NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Christy O’Callaghan

My happy place in life is also my happy place in words—with nature. The book could be the history of a plant or tree or the natural world herself playing a character. That old conflict of man vs. nature is such a large part of our world, even when we’re under stay at home orders during a pandemic. I have a hardy appreciation for those who approach this subject well.  Anthony Doerr is one of them.

If I admire an author, I’ll read all their works. All the Light We Cannot See was terrific and deserves the praise it receives. Last summer, someone recommended The Shell Collector, and that was what hooked me to Doerr’s work. Most recently, I have been escaping into the frozen winters of Alaska and the tropical island days of the Caribbean in About Grace. In each location of the book, nature is not only an element setting a mood outside of the window. She’s a mighty character.

We follow David Winkler, who studies water, especially snow, and the younger Naaliyah, who studies insects and crustaceans. Our third main character has her own agenda. “The wind assumed its voice: moaning against the window, humming around the roof corners; hissing through drafts. It whispered about darkness, about the coming shadows. Let go, it said, let go.”

Doerr evokes the power and cyclical rhythm of nature, seasons, and time. Even with characters who live in reverence of the natural world, they can’t compare with her. She exists not in the service of people but has her own story to tell.

About Grace by Anthony Doerr. Simon & Schuster, October 2015

Reviewer bio: Christy O’Callaghan lives in Upstate, New York.  Her favorite pastimes include anything in the fresh air.  For her blog and writing, go to christyflutterby.com.

Guest Post by Liz Bertsch

My pleasure reading is typically done at night, in bed with my Kindle. Mid-pandemic, however, reading has become less a pleasure and more an exercise in mindfulness as my mind drifts towards panic about my family, the world, and my zany and delightful middle-school students. I begin and then abandon many a book, just like my students, because who has time to waste on a book that doesn’t hold you?  And then James McBride’s Deacon King Kong stumbles into view, and any book bold enough for that title is something I’ll consider.

McBride’s novel centers on a crime that takes place in and around a Brooklyn housing project in 1969 when a drunken and elderly character named Sportcoat pulls out a gun and shoots a 19-year-old drug dealer.  The crime occurs early afternoon, and although the audience for the shooting in the housing project is young drug dealers, older churchgoers, janitors, and undercover police, the crime reverberates in the surrounding quiet Brooklyn neighborhood of mob bosses and organized criminals. McBride’s novel is part Greek tragedy, police procedural, crime thriller, and there is a bit of ghosty stuff thrown in for good luck.

The nicknames of McBride’s characters are hilarious, and while reading, I think of my students who would delight in encountering the character of Sister T.J. Billings affectionally known as Bum Bum, and Hot Sausage, a friend of Sportcoats.  And in a vignette when church folk tell stories of Sportcoat’s many near-death experiences, and describe the time, “He went “fatty boom bang!” I laugh and keep on reading because I care about Sportcoat, and I’m happy.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride. Penguin Random House, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Liz Bertsch teaches in an independent school on the East End of Long Island.  Her essays have appeared in a variety of arts and literary journals.

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Bill Cushing

Although best known for his Dune series, Frank Herbert’s 1982 book The White Plague may be just what the doctor ordered these days.

In a nutshell, Dr. John Roe O’Neill, an American biophysicist visiting Ireland on a research grant, witnesses his wife and twin sons killed from an IRA bombing. To say he “loses it” would be a serious understatement. The first chapter opens with an ancient Irish curse—“May the hearthstone of hell be his bed rest forever”—and Herbert delivers fully on this hex from there.

O’Neill returns to the states, isolated and vengeful, and decides that since a political cause took his wife and children from him, he would reciprocate. Designing a genetic virus that does not affect men but kills females, he adopts the name “The Madman,” releasing his biological scourge on the world by infecting low denomination bills.

Once released, the plague destroys the world in short order, causing whole nations to collapse, even forcing the Vatican to relocate to Philadelphia. As the world descends further into self-isolated tribes killing anyone approaching, Scotland Yard conducts its hunt for “The Madman.”

However, this is not simply the story of investigators trying to locate and capture The Madman. That is there, of course, but there is much more.

Like Thomas Mann’s allegorical Magic Mountain—where he uses a tuberculosis sanitarium as a vehicle for examining European nations on the edge of World War I, Herbert uses this book as a means to study nations and their peculiarities. It also offers the author an opportunity to study people’s reactions to the direst of situations as well as their use and pursuit of power.

At fewer than 500 pages, The White Plague offers a much more restrained analysis of such behavior as is seen in the massive Dune series.

The White Plague by Frank Herbert. 1982.

Reviewer bio: Bill Cushing writes and facilitates a writing group for 9 Bridges. His poetry collection, A Former Life, was released last year by Finishing Line Press.