Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land
by Rachel Cockerell
— History/Memoir —
Description (from Goodreads):
On June 7th 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews sets sail not to Jerusalem or New York, as many on board have dreamt, but to Texas. The man who persuades the passengers to go is David Jochelmann, Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather. It marks the beginning of the Galveston Movement, a forgotten moment in history when 10,000 Jews fled to Texas in the lead-up to WWI.
My review:
Thanks to Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, I knew of the proposal to offer European Jews a temporary refuge near Sitka, Alaska. A historical fact of the pre-WWII 1930s, the proposal was shot down by antiSemitic officials in the Alaskan and American governments. I knew also that Jews had for ages dreamed of a permanent homeland in what is now Israel. There my knowledge of modern Jewish history ended.
Then I read a short review of Rachel Cockerell’s family history, Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land, and learned there had been an earlier (and more successful) attempt to resettle European Jews in America, the Galveston Movement of the early 1900s, when more than 10,000 Jews, most fleeing bloody antiSemitic pogroms in Czarist Russia, stepped ashore at the port of Galveston, Texas, then moved on to various locations in the Southwestern U.S. I know some of their descendants; I was hooked and simply had to read the book.
Rachel Cockerell, setting out to write a family history, discovered that her great-grandfather David Jochelmann, whom family elders recalled as being a banker or financier, had in fact been a leading figure in the early Zionist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the movement spearheaded by Austrian Theodor Herzl and a British writer, Israel Zangwill. Zangwill, after Herzl’s death, led a breakaway faction of the Zionist movement, looking for a temporary homeland for persecuted European Jews until such time as it would be possible to establish a permanent Jewish state in Palestine. Kenya was proposed, along with a few other areas of the world; all but the Galveston proposal were failures and never came to pass. Rachel’s great-grandfather David, a Russian Jew, led the recruitment of Russian Jews for the Galveston resettlement, himself eventually settling in England.
Rachel’s detour into the Zionist movement is the heart of this family history, related almost entirely in snippets from contemporary newspaper articles, personal letters and memoirs, recordings, telegrams, and old photos … a living look at history unfolding, from Theodor Herzl’s early work in Austria right up to Rachel Cockerell’s British great-aunt and -uncle, along with their four children, her father’s cousins, leaving England after WWII to resettle in the new Jewish state of Israel. The original source material is arranged sequentially, allowing the reader to follow the history of the Zionist movement and its breakaway factions from A to Z as it happened, along with looks into the lives of an actual family who lived through it all.
A pleasant surprise, as Rachel’s family history reached the 1920s and 30s, was learning that one of her grandfather’s brothers, Emjo Basshe, was one of New York City’s “New Playwrights,” a leading intellectual of the era, denizen of Greenwich Village, close friend of John Dos Passos and acquaintance of Ernest Hemingway. She must have had a ball unearthing her own history; I had a ball reading it.
This is the best history I’ve read in ages, brilliantly told.
Livesuit (The Captive’s War #1.5)
by James S.A. Corey
— Science Fiction —
Description (from Goodreads):
Humanity’s war is eternal, spread across the galaxy and the ages. Humanity’s best hope to end the endless slaughter is the Livesuit forces. Soldiers meld their bodies to the bleeding edge technology, becoming something more than human for the duration of a war that might never end.
My review:
I held off reading the supplemental stories and novellas the authors wrote to accompany and flesh out the nine novels of The Expanse, hoping they’d collect them in a single edition. Which they did, and which I bought and read after finishing the main series.
But our book club is discussing The Mercy of Gods, the first novel of the authors’ new series) this month and I wanted to be up to date, so I invested five bucks in a Kindle edition of Livesuit, the first novella of The Captive’s War. It’s a cool story and I enjoyed it, particularly the twist at the end, but really it’s a 90-page short story and I’m resolved now to hold off reading others until the complete trilogy is written.
The Heist of Hollow London
by Eddie Robson
— Science Fiction —
Description (from Goodreads):
Arlo and Drienne are ‘mades’ — clones of company executives, deemed important enough to be saved should their health fail. Mades work around the clock to pay off the debt incurred by their creation, though most are Reaped — killed and harvested for organs when their corporate counterparts are in medical need. But when the impossible happens and the too-big-to-fail company that owns them collapses, Arlo and Drienne find themselves purchased by a scientist who has a job for them.
My review:
Tor offered an advance copy in exchange for a review. The blurb was promising and I said count me in.
In this near-future dystopia, a group of five “mades,” cloned humans living lives of indentured servitude to the corporation that owns them, find themselves suddenly unemployed. Just as one is about to be reaped for body parts and the others are being warehoused for sale at bargain prices to other corporations, a wealthy “nat” offers them money and freedom in exchange for helping her steal a data disk from a not-yet-shuttered corporate facility in the rubble of nearly-abandoned London.
The mades — except for Arlo and Drienne, who worked together as brand ambassadors in Shanghai — do not know one another until Mia, the wealthy nat, brings them together. Until that point they’ve been loners, isolated and immersed in the jobs they were bred for: IT support, HR, security, social influencers. Now, cut off from their previous lives and thrown together, they begin to learn about one another and develop personalities and interests outside the roles they were previously trapped in. This is to me the strongest element in this novel. Robson has a gift for giving life to what in other dystopian novels would be paper cutouts playing predictable roles. I was fascinated by each of them: Kline, Loren, Nadi, Drienne, and Arlo.
Robson’s image of hollow London, a ghost city being torn apart for usable scraps of material and leftover tech by salvage workers working for greedy corporations, is fascinating as well, and will stick with me.
The heist is complex: it must be planned and pulled off in a world where everything and everybody is under constant, multilayered surveillance, a world where mades have no rights — and where natural humans and executives, nats and xecs, are almost as tightly controlled. The technical tricks Mia and her gang of mades design to facilitate the caper take a lot of explanation, but here Robson excels as well, making the intricate details organic to the heist itself. The info the reader needs in order to understand what’s going on is embedded in the action as each character plays his or her separate part in stealing the disk, and the action is intense.
Spoiler alert: At the climax, betrayal rears its ugly head and things bog down a bit as the human side of the story gets sticky. It’s a huge mess; there are casualties (including one readers will be saddened by); the prize turns out to be something other than what anyone (save Mia) expected; the surviving mades make it out by the skin of their teeth; and not quite enough attention is given to the aftermath and where the mades go from here.
Overall a very solid bit of work. I’ll remember this one and talk it up with members of my book club. Other than being mildly disturbed by what struck me as a rushed ending, I’m happy to shill for The Heist of Hollow London.
One last thought: can I envision this as a movie? I can. And I’d pay to watch it.
Nightshade (Catalina #1)
by Michael Connelly
— thriller/mystery —
Description (from Goodreads):
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been “exiled” to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a homicide desk on the mainland. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor—a Jane Doe identifiable at first only by a streak of purple dye in her hair. At the same time, a report of poaching on a protected reserve turns into a case fraught with violence and danger as Stilwell digs into the shady past of an island bigwig.
My review:
I did not know about the buffalo herd on Catalina Island. After reading Nightshade, Connelly’s latest police procedural-slash-thriller, I now do. The killing and mutilation of one starts the head of Avalon’s small police force on an investigation that soon includes an assault on a deputy, a murder, the theft of a priceless object, another murder, the abduction of an island resident who happens to be the policeman’s lover, the police shooting of the kidnapper, and a high level political corruption case. Happily for Detective Stilwell, exiled to the Catalina Island LAPD substation after accusing a fellow detective of looking the other way on a serious crime and coming out on the losing end, he likes his assignment to Catalina Island, far from the messy politics of the “overtown” force. Gotta say, though, from Stilwell’s experiences in this, his first time out as a Michael Connelly character, Catalina is far from a quiet outpost.
Stilwell is a new character. He’s heard of Bosch, even met him back in his mainland days. As with Bosch in his first couple of novels, we know little of Stilwell’s backstory. If Connelly is indeed starting a new series with Stilwell, I’m confident we will come to know him well.
Spoiler alert: There are a lot of competing plot points, some introduced with little or no followup, like the decapitated bison and Catalina Island’s strange hold on UFO believers. Much is made of plans to follow GPS pings from the murdered woman’s cell phone to the point over the ocean floor where her body was initially dumped, stuffed in a sail bag and weighted with an anchor and chain, but that adventure never occurs. At several points in the climactic chapters, Connelly clearly wants us to believe Stilwell’s lover Tash, she who was abducted and then saved by Stilwell himself, is in on the crime he’s working, and maybe even about to betray him, a strange bit of misdirection. One plot element I have a hard time believing is how easily Stilwell talks himself out of trouble with his LA-based superior, Captain Corum, who calls Stilwell in a rage almost every other page.
Overall, though, Nightshade is a solid police thriller by the master, set in a new location with lots of possibilities for future installments.
The Devil by Name (Fever House #2)
by Keith Rosson
— Horror —
Description (from Goodreads):
Five years after the event that drove most of the global population to madness, the world is overrun with the “fevered”—once-human, zombielike creatures drawn indiscriminately to violence and murder. In a campaign to restabilize the country, the massive corporation known as Terradyne Industries has merged with the U.S. government in a partnership of dubious motives, quarantining major American cities behind towering walls and corralling the afflicted there with the hope, they say, of developing a vaccine.
My review:
The Devil by Name finishes the story begun in Fever House, and is a worthy sequel.
A few points from my review of Fever House, the first novel in this series:
- This was first-rate stuff and I enjoyed it. Imagine a horror story with well-developed characters! I mean, how often do you ever get that?
- The combination of believable, relatable characters and oh-my-god-what’s-gonna-happen-next kept me turning pages, and I want more.
- Maybe what impressed me most was seeing how these characters, most if not all of them wrapped up in their own lives, occupations, and problems, none of them particularly religious, spiritual, or superstitious, deal with the undeniable presence of supernatural evil that’s thrust upon them. Great question! How would everyday normal people deal with a sudden, nightmarish zombie outbreak?
The Devil by Name fleshes out how the evil introduced in Fever House came about, focusing on how the key “unafflicted” characters introduced in the first book are dealing with the aftermath, and their own roles in bringing it about. A few new characters play key roles in the ultimate confrontation with the evil that started all the horror rolling.
Yeah, it’s fantasy, totally, but it’s engaging and spine-chilling and realistic … realistic in the way you might imagine how things would unfold, and how people would react, if it suddenly turned out there really are supernatural malevolent devils out there, bent on destroying humanity.
Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During World War II
by Becky Aikman
— History —
Description (from Goodreads):
They were crop dusters and debutantes, college girls and performers in flying circuses — all of them trained as pilots. Because they were women, they were denied the opportunity to fly for their country when the United States entered the Second World War. But Great Britain, desperately fighting for survival, would let anyone — even Americans, even women — transport warplanes. Thus, twenty-five daring young aviators bolted for England in 1942, becoming the first American women to command military aircraft.
My review:
A well-written and -researched history of the British Air Transport Auxiliary program of WWII and the 25 American women who flew for it. Among the most experienced and highly-regarded American women pilots of the 1930s and 40s, these women were recruited by the British to join fellow women aviators from allied nations to ferry fighters and bombers from British factories to front-line RAF bases. The women, like their male counterparts, were a diverse group. All were good at their craft (though there were plenty of accidents), though some, off-duty, lived on the edge, and the author pulls no punches describing their lives in wartime England.
Though presented sympathetically and honestly, with details from their on- and off-duty lives in the ATA, none of the Spitfires Becky Altman writes about quite come alive on the page. That is the only demerit I give the book.
My interest comes from my own experience and knowledge of women military pilots in the U.S. Air Force — I was a flight instructor in Air Training Command in the mid-1970s when the first small group of women pilot candidates entered training, the first women to go through flying training in the military since the WASP pilots of WWII (the woman pilots of the British ATA program, the subjects of this book, came out of the world of civil aviation). Later, as a fighter pilot myself, I was around in the 1990s when the first few women were admitted to fighters and bombers. On my blog, I’ve written a few posts about my encounters with this rare breed (even today, women make up less than 4% of the USAF fighter/bomber pilot force) and their experiences. Naturally, my interest encompasses the pioneering women who came before them; notably Becky Altman’s Spitfires of the wartime ATA program (and the later WASP program of the U.S. Army Air Corps).
No spoilers, so I won’t mention the book’s big reveal about Jacqueline Cochran. She was a force, though, and that cannot be denied. Her presence in these pages makes for a page-turning read.
The Maid (Molly the Maid #1)
by Nita Prose
— Mystery/Young Adult —
Description (from Goodreads):
Molly Gray is not like everyone else.
My review:
Found in my neighborhood little free library. The jacket blurb looked interesting so I bought it home for both of us. My wife is reading it now; I just finished it.
The jacket blurb conveyed the idea the novel would explore autism, getting into the head of a different kind of person. And indeed Mary Gray the hotel maid is such a person, but there’s nothing profound or even particularly insightful in Nita Prose’s presentation of her. Instead, Prose’s novel is kind of a My Little Reader mystery; the good guys and bad guys clearly defined, not a surprise in any development, entirely predictable, with the autistic hotel maid at the center of it. Oh wait I take it back … a small surprise is revealed in the closing chapters, by Molly’s own admission, but it isn’t relevant to the mystery and it doesn’t change anything. Still, it’s a small Easter egg … the pleasure of finding it quickly undone by the otherwise sappy happy-ever-after ending.
I was shocked to see an insert at the back written for book clubs, with “clue cards” for every character, as if readers might have a hard time figuring out who the baddies and goodies are and need to swap notes at their monthly meeting. Perhaps there are such readers … tut, tut. Note to self: if you can’t say anything nice, perhaps you shouldn’t say anything at all (as Molly’s Gran might have said).
p.s. Although The Maid is not classified as “young adult” fiction, that is how I am filing it.