The Housekeeper's Tale: The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House

Domestic service was the main industry for women in paid work 150 years ago. 100 years ago it was dying out and it's now rare in private homes. The women who worked these difficult and all-consuming jobs rarely left detailed records, so (with one exception) Tessa Boase has to reconstruct their lives from public records and somewhat random items saved by their employers. She profiles five women:

    Dorothy Doar, the rare married woman in the role who lost her position for requesting a few weeks of maternity leave during the high Victorian period

    Sarah Wells, an older woman who'd been in service before marriage and returned as housekeeper to a former dairymaid's cousin who'd inherited both a house and a name (Sarah kept extensive diaries, and her time at Uppark was also recorded by her son Bertie)

    Ellen Peketh, accused of theft by her insecure and unprepared mistress and ended up working as a hotel cook

    Hannah MacKenzie, the cook-housekeeper at a country-house-turned-WWI-hospital forced out in a power struggle (she ended up as the housekeeper to Grace Vanderbilt, a definite case of "falling up")

    Grace Higgins, whose time as housekeeper to Vanessa Bell lasted into the 60s and brought her close to the Bloomberg Set.

Although the stories are personal, we can extrapolate from them to see that the work was backbreaking, tenure was at the whim of the Lady of the House, and even "kindly" mistresses were thoroughly classist. Boase's writing style is a bit dry and but the lives of the women she profiles are far more interesting than their day-to-day routines.

A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

 If you look hard enough, you can find a book on any topic. There may even be a reserve queue at your local library. A Place For Everything's subtitle isn't quite accurate; it's more a history of information systems. Tracing the categorization of knowledge from the origins of writing (while pictographic systems developed in many places, alphabets appeared spontaneously in only three places). When people and ideas didn't travel, we didn't need a universal way to categorize information but with trade and technology, that changed. Scrolls became books (more compact and portable), bookkeeping became more complex, and the alphabet overtook categorization as the dominant way to organize lists. Flanders takes us from ancient crossroads (where trade was conducted in gestures and pictographs) through the internet (where searches and hypertext decrease the importance of alphabetical order), giving the origin stories for the card catalog and office furniture. 

Some Lie and Some Die

Mike Burden tries. As Some Lie and Some Die opens, he's the single parent of two teenagers, not quite ready to admit that they're becoming self-sufficient while cringing at their taste in music. The latter part plays into Ruth Rendell's eighth Inspector Wexford mystery. John Burden's favorite singer, ZenoVedast is the headline act at a music festival just outside Kingsmarkam and when two attendees who'd snuck off for a bit of privacy stumble across a woman's body, Wexford finds himself wondering about the odd relationship among Zeno, the singer's manager, and the manager's wife. Rendell includes her usual twist ending and psychological motive, but as her books become a bit more modern, so do the motives. She also includes her usual middle-class scorn for working-class people, but it's a bit muted here compared to the early books.

Fortune and Glory: Tantalizing Twenty-Seven

 When I read a Stephanie Plum novel, I know what I'm getting. Janet Evanovich will string together funerals, family dinners, car death, Steph's attempts to capture someone who skipped bail on a petty and/or weird crime, donuts, dead bodies, and Lula's over the top fashion sense. Fortune and Glory picks up where Twisted Twenty-Six leaves off. Grandma Mazur, recently widowed after a few hour marriage to one of the Lay-z-Boys, needs Steph's help to find the keys to her late husband's fortune (which may or may not exist). Sounds easy, except there's a gangster with a habit of dismembering those who get in his way also searching for the keys. Evanovich is deep in a rut, but the set pieces still make me laugh and she manages to string them together plausibly, or at least what passes for plausibly in Stephainie's world.

Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, & Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House

 I remember Watergate, but I don't remember Spiro Agnew. Unlike Nixon's crimes, Agnew's were, well, blatant and ordinary. He was a somewhat obscure local official who spent most of his time shaking down developers for bribes. After somehow ending up as the Governor of Maryland, he was picked to be Nixon's 1968 running mate. Like the most recent ex-president, he was crude, combative, and feuded with the press - and a segment of the public loved him for it. Based on the 2018 podcast, Bag Man provide just enough background to explain how, in 1973, we had both a President and Vice-President under investigation for serious crimes. How did we survive the crisis? Three Assistant US Attorneys, Barney Skolnik, Tim Bake, and Ron Liebman, and US Attorney George Beall (the brother of Maryland's then junior Senator) stood up to pressure from Nixon and quietly put together a case that forced Agnew to plead guilty and resign. He didn't go quietly (the last few chapters chronicle months spent slowly winding down his VP office and transitioning to brokering unsavory deals with foreign governments), but he went. He died in 1996, essentially a footnote to history. The attorneys who prosecuted him also escaped fame, each spending several more years working for the Justice Department before moving into private practice (George Beall died in 2017). While Agnew can stay obscure, Beall, Skolnik, Blake, and Liebman deserve to be better known. Their job wasn't glamorous (and parts of the Bag Man are a bit dry because there's only so much you can do to make a financial investigation interesting - trust me, I know), but it's not an exaggeration to say that they may have saved our democracy.