jdscott50's reviews
1547 reviews

Bestselling author of Deacon King Kong and The Good Lord Bird returns with a new book. Author James McBride's novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, focuses on the small town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Moche and his wife Chona run a small grocery store that serves the Jewish community, immigrants, and Black residents. He also runs a local integrated theatre that brings in popular music acts. We see the ups and downs of this small community and its dark secrets. They stick together despite constant troubles. 

This was an immersive, emotional, educational, and, at times, thrilling read. McBride sets up the community and its characters from Moche and Chona, Malachi, Addie, Nate, Fatty, Dodo, and more. They deal with a racist town and fiendish government agendas who kidnap Dodo since he is deaf. A heist is panned. Water must be tapped, and an accidental murder happens. This is an engaging and educational read. 

Favorite Passages:

 “And from there, every single bit of that who-shot-John nonsense got throwed into the Schuylkill, and from there, it flowed into the Chesapeake Bay down in Maryland, and from there, out to the Atlantic. And that’s where the bones of that rotten scoundrel whose name is not worthy to be called by my lips is floating to this day. At the bottom of the ocean, with the fish picking his bones and the devil keeping score.” 

 Nate Timblin was a man who, on paper, had very little. Like most Negroes in America, he lived in a nation with statutes and decrees that consigned him as an equal but not equal, his life bound by a set of rules and regulations in matters of equality that largely did not apply to him. His world, his wants, his needs were of little value to anyone but himself. He had no children, no car, no insurance policy, no bank account, no dining-room set, no jewelry, no business, no set of keys to anything he owned, and no land. He was a man without a country living in a world of ghosts, for having no country meant no involvement and not caring for a thing beyond your own heart and head, and ghosts and spirits were the only thing certain in a world where your existence was invisible. The truth was, the only country Nate knew or cared about, besides Addie, was the thin, deaf, twelve-year-old boy who at the moment was either riding a freight train to Philadelphia or was a full-blown ghost wearing a schoolboy cap, old boots, and a ragged shirt and vest standing ten feet from him tossing small boulders into the Manatawny Creek before his eyes. Which one was it? 

 Nate was silent a moment. He peered up the slight embankment, toward the shed and the house, thinking to himself of all that was wrong in the world. So many of God’s dangers, he thought, are not the gifts they appear to be. 

 These lost people spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored, as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists, gone, wasted. Americans cared about money. And power. And government. Jews had none of those things; their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk and honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked—or worse. Life in America was hard, but it was free, and if you worked hard, you might gain some opportunity, maybe even open a shop or business of some kind. 

Joyce Carol Oates has been a literary force since the 1960s. Most recently, her book Blonde was the basis of the Oscar-nominated film. Her characters are out for revenge in the short story collection Zero Sum. There are two prominent expressions for the endeavor that revenge is a dish best-served cold, and when one sets out a path for revenge, one should dig two graves. In Zero Sum, we see both examples. 

In the titular story, a young student attempts to one-up her professor by picking on his daughter with unexpected results. In Mr. Stickum, a group of high school girls seeks revenge on abusers, but things go further than they expected. Stories about writers with suicide ideation sound inspired by David Foster Wallace and other stories. No one getting ahead or falling behind the struggle is real. 

These stories were a little uneven. Assembled on a theme with different results, it felt incoherent as a collection. Mr. Sticjum was my favorite, but most of them were not memorable.

The Russo-Ukranian War has been raging since February 2022. As this war continues, Financial Times War Correspondent Christopher Miller has become an expert on the history and what may happen next. For those who want to know more about the leadup and implications of this war. 

Christopher joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Donetsk, Ukraine. Past the beautiful parts of the country, he goes to a broken-down factory town. It's a sort of rust belt of Eastern Ukraine. However, it proves to be an extremely valuable placement when he returns as a reporter for Kyiv Post. When the Russian puppet president is ousted, Russia takes Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.

As tensions mount in 2022, Russia invades again. Miller was there before and during the war to give context to what was happening. We see the start of the Euromaidan Revolution and how Ukraine was caught flat-footed immediately after the ousting of the president. As the war churns on, it ]seems there are no easy answers to the horrors of this war.