How A Brave Ukrainian Town Rebuffed The Russian Invaders — A New Book Tells The Remarkable True Story

At first glance, Andrew Harding’s A Small, Stubborn Town appears to have nothing in common with Erich Maria Remarque’s great novel of World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front.

Harding draws on his reporting for BBC News in an acclaimed new nonfiction account of how a scrappy small town rebuffed Russian invaders in an early battle for the soul of Ukraine. Remarque turned the dross of his German military service into the gold of a classic of war fiction.

But A Small, Stubborn Town shows the “murderous absurdity” of Vladimir Putin’s war as plainly as All Quiet on the Western Front revealed the disillusionment of soldiers who had dreamed of fighting for noble ideals propagated by Imperial Germany.

Harding brings a you-are-there immediacy to his report on the fierce two-day battle for Voznesensk, a pretty rural town in the Mykolaiv region with a tactically key bridge. He summed up the significance of the fight for the BBC:

“Victory would have enabled Russian forces to sweep further west along the Black Sea coast towards the huge port of Odesa and a major nuclear power plant.

“Instead, Ukrainian troops, supported by an eclectic army of local volunteers, delivered a crushing blow to Russian plans, first by blowing up the bridge and then by driving the invading army back, up to 100km, to the east.”

Yet the battle has been overshadowed in America by the larger-scale dramas in places like Mariupol, Kherson, and Kharkiv. Interested in why it matters? I say more about the battle in my review of Harding’s remarkable book at @Medium.

View at Medium.com

Does Your Career Feel Like A Train Wreck?

This has been a tough year for my journalism colleagues, with 20,000+ media jobs lost, and not just in places where a bloodbath has been going on for years, such as newspapers and magazines. Major websites and podcasts have gone under, too.

What can the walking wounded learn from survivors of far worse disasters, like shipwrecks and plane crashes? I’ve reviewed a lot of books on world-class calamities and wondered what their authors might say. Quite a lot, it turns out.

One helpful step is avoiding self-pity or feeling sorry for yourself, according to a book that dealt with the near-miraculous survival of a mountaineer given up for dead after he broke his leg while climbing and fell into a crevasse in the Peruvian Andes.

In a new post at @Medium, I write about five strategies that worked during extraordinary catastrophes, including that of a pilot who fell five miles without a parachute and broke nearly every bone in his body. I’ve focused on the potential lessons for writers, but the tips could help people in other careers, too.

View at Medium.com

Profiles In Ukrainian Courage

Three seconds before a Russian artillery strike, the dogs take cover–a useful for warning signal for Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines.

Vivid details like that one abound in Luke Harding’s recent Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival (Vintage, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Orwell Prize for political reporting. Harding is a foreign correspondent for the Guardian, and his extensive reporting from Ukraine allows him to portray the Russian assault with a depth and credibility seldom found in the U.S. media.

Invasion blends courageous on-the-ground reporting with a sophisticated but clear analysis of the roots of the conflict in the fraught relationship between the warring nations, making it ideal for anyone frustrated by the skimpy coverage of international events in the U.S media.

Interested in learning more about the book or the war? I saw more in my longer review of Invasion at @Medium.

Ukraine’s Best-Known Poet Could Have Fled His Country, But He Stayed And Began Taking Bulletproof Vests To The Front

Serhiy Zhadan is Ukraine’s most popular poet, and when Russia invaded his country, he could have fled to protect a much-honored career that’s included being nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature.

Instead he stayed and began coordinating resistance efforts in Kharkiv through his Facebook posts, some of which he collects in a harrowing new book, Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches From the Ukrainian Front (Yale University Press, 2023).

Zhadan includes a few of his poems, but his book consists mainly of lightly edited Facebook posts along with their accompanying photos and other art. He focuses especially on the stories he heard while visiting soldiers, doctors, schoolchildren, and others.

One of the most moving involves a 9-year-old boy who, along with other children, had been taking shelter from the bombing in the subways. Zhadan asked the boy if he could bring him anything, and the child said yes: He’d like some rugs so the babies didn’t have to crawl on cold station floors.

Here’s my full review of Sky Above Kharkiv:

Italy’s Forgotten Female War Heroes Shine In The Best Nonfiction Book I’ve Read This Year

If you’ve seen Casablanca, you’ve had a glimpse of the fierce loyalty women could have to Resistance movements in World War II. Italy’s female partisans took risks as dangerous as the fictional Isla Lund did to help her freedom-fighter husband, Victor Laszlo, in the film.

Yet while popular culture has celebrated the women of French and other Resistance groups, it has largely ignored their Italian counterparts–the thousands of female partisans who look on a vast range of tasks as harrowing as they were vital.

These women carried messages, delivered weapons, administered first aid, acted as sentries, arranged for fake papers for escaped Allied and other prisoners, and much more. One transported guns by hiding them under a baby in a pram. Another specialized in kidnapping leading civilians and German officers to use as hostages in prisoner exchanges. With large political gatherings banned, a third devised an ingenious plan for holding meetings.

Caroline Moorehead describes these and other actions by Italy’s remarkable female partisans in her gripping A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy From Fascism (HarperCollins, 2020). Here’s more on these heroic women and Moorehead’s book, the best nonfiction book I’ve read this year. Here’s more:

View at Medium.com

View at Medium.com

Celebrating the Joys of a Decade of Beach Walks

Meditations on the everyday appeal of a favorite beach

A Decade of Beach Walks. By George Thatcher. Quail Ridge Press, 239 pages, $12.

By Janice Harayda

Anyone who has seen too many used condoms and empty Red Bull cans on American beaches will find a gentle antidote in A Decade of Beach Walks. In this book George Thatcher collects more than 200 of the popular Scenes from the Beach columns that he has written since 2007 for the Sun Herald in Biloxi. Each entry consists of a brief, illustrated meditation on an inspiring sight he has seen during one of his daily walks along Mississippi Sound, such as a blue heron, a scallop shell, or a cluster of acorn barnacles. Thatcher focuses on the enduring charms of the beach, not on the damage that careless visitors do, but when piercing winds blow, he reminds us that Emily Dickinson was right: “Nature, like us, is sometimes caught / Without her diadem.”

Please follow Jan on Twitter at @janiceharayda.

After ‘Under the Tuscan Sun,’ Frances Mayes Goes Home — Southern Reading

The first in a series of occasional reviews of books about the American South 

Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir. By Frances Mayes. Broadway, 352 pp., $15, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

Frances Mayes grew up in the one-mile-square town of Fitzgerald, Georgia, where one woman kept a coffin in her living room and another was a kleptomaniac “whose husband was billed quietly” for items she pilfered. This memoir describes her childhood and her move back to the South after the Italian sojourn that inspired her Under the Tuscan Sun. Mayes deals bluntly with the pre-civil-rights era injustices she observed, such as a tradition at her university that Chi Omegas “didn’t date the Jewish boys.” And if her writing about the food, weather and landscape of the region is overheated — when the sun rises over the ocean, “the wobbling golden orb hoists out of the water” — it is rich in detail. However stifled she felt as a child, Mayes conveys a deep affection for the aspects of the South that she still loves now that she lives in North Carolina — “the mellow southern winter, the humane pace, and the sweet green beauty of the land.”

(c) 2015 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Coming Soon – A Real-Life Environmental Detective Story

Suppose that an unusually large number of children in your town developed cancers that seemed to result from an environmental hazard such as air or water pollution. What would it take to prove it? A group of parents in Toms River, NJ, found out when their children were diagnosed with cancers that they believed to have been caused by toxic wastes dumped by the town’s largest employer. Dan Fagin describes their fight for justice in Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (Bantam, 2013), an environmental detective story that involves midnight dumping, criminal sabotage, and other subterfuge. A review of the book will appear soon on One-Minute Book Reviews. 

‘Being Dead Is No Excuse’: An Irreverent Guide to Southern Funerals

A witty guide to avoiding gaffes like letting people sing “Now Thank We All Our God” as your casket rolls in

Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. By Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hayes. Miramax, 243, $19.95.

By Janice Harayda

A certain kind of Southern woman would rather die than not have tomato aspic at her funeral. She tolerates churches that don’t allow eulogies because she believes God “doesn’t need to be reminded” of the deceased.  And she knows that next to the aspic, it is the hymns that make or break a Southern funeral: You can’t miss with a “stately and wistful” chart topper like “Oh, God, Our Help in Ages Past,” but nobody wants to go out to “Now Thank We All Our God.”

Any self-respecting Southern woman knows that being dead is no excuse for bad form, and this sparkling guide boldly takes on delicate issues such as: Is it proper to use the euphemism “loved one” in a death notice? (No, it’s “tacky.”) What flowers should you avoid? (“A ‘designer arrangement’ that turns out to be a floral clock with the hands stopped at the time of death.”) Should you adopt recent innovations such as having pallbearers file past the coffin, putting their boutonnières on it? (“Funerals are emotional enough to begin with – why do something that is contrived to tug at the heart?”)

More than an irreverent etiquette guide, Being Dead Is No Excuse abounds with tips on keeping a “death-ready” pantry and with recipes for Southern funeral staples such stuffed eggs, pimiento cheese, chicken salad, caramel cake and pecan tassies. But noncooks needn’t fear that this book has nothing for them. It’s comforting that if Northern funerals increasingly resemble New Year’s Eve parties with balloons and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” die-hard Southerners treat death with respect. For all its wit, this book develops a theme that  transcends geography. You may have no strong feelings for the deceased, the authors say, but you can still have grace: “A funeral reception is not a cocktail party. We want people to feel comfortable, but we want them to remember that they’re there because someone has died.”

Best line: No. 1: ““You practically have to be on the list for your second liver transplant before a Southern Episcopalian notices that you’ve drunk too much. They’re not called Whiskypalians for nothing.” No. 2: “Pimiento cheese might just be the most Southern dish on earth. Pimiento cheese has been dubbed ‘the paste that holds the South together.’”

Worst line: “We always say how much we admire her because she always holds her head up high, even though her mother ran away with the lion tamer in a traveling circus.” That sentence didn’t need more than one “always.” And is anyone today old enough to have a parent who even remembers traveling circuses with lion tamers?

Published: 2005

Furthermore: Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hayes have spent much of their lives in the Mississippi Delta. They also wrote Someday You’ll Thank Me for This: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Being a Perfect Mother (Hyperion, 2009).

Jan and Kevin Smokler will be cohost a Twitter chat on Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar today, Feb. 22, at 4 p.m. ET, 9 p.m. GMT. Please join us at the hashtag #classicschat on the last Friday of each month.

© 2013 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved
www.janiceharayda.com

‘Midnight in Peking’ — The Corpse Wore Diamonds

A Shanghai-based author revisits the notorious 1937 murder of a British consul’s daughter

Midnight in Peking How the Murder of Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China. By Paul French. Viking, 259 pp., $26.

By Janice Harayda

Midnight in Peking tells such good story that you wish could believe all of it. The book seems at first to be a straightforward history of a sadistic crime: On a frigid January day in 1937, someone murdered a 19-year-old Englishwoman and left her mutilated body, clad in a tartan skirt and platinum-and-diamond watch, at the foot of a Peking watchtower. A ghastly detail stood out: The body had no heart, which had disappeared along with several of its other internal organs.

A British-Chinese police team learned quickly that the victim was Pamela Werner, the daughter of a retired consul, who lived with her widowed father in the Legation Quarter, a gated enclave favored by Westerners in Peking. Shadier neighborhoods nearby teemed with brothels, dive bars and opium dens. And potential suspects abounded, including Pamela’s father, Edward Werner, who inherited the $20,000 bequest that his daughter had received after her mother died of murky causes. But the official investigation of the young woman’s murder repeatedly stalled in the face of bureaucratic incompetence, corruption or indifference, and it faded away, unsolved, after Peking fell to the invading Japanese later in 1937.

In Midnight in Peking, the Shanghai-based author Paul French offers a swift and plausible account of what happened to the former boarding-school student who had called Peking “the safest city in the world.” The problem is that French describes his story as a “reconstruction” without explaining what that means. Did he invent, embellish or rearrange details? French says he drew in part on the “copious notes” that Pamela’s father sent to the British Foreign Office after doing his own investigation. Edward Werner’s payments to his sources may have compromised some of that information. And Werner’s files don’t appear to explain other aspects of the book. How did French learn the thoughts of long-dead people such as Richard Dennis, the chief British detective on the case? Is Midnight in Peking nonfiction or “faction,” the word some critics apply to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which contains quotes that its author has admitted he made up? In the absence of answers, this book provides vibrant glimpses of what its author calls “a city on the edge” but leaves you wondering if deserves its categorization as “history” on the copyright page.

Best line: “Meanwhile, somewhere out there were Pamela’s internal organs.”

Worst line: “Dennis sat back. He reminded himself …” The book gives no source for these lines and for a number of others like them. An end note in the “Sources” section doesn’t answer the questions its page raises.

Published: April 2012 (first American edition).

Read an excerpt or learn more about Midnight in Peking.

You can follow Jan (@janiceharayda) on Twitter by clicking on the “Follow” button in the right sidebar. She is an award-winning journalist who has been the book editor of the Plain Dealer and the book columnist for Glamour.

© 2102 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com