Sunday Books & Culture
Reviews this week include a poetic journey of betrayal, love, and regret in Jane Campell’s “Interpretations of Love” and a comprehensive look at “Four dead in Ohio” in Brian VanDeMark’s “Kent State."
INTERPRETATIONS OF LOVE
by Jane Campbell
Published by Grove Press (August 20, 2024)
Hardcover $28.00
Audiobook $14.99
Reviewed by Penny A Parrish
This slim book centers around three main people. Agnes is an academic philosopher in her 50s. She is divorced with one daughter, who is about to get married. Malcolm is Agnes’ uncle, in his 80s and living in an assisted living center. He is a retired Oxford don. Joe Bradshaw is also in his 80s, a retired psychotherapist who once treated Agnes. There are six sections to the book, with each character narrating two.
We find out early on that Agnes was left an orphan at age four. Her parents were Sophy, Malcolm’s sister and her husband Kurt. They borrowed Malcolm’s car for a vacation, leaving their young daughter with her uncle. Tragically, Agnes’ parents were killed in an accident with that car and the raising of Agnes fell to her grandparents with loving help from Uncle Malcolm.
With the upcoming wedding of Elfie, Agnes’ daughter, Malcolm decides it is time to deliver a letter written by Sophy. He has had it for 50 years. It is addressed to Joe Bradshaw, and Malcolm promised Sophy on her deathbed that he would deliver it. He had not. But that is about to change – 50 years later, when all parties involved will be at the wedding.
Campbell then takes us on a poetic journey of betrayal, of love, of selfishness, and of regret. Relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers, doctors and patients all come into play here. Every action taken, or not taken, has had an impact on these well-meaning but often misguided characters.
I found her writing to be quite beautiful, if overly descriptive at times. We see Agnes: “She was looking, as women sometimes do when they are under stress, rather sleek and twitchy, like a beautiful greyhound.” Or this: “Vacating a relationship is like vacating a home. By the time you leave, nothing looks the same anymore.” Campbell is adept at painting verbal pictures.
One other thing to mention about this writer. This is her first novel – written at age 82. She also published a series of short stories two years ago. Reviews of her work are highly complimentary. I cannot wait to see what she creates in her 90s.
Penny A Parrish is a long-time book reviewer and artist. Learn more about her by visiting her page at Brush Strokes Gallery, which is in downtown Fredericksburg.
KENT STATE – AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
By Brian VanDeMark
Published by W.W. Norton and Company (August 13, 2024)
Hardcover $27.73
Audiobook $14.99
Reviewed by Chuck Sekinger
On May 4, 1970, the decade of the Sixties ended at 12:24 in the afternoon on the campus of Kent State University when Ohio National Guardsmen shot into a crowd of Vietnam War protesting students, killing 4 and wounding 9 others. For those who were on college campuses that day as students, that assault left an indelible mark on a generation’s soul and a grave mistrust of government for years to come.
For many others, the tragedy of that day was justly deserved as the price of dissent for taking the side of the enemy in a time of war. To this day, the root cause of the firing of lethal weapons by government forces on unarmed citizens exercising their first amendment rights for an unpopular cause has not been resolved and serves as an example, over 50 years later, as a cautionary tale exposing the price of freedom of speech in a divided country.
Author Brian VanDeMark, who teaches history at the U.S. Naval Academy, takes a methodical approach to describing every known aspect of that day on the Kent State Campus, the students who were killed and maimed for life, their backgrounds, their prior activities, lengthy hospital stays and recoveries, their supportive families, and their altered lives after the May 4, 1970.
Not only does he detail the students most grievously affected, but for the first time he included interviews taken with the soldiers that were on Blanket Hill that day. They were young guardsmen (some students at Kent State themselves) with no riot training, armed only with “bayonets and bullets.” They were exhausted from extended service in Akron serving as security during a Teamsters strike that occurred before their deployment to the Kent State campus by Ohio Governor James Rhodes after a night where student activists burnt down the ROTC quonset hut as a result of President Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia.
What followed was 9 years of state, federal, and Congressional investigations, criminal trials and civil lawsuits, culminating in a modest settlement of $675,000 (approximately $3 million in 2024 dollars) to the Kent State victims and their surviving families. As part of the settlement agreement to the civil lawsuit, the defendants, which included former Governor Rhodes and 27 National Guardsman, signed a “Statement of Regret” which in part stated: “Some of the Guardsmen on Blanket Hill, fearful and anxious from prior events, may have believed in their own minds that their lives were in danger. Hindsight suggests that another method would have resolved the confrontation.”
This book is a must-read for generations that only know of the Kent State massacre as a reference in the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song, “Four Dead in Ohio.” With all the sworn testimony, eyewitness reports and interviews available to Mr. VanDeMark (circa 2024), the book is certainly the most comprehensive of this American tragedy. After years of hatred, anguish, and denial, the KSU campus now embraces its bloodied past with an annual May 4th remembrance at the placed stone markers on campus where each student was felled by a bullet.
With enough blame to go around for everyone involved, the leadership of the Ohio National Guard, the university’s poor decisions, the rock-throwing destructive students, the campus will always be remembered as a landmark for divisiveness with tragic consequences for all. We can only hope that by VanDeMark’s excellent re-telling of this 1970’s gruesome tale that it will not happen again in the present day.
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