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Fiction Sunglasses, attitude, and charred boots FIRE AND FORGET: Short Stories from the Long War Edited by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher Da Capo Press Reviewed by Marty Carlock Fire and forget. Shoot and shake it off. Kill and care less. None of the above is possible. So say the authors of this collection of 15 stories from the Gulf Wars, who – it is clear – have been there. The detail, the veracity, the inner hurt could not be replicated by anyone just making it up. The editors put it best in the preface:  We each knew the problem we all together struggled with, which is how to say something true about an experience unreal, to a people fed and wadded about with lies…Meanwhile, home is a place you lived in once, a different person, a different life, and all the people you loved somehow alien. These fifteen authors are all veterans (except for one very perceptive military wife). The nucleus of them met in New York at the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop. They shared common interests:...

Nonfiction Civil rights in a petri dish RACE AND SOCIAL CHANGE: A Quest, a Study, a Call to Action By Max Klau 384 pp. Jossey-Bass Reviewed by Sala Wyman Developmental psychologist Max Klau begins by asking: What might we learn by carefully observing multiple civil rights movements in a petri dish?   Deeply embedded in our personal lives are beliefs about race, the order of things and decisions about whether we conform to those beliefs—or not. Klau creates a social petri dish through examining the complex systems of power that continue to feed historically created social divides and are exacerbated by current political rhetoric and actions.  In a sense, he confirms what many of us already know. It’s going to take a lot more than conversations to dismantle systems that create social inequality.  A former Vice President of Leadership Development at City Year (an Americorp program) and currently the Chief Program Officer at the New Politics Leadership Academy , Klau’s commit...

Nonfiction A journey fraught with danger CROSSING THE RIVER KABUL: An Afghan Family Odyssey By Kevin McLean 256 pp. Potomac Books Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan Baryalai Popal grew up in an Afghanistan most of us have never seen or heard about. As westerners, we—or I, at least—only became aware during the communist occupation in the late 1970s and the subsequent U.S. response to that invasion. Eventually, we would back factions to drive out the Russians. The rest, as they say, is history.  This book is the joint effort of Baryalai Popal and author Kevin McLean. It occurred to me while reading this compelling memoir that Americans are informed only about countries that affect us. The majesty of most cities of the Middle East only gains our attention on the front pages. There we see them lying in ruins after being bombed during protracted conflicts. Lebanon. Beirut. Damascus. Kabul. Aleppo. What were they like before? Where did people market, and what were their lives like before t...

Nonfiction Just another evil act A COURAGEOUS FOOL  By Todd C. Peppers with Margaret A. Anderson 279 pp. Vanderbilt University Press  Reviewed by Marty Carlock This is a book about murder. Murders, actually, plural. They were all legal. Done by you and me. A Courageous Fool is about the death penalty, and the pain it exacts not only for the condemned but on all who participate. The courageous fool is Marie Deans, a woman who fought the death penalty in some of the states where it is most often applied. Not content with opposing it, Deans visited the men on death row, listened to them, urged them to appeal, reaffirmed their dignity and their existence as human beings. Marie Deans was likely not an easy person to hang out with. She smoked, talked incessantly, had no patience for those who disagreed with her. On Death Row she was somebody else; the men adored her, protected her. She saw the humanity deep in men who had committed hideous crimes. She wrote: “To me, the people who ...

Fiction Butt the proctologist NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME By Rakesh Satyal 418 pp. Picador Reviewed by Marty Carlock A subtle bias has crept into publishing in the past few years: a predilection for stories from writers of exotic backgrounds, whether skillfully written or not. Yes, most of us readers want to be taken “lands away,” as Emily Dickinson has it; we want to read about lives different from our own humdrum. Yet most of us want to be taken there by a competent guide. No One Can Pronounce My Name is exotic enough. Rakesh Satyal is of Indian descent (his bios fail to reveal when his family immigrated to America) and is gay. His first novel, Blue Boy , winner of the 2009 Lambda Award for Gay Debut Fiction, mirrors his own boyhood growing up in Cincinnati. This current novel delves into the society and culture of immigrants from India living in this country. For women – to hear Satyal tell it – their interchange is about gossip, judgment, back-biting and competition regarding th...

Fiction Losers hating Steubenville A WELCOME MURDER By Robin Yocum 256 pp. Seventh Street Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen Journalist turned writer Robin Yocum is back with his fourth novel ( A Brilliant Death is also reviewed on this site). That book was a haunting, heart-wrenching murder mystery set in a once great Ohio steel mill town. A Welcome Murder has the same setting, but it’s unlike anything the author has written so far – a comic mystery with an undercurrent of tragedy and featuring alternating first person narration from several characters who all knew each other in high school. Johnny Earl, the main character, begins the novel by introducing the story of how in 1989, he became the prime suspect in a murder not long after returning home to Steubenville, Ohio, following a seven-year prison sentence. Once a great steel mill town, Steubenville is now a decaying shell. In high school, Johnny was the most popular boy – a good student and star baseball and football player who da...

Fiction The stratosphere of Tibet SKELETON GOD: An Inspector Shan Tao Yun Mystery By Eliot Pattison 305 pp. Minotaur Books Reviewed by Alan Goodman This is Edgar Award winner Eliot Pattison’s ninth installment in the Inspector Shan series. The world of Inspector Shan moves along quite slowly as murder mysteries go, particularly in the opening sections. Pattison is a deliberate writer, apparently intent upon setting the detailed backdrop of Tibetan culture as much as he is on drawing the scene of the obligatory opening murder itself. I mention this because while popular mystery writers such as Michael Connelly, with his detective hero Harry Bosch, rush you along with staccato-like narrative, Inspector Shan moves at a much more leisurely pace. Maybe because I had just finished the Harry Bosch series, it took some time to get down to the new speed limit. The reward for making this adjustment was to be introduced to a world that one knows mostly from myth – the stratosphere of worlds – the...