Need For reads

Fiction Desperate cries muffled UNIVERSAL HARVESTER By John Darnielle 224 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux  Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada (pronounced Nev-ay-da), Iowa. It’s the sort of store where we rented VHS tapes back in the ’90s before the advent of Hulu, HBO, and other streaming services. Things are pretty low-key in Nevada, as well as at his job, but one afternoon a woman returns one of the tapes and says, “There’s something on this one.” And so begins John Darnielle’s second novel,  Universal Harvester,  a beautiful, haunting, and at times creepy story full of loss. It takes Jeremy a while, but he finally gets around to watching the film at home where he lives with his dad, Steve. His mom died in a car wreck some years before, and the two grown men share a pleasant enough bachelor’s life. Steve does suggest to his son from time to time that there might be better opportunities for employment beyond the Video Hut.   While...

From the Tundra to the Trenches By Eddy Weetaltuk Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016 $24.95 Canadian/ $27.95 US Reviewed by Kenn Harper To say that Eddy Weetaltuk lived an eventful life, unlike the lives of his fellow Inuit, is an understatement. He was born in 1932 on Strutton Island in James Bay, one of twelve children. His surname, he points out, means “innocent eyes” (and should really be spelled Uitaaluttuq). His grandfather, George Weetaltuk, was a guide for the film-maker Robert Flaherty in the making of his ground-breaking documentary, Nanook of the North . Eddy’s childhood was what one would expect for an Inuk boy growing up in the 1930s and 40s at the southern limit of traditional Inuit land, in James Bay and on the Quebec coast – periods of joy and hunger in the comfort of a large family.  He went to school in Fort George, and finished the eighth grade at boarding school. By the time he reached adulthood, he was multi-lingual, speaking English, Inuktitut, Frenc...

Nonfiction Whiskey-voiced legend ... DICKEY CHAPELLE UNDER FIRE: Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action 136 pp. Wisconsin Historical Society Press By John Garofolo Reviewed by William C. Crawford Dickey Chapelle was a woman and an intrepid, pioneer combat photographer. In many important ways she was like the Marines that she often followed into battle. She had a nose for the images of war, but her work also captured the human side. She died in 1965 before Vietnam became a lost cause for American forces. A Marine patrol she joined hit a booby trap south of Chu Lai. Flying shrapnel severed her carotid artery. Legendary combat photographer Henri Huet caught a poignant image of a chaplain administering last rites to Chapelle on the battlefield. Huet and other well known photographers would themselves later perish in a helicopter shot down over Laos in the waning days of the War. Dickey proved herself as a war correspondent during the later years of Worl...

Fiction Grit and wit CATALINA EDDY A Novel in Three Decades By Daniel Pyne 480 pp. Blue Rider Press Reviewed by Eric Petersen Novelist and screenwriter Daniel Pyne is back with a collection of three very different yet loosely connected crime novellas, set in Southern California thirty years apart from each other, all of them focused on murder cases and tied together by characters wounded by regret and longing for atonement. The first novella, The Big Empty , opens in Hollywood, circa 1954, at the apex of the Cold War and the Red Scare. Army veteran turned hard-boiled detective Rylan Lovely literally walks into the hardest case he’s ever worked – the murder of his estranged wife Isla, whom he’d left several years earlier. Lovely blames himself for the failure of their marriage, even though Isla had an affair with his best friend. Her murder is punctuated by the invention of the H-bomb, which has ratcheted up Cold War tensions to a whole new level. Racked with guilt and determined to nai...

Fiction Like a vulture on carrion CAST THE FIRST STONE An Ellie Stone Mystery By James W. Ziskin 290 pp. Seventh Street Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen Mystery writer James W. Ziskin is back with the fifth entry (the third book, Stone Cold Dead , is also reviewed on this site) in his popular mystery series set in an unusual time and place for a mystery – upstate New York in the early 1960s – and featuring an unusual heroine. Unusual for her time, that is. At a time when career opportunities for most young women were limited by society to housewife, teacher, or secretary, Eleonora “Ellie” Stone works as an investigative reporter for the New Holland Republic , her hometown newspaper. But then, Ellie Stone isn’t like most young women. In her mid-twenties, she’s a tough-talking, hard-drinking dame with brains, guts, and wit, all of which she uses to get her story – and solve bizarre and brutal murders while she’s at it. She takes no crap from men. Artie Short, the owner and senior editor o...

Nonfiction We’ve all had dates like that THE SOUL OF AN OCTOPUS By Sy Montgomery 272 pp. Atria Reviewed by Marty Carlock Visitors at Boston’s New England Aquarium watch staffers handling an octopus. An incredulous man asks them, “Does it know you?” The answer is yes. The octopus not only knows them, it plays with them. It knows who it likes and dislikes, who feeds it and who doesn’t, who smells good and who smells like medicine. The octopus gets so bored that its friends give it toys to play with – plastic Easter eggs to screw and unscrew, jars to open, rubber toys. The octopus’s friends have to be ingenious to keep it from escaping, because it is curious about everything and has a tendency to want to go exploring. Such an excursion is usually fatal. Naturalist Sy Montgomery likes to write about unlikely animals. An earlier book of hers, The Good Good Pig , was a biography of a porcine named Christopher Hogwood, who lived with her and her family for 18 years. Octopuses, to her dismay,...

Fiction Skirting the law, searching for truth TWIST OF THE KNIFE By Becky Masterman 320 pp. Minotaur Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan Protagonist Brigid Quinn is a retired FBI officer, having left the force early for reasons hinted at but not detailed in this third Brigid Quinn mystery. These details are in the author’s previous Quinn books, which I have not read, but might after reading this one. Quinn has flown to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where her elderly father is in the hospital with pneumonia and not doing well.  During her stay, she reconnects with an old co-worker, Laura Coleman, now a temporary investigator for the Innocence Project. She has dredged up new details on the closed case, the murder of a woman and subsequent disappearance of her three children. The husband, Marcus Creighton, was convicted and has been sitting on death row for the past 15 years.  The case is old, and many have told her to leave it alone, but Coleman believes he is innocent, framed for the ...