Prince Andrew and His Accuser’s Pen

Ever since 2015, when Virginia Roberts’ 24-page handwritten diary surfaced alleging Prince Andrew’s involvement with her as an underaged sex slave for Jeffrey Epstein, the Royal had insisted he would fight the charges. Now, just one month shy of his deposition, he has settled for an estimated £12million. As a handwriting analyst who has studied her journal, I’d say he made the right decision.

Based on Iris Hatfield’s 40-point checklist in A Question of Honesty as Revealed in Handwriting, it is abundantly clear that this 17-year-old was telling her own truth. You can check out her script here and judge for yourself based on some simple graphological concepts.

Basically, prevarication in handwriting looks interrupted and troubled. The slant and spacing is irregular where the author paused to formulate their lies. The rounded vowels, which lie in the middle zone of present concerns, are muddied with random stabs/extra loops/hooks and illegible corrections, and are sometimes open at the baseline, which is also referred to as the line of reality. In other words, they know what they’re saying isn’t real, and the gaps on the line equate to holes in their story. One might find distorted shapes in the upper loops and personal pronoun I. The writing may be illegibly thready, painfully laborious, or smeary. Conversely, a practiced liar may have artfully perfect script such as one normally sees only in professional engraving.  The symptoms are many and varied, but while some such variations are human, it's a safe bet that the higher the tally, the worse the offender.

In Roberts’ case, based on the seven Daily Mail diary excerpts, there are a scarce five instances where the writing betrays even a hint of dishonesty. What we have here is typical teen script, infinitely legible, where even the touch-ups provide clarity rather than confusion. I hope she enjoys her newfound fortune, even if it can never fully compensate for her trauma.

Ahab’s Wife, or, The Star Gazer - Sena Jeter Naslund

That’s the way it is in life. You let go of what is beautiful and unique. You pursue something new and don’t even know that the wind of your own running is the thief.

The heroine of this 1999 NYT Notable Book of the Year is forever losing that which is beautiful and unique. Una flees a tyrannical father for the loving refuge of extended family in a lighthouse, only to discard that idyll for adventure. Disguised as a cabin boy aboard a whaler, she finds not one but two soul mates, only to lose them to madness following a shipwreck. Rescued by Ahab, she then goes from abused and abandoned spouse to a life of bliss as Mrs. Ahab, only to lose him to the white whale that proves her widow-maker. Along the way she befriends an escaped slave, a dwarf bounty-hunter, and Transcendalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. She goes from homeless to mistress of a mansion. She loses one baby only to raise a son destined for the seafaring occupation that repeatedly proves her undoing. As her fortunes crest and fall, she travels from Kentucky to New Bedford and parts unknown, spends an inordinate amount on the widow’s walk, and grows intellectually and morally to emerge stronger than every man in her life. It is a lonely and depressing journey.  

This beautifully written book could have been so great, and it nearly was. The first three-hundred pages had me so enthralled that I flew through them. Then, like a lifeboat in the doldrums, I drifted through the second half like a witness to a tragic shipwreck, floating from one depressing denouement to another with the specter of cannibalism an ever-present nightmare. What promised to be one of my favorite novels ultimately wound up being the most frustrating I have ever read.

Count the Ways - Joyce Maynard

There seemed almost a direct relationship between how attached her children had been to her in the old days and how distant they had grown in recent years.

Joyce Maynard, the best-selling author of eighteen books, knows how to tell a good story—particularly to a woman of a certain age who can chronicle the ascendance of every movement from Alvin and the Chipmunks to MeToo with equal fervor. In Count the Ways she delivers a tragic fairytale about an artist/writer and an artisan living the idyllic life out in the country, as Three Dog Night sang about it. But when Prince Charming proves to be Prince Disappointment, she takes the high road for the sake of the children in whom she has invested her life, only to find herself shunned by them.  Of course, it’s not that simple. Nothing ever is. Without giving up any big spoilers, I’ll just say there’s a lot more dead in the water than their romance, and some betrayals are too broad and abiding to forgive. It all depends on who’s doing the telling.

Honor and anger walk hand-in-hand in this tale of moral dilemmas that ultimately offers a hopeful ending of sorts. But as Maynard acknowledges in this interview – this book is the most obviously connected to her own life experience, i.e., as a writer who is the main breadwinner in an ultimately disappointing relationship, and therefore smacks of victimhood. It also suffers from obsessive reminiscence; beautifully descriptive reminiscence to be fair, about how beautiful family life can be at its best, but the story would have and should have been cut by a third, in my opinion. At 464 pages, I would likely have abandoned it if not for the Audible version at 15 ¼ hours, expertly read by the author.

Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife – Leslie Kean

Over 2,500 cases have been documented of children with memories they say are of a previous life, and 1,400 cases…have resulted in the identification of…the previous life personality, based on facts provided by the child.

That’s some claim, but this carefully researched and reported chronicle of such children as a three-year-old with detailed knowledge of WWII fighter planes and the people with whom he said he served in the war is enough to make even the most ardent skeptic think twice. Not only does the research cited by numerous PhD’s indicate that reincarnation is real, it elaborates on such phenomena as near-death experiences, deathbed telepathy, birthmarks and defects correlated to previous life traumas, psychokinesis, poltergeists, and mediumship. So compelling are the testimonies from around the globe that this 2017 investigation is enjoying an afterlife as a respected Netflix series, for which you can watch the trailer here.

This chronicle starts strong with numerous detailed and compelling accounts by children whose recollections of past lives proved verifiable. Then it slips into high term-paper mode with a parade of research that, while important, reaches mind-numbing levels, before ultimately turning to a historically detailed account of séance experiences that provide truly astounding and irrefutable evidence of paranormal encounters with the dead. I highly recommend this book for nonbelievers, believers, and the merely curious. 416 pages or 14 ½ hours on Audible.  

Barkskins by Annie Proulx

The sorest point is [the Indians’] refusal to grasp the fact that land belongs to the man who improved it, as scriptures show. They only fish, an idler’s occupation, and wander through the forest taking animals and plants for sustenance. But when a white man comes and cuts the oppressive and encroaching forest, builds a house for his family and shelter for his beasts, the Indians complain that he takes their land, land they have done nothing to improve, but rather have allowed to ever thicken with more and more trees.

Barkskins, winner of the 2017 Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a historical fiction with a modern message—save the trees to save the planet. Following the descendants of two 17th C. indentured servants from France, it chronicles the rape of North America’s forests by homesteaders, loggers, and paper barons, in tandem with the Mic Mac natives who bore witness, then bore axes, and finally brought hope of returning the forest to equilibrium. It reads like a cross between a James Michener epic and a Barbara Kingsolver environmental novel: thoroughly researched with intriguing characters, though so ambitious and condensed that it is sometimes hard to keep track of them all. I therefore wished that this 736-page saga (nearly 26 hours on Audible) were broken up into multiple volumes.

Although it was made into a National Geographic miniseries, the trailer leads me to believe it sacrifices the author’s focus on the Mic Macs in favor of heightened drama with more combative First Nations, and that is counter to the overall message of their decimation. I therefore leave you with an image to ponder regarding Canada’s boreal forest, the largest remaining in the world.

The Expedition of The Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate - Eliza P. Donner Houghton

While I had come from the mountains remembering most clearly the sufferings from cold, hunger, thirst, and pitiful surrounding, I had also brought from there a child’s mental picture of tenderest sympathies and bravest self-denials, evinced by the snowbound in my father’s camp. . . Vain, however, my efforts to speak in behalf of either the dead or the absent; every attempt was met by the ready assertion, “You can’t prove anything; you were not old enough to remember or understand what happened.”

As an armchair historian and one who shares Eliza Donner’s acute memory of early childhood, I found this memoir to be both illuminating and dry: illuminating for its depictions of the quotidian in the extraordinary circumstances of being stranded in the high Sierra’s worst winter, and dry for its subsequent focus on her fraught relationship with her foster parents. Little wonder that she harbored lingering fantasies of reuniting with a miraculously saved mother, despite sensitive assurances of her dignified death and cruel rumors to the contrary.

Eliza Donner penned her recollections in 1911, at age sixty-nine, following a life rich in adventure and advantage as the wife of the Honorable Samuel Houghton, U.S. Representative. It is the considered voice of this politician’s wife that the reader hears in her crusade to prove the unproveable, that no members of the Donner party willingly partook in cannibalism or ate family members—a claim contradicted by the firsthand account of at least one girl who was tortured by the memory of being given her mother’s flesh for sustenance, as recounted at the 41 minute mark of this documentary, Death in the Sierra. Nevertheless, the most interesting nuggets of Eliza’s account come in the accumulated testimonies of the Appendix, many conflated with sensational detail, and ending with her private interview with the Lewis Keseberg—the man whom legend accuses of eating her mother and trying to steal the family fortune. She absolves him of all wrongdoing.

Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape beneath the Berlin Wall – Helena Merriman

Right now, walls are in fashion. Over 70 countries, one-third of the world, have some kind of barrier or fence . . . 21 men gave half a year of their lives to dig this tunnel, but there will be other young men and other tunnels.

Sixty years ago this fall, digging began on the most sophisticated tunnel from West to East Berlin, through which 29 escapees would crawl 140 meters to freedom. In this new release, Helena Merriman brings to life the personal stories that motivated engineering student Joachim Rudolph and his collaborators to undertake the task, as well as the practical challenges they faced. Although this is a meticulously researched account of true events, it reads as suspensefully as any espionage novel, complete with a double-agent, families and lovers separated, and imprisonment for the unlucky.

Originally a BBC podcast, this account is now available in book format (352 pages) and as a 10 ½ hour audio narrated by the author, but you can watch the groundbreaking 1962 NBC documentary upon which the story is based, all ninety minutes of it, here. A highlight occurs at the 1:10 mark when the refuguees emerge from the tunnel shaking and dirtied and one of the diggers holds his infant son for the first time.

The Widow Queen ~ Elzbieta Cherezinska

In Poland, Mieskzo and Boleslaw the Brave, the first kings of Poland, are very well known . . . But nowhere in the textbooks is it mentioned that Mieszko had a daughter. I wanted to change the way of looking at that part of Polish, Scandinavian, and English history between 985 and 1017, events which previously seemed to be unrelated . . . Swientoslava was the causative axis. ~ Author’s Note

Swientoslava was better known by her Swedish name, Sigrid Storrada, meaning haughty. It is a point of historical fact that when she was widowed by Eric the Victorious of Sweden, who ruled c. 970 – 995, she burned a suitor alive for daring to offer a marriage proposal beneath her station. That this novel embroiders the tale two-fold calls into question whether or not Swientoslava also manipulated her second husband, Sven Forkbeard (King of Denmark 986-1014) with thinly veiled insults that he read as praise; whether she trained a pair of wild lynxes to guard her and her closest family; and whether she spent her life pining for Olaf Trygvasson (King of Norway 995-1000), as this tale would have us believe. But it makes for a good story and it preserves the spirit of the remarkably strong woman who was overshadowed in the history books by her more famous spouses, father, brother, and sons— Olaf the Swede (King, 980-1022), Cnut the Great (Ruler of England, Denmark, Norway, and parts of Sweden), and and Harold II of Denmark (King 1014-1018). To address Northern European history at that pivotal time without addressing her would be somewhat akin to addressing American history with no mention of Abigail Adams, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Barbara Bush.

This book, the first in a two-part series, while artfully written (and masterfully narrated by Cassandra Campbell at 9h. 23 m.), is not rife with quotable observations. But it should be required reading for informed feminists and fans of Bernard Cornwell’s Last Kingdom series of historical fiction chronically the Viking invasions of England.

Because it is translated from the Polish, there are no English author interviews or book trailers on YouTube for me to post, but there is this 8-minute biography of the widow queen.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen – Tadeusz Borowski

There is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself, and having saved himself he will commit crimes for increasingly trivial reasons. He will commit them first out of duty, then from habit, and finally for pleasure.

Tadeusz Borowski’s autobiographical short stories about life as a non-Jew in Auschwitz are considered classic of Polish literature. Written in first person, they reflect the mind-numbingly horrific scenes he witnessed. But as abominable as that sounds, his life was not as abominable as that of the Jews his protagonist sometimes helps and sometimes helps to kill. He enjoys such privileges as letters and care packages from home, as well as a job at the railway station, which enables him to pilfer and survive as a relatively rich and powerful man. This position he rationalizes as the natural outgrowth of the dehumanization around him, and his resultant apathy and self-loathing make his window into the holocaust unique.

What I found most enlightening about this memoir-like fiction is Borowski’s point of view within the genre. Other stories show how desperately corrupt others survived, but this story focuses on the desperately corrupt self. It therefore came as no surprise to me to learn that Borowski died in 1951, aged twenty-eight, by suicide. I listened to the six-hour audiobook, brilliantly narrated by Roy McCrerey. To sample Borowski’s magnificent prose, watch this dramatic reading and slide show.

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness – Karen Armstrong

. . . the religious quest is not about discovering “the truth” or “the meaning of life” but about living as intensely as possible here and now.

Karen Armstrong is a former nun and author of twenty-eight books that have been translated into forty-five languages. This memoir spans over twenty years of her life, beginning with her departure from the convent in 1969. Her story is one of transformation—from failed Oxford scholar to school teacher to British television personality on all things faith-based. Along the way she battles anorexia and epilepsy, and loses her parochial faith while immersing herself in the shared roots of the Christian, Judaic, and Muslim faiths.

The narrative arc is slow, with few memorable characters, which makes her sense of isolation all the more palpable. To be Karen, one senses, is not to be a happy person. But for the reader who enjoys philosophical discourse, there is ample material here.

To get a sense of her communication style and her thoughts on God, for which she won the 2008 TED Prize enabling her to create The Charter for Compassion, a document coauthored by religious leaders from around the world in their quest for peace, watch this brief excerpt from one of her talks.

2004, 306 pages.