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.