Sunday August 5, 2023
Editor's Note | Sunday Bookshelf | Jim Hall | SHORT ESSAY: Bastions of Terror - America's Bookstores
Editor’s Note: For several months, we at F2S have hinted that big changes are coming. Today marks the first of those changes. (The other two will be announced Monday and Tuesday - so be on the lookout.)
Welcome to Sunday Bookshelf. Each week, we will be featuring locally authored book reviews, news about local writers, and when appropriate, personal reflections on books, reading, and the community. Our book reviewers are the stars of this page. Many are already well-known to longtime readers of the Free Lance-Star. It’s appropriate that Penny A Parrish holds the honor of being the first to review a book in this new section. Penny is a longtime reviewer at the Free Lance-Star, and a respected local artist. (We already featured great several of her amazing photographs in previous Sunday issues.)
So welcome to Sunday Bookshelf. Freshen your coffee, and travel with our writers through the many books that could fill your shelves and your hearts.
If you would like to be a reviewer, drop us a line - editoratfs@gmail.com.
‘Return to Valetto’
by Dominic Smith
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Hardback - $28, 336 pages (Published June 13, 2023)
Hardback edition
Kindle version available
Reviewed by Penny A Parrish
I have been to Italy a couple of times, from big cities like Rome and Florence, to small villages in Tuscany and Sicily. Even among a throng of tourists, the country’s momentous history invades your mind and soul. Etruscans, Rmans, and not hundreds but thousands of years surround you.
Hugh Fisher is a historian who specializes in abandoned and dying towns in Italy. His late mother was the youngest daughter in the Serafino family of Valetto. It is 2011 and he has inherited the guest cottage at the villa, so Hugh plans to live there and do research while he tries to recover from the loss of both his mother and his wife.
There are only ten people living in Valetto. Centuries ago it was home to thousands, but following an earthquake in 1971, most who were left fled. Houses and buildings stand abandoned. Tourists see a church tower, a crumbling staircase on the side of a cliff, and a piazza full of stray cats.
Iris, Violet, and Rose are the three sisters of Hugh’s mother, widows who have separate apartments in the deteriorating villa. Ida, his grandmother, lives on the top floor and is about to turn 100. A few friends and a cake will not suffice, so she invites hundreds of former neighbors and old friends from around the world to celebrate her life. They have no idea what lies ahead.
There are many secrets that still live in Valetto, and Hugh finds himself in the midst of one that could tear his family apart. His plans to stay at the guest cottage are stymied when he finds a stranger named Elisa already ensconced there, saying it was left to her by Hugh’s grandfather. Her mother Alessia, one of the refugee children who hid at the villa during WWII, was best friends with Hugh’s mother Hazel. And they hide the biggest secret of all.
Smith’s writing captures both the beauty and the desolation of Italy’s small and dying towns, and the sense of loneliness and abandonment not only of the buildings but also of the people. Valetto still holds the imprint of war, of the partisans and the fascists, of those who hid fighters and those who turned them in. Blood feuds pour like wine from generation to generation in this beautifully written and haunting book.
Book Signing
Jim Hall - Saturday, Aug. 19, beginning at 1 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble in Central Park in Fredericksburg
Jim Hall, a Virginia native now living in Fredericksburg, will sign copies of his new book The Lynching of Arthur Jordan on Saturday August 19. From the book jacket:
Arthur Jordan and Elvira Corder were young and unafraid, but their love was doomed. He was Black, she was white and this was Virginia in 1880. When Elvira became pregnant, the couple fled Fauquier County to live in Maryland. But her father found them and recruited neighbors to help kidnap them. Four nights later, a mob dragged Arthur from the county jail in Warrenton and lynched him. Elvira, taken to a hotel in Williamsport, Maryland, was never heard from again. Stories of lynching are all too common in the postbellum South, but this one tells a unique tale of a couple who were willing to sacrifice everything to be together—and did. Author Jim Hall tells a classic tale of forbidden love, one of hope crushed by hate.
Hall previously published The Last Lynching in Northern Virginia: Seeking Truth at Rattlesnake Mountain in 2016, also with The History Press. He holds a master’s degree from Virginia Commonwealth University and is a former adjunct instructor at the University of Mary Washington. A native of Virginia, he is retired and lives in Fredericksburg.
Bastions of Terror - America’s Bookstores
by: Martin Davis
“The stacks.”
Few under the age of 30 would immediately understand that expression on its own. For the uninitiated, the stacks are where libraries store their books. And until relatively recently, people visiting university libraries (students, citizens, or those with borrowing privileges) were allowed to simply walk into those wonderful rooms, filled with rows upon rows of books.
As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I would use the online card catalog (there were still real catalogs when I was in school, but they were mostly sitting there like relics in a museum as computer terminals took their place) to find what I was looking for. Then I’d spend hours looking all around the book I knew I needed, discovering the books I never knew existed.
It’s the kind of exploration that online catalogs and closed stacks have ended. And we are all the poorer for it.
The Great Lie of the online world is that everything is there for you. In a sense, this is true. Unknown trillions of 0s and 1s will deliver most anything you want right to your laptop. Especially the written word.
And because so much is there, we have fooled ourselves into believing we are better off and know more.
But online delivery can only bring what you know you want. It cannot deliver what you don’t know you need. That is what roaming the stacks does for us.
Amazon tries to replicate the experience of being in the stacks by giving you related titles to the book you call up. Why would I accept the dozen or so titles a poorly written algorithm spits out, when I can browse thousands of books just a few steps from the title I went to find?
The computer promises to deliver the universe, but it does so via a pipette. We are therefore fooled into believing that we are quenching our thirst for learning because we choose what we want. Instead, we are dying of dehydration because we accept the droplets of books some coder delivers to us immediately after hitting “order.”
And this is why the stacks, and open libraries, and bookstores have become bastions of terror for people whose minds have been starved of exploration, because they’ve settled for droplets of internet dung.
Step into the stacks. Step into a bookstore. And behold.
You are confronted by everything you don’t know. Your ignorance sits before you in rows upon rows of books you’ve never read. You get a clear and profound sense of everything you don’t know.
And for the poor fools whose minds have been shrunk by the personal computer, there is only one reaction - terror.
For these people, there is only one solution - ban them. Burn them. Control the flow of information, just as they’ve allowed the computer to control their limited minds.
But to those who know the stacks, our bookstores and libraries elicit another reaction. Curiosity. We walk in, walk around, placing our hands on thousands of years of learning, allowing our minds to explore everything we don’t know, and to occasionally discover a familiar friend to read, a book that reminds us of the power of the printed word to open our minds to the world beyond.
Is it any wonder the simple-minded people, choosing to die of thirst, are afraid to walk into their local bookstores and libraries to drink?
They never learned to swim in the pools of wisdom, and they’ll drown.
No wonder they’re so afraid.