In Search of a Kingdom: Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire, Bergreen - B+

     In November 1577, the "pirate, plunderer, and scavenger," Francis Drake, set out from Portsmouth with a small fleet to circumnavigate the globe. The only person who knew of his intentions was the Queen. Drake was to also raid the west coast of South America, and otherwise harass the Spanish. England had naval ambitions and eyes on the New World. Drake was the man Elizabeth trusted to expand her remit, and tackle the Spanish. "Drake became the catalyst in England's great transition from an island nation to the British Empire." He had been born in 1541, went to sea early, became a slaver, and a man who despised the tyranny of Spain. His fleet, reduced to three ships, entered the Straits of Magellan on August 20, 1578. Two weeks and 350 miles later, they entered the Pacific.  The heavy weather did not relent and the Marigold, captained by his brother Thomas was lost with all 28 hands. The Elizabeth, captained by a nobleman who despised Drake, was separated, and returned to England. He sailed on with only the Golden Hind. He raided Spanish settlements along the coast. In March 1579, he captured a treasure ship with 26 tons of silver. He captured a second treasure ship, and sailed north to what is today British Columbia. It was time to return to England. They sailed to the Philippines and on to Indonesia. They then encountered the most dangerous moment of their trip. The Golden Hind ran aground on a submerged shoal somewhere in the middle of the ocean. For twenty hours, they lightened the ship, even throwing their cannons overboard. A strong wind nudged them free. They sailed 6,000 miles across the Indian Ocean and rounded the Cape on June 15, 1580.  In September, they sailed into Portsmouth. "Drake's success was Spain's humiliation. He had not simply beaten Spain to distant outposts and trade routes, he had not simply outdone Magellan* and other would be circumnavigators, he had stolen vast wealth from Spain in a flagrant display of global piracy."

   The plunder from his trip was worth approximately a million-and-a-half pounds. Half went to Elizabeth, 10,000 to Drake, 40,000 for his crew, a return for his investors, and the rest to the Treasury. Financially, both Elizabeth and the nation were now in good stead. Elizabeth conferred a knighthood on Drake in April 1581. Drake's flagrant attacks on the Spanish combined with Spain's desire to eradicate Protestantism in England led a  deterioration the relations between the two countries. The Pope encouraged Philip II of Spain to invade England and Philip decided to act. The 1587 execution of Mary Queen of Scots strengthened his resolve. Spain's plans were massive; over a hundred ships and thousands of soldiers were readying to invade England. Drake, who had been raiding in the Caribbean, was given a prominent role in preparing the defense of the realm. He conducted a very successful raid on the Spanish port of Cadiz in the spring of 1587, and spent a month plundering as far as the Azores. England, with no standing army and with half of its population Catholic, had to defend on the seas. The Armada set sail on May 19, 1588 in a crescent 7 miles wide. One hundred and thirty ships, manned by almost 9,000 sailors and carrying over 21,000 soldiers, headed north. The vastly outnumbered English however, were  smaller, faster, more agile and possessed of better armaments. After struggling against heavy seas and weather, the Armada arrived off the Cornwall coast on July 19. The Spanish sailed east toward Dunkirk where an army supposedly awaited transport. All the while the English harassed them.  Off of Calais, the Spanish sought out the Duke of Parma's army, but he never showed. At this point, the English had more ships than the Spanish. They attacked and severely crippled the Armada in the Battle of Gravelines. The fatal decision to return home by sailing around Scotland and Ireland was made and the weather destroyed much of what was left of the fleet. It is estimated that English guns sank a fifth of the fleet. Twenty-six ships floundered off the Irish coast. Only half of the Spanish made it home. The English losses were less than 100 men.

   "The victory over the Spanish Armada solidified Elizabeth's claims to Empire." The memory of the success was cited during the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War. The Spanish Empire began its long decline, and Drake slowly fell from favor. Although he continued to sail and fight, there were no more glorious successes. He died of dysentery off the Panama coast in January, 1596. History, though, has treated him kindly. John Maynard Keynes stated that the wealth he brought home settled the kingdom's debt and set it on the road to empire and prosperity. His sailing skills were unparalleled and his aggressive style became the template for the Royal Navy of the future.

    This is an excellent history book and one that filled in a few blanks for me.  I've never paid much attention to what the Spanish did in America, but this book reminds us that it was genocide, theft, rape and plunder on a massive scale.  Drake's skills are apparent and the author has no hesitation about praising him, yet acknowledging that he was a pirate. 

*Ferdinand Magellan is credited with the first circumnavigation of the world, but he did not survive the trip. He was killed in the Philippines. .

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, A Temptation, and The Longest Night of the Second World War, Gladwell - B +

    The Bomber Mafia were the young men of the US Army Air Force Technical School in the 1930's who tried to plan for a future in which sophisticated modern airplanes could be used in war. In 1941, they presented Air War Plans Division One to headquarters, mapping out in nine pages the US strategy for an air war against Germany. They believed in the concept of precise daytime bombing utilizing the Norden bombsight. When war came and they tried to implement their plans, they failed. The bombsight, a sort of analog computer, worked in the research lab, but the mass produced iteration did not work as planned in combat situations.

   The air war in the Pacific was different from the one in Europe. The B-29 was built  because it could fly farther, and distance was the challenge in the Pacific. Only after the capture, in 1944, of the Marianas could the US launch bombing raids on Japan. The Marianas were actually a rat and mosquito infested hellhole from which the new Superfortress could reach Japan, but only when the weather was perfect. And when they arrived over Tokyo seeking out the Nakajima aircraft plant, they couldn't effectively bomb it because of the jet stream's interference with their bombing runs. Washington decided it was time to forget precision bombing and burn Japan's cities to the ground.  They had the perfect tool to accomplish their goal - napalm and, the perfect man to lead he charge - Curtis LeMay. LeMay decided to have his planes make low altitude saturation bombing runs at night. He reversed all of our strategic plans, and began the terrorization of the Empire on March 9, 1945. Hundreds of B-29's dropped 1655 tons of napalm on a 12 square mile section of Tokyo. In the next six months, firebombing destroyed most of Japan's cities and killed anywhere from 500,000-1,000,000 people. Historians from both Japan and America believe the firebombing hastened the end of the war, and avoided an invasion of the home islands by the US and the USSR.

   Today's US Air Force has mastered precision bombing and perfected the dream of the Bomber Mafia of limiting civilian casualties. This is a fascinating and very brief read. As the author declares in his closing comments, the Mafia prevailed in the end, but it took completely overturning their plans to win the war.

Goodbye To The Dead, Freeman - B+

        This is the 7th in the Stride series set in Duluth. The story is told in halves, one  a decade ago, and the other in the present. Stride's wife, Cindy, was dying during a mesmerizing murder trial involving one of the city's best surgeons. A decade later, the murder weapon, which had not found turns up leading to a second complex case and the true explanation of what had happened earlier. Once again, this is a great book in a very powerful series.

The Cellist, Silva - B+

       In the 21st iteration of Gabriel Allon's battle against the world's evildoers, the author has pulled off a minor classic. The Office runs an op against a Russian oligarch who launders money on behalf of the Kremlin. Gabriel plants someone in his inner circle and manages to close down the German bank that runs the 'Russian laundromat' out of a Swiss branch, cost the oligarch his freedom and fortune, and most importantly, arrange for authorities in the West to seize billions of the Tsar's ill-gotten gains. This is another fabulous read in this series that cannot have many more to come. Gabriel's term is up in the new year, and Chiara is moving to Venice.

Eddie's Boy, Perry - B

      This is the fourth, and likely last, in the Butcher's Boy series. After decades of hiding out in the UK, Schaeffer finds himself under the gun. A mob boss about to get out of the federal pen has put a contract out on him. That was a mistake, as Eddie's Boy lays waste to anyone and everyone in that family. These are always great reads and this is no exception.

A Man Called Doll, Ames - C+

       Hank Doll is a former member of the LAPD, a PI and nighttime security at a massage parlor. A meth-crazed customer nearly kills him and the next day his best friend walks in his front door and dies from a gunshot wound. We learn a little bit about illegal organ transplants, but not much more.

You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War, Becker - B+

      Prior to Vietnam, the term war correspondent applied exclusively to men. A Frenchwoman, an American and an Australian were the groundbreakers who altered that dynamic. Catherine Leroy was a photographer; Frances Fitzgerald wrote for US magazines and was skilled at writing about the war from the Vietnamese perspective; Kate Webb excelled at combat reporting.

     MACV selected Leroy to cover its first and, as it turned out, only airborne offensive in early 1967. She was 5 feet tall and weighed 87 pounds, but had made dozens of jumps in France. She had arrived in Saigon a year earlier. She had a vague affiliation with Paris Match and talked her way into being a stringer for the AP.  She spent more time in the field in 1966 than any other journalist. She smoked, cursed and lived with the soldiers in the jungle. Her photographs garnered world wide applause.

    Also arriving in theater in 1966 was Frances Fitzgerald, the daughter of a senior CIA executive, and a Peabody heiress on her mother's side. She had graduated from Radcliffe in 1962 after a childhood of remarkable privilege. She had planned to write a few articles and stay in Vietnam for a month.  She was intrigued by Buddhist culture and reported in depth about the Buddhist opposition to the Saigon government. Her articles began to appear in the Village Voice, the Atlantic and the New York Times. Exhausted and ill, she returned to New York in the fall.

   Early the following year, Leroy accompanied the Marines into their battle for Khe Sanh. Her intimate photographs of the anguish and pain of combat were featured in Life, the NYTimes, and Paris Match and led to an article about her in Time. Her work was compared to the iconic photograph of the Marines on Iwo Jima. A few months later, she was seriously wounded, after being hit by 35 pieces of shrapnel. After a respite in hospital and in Paris, Leroy returned to the field. When the Tet offensive broke out, she went to Hue, the scene of heavy fighting. She was briefly captured by the NVA and her pictures of the North Vietnamese soldiers were the first of the war. Her fame increased as Life used one of her photographs for its cover. Award followed award. Look used a 10 page spread of her photos to announce its opposition to the war. Worn out and haunted by what she had been seeing for three years, she left Vietnam at the end of 1968.

   On the opening morning of Tet, an Australian stringer for UPI, Kate Webb, ran to the US Embassy. Her article used the phrase "a butcher's shop in Eden" to summarize the scene. The line was quoted around the world and led to a full time job.  UPI put her into a regular combat rotation, something neither the Times nor the AP would do for four more years. Her specialty was covering the ARVN and the impact of the war on civilians. In 1970,  UPI sent her to Cambodia, where she would become a legend. That year, the US expanded the war with extensive bombing and a brief invasion of the country. Reporters following the war in Cambodia were dying at an incredible rate, as they entered the war zone without the protection of American forces. The rather ineffective Cambodian army could not hold off the communist Khmer Rouge. She became bureau chief when her boss was killed.  In April 1971, Webb and five other journalists were captured by the North Vietnamese. Weeks of interrogation and marching followed. They were released three weeks later.  Kate was an international celebrity, but a very ill one, having contacted two different strains of malaria.                                                                One of Fitzgerald's last reports was a 15 page article in the Atlantic in 1967. It would become the outline for her masterpiece, 'Fire In The Lake', which was published in 1972. Unlike most journalists and the American military, she understood that the issues in Vietnam went back longer than the last few decades. She wrote of the half-millennium of Chinese overlordship that fostered the desire for freedom. Her focus was on Vietnam, its people and culture. The New Yorker serialized it, something it had last done for Hersey's Hiroshima. The book was an immediate best seller, and won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and Bancroft Prize, besting Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. 

     When the end came in April 1975, Leroy was in Saigon, Fitzgerald in Hanoi and Webb in Manilla. Leroy continued as a war photographer around the world in the 70's, 80's and into the 90's. She died in 2006. Webb left journalism for a decade and then went to work for Agence-France Press and reported throughout Asia. She retired in 2001, returned to Australia and died in 2007. Fitzgerald stayed on in the upper echelons of American society and academic circles. She published a book on American history text books, and won a second set of awards for a 2017 book on American evangelicals.

    This is a fabulous book, very well written and a testament to the extraordinary courage these three young women showed in daily risking their lives and in overcoming the prejudices they faced.  For almost fifty years, 'Fire in the Lake' in its bright yellow dustcover has been in my library and my heart. It, along with 'The Best and the Brightest' , helped me come to understand the paramount political issue of my youth. 

   

   

Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, McDaniel - B+

   This is the powerful Pulitzer Prize winning history of Henrietta Wood, a black woman who sued for her wrongful enslavement and was paid $2500 by her wealthy, white slaveholder. It is the largest sum ever paid as restitution for slavery. She was born in 1818 or 1820 in northern Kentucky. As a teenager, she was sold to a man in Louisville and taken away from her extended family. She was sold again during the Panic of 1837 to William Cirode, who moved Henrietta with his family to New Orleans. When Cirode abandoned his family and left America, his wife Jane went back to Louisville with Henrietta. They then moved to Cincinnati, likely because Jane was fleeing her husband's creditors. Henrietta became free upon entering Ohio and in the spring of 1948, Jane registered Henrietta's freedom in the local courthouse. Five years later, while working for a different woman, Henrietta made the mistake of accepting an offer to take a ride on the Kentucky side of the river. Her kidnapping and sale to Zebulon Ward was orchestrated by William Cirode's daughter and son-in-law, the two people behind Cirode's financial difficulty. Her kidnapping garnered widespread attention leading to a prosecution of two people in Cincinnati and a lawsuit on her behalf in Kentucky. The prosecution in Ohio was dismissed, as was the case in Kentucky. She was sold down the river to Natchez, where, at an auction, a cotton planter purchased her. Gerard Brandon owned several plantations and over 700 slaves. The outbreak of war disrupted the economics of the cotton trade and the Union's capture of the Mississippi in 1863 sent Brandon and hundreds of his slaves to Texas. Three years later, Henrietta was with Brandon for his return to Natchez.

    In June 1870, the Cincinnati Enquirer published an article about a lawsuit seeking $20,000 from Zeb Ward for abduction and enslavement brought by a mulatto woman and former resident of the city. Henrietta had returned to Cincinnati in 1869. Ward's primary defense tactic was delay, and more delay. In 1874, Henrietta's lawyer, who was also her employer, was shot and murdered by the ex-husband of a woman he had represented in a divorce case. A reporter, Lafcaido Hearn, began to publicize her case in a local paper. The case was presented before a jury of 12 white men in the spring of 1878. Two days of testimony were followed by confusing instructions by the judge. He did however emphasize that the controlling fact was whether Henrietta had been free in 1853. He also cautioned against an excessive award if the jurors found for the plaintiff. The jury awarded Henrietta $2500 and Ward's lawyers immediately moved for a new trial. The motion was denied a year later and Ward paid the judgement. She moved to Chicago, where her son Arthur, born in Mississippi before the war, was living. Arthur worked as a Pullman porter and in the 1880's went to law school.  He purchased a home near Washington Park, likely funded with Henrietta's award, married and built a succsessful law practice. Henrietta lived until 1912, the year her granddaughter married. Later in life, Arthur was featured in Jet magazine as the oldest working black lawyer in America. He died in 1951.

   This is a fabulous read and enlightening in so many ways. It is probably the first book I've read since 'Roots' in 1977 that delves with so much detail into the day to day of slavery. The simple fact that she was sold multiple times is eye-opening and heartbreaking. Thanks to Greg Weiss for the recommendation.

   

Northern Heist, O'Rawe - B +

    This is a fabulous novel set in Belfast in the early years of the century. James O'Hare orchestrates a brilliant and successful robbery of the national bank. Outwitting and eluding the police forces are only half the story. For any Catholic thief, there is a tax that has to be paid - to the IRA. This is a gritty, street level look at life and crime in the north.

The Lost Apothecary, Penner - B-

    This novel is set in London and features an American woman, Caroline, visiting in the present, and two Londoners, Nella and Eliza, in 1791. Nella was an apothecary specializing in mixing poisons for utilization by women wronged by men. Eliza was the 12-year old maid of one of her customers. In perhaps one of the most unbelievable leaps of imagination ever written, Caroline finds Nella's shop behind a wall down an alley in the middle of the metropolis, and unearths Nella's secrets. A bit too much fantasy for me.

Icebound: Shipwrecked At The End Of The World, Pitzer - B-

     William Barents, a Dutch navigator and ship's captain, sailed north from Amsterdam in May, 1594. He was in pursuit of the elusive northeast passage north of Russia. His goal was to find and chart a route that would be the pathway to China. He was part of a four ship fleet that had been directed to explore the sea lanes around Nova Zembla (today Severny Island). They sailed north to the end of  the island, but faced endless miles of ice, and turned back toward the Russian coast. Barents had sailed further north than anyone before. The fleet returned to Holland in mid-September. The Dutch decided to fund a second, larger fleet the following year. They thought that the previous year's efforts pointed to clear sailing, failing to recognize that Barents and the others were thousands of miles from Asia. The second fleet, which carried cargo for trading and consisted of seven ships, sailed north a month later than the prior year. They sailed as far east as the year before, but faced a sea covered in ice. Overwhelmed and stymied, they returned home again, this time in November. The backers were less than pleased, but the city of Amsterdam decided to fund a third try. In May of 1596, once again Barents sailed north. He was directed to try a more northern route, on the delusional theory that the water closer to the pole was ice free and warm. At a hundred miles further north than he had ever sailed, Barents discovered Spitsbergen due north of the Norwegian coast. He then sailed east, rounded the northern tip of Nova Zembla, sailed into the Kara Sea and sought safety in Ice Harbor, only to be locked in. He and his men came to the realization they would have to winter in the Arctic.  They faced the obvious challenge of the oncoming winter and daily had to fend off  fearsome polar bears. By the end of October, they fashioned a small shack and left the boat in the harbor. The last moments of daylight were on Nov. 4th. The men had ample supplies, but nothing that would help them battle a disease they did not understand - scurvy. Only freshly killed Arctic foxes kept them from succumbing. Through months of freezing desperation, they somehow survived until the spring. On June 14, 1597, in two open boats, fifteen men departed Ice Harbor. The oldest man of the group, Barents, was the first to die. He would become the first Arctic hero, and a legend amongst the Dutch. As they journeyed south,  more death brought their number down to twelve. They fought the ice and almost daily attacks by bears. On August 3rd, they left behind the southern tip of Nova Zembla, headed for the Russian coast, 120 miles away and reached it the following day.  They continued west for a month and met a Dutch ship. They were saved.  The twelve survivors arrived in Amsterdam on Nov. 1st. Their survival made Barents "immortal." And today, because of climate change, the passage from Europe to Asia can now be made in the summer in two-thirds of the time of the old southern route.

Red Widow, Katsu - B

      This is a thriller set in modern Washington at CIA headquarters in Langley. Lyndsey is recalled from home leave to lead a search for a mole after three Russian agents are discovered by the FSB. She suspects Theresa, widow of a noted CIA leader captured and killed in an off the books op two years before. But perhaps Theresa's husband is not dead. Could the section chief be running a rogue investigation? As always in spy thrillers, there are endless loops of intrigue and deceit.