It was a hot and dismal day in Charlottesville, Virginia, in June 1815 as Thomas Jefferson watched the last of ten wagons carry away his entire personal library. His beloved 1744 edition of Cicero was headed north along with nearly 6,500 other volumes, and the Sage of Monticello was bereft. “I cannot live without books,” he wrote to John Adams shortly thereafter.
Liquidating his library had been a painful choice, but Jefferson had compelling inducements. For one, the former president was facing some $20,000 in debts, and the library would net him nearly $24,000. But Jefferson had a second motive: His books were bound for Washington, D.C., where they would become the cornerstone of the rebuilt Library of Congress, which the British Army had torched the previous year, along with everything else in the old Capitol. Jefferson was now the founding father of the nation’s restored library.
A product of the incarceration herself, Yamamoto’s stories focus on the camps, but also on the life of Japanese Americans after they were released, bringing a keen eye to the complex relationships that exist between first-generation Japanese Americans and their children. Perhaps what is most striking about Yamamoto’s stories, though, is how easily they could be written by a Japanese American author today, though many of them were written over fifty years ago, so focused are they on issues of race and the gendered expectations of women that still exist. Reading a Yamamoto story now makes you realize that her work was ahead of its time, but also that the struggles of the past are still with us in the present.
You should know, before you begin this journey, that “This Time Tomorrow” is a story about time travel. So prepare your suspension-of-disbelief mind muscles for the heavy lift. Or just settle in for the ride, confident that Emma Straub will conduct you to the welcoming place where fiction and wishful thinking align. There are plenty of signposts to ease your way.
Archaeologist and journalist Mike Pitts, who has studied the ruins for decades and co-directed excavations at the site, offers readers an in-depth assessment in “How To Build Stonehenge.” While he doesn’t try to answer the first question of why – writing that “imagination is the only limit” to finding a motive – he does break down the second question into several components: how the stones were obtained, how they were moved to the site, how the structure was erected, and how its construction has changed over time. Overall, the book feels geared toward readers who relish granular technicalities of geological analysis. Yet for those who are more interested in the human aspects of Stonehenge’s construction, Pitts’ review of how megaliths have been handled over time still proves noteworthy.
“There is nothing that doth more advance and sour a man’s misery”, the eulogist said at the funeral of Sir Marmaduke Rawdon in April 1646, “than this one thought and apprehension: that he was once happy.” Before the outbreak of the English civil war, Rawdon had been a highly successful merchant in London; his unofficial motto, “win gold and wear gold”, hints at his style. But history knows him as a leading royalist officer in the defence of Basing House.
The siege of that house is the immediate subject of Jessie Childs’s riveting new book. The mansion, part of which was a castle, was reputed to be the largest private residence in England. The estate was the Hampshire seat of John Paulet, Marquess of Winchester, a Catholic royalist. The nickname Loyalty House derived from “Aimez Loyauté”, the Paulet family motto.