Edward Ashton

Edward Ashton is the author of the novels Mal Goes to War, Antimatter Blues, Mickey7 (now a motion picture directed by Bong Joon-ho and starring Robert Pattinson), Three Days in April, and The End of Ordinary. He lives in upstate New York in a cabin in the woods (not that Cabin in the Woods) with his wife, a nine pound killing machine named Maggie, and the world’s only purebred ratrantula, where he writes—mostly fiction, occasionally fact—under the watchful eyes of a giant woodpecker and a rotating cast of barred owls. In his free time, he enjoys cancer research, teaching quantum physics to sullen graduate students, and whittling.

Recently I asked Ashton about what he was reading. His reply:

I've been spending a lot of time on airplanes recently. Downside? Deep vein thrombosis. Upside? Lots of reading time! Travel is stressful, though, so I tend towards comfort reads when I'm flying. For me, that often means re-reading books that I first grew to love when I was a child.

On my most recent trip, for example, I brought along City, by Clifford D. Simak. This book is a classic--I mean, all of Simak's books are, but this one holds a special place in my heart. It's a collection of eight separate but interrelated stories chronicling the decline and fall of man and the rise of doggish civilization over thousands of years, told through the eyes of the Webster family and their associated dogs, robots, martians, and other assorted hangers-on. Each tale is preceded by a snippet of scholarly discourse among doggish scholars arguing over whether the stories are meant to be taken literally or figuratively, and whether "man" is meant to refer to an actual creature that once lived, or is simply a part of dogs' origin myths. As someone who loves dogs, scholarly discourse, and Simak in roughly equal measure, this book is pretty much tailor-made for me.

When I'm not on the road and I'm able to read things that actually require me to pay close attention, I tend to bounce between newer SF and the wackier edge of contemporary fiction. An example of the former is Corporate Gunslinger, by Doug Engstrom. This overlooked gem from a few years back takes modern capitalism to its logical endpoint, at which any problems you might have with our corporate overlords can only be addressed by facing a customer service representative with guns drawn at twenty paces. The book follows the career of one such representative, a debt-drowned theater major who takes a gig as a professional duelist to avoid being literally repossessed by her creditors. This book has tons of action, a fair amount of violence, and a surprisingly touching ending.

On the contemporary side, I just finished Tim O'Brien's new book, America Fantastica. I first met O'Brien through Going After Cacciato when I was in college, and I believe I've read everything he's ever written in the interim. There are certain elements that you find in every O'Brien book--a deeply traumatized protagonist, wacky side-characters, a plot that often flirts with and sometimes crosses over into surrealism, and a biting critique of society in general and American culture in particular--and this one has all of those in spades. I described it to one of my friends as probably the most Tim O'Brien book that Tim O'Brien has ever Tim O'Brien-ed, and I stand by that assessment. It's funny and poignant and cringe-inducing by turns, and I could not put it down.

Visit Edward Ashton's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mickey7.

Q&A with Edward Ashton.

The Page 69 Test: Antimatter Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Mal Goes to War.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's latest novel is Lunatic Carnival, the tenth legal thriller 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, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

When someone told Friedrich Nietzsche that he had not understood a single word of Zarathustra, Nietzsche replied that “this was perfectly in order: having understood six sentences from it - that is, to have really experienced them - would raise one to a higher level of existence than ‘modern’ men could attain.” It was no better with those who claimed they understood what he had written. “Whoever thought he had understood something of me, had made up something out of me after his own image.” Nietzsche did not expect to be understood. “The time for me hasn’t come yet: some are born posthumously.” The confidence that he would eventually be understood was, at least in part, based on how he could write. After reading him, he insisted, “One simply can no longer endure other books, least of all philosophical works.” The right reader, someone “related to me in the height of his aspiration will experience veritable ecstasies of learning: for I have come from heights that no bird has ever reached in flight, I know abysses into which no foot ever strayed.”

What had Nietzsche learned from the heights he had reached and the depths he had explored? What had he written that no one then living could understand? That Europe, that is to say, the West, was being destroyed by its own history, or, rather, by what had become a wholesale dependence on what history - history with a capital H - was understood to mean. This was because of Hegel, who had tried to make sense out of all the wars and revolutions, all the chaos and misery, of human history, by showing that, instead of a ‘tale told by an idiot signifying nothing,’ history was really the struggle, the conflict, that, through the final stage of the French Revolution and the emergence of Napoleon, had brought history to an end. Everyone would now have equal rights and the promise of a comfortable existence.

Hegel thought this a triumph; Nietzsche thought it the end of civilization and the beginning of the age of barbarians. The end of history meant the “last man,” the man who has no aspirations, who spends his days acquiring wealth and his evenings seeking entertainment, the man always in a hurry, never satisfied, who thinks nothing more important than to live as long as possible the only life he has known. The end of history meant that everyone would live like an American.

History, Hegel’s History, had somehow to be replaced with a different understanding. In one of the first things he wrote, The Use And Abuse Of History, Nietzsche took aim at the catastrophic consequences of trying to judge the past from the point of view of the present. There is a line, more than one, that Nietzsche wrote that is impossible to forget. Nietzsche writes in a way that no one, certainly no philosopher, had written before, or that anyone has written since. When he criticizes the attempt of the present to judge the past, he does not simply say that the contemporary understanding of history is incorrect, he thunders, “Who compels you to sit in judgment?” You have to stand higher than those who came before you if you are going to judge them, but instead of standing higher, “you merely came after them.” When the present judges the past, “it only brings the past down to its own level.”

The kind of history Nietzsche was attacking is, we need to remind ourselves, the kind that is taught everywhere today, that kind that judges the past by what the present thinks important. Everything about the past, including especially those whose names are still famous, is examined to see how close, or how far, they were from what we believe, or, rather, know with absolute certainty, is morally right or morally wrong. For most of our present day historians, and others who try to teach about the past, this means equal rights for everyone and the absence of every kind of prejudice. Everyone today agrees that slavery is wrong; anyone who owned a slave in the past must have been a monster and a villain, even if, or perhaps especially if, they were, like Thomas Jefferson, devoted to the cause of human freedom and tried, in their lifetime, to abolish slavery in the states where they lived.

Nietzsche understood this, and condemned it for its obvious tendency to discredit any kind of human greatness. Instead of trying to diminish what a Caesar, or an Alcibiades, or a Julian, had done, to name three great men Nietzsche singled out, history should tell their stories. History should become, in a phrase he used, “monumental history.” What was important was the possibility of human beings who could become again great creators, men and women with the power to do great things. If you read the history of great men or great events, then, and only then, is there a chance that you will try to do something great yourself.

This concern with history and the various ways of understanding it, led Nietzsche to go back in history to the Greeks and how they understood the world. This attempt changed everything. Europe, the West, had not been advancing toward a higher civilization for the last two thousand years, as Hegel had insisted. It had been, with rare exceptions like the Renaissance, in a continual state of decline, a free fall from the height of the Greek experience. The Greeks had lived within a limited horizon, a closed universe, the sun, the stars, fixed in place; the earth, at the center, the home of the human being who, in the best case, developed his own specific excellence, his reason, to contemplate and understand the world in which he lived. Everyone is connected to everyone else in a city that honors those who have contributed to its greatness, a city in which no one thinks life worth living when they are no longer able to do their own, proper, work as a citizen. Rome, first as a republic, then as an empire, lost much of what Athens had. There was nothing like the same freedom of the citizen or the independence of human thought, but there was still the same belief that the world was the only important place for both gods and men.

Modern science changed all this. The world was no longer the only place there was. The earth was now seen as just one of an uncountable number of planets in a universe of no determinate size. Instead of dominant creatures whose lives were, or could be, of eternal fame, we were nothing but the temporary spectators of our own ephemeral dreams, unless of course we shared the belief in a heaven where, after death, we lived forever. The Christian belief, however, had vanished, even, and perhaps especially, among those who claimed it for themselves. The morning prayer, according to Nietzsche, had been replaced by the morning paper. There was no more reverence for the unchanging, the eternal, only an endless desire for whatever was changing, whatever was new.

The question was what could be done? How, as someone who studied Nietzsche with more than the eye of a scholar once put it, could antiquity be retrieved from the emptiness of modernity? Nietzsche’s answer was the “eternal return of the same.” He mentioned it first in that early writing of his, The Use And Abuse Of History, in a passing reference to Pythagoras, but that passing reference is the beginning, the foundation, of what would become the central teaching Nietzsche wanted to leave the world. According to the Pythagoreans, when an identical constellation of the heavenly bodies occur, identical events - down to individual, minute details - must repeat themselves on earth as well. Everything that happens, happens again. Julius Caesar will again be murdered, Christopher Columbus will again discover America, everything repeated, over and over again, the eternal return of the same endless repetition. What I am writing now I have written timeless times before, and will write timeless times again. Nietzsche develops this thought through the most important of his later writings, including especially Zarathustra, which he considered his greatest work.

The eternal return of the same changes everything. The world becomes again what it once was, the closed world of the ancient Greeks. Instead of infinity, endless time and endless space, the world is limited to the time of each of its same time repetitions, and the human being is again the central character in the comedy and tragedy of the world’s constantly replayed drama. Existence is no longer meaningless. This was Nietzsche’s great achievement, his message to the present and the future as to how the past should be understood. No one took it seriously, perhaps because no one really understood it. Nietzsche was aware of this. He did not expect anyone to believe what he was teaching. He did expect that, in time, perhaps another century or so, others, a few others, would discover, or rediscover, what he had written, and know how to read him the way he meant to be read. They would understand, as none of his contemporaries could, the real meaning of that marvelously seductive, and daringly mysterious, suggestion that he was one of those extraordinarily rare human beings who have been born posthumously.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.

Third Reading: Main Street.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II.

--Marshal Zeringue

Verlin Darrow

Verlin Darrow is currently a psychotherapist who lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near the Monterey Bay in northern California. They diagnose each other as necessary. Darrow is a former professional volleyball player (in Italy), unsuccessful country-western singer/songwriter, import store owner, and assistant guru in a small, benign spiritual organization. Before bowing to the need for higher education, a much younger Darrow ran a punch press in a sheetmetal factory, drove a taxi, worked as a night janitor, shoveled asphalt on a road crew, and installed wood flooring. He missed being blown up by Mt. St. Helens by ten minutes, survived the 1985 Mexico City earthquake (8 on the Richter scale), and (so far) has successfully weathered his own internal disasters.

Darrow's new novel is The Not Quite Enlightened Sleuth.

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

I’m currently reading Other Plans by Caimh McDonnell, an Irish comedian turned author. This is his latest and I’ve read them all, beginning with the Dublin Trilogy, which is actually four comic crime novels. He’s one of my favorite authors, rivaling Donald E. Westlake. A minor character in his first book was so well-loved that he started another series with this colorful figure. The plotting is tight, the characters are fascinating, the setting interests me, and I laugh out loud while I’m reading. What more could ask for?

Recently, I finished Bone Canyon by Lee Goldberg, a complex police/fire fighter procedural with a keen sense of place—the dry canyons north of LA. I found it hard to put down as I continuously wanted to know what came next.

Lastly, I reread my first mystery—Blood and Wisdom—for the first time in years. I still liked it a lot, but I could see that I should’ve simplified the plot and some of the humor was off the mark. Oh well.

As you can gather, I favor genre novels. I actually think that a great deal of the literary works taught in schools are poorly written. (I know, I know. I’m a barbarian). But why should the reader have to work so hard?

Visit Verlin Darrow's website.

My Book, The Movie: Murder for Liar.

The Page 69 Test: Murder for Liar.

The Page 69 Test: The Not Quite Enlightened Sleuth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Dugoni

Robert Dugoni is a critically acclaimed New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and #1 Amazon bestselling author, reaching over 9 million readers worldwide. He is best known for his Tracy Crosswhite police series set in Seattle. He is also the author of the Charles Jenkins espionage series, the David Sloane legal thriller series, and several stand-alone novels including The 7th Canon, Damage Control, The World Played Chess, and Her Deadly Game. His novel The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell received Suspense Magazine’s 2018 Book of the Year, and Dugoni’s narration won an AudioFile Earphones Award. The Washington Post named his nonfiction exposé The Cyanide Canary a Best Book of the Year.

His new novel is A Killing on the Hill: A Thriller.

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

I’m currently reading two works. I’m reading the young adult series, Peter and the Star Catchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, because I love to get lost in fantasy.

I’m also reading Joy Jordan-Lake's Echoes of Us, a historical mystery about World War II coming to the island of St. Simmons Island off the coast of Georgia and three men who become unlikely allies, a German Soldier, a British Pilot and an American soldier. I have two historical novels coming out this year and love how she weaves in the setting and period.

Visit Robert Dugoni's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: Wrongful Death.

The Page 69 Test: Bodily Harm.

My Book, The Movie: Bodily Harm.

The Page 69 Test: Murder One.

My Book, The Movie: Murder One.

My Book, The Movie: The Eighth Sister.

The Page 69 Test: The Eighth Sister.

My Book, The Movie: A Cold Trail.

The Page 69 Test: A Cold Trail.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Agent.

My Book, The Movie: The Last Agent.

Q&A with Robert Dugoni.

The Page 69 Test: In Her Tracks.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's new novel is Lunatic Carnival, the tenth legal thriller 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, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is part II of Buffa's take on Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series:

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won the Presidency in a landslide against Barry Goldwater, with more than 61 percent of the vote. Four years later, in 1968, Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States with only 43.4 percent of the vote, and yet, according to Theodore H. White, Nixon’s election was also a landslide, a negative landslide, the first one in American history. Adding the vote for George Wallace, an extreme conservative, to that of Nixon, a traditional conservative, the conservative vote against Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate, was 56.9 percent. What had happened?

The war in Vietnam had happened. What became known as the Tet offensive, had broken “the confidence of the American people in their government, their institutions, their leadership….” The enemy “had astounded the world with a force, a fury, a battlefield presence that gave the lie to all that America has been told for months,” that America was winning the war. It is one of the ironies of history that the Tet offensive had been “a complete failure,” with a third of the enemy forces killed, and none of its objectives achieved, but failure on the battlefield was a victory in the domestic politics of the United States.

Opposition to the war was led by university students, a group that had become, in White’s description, “the largest working-class group with a single interest in the United States - or any other country.” There had been 1,350,000 college students in l939; there were 6,900,000 in 1968. Political compromise, the idea that it takes time to change things, was seen by university students as nothing more than an “excuse for postponing the inevitable, for denying the truth. If a certain goal is accepted by the best thinking as an unchallenged good, why cannot it be made real now?” What was considered the “best thinking” was itself a reflection of a remarkable revision, and sometimes an outright rejection, of traditional values. “On stage, on screen, in letters,” American intellectuals “created a world without heroes.” The “new avant-garde has come to despise its own country and its traditions as has rarely happened in any community in the world; American institutions, customs and laws are regarded as the greatest system of restraint on that individual self-expression which it sees the highest right of man.”

Free from all restraint, and appalled by what the future seemed to offer, American students mobilized against the war. Convinced that the war would not be ended so long as Lyndon Johnson was still President, the question was who among the Democratic politicians who opposed the war would be willing to challenge him for the Democratic nomination. Eugene McCarthy, the Senator from Minnesota who owed his start in politics to Hubert Humphrey, decided it should be him. McCarthy did not doubt he was qualified. “You can put it down that I’m the best prepared man who ever ran for the Presidency of this country,” he told White. McCarthy had no political allies and few personal friends. He “lived by truth and principles of his own soul, with a courage that was to change American history. He owed no one anything, recognized no political obligation - not even to his own movement, or his own constituency.” And then White adds, in one of the most subtly devastating lines ever written about a candidate for the nation’s highest office: “All through the year, one’s admiration of the man grew - and one’s affections lessened.”

McCarthy came within a few votes of winning the Democratic primary in New Hampshire, and Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not be a candidate for re-election. Bobby Kennedy entered the race, and the McCarthy students felt they had been stabbed in the back. Martin Luther King was murdered, two months later Bobby Kennedy was killed, and the world seemed to be spinning out of control. The choice for Democrats was now between McCarthy and Lyndon’s Johnson’s vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, but when the Democratic convention that met in Chicago became a study in televised violence, the nomination was almost not worth winning. White insists that, “The revolt in the streets was an attempt of the alienated to express their desire for an identity, an attempt to control their environment by protest.” It may have been that, but it was also an attempt at intimidation, an attempt by the anti-war forces to win in the streets what they could not win in the convention, an attempt to overturn the result of an elective process by threatening to destroy everything in their way, an attempt which brought the police into open conflict, which, witnessed by tens of millions on television, seemed at the very least to cast doubt on the ability of the Democrats to govern even their own party.

In all the turmoil, no one paid much attention to a minority report that, in a moment of absent mindedness, the Democratic Convention adopted directing the formation of a reform commission to take up the question of how the party could become more open and more responsive. After nearly a year of hearings, the Reform Commission decided that it was not enough to prohibit the exclusion of blacks and other minorities from participation in the Democratic Party; they must, as White describes it, “be guaranteed their mathematical proportion of representation….” This meant quotas, and it would become, four years later, one of the major reasons for George McGovern’s massive, inglorious defeat.

Scorned by conservatives and hated by liberals, Hubert Humphrey never had a chance. With their protests, with their open contempt for American traditions and American power, liberals made it possible for George Wallace to become a serious candidate. His followers, like those who follow Donald Trump today, had “a nearly religious faith that everyone was against them but the people, and that the saving of white America from the pointy-heads was a cause greater than politics.” The phrase ‘pointy-heads’ was George Wallace’s contribution to the American political vocabulary, a more colorful reference to the government bureaucrat who decided everything and knew nothing, the over-educated, narrow-minded, unelected government official who, as Wallace joyfully added, carried only a ham sandwich in his otherwise empty brief case.

Wallace was a racist, pure and simple, the Governor of Alabama who had declared with willful pride, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” His appeal in the North was to the white working class, the union member in Michigan who had moved to the suburbs so he and his family could live in safe neighborhoods and send their children to safe schools, and had then discovered that the government thought it necessary, in the interest of racial balance, to open their neighborhoods to public housing and bus their children thirty or forty miles away to a school in a crime-ridden inner city. While the children of the affluent white professional class were protesting the war they did not want to fight, the white working class was voting for Wallace to protest a liberal government that would not leave them alone; a government, as Wallace was quick to point out, made up of people who could afford to send their own children to private schools.

McCarthy had been defeated in Chicago, and Humphrey was defeated in November, but the student movement continued to protest the war. Nixon was concerned about this, not with the protests as such, but the absence, among young people, of “a sense of common challenge.” Sitting with Teddy White in the Oval Office, days after his inauguration, Nixon said he agreed with what John F. Kennedy has said in his inaugural, that famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” The nation “needed a sense of purpose, a sense of a binding ideal.” He asked White if he remembered the phrase he had used in the campaign: “‘the country needs the lift of a driving dream.’ That is what he was looking for.”

Lyndon Johnson had spoken of the Great Society, and had promised to find the experts who would discover what the American purpose should be. Nixon agreed with what Kennedy had said, but he had no more idea than anyone else what anyone should be told who asked what they could do for their country. Nixon knew it was important, and White thought it important as well; not just important, but a matter more complex than what Lincoln or FDR had faced, because, “it defied definition, thus it was graver.” This, to be polite, is almost insane. Something is missing, without it the country can never be what it should be, and no one, at least no one elected President, has any idea what it actually might be!

Four years later, in l972, the Democratic Party, now led by George McGovern, did not have any doubt about the purpose of the United States, or, rather, the purpose of the United States government. It was to oppress the American people. The government, which did nothing but lie, supported a “corrupt clique in Saigon against a peace-loving regime in Hanoi,” and murdered innocent civilians. McGovern’s army was not just out to win an election; they were going to change politics and make it, finally, democratic, everyone able to participate at every stage in the choice, and the election, of candidates. The quotas of the Reform Commission of l969 were applied in full vigor. Blacks, women, and youth, defined as anyone between the ages of l8 and 30, were represented at the Democratic convention in proportion to their percentage of the population. Every trio of speakers contained a man and a woman, a black and a white. Democrats thought this progress; Nixon thought it helped him win the election. Accepting the Republican nomination, he insisted that “the way to end discrimination against some is not to begin discrimination against others. Dividing Americans into quotas is totally alien to the American tradition.”

In 1968, as has been noted, Nixon and Wallace together had 56.9 percent of the vote. In l972, Nixon alone got 60.7 percent of the vote. The Democratic share went from 42.7 percent for Humphrey to 37.5 percent for McGovern. Lyndon Johnson had gone from the “greatest mandate, the greatest personal triumph of any election year, the election of l964, to the greatest personal humiliation of any sitting President.” Until Richard Nixon, who, less than two years after winning re-election by almost the same percentage of the vote Johnson had been given, became the first American President to resign in disgrace.

For all his fascination with the personal character and the political style of candidates for the Presidency, Theodore H. White has a deep concern for the underlying forces that were changing American politics by changing America. The students who organized to protest the Vietnam War and made Eugene McCarthy their temporary hero, constituted a new phenomena made possible by an increasing prosperity that, by allowing millions of young people to avoid the necessity of work, gave them the opportunity to spend four or more years in college. There was another large segment of the American population who, with nothing like the same advantages, had faced problems of a kind difficult for anyone who has not faced them to understand. It is impossible, White tells us, “to understand any of the domestic politics of the United States…without understanding how deeply…goes the cleavage of race.”

Unlike most writers on American politics, Theodore H. White knew his history, both ancient and modern. It is, for him, almost a commonplace that no one in American history understood better than Abraham Lincoln what would happen to race relations unless white citizens changed they way they thought. “Now when by all these means you have succeeded in dehumanizing the Negro; when you have put him down and made it forever impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul, and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out in darkness like that which broods over the spirits of the damned; are you quite sure the demon which you have roused will not turn and rend you?”

Starting in the early sixties, there were riots, demonstrations, and protests in the South, and then riots, demonstrations, and protests in the North, for civil rights. In l940, 77 percent of blacks lived in the South; thirty years later, in l970, 65 percent of blacks lived in the industrial states of the North and West, mainly in the major cities. This changed politics. The black vote was now an essential part of the Democratic coalition. But there were other changes as well, one of which White considered a serious threat to political stability. The movement from the South to the North brought with it “a decomposition of family life and family discipline which simply cannot be contained in the traditional form of American democracy or orderly politics.” One fifth of black children were illegitimate in l960; nearly 29 percent in l970. The riots, according to White, “were not race riots.” They were instead “a revolt led by wild youth against authority, against discipline, against the orderly government of a society that had taken too long to pay them heed.” And then he adds, “Despair incubated the riots, but dogma created the thought climate which realized them: the dogma that all ills within the Negro bit-city community are the fault of white men alone….”

It is our great misfortune that black despair at their condition, and white resentment at the remedies that have been tried, are not only still with us, but have, if anything, become more pronounced, intensified by the dangerous rhetoric of our times; rhetoric that, instead of leading us toward a sense of common purpose, something we can believe in, something that challenges our imagination, threatens to divide us even more. In that threat, however, some instruction may be found - the need for a different rhetoric, one that defines what Teddy White thought defied definition, but what both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, jr. understood: that it is not what we want to achieve, but rather what we want to be, what kind of human being, that is important, and that in a republic, a nation of free men and women, the pursuit of human excellence is the one true common endeavor.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.

Third Reading: Main Street.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris Nickson

Chris Nickson is the author of eleven Tom Harper mysteries, eight highly acclaimed novels in the Richard Nottingham series, and six Simon Westow mysteries. He is also a well-known music journalist. He lives in his beloved Leeds.

Nickson's newest Simon Westow mystery is The Scream of Sins.

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

At the moment, a variety of things seems to be the answer, and it's all re-reading. A few favourite Georgette Heyer titles: The Grand Sophy (even with its moment of outmoded anti-Semitism) and Veneita. I love that she has strong heroines, and the dialogue between her female and male lead characters is like watching masters fencing, a masterclass in how to do it. I came later to her, but for the most part I'm very much a convert.

Right now, however, I'm on The Investigator by John Sandford, the first in a series featuring Letty Davenport, the daughter of Lucas, the lead in many of Sandford's books. It's an undemanding read, with plenty of action and violence (typical Sandford), good, breezy dialogue and strong characters. I've long been a fan of his work; everything flows, and he's enough of a pro that you accept the big plot leaps. But this brings in some fresh blood - she's featured to a small degree as a minor character in some of the Davenport novels - and gives the writer a chance to do something different. One thing about Sandford, at least for me: he never disappoints.

Visit Chris Nickson's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Constant Lovers.

The Page 69 Test: The Constant Lovers.

The Page 69 Test: The Iron Water.

The Page 69 Test: The Hanging Psalm.

Q&A with Chris Nickson.

The Page 69 Test: The Molten City.

My Book, The Movie: Molten City.

The Page 69 Test: Brass Lives.

The Page 69 Test: The Blood Covenant.

The Page 69 Test: The Dead Will Rise.

The Page 69 Test: Rusted Souls.

The Page 69 Test: The Scream of Sins.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cara Black

Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 21 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, and two World War II-set novels featuring American markswoman Kate Rees. Black has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris—the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture—and invitations to be the Guest of Honor at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime.

Black's new novel is Murder at la Villette, the 21st installment of her mystery series featuring Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc.

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

I've been reading The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies in the English translation.

To me, historical fiction matters and it's a way of how to breathe life into forgotten moments, lost voices little told women's stories and the timeless human experience.

Published in French as La Propagandiste, written by Desprairies a historian, this is her first novel.

I've read several of her historical books and this story, her first fiction, pulled me in from page one.

It's the story of Lucie, the narrator's mother. who we meet in Paris during the Trente Glorieuses, the Thirty glorious years of de Gaulle after WW2. Lucie's daughter, as a child, attends the meetings of the women of the family organized at their apartment. They gossip. Underneath the conversations, one thing leads to another, piercing the lies and unsaid things of this enigmatic mother.

The masks fall, and the story of this woman, a zealous collaborator, in France, under the Occupation, is revealed in full, in the image of a collective past of which we have, even today, not finished to take inventory. La Propagandiste takes an uncompromising look at the France of collaboration and its imprint on our collective memory.

Visit Cara Black's website and follow her on Twitter.

The Page 69 Test: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

My Book, the Movie: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

The Page 69 Test: Murder below Montparnasse.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder on the Champ de Mars.

The Page 69 Test: Three Hours in Paris.

The Page 69 Test: Night Flight to Paris.

Writers Read: Cara Black (March 2023).

--Marshal Zeringue

Wendy Church

Wendy Church is the author of the Jesse O’Hara and Shadows of Chicago Mysteries series. The first book in the Jesse O’Hara series, Murder on the Spanish Seas, was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten Debut Mystery/Thriller novels of 2023, and received a starred review.

Church's newest books are Murder Beyond the Pale, the second Jesse O’Hara mystery, and Knife Skills, the first Shadows of Chicago mystery.

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

When I'm in the middle of a project I limit my reading to primarily nonfiction (as part of book research), and these days it seems like I'm constantly in the middle of a project! But I always make time for the latest from Val McDermid, and am very excited to finally get my copy of Past Lying, the latest Karen Pirie novel. For some reason I've gravitated towards more UK and Irish crime fiction over the last few years, and also try to make time for Dervla McTiernan's Comac Reilly books, or Brian McGilloway's Lucy Black series. Anyone who's read my books knows I'm not heavy with description, but these authors have such a great command of the language, and manage to keep the pacing up even as they work wonders with verbal illustration, it inspires me to do better in that regard.

Visit Wendy Church's website.

The Page 69 Test: Murder on the Spanish Seas.

Q&A with Wendy Church.

My Book, The Movie: Murder on the Spanish Seas.

The Page 69 Test: Murder Beyond the Pale.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen O’Clover

Ellen O’Clover writes stories about finding your people, falling in love, and figuring it all out (or trying to, anyway). Her debut novel, Seven Percent of Ro Devereux, came out in 2023 with HarperCollins/HarperTeen, and her second book, The Someday Daughter, is just out in bookstores.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. O’Clover's reply:

The last book I read and can’t stop thinking about is Samantha Markum’s Love, Off the Record. I love Markum’s voice: her YA romances are swoony and sincere, with complex characters who feel big, love hard, and navigate coming of age with all the messiness of the genuine human experience. Love, Off the Record follows college freshman newspaper staffers Wyn and Three as they compete for a coveted reporter spot. It’s everything I love in a rivals-to-lovers romance, and I can’t recommend it enough.

I also just finished Krystal Marquis’s The Davenports, a Bridgerton-esque historical romance that follows four young women navigating life and love in 1910 Chicago. This book is an irresistible escape into the lush world of servants, lavish parties, and carriage rides—but also illuminates a period of African American history that’s often overlooked: in the early 1900s, the Davenports are one of the few Black families of wealth and status in the US. This one’s a must-read for anyone who enjoys historical fiction!

Visit Ellen O'Clover's website.

Q&A with Ellen O'Clover.

--Marshal Zeringue

Suzanne Redfearn

Suzanne Redfearn is the #1 Amazon bestselling author of six novels: Where Butterflies Wander, Moment In Time, Hadley & Grace, In an Instant, No Ordinary Life, and Hush Little Baby.

Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages and have been recognized by RT Reviews, Target Recommends, Goodreads, Publisher’s Marketplace, and Kirkus Reviews.

Redfearn has been awarded Best New Fiction from Best Book Awards and has been a Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist.

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

This prompt caught me at a moment when I have four books going at once, which is not entirely unusual.

On Audible, I am listening to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. This book has been huge for a while, but I mistakenly believed it wasn’t my cup of tea. Based on the cover and title, I thought it was going to be all fluff and romance. One of my book clubs chose it, which is the reason I picked it up, and I’m very glad I did. It has surprising depth and underlying meaning. Reid is an outstanding storyteller, and I am completely caught up in the tale.

On my Kindle, I am reading The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (author of Code Name Helene). She is a fantastic writer and a master at writing about the past with such detail that I am completely immersed, and I feel like I’m in Maine in 1789 as I’m reading it. There’s also a surprising dash of mysticism, which I enjoy, and the protagonist is wonderful, a strong woman kicking but at a time when women in America were mostly relegated to the sidelines.

On my phone is Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord. This book’s been out for a while, and I’m not sure how I stumbled upon it, but it’s a hoot and the perfect book for reading when I’m standing in line or sitting at the car wash. Kooky and heartwarming, I’m in love with Hector and look forward to the next time I get to join him on his quest.

On my bedside table is Jill Hannah Anderson’s latest, Closer to Home. I’ve just started this. It doesn’t release until March, so I am reading an advanced copy. So far it’s fast-paced and suspenseful. The synopsis makes me think it’s going to be a little like Safe Haven by Nicolas Sparks, suspense meets romance.

Visit Suzanne Redfearn's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Suzanne Redfearn and Cooper.

My Book, The Movie: Hush Little Baby.

The Page 69 Test: Hush Little Baby.

The Page 69 Test: No Ordinary Life.

My Book, The Movie: No Ordinary Life.

My Book, The Movie: In an Instant.

The Page 69 Test: In an Instant.

Q&A with Suzanne Redfearn.

My Book, The Movie: Hadley and Grace.

The Page 69 Test: Hadley & Grace.

The Page 69 Test: Moment in Time.

My Book, The Movie: Moment in Time.

--Marshal Zeringue