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Hello and welcome to our September 2022 edition of “Heard Any Good Books Lately?” a program from the North Carolina Reading Service. I’m George Douglas. This program is brought to you by the Friends of the North Carolina Library for the Blind, an organization of citizens, volunteers and patrons all interested in supporting the library and the services it provides. The Friends group was founded in 1989 and now has more than 300 members across North Carolina. If you would like to join the Friends group yourself, we’ll have information on how to do that later in the program.

This program is all about books, with special emphasis on those available from the State Library of North Carolina – Accessible Books and Library Services. The library has more than 86,000 titles in its collection. Books and magazines are available in large print, Braille and talking books as well. 

The library also has more than 11-thousand patrons across the state. If you are not a patron but are interested in becoming one, I’ll have more information at the end of this program.

This month we will take a look at some of the most popular books checked out in the month of August at the State Library of North Carolina - Accessible Books and Library 

The Club: a Novel by Ellery Lloyd

From the author of People Like Her comes a smart and sinister murder mystery set in the secretive world of exclusive celebrity clubs.
Everyone's Dying to Join...

The Home Group is a glamorous collection of celebrity members' clubs dotted across the globe, where the rich and famous can party hard and then crash out in its five-star suites, far from the prying eyes of fans and the media.

The most spectacular of all is Island Home—a closely-guarded, ultraluxurious resort, just off the English coast—and its three-day launch party is easily the most coveted A-list invite of the decade.

But behind the scenes, tensions are at breaking point: the ambitious and expensive project has pushed the Home Group's CEO and his long-suffering team to their absolute limits. All of them have something to hide—and that's before the beautiful people with their own ugly secrets even set foot on the island. 

As tempers fray and behavior worsens, as things get more sinister by the hour and the body count piles up, some of Island Home's members will begin to wish they'd never made the guest list.

Because at this club, if your name's on the list, you're not getting out.

Abridged Version…

We Came, We Saw, We Left: A Family Gap year by Charles J. Wheelan

What would happen if you quit your life for a year? In a pre–COVID-19 world, the Wheelan family decided to find out; leaving behind work, school, and even the family dogs to travel the world on a modest budget. Equal parts "how-to" and "how-not-to"—and with an eye toward a world emerging from a pandemic—We Came, We Saw, We Left is the insightful and often hilarious account of one family’s gap-year experiment.


Wheelan paints a picture of adventure and connectivity, juggling themes of local politics, global economics, and family dynamics while exploring answers to questions like: How do you sneak out of a Peruvian town that has been barricaded by the local army? And where can you get treatment for a flesh-eating bacteria your daughter picked up two continents ago? From Colombia to Cambodia, We Came, We Saw, We Left chronicles nine months across six continents with three teenagers. What could go wrong?
 
January 31, 20213:55 AM ET

CARSON VAUGHAN, REVIEWER

In 2015, my wife and I renovated a ramshackle travel trailer and toured the Lower 48 states — one week, one campground at a time.
It was the most rewarding year of our lives, and yet our adventure seemed to polarize everyone who knew about it — especially the baby boomers. They either encouraged the idea, wishing they had done something similar before their health had failed or their life had grown too complicated, or they wrote us off with patronizing jokes about freelancers and millennials, wishing they had done something similar before their health had failed or their life had grown too complicated.
"A big reason many people don't do it," concludes author Charles Wheelan in his latest book, We Came, We Saw, We Left: A Family Gap Year, "is because many people don't do it."
He isn't just talking the talk. A public policy and economics professor at Dartmouth College, Wheelan is known primarily for his best-selling book Naked Economics and his two follow-ups, Naked Statistics and Naked Money. But in May 2019 he published The Rationing, his first political thriller, and now comes We Came, We Saw, We Left, a travel memoir based on his family's world tour.

In 2016, Wheelan and his wife, Leah, inspired by their own youthful travels, embarked on a nine-month globetrot with their son, CJ, and two daughters, Sophie and Katrina, all of them starkly different and sensationally teenage. They called it a "family gap year." They rode horseback through an organic coffee farm in Colombia, swam a subterranean river in the Amazon, safaried in the Serengeti. Sophie vomited from the top bunk of an Indian train, Katrina contracted a parasitic disease, and CJ mentally imploded at a modern art museum in Tasmania.
The book is a swift and refreshing escape during these isolated, isolating times. It is also a disarming repudiation of those patronizing and "powerful social forces" that prevent too many families from similar adventures, and a waggish examination of nuclear (pun intended) family dynamics.
"Having them [the kids] in a confined space after traveling for thirty-six hours," Wheelan writes in the prelude to one of several family meltdowns abroad, "was like chain-smoking in a fireworks factory."
If this sounds like an utterly conventional book to hit the shelves in 2021 — an upper-middle class white family traveling the world together — you'd be right. Sort of. There's nothing especially novel in the premise alone, despite the obvious hazards involved in such a bold endeavor. And as the American publishing industry rightfully continues to grapple with a conspicuous lack of diversity, one might be tempted to question how or why such a book ultimately landed on the shelves.
Only by chance did I snag an early copy myself, but Wheelan quickly proves an astute chronicler of both family life and foreign cultures. And ironically, it's often the utter normalcy of the Wheelan family that makes this travelogue so endearing. Certainly not every family can afford a gap year — though he makes a convincing case for the affordability of travel — but many can relate to the meltdowns, the blame games, the hyper-sensitive "family mood gauge," or the sudden hysterics of a hungry 13-year-old boy.
"At one point Leah gave CJ a tough geometry problem in our Berlin hotel room," Wheelan writes. "He collapsed to the floor, where he began crying and saying repeatedly that he wanted to be a taco."
Much to his readers' benefit, Wheelan doesn't shy away from illustrating his family's quirks and foibles, despite his obvious love for them. At 18, Katrina is portrayed as the quiet intellectual. Sophie, at 16, is perpetually battling her parents, slamming doors and straining valiantly for her freedom. And 13-year-old CJ — whose antics truly shine under Wheelan's careful gaze — is garrulous, inquisitive and frequently out of his depth. In one particularly memorable example, CJ finds himself dumbstruck at Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art (MONA):
"It was the Great Wall of Vagina that rendered CJ speechless. As the name might suggest, the exhibit was a wall of four hundred vaginas: plaster molds of vaginas made from volunteers, young and old. All were displayed along the wall of a corridor, vagina after vagina. CJ wanted to talk about this, but he could not formulate a specific question. 'That thing with the vaginas...' he began. 'Like, who...' Still, no complete thought. He stared in silence for a while and then went back to the flabby Ferrari."

Though Wheelan sometimes humors his inner public policy wonk — in Bhutan, he deconstructs the king's emphasis on gross national happiness; in Argentina, the paradox of a "robust food food culture" and a seemingly low obesity rate — he's careful not to let it derail the narrative. More often, he filters the world through the lens of his family. How did the Wheelans escape a small Peruvian town on strike? How did the Wheelans navigate the byzantine Indian government to secure a multi-entry visa? How did the Wheelans handle homeschooling and online learning abroad? I often felt as though my own father were narrating the trip: earnestly studying the local culture one minute and laughing at his own bad dad jokes the next. I suspect others will, too.
But nobody likes the jester who won't shut off. It's the sparing moments of sincerity that truly ground the memoir, reminding readers that travel, in the oft-quoted words of Mark Twain, is "fatal to prejudice." In South Africa, Wheelan and his wife took a day off, touring wine country away from the kids. They shared a van with a white couple from Brazil, and five black nurses from Johannesburg. At the end of the tour, one of the nurses suggested they take a group photo. They all gathered together, inadvertently divided by color. Wheelan lets the moment speak for itself.
"No, no, no," the nurse who had requested the photo said. "We have to be mixed." And then, after we moved around to create a photo more consistent with South Africa's aspirations, she added, "We have come too far for that."
Carson Vaughan is a freelance writer and author of Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream.

The Stone Wall by Beverly Lewis

Anna is eager to begin a new chapter in her life as a Lancaster County tour guide in the picturesque area where her Plain grandmother once stayed. Anna wishes she could talk with her grandmother about those long-ago days, but the elderly woman suffers from Alzheimer's, and beyond a vague hint about an old stone wall, much about that time is a mystery. Thankfully, Martin Nolt, a handsome Mennonite, takes the young Beachy Amish woman under his wing for her training, familiarizing her with the many local highlights, including Peaceful Meadows Horse Retreat, which serves children with special needs. The retreat's mission so inspires Anna that she returns to volunteer, and she quickly strikes up a friendship with Gabe Allgyer, the young Amish widower who manages it. 

As Anna grows closer to both Martin and Gabe, she finds herself faced with a difficult choice--one in potential conflict with the expectations of her parents. Will Anna find true love and the truth about her grandmother's past in Lancaster County? Or will she find only heartbreak?
 
Hurricane Season by Lauren K Denton

There is nothing like the nervous anticipation of an impending storm to make a person think about all they value in life and how to protect it. In Lauren K. Denton’s new novel, Hurricane Season, the weather is just the beginning of what’s keeping Betsy Franklin awake.
Living on a dairy farm in southern Alabama with the love of her life, Betsy has truly found her happy place. But the ominous weather forecast from the Gulf of Mexico isn’t the only thing ruffling the feathers of her otherwise serene existence—she has also received a call from her younger sister, Jenna, with an unexpected request.
Jenna, a single mother of two and a coffee shop manager in Nashville, has received a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rediscover her passion for photography at a world-famous artists’ retreat. Could this be her chance to make something of herself and provide a better life for her daughters, Addie and Walsh? To find out, Jenna’s only option is to give up her job and leave Walsh and Addie in the care of Betsy, with whom she hasn’t exactly been close.
Between Betsy and her husband dealing with their little guests (and their own marriage and unfruitful parenthood) and Jenna chasing her artistic calling (which keeps taking longer and longer), Denton artfully explores the struggle between caring for one’s own dreams and helping someone else achieve theirs. Any reader who values the comfort of family, the possibility of second chances and the simple truths of love and sisterhood will devour Denton’s novel. In many ways, Hurricane Season feels like the calm before a storm that changes everything—for the better.

Huck Out West by Robert Coover
Coover’s 11th novel borrows its protagonist—and its inspiration—from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but don’t be deceived: this is less pastiche or sequel than a project with deeper roots. Taking place in the Dakotas during the decade after the end of the Civil War, the book follows Twain’s eponymous protagonist, now an adult, through a series of misadventures, including a turn as a Pony Express rider, some time spent living among the Lakota Sioux, and a difficult engagement with Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry Regiment, which ultimately met its fate at the Battle of the Greasy Grass. 
If such a setup seems reminiscent of Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man(1964), however, Coover has something more than satire on his mind. Rather, he is out to deconstruct not a genre but American literary iconography. In his telling, Tom Sawyer, who keeps turning up like a bad penny, has long since ceased to be a charming bad boy; he is now a zealot for public hangings and worse. “Anyways, Huck,” he explains, “EVERYTHING’S a hanging offense. Being ALIVE is. Only thing that matters is who’s doing the hanging and who’s being hung.” 
Becky Thatcher, meanwhile, abandoned by Tom when she was six months pregnant, has become a prostitute. These are not gratuitous turns but extrapolations based on the characters’ limited possibilities in a world defined by brutality. Coover effectively mirrors Twain’s style and Huck’s voice as well as the peripatetic movement of the original. More to the point, though, he is after a consideration, or critique, of the narrative of westward expansion, in which American hegemony was recast as opportunity and morality became an inconvenient truth at best. 
“We ARE America, clean to the bone!” Tom enthuses to his erstwhile friend late in the novel. “A perfect new Jerusalem right here on earth!.…They call us outlaws because they say we’re on tribal land, so we got to show our amaz’n American PATRIOTICS! These lands is rightfully OURN and we’re going to set up a Liberty Pole and raise the American flag on it to PROVE it!”
This novel reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Love’s First Bloom by Delia Parr

Ruth Livingstone's life changes drastically the day her father puts a young child in her arms and sends her to a small village in New Jersey under an assumed name. There Ruth pretends to be a widow and quietly secludes herself until her father is acquitted of a crime. But with the emergence of the penny press, the imagination of the reading public is stirred, and her father's trial stands center stage. Asher Tripp is the brash newspaperman who determines that this case is the event he can use to redeem himself as a journalist. 

Ruth finds solace tending a garden along the banks of the Toms River--a place where she can find a measure of peace in the midst of the sorrow that continues to build. It is also here that Asher Tripp finds a temporary residence, all in an attempt to discover if the lovely creature known as Widow Malloy is truly Ruth Livingstone, the woman every newspaper has been looking for. Love begins to slowly bloom...but is the affection they share strong enough to withstand the secrets that separate them?
 
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz

Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel García Márquez.
Håkan Söderström is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it. The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company—crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man—and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. 
Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.; Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them; for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, “He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away.” The Hawk protests that most of what has been said about him is untrue—but not all of it. As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs his adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. 
One fine set piece is a version of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which religious fanatics dressed as Indians attack a pioneer party—save that in Diaz’s version, Håkan tears his way across the enemy force with a righteous fury befitting an avenging angel. “He knew he had killed and maimed several men,” Diaz writes, memorably, “but what remained most vividly in his mind was the feeling of sorrow and senselessness that came with each act: those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable.”
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.

Tiger in the Sea: the ditching of Flying Tiger 923 and the Desperate Struggle for Survival by Eric Lindner

Businessman Lindner (Hospice Voices) recounts in this dramatic history the 1962 crash-landing of a charter plane in the North Atlantic and the survivors’ fight to stay alive as they waited hours to be rescued. En route with 68 passengers, including a Hawaiian family and 30 U.S. paratroopers, from Newfoundland to Germany, pilot John Murray was 1,000 miles from land when one of the plane’s four engines caught fire. A second engine was lost when a crew member mistakenly pulled the lever for a shutoff valve. 

Murray decided to ditch the plane after a fire broke out in the third engine. Fifty-one people who survived the crash landing into the storm-tossed ocean made it onto the one available life raft (which was designed to hold 20 and had accidentally been inflated upside down). Every time a wave hit, the raft threatened to capsize and toxic aviation fuel leached into the survivors’ wounds. 

It took six hours for the closest ship, a Swiss freighter, to reach the crash site. Remarkably, all but three of the people on the life raft survived. Lindner recounts the action in crisp, colorful prose and skillfully interweaves the perspectives of multiple passengers and crew members, their family members, and people who took part in the rescue operation. Aviation and adventure buffs will be riveted.
 
The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama by Claude A. Clegg

In The Black President, the first interpretative, grand-narrative history of Barack Obama's presidency in its entirety, Claude A. Clegg III situates the former president in his dynamic, inspirational, yet contentious political context. He captures the America that made Obama's White House years possible, while insightfully rendering the America that resolutely resisted the idea of a Black chief executive, thus making conceivable the ascent of the most unlikely of his successors.

In elucidating the Obama moment in American politics and culture, this book is also, at its core, a sweeping exploration of the Obama presidency's historical environment,impact, and meaning for African Americans--the tens of millions of people from every walk of life who collectively were his staunchest group of supporters and who most starkly experienced both the euphoric triumphs and dispiriting shortcomings of his years in office. In Obama's own words, his White House years were "the best of times and worst of times" for Black America. Clegg is vitally concerned with the veracity of this claim, along with how Obama engaged the aspirations, struggles, and disappointments of his most loyal constituency and how representative segments of Black America engaged, experienced, and interpreted his historic presidency.

Clegg draws on an expansive archive of materials, including government records and reports, interviews, speeches, memoirs, and insider accounts, in order to examine Obama's complicated upbringing and early political ambitions, his delicate navigation of matters of race, the nature and impacts of his administration's policies and politics, the inspired but also carefully choreographed symbolism of his presidency (and Michelle Obama's role),and the spectrum of allies and enemies that he made along the way. The successes and the aspirations of the Obama era, Clegg argues, are explicitly connected to our current toxic political discourse. Combining lively prose with a balanced, nonpartisan portrait of Obama's successes and failures, The Black President will be required reading not only for historians, politics junkies, and Obama fans but also for anyone seeking to understand America's contemporary struggles with inequality, prejudice, and fear.
 
Silence for the Dead by Simone St. James

In St. James’s atmospheric third ghostly mystery set in post-WWI England (after 2013’s An Inquiry into Love and Death), Kitty Weekes is fleeing her abusive father when she learns of a nursing vacancy at Portis House, a grand estate now housing shell-shocked veterans. 

Hoping the remote location will protect her, she wins the job using falsified credentials. Kitty learns that the eerie house’s original owners have mysteriously disappeared and that the patients suffer the same terrifying nightmare as well as a propensity for similar suicides. 

As fear drives her search for explanations, Kitty bonds with a man known only as Patient Sixteen. He proves an able—and attractive—fellow investigator before a deadly influenza epidemic isolates Portis House, leaving it prey to a past that will not rest. St. James cleverly intertwines the story’s paranormal elements with what is now called PTSD, crafting a pleasurably creepy tale about the haunting power of the unseen.
 
Closing

That’s all for this month’s edition of “Heard Any Good Books Lately? I’m George Douglas. I hope you enjoyed it. If you would like more information about how to become a patron of the State Library of North Carolina - Accessible Books and Library Services, simply Google or search for Accessible Books – North Carolina Library – or call toll free -888-388-2460. That’s 888-388-2460.

You can also use the same numbers and website to join the Friends of the NC Library for the Blind. It is that wonderful organization that sponsors this monthly feature on books. 

This program is intended for people who are blind or print impaired. “Heard Any Good Books Lately” will be available right after the broadcast at our website NCReadingService.Org. So long until next time.