Tag Archives: Non-Fiction

George F. Kennan: An American Life

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by John Lewis Gaddis, 2010, Penguin Books

This book was on my dad’s Kindle which I inherited after he passed away.  Dad always had an interest in George Kennan’s career and had read many of his books.  Since I already had the book, I decided I should read it.

The biography was fairly well-written but it was a bit repetitious at times, continually returning to the same points the author was emphasizing.

What I didn’t realize prior to reading this book was how strange an individual Kennan was.  As an employee of the State Department, he knew more about the Soviet Russians than probably any other American.  He was able to articulate a foreign policy for the U.S. toward the Soviet Union that served us very well in the Cold War.  On the other hand, there were several instances when his tunnel vision caused him to get things totally wrong.  His personal issues, which included depression, marital problems, poor health, and an insatiable desire for recognition, caused  him quite a few problems, both in his life and his career.  Despite this, he managed to live to a ripe old age of 95 before he died.  On the whole, his contributions to U.S. foreign policy were substantial.3 1/2 stars

An Innocent Man, Murder and Injustice in a Small Town

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by John Grisham, 2006, Audible Audio Edition, narrated by Craig Wasson, 2006

I listened to this book on CD driving down to Florida from Rhode Island this year.  I didn’t pay much attention to it when I checked it out from the Narragansett Library, so when I put it on, I thought it was fiction.  I went through the first one or two CDs before I finally figured out that Grisham had written this non-fiction account of a trial in Oklahoma. Until that time I was thinking that the book had way too much detail to be an enjoyable.

The book was interesting, but Grisham seems a bit too emotionally involved to give an unbiased account of what happened.  The individual who was falsely convicted had some deep character flaws which made it somewhat difficult  for me to totally sympathize with him.  Grisham does, however, show how the justice system can miscarry to convict an innocent individual, especially in a case where some law enforcement officers are corrupted with drug dealings.  I wish that Grisham had delved into the police corruption angle a bit more as he only touched on that aspect. The focus of the book seemed to be more on the impact of the wrong conviction on the individual rather than the underlying causes of it and this made the narrative a bit repetitive.2 1/2 stars

Armies of the Night

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by Norman Mailer, 1968, The New American Library

I picked this book up and decided to try it again as I had tried to read it back in 1968 in college when I belonged to a book club.  I found a bookmark at page 42 so I assume that was as far as I got.

I think now that I understand why I didn’t get any further.  Although Mailer seems to have a pretty good grasp on the issues and emotions of the time, his writing is pretty disjointed.  The premise of the book is that he is writing a novel about what a character (Mailer, himself) went through during the march on the Pentagon in 1967 while a portion of the book is devoted to the history of the march and, as such, is detached from any specific character.  Mailer is in the unusual position of being a conservative radical when it came to his views on the war which gives him the enviable position of being able to observe both the crucial elements of the times as well as its absurdities.

The main problem with the book is Mailer’s writing.  He can spin a pretty good narrative for a while and then he gets all tied up in a sentence that goes on and on without any specific direction.  He definitely has a mind of an intellectual and it’s almost as if he wants to prove it every so often.  He is at times profound and at other times his message gets all mushed up in the verbiage.

At any rate, I found it interesting to go back and revisit the times which were some of the most trying this nation has ever endured.  Unfortunately, having observed the recent Iraq war and its results, it appears that a lot of the lessons we should have learned from the Vietnam War were lost.

 

In the Garden of Beasts, Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

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by Erik Larson, 2011, Broadway Paperbacks, New York

This is a fascinating book, well-written and extremely well-researched.  I was amazed at how well the author could reconstruct events that occurred so many years ago.  I couldn’t help compare his work to The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan which I had recently read.  In that book the author apparently had the opportunity to interview many of the participants in that particular piece of history and did a poor job of bringing those insights to his book.  In the case of Larson’s book, he did not have an opportunity to interview many of the persons involved in his book because almost all of them are deceased.  Nevertheless, he did a much better job of relating the events that occurred.

Another aspect of the book that I appreciated was that the author didn’t attempt to over-embellish the narrative.  He just describes the events and lets the reader react.  All too many times an author seems to try to pound home his or her particular views (e.g., Stacy Schiff in Cleopatra and Doris Kearns Goodwin in Team of Rivals.  I much prefer Larson’s style where he leaves it up to the reader to react and form opinions.

It is chilling to read about this period of time in history when almost an entire population of a so-called civilized county was highjacked by a ill-educated megalomaniac and his henchmen.  In current times where there are very real dangers in our own country that require extra vigilance (i.e., surveillance) by our government of individuals’ actions, it behooves us to ensure that adequate processes and protections are in place to ensure that a similar result never occurs.
four stars

The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan – A History of the End of the Cold War

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by James Mann, 2010, Penguin Books

This book was very disappointing, primarily because it was so repetitious.  There were over sixty pages devoted to objections by various individuals to Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech.  Many of the objections were repeated numerous times in the book.  Our book club selected the book for the month of May, but many participants said they didn’t bother to finish the book.

I was further disappointed when I read the acknowledgements at the end of the book.  The author interviewed numerous individuals who were involved in the events depicted in the book.  He also spent a number of months in Berlin studying.  The disappointment is that he brought so little from those interviews and studies to the book.

Did I say that there was a lot of repetition?  In case you missed that part, I have to mention that the author repeated a lot of information, much of it over and over and over again. 2.0 Stars

Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938

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by R. A. Scotti, Back Bay Books, 2004

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book.  I was expecting another fairly dry (no pun intended) description of the devastation wrought by this super storm.  Instead, I got a collection of well-written vignettes of what happened to certain individuals during the storm, along with some pretty well-researched description of the impact of the hurricane on a macro level.

The author, R. A. Scotti, is apparently also a mystery/suspense writer.  She utilizes these skills well in her telling of the stories in this book.  I am reminded of how well Ken Follett applies the skills he utilized in writing adventure stories to his more recent work (he managed to keep his readers’ interest while telling a story about building a cathedral, which should be a bit like reading about grass growing).  I think that many of the authors today who write popular fiction tend to be stuck in their groove and aren’t able to do anything different (e.g., James Patterson, et. al.).  I guess one reason is that once they start raking in the money doing what they are doing, there is little incentive to try anything new.

Anyway, I have digressed a bit.  As I have stated, I think that this book is extremely readable and interesting and my only criticism is that she may have devoted a bit too much discussion as to what happened to the school bus passengers on Jamestown Island.  Possibly, too much information here.  Other than that, I recommend this book, especially to anyone who has lived or spent any amount of time in the areas affected (which is just about all of the Northeast U.S.)four stars

Killing Lincoln

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by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, 2011, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, New York

This is an attempt to make history exciting as it gets the reader inside of the heads of the individuals involved.  It succeeds as entertainment but doesn’t add much to a story that’s already been told many times before.  If you like light reading and don’t know much about history, this is a great book for you.  Personally, as I put down the book, I felt disappointed that it didn’t provide something more.2 1/2 stars

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

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by James W. Douglass, 2010, Touchstone

I really don’t know what to say regarding this book.  Mr. Douglass has done a great deal of thinking and research on the Kennedy assassination and is convinced that the CIA orchestrated it because they felt Kennedy was moving toward disarmament and the end of the Cold War.  He frames his argument around some writings and predictions of Thomas Merton, a prominent Catholic priest and writer.

Douglass presents a great deal of information that he attempts to tie together as proof of his theory.  I do not profess to be very knowledgeable about the assassination or the subsequent investigations, so I am not able to refute his facts or theory.  I finished the book with a great deal of skepticism, however, primarily because the author was so intent on presenting facts that supported his theory.  Many of the supposed witnesses that he cites are mental cases, heroin addicts, or just other somewhat shady persons.  In addition, some of the testimony is a bit hard to believe (such as the story of a C-54 cargo plane that left Andrews Air Force base in Maryland, flew to Dallas, landed in the Trinity River basin, and picked up an alleged Oswald double after the assassination.  Another story is about an alleged plan to assassinate Kennedy in Chicago in early November.  Only the cancellation of this trip apparently saved Kennedy at that time.  The question that popped into my mind was whether the President would have been travelling in an open car on an expressway in Chicago in November?

In addition to my doubts about some of the information presented, the organization of the book was an absolute mess.  Rather than constructing the argument chronologically, the author randomly jumps around, making the entire story much harder to follow than it needed to be.  He also repeats information time after time, supposedly to prove his point.

There is a lot of information in this book that was new to me and, for that reason, it was worthwhile.  It would have been a much better book if it had been written from a more objective point of view and if it had been organized much better.2 1/2 stars

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

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by Barry Estabrook, 2012, Andrew McMeel Publishing

Barry Estabrook does a good job of outlining what has happened to the tomato in Florida over the last few decades.  It was particularly interesting because we live so close to the heart of Tomatoland and I didn’t have a lot of the information that the author provided.

The books seems divided into two separate themes: first, the conditions under which the workers live and work and, second, how the tomato evolved into a hard, tasteless fruit and the current efforts to fix the problem.  The author does a pretty good job with each of these topics, but it makes the book a little disjointed.

There was a lot of information in this book that I didn’t know and I found it to be extremely readable.  By the end of the book, however, I think I had had enough of tomatoes.

Note: This is the first book I have read using a Kindle Touch device. It was a pretty good experience, especially since I could make the text bigger.  I put it in landscape mode so that I could have bigger text and still have a decent number of words on a line.  It created a bit more page turning, but that was okay.  3 stars

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

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by Jared Diamond, first published in 1997 this edition has an afterword published in 2004, W.W. Norton & Company

This book was interesting for me to read, although a bit of a chore.  The work is very repetitious and sometimes downright boring.  At other times it was very interesting and the author asked and asnwered some very provocative questions, the main one being how did we get to where we are from prehistoric times.

I can’t recall a book that provided so much information in a concise manner.  On the other hand, I can’t recall a book that seemed so repetitious.  This is a strange conundrum.

The theories that the author proposes seemed, for the most part,  very logical and well stated but I finished the book with a suspicion that he provides only a part of the story and the part he provides is the part that fits in with his theories.  I was cruising along and accepting his logic until, all of a sudden, he stated that there were too many variables contributing to the spread of technology that the answer was that it was random.  After spending so much time articulating how the domestication of plants and animals occured and then outlining the origins of written language, he gets to technology and finds a whole bunch of reasons so he states it must be random!  So much for the scientific method and its application to history.

Diamond’s approach certainly has merit and holds out promise.  I just don’t think he has accounted for all the proximinate and ultimate causes of how we got to where we are.  Another book I read, The Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, deliniates some of the environmental factors that contribute to success.  That book seems to drill down into the factors that cause sudden technological advances to a much better extent than Guns, Germs and Steel.

In the end, I am glad that I slogged through this as it caused me to think a lot on human develoopment and gave me a lot of information I didn’t know before.  I don’t feel, however, that the ques

2 1/2 stars