E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime": Book Review

No, I never saw the 1981 movie. And after sampling the author himself reading the audio version in a surprisingly perfunctory, even dull, manner, I opted for the book on a recent flight to New York. The story rushed past, and as I was using a Kindle, I had no idea that the novel would finish so rapidly. I felt I was halfway through when suddenly, the characters were all wrapped up and the ending loomed. Like the audio, it's itself perfunctory in places, and it felt as if E.L. Doctorow wanted it over.

Looking back forty-plus years, this 1975 novel feels a bit dated. Of course, it's an historical narrative dramatizing real life characters such as Evelyn Nesbit and Harry Thaw, Harry Houdini and Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford, and a bit of Sigmund Freud and Booker T. Washington in cameos. This is mixed with parallel stories of a Jewish immigrant and his daughter, and the "Younger Brother" of a scion of a flags and fireworks manufacturer in New Rochelle, NY. Yes, it's a bit of an easy target for Doctorow, and like the incorporation of the Coalhouse plot that sparks the action, these themes carry a counterculture air of disdain and dismissal for the American dream and its first takers.

The immigrant vs. Yankee, white vs. black, Irish vs. everyone else tensions permeate these pages. It reads well, but the sour authorial tone dampens enjoyment. Doctorow wants us to criticize the wealthy and while this may be an admirable sentiment then as now, the intrusive voice (which in other novels I do not mind necessarily) grates now and then. He keeps a distance between us and the characters, so the events feel more staged than organically motivated. as if to exemplify class struggle. This suits the 1902-1912 focus, but when towards the conclusion, other noteworthy struggles crowd in, the pace alters and one can sense Doctorow's manipulation and compression.

If he'd taken his time in the latter portions, it might have resembled the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos even more than it certainly does, especially in the Younger Brother's picaresque itinerary. Doctorow starts this part off inventively, but he then crams in more telling than showing, and the momentum weakens when it should have accelerated after the pivotal New York City showdown.

The mechanical nature of this storyline may result, as a 1998 piece in the Observer reminds readers, from Doctorow's debt to the novella Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist. While Doctorow nods to this source for Coalhouse Walker, it does tip his own reworking of this idea into melodrama, as this Observer critic noted. Like Dos Passos, the machinations of the characters wind up less engaging than the ideas and the milieu depicted, in the early part of last century. (Amazon US 5-30-17)

Herman Melville's "Redburn": Audiobook Review

"A leisurely if perplexing voyage "
What did you like best about Redburn? What did you like least?
I liked the hints of the themes Melville would elaborate in Moby Dick. The start was promising, if heavily "based on a true story" and I presume heavily autobiographical. The Famine emigrants in Liverpool and at sea gain some attention, perhaps notable in fiction of this mid-19th c. era. But I disliked the "Harry" diversion and the latter part of the story weakened the plot. It reminded me of how Huck Finn also falls apart after a strong start, a few decades later.

If you’ve listened to books by Herman Melville before, how does this one compare?
I have not heard any (yet).

What aspect of Kirby Heyborne’s performance would you have changed?
I liked Kirby Heyborne dramatizing David Mitchell's own "heavily autobiographical" coming-of-age Black Swan Green. So I purchased this on that strength. But Kirby H. mispronounces hillocks, shillelagh, Lothario, Hecate, indefatigable, and over and over tarpaulin, to name but a few words he surely should have known, or checked. My [three-star] rating reflects this shortcoming.

Was Redburn worth the listening time?
It unfolds more slowly than any other audiobook I can recall outside of, say, the dense Thomas Sowell treatise on Marxism. Not unpleasant, and I fell asleep (with the timer) many nights as I listened to segments. Melville does put you at sea with him vividly. Despite the clunky plot, this is mostly worthwhile. I assume it's not the highest-ranked among his canon.

Any additional comments?
It's a strain to hear the perorations to Carlo the Italian organ-grinder boy (yes, that's him) as well as the paeans to the "girlish figure" of the narrator's pal and bosom (?) buddy Harry. Their relationship and his backstory are occluded, but scholars now must have devoted feverish scrutiny to what Melville's alluding to. But the novel "goes south" and never returns. (Audible US 3-18-17)

David M. Emmons' "Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910": Book Review

"Beyond the pale" originated from the limits, the palisades that the Normans erected around their incursions encircling Dublin. Outside of that tamed territory, Hibernian natives lurked, uncivilized according to the conquerors' suppositions. David Emmons, historian at the University of Montana, adapts this title cleverly. For in the American expansion, the immigrant Irish were also seen by Protestant counterparts as inferior, and relegated to the margins socially and spatially. In the growing U.S., contrary to stereotype, some “two-boat” Irish Catholics settled for neither shanty nor tenement. 

Industry demanded cheap, expendable frontier labor. The mines and mills erected, often by Protestant capitalists, attracted desperate Irish. Outnumbered, they formed communities and institutions to secure themselves in hostile territory. Having studied this phenomenon in the Irish-dominated enclave of Butte, Emmons in this follow-up expands his focus to eight different concepts of "the West" in the American imagination and fact. He compares or contrasts Irish Catholic experiences with those of black slaves and Native Americans, broadening this 2011 book's relevance today. 

It rewards careful reading. It's accessible, with folk stories and testimonies drawn from archival research. Its hundred-page list of documentation attests to Emmons' scope and discipline. Attention to detail regarding his claims, therefore, is expected.

The local insistence on camaraderie given dangerous jobs and social prejudice meant many Irish newcomers rallied together in their camps and towns. Emmons suggests that in a land where the future meant to go West, the Irish for their own survival might have cut themselves off from joining this enormous juggernaut. Faced with anti-Catholic discrimination and anti-Irish sentiment, they found themselves beyond the pale again, gathered in their clans, defensive against an all-too-familiar aggressor. (Spectrum Culture for "Our Favorite Books Read in 2016" staff list 12/18/16; Amazon US 11/16/16)

Yellin' with "Ellen"

Waiting for my physical, one other person preceded me. An obese man in his thirties. T-shirt, shorts, sandals with socks. Resembling the character on "30 Rock" with the ironic trucker's cap. His hair, brown and wavy, hung down his back from beneath a UCLA hat with smaller letters my lenses could not make out. His lenses were standard hipster heavy plastic black frames. Which complement very few facial types. He stared into his phone, its smallness evident against his bearish paws. I chose to sit beneath the t.v. rather than face it, knowing from previous long perches the added aggravation of the daytime fare it peddled. At Loma Linda, where I had often taken my wife for dental work, Fox went on and on, and I endured the news cycle every half hour, repeating nothing in particular. At least in Burbank, it was tuned to one of the networks, with what used to be deemed housewife fare, "Ellen." She boasted of turning 59, amid her schtick. Canned or not, cheers followed every utterance.

I had snatched up a book before I dashed out. Traffic filled the 5. I took Riverside Drive along that concrete stretch, through Griffith Park. A few glimpses of the riparian and hilly settings that I have witnessed nearly all my life, usually from car windows. I got to my appointment just in time, not that it mattered. Still had three-quarters of an hour ahead, and then five others entered. All greyer than me.

First a solicitous yenta, showing the indifferent receptionist an ad from "one of your magazines." Then her husband, more rotund, on what used to be deemed a cane. He looked dazed and pale. She and he watched the television. So did another couple, a dark-dyed haired wife who looked happier than her dour tubby husband. Finally a stiff balding man walked in and took the chair next to mine, dragging it away from me towards the door. I felt a bit hurt, wondering what I looked like to him.

I dipped into a book I can drift in and out of. John Cowper Powys' 1934 autobiography is an odd work for its time, the kind of upper-middle-class account of nature, prep school, Cambridge, an allowance to live on sparely (if it seems always at ease) from father, and the first job teaching, in a girls' school. That's where I am about 40% in, not that much happens. His intent is rather to give the mental and emotional state of himself, curious even by English eccentricity. His measured admissions of sadism, and his decision to excise his mother, his wife, and any other female paramour except by vague allusions attests to his oddity. Apparently not to offend, but the imbalance given his preoccupation with keeping his savage impulses controlled leaves an strange impression. A muse, a magician, a would-be mage, JCP argued for a native, natural, and naive approach to life in its energy.

His erudition evident, but his preference for his attenuated "Celtic" wild quality makes his claims rather specious, he one of many children of a Derbyshire cleric. He wrote his life around the age of 60, and four years after his first major and of course heavily autobiographical novel was published.

He had lived as a lecturer in the U.S, and his turn to writing to support himself as radio displaced the appeal of the wandering entertainer indicates an era when the written word still commanded enough of an audience among the discerning and the curious to pay the bills in upstate New York. He might be a blog pundit now, with his own YouTube channel. He spoke of his own wish to fit in with the hardy folk as he strolled about Cambridge's flat fens, even if he stayed balanced enough to realize he resembled "a caricature of Taliesin." This reminded me of the scene around me, in everyday Burbank.

A city I had begun my childhood in, having moved there in pre-school and left after second grade. We lived two blocks from the 5 Freeway, where my parents ran a dog kennel on an industrial street. Now the world's biggest IKEA looms over "Beautiful Downtown Burbank," while a shopping sprawl with the usual big-box logos replaces the aircraft factory my mom had worked at as a secretary. Watching these streets for over five decades, it used to be mocked in my childhood on "Laugh-In" but now the Middle-American complexions of its residents had given way to the gray, in a place heavily Armenian and Latino, as much of the San Fernando Valley, now that Bob Hope was dead and gone.

I've related last November my conversations on the bus tour of Irish Montana with an anthropologist who had retired from the Army to live with her family off the grid near the northern border. She and I wondered where smart misfits fit in, who cannot handle either the earnest platitudes of the urban intelligentsia with its kale smoothies and NPR (ok, I listen now and then, when the classical station has a pledge drive) or the inspirational claptrap of the super-sized Wal-Mart megachurch heartland.

These dovetail with a decision of a colleague who relocated to Cascadia, weary of the academic betrayals and "misguided liberals" who thwarted her path in SoCal. How many share the quest of these two women, with doctorates, who dwell far from the "hot, brown, and crowded" sprawl (to twist a term from globalization shill Tom Friedman, used by a third Ph,D. to refer to her and our hefty sitter's UCLA thirty thousand aspirants, at our drought-plagued, charm-challenged alma mater)?

Around me, those at the doctor's waiting room gazed up at "Ellen." A woman with a vacant expression except of utter awe, grey hair like a hippie caricature, face pink and soft, eyes wide open, heard the celebrity and a singer named Adam who apparently replaced Blake as Nicole Kidman's arm-candy ramble about paying off an audience member's "wedding debt" to braying applause. And this was the "better" of the humbugs taking up the allegiance of the yearning masses breathing free.

Like JCP, if from a source far closer to the toilers than he, I'm a coddled holder of an elite degree among the masses. Unlike him and some of the Whole Foods contingent (ok, I have shopped there for their great beer selection, but I prefer a local-run place near work), I don't romanticize the hoi polloi.

The current fetish to laud "immigrants" regardless of their legal status as heroic reminds me of the folly of liberal rhetoric. You get Nobel laureates and shot-callers, Boston bombers and studious refugees, shady scammers and diligent toilers. The pitch made by progressives elevates all as if fleeing annihilation, when nearly all of the million-plus entering the country yearly come as part of a family chain, preferred over those with skills unmet by the American-born. For every twelve people we could aid in their own country, we pay for one to come here. I remain rarely moved by appeals to heartstrings, and this may betray my rational bent, as I'd like less immigration and fewer people overall. The more people in America, the heavier their environmental footprint. On the other hand, call me out as a father of two, and a hypocritical immigrant's son who burrows back into the oul' sod.

I know how corrupt, ecologically damaged, spiritually wounded, and socially unequal Ireland too remains, alas. There's no shelter for the pessimist, the cautious idealist, the searcher for solace. As JCP learned in his upstate hideaway, the world demands us back. He had to leave for England as the war loomed, and then fled to his dim ancestral Wales to claim his turf as if its lord. We mix our real and our fantasy lives, as he knew well, and we must endure as mortality looms and doctors await us.

Photo:"Celebrity Worship Syndrome"

"Ice Age Columbus"

It never occurred to me that during the last Ice Age, European hunters might have been blown off course on the massive sub-polar pack ice covering the North Atlantic, towards North America. This thesis, contrasting with the conventional Bering Strait land bridge model of indigenous settlement, has been advanced by Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford. Predictably, there's been massive denial from the "Clovis" contingent defending the standard model of Siberian migration. Still, it's intriguing.

Discovery Channel in 2004 made a documentary you can see here under the clever title Ice Age Columbus. This dramatizes, with re-enactments (did the actors speak Basque?), computer analyses, and interviews, the "Solutrean hypothesis." Before Clovis spear points were found in today's New Mexico, ca. 500 years after the "Beringian" bridge was crossed, there may have been earlier survivors on the other coast who'd emigrated from today's South of France, with distinctive shaped spear tools.

One point, flaked to this standard, has been dredged along with a mastodon, from the waters off Virginia. This artifact is called the Cinmar biface, and if the dating with the wooly beast's remains is correct, dates to 22,000 years ago. The problem is that the shorelines back then, as in the Great Banks off Newfoundland which were probably the "Plymouth Rock" or "Vinland" for the cavemen and women made chilly, floating refugees, have been submerged by the waters after the glacial melting.

The Wikipedia entry linked to the hypothesis tends to argue against the hypothesis. But one link to a 2012 article in the Independent mentions a finding that appears key, despite detractors. The film for all its merits has to compress a lot in a little time. The seals drawn in a cave Bradley shows seem to suggest the natives knew how to hunt them, but the jump from this is too rapid; likewise why the Cinmar biface is not examined more in detail as to its origins invites speculation. So, the Indie piece may cheer on the few proponents of the alternative theory. Other tools from 26,000-19,000 y.a. have been tested, all from the American East Coast. Summing up Bradley and Stanford, it reports that "chemical analysis carried out last year on a European-style stone knife found in Virginia back in 1971 revealed that it was made of French-originating flint." How do the opponents respond to this?

The DNA data appear to be used by both sides. Haplotype X has been asserted as the genetic link between the two continents. It may be that more research has to be done, in a very contested debate.

The docu-drama has a memorable scene imagining millennia later the meeting of the eastward-bound natives with the descendants of the Iberians. That changes this prequel for Thanksgiving, doesn't it?

"A Clann Díbeartha"

To follow-up my previous entry on the Irish in Montana, here's a link to the Indiegogo crowdfunding project. This is to help generate income for three documentary films proposed by the local historians. This is a worthy endeavor to document the contributions to Irish culture from its Western heartland, part of Big Sky dynamism.

Information about the three films is here. There's one on Thomas Francis Meagher, the Fenian felon turned famed escapee, then Civil War veteran, and finally two-time Territorial Governor. There's another on Marcus Daly, who rose from poverty in Co. Cavan as the Anaconda mining magnate and one of America's richest men. Finally, there's a tribute to two founders of the Gaelic League in Butte, Seán Ó Súilleabháin and Séamus Ó Muircheartaigh, who inspired today's transmitters there of a renewal for an teanga beo. The Friends of the Irish West sustains this energy.

I encourage you to support this enterprise. I saw in Missoula at last month's ACIS-West conference the RTÉ documentary by Breandán Feiritéar, Scéal ar Butte, a bilingual presentation of three brothers in the copper mines, and their fates. The same director plans to make these films in Gaeilge + Béarla.

The blog entry title today is "her exiled children." This phrase resonates for the diaspora, as these words are taken from the 1916 Proclamation of Irish independence. They remind us that the call for freedom spanned the seas, and that many, as this exhibit displays, responded to that cause from here.

"Her Exiled Children": The Irish in Montana

A month ago, I attended this gathering of scholars and supporters in Missoula. The American Conference of Irish Studies-West regional meeting coincided with the exhibit "Her Exiled Children". In turn, to my surprise, these events dovetailed with a visit to Big Sky Country from the Irish Ambassador to the U.S., and the Governor of the state. The locals were out to welcome us delegates.

Professor David M. Emmons, Irish West expert and retired historian at the U. of Montana, guided our bus tour. We rode past the Clark Fork named after the explorer, and then the back way on Highway 1 to skirt more riparian valleys. The weather forecast was for rain, so I dressed the part, but I did not need to, as the climate was brisk but clear. Recent snowfalls speckled peaks. Far away from 90· L.A.

We stopped after an hour and a half in Anaconda, a copper mining town that stood out not only for its stack (my seatmate compared it to Sauron's tower) but its hardscrabble endurance as an Irish-managed production hub for that mineral much of the past century. It was a bustling region where the bosses were Catholic, as well as the workingmen and women. Little cabins attested to the life of the miners and their families, who walked out to the mines and back, by the railroad, self-contained.

The steadfast Corkonian, Dr. Traolach Ó Riordáin, told me that the children of Seámus Moriarty only spoke Irish at home back then, but that such fidelity to Gaeilge was the exception. But I never heard such an amount of an teanga beo in America before, for he and others chatted away in it, naturally. My two halting attempts failed to rouse responses. When I complimented his young son on his tweed hat, or when I warned him to be careful as he lugged a concrete block in the cemetery, both attempts at conversation were ignored by him. Will nobody ever understand my bleats, as exiled Gaeilgeoir?

You can see me in this snapshot at the AOH breakfast hosted for us at the Anaconda branch, one of the few west of the Mississippi, and one still, I am happy to report, thriving today after decades on. I never expected such a reception and it testified to unapologetic pride I felt during my too-brief visit. This mortás cine is perpetuated by the Friends of Irish Studies in the West, which I've happily joined.

Butte dramatically perches on the side of a massive pit. So much so that neighborhoods of Italians and Eastern Europeans were dug into, for the resources beneath outweighed the value of those on the top. The memorial to hundreds who died in one of many accidents is moving, with flags of many nations around to commemorate the losses of those from around the world driven to that far corner.

I heard the daughter of the famed poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill exclaim "there's Turkey!": land of her father, as we all entered the marker area. Sure enough, the lists of the dead were diverse, although mainly Irish. Back then, almost 100,000 lived there. Now as in Anaconda, far fewer: a third of that.

Montana boasts even today at 27% the highest percentage of Irish-identified U.S. residents. That cheered me. I knew historically there'd been many miners, but I did not realize how many stayed.

Vowing to return, to the Mining Museum, the town excited me. The downtown again struggles, but its buildings preserved from that boom era could entice the bold and brave today, to restore and care for them a mile high. Up by Walkerville, dwellings stretched out in precarious, attenuated, thinning lines, presumably to avoid the subsidence that would swallow them up from those voracious excavations.

The archives there attracted me. I wanted to scrabble in them, especially for Fr. Michael Hannan's diary where he lamented his stay among the squabbling clergy and all those non-recalcitrants from Hibernia not sharing his belief in a particular brand of Fenian payback. Professor Emmons showed me the scrawl of photocopies of the priest's diary: not easy to decipher. But he published his findings in The American Journal of Irish Studies (2012 issue; abstract only, alas, online for we the curious).

The cemetery walk in Butte also alerted me to the many graves from the Spanish American War, next to a Mass Rock memorial. I wondered why the amount. The number seemed disproportionate for the city. I suppose to me, any death toll is more than it should be, going to fight in such dubious battles. A lesson for all who labor to resurrect the names and deeds of those rallied to a cause, and with arms.

In the shadow of The Great Communicator

 

I suppose patience, being a virtue, grows even on me. Long chastised as the one who wants to hurry business along, who has no time for chit-chat, who gets to the point even if barbed by bluntness or tipped with frankness, this trait of mine may be at odds with my aloof quality and self-effacing mood.

Last evening, I watched the GOP debates, round 2. I had missed the preliminaries last month, when the candidates who garnered below 10% were relegated to the "JV" game. I did not even know it was televised. Apparently Carly Fiorina did well enough to get called up to the majors this time around.  She joined a sometimes tame, but often near-rabid, flock of hawks.

Perhaps it's as well I did not watch her in the first dust-up. Her look cut glass. So, when The Donald patronized her, she shot back the kind of glare all men know all too well from matriarchal millennia. We watching wondered if she was always like this. Having as Californians dismissed her in a failed gubernatorial run a few years back, I don't think I had ever bothered to hear her speak back then on tv. Despised for her termination of 30k workers at HP, and a disastrous takeover of Compaq, surely her appearance was ill-timed considering HP, crediting years later her tenure, prepared yesterday to lay off another 30k. But that's my dad's days term. Now we say "reduction in force" or "rightsizing."

Such muffled verbiage, however, was not the case when it came to more war. All rallied 'round the flag, boys and girl. At least semi- libertarian Rand Paul, like his father Ron, at least demurred to it as a last resort. He held his own when defending states' rights on an issue even liberals might support, marijuana decriminalization. Fiorina, defying my wife's insistence that if women ruled, we'd have no more war, proved herself at least in this man's world to be as hawkish as, well, Hillary herself.

A lot of people are distracted by Trump. I don't worry. At this point in '08, Rudy Giuliani was ahead; in '12, Rick Perry. We all know whom we thought would run against Rudy two elections ago. Beyond Trump's calculated, celebrity-honed, media-savvy bluster, there were ideas that he and his colleagues revealed now and then. I found as I listened, to the small debate of two hours between wild-eyed Bobby Jindal, patrician George Pataki (was he running even?), a rather subdued Rick Santorum, and a puckish Lindsey Graham, drawn in much more than I expected. With only four, they had room for extended confrontation. They had a great tussle over the Kim Davis clerk case, and her refusal to carry out the law. This was contrasted and compared to the "gay wedding cake" trope and bakers' rights. I find this all engrossing, as it pits the Establishment against the Free Exercise clauses. And, First Amendment issues, to me, have always been my favorite. In Civics, I loved the Bill of Rights.

Graham even raised Marbury v Madison. With some Carolinian humor and banter, he praised drinking and provided lighter relief. Pataki reminded me of some Rockefeller Republican, from an era before The Great Communicator dominated, as he has, nearly my entire adult life as a voter.

For, before the prop of his Air Force One, the Reagan Library (to me a desecration of Simi Valley's open space, but that's a cowboy actor from Illinois for you, another fake native of my Golden State) hosted the GOP rivals. They all paid homage to their icon. Many were lost in the shuffle this time. John Kasich (whom I found since the first debate worked 2002-08 for Lehman Brothers, hmmm) could not get in as much of a presence as before. A booming Mike Huckabee, a feral Scott Walker, a sly Ted Cruz, and even straight-talking, albeit crooked, Chris Christie got lost in the crowd. At least Christie told the grandstanders to shut up and focus on the issues, a page stolen from "the Socialist's" strategy that Bernie Sanders insists upon when refusing to attack Hillary Clinton. (We'll see after next month's debate.) Fiorina shouted above them, and then pulled the predictable pout card to hint that the gang was shutting her out. She slammed as hard as the rest of them, and sought to out-do Trump at times in presence--her blue dress and botoxed face, perfect hair and grimacing mien assisted this.

Lest you call me sexist, look in the aftermath at Arnold Schwarzenegger. His florid face, pulled back, revealed a plastic surgery disaster, as The Dead Kennedys called an album. Let alone his wattles. 

Along with Fiorina, Ben Carson is rising in the polls, but I fail to understand his appeal. He seems too understated, too disengaged. His prattle lacks substance, even as his doctor's manner soothes us. None of them had that slick ease Reagan and Hillary's husband had perfected before the cameras.

Marco Rubio, at 43 looking 23, has that Kennedy-esque boyishness that may appeal. He's been dogged by his flip-flop on his immigration stance, as he tries to court those whom his some of his opponents shun. But I do support his proposal (was it him?) to end chain-migration and instead favor those whose talents can aid us. Rather than giving priority to those who cut in line and demand their rights by proximity south of the border. On the other hand, he and Jeb Bush sought to reach out, unsurprisingly, to the "Hispanics." Bush called Trump out on the charge Jeb played favorites due to his wife's Mexican origins, but to me, objectively, this seems fair--we all are influenced by bonds to those whom we love or whom we invite into our family and friendship. I do credit Cruz, much as liberals mock him, for getting us all once again (as Fiorina said, for the past twenty-five years an ignored or at least failed issue) to discuss the impact of 11 million here who have broken the law.

In Europe, millions are trying to reach there from Africa and the Middle East. Generous welfare and resettlement programs abound. The plea is that the West is not reproducing enough, so "we" need the labor that others provide to shore up such programs. But is this not inviting many more beyond, and as with Latin American and Asia to North America, accelerating rather than decreasing pressures? 

For we born here have no say. We elect officials and as Pataki said re: Kim Davis, they are expected to carry out the law. But direct involvement is always removed, whether we want to overturn gay marriage discrimination, or control who comes into our country legally and who is best qualified. I know this separates me from most of my family and friends and like-minded fellow travellers. Yet, I am firmly convinced that reductions in population and incentives to immigrate will ease pressure on the planet, and promote a more sustainable economy and society than our crowded capitalist frenzy.

The birthright citizenship question emerging now is indicative of what we ignore. Paul claimed  (as did Trump to Bush) that the 14th Amendment granting slaves citizenship if born on American soil applied to those "under the jurisdiction of the" U.S. He and Trump (who started off the debate by insulting Paul for his "1%" polling) at least concurred that this wording had not even been adjudicated conclusively at the highest level. Whether this makes the children of illegal (undocumented? here without permission?) immigrants citizens by default is, once again, a topic I look forward to hearing serious debate about. The left decries any dissension as prejudiced, but I'd be as angry if Canadian Hutterites sauntered over the Great Plains and settled on Lakota reservations.

Nations may falter before multinationals, but for now, doesn't a country have the right on behalf of those who live there, not those who enter there without permission, to decide who gets to stay there?  None of us like gate-crashers in person. We are told that open borders are moral, but we do not practice the concept of pushing to the front of a line. Others have waited years for visas. Besides, 40% of those who come here, as the candidates admitted, are on visas that expire. Many shrug. Sanctuary cities are justified, families are caught up in legal limbo, and big business likes the cheap labor as much as the Dems welcome if not a present than a future "demographic." Until the next "reform" or "amnesty" fifteen years from now. No wall is big enough, no screening tough enough.

For too long--and it shows once in a while patience can enable me to agree with nearly anyone if only on one in a hundred assertions--the Democrats, pandering to their voter base, or non-voting if you look around where I live, have shut down any serious debate on this, with knee-jerk charges of racism. This frustrates me for ecological and practical reasons. Our "democratic" system enables a few who decide such issues, imposing or ignoring policy for the many. So, for all the silliness that the media and liberals assume swirls around the "clown car" of GOP candidates, I do rescue thought now and then. However brief. Otherwise, ISIS vied with Planned Parenthood as last night's demon du jour.

Who do I side with?

Every few years, elections loom. I grumble but I vote. The ISideWith site helps confirm my bias...

American results demonstrate how I lean Green. Originally I hit 92% but as my results vanished, I retook the quiz and got 91%, tying with Democrats. I still go more Green, with the environment as well as domestic and foreign policy. Dems and me agree most on education and education. Then, it's the GOP on immigration (always the wild card for me), Socialists for logically social issues, and somehow the Libertarians for healthcare. My numbers align with 87% Socialist (and no accident the at least former and somewhat democratic-small-d socialist) Bernie Sanders. Then it's 64% Constitution Party, which I never heard of, and 55% Libertarian. Unlike many of my friends who seem to report scores like 99% Dem and 5% GOP, my grumpiness earned me 39% with the grinches.

As this image reiterates, my real preference is neither "default" party at all. Part of me wishes no parties were necessary, or a bare minimum of oversight, for I value grassroots consensus. Yet I realize how hard that is to obtain in a complicated society, an easily misled populace, and a globalized world. Recent acceleration towards widening income inequality, lack of opportunity to decent education at affordable (or free) rates, unstable jobs, media distractions, and both undereducated and very educated people who dismiss fair distribution of resources depress me. I hate lobbyists and cronies. I distrust party politics. Today I despair at how intractable our capitalist system is, despite opposition. Many give in and accept a for-profit economy, which absorbs discontent and forces our compliance.

My ideal locales to live among congenial neighbors at the ballot box? From Monterey County up the Pacific Coast to the Oregon border, except for Silicon Valley. Then, all of Sanders' adopted state, VT. "Your political beliefs would be considered moderately Left-Wing on an ideological scale, meaning you tend to support policies that promote social and economic equality." But I do refuse to toe the line on a few hot-button issues, so I will never be a reliably swayed voter even if I lean to the left. I swing away on immigration and to me, this logically squares with my environmental priorities and the need for population reduction and more control over development vs. sustainability. Apparently very few of my fellow citizens agree with me in either nation, as this goes against MSM groupthink.

British results reveal my 87% tilt for the Liberal Democrats. They might have needed my vote given their dire results in the last election, which decimated them in Parliament. Fermanagh and South Tyrone somehow wound up as my constituency, despite the fact it polls Tory. "Your political beliefs would be considered moderately Left-Wing Authoritarian on an ideological scale, meaning you tend to stand up and protect those who are oppressed or taken advantage of and believe the government should do the same." This is a bit south on the chart compared my U.S. version, where I balance as usual between authoritarian and libertarian. I think my tougher stance overseas comes from a discontent with the drift of both governments not to crack down on tax evasion, immigration abuses, and capitalist collusion. I would have predicted myself to be slightly more libertarian, but the recent and growing disparity between the 1% and the rest of us, as it worsens, troubles me increasingly.

The British results plot me oddly. "You agree with most UK voters on Social issues but disagree with most UK voters on Healthcare issues. You agree with most Northern Ireland voters on Social issues but disagree with most Northern Ireland voters on Healthcare issues. You agree with most Fermanagh and South Tyrone voters on Immigration issues but disagree with most Fermanagh and South Tyrone voters on Healthcare issues." I side, therefore, with Conservatives on immigration and transportation; LibDems for social, economic, and healthcare; and (don't pillory me) UKIP on domestic policy! Also, Plaid Cymru and Scottish Nationals resemble my environmental beliefs; SNP for education and for foreign policy. It's fun to play a voter from another nation. On many questions I opened up the informative explanation to educate myself about the issues, as of course I needed more direction here.

Overall, nearly every party may like me. Along with the LibDem preference, I get 82% SNP; 81% Labour and Green; 73% Plaid; 63% Sinn Fein; 53% BNP; 52% Conservative. But, despite or due to my supposed Ulster provenance, some things for me are inherited and unalterable. I got 8% DUP.

Baile na gCorcaigh '57

Chuaigh Lena agus mise ag dul Naomh Monica Dé Domhnaigh seo caite. Chonaic muid an drama nua de réir na hAirm Phoblachtach Ëireannach agus Saor Uladh. Tá sé Baile na gCorcaigh '57.

Measaim go raibh ag tharla i mBaile Átha Cliath, go nádurtha. Ach, duirt Lena liom go bhfuil ina Philadelphia in áit. Bhí seo an gceantar na an chathair sin ar an lar leis lucht na Éireannaigh is mó.

Scriobh an h-údar leis as a chuid cuimhní linn a h-óige. Mheas muid go raibh an drama réasúnta mór.
Mar sin féin, shíl muid go raibh sé mall, agus leis ro-iomarch ceapacha laistigh lú na dhá uair an chloig.

Níos déanaí, thiomaint muid ag dul an teach tabhairne na Fionn Mac Cumaill. D'ith mé iasc agus scéallogaí leis leann ó Lagunitas. D'ól Léna leann piorraí leis ceapaire.

Ansin, shiúl muid ar cheile ar an bpríomhshráid in aice leis an dúiche na Venice. Bhreatnaigh amach an farraige fada an Aigéin Chiúin. Mhothaigh muid an leoithne fionnuar in aice le luí na gréine.

Corktown '57.

Layne and myself went to Santa Monica last Sunday. We saw a new play on the matter of the IRA and Saor Uladh. It's Corktown '57.

I thought that it happened in Dublin, naturally. But Layne told me that it was in Philadelphia instead. This was a district of that city center with very many from Ireland.

The author wrote this from his memories in his youth. We reckoned it was a reasonably good drama. Nevertheless, we thought that it was slow, and with too many plots for less than two hours.

Later, we drove, going to Finn McCool's pub. I ate fish and chips with an ale from Lagunitas. Layne drank pear cider with a sandwich.

Then, we walked together on the main street near the district of Venice. We looked out at the long shore of the Pacific Ocean. We felt the cool breeze near the sunset.

Ivanka DiFelice's "A Zany Slice of Italy": Book Review

Forced out of her stockbroker's job during the recession, Ivanka DiFelice and her first-generation Canadian husband, David, decide to visit his family's homeland. Their stay, and their eventual decision to resettle there, comprise the series of episodic chapters that make up "A Zany Slice of Italy." I read this, curious about the country as perceived not by visitors but by those who had dealt with relocating there, a more rarely told tale.

This, then, offers a different view than such studies as John Hooper's "The Italians" (also reviewed by me). But it shares its treatment of issues like endemic nepotism, male privilege, female vanity, bureaucratic corruption, the culture of both genuine warmth and instinctive distrust that continue to distinguish Italy. David's relatives, as t.v. broadcasts stories of "violence, racism, unemployment, drugs, and scandals," proclaim "what vastly better lives David and I would have if we stayed in Italy" as "they shake their heads in disgust and yell various saints' names at each news clip." This shows Ivanka's knack for observation. You may not get much detail on actual political situations or facts, but you get a sense of life lived in the villas, beyond the tourist sights--which are barely noticed here.

For instance, the couple's week in Rome is summed up in one sentence, as they are "in total agreement with our guidebook," boasting of the city's fascinations. So, readers anticipating a travelogue will be disappointed. Instead, lots of accounts of their run-ins with the in-laws dominate.

"We soon have to agree with the Minister of Tourism, who declared that 'Italy is like a man driving a Ferrari at sixty kilometers (thirty-seven miles) an hour." But, vowing to remain there and outlasting extended attempts to buy a car, rent a place, buy a place, and negotiate the paperwork for residency, the couple finds brief work as minding children of summer holidaymakers in their adopted Tuscany.

It's not the ex-pat idyll. One may long for more of the sense of Italy's natural beauties (despite the junk heaps nearby) that Ivanka relates late in the narrative. Parts do lag, as like many anecdotes, the telling may regale those in the know more than outsiders to her family, but she sustains a cheerful, self-deprecating tone and she keeps the chapters short to vary the pace. But the food often sounds wonderful, and recipes are added. I liked the telling conversation when David and Ivanka, trying to get out of yet another meal with one of his many uncles and aunts, beg busyness as an excuse. All the more reason to dine out with the relatives, he is assured firmly, as the couple will save time cooking...

It's a pleasant introduction to daily life as seen from a North American perspective, as the couple dares to drive faster, to hang out with the clever and conniving locals, and to offer them a change from mutually held stereotypes. Gradually, the "stranieri giusti" (the right type of foreigners) characterizes the couple, who survive. This will entertain an audience seeking to experience Italy.
(P.S. I was asked to review this in exchange for a copy of this e-book; Amazon US 2-14-15)

Ivanka DiFelice sent me this in reply to my informing her about John Hooper's Q+A in the NYT. "Had I been interviewed (I need to get famous enough!) here is what I would have written:" 

You mention Puglia in your book as a recently popular destination for tourists. What’s an area nearby that people don’t know about yet?

There are lots of lovely places throughout Italy, some with far less tourists than others. However, the most famous sites have all been discovered. Admittedly, Florence, Sienna and Rome are full of tourists but that is because they are beautiful and there is a lot to be seen that cannot be found in North America. The heavily forested Casentino area of Tuscany is lovely with few tourists but while the area is pretty I would not recommend a North American travel thousands of miles to see something he could have driven a hundred miles to see back home. So figure out what you would like to see and don't worry if there are tourists in the area - that is part of the experience and will give you something to come home and grumble about.

Pasta is such a go-to food choice for foreigners. Should it be?

If you like pasta then yes! Pasta is even better in Italy and is served in a variety of sauces which we do not find in North America (wild boar sauce, truffle and porcini) so you can still eat pasta and discover something new. It is also relatively cheap and almost always good. As a side note I have several friends that cannot eat the pasta in Canada yet are able to digest the pasta in Italy. Search the menu to see if you can try something new; even if that means pasta with a sauce you have never tried before.

Italians love to talk about food, right?

Yes, they are absolutely passionate about it - avoid any talk with farmers about their garden - unless of course you have a deep interest in prized tomatoes and several hours to spare. Italians view a "drive through" as a punishment that should be reserved for only the most hardened criminals. 

What are faux pas to avoid with how you dress?

Fashions change so you need to keep up - at the moment I would describe the latest look for men as Homeless meets Zegna (from the head up a man appears to be destitute or homeless; with terribly unruly hair and a long scruffy beard.) From the head down his financial status appears to change as he dons a prohibitively expensive and well fitted suit (except it appears the pants are too short) by Zegna. If you do this look remember to leave plenty of hem on your pants as in no time the fashion will change

For women, as long as you are wearing something remotely immodest you should fit in just fine.

The key difference between Italian and North American dressing is comfort - if you are comfortable go back and adjust something if you really want to appear Italian.

What would be your first response if someone said: “I’m going to Italy next week. What should I do?”

Figure out your interests and what you want to see - then plan accordingly. There is something for everyone in this wonderful land! And don't worry about where tourists are and where they aren't - go see what you want to see and if you don't like crowds try to go "off season!"

Gruff Rhys' "American Interior": Book + Music Review

At twenty-one, John Evans left his Welsh farm. Arriving in Baltimore in 1792, he set off from the Alleghany Mountains into uncharted heartland. He sought a lost tribe of Welsh Indians.

His distant descendant by a maternal uncle, Welsh musician Gruff Rhys, is best known for his singing and songwriting as a founder of Super Furry Animals, and currently as a solo artist and a member of Neon Neon. Long intrigued by his forebear, Rhys pursues Evans' path on an ambitious 2012 "investigative concert tour" up the great rivers of Mid-America into the Great Plains. It's all documented in a "psychedelic historic travelogue", an album, a film directed by Dylan Goch, and a bilingual app mingling these media from Penguin (the last not made available for this review).

"It sounds like a joke: here were a Scotsman and a Welshman employed by a Spanish king, leading a boat full of French speakers into the precarious tribal waters of the Mississippi." Furthermore, John Evans sought to rid the West of the British, reach the Pacific, capture a unicorn, grab a seashell or two as proof, and then return for a two-thousand peso reward from Spanish Louisiana's governor, at a time when British Canada threatened to sweep south into Mexico, after French Canada succumbed to the British Empire, and as the American expansion under Thomas Jefferson eyed territory which the Spanish feared losing.

Into this geopolitical arena, young Evans entered. For five years, he mapped many blank spots and tried to verify what Rhys rightly calls the "most useful invention" of Prince Madoc. Supposed to have arrived from Wales in 1170 and rumored to have spawned a clan of Welsh-speaking natives who mingled with, or were, the Mandan of the present-day Dakota states, Madoc's reputation endured. In colonial America, a few Welsh emigrants swore they had met tribesmen who answered them in their common language. Rhys labels these as "ear-witness accounts". He explains how these settlers made Madoc "a tangible hero" among those pioneers who confused, for example, Kentucky's "Padoucas" with the supposedly Welsh "Magodwys" who had perpetuated their customs in Native America. This legend had persisted from Elizabethan times. Madoc's landfall (purported at Mobile Bay, Alabama) was appropriated by the English Crown, in a concerted effort to concoct noble lineage and irrefutable prior proof that the British could lay claim to the continent their forays now forced open to conquest.

As a Welsh speaker, Rhys brings the advantage of judging not only the discredited claims for Madoc, but providing comparisons between Welsh and Native American predicaments. Both communities feature indigenous speakers of a threatened language and ancient culture. Both face a relentless pressure which shoves the natives off their homeland, erases names and memories, and which forces their political assimilation. Evans, after all, proved no friend of the British. In 1793, he had been imprisoned by the Spanish in St. Louis, who feared either an American agent or a British spy. As a patriotic Welshman, he favored American claims to the New World's frontier. But he defected on the western side of the Mississippi River to the Spanish, becoming their citizen, so as to finance a 1795 expedition. Spain wished to fend off any British takeover west of their great river border. Spain had taken vast territories from the French, and soon Spain was at war with the British again in Europe.

So, the Spanish authorities sent Evans upriver to drive off the British who infiltrated into the Midwest across a contested Canadian frontier. Evans proves in Rhys' wry telling "responsibly delusional". He charted (but did not understand the sight of) volcanoes and veered from crocodiles. He survived passing through the lands of twelve tribes of hostile reputation, and an assassination attempt by a British operative from Canada. A skilled cartographer, after nine months in the Dakotas, the diligent emigrant Evans in conscientious fashion ultimately failed to match the Mandan evidence with any Magodwys of Madoc's purported lineage. By winter of 1796, Evans turned back from near Canada when his funds ran out and weather blocked his progress westward. His luck appeared to run out, too.

Yet, his mission paid off a few years later. Evans' hosts among the Mandan and guides from the Arikara told him what he needed to draw the first map of the source of the Missouri River. He noted the presence of what we call Yellowstone, and indicated how the Rockies comprised not one but three tiers of mountain ranges. This information enabled William Clark to plot the correct course when he and Meriwether Lewis planned and carried out their own venture less than a decade after Evans.

Rhys tracks Evans on his journey, even if his firsthand manuscripts have been lost and we must rely on those who met with him, corresponded, and copied his discoveries into their own reports. In turn, Rhys largely follows Gwyn A. "Alf" Williams' similarly lively Madoc: The Making of a Myth (1979). Williams, a Marxist historian and Welsh republican, proved a masterful interpreter in print and on film of this controversial topic, debunking persistent claims by a few Celtic romantics convinced of Madoc's existence, but Rhys appears in two places I spot-checked to repeat Williams' minor errors. For example, neither the self-styled Muskogee chief, William Bowles, nor the flamboyant double- or triple-agent Brigadier General James Wilkinson were Irishmen. Both were born in colonial Maryland.

In his own account, Rhys discusses his musical interpretation of Evans' undertaking sporadically. Although Rhys is on the road as not only an adventurer and interviewer but as a working musician, a reader needs a wider sense of how this "investigative concert tour" succeeded. Mentions of appearances, scattered lyrics, and a few comments from fans gain transcription. Rhys sees the sights and relates folksy or impassioned chats. The best of these happen on the prairies with native activists, and in Louisiana among voudou haunts. But many other places blur. Some characters barely register.

Therefore, the film (to be released on DVD April 18, 2015, in the U.S.) and the album fill in what the book may allude to or skim past. Rhys' PowerPoint presentation for American audiences, his rock songs worked out on the road, and his interviews (some with English subtitles, as the documentary aired on SC/4, the Welsh-language BBC channel) enrich the experience as he retraces Evans' steps.

The concept album, appropriately homespun and often acoustic-based, but also cinematic in scope, compliments the print version. "100 Unread Messages" lists Evans' itinerary in jaunty verse. "His mind was baked just like a cake as trouble gathered 'round." It's impressive to merge Evans' accomplishments into a skiffle song, in far less than five minutes, too. The melodic "The Weather (Or Not)", "Liberty," the title track, and the spacier "The Last Conquistador" and "Lost Tribes" mix the moods familiar to Super Furry Animals' fans, spiced by varied sonic textures, sprinkled with electronics and smooth vocals. Rhys always stands out singing in his first language. "Allweddellau Allweddol" (roughly "Keyboard Key") emits childlike native, tribal chants, wrapped into an experimental tune. "The Swamp" layers keyboards and processed beats, akin to his SFA and his three past solo albums. While some of this album floats along into its plush surroundings and threatens to drift away, the storyline manages to transfer Evans' vision into digital files through Rhys' skill in multimedia. These sixteen tracks can stand apart from the book or film, but Rhys' triple telling deserves full exposure.
(The film's trailer typifies the visual presentation; so does the array of platforms on the project site and, from the album itself, the title track video.)

"Iolo" gallops along as if a string-sweetened, synthesizer-warbling soundtrack for Evans' wild flight, when he was chased away by the Lakota. An anthemic "Walk into the Wilderness" precedes the pedal-steel, country-tinged musings on "Year of the Dog" and "Tiger's Tail". These demonstrate Rhys' knack for converting pop tropes into lush arrangements that try to evade predictability or repetition. "That's Why" picks up the pace, helped by guest drummer from The Flaming Lips, Kliph Scurlock. "Sugar Insides" resembles the Lips' congenial eclecticism, in fact. "Cylchdro Amser" (roughly "Circle Time") appropriately spins beyond temporal limits Rhys measures, as Evans' life orbits away.

Nobody knows what Evans looked like. So, Rhys in typically sly fashion commissions a three-foot "John the Avatar" as a felt doll. Rhys carries it with him as he traces Evans' five-year quest into the northwest as it was known, or not known yet, to Europeans. Intriguing vignettes parallel Evans' separation from his society, as Rhys encounters contemporary folks, native and other Americans, who warn of global warming and corporate control. A few still seek solace on the river, or in a simpler existence lived off of the grid, away from the urban gridlock. At one point, so far removed in places a map had yet to fill in, Evans was the most isolated white man on the entire continent, Rhys reckons it.

Throughout, as Rhys shows in genial but earnest manner, Evans faced challenges as he tried to prove what reality showed as false. Madoc was verified as only myth, when the Mandan failed to chatter in Evans' first language of Welsh. The dream ended, Evans returned on a sixty-eight day voyage down the Missouri River, 1800 miles to St. Louis. He tried working as a surveyor, but the fractious territory bristled with Frenchmen abandoned by their nation's loss to Britain. The Spanish tried to keep their hold on a region where the Americans and the British infiltrated to assert their own imperial claims. This left Evans no opportunity for an easy occupation. Rhys tries to track down Evans' ultimate fate.

In New Orleans, where Evans was monitored by a suspicious Spanish governor uneasy to let such a skilled frontiersmen loose in dangerous times to spill his secrets to a rival power, he succumbed to delirium by 1799. Whether due to depression after his long adventure's denouement, malaria, alcohol, or more than one cause, Evans met a humble and early end. No grave remains. Most documents in his own hand probably were thrown overboard by pirates looting the ship on which the Spanish, departing after the Louisiana Purchase, had loaded up treasures to safeguard in their Florida redoubt. While Evans' tale has been scrutinized by previous scholars, Rhys admits he has found a bit to add to Evans' saga, given their common language, and thanks to Rhys' recent archival research in Seville.

Out of his thin family tie, on a search for origins, Rhys connects with Evans poignantly. It's in an eerie, prescient form left for the reader, listener, or viewer to witness. (Here, I prefer the book to the film, as it evokes more sensitively Rhys' epiphany as he seeks Evans' final destination, if he rests near the site of New Orleans' notorious Storyville.) Beforehand, in a meeting conveyed well on both page and screen, Rhys visits Keith Bear, a Mandan flute player. Bear envisions the fabled dragon of the Welsh flag as combining mythic with real, out of a creature half-earth and half-air. Truths conjured from fables create their own power, spurring Evans and Rhys on to cross paths with native tribes, once hoped for as evidence of a utopian, hybrid heritage. The Welsh imagined a few natives in America had forged a congenial community and that they had lived as inheritors of Welsh customs, for hundreds of years. Out of such suppositions, the true and the imaginary create a kind of "common" sense, even if this conceit fails as commonsense. This expresses an elusive awareness beyond mere fact. In American Interior's multimedia endeavor, as innovative as an app, as venerable as an old map inspiring an epic, Gruff Rhys honors his ancestor, Ieuan ab Ifan (renamed John Evans by the English), as natives do. Rhys and Evans share, two centuries apart, a tribal Welsh vision quest.
Project's website
Artist's website
(This appeared on PopMatters 12-18-14 as "A Multimedia Tale of a Welsh Vision Quest")

Donal McLaughlin's "Beheading the Virgin Mary and Other Stories": Review

Seventeen stories alternate between an Irish boy raised in Derry whose family moves to Glasgow, and other tales, many about Irish people living among Scots, uneasy about their situation, and growing distant within themselves and amidst their neighbors. Donal McLaughlin's upbringing, born in 1961 in Derry, to a family who left for Scotland around 1970, reflects that of his fictional O'Donnell clan, and the fortunes of Liam, the young protagonist. Preferring a blend of dry detachment and steady immersion in a different type of Scots-Irish experience than that which dominates in Ulster, McLaughlin explores The Troubles and the gradual drift from religious allegiance and political loyalty which has characterized many of his generation, in Ireland and its diaspora.

"Big Trouble" set in late 1968 presages the burst of violence the following summer in the North of Ireland. It juxtaposes the O'Donnell children acting out a Civil Rights march for Catholic equality which is mixed, in their confused understanding, with the traditional Orange Order parades reminding the province's minority of the claims to domination by the Unionist majority. The little ones lack the awareness of their parents as to who is representing what; McLaughlin adapts a clever perspective for his play-act.

By the time of "Enough to Make You Hurt" four years later, the indifferent or dull reactions of those in Scotland who hear of the Bloody Sunday protests in Derry again represent the clash of one people with another, as the Irish Catholics in Glasgow tend to lose their accents and their identity the more they remain overseas, even if their sectarian faith in the Celtic football club persists as their true icon. Liam's father resents the lack of compassion shown by the assimilated Irish-Scots, who cheer the team but offer at best only lip service to pain felt by those who learn the names of dead Derrymen.

"A Day Out" in 1974 finds Liam beginning to blend in among his classmates in Glasgow. Hearing of I.R.A. threats to the Queen on the radio during a bus excursion, he fears retaliation from his mates. "Would they turn on him? Then he minded his Scottish accent now but. That he'd lost his brogue. Only the boys he went to primary wi knew he was from Ireland originally. Others wouldn't know unless they told them."  He relies on the trust of his new comrades to protect himself from old hates.

The old ways tug on another character, who in "Somewhere Down the Line" lies to his wife about going to the "[Cel]'Tic" match so he can wrangle quiet time to visit the People's Palace in Glasgow. There, he sees exhibits about the work his father and grandfather had done there, and he relishes the intimate contact with a past that few care about, given "fitba" and crowds as a boisterous alternative.

McLaughlin handles such figures well. In the stand-out story "The Way to a Man's Heart", Sean, a Derry emigrant, drives over half of Scotland, up to Inverness. His assignation with a woman, herself longer over from Ireland, turns poignant. He came for sex with her, but he stays for her hearty stew.

Another wanderer, the enigmatic "Kenny Ryan", claims darkly to have left Derry, but the O'Donnell's diligent inquiries among those back home cannot account for the reasons Kenny now insists on puttering around the O'Donnell's home so persistently. This mysterious miser hovers, and lingers in the memory of the reader, too. At his best, McLaughlin conjures up such lonely Irish men, still adrift.

The dour tones of Irish Catholicism echo, but fewer in Liam's generation pay homage to the likes of the elderly man whose favorite prayers included "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, assist me in my last agony", or the sustained abuse uncovered sexually at home by a cruel father and in the parish at the hands of a cunning priest, a difficult subject limned sparely and effectively in "We Now Know". In a vignette "The Secret of How to Love", a son who admits his father told his mother to her face that he did not love her finds in his father's posthumous file of "Useful Quotes" tucked between saints' pious aphorisms this: "Love is not a feeling/ It is an act of will." The narrator adds: "Anonymous, I take it."

Liam's maturation follows, and while later stories dissipate the force of the earlier ones as music, school, and the Continent beckon, in his eighteenth year, 1979, his studies in Germany and German remind him of sinister echoes. "Dachau-Derry-Knock" attempts to, through Liam's associations, link the tin drum Oscar beats at Nazi rallies in the 1978 film adaptation of Gunter Grass' novel with the mass rallies for Mass held by the new pope, John Paul II. He appealed in his Irish visit to the I.R.A. to follow the path of peace, and this controversial message, within the tangled context of hunger strikes by I.R.A. prisoners for political status, and the clash of the Catholic with the Irish Republican ideologies, made for a delicate situation, or a hopelessly conflicted one, within the Irish public. As with James Joyce's portrayals of bickering within extended families over past political debates pitting men of violence against men of peace, the O'Donnells fail to reach concord between the two factions.

Weary of this, Liam agrees with his Gran's advice: "You're better off leaving it, sure. Not saying nothing." Again, rather typical Irish advice. In a manner again reminiscent of Stephen Dedalus' choice to leave Ireland for the Continent, Liam for university resolves to emigrate from Scotland.

The title story rushes headlong through its desecrating incident in compressed prose. Taking place on Boxing Day around now, it shows the O'Donnells leaving many traditions behind, unsurprisingly. A "bonus" story recounts a seaside ghost, again delving into the O'Donnell family McLaughlin can't yet leave behind, even if Liam has promised to do so. For, like Dedalus, he's back among the clan again.

As a translator of Swiss-German fiction (see my 5 June 2014 review of The Alp by Arno Camenisch), McLaughlin appears to have achieved Liam's ambition. These stories work best when tracking loners, those who cannot fit into the ethnic identities of their counterparts or cultural descendents abroad. Anticipating how this rarely explored dimension of recent Irish-to-Scot emigration plays off the legacy of The Troubles and of Irish-Catholic assimilation as religious ties unravel, McLaughlin follows the way his early life has transpired, if as in Joycean fashion, ambling into its preoccupied, idiosyncratic fictions. Out of familiar concerns of youth and adolescence, he plots his own direction.
(6-12-14 to PopMatters; Amazon US 7-28-14)

Joanna Higgins' "The Anarchist": Book Review

Writing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.

Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Ms. Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels. 

When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Ms. Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?

Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.

How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain. 

Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide. 

We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then, we hear a young Emma asserting, after she has read the militant newspaper which radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest. 

This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike. 

Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for.  Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive. 

In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country. 

Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon effect the President, after another botched act of violence. 

Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)

He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him. 

Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So, it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic. 

Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents. 

The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.

This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma. 

When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon-- gains its own place in the spotlight. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully. 

Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position. 

In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time. 

From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all. (NY Journal of Books 5-2-14.)

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.