en-US Fri, 25 Apr 2025 13:59:13 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 30231734 "WESTWARD HO! FOR OREGON AND CALIFORNIA!"


In the eerily warm spring of 1846, George Donner placed this advertisement in a local newspaper as he and a restless caravan prepared for what they hoped would be the most rewarding journey of a lifetime. But in eagerly pursuing what would a century later become known as the "American dream," this optimistic-yet-motley crew of emigrants was met with a chilling nightmare; in the following months, their jingoistic excitement would be replaced by desperate cries for help that would fall silent in the deadly snow-covered mountains of the Sierra Nevada.


We know these early pioneers as the Donner Party, a name that has elicited horror since the late 1840s. Now, celebrated historian Michael Wallis—beloved for his myth-busting portraits of legendary American figures—continues his life’s work of parsing fact from fiction to tell the true story of one of the most embroidered sagas in Western history.


Wallis begins the story in 1846, a momentous "year of decision" for the nation, when incredible territorial strides were being made in Texas, New Mexico, and California. Against this dramatic backdrop, an unlikely band of travelers appeared, stratified in age, wealth, education and ethnicity. At the forefront were the Donners: brothers George and Jacob, true sons of the soil determined to tame the wild land of California; and the Reeds, headed by adventurous, business-savvy patriarch James. In total, the Donner-Reed group would reach eighty-seven men, women, and children, and though personal motives varied—bachelors thirsting for adventure, parents wanting greater futures for their children—everyone was linked by the same unwavering belief that California was theirs for the taking.


Skeptical of previous accounts of how the group ended up in peril, Wallis has spent years retracing its ill-fated journey, uncovering hundreds of new documents that illuminate how a combination of greed, backbiting, and recklessness led the group to become hopelessly snowbound at the infamous Donner Pass in present-day California. Climaxing with the grim stories of how the party’s paltry rations soon gave way to unimaginable hunger, Wallis not only details the cannibalism that has in perpetuity haunted their legacy but also the heroic rescue parties that managed to reach the stranded, only to discover that just forty-eight had survived the ordeal.


An unflinching and historically invaluable account of the darkest side of Manifest Destiny, The Best Land Under Heaven offers a brilliant, revisionist examination of one of America's most calamitous and sensationalized catastrophes.]]> 496 Michael Wallis 0871407698 Florence 5
Fast forward to winter of 46-47 in what is now the state of Nevada. Snowstorms in the Sierra Nevada started in October and never stopped until Spring. The Donner party found themselves stranded on the east side of the Sierra. They had been forced to jettison most of their animals and possessions including the wagons. I find it difficult to visualize snowdrifts of twenty and thiry feet, but that is what the travelers faced. Starvation followed with death in its wake. The details are grim.

In subsequent years the Donner story gained notoriety that exists to this day. There were few heroes or villains, just people desperately clinging to life. You will appreciate your comfortable, warm armchair while reading their story.

Note: It disturbed me to realize how much pack animals also suffered during wagon trips.]]> 4.21 2017
author: Michael Wallis
name: Florence
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves:
review:
The year was 1846. It was springtime. The Donners, the Reeds, and scores of other families were heading west to start a new life in California. They travelled in covered wagons pulled by oxen. They were well supplied with food, bedding, equipment and were full of anticipation. Starting out from the edge of the wilderness in Springfield, Illinois, the main trail was well marked with few obstacles. The travelers formed a congenial community with common purpose. When they had reached what became modern day Utah the Donners separated from their fellow travelers. They took a side trail known as the Hastings Cutoff. It was a disastrous decision.

Fast forward to winter of 46-47 in what is now the state of Nevada. Snowstorms in the Sierra Nevada started in October and never stopped until Spring. The Donner party found themselves stranded on the east side of the Sierra. They had been forced to jettison most of their animals and possessions including the wagons. I find it difficult to visualize snowdrifts of twenty and thiry feet, but that is what the travelers faced. Starvation followed with death in its wake. The details are grim.

In subsequent years the Donner story gained notoriety that exists to this day. There were few heroes or villains, just people desperately clinging to life. You will appreciate your comfortable, warm armchair while reading their story.

Note: It disturbed me to realize how much pack animals also suffered during wagon trips.
]]> 168677579 ��
Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens�� confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule.
��
That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection.
��
At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court.
��
None of it went as planned.
��
While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality, it involved a��large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation.
��
That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.]]> 416 Rachel Maddow 0593444515 Florence 0 currently-reading 4.35 2023
author: Rachel Maddow
name: Florence
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 Florence 5
TB used to be called Phthisis. What a tongue twister! It has been the scourge of mankind for thousands of years. The good news is that it is now curable. Among those one and a quarter million people who will be afflicted this year, the ones who will be saved are those with a high standard of living and access to expensive drugs.

Mr. Green says that world conditions run in cycles. Next year conditions will probably be different. We could have a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle. With the death of Paul Farmer, the demise of USAID, and the rise of Donald Trump, things are looking dire.]]> 4.52 2025
author: John Green
name: Florence
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/15
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves:
review:
Yes, to John Green, everything IS tuberculosis. He is obsessed. He wants to find a way to prevent the death of 1,250,00 people this year and more than that if things don't improve. Mr. Green writes with some humor and much passion. The book is not dry or dull. It is filled with pathos, suffering, and some joy.

TB used to be called Phthisis. What a tongue twister! It has been the scourge of mankind for thousands of years. The good news is that it is now curable. Among those one and a quarter million people who will be afflicted this year, the ones who will be saved are those with a high standard of living and access to expensive drugs.

Mr. Green says that world conditions run in cycles. Next year conditions will probably be different. We could have a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle. With the death of Paul Farmer, the demise of USAID, and the rise of Donald Trump, things are looking dire.
]]> 214152292 As relevant as it is comprehensive, Red Scare tells the story of McCarthyism and the Red Scare—based in part on newly declassified sources—by an award-winning writer of history and New York Times reporter.

The film Oppenheimer has awakened interest in this vital period of American history. Now, for the first time in a generation, Red Scare presents a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. The cultural phenomenon, most often referred to as McCarthyism, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, coupled with the terrifying onset of the Cold War. This defining moment in American history, unlike any that preceded it, was marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria. Drawing upon newly declassified documents, journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.

Beginning with the origins of the era after WWI through to its conclusion in 1957, Risen brings to life the politics, patriotism, opportunism, courage, and delirium of those years through the lives and experiences of a cast of towering historical figures, including President Eisenhower, Roy Cohn, Paul Robeson, Robert Oppenheimer, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Richard Nixon, and many more individuals known and unknown. Red Scare takes us beyond the familiar story of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists to a fuller understanding of what the country went through at a time of moral questioning and perceived threat from the left, and what we were capable of doing to each other as a result.

An urgent, accessible, and important history, Red Scare reveals an all-too-familiar pattern of illiberal conspiracy-mongering and political and cultural backlash that speaks directly to the antagonism and divisiveness of our contemporary moment.]]> 480 Clay Risen 1982141808 Florence 5
From the end of World War II until the mid fifties our country seemed to be in a state of anti communist hysteria. Right wing pundits convinced people that scores of communists were controlling social justice organizations, government agencies, labor unions, Hollywood studios, universities and even the US Army. These radicals were credibly planning to violently overthrow the government, they claimed. It was a greatly exaggerated fear that spread like wildfire, fanned by men such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Lives were ruined by innuendo. People were hounded out of their jobs on scarce or non existent evidence. Some went to prison. Others avoided that fate by informing on their friends.

Today our government has fallen into a similar pattern of denying the right of free speech, free association and privacy from government intrusion into private sexual mores. Warrantless arrests are taking place. Risen, the author, compares our current situation to an underground fire in a coal seam. The illiberal passion that was ignited during the Red Scare has burned underground since that earlier time and has reemerged as a fear of immigrants, Diversity, Inclusion, Equity programs, and even demonization of Democrats as neo communists. These are perilous times; dangerous during the Red Scare and worse today.]]> 4.33
author: Clay Risen
name: Florence
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves:
review:
To those who have lived through the Red Scare, today's headlines must seem like deja vu. Once again rights guaranteed by the US Constitution are under attack. Clay Risen sticks to the objectivity of his journalistic profession but the parallels to current Trump administrative policies are undeniable.

From the end of World War II until the mid fifties our country seemed to be in a state of anti communist hysteria. Right wing pundits convinced people that scores of communists were controlling social justice organizations, government agencies, labor unions, Hollywood studios, universities and even the US Army. These radicals were credibly planning to violently overthrow the government, they claimed. It was a greatly exaggerated fear that spread like wildfire, fanned by men such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Lives were ruined by innuendo. People were hounded out of their jobs on scarce or non existent evidence. Some went to prison. Others avoided that fate by informing on their friends.

Today our government has fallen into a similar pattern of denying the right of free speech, free association and privacy from government intrusion into private sexual mores. Warrantless arrests are taking place. Risen, the author, compares our current situation to an underground fire in a coal seam. The illiberal passion that was ignited during the Red Scare has burned underground since that earlier time and has reemerged as a fear of immigrants, Diversity, Inclusion, Equity programs, and even demonization of Democrats as neo communists. These are perilous times; dangerous during the Red Scare and worse today.
]]> 19063 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still.

By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordian-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.

In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

(Note: this title was not published as YA fiction)]]> 592 Markus Zusak Florence 3 4.38 2005
author: Markus Zusak
name: Florence
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:
The Book Thief features an unusual narrator that is reliable, persistent, but not human. This puts the book in the realm of science fiction or fantasy, but just barely. The tale is all too human; full of suffering, grief and loss. In a suburb of Munich people go about their everyday lives in spite of the second world war raging around them. Devotion to family, neighbors, and occasionally to strangers surprisingly dominates the small city in peril. A young girl with a profound attachment to the written word conveys hope to those who are doomed.
]]> 60277002 480 Aran Shetterly 0062858211 Florence 3
I do credit this author with researching and publishing details of the tragedy. It has been relatively unknown to most people.

The book could have used extensive editing. Too many organizational acronyms were scattered on each page. The same with minor character's names. The lack of concise structure made important events seem indistinct. The book ends with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission not supported by the city and featuring unrepentant Klansmen as speakers. We cannot have a peace and joy moment before members of the community embrace the wrongs of history. That is more true than ever at the present moment in the United States.]]> 4.27 2024
author: Aran Shetterly
name: Florence
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves:
review:
I have always had an interest in the 1979 event labeled The Greensboro Massacre. It has alerted me to the ever present danger of political street violence. For those not familiar, five young people were killed by the Ku Klux Klan while leading a march meant to improve the lives of Greensboro's under privileged black citizens. The victims were member of the Communist Workers Party. No one was ever held responsible for the killings. The CWP evoked no sympathy.

I do credit this author with researching and publishing details of the tragedy. It has been relatively unknown to most people.

The book could have used extensive editing. Too many organizational acronyms were scattered on each page. The same with minor character's names. The lack of concise structure made important events seem indistinct. The book ends with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission not supported by the city and featuring unrepentant Klansmen as speakers. We cannot have a peace and joy moment before members of the community embrace the wrongs of history. That is more true than ever at the present moment in the United States.
]]> 52019031 "A fantastic book. It's harrowing, tender-hearted, and funny as hell. O'Connell proves himself to be a genius guide through all the circles of imagined and anticipated doom." --Jenny Offill

By the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine, an absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense--and coming to grips with the future

We're alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. Our old postwar alliances are crumbling. Everywhere you look there's an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What does it mean to have children--nothing if not an act of hope? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on Earth is anybody doing about it?

Dublin-based writer Mark O'Connell is consumed by these questions--and, as the father of two young children himself, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization's collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to those places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited--real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. In doing so, he comes to a resolution, while offering readers a unique window into our contemporary imagination.

Both investigative and deeply personal, Notes from an Apocalypse is an affecting, humorous, and surprisingly hopeful meditation on our present moment. With insight, humanity, and wit, O'Connell leaves you to wonder: What if the end of the world isn't the end of the world?]]> 272 Mark O'Connell 038554300X Florence 4
The book is not grim. Quite the opposite; it is witty, imaginative, and filled with an astonishing array of uncommon words that sent me googling.]]> 3.72 2020
author: Mark O'Connell
name: Florence
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:
Global warming is a subject that causes Mr. O'Connell a lot of anxiety. That sounds reasonable, however he is positively fixated on the idea that the world will end with a devastating climate event. It's a depressing concept but the book snagged my interest when it became a travelogue. First stop was a desolate spot in North Dakota where a "prepper" salesman has plans to develop former World War II arms depositories into luxury underground bunkers for wealthy people trying to escape the coming apocalypse. Then onto New Zealand where billionaires are buying up land to preserve their lives of luxury in a beautiful and remote spot. Some other folks want to start a colony on Mars. Most of these schemes have one thing in common. It's every man for himself, it takes a lot of money, and screw your neighbor.

The book is not grim. Quite the opposite; it is witty, imaginative, and filled with an astonishing array of uncommon words that sent me googling.
]]> 112975117
The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story—of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention.

From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society.

The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New York society and inserted themselves into political and cultural life, but also suffered the most famous loss on the Titanic, one of many shocking and unexpected twists in the family’s story.

In this unconventional, page-turning historical biography, featuring black-and-white and color photographs, #1 New York Times bestselling authors Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe chronicle the lives of the Astors and explore what the Astor name has come to mean in America—offering a window onto the making of America itself.]]> 322 Anderson Cooper 0062964704 Florence 3
Anderson Cooper is a charming narrator of events and history of New York City. He offers a personal, yet not overly sympathetic perspective of great wealth and social standing, being a member of the fallen Vanderbilt dynasty. ]]> 3.70 2023
author: Anderson Cooper
name: Florence
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves:
review:
John Jacob Astor, a native of Germany, landed on American shore in 1783. He was not penniless but close to it. Realizing that he wasn't cut out to be a wage slave, Astor started his enterprise by slaughtering thousands of animals, and trading alcohol to native people for fur pelts. Fast forward to the nineteenth century. The Astor family became grand slum lords of New York's lower east side where immigrant families were crowded into small, dark tenement rooms, struggling to survive. Business was booming. Astor is still a familiar place name in New York but you don't see it in hospitals, libraries, museums. They didn't invent anything. They were not known for their charitable contributions. They built mansions, yachts, and battled each other over a fortune that eventually dissipated.

Anderson Cooper is a charming narrator of events and history of New York City. He offers a personal, yet not overly sympathetic perspective of great wealth and social standing, being a member of the fallen Vanderbilt dynasty.
]]> 56790170 For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about.

Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19.

The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work.

Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.]]> 304 Michael Lewis 0393881555 Florence 3 4.25 2021
author: Michael Lewis
name: Florence
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves:
review:
Michael Lewis starts off with this startling statistic: The United States has 4 percent of the world's people yet we experienced 20 percent of the world's deaths from Covid 19. Holy cow! How did that happen? If you are looking for someone to blame, the candidates are numerous. The Center for Disease Control had no plan to control the pandemic. They could not even produce a mechanism for testing to see how quickly Covid was moving. The Trump administration offered daily assurances that it would all go away. In a fierce battle for protective supplies and life saving equipment, the states were left to compete against each other. This book, to its credit, extols the work of a few individuals who actually had the desire and a plausible scientific method to slow down the carnage. Unsurprisingly, no one listened to them. I wish I could say we will do better next time.
]]> 278828
The Englishman’s Daughter is the never-before-told story of these extraordinary men, their protectors, and of the haunting love affair between Private Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne, the most beautiful woman in Villeret. Their passion would result in the birth of a child known as “The Englishman’s Daughter,�� and in an act of unspeakable betrayal, a tragic legacy that would haunt the village for generations to come.

Through the testimonies of the villagers and the last letters of the soldiers, acclaimed journalist Ben Macintyre has pieced together a harrowing account of how life was lived behind enemy lines during the Great War, and offers a compelling solution to a gripping mystery that reverberates to this day.]]> 254 Ben Macintyre 0385336799 Florence 5 with water, rats, boredom and punctuated by moments of death and terror. This book tells the story of four British soldiers who escaped those trenches and found themselves behind enemy lines in a small French village. The villagers managed to bury their mistrust of foreigners and hid the fugitives for years. Things grew more complicated. The German regime was harsh and punitive, There were no happy endings for any of the players. Mr. Macintyre guides us through events ending with a quest to solve a wartime mystery that seemed to haunt him personally.]]> 3.69 2001
author: Ben Macintyre
name: Florence
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
This book would have benefited from a list of characters and a more cogent explanation of the movements of three armies during World War I. Despite these flaws I disappeared into its pages. Trench warfare is an unspeakable horror. Soldiers trapped in deep holes filled
with water, rats, boredom and punctuated by moments of death and terror. This book tells the story of four British soldiers who escaped those trenches and found themselves behind enemy lines in a small French village. The villagers managed to bury their mistrust of foreigners and hid the fugitives for years. Things grew more complicated. The German regime was harsh and punitive, There were no happy endings for any of the players. Mr. Macintyre guides us through events ending with a quest to solve a wartime mystery that seemed to haunt him personally.
]]> 13369533
Following the tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast ancient network of routes criss-crossing the British Isles and beyond, Robert Macfarlane discovers a lost world - a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ritual, of stories and ghosts; above all of the places and journeys which inspire and inhabit our imaginations.]]> 433 Robert Macfarlane 0241143810 Florence 3 4.14 2012
author: Robert Macfarlane
name: Florence
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2013/03/24
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves:
review:
The author is fascinated by ancient walking trails and sea lanes. He invokes the history of those who created them as he actually retraces their footsteps in the present day. His language is obscure, though poetic and very beautiful. There is a glossary in the book, but it is incomplete and you will need a comprehensive dictionary to fully understand the prose. As you would expect, English trails are chalky and the landscape is cool and green. Other locations are mountainous, war-torn or nearly obliterated by time.
]]> 44525300 On New Year's Day 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck a day, month, and year from a hat. That day--chosen completely at random--turned out to be Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing.

That Sunday between Christmas and New Year's turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, prejudice, selflessness, coincidence, and startling moments of human connection, along with evocative foreshadowing of momentous events yet to come. Lives were lost. Lives were saved. Lives were altered in overwhelming ways. Many of these events never made it into the news; they were private dramas in the lives of private people. They were utterly compelling.

One Day asks and answers the question of whether there is even such a thing as "ordinary" when we are talking about how we all lurch and stumble our way through the daily, daunting challenge of being human.]]> 384 Gene Weingarten 0399166661 Florence 5
Among those stories: a woman received the transplanted heart of a young murderer. The heart worked well. It was painful for her to deal with the irony of the situation. A man with no real purpose in life used his last moments in an attempt to rescue children from a house in flames. A traffic policeman with a penchant to harassing young women crossed a fateful line. The AIDS epidemic exploded like a holocaust for gay men, ignored by the Reagan administration. Each chapter zeroed in on its specific December 28, 1986 event by meticulously revealing backstory and by tracing subsequent events like outward ripples in a pond.
]]> 3.90 2019
author: Gene Weingarten
name: Florence
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves:
review:
December 28, 1986. It was a day in the not so distant past, a Sunday between Christmas and New Year's Day. Nothing much happened on that ordinary day, you would think. Gene Weingarten dug deeply and uncovered some quirky stories in his best journalistic style.

Among those stories: a woman received the transplanted heart of a young murderer. The heart worked well. It was painful for her to deal with the irony of the situation. A man with no real purpose in life used his last moments in an attempt to rescue children from a house in flames. A traffic policeman with a penchant to harassing young women crossed a fateful line. The AIDS epidemic exploded like a holocaust for gay men, ignored by the Reagan administration. Each chapter zeroed in on its specific December 28, 1986 event by meticulously revealing backstory and by tracing subsequent events like outward ripples in a pond.

]]> 23492799
Spanning 2,000 miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific Ocean, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used it to emigrate West--historians still regard this as the largest land migration of all time--the trail united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. The trail years also solidified the American character: our plucky determination in the face of adversity, our impetuous cycle of financial bubbles and busts, the fractious clash of ethnic populations competing for the same jobs and space. Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten.

With "The Oregon Trail "he seeks to bring the most important road in American history back to life. At once a majestic American journey, a significant work of history, and a personal saga reminiscent of bestsellers by Bill Bryson and Cheryl Strayed, the book tells the story of Buck's 2,000-mile expedition across the plains with tremendous humor and heart. He was accompanied by three cantankerous mules, his boisterous brother, Nick, and an "incurably filthy" Jack Russell terrier named Olive Oyl.

Along the way, Buck dodges thunderstorms in Nebraska, chases his runaway mules across miles of Wyoming plains, scouts more than five hundred miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, crosses the Rockies, makes desperate fifty-mile forced marches for water, and repairs so many broken wheels and axels that he nearly reinvents the art of wagon travel itself.

Apart from charting his own geographical and emotional adventure, Buck introduces readers to the evangelists, shysters, natives, trailblazers, and everyday dreamers who were among the first of the pioneers to make the journey west. With a rare narrative power, a refreshing candor about his own weakness and mistakes, and an extremely attractive obsession for history and travel, "The Oregon Trail" draws readers into the journey of a lifetime.]]> 451 Rinker Buck 1451659164 Florence 5
When I pulled this book from a library shelf I never realized what a gem I was selecting. Rink constantly veers into the history of the trail, the dangers of disease and accidental death that plagued early travelers, and how to get a mule to cooperate. There are moments of peril, relief, joy and brotherly rancor. I was sorry to reach the last page.]]> 3.79 2015
author: Rinker Buck
name: Florence
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves:
review:
What an incredible adventure! Rink Buck and his brother, Nick decided to recreate an American pioneer experience by driving a covered wagon pulled by three mules along the remnants of the Oregon Trail. In the almost two centuries that have passed, much of the famed route from Missouri to Oregon has been converted to interstate highway, railroad track, private ranchland or just obliterated by time. But for two intrepid brothers, the pioneer spirit is still alive.

When I pulled this book from a library shelf I never realized what a gem I was selecting. Rink constantly veers into the history of the trail, the dangers of disease and accidental death that plagued early travelers, and how to get a mule to cooperate. There are moments of peril, relief, joy and brotherly rancor. I was sorry to reach the last page.
]]> 75305025
A husband sells property to a mysterious, temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man’s character. A couple grows concerned when an enigmatic family moves next door, and the children start sneaking over to beg for help. Two dangerous criminals kidnap an elderly couple and begin blackmailing their grandson, demanding that he pay back what he owes.

Suspenseful, thrilling, and expertly crafted, American Spirits explores the hostile undercurrents of our communities and American politics at large, as well as the ways local tragedies can be both devastating and, somehow, everyday. Ushering the reader through the town of Sam Dent, Russell Banks has etched yet another brilliant entry into the bedrock of American fiction.]]> 240 Russell Banks 0593536770 Florence 5 3.80 2024
author: Russell Banks
name: Florence
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:
These three interlocking stories, set in a small upstate New York town with a long history, will not be easily forgotten. Curiously, five of six main characters are well meaning, somewhat naive, Trump voters whose lives inevitably drift into tragic circumstances. The tales offer no overt political viewpoint. They imply a bit of truth about evil embedded in everyday life. Mr. Banks does not paint an optimistic picture. He reaches deeply into human behavior and reveals shocking results.
]]> 199797556
The idea of "Scotland Yard" is steeped in atmospheric stories of foggy London streets, murder by lamplight, and fiendish killers pursued by gentleman detectives. From its establishment in 1829 through the eve of World War II, Scotland Yard—the world’s first modern, professional, and centrally organized police force—set new standards for policing and investigating.

Scotland Yard advanced ground-breaking use of forensics—from fingerprints to ballistics to evidence collection—made the first attempt at criminal profiling, and captivated the public on both sides of the Atlantic with feats of detective work that rivaled any fictional interpretation.

Based on official case files, contemporary newspaper reporting, trial transcripts, and the first-hand accounts of the detectives on the beat, Scotland Yard tells the tales of some of history’s most notorious murders—with cases that proved to be landmarks in the field of criminal inquiry.]]> 480 Simon Read 1639366393 Florence 4
The book is a condensed history of the internationally venerable Scotland Yard. Starting in the mid nineteenth century, periodically cases of heinous murder drove the public into a frightened panic. Thus spurred on, the Yard grew into a respected organization employing new professionals, known as detectives, who were eventually armed with revolutionary crime solving skills like fingerprinting, blood splatter analysis, and firearm ballistics. They never dreamed of something as fool proof as DNA analysis.]]> 3.83 2024
author: Simon Read
name: Florence
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves:
review:
The Victorian era population of Great Britain was fascinated by murder, the gorier, the better. And the tabloids of the time catered to the unhealthy obsession. This book describes some of the bloodiest crimes I could have ever have imagined. For a nation that was not bristling with firearms, criminals found some creative ways to carve up their enemies and to dispose of the evidence.

The book is a condensed history of the internationally venerable Scotland Yard. Starting in the mid nineteenth century, periodically cases of heinous murder drove the public into a frightened panic. Thus spurred on, the Yard grew into a respected organization employing new professionals, known as detectives, who were eventually armed with revolutionary crime solving skills like fingerprinting, blood splatter analysis, and firearm ballistics. They never dreamed of something as fool proof as DNA analysis.
]]> 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Florence 3 3.92 2023
author: Ann Patchett
name: Florence
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves:
review:
Lara and her young family have run a cherry farm in Michigan for many years when the past seems to intrude on their comfortable lives. Lara once aspired to be an actress. She spent a long ago summer portraying the character of Emily in a summer stock production of Our Town. As she relates the events of that summer to her daughters, long buried emotions return in force. It's a tale of love, friendship and the painful process of finding oneself. When reminiscing about past events, it's wise that some things remain a secret.
]]> 199529084 “A master of narrative nonfiction �� in this mesmerizing tale about a Jazz Age gentlemanly thief, Jobb has found his own perfect jewel.�� �� David Grann, New York Times #1 bestselling author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon

Catch Me If You Can meets The Great Gatsby meets the hit Netflix series Lupin in this captivating Jazz Age true-crime caper about "the greatest jewel thief who ever lived" (Life Magazine), Arthur Barry, who charmed celebrities and millionaires—everyone from Rockefellers to members of the royal family—while simultaneously planning and executing the most audacious and lucrative heists of the 1920s.��

A skilled con artist and one of the most successful burglars in history, Arthur Barry��was adept at slipping in and out of bedrooms undetected, even when his victims slept only inches away. He became a folk hero, a gentleman bandit touted in the press as the “Prince of Thieves�� and an “Aristocrat of Crime.�� Think Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief.�� In a span of seven years, Barry stole pearls, diamonds, and other precious gems worth almost $60 million today. Among his many victims were a Rockefeller, an heiress to the Woolworth Department Store fortune, an oil magnate, Wall Street bigwigs, a top executive of automotive giant General Motors, members of the Royal Family who were touring America, and a famous polo player. He befriended the Prince of Wales, Harry Houdini, and other luminaries. The rollicking, caper-filled rise and dramatic downfall of this master thief is a high-speed ride told in stylish prose.
��
A Gentleman and a Thief is also a love story. Barry confessed to dozens of burglaries to protect his wife, Anna Blake (and was the prime suspect in scores of others on Long Island and across Westchester County). Sentenced to a twenty-five-year term, he staged a dramatic prison break—triggering a bloody inmates' riot—when Anna became seriously ill, so they could be together for a few more years as fugitives. Page-turning, escapist, and sparkling with insight into the allure of gemstones and our fascination with well-planned heists and the suave, clever criminals who pull them off, A Gentleman and a Thief is perfect for true crime fans who relish the exploits of con artists and high-class crooks.]]> 448 Dean Jobb 1643752839 Florence 5
The book provided many enjoyable reading sessions. I found myself rooting for a man who disdained violence and only relieved the rich of a few replaceable geegaws. I think the author may have admired him, as well. And, oh yes, Mr. Barry served in the US Army and was a decorated hero of the Great War. What a guy!]]> 3.85 2024
author: Dean Jobb
name: Florence
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves:
review:
Arthur Barry was a charming Irishman good at his chosen profession. He could blend into a crowd of a listers with ease. He was handsome and physically fit enough to breach any second story window of a mansion in pursuit of valuable jewelry. During the Jazz Age of the nineteen twenties he lived the good life, dining, drinking, gambling, and hanging out with people of high and low repute. But the good times had to end sooner or later and he ultimately paid a heavy price.

The book provided many enjoyable reading sessions. I found myself rooting for a man who disdained violence and only relieved the rich of a few replaceable geegaws. I think the author may have admired him, as well. And, oh yes, Mr. Barry served in the US Army and was a decorated hero of the Great War. What a guy!
]]> 12985
Each edition includes:
�� Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play

�� Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play

�� Scene-by-scene plot summaries

�� A key to famous lines and phrases

�� An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language

�� An essay by an outstanding scholar providing a modern perspective on the play

�� Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books]]> 218 William Shakespeare Florence 0 3.79 1611
author: William Shakespeare
name: Florence
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1611
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves:
review:
I have come to appreciate Shakespeare rather late in life, Earlier, the beauty and meaning escaped me.
]]> 196585876 An Unfinished Love A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In his thirties he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.

Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved.

The Goodwins�� last great adventure involved finally opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They soon realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice, a time when lines were drawn and loyalties tested.

Their expedition gave Dick’s last years renewed purpose and determination. It gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s. And it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.]]> 480 Doris Kearns Goodwin 1982108665 Florence 4
The book is titled An Unfinished Love Story. I was left wondering about the couple's courtship, their personal relationship, the difference in their backgrounds. My memory was stirred by political turmoil and names in the newspapers, but I learned very little about an actual love story.]]> 4.53 2024
author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
name: Florence
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/07
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves:
review:
History as told by Doris Kearns Goodwin is dynamic. It feels alive, compelling, no matter how much time has elapsed. I too have memories of the the chaotic sixties, but not from the White House, the Johnson ranch, or in the company of Bobby Kennedy. (In contrast to the Goodwins, my memories center on street demonstrations, underground newspapers, and drug experimentation.) Dick Goodwin and Doris actually participated in the headline political events that she describes.

The book is titled An Unfinished Love Story. I was left wondering about the couple's courtship, their personal relationship, the difference in their backgrounds. My memory was stirred by political turmoil and names in the newspapers, but I learned very little about an actual love story.
]]> 35106178 FROM THE CREATOR OF DOWNTON ABBEY The New York Times bestselling novel about scandalous secrets and star-crossed lovers On the evening of 15 June 1815, the great and the good of British society have gathered in Brussels at what is to become one of the most tragic parties in history - the Duchess of Richmond's ball. For this is the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, and many of the handsome young men attending the ball will find themselves, the very next day, on the battlefield.
For Sophia Trenchard, the young and beautiful daughter of Wellington's chief supplier, this night will change everything. But it is only twenty-five years later, when the upwardly mobile Trenchards move into the fashionable new area of Belgravia, that the true repercussions of that moment will be felt. For in this new world, where the aristocracy rub shoulders with the emerging nouveau riche, there are those who would prefer the secrets of the past to remain buried...



]]> 417 Julian Fellowes 1455541192 Florence 4
The first half of this book set up a tangle of mysteries. The second half untangled them slowly. I was raptly turning pages, happily entertained by the foibles of the rich and their deceitful servants.
]]> 3.83 2016
author: Julian Fellowes
name: Florence
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves:
review:
I chose this book because Julian Fellowes created the Downton Abbey series. He did not disappoint. In the nineteenth century world people of Belgravia, London were expected to adhere strictly to a life script determined by their station in life. There were thousands of ways to indicate to those of a lower class that they just did not cut it. Tradesmen of all types were definitely out. Marrying beneath one's station was beyond the pale. Any type of scandal spelled ruin.

The first half of this book set up a tangle of mysteries. The second half untangled them slowly. I was raptly turning pages, happily entertained by the foibles of the rich and their deceitful servants.

]]> 24914 --back cover]]> 363 E.L. Doctorow 0812976150 Florence 5 3.75 2005
author: E.L. Doctorow
name: Florence
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves:
review:
Having read The March, I feel like I have seen a motion picture panorama of the Civil War. It was all there on the page; the glory and the agony. Both the figures of historical renown and ordinary people displaced by the chaos of war. General Sherman was introduced in his glory and other generals in their uncertainty and shame. Masses of newly freed enslaved people followed the march, joyful of their newly found freedom. and uncertain of the future. Affluent Southern women lost their husbands, their children, their china, and often their sanity. Colorful characters appeared and just when you thought the author had forgotten them, they popped up again with the rest of their story. Among the carnage, there was some humor along with the blood and guts. I was entranced by the skill of master novelist EL Doctorow.
]]> 15195
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust�� (The New York Times).

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.]]> 296 Art Spiegelman 0141014083 Florence 0 4.57 1980
author: Art Spiegelman
name: Florence
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/22
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review:

]]> 13079982 Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.�� But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.]]> 194 Ray Bradbury Florence 0 3.97 1953
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Florence
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 39214757 This prize-winning novel of a fugitive priest in Mexico is quite simply “Graham Greene’s masterpiece�� (John Updike, The New York Review of Books). �� In the Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s, all vestiges of Catholicism are being outlawed by the government. As churches are razed, icons are banned, and the price of devotion is execution, an unnamed member of the clergy flees. He’s known only as the “whisky priest.�� Beset by heretical vices, guilt, and an immoral past, he’s torn between self-destruction and self-preservation. Too modest to be a martyr, too stubborn to follow the law, and too craven to take a bullet, he now travels as one of the hunted—attending, in secret, to the spiritual needs of the faithful. When a peasant begs him to return to Tabasco to hear the confessions of a dying man, the whisky priest knows it’s a trap. But it’s also his duty—and possibly his salvation. �� Named by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels written since 1923, The Power and the Glory is “a violent, raw�� work on “suffering, strained faith, and ultimate redemption�� (The Atlantic).]]> 157 Graham Greene Florence 0 4.09 1940
author: Graham Greene
name: Florence
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1940
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 78895 NOW��A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

Robyn Davidson's opens the memoir of her perilous journey across 1,700 miles of hostile Australian desert to the sea with only four camels and a dog for company with the following words: “I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back."

Enduring sweltering heat, fending off poisonous snakes and lecherous men, chasing her camels when they get skittish and nursing them when they are injured, Davidson emerges as an extraordinarily courageous heroine driven by a love of Australia's landscape, an empathy for its indigenous people, and a willingness to cast away the trappings of her former identity.��Tracks��is the compelling, candid story of her odyssey of discovery and transformation.��

“An unforgettably powerful book.”—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild

Now with a new postscript by Robyn Davidson.]]> 288 Robyn Davidson 0679762876 Florence 0 3.92 1980
author: Robyn Davidson
name: Florence
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 569564 Two Gentlemen of Verona
Merry Wives of Windsor
Measure for Measure
Comedy of Errors
Much Ado About Nothing
Love's Labour's Lost
Midsummer Night's Dream
Merchant of Venice
As You Like It
Taming of the Shrew
All's Well That Ends Well
Twelfth Night
Winter's Tale
King John
King Richard II
King Henry IV. Part 1
King Henry IV. Part 2
King Henry V
King Henry VI. Part 1
King Henry VI. Part 2
King Henry VI. Part 3
King Richard III
King Henry VIII
Troilus and Cressida
Coriolanus
Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet
Timon of Athens
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet
King Lear
Othello
Anthony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline
Pericles
Venus and Adonis
Rape of Lucrece
Sonnets
Lover's Complaint
Passionate Pilgrim
Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music
Phoenix and the Turtle]]> 1229 William Shakespeare 0517053616 Florence 0 to-read 4.46 1623
author: William Shakespeare
name: Florence
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1623
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 200634629
In 1850, Fredericka Mandelbaum traveled to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a widow with four children, a fixture of high society, and an admired philanthropist. What had enabled a woman on the margins of American life to ascend from tenement poverty to immense wealth?

In the intervening years, “Marm�� Mandelbaum, as she was known, had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a successful criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (the equivalent of nearly $300 million in today’s money) had passed through her modest haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side. Called “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime in New York City�� by the New York Times , she planned, financed, and profited from robberies of cash, gold, diamonds, and silk throughout the city and across the United States.

But Fredericka Mandelbaum wasn’t just a successful She was a business visionary—one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the formerly scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of New York's foremost bank robbers, housebreakers, and shoplifters, and neatly bribing anyone who stood in her way, she handled logistics and organized supply chains—turning theft into a viable, scalable business .

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid image of Gilded Age New York—a city teeming with delightful rogues, capitalist power brokers, and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all of whom straddled the line between underworld enterprise and the realm of “legitimate�� commerce. Combining deep historical research with the narrative flair for which she is celebrated, Margalit Fox tells the unforgettable story of a once-famous, now-forgotten heroine, a tale that exemplifies the cherished rags-to-riches narrative of Victorian America while simultaneously upending it altogether.]]> 301 Margalit Fox 0593243854 Florence 5 3.42 2024
author: Margalit Fox
name: Florence
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:
Mrs. Mandellbaum was no fool. She figured out early on that slave wage drudgery in mid nineteenth century's lower east side would never make life any easier. So she set up a dry goods store and began accepting stolen goods. She became a fence, probably the second oldest profession in the world. And she was damn good at it. In an age with very few options and very little respect for women she had the city's underworld eating out of her hand. In today's world all of her drive and business acumen would never go to waste in a criminal occupation. But for her time Fredericka was a star.
]]> 183932735 224 Anne Applebaum 0241627893 Florence 3 4.21 2024
author: Anne Applebaum
name: Florence
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves:
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Anne Applebaum firmly rejects the notion that the world is experiencing a second cold war. The concept of a left or right leaning political agenda is obsolete. She points out that relevant political battles now involve autocratic and democratic regimes (including what she terms illiberal democracies like Hungary, Turkey, and Poland). She further develops the theory that autocratic nations have learned to successfully maintain power by the use of widely disseminated false propaganda, corruptive use of democratic banking systems to conceal ill gotten cash, unleashing spigots of lies until people become indifferent to learning the truth, and demonizing dissidents. Identification of these tactics is neither new or revelatory. Strangely, she agrees with Donald Trump that high tariffs are a good option to reduce dependency on Chinese goods. Perhaps that is true for goods that are important to national security, but I maintain that international trade is a force for stability in a volatile world.
]]> 25409816
Over a decade ago, when Siddhartha Mukherjee was a young, exhausted, and isolated medical resident, he discovered a book that would forever change the way he understood the medical profession. The book, The Youngest Science, forced Dr. Mukherjee to ask himself an urgent, fundamental question: Is medicine a “science��? Sciences must have laws—statements of truth based on repeated experiments that describe some universal attribute of nature. But does medicine have laws like other sciences?

Dr. Mukherjee has spent his career pondering this question—a question that would ultimately produce some of most serious thinking he would do around the tenets of his discipline—culminating in The Laws of Medicine. In this important treatise, he investigates the most perplexing and illuminating cases of his career that ultimately led him to identify the three key principles that govern medicine.

Brimming with fascinating historical details and modern medical wonders, this important book is a fascinating glimpse into the struggles and Eureka! moments that people outside of the medical profession rarely see. Written with Dr. Mukherjee’s signature eloquence and passionate prose, The Laws of Medicine is a critical read, not just for those in the medical profession, but for everyone who is moved to better understand how their health and well-being is being treated. Ultimately, this book lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding medicine, now and into the future.]]> 70 Siddhartha Mukherjee 1476784841 Florence 4 4.05 2015
author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
name: Florence
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves:
review:
Honest thoughts from a medical student encompassing the limits of his new profession. A weak link in medicine is bias that is not recognized when diagnosing and treating a patient. Technology will never replace the careful, insightful thought process of a dedicated physician.
]]> 210246743 An incredible true story of murder in a utopian community established on a remote Galápagos island by European refugees and the American industrialist who became embroiled in the investigation—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park

At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures.
As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two adoring paramours—were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The baroness, wielding a riding crop and pearl-handled revolver, staged physical fights between her two lovers and unabashedly seduced American tourists. The conclusion was deadly: with two exiles missing and three others dead, the survivors hurled accusations of murder.
Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia—and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.]]> 352 Abbott Kahler 0451498658 Florence 2 3.77 2024
author: Abbott Kahler
name: Florence
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves:
review:
Floreana island in the Galapagos archipelago was never a paradise. The settlers were human oddities thrown together. Ill will, rancor, and eventually open hostility resulted. Reading this book was not a pleasant experience. It just offered a glimpse into the pathologies of human behavior.
]]> 199797807
On the face of it, Denise Williams and Brian Winchester had the perfect, quintessentially Southern lives. The two were hardworking devout Baptists and together, with their respective spouses, formed a tight-knit friendship that seemed unbreakable. That is, until December 16, 2000, when Denise’s husband Mike disappeared while duck hunting on Lake Seminole on the border of Georgia and Florida.

After no body was found, it was assumed that he had drowned and was consumed by alligators in a tragic accident. But things took an unexpected turn when Brian divorced his wife and married Denise. Their surprising marriage was far from happy and in 2018, he confessed to police he killed Mike with Denise’s help nearly two decades earlier.

Now, the full, shocking story is revealed by Mikita Brottman, acclaimed true crime writer and “one of today’s finest practitioners of nonfiction�� ( The New York Times Book Review ). With tenacious investigating and clear-eyed prose, she exposes the dark underbelly of far-right conservative Christianity and how it led Brian to choose murder over adultery. A fascinating and in-depth page-turner, Guilty Creatures is destined to become an instant classic in the true crime genre.]]> 288 Mikita Brottman 166802053X Florence 3 3.38 2024
author: Mikita Brottman
name: Florence
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/11
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves:
review:
This story could be taken directly from the pages of a tabloid. Four friends went to the same Southern Baptist high school in Tallahassee. They paired off and married. They stayed devoted to the church. The wife of one couple began an affair with the husband of the other couple. Disdaining divorce as sinful, they decided to kill the adulterous wife's husband. After the murder, the sinners married and stayed devoted to the church. Years passed. What had become a cold murder case suddenly heated up. Justice was served. Who could make this stuff up?
]]> 203767605 A thrilling tick-tock recounting one of the most harrowing hostage situations and daring rescue attempts of our time—from true-life espionage master and New York Times bestselling author of Operation Mincemeat and The Spy and the Traitor Ben Macintyre.

As the American hostage crisis in Iran boiled into its seventh month in the spring of 1980, six heavily armed gunman barged into the Iranian embassy in London, taking twenty-six hostages. What followed over the next six days was an increasingly tense standoff, one that threatened at any moment to spill into a bloodbath.

Policeman Trevor Lock was supposed to have gone to the theater that night. Instead, he found himself overpowered and whisked into the embassy. The terrorists never noticed the gun hidden in his jacket. The drama that ensued would force him to find reserves of courage he didn’t know he had. The gunmen themselves were hardly one-dimensional—all Arabs, some highly educated, who hoped to force Britain to take their side in their independence battle against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Behind the scenes lurked the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who had bankrolled the whole affair as a salvo against Iran.

As police negotiators pressed the gunmen, rival protestors clashed violently outside the embassy, and as MI6 and the CIA scrambled for intelligence, Britain’s special forces strike team, the SAS, laid plans for a dangerous rescue mission. Inside, Lock and his fellow hostages used all the cunning they possessed to outwit and outflank their captors. Finally, on the sixth day, after the terrorists executed the embassy press attaché and dumped his body on the front doorstep, the SAS raid began, sparking a deadly high-stakes climax.

A story of ordinary men and women under immense pressure, The Siege takes readers minute-by-thrilling-minute through an event that would echo across the next two decades and provide a direct historical link to the tragedy on 9/11. Drawing on exclusive interviews and a wealth of never-before-seen files, Macintyre brilliantly reconstructs a week in which every day minted a new hero and every second spelled the potential for doom.]]> 400 Ben Macintyre 0593728092 Florence 5 4.36 2024
author: Ben Macintyre
name: Florence
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/08
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves:
review:
This was an event that didn't exist in my memory. I didn't know how it ended and the suspense was maddening. After the siege began there was chaos inside the London embassy of Iran. Ben Macintyre gives just the right amount of background information necessary to understand the motives of the six terrorists holding multiple hostages. The heavily armed gunmen are young, amateurish and dangerous. During the six day siege relationships developed among those effectively imprisoned together, despite cultural and language differences. Daily interactions sometimes appeared to be harmonious but terror was always lurking beneath the surface. In these pages an unforgettable story and some truths about human nature seem to come alive.
]]> 199798457
One peaceful morning, in the small, Puget Sound town of Point Orchards, the lifeless body of Dr. Erin Landry is found hanging from a tree on the property of prodigal son and failed writer, Elijah Leith. Sheriff Jim Godbout’s initial investigation points to an obvious suicide, but upon closer inspection, there seem to be clues of foul play when he discovers that the circumstances of the beautiful doctor’s death were ripped straight from the pages of Elijah Leith’s own novel.

Out of money and motivation, thirty-three-year-old Elijah returns to his empty childhood home to lick the wounds of his futile writing career. Hungry for purpose, he throws himself into restoring the ramshackle cabin his father left behind and rekindling his relationship with Nakita, the extraordinary girl from the nearby reservation whom he betrayed but was never able to forget.

As the town of Point Orchards turns against him, Elijah must fight for his innocence against an unexpected foe who is close and cunning enough to flawlessly frame him for murder in this scintillating literary thriller that seeks to uncover a case of love, loss, and revenge.]]> 288 Sarah Crouch 166803509X Florence 3
Unfortunately, plausibility was lost in the final chapters when the story began to resemble a conventional murder mystery and eventually, a romance novel. The pieces fit together a bit too neatly. I always hope for an offbeat ending leaving some room for interpretation.]]> 3.48 2024
author: Sarah Crouch
name: Florence
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves:
review:
Sarah Crouch created strong characters and a startling murder in the first few pages. The book didn't feel much like a murder mystery, though; it was more of a quest to recapture lost young love in a small town of the Pacific Northwest. Details of an isolated rural setting enriched the pages.

Unfortunately, plausibility was lost in the final chapters when the story began to resemble a conventional murder mystery and eventually, a romance novel. The pieces fit together a bit too neatly. I always hope for an offbeat ending leaving some room for interpretation.
]]> 198902282 Named a best book of the year by Amazon and Kirkus

Weaving his own moving family story with a sweeping history of cancer research, Lawrence Ingrassia delivers an intimate, gripping tale that sits at the intersection of memoir and medical thriller

Ingrassia lost his mother, two sisters, brother, and nephew to cancer—different cancers developing at different points throughout their lives. And while highly unusual, his family is not the only one to wonder whether their heartbreak is the result of unbelievable bad luck, or if there might be another explanation.

Through meticulous research and riveting storytelling, Ingrassia takes us from the 1960s—when Dr. Frederick Pei Li and Dr. Joseph Fraumeni Jr. first met, not yet knowing that they would help make a groundbreaking discovery that would affect cancer patients for decades to come—to present day, as Ingrassia and countless others continue to unpack and build upon Li and Fraumeni’s initial discoveries, and to understand what this means for their families.

In the face of seemingly unbearable loss, Ingrassia holds onto hope. He urges us to “fight like Charlie,�� his nephew who battled cancer his entire life starting with a rare tumor in his cheek at the age of two—and to look toward the future, as gene sequencing, screening protocols, CRISPR gene editing, and other developing technologies may continue to extend lifespans and perhaps, one day, even offer cures.]]> 320 Lawrence Ingrassia 1250837227 Florence 4
This book illuminates two rare and unfortunate families who are genetically predisposed to developing cancer. It can strike at any time, at any age. It can strike numerous times. Lives are cut short. Families are plagued by the nightmare that more of their relations will die. Both survivors and their kin live with a dread of recurrence. The author's family has this plague-like malady. He has lost his mother, three of his four siblings, and a nephew. It was painful to read of their suffering.

The other aspect of the book is the search for a cure. Without knowledge of genetics, it was impossible to solve the mystery of afflicted families. Slowly, knowledge was acquired by a few dedicated researchers. Progress was made. But it is still not complete. The science of genetics is maddeningly complicated. More research lies ahead. An effective cure is elusive.]]> 4.27 2024
author: Lawrence Ingrassia
name: Florence
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves:
review:
Cancer is about the worst illness that can strike a healthy body. Some advanced treatments have been developed in recent years but many treatment therapies are still like blunt instruments. Chemotherapy, for example, attacks all dividing cells, often with debilitating side effects.

This book illuminates two rare and unfortunate families who are genetically predisposed to developing cancer. It can strike at any time, at any age. It can strike numerous times. Lives are cut short. Families are plagued by the nightmare that more of their relations will die. Both survivors and their kin live with a dread of recurrence. The author's family has this plague-like malady. He has lost his mother, three of his four siblings, and a nephew. It was painful to read of their suffering.

The other aspect of the book is the search for a cure. Without knowledge of genetics, it was impossible to solve the mystery of afflicted families. Slowly, knowledge was acquired by a few dedicated researchers. Progress was made. But it is still not complete. The science of genetics is maddeningly complicated. More research lies ahead. An effective cure is elusive.
]]> 181109944 From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Chesapeake Requiem comes a gripping new work of narrative nonfiction telling the forgotten story of the mass killing of eleven Black farmhands on a Georgia plantation in the spring of 1921—a crime that exposed for the nation the existence of “peonage,�� a form of slavery that gained prominence across the American South after the Civil War.

On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921, a small boy made a grim discovery as he played on a riverbank in the cotton country of rural Georgia: the bodies of two drowned men, bound together with wire and chain and weighted with a hundred-pound sack of rocks. Within days a third body turned up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that followed, eight others. And with them a deeper horror: all eleven had been kept in virtual slavery before their deaths. In fact, as America was shocked to learn, the dead were among thousands of Black men enslaved throughout the South in conditions nearly as dire as those before the Civil War.

Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that mass killing and of the revelations about peonage, or debt slavery, that it placed before a public self-satisfied that involuntary servitude had ended at Appomattox more than fifty years before.

By turns police procedural, courtroom drama, and political exposé, Hell Put to Shame also reintroduces readers to three Americans who spearheaded the prosecution of John S. Williams, the wealthy plantation owner behind the murders, at a time when white people rarely faced punishment for violence against their Black neighbors. The remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson, newly appointed the first Black leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, marshaled the organization into a full-on war against peonage. Johnson’s lieutenant, Walter F. White, a light-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed Black man, conducted undercover work at the scene of lynchings and other Jim Crow atrocities, helping to throw a light on such violence and to hasten its end. And Georgia governor Hugh M. Dorsey won the statehouse as a hero of white supremacists—then redeemed himself in spectacular fashion with the “Murder Farm�� affair.

The result is a story that remains fresh and relevant a century later, as the nation continues to wrestle with seemingly intractable challenges in matters of race and justice. And the 1921 case at its heart argues that the forces that so roil society today have been with us for generations.]]> 419 Earl Swift 0063265389 Florence 5
Thanks to the author for shining a light on this shameful episode of American history. While reading the book I felt that Mr. Swift was also troubled by the events he so diligently reported.]]> 4.01 2024
author: Earl Swift
name: Florence
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/19
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves:
review:
Earl Swift disinters a long forgotten era of the rural Georgia, USA. A series of savage murders took place there roughly one hundred years ago. The lowly plantation of John S. Williams, a white farmer, was hell on earth for the black men he imprisoned and murdered. Justice was routinely denied to black citizens throughout the South. Lives were brutally ended for trivial, manufactured offenses. I would like to forget the details of torture revealed in this book. It won't be possible. Sadly, the social norms of racial servitude in early twentieth century Georgia have echoes in today's phobia against immigrants and other minorities.

Thanks to the author for shining a light on this shameful episode of American history. While reading the book I felt that Mr. Swift was also troubled by the events he so diligently reported.
]]> 39863514 The dramatic story of the explosive 1894 clash of industry, labor, and government that shook the nation and marked a turning point for America.

The Edge of Anarchy by Jack Kelly offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of working people in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke out along the rail lines. Soon the U.S. Army was on the march and gunfire rang from the streets of major cities.

This epochal tale offers fascinating portraits of two iconic characters of the age. George Pullman, who amassed a fortune by making train travel a pleasure, thought the model town that he built for his workers would erase urban squalor. Eugene Debs, founder of the nation's first industrial union, was determined to wrench power away from the reigning plutocrats. The clash between the two men's conflicting ideals pushed the country to what the U.S. Attorney General called "the ragged edge of anarchy."

Many of the themes of The Edge of Anarchy could be taken from today's headlines--upheaval in America's industrial heartland, wage stagnation, breakneck technological change, and festering conflict over race, immigration, and inequality. With the country now in a New Gilded Age, this look back at the violent conflict of an earlier era offers illuminating perspectives along with a breathtaking story of a nation on the edge.]]> 320 Jack Kelly 1250128862 Florence 4
Eventually the corporate owners put an end to the strike by urging President Grover Cleveland to favor the demands of capital over laboring people, using the United States military. Bloodshed ensued.

Also, George Pullman had instigated the strike by paying his workers starvation wages. They lived in a company built town and paid inflated rent for their homes. Pullman stubbornly refused to consider his workers' demands thereby lengthening the strike and greatly expanding it. He was an early version of a heartless, wealthy scoundrel exerting undue influence on our government. There are examples of his ilk today. Elon Musk comes to mind.]]> 4.10 2019
author: Jack Kelly
name: Florence
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/12
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves:
review:
This book filled me in on much of labor history that i never learned in school. Some things were stunning. Apparently the general public looked favorably upon a massive railroad strike. When the Pullman railroad sleeper car company went on strike they were joined by members of the much larger American Railroad Union. All for one and one for all wasn't just a slogan. It was lived. It was an era of solidarity.

Eventually the corporate owners put an end to the strike by urging President Grover Cleveland to favor the demands of capital over laboring people, using the United States military. Bloodshed ensued.

Also, George Pullman had instigated the strike by paying his workers starvation wages. They lived in a company built town and paid inflated rent for their homes. Pullman stubbornly refused to consider his workers' demands thereby lengthening the strike and greatly expanding it. He was an early version of a heartless, wealthy scoundrel exerting undue influence on our government. There are examples of his ilk today. Elon Musk comes to mind.
]]> 155685403
Caleb Carr has had special relationships with cats since he was a young boy in a turbulent household, famously peopled by the founding members of the Beat Generation, where his steadiest companions were the adopted cats that lived with him both in the city and the country. As an adult, he has had many close feline companions, with relationships that have outlasted most of his human ones. But only after building a three-story home in rural, upstate New York did he enter into the most extraordinary of all of his cat Masha, a Siberian Forest cat who had been abandoned as a kitten, and was languishing in a shelter when Caleb met her. She had hissed and fought off all previous carers and potential adopters, but somehow, she chose Caleb as her savior.
��
For the seventeen years that followed, Caleb and Masha were inseparable. Masha ruled the house and the extensive, dangerous surrounding fields and forests. When she was hurt, only Caleb could help her. When he suffered long-standing physical ailments, Masha knew what to do. Caleb’s life-long study of the literature of cat behavior, and his years of experience with previous cats, helped him decode much of Masha’s inner life. But their bond went far beyond academic studies and experience. The story of Caleb and Masha is an inspiring and life-affirming relationship for readers of all backgrounds and interests—a love story like no other.
��]]> 344 Caleb Carr 0316503606 Florence 5
Mr. Carr made me more aware of what my own three cats are thinking. I watch them closely now, curious about just how much we understand each other. I try to anticipate their needs and I thank the author for this personal awakening.

]]> 4.11 2024
author: Caleb Carr
name: Florence
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/04
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves:
review:
Masha, a Siberian Forest cat was not really a monster. But neither was she a contented house cat. Abused in her youth, she became a beloved companion of the author while maintaining her semi-wild nature. I suffered with both of them through physical difficulties and moments of peril. The author also had a difficult childhood. He seems to prefer the quiet life with little human contact. Trust between the man and his cat developed slowly. It ripened into a mutual pact to care for each other for life.

Mr. Carr made me more aware of what my own three cats are thinking. I watch them closely now, curious about just how much we understand each other. I try to anticipate their needs and I thank the author for this personal awakening.


]]> 77265006 An incandescent novel about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women.

Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the famed Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless, full of verve and wit, twenty-two-year-old Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s home to find her voice as a writer and live a life of her choosing. Carmel, too, knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry—and the broken promises within its verses. When Phil abandons the family, Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet�� with the man whose desertion scars Carmel, her sister, and their cancer-ridden mother.

The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of women who contend with inheritances—of abandonment and of sustaining love that is “more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.�� In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.]]> 278 Anne Enright 1324005696 Florence 3 3.51 2023
author: Anne Enright
name: Florence
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/28
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves:
review:
I don't have much to say about this book. Despite its acclaim, it didn't inspire me.
]]> 65211783
"An engrossing, psychologically complex and politically astute novel." ―The New York Times

Haiti, 1991. When a violent coup d’état leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, American expat Matt Amaker is forced to abandon his idyllic, beachfront scuba business. With the rise of a brutal military dictatorship and an international embargo threatening to destroy even the country’s most powerful players, some are looking to gain an advantage in the chaos–and others are just looking to make it through another day.

Desperate for money―and survival―Matt teams up with his best friend and business partner Alix Variel, the adventurous only son of a socially prominent Haitian family. They set their sights on legendary shipwrecks that have been rumored to contain priceless treasures off a remote section of Haiti’s southern coast. Their ambition and exploration of these disastrous wrecks come with a cascade of ill-fated incidents―one that involves Misha, Alix’s erudite sister, who stumbles onto an arms-trafficking ring masquerading as a U.S. government humanitarian aid office, and rookie CIA case officer Audrey O’Donnell, who finds herself doing clandestine work on an assignment that proves to be more difficult and dubious than she could have possibly imagined.

Devil Makes Three ’s depiction of blood politics, the machinations of power, and a country in the midst of upheaval is urgently and insistently resonant. This new novel is sure to cement Ben Fountain’s reputation as one of the twenty-first century’s boldest and most perceptive writers.]]> 544 Ben Fountain 1250776511 Florence 3
But the story took some odd turns. The coup leader turned out to be a mild mannered guy, slightly henpecked by his wife. Political prisoners thrown into a suffocating, unsurvivable dungeon were never in focus. Wealthy Haitians continued their lives pretty much as before the coup. Having experienced Haiti during this tumultuous time period, I craved more of a sharp political definition to the events.
]]> 3.74 2023
author: Ben Fountain
name: Florence
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves:
review:
The opening scenes were the best. Offset by the brilliant sunshine, blue sea, and tropical splendor of rural Haiti were malevolent hints of violence to come. It didn't take long, appearing in the guise of good old boys wishing to have fun deep sea diving. The main characters had to adjust their lives to a country in the midst of a bloody political coup. Some lives hung by a thread. The CIA turned a blind eye to corruption and drug dealing. Ordinary people suffered as they usually do.

But the story took some odd turns. The coup leader turned out to be a mild mannered guy, slightly henpecked by his wife. Political prisoners thrown into a suffocating, unsurvivable dungeon were never in focus. Wealthy Haitians continued their lives pretty much as before the coup. Having experienced Haiti during this tumultuous time period, I craved more of a sharp political definition to the events.

]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Florence 0 to-read 3.87 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Florence
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199797834
D-Day is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military and human triumphs. Though the full campaign lasted just over a month, the surprise landing of over 150,000 Allied troops on the morning of June 6, 1944, is understood to be the moment that turned the tide for the Allied forces and ultimately led to the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. Now, a new book from bestselling author and historian Garrett M. Graff explores the full impact of this world-changing event—from the secret creation of landing plans by top government and military officials and organization of troops, to the moment the boat doors opened to reveal the beach where men fought for their lives and the future of the free world.

Fascinating, action-packed, and filled with impressive detail, When the Sea Came Alive captures a human drama like no other, and offers a fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation.]]> 608 Garrett M. Graff 166802781X Florence 5
It worries me that once this postwar generation of veterans and their children are gone, the sacrifice of d-day will be largely forgotten. The promise of peace seems lost. Neo naziism is rising in the United States and in Europe. The world needs to remember the cost of the ideology of hatred.]]> 4.49 2024
author: Garrett M. Graff
name: Florence
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/10/13
shelves:
review:
I watched the 80th commemoration of D-Day this year, noticing that the actual veterans were aged and fragile. Then I thought who will remember that day as it actually happened. Reading this book is a good place to start. I have trouble imagining the courage of the American paratroopers who landed in enemy territory on the eve of the invasion. Also true for the British glider pilots who guided their fragile crafts into a rough landing on a mined beach. And the hundreds of thousands of mostly young men who willingly gave their lives for their mission. Each and every individual who landed in Normandy or provided supportive naval assistance from offshore is a hero.

It worries me that once this postwar generation of veterans and their children are gone, the sacrifice of d-day will be largely forgotten. The promise of peace seems lost. Neo naziism is rising in the United States and in Europe. The world needs to remember the cost of the ideology of hatred.
]]> 59948520 A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during a time of war.

It's 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.

Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle--an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood--without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.

An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.]]> 382 Alice Winn 0593534565 Florence 4
Things change rapidly as World War I beckons. The schoolboys become army officers and men nearly overnight. The author takes us deep into the trenches sparing no misery. A close relationship among former schoolmates develops in the midst of the nightmarish environment. It is a passionate, yet delicate closeness that gains strength in spite of the circumstances. Or possibly due to the circumstances. Several surprising plot twists are involved. Though the story takes place long ago and faraway it is skillfully brought to life in these pages.]]> 4.51 2023
author: Alice Winn
name: Florence
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves:
review:
In the beginning all is fun and games for a group of public school English boys. The school is exclusive. The students are from wealthy families. They are a rowdy group of rule breakers. There is plenty of sexual experimentation with no attached emotion.

Things change rapidly as World War I beckons. The schoolboys become army officers and men nearly overnight. The author takes us deep into the trenches sparing no misery. A close relationship among former schoolmates develops in the midst of the nightmarish environment. It is a passionate, yet delicate closeness that gains strength in spite of the circumstances. Or possibly due to the circumstances. Several surprising plot twists are involved. Though the story takes place long ago and faraway it is skillfully brought to life in these pages.
]]> 211026628 A compelling memoir by ABC News correspondent James Longman in which he discusses mental illness and trauma in families, what the latest genetic science is telling us, and how to not only persevere but thrive.

James Longman was a preteen in boarding school when his dad, who was diagnosed with depression and schizophrenia, died by suicide. As he got older, James’s own bouts of depression spurred him to examine how his father’s mental health might have affected his own. He engaged with experts to uncover the science behind what is inherited, how much environmental factors can impact genetic traits, and how one can overcome a familial history of mental illness and trauma.

In The Inherited Mind, James Longman invites readers to reflect on their own stories as he shares his quest to better understand himself and his family. Through speaking to mental health experts, to those who have had similar familial experiences, and about his own life stories, James shows us, with heart and humor, how much our bodies can empower and inform us about our own personal mental health histories.]]> 304 James Longman 1368099475 Florence 0 to-read 4.04
author: James Longman
name: Florence
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 198123556 272 Frank Figliuzzi 006326515X Florence 3
The details of murder investigations were sketchy. Following actual cases from beginning to end would have been more enlightening. Personal histories of victims, most of whom were prostitutes and victims of sex trafficking, were missing. What were the circumstances that made them choose such a reckless and ultimately tragic lifestyle? The issue deserved more comprehensive research into a pervasive, troubling series of crimes.]]> 3.47 2024
author: Frank Figliuzzi
name: Florence
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:
It's a shocking statistic. The number of murders committed on our nation's highways attributed to long range truckers. At first it seemed like all truckers were being tarred with the same brush. But then Frank Figliuzzi teamed up with Mike, a flatbed semi driver for a week. He details the life of driving such a behemoth for a living and it's not a job for the faint hearted. Frank's week long experience as Mike's sidekick was the most interesting part of the book. Most truckers are hard working, law abiding citizens.

The details of murder investigations were sketchy. Following actual cases from beginning to end would have been more enlightening. Personal histories of victims, most of whom were prostitutes and victims of sex trafficking, were missing. What were the circumstances that made them choose such a reckless and ultimately tragic lifestyle? The issue deserved more comprehensive research into a pervasive, troubling series of crimes.
]]> 62583522 From award-winning, New York Times bestselling historian Adam Hochschild, a fast-paced, revelatory new account of a pivotal but neglected period in American history: World War I and its stormy aftermath, when bloodshed and repression on the home front nearly doomed American democracy.

The nation was on the brink. Angry mobs burned Black churches to the ground and chased down pacifists and immigrants. Well over a thousand men and women were jailed solely for what they had written or said, even in private. An astonishing 250,000 people joined a nationwide vigilante group—sponsored by the Department of Justice.

This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by torture, censorship, and killings. Adam Hochschild brings to life this troubled period, which stretched from 1917 to 1921, through the interwoven tales of a colorful cast of characters: some well-known, among them the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson and the ambitious young bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover; others less familiar, such as the fiery antiwar advocate Kate Richards O’Hare and the outspoken Leo Wendell, a labor radical who was frequently arrested and wholly trusted by his comrades—but who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent.

A groundbreaking work of narrative history, American Midnight recalls these horrifying yet inspiring four years, when some brave Americans strove to keep their fractured country democratic, while ruthless others stimulated toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law—poisons that feel ominously familiar today.]]> 432 Adam Hochschild 035844201X Florence 5
These things have happened before in the USA. That does not comfort me. In 1917 the country broke out into a manic frenzy of war fever. Farmers were tarred and feathered for not buying war bonds. Groups of violent vigilantes roamed the street looking for draft dodgers. Things didn't calm down after the war ended. Returning Black soldiers trying to reclaim their dignity at home were hunted and killed. Some atrocities mentioned are unbearable to contemplate. Striking workers also were assaulted with much loss of life.

After congress passed the Espionage and Sedition acts of 1918 it became extremely hazardous to identify as a socialist or to express support of the Russian revolution. Freedom of speech was gone, as was freedom of assembly. The mail was censored. Publications were arbitrarily destroyed by the Postmaster. Thousands of immigrants, guilty of no crime were rounded up and deported without any due process.

Fascism has threatened this country before. Politicians whip up anti-immigrant hatred and racism to distract from economic hardship experienced by many working people. Groups of vigilantes threaten violence with a silent assent from on high. It happened then and it's happening now.]]> 4.36 2022
author: Adam Hochschild
name: Florence
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/19
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves:
review:
Since the rise of Donald Trump as a politician I have been worried about the endurance of the United States Constitution. Anti immigrant hysteria, dog whistles to racist groups, unspeakable cruelty such as removing children from the care of their parents at the southern border, and disregard of basic ethics, have all given me reasons for sadness and rage.

These things have happened before in the USA. That does not comfort me. In 1917 the country broke out into a manic frenzy of war fever. Farmers were tarred and feathered for not buying war bonds. Groups of violent vigilantes roamed the street looking for draft dodgers. Things didn't calm down after the war ended. Returning Black soldiers trying to reclaim their dignity at home were hunted and killed. Some atrocities mentioned are unbearable to contemplate. Striking workers also were assaulted with much loss of life.

After congress passed the Espionage and Sedition acts of 1918 it became extremely hazardous to identify as a socialist or to express support of the Russian revolution. Freedom of speech was gone, as was freedom of assembly. The mail was censored. Publications were arbitrarily destroyed by the Postmaster. Thousands of immigrants, guilty of no crime were rounded up and deported without any due process.

Fascism has threatened this country before. Politicians whip up anti-immigrant hatred and racism to distract from economic hardship experienced by many working people. Groups of vigilantes threaten violence with a silent assent from on high. It happened then and it's happening now.
]]> 199344846
On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black—black clothes, black mask—rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are.

What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey toward physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.

Knife is Rushdie at the peak of his powers, writing with urgency, with gravity, with unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.]]> 209 Salman Rushdie 0593730240 Florence 4 3.99 2024
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Florence
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/19
date added: 2024/09/19
shelves:
review:
The attack on Mr. Rushdie almost took his life. But his spirit and his will to continue writing have thankfully survived. The details of the attack and its aftermath; months of recovery and the loss of an eye, are the stuff of nightmares. The book is not a trope of optimism. It's an honest inquiry of how the attack has changed the man. I have great compassion for him.
]]> 112976346
An archipelago off the southern coast of Italy, Malta is a picturesque gem eroded by a climate of corruption, polarization, inequality, and a virtual absence of civic spirit. In this unpromising soil, a fearless journalist took root. Daphne Caruana Galizia fashioned herself into the country’s lonely voice of conscience, her muckraking and editorializing sending shock waves that threatened to topple those in power and made her at once the island’s best-known figure and its most reviled. In 2017, a campaign of intimidation against her culminated in a car bombing that took her life.
��
Daphne was also the mother to three sons, who with their father have carried on the quest for justice and transparency after her death. Narrated by the youngest of them, the journalist Paul Caruana Galizia.]]> 304 Paul Caruana Galizia 0593543734 Florence 4
Malta has 136 miles of coastline and a small population. The three boys lived an idyllic childhood, free to roam. Later, their lives were touched by hatred and intolerance. On an island the size of Malta it is impossible to escape the wrath of one's neighbors and acquaintances. In a supreme act of courage and persistence her sons were able to expose Malta's corruption to a world audience and bring their mother's killers to justice.]]> 4.31 2023
author: Paul Caruana Galizia
name: Florence
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves:
review:
Malta is one of the smallest countries in Europe; a island south of Sicily. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a journalist with an instinct to expose a sometimes violent government engaged in self enrichment. Eventually she paid the ultimate price leaving behind three sons who were devastated by her death.

Malta has 136 miles of coastline and a small population. The three boys lived an idyllic childhood, free to roam. Later, their lives were touched by hatred and intolerance. On an island the size of Malta it is impossible to escape the wrath of one's neighbors and acquaintances. In a supreme act of courage and persistence her sons were able to expose Malta's corruption to a world audience and bring their mother's killers to justice.
]]> 163739410
April 5th, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house �� and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. And then there is Nathan, age ten, taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.

April 5th, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe. Isabel and Dan circle each other warily, communicating mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts �� and his secret Instagram life �� for company.

April 5th, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family comes together to reckon with a new, very different reality �� with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.

From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss, and the struggles and limitations of family life �� how to live together and apart, and maybe even escape the marriage plot entirely.

‘Cunningham is one of our great American writers, and here is another masterpiece �� Read it and be changed�� Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less]]> 290 Michael Cunningham Florence 2 3.77 2023
author: Michael Cunningham
name: Florence
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves:
review:
Day follows the events and internal musings of an extended family over three days, spotlighting life events of three years, including a period of pandemic isolation. Characters are introduced rapidly with broad brush strokes. None sparked my imagination. Dramatic events felt contrived or worse, uninteresting. The subplot of a social media avatar seemed pointless. This short novel was an ambitious idea that did not gel.
]]> 26795307 The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.

��Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.�� It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator’s grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination.

��From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the “American Century,�� the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.]]> 430 Michael Chabon 0062225553 Florence 4 3.77 2016
author: Michael Chabon
name: Florence
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:
Michael Chabon's grandfather was a man in step with himself alone. He inspired this so called novel and family memoir hybrid. The grandfather was obsessed with rockets and explosives. He built thousands of models for NASA in his later years. He also blew up a few things to less acclaim. His temper was raw and led to a prison sentence. As a soldier during World War II he experienced the carnage of battle, then, going rogue, he hunted a well known Nazi officer to satisfy a personal obsession. Other members of Michael Chabon's tribe exhibit further idiosyncrasies. It's good to remember that sometimes a life lived without comfort and security can still be a life well lived.
]]> 66086834 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525558965.

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.

Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . .

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”]]> 464 Zadie Smith Florence 4
Still, Eliza explored the world beyond. She became a fervent abolitionist and learned of the barbaric conditions of slavery in Jamaica firsthand from a former enslaved person. In time she identified a connection between conditions on Jamaican plantations and the misery of England's own working class.

The novel frequently invokes historic figures and involves them in fictional narrative. Sometimes events are slightly hard to follow. The focus of this reader was mainly on deciphering date and place of the action.. As a consequence, the emotional aspect of the novel suffered, deprived of some energy.]]> 3.25 2023
author: Zadie Smith
name: Florence
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/04
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves:
review:
Eliza Touchet, our heroine of the nineteenth century, never quite achieved the life she thought she desired, one of intellectual and personal freedom. In her early years she experienced passion. Those memories always stayed with her. In later years she became the housekeeper and sometime mistress of her cousin, a novelist. It was a thankless position; that of a caretaker of a house, also lookimg after a grown man, his daughters, and later his young wife and her offspring. There were frequent well known literary visitors. All were quite arrogant. She was almost an invisible presence in the household. No one asked or listened to her opinion.

Still, Eliza explored the world beyond. She became a fervent abolitionist and learned of the barbaric conditions of slavery in Jamaica firsthand from a former enslaved person. In time she identified a connection between conditions on Jamaican plantations and the misery of England's own working class.

The novel frequently invokes historic figures and involves them in fictional narrative. Sometimes events are slightly hard to follow. The focus of this reader was mainly on deciphering date and place of the action.. As a consequence, the emotional aspect of the novel suffered, deprived of some energy.
]]> 196846120
Since 1984, Nicholas Kristof has worked almost continuously for The New York Times as a reporter, foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and now columnist, becoming one of the foremost reporters of his generation. Here, he recounts his event-filled path from a small-town farm in Oregon to every corner of the world.

Reporting from Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, while traveling far afield to India, Africa, and Europe, Kristof witnessed and wrote about century-defining the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, the Yemeni civil war, the Darfur genocide in Sudan, and the wave of addiction and despair that swept through his hometown and a broad swath of working-class America. Fully aware that coverage of atrocities generates considerably fewer page views than the coverage of politics, he nevertheless continued to weaponize his pen against regimes and groups violating basic human rights, raising the cost of oppression and torture. Some of the risks he took while doing so make for hair-raising reading.

Kristof writes about some of the great members of his profession and introduces us to extraordinary people he has met, such as the dissident whom he helped escape from China and a Catholic nun who browbeat a warlord into releasing schoolgirls he had kidnapped. These are the people, the heroes, who have allowed Kristof to remain optimistic. Side by side with the worst of humanity, you always see the best.

This is a candid memoir of vulnerability and courage, humility and purpose, mistakes and learning—a singular tale of the trials, tribulations, and hope to be found in a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth.]]> 480 Nicholas D. Kristof 0593536568 Florence 5
His background is a bit unusual. He is the son of European refugees. He graduated from a small town high school in Oregon and went straight to Harvard, then on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. While in high school he rode the bus with classmates from under privileged homes. Sadly, in later life some of them struggled with addiction, disfunction, and many died young. Nick stayed in contact with his former classmates and faulted himself for not trying harder to offer more assistance.

The New York Times fulfilled his dream by assigning him to China and Japan as a foreign correspondent. He gravitated to scenes of peril; the wars in Congo, genocide in Darfur, student massacre in Tiananmen Square. The human suffering that he witnessed seemed to never leave him. Even so, he doesn't despair at at the human condition but always has hope that things can be improved.

]]> 4.47
author: Nicholas D. Kristof
name: Florence
average rating: 4.47
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/29
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves:
review:
Nick Kristoph is not the type of reporter who gets the story then gets out. Often he interviews ordinary people for a more realistic point of view and he struggles with so called objective journalism. He is absolutely concerned with truth in his reporting. That is refreshing to me.

His background is a bit unusual. He is the son of European refugees. He graduated from a small town high school in Oregon and went straight to Harvard, then on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. While in high school he rode the bus with classmates from under privileged homes. Sadly, in later life some of them struggled with addiction, disfunction, and many died young. Nick stayed in contact with his former classmates and faulted himself for not trying harder to offer more assistance.

The New York Times fulfilled his dream by assigning him to China and Japan as a foreign correspondent. He gravitated to scenes of peril; the wars in Congo, genocide in Darfur, student massacre in Tiananmen Square. The human suffering that he witnessed seemed to never leave him. Even so, he doesn't despair at at the human condition but always has hope that things can be improved.


]]> 191746386
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution . Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?

Hampton Sides�� bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science-–the famed naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied him on his first voyage, and Cook has been called one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. In fact, his stated mission was to return a Tahitian man, Mai, who had become the toast of London, to his home islands. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well, and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.

Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.

At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, THE WIDE WIDE SEA is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.]]> 408 Hampton Sides 0385544766 Florence 5 4.47 2024
author: Hampton Sides
name: Florence
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/21
date added: 2024/08/26
shelves:
review:
James Cook was a reasonable man who loved the adventure of commanding a seaborn vessel. After two lengthy voyages of discovery he could have retired to a life of pleasant leisure. Instead he chose a perilous third voyage, circumventing the earth from South Pacific Islands, touching the unknown west coast of North America and on to treacherous ice shoals in Arctic waters. He was at sea with his men from 1776 to 1779. They endured harsh weather, invasion of shipboard rats, moldy food, a leaky vessel among other wretched conditions. To some Native people who had not known Europeans, the sailors were exotic beings who suddenly arrived and could have been gods or devils who came to kill them. At the best of times the men enjoyed tropical splendor with carnal pleasures. Captain Cook was not a brutal disciplinarian in the tradition of many English captains of the eighteenth century. He was thoughtful, patient, and diligent in his leadership duties. Most of the time his men revered him. This is the story of a renaissance man who tragically lost his bearings at a crucial moment. It is a tale of high adventure from beginning to ending. Don't miss it.
]]> 196859498 288 Rae Wynn-Grant 1638930406 Florence 2 3.98 2024
author: Rae Wynn-Grant
name: Florence
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves:
review:
I obviously read the title of this book incorrectly. It clearly refers to the author's wild life, not her devotion to Wildlife. I wanted to read about her experiences with wild creatures in their natural habitat, She doesn't mention animals very often and a couple of incidents were distressing. She helped to butcher a giraffe that had been killed by poachers in Kenya. Then she dined on the meat. At that point, I lost respect for her personally. Later in the memoir she took part in a Minnesota expedition to study black bears. After disturbing their winter den, and retrieving two cubs the mother was tranquilized and almost died. How can a scientific quest excuse this kind of intrusive behavior? Most of the memoir is about Dr. Wynne-Grant's frequent epiphanies, insecurities, and how her life kept failing to bring satisfaction. Her academic achievements are impressive. Her dedication to animal welfare, not so much.
]]> 61272701
Once it was one of the most famous events in early American history. Today, it has been nearly forgotten.

In an obscure, two-hundred-year-old museum in a little village in western Massachusetts, there lies what once was the most revered but now totally forgotten relic from the history of early New England—the massive, tomahawk-scarred door that came to symbolize the notorious Deerfield Massacre. This impregnable barricade—known to early Americans as “The Old Indian Door”—constructed from double-thick planks of Massachusetts oak and studded with hand-wrought iron nails to repel the flailing tomahawk blades of several attacking native tribes, is the sole surviving artifact from the most dramatic moment in colonial American Leap Year, February 29, 1704, a cold, snowy night when hundreds of native Americans and their French allies swept down upon an isolated frontier outpost and ruthlessly slaughtered its inhabitants.

The sacking of Deerfield led to one of the greatest sagas of adventure, survival, sacrifice, family, honor, and faith ever told in North America. 112 survivors, including their fearless minister, the Reverand John Williams, were captured and led on a 300-mile forced march north, into enemy territory in Canada. Any captive who faltered or became too weak to continue the journey—including Williams’s own wife and one of his children—fell under the knife or tomahawk.

Survivors of the march willed themselves to live and endured captivity. Ransomed by the King of England’s royal governor of Massachusetts, the captives later returned home to Deerfield, rebuilt their town and, for the rest of their lives, told the incredible tale. The memoir of Rev. Williams, The Redeemed Captive , became the first bestselling book in American history and published a few years after his liberation, it remains a literary classic. The old Indian door is a touchstone that conjures up one of the most dramatic and inspiring stories of colonial America—and now, finally, this legendary event is brought to vivid life by popular historian James Swanson.]]> 336 James L. Swanson 1501108166 Florence 3 even before French and Native raiders attacked the small settlement. Back then Deerfield was at the edge of a wilderness, vulnerable and isolated. The massacre brought a great loss of life and most of the town was burned and destroyed. Babies were instantly killed often along with their parents. Survivors were mustered and forced to begin a brutal three hundred mile march to Canada. This bloody spectacle is painful to contemplate.

Unfortunately, some relevant history is omitted from the book. The settlement of Deerfield was first known as Potcumtuck, a Native American village. The area had been a domicile for Native tribes for thousands of years. Yet the story is told from an English settler perspective, a serious shortcoming.

The author did not include a history of the original encounter between Natives and English newcomers in 1666. I was left to wonder how the relationship deteriorated in just a few years. Events largely from the Native perspective were not recorded. Their tradition has always been oral remembrance and thus lost to recorded history. Many of the child captives were adopted by so called savage tribes and willingly chose to spend their lives in that tradition. My imagination was left to fill in much of the human agony of a winter forced march to Canada and the permanent assimilation of many young captives to a foreign culture. These details are unknowable, as is much of history.]]> 3.35 2024
author: James L. Swanson
name: Florence
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:
Life in Deerfield, Massachusetts during the winter of 1704 was already difficult
even before French and Native raiders attacked the small settlement. Back then Deerfield was at the edge of a wilderness, vulnerable and isolated. The massacre brought a great loss of life and most of the town was burned and destroyed. Babies were instantly killed often along with their parents. Survivors were mustered and forced to begin a brutal three hundred mile march to Canada. This bloody spectacle is painful to contemplate.

Unfortunately, some relevant history is omitted from the book. The settlement of Deerfield was first known as Potcumtuck, a Native American village. The area had been a domicile for Native tribes for thousands of years. Yet the story is told from an English settler perspective, a serious shortcoming.

The author did not include a history of the original encounter between Natives and English newcomers in 1666. I was left to wonder how the relationship deteriorated in just a few years. Events largely from the Native perspective were not recorded. Their tradition has always been oral remembrance and thus lost to recorded history. Many of the child captives were adopted by so called savage tribes and willingly chose to spend their lives in that tradition. My imagination was left to fill in much of the human agony of a winter forced march to Canada and the permanent assimilation of many young captives to a foreign culture. These details are unknowable, as is much of history.
]]> 43721059
Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation�� bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination�� that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run��?

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.]]> 464 Louise Erdrich 0062671200 Florence 5
Thomas, a night watchman at a manufacturing plant, tries to rally his people to defend their rights. It is a long shot. They are battered by hardship but not bereft of spirit. Louise Erdrich offers this rich mosaic of intimate family life; tragic and at times, subtly humorous. In spite of bare bones poverty, alcoholism, and prejudice of white society they manage to hold onto a tensile memory of tradition. To most North Americans it's a trip to an exotic culture that inspires both shame and admiration.]]> 4.05 2020
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Florence
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/07
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:
Life on the Chippewa Reservation of Turtle Mountain, North Dakota was challenging. The 1950s brought trouble in the usual form of poverty, despair, and loss of dignity. Trouble for the tribe was also brewing in Washington, DC. There was a move afoot to sever the treaty relationship and terminate the tribe. In plain words, Congress wanted to steal land protected by treaty and end all federal support of tribal people.

Thomas, a night watchman at a manufacturing plant, tries to rally his people to defend their rights. It is a long shot. They are battered by hardship but not bereft of spirit. Louise Erdrich offers this rich mosaic of intimate family life; tragic and at times, subtly humorous. In spite of bare bones poverty, alcoholism, and prejudice of white society they manage to hold onto a tensile memory of tradition. To most North Americans it's a trip to an exotic culture that inspires both shame and admiration.
]]> 194803881
Tracking the natural beauty that surrounds us, The Backyard Bird Chronicles maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches. With boundless charm and wit, author Amy Tan charts her foray into birding and the natural wonders of the world.

In 2016, Amy Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the Hatred and misinformation became a daily presence on social media, and the country felt more divisive than ever. In search of peace, Tan turned toward the natural world just beyond her window and, specifically, the birds visiting her yard. But what began as an attempt to find solace turned into something far greater—an opportunity to savor quiet moments during a volatile time, connect to nature in a meaningful way, and imagine the intricate lives of the birds she admired.]]> 291 Amy Tan 0593536134 Florence 5
Amy's bird illustrations capture the animation of various species from different angles and in different circumstances. Her curiosity of bird behavior seems boundless. Her dedication in caring for backyard visitors is impressive. I have not tried feeding live worms! Have you?]]> 4.05 2024
author: Amy Tan
name: Florence
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves:
review:
Amy Tan is a kindred spirit. I have also been feeding backyard birds for several years and enjoying their antics. Most of the species that Amy identifies in Marin County, California are different from the ones that populate central Virginia. Still, the blue Scrub Jays have the same raucous calls as eastern Bluejays. Goldfinches, House Finches, Nuthatches, and some Sparrows are also numerous in both locales.

Amy's bird illustrations capture the animation of various species from different angles and in different circumstances. Her curiosity of bird behavior seems boundless. Her dedication in caring for backyard visitors is impressive. I have not tried feeding live worms! Have you?
]]> 61827549
“Reads like a thriller . . . The Secret Gate is a fast-paced escape narrative, but it is also a morally complex interrogation.”�� The Washington Post

When the U.S. began its withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Afghan Army instantly collapsed, Homeira Qaderi was marked for death at the hands of the Taliban. A celebrated author, academic, and champion for women's liberation, Homeira had achieved celebrity in her home country by winning custody of her son in a contentious divorce, a rarity in Afghanistan's patriarchal society. As evacuation planes departed above, Homeira was caught in the turmoil at the Kabul Airport, trying and failing to secure escape for her and her eight-year-old son, Siawash, along with her parents and the rest of their family.��

Meanwhile, a young American diplomat named Sam Aronson was enjoying a brief vacation between assignments when chaos descended upon Afghanistan. Sam immediately volunteered to join the skeleton team of remaining officials at Kabul Airport, frantically racing to help rescue the more than 100,000 stranded Americans and their Afghan helpers. When Sam learned that the CIA had established a secret entrance into the airport two miles away from the desperate crowds crushing toward the gates, he started bringing families directly through, personally rescuing as many as fifty-two people in a single day.��

On the last day of the evacuation, Sam was contacted by Homeira's literary agent, who persuaded him to help her escape. He needed to risk his life to get them through the gate in the final hours before it closed forever. He borrowed night-vision goggles and enlisted a Dari-speaking colleague and two heavily armed security contract “shooters.�� He contacted Homeira with a burner phone, and they used a flashlight code signal borrowed from boyhood summer camp. For her part, Homeira broke Sam’s rules and withstood his profanities. Together they braved gunfire by Afghan Army soldiers anxious about the restive crowds outside the airport. Ultimately, to enter the airport, Homeira and Siawash would have to leave behind their family and everything they had ever known.��

The Secret Gate tells the thrilling, emotional tale of a young man's courage and a mother and son’s skin-of-the-teeth escape from a homeland that is no longer their own.]]> 316 Mitchell Zuckoff 0593594843 Florence 5
This book is the story of one man, behind the scenes; a state department bureaucrat who was caught up in those events. Sam Aronson was originally tasked with denying entry to people without the proper documents. It is also the story of one woman; a single parent living in Kabul, knowing that she was targeted by the Taliban for courageously speaking out for women's rights, but refusing the leave her family and her beloved city.

The events that transpired in a frantically short window of time were life changing. Somehow, both of these people rose to the moment in a burst of courage. Their actions were life-affirming in the midst of devastation. This is an inspiring tale of heroism behind public scenes of carnage.








rescue scores of people.

]]> 4.24
author: Mitchell Zuckoff
name: Florence
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:
After the Taliban took over Afghanistan thousands of citizens gathered at the Kabul airport desperate for a flight out of the country. The mobs were hungry, thirsty, terrified, and in constant danger of stray gunfire. Those who were not US citizens or permanent residents were denied entry, leaving behind Afghans who were targeted by the Taliban due to their association with the American occupation forces.

This book is the story of one man, behind the scenes; a state department bureaucrat who was caught up in those events. Sam Aronson was originally tasked with denying entry to people without the proper documents. It is also the story of one woman; a single parent living in Kabul, knowing that she was targeted by the Taliban for courageously speaking out for women's rights, but refusing the leave her family and her beloved city.

The events that transpired in a frantically short window of time were life changing. Somehow, both of these people rose to the moment in a burst of courage. Their actions were life-affirming in the midst of devastation. This is an inspiring tale of heroism behind public scenes of carnage.








rescue scores of people.


]]> 23788985
Sam Hardacre makes a tough yet honest living as a fish gutter. But he has ambitions for a life far removed from the harsh existence on the quays of the north English coast. Through drive and determination he builds a business empire and amasses a fortune. His wife, Mary, once a poor street urchin, must learn to adapt to her new role as mistress of a grand house in Yorkshire.

Sam's sons, Joe and Harry, inherit some but not all of their father's qualities. Their opposing personalities lead them to make very different choices about their futures. Meanwhile, their younger sister, Jane, is born into a life of privilege and has no experience of her family's early struggles.

The three siblings and their offspring will know love, hate, passion and tragedy, as they live through the dramatic events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The lives of the Hardacres are shaped by the extraordinary events of the Boer War, the Great War, the Wall Street Crash, the Second World War, Hitler's Germany and the London Blitz.

Hardacre is a gripping pageturner; a tale of ambition, fate and family ties.

Praise for the bestselling Hardacre

'History comes alive ... innocents, rascals and middling humans - an authentic bunch to set against tempestuous times.' Publishers Weekly

'This skilfully written, always entertaining family saga ... rich in plot, pace and character ... polished storytelling.' Newsagent and Bookshop

'The best family saga since Penmarric.' Manchester Evening News

For fans of rich and dramatic family sagas from the Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey.]]> 596 C.L. Skelton Florence 4 4.33 1976
author: C.L. Skelton
name: Florence
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1976
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/21
date added: 2024/07/21
shelves:
review:
This book was retrieved from a library book sale. The price was one dollar. What a buried treasure! Hardacre is the saga of a Yorkshire family who rose from working class subsistence to fabulous wealth. They never did learn the rules of upper class etiquette. Mary and Sam viewed the servants as friends. They sometimes invited the butler to sit for a cup of tea. Sam was generous to a fault. Three wars took their toll on the family. Tragedies were endured. Babies were born into what became a dynasty. Eventually times changed and even wealthy landowners saw their way of life disappearing. It's a lovely, nostalgic, old-fashioned tale.
]]> 53138081 Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with a vengeance.

In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli—like so many of her neighbors—must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life. The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American Dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes an epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America’s most defining eras—the Great Depression.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250178602]]> 464 Kristin Hannah 1250178606 Florence 4 4.27 2021
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Florence
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/14
date added: 2024/07/14
shelves:
review:
This book took a long time to draw me in. At first the characters seemed superficial. That certainly changed. Before long I was turning pages quickly wanting to know what happened next. It's a story of hardship, and courage as one family experienced the Dust Bowl in Texas and the Great Depression in Calfornia. Life is cruel at times but there can be hope. And sometimes love.
]]> 61358638 Reimagining the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.

Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.]]> 304 Matthew Desmond 0593239911 Florence 0 to-read 4.27 2023
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Florence
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199798868 New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis�� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 294 Colm Tóibín 1476785112 Florence 5
In this book, characters continually pop up until we are immersed in a tight community from which there is no escape. Gradually, individuals take shape revealing hardships, disappointments, and the grind of daily life. Sometimes they are driven to take actions that are emotionally dangerous. In the absence of drama or violence, the story quietly imparts an uncanny understanding of inner passion, tattered by years of neglect. Colm Toibin creates a deep understanding of dreams, forever unfulfilled. He makes it look easy with a simple, compelling story.]]> 3.68 2024
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Florence
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves:
review:
It seems that Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York and Enniscorthy, Ireland have a lot in common. Both are small communities where family, neighbors, and onlookers invade a person's privacy. Eilis Lacey, mother of teenagers, wife of Tony, and captive of his large Italian family, escapes to Ireland, her homeland that she has not seen in twenty years.

In this book, characters continually pop up until we are immersed in a tight community from which there is no escape. Gradually, individuals take shape revealing hardships, disappointments, and the grind of daily life. Sometimes they are driven to take actions that are emotionally dangerous. In the absence of drama or violence, the story quietly imparts an uncanny understanding of inner passion, tattered by years of neglect. Colm Toibin creates a deep understanding of dreams, forever unfulfilled. He makes it look easy with a simple, compelling story.
]]> 6101138 This is an alternative cover edition for ISBN 9780007230181

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?]]> 653 Hilary Mantel Florence 5 ]]> 3.90 2009
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Florence
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/05
date added: 2024/07/05
shelves:
review:
Times in the 16th century world were tumultuous. The world powers were tentatively at peace. Henry the VIII was on the throne, married to Queen Katherine, and missing a male heir. Thomas Cromwell had some challenging times, personally. He was brutalized by a sadistic father and forced to leave home at the age of fifteen. For many years he wandered on his own, clinging to survival by any means necessary. He developed his natural intelligence into a talent for accumulating wealth, understanding human nature. This book is a complex, nuanced portrait of that man who rose from obscurity to be the King's most trusted advisor. Somewhat hardened to suffering of former friends and mentors, he carried out the will of his sovereign. Times change. King Henry lusted after Anne Boleyn. He wanted to jettison Queen Katherine and marry Anne. That desire created a worldwide, violent upheaval. Roman Catholicism was out. Henry would replace the Pope as head of the English church. Dissenters were dispatched in violent, gruesome manners. Cromwell's skillful manipulation of enemies, sharp tongue, and hard gained street knowledge kept him on top of the heap. HIlary Mantel brings Cromwell to life along with familiar, well told events. You just had to be there. I feel like I was.

]]> 61272711 New York Times Bestseller | New York Times 10 Best Books of 2023

The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his�� slave.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.

Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day—among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again—this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.

With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story—one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.]]> 416 Ilyon Woo 1501191055 Florence 5
The author claims that the story has no happy ending. The Crafts had a secure life in England where they gained an education. After the Civil War they chose to return to Georgia. Ellen was reunited with her mother. Amid some financial problems and harassment by racist elements, they had a large family, and lived out their years as free people. Nothing is perfect but I call that a happy ending.]]> 3.95 2023
author: Ilyon Woo
name: Florence
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/22
date added: 2024/06/22
shelves:
review:
Ellen and William Craft, enslaved people in Macon, Georgia pulled off an audacious plan of escape in 1848. The were both skilled craftspeople. Ellen was a seamstress. William was a cabinet maker. Years later, having settled in England, beyond the reach of slave catchers, Ellen was asked if she had been mistreated during her years of bondage. She said no. Then why escape? she was asked. I wasn't allowed to become literate, she replied, it was a violation of my human rights. That makes sense to me. Having gained freedom Ellen and her husband became strong activists for abolition on the lecture circuit in Boston and throughout the northern states.

The author claims that the story has no happy ending. The Crafts had a secure life in England where they gained an education. After the Civil War they chose to return to Georgia. Ellen was reunited with her mother. Amid some financial problems and harassment by racist elements, they had a large family, and lived out their years as free people. Nothing is perfect but I call that a happy ending.
]]> 27276428
The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a ‘unit of heredity��. It intersects with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds �� from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.

This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history �� the story of Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to “read�� and “write�� the human genome �� unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.

Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity �� and a vision of both humanity’s past and future.]]> 592 Siddhartha Mukherjee Florence 5 4.34 2016
author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
name: Florence
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/15
date added: 2024/06/15
shelves:
review:
Doctor Mukherjee takes the reader on a long journey beginning with a tunnel that is dark and bereft of knowledge. The passage gradually widens with the light of discovery. He chronicles nothing less than a growing understanding of mankind's history from ancient times up to period when the future seems limitless. Genes are the basic building blocks of all life from a lowly worm's body to a maddeningly complex human being. Uncovering the secrets of DNA, RNA, and the double helix has been a goal of scientific minds for millenia. It is a history with many false theories, hubris, and flashes of brilliance. Hardwon knowledge has been used to discover the cause of illness and tragically, to aim at building a master race through eugenics. Mukherjee is able to present the essence of genetics for readers like myself who lack a scientific background. He writes with humor and passion, often referring to tragedies in his own family. This book has given me a glimmer of clarity to a world formerly opaque. What a privilege.
]]> 40097951
Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London.

Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him....

The Silent Patient is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive.]]> 336 Alex Michaelides 1250301696 Florence 2 4.17 2019
author: Alex Michaelides
name: Florence
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/09
date added: 2024/06/09
shelves:
review:
This is a ‘who done it�� murder mystery with a twist at the end. It was not a very compelling story even with some gore and suspense.
]]> 55711638 A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient Redwoods. Colleen, desperate to have a second baby, challenges the logging company’s use of herbicides that she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community—including her own. Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict that threatens the very thing they are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.]]> 464 Ash Davidson 1982144408 Florence 3 3.86 2021
author: Ash Davidson
name: Florence
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/03
date added: 2024/06/03
shelves:
review:
This is a world of mud, muck, blood and tough men with resilient families. They are loggers in the Pacific Northwest contending with the end of their vocation due to environmental destruction. Formerly sparkling creeks are running with silt and the salmon are imperiled. Too bad that the working families who are suffering aren't the ones protesting the poisoning of their own backyards. Environmental degradation is a subplot to one family's saga in this book. That leaves me unsatisfied.
]]> 7170627 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here and here.

The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography�� of cancer - from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.

Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousand years.

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.��

The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive—and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease.

Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.]]> 571 Siddhartha Mukherjee Florence 5
I was not reassured that cancer will be conquered with a universal cure. Today's treatments (in 2024) still seem like blunt instruments to one who has experienced them. But scientists continue to search for ways to destroy those ever expanding cancerous cells without harming healthy ones. To cure the body without harming it. That is the quest.]]> 4.32 2010
author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
name: Florence
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/26
date added: 2024/05/26
shelves:
review:
Thank you Doctor Mukherjee for this clear biography of humanity's most dreaded disease. You explained complex physiological concepts so that a person with no scientific background can begin to understand. Genes made of DNA containing the very secret of life are contained within each human cell. Mutation of a dividing cell can lead to uncontrolled cell division and growth which eventually will overcome the body's healthy cells. The mutant cells are not deterred by the body's natural antibodies. They can travel freely throughout the bloodstream to attack distant organs. Cancer is insidious, relentless, fascinating, frightening and after all these years, still mysterious.

I was not reassured that cancer will be conquered with a universal cure. Today's treatments (in 2024) still seem like blunt instruments to one who has experienced them. But scientists continue to search for ways to destroy those ever expanding cancerous cells without harming healthy ones. To cure the body without harming it. That is the quest.
]]> 56305709 228 Eline Allaart Florence 0 to-read 4.36
author: Eline Allaart
name: Florence
average rating: 4.36
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13687301
Surviving Triple-Negative Breast Cancer delivers research-based information on the biology of TNBC; the role of genetics, family history, and race; how to navigate treatment options; understanding a pathology report; and a plethora of strategies to reduce the risk of recurrence, including diet and lifestyle changes. In clear, approachable language, Prijatel provides a fact-filled guide based on a vast array of scientific studies. Woven throughout the book are stories of women who have faced TNBC. These are mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters who went through a variety of medical treatments and then got on with life--one competes in triathlons, two had babies after being treated with chemo, one got remarried in her 50s, and one just celebrated the 30th birthday of the son she was nursing when she was diagnosed.

Writing with honesty and humor, Prijatel delivers an inspiring message--that TNBC is a disease to take seriously, with proper and occasionally aggressive treatment, but it is not automatically a killer. Most women diagnosed with the disease survive and go on to live full lives. Surviving Triple-Negative Breast Cancer is a roadmap for women who want to be empowered through their treatment and recovery.]]> 223 Patricia Prijatel 0195387627 Florence 0 to-read 4.39 2012
author: Patricia Prijatel
name: Florence
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 43582376 A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the science of our world both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe.

Now he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories, The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up.

A wonderful successor to A Short History of Nearly Everything, this book will have you marvelling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again.]]> 450 Bill Bryson 0385539304 Florence 5
The history of medicine has many ugly chapters. Some doctors, impressed with their own boundless wisdom, hastened the death of patients with reckless procedures. Frontal lobotomy performed with an icepick through the eye socket is but one example. Didn't these people take the Hippocratic oath?

The expense and wastefulness of modern medicine was another eye opener. The United States, with the most expensive health care in the world, has poor average longevity, high maternal mortality rate, compared to other developed countries.

I am now inspired to learn more about the body. The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer is next on my list!]]> 4.30 2019
author: Bill Bryson
name: Florence
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/15
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves:
review:
The history and plain facts of what can go wrong with the body are not for the faint hearted to read. They left me with stunned by the intricacy of the brain, the eyes, the not so pretty digestive system. The body is complex and largely unknown, even to this day. The book made me wonder why I never took a greater interest in science.

The history of medicine has many ugly chapters. Some doctors, impressed with their own boundless wisdom, hastened the death of patients with reckless procedures. Frontal lobotomy performed with an icepick through the eye socket is but one example. Didn't these people take the Hippocratic oath?

The expense and wastefulness of modern medicine was another eye opener. The United States, with the most expensive health care in the world, has poor average longevity, high maternal mortality rate, compared to other developed countries.

I am now inspired to learn more about the body. The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer is next on my list!
]]> 182762283 The Moscow Rules��and��Argo tells her riveting, courageous story of being a female spy at the CIA and battling against the prevailing culture of sexism at the time, all while undertaking dangerous missions for America’s safety during the height of the Cold War.

Jonna Hiestand Mendez began her CIA career as a "contract wife," a second-class citizen who was hired as a convenience to her husband’s career, a young officer stationed in Europe. She needed his permission to open a bank account or shut off the gas to their apartment, and she performed secretarial duties for the CIA.

Mendez's talent for espionage was clear, and she soon took on bigger and more significant roles at The Agency. She lived under cover and served tours of duty all over the globe, as well as��at CIA Headquarters. She confronted dangerous situations that called on her spy coming face to face with a rogue Jihadi who had brought down an American plane, and helping steal a top-secret encryption machine from a Soviet embassy, among other high stakes situations. She became an international spy and ultimately Chief of Disguise at CIA’s Office of Technical Service--a kind of female American version of James Bond's famous "Q."

In this breakthrough memoir, Mendez recounts not only the drama of her international spy career but the grit and good fortune it took for her to navigate a misogynistic world. She was undermined, harassed, and intimidated, all while maintaining a patriotic mission and working to advance her own career.��She was a firsthand witness to the cost of this gendered culture, both to the women who worked there, and to the interests of the agency and the nation it serves.

In True Face is both clear-eyed and the story of an incredible spy career, and what it took to achieve it.��]]> 320 Jonna Méndez 154170312X Florence 4 That was not ok for Jonna Mendez. She knew she could do better. She fought an uphill battle to develop skills that eventually brought her respect and promotions. Being from the same approximate age group and having worked for a male dominated government agency (not the CIA!) I understand the battles she had to fight. I'm glad she won and I admire her spirit.

This book made me realize how lonely it must be to work for the CIA. Often having to invent a fictional identity, being unable to discuss your work with friends and family members. It's a considerable sacrifice to make in the service of one's country.]]> 3.65 2024
author: Jonna Méndez
name: Florence
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/08
date added: 2024/05/08
shelves:
review:
The image of the Central Intelligence Agency is one of mystery and intrigue. An agent's life can be exciting and dangerous. That was not so for the women who traveled to distant lands to support their husbands' careers. Women employees were pretty much ignored and stuck in lower level clerical jobs.
That was not ok for Jonna Mendez. She knew she could do better. She fought an uphill battle to develop skills that eventually brought her respect and promotions. Being from the same approximate age group and having worked for a male dominated government agency (not the CIA!) I understand the battles she had to fight. I'm glad she won and I admire her spirit.

This book made me realize how lonely it must be to work for the CIA. Often having to invent a fictional identity, being unable to discuss your work with friends and family members. It's a considerable sacrifice to make in the service of one's country.
]]> 126609
Theodore Dreiser: Βαθιά πολιτικοποιημένος, ακτιβιστής, δούλεψε για το Χόλυγουντ, συνεργάτης του Τσάπλιν, στη μαύρη λίστα του Μακάρθι.]]> 580 Theodore Dreiser 0393960420 Florence 5
When dreams overcome thoughtful reason, trouble is in store. Carrie yearns to live a life surrounded by beauty, fine clothing, luxurious surroundings. She rejects the dullness of routine; an existence made possible by hard labor. Unfortunately, life experience does not equip Carrie to judge character. Her youthful beauty and simplicity leave her vulnerable to the attentions of an unscrupulous older man.

Many of the ensuing events are predictable; even melodramatic. Early twentieth century manners seem quaint. Mr. Dreiser, however, keeps the story alive by revealing the intimate emotions of his important characters. To a reader's fascination, they stumble through life. Self-deception is not rewarded by happiness. A villian, even one with a reader's sympathy, pays a just penalty. There is redemption in art and intellect. This book has been studied and lauded for over a century, though I read it for pleasure. It is still fresh and relevant.
]]> 3.77 1900
author: Theodore Dreiser
name: Florence
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1900
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/02
date added: 2024/05/02
shelves:
review:
Carrie, an unsophisticated country girl arrives in the enormous city of Chicago by train. The year is 1889. She has very few possessions, hardly any funds, but her dreams are intact. Reality soon intrudes. Throughout the story poverty shows its brutality. Strangers are indifferent to suffering. One must labor under harsh conditions to earn a bed and some hot food.

When dreams overcome thoughtful reason, trouble is in store. Carrie yearns to live a life surrounded by beauty, fine clothing, luxurious surroundings. She rejects the dullness of routine; an existence made possible by hard labor. Unfortunately, life experience does not equip Carrie to judge character. Her youthful beauty and simplicity leave her vulnerable to the attentions of an unscrupulous older man.

Many of the ensuing events are predictable; even melodramatic. Early twentieth century manners seem quaint. Mr. Dreiser, however, keeps the story alive by revealing the intimate emotions of his important characters. To a reader's fascination, they stumble through life. Self-deception is not rewarded by happiness. A villian, even one with a reader's sympathy, pays a just penalty. There is redemption in art and intellect. This book has been studied and lauded for over a century, though I read it for pleasure. It is still fresh and relevant.

]]> 195474144 From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility, a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories set in New York and Los Angeles. The millions of readers of Amor Towles are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter six stories set in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles. The New York stories, most of which are set around the turn of the millennium, take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of compromise which operate at the heart of modern marriages. In Towles’s novel, Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September, 1938, with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood�� describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age. Throughout the stories, two characters often find themselves sitting across a table for two where the direction of their futures may hinge upon what they say to each other next. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting historical fiction.]]> 451 Amor Towles 0593296370 Florence 5 4.15 2024
author: Amor Towles
name: Florence
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/25
date added: 2024/04/25
shelves:
review:
The characters in this collection of stories and a novella don't give up their secrets easily. In each case they leave a trail of clues that a reader is compelled to follow. No one is strictly benevolent or evil. Some have discovered larceny. Others have found unexpected joy. Others are on a voyage of self discovery. In each case there is a powerful motive. I'm sorry for being so cryptic. I don't want to spoil this delicious treat for anyone. It is sufficient to say that by the end of each tale an imperfect human being has emerged, fully formed in his or her complexity. I am eagerly awaiting Mr. Towles' next book and his scheduled appearance in Charlottesville at the Paramount Theater in June of this year.
]]> 61966682 184 Jeremy Cooper 1804270369 Florence 4
As a fellow film buff, I understand Brian's attraction to the darkness and the big screen.]]> 3.81
author: Jeremy Cooper
name: Florence
average rating: 3.81
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/18
date added: 2024/04/18
shelves:
review:
Brian has suffered mostly untold trauma in his young life. His days are solitary, lived within rituals which offer small comfort. Sudden unwelcome events disturb the placidity of his everyday existence. One could say that he is hiding from life. Then things begin to change, very, very slowly. Brian becomes a connoisseur of movies. He begins to interact with a group of fellow film buffs. Like a chrysalis he gradually emerges from his small living space.

As a fellow film buff, I understand Brian's attraction to the darkness and the big screen.
]]> 56140 Cadillac Desert Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West.

Based on more than a decade of research, Cadillac Desert is a stunning expose and a dramatic, intriguing history of the creation of an Eden—an Eden that may be only a mirage.]]> 582 Marc Reisner 0140178244 Florence 4
During the post World War II period and through the 1960s the United States was in a dam building
frenzy. Starting with the colossal Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border and rampaging through California and points east, the goal was to redirect the water of many naturally flowing rivers onto private agricultural land. Cost was no object. The desert was made to bloom.

No one seemed to question the expense of channeling water over land, uphill, over mountains and through miles of desert, even if the cost exceeded the value of crops being irrigated. Politicians were all on board. Each wanted to snag a project for their state. Tens of thousands of dams were built.

Eventually the dam building fever subsided. Questions remained. Wild salmon became a dying species in California. The Teton Dam in Idaho collapsed wiping out several small towns in the path of its raging outflow. Many overly ambitious projects were shelved.

An environmental lobby grew. What happened to our scenic, wild rivers? Should marginal, desert land be taken out of production? How can desert areas with little rainfall support population explosions in California, Arizona? How about Las Vegas? The Colorado River, feeding these thirsty cities, is being drained on its way to Mexico. Like all concrete structures, dams do not last forever. Reservoirs become silted mudpiles. Recycled water becomes overly salinated. The Ogallala aquifer continues to be drained at an alarming rate. This book was written in the 1980s, but it is eerily prescient. Just look at the water levels of Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs today. Leaving the land as nature intended it seems like a sensible plan, even at this late date.]]> 4.27 1986
author: Marc Reisner
name: Florence
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/11
date added: 2024/04/11
shelves:
review:
Marc Reisner had a wry sense of humor and a prodigious vocabulary. Consider "sesquipedalian tergiversation". But don't let that phase stop you from reading this book. Just keep a dictionary handy.

During the post World War II period and through the 1960s the United States was in a dam building
frenzy. Starting with the colossal Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border and rampaging through California and points east, the goal was to redirect the water of many naturally flowing rivers onto private agricultural land. Cost was no object. The desert was made to bloom.

No one seemed to question the expense of channeling water over land, uphill, over mountains and through miles of desert, even if the cost exceeded the value of crops being irrigated. Politicians were all on board. Each wanted to snag a project for their state. Tens of thousands of dams were built.

Eventually the dam building fever subsided. Questions remained. Wild salmon became a dying species in California. The Teton Dam in Idaho collapsed wiping out several small towns in the path of its raging outflow. Many overly ambitious projects were shelved.

An environmental lobby grew. What happened to our scenic, wild rivers? Should marginal, desert land be taken out of production? How can desert areas with little rainfall support population explosions in California, Arizona? How about Las Vegas? The Colorado River, feeding these thirsty cities, is being drained on its way to Mexico. Like all concrete structures, dams do not last forever. Reservoirs become silted mudpiles. Recycled water becomes overly salinated. The Ogallala aquifer continues to be drained at an alarming rate. This book was written in the 1980s, but it is eerily prescient. Just look at the water levels of Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs today. Leaving the land as nature intended it seems like a sensible plan, even at this late date.
]]> 123266603 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"A fast-paced debut...Espionage buffs will savor this vibrant account." �� Publishers Weekly

A U.S. naval counterintelligence officer working to safeguard Pearl Harbor; a Japanese spy ordered to Hawaii to gather information on the American fleet. On December 7, 1941, their hidden stories are exposed by a morning of bloodshed that would change the world forever. Scrutinizing long-buried historical documents, NCIS star Mark Harmon and co-author Leon Carroll, a former NCIS Special Agent, have brought forth a true-life NCIS story of deception, discovery, and danger.

Hawaii, 1941. War clouds with Japan are gathering and the islands of Hawaii have become battlegrounds of spies, intelligence agents, and military officials - with the island's residents caught between them. Toiling in the shadows are Douglas Wada, the only Japanese American agent in naval intelligence, and Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese spy sent to Pearl Harbor to gather information on the U.S. fleet.

Douglas Wada's experiences in his native Honolulu include posing undercover as a newspaper reporter, translating wiretaps on the Japanese Consulate, and interrogating America's first captured POW of World War II, a submarine officer found on the beach. Takeo Yoshikawa is a Japanese spy operating as a junior diplomat with the consulate who is collecting vital information that goes straight to Admiral Yamamoto. Their dueling stories anchor Ghosts of Honolulu's gripping depiction of the world-changing cat and mouse games played between Japanese and US military intelligence agents (and a mercenary Nazi) in Hawaii before the outbreak of the second world war.

Also caught in the upheaval are Honolulu's innocent residents - including Douglas Wada's father - who endure the war's anti-Japanese fervor and a cadre of intelligence professionals who must prevent Hawaii from adopting the same destructive mass internments as California.

Ghosts of Honolulu depicts the incredible high stakes game of naval intelligence and the need to define what is real and what only appears to be real.]]> 272 Mark Harmon 1400337011 Florence 3
Unfortunately, by the time this book was written, it was too late to interview the people who experienced the tumultuous events of the war and its aftermath. Most of the figures involved in these events have passed on and we have lost most of their personal history. Navy intelligence operations remain opaque to this day.

This book would have benefited from a list of major characters and a map of the battle zone.]]> 3.58 2023
author: Mark Harmon
name: Florence
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/31
date added: 2024/03/31
shelves:
review:
In Hawaii, residents of Japanese descent had a close relationship with their former home country. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor their orderly lives were severely disrupted. Many were suspected of being disloyal and threatened with collective punishment. This book clarifies that the majority of the younger Nisei generation, born in Hawaii, were loyal to the United States.

Unfortunately, by the time this book was written, it was too late to interview the people who experienced the tumultuous events of the war and its aftermath. Most of the figures involved in these events have passed on and we have lost most of their personal history. Navy intelligence operations remain opaque to this day.

This book would have benefited from a list of major characters and a map of the battle zone.
]]> 180633958 THE FINAL BOOK FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST WRITERS

In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,�� she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.�� A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.

Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed, and beautifully rendered. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels—revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England; and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is her legendary essay “Royal Bodies,�� on our endless fascination with the current royal family.

From her unusual childhood to her all-consuming interest in Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall trilogy, A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel’s life in her own luminous words, through “messages from people I used to be.�� Filled with her singular wit and wisdom, it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.]]> 419 Hilary Mantel 1250342228 Florence 5
The essays in the book are varied featuring autobiographical sketches, book reviews, movie reviews, speeches given to a group of writers, the British royal family, reflections of life and death. All are imbued with the unique perspective of a skilled writer with a boundless imagination.
]]> 4.27 2023
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Florence
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/26
date added: 2024/03/26
shelves:
review:
To Hilary Mantel, history is alive at this very moment. It is almost a mystical process of entering a lost world and bringing it back to life. While reading this book I decided to also read Wolf Hall, Hilary's acclaimed novel of the English Tudors during the sixteenth century. The broad scope of the novel had seemed a bit intimidating but having read this compilation, I want to explore more of her work.

The essays in the book are varied featuring autobiographical sketches, book reviews, movie reviews, speeches given to a group of writers, the British royal family, reflections of life and death. All are imbued with the unique perspective of a skilled writer with a boundless imagination.

]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Florence 4
The book provides an insider's view of the life of a British sailor of the times. It was dangerous, uncomfortable, and often not voluntary. When additional manpower was needed naval recruiters were not averse to kidnapping young men. Life could end violently due to bad weather, scurvy, or bloody sea battles.

The Wager is a gripping story that has inspired many writers of nautical fiction. I zipped right through these pages wanting to discover the resolution.]]> 4.14 2023
author: David Grann
name: Florence
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/18
date added: 2024/03/18
shelves:
review:
This is an old fashioned, swashbuckling, eighteenth century maritime adventure. It takes place during the little known and curiously named War of Jenkins Ear, a conflict between England and Spain over mercantile advantage. There is no side to root for. Both nations were involved in looting native peoples of their land, their treasure, and their freedom.

The book provides an insider's view of the life of a British sailor of the times. It was dangerous, uncomfortable, and often not voluntary. When additional manpower was needed naval recruiters were not averse to kidnapping young men. Life could end violently due to bad weather, scurvy, or bloody sea battles.

The Wager is a gripping story that has inspired many writers of nautical fiction. I zipped right through these pages wanting to discover the resolution.
]]> 145624514
Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. An overwhelming share of them come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, although many migrants come from farther away. Some are fleeing persecution, others crime or hunger. Very often it will not be their first attempt to cross. They may have already been deported from the United States, but it remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. Their homes have become uninhabitable. They will take their chances.

This vast and unremitting crisis did not spring up overnight. Indeed, as Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, it is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture for the first time.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is an odyssey of struggle and resilience. With astonishing nuance and detail, Blitzer tells an epic story about the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, and in doing so, he delves into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation’s turbulent politics and culture in countless ways—and will almost certainly determine its future.]]> 544 Jonathan Blitzer 1984880802 Florence 5
The United States has much to atone for in its relations with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. During the Reagan years our government provided support to military death squads terrorizing and murdering civilians in those countries. Jonathan Blitzer not only reminds us of those US sponsored atrocities, he also tells the personal stories of four of its victims. The tales of torture are extremely difficult to read. They are the subject of nightmares.

Through the postwar years the US government has used central american states as though they were a personal fiefdom. No single administration has been without fault. United States political objectives have frequently interfered with central american sovereignty to the detriment of its ordinary citizens. And the most recent atrocity - committed by the Trump administration - was to separate migrant parents from their children. They even failed to keep documentation making it almost impossible to reunite families.

These actions are not compatible with a nation that considers itself to be lawful and just. It is painful and necessary to remember this shameful history.]]> 4.47 2024
author: Jonathan Blitzer
name: Florence
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/14
date added: 2024/03/14
shelves:
review:
Lately it seems like entire populations of Central American are arriving at the southern US border to request asylum. Most migrants have made a perilous trip through Mexico desperate to escape corruption, violence, and instability. Immigration is a hot political issue being discussed with rancor almost without any grasp of history. This book attempts to set the record straight.

The United States has much to atone for in its relations with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. During the Reagan years our government provided support to military death squads terrorizing and murdering civilians in those countries. Jonathan Blitzer not only reminds us of those US sponsored atrocities, he also tells the personal stories of four of its victims. The tales of torture are extremely difficult to read. They are the subject of nightmares.

Through the postwar years the US government has used central american states as though they were a personal fiefdom. No single administration has been without fault. United States political objectives have frequently interfered with central american sovereignty to the detriment of its ordinary citizens. And the most recent atrocity - committed by the Trump administration - was to separate migrant parents from their children. They even failed to keep documentation making it almost impossible to reunite families.

These actions are not compatible with a nation that considers itself to be lawful and just. It is painful and necessary to remember this shameful history.
]]> 17431028 368 Vicky Halls 1448110661 Florence 3 3.74 2005
author: Vicky Halls
name: Florence
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2014/09/14
date added: 2024/03/05
shelves:
review:
I have often wondered what is going on in the minds of my six house cats. This book helped me figure it out. I am now observing the interactions between them to see who is an intimidator and who is a nervous victim. I probably already knew the answer, but I didn't realize the subtlety of the clues. There were several practical tips I can put to use. One is "hiding" food in containers around the house so the cat enjoys some natural stimulation in finding it. The idea is to substitute for that impulse to stalk prey that has been unnaturally suppressed in an indoor cat. The author contends that cats should be allowed to roam outdoors. I disagree. The cats themselves are safer and other small creatures such as birds are definitely safter when the cats don't go outdoors. I was somewhat comforted to learn that behavior problems are somewhat standard in multicat households like ours. At least we are not alone!
]]> 101135487
Chronicling two-hundred years of glamour, intrigue, and hedonism, this rich and vivid history of the French Riviera features a vast cast of characters, from Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel to Andre Matisse and James Baldwin.

1835, Lord Brougham founded Cannes, introducing bathing and the manicured lawn to the wilds of the Mediterranean coast. Today, much of that shore has become a concrete mass from which escape is an exclusive dream. In the 185 years between, the stretch of seaboard from the red mountains of the Esterel to the Italian border hosted a cultural phenomenon well in excess of its tiny size.

A mere handful of towns and resorts created by foreign visitors - notably English, Russian and American - attracted the talented, rich and famous as well as those who wanted to be. For nearly two centuries of creativity, luxury, excess, scandal, war and corruption, the dark and sparkling world of the Riviera was a temptation for everybody who was anybody. Often frivolous, it was also a potent cultural matrix that inspired the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Coco Chanel, Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, James Baldwin, Catherine Mansfield, Sartre and Stravinsky.

In Once Upon a Time World, Jonathan Miles presents the remarkable story of the small strip of French coast that lured the world to its shores. It is a wild and unforgettable tale that follows the Riviera's transformation from paradise and wilderness to a pollution imperiled concrete jungle.]]> 464 Jonathan Miles 1639364951 Florence 3 3.43
author: Jonathan Miles
name: Florence
average rating: 3.43
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/03
date added: 2024/03/03
shelves:
review:
The French Riviera has always been a place of natural beauty. Its serenity has been disturbed by years of development, tourism, war, organized crime, economic downturn and corrupt local government. The book takes you through the decades of history with precise detail beginning with European history and devolving into salacious gossip of the area's rich and powerful inhabitants. It is painstakingly researched. Unless you are searching for a exhaustive volume of geographic, political, and sociologic history of the region, it will take enormous patience to wade through these detailed pages.
]]> 62914100
In this remarkable memoir, Jeremy Norton marshals twenty-two years of professional experience to offer, with compassion and critique, an extraordinary portrayal of emergency responders. Trauma Sponges captures in arresting detail the personal and social toll the job exacts, as well as the unique perspective afforded by sustained direct encounters with the sick, the dying, and the dead. From his first days as a rookie firefighter and emergency medical technician to his command of a company as a twenty-year veteran, Norton documents the life of an emergency responder in the harrowing, heartbreaking calls, from helping the sick and hurt, to reassuring the scared and nervous, to attempting desperate measures and providing final words. In the midst of the uncertainty, fear, and loss caused by the Covid pandemic, Norton and his crew responded to the scene of George Floyd’s murder. The social unrest and racial injustice Norton had observed for years exploded on the streets of Minneapolis, and he and his fellow firefighters faced the fires, the injured, and the anguish in the days and months that followed. Norton brings brutally honest insight and grave social conscience to his account, presenting a rare insider’s perspective on the insidious role of sexism and machismo in his profession, as well as an intimate observer’s view of individuals trapped in dire circumstances and a society ill equipped to confront trauma and death. His thought-provoking, behind-the-scenes depiction of the work of first response and last resort starkly reveals the realities of humanity at its finest and its worst.]]> 352 Jeremy Norton 1517914183 Florence 5 3.43
author: Jeremy Norton
name: Florence
average rating: 3.43
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/02/25
shelves:
review:
Can a civilian really know what it is like to be a firefighter? A career Firefighter is occasionally called to the scene of a conflagration, however emergency medical calls are a ceaseless daily grind. This unusual book lays out the emotional toll accumulated by those performing a unique service to individuals and the community at a desperate time of need. To the men and women who answer emergency medical calls, it is a struggle to remain cognizant of each person's humanity. There is a real danger of becoming callous, indifferent to suffering after having witnessed so much chaos and pain. Jeremy Norton writes in a heartfelt, honest and emotional manner of what firefighters encounter during each 48 hour shift. He is passionately concerned about police using excessive deadly force as in the murder of George Floyd, systemic racism, poverty, the emotional stress that accumulates upon witnessing humans in traumatic circumstances. He doesn't sugar coat anything.
]]> 62039254 A thrilling, witty, and slyly original Cold War mystery about a ragtag group of Jewish refuseniks in Moscow.

On his wedding day in 1976, Viktor Moroz stumbles upon a murder: two gay men, one of them a U.S. official, have been axed to death in Moscow.
Viktor, a Jewish refusenik, is stuck in the Soviet Union because the government has denied his application to leave for Israel; he sits “in refusal�� alongside his wife and their group of intellectuals, Jewish and not.
But the KGB spots Viktor leaving the murder scene. Plucked off the street, he’s given a chance to find the murderer or become the suspect of convenience. His deadline is nine days later, when Henry Kissinger will be arriving in Moscow. Unsolved ax murders, it seems, aren’t good for politics.

Immersive, unpredictable, and always ax-sharp, The Dissident is Cold War intrigue at its most inventive. It is an uncompromising look at sacrifice, community, and the scars of history and identity, from an expert storyteller.]]> 432 Paul Goldberg 1250208599 Florence 5
Among the motley group of characters are Jews trying to leave the country, international reporters, black marketeers, shadowy KGB thugs, and Henry Kissinger. Some of these folks are fiction. Some are historical figures. Don't try to figure out who committed the crime. Just enjoy the ride.]]> 3.64 2023
author: Paul Goldberg
name: Florence
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/15
date added: 2024/02/15
shelves:
review:
This book is a lot more than a whodunnit. It is a wonderfully entertaining literary novel that takes you deeply into Soviet Moscow of the 1970s. It is saturated with sly humor, venom directed at the KGB, ridicule of the Soviet government, and scathing satire; a joy to read. The author, a Russian emigree, is intimately acquainted with Moscow, aka the Big Potato, and the people he has portrayed in these pages. It's obvious that Mr. Goldberg loves the Russian language and culture. It's likely that he may have a touch of permanent homesickness.

Among the motley group of characters are Jews trying to leave the country, international reporters, black marketeers, shadowy KGB thugs, and Henry Kissinger. Some of these folks are fiction. Some are historical figures. Don't try to figure out who committed the crime. Just enjoy the ride.
]]> 60784741 The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children—and a searing indictment of the American foster care system.

On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff beside the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted the six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade, however, was a pattern of abuse and neglect that went ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved across the country. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew very little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children—with fateful consequences.

In the manner of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and other classic works of investigative journalism, Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family is a revelation of vulnerable lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian became the first reporter to put the children’s birth families at the center of the story. We follow the author as she runs up against the intransigence of a state agency that removes tens of thousands of kids from homes each year in the name of child welfare, while often failing to consider alternatives. Her reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as children of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America’s most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.]]> 320 Roxanna Asgarian 0374602298 Florence 4
It can be extremely traumatic for a child to be removed from the only home they have known. The decision is sometimes made too quickly by a bureaucratic agency without considering alternatives. A case worker should be acting to assist a family in trouble. Why not be an advocate instead of a threat? Sadly, in this case the answer involves poverty, racism, and courts biased against disadvantaged families.

The personal circumstances of these unfortunate children and their extended families are heartbreaking. The children could have been saved. They could be alive today, if someone in an official position had cared enough to dig a little deeper. ]]> 4.30 2023
author: Roxanna Asgarian
name: Florence
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/07
date added: 2024/02/07
shelves:
review:
How did six innocent, young children end up in a tragic situation? They were murdered by their adoptive parents. There has been much speculation about the shocking event. It is relatively easy to place blame but many times more difficult to espouse preventive measures.

It can be extremely traumatic for a child to be removed from the only home they have known. The decision is sometimes made too quickly by a bureaucratic agency without considering alternatives. A case worker should be acting to assist a family in trouble. Why not be an advocate instead of a threat? Sadly, in this case the answer involves poverty, racism, and courts biased against disadvantaged families.

The personal circumstances of these unfortunate children and their extended families are heartbreaking. The children could have been saved. They could be alive today, if someone in an official position had cared enough to dig a little deeper.
]]> 63340976 Two sisters navigate the turbulent, euphoric early days of California surf culture in this dazzling saga of ambition, sacrifice, and longing for a family they never had, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Aviator's Wife

Southern California, 1960s: endless sunny days surfing in Malibu, followed by glittering neon nights at Whisky A-Go-Go. In an era when women are expected to be housewives, Carol Donelly is breaking the mold as a legendary female surfer struggling to compete in a male-dominated sport--and her daughters, Mindy and Ginger, bear the weight of her unconventional lifestyle.

The Donnelly sisters grow up enduring their mother's absence--physically, when she's at the beach, and emotionally, the rare times she's at home. To escape questions about Carol's whereabouts--and chase their mom's elusive affection--they cut school to spend their days in the surf. From her first time on a board, Mindy shows a natural talent, but Ginger, two years younger, feels out of place in the water.

As they grow up and their lives diverge, Mindy and Ginger's relationship ebbs and flows. Mindy finds herself swept up in celebrity, complete with beachside love affairs, parties at the Playboy Club, and USO tours to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Ginger--desperate for a community of her own--is tugged into the vibrant counterculture of drugs and cults. Through it all, their sense of duty to each other survives, as the girls are forever connected by the emotional damage they carry from their unorthodox childhood.

A gripping, emotional story set at a time when mothers were expected to be Donna Reed, not Gidget, California Golden is an unforgettable novel about three women living in a society that was shifting as tempestuously as the breaking waves.]]> 368 Melanie Benjamin 0593497856 Florence 4 3.54 2023
author: Melanie Benjamin
name: Florence
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/03
date added: 2024/02/03
shelves:
review:
I didn't expect to admire this book so much. From the title, it could have been a piece of fluff. Yet this story of sunny California during the Beach Blanket Bingo days of the early sixties had me hooked almost from the very beginning. Yes, it diid veer off into melodrama several times but I kept turning pages rapidly. How could I abandon such oddball characters? Amidst all the beach scenes, the surfing and hippie drug culture there lurks a serious theme. Women of that era had such limited life choices, especially if they had athletic aspirations.
]]> 62585977
In constant pain, addicted to painkillers at the cost of his relationships with his wife and son, Tom slowly comes to realize that he can never work again. If he is not a working man, who is he? He is not, he believes, the kind of person who lives in subsidized housing, though that is where he has ended up. He is not the kind of person who hatches a scheme to commit convenience-check fraud, together with neighbors he considers lowlifes, until he finds himself stealing his banker’s trash.

Who is Tom Lowe, and who will he become? Can he find a way to reunite hands and heart, mind and spirit, to be once again a giver and not just a taker, to forge a self-acceptance deeper than pride? To one man’s painful moral journey, Dubus brings compassion with an edge of dark absurdity, forging a novel as absorbing as it is profound.]]> 336 Andre Dubus III 1324000465 Florence 4 3.93 2023
author: Andre Dubus III
name: Florence
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/30
date added: 2024/01/30
shelves:
review:
This is a story about a man who has fallen almost as far as a human being can fall, both physically and socially. He's down and out. He's in constant pain. He's also estranged from his son and still in love with his ex wife who has remarried. Does that sound depressing? It's not. Tom Lowe, Jr. fully inhabits his simple world. He lives his life without despair and he keeps learning from life's harsh experiences. It's an uplifting book in an era where kindness to other human beings seems illusive.
]]> 62918254 The untold history of Moscow's Metropol hotel—a fervent spot of intrigue, secrets, and the center of Stalin's nefarious propaganda during WWII.

In 1941, when German armies were marching towards Moscow, Lenin’s body was moved from his tomb on Red Square and taken to Siberia. By1945, a victorious Stalin had turned a poor country into a victorious superpower. Over the course of those four years, Stalin, at Churchill's insistence, accepted an Anglo-American press corps in Moscow to cover the Eastern Front. To turn these reporters into Kremlin mouthpieces, Stalin imposed the most draconian controls �� unbending censorship, no visits to the battlefront, and a ban on contact with ordinary citizens.

The Red Hotel explores this gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel. They enjoyed lavish supplies of caviar and had their choice of young women to employ as translators and share their beds. On the surface, this regime served Stalin his plans to control Eastern Europe as a Sovietised ‘outer empire�� were never reported and the most outrageous Soviet lies went unchallenged.

But beneath the surface, the Metropol was roiling with intrigue. While some of the translators turned journalists into robotic conveyors of Kremlin propaganda, others were secret dissidents who whispered to reporters the reality of Soviet life and were punished with sentences in the Gulag. Using British archives and Soviet sources, the unique role of the women of the Metropol, both as consummate propagandists and secret dissenters, is told for the first time.

At the end of the war when Lenin returned to Red Square, the reporters went home, but the memory of Stalin’s ruthless control of the wartime narrative lived on in the Kremlin. From the weaponization of disinformation to the falsification of history, from the moving of borders to the neutralization of independent states, the story of the Metropol mirrors the struggles of our own modern era.]]> 352 Alan Philps 1639364285 Florence 5
What was indeed surprising was that correspondents who sympathized with the Soviets rather quickly realized that the USSR was no worker's paradise. The same change of loyalties also affected some of the Russian female employees at the Metropol.

Told through diaries and memoirs, this book gives the personal, inside story of what is was like to live through Stalin's reign of terror. Those who associated with foreigners were considered traitors. Scores of innocent people, including those who worked with foreign correspondents at the Metropol were eventually punished by exile to the Siberian gulag or execution. An afterward to the book outlines the similarities of Stalin's modus operandi to that of Vladimir Putin. ]]> 3.59
author: Alan Philps
name: Florence
average rating: 3.59
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/26
date added: 2024/01/26
shelves:
review:
The Metropol is a legendary Moscow hotel seeped in Russian history and tradition. During the second world war after Hitler invaded Russia, European journalists were posted to Moscow in an attempt to ease the uneasy alliance with the Western allies. No true information about the Red Army ever leaked out from the Metropol, home base of journalists and their Russian translators. Not surprisingly, Stalin controlled every word that was released.

What was indeed surprising was that correspondents who sympathized with the Soviets rather quickly realized that the USSR was no worker's paradise. The same change of loyalties also affected some of the Russian female employees at the Metropol.

Told through diaries and memoirs, this book gives the personal, inside story of what is was like to live through Stalin's reign of terror. Those who associated with foreigners were considered traitors. Scores of innocent people, including those who worked with foreign correspondents at the Metropol were eventually punished by exile to the Siberian gulag or execution. An afterward to the book outlines the similarities of Stalin's modus operandi to that of Vladimir Putin.
]]> 62050250
In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.

Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she'd long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in �� where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations �� looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets.

When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens �� less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world.

Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another �� and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society.]]> 256 Nicole Chung 0063031612 Florence 0 to-read 3.98 2023
author: Nicole Chung
name: Florence
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61056742 347 Stuart Woods 0593540077 Florence 3 4.18 2023
author: Stuart Woods
name: Florence
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/20
date added: 2024/01/20
shelves:
review:
At first I thought I had wandered into the wrong genre. The story was short on exposition, had no character development. It was all bare bones plot and sparse dialogue. It was almost like watching stick figures try to kill each other. But I was wrong. Things got more interesting. I ended up reading the book in 24 hours and in practically one enjoyable sitting. I'm glad I didn't give up on this one.
]]> 62673108 From the Academy Award-winning actor and best-selling author: a novel about the making of a star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film . . . and the humble comic books that inspired it. Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, while also capturing the changes in America and American culture since World War II.

Part One of this story takes place in 1947. A troubled soldier, returning from the war, meets his talented five-year-old nephew, leaves an indelible impression, and then disappears for twenty-three years.

Cut to 1970: The nephew, now drawing underground comic books in Oakland, California, reconnects with his uncle and, remembering the comic book he saw when he was five, draws a new version with his uncle as a World War II fighting hero.

Cut to the present day: A commercially successful director discovers the 1970 comic book and decides to turn it into a contemporary superhero movie.

Cue the cast: We meet the film's extremely difficult male star, his wonderful leading lady, the eccentric writer/director, the producer, the gofer production assistant, and everyone else on both sides of the camera.

Bonus material: Interspersed throughout are three comic books that are featured in the story--all created by Tom Hanks himself--including the comic book that becomes the official tie-in to this novel's major motion picture masterpiece.]]> 448 Tom Hanks 052565559X Florence 4 3.64 2023
author: Tom Hanks
name: Florence
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/19
date added: 2024/01/19
shelves:
review:
I loved reading about the nuts and bolts of movie making, even in fictional satirical mode. The characters Tom Hanks creates seem to leap off the page and breathe. And best of all even the most annoying movie star can be fired if he is too full of himself. I look forward to Tom's next book.
]]> 876822 Craig Thomas 0061099082 Florence 1 3.51 1990
author: Craig Thomas
name: Florence
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1990
rating: 1
read at: 2024/01/11
date added: 2024/01/11
shelves:
review:
This book was written as a thriller, full of action. Unfortunately, the thrill ran out for me after roughly half of its 460 pages. Even the action seem endlessly repetitive. A lone good guy was always escaping after being surrounded by a group of bad guys intent on killing him. There were an inordinate number of characters to keep track of and more were constantly being added. None of them fired up my imagination. The ending hints of a sequel which I won't be reading.
]]> 17318671
They are reviled. For centuries the Roma have wandered Europe; during the Holocaust half a million were killed. After World War II and during the Troubles, a wave of Irish Travellers moved to England to make a better, safer life. They found places to settle down �� but then, as Occupy was taking over Wall Street and London, the vocal Dale Farm community in Essex was evicted from their land. Many did not leave quietly; they put up a legal and at times physical fight.

Award-winning journalist Katharine Quarmby takes us into the heat of the battle, following the Sheridan, McCarthy, Burton and Townsley families before and after the eviction, from Dale Farm to Meriden and other trouble spots. Based on exclusive access over the course of seven years and rich historical research, No Place to Call Home is a stunning narrative of long-sought justice.]]> 352 Katharine Quarmby 1851689494 Florence 3 3.45 2013
author: Katharine Quarmby
name: Florence
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/04
date added: 2024/01/04
shelves:
review:
This book centers around the forced eviction of a Gypsy community in England. The settled neighbors, the local government, and the police were all united to uproot this meager settlement of poor people. Gypsies in England live such a precarious existence. Many of them would like to settle in a permanent home so their lives can be improved. They would like to educate their children to give them a shot at a better life. It's a book that opened my eyes to an injustice. Racial and cultural hatred toward fellow human beings never seems to diminish, whatever the country.
]]> 163921
Full Tilt was only the first in of Murphy's accounts of her travel adventures, and provides an exciting introduction to this remarkable woman..]]> 256 Dervla Murphy 0879512482 Florence 3

]]> 4.05 1965
author: Dervla Murphy
name: Florence
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1965
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/28
date added: 2023/12/28
shelves:
review:
Dervla Murphy is courageous. She set out from Ireland to bicycle across Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and through the Himalaya. She encountered dangerous weather, injury, near starvation. But she also had the adventure of a lifetime. The trip itself was full of suspense and wonder. This book, written from a daily journal was not quite as enthralling. I guess you just had to be there.



]]> 176206 226 Gary J. Katzenstein 0133452328 Florence 2 3.36 1989
author: Gary J. Katzenstein
name: Florence
average rating: 3.36
book published: 1989
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/23
date added: 2023/12/23
shelves:
review:
Mr. Katzenstein harshly criticizes the rigid social culture of Sony, the Tokyo-based corporation where he is employed as a trainee in an international exchange program. Rather than finding fault with his coworkers and their lockstep conformity, he could have remembered his guest status and been less judgmental. Surely American corporate workers experience similar limits of free expression as the workers at Sony. At best, a cultural exchange like this should be fueled by a desire to understand a foreign culture rather than to challenge and disrupt it recklessly.
]]> 419324
Here is a fascinating exploration of both the seething big water and perilous terrain of the legendary Shangri-la, and the men who dared challenge the furious rapids that raced through this 140-mile-long canyon. The Last River invites us to view the Himalayas from a totally new perspective -- on a historic river so remote that only the most hardy and romantic souls attempt to unlock its mysteries.]]> 304 Todd Balf 060980801X Florence 3 3.55 2000
author: Todd Balf
name: Florence
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/17
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves:
review:
I won't ever understand what drives a man to leave his work, his home, his family and try to conquer a raging river in the Himalaya. It's beyond me.
]]> 59366154
Following his explosive New York Times bestseller Red Notice, Bill Browder returns with another gripping thriller chronicling how he became Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy by exposing Putin’s campaign to steal and launder hundreds of billions of dollars and kill anyone who stands in his way.

When Bill Browder’s young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail, Browder made it his life’s mission to go after his killers and make sure they faced justice. The first step of that mission was to uncover who was behind the $230 million tax refund scheme that Magnitsky was killed over. As Browder and his team tracked the money as it flowed out of Russia through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas, they were shocked to discover that Vladimir Putin himself was a beneficiary of the crime.

As law enforcement agencies began freezing the money, Putin retaliated. He and his cronies set up honey traps, hired process servers to chase Browder through cities, murdered more of his Russian allies, and enlisted some of the top lawyers and politicians in America to bring him down. Putin will stop at nothing to protect his money. As Freezing Order reveals, it was Browder’s campaign to expose Putin’s corruption that prompted Russia’s intervention in the 2016 US presidential election.

At once a financial caper, an international adventure, and a passionate plea for justice , Freezing Order is a stirring morality tale about how one man can take on one of the most ruthless villains in the world—and win.]]> 336 Bill Browder 1982153288 Florence 5 Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian attorney who was closely associated with Browder, paid with his life for exposing the same crime and Browder has devoted portions of his own life to honor his friend's sacrifice. Yes, the Russians routinely include assassination in their political operations. Read this book and the daily newspaper if you have doubts.]]> 4.26 2022
author: Bill Browder
name: Florence
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/12
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves:
review:
Bill Browder exposes the corruption in post communist Russia. It's a dangerous game, trying to expose Russians in a criminal enterprise closely intertwined with state business. Browder tries to follow the money and figure out who reaped the benefits of a $230 million dollar rip off of state funds.
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian attorney who was closely associated with Browder, paid with his life for exposing the same crime and Browder has devoted portions of his own life to honor his friend's sacrifice. Yes, the Russians routinely include assassination in their political operations. Read this book and the daily newspaper if you have doubts.
]]> 51931
The basis of an upcoming motion picture, Jungle is the story of friendship and the teachings of nature, and a terrifying true account that you won’t be able to put down.]]> 241 Yossi Ghinsberg 0977171906 Florence 2 Later in the story after the group separated and encountered life threatening conditions my sympathy for them was tempered by their earlier behavior.
I'm glad this is a story of survival, but to me, it is deeply flawed by insensitivity to the suffering of other creatures.]]> 3.94 1985
author: Yossi Ghinsberg
name: Florence
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1985
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/07
date added: 2023/12/07
shelves:
review:
When I first read of these young men who would venture into the Bolivian jungle I thought they had a healthy respect for its inhabitants both animal and human. To my disgust, they entered the rainforest like a gang of macho men armed with shotguns and eager to kill every animal they laid eyes on. The cruelty to animals was painful to read. I had to skip sections of the text.
Later in the story after the group separated and encountered life threatening conditions my sympathy for them was tempered by their earlier behavior.
I'm glad this is a story of survival, but to me, it is deeply flawed by insensitivity to the suffering of other creatures.
]]> 13538342 The electrifying story of Abraham Lincoln's rise to greatness during the most perilous year in our nation's history

As 1862 dawned, the American republic was at death's door. The federal government appeared overwhelmed, the U.S. Treasury was broke, and the Union's top general was gravely ill. The Confederacy--with its booming economy, expert military leadership, and commanding position on the battlefield--had a clear view to victory. To a remarkable extent, the survival of the country depended on the judgment, cunning, and resilience of the unschooled frontier lawyer who had recently been elected president.

Twelve months later, the Civil War had become a cataclysm but the tide had turned. The Union generals who would win the war had at last emerged, and the Confederate Army had suffered the key losses that would lead to its doom. The blueprint of modern America--an expanding colossus of industrial and financial might--had been indelibly inked. And the man who brought the nation through its darkest hour, Abraham Lincoln, had been forged into a singular leader.

In Rise to Greatness, acclaimed author David Von Drehle has created both a deeply human portrait of America's greatest president and a rich, dramatic narrative about our most fateful year.]]> 480 David von Drehle 080507970X Florence 0 to-read, did-not-finish 4.28 2012
author: David von Drehle
name: Florence
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read, did-not-finish
review:

]]> 62668811
Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive, and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway.

Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colorful lives--sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent--Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all: caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank, in typical Bascombe fashion, faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days.

In this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on displays the prose, wit, and intelligence that make him one of our most acclaimed living writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world.]]> 352 Richard Ford 0061692085 Florence 2 3.88 2023
author: Richard Ford
name: Florence
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/05
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves:
review:
I read this book of a septogenerian man in a season of crisis while I was in a health crisis of my own. I'm sorry to say that I found it relentlessly depressing in spite of many humorous episodes. If you have liked other works by this author, please disregard my opinion and decide for yourself whether or not you value this book
]]> 43565369 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ��97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting “lost boys�� to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart―who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient―into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.]]> 282 Ben Lerner 0374277788 Florence 1 did-not-finish, to-read 3.51 2019
author: Ben Lerner
name: Florence
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2019
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves: did-not-finish, to-read
review:
I was not enjoying this book and I stopped reading.
]]>