By Miriam Kramer FROM THE VAULT: In April 2016 I reviewed the book about writer Truman Capote and his high-society female friends, The Swans of Fifth Avenue. Last year Laurence Leamer released his book Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era, a comprehensive view of Truman Capote’s relationship with this elite coterie of international socialites he called his swans. Subsequently FX released its dishy second season of the TV series Feud. Titled Capote vs. The Swans, this glitzy drama was based on Leamer’s book. It brought writer Truman Capote to life for a new audience, further camping up the story of an unusually flamboyant gay man in high society and his elegant friends while detailing the bitchy, heated betrayals and backbiting that caused their relationships to fall apart. His close circle included Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Lee Radziwill, and C.Z. Guest, among others. In Leamer’s book I perused specific chapters on his swans’ lives, which I found fascinating but often depressing. In the mid-twentieth century they grew up to marry well and present a glamorous image. Trying to escape the gilded cages they were raised to inhabit, many moved from one wealthy, distinguished man to another, succumbing to the superficial values and shifting allegiances that surrounded them. Both Leamer’s book and the TV series portray Capote’s capacity to be vicious, sozzled, and showy without revealing his depth, education, childhood, and early life. Gerald Clarke presents the writer fully in Capote: A Biography. I highly recommend the latter if you want to see a well-rounded, engaging, and often compassionate picture. Capote’s acute eye, captivating persona, beautiful writing, and unusual sensitivity helped make him one of the most prominent American men of letters from the 1940s to 1980s. The Swans…
By Miriam R. Kramer Despite weighing in at a walloping 716 pages, Don Winslow’s The Border explodes off the mark like a doped-up Olympic sprinter. The final installment in a trilogy covering the United States’ War on Drugs, The Border picks up where The Cartel and The Power of the Dog leave off and brings the story to an electric conclusion. Winslow’s twenty years of research into the illegal drug trade between the United States and Mexico make him uniquely qualified as a novelist to bring its dizzying highs and lows to light. Art “Arturo” Keller, the American son of a Mexican mother and an absentee American father, is a former CIA agent turned DEA after Vietnam. Having spent more of his career living in Mexico than the United States, Art has seen everything from the burning of Mexican poppy fields in the mid-1970s to the vicious battles between cartels seeking to mark territory in the early 2010s in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Obsessed with bringing down Sinaloa cartel leader Adán Barrera, who murdered his partner, Ernie Hidalgo, Keller uses almost any resource possible, even other cartels, to find a way to destroy his bête noire. In The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, Winslow brings to life complex interactions between drug cartels; Mexican armed forces, police, and security agencies; ordinary and upper-class Mexicans; and Mexican journalists. In The Border, Winslow continues the gritty stories of his mesmerizing characters while turning his attention more towards the United States’ role. After staggering out of a firefight involving Adán Barrera and a competing cartel at the beginning of The Border, Keller has been tapped to become the head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, placing him in the position to take his decades-long worm’s-eye view…
By Miriam R. Kramer David Grann unearthed a stunning chapter in Native American history with his nonfiction work Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. In 2017 he appeared in multiple top ten books of the year lists from news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, NPR, and Slate. His revelatory book about widespread murder in the Osage settlements in Oklahoma and how this phenomenon helped J. Edgar Hoover birth the FBI has become a modern classic. Recently director Martin Scorsese turned his hand to adapting the story into a film, which is heading into this 2024 Oscar season with multiple nominations. Grann’s story begins in 1921 with a woman named Mollie Burkhart, an Osage Indian woman living in the Osage settlement of Gray Horse, Oklahoma. Distressed by the mysterious murder of one of her sisters, Anna Brown, Mollie saw one of her other sisters die of a mysterious wasting disease several years earlier. As a member of the Osage tribe, she was an accidental inheritor of tremendous wealth. The Osage, driven in the 1870s from their lands in Kansas, ended up on a rocky Oklahoma reservation that seemed worthless until prospectors discovered that the land sat above huge oil deposits. Because of an unusually canny legal proviso in their favor, each member of the tribe could lease their land, but were due yearly profits from any oil wealth, which came to a staggering amount that only increased over the years to equal today’s equivalent of $400 million in 1923 alone. At one point the Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world, while still seen as second-class citizens for their skin color and status as Native Americans. Most importantly, headrights, the right to these profits and…
By Miriam R. Kramer As a member of Generation X who is pondering where I am in life, I am not sure how I made it out of my twenties and thirties without cruising through one of Bret Easton Ellis’s stylishly nihilistic novels. As a member of the literary New York Brat Pack, which included Jay McInerney, Jill Eisenstadt, Donna Tartt, and Tama Janowitz, Ellis made it big early, publishing his first bestseller, Less than Zero, while still in college at Bennington. I finally caught up with his recent, drawn-out work of autofiction: The Shards. Many years later he revisits his adolescence during his senior year at the Buckley School, one of the toniest, if not then competitive, prep schools in Los Angeles. His novel offers alternatively chilly, wistful, paranoid, dreadful moments and elliptical, slip-sliding conversations between teens who role-play. With a few exceptions, his self-titled character’s crowd is a handful of beautiful, noxious, and surface-level egos, teens who never tell each other the truth that goes on beneath their surfaces. Why did this six-hundred-page book catch my attention now? Could it use a landscape gardener to chop off branches with a dripping hatchet? It sure could if you were looking to propel plot. Instead, though, Ellis is working some issues out. Building suspense, setting a mood, and creating uncertainty in his own impressions was more his goal. Nor was following a plot quickly my purpose in reading it. At this age I have space to look back over my own life in high school, viewing my own graduation year that occurred some years later in the Eighties. I too felt like an outsider while attending high school in what was then known as one of the handful of high-quality “country club” public schools outside of Washington, DC. I attended…
By Miriam Kramer Beirut Station is my first Paul Vidich book, but it will not be my last. His latest espionage thriller stars a female CIA field officer operating in Beirut during the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel. The half-Lebanese, half-American heroine, known by her pseudonym Analise Assad, works under non-official cover as a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) staffer in 2006 Beirut. Analise has an assignment: to assassinate a Hezbollah leader. She serves on a joint CIA-Mossad team in planning this operation. While having a casual affair with an American war correspondent, she collaborates with a South African war correspondent whom she knows to be a Mossad agent. Her colleagues are not necessarily as they seem. As Analise progresses in cultivating sources, she plots a car bomb assassination with the CIA station chief and their Mossad colleagues. She mistrusts most, as do those around her, with the reporters, terrorists, and local intellectuals showing the same skepticism and noses for information as intelligence officers. Those she knows are only versions of themselves, and as a person who lies for a living, she rarely trusts what she sees and hears. Vidich also portrays her as a woman half in and half out of the culture around her, fluent in Arabic with a Lebanese appearance and an American upbringing that fosters her sense of displacement. Outwardly messy, Analise has an internal sense of organization and flashes of inspiration that enhance her skill at living her different, compartmentalized lives. Somehow Vidich manages to birth her as both a complex and anonymous character. We never learn her real name, and it does not matter. Vidich colorfully depicts 2006 Beirut, which also helps one appreciate the novel. He does not paint atmosphere with the dark and lovely brushstrokes of Alan Furst, who…
By Miriam R. Kramer Few kill time during the holidays. There’s just too much to say, cook, and do. That being said, you may dedicate your spare, scattered hours to reading in between your travels to visit family or preparations to welcome them. I know that if I don’t have a chance to read and refresh myself, I don’t feel prepared to do too much else. This month two new mysteries impressed me: The Running Grave, by Robert Galbraith, and Black River, by Matthew Spencer. The Running Grave serves as the seventh installment in the popular series J.K. Rowling writes under the nom de plume Robert Galbraith. If you have read my column for a while, you will know that I panned its predecessor, The Ink Black Heart, for its verbosity, sloth-like pace, and difficult-to-read layout that involved long side-by-side phone texts between characters. Nor did I care what happened to any of its characters. Rowling is not known to stint her words, and she badly needed an editor to stand up to her and prune it back. I even thought of not reading the next book. Luckily, I can report the opposite for this next novel in the series. The Running Grave, while long, had me looking forward to returning to it after taking a break. Cormoran Strike, ex-military police and private detective, and Robin Ellacott, who starts as secretary and becomes his partner at the agency, have matured over the years they have worked together. Their sexual tension has remained on a slow boil as they distract themselves with other romantic or sexual partners. In The Running Grave, Robin goes undercover as Rowena Ellis at a cult in Norfolk, England, known as the Universal Humanitarian Church (UHC). She and Cormoran have taken on a client who wants to…
By Miriam R. Kramer Witches, vampires, and daemons, oh my! The bitter winds and darkening days of November will inspire you to enjoy Deborah Harkness’s absorbing historical fiction trilogy: A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night, and The Book of Life. Drawn from her experience as a professor, she explores an enticing world of academia and ancient lore, dipping into history as her vivid characters take life, some in more ways than one. Start reading on November 2, All Souls Day, for fun. A Discovery of Witches, published in 2011, features Diana Bishop, descendent of a Salem witch and tenured professor of protochemistry at Yale. While living in Oxford for a year, she keeps denying her powers, keeping away from fellow witches and other non-human creatures, and attempting to control her environment and research her area of expertise as if she were a human. In particular she pours herself into studying the natural philosophy of alchemy. Alchemists focused on transmuting base metals such as lead into precious metals such as gold while looking to create the philosopher’s stone, an elixir of mortality known to many Millennials from the Harry Potter books. They also searched for panaceas to disease. If the paragraph above sounds tedious, don’t let it scare you off. Harkness is a vivid storyteller who weaves academia into an enjoyable, fast-moving tale of escapism. It involves romance, time travel, and the innate powers that people find when they explore what and whom they love, who they are, and become the best versions of themselves. At Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Diana asks to review a medieval text, labeled Ashmole 782 for the man who owned it. When she receives the book, she realizes that it is set apart by its imagery unusual to alchemy. A magical palimpsest, it is a text…
By Miriam R. Kramer From the Vault, September 2015: These novels remain compelling and evergreen. I also recommend The Kremlin’s Candidate, which was published as the last in this trilogy after I wrote this review. As one who lived in Russia twice since the fall of the Soviet Union and visited the American Embassy in Moscow several years ago as part of a diplomatic delegation, I consider them among the best Russia-set spy thrillers I have read in recent years. What would Jason Matthews, Graham Greene, or someone as gloomily introspective as John Le Carré write about gathering intelligence during Russia’s war on Ukraine? May Vladimir Putin end his reign and the Ukrainian people resoundingly repel his aggression. Ripped from the heart of Mother Russia, Jason Matthews’s spy novels Red Sparrow and Palace of Treason are two very enjoyable ways to while away this month. Red Sparrow won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American in 2014. Its successor is a worthy follow-up, packed as completely with inventive plots, the type of burned-on-the-retina characters that make thrillers actual page-turners, and a dizzying variety of locales that would satisfy even Jason Bourne’s lust for travel. The characters dancing first in Red Sparrow are the SVR operations officer, Corporal Dominika Egorova, and CIA case officer Nathaniel Nash. Egorova, a once-promising prima ballerina and pure-blooded Russian patriot, sidelined by a foot injury, is introduced to the world of Russian spycraft by her sleazy uncle, First Deputy of the Foreign Intelligence Service Ivan Egorov. He uses her beauty to sideline one of Vladimir Putin’s rival oligarchs during an evening à deux in the oligarch’s apartment on Moscow’s Arbat. After her training in traditional operations, her uncle sends her to Sparrow School, a degrading Soviet-style institution where she must learn to act…
By Miriam R. Kramer This month I decided to navel-gaze with the characters in three non-fiction books about therapy patients: Group, by Christie Tate, Good Morning, Monster, by Catherine Gildiner, and Pageboy, by Elliot Page. Filled with patients, psychologists, psychiatrists, and more-or-less triumphant journeys towards wellness, the books all completely absorbed me on multiple levels. I looked at the human condition from different angles and through other eyes with these authors. Christie Tate was ranked at the top of her law class, a twenty-something with a severe eating disorder who thought constantly about suicide and was unable to be close to anyone, let alone find a husband and have children. When she saw an eccentric therapist, he urged her to join one of his therapy groups where she would have to bare her soul and tell all her secrets. It frightened her to a point of paralysis. When she finally joined and was urged to talk about her secretive restrictive food habits and sexual experiences, she had an exceedingly difficult time adjusting. Gradually, though, her turn towards vulnerability, however forced, started giving her a foundation and roots in the community. She had a long, hard journey giving up some of her neuroses and isolation to gain better self-esteem and boundaries, but she finally found a better place. Over years in the group and another that pushed her further, she found the self-esteem to look for better work, also chancing attachments to lovers and boyfriends only to be heartbroken multiple times. Yet the groups were there to save her, along with her law school friends. Years later, with the help of her groups and therapist, she finally found out who she was and what she wanted, she received the love she was looking for. Tate’s messy, funny book shows a radical…
By Miriam R. Kramer With a monstrous heat wave burning up the South and Southwest of the United States recently, we could all use a physical and mental break. So why not sit on a covered porch or under an umbrella at the beach and take a trip to Sweden? Try out The Sandhamn Murders, this series of nine murder mysteries set on Sandhamn, a popular island near Stockholm where tourists vacation in the short, beautiful summer months. Viveca Sten has written a clutch of books that make for perfect beach, lake, or pool reading, especially for travelers looking to escape to someplace with sun and cool summer breezes. Her novels have been televised as a popular Swedish crime series as well. The Sandhamn Murders features two primary protagonists: Nora Linde, a lawyer, and Thomas Andreasson, a police detective with the Nacka police division in Stockholm. Having known each other since they were children, they love each other as brother and sister Nora owns a home on Sandhamn which she has visited for mini-breaks and vacations since she was a child. At the beginning of the series, she arrives there with her two young sons and a handsome doctor husband. Thomas, who has lost his wife when his child died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), also has a small summer home on a nearby island, Harö. Nora and Thomas face diverse crime schemes and murders that take place not only in Sandhamn, but also in the archipelago of small islands with summer cabins that exist east of Stockholm. They exchange information to help each other solve the homicides. Instead of being a safe haven for hordes of tourists looking for a weekend getaway from the city, along with celebrating the popular Swedish holiday of Midsommar (Midsummer), murders taint festivities…
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