Ilyon Woo, Master Stave Husband Wife (Simon & Schuster, 2023, 410 pages)

A story like this is too implausible for fiction, and it is not -- it is a carefully documented history of an amazing escape from slavery in Macon, Georgia, in 1848.  William Craft and his wife Ellen, both enslaved by Macon owners in the same family, set out for the North.  Ellen, a seamstress, outfitted herself as a young planter in need of medical attention in the North, and William played the part of her attending slave.  Traveling by rail, steamboat and coach, they reached Philadelphia and eventually moved on to Boston.  But even there, after the passage of far more cruel Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, they feared recapture.  So they spent 

NOTE TO SELF:  also write about Kindred and Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Clan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (Viking, 2023, 356 pages plus 50 pp for sources and index)

 Coming across a review of Timothy Egan's study of the mid-20th century KKK in the Midwest, having greatly enjoyed the author's 2006 account of the Dust Bowl years, The Worst Hard Time," my expectations were high.  Egan is a skillful writer, keeping an overall narrative moving while illustrating it with local events and remarkable personalities.  And the story is incredible, if not entirely unfamiliar:  in the early 1920's the Ku Klux Klan reached levels of political influence and cultural dominance in Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and other states in the heartland that exceeded its achievements in the post-Civil War South.  Drawing on a wide range of sources, Egan documents the incredible numbers who were members of the "invisible empire":  400,000 in Indiana, maybe half that in neighboring states, with rallies in Indianapolis and Kokomo that drew tens of thousands.  The ranks of the Klan expanded to a women's organization and a "Ku Klux Kiddies" club.  Any journalist or politician who dared challenge its hegemony was quickly silenced.  In Indiana the governor, many mayors, most police forces, and many judges were members.  But it all unraveled within a few years when the craven exploitation of followers and sexual predation on young women that had become the standard operating procedure of the Klan's Grand Dragon, D. C. Stephenson, at last came to light, mainly owing to the courage of one young women, Madge Oberholzer, whose physical and psychological injuries while being forcibly captured and raped by Stephenson caused her death, days after she dictated a detailed account of her ordeal.  Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder and given a life sentence, and the Klan gradually diminished across the Midwest.  It's a tawdry and instructive tale -- a little heavy on the sordid details for my taste, and I could have done with maybe half as many pages devoted to Stephenson's foibles and follies.  But there are disturbing foreshadowings -- not directly noted by Egan, but no doubt anticipated -- of a politician a century later who would suborn politicians, slander judges, and set out to build a political empire accountable to him and his most faithful acolytes alone.

Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First (Little, Brown, 2023, 321 pages plus 62 more for glossary, bibliography and index)

 The opening chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson's amazing climate catastrophe scifi novel, The Ministry for the Future (Susan and I have both read it but I haven't reflected on it here yet) describes an indescribably horrifying heat wave in India that causes more than a million deaths.  The opening chapter of Goodell's book offers instead a single story, no less terrifying:  a young couple who set out with their infant daughter and their dog for a morning walk in the Sierra Nevada foothills, do not return, and are all eventually found dead of heatstroke and dehydration, on a hot day (upper 90s), on trails exposed to direct sun as a result of wildfires that burned off the forest cover.  This sets the stage for an extraordinary overview of recent trends in global temperature, ocean levels, polar ice caps, and more.  A chapter traces the evolution of heat-regulating mechanisms in living things; another describes the urban heat islands where every inhabited structure needs air conditioning, boosting the outdoor temperature even further.  He recounts the extraordinary and deadly heatwave in the Pacific Northwest that buckled roads and killed off sea life by overheating the ocean.  He reminds us of the enormous death toll, overwhelming mortuaries and cemetaries, resulting from the heat wave that brought Paris to its knees in 2003.  The picture is not entirely devoid of hope:  activists and even some governments are beginning to take action to push catastrophic temperatures and sea levels a bit farther into the future, trees are being planted, solar arrays constructed, rooftop gardens installed on new housing in some European cities.   

May Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (W. W. Norton, 2023)

 This was my first encounter with Mary Roach, author of a long string of popular science books that aim to entertain as much as inform.  I had an odd feeling as I read the book, reflecting on how my own first drafts often include painful puns, strained wordplay, tasteless jokes and mostly irrelevant but amusing side comments -- and if I don't edit them in the next draft out my most ruthless editor (my spouse) crosses them through with a thick ink marker.  Roach just leaves them all in.  Her science credentials are impressive, however, and each chapter is supported by an extensive list of sources.  What she undertakes here is to ask all the embarrassing questions that may have crossed our minds but we didn't dare ask our physician, let alone our high school science teacher, about what happens to our food between the entryway and the exit door.  Why doesn't the stomach digest itself?  Can constipation kill you -- did it kill Elvis?  Why do we ignore or trash-talk our anus when it is one of the most versatile and important organs of the body?  And so and so on.  Without the recommendation of a member of my Green Valley book club I would never have picked up this book.  Now I've gone on to read another in the same vein (Bonk, an exhaustive and no-holds-barred study of human sexuality and the scientists who have studied it.) 

J. K. Chukwu, The Unfortunates (Harper, 2023, 320 pages)

 I look for books by West African and diasporan writers on the new books shelf at Loutit Library, and this one stood out from the ever-growing number of new books by new writers.  Chukwu is Nigerian-American ("half Nigeria, half Detroit" says her agency's blurb) and sets this novel in an unnamed university -- a prestigious one, and an overwhelmingly white one, we are told.  (But there are many clues that point to the University of Chicago, where she earned her BA.)  Few students of color are admitted to the narrator's graduate program, and the obstacles they face are formidable -- so much so that they seem to disappear, one after another, slipping away from the university without notice and leaving no trace.  The novel is cast as a series of drafts of an undergraduate thesis that challenges the racism and insensitivity of the university, and its apparent lack of interest in doing anything about it.  And the thesis takes shape as an interior dialogue with the narrator's "Life Partner," her recurring and inescapable depression, as she contemplates withdrawing not just from ir elaborate sort of academic suicide note, leading to the narrator's withdrawal not just from the university but from life itself.  In the end she pulls back, and there are moments of light in the company of friends.  The book is a blend of memoir, psychological confessional, and broadside against the self-importance and racial insensitivity of higher education.  Strange, surprising, and sometimes moving.

Paz Pardo, The Shamshine Blind (Atria Books, 2023, 233 pages)

 I tracked the book down on the basis of a review I read somewhere (NY Times?) citing it as one of the most original and imaginative novels of the year so far.  Which it is:  a mystery story wrapped in a noir novel built on a scifi framework.  In an alternate universe the year is 2009, Argentina won decisively in the Falklands war, its agents have more or less attached everyone in the world to puppet strings that are "psychopigments," psychoactive drugs that promise to cure all ailments, physical and psychological -- and that are enthusiastically embraced as recreational drugs.  But dark forces are at work, synthesizing chemicals that induce suicidal despair, and a ragged band of friends sets out to track down the villains and take them down.  It just didn't connect with me on most levels:  too arcane in plot lines, too bizarre in the fictional workings of the pharma lords' networks, very imaginative but sometimes just confusing.

Rinker Buck, Flight of Passage (Hyperion, 1998, 351 pp)

 A book I would never have picked up without the warm recommendation of Rick Cendo, who selected it for the Amigos book club in Green Valley -- and one I found fascinating.  Buck recounts his adventure decades earlier when, at 15, he joined his 17 year old brother to fly from New Jersey to southern California in a single-engine Piper Cub that the brothers had bought and meticulously restored through the winter.  Buck writes with affection about his eccentric father, a former stunt pilot who gave up that activity after a crash that left him with leg injuries and mobility restrictions, but whose high-level position as an editor at Life magazine enabled him to support any number of hobbies and activities for his nine children, including flying.  Rinker and his brother set out without instruments, without a radio, navigating on the basis of maps, assisted at airfields across the country by the aging airmen who hang out there.  There are hilarious stories such as playing chicken on an Arizona highway with a Greyhound bus.  Buck writes with vivid detail (and amazing recall of details).