December Booknotes

 

“While we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

I went “insane” this month and read only novels!

 

Fiction: Mystery, Crime

BLACK BEACONS MURDER SERIES (also known as DCI Evan Warlow) by Rhys Dylan

I started reading this series in August. By September, I exhausted the titles in the public library’s collection and then had to purchase the rest of the series. This month I read books 11 through 14.  

In each successive book, the characters have retained their likeability and sense of humor. Even though the books contain a lot of Welsh language and place names, most phrases are translated. Plus, the settings, traditions, and landscapes in rural Wales also add an interesting, somewhat “exotic” atmosphere.

#11 The Light Remains - When a revered sports legend falls victim to a brutal home invasion, a nation is shaken to its core. Outrage swells and the press and powers that be demand answers.

#12 A Matter of Evidence - A man, recently released from prison after a 20-year wrongful conviction, is discovered dead, igniting a storm of doubt and suspicion. As long-buried secrets claw their way to the surface, the line between truth and deception blurs.

#13 The Last Throw - DCI Evan Warlow confronts what initially appears to be a straightforward case, only to find himself ensnared in a web of deceit. And when a routine press assignment also exposes a team member to a malevolent scheme, chaos begins to spiral.

#14 Dragon’s Breath - A man wanders lost on a freezing night in the Black mountains of Wales. Despite the valiant efforts of the rescue services, he does not survive. Is this an accident? Or murder?

This series has a good balance of forensic evidence, basic police work, and intuition. Each book can stand alone but the characters’ personalities are enriched from one book to the next, just as members of professional “teams” do over the course of their working lives. As soon as book #15 is published, I will order it – I can’t wait!

 

Audiobook Fiction: Mystery, Crime

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

*NOTE: I listened (free with my public library card) to this book on the Libby app.

Don’t go into this expecting a straightforward mystery. It has a farcical feel to it as well as unexplained motives, and things that must have been happening behind the scenes that I wasn’t quite sure of…

A diverse group is gathered at Burton Makepeace, a crumbling manor house, for a murder mystery weekend. We are introduced to each carefully crafted character one at a time and they will eventually be trapped together in the manor house. My favorite was Lady Milton. She is hilarious, I chuckled every time I read her chapters. However, there are a few characters who are less funny - the vicar who's lost his faith and his ability to speak, and the veteran who's lost his leg and his interest in life.

The protagonist, a private detective, Jackson Brodie, is investigating the theft of a renaissance painting from the home of a recently deceased woman. During that investigation, he discovers similar thefts have occurred previously. In each case, the housekeeper/caregiver was the primary suspect but neither the woman nor the art was ever found. Several years ago, Lady Milton was also a victim. She suffered the loss of her last remaining painting of any value, a Turner. The housekeeper, Sophie, who disappeared the same night, is suspected of stealing it. Oh, and a convicted murderer is on the run on the moors around Burton Makepeace. Somehow this all comes together.

“God Almighty, Jackson thought. Neither of them could open their mouths without a cliché falling out.”

It’s a good thing there’s so much humor, because Atkinson takes her time setting up the premise of this book. The plot isn’t nearly as strong as the humor and characters. But, boy, did I enjoy listening to this book! The audiobook reader, Jason Isaacs, was fantastic!

 

Fiction: Short Stories

Float Up, Sing Down by Laird Hunt

I read Zorrie by the same author, so I decided to give this collection of short stories a read. While Zorrie makes an appearance in this book, it isn’t focused on her.

Float Up, Sing Down is the story of a single day (1982) in a small-town Indiana community through a series of interrelated short stories, each focusing on a different character. There aren't many secrets in a small town where everybody has known each other since they were kids.

“God’s country. Or God’s cousin’s country anyway. Maybe God’s nephew. No need to get grandiose.”

I thoroughly enjoy the simplicity of Hunt’s writing and exploring the rich inner lives of these ordinary people. Each story and history were so different, but I loved the way they subtly wove together so you got a clear picture their relationships with one another and of their community.

Imagine if you could get inside 14 different people's heads, all on the same day, all in the same town, and how many different concurrent experiences, thoughts, feelings, and memories would occur! That's this book.

 

Fiction: Graphic Novel

Here by Richard McGuire

NOTE: There is a movie based on this graphic novel. I have not seen it yet. I want to watch it just to see how anyone was able to bring this book to the movie screen!

Here is a stunning visual experience! It takes a single spot and examines it over the course of human history. From a prehistoric forest; the hunting grounds of Native Americans; America’s colonial days; contemporary family living; and then on into the future. We see this single spot seemingly unchained from the flow of time and instead as if it is all occurring at once. McGuire shows how we are not just merely an inconsequential speck in the cosmos, but an integral part of history. Despite our differences across time, we all share the same emotional experiences and, ultimately, death. We all love, laugh, cry, and we all die, and yet time marches on.

“Life has a flair for rhyming events,” Benjamin Franklin tells his grandson – indeed it does!

 

Fiction: Science Fiction

The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff

First published in 1939, as the world was careening towards the Second World War, The Hopkins Manuscript is now considered a classic novel. Reissued in 2023 due to the popularity of the award-winning Netflix movie Don’t Look Up, it tells the story of how a small English village prepares for the end of the world.  

The foreword is written from the perspective of an academic society 1,000 years in the future commenting on the manuscript as a historical document. The remainder of the book is the narrative of Edgar Hopkins – author of The Hopkins Manuscript. He wrote about life just before, during and after a catastrophe in which the Moon collides with Earth.

When his story starts, Hopkins is an unmarried, retired teacher who breeds poultry in Hampshire. He is a middle-class, small-minded snob living a lonely life.  He looks down his nose at “the lower classes” and then rages with jealously at more successful peers. He idolizes an aristocracy that is unaware and uninterested in his existence. As a result, Edgar’s best friends are chickens.

But his life begins to change when the news comes that the moon is going to crash into the Earth. Hopkins works with his fellow villagers to prepare for the great cataclysm, and he discovers that he likes many of them.

After the great cataclysm, class boundaries and social conventions are destroyed. Hopkins then slowly begins to develop close relationships. He begins to find a fulfillment in helping others. Hopkins admits that the happiest days of his life were immediately after the great cataclysm, working within the small, self-sufficient egalitarian society of local survivors. However, as the national infrastructure recovers and a governmental hierarchy regains control of the country it appeals to the survivors to fulfill their duty “to the state.” Now the survivors’ lives become even more precarious. The great cataclysm was terrifying, but it wasn’t what destroys the western world. That lesson is even more revelatory considering the times we're in now.

“The strange thing is this. Political upstarts, fanatics devoid of all powers of reason and common sense, greedy for wealth and power, their only claim to attention a loud voice and endless cascades of words. These nasty creatures swoop down upon peaceful, hardworking communities.”

While published before World War II, this book is so prophetic of how the British coped and tried to pull together while their country was being bombed. The Hopkins Manuscript is speculative but also a timely and powerful warning from the past that captures human nature in all its complexity.

 

Also, by R. C. Sherriff but a totally different genre!

Audiobook Fiction: Drama, World War I, Classic

Journey's End by R.C. Sherriff

*NOTE: I listened to this on the Hoopla app (public library). It was produced in February 2024 by L. A. Theater Works and is 1 hour and 47 minutes long.

Set in British trenches during the First World War, this play deals with the horror and futility of trench warfare.

It’s March 1918, and in the trenches of northern France, a group of British officers, led by the war-weary Captain Stanhope, ready themselves for a major German attack while facing their worst fears.

Author, R.C. Sherriff drew on his own experiences in World War I to create the play, which premiered in 1928 starring a young Laurence Olivier.  Sherriff had trouble getting it produced because theater managers thought no one would see a play that did not have a leading lady, and no one wanted to see a play about war. However, after Journey's End’s first performance, the audience sat in stunned silence and then gave a standing ovation.  It is now considered one of the preeminent works about the horrors of war.

Journey's End is worthwhile listening. I learned about it from an excellent World War I, 3-part series, Long Shadow (BBC documentary) which is available on Amazon Prime Video.

Booknotes: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

  

“History is not there for you to like or dislike, it is there for you to learn from it. And if it offends you, even better, because then you are less likely to repeat it. History is not yours to erase or destroy.”- U.S. Army Ret. Lt. Col. Allen West.

Nonfiction: History, Politics, War

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer

If I were to recommend only one book on Nazi Germany this would be it. This worldwide bestseller has been acclaimed as the definitive book on Nazi Germany; it is a classic work. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was published in 1959 and was written by foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, and then spent five and a half years sifting through massive documentation. There are 32 pages of citations, a 10-page bibliography, and an index. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind. Official casualty sources estimate World War II battle deaths at nearly 15 million military personnel and civilian deaths at over 38 million.

Shirer reveals Hitler as intelligent and determined, but also delusional and a pathological sociopath. How did a man like that become a world leader?  On July 29, 1921, Adolf Hitler became the leader of the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party. Under Hitler, the Nazi Party grew into a mass movement and ruled Germany as a totalitarian state from 1933 to 1945.

It is all here – Hitler’s rise to power in the 1920’s, the appeasement of the European powers during the 1930’s, the ruthlessness of the Hitler-Stalin pact and then the war itself with, for a time, Britain and Churchill standing alone. Enveloping all this are the hatreds of Hitler and the Nazi party - their hatred of the Jews; the Slavic and Russian peoples; democratic values (what we would now call human rights); and their hatred of the Versailles Treaty. Versailles was never the humiliation it was made out to be. As Shirer points out this “stab in the back” myth was also propagated by the Weimar Republic as well which unwittingly set up Hitler and the Nazis for success.

“And the German people? … some 90% voted approval of Hitler’s usurpation of complete power.”

Hitler knew how to rally German nationalistic fervor and dubious impulses of most of the German people. Shirer uses many of Hitler’s speeches and the people’s reaction to them to illustrate how the German people adored their beloved leader. I was struck by how a people could swallow his words so whole-heartedly – words that are so diametrically opposed to the best values of the Western World. The speeches are filled with hatred for Jews and ridicule for the leaders of the Western World. Hitler’s reply to President Roosevelt in 1939 before the war – though successfully manipulative – is haunting in retrospect.

Hitler consolidated his political ambitions with the full cooperation of German military power. Hitler demanded personal fealty from staff and purged any party or military members who he perceived as challengers. Eventually the Nazi salute took the place of the military salute “as a sign of the Army’s unshakable allegiance to the Fuehrer and of the closest unity between Army and Party.”

Hitler also worked with wealthy German industrialists to create “labor serfdom” to support the rich at the expense of the workers. Hitler’s “Charter of Labor” (20 Jan 1934), states that: “The employer became the ‘leader of the enterprise’, the employees the ‘following.’” Hitler decided early in his regime “not to permit any rise in the hourly wage rates.”

“Deprived of his trade unions, collective bargaining, and the right to strike, the German worker in the Third Reich became an industrial serf, bound to his master, the employer, much as medieval peasants had been bound to the lord of the manor.”

Hitler also consolidated his political aims with the educational system through compulsory participation in the Hitler Youth. There were specific organizations for each age group. Teens were required to work for six months either on a farm or in a factory. When parents of teen girls complained their young daughters were returning home pregnant, they were told it was for the “good of the Reich” and they should be “proud” of their Aryan grandchild since the child would “build up the master race.”

At age 10, children were required to swear to the oath of allegiance:

“In the presence of this blood banner, which represents our Fuehrer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God.”

In “The New Order” according to Hitler: Jews and Slavic people were Untermenschen – subhumans. To Hitler they had no right to live, except for some of the Slavs because they were needed to toil in the fields and mines as slaves of their German masters.

Millions of decent, innocent men and women were driven into forced labor, millions were tortured and tormented in concentration camps, and millions more still, of whom there were 4 ½ million Jews alone, were massacred in cold blood or deliberately starved to death and their remains treated with the utmost disrespect.

Hitler boasted that The Third Reich would last a thousand years. It lasted only 12. But those 12 years contained some of the most catastrophic events Western civilization has ever known!

No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich.

If you want to understand how World War II and the Holocaust could have ever possibly happened, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is the definitive book on Nazi Germany.  It is a classic work well worth the effort to read and contemplate. Shirer presents a clear picture of the rise of Hitler, his philosophy, the rise of the Nationalist Socialist Party, and the Nazification of Germany. He describes accurately life in the Third Reich, from the gradual increase of a totalitarian state to the escalation to war - on both Western and Eastern Fronts – to the loss of momentum, and, finally, the inevitable destruction of the Nazi regime.

Which leaves us with the question: Can a Hitler-type leader come to power again?

*NOTE: I watched these movies after reading this book and recommend as extremely worthwhile viewing. Both are excellent award-winning movies: