Stepping in the Write Direction

If you’re lucky and had great parents, you come from a place of optimism and possibilities. Like the Little Engine Who Could, you keep on chugging whatever the circumstances are. Divorce is rarely an expectation, never something wished for as a child or an adult, because you’re not a quitter or anyone who wants a family split. One thing is certain, if you’ve experienced divorce, you can connect with other people’s similar experiences and feelings about it. It’s a bridge of commonality that spans differences such as who you hated and who you loved in the last election, what kind of music is best, or whether you believe God exists or not. Poet and author Maggie Smith’s book You Could Make this Place Beautiful: A Memoir surely resonates with many as it is a series of vignettes about her thoughts and experiences going through a divorce as a mom of two and a serious writer. It is a poignant, humorous look at a painful time, that in the hands of a poet, deftly lays bare the human and soc...

I read Yeonmi Park’s 2015 book In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom the first week of this month. It was the riveting, excruciating account of her life in North Korea and the harrowing story of her escape to China, South Korea, and America. Two weeks later I finished her 2/14/23 book While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America, which contrasts the tyranny and oppression she experienced in North Korea to her concerning observations of things she’s experienced here in “the land of the free” where censoring and “group think” may foreshadow sliding down a slippery slope toward erosion of American freedoms she holds so dear. In his forward Jordan B. Peterson states Park seeks “to warn us here in our luxury and comfort not to fall prey to the same ideological temptations that doomed the Soviet Union and all its satellites and that still possess the billion-plus people in China, much to the detriment of that country’s beleaguered c...

Dave Barry, author of Swamp Story, is “A wildly popular syndicated columnist best known for his booger jokes; Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.” (from Swamp Story “About the Author”) His much anticipated annual Year In Review is a must read in our household.  What Carolyn Chute did for Maine Gothic and Flannery O’Connor did for Southern Gothic, Dave Barry is doing for Florida Gothic. Swamp Story is a funny and fast moving tale teeming with bad guys, a few good people, Everglades swamps and sinkholes, a 14’ gator, a 16’ python, a wild boar, a politician and an attorney, both morally bankrupt, a mom dreaming of her escape from her feckless baby daddy and his cohorts, ATV chases, gleaming gold bars, hidden treasure, get rich quick schemes, crazy viral internet stories, and the usual suspects struggling to survive in the hot, humid Sunshine State.  Barry brings the disparate plots and characters together in a climactic swamp side scene at the state sponsored announ...

  Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford (7/7/20)  is a m emoir involving a sexual assault the author suffered at St. Paul’s boarding school from male students. It describes how the assault and subsequent silencing affected her life, about later developments when many other former students came forward and charges were brought against the school, and her journey of coming to terms with the harm she suffered culminating in her writing the book. I listened to the Audible edition (11hrs 15min) which Crawford narrates. Author Lacy Crawford was raised in Lake Forest, IL, an area I know well having lived in the adjacent community Lake Bluff at the same time she was away at boarding school and later Princeton. “ Crawford attended St. Paul's School where she was raped by two senior boys in 1990 at the age of 15. She reported the incident to the school and underwent a medical examination that revealed she had been infected with herpes, but the school covered it up. After graduating from...

 The Third Twin is a 1996 techno thriller by Ken Follett. It’s like a ride in a literary time machine set to the years James Bond movies ruled the box office and John MacDonald’s PI Travis McGee captured readers’ hearts and minds, where cops interviewing rape victims are accusatory, rapists openly visualize the crimes they’re about to commit while savoring the details, male and female characters have a robust sex drive that colors their everyday lives, and concerns about medical privacy and genetic engineering shadow the future, as AI does today.  All the main villains appear to be political conservatives; Follett describes the ringleader: “Berrington sat at his desk, breathing hard. He had a corner office, but otherwise his room was monastic: plastic tiled floor, white walls, utilitarian file cabinets, cheap bookshelves. Academics were not expected to have lavish offices. The screensaver on his computer showed a slowly revolving strand of DNA twisted in the famous double-heli...