Pg. 99: Susan A. Brewer's "Why America Fights"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq by Susan A. Brewer.

About the book, from the publisher:

On the evening of September 11, 2002, with the Statue of Liberty shimmering in the background, television cameras captured President George W. Bush as he advocated war against Iraq. This carefully stage-managed performance, writes Susan A. Brewer, was the culmination of a long tradition of sophisticated wartime propaganda in America.

In Why America Fights, Brewer offers a fascinating history of how successive presidents have conducted what Donald Rumsfeld calls "perception management," from McKinley's war in the Philippines to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Brewer's intriguing account ranges from analyses of wartime messages to descriptions of the actual operations, from the dissemination of patriotic ads and posters to the management of newspaper, radio, and TV media. When Woodrow Wilson took the nation into World War I, he created the Committee on Public Information, led by George Creel, who called his job "the world's greatest adventure in advertising." In World War II, Roosevelt's Office of War Information avowed a "strategy of truth," though government propaganda still depicted Japanese soldiers as buck-toothed savages. In the Korean War, the Truman administration delineated differences between "good" and "evil" Asians, while portraying the conflict as a global battle between the Free World and Communism. After examining the ultimately failed struggle to cast the Vietnam War in a favorable light, Brewer shows how the Bush White House drew explicit lessons from that history as it engaged in an unprecedented effort to sell a preemptive war in Iraq. Yet the thrust of its message was not much different from McKinley's pronouncements about America's civilizing mission.

Impressively researched and argued, filled with surprising details, Why America Fights shows how presidents consistently have drummed up support for foreign wars by appealing to what Americans want to believe about themselves.

Learn more about Why America Fights at the Oxford University Press website.

Susan A. Brewer is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Her publications include To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States during World War II.

The Page 99 Test: Why America Fights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Review: Bernardo Atxaga's "The Accordionist’s Son"

Ray Taras, who covers contemporary world literature for the blog, reviews Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist’s Son (Graywolf Press, 2009):

This ambitious novel paints a broad canvas of social and political life in the Basque Country. Centered on the obscure village of Obaba, we are introduced to the cleavages that have scarred Basque society for three-quarters of a century. The Spanish Civil War polarized Obabans as General Franco’s forces moved in: “The first thing the forces opposed to the Republic did when they ‘liberated’ a village was to bring in a priest to celebrate mass in the church, as if they were afraid that, under the Republicans, the devil had established himself there” (188). Right-wing Catholic extremists, like the Navarrese integristas who “liberated” Obaba, were brutal. But Falangists were the most feared of all. Inevitably, collaborators were found to be introduced into their ranks. One of them is the narrator’s father.

David, who had moved from Obaba to a ranch in California as a young man, returns to his native village to discover the controversial figure that his father had represented. Which people had Ángel, the Christian name David uses without affection to refer to his Dad, betrayed to the fascists? Was he implicated in the first killings of a group of villagers? Had he shot a horse adored by the youth of the area in order to spite a man he did not like? The verdict is clear to David but he is emotionally torn whether to embrace it. Just as he is torn whether to replace his father as the accordionist at village fêtes, which would turn him into a public symbol of acquiescence to the village authorities and the contemptible Guardia Civil.

David’s role model is Uncle Juan who, by contrast, stands as a symbol of Basque anti-fascist resistance. The tender portrayal of their long relationship, especially poignant since Juan is not David’s real uncle, is arguably the romantic centerpiece of this novel. Because of his politics, Juan becomes David’s figurative father.

David is infatuated with a series of village girls, who figure among the subjects of a shortlist he draws up, together with friends, identifying the area’s five top beauty queens. The extended account of young men in a bar over a long night making the case for ranking the doctor’s or farmer’s daughter --replete with comparisons of the most striking physical attributes of each-- on this list can make for tedious reading. To be sure, female interests that David has while away at university are condemned to only passing mention. The callousness towards the women of his youth stands in sharp relief to the male bonding that permeates David’s adolescence.

There is more to this narrative than we anticipate. Circulating copies among villagers over the next few days of the beauty queen list appears downright crude. But in a subterfuge way, the story of this list serves Atxaga’s literary purpose. When some time later ETA (“Basque Homeland and Freedom”) leaflets are distributed in the area, the Guardia’s suspicions immediately fall on the boorish young men. Were they not, perhaps, carrying out a trial run of colportage of political literature with the Obaba beauty queens’ list?

There is much subtlety in the author’s narrative structure, as there is to his politics. Atxaga is aware that Euskadi independence is not exactly an international cause célèbre to rival Tibet. Bilbao, where nearly half of all Basques live, does not have the cachet, or economic might, of Barcelona, capital of Catalonia. So he does not proselytize for the Basque independence movement but, instead, is content to reveal its inner struggles (the hardcore ideologue on the farm across the border in France), its devoted adherents (Papi), its twisted betrayals (as on the train carrying David and two companions to a mission in Barcelona), and its often tragic outcomes (Lubis’ death).

If Atxaga has made any inroads in attracting sympathy for the Basque cause, it is in tantalizing the reader with the Basque language. There are just enough Basque phrases—and a whole lot of Basque names for the different species of butterflies found in the region—to pique our interest. Euskalerriko Tximeletak?—“Butterflies and Moths of the Basque Country.” Music to Nabokov’s ears.

In some measure the author raises awareness of the Basque diaspora in the United States, too. David meets his future wife in Sausalito, but Basques have generally preferred life in the open spaces of California and the Intermountain West, above all Idaho. Boise and Gernica (Basque spelling), where one of the novel’s protagonists lost family in the 1937 Luftwaffe bombing, are twin cities.

It takes a village to populate The Accordionist’s Son. The Basque village is Axtaga’s idyllic model. It spawns a lengthy list of characters. Some of them leave more profound marks on David--and Obaba (though the egalitarian Axtaga would dispute this)--than others. The author’s most admirable achievement is his political restraint. He subordinates the significance of Basque politics to that of the Basque people.
--Ray Taras

Ray Taras is a visiting scholar at Stanford University. His many books include the recently released Europe Old and New: Transnationalism, Belonging, Xenophobia and Understanding Ethnic Conflict, 4th edition.

He has reviewed the following fiction for the blog:
Elina Hirvonen's When I Forgot
Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce
Per Petterson's To Siberia
Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger
Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses
M.G. Vassanji's The Assassin's Song
3 Works by Dorota Masłowska
Andreï Makine's L’amour humain
Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island
Emmanuel Dongala's Johnny Mad Dog
Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best baseball books

A few years ago, former major league catcher Tim McCarver named a five best list of baseball books for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on his list:

"Ball Four" by Jim Bouton (World, 1970).

Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" was a terrifically revealing book, and for writing it he was ostracized by the baseball establishment--both by the players and by Bowie Kuhn, the baseball commissioner at the time. He'd kept a diary about his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros--material filled with locker-room stories and other forbidden topics. It was hilarious stuff. Now here it is 35 years later, and it all seems so tame--so innocent! The innocence is one of the book's charms today. But back when it first appeared, and this says something about where we've come, it was like "Peyton Place."

Read about another book on McCarver's list.

Also see Tom Werner's six favorite baseball books, Fay Vincent's five best list of baseball books, and Nicholas Dawidoff's five best list of baseball fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Timothy J. Shannon reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Timothy J. Shannon, a history professor at Gettysburg College and author of Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier and other works.

His entry begins:

It is summer, the time of year when I try to squeeze in most of my pleasure reading. My usual tactic is to pick one contemporary work of fiction and one long-neglected (on my part at least) classic and then to see what those titles lead me to next.

I started off with Dear American Airlines, a well-reviewed debut novel by Jonathan Miles last year. The story is told by the protagonist, a recovering alcoholic and divorced father who is trying desperately to make it to his daughter’s wedding, only to find himself thwarted by the capricious nature of modern air travel. His angry letter of complaint, composed during an interminable and unplanned layover, becomes a confessional account of his life, told with hearty doses of black humor. Of course, I may have been cajoled into reading this one simply by the description of the author’s day job on the dust jacket: he is the cocktails editor for the New York Times.

The classic novel I have selected for the summer is...[read on]

In addition to Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (2008), Tim Shannon is the author of Atlantic Lives: A Comparative Approach to Early America (2004), and Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (2000), which won the Dixon Ryan Fox Prize from the New York State Historical Association and the Distinguished Book Award from the Society of Colonial Wars. He is also co-author with Victoria Bissell Brown of Going to the Source: The Bedford Reader in Early American History (second edition, 2008). His articles have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the New England Quarterly, and Ethnohistory.

Writers Read: Timothy J. Shannon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Julia Gregson's "East of the Sun"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: East of the Sun by Julia Gregson.

About the book, from the publisher:

As the Kaisar-i-Hind weighs anchor for Bombay in the autumn of 1928, its passengers ponder their fate in a distant land. They are part of the "Fishing Fleet" -- the name given to the legions of Englishwomen who sail to India each year in search of husbands, heedless of the life that awaits them. The inexperienced chaperone Viva Holloway has been entrusted to watch over three unsettling charges. There's Rose, as beautiful as she is naïve, who plans to marry a cavalry officer she has met a mere handful of times. Her bridesmaid, Victoria, is hell-bent on losing her virginity en route before finding a husband of her own. And shadowing them all is the malevolent presence of a disturbed schoolboy named Guy Glover.

From the parties of the wealthy Bombay socialites to the poverty of Tamarind Street, from the sooty streets of London to the genteel conversation of the Bombay Yacht Club, East of the Sun is graced with lavish detail and a penetrating sensitivity -- historical fiction at its greatest.

Read an excerpt from East of the Sun, and learn more about the book and author at Julia Gregson's website.

"Gregson delivers 1928 India in livid, vivid color. East of the Sun is a fantastic book, one that endures in the mind long after the final page is turned."
--Monica Stark, January Magazine

The Page 69 Test: East of the Sun.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jay Wexler's "Holy Hullabaloos"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars by Jay Wexler.

About the book, from the publisher:

Prayer in schools? Animal sacrifices in public? Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn? Jay Wexler has seen it all...

After ten years spent riddling over the intricacies of church/state law from the ivory tower, law professor Jay Wexler decided it was high time to hit the road to learn what really happened in some of the most controversial Supreme Court cases involving this hot-button issue. In Holy Hullabaloos, he takes us along for the ride, crossing the country to meet the people and visit the places responsible for landmark decisions in recent judicial history, from a high school football field where fans once recited prayers before kickoff to a Santeria church notorious for animal sacrifice, from a publicly funded Muslim school to a creationist museum. Wexler's no-holds-barred approach to investigating famous church/state brouhahas is as funny as it is informative.

Read more about Holy Hullabaloos at the publisher's website, learn more about the author at Jay Wexler's faculty webpage.

Wexler teaches at the Boston University School of Law. He studied religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School and law at Stanford, and worked as a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He has published numerous academic articles, and reviews, as well as nearly three dozen short stories and humor pieces in outlets such as Spy and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

The Page 99 Test: Holy Hullabaloos.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Julia Buckley & Simon

The current feature at Coffee with a Canine: Julia Buckley & Simon.

Buckley lives and writes in the Midwest. The Dark Backward was her first mystery and is available at your local bookseller. Her novel Madeline Mann was called “A bright debut” by Kirkus, and Library Journal has dubbed her “a writer to watch.” Simon, her half Jack Russell, half Beagle, inspired the Beagle who lives with the protagonist of her third novel.

She posts at three online blogs: Mysterious Musings, Poe’s Deadly Daughters, and The Inkspot.

View The Dark Backward book trailer and learn more about the author and her books at Julia Buckley's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Dark Backward.

Read--Coffee with a canine: Julia Buckley & Simon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oprah's summer list: 7 indie titles

Books from independent publishers have been an extreme rarity on Oprah's recommended summer reading lists. Until this year.

MobyLives identified seven books (out of a total 25) by independent publishers on Oprah's current list.

One of the indie books:

The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards: Stories
By Robert Boswell
Graywolf

Read about another indie book on Oprah's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Isla Morley's "Come Sunday"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Come Sunday by Isla Morley.

About the book, from the publisher:

A wonderful new storyteller unleashes a soaring debut that sweeps from the hills of Hawaii to the veldt of South Africa.

Come Sunday is that joyous, special thing: a saga that captivates from the very first page, breaking our hearts while making our spirits soar.

Abbe Deighton is a woman who has lost her bearings. Once a child of the African plains, she is now settled in Hawaii, married to a minister, and waging her battles in a hallway of monotony. There is the leaky roof, the chafing expectations of her husband’s congregation, and the constant demands of motherhood. But in an instant, beginning with the skid of tires, Abbe’s battlefield is transformed when her three-year-old daughter is killed, triggering in Abbe a seismic grief that will cut a swath through the landscape of her life and her identity.

What an enthralling debut this is! What a storyteller we have here! As Isla Morley’s novel sweeps from the hills of Honolulu to the veldt of South Africa, we catch a hint of the spirit of Barbara Kingsolver and the mesmerizing truth of Jodi Picoult. We are reminded of how it felt, a while ago, to dive into the drama of The Thorn Birds.

Come Sunday is a novel about searching for a true homeland, family bonds torn asunder, and the unearthing of decades-old secrets. It is a novel to celebrate, and Isla Morley is a writer to love.

Preview Come Sunday, and learn more about the book and author at Isla Morley's website.

The Page 69 Test: Come Sunday.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Guobin Yang reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Guobin Yang, author of the newly released The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.

His entry begins:

I have just read Kristen Ross's book May '68 and Its Afterlives (2002). The book shows that in the decades after 1968, mainstream social science has constructed a mellow and tame image of the May Movement as a student movement about lifestyles and cultural identity. Ross argues that this image distorted historical reality, contending that the May Movement was a violent, not tame, revolutionary movement about social equality rooted in the fundamental crises of capitalist society and involving broad cross-sections of French society, notably workers, but also farmers, as well as students.

I have always been struck by the numerous parallels in the social activism of the 1960s in Western societies and in China. It is sobering to realize that the mainstream image of the 1960s movements in the West is mellow and quiescent, whereas that of the Red Guard movement and the Cultural Revolution in China is just the opposite -- violent, bloody, and cruel. The unstated commonality between these two images is that neither has anything to do with revolutionary transformation. Ross's book shows how this image is false.[read on]

Guobin Yang is an associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is coeditor, with Ching Kwan Lee, of Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China.

Watch a video of Guobing Yang discussing The Power of the Internet in China, and read more about the book at the Columbia University Press website.

Learn more about Guobin Yang and his scholarship.

Writers Read: Guobin Yang.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 worst books in international relations

Daniel W. Drezner named the 10 worst books in international relations for Foreign Policy. His criteria:

to earn a place on this list, we're talking about:

* Books by prominent international policymakers that put you to sleep;
* Books that were influential in some way but also spectacularly wrong, leading to malign consequences.

One title on the list:

Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb.

The first of many, many, many books in which Ehrlich argued that the world's population was growing at an unsustainable rate, outstripping global resources and leading to inevitable mass starvation. Ehrlich's book committed a triple sin. First, he was wrong on the specifics. Second, by garnering so much attention by being wrong, he contributed to the belief that alarmism was the best way to get people to pay attention to the environment. Third, by crying wolf so many times, Ehrlich numbed many into not buying actual, real environmental threats.

Read about another book on Drezner's list.

Also see: Top 10 books for students of international relations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Chris Grabenstein's "Mind Scrambler"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Mind Scrambler by Chris Grabenstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

John Ceepak and Danny Boyle are making the rounds in Atlantic City when Danny runs into his former crush, Katie. She’s working for a magician named Rock, and her life seems to be in better order than Boyle could have hoped for. But Ceepak and Boyle soon find themselves on another case when Katie is found strangled to death. It is up to Ceepak and Boyle to find out who killed her. Their lives and the lives of others depend on it.

Learn more about the author and his work at Chris Grabenstein's website.

Mind Scrambler is the 5th John Ceepak mystery.

Chris Grabenstein won the Anthony Award for "Best First Mystery" (given at Bouchercon 2006) for his debut novel Tilt A Whirl—the first in a series of John Ceepak stories to be set "Down The Shore" in a New Jersey tourist town called Sea Haven. It was followed by Mad Mouse, Whack A Mole, and Hell Hole.

The Page 69 Test: Hell Hole.

The Page 99 Test: Mind Scrambler.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Heather Barbieri’s "The Lace Makers of Glenmara"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Lace Makers of Glenmara by Heather Barbieri.

About the book, from the publisher:

"You can always start again," Kate Robinson's mother once told her, "all it takes is a new thread." Overwhelmed by heartbreak and loss, the struggling twenty-six-year-old fashion designer follows her mother's advice and flees to her ancestral homeland of Ireland, hoping to break free of old patterns and reinvent herself.

She arrives on the west coast, in the seaside hamlet of Glenmara. In this charming, fading Gaelic village, Kate quickly develops a bond with members of the local lace-making society: Bernie, alone and yearning for a new purpose since the death of her beloved husband, John; Aileen, plagued by doubt, helplessly watching her teenage daughter grow distant; Moira, caught in a cycle of abuse and denial, stubbornly refusing help from those closest to her; Oona, in remission from breast cancer, secretly harboring misgivings about her marriage; Colleen, the leader of the group, worried about her fisherman husband, missing at sea. And outside this newfound circle is local artist Sullivan Deane, an enigmatic man trying to overcome a tragedy of his own.

Under Glenmara's spell, Kate finds the inspiration that has eluded her, and soon she and the lace makers are creating a line of exquisite lingerie. In their skilled hands, flowers, Celtic dragons, nymphs, fish, saints, kings, and queens come to life, rendered with painterly skill. The circle also offers them something more—the strength to face their long-denied desires and fears. But not everyone welcomes Kate, and a series of unexpected events threatens to unravel everything the women have worked so hard for....

Read an excerpt from The Lace Makers of Glenmara, and learn more about the book and author at Heather Barbieri’s website.

The Page 69 Test: The Lace Makers of Glenmara.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Cry in the Dark"

John Bryson's best known work is Evil Angels, his 1985 book chronicling the story of Lindy Chamberlain's trial for murder, following the disappearance of her baby daughter, Azaria.

Americans of course know the story better as A Cry in the Dark, the film (adapted from Evil Angels) starring Meryl Streep as Lindy Chamberlain.

The sensational trial, conviction, and subsequent acquittal of Lindy Chamberlain did not help the plight of the Australia dingo.

Some people are trying to change that. Visit Coffee with a Canine and see what Nic Papalia & Lindy the dingo (yes, "Lindy"--how's that for irony?) are doing to raise awareness about Australia's dingo population.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 out-of-town tales

Edward Hogan is the winner of the Desmond Elliott first novel prize for Blackmoor, his story of a Derbyshire village during the miners' strike.

For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of stories set outside the city.

One book on the list:

The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe

An incredible first line: "When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent." You'd be right to be suspicious of a narrator with a two-decade margin of error concerning his own age. A stunning tale of a town that can't control the man it has created. I imagine it influenced Ross Raisin's excellent debut, God's Own Country, set in agricultural Yorkshire.

Read about another book on Hogan's list.

The Butcher Boy also appears on crime writer Declan Burke's top ten list of Irish crime fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mike Brotherton's "Spider Star," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Spider Star by Mike Brotherton.

The entry begins:

My novel Spider Star from Tor Books is a far-future space adventure with starships, aliens, advanced technology, and a lot of astronomy. Unfortunately a lot of Hollywood movies with these elements wind up being pretty dumb, with Armageddon at the top of the heap. With this in mind, my first notion about my book as a movie is that Michael Bay be assassinated if he even hears the slightest whisper about Spider Star. I might become suicidal if my ideas became transformed into a Michael Bay movie.

Having said that, my choice for director would be Zombie Kubrick, but he worked slowly even when he was alive, so let's go with Robert Zemeckis. He did a good job of making the science fiction elements of Contact realistic, and I love the way he uses special effects as a tool rather than an end product (e.g., Michael Bay).

There are three point-of-view characters in Spider Star. Frank Klingston is an older family-oriented man of Nordic stock who has put his days of exploration behind him, but when his world is threatened, he takes up the challenge. A lot of the book is about him struggling with sacrifice for his family, which he must give up in order to save, and how discovery and risk are a young man's game that he must learn how to play all over again. I see...[read on]

Read the prologue and first four chapters of Spider Star. Learn more about the author and his work at Mike Brotherton's website.

The Page 69 Test: Spider Star.

My Book, The Movie: Spider Star.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Nicholas Griffin reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Nicholas Griffin, author of the historical novels The Requiem Shark, House of Sight and Shadow, and Dizzy City, and the nonfiction work, Caucasus.

His entry begins:

I'm heading toward the end of nine months of research for my next book. That means I've read around 120 books, all non-fiction, as well as several hundred articles. The problem with research is not only that so much of it is dry, most of it is happens to be irrelevant to your own end-result, but even the author doesn't know exactly where he or she is heading at this stage. Among the dross, I read many first rate books, two of which, Nelson Mandela's Long Road to Freedom and Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold stand out.

Writers need patience, but patience itself is put in perspective through Mandela's accomplishments, always pushing outwards, reaching outwards, observing, even when all he had was...[read on]

Learn more about the author and his work at Nicholas Griffin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Dizzy City.

Writers Read: Nicholas Griffin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: James Hayman's "The Cutting"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Cutting by James Hayman.

About the book, from the publisher:

From a formidable new voice in suspense fiction comes an edge-of-the-seat story of a homicide detective on the trail of a killer, who slays with exacting precision, and who harbors a terrifying motive

Detective Sergeant Michael McCabe moved from New York City to Portland, Maine, to escape a dark past: both the ex-wife who’d left him for an investment banker, and the tragic death of his brother, a hero cop gone bad. He sought to raise his young daughter away from the violence of the big city ... so he’s unprepared for the horrific killer he discovers, whose bloody trail may lead to Portland’s social elite.

Early on a September evening, the mutilated body of a pretty teenaged girl, a high school soccer star, is found dumped in a scrap-metal yard. She had been viciously assaulted, but her heart had been cut out of her chest with surgical precision. The very same day a young businesswoman, also a blonde and an athlete, was abducted as she jogged through the streets of the city’s west end. McCabe suspects both crimes are the work of the same man---a killer who’s targeting the young---who is clearly well-versed in complex surgical procedures, and who may have struck before. Just as the investigation is beginning, McCabe’s ex-wife reemerges, suddenly determined to reclaim the daughter she heedlessly abandoned years earlier.

With the help of his straight-talking (and, at times, alluring) partner, Maggie Savage, McCabe begins a race against time to rescue the missing woman and unmask a sadistic killer---before more lives are lost.

Read an excerpt from The Cutting, and learn more about the book and author at James Hayman's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Cutting.

--Marshal Zeringue

Harley the lit blogging corgi

Although Harley doesn't do much of the heavy lifting at Kaye Barley's Meanderings and Muses blog, he certainly is a presence there.

Harley and Kaye are the currently featured duo at Coffee with a Canine.

Kaye introduced the couple:

Harley and I live with my husband Donald in Boone, NC, which is a small town in the Western Carolina mountains. When I'm not working, I'm "Mistress of Meanderings and Muses," a terrific little blog which recently had a virtual party in celebration of welcoming 10,000 visitors. And that's after having been around for less than eight months. I'm pretty proud of that, and over the moon proud of Meanderings and Muses where we host writers and fans from the mystery/crime fiction community as guest bloggers. While most of us have roots in the crime fiction world, our conversations at M&M are all over the place. It's fun and it's interesting, and I hope some of your readers will stop by for a visit. You never know who you'll see there, or what we'll be chatting about.

Harley's full name is Harley Doodle Barley. We added the "Doodle" 'cause he was born on the 4th of July, 2005.

Read more at Coffee with a Canine: Kaye Barley & Harley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best marital rows in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best marital rows in literature.

One dust-up on the list:

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

Lydgate and Rosamond marry in mutual passion, but impecuniousness begins to render the husband "disagreeable" to his wife. Their first row is all the ghastlier for producing no raised voices, just the certainty in Rosamond's mind, when Lydgate talks of pawning her jewels, that if she had known this "she would never have married him".

Read about another marital row on Mullan's list.

Middlemarch also made Mullan's list of ten of the best funerals in literature.

Are you a little unsettled for not having read Middlemarch? So are John Banville and Nick Hornby.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Patrick Manning's "The African Diaspora"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture by Patrick Manning.

About the book, from the publisher:

Patrick Manning refuses to divide the African diaspora into the experiences of separate regions and nations. Instead, he follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In weaving these stories together, Manning shows how the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean fueled dynamic interactions among black communities and cultures and how these patterns resembled those of a number of connected diasporas concurrently taking shaping across the globe.

Manning begins in 1400 and traces five central themes: the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community; discourses on race; changes in economic circumstance; the character of family life; and the evolution of popular culture. His approach reveals links among seemingly disparate worlds. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, slavery came under attack in North America, South America, southern Africa, West Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and India, with former slaves rising to positions of political prominence. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century, the near-elimination of slavery brought new forms of discrimination that removed almost all blacks from government for half a century.

Manning underscores the profound influence that the African diaspora had on world history, demonstrating the inextricable link between black migration and the rise of modernity, especially in regards to the processes of industrialization and urbanization. A remarkably inclusive and far-reaching work, The African Diaspora proves that the advent of modernity cannot be imaginatively or comprehensively engaged without taking the African peoples and the African continent as a whole into account.

Read an excerpt from The African Diaspora, and learn more about the book at the Columbia University Press website.

Learn more about Patrick Manning's research and teaching at his World History Network webpage.

Patrick Manning is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh and president of the World History Network, a nonprofit corporation fostering research in world history. His books include Slavery and African Life, Migration in World History, and Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past.

The Page 99 Test: The African Diaspora.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Binnie Kirshenbaum's "The Scenic Route"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Scenic Route by Binnie Kirshenbaum.

About the book, from the publisher:

Divorced, alone, and unexpectedly unemployed, Sylvia Landsman flees to Italy, where she meets Henry, a wistful, married, middle-aged expatriate. Taking off on a grand tour of Europe bankrolled with his wife's money, Henry and Sylvia follow a circuitous route around the continent—as Sylvia entertains Henry with stories of her peculiar family and her damaged friends, of dead ducks and Alma Mahler. Her narrative is a tapestry of remembrances and regrets...and her secret shame: a small, cowardly sin of omission. Yet when the opportunity arises for Sylvia and Henry to do something small but brave, the refrain "if only" returns to haunt her, leaving Sylvia with one more story of love lived and lost.

Browse inside The Scenic Route, and learn more about the book and author at Binnie Kirshenbaum's website.

Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of two short story collections and six novels. She is a professor of fiction writing at the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts and lives in New York City.

The Page 69 Test: The Scenic Route.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best vegetables in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best vegetables in literature.

One title on the list:

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

At the Grand Academy of Lagado, Gulliver discovers a scientist who "has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers". His experiments were failing, however, "since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers".

Read about another book on Mullan's list.

Gulliver's Travels is one of Neil deGrasse Tyson's 5 most important books.

Also see Mullan's list of the ten of the best pieces of fruit in literature and Adam Leith Gollner's top 10 fruit scenes in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue