Review: ‘Suffering Succotash: The Comic Life of Molly Maise,’ by Lula Mae Barnes

Satire from the archives

Suffering Succotash: The Comic Life of Molly Maise,” by Lula Mae Barnes (Corn Fritter Press, September 2012), 4,837pp with illustrations, index, maps, and bibliography.

As time goes by, fewer and fewer people remain on this Earth who suffered through depression-era and Thanksgiving meals constructed substantially of succotash.

“As far back as the Revolutionary War,” writes Lula Mae Barnes in her new and overly definitive biography of the 1770s Rhode Island innkeeper, dancer and lady of the evening Molly Maise, “people were thankful to live off succotash when times were hard and just as thankful to get rid of the vile mixture when good fortune smiled upon them again.”

Barnes, who spent the last fifty years uncovering the obscure details of the inventor of succotash, claims that the mixture of corn, various forms of beans and minced oaths is far too improbable a concoction to have occurred by accident.

Young Molly Maise, an innkeeper on Aquidneck Island who supported the “divine cause of everything that wasn’t British,” devised succotash as a “devious treat” for British sailors enjoying her favors in the days leading up to the 1778 Battle of Rhode Island. Ever after, she claimed her succotash made the sailors so ill, they scuttled their own fleet to kill the pain. While historians agree that the fleet was scuttled, they do not cite succotash as a cause.

According to Barnes, Maise spent a lifetime giving humorous talks, some bawdy, about the ills of succotash and the role it had in the war. While her speeches and dance routines, including “The Succotash Rag” (which pre-dated the American Ragtime boom by one hundred years) were well attended, she failed to gain the validation as a soldier and inventor she was seeking.

In fact, the biography’s references clearly indict most, if not all, of the United States’ founding fathers, soldiers, newspapermen and historians of a “treasonous level of guilt” for their roles in covering up the role of Molly Maise and succotash in “the cause of freedom.”

Barnes’ epic work clearly shows that every human’s recipe for defeat is based on the foods they eat, how they mix them together, and what they name the resulting entree. Had Maise called her corn and beans a Corn & Bean Medley, history might have duly honored her for the suffering her invention caused herself and all the generations that followed.

The epitaph on Maise’s tombstone reads: “Loose corn and beans sink ships faster than loose lips.”

–Jock Stewart

Location Settings: The Other Florida, featuring Panacea and St. Teresa

This is the fourth in a series of posts exploring the location settings I’m using in my fantasy adventure novels. I hope the settings are interesting and that my rationale for selecting each place will help provide ideas to other writers who want to set their novels in settings that sit their stories.

Terms like “the other Florida” and “the forgotten coast” are often used to describe the swamps and beaches in the Florida Panhandle. The glitz, glitter and crowds of Orlando, Daytona and Miami are missing from these settings only thirty to forty miles from the state capital where I grew up.

In this post: The former Oaks motel and restaurant in Panacea at the end of the long bridge across the Ochlockonee River. This bridge is often crowded with fishermen. And, about ten miles away, the former Wilson’s Beach Cottages near St. Teresa. Author Julie S. Bettinger tells me those cottages began as efficiency rentals for soldiers. Both the restaurant and the cottages have been closed for ten years or so. Author Rhett DeVane and Florida big bend poet laureate Mary Jane Ryals have told me how The Oaks fells on hard times. What a pity. Since I couldn’t find my own photographs, I’ll be using some images here from old postcards to show what my protagonist David Ward sees in my upcoming novel The Seeker.

Why I Used The Settings

David Ward, who grew up on a Montana ranch, travels to north Florida to see his prospective fiance Anne Hill. Since she is at home on Florida’s blackwater rivers and coastal swamps, I wanted their meeting to occur in a part of the state that remains natural and relatively unspoiled and, most especially, without the usual sterility of Florida’s crowded and over-developed tourist locations.

The Oaks Restaurant and Wilson’s Beach Cottages were known to locals and to in-state tourists and were also very typical of the more-utilitarian motels and restaurants in the Florida Panhandle during the 1960s when the novel is set.

While I haven’t been to Panacea or St. Teresa in over thirty years, I grew up a few miles away. I enjoyed seafood and hushpuppies at The Oaks dozens of times and stayed at friends’ cottages a short stroll down the beach from Wilson’s. My memories, then, allowed me to put David and Anne in an old Jeep and drive south out of Tallahassee to the Gulf Coast.

The Oaks

This short excerpt from The Seeker shows how I used The Oaks setting:

At Panacea, where one could still see the remnants of a spa where the mineral waters were once thought miraculous, Anne turned in at a relatively non-descript bait, tackle, gift shop and restaurant called The Oaks.

Business was booming.

“Nothing fancy here,” she said. “Just good food.”

“You better do the ordering,” he said, glancing over the menu.

“Anne chose mullet, French fries, hush puppies (with onion), a wedge of lettuce with thousand island dressing, and sweet tea. The waitress brought several small boat-shaped bowls containing garlic butter in the prow and crackers in the stern to munch on while they waited for their entrées.

The setting here is also a device to show David the kind of world where Anne feels comfortable. Since he’s a mountain climber and she’s a “swap lady,” she wonders if they are truly compatible. As a writer, I wanted to give the reader a down-home, close-to-the-land setting that would feel much different than, say, a beach setting at either Daytona or Pompano Beach. Writers can enhance moods and themes via the location settings where their stories unfold.

Wilson’s Beach Cottages

Like The Oaks, these cottages were not only non-glamorous, they were also very typical of the 1940s and 1950s detached cabin style of motels.  In later years, such beaches would have highrise hotels, bars, fresh water and salt water swimming pools and multiple other attractions that—as you see in Daytona Beach—pretty much block the view of the water from drivers on the highway. At present, the location where these cottages were sits vacant with, so I hear, with a remaining cabin or two rotting away back into the earth. That’s too bad: it’s a wonderful beach along a bay sheltered by the Nearby Alligator point.

Here’s an excerpt set at the cottages:

Now—as that blind poet once said—“when the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared,” they went into the sea and he heard women’s voices singing a far-off hymn while Anne walked close through the incoming tide. They walked in the company of gulls and sandpipers, and a playful cocker spaniel puppy that stayed with them until they reached the end of Wilson’s long pier. Anne was saying, as the wind blew her hair toward the high water outside the confines of the sheltering bay, “we were good last night.” David kissed her and said “yes.” Last night in this place she had worn a sheer cloak of starlight in the diamond spray, her face no longer in shadow, and they had seen fire howling between their legs until the waves drove them down with murder in their eyes and all was claws and blood.

Notice the trees across the highway from the cottages. This is typical of north Florida then and now, and provides a much different kind of ambiance than a south Florida motel that would have endless city-scape on all sides.

Choosing Settings

Writers are often advised not to use their familiarity with a setting as a primary reason for making it part of their characters’ world in a short story or a novel. I can understand the reason for that advice: using a place close to home might be taking the easy way out. It might kill the story because it doesn’t have a realistic connection to the theme, characters and plot. One has to be sure that writing about a setting they know well isn’t like a beautiful shoe that just doesn’t fit.

I see stories as being, to some extent, organic to a place in the same way that legends, tall tales, many ghost stories and folk tales arose out of certain places and never would have happened anywhere else. Perhaps I look at places first and ask “What kind of story would happen here.”

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Here are the other posts in my location settings series:

• On Location: Florida’s Tate’s Hell Swamp (You can see the location of the swamp on the map above.)
• Location Settings: Tallahassee Florida’s College Avenue (Anne goes to college thirty miles north of The Oaks)
• Location Settings: Morning Eagle Falls (This waterfall is in Montana’s Glacier National Park.)

–Malcolm

Coming March 2013

A dark and earthy fantasy adventure that twists the results of magic and visions in the opposing worlds of Montana’s mountains and Florida’s swamps.

We could fill cemeteries with neglected books

“There was a time when a learned fellow (literally, a Renaissance man) could read all the major extant works published in the western world. Information overload soon put paid to that. Since there is “no end” to “making many books” – as the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes prophesied, anticipating our digital age – the realm of the unread has spread like a spilt bottle of correction fluid.” - The Guardian in “In theory: the unread and the unreadable”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón writes about a “cemetery of forgotten books” in his novel The Shadow of the Wind. This cemetery is a library maintained by the secret few who know about it and who may lend you a volume if you will protect it for life. After reading the article in “The Guardian” which led me to The Neglected Books Page which led me author Jo Walton’s lengthy 2010 Neglected Books: The List (with a science fiction and fantasy focus), I wondered if we should build a cemetery, that is, a library, of forgotten AND neglected books.

You probably have some favorite authors and books that never seem to catch on with the general public. With my Georgia focus, I can usually name several Georgia authors who seem to be lost in the shuffle even though they have won awards and/or had a book or two made into a movie. While I’ll probably read the upcoming Dan Brown book Inferno, I don’t usually follow fads. Reading outside the latest fad, I’m usually able to think of wonderful books that are being overlooked.

“The Guardian” article mentions information overload. That’s certainly a factor. Adults aren’t known for reading a lot of novels per year. Perhaps high school and college literature classes made fiction seem boring. Perhaps the latest reality show, movie, or trending Internet story gets in the way. There are plenty of reasons.

One can also say that small press authors, not including those published by old-line prestigious small presses, are likely to feel neglected. For the most part, small press books do not get reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly and major newspapers. There usually are no noteworthy interviews with small press authors or off-book-page stories about their work. With few exceptions, their books are not entered into awards competitions, included on the media’s best-books-of-the-year lists, optioned for movies, or remotely on the radar of most prospective readers.

If you ask a major critic, book reviewer, literary magazine, or publishing magazine what a neglected or a forgotten book is, it is normally considered one from a major publisher that was well reviewed, but had lower than expected sales and was allowed to go out of print. Books by popular authors that don’t catch on like the authors’ other works are also in the “neglected” category.

The cemetery/library in The Shadow of the Wind resonated with me in part because of the novel’s notion that “Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.” In “real life,” a secret library that almost nobody knows about won’t serve our need. Perhaps books need patrons or people who love them and talk about them or people who share them with their friends. Perhaps we need more adventurous readers who will commit to buying five books a year that are not on the bestseller list. We need more reviewers: writers often wonder why people say, “hey, I loved your book” but then don’t follow that up with a reader review on GoodReads or Amazon.

I think I’m only talking about band-aids here unless more people find more reasons to read. According to ParaPublishing, 27% of adults in the U.S. don’t read books for pleasure (based on figures from a few years ago). What books are the remaining adults going to pick from: an old and forgotten book, a book from a small press author, or the book sitting in the bookstore window and at the top of the national bestseller lists? No wonder so many books are forgotten and/or neglected and/or passed over—depending on your definition of those terms.

Years ago when literature and other liberal arts courses were more valued in high schools and college than they are now, most of the students in my classes came from families where their parents read almost no books. The students learned from home that reading wasn’t valued. Our town’s public library has reading classes for kids, and I love seeing the kids there. But I wonder, is the excitement of the reading program reinforced by parents at home or are the kids just dropped off at the library by parents who need time to run some errands elsewhere?

Reading is an investment in time more than an investment of money. I get offers via e-mail, Facebook and GoodReads for free downloads and sample chapters. I read a lot, but I can’t keep up with the deluge. I try to promote new authors on my blogs and on Twitter, but sooner or later, I want to read the books I hear about rather than free books I’ve never heard about. It’s book overload even for those of us who read a lot.

Perhaps reading just isn’t a modern-day avocation and perhaps it’s too late to change that. Can reading-oriented groups help or did we let lack of reading get so far out of hand that the problem is too broken to fix? More and more people are writing and publishing, but their viable readership seems to be getting smaller no matter how much time we all spend arguing about whether e-books should be almost free or should sell for enough to support the authors who wrote them?

• So, what books and authors do you like that have fallen into the neglected or forgotten categories?
• What happens when you tell your friends about these books? Do they yawn and then spend another evening watching reality TV shows or reading only the top ten book on their genre’s bestseller list?

–Malcolm

‘The Totally Out There Guide to Glacier National Park’ offers fun facts for teens and adults

Can you squeeze both feet onto a 2″ x 6″ piece of rock? What if that rock is 3,000 feet above a cold mountain lake?

Mountain goats, the iconic symbol of Glacier National Park, can place all four feet on a rocky pinnacle or ledge that small, and they can leap from rock to rock. The design of the mountain goats’ legs and feet makes them very good climbers.

Donna Love (“The Wild Life of Elk” and “Henry The Impatient Heron”) filled “The Totally Out There Guide to Glacier National Park” (Mountain Press, 2010) and the free Arts and Activities Guide (PDF download) with facts like these. Illustrated by Joyce Mihran Turley, the book’s visually exciting art work will delight the younger members of the family. The text is written for both teens and adults.

From the Publisher:

Glacier National Park remains a unique ecosystem, one of the most unspoiled in the world, full of wonders to discover. Triple Divide Peak is the only place in the United States where water flows to three oceans west to the Pacific Ocean, east to the Atlantic, and north to the Arctic. The Big Drift, the snowdrift that forms on Logan Pass each winter, can grow to over eighty feet high and takes road crews months to clear each spring. Come discover the Crown of the Continent with The Totally Out There Guide to Glacier National Park, the first in a new book series that encourages kids and their grownups to get off the couch and get totally out there experiencing the wonders of our national parks.

Join acclaimed author Donna Love as she examines the park s twenty-five remaining active glaciers, explains the formation of the park s towering mountains, vibrant valleys, and pristine lakes, and looks at living things from beargrass to grizzly bears. You ll learn about the park s human history as well, from the arrival of the first ancient peoples to the establishment of the park in 1910 to plans for the twenty-first century and beyond. Whether you re taking a real trip or an imaginary adventure, you ll definitely enjoy the journey!

Coming Soon

Donna is working on a similar book for fans of Yellowstone National Park. Donna says on her website that “When our children were young, I found I had the ability to explain nature to them. I believe that the more you know about something, the better care you can give it, so I enjoy learning about new subjects. To learn about the subjects for each of my books, I study it until I understand it. Then I explain it. I think that’s why children, as well as adults, love my writing.”

Her approach has, I think, made the 96-page “The Totally Out There Guide to Glacier National Park” a classic. We can look forward to her Yellowstone book with high expectations.

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You May Also Like: A review of Sheridan Hough’s romantic mystery “Mirror’s Fathom.”

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Bears; Where They Fought – Life in Glacier Park’s Swiftcurrent Valley.”

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Got book lovers? Here are three Christmas ideas

If you still have some holiday shopping to do, here are a few of my favorites this year that might make for some very nice gifts:

 “Goatsong” by Patricia Damery, il piccolo editions Fisher King Press (November 1, 2012), ISBN-13: 978-1926715766 – A wise view of the world through the eyes of a child, homeless women, a goats.

• From my review: When you read Goatsong, you are breathing in fresh air off the Pacific ocean, smelling the sweet scent of the bay laurel, and cooling your tired feet in sacred streams flowing through old redwoods in the company of wise women who, without agenda, may well change you as they changed the ten-year-old Sophie in those old family stories about the town of Huckleberry on the Russian River.

“In Sunlight and Shadow” by Mark Helprin, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (October 2, 2012), 978-0547819235 – A combat veteran whose business is threatened by the mob falls in love with a young woman from a rich and influential family. Readers will discover a poetic view of New York  City played off  against the Mafia’s protection racket and the protagonist’s combat experiences as a behind-enemy-lines pathfinder.

• From my review: Mark Helprin recalls post World War II New York City throughout In Sunlight and in Shadow with the accuracy and atmosphere of A Winter’s Tale (1983) and his protagonist’s combat experiences with the chilling combat detail of A Soldier of the Great War (1991).

“The Casual Vacancy” by J. K. Rowling, Little, Brown and Company (September 27, 2012), ISBN-13: 9780316228534 – Rowling steps away from teenagers and contemporary fantasy with a story about the people and politics of a small English town.

• From my review: Winesburg, Spoon River, Grover’s Corners and Peyton Place reside so powerfully in the consciousness of readers as accurately rendered representations of small town life that their people, town squares, relationships and secrets are forever in our memory almost crossing the boundary from fiction into reality. The English village of Pagford in J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy belongs on this list.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of contemporary fantasy novels, including “Sarabande.”

Contemporary fantasy for your Kindle.

Briefly Noted: ‘Reshaping Our National Parks and Their Guardians’ by Kathy Mengak

Reshaping Our National Parks and Their Guardians: The Legacy of George B. Hartzog Jr., by Kathy Mengak, with a foreword by Robert M. Utley, University of New Mexico Press (April 2012), 336 pp

When Glacier Park’s Centennial Program Committee received the George and Helen Hartzog Volunteer Group Award for promoting the park’s 2010 centennial, many visitors were unfamiliar with the man who led the National Park Service between 1964 and 1972 or with the award established in 1998 (and subsequently supported via a fund created by his wife) to honor those donating time to help the parks.

Published earlier this year, Kathy Mengak’s Reshaping our National Parks and Their Guardians ably tells the story of the highly successful NPS director who added 72 new parks to the system during a contentious political era in American history. In his book review in the Autumn 2012 issue of “Montana The Magazine of Western History,” Craig Rigdon writes that while the author’s “fondness for Hartzog is evident…she provides a fairly balanced review of his career.”

Originating with Mengak’s dissertation at Clemson University, the book draws heavily on twelve years of interviews conducted with Hartzog and other key officials. Hartzog died in 2008.

Kurt Repanshek (National Parks Travler) writes that Hartzog “was a cigar-chewing, Scotch-loving, Stetson-wearing, lover of fishing, hard-charging director who often knew exactly what he wanted and found a way to get it. One way or another.” His review of the book is posted here.

From the Publisher

Wikipedia Photo

This biography of the seventh director of the National Park Service brings to life one of the most colorful, powerful, and politically astute people to hold this position. George B. Hartzog Jr. served during an exciting and volatile era in American history. Appointed in 1964 by Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, he benefited from a rare combination of circumstances that favored his vision, which was congenial with both President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and Udall’s robust environmentalism.
 
Hartzog led the largest expansion of the National Park System in history and developed social programs that gave the Service new complexion. During his nine-year tenure, the system grew by seventy-two units totaling 2.7 million acres including not just national parks, but historical and archaeological monuments and sites, recreation areas, seashores, riverways, memorials, and cultural units celebrating minority experiences in America. In addition, Hartzog sought to make national parks relevant and responsive to the nation’s changing needs.

I like Rigdon’s comment that while most people remember the National Park Service’s first two directors, Stephen Mather and Horace Albright, Reshaping Our National Parks and Their Guardians demonstrates that “some of the most critical years in the agency’s history took place during George B. Hartzog’s tenure as director.”

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Bears; Where They Fought: Life in Glacier Park’s Swiftcurrent Valley” and two contemporary fantasy adventures set in the park, “Sarabande” and “The Sun Singer.”

All three books, from Vanilla Heart Publishing, are available on Kindle. “Sarabande” and “The Sun Singer” are also available in trade paperback.

Briefly Noted: ‘Voices of the Elders’ by Shelly Bryant

Shelly Bryant (Cyborg Chimera, Under the Ash) is a prolific poet whose work never fails to inspire readers with pointed and poignant images that rise from the earth on the wings of spare words. Her new collection Voices of the Elders from Sam’s Dot Publishing is startling in the risks taken, the variety of its forms and references and the scope of its vision.

The fifty-five poems in this 59-page volume, many of which have appeared in “Aoife’s Kiss,” “Scifaikuest,” “Sloth Jockey” and other publications, are grouped into four sections—seduction, obstruction, destruction and abduction.

Jason Gantenberg aptly describes Bryant’s scope in these groupings in the book’s introduction: “What I’ve always loved about Shelly’s writing is the breadth of genres and periods in which she embeds her thoughts. There are few writers who will quite so fearlessly juxtapose classical Anglo-Saxon fantasies about fairies and dragons with ruminations on supernovae, historical fiction with futurism, cynical politics with whimsy.”

In “Oort” Bryant writes of “a failed planet” that’s “denuded of destiny,” followed by “Styx” an “eternal river” with an “ever-changing flow,” followed by “Bargain Hunter” about a young man in a store who makes a five-dollar purchase out of books for “aficionados with loads of cash.” The poem ends with these lines:

producing pleasure
properly pirated porn
just like the real thing

“Keep it in the Family,” begins:

familiarity
and its child
contempt
creep into familiar lines

And “Voice of the Elder” ends:

the elder dryad
to the swirling storm
raises his dying howl

I will return to “Memories Shared, Standing on Your Balcony,” the writer’s block in “Project,” “Men of Renown” with their Achilles heels and the other fresh-faced words in Voices of the Elders many times, for while they speak to me of today’s world in today’s language, they are, I think, penned by an old and very wise soul.

–Malcolm

Books: Magic Between the Covers

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.” – Caroline Gordon

My parents orchestrated Christmas Eve and the following morning with skill, making it a time of magic and expectation even though the gifts beneath the gifts beneath the tree were saturated with love rather than money. More often that not, one or more of the carefully wrapped packages beneath the spruce tree contained a book.

More often than not, each book was inscribed with my name, the date, and the name of the person who found the book and thought I might like the story. Pirates, space ships, wild animals and detectives waited between the covers for me to turn the page and enter an alternate universe. I didn’t see stories as alternate universes at the time, but now when I think of books, I smile at the concept of being in two places at one time.

There I was following the Hardy Boys in their latest attempt to help their police detective father crack a dangerous case AND there I was sitting in a comfortable chair in the living room next to a lamp. According to reports, I often didn’t respond when my parents called me to dinner when I was more there than here within the pages of a book like The Twisted Claw.

Portals, Portkeys and Magic Carpets

Caroline Gordon saw books as magic carpets. Ever fascinated with portals, I see books as doorways to faraway lands like the famous wardrobe in C. S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia. In today’s Harry Potter series terms, readers might well see a book as a portkey that whisks them away the minute they touch it.

While looking at the Amazon page for Mark Helprin’s upcoming novel In Sun Light and Shadow, I found the novel’s stunning 489-word prologue included there as part of the book’s description. The constraints of fair use don’t allow me to cut and paste the entire prologue into this blog as a shining example of an author’s invitation to his readers asking them to step through the door, touch the portkey or settle themselves onto a flying carpet. But, here’s a taste. . .

An Invitation

Helprin’s prologue begins with the line: If you were a spirit, and could fly and alight as you wished, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then you might rise to enter an open window high above the park, in the New York of almost a lifetime ago, early in November of 1947.

The prologue goes on to describe the view from that window, and then the room itself: full bookshelves, the Manet seascape above the fireplace, a telephone, a desk drawer containing a loaded pistol, and a “bracelet waiting for a wrist.” Then the prologue concludes with: And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold.

Even though I was, from the viewpoint of my three cats who were hovering around the den door waiting to be fed, sitting here at my desk, I had in fact stepped through a portal to an apartment in New York 65 years ago. I tell you this: I wasn’t ready to return when Katy, our large calico, rubbed against my leg with a no-nonsense purr because I was thoroughly enchanted by the magic between the covers.

Even though a small percentage of the books I read each year come into my hands as gifts, I approach every book with an interesting premise and a cover splashed with promises as a gift. Years ago, I watched a TV western called “Have Gun, Will Travel.” Today, I gravitate more toward Have Book, Will Travel. Each book is an invitation to adventure, lives hanging in the balance, twisted claws lurking in the dark, castles set high above green valleys, and frightened travelers walking down roads in sunlight and in shadow.

Books cast spells and carry us away and while we are gone, we are changed, writ larger by the experiences now living within our consciousness, and ready to see the word of here with the visions we had while we were there.

–Malcolm

Travel to mountains and magic for $4.99. It’s cheaper than Amtrak and Delta Airlines.

If you ask me what I’m reading, you’re on your own recognizance

A writer friend of mine once told me she looks at my book reviews here as prospective To Be Read books for her Kindle. “You have never steered me wrong, Malcolm,” she said. Perhaps he fingers were crossed behind her back.

Take a look at my current reading shelf. It should be a warning. I say that because I am probably the only person in the known universe who has these three books on his shelf at one time. Or at any time. My reading tastes are both wide-ranging and eccentric. (Not always because, hey, I can enjoy a good Nora Roberts or John Grisham novel like anyone else.)

People sometimes note that most of my reviews on GoodReads and Amazon end up with four or five stars and suggest that I’m just trying to be nice. No, I’m doing that because I usually only review books I like a lot—well, unless I read something that really ticks me off.

However, five stars from me doesn’t mean the book will get give stars from you.This was proven conclusively several years ago when I gave  Dow Mossman’s novel The Stones of Summer a glowing review. People told me I was crazy. Possibly so even though I was one of 30 people who felt that way.

Consider the Source

So, when I tell you what I’m reading, you need to consider the source (me) and remember that even though I often read mainstream bestsellers, I probably read them for the wrong reasons. The other books on my shelf are going to have a very strong flavor of magical realism, speculative fiction, fantasy, folktales, literary fiction, and stuff that—for the want of a better words—is just plain weird.

Now, my writer friend hasn’t told me directly that I inadvertently steered her wrong on a book last year, that one being The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht,  but I noticed she gave it three stars on GoodReads. Sigh. After The Night Circus, that was my favorite novel of the year. I think both of these novels are Pulitzer Prize level novels, though I doubt either one was nominated (or seriously considered) since the rules say the novels must be truly American stories and neither of these books were.

Your Own Recognizance

As it turns out, this post is a disclaimer, meaning that I am often drawn to stories that mesh one way or another into my sense of wonder and my world view of real life and fiction. Before spending your money on anything on my To Be Read shelf, you better get a second opinion.

What’s on your shelf these days?

–Malcolm

BOOKS: Are we raising the cute baby alligator that will ultimately eat us alive?

Small juvenile crocodilians are deceptive – they seem easy enough to handle, and persuasive dealer talk can easily convince people to part with their cash. But do not be fooled. As they grow larger, crocodilians rapidly become stronger and more boisterous. After only a year, many people can no longer handle their animals and it is very common to see 1 to 2 year old animals being given away or illegally released into the wild. Larger crocodilians are, without a doubt, extremely dangerous animals. – crocodilian.com

“The evidence is, in fact, absolutely conclusive that the Standard Oil Company charges altogether excessive prices where it meets no competition, and particularly where there is little likelihood of competitors entering the field, and that, on the other hand, where competition is active, it frequently cuts prices to a point which leaves even the Standard little or no profit, and which more often leaves no profit to the competitor, whose costs are ordinarily somewhat higher.” – Eliot Jones. The Trust Problem in the United States 1922

Human beings are strange animals in that they rush hell-bent-for-leather to participate in their own demise.

When I was a kid, one of the first things I learned about people and their money is that the most powerful bragging rights come from getting something cheaper than your neighbor got it. Woe be unto the guy at the neighborhood barbecue who paid five cents more for a sparkplug or a hundred dollars more for a new car than the guy flipping chickens on the grill.

When economic times are tough, saving a nickel on a sparkplug or a c-note on a car makes logical sense. People are trying to scrape by everywhere they can. In fact, scraping by has almost trumped bragging rights over buying something cheaper than our neighbor bought it for.

Looking Down the Road

In Florida where I grew up, a lot of folks thought it was cute to buy baby alligators. How cute. Certainly more exciting than a puppy, cat, or a goldfish in a bowl. If one kid got one, his friends all wanted one. It was all the rage, rather like bragging that you were the first person to drive to the edge of town and shop at the new big box store. (When I was a kid, one of the first things I observed about people is that they feel powerful when doing things are all the rage and that they feel sheepish when they’re not doing them.)

Baby alligators grow up and when they do, their not as cute as they once were. So it is, that on a dark and stormy night, the alligator is wrestled out to the nearest lake or swamp before it figures out, “hey, I can eat the family.” In the wild, it may go off and live a beautiful life or it may lurk around the fringes of the neighborhood where it hunts for pets and small children.

Remembering Ida Tarbell

One of the first term papers I ever wrote when I got into one of those classes where we were taught how to find sources and use lots of footnotes was about Ida Tarbell and her 1904 book The History of the Standard Oil Company. When Standard put up a new gas station in town, they offered low prices until all the other gas stations went out of business trying to compete with them. Ultimately, the company was broken up even though its remnants, including Exxon in the U.S. and Esso in Canada are doing quite well.

Bragging rights about cheap products followed by the need to scrape by have both been powerful incentives for helping build the businesses that ultimately got big enough to eat us alive. Perhaps Standard Oil is too far away into the past to be a good case in point. Okay, think Walmart and every other big box store that showed up in your home town and ultimately killed all the local businesses.

Statistics show that more dollars leave a community when people shop at big box stores than when they shop at the locally owned shops in what’s left of the down town. Few people care because, truth be told, they feel really sheepish admitting that they paid 15 cents more for a gallon of paint at Bob’s Hardware than their neighbor paid for the same paint at Home Depot. And goodness knows, who wants to admit they paid 10 cents more for a pound of hamburger meat at Jenkin’s IGA than they would have paid at Walmart?

Amazon Used to Be Cut, but It’s Still All the Rage

Baby alligators grow up and become angerous. While Amazon has grown up, most people don’t view it as dangerous in spite of the all the charges that surfaced over the Christmas holidays about predatory practices, removing the middle man, wanting to be the only publisher in town, and offering “democratic, be-your-own-publisher” deals to authors who claim “New York Publishers” are a vicious monopoly that won’t let them in the door.

But Amazon is selling books at low prices. Isn’t that all the justification we need for helping the cute little bookselling company make its way in a cruel world where everyone wants to scrape by—if not brag about getting great books cheaper than the bricks-and-mortar and other online booksellers are offering them for.

Well, as The New York Times noted in a yesterday’s feature story about whether Barnes & Noble can survive, Amazon is now worth $88 billion. It’s almost big enough to eat us alive. When Powell’s books is gone and when Barnes & Noble is gone, will we still be able to brag about lower prices when Amazon is the only bookseller/publisher/distributor in the country?

I wonder. And as I wonder, I think about all the people who rushed out to buy gasoline at the Standard Oil Station because it was cheaper than the gasoline over at Bill’s Friendly Service Station. When Bill’s folded up, there was hell to pay, but (what with bragging rights over low prices) the handbasket ride toward monopoly was a heady experience. Bob’s Hardware is gone, too, as is Jenkin’s IGA.  In fact, pretty much the entire center of town stands empty.

According to that article in The New York Times, we’ve lost 20% of our independent bookstores in the United States since 2002.  Sure, the economy has been bad and now e-books are all the rage. When people want paperbacks, there are bricks and mortar and online alternatives to Amazon. When people want e-books, Amazon isn’t the only game in town. But now, by default, they run to Amazon.

Will Amazon eat us all alive one day? I wonder. At $88 billion in assets, I guess it can eat whoever and whatever it wants. But maybe it won’t. Maybe everything will be okay as long as we keep our pets and small children inside the house reading the books purchased from the full-grown set of jaws on the edge of the neighborhood.

–Malcolm