The Revolutionary War is remembered as a fight won by Americans who had the nerve to ignore the edicts of King George III, dump British tea into the Boston Harbor, and go toe-to-toe with the world’s greatest military power. But it was larger than just the 13 colonies’ battle for independence. The war was also a full-throttle global conflict, as other European empires, namely France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic, assisted the American cause and challenged British dominance across North America, the Caribbean, and India.

In fact, it is very unlikely the Americans would’ve prevailed without their allies. The French and Spanish, in particular, forced England to divert military resources away from America to defend their empire. They provided foreign financing and credit as well, bankrolling much of the eight-year campaign.

In The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, University of Maryland historian Richard Bell, British-born coincidentally, reevaluates our understanding of the Revolution. Not just the global nature of the conflict, but that here at home it was, in fact, a civil war, with African-Americans and Native Americans fighting on both sides. It’s a must read for those who want to expand and deepen their understanding of American history.

A good place to start is the framing of the Revolution as America’s first civil war. Not just because the Founding Fathers were British citizens, but because most Americans weren’t on board initially.
There wasn’t the polling we do today, but the best estimates are 40 percent of white residents [in America] would’ve been considered patriots, maybe 40 percent neutral—think of them as today’s swing voters—and 20 percent strongly loyal to England.

And there was a great propaganda battle. Today’s conspiracy theories are not exactly a novel political tactic.
There’s a fierce battle waged by patriot writers and loyalist writers to win the hearts and minds of those who are neutral at the start. Writers like Paul Revere and Samuel Adams try to persuade them to adopt George Washington’s side and maybe even pick up arms. Patriots try to convince their fellow colonists that British East India Company tea has been packed down into chests by Chinese warehouse men with filthy feet. . . . [Meanwhile] loyalists are weaponizing their fellow colonists’ fear of foreigners by spreading ugly, untrue rumors that the arriving French Catholic soldiers have orders to persecute American Protestants, steal their lands for King Louis of France, and even ban the speaking of English in America.

Everything considered, Harry Washington might have the most compelling personal saga in the book.
What I like about the remarkable life of Harry Washington, who, at one time, was enslaved to George Washington, is that both have their own way of pursuing ideas of liberty. For George Washington, that means liberty from the control of the British government, and it has to do with land, trade, and political power. For Harry, it’s freedom from slavery, most immediately, and then all that comes after that in terms of seeking self-determination, civil rights, and political power. It’s a journey that takes him from revolutionary America to British Canada, and then to Sierra Leone in West Africa.

We’re also reminded the Revolutionary War, like nearly every war, was not good for the American or British economy.
The war was an economic disaster for almost everyone involved, on every side. The British economy was ruined by the suspension of trade with its biggest customers in America. The economies of the 13 rebel colonies completely collapsed when trade was cut off with their biggest trading partner, the British Empire, including Canada and the Caribbean. It’s calamitous. Shipping is halted, which creates huge shortages, price hikes, and hyperinflation. People lose their jobs. Companies go out of business.

On both sides of the Atlantic, that puts enormous pressure on politicians to end the war. In Britain, those economic concerns drive numerous peace petitions sent to Parliament and to the king by ordinary hard-up British people, who want this economic hardship over as quickly as possible.

What does Thomas Paine mean in 1776 when he declares Americans “have it in our power to begin the world over again?”
He’s encouraging readers to take the leap, to embrace the cause of independence, to fight this war and win it, because as humans we all have extraordinary amounts of political power and agency. When we work together, we can do great things. He’s also noting that for a group of rebel colonies to break away from an empire in the 18th century would be unprecedented and send a signal around the world that the king’s control over his colonies is neither permanent nor invincible. That such an example could reshape the modern world, and it has, right? There have been loads of revolutions in the wake of the American Revolution.

As he did every night, Eddy Crane had called his wife to let her know he was leaving the trucking company that he co-owned in Curtis Bay and would be home soon. But he never did come home that night—and he was never seen again.

Kate Crane had just started eighth grade when her father went missing in 1987. Whether it was intuition or fear, she immediately thought the worst—that her father was gone forever, dead.

In the ensuing years, her mother and family never talked about the police investigation, the unsolved mystery, or her father. Twenty years after his disappearance, and unable to cope with the unresolved trauma any longer, the former journalist went searching for answers and healing.

After nearly two decades of research and writing, Whatever Happened to Eddy Crane? is less a true crime story and more a heart-rending narrative of Crane’s journey into his disappearance, her close relationship with her father, and her unfathomable loss.

There are no easy answers in this elegantly crafted book. It is, however, a memoir that will speak to anyone who has suffered loss and wrestled with grief.

One surreal thing about your father’s disappearance is that it’s mentioned in Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire. David Simon covered the story at The Sun. That he had not forgotten your father, ultimately, meant a lot.
I was so mad when that Homicide episode came out [fictionalizing my father’s story]. But as the years passed, living in New York, I felt very alone with what had happened, even though I knew it was not the most important thing that ever happened in the world. The timing behind The Wire was a totally different reaction. By then, I thought everyone had forgotten my father.

Your father’s name also became a shorthand for Baltimore detectives when they had a strong suspect but couldn’t bring a case because they didn’t have a body.
Yes, in that era…the timing of The Wire episode was in the same two-week period that I had my first conversation on the phone with [detective] Donald Worden. He said, “That’s not a murder [technically], that’s a missing persons case. I just had the folder out the other day.” Between those two things, the Earth shifted.

Setting out, was writing this book an obligation you felt to you father? Were you seeking justice? Or catharsis?
I didn’t know all the things this book would be at the beginning, all I knew was I can’t take this anymore. I had to do something. Well, what can I do? I’m a moderately legitimate writer at this point. I’ve got these Wall Street Journal experiences and with the alt-weekly New York Press. [The podcast] Serial had not come out, but I already had an aversion to the true crime thing. I didn’t want to pretend I’m a detective. I’ll just start down this path and, yes, to the word catharsis. I do think the project has a cathartic quality.

Eighteen years is a long time on one book.
As time passed, what I realized was the book and I were creating each other. It was the center of my life. I became deeply appreciative of the alchemy of it. I took this thing that was too painful to bear, and I turned it into art. The one thing I’d like people to come away with is the idea we all have some creative capacity. Whether it’s music, photography, painting, or writing, it’s a way to work with the things that we’re afraid of, a way to work with pain. From the time I was a teeny-tiny kid, I loved books more than anything.

Your father, we learn, was a complicated guy. He’d been arrested. He was in business with shady characters, but he was also a sensitive man who appreciated music and photography—and loved his family. It’s a difficult story at times, but always artfully told.
I realized if I didn’t have the skills to do it right, I’d have to walk away because there’s so much to this [to tell]. And my family did not want anything to do with it. At the very least, if I was going kick up pain for family members, I wanted it to be a very solid book.

Has your mother read the book?
As far as I know, she has not read it.

The story of the Civil Rights Movement has centered around the struggle to end legal segregation, voter suppression, and housing discrimination. For good reason, of course. That long fight culminated in landmark victories in the Supreme Court and legislation in Congress ended the system of laws, social practices, and economic restrictions that enforced an apartheid system in the United States.

The Civil Rights Movement’s battle against police abuse, however, has been largely overlooked. Often, we think of those in the Civil Rights Movement as victims of law enforcement misconduct and violence. But in Police Against the Movement, University of Baltimore history professor Joshua Clark Davis reframes that narrative, presenting evidence that the movement tackled police injustice head-on, offering insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government and law enforcement attacks on protest.

Police Against the Movement shows how early civil rights activists set the stage for the Black Lives Matter movement and adds important context to the intimidation, violence, and tragic recent events involving ICE’s ongoing treatment of U.S. residents and activists today.

What prompted you to revisit the Civil Rights era?
I started in 2017 when Black Lives Matter was on the rise. In my previous book, From Head Shops to Whole Foods, I had researched FBI surveillance of Black-owned bookstores. The other thing was, many journalists and commentators were describing BLM as something completely new. Or they’d say BLM [picks up] where the Civil Rights Movement ended or this is the Civil Rights Movement 2.0.

And in Police Against the Movement, you document how the Civil Rights Movement was also calling out and fighting police violence and injustice.
We’ve all seen the horrific footage from Selma, from Birmingham. Those [violent] images are some of the most prominent images of the Civil Rights Movement. The question to me was, “How did the Civil Rights Movement respond to police violence?” You can point back to the Black Panther Party [as far as standing up to police abuse], but what about before the Black Panthers? I learned there was this incredible record of protests and demonstrations at precinct stations, inside police headquarters, campaigns against surveillance, campaigns to monitor and observe the police even before the Black Panther Party had started doing that.

One incredible anecdote about Baltimore, is that police here trained the police attack dogs used in Birmingham.
Yes, and I also wrote a whole side piece for Slate on that a few years ago. Basically, Baltimore’s police department pioneered the canine unit and were evangelical in their zeal to spread the idea to other departments.

Can you explain what you mean by the term “slow violence?”
Slow violence describes non-physical forms of harm carried out by the state that are slow in their execution and their effect. When we think of violence against the movement, we think of billy clubs, beatings, and attack dogs. But we are missing a big piece of the picture because we haven’t adequately considered that local police all over the country, not just the FBI, were inflicting surveillance on civil rights activists, bringing fabricated charges, and specious, trumped-up felony indictments that not only put them in jail, but carried the threat of prison. They carried out forms of character assassination that got people fired from jobs. These things were geared toward political intimidation and chilling political speech. So, slow violence is this umbrella term that covers more sophisticated trickery.

One of the more interesting things you document is these police behaviors against political activists predates the FBI. It begins with local detective “Red Squads” surveilling Socialists, unionists, and Communists in the early 1900s.
Baltimore had one called the Inspectional Services Division. Part of why there isn’t more Baltimore in this book is that it appears the vast majority of records from Baltimore’s Red Squad don’t exist or have been lost or have been destroyed. The only copies I’ve seen show up in an FBI file. So, Baltimore was no exception to this. Every single city had a Red Squad. Some people thought of them as little FBIs. They were political intelligence units designed to ferret out political radicals, though they rarely admitted that out loud after the 1950s. They often said they were concerned with organized crime, but political radicals were their focus.

Part of why they are so important to the story is that they’re the main way police attack civil rights activists, especially outside of the Deep South. Most police departments in the United States realized by the mid-1960s that it was not really going to work to flagrantly, unapologetically brutalize civil rights protesters on camera. They thought, “We’re going have to come up with more sophisticated ways to undermine them and sabotage them.”

Baltimore-based journalist Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian, has spent the past decade covering national politics. Just 32 years old, his work has always transcended traditional political journalism, combining history, theory, reporting, and analysis to unpack the issues of the day.

His first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, published by Penguin Random House, makes a bold assertion. On the cusp of the country’s 250th anniversary, Nwanevu examines and reframes the institutions and practices that, in theory, are upholding American democracy, and argues that the U.S. Constitution is not the solution to our dysfunction, but its cause.

He notes that, at the time of its drafting, critics of the Constitution argued the Founders had created a president akin to an elected king. And since then, the president’s powers have only increased—right up to the exponential expansion undertaken by the current occupant of the White House.

Here, Nwanevu sits down with us to explore the book’s research and analysis.

You highlight that Thomas Jefferson himself believed that even the best constitution was likely only good for about 20 years. Essentially, it was up to each generation or two to reform their government as new challenges and better ideas emerged.
So, I think there’s something odd about our relationship with the founders in this respect, people like Jefferson. We revere their wisdom and insight, they’re very intelligent people, but they also made mistakes in creating the institutions that they did. They had very different ideas, of course, about who belongs to this country and who deserves political rights than we do. To change the system that they set up, that’s our right, it’s our prerogative.

Certainly, we know more about how to govern than they did. They were just starting out the government in this country. We’ve now had over two centuries of experience. We’ve also seen democratic governments around the world pop up that we can draw from. We have political science as a discipline that was not around in 1787 in any kind of serious form.

Most are familiar with our antidemocratic issues—the Electoral College, gerrymandering, the disproportionate representation in the U.S. Senate, the lifetime-termed Supreme Court, etc. When did you conclude these aren’t bugs, but features of the Constitution?
I remember the 2000 election, Bush winning despite losing the popular vote, and I sort of absorbed this vicarious anger and retained a basic sense of unfairness. Then, that’s how Trump wins in 2016 and it many ways it became more difficult to ignore.

He stayed in office despite U.S. senators representing the majority of the American population voting to remove him from office at both impeachment trials. He was able to build the conservative majority on the court that’s going to be in place for perhaps many, many years…If you can win power despite most Americans not supporting your candidates or your agenda, I think that creates an incentive to move further to the political extremes.

You point to three pillars of a functioning democracy—political equality, responsiveness, and majority rule—all places where we are currently failing. You also touch on the amount of money in politics and the growing wealth inequality gap—not as separate concerns, but issues that compound this dysfunction.
That’s right. I mean, there are certain parts of the country, because of the Electoral College, that matter more in federal politics than others. How often do presidential candidates come to Baltimore or Maryland? Look at how many parts of this country are ignored or marginalized or abused, as we see in Los Angeles, as we see in Chicago [with ICE raids and sending in of National Guard units from other states]. That’s all a function of the fact that some places, and their voters, matter much more than others. If we care about democracy, that’s not tenable.

I think people who read this book will see our government in a different light and maybe embrace the idea that an effective democracy doesn’t end division. It provides an equitable means of resolving conflict.
America is a large and diverse country, and this naturally produces a lot of differences. This is why it is necessary to have to a good political system. People think the political environment is difficult now; I promise you, it was not better in 1925 or 1825. We had race riots and political violence that far outstrip what we’re facing now. The Ku Klux Klan was lynching people. Union members were getting shot. We have had a chaotic political history.

Do you have a favorite quote from a Founding Father?
Thomas Paine certainly had a way of cutting through the noise. My favorite from Thomas Paine is the one that I end the book with. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

In the 1970s, no baseball team in the American League won more games than the Baltimore Orioles. The names of the players from that era—Brooks, Boog, Eddie–still resonate throughout the city today, but one holds a special place in the hearts of fans: Earl.

Although Earl Weaver stood just 5-foot-7, the team’s legendarily mercurial manager was a giant in the game. The foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking, deep-thinking Weaver was an innovator, among the first managers to embrace technology as a precursor to today’s analytics.

Journalist John W. Miller grew up in Belgium, but when he visited relatives in Maryland, they’d take him to O’s games and shower him with stories of the team’s glory days–especially those of its fiery manager.

“I was blown away by the pageantry, the excitement, all the drunk guys yelling,” says Miller, 47, who went on to play baseball at Mount St. Mary’s University and work as a Wall Street Journal reporter. “It was very exciting. I spent 10 months of the year in Belgium speaking French. This was my American side blasting out. I fell in love with baseball.”

When Weaver died in 2013 at 82, Miller wrote his obituary for the Journal. That led to his new book, an  encompassing and enlightening examination of one of baseball’s most successful and colorful managers.

Baltimoreans like to think of Weaver as one of our own. But he was actually from St. Louis. How did it shape him?
Deeply. Pre World War II, it was a culture of taverns, barbershops, and corner stores. Earl would play a high-school game and then walk or take the trolley to Sportsman’s Park and watch afternoon baseball. He was raised in large part by an uncle who was a bookie. Earl was like a street hustler in a way: smart and clever.

Many diehard Oriole fans might not even know that he was a minor-league second baseman. What kind of player was he?
He signed out of high school and he had four really good minor-league seasons. He was on an upward progression and made one major league spring training [with the St. Louis Cardinals] in 1952…Weaver had great hands and a great batting eye. He walked a lot, he didn’t strike out a lot, and he hit the ball hard. I don’t think he would have been a great big leaguer, but he wouldn’t have embarrassed himself.

When he became a minor league manager and then took over the Orioles in 1968, what was his relationship with his Black players?
I know from talking to people in the family that his vocabulary and manner before he got to the Major Leagues was racist. He used the n-word. In the minors, he lived in the South, and he behaved like people around him. When he got to the Major Leagues, he changed.

He really needed to win over Frank Robinson. And he did. He brokered a deal so Robinson could start managing in Puerto Rico in the winter and then campaigned for him to be hired as Major League Baseball’s first Black manager. Ken Singleton told me that he loved [Weaver]. Eddie Murray loved him. He had a way of respecting people for being fully human that touched Black players. The capacity for this guy to change is an incredible part of his story. In his own memoir, he says, “I evolved.”

He was ejected from an average of six to eight games per season. Was this just theatrics, or did he have a real anger management problem?
In the minors, he had such a bad temper that he once charged an entire dugout by himself. The opposing team beat him up and broke his arm. He had a temper that he often couldn’t control. He came to realize that [arguing with the umpires] was a way of applying pressure that was strategic. It pressured the umpires to make calls that favored the Orioles, but it also deflected pressure from his own players.

When they had a losing streak, he would start getting ejected more because it was a way of blowing off steam for the team and of getting the fans’ attention away from the way the Orioles were playing. There’s a third element, which is that he realized the crowds loved it, and it brought people to the ballpark.

You manage a high-school varsity baseball team in Pittsburgh. How much do you channel Earl Weaver when you coach?
I think Earl Weaver’s simple approach to baseball is really helpful for high-school players. He believed in throwing the ball over the plate and winning battles by changing speeds and throwing your best pitch. The way he saw baseball was that there’s a few things you have to do, and everything else is bullshit. Throw strikes. Draw walks. Put pressure on the defense. He saw baseball as common sense. So yeah, I feel like his spirit is whispering in my ear sometimes.

Jack Burkert’s roots are old Bawlmer. He grew up in blue-collar, 1950s Brooklyn, attended Poly, and graduated with a degree in history and education from the University of Maryland. After teaching in the Baltimore City School system and then at Penn State University, his career in education eventually took him to Washington, D.C. and New York City.

Returning to his hometown, Burkert’s long interest in local history led to a “retirement” reinvention at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. As a BMI educator, Burkert developed a wide range of tours and programs—on everything from oyster-canning to car-making—always informed by his ever-deepening research into the history of Baltimore, its citizens, their work and lives, as well as the many forces that have shaped the city.

His recent book, Twentieth Century Baltimore: A Native Son’s Casual History of the City on the Patapsco, builds upon his 14 years at the BMI. Told a decade at a time, Burkert’s accessible story toggles between a 20,000-foot view of the century’s key people, events, and trends and down-to-earth anecdotes that bring city life to, well, life.

I love the book’s coffee-table feel and the photographs from the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s archives. How did you choose your approach—the broad strokes of history interspersed with the daily happenings in the city?
Have you ever read Scharf’s history of Baltimore from the 1880s? [History of Baltimore City and County by Col. J. Thomas Scharf.] That was the last time somebody wrote a general history of the life and times of Baltimore. The whole 20th century had passed, and I thought, there are a lot of great books on Baltimore, but nobody’s really tied all the loose ends of those 100 years together. There’s the political landscape and national and international forces at play, but I wanted to show how people lived. What were the topics of conversation? Were people asking each other if they were going to the Orioles’ game? If they’re going to win the World Series?

Taking the 20th century history of Baltimore decade by decade, is there an era that you particularly like or find compelling?
Okay, but to understand, you need to be a longtime Baltimorean: the 1970s and the City Fair, in particular. After the 1968 riots, that city was shattered. It was just despair and hopelessness. And the City Fair, starting in 1970, brought together [hundreds of thousands] of people over three days, just enjoying one another, the city, the aspects of city life. So many wonderful things came out of the City Fair and helped put this city on a better track for the next 20 to 25 years. It’s fair to say it’s a forerunner to Artscape, among other festivals.

The midcentury machine politics era is wild. With its ethical challenges, it’s similar in some ways to what the city has been through lately, right?
This may be cynical, but sometimes it seems like city politicians are naïve today. They don’t always know what they can get away with and what they can’t. One of the hardest things I had to write was describing former Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro Jr. [Nancy Pelosi’s father] and his difficulties with alleged corruption. Nothing was ever proven, but it was always just below the surface. William Donald Schaefer was a product of that system, too, and later word got around about his unappointed “shadow government” of advisors.

The 1920s photograph of three local young “flappers” standing and laughing alongside a prop plane—with a young woman pilot in the cockpit—is amazing.
They all look so carefree and ready for an adventure. That picture says to me, there’s excitement in the air, it’s brand new, and we’re going to participate as women no matter how much you say we can’t. Can you imagine a Victorian or Edwardian woman standing out there on that field next to a female pilot? None of that would have ever happened 10 years before. Symbolic of the ’20s in every way, including the airplane being discovered by everybody.

What is your favorite photo?
The interior of the Little Tavern hamburger shop from the 1950s with the woman holding a tray of hamburgers. I went to Poly when it was back on North Avenue, and I had lunch at the Little Tavern shop every day. Perfect teenage spot. Knocked back four hamburgers every day.

Kevin Shird’s writing career began in a federal penitentiary. The son of an alcoholic father, the Baltimore native began dealing drugs at 16 and spent nearly 12 years in prison. Determined to improve his circumstances, Shird took college courses while incarcerated and, in the process, discovered that writing was a healing outlet.

He has since written four books including his latest, A Life For a Life: Poor Choices and Unresolved Trauma Is Killing America. In it, Shird examines his struggles with PTSD as well as those of former cellmate Damion “Soul” Neal, a bright, if erratic, fellow Baltimore native. Shird later lost touch with his old cellmate, and then was horrified to discover Neal had been arrested again and charged with killing an ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend after a drinking binge. Shird wrestles with Neal’s troubling crime, but also Neal’s mental health issues.

A talented writer, Shird weaves several threads together in a compelling case for greater access to mental health counseling in prison and destigmatizing therapy.

Your last book, The Colored Waiting Room, which included conversations with Nelson Malden, the first African American to run for elected office in Montgomery, Alabama, was particularly well-received. What got you started writing while incarcerated?
In the prison college program, it wasn’t so much about writing at first. It was more about reading. The prison library had a collection of biographies of world leaders—Nelson Mandela, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat—all easy to read. I didn’t have an interest in fiction, but in all the “true stories,” the biographies, and nonfiction.

In fact, your first book was a memoir.
I had an aspiration to write. I think everybody says, “I’m going to write a book one day.” Few people move on it, but I was one of those people.

What prompted this current work and your investigation of your former cellmate, Damion Neal?
I first met him in a holding cell in a federal Virginia facility and then, two months later, again in Allenwood. It wasn’t until 2009 that I googled him. Just the way you get curious about people, and I read about his arrest, which had been a year earlier. I was in shock. I didn’t believe he did this for a couple of years, until I started researching the case and getting paperwork from the court.

And you two had been close for a period.
I’d get him to come up to the library. We’d check out books and talk for hours. He’d talk about going home to his daughter and stuff like that. You bond with guys inside, develop a camaraderie. It’s almost like a guy you went to war with, and you want him to be successful and then when he’s not, you feel some kind of way about it. I have that still with guys who I was in the joint with. When I see them doing great, it lifts me up.

This took 10 years for you to write. Were you busy with other projects? Or was something else going on?
That’s how long it took me to wrap my arms around the issue of mental health. I also had a psychologist tell me it was survivor’s guilt. You know, I made it through the storm. I think we all, at some point in our lives, jokingly say things like, “that’s my crazy buddy” or “that’s my crazy home boy,” not realizing that we’re referring to someone maybe dealing with a serious issue unbeknownst to us. When I spent time around him, I knew something wasn’t right. I just had no idea what it was. It took me 10 years to really understand what unresolved trauma is. Growing up, his parents were both drug addicts. He had held a dying friend in his arms who had been shot in the head. He’d witnessed a mass shooting, and he suffered from lasting PTSD.

You highlight the lack of access to mental health care for those incarcerated and the connection to recidivism, but also the need in low-income communities.
We have to make sure that people understand they need support and make sure people have access to support. Eventually, I realized I needed help—counseling and therapy—but there has never been a hesitation. If your teeth hurt, immediately you think, “I need to go see a dentist.” We’ve known anxiety and depression are not great for human beings. But in these communities, there is a lack of access to this type of care. We’ve got to make mental health just as simple and accessible for people who are struggling.

Adelle Waldman’s first novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., was widely acclaimed and named one of 2013’s best books by NPR, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Economist, and The Guardian, among others.

A Pikesville native and Friends School of Baltimore graduate, Waldman was a writer living in Brooklyn at the time and set her portrait of a young novelist navigating New York’s hip literary and dating scenes in a world in which she was familiar. Waldman heads into new terrain in her second novel, Help Wanted, widening her lens, as well.

In the decade after Nathaniel P., Waldman moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York, had a daughter, continued to write—and took a job unloading boxes at a big-box store from 4 to 8 a.m. for six months. The product of that experience, Help Wanted is an ensemble portrait set entirely in Town Square, a Target-type store where its working-class characters’ personalities and precarious economic lives are slowly revealed.

Beyond the employees’ unspoken camaraderie and wisecracks, the underlying story is both straightforward and complicated—the workers simply hope to land enough hours each week to maintain something resembling a stable existence.

Two questions. How’d you get the job? And when did you tell your fellow pre-dawn co-workers you were a writer?
When I applied, I put that I graduated from college, but I presented myself as a mother with a young child looking for something part-time, which was true. There was no question [about] previous books published. I put off telling people until I felt if word got out and I got fired, I’d be fine—four months. One coworker got on his phone and looked up my previous book and was like, “Holy shit, guys. She’s not lying.” They thought it was kind of cool. They were supportive and I got to be pretty good friends with them.

Do you consider the new novel dystopian?
Yes and no. It was important to me that it was accurate. I was careful not to exaggerate anything, not to caricature anything. I didn’t want to make a comically evil employer. I wanted to make a realistic employer and to depict the pressures the employer is under. It’s not as if the company sets out to screw employees for fun. It’s a systemic issue. [The company] has its own pressures in terms of competing with online retailers, and what shareholders and analysts want, and what the business press wants—all of which “permits” not treating its employees well.

But I do actually think it’s dystopian to an extent, by which I mean, the world we live in has dystopian elements that those of us in the white-collar workforce are insulated from.

The novel is set in Pottertown, NY. I grew up between Pottstown, PA, and Pottsville, PA, and have to ask, is the name a nod to…
Yes, I chose Potterstown as a reference to It’s a Wonderful Life. Potterville is the bad version of the world that happens if Jimmy Stewart’s character had never been born. Bedford Falls is the good version. That was my oblique reference.

Do you have a favorite character?
I am fond of all the characters [laughter]. They’re each, to me, touching. I sometimes think of the book as having seven little Deaths of a Salesman in it. I do like Raymond. He’s got this eye condition that is disconcerting for people. He’s smart, but has this congenitally low self-esteem and so he doesn’t necessarily impress other people. There’s something about that personality type that I feel sympathy for—someone who is under-appreciated because they don’t have the self-confidence and self-presentation to match their actual abilities and skills.

Near the end, there is an exchange between two female corporate executives that underscores everything so well. One says the low-level employees “aren’t like you and me” and handle negative change well because they’re accustomed to it. The other patronizingly describes them as “resilient.”
Katherine and Janine are saying things that are not shocking for people from a certain world to say or think. But in the context of reading the book, when you’ve spent so much time with these characters and you suddenly hear how these executives speak about them: “Oh yeah, some people, their lives are chaotic. That’s just how they are”—you’re like, “What?”

Writer and now-retired Towson University English professor David Bergman became a significant figure in gay literature decades ago. His first book, Cracking the Code, received the George Elliston Poetry Prize in 1985. Six years later, he published Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature, a seminal work of gay literary criticism. In 1998, as the deadliest years of the AIDS epidemic finally receded, he produced his second book of poetry, Heroic Measures. Subsequently, he and co-editor Karl Woelz won a Lambda Book Award for Men on Men 2000: Best Gay Fiction for the Millennium. Bergman’s third book-length work of poetry, Plain Sight, comes from Baltimore-based publisher Passenger.

Now 74, Bergman retired from teaching eight years ago, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s. It was a combination of events that has provided him with time to write and new subject matter as he copes with aging and the evolving relationship with his body, which he does wryly and wistfully—and with a certain mordant humor. In whole, the observant stories in Plain Sight aren’t sad, but a wake-up call to see the wonder before us each day.

I love the title poem and the figurative use of in “plain sight” and what hides in plain sight—murder weapons, car keys—but mostly within ourselves. The last line is: “Look, I’ve been lost in plain sight for years, and no one has found me yet.”
Ha, yes. There’s nothing particularly plain about what’s in plain sight. There are writers who’ve been forgotten. I was thinking about me. Their books are on the shelves. They’re lost in plain sight. [The stories and characters in their books], they’re lost in plain sight.

It’s been 25 years since your last book-length work of poetry. Should we assume that these poems took time to germinate?
Well, I did have to wait, that’s true. But I wasn’t energetically pursuing getting a book published. There were so many more things happening in my life, like taking care of my parents and teaching, which took up an enormous amount of mental energy. I understand why writers were carpenters and farmers in the past. It’s not the same part of the mind working.

Obviously, Parkinson’s has changed your life. How has it changed your perspective as a poet?
I’m having trouble buttoning buttons because my fingers are not as sensitive as they were. Can I stretch the shape of the hole to make the buttons fit? Do I have to buy shirts with buttons that are easier to button? I begin to think about the whole problem of buttoning a button and that’s sort of amazing because even four years ago, I never would have thought about it. A small example. I’m working on a poem about becoming lightheaded, which sort of feels like going into a room that you recognize, but the furniture has been taken away. I also suffer from auditory hallucinations, a common side effect. There are allusions to that in the book. It’s fascinating how it functions. Sometimes I can stop them. Other times, it’s music that I hear, usually quite pleasant.

Much of the collection revolves around the engaging “The Man Who…”series. “TheManWho Hated Irony,” “The Man Approached by Dead Lovers,” etc. Some represent an aspect of your experiences. Not all, correct?
That’s right. “The Man Who” series began in one of my poetry writing classes [where the students] seemed emotionally closed in. I suggested they should write about themselves, but as a third person, and I wrote that poem in that class, too. I realized, “Oh, this might be a useful way of approaching some of the things that I want to talk about.” I’ve always loved psychological case studies, Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, Oliver Sacks, and these sort of became case studies. It opened up enormous possibilities for artistic speculation.

I also particularly admire the last poem, “Grace.” Perhaps because I recently had a high school reunion.
I went to a very small high school which closed soon after we graduated. Before our 50th year anniversary, one of the students contacted me via email and said, “Why don’t we get together for a high school reunion?” We’d never had one before and, in fact, there were only 22 members of the class. We were able to hunt down 20. Fifteen of them showed up and I didn’t remember ever being so warmly greeted. They extended grace—undeserved. I didn’t remember being that well-liked in high school. But, in retrospect, people seem to have liked me in school. It was nice. And I could extend grace in return. It was a nice feeling.

Patrick Smithwick has written three previous memoirs, all connected to horse racing, family, and loss. His father, A.P. Smithwick, one of the greatest steeplechase jockeys ever, died at 46 from cancer. Readers are likely to find his latest work, however, his most heart-wrenching.

In War’s Over, Come Home: A Father’s Search for his Son, Two-Tour Marine Veteran of the Iraq War, the Monkton author, longtime teacher, horse trainer, and former competitive rider chronicles his family’s struggle to help their oldest son as he suffers through PTSD after two tours in Iraq.

The “search” in this case is literal. Andrew Smithwick eventually became homeless after returning to civilian life, using his U.S. Marine training to survive in far-flung corners of the country as his family desperately sought to track him down and get him mental health assistance.

Although he also has a newspaper and magazine background, including a brief stint at this magazine, Smithwick has not set out to objectively report on veteran PTSD or homelessness. Instead, he keeps the focus on his son’s struggles and the loving, frustrated efforts of his family—which in turn brings PTSD and the tragedy of veteran homelessness into extraordinarily sharp relief.

As a parent, one of my first thoughts was around what must be Andrew’s profound loneliness as he spends day after day simply walking and camping by himself.
Yes, definitely. He was our most social child. You can tell from one of my favorite pictures in the book, where my wife is reading to him and he’s looking up at her. He loved being with the family. When he was in the Upper School at Boys’ Latin, his friends would come over [a lot]—he was sort of the leader of the pack. It really hurts thinking of him alone.

For the most part, the book was written in real time, between 2017 and 2019, as you and your family search for Andrew in several states. How hard was writing during that process?
Sort of painful. But I just got up and did it, because I knew from my writing experience that things would drift away and become foggy. I was making notes and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do [with it] initially, but I knew if I didn’t get it down immediately that I wouldn’t be able to do it.

Why did you write the book?
I knew when we started on these searches this was a microcosm of experiences other people were going through. I met so many people who had similar experiences. I met parents who had lost children, relatives, or friends to PTSD and homelessness. And I met homeless people themselves. Every time I’d talk to someone, I would learn more about it and realize maybe one out of every four or five people would have some relationship to this story. I’m writing this for all of them, too.

The book ends with a late-2022 update on Andrew. He seems to be doing okay physically even as he continues to live “off the grid.”
Working on the book and getting a publisher, more time had passed. So, I put an update in the postscript and it kind of ends in an upbeat way, with some positive information about my daughter getting married on our farm and hearing that someone had seen Andrew.

One of things you point out is that you, like most of us, during periods of great personal difficulty tend to compartmentalize as a means of coping. At the same time, beneath that, a part of you remains hopeful that someday Andrew will either tire from—or heal enough from—the outdoors, the hiking and camping, that he connects back to some type of services or returns to the family fold.
Yes, either one of those two things. The main thing that I notice from talking to so many people that work with the homeless is the main ingredient for them to have a successful recuperation is to have a place, a little place, where they can live and it can be their home. A small apartment or whatever to keep their stuff and get cleaned up and go out. There are 67,000 homeless vets the last time I checked. I’m hoping they can start getting more help. And Andrew is one of them.

What do you hope people take away?
Well, if you see a homeless vet on the sidewalk or in a city or somewhere, you don’t have to just be afraid, walk away, and lower your eyes. You can say, “Hi.” You can look them in the eye, talk to them, and ask how they’re doing, realizing it’s an individual. Maybe there’s something you can do to help, like get them a sandwich or a cup of coffee.

Anything else?
Just to keep an eye on these young men and women when they come back. If you know one, maybe you can help them with their transition into normal life, because normal life is just so, so incredibly different and hard after what they have been through.

Basketball fans might expect an autobiography by a 10-time NBA All-Star and three-time Olympic gold medalist to celebrate a career highlight or two. At least note them, right? That’s not the book Carmelo Anthony has written with D. Watkins, both of whom grew up in Baltimore on the city’s basketball courts and streets.

Instead, the 37-year-old Los Angeles Lakers star, with the help of the New York Times best-selling author, chronicles his first 19 years in a raw, compelling coming-of-age story set largely around Baltimore’s rec centers, schools, and the former Murphy Homes public housing project. Hoops fans, but more so Baltimoreans, shouldn’t miss Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised as Anthony recounts weaving his way through poverty, family addiction, guns, and his own unresolved pain.

We interviewed Anthony and Watkins by email about the well-received book, which was released last week.

In many ways, this is a real Baltimore book. Readers from the city are going to appreciate it like no one else. What made you decide to focus on your years coming up—and not, say, your NBA career?
Carmelo Anthony: Everyone knows my NBA career, but what most people don’t know is how I came to be the person I am today, and that all starts at my roots. But I know my story is one I think will resonate with many people, especially those who were also raised in Baltimore and similar communities. I wouldn’t be the man you know today without the experiences I had in Baltimore and the people I grew up with there. I hope that my story not only inspires others to look at their own lives and realize they aren’t defined by their circumstances, but also encourages people with different upbringings to understand how circumstances can shape our view of the world. That’s why this story is important to tell, now more than ever.

D. Watkins: Melo really wanted to focus on everything he had to overcome just to be able to step onto the basketball court, and I think a lot of people don’t get that. Most of the standout talent, and future NBA players are allowed to only focus on basketball from as young as the age of five, but Melo had to survive Baltimore first…There’s currency in what he overcame. He’s proud of what he has accomplished, and he wants young people, from places like Baltimore, who are having a tough time to be able to dream.

Carmelo, you lost your father and then your stepfather. You talk about not having the mental health resources you needed to deal with the depression and trauma you faced as a teenager in Baltimore.
CA: For generations, people in my community were taught to never show vulnerability, that emotion was a weakness. It’s just how life was, and I’ve never held any resentment towards the community that raised me. I know I [developed] a certain toughness in me because of it, and I have my fair share of scars, but I’m glad my son doesn’t have to grow up like that and feels comfortable talking things out when he needs to. We’re always learning, always growing, and the more we talk about mental health in society, the better the generations that come after us will be because of it.

How did you guys get together to do this book?
DW: Melo’s agent at CAA was going sign me a long time ago but we never really did a deal––then when this opportunity came. I believe it went to Wesley Lowery from 60 Minutes first. Lowery thought the project was a great idea, but felt the best person to write the book was me. And Melo’s agent was like, “Oh! I know that guy!” I was truly honored, because I have been a fan of Melo and Lowery for a really long time.

Carmelo, what does being selected as the inaugural Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion honoree this year mean to you
CA: It was incredibly humbling, and one of the proudest achievements of my career. Kareem is such a legend both on and off the court, and his drive to fight for equality and positive change is beyond inspiring. It’s our hope that this award inspires action, as it is up to each and every one of us to do our part to create a future for the next generation where everyone is accepted for who they are, regardless of skin tone, gender, sexuality, religion, or income level.

What did you take away from guest editing Slam magazine’s Social Justice issue in 2020?
CA: For me, guest-editing the Social Justice issue was a very moving experience. I really wanted to take the gloves off with this issue, and it was important for me to use this platform to shed light on the injustices taking place and how we can find solutions to move forward. From front to back, we wanted the entire issue to make a powerful statement. It highlighted the men, women, and children who are leading the fight against discrimination, and paid homage to those who are currently doing the work to shift our culture towards equality in every corner.

It was also important to celebrate the men, women, and children who are trailblazing across the landscape of sports. It was an especially meaningful opportunity because my son joined me on the cover to represent the future.

Why does Baltimore produce so many great ballplayers? What’s special about this city, in terms of basketball?
DW: Baltimore is just the toughest city in America. And that crosses over into everything, our chefs are tough, our dancers are tough––some of our teachers, the good ones are like gladiators. So you better believe then if a person is good at basketball, then being from Baltimore is going to turn them into a great.

Danielle Evans was born in 1983 in Alexandria, Virginia, which means she is old enough to appreciate what the integration of the federal government—and the middle-class jobs that came with it—meant for Black families.

It also means the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars instructor is young enough to appreciate the surreal nature of a highway named after Jefferson Davis mere miles from the nation’s capital. Evans lived in several states growing up as she pursued her academic, teaching, and writing careers—all of which informs the short stories in her acclaimed recent collection, The Office of Historical Corrections.

These smart, intimate, unpredictable tales of mostly young Black women seem at once ahead of their time, as if looking back on current moment of racial reckoning, yet plausible enough that they could be headlines in tomorrow’s newspapers. The book’s informed, exquisite writing, however, demands to be read today.

We’re curious where your story ideas come from. A federal agency named The Office of Historical Corrections, which is both the title of the last story and the book, feels like it could almost exist.
Often for me, something goes from random idea to story when I can find a connection between two things that don’t feel connected. Strange things happen in the world all the time, so part of being a writer is just being observant. In the beforetime [pre-COVID], I took a lot of public transit, and I got a lot of my strange ideas—what just happened?—on public transit. The original spark for the novella came years ago when I was on the Metro in D.C. I was overhearing people having a wildly wrong conversation about a historical event.

The ramifications of history, both personal and political, inevitably impact the characters.
Often the story for me is in these strange intersections. The long-term questions I’ve been asking myself are about history, about responsibility, about agency, privilege, and fundamentally how privilege operates. I do think part of the project of this book for me, I realized about halfway through, is how a narrative changes if you just choose differently who the protagonist is. That’s true in a sometimes very personal way. It’s also true in the story we tell about the country or the story of history. If white Americans are the protagonists of the American story, then yeah, maybe we have hundreds of years of building better white Americans.

Other stories are very timely, especially “Boys Go to Jupiter,” which is about youthful transgressions, unintended and otherwise, racism, social media, and grief.
So I’ve been writing about the strangeness of diverse or multicultural spaces that are invested in this iconography for a really long time. In fact, originally, I thought that story was going to be a novel, based on a controversy that happened at a college in the 1990s that brought about a huge public debate. But I think part of what makes that story feel topical is social media. I am interested in social media and interested in social media as a story question because so much [today] is about who we understand ourselves to be and the difference between our public lives and private lives.

Nancy Murray was 16 when she became pregnant and made the gut-wrenching decision that she wanted to give up her baby for adoption. She eventually reunited with her son Dylan and his adoptive parents, and she chronicled her experiences with adoption, abuse, and teenage motherhood in her memoir One Child for Another. Murray joined us to discuss how she decided to write the book, the pain of memory, and the role of writing in her life.

How did you come to the idea that you wanted to write about this part of your life? It is so personal, and I’m sure that made it so difficult to write about.
Dylan and his other mother and I have done the circuit of talking to adoption agencies, so we’ve told the story. And of course, among friends and family we’d told it again and again and again. But the story we told was always the Hallmark version, with the big happy ending. We didn’t really talk about what it was like to be the birth mother, we talked about the celebration of coming together. It was always sort of in my mind that I wanted to say, ‘You know, it wasn’t easy.’ It was scary and it was hard, and I wanted people to get that. There’s a lot of birth mothers out there that don’t have the big happy ending with their child that we had.

What was the process like of beginning to write the book?
I wrote it as part of my graduate thesis. Dylan and I have always talked writing about it or making a movie out of it because it’s so grand, there’s so many elements to it. But it was always very lighthearted. I went to [Dylan and his adoptive parents] after, when I actually had a body of work to say, ‘Hey, what do you think about this and what do you think about this being out in the world?’ We talked from there.

What was your family’s response to you writing about this time in your life?
I talked to them about it beforehand, but they didn’t read it until it was published. I was really worried about that, to be perfectly honest, because all my siblings are good people, but they all have chosen to frame their lives how they’ve chosen to frame their lives. It’s different for each one of us. For me to be going public with some of the things I had in there, I was concerned. [One of my brothers] had a very strong bond and connection with my mother. I was very worried that he would be hurt by the fact that I was exposing some of her weaknesses. But he wasn’t. He read it and the word he used was, ‘perfect’ because it captured the darkness that she was surrounded by and also showed her with some strengths and as a loving mother. I was happy about that. My sister who did not have a close relationship with my mother, she reacted differently, but she was still supportive. She said, ‘That is your story and you tell it.’

How long did it take you to write?
When I actually put pen to paper, I wrote it in about three months.

That’s fast.
I had to cram it in, I was on a timeline. But I had been chewing on it and mulling it over for my whole life, to understand what it meant to me and to understand the idea that something terrible happened in my life and it turned into something so positive . . . I grew from that experience. I’d been thinking about it for a long time, so it wasn’t like I had to untangle it and understand its meaning before I started to write. I had already been doing that.

One thing that impressed me in the book was its level of detail. Was that still very present for you?
No. I actually had to go back to [St. Ann’s Infant and Maternity Home]. Once I walked around the grounds and the building, some memories flooded back . . . I did keep a diary, but unfortunately, the diary vanished. I’d been carrying this thing around for my entire adult life that I’d written while I was there and I’d read it once or twice, so I had some memories of what I said. But, when I actually sat down to put the pen to paper, I couldn’t find the diary anywhere. It was maddening. So I did have to pull from my remembering reading the diary. I asked some of my siblings what they remembered about that experience. It was a lot of piecing things together.

Was there anything particularly surprising to you about writing the book?
I hadn’t realized that I had blocked the day that I gave birth. I wrote that at the very, very last minute. I had to push through a wall of fire to get there because I didn’t want to face it, I didn’t want to go back and remember that. So I locked myself in my room and forced myself to do it, because I knew it had to be a part of the story. I learned as I was actually writing it and crying—it really brought up a lot of feelings—that that day was when my bravado of being a tough kid and a really savvy person all broke down. Because I was frightened, I was weak, I was out of control, I was a kid. And that was the moment that I had to accept it . . . I did remember going into shock, I did remember punching the nurse—those are things you don’t forget. [laughs] But I didn’t really remember what I felt. One of the fears about memoir is that it’s therapy for the writer and not interesting for the reader. For most of the book I knew I was writing something was interesting for the reader because I had already worked out all my therapy stuff, but this was the one moment where I was thinking, ‘Oh wow, this is some stuff I need to work on.’ I was really surprised at the level of emotions that came out of that. It was very hard for me.

Are you considering writing more memoirs or do you think you’ll venture into other types of writing?
I have so many projects floating around in this brain of mine right now. I’m working on another memoir about my relationship with money, which also has a lot of highs and lows and dramatic, relevant experiences. I also have a goal to do a historical fiction work based on the ancestry of my family. There’s an incredible thread of a story there, which I won’t tell you now, that I can’t wait to write.

Was writing always a part of your life?
Yes. There was a bit of a dual existence for me, as I had a lot of secrets, and the way that I sort of kept track of myself was through writing. I always had diaries, I always wrote poetry, I wasn’t always good. There’s a poem in the book that I wrote about Dylan a couple of days after I gave him away. But it’s not been something I’ve shared, because of the secrets in my family. I was sort of trained not to share what was inside of me—write it down, keep it for myself. There was a lot of work for me to get to the point where I could actually get the stories out.

When did that point occur?
I’ve been trying all my life to do it. I’d been starting and stopping, starting and stopping. That’s why I went to the writing and publishing program at the University of Baltimore—I wanted to force my hand, to force myself to get it out there. That was my motivation for going to school.

And it worked.
It worked in a lot of ways. It changed my thinking, it built my confidence and now I’ve got all these other projects that I feel much more comfortable putting out there. It’s been a great experience . . . [The book] was about more than having a baby. At least I attempted to make it be about the powerless in a difficult situation, letting the difficulties actually be what spurs them on to finding their power. I find my voice in the book and I find my motivation to change my situation. And it was this kind of terrible event that happened that gave me that. There’s gifts in all things.

The Great Grisby
Mikita Brottman (Harper)

This is a love story. Brottman, who teaches in MICA’s Humanistic Studies department, loved her dog, Grisby, who passed away just months after she finished the book. The bulldog accompanied her everywhere, from the classroom—he’s pictured with Brottman on her MICA bio page—to the bathtub. If that seems a bit extreme, this spirited book provides context, both historical and personal. Over the course of 26 chapters (from A to Z, each one takes the name of a dog owned by an artistic or historical figure), Brottman examines the human-canine connection with a historian’s eye for lasting significance and a diarist’s fondness for everyday detail. She mixes stories and anecdotes about Picasso’s dachshund (Lump) and Freud’s chow (Yofi) with candid and intimate appraisals of life with Grisby. Brottman also injects a fair amount of psychology into the book and comes off as completely crazy—crazy about Grisby.

See our Q&A with author Mikita Brottman.

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Ripple Meets the Deep
Jason Tinney (CityLit Press)

Harry Crews blurbed fellow Southern writer Larry Brown’s debut book by succinctly stating, “Talent has struck.” This book of short stories by Jason Tinney, a Frederick resident and occasional contributor to Baltimore, brings Crews’s quote to mind. Tinney, like the aforementioned writers, crafts bold and sensual stories that ripple with nuance below the surface. His self-conscious characters might bleed and bruise, but it’s the seemingly offhanded comment that hangs in the air or the sense of unspoken longing that nudges them toward profundity. They grapple with aging and mortality and a sense that the open road, once so inviting, might lead nowhere good. They also sense that the salvation they’re seeking might be found closer to home, in things like the hushed beauty of a snowfall or the warmth of a pre-dawn embrace. But the restlessness stirs, bringing tension and an aching humanity to Tinney’s prose.

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Design and Content
Abbott Miller (Princeton Architectural Press)

Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton, Baltimore’s graphic-design power couple, have both published new books recently. Lupton’s Type on Screen, a follow-up to her influential Thinking with Type, is basically a textbook on screen-based typography, the perfect gift for the hotshot web geek in your life. Miller’s book, a monograph surveying his career to date, has much broader appeal and includes his print work (the Matthew Barney 2003 Guggenheim catalog is stunning), exhibition design (check out 2002’s traveling Harley-Davidson exhibition), and collaborations with the likes of Yoko Ono and Philip Glass. I especially like the generous selection of spreads from 2wice, the arts magazine Miller founded in 1997. The writing isn’t bad either, especially an insightful essay by Lupton, who recalls the days when they would “work side by side as friends, no benefits, pursuing a journey that still defines us.” I should note that the book is well-designed—by Miller, of course.

Tales from the Holy Land

Rafael Alvarez (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing)

If
Baltimore is the Holy Land, Alvarez is its Pope of pulp. These 19 short
stories exude hardboiled fortitude and an aversion to pretension of all
types. Populated with anti-heroes and set mostly between Fells Point
and Highlandtown, they pull the vigorous specificity of Mencken’s Happy
Days through The Wire (a show he helped write) with so many details
intact that they feel utterly real. But Alvarez’s fiction also traffics
in the mysteries of human kindness and cruelty, and his soulful
rendering of characters such as Basilio Ballousa, Pio Talle, and Gibby
Lukowski makes these stories true. His people are from the streets, but
they believe in something bigger——be it a familial bond, Catholic
mysticism, or the music of Johnny Winter——and that’s what ultimately
makes these tales transcendent.

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Unruly Catholic Women Writers

Edited by Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke & Ana Kothe (Excelsior Editions)

Put
together by DelRosso, an English professor at Notre Dame of Maryland
University, and two co-editors, this literary anthology seems especially
timely with Pope Francis shaking up things at the Vatican. It
spotlights writers who are, indeed, unruly. But they’re also thoughtful,
witty, and sensitive, and their irreverence is part of a two-sided coin
in the air. Here, their personal essays, monologues, short stories,
plays, and poems are grouped in three sections: “The Joyful Mysteries,”
“The Sorrowful Mysteries,” and “The Glorious Mysteries.” Mystery, not
dogma, infuses the pieces, as these women grapple with the inspiration
and indignation Catholicism has produced. Many of them continue
contemplating the silences and empty spaces that religion fills for many
people.

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Gentlemen of the Harbor

Captain Bill Eggert (self-published)

The
opening story in Rafael Alvarez’s Tales from the Holy Land involves a
teenager losing his virginity aboard a tugboat. Eggert’s tugboat history
includes nothing as racy as that——though, coincidentally, its cover and
the Alvarez cover are nearly identical——as its captains and crews
generally live up to the book’s title. Superbly illustrated with
photographs by famed Sun photographer Hans Marx and others, it depicts a
way of life that is hidden in plain view. Tugboats have been a common
sight around the harbor for generations, but most people aren’t privy to
the culture arising from these decks and docks. Eggert remedies that
with a pithy mix of maritime history and local legend, augmented by old
newspaper stories and even an occasional poem.

Someone

Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Eudora Welty once compared V.S. Pritchett’s fiction to “a well-going fire. Wasteless and, at the same time well-fed, it shoots up in flame from its own spark like a poem or magic trick.” The same could be said of McDermott, a Hopkins professor who writes with economy and elegance in this novel, which traces the life of one ordinary woman. Every page sparks with sensuous detail, fires the imagination, and leaves the reader asking, “How did she do that?”

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James McHenry Forgotten Federalist

Karen E. Robins (University of Georgia Press)

Like a lot of Baltimoreans, my knowledge of Fort McHenry revolves around the War of 1812 and the writing of the national anthem. The man the fort’s named after, James McHenry, never gets much play and tends to be overlooked. Robbins recounts McHenry’s revolutionary cred—serving under Washington and Adams and representing Maryland at the Constitutional Convention—and helps move him from the margins to the pages of history.