Briefly Noted

“The Hello Girls,” “The Souls of China,” “Miss Burma,” and “My Cat Yugoslavia.”

The Hello Girls, by Elizabeth Cobbs (Harvard). This engaging history crackles with admiration for the women who served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the First World War, becoming the country’s first female soldiers. Operating switchboards in France, they juggled constantly shifting lists of codes and connections, worked fast amid artillery blasts, and mastered the “genteel diplomacy” needed to communicate with officials in French as well as English. Their technical skill was matched by what one woman called the “great, unquenchable, patriotic desire to do my bit.” Cobbs intercuts front-line activities with political battles on the home front: the women returned from victory to an America that did not yet grant them the right to vote.

The Souls of China, by Ian Johnson (Pantheon). Chairman Mao banned religious observance, but in the decades since his death it has been resurgent, with many Chinese identifying themselves as Daoist, Buddhist, Christian, or Muslim. With a subtlety born of years spent in China, Johnson explains how traditional rituals help people overcome urban anomie and answer the “pragmatic but profound issue of how to behave” at critical life junctures. Participating in funerals, temple fairs, pilgrimages, Christian social work, and Daoist meditation, Johnson describes the uneasy relationship between religion and politics. He sees believers’ recurrent invocation of “heaven” as an aspiration for justice and respect, couched as an appeal to a power higher than the government.

Miss Burma, by Charmaine Craig (Grove). Relating a single family’s struggle “to do more than endure,” this multigenerational saga portrays the emergence of modern Burma—through British colonialism, wartime occupation by the Japanese, and the independence era. The family, like that of the author, are members of a long-persecuted ethnic minority, the Karen; the plot centers on a daughter, who, in 1956 becomes the country’s first beauty queen amid a civil war. Craig ably controls the novel’s historic sweep, and is unsparing in providing details of meticulous torture and wartime horror. She also conveys a strong sense of family. A mother, parting with her children, kisses them “by placing the side of her nose against each of their cheeks and inhaling deeply.”

My Cat Yugoslavia, by Pajtim Statovci, translated from the Finnish by David Hackston (Pantheon). This début juxtaposes the story of a young bride in Kosovo, in the nineteen-eighties, with that of her son, Bekim, twenty years later—who, like the author, is a gay Kosovar refugee living in Finland. Bekim is isolated, angry, haunted by memories of a violent father, and desperate for intimacy. He buys a boa constrictor, allowing it to wrap itself around him while he sleeps “like a protective wall, a halo.” At a gay bar, he meets a talking cat—cruel, like his father—and the two begin a volatile relationship, which, echoing that of Bekim’s parents, leads him to confront his past. Strange and exquisite, the book is a meditation on exile, dislocation, and loneliness.