Inherit the Wind (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                             2 hrs & 8 min, b&w, 1960

The big debate in some quarters about so-called Creationism vs. Evolution shows no sign of cooling off.  Strange to say this sizzling controversy’s persistence has produced in my judgment at least one good result.  It has made a much neglected motion picture more appealing than it was fifty-four years ago when it was released.  “Inherit the Wind,” Producer/Director Stanley Kramer’s excellent adaptation of the hit play of the 1950s by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, hardly made a ripple among the general public when it bowed in at movie houses during the summer of 1960, long before the term Creationism was even invented.   At the time the story is set (the 1920s), so much was unknown at the grass roots about Darwin’s theory, his contention that human mortals were not fashioned out of the dust in six days but evolved from ape-like creatures over millions of eons, but enough was known for fundamentalists in the Bible Belt and elsewhere to dismiss his idea out of hand as a form of flagrant apostasy, something “right out of the pits of hell.” 

There was, however, one community in Tennessee at that time that became exceedingly familiar with the controversy, more than they wanted to be, when the whole furor was dumped upon their doorsteps.  A public school teacher in that town was arrested for introducing his class to Darwin in violation of a state ordinance prohibiting the teaching of any theory of the origin of man contrary to the Genesis account.  Other states had similar laws, but only in Tennessee was anybody ever charged with an infringement.  Only in Tennessee was the viability of such a law ever put to the test.  The result of that testing is not something that I would suppose the average resident or native of Tennessee enjoys looking back on.  At least that is my guess.  The ensuing battle in the courtroom has been colloquially referred to as the “Monkey Trial.”  A more enlightened name for it is the “Scopes Trial,” Scopes being the name of the prosecuted teacher. 

The story is well named, “Inherit the Wind.”  The phrase is taken from a verse in the Book of Proverbs: “He that troubles his own house shall inherit the wind, and the fool shall be servant to the wise in heart.”  Wind there is plenty of in the film, generated by passionate rhetoric and exceptional gifts of oratory, and it blows with the strength of a fierce electric storm.  Any thinking person cannot help being totally absorbed.  The play that made it to the screen is a fictional enlargement upon that factual event.  All the names, including that of the town as well as the notables involved, have been changed.  At least three television versions have come forth over the subsequent decades, but none of them has achieved the power and driving force of Kramer’s.  For purposes of televising, they were all somewhat trimmed and abbreviated, broken up by commercials and the restrictive demand of predetermined air time.  But Kramer, under no such restriction on the big screen, spared no detail; he even added scenes that enlarge upon the issues as well as the fine points of personality, Scriptural interpretation and legality.  He portrays the small town affair as having the ambiance of a circus, as the outside media world descends upon the previously isolated rural hamlet, and he uses his fluid camera to highlight absurdity and elements of satire when it seems appropriate. 

There are numerous touches of pure brilliance, one of which is the opening pan shot of the town square, accompanied on the soundtrack by a very slow-paced, doleful singing of “That Old Time Religion.”  A familiar, lively evangelical song treated as a funeral march!  Foreshadowing the coming of a war of strong wills which somebody is going to lose!  The credits roll as we see the hand of intrigue at work in that square – the community elders moving toward the schoolhouse to make the arrest of the teacher.  But the mood quickly shifts, once the arrest is made, as the unsuspecting town bursts into life absorbing the news.  From that point on the movie has pace and delivers one wallop after another.

Another move on Kramer’s part in making the work superior is the decision to cast two icons to fill the leading roles of prosecutor and defender, both of them two time Oscar winners.  Here, though the characters’ names may be fictitious, little is done to disguise the identities of Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution.  These two men made indelible history in that remote place.  Spencer Tracy has one of his finer moments on screen as the Darrow-like defender.  He has the appearance of a tired warhorse who has suffered through many a battle for the dignity of vulnerable individuals standing before the formidable bar of blind justice.  Paunchy and gravel voiced, he scarcely needs to breathe his well chosen words to coil his way into the listener’s mind.  There is also the quality of naturalism that he always employed.  He was the first notable naturalistic actor in American movies.  (Once asked by a student aspiring to learn to act if he had any advice to give about the craft; with a cool tongue he replied, “Yeah, don’t let anybody catch you at it.”)  If Kramer had been able to resurrect Darrow from the grave, he could not have improved on Tracy.

The other giant is Fredric March, as much a veteran at the time as Tracy.  He too improves on every other rendition of the character of the prosecutor we have since seen.  His more expansive style of delivering a line, in contrast to Tracy’s naturalism, serves equally as well in making the Bryan-like figure come to exciting life.  The man he embodies is the sharp witted, well dressed super salesman in political and pious trappings, and super self-confident, until the heat and ferment of the trial betray a hidden and fatal flaw.  Gene Kelly does himself quite proud as the cynical journalist covering the big story, inspired by the figure of H. L. Mencken, who actually did.   The jailed teacher, also a somewhat conflicted person at first, is played with forthright tenacity and emotional clarity by Dick York.  He is actually a completely fictional character, in love with and engaged to Donna Anderson, the daughter of the town’s leading cleric, who is quite active in the prosecution of the defendant.  Scopes himself was single at the time but not romantically involved with anyone.  I guess the playwrights felt obligated to hand the audience a love theme.  Needless to say, the young woman is put into a very awkward predicament and almost sinks her fiance’s ship.    

The trial is by all standards a travesty of impartial justice.  The rulings this judge (Harry Morgan) makes could not be made today without bringing down the wrath of the Justice System upon his head.  A mistrial would be a cinch to obtain.  And at the very least any lawyer in Darrow’s place would early on petition for a change of venue.  But back then local jurisprudence did not fall so squarely under the searchlight of Federal authority, especially in the prosecution of a controversial law of mostly regional interest.  As for the guilt or innocence of the accused in this case, I have to say that the final verdict is not the end of the proceedings but the first of a series of climaxes that have a most sobering effect upon all the parties involved, including the spectators.   What was won or lost to this day remains a matter of opinion and perception.    

The film is so thick with earthshaking issues and questions that just about each and every scene could be an extensive subject for discussion by itself.   Science and the Bible, judicial prerogative and precedent, intellectual freedom, the education of young minds, the sanctity of truth, the mixed blessing of democracy, freedom of the press – you name it!  Thought-provoking, ironically humorous, eloquent, explosive and uplifting!  What a feast!

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Lee Daniels' The Butler (2 hrs & 18 min, color, 2013) and Blue Jasmine (1 hr & 38 min, color, 2013)

Movie Reviews by Bob Racine

Motion picture history is replete with examples of great acting that has made otherwise only medium level screenplays memorable and uniquely enjoyable.  The portrayals transcend the material; the charisma of the players elevates it to a level of emotional clout that is not especially inherent in the writing itself.  In Woody Allen’s latest dramedy, “Blue Jasmine,” Cate Blanchett does a sensational job of breathing life into a very reprehensible character – a wealthy, spoiled, dishonest, manipulative lush, whom we are expected to find amusing.  I found her and her devices disgusting.  Aside from her antics, the film has nothing more to recommend it.  Allen (of whom I am a longtime fan), for my money, has many times before done far better, whatever my fellow critics and the Academy of Motion Pictures have chosen to say.  The action is so contrived and cartoonish, and the general dialogue so full of clichés that do not serve the quality of the cast he has assembled that I was turned off.  But of course Blanchett chews up the scenery until not a morsel of it is left.  She alone might make many take delight in what I found to be a labored vehicle of comedy errors. 

That of course is an extreme example.  Lee Daniels’ work in “The Butler” is something far above mere device and bare bones.  The idea of tracing the life of an Afro-American male, Cecil Gaines (Forrest Whitaker), from plantation poverty and cruelty to and throughout a career as a manservant in the White House under eight presidents (beginning with Eisenhower) and using that narrative line to reflect upon the major newsreel events that have carved themselves into the nation’s collective memory over the intervening fifty years is at the very least an enticing adventure of the mind and heart.  We see things through Cecil’s eyes.  He views the unfolding history from behind the silent class barrier that keeps him and other household staff in a state of helpless subservience to a political system in which they have no real input.  So near, at the elbow, but so far removed!  

The film suffers a little for trying to cover so much of a time span.  A whole half century!  So much has to be skipped over, so much space that never gets filled.  Surfaces must be skimmed.  But largely compensating for that flaw are two sterling performances – by Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey as Cecil’s wife and the mother of his two sons.  The work these two turn in elevates the story so far beyond the mere perfunctory that it gives deep voice as well as presence to the family’s struggle with the demeaning life they are forced to live despite the luxury they enjoy.  The domestic sequences are by far the best in the footage. 

Oprah at first resisted Daniels’ offer of the part.  But there is no doubt that whatever else she has developed a knack for over the years, whatever other personae she has taken to herself, she is still first and foremost a quality actress.  Though a supporting player she is in enough of the movie to shake me profoundly.  I felt so much sympathy for her, even in her drunken moments.  As for Whitaker, I have to agree with so many others that he here surpasses all his past work, as adorable as that work has been.  Brilliant seems too tame a word for what he makes of Cecil Gaines.  As marginalized as Cecil is on his job, at home he is right in the thick of intergenerational strife.  His oldest son becomes a much battered Freedom Rider and eventual Black Panther, bringing unexpected worry and heartache to his parents who want him to finish school and enter a profession.  The youngest son enlists in the army during the Vietnam War and by so doing adds to the parents’ worry.  It is as if the national conflicts have invaded their well protected lives. 

The central conflict is quite explicitly a generation gap that threatens to swallow the lives of father, mother, and sons before it can be closed.  I found myself envying Cecil after escaping his horrid childhood and landing his indoor job in the President’s home, but slowly I began to worry that all of that would be snatched away as pressures of family close in on him and he succumbs to the befuddlement of the racial issue that his son brings into his space.  There are some very harsh moments at the dinner table resulting in a bitter estrangement.  But he lives to experience some vindication for all his heartache when Obama is elected to that White House and new promise and hope raise their esteemed heads.     

As far as I am concerned this is a fictional tale, even if it was inspired by the life of a factual person.  The cast is huge; most of the casting is well done, though a few choices provoke a little head-scratching.  Robin Williams as Eisenhower!?  John Cusack as Nixon!?  Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan looks the part, but why waste an accomplished actress like her in nothing more than a walk-on?  She is only on the screen for little more than a minute in medium range, never seen in close-up.  Another head scratcher is the director Daniels’ decision to include his name in the titling, something very rarely done I am pleased to say.  “The Butler” would have been sufficient nomenclature unto itself, without this bit of conceit.  But his writing is good enough that the vast production does not inundate the major characters.  The personal saga comes through most vividly.  In lesser actors’ hands I am not sure that would have been the case. 

Someone of my generation naturally looks at all the story’s chapters with some degree of nostalgia, having lived through them all.  It would be interesting to me to hear how the story plays for those who have been born in the last two or three decades.  What is their experience of Kennedy’s assassination, or the Watergate scandal, or the Civil Rights Movement or the student protests of the 1960s and 1970s?  How do they perceive that their lives have been impacted upon by all that, or do they at all?  The viewer is asked by implication to locate herself/himself in the ongoing drama of a nation still struggling to understand the full meaning of economic equality and individual freedom.  It would be like my being asked to contemplate how World War I and the Great Depression have impacted upon me, neither of which I encountered first hand.  Locating one’s self in the larger odyssey of time and national history is not easily done, but “The Butler” has made the task at least a bit more possible for many Americans now living.  I would not be surprised if the picture were sooner or later a part of high school curricula.      

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

The Insider (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

          2 hrs & 37 min, color, 1999

The making of a docudrama is quite a challenge.  I am speaking of a true story that demonstrates the old adage that fact can be, if not stranger than fiction, then at least as amazing and startling.  There are of course those movies that purport to be true but are little more than contrived tributes to factual persons or groups of persons.  This is especially the case when the tale told is cast in the form of a musical.  Al Jolson, Eddie Duchin, Glenn Miller, and the composing team of Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, and several other show biz figures, have had the supposed stories of their lives emblazoned on the screen, but dig a little and you will find that at least 90% of the details portrayed come from the fertile mind of a Hollywood scriptwriter.  All of these above showy productions took great liberties in cleaning up the person’s act, making sure they came out smelling sweet for a family audience.  But just Google any one of them, and you will see just how phony the whole shebang really is.  “Based on the life of - !”  So the credits read.  Those two little words, “based on,” can mean nothing more than a faint suggestion of what might have been fact, if only, or what we would like to believe was fact.

A docudrama is something else.  It is a serious and concentrated attempt to tell the unvarnished truth about a living or historical subject or event.  It is not created in order to sell anything; it is not propaganda.  See how the word breaks down: docu - drama!  It falls somewhere between a newsy documentary and an entertaining but serious depiction.  A documentary is concerned with facts; a docudrama is concerned with truth.  It is an attempt at least to get at the truth by way of the facts.  Scenes and even characters are created out of the screen writer’s imagination “for dramatic purposes.”  But no attempt is made to clean up the undesirable elements.  Dialogue more inspired than the conversation that actually occurred can heighten the salient points in a historical reenactment.  These additions can give clearer definition to what was at stake in the course of events under examination. 

In my estimation “The Insider,” released in 1999, is a superb example of how to do it right, with honesty and integrity and with first rate film-making skill.  (“All the President’s Men” from 1976 is another.)  The quality screenplay, adapted from Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair article “The Man Who Knew Too Much” is the work of Eric Roth and Michael Mann under Mann’s firm direction.  Russell Crowe plays Jeff Wigand, the biological chemist hired by the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company (manufacturer of Philip Morris Cigarettes) who, after he was fired, blew the whistle on the company’s insidious process of deliberately enhancing the addictive effect of its product.  He did this by way of an interview with Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) on 60 Minutes in 1996, thereby taking the bold step of violating his severance agreement not to talk.  At first he resists opening his mouth to anyone in keeping with that gag order, but when Brown and Williamson starts tracking his every move and spying on him and attempting to add more severe conditions to the agreement, ones that are threatening to his wife and two little girls, he changes his mind and begins corresponding with CBS program supervisor Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) and soon agrees to the interview with Wallace, after which his troubles and heartaches are just beginning.   

Oddly enough, it is not just the tobacco industry and its underhanded behavior that is scrutinized so much in this tense probe, but also television journalism itself and its ethical quandaries.  It seems that Bergman’s enrolling of Wigand into telling all gets him entangled in a dilemma of his own.  The top officials of the network balk at running the expose, once filmed, for fear of being sued by Wigand’s former employer.  When the other news people besides Bergman concur in the decision, thereby leaving Wigand hung out to dry, Bergman must use his wits to get the decision reversed and save Wigand from total despair, his marriage having already failed.   After the full interview is broadcast, Wigand is gratified to know that his children are able to learn why he had put them through all that crisis.  He then became a high school chemistry teacher, a job that led to other opportunities.

Questions are raised that defy easy answers – about free speech and privileged communication.  And they are handled in good taste, with excellent pacing.  The film may run a full two and a half hours, but it is inconceivable to me that any caring person would be bored.  Every scene without exception is gripping; there are no drags or lags.  And after fifteen years it remains quite relevant and contemporary.  We are still hearing much about the subject of tobacco’s addictive power and about efforts to lobby Congress to increase the excise tax on this product.  A recent editorial in the Washington Post took issue with those who feel that we should just let the long time smokers smoke themselves to death and concentrate on saving the younger crowd.  It maintained that lung cancer is a very real danger.  It kills people by very slow degrees.  My own father was “lucky” in that he was dead within less than three months after he was diagnosed.  Most victims are not so “lucky.”  When Humphrey Bogart was watched lighting up with his leading ladies in all those movies he made during the 1940s, few people knew at the time that those weeds were killing him.  He finally died a very horrible death in 1957.  If anyone wants to know how horrible, just let them read Lauren Bacall’s autobiography.  The good news:  Recent polls have shown that while in the 1950s a full half of the U.S. population were smokers, today less than one fifth are.  But the push stays on for reducing that figure far more.  And we all know now that smokers have become a segregated minority in public with smoke free public places. How sweet it is!  Wigand enjoys his share of the credit for that.

The movie benefits from three strong male performances, each one a sturdy example of the acting craft. 

Christopher Plummer does not attempt to imitate Mike Wallace’s manner of speech or reconstruct his personality.  Such an attempt would have been a fool’s errand.  But he does capture the man’s tenacity and unapologetic attack mode, smartly and cogently.  You can hear the spirit of the man at work, and that is enough.  The character we see can cut someone down in a few words when he picks up the scent of mendacity.  Plummer must have spent many hours watching footage of Wallace doing his thing.  Great supporting work!

Russell Crowe is magnificent in the shoes of Wigand.  He brings a lot of vulnerability and snap and controlled fury to the part.  The character he embodies can be a bit fast on the draw, but he can also seethe until tempered by the input of calmer individuals.  According to reports from those at the CBS network who have seen the film, his interpretation of Wigand is quite accurate.  This remains in my opinion his best work on screen.  Only “A Beautiful Mind” would compete for the honor.

Al Pacino as Bergman comes forth with another of his brassy, take-charge, no-nonsense depictions, combining sincerity and dedication to the art of journalism with the voice of rationality amidst pending calamity.  No one else I know of could handle that better.  His scenes with Crowe are letter perfect and tone perfect, two vastly different warriors trying to find a common strategy.  

Though her part is quite small, I need to put in a word for Diane Venora, who plays Wigand’s wife.  She does a splendid job, bringing her share of heart to the picture.  One of the most stirring moments is the one in which she announces to her husband that she is leaving him.  She does not stage an uproarious scene; she just simply confesses to him, meekly and tearfully, that “I don’t think I can do this.”  She knows she should stick with him, that a wife’s place is at her husband’s side in a crisis, but she has to back out.  This confession follows a death threat which she herself has read on their e-mail.  A little too much for her! 

There are many memorable moments of confrontation in this masterpiece.  I have seen it about a half a dozen times, and I hope to again.  It is easy enough to obtain from Netflix.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Sycamore Row by John Grisham (Book Review by Bob Racine

                         Published by Random House, 2013

After each reading of a John Grisham novel, I feel as if I have learned more about the law and the justice system in our country than any textbook or crash course for non-schooled adults could possibly teach me, and his latest work is no exception.  In fact, it is the most revealing I have ever taken the time to absorb, it being the ninth of his writings I have checked out.  As many of us know, Grisham is himself a lawyer.  When you follow the intricacies of any suspenseful plot he devises, you can rest assured that you are getting an accurate and authentic portrayal of how the court system operates.  His stories may be fictional, but they are not fanciful.  I suppose you can call Grisham’s books legal thrillers.  The devices of his principal characters in their struggles for justice and rectitude and legitimacy do not consist of firearms or martial arts or implements of cloak and dagger.  The system of jurisprudence itself is both the means of embattlement and the arena in which the embattlement occurs.  There are no white knights or flawless role models or Perry Mason-style practitioners.  All the persons he depicts are deeply flawed.  Some drink to excess and/or smoke to excess and/or bend the rules almost to the breaking point; all make mistakes, sometimes whoppers.  No one is lily white, not even the main character, Jake Brigance.

Do any of you Grisham fans recognize the name?  Jake put in his first appearance in the author’s first novel, “A Time to Kill.”  In that earlier work he is a trial lawyer in Ford County, Mississippi (fictitious of course) in 1985 defending a black man against a murder charge for killing the two white men who raped his daughter.  That was three years before the time setting of “Sycamore Row,” in which the litigation is not a murder trial but a contest over the legitimacy of a will handwritten by a man named Seth Hubbard just before he hangs himself from a sycamore tree.  It seems Seth has done something very odd and heretofore unheard of.  He has bequeathed 90% of a 24-plus-million dollar estate not to his two grown middle-aged children, but to his black housekeeper named Lettie.  In a death note that reaches Jake’s hands after the suicide has already taken place, Hubbard predicts that his relatives, all of whom he despises, completely cut out of the inheritance, will be greedily contesting its terms but urges Jake, whom Seth has chosen, to fight them all the way.  Lettie must prevail.  What complicates these seemingly clear instructions is the fact that over a year beforehand he made out an earlier one dividing his fortune between all of his offspring and their children, one that this new one is supposed to nullify completely.  Jake is faced with the task of serving the wishes of a man he has never met or seen in the flesh and proving that the second will is valid.    

The book has some length, quite a number of characters, and much of it portrays the maneuverings of the attorneys on both sides of the aisle.  The reader knows well ahead what each of them is up to and something about how they are plotting to establish that Seth either was or was not of sound enough mind to compose such a holographic document and only a day before he dispatched himself.  What seems at first a rather simple affair for Jake compared with the sensational murder trial of three years before is beset by complications piling one on top of the other until the outcome appears to be anything but a slam dunk. 

Jake is up against more than the greed of Seth’s relatives; there is chicanery right and left on the part of the lawyers for the family and Jake himself is not above a little maneuvering of his own.  In short, he needs the fees after a very dry season.  Over those previous three years business has been very sparse and because the Ku Klux Klan protested his defending a black person by burning down the house he and his wife Carla owned, he lost all his equity and has been renting a shabby small abode.  This will probate that has fallen into his hands promises to deliver him and his family from the financial doldrums, but there are rocks and shoals around which he must navigate.      

The stage is set for a marathon fight in the same courtroom where “A Time to Kill” takes place.  But the fight is entangled in many questions that no one including Jake can answer.   Why would a millionaire leave 90% of his assets to a housekeeper, something unheard of in a deep south community?  What influenced his decision?  The man was dying of cancer and in wretched pain.  Was his mind beclouded by the Demerol he was taking in such large quantities?  Did he really hate his children that much?  Did Lettie, who cared for him in the closing hours of his life and nursed him on his deathbed, use some feminine wiles to induce him into leaving her such an astronomical sum, one that no black person in the state owns or has ever owned?  What came over Seth?  And what dark secret out of Lettie’s past lurks in the shadows?  It is that dark secret, hidden even from her, that eventually breaks the case wide open.

The legal trajectory that slowly leads to the final courtroom confrontation I found absolutely enthralling.  It is perhaps unsettling for many readers to learn how so many rules governing jurisprudence are honored as much in the breach as in the observance, even by judges on the bench.  Consider these observations either from or about his characters that Grisham drops along the way: “[Legal] ethics are determined by what they catch you doing;”  “He was well versed in the ethics of his profession when they could be beneficial, otherwise he ignored them;”  “Trials are not about fairness – trials are about winning.”  The most fascinating of all is the sleight of hand by which the lawyers influence the selection of the jury.  (Of course, Grisham deals at even greater length with that subject in “The Runaway Jury,” one of the most exciting of his earlier works.)      

There are many and varied moving scenes depicted in this book.  Seth’s funeral gives new coloration to the term tragicomic.  Droves in attendance but no one present to grieve, only to keep up appearances with money on their minds or, as in the case of the county sheriff, to perform a duty and cover the scene.  Jake’s many off-the-record conversations with the judge are potent and most revealing about the delicate and slippery side of practicing law.  There is a very heartwarming sequence in which Grisham visits the Brigance household (including a 7-year-old daughter) on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.  There are conversations between husband and wife pertaining to the lifestyle forced upon them by Jake’s practice.  There is a subplot pertaining to Lettie’s drunkard husband and her wish to be free from him, one that ends quite tragically for him and for two innocent victims of vehicular homicide and almost puts a stain on Lettie’s reputation, something under these circumstances she does not need.  

All through the circuitous but well integrated narrative, we can pick up the sound and the rhythm of jackals circling their prey and with an appetite for conquest, and over against all this fury is the simple private person of Lettie reluctantly participating and apparently helpless against the onslaught and the front page publicity.  Even members of her extended family, whom she barely knows, come flocking around her hoping for a windfall from the expected inheritance.  In an area like Ford County, what are the chances of an unprecedented probate trial such as this grinding on without the issue of race raising its ugly head?  What are her chances up against the machinations of professional white attorneys eager to keep the money in white hands and collect handsomely themselves off a protracted litigation?  And whose hands can Lettie hold while the storm rages on?  One sentence in the novel sums up the crucial question: “After all the witnesses had testified, after all the lawyers had been silenced, after all the wise words had been uttered . . . could those [jurors] (ten of whom are white) reach deep and find the courage to uphold Seth’s will?”

5% of the fortune has been left to Seth’s local church and the other 5% to his brother Ancil, whose whereabouts are at first unknown and whom he has not seen or heard from in decades.  Without giving away the outcome of this tense narrative, I will simply say that Ancil, whom nobody is thinking about during the course of the proceedings, gets to deliver the stunning blow that tears the lid off the county’s shameful past.  The closing chapters of “Sycamore Row” had me in cathartic tears.  The heartfelt truth finally has the last, unwanted but cleansing word. 

Recommended for serious and probing adult readers with socio-political conscience and awareness!

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.