#26-- July 2026

So What's Ted Been Reading in the New Year?

If you've gotten this far, you're curious or you have too much time on your hands, but it has been a profitable 6 months of reading. Proceeding alphabetically, as a librarian would-- I'll begin with a wonderful anthology entitled A River Dream: the Writing and Art of Russell Chatham's Clark City Press.  Russell Chatham (October 27, 1939 – November 10, 2019) was an essayist, flyfisherman and artist based in Livingston MT where he established his press and attracted a who's who of authors, friends many of who contributed to this collection edited by Jamie Harrison. Besides his art and essays, this collection includes work from Thomas McGuane, William Hjortsberg, Rick Bass, Jim Harrison, Barry Gifford, Richard Hugo, and James Crumley. Beautiful!

Next up is an old timer, Fredric Brown's The Fabulous Clipjoint, first published in 1947 and reissued by Mysterious Press (2024) publisher Otto Penzler with an introduction by Lawrence Block- you know these two know Mysteries. The book introduces 18 year old Ed Hunter whose father is murdered in an alley in Chicago and his step-mother and her daughter don't seem very concerned. Ed hitchhikes to link up with his uncle Ambrose who runs a traveling carnival game and Am wants justice for his dead brother. They return to late 1940s Chicago to explore the gang gunmen and molls with wonderful noir dialog in this EDGAR awardwinner for Best First Novel of 1948. 

A new series by crime-writing boss, Michael Connelly, is always worth a read. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell is exiled by office politics to Catalina Island to deal with petty crime but the discovery of a decomposed body--Nightshade-- in a canvas bag tied to an anchor in the bay really gets him going. A run in with a local bigwig involved with land development and a bison beheading finds him again going off line as he breaks all the rules with his mainland bosses while working both cases.

Walter Moseley returns to 1970s LA in his 17th Easy Rawlins novel, Gray Dawn. Easy has grown his detective agency, hiring his first female detective and now living in luxury up in the hills above the grit of a wild LA. But his latest case to discover the whereabouts of a housekeeper Lutisha leads Easy into a fearsome personality, murders and his past in 1940s Houston which could lead to his demise now.

Ethnobotanist and widely regarded desert explorer Gary Paul Nabhan has produced his memoir Water in the Desert: A Pilgrimage. And what a journey it is from his youth in a large Lebanese family living in the Dunes area of the south end of Lake Michigan near Gary, Indiana. His life and mine were close, not only chronologically, geographically, but also ethnically, economically and socially. His difficulties in school led him to focus almost exclusively on nature in the sand dunes which served him well as he made his way to Arizona and his career in exploration, writing and teaching. And the guy can really write! 

The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants by Robert Suits presents a slice of American history that bears review--climate change matched with industrial change. Beginning with steam power through petroleum based power, migrant workers have found jobs in agriculture, the timber industry and mining. And as weather changed-- the Dust Bowl years-- steam power on trains provided the mechanism for moving around America to find work. Never well paid, almost always cross wise with the law, hobos moved east to west and central up north as crops came in and work was available. The arrival of petroleum power in tractors, trucks and other equipment played out the hobo life but the book covers the social, political and economic aspects very well.

And finally last, but not least, is ETNA: A Novel by Paul Yoon, an extraordinary read, IMHO. ETNA tells his story as a young puppy taken from his farm and turned into an US Army working dog, clearing mine fields in an unnamed country until an accident takes his partner's life and leaves him seriously damaged. ETNA resolves to leave the Army and travel back home. His story is a revelation of life in a dangerous environment as experienced and told through a dog's eyes and voice. This one is not to be missed!

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 #25 Happy Thanksgiving 11/27/2025 and Some Really Good Reads!

Thanks to my parents, Mildred and Harry, who read to and with me at the outset and the teachers at St. Pauls, Hammond especially those early teachers-Edna Hoemann, Bill Hoffmann and Dave Brandt who really got me going. Especial thanks to the public librarians at the Harrison Park Branch who let me read in the Adult Area and made many good recommendations!

So, what's worth your time and effort to read? My last 8 months of fun reading-in alphabetical order- includes Lou Berney's DARK RIDE, a shorter work from the Edgar Award Winner who seems to be undeservedly a little under the radar as an author. Hardy "Hardly" Reed is a 21 year old "actor" in a local "horror" theme park, usually stoned who is totally irresponsible. But one day while waiting to pay a ticket at the city hall, Hardly sees two children, ages about 7 and 9, sitting on a bench near him. Both appear to have physical injuries and don't respond when he asks if they are okay. When their mother collects them and ignores Hardly's questions, he takes on a first-time inquiry into what's going on. And for his first time, Hardly's  looking out for someone else, plotting how he'll uncover their story. The trail heads downhill for Hardly as the parent's background presents violence and crime. 

James Church, a pseudonym for a retired US intelligence officer who worked primarily in the Koreas is next up. His six book series begins with A CORPSE IN THE KORYO(2006) through The GENTLEMAN FROM JAPAN (2016) and present amazing insight into life in North Korea. Inspector O is with the capital city police but gets entangled with national and international politics and crime in the richly drawn and quite horrible environment of North Korea under the Kim dictatorship. If you like Arkady Renko (Russia) books by Martin Cruz Smith and the Philip Kerr Bernie Gunther (Germany) series, give Church a try. You won't regret it.

Sulari Gentill, a Sri Lankan author living in Australia, has a new novel FIVE FOUND DEAD to add to her Rowland Sinclair series and her Woman in the Library. Australian crime fiction author Joe Penvale and his twin sister Meredith are celebrating his post-cancer with a trip from Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express. Their deluxe trip is interrupted when bodies start showing up in the train cabin next door and throughout the train. They realize that not only are they in danger but someone is mimicking Agatha Christie. And then the covid epidemic totally changes the train trip.

Best-selling author Tom Perrotta has a new novel, GHOST TOWN that presents an author returning to his suburban New Jersey town after decades away to participate in the dedication of a building named for his late father, a firefighter, who died in a rescue attempt. The author Jimmy Perrini returns by memory to his 1970s town that he grew up in after his mother's tragic death as he was just graduating 8th grade and starting high school. He relives those tough years with his distant father while he hung out with the wrong guys and with a girl at school who relies on the Ouija board for all her and Jimmy's instruction and decisions.

BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan is a big book- 452 pages-- that contains so much.  The world and lives of four people are offered intertwined with the past of post-WW 1 parents, into and through WW ll into the recent past, all focused on a small town, Bonhomie in northwest Ohio. Two married couples, one native to Bonhomie and the other resettled there from the big city, Columbus, are four individuals who have history as an abandoned baby raised in an orphanage, a person who can hear from the dead, a WWll sailor who barely survives a torpedo attack of his ship, another man who can't physically serve the war effort, and a beautiful woman. Their lives intertwine in very realistic, historic stanzas in this highly colored novel. 

Callan Wink's debut BEARTOOTH is set in Montana just outside Yellowstone NP. Two brothers scrape by cutting timber for fire wood while trying to preserve the cabin their late father built. An offer from a questionable man, The Scotsman, who lives near them offers money to them to smuggle elk antlers out of the Park- highly illegal. As the plan is underway and begins to unravel, their lives are dramatically altered. Again, one worth reading,

 #24  March 6,2025    

So another year has gone by and What's Ted Reading? Not that anyone has asked or clamored for a new Stuff to Read but here are some high points from 2024's reading,,,in alphabetical order:

Kevin Barry's Heart in Winter is set in 1891 mining town of Butte Montana and it doesn't get colder or more desolate than that. Tom Rourke is a poet, photographer's assistant and man about town as an alcoholic, drug user and general degenerate. When assisting with wedding pictures of newly arrived east coast bride Polly Gillespie and copper mine captain Long Anthony Harrington, Rourke falls madly in love with Polly. Following a short honeymoon, Polly is ready to escape husband and Butte and head west to San Francisco with Rourke. They steal one horse and head west into the winter wilderness. Polly has some history back east and her husband wants her back so he has the Butte sheriff hire a trio of Cornish trackers to catch the couple. Not necessarily a Happy Ending but the book really lays out the place and period very believably.

Armando Correa's Silence in Her Eyes is a winner. Leah Anderson (28) lives near Columbia University on the 3rd floor of the Mont Cenis apartments on Morningside Drive. She has akinetopsia (motion blindness), a rare neurological disorder. She hasn’t seen movement since she was 8. People think she’s blind, but Leah sees a lot-in static images. Her senses of smell and hearing have risen to almost superpower levels as she registers snapshot views. She lives very quietly with contacts of her doctor, the housekeeper and an elderly neighbor until a new neighbor awakens her with noise from a volent fight next door. Alice is trying to leave her abusive husband but it's not going well. Leah tries to help but is limited and when her apartment is broken into at night, it's too much.

Erik Larson's latest The Demon of Unrest is relevant and timely review of how Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbor became the focal point for the South's moves to secede from the Union following the election of Abraham Lincoln. The book is equal parts a history of secession moving from South Carolina across the South and what was happening inside the fort as the few soldiers short of food, ammunition and materials to repair the fort prepared for the inevitable. The book really illustrates how quickly things get out of hand and become inevitable.

Lois Lowry's latest Tree.Table.Book is an interesting departure for the two-time Newbery award winner. Sophie Winslow is an 11 year old schoolgirl and very best friend is 77 year old Sophie Gershowitz and they share everything over their daily cup of after-school tea. When Sophie senior seems to be slipping a bit, Sophie junior hears that her son is looking into placing his mother into assisted living in another state. Sophie junior, with help from her neighbor friend, Ralphie, begin working on cognitive practice sessions with elderly Sophie. This leads to her opening up her life story which is a real eye-opener for her friend.

Another non-fiction book worth reading is Rick Steve's On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer. During covid lockdown, Rick re-discovered his journals and photographs from his 1978 trip from Europe across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. This is what transformed the piano teacher into the travel writer and organizer, but it was not an easy journey for two young guys on public transportation and cheap housing and food. Lots of illness and travel drama but equally beautiful photos and stories of the hippie trail.

Finally, Holy City by Henry Wise, a debut novel, is the hard telling of life in very rural, south Virginia. A sheriff's deputy returns home after working in Richmond, the title's Holy City,  and is confronted with a murder and an accused black man who claims innocence and the deputy believes him. The local black community hires Bennico Watts, an unpredictable private detective from Richmond, to find the real murderer and Watts and the deputy try to work together. And "try" is the operative word as they both bring Richmond attitudes to a very rural Virginia.

#23-Where did the Year of Really Good Reading Go?

 Okay, I would agree Stuff to Read blog has been a little late getting written, but that doesn't mean I haven't been reading. So what better way to start off  2024 than to tell you what's worth your time to read from 2023. I do have to say last year's reading may have tended to be on the noir or dark side but quality is always quality, so here goes.

High school football is King in Denton, Arkansas and Billy Lowe, the star running back, takes out his frustration and hatred for his mother's boyfriend who abuses him constantly, on crushing anyone trying to tackle him. The new football coach, fresh from California and driving the only Prius in truck-loving Denton, is born-again and bent on saving Billy. But when Billy's abuser is found dead in Billy's trailer, he becomes a suspect and the state playoff hopes suffer. Author, Eli Cranor won the EDGAR award for this first novel, Don't Know Tough, and it's worth a read.

Cranor's second novel, Ozark Dogs, presents Vietnam War veteran Jeremiah Fitzjurls, who is raising his high school aged grand-daughter Joanna, inside his high-fenced junkyard/armory while the dreaded Ledfords, notorious meth dealers and fanatical white supremacists, come to collect on Joanna as payment for a long-overdue blood debt. There is football, a drug cartel and weak local law enforcement moving the story forward.

William Kent Krueger offered his latest stand-alone novel, The River We Remember, in 2023 and it is a real winner. Jewel is a small town on the Alabaster River near the Minnesota-Iowa line, racked by the murder of its wealthiest but least-liked citizen, Jimmy Quinn, by shotgun blast, found floating in the river on Memorial Day, 1958. The sheriff, a WW ll survivor, investigates as rumor points to another war veteran Noah Bluestone who is Native American and has returned to Jewel with his Japanese wife. The setting and in-depth characterization of the characters carries this novel to a winning conclusion.

Dennis Lehane's latest Small Mercies takes place in Boston in the scorching summer of 1974, and centers on Irish Mob conflicts, a missing teenaged white girl, and a Black man's murder on the subway track in the days approaching the first day of school integration during the Boston busing crisis. The story.is told through single mother Mary Pat Fennessy, a Southie, whose daughter doesn't return from a night out. Mary Pat starts turning things over in Southie that are better left untouched in this stunning novel.

James McBride follows his 2020 bestseller, Deacon King Kong (One of my all-time favorite books!) with The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store which begins in the 1970s with the discovery of a corpse in the bottom of a well but shifts back to the 1920s and the Black and Jewish community of Chicken Hill in Pottstown PA and the title grocery store and a music hall and the real novel. It features a huge cast trying to save a young Black boy who is deaf from placement in an evil mental institution. Suffice it to say, McBride moves the characters masterfully in this small town as racism is rampant.

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead is the 2023 return to the characters and setting of his 2021 bestseller Harlem Shuffle to be a work of crime fiction and a family saga that takes place in Harlem during three periods: 1971, 1973, and 1976, the year of the America's bicentennial celebration. The three periods display Harlem through the eyes of Ray Carney, a furniture store owner who has numerous connections to gangs, police fixers and other very interesting characters.

I'm finishing Thomas Perry's latest, Hero, and it is way worth a read. Justine Poole, works for a prestigious security company in LA. She becomes the title character when she thwarts a "follow-home" robbery of two elderly figures in the movie industry, shooting two of the five robbers. She is a media star, but the gang leader hires a killer for pay to take revenge and eliminate Justine. The LAPD are somewhat ambivalent about Justine and her company but when bodies around her start falling in the hired killer's wake,Justine and others are fighting back. This is another Perry work that is ultra logical and detailed about crime and its underbelly. 

And lastly, I have the Vanessa Chen novel, The Storm We Made, on top of the reading pile, so watch for a review of that. It sounds very good. Til next time...keep reading.

 #22- Has It Really Been a Year?     2022 A

Yes, it has and Stuff to Read has fallen way behind. But, I can make up for it quickly in two articles, artfully called 2022 A and 2022 B that will give you a lead on some really good writing worth your time. 2022 A in alphabetical order begins with John Branch's Sidecountry: Tales of Death and Life from the Backroads of Sports. Branch, a NY Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist chose 20 of his favorite articles covering such topics as alligator hunting and sky sailing, avalanche skiing with the aftermath, the Dawn Wall climb by Tommy Caldwell and Alex Jorgeson in Yosemite--BTW, an excellent documentary--and an extended essay on the school girls basketball team at a Tennessee reformatory that hasn't won a game in decades. All are wonderfully written pieces about sports we seldom think about.

H.W. Brands latest Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution goes beyond the history texts to reveal the origins of the split between those loyal to the Crown and Parliament and those opposed who would form the Patriots of the Revolution some years ahead. The interesting emphasis is on the intertwined lives of Washington and Franklin who had their reasons for supporting the Revolution including family squabbles and ambition. Most interesting to me was how this Civil War shifted from the north to the south, especially the Carolinas and Georgia late in the war leading to Yorktown. Another especially good book I've read on the American Revolution in the South is John Buchanan's The Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas.

Next up is Gwendoline Brooks bestseller Horse which intertwines four subplots about the world's fastest thoroughbred, Lexington, born and raised in Kentucky in the 1850s by his Black trainer and son, but raced around the South pre-Civil War, a skeleton of a racehorse found in storage in the Smithsonian, an art dealer who is obsessed with an oil painting of a race horse and two young people in Washington who tie the story together. IMHO, I was not satisfied with the book's ending which had that dreaded quick ending, tacked on but all that preceded--the story of Lexington, the racing, the painting is first rate and worth your time.

A.F. Carter's The Yards is a debut definitely worth reading. Baxter is a mid-west, rust belt town on the way down when Git O'Rourke, a single mother holding 2 jobs as an LPN for the sake of her daughter and mother who lives with them, heads out for a night of bar adventure, and maybe sex. She links up with the best of the bar lot, heads to a local motel, has sex, finds the guy unconscious in bed after a dose of heroin, and leaves with his bag of money and a gun. The next morning local police officer Delia Mariola is called to the motel when the guy in bed now has a bullet hole in his forehead. The book moves among Git, Delia and a local crime king as they work out who shot the guy and why and what happens to the money.

And speaking of a shot to the head, the next book under consideration is One Shot Harry by Gary Phillips. His photographer/process server Harry Ingram listens to the police scanner to get his photography leads but a call about a car accident that kills a friend and fellow Korean war veteran leads Harry into some dangerous territory in racially charged 1963 LA. Phillips presents a mystery but one charged with a lot of history and sociology of the times.

Stephen Pyne,an emeritus faculty member at Arizona State in ecology, earth history who served as a wildland firefighter for many years on the north rim of the Grand Canyon has presented what seems a summary of his thinking on the history of homo sapien's impact on earth as seen through the history of fire. When people learned how to manage fire from volcanic events to clear forests for hunting and eventually, agriculture, all was basically in balance. The middle ages leading into the Industrial Revolution changed that as well as how people viewed fire. Now , people have introduced what Pyne terms the Pyrocene when wildfire combines with climate change to create a new world governed by fire. This is an important book based on a career spent in thought.

The final book in 2022A is another non-fiction/novel written by the late Valparaiso U theologian, teacher and author Walter Wangerin entitled The Book of God. It is written as a continuous story beginning with Abraham and his wife receiving new names and a mission from God. The book moves through the old and new Testaments in chapters as the twelve tribes war with each other and all the other inhabitants of what would become the middle east. It was indeed a bloody time but the Old Testament reads like a novel. I need to borrow it again from my library to read the New.

#21-- 2021 into 2022: Seven Months of Really Good Reading

So, besides hiking, biking, tennis and racquetball, I've enjoyed a good seven months of reading and wanted to share what's really Stuff to Read. Kicking off the list is an old mystery that I've had for about 20 years and re-discovered when I bought the author's latest from 2017, the fifth in a series that began with River of Darkness:: A Novel of Suspense in the Shadow of World War l (1999). This book introduced Inspector John Madden who is a very damaged person after his experiences in the trenches in France during WW l and the deaths of his wife and daughter to the flu epidemic that followed. Madden's 1924-based superiors at Scotland Yard assign him to a multiple murders case in Surrey that appears to be a gang burglary of a country house gone wrong. But Madden doesn't agree after seeing the wounds on the bodies during the autopsy. They appear to be caused by one person using a wartime bayonet. While Madden pursues the killer with the help of the local doctor, a beautiful woman, we are given alternating chapters as the actual murderer prepares his next venture. We are given his history and insight into why he's following the River of Darkness very much in the style of Harris' Silence of the Lambs..

Next in line is Naomi Hirahara's latest, Clark & Division.  Set in 1944 in Chicago's northside, the novel introduces 20 year old Aki Ito and her family who have been released from California's Manzanar camp following Pearl Harbor to live in a Japanese-American community in Chicago with her older sister, Rose. But just as the Ito family is traveling to Chicago, they get word that Rose died when she fell onto the subway tracks .Furthermore, Rose was pregnant and Aki doesn't buy the accident story. The novel carefully presents life in the very segregated community as WW 2 rages and tempers run hot.

Thomas Perry, author of the Butcher's Boy an EDGAR awardwinner in 1983, has a knack for exploring the workings of prison escapes, hired killers and now, The Burglar(2019).Elle Stowell is a young woman with an unconventional profession: burglary. But Elle is no petty thief―with just the right combination of smarts, looks, and skills, she can easily stroll through ritzy Bel Air neighborhoods and pick out the perfect home for plucking the most valuable items. This is how Elle has always gotten by―she is good at it, and she thrives on the thrill. But after stumbling upon a grisly triple homicide while stealing from the home of a wealthy art dealer, Elle discovers that she is no longer the only one sneaking around. Somebody is searching for her. As Elle realizes that her knowledge of the high-profile murder has made her a target, she races to solve the case before becoming the next casualty, using her breaking-and-entering skills to uncover the truth about exactly who the victims were and why someone might have wanted them dead.

Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys authored another great novel last year with The Harlem Shuffle. Ray Carney, a Black man and furniture store owner in 1959-1964 Harlem strives to support his growing family, maybe raise himself in his father-in-laws eyes, and try to turn his crime inclined cousin around. But Ray also is known to take the occasional piece of jewelry, tv, or fancy houseware in "trade" and move it along to a local fence. All is going reasonably well in Ray's life until his cousin joins a gang wanting to knock over the Hotel Theresa-- the Waldorf of Harlem-- and the wrong stuff gets stolen. Ray must use all his skills to avoid the real mafia and corrupt cops as the story moves along. 

Wm. Kent Krueger's 18th novel in his Cork O'Connor series is almost a stand alone as Krueger works the territory he so successfully opened in his novels Ordinary Grace (a 2014 EDGAR award winner) and This Tender Land (2019), another award winning bestseller. Lightning Strike is the prequel to the Cork O'Connor series as Cork, a 12 year old in 1963 Aurora MN, finds the body of one of his heroes hanging from a tree in the deep forest near Iron Lake. Cork's father, the sheriff, is expected to agree with the view that the death of the Ojibwe leader was suicide. But Cork and his dad aren't easily led so they work independently and together to get to the truth. BTW-- Krueger will finally be coming to Loveland on Monday, April 11 for a Loveland Loves 2 Read program on the three mentioned books and his career in writing.

Silvia Garcia-Moreno, best selling author of Mexican Gothic, has produced a novel viewing the 1970s student protests and government crushing of revolt in Velvet was the Night. Maite, a 30 something secretary in a Mexico City law firm, lives lonely and carless in an apartment with her mother's constant criticism and only the latest issue of Secret Romance magazine to give her any relief. El Elvis is a 20 something escapee from rural poverty working as a thug for El Mago and his Hawks who are a government supported group sent to break up demonstrations and deliver bodily damage to the student demonstrators. Their paths move in parallel as Leonora, a neighbor of Maite, leaves her cat and a key to her apartment and disappears. Leonora, has a roll of undeveloped film of the Hawks and police beating students and many parties would like access to it. Elvis follows Maite and discovers that they have a lot in common, hence the title.

Finally, for my post-holiday, non-fiction reading, my daughter gifted me a copy of the 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Like last year's Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, this book is big, 624 pages and it deals with the painful  discussion of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era and life into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The 1619 book is eighteen chapters, each researched, footnoted and written by a different scholar on subjects like politics, music, sugar industry, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. The book is a clear, connected review of US History in the many chapters, stories, poems and photos that reveal the past and present pain that originated in this country when that first ship carrying slaves from Africa landed in Virginia.

#20  Winter into Summer 2021--Vaccinated and Reading Like Crazy

So, it's been six months or so since I updated the waiting world on what has been worthwhile  to read. Christmas brought a gift from my daughter of Barak Obama's first volume of biography, A Promised Land, which weighed in at 700 pages and basically covered his first two years in office. There are returns to his boyhood on Hawaii and his education as he gradually moved into local then state and national politics. The book is very conversational as he talks about his family and especially his wife Michelle and his daughters. He maintains the tone which is highly readable when talking about politicians and world leaders, but he really gets into the detail of the BIG issues of his first two years, namely the worldwide financial collapse of 2008-9 and the Affordable Care Act-Obamacare. If you were not a poli sci major in college you might wish for some serious editorial oversight on topics like these but his writing about foreign policy,especially the hunt for Osama Bin Laden are edge of seat reading. I'd recommend it regardless of political leanings as the writing of a very smart man.

Another earlier gift from my daughter got read as I racked up miles all winter on the recumbent bicycle downstairs. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson was truly a transformational book for me as she pursued in vast historical scope (she interviewed more than 1,000 people) of the Great Migration of Black Americans from the Jim Crow South of the 1920s to the 1970s, focusing on three people--  Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat ; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida orange groves and potential lynching for Harlem and work as a Pullman porter on the NYC to Florida train, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God ; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career in the military and in Los Angeles, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home but exposed him to Vegas gambling and the horses. This book helped me better understand my years growing up in the Calumet Region and news from Chicago on red-lining, race riots and the protests.

A third book by a Black author that I enjoyed immensely was J. Drew Lanham's  The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature which is set in the southwestern corner of South Carolina near Augusta GA. It is the story of his boyhood and family as seen through the lenses of history and nature as he presents the history of the Lanham name originating with a great, great grandfather , a slave in the late 1790s working on the Lanham plantation, tracing down to his grandmother and father living in the Jim Crow south. But equally important are the lessons he learned observing nature on the family's wild lands that led him to college and a Wildlife Ecology professorship at Clemson University. Now retired Lanham still revels in ornithology but he's very aware of his surroundings.

And speaking of the South, we made our first trip of the Covid years to North and South Carolina in late April, May and toured the Kings Mountain National Military Park on the NC/SC border. The Park Ranger strongly recommended  a the book to read to understand the Revolutionary War fought in the South, specifically the Carolinas. and he was right though the 400 pages were somewhat daunting.  The Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas opens with the 1776 Battle of Sullivan’s Island where Patriot forces successfully defended the Charleston Harbor and concludes with the British victory at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in 1781. While these two events bookend this military history, the meat of the work is a battle-by-battle march through the skirmishes and battles of the Southern Campaign, culminating at Guilford Courthouse. The author, John Buchanan, examines not only the battlefield strategy and tactical decisions made in the Carolina back country, but also the personalities and military careers of the major characters of Daniel Morgan, Nathanael Greene, Francis Marion, Sir Henry Clinton, Lord Cornwallis, Banastre Tarleton and Scotsman hero of the Kings Mountain battle, Patrick Ferguson

The final book I wanted to focus on is guitarist extraordinaire Richard Thompson's  brand new book Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975. This presents the early years career of Fairport Convention, a super group of folk and rock musicians who scuffled along Great Britain but made exceptional music. And Thompson can write!