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."

Spycatcher, Dunn - B-

                          This is the first book in a series, written by a retired MI6 field agent. Thus, our hero is British.  Will Cochrane is the only agent designated as 'Spartan' and, as such, operates outside of normal channels. His existence is known only to the PM and his controller.  He is truly a superman spy and saves the world from an Iranian assault on the US. The details are unimportant.

Engineers of Victory, Kennedy - B-

                           This book, by the noted Yale professor Paul Kennedy, is subtitled 'The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide In The Second World War'.  He studies five strategic challenges identified by Roosevelt and Churchill at the Casablanca Conference in 1942 and makes his case for the technological adjustments and discoveries that led to the dominating Allied victories in 1944 at Normandy, in Operation Bagration in the Ukraine and the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. I do not believe his thesis is compelling.
                           His best argument is about the air war over Europe. By the end of 1943 into early 1944, the RAF and USAAF had virtually abandoned their failed attempts at strategic bombing, which Kennedy, an Englishman who remembers being bombed in London as a boy, calls indiscriminate terror bombing.  There were days when the Allies lost 20% of their planes and the raids on Berlin were costing the British 5.2% of every sortie.  The solution for victory was a plane with an American frame and a Rolls Royce engine; the Mustang.  By providing the bombers full escort coverage with the Mustang, the Allies quickly controlled the air over Europe. The Mustang was faster than anything the Luftwaffe had, could fly higher and longer, and, virtually overnight, grounded the Germans in the spring of 1944. On June 6th, we had 12,000 planes in the air and the Germans had 170. I find it ultimately incredibly ironic that today the Rolls Royce automotive brand is owned by BMW, of Munich.
                          The case for change in the Battle of the Atlantic is a bit less compelling, but certainly credible. In March of 1943, the U-Boats were on the verge of shutting down the UK. Yet, the introduction of radar on fighter planes, a new type of depth-charge, a night vision device that could find U-Boats surfacing to re-charge their batteries, better escort techniques, and escort airplane carriers, eliminated the German challenge in the North Atlantic. For the rest of the war, the U-boats went far afield to the Americas and Africa to carry on their fight.
                          The third strategic challenge was how to land on a foreign shore. After barely coming ashore in Africa and almost losing at Anzio, there was no certainty that Overlord would succeed. The author reminds us that Ike wrote a letter of resignation apologizing for the failure of the invasion. Control of the air carried the day, and the German belief (helped by subterfuge) that the main thrust would come in the Pas-de-Calais assured that Rommel received inadequate reinforcements.
                          The case he makes for stopping Blitzkrieg is, in my opinion, the weakest. He points to the T-34 tank as a weapon that made a difference on the Eastern front. Yet, it is  Russia's overwhelming superiority in numbers that led to Germany's defeat in the East.  Indeed, he points out that man for man, unit for unit, army for army, the Allies had no match the Wehrmacht.
                           His last case study, the tyranny of distance in the Pacific, states that it was the Marines, the aircraft carrier dominance and the B-29 that turned the tide. As I have always assumed that mid-war weaponry and systems adjustments were part of all wars, this just doesn't add up for me.
                            Although, I struggled with the basic premise, I thoroughly enjoyed this esteemed historian's insights into so many aspects of the war. He points out that Ike stopped the strategic bombing and had both Air Forces bomb the French railroad infrastructure. There were 20,000 French casualties, but it prevented the Germans from retreating or being reinforced in Normandy. Also, as the Germans were trying to restart their Eastern war at Kursk in 1943, Hitler moved troops from that front to Italy, because the Allies landed and the Italians withdrew from combat.  He even muses about the consequence of forty-million Ukrainians who welcomed the Germans, despised Stalin, but were brutalized and not welcomed as potential allies.  This was not an easy book, but it is an insightful one.

Cuckoo's Calling, Galbraith (Rowling) - C+

                                                 From sales of approximately 1500 to the best-seller lists when its actual author was identified, this novel is now part of pop culture - famous for being famous.  It's oh-so-trendy and  sequels are being anticipated.  Cormoran Strike is about to become a series. Perhaps the BBC should make a bid before it's too late.   If the author had not been identified, this book clearly would have disappeared.  It's kind of interesting and maybe even well-written, but the story is not that compelling.  A fashion model falls to her death and her brother hires a down-and-out detective to find out if she had been killed, after the police had ruled it a suicide.  The inquiry does highlight the fascinating world of supermodels, designers, rock stars and social-climbers.  The key clue is a designer one-off hoodie  made for a rapper, who has written songs about Lulu, the poor victim here.  I don't think the Strike character is that interesting and certainly isn't fully developed. The Times reviewer couldn't resist calling it a "book set in all-Muggles London", but concludes it "is flawed by a Psycho-like explanatory ending".