At a bank in the border town of Nogales, a Mexican woman named Lydia attempts to withdraw cash from her dead mother’s account. She needs $11,000 to pay a smuggler to lead her and her 9-year-old son into the United States. But when the bank manager asks for documentation, Lydia can’t supply any. Less than two weeks earlier, her mother, her husband and the rest of her family were murdered at an afternoon barbecue. Lydia and her son, Luca, have since then been on the run. Up to this point, two-thirds of the way through Jeanine Cummins’ thrilling and devastating “American Dirt,” I’d devoured the novel in a dry-eyed adrenalin rush. Lydia, Luca and the teenage Honduran sisters they’re traveling with – who are fleeing gang violence – leap on top of freight trains. They endure kidnapping, rape and the constant threat of death. “If there’s one good thing about terror,” Lydia thinks wryly, “it’s that it’s more immediate than grief.”
“Circe” – a book that explores the perspective of a witch-goddess who appears in Homer’s “Odyssey” – was the area’s most circulated library book in 2019, with 961 checkouts in the Spokane Public Library and 563 in the Spokane County Library District.
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Earlier this fall, The Spokesman-Review honored 15 women for the work they have done to improve the quality of life in the Inland Northwest. (Revisit those stories at spokesman.com/sections/women-of-the-year/.) On Thursday night at the Bing Crosby Theater, we’ll give these fine community members a proper shoutout during a special Women of the Year event with the Northwest Passages Book Club. Joining us will be two impressive women who talk about “Making Life Work on Your Terms.” Karen Wickre is a former executive at Google and Twitter, and Tess Vigeland is a former reporter and host for the public radio business magazine “Marketplace.” Joining them onstage to moderate the conversation will be Mary Cullinan, president of Eastern Washington University.
After carrying Chris Bovey prints for several years at Atticus, Andy and Kris Dinnison helped the artist create his first book, “Vintage Spokane: The Art of Chris Bovey.”
Wickre, a former executive at Google and Twitter, will be in Spokane on Nov. 14 for a Northwest Passages Book Club event with journalist Tess Vigeland.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer,” will give the Idaho Humanities Council’s distinguished humanities lecture on Friday at the Coeur d’Alene Resort.
Mueller spent the last seven years researching, writing about and interviewing whistleblowers. Just weeks ahead of the release of his book, “Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud,” a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump made international news and sparked an impeachment inquiry.
In Homer’s epic “The Odyssey,” the hero Odysseus and his men land on the island of Aeaea, where they encounter Circe, a powerful witch who is the daughter of the sun god Helios.
