6
JANUARY 5�12, 2022
FROM THE SHELF
CHECKING OUT THE
WORLD OF BOOKS
Some of the best books of 2021
‘THE MADNESS OF CROWDS’
By Colette Bancroft
Tampa Bay Times
by Louise Penny
Penny co-wrote a bestselling thriller,
“State of Terror,” with former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton this year, but the
bestselling Canadian author also pub-
lished the 17th in her series of novels
about Chief Inspector Armand Gam-
ache. Penny imagines a world after the
pandemic, but one where dangers it has
provoked linger — and have murderous
results in Gamache’s beloved hometown,
Three Pines. The mystery wraps around
a thoughtful and disturbing look at how
societies respond to mass trauma.
E
very year I review at least 50 books
in the Tampa Bay Times, but I read
many more than I review. Here are some
of the books that I didn’t review this year
but that stuck with me.
‘ORWELL’S ROSES’
by Rebecca Solnit
If all you know about George Orwell
is that he wrote “1984,” allow Solnit to
bring her astonishing capacity for con-
necting things you did not think were
connected to his biography, and beyond.
Moved by her discovery that Orwell was
a passionate gardener with a special
love for fl owers, Solnit uses that lens
to examine his life, writing and antifas-
cist politics, swings wide to look at the
relationship between fl ower gardens
and colonialism, and fi nally off ers a new
perspective on “1984.”
‘FORGET THE ALAMO:
THE RISE AND FALL OF AN
AMERICAN MYTH’
by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson
and Jason Stanford
Three Texas writers take on their
state’s creation myth and fi nd that,
‘DAUGHTER OF THE
MORNING STAR’
Penguin Random House
even before the gunsmoke cleared, the
battle’s history was being twisted. (For
starters, the Americans who died there
weren’t fi ghting for freedom, they were
fi ghting to preserve slavery.) Deeply re-
searched and brightly written, this book
examines not only what happened at the
Alamo in 1836 but the fascinating revi-
sions and re-revisions of that story right
up to the present, when the issue of who
writes history is hotter than ever.
by Craig Johnson
This is the 17th novel in Johnson’s reli-
ably excellent crime fi ction series about
Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire (inspira-
tion for the namesake Netfl ix series). This
time Johnson takes on an all too real
issue: the epidemic of violence against
Indigenous women. Longmire is called on
to protect Jaya “Longshot” Long, a bas-
ketball phenom at her high school on the
Cheyenne reservation. Her sister disap-
peared a year ago, and now she’s getting
threats — but she’s so tough she doesn’t
want to admit she needs help.
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‘THE SPECKLED BEAUTY:
A DOG AND HIS PEOPLE’
by Rick Bragg
Journalist and memoirist Bragg has
written with humor, pain and love about
his human family in books like “Ava’s
Man” and “All Over But the Shoutin’.”
Here his main character is Speck, a
one-eyed stray dog who shows up at the
family farm nearly dead of starvation, in-
fection and who knows what else. Bragg
(and his mother’s legendary cooking)
bring the dog back to health, but he does
not emerge as a good boy: His idea of
fun is picking a fi ght with the mule, rolling
in a decayed deer carcass or trying to
herd the farm cats (he’s mostly Austra-
lian shepherd), who are having none of
it. And yet Speck is clearly the dog of
Bragg’s life, the dog who shows up just
when he should and does what needs to
be done.
‘A CARNIVAL OF SNACKERY
(DIARIES: 2003-2020)’
by David Sedaris
If you’ve ever wondered where Se-
daris’ uniquely hilarious stories come
from, the answer is the diaries he’s kept
all his life. He published “Theft by Finding:
Diaries (1977-2002)” in 2017, and it was
a fascinating look at his creative process.
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