starting off the month with an incredible book: A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, by Ben Macintyre

9780804136631
Crown, 2014 (July)
384 pp

hardcover

My very grateful thanks to Crown and to LibraryThing's early reviewers program for my copy of this book.

I have been a huge fan of Ben Macintyre since I read his Operation Mincemeat; I've devoured every book he's written since and have never been disappointed. And once again he delivers with his newest book, A Spy Among Friends, which is, in his words, "not another biography of Kim Philby," ... "less about politics, ideology and accountability than personality, character, and a very British relationship that has never been explored before." Macintyre notes also that the "book does not purport to be the last word on Kim Philby," but rather "it seeks to tell his story in a different way, through the prism of personal friendship..." and his work succeeds on every possible level: impeccable research, the very-well developed investigation of Kim Philby's dual character, and frankly, despite the fact that it's nonfiction, it reads like a highly-polished, top-tier espionage novel,, making it reader-friendly  for anyone at all interested in the subject.   This book is, in fact, one of the best I've read this year. 

If you'd like to learn more about it, I've written about it on the nonfiction page of this reading journal -- just click here to get there. It is, in one word, stellar.

another book comes off the TBR pile: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown

9780670025817
Viking, 2013
404 pp

hardcover

"They weren't just nine guys in a boat; they were a crew."

 Considering that I'm not at all a sports person, it seems odd that I would even be reading a book about the University of Washington crew team.  I didn't know what to expect, but after reading the first chapter I was totally hooked.  It only got better from there.  I don't often seek out inspiring reads, and I had no intention at all of buying/reading this book until one of my online reading friends (thank you, Trish!) wrote a review that made me want to run to the store to pick this one up. And I'm happy I did.

It's probably a given that almost everyone is familiar with the fact that at the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin, Jesse Owens walked away with four gold medals, throwing the Nazi ideal of the Aryan supremacy right back in Hitler's face. Another thing about that year's Olympic games that most people are familiar with is the call for a boycott of the games, as rumors were circulating about what was really going on in Germany and the repressive measures of the Nazis. But it's very unlikely that anyone other than sports historians or people who are really into the history of the Olympic games know about the crew team from the University of Washington who literally battled the odds and not only made it to the games, but went on to win won the gold medal.  The Boys in the Boat not only takes the readers through the crew's efforts in getting there, but also goes into great depth about the crew members, especially the central figure in this book, Joe Rantz.  His story lies at the heart of this book, but the author also includes stories about the other members of the team, a look at the Depression in the US, and what was going on in Germany at the time. He also examines the sport of crewing itself -- especially the prominence of the teams from elite Ivy League universities.  As he notes, "the center of gravity in American collegiate rowing still lay somewhere between Cambridge, New Haven, Princeton, Ithaca, and Annapolis."  Joe's story is the best part of this book.

I've written more about this book on the nonfiction page of this reading journal blog, but the bottom line is that it's one I can recommend very highly, and a book that absolutely should not be missed.

a "modern-day Boo Radley:" *Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune, by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.

 9780345545565
Ballantine/Random House, 2013
456 pp
 
 Empty Mansions is a book that proves the old axiom that sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, and,  I would add, just as captivating.  The centerpiece of this book is Huguette Clark, a privileged, incredibly wealthy woman who chose to live her life happily by staying hidden. Huguette's story may seem to some to be the stuff of madness, but the the authors disagree, calling her  a "modern-day 'Boo' Radley," someone who shut herself away  in order to remain "safe from a world that can hurt."    Huguette died in 2011, at the age of 104, two weeks shy of 105, but her death isn't the end of this story.  As of yesterday, according to a report from one NPR station, jury selection began in the trial to decide who gets what from her estate.  Empty Mansions takes you from the wide Montana prairies to the smaller world of the privileged elite; from a beautiful mansion topped with a golden tower on Millionaire's Row in New York City  to a hospital room next to a janitor's closet in this strange but well-told and thoroughly-researched story.

The book takes the reader through the life of  W.A Clark,  former senator from Montana and self-made multimillionaire known as the "copper king," and his family -- his wife Anna La Chapelle, daughters Huguette and older sister Andrée.  Clark had other older children from a previous marriage, but lived with his second family on New York City's Millionaire's Row in a six-story mansion at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-seventh street.  The sisters grew up in opulence and lived privileged lives, all before tragedy struck with Andrée's death at the age of 16. After having lost her sister and best friend, Huguette was sent alone to a school for the "daughters of elite," where her dance teacher was Isadora Duncan.   In 1925 her father died, but due to the terms of his will, Anna and Huguette moved to an apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue. Huguette married in 1928, but it didn't last, and she was divorced by 1930.  As time went on, Huguette began to stop seeing visitors, becoming reclusive, and eventually stopped leaving her apartment.  Anna died in 1963, and Huguette "throws herself" into her art -- which consisted of painting and meticulously furnishing dollhouses, or more accurately, storyhouses where she could move her dolls (a massive collection) through the rooms, having them do different things, and studying cartoons frame by frame. She spent tons of money on these projects, and was also very generous with her money among friends and supporting worthy causes (along with paying for upkeep of the "empty mansions" she'd inherited) from her "fairy-tale checkbook,"  but above all valued her privacy, trusting in her attorney and her accountant to handle all business transactions.  But Huguette had also been getting treatment for skin cancer, and when her doctor died in 1990, she didn't look for another one, and all the while she was getting worse. A friend persuaded her to go the hospital for treatment, and she ended up at Doctors Hospital,  a "treatment center for the wealthy,"  in New York City.

The story of the Clarks, the author says, is also  "like a classic folk tale" in reverse, with

 "the bags full of gold arriving at the beginning, the handsome prince fleeing, and the king's daughter locking herself away in the tower."

Now, as if the dollhouses weren't weird enough, this is where the story starts getting just plain strange and even worse,  just plain sad.   At the age of 85, within two months of  Huguette's surgeries, she becomes an "indefinite patient," at Doctors Hospital,  choosing to remain there for the rest of her life, never telling family where she was, ordering everyone to respect her privacy at all costs.   According to the authors,  within a month, one of her doctors alerts the hospital's powers-that-be Huguette is the daughter of a multimillionaire, and that he'd be willing to help develop an "appropriate cultivation approach." Behind her back, they made fun of her, but the hospital officials hold meetings to figure out how to get her to give up some of her money.  The president of the hospital, again according to the authors, boldly says that

"Madame, as you know, is the biggest bucks contributing potential we have ever had."

The doctors go all out trying to get her to cough up in a number of measures that can only be described as coercive.

[As an aside, I'm a notetaker when I read, and going through them now, I see I had a "holy sh*t" moment that I noted in the margins when I came upon a scheme to get her to sign over her assets in a "charitable gift annuity"  scheme --

that carried much more risk than benefit for this 98 year-old woman.]  

It wasn't just the officials or her doctors who got part of her money, either, one of them outright blackmailing her into loaning him  an extra $500,000 on top of the million she'd already given him.  Her private nurse/companion is Hadassah Peri who also came to benefit from Huguette's generosity, as Huguette gave her and her family several "gifts" of cash and property, coming to over $30 million dollars.  Every now and then Peri would just happen to mention some monetary issue she was having, and Huguette would take care of it.  For example, Peri once told Huguette that her kids have asthma and there was a flood in the basement.  Huguette tells Peri she should really move, and hands her $450,000 for a new house. Christmas gifts came in the form of tens of thousands of dollars, she paid for Peri's children's schooling, their summer camps, back taxes the family owed to the IRS, a new house for Hadassah's brother and family to use when they were in town, and the list goes on and on and on.  She was being taken advantage of by pretty much everyone, including Citibank, who'd earlier lost millions in jewelry she'd had in safety deposit boxes, and only allowed her to settle for a maximum amount, playing on her need for absolute privacy and knowing she'd never take them to court.  By the time of her death, Huguette was cash poor, and had been selling off extremely valuable possessions  to pay for the little "gifts" she gave out as well as the taxes attached to the gifts. 

The empty mansions of the title refer to the places that had been acquired by the family over Huguette's lifetime, and then rarely, if ever used, and the chapter headings carry the names of the properties. Each one, including Woodlawn Cemetery, had been kept up by Huguette as places to preserve memories, and were left frozen in time with orders to the caretakers not to be disturbed in any way. 

This is truly an incredible story, and I've thrown it into the book group mix this year.  I will say that the first parts of the book that went back to the days when W.A. Clark was making his fortune and building up a tarnished reputation as a Montana senator were pretty dull, and that I almost put the book down.  Once the early history was finished, however, the story picked up with a vengeance.  There were parts that shocked, parts that made me downright angry, and parts where I couldn't tell whether Huguette was mentally disturbed, easily taken advantage of or coerced,  or whether she was just exercising her right to spend her money the way she chose to. I just wanted to know her story and how she got to the point where she chose to stay in a hospital for twenty years, but it turned into much more than that.  There are some really good points raised  in this book, but in the end, I discovered that it actually raises more questions than it answers.  That's not a bad thing, and there are probably things that will never be known, even when this upcoming trial gets underway.  

Definitely recommended, and while not all reviews have been positive, I don't really pay attention to them when I find something I've really liked reading.  If you are looking for something beyond the ordinary, you'll definitely find it here.

-- reposted at my nonfiction page, The Real Stuff.

White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, a memoir by Michael W. Clune

1616492082
Hazelden, 2013
260 pp

my copy from the publisher -- thank you! 

At the time the author wrote this book, he'd been free from his heroin addiction for ten years. White Out is his story of his addiction and then how he came to kick it.    I won't got into great detail about what he wrote per se, because this is a book that actually has to be experienced --  it reads like he sat down at his computer and just let everything pour out of himself.

While a grad student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore,  starting at age 21, Michael Clune lived the life of a heroin addict for years, until he got to a point where on a visit to his parents in Chicago he was picked up by the police, thrown in jail and then given a choice of prison or recovery.  In between those two times, his experiences and his feelings often flow here in stream-of-consciousness-like prose, where he also reflects on memory, addiction, and time.  The book gets into his introduction to heroin, his addiction (and the denial that he's an addict) and his ongoing relationships with his demons. In fact, other than the central metaphor of "white," one of the themes that runs consistently through this narrative,  he spends a lot of this book talking about "the first time."  As he tells his readers, the first time is "dope's magic secret."

"Then I see a white-topped vial. Wow. I stare at it. It's the first time I've ever seen it. I know I've seen it ten thousand times before. I know it only leads to bad things. I know I've had it and touched it and used it and shaken the last particles of white from the thin deep bottom one thousand times. But there it is. And it's the first time I've ever seen it."

and 

“It might seem like I’m kind of obsessed by the first time I did dope. No shit. If you’re writing a book about this, and you don’t use at least this much space writing about the first time, you’re not being honest.”

Well, honest is what you get in this narrative, written in a style that can often come across as repetitive, but one which tries to convey what it was like for the author during the addiction years. His writing style seems to mirror his inner unraveling, but it makes sense and coheres in a bizarre, offbeat sort of way.  Through it all he reminds his readers that the heroin  is still "right over there" which, if you think about it, is pretty frightening. 

I liked this book.  I'll probably never really gut-level understand what Mr. Clune went through, and for someone like myself who picks up a personal account like this, I don't think it's fair to say that his experience can be entirely comprehended within the scope of a couple of hundred pages.  That's not a negative -- this is his unique story, a way for him to try to relate his unique experience which was pretty frightening,  even considering the positive outcome.  But I think this book is probably best suited for readers who are close to someone who is an addict and who may want to try to glean some insight from Mr. Clune's experiences. It's definitely an account I'd turn to in that situation.

my thanks to TLC book tours

The Price of Justice: A True Story of Two Lawyers' Epic Battle Against Corruption and Greed in Coal Country, by Laurence Leamer

9780805094718
Times Books/Henry Holt, 2013
448 pp

(arc: thanks to LibraryThing's early reviewers program  and to the publisher for my copy)


[reposted at The Real Stuff (nonfiction) page of my reading journal]

"A fair trial in a fair tribunal is a fundamental constitutional right...That means not only the absence of actual bias, but a guarantee against even the probability of an unfair tribunal." (334)

When I first requested this book from LibraryThing I thought it sounded interesting, and once I picked it up, I didn't realize just how blah a word "interesting" would come to be in this case. That cliché about not being able to put the book down was absolutely true for me. I'll get right to the point and say that this is one of the most outstanding books I've read this year. Coming on the heels of Going Clear by Lawrence Wright, you can believe that The Price of Justice was a powerful read.  It reads much like a legal thriller, but this story of corporate greed, judicial and political corruption, and sheer, unmitigated disregard for human life in return for one man's drive for greater profit in the coal industry is all too real.

While there are several issues covered in this work of investigative journalism, at the heart of this story is the question of whether or not corporations should be allowed to fund the very court justices who are involved in rulings involving the corporation,  followed by the question of correctness in allowing the justice in question to remain as a judge.  In this instance, it all started with a verdict handed down by a West Virginia court in the case of Caperton v. Massey Coal Company. Mr. Caperton had sued Massey because it had canceled its contract with Harman Mining to supply Harman with needed coal. Caperton, the owner of Harman, was severely affected by Massey's fraudulent cancellation, and his company went out of business.  He found himself in huge trouble and a mounting pile of debts including miners' pension funds.  His attorneys, Bruce Stanley and Dave Fawcett, worked hard to get Caperton an award for damages;  Massey, headed by Don Blankenship, appealed the decision and the case was set to be ruled on by the West Virginia Supreme Court.  However, before the judgment could be appealed, an election of a new WV Supreme Court Justice was underway, and Blankenship set up a nonprofit through which he was able to contribute millions to eliminate the incumbent (Warren McGraw) and bring in someone he knew would take his side in the case. Although legally not allowed to directly support his candidate of choice (Brent Benjamin), Blankenship used the money to pay for a slur campaign against McGraw.  Even though Blankenship's participation in the campaign against McGraw came to light, the appeals trial continued with Benjamin as a justice, and ended up in Massey's favor.  Later developments would take the case right up to the US Supreme Court, but as Leamer notes, the battle was far from over. In the meantime, Massey (and Blankenship) was allowed to continued its fraudulent practices while the utter disdain for following mandated safety and environmental measures led to tragedy among many mine workers and their families.

For several reasons the topics involved in this  book struck a personal chord. I wish I could say that I was surprised at some of the blatant misdeeds going on in the courts and among politicians as outlined by Mr. Leamer in this most excellent book, but frankly, I'm not. Aside from those issues, I was also deeply disturbed by the blatant disregard that this one man in the coal industry showed for his workers and other human beings whose lives were turned upside down, ruined or extinguished by his unscrupulous business & political practices. His absolute control was backed up by threats, intimidation, money and protection from court officials and politicians who looked out for their own financial and political interests, rather than for the interests of the victims. Had the above-mentioned subjects been all there was to this book, it still would have been good, but Mr. Leamer also examines the price paid in personal terms by everyone involved on the side of obtaining justice, including the dedicated attorneys fighting this man for over 14 years.

Other reviewers of The Price of Justice have correctly noted that this book reads like a legal thriller, and while I'm not a huge fan of that genre, the book kept me turning pages until the very end. Definitely and highly recommended -- absolutely one of the best books I've read this year. 

***

sadly, read on the way home from Maui

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright

9780307700667
Knopf, 2013
430 pp (including index & bibliography)

[reposted at The Real Stuff (nonfiction) page of my reading journal]

Once in a while you pick up a book that just literally blows you away, and for me, Going Clear is one of these.   From the first words through the last, I have to say I was completely mesmerized and well entrenched in this page turner of a book -- even missing a day on a Maui beach to finish it -- some of the stuff in here is so unbelievable that you just know it has to be real.   If you're an ardent Scientologist, you probably won't want to read this book, but for anyone who's interested in looking at this group's origins, the life of its founder, its beliefs and the goings on within, it's a definite must read.  Now added to  my favorites list for 2013, Going Clear is an outstanding work of investigative journalism, made even more believable by the author's focus on maintaining a balanced presentation, including comments from the Church of Scientology's leaders, attorneys, and meticulous fact finding and fact checking.  I'll skip to my usual ending and recommend it highly right up front. 

The author was, in his own words, "drawn to write this book" based on a number of questions many people have regarding Scientology: what makes it so "alluring;" what its adherents gain from it; how "seemingly rational people" can subscribe to beliefs that most people would see as "incomprehensible;" why celebrities and other "popular personalities" get themselves involved when the end result is a "public relations martyrdom;"  etc.  The book starts out with a look at the life of L.Ron Hubbard, a science-fiction writer who ultimately became the founder of this religion/cult/organization whatever you want to call it, the beliefs it is founded on and espouses,  and its growing popularity.  Then Wright spends some time on just how Scientology came to acquire religion status with the IRS -- an ugly story that  will cause you to shake your head in total disbelief, -- and how even the FBI couldn't shake down this organization despite its illegal maneuverings and activities because no one would speak up.  He also examines the Hollywood celebrities and other well-known people who embraced Scientology and how the head of the organization came to woo them for monetary gain and as a lure for new members, and finally, he examines why people are reluctant to leave the organization and the experiences of those who managed to "blow."   Throughout the book he also examines "the process of belief," not just in terms of Scientology, but in other religions as well. He's done an amazing amount of meticulous research, and his narrative is based partially on people who got out of Scientology and had plenty to tell, although as I noted above, he gives equal time to Scientology's array of attorneys, some of the organization's own documentation, and to the people high up in the movement.

There is no adequate way to summarize what's in this book ...it's definitely one you must read for yourself. All I can say is that you will likely be blown away by its contents and by Wright's magnificent reportage.  Granted there are a few tedious spots centering around Tom Cruise which probably could have been left out because frankly, he's just not that interesting of a person, but overall, it's one that should not be missed whatsoever.  Definitely prizeworthy, it will keep you absolutely astounded throughout the entire book.

***

read from Seattle to Maui and on my hotel balcony 

*Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge, by John Gimlette

9780307272539
Borzoi/Knopf
2011
358 pp

Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge is a contemporary travel account mixed with history.  Don't write it off based on that statement -- it is a phenomenal book, some of which reads like good, old-fashioned travel narratives of earlier eras.  Told over the space of nine chapters, the story alternates with the author's travels through Guyana, Surinam (or Suriname), and French Guiana. He's in good company: these regions were visited separately at one time by literary greats V.S. Naipaul (along with his brother Shiva) and Evelyn Waugh, whose sojourn through Guyana played a part in the creation of his most excellent novel Handful of Dust, as well as his own narrative of travel in Guyana and Brazil called 92 Days.

The author's first stop is in Georgetown, Guyana (once known as British Guiana) but his first side trip is to Jonestown, the site of the famous (or infamous) People's Temple led by Jim Jones.  In the town of Port Kaituma he talks to some of the locals about the events of 1978, especially the shooting of Congressman Leo Ryan, three newsmen and a People's Temple defector.  Driven to the airstrip where all of that went down, he finds that people are still somewhat reluctant to discuss what happened because, as his guide at the time told him

People here are still frightened...They don't know what happened, or who anyone is. They hardly ever seen any white men before. The only ones they saw were people from the Temple, who then starts killing them. Are you surprised they're still afraid?

Leaving Jonestown, Gimlette makes his way to the Savannah of Rupununi, which he calls one of the "most magnificent, untrampled corners of our planet." After observing and discussing the landscape, he explains that the area once was thought to be the site of the mythical El Dorado, the city of the Gilded Man, also known as Manoa. The legend was started after an expedition down the Orinoco by Martinez, a Spanish Captain and munitions master whose cargo ignited. As a punishment, he was bound and set adrift in a canoe, where supposedly he was rescued by Indians and taken to this city, where all he did for seven months was to collect gold pebbles. The story was picked up again in the 1580s by another Spaniard who hears of a city of gold -- confirming the tale told by Martinez. As he's planning to make his own expedition to the area, he's captured off of Trinidad by Sir Walter Raleigh, who is also planning to undertake the same search. It is, of course,  fruitless, but undeterred by his lack of discovery, Raleigh sees that there's money to be made here and publishes a book that he hopes will catch the fancy of investors back home.  Laughed at, ridiculed, he sends one more explorer to find the city, and this time, taking a new route, Manoa is found. It's not the city of the Gilded Man, but it does exist. Voltaire will later capture the search for El Dorado and the "general foolishness of mankind" in his work Candide. Gimlette explores the forests of the Essequibo river, as well as the ruins of the old Dutch plantations that existed there.  In an area known as the Berbice, where one man told the author to  "expect giant frogs, marijuana plantations and strange, old people jabbering in Dutch," the author takes a "journey through 1763," the year of a particularly bloody slave revolt -- and tries to imagine the lives of the Dutch plantation owners and families along the way.

Then he's off to Surinam (or Suriname), where he finds in Paramaribo a city that he loves and people who speak a rather odd form of pigeon English called Talkie-talkie -- in which, for example, Olie Bollen, Pom, Bami Kip and Pinda Soep with Tom Tom  become oily bread, yam, chicken noodles and peanut soup with plantain. He follows a trail made by two soldiers sent there by the government to help quell the slave revolts of the 1700s.  The first is  Colonel Fourgeoud, who at sixty was already a veteran of the earlier Berbice revolts, and who the author describes as being a psychopath, "like Robert Duvall's Colonel Kilgore: a thundering, bare-chested killer who will eat nothing, feel nothing and fear nothing."  Second is Scotsman John Gabriel Stedman, wrote and published an account of his adventures in jungle warfare, which the author notes, "reads like a Georgian rendering of Apocalypse Now."  But war isn't only a thing of the 18th century, as the author reveals -- Surinam's hinterlands became the site of some of the most bloodiest and ruthless wars not so long ago.

Leaving Surinam, it's on to French Guiana, the old penal colony captured in readers minds forever with Henri Charrière's book Papillon, which was made into a film in 1973.  Gimlette notes that "as an autobiography, Papillon is highly improbable," but that he describes things that happened to several people -- it seems that he was never in trouble, and spent his time taking care of the latrines.  But the brutality of the penal colony and the various institutions throughout the country is all too real, as are the dangers of French Guiana's interior, as evidenced in an account published in 1953 by the father of Raymond Maufrais, who at 23 decided to make the trip down the Maroni river, into 35,000 square miles of jungle.  Maufrais never made it out; only his diaries were found.  After spending a few days on the Salut Islands, site of Devil's Island, the author took a tour of the Centre Spatial Guyanais, a space station whose proximity to the equator makes for shorter orbit of the satellites launched by various European countries. And finally, the last journey is to the lake area of Oyapok, where in 1629, one of the author's forebears had set foot and "finished up." Gimlette knew very little about that expedition, only having very brief clues left behind in bits of documentation. 

The author's travels are interesting on their own, but his extensive knowledge of the history of the three countries adds another dimension to this novel.  One of his working ideas throughout the novel is that although "slavery seemed to have disappeared completely," it is "everywhere, even in the food and the way people lived".  He notes that "every strand of Guianese life somehow led back to this point". To understand this concept, he takes his readers back in time, place to place, discussing not only slavery, but events leading up to the revolts of 1763 in the Barbice and again in Surinam of 1769, and what happened with the slaves who managed to escape afterwards.  Truly fascinating stuff, but the book also incorporates the effects of colonization, racism, and immigration, as well as the geography, all of which have had a hand in making these areas what they are today.  The history is quite necessary to the book, and there is the added bonus of all of the quirky people he happens to meet along his many journeys. 

I very highly recommend this book -- one of the joys of reading it is that there is no sense that the author is trying to show us how interconnected our cultures are -- quite the opposite. Those types of travel narratives I can live without.  In Wild Coast he shows that there are, inevitably, places in which the modern world has encroached, whether for good or for bad,  but for the most part, there are still some mysteries left in these countries, vast areas of which are still dark and inaccessible.  A truly fascinating read.

Lost in Shangri-La, by Mitchell Zuckoff

9780061988349
HarperCollins, 2011
384 pp.

Lost in Shangri-La is book of narrative history, focusing on a single event that happened in 1945 in what was at that time called Dutch New Guinea.  The Hollandia army base there was filled with soldiers, both men and women (WACs) who would be moved out periodically to other areas of fighting during the war in the Pacific. Life on the base was dull at times, and life could be difficult in the jungle.  Not only were these people in the middle of a war and far from home, they also had to contend with rats, spiders, mosquitoes and five types of "jungle rot."

In 1944, an Army Air Force pilot named Grimes was on a routine reconnaissance flight over the island and discovered what he'd called "Hidden Valley," some 150 air miles from the Hollandia Base.  The valley wasn't on any of the official maps used by the Army Air Force, and was as yet unexplored.  A week later, another pilot, Elsmore, was assigned the task of finding a landing site for a supply stop between Hollandia and another base on the other side of the island.  In the air with Grimes, Elsmore decided to explore the newly-discovered Hidden Valley along the way. They flew the plane into a canyon surrounded by mountains, made their way over a ridge and there it was.  The valley was about 30 miles long, at its widest point eight miles across, surrounded on all sides by sheer mountain cliffs. The two pilots saw a river, rapids, trees, etc., but it was the discovery of several "native compounds" and the people on the ground that really held their interest.  When the two returned to Hollandia, they spread the word of their discoveries, and soon, flyover visits to the Hidden Valley became a way of easing the monotony of life on the base for a while.  So an occasional pilot would load up his C-47 with handfuls of people and take short jaunts over the island as a sightseeing tour, and by virtue of having taken these flights, on their return the men and women would become members of the "Shangri-La Society."

On May 13, 1945, one of these sightseeing tours was scheduled, and everyone was ready for this big adventure on "The Gremlin Special." Nine officers, nine WACs, and six enlisted men were aboard when the plane took off. But unlike previous flights, this one never made it back. Instead, the plane crashed into the side of mountain. What caused the crash can only be speculated about, but be that as it may, only six people made it out, one of whom was killed immediately when the fuel tanks burst into flames.  That person might have survived, but at the time, his foot was caught and tangled in the roots of a tree near the fuselage during the explosion. Then two of the surviving WACs died, leaving Maggie Hastings as the only woman left alive along with John McCollom and Kenneth Decker. Although they all had injuries and burns, they managed to walk away from the crash.  And although they had survived the crash, surviving in unknown territory was quite another thing, especially since they were wounded, with no supplies. And then, of course, there was the unknown factor about the indigenous people -- were they really headhunters and cannibals as had been rumored?

After the crash, the author proceeds to explore how the survivors made it out from under the jungle canopy, headed to a clearing, and came into contact with a search plane.  While awaiting rescue, the three had to survive -- and this is the second part of this story, which includes contact with the native New Guinea people. Part three deals with trying to get the survivors back home -- they knew that rescue would happen, but their location raised some problems for getting them out of there, so the Army had to muster all of its resources, including bright minds, to come up with what would turn out to be nearly impossible. Part four deals with what happened to the survivors afterwards , their stories after the end of the war, and a return to the Hidden Valley.

Lost in Shangri-La was an interesting read, and I love finding these little nuggets of unknown historical events that someone takes the time to research and write about. The author used parts of Hastings' quickly shorthand-scribed daily journal of events, along with the stories of the other two survivors.  The segment about the people and events building up to the crash was well told, and I was impressed with the author's focus on the unselfish efforts each of the three injured survivors made toward the group's survival.  The rescue plans were also well related, and I did sense the frustration on the parts of both the rescuers and those they had to pull out of the jungle. 

This book is, in part, a testament to courage and to determination, and the book received great acclaim and very high ratings from readers everywhere.  You don't have to be a war buff to enjoy it -- it is at times an engrossing read.  But far from being a "riveting work," and considering the story that's being told, much of the book was a bit on the boring side, and I found myself doing the dreaded skim.  There was just so much related by the author in terms of the backstories of every single person involved in either the crash or the rescue that it totally detracted from the narrative as a whole.  And somehow, the story of the survivors' predicament did not come off as being as dire as it was given to be from the dustjacket -- especially after the landing of the second group of soldiers in the area.

What was most amazing to me though, aside from the crash story, was American attitudes of the time to the people of New Guinea.  I realize that I'm seeing it from a perspective from the 21st century, but still, it's a bit unsettling to read for example that some of the American soldiers thought that the natives could be easily educated in order to have a higher standard of living. I mean, they'd been there for centuries doing what they always do, living how they'd always lived -- that was their standard of living.   Considering what was in store for these poor people after the crash put them on the world's map, they probably had things better as they were. And though the author did go into this aspect a bit, there could have been a lot more.

I think I expected a little more of what was promised, something more along the lines of Hampton Sides' Ghost Soldiers, which did in fact involve an "incredible rescue mission of World War II."   I think I would recommend Lost in Shangri-La, but be ready to wade through a lot of extraneous information as you read it. 

Four December titles -- and greetings from the Pacific Northwest

This post is brought to you by the letter "d", especially as it is the first letter in distraction. And distracted has been my middle name for most of the month. First at home, with various family issues, getting ready for the holidays and getting myself ready for travel; now away (hello from Seattle!) with little writing time at my disposal, the rare moments available for penning my thoughts have been relatively few and far between.  Even today I have only a brief window of time (stolen while others are busy playing with the Wii) -- enough to jot down a list of definite "yesses" in my world of books lately.

The first up is The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, (Knopf; 0307268934, 2010, 352 pp) by John Vaillant. The Tiger is a simply amazing work of nonfiction, detailing the hunt for an Amur tiger responsible for killing a man in the far east of  Russia, in Primorye.  While this is the central story in this book, around this narrative Vaillant provides a look at the environment, ecology, and history of the area, as well as an examination of the cultural make-up of the people who inhabit this place and its boundaries. Throughout the book the author details how perestroika and the fall of the wall in 1989 changed this sparsely-populated area, often not for the better.  But it's the story of the Amur tiger that will keep you turning pages -- well worth every second of time you invest in it.

Next: Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts (Gollancz; 0575083581, 2010, 488 pp), is a novel that will be appreciated by sci-fi fans who are into quantum physics & alternate time lines as well as conspiracies, put together in a rather humorous fashion.  Again, the setting is modern-day Russia, but the novel begins back in Stalin's USSR, when a group of science fiction writers are summoned to a countryside dacha by the evil dictator himself.  Their task: to create a believable scenario of attack by aliens (the intergalactic kind) to bring together the people in a common unity against an enemy.  Konstantin Skvorecky is one of these writers, and he and the group have just started writing when suddenly the project is cancelled for no reason.   As the writers are being sent home, they are sworn to secrecy -- in fact, told that their little conclave never happened.  But in 1986, he is drawn back into the whole UFO thing when he is placed at the center of two competing groups of conspirators: both believe that the Earth is in the midst of an alien invasion and both want his help to further their own agendas.  Yellow Blue Tibia is literate and funny -- yet also reveals that we are not alone in our American fascination with the UFO phenomenon.  This little paragraph does not do the book justice, but if you like your science fiction on the witty side, you'll enjoy this one. It's one of those books I'd label as "not for everyone," but it's really quite good and you'll find yourself sucked into your own private vortex as you read it.

The Redeemer, by Jo Nesbo (CCV; 0099505967, 2009, 592 pp) picks up where The Devil's Star left off.  Harry Hole, Nesbo's awesome yet angst-ridden Norwegian detective, is back -- and this time he's investigating a cold-blooded murder of Salvation Army officer Robert Karlsen in Oslo. The man was killed at point-blank range and the killer left behind no evidence. The police are stymied -- but on his way home, the killer realizes that he's killed the wrong man and botched the hit he was paid to make -- and must stay until the job is completed correctly.  Nesbo's done it again (he's undoubtedly ranks among my top three Scandinavian crime writers) with a great storyline as well as a mystery which will leave you scratching your head throughout the novel as you try to figure it out. Beyond the mystery the author examines what makes the killer tick, as usual, going back a bit into the past to put some relevance into the present. He also looks at the machinations of wealth and power -- and of course, delves more deeply into Harry's psyche as he attempts to reroute his life.  My only issue with this novel is that I wasn't enthralled with the whole Salvation Army bit but it wasn't enough to make the book any less of a good read. Highly recommended, but do read these novels in the right order -- putting The Redbreast, Nemesis, and The Devil's Star before this one keeps the underlying Harry Hole story flowing.

Last but definitely not least is  Ben Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (Crown; 0307453278, 2010, 416 pp). I just finished this one, actually, and I have to say it's one of the most fascinating books of history I've read in a very long time.  You don't even need to be a WWII buff to appreciate it -- I'm not -- but it's simply amazing. The basic story is this: it's 1943, and the Allies have plans to invade Sicily to get a foothold in Europe and defeat Hitler.  But since Sicily is the most obvious place for an Allied landing, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley (it's pronounced "Chumley") of the Naval Intelligence section of the Admiralty decide to dupe the Germans into thinking that Greece is the actual target -- and with the help of a fiction writer, a plan is born. The British Navy will ferry a dead body in the guise of a Navy officer carrying misleading documents to the coast of Spain, where the body would be found and the documents leaked to German spies there and hopefully believed.  The idea is that the Germans will redeploy a large percentage of their military forces currently on Sicily elsewhere, saving countless Allied lives. How the plan was conceived and how it was put into action is an amazing story in itself, but Macintyre does so much more -- he manages to infuse the story with a bit of suspense and delivers human portraits of all those involved, including the Germans, rounding out this remarkable story.  The drawback to this one is that often the story gets bogged down with a little too much detail (like the description of an entertainer doing his show), breaking up the flow of the narrative, but otherwise it is definitely one of those stories you won't soon forget.

That's it...back again with my list of favorite books before the year's out.

*Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD and the Politics of Ecstasy, by Mark Christensen

9781936182008
Schaffner Press, 2010
440 pp.

First, a huge thanks to the publishers who sent me this book as an ARC! 

Ken Kesey is probably best known to most people as the author of the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) or for his crazy group, The Merry Pranksters, made famous  through Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), which, sadly I have not yet read (but I just bought a copy, so that will be rectified shortly).  In Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstasy, author Mark Christensen has written what he calls a “participatory biography,”  offering not only Kesey’s  story but his own as well in a parallel narrative – so that he could explain how Kesey came to affect his own life as he grew up in the 1960s and joined in the drug culture that was transforming America one tab at a time. One of the major questions Christensen seeks to answer about Kesey is why, after writing two excellent novels, he decided to “ditch” writing all together.

The author used a wide variety of sources and has obviously done his homework.  The sections on Kesey provide a wealth of information and insight, especially when Kesey himself is speaking (via interviews, writings, etc.), although I have to admit that I haven’t read much about Kesey prior to this book, so I have to take Christensen’s word for everything else. The other thing the author does well is to situate the book in time – there’s a great deal of background as the younger generations moved from the whole Beat scene into the era of the hippies, Timothy Leary, and the LSD explosion -- the positive effects of which Kesey believed would actually transform the nation. As the author notes, Kesey wanted to “coalesce the counterculture,” and “open the American mind and set it loose, unfetterered by the conventional constraints of the nine-to-five,” the requirement for which was a “national party in which the punch was spiked with the stuff of dreams.” 

As much as I liked the Kesey sections, the “participatory biography” thing didn’t work for me. Although Christensen’s accounts of his own life and his journey through the psychedelic era were interesting, I was disappointed that they took up so much space in the book. After all, this is a book about Ken Kesey, but there are long chapters about people that for the most part, had very little or no connection to Kesey. In fact, I’m still not sure about the author’s connection to Kesey, except that he was a friend of his brother.  There’s a lengthy chapter about Paul Krassner, another counterculture player, who did know Kesey, and who was actually the author’s first choice for a biographical subject, but when it comes right down to it, I wanted to read about Ken Kesey. 

I would recommend the book (with the caveat about some long and rather slow-moving sections about the author’s experiences), especially to people like myself who totally missed  the whole hippie, LSD, counterculture movement but are still interested in that time period.  Personally, I think that whole movement laid the foundations for much of what’s happened since in terms of grassroot effort, so it’s important to have an understanding of its key players, and Kesey was definitely one of them.

*Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, by Colin Dickey

9781932961867
Unbridled Books
2009
308 pp

Each one of these people has something in common beyond the fact that they're famous (okay, and that they're dead): the composers Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart; Spanish artist Francisco Goya; and philosophers Emanuel Swedenborg and Thomas Browne, and Rene Descartes have all at some point in time had their skulls stolen.  Not only were they taken, but they were moved around Europe, often under shrouds of mystery that would not be cleared up in any short order.  Cranioklepty examines why and how these thefts occurred, offering a brief history of skull theft as well as a look at cranioscopy (what we could today call phrenology) and its uses, tracing how it went from a "dubious scientific theory to a worldwide cultural phenomenon," even so far as to be used in literature: it made its appearance into works by George Eliot (who used it in her early works such as Scenes of Clerical Life) who used her subject's skull to "access...that inner consciousness." The Bronte sisters used it, and so did Charles Dickens.

Cranioklepty is an accessible book for those who are interested in the history of science and for those readers who want something a bit different in their nonfiction reading.  The author shows that in some cases, skulls were kept based on the idea that genius could be measured; in other cases, skulls were relics to be venerated.  The idea is not new; in the middle ages, many religious pilgrimages were based on the trek to worship these relics, which were held at churches and became objects of awe and reverence. The holding of these relics often resulted in competition among churches for congregants or pilgrims, and there was an entire illicit trade of bones or skulls purportedly belonging to saints, as well as relic theft.  But in later times, as the author notes, scientists used skull measurement (craniometry) to prove theories of intelligence capabilities based on race, which were completely bogus, but which only added to the imperial mindset of the superiority of Europeans over other races. There's much more to this book -- these are the highlights. Cranioklepty is well written and is an interesting addition to the history of not only science, but cultural and intellectual history as well.

I liked Cranioklepty, and I'd recommend this book, largely to people who have an interest in the history of science and pseudosciences. At times it does get a bit draggy, and sometimes you're in the middle of a story about one skull and it switches to something else, so it's easy to become a bit confused.  Overall, however, it is quite interesting. It's obvious he's done a lot of research, and I was quite happy to see that he used two of my favorite books as part of his work: Russell Martin's Beethoven's Hair and Russell Shorto's Descartes' Bones.  There's also a bibliography at the back so that geeky people like myself have an opportunity to read more.  I hope he writes another one like this!