A Stricken Field by Martha Gellhorn

A Stricken Field by Martha Gellhorn

With the signing of the 1938 Munich Agreement, Nazi Germany annexed portions of Czechoslovakia inhabited by German speakers, an area that came to be known as the Sudetenland. A Stricken Field is a novel based on a week Martha Gellhorn spent in Prague in 1938. She had gone as a reporter on an assignment to interview President Benes, but got caught up in the plight of the refugees fleeing the German occupation. No longer citizens of Czechoslovakia, they were being forced to return to German controlled territory where they feared for their lives. While trying to write an objective piece on the effects of the Munich Agreement on the economy, she is confronted all around by the terrible problems of good citizens hiding and being forced to return to the brutal oppression of the Nazis.
She never wrote that news report. Instead she wrote this novel about two refugees Rita and Peter who, for a brief period of time, have found refuge in each other's love. Gellhorn is there too as Mary, an American reporter who observes a great injustice and is powerless to help.
Gellhorn admits she never read the published book until she had to write an Afterword to this 1985 edition. In that Afterword she concludes "I am proud of it. I am glad I wrote it. Novels can't 'accomplish' anything. Novels don't decide the course of history or change it but they can show what history is like for people who have no choice except to live through it or die from it. I remembered for them."
Today as Russia casts greedy eyes on eastern Ukraine and Russian-speaking Ukrainians seek to reunite with their homeland, this novel has a strangely modern relevance. Not that Putin is a new Hitler, but it points out the indifference and powerlessness of world governments to situations like these.

Nettie's Trip South by Ann Turner

Nettie's Trip South by Ann Turner

Nettie's Trip South is a large format children's book with pencil illustrations on every page by Ronald Himler. It is based on diary entries of the author's great-grandmother. The book tells the story of 10 year old Nettie (Henrietta) and her sister accompanying their older brother on a trip from Albany New York to Richmond Virginia in the year 1859. Nettie has never seen slavery before and relates her encounters with Virginia slaves in a letter to her friend when she returns. A simple yet profound condemnation of the South's Peculiar Institution.

Feiffer's Children by Jules Feiffer

Feiffer's Children by Jules Feiffer

Feiffer's Children was published in 1986, the year Jules Feiffer won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in The Village Voice. It is a collection of his one page cartoon strips on children and parenting. Each comic strip takes up one page of and includes 6-10 frameless panels of his line-drawn black and white characters. One reviewer wrote that Feiffer writes of "the postwar Age of Anxiety in the big city." Be prepared for page after page of hilarious looks at anxious urban children and parents.
Included is his classic anti-war short graphic story Munro which was made into a film that won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 1961. Wikipedia described Munro as "a rebellious little boy who is accidentally drafted into the United States Army. No matter which adult he tells "I'm only four", they all fail to notice his age."
The book ends with "Movie-Child: An Afterword" which is a three page autobiographical sketch on Feiffer's growing up in a poor Jewish family in the Bronx. He talks about how his only escape from the dark, dingy and dangerous world around him was the movie house three blocks from his home. His heroes were Shirley Temple, Douglas Fairbanks, Henry Fonda, James Cagney, John Garfield, and Mickey Rooney.

The Iron Trevet

The Iron Trevet; or, Jocelyn the Champion; A Tale of the Jacquerie by Eugene Sue

The Iron Trevet is the 13th book of Eugene Sue's 21 volume series The Mysteries of the People; or History of a Proletarian Family Across the Age. The series was created to be a European history that depicts the struggle between the ruling and the ruled classes. 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 as each generation of Joel's family writes the story of their lives and adds it to the collective story gathered so far.
This book is set in the year 1356, a time when feudalism is at its peak and the rights of the lords were never questioned, and their serfs had none. This period is known to us today as the Hundred Years' War, but Eugene Sue presents it from the point of view of the peasants of the countryside and the merchant class of Paris, both struggling for more rights during the unrest of the times. He tells of bravery, boldness and betrayal in a sweeping story that moves between The peasant revolt known as the Jacquerie and the intrigue in Paris between Etienne Marcel and Jean Maillart to create a limited monarchy.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
Etienne Marcel, John Maillart, William Caillet, Adam the Devil and Charles the Wicked, King of Navarre, are the five leading personages in this story. Their figures and actions, the virtues and foibles of the ones, the vices of the others, the errors of all, are drawn with strict historic accuracy, all the five being historic characters. Seeing the historic importance of the epoch in which they figured, and the types that these five men represent, the story of "The Iron Trevet; or, Jocelyn, the Champion" is more than an historic narrative, it is more than a treatise on the philosophy of history, it is a treatise on human nature, it is a compendium of lessons inestimable to whomsoever his or her good or evil genius throws into the clash of human currents, and to those who, though not themselves participants, still may wish to understand that which they are spectators of and which, some way or other, they are themselves affected by and, some way or other, are bound to either support or resist. In a way, "The Iron Trevet; or, Jocelyn the Champion" is the uniquest of the series of brilliant stories that the genius of Eugene Sue has enriched the world with under the collective title of "The Mysteries of the People" we can recall no other instance in which so much profound and practical instruction is so skillfully clad in the pleasing drapery of fiction, and one within so small a compass. To America whose youthful years deprive her of historic perspective, this little story, or rather work, can not but be of service. To that vast English-speaking world at large, now throbbing with the pulse of awakening aspirations, this translation discloses another treasure trove, long and deliberately held closed to it in the wrappage of the foreign tongue in which the original appeared. DANIEL DE LEON. New York, April 13, 1904.

Son of a Witch

Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire

In Wicked Gregory Maguire retells L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. He restructures Oz into a complex society with limited technology and complex religious beliefs. One of the minor characters is the boy Liir who lives with her, but due to a large gap in her memory, no one knows if he is her son.
Written 10 years later, Son of a Witch picks up where Wicked leaves off and begins a series of three sequels to the original novel called The Wicked Years. I found it helpful to reread Wicked before starting this book.
The second book is a coming of age novel where Liir starts out as a child and grows to be a man, fulfilling his destiny in the strange world that Maguire created. However, with Dorothy and the Wizard gone and the witch sisters dead, it is an Oz that relies very little on Baum's writings for support. This is Maguire creating an Oz of his own.
I enjoyed this book very much and am looking forward to seeing if Maguire can continue creating compelling drama in A Lion Among Men and Out of Oz, the final two volumes of the series.

Cobalt Blue

Cobalt Blue by Peggy Payne

Peggy Payne's Cobalt Blue is about what happens to a down on her luck North Carolina artist when is struck one night with the grace of kundalini energy. While she struggles with the sexual and creative urges of her rising kundalini, she also has to negotiate her biggest commission ever, the official portrait of a right-wing US Senator from North Carolina whose political values are abhorrent to her. Filled with lots of local details, great North Carolina personalities, and a commanding knowledge of Kundalini Yoga, Cobalt Blue is a joyous and affirming book about our inner ability to grow and change.

Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents

Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents by Alex Forman

These brief biographies provide a few little known facts, normally about personal habits, love life, unusual beliefs or behaviors, hand shaking techniques, and last words. Rather than write biographic sketches, Alex Forman collected phrases from other books, and illustrated each presidential chapter with a black and white photo of that president's toy figurine from the Miniature Figures of U. S. Presidents collection of toys created by the Marx Toy Company.
This is an amusement that will be useful to someone like me who knows little about the presidents' lives.

Here are memorable lines from each brief bio:
"Nixon asked Pat Ryan to marry him the first night they went out."
"His secretary revealed that LBJ would wash and reuse Styrofoam cups."
"In 1963, JFK confided that he got a headache if he went too long without a woman."
"In 1959, Robert Woodruff, president of the CocaCola Company, scolded Eisenhower for appearing in a photograph sipping Coke from a bottle through a straw -- a sissy way to imbibe."
"Truman gave strong approval for a judicial process and said in support of the Nuremberg Trials: Never again can men say, I was following orders. And never again can men in power give such orders."
"In the fall of 1900, FDR entered Harvard and went all out to make the football team. He was turned down when he weighed in at a brittle 146 pounds. He became, instead, a cheerleader."
"Hoover's parents were poor, and he was orphaned at nine, but he amassed a fortune as a mine engineer and owner."
"A few days after Coolidge entered the White House, he wrote to Jim Lucey, a cobbler from his hometown, I want you to know, he said, that if it were not for you I should not be here and I want to tell you how much I love you." When Coolidge died in 1933 "Jim Lucey was heartbroken... He was the best friend I ever had, said the cobbler of the former president."
"Harding's wife Florence worried incessantly about Harding's grasp of events and had the cabinet report to her."
"All his life, Wilson insisted on his intensity and his strong passions. But at the age of twenty-eight he was almost certainly a virgin. His pleasures were all connected with the use of his mouth."
"Taft owned a Holstein cow, Pauline Wayne, which he let graze freely on the White House lawn. Pauline was the last cow to live at the White House."
"Roosevelt said, Our first duty, our most important work, is setting our own house in order. We must be true to ourselves, or else, in the long run, we shall be false to all others."
"McKinley had told Chicago newspaper publisher, H.H. Kohlstaat, that they were trying to force him into declaring war with Spain. As he said this, He broke down and wept as I have never seen anyone weep in my life. His whole body was shaken with convulsive sobs."
"Illness and depression caused his wife, Carrie, to imagine that Harrison was falling in love with her niece, the widow Mary Lord Dimmick. After his wife's death from tuberculosis, Harrison married his niece. He was healthy and vigorous and enjoyed again the pleasures of fatherhood."
"Charged with seduction and bastardy, Cleveland said, It is true. Tell the Truth! To the surprise and dismay of mentors and opponents alike, he remained incorruptible."
"Arthur did not like to dress himself but preferred to be dressed by boys. He kept eighty pairs of pants in his wardrobe and changed them several times a day."
"Garfield was one of the few scholarly men of the presidency. A lover of poetry and the classics, he wrote passable verse, could read and write in Latin and Greek, and used to entertain his friends by simultaneously writing Latin with one hand and Greek with the other."
"Hayes and his sister, Fanny, had affection for each other that spilled over the customary bounds of sibling devotion."
"Julia Dent Grant was by no means a beauty. As First Lady, she considered an operation to correct an eye defect, but the president liked her, he said, with her eyes crossed and would not have her different."
"Johnson did not master the basics of reading, grammar, or math until he met his wife, Eliza, at the age of seventeen. Determined that her husband should amount to something, Eliza hired a man to read to him as he worked, and she taught him writing and arithmetic at night."
"Lincoln was of Melungeon descent. Cartoonists nicknamed him, Abraham Africanus the First."
"Buchanan enjoyed a twenty-year intimate friendship with Senator William Rufus de Vane King. He referred to King as Aunt Nancy."
"In 1853, while in office, Pierce was arrested for running over an old woman with his horse. The case was dropped due to insufficient evidence."
"Fillmore was seventeen before he saw a dictionary. He was illiterate until adulthood. In 1826, he married Abigail Powers, a schoolteacher, who helped him with his education."
"Zachary Taylor had little schooling, no knowledge of law, government, or politics, and had never cast a vote in his life."
"Polk suffered from chronic diarrhea, succumbing to it three months out of office."
"Tyler is the only president to have three different First Ladies during his time in office."
"Harrison ate only cheese and milk products."
"Van Buren is the only president for whom English was not his first language. He grew up speaking Dutch."
"Jackson was called a Jackass. He liked the name and used it for a while; later it became the symbol of the Democratic Party."
"J.Q. Adams rose at five, read the bible, and took a nude swim in the Potomac." "In private,Monroe and his wife, Elizabeth, spoke only in French."
"James Madison was our smallest president, standing only 5 feet 4 inches and weighing about 100 pounds."
"Jefferson ate little animal meat. Vegetables were his principle diet."
"John Adams started smoking and chewing tobacco at age eight and continued throughout his life."
"Washington's 900-volume library was filled with all the get-rich-quick handbooks of the day."

[I have sometimes replaced a pronoun with the president's name for clarity.]

The Book of Dragons

The Book of Dragons by Edith Nesbit

The Book of Dragons contains eight short stories by Edith Nesbit that have a dragon or dragons as the main plot element. Originally published in 1900 for British children, modern American readers may find many of the references charming or confusing. However, Nesbit's imagination and writing skills are well represented in these children's stories. Being in the Public Domain, this and many other books by Nesbit are now freely available online through sites like Internet Archive, Amazon, Google Books, and others.
"The Book of Beasts" tells how young Lionel inherits a kingdom and find the in the palace library a magic Book of Beasts where the animals fly off the pages when viewed in daylight. All goes well until he gets to the page with a dragon.
In "Uncle James, or the Purple Stranger" Princess Mary Ann lives on a topsy turvy island and plans to marry Tom the gardener when she grows up. However when a dragon crash lands on the island, her evil Uncle James devises a plot to rid the island of the dragon and Mary Ann that Tom must find a way to stop.
"The Deliverers of Their Country" tells the story of two young siblings Effie and Harry who respond to an invasion of dragons by attempting to waken England's ancient hero St. George the Dragonslayer.
In "The Ice Dragon" George and his younger sister Jane go out in their backyard one cold wintery night to see the fireworks. In the northern sky they see something much more amazing, the Aurora Borealis, and decide to go get a closer look by going to the North Pole.
A mean-hearted king imprisons his daughter in the Lone Tower on "The Island of the Nine Whirlpools" which is guarded by a dragon, a griffin and dangerous whirlpools. Can she be saved by an observant young man with a talent for maths?
In "The Dragon Tamers" John the blacksmith is so poor that he lives with his family in the ruins of an old castle. One day he awakens the dragon that lives in the dungeon beneath the ruins.
When her parents die a young princess is imprisoned by her evil cousin so he can rule the land. Then "The Fiery Dragon" attacks the kingdom, and the princess with the help of a pig herder outsmart both the prince and the dragon to set things right.
"Kind Little Edmund" is a boy with an inquiring mind who wants to learn things no one else knows. His quest leads him deep into a dragon's lair where he must figure out how to trick the dragon to save his village.

Helen and Desire

Helen and Desire by Alexander Trocchi

While living in Paris in the 1950s Alexander Trocchi was commissioned by Maurice Girodias, publisher of Olympia Press, to write "dirty books." Trocchi wrote Helen and Desire in one week in December 1953 and it was published under the pen name Frances Lengel. The book is the diary of Helen, daughter of a fishing boat captain in a rural village in Northwest Australia, who plans to use her natural enjoyment of sex to have adventures and travel the world. Determined to flout convention and chronicle her life, Helen writes of her loss of innocence on the eve of her 18th birthday, her use of men and their use of her, and her travels to Sydney, Singapore, India, France, and finally the deserts of North Africa. It is here that two officers of the French Foreign Legion who find Helen's journal make it public.

Fairy Tale

Fairy Tale by Erich Segal

This is a modern fairy tale about the Kertuffel family of moonshiners who live on Poop's Peak in the Ozarks. Told by Erich Segal of Love Story fame and illustrated by Dino Kotopoulis, this is a playful look at the stereotype of simple mountain people who live off the grid and outside the system. They are so far from the normal cares of modern life that something magic might happen to them without their batting an eye. And so it does when Jake Kertuffle goes down the mountain to The Big City to buy a new car. Segal obviously enjoyed the alliteration, puns, and rhymes that fill the text and make reading this short tale a joy. This book cries out to be read aloud.

Valley of the Dolls

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

Jaqueline Susann tells the story of three women in the entertainment industry in the 20 years following World War II. Each struggles in her own way with the demands of working in a field where beauty and talent are the keys to admission, but where cut-throat competition and ruthless self-promotion are the path to success. The "Dolls" of the title is a term Susann coined for the pills like Seconal and Benzedrine that are used, and then abused, to deal with the pressures of objectification in the industry and deteriorating personal relationships. While the book was shocking when first published, the sex is tame by modern standards. Yet the story has aged well and is still a fast-paced and enjoyable read today.

Tobacco Road

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

Tobacco Road is Erskine Caldwell's classic about the poverty of farmers in the American Southeast during the Depression. Jeeter Lester is a typical Georgia farmer: his grandfather owned a plantation, and his father was a sharecropper. He just wants to plant cotton as the spring is coming on, but he has no education, no food, no land, no credit, and no hope. All he has left is faith in God and an instinctual desire to farm the land as he lives for free in an abandoned shack on a deserted farm.

While Jeeter blames God, Caldwell blames Jeeter's problems on rich people who have withdrawn their financial support of the rural farmers, leaving them poor, hungry and illiterate. At the end of the book Lov says "It looks like the Lord don't care about crops being raised no more like He used to, or He would be more helpful to the poor. He could make the rich people lend out their money, and stop holding it up. I can't figure how they got hold of all the money in the country, anyhow. Looks like it ought to be spread out among everybody."

It is this callous indifference of the Southern rich to the poor people of their states that makes this book seem relevant in my mind to modern readers. Once again today we have rich people in power gutting the enlightened policies that helped raise the Depression era poor out of their squalid conditions. Will today's politicians create the conditions for a new generation of Jeeter Lesters to suffer in poverty and neglect?

Drawings from the Gulag

Drawings from the Gulag by Danzig Baldaev

Disturbing series of drawings depicting cruelty inside the gulags of Soviet Russia drawn by a prison guard. The original Russian text is translated, and notes are added to explain or verify incidents depicted. Not for the squeamish.

The Iron Pincers: Or, Mylio and Karvel, a Tale of the Albigensian Crusades

The Iron Pincers: Or, Mylio and Karvel, a Tale of the Albigensian Crusades by Eugene Sue

The Iron Pincers is the thirteenth volume of a nineteen volume series that Eugene Sue called The Mysteries of the People, or, History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages. Each volume is written as if by a member of the family set down the events of their life. This volume is set in the beginning of the 13th century where Mylio is a troubadour who sings love songs to the ladies of the town while their husbands are away at the last Crusade.
In the opening scenes, Mylio is successful at both singing and wooing the ladies of the town, but when their husbands return from the Crusades they have a new mission from the priests. They are being told to take their armies south to slaughter the Albigensian non-Catholics, plunder their riches, and take their lands. When Mylio hears this he rushes south to warn his brother Karvel of the impending invasion. While they put up a good resistance, they are greatly outnumbered as city after city falls before the Catholic army.
This was one of the most difficult of the books in this series to read. The author has always depicted the invading ruling class as greedy, cruel and amoral, but this slaughter is one of the worst in French history and he doesn't spare the details to protect the readers.

A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby el Mezrab

A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby el Mezrab by Mary S. Lovell

Mary Lovell presents the scandalous life of Jane Digby in a detailed yet respectful way. She had access to family papers, so we get the inside personal view that her letters and journals provide, not the scandals and gossip of the press. It is a fascinating life for a 19th century British woman. At 17 she marries a wealthy but unloving husband, only to leave him when she falls in love with another man. After a divorce she is abandoned by her lover who cannot marry a divorced woman. She proceeds through continental Europe making a few more attempts at finding a place to call home. Always her famous beauty and outstanding personality wins her the devotion of men she doesn't love while the men she loves cannot provide her the legitimacy of marriage. Jane finally goes to Syria and marries a desert nomad half her age, living a strange double life as a muslim wife and an English lady expat spending months at a time in desert tents, but having houses in Damascus and Homs, places known to us today from news reports of the violent civil war.

Woman at Point Zero

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi

Written in 1975 by an Egyptian doctor who was once the Minister of Health, but who lost her job and spent time in jail once she started fighting for women's rights, Woman at Point Zero is a powerful tale of the oppression of women by men and society. According to the Preface El Saadawi had lost her job in the Egyptian government and as a journal editor because of her feminist novels and was researching women in prison as a faculty member of Ain Shams University when she met Firdaus, a female prisoner convicted of murder at Qanatir Prison. Her interviews of Firdaus eventually became the source material for the novel Woman at Point Zero.

The novel begins with a short introductory chapter told in the voice of a woman psychiatrist studying female criminals at a prison. She is told of one extraordinary woman who is to be executed for committing murder but who will not see anyone. After many attempts to see her, Firdaus finally sends for her the day before her execution.

The main body of the book is Firdaus telling the story of her life to the psychiatrist. As she tells of the many ways she has been oppressed my men and society, her voice is sparse and coldly logical . She tells of a loveless life ruled by men. All of her attempts to take control of her situation are thwarted by men and societal norms. As a last resort she kills rather than submit any longer and, for this, society will execute her.

In the final two page chapter of the book the doctor realizes that Firdaus has more courage than she will ever have.

Canone Inverso

Canone Inverso by Paolo Maurensig

A man buys a unique violin "with a tiny anthropomorphic head carved into the top of the pegboard" at an auction in London. Soon after the instrument arrives at his hotel room, another man comes to his hotel offering to pay him twice or three times the price for it. He claims to know its terrible story, and the violin's new owner asks him to tell his tale. He says he is a writer and tells of meeting Jenő Varga as a street musician in Vienna playing for tips in a tavern. After befriending the strange musician, Jenő tells him the story of two young Central European violinists of extremely different circumstance who meet and establish a special bond at a Kafkaesque music academy in the years prior to World War II. Kuno Blau is from a aristocratic Austrian family, and Jenő is a bastard son of unknown paternity raised by a sausage-maker step-father. The one thing that holds a clue to their relationship is the unique violin that has a special meaning to each of them.

Just before their final year at the academy, Jenő falls hopelessly in love with the famous violinist Sophie Hirschbaum, and then accepts Kuno's offer to spend the summer with his family in Innsbruck. The twisted lives of Kuno's family, and a deteriorating friendship between the two boys transforms their lives and their music forever.

It is Jenő's tale that has driven this man to seek the violin, hoping to confirm some part of the fabulous story he has heard. How can the new owner of the instrument make sense of all of this, and what can he contribute to its meaning?

In addition to telling the story of a talented musician and his instrument, this book addresses the following questions. Where does the exceptional talent come from that makes a great musician? What is the relationship between musicians and the music they create. Is there a bit of madness necessary to bring music to life? At what point does there cease to be a division between the music and the musician?

Fractured Fairy Tales

Fractured Fairy Tales by A. J. Jacobs

As part of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, Jay Ward produced 91 cartoons between 1953 and 1964 in a series called "Fractured Fairy Tales," humorous retellings of classic fairy tales narrated by Edward Everett Horton and written by the staff writers for the show. This book, written by A. J. Jacobs in 1997, takes 25 of those cartoons and adapts them as short fairy tales. Some references are updated for a new audience but he is fairly faithful to the scripts and does well at turning them into stories. While Jacobs' retellings are funny and faithful to the originals, they have a limited appeal now that all of the original cartoons are available on DVD or YouTube.

The Witch of Cologne

The Witch of Cologne by Tobsha Learner

Set in the second half of the 17th Century in the city of Cologne Germany, this book tells the story of two people seeking rational truth in an age of religious superstition, political turmoil, and economic change. Ruth, the only child and daughter of the local rabbi, is a midwife trying to perfect her craft through scientific observation. She has returned from Amsterdam, the center of modern thinking, where, disguised as a young man, she studied under the great philosopher Benedict Spinoza. Detlef von Tennen, the younger brother of a local count, is the canon of the cathedral of Cologne. He has wealth, beauty and privilege, but he seeks truth and longs to study the forbidden books of the modern philosophers of Amsterdam. They are brought together when Ruth is accused of witchcraft by a sadistic monk of the Inquisition. While the monk sees black magic in her birthing skills, Detlef understands that her skill comes from the scientific method rather than a deal with the devil.
Although the book is about an impossible love between two people, it is more a historic thriller than a romance, Tobsha Learner has named the chapters after the ten Sefiroth of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. She includes a Historic Backdrop, Glossary, List of Characters, and Bibliography of reference books used in her research to help readers not up to date on German history. Weaving together the rich cultural, philosophic and religious differences of the times into an exciting adventure that keeps the plot changes coming, I found this an adventure and a romance that touched me deeply. Yet it provided a wealth of historic detail that satisfied my desire for historical accuracy and depth.

The Pilgrim's Shell by Eugène Sue

The Pilgrim's Shell; Or, Fergan The Quarryman, A Tale From The Feudal Times; by Eugène Sue & translated by Daniel De Leon. New York Labor News Company, 1904.

The Pilgrim's Shell is the 12th volume in a series called The Mysteries of the People; or History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages that was written between 1849-1857. Eugène Sue created this series to be a European history that depicted the struggle between the ruling and the ruled classes. One family, the descendants of a Gallic chief named Joel, represent the oppressed and the descendants of a Frankish chief Neroweg, typify the oppressors. Down through the ages the successive struggles between oppressors and oppressed are depicted in a series of stories that culminate in the European Revolutions of 1848.

Considered 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 recently become available 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, writes a Preface to each volume as an introduction.

The story of this volume is told in three parts. Part I, "The Feudal Castle" is set in the year 1094 when the Gallic descendent of Joel, Fergan the Quarryman, is a serf of the Manor of Plouernel, ruled by Neroweg VI. Serfs had no rights and were property to be disposed at the will of the lord of the manor. Most of the people of Gaul have become submissive to their ststus, but Fergan still carries the ancient fire of independence in his heart. When he learns that Neroweg has kidnapped his son, Fergan seeks to free the child by entering the castle through a secret tunnel his father built for Neroweg's father.

Part II, "The Crusade" is set in the year 1099 during the first of the European Crusades to the Middle East. Fergan and his family escape Neroweg's vengeance by leaving with the Crusade's peasant army. This section is an account of the hardships and atrocities of the Crusade as seen through Fergan's eyes, the eyes of a common working man.

In "The Commune of Laon" Part III, set in the year 1112, the disruption of war has left the Bourgeois middle class with the power to negotiate from strength with the lords and bishops. City communes have begun to replace the feudal system, at least in the cities. Fergan's son now runs a tannery, and a union of the businessmen and workers are struggling to maintain control of their newly-won independence against the attempts of the bishops and lords to destroy the Commune.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
In my introduction to "The Silver Cross; or, The Carpenter of Nazareth," I said: "Eugene Sue wrote in French a monumental work--the Mysteries of the People; or, History of a Proletarian Family. It is a 'work of fiction'; yet it is the best universal history extant. Better than any work, avowedly on history, it graphically traces the special features of the several systems of class-rule as they succeeded each other from epoch to epoch, together with the nature of the struggle between the contending classes. The 'Law,' 'Order,' 'Patriotism,' 'Religion,' etc., etc., that each successive tyrant class, despite its change of form, hysterically has sought refuge in in order to justify its criminal existence whenever threatened; the varying economic causes of the oppression of the toilers; the mistakes incurred by these in their struggles for redress; the varying fortunes of the conflict;--all these social dramas are therein reproduced in a majestic series of 'historic novels,' that cover leading and successive episodes in the history of the race."
The present story--The Pilgrim's Shell; or, Fergan the Quarryman--is one of that majestic series, among the most majestic of the set, and, with regard to the social period that it describes--its institutions, its classes, its manners, its virtues and its crimes, and the characters that it builds--the most instructive treatise on feudalism, at the very time when the bourgeois or capitalist class was struggling for a foot-hold, and beginning to break through the thick feudal incrustation above. More fully than Molière's plays, and strangely supplemental of the best passages on the subject in the novels of George Eliot, The Pilgrim's Shell; or, Fergan the Quarryman chisels the struggling bourgeois on the feudal groundwork and background, in lines so sharp and true that both the present fully developed and ruling capitalist, inheritor of the feudal attribute of plundering, is seen in the historic ancestor of his class, and his class' refuse, the modern middle class man, is foreshadowed, now also struggling like his prototype of feudal days, to keep his head above water, but, differently from his prototype, who had his future before him, now with his future behind. This double development, inestimable in the comprehension of the tactical laws that the Labor or Socialist Movement demands, stands out clear with the aid of this work.
Eugene Sue has been termed a colorist, the Titian of French literature. It does not detract from his merits, it rather adds thereto, that his brush was also photographic. The leading characters in the story--Fergan, the type of the physically and mentally clean workingman; Bezenecq the Rich, the type of the embryonic bourgeois, visionary, craven and grasping; Martin the Prudent, the type of the "conservative workingman"; the Bishop of Laon, the type of usurping power in the mantle of religion; the seigneur of Plouernel, the type of the ingrain stupidity and prejudices that characterize the class grounded on might; a dazzling procession of women--Joan the Hunchback and Azenor the Pale, Perrette the Ribald and the dame of Haut-Pourcin, Yolande and Simonne, etc.--types of the variations in the form of woman's crucifixion under social systems grounded on class rule; Walter the Pennyless, the type of dispositions too indolent to oppose the wrongs they perceive, and crafty enough to dupe both dupers and duped; Garin, the type of the master's human sleuth--are figures, clad in historic garb, that either hurry or stalk imposingly over the boards, followed by mobs of their respective classes, and presenting a picture that thrills the heart from stage to stage, and leaves upon the mind rich deposits of solid information and crystalline thought. As a novel, The Pilgrim's Shell; or, Fergan the Quarryman pleases, entertains and elevates; as an imparter of historic information and knowledge, it incites to thought and intelligent action. Whether as literature of pleasure or of study, the work deserves the broader field of the Socialist or Labor Movements of the English-speaking world, hereby afforded to it; and inversely, the Socialist or Labor Movements of the English-speaking world, entitled to the best, and none too good, that the Movements in other languages produce, can not but profit by the work, hereby rendered accessible to them.
DANIEL DE LEON.
New York, January 1, 1904.