Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion, by Kurt Seligmann. Pantheon Books, 1948

This book is not a how-to, DIY tome; it is a history of its subjects, told in a neutral, dispassionate vein. It starts with Mesopotamia, goes through Persia, the Hebrews, Egypt, Greece, Gnosticism, the Roman Empire, the shifts to Europe and the magical arts that survived during Christian times. The author takes neither a “magic was bad and misguided” nor a “Christianity was a bully that took over and destroyed magic” that is today’s take on the subjects; he stays totally neutral. Yes, he does talk about the witch trials and the trials of alchemists, but it’s told in a ‘just the facts, ma’am” tone. I found it pretty interesting, although quite dry. When you don’t take sides there isn’t any passion in writing, I guess. The illustrations were fascinating; pen and ink drawings of magical principles and things like palmistry charts fill the book.

 

Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries, by Greg Melville. Abrams Press, 2022

The title pretty much says it all. He gives the history of not just the cemeteries, but of the area in general, as well as who designed the graveyard and the people who are buried there. Each chapter of the book is about a different American cemetery, starting with colonial Jamestown and ending with Hollywood Forever, and then devoting chapters to cremation, green cemeteries, and the way that a person can stay “alive” indefinitely via computer files and the internet.

One thing that comes up repeatedly is how the American Way of Death (as Jessica Mitford named it a few decades ago) is a money making machine. The plot purchase, the coffin, the embalming, the services, the maintenance of the gravesite… it all adds up tremendously. And they don’t tell you that most of it isn’t necessary. You don’t need a mahogany and brass coffin that’s better made than many people’s furniture. You don’t need a concrete vault in most cases. Embalming isn’t required in most jurisdictions, unless the body is being held for over a certain amount of time. But it’s easy to lay a guilt trip on a grieving family- “It shows your respect for your father!” “Don’t you love your mother enough to buy the very best?”- and upsell them.

Another item that comes up several times is the utter disrespect for existing graves when the well to do or those in power (usually the same thing…) wanted to use the land for something else. The early white colonists rode roughshod over Native American graveyards, whether it was for building, their own graveyards, or for agriculture. The poor had their graveyards built over in more than one place. A graveyard for African-Americans in New York had Central Park built over it- the grave markers were moved, but the bodies weren’t.

The book is well written, presented as a travelogue; anywhere the author travels, he tries to call in at any graveyards in the area, especially well known ones. His family finds this rather tiresome, given that they don’t share his enthusiasm for cemeteries (Hollywood Forever was found more acceptable than most, but just barely). Anyone who likes to walk through graveyards will enjoy this book.

 

 

The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women, by Mo Moulton. Hachette Book Group, 2019

Dorothy Sayers and her college circle of women friends were a high achieving group. Sayers is the best known of them as the author of the Lord Peter Whimsy mysteries, but she was not the only one to achieve a great deal- and the Whimsy stories were by no means her only writing. One of the group, a historian, discovered a cache of Tudor era letters, which she translated into modern English and published over the course of 40 years. One was in a long term lesbian love triangle. One became a birth control advocate, a parenting expert (she wrote much on those subjects), and midwife.

They met at Oxford, where they were a group of some of the few women to be admitted in that time. At the time, a few women were allowed to attend, but they could not receive degrees. This came later (in 1920); some of the group were given retroactive degrees. Sayers wrote an essay titled “Are Women Human?”, which, it seems, women really weren’t in those days. The MAS was a female equivalent of The Inklings; a university group of writers and scholars with common interests.

This group biography covers the women’s lives from Oxford to their deaths. It’s extremely well researched (the notes and bibliography take up almost 60 pages) and detailed. It’s not fast reading, but I found it fascinating.

Royal Witches: Witchcraft and the Nobility in Fifteenth-Century England, by Gemma Hollman. Pegasus Books, 2020

In the 15^th century, if there was a rich woman whose wealth you craved, you accused her of witchcraft. Powerful woman in the way of your advancement? Accuse her of witchcraft. Powerful man who you want brought down? Accuse his wife of witchcraft. None of these women were witches, although one did admit to seeking out a wise woman for a charm to help her conceive. What they were, were powerful, rich women who stood in the way of powerful men. Witchcraft was an easy accusation to make, since it’s impossible to prove one didn’t do it.

Joan of Navarre, Eleanor Cobham, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, and Elizabeth Woodville are the women this book examines. The author gives the first two each a section of their own; Jacquetta and Elizabeth, being mother and daughter, share the last half of the book. I have to admit; Woodville was the only one I was familiar with. I had never even heard of Cobham. Turns out that they were fairly important to the War of the Roses and how it turned out, yet historians have ignored them.

I found parts of the book riveting, and others lost me. Part of the problem is the fact that so many people had the same names- Henry, Richard, Joan, Elizabeth- that I would have trouble keeping them all straight in my mind. The writing was uneven, too; parts seemed like they could have used a good editor to smooth them out. The strange part, however, is that the book is basically biographies of the four women, and of the men they were attached to, rather than concentrating on the witchcraft aspect. The witchcraft trials are a very small percentage of the book. I give the book four stars.

 Hippie, by Barry Miles. Essential Works Limited, 2003

Covering seven years- 1965 through 1971- this book gives good picture of the main hippie era. Yes, hippies still exist, but these were the years when they flooded western culture with new music, new social movements, new clothing and new ways of living. Some of it wasn’t entirely new- the movement was rooted partly in the Beats of the 50s and in the intentional communities that went back some 100 years.

I really enjoyed this book; while I’ve read a good deal about the era, Miles really brought it to life. Pretty much every page has an illustration on it: photos, posters, ads. The main subjects are music and concerts, drugs, and protest movements. While “Hippie” is the title, the author also covers the Beats, the Black Power movement, Gay Pride, the Mods, and more. It’s all part of the era. I lived through the era, but I was a child and my exposure was limited to TV, radio, and magazines. This book made me wish I had been just a little older. I would have loved to have gone to a Be-In, a Dead or Joplin concert, seen the Merry Pranksters with their bus. This book isn’t just the pretty stuff, though. He exposes the meth and heroin use, the Hell’s Angels becoming an unwelcome force at concerts, the ODs and the VD, and all the ugly parts. Five stars.

The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000 Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection, by Tamim Ansary. Hachette Book Group, 2019

Like the butterfly effect, what happened in China affected what happened in Rome; what the Vikings did affected the world. No culture is ‘pure’; every nation has been changed by others. We are all interconnected; progress does not take place in a vacuum.



The average world history book aimed at the English speaking world tends to start with the Fertile Crescent, give a fair bit of time to the Greeks and Romans, and then go straight to Western Europe for the rest of the book, with some time spent on North and South America. Ansary looks beyond those, and focuses mainly on connections. The far flung Roman Empire put many different cultures and religions in touch with each other, as did the Vikings, and then the Crusades. When Columbus discovered the Americas, a whole new world of cultures, foods, animals, and inventions collided and merged. The advent of factory work changed how the world worked, as much or more than the transistor did. Communications and management changed the world as much as armies and navies did.



The book reminded me of “Guns, Germs, and Steel” in the way the author looked at things other than kings and armies as forces that shaped our civilization. Ansary is a bit more casually written, at times drifting into slang, but the thinking and writing is solid. I enjoyed this book a lot, and it taught me things I’d not thought of before.

Elizabeth of Bohemia: The Winter Queen, by David Elias.

In 1596, Elizabeth Stuart was born to James IV of Scotland (soon to be James I of England when Queen Elizabeth I died) and Anne of Denmark. In 1616 she was married to Frederic V, the Elector Palatine of the Rhine (part of the Holy Roman Empire). On his part, it was a love marriage (and they married on Valentine’s Day); she was far less enthusiastic but found him tolerable. She is ambitious; he is not.



They lived happily in Heidelberg for a while; Elizabeth had 13 children. When the Bohemians overthrew their king, Ferdinand, Frederic was elected to that post. But his rule only lasted a few months before Ferdinand regained his throne and Frederic and Elizabeth had to flee. The Princes of Orange at the Hague took them in and supported hem. But they were not supported in the style to which they were accustomed, and this grated Elizabeth to no end. She conducted an incessant letter writing campaign, seeking aid from Parliament, her brother Charles (who was now King of England), and the English ambassadors.



It’s an interesting story, and we get to see it from the POV of a largely ignored character in history. But the story drags at times; there is just not enough of Elizabeth’s life that is interesting for a book of this size. I found myself really wishing at times that the author hadn’t made it so detailed, although I did enjoy the parts about Elizabeth and Walter Raleigh, and Descartes.



Elias does a good job of recreating the language of the era. Elizabeth is an important figure in that her descendants went on to become kings and queens of England. Elizabeth just does not come off as a compelling character; her scheming and complaining get very tiring after a while. The death of her beloved brother Henry left her shattered, and perhaps unable to love again. It’s the only explanation for her disregard for her children and husband.

Gatsby’s Oxford: Scott, Zelda, and the Jazz Age Invasion of Britain: 1904-1929, by Christopher A. Snyder. Pegasus Books, 2019

This book loosely- very loosely- ties the fictional Jay Gatsby to Oxford. The author posits that being an ‘Oxford man’ is very important to Gatsby’s image and ability to enter high society; he would not be able to pursue Daisy without this in his background. The author then carries this to show that, were Gatsby a real person (and if the character had really gone to Oxford, which is dubious given some clues in the story) he would have seen certain places, met certain people, and examined certain ideas. Given that, the author then tells us about those people, places, and ideas in detail.



He tells us about the various castes that inhabit Oxford: the athletes, idealists, poets, and enlisted men. He tells us about the medievalism and romanticism of Oxford of the time. And he tells us about Tolkein, Waugh, C.S. Lewis, Woolf, Yeats, Eliot, Huxley, and Churchill, among many others.



The text wanders and goes into great detail. The author seemed intent on showing us every single influence that might have touched Fitzgerald (who was at Oxford with his wife, Zelda, for a few months) and Gatsby, the history of that influence, and possibly the influences brother-in-law. We get how Princeton was set up to be like Oxford, how race was dealt with, the Jazz Age, and even what businesses were run later by Oxford men. It really seemed like he was carrying things a bit far at times.



Because of this, I found some parts of the book very interesting and some, well, less so. The chapter on Tolkein & Lewis I loved, as well as the one on the Jazz age. The one on American Rhodes scholars really lost me a few times, as did the one on Princeton. I suspect many people will wish to pick and choose which chapters to read- although there is so much wandering even inside chapters one risks either missing something really interesting or being bored to tears. Four stars.

Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, by Naomi Wolf. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019

It wasn’t until well after I read this book that I found out how controversial it is. In gathering her facts, she misread court records. Where she saw the words “Death recorded” she took it to mean that the accused was hanged. In reality, that shorthand meant that the death sentence had been commuted, and the accused allowed to live. She also missed that in those days, ‘sodomy’ did not just apply to anal sex between males, but also applied to child abuse. There were probably no executions for consensual sex- but there *was* hard labor, as Oscar Wilde discovered.



Wolf writes that 1857 was a year when being gay became a crime, or became more of a crime. The laws against homosexuality had been on the books for years. It was the year when the Obscene Publications Act was enacted; it allowed the courts to seize books on the mere suspicion of being obscene- without defining obscenity. The Contagious Diseases Act was put in place in 1864. This act allowed the police to seize any woman force her to submit to a vaginal exam; if they felt she was infected, she was imprisoned. The act also allowed them to examine male anuses; if dilated, the man must be gay. So it was a time of anti-sex legislation.



The author uses the lives of a few gay men to demonstrate what life was like them, and the book does give you a feel for the era.



The book has been withdrawn by the publisher; I have no idea if Wolf will rewrite it, if it will be published as is, or if its publication will be canceled.

Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, by Gordon H. Chang. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019

Most Americans learn in school that there were Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad project, but that’s usually where it stops. Chang, professor of humanities and of history at Stanford, the director of the Center for East Asian Studies and co-director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America project, has gone to primary sources to shine a light on the lives of the some 20,000 workers who came from China to work on the tracks.





When the Transcontinental Railroad project was put together, a competition arose between the Union Pacific railroad working from the east and the Central Pacific railroad working from the west. They started in 1864 and finished in 1869. Union Pacific had it fairly easy; they covered a lot of fairly flat states. Central Pacific, on the other hand, started at Sacramento and went right up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There were no machines to do any of the work; it was all done with shovels and picks, moving rocks and soil in buckets. Differences in elevations had to be smoothed into easy slopes, sharp curves had to be made wider. Once the rail beds were done, ties and steel rails had to be laid. They went right on up through the Donner Pass, working night and day, summer and winter. It was dangerous and horribly hard work. They were paid submarket wages and were treated badly by the whites, especially by the settlers they worked around- settlers afraid the Chinese would want to stay there once the railroad was down.



Not all the Chinese in the project were railroad workers; some were vendors, while some made livings farming and providing familiar foods to the RR workers. While there were very few Chinese women involved in the project, what there were tended to be enslaved as sex workers.



Sadly, no first-hand account has ever been found. Chang has had to resort to ship manifests, immigration lists, business records of the Chinese community, old newspapers, family stories, and oral histories. He’s put together a solid history that, while dry, is good and fairly easy to read. There were sections that I found slow and boring, but most held my interest well. Four stars.

Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World, by Lyndall Gordon. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019

The ‘outsiders’ that the author has selected are Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Shreiner, and Virginia Woolf. They were outsiders in the way they lived their lives, and in the things they wrote. All were motherless and learned the ways of being a woman through books. Three of them published under an assumed man’s name, in order to get their work taken seriously. All were feminists. All but Woolf lived in social isolation. And even though they never knew each other, there are connections between them that Gordon makes, looping back to reference something in a different chapter.



Each woman’s life and work is explored in detail, one per section. In some ways, the book reads as if it were five separate thesis or lecture; things we’ve already been told in one section get restated in another. But there is not enough of that to get tiresome.



All these women stepped beyond the common boundaries of the time that were prescribed for women. Some lived ‘in sin’. Some lobbied for women’s and human rights. Gordon describes their lives in detail, and also tells about how the world reacted to their writing, and how the writers who lived after them were affected by their work. She also shines a light on who influenced them, be they absent mother, father, husband, or sister.



I enjoyed the book (although it wasn’t a fast or easy read), but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had known more about the women beforehand. I was lost a few times because I had not read this or that of their works. While I’ve read Shelley and Woolf, I have barely read Bronte and Eliot; Shreiner I had never even heard of. Gordon’s writing expects the reader to be widely-read. Four stars.