Water To The Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct And The Rise Of Los Angeles, Standiford - B

                                             This is the momentous story of how a city with a laughingly minute amount of available water in a vast desert became a megalopolis of millions of people. Perhaps Los Angeles could have become a city of 50-100,000 if left to its own devices. Fortunately for LA and its environs, an itinerant Irish-born laborer was hired as a well-driller in the late 1870's. William Mulholland would go on to run LA's water systems until deep into the 20th century. He had the vision and ambition to imagine the 233-mile-long aqueduct running from the Owens River in the north of the state down (literally downhill all the way, thanks to gravity) to the San Fernando Valley. He traveled by buckboard throughout the region to research the possibilities and supervised the construction of the aqueduct that created southern California. (A later project brought Colorado River water to Long Beach, Orange County and San Diego).This book delves into the specifics of the financing, the nuances of the nascent labor movement and the details of the incredibly complicated construction. It took six years, 46 deaths and millions of dollars to complete the project in November, 1913. The result was an explosion in  agricultural productivity, population and economic growth.
                                            Over a decade later, the collapse of the St. Francis dam led to hundreds of deaths and haunted Mulholland to his grave. History has suggested that he could not be faulted for the site selection based on the science of his era. During the inquest, he said he "envied the dead". Seven months later and after 50 years on the job, the 'Chief' retired from public service.  Long after his 1935 death, in 1990, he was listed by Life magazine as one of the 100 most influential men of the century.
                                            The author closes with the backstory to 'Chinatown', in which Hollis Mulwray was based on Mulholland, albeit three decades later. He surmises that great scripts require great stories and that the quest for water, the corruption amongst the landowners and the success in finding it is so quintessentially Californian that 'Chinatown' has been accepted as history.
                     

Rogue Lawyer, Grisham - B +

                                                We all know that John Grisham is one of the best writers of the last thirty years. He has excelled continually and does so again. The rogue is Sebastian Rudd, a man who seems a lot like Connelly's 'Lincoln Lawyer'.  He has no office, is very unorthodox, has a driver/bodyguard, has an ex who is a lawyer, and  outfoxes the police and prosecutors at every turn. This, though, is not one story but an unrelated series of tales focused on police and governmental brutality and incompetence. His last book was an effective polemic against Big Coal and I note that recently coal companies and executives have, at long last, run afoul of the law. He is always an effortless joy to read.

All Involved, Gattis - B+

                                               This absolutely amazing novel is set in LA in the middle of the Rodney King riots.  The theme is revenge because during the 6 days of urban explosion there was no other policing going on in most sections of the city and everybody (including the authorities) who wanted a little pay backing took advantage. The author speaks in a street-wise vernacular  and uses a very interesting technique over and over again. All of the characters speak in the first person, including some right up to the moment they meet a particularly violent end. It's unnerving.  Each narrator is tied to someone who came before them in the development of the story within the story within the nightmare. This connectedness makes a tale told from very different perspectives ( a junkie, say and a fireman) flow smoothly. The title refers to someone who is a gang participant. This tale totally immerses the reader in a world that we don't know and that quite frankly, I can barely comprehend as part of our country.                            '.

The Murder Of William Of Norwich: The Origins Of The Blood Libel In Medieval Europe, Rose - B+

                                           This splendidly intriguing book is about the genesis of a hideous mistruth that added to the maltreatment of Jews in Europe.  The 'blood libel' - the idea that Jews tortured and murdered young Catholics as part of a black ritual- began in the late 12th century. A knight in Norwich was prosecuted for the murder of a Jewish money-lender and his defense was that his creditor had participated in the murder of a young monk, William of Norwich.
                                           William was a teen-age-monk whose body was found in a forest outside of Norwich in 1144. He died during a time of intense violence amidst a civil war. His death was relatively uneventful until the trial six years later.   In the interim,  Europe experienced the unsuccessful Second Crusade. Crusades were a time of financial strain. It was expensive for knights to fund their adventures, and when those adventures failed, the financial consequences could be onerous. It was impossible to repay debts without booty from overseas.  The murderer was Simon De Nover and his victim was a Jewish lender known as Deulesalt. Simon was defended by the Bishop in a trial before King Stephen and a council of Lords and Barons. Bishop Thurbe did what grandstanders and miscreants do today; he didn't defend the knight; he attacked the victim. He asked for a postponement so that the victim's role in the death of William could be investigated.  A tired monarch adjourned the case and it was never recalled.  Thus ended the matter until Brother Thomas, with the enthusiastic encouragement of Bishop Thurbe, began the efforts to build the cult of William of Norwich. He published 'The Life and Passion of St. William of Norwich' (amazingly the book in its entirety survived into modern times in the local library)  as part of a process to provide the Norwich Cathedral priory with its own patron saint.  William's story was contrived from whole cloth for local reasons, but he actually gained some traction on the continent and further afield in England. For purely political reasons, the blood libel was used in Gloucester to extract funds from Jews for the invasion of Ireland, in Blois in northern France by the local count to martyr dozens and confiscate their wealth, and at Bury St. Edmunds to expel Jews.  The tall tale was well received by contemporary Catholics. In Paris, Philip II, King of France, used a ritual murder accusation to consolidate power, confiscate wealth and expel the Jews from his territory.
                                         The author asserts that these few decades saw the first assignation of guilt to a people and not an individual, and that the events in Blois marked a significant turning point. Prior to then, Jews were mostly tolerated. Afterwards, they could be burned as heretics.  This book is very, very well-written. A deep dive into medieval Catholicism, Judaism, judicial and political processes is not an easy topic. Rose pulls it off.

Pirate Hunters: Treasure,Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship, Kurson - B

                                             This is the true story of the pursuit of the 'Golden Fleece', not the logo of Brooks Brothers or the mythical beast pursued by Jason and the Argonauts, but a seventeenth century pirate ship. It was commanded by Joseph Bannister and sunk off the north coast of what today is the Dominican Republic.  In the world of underwater searchers, pirate ships are the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There are galleons, transports, freighters, passenger ships and all sorts of warships buried beneath the seas. The difference is that almost all of the others were engaged in lawful activities and someone somewhere had a record of where they were or were suppose to be. Not so for the pirates. They were the ultimate outlaws and their whereabouts were always concealed. Finding a sunken ship lost over 300 hundred years ago requires a lot of research. The divers studied records in NY London and Spain. They knew Bannister was careening* the ship when a British duo of warships attacked and sank the 'Golden Fleece' just off shore. The question was how far offshore, and that is the central mystery here. Like Kurson's previous book, 'Shadow Divers', about a lost German U-Boat, this is a fun read.

*rolling a ship on its side on a beach and essentially scraping off all the barnacles and seaweed attached to the bottom

Between You And Me: Confessions Of a Comma Queen, Norris - B

                                             The author has spent over thirty-five years at the New Yorker as an Ok'er, one of a handful of people who have the final say before a page goes to the printer. The editor David Remnick analogized the job to that of an auto mechanic who only works on 200mph cars - pretty heady stuff in the world of copy editors.   The book is a thoroughly enjoyable jaunt through the crevices and corners of the American institution most committed to proper usage of the English language.

The Avenue of Spies: A True Story Of Terror, Espionage And One American Family's Heroic Resistance In Nazi - Occupied Paris, Kershaw - C

                                               This history is set in occupied Paris and focuses on two men: American physician Sumner Jackson and a German SS Major, Helmut Knochen. They had addresses a few doors apart on Avenue Foch, one a long-term family residence and the other a converted office. Their paths never crossed and the title of the book appears to be a bit of a contrivance.
                                               Jackson had served in the US Army Medical Corps in WWI, married a Frenchwoman and stayed on at the American Hospital in Paris. He rose to its head and, from May 1940 on, always managed it with an eye to helping those whom he was not supposed to treat: downed allied pilots, refugees, spies, soldiers while also contributing to an escape line to Spain. Knochen supported Eichmann's deportation of France's Jews and was in charge of suppressing the Resistance. Because Jackson was so highly regarded by the French, he was allowed to continue his role at the hospital. Although only a few feet from the Gestapo, they did not know of his existence. In 1943, his wife, Toquette, was recruited by and joined the Resistance. Arrest came  two weeks before D-Day. Shipped around France but never tortured, Jackson and his son, Phillip, wound up just outside of Hamburg and Toquette in Ravensbruck, north of Berlin. Toquette, barely alive, was transported to Sweden, where she slowly regained her health.  Both Sumner and Phillip were on another transport headed to Sweden when their overcrowded ship was attacked by the RAF. Thousands died, including Sumner, but Phillip miraculously survived.
                                             Sumner received posthumous awards from the French and American governments.  Toquette lived until 1968  and Phillip has had a full life in France. Like so many German war criminals, Knochen was twice sentenced to death, but both times, his sentence was commuted. He was out of prison by 1958 and lived to be over ninety and into the next century.
                                             I suspect the story might be compelling in different hands. But, it's very hard to take seriously histories that constantly use the phrase "one can only wonder' when discussing the actions, thoughts or activities of the principal players. This may be an example of superior marketing - certainly not storytelling.