Dave
Dave and his wife Jane own the bookstore. Unlike everyone else there, he knows nothing about the business - but from constantly asking questions, he’s trying to learn. The staff very much hopes he’ll succeed before he starts coming up with ideas he’d like them to implement. A trial lawyer in his prior life and now a part-time human rights lawyer focusing on Africa, he’s looking at the ways in which the bookstore can be a forum for critical issues. Examples include increasing diversity on the island, confronting xenophobia, racism, and considering the distinction between freedom of speech and hate speech.
Picks:
Through snapshots of five young children beginning with their death in a 1944 German bombing of London, this incisive novel imagines their long lives had they survived. Light Perpetual recounts the music scene in the 60’s, a mental breakdown of a bus conductor and his later renewal, gang warfare’s imprint on one of them, another’s complicity in a property boom and bust cycle, and reconciliation between a long divorced couple. With a magic touch, Francis Spufford affirms his fascination with “the complicated fractured broken-up difficult surface of the real world.” Easily, the best literary fiction I’ve read since Hamnet and A Gentleman in Moscow.
Thanks to the dominance of Hitler’s U-boats over the Atlantic shipping lanes, Great Britain was starving – for food to feed its citizens and goods to fight the war. This is the story of the design, by a medically unfit former British naval officer, of a board game demonstrating how to sink Hitler’s U-boats. In highly skilled hands, these war games illustrated that the British naval officers were doing it all wrong. The problem was that Britain’s men were at war, and the only available work force to teach these ol’ sea dogs that they didn’t know how to hunt U-Boats were uneducated young women! Simon Parkin’s never before told story of how that happened is a marvelous read, by measure both riveting and surreal. ~ Dave
Rundell, a retired American foreign service officer who spent most of his career based in Saudi Arabia, writes insightfully about the vast changes in the kingdom’s governance during the past two decades. In the process, he blasts a hole in typical western stereotypes. (Yes, female professional wrestling really is now legal.) Unlike messy democracies, absolute rulers really do get to take the long view. Rundell is cautiously optimistic about many of the very significant pivots that are being put in place while being fully aware that these big bets could all fall apart.
The life forces that formed William Shakespeare – the English language’s greatest writer and dramatist – are lost to history, giving Maggie O’Farrell in her exquisite Hamnet license to imagine an answer. Told through the lens of his endearing yet peculiarly fascinating wife, one learns of a couple who could only have been with one another. With consummate skill, O’Farrell said enough so that the shadow of what made him him came somewhat in focus. By the novel’s end, it was hard to understand how the unimagined Shakespeare could have been different than the one she created. Yet this skin and bones of the novel gave way to the pages describing Hamnet’s ultimate act of love for his sickly twin sister. And from that, Hamlet – his greatest play. The ending was impossible to imagine and impossible to be other than it was.
The light went on as I watched a proud grandson selling honey from his sidewalk stand that he had collected from his dad’s hive. Figuring that creating my own hive might ramp me up in his eyes, I turned to this book. If a guy living on a houseboat in the Fraser River just south of Vancouver who knew nothing about anything beyond the ability to tell a good story could succeed as a beekeeper, so could I. Even if you have no interest in scratching your inner apiarist, read this book to learn about the fascinating world of bees from Doroghy’s keen eye, or just to enjoy the absurd adventures of living with thousands of bees on a houseboat.
Margaret Thatcher was probably the most significant PM in modern UK's history since Churchill, and her nativist views are doubly of interest in the age of Trump. Yet aside from that imperfect parallel, Moore's third Thatcher biography stands alone as both authoritative and fascinating. The telling of her Euroskeptism and how it led to her ultimate downfall helps readers better understand Brexit, and how a woman with such dogged and unwavering views could so effectively bludgeon her male cabinet members to do her bidding, year after year. Even the boys who captured her old job never managed to escape her raptor like presence. Perhaps, still quietly circling high over Britain until - provoked by a deviation too far from the way things should be - she will again dive down for the kill. ~ Dave
England's towering novelist, Ian McEwan (Man Booker award for Amsterdam and now this novella.) has decided to have some fun writing a political satire. (Good idea, that, since our two countries seem like they're trying hard to self-destruct.) On the surface, it's all about Brexit and Boris but his readers will know he had his eye on a certain other political leader as he wrote it. With more than a nod to Kafka's Metamorphosis, he's turned the Prime Minister into a cockroach. In his new exoskeleton, the PM bludgeons his cabinet into support something he calls Reversalism. Henceforth, the flow of money is upended so workers pay a salary to be allowed to work. To get the needed cash, they earn it by going shopping, where the shops pay them for their purchases. Sounds like a country run by a maniac, doesn't it?
Pulitzer Prize winner ( Empire Falls, 2002) Richard Russo has pulled off another great novel. Three middle-class retirement-age white guys who graduated from a small private college 44 years earlier, are reuniting at Martha's Vineyard, where they had previously held a college farewell party. Ho hum? Not at all. The story begins the day they received their Viet Nam draft lottery numbers that changed their lives. They were each in love with their wild and rich sorority classmate Jacy Calloway, but as their farewell party ended, she disappeared without a trace. Slowly, Russo feeds his readers with bits of their intervening lives while weaving Jacy's disappearance into the telling. One of them secretly turns to a retired island cop for clues, which ultimately leads to the answer they've waited for, and an insightful exploration of the impact it had on how they felt about themselves and one another. You'll be right to think your hunches about what happened to Jacy will likely turn out to be hopelessly wrong.
Diplomacy is the business of discreetly representing one's country's interests by following orders of the President while prudently recommending to the boss what should be done. Beginning as a Foreign Service officer in Vietnam to his career's denouement after his brilliant work leading to the Dayton peace accords where he effectively ended the war in the Balkans, Richard Holbrooke did the opposite. Many fascinating examples are shared as to how, seemingly, he tried to fail. Despite this, throughout his long career he continued to distinguish himself as an insightful observer of the key foreign policy issues confronting all presidents from Nixon through Obama. Our Man is the book to read for a combination of best understanding a half century of American foreign policy and the jarring complexity of our most baffling diplomat. Parker suggests that we remember that an individual can be brilliant even though he may have been "...a child who fiercely resisted toilet training."
The AI personal assistant McEwen puts in the flat of the not so clever protagonist, with a not much more clever girlfriend, is on steroids compared to the ones now on the market. What it does to their lives should make all of us think twice about ever letting something like that in our house. Or maybe it’s no longer an “it.”
If you are an experience mountaineer or (say) a designer of quilts, read this book since both of you will then have one thing in common; a sense of wonderment that any sane person would (let alone could) do what Alex Honnold did. Considered the last great rock climbing challenge, he climbed 3000 feet straight up the most difficult route on El Capitan without help - no rope, no partner, no equipment. The author, himself an elite rock climber, astutely explains how someone can seemingly lack the capacity to experience fear. The complexities of us humans are magnified in this telling. The purity of the pursuit butting up against the pressure to monetize doing the impossible; petty cruelty and selfless concern for others, and self-confidence bordering on insanity all the while preparing for the climb with thousands of hours choreographing the exact placement of every hand hold and a nubbin of friction for each foot hold. By the end we wonder; which of us is living the fullest of a lives.
We've all heard about how the Facebooks of the world only feed us versions of the truth supporting our biases, and how our every click feeds a clever algorithm giving us more content proving that our truth is THE truth. After all, how else will they keep us clicking their sites - which in turn drives advertisers to send us targeted ads? Jill Abramson, the former editor in chief of the New York Times, vividly makes it clear the problem is much worse than most of us probably think. It's hard to escape the conclusion that we are collectively getting dumber by only reading sources that are cheerleaders. Profiling the creation of BuzzFeed and Vice, and then the reinvention of the Washington Post and her old paper to compete with these assaults on balanced reporting, Abramson recounts the gritty details. Happily, the Post and Times finally got it right, assuring we can still get a broad spectrum of news. Luddites über alles.
This is the most recent in a long series of Montreal based crime novels with a big following on Bainbridge. The ever-brilliant Chief Inspector has never been in the middle of a baffling murder investigation in which he is a key witness at the same time his career is on the line owing to a dicey judgment call he made concerning a major drug bust on a previous case. Penny’s clever if not devious mind links the murder of a prominent Montreal financier to a 150-year old dispute between beneficiaries of a will that gave all of an estate to each son of the deceased. And therein lies the tale.
Even if you're not among the large population of Americans with heart disease or a family history of it, Sandeep Jauhar'sHeart, a History is a gripping story. How our heart pump works, and the history of wacky and brilliant experiments into its mysteries that refused to go away, speaks to the broader issue of how science makes progress over time. From the fatal heart attack suffered by his grandfather in rural India to his own heart disease, this cardiologist clearly lifts the fog around the various ways the heart can fail and steps we can take to avoid the operating room.
Leaving the comforts of Vienna, young Lucius Krzelwewski, a physician barely out of medical school, is posted to a WW I field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains. Sister Margarete, the head nurse who may or may not be a nun, and the brutal conditions of a nearly abandoned hospital, quickly upend his cloistered world. His struggle to comprehend how ill equipped he is as the only physician left in this nearly forgotten outpost, and what to make of the baffling head nurse, frame this tale. One day, a severely injured soldier who can’t or won’t talk arrives and is unresponsive to treatment. Krzelwewski sees no solution other than to send him away to an uncertain fate. The war ends, he returns to Vienna but is consumed with the need to find the woman he loves and perhaps come to peace with what happened to the winter soldier. All in all, a beautiful tale.
Egan conjures up a wonderful tableau of characters in this richly told novel about NYC during WW II. A precocious ingénue turned hard hat diver is the star of the show, a crippled sister who briefly arises Lazarus-like, a fraught dad, and a gangster who can't quite decide if he fits the mold. This tale starts slowly but properly so, since developing these complex characters understandably takes time. The research into the functioning of New York's waterfront during the war effort is fascinating and her treatment of how all these lives connect delights to the very end. No wonder Egan is a previous Pulitzer Prize winner.
The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming! Actually, they had already come. Sputnik in 1957, then Laika the Samoyed, and finally Yuri Gugarin, up and back in 1961. The humiliation was too much for Kennedy. Months before he was killed, he announced we'd be on the Moon by the decade's end. We were in no position to come close, let alone beat the Soviets. That we did both, and within the deadline, is recounted using layman language in this wonderful new book; one of several coming out now to mark the 50th anniversary. An untested rocket, breaking free of Earth's orbit, getting to the precise spot needed for the trip around the moon's back side out of radio contact with Houston, and re-entry were all done for the first time by the crew of Apollo 8. Why not? After all, if the 7,100,000 of Apollo's parts and systems performed at 99.9% reliability, they only had to contend with the failure of 5,600 defects during the trip.
From studies the world over of people in every economic strata, one in every six people suffered at least four "Adverse Childhood Experiences" (ACE) when they were young, with the result that they are 10 times as more likely to attempt suicide and significantly more at risk of heart disease, cancer, and any of the auto immune disorders. After reading Dr. Nadine Burke Harris' The Deepest Well, I learned how wrong I was to assume childhood trauma caused only psychological difficulties. It helps us to understand why effectively fighting obesity, diabetes, and ADHD to name a few may first require an understand of the underlying causes. Even if one believes the issue doesn't personally resonate, the science of how early trauma fundamentally alters the brains of its victims is fascinating.
A British alchemist of the English language paints a New York we could only imagine in the telling. The story revolves around the clash that results with the arrival of a mysterious transplant from England into the city’s affluent merchant class. Of course, Spufford throws a very baffling young woman into the mix.
Both odd and lovely, this is the account of a friendship between two brilliant Israeli psychologists—Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky—whose research upended prior entrenched views about how the human mind works.
We all have some sense of the Vietnam War, most of us viewing it as one of our major military failures. This granular coverage of a battle that U.S. forces ended up winning in the technical sense, but losing in every other way, is riveting for its lucid play by play coverage of how our soldiers fought against a motivated enemy. It also reminds us that our military and political leaders, in nearly every sense, were in denial of the forces against us and unwilling to respond to the needs of the front-line soldiers. I hope our current military leaders will read this book .
How is it that after spending four winters in Cape Town working on and reading about post-Apartheid South Africa that I remained relatively clueless about the complexity of the race question until I read this book? Stir in his childhood stories of being dragooned into multiple all Sunday church services by his formidable mama, and the result is pure joy and wonder. How did he survive to become the comic he is, or maybe, how could he have become who he is without growing up as he did? I haven't a clue but do know the clarity of his writing and his life as a kid in the fascinating mess of South Africa made for a marvelous read.
This pile of Christopher Hitchens’ essays written in the decade before his death reminded me of his nasty wit and how few English language words I know. In one, he tips his hat to Charles Dickens while also making it clear the great man was all wet when writing about religion: “… with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes in A Christmas Carol, (Dickens) took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers.”
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like for the fetus when mom is experiencing as much, if not more, intimate attention than is wanted at the moment, McEwan provides the answer through his narrator, the most precocious unborn in literature. Dryly humorous and poignant, McEwan gives us an incisive, talking and hearing being who misses nothing that mom, dad, and dad’s odious brother are doing while he/she bobs around in amniotic fluid, itching to get out and make things right.
Many of us from this part of the world don’t recognize the citizens of the country who voted for Trump. Theroux’s account helps. Avoiding cities, he wanders through backwaters, talking and listening. What his readers get is an awakening, but one we expect when reading about, say, Mozambique. Over and over, we learn about trailer parks, gracious citizens, gun shows, and that running water is a luxury. But we don’t learn why the Gates Foundation has never been seen down there. Reading Deep South and what it says about the Trump phenomenon causes me to hope Theroux will next profile working class white men from, say, Ohio.
Towles is highly regarded for his novels set in sophisticated milieus. Still, how can any novel of the life of a man condemned to spend his entire life in a hotel possibly hold any sensible reader’s attention? It commanded rather than held mine. The simple tableau of the inside of a hotel allows the reader to focus on the plot, Towles exquisite development of the main characters, and the protagonist’s incisive mind. My greatest joy was experiencing Towles’ deft continual pulling rabbits out of a hat when I didn’t see them coming. Easily, my favorite fiction read of the past year or two.
This whimsical story starts in Kansas Territory in 1857, amid anti- and pro-slavery battlegrounds, in and between beer hall towns, where John Brown traveled before his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry. The narrator: Henry, a diminutive black shoe-shine boy who says he's 11 or 13 years old, makes some kind of sense of his life with John Brown during those years. James McBride, with an exquisite use of the patois of the times, recounts Brown's blinding adherence to his made-up version of the Bible in his effort to free slaves - whether they like it or not. The result is an hilarious and confounding story, rich in characters, and told through imagined conversations with the heroes of the fight against slavery, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. But the story's true hero is language. The description of a how a dance-hall girl's dress, decorated with flowers, moved as she slithered down the stairs should be on anyone's list for the most delightful paragraph of fiction every written. It's well and good that McBride won a National Book Award for this one.
Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot’s Middlemarch both revolve around 19th century English mores, particularly as they speak to both the constricted lives of peasant women (“Tess of the D’Ubervilles”) and the gentry (“Middlemarch”. Tess can never outrun her shadow and the privileged women of Middlemarch are equally tethered to strict rules of acceptable behavior. At least Eliot in her engrossing story makes clear that men are nearly as hidebound as women.
Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot’s Middlemarch both revolve around 19th century English mores, particularly as they speak to both the constricted lives of peasant women (“Tess of the D’Ubervilles”) and the gentry (“Middlemarch”. Tess can never outrun her shadow and the privileged women of Middlemarch are equally tethered to strict rules of acceptable behavior. At least Eliot in her engrossing story makes clear that men are nearly as hidebound as women.
