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.