Book of the Day Roundup: July 3-7, 2023
The All-American
Susie Finkbeiner
Revell
Softcover $16.99 (368pp)
978-0-8007-3936-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Sisters’ lives are upended when their father is accused of being a communist in Susie Finkbeiner’s historical novel The All-American.
Bertha is a high school student in Michigan. Her mother is British; her father is a talented novelist whose work has been likened to John Steinbeck’s. Her sister, Flossie, is a precocious library patron who’s eager to grow up and who has few friends. Bertha herself longs to join a girls’ baseball league; she practices with the neighborhood boys. Their family’s love is apparent in everyday sketches that reveal how each member stands out in their suburban town.
But trouble is brewing: newspaper articles cover the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which include a neighbor’s testimony. Bertha and Flossie’s father falls under investigation too, and the family’s neighbors begin to ostracize them. They are forced to move to Bear Run and live with a taciturn uncle, Matthew. Despite these circumstances, Bertha and Flossie adapt.
The novel’s themes of patriotism and censorship are handled in a light manner. Indeed, the threat to the family recedes as the story progresses. Instead, the book focuses on the positives, as with letters sent to loved ones back home. The sisters continue to pursue their hobbies, and their chatter draws Matthew’s personality out; he becomes an unexpected source of encouragement.
Bertha’s tryout for the baseball team generates anticipation and results in messages of hope. Christian ideas about enduring trials are sprinkled throughout the book’s latter half, though they’re somewhat underdeveloped and are made necessary because of a tragedy.
In the vivid, episodic historical novel The All-American, a family targeted by McCarthy-era hysteria grows closer while they’re awaiting justice; their dreams are kept alive despite the intrigue that ensnares them.
KAREN RIGBY (June 27, 2023)
Into the Bright Sunshine
Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights
Samuel G. Freedman
Oxford University Press
Hardcover $29.95 (336pp)
978-0-19-753519-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Into the Bright Sunshine is an incisive biography of Hubert Humphrey, the rural Midwesterner who grew into a prominent, persuasive politician in the vanguard of civil rights.
Humphrey’s Great Depression-era childhood in South Dakota was isolated and challenging. It also shaped him into an unlikely hero. Fragile in health, long-winded, ever strapped for cash, he nonetheless ascended to become a popular, progressive Democrat whose support for the Vietnam War clouded his legacy.
Humphrey attended graduate school in the South. Later, as Minneapolis’s mayor, he was further exposed to gross examples of racial and religious bigotry. Vivid profiles of Humphrey’s political allies and adversaries flesh out the social context of his time: he formed longtime friendships with a Black newspaperman, Cecil Newman, and with Jewish activist Sam Scheiner. These personal experiences and relationships had a powerful influence on his promotions of social justice.
The book’s dramatic crescendo is Humphrey’s speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, an event of “underappreciated importance in civil rights history.” The sweaty, nerve-wracking tension of the speech, which could have been political suicide, is imparted. Instead, Humphrey achieved a triumph of tactical and oratory skill, calling for the country to “walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” He was prescient in his vision of a successful long-term Democratic coalition that included Black voters.
The behind-the-scenes details of turning points throughout Humphrey’s career are captivating. Policy wonks will revel in absorbing glimpses of Sam Rayburn’s parliamentary wizardry, Dixiecrats’ machinations, and Harry Truman’s back-and-forth support for desegregation. The workings of journalism and politics in the pre-television, pre-internet age, when national conventions were a hotbed of political action, with millions of people captivated by their radio broadcasts, are also conveyed.
Into the Bright Sunshine is astute in capturing pivotal moments in American political history.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (June 27, 2023)
The Ice Harp
The American Novels
Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press
Softcover $17.99 (240pp)
978-1-954276-17-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Norman Lock’s historical novel The Ice Harp, Ralph Waldo Emerson struggles with encroaching dementia and the incontrovertible realities of aging.
In 1879, Emerson is seventy-six and troubled. Once heralded as the Sage of Concord, the brilliant essayist, philosopher, and poet clings to his remaining knowledge, though his memory and thoughts are often addled and disordered. He also has frequent visions—visits from ghostly friends. He engages in reflective conversations with the late Henry David Thoreau, abolitionist John Brown, and fellow transcendentalist Margaret Fuller.
Emerson’s wife, Lidian, worries about her husband’s “fuddled” behavior, and that he’ll soon be eating “breakfast in the asylum.” But when Emerson meets James Stokes, a former slave and a fugitive soldier, he is confronted with a more immediate dilemma. After being provoked by racial slurs, Stokes killed a white man; he is trying to escape likely execution. As Emerson recalls his own anti-slavery exhortations, he contemplates the paradox of Black emancipation in post-Civil War America.
This compelling narrative is heightened by intricate historical details and its distinct New England setting. Oilcloth on a kitchen table is “gashed from cutting pie dough into strips.” Emerson’s neighbor, Louisa May Alcott, keeps first aid supplies in a ladies’ hatbox, while in Thoreau’s Walden Woods, the famed pond is like a “bowl brimming with silver.” And without pathos, the book conveys Emerson’s fearful frustrations regarding his mental state. Amid the pensive turmoil of his thoughts are instances of wry eloquence; he notes how memory “is the thread on which the beads of a human life are strung,” and worries his thread has snapped.
A fascinating and haunting novel, The Ice Harp chronicles the vulnerable mortality of an American genius.
MEG NOLA (June 27, 2023)
Her Own Revolution
Debra Borchert
Le Vin Press
Softcover $19.99 (425pp)
978-0-9894545-7-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Debra Borchert’s suspenseful historical novel Her Own Revolution, a woman is pulled between a sense of duty to her French family and her personal beliefs.
Geneviève is a strong-willed Parisienne who resents that she doesn’t have the same freedom, safety, and rights as a man. Thus, she dresses like a man to achieve her goals, including attending university and earning passage to America to reunite with her lover, Henri. Her choices are risky; her father is a public prosecutor under whom she works as a clerk, and he would make an example out of her if he knew. And Geneviève’s conscience strikes her when an executioner’s list passes through her hands, inspiring her to save a former classmate, Louis.
Geneviève delivers keen insights into her own desires and reveals 1790s France in the process. The book’s details about the era’s prisons, restrictions, cautious citizenry, and anti-royalism are visceral. The story moves from the countryside to dank underground tunnels, revealing Geneviève’s stepmother’s Sèvres-set dining table and a Paris printshop that forges identity papers alongside instances of violence and public barbarism.
Amid broader moral concerns and the duplicity involved in hiding her actions to save people from execution, Geneviève’s story is intimate, too, drawing forth her uncertainty about Henri’s intentions. The risk of being discovered is constant; her sense of duty leads to daring rescues, including of orphans. As Geneviève trades between acting as both a man and a woman for safety, she develops fresh resolve, staying humane despite the turbulence. Louis, in turn, proves to be her resourceful, surprising equal.
An engrossing depiction of feminine courage, the novel Her Own Revolution features a renegade heroine whose compassion for innocent people leads to both loss and love.
KAREN RIGBY (June 27, 2023)
American Idolatry
How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church
Andrew L. Whitehead
Brazos Press
Hardcover $24.99 (240pp)
978-1-58743-576-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
With a mix of scientific and insider perspectives, sociologist Andrew L. Whitehead’s American Idolatry is a fascinating investigation of politics and racism in American Christian evangelicalism.
Using statistical data and stories from American history, the book reveals white evangelical Christian distrust toward others. Whitehead argues that the real “American idol,” worshiped and sought after, is power. His book covers the process by which white Christians tolerate nationalism or become nationalist themselves, showing how fears of the Other are used to scare evangelicals into stances that are the opposite of Jesus’s own teachings regarding charity and compassion. Indeed, Whitehead says, some evangelical leaders encourage this alienation, using it to gain power and influence in the public sphere.
Most of the book focuses on big-picture patterns in American evangelical Christianity, among which are included evocative vignettes from Whitehead’s small-town youth, as with a memory of a public school teacher engaging in popular culture wars by showing his class a threatening video of a martyr of “some futuristic un-named authoritarian regime” in which the faithful would be pitted against the government. Here and elsewhere, Whitehead’s work leaves the frightening impression that secular and evangelical Americans live in different countries, determining differing secular and evangelical reactions to violence, sexism, and racism. However, balancing out these impressions are inspirational stories from contemporary Christians who exemplify a better way, volunteering and working to serve their whole communities, not just those in their own church. Still, because it discusses Christian nationalism and racism on broad levels, the book leaves nationalism’s effects on individual Christians somewhat under explored.
Sharing eye-opening data and stories from American history and an evangelical childhood, American Idolatry is an informative text that asks Christians to reject xenophobia and love their neighbors instead.
MEREDITH GRAHL COUNTS (June 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
