The Best Book I Read This Month: The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed

The best book I read this month is a remarkable work by historian Annette Gordon-Reed: The Hemingses of Monticello. To be perfectly honest, I am still reading it. It's a massive work--662 pages, not including the notes and other back matter. I've got a little more than two hundred pages left to go, but I will be reading every word.

I'd heard about the book and the acclaim surrounding it (it won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award) when it came out in 2008, but it took me until this month to actually pick it up and read it. My book club was reading a work of historical fiction, America's First Daughter, which told the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings through the eyes of Jefferson's oldest daughter, Patsy. My book club loved the book, but I didn't, for reasons I still can't entirely pinpoint. I put it down about 200 pages in. I still wanted to know more about Hemings and Jefferson, though, so I picked up Gordon-Reed's book.

I was not disappointed. Gordon-Reed tells the story not just of Sally Hemings, but of Hemings's family--from her grandmother, who was brought over from Africa, to her children, some of whom passed as white. In doing so, Gordon-Reed also tells the story of Jefferson and slavery in colonial America--not from the usual white plantation owner perspective, but from the perspective of the enslaved and of society at the time. She points out how our modern perceptions of life in that era are narrow and do not account for the varied realities of enslaved people, but neither does she skimp on the harshness of  those realities.

It's an eye-opening read. Every paragraph is packed with information. (Hence, the slow reading pace.) Gordon-Reed did a remarkable amount of research, and it shows in her work. We have no writings left by Sally Hemings or her mother. If Jefferson wrote about Sally, those letters and papers have been destroyed. (Many historians believe that Jefferson's daughter Patsy and her children purged Jefferson's papers after his death, removing all references to his relationship with Sally Hemings.) So Gordon-Reed pieced together their story from public records and scraps about Sally left by others and by examining patterns of life in colonial Virginia, pre-Revolutionary France, and the early United States. The conclusions she draws and inferences she makes are well supported by a wealth of facts and details.

What I particularly liked, in addition to the plethora of historical details, was that Gordon-Reed paints a picture of Sally Hemings as a woman with agency, not as a helpless victim of circumstance. The same is true for many of the other Hemingses. That agency was possible partly because of the Hemings's white forebears and partly because of the value Jefferson saw in them as a family. He treated the whole Hemings clan very differently than he treated the other enslaved workers on his plantations.

I will say that Gordon-Reed is far kinder to Jefferson than I would be. From the other reading I've done, he seems to have been a manipulative narcissist. She does not go that far in her assessment of him, but she does make the point that Jefferson was not the broad-minded, forward-thinking Founding Father that our textbooks so often paint him as. He was very much a man of his time, especially when it came to his views of women and race.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Good People by Hannah Kent

The best book I read this month was a work of fiction: The Good People by Hannah Kent. Having read and loved Kent's Burial Rites (about a young woman accused of murder in 1829 Iceland), I was eager to read Kent's next book. It's been four years between books, but it was worth the wait.

The Good People is set in Ireland in the 1820s, and it focuses on three woman: a woman caring for her disabled grandson, the girl she hires to help, and the local healer.  The story focuses on women--these three and the other women in their town in County Kerry. The men in the story are on the periphery, and on the whole are not as fully developed as characters as the women are.

I read the book quickly--it was an engaging read--but it stuck with me. It's not a happy story, but it is a rich one. There is much to unpack about superstition, grief, and society's views/treatment of women. Two days later, I was still thinking about it. Even now, more than two weeks after I finished it, bits and pieces still come back to me in odd moments. This is definitely a book I want to reread someday.

The Best Book I Read This Month: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

The best book I read this month was a captivating murder mystery--and a completely true story. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann tells the story of  murders of members of the Osage nation in the 1920s and how the fledgling FBI solved them.

In the 1920s, the Osage in Oklahoma were among the richest people in the country, thanks to their shrewd management of the oil resources beneath their land. Then they started dying. Some deaths were blatant murders; others were suspicious accidents. Local law enforcement got nowhere. The FBI was brought in.

At the time, the FBI was relatively new and J. Edgar Hoover was newly appointed as director. Both the agency and its boss had a lot to prove. They needed to prove not only that they were a capable law enforcement organization, but also that they were free of corruption. The Osage murders tested them on both fronts.

One recurring theme in the  book is the rampant institutional infantilization of and discrimination against Native Americans to serve the white community’s unquenchable greed for wealth and power. It's a combination that has plagued Native American communities since the first European colonists set foot on North American soil. It reached fever pitch in the story of the Osage murders.

I could not put the book down. Grann crafted a page-turner, with dramatic descriptions, vivid turns of phrase, and well-timed cliffhanger chapter endings. And the wild, almost unbelievable story that Grann uncovered through his research and interviews prove the adage that truth can be stranger than fiction.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson

The British cover of the book. The cover of the American edition features a sheep.

I love Bill Bryson. His books fill almost an entire shelf of my bookcase. Every single one has made me laugh out loud. When I was in Wales last year, he had just released a new book--The Road to Little Dribbling. At the time, it hadn't been released in the United States yet, so I bought a copy at the nearest Waterstone's (the British equivalent of Barnes and Noble). It took me until this month to get around to reading it.

About twenty years ago, Bryson published a book called (in the US) Notes from a Small Island. It was a travelogue of sorts. Bryson was--and still is--an American living in the United Kingdom. In Notes from a Small Island, he traveled around his adopted country and shared his impressions. It was hilarious. The Road to Little Dribbling was intended, I think, as a celebration of Small Island's anniversary. Once again, Bryson ventures around the British Isles and shares his remembrances and impressions. (That said, you don't have to have read Small Island to enjoy Little Dribbling. However, if you've never read Bryson before, please start with A Walk in the Woods, which recounts his misadventures hiking the Appalachian Trail.)

My favorite illustration in the book

Bryson's humor is dry, sarcastic, and self-deprecating. I laughed out loud through the first thirty pages. I giggled through the rest--often at something Bryson said, but sometimes at one of the illustrations that opened each chapter. The illustration that opened Chapter 16 was my favorite. At first glance, it's a dodo with a wicked case of body odor. Later in the chapter, though, I learned I was wrong. It's a dodo, all right, but body odor was not its problem. By the time I finished the book, I was overcome--not for the first time--with a desire to move to the UK.

The Best Book I Read This Month: A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee

The best book I read in September was A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee. I started it during my lunch break on a Monday. By the end of my lunch hour, I wanted to call in sick for the rest of the day so that I could keep reading.

Set in Calcutta in 1919, A Rising Man centers around policeman Sam Wyndham, a World War I veteran newly arrived from London, as he acclimates to his new home and attempts to solve the murder of a high-ranking colonial official. He faces the dual tasks of deciphering the culture of colonial India and navigating competing powers within the British government. His partner in crime, so to speak, is a local,  "Surrender Not" Banerjee.

What struck me first--what enthralled me from the get-go--was Mukherjee's descriptions of Calcutta. I could not only see it, I could hear and feel it too.

Then I was drawn in to the two main characters, each challenged in his own way. Wyndham, for example, is an opiate addict--the result of injuries from his war years. He struggles to manage his cravings while simultaneously wishing for the oblivion of a high. Banerjee is caught between cultures--not entirely trusted by the British police because he is Indian and disowned by his family for working in/with the colonial government.

The solution to the mystery could have used a few more seeds planted throughout the story, but I will definitely be reading the next book in this new series, if only so I can spend more time with Wyndham and Banerjee.