What they're saying ... (blurbs, reviews, reader comments, etc.) October-November, 2009

11.27.09. Amazon.  "As fascinating as the Kennedys.   Dr. Michael Hogan (Guadalajara, Mexico).  Family history is not a popular genre these days, unless the families being written about are the Tudors, the Romanovs or the Kennedys. Nor it is an easy one to write especially for a family member; the tendency to sentimentalize, to over-dramatize the family's historical impact while ignoring or sanitizing their foibles is hard to overcome.
Despite the fact the Gatins is not a well-known name outside of Atlanta, and that this history was written by a family member, readers of We Were Dancing on a Volcano by Joseph Gatins are in for a pleasant surprise. Not only is the family as fascinating as the Kennedys to whom they bear some surface similarities (Irish Catholic, a rich scion with a disreputable past, a war hero and international impact), but the author is able to keep his distance and cast a cold critical eye on the family curse of alcoholism and its insidious legacy.
The Gatins family story begins with the founder's acquisition of considerable wealth through illegal speculation in New York, his investments in real estate in Atlanta and the building of the Georgia Terrace Hotel which provided income for the next three generations. Where the book evolves from interesting to fascinating, however, is with the founder's marriage to a French noblewoman and the subsequent connections to Paris which would continue in the succeeding generations. The most compelling is the tale of Joseph Francis Gatins III, the author's father who served in the French Army during World War II, was captured by the Germans, tortured because they thought he was Jewish, and who escaped several times only to be transferred to more and more horrible prison camps. With the help of his mother, Eglé Gatins, who smuggled gold coins to him in tins of honey via Red Cross care packages, he was able to bribe prison guards and get transferred finally to a work detail from which he finally made his way to freedom. This whole section with escape attempts being foiled, prisoners being executed, and the boxcars of Jewish prisoners transported to death camps as part of the Third Reich's "Final Solution" is as compelling as an action novel.


For more sophisticated readers, Eglé's own life "entre deux guerres" in Paris is as rich as Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. She knew Hemingway, of course, and Gertrude Stein, Paul Valery, de la Rochefoucauld, and Paul Claudel. Another of her friends was Sylvia Beach, the founder of the famous Shakespeare and Company Bookstore in Paris. She was a cousin of the well-know paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. These wonderful years between the wars give the book its title, to quote Eglé in her own letter: "We were dancing on a volcano," the German resentment over Versailles which would eventually plunge the world into a devastating war. Soon the invasion of Paris would come and the end to life as Eglé and most Europeans knew it. During the war, she not only worked to get her son out of the German Stalag, but she also labored to help other prisoners through the International Red Cross, and operated as a liaison for the French Resistance. For her services she received France's highest award, the Legion of Honor.
Joesph Gatins' research is extensive and the book contains a useful index as well as voluminous end- notes and a bibliography. It is the work of a careful historian with a journalist's eye for the telling detail, as well as the compulsion to tell the whole truth even when it might sometimes be embarrassing to other family members. The book itself is handsomely designed and rich with photographs which show us not only the colorful characters that enlivened four generations of the Gatins family but a mini-documentary of their lives and the times.
11.26.09.  Amazon.  "Worlds Converge."  B. Smith, (Rabun Gap, GA).  A beautiful French lady becomes a wise old woman living in an apartment in Buckhead, a neighborhood of Atlanta Georgia; this seemed to be the hook that drew me into, We Were Dancing on A Volcano. Seeing history through the eyes of this lady as she lives through the French Occupation helps make it less textbook and more real. My favorite part of the book was the last few chapters as the author wove the strands together and put himself into the picture with his own memories. This book was well researched and written, but when feelings and emotions were added to the weaving, it gave it a more personal touch that allows all the parts to converge into one man's story and his place in history.

11.17.09.  Blog comment and Amazon.  "Move Over, Margaret Mitchell."  Five-star review from Delphine Herbert, (Ocala, FL). "A real-life refugee from the potato famine spawned a dynasty in which his son was among the Madoffs of his day, gaining notoriety and the attention of the Feds a hundred years ago as a wheeler/dealer stock trader known on Wall Street as a "bucket shop man." His oldest son, in turn, transformed himself into a pillar of social and entrepreneurial respectability on Peachtree Street aided by Atlanta's adulation of his French wife, the "Comtesse."  Their son, Francis, the author's father, joined the circle of American expatriates living in Paris between the great wars during which time he fell in love with a beautiful aristocrat from Colombia. As a French military prisoner of war responsible for opening cattle cars arriving at a death camp in the Ukraine, Francis was witness to the horrors of the Holocaust while his mother played a significant role in providing succor through the Red Cross to those unable to escape Paris during the Nazi occupation. Once the reader negotiates the initial introduction to the bewildering number of Josephs and Egles , the fact-filled pages fly swiftly through one hundred and forty years of the triumphs and tribulations of this indomitable family which has survived wars, tenuous marriages, the ebb and flow of their finances and the scourge of alcoholism. Through it the women of the family were sustained by the certitude of their strong and rigid Catholic faith. This searingly honest and well written family history will be my Christmas gift to my most cosmopolitan friends, many of whom now also are "dancing on a volcano" of global uncertainty. 

10.31.09.  Amazon.  "Fascinating Family Saga.  Five-star review from Marianne J. Skeen (Decatur, GA).  "This unvarnished account of a multi-national family with strong historic ties to Atlanta provides a personal window into the turbulent times of the 20th century. The volcano erupts and it's not always pretty, but always intriguing, especially when viewed from the family perspective. I meant to read just a bit more while finished a cup of coffee after breakfast, but ended up reading the second half straight through! I found it a bit slow at the beginning, but it really gained momentum when the author's personal reflections began to dominate. It's both a thoroughly researched history and fascinating tale."

10.31.09.  Amazon.  "A Must Read."  Five-star review by Alexander Shapleigh (Massachusetts). "We Were Dancing on a Volcano is a compelling read from start to finish. It traces the coming together of two extended families in Atlanta and France over five generations, against the backdrop of the emergence of Atlanta after the Civil War, the fast money and wealth of the Gilded Age, the Belle Epoque in Paris, the concentration camps of World War II, and the author's coming of age in Vietnam and as a journalist.  As pure history, one is drawn from chapter to chapter in anticipation of what will be the fate of each generation on both continents (and a third -- South America also enters the story). As pure, and emotionally charged, writing, the real life characters all come vividly onto the scene, backed by thorough research and unmasked conclusions by the author on motivations and outcomes of decisions (and behaviors) of each protagonist.  There is a treasure of history and stories in this book that should resonate with hundreds of thousands of potential readers, who can pick and choose where and how it relates to their own experience, and will leave them contemplating about the roll of the generations, the very real lives that our forebear generations have led, the lives that we are now living, and that those who follow will have in turn."

10.30.09.  "Consistently excites the imagination." Dissection and critique by James Crusselle (Atlanta, GA), in the form of a letter to the author's sister, Eglé.  "I thoroughly enjoyed your brother's book. He has a journalist's instinct for the telling detail, so that he's able to use what he shows us to evoke what he doesn't. When he has no way of knowing what happened, and has to speculate, he's scrupulous about letting us know that that's what he's doing, and he does it with a tact and intelligence that opens up the subject. By having the wit to tell us, for instance, what the various historical terms for alcoholism were, he even gets by with such currently fashionable diagnoses as post traumatic stress disorder (a real howler, I think) and, of course, alcoholism. We get a sense of a problem larger, as he points out, than anyone has yet been able to define properly and solve. We get a sense of the mystery of how clinical data actually function in people's lives (to the extent that they do). Terms like these tell us less than they're popularly thought to mean, and too neatly close off the subject. They don't in this case because the author's mind is always at work exploring the possibilities in the people he's writing about, and in the use of language. It's a gesture of what can only be called love, and not in the sentimental popular sense but in the sense of accepting the potential of one's self in others and vice versa. (This is not always a happy discovery -- especially, I'm afraid, when the others are relatives.) Having read some truly terrible attempts at this sort of thing, I know just about every way his book could have gone wrong. It doesn’t.

"Since your grandmother provided so much of this material, it may seem inevitable that she's its center – even when she's offstage; but she does it by force of personality. Even when she's in the background, we wonder about the effect on her of everything that happens. She was the right choice for a central figure, and the recurring pattern of fortunes won and lost, which the book shrewdly sets in motion in the first chapter, provides such a solid, expressive structure that the narrative never rambles.  The author doesn’t overanalyze the key moments or prod us to respond.  He doesn’t need to, because he’s drawn us into his speculative approach to the material; he invites us to participate; we get a sense of discovery.  (For me, at least, the image of your father asleep outside on the ground and of your brother Miguel helping him up to bed is one of those great, wounding moments that says everything.)  The simplicity of the presentation gives it tragic dignity.  I realize that the final chapters of We Were Dancing on a Volcano must be painful for the family, but they have, if you'll forgive me, their own sweeping dramatic logic. The book brings us so close to the people that we'd feel insulted for them, I think, if it handed us the usual easy gratifications. Satyajit Ray's artistry prepares us for gratifications other than what we expect from ordinary popular entertainment, and in its own way I think this book does too. It does the almost unheard-of for this kind of project: it consistently excites the imagination. This is a demonstration or such subtle sensibility that I can't exactly see how the author brought it off; it can't have been conscious. It's a sustained expression of respect for the subject.

"Your brother suggested that the women here often overshadow the men; but extraordinary as the women are, I don't think that's exactly what happens. As he's organized the material, it's full of disturbing, reverberant images: your grandmother's quietly not lingering at the dinner table during those boisterous discussions, your skipping the debutante scene and going off to study art in Paris, your father's not too corporal application of military discipline, those hikes in the mountains, his death in his son's arms.  The author’s most aesthetically impressive achievement here is that he’s reached the point of responding to the material intuitively.  (Some of us remember from the Art Department how difficult that can be to achieve.)  If he hadn’t, these details wouldn’t work as beautifully as they do, and possibly not at all. They feel unplanned, spontaneous, and yet arrive just when they’re most needed to sum up his themes.  Though he admits to having known your grandmother only as a rather remote and indecipherable figure, his portrait of her comes close to justifying his opinion that the women tend to dominate the book. In many ways they do; they're not weaklings, to put it mildly -- but then neither are the men.

"Your grandmother had an obviously phenomenal capacity for enjoyment, and for practicality, and though we always understand that France and its troubles must have been real to her in ways Atlanta wasn't, quite, she seems eager and delighted to find something good wherever she goes. (So what if her tolerance didn't extend to Gertrude Stein? Mine doesn't either.) The way Atlanta "society" and the local papers sucked up to her and kept desperately turning her into a countess made me squirm with embarrassment for Atlanta (then and now), but I couldn't help noticing that she accepted this, too, without looking down her nose at it. That same open-handed but not really naive acceptance of experience and new places sets much of the tone of this book, so that in a way her presence dominated the book signing as well. The family the author describes seems perfectly functional because she's at least one of the sources of the spirit that holds it together. Your father is another. The description of his acceptance of financial trouble, and his taking jobs wherever he could find them, would be admirable enough even if we didn't have your Uncle Charlic to compare him to; and when his withdrawal into himself begins, we may almost feel that, family man or no, he's earned the right to it.

"Your father, to whom the author was obviously much closer than to her, emerges as a great, unsettling character, torn between love for his family and his increasingly compelling need for isolation. Difficult as it is to search out a personality one didn't relate to very much, achieving the objectivity to do justice to those one knew best is even harder.  Your father's conflicts with himself would probably speak to more men than you might suspect. Your brother's success in doing justice to what your father suffered -- in accepting his humanity rather than simply his role as protector and head of the household -- is a rebuke I can appreciate.  When our parents fail us, we may, as their children, hate their guts; and even if we don't, we may recognize that our survival (psychologically at least) depends on distancing ourselves from them. But we are spoiled babies if we don't face the fact, at some point, that our parents had a life, with or without us -- and why shouldn't they have? Your family comes across as a triumphant example of what can happen when people achieve that awareness and go on to do something with their lives. What moved me most about the narrative is that that other fashionable term, dysfunctional family, really doesn't seem to end up applying to the situation at all.

"I might be more tolerant of the dysfunctional family concept if I knew how a functional family would behave. (Like the Waltons, presumably, and who wants that?) It occurred to me while watching the gathering at the book signing that what I was seeing is not what dysfunctional means. We Were Dancing on a Volcano, and that book signing reception, too, showed me how a family can in fact function and achieve a great deal under disruptive circumstances. That's part of the reason why I think the publishers who decided it didn't have broad enough appeal made a bonehead mistake.

"The narrative does get sketchier toward the end than one might like; but this is actually a compliment to the strength of the storytelling. We can sense the author's rush to get it finished, and we're not in that much of a hurry: we want to know more about how these people accomplished what they did. Publishing has changed so much that reaching a responsive public may no longer depend on working with a big publishing house (or trying to). This book deserves to be read, and could mean something, I think, to a large audience. I hope it gets the chance to do so. I found it so disquieting that I slept very badly after reading it; and this isn't just a question of the gruesome parts but of the many instances of family solidarity as well. After exposure to people that intensely alive, who wants to sleep? There's too much else to get up and do.

10.26.09. Amazon. Five-star review from Lucy Bartlett (Tiger, GA). "Well-researched and compellingly written, this book is a must read. Particularly, the material about Mr. Gatins' father's time in the POW camps during World War II bring to life the conditions in these camps that even a degree in history didn't give me. One is able to feel the horror of the POW camps through Mr. Gatins' vivid descriptions of his father's time there as well as be inspired by his grandmother's devotion to the work of the Red Cross and in sending the care packages to the POWs. To have written so honestly about the history of his family, warts and all, gives the reader real insight into life in France and in Atlanta during almost 150 years. I strongly recommend this book, particularly to students of the history of the World Wars and to those who need to understand Post-traumatic stress syndrome."

10.25.09. Amazon. Five-star review from Betty Booker Morriss (Richmond, VA). "I'm a huge fan of real stories about real people, especially families. Joe tells all, only his relatives are far more interesting characters than most families' kinfolk, including mine. The Gatinses are Wall Street and Southern wheeler-dealers, a World War II French Resistance fighter and a POW escapee thrown into ever-more-hellish stalags (no Greatest Generation vet should miss these gripping tales), heiresses, Irish immigrants and high society and Spanish relatives by way of Spain, Mexico, England, France and the US. They all live life to the fullest -- and sometimes a little too much and suffer the consequences. But they endure through the generations.  Joe reports on the whole thing with respect and unstinting truth-telling. I read half of it in one sitting, and finished up the next day! Kudos and highly recommended."

10.25.09. Amazon. Four-star review from Cynthia Stacey (Highlands, NC). "Joe's book delivers a piece of history through his personal accounting of his family's lineage that otherwise would not have been available. It is of particular interest to those with connections to Atlanta. The voice of his Grandmother is that of a strong and independent woman who lived through tumultuous as well as enlightening times. We are fortunate that Joe has taken the time to research and share these bloodlines and fault lines with us. The imagery is strong throughout the book and I think it would make for a great movie. I also can't wait for the audio book so I can hear all the wonderful French and other inflections spoken by the author himself."

10.20.09. Amazon. Four-star review from P. Howell. "Compelling story. Well-written and entertaining. I just finished reading We were Dancing on a Volcano and found it to be a compelling story that describes the profound impact of major world events on a far-flung, eclectic family. I was particularly moved by the lives of the women in this family. This book made me realize that we all have stories to tell and that we will never know our place in history until much later. Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in Atlanta history. Gatins has woven together his personal story with well-documented research and I truly couldn't put it down!"

10.18.09: Amazon. Five-star review from Alicia M. Scotti, NY, NY. "Debut Biography That is a MUST-READ. This is a must-read family biography that is simultaneously blunt, profane, sweet, tender and true-to-life, and that depicts some remarkable women and lovely (but not-always-nice) men over more than five generations of life, love and war. Joseph Gatins weaves a wonderful story with ease and style of this fascinating family, you cannot put it down."

10.01.09. From the book blurb by Dr. John C. Inscoe, Editor, The New Georgia Encyclopedia. “Joseph Gatins boasts a remarkable family tree, and chronicles their dramatic ups and downs with great verve and insight in this very aptly titled We Were Dancing on a Volcano. It’s a narrative full of memorable characters – from the Irish brothers who first came to Atlanta in 1849, to a great-grandfather whose gambling operations in New York City provided the wealth with which he built and operated the Georgian Terrace Hotel, to his one-armed grandfather and the French heiress who married him, to his father’s harrowing experience in and ultimate escape from German POW camps during the Second World War, and his romance in the midst of it all with Gatins’ mother, daughter of Colombian ex-patriates in Paris. Through their lives and those of other ancestors, equally colorful, Gatins makes this as much a rich social history of Atlanta – and early twentieth century Paris – as it is a compelling family saga.”