New England — Great Events, Wild Turkeys

Vermont has cool bookstores and Cambridge has funny pedestrians

It’s been a hectic and wonderful week in New England, with a great reading at the beautiful Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, a signing at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, a virtual conversation with the awesome James Carroll for Books & Books in Florida, many more conversations with more interesting people, and a winding drive through the epic Green Mountains.

I’m in Cambridge now, where students mill about on every corner and wild turkeys cross busy roads with impunity. I’m looking forward to a conversation with Alex Beam at the Harvard Bookstore tonight. Some highlights below.

Vermont Digger

A local reporter once told me that in 2009 after Anne Galloway was laid off from her Vermont newspaper and she went on to found VT Digger, everyone there thought, “Yeah, good luck with that.” Now VT Digger is a thriving source of independent local news, while the newspaper where Galloway used to work has shrunk to a shadow of its former self. Getting a nod in this review from Kevin O’Connor, who has extensively covered the catholic church in Vermont, was extra special.

…Kenneally wasn’t ready to move on. After devoting six years to the BuzzFeed article, the writer has invested five more expanding it into a new book, “Ghosts of the Orphanage: A Story of Mysterious Deaths, a Conspiracy of Silence, and a Search for Justice.”

“Take a group of people at their most vulnerable, make them subject to an organization with almost zero transparency to the outside world, build weak to nonexistent systems of oversight, and give the organization social status or exemption from taxes — then what does the abuse look like?” she writes in the introduction. “It is profuse, complicated, and category-busting.”

Read it here.

WDEV

You learn all sorts of things about yourself on the road. For example, I love doing talkback radio. Who knew? The sincerity of the callers who contributed to this show is very moving.

Listen here.

Sydney Morning Herald

Simon Caterson is one of Australia’s most prolific and astute reviewers of books and art. I’m grateful he wrote about Ghosts.

Orphanages were often regarded as a convenient way to accommodate children from backgrounds that did not conform with the social mainstream and the children sent there were made to feel unwanted and powerless. The priests and nuns in charge were not trained to work with children, and there was little if any state oversight.

Read it here.

The New Yorker

Ghosts of the Orphanage was included in a New Yorker roundup! Read it here.

The result is a gripping chronicle of the ways in which those in power ignored, or even encouraged, the ill-treatment of children across borders, cultures, and decades.