Isabel Dalhousie Is Back – The Sweet Remnants of Summer by Alexander McCall Smith

What a perfect book to wrap up my reading challenge for 2023!

The Isabel Dalhousie books by the amazingly prolific Alexander McCall Smith are my favorite among his many successful series. Set in contemporary Edinburgh, they chronicle the life of Isabel, a philosopher, her somewhat younger husband Jamie, a classical musician, their two little boys, and their housekeeper, Grace.

Isabel is a philosopher who edits and publishes a magazine devoted to ethics, and is a person who others come to for help with their personal problems and dilemmas. The series, and in particular this volume, explores how she (and we) cope with the challenges of modern life and its conflicts.

Isabel leads a very comfortable and appealing life, but though she is well off financially, has a loving and handsome spouse, and healthy children, she takes nothing for granted. She knows well that she leads something of a charmed life, and is aware of the good fortune that allows her to pursue her career, which is certainly not one that exposes her to what most of the rest of the working world experiences.

I am always just a little amazed how well McCall Smith writes from the woman's point of view. He seems so adept at understanding how women balance their personal, professional and inner lives.

He also presents the moral and ethical problems Isobel is called on to solve with a light, yet insightful and profound touch. It is impossible not to enjoy these books or come away with the positive feeling that all could somehow be right with the world if we would only make the effort.

A Summer of Drama by the Sea – Dreamland by Nancy Bilyeau

New York, 1911: Peggy Battenberg, an independent-thinking twenty-year-old woman and the eventual heiress to a fortune, unwillingly joins her family for a summer sojourn at the exclusive Oriental Hotel, a massive and lavish Victorian-era establishment on Brooklyn's fashionable Manhattan Beach, just down the shoreline from the playground to the masses, Coney Island.

Peggy had been enjoying her volunteer job at a Manhattan bookstore where she met intriguing people who furthered her interests in the arts, social welfare, and politics, but her widowed mother and uncles, who controlled the family money, put a hold on the relative freedom she'd tasted, in order to secure her younger sister's engagement to a man who would expand her family's influence and their holdings in the mining industry out west. As she was still a minor, and had yet to come into any of her inheritance, and because, as a woman, she had no property or other rights, she was compelled to obey her uncles as well as please her mother, who followed strict codes of behavior, dress, and even food and drink choices. Though the Batternbergs were Jewish, they had long left behind such traditions as kosher dining – their food restrictions were more about shunning the tastes of the less well off for such items as Coney Island sausages, which would eventually be known as hot dogs, and the new drink, Coca Cola.

Still, once at the hotel Peggy found opportunities for rebellion: bicycling with her brother as her only chaperone, doctoring her restrictive swimming costume to remove the sleeves and under layers, and eventually making her way to Coney Island, where she is determined to find new adventures, but ends up involved in far more scandalous and sinister activities than she bargained for...but also falls in love with both modern art and and a pioneering artist.

This carefully researched and richly detailed mystery novel is a compelling read, especially for those who are interested in New York and Brooklyn history, the art world as it edges toward modernism, and the societal changes in both Europe and the United States in an age of mass immigration and the sweeping technical and scientific developments in the period preceding World War I.

 

Drugs, Sex, and Dissension – All the Leaves Are Brown by Scott G. Shea

Some of most memorable sounds of the 60s were the harmonies of the Mamas and Papas, though compared to The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, and the artists of Motown, they lacked the depth of catalog and output, and their time as an active group was limited to just a few years, far fewer than memory may render. 

The group was composed of John Phillips, his eventual second wife Michelle Gilliam Phillips, Cass Elliott, and Denny Doherty, all of whom (other than Michelle) had initially been members of other groups and musical acts. The group came together in Greenwich Village and fell apart in California.

As the book started off with a very boring account of John Phillips's background, I skipped forward to where it became more interesting – when it finally got into the origins of the Mamas and Papas (a good deal of which I already knew), but then it meandered off far too much into the lives of other musicians, not necessarily related ones, and was also chock full of irritating typos and misspellings. Several artists were also savaged, rather unfairly in my opinion, including the great Laura Nyro. 

I was already well aware that John Phillips was a person who led a life of extreme excess. For a time he subleased a coop apartment in Greenwich Village in a friend's building, and she complained about his parties and the noise a number of times. After reading the book, I disliked him all the more. He squandered his talent and actually produced very little. Drugs, alcohol and sex seemed to be his most compelling pursuits.

The book made it clear that the most interesting and likable member of the group was obviously Cass Elliott. She too, lived a life of excess, and her early death was very sad. Had she been able to overcome her addictions, she could have had many more years of influence in the music world.

All in all, this was a chronicle that focused on how four lives were often badly spent. It seemed more an indictment of a period in music history than a celebration of it, and while there bright spots in the book, it seemed to glory in the bad aspects of the time. Overall, a more disappointing than satisfying read.

 

War and Art in Italy – The Last Masterpiece by Laura Morelli

A deep dive into World War II Italy, and the race between the Nazis and the Allies for the fate of the treasures of European art, particularly that of Florence, where, in my experience, there is something that stops the traveler in their tracks with practically every step.  

The author tells the story from the points of view of two fictitious women. Eva is a German photographer who is brought on to document the paintings, sculptures, and other works that the Nazis are removing from the museums and other locations, ostensibly to protect them, but in reality to eventually bring them to the "super museum" Hitler is planning for Linz, Austria. Her counterpart is Josie, an American, who has joined the WACs (Women's Army Corps), and because of her excellent stenography skills, becomes an assistant to the officers of the Monuments Men, who are trying to save the same works from falling into Nazi hands. 

Author Morelli is an art historian with a Yale Ph.D, who has written several historical novels set in the art world. This is the first I've read, but I will get to the others (eventually), as this one was so fascinating for a reader like me with a strong interest in art and art history, and a love for all things Italian. As I read, I thought of my trips to Italy, especially Florence, and how astonishing it is, and how grateful I am, that so many of the great works of art were saved, and that so much of the war's destruction has been restored. It is a profound to realize, while reading this book, how differently things could have turned out, had the Nazis triumphed – here that is concerning art, but of course there is so much to consider.

It is very evident how much research and knowledge went into this book, with its descriptions of the art and the physical environment throughout Italy, along with aspects of the conditions in Austria (as background for Eva's story).

Morelli also handled the characterizations very well, for both women, their families and personal relationships. Both primary characters evolved and grew due to their wartime experiences. The forays into the friendships and camaraderie that developed among the WACs, and the inner thoughts of each woman as they dealt with their own conflicts were sensitively portrayed. Her light touch on romance rounded out the novel, but was not its point – there was just enough.

I felt the chapters featuring Eva moved a little slowly at first – my only criticism. Because of her origins and beliefs, she was not immediately likable, or understandable, to me, but as I continued reading, I was able to understand and even feel sorry for her. As the book closed, I thought of what it would be like for her to be on that losing side, and return home, knowing that she had embraced and worked for a cause that she realized was both evil and immoral. That is a topic for another kind of book altogether...

Songbirds of the 60s – But Will You Love Me Tomorrow by Laura Flam and Emily Siue Liebowitz

Before the Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys and so many others, there were the Girl Groups: the Shirelles, Ronettes, Angels, and Crystals (to name just a few) and songs like "Be My Baby", "Soldier Boy", "Then He Kissed Me", and of course, the one that inspired this book's title, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow". Most of the early Girl Groups came out of the New York/New Jersey area, with another wave coming from Detroit, at the very beginning of Motown: the Marvelettes, Vandellas, and then the Supremes.

It was impossible, in the early 60s, to turn on the radio to your local pop station, and not hear those songs. They were the songs you sang along to, and likely danced to, if not then, a little later on. They were songs of love, hope, yearning, and desire.

This engaging book is a chronicle of the groups, their members, their producers, promoters, and the songwriters. Some of the singers became household names: Ronnie Spector, Martha Reeves, Darlene Love, and Diana Ross. Some of the songwriters are also renown: Carole King, Neil Sedaka, Ellie Greenwich, Stoller & Leiber, and Holland-Dozier-Holland. Other figures like Dick Clark, Don Kirshner, Berry Gordy, and the long shadow of Phil Spector figure prominently. 

The authors interviewed many of the surviving group members and others who contributed to their records and their fame. Their backstories are individual but make a collective, though not necessarily cohesive, whole. All of their music is part of our history and a backdrop to at least parts of our lives.

The book is organized more or less chronologically, but also topically. It takes us through such historical life-shaping milestones as the JFK assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War. Some of the most moving, and chilling, reminiscences are the descriptions of the discrimination and occasional violence that these nearly all Black groups encountered on road trips through the South. 

If you have an interest in the history of the last 65 years, popular culture, and music, you'll enjoy this book, and you'll hear your favorites again, playing in your head as you read along. 

Jewish Cooking and Culture in Rome, The Eternal City – Portico by Leah Koenig

What a wonderful book...the recipes are enticing, the pictures are stunning, and the commentary is so interesting. My only wish is that such a book had existed before I traveled to Rome in 1983, on my first trip abroad. Even though I had read guidebooks, I had almost no information about the former Jewish Ghetto, and I was dissuaded even from going to Trastevere, having been told that it was a dangerous neighborhood at the time, and perhaps it was for a young woman tourist on her own. After a couple of incidents of unwanted and aggressive attention, I took the warning seriously. Now, after reading this cookbook I am absolutely ready for fourth Italian sojourn, which would certainly now include Jewish Rome.