Warlight by Michael Ondaatje – Book

warlight big lawn gnome publishing Michael Ondaatje never writes an ordinary book, at least in my estimation. His books put me in a reverie of unique experiences lived in far off places and times. In his novel, Warlight he writes of some of the people of England and London who performed secret services all over Europe and the Baltic states during World War II. These services had to be kept so discreet that it is difficult for these members of the intelligence service to reenter their prewar lives.

Wars don’t end on the day that a treaty is made. The hurts, the resentments, the losses stay with people affected by wars. People swear to avenge their loved ones from cruel strikes perhaps necessitated by war, but still seen as desecrations. Strategy may deem it appropriate to level a village but the relatives and friends or absent residents cannot rationalize. They carry their shock with them and they nurse their anger and they vow they will seek retribution.

When first their dad and then their mom leave, Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are in their early teens. They think their mom has gone to Singapore to be with their dad who was sent there by his company, until they discover her carefully packed trunk in the basement of the family home in London.

These two have been left in the care of a man called The Moth, a rather lackadaisical caretaker, and all that was orderly about their lives falls away. Rachel (nicknamed Wren by her mother) learns that she has epilepsy and of course she is a girl so what she experiences is quite different from what Nathaniel is allowed to get involved with. The Moth is soon joined by another character, The Darter.

Nathaniel is allowed to work with the immigrant staff overseen by Moth at Criterion’s Banquet Halls, setting up for events and washing dishes. Later he helps The Darter smuggle greyhounds into unsanctioned race tracks through keeping a schedule of nighttime pickups at various stops along a network of rivers and streams near London. Nathaniel is the narrator of Warlight but he does not know why his mom left him and his sister with these strange guardians.

As a grown man Nathaniel (who was nicknamed Stitch by his mother, Rose), is offered a job going through the archives collected during World War II, and although he has been reunited with his mother, her continued secrecy prods him to take the job. He begins to learn about what his mom did during the war and how it has followed her home, why she feels she endangers her own children. With great detail Ondaatje creates a world of lives lived outside the mainstream, interesting but slightly dodgy lives. Rose’s caretaker picks prove wiser than they seem.

Ondaatje reminds us that the human memory is long and that there are rarely clear demarcations between one event and the next, in fact the more complex and heartrending events leave traces that may never quite go away. He teaches us that life, like certain passages in music has moments that can best be described by a term Mahler uses to mark a passage that is difficult or heavy. Life can be schwer. I think you will love learning Rose’s story along with Nathaniel, and how it intertwines with that of Marsh Felon, a thatcher’s son who once fell off the family’s roof and had to mend on a cot in their kitchen. And just to add a bit more mystery, you will find out about Viola and many more ordinary heroes.

Find me at Goodreads at Nancy Brisson

Photo Credit: From a Google Image Search – Lawn Gnomes Publishing

The Secret Servant by Daniel Silva – Book

the Secret Servant by Daniel You Tube

The Secret Servant by Daniel Silva begins with a dead Jewish scholar, as Gabriel Allon books often do. Professor Solomon Rosner is “the first asset in the annals of Office history to have proven more useful to them dead than alive.” He is killed in Amsterdam in a normally a peaceful neighborhood. Rosner runs the Center for European Security Studies. “[T]he center had managed to produce a steady stream of authoritative reports and articles detailing the threat posed to the Netherlands by the rise of militant Islam within its borders.” Rosner had a lot of enemies both Islamic and Dutch. He is killed on the way to lunch by one of the painters who has been working across the street from his office. Obviously painting is not the man’s only job.

Gabriel Allon flies into Tel Aviv and is met by Uzi Navot. Once a katsaor western European undercover case officer, Uzi is now Chief of Special Ops. He had done jobs no one else wanted to do, executioner, kidnapper, bugger, blackmailer. Uzi is a bit bitter about Gabriel’s star status. Uzi to Gabriel: “Art restoration was your cover job, Gabriel. You are not an art restorer. You are a secret servant of the state of Israel and You have no right to leave the fighting to others.”

Shamron reveals that Rosner also worked for the Office. Rosner was to keep eyes and ears on Islamic extremism to give some early warning of possible terrorist targets. Rosen helped them stop and assassinate the members of an al-Qaeda affiliated “cell operating in West Amsterdam [when they] got their hands on a missile and were planning to shoot down an El Al jetliner.”

The painter who killed Rosen was named Mohammed Hamza and there was a videotape found in his apartment. Gabriel is to go get all of Rosen’s files which ends up being about 500,000 documents. Rosen started out as a sayan. “[S]ayanimare a worldwide network of volunteer Jewish helpers, Bankers are used to provide cash for Office agents, doctors treated them in secret, hoteliers gave rooms under false names, rental car employees gave them untraceable vehicles. Then Shamron recruited him.

Gabriel is given an assistant, Eli Lavon. He is described as small and bookish, with wispy unkempt hair and quick brown eyes – As usual he seems to be wearing all his clothes at once. And he is “the finest street surveillance artist the Office has ever produced.” He is an archeologist by training and has also been an ayinor tracker.

Gabriel and Eli Lavon meet Sophie Vanderhaus, Prof. Rosner’s assistant at the same café where Rosner was killed. At the end of a long day going over files Gabriel goes out for Thai food – and never comes back. Someone, an old Arabic man wearing keffiyeh and kufi, follows Gabriel and, after Gabriel almost kills him, the man says he has come to help them. He worked with Rosen. He is Ibrahim Fawaz.

Ibrahim tells Gabriel that, “Takfir was a concept developed by Islamists in Egypt in the nineteen seventies, a theological sleight of hand designed to give the terrorists a sacred license to kill almost anyone they pleased in order to achieve their goals of imposing sharia and restoring the Caliphate. To the Takfiri, democracy was a heresy, for it supplanted the laws of God with the laws of men.” “Muslim citizens of a democracy were apostates and could be put to the sword.

Fawaz also tells Gabriel about Samir al-Masri who is a dangerous man, and that Samir and four other young men have disappeared from Amsterdam. They go to search his room. In Samir’s room they find photos of Samir in Trafalgar Square, Samir with a member of the Queen’s Life Guard outside Buckingham Palace, Samir riding the Millenium wheel, Samir at the House of Parliament and the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Guess who’s going to London now?

As they part ways Eli says, “And so here we are again two nice Jewish boys, sitting on a European street corner at three o’clock in the morning. My God when will it end.” “It’s never going to end, Eli. This is forever.”

It can take a lot of build-up to get to the heart of the action in Silva’s popular spy thrillers. Back stories are long. Some readers run out of patience. But we are there now.

Gabriel is not exactly warmly welcomed in London and his cohorts there do not take the threat very seriously because they have been through so much. Gabriel narrows down the threat to Hyde Park and the American Embassy.

Robert Halton, the ambassador, waves his daughter, Elizabeth Halton, MD goodbye, not without trepidation, as she leaves for a run in the park. She is kidnapped in broad daylight by men dressed all in black and driving a park maintenance truck. Gabriel’s warning came too late, but he is in time to see the attack and shoot some kidnappers. Still, Elizabeth is gone.

Now Adrian Carter from the CIA, who is always a good partner joins the hunt since the American ambassador’s daughter is involved.

Who took her? What do they want? Will Gabriel get her back alive? What injuries will he sustain this time? Who is the mastermind of this plot.? How is Egypt involved? Who are the Swords of Allah? Who gets married?

Find me on Goodreads as Nancy Brisson.

Prince of Fire by Daniel Silva – Book

prince of fire big you tube

Most books in the Gabriel Allon series begin with violence; a murder or perhaps a bombing where someone who is Jewish or Israeli is targeted. In book five, Prince of Fireby Daniel Silva the catalyst to Gabriel’s newest investigation involves both. There is a bombing at the Israeli Embassy in Rome and then four terrorists arrive and target anyone who might have survived with automatic assault rifles. Both ambassadors who are present die.

Gabriel is an art restorer of some genius. He would be happy to do this full time, but he has also been trained as a skilled spy and assassin for the Israeli Secret Service. Shamron, his mentor, an irascible old survivor of the Palmach in the War of Independence in Israel, keeps suddenly appearing in Gabriel’s peaceful life in Europe, where the great cathedrals and paintings live. Suddenly Gabriel will get a whiff of a smelly Turkish cigarette and know his peace will be disturbed because someone else’s peace has been shattered.

A mysterious man rents a villa in Bracciano, Italy, a Monsieur Jean-Luc. He arrives in January and vanishes in late February. The owner of the villa remembers that he spoke French with an upper-class accent.

Near the Borghese Gardens in Rome with its “elegant boulevards and quiet leafy streets, on a cul de sac sits the Israeli Embassy in Rome.

“Survivors and witnesses would recall the perfection of that late-winter morning: bright and clear, cold enough in the shadows to bring on a shiver, warm enough in the sun to unbutton a wool coat and dream of an al fresco lunch”

This stellar late-winter day is disturbed by first the aforementioned truck bomb and then by the four men with automatic rifles who jump from a car to shoot any survivors.

Once the Intelligence service on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv collects itself, the Roman katsa (Hebrew for a undercover foreign office manager) Shimon Pazner is located and the terrorists movements are traced. Forty-eight hours later investigators find a hurriedly abandoned room pointed out by a Tunisian informant. After a thorough search the investigators find a computer disc sewn into the lining of one piece of the abandoned luggage. Shimon takes the computer disc to Tel Aviv because they have had reason to develop excellent skills for decoding encrypted information.

What they find sends them off looking for Gabriel who happens to be away from the Bellini painting he was restoring in Venice. He is in London to see an old and useful friend, Julian Isherwood, an art dealer and friend of the Israeli Secret Service, and to visit his wife who had been badly burned and emotionally damaged in a car bomb incident in Vienna. Gabriel and Leah’s son was killed. Now Leah goes through her days in silence and seems unable to remember Gabriel.

“Leah had been punished for his sins. Leah was the price a decent man paid for climbing into the sewer with murderers and terrorists.”

Gabriel is at the sanitorium to let Leah know that he intends to marry Chiara who lives with him in Venice and also works for the Office on King Saul Boulevard, but he finds he cannot say the words to her.

Shamron finds Gabriel at last when Gabriel returns to Venice and Chiara and the Bellini. Shamron reveals that the computer disc they decoded contained a detailed dossier of Gabriel’s assassination activities for the Office. Fingerprints identified the holder of the dossier as Daoud Hadawi, a Palestinian refugee. The same computer disc also contained photos and security analyses for targets in Europe. Gabriel could not say no to Shamron. Chiara is coming too.

Gabriel is given an office in Room 456C at King Saul Boulevard and this time he has a team. Chiara is bat leveyha, Hebrew for a girl escort officer. Yossi comes from Research, Dina, from History, Yaakov from Arab Affairs is a shabak, a body guard, Rimona is from Military Intelligence and is Shamron’s niece. Using what they know, the name and national origin of Daoud Hadawi, they begin their investigation, which also seems to have a connection to Yasir Arafat, by interviewing all of their Arab informants.

“Gabriel began each day by posing the same series of questions. Who built the bomb? Who conceived and planned the attack? Who directed the teams? Who secured the safe houses and the transport? Who handled the money: Who was the mastermind? Was there a state sponsor in Damascus or Tehran or Tripoli?”

And who is Khaled al-Khalifa. “Khaled is a rumor. Khaled is a ghost story. He is the thing that is missing.”

The investigation will lead far and wide. How many times will Gabriel be wounded in the search for Khaled al-Kalifa? Who else will die? Will Gabriel ever get to finish working on the Bellini in Venice? Will he ever tell Leah about Chiara? So many questions I can’t answer because that would ruin this excellent spy story.

Photo credit: From a Google Image Search – You Tube

Democracy Betrayed by William W Keller – Book

Democracy Betrayed big PW

“Western leaders appear to have lost their compass. They have delegated the safety of the nation to a newly empowered class of internal security and intelligence professionals,” says William W. Keller in his book Democracy Betrayed: The Rise of the Surveillance Security State.

Life is full of trade-offs. We trade off free time or family time for money by going off to jobs that sometimes feel rewarding and sometimes just feel boring. Keller asks us how much freedom we are willing to give up for security, not even real security, but, for the most part, false security. The part of our freedom we pay with for this false sense of security is a loss of our privacy. We have not lost enough privacy that we live in a police state – yet. But we have lost control of our private data and not just to hackers but to our own National Security apparatus, which has grown enormously since 9/11. Our government now uses (as Edward Snowden made us aware) a giant sieve to catch a few tadpoles. Often it is not even necessary to get a court order to collect whatever the government wishes to see.

The author calls this “Secure Democracy”, which he tries to prove to us, is not really democracy at all. The new name states have invented for this is “illiberal democracy” which sounds an awful lot like Orwellian double speak.

The book is academic, with plenty of documented research, carefully noted in the end notes. However, the author does not bury his points in academic language. It’s very readable, although it may not keep you on the edge of your seat. But it really should keep our adrenalin pumping. Every modern President has done little to curtail foreign surveillance in the hopes of learning in advance about terrorist attacks. Even though data shows that very little useful intelligence has come from massive data collection, the spy apparatus grows. Perhaps the assumption is that we are just not collecting enough data and more will be the ticket into the minds of bad actors. Perhaps the security people are just getting a little giddy on ones and zeroes.

And it is not just foreign data collection. Domestic spying and data collection shows the same acceleration. I don’t believe, and neither does the author, that we know how to stop the secret intelligence “state” from growing. But we do know that a democratic government with an insatiable appetite for data about its citizens is an anomaly. A government that wants to scoop up data without a specific purpose or a court order should have our mental alarms going off like crazy. It seems that even a few terrorist events make us feel very vulnerable and afraid so we acquiesce to the surveillance state, something we were determined never to do. Keller’s evidence about the scope and reach of our surveillance state is compelling.

I always tell myself that someone would be bored to death tracking my communications and my online activities, but I do keep a blog about politics. It’s a fairly easy leap, especially right now, to imagine someone knocking at my door and frog-marching me off to jail. It is fairly easy to imagine being incarcerated without due process. This has not happened but it is only a baby step away, it seems, in a 21^stcentury when we expected to enjoy more freedom, more global freedom, than ever.

Keller calls our current surveillance state the Security Industrial Complex. The internet, which makes the world seem so small, also makes itself a tempting target for a surveillance state eager to mine all that data. Why should businesses get to use the data and not the government?

Now that the intelligence community seems to have gone rogue we are surprisingly complacent about it. Keller does not offer much advice about how to keep our government out of our business, or how to protect our constitutional right to privacy (4^thAmendment) but he knows that knowledge is power. I know, I know, who wants to read about something like this. What a downer. However, this is a book that everyone should read, downer or not.

July 2018 Book List

Every month new books arrive in our lives and in our bookstores and libraries and so it is difficult to keep up with what is out there. I made these book lists for myself but then I decided to share them. All of this information is available elsewhere online, but not in one place. I added a * symbol next to books that piqued my interest the most. Happy reading!

Amazon

Literature and Fiction

What We Were Promised by Lucy Tan

Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams

Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce *

A Terrible Country: A Novel by Keith Gessen

The Mere Wife: A Novel by Maria Dahvana Headley

Clock Dance: A Novel by Anne Tyler *

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottesa Moshfegh *

America for Beginners by Leah Franqui

All We Ever Wanted: A Novel by Jordy Rosenberg

Mysteries and Thrillers

Baby’s First Felony by John Straley

Safe Houses: A Novel by Dan Fesperman

The Ruin: A Novel by Dervla McTiernan

Hangman: A Novel by Daniel Cole

Baby Teeth: A Novel by Zoje Stage

Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott

The Other Woman by Daniel Silva

Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery by Andrew Shaffer

The Last Time I Lied: A Novel by Riley Sager

Watch the Girls by Jennifer Wolfe

Believe Me: A Novel by J P Delaney

Biographies and Memoirs

A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety by Donald Hall

Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border by Porter Fox

Rad Girls Can: Stories of Bold, Brave, and Brilliant Young Women (Rad Women) by Kate Schatz, Miriam Klein Stahl

Risk: True Stories People Never Thought They’d Dare to Share by Kevin Allison

My Twenty-Five Years in Provence: Reflections on Then and Now by Peter Mayle *

Cancerland: A Medical Memoir by David Scadden, Michael D’Antonio

Happily Ever Esther: Two Men, A Wonder Pig, and Their Life-changing Mission to Give Animals a Home by Steve Jenkins

You’re On An Airplane: A Self Mythologizing Memoir by Parker Posey

City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai by Paul French *

From the Corner of the Oval: A Memoir by Becky Dorey-Stein

Nonfiction

Don’t Make Me Pull Over: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip by Richard Ratay

Tropic of Football: The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans to the NFL by Rob Reich

Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures by Nick Pyenson

Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, The Quest for Justice, and The World’s Most Famous Detective Writer by Margalit Fox

Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border by Porter Fox *

The Promise of the Grand Canyon: John Wesley Powell’s Perilous Journey and His Vision for the American West by John F. Ross

The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy by Anna Clark *

Risk: True Stories People Never Thought They’d Dare to Share by Kevin Allison (Ed.)

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey through India’s New Gilded Age by James Crabtree *

Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U S Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man by Lynn Vincent

Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with the Rolling Stones at Altamont by Saul Austerlitz

New York Times Book Review

June 3^rd

Fiction

The Outsider by Stephen King

First Person by Richard Flanagan

The Judge Hunter by Christopher Buckley

A Place for Us by Fatima Mirza

Do This For Me by Raney Moore

The Dead House by Billy O’Callaghan

The Glitch by Elisabeth Cohen

Sophia of Silicon Valley by Anna Yen

Circe by Madeline Miller

Love and Ruin by Paula McLain *

How Hard Can It Be by Allison Pearson

What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw by Leah Stewart

He by John Connolly

Madness is Better Than Defeat by Ned Beauman

The Life List of Adrian Mandrich by Chris White

Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison

Nonfiction

Pops by Michael Chabon (essays) *

Inseparable by Yunte Huang

Robin by Dave Itzkoff

Asking for a Friend: Three Centuries of Advice on Life, Love, Money and Other Burning Questions From a Nation Obsessed by Jessica Weisberg *

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

All the Answers by Michael Kupperman

Flash by Christopher Bonanos

To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine

Chefs, Drugs and Rock and Roll by Andrew Friedman

Renaissance Woman by Ramie Targoff

Daughters of the Winter Queen by Nancy Goldstone

Patriot Number One by Lauren Hilgers

Sex Money Murder: A Story of Crack, Blood, and Betrayal by Jonathan Green

Adventures of a Young Naturalist by David Allen Attenborough

Bernice Abbott: A Life in Photography by Julia Van Haaften

The Wondrous Life of the Library by Stuart Kells

The Rise and Fall of the Dinaosaurs by Steve Brusatte

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson

The Mirage Factory by Gary Krist

A Short History of Drunkenness by Mark Forsyth

June 10^th

Crime Fiction

The Woman in the Woods by John Connolly

Exit Strategy by Charlton Pettus

Don’t Believe It by Charlie Donlea

The Fens (An Abby Endicott Mystery) by Pamela Wechsler

Fiction

Companions by Christina Hesselholdt (Danish)

Woman of the Ashes by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje *

Disoriental by Nigar Djavadi (“I’m not an immigrant, I’m an exile.”

Nonfiction

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by John Meacham

The Efficiency Paradox by Edward Tenner

Jimmy Carter: The White House Years by Stuart Eizenstat

Edge of Chaos by Dambisa Moyo

There Are No Grown-Ups by Pamela Druckerman

The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge

The China Mission by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

Struggles of Motherhood

The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy

Mother of Invention by Caeli Wolfson Widger

Amateur Hour : Motherhood in Essays and Swear Words by Kimberly Harrington

June 17^th

Fiction

The Pisces by Melissa Broder

Kudos by Rachel Cusk

Nonfiction

And Then We Danced by Henry Alford

Celestial Bodies by Laura Jacobs

Frenemies by Ken Auletta

Reporter by Samuel M Hersh

The Girl from Kathmandu by Cam Simpson

Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Prodigal Tongue: The Love Hate by Lynne Murphy

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh by Carl Zimmer

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

Our Towns by James and Deborah Fallows *

The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester

The Death of Democracy by Benjamin Carter Hett

The Great Revolt by Salena Zito and Brad Todd (Allows Trump backers to speak in their own voices)

Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North by Mark C Serreze

To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration by Edward J Larson

The Ends of the Earth: The Truth Behind the Glory of Polar Exploration by John V H Dippel

June 24^th

Fiction

Crime

Bearskin by James A McLaughlin

The Dante Chamber by Matthew Pearl

A Taste for Vengeance by Martin Walker

There There by Tommy Orange

84K by Claire North (Sci Fi)

So Lucky by Nicola Griffith

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

Bandwidth by Eliot Peper

The Comedown by Rebekah Frumkin

The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

A View of the Empire at Sunset by Caryl Phillips

Nonfiction

Why “To Kill a Mockingbird” Matters by Tom Santopietro

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

The Moralist by Patricia O’Toole

Atticus Finch: The Biography by Joseph Crespino

Asperger’s Children by Edith Sheffer

Queer City by Peter Ackroyd

The Fair Chase by Philip Dray

July 1^st

Fiction

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Slave Old Man by Patrick Chamoiseau

Upstate by James Wood

The Honey Farm by Harriet Alida Lye

Nonfiction

The Perfect Weapon by David E Sanger

Bull…. Jobs by David Graeber

The League of Kindness by Christie Walson

Damnation Island by Stacy Horn

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

This Little Art by Kate Briggs

The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are by Alan Jasanoff

Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change by Leonard Mlodinow

Publisher’s Weekly Tip Sheet

June 4^th

Lagos Noir by Chris Abani (anthology)

Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain by Karen Auvinen (memoir)

Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton (F)

The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson (F)

Of Marriage by Nicole Cooley (anthology)

Kudos by Rachel Cusk (F)

Rough Animals: A Novel by Rae Del Bianco (F)

Reporter: A Memoir by Seymour M Hersh (Memoir)

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz (Memoir)

The Good Son by You-Jeong trans. from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim (F)

There There by Tommy Orange (F)

How Hard Can It Be by Allison Pearson (F)

Bruce Lee: A Life by Matthew Polly (Biography)

Sweet and Low by Nick White (Short Stories)

June 15^th

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Essays by Thomas Frank (Reports from a Sinking Society) (NF)*

The Grey Bastards: A Novel by Jonathan French (Fantasy)

Call Me American: A Memoir by Abdi Nor Iftír (Memoir)

A Stitch in Time by Daphne Kalmar (YA)

Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Pi (F)

The Great Believers: A Novel by Rebecca Makkai (F)

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty (F)

Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over by Neil Painter (Memoir)

Confessions of the Fox: A Novel by Jordy Rosenberg (F)

The Anomaly by Michael Rutger (F)

Not the Girls You’re Looking For by Aminah Mae Safi (YA)

Rainy Day Friends by Jill Shalvis (F)

The Shepherd’s Hut: A Novel by Time Winton (F)

June 22^nd

For Profit Democracy: Why the Government is Losing the Trust of Rural America by Loka Ashwood (NF)

Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory by Mike Davis (NF-Essays)

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism by Robin Diangelo with a Forward by Michael Eric Dyson (NF) *

The Inward Empire: Mapping the Wilds of Mortality and Fatherhood by Christian Donlan (Memoir)

The Darkest Time of Night: A Novel by Jeremy Finley (F)

Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, The Quest for Justice, and the World’s Greatest Writer by Margalit Fox (NF)

All We Ever Wanted: A Novel by Emily Giffen (F)

My Plain Jane by Cynthia Hand (YA)

Liar, Liar by Lisa Jackson (F)

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse (Fantasy)

The Cabin at the End of the World: A Novel by Paul Tremblay

July 2^nd

The Moment Before Drowning by James Brydon (F)

The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness: A Memoir by Graham Caveney (Memoir)

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age by James Crabtree (NF)

Zen and Gone by Emily France (YA)

City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai by Paul French (NF)

Idiophone: An Essay by Amy Fusselman (Essay)

Retribution by Steffen Jacobsen (Thriller)

Rip the Angels from Heaven by David Krugler (Thriller)

Dear Mrs. Bird by A J Pearce (F)

Queen’s Progress: A Tudor Mystery (A Kit Marlowe Mystery) by M J Trow (F)

A Death in Vienna by Daniel Silva – Book

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Three of the books I have read in the Gabriel Allon series, Daniel Silva tells us in the end notes of A Death in Vienna, are thematically related. They each are “dealing with the unfinished business of the Holocaust.” In The English AssassinSilva looks at “art looting” and the “collaboration of Swiss banks”. In The Confessorhe looks at the “role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and the silence of Pope Pius XII. In A Death in Viennahe looks into Aktion 1005 which was “the real code name of the Nazi program to conceal and destroy the remains of millions of Jewish dead” and the activities of Bishop Aloïs Hudal “rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima, who helped hundreds of Nazi war criminals flee Europe.” He tells us that the Vatican still maintains the Bishop acted without the knowledge of the pope. It is unusual for a thriller to have an Israeli subtext, and it takes skill on the part of the author to expose real wrongs while his novel still unfolds as an exciting puzzle for a spy, or spy organization, to solve.

This tale begins with a bomb at the Wartime Claims and Inquiry Office. Eli Lavon, who runs this office is critically injured. His employees, Reveka and Sarah are killed. Eli Lavon is an Israeli but he has a closer connection to the Israeli Secret Service known as the Office. In the early 70’s he worked for them and the skills he possesses are legendary. Gabriel, art restorer and Israeli spy, leaves another Bellini in another Venetian Cathedral to find out why the Wartime Claims and Inquiry Office was bombed and why his friend Eli Lavon is lying unconscious in a hospital in Vienna.

Clues lead Allon to a Nazi hiding under a new name in Vienna. At least he seems to be this certain Nazi, but research is necessary to confirm it, even involving travel to South America. This hidden Nazi basically worked for the Germans as an eraser. Mass graves full of dead bodies were beginning to show signs of what had been hidden under too little earth. It was this man’s job to uncover these putrefying mass graves full of Jewish people who had been gassed or executed and to sanitize them by burning the remains and scattering the ashes. Of course this would also erase any evidence of what the German’s had been doing. This particular Nazi had value because he had devised a way to make a fire that was hot enough to do the sad job. He used Jewish prisoners to do the macabre work and the ashes and bones were moved to local rivers and streams. He never got to erase all of the evidence because the German’s ran out of time and lost the war.

This eraser man, like many Nazi’s saw himself as culturally sensitive because he loved great art and music. Since he did not actually get his hands dirty he apparently did not feel that the inhumanity of what he did compromised his elitism. He accompanied Gabriel’s mother on the Death March out of the “camps”. He killed survivors on the way out if they gave the wrong answer to the question “What will you tell the world and your children?” He once spent on day on a railroad platform forcing a Jewish man to play a classical piece of music over and over again. This Nazi on the rise asked arriving prisoners if they knew the name of the music. If they didn’t know he shot them.

Does such a man deserve to be stalked and taken off to prison in Israel? Almost any human being would say yes. But for Gabriel this one is very personal.