Joseph Olen Butler. Star of Istanbul. © 2013 Christopher Marlowe Cobb, a foreign
correspondent, is co-opted by the US Secret Service to follow Walter Brauer, a
suspected German agent, and Greek American silent film actress Selene Bourgani,
who may also be working for the Kaiser. Cobb gets to know Selene intimately as the Lusitania cruises toward Ireland. When the ship is torpedoed, Cobbs helps
Selene survive the sinking. Cobb turns
out to be a very resourceful agent. He
tails Brauer and Selene in London and then follows them to Istanbul. It turns out Selene is actually Armenian and
is pretending to cooperate with the Germans, who are allied with the Turks, to
get an opportunity to assassinate the Pasha in
revenge for what the Turks have done to the Armenians throughout
Turkey. Cobb lends a hand. I like the WW I setting, but this was a
little hokey. December 2014
.
Rene Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy. This is six meditations over six days
intended to prove that God exists and that the soul is separate and distinct
from the body. The way he lays out his
arguments is interesting, and it may or may not convince you. In college, and perhaps in high school as
well, the Jesuits tried to persuade me that Descartes was at least wrong, if
not evil. As that key phrase, “Cogito
Ergo Sum,” was presented, Descartes was supposedly saying that his thinking
caused his existence. As he explains
clearly in is meditations, it was nothing of the sort. Instead he was arguing that because he is
thinking, he knows he exists. December
2014
Eri Hotta. Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy. © 2013
After researching reams of original documents, the author dispels the self-perpetuating
myth that military took over leadership and was entirely responsible for
Japanese aggression and the attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Actually civilian and military leaders met
more than 70 times to discuss the issue; civilians deluded themselves and went
along, perhaps in the hope that events would over take them in some way and
avoid the war which almost everyone believed would lead to a disastrous
defeat. There is an interesting
interview with the author in the YouTube clip below:
.
Simon Mawer. Trapeze. © 2012
Marion Sutro is the daughter of an English father and a French mother. She was spent much of her childhood in Geneva,
where her father worked for the League of Nations. She is fluent in French and English, both the
languages and the cultures. In the early
days of WW II she is working as a WAAF when she is called for an interview with
an agency that won’t even identify itself.
After several interviews, she is recruited as an agent, trained at
secret sites and parachuted into southern France. She has her routine duties with the
underground, but she also has a special assignment to persuade a childhood
friend from Geneva to leave his laboratory in Paris to work on the atomic bomb
at Cambridge. In the course of arranging
his pickup, she kills two German counter espionage agents. When the plane lands for the pickup, her
friend expects her to get aboard with him.
She elects to stay in France and continue with her clandestine
assignment. There’s lots of tradecraft
and lots of excitement throughout the novel.
It’s a good read. December 2014
John Sandford. Heat Lightning. (Virgil Flowers No. 2) © 2009
Flowers goes about his job as a senior investigator in the Minnesota
Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in a sport coat, a T shirt with the logo of
some band, denims and cowboy boots.
There’s often a boat hooked up to the back of his van. There’s always a whole armory inside the van
in case he needs something, but he rarely carries a sidearm unless he thinks
he’s going to have to shoot someone.
This time there’s a serial killer murdering veterans and leaving their
bodies at veterans’ memorials, always with a lemon slice in the mouth. A little research tells Flowers that the
lemon in the mouth was something Vietnamese executioners did to stifle the
cries of their victims. As always in
Sandford novels, there’s a complicated plot, and this one involves retribution
for a war crime in Vietnam. The dialog
is clever and funny, and this alone would make this a great read. December
2014
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