America's War: For The Greater Middle East, Bacevich - B

                                                      This is a damning critique of the last forty years, written by a 1969 West Point grad, combat vet, PhD., and father of a son lost in Iraq.  He acknowledges upfront that for all our high-minded eloquence, our involvement in the Middle East is about oil. Although the US's oil hegemony was challenged with the 1973 embargo, the actual militarization of US policy in the Middle East was never under consideration until the Iranian Revolution. Ironically, the event that forever changed American policy, the takeover of the embassy in Tehran, was a student, and not government, initiated activity. When the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was added to the mix, Carter announced that the Persian Gulf was considered strategically critical to the US and any interference with our access to oil would be met with a forceful military response. Danger and dependence drove the conclusion. The US military response was to create Central Command (Centcom) for action in the Middle East.
                                                     The first failure in the author's eye in our preliminary war in the Middle East was Afghanistan because our success against the Soviets led to the Taliban. Next was Reagan's optimistic intervention in Beirut that led to the bombing of the Marine barracks and our quick departure. The stated intent was to provide a peacekeeping force in the midst of the civil war in Lebanon. No one anywhere would ever conclude our men accomplished anything. The Reagan administration followed up with the multiple bombings of Libya in response to an act of terror in Berlin, but it did not prevent the sabotage of Pan Am 103 a few years later. The mishmash of the Iran-Iraq War saw the US declare neutrality under Carter, back surreptitiously, and then outright, Iraq under Reagan. Eventually we provided arms to Iran through Israel all of which led to a deadly attack on a US destroyer by Saddam Hussein. Saddam apologized, we blamed the Iranians with no particular rationale and initiated a shooting naval war against them that culminated in our shooting down of a commercial passenger airplane. A ceasefire ensued and all of America patted itself on the back for keeping the Straits of Hormuz open and enforcing the Carter Doctrine with  firmness and force. In 1991 in the First Gulf War, the American led coalition utterly destroyed the armed forces of Iraq.  But we ended it early, without a follow-up plan. Kuwait was freed, but Hussein and the remnants of his army were still intact. Indeed, they engaged in a violent suppression of a Kurd and Shiite rebellion against Saddam that we stood by and ignored. Many believe the US left Saddam in place as a counterweight to Shiite Iran.
                                                      Whatever our intent in letting Saddam stay, we paid a heavy price for the decision for over a decade. We started what the Air Force has labelled an 'air occupation', by enforcing a no fly zone over the country that entailed hundreds of thousands of sorties. The 1990's saw the US Everywhere concept evolve. The Soviets were defeated and we could solve many problems with our awesome military power and good will.  In Somalia, we had our nose bloodied while trying to intervene in a tribal civil war. We intervened twice in the former Yugoslavia. The decade closed with Clinton declaring war on Al Qaeda.
                                                      After Sept.11, the new Bush administration, seeking to eliminate evil, declared a global war on terrorism.  A brief air war in Afghanistan led the Taliban to abandon the country's principal cities and  forced bin Laden into hiding in Pakistan. Bush declared matters resolved and turned to Iraq. Clearing away the platitudes and lies, we invaded Iraq to establish the effectiveness of preventive war, to show that we could effectuate regime change, and to show the Muslim world it was not exempt from the same governing themes that the rest of the world lived by. Iraq was not a danger, it was an opportunity. The regime and its army were disposed of in three weeks. We had no plan for the occupation. The insurgency immediately ensued. It would be another decade before we left. The following year, 2004, saw the insurgency deepen and the theme of bringing freedom and democracy to the Muslim world thoroughly undermined by the photographic evidence of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Thereafter, the insurgency morphed into a Shiite-Sunni civil war, with jihadists from nearby countries joining in. A full six years later, in the second year of the Obama administration, the US combat mission was declared over. By 2011, there were no US troops left in Iraq.
                                                     During the campaign in 2008, Obama had declared that the war we needed to fight was not in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. So, in 2009, he increased the number of American troops, but not to the degree that his commanders desired. He also stated that the surge would be of limited duration. It only accomplished an increase in US and civilian casualties. At the end of 2014, Obama declared that our longest war had come to a responsible conclusion, even though 10,000 Americans remained there. As Obama backed away from the two wars, he expanded drone operations and extended American activities to Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon. When ISIS struck in 2013, we were back in Iraq as the hawks in the US screamed about Obama letting American control of the Middle East slip away. The author suggests that the US foreign policy establishment has a collective memory of about ten days.
                                                       From the time of George Kennan through the end of the Cold War, the US established and maintained massive wealth and military power with the objective of outlasting the USSR and averting war. "Freedom, abundance and security went hand in hand." Shaping the future became the new mantra and rationale for the massive military establishment. We believed that the determined use of our power would set all things right. We defeated fascism and communism and should be able to defeat or fix all else that comes along. We have power and we wield it righteously. And the war for the Greater Middle East has become a way of life.
                                                        The author  feels very strongly that everything we have done has failed and his principal rationale is our inability to fix the underlying problems of the Middle East: absurd post-Colonial borders, poverty, religious conflict, corrupt regimes, Israel's existence and the Iranian Revolution. The problems are intractable and cannot be resolved by intervention. Nonetheless, every president from Carter to Obama delusionally attempted to do the impossible. He closes very strongly by arguing that there is nothing for us to do in the Middle East. Between climate change and the rise of China, there are much more important things to attend to elsewhere. This book is well-written, relatively brief and quite thorough. It will remind you of some events that have slipped away from our collective memories, and sadly, points out that we have been actively fighting for a very long time, and have very little, indeed virtually nothing,  to show for it.

All For Nothing, Kempowski - B

                                                      This superb German novel is about a well-off family on a small estate in East Prussia in 1945.  Eberhard is away with the Wehrmacht in a civilian capacity, the beautiful Katharina dreamily floats through every day, Peter is twelve, and Auntie pretty much runs the place. Life goes on. All is peaceful and quiet even though war has raged in Europe for five-and-a-half years. The occupants of the Georgenhof know the Russians are not far away, but the question remains 'if' not 'when'. "Our men will throw them straight back to the Urals" was the consensus of the village. One late night, Eberhard calls from Italy and tells them to get out immediately. Katharina exhibits no enthusiasm to leave and delays consideration for some time. Auntie sees to it that a cart is piled high with as many of their possessions as it will hold. For sheltering a refugee for one night at the request of the local pastor, Katharina was taken in for jail and questioning. Auntie and Peter leave with Vladimir, the Polish laborer assigned to the estate, and Vera, the Ukrainian girl also working there. Soon, Vladimir takes all their goods and leaves them behind. Peter sees him a few days later hanging from a tree with a looter sign draped over him. They are walking when Auntie is killed by a bomb. Peter continues west. With help from various people, he survives and is still on the move  in May, when the Nazi functionary who had reported his mother gives up his place to Peter in the last escaping motor launch.
                                                     This is an excellent book, one that skillfully depicts the trials and tribulations of the millions who took to the roads at various times throughout the war. Three-quarter of a million Germans fled Prussia.  Almost half perished in the flight. The author witnessed the refugees arriving in Rostock, where he lived as a boy, and watched his father, a ship's captain, ferry them from the east. Over the course of the author's life, he compiled a twenty volume collection of reminiscences, letters, diaries and other written memorabilia of the war.

A Bell For Adano, Hersey - B

                                                      This novel won the Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1944. Hersey was a war correspondent in Italy when he penned this classic. Adano is a small fictional town in Sicily. An American major from the Bronx is put in charge and quickly, humanely, and with deft touches, reverses the policies of the recently departed Fascists and wins the hearts of the locals. He is a gracious and gifted manager who makes Adano a very good place to live in again. He dispenses justice dispassionately and seems to always do the right thing. Although his romance with the daughter of a local fisherman is an important part of the story, the two compelling side stories to his magnificent work are his attempts to replace the town's bell and his run-in with Gen. Marvin*. The bell, which had regulated life in Adano for 700 hundred years,  had been carted off a few months before and made into a cannon. The totally mean-spirited and obnoxious Marvin had ordered carts off the only road in and out of Adano after one had slowed him down, and he had the carter's mule shot. The town could not survive with the road closed and Maj. Joppolo reversed the General's order. The MP's duly reported the reversal of the order to HQ, but hoping to save Joppolo, mailed it to Algiers. Unfortunately, the information eventually came to Marvin's attention and he ordered his adjutant to replace the little wop. The day the Navy dropped off a bell for the good folks of Adano, Joppolo's relief order, signed by Gen. Marvin, arrived. John Hersey was obviously one of America's great writers, and his admiration for men like Joppolo, the men who selflessly tried to do right by those they interacted with during the war, is a refreshing reminder of why we call them the 'greatest generation.'

*Marvin is clearly George Patton and just as clearly, Hersey was no fan of Old Blood and Guts. The movie, which came out in 1945, politely skips over the General's  conduct.

Directorate S: The C.I.A. And America's Secret Wars In Afghanistan And Pakistan, Coll - A*

                                                      Once again, back to Af-Pak and this time, for 688 pages. The book is named after the Directorate S buried deep within Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency. They were the group that covertly provided funds for the Taliban and other Islamic radicals. "Our failure to solve the riddle of ISI and its interference in Afghanistan would prove to be our greatest strategic failure."
                                                       There was no surprise at the C.I.A. when the Sept.11 attacks came. The question the US posed to President Musharraf of Pakistan immediately after 9/11 was whether Pakistan was with the US, and would help with our actions against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or against us. There were seven specific requests and Musharraf answered yes to all, but clearly the Pakistani's would view the issues through their own lens and act in their own best interests. The continuing issues for the Pakistanis were a need to maintain peace along the shared border region with Pashtuns on both sides, the desire to have a friendly Muslim neighbor to the north and their ongoing fear and hatred of India. The Pakistanis and the Americans were involved in a very awkward partnership. When Mullah Mohammad Omar, Taliban emir, would not turn over Bin Laden as requested by the Pakistanis, the US began its pursuit of the two men, and began the air war in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001. It was over very quickly.  Before year-end, the Taliban left Kabul and Bin Laden and 2,000 of his men escaped to Pakistan. Hamid Karzai and a coalition government were soon in place.  One of the issues second-guessed ever since was the decision made by Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld to not put troops on the ground in Tora Bora to capture or kill Bin Laden or Omar. Although at the time all seemed well, the truth is that Afghanistan, after thirty years of war and turmoil, was not able to stand on its own feet and the 2,000 members of Al Qaeda who escaped to Pakistan would further destabilize an already unstable country.
                                                        The CIA's mission in post-Taliban Afghanistan was to find the surviving members of AQ. There were a few thousand American and NATO troops there to assist in the process. Fear of a recurrence of 9/11 haunted everyone in the war on terror. Concurrently, the US was desirous of establishing a stable government, but put little time and less money into the effort. Under Karzai, the country reverted to its racketeering tribal past, and finding no AQ jihadis left, the US started shooting suspected Taliban members. Finding no one from AQ and gleaning virtually no intelligence about it, the Americans in Afghanistan began to torture and abuse anyone they thought might have information. The US made a commitment to support Karzai's newly elected government in 2004, but the Pakistanis renewed their old habits of trying to destabilize the Pashtun dominated border areas by assisting the Taliban. They feared the US would leave just as we had in the 1990's. They were also concerned that Karzai would be friendly with India. The 2006 US accord with India and the decision to turn over most of the ground work to NATO forces further complicated relations and put the two countries at cross purposes. The Taliban took the offense in 2006 and successfully began to re-occupy their country. By 2007, it was apparent that we had accomplished very little, if anything, in Afghanistan. The Taliban had not only re-taken most of the southern part of the country, but they had destabilized the border lands within Pakistan. The Taliban was growing so quickly in Pakistan that there was fear they could topple the secular government. The US's frustration with the ISI and the entire Pakistan government led to US drone attacks on Pakistan soil. In the waning days of the Bush administration, seven years on, a strategic assessment confirmed that the Taliban needed to be defeated in order to make certain that AQ, then safely operating out of the Pakistani Tribal Areas, did not have a fallback safe haven in Afghanistan. This tortured logic led to consideration of a substantial troop increase in Afghanistan the following year. Obama had campaigned criticizing the Iraq war as the wrong place to fight AQ. The Afghanistan war was the one to be pursued, so he approved  the Pentagon's request, but only for half of the troops they desired. Those troops found a landscape in which the Taliban, well-funded by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, were welcome in the countryside because of the corruption and perceived indifference of the northerners in Karzai's government. The new American military team decided to deploy their recently used counterinsurgency practices from Iraq in key areas in order to clear-hold-build-transfer. Transferring to the Afghanistan government was a delusional dream. The Generals asked for an additional 80,000 men. Obama gave them 30,000 and announced that they would start leaving in 2011. Once again the US decided to not abandon Afghanistan, and to pursue AQ, but would not confront ISI and acknowledged that the Taliban could not be defeated. The plan of the Obama team was to allow the Afghans to build up the capacity to rule and police their own nation.
                                                              In 2010, prospects for a political settlement were in the air. The Taliban reached out to the US by contacting a colleague of Richard Holbrook, special US envoy for Afghanistan, while at he same time ISI was talking to the Karzai government. Meanwhile, Gen. Petraeus prepped a major effort in and around Kandahar, featuring the 101st Airborne. Reminiscent of Westmoreland in Vietnam, he heralded body counts. Late in the year,  low level representatives of the US and Taliban met in Germany. As the year closed though, new clouds were darkening the horizon. The Pakistanis were fed up with being blamed for our failure and  Hamid Karzai had come to despise the US for many reasons, the paramount one being our investigations into the rampant corruption at the top of the country, particularly amongst his family. Relations with Pakistan plummeted after our May, 2011 killing of Osama Bin Laden, while it gave President Obama the political cover to start the troop drawdown.  As the fighting dragged on, the US, Pakistan and Afghanistan continued to mistrust and blame each other for the endless deaths. Karzai refused to believe the Taliban was an indigenous insurgency. He considered them a tool of the ISI. The Pakistanis characterized the Bin Laden raid as their biggest national embarrassment since losing Bangladesh over forty years earlier, and no one in the US trusted anyone in either country. 2014 saw a fraudulent, violent election go to Mohammad Ghani to succeed Karzai. Ghani was a southern Pashtun and may or may  not have actually defeated the northern candidate. That year also saw the handover of most of America's and NATO's equipment and bases to the Afghans. Obama declared US combat operations to be over in December.
                                                      This book was reviewed for the NYTimes by a military historian with experience and extensive knowledge about our wars in the Middle East. He calls it "a book of surpassing excellence that is almost certainly destined for irrelevance". In December of 2017, this administration's  VP told American troops in Afghanistan "We're here to stay until freedom wins. I believe victory is closer than ever before."
                                                        This is an extraordinarily discouraging tome to read because of the delusional decision making that led to the loss of 2400 American lives, countless Asians and an estimated trillion dollars. One comes away incredulous at the thinking that went, and still, goes into endless attempts to quell the Taliban and shore up one of the most incompetent, of the many incompetent, regimes we've backed over the last seventy years. It is heartbreaking to read this. Amazingly, almost seventeen years after we started in Afghanistan, today's newspapers carry a story about the Taliban handing a resounding defeat to the central government.
                                                   

The Hypnotist, Kepler - B-

                                                       This is the first novel in the series about the Stockholm detective Joona Linna. A physician hypnotizes a traumatized 15-year-old boy whose family has been slaughtered. It turns out that the boy was the perpetrator. When he escapes, news of the hypnotism reaches the front pages and unleashes the emotions of a few very disturbed former patients of the doctor. The doctor's son is kidnapped.  Joona uncovers the past and chases down the perpetrator to the north of Sweden. This is pretty good.

The Cloister, Carroll - B

                                                      Carroll is a well-known author of both fiction and non-fiction, a former RC priest and a man with a keen eye for the intricacies of faith and religion. He has published a book that studied the RC faith's treatment of Judaism, and again in this novel explores the two religions, their shared history, roots and built-in antipathy and contradictions. He weaves together in 1950 NYC the stories of a priest, Michael Kavanaugh, and a French Holocaust survivor, Rachel Vetter, who was a student of Latin and Medieval History and a specialist in the romance of Abelard and Heloise.  Kavanaugh's world is the parish just north of the Cloisters in Manhattan, where he meets Rachel, a docent at the Museum. She was working for the Musee Cluny in France when she was caught up in the 1942 roundup of Paris' Jews. She and her father were transported to Drancy, where she managed to keep her father supplied with medicine until he was transported to the east. She denied he was her father the night he was taken away and thus saved her own life. The shame and guilt would forever haunt her. Kavanaugh struggles with much less baggage as they become friends and he seeks the truth of the banishment of a friend from the seminary a decade and a half ago. He had been told his best friend left because he had 'feelings' for Kavanaugh, which Michael now learns to not have been the truth. The story of Abelard and Heloise, the medieval French lovers, he a priest and she a postulant, is a tragic one, yet filled with inquisitive discussions of the meaning of faith and forgiveness and portrays them as modern humanists centuries ahead of their times. Also explored is the role of anti-semitism in Catholicism, and the absolutism and conservatism of the church hierarchy, because part of the reason Peter Abelard's writings wound up on the Index was that he wrote that Jesus would never condone the castigating of his people as  Christ-killers. Abelard's theme was simple: a loving God was not cruel and did not condone cruelty or violence in his name. The conversations between Michael and Rachel lead them both forward to the next stage of their lives. She comes to grips with her past, sheds her mourning demeanor and become a vibrant school teacher. He parts with the church after midnight mass on Christmas. This is a very well done and thought provoking novel.

The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France's Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, Kix - B

                                                      In 1940, Robert de La Rochefoucald was the 16 year old son of a count in Soissons, north and east of Paris. The family estate was partially occupied by the Germans, with whom they now lived in an uneasy truce. In late 1942, Robert decided to try to go to London and join de Gaulle. He received help from the underground, travelled through Vichy, and crossed into Spain, where he was imprisoned. Because he had acted as an interpreter for some downed RAF pilots, the British helped him travel from Madrid to London. He was recruited by and joined Special Operations Executive, the first institution to adopt, teach and sponsor guerrilla warfare on a large scale. In the summer of 1943, he parachuted into France. He  trained local 'resistants' in the use of  explosives and led two successful missions, before a double agent's betrayal led to hundreds of arrests in central France. In December, he was awakened in a barn and captured by the Gestapo. He was interrogated and tortured for four months, escaping on the morning of his scheduled execution when he jumped from a moving truck and hijacked a Gestapo car. After weeks of recuperation in and around Paris, Robert was able to return to Britain and a month before D-Day, he was sent on a mission to Bordeaux. Sabotage was the order of the day and the French severely crimped the German's ability to reinforce Normandy. He spent seven days posing as a worker and cased a factory before setting the explosives that blew it up. In late July, he was imprisoned for a second time by the occupiers. On his second night in prison, he killed three guards, stole a key ring and walked out the front gate of one of the most notorious prisons in the country. Liberation came in August and along with 200,000 'resistants', he joined the French Army. In April of 1945, Robert led his final commando action against the German submarine pens on the Atlantic coast of France. He was in a hospital at the war's end and returned to the family estate later that summer. He received every medal France gave, and was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1997. He died on VE Day in 2012.

Need To Know, Cleveland - B +

                                                      A veteran CIA counter-intelligence analyst, mother of four, develops a program to see into the computer of a Russian who runs sleeper agents in the US. When she clicks on a file with the picture of five spies, she is totally floored when the third one is her husband. That night after they get the kids down, she asks him how long he has been working for the Russians. He replies twenty-two years. The  ensuing story is just as unbelievable as Matt and Vivian  try and sort out how to keep their family together. There are some fabulous plot twists in a totally enjoyable quick read.

Ghost Wars: The Secret History Of the CIA, Afghanistan, And Bin Laden, From The Soviet Invasion To September 10, 2001, Coll - A*

                             This excellent book is a Pulitzer winner from 2005. The title stems from the nature of the war in Afghanistan, where the Soviet conscripts called their opponents 'dukhi' or ghosts. The enemy in the high mountains was a fleeting and lethal apparition.
                             The year 1979 saw the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the deposing of the Shah, the assaults on the US embassies in Tehran and Islamabad, the attack on Mecca's Grand Mosque and an anti-communist revolt in Afghanistan. The Soviet trained and supplied regime had been in place only a year and seemed incapable of dealing with the changes sweeping the Islamic world. The Soviets invaded in the waning days of the year. The US response was to support the rebels through Pakistan and make the Soviet occupation as painful as possible. The CIA would supply "mules, money and mortars". The Saudis quickly joined in and began delivering endless amounts of cash to Pakistan to support the fight in Afghanistan.  Saudi individuals ready to take up arms soon followed. One wealthy young Saudi who travelled between the peninsula and Pakistan and tirelessly worked for the jihadists fighting the infidel Soviets was named Osama Bin Laden. The US and Saudi funded mujahedin effectively bled the Soviets dry in Afghanistan. It was one of the most successful and effective guerrilla wars in history.
                             The most capable Afghan rebel was Ahmed Massoud, son of an army general, Islamic student of the great resistance fighters and anti-Soviet genius. He led thousands of fighters in the north of the country and stole almost all of his supplies from the Soviets, who threw their best equipped Spetsnaz units against him to no avail. In the US, Bill Casey initiated a massive escalation of the CIA efforts in 1985. In addition to increasing the supplies of money and arms, the US supported a Pakistani guerrilla warfare (if not terrorism) training center that taught combat skills to thousands of not just Afghans, but mujahedin from all over the Middle East. Money poured in and roads were built along the border to assist the delivery of endless material. The Soviets' success in the mid-80's was met by Stinger missiles that turned the tide and the Politburo in the USSR began to consider withdrawal. The confluence of so many jihadists in the area led to discussions about the future nature of their ambitions, as it was not just the communists, but the Americans and Israelis that they despised. In 1989, the Soviets left behind their ten-year equivalent of Vietnam. They had killed  two million Afghanis, destroyed whatever bit of a nation there was, had lost 15,000 of their own men, suffered another 35,000 wounded and had failed in their mission to prop up the local regime.
                             The Soviets left behind a regime headed by Mohammad Najibullah that everyone expected to fail, and the question in Washington and Pakistan was what would come next. The US wished to see Afghani self-determination and our ally wanted an Islamic regime on their northern border. Thus began a variance in policy between the US and Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI). Concurrently, the Saudis lost influence with the mujahedin  for their failure to pursue aggressive Islamism in the country. The alliance that had defeated the Soviets was falling apart. With the death of the USSR, Washington ended all financial aid to the country and left it to the Afghanis to sort things out.  Kabul fell to Ahmed Massoud in 1992. In a country that had more weapons per capita than any in the world and was selling vast amounts of opium, the US would go almost a decade without a policy or a presence. Afghanistan quickly devolved into internecine tribal fighting. Concurrent with Afghanistan's chaos, the early-90's also saw the rise of aggressive Islamic extremism that culminated in the Taliban's rise to power in Kandahar in 1994. The Pashtuns in the southern part of the country fell under the leadership of Mullah Omar. The Taliban offered  a return of the king and an end to the cycles of violence. The rise of the Taliban was supported by both the ISI and Saudi Intelligence. With a financial assist from the new Afghanistan resident, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban occupied Kabul in late 1996 and effectively took over control of the country. The same year saw bin Laden fax his declaration of jihad against America, Israel and Saudi Arabia to a London newspaper. Two years later, he issued a fatwa in conjunction with Ayman al-Zawahiri calling for assaults on American civilians anywhere in the world. By this time, the US was actively trying to hunt down bin Laden.
                             Al Qaeda and Bin Laden struck for the first time against two US embassies in Africa on August 7, 1998, when truck bombs were detonated causing significant American and African casualties. Capturing Bin Laden became an American objective, yet one that was never successful.  There were multiple reasons for the failure. Satellite imaging technology in the late 90's was not what it would become a decade later. In Washington, there were a handful of entities tasked with the pursuit, but none had the funding or manpower necessary for the task. There were also endless legalities that the White House and CIA faced regarding fighting terrorists. Additionally, Bin Laden practiced exquisite evasive tradecraft. He was constantly on the move, did not use telephones and only trusted Arab bodyguards. There were no Afghanis close to him who could be bought. And perhaps most importantly, the Pakistanis lied continually and were of absolutely no help in ascertaining his whereabouts. On top of all this, the author pounds home one consistent theme - in the turmoil of the Clinton White House, there was no policy on Afghanistan or Al Qaeda. That is not to say they weren't very concerned, they just never figured out how to go after him. Bin Laden struck a second time on Oct. 12, 2000 when a small skiff blew a hole in the USS Cole while it was docked in Yemen. The US response would now be in the hands of a new administration.
                              The outgoing Clinton team told the newcomers that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were existential threats and the most important national security issue they would face.  It didn't register with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or Rice. By the spring of 2001, the new administration realized that they needed to go after Al Qaeda, but ran into the same strategic hurdle that Clinton had. Pakistan, with its eye on India, had to have an Islamist neighbor to the north. For the US, keeping the two nuclear-armed south Asian countries at peace and  the Pakistan nuclear arsenal safe from radicals always trumped the Bin Laden issue. Around and around the conversation went. By the summer, everyone in American counter-intelligence knew something big was about to happen.  On Sept. 4th, the administration initiated a plan that would pursue bin Laden in conjunction with an alliance with Ahmed Massoud, who led the only viable anti-Taliban efforts in Afghanistan from its northern regions. They also concluded that the CIA should prepare to fly armed Predator drones in pursuit of Bin Laden. On Sept. 9th, a Taliban suicide bomber killed Massoud.
                              This is a superb book. But 584 pages of text and mind-numbing detail on every conceivable issue and individual turned this into a 2 week slog for me. This is only for those with ample time and unlimited patience.  The sequel 'Directorate S' has just been published and will be tackled in due course.
                           

The Other Woman, Silva - C

                             The latest Gabriel Allon book has all the things that make this series as welcome as an old friend. There is intrigue, spycraft, fabulous European locations, the usual cast of delightful Israeli operatives and fascinating insights into pieces of the past. But, I fear the author has jumped the shark with the key character the unknown and illegitimate child of a member of the Cambridge Five, alive and well-placed at the upper echelons of a western intelligence service.

The Triumph Of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept The World, Ehrman - B

                                                       "The ancient triumph of Christianity proved to be the single greatest cultural transformation our world has ever seen." Christianity supplanted religions that had survived for thousands of years,  insisting that only the worship of Jesus Christ was allowed. By changing the world and the way people looked at it, Christianity reset the course of history. The concept of dominance of one person over another was replaced with the ideas of equality and  service to others. From this flowed societies with a concern for the sick, poor and marginalized. "This effected the history of the West in a way that simply cannot be calculated." The pivotal point in the success of the religion was its adoption by Constantine. "Few events in the history of civilization have proved more transformative than the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in the year 312 CE." Thus, Christianity went from being persecuted to enjoying imperial privileges and became the official religion of the empire 80 years later.
                                                           The one other conversion just as significant preceded Constantine's by three centuries, and that was of Paul soon after the death of Jesus. Paul believed he was called by God to bring the religion of Jesus to the gentiles of the world. He thus greatly expanded the possibilities of the new religion by bringing it beyond the Jews of the empire. He spread the word from Galilee to Greece and the Balkans.  "The death and resurrection of Jesus brought a salvation that was not tied to explicit Jewish identity; ...the salvation of Christ was as efficacious for gentiles as well as Jews; ....pagans who came to believe in Christ did not first have to convert to Judaism". The Jews never could accept Christ because it was beyond their comprehension that a lower class carpenter, a criminal brutally executed by the Romans, could be their messiah. It fell to the former pagans to adopt the new religion in increasing numbers.  Paganism itself was a characterization that Christians adopted to refer to the polytheists of the empire who were neither Jews or Christians. The new faith spread because of the evangelistic actions of its new adherents and its requirement of exclusivity meant it would not be absorbed into the polytheistic world by becoming a new add-on. Christian proselytizers raised the concept of an afterlife and effectively used a fear of hell and its very specific forms of eternal punishment to bring newcomers into the fold. From the time of Constantine, when Christianity claimed a small percent of the empire, the faith grew to encompass half of the 60 million people of Rome by 400 CE.  When he built Constantinople, Constantine had many of the pagan statues and idols throughout the empire melted down for use in adorning his new city. Later in the century, Theodosius I proscribed animal sacrifice, and pagan cults and proclaimed Christianity the state religion.
                                                           "However one evaluates the measure of the case, whether Christianization of the West was a triumph to be treasured or a defeat to be lamented, no one can deny it was the most monumental cultural transformation our world has ever seen,"

                                                   

The Woman In The Window, Finn - B

                                                       This novel is the classic beach read page-turner that can be, and was by me, knocked-off in a day.  Dr. Anna Fox suffers from a severe case of agoraphobia and is unable to leave her four- story Harlem townhouse. Like Jimmy Stewart in 'Rear Window', she sits with a long range lens and watches things going on across the street. She watches b +w movies, especially old Hitchcock's, as she pops pills and consumes vast amounts of merlot trying to forget the events that drove her over the edge. She thinks she sees a murder, but then again, who'd believe a woman who can barely remember what day it is. I wouldn't be surprised if this makes it to the silver screen.

A Taste For Vengeance, Walker - B

                                                       After a decade as the only policeman in St. Denis, Bruno is promoted to chief for a  much larger area and actually, has subordinates for the first time. He also has a confused reporting chain of command, yet rolls with the changes and brilliantly leads the search for some IRA hit-men brought back to action in the south of France. His adroit social skills help a young woman overcome a personal challenge and play for the nation's rugby team.  All's  well in this thoroughly comfortable and enjoyable series.

A Necessary Evil, Mukherjee - B

                             This is the second book in a series set in India in 1920 and first seen here in May of last year. This time, Capt. Wyndham and Sgt. Banerjee, his Cambridge-educated assistant, witness the assassination of the heir to a throne in southern India. The kingdom at the center of this story is thousands of years old and its diamond mines were mentioned by Ptolmey, one of Alexander the Great's generals. Wyndham and Banerjee pursue the case, while the author enlightens us on the intricacies of the Raj after the Great War, and the attempt by the Governor-General to bring the dozens of principalities and kingdoms into a Chamber of Princes supporting the UK. The Raj held together for another 27 years.

Something In The Water, Steadman- B

                                                      A British couple honeymooning in Bora Bora find - something in the water - and off we go. Pull out all the cliches because they fit: page-turner, summer read, beach fun, thriller. It was written by the young British actress who played Lady Mabel on season 5 of Downton and has already been optioned by Hollywood. Read it when looking for fun.

The Temptation of Forgiveness, Leon - B

                                                      Commissario Guido Brunetti is at it again. He teams with Paola in the raising of two teenagers and negotiates the endless politics of the Questura. Along with his usual colleagues, Guido resolves an apparent drug-related crime that actually is tied into a heart insurance/prescription drug ring. Venice remains the center of the series.

Smoketown: The Untold Story Of The Other Great Black Renaissance, Whitaker - B -

                                                      This is the story of the flourishing of Pittsburgh's  black community from the 1920's through the late 1950's. It saw the finest black paper in the country, the Pittsburgh Courier, the two best Negro League baseball teams, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays, a flourishing of the performance arts, and the birth of August Wilson. Most of Smoketown's story is centered in the Hill District, just east of downtown. The lead in this story is the Courier, which rose to become the nation's most successful  black newspaper by endorsing and promoting the career of the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis, in the 1930's. The paper had been started by a dreamer, but acquired in 1910 by Pittsburgh's most successful black entrepreneur, Cap Posey. As a river town on the underground railroad, in a state that had led the way in the emancipation and education of blacks, Pittsburgh had a small, well-educated, and cohesive black community. Robert Vann built the paper into an economic success and overtook the Chicago Defender as the leading voice of black America. He also led the charge that started blacks voting Democratic when the paper endorsed FDR in 1932. That same year, the  Black Yankees and the Pittsburgh Crawfords opened Greenlee Stadium, the first ever built by a black man. Red Greenlee was a bootlegger, the owner of the numbers racket in town and the bank for the city's negroes. He was also an entrepreneur extraordinaire who brought 5 future Hall of Famers to the Crawfords. Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson though, were the sidemen for Satchel Paige, the most famous of them all. The late 30's and the war years saw Lena Horne, Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine all achieve national prominence. During the war,  the Courier fostered the promotion of blacks in the military, and one of its reporters, Wendell Smith, was Jackie Robinson's travel companion and spokesman starting in 1947, when Robinson became the most famous black in America. The paper pioneered women in roles other than the society pages and  heaped praise on the nascent civil rights movement. When mainstream white papers began to follow the civil rights movement and hire the best black reporters, the end came quickly for the Courier as it went bankrupt in 1966, and the memory of Pittsburgh as the crossroads of black America faded away. A son of the Hill District, August Wilson, has immortalized the era in his works.

The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made, O'Toole - B+

                                                      Thomas W. Wilson was born in and raised in the south, the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers. He attended college at Davidson before graduating from Princeton in 1879. After a half-hearted effort at the law and having dropped his first name, Woodrow decided on an academic career, and married Ellen Axson, also the oldest child of a minister. He received a PhD from Johns Hopkins and taught at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan before returning to Princeton as a full professor. He longed for a life in politics, but settled for success as a teacher, author and lecturer. At thirty-nine, he suffered from chest pains and paralysis of his right hand. The physician who treated him decades later surmised that it was a mini-stroke. In 1902, he was offered and accepted the presidency of Princeton. Ten years after his first stroke, he woke up one day having lost the vision in his left eye and with no feeling in his right arm. In 1907 and again in 1909, he dueled with the trustees of the university and evidenced the intransigence and inability to compromise that haunted his second term as president. A year later, Democratic pols offered him the New Jersey governorship, and likely, the 1912 nomination. After his election in NJ, he offered some progressive ideas to the legislature, and began running for president. With the Republican schism, the Democratic nomination would be priceless and Wilson claimed it on the 46th ballot at the Baltimore convention. He was a gifted orator, indeed a fantastic public speaker, and his campaign theme about addressing wealth inequality resonated with the public. He easily won a sweeping electoral victory and entered the White House full of hope. It is at this point though, that the author points out that the fifty-six-year old Wilson had no friends, was seldom introspective, and always faulted others for his stumbles.
                                                         He met with early success as tariff reform, the income tax and the Federal Reserve were soon enacted. That said in 1913, Wilson probably had another minor stroke, and was bedridden six times from stress-induced stomach turmoil and exhaustion, even though he played golf three times per week and spent only about six hours per day working. His first foray into foreign affairs was trying to cope with a  revolution in Mexico. His approach was to make a series of moral pronouncements, and just assume that because he was right, everyone would follow. Thus, a morals-driven foreign policy with the goal of spreading democracy was introduced to the world. In August of his second year in office, he was met by war in Europe and the death of his wife two days later. Juggling neutrality would challenge Wilson, Congress, American business and the American people for the next two-and-a-half years. The most signifiant challenge was the sinking of the Lusitania in May, 1915 and the overwhelming complexity of Britain's and Germany's conduct at sea. He impulsively solved his personal grief and loneliness by proposing to a younger woman, Edith Galt, two months after he met her in 1915. Wilson believed in, worked hard at preserving and proclaimed neutrality. But the American people supported the Allies and American businesses were growing wealthier supplying them.  Wall Street lent Britain and France substantial sums. "Wilson's decision to standby in silence as American banks lent $500 million to the Allies effectively brought US neutrality to an end." In 1916, tensions were heightened by continuing submarine attacks, which Germany thought an appropriate response to the illegal naval blockade that was starving them. Wilson ran for reelection with the party citing his work keeping America out of war. He barely won and he was  convinced that the Germans would soon adopt unrestricted submarine warfare. They did on Feb. 1 and the US severed diplomatic relations. On April 6, 1917 the US declared war on the Central Powers and went to war "to make the world safe for democracy." In the two-and-half years prior to the US declaration, Wilson had sought to find a way to stop the war. He believed that the unsullied US was in a unique position to mediate. He also articulated a need for a league of nations to prevent future militancy, and spoke of "peace without victory." His emissary, Col. Edwin House went Europe and tried to find a means to end the war. The Europeans thought Wilson was naive and weak, particularly after the Lusitania, and a British  diplomat referred to the Colonel as "the empty House." The US was entering the world stage led by an idealistic president who generated little respect from the Europeans.
                                                      The US did a superb job organizing a war effort from scratch. In addition to the existing cabinet, Wilson brought in Bernard Baruch, Herbert Hoover, and William Howard Taft to get things moving. And move they did. On the domestic front, the administration engaged in propaganda that was very effective, but also in censorship and outright suppression of free speech. Eugene Debs was prosecuted and jailed for decrying the draft and castigating war profiteers. "Wilson is still remembered as the president who repressed dissent more often more harshly than any other occupant of the White House." He opened up the year 1918 with his famous Fourteen Points speech outlining America's optimistic war aims. The first members of the AEF went into the line in April. "By the Fourth of July, the United States had fulfilled its promise of a million man army in France." The German's last offensive had failed and the end of the war was within view. November brought armistice and a Republican majority in both houses, in response to some heavy-handed politicking by the President.
                                                        Wilson wanted a peace that would benefit all, and a league of nations. His allies wanted revenge. He sailed for Europe in December, without a prominent Republican in his entourage. He was hailed by millions as the savior, "Moses from across the Atlantic." He considered Clemenceau an "old man" and Lloyd George, a "second rate politician." In the early going, Wilson accomplished the drafting of the covenant for the League of Nations, before returning home for a visit in February. During his time home, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, both leader of the Republicans in the Senate and Chmn. of the Foreign Relations committee encouraged a discussion of all the terms and possible modification of Article X of the covenant. Wilson would not hear of it. The majority of the country was with him. Unfortunately, he was shy of the two-thirds he needed in the Senate. Back in Paris, doing battle with the indefatigable Clemenceau, who remained hell bent on revenge and  France's security with little concern for Wilson's ideals, wore out the president and sent him to bed. Wilson got his League from Clemenceau and George, but compromised elsewhere and gave them a blank check on reparations. "Self interest had triumphed with a vengeance, and U.S. Secty. of State Lansing did not believe the peace made in Paris would hold. It was humiliating, unduly punitive, and impossible to carry out." On June 28, 1919, the treaty was signed.
                                                        Wilson came home in physical decline and with his oratorical skills lost forever. He was three votes shy of the number he needed and was told that if he would accept a few reservations, he would have his treaty. Both the French and the British indicated they would allow the modifications. Wilson said  he "would consent to nothing. The Senate must take its medicine." He took his case to the people and barnstormed the nation for weeks until he collapsed of 'nervous exhaustion'.  A stoke felled him with a year-and-a half left in his term. However, the words stroke or paralyzed were never mentioned in public as the First Lady and Wilson's doctor, Rear Adm. Gary Grayson, began the coverup. The Cabinet received only a partial briefing, considered invoking the disability clause in the Constitution, but deferred any decision. No one knew who would determine disability and the Vice-President, Thomas Marshall, had no interest in becoming president. Washington engaged in watchful waiting. History suspects that the chief architect of the deception was Edith Wilson, with Grayson and the president's secretary, Joe Tumulty, as accomplices. Wilson was capable enough to remain intransigent, resisting all attempts at compromise and the treaty failed on November 19, 1919. "In the end, it was Wilson who broke the heart of the world."  His last three years saw slow improvement in his health, but  he never recovered. He was paralyzed and could not walk more than a few steps. He and his inner entourage flummoxed all and he remained in office until the end. He had hopes that he would be called upon for a third term, but Grayson quietly let the powers that be know he was unable to run or serve. He left a bitter man, rejecting his few friends and delusionally dreaming of bringing the treaty to the people. He died in February, 1924, and is buried at the National Cathedral.  His wife declined the offer of a state funeral and burial at Arlington.
                                                          It seems to me that a brilliant man who loved privacy, eschewed the company of other men, particularly successful strong ones, and deplored negotiations in any form, was at best, tolerant of lesser minds would be better suited for many things other than politics and government. But he chose a public life and achieved fabulous highs in his first term and abysmal failure in his second.  I have long held Wilson in low regard because of his insistence on the messianic foreign policy that I have long abhorred. There is nothing here that has changed my view on that, but I have come away with a somewhat higher regard for the man's intelligence, skills, idealism and integrity. Regardless of how one feels about, or comes to a new conclusion about Wilson, this is a great book. It is extraordinarily well-written and a pleasure to read. I recommend it to all.

The Source: How Rivers Made America And How America Remade Its Rivers, Doyle - C, Inc.

                                                      "Rivers are the defining feature of America's landscape." We have over 3 million miles of rivers in the lower 48. "This book is about how our ideas have shaped the rivers of America - and how the rivers have shaped our ideas."  Both Washington and Jefferson were concerned about the new nation's need to spread over the Appalachians and the fact that there was no river that crossed the mountains. Instead of a river, it would be a canal in NY that connected the seaboard with the expanding country. As important as the Erie Canal and the Hudson River were to the economy of the young nation, it was the mighty Mississippi and its tributaries the Tennessee, the Ohio, the Illinois and the Missouri - that linked together the United States.  The great rivers of the west were managed by the Corps of Engineers for the simple reason that the only engineers in the new nation were graduates of the USMA. The full federalization of the nation's rivers came after the 1927 Mississippi flood forced the federal government into the flood control business.
                                                     From my perspective, this book lacked a unifying narrative, which is why I skimmed a great deal. A section on sovereignty discussed the Colorado River Compact, a section on taxation discussed how states developed systems to pay for canals, a section on regulation discussed utilities, and the closing section on conservation reviewed the efforts going on around the country to revise some of the consequences of industrialization and over-population.

The Knowledge, Grimes - B-

                                                       I was pleasantly surprised to see that the 87-year-old Grimes had published her 24th novel in the Richard Jury series that goes back to 1981. The ageless Jury and his cohort of odd-ball friends, Carol-anne, Melrose Plant, Diane Demorney, Marshall Trueblood, Vivian Rivington, and his priceless Sergeant, Wiggins, continue to delight and amuse. The pub in this one is named after "the knowledge" that London's cabbies have to acquire to pass the strenuous test to become licensed. Knowing every nook and cranny of the city allows them to establish a cabbies-only place so off the beaten track that no one else can find it. As always, this was  a delight.

Mischka's War: A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York, Fitzpatrick - C

                                                       The author is a noted historian of the Soviet Union, and this is a book written about her husband, a theoretical physicist, whom she married in 1989. Mischka Danos was born in Latvia in 1922. Six years after his 1999 death, Fitzpatrick opened a box that held her husband's diary, as well as his mother Olga's, from before WW2 and up to the early 1950's. She decided to write this history.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Mischka was the second of three children born in a Riga that had suffered throughout the first War and the ensuing Revolution. His family struggled financially until his mother opened a dress shop.  Mischka attended the University of Riga as an engineering student in 1941, and somehow avoided both Soviet and German conscription. He was employed at the State Electrotechnical Factory, a critical provider of radios and electrical equipment to the Soviets, and, after Barbarossa, the Germans. Olga used her shop to employ and hide Jews from the Nazis. In 1944, when the Soviets were re-taking the Baltics, Mischka, fearful of being drafted by the Germans, transferred to a university in Dresden. Olga utilized her contacts in the German military and also fled Riga. Her husband and two other sons remained in what again became the Soviet Union. Mischka survived the bombing of Dresden and headed to a town near the Danish border. He and Olga had concluded their best bet was to get as close to the western Allies as soon as possible.
                                                        The end of the war saw both Olga and Mischka in Flensburg as displaced persons (DPs). Because the UK and the US did not recognize the Soviet occupation of Latvia, they were not subject to forcible return. Mischka enrolled in Hanover Technical University in January, 1946. He graduated in 1946 and went to Heidelberg to study for his doctorate under his mentor, who was offered a full professorship. In 1949, he married Helga Heimars. The focus of those in charge of the DPs turned from repatriation to emigration from Europe. Argentina, Australia, Canada and the US were the preferred options. Sponsored by a Jewish family she had helped in Riga, Olga left for New York in 1950. A year later, Mischka and Helga followed. He did some postdoc studying at Columbia, before obtaining a job with the US Government, where he would work for forty-years.
                                                         Clearly, the author is devoted to her late husband. And his story is mildly interesting. But there just is not enough here to merit attention.
                                                       

The Sandman, Kepler - B+

                                                      This is the fourth book in a Swedish series about Joona Linna, a police detective who in a previous novel put away a serial killer who has been in a highly-secured psychiatric facility for thirteen years with no outside access allowed.  Suddenly, a kidnap victim, assumed and declared dead quite a few years ago, appears running on a railroad track in the dead of night. The search for other victims and a likely accomplice is back on. This is a high-quality police thriller, and the good news is that there are seven books in the series. Amazon is rushing translations for publication later in the year. Thanks again to Wendell Erwin, finder of Nordic noir.

The Cuban Affair, DeMille - C+

                                                      This is a light-hearted beach read that felt way longer than its already hefty 448 pages. Mac is a captain of a fishing boat out of Key West. He is also a decorated Army officer with two tours in Afghanistan. A group of Cuban-Americans contact him and make him a massive financial offer to go to Cuba. So, off we go on a romp that predictably isn't predictable and leads to intrigue, love and a boat chase. Its one saving grace is a bit of background on Cuba, and interestingly for me, the background of a notorious prison building in Havana. Villa Marista was once a Catholic boys' school, run by the Marist Brothers, one of whom was my high school chemistry teacher.

The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, Davis - B

                                                      "The American Sea has been and will continue to be a gift to humankind. It brings beauty into our lives and invigorates the human spirit. It gives us food, moderates our climate, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and puts oxygen into the same. There is a kind of nourishing energy out in the gulf that doesn't pump from a well."
                                                       Interestingly, it is, on average, only a mile deep. There are nearly 200 estuaries ringing its shores. The mild temperatures assured that the shoreline in Florida was rich in wildlife, a perennial store of food for the indigenous peoples. "The Indians were tall in stature because they were rich in food." The natives lived in total harmony with nature.  "The European conquest introduced a future of imprudent relationships with nature." It is believed that over 350,000 aboriginals populated the Gulf coast. The unwelcome Spanish incursions of the 16th century "planted genocidal time bombs that helped clear the way for future colonization." The Spanish were replaced by the French, then the English,  and the Americans. The indigenous population was no more.
                                                       The purchase of Louisiana in 1803 and Florida in 1819 ceded most of the Gulf coast to the US. The admission of Texas a few decades later finished the process. Mapping the ever-changing coastline of inlets, bays, marshes and deltas was a job that occupied the government for most of the century. Fishing became the Gulf's primary occupation and Pensacola was its capital. Fishing off Florida's coast was so popular that it ignited a tourism boom. Of all the Gulf fish, it was the tarpon that attracted Americans as well known as Grover Cleveland, TR, Edison, Ford and  Ted Williams. It was six feet long and often over 100 pounds. Hemingway and Zane Grey wrote about it and railroads were built to transport people south to catch it.
                                                        However, it was not the attractions around nor the fish within, but the fuel below the Gulf that brought it to its pivotal role in the American economy. The 1901 the Spindletop gusher  that ushered in the petroleum era in America occurred just a couple of dozen miles from the Gulf.  Soon thereafter, the first ever water rigs appeared. Just after WW2, the first over-the-horizon rig drilled off the Louisiana coast.
                                                         The Florida coast has been protected by mangrove trees living comfortably between sea and fresh water for eons. The post-war era saw a vast immigration to the coast, one that cleared away the mangroves and replaced them with canals, breakwaters and cement seawalls. The sunbelt was attracting people and the onslaught of the Gulf's natural ways was underway. Pollution, meaningful and massive, followed the population increases and most importantly, the industrialization of the estuaries. Throughout the Gulf, and in particular at the mouth of the Mississippi, the waste, nitrates and pollution of two-thirds of the nation flowed into, and poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. A vast dead zone the size of New Jersey was discovered as early as the eighties. Throughout the region, pushback by private entities and pieces of local, state and federal governments are trying to turn the environmental depredation tide. "Fortunately, every estuarine bay and river has at least one organized group defending its ecological integrity. Multiple concerns are doing the same for the larger gulf."
                                                          This book is very well-done, and at 531 pages, pretty long. I can clearly state that if you want to know everything possible about the Gulf, this book is for you.

Tiger Woods, Benedict and Keteyian - B +

                                               Every aspect of Tiger's story requires us to reach for superlatives to discuss his golf. Phenomenal, greatest of all time, unsurpassed, extraordinary, remarkable, exceptional, astonishing, and on and on  - his golf career included the most dominating decade of any athlete in any sport at any time.  He was bigger than Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan. He drove the television ratings of the PGA ahead of the NFL. A young golfer of color took a sedate sport played by the few and made it more popular than America's secular religion. Incomprehensible. It was, and still is, Tigermania.
                                              Yet, his personal story is terribly sad. His parents created a person barely capable of functioning. He grew up friendless, never learned how to talk to or treat colleagues, teammates or coaches, blew off his high school/college girlfriend when told to do so by his folks. He told sophomoric, moronic, off-color jokes in attempts to relate to women. He eventually took control of his life in his early twenties. He found some space for privacy and established an important relationship with Joanna Jagoda, a woman who had a settling effect on his life. But she moved on to law school and out of the limelight. He found friendship and camaraderie in Las Vegas with the rich and famous, particularly Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan. For the high rollers in sin city, discretion was part of the appeal. Another part of the appeal was the endless buffet of available and attractive women. Las Vegas provided privacy and a release from the high-pressured life of being Tiger. However, it was at home at Isleworth where the aspirational role model for his life lived happily, with a beautiful wife and two kids. Mark O'Meara was Tiger's friend, neighbor, and mentor.  Mark and Alicia provided Tiger his home away from home. In 2004, he married Elin Nordegren. However, being married to a gorgeous woman was not enough for Tiger's narcissistic personality.  Las Vegas beckoned and Tiger continued years of endless serial philandering that exceeded that of his father's. As Tiger grew older, one aspect of his life remained mired in the past and that was his complete lack of human understanding and empathy. After insulting then president Bill Clinton by declining a White House invitation, he later asked Clinton to make an appearance at an event in California. The ex-president duffer asked for an 18-hole round in exchange; Tiger ignored him on the course, walked off greens chatting on his cellphone while Clinton was putting, and generally treated Bill Clinton like crap. Jerk is an inadequate descriptor. After Earl died in 2006, an unhinged Tiger went off to take SEALS training rather than prepare for the US Open. He later won the British and crushed it for the balance of the year. His golf kept getting better, but his personal life was on the brink. He escaped exposure of an affair with a waitress in the 'Enquirer' in exchange for an interview in 'Men's Fitness.' His daughter Sam was born in early 2007. Years of weight-lifting and very physical golfing led to medical problems that peaked in 2008, when he won the US Open with no ACL and two stress fractures.  Painkillers became part of his life, while the great golf and good times in Las Vegas continued. His son Charlie was born early in 2009. His womanizing was getting worse and worse and he actually lost a major, after leading going into the final day. Thanksgiving weekend of 2009 was when the world that Tiger had created fell apart. Elin, and soon everyone, learned of his multiple transgressions.
                                             After 45 days at a sex addiction clinic, he made a televised apology to the world at PGA headquarters. He then played well in the 2010 Masters, but seemed uncomfortable. Hank Haney, his coach of many years, walked away. Elin finalized their divorce over the summer. He and his caddie, Steve Williams, had a nasty falling out in the fall. And the injuries started piling up. He missed most of 2011, but had a very solid stretch in 2012 and 2013 and regained his number one ranking after winning a few tournaments. His personal life was shaping up after he and Lindsey Vonn got together. Back surgery in 2014 was followed  by some absolutely horrible golf the following year and the end of the relationship with Vonn. In the summer 2015, his once only friend on the tour was inducted into the Golf Hall of Fame before the British Open. Mark O'Meara twice specifically asked Tiger to come. Although he was in St. Andrews, Woods did not join the other almost two dozen tour players who attended the ceremony. He spent most of 2016 recovering from two more back surgeries. A year later, he had back fusion surgery that was followed by an arrest after he nearly overdosed on painkillers. Tiger has put his medications behind him, is free of pain and has played some competitive rounds of golf this year. There are reports that he may even be a better man.  Let's hope he is.

The Flight Attendant, Bohjalian - C

                                               The first nine-tenths of this novel is about the trial and travails of Cassie, a woman who drinks herself into blackouts, pretty much sleeps with whoever is at hand and lies to everyone in her life. Her family, colleagues, union and lawyer do their best to keep her on an even keel after she wakes up in a Dubai hotel with a dead man. The first implausible plot twist is followed by a few more on a way to an unforgettable conclusion.  For me, it doesn't even rate a look-see at the beach.

Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Evolution, Purdum - B +

                                               They are America's most successful song writers, winners of 34 Tonys, 15 Oscars, 2 Pulitzers, 2 Grammys and 2 Emmys. They were very skilled businessmen who controlled their product and maximized their revenue. The created Oklahoma!, Carousel, The King and I, South Pacific and The Sound of Music. "Oklahoma! was the first musical to fully integrate song, story and dance in the service of a realistic narrative and character development, revolutionizing the Broadway theater forever." They were also the producers for other works such as Annie Get Your Gun and I Remember Mama. In October, 1957, their 90-minute live television presentation of Cinderella preempted Ed Sullivan and was watched by 107 million people, two-thirds of the country's population. Walking through Disney World today, one of the theme songs in the background is Surrey With the Fringe on Top. They created the modern musical; their songs permeate our culture.
                                               Ockie Hammesrstein had it easy. He was born into the business, seamlessly slid into a job, and began producing and creating in the 1920's. He had middling success until he teamed up with Jerome Kern and created Showboat in 1926. He tried his hand in Hollywood and felt he was over the hill, done for and a has been by the early '40's. Richard Rodgers grew up in a prosperous musical house and was writing musicals with Lorenz Hart while still a teenager. They had a run of successful shows in NY and London, and in the late '30's, they created hit after hit including I'd Rather Be Right, starring George M. Cohan, On Your Toes, featuring a George Balanchine ballet, and Pal Joey, which brought a new depth of character development to a musical, and featured Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. However, Hart's drinking brought an end to their collaborations.
                                             The play Green Grow The Lilacs was written in France by a young man trying to recreate his youth in Indian Territory. It had a brief run in NY in the early '30's but had made an impression on both Rodgers and Hammerstein, who decided in 1942 to do it together. It took Hammerstein three weeks to write Oh What A Beautiful Mornin and ten minutes for Rodgers to bang out the tune. They created, raised money, hired the cast and the director, arranged for the orchestration and took it on the road. Oklahoma! premiered on March 31, 1943 and was an instant sensation. It ran for a little over five years. It was the most successful musical ever and perfectly matched the mood of a nation fighting a war to build a better world. Seventy-five years later, it still stirs the soul.
                                              They worked together on a redo of State Fair before adapting a turn of the century Hungarian drama called Liliom, which they turned into Carousel. Backed by the same creative teams, it previewed out of town and was severely panned in Boston. Reworked and cut by almost a third, it opened April 19, 1945 to rapturous reviews. It featured You'll Never Walk Alone and If I Loved You. It was Dick Rodgers favorite of them all.
                                              They then turned Michener's loosely connected Tales into the majestic South Pacific. It won every award imaginable, including the Pulitzer, and launched what the author calls the empire phase of their careers. Anna and the King of Siam became the King and I, which required more pre-Broadway cutting than any of their other works. It was also a resounding success. They finally began to allow Hollywood to film their works. They actually produced Oklahoma themselves and let the studios do Carousel and The King and I. They succeeded spectacularly with their tv production of Cinderella. To be fair, the 50's were not all magic for them as both Pipe Dream and Me and Juliet were flops and Lerner and Lowe was pushing them with My Fair Lady. Rodgers had had cancer surgery a few years back, drank too much and had a breakdown after Cinderella. He spent three months in a high-end  private hospital in Manhattan. They produced the film version of South Pacific in 1958. Because they had allowed their long-time director to use ill-advised color filters throughout, the critics panned it.  Rodgers thought it was "awful." But as the author points out, the material was "indestructible", a smashing success and the album sat atop the charts for a year. They followed up with Flower Drum Song which was, at best, ok, but paled compared to what Oscar's protege, Stephen Sondheim, had done with West Side Story. Their final magical transformation was to convert a 1956 German movie, Die Trapp Familie into The Sound of Music. While the show was in previews in Boston, Hammerstein, dying of stomach cancer, penned his last work, Edelweiss. The show opened in late 1959 and the New York reviewers felt it was too old fashioned. The public disagreed. The cast album and the later movie soundtrack made The Sound of Music the "best selling Broadway score of all time."
                                             Ockie died at 65 on August 22, 1960. Rodgers would struggle to find his footing for the balance of the almost twenty years he had left. He was involved with the capstone of their career, the movie version of The Sound Of Music. The film was panned as saccharine by the NY critics, but won the Best Movie Oscar and is so revered in American society that Lady Gaga and Julie Andrews reprised songs for the Oscar show fifty years later. He tried his hand at a few things, but there was no magic left. He had a heart attack in the late 60's, that was followed up by the removal of a cancerous larynx. He died at the end of 1979 as an Oklahoma revival opened on Broadway. "As had been done for Oscar Hammerstein nineteen years earlier, the lights of the Broadway that Richard Rogers had changed forever were darkened in his honor."
                                            In the '70's and '80's, their "wholesome, cheery land" fell out of favor. Some blamed them for America's Vietnam policies because of the western exceptionalism in South Pacific and The King And I. It was a passing fad as revivals in both NY and London  returned them to their rightful place.  It has been estimated that "Rodgers ranks as the most-played composer of any kind of music, ever." Hammerstein's lyrics are part of our everyday life. I grew up in a house where the 78rpm albums for Oklahoma, The King and I and South Pacific played often. I love the theater, am happy to have introduced my daughter to it and am looking forward to an Oklahoma show next week with Lauren and her daughter Eloise. What more could anyone ask of such magnificent artists than to have enriched the lives of generations.

Eat The Apple, Young - B+

                                               Sixty years makes a difference. It is a long way in American history between 1945 and 2005, when this profane and uncertain Marine memoir begins. Recruit (fill-in-the blank), Past-me, Person thing  (some of the ways the author refers to himself here)  keeps wondering why the hell he volunteered for this. Ironically,  he is assigned to mortars and trained at Pendleton, just like Sledge. He's off to Iraq in January 2006. You fly from California, to Maine, to Frankfurt, to Kuwait filled with fear, anxiety, self-loathing and more fear. " I feel like an animal in a trap waiting for some hunter to come put a slug between i's eyes." After being in-country for a while, they occupy part of a village. "The house is a terrarium of horror; we are being eaten alive. Our feet and hands split and puss and crust, and sleep does not come." "We pray for a barrage of mortars to wipe us away." In April, the Humvee he is in is flipped by an ied. Two of his comrades are sent away never to come back; he is concussed, confused, in the hospital and soon back on duty. After eight months in the sand, you get to go back to Camp Pendleton and merit some leave time. Drink yourself insensitive as much as you possibly can. Fuck anything that will let you, while feeling bad about your fiancee back in Indiana. By September of 2007, the battalion is back in the exact same place they left the previous year. But, it is different this time - there is little if any shooting going on.  Back to the states for more drinking, fucking and fighting in bars. He volunteers for a third tour and convinces the ready-to-be-convinced psychiatric officer that he is ready to go. No sir, I don't smoke, I don't have nightmares, I don't get into bar fights, I don't drink, I don't take drugs, my family is behind my decision. No sir, I do not dream of being devoured by decaying dogs. The third time's a charm. At the HQ security detail, there's hot food, air-conditioned barracks, a swimming pool and a Burger King. "There are no more tactical firing ranges, no more sun-bleached camouflage utilities, no mud, no detainees." It's a quick 12 week tour and back to California, to do steroids with Hang Ten Tony. Barely surviving and staying out of the brig, his enlistment is up.
                                               Unlike Sledge, Young did not have his proverbial shit together when he joined up. Sledge was half-way through college, came from normal family and knew what he was doing when he joined. Young was a crazed, angry teen from a broken family who escaped a drink and drug filled life of failure when he enlisted. Is that the reason for the difference? Was it generational? Was it the mission? I do not know. Either way, loyalty to comrade is the constant. Marines are exemplary in their commitment to each other. The author pulled his life together, married, went to Oregon State, obtained a Masters  at the University of Miami and has written a helluva story here.

With The Old Guard, Sledge - A*

                                            Thirty-six years after his experiences at Peleliu and Okinawa, E. B Sledge, by then a retired ornithology professor and PhD., published what is generally considered the finest memoir of the war in the Pacific. His story was the foundation of HBO's 'The Pacific' and the audio version of this book is voiced by Tom Hanks.
                                            He volunteered for the Marines and arrived in 1944 in the Pacific as a Pfc. 60mm motorman and replacement in the 1st Division. On 15 September, they stepped out onto Peleliu. Whether the battle was worth the effort has been long debated. Many think it was not strategically necessary. It was the first time the Japanese utilized defense-in-depth, as opposed to fighting on the beach. The result was a Marine casualty rate twice that of Tarawa and later equalled at Iwo Jima. Day one was gut-wrenching fear, anxiety, confusion, incoming artillery, no sleep, filth and thirst.  Advancing across a Japanese airfield, "bullets snapped and cracked, and tracers went by me at waist height. To be shelled by massed artillery and mortar is absolutely terrifying, but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who hasn't experienced it." On the third night, an experienced officer made the observation that courage was a matter of doing your duty while afraid. There was no ever being unafraid. They were relieved on D +10 by Army soldiers, only to march around to another part of the island and continue the fight. "The war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely...........Time had no meaning; life had no meaning." Added to the physical threat and emotional exhaustion  was the stench. They were on a rocky atoll, surrounded by decaying corpses, accumulated human waste and rotting food. Sledge survived and on 30 October left the island. His company left with 85 of 235 unhurt. The Marines suffered 1252 dead and 5274 injured. The Army lost 542 with 2736 wounded. As for the defenders, they had 10,900 dead, and of the 312 captured, only seven were soldiers.  The rest were civilians.
                                            They were sent back to the Solomons for rest and refitting. The war in the Pacific was not non-stop and Marines had months off between action. Okinawa, only 350 miles from the home islands, was expected to be, and was, the longest and largest battle in the Pacific. It had 110,000 defenders. The Marines were advised their beach casualties would be 80-85%. At 0830 on April 1, Easter Sunday, they went ashore. Fifty-thousand men landed unopposed. Although there was heavy fighting, the 1st Marines were in the rear and not in the mix for the entire month of April. They went into action on May 1 and would stay at it for 50 days. The fighting on Okinawa is well-known for it's intensity, and compounding the tension in May was rain, lots of rain. He describes trying to dig a foxhole through a decaying maggot-infested Japanese corpse with hands deformed by malnutrition. As good as the US was at supporting its frontline troops, weeks of cold food, rotting clothes, the unburied dead and endless enemy fire took its toll. Okinawa was finally taken on 21 June. Their war was over. Company K had gone to Peleliu with 285 men. Eighty-five landed on Okinawa. Only 26 were there when the battle ended. ""War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste. Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it."
                                            This extraordinary story is highly regarded because it is so plainly and almost matter of factly written. Sledge does not deal with any big picture issues. He never mentions Pearl Harbor and barely comments on FDR's death or V-E Day. There are no histrionics or paeans to patriotism. It was about being a Marine and doing your duty. He does observe that they hated the Japanese because they had mutilated American dead. That's it. No more, no less.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, Grann - B +

                                                The Osage refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon because new and taller plants crowd out and kill the smaller ones already budding and send their petals into the sky like confetti. The Osage of the 1920's were considered the wealthiest people in the world because every member of their tribe collected a quarterly dividend in the thousands from the oil found on their reservation decades before. The Osage had purchased their land in Oklahoma with the monies the US had given them when booting them out of Kansas. They thus had a stronger hand to play when the Territory was opened up to white men and were fortunate enough to have language placed in the state Enabling Act providing the tribe with permanent mineral rights, even if an individual Indian sold his share of the tribe's land.  In May 1921, two Indians were murdered at about the same time and likely with the same .38. One of the two, Anna Brown, had a sister who had preceded her in death and a mother who died soon thereafter. It appeared as if both the sister and mother had been poisoned. In the following months more were poisoned, and eventually, a national newspaper ran a headline 'CONSPIRACY BELIEVED TO KILL RICH INDIANS'. The Indians' wealth attracted jealousy and attention. The US intervened to appoint guardians and restrict the natives' access to their own money.  Anna's sister and her husband were blown to smithereens when their home was dynamited in 1923. The official death toll in the Osage Reign of Terror was now 24. Whenever someone investigated and made some progress, they were found dead soon thereafter.  In 1925 Jim White, an agent of the Bureau of Investigation, an obscure federal agency,  arrived in Oklahoma. He had been sent personally by J. Edgar Hoover in an attempt to save the fledgling bureau's investigation and likely, Hoover's career. White was a wizened former Texas Ranger who was able to dig deeper and fine-tune probable suspects. What he did establish within a few months, though, was that many of the whites involved with helping the Indians were, in fact, ripping them off. It has been estimated that by 1925, the local legal, advisory, and business community had siphoned off $8 million of Osage money. White's investigations pointed to Anna Brown's surviving sister, Mollie, who inherited quite a bit of mineral rights and was married to Ernest Burkhard. At that point, Mollie's two children with Burkhard were the potential recipients of a bona-fide fortune. A local businessman, and coincidentally Burkhard's uncle, William Hale, seemed to be at he center of much that was questionable, yet he was beloved by all and was known as 'The Reverend'. The Feds arrested White and Burkhard with the intent of turning Burkhard, which they did. White obtained the confession of another witness, but Hale would not admit guilt.  Newspapers reported that the ensuing trial generated more interest than the previous year's 'Scopes Monkey Trial'. The first trial of William Hale ended in a hung jury; the second rightly sent him to Leavenworth for life. Hale was met at the prison by Jim White, who had tired of moving for the Bureau and welcomed the stability of the job as Warden.  Hoover was able to leverage White's success into establishing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, providing it with new police powers and an extended mission. The 'G Men' were now a national legend.

                                          The author concludes with a section on his research for the book and his discovery that there is much more to the story. The Reign of Terror was generally thought to have occurred from 1921-25 and coincided with William Hale's time in Osage Country. The author searched records far and wide and believes it started as early as 1919 and was still going on in the 30's. He names names and finds dozens more cases of Indians who were poisoned, disappeared, or were straight out murdered for their money. 'Tis another sad chapter in the plight of those who were here first and, in this instance, flat-out robbed long after the frontier was closed.

Retribution, Jacobsen - B

                                               This is the third book by the author, and needless to say, I am hooked, as I read the first one just a bit over a month ago. Jacobsen is a Danish orthopedic surgeon and introduces us to something I had no clue about.  Denmark has a substantial special forces arm, has been an enthusiastic NATO supporter, and has suffered more casualties per soldiers served, in the Middle East and Afghanistan, than any other member. So we get to visit the decades-old war on terror from a very different perspective.
                                               The book opens up with a hypothetical attack at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen that stuns and traumatizes the nation. The action switches back and forth between Jordan, where the attacks are planned, and the city, where they are trying to figure out what happened the first time and how to avoid a second attack. The author further develops the two characters from 'Trophy', adds a few more, and plots a devilish page-turner. A very fun read.