SoMinn THE BOOKWORM SEZ

Magic Season, All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak, The Deal Goes Down, and All the Living and the Dead

Magic Season: A Son’s Story

by Wade Rouse

c.2022, Hanover Square Press $27.99 304 pages You’ve always looked up to your dad. Sometimes it happened literally, like when you were a child and “up” was the only way to see his face hovering over yours. You’ve looked up at him in anger, embarrassment, dismissal, and yeah, you’ve looked up to him in the best ways, too – never forgetting, as in the memoir “Magic Season” by Wade Rouse, that sometimes, the hardest thing is seeing eye-to-eye. Wade Rouse threw like a girl. He couldn’t catch a baseball, either, and he wasn’t much of a runner as a young boy. He tried, because his father insisted on it but Rouse was better with words and books and thoughts.. He was nothing like his elder brother, Todd, who was a natural hunter, a good sportsman, and an athlete, and their father never let Rouse forget it. And yet, curiously, Rouse and his dad bonded over baseball. Speci cally, their love of Cardinals baseball became the one passion they shared. The stats, the players, the idea that “Anything can happen,” the hope that there’d be a World Series at the end of every season was the glue they needed. It was what saved them when Todd was killed in a motorcycle accident. When Rouse came out to his father, Cards baseball was what brought them back together after two years of estrangement. In between games, though, and between seasons, there was yelling, cruelty, and all the times when father and son didn’t communicate. Rouse accepted, but didn’t like, his father’s alcoholism or his harsh life-lessons: his father didn’t like Rouse’s plans for his own future. Rouse admits that he cried a lot, and he was surprised at the rare times when his father displayed emotion – especially since an Ozarks man like Ted Rouse didn’t do things like that. Until the time was right. Love, Wade Rouse says, is “shaped like a baseball.” You catch it, throw it, or hit it out of the park, but “You don’t know where it’s going.” Just be sure you never take “your eye off it, from beginning to end.” Oh, my. Oh, my, but “Magic Season” is a ten-hankie book. First, though, you’re going to laugh because author Wade Rouse is a natural-born humorist and his family is a great launching-pad for him despite the splinters and near-clawing despair of the overall theme of this book. That sense of humor can’t seem to let a good story go, even when it’s obvious that there’s something heartbreaking waiting in the bullpen. Which brings us to the father-son-baseball triple-play. It may seem to some readers that such a book has been done and done again, but this one feels different. Rouse excels at lling in the blanks on the other, essential teammates in this tale and, like any big skirmish, readers are left breathless, now knowing the nal score until the last out. If you like your memoirs sweet, but with a dash of spice and some tears, right here you go. For you, “Magic Season” is a book to look up.

All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak:

A Funeral Director on Life, Death, and the Hereafter

by Caleb Wilde

c.2022, Broadleaf Books $26.99 208 pages You are never alone. There’s always someone running in and out, always traf c in your house. The neighbors are close, your friends are a phone call away, and it seems as though you’ve always got company. You’re never alone, and in the new book “All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak” by Caleb Wilde, you’ll see how that might extend beyond. For more than 170 years, someone in Caleb Wilde’s family has served their community by facilitating funerals. Wilde himself is a sixth-generation funeral director and up until a few years ago, he says that he was skeptical about the possibility of a hereafter. “I used to believe,” he says, “that terror management theory offered the only viable way to explain heaven...” But yet, he says, he heard “so many stories” that he “began to wonder if they might hold some kind of truth.” Clients through the years had told him too many “ghost” tales for him to ignore. The idea nagged at him enough that he began to study it in earnest. His urgency increased when he suffered from burn-out, and sought therapy. His therapist helped him see that his family’s past was what kept him at his job. He began to think: what if our ancestors were with us at all times? Funerals, he believes, are to death what midwives are to birth, and funerals are not just “for the living.” Because boundaries are blurred, he says that the dead are able to “surround us, live in us, integrate themselves into our soil.” The love they carried in life extends to their children’s children, and “it creates the world” – and when we listen to what the dead have to tell us, it begins “to ll a void we may not have even noticed.” This helps keep our loved ones alive in us, and we don’t even have to limit the conversation to speech. We bolster each other, support and provide for one another in life – why not receive the same from the dead? The easiest way to decide whether or not you want to read “All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak” is to know your own tolerance for New Agey-ness. Author Caleb Wilde hypothesizes at great length about ancestry and the hereafter, in conjunction with their real-time in uences on current lives. Can you follow it and will you embrace it? Will you be able not to cringe at his explanations of Black funerals versus “white funerals”? He explains his well-considered intentions for the distinction, but the lengthy discourse grows quite awkward as it progresses. Can you tease out the stories that Wilde’s known for, and which are fascinating and too few, from the philosophy that creeps into the narrative sometimes? These are questions that will separate readers into those who ponder life and death now, and those who aren’t quite ready for the deep stuff. If you fall into the rst category, “All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak” should be your next new companion. If not, then leave it alone.

Lookingforsomethingspecial? SpecialordersareneveraproblemforLittleProfessor.Giveusacall! The Deal Goes Down

by Larry Beinhart

c.2022, Melville House $27.99 288 pages You didn’t want to do it. Ach, but you said you would, and there you go. You’ve tried for hours to think of how you’re going to get out of this thing, but you’ve come to the conclusion that you’re stuck. Planted in a corner. Glued to a “yes” and you’re going to have to do it. Even if, as in the new book “The Deal Goes Down” by Larry Beinhart, you’ve never done it before. A couple more days, and Tony Cassella was going to lose his house. He’d lived there on a mountain in upper New York for more than two decades but bank sell-outs and paperwork and this and that, and now he needed a little more than $7,000 to keep the place. Which is why he listened to the woman on the commuter train who told him she’d pay him to kill her husband. She seemed to know Cassella. Seemed to know that he’d once been a private eye and had done some sketchy things. Truth was, though, that he’d never killed anybody for money before. He really didn’t like killing people, period. But he’d said “yes,” and he’d negotiated with the woman’s colleague for bigger money plus expenses, which included the price of a helper who looked like a young teenager. And so, on a perfectly rainy night, Cassella set up a fact- nding evening that led to a wild ride on an icy road and an accident that killed the husband before Cassella could. But nobody would believe that the man’s death wasn’t Cassella’s fault. Nobody, especially the women who backed him into a nancial corner and a contract to eliminate other abusive husbands, starting with a powerful Russian billionaire who was holding his beautiful wife and toddler son hostage. The elimination needed to happen while the family was on a skiing vacation in Austria, a place Cassella knew well. The wife and child were constantly surrounded by bodyguards, but that was a problem easily overcome. The oligarch was vile, but he was smart, too. And, of course, accidents happen... Was this novel written with a movie script in mind? Because author Larry Beinhart has been down that road before. You won’t mind if it was. “The Deal Goes Down” is very clever, with its hardbitten, introverted and surprisingly nice ex-P.I. at the helm, surrounded by old Woodstock hippies and aging colleagues. Readers may be familiar with this kind of launching point in a good detective novel; what’s delightfully different about this one, though, is that it’s not full of blood, guts, and gratuitous death. Of course, you’ll nd mayhem in here but the story’s intelligence supersedes it, as does the winking humor that astute fans and author-bio readers will spot, and love. (Yes, that’s a hint.) Though it ends rather oddly – with a promise of a sequel? – this detective-slash-murder novel is a fun book to try. If you’ve been promising yourself that you’ll read one good novel before summer ends, “The Deal Goes Down” is how you do it.

All the Living and the Dead:

From Embalmers to Executioners, and Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life’s Work

by Hayley Campbell

c.2022, St. Martin’s Press $29.99 269 pages Every day, you go to work and quietly do your job. There’s no fanfare, no hourly kudos, parades, or regular praise; you were hired for a task or a series of tasks and that’s what you nish. It’s the work you’ve chosen and nobody notices that you do it well but, as in the new book, “All the Living and the Dead” by Hayley Campbell, they’d notice if you didn’t. In Hayley Campbell’s childhood home, death was no big deal. Her father was an artist who was paid to illustrate death as a theme, and Campbell recalls imitating his artwork, pets that met early demises, and a childhood friend who drowned. Death, for her, was just a part of life. “We are surrounded by death,” she says, in our games, the news, the songs we sing, everywhere. More than 55 million people around the world die each year but most of us don’t know much about those who do the “necessary work” of dealing “with the things we cannot bear to look at...” Are we “cheating ourselves out of some fundamental human knowledge...?” Campbell began her search for an answer with a funeral director, who advised Campbell to “separate the shock of seeing death from the shock of grief” by ensuring that the rst dead body she ever saw was not that of someone she loved. She visited the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, to talk with a man who prepares the “gift” of body donorship. An artist showed her how he memorializes the faces of those who’ve departed, and a disaster mitigator explained how he deals with “catastrophe.” Campbell met with a crime scene cleaner, had lunch with someone who executed Death Row inmates, she heard stories from an embalmer, cleaned a cremation retort, helped an anatomical pathology technologist, spoke to a midwife, visited with gravediggers, and learned about cryonics. “I wanted to see all of it,” she says. “But in many of these rooms... I was, for a few moments, speechless.” Go ahead. Admit it. You were curious, too, weren’t you? That’s the beauty of “All the Living and the Dead”: that author Hayley Campbell gives readers plenty of room to be inquisitive, offering facts that they perhaps haven’t even had a chance to conceive yet, without shame and without making anyone feel like a ghoul. This is, in fact, a wide-eyed book, it’s respectful, humble, and lled with honor and it’s not gratuitously gory, although there are a few cringey moments inside. On those, steel yourself. Campbell doesn’t just write “squelchily,” she’s also forthright on things that left her unsettled and that which sent her reeling. That – the emotion and its lingering effects on her entire being – can feel worse than the malodorous moments here, and Campbell honestly tells readers how she dealt with that, too. You won’t be sorry knowing. Curiosity, RIP. Bury your lack of information. If you’ve got questions about people who work with the dead and you need answers, “All the Living and the Dead” will do the job.