Keigo Higashino is Japan’s most decorated mystery writer, and this book, Malice, the first in a series, catapulted him to fame. Unlike nearly any other mystery, the crime, perpetrator (Osamu Nanoguchi), and detective, Kyochiro Kaga, are all known near the outset. What follows is a chess match between Nanoguchi and Kaga as the detective move by move picks through the crime and move by move Nanoguchi counters. The reader is left to wonder if Nanoguchi actually did what he admits to while Kaga searches for a credible motive. The book reads like a script for a play. The two main characters sit opposite one another as the spotlight highlights one and then the other. Additional characters fill out the story and the reader is left guessing not only whodunnit, but why.
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The Slip by Lucas Schaefer **** (of 4)
Nathaniel Rothstein, a high schooler in Newton, Massachusetts, beats up a student even dorkier than himself. His mother, beside herself, ships him off for the summer to live with his uncle, an emeritus professor of history at UT-Austin. Uncle Bob takes his bushy eyebrowss, baggy gym shorts and wayward nephew to volunteer in a senior citizen home and to join him at Terry Tucker’s boxing gym. Nathaniel serves up a few weeks of requisite teen-age sullenness at the senior citizen home, but with time is mesmerized by his boss, the Haitian immigrant David Delice.
Impressionable and horny, Nathaniel uses his emergency money to call a phone-sex line (the year is 1998.) Sasha, a Russian dominatrix, plays her part for Nathaniel, who after painfully long-minutes of silence, finds a voice as the Haitian, David. For reasons you’ll have to read about, it is just quite believable that a summer-long relationship develops between Nathaniel, who is pretending to be Black and Sasha. Sasha, it turns out, is also a high school student in a boy’s body, who is discovering they are a trans woman. When Nathaniel and Sasha, still embodied in their personae decide to meet up, Nathaniel must turn his skin black. Only a high school student would try this. Sasha, born in a boy’s body, has to appear to be female. On the day of their planned meeting Nathaniel disappears. (That’s not a spoiler. His disappearance is announced in the opening chapter.)
So we are left with a ringside collection of characters all related to the missing Nathaniel. They wander the nursing home, sweat at the boxing gym, mature in the miasma of two high schools (Newton and Austin), drive across the expanding city of Austin, and work in Austin’s police force. Every one of them has regrets, secrets, wishes, and desires. The Slip is a wild 12-rounder of a boxing match. A lot like life.
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Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes *** (of 4)
Istanbul, the city, sits at the junction of Europe and Asia, literally and metaphorically. Istanbul, the book, moved my perception of history eastward, away from an inevitable march toward western cultural hegemony. As Americans, our history often begins with ancient Greece and its democratic ideals. Yet, ancient Greece is adjacent to modern Turkiye. Greeks inhabited Turkiye and the eastern Mediterranean. When Rome supplanted Greece, it too inhabited Turkiye. The Roman emperor Constantine brought the center of the burgeoning religion of Christianity to Constantinople, Istanbul’s forerunner. When the city of Rome collapsed, the Eastern Roman Empire continued from the 4th to the 15th centuries, as Roman rule persevered in Istanbul. All of which is to say that Greece and Rome expanded to the east at least as much as they did toward the west.
Covering 10,000 years of history is no simple task, but to Bettany Hughes great credit, she delivers more than wars, dates, and chieftans. Combining extant writings with modern archaeological analysis, Hughes spends time with peasants caught up in the religious cross-winds of history, explaining why and when Christianity displaced Roman gods, and how, where, and why Islam overtook Christianity. She details the cultural significance of harems and how Victorian westerners turned harems into dens of iniquity. She tells us how people farmed and what they ate and how ships and bridges and tides and seawalls all played their part in shaping history. Most of all she moves the center of the world away from Paris and London eastward across the Eurasian continent through Istanbul Damascus, Baghdad, Ifsahan and beyond. Istanbul was the center of it all.
The Silk Road ran through Istanbul. Products, ideas, and diseases, e.g., the plague, all moved through the city on route from China to England and back. Byzantines battled Persian and Indian empires, reminding me that while the history I learned focused on the Dark Ages, Crusades, and squabbles among European nobles, Byzantines fighting for territory were enormous empires farther east.
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The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka *** (of 4)
An expertly crafted introduction to the people that swim laps with the author. Lap swimmers, she makes clear, forego daylight and nature in exchange for the seclusion and focus of repeating passes over an unwavering black line. Yet, there are personalities. Speedsters. Lane hogs. Dawdlers. Aggressive competitors. Friendly acquaintances. Reliable supporters. In short, our friends.
The book is written in a series of laps. A short description. Reach the wall. Turn around and start a new lap. One of the regulars in the pool, about a third of the way through the narrative, becomes the primary subject of the book, about whom I can say no more without spoiling. The story of the central character is captivating and as meditative as any long-distance exertion.
- Book Reviews, Europe, FICTION, FOUR STARS ****, History, Nazis, Suspense, Uncategorized, World War II
Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys **** (of 4)
There is no shortage of books describing the horrors of war, which makes this novel of World War II refugees so remarkable for its riveting description of refugees seeking escape from vengeful Russians overtaking Germany. Sepetys follows the plight of a young Lithuanian nurse, a 15-year old Polish girl, a six-year-old German boy, an old German shoemaker, a blind German girl, a woman who is an annoying German battle-axe, and a young German man with shrapnel in his side, a mysterious knapsack, and civilian clothes, when he should have been conscripted. With Russian soldier hot on their heels, seeking revenge for German atrocities, the main characters flee through woods, on back roads, and along throughways crowded with thousands of additional refugees heading for ports on the Baltic Sea.
Operation Hannibal was Germany’s plan for evacuating troops and civilians at the end of WW II. The cleverness of the book, in addition to its unnerving suspense, is to bring lives and backgrounds of a few real people caught up in a war not of their making. As readers we feel sympathy for the Pole and the blind girl, because if they are caught by Nazis they face execution for being inferior to the master race. But we also feel bad for Germans who are neither in favor of Nazism or warfare in general.
It is a major feat to engender sympathy for Germans in World War II. It is also a very difficult book to read with the plight of so many Gazan refugees hanging in the balance. Warfare is a horrible way to make policy.
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The Lock-Up by John Banville ** (of 4)
The remarkably prolific Irish writer, John Banville, gives his take on Jews in Ireland soon after the end of WW II. Rosa Jacobs is a doctoral student in Dublin and a firebrand supporting long-shot progressive causes like a woman’s right to abortion. Not going to happen in Ireland in that century. Until, that is, Rosa is found asphyxiated in her own car in a locked garage. A hose from the exhaust to the front window suggests suicide.
Rosa’s older sister is dubious that her sister was suicidal. The coroner suspects foul play. One of Rosa’s friends was a recently arrived German “industrialist” with a hidden past. By the time the German’s ties to Israel’s secret attempts to construct a nuclear weapon emerge, the credulity of the novel exceed its author’s tenuous hold on either plot or characters.
Banville has won a Booker prize and in some years has published as many as five books. I presume some of his other books are better.
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A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid (***) of 4
Jamaica Kincaid’s second book (1988) expands the vision of a theoretical tourist vacationing in Antigua. The tourist soaks up deliciously sunny skies, gazes at unbelievably blue seas, and walks along silky white sand beaches. Kincaid, residing invisibly alongside her created tourist, points out what else needs to be seen.
Why are the natives all Black, and under what conditions did colonial masters purchase them and put them to work as slaves? Why did British colonists leave a recently independent island nation with such a corrupt government? How come there are no working sewers, no library, and the island’s only hospital is filthy, crumbling, and occupied by three incompetent doctors? What right do the islands tiny minority of whites and middle easterners have to their exclusive clubs, gated mansions, and subservient (Black) servants.
Nearly 40 years on, Kincaid’s strong voice, points a lasting indictment at colonialism, tourism, and corruption.
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Red Scare by Clay Risen *** (of 4)
Clay Risen’s thorough recounting of the Red Scare, which began well before Joseph McCarthy’s rise to infamy, makes clear that right wing opposition to progressive politics has always been part of American politics. White, male, heterosexual, Christian capitalists have long held that the United States should be free from wealth sharing or government restrictions. The spoils of business, as well as the story of the country’s history, should be theirs alone.
The late 19th century closed with capitalists triumphant, amassing unseemly quantities of wealth among Rockefellers, Fricks, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts. When, in the early 20th century, communist ideology suggested that workers deserved reasonable hours and greater income–essentially more equality–interest in communism came from obvious quarters: African Americans, Jews, women, LGBTQ+, east coast liberals. The New Deal of FDR went a long way toward improving the lot of the underclasses, but it also enraged Republicans who gnashed their teeth at having to share.
When FDR died, and Stalin’s insane use of communist ideology, set off a post WWII Cold War, right wing politicians used aggressive tactics to hunt down anyone who ever had any affiliation with communism. Hollywood moguls, writers, and actors were targeted and blacklisted. Professors lost their jobs. Workers who had supported communism in principle during the thirties were tossed from their jobs 20 years later. Government employees and military personnel whose ideologies were not pro-white, pro-business, and pro-Red Scare were let go.
The techniques should sound familiar. Accuse first, find evidence later. Invent accusations, even false ones. Launch conspiracy theories and float them in the (social) media. Use government agencies to attack and intimidate opponents. Bring anyone whose free speech fails to toe the government line to a congressional shakedown or to court. Bully.
After a decade of blacklists and Cold War scare mongering, McCarthyism (like American communism) slowly ran out of steam. What Risen makes clear is that even after the Red Scare abated, more than a third of Americans still believed untrue conspiracies. The far right has always been part of America (the far left, too, no doubt) and always will be.
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Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson *** (of 4)
This is Kate Atkinson’s sixth in her series of Jackson Brody novels. Brody is former British police, now private investigator, called upon to look for a stolen painting: Lady with a Weasel. The question of who stole the renaissance oil painting is secondary. Front and center is Atkinson’s delightful send-up of two of Britain’s most hallowed traditions. In one part of her farce, a lunatic of a family live in a Downtown Abbey-like mansion called Burton Makepeace. While Atkinson destroys the obsession with old money and crazy old Ladies of the house, she also dismantles the British preoccupation with murder mysteries. A bedraggled, over-the-top, full-of-itself, not-very-talented, understaffed troupe of actors host a murder-mystery dinner in Burton Makepeace mansion. In a nod to Agatha Christie, all of the main characters find themselves trapped in a single location (a vicious snowstorm makes travel impossible) to solve a real crime, while Jackson Brody tries to make sense of it all. A fine escapist read for troubling times.
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An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi *** (of 4)
A much needed, and enthusiastically rendered account of the history of Africa as seen through the eyes of Africans. Badawi, a native of Sudan, and now a renowned British journalist, visited more than 30 countries and spoke to experts of history in each of them. Unsurprisingly, there are kingdoms and nations and developments that are shockingly extensive and successful. Many of them thrived while Europeans slogged through the thousand years of the Dark Ages. It is a lovely flip on which continent is the Dark one.
The book opens with the archaeological evidence demonstrating that all humans are immigrants from Africa. Unfortunately, to cover hundreds of thousands of years of history, Badawi relies primarily on the tried and true formula of recounting the names of leaders, their dates of leadership, extent of their kingdoms, and visits to their largest and most impressive extant buildings. One example, to put things into perspective, are the pyramids and rulers of Ancient Egypt. Egypt, Badawi wants to be certain her readers know, is in Africa.
Unfortunately, lauded thought the book is, and deserves to be for its anti-colonial perspective, it is my least favorite kind of approach to history: names and dates. Eventually, I fell victim to Africa’s TseTse flies, bearers of sleeping sickness.
