Eva Casey’s 2024 Selected Book List. Fact before fiction, Otherwise Order is not significant. December 30, 2024
1. Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow ©2023. 324pp. The Ultra podcast expanded into a book. The WW II era domestic heroes are Leon Lewis and his team of infiltrators into “Silver Shirt” militias; Henry Hoke, a man in the advertising biz, who recognized a mass-mailing propaganda effort to persuade America to stay out of the war that turned out to be directed from Berlin; and Washington Post Journalist Dillard Stokes. America Firsters Charles Lindberg, Henry Ford, and Fr. Coughlin were exercising legitimate freedoms. The 24 Congressmen who secretly colluded with the Nazis, not so much. They got away with it because the judge died resulting in a mistrial. The report written after interviews at Nuremberg was stamped ‘Secret’ and never saw the light of day. Also, Supreme Court decisions helped let them off the hook. The good news is most of the unregistered-foreign-agent Congressmen were not re-elected. There was even a politician in the 1930s and 40s who wished he could build a wall around America to keep the refugees out. Philip Johnson admired Hitler until Johnson reversed that in 1941.
2. More Than Words Can Express: A Story of Love and Forgiveness by Tasha Donahue (1946-2024, Aquinas ’64) ©2015. 256pp. Tasha and her husband Ted had two sons, Chris born in 1972 and Brian in 1981. Tasha married a sailor. Like her, Ted was from a working-class Catholic family. Tasha put him through college, medical school, and five years of surgical residency, during which he was too busy to participate much in the family (she marvels that they conceived Brian). When the boys were 4 and 13 Ted went into private practice in Arizona with regular hours. Tasha managed his office, but otherwise devoted herself to family life in their lovely home. She enjoyed cooking fabulous family meals–she had gone to culinary school, and one of her jobs had been “food writer.” But the marriage deteriorated. When Brian had just finished 7th grade, and Chris was in the military, she and Ted divorced, after 23 years of marriage. About this time Brian’s epilepsy manifested, and plagued him for the rest of her life. As an adult he had a couple of brain operations. She was at his bedside. Tasha and Ted had welcomed her father into their home in his old age. Tasha had had great parenting early, but then her mother became an alcoholic and died in her mid-forties. Tasha was embarrassed to bring friends home from school. When she was 17 her mother told a boyfriend of Tasha’s “You are too good for her.” I read one of Tasha’s other books, a light-hearted story about a divorcée living out a dream in Paris for six months. Not my cup of tea. But this book was. Had Tasha not just died I’d have written her my appreciation. Her mother misjudged her worth.
3. Scientist: E.O. Wilson: A Life in Nature by Richard Rhodes ©2021. 221pp. Photo plates. Covers Wilson’s (1929-2021) childhood, education, marriage, and fatherhood, but it’s mostly about his career. I liked reading about his field trip to the South Pacific while courting Irene with daily letters. There were battles for dominance in the biology faculty at Harvard with James Watson. It was resolved by dividing the department into Molecular Biologists and Whole-Organism-Environmental Biologists (whom Watson disparaged as “stamp-collectors”). Later Wilson created the field of Sociobiology, eliciting even more controversy. In his retirement Wilson was an activist for biodiversity. Throughout history a total of 7000 plants have been used as food. Of these 20 species provide 90% of the world’s food, and just three, wheat, maize, and rice, constitute about half.
4. Inherit the Truth by Anita Lasker-Wallfisch (1925- ). ©1996. 145pp. Fills in the details of the great video interview (Google it) that first alerted me to the existence of this wonderful book. It’s about Pre-war Breslau, Nazi Breslau, Auschwitz, post-war. What a loving, cultured family! What a survival story! Anita’s cello training saved her life and her sister Renate’s, and it gave her a goal: When she got to England in 1946, she knew what she wanted to do: Music. It’s not in the book, but I found out on the web that Anita settled in Kensal Rise a few blocks from where I lived for 5 years. She would have been about 50 then, raising a family.
5. The Martian’s Daughter by Marina Von Neumann Whitman. ©2012. 282pp. Photo plates. The only child of John von Neumann, Marina (1935- ) had high level careers in academia, government, and business. She’s honest about her successes and failures. Being on corporate boards was less productive than working in government. Though her parents divorced when she was 3, they both had a good influence on her. Both remarried. Marina had a happy childhood with four parents and a half-brother. She had a successful marriage and her two children, IMHO, turned out great, though her physician daughter pre-deceased her,
6. On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci, M.D. ©2024. 622pp. (Large Print). Dr Fauci (1940- ) describes his upbringing, education, and career as a civil servant. He was involved in defense against AIDS, bioterrorism, Zika, SARS, MERS, Ebola. and COVID. He served 7 presidents. He’s run marathons. He tells us about his wife and 3 daughters. In June 2022 he attended his 60th college reunion at Holy Cross in Worcester. No one was wearing a mask. He did not want to make anyone uncomfortable so he took his off. He got COVID, which caused him to miss his daughter’s wedding. He credits being vaccinated and Paxlovid with keeping his 81-yr-old body out of the hospital. Testifying before Congress, MTG scornfully refused to call him a doctor. (He does not complain about that in the book. I saw it on YouTube.) He had to hire protection due to death threats.
7. Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison ©2007. Read by Mark Deakins. 8 CDs, 9 hrs 17 min. Despite his difficult childhood, the author succeeded as an adult. He was good at creative electronics for the band Kiss. He held a corporate engineering job for a few years with Milton-Bradley. Finally, he owned a garage. He married twice, and was a good father to his son Cubby. He honored his difficult parents. He had always wanted to have friends and loved ones. He managed it.
8. The Magician by Colm Tóibín ©2021. Read by Gunnar Cauthery. 14 CDs. A fictional biography of Thomas Mann (1875-1955). It is fictional because there are thoughts and conversations that are necessarily imagined. Every fact and photograph I found on the web was consistent with this account. In a conversation in Princeton NJ among the Mann family and their guests, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, touching on Virginia Woolf, I trusted that Tóibín had researched enough to plausibly portray the tone and content. I admired the way Katia and Thomas raised 6 interesting children—creative individuals. Each made a mark. I loved the descriptions of Katia’s Pringsheim’s family’s cultural life in pre-WW I Germany. The early manifestations of Naziism disturbed me—intolerance and violence. The psychosexual is considered, with emphasis on the psycho.
9. An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin (1943- ) ©2024. Read by the author. DKG was a White House Fellow during the Johnson Administration. My friend EF led a discussion on this book for her White House Fellows book group. Dick Goodwin (1931-2018), Presidential speechwriter (and more), saved everything. DKG got the material for this book while downsizing. The audio book plays recordings of Dick’s speeches as delivered by the men he served.
10. Ghost Boat by Dan Gillcrist (1939-2023, my cousin) ©2012 106pp. Fiction! The 1st chapter grabbed me. In 1998, an American submarine sunk in 1943, was discovered & its log recovered with the help of an underwater robot. In WW II, almost 1 in 4 submariners died serving. They hardly ever get medals because there are no witnesses. When the sub hit bottom, all compartments were flooded but one. The 3 men in that compartment knew their fate, but they had hours before their air would be gone. The log tells the story. An Afterward tells about a descendant of one of the trio going to “Canoe U” (The Naval Academy).
11. Long Island by Colm Tóibín ©2024. Read by Jessie Buckley. 8 CDs. Enough of Eilis’s first visit home in 1950, covered in Brooklyn, is reprised for Long Island to stand on its own. It’s 1976. The Fiorello clan live close together in suburbia. Eilis returns to Enniscorthy for her mother’s 80th birthday at a time when Eilis’s marriage is under serious strain. Jim Farrell, whom she had jilted (sort of) in 1950, is now owner of a Pub. He’s still a bachelor. Eilis’s best friend in girlhood, Nancy, is a widow, privately engaged to Jim–they are holding the announcement until after Nancy’s daughter’s wedding. Soon Eilis’s teenaged son and daughter arrive. They meet their grandmother. Eilis had not technically committed adultery in 1950 but now she did, with Jim still in the dark about where her marriage stands. Eilis does not know about Jim and Nancy, nor Nancy about Jim and Eilis.
12. The Dork of Cork by Chet Raymo ©1993. Audio book on Hoopla. Narrated by Donal Donnelly in 12 hours 35min. Frank Bois opens with “I am 43 years old and 43 inches tall.” He has just published “Nightstalk,” a memoir interspersed with astronomy. Other characters: Bernadette, who stowed away on a troop ship in France in 1945 and was de-shipped in Cork freshly pregnant; Jack Kelly, an Irish immigration officer who loved Frankie and his mother Bernadette, but also his wife and 6 daughters. Jack shared his love of astronomy with Frankie; Roger Manning, Church of Ireland cleric and poet, who also loved Bernadette; Frank’s agent Handy Page; Jennifer, Frank’s publisher in London; Terry Clout, aka Terry Cloth, who had been one of the American soldiers on that troop ship: not Frankie’s father, just a young fellow captivated by Bernadette from a distance. Terry returned to Ireland to find Bernadette after his wife and daughters in Missouri left him. Frank finds love in his forties. I liked the novel’s treatment of love, sex, religion, and art. I enjoyed the Irish accent and setting. I got insight into the life of an author.
13. The Story of Lucy Gault by Wm.Trevor ©2002. Performed by Terry Donnelly. 8 CDs. A NY Times notable book of 2002. Short listed for the Booker and Whitbread prizes. Set on the estate of Everard and Eloise Gault, Protestants who love their home on the coast of County Cork, where Everard was born. Young men try to burn out the Gaults. I had just watched Michael Collins, so I was aware of the violence of the era. The Gaults have a 9-yr-old. They decide, for Lucy’s safety, to leave the estate in the care of Henry and Bridget, their employees, and move to England. Lucy runs away. There is strong evidence that she drowned. Maybe it was suicide. The departure is delayed by two weeks with all the townspeople searching. Eloise can’t bear even to stay with her family in England. She and Everard embark on a peripatetic life on the Continent, leaving no forwarding address. Lucy is found, barely alive. The Gaults’ lawyer hires a detective. I won’t give the rest away, but Lucy lives a long life into the age of cell phones.
14. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray ©2023. 643pp. Set in an unnamed town 2 hours from Dublin. The characters: Imelda and her husband Dickie, manager of Barnes Motors, until recently a successful business; their children, Cass(andra), 17, and PJ, 12; Frank Barnes, Dickie’s only sibling, 2 yrs younger, who was beautiful Imelda’s football hero fiancé until Frank died in a car crash; Maurice Barnes, the patriarch, who has retired to Portugal; Ryszart, a Polish mechanic; Willie, a politician and former friend of Dickie’s at Trinity College; Elaine, Cass’s friend. At first it’s a family saga about the stresses each family member endured alone during the financial crash of the Celtic Tiger (2008-2014). Then it turns into a mystery and a thriller. The ending is tragic (probably), but it’s left to the reader to spell it out. Short-listed for the Booker Prize. One of The NY Times’ Best Books of 2023.
15. Tom Lake by Ann Patchet ©2023. Performed by Meryl Streep. 9 CDs. Lara got hooked on acting in high school. when she played Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. After College she reprised the role in a summer stock production in Tom Lake, Michigan. At Tom Lake Lara had an affair with Peter Duke, then unknown, but destined for acting fame. She tells the story of that summer to her 3 grown daughters when they were all home in their family cherry orchard during COVID many years later.
16. The Bartender’s Tale by Ivan Doig ©2012. Narrated by David Aaron Baker. 13 CDs.. Told from the point of view of Rusty Harry, son of Tom Harry, an older single parent and owner of The Medicine Lodge in Gros Ventre, Montana. In 1960, when Rusty was 12, he and his friend Zoe got “into” community theater, and doing “bits.” Also, Del (short for Delano), an employee of the Library of Congress, came to town specifically to collect an oral history from Tom Harry. Turns out back in the Depression Tom had owned a different bar, The Blue Eagle, in Fort Peck. There had been a disaster there while the dam was being built.
17. Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay ©2023. 230pp. My book group selected this. One of The NYer’s Best Books of 2023. Lyrical writing. E.g. “Butterflies rested on the road…opening up their colored robes, their kimonos, showing everything.” Set in Ontario in 2008. The novel opens with actress Lulu Blake blanking on her lines in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. Afterwards she drives to her tiny hometown for a wedding. She stays with her old friend Nan. They are both in their sixties. Lulu decides to retire there. It’s maple-syrup-making time. New and old relationships are developing. The younger generations have lives of interest.
18. The Elephant of Belfast by S. Kirk Walsh ©2021 320pp. Book group. Belfast was blitzed in WW II. This novel describes it from the perspective of Hettie, a 20-yr-old zookeeper. It is a historical fact that many zoo animals were shot because of the fear of them getting loose. There was a real life model for Hettie, who did spare an elephant by hiding it in her backyard. Some in the IRA favored the Axis. Hettie’s sister, a Protestant, eloped with a Catholic. Hettie advanced in social experience with young men.
19. Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan ©2012. 10 CDs. Serena Frome lands her first job, at MI5. It’s 1972. She meets Tom Haley, a starving writer. Mutual attraction. But Serena met Tom in the context of an undercover MI5 assignment, “Operation Sweet Tooth,” She can’t tell him that MI5 was trying, through a front, to give grants to authors in hopes that they could be nudged to move the needle on the “soft” cold war front. So she’s serious about Tom, yet keeping a secret from him. She has a fake job as a reader for a philanthropical cultural society. Tom finds out, feels betrayed, but then decides to write a novel about it. The novel was to be written from Serena’s point of view, so Tom visited all the people & places she had ever told him about. Obsession intrigues me.
20. Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) ©1871. 26 CDs. I heard 25 hours of it driving back and forth 25X to Walden Pond this summer. The writing bowled me over. As for the plot and content: I’ve enjoyed other books on this list more (call me shallow), but I’m really glad I finally read this classic. Three couples wed: Dorothea and Mr. Cassorbin, her sister Celia and Sir James Chetham, and Rosamund Vincey and Dr. Lidgate. All the brides are probably under 20. And then there’s Fred Vincey, in a vocational crisis, who is sweet on Mary Garth. Will Ladislaw is another major character. The region is Middlemarch.