Like a great general, not a good one, but a great one, Rick Atkinson tracks the final battles for European supremacy as the Second World War ground to close. Simultaneously, he debates grand military strategies, political realities on several homefronts, and problematic relationships among national leaders like Montgomery (England), De Gaulle (France), Stalin (Russia) and Eisenhower, the Allied supreme commander. And just when you have the big picture and can imagine hundreds of thousands of soldiers swinging about the continent, Atkinson has you read the final letter from a soldier in the trenches, an important reminder that war is senseless for young men dying individual deaths. All the while, again like the general who must track every detail, Atkinson explains how much successful warfare depends on provisioning. The correct size ammunition must be manufactured in large numbers in a state in the U.S. and then find its way in sufficient numbers to the right gunners facing German sharpshooters somewhere a few hundred miles inside France. The same is true for warm socks, powdered milk, gear boxes for over-used half-tracks, and petrol for fuel-guzzling tanks. All of it has to be manufactured quickly (what happens to soldiers on the front if there are not enough laying chickens to produce dehydrated eggs?), labeled correctly, shipped promptly, and transported efficiently along stretched supply lines. What if it all goes on schedule, except for the fuel or the gear boxes? Then nothing else moves. Atkinson presents a remarkable view of WW II from an observation post that perceives a lot more than just men shooting one another.
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Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem **** (of 4)
Lionel Esrog, along with three friends, is plucked from a Brooklyn orphanage by Frank Minna, a self-made detective and small time Brooklyn nogoodnik. Early in the book, Minna walks into a trap leaving his four offspring to solve the mystery of what happened to their boss. Lionel lets you know in the opening lines that he has Tourette’s Syndrome. He obsesses on numbers and patterns, word tensions explode in his mind and burst from his lips: EAT ME, BAILY! As he works to solve the mystery, Lionel becomes a full human being, far deeper, funnier, and more intelligent than we, or anyone around him, gives him credit for. His fellow Brooklynites refer to him as FreakShow, and we do, too, until slowly we recognize how automatically we have categorized Lionel because of his ticks and squirms. The supporting cast, including the entire borough, are superbly rendered. Every voice retaining its original Italian, Jewish, or out-of-city origins with precise adjustments for the age of the speaker. The mystery is fun and funny enough, but Motherless Brooklyn is a must-read because its characters and sense of place lodge in your head like one of Lionel’s numerical obsessions, a friendly itcth that cannot be ignored. -
The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson **** (of 4)
Jun Do, a North Korean John Doe, lives many lives. He is an orphan in a camp for throw-away children, he undergoes pain training and learns to fight in abject darkness in the tunnels beneath the DMZ, he becomes a spy, a kidnapper, a prisoner, and an army commander. That is more than is possible for anyone in North Korea where life is too often a drudge from morning factory or field work until evening when the electricity is turned off. Yet, in Adam Johnson’s capable hands several clear images emerge. North Korea is awful. (For fuller and more accurate depictions, read Escape from Camp 14 or Nothing to Envy.) While reawakening us to the horrors of totalitarian rule, Johnson also gets us to consider whether a person is only the sum of his or her actions or, rather, actions might be dictated by circumstance and a person is somehow more intrinsic. Are we the sum of our stories, or as in North Korea, are stories too subject to stretch and warp? As Jun Do spends a lifetime navigating North Korea he also has heart and courage, enough of both to inspire others. Not to be overlooked, either, are jibes at America appearing in the guise of North Korean hyperbole. As the Dear Leader’s nightly broadcasts on loudspeakers make all too clear, the United States really is a place where one in six are hungry, the poor live in the streets, and neither justice nor access to health care are free. This one might be better to listen to as an audio book. The readers are terrific. -
Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum ** (of 4)
World War II came to an end in large measure because the Russian Army came to the aid of the Allied Forces. Irate at having lost twenty million citizens, Stalin’s troops raced into Germany to crush the Nazi Army. Their war prize was control over the countries of Eastern Europe: Poland, East Germany, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Initially welcomed as liberators, Stalin’s communists enforced brutal dictatorships across the bloc. Dissenters were shipped to Siberia, tortured, or disappeared. Economies fell under total state control. Freedoms of the press, dissent, religion, even thought were strictly and forcefully prohibited. Anne Applebaum’s book is a comprehensive survey of how these countries were crushed, by whom, for what purpose, and in what time frame. Divided by subject matter — religion, economy, industry, etc. — Applebaum provides myriad examples first from Poland, then Hungary, and then Germany. Repeat. The net result is a prize winning piece of research (National Book Award Finalist and a Pulitzer), but a book that is no more interesting to read than a communist manifesto orated during a May Day march. -
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra **** (of 4)
Half a dozen fully realized characters intertwine as the Russian empire disintegrates in the early 2000s and the Republic of Chechnya is obliterated by two wars. Each person trying to survive in a small Chechnyan village must make his or her own decisions with respect to survival and morality as nearby buildings are destroyed and friends are disappeared. Too often those decisions are at odds. “Do I save myself or protect my neighbors and family?” In the end, we learn that a person cannot choose his family. Sometimes family members engage in despicable acts; other times we care and love for those not fully related to us as if they were. I suppose its interesting that in trying to recount this book, a narrative rich in plot, that it isn’t the action that has stayed with me, but rather issues of morality. The added benefit is that the deep research incorporated into the book offers a history lesson about a little-known part of the world without ever feeling like a treatise. I want to learn more about Chechnya. Do not be put off by the grim subject matter. Embrace this book for the great novel that it is. -
Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon *** (of 4)
Four horse races are run at a bottom-of-the-barrel track inWest Virginia. The horses are knock-kneed, belligerent, over-the-hill, lazy, or used-up. So are the people that populate the track as their grooms, trainers, riders, and no-good-for-nothing hoodlums trying to make a fast buck. Gordon provides a view of people and horses I would never in my life meet and does so with such intimacy and accuracy that I felt I was in a neighboring horse stall peaking through a crack in the wallboards. Her races come alive, but somehow they don’t seem to be the main point. What Gordon wants us to see is that everything has a price. A horse can be bought, a race fixed, a trainer’s allegiance redirected, and even love can all be purchased. She captures each character’s manner of speech and thoughts with deadeye accuracy, but curiously, prints her dialogue with neither quotations nor attribution, leaving the reader to discern when words are spoken aloud and by whom. For that she won the National Book Award and though I couldn’t really put the book down it gave me a headache. -
Master of the Senate by Robert Caro **** (of 4)
Third in Caro’s serial biography of Lyndon Johnson, this massive volume covers Johnson’s decade in the Senate. For most of the 1950s LBJ ran the senate with an iron fist, at once the youngest and most skillful man to do so perhaps in the Senate’s history. In following Johnson’s story we learn how the Senate really operates; a civics lesson far in excess of anything any one ever (used) to learn in school. We see the deep divide among red states and blue states over issues of business versus labor, wealth preservation in opposition to support for the needy, the Cold War, and greater than any other issue, race relations. Through the 1950s most black Americans in the south were prohibited from voting, fully segregated from whites in schools, stores, hospitals, and anywhere else blacks and whites might find themselves in extended proximity, and subjected to mob justice. Whether the stranglehold on black lives could be addressed by the United States federal government divided the South (opposed to Federal usurpation of States’ rights) from the north and Johnson gets credit in this book for managing a compromise that for the first time cracked the door open to let a slim ray of light expose the darkness of southern discrimination. Partly what makes the book so fascinating is how complex is Johnson’s personality: driven, ambitious, cajoling, vicious, denigrating, sycophantic, manipulative, caring, and insufferable. Taking on any of Caro’s books is a commitment — they are very long — but his able technique includes stories both small and large that together assemble into a complete tale of America in the mid-20th Century. -
March by Geraldine Brooks *** (of 4)
Mr. March, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, heads south to fight the Confederacy at the opening of Alcott’s novel and returns on Christmas a year later. This is Brooks’ imaginings of what March would have encountered as an idealistic preacher from Concord heading into the heart of a Civil War. Not surprisingly, he learns war is hell, slavery is worse, racism is painfully ugly and not the sole purview of southerners, and that his personal attempts at action and intervention are pitifully ineffective. Look, if you are going to read a book about slavery, by all means begin with Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, the recounting of slave life and uprisings in Jamaica. Levy’s characters are real people. Brooks’ has an interesting idea — she won a Pulitzer Prize for this book — but like most of her books the characters in March are uni-dimensional, interesting in a TV sort of way, but utterly forgettable as soon as the book is completed. -
The Long Song by Andrea Levy **** (of 4)
This is the story of Miss July a house slave in Jamaica from her birth in the cane fields to her post-slavery restitution living in the house of her accomplished son, his wife, and according to Miss July, her son’s three excessively pampered daughters. This memoir of sorts is chirpy and upbeat as seen through the ordinary lives of enslaved Africans. Yet their lives are so horrible and awful that no amount of rationalizing on my part could let me understand how a slave owner could treat other humans worse than penned chickens. Masters had to maintain the concurrent belief that slaves were no more capable of higher thoughts than feral goats and simultaneously worry that his slaves were so clever and devious that a deadly revolt or uprising could erupt at any moment. The voices of both masters and slaves are so real in the hands of Andrea Levy’s skillful pen that they creep inside your head to linger for days. -
Tinkers by Paul Harding ** (of 4)
An old man lies in his bed surrounded by family and his memories as his life winds down like the clocks he used to fix. He once drove a horse-drawn cart of household items to sell to rural, early-nineteenth century, New England homesteads. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and somehow I missed the point. The book was half plot and half romantic depictions of people in nature in a part of American history that probably only ever existed in the minds of contemporary American fiction writers. The poetry of Harding’s language didn’t hold my interest and it opened gaps in the narrative that became too long before returning to story. Obviously, the critics and most readers loved this book. Feh.
