BOOK REVIEW: Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt

I’ve fallen way behind on my reading for two main reasons. First, I’m working on my next novel and writing to a deadline. Second, the book I was reading was not one to fly through. It’s a biography of Christopher Marlowe. I’ve had a vague interest in Marlowe for a long while, but I only knew of him as someone “Shakespeare-adjacent.” A contemporary of Shakespeare, Marlowe was also a playwright and poet. He was reportedly a spy for Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster. And he died far too young in a barroom brawl, or some such thing. That is a woefully inadequate biography.

What really pulled him from the shadows for me was Allison Epstein’s extraordinary novel, A Tip for the Hangman, which I highly recommend. More recently, I came across this literary biography by Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival.

This book succeeds best as a literary biography, more so than as a straight biography. The difficulty is that so much of Marlowe’s life story just isn’t known. Particularly when dealing with Marlowe’s early life, but not exclusive to his early days, we are asked to follow along with the author’s speculations and imaginings. And while they are educated, reasonable speculations, I was frustrated in wanting more certainty from a biography, even though I recognize that information is lost in the past.

Greenblatt does a wonderful job of explaining the dangerous times that Marlowe was living in. The Protestant-Catholic suspicions and plots created a highly anxious society with an undercurrent of violence. Marlowe was sucked into the world of espionage on behalf of Queen Elizabeth’s spy-ring. He was murdered in a tavern, the crime officially explained as a quarrel over the bill. All of which makes his life intriguing.

But what he should be remembered for is not the spying, but his extraordinary literary talent. This biography examines in depth his plays and some of his poetry. It interprets them, and Marlowe’s motivations for writing them,  in light of the life he was living. It all sounds plausible, and it is fascinating, but first you have to accept Greenblatt’s speculations about that life and about those motivations.

Marlowe’s life can be summed up as “live fast, die young.” But his life’s work lives on. It especially lives on in the influence he had on contemporary and future writers.

(If you like literary biographies, I highly recommend Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell, which is a biography of John Donne.)

BOOK REVIEW: The Librarian Spy by Madeline Martin

My history/historical fiction book club’s next pick is The Librarian Spy by Madeline Martin. In this WWII-based historical novel, two women use their literary-adjacent talents to help the war effort.

Ava is a librarian at the Library of Congress, who is tapped by the military to go to Lisbon, a neutral country, to gather intelligence. Her job is to collect as many newspapers and other documents that slip into Lisbon from war-torn countries as she can. Then she helps photograph them for transfer to microfilm so that they can be shipped to the U.S. and evaluated. Determined to do her part because her brother is a fighter pilot and she wants the war to end before he is injured, she doesn’t feel what she is doing is dangerous. And yet, it seems a German fellow, Lukas, a likely spy, is trailing her. And a British fellow, James, is paying her a great deal of unexpected attention as well.

Elaine is a French patriot living in occupied France, whose protective husband has been doing his best to keep her from sticking her neck out. When he goes missing, she joins the resistance. At first, her role is to help distribute an underground newspaper. And then, when it becomes known that she is familiar with running a mimeograph machine, she begins working for the press itself.

Their work intersects when Elaine decides to help a young Jewish mother and child escape occupied France and Ava discovers Elaine’s secret message encoded in the Nazi-banned newspaper.

The contributions of women in WWII is an entire subgenre unto itself, and this is a fine addition, exploring lesser known modes of aiding the war effort.

BOOK REVIEW: Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

I’ve been reading some beautiful but painful-to-read books lately. Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas is another. Originally published in 1947 in Norway, it is being re-released by The Modern Library in an English translation by Bibbi Lee.

Set in the mid-twentieth century (contemporary at the time, but now historical), it’s the story of a woman who suffered terribly at the hands of an older man, her high school teacher, with whom she’d fallen obsessively in love at seventeen. He slept with her, used her, pretended to care for her when it suited him, and repeatedly tossed her aside. 

The novel is unusually structured. It’s in the first-person viewpoint of another older man, who is relating the story as told to him by the woman in one long alcohol-infused night. They are strangers who met at a train station. (In this way, it reminds me a little of The Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque.)

The woman is older now, thirty-eight. The events of her life are not presented chronologically because that is not how memory works. She’s haunted by the relationship and what it has cost her, but at the same time, she is clearly still in love with the man who destroyed her. She suffered abortions, poverty, and alcohol abuse, all of which fed upon each other to send her into a downward spiral of despair.

The fact that the woman is not named makes it feel both anonymous and universal. It is a cry for justice.

Nothing Grows by Moonlight is a powerful novel and highly recommended. However, as a content warning, there is a graphic description of a self-induced abortion. 

BOOK REVIEW: Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

I read Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore for a book club. It’s a gripping (and enraging) account of the young women exposed to radium in their occupation of painting luminescent dials for watches and military equipment. After its discovery, radium was considered a miracle drug, touted for everything from a cure for gout to an aphrodisiac to a beauty treatment. But its most exciting property was that it glowed.

Women were entering the work force in large numbers in the WWI era, and working in the dial painting factory was considered a plum job. Women were uniquely suited to painting the tiny numbers on the dials. There was no protective equipment, despite the radioactivity of the radium-containing paint, because the dangers were not recognized (or not acknowledged.) And worse, the women were taught that the best way to bring the delicate paint brushes to a precise point was to wet them between their lips. And so for months, even years, these women ingested minute but cumulative doses of radium day after day after day.

And then, usually after a couple of years had passed, often when they were no longer working for the company, they began presenting to dentists and physicians with a mysterious array of symptoms, commonly including disintegration of their jaw bones, loss of teeth (and pieces of bone), hemorrhage,  purulent eruptions, and bone pain. Eventually, it became clear that they were suffering from radium poisoning. A deadly and incurable disease. But the men owning the companies and the higher ups who were all getting rich, denied the possibility and refused any concessions to the women. Instead, they fired troublemakers. They called the women hysterical and insinuated there was nothing wrong with them. And when the women banded together in lawsuits, mostly to get settlements to pay for medical care (they were all essentially bankrupted by job loss and medical bills) the response of the companies was to stall and appeal, hoping the women would die and the suits would be dismissed. (They also declared bankruptcy, reorganized, and reopened elsewhere.)

It’s an important book. And while it’s true that studying these brave women advanced medical science, and that in the aftermath, important industrial safety measures were passed, the most vivid scenes in the book are of the horrific pain and suffering experience by these women, and the callousness and greed of corporate men.

BOOK REVIEW: Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes

I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Langston Hughes is an author on my should-read list, so I was glad of the nudge provided by Netgalley to read the novel Not Without Laughter. First published in 1930, it is being re-released by Union Square & Co. with an introduction by the poet Jasmine Mans.

The novel is semi-autobiographical: a coming-of-age story of a young Black man, Sandy, growing up in Kansas. Sandy is primarily reared by his grandmother, Hager, who was once enslaved. She is a deeply religious woman who refuses to hate, despite the injustices she sees in the world. She works hard as a laundress. And she has big hopes for Sandy.

Also in the family are Hager’s three grown daughters. The eldest, Tempy, has married well and is financially comfortable. However, she feels superior to the rest of her family and rarely comes home. The middle daughter, Annjee, is Sandy’s mother. She’s another hard-working woman, in service to a white family, but her focus is on her much-absent husband, Jimboy, not on her son. She works long hours, and when she’s home, she’s tired and depressed over Jimboy. He’s got itchy feet, never able to hold a job for long and constantly on the move looking for something better. And finally, the youngest daughter, Harriett, is a good-time girl. She wants better for herself. She is fiercely aware of racial injustice. And she doesn’t want to get trapped in the drudgery that rules the lives of her sisters and mother. She runs off to join a carnival. She resorts for a while to prostitution. But she finally finds her stride as a Blues singer.

Sandy is influenced by all of these family members. He grows up learning to take jobs wherever he can to help his grandmother and to have some spending money. But he’s also a fine student. He knows that a good education is his best hope of escaping poverty.

It was a little difficult settling into the book. The beginning uses a lot of Black dialect that, in this day and age, is disconcerting to read. But this is less pronounced, or less noticeable, as the book progresses and we are pulled deeper and deeper into Sandy’s life. The novel doesn’t shy away from his confusion and conflicted feelings. It presents the family members compassionately while showing them warts and all. It shows the differing struggles of the Black community in Kansas in that time period, but also brings to life their love and joy. 

BOOK REVIEW: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

I just (finally) finished The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, short-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize. A good short description comes from the book jacket: “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next.”

I enjoy sweeping, inter-generational family sagas in general, but this one got to be too much. The smallest part of the novel was the slow-motion love story between Sonia and Sunny. They are from the youngest of three generations covered in the book. The contemporary generation. They are from wealthy, higher-caste Indian families and are sent to the U.S. for college in order to make something of themselves and to bring prestige to their families. But in the U.S., they are lonely and unable to form healthy relationships, unable to find the lucrative careers that their families expect. Eventually, they have to find their way to each other, back in India.

However, this is not really their love story as much as it is the story of their relationships with their parents, their country, and their culture. The book takes the reader through the backstories and ongoing stories of family members and friends. And while it was interesting at first, I got bogged down in a narrative that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. The themes of alienation and dysfunctional families are not favorites of mine, and these themes seemed to swallow up all the others. The characters were all largely unhappy, unfulfilled, and selfish, which, although sadly realistic, made it difficult to sympathize with their plights. Eventually, in order to draw the disparate threads back together, it became necessary to rely on magical realism, and I’m not a magical realism fan. 

But this is a novel to read for the beauty of its language, not the plot or interwoven themes. And the language is beautiful. Mostly. The descriptions of setting and the deep psychological dives were compelling enough to keep me reading. But even that got to be too much. Like a lot of modern literary fiction, this novel showcases its lovely prose using lists. Lots of long lists. Inevitably, I’d find myself skimming.  

The book has earned a lot of praise, and it is certainly ambitious and sweeping. But it just wasn’t the right book for me.

BOOK REVIEW: The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur by Scott S. Greenberger

The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur by Scott S. Greenberger is our history/historical fiction book club’s next pick. Presidential biographies are not really my thing, but I’m glad to have read this one. I knew nothing about Arthur. He’s pretty obscure as presidents go. During the Gilded Age, he was James Garfield’s vice president so he became president when Garfield was assassinated.

This biography points out how Arthur was an important cog in the New York State Republican machine, a close underling of Roscoe Conkling. He was chin-deep in the corruption of the times and became a very wealthy man.

The thesis of this biography is that he turned over a new leaf when he became president, turning his back on his old machine cronies and trying to reform the spoils system. This was partly in response to letters written to him by a woman who was a stranger to him, who urged him to redeem his reputation while there was still time.

It’s an interesting picture of the man and his times, but I’m not sure I buy that his late turnaround redeemed him.