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January 14, 2022

George Ernsberger
Posted 1/14/22

The Fifties: An Underground History by James R. Gaines (Simon and Schuster).

A smart, alert history of a near-past decade in America that was never given a name and is mostly overlooked and …

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January 14, 2022

Posted

The Fifties: An Underground History by James R. Gaines (Simon and Schuster).

A smart, alert history of a near-past decade in America that was never given a name and is mostly overlooked and forgotten; it wasn’t the Roaring or the Sexy or… Much needed to be rebuilt (or just built) that had been neglected during the War; but then it was also when much of what’s remembered as epochal in the very dynamic sixties first arose. LGBTQ rights first were meaningfully, openly asserted in the fifties, when the Mattachine Society was founded (can they do that? I remember thinking, out there in Indiana); in the fifties Medgar Evers, who’d be murdered in ’63, began showing in Mississippi what might be achieved all over the deep South. Rachel Carson and Betty Friedan both came into public view in the fifties. Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism rose and exploded and drifted away (for a while) in the fifties. This account of all that is organized largely around historically important persons, those I’ve referred to here and, of course, many more. Gaines is a serious popular historian; his research is well documented, but the tone and attitudes are those of a person who wants smart readers more than he wants another degree.

Find Me by Alafair Burke (Harper). An Ellie Hatcher novel, the first in six years, after some standalones.

Everything from this really elite crime novelist is about equally welcome, but it’s especially good to have Ellie, again; she doesn’t enter this book until she’s really needed: Chapter 12 (of 41). This is (it won’t shock Burke’s regular readers to hear) a terrific New York novel, of a complexity that develops from the personalities involved as much as (I don’t say instead of) authorial manipulations. It’s a novel of character and of general social awareness, not only of crime; that won’t surprise Burke’s regular readers, who know to expect character in depth and, yeah, still suspense aplenty.

The Other Family by Wendy Corsi Staub (Morrow).

Good, very inventive domestic suspense, a trade paperback original, by a very well established writer (dozens of books over years) that the column has somehow overlooked. And—maybe the first I’ve come across where a family from California moves to Brooklyn, rather than in the other direction—into a nice neighborhood, and into a house that has a sinister, even evil, history.

Robert B. Parker’s Bye Bye Baby by Ace Atkins (Putnam).

You don’t need to hear from me yet again how good Ace Atkins is at everything, and how strong a character Parker’s Boston private investigator Spenser was and, thanks be to Atkins, still is. There are some sensational factors in play here (a crucial character is a Massachusetts congresswoman clearly based on New York’s notorious AOC); but here’s an alert: this will be Atkins’s last Spenser (and Hawk, of course) novel, and it’s as good as the best of them.

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