All The Light We Cannot See, Doerr - B +

                                               This novel was a National Book Award Finalist in 2014. It is a finely-drawn tale of two young people whose paths cross in St. Malo, France in August 1944.  St. Malo was a fortress city at the mouth of the Rance River that was bypassed by the Allies for two months. However, the Allies finally decided to bomb on August 7th.
                                               We first meet Werner a decade before in an orphanage in the Ruhr Valley where he discovers a skill for fixing radios.  His talents afford him the opportunity to avoid the mines, where his father died. He is sent to technical training school. Marie is the blind daughter of the chief locksmith of the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Her father teaches her how to navigate the world by constructing miniatures of her environment and then escorting her from place to place until the real world is as familiar as the miniatures she has committed to  memory.  Werner is so skilled that at school he is able to plan, design and build a machine to triangulate radio waves and find illicit radio activity.  His superiors doctor his paperwork to call him up for Wehrmacht duty at sixteen. Marie's father is charged with protecting a very important diamond. The Director of the Museum has three redundant copies made and sends four of his direct reports off to different parts of the country to confuse the Germans, who assign a jeweler to track down the diamond which Marie's dad has secreted inside her miniature of St. Malo.  After the bombing, Werner escapes from a cellar where he has spent almost six days awaiting death.  Marie is on the sixth floor of her family's home in a hidden attic while the jeweler is trying to find her.
                                                This is a fine book, that is not too easy to read and very challenging to outline.  In the interest of those who will read it,  I have not detailed the consequence of Werner and Marie's meeting, nor the post-war epilogue.  Great books invest you in their characters and bring you to places and times you've never been to. This one adds a deft touch of human insight and emotion. It deserves all the attention it has received.

The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact With Stalin, 1939-1941, Moorhouse - B +

                                               It was not just the world that was totally shocked by the famous pact, it was each country's populace and military staffs. The Germans had spent the 30's vilifying the Soviets. For the communists, Germany, the most industrialized country in the west, was always assumed to be the place where their philosophy would take root and defeat capitalism and the bourgeoisie.  However, both Hitler and Stalin saw meaningful benefits to the pact. Hitler was annoyed that  the British and French had delayed him from moving on Prague, and then guaranteed Poland's integrity.  Having a temporary understanding in the east would help him move in the west. As for Stalin, he was afraid the British and French were trying to engineer a war to the death between Germany and the USSR. Also, the German offer of territory and non-belligerence was particularly timely as the Soviets and Japan were engaged in serious skirmishes in Asia. Within days of the pact, war broke out, Poland was divided between the two signatories and the murder of the country's elite began. "Measures adopted against the racial enemy in one half of Poland were virtually indistinguishable from those applied to the class enemy in the other."  Hitler started moving Germans into the desirable sections of western Poland and  began the importation of what would eventually be over a million laborers into the Reich. Stalin sent tens of thousands of Poles off to Siberia and Kazakhstan, murdered almost all of Poland's officer corps at Katyn, and began to absorb the Baltic states.  He had a free hand to then initiate the Winter War against Finland. Less than a year after the pact, Hitler and Stalin had achieved all that they could have imagined. Stalin had recovered everything that Russia had lost in WWI and more, and Hitler had chased the British from the continent and marched into Paris.  The first significant crack in the relationship came when the Soviets took Bessarabia from Romania. Hitler was quite angered because there had been no mention of this in the allocation of spheres of influence.  In November of 1940, Molotov and Ribbentrop sat down again, this time in Berlin.  No progress was made on any topic and the Germans became further alarmed when it became apparent that the Soviets were desirous of  expanding further into the Baltic and the Balkans. On Dec.18, 1940, the Fuhrer ordered the planning for an invasion of Russia.  Soviet intelligence advised Stalin within a week that the attack would come in March.
                                                         This is a well-written and enlightening read. It's a good book.  That said, it felt at times as if the author was struggling with the the story from the end of 1939 until Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. Almost all of the action took place hard on the signing of the pact. Then, it was just a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Any reader of 'Mein Kampf' could tell you the Reich was not going to ally itself with the USSR for long.  Interestingly, the anniversary of the signing, August 23rd, has become known in Europe as the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Naziism and is commemorated across central and eastern Europe.

The Astronaut Wives Club, Koppel - B -

                                               For people of a certain age, the names Shepard, Grissom, Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra, Cooper and Slayton bring back powerful memories of a simpler, perhaps even more glorious, time.  The Mercury 7 Astronauts were gods in their day. Here though, the names are not Alan, Gus, John, Scott, Wally, Gordo or Deke, but Louise, Betty, Annie, Rene, Jo, Trudy and Marge.  The woman too were on the cover of 'Life'. They lunched at the White House and met Jackie.  Because they were in charge of the home front, the book also deals with the economics of their lives and that, I found interesting.' Life' was accorded special access and was the only media allowed in their homes during their husband's flights. For the access, 'Life' paid $500,000 per year or $71,428 per family. Those  were huge, life changing numbers in 1959. For the men, GM offered them the opportunity to test Corvettes - for a dollar per year. When they all moved to Texas when the Johnson Space Center opened, they got new houses for a song. For seven military families, the Mercury program was a game-changer.
                                              The 'New Nine' were followed by the 'Next Nineteen' as NASA geared up for Gemini and Apollo.  Life, though, became more complicated for the men and the wives. The flights were much, much longer.   It was now weeks of stress and tension rather than hours. The famous Gemini 1 fire took the lives of Grissom, Chafee and White. More and more of the wives drank as their husbands, if ever at home, were often distracted.  And as time went on, the 'Cape Cookies' took their toll.  From a program you could not get into unless you had a solid marriage, only seven couples survived from the 35 that were in the Mercury 7, New Nine,  and the Next Nineteen.  The Astronaut Wives Club survives to this day and many of the woman have remained close and still try very hard to help each other. They shared a uniquely American and exclusive experience.

The Narrow Road To The Deep North, Flanagan - B +

                                              This novel won the Booker for 2013. It is the story of Col. Dorrigo Evans, physician to some of the 22,000 Australians captured when Singapore fell to the Empire of Japan in February 1942.  A third of them died constructing the Siam-Burma Railway. Locomotive C 5631, the first to transverse the 400 + kilometer Death Railway is enshrined at Yaksuni, along with 1068 war criminals, some of whom worked as overseers of the Aussies.  Allied POWs were but small fraction, as somewhere between 100,000 - 200,000 died during the construction. This is as apt a description of unspeakable horror and filth as I have come across. Starvation, ringworm, dysentery, pellagra, cholera, beri-beri, malaria and vicious treatment were the lot of the British and Empire troops, for whom the loss of a boot was a fatal event. Evans tended to their care, faced the Japanese with verve and became the legendary 'Big Fella' to his men. Most importantly, he survived.  As the war passed further and further into the continent's collective memory, he became more and more important and eventually, lionized.
                                              This book is also a nuanced study of memory and memories. For the Japanese, it is  conflicted memories.  They built the railway for the Emperor in record time.  The fact that men who had surrendered and were no longer worthy of respect died is an understandable consequence of the task. To be punished by the Allies for doing their job was incomprehensible to the guards.  But the memory that dominates the book is of Dorry Evans' love for Amy, the young wife of his uncle and unquestionably the love of his life. They spent much of the summer of 1941 together - he, a training officer in the Army and she, the mistress of the family inn in Adelaide.  It was wild, passionate, senseless and unforgettable. It carried him through his long imprisonment. It helped him be the man he was expected to be. It hounded him through his long post-war marriage and career. He believed her dead until he saw her in Sydney in the mid-60's, but could not say a word as she walked by. Would he have been a better man with her? Or,was the memory of her more important?
                                              The Times reviewer points out that Evans spent a great deal of time talking to his father who was a POW survivor who lived to 98. Without him, he could not have provided the details about the smell of the cholera hut,  the horrible stories that are revealed, and the generally remarkable detail that make this such an extraordinary tale.  That said, the Booker award praised as a "novel of love and war." It is both, and it is very good.

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, Macintyre - B +

                                                As all of the files are still classified, this is an attempt to tell the Philby story through the prism of his friends and the upper-class concept of friendship. Kim Philby, Nicholas Elliott, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross and Donald Maclean were all well-educated Englishmen, members of MI6, MI5, or the Foreign Office.  Elliott didn't work for Moscow and was Philby's closest friend and colleague. The rest are forever known to history as 'the Cambridge Five', all traitors. Philby was born in India, the son of a brilliant, eccentric scholar who converted to Islam and became an advisor to Ibn Saud.  A communist by the time he left university, Philby was like many facing the nihilism and threats of fascism for whom USSR seemed to offer an alternative. He became their dedicated and devoted agent, feeding Moscow Center everything he came across at MI6. He specialized in counter-intelligence during the war, before being assigned to Istanbul, and then the ultimate post: Washington. His material was so good that at times the Soviets didn't believe him. They thought he was a double agent feeding them falsehoods. But he kept providing such excellent intelligence that they eventually realized he was a gold mine. In particular, while in Washington, he was able to let them know everything the British and American services were trying to do to crack the Eastern bloc. He caused innumerable deaths, especially among  the emigres who so often were the people acting as infiltrators and spies. Tipped by Philby, Burgess and Maclean defected to Moscow in May 1951. Thus began his own eventual downfall. Both the CIA and MI5 had their doubts about  Philby. The CIA said he could never return to the US and intelligence sharing would be ended if Philby stayed on. MI5 also concluded he was guilty. His standing within the English upper class initially protected him.  It simply was incomprehensible that a gentleman would lie. Nonetheless, MI6 eventually sacked him.  However, most of MI6 believed him to be innocent and MI5 and 6 engaged in a five-year-long battle over Philby. In the end, the old boy network, with Elliott taking the lead, prevailed. Philby was in from the cold and back at MI6 as an agent with the cover of a journalist in Beirut.  A few years later he was riding high with a new wife, re-engaged with the Soviets and treasured by the British, as the new Beirut Station Chief was his good friend, Nicholas Elliott.  However, by 1963 the noose was tightening  as a Soviet defector and an old English friend he had tried to recruit in the 30's provided damning information to MI5. By then Elliott was back in London and he was sent out to confront Philby.  He did and they spent four days verbally dueling, parrying, and Kim Philby gave up most of the ghost. He confessed to a lot but not all that he had done, and he let Elliott infer that he would take up his offer of amnesty in exchange for truthfulness. Instead, he did a 'fade' and wound up in Moscow.  For those on both sides of the Atlantic who had trusted him, it was a devastating turn of events.  He lived another twenty-five years bored and drunk, received the Order of Lenin and was given a grand funeral with a KGB honor guard.  Elliott issued a press release praising him, in an attempt to get the Russians to think he had duped them.  The game never ends.

                                                This is a fun, interesting read. I do think Macintyre succeeds in his exposition of the friendships amongst the upper class. The concept that someone who clubbed at Whites couldn't betray his country is so very, very English.  I would also be remiss if I did not point out that the author is being somewhat cute with the title.  The very beginning of the book points out that 'Friends' is slang for members of the intelligence services.

One Summer: America, 1927, Bryson - C

                                                This somewhat confusing book is a tour of America during the remarkable summer of 1927.   What I found totally befuddling is the Table of Contents, which set forth the division of the book into four parts; Lindbergh, the Babe, the President, and the Anarchists. It is always a delight to revisit Lucky Lindy's amazing feat of derring-do. Its scale and importance are hard to fathom in today's connected world. His flight was called the most significant event since the Resurrection. The French gave him the Legion d'Honneur, and in America, a mania swept the nation. "Proposals were put forth to exempt him from paying taxes for life, to name a star or planet after him, to install him in the Cabinet as the permanent head of a new aviation department and to make May 21 a national holiday. He was given a lifetime pass to all major league baseball games everywhere. In Minnesota. a proposal was made to rename the state Lindberghia.' In NY, between 4-5 million turned out for his ticker-tape parade. He was the most famous person on the planet for quite some time. However, after recounting the Lindbergh feat, the book loses its moorings and meanders, almost pointlessly, through vastly disparate events and themes. He covers the momentous season Babe Ruth and the Yankees had, along with Prohibition, the Mississippi flood, the broad career of Herbert Hoover, the rise of J. Edgar Hoover, the downfall of Al Capone, skyscrapers, international finance, the strange Presidency of 'Silent Cal', the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the KKK, Mt. Rushmore, Henry Ford's anti-Semitic magazine 'The Dearborn Independent', the Dempsey-Tunney fight, Hollywood and a lot more. He is a talented writer and the 20's, particularly 1927, are fascinating. But, it's impossible to read a book when you have no idea what could be on the next page.

The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy and King - The Five Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea, Borneman - B +

                                               Thanks to Wendell Erwin for recommending  this excellent group biography of the only four men to ever wear five stars in the Navy.  They all graduated from Annapolis around the turn of the century ( Leahy-'97, King-'01, Halsey-'04 and Nimitz-'05) and saw early duty in America's burgeoning Navy. Halsey and Leahy both met the young Asst. Navy Secretary, Franklin Roosevelt; Leahy and FDR became fast friends. All four participated in the Navy's convoying activities in our very limited WW1 naval actions and their year-and-a-half at war demonstrated that submarines and naval air power threatened the primacy of battleships. The inter-war years saw downsizing, naval disarmament treaties and the on-going questioning of the relevancy of the battleship.  Nimitz and King went into submarines and King then qualified as a naval aviator. Halsey was a destroyer man and the older Leahy was appointed CNO.  He used his Washington time to hone his political skills and bolster his relationship with FDR.  When Leahy retired in 1939, the President assured him he would be back "if we ever have a war".  On Dec. 7, 1941, Leahy was on a mission to Vichy, King in command of the Atlantic fleet, Nimitz head of personnel in Washington, and Halsey sailing to Oahu after dropping off planes at Wake Island.
                                               Ernest King was returned to Washington and made Fleet Admiral and commander of the entire US Navy.  Chester Nimitz was sent to Pearl and made CINCPAC and told to stay there until the war was won.  The attack on Pearl Harbor is remembered as a disaster of the highest order, but the author points out that it was the aging battleships that were sunk.  The oil storage facilities and the submarine base were unscathed and the three carriers were at sea.  We struck back at Coral Sea and most importantly, at Midway.  Bill Leahy was recalled to active duty in July and appointed the Presidents personal military advisor and the Chairman of the JCS. Bill Halsey had launched Doolittle's Raid but had missed Midway because of an illness, and had told the June 1942 graduating Annapolis class that he was "going back to the Pacific where he intended to personally have a crack at those yellow-bellied sons of bitches and their carriers."  Halsey whose oft-quoted mantra was "kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs" also had the personal skills to be the one person in the Navy who could work well with MacArthur, and together they lead the charge across the Pacific.  Victory piled on victory and soon the end was in sight. Congress authorized the granting of five-star rank for four men in  the Army and Navy in Dec. 1944. In sequence, they went to Leahy, King, Nimitz and Halsey, and, for the Army to Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower and Arnold. The power to award a fifth star lapsed at the end of hostilities plus six months.
                                             The most important take away for me in this book was Frank Leahy's role as key advisor to both FDR and Truman. The author contends that for most of Roosevelt's final year, Leahy operated as an almost de facto President - indeed he labels a chapter 'Interim President'.  Nor was I  aware that he stayed on as Chairman of the JCS for another four years under Truman.  The author refers to his role as a combined National Security Advisor/JCS Chair/Chief of Staff.  That is a remarkably long time for one individual to be at the center of such momentous events.  The other thought that crossed my mind thinking about the men who made the strategic decisions on both sides in the war is the changes they saw in their lifetimes. Whether Allied or Axis,  they were born in an era without electricity, telephone or  radio and finished their careers in the atomic era. This is a very, very good book.