In the Garden of Beasts - Erik Larson

Erik Larson is an awesome history author.  I've read both Dead Wake (about the sinking of the Lusitania) and Devil In the White City (about a serial killer and the Chicago World's Fair) by him, and found both of them to be excellent in quality.  When I was looking for a book linked to my family history for my reading challenge, I decided to just pick something set in Germany, because I didn't know what else to focus on.  (Despite this book focusing on the family of an ambassador in WWII Germany, I am neither related to the Dodds, nor am I aware that any of my direct family were Nazis, though I suppose anything is possible; wouldn't that be a nasty surprise?)

In this book, Larson focuses on Ambassador William Dodd, the first US ambassador to Hitler's Germany, and Dodd's daughter Margaret.  His wife and son were also present in Germany, but are not looked as much in the course of the book.  And what the book is, is a startling examination of the old adage "Hindsight is 20/20."  Now, we have such clear hindsight, being able to see that Hitler was bad news, and that something should have been done sooner--but through the Dodds, we can see how that wasn't the case at the time.  They initially were kind of friendly toward Nazism in general, being somewhat anti-Semitic themselves, though Hitler himself was seen as kind of a kooky guy who Hindenburg had well in hand and who probably wouldn't remain in power very long.  But the Dodds slowly become more and more aware of what a terrible situation is brewing in Germany--and are stonewalled by everyone else, who either outright don't believe them or don't want to believe them, or do believe them but don't want to get involved with European affairs and instead only want to focus on Germany paying its reparations from World War I.  It's an incredibly frustrating story to read, because you can see the trouble building in the background, and the Dodds growing increasingly concerned and Ambassador Dodd's attempts in particular to do something without causing an international incident--and without getting himself fired in the process, as he isn't well-liked in the State Department to begin with--and knowing that it's all futile.

Larson builds the tension here wonderfully.  This is a true work of nonfiction, as well--everything he implements is taken from letters, cables, diaries, etc.  He does step back to speculate once or twice, but always notes that he's doing so, saying something such as, "Perhaps, but they didn't write about it they did, so we can't really know."  The Dodds aren't really the most interesting people on their own; the details of their day-to-day lives can be boring, mostly consisting of Dodd's colleagues at the State Department planning to oust him and working to undermine him at pretty much every turn and Margaret having a bunch of affairs, but I think that provided exactly what it was supposed to: an idea of how life went on for most people in Germany, and it was not a sudden event that Hitler rose to power, made being Jewish illegal, and started killing people and planning to take over Europe.  Rather, it was a slippery slope that rose against a background of existing tensions, and no one action took place until the preceding ones seemed normal.  Hm...does that sound familiar to anyone alive today...?

This is not a "fast" read, nor is it a thrilling one.  But it is one that is chilling in the way that it, in many ways, mirrors the world we live in now.  They say that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it--so study up, folks.

4 stars out of 5.

Murder in Matera - Helene Sapinski

True crime stories are awesome--terrible, but awesome.  I just started listening to this amazing podcast, My Favorite Murder, which is both terrifying and fascinating at the same time.  I can't stop listening, or looking over my shoulder as I do so to make sure no one is lurking there with a large knife.  And so what could be better than a book combining true crime, history, and Italian food?

Murder in Matera is the story of Helene Stapinski's search for her family's fabled murder.  She grew up with her mother telling her stories of how her great-great-great (I think) grandmother, Vita, murdered someone in Matera, Italy, and fled to the United States with her children in tow, but lost one of them along the way.  Stapinski's family is apparently riddled with criminals, the most notable being her grandfather, Beansie, and she's haunted by a concern that criminality is a genetic trait and that she has passed it down to her children, and so she wants to "solve" the murder in order to figure out what happened...because apparently that will fix it?

There are some awesome things in this book and some things that bothered me.  First off, anything involving tracking down a murder--particularly one that took place over a century ago--is interesting.  Stapinski had to dig down into the archives of various towns in the region in order to find out what happened--with her great-great-great grandmother, grandfather, the padrone of the region, the children, etc.  She speaks some Italian but also hires a few locals to help her as researchers, and struggles with navigating the small-town atmospheres of the places she goes.  The scenery is clearly gorgeous and Stapinski captures it well, as she does with the food.  This is a book that will make you want to eat Italian food--all the Italian food, from fresh fruit to pasta puttanesca to pizza to--well, absolutely everything.  Even foods you don't like will sound good here.

But what I didn't like was when she takes broad liberties with Vita's story.  The actual details of the murder are eventually discovered, because they're contained in a court document.  But for Vita herself, Stapinski blatantly makes up her thoughts, feelings,a and actions, saying in the afterword that the relied on her "Gallitelli blood and bones" to know what her ancestor would have thought...which is ridiculous.  You can't just make up history.  The problem is that she wants Vita to be a saint, and so she decides that's how things must have been, without having any evidence of really knowing it.  Ascribing emotions and actions to people from the past without having any idea of what they actually did is a classic pitfall in talking about history, and Stapinski blunders into it full-throttle here.  These portions do not belong in a work of nonfiction.  Additionally, her obsessing about her children's genes got old quickly.  Apparently there is one study from Iceland about prisoners (or was it Finland?) that said many who committed violent crimes had a gene tied to aggression, but guess what?  You are not your genes!  Just because you have a gene tied to aggression doesn't mean you have to kill people!  In this way, Stapinski seems to throw her hands up in looking at the past, putting it all down to fate and not looking at responsibility for one's own actions, which really bothered me.

Overall, an okay book that could have been a good book, but strayed past its boundaries and into fiction instead of history too much.  The nonfiction portions are excellent, but the "creating stories out of whole cloth" portion left a bad taste in my mouth.

2 stars out of 5.

Ghostland - Colin Dickey

This is not a book of ghost stories.  Let's get that out there right now.  There are some ghost stories in it, yes, of various turns and origins.  However, ghost stories are not the focus of this book.  Instead, what Dickey turns his attention to is the historical and cultural atmospheres that contributed to these stories, as most of them--as Dickey demonstrates--have absolutely zero basis in fact.

The United States has a tumultuous history, and it shows in the ghost stories that populate it.  Dickey digs into a lot of different areas, both geographically and topically, examining such things as: Why aren't there more stories of Native American ghosts, given the violence rained upon them by whites?  Why aren't there more black ghosts in areas that are fraught with dismay and death for Africans or those of African descent, such as former slave markets and places where slaves were tortured?  Why do the details of ghost stories change, sometimes dramatically, over time--things like race, age, and origin all altering on the same ghost?  He answers all of these in turn, and some others to boot.  Though the details vary somewhat, what it all boils down to is that ghost stories reflect cultural hopes and fears at the time they are told, and so the areas that are important at the time of telling are sometimes altered for emphasized in order to emphasize these tensions, whether the alteration is deliberate or not.  For example, a ghost can be a slave in a time when tensions about race and brutality by masters was of cultural importance, but the same ghost can be a white lower-class woman in a time when matters of economic tension are more predominant in the psyche.

Dickey's book works its way from the small to the large, from haunted houses to civic buildings to entire towns and cities and to an idea that our entire country is haunted.  While he touches on some of the places that are particularly renowned for hauntings, such as Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, he mostly focuses on places that aren't quite as well known.  He doesn't really explain why he does this, but it seems likely that it's because the less-known places are actually easier to track, as stories might go through fewer permutations if there are fewer people telling the tales.  He also touches on some other areas of ghost stories that might not occur to everyone every day.  For example, by case law in New York State, if a building is said to be haunted it is, by law, haunted--because whether hauntings are a matter of fact or fiction, the belief that a building is haunted affects its value. 

This book had a lot of interesting aspects.  However, because Dickey has a lot of points he wants to make--and many of those points have overlapping and repetitive aspects--none of them are really delved into too deeply, and each point has one or possibly two examples at the most.  I think it would have been interesting to see how some of his theories played out in the context of places said to be more haunted--like the Eastern State Penitentiary, or the White House.  Seeing some of the stories completely debunked was interesting, but then there was no real context for how some of the stories came to be in the first place.  For the Winchester House, there were some rumors started by a paper, but even that can't really indicate the absolute plethora of stories that surround it, and the details are, as Dickey pointed out earlier in the book, what is so very important.  But none of those are touched on.

Overall, a fascinating book, but one that probably could have been a bit stronger in constructing its central argument.  Great for fans of history or fans of ghosts, or skeptics of ghosts!  Or someone who is all of the above.

4 stars out of 5.

Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

Last September, I was at the National Book Festival hoping to get a signed copy of Outlander for my boyfriend's mother (because Diana Gabaldon is her favorite and I'm thoughtful like that).  A few queues over from the Gabaldon line was one for Margot Lee Shetterly.  There was practically no one in it.  How odd, I thought.  Hidden Figures was a pretty big movie, after all, getting a lot of press, acclaim, the whole shebang.  I found it very odd that there wouldn't be more people in that line.  Well, now I know why the line was so short: this book is boring.

And let me say this.  A book about a story that is this fascinating should not be this boring.  And yet boring it is.

This is, undeniably, an important story.  In a time when segregation was still the norm, female working women were still referred to as "girls," and women were pretty much banned from STEM fields, women were essentially storming NASA's predecessor, NACA, working as human computers and clawing their way upwards to the ranks of mathematicians and engineers, marking various "Firsts" and shattering glass ceilings as they went.  While white women were involved, Shetterly focuses on a much-ignored group, the West Computers and the women who came out of that pool to work in other areas, who were black.  While she talks about a few people here, only two names ultimately stuck in my head: Dorothy Vaughn and Katherine Gobels/Katherine Johnson.  Vaughn eventually ran the West Computers, and Johnson ran the calculations for the first American orbital flight and the reunion of the Apollo 11 moon landing crew and flight crew after departing from the moon.  There was a third main person, but Shetterly does such a poor job of actually distinguishing between these women that I honestly couldn't tell you anything about her.  And actually, there was a fourth woman, too--but she was in college for the events of the book, and I'm not entirely sure why she was included at all.

But my biggest dig against this book is that it's not predominantly about these women.  They are simply a lens through which Shetterly examines the Civil Rights movement, the press for desegregation, and all kinds of other social movements that surrounded these issues in the forties, fifties, and sixties.  While all of this is vitally important, it's not what I picked up the book to read about.  Additionally, the writing is extremely purple at times, not at all suitable for a nonfiction book.  It's entirely possible to do a book of literary nonfiction and do it well, but Shetterly does not.  It's always dangerous to project details of emotions, actions, etc. onto conversations and situations at which you were not present, and are collecting details from second- and sometimes third-hand, and yet that is exactly what Shetterly does.  Between wariness at this practice and sometimes eye-drooping boredom when Shetterly spent ages away from the main narrative to instead talk about the March on Washington, or something else entirely, I found that I didn't enjoy this book much at all.

Overall?  Important, fascinating story, but obscured by poor telling.  The movie might be better on this one.

2 stars out of 5.

The Wilderness of Ruin - Roseanne Montillo

I adore true crime books.  I adore things about serial killers, who are obviously terrible but are also fascinating.  I've watched Criminal Minds through like six times.  So when The Wilderness of Ruin popped up in the libraray's true crime category, I was intrigued.  Why?  Because, according to the cover, this book is supposed to be "A tale of madness, Boston's greatest fire, and the hunt for America's youngest serial killer."  In reality, it is none of those things.  In fact, it is three separate things: an account of the evolution and of the so-called "youngest serial killer," Jesse Pomeroy (who wasn't really a serial killer, though he undoubtedly would have become one--he killed two people, and technically you need to kill three people over a span of more than a month to be considered a serial killer), a short telling of a huge fire that swept through Boston, and a mini-biography of Herman Melville. 

This book was pretty awful.  Why?  There is absolutely nothing in these three narratives to tie them together.  Montillo tries for a "well, the fire happened while Jesse lived in Boston, and Melville probably read articles about Jesse and was interested in mental illness!" as an explanation for why these three things comprise the book, but it's a very weak explanation and doesn't work at all in context.  The fire takes about two chapters and is never mentioned again.  There is no "hunt" for Jesse Pomeroy; because he'd assaulted younger children before, the police knew exactly where to look when they found a body that matched his MO and had him arrested in pretty short order.  I kept expecting a jail break or something that would lead to an actual hunt, but that never happened.  And the Herman Melville thing was just...weird.  I have no idea why a biography of Herman Melville occupied approximately a third of this book.  In addition to these three main threads, other random topics are delved into with an amount of detail that wasn't appropriate for what was going on in the larger narrative, such as the production of dime novels or penny dreadfuls.  Montillo seems to want to tackle the ethics of Jesse's sentencing--both the death sentence and his commuted life in solitary confinement sentence--but doesn't really do so well; perhaps she was afraid of getting too political?

The writing itself wasn't bad, but the content was scattered and the structure did not hold together.  This seemed like it was going to be fascinating, but really was just disappointing.  Talk about a premise that did not deliver.

1.5 stars out of 5.

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.

Rabid - Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

Rabies is a terrifying but absolutely fascinating disease.  Pretty much the only disease guaranteed to kill you--more people have survived Ebola than rabies--it's been around for as long as civilization has and has also lurked close to humanity because one of one of its main carries, dogs.  In Rabid, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy go not into the science of rabies, though they touch on it, but into the cultural history of rabies, including how it's inspired works of fiction in genres of literature and horror.

The book starts with a quick overview of rabies as it exists in our culture today--a looming threat of twenty shots in the stomach that's not true of all--touches on Louis Pasteur and his team's work to create a vaccine, and then dives into the first chapter, taking us all the way back to ancient times and touching on lyssa, a sort of rabid rage that pops up in The Iliad.  Wasik and Murphy aren't arguing that Paris, who lyssa refers to in the original Greek, is actually rabid, but more that the sort of rage that consumed him was the type that was seen in rabid animals, drawing evidence that rabies existed even back then.  A Sumerian joke adds to the argument.  From there, they work their way forward in time, through dog cullings, the evolution of vampire and werewolf myths and werewolf trials, how it's affected zombies (fast zombies, distinct from slow zombies that are more true to their origins in voodoo), and so on.  While parts of this were fascinating, I found myself wondering if it was quite so necessary to spend so long on the pop culture when there's really a lot more to "culture" in general than werewolfs, vampires, and zombies.  The final chapter, about a recent rabies epidemic in dogs in Bali, was more intriguing to me, because it dug into not only how rabies spread, but how it was maintained in Bali because of the relationship people had with their animals.  In the conclusion, they go into the potential that rabies has to be a tool of use instead of evil.  They also touch on the treatments for rabies, which, if you miss the vaccine, is pretty much only one and has only been "successful" six times, if you count "successful" as "didn't die from rabies, but died of other complications, remained in a vegetative state, or had serious other impairments," with only two people actually recovering.

I listened to this as an audiobook, and the narration was good, but having it in audio form really hammered home how much time the authors spend recounting various vampire and werewolf encounters, relating the plots of zombie movies, and things like that.  It seemed like, for much of history, they didn't really have a lot of "cultural history" of rabies to pull on, so they used up pages by relating every detail they could dig up for the instances they did have.  Consequently, if you're not interested in vampires, werewolves, or "fast" zombies, it can be a bit of a drag.  Rabies influenced these genres?  Interesting.  An hour of records of every supposed vampire or werewolf encounter?  Not as interesting.  I guess I was looking for something that did have a little more science behind it; we still don't know a ton about rabies, but that's been the case for much of history with supposed "cures" ranging from the ridiculous to the downright dangerous, and I think I was looking for some idea of how culture had lent itself to these, more than just myths and legends.  The actual science parts of this book were so much more interesting than the recitations of myths and extended quotes of records and the science didn't feel like filler, unlike the numerous examples for the "cultural" bits.  I think the culture was interesting, but there was a bit of "beating the dead horse" here, and that was frustrating.

Overall, a decent book, and I liked it, but I was hoping it would have a bit more substance than it actually did.

3 stars out of 5.

In the Heart of the Sea - Nathaniel Philbrick

The story that inspired Moby Dick (which no, I have not read), the sinking of the Essex, a whaleship out of Nantucket, seems like something that could only have been made up.  A whale sinks a ship designed to hunt it and the crew are left as castaways in a trio of boats for three months, sailing around the Pacific with dwindling rations and deteriorating vessels, succumbing to despair, dehydration, starvation, and eventually resorting to cannibalism so that some of the crew may survive.

Nathaniel Philbrick uses two main narratives written by survivors, first mate Owen Chase and cabin bow Thomas Nickerson, to construct the main story here, though he also relies on other resources, such accounts of the story told by Captain George Pollard, letters that were written, and other documents from the time.  He provides context of what life was like in Nantucket at the time, some history of the Essex--which was known as an unusually lucky ship, prior to its ill-fated prior journey which seemed plagued by bad luck from the start--as well as information on what happened after the survivors of the wreck were rescued.  At first, I thought that the narrative was ending remarkably early, but all of that information on what came after was so important to showing the slide of affairs in the whaling industry and to, ultimately, make the tale more believable.  For example, no ship had ever been sunk by a sperm whale prior to the Essex, at least not that anyone knew of--but Philbrick includes information on how, in the decades after the Essex sank, whalers reported that whales were becoming scarier, and several other ships were sunk or heavily damaged by whales.

Apparently I'm super into survival stories recently, since this is the second one in a row I've tackled, after Unbroken (yes, the reviews sometimes show up out of order based on how I schedule them!) and I have Robinson Crusoe lined up for the near future, as well--though that one is fiction.  But it's interesting to see the differences between them; for example, while both this and Unbroken are stories of survival and both feature exiles at sea, In the Heart of the Sea seems to come across as more realistic than Unbroken, even though the circumstances are so much more extraordinary.  It definitely has something to do with the writing; Philbrick's seems so much more matter-of-fact than Hillenbrand's, which felt more sensational.  I do think this one was actually referenced in Unbroken, which might have been what put it in my head to begin with.  Additionally, I did this one as an audiobook; the narrator was excellent for this and I think really contributed to the overall feel of the story.  And it was a piece of history that I hadn't been familiar with, though I had heard of it before, so learning about it was great!  The denouement was a bit long-winded, even including all of the excellent extra information, but I think that was probably the book's only big detractor.

Overall, I really liked this one; I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in history, nonfiction, survival stories, any of that!

4 stars out of 5.

Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand

Unbroken was my latest audiobook, following Missoula as a selection to listen to while walking to and from work some days and while running.  It had been on my to-read list for a while, but wasn't high-priority, so it seemed like a good audiobook choice.  It's the story of Louis Zamperini, an American bombardier in World War II who competed in the 1936 Olympics as a runner, was expected to be the first person to break the four-minute mile, and who ultimately survived the crash of his plane, an extended time in a life raft, sharks, and a series of prison camps in Japan and its territories, including under the reign of a nightmare of a man known to the prisoners as The Bird.  There's also a little nod to Hillenbrand's other book, Seabiscuit--namely that, upon seeing Louis run, someone said that Seabiscuit was the only one that could beat him.

It's an incredible story; Louis had a bit of a misspent youth, and his brother (who was sometimes his co-conspirator, though Louis seemed to be the only one to ever get caught) helped straighten him out by turning him into a runner.  Louis ended up competing in the 5,000 meter event in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, running in an event that he'd only practiced a few times before his arrival in Germany.  Though he didn't medal, he seemed to be set for the next Olympics as a competitor for the mile--until the US was pulled into World War II and Louis was drafter into the Army Air Force, where he'd briefly enlisted before.  When his plane crashed during a search and rescue mission, Louis and two crewmates survived and found themselves stranded in a life raft that was abysmally poorly provisioned; the three men only had two bars of chocolate and a few cans of fresh water.  Eventually, two of them survived to be picked up...by a Japanese ship, and they promptly became prisoners of war, except without any of the rights accorded to prisoners of war by the Geneva Convention.  Spending time in three different prison camps and never registered with the Red Cross, Louis was lost; his family thought he was dead, and at times, he probably wished he was.

This is a truly amazing story, but I'm ultimately not sure that "Unbroken" is a good title for it.  Louis survived his imprisonment, yes, but he was very, very broken after it.  With a nasty case of PTSD that led him into alcoholism, an obsession with finding and killing The Bird, and nightmares that once had him waking up strangling his wife, Louis certainly didn't walk away from his imprisonment in Japan "unbroken."  Additionally, while it's certainly a story of survival and resilience, I'm not entirely sure where "redemption" plays into it, unless you're counting it as in "The Redeemed Captive" sense, where it means being brought back.  Louis didn't really have anything to be redeemed from; is Hillenbrand trying to get at his religious conversion and eventual comeback from his PTSD, at least to some extent?  Because that's not something that he really needed to be "redeemed" from.  So, yes, probably not the best titling there.

It's an intriguing book and story of survival, but it does drag on a bit.  Every single detail that Hillenbrand seems to have been able to unearth is listed here; every beating, every beating that other prisoners suffered, multiple accounts of how Louis' family was pining away in America for him, though nothing ever changed between these sidebars until it was discovered Louis was, in fact, alive.  Additionally, the final part of the book that detailed Louis' life after the war seemed to drag on.  It really hammers home that PTSD is not a "new" thing, as some people make it out to be, but it also goes into sometimes agonizing detail about what The Bird was up to and how he didn't feel responsible for his actions or that said actions were really bad to begin with.  I understand wanting to have the story be "complete," but it seemed so much slower and dragged on so much more than the earlier parts of the book.  This clearly isn't the "main" story and I feel like it could have been wrapped up in a much shorter section than it was truly given.  It was probably meant to hammer on the "redemption" theme that Hillenbrand was apparently going for, but I really wasn't feeling it.

Overall, this was a good book, but it's nothing I'd be reaching for again.  The pacing was strange and it sometimes seemed over-sensationalized; it was an amazing story on its own, so it didn't really need all of the "look at how amazing this is!" hammering that Hillenbrand laid on it.  It's also not a story of someone remaining unbroken; everyone has a breaking point, everyone, and Louis definitely hit his during his captivity.  His survival was remarkable, but I think Hillenbrand actually blew it up and made it too "larger than life" for it to come off as sincere here.

3 stars out of 5.

American Lightning - Howard Blum

Okay, I'm going to come out and say it: this book was kind of a drag.  Especially for a book that promises to be about "Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century."  Ostensibly, it's about the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, the bombings that came before and after it, the hunt for the criminals, the trial...and a guy who makes movies?  What?  Where the connection?  Well, here's the answer: there isn't one.

Now, that's not 100% true.  The private detective who worked on the bombings knew the guy who made the movies.  But still.  The movies weren't actually about the bombings, they were just about social events that occurred around the same time, and in a very vague sort of way--putting the two directly together is a very tenuous connection at best, and trying to tie it together with "But they saw each other in a hotel at the end of it!!!" doesn't really lend the connection any credence.  And with the book relying on such a tenuous connection, it was on shaky ground to start with.

Blum focuses on three main figures in this book: Billy Burns, a private inspector; Clarence Darrow, a lawyer; and D. W. Griffith, the filmmaker.  But for most of the book, only Burns is actually relevant, as he and other inspectors from his company attempt to find out who are behind the bombings that are sweeping the nation.  A startling string of domestic terrorist attacks, the bombings sprung from the ongoing battle of union workers vs. businesses, but initially no one was sure which side was actually doing the bombing.  Was it the unions, trying to get back at businesses who were against unions?  Or was it the businesses themselves, trying to frame the unions?  Meanwhile, Blum intersperses chapters about Darrow and Griffith just...being themselves.  Lawyering.  Having affairs.  Making movies.  It's incredibly boring and served no purpose.  Griffith's line isn't necessary at all and certainly doesn't play into "the birth of Hollywood" as his movies were made in New York and he wasn't even the first person to film a big movie.  Darrow becomes necessary to the story, but not until the very end, and even then it seems like Blum greatly inflated his role in the story, especially given the way the investigation and trial ended.

The writing is bland and it's hard to determine what's actually pulled from research and what's conjecture, especially in the realm of conversations that occurred.  There always seemed like suddenly there was going to be a turning point, a new sight of depths...but then that point never actually developed.  There were some interesting parts, mainly when Blum actually focused on the investigations, but for the most part this was a very "meh" book.  For a good read about an investigation surrounding a crime closely linked to social issues, I would recommend American Fire or Killers of the Flower Moon--the first is set in the 2010s, the second in the 1920s.  They are both excellent and far outshone this one.

2 stars out of 5.

The Ghost Map - Steven Johnson

I love me some good nonfiction, and the story at the heart of The Ghost Map is one I'd encountered before but was interested in learning more about, so when it showed up at the library, I snatched it up.

The Ghost Map is the story of an outbreak of cholera in London in 1854 that ripped through a neighborhood like wildfire, far faster than any other cholera epidemic and with no visible source.  While most of the city fretted about the poisonous "miasma" that they thought caused disease and every inhabitant who was still mobile fled the area, two men--Dr. John Snow and the clergyman Henry Whitehead--ultimately narrowed down the source of the outbreak to the Broad Street water pump (Snow) and the "patient zero" whose illness had contaminated the water therein (Whitehead).  In doing so, they actually challenged the prevailing "germ theory" of the day, even though "germ theory" as it is today didn't exist then.  Though their efforts didn't immediately revolutionize the world of public health, the case was still an important one in changing urban design, public health, and the future of cities in general.

This is a pretty short book.  Most of it covers the "solving" of the cholera outbreak, along with the counterproductive efforts that were being undertaken by the "miasma" believers who thought that the disease must have been spread by London's poor air quality.  But Johnson also dips into how cities were on the verge of collapse due to things such as epidemics and eventually into how this case of cholera set up a chain of events that ended with the revolutionizing of London's sewer system, water quality control, and overall approach to public health.  In the wrap-up, Johnson moves to the big "but what does this mean to me?" question, in how the cities of today are still expanding.  He goes into how cities are actually greener to live in than the countryside is due to economies to scale, how bioengineering can be used to essentially take out a bacterium or virus before it can even get started, how eighty percent of the world will probably eventually live in urban areas, how waste and clean water are interconnected.

The narrative parts of this book are excellent--you know, the parts that are really "solving the mystery."  Snow went through a process that no one else had, not only mapping the deaths of the cholera victims geographically but also figuring out their connections to the Broad Street pump in order to determine that it was the source of the outbreak.  Whitehead used his local knowledge and "ins" with the people of Soho in order to find the "patient zero" that caused the contamination in the first place.  What was less fascinating was how Johnson kept hammering on the "BUT EVERYONE THOUGHT IT WAS MIASMA!!!!" angle.  That was pretty apparent very quickly, but Johnson kept coming back to it, again and again and again, and just hammering on it.  Additionally, while I think he raised some good points in the epilogue, it came across as scattered and unfocused, jumping from one type of threat to another--viruses, terrorists, nuclear holocausts...  And by the time that he got there, I think he'd made his point thoroughly enough that I was ready to just be done with the book.

Overall, this is a book about a fascinating case that I'm not sure really does it justice.  The thing is, there's not that much to be said about the case; I'm pretty sure there's an episode of a show on maps on Netflix that covers all of this pretty thoroughly in about half an hour.  There's just so much added stuff in here that wasn't particularly intriguing or relevant that seemed to be added simply to bulk out the book and I think that did drag it down somewhat.

3 stars out of 5.

Princesses Behaving Badly - Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

I am twenty-five years old and I still adore princesses.  Most particularly, I adore the spunky, kick-butt princesses who Go Out and Do Things.  Who do I like?  I like Addie of Bamarre and Cinder/Selene, Celaena Sardothien and Queen Bitterblue, Elisa with her Godstone and Raisa with her Grey Wolf Throne, Moana sailing into the unknown and Rapunzel shaking off her lifelong abuser.  I can't get enough of them.  But these are fictional women, and there have been plenty of bad-ass women in history who haven't gotten a lot of attention, so I was super excited to read Princesses Behaving Badly and get an insight into some of them.

The book is divided into seven sections and each focuses on a different "type" of princess: Warriors, Usurpers, Schemers, Survivors, Partiers, Floozies, and Madwomen.  Obviously there is some crossover between these categories, and several of them are pretty derogatory terms, which made me raise an eyebrow when I encountered them.  Yes, the women in this book were flaunting convention for their places and times--otherwise they wouldn't have been behaving badly.  But to term them "floozies" and "madwomen" seemed a bit harsh.  Each part of the book then features several mini-biographies of princesses who the author has deemed to fit that category, each of which took about five to ten minutes to read, and also a few shorter sections that could skim over a topic, like so-called American "dollar princesses" who married European nobility on the basis of their money, with a paragraph or so devoted to each woman in that short section.  Real, born princesses are covered but also women who pretended to be princesses, possessed positions similar to that of princesses in societies that didn't have princess roles, and women who married up to become princesses.

What struck me most about this book, however, were two things.  First, it's so surface level.  I think I would have preferred fewer but more in-depth sections about a selection of the women here; I didn't expect the book to be comprehensive, there's just too much to cover, but it seems like even so it really did a disservice to some of these women by skimming over their lives at such a high level, doing very little to cover their motivations, circumstances, desires, etc.  And second, the book kind of had a derogatory tone in general to it.  While I've already pointed out some of the questionable words selected, many of the stories about women who didn't really do anything wrong had this overarching tone of, "Well, she got what was coming to her."  Which...what?  Yes, maybe Elizabeth of Bathory deserved to be bricked up in a tower--she might have killed up to 650 people, after all--but Lakshmibai, covered in the "Warriors" chapter?  She got forced into a terrible situation, dealt with it the best she could, and then got killed in battle.  And yet there's no sympathy at all in this tale, just a, "Well, that's what happens when you do that stuff" sort of feeling.  Yes, this was a book that explicitly said "without the happy endings" in the subtitle, but the tone in which these were covered rubbed me the wrong way.

Overall, a very surface-level book that I think serves mainly to direct one to the Wikipedia articles about some of these women; Wiki probably covers many of them in much more depth than the book does.  Wiki probably has better sources cited than this one, too.  It brings to light some remarkable women throughout history but is baffling irreverent towards their struggles and accomplishments instead opting for snark and disparaging terms and a tone of "well she must have deserved it" for the not-so-happy endings.

3 stars out of 5, and mainly just for bringing some light to these princesses.

Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann

This was my choice for my April Book of the Month.  As soon as I read the description--about how, in the 1920s, the Osage Native American tribe was the richest per capital group in the world, and its members suddenly began dying under mysterious circumstances, and how the FBI became involved, trying to make a name for itself after a restructure--I knew it had to be my selection.  Nonfiction of this variety is fairly rare in Book of the Month; most of the nonfiction they feature is contemporary memoirs and collections rather than actual investigations like this, so I snatched it up while I could.  It sounded fascinating.  Terrible, but fascinating.

And that's exactly what it was.  A string of mysterious murders plagued the Osage, particularly the family of Mollie Burkhart, who lost essentially her entire family in a short span of time.  Eventually, with more than twenty-four murders looming over the Osage, with the tribe members afraid to go out at night, the FBI under the newly-appointed J. Edgar Hoover was told to do something about it.  The FBI had existed before this, so in that sense it's really not a story about the birth of the FBI.  But it is a story about the rebirth of the FBI, which prior to its restructure had been plagued with corruption and inefficiency.  Granted, most people know that the FBI under Hoover wasn't exactly squeaky clean, but he certainly wanted his new bureau to look good when it came under his control, and that led to a lot of pressure for Agent White, the man put in charge of the case, to solve the murders.

This is a complicated story involving a ton of twists and turns and strings of murders that point to multiple serial killers involved in the Osage murders.  While the case was eventually "solved" and closed, Grann found while writing the book that there were holes in the case and that, while the person who was convicted was definitely involved, there was more going on.  He conducted interviews, combed through archives, and eventually managed to piece together more of the story, uncovering a whole string of serial killers targeting the Osage in an attempt to gain control of the headrights that granted them money from the oil companies drilling on land the Osage owned the mineral rights for.  That this happened with one serial killer is imaginable, though of course terrible; that multiple people thought that this was acceptable, and either got away with it or got off lightly, is a travesty of justice.  That people beyond the Osage have completely forgotten about this or never known about it shows how little the Osage's lives were valued by those outside their community, and that is a tragedy.

This is a well-researched book; you can definitely see the legwork that Grann put into writing it.  He has extensive end notes including interviews and archival sources that aren't in publication, and read the case files from the FBI regarding the case.  That he not only reported on the original case but went beyond it and seems to have solved several more and established that the Osage's "Reign of Terror" actually extended much further and longer than most people had previously thought is remarkable and admirable.  The writing was also eminently readable.  It really reads like a narrative about Mollie and her family, and then about Agent White when he comes in to solve the case with his band of miscreants.  It was a real page-turner that had me trying to carve more time out of my day to finish reading.  And when I found myself wondering how Grann could possibly fill up another third of the book when I neared the end of part two, that's when he dropped the revelation that there was so much more than White and his fellows had ever thought.

This is an Old West story with cowboys and "Indians" and oilmen and people being thrown off trains to hide the dirty deeds of other.  It has cattle rustlers and undercover agents and all of the elements of a good Western story, except it is tragically and almost unbelievably true.  Grann has done a marvelous job with this, creating a book that had me raring to talk about it with others the moment I finished it.  I definitely recommend!

5 stars out of 5.

Krakatoa - Simon Winchester

Natural disasters hold a fascination for me, just as they do for many others.  They're terrible in the destruction they wreak, sometimes on a global scale, and yet it's hard to look away.  And of course the underlying forces behind the disasters are fascinating in their own right.  Volcanoes are one of the biggest cases of natural disasters, and among them the name "Krakatoa" has its own sort of mystique.

 

Like many others, I first encountered Krakatoa in the children's book The Twenty-One Balloons.  I don't remember a lot about the story, except that it involed a group of Europeans who lived on a volcanic island in the Pacific (the island was misplaced in the book; Krakatoa was actually located in the Indian Ocean in the Sunda Straight) who had crazy houses, and had to flee on a big balloon platform and parachute down to the new places they wanted to live when the volcano that loomed over the island exploded.  All these years later, when I wanted a nonfiction palate cleanser from a particular book hangover I was suffering (thank you, Hunted), I decided that the real story of Krakatoa would be a good candidate.

 

But the thing is, not a heck of a lot is actually known about Krakatoa.  Not many people within distance of actually witnessing its explosion survived; instead, all but a handful were killed by the massive tsunamis (up to a hundred feet high) that pummeled the coasts of both Java and Sumatra and killed probably thirty-five thousand people--only about a thousand died from the usual volcanic killers, such as pyroclastic flows.  But these figures, again, mean that there aren't a lot of witnesses.  Instead, witnesses were limited to a handful of survivors who outran tsunamis (very impressive) and were on ships large enough to ride out the perilous seas in the wake of the eruption.  In addition, not enough was known about volcanology in the late nineteenth century to really document the causes of the eruption.  And, unfortunately, Krakatoa was almost entirely destroyed in the eruption, leaving behind only half of one of its three peaks.  So, while another island has begun to emerge (called the Son of Krakatoa) there's not enough of the original left for modern geologists to examine it for potential insights about the famed eruption.

 

Because of these informational deficits, Winchester bulks out his volume with some of the history of Indonesia, though only its colonial parts.  The focus here is very much on the Dutch colonizers, barely touching on the native population at all except to mention local superstitions about volcanoes and one chapter about the growing resistance that spread in the wake of Krakatoa's eruption, which probably contributed to the resistance (though saying that the eruption caused the resistance, as Winchester muses at one point, is probably a stretch).  He also explains the history of botany in the region and a larger chunk of the book is contributed to a history and explanation of the theory (in this use, theory being fact, as it is used in science) of plate tectonics.  Some of this was interesting, and I think it probably is needed in some form for a book of this nature, but the sheer amount of page time devoted to it seemed a bit excessive when a simpler explanation could have accomplished the same understanding.

 

Then there's the writing.  Some of it is vivid and engaging.  Some of it is dry as dirt and I found myself skimming paragraph after paragraph.  There doesn't actually appear to be much rhyme or reason to when the writing is good and when it's a bit rough, either.  The good and bad parts both appear in all parts of the book, in all topics.  The drier bits do seem to have some issues with structure, which seems to be an editing problem or at least a problem that should have been weeded out during editing; they're frequently confusing in how they're written and there are a lot of weird paragraph breaks that didn't seem to really be necessary.  And one big thing did bother me: I had no idea where Krakatoa actually was.  This book has a wealth of illustrations, photographs, diagrams, and maps, but despite all of that I found myself pulling up Google Maps to figure out where all of this was actually taking place--Krakatoa not being labelled on any of the wider maps of the region, and not enough specificity being given for me to envision it without a proper map.

 

Still, the story of this remarkable mountain was intriguing, enough to have me neglecting another book to read it.  That said, you have to go into it with the awareness that the portion about the eruption itself and its direct consequences is not very long at all.  I'm pretty used to this from history books, which never seem to focus as much on their titular subjects as one would think, but I can definitely see it bothering others, so reader beware in that respect.

 

4 stars out of 5.

Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow

Hamilton fever has swept the nation, and I am not exempt.  I put off listening to the musical soundtrack for a long time mainly because I am not a rap/hip-hop type person, and that is, of course, what Hamilton's soundtrack is primarily comprised of.  But then PBS had an awesome documentary about the musical and the history behind it, and so I downloaded the soundtrack from Amazon and we listened to it on our way to New Jersey for Thanksgiving.  And on the way back.  And about 20 other times.  And when a friend on Facebook started singing the praises of the biography that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write such a musical and said friend said he was looking for someone to discuss it with, I put in a request to the library.  Perks of working at a university: using the university inter-library system to request books so you don't have to wait for 30 people ahead of you to read the 700-page biography first.  Score!

Let me tell you this: Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton is heavy.  Definitely too heavy to carry around in my purse, which meant I had to pick away at it in smaller chunks than I would like.  And for those curious about how the real history differs from the musical, the answer is...a lot.  Mainly, Miranda played with the time line in huge ways, but he also drastically dramatized the relationship between Hamilton and Angelica Schuyler, and made Burr into a much more prominent and sympathetic character in Hamilton's story than he really was.

Now, for the book itself.  It spans Hamilton's entire life, but portions of it are necessarily clearer than others.  Hamilton was born in the Caribbean, making him one of the most prominent foreigners to feature in American history.  While the facts of Hamilton's childhood, such as the death of a succession of relatives that left him essentially, though not technically, orphaned is known, there are necessarily fewer documents that support Hamilton's own thoughts and development during this time.  Consequently, Chernow falls into a common pitfall of biographers of historical figures, who write hundreds of years after the fact.  Namely, he projects.  He goes into a lot of "It must have meant," and "Hamilton must have felt," and so on, a pattern that continues throughout the book in regards to how events of Hamilton's early life "must have" influenced his later life, though Chernow himself admits that Hamilton essentially severed himself from his childhood after his arrival in the United States, and particularly following the American Revolution.  Some of this projection also seems to apply to Aaron Burr and his background, though I can't say that I delved too deeply into Chernow's sited sources to see what he was drawing on for Burr's feelings on matters that weren't directly drawn from his own words.

My only other complaint about this book is in two parts.  First, Chernow sometimes has a tendency to go out of chronological order.  When he sees a connection between the events currently at hand and something that comes up later, he sometimes jumps to the later event to make sure that the connection is clear--and then ends up re-hashing the event, its precedents, and the connection.  This happens particularly in regards to elections.  As Chernow covers a variety of election levels at any one time, sometimes their orders and the impacts they have on each other get a bit jumbled together in the telling, and then when they come back later, it creates a sensation of, "Oh, wait, I thought we already covered this...?"

Other than that, I enjoyed this quite a bit.  I'm not typically very interested in American history, preferring European and Asian history, but Chernow does a great job of bringing Hamilton and his contemporaries to life.  Hamilton is definitely an under-studied figure in American history, overlooked in favor of the the other Founding Father such as Washington and Jefferson.  And while Chernow doesn't hesitate to point out how devious figures such as Madison and Jefferson could be, he also didn't shy away from pointing out Hamilton's own hypocrisy on various fronts and how he didn't always support the democratic republic form of government, instead favoring something akin to a monarchy (though not on the exact same lines as the British one).  He also doesn't go easy on Hamilton when getting into the Reynolds affair, pointing out how callous Hamilton was in arranging rendezvous with Maria Reynolds while trying to keep Eliza in Albany...though he does seem remarkably forgiving of the affair afterwards. 

Overall, I think this a great addition to the other volumes of biographies tied to figures of this period.  Hamilton has been very overlooked, and some of the other Founders much aggrandized in ways that, after reading this, don't seem entirely deserved.  Of course, reading biographies of those other figures might provide a different perspective; biographers do tend to be remarkably sympathetic toward their subjects, though understandably so given the amount of time they have to spend studying them.  Definitely worth a read, if you're interested in American history and have the time to devote.

4 stars out of 5.

Frozen in Time - Mitchell Zuckoff

I've read another of Zuckoff's books, Lost in Shangri-La, which is about a rescue of a group of Americans who were in a plane crash in a remote area of New Guinea during World War II and ended up in a village that had very little outside contact prior to the crash and the Americans' arrival.  With Frozen in Time, Zuckoff moved on to another island rescue mission, but instead of the tropics, this one goes to the Arctic, to the glaciers of Greenland.

There are two stories here: the historical, World War II crash-and-rescue story, and the modern story about the attempts to get a recovery mission up and running.  In 1942, a plane crash in New Zealand leaves five men stranded, and the rescue attempts strand nine more in a different location.  And the rescue attempts for the combined crews start stranding and claiming the lives of even more men.  On top of everything, it's not expected that men can live more than a month on the glaciers of Greenland, and winter is bearing down.

I did find this book a little misleading.  I knew several crashes were going to happen in this book, but when the modern chapters started, I got the distinct impression from Zuckoff's narrative that a lot more people died than actually did.  Don't get me wrong, people die in this book--too many.  But Zuckoff gives the impression early in the book that all of the stranded men died, and that the recovery mission was for all of them.  Consequently, I spent much of the book going, "But how do they know this happened this way?"  Well, they know because most the men from the B-17 plane that went down in search of the first plane made it out alive.  The other parts of the story are left more in fog, because those people didn't make it out.

The modern part of the story is mostly comprised of negotiating for funding to get a recovery mission going.  This guy named Lou wants to find the Duck, one of the rescue planes that went out, but he doesn't have the money to do it so he spends his time trying to get the funds from the US military, particularly the Coast Guard (who the Duck belonged to ).  Zuckoff himself ends up pitching in a significant amount of money, at one point even agreeing to use his house as collateral for a loan--though the loan never actually goes through.  This all made me raise an eyebrow at Zuckoff's judgment; while he's perfectly within his rights to spend his money however he wants, I definitely started to wonder how colored this narrative was by his desire to see it through, and I'm not sure that it's the role of the author (Zuckoff was already writing the book when he chipped in the money) to be so financially invested.  Maybe that's weird of me, but I can't quite shake that feeling.

The rescue  mission story is overall interesting, but the modern one is not.  After the fundraising, there's a lot of shifting equipment around on ice, and the end of this is pretty apparent.  Basically, it can only go two ways--they find the plane or they don't, and either way the book isn't long enough to include any sort of cover on the actual recovery mission, rather than the "let's find out where it is" mission.  As a result, I felt kind of bummed and a bit deceived by the end of this, and it's made me a little leery of Zuckoff's other works, though I would still recommend Lost in Shangri-La.

I read this book for the 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge for the category of "A book with a subtitle," the subtitle being "An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest For Lost Heroes of World War II."

3 stars out of 5.

And a Bottle of Rum - Wayne Curtis

Let me put this out there to begin with: I am not a big drinker.  I can nurse a cocktail all night long, and beer and wine?  No, thank you.  That said, I don't mind reading about drinking.  And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails seemed like an interesting title, so I tossed it into my Amazon cart a while back when I needed something to push me over the limit for my add on items to ship.  It's a food history, and I love those, and also seemed like a fun spin on American (and Caribbean) history, which is a field I'm normally not too fond of because I find it boring compared to history in the rest of the world.

Curtis' book does focus exclusively on rum, though a few other types of alcohol are mentioned in passing.  The portions of the book are all named after a cocktail, though the section sometimes only bears a loose connection to the cocktail it's named for and "themed" to.  And this isn't a very comprehensive history, to be sure.  It focuses mostly on the United States, with maybe two chapters looking more at the Caribbean.  And because this book is rum-focused, it doesn't really touch on "New World" history until rum production began, which is significantly after the New World was "discovered" by Europeans, and obviously far, far after the history of people living in the Americas began.  (Remember, there were people in all of these places before the Europeans sailed onto the scene and began killing and enslaving people.)

Curtis keeps his history brief and high-level, glossing over a lot of the messier aspects of history such as slavery (vital to rum production in the Caribbean because of the labor commitments required to grow and process sugarcane, the byproduct of which is molasses and is what rum is based on), war, and even rum production itself.  For example, he talks about producers throwing in things like dung or the contents of a chamber pot to assist with fermentation, but doesn't really go into what this would do or the potential health consequences it might have.  He breezes over a lot of things, focusing on the romantic and patriotic instead of dirtier side of history that is always there, only really lingering on how awful the original rum must have tasted.

This book is basically the cocktail of the history genre: light and fun without a lot of depth.  True, some of this might be attributable to the checkered history that alcohol in general and rum in particular has; with periods of dry states and countries, rum running, and smuggling rampant in the various periods Curtis touches on, there's a lot of documentation on rum that just doesn't exist to be drawn on.  It's a historian's nightmare, and I think probably is a big reason why this is as surface-level as it is.  Still, it did make me want a tiki drink!

3.5 stars out of 5.

The Good Girls Revolt - Lynn Povich

One of the newest Amazon series is Good Girls Revolt.  I started watching it recently, and immediately began to wonder what was the story behind it.  So I Googled, and it turned out that it was based off this book: The Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich, which is about the women who worked at Newsweek in 1970 suing the magazine for discrimination based on their sex.  Though women worked at Newsweek, they were confined to low-paying and low-prestige roles, such as delivering mail, clipping articles from other publications, and checking facts in stories that (male) writers produced.  Unfortunately, this wasn't as riveting a story as I'd thought.

The thing is, the lawsuit wasn't really a lawsuit.  I mean, yes, a lawsuit was filed, several times, but the women kept dropping the suit and turning to arbitration with the management instead.  There isn't really anything interesting here, other than that it happened.  It's mostly just a bunch of negotiations, most of which didn't have any results and few of which had long-term results; in fact, the book starts off with a prologue featuring a few women who found themselves still facing discrimination in the 2000s!  Knowing that going into the story, it was a rather discouraging tale from the beginning.

There were two things I found interesting about this.  First, the exact form that it takes.  Lynn Povich was one of the women who worked at Newsweek and was part of the suit, and was actually the only female writer on the staff of the New York bureau when the conflict started.  Because of her personal involvement and her journalistic background, the book is half memoir, and half traditionally researched book.  While she relates her own experiences and memories of the events, she also makes sure to include plenty of quotes from interviews with the other parties involved, including the women, the management, and the lawyers.  The inclusion of all of these different perspectives helps to give a really cohesive feel to the book, even though it's quite short.  For example, she makes sure to include the women for whom the suit didn't work out, either because they ended up being punished for their daring, or because they didn't actually want to advance, and were happy in their pre-suit positions, but felt like they were being forced to advance so as not let down their fellow women.  The second part was that the first lawyer who took on the case was Eleanor Holmes Norton, who currently serves as the District of Columbia's representative to Congress!  (With limited powers because screw all of us in DC, right?  But still, pretty cool.)

The book finishes up with a rather cheesy "Where Are They Now" epilogue, which feels like it came off an entertainment news broadcast.  It definitely suited the 1970s Newsweek that Povich portrayed in her book.  Honestly, her portrayal of the magazine's atmosphere was probably the most vivid part of the book.  The descriptions of how people there interacted, how they behaved while waiting for the stories to come in--playing baseball in the hallways and having rampant affairs in the infirmary, for example--definitely gave a sense of time and place to the events in the book.  It's hard to imagine such an atmosphere anywhere and anywhen except at Newsweek in the 70s.  (In fact, a few people said that it wasn't like that, even at other magazines.)  But the story itself isn't interesting, even though the prologue hints that it's a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court and essentially changed the workplace forever.  In fact, it wasn't like that at all, and I was left rather disappointed in the end.

Basically, if you're hoping for the drama of the Good Girls Revolt on Amazon, stick with the show.  The book is interesting if you're into feminist negotiations, but even for someone who's interested in law, it was rather a let down overall.

2.5 stars out of 5.

The Black Count - Tom Reiss

The Black Count was another book I was reading as catch-up for the online book club over at The Deliberate Reader, but I was also planning on doing a "Read This, Then That" with it and The Count of Monte Cristo (also read for book club catch-up) because, uhm, the subtitle of The Black Count is "Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo."  Unfortunately, that didn't work out so hot, for a couple of reasons.

The Black Count is supposed to be a biography of Alex Dumas, father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, who served in the army during the French Revolutionary era.  Reiss tries to make the argument that it was Alex Dumas' experiences that inspired The Count of Monte Cristo, but honestly, after read the whole book, I can only see a few tenuous connections; the strongest points of influence don't even have to do with a Dumas/Edmond Dantes connection, but rather in general constructions and side characters.  The only connection between the two directly is that Alex Dumas was imprisoned for two years.  Edmond Dantes was imprisoned for fourteen.  But whereas Dantes was thrown into prison because he'd been framed, Dumas was imprisoned because he was an actual prisoner of war and had made the mistake of winding up in a territory that was at war with the revolutionary French Republic that he served.  So honestly, I don't think that "Alex Dumas inspired Edmond Dantes!" is an argument that holds water; Reiss even quotes Alexandre Dumas in the prologue of the book, from when the novelist said that he was inspired by a news article about a serial killer and added a revenge plot to bulk it up when he wrote the book.  But that doesn't mean that this book was bad...

...it just wasn't, predominantly, about Alex Dumas.  The first several chapters build up the Dumas family history, it's true, but after that the focus of the book turns largely to the French Revolution as a whole, and with a particular focus on the time when Napoleon was rising to power.  Reiss' main goal actually seems to be to illustrate what a jerk Napoleon was, and he uses Dumas to illustrate that point rather than to actually tell Dumas' story in and of itself.  I think it was an interesting book--I wrote my senior thesis for university on the French Revolution, and particularly on the noyades de Nantes, the mass mass drownings that Reiss mentions briefly here, but I actually hadn't known about a lot of the Napoleonic parts that Reiss goes into.  This is probably because no one really knows whether to properly include Napoleon in the main Revolution or not, and so it gets a bit jumbled up when it's taught.  I learned a lot on those aspects, and about things that happened outside of Paris, which, again, classes don't typically go into.  But once the revolution actually gets underway, Dumas himself really falls into the background as Reiss lets us know about everything else going on, so I think putting this forth as a book that's really about Dumas is a bit of a stretch.

So, overall, an interesting history book...but a biography, or something about the "real" Count of Monte Cristo?  I think not.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Shutting Out the Sun - Michael Zielenziger

Shutting Out the Sun is really about Japan in the first decade of the 2000s, and as such parts of it might be just a tiny bit outdated.  However, there's still some really interesting stuff in here.  The thing is, I think Zielenziger divided the book into two parts.  A very interesting, well-written first part, and a second part that's basically just economic info and isn't as good for reasons I'll discuss more below.

The first part of the book really focuses on the phenomenon of hikikomori, which is a mental health epidemic (Is epidemic too strong a word?  I don't really think so, but maybe.) affecting primarily young men in Japan, where the sufferers shut themselves away, refusing to leave their rooms for months or even years, and refusing to let anyone else see them, as well.  The cause seems to be rooted in what amounts to a form of social anxiety that's brought out because Japan's social constructs are very rigid and community-based, and there's not a lot of ways to exert one's personality.  Zielenziger even points out that things that Westerners would normally count as asserting one's personality, such as unusual clothes, collections, etc., tend to be just another way of fitting in with a certain social group in Japan.  In this part of the book, Zielenziger makes a point to talk to a lot of Japanese citizens who either identify as hikikomori or who study and try to help the hikikomori.  In his introduction, he even made a point to say that he felt a need to include as many Japanese voices as possible because, as an outsider and a Westerner to boot, he couldn't really get a grasp on the hikikomori phenomenon as well as those who are "inside" Japanese society do.  I thought this was a very good point, and was happy to see that Zielenziger did such a good job with this.  I also particularly liked his chapter on women in contemporary Japanese society, and how careers, marriage, and birth control are handled; this was another chapter in which I think there were a good number of Japanese voices to help give us outsiders a look at what's really going on in Japan.

But then we hit the second part of the book.  In the second part, Zielenziger tries to make an argument for the economic and social issues that have formed an atmosphere in which young men can shut themselves away from society and the national birth rate can plummet because women refuse to have children.  In the second part of the book (roughly the second half; there is no real "part" division built in) the Japanese voices nearly vanish.  Zielenziger still has a lot of citations and there's definitely some research here, but it's pretty much all from a Western point of view and, though he does make an attempt to point out American imperialism towards the end, it's somewhat of a weak one and lets the West in general and the United States in general off very lightly for contributing to Japan's current situation.  Granted, many social constructs play into the social problems now facing Japan--but if you're going to make an argument that economics is essentially behind the social problems, then you really need to put a heavier does of the blame on the country that forced the economic situation on Japan in the first place.  That would be us, the good ol' US, and Japan probably doesn't have as much freedom to just "ditch" the US as Zielenziger implies.  Because of the lack of voices in the second half of the book, it does come off as very superior-sounding.  Very much, "Well the west is like this, why can't Japan just change to be like this, too?" with only a passing nod to the conditions that do prevent Japan from just adapting Western attitudes.  And then, of course, there's this kind of expression that the "Western" way is the only way and a presenting things as globalization when they're really imperialism.  Yes, globalization is a real force, but the things that Zielenziger brings up here more often than not fall into imperialism instead.

Overall, some interesting information and interviews to begin with, but the second half is a work I'm very leery of praising.  I liked this book overall, because of that first half, but have some reservations about the second and don't feel confident giving it more than...

3 stars out of 5.