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[hiphuman2020]

In her debut novel, Between Shades of Gray, Lithuanian-American Ruta E. Sepetys accomplishes something few authors ever do. She presents the awful truth of genocide in a riveting and transcendent story. 

The plight of the Baltic countries after the USSR invaded them in 1941 is lesson we must take from history so that we do not let it happen again.

In 1941, the Soviet police (NKVD) storm into the home of fifteen-year-old Lina and her family. Her well-educated Lithuanians parents were about to send her off to art school, a dream that will never come true. They’re told that they had thirty minutes to pack up all their belongings.  Their father is already missing, so Lina, her younger brother and her mom quickly stuff their cloths and a few…

[hiphuman2020]

The Lost Bookshop touched my soul. Evie Woods writes about three of the most important things in my life – books, strong women and hope.

For all the 'all of the women who have been marginalized in the past and continue to be written out of their stories, even today.'

The story is told by two women who, though they live generations apart, are able to claim their self-determination and liberty at the same location in Dublin, at 12 Ha’penny Lane.  In 1921, Opaline escapes a brutally domineering brother in London, finds her footing at a bookshop in Paris, but has to escape again to Dublin. In current times, Martha arrives in Dublin battered and bruised, having…

[hiphuman2020]

We All Need Absolution.

Without absolution, we falter. Without owning our mistakes, we move ahead blindly.

Absolution is about forgiving ourselves, our past selves. Alice McDermott presents two women from different generations confessing to their imperfect pasts. In the author’s own words, Absolution is “an exchange of memories: those of a young American wife who lined in Saigon in 1963, and of a woman who was a child, the daughter of an American oil executive, in the same time and place.” Tricia…

[hiphuman2020]

When Irwin Shaw wrote Voices of a Summer Day, he didn’t mean it to be historical fiction, but it has become just that. Shaw captures the lives and attitudes of post-WWII Americans and makes it personal.

Authors like Irwin Shaw, writing from 1965, narrate the reality we baby boomers were born into.

Benjamin Federov is experienced, a WWII veteran, successful with both business and women. He is a nicer version of Don Draper (Mad Men) or maybe it’s just that he just doesn’t drink as much. He’s sitting alone in the bleachers of a small town ball park watching his son play a late summer baseball game in 1964, reflecting on his life. He’s joined later by a woman who also has a son on the…

[hiphuman2020]

If you are a book lover, if you’ve ever been in love, if you’ve ever had your heart broken, you must read The Echo of Old Books by Barbara Davis.

Through college, through my business career, through my heartbreaks and into my later years, books have always been there for me.

Barbara Davis uses book-care language and the mystery of forgotten books to unfold two beautiful love stories set decades apart. Ashlyn Greer sells rare books out of her smalltown New England bookstore. In the back of her store, she binds new books and carefully restores old ones. She also has the rare gift of psychometry. When she touches an old book, she can feel the echoes of the books’…

[hiphuman2020]

According to Dave Eggers in The Every, we cannot address the climate crisis without a giant tech monopoly subsuming us into tech-complicit conformity. 

Dave Eggers postulates an Orwellian future in which techoconformity is the only thing that stands between us and climate catastrophe.

I’m not sure what scares me more – the climate crisis or ‘technoconformity.’  While Eggers makes a compelling case for why we should be afraid of the latter, he also satirizes the climate movement. He portrays an app that help you reduce your carbon footprint as another silly means of tech controlling human behavior. The Every is a near future mega-corporation. Think Apple buys Google and then…

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With its old-world lyrical prose, deeply developed plot and an astounding inclusion of characters, Greenlanders by Jane Smiley is a huge literary accomplishment.

Jane Smiley is a master storyteller with deep insight into human nature.

It also challenges the ethics and narrow-mindedness of white Christian-centered colonization. In the 14th Century, some three hundred years after Erik the Red established it, the Western Settlement of Greenland boasts a few thousand hearty souls, farmers and hunters spread out in shoreline settlements along a dozen fjords. Some claim kinship with Erik and his famous son, Leif. Others are…

[hiphuman2020]

Despite numerous awards for his advancement of issues around sexual identification, Edmund White, author of Jack Holmes & His Friend, still encounters rejection.

A sex educator in the late 1970's, I am surprised to see the topic of human sexuality so stifled fifty years later.

Eager to get my reaction to it, my brother recently handed me a copy of Jack Holmes & His Friend that he’d found at a used bookstore. It’s is a nice hardcover first edition with a protective mylar cover over the book jacket. Opening the cover, I am startled by a big ‘WITHDRAWN’ stamped into the first page.  A sticker on the back cover identifies the book as the former property of the Appleton…

[hiphuman2020]

Hermann Hesse & Me

Fifty years later, I remember how Hermann Hesse helped define the course of my life.

Fifty years ago, Hermann Hesse was one of the poet-philosophers who, like Gibran and Castaneda, I hero-worshiped while searching for a new religion.  The Glass Bead Game and Siddhartha got my attention but it was Narcissus and Goldmund that made Hermann Hesse my personal saint. I’m sure that when he wrote it in in the late 1920’s he was looking back at his own life, so I was astonished that he…

[hiphuman2020]

As the Nazis were invading France at the beginning of WWII, Irène Némirovsky wrote a love story, suggesting that war cannot defeat true love.

Has love become too easy?

The original French title of All Our Worldly Goods was Les Biens de ce monde. First published in 1946, the story of Pierre and Agnès cannot be read outside the shadow of Némirovsky’s own life story. Neither of them could remember a time when they were not in love, nor could they recall when they first understood that they must keep it a secret. “He loved her just as she was, willing and pure.…

[hiphuman2020]

Jane Smiley wrote her alter-ego into Lucky, conjuring up a folk/rock artist whose life runs parallel to Smiley’s and rivals her success.  

A compelling understated novel, in the end Jane Smiley holds nothing back.

Jodie Rattler was born lucky. That’s how she’s seen herself since she was six when she accompanied her Uncle Drew to a race track and randomly chose horses that won him thousands. He gave her forty-two $2 bills to thank her. For the rest of her life, the rolled-up $86 bundle is her good luck charm. Maybe it’s the rubber-banded stash of money. Maybe it’s her clear, cautious approach to life, but…

[hiphuman2020]

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons ascends from a young mother’s ribald confessions to a prescient perception of death.

Mourning a death requires honesty, sometimes a full confession.

Kit is a bisexual mom with a good husband, a wry sense of humor, a mild porn addiction and a dead sister. She’s devoted to her three-and-a-half-year-old baby girl. Whisking Gilda from one playground to another, giving her constant attention at home, she’s hard-pressed to think of anything but Julie, who died while Gilda was still in her womb. “By the time I lost her, drugs and risky sex – my…

[hiphuman2020]

A frank, funny, and endearing novel, Caroline O’Donoghue elevates The Rachel Incident from coming-of-age to a human rights awakening.

A compelling first novel by an Irish writer, The Rachel Incident is a testament to the new generation's honest relationship with human sexuality.

Rachel is instantly likeable. Recalling her year on Shandon Street in Cork from a decade in the future, she presents her twenty-year-old self as a book lover, someone who reads “books that were rancidly popular in the mid-twentieth century.” She’s also wonderfully naïve, open and self-effacing. She’s so open and honest about her own sex experiences, it’s hard for her to understand other people’s…

[hiphuman2020]

Peter Heller’s Burn taps into our fears of divided-country extremes but eschews politics for a moving testimony to lifelong friendship.

Emerging from the remote wilderness of northern Maine after two weeks of moose hunting, Jess and Storey are confounded by clues suggesting that something has gone terribly wrong. The bridges south have been destroyed and the first two towns they encounter heading north are both smoldering in ashes.  They have no access to the outside world, no cell bars, nothing but static from radio stations.…

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Described as Kafkaesque, as Sci-Fi or fantasy, as surrealism or a fable and as a postmodern manifesto, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is nothing but Haruki Murakami at his best.

No one makes you examine consciousness like Haruki Murakami.

Nothing is as it seems in either of the parallel worlds. A Hard-Boil Wonderland seems to exist in a near-future Tokyo. While the infrastructure is familiar, infowars dominate the lives of the main characters. The narrator is a Calcutec. Because of the “unknowability of the subconscious”, his brain has been altered so that he can digest large volumes of data, safeguard it and retrieve it by using…

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Forget the controversy, put aside the astounding 12 million books sold and the 2022 movie, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is a singularly beautiful novel.

Where the Crawdads Sing has much to teach us about our relationship to the natural world.

Kya lives in a shack set back in the palmettos in the marshlands of the North Carolina coast. Just before her sixth birthday, her mother leaves. She has lost track of when her siblings drifted away. Before she turns seven, her father is gone.  If there is any good fortune to be had by a child whose entire family has abandoned, it is that Kya lives in a shack set back in the palmettos in the…

[hiphuman2020]

True to her elevated style, Louise Penny turns The Beautiful Mystery into a revelation. 

Minus the murder, Louise Penny took me back to serenity of my time in the seminary.

In the opening chapter, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir of the Sûreté du Québec are forced to leave behind their loved ones and the quaint village of Three Pines. In the twenty plus books in Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache series, their isolation from the home community is unusual and quite significant to the plot. After a long flight to the northern reaches of Québec,…