The Four Winds

by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press, 2021)

The phrase “to the four winds” means in all or many different directions or across a wide area (said of something that has been dispersed). [https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/to+the+four+winds] In the story of Elsa Martinelli (and to a lesser extent, her daughter Loreda), Kristin Hannah has written a Tom Joad story that focuses on the women (and girls) of the Dust Bowl. Their strength and resilience against impossible odds form the backbone of this novel of the 1930s, set in the Texas panhandle and California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Elsinore “Elsa” Wolcott had rheumatic fever as a child, and from a young age, she was made to feel sickly, inferior, and unattractive by her bigoted middle-class parents and the usual school bullies. Her attempts to break free of these prejudices are destined to fail. At the age of 25, in a bold act of defiance, she allows herself to be seduced by a handsome, charming Italian American from the next town, Raffaello Martinelli; of course, she gets pregnant. Rejected by her parents and foisted onto her lover’s family, she begins her married life under a cloud, but she is so eager to please and so hardworking that Rafe’s parents soon accept her into their home and give her the familial love she has always lacked. She has the baby–a girl that they name Loreda–and then a son, Anthony “Ant”. And then the Depression hits, and the drought, and the dust storms, and the crop failures, and the repossessions, and then Rafe abandons his parents, his wife, and his children, who are left to try to survive until the rains return.

Elsa’s in-laws, Tony and Rose, are determined to stay on their land, which they see as the salvation of their family, but they are finally forced to admit that they will die if they all stay, so they encourage Elsa to leave for California with the children; angry teen-aged Loreda, who blames her mother for everything that is wrong with her life, and 8-year-old Ant, a cheerful child. Their long, difficult drive west and their struggle to find work that will sustain them when they reach the San Joaquin Valley, constitute the rest of the novel. They encounter much cruelty, greed, and prejudice, but also kindness, friendship, and love. I enjoyed Elsa’s story, the ending of which I won’t divulge here.

The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA

by Liza Mundy (Crown

by Liza Mundy (Crown 2023)

On May 18, I volunteered as an “Author Escort” at the Gaithersburg Book Festival. After an author finished their presentation in the Frederick Douglass adult nonfiction pavilion, it fell to me to escort them to the book signing line. One of the four authors who had their presentations during my shift was journalist Liza Mundy, who talked about her new book, The Sisterhood. I listened, fascinated, to the presentation, and I later purchased the book (rare for me, a devoted library patron).

In The Sisterhood, while Mundy focuses on female employees and the difficulties that they faced if they wanted to do operations (as opposed to analysts and reports officers), the scope of the book is really much larger than just the women. Mundy presents a history of the CIA, starting with World War 2 and the intelligence failure which resulted in Pearl Harbor, continuing through the Cold War and finishing up with the war against terror. In every phase of its history, women did valuable work, whether they were acknowledged or not (mostly, they were not). Mundy makes sure the reader knows that the people responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden were in large part women. (Similarly, women brought down double agent Aldrich Ames.) Mundy’s point is that women tend to have the patience and the attention to detail that intelligence work requires.

Mundy goes all the way back to Harriet Tubman and Kate Warne, 19th century spies, and includes a multitude of female CIA employees, but Heidi August, Cindy Storer, and Lisa Manfull Harper get the most pages; their names are not familiar to us because their work was done under cover and their contributions never publicly acknowledged (similar for male spies, although some men made a habit of taking credit for the women’s successes). Their stories and those of other women who work in intelligence were a fascinating read.

My only complaint is the constant use of abbreviations and acronyms (NESA, OTA, DI and DO, SOOs, PDB and lots more). That’s U.S. government culture, but I would have appreciated a reference list of those in the front or back of the book to refer to, because the index was not always helpful. I ended up making my own list on the inside of the back cover, but it would have been nice if the publisher had done that work,