“When Sounds Collide: A Novel”

Paradise novelist M. Day Hampton wrote a fictionalized account of former Paradise Mayor Howard Johnson’s life in “Behind Picketwire.” In the early 1950s young protagonist Red Johnson meets an old man named Custis living in the Napa Valley. Custis directs Red and his mom to a safe place, a little town called Paradise.

Hampton (mdayhampton.com) was intrigued by Custis and began crafting his back story, a prequel to “Behind Picketwire.” Now, 147,000 words later, his life and longings are on full display in a magnificent, eloquent, and heart-pounding story called “When Sounds Collide: A Novel” ($23.95 in paperback from River Grove Books; also for Amazon Kindle).

Stretching from the late 1800s to 1953, the novel begins in North Carolina. It is a perilous time for a brilliant young Black boy named Custis, who angers local punks when he accidentally reveals he can read. “His mind could have belonged to a poet, a teacher, an author, or a scientist, but his heart was only ten years old.”

Beaten and left for dead in the woods, his house—and his mother—destroyed in arson, he is saved by young white girl, Sarah Tennison, living at a nearby ranch. Sarah had not spoken since her mother died from cancer, blaming her father and Doc Lyman; but now she gives voice as she seeks help, and over years an unbreakable bond forms between Sarah and Custis, “a Black man forbidden to marry outside of his race.”

Though sheltered and encouraged at the ranch, Custis, desperate to develop his idea of using sound waves to look inside the human body, heads to New York. Through the machinations of three unlikely friends, he passes as a man from Greece to enter the physics lab at Centennial University, “which still would not allow a Black man to obtain a degree.”

The book is a complex story of love and regret, and deep loss, and yet what shines in these pages are truly good and kind people, even in the midst of devastation. This goodness is a kind of “silent sound” which “has been here all this time.” 

The story will draw you in and will not let you go.

“Pacific Coast Bird Finder: Identifying Common Birds Along The Pacific Coast”

For the beginning bird-watcher, storied Chico ornithologist Roger Lederer has just the ticket. It’s a little, staple-bound 64-page booklet called “Pacific Coast Bird Finder: Identifying Common Birds Along The Pacific Coast” ($7.95 from Nature Study Guild Publishers). 

With black-and-white drawings by Jacquelyn Giuffré and Carol Burr, the guide “will help you to identify sixty-three of the most common species” in California, parts of Oregon and Washington, and Canada and Mexico.

Lederer notes that “because there are about 500 species of birds in the Pacific Coast area, bird-watching could become overwhelming. But you have to start somewhere, and a simple book like this is a good choice.” Though birds appear in “taxonomic order, beginning with grebes and ending with songbirds” (and there’s a common-name index at the end), the real joy comes in leafing through the pages to find just the right identification.

Each page features a “sketch of the bird and gives its common and scientific names; body length … and wingspread; some identifying features such as eye stripes, wing bars, tail pattern, and behavior; and icons that indicate its usual habitat.” Here and there little boxes call out items of interest, noting, for example, that “there is no biological difference between pigeons and doves” which, “unlike other birds, can drink water by sucking with their head down.”

The American Robin is “perhaps the best-known American bird.” “Young robins,” Lederer writes, “hatch in about 10 days. After another 10 days they will jump from the nest, even though they can’t fly. Parents will take care of juveniles on the ground until their feathers grow enough to allow them to fly. People mistakenly think baby robins have fallen from their nest and need help. They don’t.”

From the Black Tern to Anna’s Hummingbird, from the Ruby-crowned Kinglet to the Dark-eyed Junco, from California Quail to Steller’s Jay, familiar birds flock in the guide, letting young bird-watchers know that one good tern deserves another.

Lederer has also published a companion guide, in the same format and from the same publisher, called “Bird Finder: Identifying Common Birds Of Eastern North America,” with sketches by Roger Franke and Carl Burr.

“American Laughter, American Fury: Humor And The Making Of A White Man’s Democracy, 1750-1850”

Eran A. Zelnik, Lecturer in the History Department at Chico State, observes that “The riot at the US Capitol of January 6, 2021, was violent, but the atmosphere was curiously jubilant.” It had a “carnivalesque” atmosphere, “a celebration of a world … where there are no inhibitions and the id reigns supreme…. For many of them, they were restaging the American Revolution, and quite aptly they came in high spirits.”

This mixture of violence and cosplay did indeed have its roots in the Revolutionary period. “Many of the events leading up to the Revolutionary War, such as tarring and feathering and the Boston Tea Party, were done in the spirit of levity and play.” For the rioters, it was like “the call to arms at Lexington and Concord, the moment in American memory when common people rose up spontaneously to fend off tyranny.”

Zelnik, who grew up in Israel, finds a deeply troubling theme of racism where “being a white man in America has meant being defiantly uninhibited, even giddy, when enacting one’s manhood and nationalism.” 

“American Laughter, American Fury: Humor And The Making Of A White Man’s Democracy, 1750-1850” ($64.95 in hardcover from Johns Hopkins University Press; also for Amazon Kindle) focuses on the “spirit of laughter, mirth, and play” in tracing “how genuine commitments to democracy became wedded to violence and exclusion” (if you don’t “get” the joke).

For Zelnik, the key to understanding humor’s function in making “violence and oppression … palatable or even enticing” is the yearning of white male colonial settlers to see themselves as “indigenous.” “Blackface minstrelsy,” for example, “was part of a culture that rendered blackness an inherently comical and degraded category.”

In the “American experiment in self-rule,” Zelnik notes, humor created an “environment in which only white men could feel comfortable in their own skin.” The militia movement of “merry men” from Revolutionary times is a way for “white men to transform themselves through shared masquerade into ‘true’ natives and to claim ‘their’ land.” Think also of the violence visited by the masqueraded Ku Klux Klan.

Weaponized humor, it turns out, is no laughing matter.

“The Head Case: A Rick Rose Novel”

Heads up, dear reader. Retired dentist and Chico writer Mike Paull is back with a second Rick Rose murder mystery featuring the handsome, 37-year-old forensic odontologist working for San Francisco’s Chief Medical Examiner, beautiful Dr. Alexandra Keller. Keller has given Rose, a recovering alcoholic, a second chance after he loses his private practice.

A forensic odontologist is a “mouth mechanic” (the title of the first book in the series), “a dentist who uses clues from the corpse’s mouth to give it an identity before it’s buried and forgotten.” Rose is a detective, narrating the twists and turns of his investigation, his sarcasm tempered by humbling experience (including violent encounters).

“So, here I am in 2022,” Rose muses, “after surviving a painful divorce, professional disgrace and the Covid pandemic, making more money than I’d ever dreamed, and getting to spend a lot of time working for Alex. Except for the formaldehyde, it’s a damn good gig.”

The biggest test yet comes in “The Head Case: A Rick Rose Novel” ($15.95 in paperback from Wings ePress, Inc.; also for Amazon Kindle). “Until now,” Rose tells us, “my job had been to identify dead bodies, so I wasn’t sure where to go with this one. There was no body—just a head.” And it was burned, as through fire. Though there is nothing remarkable about the teeth, Rose discovers some unique dental surgery that starts him on a dangerous exploration all the way to the little town of Batesville, Arkansas. It’s not as sweet as one might think.

Rose’s personal life is mixed in. He is taken with Alex, though he doesn’t tell her, and instead begins dating another beautiful woman named Viv after a chance encounter. Added to the mix are homicide captain Mike Kelly (whom Alex is sort of dating) and Jim Allen, an investigator whom Alex had formerly dated (until she “saw through his narcissistic personality”). And oh, yes, Josie, Rose’s ex, who wants him to finance some hairbrained business idea.

Somehow they all contribute to heading Rose in the right direction and to a surprise revelation. It’s a fast-paced thrill for mystery fans with relationships that transcend dental medication.