Two of Open Road's recent TC selections were "Your Sins and Mine," and "On Growing Up Tough." Those are two of my sister's favorite TC novels. To prove it, my sister (Drina) decided to do the reading for the e-book version of it; with her own cover version, as well.

Here is an offering of it, with a free excerpt: Your Sins and Mine. Here, too, you can see Drina's cover. The abstract for it starts:

In this terrifying fable of a world without faith, first there were the changes in weather. Lack of rain was turning the plains of Iowa, Kansas, and Idaho into arid blocks of parched earth. In the North, it was already January, and no sign of snow. All over the world, the seas were shrinking, and creeks and rivers looked like dried scars. But for Pete, the terrified son of a midwestern farming family, the first great omen came one unseasonably warm winter night when the moon simply vanished.
Sounds like a forewarning on Global Warming, with a serious touch of something metaphorically like COVID-19, doesn't it?

My last newsletter included reference to "Your Sins and Mine." Open Road referred to this as Science Fiction. I noted what type of literature TC read, predominantly murder mysteries as documented by Peggy, who received many of them second-hand from TC. (Again, we, Peggy's children with Peggy included, lived a 5-minute walk from TC's home.)

Now, I never read murder mysteries, but I did read a vast amount of Science Fiction in High School, which I got from Peggy, who did not get it from TC. Here's why none of TC's books could be called Science Fiction: They contained not a whisper of Science. Here is a point I have made about Science to many.

Most people hardly know a single person who even knows what Physicists call elementary Quantum Mechanics. Yet, I hardly know anyone who doesn't know what is a laser: The primary gadget whose explanation is from elementary Quantum Mechanics.

Most people hardly know a single person who even knows Special Relativity, much less General Relativity (nor what is the difference between them). Yet, I hardly know anyone who doesn't know what is GPS (the device by which the app "maps" on an iPhone gets you to an address). That is the primary gadget that is totally dependent on satellites employing equations that come from General Relativity.

True, you don't have to know the science behind these clear victories for Science. Still, you don't get these scientific offspring for free. They are fulsome results from hundreds of years of scientific effort. Continuing results from them require continuing effort. It doesn't take a genius to realize that getting results like these calls for some brilliance.

If you wonder about my right to speak of Science in this way, here is the URL to the four parts of my research website: Mike Fried's Research Web Site.

As for "Growing up Tough:" As I previously documented, this was part and parcel of TC's support for Apartheid (in what was then called Rhodesia). I don't know if she supported other authoritarian governments. This "autobiography" was also the source of TC's close connection to the John Birch Society. As I have previously documented to laudatory URLs on the JBS site.

In it, she proclaimed the value of her own approach to parenthood as deriving from what she –in her poor Scotch family – lived with as a child. To me it looked as if this was what gave her – a smart woman – lessons on how to perpetrate child abuse on Peggy, my mother.

Peggy, not as smart as TC, perpetrated a milder, though still consistent, version of it. What made it milder was that it was possible to hide from Peggy.

The affect on TC's second daughter, with a different father – one who did a great deal to finally get TC published – and with an immensely more privileged upbringing, was more complicated. Eventually, though, Judy – as a direct consequence of TC mustering as much cruelty as she could imagine; I have, after all, her novels with which to make a comparison –was driven to suicide. The evisceration included TC's claim that Judy was not the child of TC's second husband. She managed to get away with that in court; there were no DNA paternity suits in that day, and TC's money worked. Ah, but the timeline in Peggy's autobiography makes it crystal clear she was.

I would understand if you saw these TC children vaguely. Yet, they were very real to me. Indeed, Judy was more real to me than was my mother, Peggy, as Judy and I – closer in age – had real conversations. This was mostly when I worked in Boston at an aerospace company (when I was 19) and was later a professor at State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island (between the time I was 26 and 30, though officially for 8 years). During both tenures, I lived in the vicinity of where Judy was living. By contrast, Peggy had no such – real conversations – with any of her children. Indeed, as I document in my expansion of Peggy's autobiography, she knows little of the basic details of their lives.

None of this denies the value – say, to me – of some of TC's massive novels: historical romances and – at least in some ways – sociological treatises. The two books above were neither of these. I will put together a newsletter on two August offerings that suit as exemplars of these genres: 08/15/2021 "The Strong City" and 08/31/2021 "Great Lion of God." Those are Open Road promotion dates. They also represent events aligned with a continued interest in TC at her best and brightest.
Michael Fried, Grandson
For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell
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