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In her beloved New York Times bestsellers Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, and, most recently, Shanghai Girls, Lisa See has brilliantly illuminated the potent bonds of mother love, romantic love, and love of country. Now, in her most powerful novel yet, she returns to these timeless themes, continuing the story of sisters Pearl and May from Shanghai Girls, and Pearl’s strong-willed nineteen-year-old daughter, Joy.

Reeling from newly uncovered family secrets, and anger at her mother and aunt for keeping them from her, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father—the artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the communist regime.

Devastated by Joy’s flight and terrified for her safety, Pearl is determined to save her daughter, no matter the personal cost. From the crowded city to remote villages, Pearl confronts old demons and almost insurmountable challenges as she follows Joy, hoping for reconciliation. Yet even as Joy’s and Pearl’s separate journeys converge, one of the most tragic episodes in China’s history threatens their very lives.

Acclaimed for her richly drawn characters and vivid storytelling, Lisa See once again renders a family challenged by tragedy and time, yet ultimately united by the resilience of love.

Review

“Dreams of Joy” by Lisa See continues the story of sisters Pearl and May, and of Joy, the daughter they share. The story began in “Shanghai Girls” which I very recently read, so the story was fresh in my mind. Pearl and May were once rich and pampered young women who modeled for an artist who painted calendars and ads in 1930s China. The story of how the sisters came to America in the 1930s was riveting and I wasn’t ready for their tale to end, so I was happy to learn that Lisa See was already at work on a sequel and “Dreams of Joy” is it.

Told in alternating first-person narratives by Joy and Pearl, we first meet nineteen year old Joy, who recently discovered a huge secret about her past and decides to go to the People’s Republic of China to find her birth father and to help Chairman Mao’s Communist cause. Pearl is hot on her trail to China, returning to places once familiar now quite changed. The alternating points of view are an effective way to show how both idealistic, Joy, and cynical Pearl, adjust to their new environments. At first, Joys is quite enamored with the new Communist ideal of sharing and equality. Pearl, on the other hand, can easily see the cracks, fissures and hypocrisies in the new regime.

As Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” begins to bring famine and death, the novel includes descriptions of suffering as horrible as any zombie movie I’ve ever seen. These passages are shattering and difficult to read. But the novel is also full of fascinating bits of arcane information, such as that the Maoists thought that bras were oppressive and confiscated them. Also, that returning Chinese scientists had to sign a confession admitting that the Chinese moon was larger than the American moon.

I expect this newest Lisa See novel will be quite popular. See has written several interesting and bestselling historical novels and certainly fans of “Shanghai Girls” will be avid to read this sequel. See does not disappoint. – Mary Lins, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Book Review: ‘Dreams of Joy’ by Lisa See

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – May 15, 2011 (Excerpt)

With each new novel, Lisa See gets better and better. Each work is more tightly woven, richer with information, its characters more memorable than the last.

In her previous novel, “Shanghai Girls” (2009), See gave us an unforgettable portrait of Shanghai, of its cosmopolitan ways and elegant atmosphere that made it a cultural center of Asia, and of two sisters thriving in that world of beauty and delicacy — until history intrudes and forces them to leave it all behind for an uncertain future far away in Los Angeles.

And so it is with “Dreams of Joy,” which picks up where “Shanghai Girls” left off, giving us the story of a young Chinese American woman’s search for her father and her three-year odyssey in the People’s Republic during Mao Tse-tung’s Great Leap Forward. The scope of the novel is astonishing — including the ingenious ways Chinese women handled their menstrual periods and the carefully concealed and shocking stories of starvation in the communes, the suffocating collectives into which the country was divided. (This starvation was due, in part, to central government edicts to focus on industrial production rather than agriculture.) See aims her pen at the most vivid aspects of daily life but never loses sight of the sweep of history.

Joy, 19 in 1957 and growing up in L.A.’s Chinatown, has just made several powerful discoveries: that her aunt (one of the sisters) is her real mother; and her father, who has committed suicide just two weeks previous, was illegally in the U.S. He was not even her real father, she learns, and his suicide was partially her fault because by participating in civil rights organizations in college, she has called attention (these are the feverish McCarthy years) to her family and his citizenship status. [Read the full article...]

A Comrade by Accident, a Seeker by Design

The New York Times Book Review – June 9, 2011 (Excerpt)

“You don’t say much,” says the man who flirtatiously sidles up to Joy, the young heroine of Lisa See’s latest novel. He has a smile that’s “warm and embracing.” He leaves Joy “dumb with wonder and astonishment.” And he has a question for Joy’s father: “How many more pretty daughters have you left across China?” Perhaps the question is impertinent, but this is a man who can say whatever he wants to: Joy is fielding a come-on from Chairman Mao.

Ms. See’s formula for best-selling fiction steeped in Chinese culture and history has usually involved longer and more glamorous leaps through time. “Peony in Love” went back to the 17th century (and into the afterlife). “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” was a 19th-century story. Even“Shanghai Girls,” to which “Dreams of Joy” is a sequel, went back to reasonably carefree pre-World War II Shanghai. Ms. See’s heroines (and readers) are allowed to enjoy lavish period detail before being forced through the melodramatic misery that her novels also feature.

But her latest book is set during a more recent and forbidding era: that of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which began in 1958 and mandated the collectivization of Chinese agriculture and led to catastrophic famine in the early 1960s. Since Ms. See presents these events through the eyes of Joy, a headstrong young woman who grew up in Los Angeles but rejects her family and the United States to find out what China is like, “Dreams of Joy” might have been called “We Told You So.” [Read the full article...]

Dreams of China

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – August 24, 2011 (Excerpt)

Author Lisa See never intended to write a sequel to her 2009 best-selling novel, “Shanghai Girls.”

“To me the ending (of ‘Shanghai Girls’) was a new beginning, and I was very happy with it,” said See, sitting in the lounge at her Chicago hotel.

But the president of the Random House Publishing Group asked her to reconsider.

“I … started doing research and got more and more excited about the idea and what I could do with these characters.”

Two years later “Dreams of Joy” debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list.

“Readers weren’t ready to let go of the characters,” said Susan Kamil, publisher and editor-in-chief of Random House. “May and Pearl’s honesty about getting out of China in ‘Shanghai Girls’ and establishing a life (in Los Angeles) was so powerful that readers had to know what happened to them.”

“Dreams of Joy” picks up directly where “Shanghai Girls” ended. The character Joy, now college-aged, has fled to China to find her real father after the man she thought was her father committed suicide. Pearl, who raised Joy as her daughter, follows her. [Read the full article...]

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Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

Now Available As Paperback And Kindle Edition!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Bernie Gunther’s past catches up with him in Kerr’s outstanding seventh novel featuring the tough anti-Nazi Berlin PI who survived the Nazi regime (after If the Dead Rise Not). In 1954, Bernie is living quietly in Cuba, doing a little work for underworld boss Meyer Lansky, when he runs afoul of the U.S. Navy and lands in prison in Guantánamo.

Later, at an army prison in New York City, FBI agents ask him about his service in WWII, in particular as a member of an SS police battalion on the Eastern Front. Another transfer sends him to Germany’s Landsberg Prison, where Hitler was imprisoned in 1923. Officials from various governments question and torture him, but grimly amusing Bernie, who’s smarter than any of his interrogators, successfully strings each one of them along. Vivid flashbacks chronicle Bernie’s harrowing war experiences. Series aficionados and new readers alike will take comfort knowing that Kerr is hard at work on the next installment. – Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

“Bernie Gunther is the most antiheroic of antiheroes in this gripping, offbeat thriller. It’s the story of his struggle to preserve what’s left of his humanity, and his life, in a world where the moral bandwidth is narrow, satanic evil at one end, cynical expediency at the other.”
-Philip Caputo, author of A Rumor of War

“A thriller that will challenge preconceptions and stimulate the little grey cells.”
-The Times (London), selecting Field Gray as a Thriller of the Year

“Part of the allure of these novels is that Bernie is such an interesting creation, a Chandleresque knight errant caught in insane historical surroundings. Bernie walks down streets so mean that nobody can stay alive and remain truly clean.”
-John Powers, Fresh Air (NPR)

Bernie on Bernie: I didn’t like Bernhard Gunther very much. He was cynical and world-weary and hardly had a good word to say about anyone, least of all himself. He’d had a pretty tough war . . . and done quite a few things of which he wasn’t proud. . . . It had been no picnic for him since then either; it didn’t seem to matter where he spread life’s tartan rug, there was always a turd on the grass.

Striding across Europe through the killing fields of three decades-from riot-torn Berlin in 1931 to Adenauer’s Germany in 1954, awash in duplicitous “allies” busily undermining one another-Field Gray reveals a world based on expediency, where the ends justify the means and no one can be trusted. It brings us a hero who is sardonic, tough- talking, and cynical, but who does have a rough sense of humor and a rougher sense of right and wrong. He’s Bernie Gunther. He drinks too much and smokes excessively and is somewhat overweight (but a Russian prisoner-of-war camp will take care of those bad habits). He’s Bernie Gunther-a brave man, because when there is nothing left to lose, honor rules.

Review

Field Gray begins in 1954 when Bernie Gunther is persuaded to smuggle a woman out of Cuba. Once they are at sea, Gunther’s boat is stopped by an American naval vessel and Gunther is taken into custody. After brief stays (accompanied by beatings) in Gitmo and a military prison in New York, Gunther is rendered to Germany where Americans interrogate him about war crimes. As Gunther begins to reveal his past, the novel shifts in time; ensuing chapters alternate between 1954 and earlier times in Gunther’s life: the 1930′s and 1940′s in Germany and France and Russia. As a captain in the SS, Gunther commanded a firing squad that executed Russian POWs; in occupied Paris he was nearly murdered; as a POW in a camp near Stalingrad he conducted a murder investigation. These and many other snippets of Gunther’s checkered life are linked (more or less) by Gunther’s on-and-off involvement with Erich Mielke, who (in the real world) served for many years as the minister of state security in the German Democratic Republic.

In some respects, Field Gray reads like the autobiography of Bernie Gunther. Unfortunately, the narrative shifts ground so often, and Gunther seems so detached from the story he tells, that the novel fails to create an emotional resonance between the reader and its subject. What makes Field Gray worth reading is Philip Kerr’s creation, in Gunther, of a morally complex man, one who is neither entirely good nor primarily bad, who tries to survive in an evil environment without becoming wholly corrupted by it. At one point Gunther is described as “a victim of history,” an apt label that gives him an interesting perspective upon the era that is the novel’s focus. That perspective is most often one of anger, broadly directed at Americans, Russians, the French, and other Germans, although he’s more forgiving of the British (perhaps because Kerr is British).

The story’s pace is a bit uneven; unfortunate since Kerr doesn’t have the kind of absorbing prose style that rivets a reader’s interest when the plot begins to lag. Kerr’s writing style is nonetheless capable; I never considered abandoning the story despite its occasional dull moments. Staying with it paid off in the form of an unexpected ending. While I liked the choices made in the last few pages, I suspect some will not, particularly readers who want the good guys to triumph; there are no “good guys” in this novel. But the ending is true to the story that precedes it, and I thought it was both clever and satisfying. Readers who stay with Field Gray and who aren’t turned off by moral ambiguity should have a rewarding reading experience. – TChris, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. Finn is protected in his exile in the United States after having worked for the CIA. Consequently, British Intelligence has come up with a plan to lure Finn back into their jurisdiction, Northern Ireland, by revealing the identity of the man who is ultimately responsible for the killing of Finn’s wife, Shauna. Here they hope not only to apprehend him, but also lead them to another conspirator, Martin Sheehan, who hides in the Northern provinces. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good book store.

From the beginning Oliver Walzer is a natural–at ping-pong. Even with his improvised bat (the Collins Classic edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde) he can chop, flick, half-volley like a champion. At sex he is not a natural, being shy and frightened of women, but with tuition from Sheeny Waxman, fellow member of the Akiva Social Club Table Tennis team, his game improves. And while the Akiva boys teach him everything he needs to know about ping-pong, his father, Joel Walzer, teaches him everything there is to know about “swag.” Unabashedly autobiographical, this is an hilarious and heartbreaking story of one man’s coming of age in 1950′s Manchester.

Editorial Reviews

“Poignant, moving, hilarious . . . laugh-out-loud funny . . . the sort of book that might change your life.”—Observer (UK)

“Jacobson is a great storyteller: phrases, anecdotes and atmosphere roll off the page with the ease and sublime, scary grace of drunken eels—he is unsurpassable.”—The Times (UK)

“This mature novel has the sustained exuberance and passion of his youthful writing . . . an achingly funny book . . . an amazing achievement . . . There are few novelists today who can imbue the trifles of life with such poetry.”—Independent (UK)

“Marvellous. Jacobson has not just written the first great novel about ping-pong. He has written one of the greatest sporting novels ever.”—Sunday Telegraph (UK)

“[Jacobson’s] humour is unashamedly savage and his jokes as sharp as a switch-blade . . . comic vitriol worthy of Evelyn Waugh.”—Express on Sunday (UK)

Review

I defy you to keep silent while reading this acerbic, very auto-biographical book. My wife nearly divorced me on the spot for all the sighing and laughing. Very funny, very moving – but if you’re anti-Semitic or at all prudish, forget it. There’s something of Portnoy in here, of course – how else, he implies, do table tennis players make those wristy shots work so well? Jacobson’s great achievement is to make the prosaic but strangely magnificent sport of table tennis the stuff of great literature. (And unless being ridiculously funny means that a book can’t count as great, this is high quality material.) You don’t have to be coked up like Patsy in Ab Fab to find the whole procedure irresistible. Highly recommended. – Forrest, Amazon.Com Customer Review

‘The Mighty Walzer,’ Pingpong Wizard (Of Sorts)

NPR Book Review – April 2, 2011 (Excerpt)

Howard Jacobson’s novel The Mighty Walzerwas acclaimed when it was published in Great Britain more than 10 years ago. It tells the story of Oliver Walzer, an anxious adolescent in Manchester, England, in the 1950s, who doesn’t quite know how he fits into the world around him. His family immigrated from a part of Eastern Europe he calls “bug country … all we’ve been doing since the Middle Ages has been growing beet root and running away from Cossacks.” Oliver is especially shy around girls, but at least he has pingpong. That’s right — pingpong.

Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize last year for his novel The Finkler Question; as a result, his 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer is now being published in the United States.

The novel has been called autobiographical, which Jacobson agrees with in a sense — like Oliver, Jacobson grew up in Manchester in the ’50s, played table tennis, dreamed of being a world champion and mostly failed. [Read the full article...]

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Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Ozick’s heady fiction springs from her deep critical involvement in literature, especially her fascination with Henry James, which emboldened her to lift the plot of his masterpiece, The Ambassadors, and recast it in a taut and flaying novel that is utterly her own. It’s 1952, and Bea has lived alone for decades after a fleeting marriage, teaching English to street-tough Bronx boys she much admires even as she covers their compositions with red ink. Haunted by her ex, a composer who decamped to Hollywood and made a fortune writing movie scores, Bea is also long estranged from her wealthy brother, Marvin.

Yet he asks her to fly to Paris to search for his missing son, Julian, whom he surmises is besotted with the city’s fabled charms. Instead, Julian’s Paris is a dark and merciless place of lost souls because he is in love with a Romanian refugee whose family perished in the Holocaust. Operating in a fugue state brought on by the sudden eruption of deeply buried pain and rage, Bea manages to make bad situations truly disastrous. Ozick’s dramatic inquiry into the malignance of betrayal; exile literal and emotional; the many tentacles of anti-Semitism; and the balm and aberrance of artistic obsession is brilliantly nuanced and profoundly disquieting. –Donna Seaman, Booklist.com

Review

Cynthia Ozick, author of The Shawl and Trust: A Novel, two of my favorite books, has written a gem of a novel in Foreign Bodies. A slithering and taut comedy of errors, this book examines issues of betrayal and trust, literal and emotional exile, regret and rage, Judaism in post-World War II Europe and the meaning of art in one’s life. While based on themes similar to Henry James’ The Ambassadors, this novel is distinctly and uniquely Ozick’s.

It is 1952 and 48 year-old Bea Nightingale has been teaching English to boys in a technical school for decades. They are more interested in other things than Shakespeare and Dickens but Bea gives it her best shot each semester. Once briefly married to Leo, a composer and pianist, Bea has been divorced for decades and Leo has gone on to do very well as a composer of scores for Hollywood movies. After Leo left Bea, he also left his grand piano which takes up a huge place in Bea’s small Manhattan apartment and symbolizes several things to her – regret, the importance of art, and betrayal. Leo was supposed to pick up the piano and never did. It has sat untouched for years, an homage to Bea’s anger and loss, along with its symbolic meaning of art as creation.

One day, out of the blue, Bea gets a letter from her semi-estranged brother, Marvin, asking her to to find his son Julian, an ex-pat who took a college year abroad and has not returned after three years. Marvin is a legend in his own mind, an arrogant, controlling, rude man who has made his fortune in airline parts in California. His wife Margaret, is a blue-blood who Marvin met at Princeton when he was there on scholarship. She is now in a rehab center ostensibly because the loss of Julian has sent her over the edge. Julian was always the lost child, the one who Marvin considered a loss. He had his head in the clouds and his desire was to write though Marvin wanted him to become a scientist. He has one other child, Iris, who is on the mark and following Marvin’s goals for her to become a scientist. Marvin tells Bea in his letter, that he knows she is going on holiday to Paris and he’d like her to look up Julian and get him to come home. He feels that she must do this for what else does she do in her life but teach thugs. (As a matter of clarity, Marvin’s last name is Nachtigal and Bea’s is Nightingale. She changed her name because she thought it would be easier for her students to pronounce).

On Bea’s trip to Paris, she makes two minor attempts at the end of her trip to contact Julian but is unsuccessful. He has already left his apartment and his where-abouts are unknown. Bea returns to New York and gets a scathing letter from Marvin all but ripping her to shreds. How she is able to stand his abuse is a comment on her own sense of self-deprecation. Marvin has a new idea. His daughter Iris is close to Julian and knows him well. He will send Iris to Bea’s for a few days and she will tell Bea all about Julian and then Bea will again venture to Paris ‘knowing’ Julian and better able to find him. What ends up happening however is the beginning of a long line of betrayals for which Bea is responsible. Iris does come to New York but instead of Bea going to Paris, Iris goes and Bea makes up a story to Marvin about what is happening. Whatever Bea touches comes back inside-out.

Iris writes to Bea and tells her she plans to stay in Paris. Bea goes back to Paris, this time in search of Iris as well as Julian. What Bea finds in Europe is that Julian is married to Lili, a Romanian holocaust survivor several years older than him. He works part-time in cafes and lives on the money that Marvin sends him. Julian and Iris want nothing to do with Bea and give her the cold shoulder. Instead of returning to Manhattan, Bea impulsively flies to California and contacts her ex-husband, starting off a chain of events that leads to artistic obsession. She also contacts Margaret in her rest home which also leads to dire consequences.

Bea’s betrayals are numerous and though often done with good intentions, end up with horrible repercussions. She is passive in her life but feels like she is able to take control when it comes to others. She has this grandiose sense of what is right for those around her. Bea gives a lot of thought to exile and sense of place and these themes resonate throughout the book. While Julian has chosen to exile himself from his father emotionally and as an ex-patriate, Marvin then chooses to exile Julian from his life unless Julian is willing to take a bribe and come home. Bea again intervenes and betrays Marvin. It is hard to see what is going on in Bea’s mind but there are a lot of deep feelings, especially anger, rage, and regret. While her actions might seem magnanimous to her, they often seem controlling, misguided and horrific to the reader.

Cynthia Ozick has created a small treasure with this novel. Its twists and turns, keeping the reader enthralled and emotionally transfixed. We are led through a maze of human frailty, often disguised as strength, as we are swept away with the undercurrents of duplicity and displacement. This is a must-read for Ozick fans and, for those not familiar with her writing, a good place to start. – Bonnie Brody, Amazon Review

‘Foreign Bodies’: Disappointing ambassador for Henry James

The Washington Post Book World – January 11, 2011 (Excerpt)

The story behind the story in Cynthia Ozick’s new novel – her sixth – is Henry James’s “The Ambassadors,” whose plot Ozick has repurposed in a different time period with a new set of characters. This venture will come as no surprise to Ozick’s many longtime admirers, who know that she wrote her master’s thesis on “Parable in Henry James,” that her long first novel, “Trust” (1966), was a self-consciously Jamesian enterprise and that she archly explained in a well-known 1982 essay called “The Lesson of the Master” how James ruined her youth.

Ozick is now in her 80s, and James is ruining her still. In the title story of her last book, “Dictation” (2008), she imagined James’s young amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, forming a mischievous alliance with Joseph Conrad’s typist. And now Ozick offers this palimpsest of “The Ambassadors,” the groundbreaking 1903 novel that James regarded as his best.

Regrettably, “Foreign Bodies” is far from Ozick’s best, displaying few traces of the searing authorial command she has demonstrated in the past, most notably in her stories “The Shawl” and “Envy: Or Yiddish in America.” The new book is an overworked and cramped affair, whose prose reads as if it were being tweezed out of a tiny hole. And worse, the characters here are brittle, shadowy creatures. Despite evident effort, Ozick has not managed to infuse them with a breath of life. [Read the full article...]

A heartbreaking yet deeply hopeful memoir about life as a twin in the face of autism.

When Allen Shawn and his twin sister, Mary, were two, Mary began exhibiting signs of what would be diagnosed many years later as autism. Understanding Mary and making her life a happy one appeared to be impossible for the Shawns. At the age of eight, with almost no warning, her parents sent Mary to a residential treatment center. She never lived at home again.

Fifty years later, as he probed the sources of his anxieties in Wish I Could Be There, Shawn realized that his fate was inextricably linked to his sister’s, and that their natures were far from being different.

Twin highlights the difficulties American families coping with autism faced in the 1950s. Shawn also examines the secrets and family dramas as his father, William, became editor of The New Yorker. Twinreconstructs a parallel narrative for the two siblings, who experienced such divergent fates yet shared talents and proclivities. Wrenching, honest, understated, and poetic, Twin is at heart about the mystery of being inextricably bonded to someone who can never be truly understood.

About the Author

Allen Shawn grew up in New York. He currently lives in Vermont and teaches at Bennington College. As a composer, he has produced a large catalogue of orchestral, chamber, and piano works, as well as scores for ballet, theater, and film. He performs frequently as a pianist, and he has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications.

Phantom Twin

by Allen Shawn – The New York Times Book Review – November 30, 2010 (Excerpt)

I don’t like losing things. I keep a list of books I know I once had, and know I’ve read, that I have somehow misplaced; “The Magic Mountain,” Loren Eiseley’s “The Star Thrower,” “The Complete Claudine” by Colette are on it, along with at least 40 other titles. Even when I lose a pair of pants, a sense of vexation, a confusion arises in me that seems out of all proportion to the loss, and if the pants are suddenly presented to me apologetically at the dry cleaners I feel a strange giddiness, a tincture of the kind of joy displayed by reunited families in movies about Mormon heaven. It is strange that in this world in which everything is sooner or later lost, where losing is the only certainty, one gets attached to even the smallest things and wants to be able to say goodbye even to a pair of pants, rather than have it simply disappear. One wants to see a logic in disappearances, and to know when one is losing things. Even if, in the end, we get to keep nothing.

Mary disappeared from my daily life when we were 8 years old, when my parents placed her in an institution for the mentally disabled. It took me painfully long even to recognize that the event had left a kind of ocean of disquiet in me that manifested itself in panic attacks and a lifelong struggle with agoraphobia, and in my difficulties negotiating some aspects of public life, as well as in my reactions to trivial losses. I suppose that as her twin, it was doubly hard for me to know how and where to draw the boundary line between her nature and mine, between the inherent strangeness of being a person and the kind of strangeness that led to what I saw as banishment from normal human society. Yet I wasn’t aware of any of this when I was growing up. It wasn’t until I reached late middle age that I could even begin to acknowledge that being Mary’s twin was a central fact, perhaps the central fact, of my life. All I did feel was a kind of blank place inside, where memories and feelings should have been. [Read the full article...]

Evans’s lively book seeks, first, to demonstrate that Communists worked, often successfully, to undermine American security during the Cold War. It tries, second, to defend Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the egregious scourge of American Communists and fellow travelers, against those who, in Evans’s (The Theme Is Freedom) view, have unjustly ruined his reputation. On the first point, save for some new details, Evans, a contributing editor to Human Events, treads worn ground. Most scholars, having also used Soviet archives, concede his position and argue now only over secondary matters, like the guilt of Alger Hiss. On the second point, Evans has a tougher case, which he seeks to make as a defense attorney would: by conceding nothing to McCarthy’s detractors.

Evans is also given to conspiracy thinking—an approach that, by its nature, yields claims that can neither be confirmed nor falsified. Defense attorneys and debaters like Evans follow different rules than historians—they try to score points, not to advance knowledge. Evans is good at the former, his propulsive style carrying much of the argument’s burden. But the history Evans relates is already largely known, if not fully accepted.

- Source: Amazon.Com

Reviews

“It takes M. Stanton Evans’s meticulous investigative journalism to show what Joe McCarthy’s short stay on the national stage (a little under five years, from February 1950 to December 1954) really was about.”
-Robert Novak, Weekly Standard

“So comprehensive is Evans’s research that it will be a foolish historian who does not consult Blacklisted by History when a question arises over some person or event that comes into the McCarthy story.”
-John Earl Haynes, co-author, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

“This book will change forever how you think about Sen. McCarthy and the Soviet penetration of the U.S. government and society.”
-Bob McMahan, Foreign Service Journal

“Evans goes through extensive files and transcripts with complete mastery of complex material and an engaging turn of phrase that makes more than 600 pages of painstaking analysis both a triumph of historical scholarship and a gripping detective story.”
-David Ashton, The Salisbury Review

“Of the hundreds of books on the McCarthy era, Stan Evans has written the best—a nuanced, incredibly detailed work of scholarship.”
-William Schulz, The American Spectator

“In this masterful instant classic, M. Stanton Evans sets out to tell the ‘Untold Story of Joe McCarthy’ and does so definitively.”
-Jack Cashill, WorldNetDaily

“This is a master newspaperman at work: digging, interviewing the record, pulling apart and putting together the details of deeds done mostly by the politicians who ran our imperfect national government in the nineteen fifties.”
-John Willson, Chronicles

“After combing through masses of declassified documents from Congress, the FBI, the State Department and other federal agencies, Stan Evans has produced a masterpiece of tru th.”
-Terry Jeffrey, Human Events

“Evans, a veteran journalist, doesn’t shout. He displays, instead, a deadly meticulousness that is, at last, overwhelmingly convincing.”
-William Rusher, United Features Syndicate

“the most thorough scholarly examination of [McCarthy's] career”
-Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy In Media

“brilliantly documented”
-Wes Vernon, RenewAmerica.us

“monumental … the result of six years of reading primary sources. Evans proves that almost everything about McCarthy in current history books is a lie and wil l have to be revised…. one of Reagan’s old radio commentaries referred to Evans as ‘a very fine journalist.’ He is, indeed, but this book shows that he also is a Sherlock Holmes-type detective who chased every clue to find the truth and to write accurate history in elegant prose….. Everyone who henceforth writes about Joe McCarthy will have to check his facts with Evans’ documented discoveries.”
-Phyllis Schlafly, Creators Syndicate