The End of Oz

The End of Oz by Danielle Paige

This is the fourth and final volume of the Dorothy Must Die series. It picks up where the third volume, Yellow Brick War, ends with Dorothy back in Oz, now with her high school friend Madison. They and her Oz boyfriend Nox are in Ev to defeat the Nome King.
As with the previous three novels in the series Danielle Paige shows a good grasp of the Baumian characters of Oz, and has a clever way of modernizing them to make them of interest to a modern Young Adult audience. Each book introduces more of Baum's characters, and in this volume they meet the Wheelers, and Princess Langwidere.
In this final book both Amy and Dorothy narrate alternating chapters so we finally get to see Dorothy as something other than the evil enemy. She has been taken captive by the Nome King who plans to marry her to steal her magic.
Like the first three, Yellow Brick War is best read as part of the series, as the story picks up and ends abruptly. Could the author be planning to continue the series? I gave the book four stars instead of five because I feel the author is, at times, too free in her adaptation of Baum's characters, revisioning them for a modern audience in a way that is jarring and discordant to people who know them well from reading Baum's books.

Yellow Brick War

Yellow Brick War by Danielle Paige

This is the third volume of the four volume Dorothy Must Die series. It picks up where the second volume, The Wicked Will Rise, left off, with both Dorothy Gale and the Alliance of the Wicked, along with Amy Gumm, back in Amy's home town in Kansas. While Dorothy escapes back to Oz, the Wicked are marooned. Their only hope to get back to Oz is for Amy to find the silver slippers that Dorothy originally used to return to Kansas. Amy has no magic in Kansas, and has been presumed dead since the tornado blew her to Oz. While the witches hide, Amy returns to her mother's home and her high school. She searches for the shoes that will allow them to return to Oz and defeat Dorothy.

As with the previous two novels in the series Danielle Paige shows a good grasp of the Baumian characters of Oz, and has a clever way of modernizing them to make them of interest to a modern Young Adult audience. Each book introduces more of Baum's characters, and brutally murders others. Like the first two, Yellow Brick War is best read as part of the series, as the story picks up and ends abruptly. I gave the book four stars instead of five because I feel the author is, at times, too free in her adaptation of Baum's characters, revisioning them for a modern audience in a way that is jarring and discordant to people who know them well from reading Baum's books. Also the violent treatment of the battle scenes is not to my taste.

The Wicked Will Rise

The Wicked Will Rise by Danielle Paige

This is the second volume of the four volume Dorothy Must Die series. It picks up where the first volume, Dorothy Must Die, left off, right after an epic battle in the war of the wicked witches against Dorothy Gale and her followers, the Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, Tin Woodman and Glinda the Good. The Emerald City is in shambles, and the forces of the Wicked have been scattered. Our heroine, Amy Gumm, is being rescued, along with Ozma, by a pair of flying monkeys, who plan to take them to Lulu, the Queen of the Flying Monkeys.

In the first book Amy Gumm was taken by a tornado to Oz. Only the fairyland of L. Frank Baum's imagination is turned upside down, with a tyrannical Dorothy draining all the magic in Oz to increase her despotic rule. Amy was recruited by The Revolutionary Order of the Wicked and trained to be the person to assassinate Dorothy. Their coup ends up being the first battle in a war, and The Wicked Will Rise tells the tale of Amy's continuing adventures, trying to reunite with the rest of the Wicked and complete her mission. First a visit to the Flying Monkeys and then a search for Polychrome, the Rainbow's daughter, leads up to her next confrontation with Dorothy. Amy is with Ozma through this whole book and learns much more about Ozma's past and watches as Ozma starts to regain her fairy powers.

Danielle Paige has a good grasp of the Baumian characters of Oz, and has a clever way of modernizing them to make them of interest to a modern Young Adult audience. This book is best read as part of the series as it picks up and ends abruptly. I give the book four stars instead of five because I feel the author is at times too free in her adaptation of Baum's characters, revisioning them for a modern audience in a way that is jarring and discordant to people who know them well from reading Baum's books.

Dorothy Must Die

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

Danielle Paige has written a four volume series of books based on the characters of L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz series. The first volume Dorothy Must Die tells the story of how a misfit high school student named Amy Gumm, who lives in a trailer in Kansas with her alcoholic mother, gets swept away by a tornado and lands on the Yellow Brick Road in Oz. While this is Baum's Oz, it is a dystopian version of the magical land where Dorothy Gail, the Good Witch Glinda, the Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Woodman terrorize the land. They are opposed by the evil witches who call themselves the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked. As Amy tries to understand and make her way in this very different Oz than the one in Baum's books, everyone's advice to her is to not trust anyone. This first volume introduces the major factions of this world in conflict, as the Wickeds develop a plan to kill Dorothy.

Unlike Baum's Oz, Dorothy Must Die has a fair amount of violence and cruelty. The action is fast paced and I found the books compelling reading. Paige has done her homework and knows Oz very well. So although this is a very different time in Oz, there is a great depth of characters and locations that will appeal to loyal fans of Oz.

There are three more books in the series as well as a set of three volumes of Oz Stories that accompany the four volume series so this book is the bait designed to pique your interest enough to continue on through the rest of the series. This it does admirably well, with the expected ending that leaves matters unresolved and provides the opening 15 pages of the next title The Wicked Will Rise attached to the end. I know I will be reading it soon.

The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth by Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor

Reading the first editions of this book when first published back in 1981 and 1987 transformed my thinking, making me a lifelong Goddess worshipping feminist. So I looked forward to re-reading this 1991 second edition from the perspective of thirty years later.

Swedish artist Monica Sjöö and American poet Barbara Mor met after Sjöö published a 1975 short pamphlet The Ancient Religion of the Great Cosmic Mother of All in the UK. This was edited and extended by Mor and republished as an 80 page small book in Norway in 1981, which is when I became aware of it through its distribution in the USA by the feminist press WomanSpirit. It was very influential to members of the Feminist Goddess movement. Barbara Mor completely rewrote and updated the book to its present size of 500 pages for publication by Harper & Row in 1987 with a second edition in 1991 that included color plates and a new Introduction by Monica Sjöö. She wanted this book to be called The First God, but was over-ruled by publisher Harper & Row. It has never been out of print and is one of the classics of Second Wave Feminist thought.

The book is divided into four sections:
1. Women's Early Culture: Beginnings
2. Women's Early Religion
3. Women's Culture and Religion in Neolithic Times
4. Patriarchal Culture and Religion

The first three sections cover the first 400,000 years of human development in Matriarchal Goddess worshipping cultures, while the last section examines the last 4,000 years of male-god societies and religions with their endless war, female oppression, and profiteering use of Nature and people. Reading the first three sections again did wonders towards breaking my mind free of society's Patriarchal assumptions, both in the 1980s and on rereading it this year. The last 200 page section on "Patriarchal Culture and Religion" was difficult to read as the immense harm to people and the planet that Mor claims comes from male cultural assumptions and power gets hammered home by her extensive analysis. I would read a couple pages and have to put the book down, depressed and unable to continue for a while, before I could push on. The book is worth the effort it takes to read as it is truly mind expanding and transformative.

Monica Sjöö died in 2005 and Barbara Mor in 2015. Their spirits will live on in this classic work on Goddess Feminist thinking.

El Deafo

El Deafo by Cece Bell

Author/illustrator Cece Bell chronicles her hearing loss at a young age and her subsequent experiences with a very powerful, but very awkward, hearing aid. Delightful illustrations colored by David Lasky illustrate a sensitive and revealing story of growing up with hearing loss.

A Case of Two Cities

A Case of Two Cities by Qui Xiaolong

I don't often read mysteries or what are called Police Procedurals but I have become fond of Qui Xiaolong's series about Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Department. The Inspector is a poet who has become a cop, and he navigates the complex political and social milieu of modern Shanghai while solving difficult cases with a poet's mind. With a lot of emphasis on the local foods, I have fallen in love with this author's depiction of life in the city he grew up in as seen through the eyes of a poet detective.
In the fourth volume of the series, A Case of Two Cities, he is given a case dealing with corruption that may lead to the highest levels of Chinese government, but the culprit has fled to Los Angeles. Filled with food, poetry and politics, this is a detective story with a unique perspective that I find irresistible.

Christmas on Record

Christmas on Record: Best Selling Xmas Singles and Albums of the Past 40 Years by Craig W. Pattillo

Craig Pattillo has gathered together an amazing set of lists about the most popular Christmas songs and albums of the 42 year period beginning in 1940 and ending in 1982.
His first list is 20 pages long and contains Charted Xmas Singles alphabetical by recording artist.
The next list is a one page list of the Number One Christmas Songs for each year from 1940 through 1982.
The next two lists are the Top Christmas Songs By Artists of the Past 42 Years and the Top Christmas Songs of the Past 42 Years.
Then there are two lists of Million Selling Songs, first by number of copies sold, and then by Year.
The 20 Top Christmas Single Artists are listed next, with Bing Crosby as number 1.
Following these, is a 50 page list of Notable Xmas Singles & Artist Index which lists artists alphabetically with their holiday singles.
Next is a 25 page Xmas Song Index by song title, listing the artists who sang each.
This is followed by a series of lists of Extended Play (EP) records.
A 25 page listing of Charted Xmas Albums from 1945-1982 is arranged alphabetically by artist and lists the serial numbers for various releases.
This is followed by a one-page list of the Number One Christmas Album of each year from 1942 to 1982.
The next list is a ranked listing of the 254 Top Christmas Albums of the Past 37 Years.
Another 25 page list contains an Artist Index of Notable Christmas Albums, going from Abbott & Costello to Loretta Young.
There are also lists of Albums related to Television shows or that are compilations of various artists.
I used this book to create a YouTube playlist of the Top Christmas Songs from 1940 to 1982.

Ronia, the Robber's Daughter

Ronia, the Robber's Daughter, by Astrid Lindgren

Swedish author Astrid Lindgren is the fourth most translated children's author, primarily for her popular Pippy Longstocking books, published in the 1940s. I was intrigued when I found Ronia, the Robber's Daughter, which was written over thirty years later when Lindgren was in her seventies. The English translation by Patricia Crampton won the 1984 Mildred L. Batchelder Award for Children's Literature in Translation and is an ALA Notable Book.

This is a wonderful story of a young headstrong girl named Ronia raised by the robber chief Matt and his understanding wife Lovis, who live with the twelve robbers of his band of thieves in an abandoned castle on top of a mountain deep in a Swedish forest populated by wild animals, harpies, gray dwarfs, and rumphogs. Being the only child in the robber castle, she is everyone's darling and loved most dearly by her father Matt. She is left to find her own adventures in the vast forest that surrounds them as the men are busy robbing and Lovia has a castle's full of work to handle.

All goes well until the day she meets and becomes friends with Birk the son of Matt's rival robber chief Borka. Then their inseparable friendship cause great disruption between the hostile robber camps. The book is the story of this disruption and how it is settled. The magical Swedish forest and the strong Swedish robbers provide a wonderful setting for this story of two children developing their relationship and its effect on the lives of those around them.

Outrageous

Outrageous: The Victoria Woodhull Saga, Volume One: Rise to Riches by Neal Katz

Neal Katz has written and published a partial biographic novel covering the early years of the life of Victoria Woodhull, a 19th century American woman of great notoriety in her time, who was a pioneering voice in Women's Rights and Sexual Freedom. He promises to complete the story in a second novel due out later this year called Scandalous, the Victoria Woodhull Saga, Volume Two: Fame, Infamy, and Paradise Lost. Winning several awards, including the Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin, the Independent Publisher Book Awards IPPY, the Next Generation Indie, and the IndieReader Discovery Award.

Starting in 1847 when Victoria was eight years old, Katz tells her story from the poverty and abuse of her childhood up to 1870 when she, with sister Tennessee Claflin, opened a brokerage firm and became the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street. He portrays a rags to riches rise that is an amazing story of women successfully living outside the defined social limits of the time.

Woodhull, long overlooked by history, has become recognized in recent years for her major role in American thought. In 2001, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. A 1980 Broadway musical entitled Onward Victoria and a 2012 opera "Mrs. President" have been written. Scholarly biographies include:

2014 - The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age, by Myra MacPherson
2004 - Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America, by Amanda Frisken
1998 - Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored, by Mary Gabriel
1998 - Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, by Barbara Goldsmith
1995 - The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull, by Lois Beachy Underhill
1980 - The Vixens: A Biography of Victoria and Tennessee Claflin, by James Brough
1976 - Free woman: The life and times of Victoria Woodhull, by Marion Meade
1967 - Vicky: A biography of Victoria C. Woodhull, by M. Marion Marberry
1928 - The Terrible Siren Victoria Woodull 1838-1927, by Emanie Sachs

Cultural Slag

Cultural Slag by Felicia Lamport

Published in 1966, this collection of poems and short essays reflects the time in which it was written. Portions of the book previously were published in publications like The Atlantic, Harper's, Life, McCall's, The New York Herald Tribune, and The Saturday Evening Post. In addition to being a freelance author Felicia Lamport wrote the "Muse of the Week in Review" column for The Boston Globe. Cultural Slag is the third collection of her work all of which were illustrated by Edward Gorey.

For this collection Gorey created a series of full page drawings featuring striped insects and piles of stones that appear on the title page and introduce each chapter. In addition each poem or essay has its own pen and ink drawing. The combination of short poems and Gorey illustrations makes this book a quick and enjoyable read. Lamport had a sophisticated command of the English language and was often creative in her use of puns.

The short pieces of the book are clustered into chapters based on broad categories. Most are one page poems with a facing illustration, but there are also several essays as well.


THE NEW YORK PEDESTAL SET pays poetic homage to the statues and busts that grace public spaces in this city. These monuments are meant to pay homage to famous people, but what if the famous people of the past are no longer household names? That is the subject of one of the poems in this chapter called "Who He?" that begins:

One expects the mind to trigger
When one contemplates a figure
Cast for sempiternral fame,
But the brainpan starts to joggle
If the viewer starts to boggle
At the name.

This is followed by verses that remind the reader of some of the not-so-famous people who have commemorative statues in New York.


ALARUMS AND DIVERSIONS is a series of satirical poems on various performing arts and literature. My favorite is a poetic review of Edward Albee's 1964 play Tiny Alice called "DAS IST ALICE". I have never read a drama review written as a poem before. In one verse of this poem Lamport asks:

Was it turgid dramaturgy meant to vent on law and clergy
All the author's rage against the world today,
Psychopathia sexuAlice, or an allegoric chalice
He was raising in a reverential way?

This chapter also contains the first of Lamport's essays, a six page piece on non- and anti-book-reviews entitled "The Hypocritics". Anyone who writes book reviews will find much food for thought here.


POLITICAL CLINKERS is a collection of political poetry which has mostly aged badly as yesterday's politicians are largely forgotten quickly and with good reason. However her Viet Nam War era poem 'EMBATTLED OXYMORON" has some universal appeal even today. Here is a sample verse:

One grows strangely apprehensive
When one contemplates the sense of
Peace offensive,
Which, aggressively commanding
That which passeth understanding
Turns the sentiment it rouses
To: A pax on both your houses."


JOTS AND TITTLES is a collection of poems and an essay on travel and social interactions. The poem "SOUTHERN COMFORT' addresses that time in spring when the north is covered in snow while the south is in bloom:

No meter can measure
The infinite pleasure
Of people in tropic resorts
who squirm with delight
Through the sweltering night
At their home town weather reports.


ANIMAL SPIRITS is a short chapter of four poems about the Animal Kingdom. "ICHTHYOLOGIC" asks the question:

Why do fish, who get no pleasure out of mating,
Top all mammals in the rate of propagating?


PARTY LINES is another short chapter of five poems describing the urban party-going scene. The poem "DENSITY PROPENSITY" starts:

From five to seven every night
The party-goers coalesce
Participating in the rite
That equalizes social debts
In all the best sub-bourbon sets.


SWEET AND SOUR SERENADE TO CAMBRIDGE is a set of poems dedicated to Cambridge Massachusetts. The poem "EDUCATION INFLATION" ends with the verse:

Corporations vie to buy queues of the higher bracket I.Q.s
That were lately held in rather low esteem:
All of Cambridge now is reeling with such wheeling Ph.Dealing
As has never graced the grooves of academe.


SOCIAL SPINOFF is a chapter on social issues of the day. The preference for plastic cards over paper money is the subject of "YON CASH HAS GOT A LEAN AND HUNGRY LOOK". It opens with the verse:

It's funny what's happening to money:
It seems to have gone out of fashion.
The flashing of cash is considered so brash
That it turns any headwaiter ashen.

While the book is 52 years old, it can still provide some amusement, and the drawings of Edward Gorey fill the pages with art worth seeing.

Murdering Mr. Monti

Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence by Judith Viorst

While the title brings thoughts of a murder mystery to mind, the phrase A Merry Little Tale in the subtitle reveals this novel as a Comedy of Manners where the humorous situations, and some suspense, drive the plot.

Set in the suburbs of Washington DC, the book is about Brenda Kovner, a successful 46 year old syndicated advice columnist who is married to Jake a pediatric surgeon. They have two grown sons Jeff and Wally. Wally has fallen in love with Jo Monti the youngest daughter of Joseph Monti, a narcissistic bully of a man. Mr. Monti has dominated his wife and three daughters, and Jo has shown budding signs of rebellion by falling in love with a Jewish man. Mr. Monti stands in the way of Wally and Jo's plans. Not only does he intend to drive off Wally, but he has taken steps to ruin Jake and Jeff's lives.

Brenda has reached middle age having slept with only Jake her husband, and her attempts to micro-manage their life has created tensions in their marriage. She had decided before the story begins to sleep with other men before her 46th birthday in order to have a variety of sexual experience and ended up sleeping with three men in 24 hours. One of them was Mr. Monti.

Once she decides that the only way out of her problems is to murder Mr. Monti, the readers' fun begins.

Judith Viorst is an established author of poetry and children's books. This delightful novel shows her skills at character development and humor. Filled with her own advice from her syndicated column, well-developed characters, outlandish situations, and a complex plot full of surprises, this is a delightful fun read.

My Horizontal Life

My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands by Chelsea Handler

My Horizontal Life is a set of 18 stories depicting short-term sexual relationships that Chelsea Handler claims to have had between the ages of 18 and 28. Actually the first story "Guess Who's Having Sex with Mommy" tells about the time seven year old Chelsea walked in on her parents having sex. All the actual details of these stories must not be taken as factually true because Chelsea Handler claims to drink and lie an awful lot. So the possibility that she can't remember details or that she makes them up makes this book probably more fiction than memoir. What she does remember or lie about is more often humorous rather than lascivious. I get the feeling that even Chelsea was too drunk to actually remember the sexual part of the relationship. So these stories consist of a lot of amusing situations leading up to and following the sexual act, without any actual salacious sexual details.

The Renegade Queen

The Renegade Queen by Eva Flynn

Eva Flynn's The Renegade Queen is a novel told in the first person about the life of Victoria Woodhull, one of the most amazing women of the 19th Century who, because of her radical positions, has been written out of many historical accounts of the time. There are several excellent biographies of Victoria that have built up the details of her life from the published sources of the time. Benefiting from all that research this novel, by telling her story in the first person, breathes life into the character and personage of Victoria Woodhull. What Eva Flynn has done most admirably in this book is to "channel" the spirit of Victoria's character so the reader can glimpse, not only what she accomplished, but why she did all the things she did in the fields of Spiritualism, Women's Rights, Civil Rights, Commerce, Publishing, Free Love, Politics, and so many others.

The Renegade Queen won the 2016 Independent Publisher Gold "IPPY" Award for Best Adult Fiction E-Book and I can see why. Not only does Flynn bring Victoria Woodhull to life, but she does the same for her two husbands Canning Woodhull and James Blood, her sister Tenny C. Claflin, her father “Buck” Claflin, Susan B. Anthony, Commodore Vanderbilt, Massachusetts Congressman Benjamin Butler, and a host of others. I feel the author has immersed herself in the Civil War and Reconstruction period and used her knowledge to create great depth in the characters and the settings of the novel. If you have ever wanted to learn more about Victoria Woodhull, this novel is a very enjoyable way to do that.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

David Sedaris is a master of short biographical memoirs that are funny, insightful, and poignant, sometime all at the same time. This volume collects a group of his essays mostly about the members his large Raleigh, NC family. I enjoy reading his insights into life as revealed by his interactions with others.
"Us and Them" is about moving next to a family that is raising their family without television.
In "The Ship Shape" David describes his family's version of the North Carolina custom of having or renting a house at the coast.
"Full House" describes David's first sleep over when he was in the sixth grade.
David gets hit in the mouth with a rock thrown by one of the most popular boys in his class in "Consider the Stars." This leads to a confrontation between his father and the parents of the other boy.
David's relationship with his rich great aunt is the topic of "Monie Changes Everything."
Asking for Spare Change at the NC State Fair is the topic of "The Change in Me."
In "Hejira" David tells the story of when his dad kicked him out of the house when he was 22 because he is gay.
"Slumus Lordicus" is about the time his parents' get rich plan of buying and renting out apartments.
In "The Girl Next Door" David makes friends with the nine year old girl next door with disastrous consequences until his mother saves him.
"Blood Work" tells of an unusual but lucrative experience David had while working in New York City cleaning apartments.
In the next story David tells of seeing "The End of the Affair" with his partner Hugh.
"Repeat After Me" describes David's visit to his sister Lisa and her talking parrot Henry.
On a visit to Amsterdam David asks the cab driver about his Christmas celebration and learns about the "Six to Eight Black Men" who accompany Dutch St. Nick.
David's brother Paul, who runs a floor sanding service in Raleigh, is the topic of "Rooster at the Hitchin' Post."
Hugh and David visit the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in "Possession."
Most poignant was "Put A Lid On It" describing his visit to his sister Tiffany who lived in Boston. Their lives are obviously worlds apart and the distance is painful to watch unfold.
A "Can of Worms" found in Texas that survived the space shuttle explosion is the dinner table topic of an evening in Los Angeles.
In "Chicken in the Henhouse" David helps a young boy at a hotel, and then has second thoughts about how his gesture might be misinterpreted.
David and Hugh get into an argument over a rubber hand during a dinner conversation with friends in "Who's the Chef."
Paul becomes the first of David's siblings to have a child in "Baby Einstein."
A burglar gets stuck in a chimney and dies in "Nuit of the Living Dead."

The Voyeurs

The Voyeurs by Gabrielle Bell

This book was my first encounter with the cartoonist Gabrielle Bell and it took me a while to get into the structure and content. Most of the book is a chronological series of dated sketches from Bell's graphic journal covering the four years from 2007 to 2010. The book opens with a 13 panel cartoon called "The Voyeurs" from which the book derives it's name. In it Bell finds five of her friends on the roof of her apartment building watching a couple make love in an apartment across the way. I get a sense that she thinks of the readers as Voyeurs into her life through the reading of her journals.

Getting thrown into the middle of a person's life as revealed through their journals can be a bit disorienting at first and it took me a while to warm up to the format, the story, and the author. Once I got involved in her life, though, I found it a good read with lots of detail that the dialog and the sketches bring to life.

Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg

Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg by Kate Evans

Red Rosa follows the life of Rosa Luxemburg from her birth in Zamość Poland in 1871 to her execution in Berlin in 1919. Born with a congenital dislocation of the hip, Rosa's left leg was shorter than her right and she walked with a limp and used a special shoe with a lift. After she was born her family moved to Warsaw where, at the age of 15, she became involved with the Socialist Proletariat Party and helped organize a general strike. When four of the Proletariat Party leaders were put to death and the party was disbanded, she fled to Switzerland where she attended the University of Zurich. Her doctoral dissertation, "The Industrial Development of Poland," was published when she was 27. It is in Zurich that she meets and falls in love with Leo Jogiches who helps her organize Polish Socialist activities.

Wanting to be in Germany where the leading Socialist thinkers are, Rosa marries the son of an old friend Gustav Lubeck to get German citizenship and moves to Berlin in 1897. They never lived together and they formally divorced five years later. She became a leftist member of the Social Democratic Party and a founding member of The Spartacus League. Through these groups she promoted equal rights for women, an internationalist perspective, and opposition to the First World War. She tried to rally the workers to a general strike when war was declared saying "If they think we are going to lift the weapons of murder against our French and other brethren, then we shall shout: 'We will not do it!'". During the war the Spartacus League wrote illegal, anti-war pamphlets signed "Spartacus" (after the slave-liberating gladiator who opposed the Romans) and Rosa was imprisoned for two and a half years, as was her lover Karl Liebknecht. At the end of the war she and Liebknecht were freed from prison and they resurrected the Spartacus League, pushing for a Free Socialist Republic. Both were shot by right-wing paramilitary militia working for the government.

That is the framework that Kate Evans uses through her drawings to breathe life into the story of Rosa Luxemburg. She uses a recently made available letters written by Rosa and other works of scholarship to create a detailed account of her life. Filled with lovely black and white drawings, we find a Rosa Luxemburg that author Stephen Eric Bronner called in 1987 A Revolutionary for Our Times. I found her economic arguments written at the end of the 19th century, and very deftly explained by Kate Evans, very forward thinking and with extreme relevance to our 21st century predicament. Kate Evans' six pages of Rosa explaining Capitalism to her family at the dining room table is excellent. The book closes with 33 pages of notes for people who want to know more about particular events in the book. There is also an Afterword that brings the reader up to date on the historiography of thinking about Rosa Luxemburg and her influence. An excellent introduction to a radical and highly insightful scholar.

Munch

Munch by Steffen Kverneland

Munch is a graphic novel biography of Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter born on December 12, 1863 and died 80 years later on January 23, 1944. Most known for his painting of The Scream, his works cover a wide range of portraiture and group settings and are drawn from his own life experiences. He painted what he felt rather than realistically portraying what he saw. Many of his paintings are recreated in the text or used as source material for the author's own drawings.

The author wants Munch and the other characters in the book to speak their own words so all their spoken words are authentic quotes from letters, diaries, and notes. To make the book more interesting to read the author and his friend Lars Fiske introduce the book and appear occasionally explaining the methodology of the work or some of the background material, mostly as drawings but with some photographs taken at sites used in Munch's paintings. This mix makes for an enjoyable read that also provides an in-depth view of the artist, his family and friends, and the the society in which they worked.

I can highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the artist and his work. The translation from Norwegian by Francesca M. Nichols reads very well. It has made me interested in reading other volumes in the Art Masters Series put out by Self Made Hero Press.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

I have been a David Sedaris fan for a long time. He grew up in Raleigh and writes humorous sketches on life, often based on his experiences here in the City of Oaks. When I moved to Raleigh in 1979, he was the waiter at the coffee shop I frequented before going to work each morning. Most days it was David, DD (a woman who worked in a dairy lab at the land grant university across the street), and me. This was before he was a writer. He considered himself a performance artist at the time and would stage strange performances with his friend Avi for a small but confused audience of friends. I am glad he took up writing as he is much better at it than performance art.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames was written in 2008 around the time David was living in France and gave up smoking. There is a large 83 page Smoking Section at the end of the book where he recounts his experiences with smoking and ends with his three month trip to Japan to give up smoking "cold turkey." This book seems to be more introspective than his earlier works and includes many stories about his relationship with his partner Hugh Hamrick. His mixture of humorous observations on life, mixed with his own foibles, make for both funny and tender reading moments that are unique.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Weapons of Math Destruction looks at the fields of Analytics and Big Data in a non-technical manner to provide a basic overview of how statistical models are built and used to predict behavior and improve efficiency. The focus is on showing how well-designed analytical models are built, and how to distinguish them from those that have destructive, but profitable, outcomes. It is an insider's look at the science and practice of Big Data for the benefit of those outside the field. As such, it is a good introductory text to the issues involved. Broad in its sweep, this book looks at Big Data applications in education, criminal justice, the workplace, and politics. It points out how, while promising fairness and efficiency, the uses of Big Data can often punish the poor while rewarding the upper class.
Any book with the word Math in the title can be expected to have formulas full of symbols, or at least graphs, spreadsheets or data. But this book has none of these and can safely be read by the math averse population.
What you can expect to come away with is a sense of how pervasive Big Data have become, how its use may effect your daily life and those who are hurt by it, and how to develop an understanding of ways to determine which uses of Big Data increase inequality and threaten Democracy.
What I felt was its weakest point was when the author talks about solutions. O'Neil sees this as a young field and that the problems pointed out in the book will be seen as the early days before the practitioners learned to bring fairness and accountability to the field. Suggested improvements in the book include teaching ethics to the researchers in the field, and developing a Hippocratic Oath for Big Data similar to the one used in Medicine. However, I think the book itself is a good start towards developing an informed public able to understand the fair and unfair uses of Analytics with a goal towards developing a regulatory structure that allows individuals to see how their data is being used, and to provide the feedback mechanisms to help users actively participate in their profiling.
While this is an overview written for a general audience, and is relatively free of footnotes, there is a 34 page section of Notes at the end of the book showing the sources used for the information discussed throughout the pages of the text. I came away from reading this book with a much better understanding of the impact of Big Data and the analytical tools used to work with it. Much of what I see online has been modified to fit a profile of me created by my past online choices that have put me in a statistical bucket or silo and limits what I see and hear. This reminds me of the parable of the frog in the well. The frog lived in a well where there was all he needed to live and a small patch of blue sky visible at the opening of the well. One day, a turtle came by and told him about the vast sea. The frog replies 'The sea? Hah! It's paradise in here. Nothing can be better than this well." With the Moral being that ignorant people know nothing aside from their own small world. Cathy O'Neil is the turtle offering this book as a way of showing us frogs caught up in our silos of information about the vast Ocean of Big Data that is out there if we can learn to see outside our small computer screen view.
Big Data for the Masses

The Galley Slave's Ring

The Galley Slave's Ring : Or, The Family of Lebrenn : A Tale of the French Revolution of 1848, by Eugene Sue

The Galley Slave's Ring is the final volume of a 19 volume series of novels written by Eugène Sue called The Mysteries of the People; or History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages that was written between 1849-1857. The author, once called "the king of the popular novel," created this series to depict the struggle between the ruling and the ruled classes in French history. One family, the descendants of a Gallic chief named Joel, represent the oppressed, and the descendants of a Frankish chief Neroweg, typifies the oppressors. Down through the ages the successive struggles between oppressors and oppressed are depicted in a series of stories told by the descendants Of Joel that culminate in the European Revolutions of 1848.

Considered at one time classics of Marxist/Socialist thought, these books are mostly forgotten today, and the English-language editions published at the beginning of the 20th Century have only become available again recently through large-scale digitization projects of Public Domain books. Daniel DeLeon, leader of the Socialist Labor Party of America and translator of this series into English, wrote in his Preface to The Gold Sickle that it was owning class influence that kept English translations of this series from being available for over 50 years. A 2004 article entitled "Eugène Sue : Champion of the Oppressed" in The People, written to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the English translations, said the following about the series:

"It is by far the best work ever written for giving the working class reader an intimate picture of society as it evolved in France from the days of Gaul, before the Roman conquest, to the middle of the 19th century. It is especially valuable for the picture that it provides of the various phases of feudal society, and the growth of infant capitalism within the feudal womb."

While Sue's anti-Catholic works The Wandering Jew and The Mysteries of Paris are still known, this Socialist series of 19 novels has been out of print for over 100 years. Here is a listing of them:

The Mysteries of the People; or History of a Proletarian Family Across the Age series
1. The Gold Sickle or Hena, the Virgin of the Isle of Sen: A Tale of Druid Gaul
2. The Brass Bell; or, The Chariot of Death: A Tale of Caesar's Gallic Invasion
3. The Iron Collar; Or, Faustina and Syomara: A Tale of Slavery Under the Romans
4. The Silver Cross; or, The Carpenter of Nazareth: A Tale of Jerusalem
5. The Casque's Lark; or, Victoria, The Mother Of The Camps: A Tale Of The Frankish Invasion Of Gaul
6. The Poniard's Hilt; or, Karadeucq and Ronan: A Tale of Bagauders and Vagres
7. The Branding Needle; or, The Monastery of Charolles: A Tale of the First Communal Charter
8. The Abbatial Crosier; or, Bonaik and Septimine: A Tale of a Medieval Abbess
9. The Carlovingian Coins; or, The Daughters of Charlemagne: A Tale of the Ninth Century
10. The Iron Arrow Head; or, The Buckler Maiden: A Tale of the Northman Invasion
11. The Infant's Skull; or, The End of the World: A Tale of the Millennium
12. The Pilgrim's Shell; or, Fergan the Quarryman: A Tale from the Feudal Times
13. The Iron Pincers; or, Mylio and Karvel: A Tale of the Albigensian Crusades
14. The Iron Trevet; or, Jocelyn the Champion: A Tale of the Jacquerie
15. The Executioner's Knife; or, Joan of Arc: A Tale of the Inquisition
16. The Pocket Bible; or, Christian the Printer: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (2 volumes)
17. The Blacksmith's Hammer; or, The Peasant Code: A Tale of the Grand Monarch
18:1. The Sword of Honor; or, The Foundation of the French Republic: A Tale of the French Revolution
18:2. The Sword of Honor: Part II - The Bourgeois Revolution: A Tale of the French Revolution
19. The Galley Slave's Ring; or, The Family of Lebrenn: A Tale of the French Revolution of 1848

Having already enjoyed Sue's The Wandering Jew, I looked forward to starting a work which united my interest in serial novels, historic fiction, and Class Warfare. Fortunately, the whole series is now available free to anyone who has Kindle or epub software on their reading device.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
With this story, The Galley Slave's Ring; or, The Family of Lebrenn, closes the series of the nineteen historic novels comprised in Eugene Sue's monumental work The Mysteries of the People; or, History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages.
They who have read the preceding eighteen stories will agree that from the moment they began the first volume of the series, The Gold Sickle; or, Hena the Virgin of the Isle of Sen, down to the eighteenth, The Sword of Honor; or, The Foundation of the French Republic, they enjoyed a matchless promenade as they followed Sue through the Ages of History, from the time of the invasion of Gaul by Julius Caesar, shortly before Christ, down to the great epoch marked by the French Revolution. Nor will their expectations concerning this closing story be disappointed.
The Galley Slave's Ring; or, The Family of Lebrenn is staged on the Age that witnessed the downfall of Louis Philippe--the last of the Bourbon line--and the aspirations that raised the Second Republic. While several of the figures are historic, in this story historic characters step forth less pronouncedly than historic principles. In this story are found the Principles, the old and the newest, that have since occupied the stage of man's history, and the clash of which, down to our own days, occupies man's attention.
Inestimable as the previous stories are to the understanding of the Age of the present story, the present story, enlivened with the vein of romance, is inestimable to the understanding of our own Age.
DANIEL DE LEON.
Milford, Conn., February, 1911.

The Galley Slave's Ring begins in Paris on Rue Saint-Denis on February 23, 1848 during the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and ends in December, 1851 during the French Second Republic headed by Louis-Napoleon. It is the story of Marik Lebrenn and his family who run a cloth and clothing shop and live upstairs. He and his wife are about 50 years old, and they have an adult son and daughter that help in the shop. Although he is a bourgeois shop keeper, his values and ethics are aligned with the working class of his ancestors. The book begins with Lebrenn preparing to take part in the "February Revolution" that ended the reign of Louis-Philippe. It was one of the many uprisings of The Peoples' Spring that spread across Europe in 1848.

At the same time he is helping his shy neighbor George Duchene, a laborer who takes care of his aging grandfather, to become engaged to his daughter Jeanike. Jeanike loves George but has caught the eye of Count Gonthram of Ploernel, who is descended from the Neroweg Franks whose family has oppressed Marik's family for centuries. The Count, not knowing the history of their two families, hopes to win over Marik with a large order of uniforms for his garrison so he can seduce his daughter Jeanike. Their dialog is one of the high points of the book as the Count plays on his wealth and class, and Marik, armed with his knowledge of the history of the two families, counters with the socialist values that have become so prominent in Europe in this time. The Count realizes he has met his match, and both go back to planning for their roles in the impending revolution.

They meet again on the barricade at Rue Saint-Denis on opposite sides of the battle, where the workers led by Lebrenn hold off the troops. At the end of the battle, Lebrenn hides the wounded Count in his house and arranges for his safe transport home, possibly saving his life. The battle ended the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and marks the beginning of the Second Republic. However through a strange twist of fate, Marik finds himself accused, found guilty and sentenced to the life of a galley slave, while the Count becomes an officer in the army of the Republic.

Eugene Sue himself suffered a reversal similar to Marik's. After the French Revolution of 1848, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly in April 1850, only to be exiled the following year to Sardinia for his protest of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's coup d'état of 1851. It is in Sardinia that Sue writes the 19 volumes of The Mysteries of the People.

As the last volume of the series, Eugene Sue uses this story to recap the history of the family that has been told in the previous 18 volumes and to point out the moral strength of the socialist working class. His goal in portraying the struggles of the working class is to show that set backs like the Second Empire should not cause people to give up hope, but to realize that the long history of progress has often been accompanied by losses that seemed hopeless at the time. At the end of the book, after showing his family the stories of his ancestors going back over 1,000 years, Marik tells them "What does it matter, my children, whether we actually witness or not the dawn, if we have the certainty that the sun of that beautiful day is bound eventually to shine over a regenerated world!" He goes on to say "Whatever appearances may be, whatever the present depression, revolutionary thought is at this very hour germinating under the soil. It is spreading and gaining in depth through a thousand underground rootlets. Sooner or later, its sudden and last irresistible explosion will be heard. Upon the ruins of the old social system a new social order will be established. There can be no doubt whatever, my children, regarding that great and crowning event. Progress is the law of humanity -- for society as well as for the individual. Our plebeian narratives furnish the irrefutable proof."

Prior to reading Sue's "Mysteries of the People" which ends in 1851 with the beginning of France's Second Empire, I had read Emile Zola's 20 Rougon-Macquart novels which are a panoramic account of the Second Empire. They are the story of a family between the years 1851 and 1871 who descend from the two family lines of the Rougons and Macquarts. The two series are wonderfully complimentary to each other and I recommend them to anyone looking for 40 or so novels to read that reveal the history of France.

The Painted Bird

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski

This novel tells the story of a young boy who wanders through the eastern regions of an unnamed Central European country during World War II. As Nazi Germany invades the country he is sent east by his Jewish parents for safety. The boy ends up, with no friends or resources, wandering from village to village seeking refuge. As a dark-eyed, black-haired youth he is referred to as a Gypsy orphan by the blond, blue-eyed Slavs of the area. Mistreated as an outsider, he is like a painted bird who seeks to join the flock but is rejected because of its different appearance. In each village he is bullied and abused and only finds refuge in the most unsavory of situations, always under the threat of being turned over to the Nazi invaders as a Gypsy. Through all of this, the youth tries to understand the cruel and violent world with which he is faced, developing theories and philosophies of life and discarding them as they fail to help him cope with the primitive lives of the peasant farmers and their harsh treatment.
Describing all of the cruelty and horror of war in the voice of a young child, this book is not easy to read and may be too upsetting for some readers. For those readers who manage to endure, the story reveals the war in a personal way that can only be possible through the eyes of a child.
The author was born in 1933 in Łódź Poland. So he was the same age as the boy in the story during the war. He and his Jewish parents survived the war in eastern Poland by assuming false identities and living as Catholics with the help of local Polish families.
First published in 1965, this 1976 Second Edition has an Introduction by the author that tells the amazing story of the book and its reception both in the West and in Poland where it was banned. He responds to criticism that the book dwells too much on the horrors faced by people in Poland during the war. Although the book stands on its own, this is a really useful addition to understanding the author and the initial reaction to the work.

I Went Down to St. James Infirmary

I Went Down to St. James Infirmary: Investigations in the Shadowy World of Early Jazz-Blues in the Company of Blind Willie McTell, Louis Armstrong, Don Redman, Irving Mills, Carl Moore, and a Host of Others, and Where Did This Dang Song Come from Anyway? by Robert W. Harwood

Robert Harwood does a very good job of tracing the roots of the legendary American song St. James Infirmary, finding similarities with the 18th century British folksong The Unfortunate Rake and also the American ballad The Streets of Laredo. He also uses the history of this song to show the beginnings of the music industry's creation of Race Recordings, the recording of African American artists for sales to the Black community. In addition, he uses a copyright trial over the name of the song to illustrate how folk musicians borrowed and changed music and lyrics to make songs their own, and how the music industry used copyrights on sheet music and recordings to profit from the musicians' work.

For those who want to research these topics further, this is a good piece of scholarship with extensive notes, a three page bibliography, and four appendices. I found the writing could have benefited from the hand of a good editor as whole paragraphs appear more than once in the text. It was an interesting and enjoyable read for a fan of this classic song that has been recorded by many musicians in a diverse range of genres including folk, blues and jazz.

Hua Hu Ching: The Teachings of Lao Tzu

Hua Hu Ching: The Teachings of Lao Tzu by Lao Tzu and Brian Walker

Most people who have heard of Lao Tzu know him through his book the Tao Te Ching, a fundamental Taoist text. The authorship and history of the Tao Te Ching is still being debated. And so it is also the case for the Hua Hu Ching which is also often attributed to Lao Tzu. The text has come down to us largely through oral tradition although fragments, although a partial manuscript was discovered in a cave in China.< In 1979 the first English translation by Hua-Ching Ni of the Hua Hu Ching was published by Shambhala Press under the title Hua Hu Ching : The Later Teachings of Lao Tzu.
This 1992 translation of the Hua Hu Ching by Brian Walker, who is famous for his highly accessible translation of the Chinese text The I Ching or Book of Changes: A Guide to Life's Turning Points, is equally accessible to Western readers. Having not read Hua-Ching Ni's translation, I cannot compare the two. However, I have read various translations of the I Ching, and I can agree that Walker's translation makes a very good starting point for a Western reader to the concepts outlined in the text. I found it inspiring and only slightly unclear in certain spots where I felt a Glossary with fuller descriptions of certain terms would have been helpful. E.g. he seems to translate "Tao" as "The Integral Way" without ever sitting the reader down and explaining either term. It is a wonderful companion to the Tao Te Ching and I recommend it to anyone who, after reading the Tao Te Ching, wants to find something else to read to get more information.

The Discovery of Heaven

The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch

If humans have free will, how does God know how everything is going to turn out? More significantly, how can God create a given outcome using these humans?

I first encountered Mulisch's work with his earlier title The Procedure which examines the way that inanimate matter becomes living organisms by telling the stories of a modern day Dr. Frankenstein, Victor Werker, a Dutch biologist who creates a complex organic clay crystal that can reproduce and has a metabolism, and the late sixteenth century Rabbi Jehudah Löw of Prague who creates a golem by following the procedure outlined in a third-century cabalist text that God used to create Adam.

The Discovery of Heaven is a large novel of 730 pages that deals with God's relationship with the human race, predestination and free will, and the lives of two men, the woman they both love, and the child she conceives to fulfill a divine purpose. Translated from the Dutch by award-winning translator Paul Vincent, the book makes a smooth transition into English. I found it easy and compelling reading with a thought-provoking ending. While this is one of the most read and respected novels in The Netherlands, American readers are not always so enthusiastic. I believe that the philosophical and theological questions raised and the literary style that Mulisch uses to covey them may be difficult to translate, sort of like reading an English translation of the Chinese I Ching.

It has a story within a story construction that opens with two heavenly spirits talking to each other. One is telling the other how complex it was to bring together the right genetic profiles to produce the desired child who would be able to fulfill a mission from God. The story the spirit tells begins with astrophysicist Max Delius and philologist Onno Quist meeting, seemingly by chance, in The Hague in February 1967 when Max stops his car at midnight to pick up Onno who was hitchhiking to Amsterdam.

Their friendship forms the core of the book, which tells the story of first Max, and then Onno, falling in love with young cellist Ada Brons. From this love triangle, Ada produces a son Quinten, whose paternity is uncertain, but we watch as he grows to maturity and the fulfillment of his mission.

This is a story of how heavenly predestination looks like free will to the humans involved as the humans exercise their free will, and yet their situations are manipulated from heaven by a spirit with a mission to accomplish. What does God need from humans at the end of the 20th century? Read the book and find out one man's thoughts on this.