Augustus, Williams - B

                                               This novel was the National Book Award Winner in 1974.  I've been on and off about Rome, its history and extraordinary accomplishments over the years. My early interest stemmed from four years of Latin in high school.  I believe Gibson's 'Decline and Fall' is one of the greatest books ever written. That a political entity could endure (in theory and in two different capitals) from it's mythic founding in the 8th century B.C. to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 has always fascinated me. Somewhere along the way though, the endless and barbaric infighting among consuls, senators, triumvirates, generals, sons, adopted sons etc. turned me away. The approach Williams takes in this book is one I've not seen before, although I am certainly aware of the novels by Robert Graves. It is Augustus's story told through letters from and to many of his contemporaries, friends and enemies. Some of the characters depicted are real and many fictitious. I don't know enough about the era to know how much of the history is accurate. The book takes us from Augustus' adoption by Julius Caesar, his return to Italy to begin his revenge against Caesar's assassins and victory over Brutus and Cassius at Phillipi. The approach  provides a feel for the history and the people and thoughts behind it all. After defeating Marc Antony and Cleopatra at Actium (which I did not realize was a naval battle), Augustus returned to Rome as ruler of the known world at the age of 33. The novel then turns to domestic affairs, where women were to be bartered for like beads in a bazaar.  To preserve his dynasty, Octavius Augustus marries his beloved daughter Julia to Marcellus, Marcus Agrippa and Claudius, all before she is thirty.  Personal lives among the elite were part of the political process, and because of her infidelities and liaisons with intriguers, Julia is banished for life. In his dying days, Augustus reflects upon the most important aspect of his rule - no Roman had fought another within the confines of the Empire in forty years.  Books do not generally win awards without deserving them and this is no exception. Thanks to Greg and Karen Weiss.

Driving Honda: Inside The World's Most Innovative Car Company, Rothfeder - C, Inc.

                                               I think I read just about every book ever written about my clients at GM and Chrysler from the mid-80's to the mid-00's and  I also read 'The Machine That Changed The World' about Toyota's lean manufacturing system in the 90's.  'Machine' remains the best book about the automotive industry that I have read. This book could be sub-titled "how Honda and Toyota differ".  The difference is meaningful. It describes Toyota as a structured, rigid and top-down company where there is a plan, program or system for everything. Yes, Toyota receives feedback from the factory floor but everything is done the Toyota way. In contrast, at Honda the goal is established and then a very flat, decentralized system, staffed from top to bottom with 'gear heads', achieves the goal. And the accomplishments have been many: largest motorcycle company in the world only a decade after establishment; first automobile engine to meet new 1970's EPA requirements while the industry was saying it couldn't be done; first successful foreign auto plant in the US (Marysville, Ohio in 1982); first company to manufacture in China; etc. etc.  Nonetheless, I had trouble with the structure of the book which uses sequential chapters based on some of Soichiro Honda's unique philosophies.  That said, I loved my Honda Accord and Acura RL (both over 10 years old and running like new).  Honda was the third foreigner and first Japanese to be admitted to the Automotive Hall of Fame in Detroit in 1989.

All The Light We Cannot See, Doerr - B +

                                               This novel was a National Book Award Finalist in 2014. It is a finely-drawn tale of two young people whose paths cross in St. Malo, France in August 1944.  St. Malo was a fortress city at the mouth of the Rance River that was bypassed by the Allies for two months. However, the Allies finally decided to bomb on August 7th.
                                               We first meet Werner a decade before in an orphanage in the Ruhr Valley where he discovers a skill for fixing radios.  His talents afford him the opportunity to avoid the mines, where his father died. He is sent to technical training school. Marie is the blind daughter of the chief locksmith of the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Her father teaches her how to navigate the world by constructing miniatures of her environment and then escorting her from place to place until the real world is as familiar as the miniatures she has committed to  memory.  Werner is so skilled that at school he is able to plan, design and build a machine to triangulate radio waves and find illicit radio activity.  His superiors doctor his paperwork to call him up for Wehrmacht duty at sixteen. Marie's father is charged with protecting a very important diamond. The Director of the Museum has three redundant copies made and sends four of his direct reports off to different parts of the country to confuse the Germans, who assign a jeweler to track down the diamond which Marie's dad has secreted inside her miniature of St. Malo.  After the bombing, Werner escapes from a cellar where he has spent almost six days awaiting death.  Marie is on the sixth floor of her family's home in a hidden attic while the jeweler is trying to find her.
                                                This is a fine book, that is not too easy to read and very challenging to outline.  In the interest of those who will read it,  I have not detailed the consequence of Werner and Marie's meeting, nor the post-war epilogue.  Great books invest you in their characters and bring you to places and times you've never been to. This one adds a deft touch of human insight and emotion. It deserves all the attention it has received.

The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact With Stalin, 1939-1941, Moorhouse - B +

                                               It was not just the world that was totally shocked by the famous pact, it was each country's populace and military staffs. The Germans had spent the 30's vilifying the Soviets. For the communists, Germany, the most industrialized country in the west, was always assumed to be the place where their philosophy would take root and defeat capitalism and the bourgeoisie.  However, both Hitler and Stalin saw meaningful benefits to the pact. Hitler was annoyed that  the British and French had delayed him from moving on Prague, and then guaranteed Poland's integrity.  Having a temporary understanding in the east would help him move in the west. As for Stalin, he was afraid the British and French were trying to engineer a war to the death between Germany and the USSR. Also, the German offer of territory and non-belligerence was particularly timely as the Soviets and Japan were engaged in serious skirmishes in Asia. Within days of the pact, war broke out, Poland was divided between the two signatories and the murder of the country's elite began. "Measures adopted against the racial enemy in one half of Poland were virtually indistinguishable from those applied to the class enemy in the other."  Hitler started moving Germans into the desirable sections of western Poland and  began the importation of what would eventually be over a million laborers into the Reich. Stalin sent tens of thousands of Poles off to Siberia and Kazakhstan, murdered almost all of Poland's officer corps at Katyn, and began to absorb the Baltic states.  He had a free hand to then initiate the Winter War against Finland. Less than a year after the pact, Hitler and Stalin had achieved all that they could have imagined. Stalin had recovered everything that Russia had lost in WWI and more, and Hitler had chased the British from the continent and marched into Paris.  The first significant crack in the relationship came when the Soviets took Bessarabia from Romania. Hitler was quite angered because there had been no mention of this in the allocation of spheres of influence.  In November of 1940, Molotov and Ribbentrop sat down again, this time in Berlin.  No progress was made on any topic and the Germans became further alarmed when it became apparent that the Soviets were desirous of  expanding further into the Baltic and the Balkans. On Dec.18, 1940, the Fuhrer ordered the planning for an invasion of Russia.  Soviet intelligence advised Stalin within a week that the attack would come in March.
                                                         This is a well-written and enlightening read. It's a good book.  That said, it felt at times as if the author was struggling with the the story from the end of 1939 until Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. Almost all of the action took place hard on the signing of the pact. Then, it was just a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Any reader of 'Mein Kampf' could tell you the Reich was not going to ally itself with the USSR for long.  Interestingly, the anniversary of the signing, August 23rd, has become known in Europe as the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Naziism and is commemorated across central and eastern Europe.

The Astronaut Wives Club, Koppel - B -

                                               For people of a certain age, the names Shepard, Grissom, Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra, Cooper and Slayton bring back powerful memories of a simpler, perhaps even more glorious, time.  The Mercury 7 Astronauts were gods in their day. Here though, the names are not Alan, Gus, John, Scott, Wally, Gordo or Deke, but Louise, Betty, Annie, Rene, Jo, Trudy and Marge.  The woman too were on the cover of 'Life'. They lunched at the White House and met Jackie.  Because they were in charge of the home front, the book also deals with the economics of their lives and that, I found interesting.' Life' was accorded special access and was the only media allowed in their homes during their husband's flights. For the access, 'Life' paid $500,000 per year or $71,428 per family. Those  were huge, life changing numbers in 1959. For the men, GM offered them the opportunity to test Corvettes - for a dollar per year. When they all moved to Texas when the Johnson Space Center opened, they got new houses for a song. For seven military families, the Mercury program was a game-changer.
                                              The 'New Nine' were followed by the 'Next Nineteen' as NASA geared up for Gemini and Apollo.  Life, though, became more complicated for the men and the wives. The flights were much, much longer.   It was now weeks of stress and tension rather than hours. The famous Gemini 1 fire took the lives of Grissom, Chafee and White. More and more of the wives drank as their husbands, if ever at home, were often distracted.  And as time went on, the 'Cape Cookies' took their toll.  From a program you could not get into unless you had a solid marriage, only seven couples survived from the 35 that were in the Mercury 7, New Nine,  and the Next Nineteen.  The Astronaut Wives Club survives to this day and many of the woman have remained close and still try very hard to help each other. They shared a uniquely American and exclusive experience.

The Narrow Road To The Deep North, Flanagan - B +

                                              This novel won the Booker for 2013. It is the story of Col. Dorrigo Evans, physician to some of the 22,000 Australians captured when Singapore fell to the Empire of Japan in February 1942.  A third of them died constructing the Siam-Burma Railway. Locomotive C 5631, the first to transverse the 400 + kilometer Death Railway is enshrined at Yaksuni, along with 1068 war criminals, some of whom worked as overseers of the Aussies.  Allied POWs were but small fraction, as somewhere between 100,000 - 200,000 died during the construction. This is as apt a description of unspeakable horror and filth as I have come across. Starvation, ringworm, dysentery, pellagra, cholera, beri-beri, malaria and vicious treatment were the lot of the British and Empire troops, for whom the loss of a boot was a fatal event. Evans tended to their care, faced the Japanese with verve and became the legendary 'Big Fella' to his men. Most importantly, he survived.  As the war passed further and further into the continent's collective memory, he became more and more important and eventually, lionized.

                                              This book is also a nuanced study of memory and memories. For the Japanese, it is  conflicted memories.  They built the railway for the Emperor in record time.  The fact that men who had surrendered and were no longer worthy of respect died is an understandable consequence of the task. To be punished by the Allies for doing their job was incomprehensible to the guards.  But the memory that dominates the book is of Dorry Evans' love for Amy, the young wife of his uncle and unquestionably the love of his life. They spent much of the summer of 1941 together - he, a training officer in the Army and she, the mistress of the family inn in Adelaide.  It was wild, passionate, senseless and unforgettable. It carried him through his long imprisonment. It helped him be the man he was expected to be. It hounded him through his long post-war marriage and career. He believed her dead until he saw her in Sydney in the mid-60's, but could not say a word as she walked by. Would he have been a better man with her? Or, was the memory of her more important?

                                              The Times reviewer points out that Flanagan spent a great deal of time talking to his father who was a POW survivor who lived to 98. Without him, he could not have provided the details about the smell of the cholera hut, the horrible stories that are revealed, and the generally remarkable detail that make this such an extraordinary tale.  That said, the Booker award praised as a "novel of love and war." It is both, and it is very good.

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, Macintyre - B +

                                                As all of the files are still classified, this is an attempt to tell the Philby story through the prism of his friends and the upper-class concept of friendship. Kim Philby, Nicholas Elliott, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross and Donald Maclean were all well-educated Englishmen, members of MI6, MI5, or the Foreign Office.  Elliott didn't work for Moscow and was Philby's closest friend and colleague. The rest are forever known to history as 'the Cambridge Five', all traitors. Philby was born in India, the son of a brilliant, eccentric scholar who converted to Islam and became an advisor to Ibn Saud.  A communist by the time he left university, Philby was like many facing the nihilism and threats of fascism for whom USSR seemed to offer an alternative. He became their dedicated and devoted agent, feeding Moscow Center everything he came across at MI6. He specialized in counter-intelligence during the war, before being assigned to Istanbul, and then the ultimate post: Washington. His material was so good that at times the Soviets didn't believe him. They thought he was a double agent feeding them falsehoods. But he kept providing such excellent intelligence that they eventually realized he was a gold mine. In particular, while in Washington, he was able to let them know everything the British and American services were trying to do to crack the Eastern bloc. He caused innumerable deaths, especially among  the emigres who so often were the people acting as infiltrators and spies. Tipped by Philby, Burgess and Maclean defected to Moscow in May 1951. Thus began his own eventual downfall. Both the CIA and MI5 had their doubts about  Philby. The CIA said he could never return to the US and intelligence sharing would be ended if Philby stayed on. MI5 also concluded he was guilty. His standing within the English upper class initially protected him.  It simply was incomprehensible that a gentleman would lie. Nonetheless, MI6 eventually sacked him.  However, most of MI6 believed him to be innocent and MI5 and 6 engaged in a five-year-long battle over Philby. In the end, the old boy network, with Elliott taking the lead, prevailed. Philby was in from the cold and back at MI6 as an agent with the cover of a journalist in Beirut.  A few years later he was riding high with a new wife, re-engaged with the Soviets and treasured by the British, as the new Beirut Station Chief was his good friend, Nicholas Elliott.  However, by 1963 the noose was tightening  as a Soviet defector and an old English friend he had tried to recruit in the 30's provided damning information to MI5. By then Elliott was back in London and he was sent out to confront Philby.  He did and they spent four days verbally dueling, parrying, and Kim Philby gave up most of the ghost. He confessed to a lot but not all that he had done, and he let Elliott infer that he would take up his offer of amnesty in exchange for truthfulness. Instead, he did a 'fade' and wound up in Moscow.  For those on both sides of the Atlantic who had trusted him, it was a devastating turn of events.  He lived another twenty-five years bored and drunk, received the Order of Lenin and was given a grand funeral with a KGB honor guard.  Elliott issued a press release praising him, in an attempt to get the Russians to think he had duped them.  The game never ends.

                                                This is a fun, interesting read. I do think Macintyre succeeds in his exposition of the friendships amongst the upper class. The concept that someone who clubbed at Whites couldn't betray his country is so very, very English.  I would also be remiss if I did not point out that the author is being somewhat cute with the title.  The very beginning of the book points out that 'Friends' is slang for members of the intelligence services.

One Summer: America, 1927, Bryson - C

                                                This somewhat confusing book is a tour of America during the remarkable summer of 1927.   What I found totally befuddling is the Table of Contents, which set forth the division of the book into four parts; Lindbergh, the Babe, the President, and the Anarchists. It is always a delight to revisit Lucky Lindy's amazing feat of derring-do. Its scale and importance are hard to fathom in today's connected world. His flight was called the most significant event since the Resurrection. The French gave him the Legion d'Honneur, and in America, a mania swept the nation. "Proposals were put forth to exempt him from paying taxes for life, to name a star or planet after him, to install him in the Cabinet as the permanent head of a new aviation department and to make May 21 a national holiday. He was given a lifetime pass to all major league baseball games everywhere. In Minnesota. a proposal was made to rename the state Lindberghia.' In NY, between 4-5 million turned out for his ticker-tape parade. He was the most famous person on the planet for quite some time. However, after recounting the Lindbergh feat, the book loses its moorings and meanders, almost pointlessly, through vastly disparate events and themes. He covers the momentous season Babe Ruth and the Yankees had, along with Prohibition, the Mississippi flood, the broad career of Herbert Hoover, the rise of J. Edgar Hoover, the downfall of Al Capone, skyscrapers, international finance, the strange Presidency of 'Silent Cal', the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the KKK, Mt. Rushmore, Henry Ford's anti-Semitic magazine 'The Dearborn Independent', the Dempsey-Tunney fight, Hollywood and a lot more. He is a talented writer and the 20's, particularly 1927, are fascinating. But, it's impossible to read a book when you have no idea what could be on the next page.

The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy and King - The Five Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea, Borneman - B +

                                               Thanks to Wendell Erwin for recommending  this excellent group biography of the only four men to ever wear five stars in the Navy.  They all graduated from Annapolis around the turn of the century ( Leahy-'97, King-'01, Halsey-'04 and Nimitz-'05) and saw early duty in America's burgeoning Navy. Halsey and Leahy both met the young Asst. Navy Secretary, Franklin Roosevelt; Leahy and FDR became fast friends. All four participated in the Navy's convoying activities in our very limited WW1 naval actions and their year-and-a-half at war demonstrated that submarines and naval air power threatened the primacy of battleships. The inter-war years saw downsizing, naval disarmament treaties and the on-going questioning of the relevancy of the battleship.  Nimitz and King went into submarines and King then qualified as a naval aviator. Halsey was a destroyer man and the older Leahy was appointed CNO.  He used his Washington time to hone his political skills and bolster his relationship with FDR.  When Leahy retired in 1939, the President assured him he would be back "if we ever have a war".  On Dec. 7, 1941, Leahy was on a mission to Vichy, King in command of the Atlantic fleet, Nimitz head of personnel in Washington, and Halsey sailing to Oahu after dropping off planes at Wake Island.
                                               Ernest King was returned to Washington and made Fleet Admiral and commander of the entire US Navy.  Chester Nimitz was sent to Pearl and made CINCPAC and told to stay there until the war was won.  The attack on Pearl Harbor is remembered as a disaster of the highest order, but the author points out that it was the aging battleships that were sunk.  The oil storage facilities and the submarine base were unscathed and the three carriers were at sea.  We struck back at Coral Sea and most importantly, at Midway.  Bill Leahy was recalled to active duty in July and appointed the Presidents personal military advisor and the Chairman of the JCS. Bill Halsey had launched Doolittle's Raid but had missed Midway because of an illness, and had told the June 1942 graduating Annapolis class that he was "going back to the Pacific where he intended to personally have a crack at those yellow-bellied sons of bitches and their carriers."  Halsey whose oft-quoted mantra was "kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs" also had the personal skills to be the one person in the Navy who could work well with MacArthur, and together they lead the charge across the Pacific.  Victory piled on victory and soon the end was in sight. Congress authorized the granting of five-star rank for four men in  the Army and Navy in Dec. 1944. In sequence, they went to Leahy, King, Nimitz and Halsey, and, for the Army to Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower and Arnold. The power to award a fifth star lapsed at the end of hostilities plus six months.
                                             The most important take away for me in this book was Frank Leahy's role as key advisor to both FDR and Truman. The author contends that for most of Roosevelt's final year, Leahy operated as an almost de facto President - indeed he labels a chapter 'Interim President'.  Nor was I  aware that he stayed on as Chairman of the JCS for another four years under Truman.  The author refers to his role as a combined National Security Advisor/JCS Chair/Chief of Staff.  That is a remarkably long time for one individual to be at the center of such momentous events.  The other thought that crossed my mind thinking about the men who made the strategic decisions on both sides in the war is the changes they saw in their lifetimes. Whether Allied or Axis,  they were born in an era without electricity, telephone or  radio and finished their careers in the atomic era. This is a very, very good book.

                                 

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, McKeon - B +

                                               This is a very good book about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. It tells the story from the perspective of a boy from a local family; a surgeon assigned to work the debacle;  his ex-wife, a worker at a Moscow factory; and her nephew.  Artyom is a thirteen year old boy who lived 10 kilometers from the disaster. The  day after the meltdown he, his mother and sister are shipped off to the Minsk area and settled in a vast warehouse. Later on, they are assigned their own hut. They find his dad in a hospital. He and the other men had stayed behind to help clean up their village. His reward months later is a horrible, horrible death from radiation poisoning. Grigory, a Moscow doctor, is tasked to work at the site and is kept on overseeing the declining health of the evacuees. For months on end, he performs surgeries, previously unimagined, on those whose lives and bodies have been transformed. Within months, he succumbs. Maria survives in the slowly crumbling Soviet structure that is dying in the era of glasnost and perestroika.  She manages to assister nephew Yevgeni on a trajectory to worldwide success as a pianist.
                                                As always, the sheer stupidity and inane unfairness of the Soviet system screams out for mockery, derision and elimination. It's a solid reminder that almost all that the Bolshies wrought was a colossal mess.

Cities of Empire: The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World, Hunt - B +

                                               The author posits that the great gift of the Empire, its true legacy, is urbanism. "This book seeks to explore the imperial story through the urban form and its material culture: ten cities telling the story of the British Empire."  Commerce was the thread that started to bind the disparately structured (joint stock companies, royal governors, local legislatures, individual patentees) colonies into something resembling a system. The concept of Empire  "became much more regularly employed as trade fostered some sense of shared interest and political community across Britain's congeries of territories."
                                               It was "a mercantilist consortium of mutual commercial advantage". However, all of the shared interests, beliefs, convictions, and unifying Protestantism could not survive the imposition of some modest taxes on the Bostonians. The first English city in America became the 'cradle of liberty' and led the march toward the disassembling of the first Empire.  When the 13 Colonies left, the West Indies and the sugar trade replaced them in import. Centered in Bridgetown, Barbados, the sugar trade was built upon the foundation of human slavery, a foundation that supported "opulent profits".  "The staggering returns from the West Indies colonies funded the acceleration of the British Empire, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the Royal Navy."  The author asserts that the harbors, ports, docks, wharves, warehouses, ships, sailors, merchants, and financiers  that we associate with a burgeoning London and Liverpool all stemmed from the slave-driven sugar trade, which was much more profitable than the troubling United States had been. The Revolutions in America and France "forced Ireland to change from uncomfortable colony into a component part of the British Isles".  The transformation from "problem to partner" took place in Dublin. And, it is the construction of Georgian Dublin, well-planned, thorough and grand, at the height of the Protestant Ascendancy in the late 18th century, that tied the city to the Empire.  In 1800, Ireland became part of the UK, no longer a separate kingdom or colony, but an integral part of the mother country. The Irish joined the Scots as foot soldiers of the Empire.
                                                 "Much more than Boston, fetid Bridgetown or familiar Dublin, the British fell in love with Cape Town." It was the axis of the Empire's pivot to the east.  Its purpose was to help secure  British domination of India and ensure the demise of the French colonial competition. The British took the Cape in 1795 from the Dutch for a very simple strategic reason: revolutionary France had invaded Holland. As a crossroads, cape Town was an extraordinarily diverse city. Muslims, Catholics, Hindus, and every branch of Protestantism  worshipped and lived side by side. No race was predominant. It connected east and west and it was from the Cape, in 1798, that Richard Wellesley, older brother of the future Duke of Wellington and Governor-General of India set sail for Calcutta. A generation earlier, in 1773, Parliament began the six-decade process of first diminishing and later eliminating the East India Company's monopoly, and began to exert control through the new office of the Governor-General.  The Raj would be headquartered in Calcutta until its early-twentieth century removal to New Delhi. Anxious about French influences, Wellesley undertook the "establishment of dominion over the Indian subcontinent and witnessed the beginnings of the projection of British  military and maritime power into the Middle East and south-east Asia." He built up Calcutta, which proved to be a springboard for next leap east, to China.  By the mid-19th century, religion as a prime motivator had been long replaced by mercantile aggrandizement.  The move into China was driven by the desire to peddle opium, not Anglicanism. "Hong Kong would be the resplendent if uneasy monument to the global reach of the British Empire and to British imperialism at the height of its ideological self-confidence."  Hong Kong and the chant of free trade were the vise with which the British opened up the Middle Kingdom.
                                                "A second revolution of rail and steam was rolling across the Empire ........industry and mass production would change the function of imperial cities.........the dirty, smoggy city of Bombay would come to take the colonial mantle from the Fragrant Harbor of Hong Kong."  It was a city in a hurry, a city focused on making money and believed "to embody the Victorian spirit of progress." "In Bombay the British Empire would build a monument to its own modernity."  And the monument that rose the highest was the Victoria Terminus, a train station to rival any in Europe, still in use and featured in 'Slumdog Millionaire".
                                                 Melbourne is cited as a city that embraced a concept of Empire based on race. The white colonies of Canada, New Zealand and Australia viewed their relationship with Britain as a partnership amongst the Anglo-Saxon tribe.  In New Delhi, the Empire peaked and it is where the Raj ended and the sun began to set.  August 15, 1947 was Independence Day in India - perhaps it  was best that Churchill had lost 10 Downing Street the year before.  Hunt closes with Liverpool, once the second richest city of the Empire, the city that had commanded global trade since the 1700's and in 1981, so bereft of hope, that riots there led to the first use of CS gas by the police on mainland Britain. The end of empire meant the collapse of trade and catastrophe for Liverpool.  A key driver of 19th century globalization become a 20th century victim, as trade moved to the eastern British cities, closer to the other EU countries.  By the 1990's, "Liverpool was Britain's Detroit, a city that had died through its own irrelevance to the modern economy." Today, matters have come full circle - Chinese investment is regenerating the Merseyside.
                                                 This is a very good book that tells the story of the Empire in fascinating, insightful vignettes; a superb and creative way to depict the history of the Empire upon which the sun never set. I'm not convinced he makes his case about urbanism, but that certainly doesn't detract from the history told here.  This is a great book for those who are intrigued by the British and all of their accomplishments (and failures) overseas.

Death of the Black-Haired Girl, Stone - B

                                               The Times reviewer refers to this short novel as a "Hawthorne-like allegory and a sure-footed psychological thriller."  It is a fine read, particularly for those with a penchant for New England colleges or some fine NYC Irish Catholic guilt, remorse and blue-collar alcoholism.  The setting is a college campus, where a married professor is having an affair with, Maud,  a black-haired beauty from Queens. He breaks it off when he finds out his wife is pregnant and she drunkenly confronts him late at night on a busy street with fatal, accidental consequences.  Her failing city cop father struggles with the Church, which is very unwilling to bury her with her mother because Maud had written an incendiary article condemning the Church's vitriolic attacks on the abortion clinic near the college. All in all, a solid read.

In Love and War, Preston - C +

                                               This is one of those interesting little novels that make the best of/notable lists at years end. Esmond Lowndes is banished to Florence in 1937 for being caught at Oxford in bed his with buddy.  His dad is the fictional number two to Oswald Mosley in the British Union of Fascists. Esmond is sent to the continent to establish a radio station for English speaking right wingers.  While there, he observes Europe's slow descent into the abyss and, after it starts, he tries to fend for his Jewish assistant, Ada, with whom he has fallen in love.  With little enthusiasm, he continues his Fascist broadcasts, thus avoiding internment.  Facing expulsion, Esmond and Ada seclude themselves in a villa in the country, doing occasional jobs for the resistance. In the summer of 1943, Italy withdraws from the war, Ada is pregnant and the world is full of hope. That hope is quickly shattered when Germany occupies Florence in August.  As the Germans and Italian Fascists escalate their attacks on the leftists and the Jews, the resistance matches their violence. Soon, assassinations, bombings and raids are the reaction to  each train to the north.  Esmond loses Ada to the Nazis, and immediately thereafter killing becomes easy, second nature.  Captured and tortured, he manages to propel himself and Carita, the obnoxious fascist oppressor of Florence, out a window to their death.                                                                                                                                                                         This is a well-written, craftily created tale that provides a bit of insight into the German occupation of northern Italy  after Italy surrendered.  As I've intimated recently, I don't do well with WW2 novels, perhaps because the history itself is so peerless.
                                           
                                             

Touching History: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies over America on 9/ 11, Spnecer - B +

                                               Thanks to Tim Farrell and Marcella for this recommendation.  We tend to focus on what happened in the hijacked planes and on the ground that terrible day.  This absolutely remarkable book tells  what happened at the FAA, at the American and United Airline Operations Centers, at various military bases, at the numerous air-traffic-control centers whose professionals who dealt with the unfolding disaster and in particular, it tells about the pilots and crews of the thousands of planes in the air that morning.  I'm not terribly sentimental about much that's happened in my lifetime, but I felt proud to be an American as I read this book. It's hard to imagine any other people handling their jobs that day as well as all the folks in this book.
                                               The book has the pace of a thriller and is filled with information I was never aware of or thought about. There were 400 planes over the Atlantic. A Delta flight was "thought' to be hijacked and treated very carefully over Cleveland. One United flight that never took off from LaGuardia had four Arabs in first class - they left the airport and were never identified.  All the flights from Asia had to go somewhere else - thank God for the Canadians. Totally unprepared for anything like this,  the FAA was able to clear US airspace and by noon, the military controlled the skies.  It's a superb book and a great story.

The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, The CIA, and the Battle Over a Banned Book, Finn and Couvee - B

                                               Published in 1957 after a decade in the making, 'Dr. Zhivago' was awarded the Nobel Prize.  The 1965 movie received 5 Academy Awards.  The remarkable first and only novel by a 65-year-old poet, Boris Pasternak, rocked the world.  That he had survived until the thaw after Stalin's death was a surprise. "Through much of his life, Pasternak assisted people imprisoned or impoverished by the regime." He never towed the Soviet line, but in the early thirties had penned a note of sympathy at the time of the death of the dictator's wife. It is presumed that is what saved him.  Pasternak passed the novel to an Italian communist publisher in 1956. The KGB found out after the fact and began its campaign to stop the publication of the book.  For a year and a half, the Soviets tried their heavy-handed, clumsy best to stop publication, but it came in late 1957. A year later, the CIA sponsored Russian edition was distributed at the Brussels World Fair and soon later, the Nobel followed. A drumbeat of condemnation rained down on Pasternak in Soviet papers and on tv and radio.  He was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers.  Under intense pressure, he withdrew his joyful acceptance and rejected the Nobel Prize.  He penned a letter of apology to Khruschev, pleading to not be expelled from Russia.  As the book grew in worldwide popularity, he was excised from Soviet society, and died in May of 1960 at the age of 70. He was intestate and there followed thirty-years of "unseemly struggles" over his affairs. In 1989 in Stockholm, his son Yevgeny accepted the the gold medal for the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.

I Am Pilgrim, Hayes - B -

                                               This novel is a thriller that received very, very complimentary reviews. The author is a well-known screenwriter and this is his first book.  'Pilgrim' is the code name of a US agent of extraordinary skill who apprehends a committed Saudi terrorist. Although it qualifies as a fun read, I'm not sure it is a must read. My disappointment stems from the length (613 pps.) and the fact that the author's diversions are frequent, lengthy and in my opinion, unnecessary.

Absolute Monarchs: A History Of The Papacy, Norwich - B -

                                               John Julius Norwich is one of those great writers of wonderful histories. I've read a number of his books and thank David Brewer for recommending this one to me. In his introduction, the author states that his "task has been simply to look at what is perhaps the most astonishing social, political, and spiritual institution ever created and to give as honest, as objective, and as accurate an account of it as I possibly can."  There is little actual history to go on in the early centuries. For instance, if Peter was a rock upon which to build a church, there's no evidence of anything of the sort.  The first real mover and shaker in the church was Constantine the Great who made Christianity official in the early 4th century.  A century and a half later, by the time of Leo the Great, all temporal power had passed east. A vandalized Rome had but the Papacy left.  Another century on, Gregory the Great was able to consolidate temporal and spiritual, affording the Church the opportunity to survive and prosper as the principal institution in the diminished west.
                                               Early in the 7th century, Christianity was sundered. "The lands which had seen the origins of Christianity were all lost, never to be properly recovered. The eastern empire was hideously maimed.  Perhaps, ..it was Mohammed who made Charlemagne possible." Charles Martel stopped the Arab invasion at Tours in France in 732. It would take another 7 centuries before they were evicted from Spain. The crowning, as Emperor, of Charlemagne by Leo III on Christmas day in 800 is one of the most significant events in European history. The west once again had an Emperor - and he had been crowned by the Pope. Soon thereafter, Charles's empire withered, but the Papacy prospered.  By the turn of the millennium, a sequence of popes in loose partnership with the Holy Roman Emperors ( neither holy nor Roman, per Voltaire) expanded Christianity to Hungary, Poland and northern Germany.  Unfortunately for a united Christendom, the east and west sanctioned  the final Great Schism in 1054. Yet in the west, the Papacy was supreme in matters temporal and spiritual. In 1095, Urban II called for the Papacy's great foreign policy adventure in the middle East, the chance to save the Holy Lands from the infidel Saracens - the First Crusade. "On July 15, 1099, amid scenes of hideous carnage, the soldiers of Christ battered their way into Jerusalem, where they slaughtered all the Muslims in the city and burned all the Jews alive in the main synagogue." Thus, began Europe's two century dalliance in the Middle East.
                                                The early centuries of the millennium were dominated by a test of wills, the interminable battle for titular control of Europe between the popes and the emperors. Endlessly, the German emperors would travel to Italy to supplicate themselves, to conquer, to dominate and select popes. The source of much of the conflict was investiture: the right to appoint bishops and abbots. This struggle was over power and wealth and would manifest itself in different places for a very long time.  It led to the seven decade Avignon papacy in the 14th century.  The next century brought the Renaissance, the loss of Constantinople, the Sistine Chapel, the Spanish Inquisition and the division of the New World between Spain and Portugal.  The Reformation led by Martin Luther in 1517 further diminished the world of Roman Catholicism and led to a century and-a-half of war, now with religion as a disruptive cause. The Enlightenment opened the Church up to significant challenges, and it was followed by the severe anti-clericalism of the French Revolution and Napoleon's attempts to end the Papal States.
                                                 The Pope's role as temporal ruler was finally ended in 1871, hopefully putting behind the Holy See its history of war, dynastic intrigue, deception and conduct wholly unbecoming to its stated mission as Christ's vicar on earth.  The 20th century opened and closed with two superb modern Popes. Leo XIII tried to find and articulate a role for the Church as a standard bearer for the common man worn out by the industrial revolution, and John Paul II, the first Polish pontiff, stood firm in the battle against communism.
                                               All in all, this is a good read. I found it somewhat surprising that certain events of consequence, such as the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ending the Thirty Years War or the Turks reaching the gates of Vienna are not mentioned as part of the background to this history. But, perhaps with hundreds of popes and endless fighting in Italy, there is not room for too much of the bigger picture.

Money: The Unauthorized Biography, Martin - Inc.

                                               The mission of the author is to disprove the generally accepted theory that the concept of money evolved as a replacement for barter systems, and that it initially used commodities, such as silver and gold, for coinage. "Currency is not money. Money is the system of credit account and their clearing that currency represents."  The coins invented in the 6th century BC simply represented the agreed upon system of valuation. The magic was in agreeing on a value and adopting it into everyday life.  The Romans had a fully sophisticated, almost modern financial system that succumbed when they did. The concept of universal economic value does need governments to provide the skeletons to hold the systems in place.  In essence, "money is a social technology - a set of ideas and practices for organizing society". In the end, I was once again unable to complete a book with economics at i's heart.  Perhaps John Lennon sang all that we need to know: "that's what I waaaant".

In The Wolf's Mouth, Foulds - C +

                                               This novel came to my attention because it was highly praised by reviewers. It is the story of an Englishman, an American of Italian descent, and a Sicilian-American whose paths all cross in Sicily after  the liberation in 1943.  It is beautifully written and extraordinarily effective depicting the random violence of war.  But there is no real narrative, no particular beginning and ending, just a well-written novel.

The Silkworm, Galbraith - B

                                               I'm not sure why I fell for the second in the new series about Cormoran Strike,  J.K. Rowling's rather odd private detective.  In this one, we delve into the publishing world and the gruesome end of a crazed writer. He is 'done in' in a manner set forth in his as of yet unpublished, and obviously final book.  I'm not sure what it is about Strike, but he is not as appealing or interesting as most of the usual British investigators, public or private.  Here, he once again out foxes the police and applies some of his eccentric genius in what I have to admit is a rousing finish. The Times reviewer  (a fellow bestselling author) suggests that the series could be as successful as some of the big ones in the UK - but, I have my doubts

Ring Of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, Watson - B +

                                            Returning to the study of  Europe in the early 20th century, one is struck by the foolhardy willingness with which monarchs, parliamentarians, statesmen, diplomats all considered all out war as a viable national policy. Here we look at 'the great seminal catastrophe'  from the perspective of the two major Central Powers. Stung by the Serbs, A-H felt war was the appropriate response, the Russians were all in in their support for the Serbs, the Germans equivocated and, very quickly, the lights went out.  In both empires, the war was considered defensive, started by the Russians and thus, a source of solidarity and determined nationalism.  We know that the Germans had a plan and they almost succeeded in the west and were deft enough to win in the east. Not so the Hapsburg armies. The Serbs repulsed them in less than a week and the Russians routed them within a month. Before the Germans turned the tide at Tannenberg, the Russians had raped, pillaged and plundered their way across East Prussia and Galicia in a manner that presaged the events of a generation later. Indeed, the author states that, between the Russians and the internecine bloodletting amongst the incredibly diverse races in the Hapsburg Crown lands, the 'bloodlands' started on this, and not the later, Eastern front.  Jews and ethnic Germans were particularly abused in the attempt to Russify the newly captured lands. "The Tsarist army's invasions in the east....offer the closest link between the the campaigns of 1914 and the genocidal horrors of the mid-twentieth century." The refugee crises that followed had differing consequences. The Germans welcomed their East Prussian neighbors and strengthened their resolve.  The Austrians deplored the hundreds of thousands Galician Jews and Ukrainians, felt put upon by their arrival and were angered that their breadbasket had been destroyed - not a positive or constructive civic response.  As the war progressed, though, it was the British who assumed the mantle of the archenemy in Germany. The blockade was, per the international rules of the era, illegal. Thus Britain's 'starvation war' grew into what the Germans were fighting.  As the war wore on, the Central powers knew they were over-matched and Germany militarized its society in order to find a strategy of survival.  Food shortages led to widespread starvation and a collapse of civic order in both empires. Then in early 1917, the Germans made the decision that guaranteed the loss of the war - they authorized unrestricted submarine warfare - and assured the US would join the Entente.  The irony of the timing of their decision is that the British were nearly bankrupt, the French as spent as they were, and most importantly, the Russians were a month away from removing the Tsar. The eventual collapse of Tsarist Russia, followed by the Bolshevik plea for peace offered Germany a chance to win prior to the American arrival changing the balance of forces. They shot their load in 1918, failed, and pretty much fell apart.  Let me set forth some of Watson's closing thoughts. "The First World War was a catastrophe for central and eastern Europe. The new republics that replaced the old,  discredited empires were themselves undermined by the war's bitter legacy. Impoverished, insecure and frequently with large, resentful minorities, most proved unstable. War had rent the fabric of their multi-ethnic societies and disastrously exacerbated racial divisions, bequeathing lasting antagonisms above all against older Jewish and new German minorities. Within a decade, there was little left of Wilson's new democratic order, for most of the east had fallen under the rule of autocratic strongmen."
                                                 As most of my reading on this topic for the past half century has been from the British or Entente perspective, this book has been an eye-opener.  It delves deeply into what was happening, what was thought and how the war was managed by the two key central powers.  Thus, I commend it to someone seeking to round out their understanding of the Great War. However, as good as this book is, I found that its lack of attention to the goings on on the fronts to be a minus.The author is writing about matters from the perspective of the two Central powers, but assumes a vast knowledge of military history by his readers.  I'd vote for some more background on the actual fighting itself.

The Wrong Enemy; America In Afghanistan, 2001-2014, Gall - B

                                               Gall is a NY Times reporter, the daughter of a British journalist, who covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a lifelong supporter of the Afghanis. It is my belief, after over forty years of reading books by Times reporters, that they write the best first drafts of history (see Karnow, Halbertsam, Sheehan, Friedman etc.)  Gall makes it clear in the prologue - and this is no surprise to anyone - that it is Pakistan that has taken our money, played a nefarious game, supported Islamic terrorism and is the "right" enemy.  We ventured into the 'graveyard of empires' just after 9/11, as the Taliban had sheltered and nurtured Al Qaeda. Within two months, both were vanquished.  Many moved to Pakistan, where they prospered, particularly after a Pakistan election in 2002 empowered the religious right. Due to Pakistan's historic strategic interest in controlling Afghanistan and  shared tribal (Pashtun) connections, the north-west provinces of Pakistan became a staging area for the Taliban's eventual return home. Both the military and the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) paid lip service to America's interests, while supporting the Taliban.  The Taliban resurgence in southern Afghanistan was met with a NATO response that kept them at bay but began to alienate the countryside. Errors leading to civilian casualties in the air war caused endless distress.  As the Taliban strengthened in Afghanistan, they exerted their power back across the border in the tribal areas, virtually replacing the Pakistan government. The Karzai led government and NATO could not staunch the Taliban in Afghanistan. A resurgent Taliban was ready to capture Kandahar by 2010, leading to  Obama's surge of an additional 33,000 US troops. Once again, the Taliban were routed. The author feels that the Taliban, Pakistan's proxies, are down but not out. She feels that with the US and NATO leaving,  they will reprise their success in Afghanistan.   She is of the school that says we are leaving too early.
                                             As good as this first draft is, it lacks perspective and background. It never really explains the 'whys' behind the success of the Taliban. They overcame the mujahideen, who had worn out the Soviets, but there is scant information to explain how they wound up governing the country. The US's strategic plan is also skipped over. Perhaps we didn't have one. We went to defeat Al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts. Why did we stay after they were defeated in 2001-2?  I'm not sure I remember and there's no elaboration here.  Indeed, the author sort of flash-forwards  half a dozen years at one point. Of perhaps greatest importance, why did we funnel over $25B to Pakistan to be our ally in the GWOT?  What has that accomplished?  Gall points out in closing that Pakistan is a major exporter of terror.  The British, I believe, tried to invade Afghanistan and could not.  The Soviets were embroiled there for a decade and failed. We have been there for almost a decade and a half. The sobriquet 'graveyard of empires' seems appropriate to me.

The Final Silence, Neville - B

                                             This is the fourth Belfast Novel featuring Jack Lennon and like its predecessors, it screams dishonesty, violence, betrayal, deceit, indifference, and a dark and dreary background. It's not just that the weather is rotten, it's that hundreds of years of conflict can add up to a community as bad as the weather. Lennon survives, manages to get his daughter away from his insidious in-laws, and has a shot at getting a disability pension. I just saw an interview with Neville, who is reasonably young and committed to staying in Belfast. So, there will be more.

The Burning Room, Connelly - B +

                                               This is the 21st book in the Harry Bosch series. What can you say?  Harry gets better with age. Connelly is a master. I believe this series is recognized nationally as one of the best out there. The fact that this was published on  Monday, Nov. 3rd points to it as a significant reason for the very recent settlement between Amazon and the Hachette Group.  Harry is teamed with a young Mexican-American woman who has recently been assigned to the cold case unit. They are assigned a murder case where the victim just died, even though he was shot ten years ago. Lucy wrangles the addition of a twenty-one year old arson/murder/robbery on to their plate and they solve the two cases concurrently. There is the usual wonderful background information on the City of Angels and its geography. The only unsettling thing is that Harry is very, very close to the end of the line with the LAPD. It's going to take some creativity to keep this going

Invisible City, Dahl - B +

                                              This is the first book in an intended series about Rebekah Roberts, a cub reporter for the mythic NY Tribune, a flat-out distasteful tabloid. Her back story is bit odd.  Her mother is a Hasidic Jew who had a fling with Rebekah's religious, albeit Christian, dad, gave birth and left to return to her people. Rebekah is a recent grad of the University of Central Florida journalism school, a stringer for the paper, and a young resident of the up and coming Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. She is very conflicted, but primarily angry, about her mother.  She is assigned to a story about the murder of a young Hasidic woman and the novel turns into a searing indictment of the Hasidic community.  If half of the story is true, I'm embarrassed for the City for giving them so much leeway and appalled that such a community can prosper in this country. They are allowed a tremendous amount of autonomy because of their political clout. That autonomy extends to their murder victims not requiring autopsies. Their children do not stay in school through the minimal age required by law. Their medieval family practices and structures are apparently accepted in Family Court. Divorcing parents who leave the community aren't allowed visitation because it would interfere with the child's religious training. They utilize a self-policing vigilante system. Most appalling is that they treat their woman no better than the Wahhabi's in Saudi Arabia. Their rationale is that they must remain a strong, self-reliant community after what happened in Europe seventy years ago. The plot is pretty good, although I thought it slipped in the end. I'm looking forward to the next few.

The Rule of Nobody: Saving America From Dead Laws and Broken Government, Howard - B

                                               This is a fascinating, brief (only 183 pages) book about how our country's love for the rule of law has made our society much, much weaker than it should be.  The message is that government ( at all levels) does not work and is horribly inefficient in almost everything it does - the proverbial law of unintended consequences. Howard is a noted lawyer, commentator, and author who I saw on Fareed Zakaria's GPS show a few months ago. I believe the book is apolitical. His enemy is incompetence and he clearly states that an efficient government need not offend either the right or the left. His first example is the Goethals Bridge connecting Staten Island to New Jersey. The Port Authority concluded that the best way to modernize the Bridge is to raise its roadbed, thus allowing SuperPanaMax tankers to pass under and keep the Port of Newark competitive.  Many years later, nothing has happened because of the assessment process. He points out that since the approach roads would be the same and there is no increase in traffic, perhaps environmental impacts could be fast-tracked. Not in modern America, because we have endless laws that prescribe how things must be. There must be an environmental study, and in that study, time was spent on whether it was a good thing for the Port to be competitive. After all, this might lead to more traffic in Newark. Also, it took a year to complete the study of the project's impact on historic buildings within a ten mile radius.  Western Staten Island is industrial and there isn't a historic building anywhere near, but there are a lot in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Other examples of rule governed policies are: a cafeteria worker fired from a school for feeding a hungry child whose pass had expired, a lifeguard fired for saving a life after he crossed a beach boundary line when he should have called 911, a fireman prevented from saving a drowning man by his boss, because he did not have the proper certification, and on and on endlessly, until you don't know whether to laugh or cry. On a larger level, he tells the story of the cotton subsidies for farmers put in in 1933. They were part of staving off the Great Depression. Today we spend $2.5B on cotton subsidies and the WTO condemned us and slapped sanctions on goods sent to Brazil. Brazil had initiated the objections about our subsidies. Our Congress would not eliminate the subsidies and was pained to see innocent bystander industries punished because of their exports. So, we solved the problem by sending $147M annually to Brazil's cotton farmers. His suggestion is that we need less reliance on rules to be followed and more focus on outcomes.  He provides some great examples in the area of nursing homes. America has so many rules that homes will wake people from a sound sleep in order to comply with eating time requirements or place comatose a patient in play groups in order to comply with play ratios. In Australia, the industry has been revolutionized by using outcome based rules.  They simply require that people be taken care of humanely and with consideration. There's a reasonably long section on government philosophy and a suggested list of constitutional amendments. As I think we all know, we could figure this out if we left the politicians out of it. That is not likely because only legislators can change the Constitution or anything else in the good ole USA.

Natchez Burning, Iles - B

                                               I've read quite a few books by Greg Iles, most set in and around Natchez, Miss. and all very good. The books are legal/criminal thrillers with a tremendous amount of detail about race relations in the deep south. Iles is a southerner and I think I've learned that only a southerner could depict the concurrent closeness and distance between blacks and whites in a place like Mississippi.  Interracial friendship and love go hand in hand with visceral hatred and violence, in a way that can only happen because so much of life is shared in the south, as opposed to the north where segregation is the norm.  In this novel, which I believe is the fifth in the series and the first of a trilogy involving crusading young lawyer, now Mayor, Penn Warren is confronted by his local DA with the fact that his father, local medical legend, may have facilitated the death of his former nurse. Viola Turner had worked for Dr. Tom Cage forty years earlier when they had been lovers and she fled north after the locals killed her civil rights activist brother and gang-raped her. She had come home to die and Tom had been ministering to her.  Swirling around the death of Viola is the investigation of the historic and on-going activities of the local KKK spin off, the Double Eagles, who're suspected in a dozen deaths.  Clearly, Tom did not kill Viola, although he refuses to discuss anything about their relationship based on the doctor-patient privilege. If the Eagles did, it's not apparent.  So, the DA arrests Tom.  His son Penn, Penn's fiancee newspaper editor, a local journalist, the FBI, the local police, and just about everybody is now engaged in the pursuit of how Viola died and much more importantly, what happened forty years ago and how is it still a secret.  As the noose tightens around the necks of the Double Eagles, their supporters in and around two states  and the statewide corrupt police authorities all lash out with all they have.  They come very close to killing Penn, his dad and his fiancee, Caitlin.  They are saved by two very unlikely heroes. Iles is a great storyteller, with an incredible feel for the deep south and a remarkable ability to write about its nuances and subtleties. That said, this book is way too long at 788 pages. My grade kept deteriorating as it kept going on, and on.  Having read a Grisham novel a week ago, I kept thinking about how efficient a writer he is. This author should try to emulate that approach.

Gray Mountain, Grisham - B

                                                It is hard to believe that this is Grisham's 29th book, 25th if you only want to count the legal thrillers.  He has provided some memorable stories over the last twenty-three years.  This one falls a bit shy of the usual high bar.  A fourth-year associate loses her job in Manhattan as a consequence of the collapse of Lehman Bros. and, notwithstanding degrees from Georgetown and Columbia and a childhood in D.C. as the only child of two lawyers, Samantha Kofer takes a non-paying Legal Aid internship in rural southwestern Virginia two days after being furloughed. Grisham can still write, but this is not just the usual highly complex story, although it is the usual good v. evil drama. What it is is a thorough polemic tearing apart the coal industry for its abuse of the land, total disregard for the law, lack of ethics, domination of the political and legal institutions of the five states that mine coal in the region, and indifference to human suffering. He really goes after them. According to this novel, Big Coal never pays on the black lung cases. They just appeal and appeal until they have to pay, five to seven  years after the initial claim, when in all likelihood, the claimant is either at deaths door or has already crossed over. Black lung is completely untreatable and is depicted as an absolutely horrible way to go. Also, the companies never repair the strip-mined landscape because it's less expensive to not do so and instead, to pay some light fines. If the coal industry is half as bad as depicted here, its owners and mangers should  all be condemned to a life in underground mines.  Samantha and others in the legal community make a difference, take on Big Coal and appear to be on the road to living happily ever after.

Alan Turing: The Enigma, Hodges - B -

                                               I decided to read this thirty-year old-book because it is the basis of the new movie 'The Imitation Game', wherein Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing so extraordinarily well that it piqued my curiosity. This is the definitive biography, perhaps because only a mathematician could write about one of the maths greats of the 20th century. After all, Turing dreamed up a machine that was an early computer. So, the good news is, it is a well-written book. The bad news is there's a lot of math in it. There is also a tremendous amount of detail about the intellectual background of the era, as well as on society's perceptions of homosexuality. Turing was brilliant, socially awkward and a homosexual, thus making his education years ones to be endured. He studied at Kings College, Cambridge, stayed on as a don, spent time at Princeton and in 1937 published 'Computable Numbers',  the conceptual foundation of the Turing Machine.  In 1938 he was one of the first mathematicians to join the team that was working on the German Enigma machine challenge. The day after the war began, he became full-time at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park.  Turing worked in Hut 8 and was in charge of the German naval code section.  There was no epiphany moment, but rather slow, increasing skill at deciphering that led to times of  full access to German signals. As they were part of the Secret Service, their information went directly to the PM and not to the various military branches. Churchill visited in the summer of 1941 and was introduced to Turing. "He used to refer to the Bletchley workers as the goose who laid the golden eggs and never cackled." A few months later, Turing wrote to Churchill and requested a significant increase in personnel and funding.   The PM's response was brief and to the point. He told his staff, "make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done."  By the middle of 1942, 50,000 decrypts per month were providing the British with the upper hand, which they and the Americans used to defeat the Afrika Korps and then win the Battle of the Atlantic. They maintained their advantage because, even when the Germans believed their positions had been exposed, they tended to blame it on Allied spying. They never would entertain that their signals had been intercepted. They had too much faith in Enigma. Alan then switched over to Hanslope to work on radio direction finders and voice encipherment. As the war wound down, Turing knew he could go back to Cambridge, but his horizons had expanded, he wanted to build a machine, a 'brain'.  He went to Manchester and here, once again, the author delves deeply, very deeply into the science and maths behind Turing's work. In early 1952, Alan made the mistake that would cost him his reputation and his life. He reported a petty burglary that had been committed by someone that he had sex with and then acknowledged it all in writing to the police. The naive genius was comfortable with his sexuality,  not at all ashamed, certainly aware that it was illegal to have 'indecent relations', but not that all hell would break loose.  Prosecuted and convicted, he opted for a year of chemical castration, rather than prison. When he came off probation in 1953, the Manchester University Council  voted  him a ten-year specially created Readership in the Theory of Computing.  A year later he took his life. "It seemed an isolated act of self-annihilation."  Turing's seminal role in the war came before the public sparingly in the 70's and then in the 90's a play and a tv movie brought him to wider acclaim. In 2009, PM Gordon Brown apologized for his mistreatment and the credits for the above-mentioned movie said that the Queen pardoned him in 2013.  As fine a book as this is, it is only for those with a strong scientific and mathematical curiosity.

Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, Solomon - B

                                               Tevye first appeared in a series of stories in the 1890's and in a 1905 Warsaw production written by Sholem-Aleichem, the pen name of Sholem Rabinowitz, from Kiev. Rabinowitz was a pioneer of the use of Yiddish, the language of the shtetl.  It was the Yiddish theater in NY that brought him to America a year later.  And in 1919,  a few years after his death, the work of Sholem-Aleichem triumphed in America in 'Tevye der milkhiker'.  The play became a worldwide favorite, was actually performed in NY in 1939 by a traveling Soviet company and was made into a movie the same year.  After the war, an English play 'The World of Sholem-Aleichem' brought Tevye to a wider audience and in 1957 'Tevye and his Daughters' was produced in NY. The three men who put Fiddler together were Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein.  Jerome Robbins was brought in as director, Zero Mostel signed on as Tevye.  Jerome Robbins is the hero of the story as he masterminded endless changes and adjustments to make it the Fiddler we know and love. Previewed in Detroit and Washington, the show premiered in NY on Sept. 22, 1964 and has been a worldwide phenom ever since.  The movie came out in 1971 and to this day, Fiddler remains a revered and oft-produced staple of the live theater, here and around the world.
                                             This is a very well-done, thoughtful and serious book that delved into the topic in much greater detail than I did. There is background information on Sholem-Aleeichem and the eastern European world that produced him and Tevye.  The world of NY theater for the fifty years that preceded Fiddler is thoroughly explored, as is the role of Fiddler in Jewish culture.  After-all, these are folktales that morphed into the theater of the new world at a time when America's Jews became completely mainstream, then became part of American culture and by now have re-impacted 21st century Judaism.  Of course, I am listening to the Broadway album (and let's acknowledge that it's as good as it gets) as I type.

The Undertaking, Magee - B

                                               I'm not sure why, but I very seldom come across WW2 novels.  This is a rather interesting plot for the telling of the slow motion horror of being a German soldier on the eastern front and a woman in Berlin.   Peter and Katherina marry in the fall of 1941 through the Marriage Bureau, he to get some time off and she to get a shot at a widow's pension. To their surprise, they like each other and fall in love.  After their very brief honeymoon, he heads back east and their lives head their separate ways. She has a child and lives well in mid-war Berlin, for her father is friends with a man in power and they find themselves in a fabulous apartment, recently vacated by Jews. Her belief in the system doesn't appear to be too sincere; she is just someone going with the flow. He despises the war and winds up caught in the maw of Stalingrad, where he crosses the Volga to surrender.  Peter somehow survives, and eight years after the war ends, returns to Berlin. Katherina was one of the millions raped and is raising her half-Russian son, her own son having died earlier. He cannot accept the prospect of raising the bastard and leaves for anywhere where there aren't Russians.  All in all, this is a first-class effort and one that conveys the brutality of lives torn asunder seventy years ago in central Europe.
                                            I wonder if there are not that many novels of the war or if, as a reasonably well-read student of the war, I am immune to novelizations of the times. After all, no novel can provide greater detail or insight into the incredibly well-documented hell that was the world of this war.

MJ, Lazenby - B -

                                               When we are young, we admire our sports heroes. We also have a great many of them. For me there were Dodgers, Olympians, and Knicks.  Things change when you are an adult. It becomes more a matter of being in awe of a skill set. I've enjoyed watching and have been enchanted by Dan Marino and Tiger Woods. But as a Bulls season ticket holder,  someone who saw Michael play in person over 200 times and watched him, I guess, over a thousand times on tv, it is almost impossible to describe the feelings one has for a super-star who plays for your home team.  Being a Bulls fan during that era was quite frankly, a lifetime highlight. It sounds trivial - but, it wasn't. How and why people can become so enthralled with their home team, be it baseball, soccer, football or any other sport is a fascinating topic. And how anyone could have his "will" to win, to never lose, to always be so competitive is almost incomprehensible. So, I opened this book with enthusiasm.  Over the course of more than 600 pages, the author tries to find the "why" behind Michael, and points in many directions. Likely, it was his desire to overcome his older brother Larry one-on-one in the backyard and earn his father's respect. Everything else, every player, every teammate, every coach is part of the picture, but certainly not the answer. His ability to manufacture extreme motivation out of long-past slights was part of the process. But, again, why? I'm not sure that is ever answered.
                                              Perhaps it's easier to set forth those things that surprise someone who has a good feel for the story.  I knew that his dad was no saint, but the degree of his depravity is a bit surprising. His oldest  daughter accused him of molesting her, he was fired from GE for theft and only escaped jail because he was Michael's dad. He was a thorn in the side of Nike, ran a business they created for him into the ground and is credited with causing so much trouble that Michael lost the one sanctuary he could rely on - his family.  He was facing a Chicago area paternity suit at the time of his murder.  I don't remember  that Doug Collins was, during his first NBA stint, not a particularly good coach, or that almost all of Michael's teammates didn't like him.  I never realized just how serious the gambling was.  Also, the Sam Smith book 'The Jordan Rules' which shed light on Michael's obsessions and difficulty as a teammate apparently tore the team apart. Everyone was angry and pointed fingers at each other about leaks. It was part of the reason Paxson retired and Grant and Cartwright left. Jackson and Krause fired Johnny Bach for being the 'leaker', when it turned out that Jackson was Smith's primary source. The Bulls team that Michael retired from the first time was a dysfunctional mess.  When he came back, he was meaner, more intimidating;  he, along with Jackson, totally dominated the second championship team.  I never knew what an SOB Reinsdorf was; he had to 'win' every negotiation and told MJ after the 1996 $30m contract that he would regret paying him that.  This, perhaps is the biggest shocker. No matter how good a businessman Reinsdorf is or was, pre-MJ the franchise was a joke. He may have been one of the luckiest people on the planet - Jordan 'made' him.  Yet, sadly,  MJ was no hero, as he proved with his Hall of Fame induction speech.  And that returns us to the most important take-away when reading about athletes. They are unfailingly human.  It is what they do on the court or inside the lines that moves us.  There has never been anyone like Michael Jeffrey Jordan and I'm glad that he and I came to Chicago at the same time.

The Murder Man, Parsons - B

                                               This is the second book in a new series set in the UK. Ironically, the first is not yet available in the US. Our hero and DCI is Max Wolfe. He's on the trail of a serial killer, while everyone else is pursuing the social media fanatic who claims to have done it. The key to the crime is the common experience these victims had together back in boarding school twenty years ago. According to the author, the English class system is alive and well.   There is just enough plot, action, human interest and deduction to make this work.

The Medici Boy, L'Heureux - C

                                               This book has been critically acclaimed and does do a fabulous job of recreating the world of Florence in the first half of the 15th century.  It is the backstory to the creation of Donatello's David, the first bronze statue of a naked human in Europe in over a thousand years.  Donatello has been long suspected of homosexuality because of this statue.  Thus, this is a long treatise about homosexuality in Florence, where it was accepted to a point. If a man could not afford to marry or pay a prostitute - well, you get the picture.  A sodomite younger than 18 was forgiven and it was only after a number of convictions that matters became serious. Upon a 5th conviction, burning at the stake was likely.   There is a tremendous amount of enlightening information about the art of the era, but the background story doesn't work for me.

Command And Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety - Schlosser - B +

                                             This intriguing book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist a year ago. It tells two stories in alternating chapters. The first story is about how close we came to a nuclear accident in Arkansas in 1980.  There were 18 Titan-II silos in a semi-circle about an hour north and west of Little Rock.  On Sept 18, 1980, near the town of Damascus, a technician dropped a socket that somehow smashed a hole in a stage 1 fuel tank and a slow leak began. The propellant leak was followed by a series of cascading failures leading to more leaks, falling and rising pressures in different tanks, and the release of 100,000 gallons of water into the silo.  "Flashing red lights on the control center warned there was a fuel leak, an oxidizer leak, a fire in the silo - three things that couldn't be happening at once." About 7 hours after the initial error, the first stage of the rocket  blew up, scattered the silo and the 180,000 pound blast doors over about half-a-mile and then the rocket rose a thousand feet into the air before the second stage blew up.  Although there was a night-to-day explosion, it was not the nuclear core, which was  defused the next day. One technician died and a few more were injured. Amazingly, the Air Force denied there was a warhead, refused to tell the local authorities anything (even declining to provide medical information to help their own men) and eventually punished most of the people at the site. A year later, the aged Titan II's were decommissioned, a decade after they had become obsolete.
                                             The second story is the more familiar one of the atomic and then nuclear programs from Einstein's letter through the entire Manhattan project and into the post-war era.  Reading about the fifties is always fascinating. We had unlimited resources and unceasingly deployed them. Planes, more planes, bombs and bigger bombs, rockets, early warning radar systems and extensive management commands were nothing the American military budget couldn't handle. I've always admired Ike's loathing of war and his constant rejection of the military's desire to strike first at the Soviets. But, more than anything else, I remain amazed at those who thought nuclear war winnable or survivable.  We should never forget that much of the massive build-up was pure politics and pure fear. We were always ahead of the Soviets. The one time they trumped us was in the late fifties when they deployed Sputnik because they had the rocket delivery system to propel massive weights into outer space. We did not have an early warning system for rockets, so the military came up with a 'Dr. Strangelove' system to advise the President if we had been hit. They placed thousands of radiation and flash  sensors on buildings around the country, wired into some rudimentary computer system and capable of presenting Ike with a visual pattern of the hits. How bloody useless that would be appeared not to have been considered. And, any reading of the era is never complete without total wonder at SAC's Curtis LeMay. He clearly was one heck of an organizational genius, a WW2 hero, but frightfully zealous in his belief in nuclear weapons. With half-lives of 24,000 years and hundreds of millions of years for plutonium and uranium respectively, one can only wonder what a post-apocalyptic world would look like.    Inter-service rivalries, i.e. the Army and Navy seeking to stop the Air Force's near monopoly of weapons, led to two of my favorite lunacies - the atomic land mine and the hand-held atomic rifle.
                                          For me, the Damascus story was the more interesting of the two.  I've read both of Richard Rhode's books and recently read a book called '15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation'.  Thus, the general background material was somewhat repetitive. If someone hasn't read all of those, this is a great and relatively brief primer on the topic.

Land Of Dreams, Sundstol - B -

                                               This is the first book of a Norwegian trilogy set in Minnesota, and my initial thought was, how odd is that?  Considering all the things Americans write about, clearly I was suffering from some sort of literary nationalism.  The story is set in and around the Duluth area, the westernmost point of the Great Lakes and in Superior National Park. The principal character and storyteller is Lance Hansen, a Park Service police man and local historian. The book goes into pleasant details about the Norwegian character and the history of the community.  It's an enjoyable tour of a part of the country I know next to nothing about. A Norwegian canoeist is found bludgeoned in the park and the investigative team is joined by a policeman from Norway.  The question is posed as to whether or not there had ever been a murder in the county before.  Lance, as the local master of the topic, begins to look into the the disappearance of an Indian in 1892.  Although it was never proved he was murdered, Lance slowly concludes he probably was - and by Lance's very own great-grandfather.  The murder is wrapped up with a suspect arrested (although he is innocent) about three-quarters of the way through the book.  Considering all of the mysteries I've read over the years, one might assume that I've developed some detection skills.  Not so. I never figure out "whodunit" - except here where it was clearly telegraphed.  I'm thinking of Groucho Marx's famous line about not wanting to be a member of any club that would take him. I'm not sure about the rest of a series, when it was so easy to figure out.

Neanderthal Man: In Search Of Lost Genomes, Paabo - B-

                                               I suspect most of us are at least curious, about our connection to our Neanderthal ancestors. As a client of 23andme.com, I am told that 2.9% of my DNA is Neanderthal. This book tells the story of how the science of DNA sequencing has evolved over the last two decades to the point that someone can state to the tenth of a point a person's genetic composition. Heretofore, scientists have been limited to studying fossils and, quite frankly, guessing what the heck has happened over the millennia.  The author, a Swede, trained in many places and settled in Germany, has been part of the process of studying DNA extracted from ancient bones. His curiosity began with mummies from Egypt, and moved on eventually to Neanderthal bones. Although the first bones found and identified as our 'cousins' were in the Neander Valley in Germany, the largest cache of Neanderthal bones are found in Croatia.  The author can write, and write well. However, I do not think that the greatest writers of all time could make pyrosequencing or DNA cloning very interesting to me. So, about half way through and overwhelmed by the science, I started skipping forward.  After processing billions of nucleotides,  the conclusion was drawn that almost all humans today have Neanderthal DNA. How that DNA was shared between two different species remains an item of scientific speculation. That conclusion shattered  many of the archaeological theses about human evolution.  I've always been intrigued by this topic and have read many of the older books about 'Lucy' and the battles between the Leakeys and the 'out of Africa' controversies v. multi-origin theorists. As more and more has been written about what the chemist's are doing, the conclusion I have come to is that the teams in the chemistry labs will be the ones who learn all about our past. That said, I think I'll limit my inquisitiveness to newspapers and magazines.

A Coffin For Dimitrios, Ambler - B -

                                               This book was written in 1939 and was recently cited by Alan Furst in a Times interview as an inspiration for his 'Night Soldier' series.  It's rather fun to start to think that, yes, it's a lot like Furst's books, until you realize, it's the other way around.  An Englishman, a writer, meets a Turk of mysterious official responsibilities in Stambul.  He learns of the death of a Dimitrios,  a shifty character of bad reputation. He decides to find out more, perhaps for a book, perhaps out of curiosity. So he begins to look into the story of  Dimitrios. Unknown to him, he is being shadowed. As he wanders the Balkans, we get a lesson on the Turk ethnic cleansing of the Greeks after the Great War, Bulgarian parliamentary politics, Italian - Yugoslav border conflicts, and then it's on to Paris, where he learns of Dimitrios years as drug dealer.  He also ascertains that the body of Dimitrios, found floating in the Bosporus, might actually be one of Dimitrios partners-in-crime. Plot twists in Paris lead to a shoot-out and an awfully good tale for the Englishman to write about. Or, is he writing about something else? If it inspired Alan Furst, that is high praise. And just like Furst's books, this is one of those where you can see and feel the fog surrounding you while you read.

Five Came Back: A Story Of Hollywood And The Second World War, Harris - B -

                                               This is the story of the relationship between Hollywood and the American military as told through the war-time service of Frank Capra, John Ford, George Stevens, William Wyler and John Huston. "They honored their country, risked their lives and created a new visual vocabulary for fictional and factual war movies."   Because the men who ran Hollywood were first and second generation Jewish immigrants, fearful of Washington and anti-semitism, they avoided the oncoming catastrophe until 'Confessions of a Nazi Spy' in April 1941.  Warner Bros. very happily presented America with a rousing 'Sgt. York' in July, but generally speaking, Hollywood was only dipping its toes in the water until Dec.7, 1941.  "Any trepidation the studios felt about making war movies vanished within weeks."  Wyler was making 'Mrs. Miniver' before Pearl Harbor and made it even more of a patriotic piece, leading to Churchill's praise and the best picture Oscar.  By the spring of 1942, Capra, Ford, Huston and Wyler were in uniform.  Stevens  followed in early 1943.  Capra began making 'Why We Fight', which the author contends was the most important filmed propaganda of the war.  I agree. The series of films are over-the-top, but nonetheless brilliant. Ford was the first to shoot actual combat scenes, which he shamelessly embellished in his 18 minute 'Battle of Midway'.  When FDR saw it, he turned to his Naval aide and said, " I want every mother in America to see this film". A year later, Wyler flew five combat missions over Germany and filmed the documentary 'Memphis Belle'.  For every success, though, there were an equal amount of failed efforts, occasioned by endless bureaucratic infighting, confused strategy, inter-service rivalries and politics. Ford and Stevens were on Omaha Beach on D-Day as part of a major effort to document the momentous landing. Some of what they filmed was so brutal that it wasn't released for fifty years.  The work got better and better as the last year of the war played out. Ford actually returned to Hollywood to film 'They Were Expendable' while still on active duty.   After Wyler was wounded, Stevens was the last of the major directors in Europe and was the man who filmed the harrowing death camp scenes, particularly the American arrival in Dachau. Long after the war, Stevens turned to his reels of everything he had filmed while preparing to direct 'The Diary of Anne Frank'.  After a minute of his 'Eyewitness To Dachau', he returned the film to its box. The directors received medals, commendations and Oscars before they returned to Hollywood. Steven's work was used as evidence at Nuremberg. Wyler had the privilege of making what is generally considered the best post-war movie, 'The Best Years Of Our Lives". The book only tangentially and infrequently mentions the hundreds of movies made in Hollywood about the war and thus for me was a bit of a disappointment .








                                             

Personal, Child - B

                                              This is the 19th Reacher book in the series.  He is tracked down by the Army and asked to come back to assist (unofficially) in the search for one of the world's best snipers. It seems there is an attack planned on a G-8 meeting in London and the leading candidate to do the shooting is someone Reacher put in jail fifteen years before. I believe Reacher has been out for twenty years, but this is fiction.  Applying his awesome deductive reasoning, as well as his physical skills, to a mosaic of international and criminal challenges, Jack saves the day.

Dead Water, Cleeves - C +

                                                This book is the latest in a series set in the Shetland Islands.  Thus, it passes an important test for me; ie. it takes me somewhere I've never been before.  The Shetlands are 110 miles north of the Scottish mainland, rather far from civilization.  They have been changed by the North Sea oil that has reordered Scotland in the last forty years.  A local man is back from London where he works for a national newspaper, hoping to land a scoop. Instead, he's found dead in a boat in the harbor. The hunt begins.  The team gathers, sorts out their responsibilities and, along the way, we learn about the Shelands, crofting, ferries, weather and most importantly, the decline of oil and the possible rise of green energy. Of course, a second corpse is soon on the otherwise peaceful scene.  The case is resolved, but quite frankly, the details about the Shetlands are a lot more interesting than the plot and the solution. I doubt I'll check out the earlier books.