The Year 2021: A Look Back
Now is the winter of our discontent -- but where is it, pray-tell? We're in the fifties every day here in Missouri/Kansas, alas. On a personal note, I turned 60 in May and the family also lost my dad, Jack C. Pritchett, a woodworking addict, to pancreatitis at age 86. I also underwent surgery (a TURP; you'll have to look it up) and sent out my work 175 times, and will have a story ("White Wedding") forthcoming in the I-70 Review in September 2022. But what's happened with me doesn't matter much in light of the loss of 386,000 lives just in the US to the pandemic.
Good books get published every year and one of the years best was George Saunders A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give A Master Class On Writing, Reading And Life. The book is such a pleasure because each of the seven stories is a gem and Saunders lets them upstage his commentaries.
I've been waxing nostalgic (in a possibly strange way) about the 1970s and reading The Manson Women and Me by Nikki Meredith and Soliah: The Sara Jane Olson Story by Sharon Darby Hendry (about a Symbionese Liberation Army member) and Child of Satan, Child of God by Susan Atkins with Bob Slosser (about another Manson family member) and Reflexion by Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme and Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Gunn and Murder at San Simeon, a murder mystery co-authored by Patricia Hearst and Cordelia Frances Biddle. Every three to five years or so, the surviving, incarcerated members of the two groups come up for parole hearings and are denied, mostly, because the national memory is long and families who lost loved ones in various acts of terror still come to the hearings. The motivations of the mostly white, mostly middle-class female revolutionaries who joined the groups remain the deepest source of fascination. (P.S. Fifty years later, the Manson story continues to unfold as the daughter of family member Paul Watkins, Claire Vaye Watkins, has just published her novel I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness.)
Books on my radar for 2022 are
W-3 by Bette Howland (psych ward expose),
Fundamentals: 10 Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczak,
The Storytelling Code by Dana Norris,
The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright,
Shape by Jordan Ellenberg (it's literally about geometric shapes),
Secrets of Happiness by (my former prof) Joan Silber
and Special Relativity For Somewhat Serious Students by Dave Goldberg, to name a few.
Have a wonderful Year-End and a happier New Year!
I’m recommending The Auschwitz Report, almost entirely because of a single scene that occurs at the very end when two escapees from Auschwitz deliver their report about what is actually happening at the camp to a British Red Cross official. The scene is unforgettable partly because of the way it is shot and partly because it never occurred to this man that another Red Cross official – the Nazi officer he gets his information from – might violate his sacred duty as an aid worker by lying.
For any new readers: My new novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.