Peachy Reads

William E. Dodd was a lifelong academic who thought an ambassadorship would afford him needed time to work on his life’s ambition, writing a multi-volume history of the American South. He ended up being awarded the posting in Berlin during the years the National Socialists had gained power and Germany was hurtling towards war. He was pretty well-connected in the halls of government, but it helped that several others had refused the German ambassadorship before it was offered to him. He was probably ill-suited to the position, but did what he could to sound warning bells about the rising threat of Nazism and Germany’s renewed military escalation. Had Dodd's warnings been heeded, it may have been possible for western governments to thwart Hitler’s ambitions, but it wasn’t just Neville Chamberlain who indulged the Nazi regime, and eventually the appeasers were to regret their isolationist tendencies and kid-glove treatment of Germany in the 1930s. It seems a real worry, at least fr...

This short novel, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction, chronicles the gritty life of a motherless rural Mississippi African American family, trying to scrape by in their daily existence. The novel takes place in the days leading up to Katrina and ends with the catastrophic effects of that singular storm. There is love in the Batiste family, but it is so tempered by the hardship of their lives, that it manifests itself in small and sometimes surprising ways. Even though this was a very credible portrayal of rural Southern poverty, I felt it was a bit of a slow-starter, and the pace didn’t really pick up until well into the book. Salvage the Bones provides a good rural counterpart to the Katrina narrative  Zeitoun by David Eggers. Salvage the Bones won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction .