Title Sixty Three: Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery by Norman Mailer

So, the good news is that I finally found a cure for my chronic insomnia. For serious, every time I read this I fell asleep. I'm blaming Mailer for The Great Nap Debacle of Last Sunday, wherein I took not just one but two lengthy naps, and was awake till the wee hours, when it occurred to me to pick up the book again. Bingo. Out like a light. This shit is better than Xanax.

So anyway. I was feeling guilty about all the trash I've been stuffing into my brain lately, so I wanted to redeem myself. This Guy Formerly Known as My Stepfather had this for years, and was kind enough to leave it when he vacated the premises. I spotted it and said, "Nicole, grab that. You need to make penance for all that Nora Roberts noise you've been reading." In the future, the next time I tell myself to do something, could one of you hit me in the head? 'Kthanksbye.

This book is exhaustive. I mean, really and truly. I read all 791 pages, because I do not like to give up on books, but my stars, I was more confused at the end than at the beginning. Like, trying to solve a physics problem confused. I wasn't even sure where I was. (Extensive research led me to the conclusion that I was in my bedroom.) Mailer interviewed family, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues of Lee Harvey Oswald; he pored over and frequently references the Warren Commission testimony; he took excerpts of other books written about LHO; he incorporated letters and other writings, both to and by Oswald. Oswald's time in Russia, where he married Marina and had his first child, takes up nearly the first third of the book. His military history with the Marines is dissected. His job history is investigated. KGB and FBI records are made public. Mailer leaves no stone unturned in his quest to find the man who killed JFK (I don't even want to go into conspiracy theories). He not only delves into Oswald's past, but that of his wife, her family, and his mother. He goes back decades and decades to the beginning of the 20th century. He outlines the differences between various intelligency agencies and the perceptions of Oswald gleaned by said agencies.

The problem is, Oswald was a puzzle in life, and remains a series of contradictions in death. He was a failure who thought that he was something special; he renounced his US citizenship in Moscow (but not formally) only to return to the States a few years later, his experiment with communism a wash; he may or may not have been gay; he was a gregarious recluse. There's just too much information, and there is never a satisfactory answer to the question "Who was this man?" Again, this was no fault of Mailer's. It was just a question that will never be answered. No one could get a handle on Oswald before Jack Ruby put a bullet in his belly, so how could anyone possibly do it when the man's secrets died with him?

I'm going to keep the book on hand as a weapon for the zombie invasion. They're coming. Just you wait.

Title Fifty Six: The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper

It is so, so rare to find a memoir that can blend fact, experience, personal and political history, and a conversational tone and deliver something so pitch-perfect that you can't put it down. I managed to read Cooper's lovely account of her privileged girlhood in Liberia, followed by her escape to America as a refugee and successful career as a journalist, in about three and a half hours (roughly the time it took for me to fly to Portland and back). It was that engaging and gripping; touching without being manipulative, and informative without being pedantic.

Cooper begins with a short history of the country of Liberia itself - the only American attempt at colonization - and traces her own roots back to the founders of the country through both her mother and father. The author neatly encapsulates the background and peppers it with enough details and anecdotes to keep it from becoming dusty or dry. Fast forwarding nearly a hundred and fifty years, Cooper describes her childhood as a daughter of a wealthy and influential family; her father built a luxurious estate in a secluded suburb of the city of Monrovia, a home that the family called "Sugar Beach." Cooper's parents, who already had children of their own, brought a poor native girl named Eunice to live with the family in order to keep Helene and her sister Marlene company. Eunice was treated well and loved by the girls as a sister, but the Liberian caste system prevented her from truly belonging to the family. Cooper evokes vivid memories of parties, private school, clothes from America, vacations, fancy cars, and handsome boys as she describes a charmed girlhood. Then overnight, a coup destroyed the delicate balance of Liberian life and families such as the Coopers were marked for death. Helene watched her uncle, a government official, executed on television. In a matter of weeks Helene, Marlene, and their mother refugeed from Liberia and fled to America as the world they left behind crumbled and burned, giving way to a new world where women were raped and slaughtered and children were orphaned and forced into militias. Eunice had to be left behind, and Helene didn't see her again for decades.

After the coup and the escape, the Coopers built a new life in America, but Helene was never comfortable, and they moved around quite a bit. John Cooper eventually went back to Liberia and died there; Calista and Marlene Cooper also returned but came back to the U.S. after several years. Only Helene never cared to go back. Helene dedicated herself to her studies and became a reporter at UNC, then moved on to a journalism career that took her to the Wall Street Journal and later all over the world, but she locked away her feelings on Liberia and focused on her new life as an American, preferring to forget her past, until she found herself in Iraq in the beginning of the war and narrowly avoided dying in an attack. Helene Cooper picked herself up, dusting herself off, and decided that if she were going to die in a war, it should be Liberia. Her decision brought her face to face with the horrors she never wanted to see again, but it also brought her back to Eunice, and gave her a second chance that should probably never have happened.

A story like this should be trite. It should make you roll your eyes and sigh derisively. The beauty of The House at Sugar Beach is that, instead, it makes your heart ache and your eyes tear in the best of ways. (I fully admit to crying a little while reading the description of Helene's father's death, although I was surreptiously trying to knuckle the tears away lest the air hostess ask me if I was all right and embarrass me on a plane full of strangers.) It made me wonder why I didn't know more about Liberia or the atrocities committed there, and it made me respect someone who took the pieces of a shattered life and rebuilt them while she was still just a child, and then had the courage to risk that fragile existence by going back as an adult. Cooper keeps it real in the best sense of the word, being matter-of-fact without being cold, being honest without being callous, and being true without being exploitative. The mixture of emotion and fact is beautifully balanced, and makes for a bittersweet story with the happiest ending it could have had.

Title Twenty Six: Life Class by Pat Barker

No one does WWI fiction better than Pat Barker. Her Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road) is probably the definitive example of how to create fiction about a war that almost no one ever thinks about. It's true; we remember the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (or War of Northern Aggression, depending on your side of the Mason-Dixon line), WWII, and Vietnam. How often do you think of that little skirmish in the second decade of the twentieth century? America didn't really get involved until the end was near, so it doesn't have the same impact in our history as it does in those of England, Canada, and France, to name a few.

In Life Class, Paul and Elinor meet as art students at the Slade School of Art and have an attraction to one another, but are involved with other people. The first part of the novel is full of blather about art and "the work" and coffee houses and bars and sexual tension, but it's really just filler for the war that is already beginning to cast a shadow on the fringes of student life. As Paul and Elinor turn towards each other, the fighting begins in earnest and Paul, ineligible for service due to problems with his lungs after an illness, volunteers with the Belgian Red Cross. This is where Barker finds her familiar and formidable rhythm, as she describes the conditions of the men, the reports of battle, and the havoc that war wreaks on the mind. Regeneration dealt with the phenomenon of "shell shock" and the beginning stages of its validity as a clinical diagnosis at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland; that novel is based in large part on real events and people (including the famed poet Wilfred Owen, who died only days before the armistice). Although Life Class is completely fictional, there are parts of it that are achingly real and heartwrenching. Barker uses words like the finest strokes of a paintbrush to create the image of a soldier's gangrenous pelvic wound; it's revolting but stunning at the same time. She captures the struggle between the war and home fronts, both turned mad, in Paul and Elinor's letters to each other. Moreover, she uses the concept of art as a medium for what we cannot say to perfection - it's only in Belgium that Paul feels that he can really put himself into his work, although his subject matter is clearly disturbing - it is the only way that Paul can rid himself of the horror of the broken and torn human beings around him. His work, which was never very good at school, is transformed into something more real and honest. It only took the most terrifying circumstances to make it possible.

That said, the story ends rather weakly, with an injured but recovering Paul and a drifting Elinor stumbling towards the end of the love affair that they consummated over a few days while the latter came to visit in the early days of the war. Neither of the main characters could be called likeable, and I didn't really care what happened to them. I think that the real strength of the book rests in the war, but unfortunately the book is meant to encompass more than that and it falls rather flat.

Title Sixteen: The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks

For Civil War buffs like me, Robert Hicks has created a well-told tale of the Battle of Franklin. In November 1864, the Union and Confederate forces met on the outskirts of this nondescript Tennessee town and clashed in a bloody battle that left 9,200 men dead and had far-reaching ramifications for not only the town's residents but the soldiers on both sides. Carrie McGavock, a grieving mother of three whose husband and two surviving children mean little to her as she inhabits a ghost world where her dead children still live, laugh, and play, finds her home, Carnton, rudely turned into a field hospital for the Confederate wounded. This snaps Carrie back to a reality she never wanted to see again and transforms her from a shadow woman into an efficient nurse, house mistress, and sparks a love between this refined gentlewoman and a crude Cracker soldier named Zachariah Cashwell, with whom Carrie spends hours, not caring what anyone may think - not her husband, John, her slave, Mariah, nor Mariah's son Theopolis. Carrie tends to the dead and dying, writing to their families and hoping against hope that Zachariah will not be taken from her too, but it is not meant to be when he is pronounced fit enough to be carried off by the Union army to a prison camp and Mariah once again loses a piece of herself. However, this time she is stronger and begins to fight for what she believes in, refusing to accept that the dead men buried in her fields can be forgotten.

Other characters weave in and out of the narrative, which takes the form of journal entries or perspectives from Union soldiers and Cashwell himself, as well as third-person accounts of John McGavock and Mariah's forays into the ravaged town of Franklin. Franklin itself becomes a symbol of the defeated South itself, from burned buildings and destroyed roads to the homes and shops of free issue slaves. Cashwell escapes his prison and goes to work for a time on the railroads, but something pulls him inexorably back towards Franklin, Carnton, and Carrie. The Widow of the South is a love story in a similar vein as Gone with the Wind, but the two could not be more different. The two novels share only the descriptions of the hardship of the "War Between the States," the loss of so many brave men who died for nothing, the poverty and hunger of the aftermath, and the jarring difference between life before and after the war. Carrie and Zachariah's love is not epic or sweeping, like that of Scarlett and Rhett; it is more basic, more earthy, and more real.*

Towards the end of the novel, the McGavocks realize that a wealthy neighbor who owns most of their land (John having sold it off, piece by piece over the years to finance, at first, his family's lifestyle and later, his incessant drinking, the only activity which gives him solace) has decided to dig up the graves of the boys who died on the McGavock property - on the carpets, the floors, the porch, in the yard, and whose amputated limbs were dumped like so much chattel out of the kitchen windows and doors during cruel field operations. This neighbor hates the Confederacy because his only son left to fight for the Cause and was killed instantly on the Franklin battlefield. Carrie musters every ounce of rage, horror, and deviousness in her heart and mind and blackmails old Mr. Baylor into leaving the ground undisturbed. It is then that Carrie McGavock undertakes the greatest project of her life: turning those fields into one of the largest, if not the largest, Confederate cemetery in existence, erecting a marker at each grave and keeping a detailed log of each soldier in a book that never leaves her side as she makes her daily rounds, dressed in old, neatly-mended black, accompanied by the faithful (and psychically gifted) Mariah. Carrie continues these rounds into her old, widowed age, and the novel is nicely bookended by scenes of her, going about her caretaker's business, in 1894, when a mysterious man returns to Carnton. If you've read this far, you already know that Zachariah Cashwell, suffering from consumption, has come back to his home - which is both Carrie and Carnton - to die.

What struck me most, besides the honesty and keen attention to detail of Hicks' novel, was the fact that Carrie McGavock was a real person and Hicks leaves no stone unturned in his research. It's a beautiful, haunting, and excellently-written book that I strongly recommend to anyone with a love of history, Americana, true patriotism, human compassion, and the strength of the human spirit.


*GwtW remains my favorite novel to this day.

Title Thirteen: Stealing Lincoln's Body by Thomas J. Craughwell

Did you know that, in 1876, a small gang of thieves devised a plan to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from its tomb in the Oak Ridge Cemetery outside of Springfield, Illinois, and hold it for ransom? I never knew that, so it was with a certain amount of curiosity that I picked this book up from one of the non-fiction tables at Barnes & Noble. Craughwell has done an incredible job of researching his material (and when I say incredible, I mean it - the notes, bibliography, and index span nearly 40 pages at the end of the book) and he draws in all sorts of interesting and not-so-interesting information to create a tale that begins with Lincoln's shooting at Ford's theater and ends nearly a century later with the death of the final person involved in the entire situation - a plumber named Leon Hopkins who opened and sealed Lincoln's sarcophagus twice, and died in 1946 at the age of 94. (I told you the author took his research very seriously.)



To make a long story short, the whole plot arose out of a counterfeiting ring. When the Secret Service arrested Ben Boyd, something of a counterfeit genius operating out of Chicago, he was tried, found guilty, and summarily sent to the state pen. Jim Kennally, a saloon operator, political machinator, and all-around crook took a serious financial hit with the absence of Boyd and orchestrated a plan to steal the president's coffin and hold it for the ransom of Boyd's release. Thanks to a paid Secret Service informant, the plot was foiled, the culprits caught and sent to prison, the body saved, and this book written.

I picked up Stealing Lincoln's Body because I have a weird fascination with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, and I thought this looked like an interesting read. The blurb on the back even notes: "The custodian of the tomb was so shaken by the incident that he willingly dedicated the rest of his life to protecting the president's corpse." In the bookstore, my mind conjured up a lone old man, with only a pipe and lantern for company, perched in a chair in a house next to the tomb until his dying day. (Apparently I have a very active imagination.) Instead, the book was far too long on detail and minutiae - while I understand that the counterfeiting angle was integral to the plot and the history, I didn't need the entire history of counterfeiting in the United States. Did I need to know that the Indians traded counterfeit wampum to the white man in the early 17th century? Do I feel like I'm going to stab a pen into my eye if I type the word "counterfeit" one more time? The answers are, respectively, no and yes. Lincoln family lore is thrown in haphazardly and far more attention is paid to the qualities of mortar, brick, and marble than I needed.

I'd recommend this book to history buffs, but be prepared for a dry read. The most interesting fact that I took away from Stealing Lincoln's Body is that there is photographic evidence (included in the pictorial section of the book) of future President Theodore Roosevelt and his brother watching Lincoln's funeral cortege make its way through New York City. Put that factoid in your brain and chew on it, kids.