“The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place”, by Alan Bradley

 

400 pages, Bantam, ISBN-13: 978-0345540003

The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place is the next-to-last Flavia de Luce mystery (so far), and as with the last several books I have read in Bradley’s chronicle of the Divine Flavia, I have been slow-walking it, limiting myself to a chapter a night before bed in order to savor what could very well be one of the last times this utterly fascinating character comes to life (Bradley has never definitively announced that the series is over, only that “he and Flavia are taking a break to sit and mull the future while enjoying a nice cup of tea”; Flavia, I’m certain, wants to come back and continue her chemical and investigatory antics). So I will continue to savor the tales of this rather peculiar and utterly engaging young lady for as long as I can.

We find the de Luce’s on holiday after the tragedy that befell them at the end of Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d, attempting to reconnect as a family and find their way in the world – which is when Flavia, her hand idly trailing over the side of the punt they are relaxing in, snags a recently-drowned corpse of a man dressed in theatrical garb by his gaping mouth (really, now; what better way for Flavia to get her mind off of things than a smashing murder?). And so we’re off as Flavia investigates the death of this young man far away from the confines of Bishop’s Lacey and Inspector Hewitt and all of her other familiar haunts. But Flavia makes due – helped as always by the ever-accommodating Dogger, who takes on a greater role in this book.

What follows is a standard Flavia de Luce mystery in which our freelance detective pursues her own criminal investigation quite apart from the local constabulary, led in this instance by one Constable Otter, who – like Inspector Hewitt – is impressed and exasperated by Flavia in equal measure. But outside of the confines of Buckshaw (and her laboratory), Flavia must make due with slap-dash techniques, like using a teapot to conduct an experiment in her pub bedroom, an experiment in which Dogger proves to be invaluable (an instance of foreshadowing, perhaps?). But while Dogger assists throughout the book, it is Flavia, as always, who is the motor that drives this vehicle, and she does so with her usual verve, imagination and chutzpah.

And the mystery itself is satisfying in its complexity and ambiguity. The corpse that Flavia discovers is of one Orlando Whitbread, the son of the late lamented Canon Whitbread, a clergyman who was executed three years previously for the murder of three of his parishioners, known as the Three Graces. Was Orlando murdered and, if so, why and by whom? Did his death have something to do with his father’s and, consequently, with the Three Graces? If Canon Whitbread was innocent of their deaths, then the real murderer must still be at large – and willing to go to any means to keep their identity and crimes a secret. All good stuff that keeps one guessing until the end and, if I do say so myself, satisfied that the mystery was legit and justice was done, all thanks to Flavia.

As well, the long-delayed conclusion to the fate of Buckshaw, the de Luce familial estate, should be coming to an end – and about damn time, too. We also have an insight into what awaits Flavia in upcoming books, as well as others in her circle: loyal Dogger; Aunt Felicity, member of the secret organization, the Nide; Mildred Bannerman, once-convicted murderess and former teacher at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy; the floralarchaeologist Adam Tradescant Sowerby; and even cousin Undine – as a new chapter promises to be written in the life of this unique character – and, if I may be so bold, I applaud myself for foreseeing a potential change in the character and her circumstances, sans short skirts or go-go boots or Vespas or poisons and bombs.

At the end of my review of Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d, I said that Flavia must be allowed to grow up, as all children do; perhaps Bradley thought so, too, for he has Flavia, after contemplating all of the chemicals (and poisons) to be found in a church’s stained-glass windows, observe: “Such happy thoughts are proof that I have become an adult. I am now ruled by not only what I see, what I hear, what I taste, and what I smell, but also, and perhaps most important, by what I think”. If so, then Flavia has always been an adult, for she has been cerebral much more than emotional, more driven by her intellect than by her baser functions. But the very fact that she (and Bradley) have decided to take the training wheels off speaks volumes for what awaits us.

“Frederick the Great: King of Prussia”, by Tim Blanning

 

688 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-1400068128

Just how much more can I learn about Frederick the Great anyway? Frederick the Great: King of Prussia by Tim Blanning is, by my count, the third biography I have read about him, the others being Frederick the Great: The Magnificent Enigma by Robert B. Asprey (reviewed on July 5^th, 2017) and Frederick the Great: King of Prussia by David Fraser (reviewed on February 10^th, 2021); but I’m glad I read Blanning’s bio as it is hands-down the best of the trio. Blanning’s fresh writing style combined with his top-notch research and clear-eyed take on his subject delivers up as complete a portrait of Old Fritz as one could hope for, all in less than 700 pages – and from an academic historian, to boot (much of academic history is so damned stunted as to give the history genre a bad name, if I may be so bold).

Blanning’s take on Frederick is thematic as he focuses on aspects of his upbringing, interests, personality and so forth, bringing into the light what only the most ardent Frederickophile would know. To do so, he has divided his book into three parts. Part one describes the social, historical and familial background in which Frederick was raised, focusing especially on how his relationship with his abusive father shaped him. Part two is a history of the Seven Years’ War and how victory made not only Frederick but the Kingdom of Prussia, as well. Part three is an Everything but the Kitchen Sink grab-bag which touches on subjects from agriculture to censorship to the treatment of Jews under Frederick’s reign; everything, I suppose, that did not fit into parts one and two. A rather peculiar way to organize a biography, but not unappreciated.

I found the writing to be clear, concise and informative, as one would expect from Blanning. I also found a few other items of note, one being that Blanning is the first author to declare openly that Frederick was homosexual, rather than dancing around the issue by saying that he was asexual or that there just wasn’t enough information to go on. All well and good, but he does harp on it a little too long, and it still must be said that all of his evidence is circumstantial. And for those seeking an in-depth study of Frederick the Soldier-King will be disappointed, as the battles and wars that the man fought in are given rather short shrift. The lead up to his wars are discussed, the campaigns are detailed and the battles are shown, but all in a rather lackadaisical fashion, I assume because Blanning’s interest just doesn’t extend to this aspect of Frederick’s reign. Furthermore, showing Blanning’s independence of thought, he is the only author not to praise Frederick as a military genius but rather to declare that “he was an indifferent general but a brilliant warlord”.

So what to make of it all? Blanning has drawn a portrait of a man driven by his love/hate relationship with his tyrannical father and shows how he kicked the traces over with a vengeance in regards to his embrace of cosmopolitanism and libertinism, to say nothing of his atheism. This makes his drive to have Prussia recognized as a great power, his aggressive militarism and his personal autocratic rule all the more revealing, as it could be argued that Frederick was merely following through on his father’s policies. While in many ways the enlightened despot of historical myth dedicated to the welfare of his subjects, he was contemptuous of the great majority of Prussians. A foe of religion, his Prussia was notable for its religious tolerance while also being a nasty anti-Semite. A patron of the arts, his taste was decidedly conservative.

We get it all in Frederick the Great: King of Prussia, a biography of an endlessly fascinating, enraging, important and all-too-easily forgotten man whose influence is with us still, whether we know it or not.

“The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch”, by Miles Harvey

 

416 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316463591

Mr. House, my high school college prep history teacher, claimed that an ancestor of his assassinated a man who proclaimed himself to be the Imperial primate and actual Sovereign Lord and King on Earth in northern Michigan, and so when I discovered The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch by Miles Harvey about James Jesse Strang, the very same man, I was intrigued – although a perusal of the index saw no mention of Mr. House or his ancestor. Pity.

So anyway, in 1844 Strang claimed to have been appointed to be the successor of Joseph Smith as leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, claiming that he had possession of a letter from Smith naming him as such and that, furthermore, an angel had confirmed him in his appointment. Not all Mormons bought this and instead followed Brigham Young out west to what would become Utah, leaving Strang and his followers to establish themselves on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan where the increasingly monomaniacal Strang would hold “court”.

But it turns out that The King of Confidence is more than a dissection of this singular individual who, through sheer force of will, made himself into the master of his sect’s lives both on Earth and in Heaven; it is also an exploration of a time and place in which liars, tricksters and charlatans – Confidence Men – lived, thrived and survived like no other. This era of American history saw an anxiousness like no other in its brief history in which lost people cast around for something to believe in and someone to guide them, and so: Comes the Age; Come the Man.

Although the man in question remains elusive. Was he calculating or delusional? Did he in fact believe in his brand of Mormonism or was it all an elaborate con? Did his followers truly see him as their “Sovereign Lord and King on Earth” or did they grasp at straws in an uncertain age? We have only what they left behind them to go on, which would imply a great deal, but not necessarily so: so much of what people in this more-literate society wrote amounted to nothing more than justification for the future and, thus, must be taken with a grain – or more – of salt.

The King of Confidence is replete with so much more that brings this peculiar era to life, with so many thumbnail sketches of things one would not immediately think of when regarding 19^th Century America, such as John Brown and his antislavery crusade, the Underground Railroad and all its works, John Deere and the founding of one of the US’s first successful corporations, the Brontë’s and their multifarious works, mesmerism and its effect on the age’s psyche, newspaper exchanges as a kind of proto-internet, the founding of the Illuminati by Strang himself…

And much, much more besides. This all serves to recapture the hyper-dynamism of Antebellum America and the lead up to the Victorian Era and the American Civil War in which all of these conflicting and chaotic elements would at last explode across the continent. It was, in short, an age in which the US at last attempted to truly wean itself from the Old World and instead build a World Anew in all of its madcap chaotic glory in this “this stammering century”, as Horace Greeley said. The Birth pangs of our own, chaotic age and the eras in-between.

As Harvey says, Confidence is the “de facto national [American] currency”, and The King of Confidence shows unequivocally just how much this currency buys when paid out by a man with nothing to lose and everything to gain.

“How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise” by Chris Taylor

 

488 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0465089987

After having suffered through the lamentable Star Wars: The Triumph of Nerd Culture by Josef Benson (reviewed on July 25^th, 2025), I was in need of another, more reliable history of one of the world’s most successful and beloved – and, it must be said, reviled – pieces of pop-culture ever to be made. And so, having found How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise by Chris Taylor while walking the shelves of my library, I took another plunge into the franchise that informed so much of my childhood, alongside Transformers and ever-present LEGOs. And am I ever glad that I did, for Taylor does in fact what Benson sought to do but only in theory: explain how and why Star Wars came into being, how it survived and thrived and, even, how it failed.

Taylor has written as complete a history of this pillar of nerdom as can be, resembling as it does one of those display cases that Superfans stuff with their madcap collection of merch in which the truly collectable, keepable stuff jostles with the crap that was churned out on the cheap. Thus, the book has iconic moments – like at the beginning, where he discovers the Navajo’s Diné-dubbed version of Star Wars – and there are parts that fade quickly from thought. All are treated as importantly as the next, even if they necessarily aren’t. This discovery is just one of many involving this franchise that fans have embraced like few others: the fan-led 501^st Legion, “Vader’s Fist”; the builders of home Astromechs; the independent Orders of Jedi Knighthood; the Darth Vader impersonators…all are represented and even celebrated.

Despite Taylor’s admitted love for Star Wars, he rarely flinches from showing how badly written (and occasionally executed) the many properties are, especially the execrable prequels (the book was released the year before the second execrable trilogy began). His chapter on denial, anger, rewriting and other responses to these badly done movies is perhaps the best part of the book, showing how different fans try to excuse, come to grips or ignore them altogether. He doesn’t let his love of the franchise get in the way of reality, and let’s face it: that’s the best fandom of all, a critical fandom that includes reality right in with the adoration. As much as Lucas laments these fans and their criticism of his work, most of it comes from a place of love, as they care deeply for a product that has profoundly affected and touched them.

Taylor doesn’t just focus on the movies – the crazy, chancy world of movie production where anything at all can get you greenlit or back-burnered – but also on all of the novels, television series, cosplayers and so on. But Taylor’s description of the increasingly-driven Lucas to write more Star Wars simply to earn money in order to have more control over his own work which in turn caused him ever-greater stress which in turn affected the quality of the work because he was increasingly the only one whom he trusted to be in control…explains those crappy prequels. Reading Lucas say repeatedly that he is done with Star Wars and just wants to make small, independent, personal movies soon becomes just plain sad, as the man can’t quit his biggest money-maker and the source of all his supposed dreams.

How Star Wars Conquered the Universe is well-written, objective, respectful of the fandom and history yet still critical when it needs to be. This book is not just for fans but for anyone wanting to know the history of this brilliant and maddening pop-culture phenomenon and how and why it has endured for so long, often in spite of itself.

“Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt”, by Aida D. Donald

 

304 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0465010240

I knew I had to be wary of Aida D. Donald’s take on Ole Teddy in her biography Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt when, in her Introduction, she praised Roosevelt for his Big Government Interventionist views:

 

Roosevelt was the only progressive president in the history of the Republican Party [Thank God]. In fact, Roosevelt’s presidency was one of the great forward, or progressive, era in the nation’s history as a whole. His party never again reached such heights in advanced legislation or in the care of the people. No Republican president since had embraced the idea of creating, through active government, the greatest good for the greatest number of people [I repeat, Thank God].

Herein is one of the issues with this book, as Donald takes for granted that bigger government is better government, that increasing the size and scope of the Federal bureaucracy in everyone’s lives by definition is good and necessary and that isn’t it a damn shame that more Republicans didn’t follow in Teddy’s footsteps in doing so. But that is, perhaps, the least of one’s concerns with her bio. At a mere 304 pages, Lion in the White House is, at best, an overview of the life of this colossal personality.

But I still had a lot of “Whys?” that were unanswered as I read the book. As an example, upon returning from the Spanish-American War Roosevelt flirted with the idea of running for governor of New York, an idea that his wife Edith did not relish, but she eventually changed her mind. Why? Don’t know, as Donald never tells us. One day she was opposed and the next she was on board. One would think that if her opposition was important enough to mention in the first place then her ultimate acquiescence is equally important.

Also, while the book is filled with excerpts from Roosevelt’s letters and speeches, some of his best quotes are inexplicably left out. For instance, his 1915 speech to the NYC Knights of Columbus where he dismisses “hyphenated Americans” is not so much as mentioned, nor is his declaration that “[i]t takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose” after the assassination attempt on him during the 1912 presidential campaign. Two of the best quotes in American political history don’t even get a reference in a biography on the man who uttered them.

Not a bad overview, mind, but a book that leaves you wanting to know more about its subject (whether that means I must at last tackle Edmund Morris’ trilogy on the man remains to be seen). If that was Donald’s intent than mission accomplished, but I somehow suspect that no author wishes to merely be the impetus to read further on a subject; they wish to be the principle source of knowledge on the same, and in that case, then she failed miserably. Still a good intro to the life and times of one Theodore Roosevelt Jr., however.