Read Beat (...and repeat)

So where did we get all these letters that children learn as their ABC’s? Danny Bate has the answer in his book, “Why Q Needs U.”

Born and raised in England and now living in Prague, Bate is a linguist, writer, broadcaster, and podcaster (A Language I Love is…), Bate admits to being obsessed by language and its history.

“Nowadays, the alphabet has become so successful that we rarely recognize its achievement,” he noted in his book regarding the alphabet's development over 4,000 years. “Yet over the course of its long development, nothing is fixed, and every letter has a story to tell.”

Bate tells each of the 26 letters' stories, starting logically with A. Tracing the letter’s history from Egypt, through the ancient Phoenicians to the Greeks who gave us “alpha” (as in alphabet), Bate explains how language evolves over time.

There’s a certain excitement that comes with discovering where our letters come from. In his review of the book for The Times, James McConnachie seems positively elated:

“I have been able to tell everyone within earshot that Q has a tail because it was once a picture of a monkey, that O used to have a dot in the middle because it used to be the Egyptian hieroglyph for an eye, and that A — bear with me here — started life as a picture of an ox’s head (because it used to represent the glottal stop that began the ancient Semitic word for ox, ’alp) and then morphed into a vowel over time while also somehow turning itself upside down, the wonderful result being that the two legs on our capital A started life as … horns. And’alp, of course, became alpha.”

English has its quirks, Bate admits. We’re talking about the fact that there’s a hard c (coconut) and a soft c (cigar) and don't forget the “magic e,” which Bate explains is a split digraph. But don’t worry, it all becomes clear once you follow the explanations Bate provides. 

We can thank the Romans for coming up with cursive handwriting, and we learn that the letter W is a child of the fall of Rome. Want clarification? Listen to the interview with the author.

At a time when U.S.-Cuban relations have probably never been worse, there’s Barbara Caver’s “A Little Piece of Cuba,” a book that explores her own journey “to become Cubana-Americana.”

Caver’s mother was born in Cuba before leaving for the United States with her family at the age of seven in 1959. While the author, who lives in New York, doesn’t speak Spanish and only visited Cuba for five days in 2017, Caver’s story is a family memoir, her effort to forge a relationship with Cuba.

“I’ve traveled to many far-flung places, and Cuba is the only one that I can remember with all five senses,” she wrote. 

“For my grandparents, Cuba was in the tiles on the kitchen floor and hanging on the walls of their home, but the walls and floor are taken for granted and not often noticed. My grandmother’s story, my mother’s story, my family’s story belong to them. I have my own version of the Cuban American story to tell, and in that story, I embark on a brave adventure to a forbidden place, curious to know more, and discover that Senora Cuba wanted to know me too,” she noted.

On the U.S. political scene, Cuba has become the proverbial football. Depending on which political party is in power, so goes U.S. treatment of Cuba. President Barack Obama visited Cuba in 2016, the same year that Fidel Castro died at the age of 90. Obama loosened restrictions with Cuba, but  President Donald Trump reinstated them when he took office in 2017.

In 2022, President Joe Biden eased restrictions on the country once again, only for Trump to restore a hard-line policy upon his return to the White House in 2025.

Now Raúl Castro, who stepped down as Cuba's leader in 2018, is back in the news. At age 94, he’s just been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department. That indictment of Castro “comes at a tense time for US-Cuban relations, with the Trump administration declaring the Cuban government is a threat to US national security. Cuba is also dealing with a collapse of its energy sector due to an oil blockade following the U.S. attack on Cuba’s oil-rich ally Venezuela,” stated CNN.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that widespread blackouts are common on the fuel-starved island. The country of some 10 million people (2 million in Havana) is “trapped in the vise of a repressive regime and punishing American sanctions,” the paper reported.

“I worry over the political tensions and embargo. The present policy is not fair to the American people, Cuban Americans, or the Cuban people,” said Caver.

To better understand the situation, “I think people need to hear more personal stories about Cuba,” she said. 

She provides her own personal story in this book. “If one day you decide to visit Cuba, you find yourself on TripAdvisor or some other website, and you stumble across Casa de Maria Mendoza, well, I hope you know what you’re in for. If you’re looking for mojitos on white sand beaches and rides at sunset in Franken cars, you should move on. Casa Maria offers an unparalleled immersion and exploration into Cuban culture for people who always questioned what it meant to be Cuban…Casa de Maria might just change your life.”

The saga of basketball star Larry Bird invariably culminates in the Bird-Magic Johnson story, two players who met in the most-watched basketball game of all time, the 1979 NCAA championship game between Indiana State and Michigan State, and then went on to "save" the NBA, each winning titles for their respective teams, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers.

But Keith O'Brien saw another story: the rise of Larry Bird from a small town in Indiana whose collegiate career was very nearly derailed before it began.

Bird famously walked away from a spot on the Bobby Knight-led Indiana University team and was picking up garbage in his hometown before arriving on the Indiana State campus.

O'Brien's exhaustive research uncovers the contributions of people who helped an 18-year-old kid find his way. Friends, fellow players, and coaches -- even an enterprising university president -- recognized the greatness of Larry Bird, perhaps even more than he did.

Bird's epic season at Indiana State, when the team went unbeaten until the championship game with Michigan State, is chronicled in full detail by O'Brien, who called the school's success "one of the original Cinderella stories in basketball."

Bird's success came despite his becoming increasingly hostile toward the print media as the team drew the country's attention. O'Brien noted that Bird, a man who liked to keep his private life private, was even able to cope with the "great white hope" label the media gave him on his way to the NBA, a league dominated by Black stars.

O'Brien noted that while much is made of Bird's reticence with the media, he also never suffered the consequences of altercations with fans that took place on the basketball court.

But his accomplishments on that court continue to shine. The magic of Larry Bird lives on, said O'Brien. "Local tourism officials estimate he is worth at least $7 million annually to the economy of Terre Haute," he said, referring to the town where Indiana State University is located.

"Almost five decades since his last college game, Bird is still keeping the lights on, putting people in seats, drawing fans downtown, and making Terre Haute relevant," said O'Brien.

A true story, The Navigator’s Letter is a tale of uncanny coincidences: two friends from the same small town in Illinois join the Army Air Corps in World War II. 

Both become navigators. Both were assigned to B-24 Liberators. Both flew missions over Europe. Both of their planes were forced down over Ploesti in Romania, a target for Allied bombers that wanted to knock out Nazi Germany’s primary fuel source.

Jan Cress Dondi has written an account that captures the sense of the all-involving conflict that WWII became. It was a war that, once it began to rage, reached every small town, every family. 

Dondi’s discovery of a footlocker filled with letters in her mother’s cellar said those letters reached out to her. “While the early letters revealed a prewar innocence, as they moved into 1943, reading turned to a curiosity of how war impacted family. As for WWII itself, I found how little I understood about this major event,” she wrote.

But the letters led the author on a quest that included interviews with the main characters and the people who knew them. She found and used a POW diary, memoirs from crewmembers, scrapbooks, and newspaper clippings. She dug up records from the National Archives, both American and German.

“At its heart, The Navigator’s Letter is a personal narrative,” noted Dondi. “It’s a true story about three youths growing up (in Hillsboro, Illinois) at the advent of WWII. The main characters, John B. and Bob (Dondi’s father), drive the story through Polley’s eyes—a journey that took two young men from the heartland of America to a cauldron of Hitler’s crude oil at Ploesti.”

Dondi’s description of the bombing runs over Ploesti, the heavily protected Nazi stronghold, reveals the horrifying fate faced by those flying planes at tree-top level into the teeth of German anti-aircraft guns. 

It’s a familiar story: the animals we’ve all known since we were children, the lions, tigers, and elephants, all disappearing from the wilds due to loss of habitat, hunters, or a changing environment.

So how gratifying is it to learn that in one part of the world, a wintry forest area between Russia and China, that the Siberian tiger is actually making a comeback?

That’s what Jonathan Slaght writes about in Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China.

The proper reference for the Siberian cat is Amur tiger for animals that live in the Amur River basin, which forms part of the border between Russia and China. 

By whatever name, they are an endangered species. In the final years of the Cold War, only a few hundred of these great cats remained. And make no mistake, the Siberian tiger is a great cat. It weighs in at almost 700 pounds, and can reach 11 feet in length. A tiger can leap up to 15 feet in the air and drag or carry prey weighing 1,000 pounds. It can devour 60 pounds of meat at one sitting--but seldom does 

A meal can take many days to find in the wild, especially with changing political conditions. When the Soviet Union fell, catastrophe arrived, with poaching and logging taking a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species.

Slaght, who now travels the globe for the Wildlife Conservation Society, charts the incredible story of a 35-year program that brought Russian and American scientists together to help save the tigers. 

He shows how this coalition laid the foundations of new tiger research across Asia, transforming public opinion around tigers from something to be feared and hunted to creatures we must protect.

Today, tigers occupy only 7 percent of the land they did 100 years ago, disappearing from the wild across Bali to Iran. In the ongoing global crisis of species destruction, Slaght brings us hope for the future. Slaght gives credit to the people who worked on the project over the years, Americans like Dale Miquelle and John Goodrich along with several Russian scientists.

Slaght’s account of how the tiger project progressed reveals that conservation is not for the weak of heart. Tagging a wild tiger so that it can be tracked for research purposes is no simple matter. Is there enough tranquilizer in the dart to do the job? What about the aim? What about confronting an enraged tiger caught in a trap?

There’s also endless waiting for researchers to find their tigers. Dealing with shortages in the field was made even worse with the collapse of the Society Union,  a time when the research project was just coming together.

Slaght cited another possible success story is underway with the relocation of Amur tigers to Kazakhstan. Tigers are being reintroduced into the Balkhash Nature Reserve, an environment that closely mirrors where tigers roamed many years ago. 

Slaght’s first book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, also documents a conservation story. But the difference between owl and tiger is one of territory. While the owl secures only a small part of the forest, one lone Siberian tiger ranges in an area that might encompass more than 500 square miles.

While powerful hunters, tigers are at the mercy of the environment. With the recent outbreak of African Swine Fever striking down Russia’s population of wild boar, a favorite tiger dish, the great cats have had to turn to villages for food. When tigers confront an angry public, it never turns out well for the tiger.

Yet Slaght believes progress is being made. If not for the animals' sake, for our own. International collaboration is essential to conservation, he noted.

Abraham Lincoln has been characterized in many ways: as a father, statesman, lawyer, writer, speechmaker, and military leader. He served as U.S. President during this country’s Civil War, grappling under the intense pressure that could have split the nation in two permanently. There are probably more books written about Lincoln than about any other individual in U.S. history.

Add one more. Matthew Pinsker, a history professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., has written Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln. This is a look at Lincoln the politician. Honest Abe may have split rails and freed the slaves, but he also practiced politics. 

“Matthew Pinsker performs a small miracle by writing something fresh and important about Abraham Lincoln,” noted Alan Traylor, author of American Civil Wars, adding, “Pinsker reveals a pragmatic politician adept at building coalitions, doling out patronage, and even playing the dirty tricks of old-school politics.”

Lincoln was a tireless politician at a time when politics was a little different from what it is now, said Pinsker, calling his subject a workaholic. In the 19th century, a politician wrote letters, made speeches, traveled by rail or stagecoach (or steamboat when it was appropriate), all the while cultivating political allies who could be called on to provide support when needed.

Pinsker lays out how Lincoln hit the national stage when he made his first visit to Chicago in 1847 to speak at the River & Harbor Convention. The National Intelligencer, a Washington, D.C. paper, noted that “Mr. Lincoln … (made) some sound and sensible remarks.”

The following year, Lincoln made a series of speeches in Massachusetts. This was 1848, a time of movements. You had the civil rights movement with the Underground Railroad transporting runaway slaves to safety, and a burgeoning women’s rights movement highlighted that year by a conference in Seneca Falls, N.Y., with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

“This was no era of good feeling,” noted Pinsker, pointing to political discontent that exceeded the polarization of our present period.

This was a growing nation. By 1850, there were 30 states and 23 million people, of which three million were slaves. There were a variety of political parties in that era, such as the Free Soil Party, the Liberty Party, the Whig Party, the American Party, and the Union Party.

The early 1850s found Lincoln heavily involved in patronage appointments. “By the mid-1850s, Lincoln the lawyer appeared to be almost everywhere,” stated Pinsker, noting that Lincoln averaged 150 days a year on the road.

Pinsker follows Lincoln’s rise to the White House and through the Civil War, a time when he was forced to straddle a fence between those who wanted to save the South while others wanted to punish it for secession.

Pinsker doesn't apologize for hanging the partisan label on Lincoln “It has always seemed an insult to call someone ‘partisan.’ The term feels like shorthand for petty combativeness. Lincoln’s partisanship was more dynamic and honorable. He fought with his opponents and endured their attacks but also learned how to bring people together to save a democratic nation,” noted Pinsker, adding that we need to think about that in these divided times.

Jesse Sutanto has found a unique writing formula. The author of over a dozen books including the Aunties and Vera Wong (the previous interview with Sutanto came after the publication of Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) treats her writing like it’s a day job. 

After writing an outline, she walks about her Indonesian home, which she shares with a husband, two children, and a nanny “talking to myself about what characters would say and do,” said Sutanto.

Allowing about five weeks per book, she writes by day while her kids, ages seven and 11, are at school. “I write 2,000 words a day—usually writing every weekday before lunch time,” said Sutanto. After completing 40,000 words, she checks into a luxury hotel in Jakarta, recently declared the largest city in the world (its
estimated population of 42 million tops Tokyo, the previous leader).

There in her favorite hotel, she gets down to brass tacks or bold headlines (make that deadlines), and comes up with 12,000 words a day. In three days, she’s done. “I’ve followed this routine six or seven times,” she said.

Sutanto’s latest effort is Ms. Mebel Goes Back to the Chopping Block. Mebel Tanadi
is a doting Chinese Indonesian trophy wife who finds, at age 63, that her
husband is leaving her for a much-younger woman, the couple’s private chef.

Rather than wallow in her sorrow, Mebel enrolls in culinary school, and the adventure begins. Since the book delves into some of the intricacies of preparing fine dishes, I asked Sutanto if she was a foodie. It turns out that she had considered developing the culinary arts, herself, before opting for creative writing. But a good friend of hers did go to culinary school and became a major source for Chopping Block.

Jesse said she didn’t think Chopping Block qualified as a cozy mystery (the label she used for Snooping), but rather, a coming-of-age mystery.

Sutanto, who got her bachelor’s from the University of California and a master’s from Oxford (one of the settings for Chopping Block), grew up in Singapore where she spends time when she’s not in Indonesia writing books according to that formula that she’s shared with writer-friends, some of whom have followed her example. (Do the Hilton people know about this?) 

The first thing that makes a reader read a book is the characters. That was John Gardner. If the characters come alive, the novel comes alive. That’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Given the importance of characters, James Plath, an English professor at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Gail Sinclair, the executive director of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., and Kirk Curnutt, an English professor at Troy University in Troy, Ala., set about to identify the 100 greatest characters in literature.

Such a daunting task required setting up some rules. One of those was that the authors decided against picking multiple characters from a single novel. So Mark Twain’s Jim didn’t make the list while Huck Finn did. Sherlock Holmes got the nod. Dr. Watson didn’t. Frankenstein’s monster made the list over his creator.

On a separate list included in the book, each author listed 10 characters they deemed especially great. Plath listed the following: Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes, Hester Prynne (The Scarlet Letter), Jay Gatsby, Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter, Dracula, Ebenezer Scrooge, James Bond, and Jane Eyre.

“I gravitated towards unique, richly imagined characters that have been embraced by pop culture in substantial or significant ways and are known by people who haven’t read the novels,” said Plath.

Don Quixote is revered around the world, while tourists make a pilgrimage to 221B Baker Street in London to see where Sherlock Holmes hung his deerstalker. Hester Prynne was the perfect example of society’s double standard, said Plath. “It takes two people to have an affair, but only one is held accountable (the woman),” he said.

Jay Gatsby came alive on Broadway recently, said Plath, while many knew the Alice in Wonderland story and characters, but few have probably read the Lewis Carroll work, he said.

Harry Potter, on the other hand, got people reading again and now has his own theme park, noted Plath. Dracula’s storied fame has been broadened by the many films that have followed, something that has also heightened the character of James Bond, he said.

Plath said he retained the Bond paperbacks he read as a kid and recently reread them, noticing that Ian Fleming’s 007 novels tend to be less detailed than the movies that have carried the franchise forward. “In the novels, Bond can be almost cruel at times,” he said.

Ebenezer Scrooge represents the bad character who is transformed, while Jane Eyre may be the all-time romantic favorite, he said.

Plath, who’s taught at Illinois Wesleyan since 1988, has taught American literature, journalism, creative writing, and film. He’s written several volumes of poetry and serves as president of the John Updike Society. Among the books he’s written are Conversations with John Updike (1994), Remembering Ernest Hemingway (1999), and John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews (2016).

The date of June 18, 1940 proved to be the most important day in the lives of two of the best-known world leaders of the 20th century: Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle.

World War II had taken an ugly turn in Europe with the fall of France, and both men took to BBC radio on that day to rally their respective sides, England and France, said Richard Vinen, author of The Last Titans: How Churchill and deGaulle Saved Their Nations and Transformed the World.

“Both men made critical speeches. It was Churchill’s ‘finest hour’ speech and de Gaulle’s initial call for French resistance," said Vinen, a professor of history at King’s College, London.

While Churchill’s famous call to arms (“Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”) was the result of 40 years of public speaking in the House of Commons, de Gaulle took to the radio microphone for the first time, two days after arriving in London, having been evacuated from his conquered France.

“Both Churchill and de Gaulle were radio stars,” said Vinen, referring to the four years of wartime speeches made by both men. BBC officials were impressed by de Gaulle’s efforts because he’d never had any experience as a radio broadcaster before.

Both men also played a role in how their respective countries came to grips with a new world order that precluded empires and was now led by the United States.

Vinen draws comparisons and similarities between the two men. “(Churchill) liked people and particularly the British. De Gaulle loved France, but he loved it as an abstraction separate from the French people,” he stated.

As to his next effort, Vinen is taking measure of these interesting times. “I feel history is moving under our feet as we talk. I’d like to know what’s about to happen before I start trying to write about it,” he said.

An upcoming story on the CrimeReads website (https://crimereads.com/) will look at the performances of movie/TV good guys who later took on bad-guy roles and vice versa. It can only be another story by Keith Roysdon, whose previous stories on CrimeReads include looks at writers Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch, a historic scan of Universal monsters, and a review of 1970s disaster movies.

Having served as a reporter and editor in Muncie, Ind. for some 40 years, Roysdon has written three novels, most recently Seven Angels. Now living in Knoxville, Tenn., Roysdon is also a partner in Constellate Creatives (https://constellatecreatives.com/), a one-stop shop that seeks to help writers publish books with editing and marketing services.

Marketing a book once it's published is the one thing new authors tend to dread, said Roysdon, happy to provide help in getting a new book noticed. 

Roysdon said his offbeat entertainment stories are the result of an open-minded editor who sees the value in giving a creative talent free rein. “I’ve got to give Dwyer Murphy, my editor at CrimeReads, and everybody there, credit, because the more obscure thing that I can think of, it seems like they're on board with that,” he said. 

Who but Roysdon would review Pray for the Wildcat, a TV movie from ABC made in the 1970s starring Andy Griffith as a corporate boardroom bully who makes life miserable for all those around him? This role flies in the face of the one most of us have for Griffith--good old Andy Taylor from Mayberry, said Roysdon.

The movie’s cast includes William Shatner, Robert Reid, and Lorraine Gary, who played Chief Brodie’s wife in Jaws, said Roysdon. Other character shifts noted in the article focus on players like Angela Lansbury and Fred MacMurray, he said. The story will be published soon on CrimeReads.

Writing stories for the crime website keeps Roysdon pretty busy in itself (he’s had more than 75 stories published), but along with the three novels, he also works on reading and editing other writers’ work on the growing Constellate site. 

Recalling his time writing for the newspaper in Muncie where he did movie reviews from 1977 to 1990, a distinct period, said Roysdon, identifying it as a future project he’d like to tackle. 

“It was a really good time for pictures, and that's something that I've considered writing about in the way of a movie book. But I don't know if I'll ever get around to it, because I've got so many other things I want to do,” said Roysdon.

Whatever Roysdon decides to do, you know the result will be distinctive—and just slightly offbeat.