Harlan
Coben. Miracle Cure. © 2011 A New York clinic run by two doctors
is working on a cure for AIDS. There is
a conspiracy against the clinic of four prominent men, each for his own
reasons. All of the patients at the
clinic are gay men or intravenous drug users.
Three of the patients who test HIV negative after the course of
treatment are stabbed to death by an apparent serial killer dubbed “the
slasher.” Then one of the doctors is
thrown through an 11th story window and there are a couple of other
murders. For a while the NYPD detective
on the case thinks that someone is trying to discredit the clinic’s
research. There are three other patients
who now test negative, and the detective takes them off to a safe house to
protect them from the slasher. He has
his own doctor test them without telling the clinic. They test negative. Off and on I thought the premise for the
story was a bit over the top, but it’s always a good idea to stick with Harlan
Coben, particularly when the Knicks star forward is part of the action. March 2015
.
Ken
Follett. Edge of Eternity. ©2014
This is part three of the Century Trilogy. Parts one and two were Fall of Giants ©2010 and Winter
of the World ©2012. Like the first two volumes, Edge of Eternity is a very long novel (29 CDs or 1100 pages). If it’s not a masterpiece, it’s very close to
that. As in the two previous volumes,
Follett inserts fictional characters into the critical events of an era, this
time from the 1960s to the fall of the Berlin wall. The central characters are from the third
generation of the original four families in Russia, Germany, Britain and the US. These have now become extended families, and
it becomes difficult at times to keep all of the characters straight. In Russia Dmitri Dvorkin is a staffer in the
Politburo and his sister Tanya is a star correspondent for TASS. George Jakes is the illegitimate son of Greg
Peshkov and a young African American woman and grandson of Lev Peshkov who fled
Russia in Vol. 1. Jakes is a graduate of
Harvard Law, and his story starts with a freedom ride and then as an aide to
Bobby Kennedy. His story is paralleled
by Cameron Dewar, son of Woody Dewar who worked for FDR. Unlike his father and grandfather, Cameron is
a conservative. He becomes an aide to
Nixon and after Watergate joins CIA where he participates in some of the chancy
covert schemes during the Reagan administration. Rebecca is a Jewish woman who was adopted
into the Franck family in Berlin during WW II.
She escapes over the wall and eventually becomes a member of the
Bundestag. Willi Franck, a young
musician, runs over and kills a VoPo with a truck as he escapes through the
wall. After he joins Rebecca in Hamburg
he fills in for a member of Dave Williams rock group and they begin a long and
successful musical career together. Dave
is the grandson of Ethel Williams, now a member of the House of Lords, and Lord
Fitzherbert, who acknowledges Dave for the first time as Ethel is dying of lung
cancer. It’s a lot of people to keep
track of, but it is these people who light up the historical events of the 30
or so years covered by the book. The
four main themes are the Cuban missile crisis and then Civil Rights and
Watergate in the US, the gradual disintegration of the USSR and the communist
regimes in Eastern Europe, the horror of the Berlin wall and the importance of
rock and roll bands as vehicles for dissent.
It might be worth noting than unlike in the movie Selma, Lyndon Johnson
comes out unequivocal, strong and uncompromising on the 1964 Civil rights Bill.
It’s a book you wish would never end.
March 2015
Robert Harris. An Officer and a Spy. © 2013
George Piquart was a French army officer, who was promoted to colonel right
after the court martial of Alfred Dreyfus and put in charge of the intelligence
branch of the General Staff. Perhaps
this book is a novel but I prefer to think of it as a dramatization of real
events and the actions of real people.
Piquart started out as anti-Semitic as his peers, but as he looked at
the evidence and secret files that had been used to get a conviction, he
realized that Dreyfus was innocent and jeopardized his own career to free him
from Devil ’s Island. I had not known
the details of the Dreyfus case, and I found this book as fascinating as any
mystery novel or spy thriller. Among
other things, the rampant anti-Semitism in the military and the population at
large in the late 19th and early 20th C’s helps explain
what happened to French Jews during WW II.
As an historical aside, Harris has Piquart mention the Paris drains
several times. In warm weather there was
no escape from the stench of sewage in the city. March 2015
.
Greg
Iles. Natchez Burning: A Novel. © 2014
As I read this, I almost expected James Lee Burke to send Dave
Robicheaux and Clete Purcell over to lend a
hand to Penn Cage, the Mayor of Natchez as he tries to deal with a charge of
mercy killing against his
physician father along with the legacy of
racially motivated murders 40 years earlier. This is the first volume of a projected
trilogy that addresses the racial history of the American South. After his wife’s death from cancer, Penn, a
lawyer turned novelist, returned to his childhood home in Natchez, Miss. He was looking for a fresh start, but instead
became embroiled in a series of violent investigations that illuminated the
darker side of life in Natchez, past and present. Determined to help restore the struggling
city, Penn changed professions once again and ran successfully for mayor. Before
the story gets underway, Iles opens with a historical prologue that contains
the seeds of virtually everything that follows. Among the events recounted or
referred to here are the 1968 murders of two black civil rights activists,
Luther Davis and Jimmy Revels, the immolation by WW II flame thrower of a
record store owner and the brutal gang rape of Revels’s sister Viola. These and
other atrocities were carried out by the Double Eagles, an ultra-violent
splinter group of the Ku Klux Klan.
Viola Revels had been Dr. Tom Cage’s nurse and office manager and
lover. After the murders and the gang
rape, she moved to Chicago, but she returns in 2005 suffering from lung
cancer. Dr. Cage gives her palliative
treatment. When she dies, he is charged
with assisting a suicide and likely will be charged with murder. This sets off a chain of events that
endangers the lives Penn and his daughter, his fiancé, his father, a journalist
who has been digging into the Double Eagles story, and a Double Eagle who wants
to make a deathbed confession, and reveals corruption everywhere, including in
the State Police. The cruelty and brutality here are like nothing I’ve seen
before, and I thought, thanks to Robicheaux, that I had seen everything. Iles keeps thing moving for the whole 800
pages. January 2015
.
Elizabeth
Kolbert. The Sixth Extinction. © 2014
Since life first began on earth there have been five major eras of
extinction -- dinosaurs, for example, 65
million years ago. In the 1790s George
Cuvier was the first scientist to identify extinct animals. Until then no one had imagined
extinction. He was right on that and
right about many other things, but he disagreed with Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s theories about evolution and instead
proposed new creation after each extinction.
Kolbert believes we are in a sixth era of extinction and that it is man
made. She starts with frogs. For the overall environment, they seem to be
like canaries in coal mines. Then she traveled
all over the world to make her point: the Panamian rain forest, the Great Barrier
Reef, the Andes, Bikini Atoll, city zoos and our own backyards. She mentions the disappearance of the great
Auk in Europe as the result of hunting by humans and the disappearance of
Neanderthals from Europe and Asia Minor as a result of hunting by and
interbreeding with humans. I can mention
the disappearance of large mammals in North America within a few generations
after humans arrived from Asia across the Bering Straits. These were significant examples of extinction but of a lesser degree
of magnitude than the five major extinctions and the sixth which we are
experiencing now. This major era of
extinction is totally the result of human activity. She estimates that between 20% and 50% of
current life forms, flora and fauna, will disappear by the end of the
century. February 2015
.
Jaron
Lanier. Who Owns the Future? © 2013
I read this several weeks ago and I didn’t take good notes but I think it is an important
book. So here is the first paragraph of
the Guardian’s review along with a link to the full review. It’s worth reading all the way through. “Jaron Lanier, groundbreaking computer
scientist and infectious optimist, is concerned that we are not making the most
of ourselves. In Who Owns the Future? he tellingly questions the
trajectory of economic value in the information age, and argues that there has
been a fundamental misstep in how capitalism has gone digital. For Lanier, late
capitalism is not so much exhausted as humiliating: in an automated world, information
is more important to the economy than manual labour, and yet we are expected to
surrender information generated by or about ourselves – a valuable
resource – for free.”
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/27/who-owns-future-lanier-review
Aristotle
foresaw machines to play music and operate looms, work normally performed by
slaves. This may have been the first
time the replacement of workers was recognized as a potential problem. We have been through many iterations of this
problem since then, and Lanier suggests we are approaching a point where all
gains flow upward to fewer and fewer individuals as machines, robots and
information systems take over the functions of workers. To counteract
this one-way, feudal system of financial gains, he suggests that we become more
ferocious agents of our own informational resources. His vision of a humanistic information economy
is one in which participants achieve "economic dignity" by being
proportionally compensated for all their contributions to the massive clusters
of information – the so-called "big data" – circulating across
digital networks. Right now we are all
giving away information for free to Google, Face Book and other service
provider in return for free use of their services. February 2015
Andro
Linklater. Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country
and Forged Our National Identity. © 2007 The book contains a comprehensive biography of Andrew Ellicott, the surveyor
who set the borders of 11 states, the District of Columbia and our northern and
southern borders, but it is much more than that. On November 4, 1892 Frederick Jackson Turner
published the first version of his frontier theory of American history in a Wisconsin
student newspaper. The basic idea is
that the freedom of the frontier is what formed the American character; it “established liberty by releasing Americans from European
mindsets and eroding old, dysfunctional customs. The frontier had no need for
standing armies, established churches, aristocrats or nobles, nor for landed
gentry who controlled most of the land and charged heavy rents. Frontier land
was free for the taking.” (Wiki).
Linklater does not agree. He
makes a strong case that it was the federal and state governments, which surveyed
and allotted land for settlement, provided titles to settlers who moved in and
established how these lands could become states that formed the basis for our democracy. There’s a lot to be said for both sides. There’s a good review in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
.
.
Read
this book for Ellicott’s story. None of
us has ever heard of him until now, even though Ellicott City just up the road
is named for him, but he was an important player in many of the most
significant events in the US in the late 18th and early 19th
C. He took over the mapping of the
District of Columbia after L’Enfant was fired and his mapping of our southern
border played a significant role in our acquisition of Florida and other
Spanish territories along the Gulf Coast.
Also there are many anecdotes such as mention of a volcanic eruption in
Iceland in 1783 that caused record cold in New England in 1784 and which put so
much particulate into the atmosphere
that even on a sunny day Benjamin Franklin found that a magnifying glass
would barely ignite a piece of brown paper.
February 2015
.
Martin Cruz
Smith. Tatiana. © 2013
On a beach in Kaliningrad, a simultaneous interpreter is murdered for
his notes of a high level meeting. When
the notes turn out to be indecipherable pictographs, the murderer throws them
in the sand. They’re found by some kids
who live on the beach and sold to a reporter named Tatiana Petrovna. After she is defenestrated and Grisha Grigorenko,
one of the principals at the meeting where the interpreter worked, dies,
detective Arkady Renko decides to
investigate. Zhenya, a chess hustler and
Arkady’s ward, swipes the book from Arkady’s flat and, working with a girl he’s just met while losing to her
in the finals of a chess competition, reads the notes. It’s about a meeting of Russian mobsters with
the Chinese military about raising a sunken Russian nuclear sub. Then there’s the question of whether Tatiana
is really dead. The novel paints a grim
picture of contemporary Russia. I wish I
knew how accurate it is. March 2015
.
Tom
Standage. Writing on the Wall. © 2013
The title refers to the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum,
of which 11,000 examples survive. Writing began about 9000 BCE with
hieroglyphics and cuneiform. These
eventually evolved into a phonetic alphabet of consonants, to which the Greeks
added vowels. There was some literacy in
Greek cities, but Greeks really didn‘t like to write things down because they
thought they lost them when they did. It
was in Rome that writing came into its own, chiefly in the form of letters
which often were originally sent in multiple copies and then copied again and
again. After Guttenberg began
experimenting with printing in the 1440s, writing metastasized, much of it in
the form of pamphlets. Standage
mentions the Devonshire Manuscript, which was passed around in the 1530s and
1540s among 17 people and contains 194 entries, mostly poetry. His interest is in the phenomenon of its
being passed around or circulated rather than in its content. News papers originated in the UK in early 17th
C after hard fought battles with government censors. They began to appear in France about a
century later, having grown out of exchanges of poems. The next big steps were Morse’s telegraph and
Marconi’s wireless. It took a while to
get to the idea of broadcast radio, where communications went only one
way. This was followed, of course, by
TV. The first system was electro
mechanical and one of its first messages was seen by President Hoover. Then came the invention of the cathode ray
tube and even before WW II Sarnoff’s CBS was broadcasting to about 200 sets in
NYC. Now we have the internet and
Facebook and we are back to where we were in the Roman Republic. February 2015
Simon
Winchester. The Men Who United the States. © 2013
When you read the title of this book you may be expecting “founding fathers” or Civil War era
politicians and generals. Winchester has
a different story to tell. It’s
basically the history of our transportation and communication infrastructure
and the men who imagined it and then built it and of the surveyors who laid out
borders and determined the best practicable routes for canals roads and
railroads and lines for telegraphs and telephones. Along with some serious analysis, the book is
loaded with anecdotes with things we just didn’t know like development of the
first steamboat: Robert Fulton in 1807? Nope, John Fitch was steaming up and down the
Delaware in 1787. Unfortunately, unlike
Fulton, he never figured out how to make any money from his innovation. One of the best passages relates events
leading to the link up in Utah of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific
railroads on May 10, 1869. Brigham Young
declined an invitation to attend the ceremony. There’s the story of how Bell invented the
telephone and later the struggle between Edison and Tesla over the choice
between DC and AC current. Imagine what
an undertaking it must have been to wire up Manhattan so that the lights could
be turned on for the first time. Winchester gives extensive coverage to the
development of radio broadcasting and then television. As for the highway system, in 1919 Dwight
Eisenhower led a convoy of military vehicles from the east coast to the
west. It took 62 days. . I can recommend Stephen Mihm’s November 8,
2013 review in the NYT. Andro
Linklater’s Fabric of America: How Our Borders and
Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity, reviewed elsewhere, makes a nice companion piece for
this book. March 2015
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