• The Pigeon Tunnel by John LeCarre *** (of 4)

    November 23, 2023

    Nearing the end of a long and terrifically prodigious career as a writer, Le Carre assembled here the true events that undergird his novels. He revels in his encounters with world leaders and events of the 20th century. He meets Yasser Arafat amidst heavily armed bodyguards, dines with Soviet exile Andrei Sakharov, skis with the actor Alec Guinness, takes a field trip to meet African warlords, hob knobs with KGB intelligence officials, tours the killing fields of Cambodia, interviews jailed terrorists, kvetches at length about his low-life father, and generally downplays his early days as a spy for British intelligence as being insignificant.

    Every one of his stories is compelling, and quite often humorous, for their air of authenticity and authority. Each vignette is assembled with the care and precision of a master novelist. Yet, because Le Carre has passed his entire life as a fabulist — first as a spy and then as a novelist — lingering above each tale is a question of whether every event is reconstructed with full honesty. Near the end of the book, Le Carre hints that he is not a totally trustworthy storyteller, and a posthumously published biography claims that Le Carre used his skills as a liar and deceiver to philander with multiple mistresses. But, you know what? It doesn’t matter: The Pigeon Tunnel is a great read. The audiobook is read by the author, who is a master of impersonations, bringing his counterparts to life as he meets them one by one.

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  • Homegrown by Jeffrey Toobin ** (of 4)

    October 27, 2023

    Toobin can be a captivating writer; he is one of the greats at uncovering the backstories of a variety of criminals and noteworthy trials: OJ Simpson, Patty Hearst, Donald Trump, the Gore vs. Bush election, Bill Clinton, and the make-up of the Supreme Court.

    Which is why it is surprising that he missed the mark with this book. No question that Timothy McVeigh was one of America’s most successful and by Toobin’s accounting, one of its first domestic terrorists. On April 19, 1995 he drove a truck bomb to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and blew it up, killing 168 people including 19 children in the building’s daycare facility.

    He was motivated by rightwing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and the conspiracy theories that circulated amongst politicians. Shock jocks and their supporters pedaled lies about government overreach and suggested in rather stark terms that only patriots and other defenders of the second amendment could save the nation. Toobin draws a direct and clear line from McVeigh to the treasonous revolutionaries that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Men and women who attacked the Capitol were also spurred forward by a new generation of right-wing conspiracists and a new generation of communication, social media, but recycled the same dogmas that led to McVeigh.

    It is an important arrow pointing at how dangerously thin the line is between election deniers, second amendment fanatics, Newtown skeptics (Alex Jones acolytes) and their proclivity toward violence.

    But Toobin makes two mistakes. The first is subtle. He implies that McVeigh was the first right-winger of his ilk, overlooking McCarthyism, Silver Shirts, American Nazis, the KKK, and White Supremacists some of whom have been around since colonists considered Native Americans subhumans. The line leading to January 6 is twisty, but continuous, and a lot longer than Toobin is willing to admit. In a single toss away line he points to the Tulsa Race massacre of 1921 as having killed as many as died in Oklahoma.

    The first half of the book is a thorough biography of Timothy McVeigh from birth to bombing with thorough detailing of the years, months, days, and minutes leading up to the bombing. Then, because he cannot resist describing courtroom proceedings, Toobin repeats everything we have already learned as it was presented by prosecuting and defending attorneys. One recounting, or half the book, would have been enough.

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  • Gettysburg: The Last Invasion by Allen Guelzo *** (of 4)

    October 20, 2023

    Tens of thousands of books have been written about the Civil War, and thousands have covered one of the most significant battles of the conflict: the invasion of Gettysburg by General Lee and his confederate rebels and its defense by the Army of the Potomac. I read this book in preparation for an insider’s tour of the battlefield I was given by Dr. Carol Reardon.

    Guelzo’s take is to zoom in on the experience of less well-known officers beneath the famous Generals Lee and Meade and then to zoom in further to the experience of individual soldiers.

    General Lee’s objective was to invade the north and by so doing create enough carnage and dissent among anti-war Northeners that he could draw them to the negotiating table. Lee’s counterpart, General McClellan of the Army of the Potomac, was widely popular among soldiers and politicians, but on a field of battle so cautious that he avoided every opportunity to fight. Just three days before the face-to-face meeting at a crossroads in Pennsylvania, following McClellan’s dismissal, George Meade was appointed General of the American army.

    The three days of battle in the heat of July turned on a hundred small calculations, luck, ineptitude, and fortunate timing. The outcome was so closely contested that a single successful artillery barrage or an attack begun five minutes earlier or later could have altered the outcome.

    On the battlefield, Guelzo makes us feel the challenge of moving roughly a hundred thousand men on each side across scores of miles of countryside to take up position. Then he explains what a soldier had to endure, marching day and night without rest, proper nutrition, or kit before being dumped directly into battle. Guelzo also explains that guns were far from accurate and that compensation for an inability to aim accurately or see an enemy through a dense fog of gunsmoke was to fire a hailstorm of bullets. Trees were stripped of leaves and branches. Artillery blasted away. Men were torn to shreds in an age before the discovery of germs or antiseptics; horses were broken and discarded like so many tanks.

    Reading between the lines, the political adeptness of Lincoln is exceptional in holding together his coalition. The primary goal of the northern states was to preserve the union, not necessarily abolish slavery. Furthermore, many Americans in the north objected far more to Lincoln’s policies of warfare, were opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation, and were more interested in continuing their economic partnerships with southern producers (read slave owners) than in paying taxes to fund a war.

    Unfortunately, Guelzo clearly does not like General Meade and fails to give him credit for expertly deploying his forces to fend off General Lee’s attack.

    Above, the field across which Pickett led the famous last charge of the rebellious south at Gettysburg.

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  • Properties of Thirst by Marianne Wiggins *** (of 4)

    September 19, 2023

    An ambitious book that centers the Owen’s Valley in California, the valley’s desertification following rerouting all of the valley’s water to Los Angeles, and the placement of the Japanese internment camp, Manzanar, in the midst of the dusty, isolated desert. A lone holdout rancher, Rocky Rhodes, refuses to cooperate with the water boys from LA. He is joined by his twin sister, Casswell, his wife (who is already dead by the time the book opens), and his two children: Sunny and Stryker. (Get it: Rocky Roads, Sunny Roads?). The Rhodes’s come from old waspy money back east.

    Schiff, a nebish of a Jew, with a big conscience, from Chicago is charged with building a camp — really a ghetto — for 10,000 American citizens forced to abandon their jobs and homes with nothing more than what they are wearing and could carry in their hands. Sunny and Schiff have eyes for one another, Sunny is an indomitable chef in the middle of nowhere, Nature (with a capital N) in the desert and in the nearby Sierras is a character in its own right, and Japanese prisoners of war stagger through the indignities of living behind barbed wire.

    Wiggins is a master story teller and a wizard with words, but may have taken on too many themes to do sufficient justice to all of them in one book.

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  • Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule *** (of 4)

    August 23, 2023

    The author, Ty Seidule, is a professor of history at West Point. That gives him real cache when he says the southern states lost the Civil War but won the battle for the narrative that followed. The South, he argues, maintains a perception that the war was over “states rights,” that the north won only because of overwhelming financial resources and personnel (the north also used unfair tactics, they claim), and that the really brave and heroic military commanders were southerners, most notably, Robert E. Lee.

    Seidule was raised in the south and growing up wanted nothing more than to become an upstanding southern Christian gentleman in the mold of Lee. Gentelmanliness was another myth of the Lost Cause, that southern life before the Civil War was best depicted in Gone With the Wind: iced tea sipped quaintly on the wide porches of antebellum plantations by women in wide skirts attended by chivalrous men.

    As Seidule makes clear in his introduction, the more research he has done, the more shocked he is by the effectiveness of southern propaganda. Plantations are nothing more than enslaved labor work camps. The Civil War followed a free and fair election that displeased the south so much, they started an insurrection and fought a bloody war against the United States Army. From that perspective, no southerner deserves a statue or recognition of any kind, and yet as he digs into the records, he sees that enslaved girls and women were subjected to sexual violence at will by southern gentlemen, and for decades, onto today, black men and women face an unfair electoral and judicial system of terrifying efficiency.

    His point is made early enough in the book that reading the whole thing may not be necessary. Worse still, at the very opening, he admits that southerners wedded to Lost Cause mythology have rarely if ever been persuaded to change their perceptions when presented with facts.

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  • Grandma Gatewood’s Walk *** (of 4)

    August 2, 2023

    In 1955, when the Appalachian Trail (AT) was still in its infancy, Emma Gatewood walked its full length, 2050 miles from Mount Oglethorpe, Georgia to Mount Kathadin, Maine. She was 67 years old, a great grandmother, and did it solo. Her 11 adult children only found out after she was gone for several weeks and had already walked 800 miles.

    What is most striking about her walk is not her age nor intrepidity, though her courage and fortitude were boundless, but rather how simple she made it all seem. She sewed her own knapsack and filled it with less than 20 pounds of stuff. She hiked in sneakers and dungarees and slept on the ground on piles of leaves when she couldn’t find a lean-to. Almost without exception, whenever she appeared on someone’s doorstep, strangers welcomed her and fed her. Everything about her hike seemed matter-of-fact, because that was Gatewood’s attitude: put one foot in front of the other, a useful philosophy for living.

    It is hard to believe there was a time in America when hikers did not bear high-tech equipment or post selfies from every peak. It is just as hard to remember a time when a bedraggled stranger could arrive at someone’s door and expect to be offered a meal, a shower, and a bed.

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  • The Poison Machine *** (of 4)

    July 18, 2023

    Some authors of historical fiction (see Geraldine Brooks) are so caught up by their research that plot and characters are afterthoughts or cliches applied to hold together what really ought to be nonfiction. Robert J. Lloyd, in contrast, paints 1679 England, and in this caper, France, too, with effortless ease. Homing in on a mysterious murder of the Queen’s dwarf, the author sets Robert Hooke and his assistant Harry Hunt on the investigatory trail. They are a perfect duo, because Hooke was, in real life, one of the first scientists of modern history. He and Hunt use the scientific method and are slowly breaking the shackles of one thousand years of church indoctrination.

    Roiling in the background are deadly conflicts between Anglicans and Papists. Isaac Newton makes a guest appearance as do other scientists of the day while poor Harry, in love with Hooke’s niece, Grace, has to uncover the mystery of the murder while learning to stand on his own two feet. The plot is preposterous and believable at the same time and local color is imparted so seemlessly that the somewhat complex question of how the dwarf met his demise is not that important.

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  • Gangland by Chuck Hogan *** (of 4)

    June 12, 2023

    Based on the true story of Tony Accardo, Al Capone’s protege, the undisputed mob boss of Chicago in the 1970s. Accardo’s mob runs all of Chicago’s organized crime including a significant portion of the city’s police force and courts. Until, that is, another mobster breaks into Accardo’s home, stealing just enough valuables to send a threatening message. Accardo turns to Nicky Passero to set matters right, by whatever means necessary.

    As mobsters start appearing in trunks, Passero finds himself in a moral quandary, as he himself also is being squeezed by an FBI agent trying his darnedest to work up the Outfit’s ladder to nab the mob’s capo. Passero also has misgivings about how far his trust in Accardo can go and how many murders he can perpetrate in order to stay in the Outfit’s good graces.

    At first the Italian mobsters feel stereotyped, but as their personalities blossom and the suspense builds, Chuck Hogan brings people, place, and an era into irresistibly vivid focus.

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  • A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan **** (of 4)

    May 19, 2023

    Following more than 100,000 American casualties in WWI and the death of 450,000 Americans from viral influenza in 1918, most Americans roared into the 1920s with abandon. They drank, they danced to America’s indigenous musical invention – Black jazz, they smooched in the back seats of cars and in public. The backlash from Christian Nationalists was swift, brutal, and shockingly widespread across the heartland.

    By the early 20s, Indiana alone boasted more than 400,000 Klansmen, Klanswomen, and KlansKiddies. Colorado, Texas, Pennsylvania added hundreds of thousands more. The Klan grew in status and popularity under the spell of D.C. Stephenson: a fabulist with no allegiance to truth, an abuser of women, an orator who reflected the fears and desires of white Americans concerned for the purity of “their” nation, a money-hungry businessman anxious to make the next deal, a strong desire to become America’s dictator, a virulent anti-woke activist who said clearly and repeatedly that America was threatened by Jews, Catholics, foreigners, and especially Blacks, and a politician who dominated and controlled other politicians. Ultimately, Stephenson said aloud, and believed completely, that he was above the law.

    Timothy Egan never mentions any contemporary politicians with similar proclivities, but makes clear that Stephenson was as much a man of his time and place as he was a leader of it. In response to Reconstruction, the Klan and Jim Crow were born. In the 1920s, the Klan rose again. In the 1940s, as Ultra makes clear, American Nazis were more prevalent in society and in Congress than most of us realize. For those who care about the rights of racial, ethnic, sexual minorities, and others deemed unacceptable, Timothy Egan’s well-told history is a reminder that vigilance remains a necessity in America.

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  • Two Wheels Good *** by Jody Rosen

    May 5, 2023

    Jody Rosen really does elucidate the mystery and history of the bicycle. A consistent theme is the bicycle’s lifelong conflict with motorists and pedestrians. Since the bike’s invention just under two centuries ago, bicycle riders have enjoyed a silent sensation of something akin to flight. Walkers have bristled when being overtaken by a silent accelerator. Automobilists, sitting in their protected metal boxes, insist that paved surfaces belong to them. When they were first invented, horse-drawn conveyances hated them.

    Rosen makes a compelling case that bicycles democratized transportation and someday soon as climate catastrophe becomes more pronounced and the combustion engine more to blame, might again rise to the pinnacle of transport. Rosen discusses bicycles and warfare, showmanship, the liberation of women from Victorian constraints, bicycle mania (at one time a real disease), and bicycles and sex. Rosen’s vignettes trivia, historical uncoverings, and anecdotes are fascinating, but overall the book lacks narrative drive. (I’m not certain this should matter but halfway through when I figured out that Jody Rosen was a man in his fifties, not a young woman, my perspective on the stories changed.)

    Sometimes Two Wheels Good feels like riding a Peleton.

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