Summer is our busiest season for the Critical Eye. Chautauqua Institution’s schedule is so packed with artistic events that it’s difficult to cover them all.

And yet, although we start in June, trying to schedule our nine Chautauqua season columns so that we can tell you about them in advance, many years something goes awry and we end up with an open week to write about something completely different. That’s the case this week, and it’s our chance to tell you about some of the books which have been published recently by authors who live here in Chautauqua County.

Since there will be some extra space in the column, we can also share with you our views on one other book published nationally and sent to us for review. What in the world is more civilized or important than books?

HAVING EVERYTHING

”Having Everything: A Father’s Gift,” is a memoir of the author’s father and of the author’s time growing up in Jamestown. It is the work of Daniel J. Carlson, who now lives in Charlestown, Rhode Island, where he is a Lutheran pastor.

J. Chandler Carlson is described in his son’s book as a humble, quiet man whose formal education ended with the sixth grade, and who did not marry until he was 40 years of age. The author tells us that his father worked as an orderly at Jamestown General, the city-owned hospital, which is now part of the Jones Hill Memorial Health Center on Baker Street in Jamestown. He worked an irregular schedule at Jamestown General which kept him at work for 105 hours, in each two-week period. A photo of that hospital decorates the book’s cover.

Born in Jamestown in 1897, the older Carlson lived well into his 90s, dealing with two World Wars, Prohibition and the Roaring ’20s, the Great Depression and well into the nuclear age, but the author chooses to focus on his father’s life and on his own observations of, and interactions with, that life.

Rather like a conversation, the narrative of the memoir occasionally shifts in mid narration from one subject to another. In general, it moves from his grandparents’ arrival from Sweden, attracted by jobs available in our city’s then-prospering furniture industry, through his father’s move into what was then the Lutheran Social Services home near Jamestown Community College, and eventually to his passing in 1989. Afterward, it establishes the author’s children and grandchildren, in light of their relationship to his father.

There are occasional, homey facts such as that the family’s last name was originally Nelson, but when the author’s grandfather, John Nelson, arrived in Jamestown, he lived in the same building as another man named John Nelson, so he went to court and changed his last name to Carlson so the two men could keep their bills and their mail separated. The author ponders why his father’s Christian name was Chandler, which is an English name, rather than a Swedish one, but he doesn’t know the answer for sure.

There is a story about how his mother, the former Ruby Haskell, once brought home from school a classmate with whom she had a budding friendship, until her mother took her aside and told her that her friend had committed the unforgivable sin of wearing slacks to visit their home, so Ruby was forbidden to have any more association with that wicked Lucille Ball.

Reading the book allows us to develop a much better sense of what our community was like in the early 20th century. It’s a warm and loving memoir, well documented and easy to understand. Most of all, it records how a good man, despite lacking education and money, managed to influence positively many hundreds of lives and the development of our community. I feel I benefited greatly by reading it and recommend it to you as well.

The book is published by WestBow Press. It has 154 pages in paperbound edition, and is marked for sale at $13.95. Find it for sale with ISBN number 978-1-4908-6748-9.

STALIN’S FEISTY GUEST

I have been lucky in my life to meet a large number of people who have experienced war, not from watching it on television, or from reading about it in books, but from having lived in a place where war was taking place.

It is my observation that those people who know war from their own lives have nearly all wanted to tell their stories because they believed that if people knew what war is really like they would do anything in their power to prevent it from ever happening again.

I’ve recently read a book telling just such first-person war stories. The title is ”Stalin’s Feisty Guest,” and it is the memoir of a woman named Felicia, which has been told to and recorded by her daughter-in-law, Marjorie Hope, who grew up in Western New York and graduated from the University of Buffalo.

The book refers to nearly everyone by first name only.

Felicia lived in Warsaw, Poland, as a young, married woman, when World War II broke out in September of 1939. Her husband’s name was Simon, and he was a physician. They had a son named Teddy. The narrative doesn’t state whether Felicia and her family were Jewish or belonged to one of the other groups which were especially hunted out and persecuted by the Nazis, although just being middle class Poles would have been reason enough.

One day, this young family was living a normal life, enjoying the summer weather, and the next day, Hitler’s troops invaded their country. Felicia received a phone call that her husband had been drafted into the Polish army, and she was advised to grab up food and a small amount of clothing for herself and her son, and to flee to the east, away from the invaders.

In 1939, directly to the east of Poland lay the giant Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was then being governed by the ruthless dictator Josef Stalin. What Felicia and her countrymen at the time did not yet know, was that before invading Poland, Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. Not long after Germany invaded Poland, Soviet troops invaded it from the opposite direction.

Felicia and her son were enemies in the U.S.S.R., as surely as they had been with the Germans, and like it or not, they were guests of Stalin.

Soon Felicia and Teddy were arrested by Soviet troops, and were put into a box car on a slow-moving train which took them all the way across the continents of Europe and Asia, to the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, which borders Mongolia and China.

There, they were placed in a prison camp and forced to work on the Soviets’ attempt to create a communal farm in a wasteland where even water needed to be shipped in from elsewhere. Felicia remarks that the one positive thing about their experience was that at least the Soviets treated everyone the same, which the Germans did not do.

Gradually, Felicia uses the fact that she could read and write in English, French and Russian to be freed from duties herding animals and making building materials from mud, and be put to work keeping records and doing correspondence for the prison camp. Then she used her familiarity with medical terminology and methodology from her marriage to Dr. Simon to meet and become an assistant to a Polish doctor named Anya, who did her best without proper medicines or equipment to help the prisoners.

When Hitler turned on his former ally and invaded the Soviet Union, the Poles found themselves no longer enemies of the Soviet government, but allies. Gradually they made their way back to Poland. When the war ended, Felicia was able to contact a relative who lived in Paris, who agreed to sponsor her as a refugee to France. From there, they eventually made their way to the United States, where Teddie grew up and married the book’s author.

The book isn’t a careful history. The reader only knows what Felicia would know, and that was limited and uncertain. The language is easy to read and the stories are comprehensible, although some understanding of the history and geography of Eastern Europe would be helpful.

The great gift of reading this book is that it puts history into personal terms. We become used to reading histories in which thousands are killed, and diseases kill hundreds, but it is very different when we know the names of the victims, and their personalities, and we know their families and the horror of their deaths to their parents and their children.

”Stalin’s Feisty Guest” was published by Xlibris. It has 55 pages, in hardcover edition. It is for sale through major online booksellers in hardcover, paper bound, and e-book. The hardcover edition is priced at $24.99. Find it with ISBN number 978-1-5035-5157-2.

THROUGH THE

PERILOUS FIGHT

We have been fortunate in our country that most of our wars have been fought on foreign soil, and while our actual troops may have suffered enormously, our private citizens have been able to live in relative safety.

One of the few exceptions to that fact was the War of 1812. Most Americans know that just over 30 years after our Revolutionary War, for independence from Great Britain, we fought another war with our former mother country.

In 1812, Britain was fighting for her very survival against the French emperor Napoleon, who had conquered nearly all the continent of Europe. Desperate for fighting men, the British took to stopping ships from non-combatant nations, including the U.S., and impressing – drafting – trained sailors into the British navy.

Preventing those impressments was the official reason for the war, although it doesn’t take much historical research to find those Americans who believed that while the British had their hands full with Napoleon, the U.S. might conquer Canada, or gather other economic and geographic advantages. To our dismay, the British managed to send a naval force to Chesapeake Bay in the American states of Maryland and Virginia to burn our government buildings, including the Capitol and the White House, along with smaller cities near Washington.

Historian Steve Vogel has written a beautifully researched book about the British Chesapeake Campaign, which he gave the title ”Through the Perilous Fight: Six Weeks that Saved the Nation.”

The title, of course, is a line from the words to our National Anthem, which described the final battle in that campaign where the British attempted to follow up their destruction of our capital by seizing control of our third largest city – at that time – Baltimore, Maryland. An American attorney, Francis Scott Key, watched the naval bombardment of Baltimore from aboard a small ship on which he had been sent by the American government to try and negotiate the release of certain American citizens who had been taken prisoners by the British.

In addition to a successful law career, Key was an amateur poet, and he was startled by the overwhelming explosive force with which the British pounded Baltimore, and especially the small Fort McHenry, which guarded the city’s harbor, throughout an entire night. When dawn came, the British expected to see the white flag of surrender, flying from the fort’s flag pole.

Instead, they saw the American flag, still flying. Because the fleet had received orders from London to withdraw from the Chesapeake in order to participate in the British attempt to invade the U.S. up the Mississippi River by the capture of New Orleans, they withdrew, leaving the city in American hands.

Key was so astounded, he wrote a poem, which was eventually found to suit the exact rhythms of a popular song which was frequently sung in taverns, in those days. The song eventually became our national anthem.

The book is filled with small corrections to national myths. For example, if you pay a visit to the Smithsonian Institute, in Washington, D.C., you can see a giant American flag which is called the original Star-Spangled Banner. The flag is ragged in shape and has holes through it, including having one star completely missing. Visitors assume that the flag was tattered by British shells.

In fact, for a number of years after the battle, souvenir hunters paid the woman who made the flag – not Betsy Ross, she came earlier in our history – to be allowed to snip off a souvenir from the fabric of the flag. We’re told that the flag originally had 16 stars, although there were 18 states, in 1814, because Congress had admitted two more states to the Union, but hadn’t gotten around to passing a law to order the remaking of the flag.

The final blow in that area is the report that in fact, the flag which is preserved at the Smithsonian wasn’t the flag which was proudly flying when the British stopped firing. Vogel reports that the historic flag was the official one, but that such a huge flag couldn’t be flown during heavy rain, as was falling the entire night of the bombardment. The cloth soaked up so much water that the flag became so heavy that it would rip down the pole from which it was displayed.

Instead, the city also owned a ”storm flag,” which was significantly smaller and could be flown during rain without destroying the pole. It was the banner which delighted the poet’s eyes.

The book teaches us the personalities and personal histories of the British officers who led the campaign, especially Vice-Admiral George Cockburn. As is often true, with British names, his name is not pronounced the way it is spelled. It is pronounced as though it were spelled ”Coburn.” Americans, we are told, delighted in pronouncing it exactly as it was spelled, and doing it to the admiral’s face, pretending they didn’t realize the correct pronunciation.