

Literature and Poetry
Joan L. Cannon Wrote: A Curmudgeon's Complaint
Joan Cannon wrote: An editor no longer can browse the slush pile for something that might be to his or her individual taste and take a flier on it. As for fiction: the formulas for success (read enormous sales) have multiplied. Does the story have a thriller pace? Check. Plenty of sex, preferably explicit and at least somewhat unconventional? Check. Violence? Check. Shocking characters, scenes, plots? Check. Or, perhaps to fit into another category, it may need to be gently bland, without a suggestion of the unpleasant realities of life and certainly no more than a hint of sex, and make every character call regularly and verbally on the Almighty. Even the category romances of my day have become less rather than more convincing. more »
Jo Freeman Reviews: No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice
Jo Freeman Writes: Those who suffer defeat, be they Presidents or populations, deal with downfall in different ways. Denial is one way. Simply flip defeat on its head and claim victory. You might not get the concrete benefits of an actual victory, but you can get the psychological ones. The white South admitted to only military defeat. To claim a moral victory, it invented the Lost Cause, which saw the War as an heroic attempt of a noble people to leave a union that only wanted to exploit its wealth. Believers insisted that the reason for the War was states’ rights, ignoring the fact that the Secession Ordinances declared it to be slavery. This is a timely book. What to do with statues of Confederate soldiers has been much in the news lately. As the author points out, however, this is just the latest twist in a story that began after the Civil War. more »
Jill Norgren’s Late Summer Reading Suggestions
Jill Norgren Reviews: There are a few weeks remaining before summer’s end. Here are some of my suggestions for off-hours reading — several outstanding books, newly published and golden oldies. Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamtress is an extraordinary, near perfect novel, slight of size. In The Alice Network, Kate Quinn creates a world of female spies in World War I with a parallel story of disappearance during World War II. In The Barefoot Woman Scholastique Mukasongas, like Kate Quinn, gives us another story of an intrepid woman. Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain considers a childhood quite different from Mukasongas’s, one is which a child tries to protect and save his mother from her worst instincts. An astonishing first novel-autobiographical, winner of the Booker prize, Shuggie Bain is set in 1980s Glascow, the Thatcher years. more »
Jo Freeman Reviews MADAM SPEAKER, Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons Of Power: “An iron fist in a Gucci glove”
The bulk of the book is on Pelosi’s 35 years (to date) in the House. As Washington bureau chief of USA Today, Page has been well-positioned to cover a woman who has broken several glass ceilings. Pelosi was the first women to be elected Whip and House Minority Leader. She’s been Speaker twice (2007-2011 and 2019 to date). Nancy used her ability to corral votes to pass Obamacare. She opposed the invasion of Iraq while remaining cordial with Bush ‘43. She opposed his impeachment for that war while supporting the impeachment of Trump years later. She’s been attacked and lauded. (Editor's note: A marvelous gift for a daughter, relative, friend, for the Holidays and birthdays.) more »