Shirley Russak Wachtel

Shirley Russak Wachtel is the author of A Castle in Brooklyn. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Wachtel holds a doctor of letters degree from Drew University and for the past thirty-five years has taught English literature at Middlesex College in Edison, New Jersey. Her podcast, EXTRAordinary People, features inspiring individuals who have overcome obstacles to make a difference. The mother of three grown sons and grandmother to three precocious granddaughters, she currently resides in East Brunswick, New Jersey, with her husband, Arthur.

Wachtel's new novel is The Baker of Lost Memories.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I have been an avid reader since I was eight years old. Whether I’m sitting in my backyard, waiting in a doctor’s office, or just before drifting off to sleep, I always have a book in hand. Like the stories I write, I am drawn to tales about people and relationships. My love for books goes beyond the stories so that I never borrow books but buy each book so that it occupies a coveted space in my library. Every few weeks, I rotate the genres, moving from classics to nonfiction and popular fiction.

I recently reread Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a play about a small town in New England which takes us through the lives of ordinary people as they raise their families, find love, and endure loss. This play touched me as it showed that there is beauty in even the mundane. I made sure to see the latest rendition of this play on Broadway shortly after I read it.

The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon sheds light on individuals in American history who made significant contributions to our country, but whose names we may not know. One woman, Clara Brown, comes to mind. As a slave, Clara was separated from her young daughter and searched for her in the ensuing years. Once emancipated, Clara worked for others, then established her own cooking and laundering business before becoming a millionaire and philanthropist in Colorado. At age 82, she and her daughter were finally reunited. Each of the vignettes in McMahon’s book are just as compelling and inspiring as this one.

As soon as Lynda Cohen Loigman’s The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern came out, I knew I had to read it. I have been a fan of her work since The Two-Family House, for she writes of the people I know, the Jews of Brooklyn who face struggles as they build their lives. In her latest book, we meet a retired pharmacist who relocates to a senior community in Florida where she is shocked to meet the man who deserted her sixty years earlier. We learn what happened through a series of flashbacks. Adding extra spice to the story is magical realism, a technique I use in my latest book.

Visit Shirley Wachtel's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Castle in Brooklyn.

My Book, The Movie: A Castle in Brooklyn.

Q&A with Shirley Russak Wachtel.

My Book, The Movie: The Baker of Lost Memories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Buccola

Allison Buccola is the author of The Ascent and Catch Her When She Falls.

She has a JD from the University of Chicago and lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and their two young children.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Buccola's reply:

I just finished reading The Felons’ Ball by Polly Stewart, which was great. It’s about a family who made their fortune running moonshine. They now make their money in legitimate ways, but every year they host a huge party called the Felons’ Ball, and this year something goes terribly wrong. Stewart really knows how to conjure a setting, and her description of this small Southern townimmediately drew me in. So much of this book is set on the water—on houseboats and motorboats and dock bars—and the specter of the family’s past hangs over everything.

And I’m currently reading Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall, which also has rich, immersive setting: an English farming village in the 1960’s. I didn’t know much about the plot going into it—I had heard it described as a love triangle with some mystery elements—but it’s a much more beautiful story than I was expecting. The setting and the two love interests (a steady, loyal farmer and the narrator’s first love who rocketed to fame as an author) remind me, in some ways, of Tom Lake—but it’s much more fraught, with the relationships woven into a mystery. I’m really enjoying it!

Visit Allison Buccola's website.

Q&A with Allison Buccola.

The Page 69 Test: Catch Her When She Falls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samantha M. Bailey

Samantha M. Bailey is the USA Today and #1 international bestselling author of Woman on the Edge, optioned for series adaptation, Watch Out for Her, shortlisted for Canada Reads 2025, A Friend in the Dark, an Amazon Charts bestseller, and the newly released Hello, Juliet. Her novels have sold in twelve countries. She lives in Toronto, where she can usually be found tapping away at her computer or curled up on her couch with a book.

Recently I asked Bailey about what she was reading. Her reply:

At ThrillerFest 2024, I was so happy to chat with my fellow Canadian author, Mailan Doquang. Mailan and I had connected on social media, but meeting in person is always such a fulfilling experience. I hadn’t yet had the chance to read her acclaimed debut, Blood Rubies, so I was very excited when she asked if I’d blurb the second book in the series, Ceylon Sapphires. It was a resounding yes, but I had no idea how exceptional a read it would be. Mailan is an architectural historian turned thriller writer, and her expertise and skill are on full display in this slick and dazzling novel. The feverish pace never lets up as the savvy Rune Sarasin cleverly attempts to outwit every player in a zero-sum game for her life. Action-packed and captivating, this stunning, globe-spanning suspense is one of the most exciting books I've ever read. It’s out June 3.

Visit Samantha M. Bailey's website.

Q&A with Samantha M. Bailey.

Writers Read: Samantha M. Bailey (April 2024).

--Marshal Zeringue

Jesse Browner

Jesse Browner is the author of the novels The Uncertain Hour and Everything Happens Today, among others, as well as of the memoir How Did I Get Here?

He is also the translator of works by Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Matthieu Ricard and other French literary masters. He lives in New York City.

Browner's new novel is Sing to Me.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Browner's reply.

You Dreamed of Empires, by Álvaro Enrigue. This is already my second read. My hands-down favorite book of 2024. It reinvents the story of Hernán Cortés’ first week in Tenochtitlan and his meeting with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma – probably one of the most fateful encounters in world history, as the future of the entire New World hung on its outcome. Yet Enrigue treats it with irreverence, irony, broad (almost slapstick) humor and compassion for all its protagonists. For me, You Dreamed of Empires is the ideal model of the historical novel, adhering to the few known facts yet freely acknowledging that all history is, first and foremost, an elaborate work of fiction.

Writers Read: Jesse Browner (January 2012).

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Vidich

Paul Vidich's seventh and newest novel is The Poet's Game. His previous novel, Beirut Station: Two Lives of a Spy, was selected by CrimeReads as one of the best espionage novels of 2023. Vidich's debut novel, An Honorable Man, was selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top 10 Mystery and Thriller in 2016. It was followed by The Good Assassin. His third novel, The Coldest Warrior, was widely praised in England and America, earning strong reviews from The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. It was shortlisted for the UK’s Staunch Prize and chosen as a Notable Selection of 2020 by CrimeReads.

Recently I asked Vidich about what he was reading. The author's reply:

I am fascinated by the different paths that espionage fiction has taken in the England, where is began with Erskine Childers and Eric Ambler in the early 20 th century, and its American expression, which didn’t emerge until the 1960’s with Robert Ludlum and Charles McCarry. There are interesting differences between English and American spy fiction and to understand the differences, I recently began to reread early American spy fiction classics, Charles McCarry’s The Tears of Autumn and Robert Littell’s The Amateur.

McCarry, a CIA intelligence officer before he turned to writing novels, reimagines the assassination of JFK as an act of revenge for America’s killing of South Vietnam’s president Diem in 1963. McCarry’s protagonist, Paul Christopher, is a weary anti-Bond figure who pursues his theory against the advice of agency’s higher-ups, and finds himself out in the cold. It’s a fine novel with an interesting premise, and what makes it stand out is McCarry’s empathy for his protagonist’s loneliness, which borders on loveless despair.

Robert Littell’s protagonist in The Amateur is also an agency employee who goes out into the cold to exact personal revenge for the murder of his fiancé, also an agency employee, by terrorists affiliated with the KGB. Littell gives his protagonist the urgency of an amateur motivated by revenge, but his sardonic sense of humor adds needed humanity to the assassin he becomes.

Visit Paul Vidich's website.

Q&A with Paul Vidich.

My Book, The Movie: The Mercenary.

The Page 69 Test: The Mercenary.

Writers Read: Paul Vidich (January 2022).

The Page 69 Test: The Matchmaker: A Spy in Berlin.

Writers Read: Paul Vidich (October 2023).

My Book, The Movie: Beirut Station.

The Page 69 Test: Beirut Station.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot:

In December of l875, Henry James published a review of the French writer Honoré de Balzac that ran nearly seventeen thousand words. The review can be found in the Library of America’s edition entitled, Henry James: European Writers and The Prefaces. It should be read by anyone with a serious interest in Balzac, and a serious concern with how far the 21st century has fallen below the literary standards, and perhaps not just the literary standards, of the 19th century.

One of the great, if least noticed, differences between what was written then and what is written now, is that writers devoted their lives to what they did. Born in 1799, Balzac spent three years working in a lawyer’s office, the necessary apprenticeship to practice law in France, and then, over the protests of his family, decided to become a writer, and before he was thirty he had written a number of unreadable novels which left him as impoverished as he had been when he started. He learned from his failures, and instead of narrowing, broadened the scope of his ambition. He would write a series of novels that would together describe the human condition, that is to say, the human comedy, the world as it really existed, or at least that part of the world known as Paris. The best of these novels is Père Goriot, a novel Henry James considered among “the few greatest novels we possess.”

Père Goriot begins with nothing of what is usually considered action, nothing that immediately captures the reader’s attention, nothing that creates a sense of mystery or adventure or even anticipation. It opens with the description of a place, a boarding house where no one would live if they could afford something better. Everything about it is dismal.

“In the whole of Paris there is no district more hideous, and none, we must add, more unknown.” The boarding house is four stories high, and of a “squalid appearance,” every squalid detail of which is described. The boarders have their meals on “a long table covered with oilcloth so greasy that a playful diner can autograph it with his finger.” It is a place of poverty, “pinched, concentrated, threadbare poverty,” a place “where all hope and eagerness have been extinguished.”

This goes on for pages, one grim, depressing detail after another. And it is all quite deliberate. “The place in which an event occurred,” explains Henry James, was in Balzac’s view, “of equal moment with the event itself; it was part of the action; it was not a thing to take or to leave, or to be vaguely and gracefully indicated; it imposed itself; it had a part to play; and need to be made as definite as anything else.” It is the same thing with persons as with things. Madame Vauguen, who owns and runs the boarding house, is introduced in a way that make you feel, not that you know her as well, or better, than anyone you have actually met, but someone you would immediately recognize if you happened to see her on the street:

“The apartment is in all its lustre at the moment when, toward seven o’clock in the morning, Madame Vauguen’s cat precedes his mistress, jumping on the side- boards, smelling at the milk contained in several basins covered with plates, and giving forth his matutinal purr. Presently the widow appears, decked out in her tulle cap, under which hangs a crooked band of false hair; as she walks she drags along her wrinkled slippers. Her little plump elderly face, from the middle of which protrudes a nose like a parrot’s beak; her little fat dimpled hands, her whole person, rounded like a church-rat, the waist of her gown, too tight for its contents, which flaps over it, are all in harmony with this room, where misfortune seems to ooze, where speculation lurks in corners, and of which Madame Vauguen inhales the warm, fetid air without being nauseated.”

Among the seven residents of this dreary, unfortunate place are an old man, Goriot, and a young student, Eugene de Rastignac. Goriot has lived there for years, “a kind of automaton, shabbily dressed,” who always has in his hand a “yellow, ivory knobbed cane.” Everyone laughed at him, but, beneath the laughter, was a doubt, a question, a mystery about who he was, and why he was sometimes visited by beautiful women much younger than himself.

Eugene is a recent arrival from the provinces, a distant relative of a countess, Madame de Beauseant, through whom he discovers that the women seen with Goriot are his two daughters, and that while he lives on not much more than forty francs per month, he had once been wealthy enough to have given each of them between four and five hundred thousand francs so they could “be happy and marry well.” Hearing this, Eugene thinks Goriot “sublime!” for the sacrifices he has made. The truth is more prosaic, more ‘real,’ and, from the point of view of character, disappointing. During the Revolution, when famine was imminent, Goriot bought immense quantities of flour and, when it became scarce and people were starving, sold it at ten times the price he paid for it. This was thought only shrewd business, until, after Napoleon was banished and the Bourbons came back, a flour merchant became, for his daughters and their rich and titled husbands, an embarrassment. He went into “voluntary exile,” and when “he saw that his daughters were happy, he realized he had done the right thing.”

The only explanation for this astonishing generosity and self-effacement is that, after his wife, with whom he had been very much in love, died “the instinct of fatherhood developed in Goriot to the point of madness.” And even that explanation may be too charitable. His daughters are married to men with the only things any woman in Paris cares about: money and position; he lives in the penniless monotony of a single darkened room. Eugene lives there as well, but only for the time being, until he gains the success he knows he deserves; the success, he is advised by Madame de Beauseant, that only a woman can help him achieve.

“If women think you clever and talented, the men will think the same,” she tells him. The women, however, are only interested in themselves, and the men are even worse. “You shall really find out how corrupt the women are here, and how desperately vain the men.” Eugene needs a woman who is young, rich, and fashionable. She has someone in mind: Madame de Nucingen, who happens to be Goriot’s daughter, Delphine. Madame de Beauseant has something Madame de Nucingen desperately desires. She “would lick the dirt all the way from the Rue Saint-Lazare to the Rue de Grenelle, to be allowed into my drawing room,” she explains. An introduction into this, the highest circle of Parisian society, will give Eugene everything he wants. “If you introduce her to me, you’ll be her little favorite, she’ll worship you. Love her afterward, if you can; if not, just make use of her.”

Eugene learns quickly. He sees the world as it is: law and morality powerless against wealth, and success the only criterion. He is determined to become “a clever lawyer and a man of fashion,” but decides to postpone his studies to have fifteen months to learn “how to manage women, and perhaps land a fortune.” To land a fortune, however, requires money. Another resident of the boarding house, Vautrin, who is actually an escaped convict, but one with access to the “enormous resources” of the “Ten Thousand Society,” an association of major thieves, will arrange a dowery for Eugene of a million francs, in other words a marriage with a rich woman, in exchange for a one-fifth commission. “Principles,” he tells Eugene, “don’t exist, only events. Laws don’t exist, only circumstances.” At the bottom of every great fortune there is always a crime.

With his looks, his youth, his apparent wealth, Eugene becomes suddenly irresistible. Goriot’s daughter, Delphine, falls madly in love with him; or, rather, falls in love with what she thinks everyone thinks about him: that he has the power to introduce whomever he likes into the only society everyone she knows would give anything to join.

“No one has been as willing to introduce me to this society,” she tells him. “I expect you’re thinking I’m petty and shallow and frivolous, like any other Parisian woman; but do remember that I’m willing to give you everything, and if I’m now more anxious than ever to be received in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it’s because you’re there.”

Delphine is getting ready to go to a ball, but her father, Goriot, is dying, and Eugene objects.

“But, madam, your father -”

“Please don’t try to teach me my duty to my father,” she interjects. “Not another word, Eugene.”

Eugene knows that, if necessary, she would march over her father’s body to go to the ball, but he has not “the boldness to find fault with her, nor the temerity to offend her, nor the strength to leave her.” And all because, to his surprise, he has fallen in love with her. “A love for which they were both long prepared, had increased by what normally kills love: its gratification. Now that he had possessed her, Eugene realized that before then he had only desired her; he had begun to love her only now that she was his.”

After he had dressed for the ball, she asks him how her father is. “Extremely ill,” he tells her. “If you wish to give me a proof of your love, we will hurry over to see him.”

“So we will,” she replies. “But after the ball.”

But she does not go to visit her father, nor does her sister. As Goriot lays dying, he understands finally that his daughters “both have hearts of stone,” and that they “are vile and criminal!”

At the burial, two carriages drive up. One of them bore the arms of Delphine’s husband, the other the arms of her sister’s husband. Both are empty. They follow the procession to the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise. Eugene, alone, walks to the topmost part of the graveyard and looks down at Paris, gazing “almost avidly on the space between the columns of the Place Vendome and the cupola of Les Invalides. There lived the world into which he had wished to penetrate.”

We expect that, having seen the corruption and the vanity, the arrogance and the ingratitude, of the Parisians he had come to know so well, Eugene will now realize what a mistake it had been to have wanted to be a part of it. But Honoré de Balzac was not interested in telling stories that teach a lesson; he had something more difficult in mind: to describe in all its glorious imperfections the world he saw all around him and then created in his own marvelously powerful mind. Eugene does not turn his back on Paris, he is determined to conquer it.

“Now I’m ready for you!” he cries. As the “first move in the challenge he was flinging at society, he went back to dine with Madame de Nucingen.”

Père Goriot may seem an absurdity, a l9th century melodrama in which a young man without means sets out to conquer the world, and an old man who learns only too late that all his sacrifices, instead of earning the love of his daughters, has earned only their contempt. But then what was it that held our attention; what made us, with each page we turned, want to keep reading? If it was not the story, what was it? Henry James has the answer, an answer that, once we hear it, makes us think we knew it all along: It isn’t the story that held us, it was the story teller. The greatest thing in Balzac is Balzac himself.

“The real, for his imagination, had an authority that it has never had for any other. He is one of the finest of artists and one of the coarsest.”

In what only seems on the surface a contradiction, James can write of him that, “He was a very bad writer, and yet unquestionably he was a very great writer.” Why was he great? “He believed he was almost as creative as the Deity, and that if mankind and human history were swept away the ‘Comedie Humaine’ would be a perfectly adequate substitute for them.” It is a judgment even less subject to doubt now than when it was written a hundred fifty years ago.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph G. Peterson

Joseph G. Peterson is the author of several works of fiction and poetry. He grew up in Wheeling, Illinois, received his B.A. from the University of Chicago, and his MA. from Roosevelt University. The Des Plaines River and the forest preserves surrounding it winds through the town of Wheeling, and through the imaginary territory of many of his books. He currently lives with his family in the Chicago neighborhood, Hyde Park, on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

Peterson's new novel is The Perturbation of O.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Peterson's reply:

I read fiction, poetry, philosophy, and scholarship. The following are my most recent obsessions.

Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is the book that I'm recommending that everyone read. It tells the story of his father's imprisonment in a Japanese labor camp where his father was subjected to slave labor. It was a notorious labor camp where prisoners were expected to die. Flanagan's father didn't have long to live when a fellow prisoner of Flanagan's father noticed a white flash of light on the horizon at mid-morning. That flash of light would lead to the release of Flanagan's father from the slave camp, and his survival which led ultimately to the birth of Richard Flanagan. The flash of light on the horizon was the bomb going off over Hiroshima. Question 7 is structured in some ways like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 as the parallelism of the titles suggests, and it grapples with several important moral questions chief among them these two questions: 1) While Flanagan's father survived and Flanagan was therefore born, there were thousands upon thousands of innocent victims of the atomic bomb blast who did not survive, nor were their potential children or their children. What burden does this place on survivors like Richard Flanagan. 2) If a story written by HG Wells can inspire a scientist to imagine and then realize how to achieve an atomic chain reaction, then what burden does this place on HG Wells and the scientist when those imaginings are turned into the bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima?

Lately, I've been reading War and The Iliad and primarily I am re-reading Simone Weil's 'The Iliad or the Poem of Force' which the editors of the volume rightly describe as Weil's "inspired" reading of the Iliad. It's hard to imagine a more primary and profound reading of the Iliad than Weil's. Indeed, one can almost read it as an essential translation of the poem. Weil's conception of the subjugating power of force to convert that person upon whom force is released into "an object" and the corrupting power of force to convert that person deploying the force into "an object" and the conjoining of the two persons as "victims of force" leads her to think clearly about the nature of war, of hubris, of the in-human condition of human bondage, and into the meaning of karma. As Weil states in her essay, the Biblical injunction, "He who uses the sword shall perish of the sword" was greatly preceded by the lesson of force provided by the Iliad. Weil's essay exposes the fundamental truth of the Iliad, which in turn exposes a fundamental truth about the use of force, which in turn exposes the primary power of art to deliver powerful concepts of truth about the conditions of life that we are subject to.

Reading War and The Iliad reminds me of another remarkable translation of the Iliad called War Music by Christopher Logue. This sparse, almost Spartan, rendition of the poem written in the contemporary idiom of modern warfare brings the insights of the Iliad to bear on our contemporary condition of war just as beautiful as this rendition of the Iliad in the contemporary idiom of our era of war brings insight to bear on Homer's Iliad.

Finally, but most happily, I have been reading Edward L. Shaughnessey's translation of The Classic of Poetry which collects the oldest written and rhymed poetry in the world. The poems are so ancient that the reader needs some assimilation into the poetry, but the introduction by Shaughnessey who in addition to being the translator is the premier scholar of the poetry helps to place the poetry into context. Once the reader does assimilate to these poems which are called "aires" it's easy to see the song-like structure of the poems and to feel the remarkable beauty of the poetry, which accounts for why they have been read continuously since they were first collected.

Visit Joseph G. Peterson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beautiful Piece.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Mae Cohen

Julie Mae Cohen is a UK-bestselling author of book club and romantic fiction, including the award-winning novel Together. Her work has been translated into 17 languages. She is vice president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the UK. Julie grew up in western Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University, and the University of Reading, where she is now an associate lecturer in creative writing. She lives in Berkshire in the United Kingdom.

Cohen's new novel is Eat, Slay, Love.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Cohen's reply:

I usually have several books on the go—one novel in physical form, and one nonfiction in audiobook.

Right now I’m reading Dear Miss Lake by AJ Pearce (to be published in the US in August 2025). This is the fourth and last in the WWII-set series of novels about Emmeline Lake, a plucky would-be agony aunt at Women’s Friend magazine, dealing with the problems of women on the home front and her own problems living in London during the Blitz. The novels are hilarious, with a cast of endearing characters. They celebrate courage in all its forms, from making cakes without any eggs or sugar to facing down the devastation of a bomb. While they’re goodhearted and uplifting novels, they don’t shy away from the reality of grief or living through the deprivations of wartime. I adore them.

I’m listening to Uncultured by Daniella Mestyanek Young, read by the author, which is a memoir of her childhood growing up in the Children of God cult, her escape, and her time in the similarly cult like surroundings of the American military. I’ve only just started listening to this but the account of the child abuse that the author suffered in the cult is incredibly harrowing. I’ve listened to several memoirs about cults, including Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing by Lauren Hough (also about the Children of God). I’m fascinated by groupthink and how the hierarchy and psychology of cults is echoed in our more mainstream institutions, including political ones.

Before this, I read What We Left Unsaid by Winnie M. Li (also to be published in the US in August 2025), which is a poignant, funny and insightful novel about three Chinese-American siblings taking a road trip across a divided USA. I loved it—not least how Li captures complex family dynamics and how one event can have so many different meanings.

And I listened to Rough Justice by Her Honour Wendy Joseph KC—a fascinating and often heartbreaking account of what it's like to be a judge in the Old Bailey trying serious crimes, and how justice has evolved, or not, since Old Bailey records began being kept in 1674.

Visit Julie Mae Cohen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Bad Men.

Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen.

The Page 69 Test: Eat, Slay, Love.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on ancient and modern writers reconsidered:

No one, at least no one who wanted to be taken seriously by serious people, ever talked about how much money they had, and no one running for public office would have thought to brag that money made him more qualified than anyone who was not rich. And now, suddenly, money, and vast amounts of it, seem to have become almost the only qualification anyone needs to have. The question is whether this almost slavish devotion to wealth, this idea that money proves ability, is a new phenomenon, or something that was there from the beginning, implicit in the very principles on which the modern world was created. It is not a new question. It is the question Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan and John Locke in The Second Treatise on Government tried to examine: whether it was time to make a final break with what Plato in The Republic and Aristotle in The Politics had insisted were the ways in which human beings should live.

The question that Hobbes and Locke thought Plato and Aristotle had failed to answer adequately, is not a question that gets asked very often anymore. We know, or think we know, how we should live. We know, or think we know, what we want and what we need to do to get it. We know that nothing is more important than economics and that money is the only real measure of success. Instead of educating citizens, men and women who know how to rule themselves, our universities are judged by how many of their graduates are able to compete in the world market. The liberal arts have been replaced in importance by the schools of business, philosophy and history by accounting and computer science, and scarcely anyone thinks this a loss. Freedom, we are told, is the most important thing, and freedom can only exist where there are free markets, where men and women are free to buy and sell, where capitalism is allowed to work.

The ancients did not think so, nor did anyone else for nearly two thousand years. Montesquieu noted the difference, and the change: “The Greek political writers, who lived under free government, did not recognize any force which could uphold them but that of virtue. Those of today speak to us only of manufactures, commerce, finance, wealth, and even of luxury.” Rousseau expressed the same thought more concisely and with greater flair: “The ancient politicians spoke incessantly of morals and virtue; ours speak only of commerce and money.”

Why had this change taken place, what had happened to make the ancient way of looking at things seem outmoded and even difficult to understand? Why did the “ancient politicians” speak only of morals and virtue, and the modern ones only of “commerce and money?” The ancients thought that the pursuit of private wealth would destroy a republic and the moderns thought that it was the only thing that would save it. Montesquieu thought the ancients were right, that “the less luxury there is in a republic, the more perfect it is.” And then he adds:

“So far as luxury is established in republics, so far does the spirit turn to the interest of the individual. For people who have to have nothing but the necessities, there is left to desire only the glory of the homeland and one’s own glory. But a soul corrupted by luxury has many other desires; soon it becomes an enemy of the laws that hamper it. When those in the garrison at Rhegium became familiar with luxury, they slaughtered the town’s inhabitants.”

The slaughter at Rhegium is an ancient example, an example which shows that the ancient reliance on morals and virtue was not always sufficient, that despite what they may have been taught about how they should live, the passions of men were often stronger than their reason and always a threat to free government. This became the basis for a central criticism of ancient thought, especially ancient political thought that, as Descartes put it, built superb palaces on foundations of mud and sand. The problem, the modern problem, was how to build a structure that would last. The foundation had to be something that could always be relied upon, something that, no matter what happened, would not change. Plato had said that the human problem, how human beings should be governed, would only be solved when wisdom and power were joined, something that if it ever happened would almost certainly never last. But if reason would not work, only passion remained: the desires, the bodily motions, the pushing and pulling, the urges, which are part of the nature – some would say all of the nature – of human beings.

All of the passions, all of the natural desires, are important, but one of them is much more fundamental than the rest: the desire for life itself, what Thomas Hobbes in the l7th century called the fear of violent death. Not the fear of death, the inevitable passing away of everything that comes into being, but violent death, the fear of what, without someone to stop them, other men might do. This may not seem like much, little more than a statement of what human beings might have to face were they to be thrown back into a state of nature in which, as Hobbes described it, life was “nasty, brutish, solitary and short,” but it revolutionized so much the way we think that it now seems a commonplace, an assumption with which everyone agrees. The fear of violent death leads us to seek the protection of others. An agreement, a social contract, is formed in which one of us is given the power of all of us in exchange for his promise to use our combined strength to protect the lives of each of us. This absolute monarchy is necessary because otherwise difference of opinion will arise as to what government should do, and differences always lead to faction and faction always leads to “the death of the commonwealth,” civil war.

Writing later in the century, John Locke agreed that self-preservation was the strongest, and most reliable, passion, but precisely because everyone was concerned with their own preservation no one was as interested in protecting anyone’s life as much as his own. To give the power over your life to anyone else was as much to lose it as to save it. The only way to make sure your life was protected was to be free to choose for yourself the means by which to preserve it. This meant a republic in which everyone had liberty, and not just liberty, but property, because without that it was impossible to be free, because without that you would be dependent on someone else for the food, shelter and clothing which you needed to live. The protection, or as Locke put it, the “fence” for my life is liberty, and the fence for that liberty is property. Thomas Jefferson, who considered Locke one of the three greatest minds, not just of modernity but all time, made this the father to that famous phrase, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ which he wrote into the American Declaration of Independence.

For Hobbes and Locke, for modernity altogether, everything is based on the importance of the individual and what is most important to the individual, his own preservation. For the ancients, for Plato and Aristotle, and Cicero as well, the individual is an individual only as part of the whole, and whatever rights he may have are derived strictly from his duties. Everyone owes everything to the city, or the polis, in which the laws, the traditions, and the dictates of religion are obeyed without question or hesitation. In Sparta anyone could propose a change in the laws, but if that proposal did not pass, you were killed. This had a certain sobering effect on anyone who thought things could be improved. Everything had to be ordered in light of a single, overriding end. The serious question for the ancients was what that order or end should be. For Plato and Aristotle, and for Cicero as well, it seemed obvious that the proper end is the perfection of that which distinguishes the human being from all the other beings, his reason. Philosophy, the quest for wisdom, for knowledge of the whole, is the highest calling, the distinctly human aim, and that becomes the central thread around which everything else, including the question how people should live, how they should be governed, must be judged and decided.

The search for wisdom, knowledge of the whole, what the ancients were certain was the highest human achievement, the most important thing men could do, was for Hobbes and Locke, and with them modernity altogether, the most serious threat to the only kind of political and social order which can provide any stability at all. If self-preservation, the fear of violent death, is the only reliable foundation on which to build, anything which makes people believe there is something more important than life becomes a danger. Ancient philosophy had taught that how you lived your life, not life itself, was the only thing worth notice; that death in battle, for example, fighting for your city, was far better than to die of old age. Death did not matter; the only thing important was how you died. Hobbes, who translated the Greek of Thucydides into the marvelously elegant English of the l7th century, could argue that when soldiers ran forward to face the enemy and the possibility of death they were really running away from the certain death which would be inflicted upon them by the officers behind them, but it was not ancient heroics he was worried about, it was Christianity.

The promise of eternal life, of life after death, is a promise that, if believed, makes death something to be welcomed instead of feared, but Christianity, instead of turning our attention to the teaching of ancient philosophy, turns all the ancient virtues, like pride and magnanimity, the great-souled man of Aristotle’s description, into vices that damn one to the flames of hell. By demanding that instead of retaliating against an injury, one should turn the other cheek; by insisting that it is “evil to speak evil of evil,” Christianity emasculated humanity and turned everyone who was not a priest into a slave.

Hobbes thought to solve this problem by giving to the sovereign the power to decide all questions of doctrine; by placing the church, and religion altogether, under the control of the civil authority. Locke was more subtle and infinitely more effective. By arguing that the liberty required to preserve one’s life was meaningless without the right to acquire the means, that is to say the property, without which one could not live, he connected freedom with acquisition and made acquisition legitimate. Far from an outgrowth of the “Protestant ethic,” far from being an expression of religious belief, capitalism came into the world as a way to destroy, or at least diminish, the power of religion over the minds of men.

When Thomas Jefferson was asked why he had used that famous phrase about life and liberty from Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, he supposedly replied that “I understood my charge was to be correct, not original.” Locke’s influence went beyond the author of the American Declaration to the author of what might be called the bible of modern capitalism, The Wealth of Nations, a book published the same year, l776, as the Declaration itself. Adam Smith replaces the fear of violent death, for Hobbes the principle and decisive passion of human beings, with a slight modification of Locke’s emphasis on the freedom to acquire life’s necessities: “the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition.” This desire, if “protected by law and allowed by liberty to exert itself in the manner that is most advantageous,” will produce a society that is both free and commercial. The traditional virtues, whether those of the ancients or those of Christianity, will be replaced by what the most insightful student of Adam Smith’s teaching describes as “the controlled passion of self-preservation through gain, the unhampered motion of which is commerce.” Capitalism, in other words, replaces virtue however understood. The moral restraints imposed by both civil and ecclesiastical authority, the prohibitions against unfair dealing or any other species of injustice, are now considered an infringement of liberty, an attempt to interfere with the free workings of a market that functions best, and, it may be argued, can only work at all, when everyone is free to follow the immediate promptings of their own self-interest or ambition.

The ancient and traditional belief that the object or aim of civil society is the common good and that reason is to determine what the common good requires, is replaced by the belief that the best political order, like the best economic order, is the result of actions which are not themselves guided by any concern for the public welfare. The good order, the rational order, is produced by the free expression of the passions, the desires, of human beings. The rational has no existence by itself, but is ultimately dependent on the irrational; like the atoms of Democritus, chaos produces order out of itself.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of The Declaration of Independence, followed Locke in his insistence that the rights of the individual are paramount, the foundation of everything else; James Madison, the principle architect of the American Constitution, writing in the tenth of the Federalist Papers followed Locke in his insistence that the first object of government is the protection of the different and unequal faculties of acquiring property. The function of government is not, as the ancients insisted, to teach character to its citizens, to make them better people; the function of government is to protect the ability of individuals to acquire as much of what they want as they think they need. Instead of a vice or a sin, acquisition has become a virtue; the desire for gain not the mark of an illiberal greed, but the very foundation of the freedom we enjoy. And if, as Adam Smith recognized, the system of economic competition leads to mediocrity and the dominance of small-minded men intent on making money, it at least provides a barrier against those who would use the power of religion to make it “evil to speak evil of evil,” in Machiavelli’s ingenious, not to say devilish, phrase.

And so we find ourselves wondering, once again, whether something has gone missing in the world, whether the “dominance of small minded men” is not itself too high a price to pay, whether it might be time to read again those ancient writers and with the benefit of what they teach us, decide whether the modern world that Hobbes and Locke helped create might itself need a new beginning.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nancy Thayer

Nancy Thayer is the author of 35 novels, including Summer Love, Family Reunion, A Nantucket Christmas, and The Hot Flash Club. Her books are about families, friendship, and the beautiful island of Nantucket where she’s lived for 39 years with her husband Charley Walters and their spoiled cat Callie. Sometimes they invite their thousands of grandchildren to visit. She loves libraries, bookstores, and zoom parties.

Thayer's novels have appeared on the New York Times best-seller lists, in Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and Cosmo UK, and are translated into many languages.

Her novel Let It Snow was made into a Hallmark Christmas movie entitled Nantucket Noel in 2021.

A Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1983, she was awarded the RT 2015 Career Achievement Award for Mainstream Fiction.

Thayer's new novel is Summer Light on Nantucket.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

It’s A Wonderful Woof by Spencer Quinn is part of his mystery series starring Bernie and Chet the dog, from Chet’s point of view. Bernie is a detective with a Porsche convertible and Chet is his sidekick. It’s often laugh-out-loud funny, and also full of wisdom. It’s a complete hot fudge sundae with whipped cream and a cherry on top, or, as Chet would say, a handful of Slim Jims.

You Took the Last Bus Home by Brian Bilston is one of his several books of clever, witty, brilliant poetry or word play or tongue twisters or deep thoughts—his writing is like no one else’s and he’s clearly in love with words and maybe a little like a verbal Rain Man.

Bread and Other Miracles by Lynn Ungar is the last book I read every night before I go to sleep. Her poems are spiritual and earthy, deeply intelligent and hopeful. This book is my candle in the dark.

Visit Nancy Thayer's website.

The Page 69 Test: Summer House.

The Page 69 Test: Beachcombers.

My Book, The Movie: Beachcombers.

Writers Read: Nancy Thayer (May 2015).

My Book, The Movie: The Guest Cottage.

The Page 69 Test: The Guest Cottage.

The Page 69 Test: Summer Love.

--Marshal Zeringue