The Lost Tudor Princess: The Life of Lady Margaret Douglas

 Like Mary Boleyn, Margaret Douglas was a medieval woman adjacent to power so the first hand accounts of her life are somewhat sketchy. She was the daughter of Henry VIII's sister Margaret Tudor and the mother-in-law of Mary, Queen of Scots (who was also Margaret Tudor's granddaughter, by Margaret Tudor's first marriage). She spent most of her young years as a political pawn (as most princesses of the era did), married into Scottish nobility, and maneuvered to put her immature and pleasure-seeking son on the Scottish throne. There aren't a lot of 'big events' in Margaret Douglas's life, but Weir's biography of her (like that of Mary Boleyn) outlines the machinations of the Tudor court.

The Chancellor's Secret

 The 25th and final installment in Susannah Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew mysteries is a decent mystery but more importantly gives the characters a happy ending. Matthew marries Matilde, he's given a source of income so he can continue to treat the poor while still supporting himself, his sister Edith has remarried to a wealthy and good man, Brother Michael has installed a figurehead into the Chancellor's position so he can run the university from behind the scenes, and the town will no longer have to worry about Sheriff Tuylet's disturbed and violent teenage son.

In the meantime, Matt and Michael have to solve the mysterious deaths of two Chancellor candidates and deal with a collapsed bridge while Matt handles an atypical outbreak of the flux and two about-to-graduate students who've already set up shop as physicians. Matt's also frustrated by the local woman who's helping Matilde and Edith plan the wedding, worried about whether his sister's new marriage of convenience (her late husband had left a financial mess and her new husband is wealthy), and contemplating life once he gives up his teaching position. Add in a drought which turns into a flood and Gregory provides a fitting sendoff for her characters. I'll miss them, but I've got 25 books to reread.

Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English

 I'll admit it - I'm a grammarian. Certain bits of "bad English" make me cringe (people who use the irregular past for the irregular past participle, I'm looking at you). But I also realize that written and spoken language are different (and did so before my Trial Advocacy teacher pointed that out to us), and besides my strong Philadelphia accent, I use split infinitives and other common oral constructions.

Like, Literally, Dude explains how some of our "bad" English is a return to old roots and how many of our "proper" constructions are relatively new and were unloved upon arrival. Valerie Friedland also points out how new constructions often come from women (who transmit those constructions to their children, putting them into the mainstream) and disfavored subcultures. She also explains how language versions used by women are viewed more contemptuously than those used by men and uses vocal fry as a result. Vocal fry appears when the speaker uses their lower register, leading to a bit of creakiness. When first discussed, it was the domain of men trying to look upper class but for the past decade or so, it's been a way to show that women's speech is "wrong." Friedland points out that the shift from noticing male to noticing female vocal fry came with the advance of women in the professions and the "problem" didn't occur until there were many women broadcasters. Women with high pitched voices aren't considered "serious" so in professional settings we use our lower registers (I know that my voice is higher and my accent stronger when I'm with friends than when I'm in a work setting). That leads to vocal fry, so the more women in those situations, the more we hear women using it. 

Like, Literally, Dude covered several other issues ("um" and "ah" point out that something important is coming, "literally" isn't the only word to change meaning when it becomes a modifier, the gender differences in the use of "like" and "dude," and the roots of "they" as a non-gender-specific singular). Overall interesting, but academician Friedland didn't quite (a word which has different significance to American and British speakers) straddle the line between popular and academic writing.

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood

 I've been interested in both movies and the process of moviemaking since I was a tween and my parents bought a then-rare VCR. I was familiar with the concept of the bullying auteur (and when the Weinstein case broke thought that the culture of fear abetted his crimes), but Burn It Down tells me it's even worse than I imagined. Entertainment reporter and TV critic Maureen Ryan shows us "how the sausage is made" leaving behind broken people and driving many out of the business. Through interviews with current and former writers, directors, actors, and assistants (some who remain anonymous but others of whom spoke on the record) tell tales of harassment by imperial show runners and producers, sometimes resulting in great shows but just as often bringing down popular critical darlings as abuse drives away writers and stars and ego and prejudice tamper with plot lines. In an odd way, the Weinstein case which should have led to a reckoning is often used to semi-justify verbal and psychological abuse. As long as there's no physical contact...well, the perpetrator's behavior isn't as bad as Weinstein's so we can deal with it.

As well as being a critic, Ryan is a fan and she gives credit to those who treat their staffs well and gives examples and advice for how to produce a good TV show (which involves a lot of hard work from scores of talented people in a whole array of jobs) without, well, being a bastard. She convincingly argues that a communicative show runner who has a vision but listens to and considers feedback and who keeps the necessary 10-11 hours days predictable and doesn't allow them to turn into 16-18 hour days while actually produce a better show due to less turnover and fresher actors and crew. Burn It Down will make you look at some of your favorite shows differently, and perhaps show how they could have been even better. 

The Tomb that Ruth Built

 I met Troy Soos at a Mid-Atlantic Mystery Convention 30ish years ago. He'd just published the first Mickey Rawlings mystery and I couldn't resist. Mickey was a young baseball player in 1910, destined to be a team-hopping utility guy, and somehow he keeps stumbling across and solving murders. Mickey played for 6 teams through 1921 and then...well, I guess Soos's contract ended and he didn't get another one. In 2014, he wrote one more installment for a small publisher, The House That Ruth Built. It's 1923 and Mickey is playing (very occasionally) for the Yankees and tasked with keeping an eye on his road roommate, Babe Ruth. Well, that's not working out very well, but at least Mickey gets a few clutch hits and Miller Huggins sees him as a potential manager and uses him as an unofficial bench coach. 

He's living happily with Maggie who has a job as a stunt coordinator with a New York based film company (showing how women had more behind the scenes jobs in the days of silents than even in the 1990s) when Yankees management gives him an extra task - find out who put a corpse behind a wall next to one of the concession stands at the new Yankee Stadium. Mickey solves the crime, of course, before being cut from the team for some kid from Columbia named Gherig. I solved the crime as well - as soon as I met the murderer in fact. As a mystery, The House That Ruth Built is only so-so but it was an enjoyable book, one last visit with Mickey and Maggie where I saw them finally marry and him embark on his career as a manager.

The Undertow

The Undertow was interesting but not exactly what I expected. Rather than a cohesive book, it's a collection of essays by Jeff Sharlet. Several cover what one would expect - the manosphere, Trumpism, shallow mega-churches. He also includes an essay on Harry Belefonte and one on one of the founders of The Weavers, which I guess he did to show that there have always been political performers. The central essay, which spans nearly half the book, starts with a Justice for Ashli Babbitt rally and meanders through multiple, often scary, encounters. As Sharlet travels and writes, he mentions that he's on this trip in part to gather his portion of his step-mother's ashes and scatter some of them. It's more about grief than about politics and while interesting, the book doesn't quite fit together.

Katherine Parr: The Sixth Wife

 Anne of Cleaves probably had the best life of Henry VII's wives, but Katherine Parr probably had, on the whole, the best marriage (Catherine of Aragon's was good...until it wasn't). In Katherine Parr: The Sixth Wife, Alison Weir brings her Six Wives series of novels to a satisfying close. 

Katherine was a highly educated woman and Weir depicted her as someone who found comfortable and joy in learning. She also portrays her as a loving and resilient person, whose close friendships an family relations (with her siblings Anne and William and her cousin Magdalen) carry her through her father's early death, three widowhoods, and political intrigue. Katherine's first marriage is to the son of a violent and controlling man, but she does develop some affection for her incompatible husband and mourns his death. Her second marriage, to Lord Lattimer, brings her two stepchildren aunt he realization that she's stronger willed and savvier than her husband. 

She also discovers her Protestant leanings. Henry's break with Rome wasn't, in his mind, a rejection of Catholicism and he disliked and distrusted Protestants as much as those who "clung" to Rome. Heretics were executed publicly, so Katherine took risks when she stepped away from Catholicism.

As she approached her 30s, she had other matters to deal with. Her husband, whom she loved, was dying of tuberculosis and she was simultaneously being pursued by Thomas Seymour, brother of the late Jane, and by Henry VIII. She loved Tom, but her family (like most attuned to political issues) convinced her to marry Henry. By this point, he wAs morbidly obese and had a leg wound that stank and could not heal so marriage to him would have been unpleasant, even if he weren't so mercurial. Their years together, at least as portrayed here, were affectionate. Both were bright and well read and enjoyed intellectual debates. Katherine was also a good stepmother to his son and daughters, with the hope of becoming regent when Henry died.

When Henry moves to another castle for Christmas, 1546, Katherine does not know she will never see him again. Or that the courtiers, particularly Thomas Seymour, have control of a weary, dying Henry. She doesn't even learn of her husband's death until the public does, 3 days after its January 28th occurrence. She fights briefly for control but gives in to the inevitable. Reading this in 2023, I can't help but see echos of the rumors that a frail Elizabeth II was controlled by courtiers who'd taken sides in the family business conflicts. 

Widowed for the third time, Katherine retreats from court only to have Tom Seymour renew his pursuit of her. She tries to resist but her earlier passion and the possibility of having a child lead to a secret marriage. Their household includes his ward, Lady Jane Grey, an intellectual but proto-puritain Protestant girl who finds wearing colors sinful and is being groomed to be Edward VII's eventual wife. It also includes teenage Elizabeth and her lady and waiting Kat Ashley. It's Mrs. Ashley who tells Katherine of Tom's early morning visits toElizabeth's chamber and the inappropriate behavior. Tom is clearly molesting his stepdaughter whom he initially wanted to marry, but while uneasy, Katherine doesn't see how serious the situation is. She's preoccupied with intrigue between the Seymours and eventually with a long-wanted pregnancy. Tom continues to flirt with and molest Elizabeth, eventually cutting a dress off her in Katherine's presence. Katherine sends Elizabeth away for her own good and is still unsure how to deal with Tom when she dies from childbirth complications, a few days after delivering a healthy daughter named Mary.

Historical fiction isn't fact, even when written by a historian. That being said, I enjoyed how Weir brought the six wives to life. As she's shown in some of her recent work, we don't have a lot of information on even famous or well connected women of the past. They're cyphers and novels bring them to life.

Speaker of Mandarin

 Ruth Rendell was a product of her time. Still, by the early 80s I knew that the L-for-R switch to connote a native Chinese speaker using English was at best cringe and generally unacceptable - and I was a tween, not an established novelist. This may have colors my view of Speaker of Mandarin but beyond that, it's not Rendell's best.

Inspector Wexford is on a tour of China. He's supposedly there s part of his London detective nephew's retinue, discussing policing, but once established, Rendell drops this. He's dealing with a stereotypically devoted party member guide and attached to a tour group from the UK. He's also hallucinating a woman old enough to have bound feet following him. 

A few months later, Wexford is called to investigate the death of one of the tourists he met in China. adela Knighton was shot at point blank range in the back of her head, and her jewelry is missing. While Mike Burden investigates the tour group and potentially disgruntled patients of Alan Knighton, Wexford focuses on her family, gaining insight from her lifelong friend.

The Knighton "had" to get married, and for years it was an outwardly satisfactory arrangement - Adela raised their four children while Alan rose in his career. In her friend's words, though, Adela "only had a husband in the sense that he slept next to her." Then, something changed.

None of this seems to connect and it doesn't play into the solution. Both the "hallucination" (which, of course, has a much better explanation than too much green tea) and the murder are solved by coincidence and not ones that are particularly interesting. i try to read entire series, but if you're wandering around the Wexford novels, you can probably skip Speaker of Mandarin.

Jane and the Year Without a Summer

 I've come to the end of some long running series. Stephanie Barron doesn't say that Jane and the Year Without a Summer is the last Jane Austen mystery, but it takes place only a few months before her death and she travels to Bath with Cassandra due to her declining health. There she encounters Raphael West (the replacement for her Gentleman Rogue) again, unpleasant fellow lodgers, and, of course, a suspicious death. Jane solves the mystery with an unlikely culprit, but it's a mediocre one. This final installment leaves us with a sense of melancholy because we know Jane will die before fully editing Persuasion and if her symptoms are any indication, it will not be a comfortable death. There's also the "what could have been" feelings from her encounters with Raphael West because she rejects his advances due to her impending death. In a way, it's appropriate that a volcanic eruption made Jane's last year one that was truly without a summer. 

Death Notes

 In Murder by Death Lionel Twain accuses the characters (based on Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Charlie Chan, Nick and Nora Charles, and Sam Spade) of cheating. I'm not familiar with the last three, but I can't think of a book where Christie cheated. She may have made it look like she did, but trace back through the clues and she supported her conclusions.

Death Notes, however, shows that even the masters like Ruth Rendell can cheat. Sir Michael Camargue was murdered shortly before marrying a woman younger than his estranged daughter (and a casual friend of Reg Wexford's actress daughter Sheila, whose banns are read at the same service). Did his daughter kill him for the inheritance? Or was someone impersonating her? Wexford travels to California ostensibly on vacation to solve the mystery...and then it turns out everything he learned there was irrelevant. I enjoyed parts of the book (Mike Burden has remarried since the last book and he's more relaxed than in the early books as well as becoming more well-rounded through his wife's interests, and it was entertaining to watch Wexford deal with jealousy when he and his wife met up with her old flame and his wife in California), but the ending was unsatisfying enough to affect the entire book.

Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies about Our Past

"We're a republic, not a democracy." I've lost track of how often I hear a caller say that on CSPAN. The second essay in Myth America proves them wrong. The Founding Fathers created a democratic republic - one that valued democracy. They also valued a central government, putting to rest any claims that they highly valued states' rights. And the idea of American exceptionalism would have been foreign to them. 

Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer have assembled 20 historians to take on popular myths of American history. It's weighted towards the 20th Century and toward social rather than "event" history and since those are among my interests, some of the material was familiar. I knew the Regan Revolution had roots 30 years earlier, that the party realignment took place not because conservative southern Democrats and liberal northern Republicans switched parties but because the old guard died off and was replaced with a new generation with different party ties, and that the lionization of MLK and the idea of 'good protest' glosses over the fact that he was hated in his day and much more radical than the modern view. Other essays discussed topics with which I only have a passing knowledge, and others put the pieces together for me. Feminism has been portrayed as anti-family, but it's been pro-family since its inception, sometimes to the point of disadvantaging the movement. I learned in high school that while the New Deal helped, the Depression didn't end until WWII - here, Eric Rauchway points out that the New Deal did pull the economy out of a tailspin and the problem was that it wasn't large enough (which echoed during the 2008 recession where more expansive programs could have brought the unemployment rate down faster). Myth America is enlightening, and as essentially a survey course left me wanting to know more.

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

 Like Mary Boleyn, no one would know about Jane Franklin Mecom if not for her famous sibling. Born into poverty the youngest of 17 siblings, married at 15 to a man who may have been mentally ill and spent time in debtor's prison, she outlived all but one (or possibly two) of her eight children who survived to adulthood, as well as most of her grandchildren and many of her great-grandchildren. We know who she is because she wrote frequently to her brother Ben, and the letters which survive form the foundation of Book of Ages.

The book in question is Jane's own, the self-made pamphlet in which she recorded her children's births and deaths in an untutored hand. That, and some of her letters to her brother, are the only traces she left and like Alison Weir'sbiography of Mary Boleyn, Jill Lepore uses Book of Ages as a guide to the biographer's craft as she pieces together Jane's life through scant records. Those records show a hard life of poverty and death, with two of her sons spending time in protective custody due to mental instability and most of her children and grandchildren living short lives of ill health (Lepore speculates that several had tuberculosis which spread easily through the large family living in a tiny house-cum-workshop). The records are also incomplete, with a few of her descendants not having definite dates of death - including her son Benjamin who was reported to have died during the Revolutionary War but reappears a decade later making and selling the family soap.

Despite her hardships and rudimentary education, Jane was an avid reader, at least of her brother's works and of books he sent her. She loved to gossip (and her letters to her sister-in-law Deborah are chatty chronicles of family and friends, full of questions about Ben and Deborah's grandchildren), was deeply religious (unlike Ben), and while her brother was in Europe helped build his image as the Country Bumpkin/Untutored Genius by sending him homemade soap to distribute to those he wanted to influence. She had opinions, and in another time may have been able to act on them.

Lepore also shows how unlikely Ben's success was. He was the only sibling to get beyond a subsistence living, let alone into wealth, and yet he didn't give much support to his poverty-stricken sister, despite how close they were. Maybe he didn't want to support her husband as well, but Edward Mecom died in 1765. Would it have harmed his self-made image to give his sister more help, or was she too deep in the Puritan mold to feel she deserved it? It's something I can't reconcile as a modern person coming from a tradition that considers charity a cardinal virtue. Maybe the answer is in the letters that have been lost.

The Secret History Home Economics: How TrailblazingWomen Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

 "The Home Economics Story" is one of my favorite MST3K shorts. Partially because it's funny, but also, I think, because of my complicated view of the field. I'm a GenX feminist, so I grew up when Home Ec was both fading from view and seen as a way to keep women in the kitchen. And, well, I'm not fully domesticated. I'm a disaster at housework, a decent but often uninspired cook (cooking for a party for fun; cooking for myself is why I have eggs for dinner at least once a week), an excellent baker, an expert knitter, and someone who's been meaning to learn how to sew since adolescence. However, I'm aware of the fact that the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from MIT, Ellen Swallow Richards, was one of the inventors of the field.

In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Home Economics was a field in which women were able to have careers. Margaret Murray Washington, who was born at the end of the Civil War and educated at Quaker schools and became a faculty member at Tuskegee where she met and married Booker T. Washington. Lillian Moller Galbraith saved her business and engineering career by designing the modern step-saving kitchen (despite the fact that she had a cook her entire life and never cooked on her own). Partners Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose ran the home economics department at Cornell as a team, with Van Rensselaer adding scientific rigor and Rose applying it to real life. Add in women who wrote, produced, and broadcast home economics radio programs; women doing outreach programs; women in government service ensuring food purity and creating food programs; and women teaching home economics to middle and high school students. If you were a woman interested in chemistry, home economics let you study and apply that science with less friction from outside groups. The home appliance track one of the women in "The Home Economics Story" followed at Iowa State was electrical engineering applied to consumer items. Home economists developed safe, practical, and attractive jumpsuits for women working WWII defense factories and ration-friendly menus. They created appliance safety standards and RDA requirements. The discipline of child development came under home economics so it's thanks to them that we know the importance of the early years.

That's not to say the discipline doesn't have an uncomplicated history. The founders were white and middle class, not accepting of immigrant traditions and foods (flavor wasn't a priority among the early home economists), and with racist and even eugenic outlooks. African Americans were barred from professional societies and created their own. And, of course, there's the 50s "please a man" aspect to the classes taught to teenagers. 

As that went out of fashion, home economics faced another threat - women who had chosen home economics because it was a way to be a chemist or engineer or psychologist when those fields were unwelcoming could (as I did) major in one of those fields. While this was happening, the discipline was also under attack from the right. Home Ec textbooks were among the first to be challenged for "promoting secular humanism" because they taught tolerance. Then the fear that US students were falling behind the rest of the world (or failing outright) pushed home ec (along with art, music, and to some degree social studies and foreign languages) down the list of educational priorities.

Fast forward to 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic had people making sourdough bread and sewing masks - very home ec projects. That follows on years of people claiming that universal home economics would solve obesity and young people's financial problems. While that may be a bit of a stretch, I agree with Danielle Drelinger's suggestion that home ec should again be required, but with the more practical and rigorous outlook of the women who led the field for over a century rather than the mediocre muffins and throw pillows image that we've had of the field.

Where Memories Lie

 Deborah Crombie combines the personal with the professional in her Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James mysteries. Here, the two are throwing their first dinner party as a couple, inviting his boss and his wife and both partners new professional partners to round out the table. Towards the end Gemma gets a call from a distressed friend. Art expert Erika Rosenthal, who escaped Nazi Germany with her late husband, and one of her former students has seen the broach her father made and which was stolen during her escape in a local auction brochure. As she begins asking a few low-key questions for her friend, Gemma discovered that Erika's husband was murdered in the 1950s and the detective on that case mysteriously died a few days after being told to stop investigating. Will Gemma solve the cold case, and is it connects to the murder of a young auction house employee? Maybe it's a bit coincidental but Crombie ties the crimes together in an unexpected way.

Katherine Howard - The Scandalous Queen

 Catherine Howard followed her cousin Anne Boelyn in two ways, as wife to the mercurial and cruel Henry VIII and to the executioner's block for adultery. Unlike Anne, there may be some truth to the charges against the younger and less educated Catherine. Katherine Howard - The Scandalous Queen is the fifth book in Alison Weir's Six Wives series and as with her other novels (and occasionally non-fiction books) about Tudor women, she has to fill in some gaps.

We first see Kathryn at her mother's deathbed. Her father, a disreputable member of a good family, has no way to support his children from two marriages while looking for an heiress to marry so the children are sent out to various relatives. After her protective and much older half-sister Isabel marries, Kathryn ends up in the household of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk where late night parties teach her about sex and sexual politics at a young age. As a flirtatious young woman, she takes part in these games and becomes involved with two very different young men. This comes back to haunt her as Queen to a besotted but jealous Henry VIII when she carries on an affair with one while being threatened with blackmail by the other. Young, shallow, and uneducated it's no surprise she found better company with a dashing courtier than with her much older, physically failing but intellectually-minded husband, but when that husband is Henry VIII, doing so meant death. 

Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee

 Looking from the perspective of the 1976 amendments to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, it's strange to see that the original 1906 law focused on adulteration and fraud. With a historical perspective, as shown in Bee Wilson's Swindled, it makes sense. At the time the risks (to drugs as well as food) weren't lack of efficacy or danger due to unknown effects. It was literal poisoning - arsenic based dyes in candy and pickles, bulking out flour with husks - or gypsum, sausages that were truly mystery meats, "swill milk" from diseased cows fed the by-product of whiskey production. Wilson traces the history of food adulteration from the early years when food fraud was deadly to the current era where world trade makes fraud easier (such as labeling rice from other areas as Basmati and charging a premium) even if deadly events, such as a formula scandal in China, have become less common.

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

 I'm a member of the Mall Generation (a better name than GenX). I remember Sunday rides with my dad to the Woodhaven Mall - a little one-story mall with a Wilco (Woolworth's other brand), a supermarket, and a Gaudio's Garden center as anchors. The central area had a fountain and the Paperback Booksmith (where Daddy usually bought me a book) was on one side, next to a women's clothing store. There was a donut shop where I'd get a grape drink and a chocolate iced donut before Daddy and I played pinball. There was also a 4-screen movie theater where Mom and I saw most of the live action Disney movies of the era. Sometimes we'd go to the larger Neshaminy Mall (where I made my first clothing request - I asked Mom for a Zoom shirt when I saw them in Pomeroy's) or the Oxford Valley Mall with its large circular ramp between floors (I'd be allowed to run down it once per visit).

We moved before I became a teenager, so my main malls were different. Plymouth Meeting was closest, but low occupancy until the first IKEA in the country opened up on the property in 1985. Michelle worked in the shoe store summers during college and one year she also worked at The Bombay Company. I waitressed that summer and around 11 am most days I'd come visit her and we'd sit in the back (no one shopped at The Bombay Company during the day), knit, and discuss last night's Eastenders. Willow Grove was new, three-level and shiny with a large food court, and had more trendy stores. Montgomeryville was a bit of a drive, but larger and busier than Plymouth meeting - and also near my high school so I was likely to run into friends. 

College didn't stop my mall days - freshman year we'd take the occasional bus trip to the Monroeville Mall and after I brought my car I made regular trips there and occasional trips to the larger but hard to get to (I have no sense of direction) Century III Mall. After college, Quakerbridge Mall and a "prestige" mall also along Route 1 had theaters with enough screens for me to go to the movies twice a week and bookstores for me to browse while waiting. I still remember the teens trying to get into Species having a hissy fit because my friend Van (then 30) and I (26) weren't carded when we bought tickets for Nine Months (for years we had a standing appointment to see Hugh Grant movies - usually in mall-attached movie theaters). What ended them was a 1999 job with a mall leasing company. They decided to have temp lawyers review all their leases as part of their Y2K update and seeing the expectations per square foot (and about once a week spending an hour or so after work in King of Prussia mall waiting for the traffic to decrease - that was always my least favorite mall, dating back to it's outdoor era, because I found it disorienting) just killed my desire to enter a mall more than a few times a year, if that.

Alexandra Lange is another mall kid, and in the introduction to Meet Me by the Fountain reminisces about her malls, comparing them to her first post-COVID mall trip, to the new and massive American Dream in East Rutherford, NJ. From there, she analyzes mall trends by decade.

Malls started in the 1950s, with suburbanization, and they catered to middle-class white women who'd left cities but still wanted convenient shopping. Initially they weren't enclosed, strips or blocks of shops with courtyards and paths in between. Developers envisioned a private version of the public square, and malls contained services like hairdressers, dry cleaners, and dentists that we don't think of as "mall" businesses. The 1960s brought enclosed malls, protecting shoppers from the heat of Phoenix, the cold of Minneapolis, and the dreariness of March in Philadelphia. Malls got larger and developed somewhat standard layouts based on letters and with anchors at the end of every strip. The 1970s brought the urban mall, starting with Boston's Faneuil Hall which restored a historic building, and expanding into new malls like Harbor Place in Baltimore and The Gallery (now The Fashion District) in Philadelphia. All three opened to fanfare and impressive sales, but their promise faded, with Faneuil Hall now for the tourists, Harbor Place an almost empty construction zone when I visited in 2018, and The Fashion District being threatened by a new arena for the 76ers.

The 1980s were the zenith of mall culture, and of mall profitability. Owners realized teens had disposable income and wanted a safe place to go. WaldenBooks received most of my money, but there were Duran Duran posters to buy at Spencers, cassettes to buy at Sam Goody or We Three Records, clothes from whatever store was "in' among my friends, and then something from the food court, usually a bacon and cheese baked potato. Maybe a few video games if the mall had an arcade (only Montgomeryville did among "my" malls).  Times were changing as I aged out of my teens, though, and by the 1990s malls began to restrict teens, saying they could only enter with adults or during certain hours (most of which were during the school day). The 1990s was also the start of the mall's decline. Maybe turning away paying teens was a bad idea, but the main villain was over expansion and economic whims. Malls grew faster than the population and ended up competing with each other for shrinking dollars as the economic distribution became dumbbell shaped. By the 2000s, anchors were closing and big boxes and outlet malls arranged like the 1950s "town centers" took over. Plymouth Meeting Mall is now quieter than it was pre-IKEA (that store moved to a big box strip a few miles away) and most of the business in that complex goes to stores with outdoor entrances only. Megamalls, like the Mall of America and American Dream seem to be surviving by adding experiences (both include amusement parks), and the mall is thriving in parts of the world where it's still a novel experience. 

Lange's book isn't all Hot Topic and Macy's, teenagers and senior mall walkers. Malls are both public and private, and she discusses how that affects the ability to protest or simply disseminate minority opinions. Malls were also built for people like me - middle/upper middle class and so white I practically luminesce. What happens when malls become the place where non-white working class people shop? I constantly read that The Fashion District underperforms, but even before its makeover, it was profitable - but the customers no longer looked like me and chains were leaving. Is that why it's being called a "dead zone" that should be replaced by a "privately funded" (if you believe that, I have a mall to sell you) sports arena that the most optimistic estimates say will be used 40% of the year? I have my suspicions. Other malls are being reimagined as college campuses or being razed for mixed use development. If The Fashion District is truly failing, we should try that rather than give in to the whims of a sports team owner.

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

 I prefer baking to cooking (probably a side effect of being single - I have no one to share ideas, admire my work, or help clean up) which is probably why I'm not much of a kitchen gadget person. Still, as a 21st Century person with a microwave and KitchenAid mixer (Mom bought me one the first Christmas I had my own house so I wouldn't "borrow" Big Yellow, which Daddy bought her for Christmas 1979), I'm far ahead of early humans who had a pot, a knife, and a spoon. Food writer Bee Wilson tracks the evolution of cooking and utensils from pre-history to the bread maker and Oxo Good Grips. 

She starts with a wooden spoon - everyone has one (and in the hands of Lisa Scottoline's South Philly matrons, it's a threatening symbol of power). It's simple, useful, heat resistant, and hard to improve. Even the stick end is useful for stirring oatmeal. So simple that we don't think about how central is is to cooking. She then moves to pots (for much of history, cooked meals were soup/stew/pottage - throw ingredients into the pot with some fluid and cook until it's time to eat) and knives. This is where specialization begins. No pot is perfect for every use (if it's a good conductor, it won't heat quickly; sautéing in a stock pot or making spaghetti sauce in a frying pan is difficult-to-impossible), and while there are some multi-purpose knives, the ideal blade size and shape depends on the job. As she expands into the idea of cooking, the use of ice and eventually refrigeration, and the kitchen itself she explains how gadgets may come and go, but the basics stay. They may be refined (as the late appearing fork moved from a skewer to the two prongs still used to stabilize meat for carving and eventually to the 3 or 4 pronged utensil we use every day) or combined (the spork and it's relatives, which she lists in a footnote), but at their core they're identifiable through the centuries.

Ice and Stone

 Grunge was just coming in when I discovered Sharon McCone in 1990, so it's a bit odd to think of Ted being into grunge when Sharon met him. Marcia Mueller's detective was 28 at her 1977 creation, 20 years older than I was. Now, her age is unstated but I estimate she's just shy of 60. Mueller's retcon skills exceed those of Sara Paretsky, though. She mentions old friends and alludes to early experiences, but since her world has changed regularly, both personally and professionally, the fuzzy timeline causes fewer problems than with Chicago's solo PI.

Sharon has also become more apolitically active, in part due to her discovery of her Native American heritage. Ice and Stone has Sharon investigating the murders of two Native women, tow of thousands who have disappeared or been murdered in the last several years. Here, the main suspects are the local landowners, a man and his two sons, or perhaps the two goons they employ. ice and Stone is tightly plotted and q quick read (only 256 pages, with several pages just giving the date), with an unexpected motive for the murders.  There's also slight pharmaceutical plot error (-zone is the nomenclature for antipsychotics, but she needed to explain how rare earth elements would factor in), but it's obscure enough and not quite vital to the plot (i.e. not five minutes of searching like the patent/trade secret confusion made me give up Jill Churchill) that I'll let it go

Water Like a Stone

Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid are police detectives so they shouldn't have to stumble across dead bodies. Deborah Crombie's mysteries border the cozy sub-genre so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when their Christmas, the first spent with Duncan's family in Cheshire, includes a murder investigation. As the couple arrive with enthusiastic 5-year-old Toby, moody teenage Kit, and two dogs, Duncan's sister Juliet calls - she's found an infant's body behind the plaster of the barn she's rehabbing. Duncan and Gemma are off duty, but the DI on the case is an old friend (of sorts) so he allows them to observe. When Kit finds the body of a longboat dwelling former social worker, a woman who'd let him and his father visit the boat, there's no way the London police can stay out of the case.

As for Juliet, finding the body isn't her only worry. She'd recently opened her building business after quitting her job as office manager to her husband's investment firm, akin to the tension created by his mistaken belief that she'd been having an affair with his business partner, Piers Dalton. Their teenage daughter Lally has secrets of her own, involving Piers's son Leo and a classmate who'd drowned a few months earlier. Kit finds himself between his magnetic new cousin and his basic nature as a good kid scarred by his mother's death. His attempt to protect her puts himself in danger and unmasks the murderer.

Crombie's books are the anti-Law & Order; the detectives personal lives play a central role. Christmas was the perfect time for Gemma, Toby, and Kit to meet Duncan's casually affectionate and welcoming parents. Cheerful, energetic Toby happily accepts them as grandparent, and Gemma almost immediately feels at home with her almost-in-laws, so different from her working class parents. Kit has a slightly harder time, as one would expect considering the fraught relationship with his maternal grandparents who are fighting Duncan, who has not legally been declared Kit's father, for custody. Despite the recurring nightmare of finding his mother's body and the turmoil caused by Lally, Kit warms to his new family. Even if the mystery wasn't a good one, Water Like a Stone would be worth reading as a straight novel. 

Spare

I'm not usually a memoir reader, but I was also raised by someone who hate-watches anything to do with the British royal family. So I read Spare in part because my mom wants to talk about it, but partially because of my own suspicions about the royal family and the British media. On that narrow criteria, Spare met my expectations.

Spare exceeded my expectations by being a thoughtful look back by a man who's been dealing with trauma since adolescence but, perhaps because of his privileged position, wasn't given the tools to deal with it. A few years ago during one of the regular debates about The Catcher in the Rye which pop up on social media, I wondered if the book is taught less often because modern teens can't imagine a world in which a boy who punches out the windows of the family car the night his younger brother died doesn't get counseling. No one seemed to think that two young teens whose mother died publicly needed anything more than a return to their routine - no extra tenderness, no grief counseling. I'm not exactly faulting Charles for being unemotional because of the environment he was raised in, but you'd think that by 1997 someone would point out that the boys needed to at least have some sort of professional grief counseling. But no, the Stiff Upper Lip ruled the day. The first section of the book, covering his adolescence, is full of "I think this happened" and disconnected events, showing a teenager adrift. He's unable to grieve for his mother (and has locked up memories in defense) and sent to Eton despite it not being a good fit in order for the public to think he's close to his brother, which he never has been. This is where the image of him as "thick" and a screw-up starts. He's honest about drinking and smoking marijuana with his friends, but I get the impression that most of their set did that (so, likely including his brother). But he was the one who the media called "naughty."

The second section covers his transition to adulthood. He entered the army in part because there weren't many other options (the tragedy of being close in the line of succession - I get the feeling Charles would have been much better suited to teaching A-level English and running the drama club). Learning to fly helicopters gives him a purpose, and he enjoys being just another officer...until the media sells him out and he's sent home. He also mentions that he killed people because it was his job and that he's conflicted about that. 

His military career is interspersed with and followed by visits to Africa, where he became interested in conservation and met nature filmmakers who became surrogate parents, and tales of his ordinary life. His girlfriends understandably can't deal with the constant media attention and even though he's grown up with it, he can't either. Everything he does is photographed and the paparazzi go out of their way to bait him. Beyond that, once his military career was over he had little to do - even as a full time working royal, his engagements were restricted to those that didn't conflict with others. Imagine a company based entirely on appearances where all members fight with sharp elbows for the best positions and make sure the competition is iced out of anything that might raise their ratings. That's the royal family. Not the best place for a young man dealing with the fallout of active military service on top of long-untreated trauma. It's no surprise he started having panic attacks and withdrew into reruns of Friendsˆ.

Then, while scrolling through a friend's social media feed, he saw her pictures with her friend Meghan and instantly fell for her. He asked their mutual friend to connect them, started chatting, and fell madly in love as he got to know her. The media (and his older brother) portray this as a "whirlwind romance" but they dated for about a year and a half, which seems normal to me. Meghan also encouraged him to give therapy another try after a prior brief and unsuccessful attempt, and at first the family seemed to like her. The media, however likes to add racism to their hazing of new royals and in retrospect, it was a warning sign that the monarchy didn't defend her. After they got married, the couple's media coverage got worse, and Harry points out that the royal rota not only have connections to courtiers (and possibly family members) who give them juicy stories (true or not) to cover for other royals' indiscretions - or just to knock more popular firm members down a few notches. Here's where William and Kate come across particularly poorly. He comes across as a self-centered bully, and she's cold and snooty. I can understand that Meghan's touchy-feely California attitude might not be a good fit, but I also didn't want to believe the trope of Woman Always Compete With Each Other. The story of the bridesmaids' dresses and Kate's apparent snubbing of the couple makes it look like there was at least a one-sided competition along with a 35-year sibling rivalry coming to a head. We know what happened next - Harry and Meghan escaped, first to Canada and then to California as their negotiated plans were rejected and/or leaked and their security (needed in part because of the hatred stoked by the media), and the book ends with the birth of their daughter. 

So, how true is the book? Memoirs are by definition one sided, but with the Levenson Inquiry we know that the British tabloid press, which is more mainstream than the US tabloids are, uses underhanded methods to write stories which either skirt or outright ignore the truth. And prior books have said that the courtiers run the firm, not the royal family themselves. Memories may vary about details, but the bulk of the story feels true. After 35 years, he's giving his side in response to twisted media reporting and his intention appears to be to get the media to tone it down and maybe give his niece and nephew - the next generation's spares - a bit more breathing room when the photographers stop being satisfied with the frequent but highly controlled photo calls.