Tag: Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

Flying Toward Catastrophe

The real canaries in the coal mine

By Anne Blythe

Many of us turned a more enthusiastic ear toward the chorus of birds in our midst during the early days of the pandemic. With the routine rumble of traffic muted to a minimum, their chirps, trills and full-throated songs offered a sense of solace in an unfamiliar world.

In their new book, A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds, Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal tell us we should lean in and pay close attention. Their calls, or lack of them, their habits and changing habitats herald the health of our environment, write the avid birders and veteran journalists.

The husband and wife team, based in Raleigh, got the bad news out of the way at the start. In the last 50 years, a third of the North American bird population vanished.

“That translates to three billion birds of all sizes and shapes, in losses stretching from coast to coast, from the Arctic to Antarctica, through forests and grasslands, ranches and farms,” the couple writes in the introduction, noting that some birds are transcontinental travelers. “As one veteran biologist, John Doresky, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Georgia, told us, ‘We’re in the emergency room now.’”

The Gyllenhaals might start their story in the ER, but their book does not dwell heavily on a doomsday scenario. Instead, they offer an optimistic outlook as they chronicle the research, new technology and conservation laboratories they explore during two years of cross-country and intercontinental travels.

The grasshopper sparrow and spotted owl serve as their bookends for a wide-ranging story reported with exacting detail about the work of “the ranks of biologists, ranchers, ecologists, birders, hunters, wildlife officers and philanthropists trying to protect the continent’s birds from a growing list of lethal threats and pressures.”

Anders and Beverly got involved with birding more than a decade ago while living in Washington, D.C. They were transitioning from long careers in journalism to “a lifestyle geared toward three Bs: birds, books and banjos, which Anders had played since high school.” Disclosure: One leg of their journalism path brought Anders to the News & Observer in Raleigh, where I worked for him and admired his dedication to solid reporting and storytelling. That commitment is evident throughout A Wing and a Prayer.

They take us along with them on a journey in their Airstream from North Carolina to Florida, through the heartlands to Kansas, and then further west to California, where they store their home office on wheels while they continue their trek through Hawaii.

They introduce us to colorful conservationists in muddy bogs, grassy fields and craggy bluffs while also giving readers a peek inside the offices of pivotal conservation organizations and ornithology labs.

Many of these scientists and conservationists could be the backbone for books of their own about trying to stop birds from being added to the list of extinct species. They introduce us to Ben Novak, a scientist in his mid-30s who grew up in North Dakota and now lives in Brevard, North Carolina. After falling in love with the passenger pigeon as a teen, he has developed intricate plans to build a lab in western North Carolina, hoping to use genomics to bring the bird back from extinction.

Not all of the conservation projects are as futuristic as Novak’s. In Hawaii they are about to release clouds of mosquitoes bred in laboratories to combat avian malaria. The goal is for the lab-created male mosquitos carrying an incompatible bacteria to mate with females that, in turn, will lay eggs that won’t hatch. In the process the conservationists hope to save some of the island state’s most threatened native birds. Hawaii, the Gyllenhaals point out, is the extinction capital of the world with 100 of the 140 native bird species having already disappeared. And, in the Southeast, the U.S. military has been heavily involved in efforts to save the red-cockaded woodpecker through controlled burns and managed forests on bases like Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune.

While the Gyllenhaals stress that it is often the bigger birds — the bald eagle, the illusive ivory- billed woodpecker or the California condor — that get much of the attention, the smaller birds that hide easily in their habitats need more vocal advocates to save their species.

Their two-year journey, covering more than 25,000 miles, gives glimpses of many different birds including the Cerulean warbler, a tiny songbird that breeds in Appalachia and the eastern U.S. hardwood forests before making a long journey to winter in South America. The Gyllenhaals traveled to Ecuador to see firsthand the conservation efforts to protect the brilliantly colored birds that winter in the mountain forests there.

“We returned home inspired by the work under way to save birds,” the Gyllenhaals write. “We met folks who ruin their knees scrambling along dangerous cliffs, agonize over algorithms, confront adversaries at gunpoint and sometimes get their eyebrows singed off. They welcomed us into their lives for days at a time and shared their hopes, frustrations, and determinations.

Taken together, their experiences help make the case for birds — not only as nature’s workhorses and cultural icons, but as living bellwethers of the environment at a pivotal time.”

If you care about the birds in your midst — those in plain sight as well as those not so easy to see — A Wing and a Prayer is a must read.

“The Three Billion Bird Study stripped all mystery from the troubled state of the hemisphere’s birdscape,” the Gyllenhaals conclude. “There’s still time to respond, but that time is now. It’s clear what steps are making a difference and what will help avoid another half-century like the last one. Halting the collapse of our birds will not be easy. But as the scores of researchers, birders, wildlife experts, hunters and philanthropists are proving every day, a turnaround is within reach if we’ll listen to what the birds are telling us.” OH

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades. She has covered city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.

The Omnivorous Reader

Heart of a Poet

Time, place and eternity meet in Indigo Field

By Stephen E. Smith

On this sunny late-March afternoon, Marjorie Hudson occupies rarefied space: She’s standing in the footprints of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe, reading from her beautifully wrought first novel, Indigo Field, at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities. Her bright eyes (they might be blue or green; the afternoon light plays tricks) stare out from a shock of white hair (she’s accurately penned the description “white-blonde hair” for a character in her novel), and she’s smiling the smile of one who’s realized her dream via pure, implacable determination. In the words of Keats, she’s surprised everyone, including herself, with “a fine excess,” writing that strikes the reader almost as a remembrance. Now all she has to do is sell her masterwork. The literary world needs to know about Indigo Field, and readers need to snatch it off bookstore shelves or download it online.

Hudson is a Midwesterner who settled in North Carolina by way of a lengthy sojourn in Washington, D.C., where she worked for a nature magazine that kept her indoors much of the time. “We all worked such long hours we hardly got to go outside,” she says. “All it took for me to jump ship was a visit to a friend (in North Carolina), a rainbow over a farmhouse, and I was hooked. My days were full of freelance writing assignments, sunbathing in the yard, gardening, and pond swimming. Whippoorwills chanted outside my window, a sound I’d never heard before. When frogs took over the pond one night in a massive mating ritual, it was better than any nature documentary.”

Thus Indigo Field evolved into a decidedly Southern novel featuring Southern characters immersed in a regional history that emphasizes a strong sense of place. Even so, there’s no forced, ersatz Southernisms in her dialogue, no Hollywood “y’alls,” and, thank God, there’s not a subhuman Faulknerian Snopes in sight. Her characters speak authentically, and they never propagate a phony gesture. Somehow she’s acquired the ability to absorb the Southern landscape she’s adopted as home.

She came by this invaluable knowledge by happening into the perfect job. “One of the many freelance jobs I took to pay the rent was copy-editing novels at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill,” she says. “I had never read much Southern lit before, and reading the novels of Clyde Edgerton and Jill McCorkle, and the stories of Lee Abbott and Larry Brown was like going to grad school. How a novel all fit together was fascinating. How a short story was constructed was beautiful. And the language! I was learning the rhythms of speech and turns of phrase from my neighbors, my new husband, and these stories. I turned to my computer and started a story of my own.”

Hudson’s prose style is clear and concise, and she preserves a delicate balance of empathy for characters who come alive with startling authenticity. Her leapfrogging plot turns sustain the story’s energy and propel the reader ever forward. The Regal House Publishing promotional material provides an accurate precis. “In this novel of moral reckoning, the unjust outcome of a murder trial, and the chance accident that follows, result in a feud that raises the spirits of the dead, forcing enemies to become allies in order to survive.”

Good enough. But the novel’s beauty is more than fancy footwork, deft plotting and the able handling of points of view. Hudson writes with the heart of a poet. Her prose has been worked on (in the best sense) to get rid of that worked-on feeling. Take this transitional passage from Chapter 49: “This great wind rode the eye of a rogue hurricane and spun out lightning and whirlwinds like warriors of a great army. These warriors flattened all they touched, and chose what they touched with care. They touched the new homes of wealthy people and left the old derelict home of Poolesville, the farmhouses of widows, the trailer parks of the destitute, damaged but still standing. The wind brought lightning strikes so pervasive that many small fires lit rooftops, tall trees and last year’s broomsedge in Indigo Field. . . . This wind skipped from high spot to high spot, so that places that had been raised up were laid low, and places that were low and humble remained intact.”

The writing of Indigo Field took up almost 30 years of Hudson’s life — with time out to write and publish an acclaimed short story collection, Accidental Birds of the Carolinas, and a history/travelogue, Searching for Virginia Dare. “I had 450 pages (of the novel) by 1998, but I didn’t know how to end it and I knew it needed revision.” She set Indigo Field aside, finished a different novel, sent it out, got discouraged, went to graduate school, and all the while the novel kept getting longer and longer. Hudson recalls: “I kept adding layers of things I was fascinated with: parrot colonies, Nike missile sites, archeology. As it got longer and longer, unbeknown to me, New York’s acceptable novel length had gotten shorter and shorter. It was roundly rejected.” So Hudson turned to a small press, Regal House Publishing in Raleigh. Regal reminded her of Algonquin in the old days: “Small, feisty, locally owned. I even knew one of the editors,” she says. “I submitted my 50 pages. They asked for the rest. I got the call a couple of months later. I was still revising. Cutting mostly. I had a whole new version by the time Jaynie called and said ‘Yes.’”

Indigo Field was chosen to be part of Regal’s “Sour Mash Series,” a selection of books centered on the American South’s sense of place and history. Hudson was in the place described by Flannery O’Connor: “The Southern writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet.” After living in North Carolina for almost 40 years, Hudson is a Southern writer, and she’s pretty proud of that.

She’s come a distance, a far piece, to stand before an audience at the Weymouth Center — and all the other audiences she’ll be entertaining in the months to come. She has a novel to sell. It’s demanding work, but Marjorie Hudson is surely up to the task. PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards.

2023 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

Courage and Candor

Daniel Wallace’s thought-provoking memoir

By Stephen E. Smith

If you read the promo material for Daniel Wallace’s new memoir, This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew, you’ll assume the message is straightforward: Hero worship is an exercise in disillusion. But the “hero” in Wallace’s memoir isn’t a hero in the accepted sense (the sociological definition for “significant other” is a more accurate term); and the message, although essential and timely, is predictably ambiguous.

Wallace is the author of the bestselling novel, Big Fish, and six other much-praised works of fiction, and the qualities evident in his earlier works are perfectly transferable to his first foray into nonfiction. He crafts a compelling narrative that pulls the reader headlong into a story whose energy never wanes. He’s thoughtful and thought-provoking. He makes sense of the past in order to free the reader to face the future, and he writes with courage and candor.

Wallace introduces his hero, his future brother-in-law, William Nealy, in a scene where he happens upon Nealy attempting a perilous leap from the rooftop of the family home into a swimming pool 25 feet below. Nealy takes flight, plunges into the water, climbs out and repeats the jump over and over. “It was pretty magnificent,” Wallace writes. “It wasn’t some unformed idea I had about masculinity or manliness in him that I was drawn to; I wasn’t into that, then or now. It was just the wildness, the derring-do, his willingness to take flight — literally — into the unknown, an openness to experience and chance that so far in my short life had not been previously modeled to me by anyone.” Wallace admits that he didn’t need to emulate Nealy’s behavior but that he learned “. . . how to become the me I wanted,” and that he would think of that day — he was 12 at the time — as the moment he was born again.

The first third of Wallace’s memoir is a biography of Nealy’s short life: his need for constant adrenalin highs, his success as a cartoonist and writer, his marriage to Wallace’s sister, their loving but troubled relationship, and how Nealy’s example encouraged Wallace to become something other than a cliché — not a writer, but someone “demonstrably unique, amusing,” someone living on the fringes.

Following Nealy’s example Wallace threw himself into several unsatisfying pursuits, eventually settling on the writing of fiction — the telling of quirky tales in which nothing is as it seems — that led to the success of Big Fish.

The Nealys settled near Chapel Hill, where they purchased a large tract of wooded land and William built a house, wrote books and produced cartoons and maps about the challenges of outdoor life. In the context of contemporary existence — the use of drugs and alcohol notwithstanding — it all seemed idyllic, skewed perfection in a humdrum world that was constantly encroaching. But that encroachment became all-consuming when a close mutual friend, Edgar Hitchcock, a drug dealer whom Wallace characterizes as “the kindest man I have ever met, so smart, funny and loving,” a dealer who confesses that “selling drugs is the final frontier,” is murdered.

The second part of the memoir centers on the mystery surrounding Hitchcock’s death. Nealy became obsessed with finding the man who murdered his friend, and the road led almost immediately to a likely suspect. Relying on simple intuition, Nealy was able to identify the culprit when he first shook his hand. “It was a notion that would be lodged into the marrow of his very being and would not be dislodged, not ever, not for as long as he lived.”

For purposes of the memoir, the suspect’s name is Stanley, a personable enough acquaintance whom Nealy “befriended” in an attempt to discover the truth surrounding Hitchcock’s murder. When Hitchcock’s body was discovered five months after his disappearance, Stanley began to subtly reveal his culpability.

It’s a long and tangled tale that leads to Stanley’s indictment and his eventual release because of convoluted legal circumstances that hindered prosecution. Nealy was powerless to avenge his friend’s murder, and his continuing obsession with the unpunished culprit damaged his marriage to Wallace’s sister. For one of the few times in his adult life, Nealy found himself powerless to influence events. His need to control the uncontrollable becomes apparent in a brief journal entry: “My whole life has been a struggle against the world to preserve my ‘being’ and it’s put me in dire conflict with the people I love . . . I MUST NOT LET THEM SEE WHO I REALLY AM!”

Nealy committed suicide in his early 40s, Wallace’s sister died in 2011, and Wallace inherited their ashes and Nealy’s journals, leaving him to piece together the events that led to his friend’s tragic end. The journal entries aren’t particularly revealing, but one laconic passage exposes the source of Nealy’s recklessness. Nealy’s hero, a Scoutmaster, sexually assaulted him while at summer camp. Nothing more is revealed about the encounter — and what more needs to be said? A physical dissociation from oneself is the inevitable outcome of such a traumatic event and might explain Nealy’s reckless behavior.

Wallace is left to manage his grief and grapple with the psychological pain suffered when the person upon whom he modeled his life proved himself fallible. He eventually comes to what he believes is a satisfactory understanding of William Nealy’s life and death, but that solution isn’t simple or straightforward. There are no easy answers — and the conundrum remains: What becomes of us when our significant other stumbles? “Can we ever know why we are who we are,” he writes, “the recipe that makes us the unique, bewildering, beautiful and sometimes insane creatures we end up becoming?”

Wallace doesn’t shy from the final truth: There are many ways to die — murder, suicide, illness — and he’s philosophical about the state in which we find ourselves: “. . . there appear to be no safe places left in the world, on our streets or in our hearts.” How true are those simple words?

This Isn’t Going to End Well is not an easy or uplifting read, but it is a memoir borne of intense experience and introspection, which is the only available panacea for what troubles us. Suicide is a perilous subject for the writer and the reader, but Wallace acknowledges that contemplating the taking of one’s life is the most damaging secret a person can have. The “Author’s Note” lists The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number. PS

2023 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

Hitting the High Notes

A debut novel delivers a musical thriller

By Anne Blythe

Brendan Slocumb’s literary debut, The Violin Conspiracy has been billed as a mystery, a musical thriller that takes readers across continents on a page-turning hunt for a valuable Stradivarius violin. While the story is suspenseful enough, the whodunnit is not much of a mind-boggler in the end. The true hair-raiser revealed in this coming-of-age story is the institutional racism that persists in the classical music world and the talented musicians of color these stubborn customs threaten to mute.

Slocumb is familiar with the story. He grew up in Fayetteville, received a degree in music education from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and has performed in symphonies, where he typically is one of few Black men playing a violin.

Only 1.8 percent of musicians performing in classical symphonies are Black, Slocumb writes in an author’s note attached to the end of the novel. Only 12 percent are people of color.

“Music is for everyone,” Slocumb writes. “It’s not — or at least shouldn’t be — an elite aristocratic club that you need a membership card to appreciate: it’s a language, it’s a means of connecting us that’s beyond color, beyond race, beyond the shape of your face or the size of your stock portfolio.

“Musicians of color, however, are severely underrepresented in the classical music world — and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to write this book.”

Readers are plunged into the story of Rayquan “Ray” McMillan, Slocumb’s protagonist, in a New York hotel room “the morning of the worst most earth-shattering day” of his life.

The aspiring violinist orders scrambled eggs, juice and coffee from room service for him and his girlfriend. Lost in thought in the shower, he ponders the fingering of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto, the piece he plans to play almost a month later at an international competition. When he prepares to leave New York on a flight home to Charlotte, he discovers that inside the case that typically holds his nearly priceless violin — a Stradivarius his grandmother (unaware of its immense worth) had given to him as her grandfather’s old fiddle — was a white Chuck Taylor shoe with a ransom note on a sheet of paper folded in thirds.

SEND $5 MILLION

IN BITCOIN FROM BISQ

TO WALLET 34U69AAV89872

Not only does the note launch an international investigation into the whereabouts of the violin, it serves as the instrument to delve back into Ray’s boyhood and the school music classes that changed the trajectory of his life.

Like Slocumb, Ray grew up in North Carolina in a family that expected him to “get a real paying job” instead of taking a path toward a classical music career in a world where few people looked like him. Instead of encouraging her son to follow his dreams, Ray’s mother told him to “stop with that noise,” take the GED and get a job at Popeyes so he could help with the family expenses.

Ray meets a music teacher who becomes a mentor who pushes him beyond such confining expectations and encourages him to join a world where he would be the quintessential underdog, an endearing and hardworking protagonist who is easy for readers to rally behind.

Ray’s grandmother, Nora, recognizes his affinity for music and pulls out an old “fiddle” from her closet for him to practice on in the summer, when the school rentals were not available. It had belonged to her grandfather, a former enslaved man, who had a musical gift, too.

That “fiddle,” spruced up and revealed for what it was, quickly drew interest from extended family members who were more interested in its value than in Ray — until he became a rising star in the classical music world and a bit of a media darling able to coax a better living than they had imagined from its strings. Not only does his own family seek to share in the value of the instrument, Ray has to fend off claims of ownership from the family that had enslaved his great-great-grandfather. None of them appreciates the questioning they face when Ray’s dilemma casts suspicion on them all.

As Ray frets over the whereabouts of his kidnapped violin, leaving most of the investigation to law enforcement and an insurance agent, he also has to continue practicing for the international Tchaikovsky competition. His musical talent transcends the bow and strings in his hands. Even without his prized hand-me-down, the unlikely competitor is a real contender, one who will not be held back by ransom notes and side dramas.

Through a cast of characters, some better developed than others, readers learn about the jockeying of musicians in the classical world, vying for bragging rights that come with lucrative invitations to perform solos and lead prestigious symphonies. Ray describes the difficulties that a Black artist — especially one from humble roots without exclusive connections from famous conservatories — faces as he pursues his passion.

“You work twice as hard,” Slocumb writes. “Even three times. For the rest of your life. It’s not fair, but that’s how it is. Some people will always see you as less than they are. So you have to be twice as good as them.”

Ray didn’t need his PopPop’s instrument on the international stage. Though the kidnapped Stradivarius remained missing during the competition, his talent shone brightly. As opportunities from around the world came his way, he got the clue that helped him — not the team of investigators he’d relied on — discover who slipped the sneaker into the violin case.

There’s a crescendo when Ray opens a door, testing his theory about who made off with the family heirloom. “PopPop’s fiddle — his own most prized Stradivarius violin — grinned up at him unharmed,” Slocum writes. “Perfect.”

In the end, without totally spoiling the whodunnit, it really doesn’t matter where the violin is throughout the pages of Slocumb’s mystery. Its presence and absence string together a tale that will strike a chord. PS

2023 Department Omnivorous Reader

The Omnivorous Reader

Finding Dylan

A riddle wrapped in a rhyme

By Stephen E. Smith

I lied to my mother, told her I was spending the night with a friend, and at 3 p.m. I climbed into a VW bug with two high school buds and blasted up the 200-plus miles of interstate to New York City’s Greenwich Village. We’d been listening to “Like a Rolling Stone” that summer, and we were determined to find Bob Dylan. We were confident he’d be hanging out in the Village, and as we milled about on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, I asked a bohemian passerby where Dylan was performing. He laughed in my face. “Good luck finding that guy,” he said.

Like most of my generation, I’ve been half-heartedly looking for Dylan ever since.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? Who is Bob Dylan, and why have we been talking about him for the last six decades? I’ve listened to most of his recordings, watched Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home multiple times and read books by and about him. I’ve even seen him in concert. Now there’s a new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, supposedly penned by the man himself, and the search continues.

Since Dylan is credited as the author, The Philosophy of Modern Song is an instant bestseller, and there are reviews galore in magazines, newspapers and online that will tell you exactly what you want to hear about the enigmatic songwriter’s literary efforts. But before committing myself to read all 350 pages, I had to be convinced that it was written by Dylan. After all, the guy has been known to mess with us. There were accusations that he borrowed lines in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech from Melville and a brouhaha about autopen-signed copies of the new book. So I plowed through the first five chapters, reread parts of Dylan’s Chronicles and watched the Scorsese film, paying attention to Dylan’s language patterns. And, yeah, what’s written in the book sounds like Dylan. His name is on the dust jacket. I trust Simon & Schuster. Dylan wrote the book.

Here’s what you need to know. First, there’s not an iota of philosophy in The Philosophy of Modern Song. If you’re looking for philosophical thought, pick up a copy of The Essential Kierkegaard. Dylan is all about pop music, and in this latest offering, he’s simply chosen songs about which he’s passionate and written semi-expository/semi-poetic essays (I use the terms “essay” and “poetic” loosely) to accompany the songs. He’s no great shakes as a prose stylist, but he makes up for his lack of finesse with unbridled enthusiasm. He’s fervent about the songs he likes (or loves) and he tells the reader why in a torrent of bewildering but compelling prose.

Dylan has chosen more than 60 popular songs, and in chapters ranging in length from a few hundred to 3,000 words, he lauds the composers, singers and musicians who created the recordings.

It’s impossible to identify a dominant musical style in Dylan’s selection — pop, rock, country, R&B, folk, jazz, soul, rockabilly, gospel, etc. — all are represented. And there’s a mishmash of performers — Bing Crosby, The Fugs, Elvis Presley, Perry Como, Webb Pierce, Tommy Edwards, Vic Damone, Dean Martin, Little Walter, Ernie K-Doe, Charlie Poole, Ricky Nelson. He is, as pop-culture aficionados are wont to say, all over the musical map.

Dylan’s essays follow no discernible pattern. He’s occasionally analytical but more often gushes torrents of expressionistic prose that imperturbable readers are left to interpret. Uncle Dave Mason’s enchanting “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy,” originally released as a single almost a century ago, is typical of Dylan’s approach to explicating a song.

“In this song your self-identities are interlocked, every one of you is a dead ringer for the other. You’re the Dalai Lama, the Black Monk and the Thief of Baghdad all rolled into one, and the whole world is your city. You’re prowling and shoplifting, going down the East End, back where you came from, to the wilderness and brush — back to Chinatown and Little Italy — saddlebags full of barley and cornbread, rosemary and ivy, and sides of bacon in your pocket. You’re unmuzzled and unleashed, nightwalkin’ up the crooked way, the Royal Road, stealing turkey legs and anything sweet and spicy, roaming through the tobacco fields like Robin Hood, broiling and braising everything in sight.”

Occasionally, Dylan steps from behind his curtain of words and lapses into playfully preposterous insights. He claims Marty Robbins’ classic “El Paso” as a song about genocide; he attacks the divorce business; and he lauds Nudie Suits and the supernatural powers of blue suede shoes.

When explicating Waylon Jennings’ “I’ve Always Been Crazy,” he dredges up a piece of history as a metaphor: “. . . and the individual peculiarities of the human condition are sliced as thin as a serving of potato during the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. Which some people will, no doubt, also view as politically incorrect caricature even though the potato was a cheap staple of the Irish population and was decimated by a fungus that destroyed half the crop in 1845.”

This didactic passage isn’t necessary — anyone who reads Dylan is probably familiar with the Irish Potato Famine — but Dylan can’t abandon his clever illustration and goes on to mix the metaphor with drugs, rabbit meat and buckshot: “People try different ways to insulate themselves as their nerves are rubbed raw — there are various mood-altering substances, some self-prescribed, others classified by the government and only available by prescription. None of these are precise — they are more akin to buckshot than to a sniper’s bullet. And though they can be helpful, anyone who has hunted with a shotgun will tell you, you might enjoy the rabbit but you’re gonna spend a certain amount of time biting down on buckshot.” It’s difficult to imagine Dylan taking time from his “Never Ending Tour” to hunt rabbits, and we’re left to wonder if he’s taken to heart the chorus of Jennings’ song regarding his status as popstar: “I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from going insane.”

In the final analysis, we should simply step back and consider Dylan’s jumbled Kerouac-ish prose as one might behold Picasso’s Guernica, not so much as individual lines of text but as a holistic composition, an attempt to transfer emotion and energy without the encumbrance of form.

Even if you’re not a Bob Dylan fan — and there are a lot of you out there — you can make The Philosophy of Modern Song an entertaining and enlightening read. Here’s what you should do. Make sure your smart speaker has a subscription to a streaming music service such as Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, etc., then kick back in your easy chair and start reading Dylan’s chapter on Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City.” Call up the song on your speaker. Read along to the music. If much of what you read strikes you as nonsensical, Dylan’s wry, incongruous humor will nonetheless impregnate your cerebrum. Expect the unexpected. As Dylan sang so many years ago: “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.” PS

2023 Department Omnivorous Reader

The Omnivorous Reader

Cozy Up

A mellow mystery on the Outer Banks

By Anne Blythe

Smile Beach may be a fictional spot on the imaginary Cattail Island, but in Smile Beach Murder, cozy mystery writer Alicia Bessette captures the real spirit of the Outer Banks, where the residents have a strong and often quirky sense of self-reliance and, at the same time, a profound need for community.

That connection is built around such places as the MotherVine Bookshop, Meek’s hardware store, the Cattail Crier office, the old lighthouse and inside the island natives’ homes, where the “inlanders” are referred to as dingbatters.

“Cattail Island is known for its beaches,” Bessette writes in the voice of her narrator. “The eastside ones evoke the covers of summer escape novels — windswept dunes sloping in fine sands, and beyond, the vast Atlantic. The westside beaches, including Smile Beach, feature the shallow, gentle waves of the Pamlico Sound. Unless of course there’s a storm.”

Callie Padgett, the protagonist, is a 38-year-old reporter freshly laid off from the Charlotte Times caught up in a storm of her own who has returned home to live with her uncle while she searches for another journalism job. She quickly gets swept up in a mystery when Eva Meeks, a beguiling eccentric whose family owns the local hardware store, is found lifeless at the base of the Cattail Lighthouse. Local police and others quickly label the death a suicide.

Callie is not convinced and begins her own sleuthing as a reporter hungry for a good story. We soon learn that Callie’s mother was found dead at the bottom of the same lighthouse 26 years earlier, an incident that prompted her to flee the island as soon as she was old enough.

Now she is back.

The feelings she has tried to bury for so many years resurface in a mystery about coming home, finding roots and finally getting to a place where they bring pride and allow for reinvention of oneself.

Cozy mysteries are a sub-genre of crime fiction that leave out the violence, darkness and sex that often accompany more hard-boiled whodunits. Always fast-paced, and sometimes lighthearted, they put readers in working detective mode trying to solve the pending conundrum alongside the protagonist.

In Smile Beach Murder, the launch of the Outer Banks Bookshop Mystery series, Callie vows to Summer, the 12-year-old daughter of Eva Meeks, that she will leave no clue unturned as she explores old haunts and new twists in this summertime narrative.

Bessette, a former newspaper reporter, poet and pianist who moved to the Outer Banks with her husband and fellow author Matthew Quick, gives a nod to mystery writers such as Mary Higgins Clark by having her protagonist work at the MotherVine Bookshop. The poetry and music come out in Bessette’s writing.

When Callie bangs on the door of a papered-up old storefront not far from the MotherVine, and encounters Toby Dodge, a former physical education teacher who moved to the island to open the Cattail Family Martial Arts School, Bessette writes: “His voice was musical, like if an upright bass could speak.” Elsewhere she writes, “Outside dusk leaked from the sky, pewter dripping into apricot . . . “

Bessette captures the sense of the Outer Banks from the very beginning of the book. “This barrier island, nine miles long, is shaped like a cattail, whip thin except for the wide part, three miles across,” she writes. “The wide part’s where most of the dwellings are, bungalow-style rental cottages and modest cedar-shake stilt homes. The southern end of Cattail Island curves slightly westward, allowing a glimpse of the lighthouse even from where I sit in the Elder Tree.”

Whether we’re with Callie on the thick and all-knowing Spanish-moss-draped branches of the Elder Tree or on madcap adventures and treasure hunts, we smell the maritime forests, peer into the waters below the rickety fishing pier and get to know Cattail Island’s cast of flawed but lovable characters.

It’s easy to embrace Uncle Hudson, Ronnie and Antoinette, the bookstore owner — all members of a group that had adventures together in the Old Farts Van, a vehicle Hudson fixed up himself when he was a young surfer. Tin Man, the bookstore cat, is Insta-famous with a delightful Instagram account the whole town seems to follow.

We cheer Callie on as she climbs over the sharp, iron-speared gate to dig into the story that Pearleen, the wealthy woman in the mansion beyond the gate, and her dutiful nephew Whitman have kept to themselves for years. Indeed, she leads us to a big breakthrough — a reveal that truly is a surprise ending.

There are times when Callie breaks into buildings and ignores boundaries that typically would not be crossed by journalists. Then again, without her making quick assumptions, pushing boundaries and beating the police to the answer of whether the Cattail Lighthouse is cursed, we would lose access to an alluring mystery that keeps us hunting for answers to the very end. PS

2022 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

Watergate Revisited

A thorough look at the end of our political innocence

By Stephen E. Smith

If you don’t believe history can turn on insignificant details, consider this: The political firestorm known as Watergate was precipitated by a piece of cheap tape. In his Watergate: A New History, Garrett M. Graff, a former editor of Politico Magazine, has gathered the particulars of America’s most infamous political scandal into an 800-page history that thoroughly examines the minutiae that brought down the 37th president.

If you’re among the millions of Americans born after the Watergate scandal, here’s what you need to know. In the early hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C., discovered that duct tape had been used to ensure that a couple of doors remained unlocked. The guard called the cops, and five officers disguised as hippies apprehended five men in suits and charged them with attempted burglary. It was the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency and America’s political naivete.

If you suffered through those troubled times — June 1972 to August 1974 — you’re probably wondering if another Watergate history is necessary. Given the number of books, articles, documentaries and movies that have investigated every possible facet of the Watergate debacle, it’s difficult to imagine the need for a retelling, but once you’ve begun your retrospective journey in Graff’s “new” history, there’s no turning back. You may think you know all there is to know about Watergate but you don’t.

Graff is a proficient storyteller and an able prose stylist, and he excels at breathing new life into characters who have dimmed with time — E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, Chuck Colson, Donald Segretti, John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, John Mitchell, John Dean, Jeb Magruder, et al. — and the journalists, senators, congressmen, wives and government employees whose lives were altered by the scandal that sent 25 of Nixon’s cronies to prison. To do this, Graff plowed through the published accounts, oral histories, the Oval Office tape transcripts, as well as FBI, court and congressional records. His objective was to “re-investigate.”

“I believed from the start,” he writes, “that the full story of this scandal didn’t lie in the umpteenth interview, fifty years after the fact, with a key player who had already spent decades telling, refining, and positioning his story.”

Graff is particularly adept at reintroducing readers to lesser-known Watergaters. L. Patrick Gray, acting director of the FBI from May 3, 1972 to April 27, 1973, is a case in point. For most Americans, he remains an insignificant figure in the scandal, but Graff fully explores Gray’s character — especially his overriding desire to become director of the FBI — and his failings, including his admission that he’d destroyed documents taken from Hunt’s safe. “Under questioning, Gray admitted he had regularly sent investigative reports to the White House via Dean,” Graff writes, “allowing the president’s staff access to files that (J. Edgar) Hoover had previously guarded.”

Likewise, Margaret Mitchell, the brash, outspoken, way-too-Southern wife of Attorney General John Mitchell, provided comic relief during the scandal, but Graff details her political insights and how she was ruthlessly attacked by members of the administration and her former husband. He recasts her as a perceptive and outspoken critic who was harassed and demeaned by Nixon’s henchmen.

Al Haig, famous for having blurted “I’m in control here” after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, became Nixon’s chief of staff when Haldeman was fired. He had, in fact, taken control of the White House prior to the attempt on Reagan’s life: “. . . as Nixon retreated deeper mentally and physically while Watergate consumed his presidency, some would joke that Haig became the nation’s ‘37 1/2th’ president.”

Another minor player was Alexander Butterfield, the soft-spoken former Navy pilot who was the House committee’s first witness in its impeachment hearings. He testified for 10 hours, revealing the secret Oval Office taping system and reinforcing the notion that Nixon was too much of a control freak not to have known what was going on with his subordinates. Even Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods (remember the “the Rose Mary stretch”?) doesn’t escape scrutiny. She was certainly a player in the coverup, and there was speculation that she was a CIA informant.

Mark Felt, the FBI’s No. 2 official at the beginning of the scandal, is the frequent subject of Graff’s reporting. When writing their investigative stories in the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein identified their primary source as “Deep Throat,” but Felt wasn’t publicly outed until 2005, at age 91, when he revealed to Vanity Fair that he was Woodward and Bernstein’s informant. Ironically, Felt’s identity as an FBI mole was known to the Nixon administration as soon as Woodward and Bernstein began to write about the white-collar criminals who facilitated Nixon’s cover-up operation.

The questions that don’t get answered are the most obvious: Why did a serving president who was a shoo-in for a second term employ widespread illegality to secure an election he was certain to win? Did the Democrats have dirt on Nixon? Was any advantage to be gained by eavesdropping on Democratic headquarters? Were the Watergate burglars — “the Plumbers,” as they were known in the administration — set up for failure? Since the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office yielded no useful information and the confusing circumstances of the ITT merger certainly went unnoticed by the electorate, why had Nixon and his minions continued their illegal activity? And there remains this overriding question: Why had Nixon insisted on recording Oval Office conversations when he knew he was speaking words that would eventually incriminate him?

Richard Nixon remains a shadowy figure in American history, and “gate” has become a convenient suffix for other scandals — most of them overblown or imaginary — but there’s no denying that Nixon’s political shenanigans changed us forever. Unfortunately, the lesson to be drawn from Watergate continues to elude most politicians. Any neighborhood gossip could tell them that in political life there are no secrets, finally or ever. PS

2022 Department Omnivorous Reader

The Omnivorous Reader

Little Press Success

Big things can come in small packages

By Stephen E. Smith

Since its founding by professor Ronald Bayes in 1969, St. Andrews Press at St. Andrews University in Laurinburg has earned a reputation as one of the most consistent and persistent small presses in the country — which is no insignificant accomplishment considering that the average small press has a lifespan of five years. Within the last few months, under the editorship of Ted Wojtasik, the press has released two books that deserve a wide audience. The first is Ruth Moose’s The Goings on at Glen Arbor Acres, a collection of interrelated stories about life in an assisted living facility.

Moose has long been a creative force in the North Carolina writing community. She has published two novels as well as numerous collections of short stories and poetry. Her work has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal and Our State magazine, and she taught for 15 years on the Creative Writing faculty at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Moose’s latest collection will not disappoint readers who are seeking to escape the everyday stress of politics and pandemic surges, neither of which is mentioned in these stories. There may be “goings on” aplenty at Glen Arbor Acres, but only of a benign nature. In “The Major’s Gun,” a character observes: “You have to be so careful around this place. One misheard word and the gossip goes rampant” — which is pretty much the source of the collection’s recurring conflicts.

Moreover, readers won’t be troubled by stories about characters who undergo overwhelming misfortunes that culminate in disasters of epic proportions. Glen Arbor is no Keseyesque Cuckoo’s Nest. There’s no Nurse Ratched in the medication room, no physical or verbal combat, no racial utterances to be heard, or even a mildly offensive exclamation that might raise a wary eyebrow. Moose’s slice-of-life stories simply offer readers a window into the everyday dilemmas of Glen Arbor’s elderly residents who eat, drink and sleep in the gossipy microcosm where fate has deposited them. If they are allowed enough freedom to cause a mild degree of mischief, they’re always on the lookout for a new source of intrigue. They’ve identified an antagonist, Miss Anne Blackmore Rae (Miss ABR aka Always Be Right), the director of Glen Arbor, and a male protagonist, the Major, a resident who functions as an authority figure who might right trifling wrongs, a tired old god the ladies can turn to in times of emotional discomfort.

Moose focuses on her characters’ foibles and eccentricities — there is a nudist yoga teacher, a wig maker, a troll-like man who intrudes himself into the ladies’ daily walks, and the mystery of the director’s runaway dog who may or may not be dead. The most “teachable” story involves a resident who submits a poem to a national poetry contest and is notified by mail that she is a finalist who should attend a dinner meeting to receive her award. Of course, it’s a scam perpetrated on the unsuspecting — in this case, the elderly — but the aspiring poet buys a new dress and attends the ceremony. She doesn’t win (there’s a surprise), but she’s received by her peers at Glen Arbor as a literary luminary, proof that there is success to be had in the waning years, and that good friends value us for who we are, not for what we do.

There’s a good deal of irony and wit in Moose’s stories, even if her characters don’t see themselves as the object of humor, even when the situation and context are obviously comic, and readers will find themselves amused and charmed by her subtly crafted narratives.

Another recent St. Andrews Press publication, Collected Poems of Marty Silverthorne, is justification enough for supporting small presses. Silverthorne died in 2019, and it’s unlikely, regardless of his talents as a poet, that a mainstream or university press would publish a book by an author who isn’t around to promote it at readings and in bookstores.

As a poet, Silverthorne had talent and perseverance to spare. He devoted himself to writing verse while working for 30 years as a counselor for persons suffering from alcohol and drug addiction. Left a quadriplegic after a motorcycle accident in 1976, he faithfully dictated his poems to a caregiver and companion, and until the pandemic, he was a steadfast participant at regular meetings of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Silverthorne is a “plain language” poet. His poems are straightforward retellings of the events that shaped his life, the loss and redemption, the small pleasures he experiences, the troubles and pain a person in his predicament suffers, as in “Inside of Me,” where the poet muses on what others expect of him after accepting his disability: Inside of me you expected to find/a motorcycle wrapped around a tree,/whiskey bottles beside the road./You did not expect to find daffodils/blooming in a pine thicket,/crape myrtles close enough/to threaten their beauty//Inside of me you expected to find/the soiled pages of Penthouse./You did not expect Yeats and Keats/on a linen table cloth,/one large candle with a wavering flame,/a bottle of chardonnay.

Much of Silverthorne’s later poetry was written while mourning the loss of his wife, as in “Delicate Ashes:” . . . Back at home our neighbor held you in his hands,/his fingers around the beautiful blue bowl/of your body, the delicate ashes of your life . . .

Silverthorne makes rich and various uses of rhetorical devices — humor, anger, wit, irony, and juxtapositions of conflicting and indecorous feelings. In doing so, he has left readers with a rich record of a life lived to the fullest despite almost overwhelming adversity.

We are fortunate that St. Andrews Press and other small presses continue to publish books that might otherwise, for reasons unrelated to literary quality, go unread. The pandemic has hit little presses hard. Readings at bookstores and arts organizations have dropped off, and live audiences are difficult to gather in dangerous times. If you’d like to encourage small press publishing, buy their books. Poets and Writers magazine lists over 370 such literary entities that desperately need our support. PS

2022 Department Omnivorous Reader

The Omnivorous Reader

Hanging Judge

A Carolina courtroom whodunit

By Anne Blythe

If you spend much time in courthouses in North Carolina, you begin to see the complex fabric of their communities.

It might be one thread, one story, one case at a time but, eventually, the many threads are stitched together into a complex tapestry. Katherine Burnette, a district court judge from Oxford who rose to the bench as a former federal and state prosecutor, pulls back the curtain on small-town North Carolina and its dramas in her debut novel, Judge’s Waltz.

It may be fiction, but the storyline created by the attorney-turned-writer — while seemingly over the top at the start — is rooted in insider knowledge from someone who has been in and out of North Carolina courthouses for much of her career.

“Barely audible above the hum of the ancient air conditioner came the creak, creak, creak of the thick rope affixed to the brass chandelier,” writes Burnette in the opening of her mystery. “Swaying ten feet above the intricately carved, pre-Civil War bench, the Honorable Patrick Ryan O’Shea had adjourned to a higher court.”

We quickly find out that O’Shea was not universally revered, nor was he a jurist with great legal acumen. His knack was kissing up to a certain professor in his third year of law school and following suit with a wide swath of politicians who helped him get coveted judicial seats.

“Not noted for his weighty opinions from the bench, O’Shea had come to be noted for the weighty politicians who stood behind him and his bid for a higher court,” Burnette writes. “Apparently, these politicians had garnered their strength and their favors to foist O’Shea upon the unsuspecting Fourth Circuit court.”

O’Shea never got there. His last dance, so to speak, was hanging in a federal courtroom in the Eastern District of North Carolina in nothing more than his black robe. “The only thing that O’Shea could do — was doing — was a slow discordant waltz at the end of a long rope,” Burnette says in her prologue.

The pages of the novel are sprinkled with humor and wit as we meet Buck Davis, the folksy lawyer from Oxford who is tapped by the chief judge in the Eastern District to sort through O’Shea’s cases as Katie O’Connor, an FBI agent Davis remembers fondly from high school, leads the investigation into the judge’s death.

Burnette deftly describes the country roads between Granville County and Raleigh, where the judge’s chambers were. She takes readers into drugstores, restaurants, courthouses and other places that will seem familiar to anyone who has experienced the slower hum of Granville County or the bustling halls of power in the capital city.

You can almost smell the drugstore coffee brewing and taste the Southern food being dished up as the suspense builds over how and why Judge O’Shea found himself suspended from that ceiling. “Today’s courtroom deals were made in the few minutes it took to eat a sausage biscuit,” Burnette writes.

The cast of characters includes Jeb, Buck’s brother, who battles demons from opioid addiction; Walter A. Johnson, the Granville County detective who went to high school with Jeb; and Mary Frances Margaret O’Shea, the widow of the lifeless judge, who does not seem to grieve her loss at all.

Even the relatively minor characters who come and go throughout the mystery are memorable, like the waitress, Wanda, who saunters up to Buck and Katie in the Oak Room with a pencil behind her ear and her weight balanced “on one polyester-clad hip.” The Oxford restaurant is where Buck and Katie often end up as they develop not only their case but also a budding romance.

Wanda gives the couple a dose of reality about the menu choices. There is no wine list, Wanda informs Katie. The choice is strictly by color, red or white. And don’t ask for an exotic imported beer, either. Buck settles for a Miller High Life.

Burnette writes, “Wanda scribbled something on her pad and strolled away. ‘One red, one champagne,’ she hollered to the bartender, confusing Katie.

“‘I didn’t know they served champagne,’ Katie told Buck. ‘No,’ Buck explains. ‘She means the Miller. You know champagne of beers.’”

The mystery of what happened to Judge O’Shea twists and turns as Burnette teases her readers with different scenarios.

Was it suicide?

Was it murder?

At whose hand?

And why?

Katie, Johnson and Buck — with a big assist from Jeb — help pull together the many threads as Burnette takes her readers on a journey to the surprise ending of a novel not only worth picking up but difficult to put down.

The verdict is in. It’s a whodunit and a page-turner that belongs on a summer reading list. PS

2022 Department Omnivorous Reader

The Omnivorous Reader

Follow the Money

Ben Franklin’s blueprint for America

By Stephen E. Smith

How is it possible that Ken Burns’ recent four-hour Ben Franklin documentary received ho-hum reviews? Have PBS devotees grown too familiar with Burns’ still-life voiceover production style? Maybe. But the lackluster reviews are more likely the fault of the kite-flying, bifocaled purveyor of the bon mot, old Ben Franklin himself. He’s every American’s everyman, the most human of our Founding Fathers.

We grew up learning about Franklin, and most of us believe we know what needs to be known about the archetypal American Renaissance man. Historian Michael Meyer’s Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet: The Favorite Founder’s Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife, and Blueprint for American Prosperity is a timely reminder that there is still much to learn about the influence Franklin continues to wield in 21st century America.

When he died in 1790 at the age of 84, Franklin was not universally mourned by his countrymen. Meyer reminds readers that George Washington and the Congress refused to acknowledge attempts by the French to express their condolences at Franklin’s passing, and John Adams had little good to say about his former diplomatic partner. Among his later detractors were Mark Twain, who wrote that Franklin “early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages”, and D.H. Lawrence reveled in revising and ridiculing Franklin’s 13 virtues.

Meyer’s primary focus is on the influence of Franklin’s last will and testament. William, Franklin’s first-born son who had sided with the British during the Revolution, was left worthless property and ephemera, and his daughter and grandchildren received gifts commensurate with the esteem in which he held them. But it was his “Codicil to Last Will and Testament,” a wordy but straightforward document, that morphed into a hydra-headed legal instrument that would vex administrators, the courts and politicians who attempted to oversee and control its ongoing disbursements.

Franklin established endowments for the cities of Philadelphia and Boston. “Having myself been bred to a manual art, printing, in my native town,” Franklin dictated, “and afterwards assisted to set up my business in Philadelphia by kind loans of money from two friends there, which was the foundation of my fortune, and of all the utility in life that may be ascribed to me, I wish to be useful even after my death, if possible, in forming and advancing other young men . . . .”

Franklin left each city £1,000, or about $133,000 in today’s dollars. The funds were intended to provide small loans to manual and industrial workers — cobblers, coopers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, etc. — to be repaid at 5 percent interest over a 10-year period. In addition to offering a helping hand for the socioeconomic class employed in manual labor, the funds’ underlying intention was to promote good citizenship. (“I have considered, that, among artisans, good apprentices are most likely to make good citizens,” Franklin wrote.) If the principal from the bequests were properly administered, the initial investment should have yielded billions in today’s dollars, making Franklin our first billionaire philanthropist.

So, what became of Franklin’s fortune, and where did his generosity lead us? Meyer follows the money, providing a decade-by-decade accounting of the funds’ expenditures while factoring in economic trends, poor oversight by fund managers, legal squabbles, political infighting, and losses incurred during national recessions and depressions.

All of which sounds incredibly boring. But be assured there’s nothing tedious about Meyer’s chronicle. What emerges is a lively and thoroughly researched social history of the country viewed through our evolving economic affluence and the increasingly litigious nature of American society.

The early ledgers read much like a personalized history of the country: “Turning the musty pages of each loan agreement can feel like reading an old swashbuckling story,” Meyer writes, “bringing the same sense of relief when the last line reveals that a character has made it through. Three cheers for the cabinetmaker Christopher Pigeon, who repaid his debt on time. And a compassionate wag of the head for Paul Revere’s son-in-law, one of only two Boston defaulters.”

Unfortunately, there was skullduggery aplenty in the management and disbursement of Franklin’s gifts. In 1838, Philadelphia’s Franklin Legacy treasurer John Thomason purchased Philadelphia Gas Works stock with Franklin’s bequest, thus impeding the money’s growth and transforming the fund into a tool of corruption and patronage. In 1890, Franklin’s descendants were so aggrieved they felt compelled to file a suit claiming that his bequests should revert to their control.

Boston did not suffer a similar level of financial chicanery. In 1827, William Minot, who administered the fund for 50 years, deposited much of Franklin’s principal into Nathaniel Bowditch’s Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company to acquire interest, thus enabling Boston’s fund balance to surpass Philadelphia’s for the first time. Beantown never trailed again.

In the final analysis, Franklin’s bequests accomplished very little of their original intent. In the days before central banking, loans were difficult to administer in an equitable manner, and many of the later loans suffered default or were not repaid on time. By 1882, Philadelphia had only about $10,000 left in its fund. Franklin had failed to factor in even a single default, and he had no way of foretelling the emergence of liberal credit terms and the growing availability of loans charging less than 5 percent interest. In 1994, the entirety of Boston’s Franklin fund went to the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology. The Philadelphia Foundation continues to manage its Franklin Trust Funds for its original purpose.

At this moment of intense political division and national soul searching, Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet is a timely reminder that we remain a generous people, and that philanthropy lives on in the hearts of ordinary Americans. The popularity of GoFundMe pages is the latest manifestation of our desire to help those in need, an example of the civic-mindedness exercised by the “good citizens” Franklin hoped to encourage. PS

2022 Department Omnivorous Reader