Cool War, Feldman - B

                                          The author is a professor at Harvard Law and brings a very cerebral, thoughtful analysis to the geostrategic issue of the 21st century:  China v. the US.  Conflict is almost inevitable as one country seeks to replace the other as the wealthiest, most powerful in the world. Within recent memory, the rise of Germany and then Japan led to catastrophic wars. The rise of the US was of no concern to Great Britain, because of their shared values and economic interdependence.  But that is hardly the model for the rise of China, as it and the US appear to have virtually nothing in common except a financial interdependency. The degree of that interdependency, though, is extraordinary and the likely reason that the author cites for arguing that the challenges can be managed.  We purchase 25% of China's output and they own 8% of our debt.  That is higher than the  degree of mutual involvement that the UK had with Germany or even the US one hundred years ago. The two major issues that can upset China's peaceful rise are Taiwan and human rights. The Chinese believe Taiwan is part of their country, and the author suggests it is only a matter of time before it is brought back into the fold. The Taiwanese do not currently wish to be part of the mainland, and we are allies of Taiwan. Feldman believes that at some stage an 'accommodation' will have to be made. We will back off and the Taiwanese will be afforded some significant self-governing latitude.  Our messianic belief in imposing our values on others will also require an 'accommodation'  of a bit less interference on our part along with additional personal freedoms in China.  He points out some similarities of consequence between the two countries. The most important is that each has a government that peaceably hands over power to the next in line. Along with its rise, China has forsaken its dictatorship. The author closes with optimism. "The cool war will not be over in a generation. But the generation that inherits it will understand its contours much better and can shape the global future with greater confidence and skill."

Stolen Souls, Neville - B

                                          This author specializes in really, really bad people in and around Belfast.  There are hardened, vicious traffickers in woman from Lithuania; stupid, brutal local thugs; a serial killing madman from England; and dishonest local cops. Pitted against them is Detective Jack Lennon, who is a member of the Police Services of Northern Ireland, which means that if you're Catholic, you are now shunned by everyone you ever knew. To further complicate Lennon's life, his wife was murdered in a previous book and her family is trying to get his daughter from him. Also, Lennon has an enemy in the Intelligence Services, who keeps trying to get him knocked off. The central character about whom the story is built is Gayla,  from Ukraine, who thought she was going to the EU for a decent job.  Trafficking in young women from behind the old Iron Curtain must be a huge issue, as it frequently comes up in mysteries from the EU.  Lennon saves her from both the Lithuanians and the serial killer, but not himself from the duplicitous local police, and he winds up with a bullet in a shoulder. An awful lot of people get shot, but not Lennon's nemesis, thus assuring a budding series.

Brother Kemal, Arjouni - C

                                          This is the last in a German series, set in Frankfurt, about Kemal Kayanaka, a German of Turk parentage and a wise-cracking PI. The author passed away earlier this year in his late forties. Marilyn Stasio, the NY Times book editor for the Crime  section recommended it; I follow her column carefully, thoughtfully and use it as the basis of many of my purchases. This' however, did not resonate with me, as the plot was straightforward and there was virtually no background on either Frankfurt or the Turkish minority in Germany.

A Disease In The Public Mind, Fleming - B

                                          The title of the book is from a comment by President Buchanan about John Brown's Raid, which he referred to as  "an incurable disease in the public mind".  The subtitle is 'A New Understanding Of Why We Fought The Civil War'.  The disease was intense antipathy, visceral public opinion, and bitter sectional rivalries that led to hatred between the North and South.  The differences stemmed back to the beginning of the Colonies, continued through the creation of the nation, and were exacerbated by just about every national decision. The North was opposed to the Louisiana Purchase because it viewed it as an extension of the Virginia slaveocracy and a diminution of the power of New York and New England, who were losing their preeminence to the Virginians. The North was so upset with tariff policies and anti-British legislation that they practically boycotted the War of 1812. As for the South, they looked to St. Domingo (Haiti) and lived in fear of race war, after the French were slaughtered by their slaves. Slave rebellions in the Indies after British emancipation inflamed their anxieties. Even if the slaves were freed, no one had any ideas about how to absorb the generally-considered inferior species into society.  Lincoln, as late as 1858, was a believer in exportation  to Africa. The Abolitionists threw fuel on the fire and called the psychopath Brown a "holy martyr". Perhaps the issue of slavery could only be resolved by war when politics could not solve the problem or delay it further. Certainly, by 1860, feelings were too high for any other solution.

A Hologram For The King, Eggers - B

                                          There is something about nuanced, sophisticated writing that eludes my straightforward mind.  I put this book on my list because the author is someone I've read before, and he is a famous graduate of our hometown Lake Forest H.S.  This very brief tale is of a middle-aged man hip deep in nothing but middle-class trouble. He is broke, he is trying to sell the house that he and his ex lived in, he doesn't have his daughter's college tuition money, he owes money left and right for a failed venture that he tried to make a go of, he's occasionally impotent, and he's off on a sales mission to King Abdullah Economic City to try and right the ship.  In essence, he's an American who has been globalized into middling irrelevance and who is throwing a hail Mary pass to save the day.  His outing eventually starts to feel like 'Waiting For Godot', but after ages of waiting, the King eventually shows up.  Trumped by the Chinese, who now buy more oil than we do and can do the job at half the price, he loses the sale, but doesn't give up. The writing is laser sharp, witty, very well-done and thus, this is a good read.
                                           I then turn to the NYTimes review and learn that I've missed at least half the book. Within a few paragraphs, the reviewer compares Eggers to Miller, Mailer, DeLillo, and Hemingway. "Every detail perfectly advances a vision of American aspirations at a time of economic collapse and mid-life crisis". "It is among other things, an anguished investigation into how and where American self-confidence got lost and - …..defeated". "In places, the book becomes almost a nostalgic lament for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands, knew struggle." "In the end what makes 'A Hologram for the King' is the conviction with which Eggers plunges into the kind of regular working American we don't see enough in contemporary fiction, and gives voice and heft to Alan's struggles in an information economy in which he has no information and there's not much of an economy." "In much the same way, Eggers has developed an exceptional gift for opening up the lives of others so as to offer the story of globalism as it develops and, simultaneously, to unfold a much more archetypal tale of struggle and loneliness and drift."  Whew!  And here I thought Springsteen  had summed it all up when he sang, "the foreman said these jobs are going boys, and they ain't coming back."

Perilous Question, Fraser - C

                                    The subtitle of this brief history book is, 'Reform or Revolution? Britain on the Brink, 1832'.  As someone who has read dozens of British history books, hundreds of novels set in the U.K., has subscribed to a British magazine for over twenty years, seen the entire Shakespeare canon on stage, in the movies, and on video, watched innumerable BBC series, studied the common law, and lord know what else, I, like I suspect most Americans, still know very little about British democracy.  After the Napoleonic Wars, Britain settled into the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and change was upon the land. People moved to the burgeoning cities, Abolition was considered, even the Catholics were allowed to vote. The Reform crisis came on the heels of famine, bad times, and rioting in Britain. The death of George IV required a general election and a new Parliament. Reform was electoral reform, as the Commons had become thoroughly unrepresentative of the country.  There were dozens of 'rotten boroughs' where there were Members and very few voters. The most famous of these was Old Sarum, empty since 1217, yet still with two members, while Birmingham and its thousands of workers was without one. The Tories, led by Wellington and with one eye on France where the Bourbons had just been deposed for a second time were in opposition. The Reform Bill carried the Commons three times and failed its first two readings in the House of Lords.  When the Iron Duke and all twenty-three of the Anglican Bishops abstained, the bill carried the Lords and was signed into law by William IV.  From almost two centuries, the modest changes and slight expansion of the electorate (from 3.2% to 4.7%, of a nation of 16 million) hardly seem that dramatic. But, as the author points out,  this reform led to substantial change throughout the century.

The Son, Meyer - B+

                                         This is a wonderful novel, one of the NY Times' 100 Notable Books of the Year.   It is a Texas-sized book and story about the fictional McCullogh clan.  There is one character so fabulously portrayed, such a grizzled fella of the old west, that I thought of Larry McMurtry and put on the soundtrack to 'Lonesome Dove'.  That man is Eli McCullogh, and the opening chapter is presented as a WPA oral project from the year 1936.  The hundred-year-old Eli is telling his story, and what a tale it is.  He was captured as a ten-year- old by the Comanches and was with them for four years.  As he was an outdoor-loving hunter and tracker, he overcame the  pain of losing his family and eventually fit right in as an Indian. He accompanied them on raids, and successfully tracked down a white man and scalped him. He was never freer or happier than when a young brave.  The Indians, though, were under relentless demographic pressure and when they succumbed to smallpox, he returned to the white man's world.  And although it took him decades to be comfortable in that world, he nonetheless prospered. He was a brevet Col. in the Texas Rangers during the Civil War, ran cattle, and ultimately accumulated hundreds of thousands of acres of land. He success stemmed from being ruthless and tough. His approach to preventing rustling on his lands was simple. If someone unauthorized rode onto McCullogh land, he was a dead man. Later, he leased some of his land to the oil companies and just got richer and richer. His Spanish neighbors had held their land for decades before any American's had appeared in the valley. When some of his cattle disappeared, he was quite comfortable blaming the Garcias and participating in the slaughter of the 'Mexicans' and the confiscation of their land.  That act, which took place during the Mexican-American border wars just before WW1, would haunt his grandson and great-granddaughter, the other two major characters in the novel. Additionally, just being a descendant of the Col. was a pretty heavy burden to bear.  This is a wonderful tale of old Texas, an exploration of the never-ending role of race in our society, and a helluva read.

Glorious Misadventures, Matthews - B

                                          This is a very well written history of Nikolai Rezanov, a Russian courtier and nobleman who attempted to solidify Russia's position on the northwest coast of North America. Furs, the 'soft gold' of the pre-industrial era, drove the French into Canada, and the Russians across Siberia into present day Alaska, British Colombia, and as far south as California. The pursuit of, and trade in,  animal pelts was one of the major commercial enterprises of its day and was the reason men crossed the northern tiers of the American and Asian wilds. Rezanov received a charter and funding from the Tsar in 1799 to create the Russian American Company, modeled on the British East India Company, the extraordinarily successful commercial enterprise that conquered for profit. Russia had scattered trading posts in North America, and Rezanov dreamed of expanding them and establishing true colonies. More of a dreamer than a man of talent, he failed utterly, although he actually sailed into San Francisco Bay and spent five weeks treating with the Spanish. He died in Siberia on his way back to St. Petersburg. When the Mexicans achieved independence, they offered Northern California to Russia in exchange for recognition.  Russia declined and sold its interests in America to the US in 1867. This sale was accomplished after the British refused to buy for Canada. The story is rather thin and the author explains how he came upon it. During his sabbatical in San Francisco, Rezanov proposed to the daughter of the garrison's commander. The romance of Rezanov and Conchita has been lauded in poem and novel in both English and Russian and in the USSR's first rock opera. Matthews saw 'Junona I Avos' as a teenager in 1986 in Moscow. Laden with hard American rock and Orthodox religious chants, it was still garnering fifteen minute standing ovations five years after it opened.

Altai, Ming - C +

                                          This book is presented as the sequel to 'Q', although there is but one very tenuous connection.  The authors have even changed their pseudonym.  The story opens with an explosion at the Arsenal in Venice.  One of the Doge's spies, a Catholic hiding his Jewish heritage, is falsely accused and escapes to Constantinople.  We are treated to some fine background information about the Fourth Venetian-Ottoman war, the siege and occupation of Cyprus by the Turks, and the Battle of Lepanto. Sadly for our main character, he is captured and returned to his beloved St. Mark's Square, where the axe awaits all heretics and traitors. Like its predecessor, this book provides insight to a very different and far away time - but, does so with too many twists and turns for me.

Steve Jobs, Isaacson - B +

                                          This is a superb book about an extraordinary man. I started this when it came out in 2012 and put it down (actually - removed it from the carousel on my Kindle Fire). The reason was that I was totally disgusted by his personal conduct, which requires hundreds of descriptive adjectives to try and summarize.  Suffice it to say, I wasn't interested in reading about a guy like that. Marcella recently suggested I give it another try and I'm glad I did.  Once you get through his early years (that is not to say he ever mellowed) and get to some of his accomplishments, his genius, skills, vision, and focus dazzle the mind. His founding of Apple and his commitment to his philosophies about what a computer company should be made him world famous before he was thirty. He was eventually fired at the company he founded and then floundered through NeXT and stumbled onto Pixar.  It was at Pixar where he developed the maturity and skills that would carry him through his second run at Apple. What he wrought is legendary, and Isaacson says that 100 years from now he will be remembered the way we remember Edison and Ford. Although there has been much hyperbole about the man and his recent untimely death, I agree with the author. Jobs himself wanted to emulate Edwin Land and Walt Disney and create lasting businesses and cultures. I can't help but think about how much more successful American businesses would be if their executives had a fraction of his focus on the quality, and his involvement in all phases, of  the products they were creating, building, and selling.  Perhaps it is naive to think that for-profit businesses could be that focused on quality without compromise, but he and Apple certainly made plenty of profits.  This is  a great  book, and I  believe the world is certainly a better place because of Steve Jobs.

The Gods of Guilt, Connnelly - B+

                                         Michael Connelly is one of the most all-time fun thriller/mystery/procedural novelists out there. I love his stuff and read them as soon as they arrive on my kindle - this one showed up yesterday.  Most of his books are about LA cop Harry Bosch, but this is the latest in his burgeoning 'Lincoln Lawyer' series about Mickey Haller.  Mick is hired to defend a cyber-pimp accused of killing a prostitute.  The client claims a frame-up, and an investigation shows that that is the likely truth. Proving it will involve uncovering a DEA-managed plot that ran for over a decade.  Mickey's cast of supporting characters -  his driver, his law clerk, his secretary and his investigator play prominent roles. A trip to a state prison about two hours north of the city is the only time they leave the environs of LA.  The courtroom closing is page-turner and as always, justice is done.

Midnight In Peking, French - B

                                         The author is a British resident of Shanghai, specializing in inter-war Chinese history and present day analysis of Chinese affairs for western publications.  This book is sub-titled 'How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China.'  I think it might better be characterized as haunting her father and embarrassing Old China.  Nonetheless, it is an international best seller, an Edgar Award winner, and is slated for a television mini-series. In January 1937, on the eve of the Japanese conquest of China and initiation of WW2, 19-year-old Pamela Werner was brutally slaughtered in Peking.  Her father was the retired British consul, which meant that a British policeman was required to liaise with the local Peking police. The embarrassment stems from the fact that no one really seemed to want the murder solved.  We learn later that it was committed by a cabal of ruthless psychopaths, a few Americans and a few Europeans, who committed the murder in a White Russian brothel, where they took the young woman after kidnapping her. The inquiries conducted in the winter of 1937 were thwarted by both the British and local authorities. The Brits seemed to be more concerned about protecting the reputation of a seedy school principal, at whose residence Pamela had resided. After they learned that he was a bad apple, they rushed him home to England. Plus, the victim's dad was an eccentric old man, who absolutely no one liked. The whole aim of Chinese justice appears to have been to sweep the crime under the rug and forget about it. In any case, it was quickly forgotten because the Japanese  invaded and occupied the old Imperial capital.  Consul Werner never gave up and solved the case, but was not able to have the perpetrators arrested because war, and then revolution, intervened.  The author discovered the story when he found that the wife of Edgar Snow, the noted journalist who introduced Mao to the world in 'Red Star Over China', feared that the murderers may have been looking for her.  She lived two doors down from the victim and she and Snow feared that the Kuomintang's version of the Gestapo was after them.  The book's success is undoubtedly attributed to the writer's skill and his insight into a forgotten world. China entered WW2 a failed state, suffering from an unresolved decades long civil war, and without a meaningful governing system.

Then We Take Berlin, Lawton - B

                                          This is a really fun novel, set in Berlin, that opens and closes on the day of JFK's "Ich Bin Ein Berliner' speech in June, 1963. I was not aware that the speech was on the 15th anniversary of the Airlift and that the Soviets shrouded the Brandenburg Gate in red.  Joe Holderness, retired from the R.A.F. Intelligence section, is hired by a former (maybe?) C.I.A. colleague to get someone out of East Berlin.  It's necessary to use contacts and information Joe developed during his post-war years as a leader of Berlin's black market. Joe's background in wartime London, as the grandson and trainee of a second-story man is enlightening, as is the story of his girlfriend's surviving in 1945 Berlin. Their stories are a lead into a detailed study of the black market, fueled by American goods and partaken in by the Germans, British, and Russians. The author has done some serious research, provides a detailed bibliography and, most interestingly, has a six book series that I think I'll look into.

Last Ape Standing, Walters - B--

                                          This is brief bit of pop-paleoanthropology that tells the seven million year story of the 27 proto-human species that have inhabited the planet.  The author devises a calendar that converts all of human evolution to a one year period and provides insight and background to the twenty-six species that preceded us.  My single most important takeaway is a confirmation of a hunch I had 25-30 years ago. Around the time of the publication of the book 'Lucy' at the height of the discussions about the Rift Valley, the Leakey's, the anti-Leakey's, the out of Africa theories etc. I remember thinking that there was an awful lot of conclusiveness based on bits of fossilized bone.  The increasing sophistication of dna testing has blown the entire school of study out of the water. The elaborate family trees and discussions of where this australo____  or that homo____  group fell has been upended.  It's pretty clear that there was extensive overlap all over the planet, and most striking of all, we share genes with the Neanderthals.  The Neanderthals were here for 200,000 years and overlapped with us (we think) for 25,000 years.  They were primarily in Europe, and we were down to a few hundred souls in southern Africa when we started our march toward the future.  They were bigger than us, stronger than us, and even had a larger brain than we do. Nonetheless, we out-survived them and, lo and behold, apparently mated with them. Most of us carry 1-4% of Neanderthal dna in us. Going back to that calendar, our arrival 70,000 years ago translates to a start date of 12/27.

The Big Crowd, Baker - B+

                                         Kevin Baker writes extraordinary historical novels about New York City that have an amazing ability to place the reader fully in the time and place of the story.  In 'Paradise Alley', he explored the world of the Irish immigrants in the Five Corners during the 1863 draft riots.  He followed up with 'Dreamland' about the Jewish experience on the Lower East Side and in Coney Island at the turn of the 20th century. Those are both wonderful books; but this is the icing on the cake for me.  It's about the Brooklyn and Manhattan docks that my father worked on when he came back from WW2.  The docks were a rough and tumble place of violence, crime, and deceit. This is the story of Charlie and Tom O'Kane, Irish immigrant brothers, the first of whom went from hod carrier, to cop, to lawyer, to Judge, to Brooklyn D.A., and to Mayor. O'Kane is depicted as an almost exact replica of the real life Mayor O'Dwyer. In order to climb that ladder, he had to compromise a bit along the way with the powers that be who ran the city.  Those powers included the Church, represented here by the real-life Francis Cardinal Spellman;  the mob, represented by Frank Costello; the International Longshoreman's Association and it's president-for-life Joe Ryan; the omnipotent Robert Moses; and a host of other historical personages, who feel like they were dreamed up by a novelist. The central event is the defenestration from a Coney Island hotel of Abe Reles, a hit man for Murder, Incorporated.  Abe had turned state's evidence and had helped put dozens behind bars. He was about to squeal on Frankie Anastasia when he flew from a seven story window, surrounded by half a dozen sleeping cops who were guarding 'the Rat's Suite'. The crime was never solved and Baker offers a possible answer in this book.  The author says, "My goal was to depict New York City in all of the gaudy glory of its postwar heyday, and to sift to the bottom of what remain to this day some of its worst and most mysterious public scandals."  He does the job so well that I have noted six or seven of the books he cites in his bibliography and will likely give them a once over. For those of us who wonder about the world that formed us and  who love New York, this is a must read.

Sycamore Row, Grisham - B

                                         I'm not certain John Grisham created the genre of the legal thriller, but he certainly over the last thirty years has excelled like no one else.  Taut courtroom drama, fascinating plots and an insight into the deep south are Grisham's standard themes, as they are in this novel set back in Ford County and featuring Jake Brigance from 'A Time To Kill'. Matt McConaughey played Jake in the movie and you can picture him swagger through some of the scenes in this book.  Other characters such as the the sheriff and Jake's drunken lawyer landlord are also back.  The drama is set around a holographic will written on a Saturday, by a man who hung himself after church on Sunday.   Seth Hubbard seemed to have testamentary capacity, but why would he leave the largest fortune in the county to his black housekeeper?  Enjoy the read.

Choosing War, Logevall - A*

                                          Like many of my era, my foreign policy assessments are haunted by Vietnam, the war that killed classmates, friends, 58,000 Americans, and millions of Asians. In the long run, our failure there did not change our strategy, nor did it prevent us from prevailing in the Cold War.  Nonetheless, the world, and certainly the United States would have been far better off had we not tried to 'save' Vietnam.
                                          This book, which was published by a Swedish-born University of California, Santa Barbara professor in 1999 goes to the top of my personal bibliography on Vietnam.  'The Best and the Brightest' by David Halbertstam, 'The Fire In The Lake' by Frances Fitzgerald, 'A Bright And Shining Lie' by Neil Sheehan and this author's 'The Embers Of War' have, heretofore, been the foundations of my opposition to Vietnam.  Much of the writing about the war focuses on the three years from March 1965 until March 1968, when LBJ initiated and then, gave up on the war that, among other things, destroyed his presidency.  There is another body of work that focuses on the Nixon years.  This book is about the run-up to those fateful years, and covers the time frame from August 1963 until March 1965. This is when, in the face of near unanimous international condemnation and significant domestic opposition, we decided to 'man up'  and fight another ground war in southeast Asia.  The author emphasizes the abject hopelessness of trying to fight a war upon the foundation of a war-weary south lacking the political will, structure, or even desire to compete with the north. It is as if we parachuted onto the Titanic as it hit the iceberg and spent years bailing water before the inevitable end.
                                           The opening chapter of the book highlights the prescient, perhaps brilliant, observations of a man few Americans had any interest in paying any attention to.  Charles de Gaulle called for a reopening of the Geneva Conference and assured Americans that neutralization of Vietnam was the only course to pursue.  It would be impossible to prevail militarily when there was no political desire in the south. Apparently, he had learned the lesson that Vietnam was a war of independence against colonial masters, with the US replacing the French.  However, we continued to view the communists in the context of the Cold War.  The Sino-Soviet split and the historic animosity between China and Vietnam did not impact our views of monolithic communism.  For JFK, and later LBJ, it was about credibility with the Soviets and the Republicans.  Neither president could 'lose' Vietnam.  In April of 1963, Kennedy told a reporter, "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to kick our asses out of there at any point. But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the communists and get the people to re-elect me".
                                            Before JFK's death,  Diem fell in a coup, primarily because the Kennedy administration was fretful that his brother-in-law, Nhu, would negotiate a neutralization deal with the north and boot us out.  The political instability is highlighted by the fact Diem was followed first by Khanh, then Huong, then a Khanh-Buddhist alliance and finally Ky in the next year and-a-half.
                                             Unfortunately, one of LBJ's first decisions was to continue with the policy he inherited, and he assured all that he would not 'lose' Vietnam.  1964 was suppose to be an 'off' year as  LBJ did not want Vietnam to figure into the election mix.  He could stop neither the continued failure of the south's government and armed forces, nor the world's desire for another conference. Even the 'dominoes' we were protecting opposed our policies.  In March, MacNamara  wrote up a National Security Advisory Memorandum encouraging escalation, particularly bombing the north.  The severe irony is that there was international and domestic consensus that bombing the north would have zero impact.  The cynical conclusion was that it was no worse than doing nothing.
                                             Throughout the year and even after Tonkin, there was major opposition to escalation in the Senate, on the editorial pages of the Times and from America's most revered columnist, Walter Lippmann.  Johnson told Bundy "I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out."  The author  points to  the election as the pivotal, missed opportunity.  Johnson thumped Goldwater after painting him as a bomb-thrower and repeatedly saying "I am not going to send American boys to fight for Asian boys."  Why he passed up the opportunity in November and December to stand down is attributed by Longevall to his ego and
insecurity.
                                              In February 1965, while Kosygin was in Hanoi and Bundy in Saigon, the Vietcong attacked the Americans at Pleiku, inflicting over 100 casualties.  With American blood shed, the die was cast. The bombing began, Marines came in March to protect the airbases, and, by the end of the year, 180,000 Americans were in Vietnam. Almost a decade later, a Navy Lt. who had received the Navy Cross told a Congressional committee that no one wanted to be the last man to die for a "mistake'.

Tatiana, Cruz-Smith - B

                                          The concept of the aging of characters is something authors treat differently.  It seems that some prefer their characters to be timeless and others let them age.  The frequency of publication is also a consideration.  Ed McBain wrote more than fifty novels in the 87th Precinct series over a fifty-year period.  Perhaps if you were reading them sequentially and annually, the fact that the key characters hardly aged would not be so disconcerting as it was when you read them over, say, five or six years, as I did.  Then you have someone like Martin Cruz-Smith, who first wrote about the idiosyncratic, wise-cracking Moscow detective Arkady Renko in the early eighties.  'Tatiana', though, is only the eighth in the series.  In 'Gorky Park' the Soviet Union was not just still in business, it was at the apogee of its 'evil empire' status.  Well over thirty years later, I have no concept of how old Arkady is, as we see him so infrequently that there is little  continuity of time or place. Additionally, the world he worked in has changed to an unimaginable degree.  Fortunately, Russian cynicism, and corruption remain ripe topics and murder, cover-ups, gangsters, and dishonest politicians make for a great story in this novel.  When a well-known journalist is flung off her balcony in Moscow and it is labelled a suicide, Renko starts to look into the matter.  The trail takes him to the Russian oblast set between Poland and Lithuania, formerly East Prussia, home to military and naval bases and the failing city of Kalingrad. The action moves back and forth between the two cities as Arkady, his chess-playing ward, and a mystery woman figure it all out.  Here, solving the mystery doesn't necessarily mean that justice is served, although it partially is, just that injustice and corruption are deferred.

Identical, Turow - B

                                          When one of the dozen or so writers whom I've read for years comes out with a new book, I generally never read the reviews.  This year, because of this blog, I do check them after I've finished the book, just to see if I've missed something important.  So, it was gratifying to see that one of the Times' noted legal writers came to a similar conclusion about the very skilled Scott Turow's latest venture into Kindle County.  There is the wonderful and warm feeling of familiarity with the place, its corrupt Chicago style politics, and the way he blends in characters from previous novels. Here we see both Raymond Horgan and Sandy Stern in minor roles.  And, Turow remains masterful in courtroom presentations.  This story, though, flagged with overdrawn character backgrounds that left me wondering when the chapter would finish.  Also, the plot is a bit of a stretch at times and strains one's credulity.  I think the conclusion is that he was slightly off his game here, but then again, his game is pretty elevated.

Between Giants, Buttar - C

                                         This book is a history, primarily a military one, of the three Baltic states who were dealt the unplayable geo-strategic hand of being caught between Germany and the USSR in WW2.  Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (from north to south) lie west of heavy forests and marshes and east of the Baltic Sea.  To the north-east is Russia and to the south was East Prussia.  All three were part of the Russian Empire and entered the 20th century with a strong desire for independence and a deep antipathy for Russia. After WW1 and the Russian Civil War, they found themselves independent countries.  Although frequently lumped together, they are different in important ways. The Estonians are linguistically connected to the Finns, and both they and the Latvians are Protestant and were heavily German. Lithuania is Catholic and was heavily Polish.  All three were occupied after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and suffered the indignity of being forced to 'apply' to become members of the USSR.  General Plan-Ost called for the liquidation of 85% of the Lithuanians and half of the Estonians and Latvians, with the goal of being completely Germanized in twenty years. Within two months of the launch of Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, they were completely overrun.
                                        Each country had a disparate Jewish tradition. There were only 4,000 Jews in Estonia, but Lithuania had hundreds of thousands and, indeed, Vilnius was called 'The Jerusalem of the North' because of tis tradition as a home to Jewish studies and culture.  Unfortunately for the Jews of the Baltic, as well as those of Belarus and the Ukraine, the Wehrmacht were handmaidens of the SS's Einsatzgruppen. Systematic slaughter by handgun and rifle  ensued.  In January 1942, a more efficient approach using xyklon-B was approved by Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference.  All three nationalities pitched in on initiating the Holocaust and signed up for a uniform.  The more trusted Estonians and Latvians were afforded the opportunity to create SS battalions; the less trustworthy Lithuanians, police battalions.
                                      As the focus of the book is military, the author skips over 1942-3 in a paragraph and moves on to the Russian re-conquest.  That is, of course, his prerogative, but the book seems incomplete for this reason.   The siege of Leningrad was lifted in early 1944 and the Soviets entered Estonia in January.  It was a hard nut to crack. It took the full effort of Operation Bagration, symbolically scheduled by Stalin for June 22 to crack Army Group Centre in Lithuania and isolate Army Group North in Latvia and Estonia. Because Stalin and the Finns were talking cease-fire, Hitler approved the evacuation of Estonia and the Soviets did not occupy Tallinn until Sept. 22, the day after the German walked out.  Riga soon followed and by the end of the year, the Army, now called Army Group Courland, was isolated on the Latvian coast.  The war moved on and the enclave held out to the very end.
                                      The three countries were unquestionably part of the Soviet Union in the post-war settlement because they had been when war broke out between Germany and the USSR.  There was no one to plead their case at any of the post-war councils, and there was certainly very little sympathy for them either. They had fought with the Nazis.   The had fought with the 'bad' guys and then wound up being occupied by the next set of 'bad' guys for four and a half decades.  Their history is at best ambiguous.  Amazingly though, these three countries have gone from 19th century Russian satraps, to 20th century battlegrounds to members of the EU and NATO today.
                                     

Ninety Percent Of Everything, George - B

                                          The title refers to the percentage of the things in our everyday life that come from somewhere else (usually Asia) and are shipped to us on large cargo ships. Our clothes, our shoes, our cars, certainly our electronics, even much of our food is not from the US or, in the case of this author, the UK.  The vast majority of the things we see and touch daily come from somewhere else in our highly globalized world. The reason is simple - it's more cost effective.  My favorite example in the book is Scottish cod. It is actually frozen and shipped to China, where it is filleted, before returning to grocer's shelves in Edinburgh or Glasgow. Trade volume on the oceans has increased fourfold in the last four decades. The value of goods unloaded at American docks has gone up eighty-fold in the last fifty years.  Of the 100,000 cargo ships at sea, it is the 6000 container vessels that do the heavy lifting.  The largest ships can carry 15,000 boxes.  The boxes are called teu's for twenty-foot equivalent units, are transferable to trains and trucks, and have revolutionized the industry.  They can't be opened, thus eliminating 'spillage' and can be moved with much less manpower than old-fashioned cargo.
                                        The author shipped out on a Maersk container ship from England to Singapore, a five week journey of over 6200 nautical miles. One of the points that she hammers home is the plight of the average seaman and the lawlessness of international waters. The Filipinos and Indians, because of their facility with English, are the most desired workers.  They are hired by manning agencies and assigned to ships, usually with a flag of convenience, an owner hidden behind shell company after holding company etc., and managed by someone from somewhere else. As a consequence, there is no country's law that applies to how they are treated while working, cared for if held hostage, or investigated if drowned. A flag of convenience is just that.  Pay Panama some money for their flag and don't worry about anything else.  Piracy, in the headlines and in the movies, is rampant off Somalia and markedly reduced in the Straits of Malacca.  The recession led to much lengthier periods of imprisonment for hostages for a fundamental economic reason: the lease costs for the ships was down so much from the heights of the boom that the operators preferred to wait out the pirates before agreeing to the ransom.  Some of the other fascinating statistics that popped up were: the port of Rotterdam is forty-miles long; sadly, there are 2,000 deaths per year at sea; and the sludge diesel they use has 45,000 ppm (particulates per million), compared to under a 100 for the clean diesel used in todays automobiles (shipped from Germany).

Ratlines, Neville - B

                                          The author is a very skilled and oft-awarded novelist, who resides in Belfast.  His books are set in both the North and the Free State.  Here, the place is Dublin, and the time is the months preceding JFK's June 1963 visit.  Albert Ryan, former British soldier and Member of the Directorate of Intelligence, is tasked with the assignment of getting to the bottom of the assassinations of Nazis hiding in Ireland. The 'ratline' here refers to the various escape routes out of Europe to South America utilized by the Nazis and facilitated by their collaborators.  Unbeknownst to me, the Irish did allow Nazis to come to Ireland and this book centers around  SS Col. Otto Skorzeny, noted for rescuing Mussolini in 1943 from the hands of those who would turn him over to the Allies.  Skorzeny owned property in County Kildare and was befriended by Charles Haughey, later the Irish PM.  Ryan winds up on the wrong side of both Skorzeny and his putative boss, Haughey, as well as the British and Israelis chasing Skorzeny. It's a miracle he survives. But he does, thus resulting in  a fun read.

The Hot Country, Butler - B

                                         This is the first book in a planned series about Kit Cobb, a war correspondent for  a fictional daily in Chicago.  The author previously won a Pulitzer for a collection of short stories, and obviously can tell a good tale. The time frame is a hundred years ago right before the beginning of WWI and the setting is Mexico, where the US had troops on the ground in Vera Cruz and further west, where they were engaging Pancho Villa.  The US was working to keep Germany out of the hemisphere at a time when the Kaiser was trying to establish either colonies or spheres of interest all over the world in an attempt to create an empire compatible with Germany's economic  might.  Cobb is an interesting and very bright fellow, who finds himself tempted to do more than report. When a US agent is throttled by the Germans, he steps in and engages in some spying and fighting of his own.  It's a good read that sheds a bit of light on a forgotten episode in our past.

Former People, Smith - B

                                          The draconian categorization of the aristocracy as 'former people' was indicative of what the Bolshies had in store for the approximate 1.9 million members of what they called the' bourgeois'.  The 1.5% of the population that were aristocrats, nobility, landlords and civil servants of the Russian Empire were unmercifully destroyed by the Soviets.   Lenin said that revolution  "is the incredibly complicated and painful process of the death of the old order and the birth of the new social order".  In this instance, the death of the old order was not figurative, but quite literal.  Half of the bourgeois escaped; the rest perished.
                                          The Russian empire under the hapless Nicholas II was on a downhill slope that steepened after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and the revolts at home in 1905.  The perpetual suppression of the poor exploded in violence, and between early 1908 and mid-1910, there were 20,000 acts of terrorism in Russia. Seven hundred officials and three thousand citizens died. Clearly, the fabric of state was torn long before the war, which led to four-and a-half million casualties. After the February Revolution, the mobs began to sack the homes of the rich and indiscriminately punish and execute them.  When the Reds took over in October, the attacks became systematic and, with all caution thrown to the wind, the peasants joined in. During the three-year Civil War (1918-21), there were an additional 10 million deaths.  Private property, particularly the financial and real estate assets of the wealthy, was confiscated by the state. Because of loyalty to the Empire, almost everyone had all of their assets at home and not in any European safe-havens. Those who survived were deprived of any citizenship rights, and many wound up in the burgeoning Gulag.  Stalin's first five-year plan and his later show trials were the final straws.  The history of Russia in the last century is an appalling spectacle of violence and atrocious governance, of which this is a modest chapter.

Solo, Boyd - B

                                          Half a century after the death of Ian Fleming, the esteemed William Boyd sets out to pen a 007 novel and, for my money, he succeeds.  It's more of a thriller than a spy novel, and is set in Africa in 1969.  Bond is tasked with the assignment of stopping a civil war by eliminating the leader of the rebellious provinces.  As it turns out, the chief dies, the war is resolved in favor of the UK's preferred side and James is pretty seriously shot up.  After he recovers, he decides to go 'solo' for his revenge and trails the shooters to Washington, D.C.  With some help from his old friend Felix Leiter, he discovers that perhaps the ending of the African civil war was not as it seemed.  He uncovers a drug smuggling ring and helps restore the apparent good guy to his rightful position in Africa, where he can sign oil leases that benefit the US and the UK.  A bit of revenge, and fun was, of course, had along the way.

Bunker Hill, Philbrick - B

                                         This is the telling of the story of Boston and its environs in the two-and-a-quarter years between the Tea Party in December of 1773 and the British evacuation of the city on March 17, 1776.  The most fascinating aspect of the book is the portrayal of the Americans as they transition from loyal subjects of the King to rebels. "The patriots had not wanted to create something new; they had wanted to preserve the status quo-the essentially autonomous community they had inherited from their ancestors-in the face of British attempts to forge a modern empire".  The Americans felt they were loyal subjects of the King, true Englishmen, covetous of their natural and God given freedoms, which they were unwilling to forego by paying Parliament's taxes. That those taxes were imposed to help pay for the imperial efforts in The French and Indian War was not a position acceptable to the Americans.
                                       The Bostonians were always somewhat detached from the motherland --after all, they were the descendants of religious emigres who had taken the drastic step of moving to Holland and the New World over theological differences. The British response to the Tea Party was a determined effort to punish and control the colony.  The new governor was Thomas Gage, who closed the port, implemented the Coercive Acts, and was met with a boycott of British goods. By the middle of 1774, Boston was cut off from the rest of the colony, which was in a state of outright civil disobedience.  Barricaded in the city with 3,000 troops, Gage asked for 20,000 more. He was instructed by London "to do something" to preserve the King's honor and he choose to try to confiscate the Americans' store of shot and powder at Concord. The sally to and from Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775  ended with 49 dead colonials and 64 dead British regulars.  Nine thousand citizens left the city which, before the later filling in of the Back Bay, was an isthmus with a narrow southern neck of land attached to the mainland. Fearing that the British would attempt to take Bunker Hill in Charleston, the Americans struck first. Overnight, they constructed defenses, which the British attacked on June 17th. The Americans were evicted, but at a heavy cost.  The British casualties were two-and-a-half times that of the defenders.  A few weeks later Washington arrived and a long, relatively inactive, siege began. When Henry Knox arrived from Lake Champlain with artillery, the Americans began firing, and the new commander, Gen. William Howe, struck a deal with Washington. If allowed to peaceably depart, they would not burn the city.  Months later, America declared her independence.

Police, Nesbo - B

                                          This is the ninth in the Harry Hole series, and here we find our alcoholic detective on a very positive upswing. He's not drinking, and he and Rakel are doing very well. Harry now is lecturer at the Police college and no longer involved with the investigations that drive him over the edge. However, a serial murderer of police is enough to pull him back in. He handles the pressure and, of course, solves the case.

Q, Blissett - B

                                          This sprawling, very long and quite good historical novel was written by a group of four Italian men  in 1999.   It has been lauded  throughout Europe for its scope and breathtaking creativity, and critiqued for its attempt to blend the vernacular into 16th century dialogue. As it provides fascinating insight and background to the first forty years of the Reformation on the continent, and has left an opening for a sequel, I look forward to the follow-up.
                                          The Q of the title is the nom de guerre of a spy in the employ of the Inquisition.  His story is told through letters to his sponsor, Cardinal Carafa, later Pope Paul IV.  Quelling heresy, hounding and slaughtering heretics, and suppressing subversive literature are the primary responsibilities of the Inquisition and of Q, whose full name is Quoelet.  Q infiltrates and betrays Lutheran and  Anabaptist sects throughout Germany, the Netherlands, and ultimately in Venice.  Carafa, on the other hand, is playing a game of three dimensional chess focused on restraining the Hapsburg emperors, and is willing to work with the French, the Lutherans, and the Sultan to accomplish his goals.  The narrator of the story, and the man Q hounds for thirty years is an Anabaptist named Gert.  He is a fighter, organizer, preacher, and perhaps more than anything else, a survivor. The most enlightening bit of background information has to do with the Reformation more as a social or economic action than as an doctrinal one.

The Decision To Intervene, Kennan - B

                                          This book is Part II of 'Soviet-American Relations 1917-1920' and the follow-up to  'Russia Leaves The War', reviewed here in May.   Chaos, confusion, paranoia and delusion dominate this tale of Allied intervention in the vast reaches of Russia, barely under the  control of Moscow and linked by telegraph wire.  After Brest-Litovsk, the Allies faced the full fury of the Germans on the western front and sought any relief possible.  One source of help that the Allies focused on were the 1.6 million former prisoners of the Central powers, now displaced persons in Russia.   In particular, the Czechs and Slovaks wanted to fight the Germans, as they were unwilling participants in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and desirous of achieving freedom for a new country.  Getting the 'Czech Legion' onto the Trans-Siberian Railway out to Vladivostok, where they could be transported to Europe became the pipe dream of the Allied Command and eventually, a poorly thought out strategy.  The Soviets agreed; then Trotsky said they needed to be disarmed. That led to the Czechs rebelling and fighting their way from the Ukraine to Vladivostok.  At one point, they had control of 2500 miles of the railroad. A reluctant Wilson eventually succumbed to Anglo-French pressure and ordered Americans to land at Vladivostok and help the Czechs hook up with their forces stranded at Irkutsk.  By the time the Americans landed, the Czechs had broken through, and more importantly, had decided to fight with the Whites in the Russian Civil War.  The Soviets shipped out the ambassadors of the Allies through Archangel.  The consular staffs had a more difficult time getting from Moscow to Finland.  In the midst of their evacuation, an attempt on Lenin's life led to a Red terror.   US- Soviet relations had gotten off on the wrong foot. Ambassadors would not be exchanged again until 1933.

The Way of The Knife, Mazzetti - B

                                          This is the story of how the CIA, in the words of Director Brennan, no longer used a "hammer", but a "scalpel".  The subtitle of the book is 'The CIA, a Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth'.  A generation ago, under attack from all corners of American society and in particular, the Church Committee, the CIA was prohibited from  assassinating foreign leaders.  That prohibition was lifted by Pres. Bush in the early days of the 'GWOT'.   The CIA latched onto the newly created drones, has utilized them effectively throughout the world  and "....has become a killing machine, an organization consumed with manhunting."  Indeed, the operation to kill Bin Laden used Navy SEALS, but was a CIA operation, commanded by Leon Panetta and not the JCS.  The road has been bumpy and the author goes into detail about the endless rivalry and competing roles of the Agency and the DOD. Even more confusing is our relationship with Pakistan and its spy agency, the ICI.  Allies? Not really - they signed up to help because they had no other choice. They were later told that we would conduct drone strikes in their country without any consultation, because we couldn't rely on them to pursue the Taliban. As we all know, they were not informed of the Bin Laden strike and have been particularly difficult since then. The author points out that Pres. Obama often articulated our (or his) aversion to "enhanced interrogation techniques", but has had no problem enthusiastically embracing drone attacks all over the world.  Clearly, the Predators and Reapers are doing yeoman's work in the pursuit of Al Qaeda, and cause concern abroad, but are popular at home and are a permanent part of the arsenal.   The only real concern or question raised is whether or not the fixation on killing has taken away from the task of spying.

Younger Next Year, Crowley and Lodge - B

                                         As far as self-help books go, this one is pretty good.   The basic message is that exercise, not just exercise, but vigorous exercise is what it takes to live long and prosper. I'm going to try to ratchet things up a bit.

Gun Machine, Ellis - B

                                          This is a fascinating fun, novel about an NYPD detective in pursuit of a madman, who thinks he's a direct descendant of the Lenape Indians, who once lived on Manahatta.   The author is a successful writer of graphic novels and screenplays.  He tells a wicked tale chock full of interesting insights into life in modern Manhattan.

Devil In The Grove, King - A*

                                          This superb book recently won a Pulitzer.  It is subtitled 'Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America'.  Half of it is the background story of the life of the hard-driving, hard-living son of a railroad porter who changed American legal history.  He graduated from Howard Law School and had won his first case for the NAACP before the Supreme Court at the age of 32. He was famous for and was the mastermind of the NAACP's assault on Plessey v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court case that allowed 'separate but equal' to be the legal foundation of the Jim Crow south.  Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund that he supervised spent over a decade in their challenges and eventually prevailed in May, 1957 in Brown v. Board of Education.
                                         Concurrent with that civil effort was a career spent traveling south and representing blacks in criminal matters.  The depth of prejudice in the southern judicial system was such that obtaining a life sentence in a capital case was considered a victory.  It was a judicial system in which it was common for the defendants and lawyers to be referred to as boys or niggers. When he arrived for a trial, the local blacks would shuttle him from home to home to protect him from the KKK and others.
                                         The story told in this book is of the prosecution and persecution of four blacks in Lake County, Florida in the late 40's and early 50's.  A young white woman, of relatively low repute, asserted after a night of drinking with her dissolute, on-again, off-again husband, that she had been kidnapped at gunpoint and raped by four blacks. She had not been raped and two of the four were not even within miles of her and her husband. The local sheriff, Willis McCall, got his boys together, busted up the shanties the local black fruit-pickers lived in, and arrested two local men and a young boy.  After merciless beatings, they confessed. The fourth was tracked down, shot in a swamp, and his body dropped in a river.  Justice was miscarried throughout a kangaroo trial, with a hanging judge who overruled every defense motion and objection, while he whittled on the bench.  Marshall joined the appeal and had the conviction overturned.  The second trial was now a national news phenomenon that ended with the same result. Years later, a Florida governor, with an eye toward northern tourism, would commute a death sentence to life.  The beatings, the bigotry, the hatred, the bombing and murder of interested parties, the shot 'while trying to escape', the intimidation of witnesses and journalists, the threats, the cloaking of it all in legality, the sheer stupidity of it all is not what shocks. It's the fact that it happened all on one case, not in isolated instances. And the sheriff who did all of this between 1948 and 1955, ignored the FBI, evaded justice and wasn't voted out of office until 1972.  There are moments in this book, when you almost think the author is making it up. I highly recommend it.

How The Light Gets In, Penny - B +

                   This is the latest, the best, and conceivably the last, in the series about Armand Gamache, of the Quebec Surete.  There are  parallel stories in each book in the series.  The first is the crime that must be solved, and here it is in the mysterious death of the last of a quintet of sisters.  Although the author states that there is no correlation between her quints and the Dionne quints, for a non-Canadian, it is a fascinating tale. Apparently, the Dionne quints were Canadian royalty and lived their lives in the public eye.  Taken for their protection by the state at the age of 4 months, the Dionne quints were made into a Canadian tourist destination, wherein up to 6,000 people per day would come to look from behind one-way mirrors at their nursery and play areas.  The second theme in the Gamache books is his behind the scenes epic battles with corruption in the upper echelons of the police. That story is resolved and concludes quite dramatically here.

The Great Convergence, Mahbubani - B

                   The subtitle of this intriguing book is 'Asia, The West And The Logic Of One World'.  The author is the former U.N. Ambassador from Singapore, currently Dean and Professor at the School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.  He makes a very compelling case for a world with stronger multilateral institutions.

                   His starting point is that the world has undergone massive change in the last three decades. Death by war and disease has declined significantly. We live in a much more interconnected world than we could have ever imagined and just about everyone in it now strives for the creature comforts that we in the West have always taken for granted.  The rise of a world-wide middle class creates massive economic and environmental challenges. The tasks at hand necessitate global solutions that our existing 19th century nation-states are ill-prepared to manage.  He asserts that the 12% of the world, that is, the West, isn't ready to share responsibility with the rest of the world and consistently undermines the U.N., the  World Health Organization and other international agencies. He cites the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as entity that has succeeded because of a program of extensive multilateral cooperation.  Policy books, by nature, are not 'fun reads', but this is insightful and thought provoking.

The Devil's Cave, Walker - B+

                                          I mentioned this delightful series in January.  Once again, Bruno Courreges, the only policeman in fictional St. Denis, in the heart of the Perigord in southern France, solves a complex crime with international implications.  The plot involves an arms sale, a black mass, a cave that had been used by the Resistance, the usual cast of colorful locals and Bruno's subtle touches. The author has written a number of well received non-fiction histories, has moved to the region, and this series is his new focus. Kudos to him, as these novels are thoroughly enjoyable.

The Third Coast, Dyja - U

                   The 'U' is for uncertain or unsure, as this book about Chicago is one of the most confusing, erratic, and inconsistent books that I have ever read.  Yet, it is filled with delightful information about the city, whose suburbs and more recently, its downtown, I have called home for almost three decades. Indeed, I live in the building that is on the cover of the book ( it's a 2006 condo conversion of an  art deco landmark former office building).
                   The subtitle of the book is 'When Chicago Built The American Dream'.  The author's premise is that from the late 1930's through the 1950's Chicago produced much of what the world considers 'American'.  That is a phenomenally bold statement that he, I believe, can back up only in one instance.  The most successful case he makes is in the field of architecture. The creative force behind America's, if not the world's,  adoption of glass on steel skeleton skyscrapers worked at the Illinois Institute of Technology, his home after he left Berlin's Bauhaus.  Mies van der Rohe was an unquestioned talent, whose influence has been unparalleled in modern architecture. His work is everywhere and is one of the reasons we have one of the most distinct skylines in the world.  Much attention in the book is appropriately placed on Mies, his students, his projects and his influence on Chicago. (Mies van der Rohe Way is a block from my building).
                 The home of the atomic bomb? Well, yes, we all know that the first atomic chain reaction occurred at the U of C. But, what about the Manhattan project?   The sexual revolution? Well, yes 'Hef'  started 'Playboy' in Chicago, but I think there's more to it than his airbrushed centerfolds. 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' and Dave Garroway started network tv? Wow, did anyone tell David Sarnoff or Bill Paley? Chess Records had a huge impact on rock'n'roll, as the home of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. All of England's great rockers, including the Stones, the Beatles, and  Clapton  have acknowledged the impact Chess had on their appreciation of the blues and it's impact on them. But Elvis was in Memphis, not Chicago.  Ray Kroc's first MacDonald's was in DesPlaines and the company has always been headquartered in Chicago. But the first six stores of the MacDonald brothers were in California, which is where Kroc's franchising efforts were focused.  Defender Magazines photos of the open casket of Emmett Till "catalyzed" the civil rights movement?  Not sure about that either, particularly when his explanation just about substitutes initiated for catalyzes.
                When he turns to criticize the city, it seems to me that he lacks perspective. The author says the city fell from its place as America's  "second city" because  the first Mayor Daley's construction projects chased everyone out of town and into the suburbs. The jet plane and coast to coast travel made O'Hare obsolete.  Interestingly, O'Hare which powers a significant amount of the region's employment and tax base, is only mentioned in this inexplicable and absurd context.  The book is filled with open ended bombastic contradictions, leading nowhere and in need of  clarification.
                  The one point, though, where I believe he is correct in his criticism of Chicago is with regard to its racial divisions.  When the  black migration from the south began a hundred years ago, they were shunted into undesirable housing around the south side's steel plants and slaughterhouses.  Today, a significant number of their descendants are not part of the American mainstream.  Who is responsible? I do not know, but it certainly seems to be a cultural/American issue more so than one city's.
                  He criticizes the city for having lost population, while NY and LA have grown. I do not believe the comparison should be to the country's coastal international destinations.  The contrast must be to the cities of the industrial heartland that have been hollowed out by globalization.  Detroit? Cleveland? Pittsburgh? St. Louis? Buffalo? Milwaukee? Cincinnati? Dayton?  Indianapolis? Where does every kid  from a Big Ten school want to go  to when he/she graduates?  I hate to be a homer - but, "it's my kind of town".


 

Those Angry Days, Olson - B+

                                          Lynne Olson specializes in relatively short, focused histories about the years before WW2.  This is her third book and again, another superb one. It is subtitled 'Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over WW2, 1939-1941.  We have institutionalized the War as our finest hour and have enshrined its youthful warriors as our greatest generation.  Many have forgotten the bitter, partisan divide that was the state of our affairs in the 30's.  In the Introduction, the author quotes Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the noted Harvard historian, who said that it was "the most savage political debate in my lifetime. There have been a number of fierce quarrels - over communism in the late forties, over McCarthyism in the fifties, over Vietnam in the sixties - but none so tore apart families and friendships as this fight"
                                         How bad was it? There were fist fights on the floor of the House. A Senator was hung in effigy on the Capital lawn. During the Lend-Lease hearings, which the editor of the Chicago tribune called "the war dictatorship bill," veiled women dressed in black went daily to the Capital to moan and weep. The British, with the approval of FDR and the FBI, conducted an active intelligence, spying, and lobbying effort.  The FBI wiretapped, bugged, opened the mail, and spied on foreigners and just about any American who they felt might be disloyal. J. Edgar Hoover had a full-fledged secret police state long before most of his later opponents were born.
                                         The military was very uncomfortable with Roosevelt's articulated support of Great Britain.  Numerous members of the Armed Forces assisted the isolationists, most famously Hap Arnold. The architect of America's air war and victory over the Axis could easily have been jailed in 1941 for passing top secret information to Sen. Burton Wheeler, who leaked it to the press in an attempt to show how Roosevelt was planning to fight Germany.  Olson claims that the German General Staff was so concerned about the information in the 'Victory Report' that they considered a halt of their march into the USSR. They thought it would be prudent to finish up in Europe and Africa, in order to be ready for America's might.  George Marshall, who comes off a bit weaselly in this book, protected Arnold and a cabal of others, who seemed to have forgotten their oaths.
                                         One of the heroes of the book is Wendell Wilkie.  Wilkie had nothing in common with the isolationists in his party and unselfishly supported Roosevelt by agreeing not to make a campaign issue of FDR's program of exchanging destroyers for the British bases in the Caribbean. In 1941, he was instrumental in convincing Congress to pass Lend-Lease. Later that year, he helped with the extension of the draft bill. The 1940 law said that the inductions were good for one year. The 1941 bill, with some crafty footwork by Speaker Rayburn ,passed the House 203-202.
                                        Olson credits Roosevelt with succeeding in his great balancing act, but ceaselessly points out how frustrated everyone (particularly the British PM and his own Sec. of War, Henry Stimson) was with his inability to follow through on his rhetorical flourishes.  His great Fireside chat on Lend-Lease included his coining the phrase 'arsenal of democracy' and  featured his famous analogy about lending a garden hose to your neighbor when his house was on fire. It was heard by 85 million people, an astounding two-thirds of the nation. Everyone loved it and agreed, yet he did nothing to initiate a program of constructing things to lend.
                                        The isolationists had a point, at least in the beginning, as two-thirds of Americans were initially opposed to any involvement in Europe.  Americans felt that they had been roped into WW1 by British propaganda and a duplicitous Wall Street. They were unhappy with all of the unpaid debts, and felt contempt for Europe's propensity to repeat its mistakes. Many Americans felt that the 1919 Peace was unfair to Germany and simply an invitation to a repeat performance. Irish-American constituents had no empathy for the British Empire. Midwesterners and farmers didn't particularly like the Brits and their east coast Anglophile supporters.  Thus, most of the opposition was in the western half of the country. The leaders were farm state senators like Wheeler from Montana, Borah from Idaho, and Nye from N. Dakota. However, events impacted opinion, and by the summer of 1941, two-thirds of the country were behind the President and ready to step up in Europe. As is always the case though, there are those who dig in and ignore the changing circumstances.
                                    And, the leader of that pack was the tragic Charles Lindbergh.  He, of course, comes off badly, but also to some extent, a victim of circumstances. At the age of 25, he became the most revered person on the planet, Time Magazine's first Man of the Year. Propelled to fame, wealth, and, most importantly, a public pedestal, he was just a poor airplane pilot who got lucky.  He was ill-equipped to deal with his place in the pantheon and unfortunately never understood that. He justifiably deplored the American press that haunted him and his family before, during, and after the kidnapping/murder of his infant son. The Lindbergh's  fled to Europe and, at the request of the US,  he spent a lot of time in Germany, inspecting and trying to find out about their air forces. He overstated their capabilities and had the misfortune of receiving a medal from Goering, commemorating his contributions to aviation. He liked the Germans, their efficiency and their respect for his privacy. He  concluded that France and the UK didn't have a chance in a future war. When he came home, he took up the cause of the isolationists and, famously in Sept. 1941, blamed the Brits, FDR and America's Jews for our opposition to the Nazis.  When war came, FDR left it to the duplicitous Hap Arnold to decline to let Lindy back in uniform. He did redeem himself  as civilian test pilot, consultant, and actually flew over fifty combat missions in disguise. Ike later reinstated him as a Brigadier General in Air Force Reserve. JFK made him his guest of honor at his first state dinner and had him stay in the White House. His autobiography, 'The Spirit of St. Louis' won the Pulitzer. However, the wisdom of age and the perspective of a long life never came to Lindy.  In his 1970 memoirs, he stated that the Holocaust was no worse than the US treatment of Japanese POW's.  The secretive, lonely old man would go to the Smithsonian several times a year.  He would hide behind a showcase and gaze up at the Spirit of St. Louis, riding above him.
                           
                             

The Black Count, Reiss - B

                                          This Pulitzer Prize winning biography is subtitled 'Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, And The Real Count of Monte Cristo'. It tells the truly remarkable story of the son of a Haitian slave mother and a dissolute French Marquis, who grew up to be a General of the Army in Revolutionary France.  Antoine de la Pailleterie brought his fourteen-year-old son to France from Haiti in 1776, after selling the boys' mother and three older sisters back into slavery.  The boy, known as Alex Dumas (his mothers name), was over six feet tall at a time when the average European was about 5'6" and was  immensely strong and a skilled horseman.   Although the French Empire was predicated on slavery, particularly in the sugar colonies of Martinique and Haiti, the influence of the Enlightenment led to a law establishing that once a person was present in the kingdom, their status was forever changed and they were free Frenchmen. After falling out with his father and abandoning his name, Alex enlisted in the army as a common soldier at the age of 26. Because of his physical endowments and the turmoil caused by the  Revolution, he was promoted from corporal to general two years later. Throughout France, full citizenship was extended to all persons of color and slavery was abolished in the Empire.  He achieved the highpoint of his career in 1794 as commander of The Army of the Alps, when he defeated a Piedmont force at Mt. Cenis and opened up Italy to French invasion. Against overwhelming odds, he later halted an Austrian invasion at Mantua in northern Italy. Unfortunately, he disagreed with the style of one of his fellow generals, his eventual superior from Corsica, and belittled the egomaniacal Napoleon. Although Napoleon personally disliked Dumas, he recognized his talents and made him General of the Cavalry for the ill-fated French invasion of Egypt.  Dumas was captured by  anti-revolutionary forces of the Kingdom of Naples when his ship floundered near their shores while trying to return to France.  Two years of captivity broke his health and he returned to Paris in 1800 to find his beloved  country in the hands of a dictator.  Napoleon had been supported by the colonial aristocracy and he re-established slavery and banned black officers from the Army. Dumas would never serve in the Army again, was refused any compensation for his time of imprisonment, and died in 1806, forgotten and impoverished.  However, he was adored by his son Alexandre, who wrote an unpublished biography of his father, upon whom he modelled his most famous character, Edmond Dantes.

Never Go Back, Child - B+

                                         This is the eighteenth book in the Jack Reacher series and the NYTimes thinks it's the best one so far. Lee Child began publishing these stories in 1997.  They are rather hard to characterize and sometimes I wonder why I, and so many others, are fascinated.  I think, at least for me, it is that the good guys always win and  do so emphatically.  There's something about righteous revenge.  In this one, Reacher heads back to the D.C. area to meet the current commander of his former unit.   Before he knows it, he's recalled to active duty, accused of a murder from almost twenty years ago,finds himself a defendant in a paternity suit, and tossed in the same jail as the woman who in now the CO of the 110th M.P.'s. Needless to say, he doesn't sit still for this, and off we go on a blast of a joy ride, in which he and his successor are exonerated.

Ready For A Brand New Beat, Kurlansky - B

                                          This short book is an homage to one of the true great and fun songs from the '60's -- "Dancing In The Street", by Martha and the Vandellas.  It's hard to imagine a Boomer out there who doesn't know the lyrics to this two minute forty second classic. I suspect most GenYers and Millennials know it too.  The song came out of Berry Gordy Jr.s Hitsville USA studio on West Grand Blvd. about a half-a-mile from the old GM headquarters building.  Motown may have been one of, if not the most productive record studios in history and this song came out in the summer of 1964, when they were at their peak. Interestingly, Martha Reeves was not supposed to sing it, but happened to be there that day and was asked to do the demo version that usually preceded the final take by the chosen singer. The producers knew they had a winner and asked the Vandellas to do the background the next day.  The book loses some of it's mojo when the author tries to make the point of its subtitle, 'How Dancing In The Street Became The Anthem For A Changing America'. The summer of 1964 was a bit of an inflection point: the Tonkin Resolution and the deaths of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, foreshadowing the  turmoil and violence of the next four years. Even almost fifty-years later, it is shocking to think of massive summer urban riots, campus shut-downs, Vietnam spiralling out of control, the Civil Rights movement turning violent, crime in the streets, and  assassinations becoming a kind of normalcy. H. Rap Brown and the Black Panthers may have liked the song, but I'm not sure it became an anthem for change. Nonetheless, it remains a fabulous song and one in the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry for records that "are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States."

Inferno, Brown - C

                                        Prof. Robert Langdon is at it again, this time in Florence, Venice, and Istanbul.  Who else can read a verse of Dante and use it to divine the intentions of an evil-doing madman?  Who else can see that a depiction of a Botticelli painting has been altered and, that it means that the quest must be moved to a different venue?  More importantly, why do I (and millions of others) read this stuff?

Manhunt, Bergen - B+

                                         This fast paced book is the summary of the well-known story of the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden.  Peter Bergen is the CNN correspondent famous for being the producer of a 1997 interview wherein bin Laden declared holy war on America. The matters that jump out in this telling are the President's decisiveness, the extraordinary technologies that our security forces have at their fingertips and the difficulty of finding this needle in a haystack. Bergen depicts Obama as cooly assessing the disparate recommendations before him. Biden and Sec. Gates were opposed to making the move. Sec's. Clinton and Panetta were in favor, even though the CIA analysts weren't certain bin Laden was there and the military plans were not a sure thing.  The technologies we have developed made it possible for Washington to watch the raid on a live feed from a  drone circling above.  Those same technologies had reduced bin Laden to living off the grid and pacing a small area of his compound hidden by a tarp. The search is recounted here, but is certainly well-told in the movie  'Zero Dark Thirty'.  Bergen points out bin Laden thought 9/11 would cause the US to cower, but instead we came out with guns blazing and pretty much buried not just him, but his ideologies, organization, dreams, and people.  The author barely touches on the costs in terms of dollars, death, and anguish that the US has undergone in the pursuit of revenge for 9/11.

The Bat, Nesbo - B-

                                         Actually, eight Harry Hole novels have been translated into English. This newly translated book was the first one written- one must assume some copyright/legal issue is the reason this has been held back so long. One of the joys of the police procedural/detective/mystery genre is enjoying the way  a writer's  characters develop as the series goes on. As this is the initial novel in the series, we have the opposite. The story from a decade ago is not as solid as the more recent ones. Plus, this whole tale is set in Australia, where the Norwegian detective has been sent to liase on the investigation of the death of a Norwegian national.  Harry doing his thing in the land down under is a bit unsettling. That said, it is filled with all sorts of local insights and is a fast moving yarn, involving a maniacal serial killer, who the young Harry tracks down.

The Cambridge Concise History of Canada, Conrad - B-

                                          Canada has much in common with the US: the vast border, NATO membership, the North-American Free Trade Agreement, language, culture, entwined economies and similar demographics as a multi-ethnic transcontinental democracy.  Our respective evolutions toward modern nation-states has been considerably different, yet strongly intertwined.  Canada was first New France, and for a century and a half struggled for its place in the New World. There were 70,000 Frenchmen incorporated into British North America in 1763 after France was defeated at Quebec, on the Plains of Abraham.  A decade later, the Quebec Act broadly expanded Catholic rights, and soon thereafter, 60,000 Loyalists fled north after the American Revolution. Those francophone Catholics and the newly-arrived Protestants provided the foundation of, and an on-going fault line in,  to what was to become Canada. The American invasions during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the inherent conservatism of the population planted the seeds of anti-Republicanism deep into the Canadian consciousness, assuring their continuing place as a colony in the British Empire.  Between 1815 and 1850, a million people immigrated from Great Britain.  The United Province of Canada Act came in 1840, after small incidents of rebellion in the cause of self-determination.  The Confederation of Canada was established in 1867 and soon thereafter stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Newfoundland and Labrador remained British colonies, however, until 1949.  In 1885, the Canadian-Pacific, the longest railway in the world was completed.  Three million immigrants came as the Industrial Revolution took place toward the end of the 19th century.   Canada fought beside the British as a Dominion in both World Wars.  In 1965, it adopted the Maple Leaf flag and began issuing its own passports. Full independence did not come until the Canada Act of 1982, although the British Monarch remains the Head-of-State.   Today, one in five Canadians is foreign born.  Canada deftly avoided most of the issues occasioned by the Great Recession, is a leading exporter of fossil fuels, and is well-positioned to capitalize on the melting Polar ice-cap.

The Golden Egg, Leon - B+

                                          Donna Leon is an American author living in Italy, and is the writer of twenty-two novels about fictional Commissario Guido Brunetti.  The first novel was published in 1992 and all of them are set in or very near Venice.  Although they fit within the police procedural/mystery genre, they really are cultural guides to Venice, its history, people, and geography. Through the introduction of colleagues from around the country, she also explores Italy's many problems and it's intransigent sectional rivalries and differences.  We have seen Guido's children grow up and have come to love him and his charming wife, Paola. Unlike most fictional policemen, Guido is not a hard-driving, hard drinking loner. He is a gentleman who loves his home and his family and quietly and diligently pursues his responsibilities. Here, the apparent suicide of a fortyish man, described as a deaf mute crosses his desk. Inquiry discovers that he has no birth certificate, baptismal certificate, health card,  or pension account. In a highly documented world, he doesn't seem to exist.  Guido begins an inquiry into a sad story of this poor man's background that takes us behind the scenes of his unhappy life.

Visitation Street, Pochada - B+

                                          This novel was written by a young woman, who grew up in Cobble Hill and lived for a while in Red Hook. And the Hook is the story and the background simultaneously. Two fifteen-year-old bored, white girls decide to have some fun and see what they can see from floating a flimsy raft off the shore. In sight of Manhattan, Governors Island, and the Verrazano Bridge, disaster strikes. The ensuing tale explores the oh so many diverse lives of the neighborhood. There are the Italian Catholics who have stalwartly survived in their row houses. There are the blacks in the Red Hook Houses, the projects where life is pretty much a dead end. Scattered around the debris-ridden remnants of a bygone seafaring era are the homeless, the winos, and the drunks at the Dockyards bar. Across the Gowanus Expressway is the rest of Brooklyn.  Racial tensions, guilt, teenage cattiness, and communing with the dead are to be found here in a really fine  novel.  As sad as life is here, perhaps the most touching emotions are the hopes of the neighborhood when cruise ships start to dock there.  However, "the traffic pattern has been designed so cars can slip in and out of the neighborhood without passing through it, sliding in from the expressway on a small street guarded by police....., avoiding Red Hook."  As the Hook is where my father and grandfather worked on the docks and is less than a mile from where my parents grew up and married, it's now a sight-seeing destination for me.

This Town, Leibovich - B--

                   The author is the chief national correspondent for The New York Times magazine and was formerly with the Washington Post.  Those credentials exempt him from being part of (yet, not really) the in crowd in Washington that refers to the nation's capital as 'this town'.  The book is seriously funny at times and certainly an enjoyable read. But the tales of Harry Reid, Jon Coburn, Chuck Schumer, Haley Barbour, Paul Ryan, and Dick Gephardt are in the end, not funny at all. Add the endless players who have flitted back and forth between public office and private gain, and you have a demoralizing reminder about why things don't seem to work in America.  I had long since concluded that the pursuit of re-election monies and then, sky-high profitable books, speaking engagements, and consulting fees after leaving office, is the 'problem' in our country. This book, which reminds us that almost all the former Majority Leaders and Speakers of the House are still in town and hustling away, confirms my beliefs.

Balanchine & The Lost Muse, Kendall - C+

                                         This is the story of the St. Petersburg training of young Georges Balanchivadze and Lidochka Ivanova, both born in the winter of 1903-04. They were students at the Mariinsky Theater, appeared before Nicholas and Alexandra, and came of age in Revolutionary Russia.  Fortunately, the Soviet minister in charge of education was a ballet fan and their classical training continued.  She was an extraordinary dancer; he discovered a talent as a choreographer.  In 1924, they received visas to travel abroad as part of a small dance company. She died in a boating accident before they departed. He left for Berlin, went on to London, and found a home in France with Diaghilev - the rest is history.  Was her death an accident?  Was she his lost muse?  The Times reviewer said the author ".. tends to press too hard, plunging down rabbit holes of forehead-wrinkling psychological conjecture." When a history is filled with "likely", "perhaps", "probably" and "possibly", it tends to not make its point.

The Decline of Bismarck's European Order, Kennan - B+

                                        This is the second book of Kennan's I've read this year and I am slowly coming to understand how his insights, assessments, and the power of his pen could have had the impact they had on US foreign policy. The man was a genius, with the writing skills of a Dickens.
                                         In this 1979 book, he looks into the background of what he calls  the great seminal catastrophe of the century - the First World War, from which flowed Russian Communism, Nazism, and nuclear weapons. "It was clear to every thoughtful observer that the origins of the war lay on a plane far deeper in space than the policies and actions of any single government or group of governments, and deeper in time than the final weeks immediately preceding the outbreak of war."  He claims that the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894 was one of "the major components" out of which the "fateful situation was constructed."  Although the book has Bismarck's name in the title, it is sub-titled "Franco-Russian Relations, 1875-90".  The successor book is "Fateful Alliance."  He sees the seeds of future destruction beginning in the years after German unification and German victory in the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-71.
                                        Diplomatic history can be tedious, and this book is no exception to that rule. One can only be thankful that Kennan came before the era of word-processing that has led to 600+ page books as the norm.  He plows back and forth endlessly between the three principal continental powers, their capitals, rulers, governments,  armies, newspapers, gossips and diplomats. But, he always stays on point in terms of his core premises. First, France was determined to revenge its loss and recover its lost territories. He points out that France should not have fought the Franco-Prussian War and that, in the 19th century, nationalism had to lead to German unification. That said, he deplored the German military's insistence on humiliating the French and agrees with Bismarck that annexing Alsace-Lorraine was unnecessary.  Second, Russia's obsession with the Balkans and possibly capturing Constantinople was misguided and self-destructive. "The Russian Empire of the final decades of the nineteenth century had no need of wars, of external adventures or the acquisition of satellites."  "It was sheer folly.....to pursue the will-of-the wisp of a control of the Straits, to try to create a zone of influence in the Balkans, to launch a war on Turkey in 1877, and to promote a breakup of the Turkish Empire".  Throughout most of these decisive years, Russia was led by a relatively unskilled Tsar, Alexander III.  Third, Germany and Bismarck wanted to maintain the status-quo of the Dreikaiserbund, wherein the three Emperors of Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary secretly entered a defensive alliance.  But, the inevitable rivalry in the Balkans between Russia and Austria-Hungary undermined his hopes.  Kennan clearly admires the Iron Chancellor as a man of vision and skill, and as one who understood that there was no future in a two-front war for Germany.  I suspect the follow-up volume will further indicate his lack of respect for Wilhelm II.
                                      The one question that kept crossing my mind was answered in the last few pages. How could war seem to be such a plausible option throughout Europe's ministries and palaces?  It was not yet understood   "that all out war between great industrialized nations.....had become a senseless undertaking, a self destructive exercise, a game at which no one could really win, and therefore no longer a suitable instrument of national policy."