Peachy Reads

It is always rewarding to revisit Bernie Gunther, the independent-minded cynical Berlin police detective who tries to pursue his profession and stay alive in a dangerous world where the rules of justice and civil order have been turned upside down. In this installment he takes instructions from Joseph Goebbels who has taken a shine to a film starlet who goes by the name of Dalia Dresner.  Gunther's task is to track down Dresner's father in Croatia, a land where a barbaric internecine conflict is taking place that in some regards rivals the brutalities of the Nazi killing machine.  Gunther's wanderings also take him to Switzerland, which in contrast to the Balkans seems to represent an oasis of tranquility and a glimpse of what life used to be like in prewar Europe. The characters are wonderfully drawn and the plot gripping.  There is an unforgettable scene where Gunther turns the tables on two Gestapo agents in a fiery defense, and a clever strategy involving a testy

I recently saw the Amazon series based on this 1962 novel and was taken by it.  It’s  set in 1962 in an America that is partitioned between the victors of World War II-- the Japanese and the Germans. There were some plot twists and scenes from the television series that I thought needed a bit more explication, so I decided to read the novel and see if it shed additional insight. Well, it didn’t.  The novel was the inspiration for the dramatic series, but other than the historical premise and some of the characters, the book and the television production diverge significantly. That’s not to say that the book isn’t good.  It’s just different.  I like alternate histories of World War II and this one is a good one. Readalikes:   Fatherland by Robert Harris, The Afrika Reich by Guy Saville

The summer of 1927 was a momentous one in America.  It was a year that saw the United States on the cusp of greatness.  Charles Lindbergh’s historic trans Atlantic flight helped to make the US the undisputed leader in aviation (whereas previously it was just trying to play catch-up with Europe).  Movie palaces were being built with a luxury to rival Versailles, newspapers boasted record subscriptions, but radio was quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with, and the earliest primitive experiments with television were being conducted.  Babe Ruth was creating a legend in the sports world, and Al Capone was becoming a legend of a different kind in prohibition-era crime-fueled Chicago.  Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in a controversial case, highlighting anarchist and anti-immigrant tendencies in the country at large.  Henry Ford abruptly ceased production of the Model T without having another replacement model in production, almost bankrupting the Ford Motor Company with this ill-

Whatever suspense the David Lagercrantz book I read lacked, this one more than made up for.   But that’s what Dan Brown has always exceled at – the breathless day and night chase where no one seems to need to sleep very much, eat, or use the restroom, a sort of mash-up of the Amazing Race, the television show 24, with a dash of Rick Steves.   This time the action begins in the art city of Florence.   It’s a wonderful tour of the historic and cultural sites, and lets the reader explore secret passageways and pass through hidden doors that seem to honeycomb every building that Robert Langdon enters.   (Particularly fascinating is the Vasari corridor in Florence that snakes its way from the Pitti Palace across the Ponte Vecchio, around the Uffizi, to the Palazzo Vecchio, a relatively unknown passageway that secrets Robert across the river, one which I remember from our visits).   Anyway, Inferno takes its title from Dante’s poem and   Brown shows us all the main sights in Dante’s

In this latest installment in the UK series of police procedural meets the X-files, Peter Grant leaves the urban core of London and investigates unusual occurrences in a bucolic English countryside setting that could be straight out of a Merchant & Ivory film. Two girls are missing and while the nation’s attention is focused on the manhunt to recover them, Peter attempts to find out if their disappearance has any hallmarks of the supernatural or spirit realm.  And yes it does--there is a fairy queen and her retinue, beefy unicorns, a geriatric wizard, and an extended appearance by Beverley Brook.  This is not a series you can jump around in.  Start with the first at least before picking this one up.  It’s a bit different, but I find it surprisingly enjoyable.

The most famous names from Swedish literature since Pippi Longstocking may well be Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander.   The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the first title in the Millennium series, and while the series wasn't perfect, the characters were strong, and the books quickly became a worldwide publishing phenomenon.  Due to his untimely death several years ago, the estate of the author Stieg Larsson contracted a new writer to pen a further installment, and along with Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman , this may have been one of the most anticipated titles of 2015. Though some fans will be pleased, others will inevitably be disappointed.  I suppose I count myself among the second group. Lisbeth and Mikael seem to be on mood stabilizers and so very different from their previous incarnations as to be almost unidentifiable.  The action doesn’t really pick up until the last one hundred or so pages, and though it provides interesting insight into Lisbeth’s twin, Camilla, th

Near the Arc de Triomphe where the elegant Parisian boulevards radiate out from the traffic circle known as l'Etoile, a greasy black smoke billows out of a chimney and infiltrates the residences along the rue le Sueur.   When police are called they discover a grisly scene of mass murder inside. In the chaos of occupied Paris, a serial murderer is able to pursue a diabolical scheme of offering a path to freedom in South America.   Instead, he kills his unsuspecting victims and collects the money and valuables they planned to carry to the new world.   This is one of France’s most harrowing cases of mass murder, the story of Marcel Petiot.   Readalike:   The Devil in the White City .

The 1936 Olympics are probably best remembered by Americans for the singular accomplishment of Jesse Owens, his athletic prowess totally debunking the notion of Aryan supremacy at the “Nazi Olympics”.   The Americans also bested the Germans in the eight-man crew competition, and The Boys in the Boat tells of their quest to win gold. The backstory mainly focuses on Joe Rantz and his hard-luck upbringing as a de facto orphan in depression era Washington. Rowing was his ticket to education at the University of W, and his place on crew, though never assured and always fought for, was a path to betterment and an improved station in life.   I was really taken by his hard-knocks life and marveled at all the hardships that he overcame. The book also focuses on George Pocock, the Englishman whose skill at boat-building (known in crew as “shells”) set the standard in the 1930s. There are other characters such as Al Ulbrickson, the indomitable coach, who badgers and shepherds the boys to vic

Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life used a narrative device that played fast and loose with typical chronology.  In her latest book, which she calls a “companion” to LaL (and not a sequel), she plays a little bit with time sequencing again.  Teddy, younger brother to Life After Life ’s protagonist Ursula Todd, is the focus of her latest novel.  The narrative sometimes ricochets around like a billiard ball against bumpers, and suggests the random remembrances of an old man, events connected by touchstones that don’t always link chronologically.  Since the storyline is intentionally a bit disconnected, it keeps the reader waiting for foreshadowed events until nearly the end.  And then the ending is a bit too much like Ian McEwan’s Atonement , which I thought was unnecessary, but all in all I enjoyed the book.  Great history.  Great  characters.

My wife has a passion for polar adventures, which is odd considering she absolutely hates being cold.  Or, maybe that’s why it makes it so compelling for her—it’s like her own personal horror literature.  Anyway, we both heard the author of In the Kingdom of Ice speak last week, and not being a fan of icy journeys myself, I was nevertheless eager to read this book. The story of the USS Jeannette is history, not fiction, and although the expedition was celebrated when it occurred during America’s Gilded Age at the end of the 1800s, there are few people in 2015 who know anything about it.  At the time the crew set out on its course past the Bering Strait little was known about what lay at the northernmost extreme of the globe—it was either the stuff of fiction—Santa Claus’s abode was placed there in the 1800s, for example, or of scientific conjecture—some speculated that an ice-free sea stretched across the North Pole.  The US was beginning to test global ambitions, and the Navy und

Several conversations with friends and family members about the ultra-competitive high-stakes college admissions process that seems to have become the norm today, have often ended with the sentiment, “It’s so different than it used to be.”  The enormous emphasis on test scores, GPAs, private tutors and consultants, taking the "right" courses, padding your teenage resume with charitable and entrepreneurial experiences, US News & World Report’s rather infamous rankings-- all these things have contributed to the single-minded push to gain admission to the most elite colleges and universities.  Is it all part of our obsession with name brands?  And does it really matter in the larger context? In this book New York Times contributor Frank Bruni gives compelling evidence that suggests that students who attend off-brand state universities and “foundation” schools are oftentimes equally, if not more successful, as those who graduate from the ivies and their ilk.  Students

Hitler’s back, that’s who.  Strangely, inexplicably, Hitler reappears in modern-day Berlin, his formal uniform reeking of gasoline, seventy years after his supposed death.  The circumstances of his reappearance are reminiscent of Rip van Winkle.  He marvels at the new technology (untested avenues for his propaganda apparatus?), the multicultural face of Berlin (was there a military alliance with Turkey?), and many other aspects of modern society in a Berlin he last saw in ruins.  He soon stumbles into a career on television.  People treat him like Sacha Baron Cohen playing Borat. Look Who's Back has become a publishing phenomenon in Germany, and has been translated for many international markets, and banned in Israel. This book is meant as pure satire and there are some amusing passages, though there are other places where the attempt at humor seems to be pushing the boundaries of good taste.   Even though the translator provides an appendix outlining key historical figures

Grace Reinhart is a couples therapist in New York City on the cusp of making the big time with a book that’s getting lots of buzz entitled  You Should Have Known .   The book is about how couples who face discord later in a marriage really should have seen it coming from the start-- the clues are always there, the fatal personality and relationship flaws obvious from the get-go, but somehow signs are ignored, until later down the line it all goes “kerflooey”.   Grace’s professional  standing, her  modest but comfortable Upper East Side apartment, son in an exclusive Manhattan private school, husband a doctor with at a prestigious hospital—it all seems so perfect and her bio should look rather nice on the jacket flap of her soon-to-be New York Times bestselling title.   But the advice she doles out to her patients and records in her book come back to haunt her—you really should have known, Grace Reinhart.  At times this novel almost reads like Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train

Mary Norris is a longtime copy editor at the esteemed New Yorker , the literary weekly that is known for its razor-sharp focus on fact-checking and punctilious attention to grammar and style.   Though Norris ruminates on many stylistic issues like the serial comma and the proper use of hyphens (yikes, sure I’ve made errors above), this book is far from another Strunk & White.  In between musings on grammar and style, Norris fills the book with interesting anecdotes about the culture and personalities behind the scenes at The New Yorker and adds some color from her Cleveland upbringing and years leading to her career in publishing.  At the end of this short book is a wonderful ode to the pencil, and a detailed description of a visit to the Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum in Logan, Ohio.  It reads almost like an essay from The New Yorker itself, which I suppose makes sense!  Must go to that museum (uh-oh, sentence fragment).

Henry and Celia are two CIA operatives who worked together at the Vienna office when a large scale hostage-taking event occurred on a passenger jet on the tarmac at the airport.  The event goes horribly wrong and there is speculation that one of the CIA operatives in the field office was feeding info to the terrorist ringleader.  Was it Celia?  Was it Henry?  They were lovers, nearly to the point of long term commitment, but then their paths abruptly diverge after the terrorist event.  When they meet up again years later, they hash out the details leading up to that awful day, in alternating chapters that offer differing perspectives on how events may have unfolded. All the Old Knives has the unusual distinction of being both a spy novel and a relationship novel, a mix that is mostly unheard of. It also distinguishes itself by being structured as an extended conversation between two people at a restaurant table a la “My Dinner with Andre”.  It's a short but sophisticated nove

Sometimes a dose of nonfiction that reads like a novel is just the reading fix I need, and Erik Larson does not disappoint.  After the Titanic, the sinking of the Lusitania is probably the most catastrophic civilian maritime disaster of the 20th century, and there are stories to tell from both ends of the torpedo.  Larson profiles some of the passengers, the crew of the German submarine that sank the ship, provides insight into the ongoing war and the United States’ reluctance to become involved, the secret intelligence gathering efforts of the Brits, and even shines a light into Woodrow Wilson’s romantic persona as he courts a woman he falls head over heels in love with after the death of his first wife.  Of course the tragic end of the luxury liner is the apex of the narrative.  The ship sank in 18 minutes and the loss of life was catastrophic.  A fascinating story, well told.

Rachel is a troubled soul who lost her husband and her job due to her uncontrolled drinking.  Now she spends her days in a charade—travelling back and forth by rail to the city (thus the title) in the pretense of commuting to the job she no longer holds, whiling away the days in public libraries, and making frequent stops at the off-license.  From the train she spies on a Victorian terrace home in her old neighborhood that backs up to the rail line and imagines a fantasy existence for the couple living there, perhaps it’s the fantasy she never was able to experience herself.  The night that the woman from her fantasy musings disappears and later turns up murdered, is a night that Rachel was nearby on a bender.  Only nebulous memories of that evening remain, but somehow she thinks they may hold important clues to an intricate web that involves her ex-husband, his new wife, the missing woman, and a mystery man.  This is the new Gone Girl by all accounts.  It has shot straight to the

Douglas is the nerdy scientist-type and displays all the stereotypes that go along with that.  Connie is a Bohemian artist-type on the rebound, and Douglas seems to be everything her last boyfriend was not.  This book charts their unlikely romance, the uneasy marriage, the dysfunctional family, and finally the inevitable but nevertheless reluctant separation.  Connie decides to inform Douglas that she’s through with their marriage just before their son is off to university and right before they’ve planned to depart en famille on a grand tour of the continent.  Against common sense, they decide to go forward with the plan, which results in predictably unpredictable consequences. I’m not sure that in real life the ill-fated grand tour would really have made it to the first hotel, but as a plot device it was pretty clever.  Perfect for the armchair traveler, there is wonderful description of some of the great art museums of Europe sandwiched in between the frequent episodes of family di

I may be a sucker for novels set in World War II, so I could not resist picking up All the Light We Cannot See .  It follows the fate of two children, one a blind Parisian girl named Marie Laure whose father works in a natural history museum as the keeper of the keys. The other child is Werner, a young orphan living with his sister in the Ruhrgebiet.  As the children mature and Hitler’s war machine grinds into gear, their paths eventually cross in the French town of St. Malo.  A third strand of the narrative is the legend of a storied diamond, the curse of which seems to shadow Marie Laure’s evacuation from Paris, and eventually brings her and Werner together. Far more compelling than the fate of the diamond is the fascinating story of these two war children and the history that swirls around them. This was one of those books that will probably rate as an all-time favorite of mine.  It was just so good from start to finish. Similar: Suite Francaise, Sarah’s Key, Atonement

The brazen theft of a number of masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 is the factual context for this complex yet enjoyable thriller.  Claire Roth is a talented artist who has had a checkered history that has more or less blackballed her in the art world, closing doors to competitions and gallery exhibitions, and stalling her career.  She makes ends meet by recreating copies of masterpieces for an internet firm called Reproduction.com. A Faustian bargain with a Back Bay gallery owner capitalizes on Claire’s talents as a forger to copy a stolen masterpiece from the Gardner museum—her task is to recreate a Degas from one of the paintings taken in 1990—or is it even an original Degas?  Her talents as both an artist and a researcher are undisputed and when her forged copy is accepted as the recovered original, things start to get really interesting. I would never have thought that this book on art forgery would be the page-turner it was!  I liked t

Who hasn’t heard the story of Marco Polo bringing pasta to Italy from China?  Well, apparently it’s a myth, thought up by a pasta company in early twentieth century America to popularize pasta in American kitchens.  If not personally delivered by Marco Polo, pasta was nonetheless likely brought to Italy by merchants on the Silk Road, an important trading route that stretched from China to the Mediterranean.  The author sets out to travel the entire length of the route from the heartland of the Chinese noodle to the Italian province where ragu is expertly paired with a noodle like tagliatelle or pappardelle (and never spaghetti!).  She investigates the noodly aspects of the current cuisine of each country she visits along the way, some of which do not seem to have maintained even a vestige of the versatile noodle.  From western China, across a couple of the former Soviet republics ending in -stan, Iran, Turkey, and finally Italy, Lin-Liu traces the historic route that pasta re

A patron recommended this title to me the other day in the library and I thought it sounded really interesting.   After having gone through the agony and the ecstasy of the college admissions process last year with our one and only child, I am still tuned in to the admissions cycle and have even been lurking in online college admissions forums to shadow students who are agonizing over their choices for college and university, and ultimately the choices that the college and universities make when considering their apps.   It was just such a monumental process that it’s hard to turn it off.   Maybe this book will serve as part of my therapy. I also saw the movie based on Admission starring Tina Fey, and while it was billed as a comedy (which the book most certainly is not), it was only mildly entertaining.   The book, as frequently is the case, is not like the movie.   The author provides wonderful insight into the highly competitive admissions process and gives it a human face in t