Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy is an engrossing novel about a woman, Inti Flynn, trying to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands after hundreds of years of them not being there. Her belief is that wolves will help the entire ecosystem come back to life. 

There with her twin sister, Aggie, Inti has mirror-touch synesthesia, where she feels in her mind sensations, including pain, that she sees happen to others. Aggie is a shell of her former self, communicating only with Inti, and often just barely, afraid to leave the house after the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband. 

The locals in Scotland are generally against Inti's efforts to introduce the wolves, believing them a threat to their sheep and way of life. One of them, Stuart Burns, who had been beating his wife, Lainey, is found dead by Inti and she buries his body to try to prevent retribution against the wolves. She had developed a relationship with the chief of police, Duncan, becomes pregnant, and goes from believing it was Duncan who killed Stuart to thinking a wolf did it after Duncan gets attacked. 

Inti goes to try to find and kill the wolf and gives birth in the forest, with she and the baby almost dying from exposure, but wolves curled around them for warmth. Her sister then finds them in the forest, and after Aggie takes the baby to get her help, one of Inti's adversary locals comes and saves her. She later learns it was Aggie who killed Stuart, and almost killed Duncan, in an effort to protect her. 

The book feels very unique, with it wild, raw, and visceral, containing a huge connection with the natural world. It's also about love and loss and finding your way through pain in your world, and contains lovely language, with Inti "halved and doubled at once" after the birth of her child.

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry is a novel that chronicles the story of Alice Scott, Hayden Anderson, and Margaret Ives. Ives is a reclusive heiress from a media family who lives on a small island in Georgia and engages both Henry and Anderson as potential writers of her biography. 

The book is told first person through the eyes of Alice, who develops a romance with Hayden, and they both see that there's more to Margaret's story, and why she brought them into her life, than she's revealing to them. 

Margaret tells Alice and Hayden that she'll meet with each separately over a 30-day period, and then decide who she wants to tell her story. During those thirty days, she speaks of family secrets, but it doesn't come out till the end that one of the secrets is that Hayden is her grandson. He doesn't know, as Margaret gave Hayden's mom for adoption. Rather than being about writing a biography, Margaret's plan was to get to know Hayden, and Henry's book about the two of them and Alice finishes nicely.

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy tells the set in the future story of Franny Stone, who arrives in Greenland with the purpose of tracking the world's last flock of Arctic terns (deer, wolves, and bears are already extinct). 

The book is McConaghy's debut novel and seems to hit on many of the same themes and emotional constructs that she covers a few years later in her novel Wild Dark Shore, with the more recent book a bit tighter of a read. It felt as if McConaghy developed further her craft as a writer, something both logical and kind of inspiring.

Franny joins with the crew of the Saghani, and the boat travels to the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. Her quest is revealed as an attempt to fulfill a desire of her late husband, Niall, and it's a nice ending to the book. 

Paper Girl by Beth Macy

Paper Girl by Beth Macy is a good book subtitled A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America. Macys grew up in Urbana, Ohio, graduating in 1982 from Urbana High School. There was a healthy economy, thriving schools, and middle class, that Macys, one of the poorer kids in her class, could aspire to. 

A Pell Grant, spearheaded by Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, enabled Macys to attend college. She graduated from Bowling Green State University in 1986, the tail end of the time a Pell Grant would cover tuition, housing, and books for a poor kid. Now the average Pell grant pays less than 30% of a public university education, an amount that could well have shut out Macys, who later was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, from college. The gutting of Pell Grants began under Ronald Reagan and continued under Bill Clinton. Reagan’s Secretary of Education derided the notion of education helping people recover from poverty, and Reagan compared Pell recipients to welfare moms. Clinton then cratered financial aid for poor kids, at the same time he brought the U.S. into the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, predicting that offshoring would be a win-win for American workers. NAFTA took a million jobs, and subsequent free trade agreements and globalization another four million jobs. 

Free trade, and anger over it, was cited in presidential election exit polls as a reason for Trump flipping Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan red in 2016. Macys writes that Democrats should have embraced unionism, a la Bernie Sanders, but instead, rural communities have been abandoned by the Democratic Party, leaving small town America available for the Republican Party to feed on. Local news, particularly in rural America, has been decimated, so people get their information from Facebook posts and press releases. This leads to a split of society, where people aren’t given real information and can easily descend into tribalism. Quoted is the philosopher Richard Rorty who in 1998 predicted that globalization and inequality would lead to class resentment, and someone would tap into it and be elected as a strongman, proclaiming that he’ll make the elites pay. Trump in 2024 won 91% of the counties lacking a professional news source.

Macys with her book went back to Urbana to write on what had become of the town. She notes that just 37% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, and only 16% in Urbana. The mayor, Bill Bean, who took over his dad’s successful insurance business that started in 1866, says college is overrated and the town’s 16% college graduation rate doesn’t bother him. Also noted is how someone who ran against Bean and lost now runs a youth center that Urbana’s establishment blocked from receiving a $2M grant from the state. 

When you’re working class, good schools and social connections are sustenance. However, the Urbana that Macys returned to featured schools with large numbers of parents yelling at teachers, and take their kids out, professing to homeschool them, but just not wanting to be responsible for their truancy when kids just weren’t showing up for school. It’s noted that homeschooling is now the fastest growing form of education in the country, with the gutting of public schools creating separate educational systems. When people lose faith in their schools, and what they can do for their kids, it's a crisis. If kids don’t see a way out, and low-income kids aren’t exposed to normal and good while at school, it’s too easy for them to become stuck. 

Factories shut down, union jobs go away, leaving low paying jobs, and when there are good jobs, it can be hard for employers to be get good workers. Enough people couldn’t be found for skilled manufacturing jobs that the Biden Administration was subsidizing. The few who go away to college don’t return, so there’s no models for kids, leaving Urbana what Macys describes as a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place. She tells the story of recent Urbana High graduate Silas James and covers how something as basic as reliable transportation to a job or school can be so vital to someone's efforts. Macys also writes about how her older sister denied sexual abuse allegations by her daughter Liza, against her stepdad. It’s heartbreaking reading and while Paper Girl is a good book, it’s also a tough one.

Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren

Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren is a solid novel, one with heart, that features as its lead one of the secondary characters from Huckleberry Finn. It was interesting reading in the postscript of the work that Jahren put into getting characters and historical details right, creating a fictional work grounded in facts.

The book is an adventure tale, starting with fourteen-year-old Mary Jane in 1846 being sent 400 miles down the Mississippi River by her mother Ida to go help her aunt Evelyn, who is caring for her injured husband George and raising daughters Susan and Joanna. She took the steamboat Minnesota Belle down the Mississippi, and then went about the Galenian, helmed by Mrs. Captain, who would become Mary Jane's good friend. The Galenian was coal-powered, with the boiler known as Robert Fulton, and Mary Jane worked while aboard, helping Mrs. Captain run the ship. She was then met by the Schmidt family, Mormons who took Mary Jane to her aunt, uncle, and cousins, where she discovered that her extended family had little, but she could help. George had suffered a head injury and wasn't able to work, and Evelyn was caring for he and the two girls, and the Schmidts giving provisions every Sunday. 

Mary Jane was a worker and tirelessly helped the family. Things were going well, with Uncle George improving, until he had a seizure, developing paralysis, then Evelyn got sick. Mary Jane had been exposed to the illness, but quickly recovered, and the Schmidt family took in Susan and Joanna so that they wouldn't catch it while Mary Jane tried to nurse Aunt Evelyn back to health. It turned out to be unsuccessful and Evelyn died, with George dying shortly after. Mary Jane decided to be responsible for her cousins and planned to take them back to her family, but a judge decided that they, including Mary Jane who said that she their sister, should go live with a relative of their father, Peter Wilks of Greenville, MS. 

For the trip to Greenville, the girls wound up back on the Galenian, with Mrs. Captain. Also onboard the ship was a boy not yet ten-years-old, Rooster, who Mrs. Captain had befriended and was working in the ship. Mrs. Captain noted that he "didn't have a good start," but was doing a great job working and living on the ship as first mate. Mrs. Captain would speak of others by saying "it doesn't cost anything to be kind" and her plan was to give the Galenian to Rooster in a few years when she retires. Peter Wilks, Susan and Joanna's uncle, was not a good man. The three girls befriended a dog, that they named Cherry, who never left their side. Wilks fell ill and died and into the picture came two people who pretended to be his brothers, and with them was a young man who Mary Jane became taken with. Peter Wilks' actual brothers showed up, were good men, and Susan and Joanna decided to go back to London with them. Once more the girls spent time on the Galenian with Mrs. Captain and Rooster, and Mary Jane went and found the young man, who turned out to be Huck Finn. 

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy is a compelling, dark, and lovely novel set on Shearwater, a fictional island based on Macquarie Island halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica. The book features the characters of widower Dominic Salt, his three children Fen, Raff, and Orly, and a woman, Rowan, who washes ashore while coming to try to aid her husband, who was the lead botanist on Shearwater.

The Salts had been on the island eight years, with Fen seventeen-years-old, Raff eighteen, and Orly nine. Dominic is caretaker of Shearwater, in charge of fixing things broken, but the people on it a bit broken inside. Dom would speak to his wife, who died of cancer at the time of Orly's birth. Fen sleeps at the boathouse to create space for herself, and Raff's boyfriend Alex committed suicide on the island. 

Shearwater is a fascinating setting in the book, with it housing an enormous seed bank containing some three million varieties of seeds. It's there to preserve plants from going extinct, especially in the fact of climate disaster threatening the global food supply. Reference is made throughout the book to deteriorating conditions in the outside world, with fires, floods, and food scarcity. The island is also natively home to plants that don't grow in other regions and the kids' connection to the animals of Shearwater, particularly the whales and seals, is great reading. 

Weather conditions on the island deteriorated, and the Salts and Rowan are waiting for the scheduled boat to come six weeks off to evacuate them and the seeds they deem most vital to be saved. It comes out that Rowan's husband Hank had an affair with Fen, thirty years his junior, then wanted to drown all the seeds as he wouldn't have been able to take them off the island and couldn't bear to pick some, but not others. He then tried to drown Fen when she told him she might be pregnant. Around this same time, Alex's brother Tom and his research partner Naija drowned, Alex killed himself, and then Rowan washed ashore. The Salts told her that Hank had left the island, not that he was being held in advance of the rescue ship coming to Shearwater.

The book hops back and forth between first-person narration by the various characters ands that makes it a somewhat disquieting read, but it pays off at the devastatingly beautiful end, with the seed vault starting to flood and Rowan giving Orly her last breaths so that he can live. In the afterword, McConaghy notes having been on Macquarie with her sixteen-month-old son, and how awe-inspiring the island was. 

All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert is a heavy, but also beautiful nonfiction subtitled Love, Loss, and Liberation. Gilbert writes about her late soulmate, Rayya Elias, the drug and alcohol addition she had, and Rayya's death from liver cancer. Also, Gilbert writes about her own sex and love addiction, how her story with Rayya was one of friendship, romance, beauty, rage, and pain, and Gilbert's recovery from her addiction.

Gilbert had to be involved in the dramas of other people, always checking in, helping them recover, being the savior. She would also become wrapped up in relationships, them turning immediately all-consuming. She was a romantic obsessive, an enabler, and codependent. Having money from her book Eat Pray Love gave fuel to the fire, she could afford to gift huge amounts, trying to save others from their problems. 

When Gilbert and Rayya didn't know each other well, Gilbert gave the gift of free lodging to Rayya after a mutual friend said that Rayya going through a hard time from a breakup. They became close friends and after Rayya's cancer diagnosis, with a six-month life expectancy, they fell into one another and started a relationship. They went everywhere, doing everything, including drugs and alcohol. For a time it was great, then it wasn't, as Rayya had experience as a drug addict, and had returned to it.

Rayya had a horrible decline back into addiction and covered in the book is how when someone an addict, the things they do and say are said and done by someone else entirely. Rayya herself had years prior told someone that when dealing with a family member who was an addict, they were no longer dealing with them, but with a vampire. They might come back to being a person, but that was up to them alone. People have to want to get clean, they can't because someone else wants them to. Rayya lived twenty months after her diagnosis and Gilbert had to leave Rayya to save herself. She had hit caregiver collapse, with Rayya's drug and alcohol addiction and Gilbert's sex and love addiction supercharging the dysfunction and then collapse.

At the end of Rayya's life, Gilbert was there, and Gilbert in her pain spun into her sex and love addiction, and then confronted it. She notes recovery from addiction of all kinds is possible, but it's hard, and requires constant effort and vigilance. The twelve steps work as long as they're worked at and the rooms of recovery, meetings, sponsors, and check ins are all needed. Gilbert went first a day, then thirty days clean from her addiction, then added on giving up alcohol and then drugs, then a year clean, then five years clean at the time of writing. The book notes that addiction is insidious, and addicts can't do normal things like normal people. Gilbert recounts a story about how an addict will always reach a point where they might relapse, and then have thirty seconds to save their life, and decide to either go to the addiction or run the other way. 

It's a beautiful story about both Rayya and Gilbert, but also a rough one, not a story that's puppies and rainbows during someone's final magical, mystical days left on earth. Gilbert includes drawings, poems, and sayings between chapters, including about her recovery from addiction, Give in. Give up. Give over. Towards the very end, Gilbert writes as part of "A Poem for Rayya, Six Years Gone" the statement I had to stay because I'm just beginning. You had to leave because you're done.

Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard

Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard is a solid work of nonfiction about the 1881 murder of President James Garfield. Millard in the book delves into Garfield's rise to the presidency, his shooting, and attempts to save his life, including the medical quackery practiced by his doctor that made the attack a fatal one.

Garfield was shot four months after his inauguration, by Charles Guiteau. He had been rebuffed in his attempts to be named ambassador to France, and believed that he would receive great acclaim for killing Garfield. Right after the shooting, doctors were sticking unsterilized fingers into the wound, probing unsuccessfully for the bullet and introducing infection more lethal than the bullet. Garfield then went under the care of Dr. Willard Bliss, who tightly controlled access to the president, keeping himself solely in charge of treatment. Bliss was a proponent of allopathy, or administering large doses of harsh medicines to counteract the original ailment. Joseph Lister at the same time was attempting to convince American doctors of the importance of antisepsis, preventing infection by destroying germs. Antisepsis means anything coming into the contact with the patient is sterilized, and was already applied with great success in Europe, but largely rejected in America, including by Bliss.

Millard also covers Alexander Graham Bell and his attempts to use his induction balance invention, a precursor to the x-ray machine, to find the bullet in Garfield. Bell was unsuccessful in part because Bliss commanded him to only search the part of the body where he incorrectly believed the bullet to be. Had Garfield been shot fifteen years later, x-rays would have found the bullet, and he would have been treated with antiseptic surgery, certainly surviving. Or, if he had been simply left alone after being shot, he would likely have survived, with the bullet remaining in his body, but without infection. It was noted how many injured during the Civil War just decades prior would miraculously survive seemingly cataclysmic injuries. They often didn't have access to care, so weren't treated by doctors who introduced germs and ultimately infection into their systems. 

Garfield spent two months at the White House, with his body wracked by infection and additionally shoddy care from Bliss, and when gravely ill, demanded to be moved to the coast, where he died two weeks later. Chester Arthur was sworn in as president, and Guiteau then hanged for murder.

The Devil Reached Toward the Sky by Garrett M. Graff

The Devil Reached Toward the Sky by Garrett M. Graff is an excellent book subtitled An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. Graff covers in detail the events around the bomb, it's origins, building, dropping of it twice on Japan, and effects of that. It was developed for use against Germany, and the intensity of work was to get the bomb developed before Hitler could. Germany never came close to developing the bomb, in part due to antisemitism casting out of scientists, some of whom fled Europe and then were involved in the effort. Germany had dropped out of the war by the time of the bombings, which were done to save the lives of American soldiers who otherwise might have died in a ground invasion of Japan. 

The Manhattan Project to create the bomb was a science and math achievement, but also just as much an industrial manufacturing achievement, one conducted in secret. At the University of Chicago they showed the bomb could be possible, creating a chain-reacting pile of uranium. Hanford, WA was the site of the plutonium refinement plant, Oak Ridge, TN of uranium refinement, and Los Alamos, NM where the bomb was built. 75,000 people were working in and around Oak Ridge by the end of the war, over 8,000 at Los Alamos, and 45,000 at Hanford. 

The project director was General Leslie Groves and in charge of building the bomb was J. Robert Oppenheimer. Other drivers of the project were Vannevar Bush, head of the science effort, James B. Conant, president of Harvard, Enrico Fermi, a physicist who was deputy to Groves, Richard Feynman, Otto Frisch, and Edward Teller. Noted was how important "energy = mass X the speed of light," squared by Albert Einstein is. Graff covers Feynman highlighting the "atomic hypothesis, that all things are made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."

The bomber wing was the 509th Composite Group, one, including transport supply aircraft, designed to fly a single weapon. They trained at Wendover Field at the Utah, Nevada state line. The bombs were dropped by B-29s, and airmen at first were reluctant to fly the B-29 as they were worried about its safety. To convince the men to fly the B-29, women, who weren't allowed to fly in combat, were recruited to fly it, and then when men saw this, they went ahead. After the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945, Harry S. Truman became President and was told about the bomb, with the full description provided by Vannevar Bush. Germany surrendered May 8, and the Trinity test of the bomb was July 16 in a remote corner of the New Mexico desert. 

The first bomb was transported on the U.S.S. Indianapolis to Tinian, 40 square miles and 1,500 miles from Japan. The Enola Gay, piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets, was the plane that dropped on Hiroshima August 6, 1945, with Nagasaki three days later. The mission over Hiroshima was a textbook effort, that which dropped on Nagasaki was riddled with problems, including a switch from Kokura to Nagasaki as the target due to cloud cover and barely landing on Okinawa, the closest American base, while little fuel after dropping the bomb. 

In Hiroshima, 70,000 of the city's 76,000 homes were destroyed. Casualty reports had 66,000 dying in the initial blast and another 140,000 by the end of the year, roughly half the city's residents. Japan initiated surrender negotiations the day after Nagasaki, and then surrendered August 15, 1945. As people in the days and weeks and months after would suffer from radiation poisoning, the U.S. government denied that there were any lasting effects of the atomic explosions. In early 1946, New Yorker correspondent John Hershey traveled to Hiroshima, and then the August 31, 1946 issue of the magazine devoted the entire issue, 30,000 words, to covering what happened in the city. The book closes with the Albert Einstein quote "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth... rocks."

Who is Government? by Michael Lewis

Who is Government? by Michael Lewis is a solid compilation book subtitled The Untold Story of Public Service. It came out of a series of essays done for The Washington Post, and features ten profiles of government employees by nine different writers, with Lewis providing the first and last essay.

“The Canary” by Lewis is about Christopher Mark, a former coal miner who led the development of industry-wide standards to prevent roof falls in mines. His work, accounting for all conditions in a given mine, led to 2016 being the first year of no U.S. mining roof fall fatalities. It’s a fascinating view into someone who studied mining engineering at Penn State and wound up working for the Bureau of Mines. 

“The Sentinel” by Casey Cep covers Ronald E. Walters of the National Cemetery Association. It details what’s done on behalf of military veterans after they pass away, and how each is entitled to a military funeral, regardless of where or how they died. Walters is in charge of this effort, including maintaining cemeteries around the world and online records of veterans who have died. It’s a wonderful story about the pursuit of excellence for an important cause. 

“The Searchers” by Dave Eggers is about employees at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory looking for the extraterrestrial life that they’re confident is out there. They’re searching for exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, that can support life, either intelligent life or even just bacteria. One of those profiled is Nick Siegler, the chief technologist for NASA’s exoplanet program. He was a chemical engineer, working in industry, and then at 32 applied and was accepted to Harvard’s Special Students program, and then 43 when he completed his PhD and started at NASA. 

“The Number” by John Lanchester details the consumer price index produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and includes mention of the misery index, the unemployment rate plus inflation. It’s noted how a high misery index almost always correlates with the political party holding the White House losing it. The exception to this was the 2024 election, where the misery index was low, but food inflation was talked about in the news to the point where people felt it a huge problem. 

“The Equalizer” by Sarah Vowell profiles Pamela Wright of the National Archives and Records Administration, and her efforts as the NARA Chief Innovation Officer to make records available for people, particularly online. Reference is made to History Hub on the NARA website, where people can submit a query and it will be answered by NARA archivists, federal staffers, and citizen volunteers, a Google search done by people. Also noted is how census records are made public 72 years after the fact, to protect privacy, and the information that people can gather on their ancestors. Mentioned as well is the staff of the National Archives are responsible for physically protecting the actual Constitution.

“The Free-Living Bureaucrat” by Michael Lewis covers Heather Stone of the Food and Drug Administration. There’s a fascinating story within about rare diseases, and how those who contract them are underserved because the disease too rare to warrant pharmaceutical company focus. Lewis writes about Walter and Amanda Smith, and their daughter Alaina. At the age of five she had a medical emergency where she seemed to suffer a seizure. Doctors diagnosed her with epilepsy, but then after her family demanded an MRI, an infection was found in her brain, one caused by her having Balamuthia, an amoeba that can enter the brain through dust and consume it. When they received this information, fewer than 200 cases had been reported worldwide, and 95% of the people infected had died from it. Heather was working in the FDA and developed and was trying to promote use of a tool to catalog treatments of rare diseases. CURE ID was designed not to be about methods that had gone through the approved for public use process, but anecdotal information that could help people learn from what others in their situation did. There’s some half a dozen cases a year of Balamuthia reported in the U.S. and the treatment that the Smiths had available for their daughter was a poor blend of cocktails, ones that just made her sick. Amanda heard about a drug out of China that might be effective at treating Balamuthia and created a LinkedIn account through which she found Heather Stone's name and called her. Stone knew of a supply of pills in California and arranged for them to ship to Dallas where Amanda's daughter was. Also, Stone obtained a letter from the FDA’s review division saying that the receiving hospital could provide the pills, extending Alaina's life.

Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride by Will Leitch

Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride by Will Leitch is a nice novel that starts with the main character, Lloyd, an Atlanta police officer with a thirteen-year-old son, Bishop, finding out he has just months to live. 

Lloyd comes from a police family, with his father having been a tough as nails Major, but he's a beat cop focused on trying to help people through his job. As Atlanta citizens would would record with their phones he and other police at work, Lloyd would regularly assume the persona of Happycop, your friendly neighborhood officer.

After finding out about the brain tumor that would soon kill him, Lloyd worries about how to provide for Bishop after he's gone, and comes up with the idea to accomplish this by dying in the line of duty. The book both funny and a lovely story about family, legacy, and what people will do for one another. 

Similar to two other novels from Leitch, How Lucky and The Time Has Come, it's a short book that's also memorable for the heart it has.

Isola by Allegra Goodman

Isola by Allegra Goodman is a captivating novel that begins in 1531 with twelve-year-old Marguerite, whose mother died during Marguerite's both, and father at war when she three. Her guardian was her father's cousin, Roberval, and Marguerite lived with her nurse Damienne, and friend Claire, with Claire's mother her teacher. 

Roberval was a sea-faring man, who would go on voyages at the king's behest. He began to take Marguerite's family money, first renting out the property where she lived, forcing her to stay in guest bedrooms, When Marguerite was seventeen, he decreed that she and Damienne would join his voyage across the Atlantic to the new world. Roberval considered himself a man of God, and gave Marguerite psalms to study and would test her piety while treating her poorly as a source of amusement. 

While on the ship, Marguerite developed a relationship with Roberval's secretary, Auguste, who had been instructed to stay away from her. To punish them, Roberval had the two, along with Damienne, abandoned with meager supplies and weapons on an island off the far north coast of North America. 

 Left to fend for themselves, the three hunted for birds, scavenged eggs, and fished. By September, the leaves had changed color and it turned cold, so they lived in a cavern for the winter. Auguste died while Marguerite pregnant, and she killed a polar bear that had scavenged his body. The baby was born in the spring, and died of malnourishment. In summer, Marguerite and Damienne saw Roberval's ships and signaled, but the ships continued on, leaving the two banished. Damienne in autumn accidentally cut herself and died of infection. Marguerite later killed a second polar bear, cutting off and keeping its claw. 

As her supplies dwindled further, Marguerite saw two open boats anchored, and men that came ashore. She convinced them to let her come onboard for the voyage back to France. The other of the two boats was lost at sea, and Marguerite after her arrival found that Roberval had sold her estate. She reconnected with Claire and Claire's mother, and met the Queen, who gave money for she, Claire, and Claire's mother to start a school for girls. Roberval attempted to get at some of these funds, and was rebuffed by Marguerite. While it would have been nice if the revenge on Roberval were more pronounced, it's a good book, a page turner.

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson is a fun novel by the author of the excellent Nothing to See Here. His latest work of fiction starts with a farmer in Tennessee, Mad Hill, having a visitor arrive, Rube Hill, a writer from Boston. Rube who he says that he believes Mad is his half-sister, with their father having abandoned each of them with no future contact, and subsequently starting new families. 

The two embark on a cross-country road trip in Rube's rented PT Cruiser to find and talk with their father, and pick up along the way two additional half-siblings who their dad also left, college basketball star Pep and fifth-grader Tom. The story features an entertaining romp from the farm in Tennessee to Oklahoma, Pep's NCAA tournament game in Austin, Salt Lake City, and finally Woodside, California. The four half-siblings meet their now seventy-year-old father and his newest child, two-year-old Rooster. 

The relationship between Mad, Rube, Pep, and Tom grows each step of the way across the country, with them protecting each other and there for one another. Tom is described as having gone from feeling like he all alone, orphaned by his father, to having three siblings with him, and then a fourth in young Rooster. 

It's not obvious in the beginning of the book that it's going to be about the connections made, but that gradually takes shape and is revealed through the story told well by Wilson.

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reed

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reed is a compelling novel set both in space and on earth. It jumps back and forth in time, both when astronaut candidates are training, and when several are on the space shuttle.

The book begins in 1984 with main character Joan Goodwin of NASA in Houston as the CAPCOM, the one person communicating with astronauts on a 1984 mission. She's in contact with Vanessa Ford on the shuttle, who needs to try to get back home after two died and two were critically injured, with the shuttle saved by the actions of Lydia Danes before she went unconscious. Mention is made of the loop, where people outside of NASA can listen to the live audio from mission control, with that audio then reported around the world in an emergency situation. 

Goodwin was an astronomer and it's solid writing on how she connects with Danes. Ford is the other main character, with her coming to NASA wanting to pilot the shuttle, but not a military pilot so there as an aeronautical engineer. 

The women were part of NASA's first training group with females, and much of the book is set earlier in time, with them as astronaut candidates. The relationship between Goodwin and Ford in detailed, and there's a lot about Goodwin's sister Barbara and young niece Frances. The part where Goodwin professes to Frances how she will always be there for her is beautiful, and the ending similarly lovely. Also, blurbs are provided by the writers Kristin Hannah and Andy Weir, and Jenkins Reed makes mention of how helpful to the writing of the book was Paul Dye, former NASA flight director and author of Shuttle, Houston.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is a solid work of nonfiction, with abundance defined as us having enough of what we need to create lives better than what we had. The book notes transportation, health, housing, and energy as building blocks of the future, and that we must build and invent more of what we need. 

The unaffordability and shortage of housing in America is described as perpetuated by a Not in My Backyard approach from people who already own homes, making it difficult to build affordable new housing. Particularly in California, projects are difficult to complete, as they're often hobbled by special interest groups. Rules and regulations, many of them environmental, from the 1970s have prevented urban-density and green-energy projects that would help alleviate problems today. 

Conservatives don't recognize when government is needed, as government must fund risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than purely economic, and liberals focus too much on protecting and preserving rather than building. 

Chapters from the book include:

Chapter one: Grow - Homelessness is a housing problem, and Lawn-Sign Liberalism is characterized by believing that all lives matter, but not wanting affordable housing around you. 

Chapter two: Build - Lawsuits are an overused took that prevents growth, and what starts as well-intentioned can become a roadblock to good. 

Chapter three: Govern - Rules and regulations, even when created for good reasons, make things difficult.

Chapter four: Invent - We need government to fund invention, with the COVID vaccine a perfect example.

Chapter five: Deploy - It's the delivery mechanisms that matter.

Conclusion - Abundance is liberalism, but it's a liberalism that builds.

Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen

Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen is another fun and entertaining novel by the author, whose books include Razor Girl, Squeeze, Me, Skink: No Surrender, Bad Monkey, Star Island, Nature Girl, Skinny Dip, Basket Case, Sick Puppy, Lucky You, Native Tongue, and Stormy Weather.

Unsavory and inept characters in Fever Beach include Dale Figgo, a dumb as a fencepost white supremacist leader of his group Strokers for Liberty, Claude and Electra Mink, the elderly right-wing politician funding racists who run a corrupt foundation whose benefactors include the Wee Hammers, a housing scam with the construction provided by children, and politician Clure Boyette, a cheating on his wife womanizer in office because of his father.

The likable and on the side of good characters in the book are Viva Morales, an employee of the Minks and renter of Dale's in the house owned by his mother, Galaxy, the 25-, but purported to be 17,-year-old escort that has dirt on Boyette, and Twilly Spree, the prone to dramatic acts of violence environmentalist who gets involved with Morales and sets his sights on taking down Figgo and his efforts.

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

My Friends by Fredrik Backman is a lovely novel that features the characters of Joar, Ali, Ted, KimKim (the artist), and Louisa. Also important to the story are Christian (a twenty year old budding artist and school janitor) and his mom (an art teacher at a university).

The book begins with a meeting between the artist as an adult in the final days of his life and Louisa as a just turned eighteen year old orphan who has recently lost her best friend. It then turns into a journey by Ted and Louisa, with Ted telling the story of the childhood friendship shared twenty-five years prior by Joar, Ali, Ted and the artist.

A central part of the story is a famous painting done by the artist (known as C. Jat, the initials of Christian and his friends), with The One of the Sea his first work when he fourteen years old and including his three friends as tiny figures in the painting. Backman writes very well about connections and My Friends covers friendship, finding your people ("one of us"), and life coming full circle. The four were damaged souls from difficult homes who found each other. They grow to share a language with each other, including "Here!" "Tomorrow!" and "I love you and I believe in you."

Joar was focused on the artist becoming a successful painter so he could escape their town and his difficult life. The start of the artist's painting career was also triggered by meeting Christian, who said to paint like the birds sing and the best art is painting not what you see, but what you feel. Later, the artist would describe his work as painting the way his friends laughed. When the four friends were young, they broke into a museum and hung The One of the Sea on the wall, which brought Christian's mother into their lives, and would become circled back on at the end. One thing about the the book is it feels at times to be going a direction, then surprises you.

The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko

The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko is a really good book subtitled The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon. Fedarko details both a 1983 wooden dory trip 277 miles down the Colorado River, one intended by Kenton Grua and two others to set the mark for fastest float through the Canyon, and the potentially cataclysmic events at the dam upstream that made the speed run possible. 

Huge El Niño rains in 1983 causing the water level at Lake Powell, held back from the Colorado River by the Glen Canyon Dam, to rise to within feet of its top. Lake Powell holds some nine billion gallons of water and the dam supplies power for many parts of the west. The book also details the harnessing of water for electricity, citing that dams covered almost every major river except the Yellowstone, including twenty-nine on the Mississippi, thirty-six on the Columbia, and forty-two on the Tennessee. 

The Glen Canyon Dam was built with spillway tunnels on either side, but it was discovered that cavitation had occurred in the tunnels, with repeatedly high water pressure straining the concrete, causing water to go into the bedrock. Rocks and dirt then further damaged the tunnels and were tossed into the river. 

It was never said in the book that the dam at risk of failing, like in the Johnstown tragedy of 1889 where thousands died, but even lesser possibilities included things that could have been calamities, ranging from overtopping of the dam to the bedrock eroding so much that water from Lake Powell make its way around the dam. Engineers had plywood put up to raise the height of the dam by several feet while the spillway problem could be worked on, and released huge amounts of water into the Colorado River. 

This created the largest flow of water down the river in a generation, making conditions dangerous for rafters, and tantalizing for Grua and the two others on The Emerald Mile. The trip down the river is typically several weeks and they finished in just over thirty-six hours, breaking the prior speed record by more than ten hours.

Fedarko provides a detailed and interesting account of the float down the river, events at the dam, including the engineering experts who worked the crisis, and the Grand Canyon itself. He writes of how remarkable it is, and how river trips often feature side hikes, with guides talking about the geology of the Canyon. 

Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey

Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey is a solid nonfiction work with ten stories of wrongful arrest, conviction, and imprisonment, with five by each man. McCloskey works with Centurion Ministries, a group dedicated to exonerating innocent people wrongly convicted, and Grisham is on the board of directors of both Centurion and the Innocence Project. There are twenty-three defendants across the ten wrongful conviction stories, with four that were on death row, two who came within days of being executed, and one who was. 

Three of the stories to highlight are that of Todd Willingham, Joe Bryan, and the Norfolk Four. Willingham was put to death by the state of Texas for the house fire that took the lives of his three children, examined by David Grann for The New Yorker with the piece "Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?" Joe Bryan was arrested for the murder of his wife Mickey in Clifton, Texas, where Joe was a principal, away at a conference at the time of the murder. The Norfolk Four features police concocting stories of what they believe happened, and then fitting evidence that fits their theories, ignoring evidence that disproves them. As new evidence would come to light disproving a police theory in the case, they would arrest another as an accomplice, and create a new theory. Then once that theory was disproved, they would arrest another purported co-conspirator and create a new made-up narrative. 

Police in these cases were often desperate to show their small towns that the killer not at large, and other examples of shoddy, malicious, or illegal police work included the following...

- Long interrogations and convincing people that maybe they did commit the crimes while sleepwalking. 

- Medical examiners who seem to specialize in autopsies that tell whatever story police want to be told.

- Jailhouse informants put in as cellmates for the purpose of them "hearing a confession."

- Hiding of evidence, that which was legally required to make available to the defense.

- Relying on shoddy work around areas like bloodstain analysis or fire investigation.

The stories of police misconduct in the ten stories are horrifying, and illustrate the importance of people asserting their Miranda rights so they not interviewed without a lawyer present. 

The Last Manager by John W. Miller

The Last Manager by John W. Miller is a solid book subtitled How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball. Miller is a magazine and newspaper writer and provides an in-depth look at the Hall of Fame manager of the Baltimore Orioles from 1968 to 1982, averaging 97 wins a season. 

Weaver is often remembered for his theatrics, getting thrown out of ninety-six big league games, but also a brilliant baseball mind, espousing the importance of the first step left or right for infielder, and how that step should come before the ball hit. He was a Moneyball-style manager long before that came into vogue, preaching the importance of on-base percentage, defense, and not wasting outs, with many of these ideas memorialized in the The Oriole Way, a manual to how to play the game.

Looking at situational stats was another innovation of Weaver's, seeing how a batter did against a certain pitcher or vice versa. He championed the idea of using a radar gun to measure pitching, especially the difference between speeds of fastball vs. off-speed pitches. Also, before Cal Ripken Jr. played shortstop for Weaver, players at that position tended to be smaller and not expected to be huge run generators. 

Also covered by Miller is both how the MLB manager has changed through the years, going from being an omnipotent face of the organization to one who gets along with rather than leading by fear their much more highly-paid players. He notes how the ubiquity of baseball also changed with the advent of television. Before that, entertainment had to be gone to so attending minor league games was more popular than when people were able to stay at home and watch tv. The drop in leagues and teams during this time was precipitous. 

Miller provides a thorough biography of Weaver, from him growing up in St. Louis, through his never realized dreams of making it as a major league player, his managing career that started at thirty-seven years old, and death in 2013. He was also the only manager to hold a job both in the five years before free agency in 1976 and in the five years after. Along with Cal Ripken Jr., other famous players Weaver managed on the Orioles included Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, Boog Powell, and Jim Palmer. 

Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olsen

Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olsen is a work of nonfiction that chronicles the separate fatal bear maulings of two nineteen-year-old women August 13, 1967 at Glacier National Park in Montana. There had been no fatal bear attacks in the 57 years of the park prior to that night, and the book came out of a 1968 Sports Illustrated story by Olsen. It's an account of the park, the maulings, likely why they happened, and what came after.  

Despite National Park Service regulations against feeding bears, park workers would leave out garbage so bears would come rummage through it, and tourists would watch from the Granite Park Chalet. Also, there were a number of bear incidents that summer, including cases of a bear acting abnormally and aggressively near Trout Lake, which should have had the Park Service on alert and taking action. 

Much of the book centers around the Chalet, where garbage was left out for bears to create a tourist attraction, and where one of the girls was killed in a campground a quarter mile away. Julie Helgeson of Albert Lea, MN, was mauled along with her friend, who suffered serious but not critical injuries. There was a doctor who was at the chalet that tried to save Julie, but she had lost too much blood by the time she was found. Twenty miles away at Trout Lake a different bear, likely the one who had been scaring campers and acting oddly, killed Michele Koons of San Diego.

A large portion of the book recounts the events of that night, and Olsen also covers the hunts for the bears that killed the two girls. The bear that was killed near Granite Park Chalet had an injured paw that would have caused constant pain, and circumstantial evidence showed it was the bear that had killed Julie Helgeson. The bear that was killed near Trout Lake was confirmed by physical evidence as the bear that killed Michele Koons.

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah is a compelling novel about Leni Allbright, her parents Cora and Ernt, and them living in Alaska.

The family in the the mid-1970s moved there from Seattle, onto a a piece of land that was gifted to Ernt by his platoonmate in Vietnam, where Ernt spent time in captivity and came back from with PTSD, a drinking problem, and short fuse to anger. 

Early teenager Leni, her mother that she had a close bond with, and her erratic at best father found themselves across Kachemak Bay from Homer, in the fictional town of Kaneq, woefully unequipped for the harsh winters. People in Kaneq, where less than thirty people lived year-round, included Marge, a former attorney in charge of the general store, Bo Harlan, whose deceased son gifted the land to Ernt, and Tom Walker, whose family including youngest son Matthew and wife Geneva. The teacher at Kaneq's school would come into town, noted as being right near Sadie Cove, from her home in Bear Cove, with both real places in Kachemak Bay.

It's a compelling book, one with maddening decisions made at times by Cora, but those decisions also heighten the drama. Each member of the family loved each other, but Cora's love for Ernt led her to her going along with his rash and often dangerous choices. His issues were compounded in winter, with the onset of harsh conditions and short days of sunlight. The title of the book came from a Robert Service poem and it's a bit melodramatic, but also a lovely book. The author acknowledgements in the back note that Hannah moved to Alaska with her when she was young. Her parents started the Great Alaska Adventure Lodge, where three generations of their family has now worked. 

The Boys of Riverside by Thomas Fuller

The Boys of Riverside by Thomas Fuller is a good work of nonfiction that centers on the high school football team at the California School for the Deaf in Riverside, CA. It's an interesting telling of the team, its 2022 season, and the deaf community as a whole. 

Fuller wrote a New York Times article on the team at the end of its 2021 season, and their story went viral, with players appearing on national television morning shows, and the team was at the coin toss of Super Bowl LVI February 2022 in Inglewood. 

The second half of the book is about the season that started in August 2022. The school had just over fifty boys in its high school academic programs, nearly half on the football team. They played eight-on-eight, rather than traditional eleven-on-eleven games. A handful of the games they play are against other deaf schools, like the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, but most are against other smaller schools, a mixture of private schools with high tuition and schools from remote areas. Fuller writes in the book about head coach Keith Adams and his two sons on the team, Trevin and Kaden, and how everyone being deaf created a brotherhood on the team. 

There's a lot about football, but equally if not more interesting is about the deaf community. By the late 1990s, just 20% of babies in the U.S. had their hearing checked, now more than 98% receive tests. This is crucial because of how important language development, either spoken or sign, is at a young age. 

Also fascinating was the writing about how in the past there had been edicts around the deaf community not signing, but rather they should read lips, with this mandate or stigma effectively taking away a language in American Sign Language for a population. As late as the 1960s, the school in Riverside would punish students for signing. The iPhone is noted in the book as having a huge impact in the deaf community, and covered is cochlear implants, enabling a degree of hearing in someone profoundly deaf. It's an interesting book, and noted in it is that the deaf university Gallaudet in Washington, D.C. is where the football huddle started. 

The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal

The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal is a solid work of nonfiction by the psychologist and professor. She notes in the introduction that "seeing the upside of stress is not about deciding whether stress is all good or all bad. It's about how choosing the see the good in stress can help you meet the challenges in your life."

It's an interesting and well put together book, with some ideas from it including:

- Stress isn't always bad for you. What is bad is stress when you believe that stress is harmful to you. That's when it can have adverse effects, and bad things snowball. 

- How you think about something can transform its effect on you. Mindsets are believes that shape your reality. For instance, adults with a positive view of aging have a lower risk of heart attack, and if you don't feel you belong, it often makes it so. You really are making a choice of how to react to something. 

- A meaningful life is also a stressful life. It means you're doing things. Think about your values, or bigger-than-self goals, those are the important things. 

- Resilience is the courage to grow from stress, to find meaning in it rather than just discomfort. Why should someone be excited before playing a big game, yet negatively stressed before taking a final? It's believing you can handle something stressful that can make it so. Think about how your stress response can be helpful to you. Embracing stress is an act of self-trust, viewing yourself as capable. 

- In a situation of stress, caring for others helps them and you, it creates courage and hope. It also goes the other direction. Having a willingness to ask for help should increase your chance of succeeding.

- Just as post-traumatic stress is a thing, so is post-traumatic growth. When something positive can come out of a trauma, it doesn't belong to the trauma, it belongs to you. You're still acknowledging suffering, but also looking for the good that can come out of the pain. It can come in the form of a sense of personal or spiritual growth, an increased appreciation for life, enhanced relationships, or new possibilities or life directions. 

Ghosts of Honolulu by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr.

Ghosts of Honolulu by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. is a solid work of nonfiction subtitled A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. It covers spy Takeo Yoshikawa and Japanese American naval intelligence agent Douglas Wada and tells an important piece of history. 

Yoshikawa worked in Hawaii under the name Tadashi Morimura on behalf of Japanese intelligence, gathering information on the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor and how best to attack it. Wada was Nisei, born in the United States to Japanese immigrants, with their parents called Issei. Wada in his hometown of Honolulu began working for US Naval Intelligence in 1937. He was a translator for the Navy, with the scope of his work expanding through the years, especially after December 7, 1941. 

It was fascinating reading of how the attack on Pearl Harbor, which killed 2,403 Americans in an hour and fifteen minutes, was viewed as a failure by the Japanese military, with it having the goal of decimating U.S. Naval forces. All U.S. aircraft carriers had departed from the base, so Japanese forces focused on Battleship Row. Along with a poor hit rate by dive-bombers, the oil storage tanks and repair facilities weren't hit, enabling the port to recover fairly quickly. Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki was in a Japanese mini-submarine as part of the attack, and ran aground and was captured as the first U.S. prisoner of war of WWII. Also covered is Otto Kuehn, a former German military officer who provided signals to Japanese military about how best to attack Pearl Harbor. 

The book covers the decisions that led up to people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast of the U.S., may of them American citizens, being held in internment camps during the war. U.S. Secretary of the Navy Frank Cox made a damning, and incorrect, statement about "fifth column" work done in Hawaii contributing to the attack on Pearl Harbor. J. Edgar Hoover was one of the people speaking out against internment, but it happened anyways with President Roosevelt issuing Executive Order 9606 authorizing the military to remove anyone deemed a security threat. The Army then announced all Japanese Americans, 120,000 people, on the West Coast needed to depart "military zones" and be held in camps.

Actual investigative work done in Hawaii showed that it was members of the Japanese Consulate aiding in the attack on Pearl Harbor, not the Nisei and Issei. Those people of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii were prosecuted less than in California, explaining why there were so many more volunteers for military service from the Islands. Nisei of the U.S. 442nd and 100th fought the Germans in Northern Italy. The 442nd was created with the goal of getting three thousand volunteers from the continental US and 1,500 from Hawaii. Instead, it was more than 10,000 from Hawaii and 1,000 from the mainland. 

There's also information about the U.S. bombing of Japan when Japanese spy Takeo Yoshikawa back in his homeland. Wada became the first U.S. civilian of Japanese ancestry to receive the Navy Civilian Certificate of Merit, and after the war was over, he deployed to Japan to continue working for the Navy there. He served as the only Japanese American agent in the Office of Naval Intelligence, which became NCIS, until the late 1960s. He retired from the Naval Reserve, with the rank of commander, in 1975. 

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett is a lovely novel that brilliantly portrays the characters in the book. The setting is a hostage situation in South America, with thirty nine men and one woman held hostage by eighteen rebels. 

Hostage characters in the book include opera singer Roxanne Cross, Japanese executive Mr. Hosokawa, his translator Gen Watanabe, Hosokawa's employee Testsuya Kato, Frenchman Simon Thibault, Priest Father Arguedas, and Vice President Ruben Iglesias, whose house they in. 

Rebel characters included General Benjamin, General Alfredo, General Hector and young rebels Caesar, Carmen, Ishmael, and Beatriz. 

They were all in the house some four months and the the relationships between everyone are fascinating. Mr. Hosokawa and Cross become lovers, as did Gen and Carmen. Kato would play the piano, accompanying Cross with her singing. Caesar became a singing pupil of Cross, and Ishmael played chess and was viewed by the Vice President as a son of sorts. It's really nice writing from Patchett. 

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is a well-written novel that's character, rather than plot, driven, and a nice read about love and relationships between people. 

In the spring of 2020, Lara is with her husband Joe and their twenty-something daughters, Maisie, Emily, and Nell, at their farm in northern Michigan during the pandemic. Lara tells of her early-twenties relationship with famous actor Peter Duke while the two of them working at a summer stock theater company, Tom Lake. 

Lara talks about her college experience with the Thornton Wilder play Our Town, her getting a staring movie role, filmed before she went to Tom Lake. She and Duke started a relationship, and Patchett writes about them, his brother Sebastian, and Lara's understudy Pallace. Also, recounted is how they all spent time at a farm (which Duke immediately and forever loved) with Lara's eventual husband Joe, and the Achilles injury that Lara suffered, changing the course of all their lives.

 Along with this, Patchett writes of the relationship between Lara and her daughters, including what they expect from their mother and what actually occurred in her life. There's a lot about how our lives not what our children think they were. The girls wanted more to the story, but it's what led to them being together. Patchett writes characters really well and provides a nice story about people and their lives.

Gringos by Charles Portis

Gringos by Charles Portis is a novel that tells the story of Jimmy Burns, an expatriate American in Mexico. The book recounts the bizarre things that occur in his life, leading up to interactions with a doomsday cult and it's wacky members.

James by Percival Everett

James by Percival Everett is an interesting novel that reimagines the Huck Finn story told through a first-person account by Jim, Huck's family slave. Everett wrote the book Erasure, the basis of the film American Fiction, and with this effort, he provides a very unique story construct.

Jim had to play a part, one expected based on the color of his skin, even with people like Huck that were kind to him, but still casually racist. There were expectations of slaves and their supposed mental shortcomings so Jim used incorrect grammar, and taught his kids to do the same. He would offer up ideas to white people, not as suggestions, but ones they would latch on to and say as if they their own. It was noted in the book about whites that they better they feel, the safer it is for black people. Jim also concealed that  he knew how to read, to the point of making a joke of what would he do with a book? 

Identity is a theme, with fairly early Jim writing with a stolen pencil "I am called Jim, I have yet to choose a name," and "with my pencil, I wrote myself into being." 

The book is funny at times and gutting at times. There's such a matter of fact telling of how an entire race was treated as less than people. It's a super creative idea and effort from Everett, and the ending of the book an excellent one, with the main character claiming his identity as James, not Jim the slave.

Dickens and Prince by Nick Hornby

Dickens and Prince by Nick Hornby is an interesting work of nonfiction that compares Charles Dickens and Prince. It's a fascinating construct subtitled A Particular Kind of Genius and the book jacket notes how it examines the two artists' personal tragedies, social statuses, and boundless productivity.

About the working lives of Dickens and Prince, Hornby write that each incredibly prolific with the craft they produced. Prince was referenced as being addicted to the creative process, and it's interesting reading about the creative process of the two, how both often worked on several projects at once, something impossible for many people. 

They were each larger than life characters, full of creative energy, which led to much being produced, a lot of it great. 

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey is lovely work of nonfiction about the bedridden author and a connection she felt with a snail that was put into a pot on her nightstand. It's a interesting book that includes the topics of kinship, resilience, and survival. 

Bailey fell ill at the age of thirty-four after picking up an illness while in Europe, and upon getting back to the United States, became largely unable to get out of bed due to the unknown pathogen. 

Her friend brought a snail to her and, first in a pot and then terrarium, Bailey provided for the snail and watched as it lived its small life. As Bailey wrote, the snail provided comfort and focus to her and buffered her feelings of uselessness. She learned what environment the snail liked and what it wanted to eat (portobello mushrooms), and provided it. Bailey appreciated how the snail would make it through the day, something that was all she could do as well. She notes that the energy of her human visitors, loved them as she did, wore her out, but the snail inspired her with its curiosity and grace in a peaceful and solitary world. 

Also noted is the concept of how time is finite, but morphs between one not having not enough of it, like all her friends, and having an abundance of time to fill, which she faced. She eventually improved some, and was first diagnosed with autoimmune dysautonomia and chronic fatigue syndrome, and then told she had acquired a mitochondrial disease, from either a virus or bacteria. It's excellent writing as well as a touching story and something that felt to come out of the book is that there's all kinds of lives, and they all matter.

True Grit by Charles Portis

True Grit by Charles Portis is an entertaining novel that was turned into an equally entertaining 2010 movie with Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin.

Portis tells the story of fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross retaining U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track down and bring to justice the man, Tom Chaney, who murdered her father. Joined in the quest initiated by Mattie is a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf.

One thing that the movie did, which was actually a remake of a 1969 film starring John Wayne, was show just how amusing the scenes written by Portis were. It's a tremendously fun western story set in 1870s Arkansas and Indian Territory. 

The skill with which Portis sets scenes and provides dialogue is remarkable, with the writing a first-person account by Mattie Ross done decades after the fact. Among many great stories in the book is the saga of Mattie's horse Little Blackie, from when she acquires him from Col. G. Stonehill through to the conclusion of the book.

The Siege by Ben Macintyre

The Siege by Ben Macintyre is an interesting work of nonfiction book A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World. 

Macintyre details the 1980 hostage crisis at the Iranian embassy in London, with twenty-six hostages taken. The perpetrators were Iranian Arabs from the Khuzestan region of Iran, where the Arabistan people were persecuted by the government in Iran, and the effort was bankrolled by Saddam Hussein, with he an enemy of Iran.

This occurred six months into the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Iran, and six days prior to the hostage-taking in London, eight U.S. soldiers were killed during an effort to rescue hostages. The Iranian government said the CIA was behind the London embassy attack, and that Iranians there would be happy to die as martyrs. 

It's a fascinating account from Macintyre of the six-day event, which the attackers believed would be over a day, including the eventual raid on the embassy by British SAS forces acting on the go-ahead from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is a solid follow up to his first book, The Tipping Point from 25 years ago, and the new effort subtitled Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.

In part one, "Three Puzzles," Gladwell writes about bank robbers in L.A., Medicare fraud in Miami, vaccination rates, and the dangerous quest for achievement, as told through the story of the fictional town Poplar Grove and its wave of teen suicides.

Part two, "The Social Engineers" includes the decades-past integration of Lawrence Lane in Palo Alto, CA and the concept of the Magic Third, the point at which something becomes normalized or integrated. If about individuals, when you get to three, you have a team, not just a single person or a friendship between two people. 

Related to the concept of ratios, Gladwell, tells a fascinating story about Harvard University, and the varsity women’s rugby team. He notes that Harvard competes in more D1 varsity sports than any other university in the country, and that Harvard has a two-track admissions process, the first for people who simply compete based on merit, and second for ALDCs, or Athletes, Legacies, Dean’s Interest List (children of rich people), and Children of faculty. The ALDCs leave admissions control to university discretion, and there is a corresponding impact on the makeup of the student body. Gladwell makes the point that varsity sports are a mechanism by which Harvard maintains control of admissions decisions, and whether nefarious or not, that that maintains group proportions within the student body.

Also included is the story of the Marriott outbreak, where a hotel in Boston became an early epicenter of the covid virus. It was interesting from the perspective of how specific individuals have the propensity to be superspreaders. Gladwell refers to it as the law of the very, very, very few, and we can somewhat tell who those people are based on the characteristics of that person. This raises the question of whether in the future people identified as potential superspreaders will be treated differently than others.

Part three, "The Overstory," includes the L.A. Survivors' Club about holocaust discussion and the impact of the 1978 tv miniseries Holocaust. For decades after the war, the Holocaust wasn’t spoken of much. Many people wanted to simply move past, to not get bogged down in thoughts and discussion of things horrible. The show airing then had a huge impact on people using the term and opening discussing the atrocities that happened.

Gladwell also writes about how the tv show Will & Grace had an impact on gay marriage becoming law, it normalized behavior, showing that homosexuality wasn’t a problem to be solved.

The conclusion to the book includes detail on the opioid crisis. Gladwell notes how select states forced doctors prescribing opioids to make triplicate carbon copies of the prescription (one for the doctor, one for the pharmacy, and one for the bureau of narcotic enforcement), and how those states have had way lower rates of addiction. There’s also an interesting point made about opioid superspreaders, doctors who prescribe way more opioids than others, similar to covid superspreaders, or pollution superspreaders.