1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro

I wondered if I would like this book so soon after reading Will in the World. Well, I loved it, and I think I might enjoy reading it again. I read it last year.

It's an account of the plays of 1599, and what Shakespeare's world was like in 1599, with a great emphasis on the political events in London that year. In fact, this book is really "about" how political events affected Shakespeare's work and I found this account both entertaining and a great improvement to my understanding of the plays. Henry the V, As You Like It, and Julius Caesar were the plays Shakespeare wrote in 1599, and I enjoyed the discussion of Julius Caesar the most.

The book opens with a wonderful adventure story: Shakespeare and his fellow Globe shareholders take apart The Theatre, their playhouse just north of London's city limits, and carry it off to re-erect it as The Globe in Southwark. They'd lost their lease to the land on which The Theatre stood. They'd built the theatre, but anticipated trouble with the landlord over removing The Theatre building, so this was a covert operation.

Sadly, the book closes on a less festive note: with Essex's rebellion and execution. The queen was increasingly unpopular, in part because she would not name a successor, leaving everyone with a sense of uncertainty. Perhaps also because the very fact that she was so old meant that it was time for something new and the younger generation was impatient for something new to begin. Finally, there were exclusive licenses being given to favorites, and this caused resentment. The impression that I carried away was that Essex was all out of chances; without a court position he was broke. He'd lost favor when he was sent to Ireland and, in the eyes of many, bungled it. Shapiro's view is that Essex had a vision of service and gallantry that was outdated.

Shapiro discusses censorship in this period, and I found myself feeling surprised that Shakespeare never ran afoul of the censors. In fact, the character of Falstaff was first named for a censor; the name had to be changed and it was changed to Falstaff. In a sense, he did not get away with that - but I think Jonson was imprisoned more than once. How did that smart mouth Mr. Shakespeare get away with that? I guess he was just that popular.

Mr. Shapiro is a Shakespeare scholar who has made quite a few public appearances and presented a television show on the historical Shakespeare. You can find these on YouTube.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

I loved Normal People. It'd gotten a lot of publicity and praise, and made it onto the "best of" year-end book lists. It came in second in the general fiction category after Margaret Atwood's The Attachments (the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale) in the Goodreads Choice Awards for 2019.

"Don't tell Mam about this," he says. Marianne shakes her head. No, she agrees. But it wouldn't matter if she did tell her, not really. Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches, as if it isn't any interest to her, which in a way it isn't. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks "warmth," by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her. " (p. 68)
   
"Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if he had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense  of the most basic premises. .. One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it seems like Mr. Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He's amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to to concern himself with fictional people marrying each other. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it "the pleasure of being touched by great art." In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr. Knightley kisses Emma's hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is not direct. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination that he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them."

"People in Dublin often mention the west of Ireland in this strange tone of voice, as if it's a foreign country, but one they consider themselves very knowledgeable about." (pp. 70-72) 

In the closing pages surprising but wonderful.

Normal People reminded me of Eleanor and Park, because in both novels the couples are seemingly misfits who have little in common with each other; the woman suffers emotional or physical abuse at home; and the relationship offers the woman emotional escape.


I looked up Normal People in Novelist because I wondered which other books would turn up on the Novelist "Read-Alikes" list for Normal People. (Novelist is a readers' advisory database subscribed to by many libraries for use by their staff and library users; it offers information about authors, lists of their work, book reviews, and finally "read-alike" lists: suggestions for new reading that fans of the book in question are likely to also like.) Eleanor and Park was not on the list much to my surprise.

(The books listed were Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi; One Day, by David Nicholls; The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBridge; Daniel Deronda by George Eliot; Purity by Jonathan Franzen; Skippy Dies by Paul Murray; The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud; Eileen by Ottesa Moshfegh; and The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.)

I like this excerpt from the review of Normal People that appeared in the Kirkus Reviews online:

"Rooney's  genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney  elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney  precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people  as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become. Absolutely enthralling. Read it."

Having done everything I can to avoid talking about what I think of the novel it is this: Like the Kirkus reviewer, I love the the psychological insight that permits Rooney to "articulate everything that's going on under the surface,"; I love that Marianne believes that Connell's love for her has "redeemed" her, giving the healing power of love a little shrine; I love that Rooney has captured the strange psychology of teenagers; I love that, to me, both Marianne and Connell are refreshingly surprising. Both Marianne and Connell are more, and very different from, what they seem. Asserting the healing power of love is in no way new; but Marianne and Connell's particularity and vulnerability means to me that Rooney has successfully reworked an old theme and made it fresh.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

As the title implies, this book is, among other things, a true crime story and a wonderfully written and entertaining one. Keefe said in one of his interviews that he worked hard on the structure. It permitted him to tell a story that was suspenseful, propulsive, sometimes amazing, but full of detail.  It provides context.

It begins with the story of Jean McConville, a Protestant woman who married a Catholic, and though a recent widow with ten children, was disappeared by the IRA. The story of what happened to her, after she was dragged from her apartment in front of her children, is the frame for the book.

It mostly focuses on four people: Brendan Hughes, an IRA commander, two women, Dolours and Marian Price, and the former leader of the Sinn Fein party and the leader of the IRA in Belfast, Gerry Adams.

It deals at length with all four of this figures. Hughes and the Price sisters made sacrifices as IRA soldiers that made the Good Friday Agreement a very bitter pill for them to swallow. Hughes specifically said that every death, civilian or paramilitary, was a worthless sacrifice.

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell

When I found out that my book club was reading this book, I was a little bit disappointed. I had really enjoyed reading Malcolm Gladwell's books in the past, but for me, the bloom was off the rose because I'd read an article online by two academics who criticized Gladwell's approach as incautious and misleading. The notion that I might have been misled had troubled me, and had dimmed my enthusiasm.

The book opens with Gladwell telling the story of Sandra Bland, an African-American woman who was arrested in a traffic stop in Texas, and unable to raise bail, hung herself in her cell about three days after she was arrested. Interestingly, Gladwell does not mention that Bland was unable to raise bail in this book. The fact that she was unable to raise bail has always troubled me, and I'm grateful that there's currently a trend to reduce bail for poor suspects in certain cases. Had Sandra Bland not been in jail for so many hours and days she might still be alive. That's not to take away from the analysis presented in the book; it's not directly relevant to Gladwell's thesis, which is about how often we rely on visual cues for assessing people we don't know and how often judgments based on visual cues are erroneous.


What I found as I continued to read was that this book, like Gladwell's others, is very entertaining. I read almost the entire book in one sitting, which really surprised me. And, Gladwell has modified his approach; this book has extensive footnotes.

Gladwell explains that an experiment in Kansas City indirectly led to setting the stage for Sandra Bland's arrest. Social scientists identified the blocks with the greatest number of criminal incidents. Patrol teams were assigned to these special blocks in one neighborhood, and asked to aggressively police, by which I mean that they were instructed to pull people over for small infractions of traffic laws and look for any evidence of other crimes. In these special areas, this strategy was successful. However, this practice of pulling people over for small infractions has been misapplied to neighborhoods that are not "hot spots" for crime and this is the context for Sandra Bland's arrest. The case of Sandra Bland is a complicated one, and Gladwell is not offering a policy prescription, but I infer from this case that police forces using this strategy in low-crime areas is inappropriate.

Two of the topics Gladwell discusses in presenting support for his theses are areas he's explored before: facial expressions (in Blink) and suicide (in The Tipping Point). In his discussion of facial expressions, Gladwell mentions Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, which collected research from others and asserted that expressions of aggression, sorrow, etc., are universal. I'd read The Expression of the Emotions in college and loved it, and so was disappointed to learn that research has recently been done to show that abilities to read facial expressions are not universal. The research is complicated; as presented, the different results in an attempted replication of experiments may result from different methodology.

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell wrote of the "contagious" quality of suicide: that the suicide of one influences others. I accepted this as true, because I knew of a such case in my high school.

Here, Gladwell writes about the context of suicide. When San Francisco's authorities proposed creating a net or a barrier to prevent suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge, members of the public opposed the move, believing that potential suicides will find another way. Interestingly, Gladwell cites a case that shows this is not necessarily true. And he frames it in an interesting way, telling the story of the suicides of the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

In the years in which the British used "town gas" in their stoves, which contained a large amount of deadly carbon monoxide, suicides like Sylvia Plath's, rates rose. After "town gas" was replaced with natural gas, which contained almost no carbon monoxide, suicide rates dropped. Gladwell found a second example of this phenomenon. Suicides like Anne Sexton's, where she closed the garage door and sat in her car while her garage filled with carbon monoxide, have dropped markedly since catalytic converters were introduced; catalytic converters emit a very small amount of carbon monoxide which is not lethal. Gladwell is saying that the ease with which a suicide can occur influences the individual. I find this fascinating; I wish I could easily learn whether scholars and researchers who study this topic agree with Gladwell's conclusion. (Here's an online article that does seem to agree with Gladwell's conclusion: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/03/trends-suicide). It certainly has policy implications; it suggests that it would not be a waste of time and money to create a barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. I must note that Gladwell has been criticized for drawing false or misleading conclusions: https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.php

Sandra Bland's experience was an example of what Gladwell calls mismatch, the misreading of visual (or behavioral) cues. It's relevant to the Sandra Bland case because the officer who arrested her reported that she was agitated and that he feared for his safety; it appears that he misread her anxiety as guilt.