Category: Books (Page 5 of 10)

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers a fresh and compelling portrait of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold the country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally-and willing to fight to the end. In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people “the art of being fearless.” It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it’s also an intimate domestic drama set against the backdrop of Churchill’s prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports-some released only recently-Larson provides a new lens on London’s darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents’ wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela’s illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the cadre of close advisers who comprised Churchill’s “Secret Circle,” including his lovestruck private secretary, John Colville; newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook; and the Rasputin-like Frederick Lindemann. The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today’s political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when-in the face of unrelenting horror-Churchill’s eloquence, courage, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together.

Charles Salmans on The Splendid and the Vile

Tom Igoe on The Splendid and the Vile

THE RUSSIAN JOB by Douglas Smith |

Kirkus Reviews

The hair-raising account of a great humanitarian act in which the United States provided vital assistance to the Soviet Union. Historian and translator Smith (Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs, 2016) reminds readers that World War I and civil war devastated Russian agriculture because the fighting armies lived off the land. By 1920, the Bolsheviks had largely won, but the government continued to forcibly extract grain from the peasants. Then the rains stopped. At first, Lenin “welcomed the famine, since he believed it would destroy the people’s faith in God and the tsar. Revolution, not charity, would save the peasants, he said.” By the summer, faced with mass starvation and violence, he changed his mind. Many philanthropists and international charities  responded to pleas for help, but only one organization had the immense resources required: the American Relief Administration, led by Herbert Hoover, who had already impressed the world with his relief of mass starvation in Belgium and northern France during WWI and then again in Europe after the armistice. A successful businessman, Hoover employed the same talents to organize a vast enterprise led by loyal underlings who oversaw the distribution chain, from docks to warehouses to transportation to the soup kitchens. A few Soviet leaders were congenial, but most believed that the ARA was a nefarious capitalist plot. Secret police harassed the Americans and arrested Russian employees but sometimes, unpredictably, helped by cutting through red tape. Local officials were usually grateful. Infrastructure, housing, sanitation, and disease were terrible, far worse than in Europe. In an often agonizing but necessary book, the author includes letters and anecdotes by participants as well as often horrific photographs, all of which tell a grim story. Starving people do not overthrow governments, so it’s unlikely American aid saved the Soviet Union, but it was a magnificent achievement—and Smith adeptly navigates all elements of the story. Except for Hoover biographers, American scholars pay little attention to this episode; it quickly vanished from Russian history. Although the catastrophic Russian famine and American relief efforts are not completely forgotten,
this expert account deserves a large readership.

The Sudden Sea

The Great Hurricane of 1938

Mystery writer Scotti (The Hammer’s Eye, 1988, etc.) applies her suspense-building skills to the story of a murderous storm that capped a punishing decade.

It’s hard to go wrong with the raw material provided by the Great Hurricane of 1938. The narrative follows the storm as it made landfall in Florida, pushed up the coast, and raced from Cape Hatteras to Long Island in a mere seven hours. Where appropriate, Scotti adds brief background material on the nature of hurricanes, the quality of weather forecasting at the time, and the histories of the towns hardest hit, particularly in Rhode Island; she also compares the 1938 storm to others in the past. But she saves her most powerful writing for the hurricane itself, describing the storm watch and the havoc wrought when it reached land with the help of a wide sampling of firsthand accounts. “The scene around us in the attic was unbelievable,” recalls a woman who was ten at the time. “The waves, at the level of the attic floor, beat unceasingly against the house, which trembled and shook.” Scotti matches the wild images of the eyewitness accounts with her own flair for descriptive narrative: “The ocean banged on doors and windows . . . then it went upstairs into the bedrooms where families sought refuge, and chased them higher yet, into third floors and attics, onto rooftops, until there was no place to go but into the sea.” Almost 700 people died, 433 of them in Rhode Island, where the storm surge buried Providence under 12 feet of water and where Scotti concentrates her story. With power and phone lines down, it was days before people understood the full extent of the devastation, which along the shoreline in particular was complete: “What they eye saw, the mind could not process and the heart refused to accept.”

A darkly intense portrait. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen, 4 maps)

Kirkus

Midnight in Chernobyl: The untold story of the world’s greatest nuclear disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

The full story of the Chernobyl catastrophe.

In April 1986, a massive accident destroyed a reactor at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station near the town of Pripyat, now a ghost-town tourist destination, in Ukraine. The disaster sent a radioactive cloud across the Soviet Union and Europe, triggered pandemonium and coverups, involved thousands of cleanup workers, and played out at a cost of $128 billion against the secrecy and paranoia of Soviet life at the time. In this vivid and exhaustive account, Higginbotham (A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, 2014), a contributor to the New Yorker, Wired, GQ, and other publications, masterfully re-creates the emotions, intrigue, and denials and disbelief of Communist Party officials, workers, engineers, and others at every stage. He takes readers directly to the scene: the radioactive blaze, the delayed evacuation of residents from the apartment buildings in “workers’ paradise” Pripyat, the treatment of the injured, and the subsequent investigation and “show trial” of scapegoats in a tragedy caused by both reactor failings and operator errors. Drawing on interviews, reports, and once-classified archives, the author shows how the crash program of Soviet reactor building involved design defects, shoddy workmanship, and safety flaws—but made “sanctified icons” of arrogant nuclear scientists. Higginbotham offers incisive snapshots of those caught up in the nightmare, including politicians ignorant of nuclear physics, scientists “paralyzed by indecision,” doctors treating radiation sickness, and refugees shunned by countrymen. We experience the “bewildered stupor” of the self-assured power plant director, who asked repeatedly, “What happened? What happened?” and watch incredulously as uninformed citizens hold a parade under a radioactive cloud in Kiev. At every turn, Higginbotham unveils revealing aspects of Communist life, from the lack of proscribed photocopiers to make maps for responders to the threats (shooting, relief of Party card) for failure to obey orders.

Written with authority, this superb book reads like a classic disaster story and reveals a Soviet empire on the brink.

Kirkus – one of 2019 best books

Tom Igoe’s notes: Notes on Midnight in Chernobyl

Harris Hester and Tom Igoe have scheduled a virtual meeting for Wednesday, March 18 at 10:00 AM to discuss Midnight in Chernobyl. Rick Agresta is setting up an audio/video link using Zoom. All he needs is your email, which if you replied to me in the last few days, you should be on the list below. If you are not on the list and would like to participate please email him directly – richard.agresta@gmail.com.

KIRKUS REVIEW

Powers’ (Orfeo, 2014, etc.) 12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life. 

In this work, Powers takes on the subject of nature, or our relationship to nature, as filtered through the lens of environmental activism, although at its heart the book is after more existential concerns. As is the case with much of Powers’ fiction, it takes shape slowly—first in a pastiche of narratives establishing the characters (a psychologist, an undergraduate who died briefly but was revived, a paraplegic computer game designer, a homeless vet), and then in the kaleidoscopic ways these individuals come together and break apart. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” Powers writes, quoting the naturalist John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” The idea is important because what Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Nick, for instance, continues a project begun by his grandfather to take repeated photographs of a single chestnut tree, “one a month for seventy-six years.” Pat, a visionary botanist, discovers how trees communicate with one another only to be discredited and then, a generation later, reaffirmed. What links the characters is survival—the survival of both trees and human beings. The bulk of the action unfolds during the timber wars of the late 1990s, as the characters coalesce on the Pacific coast to save old-growth sequoia from logging concerns. For Powers, however, political or environmental activism becomes a filter through which to consider the connectedness of all things—not only the human lives he portrays in often painfully intricate dimensions, but also the biosphere, both virtual and natural. “The world starts here,” Powers insists. “This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.” 

A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve. 

The dramatic, real-life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China’s 1949 Communist Revolution–a precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today. Shanghai has historically been China’s jewel, its richest, most modern and westernized city. The bustling metropolis was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao’s proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to fled in every direction. Seventy years later, the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have opened the story to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia, who interviewed hundreds of exiles about their journey through one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. From these moving accounts, Zia weaves the story of four young Shanghai residents who wrestled with the decision to abandon everything for an uncertain life as refugees in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the U.S. Young Benny, who as a teenager became the unwilling heir to his father’s dark wartime legacy, must choose between escaping Hong Kong or navigating the intricacies of a newly Communist China. The resolute Annuo, forced to flee her home with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome young exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation in order to continue his studies in the U.S. while his family struggles at home. And Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America

As a boy, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father’s evocative stories about traveling across America as a young man, travels in which he learned to understand the country from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age. The history of westward expansion is examined here in a new light-not just a story of genocide and individualism, but also of communalism and a respect for the limits of a water-starved terrain-to understand how settling the West shaped our national character, and how it should shape our foreign policy. In his clear-eyed and moving meditations on the American landscape, Kaplan lays bare the roots of American greatness-the fact that we are a nation, empire, and continent all at once-and how we must reexamine those roots, and understand our geography, in order to confront the challenging, anarchic world that Kaplan describes. Earning the Rockies is a short epic, a story both personal and global in scope

From the award-winning author of The Unwinding–the brilliantly told saga of the ambition, idealism, and hubris of one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history, set amid the rise and fall of U.S. power from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America’s greatest diplomatic achievement in the post Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In TK, drawn from Holbrooke’s diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man, and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited”–Publisher’s description

KIRKUS REVIEW

KIRKUS REVIEW

Meticulously reported, exquisitely written, and grippingly told, Say Nothing is a work of revelation.” –David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon From award-winning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville’s children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress–with so many kids, McConville always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes. Patrick Radden Keefe’s mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists–or volunteers, depending on which side one was on–such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace and denied his I.R.A. past, betraying his hardcore comrades–Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish

Tom igoe has written an excellent critique and background piece:

https://dariendma.org/wp-content/uploads/Notes-on-Say-Nothing.pdf