The Lioness of Boston: A Novel About A Prominent Art Collector

The life of  a late 19th century American woman who married wealthy like Isabella Stewart Gardner was apparently all about parties, international travel and art collecting. I was asked to read and review The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin and was provided with a free copy from the publisher via Edelweiss.

                               

I did like Isabella's insight that "servant life is female life" though that wouldn't have been true for Isabella.  It's the women who couldn't afford servants who had to do all the household labor and cater to the needs of the men in the household.  

Isabella also was critical of Frozen Charlottes which were cake decorations that represented a girl who had frozen to death on Boston Common.  I suppose it could be regarded as a memorial to the poor child, but Isabella knew the upper crust of her day well.  They weren't humane people.  The cake decoration was probably intended to cruelly poke fun at her.  Laughing at those who are less fortunate was a recreation for the privileged.   

Isabella met the female impressionist artist, Berthe de Morisot.  I've heard of Morisot, but this is the first time I'd seen her as a character in a novel.  Yet it seemed that her main role was to introduce Isabella to male impressionists.  Critics called her work "domestic".  Morisot felt affronted by that evaluation.  She didn't paint household scenes.  She had been a nature painter. It's likely that these "critics" hadn't actually seen any of Morisot's work.  They just imagined that a woman painter would necessarily be confined to domestic subjects.  They revealed their contempt for women in general through their denigration of Morisot.

Of the male painters that Isabella encountered,  James McNeill Whistler  seemed the most interesting to me.  Isabella noted that Whistler  had such a clean smock, and called him "as clean as a banker".  Whistler responded cynically that "Bankers are not clean."  This is probably intended as a metaphorical statement about corruption in that profession during the late 19th century.

The artist John Singer Sargent painted Isabella's portrait more than once.  It interested me that he chose to paint her as an old woman.  It also surprised me that Isabella wanted a portrait of herself when she was old.  Most women wouldn't want to gaze at an image of themselves when they were "past their prime" according to the dictates of society.

A lesbian personality of the time, Violet Paget,  told Isabella in this book that everyone is born at the wrong time.  That's not what I've observed.  It seems to me that most people are conventional and definitely suited to their social context.  If that weren't the case, conventional expectations wouldn't exist and no one would be defined as unconventional as Isabella evidently was.

By the way, if this post is reported to Blogger as having "inappropriate" content resulting in a warning being posted by Blogger, I would at least understand why that happened.  There are probably people out there, who don't think I should mention lesbian characters or even acknowledge that lesbians exist.  Yet I do consider such warnings a type of censorship.

In The Lioness of Boston, it's mentioned that Isabella met the poet Robert Browning in 1888 and obtained a lock of his hair.  There is a photo of Browning from that year illustrating his Wikipedia article here and he doesn't appear to have had very much hair at that point in his life.  I would think that he couldn't have spared a lock.

 I was interested to learn that in real life thieves broke into the museum that Isabella established and stole three of the paintings.  I hope that those paintings are eventually found and restored to the collection.

                                

                                     

When We Do Harm: A Physician's Book About Medical Errors

 So far, I've only managed to have two posts per month in 2023.  I'd like be able to do better than that in April.  I won this book through a Goodreads Giveaway and I completely forgot that this was the source of my copy until I looked at the source of my copy on Goodreads.  I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with a copy for review.    I'm sorry that's it's taken me so long to read and review it.                         

                                   

 Dr. Ofri quotes a Harvard study stating that errors were usually the failure of computerized record keeping systems rather than individuals.  It seemed to me that this was much worse because the record keeping systems are pervasive in institutions.

I've read about Ignaz Semmelweis  (1818-1865) elsewhere.  He is credited with being the first to advocate that physicians wash their hands with chlorinated lime solutions before touching patients.  Another pioneer, Joseph Lister (1827-1912) is credited with antiseptic surgery utilizing carbolic acid to sterilize instruments.  Both Semmelweis and Lister are honored today, but during his lifetime Semmelweis was ridiculed.  I found out from Ofri that Semmelweis died tragically of beatings by the guards in a mental institution.

                                      

                                        Photo of Ignaz Semmelweis 1864                                                                              Public Domain

Ofri discusses unnecessary alerts sent by the system.  One example was that drug interactions weren't available for the walker she was prescribing.  It occurs to  me that if doctors had AIs capable of learning, that sort of thing wouldn't happen.  Yet that would be very expensive.  

Ofri also gets very necessary alerts about medications being contraindicated for certain conditions or the need to dose certain medications differently. Unfortunately, Ofri gets so many alerts that are useless to her that she ends up ignoring all of them.  This is a source of medical errors.

In a discussion of medical history, Ofri brings up the possibility that Van Gogh was taking digitalis derived from the foxglove plant.  He painted his doctor holding the bell shaped foxglove flower. (See an article called "Creativity and chronic disease Vincent Van Gogh" from The Western Journal of Medicine here, and an article from the UK Guardian on Van Gogh and digitalis here. 

Below is a public domain image of the Van Gogh painting of Dr. Paul Gachet, Van Gogh's physician, holding foxglove.

                             

 

Toward the end of this book Ofri discussed patients who die from multiple causes with a colleague.  Death certificates only allow for a single cause of death. The colleague thought that death certificates should permit the listing of  a preventable complication that contributed to the death.  This would allow medical errors that hastened death to be included. 

Ofri closes with the famous quote from Hippocrates that the goal of medicine is "at least to do no harm".

I feel that informing us about the frequency of medical errors through When We Do Harm is important and beneficial.  We need to know that the practice of medicine is far from perfect despite the best intentions of medical professionals.

                           

                             

 

                                             

 

                                      

                                     

 

 

                              

Blackwater Falls: Murder in a Colorado Town

 I initially thought of placing this post on Flying High Reviews, my blog for books centering on strong female protagonists.  After due consideration, I realized that Blackwater Falls protagonist  Inaya Rahman could not be characterized as strong though she does have other admirable traits. So this review is appearing on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer. 

Blackwater Falls is the fifth book I've read by Ausma Zehanat Khan.  The first four were in the Rachel Getty/Essa Khattak series.  I reviewed two of them on this blog.   Those reviews can be found here  and here .  Blackwater Falls is the #1 book in its series.  Both series by Khan are mysteries centering on law enforcement protagonists.  It's important to note that the Getty/Khattak series takes place in Canada. So Blackwater Falls is Khan's first novel that is situated in the United States.

                                

When Khan wrote her first series she lived in Canada.  She has moved to Colorado, and has switched the location of the new series along with her place of residence.

 Areesha Adams, a community organizer and civil rights attorney, who is a prominent character in this novel, brings up a case of an unarmed Black man killed by police. 

 I would like to comment that there are numerous examples of police killings of unarmed African American men from all over the United States.  The only thing that might be considered new is that they are receiving more attention in the media.  There is a Wikipedia article on the subject with cases going back to 1870.  The first victim listed was Henry Truman shot by Officer John Whiteside on March 31, 1870 in Philadelphia.  I'm calling this particular incident to my readers' attention because today is the 153rd anniversary of this tragic event.

There is a factory in Blackwater Falls that was raided by ICE.  Many of the workers turned out to be undocumented and were arrested.  They were replaced by Somalis who promptly unionized.   This is where I stand up and cheer.  I am a huge fan of organized labor and the protection of the rights of workers. 

The victim in this novel, Razan, was a high school student who was tested in aerodynamics to see if she qualified for an internship at Apex Dynamics which is a fictional company.  In this novel's fictional context Apex Dynamics is a sub-contractor of Lockheed Martin, a real worldwide aerospace firm.  Razan was chosen for the internship which means that she was miles ahead of me in physics. I accessed a NASA article on aerodynamics because I only had a very vague idea of this field of inquiry.   The science I studied was geology.  I took several college courses in geology, but I doubt I'd ever have qualified for a competitive internship.  I would say that Razan was probably brilliant and that her death was a tragic loss.

 Lieutenant Seif ,who was the boss of protagonist Inaya Rahman, interested me because he was trying to conceal his ethnic background.  Seif's family had been in the United States for five generations.  So he considered himself an American.  I was brought up in a family where  ethnicity was very central.  So I considered Seif's perspective somewhat alien.    

Speaking about alien perspectives, I looked for a coded mosaic because Inaya commented that she thought the mosaic in the local church was in code.  I found a mosaic by the artist Sonia King called Coded Message: Dark Secret.   I don't relate to this as a work of art, but I'm willing to say that I consider it...interesting.

 Finally, I learned from the acknowledgements following the end of  Blackwater Falls that Ausma Zehanat Khan lost her father in the year this novel was published which was 2022.  I was sorry to learn this since I am a fan of this author.

                                  

                      

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is one of two books that I checked out of the library, forgot that I returned them and then purchased on Amazon to replace what I thought was a lost library copy. What can I say?  I guess people like me have helped to make Jeff Bezos a billionaire. But enough about me.  This is an important book.  It's about women's experiences of war worldwide.  The author is journalist Christina Lamb, who also co-authored I Am Malala .

                               

The abduction and rape of women has always been at the root of war.  Lamb mentions that the first history by Herodotus opens with abductions of women by Phoenicians, Greeks and Trojans.   In the modern world we have Boko Haram which actually means that  Western education is forbidden.  Is a conspiracy that is nothing but organized rape superior?  Lamb thinks that Boko Haram is a real life version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.  

 ISIS believes rape is justified if the women aren't Muslims.  So they raped Yazidi women.  The Yazidi are a Kurdish people who believe in God and a Peacock Angel that came down to earth to share its colors.   Their core religion is about beauty.   It seems to me that this is a benevolent faith, and that Yazidi definitely don't deserve to be persecuted.   The Yazidi call the Peacock Angel Melek Tawoos.  This implies to me that the Yazidi language has Semitic vocabulary.  Melech is King in Hebrew.  ISIS thinks that the Peacock Angel is Iblis, who is a Satanic figure in their religion.

Pari Ibrahim is a Yazidi lawyer in the U.S. who founded the Free Yazidi Foundation.  She said she lost 40 relatives to suicide who had been abducted by ISIS.  She also reported that ten Yazidis committed suicide every week.     

It doesn't surprise me that some Yazidi survivors of ISIS abduction were helped to recover by art therapy.  They would probably consider art as  an activity blessed by the Peacock Angel.  Fundamentalists of all stripes tend to hate art as an attempt to rival God as a creator.   I think that any deity worthy of worship would prefer humans to be creative instead of destroyers through war.   

I really like the fictional Yazidistan flag I found on a site called Alternate History uncredited. (See Source of Fictional Flag) If anyone knows who created this flag, please let me know and I will credit the creator.  There is not, and never has been a Yazidistan, but I think it would be wonderful for a nation to love the peacock and focus on beauty.  Here is that image of the fictional Yazidistan flag.

                                  

 Back to the subject of  Our Bodies, Our Battlefields--In Rwanda, during the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutu, there was also massive rape.   According to the UN report on this genocide, almost all Tutsi women who survived had been raped.  Rwanda has made an effort to change since the genocide.  They want the world to know that the membership of the Rwandan Parliament is more than 60% female.  Yet the Rwanda head of state is a male dictator named Paul Kagame.  A Tutsi woman named Diane Rwigara was imprisoned when she tried to run against him, but she was released. Possibly as a result of  U.S. politicians who included Dick Durbin in the Senate and Barbara Lee in the House, calling for Rwigara 's release.  

Rwanda wanted the U.N. to track down and arrest those who committed genocide.  The U.N. has a police force, but its mission is to support member states in ending wars.  The international police force is called Interpol.  (See https://www.interpol.int/ .)  A Rwanda Tribunal was established to prosecute those who committed genocide in Rwanda, but most surviving Tutsis were afraid they would be killed, if they testified.  Ten witnesses were killed.  One woman named Godelieve told Lamb that the person across the street from her was a killer.  She was afraid to testify.  Her husband had testified and was killed.  Godelieve herself had been severely beaten.  There was resistance to adding rape to the charges prosecuted by the Rwanda Tribunal, but it eventually was.  The judge wanted to send a message that rape is a war crime.  

The book moves on to Bosnia.  It's noteworthy that Bosnia has no memorial for rape victims considering that women were held in rape camps. There was a memorial to Russian volunteers who were pro-Serb.  Also, many of the Russian volunteers were rapists. 

I read an article about the rape of Muslim women in Bosnia by Serbs  that appeared in a British newspaper called The Independent.  You can read it here. 

Lamb's Bosnian informant, Bakira, established the Association of Woman Victims. She has 35,000 members with a database that includes date and place of rape, age of girl and ethnic background.  There are Muslim, Croat and Serbian women in the database.  Men who were raped also provided reports to the database.

There was a Bosnia Tribunal established in the Hague.  Judge Mumba told the accused rapists that they had sexually attacked Muslim women because of their religion. He considered this aggravated rape and thought it was more severe than rapes that had happened in previous wars.

Bakira's first rapist was never charged with rape even though 50-60 women testified that he had raped them.  The prosecutor said that he could be convicted more easily for other crimes that he had committed.  Admittedly, these were terrible crimes involving mass killings.  Yet Bakira didn't feel that she had gotten justice.   Was rape regarded as trivial?    Bakira and other woman victims protested outside of the Bosnia Tribunal's offices. Ten women who were raped in the Bosnian war committed suicide.  Others left the country.

It's mentioned that there is a huge bronze statue in Berlin of a Soviet soldier  crushing a swastika with a sword in one hand, and cradling a German girl child in the other.  Many German women call this statue the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist.  The Red Army in WWII raped thousands of women during their march to Berlin.  In Berlin itself, historian Anthony Beever estimated in his book Berlin The Downfall, 1945 that 100,000 women were raped in that city.  Among the World War II rape survivors were Jewish women in concentration camps who had believed that the Soviet army were liberators.

I would like to add that in 2014 Vladimir Putin signed a law that anyone who denigrates the Red Army in WWII can be fined or imprisoned for five years. I think this speaks for itself.

There is a mention of war crimes in Nanjing.  I read The Nanjing Massacre by Honda Katsuichi which didn't focus on rape. See  my review on Goodreads if you're interested at The Nanjing Massacre . 

I wasn't aware of the rapes during the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.  There was an inquiry about the My Lai Massacre that uncovered 20 eyewitness accounts of rape.  Many were gang rape.  None of these rapes were prosecuted.  

It seems likely that any war or other type of conflict was probably used by male soldiers to take advantage of vulnerable civilian women. They probably didn't know or care that this was a war crime.  Nor did they give a thought to the trauma of the women in the aftermath of their heinous acts.  

Christina Lamb did a service for woman survivors by obtaining their stories and letting the world know about these war crimes.  This book was published three years ago.  I wonder if it has had any impact in regard to the prosecution of wartime rape.  

                                    

                                     

 

                         

                                         

                                       

The Violin Conspiracy: What Should Really Matter?

 I just finished The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb. It led me to ruminate about self-definition.  It seems to me that what someone values most is what defines that individual.  If you value money most, you are going to lead a very different life than someone who places the most value on tranquility or safety.  

 In the case of someone who is deeply involved with one of the arts, that art is likely to be what that individual values most.  It is at the center of this person's existence.  She or he will define themselves according to the role they take in the particular art. 

 Some roles require an object beyond the self.  If you are a singer, you require nothing but your voice. Yet a violinist, like the protagonist of The Violin Conspiracy, needs a violin. 

                                

                                 

  The skill with which the violinist plays is important, but the connection that the musician has to the violin may be equally important if not more so.  Certainly, a singer performs best when she or he has a personal connection to the song.  So the violinist will produce his or her best work with a violin to which he or she feels personally connected. 

 The protagonist's violin is incredibly valuable.  It's a Stradivarius which means that it was made by the legendary luthier Antonius Stradivarius  in the 18th century.

Below is a public domain image of Antonius Stradivarius in his workshop examining a violin. 

 

                             Print of a painting by Victor Bobrov

  The central character's  violin was worth millions of dollars. Yet I felt that to Ray, the protagonist of The Violin Conspiracy, it mattered more that the violin had been his grandmother's and that she had given it to him.  He wanted to be worthy of his grandmother's trust.  

 Some people dismiss an attachment to an object as "sentimental".  Sentiment refers to emotion, and some emotions run deeper than others.  For many people, there is no deeper emotional attachment than the one to family.  It may seem strange to some readers, but for Ray his violin was part of his family.

So you can imagine how Ray felt when it went missing. It's mentioned in this book that musician Yo Yo Ma absentmindedly left his Stradivarius cello in a cab once. (There is an account of Yo Yo Ma's incident here .) There is absolutely no comparison, however, to the deliberate planned theft of Ray's violin in The Violin Conspiracy.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the role of racism in this novel. Ray is an African-American.  Black violinists are uncommon.  Being unable to afford lessons would tend to exclude many Black families from being able to support children who aspired to be violinists.  This is an example of systemic racism.  Ray also did meet with prejudice in the process of developing his musical career.  There are numerous examples throughout the narrative.

 In the Author's Note, Brendan Slocumb mentions that one of the professors he had in college thought that Blacks played Chopin so well because of the "jungle rhythms" in their blood.  I wonder what this professor was implying about Chopin, the composer, whose work included "jungle rhythms".  Of course, such a statement reflects more poorly on Slocumb's  professor than on Chopin.

The Violin Conspiracy reflects very well on Brendan Slocumb.  I thought it was excellent.  It's the first novel that I've given a grade of A in some time.  I didn't read any A rated fiction in 2022. 

 Oh, and by the way Slocumb is himself a violinist and a music educator.  This novel lives and breathes music because Slocumb is the real deal.  Go to Brendan Slocumb's  website.  I guarantee that you will be impressed.

                                     

 

 

Memoir of an NBC Editor Containing Hawaiian Issues

Since I don't have any requests from authors, editors or publicists at the moment, I decided to review a memoir with the title of Local by an NBC editor who is part Native Hawaiian. Her name is Jessica Machado which clearly isn't a Native Hawaiian name.  I selected her book as my December Amazon First Read which I downloaded for free, and finished on January 30.  I love its colorful cover.

                              

Native Hawaiians call themselves Kanaka.  They are distinguished from those who either are settlers in Hawaii from the U.S. mainland, or those who are descended from these settlers.  Machado refers to settlers as locals.  Yet I imagine her own self-identification is complex due to her mixed heritage.  

When Machado was called "Haole",which is the Hawaiian term for settlers from the U.S. mainland, she was upset.  Yet it occurred to me that Machado's heritage is primarily Haole.  Her mother was 100% Haole from Shreveport, Louisiana.  Machado learned to speak with her mother's Southern accent.  Her father was part Kanaka and part Portuguese. Yet his Kanaka ancestry wasn't on his birth certificate.  Her part-Kanaka heritage wasn't on his daughter's birth certificate either.  She still identifies as part-Kanaka.

 The overwhelming majority of the content of this book doesn't deal with either politics or Hawaiian culture.  Actually, 95% of this book didn't interest me. As a result of Local 's emphasis on personal events , I wasn't aware that Machado is currently an editor at NBC News until I saw her profile on Goodreads after I had finished reading the book.   

Local has inspired me to read further about Kanaka culture.  I have found books dealing with Kanaka philosophy that are available in libraries.  I would like to investigate their approaches.

I learned from this book that the word "Aloha" isn't just a greeting.  It's a concept that is found in all Polynesian languages. See the Wikipedia article on Aloha here.

Another significant Hawaiian concept is "Ohana".   Machado doesn't really define Ohana.  She thinks of it as a feeling that's associated with family. There are many Ohana graphics celebrating Ohana and family on the internet.   Here's one I particularly liked.

                                  

 

I also liked the extended family and sense of community definition of Ohana that I found at Dictionary.com  here.

 When Machado went to London for her sophomore year of college, she called her father saying she felt alone.  Her father told her that she needed to get used to it.  "All you have in life is yourself."  She felt that was anti-Ohana, but she thought it was true. (I think that someone's attitude about attachment or alienation is a choice, and that it's not a permanent one.  I've vacillated between feeling contentedly immersed in a community and feeling totally apart from community.)

Machado does discuss Hawaii's past and how it became what it is today.  A significant event in Hawaiian history was King Kalakaua being forced to sign a document known as The Bayonet Constitution  on July 6, 1887.  The Bayonet Constitution gave the King less power and restricted the rights of Kanaka voters. 

There is a Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Machado briefly discusses it and Kay Trask, a prominent activist in that movement.  I read a brief memorial account of Trask's  life after she passed away in 2021 here.  Machado asked her father what he thought about Hawaiian sovereignty.  He said that it was too late for that.  I don't think it is too late.  Hawaiians can still choose to unite behind the sovereignty movement.  They can have sovereignty rallies.  They can hold an election. An island choosing sovereignty after having been colonized hasn't always worked out well (e.g. Haiti), but I think the Hawaiian traditions of Aloha and Ohana are advantages that could potentially lead to a peaceful and prosperous future for a sovereign Hawaii.  Of course, the future of Hawaii should be up to the majority of Hawaiians.

                                       

 

 

 

 

 

Land of Careful Shadows--Police Procedural Dealing With Illegal Immigrants

 It took me ten days to read my first book of the year.  Since I'm hoping to read more in 2023 than I had in 2022, that isn't good news.  Maybe I'll pick up the pace with the next novel.  I got Land of Careful Shadows by Suzanne Chazin from the library.   I'm glad to get a chance to read a book I chose myself for a change.

I selected the only mystery on the tops of my library book piles.  I like to start months with a mystery when I can, so I can be sure to have at least one mystery to discuss at the mystery book club that I attend on Zoom.

                                     

This police procedural begins with Detective Vega being stopped by a rookie who didn't know who he was.  In case there are readers who don't know, detectives don't wear uniforms.  Detective Greco tells him he should have let the rookie know he was a cop.  "Not that he was profiling me or anything," Vega responded sarcastically.  Of course the rookie had been profiling him.   

Prejudice, particularly prejudice against immigrants, is a significant theme in this book.  The victim is an illegal immigrant, but Vega wasn't going to bury the case.  Yet a local cop who had responded to a domestic violence incident, didn't arrest the abuser probably because the case involved an immigrant couple.  He didn't care enough about an immigrant woman getting abused.

 This book takes place in a small town in upstate New York, and the characters tend to be inter-related in some way.  For example, Linda, who is originally mentioned as Vega's girlfriend when he was a teenager, turns out to be significant to the plot because she's married to a major character.

Since a quinceanera is a plot event, I learned more about this Latino equivalent to a Jewish bar/bat mitzvah.   I knew that it happens when a Latino girl turns fifteen.

 Among Jews this rite of passage was originally for boys.  The first bat mitzvah was in 1922 for the daughter of Mordechai Kaplan.  He was the founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist sect. 

 I looked up the origin of the quinceanera and discovered that it originated from ancient practices of the cultures of Latin America which means that it's a good deal older than the bar mitzvah for boys which wasn't practiced widely among Jews until the 17th century. 

One thing that bothered me about this quinceanera was that the cake was flanked by Barbie dolls.  Although I had Barbie dolls as a young girl, I now think that Barbie dolls are an oppressive aspiration for girls.  No real girl or woman can ever look like a Barbie doll.  The struggle to reach this unattainable "ideal" can result in potentially dangerous eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia.  I knew someone in college who was hospitalized due to anorexia.  No girl should risk her life for what is essentially a stereotype.

I was interested in author Chazin's idea that an accident is the opposite of murder because a murder is planned, but an accident is sudden.  Land of Careful Shadows contains both deliberate murder and a pivotal accident that seem to both bookend the storyline, and upend it. I was satisfied with the ending.  When I got to that point, it seemed fated.  The opposites complemented each other.  

Mysteries are often called puzzles.  The puzzle pieces may appear disparate but when the plot of a good mystery reaches its conclusion, they all fit together neatly.  So in this case, murder and accident belonged together.  They weren't really opposites after all.