All the Vintage Ladies

Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age
by Katherine May
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: February 28, 2023
Genre: essays, non-fiction
Pages: 212
ReRead?: No

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Wintering, an invitation to rediscover the feelings of awe and wonder available to us all.

Many of us feel trapped in a grind of constant change: rolling news cycles, the chatter of social media, our families split along partisan lines. We feel fearful and tired, on edge in our bodies, not quite knowing what has us perpetually depleted. For Katherine May, this low hum of fatigue and anxiety made her wonder what she was missing. Could there be a different way to relate to the world, one that would allow her to feel more rested and at ease, even as seismic changes unfold on the planet? Might there be a way for all of us to move through life with curiosity and tenderness, sensitized to the subtle magic all around?

In Enchantment, May invites the reader to come with her on a journey to reawaken our innate sense of wonder and awe. With humor, candor, and warmth, she shares stories of her own struggles with work, family, and the aftereffects of pandemic, particularly feelings of overwhelm as the world rushes to reopen. Craving a different way to live, May begins to explore the restorative properties of the natural world, moving through the elements of earth, water, fire, and air and identifying the quiet traces of magic that can be found only when we look for them. Through deliberate attention and ritual, she unearths the potency and nourishment that come from quiet reconnection with our immediate environment. Blending lyricism and storytelling, sensitivity and empathy, Enchantment invites each of us to open the door to human experience in all its sensual complexity, and to find the beauty waiting for us there.

Enchantment by Katherine May is my second book by Ms. May, which I checked out from the library earlier this year when it was published in February. Like Wintering, it’s a bit difficult to pigeonhole, being a memoir, a book of essays, and, as well, a bit of straight up science writing. Unfortunately, it didn’t resonate with me quite so well as May’s first book, which I read back in 2022.

Wintering
by Katherine May
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: November 10, 2020
Genre: memoir, non-fiction
Pages: 241
ReRead?: No

Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.

A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May’s story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.

Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.

There was something about this book that really worked for me – I think there was a bit of serendipity in my decision to read it. I was, myself, in a bit of a difficult time, experiencing a period of dislocation. It was the tail end of the pandemic, and work was really getting me down. Things were pretty miserable, I was pretty miserable, it was the dead of winter (literally and figuratively – it was January, 2022) and I stumbled onto the book.

I wish that I had read it ten years ago. Maybe even twenty years ago. This would have been difficult, because of course, it wasn’t published until 2020, but nonetheless, May’s open acknowledgment that some years are light and some years are dark, but both are normal, was an extraordinary insight that I had somehow avoided making on my own. I’m very GenX – I’m a buck up. shut up and get it done sort of person. But, of course, there are times when all of the bucking up, shutting up, and getting it done don’t really make me feel any better. Sure – I feel better about the thing that was the issue, but that doesn’t mean that the issue has gone away.

A good example of this was my career, from which I am now retired. There were years when I was able to handle the stress, manage my caseload with aplomb, get my work done and support my colleagues. And then there were years when I pretended that I was able to do all of those thing, but underneath, I was a frigging mess. It would have helped me, personally, to be able to offer myself some grace when things were bad. Maybe I wouldn’t have burned out. More likely, I would still have burned out, because my work eventually burns out everyone, but I would have been kinder to myself along the way.

So, of the two, Wintering was the one that worked for me better, although I liked both of them.

A Fever in the Heartland: the Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
by Timothy Egan
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: April 4, 2023
Genre: non-fiction
Pages: 432
ReRead?: No

A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan's rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.

The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows – their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

This is my second non-fiction book by Timothy Egan. I previously read The Worst Hard Time, published all the way back 2005, although I didn’t read it until 2021. It won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and tells the story of the dust storms on the High Plains during the darkest years of the Great Depression in the United States. I absolutely loved it, and have recommended it to many readers since I finished it.

Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot To Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them is Egan’s most recent book, published this year in April. It shares a focus on the geographic center of the U.S. with The Worst Hard Time, but that’s really where the similarities end. In many ways, Fever in the Heartland is a work of narrative non-fiction, politics and true crime, all mixed together. It is a deeply disturbing book, that has a lot to say about authoritarianism and racism, and how the two of them have been used by irredeemably awful people to seek and consolidate power.

The Ku Klux Klan is, without question, an organization of unremitting evil. It’s shocking – today – to realize that they operated with near total impunity in many parts of the United States for decades, in total control of all elements of the community: business, government, and religious.

“No one can deny that the United States is a white Protestant country,” wrote the Fiery Cross, the weekly newspaper of the Indiana Klan. Stephenson’s press organ was filled with scare stories of those seeking to find a home in a new land. “We receive at our ports of immigration an ignorant and disreputable omnium-gatherum of scorbutic and vicious spawn, people who possess neither blood nor brain, unclean and uncomprehending foes of American ideals.” The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should “build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven” against immigrants.”

The means always justified the ends, and the ends, for them, was nothing less than total domination of the American political system. The primary villain at the heart of the book was a man named D.C. Stephenson. Stephenson was utterly depraved: a murderous, sexually assaultive libertine who would cross any line in order to gain and maintain status, wealth and power.

He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction.

The events in the book occur in Indiana, which was called the “most Southern” of the Northern States, a place where, as the book explains, the Ku Klux Klan was so deeply embedded in the communities, that:

“Our investigation has shown that Stephenson forced a super oath” on public officials, said Adams. “This super oath was greater than the oath of constitutional authority.” The Republican Party was outraged—not at the disclosures of Stephenson’s web of graft, but at the press for reporting it. This journalism was the work of Jews, party officials implied. Clyde A. Walb, the Republican Party state chairman, said a syndicate of international bankers was trying to bring down the GOP in Indiana.

The incident that finally brings down Stephenson is not for the faint of heart – what occurs to the woman of the subtitle is horrific.

From my perspective, the thing that I find most chilling about the book was the ease with which the Americans who considered themselves decent, upstanding, even (maybe especially) Christian people were persuaded to join a group that was built upon hatred. They were convinced of conspiracy theories, and they abandoned their principles without a backward glance to grant power to terrible men because they believed that the benefit to them was worth it.

“Isn’t it strange that with all our educational advantages,” noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many “Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?” To D. C. Stephenson, it wasn’t strange at all. Steve’s 1922 epiphany in Evansville—that he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman or a member of Congress—was brilliant. And true.

I wish that this book didn’t resonate so clearly in 2023. They say that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Egan has done a service by reminding Americans of our very recent past. If only we will heed his warning.

I’m going to try to post a few reviews of some of my NF reads for this year throughout the month, but to get started, here is an overview of all of the NF I have read throughout 2023 so far. The titles link to my review (if there is one) or to the Goodreads page for the book:

• Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer (GR)
• The Life We’re Looking For by Andy Crouch (GR)
• Glass Houses by Brian Alexander (my review)
• Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond (my review)
• My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead (GR)
• The People are Going to Rise Like the Waters on Your Shore by Jared Sexton (my review)
• Enchantment by Katherine May (GR)
• Deep South by Paul Theroux (GR)
• A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan (GR)
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit (GR)
• A Horse at Night by Amina Cain (GR)
• Women We Buried, Women We Burned by Rachel Louise Snyder (GR)
• Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley (GR)

While 12 books (out of 160) isn’t a very high percentage, this is actually a lot of non-fiction compared to most years, since I am heavily weighted towards fiction in my usual reading.