The Cairo Affair, Steinhauer - B -

                                              I  became a fan of Olen Steinhauer quite some time ago, when I read his series of historical novels set in a mythical eastern European country.  The first took place  in the 1940's and, there was one for each decade through the fall of the Berlin Wall. He fantastically portrayed the desperation of life behind the Iron Curtain. My recollection is that the books were sort of a combo police procedural/thriller/spy series.  He went straight spy/thriller with his Milo Weaver trilogy.  Those books lead to the inevitable John Le Carre comparisons, but it occurred to me after about 100 pages of this book that at least with Le Carre, you have some sense of where you are headed a fourth of the way through. Not here. A Libyan-born CIA analyst, Jibril, asks to make an off-the-books trip to Libya. On his way there, he meets with a CIA agent, Emmett, in Budapest.  Emmett is gunned down soon thereafter.  Libya is on the brink of the Revolution and Jibril is murdered shortly after crossing the border from Egypt.  The first death was clearly part of whatever is going on; the second may have been due to the random violence overwhelming the country, or maybe not.  The connection is a CIA plan, Stumbler, to replace Quadaffi with Libyan exiles.  Is the CIA implementing Stumbler?  Perhaps the CIA is only appearing to?  Is it the Egyptians? They purchased Stumbler from Emmett's bored and unfaithful wife, Sophie. How do the Serbs fit in? It was their agent, Zora, who approached Sophie.  Maybe, Libya is trying to take out the exiles? Perhaps, with help from a rogue Egyptian?  It's all eventually resolved and settled - in Cairo.
                                            Interestingly, the Times published two different reviews nine days apart.  Janet Maslin, a Times staffer, acknowledged that the plot of the last Milo Weaver book bordered on the "impenetrable", but she liked this book even if it was a bit complex.  The second review was by the author of 'The Good Lord Bird', a National Book Award winner commented on here earlier this year.  James McBride said, "The book becomes more of a guessing game or puzzle and less of a story, and then it's time to reach for the remote."  He follows up by suggesting  it is "..a work that will surely have his fans clamoring for more -- and the rest of us trying to figure out a nice way to reach for the bar bill and exit."  I'm in McBride's corner. That said, I'm sure I'll pre-order the follow-up.

An Officer And A Spy, Harris - B -

                                                My initial reaction was to pass on this novel, as somewhere along the way I have read extensively about the Dreyfus Affair and didn't feel compelled to review it again..  However, Harris is quite skilled  and I reminded myself of how often  I've learned a great deal from good writers of historical fiction.  In this book, he attempts to hew as closely as possible to the actual story with a few of the novelist's artifices to help him along.  The narrator is a fictional Colonel who takes over the Security Dept. and starts to look into the treason trial and condemnation of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus.   Our fictional Col. Picquart finds a French officer in desperate need of cash visiting the German Embassy in Paris.  It slowly becomes clear to Picquart that that officer, Count Esterhazy, is the traitor to France, and that Dreyfus was framed for being the only Jew on the General Staff.  Indeed, the overwhelming evidence is that being a Jew from now German-controlled Alsace  and being married to a wealthy woman were Dreyfus's greatest offenses.  He was accused of treason and convicted on evidence that didn't reach the level of flimsy.  It was a straight-forward railroading based on bigotry and prejudice. Dreyfus's suffering as the only inmate on Devils Island was quite severe. His correspondence from home was limited, and nightly, he was shackled to his bed.  When Picquart presents his findings to his superiors, he finds himself on an inspection tour in southern France and eventually shunted aside to Tunisia.  Called back to Paris, he is now in the frame. Injustice screams out from every page. I believe Harris spends too much of his time on the mistreatment of Picquart, to the point that he places Dreyfus in a subsidiary position.  The book keeps to the storyline, with the focus, though, on Picquart.  Emile Zola's famous front page newspaper article in a paper owned by future prime Minister Georges Clemencau, 'J Accuse'  leads to the first crack in the edifice created by the French Army.  Although Zola loses the libel suit, enough doubt about Dreyfus's conviction turns up that Dreyfus is afforded another trial.  He is convicted again but amnestied soon thereafter.  Dreyfus was later completely exonerated and restored to the Army.  The chasm the Dreyfus Affair created between the right and left in French politics are generally conceded to be a significant turning point in early 20th century French history.

Uncivil Society, Kotkin - B+

                                                Thanks to my brother Will for this brief treatise, the subtitle of which is '1989 and The Implosion of the Communist Establishment'.  In the author's depiction, "uncivil" is the opposite of civil and his chosen categorization of three communist regimes:  E. Germany, Romania and Poland.  Each state fell for similar reasons, but under decidedly different circumstances. They were not pushed. They simply lacked the inner strength to hold together without the threat of Soviet troops to sustain them. The primary reason they collapsed was the abandonment of the socialist bloc by Gorbachev, who denounced the use of force as a doctrine to hold the Warsaw Pact together.  E. Germany suffered for almost its entire existence by comparison to the miracle occurring in W. Germany, which miracle was broadcast into the homes of the regime's populace on television in their own language. The Wall could not block the images of the success of capitalism.  As things deteriorated in what was arguably the communist bloc's most efficient country, the leadership turned to borrowing from the West. By the end in 1989, E. Germany owed $23.5 billion. They were not only morally bankrupt, they were on the verge of default. "The GDR was a Ponzi scheme that fell in a bank run." There were a few thousand protesters in Leipzig in October and a million in the streets of Berlin on Nov. 9th.  A botched announcement by a junior Politburo member sent the people to the Wall. The guards did nothing and it was over before anyone knew what had happened. It was completely unplanned and spontaneous.
                                              Events moved so quickly in Romania that the author says it was almost a coup d'etat. Communism in the impoverished country wrought hardship that was compounded by foreign debt. Ceausescu
responded by harshly suppressing the quality of life in order to pay the banks. By the late 80's most Romanians queued for rationed bread and meat, had hot water one day per week, went without electricity for the majority of the day, and watched the party elite live high on the hog.  Within a week in December, a rural protest over the eviction of a priest turned into a national uprising that overthrew the government; three days later the dictator was executed.
                                             Only in Poland was there an opposition: the indomitable Catholic church, the well-known Solidarity movement and other national organizations.  Additionally, agriculture was never collectivized in Poland, which like the rest of the communist bloc, fell behind the West and also went down the perilous road of serial borrowing.  The wheels became loose first in 1979, when Polish Pope John Paul II returned home and in the  words of one local "undid thirty years of communist propaganda".  A year later, Walesa and Solidarity successfully struck at the Gdansk Shipyard. The end for the communists came in 1989 when they agreed to legalize Solidarity and run national elections, which they were assured they would win.  They were crushed and allowed themselves to be voted out of business.  In the end, the onslaught of capitalism and Gorbachev's decision to not fight to hold the communists in power ended the post-war settlement in Europe.

Hellhound On His Trail, Sides - B

                                                Thanks to my friend Jack Blair for the recommendation and the loan of this book. The Hellhound is James Earl Ray and he is on the trail of Martin Luther King, Jr.   The trail ends in Memphis, a city which in no way was predestined to be their meeting place. In February of 1968, two black men, non-union hourly workers of the Memphis Sanitation Dept., were swallowed up and killed by a defective garbage truck. The truck had killed before and the compensation for the dead was a month of severance pay.  The strike that ensued brought King to Memphis a few weeks before his death. By 1968, King had shifted his focus to economic rights and support of the strike fit perfectly into his poverty theme.  At the same time, Eric Galt (the name Ray had been using since a Missouri prison break a year before ) was driving through the deep South and decided to take a detour to Selma, where King was scheduled to speak.  Galt missed King and went ahead to Atlanta where he followed King's schedule in the papers.  He went to Birmingham, purchased a rifle and drove to Memphis, where King was to meet the strikers and hopefully, lead a peaceful parade.  Knowing where King customarily stayed, Galt rented a room in a boarding house across the street.  A minute or so after 6pm on April 4th, King stepped out onto the balcony of Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel.  Galt looked down on him from 200 feet away, a distance that seemed only 30 ft. when viewed through the 7X magnification scope on his Remington Gamemaster.  Within minutes of the firing of a single shot, Galt had tossed the rifle, gotten to his Mustang and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead.  The FBI had his fingerprints within 24 hours, along with other leads and clues. But this was the analog era, and fingerprint data was analyzed manually. As the FBI had millions of fingerprints, it took a decision  by Asst. Director Deke Deloach about a week later to narrow the field.  The clues indicated that the murderer was someone on the run and using aliases.  DeLoach ordered the search to be limited to the 53,000 sets of  convict's prints .  Within a  day, they had Ray's identity and broadcast it, literally, around the world. By then he was in Toronto.  Eventually, with the cooperation of the RCMP,  the FBI learned he was in London, and Scotland Yard arrested him in early June.   Sentenced to 99 years, he escaped once and died in prison in 1998.

The Cartographer of No Mans Land, Duffy - C

                                               This is a novel set in 1917.   The action takes place simultaneously in Nova Scotia and with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces in France.  The lead character is Angus MacGrath, a mid-thirties seaman, son of an anti-war pacifist, husband of Lettie and father of 13-year-old Simon.  Because of his skills as an artist and navigator, he is trained as a cartographer, but nonetheless winds up as a lieutenant in the endless maw of filth and violence that is the trenches.  He tries to find his missing best-friend and brother-in-law, Ebbin.  Back home, his wife is lost in a netherworld of fear, anxiety and worry.  Everyone on the home front pours over maps and newspapers and follows the action of the CEF.  Angus does find Ebbin, but he no longer answers to, or even seems to acknowledge the name. Indeed, the Army has announced Ebbin as dead. But he isn't. He is now Lcpl. Havers, the legendary survivor of four years of battle.  Havers, though, appears to be a series of different men who have taken up the dog-tags in an attempt to create and embellish a legend. Soon thereafter,  the decision was made by the Generals for the Canadians to attempt a massive attack comparable to the British multiple failed attempts on the Somme.  The attack at Vimy Ridge became the focus and pride of the Canadian nation. It was, however, the end of Ebbbin/Havers - shot by the Germans and witnessed by and the scene of a serious wound for MacGrath.  The story then  moves to Angus's time in recovery without the use of his right arm and hand and his bittersweet homecoming.  The book has been very well received and reviewed.  The author was a neuroscience writer for the Mayo Clinic and this is her first novel.  Her family has had a lengthy connection to Nova Scotia and her facility with the sailing scenes is obvious.  Her career transition has generated enthusiasm amongst the reviewers.  That said, for me, it wasn't that exciting and offered no particular new insights to the war.

Germania, Winder - C, Incomplete

                                                The author is an editor at Penguin in London and this book is subtitled  'The Wayward Pursuit Of Germans And Their History'.   It is perhaps categorizable as a series of personal observations and explanations, stemming from his travels through Germany and Austria.  His follow-up book 'Danubia' was published last year and although he states in its introduction that it is not necessary to have read 'Germania' first, I figured I might as well.  His portrayal of German history is a bit offbeat. He wanders all over the place in his travels and relates back to some distant era of history by focusing on a specific place. So, he cites Quedlinburg as the burial place of Henry the Fowler, and uses that city to explain Germany at the turn of the first millennium.  It's a different approach, but an effective one. He uses the term fissiparous (tending to break up in parts) to explain and illustrate how power, wealth, and population were scattered around hundreds of Germany's cities.  Those cities, margraves, bishoprics, duchies, mini-kingdoms and principalities were all part of the loosely constructed Holy Roman Empire for over a thousand years.  This lack of centralization is a defining aspect of German history and culture.  As there was no one trying to establish a centralized state, no London or Paris ever emerged. As he moves through the passage of time, he adeptly evokes the horror and destruction of the Thirty Years War. He credits Napoleon with the positive act of decreasing the number of German governments from over 200 to a mere 39. But as the book wore, the witticisms began to outweigh the insights and history. At the one week mark and two-thirds of the way through this book, I decided to throw in the towel . He stops the book before the Nazi takeover and as tempting as it might be to hear what he had to say about Wilhelm II or von Hindenberg,  I demurred. I might add that I had already deleted 'Danubia'.  I guess eclectic, witty history is not my style.

American Rust, Meyer - B-

                                               This is the 2009 debut novel by the man who wrote last year's award winning 'The Son'.  The story here, though, is totally demoralizing, as Meyer delves into the disastrous lives of those who somehow  survived the grinding poverty of the post-industrial era in the Mon Valley, southwest of Pittsburgh.  The mill jobs have been  gone for over a generation. Those who stayed exist in a world comparable to that of the subsistence agriculture economy of  a century before - only with no hope for the future. Now they survive on disability pensions, jobs at Walmart, government largesse, and by poaching in the surrounding woods.  Two twenty-year-olds walk into an abandoned building, are attacked by three drifters, and soon thereafter, one of the drifters is dead. This sets in motion a complex series of events involving the two boys, their families, and the town's Chief of Police.  Suicide, alcoholism, living with a permanent disability, and totally irresponsible parenting amidst hopeless poverty are the themes explored, along with a chilling evocation of some time in prison.  I am very familiar with many of the place names throughout this book, because I lived in Pittsburgh in the early 80's, as the wheels were coming off the area's economy.  I've never given much thought to what happened out in all those river towns and now I know.