Book Reviews (Plural!)

The Reckoning by John Grisham
Reviewed by David Maschwitz, originally published in the March 2024 issue of the 1666 Coffman Newsletter

Why would Pete Banning, a respected member of his Clanton, Mississippi, community, and a decorated WWII hero, gun down in cold blood Dexter Bell, his friend and a popular Methodist minister? This is the over-arching question in The Reckoning, a John Grisham novel. Grisham is well-known for his many best-selling legal thrillers. This one does not fit the usual Grisham mold. Lawyers, sleazy or honest, and courtroom dramas play only a minor roll. Pete peacefully surrenders himself and the murder weapon to the local police chief, also a friend, but offers no explanation for his actions. When asked why he killed Dexter, his answer is always the same, “I have nothing to say.” He provides nothing that his family attorney can use to mount a defense at trial that might save him from the electric chair. His fate is sealed. Adding to the mystery is the fact that Pete commits his wife to the state mental asylum, while his sister, son, and daughter search for answers.

The shocking circumstances surrounding the murder are not revealed until the very end of the book. Meanwhile the reader is left to speculation, based partly on Dexter’s last words, that the motive has something to do with the close relationship that develops between Dexter and Pete’s wife after Pete is reported missing in action and presumed dead. This is proven false when an emaciated and injured Pete returns home four years later.

In a flashback, Grisham describes Pete’s experiences after the surrender of US armed forces in the Philippines in 1942. He provides a well-researched and compelling account of the brutality of the Bataan Death March, and what it was like to be held in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Eventually Pete escapes and joins resistance units that attack Japanese forces when the opportunity presents. This makes this novel part history book as well as a murder mystery and love story.

The Reckoning is probably my favorite of all the Grisham books I have read, and I’m a big fan. The story’s slice of WWII history, interesting characters, and unexpected ending make it worth a read.

Losing Music: A Memoir by John Cotter
Reviewed by David and Faye Herold, originally published in the March 2024 issue of the 1666 Coffman Newsletter

At age thirty the author, an editor of medical newsletters, realized he could no longer hear the ocean. Familiar music, even played more loudly, was missing much that he had formerly heard. His hearing loss progressed over the next ten years, accompanied by tinnitus and vertigo. His search to get to the bottom of things took him to visits with specialists of the ear— audiologists, otologists, neurologists, and each came to his condition from a different perspective based on their training. He tried the House Ear Clinic in Beverly Hills, and as a last resort the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.

He writes of his experiences with coping—the limitations of even the best hearing aids, and the realization that he was among society’s little-regarded disabled. He mentions the very obvious ear horns of an earlier age (cupping a hand to the ear increases sound six decibels), and that today’s hearing aids are deliberately designed to hide a disability. Beethoven’s deafness is briefly considered, and from the letters of Jonathan Swift he extracts a life-ending suffering from what was almost certainly Meniere’s Disease before this condition of the ear was described by medical science. Helen Keller is attributed as saying “blindness separates people from things; deafness separates people from people.”

This book, in the Biography section of the Library under Cotter, is sure to deepen a reader’s appreciation of hearing loss for the disability it really is. 

Also, in the 1666 Authors section on the upper level of the Library (and available on Kindle), you can find Sounding the Soul: The Art of Listening, a book about sound, music, the ear, and listening, by our Mary Lynn Kittelson.