History podcaster Mike Duncan offers a warm, appreciative look at the life of the Marquis de Lafayette with “Hero of Two Worlds.” Lafayette’s life had many acts, including:

• an orphan of obscure nobility
• a rich and awkward teenage member of the court at Versailles
• a general in the American Revolution
• an advocate for French liberty
• an enemy of Robespierre
• a prisoner and penniless exile
• an uneasy adversary to Napoleon
• and finally, a revolutionary once more, outmaneuvered politically in the new French society he helped to establish.

Above all, he was a man of passion and principles, and Duncan does a great job capturing the Marquis’ enthusiasms, errors, and oversights. It’s hard to believe the range of historic moments in which he played a demonstrative part.

Even applying the judgment of our later times, Lafayette shows an admirable depth of character, generally hewing the right path in treacherous times (and calling out the Founding Fathers on owning slaves.) The book is propulsive and readable, but it doesn’t feel slick or shorn of context.

Quote

Mauroy replied the Americans were not some novel species, they were simply transplanted Europeans “who brought to a savage land the views and prejudices of their respective homelands.” He proceeded to give Lafayette a brief moral history of European colonization: “Fanaticism, the insatiable desire to get rich, and misery–those are, unfortunately, the three sources from which flow that nearly uninterrupted stream of immigrants who, sword in hand, go to cut down, under an alien sky, forests more ancient than the world, watering a still virgin land with the blood of its savage inhabitants, and fertilizing with thousands of scattered cadavers the fields they conquered through crime.” This, Mauroy informed Lafayette, was the reality of the “new world” toward which they sailed.

“It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier’s mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”

Reading “The Awakening” now, it’s easy to see why polite society shunned the book when it was published back in 1899. The main character, Edna Pontellier, is part of that very society when the novel begins. She’s a wife, married to a businessman on the rise in New Orlean’s Creole community. She’s a mother too, an affectionate one, but distant, perhaps, and not fully engaged.

While summering on the coast, Edna develops an infatuation with a younger man. We think it may blossom into an affair, but it doesn’t. Instead, it frays that “garment” of convention, leading Edna to ponder what she wants in life and, moreso, to pursue it.

The rest of the book follows Edna as she tries to determine who she is, as opposed to who society has shaped her to be. It’s not a seamless process. Edna isn’t a saint or an activist; she sets up a studio and neglects it, has lazy days, times when she feels stuck and frustrated. But deliberately, she puts down the things that aren’t hers and tries to creates a space of her own, as best she can.

It proves to be a lonely space, prompting the book’s famous ending. But this sincere, likely doomed attempt makes the book a feminist statement, one that still feels unsettling today. As a reader, I can’t grasp the time in which this was written, and as a dude, I am insulated from the frustration coursing through Edna’s every action, a frustration that surely reverberates today. But “The Awakening” conjures this in plain, beautiful language, evoking a feeling that is still fresh and relevant.

I always find Kim Deitch’s graphic novels fascinating. They offer a blend of real-life history, secret societies, forgotten bits of Americana and talking cats or other weird bits of magic. It’s all anchored by his rock-solid art, which features precise black-and-white lines in an expressive early-animation style.

“Reincarnation Stories” fits the mold. We get a hole in Deitch’s retina, a parade of past lives, once-famous movie cowboys, a Native American tribe that relocates to the moon, old alt-comics memories featuring fellow artist Spain Rodriguez, and a bit of torment from his Felix-like antagonist, Waldo the cat.

It’s strange and artistic and weirdly engrossing. As always, Deitch blends the real-life elements with the made-up portions, making it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Maybe a drunk D.W. Griffith really did ID Deitch as the reincarnation of an former drinking buddy when the cartoonist was just 4 years old. It probably didn’t happen, but Deitch makes you wonder, in more ways than one.

In “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” David Mitchell offers what seems to be a restrained novel of manners and expands it into something far more unruly, strange and marvelous.

Our setting is a small island in shogun-era Japan, home to a handful of Dutch traders, the only Europeans permitted contact with the island. Jacob de Zoet is a young clerk, newly arrived with hopes of earning a fortune large enough to make him worthy of marrying the woman he loves back home. He struggles to understand this new place, to make allies, unravel corruption and stay committed to his would-be fiancee.

It seems the book will spend its span exploring this little world and the challenges of fealty and duty. But Mitchell doesn’t limit himself to that. It takes some time, but the world expands beyond the tiny Dutch island, and it also expands beyond de Zoet’s point of view, introducing us to betrayals and conspiracies, cults and cannon fire. There are whiffs of magic too, although whether it’s sorcery or stagecraft isn’t quite certain.

de Zoet is revealed to be more than he seems, as is the whole cast. Many of traders pause the narrative to briefly take center stage. They their own sad histories, from being trapped in a room of hungry orphans to gaining and losing the love of a lifetime in a brief stopover in Cape Town.

Mitchell is a special writer. One scene in particular still resonates in my memory. It centers on a one-sided sea battle, an execution ordered, than rescinded, for reasons that are carefully built but clear only to the person who offers the stay. The emotions in that scene are raw and real, speaking to Mitchell’s skill but also his daring. The book as a whole offers those same rewards.

“Parable of the Sower” offers a frightening firsthand look at a slow-moving apocalypse. It seems scarily prescient in our uneasy times.

Our protagonist is Lauren, a teenage girl who lives with her family and neighbors in a walled-off block in far-suburban Los Angeles. Society outside is crumbling; it doesn’t rain anymore, and groups of gangs and desperate homeless people live violent lives out on the streets.

It’s not a full-on Mad Max dystopia. A fortunate few still have jobs, even if commuting back and forth to them is no longer a sure proposition now that even the relatively fortunate can’t afford gas–or travel without making themselves a target.

Still, Lauren and her neighbors manage to eke out a thin existence in their complex, growing crops and slaughtering rabbits. Things gradually grow worse as intruders come in to rob and murder, and Lauren’s clear-eyed preacher father begins to intensify the community watch and firearms training.

Lauren independently realizes that their way of life is coming to an end. She begins preparing to flee, and she also turns away from her religious background, building her own faith. Earthseed, as she calls it, reflects the dual beliefs that life is unceasing change and that humanity needs to find its ultimate destiny out among the stars.

Lauren eventually finds herself on the road with a small band, disparate people, unlikely apostles. They take a dangerous journey, one that leads to death and loss but also discovery. It’s moving and gripping, with a constant sense of peril driving the reader to plow through the pages.

Author Octavia Butler does a great job building her world, giving us a plausible apocalypse. She does a good job establishing her characters too, even if the community at the end seems to come together a bit too easily.

The largest issue I have with the book is the character of Lauren herself. She’s supposed to be a teenager, but she comes across as a full adult, with a patience and perspective that belies her years. She has been shaped by trauma–including a power/disability, the empathetic sharing of pain–but she becomes a leader too easily, gaining authority on the road that extends beyond anything she could have read in the survival manuals she stockpiled.

Lauren’s journey is compelling, but it would have felt more authentic to see her struggle more along the way. (The book also has a May-December romance that stretches plausibility as well as good taste). That said, “Parable of the Sower” is an excellent piece of apocalyptic fiction, harrowing and real.