“Always live your life with your biography in mind.” - Marisha Pessl
Nonfiction: Biography, History, World War II
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner
Mildred Harnack was the only American in the leadership of the German resistance and the only American executed in Germany for resistance activities against the Nazi regime.
Mildred Fish was born in 1902 and grew up in Milwaukee, a city with one of the largest concentrations of German immigrants in America. After her schooling, she studied and then taught English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1926, a German graduate student wandered into a class she was teaching, apparently lost. Arvid Harnack introduced himself and apologized for the intrusion; a relationship quickly blossomed. They married and eventually moved to Germany in 1929. Mildred worked on her doctorate at Berlin University, where she also taught English. Arvid worked for the German government.
During the rise of Hitler and the Nazi regime, Mildred and Arvid joined a small resistance group to fight the brutal Nazi regime. They called their group the Circle; the Gestapo would later call it the Red Orchestra. Their group delivered important information that would help the Allies defeat Germany.
Their resistance costs them their lives. Arvid Harnack was hanged in December 1942. Mildred was initially sentenced to six years in prison, but Adolf Hitler refused to endorse the sentence and ordered a new trial, which resulted in a death sentence on January 16, 1943. She was beheaded by guillotine on February 16, 1943 after copying out and translating into English the line of the Goethe poem that is the title of this book.
Mildred Harnack was an ordinary American whose fate brought her to Germany and who, after realizing what the Nazi regime stood for, found strength to oppose it. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days tends to skip around a bit, but I kept turning the pages! I am in awe of Mildred for what she did despite having an opportunity to escape the fascist Nazi regime and lead a safe and comfortable life in the USA.
Publisher’s Note on the Author: “Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors’ testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, epic story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.”
Nonfiction: World War II History, Family Memoir, Holocaust
Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne
NOTE: The title may lead you to think this is a book about the development of atomic bombs, it is not. The subtitle describes the book better, because this book is a “subversive family memoir.” It “investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas-mask filters for the Nazis.”
When Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their heroic escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. Instead, what he found in his great-grandfather’s thousand-page, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story. His great-grandfather wrote, “I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error. I betrayed myself, my most sacred principles. I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.”
Merzbacher started working with the chemical company, Auer, to produce radium toothpaste (Doramand). He also created and tested chemicals for weaponization and tested the gas-masks Nazi soldiers would wear to protect them from the chemical weapons. He did this work for two years until the Nazis began persecuting Jews, which meant he would lose his job.
However, his boss arranged for Merzbacher and his family to emigrate to Turkey. While Merzbacher’s immediate family was “safe”, many of his relatives did not escape the Holocaust.
In 1937 the Turkish government approved the purchase of chemical weapons from Germany, the ones that Merzbacher developed. The Turkish then used those weapons as part of a campaign of brutal killings against ethnic minority groups in eastern Turkey. In Germany, the Zyklon B gasmasks he developed were used by Nazi soldiers to operate the gassing and murder of millions of Jews. Later, when Merzbacher learned his work aided in killing Jews including his family members, he had to live with that fact for the rest of his days.
It's sometimes hard to understand how people do things without thinking of the consequences. This book delves into the morality of Merzbacher’s choices. If he refused to do his job, someone else would lead the programs. Since he proceeded should he be responsible for what we know now?
The first half of this book is unique and provides a lot of food for thought. However, the last portion of the book veers off into events of Merzbacher's sister and away from the main story. Children of Radium would make an excellent book club pick as it provokes a discussion of the ethics of invention – is the inventor responsible for how the invention is used?
Nonfiction: Travel, History
The Full English: A Journey in Search of a Country and its People by Stuart Maconie
I am an Anglophile! I deeply admire England, its people, culture, language, institutions, history, and traditions. I often enjoy British TV – Time Team, The Detectorists, etc. I simply have a strong affinity for all things English or British. My fantasy trip would be to Great Britain. Obviously, I HAD to read this book.
Maconie recreated J.B. Priestley’s 1933 tour through England, from the south coast to the industrial north and back. Priestley wrote a critical and affectionate look at the country's social conditions, landscape, and people during a time of significant change, influencing public opinion and contributing to the post-World War II state.
In The Full English, Maconie’s book was written in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, and it shines a light on an England struggling to recover from the political and economic upheavals of Brexit. Whereas Priestley travelled in a Rolls Royce, Maconie used trains, buses and cars to get around and I suspect, got to meet a lot more genuine locals that way. He did the usual touristy things, visiting the same restaurant as every other travel writer and always managed to find a local pub with good conversation.
Maconie finds hope in the small conversations and experiences that tie us together. He finds joy in multiculturalism and rejects the populist argument that the past is dead and buried in the face of wokeness, European Union interference, and a decline in the English way of life. Maconie instead shows us how society has always changed and how transformation and community are the things that will create a bright future in which all can feel like they belong. This book is funny, nostalgic, hopeful, and, in many ways, a snapshot of what modern day England is. I must go there!
Nonfiction: History, Politics, Government
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This book is short enough (80 pages) for anyone to tackle and everyone probably should, especially as we approach our nation’s 250th commemoration. It is a word-by-word examination of the most famous sentence in the Declaration of Independence. In the process, it touches on some key influences on the Founders' thinking and discusses how we are still struggling to fulfill our ideals.
“Self-evident” – This phrase implies that the truths were true by definition, “discoverable by the mere operation of thought,” not contingent on observations. This was quite controversial, even revolutionary.
“All men are created equal” – In Jefferson’s original draft, he called the slave trade “a cruel war against human nature” and condemned King George III for imposing it on the colonies. Nevertheless, he was a slave owner. Abigail Adams spoke out saying the slaveholding delegates’ “pretentions to liberty are a mockery.” She wrote Jefferson directly, “The practice of slavery is a reproach to any people who boast of liberty and equality. How can those who advocate the rights of man hold their fellow creatures in chains?”
We have struggled with this phrase throughout our history and continue to struggle with it today.
“Endowed by their Creator” – This phrase reflected the founders religious outlook, known as Deism. Deists believe in a supreme being who set up natural laws and principles to govern the universe but didn’t interfere in human affairs. They viewed Jesus as a great teacher and philosopher – but not as God.*
Later during the first House of Representatives, while debating the First Amendment, members soundly rejected the Senate’s proposal calling for the establishment of Christianity as the country’s official religion. The United States religion is All and/or None. People can be Christians and everyone else gets to be what they want to be. Nevertheless, we are struggling with Christian Nationalism today.
These are just the three phrases that stuck out for me while reading The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. While this is a small infusion of patriotism and admiration for our founding ideals, it has a valuable place in the current moment. We could all use a reminder that there are real, meaningful ideas behind the cartoon version of patriotism so often paraded by politicians.
*NOTE: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth known as Jefferson’s Bible – Thomas Jefferson created this by using a razor and glue to create a version that focused solely Jesus’ moral teachings and cut out all mentions of Jesus’ supernatural miracles, resurrection, and divinity.
Nonfiction: Science, Medical
Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach
I can’t describe this book better than the publisher. I like Roach’s writing and this book was just as good as another of her books, Stiff.
Publisher’s Description: “The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what’s available—sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we’re attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet?
In Replaceable You, Mary Roach explores the remarkable advances and difficult questions prompted by the human body’s failings. When and how does a person decide they’d be better off with prosthetic than their existing limb? Can a donated heart be made to beat forever? Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina?
Roach dives in with her characteristic verve and infectious wit. Her travels take her to the OR at a legendary burn unit in Boston, a “superclean” xeno-pigsty in China, and a stem cell “hair nursery” in the San Diego tech hub. She talks with researchers and surgeons, amputees and ostomates, printers of kidneys and designers of wearable organs. She spends time in a working iron lung from the 1950s, stays up all night with recovery techs as they disassemble and reassemble a tissue donor, and travels across Mongolia with the cataract surgeons of Orbis International.”
I like “body” books and this one was very good. The only chapter I “skip-read” was the one on “hair plugs” because I was not interested. Otherwise, I like Roach’s humor, and I learned more about anatomy and how science is attempting to create better bodies.
Nonfiction: History, Biography, World War II, Fascism
We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler by Russell Freedman
NOTE: This is Youth Nonfiction. The author, Russell A. Freedman (1929 – 2018), was an American biographer and the author of nearly 50 books for young people. He may be known best for winning the 1988 Newbery Medal with his work Lincoln: A Photobiography.
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| Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, and Cristoph Probst, founding members of of the White Rose student resistance movement in Nazi Germany. Munich, June 1942 |
We Will Not Be Silent presents the White Rose history through the lives of siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl. Hans, once a willing participant in the Hitler Youth and a natural born leader, quickly realized that within the Hitler Youth and Germany as a whole, there was no place for anything other than what the Fuhrer decreed. Even singing folk songs from other countries around a campfire was met with severe reprimand.
Sophie, three years younger than her brother Hans, was a member of the League of German Girls, a part of the Hitler Youth. She was also enthusiastic at first, but like Hans, became disillusioned, especially after seeing some of the treatment the Nazis imposed on people who were not party members, or were Jews.
Disillusionment led to action when Hans and Sophie were students at the University of Munich. They, and a small group of like-minded friends, wrote and mailed Leaflets of the White Rose. In the leaflets they exposed what they felt was the truth about the Nazi fascism and asked the citizens of Germany to take responsibility and resist.
The White Rose distributed their first leaflet in June 1942. Altogether, six different leaflets were printed and distributed all over Germany by the thousands, so many that the Gestapo began to diligently search for the members of the White Rose.
On February 18, 1943, Sophie dropped some leaflets at the University, while Hans was carrying a suitcase full of leaflets. A janitor saw them and reported them to the Gestapo After a short trial, they were executed along with Christophe Probst on February 22, 1943.
We Will Not Be Silent is inspiring and presented in a sensitive, thought-provoking manner. I think its real strength lies in the simplicity with which Freedman tells the story of the White Rose, all the while quietly letting the courage, honor, and principles of these valiant resisters shine through. He makes clear that opposing Hitler was a dangerous business. These young idealists were aware of the danger they faced and died still believing they had done the right thing.
The last two sentences in the book: “We hear their voices even today, speaking truth to power. They will not be silent.”
