I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank Sheeran "The Irishman" And Closing The Case On Jimmy Hoffa, Brandt - B -

                                 This is Sheeran's story, told in the first person, as he related it over the course of half-a-dozen years to the author, a former prosecutor. He was born in 1920, had a classic impoverished rough and tumble Catholic childhood in Philadelphia, got kicked out of school in the 9th grade, grew to be 6'4" and saw over 400 days of combat in N. Africa and Italy. He came back meaner and tougher, without any moral compass.  He worked different jobs around Philadelphia, and met noted crime boss Russell Bufalino in 1955. Soon thereafter, he did his first 'job' for the Philly mob. Russell then introduced him to Jimmy Hoffa, who offered Sheeran an organizer's job in Detroit. At Hoffa's behest, he occasionally 'took care of somebody'. Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department spent years trying put Jimmy Hoffa behind bars and finally, in 1964, he was sent to 'school' for eight years. He didn't enter a penitentiary until three years later, after all his appeals were denied. After a hefty bribe delivered by Sheeran to John Mitchell, President Nixon pardoned Hoffa in late 1971. Hoffa's one ambition after release from prison was to regain the presidency of the Teamsters. He began to publicly state that his successor was too lenient on the repayment terms of all the mob money lent out by the Pension Fund.  By threatening the powers that be, Hoffa sealed his fate and was gunned down by Sheeran on July 30, 1975. Although the FBI never solved the case, most of the people they thought were in on it, including Sheeran, went to jail for one thing or another. Sheeran told it all to the author late in life as a confession of his sins. 

Many Rivers To Cross, Robinson - B+

                                  This novel is the latest in the acclaimed DCI Banks series that is now over 30 years old. Like almost all writers of European crime fiction for the last quarter-of-a-century, the author delves into the immigration issues that have bedeviled the EU. The victim in this one is a young Syrian boy who somehow got to England, but ran into the wrong people, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. More interesting though, is the ongoing story of a Moldovan woman who appeared in the last Banks novel, and whose story will be continued in the next one. Trafficked out of Moldova by some really bad guys from the Balkans, Zelda has managed to escape, survive and make a bit of a life with one of Banks' friends. She has a unique skill and is a 'super recognizer', who can remember every face she has ever seen and who occasionally works for the British government. She has seen those traffickers and now knows that they are  in the UK. It's an interesting plot line and I don't believe the author has carried a story forward in the past. Indeed,  it's interesting enough that I'm trying to figure out when the next book will be published.

Elevator Pitch, Barclay - B

                                  This is a very solid thriller set in today's NYC.  The title stems from the fact that someone with a very solid political motive and or connection to elevators embarks on a terrorist activity involving sabotaging elevators. The impact on the world's most vertical city is obviously paralyzing and terrifying. The conclusion is a bit weak, but all in all a fun ride.

The Ghost Map: The Story Of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World, Johnson - B

                                 In 1854, London had two-and-a-half million people crammed inside a 30 mile circumference and no system for the removal of waste. That job was left to scavengers who scoured the city for anything of value and night-soil men who emptied the city's cesspools. The city had grown in fifty-years from a million, totally lacked the infrastructure to handle that growth and was literally drowning in its own filth. In September, cholera broke out in the Golden Square neighborhood of Soho and it broke out with a vengeance. A disease that usually took days to kill was now felling entire families in 24 hours or less. 

                                  A well on Broad Street was examined and a sample of its water taken by Dr. John Snow. But the technology of the times was not able to analyze and assess the sample. Snow was the first medical professional to propose that cholera was a waterborne disease. He did so in the face of an establishment that believed in the miasma theory that all illnesses are airborne. So, he decided to track deaths, their location and their source of drinking water.  A week into the crisis, he convinced the supervisors to shut down the Broad Street well. It was the first scientifically driven preventive measure ever taken against the disease. 

                                   Snow put together a map that convinced the local clergyman of the waterborne theory, and it was adopted by the Vestry Committee. Slowly and over time, the theory gained traction. Recognition of the pollution of the Thames as a source of waterborne disease and endless stench led to the construction of a sewer system, moving storm water and waste far to the east and hopefully out to sea. The sewers built in the mid-19th century are the backbone of today's system in London. "Establishing sanitary water supplies and waste management systems became  the central infrastructure project of every city on the planet." Electrification came later, but without a sewer system, the world's cities could not continue to grow and prosper.

                                     This book is much more than a history of a singular event. Rather, it is a far ranging and enchanting story of English history, sociology, and politics along with updates on 19th century medicine and public health. Thanks to my brother Bill for the recommendation.

Reckonings: Legacies Of Nazi Persecution And The Quest For Justice, Fulbrook - B, Inc.

  This award-winning book explores how people were transformed by the experiences of the Holocaust. Both the processes of  persecution, and the long-term reverberations, are explored through the experiences of the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Early on, the Nazis sponsored state violence in order to reestablish law and order and to clear Germany of undesirables. Before the war, the 1930's saw the construction of camps throughout the country, often in close proximity to major cities. Jews, Roma, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses were uniformly condemned, imprisoned, tortured, and often murdered. "The work of leading Nazis was made infinitely easier by varying combinations  of support, complicity, acquiescence, accommodation, or capitulation among those who, for whatever reasons, did not engage in courageous acts of resistance or organized opposition." Many advanced their careers by enthusiastically embracing the Nazi's policies. Far more widespread was simple conformity. The first mass victims of Nazi extermination policies met their death in Germany, not Poland. They were the mentally and physically disabled,  whose life was deemed unworthy of living. For the common good, euthanasia of the disabled began in 1939, starting with infants and eventually, children and adults. The medical profession committed the crimes and the state's lawyers looked the other way. The euthanasia killing centers were in Germany proper and became known to the local public, who occasionally raised a mild complaint, but generally accepted what was going on around them. Those who managed the program learned important skills and many were later transferred east to participate in the burgeoning Holocaust. Those who assisted had such small roles in a large programs that they were able to later claim that their contributions were de minimis. 

  The occupation of Poland led to the first ghettos and death camps, and the opportunity for non-Germans to aid and abet the Nazis. For two years, until the invasion of the USSR and the decision to implement the Final Solution the Jews starved and suffered in Poland's ghettos. From that point on, the Jews of Poland, whether in city ghettos or small towns,  and the Jews from the rest of Europe were sent to the charnel houses. As the war's progression led to manpower shortages in German industry, many Jews, as well as POWs, were worked to death as slave laborers. Somewhere between 200,000 and one million people were directly involved in killing Jewish civilians. The invasion of the USSR gave free range to the Einsatzgruppen, who slaughtered 1.8 million Jews in the opening months of Barbarossa. The work of killing innocents was so stressful that the Reich had to devise a more efficient method than shooting in place. Zyklon-B was utilized at Auschwitz and its success led to the scaling up of the Nazi's industrial killing machines.  "Auschwitz remains an iconic site not only of remembrance but also of selective oblivion." Its place in history as the epitome of evil has been sealed by the number of deaths -well over a million - and the number of survivors whose memoirs ably described the horrors that took place there. At nearby Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, pure extermination camps, where there was no work to be done by the prisoners, there were virtually no survivors. And without witnesses, very few of the managers of the extermination camps were ever brought to justice. The killings returned to Germany as the war waned. The Soviet arrival sent hundreds of thousands on forced marches from the camps into the Reich. Those marches became known as death marches and every corner of Germany saw them. For those who survived, "the experience of persecution was the defining experience of their life, they could never forget or evade the past, only learn to live with it." Their lives changed in a matter of minutes and they went from living a normal life to losing any sense of individuality and even humanity. They became members of a subspecies. For those who survived, "they were neither entirely of  the living nor of the dead, but rather a community apart." Most survivors could only talk about their experiences with other survivors and even then, sparingly. 

  In Poland, occupied Germany and Austria, many were brought to swift justice in the immediate aftermath of the war. Nuremberg saw the trial of the top dozen surviving Nazi leaders and the exposition of their atrocities to the world. The Americans followed up with successor trials against the Army, the Luftwaffe, government bureaucrats, doctors, the Einsatzgruppen, concentration camp officials, industrial leaders,  I.G. Farben, manufacturer of Zyklon-B and others. The British held 358 trials.  Although there were hundreds executed, most were sentenced to jail and almost all of those jail terms were reduced because of a general amnesty in 1950. These men were need back in society to assist West Germany in the Cold War. West Germany also developed what the author calls 'the alibi of a nation', scapegoating the excesses of the SS and the Gestapo and alleging the army was clean. After the victors' trials, each of the successor states, Austria, East and West Germany also held trials, with the focus on activities in those states and involving crimes against fellow Germans or Austrians. 

   At the half way point in this book, I was forced to call it quits. The topic is of immeasurable consequence, one I have an interest in and a meaningful amount of knowledge about. But, the depth of the detail and the fact that in order to deal with a given topic, e.g., the use of slave labor, the author roves far, wide, back and forth and into specifics about one or two people, and then back to industry or state wide topics left me spinning. 

Lady In The Lake, Lippman - B

                                  This novel is a thriller/detective story set in Baltimore in the mid-60's. It is seen through the eyes of the two principal characters, Maddie and Cleo. Maddie is a suburban Jewish mom who decides, at 37, to give it all up and try her hand at a newspaper. Cleo is a younger black woman who hangs out with the wrong kind of men and winds up dead. The book delves into the two worlds the two different woman inhabit, Maddie's road to independence, and Cleo's struggles to find happiness.

The Secrets We Kept, Prescott - B+

                                  This wonderful novel is set on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the 1950's. The American half of the story is about the very bright young women who typed for the CIA at a time when, regardless of education, that was what women did. One actually makes it out of the typing pool to become a courier and eventually, a foreign agent. The more interesting half of the story is set in Russia and features Boris Pasternak, and Olga Ivinskaya, his inspiration for Lara. Pasternak's privileged life as a poet was always on the edge of disaster because it was generally known that he didn't really toe the communist line. Indeed at one point, they sent Olga to the Gulag as a warning to him. His affair with Olga ran for decades and she was an integral partner in the long term writing of Dr. Zhivago. The CIA tie in is that after the novel was published, the CIA was instrumental in getting Russian copies of the book into the USSR. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel, but suffered from a vicious counterattack by the Soviet establishment. The book was not released in the USSR until 1988.

White Hot Silence, Porter - B-

                                  This is a pretty good thriller set in Italy, Russia and Estonia featuring a famous aid worker and humanitarian kidnapped by Russians. The aid worker is married to an American billionaire who has uncovered a nefarious plot hatched in Moscow to disrupt European democracies. The point of the kidnapping is to make him back off from trying to expose the anti-democratic hijinks. There is, for me, one gaping hole in the plot. The Silicon Valley investor happens to have been a Kurdish Peshmerga commander and experienced fighter in a prior life. Things often do not add up in thrillers, but this is too much to ask of one character. The spouse is freed from the Russians, the plot against Europe foiled and the billionaire safely ensconced back in California. 

The Shadow King, Mengiste - C

                                  This is a novel about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.  It is seen through the eyes of an Ethiopian peasant woman, Hirut, who joined the army, fought bravely and escaped Italian captivity. The author had been told stories by her grandfather, and committed to writing the novel after she learned that her great grandmother had also been a combatant. Woman throughout the country joined the resistance, fought beside the men and supported the armies as laborers, cooks and healers. Both Hirut and her rival and ally, Aster, are the leaders of the many women who bravely and effectively fought the Fascist invaders. My preference for all novels, historical or otherwise, is for a straight forward narrative, and this is just a bit too elusive for me. Nonetheless, it is a Booker Prize finalist.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream, Lemann - B

                                    The title of this book is a counterpoint to a 1950's one called 'Organization Man'. Then, the American economy and society were dominated by big corporations and other institutions such as unions, governments, colleges and school systems that offered lifetime employment in exchange for security and  conformity. That world is long gone and today's transactional world is its opposite in every measure. Wealth is now concentrated, and the public arena is fraught with anger. "This book aims to lay out the history of our move from an institution-oriented to a transactional-oriented society." The transactional society is now slowly becoming networked by big technology. The history is told through the eyes of Adolf Berle, Michael Jensen and Reid Hoffman. 

Berle was born in 1895 as America was in the middle of its multi-generational struggle to determine how to control the concentration of power in big business. By 21, he had obtained three Harvard degrees. He practiced as a lawyer and gave serious consideration to the role of the corporation and its relationship to its shareholders. He published 'The Modern Corporation and Private Property'. Large corporations with tens of thousands of shareholders were essentially answerable to no one, and only the federal government was capable of controlling them. He became an advisor to Governor Roosevelt  and sketched out the essentials of the New Deal for him. Controlled capitalism came out of the Depression, managed the war effort and treated post-war America to a period of unimaginable prosperity. The large corporation and its people reigned supreme and was responsive and responsible to all stakeholders. In the 1950's, management consultant Peter Drucker proposed that big companies had social responsibilities, and America's biggest, GM, responded by offering health care and retirement benefits to the UAW. This world in which the forces of capital had been tamed began to change in the 1970's when substantial pools of money in pension plans and mutual funds came to the fore. Corporate pension plans owned a third of the stock issued in America, leading Drucker to announce that the workers of America owned the means of production. Soon, the providers of capital would demand higher returns on their investments. 

Mike Jensen enrolled in the graduate economics program at the University of Chicago in the early sixties at a time when the idea that the markets were the proper governing institution of the postwar world was gaining traction. Milton Friedman, among others, argued that corporate America was not sufficiently market oriented. Jensen and a partner published in 1976 a 'Theory of the Firm', castigating corporate managers for not acting as owners and not maximizing profits. Soon thereafter, corporate raiders, mergers, and hostile takeovers were the rage.  One third of the companies on the Fortune 500 did not maintain their independence in the 1980's. Wall Street changed from genteel provider of advice to its corporate accounts to swashbuckling raiders and traders. And more importantly, the social construct of running business for the well being of the community vanished. The Financial Stabilization Act of 1999 further deregulated Wall Street as financiers pushed boundaries more and more.   Eventually, Jensen concluded that the markets had overplayed their hand, as all anyone did anymore was manage for quarterly earnings. The new century saw a headlong rush from deregulation to outright speculation. It all fell apart in the Great Recession. The transaction men had demolished  the organization men, and in turn, were laid low by their own hubris. The system was adrift. 

Reid Hoffman was born in California in the late 60's. He was a gamer, and a Stanford grad who became CFO of PayPal and believed in the power of the network. He went on to found LinkedIn and became a proponent of 'social operating systems', whereby people connected person to person, and not to or from a larger entity. Money was to be made owning the connective infrastructure, not providing the content. In 2011, LinkedIn went public and today has 500 million members. In 2016, the firm was sold to Microsoft.

 The information about and the ideas generated in Silicon Valley are fascinating. But at no point does the author tie them in to the big issues that the previous ideas tackled: how to control big capital and big business, how to weigh the needs of a society, how to regulate and control fair outcomes? He closes with the observation that the organizing ideas of the past cannot make a comeback and that we are both economically and politically in hot water. He suggests a sort of return to basics,  and having interest groups fix the day to day issues and not worrying about grandiose concepts as the solution. 

Throughout the book, the author returns again and again to a neighborhood in Chicago to illustrate his points. Chicago Lawn was once an all white blue collar neighborhood just east of Midway Airport. In the 1950's, it was filled with working class Catholic ethnics, who were the bastion of the postwar world order in America. They worked for the plants in the neighborhood:  General Foods, car parts fabricators and other small manufacturers. Many worked for the city and regardless of where they worked, they voted Democratic and went to church on Sunday. The 60's saw an occasional person of color move in. The 80's saw all of the public companies in the neighborhood close up their local plants and stores. Their withdrawal ended  the economic stability of the neighborhood. The banks that financed homes were gone, and in the 2000's, many, particularly Hispanics, were victimized by mortgage brokers. Soon, community leaders met with bankers, the Governor, Senator Durbin and  the local organizer, Barack Obama, in an attempt to do something about the foreclosure crisis. Of course, they failed. The US saved the financial institutions, but not their customers. 

This has been an enlightening and informative read. I have tended to think of our nation's income inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class as caused by globalization and technology. Perhaps I've overlooked the financial services sectors' deregulation because I prospered from it. Clearly, globalization, technology and deregulation of the financial markets are the three primary reasons for our predicament. That said, the author finished with an almost incoherent whimper.

  

                                   

Chances Are, Russo - B+

                                  This fabulous novel features three men, all blue-collar underdogs who meet while working as 'hashers' in the kitchen of the Theta sorority house at fictional Minerva College in 1967. Most of the girls are from places like Greenwich while the three men are scholarship kids working their way through. The most important event of their young lives comes on Dec. 1, 1969, the night of the first lottery,  when one loses, one wins and one isn't so sure what his number means. On Memorial Day after their 1971 graduation, one of the Thetas joins them for the weekend on Cape Cod. Jacy leaves early on Tuesday morning, leaves a good-bye note and is never seen again. Her disappearance is still center stage when they reunite on the Cape forty-four years later. This is a truly superb exploration of life, love, family, the threat of war, heartbreak, failure, the eked out successes we all seek, and hopefully claim. The fact that it is written by someone my age  provides an eerie immediacy. 

Lock Every Door, Sage - B

                                  When a book is labeled a page turner and it's dedicated to Ira  Levin, you have a suspicion of what follows. On the Upper West Side overlooking Central Park is a hundred year old building filled to the brim with really nasty people. They have a propensity to hire apartment sitters who tend to be young, healthy and without family. To say more  would be inappropriate. This is nice easy fun.

The Accomplice, Kanon - C

                            Max, an ailing and old Nazi hunter,  sits in a cafe in 1962 trying to convince his nephew Aaron, a CIA desk man, to join the family business. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a man walking away and tells his nephew that the man is Otto Schramm, noted number two  to Mengele at Auschwitz. Max's heart attack and death convince Aaron to try to track down Schramm. He goes to Buenos Aires and follows Otto's daughter, Hanna. Aaron locates Schramm and recruits the Mossad, who snatch Schramm off the street. The CIA joins the fray and wants to try and turn Otto, who winds up dead in an escape attempt. Hanna winds up assisting the CIA. Kanon is an accomplished writer in this genre, but I believe he has lost a step here.

City of Windows, Pobi - B+

                                                  This an excellent novel featuring a brilliant astrophysicist who in a prior life had worked for the FBI. Lucas Page had always been a polymath boy genius and currently teaches at Columbia. His FBI career was centered on his ability to envisage bullet trajectories in his head thus eliminating massive amounts of field work. He left the bureau after getting himself very badly shot up. When a sniper starts indiscriminately firing from the heights of NYC buildings, he is pulled back in. He brilliantly sorts it all out and so begins what will hopefully be a very good series.

Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder And Memory in Northern Ireland, Keefe - B +

                         In the north of Ireland, both faiths are in the minority. The Protestants are outnumbered on the island and are deathly afraid of the Republic. The Catholics are the distinct minority in the six counties of Northern Ireland. Somehow, notwithstanding a shared ethnicity and shared back-breaking poverty, they have developed a tribal hatred based on confessional idiosyncrasies to rival any on the planet. That hatred has waxed and waned over the centuries and came to the forefront once again in the late 1960's This book is nominally about the murder in 1972 of Jean McConville, a mother of ten, a Protestant who crossed the line and married a Catholic. What it really is though is a history of the Troubles,  the violent era from  1969-1999, and its aftermath. Sectarian violence accelerated throughout the sixties and in 1972, over 500 people died. The Troubles also meant the return of armed republicanism with the birth of the provisional wing of the IRA. The Provos accepted women for the first time as front line fighters and not handmaidens. The Price sisters, Dolours and Marian, were the daughters of committed members and early joiners. The year 1972 also saw the the legendary Bloody Sunday, when British paratroopers killed thirteen and London imposed direct rule. The British Army soon had 30,000 men in the north and, under the Special Powers Act, could intern anyone for as long as it wished without trial or any form of redress. Indeed, the UK was in full colonial suppression mode, utilizing any and all tools of counterinsurgency, including clandestine assassination. In the waning days of the year, a few men showed up at Jean McConville's apartment and took her away. Her children later said that her crime had been to provide a pillow to a British soldier bleeding to death in the street. Republicans said she was a traitor. A tactic that the IRA had been pursuing was car bombs. They eventually recognized they were killing people in Ireland and no one in Britain was paying much attention. Dolours Price suggested targeting London, and in March, two bombs went off in the capital. There were hundreds of casualties, but no deaths. Dolours, her sister Marian, Brendan Hughes and half a dozen others were captured at Heathrow. They were sentenced to twenty years. They demanded to be transferred to Ireland and be declared political prisoners. They went on a hunger strike and were force-fed for five months, but eventually prevailed and were transferred to Armagh. As the conflict continued, Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA in the north, concluded that a political victory, not a military one, was the true prerequisite to the eviction of the British. But the 1979 murder of Lord Mountbatten and the election of Margaret Thatcher, followed by the car bombing of Thatcher's campaign manager, pushed any resolution out to the future. Thatcher was unmoved as Bobby Sands was the first of ten hunger strikers to die in a British prison. However, as anorexia and other health issues plagued the Price sisters, the government remitted their sentences. Gerry Adams was elected to Westminster in 1983, but never attended. He began to push the movement to the political arena, acting on constituency and everyday living matters. Behind the scenes, he discussed the possibility of peace with moderate Catholics. The violence in the eighties toned down and in 1994, the IRA declared a cease fire. In 1998, Adams, retired US Senator George Mitchell and newly-elected British PM, Tony Blair, were negotiating a real peace. The ensuing Good Friday Accord provided that the six counties of the north could, at some stage in the future, join the Republic if a majority desired to do so.  In the new century, the idea of creating an honest record of the past grew and led to the creation of the oral history program at Boston College known as the Belfast Project. By agreement, no one's recollections would be available until after their death. Many of the faithful who spoke to the BC interviewer were disappointed in the GFA. They felt betrayed by Adams for giving up on the fight to evict the British and felt the rationale behind many of their actions, certainly criminal but done for a higher purpose, had now been reduced to the mundane. Two who spoke to BC were Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes. In 2003, the corpse of Jean McConville was found and interred. Before he died in 2005, Brendan Hughes had arranged for his oral transcript to be used in a book, and in 2010, 'Voices From The Grave' told many stories and, in particular, named Adams as the man who ordered innumerable actions including the London bombing and the murder of Jean McConville. Price too said that Adams ordered the McConville assassination. Adams, by then a member of the legislature in the Republic, was arrested in 2014, but no charges were ever filed. Twenty-years after the GFA, Northern Ireland is at peace, but it hasn't really changed. Ninety percent of children go to segregated elementary schools. No one has been held responsible for the atrocities committed by the government or the Provos and no admissions have been made by either side. The population of 1.5 million suffered a total dead during the Troubles of 35,000. The conflict is paused at the moment as Brexit wreaks havoc with the structure of the United Kingdom.This book is on every 'best of' list and is very, very good. My mother's grandmother came from what is now the north and was a staunch Republican. My father's grandfather came from County Cork. Thus, I have always leaned left on this topic and sincerely believe that the British oppressed the Irish for centuries and deserve to be tossed off the island. This story depicts chapter and verse the atrocities inflicted on the Catholics in the north. I'm sympathetic to their right to rebel, but am truly saddened by the cold-hearted extremes of their tactics. There is much blame to spread around on this topic.

The Darkness, Jonasson - B

                                  This is the first book in a three-part Icelandic series featuring Hulda Hemannsdottir, a Reyjavik detective during her last few days of work. At 64 plus, she's about to be pensioned off and decides to take a peek at a cold case involving the death of a young Russian woman who had been seeking asylum. It had been declared a suicide, but it didn't feel right. Hulda uncovers some serious wrongdoing when the story abruptly, and totally without resolution, ends. I guess that's what brings on the click for the next one. 

A Bend In The Stars, Barenbaum - B-

                                  This is a solid novel set in and around Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania) and Kiev in the summer of 1914. The key characters are Jewish, at a time when the institutionalized hatred and persecution of Jews in the Pale is worse than ever, with war on the horizon. Miri is a physician, as is her fiance, Yuri.  Her brother Vanya is a brilliant theoretical mathematician, engaged in a bit of a long-distance rivalry with Albert Einstein. The focus of the story is Vanya's attempt to photograph an eclipse to see light bend, and thus to  confirm the theory of relativity before Einstein. It is also a love story as the brave Sasha replaces Yuri in Miri's heart. The author attempts a broad brush depiction of the chaos of that summer. But I believe she misses the mark with one too many harrowing escapes, close calls, fortuitously obtained train rides, wounds recovered from, and just too much luck at such an unlucky time and place. 

Agent Running in the Field, LeCarre - B+

                                                   He maintains his mastery of the language as he approaches age 90. He turns a phrase and sets up a plot as well as he has for sixty years.  He refers to the City as a 'laundromat' in reference to an oligarch's investments there. Here, a late-40's twenty-five year handler is ready to be sent off, when he is offered a low level job keeping an eye on the endless number of Russian illegals in London. Simultaneously, he begins a regular round of badminton at his club with a foul-mouthed younger fellow, whom he apparently tolerates only for his badminton skill. He manages to uncover a nefarious Moscow Centre plot with a player whose relationship with him causes the Office to have its doubts. There are plenty of twists and turns and an opportunity for Cornwall to speak his mind. He thoroughly enjoys bashing our leaders who have forgotten about who the enemy was in the Cold War. Bravo. 

The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story Of How America Saved The Soviet Union From Ruin, Smith - B

                                  Drought struck the Russian breadbasket along the Volga in 1920 and 1921. On the heels of seven years of war, revolution, civil war, and Kulak withdrawal of land from production,  the granaries of Russia were empty. People turned to cannibalism. Lenin allowed Maxim Gorky to publish an open letter to the West asking for help. US Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover's American Relief Agency had fed millions in Europe after WWI. He offered the help of the ARA and by August, 1921 it was in country to dispose of food parcels where and how it saw fit. However, it was not all hearts and flowers, the American right was opposed. The Cheka believed every American was opposed to the state and shadowed, if not hounded, them around the country. The conditions were so bad in Russia that the ARA staffers in the field were constantly felled by typhus. Within months of starting, the ARA was feeding 570,000 children a day. Massive distributions of corn in 1922 further stemmed the famine. The summer of 1922 was the peak of American success and popularity in Russia. Mission creep led to vast amounts of medicine and clothing arriving overseas. As the famine eased, Russian cooperation waned and the Americans began to plan a mid-23 exit. By that summer, the Americans were gone. It is estimated that the ARA saved ten million lives. The newly established USSR turned on those who had worked for the ARA and most wound up in jail or worse.   

I was unaware of this story and am glad to have learned of it. I must point out an obvious conclusion I came to long ago. The greatest failure of Bolshevism was its inability to feed its own people. Nothing says failed state more than that.

Button Man, Gross - B+

                                   This is an absolutely fabulous novel set in t New York in the first half of the twentieth century. There is nothing I enjoy more than a NYC immigrant story. It follows the life of Morris Raab, first generation impoverished Jewish kid from the lower East Side. He goes to work at 12, builds a firm in the garment industry, marries well and is a classic American success. At that point, he is targeted by Murder Incorporated, a Jewish-Italian racketeering joint venture that forces businesses into untenable crooked union contracts. He refuses and they burn down his business. He cooperates with Thomas Dewey's team and helps bring the bad guys down. He prospers in WWII, creates a national brand in the post-war era and lives to a respectable, happy old age. The surprise at the end of the novel is a postscript by the author. It is the story of his grandfather who, although long dead, left a recording about his incredible life and his business at N.Y.'s Fashion Institute. Thanks, Wendell.

The Andromeda Evolution, Wilson - B

                                  It's half-a-century later. It's back in a more potent and virulent form. To contain it, it's all hands  on deck from the US to the Amazon forest and the Space Station.

The Body In The Castle Well, Walker - B +

                                 This is the latest on Bruno, Chief of Police in the fictional St. Denis in the Perigord. I have complimented this series previously because the author is a semi-retired journalist and historian, so the writing is accurate and precise and, of equal import, the background information on the region, it's history and culture is accurate. Bruno discovers the body of  a young, beautiful, and rich American graduate student, who was researching a local art collection and apparently thinking about purchasing it. The autopsy shows Fentanyl and Oxycontin in her bloodstream, leading to the conclusion that her death was an accident. But all deaths must be investigated and Bruno, under tremendous pressure from Paris and America, sorts it out. This is one of the best yet in this series. I welcome the diversions to French history and we are treated to quite a bit of background on the exit from Algeria and its ongoing consequences.

Under Occupation, Furst - B

                                  This book is the fifteenth 'Night Soldiers' novel, and is fully three decades older than the first from 1988.  The novels are masterpieces of historical fiction, modeled on Arthur Koestler and Eric Ambler, and, in my opinion, exceeding both. If I can feel the fog rolling in from the North Sea or the Seine, I know I love what I'm reading. Many, if not most, of the earlier books focused on characters of elusive backgrounds and identities, who slipped through central Europe in the 1930's. This is not a series in the traditional sense of the word, but there are recurring themes and about a dozen characters who appear in two or three books. There were a great many communists in hardcore opposition to the growing fascist excesses. Only in this book and the last book one has the actual war been  the background. It is 1942 in Paris and life-long Parisian Paul Ricard, novelist, becomes a resistant. His adventures take him to Kiel in Germany, the Spanish border, Sainte-Nazaire on the French Coast, and throughout the various arrondissements of Paris.  The novel excels when in Paris, where he ultimately avoids the Gestapo as they close in around his circle. If you haven't read these, it's time to start.

The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, Harper- B+

  How could Rome, seat of state for over a millennium and the wealthiest city ever, come to be sacked by the Goths in the year 410? History tells us of the acts of emperors, generals, consuls, and invaders, but the fate of Rome "was equally decided by bacteria and viruses, volcanoes and solar cycles." The empire, which had spread from Syria to Britain, created pathways for infectious diseases that significantly contributed to the decline and fall of Rome. Gibbon ordained that the 2nd century saw mankind at its most prosperous and happiest. The empire comprised 75 million people. The city itself exceeded a population of a million, a number not to be seen in the west again until 1800. The fall of Rome was "a monumental episode of state failure", characterized as "the single greatest regression in human history." Science now allows us to recognize changes in the climate in the past and affords us the opportunity to apply that knowledge to our understanding of history. 

Rome prospered at an extraordinarily positive time, known as the RCO, the Roman Climate Optimum. During the last two centuries BC and in the first century CE, the environment was perfect for economic and population growth. Temperatures were moderate and the amount of rainfall matched the needs of the times. However, Rome's luck turned early in the Christian Era and by the Dark Ages, the Mediterranean world faced the Little Ice Age. In 165, the world's first pandemic, known to history as the Antonine Plague,  attacked Rome from the east through the Red Sea and the Nile River Valley. All indications are that it was a smallpox virus. Estimates of population loss are difficult to calculate, but somewhere between 10-20% of the people in the empire, from the Red Sea to Hadrian's Wall, died. The city itself lost as many as 300,000 souls. The impact was catastrophic. Fiscal distress and the devastation of the legions put the empire in a defensive posture at its borders, from which it never recovered. A century later, the second half of the 3rd century saw a series of governance and security crises, with emperors ceaselessly usurping their predecessors and invasions on all fronts. Concurrently, a withering drought and another pandemic slashed the empire. An African drought reduced the Egyptian wheat harvest. The Plague of Cyprian struck the length and breadth of the empire, for possibly fifteen years. Some sort of viral hemorrhagic fever is the likely cause. The frontiers buckled in the 250's as Asia Minor and the Danube basin were lost. The Rhine followed. The empire was saved when the moneyed Mediterranean aristocracy was replaced by a long series of Danubian military officers known as the Theodosian Dynasty. The empire recovered and flourished for well over another century. The long 4th century saw the empire shift its focus to the east with the establishment of Constantinople. We have known for centuries that the Hun left the Asian steppes and forced the Goths out of the area north of the Black Sea and into the empire. What we now know is that there was a mega-drought in the steppes in 350-370. The Huns crossed the Volga and headed into Europe. Their ability to shoot arrows from fast-moving warhorses swept the Goths away. The Goths didn't so much invade the empire as they migrated into it. In the fifth century, the western half of the empire of Rome faded away. The empire prospered in the east, particularly in the 6th century reign of Justinian. He reorganized the bureaucracy, codified the empire's laws, recovered portions of Italy, made peace with the Persians and built Constantinople up to a population of 500,000. However, in 541, the bubonic plague made its entry into the empire. The ensuing two decades saw the empire barely able to collect taxes, feed the people or field an army. In the capital city, half of the population died in the summer of 542. The plague devastated Asia Minor and is believed to have spread as far west as Ireland. Plague endured into the next century and even made a singular appearance in Constantinople in 747. The persistenc of Y. pestis"strangled hopes of recovery." The final sequence of Rome's demise came in the 7th century when climate change, political disintegration and the rise of Islam swept west. Two volcanic eruptions in the 530's-540's led to the coldest decade in the last 2,000 years, adding incalculable stress to the Mediterranean world. The reduction in solar radiance led to a century and a half of the Late Antique Little Ice Age. There were droughts in the south and floods in the north. Environmental degradation slowly "sapped the vitality of the empire." The interconnectedness slipped away, and slowly a globalized prosperous, trading world became a localized simpler place. Most of the west's cities entered terminal decline. Rome's population was counted in the tens of thousands. Italy was reduced to a subsistence economy. In the east, the damage was not as significant, but even there, Constantinople could not field the armies it needed and more importantly, could not pay them. The coup de grace came from the Levant. Beginning in 636, and continuing for a century, the armies of Mohammad cleaved and forever severed the southern portion of the empire. From Arabia, through the Holy Land, Egypt and all of North Africa into Spain, the Muslims conquered. Not only was no semblance of the empire's structure left, but its religion was replaced. The dynamism and great zone of energy was lost. Byzantium was a rump state centered on its capital. The Latin west became Eurasia's backwater. 

I have found this a compelling read. I have long known that our species has moved from point A to point B because of the impact of the environment where it  lived. Our country's success is a function of the bounty of our continent. So to see a historian use the  recent tools of science to delve deeper into the world's history is extraordinarily enlightening. My only caution  to prospective readers is that this is as much science as it is history.

Old Man River: The Mississippi River In North American History, Schneider - B

"It is impossible to imagine America without the Mississippi. The river's history is our history." Any moving water below the Great Lakes and between the the Appalachians and the Rockies, fully 41% of the water in the country, is part of the Mississippi watershed. It is the busiest waterway in the world,  moving half a billion metric tons per year. The first European to interact with native Americans was de Soto in 1542. The French settled Quebec in 1608. Fur traders and Jesuits headed west into the Great Lakes. The Indians told them of a great river to  the south and west. The hope was that it flowed to the Pacific. An expedition under Joliet entered the Mississippi watershed in Wisconsin in the spring of 1673. He and Marquette went as far south as the Arkansas, realized the river drained to the Gulf of Mexico and headed north. A decade later, La Salle descended the river to its mouth. For the next century and a half, French voyageurs explored every river, creek and by-water in the basin, going as far west as the sources of the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers. The claim to the west for New France was based upon their fur traders, and a hundred years later, the French era in America would come to an end. The British evicted France from Canada and Napoleon sold Louisiana to the Americans. In the 19th century, the river became the highway to the west, and in the later half of the century, became a central part of American lore, under the pen of Samuel Clemens. However, its largest role was as a battlefield  in the Civil War. Both New Orleans and Vicksburg were immensely important, cutting the Confederacy in two and assuring eventual Union victory. Lincoln's comment upon receiving Grant's telegram about the capture of Vicksburg is one of my favorites. "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." In the last chapters of the book, the author refers to the river as a 'lake of engineers'. The act of taming the river and its floods has dramatically altered forever the channel of the Mississippi. Distributary streams, starting 100 miles north of New Orleans, once made the delta. Today, it is one long canal running strait to the Gulf, and at this stage, diverted from a western flow in order to keep the port of New Orleans open.  Someday, it will once again flow on the course it has for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Scholar, McTiernan-B+

                                  This is one of those rare occasions when the second book in a series is better than the first. Reilly catches a case, but the problem is his girlfriend is the witness who called it in. Emma also works at the lab at the center of it all. This is an excellent tale involving a pharma research lab at a university and the wealthy granddaughter of the founder of the largest pharmacy company in Ireland. There are certain similarities to the first book, including the political and pretty much useless supervisor, but then again seldom does  a detective have a good boss. The sniveling DC who tries to sabotage Reilly is equally hard to swallow. This is a series with a future.

The Daughter's Tale, Correa - C +

                                            At best, I would characterize this novel as serviceable. It felt predictable. The author has put together a plot focusing on loss, and indeed Lina/Elise lost a great deal throughout the war. Viera and Lina Sternberg were born to Jewish parents in Berlin in the mid-30's. Before Dr. Sternberg died in Saschausen,  he had arranged passage to Cuba for his daughters. Only Viera made it. Lina and her mother found refuge in the French countryside. Amanda, her mother, wrote to Viera, care of her brother in Cuba, but the letters were always returned. Under her French name, Elise, Lina survived the war with Danielle Duval, her 'sister' according to Father Marcel, and later, the baker's wife,  who protected them. She was adopted by a New York relative. Seventy years later, Viera's granddaughter appears at her front door with the letters written by Amanda. 

The Seine: The River That Made Paris, Sciolino - B

Paris, city of light and love, is at the midpoint of the river's 483 mile traverse from Burgundy to the sea. It is France's only river referred to in the feminine, la Seine; all the others are le. Flowing west from its source and through the vineyards of Burgundy, the river reaches Troyes, where it is wide and deep enough for small boats. Past Fontainbleau, and the Marne,  it reaches the Il de France, the province that includes Paris and its suburbs. The first to build stone structures on the Il de Cite and Left Bank were the Romans. The first stone bridge, the Pont Neuf, connecting the Il de Cite to both banks, was built by Henri IV in 1598. Today, there are thirty-five bridges crossing the Seine. It is not the river's physicality, but its beauty that has inspired Parisians for centuries. It languidly curves through the metropolis, and is its beating heart. It has been and still is romanticized as the soul of the city of love. Love locks hang from its bridges. Lovers stroll throughout the day and night. They kiss on its bridges. It is also the focus of the city's nighttime lighting program and draws people in with its visual seductiveness. It is the subject of countless paintings and photographs. Renoir's 'Luncheon of the Boating Party' was set on its banks, as was Seuratt's 'A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte'. To the west, the Impressionists, particularly Monet, spent a significant amount of their time in Normandy, where they were the first to paint water moving. In 'Charade', Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn fall in love on a bateau-mouche.  All of the thousands of movies set in Paris feature the river. The Pont Notre Dame is where Javert ended it all. It is a working river as well with twenty million tons of freight per year and that is most evident west of the city on the way to the sea. At Rouen, the Seine is deep and wide enough to handle ocean-going ships. The estuary is miles wide, a full ten at its mouth, filled with sandbars, islands in flux and  navigational challenges. At the Channel, Le Havre is the large port on the left bank and Honfleur is on the right. Honfleur is a beautiful city, untouched by the passage of time or war. Le Havre is an industrial city considered to be without a soul. Earlier this year, in April, water from the river saved Notre Dame Cathedral. I like river biographies. They tell a slightly different story and touch upon geography, history, sociology, culture and are almost always instructive.

Pure, Miller - B +

This is a truly excellent historical novel, winner of the 2011 Costas Prize, and set in Paris just before the Revolution. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, an ambitious engineer from Normandy, is summoned to Versailles by a Minister of the Crown and offered a job in Paris.  He  is tasked with demolishing the Church of les Innocents and excavating and disposing of the remains in its cemetery. Even though the centuries old burial place has not been used in years, its odor permeates the les Halles neighborhood. Progress  requires its demolition. Jean finds an organist, a sexton, his granddaughter and a blind priest on the premises. He enlists the help of all except the priest. He travels to a mine in Normandy where he used to work, recruits 30 men, and a foreman, and soon the digging begins. It's not as hard as mining coal, but it brings its own challenges. There is stench and the unique experience of digging up layers and layers of bones as far as 30  meters deep. In order to take care of the men, Jean authorizes extra pay, tobacco pipes and whores on Saturday night. On and on they dig, and the idea of excavating a cemetery wears on the bodies and souls of all involved. The foreman tries to kill the sexton's granddaughter. After his landlord's daughter tries to bash in Jean's skull, he falls in love with a local harlot and asks her to move in with him.  Months into the project, the city has prepared the quarry* to receive the bones. After they excavate the cemetery, they turn to demolishing the church, succeed, and at the one year mark, the job is done. The miners scatter. Jean is older, wiser and happier, when he returns to Versailles to hand in his report. The Minister's office, indeed the whole palace, is empty.                                                                                                                             The author has written across a wide range of topics and has received many awards and has been nominated for the Booker. He's very good. This book immerses one fully in its time and place.  I cannot recommend this enough.

*The quarry was filled with the remains excavated from many cemeteries and is now the Catacombs of Paris.

The Devil In Paradise, Haley - B +

                                  This is the third book in this series and I can't say enough about it. Historical novels, and in this instance penned by an accomplished historian, can and do convey lessons to be learned. Here, Putnam sails the Caribbean in 1817, saves a handful of Africans from being sold into slavery as part the naval prize laws by the U.S. Treasury, and returns to Boston. His new orders send him to the Pacific, specifically the Straits of Malacca and the Sandwich Islands. He is to go to Hawaii, pay his respects and eliminate any pirates he comes across in the Straits, while not offending the Dutch or British. After a Hawaii stop, Putnam sails to Singapore, takes on supplies and heads out. He also paints the ship so that it would appear to be a merchantman. Although his subterfuge does not fool the local pirates, he still sinks their vessel. They are off to Canton, back to Hawaii where they act against a rogue American pirate and then, head back home.

Last Bus To Woodstock, Dexter - B-

                                 This is the first book in the Inspector Morse series. It was published in 1975. There was a British production of the series that appeared on Masterpiece Theatre for fourteen years beginning in 1987. I picked this book up because of a fabulous modern prequel called Endeavour, featuring 22 shows spread out over the past six years. The Morse of Endeavour is brilliant, amazingly well-read and uses his skills and Oxford education to solve crimes . He's extremely prickly and not easy to like. This book, which features the murder of a woman who missed the eponymous bus, completely lacks the charm of the tv prequel. Morse is smart but pretty much a jerk. He drinks way too much and is flat-out inappropriate with women. He closes with a flourish of deductive analysis, but I've been spoiled by the tv prequel.

Blue Moon, Child - B

                                  Jack is in a bus somewhere east of the Mississippi when he notices an old man asleep and an unseemly fella eyeing the cash envelope in the sleeper's pocket. Jack helps the man and soon finds himself in the middle of a turf war between two foreign gangs running the crime syndicate in a small city. Matters are further complicated by the Ukrainian gang having some sinister relationship with a bunch of Russians. It's timely, and, as always, very good.

The Night Fire, Connelly - B +

                                  The Bosch series is alive and well. This is the second book where the author pairs Harry with Renee Ballard and I expect all of the future books will now feature the twosome. This one closes with the next joint case teed up, and considering Harry's age, he could even be written out at some point in the future. On the late show, Ballard catches a case involving the apparent accidental death of a homeless man. About the same time, Harry helps his half-brother, Mickey Haller, with a case and realizes that the LAPD let a murderer get off. Plus, Harry and Renee work a cold case that Harry's mentor had left on his desk in retirement, and which he had asked his widow to give to Harry after he died. The three cases eventually come together with a fantastic finish. Connelly is very much still on top of his game .

The Mosquito: A Human History Of Our Deadliest Predator, Winegard - Incomplete

  "A swarming and consuming army of 110 trillion enemy mosquitoes patrols every inch of the globe save Antarctica, the Seychelles, and a handful of French Polynesian micro-islands." Last year, 830,000 humans died from mosquito bites. "As the pinnacle purveyor of our extermination, the mosquito has consistently been at the front lines of history as the grim reaper....and the ultimate angel of historical change." Traveling around the world with us, the mosquito has affected the outcome of battles and wars, felled civilizations and helped create our present reality.

  The female mosquito needs blood to reproduce. The saliva it injects into a host is an anti-coagulant and is the method of transferring disease. Mosquitoes have been around for 190 million years and have haunted, primarily with malaria and yellow-fever, our brief 200,000 year existence as a species. Malaria, which still kills hundreds of thousands of Africans annually, is caused by a parasite transmitted by the mosquito. Yellow-fever is a mosquito transmitted viral infection, as is Nile fever, Zika, dengue and various encephalitides. The transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies meant an increase in human interaction with mosquitoes, in conjunction with the spread of diseases  (common cold, flu, chicken pox, smallpox, measles and tuberculosis to name a few) occasioned by mankind's domestication of animals. Ancient texts from India, China, Mesopotamia and Egypt speak of the consequences of malaria.

  "On the battlefields of empire building, malaria prejudiced the results of clashes and campaigns during both the rise and fall of Greece and Rome." The miasma of a malarial swamp decimated 70% of  a 5th century BCE Athenian army at Syracuse. The mosquitoes and diseases of the Indus River valley marked the easternmost foray of Alexander the Great's army. Three years later, malaria killed him in Babylon.  The 310 square miles of the Pontine Marshes of Campagna were a malarial fortress protecting the city of Rome from the Second Punic War onward. Hannibal's army handily outmaneuvered and defeated the Romans in three different battles. But, Hannibal could not directly attack the city because it was too well defended. And, he knew he could not linger near the marshes and so withdrew. He lost his strategic advantage and eventually, the war. As Rome grew with fountains, gardens and aqueducts,  its citizens and soldiers were inadvertently exposed to malaria. Those soldiers spread the disease throughout the world. Ongoing and epidemic malaria, along with occasional bouts of bubonic plague, wore down and eventually wore out the western empire and it fell in the fifth  century. 

  When he attributed the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire to the mosquito, I decided to stop reading the book. I re-read the review and noted that the reviewer thought he often overstated his case. There is no doubt that disease has had an overwhelming impact on the history of mankind and perhaps a discussion that included cholera, plague and dysentery would have made more sense. 

not sure about hannibal

The Parisian, Hammad - C

                                  This grand, sweeping novel is, in a very roundabout way, about Palestinian nationalism. Midhat Kamal, a young man from Nablus, arrives in Montpelier, France to study medicine and reside at the home of Frederic Molineau, an anthropology professor. He came to France after years of preparatory study in Constantinople.  He obviously identifies as an Arab Muslim, but his focus is on his studies and improving his French language skills. The First World War breaks out and his foray on the continent becomes uneasy, but never uncomfortable. He slowly falls for the professor's daughter, Jeanette,  but he never has to face his probable rejection by her father. Midhat learns that the professor is studying and writing about him. His language skills, as a 'primitive', are to be the foundation of a doctoral thesis. He parties through the remainder of the war in Paris and heads back to Nablus to apprentice in his father's business. The goal is for him to join his father in Cairo in a year. His dad learns of Midhat's fascination and love for Jeanette by reading a letter addressed to Midhat from Jeanette. His dad harshly demands a local marriage to an appropriate girl. Midhat obtains the hand of Fatima Hammad , the beautiful daughter of a successful local merchant. Just before the wedding, his father dies in Cairo. Midhat soon learns that the business is in the hands of his step-mother and he no longer has a job.                                                       The years marking his return to Nablus coincide with the establishment of the French Mandate over Syria and the British one over Palestine. In Palestine, there is ongoing violence between the local Arabs and the recently arrived Zionists. He and Fatima eventually have five children and raise them in the house he purchased with his cash inheritance from his father. His station in the world is considerably diminished as he has to start a new business. Fatima slowly realizes that she is not married to the man she had hoped for. Midhat carefully avoids the political issues all around him, yet somehow they effect him. His business is burned down in the middle of the 1936 general strike.  He then discovers under the floor in his father's house the letter from Jeannette that he has never seen. Realizing that he has spent his life doing his father's bidding, he goes into a tailspin and is hospitalized.  His family helps him escape from the hospital and he returns to Nablus, where he realizes that he has had a good life and likely will continue to.                                                                                                                                              The NYTimes review of this book was very enthusiastic. I concede that it is very well written. I've gained a few insights into life behind the veil in the Muslim world, and I've learned a bit about Palestine of the era, including the fact that the British were not benign occupiers. But, the most compelling source of information is in the historical addendum. I never realized how many Jews were in the Holy Land that early. There were seventy-five thousand European Zionist immigrants in Palestine before World War I.  Over three hundred thousand came between the wars. At the end of the day,  there just isn't enough meat on the bones of this story. And the life of Midhat Kamal cannot sustain a book this long. 

The Guardians, Grisham - B

                                  The latest by Grisham gets off to a really slow start, leading to the fear that the master has lost a step. It's not his greatest effort, but eventually picks up the pace and delivers. The Guardians is a four person not-for-profit that works on freeing innocent prisoners from jail. Their work is in the south and most of their clients are black. A character in the book refers the Florida - Texas area as the Death Belt. Quincy Miller was framed, completely set up by a small town crooked sheriff, and has spent twenty-two years in jail. As the case begins to come together for the Guardians, those who committed the original crime come back to squelch the innocence process. The good guys always prevail in a Grisham novel. Enjoy this years legal thriller. 

The Ruin, McTiernan - B

                                 This is the debut novel in a new police series set in Galway, on Ireland's west coast. It is off to a fine start exposing, in this instance, the archaic, medieval and dark sides of the Garda and the Church. On his first case out of training twenty years ago, Cormac Reilly finds a fifteen year old girl caring for her five year old brother, with their junkie unmarried mother dead in her bed. He catches a case involving the girl and her now deceased younger brother. The plot is intricate, the story is perfectly paced and the series is one with a future.

Vasily Grossman And The Soviet Century, Popoff - B

                                  Vasily Grossman was a magnificent war correspondent during The Great Patriotic War. In 1944, he wrote the 'Hell of Treblinka', one of the first reports of the Holocaust. It was so well done that it was used as evidence at Nuremberg. He was a Jew whose mother had been killed by the Nazis.  In the 1950's, he wrote his masterpiece, 'Life and Fate'. His great novel, set during the war, compared Nazism and Stalinism in their totalitarian brutality. He was told by the KGB it couldn't be published for 250 years. His final novel, on the Ukraine famine, was so well written that two famous historians, Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum, relied on it in their histories of the era. 

                                He was born in 1905 in the predominantly Jewish city of Berdichev in Ukraine. His mother took him to Kiev in 1914 to provide better educational opportunities. War was followed by revolution and civil war. Millions died or fled the country. Throughout the chaos, he attended school, but was mostly self taught. He moved to Moscow to study chemistry in 1923. He turned to literature and politics, publishing an article in Pravda in 1928. He graduated from college in 1929 and was assigned as a mine inspector in the Donbass region of Ukraine. He contracted TB and was allowed to return to Moscow. With the help of Maxim Gorky, he published his first novel, 'Gluckhauf'.

                                Grossman worked in a pencil factory and wrote in the evenings, publishing short stories in literary magazines. He quit the factory and soon his writing career thrived. A second novel, 'Stepan Kolchugin', followed. His name showed up on certain NKVD lists, but he was not important enough to merit attention during the purges. He became a Red Star war correspondent in the summer of 1941. "His wartime notebooks contained much invaluable material that he would later use in his novels. However, everything he saw that summer - chaos at the front, the Red Army's rout, officers incompetence, and devastating losses - would later be concealed becoming Soviet taboos". He wrote extensively as he traveled all over the front and managed to obtain 2 months off in the spring of 1942. He wrote 'The People Immortal' about the 1941 invasion. It was an immediate success. He was assigned to Stalingrad in August, 1942. He was there through the end of the year, spent time in the city itself, and even a few days with one of the USSR's most famous snipers.  Some of his words are engraved in a memorial on the Volga.  His 'Stalingrad Sketches' was made into a film.  The following summer, he reported on the Battle of Kursk. As the Soviets advanced, he witnessed the consequences of the Holocaust in person and wrote 'Ukraine without Jews', but it was censored in Moscow.  His 'Hell of Treblinka' "transcended its epoch and a single genre, being at once a work of investigative journalism, a historical and philosophical essay, and a requiem to the victims." He marched into Berlin with the Red Army the following spring.  He was immensely popular, one of the best known writers of the war.

                                  He had never completely toed the line and fell out of favor after the war. As the anti-Semitism of Stalin grew and became virulent after the creation of Israel, his circumstances became perilous. All those who had worked on the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee were under suspicion and many were sent to the Gulag. His novel 'For The Right Cause', which is the first half of 'Life and Fate' came out to acclaim in 1952. Stalin's death in 1953 ended a totalitarian era of unprecedented murder and dishonesty. Stalin's crimes would not be fully known in the USSR until 1989. Millions were released from the Gulag.  It was at this time that Grossman began to fine tune his comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism. "In 'Life and Fate' freedom is the main theme. The war is fought against enslavement by both the Nazis and Bolsheviks, who destroyed freedom in their own land." In 1961, the state confiscated his novel and told him that it was too dangerous a threat to the state. He received a cancer diagnosis in 1962 and began to write 'Everything Flows', his novel on the Ukrainian famine. He died in 1964.

                                 A French edition of 'Life and Fate' appeared in 1983, an English version one a year later, and a Russian publication was released in 1988. The book became a bestseller in 2011 after a BBC Radio production starring Kenneth Branagh aired. A 2018 stage adaptation in London brought the novel publicity and, it has been referred to a the 20th century's'War and Peace'. As Russia returns to Stalinism, Grossman has faded into the background again.

                                I read 'Life and Fate' over thirty years ago and remember it as a grand. sweeping, wonderful book that displayed the war from the Soviet side better than anything I had come across. It was and is a great book, on par with those of Tolstoy, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn.

Cari Mora, Harris - B +

                                  The author is of course the creator of such memorable monsters as Francis Dolarhyde (the Tooth Fairy), Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter. Here the eponymous Cari is a young woman in her twenties who is in Miami illegally after growing up as a child soldier in the FARC in Columbia. As a consequence, she is very, very careful in addition to being smart, adept with weapons, and wary of men. Being beautiful carries its risks in her world. Then there's Hans-Peter, maniacal murderer of Paraguayan-German heritage, reciter of obscure songs and owner of a liquid cremation machine and obsidian scalpels. He sells body parts and 'customizes' women for his customers. At the center of a vast layer of thieves and killers is a refrigerator size box under the late Pablo Escobar's Miami house. The box is filled with about $25m of gold and protected by an explosives system. This is another very enjoyable read.

The Satapur Moonstone, Massey - B

                                  As is often the case, the second book in a series experiences a drop off from the debut novel. The British government requests that Purveen travel to the northwest of the country to resolve a conflict amongst the family of a young maharajah about his future education. Of course, there's a lot more going on than education planning. This book reminds us that the Raj was never a completely British operation. Throughout the vast sub-continent, the British presence was often slight. In the northwest alone, in the 1920's, there were dozens of principalities with their own rulers who were assisted, not governed, by a local Imperial agency.

The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, Okrent - B

                                  This is the history of America's virulent renunciation of a meaningful part of its heritage a century ago. A combustive mixture of racism, fear and pseudo-science led to the closing of our borders for over forty years. In 19th century England, the scientific community, fixated on Darwin's theories,  developed the field of eugenics. The term derived from the Greek  meaning 'good stock'.  Proponents of the eugenics movement believed that society could be improved by selectively breeding couples with positive genetic traits; later negative eugenicists tried to eliminate by sterilization those with unpleasant or unhealthy tendencies. Sir Francis Galton observed at a London symposium that society paid more attention to the selection of plants and animals than to people. In the US, Charles Davenport founded a lab in Cold Spring Harbor, NY to focus on the science of cross-breeding, experimental biology, evolution and eventually, eugenics. Simultaneously, one of Boston's Brahmins, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge a believer of his own admirable personal heritage, and the descendant of generations of Harvard educated men, took up the cause of limiting immigration to the US. American xenophobia was not new in America. In the previous century, Ben Franklin had deplored all the German speakers pouring into the colonies. The Irish and Germans were abhorred when they arrived prior to the Civil War. As the 19th century closed, it was the polyglot masses from Italy, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire that frightened the elitists. They looked vastly different from their northern European predecessors, did not speak English, were illiterate and worshipped differently. An 1891 law turned all immigration policy over to the federal government and precluded the admission of "idiots, insane persons and loathsome diseased peoples." Private lobbying organizations, such as Boston's Immigration Restriction League, sprang up.  The restrictionists supported Lodge's Literacy Test bill. The test would require a person to be able to read and write in their native language and per Lodge "would bear most heavily upon the Italians, Poles, Russians and Asiatics."  In Cold Springs Harbor, Davenport was able to take a major step adding the science of human evolution to his studies. Over time, all of the information compiled and the theories proposed by his Eugenics Records Office have been proven to be worthless. But, in the early 20th century, its anti-immigrant screed carried weight.                                                                                                                  The last decade of the 19th century saw 3.7 million Europeans arrive in America.  The following decade the number jumped to  6.7 million.  A restrictive immigration bill with the literacy test passed in 1912, but was vetoed by Taft in the last month of his presidency.  Two years later, Wilson vetoed a similar bill. The vitriol and hatred for dagos, kikes and bohunks could not outweigh generations of an open door policy and the need for inexpensive labor.  It finally passed in 1917 when America was in the thrall of anxiety about the war. Wilson spoke of immigrants "who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life" and called for them to be "crushed out." He actually vetoed the bill, but it finally passed over his veto.  The war virtually stopped immigration in its tracks. It started to pick up  again when 430,000 came in 1920. The Bolshevik Revolution shook the post-war world and the concept of completely eliminating immigration came to the fore in the US.  A State Dept. study referred to those looking to enter as undesirable; from Sicily - "small in stature and of a low order of intelligence", Jews from various locales - "filthy, un-American and dangerous in their habits, from Warsaw - "filthy, ignorant and verminous", and from Danzig - "decidedly inferior." The NYT berated the Senate for not acting on the "swarms of aliens." The final immigration restriction bill passed in 1924.  It lowered the number of immigrants allowed per year to 155,000 and  established a nation-by-nation quota of 2% based on the the US population as per the 1890 census. Victory did not end the anti-immigrant campaign. Millions and millions of inferior peoples were now in America and needed to be controlled. They were inclined to be ignorant, criminals, flat-footed and insane. The twenties saw the eugenics movement pursue the negative policy of forced sterilization. The Supreme Court approved a Virginia law, with Holmes stating "three generations of imbeciles is enough." Soon however, the sciences began to reject the movement.  It was taken up by the Nazis in Germany and faded from the American mainstream. The ERO finally closed in 1940. 

                                                                                  Hundreds of thousands of the undesirable Greeks, Jews, Italians, Serbs, Russians and Poles who otherwise could have come to America died in WW2. The end of the war saw a slight crack in the wall. Our Chinese alliance led to the repeal of the 1882 Exclusion Act. Refugees from the war were admitted, and later those fleeing communism were allowed to enter. In 1965, LBJ, at Liberty Island, signed the Immigration and Naturalization Act scrapping the old quotas. One of the co-authors was Emmanuel Celler of Brooklyn, grandson of German Jewish immigrants, who had vigorously fought the 1924 act as a new Congressman.                                                                                                                                                                  This is a difficult book to read. The racism and hatred of the many of the old-line elites drips from every page. It is of course a reminder that tribalism, extreme partisanship, racism and hatred have always been part of US history.

Cold Storage, Koepp - B +

                                   When an NYT reviewer calls a novel "pure, unadulterated entertainment" and compares it to a Michael Crichton novel, the book is immediately downloaded and read within a day. Good as Crichton? Close, but no cigar, but a ton of fun. The parasitic fungi was in a containment vial when Spacelab fell to earth in 1979. It took seven years for it to escape in a more lethal form, but was contained again. That is, until 2019. Enjoy!!

Lethal Agent, Mills - B +

                                 This is probably the best Mitch Rapp book by the new author. No longer working for the Agency, but rather as a contractor with a direct line to the Director, Mitch and his team are in Yemen trying to track down the ISIS commander. They do not get him and have to return home in order to stop ISIS's threat to use a bio-weapon in the states. Most of the action takes place in Mexico, where the team faces the enemy. As always, a delightful romp.

The Widows Of Malabar Hill, Massey - B +

                                  This is an intriguing and enjoyable novel set in Bombay in 1921. The principal character is Purveen Mistry, the first woman solicitor in India. It is based on the memoirs of an Indian  woman who returned home after studying law in England in the late 19th century. The mystery is about the three surviving Muslim wives of a successful businessman, the exceedingly complex estate inheritance world under Muslim law and the equally complex domestic laws of the Parsis community in India. It passes all of my historical novel tests: it is well-written, explores interesting times and places and puts the reader in the middle of it all.

The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction Of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924, Morris and Ze'Eve - B +

                                      This is a history of the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, and also of the mistreatment of all Christians under three different Turkish governments over three decades. "The annihilation of the Christian communities was not the product of a single cause. At play were fears of foreign machinations and interference, Turkish nationalism, ethnic rivalries economic envy, and a desire to maintain political and social dominance." Islam played a pivotal role throughout. "It was the glue that bound together perpetrating Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Chechens, and Arabs...".                  

                                      In the late 19th century, ethnic and religious tensions in the Ottoman Empire increased under the pressures put upon the state by a Russian invasion that would have captured Constantinople were it not for British, French and German intervention. Throughout the empire, there were nationalist movements: Greek, Arab and Armenian. For decades, overcrowding in the east and systemic Muslim prejudices had made life more and more difficult for the Christian minorities. In 1863, the government approved a very limited autonomy for the Armenians when it approved an Armenian-drafted constitution. Nonetheless, Muslims continued to abuse the Armenians while Constantinople was indifferent. The Sultan looked back on a long history of 19th century rebellions  in Greece, Serbia, Lebanon, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Crete and Bulgaria. Many of the rebels were Christian, and after the Armenians sought out the help of the Russian Orthodox Church, they were deemed the enemy.

                                            Armenian nationalism was met by Sultan Abdulhamid II with increased armed Kurdish suppression. Between 1894-96, the state unleashed a series of pogroms that led to over 100,000 deaths from starvation, exposure and outright massacre. Tribalism, exacerbated by religious fanaticism, ran amok. The violence was unremitting, constant, state-sponsored and widespread from the Caspian Sea west to Constantinople. The Turks continually pleaded that they were suppressing a rebellion, but history's consensus is that this was a racial and religious slaughter, motivated by the state's fear of Christians causing a weakening of Muslim control of the state. Rape, abduction and forced conversions were a central theme of the empire's actions. Thousands fled to Russia, Europe and America. The central government ordered a halt to the violence in late 1896.      

                                            In 1908, The Committee of Union and Progress, the CUP, or the Young Turks, took over the empire. They believed the Turkish race was the foundation of the Ottoman Empire. The need for an all-Muslim empire came to the fore as the empire lost more and more Balkan territory in the years before WWI. After allying with the Central Powers, the central government planned and implemented the Armenian genocide. The aim was to de-Christianize the empire and to use Anatolia's Muslims to carry out the massacre. In February, 1915, the Ottomans were decimated in battle by the Russians in eastern Anatolia. Blame for the defeat was placed on disloyal Armenians.  "The CUP had the motivation and capacity to commit pre-meditated ethnic cleansing - that political will, not the exigencies of the Great War, underlay mass murders". Immediately after the army's defeat, Armenian soldiers were disarmed and moved into labor battalions. Soon, the slaughter began. In the summer of 1915, the government ordered the removal of all Armenians from the war zone in eastern Anatolia. Deportation meant the murder of the Armenians while on the road west. Very few ever made it to Syria; the men were murdered outright, many young woman were taken for sexual slavery and everyone else, old and young, were either shot, starved or thrown into rivers or the sea. The following year, the genocide reached into urban and western Anatolia as viciously and as thoroughly as in the east. The generally accepted estimate of deaths over the two years is 1.2 million.

                                            At the end of the war, the leaders of the CUP, fearing a war crimes prosecution, fled to Germany. The empire was lightly occupied by Allied troops, including Greeks, who were seeking to grab parts of Anatolia. In what the Turks call their 'War of Independence', they fought the Greeks in the west and the Russians in the east. A xenophobic hatred of the Allies and Christians emerged in the body politic. The nationalist movement soon rallied around Mustafa Kemal, known to history as Attaturk. Kemal's vision of Turkey was of an exclusively Muslim, Turkic state. He opposed the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, which dismantled the empire and gave a variety of occupiers pieces of Anatolia and Thrace. He made peace in the east with Russia, ceded some land and obtained arms to fight the westerners. The Nationalists expelled the Greek army from Anatolia in 1922, and soon completely controlled their coastline on the Aegean. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne granted the Republic of Turkey recognition of its borders and ended any Allied interference in the country.

                                            From the end of the world war until Lausanne, there was a resumption of the Armenian genocide. Those Armenians who had survived the death marches to the south headed into Cilicia on the southwestern coast.  The Allies encouraged Armenians to return home and many congregated in the cities of Cilicia, as it was under French protection. There was even an Armenian Legion, albeit briefly, that was part of the French occupation. The Turks' war for independence overturned the established order. They attacked Maras, pushed the French out and massacred more Armenians. The French were eventually defeated and withdrew. "The Franco-Turkish agreement ushered in the final stage of the Armenian departure from Anatolia." As the surviving Armenians left, Kemal announced that Asia Minor must be freed of all Christians thus leading to hundreds-of-thousands more people of different ethnic groups violently forced out of their homes.

                                          "The deportation and murder of the Greeks during 1919-23 was a direct continuation of the effort to expel them that began in late 1913-1914." The 1919 Greek occupation of Smyrna (now Izmir) was a major threat to Turkish sovereignty and the beginning of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. The Greeks invaded at the encouragement  of the Allies. They advanced into Anatolia and almost reached Ankara. The final Turk counter-attack was directed by Kemal to reach the Mediterranean and soon the Turks controlled the entire Aegean coastline. A fire in the Greek and Armenian sections of Smyrna and an ensuing  massacre killed an estimated 75,000.  Eventually, the Greeks and Turks agreed on a massive population exchange leading to approximately 1.5m Greeks and 500,000 Muslims leaving  their homelands. The exchange was a violent, lengthy continuation of the tragic war that preceded it. Historians estimate a million Greek deaths.

                                            When it was all over in 1924, the Christian population of Asia Minor was 2%. It had been 20% at the turn of the century a generation earlier.  "Turkish governments and Turkish people have never owned up to what happened or to their guilt. They continue to play the game of denial and to blame the victims."

                                               This book is both majestic in its scope and detail and very trying to read. It is dense and so thorough that it feels as if the authors identified every village in every province in the empire. The endless depictions of murderous violence in the name of ethnic and religious cleansing is horrifying. Man's inhumanity to man whether it be a thousand years ago, a hundred years ago or last week still shocks me.

                                    "Imagine there's no countries                                                                            It's not hard to do                                                                                                  Nothing to kill or die for                                                                                     And no religions, too"

                                                         John Lennon

          

                                     

                                                       

Imagine

The Paris Diversion, Pavone B+

                           In this fabulous novel, we catch up with Kate and Dexter Moore seven years after 'The Expats'. Kate has taken the $25M that Dexter stole from some very bad people and used the money to fund her return to the world of the CIA, but she's not working for Langley and indeed, isn't really sure who she has been working for. What she has been doing is protecting herself, her two sons and Dexter from Susan and Bill exacting revenge for seven years ago. When Paris is locked down because of a terrorist fright and the CEO of a company Dexter is shorting goes missing, Kate knows Susan is framing Dexter. She springs into action and off we go. Anyone who has visited Paris will thoroughly enjoy the tour that is part of the story.

Washington Black, Edugyan - B

                                   Once again, a brilliant work of art has passed me by without my realizing it. A finalist for the Man Booker and a NYT Top 10, this is a pleasant and delightful read about the growth and evolution of Wash Black. We meet him as a teenage slave in Barbados and follow him through escape from the plantation, his complicated relationship with the owner's brother, running for his freedom from Virginia to the Arctic, and landing in London after the abolition of slavery in the empire. When away from the fears of living on a brutal plantation, the young man grows and has the opportunity for a rewarding life. It is certainly well-written and informative.

The Bone Fire, Sykes - B +

                           I must admit that reading and enjoying a series set in the late 14th century and featuring the plague's impact on Kent in England is a bit odd. A few decades ago, I enjoyed the Cadfael mysteries in print and on Masterpiece Theater. This current series is enjoyable, fun and better than the 'pleasant diversion' I previously used to characterize it. In this, the 4th in the series, Lord Oswald de Lacy has packed up his wife, son, mother and a valet and moved to an island off the Kent coast. They are there for the winter in the expectation that the secluded castle of Godfrey of Eden will save them from the plague. Soon, the bodies are dropping like flies over a contested paternity issue and, most importantly, Sir Godfrey's translation of the Bible into English. It is important to remember translating the Bible into the vernacular was an earth-shaking event that in reality did not actually happen for another century. A pleasant diversion with a solid mystery and an enlightening dose of history.