Best Books in 2014

For the purposes of this blog "best" is defined as my favorites among the books I read in 2014:

Fiction

The Man Who Loved Dogs, Leonardo Padura (2009, translation 2014)

Cuban writer Leonardo Padura recreates the assassination of Leon Trotsky with a deft tale of intrigue set in the context of Joseph Stalin’s quest for absolute power in the Soviet Union and the pre-war climate of the 1930’s.  Leon Trotsky’s exile is a well-told story which Padura leavens with some introspection and regrets on Trotsky’s part.  Alongside Trotsky’s odyssey, the reader is introduced to Ramon Mercader, a Spanish Republican plucked from the defeat of the his cause by the KGB and trained as an assassin.  All of this is narrated by a Cuban writer who encounters a mysterious man and his two Russian Wolfhounds at a beach.  As the mysterious man confides in him, the narrator begins to suspect that he is talking to the assassin himself.  Each subplot brings its own set of contradictions, erratic behavior and, ultimately, understanding.   The early chapters read much like a history of the era but as each subplot evolves the reader is drawn into the details of each man’s thoughts and actions.  Although Trotsky’s assassination is a foregone conclusion, Padura invests the story with mystery and suspense.

The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion, Fanny Flagg (2013)

A tale well-told about discovery and history.  Sarah Jane Poole, “Sookie” to everyone in Point Clear, Alabama, approaches her 60^th birthday to learn that she is an adopted child.  Her birth certificate showing the woman Sookie has known all her life as mother is a forgery.  Her real birth certificate lists a Polish mother and unknown father.  The discovery changes her life.  How Sookie’s life changes gradually reveals itself along with the story of Fritzi Jurdabralinski, the name listed on the birth certificate as mother.  Fanny Flagg tells the story in a lively, often funny narrative that captures the feel of small-town South and tells the story of the remarkable women who flew military aircraft during WWII.

 
 Non-Fiction

The Heart of Everything That Is:  the Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend, Bob Drury & Tom Clavin (2013)

Excellent history of the Indian leader Red Cloud, whose multi-year campaign against white expansion forced the US government to sue for peace.  Authors Drury and Clavin are clearly sympathetic to the Indian point-of-view; in their telling, Red Cloud’s resistance makes perfect sense.  What makes the story compelling is the detail about Indian culture and strategy.  Red Cloud’s achievement was unifying fractious and independent Sioux bands in a strategic campaign against the US Army whose institutional racism did not credit Indians with strategic ability.  This history debunks the image created in film and TV of the cavalry coming to the rescue.  Not only were the troops not cavalry—they were mounted infantry—but their horses were often worn-out, ammunition in short supply, and officers prone to fall for the bait in one of Red Cloud’s ambushes.  Add the Sioux’s mobility and knowledge of the terrain and you have the bluecoats at a disadvantage.  The authors don’t spare the Army leadership, a collection of officers whose ambition and prejudices often worked to Red Cloud’s advantage.

The Sleepwalkers:  How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark (2012)

A detailed, intricate history of the interests, intrigues, rivalries that led the great powers of Europe to create a series of alliances with, as Christopher Clark writes, “a trigger set in the most volatile region of Europe.”  The story  is long and involved—562 pages of text, 100 pages of notes—but Clark carefully and systematically lays out all of the threads to present a comprehensive history of how that trigger exploded with an assassination in Sarajevo in 1914. 

 

Jesus Stories

My reading choices in the past few months have focused on 1st century Palestine. It all started when a friend recommended Christopher Moore's Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. It's fiction and a clever work of imagination but Moore did some decent research to serve as the basis of his narrative.  He has a pretty blank slate work with since not much is known about Jesus Christ until about age 30.  Apparently some tradition suggests that Christ traveled east in his earlier years, an idea that Moore expands with no small amount of humor.  I read Moore's A Dirty Job years ago and found it wildly inventive and funny.  Moore does a good job with the Jesus story.  I give it as much credence as the Bible and it's WAY more readable.

About the same time I was reading Lamb I found  A Jew Among Romans: the Life and Legacy of Flavius Josephus by Frederic Raphael at the library.  I vaguely recognized the name from a classified add that often appeared in The Nation claiming to offer proof (for only $1 and a self addressed-self stamped envelop) that Jesus Christ was an invention of Flavius Josephus.  I figured I might learn what that proof was.  What I learned was that Palestine was was awash with Jewish nationalism, factionalism, messianism and terrorism in pursuit of the promised Kingdom of Israel in the years before and after Jesus of Nazareth.  I learned that in 66 CE (most any time, actually since they often profited from the Roman occupation) wealthy and educated Jews, including Josephus, thought that rebelling against the Romans was very ill-advised.  I learned, too, that many other Jews would kill anyone who questioned the rebellion.

As governor of a city besieged by the Romans and defended by zealots, Josephus was was a dead man no matter what he did.  What he did was manage to survive by making himself useful to the victorious Roman general Vespasian.  Josephus ended up in Rome as historian when Vespasian became emperor.  Josephus wrote history that flattered his patron but it serves as a valuable chronicle of 1st century events.  A Jew Among Romans taught me some history I did not know and added context to the familiar history and myth I do know.  I never learned if Josephus invented Jesus Christ.

Well before reading either of these books I had a request in at the library for Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Resa Aslan.  It drew attention when it came out a few months ago; from  Fox News wingnuts coming unglued about a Muslim writing about Jesus to and religious scholars/authorities who question Aslan's research.   Whatever it's quality and interpretation, Aslan's research is extensive--53 pages of notes and 10 page bibliography.  Aslan examines the historical record, which excludes the Gospels and other New Testament accounts written after the fact with a point of view, to place Jesus of Nazareth in the messianic and revolutionary traditions of 1st century Palestine and questions whether Jesus intended his message for non-Jews.  That said, Aslan acknowledges that Jesus of Nazareth is the only one of the several messiahs of his era who is remembered and the religions created in his name have flourished, even if the remembered Jesus is not the actual Jesus.

 Reading Zealot immediately after A Jew Among Romans added to Zealot's credibility.  Both relate the same events without contradiction.  Zealot focuses more narrowly on Palestine and events in Jesus's life but offers a rich background of the era's politics and culture.  A Jew Among Romans is more broadly focused, as Josephus life events took place on a larger stage than Jesus.  The two books reinforced my belief that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure.  I don't need him to be anything more than that. Another version of the Jesus story is "The Ballad of Mary Magdalen".  Mary figures prominently in Lamb, the most readable and fun of the three works.  Seems only right to end with her story.



"The Ballad of Mary Magdalen" is written by Richard Shindell.  It's one of many fine selections on "Cry, Cry, Cry"  by Shindel, Dar Williams and Lucy Kaplansky.

Best Books of 2013

Ever so timely.  I found this draft that I thought went out.  Here it is now.

From the book section of this blog, my choices for best books of 2013.  The only criteria I use are that I read the book in 2013--most were published in previous years--and that I remember it without looking back at my notes.

Of the fiction  I read in 2013 two novels stand out: Stalin's Barber by Paul Levin and The Taliban Cricket Club by Timeri N. Marari.  Both are tales of cleverness and chance in perilous times and places told with reasonable accuracy and imagination.  Stalin's Barber is set in the 1930's Soviet Union I know from studying Russian history in college.  Paul Levin recreates the paranoia and tension that underlay Stalin's Kremlin, a dark tale that is not at all improbable.  The Taliban Cricket Club is from more recent history and, while the dire conditions under Taliban rule that are the the setting are all too real, the plot is a real stretch.  The plot is clever, though and to Marari's credit, he makes it seem possible with a well-crafted conclusion.  Both books were published in 2012.

Sherman Alexie's short story collection, Blasphemy, is also worth noting.  The stories are fiction but the voice always sounds autobiographical.  Alexie writes with the mordant humor of a Native American who lives in two cultures and sees the fallacies and foibles of both.  At times laugh-out-loud funny, other times teeth-gritting real, Blasphemy demonstrates Alexie's mastery of the short story form.

For non-fiction:  The Man Called Brown Condor: the Forgotten History of an African American Fighter Pilot by Thomas E. Simmons (2013), A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II by Anne Noggle, and At the Dark End of the Street:  Black Women, Rape and Resistance--a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McClure (2010).  The first two were notable for me because I was entirely unaware of the history.   A Dance With Death is an oral history told by the women who served as fighter and bomber pilots, navigators, armorers and mechanics in Soviet Air Forces.  If you ever need proof that Russians are tough, these histories will serve well.  The Man Called Brown Condor tells the story of one of the first African American aviators, John Robinson, a man who in the face of 1920'sracism and exclusion. learned how to build, fly and maintain airplanes.  He became an advocate for African-Americans in aviation and ended up in flying for Ethiopia in the face of the 1935 Italian Invasion for which he became a celebrity in the US.  He returned to Ethiopia to create that nation's air force in 1944 and later Ethiopia's national airline.  He died in a plane crash flying medicine in an emergency.

At the Dark End of the Street broadens my understanding of history that I know.  Well before African-Americans began to demand economic and civil rights, their women demanded the right to be safe from assault and rape.  Beginning in the 1940's, those efforts established the organizing strategies and legal arguments that became the groundwork the broader movement that emerged in the following decades.  Along with a 2008 work, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, At the Dark End of the Street adds new dimensions to an important history that is usually told only superficially.

Book Review: Truth in Advertising

Fin Dolan is a bright advertising copywriter in New York who is sufficiently uncertain about himself that he canceled his wedding on short notice.  “I was more in love with the idea of being in love than actually in love,” he says.  Two days before Christmas his client— a maker of disposable diapers—informs his agency that it has developed the first “fully biodegradable disposable diaper that can be flushed down a toilet instead of piling up in landfills.”   The client wants to announce this amazing breakthrough in a high-profile Super Bowl ad in a mere six weeks.  Along with the insanity and pressure of that assignment, which ultimately requires some qualification of “fully biodegradable” and “flushed”, Dolan also confronts his uncertain feelings about life and others, especially his estranged father whose violent behavior led him to abandon his family and contributed to his mother’s suicide.  His two brothers and a sister are distant and, like Fin, hostile to the family memory and maybe more so.   

Despite the ominous backstory, author John Kenney offers a gentle, believable, sometimes absurd story about life in the New York City advertising world which he knows well from his own copywriting career.  The book includes much detail of the business--from brainstorming, to production, to post-production--all of which adds authority and provides generous opportunity for to create supporting characters and scenes.  Kenney fills the required positions with lively personalities and engaging subplots that move the story along at a good pace.  He tells the story with humor—at times laugh-out-loud funny—and understanding.  Fin Dolan is a real human being with all the flaws of the human condition and then some.  Truth in Advertising is one man’s story but Dolan's story has lots of interesting company and compelling circumstances along the way. 

Truth in Advertising by John Kenney