"Block Out" - A Shorf Story by Carol Shields - 17 Pages - Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

 Buriedinprint.com 

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all.

"Blocked Out " is the 31th short story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted.

The story centers on a middle aged married couple from Ontario on a trip to Portugal. The man is a commercially successful writer of comic novels. For years prior to the death of his wife his current wife was his editor, loving him and his work.  

"THE WRITER MEERSHANK, vacationing in Portugal with his wife-cum-editor, Maybelle Spritz, became blocked. The two of them spent their first morning there exploring the coastal city of Porto, which is an airy gemlike city that, as Maybelle complained, had been severely underrated—given one lousy star in the Michelin Guide, that was all. This was plain crazy, a single star for a dozen broad sun-splashed terraces, for countless baroque churches, for the elegant iron bridges, and the lazy smoky river lined with pungent fishing boats and dark bars. Ridiculous! She was indignant. She slapped the green guidebook hard against her long thigh. Coming to Portugal had been her idea. She was the one who had thought of flight, of leaving the Ontario winter behind, who had persuaded and cajoled and weakened her husband, Meershank, and she was determined to unearth treasures for him hour by hour. Now this insult, this chintzy rating, a gorgeous city awarded one grudging star. “And just listen,” Maybelle said to Meershank, stopping in the middle of a steep, winding cobbled street to consult the despised guide. “We’re supposed to ‘note the gaily colored laundry flapping overhead.’ Laundry! I ask you. Never mind this incredible architecture all around us, we’re asked to gape at mended laundry"

Another marvelous story.

Long Island by Colm Toibin - 2024 - 304 Pages

 Long Island by Colm Toibin - 2024 - 304 Pages

OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * “Stunning.” —People * “Dazzling yet devastating...Tóibín is simply one of the world’s best living literary writers.” —The Boston Globe * “Momentous and hugely affecting.” —The Wall Street Journal *

From the beloved, critically acclaimed, bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving novel featuring Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work in twenty years.

Long Island is the 16th work by Colm Toibin upon which I have posted.

Long Island is a sequel to his novel Brooklyn.   Brooklyn is set in the 1950s.  It is about a young Irish woman, Eilis, who moves from rural Ireland to Brooklyn in hopes of  making a better life.

Eilis gets a job working in a big store and lives in a boarding house owned by an Irish woman and all of the other tenants are Irish women also. 

Eilis meets a man, a kind decent one but he Italian, not Irish. She goes to night school. Brooklyn is very much about the immigrant experience. It is about longing for home and the consequences of emigration on those who are left behind.  

Long Island jumps ahead twenty years.  Eilis Lacey is, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis is now forty with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, 

A man arrives at her door one day with such shocking news that Ellis feels a need to go back to Ireland to get away from her husband. 

The occasion is the 80th birthday of her mother. She takes her two teenage children with her.  

Lacy reconnects with her best friend and an old flame who owns a popular pub.

COLM TÓIBÍN is the author of eleven novels, including The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. He was also awarded the Bodley Medal and the Würth Prize for European Literature. SimonandSchuster.com

The Keeper of Hidden Books by Madeline Martin -2023 -413 pages

 The Keeper of Hidden Books  by Madeline Martin -2023 -413 pages

This is the third novel by Madeline Martin I have had the extreme pleasure of reading.

In December of 2021 I read The Last Bookstore in London by Madeline Martin, set in London during the Blitz years of World War Two. I loved this deeply moving vivid account of the impact of Germany's bombing of London on a small Bookstore.

Last year I read her The Libraian Spy set during World War Two in Paris as well as Lyon and Lisbon. Paris is occupied by the Germans. Portugal is neutral but in danger of being invaded. People come from all over Europe to Lisbon hoping to get a visa to go to America

The Keeper of Hiden Books is set primarily in Warsaw during World War Two.  Like her other books, much of the plot action centers around the

 work of the Central characters in a library. 

Poland was the first country taken over by Nazi Germany. The Germans did all they could to destroy the culture of Poland, banning and destroying many of the books in the libraries of Warsaw.   

"The Keeper of Hidden Books is yet another expertly researched and inspiring work of historical fiction from Madeline Martin. As Zofia Nowak and her young friends fight for their fellow Polish and Jewish citizens during the horrific German occupation, they witness again and again the power of friendship and literature in even the darkest times. With her direct, brave and thoughtful manner (so wonderfully reminiscent of Jo March), loyalty and love for her Jewish best friend, and touching first love with a fellow resistance fighter, Zofia is destined to capture readers' hearts everywhere--rarely have I loved or admired a character more. A heart-pounding, illuminating, and very important addition to the canon of WWII fiction."–Natalie Jenner, bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls

I found myself caring deeply about some of people in The Keeper of Hidden Books.  Others, including all the Germans I hated.  Martin vividly brings to cinematic immediacy the way life in Warsaw keeps getting worse for the Poles and especially anyone Jewish.  

I do not want to give away much of the plot other than to say at times I was scared for the Central characters and at times elated.  I admit to enjoying death scenes of Germans and especially one collaborator.  OK and I howled over the way two tyrannical German female librarians died.

I loved this book.  Martin includes an account of her research and Warsaw history.

"Madeline Martin is a New York Times, USA Today, Publisher’s Weekly, and internationally bestselling author of historical fiction and historical romance with books that have been translated into over twenty-five different languages.

She lives in sunny Florida with her two daughters (known collectively as the minions), two incredibly spoiled cats and a man so wonderful he’s been dubbed Mr. Awesome. She is a die-hard history lover who will happily lose herself in research any day. When she’s not writing, researching or ‘moming’, you can find her spending time with her family at Disney or sneaking a couple spoonfuls of Nutella while laughing over cat videos. She also loves to travel, attributing her fascination with history to having spent most of her childhood as an Army brat in Germany." From the author's website.

The River of Doubt : Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.—2006 - 408 Pages

 

The River of Doubt : Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.—2006 - is an amazing book, combining a vivid description of the Amazon, an arduous journey with details about American political history.

"NATIONAL BESTSELLER • At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait—the bestselling author of River of the Gods brings us the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.

“A rich, dramatic tale that ranges from the personal to the literally earth-shaking.” —The New York Times

The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.

After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.

Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.

From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt’s life, here is Candice Millard’s dazzling debut." From the publisher,Anchor Books 

About 25 years ago I did a photographic trip on the Amazon, based out of Iquitos, Peru, the largest city in the world not accessible by road.  From this experience I developed an interest in the Amazon.  I am so glad I found this book  via Libby.  Millard made me feel I was along on the voyage.  I learned a lot about Theodore Roosevelt’s life and his family.  His son Kermit was on the trip.

CANDICE MILLARD is a former writer and editor at National Geographic magazine and New York Times bestselling author. She lives in Kansas City.

River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon by Buddy Levy -2011

River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon by Buddy Levy -2011 is a fascinating exciting account of the first voyage by Europeans to transverse the Amazon.  Years ago I made a photographic expedition the Amazon.  I saw pink dolphins, Indigenous villages, and much more,  My trip began in Iquitos, Peru, the biggest city in the world with no access by road. I am very glad I came upon Buddy Levy's fascinating book while browsing in Libby.

"From the acclaimed author of Conquistador comes this thrilling account of one of history’s greatest adventures of discovery. With cinematic immediacy and meticulous attention to historical detail, here is the true story of a legendary sixteenth-century explorer and his death-defying navigation of the Amazon—river of darkness, pathway to gold.

In 1541, the brutal conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro and his well-born lieutenant Francisco Orellana set off from Quito in search of La Canela, South America’s rumored Land of Cinnamon, and the fabled El Dorado, “the golden man.” Driving an enormous retinue of mercenaries, enslaved natives, horses, hunting dogs, and other animals across the Andes, they watched their proud expedition begin to disintegrate even before they descended into the nightmarish jungle, following the course of a powerful river. Soon hopelessly lost in the swampy labyrinth, their numbers diminishing daily through disease, starvation, and Indian attacks, Pizarro and Orellana made a fateful decision to separate. While Pizarro eventually returned home barefoot and in rags, Orellana and fifty-seven men, in a few fragile craft, continued downriver into the unknown reaches of the mighty Amazon, serenaded by native war drums and the eerie cries of exotic predators. Theirs would be the greater glory.

 

Interweaving eyewitness accounts of the quest with newly uncovered details, Buddy Levy reconstructs the seminal journey that has electrified adventurers ever since, as Orellana became the first European to navigate and explore the entire length of the world’s largest river. Levy gives a long-overdue account of the native populations—some peaceful and welcoming, offering sustenance and life-saving guidance, others ferociously hostile, subjecting the invaders to gauntlets of unremitting attack and intimations of terrifying rituals. And here is the Amazon itself, a powerful presence whose every twist and turn held the promise of new wonders both natural and man-made, as well as the ever-present risk of death—a river that would hold Orellana in its irresistible embrace to the end of his life.

Overflowing with violence and beauty, nobility and tragedy, River of Darkness is both riveting history and a breathtaking adventure that will sweep readers along on an epic voyage unlike any other." From Batam Books, the publisher 

The first European to ever set foot in the Amazon was Francisco de Orellana, a cousin of famous conquistador Francisco Pizarro. On a joint expedition with Pizarro's brother in 1541, de Orellana set off from Quito in search of the mythical El Dorado, a city allegedly overflowing with gold and riches 

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Amazon, European exploring and exploitation of the area.

In the elegant epilogue Levy details the on going degradation of the region in search of profit as well as efforts to safeguard this precious resource.

"Buddy Levy is the author of nine books and his work has been featured or reviewed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Kirkus Book Reviews, Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, The Daily Beast, The A.V. Club and Library Journal. He was the co-star, for 25 episodes, on HISTORY Channel’s hit docuseries Brad Meltzer’s DECODED, which aired to an average of 1.7 million weekly viewers and is still airing as reruns today. In 2018 he was an on-camera expert on the 4-part TV Series THE FRONTIERSMEN: The Men Who Built America (HISTORY, Executive Producer Leonardo Di Caprio).

Levy’s most recent book is Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue (St. Martin’s Press, 2025)-- https://bit.ly/RealmOfIceAndSky. His other books include Empire of Ice & Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk (St. Martin’s Press, December 2022), winner of the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award. His 2019 book Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition (St. Martin’s Press), won the 2020 National Outdoor Book Award and the 2020 Banff Mountain Book Award in Adventure History.

Levy is also the co-author of the National Bestseller No Barriers: A Blind Man’s Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon (with Erik Weihenmayer; Thomas Dunne Books, 2017); GERONIMO: Leadership Lessons of An American Warrior (co-authored with Coach Mike Leach, Simon & Schuster, 2014) and River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana and the Deadly First Voyage Through the Amazon (Diversion Books, 2011, 2022). His other books include the critically acclaimed and Amazon #1 Bestseller Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs (Bantam Dell, 2008), which he is currently developing for a television series; American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (Putnam, 2005, Berkley Books, 2006); and Echoes On Rimrock: In Pursuit of the Chukar Partridge (Pruett, 1998). His books have been published in ten languages.

Levy was a contributing writer on the 2018 documentary film The Weight of Water. The film was based in part on the book No Barriers, which Levy co-authored with blind adventurer Erik Weihenmayer. The film premiered at the 2018 Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prize and the Best Mountain Film Award. It has since won The People’s Choice Award for Best Documentary at the 2018 Denver Film Festival; Best Sport and Adventure Film at the 2018 Mendi Bilbao Film Festival; and Audience Choice Award at the 2019 Waimea Ocean Film Festival.

As a freelance journalist he has covered adventure sports and lifestyle/travel subjects around the world, including working with TV impresario Mark Burnett on numerous Eco-Challenges, and other adventure expeditions in Argentina, Borneo, Europe, Greenland, Morocco, and the Philippines. His interests are wide-ranging: discovery and

adventure, the mountain men, arctic exploration travail, clashes of empires and civilizations, conspiracy theories, and riveting human stories of survival." From the author's website.

Mel u

The Reading Life

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin - 2024 - 432 Pages

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin - 2024 - 432 Pages

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin is an incredibly interesting beautifully written account of the amazing linguistic diversity of New York City with native speakers of over 800 languages in resident, many of the languages are Endangered.

"Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities, from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to villages on the other side of the world, to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. He explores the languages themselves, from rare sounds to sentence-long words to bits of grammar that encode entirely different worldviews.

Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, and a hundred others living in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (“the place where we get bows”), has just one native speaker, along with a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and Yiddish, braided alongside Perlin’s own complicated family legacy.

On the 100th anniversary of a notorious anti-immigration law that closed America’s doors for decades and the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of “killer languages” like English and Spanish. At the same time, Language City celebrates the profound linguistic diversity of a single city and the joy of tuning into this unprecedented Babel." From the publisher Grove Press

New immigrants arriving New York City are caught in extensial delima.  The want to Preserve their cultural identity, make sure their children know their heritage language while having to learn English to thrive in New York City.  Perlin shows how numerous communities of language Speakers develop communities.  

" I am a linguist, writer, and translator from New York City - 

My book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York is now out with Grove in the US and the UK.

As a linguist, I serve as co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, where since 2013 I have overseen research projects focused on language documentation, mapping, policy, and public programming. Himalayan languages are a focus – for my PhD, I created a trilingual dictionary, a corpus of recordings, and a descriptive grammar of Trung, an endangered language of southwest China, based on several years of fieldwork. I also teach linguistics at Columbia. 

As a writer, I have written on language, labor, and China for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Harper's, among other places, and I published a book on unpaid work and youth economics (Intern Nation). I have given talks to students, scholars, employers, career counselors, union members, activists, and politicians at venues as different as the Googleplex, the UK Parliament, and the Economic Policy Institute, as well as universities and colleges across America. TV and radio appearances have been on MSNBC, CBS, Fox, BBC, and NPR, among others. 

As a translator, I work primarily from Chinese into English. I translated Liao Yiwu's Bullets and Opium (2019) and Chen Guangcheng's The Barefoot Lawyer (2015). I have recorded two Yiddish-language video series for The Forward and translated essays, stories, and poems as a National Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow.

I have a BA from Stanford, an M.Phil. from Cambridge, and an MA from the University of London (SOAS), the last two thanks to the British people as a Marshall Scholar. My PhD in Linguistics is from the University of Bern in Switzerland. I was a 2023 New Arizona Fellow at New America.

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin talks about the anti-immigration attitude of many Americans, exposing the hateful history and deep racism from which this is  derived.

The Reading Life Review- August 2024 - Future Hopes

 

The Reading Life Review- August 2024

Novels Featured in August

1. School for Love - by Olivia Manning

2. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride- 2023

3. Faithful by Alice Hoffman- 2016

4. Speedboat by Renata Adler- 1976

5. Yellowface by R.K Kuang - 2023

6. The Poppy War by R.K Kuang - 2018

Nonfiction Featured in August

1. Olivia Manning: A Woman at War by Deirdre David- 2013 - 

2. Provence 1970 by Luke Barr- 2016 - 226 Pages

3. I Am A Filipino and This is How I Cook by Nicole Ponseca and Miguel Trinidad - 2019 - 423 Pages

4. Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters - 2017 - 320 Pages

5. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend- 2023

The Short stories Featured in August were four works by Carol Shields 

I also posted upon three science fiction movies from the 1950s

Blog Stats

There are as of today our posts have been viewed 8,012,930 times.

There are currently 4600 posts on The Reading Life 

Home Countries of August Visitors

1. Hong Kong

2.Singapore

3. United States

4. India

5. Philippines

6. Russia

7.Canada

8.Brazil

9.Finland

10. France

The most viewed posts are on short stories 

Eight August authors are Americans, one is English and one Canadian.

 Only two are deceased. 

Eight were featured for the first time in August,  Three are men.

Future Hopes and Plans

I plan to read both of Olivia Manning's trilogies, more short stories by Carol Shields and will continue my attempted read through of Alice Hoffman.  I will read selected nonfiction as well as works related to Jewish history and culture,

Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver - 2003

 Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver - 2003

This is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in the Holocaust and the history of Jewish Life in Berlin.  Silver goes back to about 1350 when a restricted number of Jewish families were allowed to settle in Berkin, processing to periods when Jews were welcomed. By about 1940  over half of the economic productivity in Berkin was generated by the activity of Jews. (Silva goes into details on who was seen as a Jew by the Nazis and explains his own use of terminology.)  As German antisemitism grew worse some how a Jewish Hospital with almost all Jewish Doctors and staff survived, Some employees were saved by being married to Christians and for a while from being World War One Veterans.  They began to see family members deported to death camps.

The Germans actually sent Jewscto the hospital to be treated and once they recovered they sent them to death camps.  The hospital used to treat everyone.  If you could not pay you were welcomed.  Then they were told they could treat only Jews so they lost a large percentage of their paying customers.  Food rations were cut but still the hospital stayed open.

"Dan Silver, a lawyer and former general counsel to the CIA, tells the astonishing story of Berlin's Jewish Hospital during WWII. For decades before the Nazis seized power in Germany, the hospital had served Berlin's Jews as their principal medical resource. At the war's end, it was still functioning, delivering what medical care it could and sheltering a large percentage of the city's few remaining Jews. Silver asks how a Jewish institution, located in the capital city of a regime dedicated above all to obliterating the Jews, could possibly have survived. To answer this question, Silver has gathered the available documentary evidence and interviewed the handful of hospital staffers still alive. According to these sources, the institution's survival hinged on an amalgam of factors, including sheer, blind luck and bureaucratic infighting among Nazi organizations. As Silver explains, the Nazis' bizarre system for classifying persons of partly Jewish ancestry played a role as well, since some hospital personnel with mixed ancestry were not treated with the same implacable hostility as full Jews were. Silver acknowledges where gaps in the evidence make certainty impossible, as in assessing Dr. Walter Lustig, the hospital's chief during the war years. Lustig may have been a betrayer and collaborator, as some staffers think, or he may have manipulated the system as best he could to save at least some Jews from destruction. The balanced analysis of Dr. Lustig's record typifies the author's careful use of evidence throughout this absorbing book." From Amazon

Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver greatly expanded my knowledge of Holocaust and Jewish history.