A Rift In The Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam Memorial , Reston - B

                                              At the end of the Vietnam War, America had no memorial to its victories in two World Wars, to FDR or to the Korean War. A young Vietnam veteran, Jan Scruggs, who had written a few op-ed pieces in the Washington Post, took up the cause, and amazingly, it gained traction. Funds were raised and an architectural competition was sponsored by the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Fund. The design was required to promote reconciliation, list the names of all who had died and be non-political. A Yale professor required his students to submit a design as part of a class project. A distinguished panel of architects reviewed 1421 proposals and unanimously selected a black granite memorial submitted by Maya Lin, a Yale undergraduate. The architects of America were enthusiastic about the design, but many others were not. It did not properly honor the dead. It was a "black gash of shame and sorrow." And many organizations would have to give their blessing and money before it would be built. Eventually, after the matter went as high as the White House, a compromise was reached. Frederick Hart's representational sculpture of three soldiers offset Lin's wall.  The Veteran's Day 1982 dedication drew 150,000 people, of which 15,000 were Vietnam veteran's. The most famous image of the day shows a man with long blonde hair leaning on the wall and crying. Today, it is considered a masterpiece that has fulfilled the the requirement to promote reconciliation.  It is a moving and almost sacred place. The fighting and arguing decades ago seems totally inappropriate. From my only visit, the granite wall and the statute of the three soldiers seems as if they were meant to be together.

The Rooster Bar, Grisham - B

                                             There are few things in life more fun than reading a new John Grisham novel. He tends to slay dragons, and here he has the for-profit education business in his sights. Three students at Foggy Bottom Law School, a diploma mill of no repute, walk away from their third year of school, repudiate hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt apiece, change their identities and start practicing law in DC. After all, in the criminal courts and, in particular, the DUI section, no one expects you went to Georgetown or asks to see your license. The cash-only business starts out well enough, but it is soon apparent that they can't run the scam indefinitely. Simultaneously, they uncover a web of misleading ownership behind the law school and others like it. They manage to leak information to assist a class-action lawsuit and to piggy-back their going-out-of-business bogus law firm into the big payday. Like many Grisham protagonists, they wind up on a beach sipping pina coladas. This is not his best effort, but it is still is a one-day read. There is a very interesting takeaway, and that is the 2006 Congressional give-away to for profit schools. There are no caps on what can be charged or lent for graduate schools, leading to hundreds of thousands of people who were taken in, and billions of dollars of loss to the Treasury. It's a classic privatization of profit and socialization of loss.

The Novel Of The Century: The Extraordinary Adventure Of Les Miserables, Bellos - B +

                                              I believe 'Les Miserables'  qualifies as one of, if not the greatest novel of the 19th century, if not of all time. It was published in 1862 approximately seventeen years after Hugo began it in the mid-forties. He was, at that time, the world renowned author of ' Notre-Dame de Paris', a member of the Academy Francaise, and an appointed peer of the realm. After the continental revolutions of 1848, he was elected to the National Assembly. A few years later, when Louis-Napoleon failed to garner the votes to extend his presidency and effectuated a coup-d-etat, Hugo had to leave the country. During a debate, he had referred to Louis as le petit Napoleon and his uncle as le grand Napoleon, thus forever earning Louis' enmity. He fled to Belgium and then to England and settled in Guernsey. As hard as it is to believe, France's great novel was completed on a Channel Island. On the second to last day of 1860, he began to finish the book he had left untouched for a dozen years. He began Part IV with the two days on the barricades in June of 1832, because in June of 1848 he had spent two days on the barricades, not as a revolutionary, but as a supporter of the established order horrified at the excesses of the sans-culottes. It took but six months to take the existing draft, a third of the length of the final novel, and turn it into the finished masterpiece.
                                             In a world prior to copyright laws, he sold to a Belgium firm the right to publish the book in French for 12 years for 300,000 francs. Converted into gold, it was a $3m sale and the richest in history. The manuscript was sold sight unseen. The logistics of publication involving Hugo and his team handwriting, correcting, and re-writing a massive book on an island four sailing days from the printer boggles my 21st century mind. The struggles and complex procedures are incomprehensible. Released over the course of the second quarter of 1862 in five parts, and immediately translated into a handful of approved languages, it sold 100,000 copies virtually overnight. Theatrical productions soon followed and the first film version appeared in 1897. Overall, there have been at least sixty-five screen versions in dozens of languages. As for Victor Hugo, he had vowed never to return to France while Louis-Napoleon was on the throne, and he did not. When the Second Empire fell, he returned immediately. When he was interred in the Pantheon in 1885, two million Parisians turned out.
                                            This book is a delightful romp through 19th century French culture, economics, history, politics, law, banking, manufacturing, society, religion and much much more, written by a professor of French with a fine-tuned appreciation and love of the novel, its author and France itself. "The moral compass of 'Les Miserables' thus spreads far beyond...the world in which it is set.  The novel achieves the extraordinary feat of being....a portrait of a time and place...a theatrical page turner.......and an easily understood demonstration of generous moral principles..."
                                          It has been approximately a quarter-of-a-century since I read 'Les Miserables'. It is not, at almost 1500 pages, something I would ever revisit. I remember it vividly, as Hugo could obviously tell a story and whoever translated it did a superb job. To this day, the lengthy (over 30 pages if my memory is correct) description of the Battle of Waterloo at the beginning of Part II is as vivid a telling of the famous battle that anyone could ever wish to read. The book, the many movies, the musical - what a tale of love, conscience and devotion.

A Single Spy, Christie - B

                                              Seldom does a WWII spy novel start on the Azerbaijan-Iranian border in 1936 and feature as its protagonist a seventeen-year-old Russian orphan. Alexsi Smirnov has escaped from a state orphanage and has developed some serious fighting and thieving skills,working with the Shahskavan smugglers deep in the south of the USSR. He is so good that he comes to the attention of the NKVD and is sent to Moscow for  a brief recruitment and training.  Because he had lived for a while with a German family and is unusually good with languages, he is set up as a sleeper agent with a German official, who believes he is a long-lost nephew. He of course winds up in the Abwehr, sees the plans for Barbarossa, and twice transmits information about the invasion. He is not believed either time. He is then assigned to Tehran, back to Berlin and to Tehran for a second time. The novel stumbles at the end when he is involved in trying to stop an oft-rumored attempt to assassinate Churchill at the Tehran Conference.  This is a very creative book and one that effectively points out the perfidious nature of Stalin's regime.

American Revolutions, Taylor - Incomplete

                                              The sub-title of this book, which I obviously did not finish, is 'A Continental History, 1750-1804'. The book was highly acclaimed, the author has previously won a Pulitzer, and currently holds the Thomas Jefferson Chair in History at The University of Virginia. The introduction says that the book will expand on the traditional narrative of the 13 colonies revolting and bring in the role of the trans-Appalachian territories and the British, French and Spanish Empires. There are some fabulous takeaways, but just not enough to spend what was beginning to look like a month on the book. The colonies were increasingly becoming more and more important to the UK. The percentage of GDP attributed to America rose from 4% in 1700 to 40% on the eve of the revolution. Because the colonial governors were weak in comparison the the Crown and there certainly was no House of Lords, the colonies were much more 'democratic' than home. The British victory in the Seven Years War was attributed to not just naval and military strengths, but the ability to borrow money because of the establishment of the Bank of England. Those funds required repayment. Since the colonies were taxed at a rate of about 1/25th of the homeland, Parliament, the King and most in the UK felt the Americans needed to pay more. Fissures also arose over the trans-Appalchians because the colonists wanted the Indian's land and the UK desperately wanted peace with the Indians. The Sugar, Tea and Stamp taxes were the first direct taxes* imposed on the colonies and the source of tremendous resentment.
I think this is a really good book for those with a keen interest and a bit more patience than I have.

*Direct taxes, as opposed to excise duties, were so unpopular in America that our Constitution proscribed them. An Amendment was necessary to implement the Income Tax in 1913.

The Marsh King's Daughter, Dionne - B+

                                              This is a frightful page-turner, unlike anything I remember reading in a long time. The novel is narrated in the first person by a 27-year-old woman, Helena, who is the only child of an Indian who kidnapped a fourteen-year-old in the mid-1990's and held her, and her soon-born daughter, hostage in the marshes of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for over a decade.  The story opens with the news that the Marsh King has escaped from prison, and Helena  realizes he will be after her and her family. Half of the story is flashbacks to her upbringing as a skilled huntress, tracker and survivalist. They truly lived off the grid and Helena was ten before she even saw or heard another human being. The details of the skills needed to live in the marsh must have required a lot of research by the author or a bountifully creative mind. It is the details of Helena's childhood that make this a fascinating read. It is her skills as a tracker on her father's trail that generate the excitement. Summer may be over, but this is the ultimate beach-read.

High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist And The Making Of An American Classic, Frankel - B +

                                                Frank Cooper was born to prosperous English parents in Montana and had the unusual experience of being an outdoorsman and westerner who attended prep school in England and college at Grinnell in Iowa. When he was 23, he moved to LA, got a job in the movies because he could ride a horse and was soon getting roles with his new name, Gary Cooper. Within a decade, he was Paramount's biggest male star, a rich man and the archetypical American hero. By the beginning of WW2, he was, perhaps, the biggest star Hollywood would ever see. Irving Berlin revised the words to 'Puttin On The Ritz' to fit Coop into the lyrics. While doing a USO tour during the war, he was asked on the first night to repeat the Luckiest Man Alive speech from 'Pride Of The Yankees', which he did, and then reprised on every other night of the tour.
                                              The man who would write the screenplay for Coop's second Oscar-winnning role (the first was 'Sergeant York')  was a Chicagoan, Carl Foreman, the ambitious son of Russian Jewish immigrants and already leaning communist when he arrived in Hollywood in the late thirties. Foreman met Stanley Kramer during the war and joined Kramer's fledgling independent movie company when he returned to LA. Later, the director Fred Zinnemann, part of the Viennese diaspora in Hollywood, also joined Kramer's company.
                                               In 1947, the HUAC came to town, focused on exploring the industry's left-leaning tendencies.  Red-baiting anti-semitism was at the core the committee's soul. Its leaders believed "that large parts of the New Deal had been a communist plot and that the federal government was riddled with reds." At public hearings later in the year, the committee castigated the Hollywood Ten, seven of whom were writers and all known members of the Party. In response, the industry, which was under severe economic stress as the post-war era movie viewing habits declined significantly, began firing and blacklisting its people.
                                              Foreman conceived of the plot for 'High Noon' as a parable about "the climate of fear that took hold in Hollywood."  He finished the script, and he and Kramer set out to cast it. Coop, by then over 50 and desperate for a decent role, signed on for $100,000, significantly below his usual $250,000. That left Kramer and Foreman with $35,000 for everybody else. They had to sign most of the actors to a one week schedule on a thirty-two day shoot. Twenty-year-old Grace Kelley came for $750 per week.  Foreman received a HUAC subpoena while they were filming. His testimony did not lead to an indictment, but he was blacklisted and fired by Kramer. With a rare solid financial settlement, he decamped for England. The score added by Dimitri Tiomkin is considered a key element to the movie's success, on par with the screenplay, the direction by Zinnemann and Cooper's understated brilliant portrayal of Sheriff Will Kane. Released in  August of 1952, it was an immediate success and was nominated for seven Oscars. The politics of the era prevented all but Cooper and Tiomkin from winning. Indeed, the American Legion lobbied against all the nominees.
                                             Carl Foreman was the exception to the rule amongst the blacklisted because he succeeded in England, where he prospered for twenty years. He wrote, produced, accumulated wealth and enjoyed his time overseas. His two most successful films were 'The Bridge On The River Kwai' and 'The Guns Of Navarone'.  He returned to Hollywood in the seventies to close out his career. Gary Cooper continued to work throughout his fifties, but never again reached the heights of his early years in Hollywood. He died at sixty of prostate cancer.
                                             The movie, of course, lives on. In 1989, a graphic designer for Solidarity in Poland published an image of Sheriff Will Kane with a ballot in his right hand and a a Solidarity badge on his vest. The message said:  High Noon 4 June 1989.  The film has been screened at the White House more than any other. Bill Clinton watched it twenty times.
                                             This book is mostly a telling of the blacklist story and the trials and tribulations of Carl Foreman . 'High Noon' is merely the background. Nonetheless, it's been a good read, and my fascinating takeaway is Coop reciting the Luckiest Man Alive speech in the Pacific while on that USO tour. Also, I've never been much of a fan of John Wayne. I didn't think much of his acting and didn't like his enthusiastic support of the Vietnam War. I learned here that he was an active supporter of HUAC and its all but semi-official affiliate, The Motion Picture Alliance.  The McCarthy era was an unpleasant time in America, one best left in the rear view mirror.

Earning The Rockies*: How Geography Shapes America's Role In The World, Kaplan - B-

                                               Robert Kaplan is a fascinating author who analyzes geopolitical issues and foreign affairs through the lens of geography. I have read his books on the Balkans, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea,and a handful of his magazine articles. I have gained a better understanding of world affairs because of his writing. Much of his work is a a travelogue because he thoroughly researches what he writes about. The subject of this work is a cross-country trip from Stockbridge, Massachusetts to San Diego. To some extent, this is an homage to his dad, a WW2 vet, Queens-based truck driver in Brooklyn, who was way smarter than that job description implies. His father took his family on innumerable car outings to places of historical interest. This trip, by a man now in his mid-sixties, is characterized as "a landscape meditation about America's place in the world."  That said, he keeps his meditations close to the vest and hardly makes a noteworthy observation about the entire three-week drive, other than the standard statements about how our continental temperate climate with innumerable navigable rivers and two oceans has contributed to our good fortune. Upon arrival in San Diego, home of the Pacific fleet, he discusses our role in the world. Fated to lead by our geography and institutions, we saved the world from Fascism and Bolshevism and must continue to act as a counterweight to Russia and China, the dominant forces on the Eurasian landmass. Interestingly, of the century-long upheaval in the post-Imperial Islamic world, he observes that there is little we can do. And to my immense satisfaction, he cites George Kennan, who he refers to as believing that the security of the US is less endangered by its adversaries than it is by the illusions of its leaders and elites. He closes suggesting that successful empires have been cautious, restrained and strategically patient.

*"Earning the Rockies" was a phrase in a juvenile travel article that Kaplan read on a trip as a boy and stems from the statement that driving through the great interior was a dues to pay before you saw the Rockies.

Stolen Beauty, Albanese - B +

                                               Most of this intriguing novel is set in Vienna in the glorious 'fin de siecle' early years of the twentieth century and the horrifying late 1930's. The principal characters are Adele Bauer-Bloch and her niece, Maria Bauer Altmann. Adele is forever known to history as the young woman who modeled for Klimt's 'Lady In Gold'. Maria escaped from Austria after the Anschluss, later in life pursued the recovery of her aunt's picture and was portrayed in the 2015 film 'Woman In Gold'. Adele's story is fascinating. She was an early proponent of women's rights and the force behind her husband's famed art collection. Her story is a short course in modern art that had me researching something every few pages. Maria's story covers more familiar ground for any student of Nazi oppression and the run-up to WWII.  After the war, Adele's husband, Ferdinand, died in Switzerland after he implored his niece to save the portrait for the family. It was a task that she took up half-a-century later when a young lawyer, Randy Schoenburg, brought to her attention a change in Austrian law.  Schoenburg was part of the Austrian Jewish diaspora in California and led the way for the recovery of the painting by Maria when she was eighty-seven. The painting was sold at auction for $135 million to Ronald Lauder who placed in the Neue Museum in NYC.