Perveen Mistry lives in Bombay, India in the 1920s. She is the city’s first lawyer, but sexist, and racist hierarchies prevent her from entering a courtroom. She must practice law for her father from their office at home. One advantage is as a member of the Parsi community, and a woman, she has access to a Muslim family of three wives, and their children after their husband dies.  Perveen visits Omar Farid’s wives to iron out the will only to discover that the sole male protector of the household–he lives on the male side of the divided house–tells her that the household money is being donated to a school for boys. As the mystery of the bizarre financial arrangements are investigated, additional financial and social abnormalities emerge allowing us, as readers, to learn more about the lives of sheltered women, the culture of Indian Parsis (descendents of Persians), and British-Indian relations in the decades leading up to Indian independence. 

Fifth in the series of investigations by the Thursday Murder Club, a group of four delightfully quirky senior citizens who investigate murders for funsies. This case revolves around crypto-currency and deep storage of computer files–both concepts elude the seniors–but criminal activity is not the reason to read Osman’s books. Rather, the gratification comes in the gentle and quite humorous interactions of the four retirees as they squabble with one another, get into rows with their adult children, and wish they could chase down criminals, except their joints are too creaky.

In this fourth novel by Nobel Prize recipient Abdulrazak Gurnah, the author tells a coming of age story of Yusuf. It is in the first decade of the twentieth century in Zanzibar, east Africa and Yusuf is given up by his parents to repay a debt owed to an Arab merchant named Aziz . Simultaneously, Gurnah offers the equivalent of a crystal clear black and white photograph I associate with the era. 

In Gurna’s picture of east Africa, I can hear the maddening drone of mosquitos swarming over a sleeping night on a sultry night. I feel myself sitting amongst a group of story-telling men at twilight in the days before electricity and electronics. And I am struck by the cultural diversity of Africa as Arab traders bring caravans of goods to Africa’s interiors. Muslims meet animists and ridicule one another, but trade nonetheless. Indians dominate coastal commerce. Hovering just outside the central action, British and German colonists are lining up to extract Africa’s human and natural resources. As we watch Yusuf grow from a small shop boy into a young man it is a pleasure to observe a de-Europeanized vision of Africa’s melange of cultures.

Not long after the start of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, while Douglas MacArthur was Supreme Commander over a conquered Japanese nation, defeated Japanese soldiers and politicians were tried for war crimes. On one side of the ledger, Japanese soldiers committed heinous atrocities on prisoners of war and civilians, contravening so-called rules of war. What makes this book so fascinating, however, is how effectively it raises uncomfortable truths about the victorious allies.

Foremost, is that America had used atomic bombs on the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Surely, also a war crime. Japan was accused of starting a war of aggression, a so-called crime introduced after the end of World War II calling into question the legality of trying individuals for crimes not yet invented. 

The war of aggression was defined as Japan’s imperial take-over of China. Of the 11 nations with judges at the trial, most were guilty of gross imperialism in the nations surrounding Japan, which argued it was fighting in self-defense. The UK held Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma, and India. The Dutch controlled Indonesia. France occupied Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The U.S. occupied the Philippines, Guam, and Samoa. The Russians were advancing on eastern Europe, Mongolia, and the Stans. All of them operated in China. Moreover, all of the western nations were working to maintain their empires while the trial was going on. 

Ultimately, Judgement at Tokyo asks if war crimes tribunals are anything more than vengeance or have any more deterrent impact on war than the death penalty has on domestic crimes. Had Japan won, would America’s racist internment of American citizens of Japanese descent (and not citizens of German and Italian ancestry) or the behavior of American soldiers have withstood the rigors of an inverted trial before Japanese judges?

Full Episode can be found here.

Genghis Khan gets a bad rap. His negatives have been mostly related by Medieval Europeans who were about as close-minded and backward as any society in history. In contrast to the stories Europeans told of Mongol barbarians–Europeans didn’t travel much except to the Middle East for the purpose of slaughtering Jews and Muslims–Khan’s Mongols were exceptionally progressive. 

Genghis Khan was open to all religions being practiced under his rule, which by the way extended from the Pacific Ocean in the east to Europe in the west. Consider a nation unified by a comparative handful of horsemen that includes China, Russia, central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. That takes a lot more than brutality to pull off. 

Genghis Kahn, and many of his heirs, ruled with political shrewdness, military accuracy (the Mongols often fought much, much larger armies), and considerable benevolence. Khan treated his enemies with respect; if they surrendered, they were welcomed into the empire. He abolished torture. He shared the spoils of war equally, preventing both hoarding and looting. He established communications, trade, technological transfers, and a single financial system from one end of the empire to the other. He promoted military and political leaders on the basis of merit, rather than familial relationships.

He, and his fellow Mongols, worshipped The Eternal Blue Sky, a universal spirit that encompassed all life and nature. I can say after having been to the steppes of Central Asia, Mongol beliefs make a lot of sense.

James Lee Burke is a multiple award winning mystery writer and a nominee for a Pulitzer and one of the finest writers I read. Heaven’s Prisoners is the second in the series in which, former beat cop, Dave Robicheaux is entangled in a crime investigation in the bayous of southern Louisiana. Robicheaux is further ensnared by nightmares from his days in Vietnam killing undeserving civilians, a bottomless desire to return to abusing alcohol, and a blue-collar, Cajun, and deeply ingrained commitment to justice. 

While motoring his fishing skiff with his new wife in the Gulf of Mexico a small plane flies over, bursts into flames, and crashes into the water. The cockpit contains a Central American refugee, her five-year-old daughter, and a pair of drug smugglers (or worse). The US Drug Enforcement Agency deletes the announcement of the death of one of the smugglers suggesting he is an undercover agent supporting dictators whose repression is driving hordes of refugees to sneak into the United States. (Has anything changed since the book’s publication in 1988?)

Within the first several chapters wind, waves, and sunlight on the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi’s inlets are described in fifty different shades without repetition. That attention to the fallen leaves from pecan trees in the front yard, the crunch of oyster shells in the parking lot at a Cajun fish shack, and Robicheaux’s moods provide a sense of place unparalleled by even the best travel memoirs. Mark Hammer’s delivers a gritty southern drawl perfect for the audiobook.

Ali Shingri is serving in Pakistan’s army just before the unexplained plane crash of Dictator Zia Al-Huq in 1988. Shingri’s father committed forced suicide at the hands of Al-Huq’s goons and Shingri is intent on murdering the dictator as revenge, only he has to wait on line behind other would-be assassins in a farce of magnificent proportions and exceptional skill. 

Pakistan’s army and their supporters in the CIA are lampooned as a dope-smoking American agent trains Shingri, his poetry-obsessed best friend, and their peers to master a silent bayonet spectacle. Noses get broken and Zia Al-Huq doesn’t get stabbed. The paranoid, hyper-religious dictator, however, is banned from his wife’s bed when she realizes her husband is enamored by the cleavage of an American journalist sent to interview him. The ambitious head of the secret police–also anxious to kill the dictator–cannot decide what to wear on the day the plane is set to disappear. 
A Case of Exploding Mangoes demonstrates the power, and difficulty, of finding the right balance between mockery and excess. Right now, we could use that kind of book for our dictator.

Valerie, a 42-year-old nurse, burnt out by round-the-clock care for dying Covid patients during the height of the epidemic, decides to hike the Appalachian Trail. Two hundred miles from her destination in Maine, she disappears. Bev Miller, a Lieutenant in the Fish and Wildlife service is in charge of search and rescue operations. Far away, at a computer in Connecticut, a 76-year-old forager living in a wheelchair in a retirement home, sits at her computer and ponders the lost Valerie, who is now regionally important news. 

The hunt for Valerie is gripping. Our hearts palpitate as the story’s perspective switches among the three women–all of whom are Lake Woebegone strong; the men not-so-much–and we desperately hope that Bev and her crew can locate the lost woman before it is too late and Maine’s north woods swallow her up. After the story wraps, not a lot sticks, except perhaps a desire to get outside and do some hiking.

Overrated, repetitive, inconsistent, and terribly out of date just 18 months after publication. Don’t get me wrong. I think Ezra Klein is one of the great liberal thinkers of our time. His book with Thompson begins with a reasonable principle: government assistance–to anyone, except maybe the military–from food stamp recipients to scientists and contractors must conform to so many rules and such a mountain of paperwork that progress has become stiflingly slow. Try to build a windfarm, high-speed rail, or affordable housing, so the argument goes, and requirements to assure that minorities have been given a fair chance in the allocation process, environmental regulations have been carefully scrutinized, and that regular reports are filed and it might be 7-10 years before a developer has hired enough people to prepare the documents, get them read, and weathered all of the court cases. Point taken. In all of that time, no turbines are constructed, no rails are laid, and homelessness increases. However…

For readers willing to wade through arguments that could be made in two pages, and like the government bureaucracies Thompson and Klein criticize, take scores of pages to whip to death, many of their arguments disintegrate under their own weight. Take a chapter lamenting the failure of government to invest in risky scientific research. The pair complain that too much money is going to incremental advances in scientific research. Huge breakthroughs are being missed, they insist. Then, in the next chapter they point out that there are no “Eureka” moments in science, tech, or engineering. Rather, new solutions require years and years of tinkering, trial, and error. Which is it guys? Send money to people who think that autism can be cured with nutrition or stick to the painstakingly slow approach that science has always depended upon.

Their solution to America’s most pressing problems–theclimate crisis, housing shortage, clean energy solutions–are a government that is lean and nimble and willing to cut through the litigious standards established by well-meaning liberals. Way too much time and money, they say, is being spent in courts and on lawyers trying to STOP projects in the name of protecting the environment and ensuring fair play for underserved communities. It is time to make things happen like freeing up solar panel installations and interstate gridlines to transport energy in less than the dozens of years it now takes to even consider breaking ground. Yet, in one small statistic they let slide without scrutiny, they suggest the acreage of solar panels needed would cover an area equal to about 10 states. That was before AI data centers drastically increased energy demand in the U.S. Really want to turn over that much agricultural land and forest without environmental impact assessments?

In any case, just as they published, they got what exactly what they wished for: DOGE and a dictator who as fast as he can is abolishing Departments of Education, Health, Environment, and Justice, cutting grants for science, health, clean energy, and underrepresented minorities in any discipline. He is fast-tracking money for fossil fuels and wars that increase military spending without oversight. If it weren’t for litigation and slowing the government down, the environment, housing, health and so forth would be even worse off.