The Battle of Ink and Ice: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, And The Making Of Modern Media, Hartman - B

                       "By the end of the nineteenth century,  the North Pole had replaced the Northwest Passage as the Holy Grail of Arctic exploring." The field had been abandoned  by governments, and was left to entrepreneurial explorers, often backed by newspapers. The NY Times backed Robert Peary, and the NY Herald, Frederick Cook.

                       The world of America's newspapers was about scooping the competition, and there was none better than the New York Herald. It was the premier paper in the US, if not the world, because its owners, Robert G. Bennett and his namesake son, were willing to spend any amount for a story and were the first to make extensive use of the telegraph and trans-Atlantic cable. They beat their competition on Custer's Last Stand by four days. The Herald sent James Stanley to Africa to find Dr. Livingstone, and began backing Arctic exploration in the 1870s. In September of 1909 when Dr. Frederick Cook wired from the Shetlands his claim of North Pole achievement, he did so with a 2,000 word article for the Herald. A week later, the Times received a telegram about reaching the Pole from Navy Capt. Robert Peary who was in Labrador.

                      Cook was the more accomplished and experienced of the two. He had been the physician on a Belgian expedition that wintered in Antarctica. Peary's efforts in the north of Greenland and on the ice had cost him most of toes. Peary, though, was well connected and the Peary Arctic Club built him an icebreaker that helped him achieve a farthest north in 1906. The following summer, Cook sailed north. Peary was delayed until 1908. An important member of Peary's Club had died and he looked all over New York for alternative funding. The Times paid for exclusive reporting rights.

                     As Cook did not return to civilization with any of the instruments he took north, nor any documentation, his claim was met with skepticism. He told the world he would provide his proof in the book he intended to write. Among those who stated he did not believe Cook was Peary. Thus began an unending controversy. And as it turned out, Peary had no compelling proof either.  As the bickering and mudslinging wore on, public opinion leaned toward Cook. The National Geographic Society conducted a perfunctory review of Peary's records and awarded him its Gold Medal. The University of Copenhagen rejected Cook's purported proofs out of hand. For all intents and purposes, Cook was an international pariah. The US Congress reviewed the work of the NGS on Peary and concluded it was "perfunctory and hasty," and that its examiners were "prejudiced in his favor." Peary's claims were now as suspect as Cook's. Two decades later, Roald Amundsen, conqueror of the South Pole, flew over the North Pole in a plane and most experts agree he was the first to 90 north. In the end, the conclusion has become that Cook never really tried, and Peary did not get all that close to the Pole.

The Helsinki Affair, Pitoniak - B

                      A walk in at Rome's CIA section of the embassy speaks to the number two, Amanda Cole. He tells her that a US senator will be assassinated in Cairo, and she believes him. Her boss, however, does not. When an 83 year old Sen. Vogel has a stroke in Cairo's heat, she is promoted and the station chief is sent to the hinterlands. Soon she is running her Russian agent, and looking into a very complex matter that the senator was working on. He was working with a different Russian, who had shared with him the Russian president's attempts to influence financial markets in the west. Things get really complicated when it appears that Amanda's dad may have helped the Russians thirty years before. A bit too plot twisty for me.

Alias Emma, Glass - B+

                      Emma Makepace is a junior officer with MI6, whose boss asks her to speak to a young physician in London. Michael's parents were former Soviet defectors, and now decades after the fact, Russian hit men are fanning out all over Europe killing their friends and colleagues who worked in the nuclear program years ago. A revenge inspired series of killings leads to Michael's parents being taken into protective custody. Michael refuses, and the hope is that he may listen to a younger person. Emma approaches him and he does refuse, but changes his mind when Russian agents make an appearance at his place of work. Emma and Michael must get to MI6 HQ's, but are completely stymied by the fact that Russians have hijacked London's ubiquitous CCTV system. They cannot go a block without being seen. Off they go through back alleys, hidden mews, on a canal, underground where the Fleet River still flows, and onto the Thames in a stolen inflatable. Russians are at every corner, but Emma gets Michael to safety. Excellent thriller hijinks.

Simon the Fiddler, Jiles - B

                     Simon Boudlin, 23 year old fiddler extraordinaire, is drafted into the Confederate Army deep in the heart of Texas in the spring of 1865. After a very brief exchange of fire with some Yankees, the Confederates surrender, and Simon is the lead musician at that night's festivities. He sees Doris Dillon, an 18 year old woman indentured to the Union Army's colonel, and falls immediately in love. She heads to San Antonio, and he and a few other musicians go to Galveston. They scrape out a living until year's end, when they move to Houston. Things pick up and they start to make money, and Simon begins to save as his goal is to purchase some land in Texas. He also manages to open a line of communication to Doris. After playing a wedding in Corpus Christi, he heads for San Antonio. He again finds work, and contacts Doris. However, meeting Doris is a fraught enterprise, as Col. Webb is the locale's senior officer, martial law is the law of the land, and Simon has no discharge papers from the Confederates since he had simply walked away. Simon purchases land 400 miles north on the Red River, and begins to dream and plan an idyllic future with Doris. He and Doris plan a getaway from the mean, lying and thieving Colonel and his family. Doris and Simon marry after Webb has him arrested on trumped up charges. They manage, barely, to head into the future on their own. This is the fourth book I've read by this author. She is very, very good, although I'm not sure how many books involving walking around post-war Texas are necessary.

Saying It Loud: 1966 - The Year Black Power Challenged The Civil Rights Movement, Whitaker - B+

                      "After a decade of watching the Civil Rights saga play out in the South, a restless generation of Northern Black youth would demand their turn in the spotlight. Before the year 1966 was over, the story would alter the lives of a cast of young men and women, almost all under the age of thirty, who in turn would change the course of Black - and American - history."

                       Sammy Younge, a student at The Tuskegee Institute, and son of local Black elites, began working for the civil rights movement in 1965 as a student organizer. He met, and was mentored by, Stokely Carmichael, the New Yorker who worked for the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). On January 3rd, 1966, Younge spent the day registering Blacks to vote. Later that night, he left a party to go out and buy some mayonnaise and cigarettes. The owner of a service station shot him after he asked to use the restroom and fill up his car. His murder shook a lot of younger Blacks who were losing patience with Martin Luther King Jr's.  philosophies of integration and nonviolence. John Lewis, the SNCC chair, issued a statement on Younge's murder and the continuing deaths of Black Americans in the Vietnam War. In Atlanta, newly elected state ep. and former SNCC press liaison, Julian Bond, was expelled from the legislature, before being sworn in, for supporting Lewis and opposing the war and the draft. January also saw Martin Luther King, Jr. move into a slum apartment in Chicago, and Huey Newton and Bobby Seale get together in Oakland to begin to sort out how to approach all of the injustice they faced. In Lowndes County, Alabama, Carmichael worked on a project that he and Younge had begun. He organized a Black party to counter Wallace's control of the Democratic Party. Under state law, parties had to select an animal image to help their illiterate voters make a selection. Carmichael selected a black panther. Over 2,000 Blacks were enrolled to vote, and in the May primaries, Blacks voted in the county for the first time since Reconstruction. A month later, the SNCC rewarded Carmichael by electing him chairman. On a march through Mississippi initiated by James Meredith and featuring Dr. King and Carmichael, Stokely took the advice of a SNCC staffer, Willie Ricks, and made a dramatic night time speech. Instead of demanding 'freedom now,' he shouted out that "what we want now isBlack Power." Within a week, the phrase appeared in hundreds of newspapers and in the national magazines. The Meredith March continued and successfully registered over 4,000 new voters. However, extreme official hostility led to a tear gassing, the further radicalization of Carmichael, and some rejection of King's middle of the road approach to civil rights. The 25 year old Stokely embarked on a two month tour of the country and his friends and colleagues began calling him 'Stokely Starmichael.' By the end of the summer, the national press was focused on just what the catchphrase meant and what its impact on the movement was. In Chicago, Dr. King's northern crusade was faced with violence from white ethnics and the police leading him to make a deal with Mayor Daley. Many viewed it as a 'sellout.' As the summer wound down, Newsweek reported an in depth poll that showed whites were less enthusiastic about civil rights than they had been, and that Blacks were less and less patient. Carmichael became further radicalized when jailed for eight days in Atlanta as the SNCC tried to rein in his more over the top statements.  In October, he went to Berkeley after an invitation from the SDS to speak, and a telegram from candidate Ronald Reagan asking him to not come and "stir strong emotions." He spoke against the war without any emotions being stirred. Reagan won his election, as did many law and order Republicans in a clear backlash against civil rights. In Oakland, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton started wearing berets and wrote up the Ten Point Program, the founding document of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Early the following year, they were joined by Eldridge Cleaver. In December, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of seating Julian Bond, and in an upstate NY conference, the SNCC dismissed all of its white staffers.  In December, the first Kwanza was celebrated in Los Angeles.

                    In 1967, the FBI ratcheted up its efforts against Black nationalism and virtually declared war on anyone they feared may become "messiah" in the Black community. They particularly focused on the Panthers. The Black Power movement needed a charismatic leader to take it forward, and it never found one.  Stokely Carmichael, the person Hoover feared could be the messiah was targeted by the Bureau and left the country in 1968. This is a truly superb book.

Old God's Time, Barry - B+

                    Recently retired as a detective for the Dublin Garda and long a widower missing his wife June, Tom Kettle sits quietly in a rental overlooking the swirling seas off Ireland's east coast sometime in the 1990's. He looks back on a life that has been filled with unimaginable pain and suffering. His former colleague and boss, Jack Fleming, shows up and asks for his help. A few days later, Tom takes the train into Dublin and heads for the precinct where he used to work. They've asked him back because they are reopening a cold case he worked on years ago involving the murder of a  pernicious rapist priest. Both Tom and his wife had been orphans, raised in the prison-like institutions run with a mean spirit by Ireland's iteration of the Catholic Church. Tom had been abused and raped by brothers; June abused by nuns, and raped by a priest for six years. Somehow, they had survived, had a loving and successful marriage, and raised two children. The priest who had raped June was the victim of the long ago murder. The priest's colleague suggests that Kettle may have been there that day in a desperate attempt to halt the justice that is headed his way for his own contemptible sins. Tom gladly submits to a DNA test that is negative.

                  This book was long listed for the Booker, an award that the author has previously won. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes. "Being Irish he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy." William Yeats.

Dead of Night , Scarrow - B

                      In the second in this series, we find Inspector Schenke trying to stick to the letter of the law in his investigations for the Berlin police as Germany descends into war and the law seems to be becoming the whim of the Nazi Party. He investigates the disappearance of disabled children who are under the care of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses. He finds out bits and pieces of what we now know was the extreme eugenics program known as Aktion T4, whereby the Reich murdered the racial undesirables. Schenke is man of character and pursues the matter as far as he can before he is called off by Reinhold Heydrich himself. 

Song Be, Adams - B

                      This novel, by a 1967 West Point grad, is subtitled 'A Legacy of Vietnam' and is based on true events. It is the story of Lt. Richard Foxworth, a Forward Observer who is wounded in combat and recuperates first  at Walter Reed, and then at Rollingwood Sanitarium. Although he continues to rehabilitate his leg, he is at Rollingwood because of a recurring nightmare from the day he was injured. The doctors and nurses slowly help him recover his memory of that day and help him face the reality that his leg will never be the same. His Army career  is over. This is a powerful and explicit tale of dealing with PTSD and, in this instance, of making a recovery. The depictions of the battle at Song Be are also truly excellent. Thanks to my good friend, Mike Connell, for introducing me to the author years ago, and for sending me a copy of the book. 

The Last Ships From Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and The Race To Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I, Ujifusa - B

                     "Between 1881 and 1914, over ten million people crossed the Atlantic from Europe to America. Over 2.5 Million of them were Jews." Russia was forcing people out, and America's door was open. Three men, Albert Ballin, Jacob Schiff, and J.P. Morgan helped make this exodus a reality.

                     Ballin was born in Hamburg in 1857. As a child, he helped his father with his struggling migrant ticketing business, which he took over at the age of 17 after his father's death. He allied with the Carr Line to begin sending passengers to the New World. As emigration from Germany and Great Britain slowed, it grew dramatically from Russia. Czar Alexander III rejected the liberalism of his assassinated father, and began to harass all of the empire's minorities, particularly its Jews. The pogroms that began in 1881 were "ferocious and terrifying." America was the preferred destination, and Ballin would figure out how to transport Russia's Jews to the New World. In America, a successful Wall Street banker, Jakob Schiff, was committed to Judaism and the plight of those in Russia. He organized the city's charities and contributed his wealth to pave the way in America for the millions who would need help assimilating. Meanwhile, the Hamburg-American Line (HAPAG) was in need of  a rejuvenation and it turned to the upstart Jewish entrepreneur. "As the new manager of HAPAG's passenger division, the young Albert Ballin had engineered an improbable backdoor takeover of one of Hamburg's most prestigious companies." He upgraded the fleet and soon Hamburg was flooded with thousands of impoverished Jews seeking to escape. A cholera epidemic caused Ballin to alter his business model. He partnered with North German Lloyd (NDL) in Bremen, and assumed responsibility for processing immigrants at the border with Russia and quarantining them from the general Hamburg population. However, the increasing tides of immigration were stoking nativist policies in America.

                    Boston Brahmin Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge began the fight to bar entry to the US. The Immigration Restriction League was founded in Boston and targeted Jews and Italians. Congress passed a literacy test bill, but Grover Cleveland vetoed it. In New York, Schiff worked tirelessly to bridge the gap between Midtown's German Jews and the Russians on the Lower East Side. He coerced, organized and managed a massive volume of charitable giving. In 1903, Congress passed, and Teddy Roosevelt signed, the Anarchist Exclusion Act. At the same time, JP Morgan began to think about arranging for control of the North Atlantic's shipping lines. He put together a deal whereby he purchased the White Star Line from its English owner, and made an affiliation deal with Ballin. Both entities would ratchet up the volume of immigration.

                    The changing politics of Russia also increased the number of refugees seeking to depart Russia. The 1903 Kishinev pogrom ramped up demand, as did the Russo-Japanese War. Russia blamed its failure at war on the Jews, thus accelerating their departure. More and more of the empire's Jews poured into America, where nativist sentiment was becoming mainstream. An even greater threat to the transatlantic trade was the possibility of war in Europe. Ballin continued to build ships for the trade, ironically launching the world's largest passenger ship in June, 1914. War ended the migration from Europe, left over half a million Jews in "refugee limbo,"destroyed HAPAG and eventually, Albert Ballin.  Ballin committed suicide the day the Kaiser abdicated. Jacob Schiff died in 1920 and did not live to see the  law strictly limiting immigration to Northern Europeans.  This is an interesting and compelling story, but one that doesn't seem to merit 325 pages. It felt like the telling of a much broader story, with a lot of background on peripheral themes added in order to lengthen the story.

Edge of the Grave, Morrison - B+

                     This superb novel is the first of two featuring Jimmy Dreghorn, a detective on the Glasgow PD in the early 1930's. It provides a deep and insightful look into a city torn by religious rivalries, haunted by poverty, and struggling from the consequences of the Depression. Jimmy is asked to take over the case of a murdered bon vivant, brother-in-law to the man who was Jimmy's captain on the Western Front for the entirety of their four years in the trenches. The plot is quite complex involves high-level corruption in the Corporation, the name of the informal powers that be who run the city. There is gang violence, mostly along religious lines and in the pursuit of illegalities and ill gotten gains. The murderer and blackmailer turns out to be someone Jimmy knows very well.

The Plinko Bounce, Clark - B

                      Andy Hughes has used his William and Mary law degree for seventeen years as a public defender in southern Virginia. He's tired, fed up with the miscreants he's been defending and in need of a break. He resigns, but agrees to finish a murder case he's been assigned. Because of a mistake in the reading of the Miranda warning to his client, he has the confession bounced. He knows his client is guilty but has to do his job and provide the best defense he can. At trial, Andy misdirects the jury toward the adultery of the decedent's husband and his meth-addicted murdering client goes free. When the client threatens Andy's family, he has to solve matters extrajudicially.

Dances With Wolves, Blake - A*

                     In the spring of 1863, Lt. John Dunbar's act of bravery so impresses his commanding officer that he is offered whatever assignment he desires.  He asks to be sent to the western frontier. Within a month, he is on his way to re-supply Ft. Sedgewick on the plains east of the Rockies in what will someday be Colorado. Upon his arrival, he finds the garrison gone. He decides to settle in, and realizes there is a Comanche camp a handful of miles to the west. He sees Kicking Bird, and after a few tentative sightings, they slowly build up a friendship, and learn to communicate by sign language. The Comanche are waiting for the buffalo and when they arrive, Dunbar joins in the hunt. He kills a buffalo, participates in the celebration and begins to feel a kinship with the Indians that he never felt in the army. As the summer passes, he spends more and more time with the Comanche and only occasionally returns to Sedgewick. Because the Indians had seen him with a wolf that followed him around the army post, they bestow on him the Comanche name Dances With Wolves. They also have Stands With A Fist, a white woman they had saved from a Pawnee raiding party when she was seven, act as an interpreter for him. He learns the Comanche language, participates in the scouting and hunting with the warriors, and slowly falls in love with Stands With A Fist. He offers to join a raiding party going to Pawnee land, but his request is denied. While the party is away, the Comanche learn that a raiding party is heading toward them. With the best warriors away, this is a very troublesome turn of events. Dances With Wolves returns to Sedgewick to recover a buried cache of rifles. He leads the defense of the village, and is heralded as a hero by all. Upon return of the war party, Kicking Bird consents to the marriage of Dances With Wolves and Standing with A Fist. On the day the Comanche were heading south for a winter camp, Dances With Wolves goes to Sedgewick to retrieve his journal and erase all evidence of John Dunbar. The fort is swarming with soldiers, his horse is shot out from under him, and he is in jail before he knows it.  The next day, the commanding officer sends him east in chains. By noon, he is rescued and three soldiers are dead.  He returns home to winter camp. The next summer is the finest the Comanche would experience. But they know that storms from the east are headed their way. A truly great novel.

The Holy Road, Blake - B+

                     Years later, Dances With Wolves, Stands With A Fist, and their children are living happily with the same band of Comanche, led by Wind In His Hair and Kicking Bird. Although all is well, they are constantly hearing from the tribes to their north that the white man is coming, killing buffalo, and laying tracks for a road that will carry an armored car.  Dances With Wolves learns from the Kiowa that the whites are offering them war or a reservation. The Comanche conclude that they must resist. Within days, Wind In His Hair leads a war party east to kill white men, Dances With Wolves rides west to hunt, and Kicking Bird rides north to seek a meeting with the white men. While Kicking Bird is in camp with the Kiowa, a white agent, a Quaker named Lawrie Tatum, arrives alone and expresses his desire to pursue peace. Kicking Bird and the Kiowa chief engage with the Quaker agent. The village that all of the men assume safe, is not. An undisciplined group of murderous civilian rangers fall on the Comanche camp one morning and murder more than half. The survivors, under the leadership of the young, Smiles A Lot, quickly move west away from the white men and toward Kiowa country. The white men rode east with a captive white woman and her daughter. They are proud to have rescued Christine Gunther after all these years. Stands With A fist is terrified that she would never see her husband or oldest children again.  Dances With Wolves joins in an attack on a wagon train and steals the clothing of a white man. He travels extensively before he finds and rescues his wife and daughter. They return to a diminished village, one suffering endless battle losses, including Wind In His Hair, and slowly starving as the buffalo is fading from the scene.  The end is at hand for all of the plains Indians.

                  Obviously, these two books have impressed me. I cannot think of a historical novel within recent memory that so aptly tells a story with so much insight  as well as these do. The reader is totally immersed in the world of the Comanche. Simply superb.

Becoming Irish American: The Making and Remaking of a People from Roanoke to JFK, Meagher - B

                    Ireland in the first millennium of the Christian era was Celtic, rural and Catholic. The Normans came to southeastern Ireland from England in the late 12th century, and revolutionized and reorganized all aspects of Irish society. Over time, they settled into a rapprochement with the Celts. In the 15th century, Tudor England sought to assert control over Ireland. England's victories in the north led to the introduction of Scottish Protestant settlers. A century later when the Civil War spread to Ireland, Cromwell reallocated most of the land in the country to the English Protestants. By 1770, Catholics owned only 5% of Ireland's land. The English Anglican elites diminished not only the Catholics, but also the Ulster Presbyterians who in the 18th century began to flee to America. By the time of the American Revolution, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 had left Ireland for the new world. The vast majority were Protestants, and they settled throughout Appalachia. They supported independence and afterwards leaned toward the Democratic-Republican party. Initially non-sectarian, the Ulster Irish began to resent the newcomer Irish Catholics in the beginning of the 19th century.

                   The Napoleonic Wars had seen England rely heavily on Irish exports, thus bringing prosperity, and a significant population increase to the island. After 1815, that boom ended. In the thirty years preceding the famine, almost a million left Ireland for North America. "As the huge Protestant Irish immigration seemed to disappear into thin air, Irish Catholics, were growing rapidly and becoming more noticeable." The newcomers to America were met with increasing nativist opposition and violence. A million and a half Irish immigrants came to the US in the decade after the famine began in 1845. They were impoverished laborers. The 1860 census showed only 7% of Irish immigrants had white collar jobs. They stayed in the big cities of the east, because they could not afford to travel to the midwest and beyond. They struggled because of their "simple lack of money, craft skills, or even familiarity with a modern commercial society." The Irish faced the fierce hostility of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB ie., the Know Nothings). Because the Protestant hierarchy championed abolitionism and opposed the Irish, the Irish wound up supporting the Democrats and slavery. Indeed the antagonism of the abolitionists and Protestant establishment assured that virtually no Irishman outside of Illinois voted for Lincoln. They worried that the Republicans wanted to free the slaves and impoverish and disenfranchise them. The Irish fought bravely for the US, and after the war, they memorialized their commitment to the union to adhere to the American mainstream.  Nonetheless, they still faced anti-Irish racism on every front.   

                The Irish continued to arrive in America. In the half century after 1880, 1.7 million more came. They joined the burgeoning second generation Irish who were making substantial economic progress. By 1900, a quarter of them had white collar jobs. A third of the second generation women were schoolteachers. Nonetheless, the Irish seldom owned businesses or rose to upper management. "Irish American Catholics had significant advantages over other groups, being white and Christian, of course, but the Protestant establishment did set an upper limit to the Irish rise that would frustrate the most ambitious among them through much of the twentieth century." As they could not be insiders, they became the leaders of those looking in. They dominated big city politics and the labor unions. They adjusted to the influx of central Europeans, Italians and Jews by bringing them into the urban Progressive movement of the Democratic Party. The party rose in stature, began to put more and more men in Congress, and elected a president in 1912. But, pushing against liberalism in the public arena was, of course, the Catholic Church, which preferred that the Catholics remain separate. The Knights of Columbus, a pan-ethnic religious group, fostered a vision of a Catholic world as an alternative to Protestant America. The 1920's saw a "rebirth of religious and ethnic nativism." The Ku Klux Klan exploded in popularity, and a new immigration law enshrined America as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation.  The divisions in America were embodied in the 1928 presidential election, which pitted Catholics v. Protestants, cities v. the countryside, immigrant v. native, and wets v. drys. 

                   The Depression hurt all, particularly the urban working classes. However, the circumstances of the Irish improved throughout the 1930's thanks to the New Deal and the renaissance of the labor movement.  Irish politicians grew in numbers and influence. There was, however, conflict between the inherently conservative Catholic churchmen, and the elites in Roosevelt's administration. Irish Catholics supported the war and a higher percentage of the Irish population served than any other ethnic group.  Pius XII's obsession with communism permeated the church after the war. "Third generation Irish Joe McCarthy" fanned the red scare from the Senate. Another conservative Irish Catholic, William Buckley, battled the liberal elites. During the postwar years,  the Irish focused on riding "the postwar prosperity economic boom that the war had prompted to college educations, new and better jobs, and homes in rapidly growing suburbs." But they were still not assimilated. A writer observed that for the Protestants "it was their county, handed down to them by the Pilgrims." Throughout the 40's, 50's and 60's, Irish Americans had larger families than other ethnic groups, and were more religious than they had ever been.  The election of one of their own to the presidency sealed their acceptance as part of the American establishment. They no longer faced structural prejudices. The Vatican Council took some of the edge off Catholic solidarity and encouraged reconciliation with all faiths.  Increasingly conservative, the Irish have drifted away from the Democratic Party and attend church less frequently than their ancestors.  They marry non-Irish and non-Catholics more and more. Fully assimilated, the Irish Catholics are fully American.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

The Queen's Men, Clements - B

                       The second in the series is set in 1587, five years after the debut of Walsingham and Dee in their efforts to protect England and Queen Bess. An attempt is made on the Queen's life by a band of Dutchmen hiding out around London. Walsingham pursues them while Dee is trying to create an English iteration of Greek Fire. The assassins steal the Greek Fire and almost ambush the Queen on her birthday, but, of course, fail. The tensions between Spain and England and all the maneuvering between the two countries are the highlights of the series, which does a superb job of spreading light on the topic.

The Yellow Birds, Powers - B

                      The author is a combat veteran infantryman who was in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. The focus of the novel is 'Murph,' an eighteen year old who seems lost at sea thoughout the whole process. The narrator tells Murph's mom that he'll take care of him and bring him back. His company's sergeant overhears the promise, and decks the narrator for his foolishness. Murph cannot handle the pressure and fails to survive the tour. Survivor's guilt is a theme and, more importantly, despair overrides  the entire telling of their training and combat experience.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bird and Sherwin - B+, Inc.

                   "Oppenheimer gave us atomic fire. But then, when he tried to control it, when he sought to make us aware of it's terrible dangers, the powers-that-be, like Zeus, rose up in anger to punish him." This superb two decade old biography of the Father of the Atomic bomb won the Pulitzer Prize.  

                   He was born in 1904 to a family of German immigrants striving to be American. Ethnically and culturally Jewish, they sought a secular humanistic identity. He was clearly gifted and interested in books and science, with de minimus social involvement with boys his own age. He received a progressive education at the Ethical Culture School and attended Harvard in 1922. He graduated summa cum laude in chemistry. when he went to Cambridge, he was so disappointed in experimental physics that he considered suicide. After he snapped out of it, he turned to theoretical physics. When invited to study at Georgia Augusta University in Gottingen, Germany where the foundation of "post-Newtonian physics" was being laid, he readily accepted. He fit in, loved it, thrived, and received his doctorate after nine months. Upon his return to America, he took up teaching positions at Berkeley, where he quickly established it as the place to be in the world of theoretical physics. One of the things that made Oppie intriguing to students, friends and colleagues was the breadth of his interests. Beyond physics, he could discuss the latest in French poetry, was thoroughly knowledgeable about Sanskrit, and familiar with a great many topics in between. He spoke multiple languages fluently, was wealthy and generous, charming and handsome.  

              In 1936, he fell in love with 22 year old Jean Tatlock, a brilliant, attractive med student, who was also a dues paying member of the Communist Party. They would remain friends and occasional lovers until her death in 1944. He joined a teacher's union, befriended a professor who also was a communist, and supported the Republican side in Spain's civil war. Oppenheimer contributed to the Republicans, and the man who handled his gifts was a communist.  He joined a number of organizations that were later characterized as communist fronts. Frank, his younger brother, married a firebrand member of the CP and joined up himself.  Oppenheimer opposed his brothers involvement and swore that he never was a communist. "The FBI would never resolve the question of whether Robert was a CP member - which is to say there was scant evidence he was." Nonetheless, they had a 7,000 page file on him.  In 1940, he married Kitty Harrison, a woman whose late husband died a communist hero in Spain, and she also was a former member of the CP.

                 When America entered the war and the administration began examining the possibility of a uranium bomb, it was evident to many that Oppie's brilliance would be needed.  In May of 1942, he was appointed to head fast neutron research at Berkeley.  Many thought he should supervise the entire project, but the Army would not issue him a security clearance. General Leslie Groves, the man in charge of the Manhattan Project, met with Oppenheimer in the fall.  Groves wanted him as director and brought him on board. 

                 Having read Richard Rhodes' book on the Manhattan Project and finding myself worn down by the incredible detail of these authors, I'm moving on to his post-war problems.

                 Oppenheimer was a national hero, feted on the covers of Time and Life and hailed as the father of the atomic bomb. He was hopeful that the UN could control the technology and proscribe an arms race. He took up the position of director of the Institute For Advanced Studies at Princeton. He held the position until 1966. He joined the Atomic Energy Commission when it was created in 1947 and advocated for arms control. He opposed the development of the H-bomb and he left the commission when his term expired . He was an exponent of disarmament, wished that the US and the USSR could de-escalate, and preached openness and candor about our nuclear weapon programs. His opposition to the H-bomb attracted the enmity of many in the establishment. 

                "By the autumn of 1953, Washington was a city in the grip of a witch-hunt."Oppenheimer had been under the scrutiny of the FBI for over a decade. They had illegally wiretapped him as early as his time in Berkeley and continued through his residency in Princeton. An important member of the AEC, who held a grudge against Oppenheimer, suspended his security clearance when he was again accused of being a communist.  Ike ordered an inquiry, even though he realized the charges might be "scurrilous." The AEC went after Oppenheimer with a vengeance, although there was absolutely nothing new in the latest FBI report. Indeed, the only new item the AEC articulated was Oppenheimer's opposition to the H-bomb. The hearing, a full-blown kangaroo court, took place in the spring of 1954. Many scientists and military men testified to his fitness and loyalty, but Edmund Teller, the father of the H-bomb stated that he did not trust Oppenheimer. The findings upheld the revocation of his clearance because he was a security risk.  

               He returned to Princeton, where his phone continued to be tapped, and six full time FBI men were assigned to surveil him. "Many Americans began to regard Oppenheimer as a scientist-martyr, a victim of the era's McCarthyite excesses." His management of the Institute was a resounding success, and although he refrained from discussing strategic issues, he remained the darling of the world's intellectual elites. He soon was, once again, an international celebrity. When JFK became president, Robert was invited to a gala at the White House. Kennedy decided to give him the Fermi medal, an honorific that came with an attached tax-free $50,000 grant. It was a public rehabilitation. Kennedy, while a senator, had ended the public career of the AEC executive who had gone after Oppenheimer.  On December 2, 1963, President Johnson, with Jackie Kennedy in attendance, gave Oppenheimer the medal. A few years later,  he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat and died at sixty-two in early 1967.  

Murder On Brittany Shores, Bannalec - B+

                    Inspector Dupin's coffee is disturbed one morning with the news that there are three bodies on a small uninhabited island, part of a fishing/sailing/diving mecca on a small archipelago off the Breton coast. He and his team set off by boat and helicopter. To all appearances, three men were caught in a storm and drowned. About the time Dupin learns that they were drugged, thus making this a case of pre-meditated, cold blooded murder, he learns that two of the men are wealthy friends of his insufferable boss. Each man had innumerable enemies and were in the same bar the night they died. They could have been poisoned by dozens of folks. In the end, the motive was revenge, and the killer found. This is the second in the series, and so far both books excel at describing Brittany, and making it seem to be an almost magical locale. Superb and enchanting stories.

Beirut Station, Vidich - B+

                       This is the sixth novel by the former CIA agent, and perhaps the best of his so far.  All of the books are set in the past, and this one is in Lebanon in 2006 just before Condi Rice's visit to broker a peace between Israel and Hezbollah. Analise is a Lebanese-American CIA operative working undercover as a UN refugee counselor. Her task is to befriend a young boy who she tutors in order to track the activities of the boy's grandfather, Quassem. The grandfather is a highly placed Hezbollah fighter who has the blood of a great many Jews on his hands, and both the CIA and the Mossad are working to ambush him. He is extremely careful, and the focus of those in  pursuit is to find the correct place to set an IED to end Quassem's career. This story expertly outlines the tensions of Analise's position: she is a woman in a man's world, she is part of a culture in which women are less than equal, she is without diplomatic cover and on her own if things go south, and she is constantly juggling her story to avoid the inquiring minds around her. Indeed, this may be one of the best I've ever read exploring an individual's inner tensions. The superb plan is never implemented because Analise finds herself in a position to eliminate Quassem before he kills her. Although the blast puts her in the hospital, she does get her man. She then turns to the fact that she believes the Mossad killed her boss, the station chief in Beirut. That job proves to be a bit more complex.

Song of the Lion, Hillerman - B

                      Bernie Manuelito is at Shiprock HS for an important basketball game when she hears an explosion outside. One is dead. The car that the bomb was in is owned by a famous Navajo lawyer who is the mediator for the important matter of a possible tribal/outside developer project on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Emotions are running high and Jim Chee is assigned to protect the mediator throughout the public hearing process. What is the connection between the mediator, the dead man, and an attempt to injure the mediator's son. These are the challenges the police face. Manuelito solicits help from retired Lt. Leaphorn. I fear that the author cannot touch her late Dad. 

Resurrection Walk, Connelly - B+

                      A resurrection walk is when a prisoner is freed after it's determined he/she did not commit the crime. It's a defense lawyer's dream and the focus of this,  the sixth Lincoln Lawyer novel featuring Harry's half-brother Mickey Haller. Harry is working for Mickey as a driver and an investigator on possible freedom initiative cases. They surface one where a woman was sent to jail for shooting her ex, a sheriff's department deputy. It turns out that the cop was crooked, the fix was in with the prosecuting DA, and the defense lawyer was threatened with his life if he didn't go along. Clearly, there was a miscarriage of justice. However, proving that in the face of the government's intransigence, obstruction and narrow minds proves to be a challenge. Kudos to the author who never misses a beat. 

The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working Class Revolution, Kuhn - B+

                      "May 1970 was a tumultuous month in a tumultuous era. After Cambodia and Kent State, the anti-war movement revived and radicalized..." This is the story of "a city,  a mayor, a president's people, and an era when the nation diverged - living different cultures, different wars, different economies, until the American experience became so fragmented that the singular became an anachronism."

                      The NYPD and student protestors had clashed in 1968 at Grand Central Terminal and Columbia University.  There was an inherent tension between the blue collar cops, most from conservative Catholic backgrounds, and the upper middle class students. It was Brooklyn v. Scarsdale. The 1960's were a trying time in NY as the city lost hundreds of thousands of  manufacturing jobs and faced a massive middle class flight to the suburbs. Indeed, nationally there was a concern about the middle class feeling overwhelmed and unappreciated. The nascent cultural dichotomy was exacerbated by the war. The majority of those who fought, and those who died, were poor or middle class, while the sons of the elite received college deferments.  And the man that the average New Yorker felt epitomized those elites the most was the mayor, John Lindsay. The city's trade unions by the 1960's were like medieval guilds with limited access because the unions reserved most spots for the families of its members. The Nixon administration targeted construction as an industry that needed to be opened up to minorities. The trades knew that between the government and the soon to be finished construction of the WTC, their world would be changing for the worse. 

                  When Nixon invaded Cambodia in May, all hell broke loose in America. ROTC buildings around the country were bombed and half of the colleges closed. On the 4th, four students were killed by the National Guard at Kent State. Anti-war protesters marched all around Manhattan, particularly at City Hall and Wall Street. The mayor showed his sympathy by lowering the flag at City Hall, and supporting  the demonstrators.  On the 7th, workers scuffled with students downtown. Word on the street was that they were gonna bust heads the next day. A little before noon on the next day at Federal Plaza, a group of 400 workers approached a demonstration, and were kept away by a line of police. As the students chanted "fuck you and Nixon too," the police were overwhelmed as hardhats carrying an American flag crashed into the protestors. The hardhats were upset by the disrespect for the flag that many of them had fought for. A melee ensued with hardhats beating up protestors as the police stood by. The riot spread north and east as hardhats continued to extract their revenge on the "commies." They headed north to City Hall and chanted for the flag to be raised from half-staff. Feeling threatened, the deputy mayor raised the flag, and the workers sang the national anthem and 'God Bless America.' The mayhem moved across the park to Pace College, where students were taunting the hardhats. The rioters beat longhairs in front of the school, eventually broke down the doors and entered the building, where they destroyed property before the police removed them. When a different Lindsay deputy lowered the flag back to half-mast, the crowd surged back to City Hall. The flag went back up. By mid-afternoon, the unrest dissipated and the riot was over.

                 Over a hundred protestors were injured, half a dozen seriously. The mayor promised repercussions for the police inaction, but let the matter go. The FBI did not investigate, and the ACLU class action against the city in federal court failed. Twelve days later on the 20th, 150,000 flag waving union members rallied at City Hall. The press called it Worker's Woodstock and the White House noticed. These were Nixon people. Within a week, Nixon hosted two dozen labor leaders at the WH. A massive Honor America Day highlighted July 4th with over 250,000 on the Mall in Washington. The Silent Majority was adding a new constituency: the blue collar Democrat. 

               "Most Americans soured on the war but not their nation or its flag. They could not conceive of  detaching those colors from the soldiers who died beneath the nation's banner. " Two years later, Nixon won the votes of 60% of white union members. "Between JFK and McGovern, nearly all of Nixon's electoral gains were with blue-collar whites." They were now Republicans. Excellent book and another great recommendation from my brother, Bill.

The Lie Maker, Barclay - B

                      The lies that are made are by Jack Givens, an out of work writer happy to be hired by the Witness Protection Program to spin out backgrounds for people going into hiding. He thinks it only right that he tell his employer that his dad had been put in witsec about thirty years ago. His boss tells him that his dad is on the run,  likely because bad guys are after him, and the government needs to get him back into a safe place. The coincidences pile up because the woman who hired him is after his dad too. This is a pretty good tale spun by one of the authors who cranks out thrillers year after year. 

Drowning, Newman - B

                      This is a classic page turner, one of those novels that you can't put down and rush ahead breathlessly. Will, a designer in the oil platform business, is on a plane that ditches in the waters between Molakai and Maui minutes after taking off. The Airbus stays afloat for quite some time and most get into the water. Will, his ten year old daughter, and about a dozen stay on the plane as fire driven by the fuel oil consumes virtually everyone who made it off. He insists on the two open doors being closed because of the possibility of the fire reaching the interior of the plane. All is well and good until the plane sinks to 175 feet and nestles to a stop. The ensuing rescue is totally nerve wracking and exhilarating.

Chenneville, Jiles - A*

                    In the fall of 1865, Lt. John Chenneville comes to in an army hospital in Virginia, where he has been in a coma for seven months. He ha suffered a head injury during an explosion outside of Petersburg. He slowly begins the process of remembering who he is, and how to live.  He returns home to his family's large farm north of St. Louis and is told that his sister and her family were murdered in the spring, during a troubled time in the south of the state. His sister had married a paroled Confederate officer, whose presence in town had offended a Union man. John will pursue the killer, but first must recover his mental acuity, ride a horse again, and shoot a rifle.  He spends a year recovering and putting the farm back together. In November of the following year, he rides south. The only lead he has is a name - Dodd, who has left Missouri and headed to Texas when he hears someone was looking for him and. Chenneville rides into Indian Territory, loses his horse in a snowstorm and walks to a Western Union station where he receives help. He continues and picks up occasional bits of information about Dodd. A cautious man by nature and now out looking for revenge, he steers clear of company and conversation as much as he can. He crosses the Red River into Texas and learns he s two days behind Dodd, who had killed again.  He rides deeper into Texas and is surprised to learn that federal marshals are looking for him, thinking he, and not Dodd, killed the Western Union telegrapher. Chenneville is laid up in Marshall with a fever and then heads to Galveston, where he hopes to find Dodd before he can get on a boat and disappear. On the way to Galveston, he catches up with the outfit Dodd was in during the war and learns he's in San Antonio.  On the way to San Antonio, Chenneville meets up with the Marshall who is pursuing him.

Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler's Putsch, And Democracy In Crisis, Ullrich - B

                      Nineteen twenty three was postwar Germany's annus horribilis, the year in which just about everything that could go wrong did. Yet somehow the fledgling democracy survived.

                     "On January 11, French and Belgian troops marched into the industrial Ruhr Valley," because  the Germans weren't keeping up with the reparations owed the Allies. The occupation met with universal outrage. Successful German passive resistance led to the arrest of business leaders, including the chief executives of Thyssen and Krupp. In March, thirteen Krupp employees were killed by French soldiers. Soon, German acts of sabotage thwarted shipments to France. The Allies, the German government, management and labor continued to posture and negotiate into the summer, at which point the government's cost of supporting the people of the Ruhr Valley began to accelerate inflation. The government fell in August. Currency devaluation and inflation meant that everything cost a million marks or more. By the middle of 1923, the mark slid from 5000 to the dollar at the beginning of the year to over a million. By November, the exchange rate was 830 billion marks to a dollar. The continuing loss of value was devastating at all levels of society. A lost war followed by revolution and national poverty led many to lose faith in the country. 

                    Gustav Stresemann became Chancellor and Foreign Minister on August 13th. He renounced passive resistance, implemented currency reform, and achieved agreement with the Allies to revisit Germany's ability to pay reparations. When the communists joined in coalition governments in Saxony and Thuringia, the Reichswehr threatened to intervene because of widespread fear of revolution.  The potential for a communist uprising faded when the Comintern withdrew its support. The right, particularly in Bavaria,  continued to call for the end of the republic and the enthronement of a Bismarck-like messiah. The Munich-based Nazis offered up their chairman, Adolf Hitler, as the man who could save Germany. On Nov. 8th at the Burgerbraukeller, which was packed with the political leaders of the community, Hitler fired a shot into the ceiling and declared "the revolution has come..." Hitler and Ludendorf spoke, the crowd sang the national anthem and the Nazi's arrested all Bavarian office holders present at the hall. The Reichswehr and the local police fired on Nazi marchers the following day and ended the putsch. Hitler was arrested two days later. Dreams of a right wing takeover faded.

                  The issuance of new Rentenmarks in November stabilized prices, and began a slow return to some sense of financial normalcy. In the Ruhr, an agreement was reached to turn over 18% of all coal produced to the French. At the end of November, the government fell and Wilhelm Marx formed a new cabinet. Armed with temporary emergency powers, the new government stabilized the country by increasing taxes, reducing the number of civil servants, and  increasing the length of the workday for hourly employees. Consumer goods appeared in the Christmas markets; the worst seemed to be over.

                  In contrast to the major socio-economic problems the country faced, it prospered culturally, as the world of Weimar saw a growing, sophisticated film industry flourish. In the theater world, Berlin eclipsed Paris and London with forty-nine theaters, half of which seated over a thousand. Architecturally, the Bauhaus movement attracted world-wide acclaim.  

                 The beginning of the new year brought cautious optimism to Germany. The Allies, led by the US, realized that a Germany in chaos was in no one's interest, and worked to resolve the debt problems. The US's Dawes Plan established more reasonable terms for the Germany, leading the way to American investment in the country. The French reluctantly agreed to leave the Ruhr in a year. "The postwar era was over, and the path had been cleared for Germany to rejoin the international community as an equal member." The next five years in Germany were prosperous and successful, but they did not last. Reliance on American finance became an anchor after Wall Street crashed in 1929. Politically, the country could not reach consensus and struggled, with the extremists on the right and left always in counterpoint. In the end, Germany succumbed to Hitler because there was not enough belief in or support for democracy.                 

The Bitter Past, Borgos - B+

                      This novel is a well-done mystery/thriller set in northern Nevada in one of the least populated counties in the US. Just west of Lincoln County was the test range for the US nuclear bomb program in the 1950's. A great many people died as a direct result of the tests and as well as many over the passing decades because of their exposure to carcinogens. A specific test in 1957 is part of the background of our story. The county sheriff, Porter Beck, is a native of the area, a combat vet from Iraq, and who also spent five years in the Army's counter intelligence operation in Moscow. The murder of an elderly FBI retiree leads to an investigation by Beck and a high level female agent from DC. Two FSB agents are in the US tracking down elderly Nevadans who may have been a double agents in the fifties. It's fast paced, fun and has a plot line that gets your attention ( if you can excuse some over the twists and turns at the end).

Reykjavik, Jonason & Jakobsdottir - B

                      This is a mystery that feels a bit contrived, perhaps how a novel written by AI would feel. Likely, it's just the translation. Lara, a fifteen year old girl working as a maid, disappears from an island in Rekjavik harbor and is never found. The investigating officer is told by a superior to let the matter drop after he questions some well connected professionals who may have been involved. Thirty years later, a reporter is looking into the story and is told by a caller that she'll tell him know where Lara is buried. He is soon pushed in front of a bus, and his sister takes up the cause. The sister figures out who the mystery caller is, solves the murder, and writes the article in her and her brother's name.

The Secret, Child & Child, B

                     This novel is one of the handful that flashes back to Jack's career in the Military Police. He's called onto a task force set up in DC that is trying to find out why scientists who worked on a project in India in 1969 keep getting killed. It turns out that the Army/CIA project caused the deaths of over a thousand and the repercussions still reverberate 23 years later. Reacher is of course Reacher: tough, charming, and brilliant. This is the fourth collaboration between the Child brothers, and Lee's finale.  My guess is that the series survives in his brother's hand, but it appears to me as if it won't be a highlight of my Octobers going forward.

France On Trial: The Case of Marshall Petain, Jackson - B

                      During his wartime speeches, de Gaulle referred to Petain as 'le Pere la Defaite' - Father of Defeat. A trial was promised, and it ran in Paris from July 23 to August 15, 1945.  Petain was tried for treason, described in the French penal Code as 'collusion with the enemy.'  A contemporary observer wrote - " Petain will remain a tragic figure, caught between treason and sacrifice...A trial like this one is never over and will never end."

                     Because of his heroic service in WWI, the 84 year old Marshal was "viewed as a savior" when he took over the Vichy regime in 1940. Over the course of the four years he was head of state, he was continually undermined by the Germans. Even after his position was emasculated, he opted to stay on. He was essentially under house arrest for the last months before the Germans took him east in August, 1944. In April of the following year, the government announced it would begin an in absentia trial of Petain. Two days later, he "presented himself at the Franco-Swiss border so that he could answer to the French people in person." During the interrogation phase prior to the trial, it became obvious to his lawyers that the 89 year old, although a remarkable physical specimen, was approaching senility. 

                      His trial was conducted by 3 judges before 24 jurors. Petain read a statement into the record defending his actions as being in the best interest of saving France for the future. He had very little to say thereafter. The case began with the events before and after June 12, 1940 when Petain, a member of theFrench  government, stated they should accept an armistice.  Were the Marshal's actions treasonous? After a week, it was evident that the prosecution had not proved that Petain had plotted a government takeover. He advocated for peace and accepted his new role.  The defense called Maxime Weygand, the general who was made the chief of staff just before the armistice. He castigated the government for placing him and Petain in untenable positions. The politicians had mismanaged the war,  put them on the spot, and were now accusing them of treason.  Pierre Laval, former premier, the number two throughout Vichy's course and generally considered the man behind the regime's excesses took the stand. Over two days, his essential message was that Petain approved of, and knew of, Laval's actions. Each side made lengthy closing arguments. The jurors voted for treason, but requested that the automatic death penalty not be carried out. DeGaulle immediately commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

                      He was imprisoned in a two room cell on a tiny island 20 miles off the Brittany coast. By 1949, his memory was fleeting at best. He died in 1951 and was buried on the island. Throughout the country, a Petainist movement garnered support. When the 50th anniversary of Verdun approached, there was movement toward allowing the remains of 'The Hero of Verdun' to be laid to rest with his colleagues. DeGaulle declined to approve it. Decades later, in the 1990's, Jacques Chirac apologized for France's role in the deportation of its Jews, thus changing the post-war focus from the fighters to the victims. Nonetheless, the polls showed that 60% of the populace supported the armistice, and only 20% disapproved of Petain. Today, the schools from which Jewish children were deported have plaques saying they were "innocent victims of Nazi barbarism and the government of Vichy."  Vichy supporters respond that France's Jews survived at a higher percentage than any other occupied country. As it has been eight decades now, the issue is fading, but as mentioned in the first paragraph:  "this one is never over and will never end."

                      

The Devil's Playground, Russell - B+

                      This fabulous novel is set in 1927 Hollywood, and somewhere in the California desert forty years later. Mary Rourke is a fixer for Carbine Studios and is called to the house of Norma Carlton, the studio's most important actress and star of 'The Devil's Playground.' Norma is dead, and Mary begins the process of cleansing the scene, bribing the cops, and hustling the body away. Having your star kill herself is bad for business. Later, Mary realizes Norma was murdered but now it's too late to call the police. The studio head asks her to look into the mess. The studio returns to finishing 'The Devil's Playground,' an epic horror movie set in medieval France. As Rourke delves into the investigation, her sights set on Norma's co-star, Robert Huston and his wife, Veronica Stratton. They do not appear to live as husband and wife, and may be two runaways from the deep South with a sordid and violent history. People around them seem to keep dying. The final scene of 'The Devil's Playground' is the burning of the city, and it goes terribly awry, killing innocent extras and burning more than planned.  A few weeks later, Veronica Stratton and the rest of the conspirators kill the studio chief, burn all but one copy of the film, and disappear.

                     Four decades later, a film professor drives to the desert because his research leads him to believe that the only surviving copy of the legendary film may be at the studio's long abandoned hotel. He is met by an older woman, still uniquely beautiful, who invites him in and shows him the film. It is the masterpiece it has always been rumored to be.  However, even decades later, it has a sinister outcome.

                     It is difficult to write up a narrative for books that move back and forth to different eras. This book, however, is near perfect with a few plotting flaws at the end, and better than my post implies. I recommend it for the thriller aficionados.

The Exchange, Grisham - C+

                      For my money, the two most memorable characters Grisham has created are Jake Brigance from 'A Time To Kill' and Mitch McDeere from 'The Firm.' This is undoubtedly due to the charismatic renderings in the books, and the charming young actors, McConaughey and Cruise respectively, who portrayed them in the movies. Jake has had three books. This is Mitch's second, and oh what a crushing disappointment. It is to the best of my recollection Grisham's first thriller overseas. By moving the focus to Libya and featuring a kidnapping, none of the author's brilliant plotting and suspense is present. Indeed, we wait and wait for the kidnappers to raise their hands. When they do, they ask for $100M for an associate from Mitch's firm, NY based, and the largest in the world. Mitch and a few others race around the world trying to raise the funds. Unfortunately for the McDeere's, the kidnappers choose Mitch's wife, Abby, as the go-between. The money is raised, the hostage freed, and Mitch so disillusioned by his firm that he quits. I'm not sure it would rate as a thriller. It certainly flops as a legal thriller.

Clarence Darrow: Attorney for The Damned, Farrell - B

                      At the age of thirty-six in 1893, Darrow found himself at the pinnacle of success as the number two lawyer for the Chicago & North Western Railway Company. He was making a good living but felt unfulfilled working for the great businesses of the Gilded Age. His heart was with America's underdogs. When his boss died suddenly in April, he opted to go to work for the mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison. "The great theme of Darrow's life, the long war he fought in his march through courtrooms and cases, was the defense of individual liberty from modernity's relentless, crushing, impersonal forces."

                     He was born in northeast Ohio on April 18, 1857. His father was a brilliant, widely-read man of liberal tendencies who made a  modest living as a furniture maker. The growth of the country during Darrow's boyhood produced "huge extremes of poverty and wealth." From his father, he learned "to question rather than accept."  He spent a year in Ann Arbor at law school, and began clerking in Youngstown, Ohio. He passed the bar, practiced in his hometown of Kinsman and married Jessie Ohl.  In 1887, they moved to Chicago, then described as "a mining camp five stories high." His legendary oratorical skills soon attracted admiration, fans, and clients. His political involvement led to an appointment as the city's special assessment attorney. He started a law practice in the Rookery Building with three former judges. 

                  On the last day of the Columbian Expedition, Patrick Prendergast assassinated Mayor Harrison. Prendergast was convicted and sentenced to death.  Darrow took his case and obtained a retrial. After five hour closing statement regarding the man's insanity, Prendergast was again convicted, and was soon executed. It was his "first big criminal case. And he lost the mad newsboy to the hangman's rope."

                When the Panic of 1893 led to the Pullman Company cutting wages, the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, went on strike.  Violence ensued in  Chicago and Debs was arrested. Darrow became his lawyer. Debs was cited with contempt for failing to follow an injunction prohibiting the strike, convicted, and imprisoned. Additionally, the federal government pursued a criminal case for obstructing the mails. The case was so weak and Darrow's arguments so convincing that the US withdrew the complaint. Debs emerged a hero.

                 Darrow was unique for his times. He did not believe in religion. Indeed, he developed a deep distaste for presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan because of the latter's focus on the scriptures. Of equal importance, he was an inveterate womanizer who preached the gospel of free love. He divorced his wife of seventeen years and carried on endlessly with innumerable younger women.  Politically, he described himself as a "reformer, a Democrat, a philosophical anarchist, a socialist, a populist, or a progressive."

                One of Darrow's great skills was his ability to use his courtroom tactics to play to the press and public opinion. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt intervened on behalf of the United Mine Workers to compel a commission to resolve issues between the strikers and the mine owners. Before a seven man commission in Scranton, Darrow paraded disabled men, children and women to such an extent that there were regular tears in the hearing room. Although the miners did not achieve all of their goals, their success before the commission was considered a major breakthrough for union rights. Darrow was now the country's leading labor lawyer.

               In 1903, he married Ruby Hamerstrom.  Although honoring his marriage vows was not part of the understanding, the marriage was a successful one. His next great battle was in Idaho. "The violent struggle between capital and laboring industrial age America reached a climax out west." From 1906-1913, he spent a considerable amount of time there, and won a number of cases. In Caldwell, Idaho, the former Gov. Steunenberg was blown to smithereens by a miner named Frank Orchard. The Pinkerton's, charged with investigating the murder, intended "to dismember the union..." When Orchard was told he would not be hung, indeed he might even be set free, he implicated the union's management in every crime throughout the west that he could think of. After three leaders of the Western Federation of Miners were kidnapped in Colorado and taken to Idaho, the union retained Darrow. The trial of the union leader Big Bill Haywood, with Orchard was the leading witness, closed with what is considered Darrow's greatest summation before a jury. Not guilty, but many were upset with Darrow as he excused violence when discussing the union's grievances against the owners. He returned to Idaho for a second trial of a union chief in Steunenberg's death. It was the same story from Orchard, and Darrow destroyed his flimsy credibility on cross, but illness precluded him from finishing the trial. He was in LA seeking medical help when the not guilty verdict came in.  "Despite its home court advantage and the star witness, the finest prosecutors and a compliant press, the mine owner's money, the Pinkerton spies, a permissive Supreme Court, and the unconscionable meddling of Theodore Roosevelt, the state had failed to prove that the union killed Frank Steunenberg."

                 On October 1, 1910, the LA Times headquarters  was rocked by an explosion that destroyed the building and killed twenty-one. The following spring, James and John McNamara were arrested, and their union hired Darrow, who dissolved his law firm and moved to California. He put together a defense team, but acknowledged that the McNamara's were "as guilty as hell." Darrow saved their lives by having them take a plea deal, but he incurred the wrath of organized labor and was indicted for attempting to bribe the jury.  The prosecution presented a weak case and Darrow was acquitted. The LA prosecutor had state-wide political aspirations and tried Darrow for the bribery of a different juror. His lawyer became ill during the trial and Darrow defended himself. The trial ended in a hung jury, after which the prosecutor agreed to drop the matter if Darrow promised to not practice law again in California. "Darrow was fifty-five when the second trial ended, broke and disgraced. But for the rest of his life he would make amends, score his greatest triumphs, and die an American hero." 

                  No longer the darling of the labor movement, he rebuilt his life and legal practice in Chicago. In 1915, when 844 Western Electric workers and their families died when the 'Eastland' capsized in the Chicago River, Darrow represented the chief engineer, and kept him from jail by convincing the judge that the ship itself was unsafe. During WWI, the US passed an Espionage Act and a Sedition Act, both intended and used to crush any dissent about the US's involvement in Europe. Immediately afterwards, the country was wracked by race riots, labor violence, and the Red Scare. When the prosecutions began, Darrow took on many cases some of which he won and some of which he lost. As the war receded, many of those convicted were pardoned. Throughout the Roaring 20's, he represented the gamblers, rum-runners, and corrupt politicians of the era. When asked why,  he said "money." One of his biggest cases was the defense of Fred Lundin, Cook County's Republican boss, force behind the throne of the mayor and fourteen of his colleagues. They had taken Chicago's noted corrupt ways to new heights, but were of course not guilty. 

                "Of the infamous villains whom Darrow defended, none were so patently evil in the eyes of Americans as the teenaged killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb." Privileged, well-educated, Jewish homosexuals, they killed a young boy for the "thrill" of it. He took on the trial because of his opposition to capital punishment and he knew he'd be paid well. Darrow pleaded them guilty and began to present evidence of mitigation hoping to save their lives.  Darrow emphasized the fact that Leopold's nanny sexually abused him, presented exculpatory psychiatric testimony, tried to manipulate the press on the issue of hanging teenagers. In the end, the prosecution insulted the judge, and no minors pleading guilty in Illinois had ever been hung. Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life plus 99 years. 

               In 1925, Tennessee banned the teaching of Darwinism in the public schools. Beliefs other than those propounded in Genesis were criminal. One of the leading lights of the Evangelical movement throughout the Bible Belt was former Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan. He believed in a strict reading of the Bible.  The town of Dayton cooked up the trial to generate tourism, and a local teacher, John Scopes, volunteered to be the guinea pig. When Bryan offered to prosecute, Darrow decided to lead the defense. Dayton now had an international event to occupy its summer. The prosecution confirmed that Scopes had taught in violation of the law. The judge ruled against the defense's request to present expert scientific witnesses. After Darrow was held in contempt, he apologized, the judge forgave him and he called an expert on the Bible - William Jennings Bryan. They battled for two hours, at first calmly but eventually yelling and pointing fingers at each other. Darrow slowly wore Bryan down and got the better of him. Darrow pushed him on how long were the days of creation. When Bryan said they could have been a million years, the crowd gasped. He had conceded the defense's main points. Bryan "agreed that no intelligent person would accept the Bible literally." That Darrow had bested Bryan flashed around the world. William Jennings Bryan died five days later.

            "When he arrived in Tennessee in the summer of 1925, Darrow was a famous man; by the time he left, he was an American folk hero." At the request of the NAACP,  he defended 11 black men in Detroit who had fired on a white crowd trying to stop a black physician from moving into a white neighborhood. The trial led to a hung jury. In the retrial, the prosecution named the one man who had acknowledged firing into the white crowd. Darrow won a not guilty verdict and the publicity propelled the nascent NAACP to the forefront of civil rights organizations. Just before his 70th birthday, he had a heart attack. There were now fewer trials, and more speaking engagements and trips to Europe. He took on a case in Hawaii defending some navy men accused of vigilante atrocities against Hawaiians. He resolved the case with his clients sentenced to an hour in jail. He returned to the mainland, published his memoirs, and did some narrative work for Hollywood. At the age of 75, he took two more cases and saved two youngsters from the gallows. But, he was suffering from arteriosclerosis and it began to affect his brain. He soon needed full time nursing care, could not get out of bed some days, and was down to 90 pounds. He died on March 13, 1938.

                 This has been a superb read, but somehow somewhat wearying. Darrow was clearly a complex human being filled with faults, but someone on the right side of history. This book is a vivid reminder of how trying the industrialization of America was, how violent the conflicts between capital and labor were, and just how biased the institutions of the country were. I was prompted to read the life of William Jennings Bryan earlier this year ( July 11) and now Darrow by virtue of re-watching one of my favorite movies. The 1960 film 'Inherit The Wind' was based on a play produced on Broadway in 1955. The play was not historically accurate, but used events from 30 years earlier to take a swipe at McCarthyism. The Clarence Darrow character was called Henry Drummond and was brilliantly portrayed by Oscar nominated Spencer Tracy. The funny thing about reading this book is that I have seen and heard Spencer Tracy throughout. It's been over 60 years since I first saw the film and needless to say, it had a powerful impact on me.

               

The Lock-Up, Banville - B

                    In 1957 Dublin, Chief Pathologist Quirke concludes that Rosa Jacobs did not commit suicide, but rather was murdered by carbon monoxide piped into her car after she was drugged. Det. Inspector Strafford begins the investigation, with Quirke accompanying him. Rosa was a firebrand doctoral candidate at Trinity writing about the Jewish Diaspora in Ireland and yet, spending time with the Kesslers, rich Germans ensconced in County Wicklow. Both men are suspicious of the Germans who have a business in Israel and seem to have the support of a highly placed bishop, who acknowledges that the church helped them escape Europe after the war. They learn that an Israeli journalist who may have been investigating the Kesslers died in a hit and run accident. Then much closer to home, Rosa's sister, Molly, a London journalist in Dublin for her sister's funeral, is also a hit and run victim. It is, of course, the Nazis. Although the Republic of Ireland was not South America, it did harbor a few of Catholicism's bad guys after WWII.

The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Golden Age of Basketball, Taylor - B+

                      On Nov. 7, 1959, the Boston Garden, seldom if ever sold out for Celtic games, packed in the maximum capacity of 13,909. The reason was that the Philadelphia Warriors and their young rookie, Wilt Chamberlain, were coming to town. He was 3-4 inches taller, and probably 40 pounds heavier than Bill Russell, winner of two college titles, an Olympic gold medal, and two NBA titles in the previous four years. Boston won because Wilt did not have a supporting cast that could match the Celts. 

                      The two men had reached the pinnacle of the basketball world by two very different paths. Chamberlain had been heralded as an extraordinary athlete his entire life. He was courted by every university in the country. He went to KU on a basketball and track scholarship. He toured the world with the Harlem Globetrotters before joining the Warriors. His approach to hoops was one of casual, effortless success. Russell's course was less assured. He didn't play ball until he was in high school. A scout for the University of San Francisco saw him play and spoke to the coach. Bill was working in a shipyard after high school when USF offered him a scholarship. He and his roommate, KC Jones, studied and analyzed the game constantly in an effort to improve themselves. His meteoric rise saw him meet President Eisenhower at the White House before he graduated. Ike asked him to not turn pro immediately so he could play in the fall for the 1956 Olympic team.

                    After their first meeting, Wilt went on to be Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player. "Wilt had taken more shots, scored more points, gotten more rebounds, taken more free throws, and played more minutes  than anyone else in the history of the league." The Warriors met the Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals. The contest was highly anticipated and became the talk of the nation. Because Chamberlain hurt his hand in an on court melee that was par for the course in that era, and because the other four Celtics were better than the other four Warriors, the Celts won in six.

                  Their next head to head series was the conference finals two years later. The 1961-62 season saw Wilt score 100 points against the Knicks in March. Wilt was the best athlete in the league, but Russel knew how to slow him down and kept him below his averages. It went seven, with Boston winning in the last seconds at home. The Warriors moved to San Francisco, and met Boston in the NBA finals in 1964. A new coach had brought down Wilt's scoring, and had melded him together with his teammates for the betterment of the club. One again though, it was the Celtics who prevailed.  

                  In the beginning of the 1964-65 season, Wilt spent a month in the hospital  suffering from pancreatitis, insulted the principal owner, and played with his usual indifference, focused on his stats. Mid-season, the occasionally petulant prima donna was traded to the 76ers. Wilt was rejuvenated and led his hometown club on a winning streak. "Instead of the limelight seeking ball hog some of the 76ers expected, Chamberlain proved to be a true team player." They met the Celtics in the conference finals after an article in SI, authored by Chamberlain, lambasted just about everyone including the Sixer coach. Nonetheless, it came down the last play of game seven when "Havlicek stole the ball" saved Boston's season. A year later, in Auerbach's finale as coach, the Celts breezed past Philadelphia and beat LA in the finals. The next three seasons would see Russell as the player-coach.

              The following year, Chamberlain became a passer and a rebounder scoring one third of his career average. With Wilt surrounded by talent, they won 68 games - the best in the history of the league. The Celtics had won 8 titles in a row, overcoming a Wilt led team six times. Nineteen sixty-seven would be different. Philadelphia won the first three in the conference finals and closed out the Celtics in Boston in game six. Their success was short lived and they lost in 1968 to Boston, who won their tenth title in twelve years.

              When Alex Hannum, one of the only two coaches Wilt ever listened to, left for the ABA, Wilt asked for the job and a raise. His owner told him he was released and could sign with anyone he wished. Chamberlain simply was not worth the aggravation. So in 1968, Wilt joined his third and final NBA team, the Lakers. He and his new coach Butch van Breda Kolff, battled all season. In Boston, Russell signed a new two year contract, but seemed almost indifferent. As the season wore on, the 35 year old Russell seemed exhausted. It showed in the standings, as Boston finished in fourth place in the East. The Lakers, newly cohesive at season's end, finished as the number one seed. The Lakers were favored when they met in the finals. Each team held serve and met in the Forum for game seven. Back and forth it went, with Boston up by one with a minute left. Boston won by two. A very thoughtful observer said that "Russell was always able to make his players an extension of himself, while Chamberlain, for all of his personal dominance, never truly became part of a team."

           Russell drove away from Boston that summer and did not return for 30 years. Boston was a racist city that he never felt comfortable in. His post playing career was not a success. He failed as a coach and as a general manager. The immensely proud and stubborn Bill Russell cried when he came back to Boston to have his number 6 retired. Wilt, who won again in 1972 and retired himself that year appeared at Russell's ceremony in the new Fleet Center. Wilt died six months later. At his funeral service, Russell said, "The fierceness of the competition bonded us for eternity."

           This fabulous book might better be subtitled a primer on the early years of the league. Most of the owners also owned successful hockey teams and bought the fledgling NBA franchises to fill up dead dates in their arenas. Most were tight-fisted nasty men who treated each other and their players with disdain.  There are spectacular chapters on Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, and Red Auerbach. The book was written a while ago, long before Russell died in 2022. The finals MVP trophy has been named for him for quite some time and every player in the league wore a commemorative number 6 for all of the 2022-23 season. Like Jackie Robinson's number 42, it will be permanently retired. Thanks again to my brother for a great recommendation.

Moscow X, McCloskey - B+

                      Moscow X is the name of a unit at Langley whose job it is to initiate non-traditional operations against the Russians. Artemis is in charge. She opens an email from Sia, a London lawyer who happens to be an officer under non official cover (NOC). Sia has been approached by, Anna, a highly placed Russian, whose father is an FSB general and whose husband Vadim is Putin's bagman. Anna knows that Sia's law firm washes money for oligarchs and Anna is trying to recapture funds taken from her father. Anna's dad is on the outs with the Kremlin and is soon under arrest. Because Anna and Vadim own a horse farm, Artemis comes up with a plan to try to compromise them at the Mexican ranch of a foreign national officer (FNO). So Sia and Max, the owner of the ranch, entertain the Russian couple. Anna realizes that she is dealing with professional operatives. Anna is so discouraged by the brutality of her father's treatment that she wants CIA help to embarrass those roughing up her dad. The CIA cooperates, but has plans to fool the intelligence agencies into believing that a number of Putin's cronies are plotting against him. The operation is under way when the FSB comes very close to killing/capturing Sia and Max, who manage to escape. Anna is imprisoned but eventually released, and most importantly, the operation convinces Putin that there is a plot against him and he takes the necessary steps to rectify the sins of the oligarchs. I'm not sure this is a classic, but I really enjoyed it. It's long and has quite a few twists and turns. Reading this, I thought back to some of LeCarre's earlier novels and realized that we've come so, so far from the great old stories. Today's are just as intriguing, but they're completely driven by the massive technological changes we've seen over the decades.

The Nightingale Affair, Mason - B

                       The setting of this novel is 1867 London. Former Inspector Charles Field, on whom Dickens modeled his Inspector Bucket in 'Bleak House' is thrust into a nightmare from the past. A decade and a half earlier, he was sent by Scotland Yard to the Crimea to find the man threatening and killing Florence Nightingale's young nurses. He solves that crime, marries a young nurse and settles in London.  Now, strangulation victims with the same embroidered rose in their mouths pop up in the capital. Fields is beside himself as he investigates.  A man named Jack Stanhope, who was in the Crimea, is now the killer the Yard is trying to find.  Eventually, Field's wife, daughter, and son help him capture Stanhope. Some very nice insights into the the culture and physical structure of 19th century London.

Eyes of the Queen, Clements - B+

                     This is a very enjoyable historical novel set in 1572, featuring Francis Walsingham, leader of the monarch's burgeoning intelligence operation. England is opposed by enemies, all of whom would love to rally around the Queen's cousin, Mary of Scotland. Spain, of course, is the leader of the Catholic coalition, but France has just slaughtered its Huguenots and is clearly allied against England. Walsingham goes to great lengths to pass a phony document to the Spanish, which sets them off on a foolish attempt to find the northwest passage to the Pacific and put off any attempts to free Mary. Meanwhile, Mary continues her desperate attempts to communicate with anyone who will help her. Walsingham comes close to finding convincing evidence against Mary, but does not. Walsingham's most skilled agent, John Dee, astrologer and mapmaker, uncovers a plot to shoot the queen and personally captures the assassin. The queen eventually approves what Walsingham calls her majesty's secret service.

His Majesty's Airship: the Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine, Gwynne - B

                     Albeit British and symbolic of the empire, R101,  an airship 770 feet long and twice the volume of the world's largest steamship, "was in form and function a zeppelin," a rigid airship. "R101 was the largest, most expensive, most streamlined, and most technologically sophisticated zeppelin-style airship ever built." Count von Zeppelin conceived of, built and flew his new machines. Almost all of his pre-war ships crashed. During WWI, the military managed to achieve long round-trip flights for the airships. Britain decided to match and surpass the Germans. 

                     R101 was perceived of as a way to quickly and luxuriously transverse the vast empire of Great Britain. On Oct. 4, 1930, she left Cardington on a trip that would bring her to India. Onboard were 5 officers, 37 crew, and 11 VIP's. Over London, they received news that they were headed into 40-50 mph winds on the way to Paris. They decided to continue even though it was well known that flying in those conditions was perilous.  Over the Channel, "she continued to simultaneously pitch and roll in ways no one had seen before, her enormous, waterlogged, linen-clad bow rising and dropping hundreds of feet, while she rocked side to side..." By 2.00  in the morning, the wind had slowed the ship down to 20 mph, and at exactly 2:09 am, she pitched down and crashed in northern France. The hydrogen gas ignited. A few manged to jump to safety. Of the 54 men aboard, only 6 survived.

                     The funeral services saw "the greatest outpouring of national grief in Great Britain" since the 1912 sinking of Titanic. Neither the Court of inquiry nor a computer simulation run half a century later could ascertain exactly what happened. In 2014, a physicist concluded, and all agreed, that an elevator cable had snapped depriving the crew of the ability to "lift" the nose while the ship pitched up and down in the wind.

                    The British airship program was soon terminated. Three years later, America's 'Akron' crashed killing 73 of 76 crewmen. Two years later, its sister ship crashed and ended the American program. On the other hand, the German ship, the 'Graf,' was successfully traveling around the world. Of course, the 1936 'Hindenburg' crash was the finale of the airship era.