book review

“Winston and the Windsors” by Andrew Morton

November 26, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In late October, we were back at the St. Louis County Library. We had previously attended the talk by mystery writer Elizabeth George; this time it was the British writer, Andrew Morton.

Morton became an almost-household name in Britain in the 1990s when he wrote not just “a” book but “the” book about Princess Diana – the one she agreed to do. Diana: Her True Story nearly toppled the British monarchy – or at least Diana’s revelations seriously damaged the institution.

Morton has since written books about Monica Lewinsky, Madonna, David and Victoria Beckham, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, and William and Catherine when they were still the duke and duchess of Cambridge. You might say he’s an A-List celebrity biographer.

But his more recent attention has turned from contemporary celebrities to those who are more historical. And that’s what we were there to hear him talk about –Winston and the Windsors: How Churchill Shaped a Royal Dynasty.

This is a biographical work, but it’s not a biography of Winston Churchill, and it’s not a biography of the Windsor family. Instead, it’s the story of the relationship between Churchill and the royals. No one individual had more influence on the Windsors that Churchill did, with his career bookended by Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II and four kings in between.

From early on, Churchill was seen as something of a loose cannon, but as least from Edward VI onward, the royals recognized that no one was more faithful to the idea of the British monarchy than Churchill.

Edward VI liked him, even as Churchill could sometimes infuriate him/ George V started out frosty and remote, disdaining Churchill until he began to understand the man better. Edward VII, who gave up his throne, had hoped Churchill might have found a way for him to marry Wallis Simpson and keep the throne, but it never was accepted by the British establishment. (According to Morton during his talk, the royal family initially welcomes Walliss because the kept the Prince of Wales’s drinking under control.)

Considerable space in the book is devoted to what had to be the most important relationship Churchill had with the royals – that of George VI, unexpectedly thrust onto the throne by his brother’s abdication and the one who, with Churchill at his side, led Britain through the very dark days of World War II. Their friendship started off rather cool – George VI and his wife Elizabeth knew how close Churchill had been to Edward VII. But his steadfastness and devotion to the monarchy won them over.

It was that eventual closeness that led Churchill to adopt an almost fatherly role with Elizabeth II, when she became queen at 25 on the death of her father. And it was Churchill who traveled to Scotland to tell Elizabeth’s mother than she had to get over her grief and return to London: Elizabeth and the royal family needed her. That was likely the catalyst for her to become affectionately known as the “Queen Mum.” (An interesting side note: Morton says that Churchill played the decisive role in quashing the plan to rename the family “Mountbatten” upon Elizabeth’s succession to the throne.)

Winston and the Windsors is a well-done story of an important relationship that lasted, with all its ups and downs, for some 60 years. It’s fully grounded in historical records; Morton says he spent considerable time in the Churchill Archive at Cambridge University, the archives at Windsor Castle, and the archives at Blenheim Palace, where Churchill was born. That effort shows. So does Morton’s ability to take well-plowed ground and tell a story that’s fresh and fascinating.

Top photograph: Buckingham Palace.

“White Week and Other Stories” by Wojciech Chmielewski

November 19, 2025 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

The Polish writer Wojciech Chmielewski isn’t exactly a household name in America, and for a very good reason. Up to now, none of his writing has been published in English. Wiseblood Books has changed that with the publication of White Week and Other Stories, translated by Katarzyna Bylow.

Chmielewski is best known in Poland for his short stories, which have won awards in his home country. But he’s also an essayist, literary critic, and playwright for Polich Radio Theatre. This collection of stories, many previously published in Polish literary journals and anthologies. Re largely about Warsaw, a Warsaw that is there and the city that used to be. (Much of the city was destroyed during World War II and then rebuilt under communist rule.)

The stories are, in a word, haunting. The opening story is about the area near Grzybowski Square, with its church on one side and construction underway nearby. We see scenes of a marketplace, a boy selling strawberries (“Polish strawberries…all freesh”), an alleyway full of peonies, a group of drunken men arguing, a young woman waiting for someone, and the empty park with its playground. The story contains no named characters or dialogue; the character is the urban landscape itself. Slowly the reader comes to understand that this area was once part of the Warsaw Ghetto, which tens of thousands of Jews were confined before deportation to Auschwitz.

And so the stories go. Chmielewski will return to this theme of the Warsaw Ghetto, but along the way we’ll experience a religious procession (with a man dreaming about snakes), a woman working on her new novel (with some of the characters becoming parts of other stories), a man with an unfaithful wife who finds solace in eating dog food, a village that exists beneath the sand of a beach area, a man who pays a visit and seems to enjoy reading in a madhouse, conversations in a restaurant during a rainstorm, a saint awake in the dark, a young man in love with a girl whose face experiences allergic reactions, the title story about remembering a religious confirmation celebration, and others.

Like that opening story of the visible landscape not seeming to remember the history, all of the stories have that sense of “missing the context.” We’re there, but we don’t understand. We undertake our daily life, but we’re ignorant of what these streets and buildings have seen, what’s come before us, what has shaped this landscape just as it’s shaping us.

Yes, haunting is the operative word for these stories.

Top photograph: A scene of Old Town Warsaw by Victor Malyushev via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“A Słowy Dying Cause” by Elizabeth George

October 29, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

It helped to have heard Elizabeth George speak in early October at the St. Louis County Library. She was doing a promotional tour for her new novel, and among many other things, she noted that Inspector Thomas Lynley would show up late in the story.

And Inspector Lynley does indeed show up rather late for story billed as “A Lynley Novel.” A Slowly Dying Cause, the twenty-first in the Inspector Lynley series, doesn’t even mention him until about page 120, and he and his detective sergeant, Barbara Havers, don’t really start assuming a significant role until about the middle of the book.

The novel is 640 pages. The reader is well past the halfway point before Lynley learns there’s even a murder. Havers’ mother has died, and Lynley drags his DS with him when he has to go to Cornwall to attend to a leaking roof at the family estate. Lynley is an earl, even if he work for the Mtropolitan Police in London. He steps into the investigation almost accidentally, but once he’s there, no one doubts who’s really in charge.

It’s the local police who investigate the murder of a tin and pewter workshop named Michael Lobb. Potential suspects abound – the dead man’s ex-wife, whom he divorced to marry a woman abrely older than his own children; his children, both of whom need money; his brother, who owns 40 percent of the business and property it sits on; the young wife herself; the hired help, a man and his adult son; the hired man’s two daughters (one of whom is a former lover of Lynley in London); and the wife’s brother, who happened to be visiting from South Africa and opposed his sister’s marriage from the start.

The story is not a straight narrative. It includes the account of the murder investigation, interspersed by the story told by the dead man himself. Add to that the story of Lynley’s estate and its needed repairs. George writes mystery novels, yes, but she also writes novels that just happen to have a mystery as one of the story lines.

I was 200 pages from the end when I realized exactly who the murderer would turn out to be, and more to the point, what the murderer’s motive was. Yet George is nothing if not an enthralling, compelling author; even when I knew (or guessed, correctly, as it turned out), I kept reading to see how it would all tie together. And George pulls it off. A Slowly Dying Cause is more of a novel than a mystery novel.

In addition to the Lynley novels, George writes a young adult series, set on the island in Washington State where she lives. She’s received numerous awards and recognitions for the Lynley novels, which have been adapted for television not once but twice, with the new Lynley series having started this year.

An Evening with Elizabeth George.

Top photograph: Cornwall coast with tin mining tower by Danilo D’Agostino via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story” by Wendell Berry

October 22, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Andy Catlett, whom we first met as a boy in an earlier novel by Wendell Berry, is now an old man. As old men are wont to do, he’s looking backward – at his life, his parents’ lives, and even earlier. And what he sees, far more clearly than he would have seen in his youth, is what shaped four generations of Catletts, including himself and his own children.

It is a story, a story that happened to his grandfather, Marce Catlett, a story that happened in less than 24 hours but lasted more than a century. And it shows every sign of continuing to last.

Marce Catlett and his good friend and neighbor Jim Stedman travel together by horse and train to Louisville. Their tobacco harvests are finished for the season. Now comes the time when the crop is auctioned in Louisville.

Marce and Jim both have an unspoken apprehension about the auction. Both know what they need to make a profit and continue to farm. And both know there is one bidder at the auction – the agent of James Buchanan Duke, who controls a near-monopoly on the U.S. tobacco business.

When the auction ends, both Marce and Jim leave to return home. Their profit might cover the cost of their train tickets.

In a few short words, Marce will tell his family what happened. Fear enters the home. Fortunately for the Catletts, they won’t starve; they have livestock and some diversification of crops. But tobacco is the lion’s share of the family income.

Even then, however, that is not the story. The story is what Marce does next. He begins to make his plans for next year’s tobacco crop.

That resilience in the face of financial disaster, what can only be called theft by monopoly, is what propels the family forward. Marce’s youngest son Wheeler will go on to become a congressman’s aide, an attorney, and the force behind the creation of the tobacco farmers’ cooperative to ensure farmers could make a decent profit. It will propel Wheeler’s son Andy to become a professional writer and then a farmer and writer. And it will influence Andy’s own children.

That’s the heart of Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, Berry’s most recent novel and what feels like the last. Berry’s Port William novels are not precisely autobiographical, but they are clearly shaped by Berry’s own experiences. Marce Catlett reads like a summing up, not only of the series of novels but also of Andy Catlett’s, and Wendell Berry’s, life. The front and back inside covers suggest that as well – the front being a chart showing the relationships of the Feltner, Coulter, Beechum, Wheeler, and Catlett families, and the back being a map of Port William and its environs.

The map is just as important as the genealogy. Together, they are two sides of the same coin – family and geography. The story that lies between them is the resilience that binds them together.

Berry is a poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist, and social critic. His fiction, both novels and stories, are centered in the area he calls Port William, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. He’s won a rather astounding number of awards, prizes, fellowships, and recognitions. He lives on a farm in Kentucky. As he should.

Wendell Berry and the Land.

My review of Berry’s Jayber Crow.

Wendell Berry and This Day: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry and Terrapin: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry’s Our Only World.

The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry.

Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry.

Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry.

A World Lost by Wendell Berry.

A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry.

The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry and Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2023.

Remembering by Wendell Berry.

Top photograph: Broadleaf tobacco field by Rusty Watson via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Midnight on the Potomac” by Scott Ellsworth

October 1, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

A considerable portion of my historical novel Brookhaven is set in the last year of the Civil War, and yet the novel only covers a few of the momentous events – the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse, the final siege of Petersburg, Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, and Johnston’s surrender to Sherman near Greensboro.

Indirectly, the novel covers Grierson’s Raid through Alabama, the fall of Atlanta and Sherman’s march to the sea, and the political and social chaos that followed. People lived through those times; my own ancestors (on both sides of my family) lived through it.

The last year of the Civil War is also the focus of Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America. In almost a conversational vignette style, historian Scott Ellsworth guides the reader through the major events of 1864-1865, showing how they not only were significant in and of themselves but also how they shaped post-war America.

You meet spies and ghost armies, experience the horrific battle in the Wilderness near Richmond, and discover how slaves were liberated and sometimes abandoned by Union armies. You follow the acting career of John Wilkes Booth and how it led to that fateful night at Ford’s Theater. You learn how the fall of Atlanta assured Lincon’s reelection, and you join Booth in listening to Lincoln’s second inaugural speech. You meet the famous and not-so-famous, and you experience history in many of the words and first-hand accounts of the people who were themselves involved.

It says something of Ellsworth’s skill that the writing and stories seem almost effortless. You know they’re not; a prodigious amount of research and knowledge was required for that “effortlessness.”

Ellsworth previously published The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City’s Search for Justice; Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921; The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph; and The World Beneath Their Feet: Mountaineering, Madness, and the Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas. He attended Reed College in Oregon and graduate school at Duke University in North Carolina. And he also worked as a historian at the Smithsonian Institution. He lives with his family in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he teaches at the University of Michigan.

Through the power of stories, Midnight on the Potomac explains what happened that last, fateful year of the Civil War, and it does so in a highly readable, engaging way.

“The Summer of ’63: Gettysburg” by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch

September 17, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My historical novel Brookhaven is set during the Civil War’s final two years and immediately after, and then in 1915, 50 years later. The moment that sets the story into motion happens in late April of 1863 – Grierson’s Raid, in which a troop of some 1700 Union cavalry made their way through Mississippi from the Tennessee border to (eventually) Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The soldiers came to Brookhaven, most notably burning the train station and tearing up railroad track.

The raid had a specific point: divert attention from Gen. Grant’s army preparing to cross the river from Louisiana and end the siege of Vicksburg, the last Confederate position on the river. The fall of Vicksburg would been the Union controlled the entire length of the river and would split the Confederacy in two.

The Vicksburg campaign was covered in a collection of articles edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch, part of a series called “Summer of ’63.” Their Vicksburg & Tullahoma covered the events and milestones of that campaign, including a raid on Mississippi’s capital of Jackson, which eventually led to a Union victory.

Now Mackowski and Welch have done it again, this time turning to another major Union victory in 1863 – the Battle of Gettysburg.

The Summer of 1863: Gettysburg follows a similar format. Mackowski and Welch have gathered and edited articles from the Emerging Civil War web site (which I can’t recommend highly enough if you’re interested in American history generally and Civil War history specifically). When you read a concentration of work like this, you realize just how fine the historical scholarship is on the site.

The subjects include understanding why the Battle of Chancellorsville is so vital to understanding Gettysburg; how Gen. Meade took control of the Union army on the eve of battle; the mascot of the 11h Pennsylvania; prominent local families; how the Union retreated through the town at the beginning of the three-day battle; the impact of three men on the battle’s outcome; the role of Stonewall Jackson; the poet and writer Herman Melville on Pickett’s Charge; the aftermath, including the effort to punish Gen. Meade for “allowing” Lee’s army to escape; how the wounded saw the battle; how the battle was memorialized; the famous 1913 reunion of both Union and Confederate veterans,; and much more.

A professor at St. Bonaventure University, Mackowski has received B.A., M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. degrees in communication, English, and creative writing. The author of some nine books, he’s written extensively on the Civil War for a number of publications. He also worked for the National Park Service and gave tours of the Civil War battlefields at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania.

Welch is an educator in a public school district in Ohio and serves as a seasonal park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park and associate editor of Gettysburg Magazine. He’s written two books in the Emerging Civil War Series and co-edited several volumes.

A collection like The Summer of ’63: Gettysburg makes you appreciate the quality of the articles at Emerging Civil War. It also reminds me of the debt I owe to the writers there; I spent considerable time using the site for research and background for Brookhaven. It’s a debt I can’t repay. And my book has been published for some months, yet I still spend considerable time on the web site.

Top illustration: The Battle of Gettysburg as depicted by artist Thure de Thulstrup for Harper’s Weekly.

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