Last week, I went down to my parents’ place in the middle of nowhere Texas to try to rest and relax. It went pretty well, and I got to read quite a bit. First was Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I’ve owned this for quite some time, but I had it in my mind that this would be a terrible, sappy book. Boy was I wrong–at least as to whether I would like it; it is plenty sappy. It’s not exactly groundbreaking–looking at societal changes in just one generation–but it’s done well enough to be refreshing.
Set in a small village in Britain, Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague tells the story of one village’s attempt to deal with the Plague in 1665-66. The local reverend convinced the villagers to quarantine themselves from the outside world, both in the hope of preventing an outbreak in the village and, if an outbreak occurred, to prevent it from spreading beyond. When the outbreak seemed to pass, about 1 in 3 villagers were dead, leaving terrible emotional scars on the survivors.
Sebastian Junger, author of the tragic The Perfect Storm, puts together a more personal, yet more well known story in A Death in Belmont. In the fall of 1962 and spring of 1963, Junger lived in Belmont, a Boston suburb, as his family had a group of men doing work on their house. At the same time, Boston police were trying to solve a series of murders thought to be perpetrated by the Boston Strangler. When a murder happens in Belmont, somewhat out of the Boston Strangler pattern, a poor, black man with opportunity and a criminal record is convicted. Later, one of the workers at Junger’s home confesses to being the Boston Strangler. Junger compares the murders, looks at the black man’s trial, and questions whether an innocent man was convicted of murder. A quick, interesting read.
