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The Expendable Man

Hughes, Dorothy

Last Updated: Aug-25-2023
Annotated by:
Field, Steven

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

A young man, an intern at UCLA Medical Center, is heading out of Los Angeles on his way to his niece’s wedding in Phoenix.  He has signed out for the long weekend and he is eagerly anticipating some time with his family, which will include (though he doesn’t know this yet) his niece’s college roommate, an eligible young woman from a prominent Washington, DC, family, who will be at the wedding also.  Driving his mother’s late-model Cadillac, with his suitcase, medical bag, and his father’s golf clubs in the trunk, he is fifteen miles out of Indio and in the middle of nowhere when he spots a teenage girl by the side of the road.  She’s a bit disheveled and is carrying a small canvas travel bag and a white plastic handbag and nothing else; she looks to him like the girls his younger sisters refer to as “cheap.”  He pulls over and rolls down his window.  She is sullen and somewhat evasive in answering questions, and she happens to be going to Phoenix also.  Hugh feels that he can’t just leave her here, in the desert, where who knows who she might encounter, so he
offers a ride; he decides, however, that he will drop her off at the next town, where she can catch the bus. 

What could possibly go wrong, right?

This is the set-up of Dorothy Hughes’ The Expendable Man, and the answer is, of course, plenty.  It is not a big reveal to say that the girl’s motives seem dubious and she proves hard to be rid of, being dropped off and then showing up again, including showing up at Hugh’s Phoenix motel room, where he refuses to speak to her.  It is not even a big reveal to say that the morning after she shows up at his motel room her body is found in a canal on the outskirts of Phoenix, and the autopsy reveals her to have been pregnant—and aborted.  Nor is it a big reveal—indeed, it is only logical to assume—that the suspicion of the local police falls on Hugh, the last person—and conveniently, a physician—known to have seen her alive.   It will be up to Hugh to prove his innocence despite the damning circumstances.

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Annotated by:
Trachtman, Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

I Have Some Questions for You begins with the visit of Bodie Kane to Granby, the upscale New Hampshire boarding school that she attended on scholarship far from her home in rural Indiana. Back then she was a sullen out-of-place grungy adolescent, but now she is a successful journalist, famous for producing a podcast about the careers of women in Hollywood. She is a successful alumna and has been invited to teach a mini-course on podcasting during the mid-winter break. The life she leaves behind on the flight from Los Angeles is meta-stable, poised between a divorced husband living comfortably next door (he helps with child rearing) and a mysterious Israeli lawyer with whom she is having an on again-off again affair.

Bodie’s arrival at Granby triggers the resurfacing of complicated and painful memories of her time in high school. She asks each student in her class to make a podcast as a class project. Bodie suggests to one of them that she look into the death of Thalia Keith, who was found drowned in the school pool the night after she appeared in a play performance. Omar Evans, the school’s Black athletic trainer, was arrested and convicted of the murder after minimal investigation by the school or the local police. Thalia, the campus dream girl and object of adolescent desire, had been Bodie’s mismatched roommate the year before the murder. Bodie has deep suspicion about who killed Thalia and why it happened, all centered on a charismatic drama teacher. The predatory shadow of this abusive teacher hovers over the book from start to finish. The story unfolds in the wake of the #MeToo movement. But she is also uneasy about how the judicial system has mishandled Omar’s case and hopes the podcast may unearth new evidence that might cause Omar’s case to be reopened and exonerate him. But nothing in this deeply layered novel proceeds in a straight line. Her divorced husband becomes the subject of a social media attack for presumed sexual misconduct, and Bodie is forced to react. Old friends reveal new secrets. Established history is seen in a new light. What Bodie thought she knew about people is upended. The ending is neat but satisfying. Rebecca Makkai does not just have her finger on the pulse of our time – she is able to bring it fully to life.  

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Tell Her Everything

Waheed, Mirza

Last Updated: Jun-20-2023
Annotated by:
Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

The narrator – a melancholic, retired Indian physician now living in London – rehearses his life story and its secrets that he plans on telling his adult daughter when she visits him from America. Dr. Kaiser Shah (sometimes called “Dr. K”) sent his only child, young Sara to a boarding school in America after her mother, Atiya died of cardiac arrest. Since then, father and daughter have rarely seen one another.

For more than twenty years, Dr. K worked in a hot town in the Middle East yet never got to know or understand its people. His only friend was a troubled hospital anesthetist, Biju. Dr. K was employed by the local hospital and assigned to the Accident and Emergency department. The hospital administrator, Sir Farhad (a man Dr. K feared and revered) was an enigmatic figure of authority. Dr. K was obsessed with accumulating wealth. When Farhad offered him an opportunity to earn extra money, Dr. K had no qualms accepting the new part-time position: punishment-surgeon. He would supervise criminal sentences requiring physical mutilation that were imposed by a judge.

Biju sarcastically told his friend, “You are at the cutting edge of your profession, Dr. K” (111). Yet there was no humor or humanity at presiding over the amputation of the hands of a father-son team of thieves or a maid convicted of stealing jewelry who underwent a similar clinical maiming. The hospital routinely accepted these “punishment cases” referred from the Corrections department and constructed a special operating theatre on the top floor for these “special ops.” Over a decade, Dr. K figured his involvement in this injurious punishment amounted to at least twenty cases.

Raucous Biju gets accused and convicted of stealing drugs from the hospital. His penalty was removal of a hand. Dr. K pleaded on behalf of Biju with the hospital administrator but to no avail. Dr. K was not convinced of Biju’s guilt and would not participate in the amputation of his friend’s hand. Dr. K resigned his post as punishment-surgeon and eventually settled in England with plenty of money for a comfortable albeit lonely life.

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The Netanyahus

Cohen, Joshua

Last Updated: Jun-13-2023
Annotated by:
Trachtman, Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Let’s get it out there at the start: this is one wild and crazy book. It is built on a fictionalized account of a meeting that actually took place between the literary critic Harold Bloom and Benzion Netanyahu, the father of the current Prime Minister of Israel. Around this seemingly nondescript event, Joshua Cohen has created an amalgam of at least five simultaneous narratives packed into 237 antic pages.

First, there is the story of the uneasy life of an assimilated Jewish academic, Ruben Blum, the much less illustrious stand-in for Harold Bloom. He is trying to find domestic tranquility and career advancement while teaching in the history department at a small liberal arts school, Corbin College, without completely submerging his Jewish identity.

Then there is the family saga. Ruben’s wife, Edith, is bored in the boondocks. His daughter Judy, who aspires to get admitted to a top tier university (anything but Corbin), is totally focused on getting plastic surgery on her unsatisfactory nose. Blum’s in-laws, who are affiliated but barely practicing Jews, visit the Blums for Rosh Hashana and express their disappointment that Ruben is raising his family so far from the New York City metropolis. Ruben’s parents, who are more observant, visit the Blums for Thanksgiving. The visit deteriorates into the usual family squabbling and miscommunication, and  ends on a macabre, comic note. Judy agrees to a day outing with her grandfather but is not ready at the appointed time. Her grandfather knocks on her bedroom door and Judy yells that it is stuck; he then rams the door open with his shoulder and the swinging doorknob smashes right into Judy’s nose, a convenient rhinoplasty (imagine another author who would have the chutzpah to use a classic anti-Semitic trope in such a hilarious way).

Now add a tale of academic intrigue and infighting. Blum’s life becomes complicated when he is asked to chair the search committee that is charged with the decision whether Corbin College should hire Benzion Netanyahu, an unknown Jewish scholar.  Blum has to navigate the difficult passage between an objective assessment and satisfying what he thinks the administration wants him to do. Cohen captures the power dynamic of faculty meetings and visiting lectures with all their bombast and jockeying for position.

Next, fold in a robust novel of ideas. Blum reads lengthy letters of recommendation written by Netanyahu’s peers in support of or in opposition to his application for a faculty position. Netanyahu’s lecture outlines his thesis on the origins of antisemitism and the critical turn towards a racial definition that arose in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition. Of course, the story of antisemitism cannot be divorced from a dark reading of Jewish history. This is all based on academic work of the real Benzion Netanyahu.

Finally, there is the clashing cultures story as the Netanyahu family deals with the snow and cold winter weather in upstate New York and living in close quarters with Americans who they barely understand. The climax of the book involves an overheated adolescent encounter between Judy and Yonatan Netanyahu, the future Israeli hero who will be killed in the 1976 raid that rescued the hijacked hostages in Entebbe. Benjamin (Bibi), the Israeli Prime Minister, also runs across the pages of this fanciful novel but there is no intimation of what fate has in store for him 60 years in the future.

The Netanyahus is a raucous unpredictable book, one that that in all likelihood will not be comparable to anything you have read before."   

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Sawbones Memorial

Ross, Sinclair

Last Updated: May-31-2023
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction — Secondary Category: Literature /

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Dr Hunter’s 75th birthday in April 1948 falls forty years to the day after he started practice in the little prairie town of Upward. He is retiring, moving away to the big city of Saskatoon, and the citizens have gathered to say fare-well. They celebrate in the patient lounge of the new hospital soon to open bearing the name of this long-time servant of all Upward’s needs--physical, mental, social. The doctor has donated his late wife’s piano and the board is already planning to sell it for much-needed cash. It tinkles softly, unwelcome songs are awkwardly sung, coffee and sandwiches served, while the crowd of locals chatters away sotto (and not so sottovoce, with each other and the doc. 

Over the course of the evening, forty years of memories unfold: births, couplings, deaths, desires, hostilities, random acts of kindness and of spite. Folks sidle up to the doc to express thanks for his support and wisdom. The pharmacist wishes he had prescribed more pills. The journalists want him to spill secrets for a feature article in the local rag. The minister engages him in a debate over the existence of God and the meaning of life—both of which the medic denies. Gossips watch, whispering to each other about the doctor’s imagined survival and his dead wife whose alleged frigidity justified his supposed numerous infidelities. 

Shopkeeper Sarah’s revisits her embarrassed memories of adolescent attraction, that ripened into adult affection and pleasure that the doctor has long treated her son Dunc with almost fatherly care, taking him and the big but isolated Ukrainian boy, Nick, on house calls. Home from overseas with an English war-bride and now running the store, Dunc presides over the evening, trying to smooth conflicting undercurrents. The gossips speak sweetly to the newcomer bride and behind her back predict the marriage will fail.

It emerges that the incoming young medic will be Nick, once mercilessly bullied as a “hunky kid” by a few shiftless bigots still languishing in Upward. They are convinced that he is returning to extract his revenge. The old doctor defends Nick in his final words and urges his patients to help the young successor. He knows that they can briefly come together in a crisis, but he scolds them for their chronic lack of charity to strangers and to each other.

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The Pull of the Stars

Donoghue, Emma

Last Updated: May-02-2023
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

It is Dublin in late autumn 1918, the waning days of World War I, and nurse-midwife Julia Power is suddenly thrust into the task of managing a small ward of heavily pregnant women who have contracted the deadly influenza. Having survived influenza herself, she does not fear infection, but she worries about her lack of experience. She also worries about her shell-shocked brother with whom she shares a home. 

Two people appear to help: the intelligent but uneducated young volunteer Bridie Sweeney raised in an institution; and the legendary woman doctor Kathleen Lynn –who quietly reveals her competence and skill, even as authorities are lurking to arrest her.  

Over the course of just a few days, they encounter recalcitrant mothers, complicated deliveries, battered wives, stillbirths, and deaths. Influenza adds special dangers to the natural event, but some patients survive their ordeal. 

Although Bridie was to help for just one day, she learns quickly and returns. Julia is impressed by her diligence and drawn ever closer to her kindness and earthy wisdom. They pass a night together sharing confidences, and Julia begins to understand the physical and emotional mistreatment that Bridie suffered in the care of nuns. Their embrace awakens in Julia a yearning she had never imagined. But only hours later Bridie falls ill and succumbs rapidly to the deadly infection.

When an unwed mother suddenly dies after giving birth to a deformed child, Julia is horrified that the baby must be placed in an institution. Instead, she takes the baby home to an uncertain future but sparing the child the same horrors that Bridie once suffered. 

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George and Rue

Clarke, George Elliott

Last Updated: Apr-06-2023
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

George and Rufus (Rue) are born one year apart into grinding poverty of a Nova Scotia community, to a violently abusive father and a frightened well-intentioned mother. They have mixed heritage, part Black, part Mi’kmaq. Battered and hungry, they struggle with learning and abandon school after several attempts at grade three. 

George is stolid, strives to be good, serves briefly (and badly) in the military, and is happiest doing heavy physical work for farms, gardens, and woodlots. But he can never hold a job for long. He marries Blondola and they start a family in Fredericton, New Brunswick. 

Rue is more dashing, calculating, and slippery. He has a self-taught talent for piano and cultivates an odd form of jazz. He falls in love twice and loses both times--first to an accidental death and next to his own imprisonment. Arrested for theft, he serves two years in prison and, upon his release, barges into George’s marginal existence, contributing nothing and menacing the precarious but loving home. 

When Blondola goes into hospital for the birth of her daughter, the doctor refuses to let her leave until his bill is paid. George needs money desperately. Rue convinces him to use a hammer to stun a white man – any white man—and take his money. Together they settle on targeting a taxi driver, but the man who responds to the call is George’s friend. He cannot go through with it, but Rue clobbers the driver, cajoles George into robbing the dying man and dealing with the evidence.

The brutal murder and shockingly clumsy aftermath of their barely disguised deeds results in their arrest. During the police interrogation, George tries to explain his innocence and blames his brother. They are tried within the racially intolerant British-inherited court system that wrongly flatters itself to have avoided American excesses of racism. They are executed on the gallows, hanging side-by-side. 

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All Our Names

Mengestu, Dinaw

Last Updated: Mar-30-2023
Annotated by:
Trachtman, Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

All Our Names is a novel built around two overlapping but non-parallel narratives. In one, Isaac, a young man, has recently arrived in the United States from Uganda where he had moved from his rural village to study literature at a university in Kampala. After a few complicated years in Kampala, he appears unannounced in the small town of Laurel in the Midwest with not much more than the shirt on his back. The explanation for his sudden arrival will emerge over time. Helen, a young social worker, is assigned to his case, and despite their cultural dissonance, they fall deeply in love. Their physical and social disparities serve as strong attractive forces, like the opposite poles of a magnet.  There are obstacles to their relationship -- their own inherent human weaknesses, the ingrained racism of the Laurel community, and the mystery surrounding the Isaac’s past. They are both smart but lonely people who are uncertain about how open they can be about their relationship, whether they can be seen holding hands while walking the streets or even sharing a cup of coffee in a café.

The second narrative details Isaac’s friendship formed in Africa with a fellow student at the university and their gradual but inevitable involvement in the armed rebellion against the corrupt regime governing their country. There is miscommunication and violence in both narratives. They end with separation of the partners – the social worker and the immigrant and the two African men, one who stays in Africa and meets his tragic end there and the other who comes to America

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Our Missing Hearts

Ng, Celeste

Last Updated: Mar-21-2023
Annotated by:
Trachtman, Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts is set in the not-too-distant future, in the wake of the Crisis that has ineradicably altered American society. After several years of steadily worsening economic downturn and hardship, there is slowly escalating social unrest. Random political violence erupts across the country. A protester is killed and public opinion is inflamed. In the press and social media, China is blamed for the turmoil. This unleashes a wave of discrimination and persecution of Asian Americans. Emergency laws are passed to restore order and to penalize Asian Americans and their sympathizers for purported anti-American behavior. A punitive program is implemented to remove children from parents who are viewed as enemies, real or potential, to the state.

The story centers on a precocious 12-year-old boy, Bird Gardner.  His mother, Margaret Miu, of Chinese ancestry, is a  little known poet who wrote a slim volume of poems several years before the  social fabric began to fray. Without her knowledge, one of the poems, “Our Missing Hearts”, has been adopted as a literary slogan by an underground anti-government resistance movement She is targeted by anti-Asian extremists and harassed by law enforcement. Rather than have her son “replaced,” the government euphemism for removing children from families deemed disloyal and putting them into foster care, she makes the wrenching decision to abandon him and the husband she loves dearly and goes into hiding for three lonely years. She is haunted by the pain of all the removed children and devises an act of protest. It is modeled on  the public works created by current Chinese artists using gunpowder and other unusual materials. Her goal is to increase awareness and hopefully termination of the “replacement” program. Her hope is to trigger mass protest and the return of the removed children to their grieving families. The narrative moves inexorably to an unbearably sad ending.

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Demon Copperhead

Kingsolver, Barbara

Last Updated: Jan-24-2023
Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

This novel recasts Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield for modern day as a literary take on the opioid addiction crisis in the U.S. during the 1990s and 2000s with apparent connections to Beth Macy’s nonfiction book, Dopesick, and the eight-part TV miniseries of the same name it spawned. The author, Barbara Kingsolver, assures potential readers that having read David Copperfield is not a prerequisite for comprehending and appreciating Demon Copperhead.   

Demon Copperfield, a name that evolved naturally enough in early childhood from his birth name, Damon Fields, was born into entrenched poverty in the heart of Appalachia, Lee County, Virginia. He tells his story starting from when he drops out of his drug-addicted mother’s womb onto the floor of a rented trailer, to when as a young adult, he makes a last-chance effort at breaking loose from the life-threatening clutches of Lee County. In between, his stepfather frequently beats him bloody, his mother dies from a drug overdose, he enters foster care, attends school off and on, and works assorted jobs, many of which involve illegal, unethical, and dangerous activities. All the while he is variously abused, starved, and exploited. 
 

Demon shares his plight with many others in the community, and though they help each other as best they can, nearly all of them become ensnared in the same traps—drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, hazardous occupations, unfinished education, familial disintegration, and societal abandonment. For Demon, these conditions and experiences obliterated any vision of a future free of entrapments, let alone one of prosperity and happiness. “Here, all we can ever be is everything we’ve been. I came from a junkie mom and foster care,” is how he assessed his prospects (p. 461). 
 

Amidst all this suffering and bleakness, an observant and caring teacher discovers Demon’s talent in graphic arts, and he gets a peek at a path to commercial success. He has to first fight off what he knows of “Lee County being a place where you keep on living the life you were assigned” (p. 460). His story turns to this fight and onto this path. 

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