Hailing from a small, rural town in North Carolina, I have a strong understanding of small-town living. Time seems slower down here, peace and quiet echo throughout your neighborhood, and your neighbors are fairly familiar with the people in their community, which means they are knowledgeable of your comings and goings.
Anyone else who has lived in a small town knows that gossip travels fast. De’Shawn Winslow knows this well and expertly demonstrates it in his new book Decent People.
Marriage. What to do about it? We marry, then instantly yearn for freedom. Scholars concur that marriage is a tricky business. Too often our unions are a “betrayal of our inner richness and complexity,” Phyllis Rose declared in her iconic book, “Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages” (1983). But wait, don’t file for divorce! Rose suggests that learning about other people’s relationships can help us save our own, offering us new possibilities about how to remain married and fulfilled.
Enter Carmela Ciuraru. Her new book, “Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages,” is a tour de force that extends and deepens Rose’s pioneering work. Ciuraru studies five literary couples, focusing on “how women have defined themselves through or in opposition to men.” She delves into these colorful relationships as a way to show how not to be married, highlighting the dangers of unbalanced relationships. “The problem with being a wife,” Ciuraru writes, “is being a wife.” Her book explores the negotiations and compromises that occurred inside these marriages, demonstrating how subservience and disparity undermine relationships, even love.
In his introduction to “A Black Woman’s West — The Life of Rose B. Gordon,” (2022), author Michael K. Johnson noted that African American women have been nearly invisible in the recorded history of the American west. He hoped to make that history more visible with his biography of Rose Gordon.
The result is a portrait of an intelligent and generous woman whose choices in life were guided by her loyalty to her family and community. It is also a portrait of that community, the town of White Sulphur Springs, where Gordon spent nearly her entire life of 85 years. Finally, it is an exploration of how Gordon steered through a social milieu in which the color of her skin set her apart from nearly everyone else in her surroundings. For the most part, it is a story of harmony across racial lines.
Through these gripping, intertwined stories we see determination and a sponsor’s cash rescue Jules Schulback; witness the birth of Superman, midwifed by a girlie magazine publisher; and watch the abandoned foster child Norma Jeane Mortenson become the biggest star in the world.
What’s more American than all that?