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Alden Mudge

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The Moth and the Mountain

Review by Alden Mudge

Ed Caesar’s irresistible book The Moth and the Mountain tells two essential stories. Its primary story is an account of Maurice Wilson’s ill-fated 1934 attempt to be the first solo climber to summit Mt. Everest. Wilson is barely a footnote in Everest climbing history, usually derided as a grandiose dilettante whose widely publicized ambitions were not only absurd but fatal. And yet, as he promised, the traumatized, highly decorated World War I officer did learn to fly, did elude British colonial authorities seeking to ground his efforts at every turn, did pilot a biplane to India (despite an absurdly wrongheaded takeoff), did sneak across the border into Tibet dressed in the elaborate garb of a suspiciously tall holy man and did climb to substantial heights on Mt. Everest.

The important second story Ed Caesar tells is about his own obsession with solving the mysteries of Maurice Wilson. What gave Wilson his bold determination? Was it his desire to romance Enid Evans, his supposed “soul mate”? Caesar, a terrific writer and a contributor to the New Yorker, introduces us to Enid this way: "Enid was slim, winsome, brown haired, stylish, vivacious, and married. Wilson was cripplingly in love with her, and not just because of her faith in his mission."

Or might it be because of Wilson’s wartime trauma? Wilson, the son of a provincial textile manufacturer, was not of the right class to be a British officer. But the decimation in the trenches of the war led to his elevation to leadership. He performed heroically and, as a result, experienced physical and psychological torments for years. Were these wounds what led him to try to prove himself on the mountain?

The frustrating thing for Caesar and for us is that some of life’s questions are unanswerable. Enid’s letters to Maurice are lost, presumably destroyed by her husband. Caesar discovers a relative of Wilson who reveals some information but says, provocatively, that other bits will go with him to the grave. The Moth and the Mountain has many, many riveting moments of storytelling and insight, and yet, some answers to the mystery of Maurice Wilson remain shrouded in the mists of Mt. Everest.

Ed Caesar’s irresistible book The Moth and the Mountain tells two essential stories. Its primary story is an account of Maurice Wilson’s ill-fated 1934 attempt to be the first solo climber to summit Mt. Everest. Wilson is barely a footnote in Everest climbing history, usually derided as a grandiose dilettante whose widely publicized ambitions were not only absurd but fatal. […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

Nick

Review by Alden Mudge

It is a brave and ambitious project to write the backstory of Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic, The Great Gatsby, but that is what Michael Farris Smith does in his sixth novel, Nick. One of Smith’s most compelling insights is that many of the high-flying men partying through the Roaring ’20s, as depicted in Fitzgerald’s great novel, had only recently returned from the harrowing trench warfare of the First World War. “Shell shock,” “battle fatigue” and PTSD were poorly understood at that time and often simply dismissed as cowardice. In previous novels, Smith has written eloquently and sometimes in excruciating detail about masculine brutality and trauma. He does so again in Nick.

The novel opens with Nick at a cafe in Paris on leave from the war. When he meets and falls in love with a destitute artist, he debates going AWOL and staying with his beloved, but he is Minnesota born, the son of a small-town hardware store owner and a deeply depressed mother, and he knows where his duty lies. His return to the trenches is vividly depicted: Smith’s descriptions of warfare are cinematic, chilling and unforgettable.

At war’s end, Nick searches Paris for his love but is unable to find her. He is among the last soldiers to return to America, clearly traumatized and unable to go back to Minnesota. Instead he travels to New Orleans and winds up in the city’s notorious red-light district, where a bond with a fellow scarred soldier offers enough redemption for Nick to return home to recover, then travel on to East Egg and his meeting with Gatsby.

This is just an outline of a deeper investigation of war and its consequences. In style and theme, this Nick will remind readers of another Nick: the character Nick Adams of Ernest Hemingway’s best short stories.

It is a brave and ambitious project to write the backstory of Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic, The Great Gatsby, but that is what Michael Farris Smith does in his sixth novel, Nick.
NonfictionMemoir

The Sediments of Time

Review by Alden Mudge

Attentive readers of Meave Leakey’s masterful memoir, The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past, will learn a few details about her personal life. She was recruited by the great Louis Leakey for paleontological research in Africa in 1965, after sexism prevented her from working as a marine biologist. After completing her Ph.D., she returned to Kenya in 1969 for good. She fell in love with Louis’ son, Richard Leakey, despite his obnoxious reputation and the fact that he was then in an unhappy marriage. They had two daughters, who spent “field season” in remote areas of Kenya hunting fossils with their parents and their collaborators. After Richard was named the head of Kenya’s wildlife conservation department to end a rampage of elephant poaching, Meave became head of the field research operation and spent much of her life apart from him, especially as he became more involved in politics. Years later, long after Richard had lost his legs in a plane crash, she donated a kidney to him. And so on.

But the main and most illuminating parts of The Sediments of Time are about the tedious, painstaking years spent hunting for the fossilized remains of our species’ precursors. Drawing on field notes, interviews and research papers, Meave recounts the work that led to some of her and her team’s greatest discoveries. She demonstrates the astonishing amount of knowledge that can be gained, for example, through meticulous examination of something as seemingly unimportant as a prehistoric baby tooth. She writes of the shoestring budgets paleontologists operate on, the competition for research grants and the need for significant discoveries to maintain funding—and of the collaborative nature of the field’s efforts despite the competition for money. She also hails the positive impact of new communication and digital technologies in the field.

Best of all, Meave and her co-writer, her youngest daughter Samira Leakey, write clearly and compellingly about what these discoveries mean. In a fascinating chapter inspired by the birth of her grandchildren, Meave explores the advantages for our species of having parents who live long beyond childbearing years. Other chapters concern the development of our most distinguishing features: walking on two feet, the amazing mobility of our hands and the size of our brains. Some readers may find this all goes too deep into the sands of time, but many more will find it a thrilling account.

Attentive readers of Meave Leakey’s masterful memoir, The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past, will learn a few details about her personal life. She was recruited by the great Louis Leakey for paleontological research in Africa in 1965, after sexism prevented her from working as a marine biologist. After completing her Ph.D., […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

Jack

Review by Alden Mudge

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful, profound novel Jack will not be for every reader.

First of all, it’s a slow read. It has fewer than 300 pages, and if it had a vigorous plot, you’d rush through it in less than a week. Instead, you’ll find yourself spending much longer in the tangled, contradictory thoughts of John Ames Boughton—the titular Jack. You’ll want to stop and consider the foolish and wise things he thinks. You’ll wonder why he seems so eager to defeat himself. If you allow yourself the time, you could easily spend a month reading and thinking about Jack, about old-time Christian debates regarding grace, redemption and love.

Second, there’s the whole moral problem of Jack. You’ve seen him and felt him in the midst and at the edges of Robinson’s previous novels in the widely hailed Gilead cycle: Gilead, Home and Lila. He is the prodigal son of Reverend Robert Boughton of Gilead, Iowa. Since boyhood, Jack has had a shameful talent and urge for petty theft. Now, much older and out of prison, he flops in a single-occupancy hotel on the white side of segregated St. Louis just after World War II. At the beginning of the novel, he finds himself locked in a whites-only cemetery after hours, where he meets a young Black woman named Della Miles who has come there because Jack once praised the place to her. In the mysterious darkness, they talk about poetry and Hamlet and the coincidence that they are both children of ministers. He is aware of the shame that will result from her being discovered there. He wants to protect her. Yet he tells her he is the Prince of Darkness. You wonder if he is joking or really believes it.

Third is the question of Della. She is young, smart and from a good Christian family. She teaches English at the local Black high school. She is the beloved daughter of an esteemed Baptist bishop in Memphis. The risk to her and her family’s reputation in associating with Jack could be devastating. So why in God’s name would she fall in love with Jack? What does it even mean that she believes she has seen his holy human soul?

These are just a few of the spirit-boggling questions a reader will encounter by dipping into Robinson’s glorious new novel.

If you allow yourself the time, you could easily spend a month reading and thinking about Jack, about old-time Christian debates regarding grace, redemption and love.
NonfictionSocial SciencePop Culture

The Sprawl

Review by Alden Mudge

Think of The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs as an idiosyncratic road trip through America’s suburbs. Your guide, Jason Diamond, grew up in suburban Chicago but has lived much of his adult life in New York City. A recurring question during this excursion is whether or not Diamond will live in the suburbs again.

He tells us he has recently read everything he could find about suburbia. This includes fiction by John Cheever, who shaped our experience of suburban New York, and work by Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury and Celeste Ng. And let’s not forget William Gibson, the speculative-fiction writer who founded the cyberpunk genre and grew up in suburban Charlottesville, North Carolina, which he once described as “like living on Mars.”

There are movies, music and TV here, too. Who could forget Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candle or "Leave It to Beaver"?  Or the work of David Lynch, whom Diamond credits with darkening our simple notions of the suburbs with a haunting idea that “there’s darkness hiding in the corner of the [suburban] room or standing on the nice lawn.” Music? Yes! We park for a time along grassy streets to listen to garage bands rouse the neighbors. We imagine other garages where teens tinker toward new technologies.

“I like to seek out places connected to movies and shows I love,” Diamond writes. Thus we travel to Seaside, the real-life location of Seahaven Island from Jim Carey’s The Truman Show. More out of curiosity than love, we visit Celebration, Florida, Disney’s planned community, which Diamond says is pretty creepy in its near-perfection. We’ve already visited ur-suburbs like Zion, Illinois, and Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, would-be Edens founded by confused or saintly hucksters to escape the evils of city life without actually going back to hunting and gathering. And of course there is Levittown, New York, the very image of suburban regimentation. Finally, we pause in a cul-de-sac to briefly consider the changing demographics of suburbs in the age of movements like Black Lives Matter.

Like all road trips, The Sprawl has its lolling moments. Diamond’s suburbs are lonely and boring places in need of a sense of community or at least a trip to the mall. Our attention wanders, and we focus on what Diamond reveals about himself, his boyhood bouncing from suburb to suburb to be with one or another of his divorced parents. But then a thought rouses us: The very blandness of these burbs is at the root of an ongoing restless, creative explosion. Diamond, as promised, lets us see “just how much the suburbs have influenced our culture.”

Think of The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs as an idiosyncratic road trip through America’s suburbs. Your guide, Jason Diamond, grew up in suburban Chicago but has lived much of his adult life in New York City. A recurring question during this excursion is whether or not Diamond will live in the suburbs again. He tells […]
FictionFamily Drama

Monogamy

Review by Alden Mudge

Any story told quickly, without the chill or warmth of accumulated details, becomes a cliche. For example: After 30 or so years of a relatively happy marriage, a woman wakes to find her husband dead beside her. Her grief is nearly unbearable until, at his memorial, she discovers he had been having an affair. She becomes angry. What then? We’ve heard this tale a couple of times, and that is one way to summarize the story Sue Miller tells in her 11th novel, Monogamy. The best approach to this unbelievably good novel, however, is to avoid summary altogether and simply urge readers to read—and reread—the book itself.

Here is a taste of what a reader will find: The long marriage of Annie and Graham is a second marriage for both. Each has a past that captured and shaped them. Graham, who co-owns a bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a passionate, needy, generous man who clasps his past—his ex-wife, for example—more closely than Annie does hers. It’s not irrelevant that Annie, a thoughtful person and a good-not-great photographer, views the world through her own lens and keeps any boisterous turbulence at a bit of a distance. Annie and Graham really do love one another. But the past is always up for reevaluation. So is our understanding of ourselves and others.

Miller is excellent at conveying and illuminating the inner lives of her characters, and she remains one of the best writers at depicting the day-to-day normality of sexual desire. Events occur in this novel—normal sorts of things—and Miller’s attention, her descriptions and the tempo at which she reveals them help us feel these events truly and deeply. She has found in Monogamy probably the best expression of her longtime interest in sociograms, an exercise to demonstrate how lives intersect and influence each other. Among the relationships of the characters in Monogamy, there are reverberations upon reverberations.

How great is Monogamy? If this is not Miller’s best novel, it is surely among her very best. One measure of that is how the experience of it deepens with each reading.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Sue Miller on our ever-changing perceptions of ourselves and each other.

How great is Monogamy? If this is not Miller’s best novel, it is surely among her very best. One measure of that is how the experience of it deepens with each reading.
NonfictionBusiness & FinanceArt

The Death of the Artist

Review by Alden Mudge

In 2014, award-winning essayist William Deresiewicz roiled the placid ponds of academia with his controversial attack on American elite education in his book Excellent Sheep. Prepare yourself, because he’s back. His wide-ranging, vividly written new book focuses on how big tech and big money—the new economy—are devastating artists and the arts.

In The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, one of Deresiewicz’s key points—and the object of much of his diatribe—is that it isn’t necessarily a good thing that the internet allows unmediated access to audiences and artists. Sure, there are benefits, but it also “starves professional production [and] fosters the amateur kind.” Big tech has also convinced us that we can all be artists and has given us the tools (but not the talent) to believe it, with questionable results. He writes, “Have you seen your cousin’s improv troupe? Is that the only kind of art you want to have available, not only for the rest of your life but for the rest of the foreseeable future?”

William Deresiewicz’s wide-ranging, vividly written new book focuses on how big tech and big money—the new economy—are devastating artists and the arts.

How and why we may be on the verge of this eventuality—in music, writing, visual arts, film and television—is the thrust of his inquiry. In his research, Deresiewicz interviews roughly 140 artists, most of whom we might call midlevel, midcareer artists, who make up the broad ecosystem from which great work arises, and the very people likely to disappear in a new economy that favors the few. “Bestselling books have gotten bestier; blockbuster movies have gotten bustier,” Deresiewicz pointedly observes.

In the end, he argues that a new economic paradigm has arisen, and artists must respond to it. Some of his recommendations are oddly old school. For one, artists who are now asked to work for free to build an online audience, a following, must demand to be paid. “I cannot think of another field in which people feel guilty about being paid for their work—and even guiltier for wanting to be paid,” he writes. “Arts and artists must be in the market but not of it,” which is of course easier said than done these days.

But Deresiewicz’s most profound recommendations—a breakup of tech monopolies and the end to extreme inequality—are revolutionary and perhaps impossible to achieve. So there is much to think about and even more to argue with in The Death of the Artist. And that is its point.

In 2014, award-winning essayist William Deresiewicz roiled the placid ponds of academia with his controversial attack on American elite education in his book Excellent Sheep. Prepare yourself, because he’s back. His wide-ranging, vividly written new book focuses on how big tech and big money—the new economy—are devastating artists and the arts. In The Death of […]
FictionFamily Drama

The Death of Vivek Oji

Review by Alden Mudge

In Akwaeke Emezi’s brief, remarkable second novel for adults, the reader knows from the start that the central character, Vivek Oji, is dead. After riots in the marketplace of their Nigerian town, Vivek’s mother discovers his naked body placed “like a parcel, like a gift” at the family’s doorstep. Why was he killed? Who killed him? Who was he? Answers emerge incompletely, surprisingly and in fragments as the novel progresses and casts its spell.

“I’m not what anyone thinks I am. I never was,” Vivek says from somewhere outside life. “Every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them.”

One of the brilliant aspects of this novel is how Emezi makes a person’s invisibility visible. As a child, Vivek is bright, beautiful and by turns violently angry and girlishly shy. He is often beset by fugue states during which his body is present and his consciousness vanishes. Vivek’s family is loving but unable to comprehend him. His extended family is populated by “Nigerwives,” women from India, the Philippines or Sweden who are married to Nigerian men. Outdated sexual traditions and identities—multiple wives for Nigerian men and a sanctified horror of gay people, for example—still prevail in these families. After being forced to leave university, Vivek spends more and more time with the daughters of his extended family. These daughters are of a new generation and seem to understand and protect him.

Yes, it takes a village to raise a child. But, Emezi implies, it takes a culture and its mythologies to erase a child. The Death of Vivek Oji is a profound exploration of the boundaries of personal, sexual and cultural transition.

Yes, it takes a village to raise a child. But, Emezi implies, it takes a culture and its mythologies to erase a child. The Death of Vivek Oji is a profound exploration of the boundaries of personal, sexual and cultural transition.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Tokyo Ueno Station

Review by Alden Mudge

As a high school dropout, a single mother and a Japan-born ethnic Korean, Yu Miri has always been a controversial yet surprisingly popular cultural outsider in Japan. Her first novel was banned by the courts. Her second novel, published in 1996, won a prestigious literary award for young writers. In her brief, moving, poetic new novel, Tokyo Ueno Station, Miri remains focused on Japan’s marginalized people.

Kazu, the central character, is a homeless man who haunts the perimeter of Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Gift park, the largest and most important cultural park in the city. The park lies adjacent to Ueno metro station, not far from what was once known as the demon’s gate at the unlucky northeast edge of the city.

Kazu is an impoverished and uneducated laborer from the rural northern province of Fukushima who must live, for most of his life, far from home to earn money to support to his family. He arrives in Tokyo to work on the construction of the site of the 1964 Olympics. Successive misfortunes send him to the homeless encampment at the edge of the park. Now Kazu drifts along the pathways of the park, overhearing snatches of conversation and remembering conversations with a more learned homeless friend who explains the meaning of the museums and nearby historical monuments.

All this we learn indirectly, slowly, in pieces. Time collapses in this novel, with the present, past and historical past interwoven. There is a mesmerizing, wavelike tumult and calm in the story’s movement. We gradually surmise that the isolated Kazu is now a ghost. Kazu reflects that he was born in 1933, the same year as the emperor. And his ill-fated son is born on the same day as the emperor’s son. This is supposed to be fortunate, but Kazu’s mother repeatedly tells him that he has no luck. That seems true regarding Kazu’s personal journey, but a thoughtful reader must wonder if bad luck alone explains the sorry fate of this wandering soul.

As a high school dropout, a single mother and a Japan-born ethnic Korean, Yu Miri has always been a controversial yet surprisingly popular cultural outsider in Japan. Her first novel was banned by the courts. Her second novel, published in 1996, won a prestigious literary award for young writers. In her brief, moving, poetic new novel, Tokyo Ueno Station, Miri remains focused on Japan’s marginalized people.

FictionLiterary Fiction

The Yield

Review by Alden Mudge

In Tara June Winch’s engaging third book, The Yield, a young woman named August Gondiwindi flies back to Australia, rents a car and drives seven hours inland to the aptly named town of Massacre Plains. This is the small town where August grew up in the care of her grandparents. It’s a place “where the sun slap[s] the earth with an open palm.” It’s the place she fled as a teenager after the traumatic disappearance of her older sister and protector. She is returning after many years for the funeral of her grandfather, Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi, a revered Wiradjuri (indigenous Australian) elder. She soon discovers that her grandmother and family members are being evicted from their lands because an extraction company has acquired the mineral rights and plans to excavate a vast open-pit tin mine.

Even with a slightly pat ending, this thread of Winch’s narrative is irresistible, as she offers the reader both a tactile and spiritual feel for the forbidding landscape. Her portrayal of August’s rediscovery of herself and her ties to her home is moving. She presents the legacy of oppression and strife among local indigenous people and European settlers with great nuance.

But it’s when this initial thread intertwines with two other storylines that the novel fully realizes itself. One of these narratives is a long letter, a testimony of sorts, from an early 19th-century missionary who finds his calling among the oppressed Wiradjuri. In contrast to church and government powers, he comes to oppose the policy of tearing children from their families in order to “civilize” them. He realizes that the supposed “stupidity” of the indigenous people is actually a profound understanding of their environment. He worries constantly that his ministrations are not helpful, and he discovers that his advocacy makes him a hated outsider.

The other and most innovative thread involves excerpts from the dictionary of Wiradjuri words that Poppy begins compiling near the end of his life. Stripping a people of their language is a standard method for snuffing out indigenous cultures. Poppy’s effort is an act of resistance and affirmation. But the dictionary appears to be lost, and one of August’s quests is to find it.

Winch, an award-winning Aboriginal Australian writer who is now based in France, uses this dictionary of recovered indigenous words to transmit the deeper story of Gondiwindi family history. We read it—and the novel as a whole—with both sorrow and hope. 

Winch, an award-winning Aboriginal Australian writer who is now based in France, uses this dictionary of recovered indigenous words to transmit the deeper story of Gondiwindi family history. We read it—and the novel as a whole—with both sorrow and hope. 

FictionLiterary Fiction

The Glass Hotel

Review by Alden Mudge

Emily St. John Mandel follows her bestselling post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, with a more intricately layered—and better—novel about having money, not having money and the guilt, sorrow and panic of gaining it and losing it. The Glass Hotel is also, by the way, a bit of a ghost story.

The Hotel Caiette, the glass hotel of the title, is a super luxury hotel in a remote corner of Vancouver Island, a “five-star experience where your cell phone doesn’t work.” A young local woman named Vincent winds up working there as a bartender after some youthful bohemian years off the island. She is smart, witty and elegant. She catches the eye of Jonathan Alkaitis, the investment-fund mogul who owns the hotel and who soon invites her to become, essentially, his trophy wife. It’s a transaction she accepts. She moves to a posh house in Connecticut and thrives among the uber-wealthy. But it turns out that Alkaitis is running a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme. When it collapses, Vincent eventually begins a third life as an itinerant cook on an international container ship.

Mandel’s narrative does not unfold as directly and cleanly as this summary suggests. Rather, the story circles through time, deepening with each pass. This is one of its wonders. Another is how lively and sometimes mysterious the novel’s minor characters are. Vincent’s half-brother Paul, for instance, doesn’t steal money but instead appropriates an essential part of Vincent’s creative being. Alkaitis’ beloved older brother was a talented artist who died of a drug overdose, and that shapes Alkaitis’ interactions with one of his more vulnerable investors, an artist who painted a portrait of the brother. The wily Mandel even brings back characters from Station Eleven to playfully suggest that we are reading about a parallel universe.

Mandel is a vivid and observant storyteller. Some small observations make you laugh out loud. For example, that you can distinguish wealthy people from the Western U.S. from wealthy people of New York, because the former are prematurely weathered from all their skiing. But other observations are more somber. As Mandel writes, “There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life.” In this novel, the hauntings are literal and metaphorical.

The Glass Hotel is a dark, disturbing story but also an enthralling one.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Emily St. John Mandel discusses The Glass Hotel, the “kingdom of money” and the dangers of international waters.

Emily St. John Mandel follows her bestselling post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, with a more intricately layered—and better—novel about having money, not having money, the guilt, sorrow and panic of gaining it and losing it. The Glass Hotel is also, by the way, a bit of a ghost story.

FictionFamily Saga

These Ghosts Are Family

Review by Alden Mudge

As the title of Maisy Card’s radiant debut suggests, this is a story of a family shaped and haunted by the past. The Paisley family’s origin story, revealed as the narrative circles down and swims up through eight generations of family life, begins with the particularly cruel form of slavery practiced on Jamaican sugar plantations. 

The novel opens in 2005, when 69-year-old Jamaican-born Stanford Solomon summons his female descendants to his home in Harlem to tell them who he—and they—really are. The women include Stanford’s home healthcare worker, who has no idea that he is the father she thought was long dead. 

Stanford, we learn, began life as Abel Paisley. In a miserable marriage and scarred by his experience as a rookie policeman, Abel leaves Jamaica in 1970 to find work in England along with his friend, the real Stanford. In London, they find work on the docks. When Stanford is crushed by a shipping container, the other dockworkers think the dead man is Abel. All black men look alike, right? Abel, now Stanford, seizes the moment. He abandons his family, still in Jamaica, and goes to New York to start a new life. 

But on this day in 2005, it’s time for a reckoning. This all happens within the first three pages of the novel. There are many other reckonings ahead.

Card is a beguiling storyteller, and These Ghosts Are Family is layered with fraught family relationships arising from the complicated legacies of the racial divide in Jamaica and in the United States. Card’s characters—even the ghosts—are vividly drawn and compelling. The story, told in a satisfying blend of dialect and standard English, will make the reader consider both the emotional lives of the characters and the worldly circumstances that shaped them and their choices.

Card was born in Jamaica and grew up in Queens, New York. She is a public librarian and now one of our brightest new writers. There is magic in these pages.

Maisy Card is a beguiling storyteller, and These Ghosts Are Family is layered with fraught family relationships arising from the complicated legacies of the racial divide in Jamaica and in the United States.
NonfictionHistoryBlack History

Overground Railroad

Review by Alden Mudge

Not even Candacy Taylor’s electrifying deep dive into the history of the Green Book can fully explain what inspired Victor Green to launch his guidebooks for black travelers in 1938. There were similar, short-lived guides meant to help black travelers avoid the humiliations of Jim Crow laws and so-called sundown communities, where black people had to be out of town by 6 p.m. But Green, who lived in Harlem and was a mail carrier in Hackensack, New Jersey, for 39 years, was informative, sincere and genial. He had staying power. His guides were published annually from 1938 to 1967, shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, with a hiatus during World War II. In the best years, millions of copies may have been sold.

In Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America, Taylor follows the chronology of the Green Book’s development and, more importantly, provides fascinating and often disturbing context. The first guide, for example, focused mostly on Harlem, so Taylor presents riveting stories about the Apollo Theater and the Lafayette Theater, where Orson Welles produced “Voodoo Macbeth,” a retelling of the Shakespeare play with an all-black cast. In the section that recommends a few golf courses open to black players, we learn that a black dentist named George Grant invented the golf tee, and that in Louisiana, a black man named Joseph Bartholomew designed public golf courses that he wasn’t allowed to play on. We also learn that the automobile freed black travelers from the constant indignities visited upon them when they took trains and buses; that Cadillac ordered its dealers not to sell to black people because it would damage the brand; and that, since black GIs returning from World War II had difficulty using the GI Bill for college, Green’s postwar editions included a list of black colleges and universities.

This only touches the surface of Taylor’s amazing book. As part of her research, she traveled thousands of miles and visited more than 4,000 sites listed in editions of the Green Book. Only 5% of those businesses still exist, most having succumbed to urban blight or urban renewal, which bulldozed many black neighborhoods to make way for local freeways. Taylor generated so much fascinating material in working on this book that she’s now developing a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition. 

Overground Railroad is an eye-opening, deeply moving social history of American segregation and black migration during the middle years of the 20th century.

Not even Candacy Taylor’s electrifying deep dive into the history of the Green Book can fully explain what inspired Victor Green to launch his guidebooks for black travelers in 1938. There were similar, short-lived guides meant to help black travelers avoid the humiliations of Jim Crow laws and so-called sundown communities, where black people had […]

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