Latest Posts

Reimagining perspective and agency

Published by

The narrator’s point of view is critical in any novel. We see the story unfold through their eyes. What we are learning may be the truth, if only a slice of it. In the case of the unreliable narrator the reader is being pulled along by lies and misdirection. What we often miss in most novels is the point of view of those who appear to have little agency in the story and in this world. Those who are poor, trapped, or at the mercy of others. Narrators—and the author—generally are content to tell us what those with less agency are thinking.

Sometimes a book comes along that reimagines something we thought we knew, however, and suddenly the world opens up to the reader in a completely new way.

James: A Novel (2024) by Percival Everett is a brilliant reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved sidekick Jim. The first part of the book follows Twain’s general outline, but when Huck and Jim are separated Everett takes James down different paths. A masterful writer, Everett works through tales and scenes that move between gripping terror and laugh-out-loud humor, all while putting forth observations from his protagonist that cut to the bone. James is depicted with intelligence, compassion, and agency in a way seldom seen in American literature about slavery.

Early in the book we learn that James—the name he chooses although his enslavers and Huck call him Jim—has taught himself to read and write during afternoons in Judge Thatcher’s library while the judge was out at work or hunting ducks. He has also taught other slaves to read, and they all speak “normal English” as their enslavers would call it when they are not in the company of those who expect them to be ignorant and lazy. James has imagined conversations with Voltaire, Rousseau, and John Locke about the nature of freedom and equality. And he wonders.

“I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?”

Runaway (Credit: Wisconsin Historical Society)

James is married and he and his wife have a daughter. It is when James learns that he is to be sold down river without his family that he decides to run. At the same time Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. They meet up on an island and begin the well-known journey on the Mississippi River “toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.”

The broad outlines of Twain’s book are used, although the time frame is shifted forward a couple of decades to the early 1860s and some scenes are left out while others are added. The reader slowly discovers that the bonds between Huck and James are much deeper than friendship.

One way that Everett demonstrates the intelligence and agency of the enslaved protagonist is by having James run every public utterance through what he calls his “slave filter,” to make himself sound “ridiculous and gullible, to pacify the truculent white people around him.” This comes to a head near the book’s end, when James has captured Judge Thatcher in order to find out where his wife and daughter have been sold. Their conversation is confusing to the Judge, but not because he has a pistol pointed at his head.

“Where are my wife and daughter? I know you handled the sale of them. I need to know where they’ve been taken.”

“Why are you talking like that?”

“Confusing, isn’t it?” I said.

“Slaves get sold. It happens,” he said.

“Who bought them? I cocked my head. I pointed the pistol at him again. “Have a seat.” I nodded to the chair in front of the desk.

He sat. “Why are you talking like that?”

“I’m pointing a pistol at you and asking about the where-abouts of my family and you’re concerned with my speech? What is wrong with you?”

And then, to have a little fun when the Judge asks if he plans to kill him:

“The thought crossed my mind. I haven’t decided. Oh, sorry, let me translate that for you. I ain’t ‘cided, Massa.”

By novel’s end, James will have killed men, freed fellow slaves, and set fire to a breeding plantation for slaves. He is a legend.

This book is also something of a legend. James was just awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In an interview, Everett notes, “I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written. I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain.”

Among the many excellent reviews of Everett’s work is one by Dwight Garner in the New York Times that ends with these paragraphs:

“James is the rarest of exceptions [to wet-brained ‘reimaginings’ of famous novels]. It should come bundled with Twain’s novel. It is a tangled and subversive homage, a labor of rough love. ‘His humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer,’ Everett writes of Twain in his acknowledgments. ‘Heaven for the climate; hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain.’

Everett does not reprint the famous warning that greets the reader at the start of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.’ Motives, morals and plot are here in abundance, of course. And Everett shoots what is certain to be this book’s legion of readers straight through the heart.”

Do yourself a favor. Read this book.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of Mississippi River by rjdoc from Pixabay

Bringing our unique strengths to the task

Published by

A recent conversation began with a discussion around the Oscar-winning movie I’m Still Here. Nominated for Best Picture and the winner of Best International Feature Film in 2025, it follows a true story that is eerily prescient for our times.

When her husband disappears at the hands of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1971, Eunice Paiva protects her close-knit family with courage and dignity. In a review for NPR, John Powers notes that “It’s one measure of Latin America’s arduous history that it has spawned so many books and movies about dictatorship.” What they all share, Powers asserts, “is the awareness that history hurts.”

“Few films have shown this with more delicate intelligence than I’m Still Here, a moving new drama set during Brazil’s military dictatorship that began with an American-backed coup in 1964 and ended in 1985. Based on a memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Walter Salles’ movie is no political tract or manipulative tearjerker (although it may make you cry). Exploring the dictatorship indirectly, I’m Still Here tells the heroic true story of a wife and mother who steers her family through the rapids of tyranny.”

Our discussion of the brilliant Fernanda Torres—whose performance, as Powers writes, “is so subtle, so internal, so quietly shattering that, in a just world, she’d win all this year’s big acting awards”—led us to ask what we are each doing to fight the authoritarian takeover of our government in America today.

We each have special skills which we can use in our own worlds. However, every one of us can speak with friends and contacts to convey the truth as we see it. We can all be a better citizen.

I’ve thought multiple times about that conversation and the unique skills and platforms each brings to this moment. We are in a fraught time in the U.S. because of coordinated attacks on the rule of law, rampant and open corruption, and overt racism. We can all speak out, in whatever ways we have, against these efforts to destroy American democracy.

The strength of musicians

One artist has decided how to use his strength to speak out to millions worldwide. Bruce Springsteen kicked off his latest tour in Manchester, England, and right from the start he let the audience know where he stood about our life in America. Springsteen launched this run of shows with three statements about the situation in the United States, with comments preceding his songs Land of Hope and Dreams, House of a Thousand Guitars and My City of Ruins.

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll, in dangerous times . . . Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”

Here’s a live version of Land of Hope and Dreams from a 2018 concert in New York City.

Musicians have often taken the lead in speaking up against fascism. The fact that today’s performers are attacked on social media by the would-be authoritarians tells us they are effective.

Just speaking up and not letting the truth get buried under lies matters. One way evil affects us is by isolating the mind and killing the heart. “Isolated minds disregard the essential value of others . . . when evil kills the heart it takes away love, compassion, understanding, forgiveness, and gentleness.” To combat that in your own life, remember the wonder amidst the horror. And consider a way of speaking up that works for you.

More to come . . .

DJB

Gaps make life interesting

Published by

I’ve become my father, beginning with the way I repeat many of the same stories. (Did you know that I paid more for my last car than for my first house?) I am a dyed-in-the-wool Southern liberal. At age 70 I still have good-looking legs. Until I had my recent cataract surgery, I couldn’t see worth a damn without my glasses and—if you ask Candice—my hearing still remains suspect. I love to read and tell others about the books I’m reading. 

One of the things I don’t mention, however, is that I also have my father’s teeth.

Chiggers
Chiggers (photo of Tom Brown by Don Williams)

As a child of the Depression Tom Brown had bad dental care and lost a few teeth over the years. Dentures were a part of his oral history.* And for as long as I can remember, Daddy also had a gap between his two front teeth.

The spacing came naturally and was part of the gene pool he passed along to me. He used to say that if a gap-toothed grin was good enough for Ernest Borgnine it was good enough for him. Had he been from my generation Daddy could have referenced David Letterman, Madonna, Willem Dafoe, Michael Strahan, Eddie Murphy, Uzo Aduba, or other famous gap-toothed celebrities.

Ernest Borgnine
David Letterman
Madonna
Michael Strahan
Willem Dafoe
Uzo Aduba

Aduba, the Orange is the Next Black actress, says that “In Nigeria a gap is a sign of beauty and intelligence. People want it. My mother desperately wished she had the gap, but wasn’t born with one. She continued to lay on the guilt, explaining that my gap was ‘history in my mouth,'” 

I love that thought: “History in my mouth.”

Willem Dafoe even starred in a short film about his “air cooled” teeth entitled Mind the Gap. The film star says gaps are “openness, possibility, room to savor . . . Everything I bite,” he adds, “stays with me a long time.” The strange, some would say alluring others would say weird two-minute film—which was sold at auction to benefit a children’s charity—ends with the intense actor coming down hard on his love of his imperfect teeth. “They say you can never be too thin or too rich. I say there can never be enough gaps.”

Gaps and crooked teeth are actually fairly normal to this day in Europe and the rest of the world. Only in America do we obsess so much over the perfection of our teeth.

It was the parents of my generation who began that trend for the middle classes. When we discussed braces in high school the orthodontist told my parents that I had “a mouth that was too big for my teeth.”** He would straighten them out and close the gap—which he did—but unless I wore a retainer the rest of my life, my natural gap would return.

As I aged, I worried about that growing space between my front teeth. I did actually return to a retainer in my 40s, but again got tired of wearing it every night while I slept. My answer was to smile with my lips closed. Not exactly the most open, inviting, and expressive look I have to admit.

A typical DJB look when posing for a camera . . . this one with Candice from 2020 who always has a wide, beautiful, welcoming smile

I see now that I had slipped into a form of personal body shaming, which is not good when applied to ourselves or when we apply it to others.

This began to change in retirement.

As we travel the world for National Trust Tours, I walk around with a face that has a perpetual look of wonder and amazement. On a recent trip, an older traveler approached me and said, “I love seeing you as you talk, or when you’re walking on a tour, or when I pass you in the hall because you always have this big smile on your face.” That stuck with me. I know when I smile naturally that my air cooled teeth are exposed. She was saying that she liked it.

So I decided that at 70 years of age it was time to not just tolerate but to love the imperfections of my very imperfect teeth. And when I recently needed a new head shot, I decided to embrace the imperfections. Those teeth—and the open smile—would be front and center.

I rather like it.

I have come to realize how important gaps are in our lives as I wrote in the first of my Gap Year Chronicles in 2019. Writer Satya Robyn has said that when she steps out gently from the busyness of life to engage the world through curiosity and wonder, she also stops struggling. She floats as in a river, embracing the liminality. But you need the space to be able to bash into some joy along the way. And when I retired, one of our trustees told me not to be afraid of blank spaces on my calendar, because it was in those gaps where the good things happened.

In this new phase of life I’m now loving the openness. The possibility. The room to savor. You can never have too many gaps.***

More to come . . .

DJB

*Of course, if politicians keep legislating based upon the insane ramblings of our Health and Human Services Secretary—Robert “I don’t think people should take medical advice from me” Kennedy, Jr.—and we ban fluoride in our community water systems, then we’ll all go back to the poor dental health that was prevalent in the 1930s. This is a Health and Human Secretary who willingly exposed his grandchildren to “widespread fecal contamination and high levels of bacteria, including E. coli.” Is America really this stupid? (Don’t answer, that’s a rhetorical question.)

**You can make up your own joke. I’ve heard them all.

***Pair this post with Bashing into joy and you just might decide that I’m throwing caution to the wind in my old age. I’m not there yet, but that’s the road I’m taking.

Photos of DJB by Kristina Sherk

How to live—and think—through the challenges of our era of moral cynicism

Published by

There is an unease in today’s world. Our would-be dictators are rushing about severing alliances, sabotaging support, undermining cooperation within the nation and across the world. As Rebecca Solnit puts it,

“It seems to be in their nature to segregate, isolate, and disconnect. They cut the United States off from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Treaty. They cut off the countless beneficiaries of USAID programs as they left USAID workers stranded across the world. They cut off crucial parts of the federal government with reckless disregard for how those parts contribute to the functioning of the whole—or maybe with enthusiasm for its malfunction, perhaps because they’re bought into the  rightwing idea that all this stuff is unnecessary, obstructive. It’s certainly in the way of some of their ambitions.

In this climate of separation and disconnection, I first became aware of an important new book from Solnit’s mention of it in her Meditations in an Emergency newsletter. Solnit noted that long before our era, the political theorist Hannah Arendt was very familiar with these type of men who seek to tear us apart.

“A few days ago, the Arendt scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge called my attention to this passage from Arendt’s On the Origins of Totalitarianism: ‘What binds these men together is a firm and sincere belief in omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible.…Yet they too are deceived, deceived by their impudent conceited idea that everything can be done and their contemptuous conviction that everything that exists is merely a temporary obstacle that superior organization will certainly destroy.’”  

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (2024) by Lyndsey Stonebridge is the book we need for these times. A compelling biography but also a primer for how to think if we want to be free. Arendt was not perfect and not always the easiest person to understand, as Stonebridge details, but she thought and cared deeply about humanity. Thanks to Stonebridge’s very accessible and thoughtful writing, readers are brought into Arendt’s world to see why she came to think the way she did. In doing so, Stonebridge takes us from fascist Germany to twenty-first century America.

The subtitle of the work is very important. These are lessons from one of the twentieth century’s foremost opponents of totalitarianism to those of us navigating the slide into what political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt have labeled “competitive authoritarianism.” As they note in their recent New York Times op-ed, “America’s slide into authoritarianism is reversible. But no one has ever defeated autocracy from the sidelines.” Arendt’s life and work is, in this masterful biography, in a dialogue with today’s turbulent times.

Many of us have only encountered Arendt in short, quotable snippets or perhaps in her famous (or infamous) New Yorker articles on the Adolf Eichmann trial. Stonebridge’s gift is to make Arendt’s work accessible and compelling for our era. As she writes in the first chapter, it wasn’t until she started to work out why we should be reading Arendt in the age of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that she realized “it was the stubborn humanity of her fierce and complex creativity” that we had most to learn from. Throughout her adult life Arendt was asking one question above all others: What is freedom?

That is also the title of the last of ten chapters in this book, which look at subjects such as “How to Think” and “How to Think—and How Not to Think—About Race,” the latter taking up Arendt’s missteps around racial inequality in America. In a 1959 essay called “Reflections on Little Rock” she criticized the campaign against the segregation of schools in the Jim Crow South. “Written in a lofty and chiding tone, her essay caused a scandal because in it she had forgotten one of her own lessons: you can’t co-create rights and freedom with people who you cannot see.” Hannah Arendt was far from perfect. She “did not know the children of Little Rock, Arkansas, nor did she comprehend the history of their fight.”

Hannah Arendt (Credit: Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College)

Arendt’s work on race simply proves that she was human. Yet her voice is one we should still hear today. Stonebridge talks of how Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition was, above all, about bringing people back to earth “so that they could appreciate what they had—and what they had to lose.” She worried that technology and overconsumption were alienating us from the earth. Hers was not the only voice making this case. In an extraordinary passage, Stonebridge notes that in an eight month period the New Yorker published the first installments of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Rachel Carson’s article from her ground-breaking Silent Spring, and a James Baldwin essay that would become The Fire Next Time. Even contemporary readers noted the change in the quality of the magazine’s truth-telling.

“There is a reason why James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, and Rachel Carson are three of the writers from the last century whose voices speak to us most urgently in our own. They show us, yet again, possibly because people did not pay sufficient attention the first time, possibly because the very things they feared have indeed got much much worse, the beauty and fragility of existence.”

It was the chapter on “How to Love” that told me more about Arendt that one can glean from the anti-authoritarian quotes in memes. “Love is a paradox in Arendt’s thinking,” writes Stonebridge. “Love is what makes us human, plural, alive to one another and to the human condition itself.” It may be all we have. But because of its earthly power, love can be “more than human, possibly inhuman” and politically speaking, very dangerous.

“Love matters in our politics because it matters to us at the most intimate level of our lives. As we do now, Arendt lived in a world where there was far too much passionate intensity of the worst kind, and not nearly enough neighborly love.”

Totalitarianism to Arendt was not just a new system of oppression, it seemed “to have altered the texture of human experience itself.” The crime, which she explored in 1963’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, was against “both large groups of people and against the very idea of human plurality.” Yes, the moral obscenity of the Holocaust had to be recognized, put on trial, grieved, and addressed. But existing methods and ideologies could not make it right. It was the banality with which the crime was executed that needed to be reckoned with, a reckoning that we have yet to undertake.

Early in life Arendt came to see one simple idea that set the stage for her life’s work: “that we think and that how we think has moral consequences.” Embracing perplexity became her first line of resistance against the absolutism that infects totalitarianism. Truth-telling is what you do when you have nothing else. Arendt once observed:

“To be sure, no one understood the rain better, no one showed so clearly what rain was like, than the person who happened to have no umbrella and therefore became soaking wet.”

In the end, Arendt’s work comes back to love and freedom. Nothing, she wrote, “perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than a vague pervasive hatred of everyone and everything.” Real freedom, which Stonebridge highlights as Hannah Arendt’s central political insight, “requires the presence of others so that we can test our sense of reality against their views and lives, make judgements, probe, and learn.”

Adolph Eichmann, she came to realize, “was thoughtless to the point that he no longer inhabited the real world—which was partly why he could wreck such terror upon it.”

Because we have would-be dictators and tech bros who also no longer inhabit the real world of the 99% of humanity, we are facing the same issues today. This courageous book is definitely a work for our era.

More to come . . .

DJB

For those wishing to go down a rabbit hole, see Peter Michael Gratton’s essay The Banality of Complicity: Arendt’s Guide to Moral Resistance in the Age of Trump as well as Against Strategy: The Moral Stands We Need Today in the newsletter Liberal Currents. To read more about the isolation of citizens and its impact on democracy, read Elise Labott’s A Crisis of Faith. And Not the Religious Kind. in the Preamble newsletter.

Wrong Way sign by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Songs of ancestry, lineage, and the collective human experience

Published by

My admiration for the roots music supergroup I’m With Her is no secret. I first saw the singer/songwriters Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins live ten years ago at the Red Wing Roots Music Festival and they were also involved in my first and only case of celebrity stalking. Over the past decade I’ve seen the band several times at various musical events.

Watkins, Jarosz, and O'Donovan
I’m With Her—Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan—at July 2015 Red Wing Roots Music Festival (photo by DJB)

For a band that has been around—off and on—for more than a decade, I’m With Her is only now getting around to putting out their second album, titled Wild and Clear and Blue. The title comes from a song “written after the passing of two of their most beloved musical forebearers, Nanci Griffith and John Prine.”

The band takes up the story from there.

“’When I was nine my mom took me to see Nanci Griffith and I sent a note backstage requesting ‘Ford Econoline,’ and she played it at the show,’ says O’Donovan. ‘We wrote ‘Wild and Clear and Blue’ thinking about growing up so in love with music and then actually making music ourselves—it’s very specific to our own lives, but I think there’s something universal about having those childhood memories tied up in the music your parents played for you.’ The first song written for Wild and Clear and Blue, the exquisitely wistful track soon catalyzed I’m With Her’s album-wide reflection on generational bonds and self-realization. ‘So much of this record is about connecting with your past and figuring out what you want for your future, finding yourself and finding the people you love,’ says Watkins. ‘It’s a journey that everybody takes, and this is our way of singing through it.’”

The references in the chorus to the Griffith song Love at the Five and Dime and Prine’s Paradise are lovely tributes within the larger tune. It reminds me of similar musical memories in my own life, although they aren’t recaptured in such a beautiful way.

“Ooh when I was nine | Heard you singing ‘bout the five and dime | What’s that I asked | And my mama said | They were everywhere when I was a kid | I hear the fiddle and bow | Still playing long after the show | Your voice runs like the Brazos through me | Wild and clear and blue

Ooh when I was nine | Heard you singing ‘bout paradise | What’s that I asked | And my mama said | That was everywhere when I was a kid | I hear the fiddle and bow . . .”

And then in the bridge comes sadness with the realization of the fading of memories.

“Now I’m rolling down all my windows | While the wild birds cut lines across the sky | Your voices are swirling around me | Driving into the west Texas night

Breathing in the scent of the sage brush | Tears cutting lines ‘cross my face | Now the static is slowly replacing | The sounds of my childhood days”

I cry at the strangest things. This one brought on a few tears.

All three women are exceptional multi-instrumentalists, so it may seem difficult to highlight one particular aspect of the group’s work. However, what most come away with after hearing the band are their luminous harmonies. Chris Thile once introduced them with the description: “When you go to heaven and hear singing, it will sound like these three women.”

In an interview with Variety, the band talked about the writing process and how these songs for the second album came together. Wild and Clear and Blue explores themes of “ancestry, lineage, and the collective human experience.” It is “a soul-searching body of work about reaching into the past, navigating a chaotic present, and bravely moving forward into the unknown.”

I’m With Her (credit: ImWithHerband.com)

O’Donovan is quoted in the Variety piece as saying . . .

“All of these songs went into the same door and, like you said, grew up in the same house, surrounded and nurtured by the same three voices. And I think that’s what definitely sets our band apart in many ways. When I bring an idea, I feel how you guys are receptive to the idea and then add to it in this very specific way that feels super organic and natural. It’s something I personally haven’t experienced in other co-writing situations.”

Mother Eagle (Sing Me Alive) begins simply with just the trio playing and singing. It differs in that way from the rest of the album, which has bigger production values. But even with just the three of them, the sound is luscious, building throughout the song as the chorus becomes “mantra like” in O’Donovan’s words.

The lyrics of Ancient Light speak to those themes of ancestry, lineage, and the collective human experience.

“Thinking of who came before | I hear them knock at the door | They’ve been a long time comin’

Mmmm when I let ‘em in | I feel their breath on my skin | They’ve been a long time gone

We’ll be dancing | Oh what a sight | When they get here I’ll be swimming in the ancient light”

Standing on the Fault Line speaks to the path each of us has to take as we move into the future we want.

“Is it when the reservoir dries out | And the birds stop flying south | How we gonna know it’s time to flee?

If we wait for a rainy day | When the opening sky just seems to say ‘stay’ | We’ll never leave

Standing on the fault line | Waiting for the ground to crack | Just put one foot in front of the other | Don’t look back”

All three members of I’m With Her came out of the roots, folk, and progressive bluegrass worlds. Find My Way to You let’s the band open up those chops and remind us that while they do sing beautiful harmonies, they are also terrific instrumentalists.

I’m With Her is touring this year to promote the new album. Catch them when they come to your part of the country.

More to come . . .

DJB

Be not afraid

Published by

Sometimes we find unexpected courage to act on instinct. It often takes more courage, however, to stop and consider the consequences. To look without blinking at what our actions might mean. To think before we act.

Considering the consequences of our actions—or inactions—is a constant theme of a book I just finished by one of Canada’s best-known and well-loved mystery writers.

A Better Man (2019) by Louise Penny is the fifteenth work in the Canadian author’s long-running Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. The former superintendent of the entire Sûreté du Québec, Gamache has returned after a controversial suspension and demotion and immediately faces devastating spring floods, relentless social media attacks, and a law enforcement force that appears split on the question of whether he should have even been allowed to return. Gamache is now sharing the position as head of the homicide department with his former second-in-command—and his son-in-law—Jean-Guy Beauvoir who is preparing to leave the force and move with his family to Paris. As if these challenges aren’t enough, Gamache is approached by a desperate father seeking help in finding his missing daughter. In the fast paced and multi-layered story, the Chief Inspector and many others are struggling to find their footing.

This book was loaned to me by a friend and faithful MTC reader who thought I would enjoy Penny’s story of the thoughtful and kind inspector, the interplay of the various characters both in the Sûreté as well as in the little village of Three Pines, the Canadian backdrop, and the psychological mystery at the heart of this tale. I wondered if I could pick up the story lines but Margit assured me that I could. The Library Journal review noted that by bringing “several character arcs to a close while resetting others” A Better Man serves both “as a beginning for new readers and a satisfying continuation for series fans.” Gamache, the Journal notes, “is an explorer of the human psyche, and the care he takes with the victims, their friends and family, as well as his own allows this series and his character continually to surprise, delight, and enthrall.”

Chief Inspector Gamache is clearly near and dear to Penny’s heart. This is not an easy story to tell. Characters have been emotionally and even physically damaged by physical abuse. As more than one observer notes, you can see steely determination in Gamache’s eyes as he works through the twists and turns as well as the sometimes brutal facts before him. But if you look especially carefully you will also see goodness. Penny has written that “her books are about goodness. And kindness. About choices. About friendship and belonging. And love. Enduring love.”

That goodness, along with an ability to rethink assumptions and look without blinking at the facts before him, leads Gamache to see that the “obvious” murderer of the missing woman might be telling the truth when he says he didn’t do it. The twists and turns to uncover the real story of what happened on a dark and lonely bridge above a raging, flooding river—and to handle that story carefully—makes for a satisfying read.

At one point, Gamache is telling his agents that when he was Chief Superintendent he had a framed poster in his office with the words Noli timere. They were the last words of poet Seamus Heaney and they mean “Be Not Afraid.” Penny wants us to remember that fear is a thief, just as Gamache is encouraging a young agent to speak his mind, even though he’s afraid.

In the world that Louise Penny has created, there is terror, fear, and murder. But there is also goodness, and the existence of that goodness is what we ultimately remember.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash

From the bookshelf: April 2025

Published by

Author Fran Lebowitz famously said, “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” My goodness. What a concept! Wouldn’t our life be so much easier to navigate if more people in leadership positions (if not actually leaders) followed this bit of advice?

I don’t always think before I blurt something out, but it does help that I have a monthly intention to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics from different genres. Here are the books I read in April 2025. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on MORE TO COME. Enjoy.

The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past (2024) by Nate DiMeo is a wonder-filled collection of stories from our past. These “true short stories” are looks into the lives of people, some of them famous but many forgotten by time, whose stories deserve to be known. DiMeo looks at these places “between and beyond concrete facts and the well-worn language of familiar stories” to remind us that “life, in the present as in the past, is more complicated and more interesting and more beautiful and more improbable and more alive than we’d realized.” This is a work that surprises and informs and delights all while making us think.

Question 7 (2023) by Richard Flanagan is a genre-defying memoir that examines the choices we make and the resulting chain reactions that explode halfway around the world and decades into the future. The choices Flannagan considers begin with the love affair of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. He then take the reader through the work of nuclear physicists in the 1930s, the horrors of Japanese slave labor camps near Hiroshima, the world-changing 1945 atomic bomb attack on that city, and the fear of a young man trapped in rapids on a wild river, unsure if he is to live or die. But to lay them out in this sequential order does a disservice to Flanagan’s extraordinary ability to meld dream, history, science, and memory in this masterpiece. Flanagan, as a friend of mine noted, “writes like a god.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston is the story of Janie Crawford, a proud independent black woman who finds herself while navigating three marriages and a fair share of sorrow. Janie begins as a young girl, goes through a myriad of experiences in the Jim Crow South, and comes out a much wiser woman of 40. She learns that others—family, friends, lovers, busy-bodies—want to tell her how to live. Her Grandma reminds her that the black woman “is de mule of the world” and both white folks and black men will expect her to tote the heaviest load. But in the end Janie proclaims that she has done “two things everbody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.” Hurston’s vivid writing and empathetic outlook towards Janie’s quest brings this story alive.

Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (1998) by Ursula K. Le Guin is a handbook on writing well. This master practitioner examines the fundamental components of narrative in this useful, thoughtful, and—most importantly—readable work. Because story is about change, Le Guin wants writers to focus on movement. She examines the sound of language, the tools of punctuation, sentence construction, and more. This is a “deceptively simple” handbook that those wishing to communicate more effectively and skillfully through writing could return to again and again.

New Building in Old Cities: Writings by Gustavo Giovannoni on Architectural and Urban Conservation (2024) edited by Steven W. Semes, Francesco Siravo, and Jeff Cody is a highly relevant and richly illustrated book of the largely forgotten architectural work of an important early advocate for the conservation of historic cities. Because Giovannoni’s works had not been translated into English, his approach to architectural restoration and rehabilitation based on the “simultaneous consideration of the historical, technical, environmental, social, and aesthetic dimensions of ‘monuments’ and ordinary buildings” was not widely known internationally. From his base in Rome, Giovannoni urged the education of the “complete architect” who would be “multidisciplinary, practical designers capable of advancing an integrated vision of the city in all its spatial and temporal dimensions.” In this most recent installment of my Author Q&A series, I speak with the editors about this new work.

What’s on the nightstand for May (subject to change at the whims of the reader)

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: Click to see the books I read in March of 2025 and to see the books I read in 2024. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

Photo from Pixabay.

We see things as we are

Published by

I recently saw an acquaintance for the first time in a number of years. This wasn’t someone I was particularly close to at any point in time. In fact, I had kept my distance through the years, recalling a perceived slight . . . which may or may not have actually happened.

Our recent encounter was pleasant and full of memories. In the course of that conversation they thanked me for a long-ago act of kindness that I, frankly, did not recall.

I’ve been thinking about my long-held pique ever since that encounter and wondering how many other things in my memory are there because of misunderstandings or misremembrances. In a recent post on 70 things learned in my 70 years of life, I suggested we could all benefit by entertaining the possibility that we might be wrong. Had I simply been wrong about this individual? After decades of low-grade simmering that did nothing to bring me joy and peace, did it really matter?

About the same time as this conversation took place, a post from the Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr showed up in my inbox. In it Rohr writes about the importance of moving beyond our need to be right, especially in today’s political climate.

“In our ugly and injurious present political climate, it’s become all too easy to justify fear-filled and hateful thoughts, words, and actions, often in defense against the ‘other’ side. We project our anxiety elsewhere and misdiagnose the real problem (the real evil), exchanging it for smaller and seemingly more manageable problems. The over-defended ego always sees, hates, and attacks in other people its own faults—the parts of ourselves that we struggle to acknowledge. Of course, we don’t want to give way on important moral issues, but this often means we also don’t want to give way on our need to be right, superior, and in control. Our deep attachment to this defended and smaller self leads us into our greatest illusions. Most of us do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.” (emphasis in original)

This hit home, and I had a perfect example from my own experience. Here I was, with an over-defended ego, working to tell myself that I was right. That I was superior. Perhaps I was struggling to acknowledge slights I had given to others through the years.

My friend and mentor Frank Wade once made a similar point. “The Chinese have a saying,” Frank notes. “Most of what we see is behind our eyes.” In other words we see what we expect to see, not necessarily what is really there. We force the world into our preconceptions and because of that we miss a lot. It was Marcel Proust who once said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Rohr uses both Christian and Buddhist thought to encourage us to see things as they are as opposed to seeing things as we are. The Heart Sutra of Buddhist teachings, similar to saying “Alleluia” at Easter . . .

“. . . is liberation from our grief, our losses, our sadness, and our attachments—our manufactured self. It accepts the transitory and passing nature of all things without exception, not as a sadness, but as a movement to ‘the other shore.’ We don’t know exactly what the other shore is like, but we know it is another shore from where we now stand and not a scary abyss.”

In a time where we are all struggling to find our footing and defend ourselves against evil, taking the time to consider how we are looking at a situation—perhaps even considering how we are loving, or not loving, others—might help us, in the words of poet and songwriter Carrie Newcomer, to “pay attention to how the spirit of love is moving within us.” What new paths through the woods are we being called to create? Can we “find fresh springs of graciousness and laughter” that lighten the load we carry?”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps on Unsplash

A classic journey of self-discovery

Published by

Every time I visit a bookstore or library, I chance upon one or more volumes that haunt me. They seem to say, “Why didn’t you read me twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago?” My excuses are feeble. I may have been too busy reading histories and biographies to devote much time to literature and poetry. Perhaps I was hooked on a small number of well-known Southern authors and missed others I should have explored. Or maybe I was just lazy.

It never fails, however, that when I push myself to read a classic work for the first time, I am reminded of how much we have to learn between our birth day and our last day. Of all the different perspectives that could have enriched my time as an impressionable youth but that are now working their magic on my third stage of life. And that the saying “too many books, too little time” is a cliche for a reason: It is true.

A classic of the Harlem Renaissance that I only recently read for the first time is the latest of those “why didn’t I read this a long time ago” books that call to me from nearly every bookshelf I pass. Better late than never.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston is the story of Janie Crawford, a proud independent black woman who finds herself while navigating three marriages and a fair share of sorrow. In recounting her life’s story full of travel to her friend Pheoby, she explains that “you got tuh go there tuh know there.” Janie begins as a young girl, goes through a myriad of experiences in the Jim Crow South, and comes out a much wiser woman of 40. She learns that others—family, friends, lovers, busy-bodies—want to tell her how to live. Her Grandma reminds her that the black woman “is de mule of the world” and both white folks and black men will expect her to tote the heaviest load. But in the end Janie proclaims that she has done “two things everbody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.” Hurston’s vivid writing and empathetic outlook towards Janie’s quest brings this story alive.

We see Hurston’s skill in creating images early in the book, when she describes Janie’s coming of age experience under a blossoming pear tree in West Florida. She was hearing singing that had nothing to do with her ears, and she watches a “dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom.” A passing boy gives her a kiss, and “that was the end of her childhood.”

Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, which is important to the story.

“Established in 1887, the rural community near Orlando was the nation’s first incorporated black township. It was, as Hurston described it, ‘a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse.’”

She could see the evidence of black achievement all around here, and it is here where the fictional Janie comes for part of her journey. She marries the mayor, has a big house, and seems to be set in life. But her soul remains restless as her husband refuses to let her think, talk, or act in ways that he doesn’t approve. When the mayor dies she is freed, and despite the disapproval of the townsfolk she leaves with a much younger man named Tea Cake. He “engages her heart and spirit in equal measure and gives her the chance to enjoy life without being a man’s mule or adornment.” They move to the Everglades and are loving life when a hurricane hits. Once again, Hurston’s descriptive writing pulls the reader along as Janie, Tea Cake, and their friend Motor Boat sit in a small shack and listen to the wind howl and Lake Okechobee rise.

“The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against the crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

The ending is not happy but, as commentators note, it does draw to a satisfactory conclusion. Janie lives to tell the tale, a strong black woman able to hold her own and then some. It is a remarkable book that almost fell into obscurity until a young writer named Alice Walker traveled to Fort Pierce in 1973 to place a marker on the grave of the author who had so inspired her own work.

“Walker found the Garden of Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery at the dead end of North 17th Street, abandoned and overgrown with yellow-flowered weeds . . . Unable to afford the marker she wanted—a tall, majestic black stone called ‘Ebony Mist’—Walker chose a plain gray headstone instead. Borrowing from a Jean Toomer poem, she dressed the marker up with a fitting epitaph: ‘Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.’”

Despite what the tombstone says, Hurston was born in 1891. Confusion over her birth date is part of the “controversy and ambiguity that surrounds so much of her life and career.”

Walker’s acknowledgement of the debt she owed to Zora Neale Hurston led to reassessment, new editions of old works, and a renaissance that continues today.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo: Images from Eatonville, Florida, from Southern Poverty Law Center

Traveling in order to be moved

Published by

Having returned from a recent trip to Europe, I am still thinking of some of the comments made by our local guides and fellow travelers. Some were little snippets of conversation that caught my attention. At other times they were deeply held beliefs that our guides wanted to share.

Pico Iyer once wrote that you don’t travel . . .

“. . . in order to move around—you’re traveling in order to be moved.  And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see . . .”

Travel can change us. I want to share three instances of times where I was moved during our visit along the Dutch waterways.

Getting along

A favored mode of transportation in Amsterdam (Photo credit: Getty Images via Unsplash)

Everywhere we traveled the ability of bicyclists, pedestrians, and automobile drivers to navigate small and often winding streets was impressive. Even when crowds of tourists blocked the route, everyone stayed in their lane, followed the traffic signals, signaled their intentions, and performed a wonderful dance to reach their destination. We saw this time and again in large cities such as Amsterdam and in small towns such as Hoorn. It was a delight to behold.

I was reminded of how far a little respect for others can carry us along as I returned to navigate the often chaotic streets of Washington and Silver Spring. Bike lanes come and go, turn signals seem to be a thing of the past, and large cars with impatient drivers dominate our traffic system. The communities we saw on our trip show that it doesn’t have to be this way.

It was in the city of Nijmegen where our local guide made an off-hand remark that stuck with me. Our bus driver was skillfully negotiating one of the many circles found at intersections throughout this part of Europe when our guide casually commented that “roundabouts force us to learn to get along with others.”

Living in community. What a concept.

Do we have the monuments we deserve?

As I wrote in an earlier post, monuments and memorials from a variety of eras and historical contexts exist throughout the world. Memorials inevitably bring us face to face with philosophical questions of justice, collective memory, free will, moral culpability, and individual vs. national responsibility. Controversies over monuments and the memories they celebrate are not unique to the United States. We saw many examples on this trip.

When I was discussing monument controversies with some of our travelers, one mentioned that they had participated in a community discussion about this very issue in their hometown. The leading question of those organizing the conversation was, “Do we have the monuments we deserve?” We discussed how one could go about addressing that question, which is a topic for another post.

However, my mind returned to several monuments I saw on this trip that deviated from the traditional “conquering general on a horse” statue. In Nijmegen, there is a memorial commemorating the over 400 Jewish residents of the city who were murdered in the Holocaust.

The square is named after Kitty de Wijze who was murdered in Auschwitz on December 15, 1942. Monuments such as these help us recall that we should “never forget.”

Nearby is another statue, this one featuring Mariken van Nieumeghen. “Mary of Nijmegen” is a miracle play recorded in a Middle Dutch text from the early 16th century.

The protagonist of the story spends seven years with the devil, after which she is miraculously released. The oldest edition dates from 1515 and her tale is remembered to this day in the city’s large plaza. I loved the fact that the city was recalling its literary history with a statue.

And I’ve also previously featured a small but personally meaningful monument to books found near the library in Hoorn. All three of these monuments, and others we saw throughout our trip, turn our attention to those who are lesser known, perhaps persecuted, yet very much a part of our human story.

A march to remember those who fought for our freedom

Finally, we heard about a different type of memorial on this trip that reminded us of a time when allies came together to stand up for what is right. Our guide in Nijmegen was 80 years old, born a month before WWII ended. That conflict was still very much on his mind, and the support of the Americans and other allies in liberating his hometown is very much a part of his story.

As we were driving into the town he pointed to a bridge and then told the story of the allied liberation of Nijmegen, and the Sunset March held each day to honor 48 allied war dead—mostly Americans—from WWII.

(Photo credit: War History Online)

“Sunset March is a daily tribute to the Allied soldiers who fought for the liberation of The Netherlands, especially to those soldiers who lost their lives. In 2013 the city of Nijmegen completed the construction of a new city bridge called Oversteek [The Crossing]. It was constructed close to the area where members of the US 82nd Airborne Division crossed the river Waal on 20 September 1944 as part of Operation Market Garden. 48 Allied soldiers lost their lives during this ‘Waal Crossing’. The recently completed bridge has been installed with 48 pairs of exceptional street lights. At sunset these sets of street lights are lit up pair by pair at a slow marching pace. The total duration of illumination of  all these street lights is almost 12 minutes.”

Each and every night, our guide explained, a military veteran walks the Sunset March as the sun sinks below the horizon. Others can, and do, follow along. As the lights are turned on, the veteran walks along in pace with the lights being lit. It is a daily and poignant reminder that we are all part of a greater humanity, if we choose to live that way.

Work to make the change we can

These lessons learned while traveling reminded me that there is always trouble and struggle, as we see all around us today. But remembering that we can work to make the change we can, knowing that we are all part of a gathering of spirits, brought to mind two wonderful Carrie Newcomer songs.

“I see sorrow and trouble in this land | I see sorrow and trouble in this land | Although there will be struggle, we’ll make the change we can | If not now, if not now, tell me when”

“If not now, tell me when | If not now, tell me when | We may never see this moment or place in time again | If not now, if not now, tell me when.”

“Let it go my love, my truest, let it sail on silver wings | Life’s a twinkling and that’s for certain, but it’s such a fine thing | There’s a gathering of spirits, there’s a festival of friends | And we’ll take up where we left off, when we all meet again.”

As Newcomer wrote recently on her A Gathering of Spirits Substack, “. . . may we all pay attention to how the spirit of love is moving within us, what new paths through the woods we are being called to create, and find fresh springs of graciousness and laughter that lightens the load we carry.”

“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”

Carl Jung

More to come . . .

DJB

Sunset March Bridge Photo by Leo Vullings on Unsplash