I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank Sheeran "The Irishman" And Closing The Case On Jimmy Hoffa, Brandt - B -

                                 This is Sheeran's story, told in the first person, as he related it over the course of half-a-dozen years to the author, a former prosecutor. He was born in 1920, had a classic impoverished rough and tumble Catholic childhood in Philadelphia, got kicked out of school in the 9th grade, grew to be 6'4" and saw over 400 days of combat in N. Africa and Italy. He came back meaner and tougher, without any moral compass.  He worked different jobs around Philadelphia, and met noted crime boss Russell Bufalino in 1955. Soon thereafter, he did his first 'job' for the Philly mob. Russell then introduced him to Jimmy Hoffa, who offered Sheeran an organizer's job in Detroit. At Hoffa's behest, he occasionally 'took care of somebody'. Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department spent years trying put Jimmy Hoffa behind bars and finally, in 1964, he was sent to 'school' for eight years. He didn't enter a penitentiary until three years later, after all his appeals were denied. After a hefty bribe delivered by Sheeran to John Mitchell, President Nixon pardoned Hoffa in late 1971. Hoffa's one ambition after release from prison was to regain the presidency of the Teamsters. He began to publicly state that his successor was too lenient on the repayment terms of all the mob money lent out by the Pension Fund.  By threatening the powers that be, Hoffa sealed his fate and was gunned down by Sheeran on July 30, 1975. Although the FBI never solved the case, most of the people they thought were in on it, including Sheeran, went to jail for one thing or another. Sheeran told it all to the author late in life as a confession of his sins. 

Many Rivers To Cross, Robinson - B+

                                  This novel is the latest in the acclaimed DCI Banks series that is now over 30 years old. Like almost all writers of European crime fiction for the last quarter-of-a-century, the author delves into the immigration issues that have bedeviled the EU. The victim in this one is a young Syrian boy who somehow got to England, but ran into the wrong people, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. More interesting though, is the ongoing story of a Moldovan woman who appeared in the last Banks novel, and whose story will be continued in the next one. Trafficked out of Moldova by some really bad guys from the Balkans, Zelda has managed to escape, survive and make a bit of a life with one of Banks' friends. She has a unique skill and is a 'super recognizer', who can remember every face she has ever seen and who occasionally works for the British government. She has seen those traffickers and now knows that they are  in the UK. It's an interesting plot line and I don't believe the author has carried a story forward in the past. Indeed,  it's interesting enough that I'm trying to figure out when the next book will be published.

Elevator Pitch, Barclay - B

                                  This is a very solid thriller set in today's NYC.  The title stems from the fact that someone with a very solid political motive and or connection to elevators embarks on a terrorist activity involving sabotaging elevators. The impact on the world's most vertical city is obviously paralyzing and terrifying. The conclusion is a bit weak, but all in all a fun ride.

The Ghost Map: The Story Of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World, Johnson - B

                                 In 1854, London had two-and-a-half million people crammed inside a 30 mile circumference and no system for the removal of waste. That job was left to scavengers who scoured the city for anything of value and night-soil men who emptied the city's cesspools. The city had grown in fifty-years from a million, totally lacked the infrastructure to handle that growth and was literally drowning in its own filth. In September, cholera broke out in the Golden Square neighborhood of Soho and it broke out with a vengeance. A disease that usually took days to kill was now felling entire families in 24 hours or less. 

                                  A well on Broad Street was examined and a sample of its water taken by Dr. John Snow. But the technology of the times was not able to analyze and assess the sample. Snow was the first medical professional to propose that cholera was a waterborne disease. He did so in the face of an establishment that believed in the miasma theory that all illnesses are airborne. So, he decided to track deaths, their location and their source of drinking water.  A week into the crisis, he convinced the supervisors to shut down the Broad Street well. It was the first scientifically driven preventive measure ever taken against the disease. 

                                   Snow put together a map that convinced the local clergyman of the waterborne theory, and it was adopted by the Vestry Committee. Slowly and over time, the theory gained traction. Recognition of the pollution of the Thames as a source of waterborne disease and endless stench led to the construction of a sewer system, moving storm water and waste far to the east and hopefully out to sea. The sewers built in the mid-19th century are the backbone of today's system in London. "Establishing sanitary water supplies and waste management systems became  the central infrastructure project of every city on the planet." Electrification came later, but without a sewer system, the world's cities could not continue to grow and prosper.

                                     This book is much more than a history of a singular event. Rather, it is a far ranging and enchanting story of English history, sociology, and politics along with updates on 19th century medicine and public health. Thanks to my brother Bill for the recommendation.

Reckonings: Legacies Of Nazi Persecution And The Quest For Justice, Fulbrook - B, Inc.

  This award-winning book explores how people were transformed by the experiences of the Holocaust. Both the processes of  persecution, and the long-term reverberations, are explored through the experiences of the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Early on, the Nazis sponsored state violence in order to reestablish law and order and to clear Germany of undesirables. Before the war, the 1930's saw the construction of camps throughout the country, often in close proximity to major cities. Jews, Roma, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses were uniformly condemned, imprisoned, tortured, and often murdered. "The work of leading Nazis was made infinitely easier by varying combinations  of support, complicity, acquiescence, accommodation, or capitulation among those who, for whatever reasons, did not engage in courageous acts of resistance or organized opposition." Many advanced their careers by enthusiastically embracing the Nazi's policies. Far more widespread was simple conformity. The first mass victims of Nazi extermination policies met their death in Germany, not Poland. They were the mentally and physically disabled,  whose life was deemed unworthy of living. For the common good, euthanasia of the disabled began in 1939, starting with infants and eventually, children and adults. The medical profession committed the crimes and the state's lawyers looked the other way. The euthanasia killing centers were in Germany proper and became known to the local public, who occasionally raised a mild complaint, but generally accepted what was going on around them. Those who managed the program learned important skills and many were later transferred east to participate in the burgeoning Holocaust. Those who assisted had such small roles in a large programs that they were able to later claim that their contributions were de minimis. 

  The occupation of Poland led to the first ghettos and death camps, and the opportunity for non-Germans to aid and abet the Nazis. For two years, until the invasion of the USSR and the decision to implement the Final Solution the Jews starved and suffered in Poland's ghettos. From that point on, the Jews of Poland, whether in city ghettos or small towns,  and the Jews from the rest of Europe were sent to the charnel houses. As the war's progression led to manpower shortages in German industry, many Jews, as well as POWs, were worked to death as slave laborers. Somewhere between 200,000 and one million people were directly involved in killing Jewish civilians. The invasion of the USSR gave free range to the Einsatzgruppen, who slaughtered 1.8 million Jews in the opening months of Barbarossa. The work of killing innocents was so stressful that the Reich had to devise a more efficient method than shooting in place. Zyklon-B was utilized at Auschwitz and its success led to the scaling up of the Nazi's industrial killing machines.  "Auschwitz remains an iconic site not only of remembrance but also of selective oblivion." Its place in history as the epitome of evil has been sealed by the number of deaths -well over a million - and the number of survivors whose memoirs ably described the horrors that took place there. At nearby Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, pure extermination camps, where there was no work to be done by the prisoners, there were virtually no survivors. And without witnesses, very few of the managers of the extermination camps were ever brought to justice. The killings returned to Germany as the war waned. The Soviet arrival sent hundreds of thousands on forced marches from the camps into the Reich. Those marches became known as death marches and every corner of Germany saw them. For those who survived, "the experience of persecution was the defining experience of their life, they could never forget or evade the past, only learn to live with it." Their lives changed in a matter of minutes and they went from living a normal life to losing any sense of individuality and even humanity. They became members of a subspecies. For those who survived, "they were neither entirely of  the living nor of the dead, but rather a community apart." Most survivors could only talk about their experiences with other survivors and even then, sparingly. 

  In Poland, occupied Germany and Austria, many were brought to swift justice in the immediate aftermath of the war. Nuremberg saw the trial of the top dozen surviving Nazi leaders and the exposition of their atrocities to the world. The Americans followed up with successor trials against the Army, the Luftwaffe, government bureaucrats, doctors, the Einsatzgruppen, concentration camp officials, industrial leaders,  I.G. Farben, manufacturer of Zyklon-B and others. The British held 358 trials.  Although there were hundreds executed, most were sentenced to jail and almost all of those jail terms were reduced because of a general amnesty in 1950. These men were need back in society to assist West Germany in the Cold War. West Germany also developed what the author calls 'the alibi of a nation', scapegoating the excesses of the SS and the Gestapo and alleging the army was clean. After the victors' trials, each of the successor states, Austria, East and West Germany also held trials, with the focus on activities in those states and involving crimes against fellow Germans or Austrians. 

   At the half way point in this book, I was forced to call it quits. The topic is of immeasurable consequence, one I have an interest in and a meaningful amount of knowledge about. But, the depth of the detail and the fact that in order to deal with a given topic, e.g., the use of slave labor, the author roves far, wide, back and forth and into specifics about one or two people, and then back to industry or state wide topics left me spinning. 

Lady In The Lake, Lippman - B

                                  This novel is a thriller/detective story set in Baltimore in the mid-60's. It is seen through the eyes of the two principal characters, Maddie and Cleo. Maddie is a suburban Jewish mom who decides, at 37, to give it all up and try her hand at a newspaper. Cleo is a younger black woman who hangs out with the wrong kind of men and winds up dead. The book delves into the two worlds the two different woman inhabit, Maddie's road to independence, and Cleo's struggles to find happiness.

The Secrets We Kept, Prescott - B+

                                  This wonderful novel is set on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the 1950's. The American half of the story is about the very bright young women who typed for the CIA at a time when, regardless of education, that was what women did. One actually makes it out of the typing pool to become a courier and eventually, a foreign agent. The more interesting half of the story is set in Russia and features Boris Pasternak, and Olga Ivinskaya, his inspiration for Lara. Pasternak's privileged life as a poet was always on the edge of disaster because it was generally known that he didn't really toe the communist line. Indeed at one point, they sent Olga to the Gulag as a warning to him. His affair with Olga ran for decades and she was an integral partner in the long term writing of Dr. Zhivago. The CIA tie in is that after the novel was published, the CIA was instrumental in getting Russian copies of the book into the USSR. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel, but suffered from a vicious counterattack by the Soviet establishment. The book was not released in the USSR until 1988.

White Hot Silence, Porter - B-

                                  This is a pretty good thriller set in Italy, Russia and Estonia featuring a famous aid worker and humanitarian kidnapped by Russians. The aid worker is married to an American billionaire who has uncovered a nefarious plot hatched in Moscow to disrupt European democracies. The point of the kidnapping is to make him back off from trying to expose the anti-democratic hijinks. There is, for me, one gaping hole in the plot. The Silicon Valley investor happens to have been a Kurdish Peshmerga commander and experienced fighter in a prior life. Things often do not add up in thrillers, but this is too much to ask of one character. The spouse is freed from the Russians, the plot against Europe foiled and the billionaire safely ensconced back in California. 

The Shadow King, Mengiste - C

                                  This is a novel about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.  It is seen through the eyes of an Ethiopian peasant woman, Hirut, who joined the army, fought bravely and escaped Italian captivity. The author had been told stories by her grandfather, and committed to writing the novel after she learned that her great grandmother had also been a combatant. Woman throughout the country joined the resistance, fought beside the men and supported the armies as laborers, cooks and healers. Both Hirut and her rival and ally, Aster, are the leaders of the many women who bravely and effectively fought the Fascist invaders. My preference for all novels, historical or otherwise, is for a straight forward narrative, and this is just a bit too elusive for me. Nonetheless, it is a Booker Prize finalist.