The Whistler, Grisham - B +

                                               The reviewers are saying that Grisham is back on his form. I've never felt that  he stumbled, although the book from two years ago was weaker than most. That said, he continues his marvelous career of entertaining us with legal thrillers. This time we have a heroine who works for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct. Of course there is way more involved than a crooked judge: disbarred lawyers, an embittered court reporter, bad cops, hit men, a mastermind and a slew of Indians some very bad, some good, and their Casino, the source of a lot of cash and a lot of trouble.  Perhaps, the best thing though, is that the bad guys always get hoisted on their own petards and the good guys win (often with a cash reward).

The Invention Of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom To Putin's War, Ostrovsky - C

                                               The book tells the story of how Russia has evolved into a mirror of the old USSR. The author, a Cambridge PhD. and native Russian states that "old fashioned nationalism in neo-Stalinist garb" has taken over the Russian Federation. It is a disheartening tale and he lays much of the responsibility at the feet of the media: the journalists, editors and television executives in charge of the "message".  Russia has long been a society where language and communication are the foundations of power. The western-like media of the 1990's slowly became part of the establishment. The first thing Putin did was to take control of television, and it is through the visual medium that he controls the state today.
                                               The USSR fell, not because of outward pressures, but because the lies that upheld the state were exposed and undermined by glasnost. The newspapers in the big cities, along with television, were partially freed when censorship was loosened after Chernobyl in 1986. As glasnost and perestroika freed up the political system but failed to put food on the shelves, the failure of Gorbachev's reforms were out front for all to see. The 1989 Party Congress was the first ever televised and featured speaker after speaker calling for the abolition of the Communist Party. Television showed the breaching of the Berlin Wall, and two years later, the arrival of tanks at the Russian White House, heralding the coup against Gorbachev. Televising Yeltsin standing on those tanks ended the coup, but since neither Yeltsin nor Gorbachev had a plan for the post-Communist era, the USSR soon ended in ignominy.
                                                As matters fell apart in the early 1990's, America and its insidious influences were an obvious rallying point for Russian nationalists. "The disintegration of Soviet Empire was blamed on the west..." The nationalists and communists attempted a coup in late 1993 and almost succeeded. Yeltsin managed to hold them off.  Soon thereafter, NTV took off as Russia's first totally free from interference news station and made a name for itself during the First Chechnya War. The people followed NTV and not the official Channel One. Knowing that a Communist election victory would put them out of business, NTV cast Yeltsin favorably in his remarkable 1996 election comeback victory. They had been backed by the oligarchs who soon started to shower the NTV journalists with cars, flats and cash. Igor Malashenko, the man who ran NTV and the man who had defeated the war party in the Kremlin and the Communists in the election, was offered the Premiership by Yeltsin. A liberal forward thinking journalist turned the succession offer down and has lived to regret his decision ever since. The job eventually went to Vladimir Putin instead.
                                               In 1999, Chechen terror attacks in Russia's big cities propelled Putin to the top. Touring devastated buildings, he assured Russia on tv news that this would be stopped. He acceded to the Presidency on the eve of the new millennium and assured people he would restore, and make great again, the Russian state. This is what 55% of them wished to hear. Within days of his winning reelection in March 2000, NTV's offices were raided. Within a year, a new iteration of the station was his mouthpiece.  Throughout his decade and-a-half at the top, he has ruled ruthlessly and always with an eye toward how it plays on television.
                                                At the end of the day, this book is written by a Russian, and although the language is English, I suspect he targeted audience is Russian. There's way too much detail on way too many characters in the media industry. The most telling take-away for me is that the 1990's were not a time of detente that Putin later revoked. It was just a truce in the ongoing animosity toward America that is a core creed of the Russian mind.

The Venice Girl, Smith - C

                                               After all these years, Martin Cruz Smith is still at it, and this time the setting is Venice in the spring of 1945. Cenzo is a fisherman who pulls an apparently dead young woman out of the lagoon one night. However, Giulia is alive, Jewish and on the run. At his dock, an SS officer tries to grab her and Cenzo skulls the officer, disposes of his body, and all of a sudden, is hip deep in the war and managing a big problem.  The plot moves to beyond unbelievable when the local fascists send Cenzo to Salo, capital of whatever is left of Mussolini's world. The few insights on the last week in Salo are the only saving graces of this novel.

The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran, Cooper - B

                                               The author tells the history of the thirty-seven year reign of the last Shah and its climactic end. He asserts that the Shah's excesses have been greatly exaggerated, that he was a force for stability and modernity. He transformed a nation, built the infrastructure of a modern country, took his people out of poverty and ignorance, created one of the most powerful militaries in the world, fostered the rights of woman and engineered the 1973 oil embargo, which transferred the wealth of the west to the oil powers of OPEC. He believes that what has transpired since his ousting is a travesty, responsible for much of the regional debacle that is the Middle-East.
                                             Mohammad  Reza Khan, son of a Cossack brigadier in the service of the Shah, was born in 1919.  His father overthrew the government in 1921, appointed himself Prime Minister in 1923 and Shah a few years later. The dynasty was called Pahlavi.  Mohammad attended boarding school in Switzerland while his father began the modernization of the rural and impoverished but proud Shia monarchy. He returned after five years in the west and took the throne in September, 1941, a month after an Anglo-Russian invasion led to his father's abdication. As Shah, he accepted a socialist Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, who allied with the Shiite clergy and nationalized Britain's Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. The UK was nearly bankrupted by this turn of events and sought to overturn the decision. The Truman administration demurred. However, Eisenhower and Dulles were much more anxious and concerned about the USSR taking over Iran's oil. The Shah approved the 1953 CIA-inspired coup that deposed Mossadeq and at that point, decided to rule rather than just reign. One of his first acts was to accede to an American takeover of Iran's oil industry.
                                              Iran's long history of Shiite clerical extremism exploded into street violence in 1963. Mohammad Shah was implementing policies of land reform and modernization of the lives of women and children and ran smack into the extremist Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Shiite radical called for demonstrations, and it took the imposition of martial law to quell the violence in the streets. Throughout the decade, the plans to improve and modernize the country, called the White Revolution, proceeded apace funded by massive amounts of oil revenue. But the unrest and opposition to the Shah's American inspired totalitarianism never wavered and in fact increased as time went on. The Shah was seen as despotic, and Khomeini as the "Iranian Che Guevara", even though his personality was that of a right wing "medieval tyrant". One of the regime's many problems was corruption in and around the extended Pahlavi family. A weak man unable to confront his siblings and their families, the Shah let it go. He surrounded himself with sycophants and lost track of the realities of the country he purportedly ruled.  In 1971 as the Shah celebrated the 2500 year anniversary of the Persian state and King Cyrus the Great, Khomeini, exiled in Iraq, first called for the abolition of the monarchy for being incompatible with Islam.
                                             The Shah led OPEC's doubling of the price of oil in response to US support of Israel in the 1973 war with Egypt. Iran's oil receipts went from approximately $4B per year to $20B, and the Shah plowed the money back into the improvements across society that were his focus. The more money put into the country, the worse matters got between the middle class and the monarchy. Fearful of westernized modernization, the people turned to traditional religion. The Shah's attempt to liberalize political life also backfired, because it exposed the corruption in and around the regime.  For as many women as he educated and took out of the past, just as many took the veil.
                                             The year 1978 was the last full one of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's reign. It opened on a high note with a New Year's Eve visit from the US president. Within weeks, there was a massive pushback from the clerics and the revolutionaries when the security forces published a letter criticizing Khomeini. There was blood in the streets. Those who could afford it were buying real estate in Europe and America, particularly in California. Foreign observers were torn; the US Ambassador thought he would last, and the Israeli's advised Tel Aviv to start looking for a different source of oil and to prepare to extradite the many construction workers in Iran. In August, Khomeini's revolutionaries launched full-scale riots and fire-bombings in every city in the country. Terrorism, regardless of who propagates it, is terrible, vicious and violent, but Khomeini's men were outright brutal extremists. The tactics of revolutionaries are often similar and here, by combining violence with propaganda and lies, one is reminded of the Bolsheviks in 1917.  The Shah was shocked at his people's ingratitude and made slight changes to the regime that were comparable to the old cliche about shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. In September, he told his inner circle, "If my people don't want me, I won't stay by force." If I may continue the Bolshevik comparison, Khomeini was a minority within a minority. The majority of the clergy were vehemently opposed to his extremism. In November, martial law was imposed, but like every other response from the Shah, it was weak and ineffective. Inscrutable, indecisive, determined not to shed his people's blood and wracked with cancer, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi left Tehran for the last time on January 6, 1979.
                                             Khomeini returned from exile and implemented the Islamic Republic. A reign of terror followed.  By the middle of 1980, the Shah was dead.  The Carter administration which dithered throughout the crisis and had been hampered by horrible analysis on the ground in Tehran and at the CIA was out of office within two years.
                                              This has been an excellent read and learning experience. I should remember more about Iran and all that happened there, but I don't. The second  oil shock had a major impact on finances and life in America. Interest rates were sky high, the economy was in a stall and there were lines at the gas stations.  I remember the Iran Air terminal at JFK going from being packed to a ghost town in 1978.
                                             One disappointment in this narrative  is the very limited discussion about geo-political matters. The Cold War barely rates a mention. Since Iran bordered the USSR, this seems to be a bit of an oversight. Similarly, Saudi Arabia, Iran's Sunni competitor, is discussed only tangentially. The only review at length that I can find was in the Times. The reviewer, an Iranian journalist, feels that Cooper went too easy on the Shah and understated the severity of the security forces. Since the author does not do a very good job explaining the disconnect between a regime that poured money into a society that hated said regime, perhaps the NYT reviewer is correct.
                                       

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, Cleave - B-

                                               This is a superb WW2 novel recommended to me by Dennis Grindinger. It is set in London and Malta, involves a handful of intersecting lives, the Blitz and the siege of Malta. The lead character is a young woman, daughter of an MP, fiercely independent, and terribly witty school teacher. There's a well-done telling of the evacuation of children from London and the actual bombings that haunted the city in the second year of the war. Mary North teaches the down-and-out and later serves as an ambulance driver. The book effectively conveys the anguish of being constantly bombed for the year of the Blitz. Malta was under siege for two-and-a-half years. Through the eyes of Alistair Heath, London based restorer of pictures at the Tate and somewhat reluctant artillery officer,  we get a sense of what is like to starve on a rock in the middle of the sea and suffer the same incessant, endless bombing that was going on at home. Men are constantly killed, supplies are occasional  and for a very, very long time, there is no end in sight. This is a fine read.

Belgravia, Fellowes - C +

                                               I did not know that the famed creator of 'Downton Abbey' was also a novelist. For reasons unremembered, I downloaded this and sincerely wish I had done my usual research. Although set in the London of the 1840's and with some pretense toward being a historical novel, it is but a soap opera. I guess I can only conclude that soaps are much more interesting on PBS than in written form.

The Edge of Empire: Journey to Britannia: From the Heart of Rome to Hadrian's Wall, Riley - B

                                                 This hypothetical travelogue is told through the eyes of Julius Severus, who the Emperor Hadrian appointed as governor of Britain in AD 130. The-newly appointed were expected to leave Rome by April 1 in order to be at their new assignment around July 1. The first leg was a day-long trip to the Tiber ports on the Mediterranean. From there, his ship hugged the coast and sailed for a week to Narbonne, a port on the coast of Gaul. Overland transport brought our second century traveler to Lyon, chief city of the province. It then took approximately two weeks to reach the channel port of Boulogne, home of a Roman fleet. Crossing to Dover was a 6-8 hour sail. It took one full day to reach Londinium from the coast. London was the capital of the province and the seat of the Roman government. As Britain was a frontier province, military affairs were paramount and it was necessary to head west to Wales and north to Scotland. However, a day's ride from London, on the way to Wales, was the most Roman of towns and temples on the island.  Due to the underground springs, the thermal baths in Bath were surrounded by extraordinary buildings and temples. The baths of Bath were so spectacular that they actually rivaled those in Rome. On to the west and north went Severus as he approached the true end of the earth. Hadrian's Wall stretched from coast to coast and delineated Pax Romana and all it stood for against the barbarism to the north. At this northwestern most point of the Roman Empire, Severus was approximately 2,000 miles from the Empire's eastern reaches on the Black Sea. Perhaps that is just one of the many reasons the Empire's success still fascinates us two millennia later. This is a brief and enjoyable read. It's hard to characterize: part history, travel guide, commercial treatise, cultural guidebook, social commentary and geography lesson. In any event, I feel it's been fun.

So Say The Fallen, Neville - C +

                                             The author is from Belfast, and all of his previous half-a-dozen or so novels have dealt with the Troubles.  I've viewed him a master of taut tension, the explainer of the hate between the Catholics and Protestants, a storyteller of the violence and bitterness that is Northern Ireland. Everything about this title implies that that was where he was again headed. Here though, he attempts to write a 'Crime and Punishment' about a Protestant priest who, goaded by the affections of a beautiful woman, does in her bedridden husband, a survivor of a car crash that left him a double amputee. Father McKay tortures himself until he too meets a grisly end. The last third of the book focuses on the travails of the woman detective trying to sort it all out. All in all, I guess it's not that bad, just not what I was expecting