Blue Moon, Child - B

                                  Jack is in a bus somewhere east of the Mississippi when he notices an old man asleep and an unseemly fella eyeing the cash envelope in the sleeper's pocket. Jack helps the man and soon finds himself in the middle of a turf war between two foreign gangs running the crime syndicate in a small city. Matters are further complicated by the Ukrainian gang having some sinister relationship with a bunch of Russians. It's timely, and, as always, very good.

The Night Fire, Connelly - B +

                                  The Bosch series is alive and well. This is the second book where the author pairs Harry with Renee Ballard and I expect all of the future books will now feature the twosome. This one closes with the next joint case teed up, and considering Harry's age, he could even be written out at some point in the future. On the late show, Ballard catches a case involving the apparent accidental death of a homeless man. About the same time, Harry helps his half-brother, Mickey Haller, with a case and realizes that the LAPD let a murderer get off. Plus, Harry and Renee work a cold case that Harry's mentor had left on his desk in retirement, and which he had asked his widow to give to Harry after he died. The three cases eventually come together with a fantastic finish. Connelly is very much still on top of his game .

The Mosquito: A Human History Of Our Deadliest Predator, Winegard - Incomplete

  "A swarming and consuming army of 110 trillion enemy mosquitoes patrols every inch of the globe save Antarctica, the Seychelles, and a handful of French Polynesian micro-islands." Last year, 830,000 humans died from mosquito bites. "As the pinnacle purveyor of our extermination, the mosquito has consistently been at the front lines of history as the grim reaper....and the ultimate angel of historical change." Traveling around the world with us, the mosquito has affected the outcome of battles and wars, felled civilizations and helped create our present reality.

  The female mosquito needs blood to reproduce. The saliva it injects into a host is an anti-coagulant and is the method of transferring disease. Mosquitoes have been around for 190 million years and have haunted, primarily with malaria and yellow-fever, our brief 200,000 year existence as a species. Malaria, which still kills hundreds of thousands of Africans annually, is caused by a parasite transmitted by the mosquito. Yellow-fever is a mosquito transmitted viral infection, as is Nile fever, Zika, dengue and various encephalitides. The transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies meant an increase in human interaction with mosquitoes, in conjunction with the spread of diseases  (common cold, flu, chicken pox, smallpox, measles and tuberculosis to name a few) occasioned by mankind's domestication of animals. Ancient texts from India, China, Mesopotamia and Egypt speak of the consequences of malaria.

  "On the battlefields of empire building, malaria prejudiced the results of clashes and campaigns during both the rise and fall of Greece and Rome." The miasma of a malarial swamp decimated 70% of  a 5th century BCE Athenian army at Syracuse. The mosquitoes and diseases of the Indus River valley marked the easternmost foray of Alexander the Great's army. Three years later, malaria killed him in Babylon.  The 310 square miles of the Pontine Marshes of Campagna were a malarial fortress protecting the city of Rome from the Second Punic War onward. Hannibal's army handily outmaneuvered and defeated the Romans in three different battles. But, Hannibal could not directly attack the city because it was too well defended. And, he knew he could not linger near the marshes and so withdrew. He lost his strategic advantage and eventually, the war. As Rome grew with fountains, gardens and aqueducts,  its citizens and soldiers were inadvertently exposed to malaria. Those soldiers spread the disease throughout the world. Ongoing and epidemic malaria, along with occasional bouts of bubonic plague, wore down and eventually wore out the western empire and it fell in the fifth  century. 

  When he attributed the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire to the mosquito, I decided to stop reading the book. I re-read the review and noted that the reviewer thought he often overstated his case. There is no doubt that disease has had an overwhelming impact on the history of mankind and perhaps a discussion that included cholera, plague and dysentery would have made more sense. 

not sure about hannibal

The Parisian, Hammad - C

                                  This grand, sweeping novel is, in a very roundabout way, about Palestinian nationalism. Midhat Kamal, a young man from Nablus, arrives in Montpelier, France to study medicine and reside at the home of Frederic Molineau, an anthropology professor. He came to France after years of preparatory study in Constantinople.  He obviously identifies as an Arab Muslim, but his focus is on his studies and improving his French language skills. The First World War breaks out and his foray on the continent becomes uneasy, but never uncomfortable. He slowly falls for the professor's daughter, Jeanette,  but he never has to face his probable rejection by her father. Midhat learns that the professor is studying and writing about him. His language skills, as a 'primitive', are to be the foundation of a doctoral thesis. He parties through the remainder of the war in Paris and heads back to Nablus to apprentice in his father's business. The goal is for him to join his father in Cairo in a year. His dad learns of Midhat's fascination and love for Jeanette by reading a letter addressed to Midhat from Jeanette. His dad harshly demands a local marriage to an appropriate girl. Midhat obtains the hand of Fatima Hammad , the beautiful daughter of a successful local merchant. Just before the wedding, his father dies in Cairo. Midhat soon learns that the business is in the hands of his step-mother and he no longer has a job.                                                       The years marking his return to Nablus coincide with the establishment of the French Mandate over Syria and the British one over Palestine. In Palestine, there is ongoing violence between the local Arabs and the recently arrived Zionists. He and Fatima eventually have five children and raise them in the house he purchased with his cash inheritance from his father. His station in the world is considerably diminished as he has to start a new business. Fatima slowly realizes that she is not married to the man she had hoped for. Midhat carefully avoids the political issues all around him, yet somehow they effect him. His business is burned down in the middle of the 1936 general strike.  He then discovers under the floor in his father's house the letter from Jeannette that he has never seen. Realizing that he has spent his life doing his father's bidding, he goes into a tailspin and is hospitalized.  His family helps him escape from the hospital and he returns to Nablus, where he realizes that he has had a good life and likely will continue to.                                                                                                                                              The NYTimes review of this book was very enthusiastic. I concede that it is very well written. I've gained a few insights into life behind the veil in the Muslim world, and I've learned a bit about Palestine of the era, including the fact that the British were not benign occupiers. But, the most compelling source of information is in the historical addendum. I never realized how many Jews were in the Holy Land that early. There were seventy-five thousand European Zionist immigrants in Palestine before World War I.  Over three hundred thousand came between the wars. At the end of the day,  there just isn't enough meat on the bones of this story. And the life of Midhat Kamal cannot sustain a book this long. 

The Guardians, Grisham - B

                                  The latest by Grisham gets off to a really slow start, leading to the fear that the master has lost a step. It's not his greatest effort, but eventually picks up the pace and delivers. The Guardians is a four person not-for-profit that works on freeing innocent prisoners from jail. Their work is in the south and most of their clients are black. A character in the book refers the Florida - Texas area as the Death Belt. Quincy Miller was framed, completely set up by a small town crooked sheriff, and has spent twenty-two years in jail. As the case begins to come together for the Guardians, those who committed the original crime come back to squelch the innocence process. The good guys always prevail in a Grisham novel. Enjoy this years legal thriller. 

The Ruin, McTiernan - B

                                 This is the debut novel in a new police series set in Galway, on Ireland's west coast. It is off to a fine start exposing, in this instance, the archaic, medieval and dark sides of the Garda and the Church. On his first case out of training twenty years ago, Cormac Reilly finds a fifteen year old girl caring for her five year old brother, with their junkie unmarried mother dead in her bed. He catches a case involving the girl and her now deceased younger brother. The plot is intricate, the story is perfectly paced and the series is one with a future.

Vasily Grossman And The Soviet Century, Popoff - B

                                  Vasily Grossman was a magnificent war correspondent during The Great Patriotic War. In 1944, he wrote the 'Hell of Treblinka', one of the first reports of the Holocaust. It was so well done that it was used as evidence at Nuremberg. He was a Jew whose mother had been killed by the Nazis.  In the 1950's, he wrote his masterpiece, 'Life and Fate'. His great novel, set during the war, compared Nazism and Stalinism in their totalitarian brutality. He was told by the KGB it couldn't be published for 250 years. His final novel, on the Ukraine famine, was so well written that two famous historians, Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum, relied on it in their histories of the era. 

                                He was born in 1905 in the predominantly Jewish city of Berdichev in Ukraine. His mother took him to Kiev in 1914 to provide better educational opportunities. War was followed by revolution and civil war. Millions died or fled the country. Throughout the chaos, he attended school, but was mostly self taught. He moved to Moscow to study chemistry in 1923. He turned to literature and politics, publishing an article in Pravda in 1928. He graduated from college in 1929 and was assigned as a mine inspector in the Donbass region of Ukraine. He contracted TB and was allowed to return to Moscow. With the help of Maxim Gorky, he published his first novel, 'Gluckhauf'.

                                Grossman worked in a pencil factory and wrote in the evenings, publishing short stories in literary magazines. He quit the factory and soon his writing career thrived. A second novel, 'Stepan Kolchugin', followed. His name showed up on certain NKVD lists, but he was not important enough to merit attention during the purges. He became a Red Star war correspondent in the summer of 1941. "His wartime notebooks contained much invaluable material that he would later use in his novels. However, everything he saw that summer - chaos at the front, the Red Army's rout, officers incompetence, and devastating losses - would later be concealed becoming Soviet taboos". He wrote extensively as he traveled all over the front and managed to obtain 2 months off in the spring of 1942. He wrote 'The People Immortal' about the 1941 invasion. It was an immediate success. He was assigned to Stalingrad in August, 1942. He was there through the end of the year, spent time in the city itself, and even a few days with one of the USSR's most famous snipers.  Some of his words are engraved in a memorial on the Volga.  His 'Stalingrad Sketches' was made into a film.  The following summer, he reported on the Battle of Kursk. As the Soviets advanced, he witnessed the consequences of the Holocaust in person and wrote 'Ukraine without Jews', but it was censored in Moscow.  His 'Hell of Treblinka' "transcended its epoch and a single genre, being at once a work of investigative journalism, a historical and philosophical essay, and a requiem to the victims." He marched into Berlin with the Red Army the following spring.  He was immensely popular, one of the best known writers of the war.

                                  He had never completely toed the line and fell out of favor after the war. As the anti-Semitism of Stalin grew and became virulent after the creation of Israel, his circumstances became perilous. All those who had worked on the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee were under suspicion and many were sent to the Gulag. His novel 'For The Right Cause', which is the first half of 'Life and Fate' came out to acclaim in 1952. Stalin's death in 1953 ended a totalitarian era of unprecedented murder and dishonesty. Stalin's crimes would not be fully known in the USSR until 1989. Millions were released from the Gulag.  It was at this time that Grossman began to fine tune his comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism. "In 'Life and Fate' freedom is the main theme. The war is fought against enslavement by both the Nazis and Bolsheviks, who destroyed freedom in their own land." In 1961, the state confiscated his novel and told him that it was too dangerous a threat to the state. He received a cancer diagnosis in 1962 and began to write 'Everything Flows', his novel on the Ukrainian famine. He died in 1964.

                                 A French edition of 'Life and Fate' appeared in 1983, an English version one a year later, and a Russian publication was released in 1988. The book became a bestseller in 2011 after a BBC Radio production starring Kenneth Branagh aired. A 2018 stage adaptation in London brought the novel publicity and, it has been referred to a the 20th century's'War and Peace'. As Russia returns to Stalinism, Grossman has faded into the background again.

                                I read 'Life and Fate' over thirty years ago and remember it as a grand. sweeping, wonderful book that displayed the war from the Soviet side better than anything I had come across. It was and is a great book, on par with those of Tolstoy, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn.

Cari Mora, Harris - B +

                                  The author is of course the creator of such memorable monsters as Francis Dolarhyde (the Tooth Fairy), Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter. Here the eponymous Cari is a young woman in her twenties who is in Miami illegally after growing up as a child soldier in the FARC in Columbia. As a consequence, she is very, very careful in addition to being smart, adept with weapons, and wary of men. Being beautiful carries its risks in her world. Then there's Hans-Peter, maniacal murderer of Paraguayan-German heritage, reciter of obscure songs and owner of a liquid cremation machine and obsidian scalpels. He sells body parts and 'customizes' women for his customers. At the center of a vast layer of thieves and killers is a refrigerator size box under the late Pablo Escobar's Miami house. The box is filled with about $25m of gold and protected by an explosives system. This is another very enjoyable read.

The Satapur Moonstone, Massey - B

                                  As is often the case, the second book in a series experiences a drop off from the debut novel. The British government requests that Purveen travel to the northwest of the country to resolve a conflict amongst the family of a young maharajah about his future education. Of course, there's a lot more going on than education planning. This book reminds us that the Raj was never a completely British operation. Throughout the vast sub-continent, the British presence was often slight. In the northwest alone, in the 1920's, there were dozens of principalities with their own rulers who were assisted, not governed, by a local Imperial agency.

The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, Okrent - B

                                  This is the history of America's virulent renunciation of a meaningful part of its heritage a century ago. A combustive mixture of racism, fear and pseudo-science led to the closing of our borders for over forty years. In 19th century England, the scientific community, fixated on Darwin's theories,  developed the field of eugenics. The term derived from the Greek  meaning 'good stock'.  Proponents of the eugenics movement believed that society could be improved by selectively breeding couples with positive genetic traits; later negative eugenicists tried to eliminate by sterilization those with unpleasant or unhealthy tendencies. Sir Francis Galton observed at a London symposium that society paid more attention to the selection of plants and animals than to people. In the US, Charles Davenport founded a lab in Cold Spring Harbor, NY to focus on the science of cross-breeding, experimental biology, evolution and eventually, eugenics. Simultaneously, one of Boston's Brahmins, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge a believer of his own admirable personal heritage, and the descendant of generations of Harvard educated men, took up the cause of limiting immigration to the US. American xenophobia was not new in America. In the previous century, Ben Franklin had deplored all the German speakers pouring into the colonies. The Irish and Germans were abhorred when they arrived prior to the Civil War. As the 19th century closed, it was the polyglot masses from Italy, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire that frightened the elitists. They looked vastly different from their northern European predecessors, did not speak English, were illiterate and worshipped differently. An 1891 law turned all immigration policy over to the federal government and precluded the admission of "idiots, insane persons and loathsome diseased peoples." Private lobbying organizations, such as Boston's Immigration Restriction League, sprang up.  The restrictionists supported Lodge's Literacy Test bill. The test would require a person to be able to read and write in their native language and per Lodge "would bear most heavily upon the Italians, Poles, Russians and Asiatics."  In Cold Springs Harbor, Davenport was able to take a major step adding the science of human evolution to his studies. Over time, all of the information compiled and the theories proposed by his Eugenics Records Office have been proven to be worthless. But, in the early 20th century, its anti-immigrant screed carried weight.                                                                                                                  The last decade of the 19th century saw 3.7 million Europeans arrive in America.  The following decade the number jumped to  6.7 million.  A restrictive immigration bill with the literacy test passed in 1912, but was vetoed by Taft in the last month of his presidency.  Two years later, Wilson vetoed a similar bill. The vitriol and hatred for dagos, kikes and bohunks could not outweigh generations of an open door policy and the need for inexpensive labor.  It finally passed in 1917 when America was in the thrall of anxiety about the war. Wilson spoke of immigrants "who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life" and called for them to be "crushed out." He actually vetoed the bill, but it finally passed over his veto.  The war virtually stopped immigration in its tracks. It started to pick up  again when 430,000 came in 1920. The Bolshevik Revolution shook the post-war world and the concept of completely eliminating immigration came to the fore in the US.  A State Dept. study referred to those looking to enter as undesirable; from Sicily - "small in stature and of a low order of intelligence", Jews from various locales - "filthy, un-American and dangerous in their habits, from Warsaw - "filthy, ignorant and verminous", and from Danzig - "decidedly inferior." The NYT berated the Senate for not acting on the "swarms of aliens." The final immigration restriction bill passed in 1924.  It lowered the number of immigrants allowed per year to 155,000 and  established a nation-by-nation quota of 2% based on the the US population as per the 1890 census. Victory did not end the anti-immigrant campaign. Millions and millions of inferior peoples were now in America and needed to be controlled. They were inclined to be ignorant, criminals, flat-footed and insane. The twenties saw the eugenics movement pursue the negative policy of forced sterilization. The Supreme Court approved a Virginia law, with Holmes stating "three generations of imbeciles is enough." Soon however, the sciences began to reject the movement.  It was taken up by the Nazis in Germany and faded from the American mainstream. The ERO finally closed in 1940. 

                                                                                  Hundreds of thousands of the undesirable Greeks, Jews, Italians, Serbs, Russians and Poles who otherwise could have come to America died in WW2. The end of the war saw a slight crack in the wall. Our Chinese alliance led to the repeal of the 1882 Exclusion Act. Refugees from the war were admitted, and later those fleeing communism were allowed to enter. In 1965, LBJ, at Liberty Island, signed the Immigration and Naturalization Act scrapping the old quotas. One of the co-authors was Emmanuel Celler of Brooklyn, grandson of German Jewish immigrants, who had vigorously fought the 1924 act as a new Congressman.                                                                                                                                                                  This is a difficult book to read. The racism and hatred of the many of the old-line elites drips from every page. It is of course a reminder that tribalism, extreme partisanship, racism and hatred have always been part of US history.

Cold Storage, Koepp - B +

                                   When an NYT reviewer calls a novel "pure, unadulterated entertainment" and compares it to a Michael Crichton novel, the book is immediately downloaded and read within a day. Good as Crichton? Close, but no cigar, but a ton of fun. The parasitic fungi was in a containment vial when Spacelab fell to earth in 1979. It took seven years for it to escape in a more lethal form, but was contained again. That is, until 2019. Enjoy!!

Lethal Agent, Mills - B +

                                 This is probably the best Mitch Rapp book by the new author. No longer working for the Agency, but rather as a contractor with a direct line to the Director, Mitch and his team are in Yemen trying to track down the ISIS commander. They do not get him and have to return home in order to stop ISIS's threat to use a bio-weapon in the states. Most of the action takes place in Mexico, where the team faces the enemy. As always, a delightful romp.

The Widows Of Malabar Hill, Massey - B +

                                  This is an intriguing and enjoyable novel set in Bombay in 1921. The principal character is Purveen Mistry, the first woman solicitor in India. It is based on the memoirs of an Indian  woman who returned home after studying law in England in the late 19th century. The mystery is about the three surviving Muslim wives of a successful businessman, the exceedingly complex estate inheritance world under Muslim law and the equally complex domestic laws of the Parsis community in India. It passes all of my historical novel tests: it is well-written, explores interesting times and places and puts the reader in the middle of it all.