** Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow

Kat Chow’s mother died when she was only 11, leaving behind the memory of a strong woman and a devastated family. While she was watched over lovingly by her older sister, she struggled with her loss and her father seems to have been little help. In Seeing Ghosts, she recounts both her growing up and the story of her extended family, of which remarkably little is known. The stories are well told but I thought there could have been a stronger theme.

*** Mutinous Women by Joan DeJean

Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast follows a group of women deported from France to Mississippi in the early 18th century, from the very strange way in which they were chosen to how many of them not just survived but thrived. The choice of who would be sent on that fateful ship was quite arbitrary. They were sent because they were poor, mostly, accused of prostitution (usually falsely), and, for a few, simply inconvenient for their wealthy families.

All of them arrived shackled, starved, and wearing rags. Many died. But the ones who survived quickly found husbands from the French soldiers who were there, and with land readily available (that is, stolen from the locals), established businesses and built property portfolios–both unimaginable compared to their former social positions. A few even managed to track down children who had been left behind in France, a feat at a time when communications were slow and unreliable. The carefully researched archives are sometimes a bit too detailed but the story is remarkable.

** The Tenant by Katrine Engberg

In the same series as The Butterfly House, and with the same overall motif of a relentless sequence of murders, The Tenant stars two Copenhagen detectives who try to untangle a murder that follows the plot of an unpublished book and decades-old lost babies, while (for one of them) trying to keep his life together after a divorce. The coincidences were a little much for me, but the plot keeps the suspense going for sure.

** The Bald Eagle by Jack Davis

The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird is a long and exhaustive exploration of the US national symbol, from its unlikely choice through the lore of stories about it snatching babies and livestock (totally impossible!). My favorite part of the story is when the author explores how the bald eagle almost disappeared because of pesticides and hunting and how it was brought back to flourish through conservation efforts and protection–legislation passed during a Republican administration, it’s interesting to note.

** The Emergency by Thomas Fisher

The author of The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER works as a doctor in the emergency department of a Chicago South Side hospital, and describes his eerie experience during the first year of the pandemic when all patients became potential disease vectors and all the routines of the hospital were upended–as well as personal routines, since he himself lived in isolation to avoid contaminating any family members.

But he’s more interested in telling the larger story of the dysfunctional US health system, which he does in alternating chapters, which are often repetitive and rant-prone. There’s much to rant about, but a calm exposition of the system would have spoken for itself, I think.

*** The Great Stewardess Rebellion by Nell McShane Wulfhart

Not so long ago, flight attendants were overwhelmingly women, were forced to quit when they reached the geriatric age of 32 or got married, had to comply with a dizzying number of appearance rules, from weight to wearing a girdle. O, and they had to wear ridiculous, sexist uniforms that basically encouraged customers to harass them. The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet tells the story of how a few flight attendants fought to change all that. The details of internal dissensions in the union in the send part of the book get a bit tedious but the overall story is inspiring–even if it reminds us that some of the basic demands of second-wave feminism–legal abortion and equal pay–are still elusive

** Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades

Brown Girls is presented as a novel but reads more like non-fiction as it lacks a central cast of heroines and instead tells the collective story of barely identified girls and women who attended the same school and, for the most part, go on to lead much more secure lives than their mother’s, as they were able to gain education and professional skills. They also experience plenty of racism and cultural dissonance. I very much enjoyed some of the chapters, especially the one that describes their visits to their countries of origins (or, mostly, their mothers’) and the one that portrays the difficulties they had reconciling their college careers and their family lives. Strangely their brothers seem to struggle mightily, all of them. Of course it’s a novel but surely there are some that could be as outwardly successful as them?

** The Novel Habits of Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith

In The Novel Habits of Happiness, Isabel Dalhousie makes rather shocking classist assumptions about her niece’s new boyfriend–which she barely acknowledges, somehow– and is also asked to investigate a child’s fanciful recollection of a past life, leading to a delightful excursion. The best part of this installment for me was her discovery that her hatred for a fellow philosopher might have blinded her to his private struggles.

* The Method by Isaac Butler

I imagine that The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act may be of great interest to theater and film buffs who will be familiar with the many, many plays, movies, and actors it references. Without that interest and knowledge it was a trudge as the author is intent on describing all the pettiness and infighting in the many troops and casts it describes–and actors are great at infighting, it seems.

What suprised me the most is the lack of a true definition of that “The Method” is all about. We get glimpses of its initial development in pre-revolution Russia, and we  can read about the later schisms, but the underlayment remained unclear to me. For fans only?

*** Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan

In the age of unlimited searching, it may be difficult to appreciate the beauty of the humble index, but Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age (great title!) reminds us that the very idea of an index was pretty slow in coming, and sometimes executed in laughably poor manner, with incorrect page numbers, as a careless or clueless scribe just copied one to a different book format. The author also reports many tales of indexes used to entertain and shame, before turning to the beauties and limitations of searches, which fulfill many of the goals of indexes but may generate irrelevant hits along the way.