Book Launch in Chicago is Terrific! and HOT!

Naturally, this particular August in Chicago has to be the Hottest on record for umpty-up years (that's what they say in Chicago) but at least they have perfected the engineering art of Air Conditioning, so the Borders bookstores were cool and dry. Sunday was at Oak Brook, a western suburb in the lazy afternoon, but had a decent crowd with good questions.  Tonight was in my home-town of LaGrange, another Borders, and we sold out all the books they had; great group of people with really good questions. And afterwards...burritos and margaritas at Chipotle! yay! I had decided to launch my book tour in Chicago once my hometown relatives decided there was going to be a family reunion (my mom's side, Croation -- check out www.matkovichfamilyreunion.com (a website I created/designed) for more info -- and it coincided nicely with my book's publication date in July. So it's going well, but I sure am looking forward to being back in the cool, very cool (so I hear) foggy summer of San Francisco -- leaving Thursday for the Coast. Yes. Just one more gig tomorrow, at Women & Children First on N. Clark Street in Chicago - looking forward to being there!

Glastonbury Abbey, King Arthur and Gregorian Chant

I'm starting research for my next historical novel and I've been musing on things medieval. A friend dropped by the other day with a book about the Glastonbury Abbey, a most holy and beautiful place of ruins (blast you, Henry VIII and your greedy minions!). Way back in pre-history, apparently, there were settlements in the area, and it is thought that Druids held ceremonies there in the centuries before the Common Era. By the time the Romans came and went, and Christianity took over, there were hermits and holy folk assembled in small huts on the Glastonbury Plain, which eventually grew into a huge monastic community that lasted well into the 1500's. Absolutely fascinating reading. Sometime in the 1200's, a gravesite was dug up and the remains of a tall man and a blonde woman were unearthed - determined by the abbot at that time to be King Arthur and Guinevere. They were reverently re-buried, but then that darn Henry VIII 'reformed' everything and the grave was despoiled. There's only a plaque there now. Another section of the book talks about the music at the Abbey, and how one of the abbots tried to replace the popular Gregorian chant with "new" music of the day, and wasn't very successful. I'm going to have to dig up my old chant CD's and play it as background while I attempt to start a new novel.

A Woman Who'sWriting the Bible - Like, Right Now

San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum has been hosting an exhibit of a woman scribe (a soferet) who is writing out a Torah - the first five books of Moses, written on sheets of vellum (made from treated, scraped, softened cow-hide -- kosher of course -- and written with a quill pen and special black ink. Her name is Julie - yes, she's a J-Writer - and I met her today when I went down to view her exhibit. Julie is a well-spoken, slightly built young woman who is one of a very, very few women in the world who have trained to be a soferet. Her Torah, when it's finished (probably early next Spring), will be given to some lucky synagogue (reform or conservative, as orthodox congregations would not find a Torah inscribed by a woman to be acceptable) for their use in religious services. And, not only did I meet and speak with her, I gave her a copy of my "J" book - she almost gasped when she saw the cover, and said she couldn't wait to read it! I sure hope she likes it.

Anyone who's in the San Francisco Bay Area should definitely catch this exhibit - check their website (www.thecjm.org) for days and times - it's absolutely fascinating -- and there is a collection of old Torah scrolls and other beautiful, wonderful artifacts both new and historical to help present and explain the Jewish traditions.

Vietnam-Era Novel - Surprisingly Good

The Man from Saigon
by Marti Leimbach, Doubleday, 2010     

Here's another review I wrote for the May Historical Novel Society Review:

An absorbing, often gripping novel of a young woman reporter on tour in war-torn Vietnam in 1967, The Man from Saigon is gritty, realistic and poetically written. Leimbach is a master at describing the visceral: the humidity and heat of the jungle, the ache of hunger, the recoil of the body and the brain under fire, the insanity that comes from being surrounded by bombs falling for hours and bullets like hot rain.
    The protagonist, Susan, works for a woman’s magazine in Chicago and is sent to the war to gather human interest stories. She’s not supposed to leave Saigon, but of course she does. She gets drawn in to the addiction of war reporting, inching ever closer to the heavy action while putting light years of distance between her and the ‘normalcy’ of life back in the States—until life in the war zone becomes what’s normal. Two men, the Vietnamese photographer of the book’s title, and another reporter, an American, weave in and out of Susan’s mental, emotional and physical existence in a country too far from home.
    The images are often disturbing, but the insights into war and human frailty, love and courage are meaningful and intelligent. An excellent read.
-- Mary F. Burns

Evening's Empire -- A Look Back at Rock'n'Roll

I recently reviewed Evening's Empire by Bill Flanagan, for the Historical Novel Society (it's online and in their print publication for May 2010). Here's what I wrote:

With a title nod to Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, Flanagan’s 645-page epic about  rock music spans more than four decades in the life of the Ravons (Rave-ons), a fictional band that starts in London and careens like a pinball through the music universe that unhinged the popular consciousness with the arrival of the Beatles. The behind-the-scenes tales are told in the steady, likeable, first-person delivery of the band’s manager, Jack Flynn, who starts as a neophyte lawyer who shoulders the management of the Ravons’ tours and music contracts from his firm’s senior partners. The charismatic star—Emerson Cutler—is being sued for divorce and wants to catch his faithless wife in flagrante in a hotel in Spain (as leverage against his own adultery). Jack is dispatched to do the job because “you are young, Flynn. You are part of this…new vogue.”  The year is 1967 and Jack’s life is forever changed.

The band members have very distinct personalities, and it’s quite a ride as the group breaks up, reassembles, suffers reversals, betrayals, marriage, divorce, drugs, alcohol, wealth and poverty. Seen through the pragmatic eyes of Jack—the manager as confessor/father/nursemaid/fixer—the last four decades of the 20^th century come alive in small details that give rise to larger, context-setting philosophical musings about how humans respond to the changing culture with fear and love, wit and courage, greed and selfishness. Even if you weren’t there, it’s fun to revisit the times—except when it’s not. The crashes, the greed, the waste of talent and energy, the money-grubbing snobbishness—from Woodstock up to 9/11 and a few years beyond—the last four or five decades have a lot to answer for. The story drags here and there, but at the end, you don’t want to leave Jack and his friends behind.

What Music Goes with "My Book is Published!" ?

Today at Amazon.com, my debut novel finally is "in stock" and officially for sale! I have yet to see an actual printed copy of it -- but the box of twenty books I ordered a month ago is due to arrive tomorrow -- so exciting! Please visit www.jthewomanwhowrotethebible.com for more information about "J" and my Grand Book Tour, which starts in Chicago in August.

So I was wondering, what's the best background music that goes with such an event? I'm thinking "Fanfare for the Common Man." What do you think?

Springtime, Lilacs and Chopin

Two weeks ago I was in Poland, and the whole country was celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of their favored, most beloved musician, Fredyryk Chopin. Here’s what I wrote one day while there:

I’m riding in a Mercedes touring coach with twenty-eight lovely people from the SF Bay Area through the incredibly green and at this point sopping wet countryside on the way from Warsaw to Krakow. We stopped some way outside Warsaw to visit the grounds of a Chopin park, wherein is located the small house in which he was born. The landscaping of the park is in many places so recent the plants are barely six inches tall, but in other areas, there are lilac bushes waving overhead, dripping in the light rain, and exuding the heavenly fragrance that only fresh lilacs in the May rain can send forth. I was reminded of growing up in Illinois where lilacs were profuse—I so miss that smell in California, where it doesn’t get cold enough in the winter (at least along the coast) to grow lilacs properly.

We have been treated to three piano concerts of Chopin’s music in the last two days, one of them in a huge park with open air seating for Sunday concerts throughout the spring, summer and fall. The other two were private concerts arranged just for our tour group, the last one  in the living room of the Chopin family home where he was born. The pianists (all of them women, one very young) were excellent performers, award-winners of various Chopin competitions. What makes these performances particularly wonderful and poignant is the realization (as our guide told us) that under the Nazi regime for the five years of WWII, it was forbidden to play or even listen to Chopin – under pain of death or banishment to a camp! The Nazis held the Poles and their culture just half a notch above the utter disdain they felt for the Jews, and they spent a good deal of effort and dynamite destroying anything Polish that they could. Approximately 85% of the city of Warsaw was burned or dynamited by the German occupying force, including the murders of some 800,000 people of the 1.2 million who lived in Warsaw, about 10% of whom were Jews. When the Russians took over after the War, the Polish Communists in Warsaw insisted on raising money to restore the city to its former state “exactly”, using old photographs and paintings from the 19th century to re-create the centuries-old buildings, palaces and churches that had been reduced to rubble.