The litany of complaints of the squeezed middle class is familiar.
Three million jobs gone overseas this decade. People working all their lives on the promise of pensions they don’t get. Declining availability of health care. Parents believing, for the first time in U.S. history, that their children will not do as well as they did.
“Everyone knows that recitation,” said Philip Dine.
Seriously, what could be a funnier title than Robert Frost’s Answering Machine? by Daniel Waters (Indian Hill Press, $15). The West Tisbury wit-man, known far and wide as D.A.W., has been posting his quatrains in The Vineyard Gazette, Yankee Magazine, and on N.P.R. When we hear his doleful voice – Disney could cast him as Eeyore in the Winnnie the Pooh cartoons — reading his own hilarious, too-true verbal apecues on the air, we pat down our desks for a pen so we can share the ditty with friends.
THIRD STRIKE: A Brady Coyne/J.W. Jackson Mystery. By Philip R. Craig and William G. Tapply. Scribner, New York, N.Y. December 2007. 323 pages. $24 in hardcover.
A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR LANDLOCKED MERMAIDS by Margot Datz, Beyond Words, $16.
Vineyard artist and writer Margot Datz posits a universe where men, taking a page from Darwin, descended as apes from the trees, whereas women “rose up from the frothy sea, as resplendent as Aphrodite on her scalloped chariot.” But the mating call is more persistent than the tug of a thick rope, so we mermaids have “abandoned our psychic habitat to seek mates on shore, and we have been like fish out of water ever since.” Ain’t that the truth?
FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE. By Anthony Lewis. Basic Books, New York, N.Y. 2008. 221 pages. $25 hard cover.
The Vineyard’s political season is in full swing, with town meetings and local elections happening this month. It is in a season such as this that Anthony Lewis’s most recent book, Freedom For The Thought That We Hate, is particularly compelling.
There are at least five good reasons to read Bound, a new novel by Brewster resident Sally Gunning set for release in the spring.
The story of a 15-year-old British girl indentured in the New World of the 1750s is a captivating read, written by an author well-trained in taut storytelling and well-versed in the pre-Revolutionary War period of Britain’s Massachusetts Bay colony, including Cape Cod.
WOODEN BOATS OF MARTHA’S VINEYARD: The Photography of Louisa Gould. Text and photographs by Louisa Gould. Flat Hammock Press, 2008. 64 pages. $19.95, softcover.
In Mystery on the Vineyard, author Tom Dresser delves into a grisly unsolved murder. Here is an extract from the new book. It was pre-World War II and a dapper off-Islander arrived, impressing the locals. Drawn to the prettiest girl, he was upset when an elderly woman tried to break up the romance.
This story happened on East Chop in Oak Bluffs nearly 70 years ago. The Red Sox led the American League in early June and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath had recently been released as a movie, starring Henry Fonda.
KILLER HEAT. By Linda Fairstein. Doubleday, 2008. 384 pages. $26 hardcover.
Killer Heat, like any good title, is a play on words. It refers to death by New York oven — the baking August temperatures that send the rich to the Hamptons or the Vineyard, and the poor to their fire escapes for a breath of nighttime air. Killer Heat is also a reference to an actual killer or killers and to the heat, slang for law, that hunts ’em down and brings ’em to justice.
It’s irresistible to start this review of Vineyard author Tom Dresser’s new book about the Beatles, It Was 40 Years Ago Today, by saying it’s a Magical Mystery Tour of the Fab Four who Please Pleased [Us] through a Hard Day’s Night lasting six years, spanning the spectrum of I Feel Fine, to wanting to give each other A Ticket to Ride, all of them — and us —– trailing apart in a mood of benediction, Let It Be.
