"A Cruel Oblivion: A Tess Alexander Mystery"

It begins with Bay Area investigative journalist Tess Alexander reading a puzzling news report about a rich family. Rennie Matlock, just 13, used a letter opener to kill her mother, Cliona, an Irish model. Her developer stepfather, Simon Matlock, holds plenty of political sway and eventually becomes a State Senator. Rennie had everything. The murder doesn't make sense.

Thereby hangs a tale in Nevada County writer Joan Merriam's new novel "A Cruel Oblivion: A Tess Alexander Mystery" ($10.99 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle). Merriam (facebook.com/JoanMerriamAuthor) writes the Casey's Corner column for this newspaper about the care and feeding of dogs, and wouldn't you know that Tess' sidekick is Cooper, "from Homeward Bound Golden Retriever Rescue."

When Tess, a Pulitzer Prize winner, moves to "the small community of Deer Valley, about seventy miles northeast of Sacramento," Cooper becomes her "Velcro" dog, always sticking close. 

Then, when Rennie herself is found dead, police call it a suicide. Tess is convinced it's murder.

Merriam's novel, she notes on Facebook, "was just awarded the Eric Hoffer Book Award in the E-Book category" and was a finalist for the grand award. Hers is a worthy win. Compellingly written, with smooth-as-silk prose, the story draws readers into Tess' world as she conducts her own investigation.

Family mysteries multiply and so do revelations, and Tess is put in mortal danger. "Truth crept in on languid cat's feet," Merriam writes in one of the book's epigraphs, "in no rush to reveal itself." Doggedly probing behind the scenes, Tess is no one's lapdog. "Much as she loved her work, she hated being associated with the packs of media hyenas that passed for reporters these days...." But looking beyond official press releases could get you killed.

Tess sometimes senses when things aren't right; her skin crawls; visions swirl around her, but they are often cryptic even as they propel her deeper into deadly secrets. When the truth finally makes its way onstage, and there's a reordering of Tess' own troubled past, readers may feel like Cooper, "an amber tornado, racing from one end of the house to the other, dancing circles around Tess." 

Now it all makes sense.

"She's Missing"

"Follow the money." For Chico novelist, retired dentist and licensed pilot Mike Paull, Deep Throat's advice needs a corollary: "Doing so could get you killed." Especially in a spy thriller.

Stakes are high in "She's Missing" ($14.95 in paperback from Wings ePress, Inc.; also for Amazon Kindle), a follow-up to "Missing." In that earlier book a team of Americans from "the Agency," including fifty-something Craig Cooper ("Coop") and forty-something Zoe Fields, track down rumors of a hoard of gold just after Saddam Hussein's death in late 2006.

Now it's late 2010 and desk-bound Coop fields an urgent call from Zoe's domestic partner, Lara Graf, calling from Cyprus. The two are "on holiday" and now Zoe has disappeared from their hotel. It's a gut-punch to Coop. "The last time he talked to his fellow agent and best friend was before she saved his life and disappeared to Zurich with the nine million dollars the two of them had recovered...."

Coop cares little about the money; but now that Zoe is in trouble he must break his promise to his wife, Fran, and their young teenage son, Josh, not to go back to the field.

Then a memo from the Director of National Intelligence reports Israeli Mossad agents are on the trail of a suspected Iranian spy--Zoe. She had supposedly wired the money to a source that would send it to the Mossad Director. Instead it ended up in Iran.

Soon Coop, tapping resources for a Gulfstream G550 and its crack pilot, is winging his way to Cyprus only to encounter Mossad agent Lev Cohen with whom he partners (at least for a while). Lev works for Rachel Kagan and both are answerable to the Mossad Director. Everyone wants to find Zoe. Let's play together!

Coop knows better. Soon Zoe makes contact, the Mossad Director is murdered (Zoe is blamed), and the two must exonerate Zoe by finding out where the money went--and who killed the Director.

Paull's twisty tale and propulsive action unwind a cagey deception as Coop and friends "follow the money." From spycraft to aircraft, and a nail-biting trip into Iran, the novel keeps readers in suspense until the last, bittersweet page.

"We'll Laugh About This (Someday): Essays On Taking Life A Smidge Too Seriously"

Anna Lind Thomas (AnnaLindThomas.com), now living in Omaha with husband Rob and their two daughters, graduated with an MA in Communication Studies from Chico State. While there she met Rob through Match.com and they agreed to an in-person date at Olive Garden. 

That date would change her personal and professional life and result in a fart heard around the country. 

When Anna and Rob first locked eyes, "I don't know how to explain it," she writes, "other than to say when I saw him, I saw my husband." It was love at first sight for him as well, and it's a good thing. They drove over to the mall to do some shopping. And then it hit.

"Gas strikes in two different ways--uncontrollable toots or sharp, shooting pains that feel a lot like dying. I thought I was dying." She made some kind of excuse about not feeling well, but as Rob was driving her home it happened. "A horrific fart cloud. Not in an 'Am I smelling something?' sort of way. More like an 'Is someone dead and rotting in your trunk, and am I in hell?' sort of way."

The tale went viral and Thomas left Chico to take up humor writing fulltime. Her first book is full of common scents, so to speak, as she takes up raising two daughters who want to know about mommy parts, body image ("I'm almost forty now and the chubby girl is still there") and coming to terms with overlarge fears. Does that late night thump mean there's a murderer in the house? Rob, go see!

"We'll Laugh About This (Someday): Essays On Taking Life A Smidge Too Seriously" ($18.99 in paperback from Nelson Books/HarperCollins Christian Publishing and for Amazon Kindle) also comes in an author-narrated audiobook. (Thomas hosts the "It's Not That Serious" podcast.)

Thomas faces multiple miscarriages and a falling out with a business partner. But God gave her a dream even "as a little girl.... I wanted to make people laugh, see themselves in my words, and have hope."

She's not tooting her own horn. The dream really did come true.

"Human Harvest"

The place: San Francisco, near Civic Center, in the midst of the pandemic. There's a village of tents housing the unhoused, set up by the city with daily management outsourced to a nonprofit called Archemy, short for "Architectural Alchemy." The city, we are told in the new novel by Chico State grad Phil Semler, "wanted to get out of the business."

Those who run the village are ex-cons, chief among them Jack Roderick ("Rod"), out of prison "after serving twenty years for second-degree murder." Armed with a sociology degree earned during his stay he soon finds work overseeing the village with its yearly budget of $15 million.

Enter the shady operation called The Harvester Network dealing in the buying and selling of organs, preying on those in tents, enticing them to "donate" a kidney in return for money. 

The organization brokers organs for customers rich enough to pay the extravagant prices. A "doctor" performs the transplant in a room somewhere, and if the donor doesn't survive, the doctor chops them up and sends the parts to a landfill. Or so it happens in "Human Harvest" ($4.99 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle).

Semler, a San Francisco resident for some forty years, majored in Philosophy at Chico State back in the 70s. His novel raises ethical questions, certainly, but in some sense it's about the mystery of time. 

For Rod, in prison, "the days go on, they roll out, flatten, and in their heap, you finally get used to the poison of time by taking lesser amounts to get used to the poison of time. This was called many things. Resilience, mutability, getting used to not getting used, becoming a prisoner, lying in bed on a warm summer evening, unable to sleep, listening to the guttural rumble of long-haulers on Highway 50 fixated on time's flow."

Lyricism gives way to love, found and lost (mostly lost), and gross violence. As one character observes, the story is about "forgers, money launderers, murderers, unlicensed physicians, loan sharks, smugglers, cleaners, pimps, fraudsters, drug dealers, organ traffickers, arms dealers, disposers of corpses, assassins, and god knows what."

By the end, readers will be ready for a long, hot shower.

"English Composition: Writing For An Audience (20th Anniversary Edition)"

Longtime Shasta College English instructor Peter Berkow, who two decades ago developed an innovative PBS television series on writing, is now making those episodes available through an ebook.

As Berkow told me in a recent Zoom conversation, ebooks lacked the capacity to stream video but his project changed all that, most notably for the millions of libraries worldwide that subscribe to the popular EBSCO ebooks database. Librarians can easily license the book for patrons, or interested readers can purchase it directly from Amazon.

"English Composition: Writing For An Audience (20th Anniversary Edition)" ($40 in Amazon Kindle format from Peter Berkow Productions) offers twenty chapters, each streaming a half-hour video Berkow created for PBS. 

The book-and-video package covers all the expected topics of an English comp course (narrative writing, comparison-and-contrast, research, editing, and even "writing under pressure"). What sets this book apart is that it's downright fun (and funny) to view (and read). 

Berkow emphasizes writing "in the real world"; each video features interviews not only with Butte College, Chico State, and Shasta College instructors, but locals in a variety of occupations, from police work to engineering--not to mention NFL football coach Bill Walsh, rock icon Joe Satriani, or Academy Award winning writer-director Peter Farrelly emphasizing written expression. 

Chapters introduce the video topic and then consider themes in detail, drawing on interviews with writers including Frank McCourt, Sue Grafton, Charles Johnson and Chitra Divakaruni. Of special note are interviews with Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore (in their twenty-year-younger selves), each defining "welfare" in starkly different terms and thus opening up a persuasive writing discussion.

Berkow, former editor of this newspaper's "Off the Record" supplement, admits that the book "takes a rather mischievous approach to learning grammar, spelling, and punctuation rules." He finds special resonance with humorist Dave Barry, and warns students not to take Barry too seriously when Barry says of the comma, "wherever you just take a breath, you put a comma in. So, people who are in good aerobic shape hardly ever use commas."

This is the most uniquest book on English comp you'll ever view (just don't ever let Professor Pete hear you say that).

"Running From The Fire"

"My parents emigrated from Ukraine and wound up in East LA, where I grew up in the '40s and '50s." Little Phillip I. Elkins, "a skinny Jewish kid who needed glasses," learned to "pass" as Latino in order to survive in an area "rapidly becoming the largest Latino community outside of Mexico City."

He did so by "becoming a 'cholo' (or a 'pachuco,' or a low rider or street tough).... I dressed like a cholo and talked with a Mexican accent; I stopped hanging out with the white kids and all my friends were Mexican." His nickname was (and still is) Señor Felipe, who these days hosts "LA Sounds with Sr. Felipe" on Chico's KZFR.org. (Earlier he managed Chico Natural Foods and produced a line of organic salsas.)

How Elkins got from there to here is the subject of a series of autobiographies. The latest is "Running From The Fire" ($16 in paperback, published by Señor Felipe Press, P.O. Box 364, Forest Ranch, 95942; djsrfelipe@aol.com) taking Elkins from his early years through high school and some community college, and then, in 1966, being drafted into the Army at nineteen. As the book ends, he is preparing for Vietnam.

It's a raw yet oddly wistful tale of friendships, fistfights, girlfriends, making out, pregnancies, marriages, screwups and mishaps, seasoned with enough barnyard cussing to fill an oversized duffel bag. "Ahh, the joys of becoming an adult," Elkins writes. "What a long, difficult, complicated, and confusing road that seems to be."

Outside his circle he wasn't much accepted by the Mexican community, but he also didn't "know much about being Jewish" (apart from rampant anti-Semitism). His parents were a presence in his life (mostly his mom) but he leaned to fend for himself, more or less. At times, mostly less.

"All I really got out of basic training," Elkins writes, "was experiencing what it was like to be constantly tormented and threatened with 'going over to the jungles of Vietnam where many of you will die, hopefully as quickly and as painlessly as possible.'" His sadistic drill sergeant did not have a way with words.

But Elkins does. Saucy and savory, they tell an amazing story.

"Your Faithful Brain: Designed For So Much More!"

"Joy," writes Christian counselor Leonard Matheson, "is the designated state of a faithful brain, fully integrated with God, within itself and with others. Joy erupts as we're fully engaged in the moment."

After retiring from Washington University in St. Louis, and teaching graduate students in counseling at Covenant Theological Seminary, Matheson and his wife Mary moved to Chico where he is now in private practice, the founding director of Chico-based EPIC Neurorehabilitation & Psychology Services.

Drawing on his work in occupational therapy and neurology, Matheson views Christian spirituality through the lens of brain science. Published in 2014, "Your Faithful Brain: Designed For So Much More!" ($19.95 in paperback from WestBowPress; also for Amazon Kindle), by Leonard Matheson, PhD, is a popular (and very personal) exploration of his findings.

Chapters explore characteristics of the faithful brain (grace-blessed, loving, truth-guided) and include summaries and discussion questions. 

Though Matheson had pushed faith away, he writes that "God was placing in my life people who eventually would draw me back to Jesus, including Danny Munday" whom he met in "Rancho Los Amigos Hospital on the first day of my career, February 3, 1970." 

Shrunken with spinal muscular atrophy (he would die at 15), Danny was totally dependent on others to remove the mucous from his lungs before he choked to death. Yet Danny was joyful; his goal in life was to kiss Jane Fonda (and it actually happened). Matheson learned of "the potential for joy up close to death."

Though people make decisions, not brains, a key insight into more faithful decision-making is the neuroplasticity of the brain; it can change and adapt. "As we practice following Jesus," Matheson writes, "our values begin as ideas we can consider and then test. ... As this process repeats, neuroplasticity gradually creates neural patterns of values that permeate the brain," developing "our character to gradually reflect the character of Jesus."

Such alignment is never perfect; we can't fathom all the possible neural combinations, Matheson says, since there are a "Godzillion" of them. But he is convinced that our brains can be rehabilitated and that we can live a life of joy, even up close to death.

"Joe And Me: A Love Story Of A Guitar And Her Boy"

In 1933 Victor Marcini, master luthier (a maker of stringed instruments) crafts a special guitar for his soon-to-be born son. Young Joe begins calling her "Wose" and, later, Rose, since she's partially made of rosewood. Readers get the whole story not from Joe, but from Rose.

Rose is a magic guitar. "Joe And Me: A Love Story Of A Guitar And Her Boy" ($13.99 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle) is lovingly crafted by Chicoan Carolyn Ayres, combining her own love of the guitar with a deep insight into how the world looks through Rose-colored glasses.

"Although I had no eyes or ears," Rose tells readers, "I could see and hear. Victor had inadvertently activated the tree consciousness that was ingrained in my wood."

Though Rose doesn't talk, she expresses herself in more subtle ways. As Joe's guitar instructor says in wonderment, "I've never seen or heard another like it. When you play it, the guitar seems to be trying to please you by resonating with a tone I can't get from it." That's what love will do. 

Rose's narration is studded with puns (and Ayers provides a short glossary of music terms so those not familiar can join the fun). Yet--and this is hard to explain--the wordplays are not jokey but rather part of Rose's stream of consciousness. 

When Victor's wife, Collette, takes ill, Rose begins to fret. With Collette's death, and then Victor's, Joe flees the area so creditors will not claim Rose for themselves.

Joe, now a teenager, hooks up with a musical group and is soon packing them in with his playing. But Rose's magical sounds attract the attention of thieves, and Rose tells the extraordinary story of what happens over the next decades as she is separated from Joe, yearning to return. 

Rose, it turns out, is not only magically beautiful, but knows it all too well. Events will take her down a peg but that's part of the symphony of her life, a symphony constructed by Ayers with a kind of whimsical clarity that will surely pluck the heartstrings of those who listen carefully.

"Unpacking The Trauma: How To Heal And Create A Life You Love"

Dax Meredith (daxmeredith.com), the pen name of a Chico area author, college instructor and counselor, wrote of her escape from the Camp Fire in "The Sound Of The Snow Geese." Now, in a new book, Meredith offers a comprehensive approach to "Unpacking The Trauma" ($11.98 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle).

Subtitled "How To Heal And Create A Life You Love," the book is not intended as a substitute for professional mental health advice. Rather, it offers a series of techniques, in forty-two short chapters, to "take your power back from what was a hurtful or harmful situation ... and then to purposefully focus instead on something positive."

Each chapter begins with a comment made by a hurting person, such as "I can't seem to find my way out of this. When does it end?" Meredith then discusses actions to take and follows with a summary of the steps. She writes with the voice of an imperfect human who has "been there" but who has found a way "to unpack that heavy trauma that is strapped to your body." 

So, "when does it end"? "It might pass like a ginormous, gnarly kidney stone when you are least expecting it," she replies, "but it will pass. Knowing that your situation is (or was) temporary is a key component of getting through it." She recognizes, though, that "with illness, pain, and grief, it isn't taking it one day at a time. It's often getting through moments at a time."

If you can get through the next couple of minutes, or even an hour, "pass the time with healthy strategies. Some of these include ... meditation, prayer, mindfulness, music, aromatherapy, acupressure, imagery, breathing, and mantras. Have a plan in place for what you want to use...."

Meredith's goal is for readers "to begin to see each day as an opportunity to define how you want your life to feel. ... Practice positive thinking (and positive feeling) every single day, and use your energy on what you can change or accomplish, instead of dwelling on the past, fear, or negative thoughts."

Meredith is a friendly and compassionate guide.

"The Doomsday Medallion: A VanOps Thriller"

It's the present moment and the world is on the brink in the new page-turner by Grass Valley novelist Avanti Centrae (avanticentrae.com). One of the characters sums it up: "China just invaded one of Taiwan's outlying islands. And a sixteen-year-old female civilian in France predicted it."

For the teenager, Avril, it's more than a lucky guess. A student of the sixteenth-century seer Nostradamus, who some say predicted the fall of the twin towers, she "received some sort of walnut box from her father as part of her inheritance," a box originally belonging to Nostradamus himself, passed down the family line over the centuries.

Does the box contain Nostradamus' formula for his trances? If the formula falls into the wrong hands, and the invaders can then see the future, including the U.S. response to their aggression, they would be unstoppable.

Enter VanOps, short for "Vanguard Operations," a shadowy CIA organization investigating just such security-threatening "technologies." The team includes twins Will Argones and Maddy Marshall, Maddy's boyfriend "Bear" Thorenson, and Doyle, who has family in Taiwan and who, along with Maddy, belongs to "an ancient sect of royal spies."

The box, it turns out, contains not an herbal formula but a series of cryptic quatrains, a puzzle pointing to a hidden medallion on which all will be revealed. The race is on to decode the poetry and find the object even as sinister forces are bent on the same mission.

"The Doomsday Medallion: A VanOps Thriller" ($17.99 in paperback from Thunder Creek Press; also for Amazon Kindle) is the third in the series, begun with "The Lost Power" and continued with "Solstice Shadows." The new book's deft plotting, propulsive action, and revelations of long-hidden secrets, family and otherwise (who needs Dan Brown?) make for edge-of-the-seat reading.

The quest takes the team to many countries, with threats to life at every turn, but the deepening relationship between Maddy and Bear points to a sweetness in the tale which is underlined by Will, whose wife had died earlier, wondering, as he protects Avril, "what it would have been like to be a dad."

Tender touches, and world-historical implications. Get a clue, and read the book.

"Cartwheels: Finding Your Special Kind Of Smart"

When Tracy Peterson (teachertracypeterson.com) graduated from Chico State, she went on to get her Master's in Special Education. After almost four decades of teaching in California, Kansas, Nebraska, and Arkansas, she's teamed with Little Rock third grader Sloane LaFrance to write a children's book for kids with dyslexia.

"Cartwheels: Finding Your Special Kind Of Smart" ($11.95 in paperback from Et Alia Press) is narrated by Sloane and features whimsical, colorful illustrations by fine-arts major Lindsey Witting. 

"I am six years old," Sloane says. "I love to make up dances and put on shows. I play soccer and take gymnastics. I especially like to do cartwheels. I do cartwheels EVERYWHERE." But something seemed amiss. A year earlier, in kindergarten, while "the other kids were putting sounds together to make words," Sloane was having difficulty. 

One of her teachers told her to "Pay attention. Focus. You know this!" "But," she says, "no matter how hard I looked at those letters ... I never could remember which sounds were supposed to go with which letters....."

In first grade, Sloane didn't want to read; she just wanted to do cartwheels. One day she met with "a really nice lady; Mom and Dad said she was going to ask me to do some things that showed my special kind of smart. We talked and did puzzles."

Then came the diagnosis of dyslexia. How to communicate it to Sloane? Your brain is smart, her parents told her, and "it could crack this reading code ... I just had to learn it in a different way." 

Gradually she is able to make sense of letters and their sounds; now reading is sometimes actually fun. (A word to parents at the end of the book says perhaps one in five people have difficulty "decoding" sounds, letters, and words. There are many strategies since each brain is different, but "early intervention is key" to enable kids to "find their own special kind of smart.")

It was sometimes hard as Sloane worked with a special ed teacher, "and sometimes when my brain was too full, I would even get up and do cartwheels." But not, Sloane cautions, "in the classroom!"

"A Fickle Wind"

Will Russia start a nuclear war? In late October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy warned the Soviet Union of a "full retaliatory response" if it launched nuclear missiles against "any nation in the Western Hemisphere."

Yet life went on for David Janzen, 12, at Central Elementary School in Del Rio Vista, "a small, central California farming community." The new novel by David H. Dirks, "A Fickle Wind" ($8.99 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle), continues Janzen's balloon experiments begun in "The Art Of Stretching." (The sketches by Benjamin Pacheco perfectly capture the kid-centric fascination with engineering.)

In the earlier novel, Janzen and his friend Jack, who uses a wheelchair, inflate a homemade balloon with natural gas from the science classroom (Janzen's dad is the science teacher) in their effort to send a "rat astronaut" into the skies and back again safely. Now, in the new story, the goal is to hoist a radio-controlled camera into the Del Rio Vista sky and take pictures from high overhead.

Dirks, a long-time Chicoan, was one of the first three engineers for KCHO radio after it debuted April 22, 1969; he now lives in Brentwood with his wife, Karen. Janzen, on the cusp of high school, is infused with the same love of engineering. 

Ribbed at home by his three sisters, taunted at school for being a "shrimp," and bullied by a neighbor kid who secretly envies the experiments, Janzen manages to navigate his world with equanimity, expanding in awareness and friendships, including Fernando Chavez and MBB (Molly Beth Brown, "unpretentious," with "beauty more hidden than revealed").

The camera experiment makes for a great tale, and when Janzen and friends gather they revel in all their childhood stories. But childhood is ending. When he is baptized at thirteen, afterward chomping down Aunt Martha's baptismal cake, David wonders at how "the two worlds, sacred and secular, were, as they say, miles apart... Day-to-day living was carried out with only a notional nod to the sacred."

In unpretentious prose, foreshadowing something beautiful not yet fully revealed, the novel evokes a forgotten wonder--even as it makes the reader yearn for the next installment.

"The Victory Lap: Jack Yerman And His Incredible Journey To The Olympics And Beyond"

"Jack Yerman," the Paradise Post noted in 1984, "is only one of 155 living Americans who earned the Olympic gold medal. Yerman's great moment in sports came in the summer of 1960 in the Rome Olympics when he helped the U.S. mile relay team beat Germany for the gold....  For the record, Yerman ran the then-fastest first leg in Olympic history, 46.2...."

There was another big race, this time in 1970 at the Gold Nugget Days' Donkey Derby. He got a "49" to win with a donkey named "Little-Jack," but that was minutes, not seconds. The next year he won with "Silver," celebrating with sons Bruce and Bryce and his beloved wife Margo, who carried month-old Blake.

Bruce Yerman (who entered the world at "9 1/2 pounds, 2 1/2 pounds bigger than predicted") has now published a warm and well-researched biography of his dad, including key family photographs. "The Victory Lap: Jack Yerman And His Incredible Journey To The Olympics And Beyond" ($14.95 in paperback from BookBaby; also for Amazon Kindle) brings the story to 2021.

Before Margo died of cancer in 2014 she encouraged Jack to buy his dream car (a red Corvette Stingray) and "she suggested he marry again." In July 2018 "he married his new sweetheart, Carol Mattern of Paradise." In November that year, while the couple was in Puerto Rico, word came that Paradise was on fire. Their home was lost, but a friend rescued Carol's dog and Jack's gold medal. The couple rebuilt and returned to Paradise in 2021.

Bruce, Director of Operations, Camp Fire Collaborative, sensitively places family history into historical context as he tells of Jack's formative years (born in 1939) with an absent father and an emotionally distant mother and a "quiet, small, comforting voice" that said "Your time will come." 

Indeed so. He played for Cal in the Rose Bowl, excelled at running, and, later, raised his family in Paradise. Brutus Hamilton, Jack's coach at Cal, and a longtime friend, reminded Jack that even though only one name goes into the record books, "his achievement should be considered a team effort." 

Jack would never forget.

"Hope And Healing: A Dialogue On Ways To Recover From Trumpism And Covid-19"

Rob Burton, Chico State Emeritus Professor of English, is sending a valentine to those who seek common ground in a contentious era. 

In his new book Burton, a baby boomer, imagines a series of conversations with a fictional guide, a millennial named Sophia Morales, humanities professor at Northern California's "Euphoria University." 

Her father is Costa Rican, raised Catholic; her mother Pakistani, brought up "in an Islamic culture"; Morales grew up in the States "in a progressive, medium-sized college town situated just a short drive away from the headquarters of the John Birch Society, an ultra conservative group with leanings towards the Ku Klux Klan."

For Morales, this diversity is a "tapestry" to be celebrated, not a "melting pot" to be boiled down into a "stew." She channels some of Burton's utopian sensibilities but offers practical suggestions for navigating a raft of hot-button topics.

"Hope And Healing: A Dialogue On Ways To Recover From Trumpism And Covid-19" ($9.99 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing) is a concerted effort to move the discussion away from a zero sum game (winners and losers) and into win-win territory. 

As the title indicates, the book is not politically neutral (for both Burton and Morales "good government" has an essential role to play) but insists on articulating a hopeful vision of the future, advocating a dynamic balance between group and individual identity.

Throughout the dialogues Burton raises objections and seeks clarifications. Though he's actually talking to himself, the model of civil discussion is refreshing. Issues include health care, gun control, and criminal justice; women's rights, inequality and poverty; climate change and technology; nationalism vs. globalism; religious tolerance; and immigration. 

"I believe that we can make immigration a win-win social and political issue," Morales says, "if all nations, particularly the United States, welcome immigrants that same way they welcome tourists or any other temporary visitors. They are welcomed with hospitality not treated suspiciously....; they still need their valid documentation."

For Morales, "the Coronavirus magnified and intensified the structural weakness and problems that were there to begin with." Can we make things better? Burton asks readers to dream a little about the possibilities.

"Watergate's Forgotten Hero: Frank Wills, Night Watchman"

Frank Wills is the only African American associated with Watergate, the political scandal that eventually led to the resignation of Richard Nixon and the jailing of those in his inner circle. Yet while Nixon and many of his henchmen found post-Watergate life financially and culturally rewarding, Wills fared far differently.

Adam Henig, who graduated from Chico State, tells Wills' story, from his life in the segregated South to his job as "the security guard who alerted police to a break-in at the Watergate Office Building," to his death from "an inoperable brain tumor" (and other complications) on September 27, 2000.

"Watergate's Forgotten Hero: Frank Wills, Night Watchman" ($29.95 in paperback from McFarland and Company; also for Amazon Kindle) is based on interviews with family and friends that "explore the fate of Frank Wills, a Black man in 1970s America caught up in a power struggle dominated solely by white men."

Henig's research shows "that Frank Wills' actions in the early morning of June 17, 1972, were not a source of heroic pride, but in the end caused him bitterness and disappointment." Wills was 24, a high-school dropout, and, as with others at the scene, hardly realized "that his phone call to the DC police had triggered what would become the first chapter in the uncovering of the biggest political scandal in American history."

In the Foreword by JaQwan J. Kelly, who portrayed Wills in the last scene of Steven Spielberg's 2017 film "The Post," the actor notes that "even heroes are not immune to racial injustice and exploitation."

Wills was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1948. That year, Henig writes, "when the traveling display of the original Constitution and Declaration of Independence came to town ... Blacks and whites had separate viewing lines." And "even the city phone directory was divided along racial lines. If you were a person of color, there was a 'C' next to your name, indicating you were 'colored.'"

Henig's fair-minded portrait notes Wills' own poor life choices along the way, but his sympathies lie with a young Black man who did the right thing at the right time--and in so doing changed the world.

"Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness And Civil War Soldiers"

An enduring mystery of the Civil War, and perhaps any armed conflict, is how two soldiers, faced with unspeakable battlefield trauma, can diverge so greatly in their ability to cope with life when hostilities end. Some do well; others descend into insanity.

Butte College history instructor Dillon Carroll probes what he calls this "hidden history": "Soldiers, doctors, and civilians all grappled with war trauma--the long collateral damage of combat--in ways previously unknown to historians." 

His newly-published book, an extraordinary scholarly study that reads like a novel, examines the coping mechanisms of soldiers (they were not merely victims), the responses of then-prevalent "insane asylums," and how families connected battlefield experience with the decaying minds of their loved ones more swiftly than the doctors.

"Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness And Civil War Soldiers" ($45 in hardcover from LSU Press; also for Amazon Kindle) draws on hundreds of sources, including letters, diaries, and medical records (especially from the Government Hospital for the Insane, known as "St. Elizabeth's"). 

What emerges is a nuanced and measured cultural history of what may well have been PTSD in an age before the advent of brain science and psychiatry (which replaced the work of "alienists" who tried to figure out the causes of a soldier's alienation from society).

Alienists explained madness, without obvious physical causes (like syphilis), as the result of immorality (including "intemperance, masturbation, overwork, domestic difficulties, excessive ambition, personal disappointment, excessive religious enthusiasm, and overweening jealousy or pride").

Not every combatant suffered ongoing mental debilitation. "Black soldiers ..., imbued with a sense of purpose and a desire to strike back at the trauma of slavery, were less susceptible to this than white soldiers."

Almost thirty years after Appomattox, Carroll writes, some "survivors of the war's battles and their aftermath were still suffering with nervousness, kept awake by insomnia, and, when they did sleep, awakened by terrifying nightmares. The boom of the cannon, the gurgle of the dying patient, and howl of the bloodhound haunted the repose of many Civil War veterans."

Carroll's analysis of first-person accounts helps readers understand "why"--and why coming to terms with the hidden wounds of war is so difficult.

"Earthly Delights: Poems"

Troy Jollimore teaches philosophy at Chico State and, in his new book of poems, celebrates a world that contains movies. And yet, even in the theatre, "in the very temple of Delight," as he quotes Keats saying, "Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine."

Listen: "A friend who left for the East Coast two years/ ago has flown back to Chico to take photos/ of Mount Lassen exactly one hundred years after/ its catastrophic eruption. For a while/ it feels as if everything is a reenactment of something that has already happened: even dumping/ a skitter of Raisin Bran into a bowl/ ... or trying on sneakers takes on/ the aura of a ritual." 

Well, "Are you trying/ to deny time and change, to say that death/ will have no authority here, or are you/ celebrating the fact that everything is/ in flux and ungraspable, or is the season/ doing one or the other of these things for you?"

In "Earthly Delights: Poems" ($17.95 in paperback from Princeton University Press; also for Amazon Kindle) melancholy seems ever present for something lost or just beyond the horizon.

So, in "Early Morning, Upper Bidwell Park," the poet writes, "When God made the world he did it like this/ world-making in the daytime/ world-undoing at night// And it has occurred to me that we might be living/ in one of the undoings...."

Elsewhere, "When the Senator Theatre closed in 1999 in Chico, California,/ the last film to be shown was 'American Beauty,' and so I went, for the last screening./ I went to take in the last images, to feel the last light, to be a part/ of the end of something, to be, I suppose, a kind of witness, and to be a part/ of that crowd of others...."

Then a postscript to a poem called "Fire": "The world will end in fire, not ice,/ William Tecumseh Sherman said,/ as we, horizons glowing red,/ inhaled the ash of Paradise."

Now the poet sings of the "melancholy night, sagging with the heaviness/ Of summer, and of silence, of things we cannot guess,/ Rocked gently on the azure by the wind's caress,/ The trembling tree, the nightingale's mournful address."

"Lily's Lament"

Chicoan Dick Cory, retired science and health teacher, continues his environmental activism in his thirteenth self-published book. This one is for kids, but also for adults, with a narrative by a long-tailed lemur.

"Lily's Lament" (approximately $20 at Made In Chico) features full-color illustrations by Steve Ferchaud which bring lemurs to life with a distinctive tail to tell. There's a bite to this tale as it's the story of what's happening to the lemurs' home in far-off Madagascar.

"What bothers me most," Lily notes, "is I'm getting old at 17, and as leader of my troop (alpha female), I may not be able to protect and care for my family much longer. Our living space has been squeezed down to the ... southwest corner of our country. Although we spend about one-third on the ground, we still need the forest for food."

Lily is eighteen inches tall; though she weighs but five pounds, "don't sell me short on brain power. I've been able to learn simple arithmetic, understand patterns, and pick the right tool to do a job (sequencing)." As Cory writes in the introduction, non-human animals have ways of communicating, even "the ability to select, create, and use tools."

For Cory, "watching long-tailed lemurs hop, skip, and jump across open ground in Madagascar is so much like children playing on a school playground during recess. There must be some common emotions, pleasures, and need of expression." Humans should not forget.

Lily's country is poor; the most important export is natural vanilla, but the consequences for Lily are stark: "I like awake at night in my cave bed wondering what value we have to our country. Is the wood and natural vanilla so valuable to drive us off the island? Our lives are at stake (endangered) not only by this lost ground ... but by hunters for food, and pet collectors. We live on the edge of 'no more' (extinction)."

Could tourism be an answer? Kids coming to Madagascar "could watch us jump from tree to tree, climb the rocky sides of steep mountains, and hop, skip, and jump" along the ground. It's an optimistic dream, and Cory leaves readers with much to think about.

"InSanity"

"Our connection evolved into a salacious summer fling," writes Chicoan Robyn Alana Engel in her new memoir. "Between romps, there were frequent 'I’m here for you' phone calls. We’d stroll along the creek at Bidwell Park hand-in-hand and laugh about absurdities like a chihuahua chasing its own tail." But "'Jeff' wouldn't commit to an exclusive partnership with anyone.... I slipped into a bout of depression. I didn't realize this then, but my brain was screaming for balance."

The screaming continues throughout "InSanity" ($11.99 in paperback, self-published, with more at rawknrobyn.blogspot.com; also for Amazon Kindle), a dark and mordant work of creative non-fiction which explores in gritty and fairly explicit detail the tension Engel feels between self-care as a single and an insatiable desire for sex.

"Am I oversexed," she wonders in print, "due to a lack of touch throughout my childhood? Or am I oversexed because I'm trying to make up for lost time--having been such a late bloomer?" Her introduction to "Justin," her prince charming, came only in her late thirties, but the marriage didn't last. Then, later, Engel receives news that her ex had died by suicide.

Memories of growing up in an outwardly successful but inwardly psychologically abusive family flood in (never hugged by mom, ignored by dad). And guilt about how poorly she treated her middle brother. Depressed, schizophrenic, Glenn died by suicide in 1988.

Engel's own will to live is fed by a need for constant emotional and sexual stimulation ("loneliness makes me feel crazy"). Her hookups over the years (with Jeff, Twig, George, Mr. Scorpio, Fred, Paul E., Troy, Eldee S., Paul Revere, JT) and run-ins with roommates, neighbors and bosses reveal a blushingly hilarious acid tongue, a person who can't stand boredom--but also someone deeply wounded.

A licensed therapist, Engel played Annie Bidwell, shook Bernie Sanders' hand when he came to Chico, helped Camp Fire victims. For Engel, "you have to choose life, in order to inspire others to do the same.... I choose life, and I intend to give my best to the whole of it. I arrive home, in sanity."

(Please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 for 24/7 free and confidential support.)

"Sunroofs And Shoeboxes"

For Chico State journalism graduate Jaime Mathews, now living with her husband and kids in Danville, her life as a single person was, well, frustrating. "I was thirty-one years old," she writes, "and I always thought that by then, I would be married with children.... Instead, I was living with a roommate, my dog, and two cats, working at my dad's business while I was also growing the hair salon I had purchased (and already disliked)."

She felt stuck. So she started writing "on January 7 because beginning on January 1 seemed way to cliché for me" and "committed myself to writing every day for six months about the things I was grateful for. You see, I knew about the power of mindset. I had studied it constantly during my master's program in holistic health and nutrition."

Though the resulting "gratitude journey" opened many personal and professional doors, the point is to express gratitude for what you already have (and may not realize it). 

Those daily posts are contained in Mathews' upbeat "Sunroofs And Shoeboxes" ($12.99 in paperback from The Sweet Life Co., thesweetlife.co; also for Amazon Kindle). Subtitled "train yourself to find happiness in a coffee mug, joy in the laughter of a stranger, and fulfillment in the beauty of a sunset," it's like opening the sunroof on a car: "There is a distinct feeling of expansiveness."

Noticing a little extra around your mid-section? Well, your intuitive sense is called a gut feeling and "because of this, having a more visually present gut can actually be a very healthy reminder to pay attention." (Though a too-present gut can indeed pose a health risk.)

Need creative inspiration? Try Chico's Thursday night market "which showcased the uniqueness of this college town: kettle corn ... fresh herbs, and the most amazing breads."

Sad, scary, or dangerous situations can stimulate gratefulness for others: "We are not meant to live this life on our own." 

"So the next time you fail your New Year's resolutions, forget about them" and loosen up; set a goal whenever, and go for it, being kind to yourself and those around you. 

Readers will find Jaime Mathews a cheering companion along the way.