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.

The Bookshop by Evan Friss

The Bookshop by Evan Friss is a solid work of nonfiction subtitled A History of the American Bookstore. 

Friss covers topics including a bookstore run by Benjamin Franklin, the New York City bookstores Three Lives & Company, Books Are Magic, and the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop (closed down in 2009). Also detailed are sidewalk booksellers in NYC and Parnassus Books in Nashville, run by the writer Ann Patchett.  

Barnes & Noble and Amazon Books (now closed down) is also detailed, along with mention of people who put on seminars about how to open and run a bookstore.

The book has interesting content, especially the stories of modern-day bookshops.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a remarkable memoir about she, her siblings Brian, Lori, and Maureen, and parents Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Sometimes Rex or Rose would have jobs, but often they wouldn't, and they didn't believe in public assistance, so the kids would go hungry and the family bounce from city to city when bills would come due or trouble arose, doing what Rex called "the skedaddle" in the middle of the night. Among many other small towns in the Southwest, they lived in Battle Mountain, NV and Blythe, CA before moving Phoenix and then Welch, the West Virginia hollow town mining town where Rex grew up.

It's a wild story of abdication of parental responsibility, one where Rex and Rose wouldn't do adult things, because "why should they have to?" Rose had a teaching degree, but fancied herself an artist, not someone who would waste their days working. When Jeannette later had a great opportunity come her way, the response of Rose was to say it's not fair that Jeannette should have that instead of her. It comes out late in the book that as they lived this itinerant and poverty-stricken lifestyle, Rose from her family owed land in Texas worth roughly a million dollars, but wouldn't sell as she wanted it to keep it. 

Rex at times would have jobs, but focused more on his drinking and telling of his grand plans. He would talk about how he was going to come up with a new way to extract gold from the ground, and the ensuing fabulous wealth would be used to build the family a Glass Castle, a home he often shared the meticulously created designs for with his children. But when there would be money coming in, Rex would take the paycheck and buy booze. 

It's an amazing book, including the memorable scene were Jeannette was chastised by a college professor, asking her what she would know about hardships faced by the underclass.

Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell

Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell is a short and  interesting book subtitled A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures. Rundell in separate chapters covers animals including the seahorse, American wood frog, lemur, golden mole, wombat, narwhal, pangolin, and Greenland shark.

Rundell notes that in the last fifty years, the world's wildlife has declined by an average of almost seventy percent. She makes a compelling argument that these animals, many which teeter on the brink of extinction, have a right to remain, and celebrates in the book just how interesting and different they are.

The American wood frog allows itself to freeze solid for winter, with it's heart stopping for the season. The Greenland shark can live to be over five hundred years old. The swift flies at least ten months a year, sleeping in the air, with one brain hemisphere shut off while the other remains alert. The golden mole is the only mammal with iridescence, and the Somali golden mole to our knowledge has never been seen alive. The book is written as a call to act, to not give up on vanishing animals and to do the climate change mitigation needed to keep many of these species in our world.

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter is a novel based on real-life events, as Hunter tells a story taken from the life of her grandfather and his family, starting in 1939 as they celebrate Passover in Radom, Poland. 

Hunter notes that of the more than 30,000 Jews who lived in Radom, fewer than three hundred survived. The matriarch and patriarch of the Kurc family are Sol and Nechuma, and their five children (and their spouses) are Genek (Herta), Halina (Adam), Jakob (Bella), Hunter's grandfather Addy, and Mila (Selim), along with Mila and Selim's young daughter Felicia.

Addy was apart from his family during the war as it impossible for him to return from France where we was living to Poland, which fell early in the war and was split between German and Soviet control. Sol and Nechuma were forced out of their house and Genek and Herta sent to a labor camp in Siberia. In Poland, ghettos were created, and later liquidated, and there were many times various family members could have been killed, but survived due to both bravery and good fortune.

The story spans from Europe to Asia, briefly Africa, then Brazil, and ultimately America and the conclusion of the book is a powerful one, with the fate of various family members unknown during much of the war.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt is an engrossing novel that features the characters of Tova Sullivan, Cameron Cassmore, and Marcellus the giant pacific octopus. It's an ingeniously put together book with first-person narration from Marcellus interspersed throughout and a really fun read.

Cameron is a young adult without much going on in his life who goes from California to the small town of Sowell Bay, Washington in search of his biological father.

Tova is the cleaning person at Sowell Bay Aquarium, by herself after the passing of her longtime husband a few years prior, and only son Erik decades before, and is contemplating a move to Bellingham, where she can "not be a burden on people." 

There's also the local grocery store owner, Ethan, who befriends Cameron, and likes Tova. The connections between the characters both develop and reveal themselves and it's an exceptionally nice story that Van Pelt provides in her debut novel.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a work of nonfiction that's described as one where Coates "set out to write a book about writing, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities."

The book starts talking about language, and the sports stories that captivated Coates in his youth, and then gets into stories, and how stories of places not actually always what they are. 

There's three distinct parts, first on a trip by Coates to Dakar, Senegal, then on his time in Columbia, South Carolina, and finally Palestine. In South Carolina he's confronted by often racist mythology, and in Palestine, sees the repression of Palestinians by Israel.

The Barn by Wright Thompson

The Barn by Wright Thompson is an important nonfiction book subtitled A Secrete History of a Murder in Mississippi. Thompson recounts the killing of barely fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in August 1955, covering the historical conditions that led to the murder, the events around it, and what happened after, up to present day.

It's an often-repeated idea, but those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Just as the last remaining people who fought in WWII are dying, with it so important that we remember the evil that was attempted to be perpetrated by the Nazis, it is also crucial that we remember the racial injustices that precipitated Emmett's murder to try to prevent them today and in the future.

Emmett came from Chicago to Mississippi to stay with his great uncle Moses Wright and cousins Simeon Wright and Wheeler Parker. Emmett was in a store with a woman, Carolyn Bryant, behind the counter and what likely occurred is he handed her money for a transaction, touching her hand in the process, rather than putting the money on the counter. She took offense and angrily followed him out of the store, and Emmett then whistled at her. For the rest of her life, Bryant would repeat an impossible to have happened lie of what Emmett said and did to her in the store.

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam came to Moses Wright's house and demanded to take Emmett, J.W. with a gun drawn, ready to shoot anyone who would resist. Willie Reed saw a pickup truck go by with Emmett in the back, and later heard him crying out while being beaten in Leslie Milam's barn on the property he rented within the thirty-six-square-mile grid Township 22 North, Range 4 West. Emmett had a broken skull, broken wrist, and broken femur, and then was shot and killed, with his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River.

Willie Reed testified to what he saw, and then was sprinted out of Mississippi at night. He went back to a month later to testify to a grand jury, and immediately left the state again. Wheeler Parker and Moses Wright also had to leave Mississippi as it was too dangerous to stay. During the trial of Bryant and Milam, the defense argued in from of Emmett's mom, Mamie Till-Mosbley, that it it wasn't him that had died, he was fine, and this was all a conspiracy cooked up by the NAACP. Bryant and Milam were acquitted by a jury of their neighbors and extended family, with at least six other people that were likely at the site of the murder never charged. 

Thompson delves into the conditions that led to the killing with no legal consequences. He covers a history of slavery, segregation, and the Mississippi Delta land that cotton has been farmed on. At this time of the Emmett's murder, politicians in Mississippi were working to prevent the May 1955 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to integrate public schools from taking effect locally. It wasn't until 1969 that a federal judge demanded that Mississippi comply with the ruling, and when Clarksdale, MS public schools reopened after Christmas break, 574 of the 585 white students had changed schools, going to segregated academies. 

Emmett would have recently turned eighty-year-old, and places like the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, MS and the Till Institute in Chicago work to keep his memory alive, just as this excellent book does.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63 by Stephen King is a fascinating work of fiction about someone travelling back in time to try to stop the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

Thirty-five-year-old Jake Epping goes through a portal that takes him to 1958 and takes the name George Amberson, living first in Maine (including the town of Derry, where It was set). In Maine, he attempted to prevent a young girl from being paralyzed by a straw bullet, and save the lives of a mother and three of her children, all murdered in their home. He then went to Florida and finally Texas (both Dallas / Fort Worth and the 1,200 person town of Jodie). While in Jodie, he met and fell in love with Sadie, a fellow teacher at the high school.

During his years living in the past, Amberson found it to be obdurate, it didn't want to be changed. As he would attempt to do things that would alter history, roadblocks would present themselves and have to be overcome. Also, changes made to the past would cause a butterfly effect, begetting other changes.

He went through the portal several times, with each new trip to the past resetting history, cancelling out any changes he caused during previous time travel. It was a compelling book and the ramifications of what might have happened had Kennedy lived are fascinating to consider, and written about by King in the postscript.

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, author of The Midnight Library, is a novel about a math teacher in the U.K. who is gifted a home in Ibiza and, without anything else in her life after the death of her husband and long-ago passing of her child, goes to the Mediterranean island.

It's a story of mystical things, with powers and an unexplainable lifeform in the ocean, and new beginnings as the main character navigates the world she finds herself in and attempts to make a difference in it.

Burn Book by Kara Swisher

Burn Book by Kara Swisher from early 2024 is a an interesting nonfiction account of the journalist's years covering tech and the people in it. The book is subtitled A Tech Love Story and in it, Swisher provides anecdotes of her time with people like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg and her late husband Dave Goldberg, Jeff Bezos, Bob Iger, and Elon Musk. 

While she writes fondly of some of her subjects, including Goldberg and Jobs, Swisher covers how many others as they become wealthy and famous go from normal to just plain weird. As people would accumulate power, they too often would become aggrieved, developing a victim complex. All the while there would be large amounts of self-congratulation and getting rich while trumpeting how it not about the money, but about changing the world. 

On Zuckerberg Swisher notes his lack of concern about the consequences of his actions, as if it's ok for him to just learn on the fly, with no repercussions. She describes him as carelessly dangerous and writes about "the expensive education of Mark Zuckerberg."

In terms of her own biography, Swisher covers attending college at Georgetown, then journalism school at Columbia. At thirty-four years old, she moved to California to cover tech for the Wall Street Journal. She and Walt Mossberg put on the All Things Digital, later renamed Code, conferences, interviewing tech luminaries. It's definitely an interesting read that she provides with the book.