• The Ground Breaking by Scott Ellsworth *** (of 4)

    Scott Ellsworth answers a question I’ve pondered ever since I first learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. How come I had never heard of it before? Beginning the day after the flames died out, white Tulsans did everything they could to bury the evidence. Police gathered up photographs and hid them. Government investigations and after-action reports from the National Guard vanished. Bodies of the dead were buried in unmarked mass graves. Newspaper accounts were cut and taken out of library archives. By tacit agreement, white Tulsans refused to discuss it. Black survivors, like Holocaust survivors after them, were too traumatized to tell their children.

    Before the 9/11 attacks, the Tulsa race massacre of African Americans by a vigilante white mob was the worst attack on Americans in the country’s history (only if you overlook the decimation of Native American populations.)

    Ellsworth, is a white, very professional historian, opens the book with an impartial account of events based on credible evidence. His description is in contrast to white apologists who insist that deaths were minimal and roughly equal between Blacks and whites. Angry African Americans suggest that the invasion of the Greenwood District of Tusla was a pre-meditated land grab. Ellsworth lays out what can be said with certainty based on surviving testimonies and documents.

    The events were perpetrated by a riled up mob that ran out of control. Think about January 6 and the U.S. Capitol and shudder.

    Much of the book is dedicated to Ellsworth’s tireless search for mass graves of murdered African Americans purportedly dumped right after the riot. For more than two decades, Ellsworth scoured stories and archives, cajoled governments, and sought assistance from archaeologists to help him search and eventually dig through potential locations. Ellsworth is a strong proponent of the idea of paying reparations to the offspring of families whose lives and livelihoods were snuffed out by an unapologetic white Tulsa.

    His contribution was to find the bodies of some of those who had been disappeared so their remains could be returned and reburied with dignity. His other contribution was to write this book.

    The first person was identified on July 12, 2024, following the exhumation of African Americans from a mass grave in Tulsa, Oklahoma. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/tulsa-massacre-oklahoma-mass-grave-cl-daniel-rcna161599

  • Surprise, Kill, Vanish by Annie Jacobsen *** (of 4)

    Not as groundbreaking as her first book, Area 51, Surprise, Kill, Vanish is a highlight reel of the CIA’s known exploits and failures. Beginning with its birth following the dismemberment of the OSS, the CIA’s job has been to proceed when the President’s first two foreign policy options prove ineffective: diplomacy and war. Working clandestinely, and with the goal of preserving “plausible deniability” for the President, the agency is tasked with manipulating foreign governments and leaders. Manipulating serving as one of a variety of codes that include assassination.

    Jacobsen pokes at these questions with stories of covert CIA actions in Vietnam, Central America, the Middle East, Cuba, and Afghanistan. She does not do much with interventions in Africa and the ongoing War on Terror is probably still more classified than available.

    Jacobsen raises important philosophical questions about the rectitude of proper warfare. Is it acceptable to kill a Taliban warlord with a cruise missile, but not a knife to the throat? Is a drone strike that kills a future terrorist an act of prevention or an act of murder? In a world of small-state and non-state actors who do not hesitate to assassinate enemies with sneak attacks (heck, even Putin’s secret services attack its enemies of the state while they reside in foreign countries), is it inappropriate for Americans to play the same game?

  • Goodnight Irene, by Luis Alberto Urrea **** (of 4)

    Based on accounts from the author’s mother, Luis Alberto Urrea has created a fictional account of two young women who volunteer for the Red Cross in WW II. They are assigned to trucks outfitted to make donuts and sent off to the war. The two women serve GIs a taste of home: fresh donuts, hot coffee, and some healthy flirting with young female servers. As one commander says about his soldiers fighting Nazis from the beaches of Normandy toward Germany, “My soldiers know who they are fighting against, but the Donut Dollies (“STOP calling me, Dolly!” is recurring refrain) is reminder of what they are fighting for.”

    The idea of serving fresh donuts to raise the morale of troops, in hindsight, feels as quaint as a Bob Hope variety show. Urrea has set himself a difficult task of justifying another book about World War II, this one about donuts. He succeeds marvelously by painting a rich picture of Irene Woodward, a scion of New York socialites, and Dorothy Dunford, a strapping midwestern farm girl, as they descend into the dangers of wartime duties. Irene and Dorothy ask themselves repeatedly, “Is serving donuts really helping to win the war? What are we doing here?” It all matters. Keeping up morale is as important as supplying ammunition or shipping the right number of warm socks in the right sizes to soldiers on the front lines.

  • Burn Book by Kara Swisher ** (of 4)

    You can take my review with a grain of salt: everyone else loves this book. Swisher has been reporting on advances in technology since the first personal computers hit the market. She has spent considerable time with Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk. She predicted that everything, everywhere, would be digitized, and then monetized. Burn Book is a history of the PC, iPod, iPad, iPhone, Google, and so on. She also reminds us of all the epic failures. Anyone recall My Space? Netscape? Vonage? Are Snapchat and Twitter going to be around a lot longer?

    The point of her book seems to be to make sure that readers are fully aware that all the tech bros are awkward, juvenile, and male. She also wants us to know that she is, and always has been, smarter than all of them. The one distinction seems to be that she knows she is arrogant and condescending, unlike most of her subjects. It is a little bit fun to relive the ups and downs of tech throughout our lifetime, but Swisher doesn’t offer any insight. So who cares if she tells us how smart she is and how socially inept the bros are?

  • Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen *** (of 4)

    This is Annie Jacobsen’s first book in a series of investigative journalism pieces into top-secret practices of the U.S. government. Using the Freedom of Information Act, access to unclassified documents, and interviews with old-timers willing to talk on the record, Jacobsen does her best to describe goings-on at Area 51. Located in the Nevada desert, its existence is not acknowledged by the government nor is it located on maps. It is adjacent to Nevada’s nuclear testing sites, but entrance by land or air is only permitted to those with top level security clearances.

    According to Jacobsen, Area 51 was created soon after the Manhattan Project at the end of WW II. It has been used by the CIA, the Air Force, and other military operations. Nuclear weapons have been developed and tested. Spy aircraft like the U-2, Stealth airplanes that could avoid radar, drones, and planes capable of flying faster than Mach 3 were part of Cold War competition between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. They were operational for decades before the public came to know of them and have been in use in conflict zones around the world. Radiation tests were probably performed on human subjects without their consent to determine the impact of nuclear fallout and the use of dirty bombs.

    Jacobsen, strongly implies, that far more nefarious activities have been undertaken–actions so uncomfortable that they are protected against Freedom of Information inquiries. Some secret actions were so clandestine they were kept from Presidents. Jacobsen makes you wonder about the power of democracies to administer their militaries. She also makes you ponder what secret tests are underway today, tests we won’t know about for decades.

  • Essex Dogs by Dan Jones **** (of 4)

    In July of 1346, King Edward crossed the English Channel to reclaim territory taken by his independently-minded cousin, King Phillipe. Thousands of troops land on the beaches of Normandy, but we follow 10 peasants who fight together and call themselves the Essex Dogs. They have made their livings as soldiers-for-hire during summer fighting season and have gotten good at their craft. They are a Band of Brothers.

    The ten men are real people. The de facto leader of the Dogs, Loveday FitzTalbot, is questioning whether he still has the drive to kill and pillage indiscriminately. After many seasons in the field, his belly is bigger than it is used to be, running uphill winds him, and he recognizes the villagers he is terrorizing as being not unlike himself. It is hard to swing an axe effectively when your mind is questioning your motives. Their youngest recruit, Romford, overcomes hazing because what he has left behind is worse than becoming a warrior. He also has an appetite for drugs and during the heat of battle disappears to ransack apothecaries. There are a pair of expert archers from Wales who speak no English, but can shoot an arrow through the peak of your hat from a galloping horse, and a former priest, called Father, who has become a bloodthirsty madman.

    Then there are the film-clear descriptions of life on the march. Soldiers wait in long lines in the French sun while engineers repair river crossings destroyed by retreating Frenchmen. Insects swarm them. They have not washed in weeks. The food is wretched. Their leather shoes have holes. Water is often unpalatable. They get the runs. Small cuts get infected. They have been promised pay only if they complete the campaign. And they can all see that not only are knights and lords sleeping on soft beds in tents attended to by servants and squires, but that other soldiers appear to be receiving special treatment. There is a lot of well-earned grumbling.

    If you have a chance, listen to the audiobook. Not only does the reader keep all the accents straight, but he sings the abusive curses of captains handing out orders with alacrity and minces the words of King Edward’s teenage brat of a son with comedic perfection.

  • Murder in Old Bombay by Nev March *** (of 4)

    It is 1892. India is a British colony and Indians, at least upper class Indians, aspire to move up the British hierarchy. Two young women in the wealthy Framji family fall to their deaths from the university clock tower. The official ruling is suicide, but Captain Jim Agnihotri, recovering from a battle injuries suffered as a Dragoon fighting in Afghanistan cannot abide the ruling. He suspects murder.Captain Jim is hired by the Framji family to investigate.

    Captain Jim provides us with an insider’s view of British colonization, Indian opposition to British rule, and Victorian longing (think incessant pining for Lady Diana Framji, daughter of the patriarch, who is devilishly alluring, but above his station in life). Murder in Old Bombay burrows into the trains, villages, markets, and homes of turn-of-the-century India making the book a worthwhile adventure.

  • The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto *** (of 4)

    Shorto’s hypothesis is concise and convincing. His book is long and detailed. As the ages of Enlightenment and Exploration dawned on Europe, Holland was the most wide open and accepting of all the European powers in the 1500s. It was home to the most progressive artists, scientists, and philosophers. It welcomed traders from around the globe and in sharp contrast to its European competitors–Spain and Great Britain–it opened its doors to foreigners. Spain tossed out Jews and Muslims, many of whom found safety in the Netherlands. England was fighting wars over religion leaving even fundamentalist Christians who felt England was not religious enough to find sanctuary in Leiden, Holland.

    As the oceanic powers sent “explorers” to conquer territories around the world, Holland settled New Amsterdam. Its central holdings were in Manhattan and up the Hudson River to present day Albany. Henry Hudson, a Britisher, who also claimed Hudson’s Bay and surrounding territory in Canada, was actually hired by the Dutch to be their explorer.

    Those religious fundamentalists from Great Britain left Leiden because they found Holland to be too liberal for their tastes. They became the Puritan settlers of New England. To this day, suggests Shorto, New York City, formerly New Amsterdam, has maintained its Dutch character: accepting, entrepreneurial, and a haven for all immigrants and faiths.

    Among the fine points raised by Shorto’s research is his careful assessment of relations between Dutch settlers and Native Americans. By his accounting the Indians were genetically speaking, 99.99% identical to their European counterparts. Which is to say they were smart, pleasant, calculating, jealous, envious, devious, intellectual, mechanical, curious, political, and so on. The story of the Dutch selling Manhattan to Indians for $24 proves not only laughably false, but also a fabrication contrived by English historians, who as victors in the New World, got to write the continent’s history.

  • Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell *** (of 4)

    The story’s most famous character, William Shakespeare, is never mentioned by name. History tells us that Hamnet, the son of William and Agnes (Anne Hatheway) Shakespeare, died at age 11, but little more is known. O’Farrell brings to life, and death, the 1500s in rural England. The plague comes and goes. Neighbors squabble. Relatives promote themselves and (some of) their brethren, while petty jealousies fester. For the sheer strength of O’Farrell’s characterizations, her book is Shakespearean.

    But the added benefit is the authority with which she describes muddy lanes between thatched roof homes, household gardens, glove-making shops, apothecaries, market stalls, and, on the edge of town, cow fields. When illness befalls Hamnet, medical wisdom of the era recognized the symptoms and likely deadliness of Bubonic plague, but knew little of its transmission or treatments. Hamnet’s mother is broken by her son’s illness and ensuing death. William Shakespeare, speculates O’Farrell, was, too. His play, Hamlet, is a tribute to his lost son.

  • Rough Crossings by Simon Schama *** (of 4)

    How did we not know this?

    In the 1760s, a court case in England suggested that any person of African descent living in Great Britain was a free man. Enslaved Africans in America knew about the court ruling. Moreover, they were well aware that Jefferson’s paragraph in the Declaration of Independence had been deleted. Jefferson, though a slave-owner himself, recognized that the hypocrisy of a declaration calling for freedom, equality, and the removal of the tyranny by unjust overseers could not be squared with the maintenance of American slavery. The Declaration of Independence would not be ratified by southern states so long as Jefferson’s paragraph endured and the issue of slavery was postponed until a later date.

    Nonetheless, enslaved Blacks reasoned that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. By the thousands, African Americans fled to British lines, and many Blacks fought against Americans. Perhaps as many as one-fourth of all enslaved Africans escaped plantations, only to find they had backed the losing side.

    After the war, as southerners sought to reclaim their lost “property,” Blacks did their utmost to make their way to Great Britain. Three thousand Blacks, for example, were in New York City at war’s end, under the protection of British troops.

    Thousands of Blacks moved to Nova Scotia, because it was part of Great Britain. (Check out the link, Our History-Black Migration in Nova Scotia.) They were promised land, but promises were broken. In 1792, 1,192 men, women, and children sailed out of Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone to start a free Black nation on the African shores from which many families had begun their journey. In one poignant early election in Sierra Leone, community representatives were voted on by men and women of the newfound village. Which means the first women in history to ever vote were formerly enslaved Africans.