The Secret Life Of A Cemetery: The Wild Nature And Enchanting Lore Of Pere-Lacahaise, Gallot - B

         This is a delightful homage to the world’s most famous—and most visited—cemetery. The author is the son and grandson of men who created funeral monuments. He went to law school in Paris and is now the Curator, living at the cemetery with his family. Père-Lachaise was built in 1804, the first cemetery constructed pursuant to new rules promulgated by Napoleon. It was landscaped and designed with individual burial plots arranged in rows like city streets. It was expanded in the mid–19th century to 110 acres. A 2011 law proscribed pesticides, and it has been re-wilding for more than a decade. During Covid, foxes were sighted there for the first time in memory and now live in a small community in one of its quietest corners. It has also become a major bird-sighting venue, featuring dozens of species that nest there. The three million visitors who come annually visit the gravesites of Frédéric Chopin, Édith Piaf, Molière, Oscar Wilde, Modigliani, Seurat, Marcel Proust, and, of course, the most visited of them all—Jim Morrison. Today, there are 1,000 interments, 1,300 ash scatterings, and 550 sets of ashes placed in columbariums. The theme of this book is that it is a special place shared by the dead and the living.

Killing Ants, O'Quin - B+

        Esteemed Baton Rouge banker Ted, now a stockbroker, sits down with a walk-in client. She tells him she wants to move custody of the securities her late husband left her into a brokerage account. Ted processes and deposits most of the holdings but sets aside the “speculative file,” planning to deal with it after the weekend. Mrs. Lewis dies before he ever does. When Ted finally opens the file, he realizes he is sitting on $21 million in stocks that no one else knows about—fully endorsed by a woman with no family, no heirs, and no trail. The temptation is immediate, and permanent. Not long after, Ted meets a younger, aggressive, stunning blonde and falls hard. They plunge into a wild, reckless affair that ends abruptly when her father catches them together and sues Ted for ignoring his account at the firm. Ted’s wife throws him out. His children shut him down completely. Though the lawsuit is fueled more by vengeance than substance, Ted settles. The U.S. Attorney agrees to accept the plea, but the judge still sends him to prison for a year.

          Ted comes out leaner, tougher, and clearer. He sells his baseball card collection, moves into a trailer park, and begins training for a marathon. Quietly, methodically, he figures out how to access the stocks he has been hiding for years. A chance meeting with an old friend—now a minister—gives him the solution he needs. Ted arranges for the securities to be placed in a charitable account he can manage. The plan works almost too well. Ted rebuilds his life and slowly reconnects with his children. The foundation’s assets swell far beyond expectations, enriching both Ted and the church. Anticipating the 2008 crash, Ted shorts the market and hits his personal target of $10 million. Now he faces a new problem: controlling the minister’s increasingly extravagant behavior, fueled by sudden wealth. And while he’s at it, Ted decides it wouldn’t hurt to bring down his accuser and his prosecutor. He succeeds. He arranges for the foundation to be paid out to the remainder beneficiary, leaves the state, and disappears. Living quietly in Colorado, Ted eventually hears from the FBI—and escapes once more, this time for good.

         Kudos to my friend, neighbor, and first-time author who handed me this book last week. Well done, Greg.

A Short History of Poland, Rappaport - B-

        The Poles are a Slavic people once known as “the dwellers of the plains,” as the country has few natural boundaries. Long ago, it was a republic presided over by an elective chief called the king. While Europe was feudal, Poland stood for independence and liberty.

        Poland adopted Christianity in the 9th century. Bolesław the Great is considered the founder of the kingdom of Poland in the 11th century. Nonetheless, it remained a land through which rival armies marched, and the Germans, in particular, expanded their control. It was “the Polish clergy which saved Polish nationality, history, and language, and in the midst of the general chaos and anarchy maintained order, morality, and unity.” Casimir the Great, in the 14th century, took important steps to reform and unify the country, including recognizing the status of the Jews. A royal marriage led to the creation of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth a century later. In the 17th century, the Cossacks, committed to the Orthodox religion, rebelled and launched the country into a civil war in which they succeeded in transferring their loyalties to Russia. Wars with Sweden and Russia, combined with the plague, depopulated the country. When the Turks invaded in 1672, Poland sent John Sobieski into battle, and he defeated them, leading to his coronation as king. Sobieski pushed Poland to the apogee of its international fame a decade later when he rode to Vienna at the head of an army, lifted the siege, and defeated the Ottomans. Praise poured in for “the Liberator of Christendom.” When he died in 1696, the Austrian emperor said that “such a great king should never die.”

        He was succeeded by a Saxon line that drove the kingdom into ruinous wars and depopulation. The weakening of the state and the monarchy in the late 18th century aroused the ambitions of Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Endless wars allowed them to advance their boundaries deep into Poland, initiating the first partition. Some dissenting nobles asked Catherine II to help them, leading Russia to invade and occupy Warsaw and resulting in the second partition. A rebellion against the Russians, led by Kościuszko, valiantly fought the superior army but eventually succumbed. The Polish nation disappeared.

         The occupiers dismantled the language, institutions, and culture of the country. Prussia and Austria Germanized their lands, while the Russians worked to incorporate their portion into their empire. When Napoleon created the Duchy of Warsaw, the Poles joined his cause and his invasion of Russia. The Congress of Vienna considered reestablishing Poland but did not. A rebellion against the Russians in 1830 failed. Throughout the 19th century, the seeds of independence rested in people’s hearts as Russia crushed the language and made Poland a portion of its empire. Thus ends this century-old book, without reaching the painful chapters of the 20th century.

The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair, Dicker - B, Inc.

         Marcus is a successful NYC author who is struggling with writer’s block and unable to start his second book. With his agent and publisher pushing him, he heads to a seaside town in New Hampshire, where his college mentor and good friend Harry resides. Harry talks to him about the book that propelled him to fame 33 years ago. The book had been inspired by a teenage girl he had fallen deeply in love with, and who was going to run away with him. Nola disappeared and was never seen again after the day they were to depart. Nola’s remains are found on Harry’s property, and he is arrested for first-degree murder. Believing in Harry’s innocence, Marcus starts to investigate. When I can sort out who done it in a whodunit on page 184 of 636, I figure it’s not worth the effort to finish.

The Winter Warriors, Norek - B++

         This is a novel about the 100-day Winter War of 1939–40. A key character is Simo Häyhä, a Finnish country boy who won a nationwide contest as the best marksman in the country and went on to become the greatest sniper of the war. In the fall of 1939, Finland called up all the men in the Civic Guard. Village men were kept in the same unit, and Simo and his neighbors were assigned to the 6th Company near the border. The Russians invaded on November 30 on a broad front along the length of the border. Snow fell that first day as the Finns burned everything and slowly retreated. Simo’s unit acted as a rearguard, and in his first action he shot five officers in five seconds. As his unit marauded around the slow-moving, ill-equipped, and inadequately dressed invaders, he killed daily and became known as the White Death. The 6th Company successfully held off a much larger attacking force. The Russians were so enraged by the success of the White Death that they set a trap for him, with six mortars and five anti-tank weapons zeroing in on him in a single day. Miraculously, he escaped. He was circulated around the front whenever his services were required. At month’s end, his best friend was killed, and revenge became Simo’s only objective. The next day he got the Russian sniper—a 490-meter shot without a scope.

         Indeed, the Red Army had been totally unable, after five weeks of war, to advance against the Finns. They were humiliated, and rumors began to surface at home. Stalin began to negotiate, and put Timoshenko in charge. He reorganized the army and, in mid-February, took a massive gamble. He sent an army across the frozen Gulf of Finland, 120 kilometers to the Finnish side. They fought on the ice for a week, during which 12,000 died, slightly more Russians than Finns. Across the entire front, the Russians kept throwing wave after wave of men into the maw of battle. The negotiations offered Finland the same terms as before the invasion, including Finland giving up land on its eastern border. On March 6, a Russian sniper hit Simo and blew off most of his jaw. His body was tossed on a sled with the dead until hours later someone saw him twitch. He was rushed by sled to the rear. A surgeon miraculously put him back together, but he was disfigured for life. On March 9, Finland signed an armistice, forfeiting ten percent of its land to the invaders. The Red Army had advanced fifteen kilometers. An officer observed, “All we’ve done is take enough territory from them to bury our dead in.” When Simo awoke, he learned that he could not speak, and that his farm was lost to the Russians.

         The Red Army had lost 400,000 men, the Finns 70,000. The Finns, though, had created a nation. As Hitler watched the wretched performance of the Russians, he had no hesitation about attacking the following year. Simo underwent twenty-six operations and recovered his ability to speak. He retired to a farm near the border and was consistently honored throughout the nation. He lived to be ninety-six, and just before he died he released a memoir he had written shortly after the war. Whenever asked about all those he killed, he responded that if they hadn’t done what they did, there would be no Finland.

        This is an absolutely great book. A fascinating aspect is the insight into the thought processes—the slowing of the breath, the focus, the emotional detachment, and the light touch on the trigger—required of a successful sniper. Much of what he did was accomplished while enduring temperatures as low −50°C. The obvious comparison to the Russian failure eight decades later is striking. Their disillusioned, poorly led and trained, often alcohol-fueled, indifferent warriors achieved fifteen kilometers in one hundred days. Today, they have failed to reach many of their objectives in a war fought longer than World War II. As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

The Darkest Winter, Lucarelli - B

         This novel is set in Bologna over the winter of 1944–45. Because both the Allies and the Germans had declared it an exclusion zone, there were no troops there, and the Allies refrained from bombing it. Consequently, it was filled with 600,000 refugees.

         Commissario DeLuca has been assigned to the Political Division, although for most of his career he has been a homicide investigator. A few days after examining a naked corpse, he is summoned by the SS, told that the deceased was an SS officer, and tasked with finding the killer. He is told that if he can't find the killer, ten hostages will be shot. That same morning, the local prefect asks him to look into a different murder, and a fellow citizen, likely in the Resistance, asks him to take on a third case. Just about everyone in Bologna is freezing cold, half-starved, and all of them consistently lie to DeLuca. The Germans say little and are perennially dismissive of the Italians. The Italians are fed up with the war and don’t trust a soul. The city is the height of despair, hoping only to survive until spring. DeLuca navigates through treachery and slowly strings together the answers. This is a very good procedural, and more importantly, a superb depiction of a community and a people at the end of their rope.

Gods Of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, And The Birth Of The Modern City - 1986-1990, Mahler - B+

           The late 1980s were “the most convulsive and consequential years in the modern history of New York.” The city “had completely unraveled, besieged by crack, crime, AIDS, homelessness, and political scandals.” New York had been experiencing tumultuous times. Small manufacturers and their jobs had left the city in the 1960s. In the following decade, forty-five Fortune 500 companies and a million people left New York. But the 1980s started off positively as Wall Street settled down, prospered, and boomed. People and immigrants were coming back. However, the rising tide did not float the outer boroughs or the Black and brown communities, where poverty and violence were increasing. Arriving on the scene were the “crisis opportunists” who helped put the city back on track, but who also contributed to a more divided New York, one in which the rich got immeasurably richer while the middle and lower classes stagnated.

         1986 began with Ed Koch’s third inauguration. The city was better financially and socially than when he became mayor, but the cuts in services were starting to wear. Deinstitutionalization by the state of mental health facilities put more poor people on the streets, at a time when Koch was allowing developers to close the city’s SROs. Koch came under fire when the SDNY’s Rudolf Giuliani began investigating a parking payment scandal in Queens and soon uncovered massive amounts of fraud throughout city government. The AIDS crisis kept expanding, and crack cocaine flooded the city. Notwithstanding Koch’s appointment of a Black police commissioner, there was a spate of white cops murdering Black New Yorkers. The year closed with the city and its mayor “shaken.”

         1987 offered little improvement. The AIDS epidemic accelerated, and the gay community damned Koch for his silence on his own sexuality and his failure to commit to helping. Racial tensions worsened as a jury acquitted Bernard Goetz, the subway vigilante who had killed one and injured three Black youths with a pistol. The city was calm over the summer but faced a tax crisis after Black Monday in October saw the largest drop in the history of U.S. markets. When a Queens jury convicted the men behind the Howard Beach assaults of manslaughter, not murder, Al Sharpton led “the largest, most disruptive civil rights action in New York’s modern history.”

          1988 opened with Al Sharpton relentlessly accusing just about everyone in city and state government of extreme racism for not accepting Tawana Brawley’s phony kidnapping and rape narrative. He propelled himself to national prominence with his outlandish behavior and accusations. AIDS, crack, and homelessness continued to haunt Koch and the city. Nonetheless, at his annual year-end press conference, Koch told the city he would be running for a fourth term.

          1989 saw the city’s jails and courts overwhelmed on the heels of the most violent year in New York’s history. Then, in April, the Central Park jogger case became a national headline. A successful, Ivy League–educated white woman was raped and beaten senseless in the park, and five Black teens were arrested. In the midst of a summer featuring Do the Right Thing, the mayoral primary pitted Koch against David Dinkins. In the final weeks, a white gang murdered a Black teen in Bensonhurst. In the September vote, Dinkins prevailed. In the closest race in eighty years, Dinkins edged out Giuliani. David Dinkins inherited a city in trouble.

          Dinkins was as unlucky as Koch, as the city continued its downward spiral, and he lost to Giuliani, who ran on a law-and-order platform appealing to New York’s white ethnics. New York City prospered in the 21st century, but “the great working-class city was gone, and so was any realistic expectation that it might ever be bound by a single civic culture.” I’m not sure the author connected the dots between the late eighties and today’s New York, and certainly never points out what the opportunists accomplished, but it is nonetheless an intriguing read.

This Here Is Love, Perry - B+

 

         This astounding novel begins in Tidewater Virginia in the final decade of the seventeenth century. It is about freed Blacks, slaves, enslavers, and indentured whites. Of course, it is mostly, and brilliantly, an exposition of the unimaginable pain and suffering inflicted upon the Africans. From their capture, passage, and sale; to endless mistreatment, beatings, rapes, and indignity piled on top of indignity; to seeing their children sold, Africans suffered every minute of every day. The indentured whites at least had hope for a future, but they too were treated only marginally better than the animals in the pen. The primary goal of the enslaved was to seek freedom and hope that they or their children could find it. The lead characters—Andrew and Phoebe Carrabus, their son David, Bless, and even the indentured white boy turned slaver, Jack—find love and a bit of freedom in a tortured world. An excellent read.

History Lessons, Wallbrook - B +

                         This is a totally fascinating novel about a Black woman, a first-year professor at a prestigious but fictional university that sounds like an Ivy, or near Ivy. Daphne Ouverture is the daughter of a Haitian man and a woman from the Ivory Coast. Immigrant mothers are often depicted as serious taskmasters, with their daughters as their most important project, and that is the case here. Daphne is an expert on the lives of 18th- and 19th-century Black women in France and its empire. Her focus is both their treatment and their depiction in art and literature. When an aspiring, hero-in-the-making professor is murdered while texting her in French, she is inadvertently caught up in a whirlwind. As a historian seeking out the truth, Daphne begins to look into the matter, and she herself is attacked twice by someone searching for it. She devotes more and more thought to sleuthing and ultimately figures it out just as two bad guys are arrested while trying to recover whatever they think she has. They, along with the man who hired them, are arrested. Daphne suspects there is more to the story, however, because the decedent was engaged to a stunning, wealthy local woman while still having affairs with undergraduates, raping the unwilling, and stalking Daphne. Daphne’s assorted skills can strain credulity at times, but they do lead her to solutions.

                         Of course, this is a fun read with a solid storyline. The most intriguing aspects are the author’s insights into being a highly educated Black woman in a white world, her empathy for the young and abused, and her witty takedown of some of academia’s excesses.

Hollow Spaces, Suthammanont - B+

          Thirty years after their father was acquitted of murder, Brennan and Hunter sit in their mother’s apartment as she slowly dies. Brennan never believed he did it, but her brother and mother both did. Eventually, their mother tells them that she now believes he didn’t do it. Sister and brother decide to see if they can solve the case. Fascinatingly, this is a story about pursuing their father’s life as well as exploring the dynamics of siblings who have never gotten along. It’s love, hate, and disagreement—the things that bind families forever. And the author is brilliant at assessing families, spouses, lovers, relationships, partners, guilt, and infidelity—truly exceptional. As they pursue the matter and talk to people, they are threatened. There are phone calls and physical warnings. The man who prosecuted their father is now running for Manhattan DA. Nonetheless, they soldier on. They lose their mother, but come to a satisfying resolution. Simply said, this is really good.

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation, Anderson - A*

          The Shah visited Jimmy Carter in November 1977 and had a productive, successful two-day visit. Earlier in the year, the CIA had estimated that the Shah was positioned to control the country for another decade. A year later, opposition overwhelmed the country, and he fled Iran in early 1979. The Iranian Revolution “has been profoundly significant and is one of the most important political developments of the modern age.” In the almost half century since, it has led the West, particularly the U.S., to be at odds with the Muslim world; it has dominated Middle East politics; it contributed to the disastrous 1983 deployment of U.S. Marines to Beirut; encouraged the U.S. embrace of Saddam Hussein; and was a factor in America’s endless wars in the region.

         The irony of the revolution is that it was unanticipated, spontaneous, and totally unprepared for. No one, including the revolutionaries, thought that it would succeed. This book focuses on the handful of people whose decisions were decisive: Reza Pahlavi, Jimmy Carter, Ruhollah Khomeini, and the three men’s limited cohorts of advisers.

        Pahlavi came to power in 1941. He twice stopped opponents from dethroning him. In 1953, the CIA helped him recover his throne after a coup. A decade later, the imposition of martial law ended Khomeini’s first challenge. When the 1970s began, the Shah’s closest friend and adviser, Asadollah Alam, sensed that the reign was under stress. The disparity of wealth was extreme, corruption endemic, and the conservative clergy opposed to all modernization efforts. Alam frequently, but unsuccessfully, tried to encourage the Shah to engage with and listen to the people, and to provide a limited right to vote.

        Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Shah achieved some of his longest-held goals. He managed his relationship with the U.S. to the point where Iran was free to purchase any and all U.S. weapons systems, and he ended six decades of humiliation and exploitation by nationalizing the oil industry. Working with the Saudis in 1973, the Shah managed a quintupling of the price of oil. When the money poured in, he spent it immediately on infrastructure and weapons from the U.S. Iran’s military became the fifth largest in the world and the consumer of half of America’s overseas arms sales. Americans poured in by the thousands to sell products and manage businesses. As more and more posters of the Shah appeared, he became completely isolated, listening to and seeing only a handful of people.

       The vast spending program in a pre-industrial society caused massive disruptions to the electrical grid and transport system, soaring housing costs, hyperinflation, and a collapse of the agricultural base. “Hand in hand with all this was colossal corruption and staggering waste.” With the regime extremely repressive, the Shah was ignorant of the turmoil building among the people. In late 1976, the Saudis rejected an OPEC price increase and dramatically increased production. Iran’s economy stalled immediately. An old hand at the visa office noticed that his office was flooded with people looking to leave and who had already sent their money to America. When his report was inadvertently sent to Washington and raised questions, Ambassador Sullivan screamed at him and blackballed his career. The U.S. was so out of touch with Iran’s reality that while making a New Year’s Eve speech on the last day of 1977 at a state dinner in Tehran, Carter said, “Because of the great leadership of the Shah, Iran is an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world.”

       On two occasions, the regime threw Khomeini a lifeline without which he could not have succeeded in overthrowing the Shah. The first was in 1964, when he was exiled rather than imprisoned. This allowed him to launch from Iraq and later Paris a consistent series of attacks on the “American Shah.” Although he was not widely followed, he maintained contact with the clergy. In the first week of 1978, the regime’s newspaper published an unnecessary, scurrilous, and slanderous attack on Khomeini that had a butterfly effect. It began with riots in Qom and ended the Shah’s reign. The regime bestowed on Khomeini a prominence he had long sought, and the deaths during the riots provided the “disparate religious opposition a unifying cry.” After the initial riots, the country returned to normal. Only the most insightful American consuls outside Tehran saw massive trouble coming. One ally of both the U.S. and Iran, Israel, said it was already planning for the post-Shah era.

        At the end of August, in the oil town of Abadan, arson at a cinema killed 400 people. Although the fire was as swift as it was deadly, the delayed arrival of the fire department and the failure of nearby hydrants incensed the populace. In the following days, the government was silent and no one attended the funerals. History would show that the arsonists were Khomeini’s men, but a whispering campaign against the regime began immediately. A few days later, Khomeini joined the finger-pointing. At this point, the Shah replaced his prime minister with a truly incompetent and corrupt politician.

        During nationwide peaceful marches on a Muslim day of mourning, the government became alarmed because the marches were spontaneous, and the Shah declared martial law. The following day, September 8, marchers from the Tehran slums walked toward the city center and were fired upon by the authorities. Hundreds were killed on “Black Friday.” A week later, an earthquake killed 12,000 people in an obscure city far from the capital. A strike by oil workers followed. The hue and cry for revolution grew louder, and neither the Shah nor Khomeini was interested in finding middle ground. By November, the streets of Tehran were a battlefield. The Shah handed the government to the military and appointed a general as prime minister. Khomeini called for a nationwide strike, but his plea was ignored. Nonetheless, in December the people took to the streets peacefully.

        In Washington, the few men who understood Iran knew that the Shah could not survive, and slowly the idea caught on. The Ayatollah, in Paris, called for revolution and the abdication of the Shah. In Tehran, the vast American and European expatriate communities began to pull up stakes and leave. In the new year, the Shah announced he would take an extended vacation as he named a moderate prime minister who tried to form a coalition government. On the 16th, he and his wife left Iran forever.

       Throughout the crisis, the U.S. showed an appalling, if not woefully ignorant, inability to understand virtually anything about Iran’s culture, history, or religion. Only one person in Tehran and one in Washington spoke Farsi. Iran shared a border with the USSR, compelling Washington to view every issue through the lens of the Cold War. Fear of a communist revolution was always Washington’s top priority. Ironically, everyone in Iran knew that a conservative Muslim population would never partner with atheist Reds. In Washington’s eyes, Iran was also the Pentagon’s largest purchaser, paying cash for half of all U.S. weapons sales abroad. When the first attempt to forge a future in Tehran began, two different parts of the U.S. government approached the same Iranian figures with opposing instructions. It was not America’s finest performance.

       The Ayatollah returned to Tehran on February 1. He defiantly announced a new prime minister and rejected the U.S. and the army. A few weeks later, the army declared its neutrality in the “current political dispute.” The U.S. embassy cabled Washington that it had begun destroying classified materials. On February 14, a mob stormed the U.S. embassy and shot up the ambassador’s residence. The new regime began executing leaders of the old government and the army. Sixty-five hundred of the U.S.’s 7,000 residents left for home. When the U.S. Senate criticized the mounting executions, 100,000 people marched around the embassy.

       The Shah wandered from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas and Mexico in the months following his “vacation.” In the fall, the U.S. was advised of a tightly held five-year-old secret: the Shah was dying of cancer. His U.S. allies, particularly David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, lobbied to allow him to enter America. As pressure mounted on Carter, he asked his staff, “What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?” On October 23, the Shah arrived in New York for treatment. A week later, after the publication of a photo from Algeria showing the Iranian prime minister shaking hands with Zbigniew Brezhnev, the embassy in Tehran was attacked on November 4. Khomeini praised the attackers. Endless negotiations followed until the U.S. attempted a rescue mission that failed so dramatically it worsened matters. The Shah’s death in Cairo in the summer of 1980 changed nothing. The Ayatollah announced that the Great Satan must continue to be confronted. The hostages were freed on January 20, 1981.

        Senior members of Reagan’s campaign team met with Iranians that summer, and many believe that, like Nixon’s men in 1968, they told the enemy to wait for a better deal. Unlike 1968, there has been no confirmation of the misdeed. To some extent, the revolution could only have happened in the waning days of the analog era. No one in the U.S. had seen translations of the Ayatollah’s endless and virulent screeds. We simply did not know who we were dealing with. Embassy communications to Washington consisted of brief cables and lengthy typewritten memos sent in diplomatic pouches, often telling State what it wanted to hear. Again, very few in Washington understood what was happening.

       The Shah, derided for the brutality of his secret police, was probably responsible for only about 100 executions in his final decade. At least 8,000 were executed in the Ayatollah’s early years. The consequences of the revolution have been nearly 50 years of repression at home, the spewing of hatred abroad, and the ongoing export of the revolution to Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. Vehement anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli propaganda has harmed Jews and Israelis worldwide. In the end, however, it was primarily the indecisiveness, isolation, insecurity, and delusional beliefs of the King of Kings—the Shahanshah, the Light of the Aryans, the Shadow of God—that condemned himself, his family, his country, and much of the world to the disasters that followed. “The Iranian Revolution helped legitimize a current of religious zealotry and violence that is now likely to bubble up from the earth almost anywhere and at any time.”

The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win The Cold War with Forbidden Literature, English - B

         Poland was the largest and most influential country under Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. It was ground zero for the West’s efforts to smuggle and spread a vast array of ideas amidst the Stalinist propaganda of the era. The CIA consistently led the charge in supporting Eastern Europe’s dissidents.

          “The ideological manipulation system in Poland was one of the most complex in the world.” It was managed by the Main Office for the Control of Presentations and Public Performance. The censors were everywhere in a country where “every typewriter had to be registered, access to every photocopier was restricted, and a permit was needed to even buy a ream of paper.” There was one novel that was the number one priority of all censors in the Eastern Bloc—Orwell’s 1984 sat at the top of the pyramid.

          By the late 1970s, there was an active underground publication operation within Poland. It supported by the clergy, the writers’ association, and the foreign press. By 1980, the CIA-backed International Literary Center in New York was sending a million books per year through the Iron Curtain, with one-third going to Poland. The decade that would see the Wall fall began with a successful Solidarity strike at the Lenin Shipyards. The Gdańsk Accords afforded the workers—and the entire population—a new set of meaningful rights. A quarter of the population joined Solidarity, and thousands of uncensored books were published. The joy and thrill of freedom lasted until December 1981, when the government imposed martial law. Enacted at the instigation of the Soviets, who were threatening invasion, the government arrested thousands, inspiring memories of WWII. The underground immediately went to work seeking material it could use to print the voices of opposition to the government. Help came from various organizations in Paris, providing books, printing materials, and money—all backed by the CIA.

         In 1982, the Reagan administration began to funnel money directly to Solidarity. At year’s end, the Jaruzelski regime lifted martial law in name only. The repression continued, but the underground battled on. More and more money, books, and printing equipment poured into the country. What the CIA called its “Radio Shack revolution” led to the shipping of fax machines, video cassettes, and recorders, further advancing the cause of free speech.

          In 1986 and 1987, the Polish security police captured the three largest deliveries ever smuggled into the country and “exposed and humiliated dissidents at home and abroad.” In August, Solidarity launched a nationwide strike, causing the regime to realize it could not crush every demonstration in Poland. The government began to bargain, while those paying attention to Moscow slowly realized the game was changing. Gorbachev had already decided not to use force again to keep nations in line, and his reforms were incompatible with ongoing totalitarianism.

          The so-called Round Table Talks were “a no-going-back moment, which would end with the demise of a political system.” The negotiations ground on until the following April and resulted in Solidarity once again being established as a legal entity, with semi-free elections scheduled. The vote in early June gave Solidarity 99 of 100 seats in the new Senate and all of the contested seats in the lower body. Throughout Europe, borders were opening and regimes were failing. Finally, on November 9, the Wall came down. For all intents and purposes, communist rule in Europe was over, and the peoples of Eastern Europe were free. Lech Wałęsa spoke to the U.S. Congress.

          This is an intriguing and enlightening story, one that has been largely kept under wraps for decades. The man who ran CIA operations for most of the Cold War was a Romanian refugee, George Minden. When he retired, Solzhenitsyn presented him with a copy of The Red Wheel with the notation, “with gratitude.”

The Good Liar, Mina - C

               Claudia O'Shiel's life is a mess. Her husband died in a car crash eight months ago, and she believes he was murdered. Her alcoholic sister hates her and walks away. She knows that the technology behind her blood spatter analysis is flawed, and her proofs were the reason an innocent man pleaded guilty. Her sons are miserable, and her boss is playing unfathomable mind games with her. Nonetheless, she does the right thing.

                This author is highly acclaimed in the UK, and this book appears on many best-of lists. That said, I stopped reading her years ago because her novels were too violent, and this one obviously did not work for me.

Lone Wolf: Walking The Line Between Civilization and Wildness, Weymouth - B, Inc.

         The wolves of Europe have somehow survived humanity’s onslaught, and it is believed there are 21,500 alive today. There are only 137 in Slovenia, and this is the story of one of them, Slavc, who walked from the area around Ljubljana north to Austria and then south to Italy. He began his trip in December 2011, when he was a year old. Because he had been collared, his travels were closely observed in the wildlife biology community, and his success led to a reintroduction of wolves in Italy, where today there are over 3,000—the largest population of any country in Europe. The author, an inveterate traveler, walked Slavc’s route a decade later. Slavc covered 746 miles, although wolves do not walk in a straight line and he may have traveled as much as 2,000 miles. He fathered dozens of offspring and is believed to have died in the summer of 2022 at the age of 12.

           There exist in Europe the same tensions that dominate the wolf reintroduction issue in Colorado. The urban decision-making elites focus on and emphasize the environmental soundness of letting the predator roam, while the ranchers and farmers who lose animals to predation are diametrically opposed. Ironically, one of those elites is Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. The predation of her pony led the EU to downgrade the wolf’s level of protection from “strictly protected” to “protected.”