In 2014, a historian made public her horrific discovery that 796 infants had died and were buried in secret graves near an Irish home for unwed mothers and their babies between 1925 and 1961.
Her finding sparked worldwide outrage and led Ireland to set up a national commission to investigate the deaths at the Tuam Home and others like it, known as “mother-and-baby homes.” In announcing the move, the Irish prime minister said that for decades Ireland had treated babies born to unmarried parents as “an inferior sub-species.”
An official investigation found that Tuam women who became pregnant again after their stay were sometimes sent to the now notorious Irish institutions known as Magdalene Laundries.
“Orders of Roman Catholic nuns ran the laundries for profit, and women and girls were put to work there, supposedly as a form of penance. The laundries were filled not only with ‘fallen women’ — prostitutes, women who became pregnant out of marriage or as a result of sexual abuse and those who simply failed to conform — but also orphans and deserted or abused children.”
More than 10,000 women passed through the laundries, where they suffered further abuse or neglect before the last of the institutions closed in 1996. Some of the victims reported being beaten, locked in, fed bread and water, made to work from morning until evening, and forced to stay out in the cold if they broke rules. Here’s more: https://medium.com/p/dcb6dc922488
Gene Weingarten, America’s only two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, calls the Hardy Boys mysteries the novels that “most influenced” his love of his craft
When he reread the books as an adult, he made a couple of startling discoveries: Contrary to his rosy memories, the writing was so bad, it was “some of the worst bilge ever published.” But there was much to admire in the often heartbreaking, Depression-era life of their author, Leslie McFarlane, who was required by the publishers of the Hardy Boys to write under the pen name of Franklin W. Dixon. Weingarten described what he learned about McFarlane and the Hardy Boys in an article I wrote about on Medium.
Has your reading become GU, or geographically undesirable? Do you read way too many Mom Coms about mothers in deep suburbia or first novels by young Brooklynites living on Ramen noodles?
Jump start your summer reading with my list of 30 beach- and hammock-ready books from 30 countries, from Australia to Zimbabwe, all alphabetically arranged by country name. My list includes new and classic books of fiction and nonfiction with a one- or two-line review of each and a link to more information, chosen with an eye toward providing something for every taste and travel destination.
If you’ve found a great book about a place you love, please feel free to add it in the comments here or on Medium, where I’ve posted the full list:
https://medium.com/lit-life/intriguing-books-from-30-countries-151377fe8cac
Thanks for reading, and if you’ll be taking a trip this summer, happy travels.
With its racial stereotypes and romance-novel tropes, Where the Crawdads Sing is the most overrated novel of the decade. And now there’s a movie coming out from Reese Witherspoon. Why aren’t more critics calling out the obvious problems with the book? I dig into the issues the novel raises on Medium:
Moby-Dick received a chilly reception during Herman Melville’s lifetime that lasted for decades after his death. Why did Americans warm up to the novel slowly? They didn’t know how to read it, the author Clifton Fadiman argues in his introduction to the 1977 Easton Press edition shown, left.
“We must read it not as if it were a novel but as if it were a myth. A novel is a tale. A myth is a disguised method of expressing mankind’s deepest terrors and longings. The myth uses the narrative form and is often mistaken for true narrative. Tom Jones is a true narrative; Moby Dick is a false narrative, a myth disguised as a story. Once we feel the truth of this distinction, the greatness of Moby Dick becomes manifest: we have learned how to read it.”
Some of America’s best writers drank so heavily that their books bear witness to an “epidemic of alcoholism,” Donald W. Goodwin says in Alcohol and the Writer. That was especially true in the first half of the 20th century. Writers of the era who might meet today’s definition an alcoholic included William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and Eugene O’Neill. And even during Prohibition (1919–1933), the drinks kept flowing in fiction. In his recent One for the Road: Drunk Driving Since 1900, Barron Lerner writes of the 1920s and 1930s:
“As the pendulum swung away from a dry mindset, literature and the cinema increasingly celebrated alcohol and inebriation. Alcohol played a central role in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby, and eased the ennui and alienation of characters in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). Thorne Smith’s 1926 novel Topper, which became a 1937 movie starring Cary Grant, romanticized the heavy-drinking couple George and Marion Kerby, who were killed when an inebriated George drives into a tree. Friends and acquaintances are none too distraught over the demise of the Kerbys, who wind up coming back as good-natured – and still drunk – ghosts. ‘A gay life and quick death,’ remarked one character. ‘They liked it that way and they got what they wanted,’ mused another. Nick and Nora Charles, heroine and heroine of The Thin Man films of the 1930s [based on Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man], liked to compete with one another to see how many martins they could down at one sitting.”
One-Minute Book Reviews 