Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Nancy R....here is your new thread for 50 Books Read in 2015. Glad you joined us.

Our Required Format:

JANUARY

1. by Winston S. Churchill
Finish date: January 2015
Genre: (whatever genre the book happens to be)
Rating: A
Review: You can add text from a review you have written but no links to any review elsewhere even Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. And that is about it. Just make sure to number consecutively and just add the months.

MAY

1. by David Laskin
Finish date: 27 May 2015
Genre: Non-fiction
Rating: A
Review: The Family by Seattle author David Laskin won the Washington State (USA) Book Award for Biography / Memoir in 2014. I live in the Seattle area, and got the book because I thought it might reveal a new facet of Washington history to me.

It doesn't have anything to do with Washington; it was a serendipitous find for me, and a compelling read. The lives of three branches of a Russian family are the subject. One branch emigrates to New York, one to Palestine, and one stays in the towns of their ancestors in western Russia. The story of the ones who died or were killed in WWII is powerful. If something like this were to happen to me, I think I would be grateful to someone who persistently discovered and documented my story.

Good job, Nancy. Just a bit of nit-picking - "date" should be lower case. Note the example in post 1.

JUNE

2. by Douglas Perry
Finish date: 1 June 2015
Genre: Non-fiction
Rating: A+
Review: An excellent story from a terrific storyteller, Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero, chronicles Ness' lesser-known six-year turn as Cleveland, Ohio's Safety Director after setting the record straight on his three years as the Head Untouchable. Ness fought depression, doggedly if not successfully, throughout his adult life and co-existed with alcoholism more peacefully. Perry doesn't dwell on these unwanted companions overmuch, but uses them to shed light on Ness' curious career decisions that contrasted so sharply with his sharp crime-fighting strategies.

You are right on target, Nancy. I read that book last month and obviously you liked it better than I did!!!! Good review.

3. by Mark Harris
Finish date: 18 June 2015
Genres: Non-fiction, History, Culture, World War II
Rating: A
Review: Well-written collective biographies, movies and World War II history: I'm there! It was an unmitigated pleasure to wolf down the "making of" stories of some of the 1940's iconic American (and one British!) films.

John Ford's power-station roof platform for shooting The Battle of Midway, George Stevens' powerful testimony for the Nuremberg Trials Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps, John Huston's ground-breaking examination of treatment for traumatized veterans Let There Be Light, William Wyler's fictional portrait of the plight of three returning veterans The Best Years of Our Lives and Frank Capra's monumental struggles with the seven Why We Fight documentaries: they're all skillfully chronicled in this cogent book.

Four of the five directors go on to make critically successful and popularly acclaimed movies after the war. One never picks up his pre-war confidence again, and fades into film-making history. By the end of the book, thanks to Harris' intelligent interpretation of their characters and war-time experiences, we aren't surprised by the trajectories of their post-war careers.

That sounds right down my alley!!

4. by Masha Gessen
Finish date: 24 June 2015
Genres: Non-fiction, History, Sociology
Rating: A-
Review: Like the very best New Yorker non-fiction, only expanded to a length you wish all their non-fiction covered. The Brothers in the title are the Tsarnaevs, the so-called Boston Marathon bombers; some of the younger Tsarnaev's friends and their families feature as well.

The book isn't about the bombings, and we don't learn any more about the crime than we would know from a Wikipedia entry. Instead, Gessen has researched and soberly documented the family's itinerant passage through Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Massachusetts, and the numbingly repetitive physical and psychological violence that surrounded them until they came to the US.

The subtitle reference to Dreiser's An American Tragedy frames our expectations, and properly so. Younger brother Dzhokhar is, as of this writing, headed for the same destination as Clyde Griffiths.

Gessen is Russian-American; her fluency in Russian allowed her to gather and chronicle details of the brothers' experiences that would have remained hidden to non-Russian speakers. Her conclusion that some American law-enforcement practices are fostering the birth of new terrorists is worthy of consideration.

The reason for the minus in my rating is that I wish there were more of it. There are many characters in the narrative, and some of them are covered so sparingly that it is difficult to understand the roles they played in the brothers' lives. But the book is unquestionably timely, touching on events that occurred less than six months ago.

5. by Ben Macintyre
Finish date: 29 June 2015
Genres: Non-fiction, Modern history, Spy thriller
Rating: A
Review: Allen Dulles hadn't yet written his essential precepts on tradecraft when Kim Philby was plying his trade as a communist spy. Among Dulles' first 10 rules, five have to do with security. But Kim Philby knew them intuitively and practised them expertly for almost 30 years. Unfortunately, his colleagues in MI6 only got them partly right: security was paramount, and acquaintances outside the service must never learn anything they had learned on the inside. Of course, if the professional associates were themselves on the inside, and especially if they had shared school days at Eton and Cambridge, security wasn't ever an issue. There was no question but that any and all information could be freely shared with them.

This is the essence of Philby's success: he always kept his counsel while Nicholas Elliott, James Angleton, and Philby's other secret agent admirers confided in him like teen-age best friends. Hundreds of people died after Philby betrayed their plans and activities to Moscow: Russian defectors in 1944, Albanian freedom fighters and their families in Operation Valuable in 1948, and a famous frogman who was covertly inspecting the underside of a Soviet cruiser in 1956.

A Spy Among Friends is better than the best fiction spy thriller. It's fast-paced even though it covers 30+ years of mid-20th century history. It's adroitly written, full of wry detail and doesn't have even one superfluous word.

Nancy.....thanks for that review.....that book goes on my tbr list, along with the thousands of others!!

AUGUST

6. by David McCullough
Finish date: 06 August 2015
Genres: History, Non-fiction, Travel
Rating: A-
Review: This is not my favourite David McCullough. The Great Bridge and The Johnstown Flood are better, for a reader who likes lots of detail and a strong narrative, with a beginning, an end and lots of side journeys along the way. But it's still a very good book indeed, written in McCullough's easy, polished style, more like a pleasant wander in a museum than a love affair with a painting.

Americans in Paris from the 1830's to 1900, studying medicine, studying painting and sculpture, engaged in diplomacy, and above all learning a different way of living, are the subjects of this work. I've "met" many of them before (Mary Cassatt, P. T. Barnum, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Fenimore Cooper) in other, meatier works that satisfied the appetite for knowledge of their characters better. But many more of them are new acquaintances for me (the brilliant physician James Jackson Jr, portrait painter George Catlin, and above all American Minister to France Elihu B. Washburne), people about whom I want to learn more.

Washburne, as the only large foreign nation representative who stayed in Paris during the siege and then the Commune, sought to moderate the suffering of the non-combatants stranded in the city during the violence. He kept diaries (I hope they're published) and memorably tried to save the life George Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, imprisoned for no given reason during the Commune. I want to know him much better.

Speaking of the siege and the Commune, McCullough's very brief treatment makes a well-organized and easily understood high-level summary of the two periods. If you've struggled to understand the sequence of events and the motives as I have done, the description here is a welcome refresher.

Recently McCullough spoke in Seattle on a book tour for The Wright Brothers. He said he hadn't yet picked his next subject; I can't wait.

& & by David McCullough
Harriet Beecher Stowe
James Fenimore Cooper

I am a McCullough fan as well, Nancy but haven't read that one. I may give it a try after I work through the hundreds of others on my tbr list!!!

BTW, remember if you mention other books or authors within your review, they must be cited at the end of your narrative. as such:

& & by David McCullough
Harriet Beecher Stowe
James Fenimore Cooper

And don't forget to bold August.

Jill wrote: "I am a McCullough fan as well, Nancy but haven't read that one. I may give it a try after I work through the hundreds of others on my tbr list!!!

BTW, remember if you mention other books or author..."

Done! thanks, Jill.

Its easy to forget sometimes, Nancy. Thanks for being so responsive.

7. by Walter Kirn
Finish date: 11 Aug 2015
Genres: Non-fiction, True Crime, Memoir
Rating: B+
Review: The summer of 2015 is apparently the season for me to stumble on what I would have imagined to be a sparsely populated genre: combination True Crime / Memoirs written by established authors who happen to meet murderers for reasons entirely unrelated to their crimes. In June I read True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa by Michael Finkel, in which the murderer and the author meet because the murderer passes himself off as Finkel, whose New York Times Magazine travel stories he has read and admired. Not two months later, I found this tale that begins when Kirn nannies a disabled rescue dog from Montana to her new home in New York with the now notorious "Clark Rockefeller".

German-born Christian Gerhartsreiter adopts the name of a fictitious member of the Rockefeller clan and creates a bizarre yet believable persona and biography for him. In 1998, the cash-strapped Kirn delivers the dog to "Rockefeller" (a self-described "freelance central banker") in the hope that he will reward Kirn handsomely for the favour, and, let's be honest, in the hope that Rockefeller will turn out to be a subject for a future magazine piece or book.

This is the beginning of a loose friendship, which ends with Gerhartsreiter's 2013 trial for a murder he committed in 1985. There have been other books, magazine pieces and a few movies about Gerhartsreiter; their descriptions suggest that they cover the man and his story in more detail than Kirn does. The appeal of Kirn's work is the chronicle of Kirn's emotions and the self-examination that accompanies his relationship with Gerhartsreiter. Kirn himself has a history of posing (as does Finkel); both authors seem at times to be staring in revulsion at a mirror.

New York Times Book Review critic Nina Burleigh summarized the Blood Will Out pair this way: "[T]he fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald". Very nicely said.

by Michael Finkel (no photo)

8. by James Ellroy
Finish date: 20 Aug 2015
Genres: Historical Fiction, Noir
Rating: A-
Review: One of my favourite all-time movies, L. A. Confidential, turns out to have been based on a book by an author who turns out to be prolific and stylish and forceful and a brilliant blender of fiction with history. Not only that, but he has lots of books under his belt. I'll never be readless again.

Perfidia, the first of a planned second L. A. Quartet, is set about ten years before L. A. Confidential, in December 1941. Los Angeles reacts to the bombing of Pearl Harbor hyperactively. War bond rallies, enlistment drives and frenzied searches for fifth columnists explode into life in a city festooned with Christmas lights and full of shoppers. War creates opportunities for profit, adventure and score settling. Ellroy's novel relates the complicated doings of the schemers who immediately launch plans to exploit these possibilities.

This is the first "noir" novel I've read, and I found the melodramatically hyperbolic vocabulary tough sledding at first. "Whitewashing the snuffs", "putting the quietus (to something)" and "holding your mud" are a little confusing in a print narrative even though they're richly atmospheric in a movie. Despite these little hiccups, I read the 691 page novel in a week. It's mesmerizing.

The narrative twists are outlandishly elaborate. Ellroy recognizes this, and skillfully offers summaries and recaps along the way. Just when I thought: "I'm confused, didn't "x" happen?", a character brings another character up to date and I was back on track again.

There's a mystery embedded, and a number of readers have asked each other elsewhere on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ whether there were any clues to the solution along the way. I didn't find any, but didn't enjoy the novel any less for that.

by James Ellroy

Nancy....in post #15, you don't need to put the avatar if there is no photo of the author available.....just the link and (no photo) as shown below. BTW, you don't need a space between Rating and Review. Thanks, you are moving right along!!

by Michael Finkel(no photo)

Thanks Nancy for the attention to detail and following through. Thanks again for fixing what I noticed.

Our Required Format:

JANUARY

1. by Winston S. Churchill
Finish date: January 2015
Genre: (whatever genre the book happens to be)
Rating: A
Review: You can add text from a review you have written but no links to any review elsewhere even goodreads. And that is about it. Just make sure to number consecutively and just add the months.

Nancy....I apologize for not catching the format errors mentioned by Bentley and causing you extra work

Jill and Bentley,

Thanks both for setting me straight!

No problem Nancy you are on the right track (smile)

9. by John Feinstein
Finish date: 27 Aug 2015
Genres: Non-fiction, Sports
Rating: A-
Review: The transitory nature of life in American professional baseball is symbolized not by a sand mandala but by the trail of uniforms and hotel rooms pitcher Chris Schwinden left behind in his five week odyssey among four different sports organizations.

Schwinden, five other players, two managers and an umpire are the main characters in Feinstein's absorbing account of minor leaguers' serendipitous summer of 2012. Feinstein interviewed the men extensively (there's a lot of time on buses in the minor leagues) and relies more on quotes than do some narrators. The result is a book that feels like as if the players are telling their stories themselves. The yearning, the disappointment, the chaos, and the all-too-infrequent thrill of a fast trip to the airport to answer a call to the majors resonate in the players' own words.

I'm a more casual fan these days than I was in 1969 when I moved to New York in the September of the Miracle Mets, so I learned a lot that I had vaguely wondered about over the years. For instance, the structure of minor-league baseball, the six levels culminating in Triple-A ball are no longer a mystery to me, and the relationship of the independent leagues to those with ties to major-league organisations is now clear in my mind.

Feinstein explores the dilemma of "waiting for an accident" (to a major leaguer at your position) while simutaneously hoping no one gets hurt that minor leaguers live with every day along with B list per diems and hotel rooms. His book is a great late summer read as we watch this season's strugglers get DFA'd or optioned.

Nancy wrote: "AUGUST
9. by John Feinstein
Finish date: 27 Aug 2015
Genre..."

As a Pirates fan with little knowledge of the behind-the-scenes machinations, this sounds like a good book to put on my list. Thanks for the review.

A nit Nancy - one blank line under the month and before the citation

Good review

SEPTEMBER

10. by Susan Southard (no photo)
Finish date: 1 September 2015
Genre: History, Military, War
Rating: A
Review: A more emotional or forceful style than Southard's might have trivialized the stories of these five hibakusha (atomic-bomb affected people). Southard's understated, delicate prose suits her damaged, courageous subjects well, allowing their sometimes reluctant, always powerful voices to stand clearly on the page.

These men and women survived the second (non-test) atomic bomb detonation, the one over Nagasaki, the one that many people alive today don't know about or have forgotten. It happened on August 9, 1945, and, unlike the first one that exploded over Hiroshima, its use was not separately or rigorously justified by the United States. The five were ages 13, 15, 15, 16 and 18 on the day of the explosion and working in jobs that had been held by adults before the men were sent off to fight Japan's war in the Pacific and Asia.

Southard relates the fear of being shunned that kept many hibakusha from revealing their experience; this reluctance makes the bravery of these five notable and their shared stories valuable because of their scarcity.

She also details the secrecy in which the US held the research into the immediate and long-term effects of the bomb on the survivors' health. And we learn from her that as recently as 1995, when the Smithsonian planned an exhibit about the Enola Gay that would have included information about the effect of the bomb on Japanese citizens, they scaled it back in response to veterans' groups who thought that compassionate presentations would have signified American atonement for the attacks.

The scope of Southard's research is wide. She is an American Japanese speaker, and was able to read the source material in both languages, which gives her work added balance and authority. The book is a compelling blend of the personal and the political.

Good for you Nancy - you are starting September off with a roar.

11. by Jeff Hobbs
Finish date: 8 September 2015
Genre: Non-fiction, Biography, African-American
Rating: A
Review: (sub-titled) The Promise of an Ivy League Education This book succeeds on so many levels. First and foremost, it is a sincere and heart-rending memoir of the author's friend and college roommate, Robert ("Rob" or "Shawn") Peace. Hobbs learns while writing it how much more there was to know about a man with whom he lived for four years, and how and why Rob sliced his life into sections whose overlap he controlled tightly.

The level that gives me the most to think about, at least on this reading, is its examination of the meaning of Rob's relationship to his elite college experience, and the influence it had on his life after graduation. It helped him to expand and organize his knowledge, it gave him many new friends (although he didn't lack for them before), and, by altering the way his neighbours perceived him, it may have contributed to his death.

After he graduated from Yale, Rob's gift for directing his life simply left him. It's not so much that he "failed" to pursue one of the traditional career paths for brilliant Ivy science grads; it's more that he was unable to reconcile his potential with his perceived obligations to his family and neighbours. Hobbs is effective at showing how the seemingly impossible became almost inevitable.

12. by Jill Lepore
Finish date: 14 September 2015
Genre: History, Feminism
Rating: B+
Review: Two stories for the price of one, deftly interwoven; a real bargain and a mostly entertaining read with lots of (LOTS OF) original research. It's easy to get bogged down in the detail and we don't often forget that Lepore is a professor at Harvard, while it is sometimes difficult to remembers that she's also on the staff at The New Yorker.

Story One: William Moulton Marston, unconventional, educated to a faretheewell, but lacking in steadiness and singleness of purpose, invents the lie detector, briefly treats shell shock victims of the first World War, pursues a downwardly spiraling academic career, heads a ³¾Ã©²Ô²¹²µ±ð à trois that produces enfants à quatre, and along the way creates and nurtures,

Story Two: Wonder Woman, she of superhuman strength through copious bondage, who we follow from her World War II exploits until she stars in a 1972 Special! Women's lib Issue.

We get marvellous short side journeys as well: particularly interesting are the abbreviated stories of Margaret Higgins Sanger and her sister Ethel Higgins Byrne, who, in addition to being champions of birth control are, respectively the aunt and mother of one of the two female members of the Marston ³¾Ã©²Ô²¹²µ±ð.

Lepore posits Wonder Woman as the missing link in a chain of feminism that otherwise appears dormant between the suffrage movement of the early 20th century and the activism of the 60's and 70's. It seems like a bit of a stretch, because there are no grassroots participants in this link, but it's worth thinking about all the same.

13. by Michael Korda (no photo)
Finish date: 23 September 2015
Genre: History
Rating: B+
Review: Korda has a gift for seeing, summarizing and painting the big picture on an accessible canvas that is easy to view and digest. The book is described as the first major biography of Lee in twenty years. An author who chooses to write a new volume on a subject so frequently covered and upon whom there is little new research must be inspired by a new vision, a new approach, a new theme. Korda concentrates on stripping away the gilding from Lee the icon to reveal Lee the human, brilliant and skillful as always but not without misjudgments and leadership "misses".

Chapter 10, on Gettysburg, is especially well done. It makes the geography clear; it shows how terrain drives the outcome of this battle more powerfully than many others. The Devil's Den is as much of a protagonist in this narrative as General Longstreet.

But where are the copy editors? They are no more absent from Clouds of Glory than from other books published in the 20teens, and I don't want to give the impression that Korda's book is sloppier than others recently published. But really: Saint Marye's Heights? (several references around page 500). The Heights are named for the Marye family, nary a Saint among them. While many spoke of an Angel of Marye's Heights, this is the first reference I've seen to a saint on the battlefield.

A comprehensive and entertaining tour de Lee, even with all the missing and repeated parts of speech.

Nancy, you only have to place the month of September over the first book completed for that month and not the others.

So for example the month would be placed over message 25 which was the first book complete in September, but not over 27, 28, or 29 because they were not the first books completed for that month.

14. by Joe Domanick (no photo)
Finish date: 29 September 2015
Genres: Non-fiction, History
Rating: B
Review: Domanick excels at recognizing and chronicling the weaknesses in the police leaders he admires, and acknowledging the strengths of the ones that history has turned away from. Starting with the alcoholic, pietistic William Parker (who turns out to have been Gene Rodenberry's model for Star Trek's Spock), Domanick skips a few LA Police Chiefs before touching on Edward Davis, and really concentrating on Daryl Gates, Willie Williams, Bernard Parks, Bill Bratton and the still-serving Charles Beck.

He captures many transitions along the way. Particularly interesting is the change from the autocratic force of the 1950's, which proudly thumbed its nose at attempts by the city's elected officeholders to hold it accountable, to the contemporary partnership with LAPD's civilian Investigator General in examining controversial policing decisions.

He is troubled by stop-and-frisk, and does a good job of tracing its arc from its renowned "success" at reducing crime rates in New York City to its status as today's poster child for racial profiling and police harassment.

The weaker aspects of the book are: the attempt to integrate "the other side" into the narrative by introducing gang members Andre Christian and Alfred Lomas, and the awkward blending of mini-biographies of the last five chiefs with the department's evolution.

Christian and Lomas don't emerge as coherent actors in the story; their presence seems pasted in as an afterthought. Lomas and the Urban Peace Academy are under-reported in their roles as referees and soothers for the city's antagonists.

The biographical treatment of the five chiefs makes good reading, but it detracts from the narrative of police reform. Domanick is a superb researcher, and deserves to be matched with a better editor.

Gene Roddenberry

Nancy, Sounds like an interesting book and will have to add it to my TBR. Don't forget to cite authors/writers when they are mentioned in your post.

Gene Roddenberry

OCTOBER

15. by Sam Quinones
Finish date: 11 October 2015
Genres: Non-fiction, Chicano, Chicana, Politics
Rating: A-
Review: Sometimes what you want to read are great stories by an accomplished raconteur, sort of like the times when you want understated jazz instead of in-your-face symphonies. Quinones is the storyteller you want for those times. I can imagine myself listening to the chronicles (many of them almost parables) around a campfire, conjuring up the characters and wishing they were present to say "amen" or to expand on their experiences in person.

An image that pops up in the background from time to time like a screensaver is a street in a Mexican ghost town, lined with vacant US style suburban homes, set back and sprouting rebar in anticipation of storeys yet unbuilt. The ghost towns do have dwellers: the old, the very young, and some shopkeepers and service providers, but the entrepreneurs have all gone north to abundant and higher paying jobs in the US (the book was published before the 2008 recession). The houses belong to the entrepreneurs who build them in preparation for a homecoming that never comes. Their temporary jobs in the US gradually turn into ways of life, their children grow up with English as their first languages, and their Mexican hometowns become part of the past, places to visit on holidays.

Not all of the stories are about immigrants. One of the most appealing and unusual is about the outliers who form the Tijuana Opera Company and expand the definition of culture in this city known for gaudy trinkets and donkey shows. The Opera company is still going strong; according to its website it produced a "little known" one act opera by George Gershwin two days ago.

Quinones has written one of 2015's widely-reviewed books, Dreamland. It was while waiting to receive that that I found he had written some others. I'm looking forward to settling in with

by Sam Quinones

soon.

16. by Ronnie Greene (no photo)
Finish date: 16 October 2015
Genres: Non-fiction, Police Brutality, Civil Rights
Rating: B
Review: It's a time-honored tradition among retailers that poor sales performance is attributable to bad weather, while stellar performance is the direct result of executive brilliance or anything except good weather. The New Orleans Police Department adopted this ritual to explain the criminal behaviour of several of its officers in the aftermath of a post-Hurricane Katrina massacre of unarmed civilians by some members of its constabulary. Unconsciously emulating Flip Wilson, their mantra was "the weather made me do it".

The story that the book tells, of two families escaping from floods who needed help or at least to be left alone and instead became targets of hysteria-induced mayhem committed by a large gang of constables, is horrifying and compelling. Incredibly, over ten years later, the four officers found guilty of the murders and maimings and sentenced to long prison terms, are still innocent (although still in prison). The story behind the vacation of their convictions due to prosecutorial misconduct (there may have been misconduct, but it wasn't by any prosecutors involved in the case), is, if possible, more outrageous than that of the shootings.

I admired the author's passion for the story and for the shooting victims, and was impressed by the quality of his research. Regrettably, the book is confusing in places and the writing is choppy and often ungrammatical.

One example of distracting confusion: there were 11 officers in the van that sped to the bridge, according to the author. The book describes the actions of 8 of them (Barrios, Bowen, Bryan, Faulcon, Gisevius, Hills, Hunter and Villavoso). I don't think the other three are accounted for in the book. I read the chapters a few times to try to figure out what I had missed, and in the end concluded that I hadn't missed anything. It might be that the missing three simply didn't engage in any criminal behavior, although Bryan, who is mentioned, didn't either. But a simple statement to that effect would have saved the reader from rereading.

One of the book's Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviewers, Nancy Kennedy, summarizes the grammatical and structural errors well. She writes that she hates to "ding a book for something like this"; I feel the same way. But they are so pervasive as to be distracting, and in the case of a book that you desperately want to be accurate because of the gravity of the charges it brings, the careless editing creates niggling suspicions about the care taken in the writing itself.

You and I share that dislike for bad editing, Nancy. It is very distracting and is totally unnecessary. It always lowers my rating of a book.

Nancy, great progress on your books. Could you please add the citation for the other book you mentioned in message 33 as follows:

by Sam Quinones

Thank you.

17. by Sam Quinones
Finish date: 20 October 2015
Genres: Non-fiction, Drug Traffic, American Dream
Rating: A-
Review: Black tar heroin meets OxyContin in deindustrialized USA. Author Quinones shows us in Dreamland that he can handle a story with a cast of thousands as well as he managed the cast of dozens in

by Sam Quinones

The title plays on two interpretations of the word Dreamland. In the 1930's it was the perfect name for a private swimming pool that nurtured, entertained and enriched the lives of white residents of Portsmouth, in the far south of Ohio. 70 years later, the name represented the escape from reality that many Portsmouth residents sought from opiates delivered by two leading edge American business models.

The proof of the importance of this book is the number of Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviewers who recognized for the first time a hiding-in-plain-sight phenomenon that they had observed puzzling fragments of themselves. As an example, I remembered how puzzled I was when I was sent home from hospital surgery in May of this year with 120 oxycodone tablets. After I googled them and found that they were used to manage "moderate to moderately severe acute or chronic pain", I wondered why I had them, since I hadn't reported any pain that would have warranted using the heavy artillery of pain relief. Dreamland notes the inverse correlation between the time insurance companies allow doctors to spend with patients and the amount of pain medication that doctors prescribe. Quinones also comments on the increasing prominence of patient satisfaction surveys, and the extent to which patient satisfaction depends on pain experience. Aha! The light dawned.

Several reviewers commented that the book is repetitive. I agree that it is, in places, but I found the repetition helpful in reminding me of the most important points in this complicated, tragedy.

18. byDamon Tweedy (no photo)
Finish date: 25 October 2015
Genres: Memoir, Medicine
Rating: A-
Review: Powerfully simple and engagingly candid, Black Man excels at weaving stories from Dr. Tweedy's education and practice with compelling analysis of the underlying conditions that generate them. The book spans the years between his entry into Duke University's School of Medicine in 1996 and about 2013, when he revisits a monthly clinic that had been part of his early training.

Dr. Tweedy is gentle throughout the book, but he doesn't pull any punches, either. When Dr. Gale, one of his first-year professors, assumes he is the long-overdue maintenance man come to fix the lights, Tweedy doesn't excoriate him, but he doesn't gloss over the experience, either (Dr. Gale is, after all, named in the book). And Tweedy shares his fixation on the incident, the emotions it provokes in him, the discussions he has about it with some fellow students, and the long-term effect it had in a way that resonates with any of us who has ever tried to make sense of a minor occurrence that shakes our self-concept.

The interplay between poverty, discrimination, cultural factors and lifestyle choices informs his analysis of the conditions and the patients he treats. Gary, an African American man with chest pain who makes a seemingly well-informed and reasonable decision about his next steps in treatment, is referred by his white physicians for evaluation for obsessive-compulsive disorder. The reason? Gary has not chosen the next step his (white) doctors recommend, and they assume this is the result of a mental disorder. Dr. Tweedy's reaction to their assumption is thoughtful fury, which he narrates forcefully.

While this isn't intended to be a scholarly book, it is well-supported by notes on sources and an inviting and eclectic selective bibliography. It's an easy read, full of compassionate lessons.

Nancy R, good progress, you might want to add some photo for your avatar -it could be a beloved pet, flowers, a favorite place, a favorite artist's work or even a photo of yourself at a period of time when folks would not recognize you or something else.

It is easy to upload and then everybody will not just see the blank icon.

NOVEMBER
19. by Alex Kershaw
Finish date: 2 November 2015
Genres: History, WWII
Rating: B+
Review: Kershaw writes fluidly, and it's a pleasure to read his easy-flowing, well orchestrated prose. The title is a good summary of the story, with the additional information that all three Jacksons are interned in concentration camps as a result of their Resistance involvement.

The reason I don't rate it higher is that it is more of an outline, a sketch of the events the Jacksons witnessed, their brave undertakings and their suffering rather than a fully rendered portrait. Kershaw is rigorous in sticking to the facts, carefully marking speculation about what the parents, who were no longer living when he began the book, might have been feeling or might have done whenever there is no source for his conclusions. Perhaps there is a lack of source material, and that this is what curtails his exploration and leaves us starved for detail. Yet it seems that there must have been pre-war material that would have allowed him to colour and shade his subjects more fully.

In fairness, the main title features the word "Avenue", and it is only the subtitle that refers to the Jacksons. The avenue in question is Avenue Foch, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois de Boulogne, and the presence of the Gestapo on the avenue in the first half of the 40's is well-outlined. But again, a little more flesh on these bones would have been welcome.

20. by Phil Klay
Finish date: 5 November 2015
Genres: Fiction, Military
Rating: A
Review: Sometimes when I rate a book as "5 stars" , I think: "Is this really the best there is? Shouldn't I leave room for something better?" I had no such doubts about Redeployment, which really is the best there is.

These twelve stories about US soldiers redeploying, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in the United States, are polished gems, expertly crafted and faultlessly burnished. The centrepiece, for me, was Money As a Weapons System, which covers the time when "the invisible hand of the market started planting IEDs". This one is a vault into Joseph Heller territory and creates an enduring image of the uses to which baseballs uniforms, donated to propagate democracy, American style, can be put.

The stories aren't all satirical. Prayer in the Furnace contains a startling, original admonition to Marines who think that everything in the city they patrol should be burned to the ground. Unless It's a Sucking Chest Wound takes us along with a former adjutant who is redeploying into Operation Corporate Freedom in New York City.

The book which is composed of these stories won the Fiction National Book Award in 2014. I can see it being a beacon to sufferers from sanity for many years to come.

by Joseph Heller

Read it and liked it a lot. Especially the first story.

21. by Thomas Hardy
Finish date: 10 November 2015
Genre: Fiction
Rating: B
Review: Bathsheba, what were you thinking? You seem a bright enough lass, from the little we learn about your character and experience. You aren't at all cowed by the money-hungry man at the toll-gate, and stand your ground over the question of the fairness of the additional twopence he wants to charge to allow your wagon to pass. Yet when you encounter three control-hungry male peers, you turn into jelly and cast personal responsibility to the wind. You really are provoking, and after 57 chapters I was glad to say goodbye to you.

Yet that might be unfair. You note that it is "difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs", and it is this language to which your biographer limits you. So had you been free to use your own language, we might have been able to make sense of the reason you sent a complete stranger a valentine sealed with the words "marry me", chosen at random from the designs on the desk in front of you, instead of looking for a cute little monkey face.

Despite the silliness of the plot, the Greek chorus of workers make sharp and entertaining observations frequently enough to give us a pleasant read. And Hardy describes the natural environment in the fictional Wessex very winningly. The sounds of the birds Bathsheba hears after spending a night outdoors in Chapter 44 took me right to the oak and beech thicket with her. The various fogs and mists that envelop the landscape each get individual, beautifully drawn portraits.

Hardy was a popular novelist, but according to Wikipedia, his poetry is better regarded today. The poetical elements of this novel are the ones that appeal most.

Great review, Nancy!! I read that book years ago and thought it was OK but not outstanding.

22. by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill (no photos)
Finish date: 12 November 2015
Genre: True Crime
Rating: A
Review: This 2012 paperback reissue of the authors' 2000 work was prompted by the 2011 capture of Whitey Bulger. When the book was first published, Bulger had been hiding (pretty openly, as it turns out) for five years and though his story was "unfinished" it was still riveting.

Bulger, older brother of former Massachusetts State Senate and University of Massachusetts President Billy Bulger, enjoyed the protection of the FBI for about 20 years as he pursued a rewarding career as a racketeer and murderer of at least 11 targets. His FBI handler, his childhood hero-worshiper John J. Connolly Jr., kept other law enforcement agencies at bay so that Whitey could keep his criminal enterprises humming along smoothly.

The story is intricate and has a large cast. Lehr and O'Neill keep it corralled and flowing; their book is a masterpiece of clarity. They make it abundantly plain that the FBI's obsession with eliminating the Mafia from New England resulted in their playing wingman as Whitey courted the partners he needed to become and remain an accomplished crime boss. It's fascinating, expertly written and skillfully edited, a real pleasure to read.

Looks like one for me, Nancy. Thanks for the tip.

23. by Jenny Nordberg
Finish date: 22 November 2015
Genres: social science, women's studies, gender identity
Rating: A
Review: Author Nordberg is treading the well-worn path to the doors of the few women who are political leaders in post-Taliban Afghanistan. She is looking for evidence of progress for women since 2001. Azita, one of 60+ women members of Parliament, is practiced in summarizing the situation. Some advancement for women in the capital, unchanging chatteldom for women in the country. Ordinary stuff. Then Azita's twin daughters confide a family secret to Nordberg. Their youngest sibling, a brother, is in fact a sister. And so Nordberg discovers the widely-known, only slightly subterranean phenomenon of bacha posh. It is a scheme for evening the gender odds in families with no sons. It is carried out by raising the youngest daughter as a boy, at least until she approaches puberty. And it isn't documented by any of the Western women's experts who study Afghanistan.

Nordberg taps into an underground telegraph to meet dozens of girls and a few young and mature women who have been raised as boys. As she shares meals in the backs of restaurants with them (women aren't allowed to eat in the dining room)and celebrates weddings with them (men and women don't celebrate together), she uncovers a possible path out of lifelong subservience: follow the money. Economic parity is the important ingredient in political power; achieving it is essential for winning political power and social freedom.

This conclusion isn't exactly new, but her next one is more thought-provoking. She believes that engaging the men, and especially the girls' fathers, in educating other men in a new concept of honour, one that includes educating and supporting their daughters rather than selling and beating them.

Nordberg blends the stories of some of these individual women with observations on Afghan and some other patriarchal societies into a book that pleases the story-lover and challenges the reader's sense of what is possible.

24. by Eric Lichtblau (no photo)
Finish date: 30 November 2015
Genre: History
Rating: A-
Review: Communism may have been a bad thing, but (especially when separated from its totalitarian practitioners) it pales in comparison to the evils of anti-communism. Eric Lichtblau chronicles the enthusiastic campaign that the CIA and other agencies of the U. S. Government waged to persuade "non-ardent" Nazis to head west before the Potsdam Agreement was thoroughly spell-checked. The result: certainly hundreds, probably thousands, perhaps as many as ten thousand Nazis calling the U. S. home and enjoying the protections of the Constitution, some even into the 21st century.

The book lacks the powerful "force for good" that would turn it into a more gripping narrative, but this is hardly the author's fault. Some brave souls fought long, weary battles to deport these unworthy immigrants. They even achieved a few successes. But for the most part the refugees who lost the 2nd World War lived happily ever after in the Land of the Free.

Lichtblau's style is calm and matter-of-fact, most welcome in a book that invites hyperbole with its outrageous subject matter.

Nancy wrote: "30. by Eric Lichtblau (no photo)
Finish date: 30 November 2015
Genre: History
Rating: A-
..."

Interesting read, I'm adding to my TBR list :)

DECEMBER
25. by Wes Moore
Finish date: 02 December 2015
Genre: Memoir
Rating: B
Review: Expect Westley Moore to surface as a candidate for national political office 2020ish. This book is an early campaign biography disguised as an examination of the similarities and differences in the formative years of two men born in the late 70's in the same city. Expect Wes Moore to remain buried in the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services system forever.

I found the book superficial and a bit self-serving. Wes Moore the prisoner is a sketchy presence, although the author treats him with respect and compassion. We learn his biographical data, but the temper of his mind is a mystery.

To his credit, author Moore doesn't provide us with a packaged solution to the important question of why these two lives that began with much in common now share virtually nothing. It's a matter he invites us to think about on our own. He would rather see us respond to his call for action, and provides us with a map in the form of a 46 page resource guide to organizations that work on creating alternative life plans with adolescents whose choices have been few.