Review: "Everyone Knows But You," Thomas E. Ricks

By Liz Soares

FBI Agent Ryan Tapia has lost his family in a tragic car accident. He’s asked to be posted as far away from California as he can get, and ends up in Bangor, Maine. Ryan’s not at the top of his game and he knows it. He’s still mourning his terrible loss. But when the corpse of a lobsterman washes up in Acadia National Park, he has to step in to investigate. It looks like a homicide, which is beyond the purview of the park rangers.

Complicating matters, the man’s boat has “fetched up” on the shoals near Malpense Island, which is Indian territory.

The victim, Ricky Cutts, lived on Liberty Island, a tight-knit fishing community likely inspired by Stonington. Ryan is an outsider, and the islanders view him with both distaste and suspicion.

He plows ahead, enduring the jibes of the locals, and encountering a range of interesting characters. Caleb Goodwin is a “Highliner,” a group of elite lobsterman who wield clout around town. Absalom Buck runs several “Downeast Depot” convenience stores. A speciality—eaten only by tourists—is the “lobstery roll.”

Solid Harrison (named Solidarity by her back-to-the-land parents) is a former lawyer who runs a niche fish market. And “Peeled Paul” is an indigenous Malpense exiled to a small island, where he lives mostly off the land.

Ricks is a well-known historical nonfiction writer—this is his first mystery novel. His style is plain and straightforward—almost didactic at times. But I thoroughly enjoyed Ricks’ insights into aspects of the Maine lifestyle and culture. (He lives part of the year on Deer Isle.)

Ryan goes out on a lobster boat for a day. He reflects on the history of the city of Belfast. He’s appalled by the traffic in Bar Harbor in June, and intrigued by the lobstermen’s ritual send-off for their murdered colleague.

Most importantly, Ryan learns how an insular island community works—and that may include taking justice into its own hands. It really does seem everyone knows what happened to Ricky Cutts except him.

Equally compelling is Ryan’s story. By the end of the book, he’s taking better care of himself and looking toward the future. A solitary hike up Beech Mountain, on the “quiet side” of Acadia, will surely help.

Review: "First Principles," Thomas E. Ricks

 

By Paul Carrier

Following the election of Donald Trump, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas E. Ricks asked himself what kind of nation we had become and whether it was what the Founding Fathers had intended.

Realizing that 18th-century Americans were greatly influenced by “the thinkers of the ancient world,” Ricks writes in First Principles that he set out to explain how Rome and Greece helped shape the revolutionary generation. Focusing on the first four presidents — George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — Ricks says all of them found inspiration and guidance in antiquity, but to varying degrees and in different ways.

Washington embodied the Roman conception of “virtue,” by placing the common good above self-interest. Adams “cast himself as a modern Cicero.” Jefferson’s Epicureanism worked its way into the Declaration of Independence. As for Madison, his classicism “was leavened by a greater cosmopolitanism” and by his belief that “virtue” has its limits.

In fact, “the ancients” eventually lost their appeal as mounting partisanship, life-changing technological advances, expanding materialism and hostility toward elites became the American norm.

Ricks periodically digresses, but his asides and detours are illuminating. We learn, for example, that Madison’s spoken French was unintelligible because, having learned the language from a Scottish tutor, he spoke French with a Scottish accent.