visited Reviews This Month on SmallWorld Reads
Frankenstein
Snowflower and the Secret Fan
Children's Books on Slavery

Book Review: Song of the Lark

My son, now in his sophomore year in college, switched his major to English literature in the middle of his freshman year. I never imagined the burst of joy I would feel when I heard those beautiful words, "I think I'm going to change my major." It isn't that I didn't approve of his former major (entertainment industry), it's just that he is the quintessential English major.

All that to say: when I quizzed him on his favorite book all year, he named Willa Cather's Song of the Lark without hesitation. I am proud to say that I introduced my son to Willa Cather with My Antonia, which I actually didn't read until a few years ago. Oh my goodness. How I adored that book! I have no idea how Willa Cather escaped me all of my years as an English major.

But I had never even heard of Song of the Lark until my son had to read it for a class. I grabbed it from his bookshelf a few weeks ago when I discovered I had nothing to read. Notice I said "a few weeks ago." I was in one of those fall-asleep-after-3-pages kind of months. But that has no reflection on the book.

I loved it. This is the story of a little immigrant girl with a very big voice in a tiny town in Colorado. Everyone in Moonstone knows that Thea is different. It is no surprise when an inheritance from an admirer allows her to go to Chicago to study music. Ultimately she becomes a great opera singer, but not without tremendous sacrifice. This is the portrait of the artist as a young woman and more: the classic struggle of the artist with herself, with society, with the people who love her.

Cather's prose is phenomenal. This is one of those books in which I wanted to keep underlining passages and turning down page corners. Such moments of profundity! Such perfectly poetic descriptions! I am quite sure that Cather is severely neglected in the study of American literature. I don't understand why she is left out of the traditional canon. In my experience students respond enthusiastically to My Antonia, and I suspect Song of the Lark—with its themes of coming of age, search for identity, and struggle of the artist— would also widely appeal to students.

And adults, of course. I loved this novel, not as much as My Antonia, but tremendously. I noticed that there is a PBS movie of Song of the Lark. Sadly, neither Netflix nor our local public library carries it.

Book Review: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Barbara Ehrenreich— highly educated, financially comfortable— goes undercover to see what life would be like as a minimum-wage worker in America. How can someone survive on $6-7/hour?

Ehrenreich, a journalist by trade, spent a month in each of three locations—Florida, Maine, and Minnesota— as a waitress, hotel housekeeper, maid, and Walmart worker. (She did not inform her co-workers or bosses of her "real" life until her last day at each place of employment.) Her goal was to live like her co-workers (although with the benefit of three important tools: a car, a laptop, and $1000 in start-up funds).

Her life quickly became extraordinarily difficult. Affordable housing in all cases turned out to be barely habitable trailers, hotel rooms, tiny apartments. Her jobs were emotionally demeaning and physically hard. I'm sure that it was terribly hard for her that people didn't recognize her intelligence, although she never says this. I get the feeling that she often wanted to cry out, "You can't treat me like this: I have a PhD!"

Or maybe I'm projecting. I've worked minimum wage jobs as a college graduate. I've been that waitress in a polyester uniform, silently fuming because the boss was treating me like everyone else. Did he not recognize my ability to write A+ papers?

Yes, we are the privileged middle class, and the truth is, that while Ehrenreich's book is interesting and enlightening, she can't possibly present a picture of minimum-wage America with three short months in just three random cities. She needed to add in issues of health-care (when she got a rash from her work as a maid, she called her personal dermatologist and got a prescription) and family (as a single woman, she didn't have to face issues of childcare, etc.). She needed to give up her life for a year, not just a few months, and stay in one place—without a car and an emergency fund.

Ehrenreich tries, though, to present to her readers, presumably the privileged middle class, the life of millions of minimum-wage workers across America. It's hard. It's unthinkable to many of us that one could spend one's entire life working a couple of different jobs, 60-70 hours/week, on $7 an hour. Most people I know have worked in minimum-wage jobs at some point in their lives, but we all knew that we are working there temporarily—until we were done with college or graduate school, for the most part. Even working in those jobs for a set amount of time—with that light at the end of the tunnel—can be terribly depressing and demoralizing.

The author is condescending at times and often downright snarky, but I still think this is an important read. She doesn't offer any solutions, but she does raise a lot of questions and shed light on the plight of the poor.