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.