Meeting the Devil- A Book of Memoir

The Gerts have long been devoted readers of The London Review of Books (known as the LRB to the cognoscenti). We have passed our copies on to friends and family and have surely accounted for the rise in subscriptions from our harsh brown land. The journal is issued fortnightly, is closely printed, and amounts to around forty-one pages. They no longer have the amusing lonely heart entries in the back pages that used to divert us in the past, but there is always something humourous, infuriating or enlightening to read.

Let America be America Again

Langston Hughes, the African American writer who was a leader in the Harlem Renaissance wrote Let America be America Again  in 1935. I quote a couple of the most telling sections below. Eighty-five years after they were written they are still relevant.

Good Women – Jane Stevenson

I encountered Jane Stevenson when I read in The Guardian her assessment of the work of Margery Allingham.

Words of wisdom from Anita Brookner

Some baby names celebrities missed…

If you have a bub on the way, here are some ideas for names Gert found in an interesting article in the LRB:

Hillbilly Elegy- J.D.Vance

 

J D Vance dedicates his memoir thus, For Mamaw and Papaw, my very own hillbilly terminators. He was only thirty-one when his memoir was published in 2016, but he had come a long way from Jackson, Kentucky, the place he thought of as home. Here is his description,

Jackson is a small town of about six thousand in the heart of southeastern Kentucky’s coal country….Most of the people live in the mountains surrounding Kentucky Highway 15, in trailer parks, in government-subsidized housing, in small farmhouses, and in mountain homesteads like the one that served as the backdrop for the fondest memories of my childhood.

Attention, all thin people!

As part of Gert’s public service, we bring you the following important information:

Jawfaln, Lethargie and Tissick

Everyone’s talking about the coronavirus, but life was much more dangerous in the past….

Buddha Da – Anne Donovan

 

This is the story of Anne Marie’s Da, the painter Jimmy, and his involvement with Buddhism. The story is told in the voices of Anne Marie, almost twelve years old, Liz her mother and Jimmy’s wife, and Jimmy, the Glaswegian painter, ‘ma Da,’ who becomes more and more drawn to the practice of meditation. This obviously throws up conflicts within the family and among Jimmy’s friends and colleagues. A good idea to examine the practice of Buddhism through the eyes of a fairly uneducated working class man? Well, yes, but there is just one snag.

The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley by Diana Petre

Roger Ackerley died in 1929. At his funeral, the obituary in The Times states, ‘Nearly a thousand business men from all over the British Isles as well as from the Continent attended the funeral at Richmond Cemetery yesterday, and the wreaths were so numerous that four men were especially engaged to load and unload them.’