Book reviews: ‘American Reich: A Murder in Orange County; Neo-Nazis; and a New Age of Hate’ and ‘Winter: The Story of a Season’
A look at a neo-Nazi murder in California and how winter shaped a Scottish writer
‘American Reich: A Murder in Orange County; Neo-Nazis; and a New Age of Hate’ by Eric Lichtblau
The dispiriting nature of author Eric Lichtblau’s latest subject “might be reason enough to avoid this book,” said Wendell Jamieson in Air Mail. But to defeat darkness, “we must first understand it,” and the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist has dug deeply into how racial hatred has spawned deadly violence across the country in recent years, basing his conclusions on “rock solid” reporting. “Oscillating between alarming and infuriating,” American Reich focuses on the 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein, a gay Jewish college student, by Sam Woodward, a former high school classmate who’d been radicalized, having joined the Atomwaffen Division, a Texas-based neo-Nazi terrorist network. Both young men lived in Southern California’s Orange County, which Lichtblau characterizes as a hotbed for white supremacist thinking that has spread from coast to coast, showing itself most prominently during Jan. 6, 2021’s attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Orange County’s central role in spreading racial hatred “should come as no surprise,” said Costa Beavin Pappas in the Los Angeles Times. In 1906, Santa Ana ordered its Chinatown burned to the ground. In 1936, the Orange County sheriff issued a “shoot to kill” order to deputies seeking to break a strike among Mexican orange-grove workers. From the 1980s on, the county’s music scene has specialized in white-power rock bands, including one that featured the future perpetrator of the 2012 massacre of worshippers at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Since 2004, Orange County also has been predominantly nonwhite, but some conservative families, such as Woodward’s, bond over a hateful ideology. In other words, Woodward wasn’t a lone-wolf killer when he pretended to flirt with Bernstein, talking him into getting together before stabbing him 28 times.
Lichtblau contextualizes the murder by thoroughly describing many other recent Southern California hate crimes, said Elon Green in The New York Times. The inclusion of that material proves both the book’s greatest strength and “ultimately, a weakness,” because Bernstein and his killer disappear from the narrative for long stretches. “This is a quibble,” though, as Lichtblau, a former Times reporter, “has done an admirably vivid job of situating Atomwaffen amid a landscape of like-minded groups,” many of which have “risen from the muck of online forums.” Beyond that, Lichtblau “adeptly charts the sustained fallout from Trump’s first successful presidential campaign,” a period that has seen U.S. hate crimes soar to the highest levels since the FBI began tracking them in 1990. Sad as it is to say so, “American Reich is queasily of the moment, and evokes our present reality with frightening detail. One can only hope that someday its subject is relegated to the past.”
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‘Winter: The Story of a Season’ by Val McDermid
“Winter is an odd, unexpected, and quite lovely book from Val McDermid, the prolific Scottish mystery writer,” said Laurie Hertzel in The Washington Post. The days are shortand chilly in her corner of the world, but “for McDermid, these cold, dark months are not a time of dormancy—they are the most stimulating of the year.” McDermid, now 70, grew up in a village near St. Andrews, and the arrival of winter brings back happy memories, some of her favorite festival celebrations, and the run of weeks when she is most creative, habitually hunkering down to write a new crime novel. Here, in “short, evocative chapters,” she “glides gracefully from topic to topic,” and while winter is the overarching theme, her delightful book is “mostly about the things that inspire McDermid and make her happy.”
Many of the customs McDermid praises here are distinctively Scottish, said Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor. On winter’s shortest day, she notes, the sun doesn’t rise until 8:43 a.m. in Edinburgh and sets less than seven hours later. That helps explain Scots’ love for the fireworks that chase away the darkness on Nov. 5’s Bonfire Night and on Hogmanay, a celebration that begins no later than New Year’s Eve Day and can last another day or more. McDermid’s prose is sprinkled throughout with dialect such as neep for rutabaga and dooking, or ducking, for apples. Meanwhile, beautiful black-and-white drawings by Philip Harris help make this little book “a warming meditation on the coldest, darkest time of the year.”
“There are points where McDermid is revealing about the process of writing,” said Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman, and some readers may turn to the book for those insights. But even when she’s focused on winter traditions, “it is the absences that intrigue me.” Though she writes about Christmas and gift exchanges, she doesn’t write about the holiday’s religious traditions or treat it as the center of the season. And while she mentions a youthful dalliance with the folk scene and a grandfather
jailed for selling black-market cigarettes, she resists making her past fully known. Even so, “Winter allows McDermid a space to write unlike herself,” and it makes a stirring love letter to the least-celebrated season.
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