Book Review: A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). Amor Towles.

This is the beautifully written story of an elegant Russian gentleman and nobleman of the old order, Count Alexander Rostov, who becomes a "former person" when he is sentenced by the young Soviet regime in the 1920s to live out his life confined to the Metropol Hotel in Moscow.

It’s a remarkable tale of how he copes for years under a kind of luxurious house arrest, and finds meaning and love in the human relationships he builds in his tiny slice of Russian society. At the end, there’s a surprise foray into espionage, intrigue and danger, which adds delightful spice to the story. Highly recommended.

Book Review: A Long Night in Paris (2020). Dov Alfov.

A very promising first novel by an Israeli journalist, this well-written spy thriller and murder mystery starts with the mysterious disappearance of a young Israeli high-tech businessman at Orly Airport in Paris.

From there, the fast-paced adventure pits two resourceful "acting" leaders at different levels in a top-secret Israeli spy agency (one young and female, the other older and male) against their own organization's internal political conspiracies, the plodding French police inspector who is trying to manage the case, and a complex Chinese assassination plot.

To make it more challenging, another Israeli agent goes missing, as our two heroes rush to understand the underlying cause of the sudden outbreak of high-profile murders in the French capital.

An enjoyable and satisfying tale, with excellent characterization, plenty of high-tech intelligence wizardry, and an amusingly jaundiced view of the inner workings of police and intelligence organizations. This would make a great movie. Recommended.

Book Review: The Good Lord Bird (2013). James McBride.

This is an amusing and award-winning satire and fictional narrative of the last years of "Osawatomie" John Brown (the famous abolitionist), as told through the eyes and experiences of a young slave boy who is mistaken by Brown for a girl.

Our narrator ends up being freed by Brown, and swept along (now masquerading as a girl) as Brown leads his abolitionist campaign, and his tiny "army" of religious fanatics, from skirmishes in Kansas to their inevitable denouement at the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry.

Along the way, John Brown and his ragtag group encounter Jeb Stuart, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, as well as other minor heroes and villains of Brown's real-life famous private crusade against slavery that helped spark the Civil War. Recommended.

Book Reviews: Blackout (2010) and All Clear (2010). Connie Willis.

I recently re-read these two thick science fiction and historical novels, which were originally intended to be one volume, but grew to be two because Connie Willis couldn't fit the whole grand story into one book. They are built on the same time-travel plot premise introduced in The Doomsday Book, which I reviewed recently.

It's six years after the events of The Doomsday Book (it’s now 2060), and the time travel missions of the student historians at Oxford have proliferated, but trying to manage the complexity of it all is becoming an ever more chaotic process. Planned drops into past eras are being reshuffled by Mr. Dunworthy (the head of time travel historical studies) at the last minute, no one can get the right period outfits from the Costume department because the historians' schedules keep changing, and it seems to be increasingly hard to find drop sites (exact times and places in the past) that will work with the time travel machinery.

Into this organizational maelstrom come three young historian innocents, Merope, Polly and Michael, each headed for different periods and situations in World War II Great Britain, including the children's evacuations from London, the evacuation from Dunkirk, and the Blitz (the German bombing of London). But once they arrive, they slowly discover their return drops won't open, and they eventually have to face the possibility that perhaps there's no way back to their own era.

Is time travel broken? Could they be altering the outcome of the war by their own actions (which isn't supposed to be possible, according to their time travel theory)? What is going on back in future Oxford? And how can they make contact with each other, to figure out what’s wrong and how to return to their future?

Using Connie Willis's trademark plot devices of missed connections, endless frustrated plans, messages not received or answered, and time travelers under unexpected duress having to constantly improvise new solutions, these two books are a truly wonderful tour through the heroism and bravery of the British people in World War II. Marvelous, moving and really fun to read! Highly recommended.

Book Review: Kindness Goes Unpunished (2008). Craig Johnson.

This is the third Walt Longmire mystery novel. Sheriff Walt’s daughter Katie is viciously attacked and put into a potentially fatal coma in Philadelphia, where she has been working as a young lawyer and has an apparently abusive boyfriend.

Walt and his best friend Henry Standing Bear, in town for a display of Native American cultural artifacts, go looking for her attacker, while meeting Walt’s deputy Vic's whole family of Philly cops. Vic comes back from Wyoming to help Walt, and there is a race to see whether she or her divorced mother (or both) might end up in bed with Walt. No spoilers here! But another worthy addition to the Longmire saga, this time in an East Coast urban environment. Recommended.

Book Review: News of the World (2016). Paulette Jiles.

This is a very satisfying Western story about an old man, a veteran of several American wars of the early and mid-19th century, who travels from town to town across the post-Civil War west, eking out a living putting on one-man shows, where he reads and comments on stories from the newspapers of the time.

At one stop, he reluctantly accepts the job of returning a 9-year old white girl, who's been abducted by and lived among Indians, to her surviving family members.  It’s a great Western adventure tale about two lonely but strong-willed people, who learn to love and care for each other across the wide bridges of age, culture, language and understanding between them.

I previously reviewed the movie version based on this book, starring Tom Hanks.  I would rate the book as even better than the movie, due to its sensitive and powerful evocation of the complex emotions and slowly-developing relationship between the old man and the girl, and its focus on the unusual history of whites kidnapped by Indians, who then didn't want to return to white society, or to be "rescued" from their Indian families and tribal life.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Doomsday Book (1992). Connie Willis.

I re-read this excellent science fiction novel recently after many years (it was a Nebula Winner, originally published in 1992). What perfect pandemic-era reading!

This is the story of Kivrin Engle, a petite young Oxford undergrad history student in the year 2054, who is sent alone on the first time-travel study to the Middle Ages (time-travel having been discovered a few years earlier, and now being put to use as a historical research tool).  Her destination is the Oxford area, Christmas time in 1320, safely 28 years before the Black Plague will arrive, for a two-week observation and research trip.

Unfortunately, something goes terribly wrong in the time-travel drop, and she ends up desperately ill, and stranded back in the Medieval period, in a little village near Oxford, but not quite when she had intended.  Meanwhile, her academic mentor Mr. Dunworthy's frantic attempts to discover where she is, and rescue her, encounter endless obstacles as a mysterious new virus outbreak sweeps through the 2054 Oxford community.

A gripping and very moving story of the timeless nature of human emotions, behaviors and relationships, and the eternal presence of good and evil, and generosity and selfishness, in societies throughout history, regardless of their technological level.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Great Circle (2021). Maggie Shipstead.

As someone who has been a pilot and involved with the aviation community for part of my adult life, and fascinated with the history and ongoing story of human flight ever since I was a young boy, a novel like this one, where the most important character is an early woman pilot, might be more appealing to me than to people who don’t know or care about flying.  But in fact, this excellent historical novel has been winning widespread acclaim and awards, so it’s safe to say that it has a wider appeal than just to flying enthusiasts.

There are really two main characters – one the famous woman pilot, whose unusual childhood and young adult experiences span the 1930s and 1940s, and the other a troubled young actress from our own era, who has won the part of the older woman in a movie about her famous around-the-world flight attempt, which ended in her disappearance.  But there are also a number of other important characters in the story, whose lives are intertwined with those of these two young women from different eras, and who are also struggling with their own personal demons and desires.

In the course of the story of these two parallel female lives, and the contemporaneous stories of their various friends, lovers and family members, we see how each person’s knowledge of the world, the skills they develop, and the sexual and relationship experiences they have, all shape the kind of people they become, and the things they achieve.

We also are reminded how mysterious every life is to the rest of the world, and how impossible it is to ever truly know everything about who a person was, what they thought and felt, and what they experienced over the course of their lives, from the scraps of written and photographic records they left behind, and the fading memories of those who knew them.

There is also a mystery that grows throughout the book, which is this: what happened to the woman pilot, when she disappeared in the last phase of her “great circle” flight around the world?  In this respect, the story reminds us of the unsolved mystery of Amelia Earhart and her earlier (real life) around-the-world flight, and it becomes a consuming question for the young actress, as she struggles to fully understand and know the story of the character she is playing on the screen.  But of course, I can’t tell you how it turns out . . .

This was a thoroughly enjoyable novel about a cast of interesting and relatable characters, living in two different modern time periods yet somehow connected.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone (2021). Book 9 of the Outlander Series. Diana Gabaldon.

After a very long wait for legions of dedicated fans around the world, the latest installment in the epic Outlander series of novels by Diana Gabaldon (now also a major hit TV show from the Starz channel), arrived in November of 2021.  It’s the usual 900 pages or so of small, dense type (in the hardback version) – in other words, a very long read, but worth every minute of it, and the seven long years of waiting since Book 8 (Written in My Own Heart’s Blood) was released.

As the book begins, it’s 1779, and Jamie and Claire and their family are back together again at their frontier home on Fraser’s Ridge in rural North Carolina.  They’re safe for the moment, but the American revolution is moving south, and they know from their pre-knowledge of history that navigating the next two years of war, with all the fratricidal terror to come between Loyalists and Rebels, will be fraught with danger and hard choices.

As always, Gabaldon brings the characters and scenes totally alive, with fascinating attention to period detail, contrasted social and cultural mores and conditions between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, dramatic historical events described, and moving portrayals of many of the more timeless experiences of life, love and war.  No matter how long these books take to read, I never want them to end each time I start reading one of them.

When I started reading this series (some years ago now), I thought it might be a cheesy historical romance and bodice-ripper with some science fiction time-travel thrown in, but I soon realized it was serious literature and addictive historical fiction (with lovely occasional touches of the cosmically mysterious and fantastic) of the very best sort.  If you’ve read all the other books (and yes, they need to be read in order, at least the first time through), you’re definitely going to want to keep going, and read this one. 

Gabaldon has promised to write one final volume to end the series, and to reach the end of the American Revolution, but at one book every 5-7 years, it’s going to be a long wait for Book 10 (2028, maybe?).  In the meantime, if you haven't read this series, you'll have lots of time to catch up before the final volume arrives.  And if you have, you can always go back and re-read the previous nine books while you’re waiting!  Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Unsheltered (2019). Barbara Kingsolver.

Unsheltered is a beautifully woven tale of parallel lives in a small rust belt town, one thread in the late nineteenth century and the other in modern times. 

Certain themes tie the two stories together across time: the physical location and the two different slowly disintegrating houses that stand on it, the family lives and their struggles with financial survival despite educations, intelligence and good will, and the small-mindedness and irrationality of some of their neighbors in each time and place.

Kingsolver is wonderful at capturing the internal monologues and feelings of characters, and the ebbs and flows of events and emotions within individuals and communities.   I definitely will go explore some of her other novels.  Recommended.

Book Review: Where the Crawdads Sing (2018). Delia Owens.

One of the best-selling and most acclaimed novels of 2018, this haunting story set in rural North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s focuses on the childhood of a small girl, growing up alone in the coastal marshes after she is  abandoned by her mother, her siblings and ultimately her abusive father. 

It's a story of survival against the odds, nature, family dysfunction and prejudice in a small impoverished community, with a murder mystery interwoven to drive the backstory.  

Beautifully told and engrossing.  I saw recently that it’s coming very soon in a film version to a screen near you.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Under Occupation (2019). Alan Furst.

For those not familiar with Alan Furst, a quick summary:  Furst is an American novelist who has written more than a dozen novels about the period in Europe leading up to and during the early years of World War II, which are in the “spy thriller” genre, but are so much more. 

As he has commented, his stories, which take place in various capitals and countries all over eastern and western Europe, try to capture the lived experience of ordinary people faced daily with unavoidable moral choices between going along with evil or resisting that evil, and having to risk or choose life or death for themselves and others as the price of the choices they must make.  This perspective and Furst’s skill as a fiction writer make for some of the best spy novels ever written about World War II and its prelude.

Under Occupation features the latest in his obligatory middle-aged male leads, this one a writer of detective novels living in occupied Paris.  I had the feeling that this particular character was particularly close to Furst's heart and personal identity, almost as though he was imagining himself (a real-life writer of spy novels) trying to survive and participate in the World War II Resistance.  Most of his other heroes don't do exactly the same kind of work he does. 

But in any case, it’s a very compelling story, with a new set of interesting, likable and complex characters, a couple of artful sex scenes, moments of tension and fast action, and of course some treacherous Nazis and collaborators to overcome.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Passengers (2019). John Marrs.

The Passengers is another dystopian thriller of the near future, this one focused on self-driving cars. 

The essential plot:  a hacker takes over a set of self-driving cars, threatens to kill all the riders, and live streams their terror with audio and video feeds from inside each car, to make important points about financial liability and legal responsibility for accidents when self-driving cars are involved, as well as to highlight the potential vulnerability of each of us to personal data theft and misuse. 

The story raises some interesting and very contemporary philosophical and legal points about automation and self-driving vehicle technologies, but the plot becomes a little strained at the point that the hacker seems to know everything about the individual secrets and personal moral failures of each doomed passenger. 

Still, it's taut and unnerving.  It's a little too close to the media spectacles, privacy invasions and destructive online mob behaviors we've already experienced in real life on our TV news, smartphones and the internet.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Warehouse (2019). Rob Hart.

This dark near-future thriller does for Amazon what The Circle (2015) by Dave Eggers did for Google and Facebook, by painting a stark fictional picture of where unrestrained monopoly online retail capitalism could soon lead us.  

A failed small businessman who is also a former prison guard, and a beautiful female industrial spy, get jobs with "Cloud", a new mega-corporation and tech giant, in one of the company's ubiquitous live-in warehouse communities. 

As they're selected and trained for their dead-end jobs, meet each other and begin an affair, and as the spy plots to crack the all-seeing security of the company's network on behalf of an unknown client, we see a horrifying vision of all the ways our own familiar compromises with convenience in purchasing and product delivery, low costs based on cheap labor, and unlimited business access to our personal data could lead to a powerless and empty existence for all but a small ruling corporate elite.  

An excellent contemporary cautionary tale, strongly reminiscent of 1984 and Brave New World, but updated to address some of the unique challenges to freedom emerging in our own times and society.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Ministry of the Future (2020). Kim Stanley Robinson.

The New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein (in one of his  excellent podcasts on The Ezra Klein Show) called this "the most important book of 2020".  I can see why he reached this conclusion.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a famous contemporary science-fiction writer, who is best known for his novels about the colonization of Mars.  However, in this one, he takes on the climate crisis, with a small cast of characters, but as told through many different voices around the world. 

Set in the 2030s and 2040s, it tries to imagine what a quasi-worldwide "Ministry of the Future" would have to do in order to save the world, and in telling that story, looks at a variety of climate-related crises and challenges that seem all too plausible in our current political and economic situation.  

I'm not sure the author’s "many voices" story approach makes for the best novel, literarily speaking.  But he does discuss and illuminate many of the ethical, financial, political and practical hurdles we will face in the coming years, if we are to find global solutions to the crisis of human-caused climate change.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Death Without Company (2006). Craig Johnson.

This is the second Walt Longmire mystery novel, in which an elderly local woman may have been murdered in the local old-folks home. 

 

With all the same excellent literary qualities, main characters along with some new ones, and a new mix of complicated family histories and relationships, long-hidden crimes and conspiracies, and plenty of the same kind of local color and great dialogue that were present in The Cold Dish (the first Walt Longmire novel), Johnson spins another entertaining and high-quality addition to his series of contemporary Western mystery novels.  

 

I really liked it!  But on the other hand, it's two down, 22 (and counting) to go, with the recent release of the latest installment (number 24) in this series.  I'm going to need to pace myself!  Recommended.

Book Review: Rules of Civility (2011). Amor Towles.

This is Amor Towles's first novel, written as a first-person account of the life of an aspiring young woman from the lower classes, who dives into the social life of the wealthy in late 1930s Manhattan.  

It contains wonderful, evocative descriptions of the people, places and social behavior of the American Yankee aristocratic class (and particularly of the young people) at that time, when the Depression was still recent history and the calamity of World War II was just ahead.  

It also nicely depicts the way in which for so many of us, our twenties are the time when who we ultimately will become in life as adults is shaped and molded by our experiences, the people we meet then, and the historical events around us.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Recursion (2020). Brian Crouch.

This is the second novel by Crouch that approaches the question of multiple universes and timelines, but this time from the standpoint of neuroscience and memory. 

In this story, the mechanism for traversing multiple lives lived (or periods of lives) has to do with an invention that allows a person to jump back to a point in their memory where something emotional happened, and then restart their lifetime story from that point, but with their old memories intact (thus allowing them to consciously make different decisions, and become different people). 

The "life loop" is a plot that has been similarly explored in other stories.  Groundhog Day is probably the most famous example in film (with its very short "one-day" timeline loop), but it is also the basis for two earlier sci-fi novels which I highly recommend, Replay (1986), by Ken Grimwood, and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), by Claire North. 

This book is another worthy contribution to the time loop literary tradition, but one in which there is more effort made to come up with a technological explanation for what is happening to the characters.  That focuses more attention on the wider problem of the unintended consequences of the new technologies we humans keep inventing, and the massively destructive effects they can have on our happiness and social stability.  Recommended.

Book Review: Orfeo (2014). Richard Powers.

This is the most difficult and complex Richard Powers novel I've read so far.   It tells the story of Peter Els, a now 70-year-old loner and musical composer (of classical music) who has spent his adult life trying to create a piece of music of surpassing and universal truth. 

 

Through scenes looking back to different stages of Peter's adult life, we see a number of separate threads of his personal story, including his first great love in college, a failed marriage to another woman, an often-destructive collaboration and friendship with a strange dancer and dramatist, and his troubled experience as a mostly absent parent to a daughter. 

 

Along the way, we also are exposed to deep discussions of music and music theory, the history of 20th century classical music and various trends in academic criticism of it, and an interwoven set of political themes about repressive technologies, authoritarianism and the social damage of the war on terror.  

 

Looming dangerously in the background of this complicated stew of ideas and events is yet another plot-line about the accidental discovery of his amateur experiments with home-brew DNA manipulation (in his quest for a new musical form), and his eventual pursuit by a bioterrorism-obsessed police force and a hysterical internet-fueled post-9/11 public.  It definitely held my attention, but at times it seemed like there was just too much going on to follow it all.  

 

At the end, the main question I had from reading this book, which was deeply relevant to me, was: what is the point of composing and creating new music, when there is already so much of it freely available to anyone, and where for most musicians, there is so little chance that many people will ever hear or appreciate the product of all their hard work and creative obsessions?  For that matter, why is anyone driven to make art if there’s no likely probability of recognition or reward for it?

 

It’s an enduring mystery of the musical mind and the creative soul, and of our own times, as explored by one of our greatest contemporary novelists.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Echo Maker (2003). Richard Powers.

After reading The Overstory, Richard Powers’ remarkable novel about trees, forests, and how the fate of humans, the environment and the planet is bound to them, I decided to explore some of his other work.  

 

This much older novel weaves a gripping mystery out of the results of a young man’s late-night car crash, and the rare mental condition he suffers from the accident, where he can’t recognize the people and things closest to him.  

 

In the course of this unusual but masterful story, a number of different characters and elements are drawn into the mystery, including the beloved sister he can’t recognize, an alienated older popular neuroscience writer and academic, an old girlfriend of the crash victim, the fate of a local migratory crane population and the river site they visit each year, and other pieces.  

 

The book didn’t look that large or long, but it did seem to last and last, with a slowly unfolding story that held my rapt attention throughout, even though I frequently had no idea where it was leading.  A neurological, philosophical and ecological mystery of the first order.  Recommended.