The Heart Mender by Andy Andrews

By now I should know if I see "New York Times Best Seller" as the big draw card for a book that the book is not likely to be of interest to me, but this was a local  book club selection and one I'd not read.  It's also one sappy sentimental tale, that most of the women loved, but one I could have done without. Paperback, published 2010 and first in 2005 by Thomas Nelson, Inc, 239 pages and a Reader's Guide.  The author claims it is a true story with perhaps some embellishment.  It was a very fast read for me, started out better but kept going on and on; as I said, sappy....one of these books overloaded with sentimentality and pages upon pages about forgiveness..triteness that has been written every where before..just what some women like to read, but not me.  I thought I might learn a bit about WWII and the German submarines off the Atlantic coast and the Gulf Shores of  potential interest to me because of the disappearance of my father and his B-24 plane and crew in June 1944 and speculation to this day about a German U boat sinking it.  So there was a bit of history.  We have traveled to this area, set primarily in Foley, Alabama and those gulf shores so I was familiar with the setting.  Still, I  will be passing this book along.  Apparently this is a well liked author, but then so are many who specialize in the quick reading low information style.

It is the tale of  the people, Helen a bereft young WWII widow who moves to Alabama to care for her aunt, her only relative, Helen is a case study of hard luck; other characters,  Billy and Margaret Gilbert who own the local cafe and  hire Helen after  her aunt passes, of their son, Davey autistic or developmentally disabled, the local constable Wan and Josef Newman, the  German sailor whom Helen finds on the beach.  According to the author, this book was his greatest career disappointment  and his favorite.  It was first a manuscript, "Island of Saints"  and "through issues of bad timing, ..little previous success and zero publicity the book was quickly forgotten."   I give it a 2 or 3 **---*** although the book club members liked it.  I prefer more depth in reading so it just might be suitable for those interested in a quick non absorbing read.

World Without End by Ken Follett

This sequel to "Pillars of the Earth" is the second of the trilogy to this sensational historical fictional saga by this masterful  story teller and researcher..I read it in less than a month, all 1014 small print pages in this massive paperback tome published by the New American Library.   First published in 2007 in a Dutton edition, it is a delight for any historical fiction reader continuing the  tale of Kingsbridge Priory early England, reaching across the channel into France and as far as Florence Italy.  How Follett weaves all the many characters through the novel while covering suspense, tragedy, triumph, the breadth of human emotions, vice and character traits all the better to humanize the people is a testament to the gift of this author and his intense research.  

From the back cover, "Two centuries after the townspeople of Kingsbridge finished building their exquisite Gothic cathedral, four children slip into the forest and witness a killing...an event that will braid their lives together by ambition, love, greed, and revenge."   It begins December 1, 1327,  page 1, "Gwenda was eight years old, but she was not afraid of the dark.  When she opened her eyes she could see nothing, but that was not what scared her.  She knew where she was.  She was lying on the floor in a bed of straw at Kingsbridge Priory in the long stone building they called the hospital.  Her mother lay next to her.....When the dawn broke it would be All Hallows, a Sunday this year and therefore an especially holy day..." 

Among so much history of the English and French wars, the crusades, the plague, the church with it's plethora of sometimes evil leaders, I  refreshed myself and learned new history either forgotten by me or not known.  I had always believed that our current jury system was based on Old English Law,  the old common law..but learned on page 210 that indeed the concept of 12 men jurors  (and they were all men then) stretched back to Normandy, France.  

It would not be essential to have read the first novel, Pillars to appreciate this tale, but it would give a sense of familiarity and continuity to have done so and I am glad that I did.  I now look forward to reading the 3rd of this saga.   It is a book into which the reader can be truly drawn, enfolded and engrossed. Multiple characters, multiple plots and life which is not always triumphant jump off the pages.  I need say no more, Follett is famous for his intrigue.

   I give this a 5 *****.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Eagan

My good friend, Carlie, sent this book along to me with a note that she could not put it down.  I read it in October and though it started rather slowly I was drawn into the story of the life of Edward Curtis who dedicated his life to photographic preservation of the American Indians of the west in the late 1890's and early 1900's.  Starting to read, I was not familiar with Edward but when I saw some of the photos included in this wonderful biography particularly that iconic marvelous sepia of Chief Joseph of the Nez Pierce I realized I had indeed some familiarity with Curtis having seen his photos in travels through the West particularly in exhibits about Native Americans.  

Chief Joseph

This book winner of the National  ook Award, published by Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcort, in 2013 of 325 pages supplemented by an index and 25 pages of notes and sources presents a history of the early days of photography as well as of the Indians through the tragic  life of Curtis.  He's born in February 1868 in Whitewater, WI, the second of  four children to Johnson Curtis and Ellen Sheriff, a dirt poor family.  His schooling is only through the sixth grade because at 14  he went to work on the railroad to support the family.  The hard luck of the father plagues Edward too who moves with him to Puget Sound to homestead in the fall of 1887; they send for Ellen and the two youngest siblings in May 1888 but Johnson dies three days after their arrival. At only 20 Ed is the sole support again of the family but at 22 suffers a severe fall at work and is bedridden for a year, the hard luck of the father almost seems hereditary.  While he is healing he is inspired to photography, by 1891 he is off to Seattle and marries Clara who visited him while he was bedridden.   By 1895 they have a son and Curtis is  rather successful in Seattle so he brings  his mother, siblings and Clara's sister to live with them.  He and his brother Asahel "have an explosive spat" over photographs and never speak again. 

Edward Curtis

Soon the rush north to Alaska and the Klondike gold are in full swing and while mountaineering on Mt Ranier Curtis  rescues Grinnell and Merrian, eastern naturalists and explorers whom he hosts at his studio showroom later.  They are intrigued with his photographs, pg. 32..."His Indians were a startling departure from the usual depictions of these people.  There were in the faces, human beings, not character types."   .. "Good pictures, Curtis explained, are not products of chance, but come from long hours of study."  Grinnell and Merrian return east but stay in touch with him and in spring 1899 they ask him to join them in the largest  scientific exploration of Alaska where he had previously traveled.  It was to be the last great exploratory expedition of its kind in North America dating to Lewis and Clark, 100 years earlier.  (pg.34)  May 1899 he accompanies them on the steamship along with supplies, livestock and the two best known natrualists in America, John Muir and John Burroughs and Gifford Pinchot, a man of the woods fro a wealthy family.  But I cannot continue to tell the full tragic tale, you must read this for yourself.  His epoch works with Indians, living amongst them over years  earns him the ShadowCatcher" name from Arizona Indians.  He never really achieves the fame during life that he earned  despite  being befriended by President Teddy Roosevelt and backed financially and then clearly shafted by J.P.Morgan and the Morgan survivors.  He comes close to recognition but the black cloud always rises, so it is not a happy story, it is a story of a real life.  On October 19, 1952 Curtis died of a heart attack living in  a small apartment in Beverly Hills, CA; his last years were not pleasant although he tried to capture and document some of his memories for his children s children, he had suffered, become nearly blind and grew crankier.   

The last paragraph of the epilogue, pgs. 324-325 sums the tale, "Though Edward Curtis never made a dime producing what was arguably  the most expansive and comprehensive publication undertaken by a single citizen of the US though  he went to his death without the acknowledgement he so wanted in life, and though he paid for his obsession with the loss of friends, a marriage and the irreplaceable hours of watching a family bloom, he always believed his words and pictures would come to life long after he'd passed--the artist's  lasting reward of immortality.  A young man with an unlived in face found his calling in the faces of a continent's forgotten people, and in so doing he not only saw history, but made it."    

I give this book 5 stars *****; a tragic tale that made my heart ache but taught me a lot of history and meanings of many Indian words.    

Back cover of the book

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I heard about this book from a local friend  almost a year ago; her grand daughter had passed it along to her. First published in 2005, Knopf released the paperback, 550 pages in September, 2007. Because the movie is now underway,  touted for December release, and I prefer to read a book before I see a movie, I picked it up and read it in a few evening in November.  It is a different book, told by Death personified, set in Germany WWII era, it begins in 1939, and traces the experiences of a young girl, Liesel Meminger who is adopted by her foster family after her brother dies and  her mother can not care for her.  It is one of those books known as a crossover, because it was written for  younger readers, adolescents, juniors but is being avidly read by adults, the genre of books I have found to be clearly and well written with good information and emotionally moving.  It takes a  bit of perseverance to get used to Death as a narrator in what could be a gloomy tale but what becomes historically illuminating.  Reviews compare it to Anne Frank.   This era is of great personal interst to me and having just been through a series of Holocaust lectures at the University of Wisconsin, my interest was reignited.

Leisel's foster family shelters a Jew, Max, who was previously known to her father in their basement.   Leisel who is definitely "slow" learns to read through her nightmares as her father begins to spend evenings and nights with her to soothe her when she awakens screaming. Books are not readily available and Leisel begins to still books, odd ones, those she can save from the incineration piles of the gestapo.  

Listen to Death on pg. 491, "It's probably fair to say that in all the years of Hitler's reign, no person was able to serve the Fuhrer as loyally as me.  A human doesn't  have a heart like mine.  The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time.  The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst.  I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.  Still, they have one thing I envy.  Humans if nothing else have the good sense to die."

I give this a solid 4 ****

The Pirates of Somalia by Jay Bahadur

At a book sale, I stumbled across this enlightening non-fiction, investigative report of a book, published in 2013 by Pantheon Books of New York, hard back, 272 pages.  It's why I like to browse these book sales, especially when the types of books I enjoy most are often discarded and priced very cheap by those whose reading are limited.  This was very unfamiliar to me, but at $1 how could I go wrong?  Well, it was a treasure to read and a book from which I learned a great deal.  I have always wondered just a how the rag tag group of so called pirates of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden could capture merchant ships,  Jay Bahadur, a journalist answers all such questions and more in this book which   I read in September but did not get to post here. The serendipity of  finding "Pirates.." is matched by current interest generated from the recent Tom Hanks movie, about American Captain Richard Philips, captured aboard the vessel, Maersk Alabama in April 2009  by the Somalis.  Today Somalia 's Puntland  is home to 1.3 million people living below squalor primarily  and straddles the shipping bottleneck of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

To attach the word "country" to Somalia, founded in 1998 as a sanctuary for the hundreds of  thousands of Darod clans peoples fleeing massacres in the south,  is beyond a stretch for the word; there is not really a government, it is run by varying tribes at best, and has rampant illiteracy, no employment, no transit,  nomadic paths suffice as roads in most parts, a land of nothing. Pg 10..."contrary to the oft-recycled one-liners found in most news reports, Somalia is not a country in anarchy.  Indeed to even speak of Somalia as a uniform entity is a mis-characterization, because in  the wake of the civil war the country has broken down into a number of autonomous enclaves."  We have a significant population of Somalis settled by our US government in St Paul and Rochester, MN; it is a troubled people who do not assimilate well and the boys and  young men are readily recruited by Islamic jihadists today and repatriated to fight "infidels" in Somalia or elsewhere.  Pg. 5...."Somalia is like a country out of a twisted fairy tale, an ethereal land given substance only by the stories we are told of it."  

His flight to Somalia from Chicago took 45 hours and  connecting through five airports, of sorts.  The map in the front of the book  was an excellent reference for me about the geographic area, central to being understood to appreciate the revelations in the book.  I referred to that map repeatedly while reading to distinguish between Somalia and Somaliland, something I never before understood and the locations of Mogadishu, Puntland, Bosasso, and Galkayo.   It was an intriguing read. Most of the commercial vessels do not employ security guards which are expensive.  The vessels travel slowly and the pirates can easily overtake them.

The author traces the history of the clans  and details how piracy is more a business than an organized crime. Reading about the Somali coast guard (pgs.74-76) reveals the circuitous nature of the Somalis who might begin serving in their rag tag coast guard, then move on to employment as guards on foreign vessels and then as greed overcomes their senses, they hijack the very vessels they were hired to protect and link up with pirates only to later on become employed as guards or even service men  in the coast guard.  The author debunks the myth perpetuated by liberal leaning columnists of how the native fishermen have been driven into piracy while reporting that indeed the waters are being stripped of fish, lobster by the commercial vessels  from China and Korea, Taiwan.    Corruption is rampant but not deemed bad in Somalia but just how the clans operate politically.  International efforts have achieved little to nothing.  The foreign lines captured  have determined it preferable  to  pay the sums demanded by the pirates  to avoid capturing and then what to do with the pirates.  They are not wanted in any of the affected countries.  The piracy profits are not all that much because proceeds must be shared amongst many foot soldiers in the piracy and all their families as well as the backers, or investors.

Page 245 summarizes the progress of  Somali piracy over the last five years despite international efforts; it has become more lucrative with higher ransoms demanded and paid,  the gangs of pirates are slightly more organized and the encounters are becoming bloodier, more violent.  The epilogue proposes some solutions including keep on paying.  "If there is one thing on which every commentator on Somali piracy agrees, it is that the problem must be solved on land, not merely at sea." page 247.  Page 248, "the problem with getting tough with the pirates is that just one misstep could occasion a monumental financial or even ecological disaster, to say nothing of the potential loss of life.  ...In short, for pirates, coming home empty handed might prove as lethal as facing a team of Navy SEALS.  They are scared, desperate and unpredictable, and only one jittery finger on a grenade launcher would be needed to detonate an oil tanker and send a few hundred million dollars--more than the total of all ransoms paid to date--straight to the bottom of the ocean..."

I give this book 4 1/2 ****; and recommend it  to people who want to learn more than the news  reporting which is often exaggerated as well as slanted.  It is just one more example of why I am amused when people tout the breadth of their knowledge and yet base their opinions on what they hear in the news... Here is the back cover:

Killing Jesus by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard

I knew it was imminent yet said I would not buy it right away, that I have so many books on the shelf to read that I could wait, but I was wrong, I kept wondering and so one day as Jerry was on his way to Sam's I said, "pick it up for me."  He did and I read it in 2.5 evenings, all 281 pages including the Acknowledgements, sources post script and afterword.  Published in 2013 by Henry Holt and Company it is another best seller hit for O'Reilly and Dugard, another historical perspective on events, this time people are mightily confused because they think it will change their faith their Christianity.  If it does, they are not very deeply grounded, they are easily dissuaded and they need to learn.  It does not even approach the beliefs of Christians in the Master, that is no where in the purpose of this book.   

Not since my  high school Latin courses have I read so much about Caesar, back then we read Caesar's Gallic wars in Latin of which I took 3 years, which gave me an excellent foundation in language, and history.  As with  the other "Killing" books by O'Reilly, I learned things I never knew, some of which I am not so sure I needed to know as an example, pages 12-13 descriptions of Herod's illnesses and that Nazi's borrowed tactics from the Romans who also had local officials as puppet rulers (pg. 59.) Despite all my religious studies and academic courses in religions, I  did not realize that the Temple in Jerusalem  was twice as big as Rome's forum, pg. 73.  I never knew about the  Roman crucifixion death squads, four men per squad, i.e. quaternio., pg. 216.  Also on pg. 216 the intricate descriptions of the parts of the cross, the upright, vertical part, staticula  was in the ground awaiting the sentenced who carried  the cross bar, patibulum,  on his back. I believe that   every depiction of Jesus on his way to Calvary shows him carrying the cross in entirety.  Pg 223 clarifies that the temple guards who come with Judas  into the Garden are not Romans but Jews.  Page 272 mentions that Islam began in AD610 by Muhammed, 300 years after the legalization of Christianity in the Roman Empire which was in AD 313.  The historical account is  very readable and enlightening.   

There was dissension in my local book club when we chose this book for our November read.  Two of us were reading it; others agreed to it's selection.  But those who did not attend the meeting began an anti email campaign, one excuse and another how they could not get the book from the library, oh tah da, tah da, ta dah.  One who did not attend vociferously complained she did not want to read it, go figure, she's Catholic and that's her excuse? .  I reminded her that O'Reilly is a devout practicing Catholic.  No way to reason with that nonsense so long story short,  those who were not there had their triumph, another blah blah blah book was selected.  I have no tolerance for such adolescent behavior  and I will not be participating in this nonsense. One thing I cannot abide is wasting my time, so no more.   The  group has disintegrated into a ladies chat time, busy bee where thoughtful discussions do not occur. There is no criteria for book selections and as I know all to well, without guidelines, without purpose, whatever happens along is the chosen, good enough.  When absentees carry  more weight than those who show up, there's nothing to be done.  The facilitator recently had knee surgery and  is recovering   so she does not inject any voice of reason. This is not for me.  I am never at a loss of suggestions on books to read, and subscribe to several online services such as Random Reads,  Amazon, Good Reads where reviews are shared as well as thoughtful opinions.   

I give this book a full five stars and recommend it to anyone.  It joins the others as permanent  members in my  home library. 
  

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

"Crossing to Safety" first published in  1987 was a "must read" recommendation of Mary Anne Schwalbe in "The End of Your Life Bookclub" written by her son Will. They  read many books that I have read and enjoyed but this was one totally unfamiliar to me.  Based on that, I purchased a new edition of the Modern Library reprint in 2002, with  an afterword by T H Watkins.  I needn't have done so, the book is well written but I had to force myself to continue reading this 327 page paperback novel about two couples in  academia who develop a life long friendship during the Great Depression beginning their careers in Madison, WI.  I was bored throughout with much of the intellectual discourse.  Obviously  the discourses among couples is fiction, people really do not speak in such high brow  ways, do they?.   Perhaps those who have similar career paths as professors and  struggle to gain tenure might enjoy  it and relate to it; one couple is very wealthy despite striving for tenure while  the other is opposite, poor as church mice.

 The introduction by Terry Tempest Williams claims, "It is a love story not in  the sense of titillating dialogue and actions but in the sense that it explores private lives.  No outsider ever knows the interior landscape of a marriage.  It is one of the great secrets kept between couples."

 At times the idyllic carefree lifestyle  reminded me of the movie  "On Golden Pond" as the couples summer at a cottage on Bartell Lake.  Here is one example of the descriptive narrative, page 12,  The second paragraph< beginning  "Leave a mark on the world..."

 
Page 191, is a rather  lyrical way of saying, watch out for life, because stuff happens.   "Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind witless chance is still the law of nature.  You can plan all you want to.  You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions.  But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and  everything you have fought  to make yourself can be undone  as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him.  And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine."

So life does not always go as planned, something  those of us who have  survived well know.  I will be passing this book along.   Because of the good  writing I give it a 3 ***, but I cannot identify anyone to pass this to.  So to the book sale donation stack, it goes.