Historical Fiction – War Stories . . . reviewed by Suzanne

The Piano Teacher
by Janice Y.K. Lee
This is a stylistically conventional story, but very well told, about British and Chinese people in Hong Kong during WWII and about how they survive (or not) during the Japanese occupation. The story flips back and forth from the wartime setting to 1952 and ‘53 and the survivors of the war. Stories begin to be told about who did what during the war and accusations of collaboration rear their ugly heads. Several characters bridge both stories; the main one is Will Truelove (hmmm!), who after the war works as a chauffeur for Victor and Melody Chen. Before the war he was in love with Trudy Liang, a Eurasian woman who refused to evacuate before the Japanese arrived, and who has a tough time of it during the war. There's also a subplot about art treasures claimed by the Chinese and the British that were hidden during the war and that the Japanese command wanted to get their hands on. The novel reminds me of those '50s movies about doomed lovers in wartime that my mother used to love to watch and cry over. Janice Y.K. Lee's website.

Tallgrass by Sandra Dallas
Rennie Stroud is 14 and living in Ellis, Colorado, when the Japanese arrive. They're actually Japanese-Americans, but because they're deemed a "security risk" they are forced to live at the camp built for them in nearby Tallgrass. The Strouds are a close-knit, loving family and refuse to participate in the racism and hatred of their neighbors. Mr. Stroud hires some of the young men from the camp to harvest beets, a move that angers many of the townspeople. This is a heartwarming book about decent folks who do the right thing.


Life Class by Pat Barker
Pat Barker is the author of the Regeneration trilogy, which has become a modern classic about WWI. She returns to the Great War in this heartbreaking story (is there any story about WWI that is not heartbreaking?) about a group of young art students in London. Their hopeful lives are ripped apart by the war. Read the New York Times review.

Recommendation from Julie

The Small Boat of Great Sorrows by Dan Fesperman
When an exiled policeman from Sarajevo is called in to work with the International War Crimes Tribunal to find an ex-Nazi collaborator he finds himself drawn into a world of espionage, intrigue and family secrets in postwar Bosnia and post-cold war Europe. Exciting! Dan Fesperman's Website

Mysteries: Noir, Historical and Detective. . . reviewed by Julie

South of Hell by P.J. Parrish
This is my second Louis Kincaid novel and I enjoyed this one as much as the first. I love the way the author has parallel plots going on with different characters at the same time. This was a quick, easy and fun read.
P.J. Parrish's Website





The Color of Blood by Declan Hughes
This took me awhile to get into it but once I did I was hooked. The plot was exciting and that is what kept you going. Ed Loy is an interesting detective but I didn't really learn much about him. The Irish Catholic elements I found very interesting.





The Barbarous Coast by Ross MacDonald
I love Ross MacDonald—he's a classic noir writer in the style of Raymond Chandler. He is great at providing a sense of moral decay in L.A. and always has a misguided, troubled daughter to rescue.






A Paragon of Virtue by Christian Von Ditfurth
As members of a wealthy real estate family in Hamburg, Germany are murdered, the police are led to believe that the motive can be found in the past—during the Nazi regime. Stachelmann, a history professor who specializes in Nazi Germany becomes involved and through both research and footwork solves the crime. This is the first of a series and was absolutely fascinating.

Expand Your World, Read International Literature . . . from Suzanne

 

A friend came into the library recently and asked me for book recommendations. She’s a former language teacher, has traveled widely, and particularly likes books with foreign settings. The first books that came to mind were some of my stand-by favorites. These included:

• The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble, set in England, plus in the course of the novel the narrator takes some friends on a trip to Greece, I believe.
  
• Heat Wave by Penelope Lively, set in the English countryside.
  
• Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, set in Norway.
  
• The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga, set in Florence, Italy.
  

Since then I’ve been making a list of other books to recommend to her and other readers who like to travel through books, and specifically about books translated from other languages. Two of them are:

• Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Spain, Barcelona specifically)
  
• Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier

Thoughts on International Literature

The most dramatic change in fiction publishing over the past 5 years, in my opinion, is the proliferation of contemporary fiction titles from abroad that are translated into English. I’ve read in various journals, including Publisher’s Weekly, about the challenges faced by foreign publishers because of the expense of translations, with no assurance that books that have been best sellers in Europe are going to make it big in the U.S. market. In fact, two books whose U.S. publication I anticipated for a long time, both blockbusters in Europe, have not had huge sales here. These are:

• Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefonso Falcones de Sierra (Spain). This book is an 811-page saga of a Catalan family whose story is told in the context of the building of the Church of Santa Maria in Barcelona over an 80-year period. It’s long and rambling, and not as melodramatic as Ken Follett’s medieval soap operas, but better, if you have the patience.
  
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. I read this book last month, and it immediately became one of my favorite novels of the year. Rather than write a review, I’ll put you on to Michael Dirda’s Review, which sums up the loveliness of this book.

For all of you who, like me, love to “expand your borders” through books I have some recommendations and some websites. You’ll notice that a lot of these are by French authors, and that’s because I’m an ardent Francophile.

• Nada by Carmen Laforet (Spain)
  
• The Theory of Clouds by Stephane Audeguy (France)
  
• The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al Aswany (Egypt)
  
• The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier (France)
  
• Hotel Crystal by Olivier Rolin (France)
  
• The Waitress was New by Dominique Fabre (France)
  
• The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante (Italy)
  

Websites with Book News and Reviews

Two excellent websites for information about literature in translation, literary prizes, essays and stories are:

Words Without Borders
Man Asian Prize

I found a great list of translated books nominated for the “Best Translated Book 2008” award from Three Percent, a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester.

Three Percent

Thrillers Again . . . reviewed by Suzanne

The Black Tower by Louis Bayard
The only son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the guillotined king and queen of France, was locked in the Temple Prison where he languished for years, an innocent victim of the revolutionaries' hatred of the French monarchy. History tells us he died there . . . or did he? In this historical thriller, Dr. Hector Carpentier is contacted by the great Vidocq, former convict, police spy and "scourge of criminals". Carpentier's name and address were found on the body ("Never let your name be found in a dead man's trousers.") of a murder victim. The story is told by Hector and through the entries in his late father, Dr. Hector Carpentier's, journal. The older physician recounts how he treated a young patient in the Temple Prison when Hector Jr. was just a child. The tone is witty, and there is just the right amount of pathos in the appropriate places. The characters travel around 19th century Paris, which is dirty, dangerous and rat-infested, not the City of Light it is today. Great fun and a book with heart!
Louis Bayard's Web Site


The Legal Limit by Martin Clark
Mason and Gates Hunt are brothers. While Mason went to law school, married and went on to a successful law career, Gates drank too much, did drugs and was eventually arrested and convicted for selling them. Instead of taking a plea, Gates insisted on going to trial, where he lied on the stand. Even after years in prison, he continues to cast blame, not on himself, but on his brother, who he insists could "pull strings" and shorten his sentence if he tried. Flash back to their youth, while Mason was in law school and long before Gates's conviction, when an event occurred that Mason thinks is long behind them. One night, during a confrontation with a rival over a woman, a drunken Gates killed a man. It was senseless and indefensible act of brutality. Mason helped his brother cover up the crime, and neither of them has mentioned it since that night. Now it comes back to threaten Mason. This is a top-notch legal thriller. I recommend it for fans of James Lee Burke.
Martin Clark's Web Site


The Last Patriot by Brad Thor
"At the end of the day, Harvath always did the right thing." In spite of his bravery and dedication, Scott Harvath, the hero of Thor's series, lacks the humor of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and the sex appeal of Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon. The attempt to create a love life for Harvath is not convincing. He's just too serious to have fun! I’m convinced Scott would rather sleep with his gun. The books are competently written, and this one has an interesting story that hinges on a discovery about the Koran made by Thomas Jefferson. The good guys (Harvath & Co.) are trying to find an unknown document that will shed a new light on Islam, and the bad guys (Islamic extremists) are trying to find it and destroy it. I liked that this book had less graphic violence than some of the other books in the series. And it has a satisfying twist at the end. Recommended for thriller fans.
Brad Thor's Web Site


Le Crime by Peter Steiner
I picked up a copy of this book in my local independent bookstore because it's a thriller and it's set in France. The protagonist is a former CIA operative who left the agency in disgrace years previously. He also left his wife and children. When the book opens, he's living in a small town in France. One morning, sitting on his patio eating his croissant, he sees a body in his front yard. He interprets this as a warning that he is targeted for assassination. I liked that the narrator describes himself as an "old man" and contemplates his aging and sagging body in unflattering terms. There's a flashback to a pilgrimage he took through France, which is how he found the village he lives in. The plotline is thin, the reason he's being pursued by bad guys is - if I understood it correctly - ridiculous, and there are some details about other murders that were not cleared up, unless I missed something. Still and all, I was drawn to the narrator and his French comrades-in-arms, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and I'll pick up the sequel, "L'Assassin" when I get a chance.

Reviewed by Suzanne

Favorites of the Library’s Nonfiction Book Group

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath told of the Okies who fled the Dust Bowl. Timothy Egan recounts the stories of those who stuck out the hard times, refusing to leave their land. He begins with the history of the settlement of an area one explorer called “a desolate waste of uninhabited solitude.” Real estate speculators enticed settlers to fictitious towns. Settlers came to this area called No Man’s Land for lack of a better place to live, because they had hope and because they believed the soil could never be used up. A combination of natural and man-made disasters - hailstorms, plagues of locusts, severe cold and heat, and worst of all the “moving earth”, the dust storms that blackened the sky—made their lives a day-to-day struggle.


Supercapitalism by Robert Reich
“Of all the nations of the world, America is assumed to best exemplify the idea that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand,” Reich says in the introduction. He also believes that rampant free-market capitalism has become bloated and has weakened our democratic system. Why do consumers expect corporations to be socially responsible, Reich asks, when they purchase the cheapest goods, regardless of where or under what conditions they were produced? Corporations do not exist to be socially responsible; they are in business to increase stockholder profits. Reich’s suggestions for strengthening democracy include the elimination of the corporate income tax and removing corporate cash from politics.
Robert Reich's Blog


Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan
In 1972, traveling to China was “like going to the moon.” President Nixon’s decision to go to China posed several risks. Conservative Republicans opposed any diplomatic overtures by Americans to that steadfastly Communist country. Furthermore, Nixon would be humiliated if Mao refused to meet with him. Kissinger was dispatched on a secret advance trip, which even the State Department did not know about, to appraise the receptiveness of the Chinese. This is a fascinating look behind the scenes at the banquets, the competing egos of the Chinese and American officials, and the wrangling over the wording of the final joint communiqué.

Reviewed by Suzanne

Good Books for Nonfiction Book Discussion Groups —Suzanne

Playing the Enemy by John Carlin
I've admired Nelson Mandela for a long time. Without his leadership, South Africa's transition to majority rule would probably have been a lot more violent than it was. This book cemented my admiration for the man—and taught me a bit about rugby, which is like American football but without the protective equipment. I watched a YouTube video of the 1995 World Cup match and one of the Springbok players singing the South African national anthem. This is a truly inspiring book. It’s also timely, since Barack Obama has said he wants to be president of the entire US and bring people together. If you think this is an unrealistic hope, read Carlin’s account of what Mandela did for his country. Obama would do well to take some lessons from Mandela, who consistently made the effort to learn about his political opponents, to get inside their heads and hearts, and to appeal to the best in them.

The Springboks, South Africa’s rugby team, were banned from international competition as a result of worldwide condemnation of the country’s apartheid regime. Because the team members were predominantly white Afrikaners, the team was a recognizable and hated symbol of apartheid to blacks. Nelson Mandela, president of the African National Congress, whose efforts were instrumental in ending apartheid, represented everything white South Africans feared. After majority rule was instituted and Mandela became the country’s first black president they worried that their rights would be curtailed. Carlin tells the surprising and moving story of how Mandela and the Springboks players united to bring all South Africans together through sports.

I plan to use this book in my nonfiction book group. Carlin provides enough background about South African history and about Mandela’s life to make the story comprehensible. The book should launch a good discussion about political and moral leadership.

Reviewed by Suzanne