Still alive and reading

Wow!  I have been really negligent about posting my reading lists.  The holidays kept me busy.

However, I have all sorts of books to recommend,

I finally got my hands on Anthony Doerr's All the Light we Cannot See which is a fabulous read.  If you liked The Monuments Men or The Book Thief, you can add this one to your list.  If you did not read either of those selections, add this one to your list.  It is a touching story of a father's love for his blind daughter.  He creates a model of their town so that she can navigate her way safely. He also harbors a secret which could prove deadly to both father and daughter.  Across Europe in Germany, a young boy who is a prodigy in math and electronics listens to a faraway radio broadcast from France.  The boy, unfortunately, get swept up in the Nazi war machine.  Doer brings these two characters together in a heart-wrenching climax.

Give yourself some time to read this book.  There is a great deal of science in the story, algebra, electronics, marine biology and engineering.

Art Imitates Life

With all due respect to two of my favorite authors, the late Tom Clancy and Daniel Silva, I am noticing an unsettling pattern.  Tom Clancy's last novel, Command Authority co-authored with Mark Greaney is a Clancy blockbuster with weapons, action, espionage, and human drama.   It links now President Jack Ryan with his son Jack Jr. when a current nasty situation has its roots in Ryan's past.
It is a great read with lots of detail about weapons systems (OK  We paid for this stuff with our tax dollars.  We might as well be familiar with them) and enough action to leave you breathless.  The setting is Ukraine with Russia's current incursion into Crimea.  The scary part part is how plausible the plot is!
Next, Daniel Silva does a similar plot line with his spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon in The Heist.
Again, it is a great read with lots of action.  The setting is present day Syria with its current destabilization and refugee situation.  Once again, it is a great read, but a little too close to reality for comfort.

The Spy I Used to Love

When Tom Clancy's first novel The Hunt for Red October first burst upon the literacy scene, I stayed up all night reading it.  Year after year, I devoured his subsequent novels and followed the careers of the fictional characters Jack Ryan, John Clark and Diego Chavez.After Tom Clancy's passing last year, Mark Greaney continued the Jack Ryan series with the next generation of spies in the Ryan family.  While Jack Ryan Support and Defend, published this year, has all the action, technology, and government duplicity of a Ton Clancy novel,  I still miss Jack Ryan.  I know it is a current trend to keep pushing after an author has passed on, but it doesn't always work.  I miss the old Jack Ryan.  I miss the USSR - the enemy we loved to hate and I really miss a simpler world order.

MccEwan - The Children Act

I love courtroom drama. It is a holdover from my years of working in the courthouse in Virginia.  Best-selling author Ian McEwan  (Sweet Tooth, Atonment) has created another moving and controversial book.  Fiana Maye, a high court judge in Britain's Family Court has had her share of high stakes cases.  Sworn to uphold the law, she has rendered decisions in cases involving the separation of Siamese Twins, child kidnapping by a non-custodial parent and the usual divorces, child custody and protective orders.  However, as her own marriage is unraveling, she is unprepared for the emotional involvement in another controversial cases involving a young cancer patient who is refusing a live saving blood transfusion due to his religious convictions. I would not say that this book is uplifting, but the writing is exceptional.

Worthy Brown's Daughter

For fans of the legal thriller and courtroom drama, Philllip Margolin brings us something very unique.  Based on actual events, Worthy Brown's Daughter is an historical fiction set in Oregon on the eve of the Civil War.  Worthy Brown is a slave brought to Oregon which prohibits slavery.  He negotiates a deal with with his master that he will be free after a year of  unpaid work. His unscrupulous master agrees to free Worthy Brown, but keeps Worthy's daughter. Worthy proceeds to hire an attorney to sue in court for his daughter's freedom. Reminiscent of Dredd Scott, Margolin puts forth the Constitutional issues of whether or not a slave can sue for freedom after being transported to a a state that has outlawed slavery. That being said, can  he sue in a court of law when he has no legal rights?  The courtroom drama and the image of frontier justice will keep you focused until the last page.
Sometimes, the practice of law is about torts, mergers and acquisitions.  Sometimes, it is about justice.

Let's talk about race.

Race is often the proverbial elephant in the room among educated Americans.  We have a President who is a man of color, yet we had another unfortunate shooting of a black teenager  in Missouri. It seems we can talk about anything in this country except race.  It took an author from Nigeria - Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche to talk about race and how we see ourselves and other.
Adiche who is from Nigeria brings us Americanah, a love story, but a really effective book about race.  Her heroine, an educated, attractive, middle class young woman from Nigeria comes to the Unites States where she discovers that she is black. Told through a series of blog entries, our heroine Ifemelu relates the perceptions of Americans toward blacks, towards immigrants, towards Africans, towards anyone from a Third World Country. Do we see the person or the color? Which African country do you come from? Do you have schools there? How nice that you speak English! Why don't you straighten your hair?
Americanah is never preachy or judgmental.  It is, however, a good beginning for a meaningful dialog about race. And, by the way, it is a love story between two individuals for each other and for their homeland.

The Boys in the Boat

My sister recently recommended to me a new non fiction. The Boys in the Boat is about the  University of Washington crew team who qualified for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Writing good and readable non-fiction is difficult.  Laura Hillenbrand did it with Unbroken. Daniel James Brown did it with The Boys in the Boat.  The background stories of the crew members is both inspiring and touching.   These young men, children of the Great Depression, did not come from a life of privilege.  Instead, they milked cows, felled trees, paved roads and caught salmon.  Nonetheless, they succeeded in defeating the well-financed crew teams from elite California and East Coast schools for the privilege of representing the United States at the 1936 Olympics. Brown gives enough details about crew racing and boat building to add reality to the story without causing the reader to glaze over.  He also juxtaposes the crew team's preparations against the propaganda machine of Adolf Hitler. The result is a non fiction book that reads like a novel and is impossible to put down until the photo finish.