She doesn’t know her son is suspected of murder, at this point. She just thinks he has been passing bad cheques again.
“That gun cost over a hundred dollars. Dick bought it on credit, and now the store won’t have it back, even though it’s not hardly a month old and only been used the one time–the start of November, when him and David when to Grinnell on a pheasant shoot. He used our names to buy it–his daddy let him–so here we are, liable for the payments, and when you think of Walter, sick as he is, and all the things we need, all we do without …” She held her breath, as though trying to halt an attack of hiccups. “Are you sure you won’t have a cup of coffee, Mr. Nye? It’s no trouble.”
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, p. 171
Just look at that masterful dialog, how it breaks your heart!
Well, I will be thinking about this one for a long time.
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy.
from the back of the book
The first thing to know about In Cold Blood that it’s incredibly well-written. Each paragraph is a work of art. Truly. It’s not ornate, which is why I don’t say “each sentence,” but it’s simply and eloquently told.
The book reads like a novel. It goes in chronological order – roughly – but it also slips through time seamlessly, like a good novel should, filling in glimpses of each character’s backstory just when it is needed, and in just the right dosage, no more. The details of the crime itself aren’t revealed until the last quarter of the book, though before Part II of the narrative, the crime has already taken place.
The other thing about this book is that it is really, really tragic. And not just because a family of four were shot in their beds. Just about every conceivable tragedy happens to someone, somewhere in this book. The only ameliorating thing I can say about it is that no indecent assault happens, as it were, “on camera.” We are given to understand that people have experienced it, but we have to read between the lines. The author uses the smallest effective dose.
The thing I really can’t forgive, though, is the way that Capote made me care about the murderer … one of them, that is. Dick Hickock is what today we would call a sociopath (the psychiatrist’s diagnosis is “severe character disorder”). I don’t give two figs for him, except that I wish he wasn’t crashing around the world, ruining everybody’s lives. The other one, though, is more complicated.
Perry Smith (“very nearly a paranoid schizophrenic” according to the doctor) is basically a lost man-child. He is “sensitive,” prescient, plays the guitar, and cherishes a dream, left over from boyhood, of finding sunken treasure. He “has a brilliant mind” (his words) and resents that he never got more than a third-grade education. (He got his high school equivalence during one of his stints in jail.) Perry travels with a cardboard suitcase full of books, journals, maps, and adventure magazines.
… his personal dictionary, a non-alphabetically listed miscellany of words he believed “beautiful” or “useful,” or at least “worth memorizing.” (Sample page: “Thanatoid = deathlike; Omnilingual = versed in languages; Amerce = punishment, amount fixed by court; Nescient = ignorance; Facinorous = atrociously wicked; Hagiophobia = a morbid fear of holy places & things; Lapidicolous = living under stones, as certain blind beetles; Dyspathy = lack of sympathy, fellow feeling; Psiloper = a fellow who fain would pass as a philosopher; Omophagia = eating raw flesh, the rite of some savage tribes; Depredate = to pillage, rob, and prey upon; Aphrodisiac = a drug or the like which excites sexual desire; Megalodactylous = having abnormally large fingers; Myrtophobia = fear of night and darkness.”)
page 146
This is a remarkable list, especially if it was truly taken from Perry Smith’s papers. It is remarkable for the way that every single entry seems to have some special relevance to Perry. Taken together, they almost constitute his biography as it is starting to emerge from the book at this point.
So, what makes him dangerous? Perry has dissociative tendencies, and a substratum of rage that he’s not even aware of. He thinks of himself as a genius with spiritual depths whom nobody appreciates. His is the rage that comes from being inadequately parented. Perry came from an unstable home and spent time in orphanages, where (to take just a sample incident) the nuns would beat and humiliate him for wetting the bed. He’s never had a good mother or father, and has roamed the world trying to find a home. All this deprivation has made him weak, and so he is dangerous in the way that weak, conceited men are dangerous. He is too weak to control his own actions when it matters.
Dad snatched a biscuit out of my hand, and said I ate too much, what a greedy, selfish bastard I was, and why didn’t I get out, he didn’t want me there no more. He carried on like that till I couldn’t stand it. My hands got hold of his throat. My hands–but I couldn’t control them. They wanted to choke him to death.
page 136
Perry also suffers chronic pain. A motorcycle accident left his legs never the same again, and the pain in his legs (and head) tends to flare up when he gets emotionally disturbed, making it even harder for him to concentrate.
I started feeling the tragedy within a page of meeting Perry. The first thing the book tells us is that it’s his dream to learn to skin dive and find buried treasure, and I had a feeling that dream was never going to come to pass. Damn you, Truman Capote!
I may do a whole separate post about Perry as a character, but there’s one more thing I will say about this book. Both Perry and Dick are types of people that you meet very often today. Perry’s history, in particular, is mirrored by many, many others. In fact, his wild, nearly fatherless youth of knocking about the American West reminds me very much of the family history of some of my own cowboy relatives.
Both murderers are treated by the psychiatrist who is called to write reports about them as if they are uniquely mentally ill individuals. Perhaps at the time they were (or perhaps the fact that they had already committed murder made them seem more egregious), but as I look at our society nowadays, their mental landscapes seem more like the rule than the exception. Do with that what you will.
Read this book if you don’t cry easily and want to enjoy 343 pages of the most amazing writing. But just be aware of what you are getting into.
I got this tag from Bookstooge, who found these lists at Emma’s site. The idea is to answer each question with the title of a book you read from the previous year. Emma and Bookstooge both filled in three sets of blanks using titles of books they read in 2024 alone. I, on the other hand, am filling in one of the three sets of questions, using books I read in roughly the last year. When I say roughly: If I am currently reading the book (now, in 2025 – In Cold Blood), I get to use it. If I read portions of it last year (The Seven Laws of Teaching), I get to use it. And so forth. Enjoy!
When I was younger I was Ellen Tebbits
People might be surprised to discover that I Hope This Finds You Well
The Innocent, by David Baldacci, Grand Central Publishing, 2012
What can get me to read outside my accustomed genre?
That’s right, free books can!
My husband, a truck driver, knows another truck driver who likes to read. This man has somehow found out that I am also a reader, so when he finishes a book, he sometimes passes it on to me through my husband. I have never met the man, but we now share a number of harrowing mental experiences. Such is the secret society of readers.
The Innocent is a spy thriller. The first several chapters follow the lonely life of crack government assassin Will Robie as he carries out two different hits. (Apparently, this is going to be “the first Will Robie novel.”) We see that Robie is tough, cool under pressure, and professional at killing people. He’s covered in scars, which are covered in tattoos. Due to the nature of his job, he leads a lonely life. He goes to many exotic locales but never has relationships with any of the people there. He gets to eat good food and drink alcohol sometimes, but he has to keep insane hours with very little sleep sometimes. His home base is in Washington, D.C.
Robie was an inch over six feet and a rock-solid one hundred and eighty pounds. He possessed a compact musculature that relied more on quickness and endurance than sheer strength. His nose had been broken once, due to a mistake he had made. He had never had it reset because he’d never wanted to forget the mistake. One of his back teeth was false. That had come with the broken nose. His hair was naturally dark and he had a lot of it, but Robie preferred to keep it about a half inch longer than Marine buzz cut. His facial features were sharply defined, but he made them mostly forgettable by almost never making eye contact with anyone.
the first page
I love that that’s on the first page. That’s how you introduce a character, boys and girls! Now I have a clear mental picture of Robie (like a shorter Jim Caviezel), and the author won’t need to say much about his appearance for the rest of the book. Also, the description is given in a way that’s woven in with a sketch of his history.
It’s a good thing Robie has a cute last name that sounds like a first name. It’s the only thing softens him for some time.
For the first eight chapters (per the thriller genre, they are very short chapters), we see Robie go about his business. He carries out two hits. He withdraws from each successfully. He goes back to D.C. He starts to make tentative friends with a young lady who lives in his apartment complex, though he wonders whether this is a good idea. He gets ready to carry out his next hit, which is local.
Then, finally, in Chapter 9, we meet The Innocent.
She’s a fourteen-year-old girl named Julie Getty. Julie is smart and scrappy. Her parents love her, but they are druggies, so she’s been in and out of foster homes. Nonetheless, she’s in AP Calculus. In Chapter 9, Julie sneaks out of a subpar foster home to go meet up with her mom, who has sent her a note saying they are moving. When she gets to her house, though, she witnesses her parents get shot by unknown men. Not having a phone, Julie flees. Her story and Robie’s will soon intersect.
Julie came along at just the right moment. I didn’t want to read a whole novel that was basically Jason Bourne, consisting only of action + Hero Is No Longer A Normal Person Because of His Past. Once Robie starts to feel responsible for Julie, he now has to behave like a normal person in ways that he didn’t before. He also has to put up with a canny teenager who, naturally, wants to be involved in finding out why her parents were killed. And he has to do this while keeping her safe.
I’ll stop there because of spoilers, but this book was an outstanding example of its genre. It’s mostly action, but the plot is also a twisty puzzle. I don’t think the reader is meant to be able to figure out the puzzle in time to Save the World, but Robie is meant to be able to. Even the assassinations in the early chapters become relevant later. All the subplots get tied in together. There is a satisfying debrief at the end, where it’s all explained from a bird’s-eye view in case the reader missed any pieces. There is some emotional turmoil (Robie might not be normal, but he’s still human, you see). And there are hints that Robie has a heartbreaking back story, no doubt to be alluded to in later novels. Four stars.
Well, we have made it through February, when I did a post about something I love every single week. Phew, I’m certainly glad that is over with! What a relief to get into March, and start writing about stuff I hate again.
Just kidding. I didn’t hate this book; in fact, I mostly really enjoyed it. It just wasn’t a perfect bull’s-eye like all the stuff I posted about last month.
This 2024 book is narrated by Jolene, a Canadian woman whose mother is Iranian-Canadian and who works in a regular, that is to say fairly miserable, office. She has social anxiety, a moderate drinking problem, a big cohort of Persian Aunties (her mom’s friends) who really really hope she will get married, and a dark trauma from high school. Oh, and she has a habit of adding passive-aggressive postscripts to her e-mails to her colleagues, hidden in white text.
One day she forgets to turn the text white, and that kicks off her madcap adventures.
If this setup sounds like it’ll be boring and full of self-pity, all I can say is it’s anything but. Jolene, despite her hermitlike ways, is a keen observer of human nature and is mistress of the witty, cunning turn of phrase, which is exactly what makes her e-mail postscripts so devastating, and this narrative so fun to follow.
This little human [baby] doesn’t even realize the greatness of this: the only time in your life when people will simply ignore your public outbursts. The rest of us must cry without actually crying. This child, I learn as Celeste continues to soothe it, is named Thomas. I watch his little eyes dart around the room, taking it all in. Maybe Thomas is just now realizing that eventually he will grow up to spend all his daylight hours under fluorescent lights and water-stained ceiling tiles.
I don’t mean to chuckle at this depressing thought, and I stifle it as soon as I can, but that doesn’t stop a few eyes from drawing my way while I pretend I didn’t just cackle at a technically crying baby.
Then Thomas begins being passed around like a hot burrito. I curl my hands close against my chest and try to back away. When Caitlin takes said bundle, it stops crying in an instant, and her face softens in a way that makes me realize how hard it’s been lately.
“So, how is being a mom?”
Celeste starts describing things that sound dire as sh-t.
Gregory randomly pokes the ——- baby in the belly, and the cries start again in a screeching pitch.
Has anyone ever punched him in the face?
“How was the birth?” Stu for some cursed reason has to ask. I take a step back in order to avoid sticking around for Celeste’s answer.
Rhonda flashes me a disapproving stare. Why is it socially acceptable to discuss a human getting pushed or cut out of a body, yet somehow, it’s unprofessional for me to simply work rather than hold the tiny person I don’t even know?
page 102
That’s a pretty good sample of the writing style — and also a pretty good, lively description of what it’s like to be a woman with social anxiety or maybe autistic tendencies. Very very relatable.
I finished this book very quickly because of the good writing. However, it’s not uplifting or heartwarming. Jolene is engaging in some pretty significant deception throughout almost the entire book, which made it hard to enjoy. She’s under a lot of stress with several different crises bubbling (including one with the Persian Aunties), which keeps the pace fast, but makes the read also stressful. I knock off one star for this dynamic and for the author’s use of the phrase “white-passing.”
February, month of Posts of Stuff I Love, continues with the category “novels by Andrew Klavan” for 500. What I didn’t anticipate was the way that putting title and author together would make the author sound a bit like a serial killer. Anyway … onward!
Here is Andrew Klavan, known by some as “hot Gandalf.” (No, I’m not kidding.) Ironically, given that he is a fiction writer, my first discovery of Andrew Klavan came through his autobiography, The Great Good Thing, where he chronicled his journey from tough, noir-loving Jewish kid from Long Island to tough, Jesus-loving Jewish geezer from California. Klavan always loved the old-school tough-guy private-eye stories and aspired to write more of them. He got really good at tension, pacing, and action scenes. He’s also good at psychology, and particularly loves stories where the character isn’t sure he can trust his own mind.
Now, in his golden years and arguably at the peak of his art, Klavan is finally writing a mystery series. (His other novels have been stand-alones, plus movie scripts and a fantasy trilogy.)
The hero of this series is Cameron Winter, a former poor little rich boy and former spook whose Apollonian good looks and tweedy job as an English professor do a poor job of hiding the fact that he is still a dangerous man. Because this is by Klavan, about 30% of each novel is spent in Winter’s shrink’s office, where we find out through a series of sessions about different aspects of Winter’s tragic past. In the very first book, we heard that Winter’s childhood crush was Charlotte Schaefer, the daughter of his German-immigrant nanny. Winter has been looking back on Young Charlotte as his feminine ideal, and kind of not really growing up partly as a consequence of the Ghost of Charlotte. In this book, Winter finally has to deal with that. He has to go to the aid of the real Charlotte. But time has been flowing for her, too, of course, and Real Charlotte has her own ghosts.
(By the way, A Woman Underground is book 4 in the series, but I had to go crawling on my hands and knees to Amazon to find this out. Please, Mysterious Press, put the book numbers in a prominent place both on the spine and on the title page!)
I won’t give anything further away, but like all Klavans, the book weaves through time, giving us satisfying action in several different forms: international spy games, local mystery that is really none of Winter’s business, sentimental looks at the way things used to be … or did they? Plus a psychologically satisfying twist at the end.
You may wonder, since this is a series, do you have to read the earlier books first? No, you don’t, because Klavan does a fine job making each book work on its own. However, just in case you want to, here they are:
#1 When Christmas Comes
#2 A Strange Habit of Mind
#3 The House of Love and Death
So, what do you think? Do these sound like something you would like? Are you also in favor of book numbers being put on spines? Let me know in the comments!
There’s a reason I’m posting about this book on Feb. 14.
It does something that I want to do with my novels.
It takes the feeling that I get when hearing about bog burials, stone circles, cave paintings — and amplifies it.
Did I mention that I love it?
I’ll be posting quotations from this book throughout the month of February. The one I posted two days ago – To The Air – could have been written about the scene in The Long Guest where the family cremates … well, I won’t give it away. It was trying for the same thing as that scene, or vice versa. But I mostly posted it for that evocative last line.
you died horribly but are beautiful,
sleeping face and pointed cap and perfect feet,
a peat cutter’s slash dug into your back
but preserved as none of your captors are —
though what a price for immortality.
–from Tollund Man, p. 39
If you’ve ever seen a picture of Tollund Man, this is exactly it.
I haven’t yet read every poem in Bone Antler Stone. They require close attention, and some of them are not short. But every so often I’ll dip into it, and find gems like this one:
The sun sets into the sea with a hiss
and rises with the sound of a driven wheel,
the creak of speaking stone, metal and wood.
The sun sets into the sea to simmer
and rises with the sound of stretched leather
and the song of the horse’s chain and bit.
ibid, p. 23
The idea of the solar system as a great big machine, perhaps made of hoops or wheels, that is alluded to in that first stanza is actually very close to how some ancient cultures conceived of the cosmos.
The last poem in the collection shows the author leaving Orkney, where he went to view the burials, with a friend who is named Pytheas for some reason. This poem raises the thought that not everyone is going to “get” a book of poems like this one.
The price to pay for a place like that,
the price to pay for poems like these…
our intensity is terrifying or just tiresome,
and so the dead and the damp doubleback
into just another of our silent, stone secrets.
It the compares the book itself to a barrow burial waiting to be discovered at the right moment:
So Pytheas proceeded in reply,
assuring me that for us, and for ours,
there was only the odd look, the old look, the awed look,
but rarely the real look of revelation,
or the consolation of having communicated.
And so the motive was to make meaning and memory
a kind of barrow burial in bloom
a garlanded grave underground
forged with turf and stone and fire and then forgotten,
Well, it’s that time of year again: the long, long weeks of post-Christmas winter, when we grit our teeth and read the books that are not fun but are good for us. I think it was this time of year, a few years ago, that I read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzehenitsyn. This is similar.
The poison of class war
First, some background. I don’t like Marxism. I don’t like anything that has even the faintest hint of class war in it, in fact.
I was a sensitive, easily guilt-tripped child, and I grew up in a “Christian” denomination that had an intermediate-to-advanced case of marxist infection in its Sunday School materials. They would take verses like “blessed are the poor” and “how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” and use them to make it clear to me that being an American, with a high standard of living relative to the rest of the world, was not only a sin, but a very special sin, in a category all its own, because this was one sin which you could not repent of and to which the blood of Jesus did not apply. I was the “evil rich,” and there was nothing I could do about it. Also, because of this, I was morally guilty for any suffering that happened anywhere in the world, provided that the United States was somehow involved or the people suffering were “poorer” than I was. And I swallowed all this. I felt guilty, not grateful, for every little purchase or luxury. And eventually, I felt defensive about them.
I now know, based upon what I have learned since, that marxian systems by their nature do not include repentance or grace. These are Christian concepts. We cannot expect them from a system that works by designating a villain class, then constantly expanding that class. I had already figured out, simply from applying common sense, that the “logic” of class-war thinking is illogical, years before Lindsay came on the scene, but once I started reading him, it became even clearer.
As a simple piece of first advice for pushing back against Critical Race Theory, stop assuming it has good intentions. Individual people pushing Critical Race Theory might have good intentions, but the Theory they are applying does not. For liberals, this is a tough pill to swallow. Critical Race Theory ideas are not liberal ideas, and they cannot be considered on liberal terms. They are viruses meant to infect the liberal order. Assuming the ideas must mean something more reasonable than it seems or that activists won’t equivocate between meanings in a strategic way to seize power will cause you to lose every single time.
ibid, pp. 254 – 255, emphasis in original
There is no redemption in a marxian system. The only way you, as a dirty resource hog, could possibly redeem yourself would be to fix all the problems and all the suffering in the world. Since you can’t do that, you will probably die in the Revolution. Sorry not sorry. And you’ll deserve it.
It still baffles me when well-meaning people (usually women, TBH) try to “comfort” me by telling me something along the lines of “It’s not your fault. It’s the fault of Capitalism. You are the oppressed. The System needs to change.” (“It” could be anything from the difficulty of navigating the health insurance system, to eating healthy.) I just want to shake their shoulders and say, “Are you kidding? We are the ‘capitalists.’ We are the ones they hate and blame. If you blame ‘capitalism,’ you are blaming me and saying I should not have any private property.”
This sounds kind of self-pitying, so let me hasten to add that I fully realize that being guilt-tripped, blamed, and messed up in the head over your class status is by far the least harmful outcome for anyone exposed to Marxist ideas. For millions of people who were more directly affected, it cost them their very lives. However, my little story does illustrate how the only fruit of class-war rhetoric is to divide people from one another and give them hang-ups. It never makes relationships better.
O.K., so that’s bit of background #1. Me and Marx – not good buddies. No, indeed.
A challenging book to read
Second bit of background: over the past several years, I have listened to many, many hours of lectures by James Lindsay. It was a fellow Daily Wire reader who first pointed me to Lindsay’s website, New Discourses. (Fun fact: one of my kids for several years thought the site was called Nudist Courses.) Anyway, Lindsay’s podcasts quickly became a regular feature of my listening-during-chores lineup. I would do dishes, pick berries, paint, or fold laundry while listening to his dry, mathematician’s voice punctuated by occasional naughty words when the stupidity of the ideas he was describing provoked him really, really bad.
I listened to Lindsay talk about the Grievance Studies Project that he carried off with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose. I listened to him read and analyze essays by Herbert Marcuse, Kimberle Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, bell hooks, Robin DiAngelo, Jacques Derrida, and Paolo Freire. As I was listening, Lindsay was also learning. He traced modern identity politics back through the postmodernists, back to Marx. Marx’s ideas he traced back to Hegel, as he did long episodes about Hegel’s extremely convoluted philosophy and how Marx tried to remove Hegel’s mysticism. Eventually, he uncovered the occult roots of Hegel and other German philosophers. It was from Lindsay that I first heard the term Hermeticism (although I was listening to a lecture on Gnosticism by Michael Heiser around the same time).
Lindsay started out in the New Atheist movement, with a special interest in the psychology of cults. He then disassociated himself from the New Atheists when he noticed they were behaving, as a group, rather like fundamentalists. His views on religion have matured over the years. He now realizes that not all religions are equally cultlike or equally bad for society. And, after much research, he has correctly identified modern identity politics as a reboot of the ancient Gnostic/Hermetic mystery religions, complete with secret knowledge, sexual initiation rituals, and the promise to transform human nature itself into something greater. “Ye shall be as gods.”
If all of this sounds hard to believe, you can find all these lectures on the New Discourses website and most of them on YouTube as well.
I go on at such length about this in order to convey to you just how well oriented I was when I picked up Race Marxism. I had already heard Lindsay lecture on the thinkers he mentions in the book, many of them multiple times. (And for many of them, it takes multiple times to actually retain their concepts, because they are intentionally complex. Not to speak of the way they love to invent words, flex on their readers, equivocate, and even undermine language itself.)
I was really well oriented, baby.
And even so — even so — I found Race Marxism to be a slog.
I honestly don’t think this is Lindsay’s fault. He’s trying to give us the history of a concept (“Critical Race Theory”) that is intentionally obscure. Many different streams of thought have gone into it, and the Theory’s proponents take advantage of this to toggle back and forth between the different meanings of the concepts in their theory. In fact, they use the Theory’s slipperiness as a sort of shibboleth. That way, if someone says something negative about the Theory, disagrees, or even simply states the theory in terms they don’t like at the moment, they can claim that this person has not really understood it.
Critical Theories exploit this confusion by focusing virtually entirely on “systems,” which are almost impossible to pin down or describe accurately, not least since these “systems” really are stand-in descriptions for “everything that happens in any domain human beings are involved in, and how.” That is, when a Critical Theory calls something “systemic,” what it really means is that it has an all-encompassing Marxian conspiracy theory about that thing. When people don’t think that way, Theorists then accuse them of not understanding systemic thought, or, more simply, of being stupid and intellectually unsophisticated. This little trick is very useful to activists because it allows them to call everyone who disagrees with them too stupid to disagree with them and generally tricks “educated” onlookers into thinking the plain-sense folks must be missing something important, nuanced, and complex.
ibid, p. 233
Any book that tries to engage with, pin down, and define a thought system that uses these tactics is going to be a slog. Lindsay has to trace several different lines of thought, so he’s coming at the same concept from a different angle in chapter after chapter. It’s all one big tapestry, so there’s not a clear, natural place to start. The first few chapters feel as if we are going in circles a bit. Lindsay has to quote CRT authors at some length, and they are not good writers. Additionally, because their entire philosophy is based upon envy and hate, even when they are somewhat clear they are unpleasant to read. But he is not going to make a claim about CRT and then not back it up. So, we get things like, “No, CRT is not simply anti-white-people; instead…” [twenty pages later] “… and that’s how CRT manages to be anti-most -white-people while denying the reality of race.”
The book picks up towards the end, when with much blood, sweat, and tears, the basic claims of CRT have been established beyond a doubt and Lindsay can move on to how it affects organizations and what can be done about it.
What will your experience be like reading this book?
I’m not sure.
It depends upon how familiar you are with these concepts already, and how quick of a study you are. It might also help if you do your reading from this book at a time of day when you are fresh. I think part of my problem is that I was slogging through it, often when tired or otherwise unwell. It’s not really the sort of book that you can take to an event, or dip into in a waiting room.
If these concepts are totally new to you, and you are a very quick study, you might come out of this book with the experience of “mind blown!” However, it’s more likely that you will grasp some things on the first go-round, but will understand more each time you re-read a given chapter. (That’s actually my experience with most non-fiction books.)
It is the nature of Critical Race Theory to have a whole bunch of academic, intimidating-sounding terms to describe just a couple of ideas that, when you get down to it, are fairly simple and also stupid. So the learning curve is steep at first, but quickly flattens out if you know what I mean.
I bought this book primarily to have on hand as a resource. I had to read it cover to cover at least once, so that I know where to find things in it. I probably won’t do that again. But I will certainly dip into it, because it documents painstakingly all the ridiculous, counterintuitive, antihuman, incredibly damaging claims that have been made in this theory, and who made them, when and where in what publication. That is an invaluable resource to have on hand, because there will be new terms and new claims soon, and the Theorists will deny that anyone ever made the old ones.
So, I bought this book more as a reference book than anything. I hope that you will, too. Lindsay has done a fantastic job compiling all this stuff and sorting it all out in some kind of order. Perhaps, if he had spent more years on it, he could have polished the prose and made it more pleasant to read, but that wasn’t the priority. The priority was to get this book out there in time to undeceive as many people as possible about this insidious theory. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to exist.
To recap, I joined a readalong with Bookstooge of a book with a cover that looks like this:
and whose author looks like this:
… which gives you a better sense of what the book is like than the cover does, really.
Barbara Cartland turned out a book every two weeks for the last twenty years of her life. Keep that in mind.
So, I finished this book pretty quickly. I was expecting a formulaic romance, and that’s what I got. The book does not drag. I can’t say I was super invested in it emotionally, but that’s because I’m a cynical middle-aged woman. And when Richard thinks to himself,
Oh, God, he loved her so much.
page 109
… I believed him. Behold the magic of Barbara Cartland!
Now, this book remains a first draft, and there are some first draft-y things in it, such as a shawl starting out as “lace” in one chapter, and getting transformed into “green silk” in the next. My favorite of these “first draft” moments is this one:
But now — how can I bear to be his wife knowing that he is already be in love with someone else?
page 106
I mean, I can relate. The most comical and confusing typos always show up in my most emotional scenes … and I always get so carried away when re-reading the scenes, that I can never catch them myself.
So, all in all, this was a not-terrible romance novel that read sort of like an outline, because it basically was an outline. If the book had been re-written to be much longer, then I feel certain that many of the minor plot holes/historical vaguenesses would have been ironed out, plus the potential emotional heft might have been successfully deepened to actual emotional heft. But, every author has to say “done” at some point, and in Cartland’s case, that was after whipping up the first draft, because that was her business model. She let readers take care of the historical details and the emotions, handling them with suspended disbelief and imagination. And that’s fair.
There was only one thing I did not like: the angry almost-kiss. (“Almost” because the couple are interrupted by a maid, so they don’t actually kiss except once at the very end of the book.) Anyway … “angry” and “kissing,” they do not go well together, no precious, they do not. I do not want Tiana’s marriage to be the kind of relationship where Richard ever kisses her angrily. And in fact, in most of the book, that is quite out of line with his character. It just happens in one scene, where they both lost their tempers “horribly” (actually quite mildly), and then were nearly overcome with passion. I don’t know why this is a romance trope. I guess I’ve missed something during my four decades of living. But, tip for you guys, in the middle of a fight is not the greatest time to start kissing your beloved.
Out of Babel Books 