Month: February 2019

Churchill: Walking With Destiny by Andrew Roberts – Book

Churchill book cover The Spectator

Churchill: Walking With Destiny by Andrew Roberts – Book

Andrew Roberts, in his biography Churchill: Walking With Destinytells us that Churchill was not ubiquitously or universally beloved, until he was. As he tells it even Churchill’s detractors enjoyed his wit, his oratory, and his intelligence. Having just spent over a month in the company of Winston Churchill, and an enormous cast of famous cohorts, I am surprised and almost sorry to find myself back in the weird politics and tenuous peace of the 21 st century.

Churchill was born in Blenheim Palace into the family of the Duke of Marlborough, a family whose most famous member was known to have been an excellent military strategist. Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father was the third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. Churchill seems to have been born with an interest in military matters. He studied what was known about his ancestor and he wrote a book about him. In fact, Churchill was a prodigious writer and authored many books now considered classics. He also studied the life and battles of Napoleon. He was in the cavalry for his own military service and, on a hiatus from politics he served in the trenches in France in the Great War (which we call WW I).

Churchill was born at the end of the Victorian Age and lived until the 1960’s. The changes in politics and wars were dizzying and many of his contemporaries held onto the “old rules” they learned as children. Churchill was an unruly child, a challenge for the schoolmasters at the very aristocratic schools he attended. Roberts suggests that Churchill was an original who had no problems with the changes he lived through because he was never a rule-follower. He further marshalls the facts of Churchill’s life in such a way as to suggest that Churchill was born to lead the UK into war against Hitler. Churchill believed that he was safe from harm because he was destined for some greatness which made him seem almost fearless. The author suggests that Churchill could never guess what moment he was destined for so he tried to be a great man all his life. This occasionally ticked everyone off, especially some in both the Conservative and the Labor parties in Parliament. Churchill did not want to serve in the House of Lords. He never worried about not being a Lord like his parent, and he never accepted the title, because he would not have been able to serve in the Commons as he wished.

Roberts’ book is close to 1,000 pages long, longer if you count the photo section, the footnotes, the bibliography and the index. By the time Roberts, a respected and prize-winning British historical writer, tackled Churchill’s biography he had access to documents previous biographers never had. He had official papers but also the diaries of almost everyone who had known Churchill. I found myself interested in how British politics differs somewhat from our democracy, interested in Churchill’s political ups and downs, in his political and military successes and failures. Along with the public side of Churchill’s life, the diaries of his contemporaries, his secretaries and aides, his wife Clementine, and even occasionally his children give Roberts and us access to the private side of his life, even some gossipy bits.

If Churchill was destined for any one time it was 1939-1945, the World War that we call World War II. Truly the entire world was involved in this terrible conflagration with Hitler and his Germans, and the Japanese as instigators, and Russia under Joe Stalin as our rather frightening ally. Roberts makes us understand what we owe Winston Churchill, who almost single-handedly encouraged his Brits to stay in the war, a war they only believed they could win because Churchill kept telling them so. He had faith that America would eventually have to come into the war and, although he hated Communism, he set that aside so Russia would also be an ally. Although Russia gave everyone big headaches after the war, if millions of Russians hadn’t died to beat back Hitler, Churchill and all the British people could not have held Hitler off long enough for America to come into the war. Without Churchill and, indeed, without Russia, World War II could have been a tragic turning point for democracy and humanity, and Andrew Roberts makes that very clear.

Churchill - AZ Quotes

I have barely scratched the surface and the depth of Churchill’s life, but Andrew Roberts does. I say “bravo”. I highly recommend that reader’s spend some time with Churchill : Walking with Destiny. I doubt if it will take a month. I was dealing with some other challenges at the time. This is one of those books that becomes a part of you. I will make my highlighting public, but I will warn you it is voluminous. It might be easier just to read the book.

Please find me on goodreads.com as Nancy Brisson and on www.tremr.comas brissioni and at https://nbrissonbookblog.com/

Photo Credits: From a Google Image Search – The Spectator, AZ Quotes

February 2019 Book List

book with glasses by Inc.

February 2019 Booklist

There is no clear pattern in the books available this February, most of which were published in January. Topics are varied. Fiction seems to have made a comeback. Fiction titles outnumber nonfiction. Plenty of crime offerings and some thrillers that look quite interesting. There is even an offering from a daughter whose mom was a numbers runner. I am still working on Churchill: A Walk with Destiny by Andrew Roberts, which has me immersed in British politics, and right now in World War II. This is a great book but very long and I have not been able to set aside good time for reading. However, this book is well worth the investment in time that it takes to read the over 1,000 pages. Churchill is a fascinating political figure and, given his contributions to bucking up Britain, which had to fight Germany almost alone until America finally entered the war, he was a true hero in Britain. In fact he should be remembered as a hero by all of us, because Hitler didn’t win and we owe that to Churchill and the people of the UK.

Amazon

Literature and Fiction

The Cassandra: A Novel by Sharma Shields

The End of Loneliness: A Novel by Benedict Wells

Golden Child: A Novel by Claire Adam

The Age of Light: A Novel by Whitney Scharer

The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin

Lost Children Archive: A Novel by Valeria Luiselli

The Study of Animal Languages: A Novel by Lindsay Stern

Finding Dorothy: A Novel by Elizabeth Lells

The Night Tiger: A Novel by Yangsze Choo

Enchantée by Gia Trelease

Mystery and Thriller

American Spy: A Novel by Lauren Wilkinson

Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds: The First Official Stranger Things Novel by Gwenda Bond

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

Early Riser: A Novel by Jasper Fforde

Stalker: A Novel (Joona Linna) by Lars Kepler

The Next to Die: A Novel by Sophie Hannah

Never Tell: A Novel by Lisa Gardner

The Killer Collective by Barry Eisler

The Moroccan Girl: A Novel by Charles Cumming

Biographies and Memoirs

Wise Guy: Lessons from a Life by Guy Kawasaki

Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country by Pam Houston

Jimmy Neurosis: A Memoir by James Oseland

The Unwinding of the Miracles: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything that Comes After by Julie Yip-Williams

Wild Bill: The True Story of America’s First Gunfighter by Tom Clavin

No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger: The Deadliest Animal in History by Dane Huckelbridge

Figuring by Maria Popova

Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap by Judy Goldman

Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Daniel Morgan: An Inexplicable Hero by James Kenneth Swisher

Nonfiction

Drug Warrior: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo and the Rise of America’s Opioid Crisis by Jack Riley

The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, A Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film by W. K. Stratton

Liquid Rules: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances that Flow through Our Lives by Mark Miodownik

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present by Philipp Blom

How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch

Good Kids, Bad City: A Story of Race and Wrongful Conviction in America by Kyle Swenson

The Shape of Life: One Mathematician’s Search for the Universe’s Hidden Geometry by Shing-Tung Yau, Steve Nadis

Underground: A Human History of the World’s Beneath Our Feet by Will Hunt

Science Fiction and Fantasy

Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James

Polaris Rising: A Novel: The Consortium Rebellion by Jessie Mihalik

Early Riser: A Novel by Jasper Fforde

Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation by Ken Liu

A People’s Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers by Charlie Jane Anders, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Charles Yu, Victor LaValle, and John Joseph Adams

The New York Times Book Review

Jan. 6th

Crime

The New Iberia Blues by James Lee Burke

The Burglar by Thomas Perry

No Sunscreen for the Dead by Tim Dorsey

Lives Laid Away by Stephen Mack Jones

North of Dawn by Nuruddin Farah

Poetry

The Flame by Leonard Cohen

Nonfiction

Born to Be Posthumous by Mark Dery

The Future of Capitalism by Paul Collier

Never Home Along by Rob Dunn

The War Before the War by Andrew Delbanco

Fault Lines by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E Zelizer

Nonfiction Shortlist (Topic-Food)

The Bread and the Knife: A Life in 26 Bites by Dawn Drzal

Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Christine S. O’Brien

Kitchen Yarns by Ann Hood

Jan. 13 th

Fiction

Sugar Run by Mesha Maren

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg

Revolution Sunday by Wendy Guerra

My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Nigeria)

The Shortlist – 2 Japanese Writers

The Frolic of the Beasts by Yukio Mishima, trans. by Andrew Clare

The Cake Tree in the Ruins by Akiyuki Nosaka, trans. by Ginny Tapley Takemore

Nonfiction

Anne Frank’s Diary in Graphic Form by Ari Folman and David Polonsky

Duped by Abby Ellin

An Unlikely Journey by Julián Castro

The Breakthrough by Charles Graeber

Jan. 20 th

Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley

Unquiet by Linn Ullmann

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Restoration Heights by Will Medearis

Nonfiction

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

The Birth of Loud by Ian Port

Breaking and Entering by Jeremy Smith

Bluff City by Preston Lauterbock

Prisoner by Jason Rezaian

The Shortllist

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

The Free Society in Crisis: History of Our Times by David Selbourne

Try Common Sense: Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and Left by Philip K. Howard

Jan. 29 th

Nonfiction

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer

Inheritance by Dani Shapiro

The World According to Fannie Davis by Bridgett M. Davis (A daughter writes about her mother – a number’s runner)

In My Mind’s Eye: A Thought Diary by Jan Morris

Help Me by Marianne Power

Aristotle’s Way by Edith Hall

The Longest Line on the Map by Eric. Rutkow

Russell Baker books (Mr. Baker just passed)

So This is Depravity

Growing Up (Pulitzer Prize)

The Good Times

Book of American Humor

The Upside-Down Man

The Norton Book of Light Verse

Fiction

Hark by Sam Lipsyte

The Perfect Nanny by Leila Silmani

The Falconer by Dana Czapnick

An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria)

The Shortlist – History in Fiction

The Churchill Woman by Stephanie Barron

The Eulogist by Terry Gamble

The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King by Jerome Charyn

Mad Blood Stirring by Simon Mayo

Feb. 1 st

Best Winter Thrillers

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

As Long As We Both Shall Live by JoAnn Chaney

The Plotters by Un-Su Kim

Watching You by Lisa Jewell

The Current by Tim Johnston

The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Fay

Crime Fiction

Tombland by C. J. Sansoms

The Black Ascot by Charles Todd

The Suspect by Fiona Barton

The Murder Pit by Mick Finlay

Fiction

Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li

The Weight of a Piano by Chris Cander

The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash

The Spirit of Science Fiction by Roberto Bolaño

The Shortlist – 4 novels

Golden Child by Claire Adam

The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay

The Patricide of George Bejamin Hill by James Charlesworth

Talent by Juliet Lapidos

Publisher’s Weekly

Jan 7 th

New Iberia Blues: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke – F

Thick: and Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cotton – NF

Burned: A Story of Murder and Crime that Wasn’t by Edmund Humes – NF

The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai by Ha Jin – NF

Lives Laid Away by Stephen Mack Jones – F

Wanderer by Sarah Léon, trans. from the French by John Cullen – F

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss – F

An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma – F

How to Date Men When You Hate Men by Blythe Roberson – NF with humor

Mouthful of Birds by Samantah Schweblin, trans. from the Spanish by Megan McDowell – SS

Looker by Laura Sims – F

The Drowning by J. P. Smith – Thriller

Slayer by Kiersten White – F

Jan 11 th

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders – Science Fiction

Big Bang by David Bowman – F

The Breakline by James Brabazon – Thriller

Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely by Andrew S. Curran – NF

No Sunscreen for the Dead by Tim Dorsey – Crime novel

Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life by Edith Hall – NF

Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal (Pride and Prejudice Pakistani-style) – F

Last Night in Nuuk by Naviaq Komeliussen, trans. from the Danish by Anna Halager – F

Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee – F

Hark by Sam Lipsyte – F

Echo North by Joanna Ruth Meyer – YA – F

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro – NF

Unquiet by Linn Ullmann – F

The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay – F

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson – F

Jan. 18 th

The Weight of a Piano by Chris Cander – F

The Kingdom of Copper by S. A. Chakraborty – Fantasy

The Current by Tim Johnston – Thriller

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land – Memoir

The Alarming Palsy of James Orr by Tom Lee – F

Camelot’s End: Kennedy vs Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party by Jon Ward – NF

The Magic Feather Effect: The Science of Alternative Medicine and the Surprising Power of Belief by Melanie Warner – NF

The Nowhere Child by Christian White – F

Last Boat of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution by Helen Zia – NF

Jan. 25 th

Golden Child by Claire Adam – F

The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan – SS

The Prisoner of Limnos by Lois Mc Master Bujold – F – Series

Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen – F

Deep Creek: Finding Hope I the High Country by Pa Houston – Essays

Out of the Dark by Gregg Hurwitz – Orphan X – F

The Plotters by Un-Su Kim, trans from the Korean by Sora Kum-Russell – Thriller

We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin – F

Feb. 1 st

Stalin’s Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival: The Life of Mikhail Soloknov by Brian J. Boeck – Bio

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson – NF

Europe: A Natural History by Tina Flannery with Luigi Boitani – NF

El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America by Carrie Gibson – NF

Lady First: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk by Amy S Greenberg – Bio

What We Did by Christobel Kent – F

A People’s Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction From 25 Extraordinary Writers, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams – SS

The Ruin of Kings: A Chorus of Dragons, Bk. 1 by Jenn Lyons – Fantasy

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken – F

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides – F

I Am A God by Giacomo Sartori, trans. from the Italian by Frederika Randall – F

The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer – F

Off Season by James Sturm – Graphic Fiction

The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by EsméWeijun Wang – NF

The Glovemaker by Ann Weisgarber – F