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.