The story of Irena Sendler, notably shared by Uniontown High School students in the play “Life in a Jar,” continues to be told. The new historical novel “Irena’s War” by James D. Shipman is based on her life. Sendler helped provide food to those in need, forged documents to allow Jews in the Warsaw ghetto to continue receiving government aid, and smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto up until the time she was arrested by the Gestapo.
Word lovers should also love “The Liar’s Dictionary” by Eley Williams. Mallory is the sole remaining employee of “Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary,” whose history goes back to the 19th century. Owner David Swansby gives her an assignment: find the “mountweazels” in the dictionary. These are fictitious words inserted in a dictionary, often for the purpose of identifying others infringing on their copyright. Alternate sections are about Peter Winceworth, an employee of Swansby’s in 1899 who begins generating mountweazels just because he likes making up words. Mallory in the present stumbles across some of Winceworth’s mountweazels and tries to identify who originated them.
Kristin Blair offers a charmer in “Agatha Arch Is Afraid of Everything.” Her fears, which include flies and beans, keep her mostly to herself. When she catches her husband in an affair, she really has only her kids left. Her antics from that point on include putting on “spy pants” to spy on her husband’s new home and lover, hesitantly making a new friend of her neighbor, helping a young woman who panhandles on the town’s busiest street, and trolling a neighborhood mom’s Facebook group.
In “The Lost Manuscript” by Cathy Bonidan, Anne-Lise finds an unpublished manuscript in the hotel nightstand. Sending it to an address written in the margins, she hears back from Sylvestre that he lost the manuscript, when it was only half-finished, back in 1983. They cooperate in an effort to track the manuscript through the intervening years and discover who finished it. The letters they exchange with various people who had the manuscript for a while reveal secrets and long-lost love stories, and eventually the identity of the author who finished the story.
Ty Seidule grew up in the South, thoroughly steeped in the Lost Cause mythology and revering Robert E. Lee. Through a career as a brigadier general and chair of West Point’s history department, he came to reject it. In “Robert E. Lee and Me,” Seidule clearly shows how the Lost Cause mythology was purposely propagated to rehabilitate the South’s reputation and promote white supremacy. As a Kansan it astounds me how the Lost Cause mythology and glorification of the Confederacy has taken root here, in a place which would have once soundly rejected it, perhaps even violently. Perhaps this book will be a corrective.
