Book Review: we is got him

In 1874 a four year-old child named Charley Ross became the first kidnapped person in America held for ransom.  Carrie Hagen's novel we is got him traces the kidnapping that grew into a national embarassment.

The book completely fascinated me as Hagen brought 19th century Philadelphia to life.  Born and raised in Philadelphia, I learned a lot about society, corruption, and the quality of life for most from we is got him.  Through the setting Hagen recreated the events of the day and brought to life just how unsettled we still were as a nation--the irresponsibility of partisan politics rears its ugly head.

For me, the real stars of the book are the ransom notes:

Mr. Ros: We supos you got the other leter that teld yu we had yu child all saf and sond.  Yu mite ofer one $100,000 it woud avale yu nothing.  to be plaen with yu yu mite invoke all the powers of the universe and that cold not get yu child from us.  we set god--man and devel at defiance to rest him ot of our hands.

Hagen serves as a detective, piecing together the clues, ransom notes, statements, and people on both side of the ledger--the kidnappers and their families, the victims and their families, and the politicians and police from Philadelphia and New York.  She certainly pins down the high probability of what (may have) happened--the facts of the case were never resolved--and leaves me with a strong feeling of regret and empathy for the father and mother of Charley Ross.

A high profile case when it occurred, the story of Charley Ross faded with time--even as a Philadelphian I'd never heard of the case.

Overall, the case as it unfolds is exciting to follow.  As each ransom note and correspondence appears, and the months pass by painfully for the family, I was hooked and didn't find any parts slow or poorly told.  I liked Hagen's clear, efficient, style but especially appreciated the little details which brings a whole world to life:

Like so many other instituuions, the postal service changed dramatically during the Civil War.  Officials thought it more appropriate for women to learn of family deaths in the privacy of their homes, rather than the public sphere of the post office.  In 1864, sixty-six American cities instituted home delivery.  For the first time it was possible to anonymously place a letter in a container at a post office, hotel, bar, or letter box, and know it would reach a designated person exactly where he or she lived.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone, but especially those people who enjoy a mystery, crime, or historical story.  Well researched and well written, this book combines the best components of all three--add to the fact that if you are a Philadelphian, then the book becomes a must-read.

Thomas Eakins - Baby at play

Book Review: Death in the City of Light

On the one hand I am tempted to suggest that it is comforting to learn another culture screws up high-profile cases too.  On the other hand, the surreal circumstances of serial killer Marcel Petiot are too astonishing not to know--for seventeen years I've taught a WWII unit as a companion piece to a month with the Diary of Anne Frank.  My students not only read Anne's diary but they self-select two other books of interest about the period.  In all of my digging through fiction and nonfiction, poetry and ideas for lessons, research topics based on the culture of the 1940s I never once recall coming across the name Marcel Petiot.

David King's Death in the City of Light astonished me.

Who knew that a serial killer operated right beneath the toothbrush mustachioed nose of the world's most notorious serial killer.  I understand that it was difficult to compete with Hitler.

However, this isn't your run-of-mill serial killer--Marcel Petiot, a trained surgeon, lured Jews back to his house of horrors by offering help fleeing Occupied Paris.  Despicably, he preyed on frightened people, terrified people who believed this man would save their lives,  they trusted him and paid a lot of money in cash or jewels for the relief of the safe passage offered to South America.  Petiot drugged them, murdered them in a homemade gas chamber (equipped with a viewing lens so he could watch), then carved them into pieces which ended up decomposing in a quicklime pit in his yard or stoking the stove in the basement.

Beyond the cruel and savage nature of his actions, Marcel Petiot pandered to the media, yawned at the judge and jury, taunted the prosecution and made an absolute spectacle of the trial.

Rumors at the time swirled that the Nuremberg Trials would be put on hold so lawyers and politicians could attend the closing events of the Petiot trial.

From the outset, the judge lost control of the courtroom, the prosecution bungled evidence, and the public laughed at and with Petiot.  A trial for the murder of anywhere from 20 to over a 100 people (many represented by family or loved ones) turned into a source of daily laughs.

For me, the book is as much about Petiot as it is about the era.  Death followed millions during and after World War II--King suggests that a society so immersed in death had a difficult time finding the nausea, fear, and loathing for a serial killer who frankly admitted murdering many.  He claims to have been murdering Nazis--another nauseating show of disrespect to the families of the people he butchered.

The details in the book satisfy the curiosity as King digs deep into Petiot's history as well as the evidence, the files and testimonies, and the French investigators who hunted Petiot down and brought him to justice.

A highly recommended read for anyone interested in history or even pop culture--this Petiot trial is one of the enormous moments of pop culture that I never heard about from the 1940s.

Yves Klein

Book Review: A Perfect Red

Both exhaustive and exhausting, I struggled through A Perfect Red by Amy Butler Greenfield.  Perhaps this is more a reflection on me than the writer as the book has garnered many plaudits from top reviewers.  Greenfield obviously did her homework--there is little wasted space--as she elevates a lowly insect to instant celebrity. 

I did learn quite a bit, so the book did not disappoint in that regard.  Yet the full title was so inviting that I expected something sexier in style than a dry lecture: A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire.

All of those things are in the book to a certain degree, but as someone who enjoys nonfiction the telling of the story disappointed me. The gears of A Perfect Red grind and seize the worst through the core of the story--the elusive source of the lucrative and perfect scarlet: the cochineal insect.  

The writing kept me at arm's length from a story I found quite interesting.  Yet, I was never able to lose myself in the story and found myself constantly thinking that I need to keep reading because the history is compelling.  Being kept at arm's length in a newspaper or magazine informative article is one thing, but the same feeling in a book is disappointing.  For a book about a color, I expected a little more engagement of my senses.

At its best, the book reveals the compelling journey of red.  From nobility to British red coats to the man struggling to put bread and soup on his family's table, everyone sought to wear at least a small trace of red (no matter how poor the quality) on their clothing because of what it represented--wealth and power.  As a matter of fact, these strong feelings towards red do not shift until the emergence of the Victorian Age when everything bright and beautiful was summarily dismissed.

The writing yanks the reader back and forth across the Atlantic as the Spanish Empire bumbles its finances and political decisions and at the same time European scientists quibble where this lovely scarlet dye comes from--plant or insect.  It had been under the noses of Cortes and his men in Spanish-occupied Mexico for decades...meanwhile the Spanish Empire's finances burn...

We go on to follow a kidnapped cochineal insect and the quest to try to cultivate the insect.  Pirates raid ships not only for the traditional gold and silver...but for cochineal as well.  This becomes such a problem that the English found it a source of national pride when one of their men navigated a ship full of cochineal safely and successfully home.

The Spanish pressed their lips tight and their secrets to themselves for as long as they could, but the development of the microscope laid the debate to rest and the secret was out.  Manufacturing took over and squashed the highly-labor intensive development and refinement of the cochineal insect.

Overall, it is a story worth telling and knowing, and I am glad I know it now, but the journey through the book just proved dry and challenging for me.  The writing just did not appeal to my sensibilities.

Vermeer - Girl in the Red Hat

Book Review: The History of the World in Six Glasses

Beer.  Wine.  Liquor.  Tea.  Coffee.  Coca-Cola.

In six individual essays, author Tom Standage explores the impact on politics, geography, and culture caused by each of these beverages.

Built on many vignettes of history, The History of the World in Six Glasses reads like a textbook comprised of well-polished and researched informative essays.  I coudn't help but think that one section of this book will show up on an SAT someday.  Even though the book is filled with bits of narrative and some persuasive combinations of information and story, I felt as a reader at arm's length from the writer--and this was ok as I wasn't expected to be propped up on Standage's knee and told a story.

What I did get was a tightly constructed history lesson that did not disappoint to fascinate me--I kept turning pages to understand, and I kept turning pages to hurry to the next vignette:

The reason why beer is the staple in northern regions and why wine blossomed in the southern regions.

Why wine became the social drink with class and refinement.

The role whiskey played in the formative years of America and how it embodies all that is American.

The assistance coffee played in the improvement in work production as Europe and America went industrial, as well as the new political and social worlds created by the blossoming of coffeehouses as an alternative to bars and taverns.

The corrupt leveraging of tea within the politics of England...and its political and social impact on China (who suffered for decades from the results).

The mistaken assumption about American's drinking more coffee over tea.

(As an aside I barely grazed the surface by providing those examples above.)

The final essay focused on the rise and entrenchment of the iconic Coca-Cola company--the reader is just hit with fascinating fact after fact as Standage traces the rise of Coca-Cola with America's transition from an isolationist country to one who intervened in the politics of the world.  Wherever America was, we learn so was Coca-Cola.  It followed our troops around the globe (and purveyors of Coke were even granted military rank at one point) and was among the first items handed to East Germans as they passed through the Berlin Wall.

Included here are all of the associations that our enemies have with America--the Nazis are said to have printed propaganda stating that Americans have proven to be only good for two things: chewing gum and Coca-Cola.

The stories pile atop of one another and are so compelling that I will absolutely be recommending this to my father (a retired history teacher) and I know I will be taking repeated peeks inside the book over time just to enjoy the vignettes again and maybe catch a nuance I hadn't on a first read--especially in the complex and politically embroiled essay on tea.

The book concludes with one final though--a chapter on water.  Where we go from here as a civilization is inextricably tied to fresh water.  Water has become the new Coke--in countries with running tap water, people are willing to pay more per ounce of water than gasoline.  Even though it has been proven in scientific tests again and again, bottled water is no more safer or palatable than tap water--yet we pay up to 20,000 times more a bottle of water than it costs us to run the water in our own homes for several seconds to fill up a glass.  Add to this, the disease, death, and strife caused in nations where water is not readily available.  Add to this the fact that of greatest concern to our exploration of the universe is our search for water on other planets. Water is the next beverage which will absolutely shape the course of our existence.

Fittingly, the book ends with water and much like a well-crafted essay, the book leaves the reader with something to think about...actually many many many wonderful things to think about.

It is appropriate that I read this over the holidays as the information and vignettes collected here are an absolute gift.

Book Review: True Notebooks

Conflicting thoughts collide as I set to review Mark Salzman's nonfiction True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall.  Among those thoughts, two rise as the most pronounced--this is a book about finding our humanity and it is a love letter to writing.

Salzman leads a writer's group in the Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall for some of the most violent criminals in the early stages of the system--most have committed murder and are waiting to be tried as adults.

Filled with the simultaneous journeys off all of the adolescents who moved through his workshop, True Notebooks also provides a glimpse of the good people serving as advocates behind the scenes.  Remarkably, all involved recognize the importance of writing of in our lives.

Just as I, as a reader, grow attached to what an inmate has learned to express he is soon gone--gone from the book.  Gone.  Gone from the juvenile hall.  Gone.  Gone into the prison system where all acknowledge that they fall back into their hardened ways by necessity--in order to survive where they are going, some facts are indisputable.

Yet, what is never lost is what the writing experience, albeit too brief, shows each of these young people their humanity--and the possibilities of their humanity.  Through their own words we read what they have been trained to believe, their regrets, fears, hopes, and dreams.

Rough-hewn elegance meets street poetry, the writing produced by these prisoners does elicits many questions about how societies in general handles violent criminals.  However, this isn't a book set on debating the state of the justice system--when someone asks Salzman wouldn't he be better served teaching writing to troubled youth before they become criminals who committed murder we are offered the same response as when he is repeatedly asked by the inmates why he continues to show up to workshop with them: everyone needs to find their own humanity.

Never about stopping crime, Salzman's efforts demonstrate the power of writing, the power of compassion, and the many slices of reality offered to him through the writing of the inmates: 

Someone who made a big difference in my life was my partner.  Well, I should say my ex-partner, hate.  Hate was always there for me at night when I was all alone and the air-conditioning was on too high in my room.  Hate would keep me warm.  I should say he was like my father 'cause for the seven years that my father was gone, hate taught me how to speak, hate taught me how to love, and eventually hate taught me how to hate.  My best friend, my mother, my father, hate was all that.  Hate helped me grow, or was dat wrong?  I asked myself this question one day when I was lookin' into a six-by-nine mirror in my cell.  I was wearing somebody else's clothes, underwear, and socks full of holes.  Hate had left me to duel with misery and pain.  Thanks, hate.

Initially, I picked this book up because it is about writing and memoir--and as I read I saw it through the lens of being a teacher--and now, as I write this review, I've come to understand it through the lens of being a human being.

Highly recommended for teachers and human beings.

Resource Review: Save the Cat

After well over two dozen author chats via Skype in my classroom, one book continues to surface on the lips of the authors: Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need by Blake Snyder.

The first I heard of it, YA author Lizabeth Zindel responded to a question about how a writer can make a character likable.  Zindel references this book and explained that a character may be written to "save a cat" or perform an act of kindness, tenderness, selflessness that immediately renders him/her likable.

Most recently, YA author Irene Latham talked about building her novels through "beats"--a term she learned through Save the Cat.  Latham will write one line for each chapter or significant development in plot--each of those lines represents a beat because each serves a different purpose.  From there, she builds outward from each beat.

I read the book--through much of it Snyder offers a template for how many films are organized...or should be.

Without going into all twelve beats, the first several beats can be summed up as:

Act One - Thesis:
Where the audience sees the world before the adventure starts.
There is a sense that a "storm" is about to hit...things must change.

Catalyst Moment:
A life-changing moment occurs here, often disguised as bad news.
This is the first moment where something happens.

Debate:
The last chance for the hero to say that this is crazy.
Should I stay or should I go--it's dangerous out there, but what other choice do I have?


Each beat has its own chapter where Snyder explains what it is in depth and he often offers examples from contemporary film to help elucidate his point.

This book is a good tool for writers or, in my case for writing teachers, in that it provides clear examples of how writers plan.  You'd have to tease out Snyder's prescription if you are writing a novel--which Irene Latham must do. For instance, Snyder is so firm about the specific page numbers on which each beat must appear (the "catalyst moment" must appear on page 12 of a script) that everyone would be writing 100 page "novels."

More than the beats of organizing a piece, I found the book to be an interesting and a refreshing resource in that it very directly and distinctly presents some usable ideas and techniques.

August Klimt - artist