Category: Reviews

We were, for whatever reason, the lucky ones who survived when no one else had. Pretty girls covered in blood. As such, we were each in turn treated like something rare and exotic. A beautiful bird that spreads its bright wings only once a decade. Or that flower that stinks like rotting meat whenever it decides to bloom.

3.5 Stars. Quincy Carpenter is the lone survivor of the Pine Cottage Massacre, making her the third member of an elite group that nobody wants to join: the Final Girls. Lisa Milner, Samantha Boyd, and Quincy each endured real-life horrors and survived against all odds. Of all the crimes that have occurred over the years, their cases are the ones that captured the nation’s imagination. Ten years after the massacre, Quincy still has no memory of what happened that night. She has managed to put the past behind her and live a relatively normal life as a successful baking blogger. Unfortunately, it’s not going so well for all of the Final Girls. Lisa is found dead in her bathtub, in a suspected suicide. After the news of Lisa’s death becomes public, Sam emerges from hiding and shows up on Quincy’s doorstep. Quincy is suspicious of Sam at first, but she welcomes her into her home. Sam claims that she just wants to make sure Quincy is doing okay, but she’s secretive about what she’s been up to all these years. Who is Sam and what does she really want? Will Sam’s presence help Quincy remember what really happened that night at Pine Cottage?

What happened to us wasn’t a movie. It was real life. Our lives. The blood wasn’t fake. The knives were steel and nightmare‑ sharp. And those who died definitely didn’t deserve it. But somehow we screamed louder, ran faster, fought harder. We survived.

Final Girl is “film‑geek speak for the last woman standing at the end of a horror movie.” This book is the story of a Final Girl’s life after the last “scene.” In horror movies, the Final Girl usually has a unisex name and abstains from sex, drugs, and alcohol. Quincy definitely fits the role! She has a “goodness” that arouses sympathy, a vulnerability that inspires people’s protective instincts, and a strength that shows anyone can overcome trauma and come out better in the end. To the outside world, she emerged from the rubble as an archetype, not an actual human being with complex emotions who watched her best friends get murdered. When there’s an anniversary or new developments, the media descends on her doorstep and she’s expected to make herself available to the masses. Surviving a massacre has become her defining quality. She’s expected to rise above it all and be the perfect victim. Even those closest to Quincy want her to forget the massacre ever happened, yet are still willing to reduce her to an “object of pity” when it’s useful. She is shamed when she shows any sign of weakness. In the midst of all these expectations, Quincy feels herself disappearing. Her entire life is a performance.

Baking is a science, as rigorous as chemistry or physics. There are rules that must be followed. Too much of one thing and not enough of another can lead to ruin. I find comfort in this. Outside, the world is an unruly place where men prowl with sharpened knives. In baking, there is only order.

In fact, it is highly recommended that buy women viagra should be taken 60-90 minutes before sexual activity. viagra shows its effect within 30 minutes, but with generic viagra online you can be ready within 16 minutes! Food consumption: Alcohol and fatty food is not allowed with cute-n-tiny.com. Beside, this Kamagra is useful in treating female impotency. free viagra no prescription The cost of propecia at CVS pharmacy online is the best option for guys viagra free order like me. For those aged men cialis cheap canada who find it difficult to orgasm. The three Final Girls have different ways of handling their trauma. Lisa surrounded herself with friends and dedicated her life to helping others. Samantha went off the grid. Quincy keeps people at a distance and dedicates herself to her baking blog and a highly curated life. Baking allows Quincy to “pour [her] runny, sloshing existence into a human‑shaped mold and crank up the heat, emerging soft, springy, and new.” When Sam shows up her door, Quincy’s perfect facade begins to fade away. Sam is one of the only people in the world who understands what she went through, so she doesn’t have to pretend around her. Sam injects chaos into Quincy’s life and encourages her to make the messy parts visible. One of my favorite scenes is when Sam helps Quincy set up shots for her baking blog. After spending time with Sam, Quincy gets even more dependent on Xanax and wine and becomes a completely different person. The rage she has been forced to lock up begins to seep out. Will the memories she keeps locked up finally break free? 

There’s such a thing as too much sweetness … All the best bakers know this. There needs to be a counterpoint. Something dark. Or bitter. Or sour. Unsweetened chocolate. Cardamom and cinnamon. Lemon and lime. They cut through all the sugar, taming it just enough so that when you do taste the sweetness, you appreciate it all the more

I loved the atmosphere! My favorite parts were the flashbacks to the night at Pine Cottage. All the ingredients for disaster are there and the lead up to the massacre is tense. The flashback chapters are few and far between at first, but they get closer together as it gets closer to the conclusion. There were a few things that kept this book from being a favorite. In books with amnesiacs + first-person perspective, there’s almost always a lull after the first third where I get sick of being stuck in the main character’s head (In a Dark, Dark Wood, Gone Without a Trace, The Trap). The characters didn’t come alive for me so much that I was invested in their fates. (Honestly, Quincy didn’t always seem invested in her own fate!) The conclusion was the exact one I was hoping against and it made the parts that intrigued me not so interesting anymore. Some events seemed to not have much of a purpose except to mislead me. However, I also couldn’t put it down, which is sometimes exactly what I’m looking for. I read 90% of the book in one day. It’s a good summer read, and probably an even better autumn one.

You can’t change what’s happened. The only thing you can control is how you deal with it.

As Quincy reads articles about Lisa’s death, she gets a glimpse of what her own obituary will look like. The journalists focus “on the horrors Lisa witnessed that long‑ago night, as if no other moments of her life mattered.” Quincy hates that other people see her as a Final Girl or a victim, but sometimes that’s exactly what she sees when she looks in the mirror. Will she ever be able to see herself as a survivor? The Final Girls shows how horror movie tropes have roots in reality–the fetishization of young women who endured unspeakable horrors, while ignoring the reality of their situation. The sordid details of their ordeals are what sells papers, but few are comfortable recognizing the resulting trauma. I wasn’t completely on board by the end, but I enjoyed it while reading it. This book is a good choice if you’re looking for an all-consuming weekend read.

It’s Career Day at Guadalupe Middle School and Principal Linda McDonald needs the day to go smoothly. The school is in a low-income area and many of the residents are immigrants. The community is also still reeling from both the murder of a teenager by a gang member and the mysterious disappearance of a sixth-grader. Career Day is a chance to bring the students together and show them all the great things that their future could hold. But for some, the future seems too daunting and there’s no hope in sight. As the minutes tick by, the people inside Guadalupe Middle School march closer to disaster.

A school had always been a place to incubate hopes and dreams, in a village like Tío’s or in the biggest of cities. But for many of the children here, parental hopes had turned to adult expectations, and the warmth of the incubator felt more like the focused burn of a magnifying glass in the sun. He had first noticed it in the ball games—baseball and what they called soccer here. Mothers and fathers screamed at their players, not in appreciation but in command, even condemnation. Did no one still believe that childhood was a time for joy?

Guadalupe Middle School is located in the farm community of San Felipe, California. It’s a “school bubbling with hormones and suppressed rage, with threats all around it” attended by “seven hundred–plus adolescents on the brink of boiling over, into impatience, mockery, even the violence that was never far away.” All middle schools have their problems, but this one suffers from “indifferent staff, poor choices, and school board neglect.” The school has made great strides since Linda McDonald became principal, but maintaining stability always seems to be an uphill battle. There’s a little bit of everything in this book: guarded secrets, gangs, murder trials, corporate intrigue, missionaries, international terrorism, vengeful mercenaries, a missing kid, alcoholic fathers, accusations of pedophilia and domestic abuse…and even a ghost story! The entire book covers the minutes between 12:13 AM to 1:25 PM. The climatic event doesn’t begin until the last 15% of the story. The main action didn’t affect me emotionally, but I loved the urgent build-up to it. The omniscient narrator chapters reminded me of some of my favorite parts of The Martian!

It fascinates me to think how we all happen to be here, to think of the tales behind each one of us, the ways our stories not only brought us here, but how they will change how we go forward, together and apart.

The chapters of Lockdown alternate between a diverse set of characters: a principal, a school volunteer, a janitor, a coach, a school psychologist, a cop, five students, and one guest speaker. The problem with such a large cast of characters is that the detailed back stories felt like both too much and not enough. Many of the characters could’ve carried an entire book by themselves. Several of them ended up in San Felipe after escaping violence in their home countries. I’d love to read more about the school janitor who ended up in California after losing everything and Mina’s mother’s escape from Iran in the 1970s. A series with Officer Olivia Mendez would be pretty awesome too!

These were children who had long outgrown childish naiveté: raised with televised violence, playing games of graphic death, taught by their parents to mistrust any political, economic, or even religious authority. Eleven-year-old girls with braces on their teeth and sparkly unicorns on their notebooks breathed out the cynicism of a Nihilist. And yet, even the oldest, most sneering of these adolescents harbored secret pockets of hope, a hidden belief that the world might still hold out an outstretched hand in place of a fist.

The common thread between the students is that they are all struggling with their identities. They don’t like what they see in the mirror and the adults in their lives pressure them to be something other than what they want to be. They are stuck in the awkward transitional phase between child and adult. As much as they keep secrets and wall themselves off from the adults that care about them, they still seem to be aching for someone to reach out to them and break through their defenses. The faculty of Guadalupe Middle School are trying to figure out how to get through to these kids, many who don’t have the best of home lives. It’s a tough position to be in, because there’s a thin line between gaining a kid’s trust and pushing them further away.
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Guadalupe was a tapestry built from jagged and mismatched pieces that, with care, could find a fit. Unlikely shapes, from a myriad of sources, joined by skilled hands and the eye of a believer. The broken, the lost, and the hidden from view, made into something new.

The theme of Career Day is “Unexpected Threads” and the goal is to show how everything ties together. Principal McDonald says in her speech that “a school is a tapestry of threads.” Her husband muses that the roughest threads can be beautiful and the most delicate of threads can become a noose. Officer Mendez wonders if a sweater is a more apt metaphor, because it can all fall apart with the slight pull of a loose thread. In the end, Principal McDonald realizes the school is more like a mosaic than a deliberately woven tapestry. As all these disparate characters from diverse backgrounds are brought together, they set each other on new and unexpected paths: “Everyone’s histories wove together to create a thing of beauty. Or ugliness, sometimes.”

I rounded up my rating because I enjoyed Laurie King’s writing and her ability to create compelling stories for her characters. I would be interested in reading more of her books. It’s just that by the end of Lockdown, I didn’t feel much payoff for getting so invested in several of the characters’ lives. One character was noticeably one-dimensional next to the more well-developed characters and that person dampened some of the emotional power for me.

If you liked this book, you might enjoy The Light Fantastic by Sarah Combs (school shooting/threads/a ton of characters). If the ghost story interested you, I recommend reading the short story “Adela’s House” in Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez.

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? —Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

In the summer of 2006, twelve United States soldiers (also known as the “Super Twelve) were tasked with guarding former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as he sat on trial for crimes against humanity. Saddam ruled over Iraq for 35 years and is responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of Iraqis—but that’s not the version of the man the U.S. guards met. They watched over a larger-than-life figure brought down to earth, a man stripped of his power and possessions. To them, Saddam was a man who enjoyed smoking cigars, tending to the weeds in the prison yard, writing poetry, and chatting about cars and family. By the time Saddam was executed, some of the soldiers who guarded him had come to enjoy their time with the old man. He gave them a respect that they didn’t get from their own superiors and possessed many qualities they admired. The Prisoner in His Palace, published little over a decade after Saddam’s execution, is an engaging glimpse into the surreal assignment of guarding an infamous dictator and the emotional complexity of leading someone you’ve bonded with to their death.

“Any means are justified if they achieve the goals dictated by the interests of power and security.” – Zabiba and the King, a novel by Saddam Hussein

I’ve been stuck in a reading rut for the past couple of months and this is the first book that broke through the “nothing interests me” barrier! It’s about 210 pages of content and I read it within 24 hours, so it’s a great choice if you’re looking for a fascinating and concise non-fiction book to read. The style is journalistic. Within the pages is a profile of a complex figure who one CIA official called “the most traumatized leader I have ever studied.” This book is not an exhaustive account of Saddam’s life, but it covers some events from Saddam’s traumatic childhood, his violent rise to power, his reign over Iraq, and his downfall after the United States invasion in 2003. The anecdotes show a man of contradictions. He was proud of his progressive policies, but simultaneously capable of committing barbaric acts against his people. During his trial, maintaining his legacy as an iron-fisted ruler seemed to be more important to him than helping his defense save his life. His personality changed dramatically once he wasn’t in front of the camera, from aggressive theatrics in front of the judge to a polite demeanor when handed over to the guards.

“When I’d see the trial going on, and what he’d done to his people,” Rogerson later recalled, “I’d be like ‘Holy shit,’ there’s a shitload of dead people, he just killed an entire city. I’d think, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ but then I’d see him, and I never looked at him like ‘You’re a psychopath,’ because [that person] wasn’t with me. . . . He was more like a grandpa.”

We are also introduced to some of the men who were charged with guarding Saddam. We learn about the complex dynamics between these diverse personalities living in cramped quarters while working a high-stress job, but the parts about troop life weren’t as in-depth as the parts about their actual assignment. The experience of guarding Saddam was a turning point for many of them. Many of these soldiers rushed to join the military after the 9/11 attacks, but began to question their role in the conflict and what they gave up to be a part of it. For some of them, returning home after the war brought on different types of hardship. They had missed out on valuable time with family that could never be recovered. Those who wanted to talk to about their unique mission found no one wanting to listen; few people want to hear the emotional complexities of bonding with a murderous dictator and leading him to his execution. (I’ve experienced similar uncomfortable reactions when I mention this book to people.) Coming to like someone who has hurt so many people may seem odd at first thought, but it’s a very human response. For example: visceral public reaction when a beloved celebrity or community member is accused of a heinous crime, or even Oliver Stone’s opinions after spending time with Vladimir Putin. Perhaps there’s some element of it being easier to process what we’ve directly experienced, rather than events we know about secondhand.

Years later, the man Saddam had tapped to oversee the genocidal operation, Chemical Ali, would tell his FBI interrogators: “There are two faces of Saddam, one who went out of his way to share with those in need and was sometimes reduced to tears when stopping to assist a poor person, and the other a lonesome man with no friends, either inside or outside his family, who didn’t even trust his own sons.” This second “face of evil” was “so cruel you couldn’t imagine.”

There were many aspects of Saddam’s personality and incarceration that surprised me. He adjusted easily from a grandiose life to a jail cell. He had nuanced opinions about U.S. leadership, the U.S. Army, and the future of Iraq. He was allowed much more freedom of movement than I would’ve expected. Some of the guards were eager of his approval—they did their best to grant his requests and make his incarceration comfortable. Saddam returned the favors in kind, even offering to pay for one soldier’s college tuition if he ever got access to his money again. Was his kindness to the U.S. guards manipulation or was there an element of finally being able to relax and “be one of the guys”? We can never know for certain. Before you can get too comfortable with the “crotchety old man” version of Saddam, the author transports us to the past and a portrait of a brutal dictator emerges. One of the most disconcerting aspects of this book is how someone who is capable of being a thoughtful person can be capable of terrifying barbarism. I was shocked when a couple of the U.S. soldiers insisted that Saddam would never hurt them, which may speak to how easy it is for men like Saddam draw people into their circle despite all the risks involved. These insights are counterbalanced by tales of how earning Saddam’s affections was no inoculation from his cruel whims. The switch could flip terrifyingly quick, even for family members.  

Hutch later reflected: “I feel like I have to explain why it bothered me so much; for an American to be upset. But for us to stand by and let them treat another human being that way—I thought that’s what we were over here to stop, the treatment like that. I truly felt that I was just as guilty as anybody else. I’ve never really had a conscience about anything I’ve ever done over here. As far as humanity goes, I’ve seen some pretty bad things, but it’s what I had to do, it’s what was required of me, it was my job. But my job had never before said that I had to stand there and watch people spit on and kick a person’s body. And you know what, I’m glad I feel that way, I really am. Because if I didn’t feel that way, I would think something was wrong with me.”

As Saddam was led to his death, he told the U.S. soldiers that they were “’more family to him’ than any Iraqis had been.” None of the soldiers ever doubted Saddam’s guilt, but even the men who didn’t develop a relationship with Saddam were shaken by the events surrounding his execution. One of the members of the “Super Twelve” noted that “it almost would have been easier if Saddam had acted more like the murderous tyrant they’d expected to find.” The Prisoner in His Palace is an uncomfortable book to read because it made me feel twinges of empathy that I didn’t want/expect to feel and it showed the human side of someone who caused an inordinate amount of pain and suffering. Despite my discomfort, I also found it reassuring that for many people there are elements of our humanity that are difficult to override. I wish it was longer and more in-depth, but it’s a fascinating tale and I’m still talking about it weeks later!
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For other books about humanity or the nature of evil, you might be interested in Human Acts by Han Kang or Kindred by Octavia Butler. One of the men featured in the book wrote his own book about his experiences: Caring for Victor: A U.S. Army Nurse and Saddam Hussein by Robert Ellis.
A few interesting articles I read while reading this book:
‘I was shocked’: Iraqis remember day Saddam Hussein was hanged
The World; How Many People Has Hussein Killed?
Ten Years After the Fall of Saddam, How Do Iraqis Look Back on the War?
I Grew Up In Iraq During Saddam’s Worst Days — Here’s What Life Was Like
Judge Remembers Saddam as Intelligent, Charismatic and Remorseless

“The past is like a shadow, always trying to catch up.”

A beautifully-written story about an unconventional father-daughter relationship. For as long as Loo can remember, it’s always been just her and her father Samuel Hawley; her mother Lily died when Loo was a baby. Hawley sets up a shrine to Lily at every single place they stop. They’ve never stayed in one place for long. By the time Loo is 12, she’s gone to seven schools in seven states. When it’s time for her to enter eighth grade, they finally settle down in her late mother’s hometown of Olympus, Massachusetts, a close-knit fishing community with some quaint traditions. As Loo grows up, she realizes that her life isn’t normal and starts to question everything. Why does Hawley take so many guns just to go fishing? What are the stories behind each of her father’s scars? How did her mother, an excellent swimmer, die by drowning? Perhaps if Loo can unravel the past, she can make sense of their present. The chapters alternate between the stories behind each of Samuel Hawley’s twelve bullet scars and Loo’s coming-of-age story.

The marks on her father’s body had always been there….They reminded her of the craters on the moon that she studied at night with her telescope. Circles made from comets and asteroids that slammed into the cold, hard rock because it had no protective atmosphere to burn them up. Like those craters, Hawley’s scars were signs of previous damage, that had impacted his life long before she was born. And like the moon, Hawley was always circling between Loo and the rest of the universe. Reflecting light at times, but only in slivers. And then, every thirty days or so, becoming the fullest and brightest object in the sky.

Samuel Hawley isn’t a good man, but he has goodness in him, especially when it comes to protecting his daughter. He does the best he can by his family, which isn’t always good enough. He resents his own father for leaving him unprepared for the challenges he’s faced, so he’s vowed not to repeat the same mistakes with his own child. His parenting style is unusual and the lessons he imparts aren’t always legal! His philosophy: “The world is a rotten place and you’ve got to find a way to be rotten if you’re going to live in it. But you also have to be smart.” While Hawley has trained Loo to be a survivor, many of the challenges she faces are because of his past mistakes. Hawley’s criminal career has complicated his life and as with the timepieces he transports, “the higher the number of complications, the higher the price.” Hawley left a trail of destruction and a number of loose threads behind him. The past isn’t done with him yet.

On Jupiter, Loo would weigh 283.6 pounds, while on Pluto she would weigh only 8. On Mercury she’d pull a respectable 45.3 but if she ventured to a white dwarf star, her body would balloon to 156 million pounds. Changing where you were could change how much you mattered.

Loo is an angry, violent kid. She’s never felt like she belonged and has always been a target of other children. She blames herself because the “cause must be some personal defect, some missing part of herself that the others recognized, a rotting, empty hole that whistled when she walked, no matter how quiet she tried to be.” She’s afraid no one will ever love her and worries that she lacks the capability to be a good person. She wants to feel connected to the universe and to be a positive force rather than a destructive one. Once Loo and Hawley settle down and she begins to form bonds outside of her father, she starts to see a way to forge her own path. 

Hawley sat down on the couch and took Lily’s hand. Just above her wedding band there was a tiny callus, a bit of skin worn tough from the pressure of the ring. It seemed like this hardened part of her had always been there, though Hawley knew there was a time when it wasn’t.

This book has so many great qualities: interesting story, unique characters, distinctive setting, and all the little details tie connect perfectly to the greater story. There are so many perfect elements, but I had a hard time getting into it. It took me several weeks to read the first third. I became invested once Lily is introduced and I had a firm grasp where the story was headed, but it lost me again in the last quarter.
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(2) I started to dread the bullet chapters. There was something almost whimsical about Hawley’s life that made the violence less affecting for me–perhaps a disconnect between tone and what was happening. The build-up to Hawley getting shot was often slow and the action-packed chapters felt long compared to Loo’s coming-of-age chapters.
(3) Loo’s love interest didn’t really come alive for me, though I liked the part that “first love” played in her coming into her own as a young woman.

Their hearts were all cycling through the same madness—the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair—like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun. Each containing their own unique gravity. Their own force of attraction. Drawing near and holding fast to whatever entered their own atmosphere.

Will uncovering their family history affect the bond between Loo and her father? No matter what, Hawley is still her family. In The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, everyone seems to be fighting the same battle. All the characters have the desperate need for love and connection and are capable of great destruction in order to find it or keep it. They also struggle with past mistakes and losses. The past is never over and done with; it bleeds into the present and affects the future. Sometimes the characters’ memories of the past are more vivid than the present.

“Somebody has to save the world instead of just destroying it.”

I may not have been the ideal reader for this book, but it has many great qualities. I just didn’t connect with it. I think it would make a great movie!

“As it is now, the President is trying to produce confidence in the face of the Soviet menace, and McCarthy is stirring up fear; Eisenhower is trying to draw the parties together, and McCarthy is setting them apart; Eisenhower is urging cooperation with the allies, and McCarthy is attacking their policies and purposes; Eisenhower is trying to bury the past and McCarthy is trying to resurrect it.” – James Reston, New York Times, February 14, 1954

In the 1950s, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy (Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee) began his relentless search for communist spies within and outside the United States Government. He questioned people in one-senator, closed-door hearings and used senatorial privilege to protect himself from libel accusations. He doctored evidence, made baseless or exaggerated accusations, declared people guilty by association, and attacked those who wished to invoke their Fifth Amendment rights.

When the chief consultant of the subcommittee, David Schine, was drafted by the army, McCarthy and the subcommittee’s chief counsel Roy Cohn sought out special privileges for him. Cohn and McCarthy acted on threats to “wreck the Army” when their requests were ignored. McCarthy made a critical misstep in targeting the United States Army. The private threats were documented and publicized, leading to the Army-McCarthy hearings. The hearings were the beginning of the end for McCarthy’s unchecked power in the Senate. In Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower’s Secret Campaign against Joseph McCarthy, David A. Nichols shatters the notion that President Dwight D. Eisenhower sat idly by while McCarthy wreaked havoc on American institutions.

“Whenever, and for whatever alleged reason, people attempt to crush ideas, to mask their convictions, to view every neighbor as a possible enemy, to seek some kind of divining rod by which to test for conformity, a free society is in danger. Wherever man’s right to knowledge and the use thereof is restricted, man’s freedom in the same measure disappears.” (Address at the Columbia University National Bicentennial Dinner, New York City. May 31, 1954)

This thorough and well-researched book mostly covers the time period between the beginning of Eisenhower’s presidency in 1953 and the end of the Army-McCarthy hearings in June 1954. Eisenhower is an interesting figure because he was courted by both Democrats and Republicans to run for president. (“I don’t believe in bitter partisanship. I never believe that all wisdom is confined to one of the great parties.”) He ultimately decided to run as a Republican. When he took office in 1953, Americans had many fears: the intentions of the Soviet Union, weapons of mass destruction, another economic depression, and communist subversion. The fears of a communist conspiracy were further agitated by “the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the communist takeover of China in 1949, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea.”

If you imitate your enemy, you risk becoming like him. And if that is not who you really are, you will be supremely incompetent in carrying it out.

Eisenhower sought to ease the public’s fears by “protecting American democracy from extremism and avoiding another, more cataclysmic world war.” Senator Joseph McCarthy chose to stoke those fears and divide the country into “us vs. them,” going as far as accusing previous administrations of treason. Eisenhower’s administration had legitimate concerns of Soviet infiltration in the government, but the president believed the threat should be dealt with inside the court system and within the bounds of the law. Unfortunately, Eisenhower made a few of his own missteps in proving his Communist-fighting credentials—there were fears that McCarthy would bring the fight directly to Eisenhower because of his own communist “associations” in the aftermath of World War II.

“We must, even in our zeal to defeat the enemies of freedom, never betray ourselves into seizing their weapons to make our own defense. A people or a party that is young and sober and confident and free has no need of censors to purify its thought or stiffen its will. For the kind of America in which we believe is too strong ever to acknowledge fear–and too wise ever to fear knowledge.” Address at the New England “Forward to ’54” Dinner, Boston, Massachusetts September 21, 1953

Ike and McCarthy is the story of the behind-the-scenes machinations, secret meetings, and planned leaks that led to the Army-McCarthy hearings and Joseph McCarthy’s downfall. Eisenhower was criticized for ignoring the McCarthy problem, but he was managing the crisis in his own way. Great care was taken in keeping the president above the fray and ensuring the White House wasn’t implicated in undermining an elected United States Senator. He saw McCarthy “as a symptom, not a cause,” so attacking the senator directly would not effectively end the problem. Publicly demonizing McCarthy would make him “a hero and a martyr.” His public criticisms of McCarthy’s methods were subtle and never personal.

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?” – Remarks at the Dartmouth College Commencement Exercises, Hanover, New Hampshire. June 14, 1953

One of Eisenhower’s methods for dealing with McCarthy was refusing to mention him by name. He insisted on discussing “principles, not personalities.” Eisenhower knew that if he did not give McCarthy the attention he craved, he would soon self-destruct. He had to be careful about singling out McCarthy, because the entire Senate would rally around their fellow senator (not really a concern these days!). Criticism of McCarthy had to come from the Senate, not the White House. He was patient in waiting for public opinion to shift against McCarthy, while he “actively stage-managed the buildup toward action against McCarthy.” His gamble paid off. According to a January 1954 Gallup poll, McCarthy’s favorable-to-unfavorable ratio was 50% to 29%. In the midst of the Army-McCarthy hearings in May 1954, it was 35% to 49% (History of McCarthy’s support on Wikipedia). The 36-day hearings were televised. McCarthy came off poorly on television, so the lengthy televised hearings hastened his downfall. (Note: After watching Good Night, and Good Luck, test audiences complained that the actor playing McCarthy was too over-the-top. It wasn’t an actor—the filmmakers used the actual footage.)

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular” – Edward Murrow “See It Now” on CBS – March 9, 1954. “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy“

When a person goes through ordering viagra from canada such disorders he should first discuss it with the partner he’s with. Man can make use of tadalafil price these blue pills in limitation to deal with sexual mayhem. GreenGoldGinseng.com offers a wide variety of online doctor viagra authentic American Ginseng. The clinic helps you purchase viagra http://cute-n-tiny.com/cute-animals/brown-baby-owl/ to get complete instructions. After contentious Senate hearings, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure McCarthy on December 2, 1954. The story of the escalating tensions between Eisenhower and McCarthy show how far we’ve come, how far we’ve fallen, and how much has stayed the same. It was remarkable how much of this book reflected contemporary arguments, right down to Eisenhower being accused of playing golf and vacationing rather than leading. It was impossible not to make comparisons between the temperaments of Joseph McCarthy and the current United States president, though McCarthy was much more ideological. Imagine if he had access to Twitter! McCarthy is thought to have had presidential aspirations and Eisenhower knew a man like McCarthy should never make it to the Oval Office. He was aware that a public fight between the moderate and reactionary wings of the Republican Party would give the Democrats the advantage during midterm elections, but pursued the fight anyway. He chose country over party, because some values are too important to betray because of party allegiance.

“There is a certain reactionary fringe of the Republican Party,” he said, “that hates and despises everything for which I stand or is advanced by this Administration.” He pondered that the Republican Party might have to face “the complete loss of the fringe of Old Guarders,” except for procedural matters. However, he concluded, “I, for one, have always thought that we cannot afford to appear to be in the same camp with them.”

There’s a lot to learn from Eisenhower’s deft handling of a demagogue and intraparty conflict. There was so much drama surrounding the McCarthy problem, it’s incredible to think about how it wasn’t the only major thing on the president’s plate. I was also amazed by how much the Republican Party has changed over the decades. If you are interested in the nitty-gritty of politics and fly-on-the-wall accounts, this book is perfect for you. I found all the details of the political drama endlessly fascinating! As a warning, it does reflect the prejudices of the time, especially towards gay men. Many of the key players make innuendo about why Cohn was so concerned with Schine’s treatment. The author David A. Nichols is a leading expert on the Eisenhower administration. He also wrote A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution, which I want to read someday.

Side note: One of my favorite parts of the book was the sometimes strained relationship between the media in the White House:

Ike had often complained that the press had a guilty conscience about McCarthy. Having built him up, the media wanted the president to destroy a monster of their own making. His address was chock full of references to “the facts,” employing the term a dozen times. He accused the papers of placing “a premium upon clichés and slogans. We incline to persuade with an attractive label; or to damn with a contemptuous tag. But catchwords are not information. And, most certainly, sound popular judgments cannot be based upon them. . . . Freedom of expression is not merely a right,” the president concluded, “its constructive use is a stern duty. Have we, have you as publishers, the courage fully to exercise the right and perform the duty? Along with patriotism—understanding, comprehension, determination are the qualities we now need. Without them, we cannot win. With them, we cannot fail.” (Address at the Dinner of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, New York City. April 22, 1954)

Further Reading/Viewing:
The Real Joe McCarthy By Ronald Kessler (Wall Street Journal) – Was McCarthy proven right? “Efforts to vindicate McCarthy overlook the fact that he did not help the cause of dealing with the spy threat. Rather, he gave spy hunting a bad name. In sanctioning McCarthy’s intimidating tactics and dishonest charges, revisionists dangerously invite history to be repeated.”
Have You No Sense of Decency – Footage from the Army-McCarthy hearings
Edward R. Murrow: “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy”
What Donald Trump Learned From Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand Man – Roy Cohn took a special interest in Donald Trump and set out to cultivate his career. “That bravado, and if you say it aggressively and loudly enough, it’s the truth — that’s the way Roy used to operate to a degree, and Donald was certainly his apprentice.”
United States Capitol Shooting Incident in 1954 – I never heard of this incident, but it’s really interesting! On March 1, 1954, Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire in House of Representatives chamber of the United States Capitol. Five congressmen were wounded. The shooters were pardoned in 1979.

Hannah is having a great day! She can’t wait to get home and tell her boyfriend Matt about how well she did during her training course. Her excitement is dampened when she walks in through her door and notices that everything is rearranged. It looks exactly like it did before Matt moved in. His belongings are gone and her possessions are back in their original places. His social media accounts are deleted and his phone number is disconnected. All remnants of him are gone, even the photos and text messages on her phone. It’s like he never existed. After four years together, the relationship is over and she never saw it coming. Hannah was on the fast track to a promotion before Matt went missing, but it all starts to slip away as she becomes obsessed with finding him. Where could he have gone and why couldn’t he have just told her it was over? While she’s looking for him, it seems that someone is looking for her. Who’s sending her creepy messages from an unknown number? Could it be Matt?

The whole thing seemed like a dream. His living there, I mean. Like a dream, or like he’d died. It was as though it belonged in another place, another realm. Because there was no sign of him, it was as though he hadn’t existed, as though I’d made him up.

Hannah is humiliated. Everything she thought she knew feels like a lie now. How long had he been planning this? What does it say about her that he left like this? Hannah’s devastation was understandable, but she’s such an exhausting character. She’s a very immature 32-year-old and a total drama queen. Her closest relationship besides Matt is her best friend Katie, but they have more of a toxic rivalry than a friendship. They’re constantly making subtly rude comments to each other. Katie encourages her to move on, but Hannah isn’t ready for that yet. As Hannah descends into madness, little things slip that show that she’s an unreliable narrator–manipulative habits, selfish thoughts. I got the feeling she was glossing over something major. She comes across as deluded and I didn’t trust her perceptions at all. Sometimes we don’t know how far she’s fallen until someone else calls her out on it.

No matter how long you’ve known someone, you never truly know them.

They include diabetes, kidney disease, alcoholism, vascular disease, atherosclerosis (‘furring’ of the arteries which narrows them and slows down blood flow) and heart disease. unica-web.com viagra for uk These starts going not unlike tadalafil 5mg buy anything, gradually and gradually however selecting back up intensity because of time. If you apply VigRX Oil on your penis before engaging in a sexual encounter, can help you treat your stress or your heart problems, so before starting any treatment or medication go for the things which you can do by yourself before starting up with any medicine or low quality less working cialis soft tabs . The ordered order generic cialis you can try these out through online will reach to you at early days. My biggest criticism is that Hannah’s investigation is so slow. She doesn’t have much to go on because Matt was extremely thorough in extricating himself from her life! Hannah tends to make logical leaps and become obsessed with easily confirmable possibilities. At the three-month mark, I was more than ready for her to get over it and move on. He obviously didn’t want to be found. The pace picks up about 2/3s of the way and it was a wild ride. I actually guessed most of the reveals, except for the very last one. That twist was actually my least favorite, because the scene was oddly tensionless after everything that had happened.

What would cause someone to disappear on their partner without a trace? Hannah’s story kept me turning the pages, but it didn’t make my heart pound.

Violet has a good life. Her husband Finn and three-old-son Bear are her entire world. While on a family vacation in Florida, Finn offers to take Bear back to the hotel room for a nap so that Violet can get some much-needed relaxation on the beach. Even when she’s alone, all she can think about how lucky she is to have such a wonderful husband and son. She returns to their room refreshed and happy, but is shocked to find that there’s no trace of either Finn or Bear. Only her belongings remain. It’s like they were never there! She’s completely devastated: “She was acutely aware that mother was both a noun and a verb, and left without the ability to take action, the reality struck her that it was no longer possible to be who she was without Bear.” Where are Finn and Bear? How could her beloved husband do this to her?

It was never all that hard to rationalize your way through doing something wrong when it was a way to get what you wanted.

I really enjoyed reading Almost Missed You! I almost forgot I was reading a book. The writing faded away as I got caught up in these characters’ emotional journeys. The surprises are evenly distributed throughout the story, which kept it interesting. Both of the marriages in this book look happy from the outside, but they are on shaky foundations. The characters are deeply flawed, but I understood the fears and anxieties that were driving them. My heart even ached for the character that made me the angriest. I wished that it all could’ve turned out differently! Tone-wise, it reminded of Caroline Leavitt (Cruel Beautiful World). The story alternates between three characters:

• Finn’s story starts six years prior, during his chance meeting with Violet. They lost touch after that initial meeting and it was years before they met again. People always love hearing the fortuitous way that they found each other after a series of missed connections. What was the path that led Finn back to Violet?

“Nobody talks about the stuff that really haunts them. If you’re talking about it, on some level you’re dealing with it, or at least acknowledging it. If those walls could talk, the stories they’d tell you might make it seem like a spooky place, or a sad place, or even a possessed place, but I’d be willing to bet it would seem less haunted as soon as the mystery was gone.”

• Violet is easygoing and agreeable. She’s never been a worrier and she typically takes the path of least resistance. She feels completely blindsided when her loving husband kidnaps her child. But maybe she had only been seeing what she wanted to see this whole time. She’s surprised when some “new” feelings actually don’t feel so unfamiliar after all. Every odd behavior takes on a new significance in light of new circumstances. Once she’s honest with herself, all the weird things that didn’t seem like a big deal individually add up to something being majorly wrong. Did she misinterpret all the signs along the way? Was the charming man she met at the beach all those years ago the same man she reconnected with? Did she ever really know Finn?

“Before you batten down the hatches and go to sleep at night, what are you writing in your captain’s log? That you saw a port and tied up to it? Or some other story, about the stars navigating you into the path of another ship?….All I’m saying is, whatever you’ve been writing down for yourself in that captain’s log, make sure it’s honest.”

• Caitlin is an anxious person. These are her thoughts when her father-in-law suggest she take medication: “Beneath her smooth surface, Caitlin was far too anxious to take an anti-anxiety pill. What if it affected her strangely? What if she didn’t feel like herself? Or what if she liked it too much? What if she did something out of character in front of the boys? No. Not for her.” She and Finn have been best friends since their school days, but she also became very close with Violet. They became mothers at the same time and were able to support each other during the sleepless infant days. When Finn and Bear go missing, she knows she should contact Violet about what she knows–but she also needs to ensure that her own family comes out of this situation unscathed. Caitlin has always worried about outside forces destroying her family, but it turns out the biggest threat was the person she trusted the most.
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“All the wrong people know all the wrong secrets here.”

In Almost Missed You, secrets fester in the darkness. These characters feel like they have to deal with their troubles alone, but perhaps everything would’ve turned out better if they trusted their partners rather than suffering in silence. This book explores the natural impulse to romanticize the past and create a compelling story of our lives. Violet tends to find meaning in strings of coincidences and ignore any evidence that doesn’t fit. She’s always looking for outside signs to confirm her life choices, but maybe the universe more chaotic than that. All the coincidences that make up a life–is it fate or random?* Violet and Finn have two different worldviews that they neve really discussed or reconciled.

Fans of domestic fiction who like a little bit of mystery should definitely check this book out. I’m excited to see that Jessica Strawser has another stand-alone coming out in 2018!

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*My recent nonfiction reading made all the coincidences feel more realistic for me: Weaponized Lies by Daniel J. Levitin // Logical Fallacies – Illusory Correlation & Framing of Possibilities, especially the part about the chances of running into someone in a place you wouldn’t expect.

Between two people, there will always be room for failures of imagination.

The narrator receives an urgent call from her mother-in-law, wanting to know why her son Christopher isn’t answering her calls during his travels in Greece. The narrator and her unfaithful husband have been separated for six months, but they’ve decided to keep it a secret for now. Rather than admit they’ve separated and that she isn’t privy to her soon-to-be ex-husband’s travels, the narrator agrees to travel to Greece and find him. The secret separation has complicated the narrator’s life by causing her past and present to coexist. She intends to ask for a divorce when she finds him, but only his belongings are at the hotel. She decides to stay in Greece until he returns. The secret separation puts the narrator in a difficult spot and she considers dropping the pretense that they are still together.

As my life with Christopher began to recede into the past, everything that I learned about him—a meaningless detail from his new life, a revelation from his past one—was a source of potential discomfort, causing a pang of greater or lesser pain, or even occasional indifference. This was the process by which two lives were disentangled, eventually the dread and discomfort would fade and be replaced by unbroken indifference, I would see him in the street by chance, and it would be like seeing an old photograph of yourself: you recognize the image but are unable to remember quite what it was to be that person.

I liked A Separation, but I might’ve liked it more if it were part of someone’s memoir. I was underwhelmed by the story, even though I knew to expect more of a character piece than a suspenseful mystery. There was such an eerie, tense atmosphere, that I was unsatisfied when it was simply ruminations on marriage and the end of a relationship. The story is slow-moving and introspective. The narrator is well-educated and reserved, which made her feel distant. The writing is beautiful and insightful, but the style may be bothersome to some readers. There aren’t any quotation marks to differentiate dialogue, but the conversations are in short bursts. The biggest impediment to my reading comfort were the sentences within sentences. Em dashes everywhere!

The past is subject to all kinds of revision, it is hardly a stable field, and every alteration in the past dictates an alteration in the future. Even a change in our conception of the past can result in a different future, different to the one we planned.

It keeps on working to give viagra for women online a memorable and passionate performance to the patients. A lawn can add lowest priced viagra great charm to the beauty of your place. It helps to gain stronger and bigger erection in a generic cialis short span of time. The reason why men like the jelly form is an interesting method to alleviate adverse effects of the medication leave your body completely before taking another dose. tadalafil generic india The narrator travels from her home in London to the small fishing village of Gerolimenas, Greece. There’s an ominous feeling in the air. It’s the offseason and the area was recently ravaged by wildfires, so there aren’t many tourists. While waiting for her husband’s return, the narrator visits a church covered by layers of graffiti. Each layer is painted by a new conqueror but the old layers are still visible, leaving an “extraordinary…record of conflict.” There’s tension between the tourists and the locals. The employees at the hotel seem to be holding something back from the narrator, with their strange looks and careful wording. My favorite part of any story tends to be the interactions between characters, but most of this story takes place in the narrator’s head. She works as a literary translator and her understanding of the complexity of language also applies to her understanding of people and their actions. I really enjoyed the narrator’s astute, sometimes uncomfortable, observations about relationships. She’s constantly observing the people around her, interpreting them through their body language and vocal intonations. She imagines what might be going on in their lives with an enormous amount of detail.

Perhaps wife and husband and marriage itself are only words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than can be contained in a handful of syllables, or any amount of writing.

What led the narrator’s previously happy marriage to this impasse? Alone at the hotel, she has plenty of time to think about the complexity of marital relationships and the undefined borders that result when a marriage ends. Despite everything that has happened between her and Christopher, she still feels a pull to him. She wonders how he will react when he sees her. Will he be apprehensive or hopeful? She explores the cruel gap between naive expectation at the beginning of a relationship and reality of living with another person long term. The end of her marriage makes her see the depth that aging and experience add to our perspective. She examines the roles of the mother, the wife, the mistresses in her husband’s life. As more information about Christopher’s life becomes known, she notices how “experience accumulated in haphazard places, the wrong bits of knowledge residing with the wrong parties.” In her interactions with others, the unspoken social rules where “we pretend we do not know what we in fact do know” come into play. She’s hyper aware of the illusions we uphold for the sake of others and ourselves. When the nature of her separation changes, all the pretending gets to be too much. She tries to properly portray her roles, but she second guesses her reactions and feels guilty for not behaving correctly.

At the time, I was like any young person looking at an old person—even if I was not that young, and nor was Christopher—and like any person who cannot believe that they will grow old, much less die, I could not believe that our marriage could become like [my in-law’s] marriage, much less fall apart completely….[Their marriage] might have been a terrible marriage, built on betrayal—although what was really meant by the word terrible, there were betrayals that looked unforgivable from the outside and that were nonetheless forgiven, and there were forms of intimacy that looked nothing like the name—but it was nonetheless a marriage. Whereas mine had ended….One of the problems of happiness—and I’d been very happy, when Christopher and I were first engaged—is that it makes you both smug and unimaginative.

In A Separation, things the narrator thought could never happen when she first met her husband actually occur. The telling was too cold and cerebral for my tastes, but it was a well-written look into the disintegration of a marriage. Many elements reminded me of other literary tales that feature dysfunctional marriages: The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty (woman travels to exotic locale after husband’s betrayals, mostly in her head), Fates and Furies (ruminations on marriage), The Dinner (intellectual feel, uncomfortable observances), Listen to Me (tense atmosphere of a mystery, but actually a story about marriage).

George Minoru Omi was almost eleven years old when everything changed for his family. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The United States was already an unwelcoming environment for those of Japanese descent and the deaths of 2,403 Americans only heightened the hostility. Two months after the attack, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which allowed the government to forcibly relocate Japanese-Americans and Japanese nationals from their homes on the West Coast. According to the National Archives, the order “affected 117,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were native-born citizens of the United States.” (127,000 people of Japanese ancestry were living in the continental US at the time.) Less than 2,000 of the 150,000 Japanese Americans living in Hawaii were incarcerated because they were too integral to Hawaii’s economy. To protect the Southern border, more than 2,000 Japanese Latin Americans were removed to their homes in South America and transferred to internment camps in the United States.

We knew we were Japanese. We’d learned their customs, spoke their language, went to Japanese school, and ate with chopsticks. But we were Americans too. We said the “Pledge of Allegiance” in our classroom, sang the “Star Spangled Banner,” played cowboys and Indians, and listened to “Captain Midnight” and “Little Orphan Annie” on the radio.

American Yellow won first place in the Memoirs/Life Story category in the Fourth Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published e-Book Awards. It offers a glimpse into the day-to-day life in the internment camps from the view of an observant teenager. It’s only 148 pages, but there was a lot to learn. It offers a great framework for further research and is accessible for teenage readers. The tone is matter-of-fact. The first third of Mr. Omi’s account introduces his family and reveals how his parents came to live in the United States. Minoru and his sister are native-born citizens of the United States (Nisei), but his Japanese parents (Issei) were ineligible for citizenship due to naturalization laws at the time. At the time of the story, his father had actually lived in the United States longer than he’d lived in Japan. Mr. Omi describes the racism the Japanese experienced in the United States and how immigrants worked around the barriers put in front of them.

Then I couldn’t look outside anymore; we had to pull down the shades. Suddenly, we were prisoners, being secretly transported to the back woods of Arkansas.
“They say it’s for our own protection! If you ask me, they’re afraid. What they’re doing is illegal and they don’t want anyone to know about it.”
“Soh . . .” said Papa to the man. “Maybe they no want us to see. Maybe big secret outside.”
“No, Mr. Omi, I don’t think so,” said the man. “I think it’s the other way around.”

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the atmosphere grew increasingly tense. The FBI began arresting people and searching homes. Minoru’s family destroyed personal items, including treasured family photos and heirlooms, not knowing what the government could use against them. Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to assembly centers for processing. They had to abandon their homes and sell their businesses at a loss, due to the uncertainty of when or if they would be allowed to return. They were transferred to internment camps, where they were surrounded by guard towers and men with rifles. They endured cramped quarters (barracks and horse stables), questionable meals, and substandard medical care. Despite the poor living conditions, they built a life and formed communities within the barbed wire fence. All the labor was done by internees (for very low wages) and the children attended school. Kids will be kids, so there are some lighthearted moments in Mr. Omi’s story. I had to laugh at some of young Minoru’s antics, including one involving inedible jello cubes!

Rohwer. In my reminiscences, soft, mushy, clay in spring, baked as hard as rock in summer, and in the fall, the same earth, overlain with leaves of rusted orange, turned soft and cold in the winter. People, tall, short, fat, skinny, light and tanned, spoke English and Japanese in broken phrases with varying inflections and dialects. We were a family. We learned who to listen to, who meant business, who to go to for favors, who was friendly, who was not — often the harsh turned out nice and the gentle, connivers. We were as different as the spoken language. In the mess hall, laundry room, shower, dojo, commissary, talent shows, sumo matches, movies, school, we sat with each other, spoke, laughed, praised, argued, cajoled, scolded – one big family — married men, women, single, young, elderly, Issei, Nisei, Kibei, boys, girls, mothers, and teen-agers, oblivious to the outside world, comfortable with each other. But not always.

In 1943 adults were asked to fill out what is known as a loyalty questionnaire, so that the process of releasing people could begin. The two most controversial questions asked for (1) their willingness to serve in the US military and (2) a declaration of loyalty to the US and a rejection of foreign governments. This document had complicated implications for many, especially for those who weren’t allowed to become US citizens. Some people’s answers would haunt them for decades (See: No-no boys). In 1944 FDR suspended Executive Order 9066, leaving the internees free to leave for anywhere except the West Coast. Many remained in the camps for longer than necessary out of fear of what was waiting for them outside the fence. After three years of internment, Mr. Omi’s family were finally able to return to their lives.

Though we’d never been to this place before, it was in a familiar world. We’d come back. Yet, I also felt uneasy. We were like convicts who had come out of jail. Three years in prison and we were now free. But we hadn’t been convicted of a crime; only of skin color, which we couldn’t free ourselves from. Like convicts who wore striped uniforms in jail, we wore our skins outside.

I was the most interested in Mr. Omi’s observances of the varying opinions within the community, especially between the Nisei and the Issei. From the vantage point of 75 years later, it was sometimes jarring to learn the anxieties of those who were living in the middle of the uncertainty. It highlighted the fears and confused allegiances of those who didn’t know how it all would end. At one point, customers ask George’s father to put in a good word for them if Japan invaded California. I also noticed how many people had their own prejudices, despite the prejudice they experienced. Mr. Omi also mentions the powerful effect that negative media representation can have on communities.

I wish this book was even longer because I would’ve loved to read even more of Mr. Omi’s stories. It’s an important personal record of a shameful time in United States history. There are so many horrifying events that I thought were mostly “settled” when I was sitting in history class, but they’re still being debated all these decades later. Sometimes we all need to be reminded of what happens when we let fear to dictate our decisions. It can be easy to think that the ends justify the means when one doesn’t fear their own civil rights being revoked. One of the most interesting documents I found was a report written by Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Ringle recommending against the mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans. The largely ignored 1941 Ringle Report on Japanese Internment (Opinions H & I) indicates ostracization and threats to livelihood were a larger threat to national security.

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Further reading:
Gambre – (Bear the Pain) A short, powerful essay by George Omi.
Asian-American History timeline
Incident on Niahau Island – The event that is said to have influenced FDR’s decision to sign Executive Order 9066.
Densho – (To pass on to future generations) Incredible digital archive filled with firsthand accounts.
442nd Regimental Combat Team – The Japanese-American combat squad. Former US senator Daniel Inouye was a member of this team and I highly recommend reading his incredible story!
WWII Japanese American Internment Museum/Rohwer Japanese American Relocation Center in Arkansas – The camp where Mr. Omi’s family was sent.
Tule Lake – Those who were considered “disloyal” were sent to this camp.
The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act) – Established a national origins quota and excluded all immigrants from Asia. Japanese and Filipinos were allowed to immigrate to the US prior to this legislation. Asians were already forbidden from seeking citizenship due to the 1870 Naturalization Act.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (The McCarran-Walter Act) – Continued the quotas from The Johnson-Reed Act, but reopened immigration for Asian countries and allowed Asians to become citizens.
Many Americans support Trump’s immigration order. Many Americans backed Japanese internment camps, too.– The polling from the 1940s is especially interesting.

 

In Washington D.C., beautiful young attorney Evelyn Carney goes missing. She ran out of a restaurant after an argument with her husband and seemed to disappear into thin air soon after. Virginia Knightly, an executive producer at a news station, notices the city’s Criminal Investigations Division latched on to the case immediately, even though there’s no evidence of a crime. There has to be more to the story and she’s determined to get the exclusive.

Virginia’s struggling news station is desperate to get ratings up. Anxiety fills the newsroom, as the office buzzes with gossip of imminent layoffs. Nobody’s job is safe and newsroom rivalries flare. If Virginia can get the exclusive in the Carney story, maybe she can do right by Evelyn and save her coworker’s jobs. She becomes fixated on Evelyn’s disappearance. She’s certain she recognizes Evelyn from a news clip, but she can’t pinpoint the exact story. Virginia races around the city attending press conferences, finding credible sources, and verifying information. Officials are tight-lipped and there’s always the possibility information is only given to manipulate the reporting.

“You know that inscription on the pretty white building on First Street?” He was talking about the United States Supreme Court. On its facade it was written: Equal Justice Under Law.
“I’ve read it.”
“A beautiful dream, isn’t it?” he said mournfully. “But nowhere close to reality. Know what’s worse? Nobody cares.”

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Virginia’s personal life was less compelling to me. Her entire life is built around her career. She keeps people at a distance because she’s always waiting for them to deceive her. She feels guilty for something she wished as a child, even though she wasn’t able to act on it. There’s a subplot that deals with her family history, but it didn’t feel fully integrated. She repeatedly asks herself why she is so obsessed with Evelyn’s case and I kept trying to connect it to her past. I did to some extent, but it didn’t totally link up for me. Her own analysis of her fixation was what I would’ve expected any journalist to say. I also felt like I was missing something with her relationship with the charming news anchor Ben. There’s obviously some history there, but it also came across as uncharted territory.

“If you’re good at what you do, no one can steal it from you, and you’ll carry your skill wherever you go. Being good at what you do is the closest thing to freedom a woman can find.”

The Cutaway is an entertaining mystery, especially for those interested in the journalistic process. Where’s Evelyn? Did she get mixed up in something that she couldn’t handle in her career or her personal life? Will Virginia break the story before anyone else gets the chance? The author’s seventeen-year history in newsroom added so much weight to Virginia’s experiences out in the field. I really enjoyed reading a woman’s perspective. I’d love to read Kovac’s memoir!