Under the Banner of Heaven - Jon Krakauer

Okay, so, I'm gonna confess that I thought this book was about climbing a mountain, primarily because the edition I read had a mountain, or very large mountain-like rock, on the cover, and I interpreted the "heaven" in the title as "the sky."  You know, like the heavens?  No, I was not confusing it with Krakauer's Into Thin Air, which actually is about climbing a mountain, namely Mount Everest.  I've read Into Thin Air, and my enjoyment of it (as well as of Missoula) was why I picked this up in the audiobook format.  Imagine my surprise when it started out by talking about a murder!  Well, that was okay, too, because I love true crime; it's awful, but fascinating at the same time.

Krakauer starts the book by discussing a gristly double murder committed by two brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, with the victims being their sister-in-law Brenda and her daughter Erica.  Though Ron committed suicide in prison after being convicted, Dan maintained that, while he committed the murders, he shouldn't be considered "guilty" of them because he killed his sister-in-law and her daughter under orders from God.  Hm...  Then Krakauer goes into the body of the book, which alternates chunks about the events leading up to the murder, the murder, and what followed it, with historical pieces about the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormon church.  Why is the Mormon piece so important?  Because the Lafferty brothers belonged to a fundamentalist splinter group of it which subscribed to tenants that the main Mormon church has pushed to the wayside, such as plural marriage, and one of the reasons they wanted to kill Brenda was because they thought she convinced Ron's wife to leave him after he wanted to take a second wife.  Ah, yes, polygamy--this book has it.

Krakauer blantantly says towards the beginning of the book that the main, modern Mormon church is not a problem, but that the problems he examines stem from fundamentalist groups that stem from it--just as all religions have problematic fundamentalists.  (Yes, all.)  The only times he talks about the main church is in a historical context, when he goes into its foundation, which seems pretty kooky but problems seems so because, as Krakauer points out, it was just founded much more recently than most religions.  And then he goes into the integration of polygamy into the church's practices, which really seems like it happened because the founder, Joseph Smith, wanted to bang a lot of women who weren't his wife and wanted his wife to just shut up and accept it, and a bunch of other guys high up in the church decided they wanted to do that, too.  This was a problem.  Is polyamory a problem?  No, as long as all members are consenting.  But Krakauer digs into how a solid policy of it led to rampant sexual abuse, rape, and incest, which women literally couldn't say no to because the men in charge told them all it was God's will, and they could be excommunicated, losing their families and entire lives, if they refused to go along.  It's this policy and these awful practices which still abound in the splinter fundamentalist groups that Krakauer discusses in the contemporary part of the book.

This is a riveting story on all fronts, and Krakauer is an excellent nonfiction writer to record it.  There is a bit of a structure issue with it, however, because he goes and tells a lot about the murders of Brenda and Erica right in the prologue, which means that for much of the contemporary chunks of the book, I was just waiting for something to happen that I already knew was going to happen.  I think this might have been a bit better if Krakauer had let us know that something had happened, but left the "reveal" for where it fit in the body of the main book, rather than in the prologue.  That would have let us know that it was building up for a purpose, not just rambling, but still had something to "surprise" us with.  He also tries to go into all sorts of terrorism comparisons in the end, which seemed like reaching far.  Does it tie into the topic?  Yes.  However, I don't think it was the right place in this particular story, especially because there's no good answer for the question that Krakauer wants to examine by bringing a terrorism component into play--namely, if someone has religious convictions, can we count them as delusional, and in any case, if they commit a crime based on those convictions, can we hold them guilty?

Still, the body of the book, before it dives into trial transcripts and metaphysical ponderings at the end, was excellent.  I really like Krakauer and hope to read his other books as well.

4 stars out of 5.

The Couple Next Door - Shari Lapena

Ah, the "trouble woman thriller."  This seems to be a bigger genre than ever these days, and I totally blame Gone Girl.  And yes, I liked Gone Girl.  But much as Twilight (which I did not like) seemed to spawn a mess of vampire-teen-romances, so had Gone Girl spawned so many others that dream of following in its footsteps.  The Couple Next Door doesn't follow Gone Girl's plot, but it does aim for its feel and twists and such, but it doesn't really succeed.

The main characters here, Marco and Anne, leave their infant daughter alone in her crib while they attend a dinner party next door, taking their baby monitor with them and checking on the infant every half hour.  But when they return home, the baby is gone.  What follows is an investigation into the kidnapping in which suspicion immediately falls on the parents, for various reasons, and the couple's secrets start to come out a little bit at a time.

While the central story here is fine, I guess, I found the writing flat and a few characterizations that really, really bothered me.  First, those characterizations.  Within the first few pages, Anne is casting dispersions upon her neighbors, particularly the wife, because "they are childless by choice."  Clearly, this means they must be terrible, right?  Yes, the couple next door are up to some shady stuff and they're not great people...but Lapena sets all of this up by implying that not having or not wanting children somehow makes you a bad person.  What?  Since when is that true?  And then, of course, another female character has to be mentally unstable, because women who are mentally stable don't have problems, right?  Obviously.  So frustrating.  Meanwhile, the detective investigating the case is almost entirely useless, even though he is a man, because why would you ever feature a competent law officer in a book where he isn't the main character?  Sigh.

This one of the extra books I picked up from Book of the Month a while ago, in addition to my normal monthly selection, and I didn't get to it until now.  Now I see why.  Overall?  Very disappointing.

2 stars out of 5.

American Fire - Monica Hesse

Book of the Month has absolutely been killing it with selections recently; I have loved all of my main selections for the past few months, and it's been great to see more nonfiction that isn't in the style of a memoir.  Killers of the Flower Moon was stunning and terrible, and American Fire is sad and evocative and atmospheric.

This is a nonfiction book, accounting a string of arsons that took place on Virginia's Eastern Shore.  Between November and April 1, sixty-seven buildings in Accomack County burned.  (Well, it was more than that, but the sixty-seven were the related ones.)  As readers, we know pretty much from the beginning who is behind the arsons; Hesse puts it all out there right in the beginning, even on the jacket description.  But of course the people of Accomack don't know, and watching them try to figure out who is burning down their county is fascinating, as is watching the building and decaying relationship between the aronists and how it eventually all unravels in court.

Hesse's book definitely falls into the category of literary nonfiction; it reads like a story, alternating between a chapter or two about the fire departments, police, etc. trying to figure out the arsons, and a chapter about the arsonists themselves.  Hesse uses words to, stroke by stroke, paint the picture of Accomack County, accessed at the north by a road that passes by a gas station sporting a sign, "The South Starts Here."  It's a county that has largely been left behind by the rest of the United States; once the richest rural county in the US, it's now one of the poorest.  Its main employers are Tyson and Purdue.  The fire departments are entirely volunteer, so dispatchers need to call four in order to make sure enough people show up to fight each fire.  And there's no municipal water supply, so the fire departments have to bring their own water with them, and if they run out, their only chances to reload are sometimes ponds.  It's a completely different place from the urban settings that most of the country inhabits, a place that almost felt like it could have been the setting of a Sookie Stackhouse novel if they took place on the Eastern Shore instead of in Lousiana.

It's not a long book, and the narrative style is so readable that I absolutely devoured it in just a couple of hours.  But it shows wonderfully how no single factor in Accomack County or in the arsonists' lives caused the arsons.  Being poor and depressed doesn't make you set fires, and if you do set fires, it doesn't mean that you'll get away with it...but the societal fabric of Accomack County contributed immensely to it.  And, as Hesse points out, it could have happened elsewhere, too.  Such a fascinating look into this county, the arsons, the investigation, all of it.  Highly recommended.

5 stars out of 5.

Read This, Then That Vol. 1

First, let me introduce what this is: Read This, Then That is a new series I'll be doing from time to time with book pairings that complement each other.  They might be two fiction books, or a fiction and a nonfiction; two different portrayals of the same event, or the background information on the fiction, or just books that are thematically similar.  What gave me this idea was how similar Mary Chamberlain's The Dressmaker's War felt to Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, and how reading them together could be a very good pairing.  But for this first edition, I'm going to focus my attentions on a book that's famous to the world: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Read This...
Most people know about Gatsby.  He's obsessed with the green light across the way, the light that signifies, to him, his true love Daisy.  A story of a man who's not all he seems to be, seen through the eyes of an interloper on the scene, The Great Gatsby is known for its fantastical parties, starcrossed lovers, and ultimately how futile and hollow the lives these people have been living seem.  It's easily Fitzgerald's most famous book, and has become a sort of icon for fiction set in the 1920s, when "paper millionaires" abounded and life, for many, was very, very good.  This is definitely a book you've at least heard of.  There's a good chance you've already read it.  If not, give it a read, take it in...

...Then That
And then read about some of the things occurring in the world that Fitzgerald encountered while writing Gatsby. Sarah Churchwell's Careless People is both the story of the Fitzgeralds, both F. Scott and Zelda, during the time in which F. Scott was writing Gatsby, and of a double homicide that occurred and which very well might have inspired large chunks of the story.  It's nonfiction, but a riveting one, and seeks to not only portray the frantic partying of the Fitzgeralds but also plays with solving the double murder.  I really pondered the order in which to put these two books: which one to read first?  Ultimately, however, I decided that Gatsby should come first.  It lets you take in the story as a whole, without fishing around in for the details that come out in Careless People.  Reading Careless People second gives you the chance to follow along for the points of the "plot" that were paralleled in Gatsby, as well as fill in the background of the time period in which Gatsby was written and view the literary work with new eyes.  Careless People is definitely a longer book than Gatsby, but I think the writing is very engaging and that it's a worthy use of your time if you're at all interested in Fitzgerald, Gatsby, historical crimes, or the Roaring Twenties as a whole.

Career of Evil - Robert Galbraith (Cormoran Strike #3)

I am so bad at figuring out mysteries.  I swear, I'm the absolute worst.  I had a theory all throughout this one, but it is a good thing I am not a detective, because it was dead wrong.  As always, I fell for the red herring.  To be fair, though, Galbraith/Rowling can do a really subtle red herring; at points I felt like some bits were heavy-handed, but I'm starting to think that this is just a technique used in the mystery genre to keep you looking away from the real decoy, so that the truth jumps out at you from around the corner when it comes.

Let me back up.

So, Career of Evil is the third book in "Robert Galbraith," aka J. K. Rowling's, Cormoran Strike mystery series, about an ex-military private detective who has solved a few noteworthy cases in the relatively recent past, but is still struggling to keep his business above water.  Joining him is Robin, his assistant who really wants to be more of a partner due to a long-buried love of mystery solving.  The first two Strike novels involved murders, as does this one, but this one goes in two directions that the previous ones didn't: the pasts of the two main characters, and serial killers.  In this book, Robin herself becomes a target, stalked by a serial killer who we get perspective chapters from now and then.  Additionally, Galbraith starts to really lay out the pasts of the characters that brought them to where they are, in what I think is more detail than in the previous two novels.  The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm both had some of Strike's background in them, but very little of Robin's; that comes out more here, along with increased detail about Strike, amidst a slew of relationship problems for Robin and an increasing tension between her and Strike on several different levels.

Honestly, the characters are what fascinate me about these books more than the plots.  The murder mysteries are fun to try to solve, even if I never get them right, and are always just chilling enough without straying into territory that could be considered cheesy and overblown.  But Rowling has always had a knack for developing really believable characters, and she's carried that skill over into her Galbraith persona, making Strike and Robin three-dimensional characters who are more than just the sum of their parts.  Even the secondary and tertiary characters that appear here are nuanced to a degree that I think is rarely seen in fiction, which is nice.  It makes the story as a whole very complex and helps to create a full-bodied world that supports the story rather than just acting as backdrop.

But I still hate Matthew.  I know that is the point, but I hate him and I hated the chapters where I had to read about him for more than a minute or two because he was so terrible.  Also, this book relied very heavily on Blue Oyster lyrics, and it kind of made it feel like a fanfic.  Not that fanfics are bad (I've read some really excellent ones) but it seemed off from the tone of the first two books.

Overall, this series has maintained solid 4-star ratings from me, and that's true for this one as well.

4 stars out of 5.

The Midnight Assassin - Skip Hollandsworth

I adore crime shows.  Law and Order (the original one, with McCoy!) is amazing, and is Bones, and then, of course, there is the best of them all: Criminal Minds.  (NCIS and all of its spin-offs are terrible.  Do not talk to me about them.)  Criminal Minds focuses specifically on serial killers, a group of murderers which is both terrifying and fascinating.  Of course, in Criminal Minds they always get their man in the end, but in real life things aren't always so neat and tidy, especially in periods which pre-dated modern forensics.  The most famous historical serial killer is probably Jack the Ripper, but he wasn't the first person who sort of (and this is totally creepy to say but is true) revolutionized mass murder.  That honor appears to have gone to the Midnight Assassin, a serial killer who terrorized Austin, Texas starting in 1884 before up and vanishing.  This was four years before Jack the Ripper made his kills in London and about a decade before H. H. Holmes built his murder hotel to capitalize on the World's Fair in Chicago.  Unlike Holmes and like Jack the Ripper, the Midnight Assassin was never caught, despite killing at least seven people, and maybe a couple of more outside of Austin.

Skip Hollandsworth uses The Midnight Assassin to lay out the events of 1884 and 1885 that terrorized Austin.  Someone started breaking into the quarters of servant women and killing them with an axe, and then moved on to several more prominent members of the community.  Of course, it wasn't until well-to-do white women, instead of black servant women, started dying that anyone really took notice.  Racism was rampant in the day and Austin presumed that it had to be a black man, or maybe even a roving band of black men, who were behind the killings, even though at least one person said they thought the killer was white.  Two people were tried for two separate murders, despite there being little to no evidence that they were actually involved.  The whole thing was basically a debacle, with no one really having any idea of what was actually going on.  In fact, no one was ever actually caught, and when Jack the Ripper began killing women in London people thought that it might be the Austin killer, relocated to England.  This theory doesn't hold much water in modern times because the Austin killer and Jack the Ripper had very different styles, which is (and I can tell you this as a super-experienced watcher of Criminal Minds) pretty indicative that they weren't the same person.  Serial killers, we all know, tend to use the same method over and over again.

What's sort of weird with that book is that Hollandsworth lays out a bunch of false trails that I kept thinking were going to evolve into a theory about who the killer actually was, but they never did.  For example, the bits about the insane asylum seemed like they were going to result in one of the patients there at least being accused of the murders, even if they turned out to be innocent, but that never actually happened.  Consequently, I was left perplexed as to why such emphasis was placed on the asylum and its staff and inhabitants in the first place.  It seemed liked Hollandsworth wanted to tell this story, but there really wasn't enough source material to bulk out a cohesive theory, so he settled for just including random other happenings around Austin, like the asylum and the recounting of lots of parties.  The elections, at least, tied in to the story, because the scandal of the murders impacted them in a huge way.

Ultimately, though, this is an unsatisfying book because there's no theory.  Hollandsworth mentions at the end that he's still hoping more evidence will arise that might point to who the killer was, but I would have liked to see him take a stab at "solving" the case anyway and at least trying to support any idea he might have had.  As it was, the book ended on a "Yeah, we just can't know" note, which was kind of annoying because it meant the book was basically an expanded version of the Wikipedia page on the killings, without any substantive thought added into it.  Compared to the last book I read about a serial killer, Eric Larson's Devil the White City, The Midnight Assassin just ended up falling flat.

3 stars out of 5; a fascinating series of events, but nothing to elevate the book as a whole to another level.

The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert Galbraith (Cormoran Strike #1)

When supermodel Lula Landray (known affectionately to some as Cuckoo) falls to her death from the balcony of her London flat, most of the world is convinced it was a suicide.  But three months later, Lula's adoptive brother turns up at the office of Cormoran Strike, private detective, and asks him to investigate whether the apparent suicide was really a murder.  Strike is skeptical, but accepts because Lula's brother offers to pay a truly exorbitant fee that will help him clear up some debts and stay in business.  His business is his home, due to a recent break-up with his fiancee, so he's really keen on keeping it.  Add into this mix Robin, a temporary secretary who decides to stay on a bit longer than planned, and about a dozen other colorful supporting characters, and you've got this book.

Now, as most of the world knows, Robert Galbraith is actually J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame.  This was her attempt at writing crime fiction, an attempt that I personally think had rather mixed results.  The book shot to the tops of bestseller lists, but only after it was revealed that Rowling was behind the Galbraith name.  As such, it fits my "A New York Times beststeller" category for the Popsugar Reading Challenge, but indicates that the book might not be as extraordinary as some would suggest.  I think that's accurate.

Here's the thing.  There's an intricate plot, with a lot of twisted little bits all twisted up that you can untangle in retrospect, but I don't think you really can in the moment.  That's good.  Rowling also has an amazing grasp of making distinguishable, believable, awesome characters; there was not a single character in this book that I felt was superfluous or underdeveloped.  I could totally see them all going on and living their own lives outside the scope of the main story.  This is definitely one of Rowling's talents; she showed it in the Harry Potter series, and she brought it back out to trot here.  But what she didn't do was make this a page-turner.  Every chapter serves its purpose, sure, but they didn't have me staying up later, needing to know what was next.  Most mystery/thrillers have me tearing through pages to finish as quickly as possible.  I read this one over the course of a week, which is an incredibly long time for a mystery.  It was just slow.  Strike was building things up in his mind the entire them, but we couldn't really see them, and so it seemed like not much was going on at all.  That meant that this was really, really slow.  It was good, but I don't think it's a thriller, just a normal mystery, and one that can really be picked at rather than devoured without losing too much along the way.  It's not a compulsive read, and being that I knew it was coming from Rowling's pen, I was a bit disappointed that this wasn't all-consuming.

Still, I think this was a solid book, and I'm going to continue reading them.  I really like Robin, though I'm one of those ridiculous people who hopes that she will dump her fiance and she and Strike will get together.  I know the odds of this are slim to none, but I want it to happen anyway; Robin was way too awesome of a character not to get a more prominent storyline, and this is totally how I want it to go.

3.5 stars out of 5.

The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson

Not too long ago I read Erik Larson's Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, and I really loved it.  It's a great example of a narrative history and how history can be absolutely enthralling.  I'd had Devil in the White City on my list for a while, even before reading Dead Wake, and while out to dinner with a friend it was brought up--so I bumped it up on my list.  The book chronicles the building and running of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, which became known as the White City due to the color of the huge, majestic buildings built for the fair.

I almost started by saying that they just don't do World's Fairs anymore...which would have been very stupid of me because another friend actually just spent the entire summer in Milan for Expo Milano, this year's World's Fair/Universal Exposition in Milan.  Maybe the thought I'm trying to grasp is that they just don't do World's Fairs like they used to anymore--there are no more Eiffel Towers and giant Ferris wheels to dazzle us.  While I'm sure the Expo was awesome, there's just something magical about reading descriptions of what the architects of the White City achieved.  And there's something very creepy about the other story that's twined through the story of the White City--the story of the devil, H. H. Holmes.

Now, did these stories go together?  Yeah, I guess.  I mean, Holmes built his murder hotel specially to lure women arriving in Chicago to see the White City--but he'd begun his killings before that, and other than taking a love interest and her sister to the White City, he didn't have much to do about it.  I think Larson mainly put these two narratives together to play off the whole darkness/light duality, which he does quite well.  Sometimes, however, I felt like he was just using Holmes to add menace to the story he really wanted to tell, which was about the fair.  I thought this because the bulk of the book is about the fair--those chapters are much longer than the Holmes chapters in general, with the exception of the chapters regarding the eventual investigation into Holmes' devious doings.  For the most part, Larson's attention is on the building and running of the fair--which makes the title a little disingenuous, though titles are generally the publisher's decision and not the author's.

I knew about the Lusitania before I read Dead Wake; I didn't know about the White City and H. H. Holmes before I read this book, so it was educational.  This is a great book for people who like history but don't live heavily-academic works; I would totally ask for this, or give it, as a Christmas present for someone like that.  It's a great, fast read (despite being almost 400 pages; they go quickly) and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

4 stars out of 5.

The Cabinet of Curiosities - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Pendergast #3)

Oooooh boy.  Let me tell you right off the bat, thrillers generally aren't my thing.  I find their premises to be too flimsy to really enjoy, and the style they're written in doesn't agree with me.  Cabinet of Curiosities was no different in these regards, and I actually liked it even less than I like most thrillers--especially because it had a historical element, which is usually a plus for me and serves to get me interested.  But this time...no.  Gah.

So, what didn't I like about this?  Well...pretty much everything.  I only liked one of the myriad of characters, disliking the other twenty or so that populate the pages on a regular basis.  I disliked the protagonist, Special Agent Pendergast, immensely.  I hated him.  He was extremely unrealistic and unrelatable and there was absolutely nothing that compelled me to like him or root for him.  In fact, I would have been much happier if he had been killed of.  Now that would have been a plot twist.  I didn't like the fact that the authors felt like every character who appeared on the pages had to, at some point, be a point of view character.  I didn't like that the main plot of the story didn't get started until more than a hundred and twenty pages into the book.  That is absolutely ridiculous for a thriller, which should yank you in from the first page.  I found the ties between the main plot and the historical plot flimsy at best, and the plot device that drove it all completely unbelievable--even more so than in a Dan Brown novel, which are almost at the epitome of unbelievable.  I didn't like that all of the red herrings were so very obviously red herrings; not once did I believe one of the decoy leads was real, and the authors should have had me second-guessing myself at least once.  And I didn't like the length of the novel in general.  It could have been about a hundred and fifty pages shorter and been fine.  The climax--which, in a thriller, should hit hard and fast and leave you reeling--went on for far too long for it to really remain suspenseful, and instead I just found myself wondering when it would be over so I could move on to reading something else.

What did I like?  I liked O'Shaunessy as a character.  I liked that the story involved a museum.  That's about it.

This was a gift, and I feel bad for not liking it.  But I'm also confused as to how this ended up as one of NPR's "100 Best Thrillers of All Time," because if it really is one of the 100 Best Thrillers of All Time, then the thriller genre is in worse shape than I thought...because this was terrible.  At no point did I feel liked I needed to know what happened next; after every chapter, I would have been very happy going off and doing something else.  There's no real "page turner" quality here, no cliffhanger chapters that made me feel like I had to know what came next.  Instead, this was just bland.  I'd rather read Dan Brown than this, and considering how lackluster and anticlimatic I found Inferno, that's really saying something.

2 stars out of 5.

Empire of Deception - Dean Jobb

There's nothing better to kick off a weekend than a story about a swindler, amiright?  Okay...maybe there are a few better ways, but this book is pretty much like a true financial-crime version of Law & Order, which we all know is one of the best shows ever, so I can't think of many better ways.  In Empire, Jobb tells the story of Leo Koretz, who built a veritable financial empire (haha, I'm so funny) based on fake mortgages and stocks.  The mortgages were supposedly based on property in Arkansas that was used to grow rice--and indeed, the property existed, it just wasn't really worth anything, let alone what Koretz was getting for it.  The stocks, on the other hand, were a complete fabrication, based on a fictitious timber and oil company based in Panama.  Between the two scams, Koretz made off with several million dollars, much of it taken from his friends and family, who had become desperate to invest in Koretz's fake company after he repeatedly told them "no."  You know how it goes--the more someone tells you "no," the more you want what they're denying you.  And so it went here, until Koretz absconded and the truth came out.

Koretz did most of his swindling in the 1910's and 1920's, which leads Jobb to include more than a few allusions to The Great Gatsby, which doesn't really seem fair because other than liking parties and spending money, Koretz was nothing like the fictitious Gatsby.  However, the drama mostly takes place in Chicago and, to a lesser extent, Nova Scotia, which are two areas that are seldom examined in histories of the era, so getting a peek at them was awesome.  Koretz was busy swindling long before and long after Ponzi's fraud scheme began and ended, while Al Capone was clawing his way up the gang ladder, and while the entire nation was plunging head-first into the Jazz Age, which leads to a ton of colorful background for Jobb's tale.  Also getting some page-time is Robert Crowe, an attorney who once worked with Koretz and takes up the task of finding and prosecuting him after he escapes.  At times, the writing can get a bit dry, especially when Jobb dives off into using too many quotes.  Don't get me wrong, quotes are good, and can lend a lot of flavor to a book, but too many of them can be distracting and can let the mind wander while the action isn't advancing.  Overall, however, I found the writing engaging and the book a pretty easy read.  It's also much shorter than it initially appears, because a good chunk of the pages are devoted to notes on sources, which is a solid use of page space for any history book worth its salt.  But don't worry; footnotes and annotations don't weigh this one down, and the citations are tucked neatly away in the back where they won't distract you during your read.  Though if you do want to find the citation for something, that might make it a bit difficult...

Overall, though, a fun read. Not one of my favorite history books and not one I'm likely to read again, but good nonetheless.

3.5 stars out of 5.