The anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” This is an idea that finally solidified in my mind while enjoying Captain Paul K. Chappell’s succinct and very important book WILL WAR EVER END? A Soldier’s Vision of Peace For The 21st Century. The author gracefully argues that it’s up to us to create a path to peace with our actions and our peaceful vision, and that peace is not only a destination, it’s a journey. He swiftly makes the case that ending war is possible (we’ve made changes this big before) and it is crucial to our survival that we end it. Our modern weapons are so powerful that war equals total destruction. Contrary to popular myth, violence is not an innate human value. War is so counterintuitive for us that it drives us mad.

This book is only 84 pages, but it’s the biggest book I’ve read in years. It is the very rare kind of book that surprises and transforms, and leads us gently but completely to a revolution in thinking. It could very likely become required reading.

Reviewed by Emily Kischell

Published by Rvive Books - Hardcover - 84 pages - $14.95

The five stories of “Music and Nightfall” contained in Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro display Ishiguro’s virtuosity in creating fiction that is both illuminating and pleasurable. Reading his works is always an experience of multiple satisfactions — characters, landscape, plot — and the themes he explores are consistently brought to a new place of examination and understanding.  My favorite story in the collection was “Crooner”, with its narrator both innocent and wise, its underlying themes of regret and passage, and its conclusion that music (and the comfort that it gives, no matter what its motivation or how unintentionally given) is on the highest plane of human endeavor.  Writing — when it is as good as these stories are — is also on that plane, and Ishiguro gives great comfort, pleasure, and insight with these stories.

Ishiguro never takes the easy way out in his fiction; he doesn’t write stories with a  clear demarcation of right and wrong, light and dark, and yet he does insist on a  line of human decency.  His characters yearn for what is best not only for themselves but also as a reaching outward for someone or something else. Even when they fail, miserably or, as demonstrated to great affect in two of the stories, humorously, they are trying to do the right thing; Ishiguro’s characters want to be the right person for the job, to answer the needs of the people (acquaintances, wives, agents, friends, memory of a mother) making demands all around them, and to bring some gratification, some pleasure, somewhere.  Rarely do they please themselves, but that is life, both in Ishiguro’s stories and in the real world. Learning to live with dreams that have not quite come true, with loves that do not answer all needs, with the injustice of how life’s rewards and punishments are meted out, is learning to live, period. And in Ishiguro’s stories, the lesson is learned through moments of pain, of grace, and of laugh-out-loud chaos.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch at www.readallday.org

Published by Knopf - Hardcover - 240 pages - $16.50

The Child In Time might just be Ian McEwan’s least-read, but perhaps best novel.  In it, children’s book author Stephen must come to terms with his three-year old daughter’s abduction and, presumably, her death while ironically being assigned to serve on a Parliamentary commission on child care.  Complicating this heart-breaking situation is Stephen’s wife, a classical musician named Julie, who has hermited herself away in the countryside.  In addition is the fascinating and surreal parallel stories of Stephen’s own childhood, and that of his best friends—his publisher Charles and his wife Thelma.

Though the subject matter might seem obviously grim, McEwan handles it with a forthright and reflective approach, allowing the reader to explore and analyze, rather than wallow in, the disaster’s effects on Stephen and Julie.  That is not to say that the book reads cold or unemotional which, owing to McEwan’s careful craft, it does not.

Cleverly, Stephen’s publisher Charles is married to a practical but nurturing physicist who is exploring the notion of time, and it is Thelma who seems to stabilize Stephen’s life as he moves through the world in a kind of hazy but detached mourning.  The twist in the book comes not with the obvious mystery of the disappearance of Stephen’s child but instead within the subplot of Charles and Thelma.  Subsequently, what at first seems a somewhat dry recounting of Stephen’s stagnant existence turns dramatically and fascinatingly on end, altering the reader’s perspective of all events and personalities in the book.

“The child in time” is not merely a title or a play-on-words, but also describes the seemingly shifting forces of time and experience itself, while illustrating how one child lost in time might shift the timeframe of the lives of others.  Says Charles, “Stephen, talk to a ten-year old in midsummer about Christmas… For children, childhood is timeless.  It’s always in the present… Of course time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end.  But they don’t feel it.  Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up…’ there’s always an edge of disbelief.”

Beautifully concise, perfectly worded, heart-wrenching, subtle, avalanching and, at last, imbued with hope, The Child in Time is perhaps the work that first marks McEwan’s celebrated later novelistic style of Atonement and Saturday.

Reviewed by Erica-Lynn Huberty, www.ericalynnhuberty.com

Published by Anchor – Paperback – 272 Pages - $10.00

If Henry James and Margaret Attwood could have a literary child, it might be Hilary Thayer Hamann.  Evoking James’ Portrait of a Lady or Daisy Miller, and Atwood’s Surfacing, Hamann’s debut novel Anthropology of an American Girl poetically, and brutally, follows the seemingly ordinary but at once riveting life of narrator and protagonist Evaline with obsessive detail and powerful insight.  It is a modern coming-of-age epic which brings to light this complex and artistic young woman, and it is very much (as the promotion for the book reads) “not for girls.”

The book begins with Eveline’s high school days in East Hampton, Long Island.  Not the “Hamptons” of current gossip columns and Hollywood films, this is remote, Eastern Long Island in the 1970s:  the population a mix of working-class locals, rich weekenders, pot-smoking children of hippies, and oddball bohemians.  What Rick Moody described of suburban Connecticut in the ‘70s in The Ice Storm, Hamann expands on and makes her own.

Through descriptive vignettes that shift, non-linear, between Eveline’s last two years of high school, we learn of her powerful connection to her best friend’s mother, a French woman whom Eveline calls Maman, who dies of cancer (“Though my mother had hoped to soothe me, her voice did not soothe me.  Maman’s voice rolled like currents beneath the sea.  You were diving, you were rising.”).  Also brought to light is Eveline’s humiliating rape by a group of male friends from high school.

There are several men who enter into Eveline’s life: as lovers, as reflectors, as shoulders to lean on.  Yet even they, and the obvious importance of them to her, do not overpower her strong and centered voice, her unique view of the world.  In another author’s hands Anthropology of an American Girl could have been another chick-lit forum for wise-cracking or weary, post-feminist musing.  In the hands of Hamann it is a mesmeric and intelligent work of literature.

Hamman’s examination of moral character, and the intimate relationships through which power is exercised well or badly, is the centerpiece around which the convincing, though at times terrifyingly commonplace, plot revolves.  Eveline’s voice is almost impossibly and authentically observant, resonant and driven; her nuanced phrasing and painstaking scrutiny propelling the reader through thickly-woven segments of memory and experience, consciousness and perception; through the loss of love, the degradation of violence, and, in the end, the essence of hope through the human universal need for connection.

Reviewed by Erica-Lynn Huberty, www.ericalynnhuberty.com

Published by Spiegel & Grau – Hardcover – 624 pages - $25.00

Three Days Before the Shooting, The Unfinished Second Novel by Ralph Ellison is magnificent. It is magnificent for its plot and characters, for its words, and for Ellison’s fearless grappling with themes of race, identity, fate, responsibility, and the promise of the American dream. This edition put out by Random House and edited by John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley encompasses forty years of Ellison’s working on and reworking of the novel and includes Ellison’s multiple variations of chapters and the notes he made to himself while writing (which are simply captivating: “Nota bene: Remember the sound of your machine, typewriter or computer, helps you work! Start it going, even if at random!”) The editorial comments offered by Callahan and Bradley help enormously in understanding the layers of narrative and meanings that Ellison balanced along a continuum of action, reaction, and observation.

Three Days Before the Shooting is the story of Hickman, bluesman, preacher, and foster father; Bliss, an abandoned child who grows up to become Sunraider, racist senator; and Severen, another abandoned child who grows up to become an assassin. A white child is given to a black man amidst a cacophony of lynching and birthing; the child is his to raise, a gift in exchange for lives lost. The child is raised with all the hope of the black community behind him and a belief that racial identification can be transcended. But the child grows up and leaves his people, betrays those who have cared for him, and tries to publicly flog them for their race, their status, and their dreams. Sunraider’s rejection of his upbringing will wreak its own judgment hard upon his head: another white child will long for the blackness denied him, and render judgment from on high.

The multitude of characters in Three Days Before the Shooting, Hickman, Bliss/Sunraider, Severen, Janey, Lee Willie Minifees, Jessie Rockmore, Lavatrice, McIntyre, the cross-eyed woman, and the rest, have such blood and bone truth in their presentations that the book could be a documentary about life in 1950s. Much as the blues music of the 1950s reflected life of the Black populations, the characters in this novel reflect both the segregated and integrated realities of 1950s America.

What is most magnificent about Three Days Before the Shooting is Ellison’s command and use of words. This novel is rich and deep and thick with words. Open the book to any page and you will become immersed in the movement and play of monologues, observations, recollections, letters, speeches, and sermons. The novel reads like music, a baroque rendition of the blues with layers of sounds, rhythms, and meaning communicating hopes and heartbreak, the painful smack of reality and the endurance of just getting on with it all. People talk “white” or talk “black”, and tell the truth of what they’ve seen as they see the truth to be. These variations together build the story of Hickman, Bliss, and Severen, but most importantly, the words build towards a crescendo of truth about race and identity in America.

The way in which Ellison constructed his novel — how he uses words to both illuminate and obfuscate the truth behind his story of a white child raised by a black man — is a deliberate deployment of what Ellison sees as a legacy of slavery: “the way we talk… you know that our people like to talk around a subject even when there’s no danger. They enjoy it, and if they know you well enough they’re apt to leave their true subject unstated so you’ll have to supply the missing meaning.” Ellison uses the linking narratives of his many characters to circle around and around the novel’s underlying truth. At times the different layers are dizzying. The novel becomes a maze of differing points of view and of tangents gone off on and then returned from; we are returned back to the main story but from a different angle, and we see everything in a new way.

Hickman warns Bliss of the power of words: “Words are everything and don’t you forget it, ever.” Bliss takes the advice but he abandons the positive and life-affirming use of words that Hickman has tried to instill and instead resorts to life-negating rhetoric of hate and prejudice. A son rejects his father with words but the greater rejection is the wordless abandonment of a son by his true father. Ellison uses the words of one of the most powerful phrases, “Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” to represent both the disbelief and the despair caused by such abandonment. Sunraider calls those words out when the assassin’s bullets strike; Hickman instructs Bliss as a child to recite those words during a dramatization of rebirth through Christ; and Ellison returns us again and again to the lamentation. It is not only the cry of Bliss and of Severen, neither to ever know their fathers. But more, much more, it is the plea of an entire population. The words evoke the abandonment of the Black slaves, set free by Lincoln but then left uncared for and undone. There is a marvelous scene of Black pilgrims visiting the Lincoln Memorial and reflecting on the promise of the man and the failure of a nation.

The breadth and bravery of Ellison’s writing is demonstrated by how he tackles his themes of what it means to be black in America, what it means to be white, and the promise and failure of the American Dream. It is a great pity that Ellison never finished this magnificent novel. Perhaps the novel could not be finished because Three Days Before the Shooting raises the issue of what race has to do with our identity as Americans and resolution of that question — who are we? — is far from being realized. We are still a nation divided by racial identity, more than forty years after Ellison began his novel. One hundred and forty years after the Juneteenth declaration that all Americans, black and white, are equal in the pursuit of and entitlement to happiness, liberty, and respect, we are still struggling with what these words - Black, White, American — mean. Ralph Ellison in Three Days Before the Shooting offers a vision that transcends race, recording both the common ground and the individual experiences that define who we are: Americans.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch at www.readallday.org

Published by Modern Library (Random House) - Hardcover - 1136 pages - $50.00

I’m a little afraid of short stories. What I crave most in fiction is depth, characterization, richly drawn and fully fleshed-out people and places — not halved and truncated stories of people about whom I will ultimately feel nothing, if only because I never really got a chance to know them.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s stunning Interpreter of Maladies is seriously working to change my opinion.

I don’t know what took me so long to pick up this book, exactly; Lahiri’s novel The Namesake is probably my favorite book of all time. Seriously. It was the first book I set down after reading and thought, “If I’m going to be a writer, this is what I have to be. How can I be this?” And not to put a damper on my dreams, but I don’t think anyone could write like Lahiri — simultaneously combining themes of love, family, respect, devotion, rebellion, fear, desperation, loneliness and hope in, oh, twenty pages or so.

I won’t wax poetic for the entire review, I promise. The basics? Interpreter of Maladies is comprised of nine individual short stories, all dealing with similar themes (mentioned above) and centering around the quest for love, acceptance and family. All of the characters center around themes of immigration; what it means to be “Indian” (as opposed to Bengali, American, etc.); ideas of leaving behind the past in order to form a new identity in the present; how it is that we love and lose each other. And so forth. We are greeted by a variety of narrators — some telling the story themselves, some with omniscient narrators weaving the tale apart from the crowd.

Each story bears the commonality of the experience, to me, of loving someone from afar: whether because you are from different countries and cultures, speak different languages, are of a different faith, have different values or are just . . . entirely different people. Of all the stories, I found “Sexy” and “When Mr. Pirzada Came To Dine” to be the most moving. But that’s like choosing a favorite child — each story is special, unique and complex in its own way. It’s impossible to just pick one.

And from the first few sentences of each narrative, we’re introduced to people who seem just as tangible as if they were standing in front of me by a taxi or in a living room or across a restaurant. I eagerly flipped through the pages, wondering who I would meet next. Each tale was an adventure. Would we be in New England, New York City, India — in a taxi, at a monument, in a living room, raking leaves in the yard? I felt an immediate connection with each of the story’s characters, and felt sad and nostalgic by the time I reached the final page of “The Third and Final Continent.” It made me want to read The Namesake all over again. And perhaps I will.

Pick up this book. I’m pretty sure this is why I read literature.

5 out of 5!

Reviewed by Megan, a writer whose very fine book related blog is Write Meg! Another take on reading, writing, loving and eating.

Mariner Books - paperback - 978-0395927205 - $14.95

Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or find a local bookstore at Indie Bound.