book-review – Auxiliary Memory

The Forsytes on TV

by James Wallace Harris, 6/13/26

Would anyone still be reading John Galsworthy if British television didn’t keep producing new versions of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932, the year before he died, but that recognition seldom guarantees an enduring audience.

I must admit I wouldn’t be reading Galsworthy books today if I hadn’t been a fan of all three miniseries based on The Forsyte Saga. Technically, The Forsyte Saga is the title Galsworthy gave to the first trilogy of novels based on the Forsyte family. All nine novels are called The Forsyte Chronicles.

I know it sounds obsessive that I’m reading the books after watching 42 episodes of the three miniseries. However, the novels color in the main characters with greater detail. They also flesh out all the minor characters we see standing around the main characters on the screen.

The literary world has forgotten Galsworthy as a Victorian materialist who didn’t make the evolutionary step to modernism. Virginia Woolf was particularly hard on Galsworthy for failing to portray the inner lives of his characters. We don’t get deep, long stream-of-consciousness narratives, but I do feel Galsworthy describes the inner world of his characters, sometimes explicitly but often implied through dialogue and action.

Soames Foryste, who readers will hate as much as Irene Forsyte hates him, does get our sympathy. Soames is so well developed over six novels that he feels like one of the historical figures Lytton Strachey wrote about in Eminent Victorians.

Personally, I don’t know why Anthony Trollope and John Galsworthy aren’t as popular with readers as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. They fill in a gap in English history for readers who study history through novels. Galsworthy is well-suited for those who love Downton Abbey, which explains why British television has produced it three times.

Amazon has the Forsyte Collection for 99 cents, which claims to contain everything in 3,355 pages. There are several audiobook editions, but I’m listening to the Naxos editions. Naxos packages the entire story of nine novels using their trilogy names: The Forsyte Saga, A Modern Comedy, and End of the Chapter.

Only the first six novels actually focus on the Forsytes; the last three deal with a distant cousin.

The Forsytes Saga (1967) miniseries has 26 parts, and covers the first six novels and interludes (short stories):

The Man of Property
In Chancery
To Let
The White Monkey
The Silver Spoon
Swan Song

The Forsyte Saga (2002) miniseries has 10 parts, and only covers the first three novels and interludes (short stories):

The Man of Property
In Chancery
To Let

The latest television version, The Forsytes (2025), had only six episodes in its first season and covered only part of The Man of Property. It had been renewed for seasons 2 and 3. For some reason, it changes the story from the books and the two other television series. I don’t recommend starting with this series, even though it has the most elaborate production.

I recommend watching the 1967 series, which is in black-and-white. The only place I could find it was on YouTube. Among the stars were two of my favorites, Kenneth More and Susan Hampshire.

As far as I can remember, only Soames, Irene, and Winifred appear in all six of the first novels that focus on the Forsyte family from the 1880s until 1926. It involves at least ten love stories and eight marriages. It begins in Victorian times, spans the Edwardian, through World War I, and into the Jazz Age.

The 26 episodes of The Forsyte Saga reminded me a great deal of the 26 episodes of The Pallisers, which is based on six novels by Anthony Trollope. It made me wonder if Galsworthy was a fan of Trollope. But it also reminded me of the 12-volume novel series, Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, and the four-part TV series of the same name. These English writers like to span generations, combining character drama and British history.

Although there are plenty of reasons to hate Soames Forsyte, I found him a fascinating character. I was very sympathetic to Irene Forsyte, but I also wanted to condemn her. I both liked and disliked Jon and Fleur. In the 1967 version, Fleur was played by Susan Hampshire. It’s hard to judge the faults of a character played by such a beautiful actress.

I’ve already seen the 2002 version twice, and I’m looking forward to watching it again. According to WatchNow, it’s available on Netflix and PBS. Damian Lewis portrays Soames wonderfully. The character is so unlikable, yet over time, you develop great sympathy for the poor man.

Unfortunately, I haven’t taken to the new 2025 version, although I will give it another viewing. The actors all look too young and beautiful. The costumes, sets, and production are luscious. Visually, it reminds me of HBO’s The Gilded Age. The latest big historical dramas all seem to be revising the past, so everyone is young and beautiful. I really appreciated all the genuinely old-looking characters in the 1967 version.

The miniseries focuses on romantic relationships. The novels also explore many other kinds of relationships. Soames and his father. Soames and his uncles and aunts. Soames with his brothers and sisters. Soames is the patron of Philip the artist. But they are also romantic rivals for Irene. In the second trilogy, A Modern Comedy, the novels focus on Soames’ relationship with his daughter Fleur. In the second trilogy, we see Soames in several business and political relationships. And we see Soames’ relationship to art – he’s a collector of paintings.

And this is just the connections of Soames. There is an intense relationship between Old Jolyon, Young Jolyon, and his son Jolly. We encounter even more relationships with their wives and lovers. Young Jolyon is Soames’s first cousin, and the two families have several overlapping relationships.

The story focuses on marriage from Victorian times through the Jazz Age. To the first and second generations of Forystes, marriage was about improving the Forsyte holdings. Soames twice marries poor, beautiful women who come to despise him. Intense love fails other couples. In the first six novels, I can only recall one marriage where love succeeds.

I’ve read enough about Galsworthy to know that the complicated Forsytes were somewhat inspired by his own family. And Galsworthy stole his wife, Ada, from his cousin, and they lived unmarried for several years, hiding the scandal from his father. After his father died, his cousin divorced Ada, and Galsworthy married her. This is paralleled with Jolyon and Soames.

In other words, there is great depth in these novels that makes The Forsytes worth reproducing for television. And it should encourage fans to read the novels.

JWH

Separate Tables (1958) and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971)

By James Wallace Harris, 5/26/26

Last Thursday, Bookbub offered me a $1.99 deal on Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor. That deal is no longer available, and the Kindle edition is now $5.99. However, my edition is an NRRB edition, and the current one is from Virago. They each have a different introduction. That makes me wonder about Bookbub deals. Well, that’s neither here nor there. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a wonderful novel.

I bought the book and started reading it right away because it was about an elderly Englishwoman moving into a hotel that catered to retirees. For some reason, I’ve always liked movies, TV shows, and books where people live in a rooming house or hotel.

But here’s the coincidence I wanted to mention. Thursday night, YouTube offered me Separate Tables, a film about people living at an English residential hotel. You have to wonder just how savvy these AI algorithms are at knowing what we like.

I’ve since discovered there’s a film version of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, also available to watch for free on YouTube. It would have been even eerier if the algorithm had offered me this film last Thursday. And one reason I’m reviewing these two stories together is that the people in the Claremont also ate at separate tables. Both stories are about loneliness. Mrs. Palefrey focuses on older people, and Separate Tables covers everyone.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, the novel, is a gentle tale about unhappiness that makes you feel good. Laura Palfrey is a widow with one estranged daughter and one indifferent grandson.

Elizabeth Taylor describes her: “She was a tall woman with big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl. She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked as Lord Louis Mountbatten might in drag.”

The plot of this novel is rather simple. Mrs. Palfrey is embarrassed that her grandson doesn’t come to visit. She befriends a starving would-be writer, Ludo Myers, who actually likes her. So she tells the other hotel guests that Ludo is her grandson. Keeping up this lie leads to light, pleasant humor. Along the way, we get to know the other elderly guests at the Claremont.

Only one old man, Mr. Osmond, lives among the old women. I sometimes go places where I’m the only old guy among a roomful of old women. So I identified with Mr. Osmond.

Separate Tables is a far more dramatic, edgier tale, on the verge of melodrama. The film is based on two one-act plays, and the story is told through an ensemble cast. David Niven won a Best Actor Oscar, even though his time on screen was short. In all, the film was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and won two. The other was for Wendy Hiller for Best Supporting Actress.

Sibyl Railton-Bell (Deborah Kerr) is a homely spinster dominated by her mother, Mrs. Maud Railton-Bell (Gladys Cooper). Sibyl is emotionally fragile and is afraid of sex, yet she is attracted to Major David Angus Pollock (David Niven). Pollock is a lonely old man who pretends to be a war hero and has several dark secrets. John Malcolm (Burt Lancaster) is an American hiding out from life at the hotel. He has a tortured soul, drinks, but attracts the hotel manager, Pat Cooper (Wendy Hiller). They talk of getting married. Then Anne Shankland (Rita Hayworth) shows up. She’s an actress who has gotten too old and can no longer dominate men or get parts.

All the actors play against their famous type.

Separate Tables is gorgeous to look at, filmed in widescreen black-and-white. The story flows from one character to the next, bringing all the guests together into a scene I particularly liked. It’s near the end when they are all seated at separate tables, but talking to each other between tables.

Both stories, Between Tables and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, are about loneliness. I’ve known several people who have said they were loneliest at parties, when they were around people. The characters in these two stories are frequently together. The virtue of Elizabeth Taylor’s novel is that the reader hears what’s going on in people’s heads. In contrast to the film, viewers must read the actors’ minds through facial expressions and body language.

I have this odd feeling I’ve seen Separate Tables before, but I have no real memory of it, just a bit of déjà vu. Getting old is a trip. I know I’m trying not to talk about it because it depresses my friends, but I find the experience fascinating, even all the forgetting.

I’ve always assumed that if my wife dies first, I’ll move into some kind of retirement community or assisted living. Most people I know dread the thought of such a lifestyle. I like the idea of having my own room for solitude, but being able to go downstairs and find a community. And I know as I get older and weaker, I’ll be glad to give up working in the yard, taking care of the house, and driving. I think such laziness is why I’m drawn to stories about people living on hotels and rooming houses.

I’m guessing that many of my friends will find these two stories disturbing. My peers hate anything that makes them think about aging. I guess I’m some kind of existential Boy Scout, because I consider such stories to be preparing me for the future.

By the way, the introduction to Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont in the current edition is by Paul Bailey, who claims to have been Taylor’s inspiration for Ludo. You can read the sample at Amazon to read the introduction, but here’s the part I liked.

I have to begin this appreciation of Elizabeth Taylor’s penultimate novel on a personal note. I was working as an assistant in Harrods when my first book, At the Jerusalem, was published in 1967 – a fact which, for some reason, struck the diarist of The Times as being of interest to the paper’s readers. A year after publication, I met Elizabeth Taylor at a party. She told me how intrigued she had been that a man in his late twenties should have chosen a home for old women as the setting for a novel, and that she had gone to Harrods’ magazine department to see what such a curious creature looked like. She went on to say that she had watched me at work for about an hour, from the vantage of a chair in the adjoining lounge. She smiled as she made this revelation. She had not anticipated seeing someone with a youthful appearance: she had expected me to be just a trifle wizened.

When I read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont in 1971, I remembered Elizabeth Taylor’s confession. Ludovic Myers, the young man who comes to Mrs Palfrey’s aid when she falls in the street and who subsequently befriends her, is a novelist manqué. Throughout the course of Mrs Palfrey, he is writing a study of old age which – altering a phrase uttered over a pre-dinner sherry by his new, elderly friend – he gives the title They Weren’t Allowed to Die There. He works at Harrods, in the sense that he takes his manuscript into the (now vanished) banking hall, where he scribbles away happily, surrounded by Honourables on their uppers and tired county ladies resting their feet before the train journey back to the shires. Ludo, like me, is an ex-actor, who has done his stint in a tatty repertory company and has no desire to repeat the experience. In other words, I am flattered to think that I gave Elizabeth Taylor a little bit of inspiration for what is undoubtedly one of her finest books.

Taylor, Elizabeth (2011). Mrs Palfrey At The Claremont: A Virago Modern Classic (Virago Modern Classics Book 83) . Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.

JWH

ABUNDANCE by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

by James Wallace Harris, 4/17/26

When I bought Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I assumed it would be about creating a post-scarcity society. Instead, it’s about the supply-side progressivism. A post-scarcity society was a concept created by futurists and embraced by science fiction writers. It’s based on the idea that technology could produce such a surplus of everything that it would invalidate capitalism. It turns out supply-side progressivism (or the abundance movement) is somewhat related, but a smaller subset of post-scarcity.

The book Abundance originated with an essay by Klein in The New York Times and an essay by Thompson in The Atlantic. Before buying the book, I suggest reading those two essays and the Wikipedia entry. If you still feel a need to deep dive into this subject, the book is where to go. 40% of my Kindle edition is references and index. Klein and Thompson have done a massive amount of research.

Basically, Klein and Thompson are liberals attacking the government for too much regulation, and telling liberals that some of those laws designed to help people for liberal reasons are now hurting people that liberals also want to help.

The two cases Klein and Thompson focus on are finding homes for the homeless and for people who can’t afford one, and making healthcare more affordable. They go into great detail about how zoning laws are keeping us from solving the housing problem. The second focus is on how the federal government is now stifling innovation.

I agree that zoning laws keep us from solving housing problems, but I don’t think undoing those laws is possible or the full solution. I thought San Francisco was the wrong city to analyze, and considered Houston an unfair counter-example. San Francisco’s growth is limited by geography, and Houston has endless sprawl, so zoning may not be the defining factor.

I believe wealth and greed control zoning laws, and that’s not going to change. The American tech oligarchs have no trouble quickly building giant data centers, even when they face significant protests. I don’t think asking average Americans who are NIMBYs to become YIMBYs is a fair request. Or one that will bring about change.

I found their story of Katalin Karikó far more fascinating. I especially recommend chapters 4 and 5 on Invent and Deploy.

Karikó spent years submitting research proposals to study mRNA, which were routinely rejected because those who decided who received research grants didn’t think mRNA was worth studying. Yet, years later, her research led governments and pharmaceutical companies to develop Covid vaccines within one year, even though it normally takes years to develop a new vaccine.

Klein and Thompson praise the quick development of the mRNA vaccine under the Trump administration and wonder why Trump never took credit for it. They guess that Trump didn’t want to promote a huge success for big government, and a success for vaccines to his anti-government, anti-vax followers. They do recommend the book Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds by Paul Mango. It proves how successful governments can create abundance when the need arises.

Klein and Thompson show how the federal government wastes huge amounts of money on scientific research through its current procedures and often backs the wrong research. They give a history of how the federal government was successful in the past but is now confined by policies and regulations.

Modern liberal politics is made possible by invention. Almost every product or service that liberals seek to make universal today depends on technology that did not exist three lifetimes ago—or, in some cases, half a lifetime ago. Medicare and Medicaid guarantee the elderly and poor access to modern hospitals, where many essential technologies—such as plastic IV bags, MRI and CT scan machines, and pulse oximeters—are inventions of the last sixty years. It is tempting to say that, with these essentials already in existence, it is time for society to focus at last only on the fair distribution of existing resources rather than the creation of new ideas. But this would be worse than a failure of imagination; it would be a kind of generational theft. When we claim the world cannot improve, we are stealing from the future something invaluable, which is the possibility of progress. Without that possibility, progressive politics is dead. Politics itself becomes a mere smash-and-grab war over scarce goods, where one man’s win implies another man’s loss.

The world is filled with problems we cannot solve without more invention. In the fight against climate change, the clean energy revolution will require building out the renewable energy that we have already developed. But decarbonization will also require technology that doesn’t exist yet at scale: clean jet fuel, less carbon-intensive ways to manufacture cement, and machines to remove millions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

In health care, the last few centuries of invention have turned a death planet—where disease ran rampant and, before 1850, one in two babies perished before their sixteenth birthday—into a world where people can look forward to generation-over-generation increases in life expectancy. But there are still so many mysteries that require fresh breakthroughs. We’ve made disappointingly little progress with many cancers. Complex diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia elude treatment or even basic comprehension. The cellular process of aging is a deep mystery. We still don’t have effective vaccines for adult tuberculosis or hepatitis C, or vaccine platforms that we can immediately scale up in the event of a new pandemic. Decades from now, our children may gawk in horror that people with chronic pain or lingering illness in the early twenty-first century couldn’t take a simple all-purpose saliva or blood test to answer the basic question Why do I feel sick? If disease is a universe of mysteries, we have scarcely explored one minor solar system of its cosmos.

Inventions that may seem outlandish today may soon feel essential to our lives. Streets filled with electric self-driving cars that give us mobility without emissions and free us from the vast number of deaths caused by faulty human reflexes or judgment. Gigantic desalination facilities that transform our oceans into drinkable tap water. An economy with robots that build our houses and machines that take on our most dangerous and soul-draining work. Wearable devices to scan our bodies for diseases. Vaccines that we can rub on our skin rather than inject at the end of a needle. As unrealistic, or even ludicrous, as some of these ideas might seem, they are not much more ludicrous than a rejected, ignored, and unfunded mRNA theory that came out of nowhere to save millions of lives in a pandemic. To make these things possible and useful in our lifetime requires a political movement that takes invention more seriously.16

So, where is that movement? Invention rarely plays a central role in American politics. In health care, for example, Democrats have spent decades fighting for universal insurance, while Republicans have consistently fought its expansion. But while the dominant fight in Washington is typically about how we buy health care, we rarely talk about the health care that exists to be bought. After all, in the future, progressives don’t just want everyone to have an insurance card; they want that card to provide access to a world of treatments that liberates patients from unnecessary disease and debilitating pain. Technology expands the value of universalist policies.

If progressives underrate the centrality of invention in their politics, conservatives often underrate the necessity of government policy in invention. “The government has outlawed technology,” the investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel said in a debate with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2014, echoing a popular view among techno-optimists and libertarians that government laws mostly block innovation. But many of Silicon Valley’s most important achievements have relied on government largesse. Elon Musk is now a vociferous critic of progressive policy. But he has also been a beneficiary of it. In 2010, when Tesla needed cash to launch its first family-friendly sedan, the Model S, the company received a $465 million loan from the Obama administration Department of Energy.17 His rocket-launching company, SpaceX, has received billions of dollars from NASA under Democratic and Republican administrations. Musk has become a lightning rod in debates over whether technological progress comes from public policy or private ingenuity. But he is a walking advertisement for what public will and private genius can unlock when they work together.

Beyond merely regulating technology, the state is often a key actor in its creation. An American who microwaves food for breakfast before using a smartphone to order a car to take them to the airport is engaging with a sequence of technologies and systems—the microwave, the smartphone, the highway, the modern jetliner—in which government policies played a starring role in their invention or development. Federal science spending is so fundamental to the overall economy that a 2023 study found that government-funded research and development have been responsible for 25 percent of productivity growth in the US since the end of World War II.18 “There is widespread agreement that scientific research and invention are the key driver of economic growth and improvements in human well-being,” the Dartmouth economist Heidi Williams said. “But I think researchers do a poor job of communicating its importance to lawmakers, and lawmakers do a poor job of making science policy a major focus.”19

The pandemic proved the necessity of invention yet again. The mRNA COVID vaccines saved millions of lives and spared the US more than $1 trillion in medical costs.20 But they might have never existed if it weren’t for Karikó’s force of will—and the cosmic luck of an extremely well-placed Xerox machine.

Klein, Ezra; Thompson, Derek. Abundance (pp. 134-137). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Ultimately, Abundance brings little hope. I think the book showed too many examples of how we can’t create abundance and why. It thoroughly convinced me that our current political evolution is in the wrong direction.

Yes, Katalin Karikó and mRNA are shining examples of what’s possible, but one great example does not prove that change will happen. All the other examples Klein and Thompson used were from history, suggesting that Americans will step up to the plate when they face a great challenge, but not in ordinary times.

AI and data centers are a major challenge, and we aren’t stepping up. Please read “How the American Oligarchy Went Hyperscale” by Tim Murphy. Greed drives us. Klein and Thompson even use examples of how monetary prizes can be used to solve problems.

The Tech Bro Oligarchy promises a post-scarcity society with AI, which is the kind I was expecting the book Abundance to be about. But I don’t believe in that kind either. At 74, I doubt the pie-in-sky dreams science fiction promises. Just because we live in science-fictional times doesn’t mean they’ll lead to science-fictional futures.

AI-generated abundance will ruin us. Old-fashioned human-generated abundance is possible, but greed will always keep the wealthy from sharing it.

p.s.

This essay was not written with any help from AI. All the ideas are my own. But are they? My ideas come from reading books and magazines. I train my mind on information just like AIs are trained. I’ve cancelled my AI subscriptions. I’m putting that money into buying more books and magazines. Reading Abundance did me more good for my mind than reading what AI has to say about it. Gemini produced excellent summaries, but they didn’t stick in my mind.

Grinding through the book word by word will not help me remember everything, but I do think it helps me remember more than reading AI summaries. But in the long run, what’s important to remember is that we could live in a saner, more compassionate society.

JWH

THE ANTIDOTE by Karen Russell

by James Wallace Harris, 12/27/25

There are some conservative Republicans who wish to censor history by forgetting events in America’s past. They worry that such history could make their children feel bad about themselves. They want to remember a past that makes America look great again. Please read Donald Trump’s executive order regarding this issue.

Karen Russell’s latest novel, The Antidote, philosophises why we need to remember everything, even things our ancestors did that make America look bad. Russell uses fantasy to educate us about reality. When my friend Annie first recommended that we read this novel together, the fantasy elements turned me off. As a life-long science fiction reader, I was in the mood to read realistic fiction for a change. The older I get, the more I want nonfiction, but I can’t give up fiction completely.

Throughout the first half of The Antidote, I was annoyed with all its fantastic elements. However, I eventually realized that Russell was using them as a plot device to get her readers to contemplate real history. Eventually, I felt Russell had read a great deal of American history that disturbed her, and she was using her novel to come to grips with why we shouldn’t forget that which many want to erase from American history books.

Memory is the main theme of this novel. Both personal memories and historical memory.

The Antidote makes a case against five crimes our ancestors committed. These tragic deeds explore the dimensions of greed. Each of these historical atrocities has been well-documented in nonfiction books I’ve read over the years. Reading the novel made me ask: Which has more impact, fiction or nonfiction? Listening to The Antidote made me feel closer to the suffering.

How many books have you read that deal with these historical events? Did you learn more from reading fiction or nonfiction?

How did we take land from the Native Americans?
How did we force Native Americans onto reservations and attempt to reeducate them with our culture and values?
How did poor farming practices cause the environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl?
How did we institutionalize unwed mothers and steal their babies?
How do we allow the murders of women to go uninvestigated and underreported?

The Antidote is primarily set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, in 1935, between two significant real events, the Black Sunday dust storm (April 14, 1935) and the Republican River flood (May 31-June 1, 1935). The story is told sequentially, but with flashbacks. We hear the story told from many voices. Four primary characters: The Antidote (Antonina Rossi, AKA, the Prairie Witch), Asphodel Oletsky (Del), Harp Oletsky (Del’s uncle), and Cleo Allfrey (photographer), along with two significant secondary characters, a cat and a scarecrow.

Antonina, a middle-aged woman, had been institutionalized at age 15 for being an unwed mother. Her son had been forcefully taken away from her. She makes her living as a vault, or prairie witch. Antonina can enter a trance while another person relates a memory they wish to forget. That process will erase the memory from the teller’s mind and store it in hers. Antonina gives them a written receipt that will trigger that memory, and she can reinstate it at a future time. Antonina does not remember what she vaults. She is paid for this service, but her clients consider her no better than a prostitute.

Asphodel “Del” Oletsky, a fifteen-year-old girl, just five feet tall, is the captain of Uz’s high school girls’ basketball team. Her mother was murdered when she was young, and she lives with her uncle Harp Oletsky. Cleo is a young black woman who travels the country documenting the depression for FDR’s government. The plot of the novel eventually brings them all together.

The novel begins with a roundup of jack rabbits and clubbing them to death. My father was born in Nebraska and was Del’s age in 1935. He told me stories about how the farmers would exterminate the jack rabbits. My mother also went to high school around this time and played basketball. My grandmother was on a basketball team in Indiana at the turn of the century.

My memories immediately made me connect with the story. We remember the good ones, but forget the bad ones.

The story then goes into catching a serial killer of young women. The sheriff even connects the killer to Del’s mother’s cold case. This murder mystery is the apparent backbone of the plot, but it’s not the real story.

The Antidote immediately triggered a memory of an article I recently read, “The Nurse Who Names the Dead” by Christa Hillstrom. The article was about Dawn Wilcox, who created a database to track the number of men killing women. She discovered that femicide goes vastly underreported. One of the truths of Russell’s novel is that she’s writing about evils that have always existed. Can we ever break the cycle?

Dust and evil color this novel with darkness. I listened to the audiobook edition, and it felt like I was watching an old black-and-white movie. I’d call it noir magical realism.

I admit, I had to push myself to keep listening for the first half of this book. I was just put off by the fantasy elements. But the characters grew on me. And by the middle of the story, I was hooked. The last half of the book often made me teary-eyed. For most of the novel, I felt Russell was too writerly, but when Harp gives his big speech near the end, I must say I was quite impressed with the writing and the description of the riot and storm.

Throughout this story, I kept thinking about the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. Uz almost sounds like Oz. Plus, the story has a tornado and a talking scarecrow.

I wanted to connect the elements of this story with all the nonfiction books I’ve read that back up its fictional history. Especially, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan, plus the Ken Burns’ documentary, The Dust Bowl. However, I can’t remember where I read about the other issues in this book. My mind is getting old and tired.

My friend Linda and I often talk about how humans repeat the same crimes throughout history. In recent months, we’ve focused on how greed is the primary driver of evil. As you read The Antidote (if you do), think about how greed motivates people to do what they do. We’re all greedy to a degree, and that might be a survival mechanism, but there seems to be a point when more greed makes us evil. I see that everywhere.

I’m also watching The American Revolution by Ken Burns. It brings up many things that some Republicans would like the world to forget. Like I said, we don’t change. But we should ask, what are we doing now that people in the future will wish to forget that we did?

The Antidote by Karen Russell was on 11 best-books-of-the-year lists for 2025.

JWH

Can Rereading THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ Help Me Remember What It Was Like to Be Ten Years Old?

by James Wallace Harris, 12/5/25

While watching Wicked, I struggled to recall the excitement I felt when I first read the Oz books at age 10 back in the summer of 1962. I wanted to know whether the fantasy world Wicked created matched the one L. Frank Baum created in his fourteen Oz novels.

The barrier to making this comparison is memory. Memories are highly unreliable. Plus, we overwrite our memories every time we recall them, so am I really remembering 1962, or just the last time I thought about reading the Oz books as a kid?

Like most of my brain excavations, I have to rely on logic and deduction instead. I also look for corroborating evidence. I spent many days on this problem, and here are my results.

The Oz books were the first novels I discovered on my own. For various reasons, I concluded this was the summer between the 5th and 6th grades. My family lived on base at Homestead Air Force Base, and I found the Oz books in the children’s wing of the base library. They were old and worn.

The first novel I remember is Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, which my mother read to me in the third grade. I started using libraries in the fourth grade, but read nonfiction books about airplanes, space travel, cars, and animals.

I remember roaming up and down the fiction section at the base library and discovering the Oz books. I had no idea who L. Frank Baum was, nor did I have any idea when they were written. I didn’t know about copyright pages or genres. I saw “Oz” on the spines and connected those books to the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, which I had seen on television every year since the 1950s.

I did not know the word fantasy. I doubt I understood the concept of fiction. In other words, these books were an exciting discovery. To compound that excitement, they were all set in the same fictional universe. They were my Harry Potter books. L. Frank Baum had tremendous world-building skills.

Analytically, I know that at ten, I didn’t know much about the world. My vocabulary was limited. And I was unaware of most concepts and abstractions. My previous beliefs in fantasy – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy had caused me great embarrassment in first grade when a girl called me a baby for mentioning them. I was five, she was six.

In other words, I knew Oz did not exist, even though Baum created so many wonderful details to make it believable. I remember wanting Oz to exist, but I knew it didn’t. I don’t think I grasped the idea of fantasy at that time. All I knew was that the books created an artificial reality in my mind that was mesmerizing.

Watching Wicked and then rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz this week let me compare the two versions of Oz, but I couldn’t compare my initial reactions. Wicked is quite colorful, creative, and contains many elements of the original stories, but it no longer worked on me as the Oz books had in 1962. And that’s to be expected, since I’m 74, long past the age for fairytales.

My quest changed. I now wanted to know how my ten-year-old self saw the world. Rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz gave me very few clues.

My contemplations led me to some ideas, though. I have damn few memories of life before age five. I have zillions of memories dating from age five to twelve. I started thinking about them, and a revelation came to me.

Before age five, I theorize our minds are like LLMs (large language models). Those AIs can take in information and react to it, but they are unaware of the world. After five, but before puberty, we develop some self-awareness, but it’s very limiting. It isn’t until around twelve or thirteen that we start thinking for ourselves.

Here’s my main bit of evidence. As a child, my mother told me about God and took my sister and me to Sunday School and church. I just accepted what I was told. But when I was twelve, I started thinking about what they were telling me about religion. I didn’t buy it. I considered myself an atheist by 1964, when I was thirteen, maybe fourteen.

In my thirties, when I was working in a library, I came across an article that said that some librarians in the 1950s felt the Oz books gave children unrealistic expectations about life, and pulled the books from their shelves.

When I read that, I knew it had been true for me. The Oz books led me to science fiction, a genre that also inspired unrealistic expectations regarding the future that have proven to be unrealistic.

Here’s the thing: I was being told two fantasies at age ten. The first was from The Bible, and the second from the Oz books. Looking back, I see that my young self began to reject religion at age ten because I preferred the stories from L. Frank Baum. I wasn’t aware that I was comparing two fantasies; I just preferred one over the other.

Then I discovered science fiction. Concurrently, I was also discovering science. That gave me the illusion that science fiction was reality-based. When I consciously rejected religion, I thought I was choosing science. However, in recent decades, I’ve realized I had substituted science-fictional fantasies for religious fantasies.

I realize now that the Oz books had the power of Bible stories on me at age ten. The reason why so many people are true believers as adults is that they were programmed as children. Wicked doesn’t have that kind of power over me today. I can’t remember what that power felt like, but I do remember that for a few weeks in 1962, the ideas in the Oz books set my mind on fire. Rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz did not reignite that fire because I’m no longer a believer in anything.

I’ve often wondered if I hadn’t been lied to about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, and thus had not experienced humiliation at discovering they were lies, and if I also hadn’t discovered Oz books, would I have accepted the Bible stories as truth as a kid and believed them now?

JWH