The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne

Griffin Dunne was a favorite actor of mine in the 1980’s. If he was starring in a movie I would have to go see it and I particularly liked him in Almost You and After Hours. And so when I heard he had written a book The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir (2024) I immediately placed my order through Libby. The book is a NYT bestseller and so I have been on hold for weeks but the book finally arrived a few days ago and it was worth the wait.

The Friday Afternoon Club is really two books and to be honest part one which deals with Griffin Dunne’s early years growing up in Hollywood I wasn’t too interested in. Griffin’s father Dominick Dunne was a successful TV executive at the time who threw fabulous parties.  Griffin’s aunt is the brilliant writer Joan Didion and so Griffin and his siblings Alex and Dominique got to meet these famous movie stars, musicians and writers at an age too young to really appreciate who they were. Although Griffin retains fond memories of Sean Connery who rescued him from drowning at one of his family’s pool parties.

There are alot of stories like that in the first part of the Friday Afternoon Club. Griffin is not name dropping to impress the reader this was simply his childhood and he wanted to get these stories down on paper. Still, I am not that interested in the world of celebrities, parties, drugs, the children of celebrities etc and so I didn’t connect with part one.

But part two the second half of the book deals with the murder in 1982 of Griffin Dunne's sister Dominique Dunne and it is gripping.  As Griffin says it changed his family forever. Dominique was a talented actress, a caring person, and she was only 22 when she was strangled to death by her former boyfriend. The murder trial was a travesty. The killer only served two and a half years in prison.

Griffin goes into detail about the trial and its aftermath and how his family coped. His family became closer which is so admirable because this isn’t always the case with families who experience tragedy or illness.  In an interview for the book Griffin said that his family went through a dark season but that they pulled through “not by chance but by aggressively trying to pull through”

Griffin’s father, Dominick Dunne, became a bestselling author covering criminal trials for Vanity Fair and always standing up for the victims in his books.  Griffin’s mother Ellen Dunne who suffered from MS, went on and founded Justice For Homicide Victims in California, an organization that has helped people fight for justice and deal with grief. Griffin Dunne’s parents are gone now but he remains close with his brother Alex and the book is dedicated to his brother.

Finally I liked the fact that with the exception of the defense attorney and the judge at Dominique’s trial, who Griffin is understandably still angry with, he deals kindly with the people in his life. And that is particularly true of his parents, his sister Dominique and his brother Alex. The Friday Afternoon Club is a loving tribute to his family and a book that will help others deal with grief and how to pull through.

The Complete Idiot's Guide To The Middle Ages by Timothy C. Hall M.A.

Thank you Marg at the Intrepid Reader and Baker for hosting the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge and allowing nonfiction books to be included.  The Complete's Idiot's Guide To The Middle Ages (2009) by Timothy C. Hall M.A. is the non-fiction book I decided to go with.  

It's a relatively short book packed with information and Timothy Hall divides his book into three sections:  Early Middle Ages (550 to 1000 A.D.),  High Middle Ages (1000 to 1300 A.D.) and Late Middle Ages (1300 to 1500 A.D).  

The Middle Ages begins after the fall of the western Roman Empire in 476 A.D. and ends in 1500 A.D. with the start of the Renaissance Era.  And between 550 to 1500 A.D alot of history happens which the Idiot's Guide goes into detail about. 

I learned about The Viking invasions of the 8th through 10th centuries and the development of the feudal system in Europe as a defense against those invasions. 

I was interested to read about the eleventh century falling out between King Henry II and Thomas Beckett which ended with Beckett's assassination.  Timothy Hall writes about the crusades a dark period in history.  On a more positive note the Middle Ages saw the introduction of new farming techniques, the invention of the spinning wheel which revolutionized clothing production and the compass which made sea travel safer.

One thing is for sure.  If you lived during the Middle Ages you did not want to be living during the 14th century. The Great Famine (1315-1317), the Hundred Year War (1337-1453) and of course the The Black Death (1346-1353) in which some historians estimate that 20 million may have died in Europe alone.  The respect and reverence people had for the Catholic Church and its leaders also began to fracture during the late Middle Ages.  It was partly due to the plague but also the corruption within the clergy.  The book ends with the beginning of the Renaissance and explorers travelling to the New World. 

I have only recorded a fraction of the information contained in The Idiot's Guide To The Middle Ages most of which I am never going to remember.  But I did come away with key events and interesting historical figures that I might want to read more about.  And so if like me you know very little about the Midfle Ages and would like to know more, The Idiot's Guide is not a bad place to begin.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

"They met by the cotton after the village quieted down. Caesar made a quizzical expression at her bulging sack of yams but didn’t speak. They moved through the tall plants, so knotted up inside that they forgot to run until they were halfway through. Their speed made them giddy. The impossibility of it. Their fear called after them even if no one else did. They had six hours until their disappearance was discovered and another one or two before the posses reached where they were now. But fear was already in pursuit, as it had been every day on the plantation, and it matched their pace"  - Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

We have contemporary writers who are writing the classics of tomorrow and one such writer is Colson Whitehead. He has won multiple literary awards for many of his books and his historical novel The Underground Railroad was awarded The National Book Award in 2016 and The Pulitzer Prize in 2017.   I can see why.  The Underground Railroad is a wonderfully written novel that tells an important story about a dark period in American history.

The protagonist of The Underground Railroad is Cora, a young slave girl working on the Randall plantation in Georgia.  Cora never knew her father and when Cora was ten she woke up to find her mother Mabel had escaped from the plantation and was never seen again.  The Randall plantation is hell on earth run by two brothers one of whom is a sadist.  

When Cora reaches 17 she decides to escape the Randall plantation with a fellow slave named Caesar.  Escaping is an incredibly dangerous thing to do.  You will be tortured and killed if you are caught so that others on the plantation know the repercussions for trying to escape.  But Cora and Caesar decide to take the risk anyway.  Caesar's story is particularly heartbreaking.  He wasn't born on the Randall plantation.  He and his parents lived in Virgina and the mistress they worked for was an elderly lady who treated them decently and when she died she promised they would be free but she never left a will:  

"Her only relative was a niece in Boston, who arranged for a local lawyer to liquidate Mrs. Garner’s property. It was a terrible day when he arrived with constables and informed Caesar and his parents that they were to be sold.  Worse—sold south, with its fearsome legends of cruelty and abomination. Caesar and his family joined the march of coffles, his father going one way, his mother another, and Caesar to his own destiny".

Caesar and Cora decide to head north via the Underground Railroad and to quote Amazon "the railroad is no mere metaphor: "engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil."   Prior to reading The Underground Railroad I had my doubts about historical fiction being mixed with magical realism.  But I shouldn't have worried.  This is a very grounded and powerfully written novel about a terrible time in our nation's history the legacy of which we are still grappling with today.  

Killer Triggers by Joe Kenda

"In this exceptional memoir, Kenda chronicles the highlights of his twenty-one years as a Colorado Springs, Colo., homicide detective. Kenda investigated or oversaw 387 cases, and here uses them to offer insights into why killers kill...His Colorado cowboy cop humor and compassionate voice help make the dark stories he tells easier to bear. This is must reading for true crime fans." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

I totally agree with Publisher's Weekly.  If you are a true crime fan, and I am, Killer Triggers (2021) by Joe Kenda is not to be missed.  But you must read the book in audio because Joe Kenda does the narration and as anyone who watched his hit TV crime series Homocide Hunter will tell you Joe Kenda's dry humor and seen it all before voice is a real plus for this book.

As Joe Kenda sees it murders happen due to the the following triggers: fear, rage, revenge, money, lust, greed and in some cases insanity.  And in Killer Triggers each chapter is devoted to a different murder case  that Kenda worked on during his career.  These are the cases that stood out for him.  Kenda tells us about the victim, the crime, how he and his team caught the killer and the trigger that led to the murder. 

The book can at times make for grim reading but it's also fascinating because Joe Kenda has a great deal of insight based on his years of experience as a homicide detective.  Killer Triggers is also funny.  For example a retired K-9 police dog named Henry who escaped from the Kenda home and Kenda's wife Kathy frantically looking for Henry along with a police car that was equally alarmed when they heard the news that a K-9 was loose.  These dogs are trained to attack on command and should never be running around the neighborhood.  But it ended well. They found Henry in a park surrounded by little kids who were throwing him a ball and jumping on Henry and as Joe Kenda tells us "Henry was loving it".  

Homicide Hunter the series ended in 2020.   But for fans of the show and for anyone who is curious I recommend Killer Triggers and be sure and get the audio version!