Once We Were Brothers

It's been a long time since a book kept me up so late past bedtime, to say nothing of waking well before the alarm (or the early summer dawn) to try to finish it before work. Once We Were Brothers did both. Written by Ronald Balson, Brothers is the story - part historical fiction (the early chapters, especially, recall In the Garden of Beasts) and part legal thriller - of a Holocaust survivor, Ben Solomon, intent on bringing a former Nazi, Otto Piatek, to justice. The twist is that the former Nazi was raised by the survivor's family, a non-Jew among Jews, until turning against the family during the war.

Balson's strength is the plot. Fast-paced and lively, the book moves. The student who recommended it to me promised me it was a quick read, and he wasn't kidding.The twists and turns come quickly on the heels of one another; hence, the reading-induced sleep deprivation. In addition to his plot, Balson's characters are a real strength. There are, essentially, few enough to count on a single hand (Ben, Otto, the accuser's attorney, Catherine, and the PI, Liam), with other more minor characters sprinkled liberally throughout both the past and present stories.

I did have a couple of (relatively minor) complaints. Many of the chapters rely too heavily on dialogue, as opposed to narrative, to move the story along. As a result, Ben is often delivering history lessons to his attorney, Catherine, who therefore comes off as a little thick. The background is probably necessary for most readers, but I would have preferred it to be woven into the narrative. By including it in the dialogue, Ben's speech often comes across as lecture-y. I also found Catherine to be the least sympathetic character. Her constant self-doubt is grating (honestly, if she has that low an opinion of her talents, she really shouldn't be in law), and I was no fan of the (somewhat contrived) romance between Catherine and Liam.

Given that this book was recommended to me while I was in Japan, I would be remiss not to add that perhaps the most interesting thing I learned was of the presence of Jews in Japan. Balson, through Ben Solomon, states that there have been Jews in Japan since the 1860s. My curiosity was piqued. It turns out Balson may have been selling the Japanese Jews short; according to Wikipedia (yes, I know, only the finest sources for my blog) Judaism has been practiced in Japan since the sixteenth century. Really. So maybe the Star of David I saw in Japan and automatically dismissed as being something else was actually a Star of David. Who knew?

An excellent airplane/beach/rainy weekend read. Starting in the middle of the work week was a mistake.

Four stars.

The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea

So this book was, like, $1. And I was heading to Japan, meaning 28 hours on a plane, plus many more on trains, etc. I like whales. I like whale watching (most recently in Maui last March at right and below), and I like science writing. (See my review of David Quammen's brilliant essays, for evidence of this). So, I figured why not? The answer is that, I'm sorry, but it was really, really boring. As in, at one point I was hoping that hour-after-hour might lull me to sleep, but no dice and so I continued, awake but bored all the way to Detroit.

Much of the book - or at least of the first half - read like an erudite book report on Moby Dick, which I didn't read for a reason. The history of whaling in America was fascinating, especially knowing a different side of the industry from The Richest Woman in America.  Occasionally, Philip Hoare would offer some nice insight, such as his observation that, "through whaling, America reached across the world for the first time; whaling exported its culture and ideas," but mostly I was bored. Also, his case -  or mine - was not helped by my visions of whale bacon, a Japanese delicacy on display at the Tsukiji Fish Market (and whose picture I have helpfully included below), and which I could not sufficiently banish, especially during Hoare's descriptions of rending the blubber. On the other hand, the comment about America exporting itself through whaling probably stuck because of the way our Tsukiji market guide noted that it was the Americans who taught the Japanese to hunt whales. Whatever the case, between my visions of whale bacon and the tiresome Moby Dick, I was done for.

Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End

Farewell to the East End is the last of the three books chronicling nurse Jenny Lee's time as an East End midwife in 1950s London. (It is also the basis for almost all of season two of the show Call the Midwife on BBC/PBS.) It follows the same structure as the first memoir, Call the Midwife, with each chapter detailing the story of a patient - usually, but not always, a woman in labor. Jenny Worth (nee Lee), the author, also does a commendable job of providing background chapters on some of the issues, both social and medical, that nurses faced in 1950s Poplar, such as tuberculosis and access - or lack thereof - to safe, legal abortions.

In many ways, Farewell to the East End reads like a continuation of the original book, making the placement of Shadows of the Workhouse, the second book of the series, seem awkward or ill-considered. In total, though, the trilogy is very well-written and informative, both humorous and heartrending, and well wroth the read for anyone with an interest in Cockney history or even British social policy from the Victorian age forward.

The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder

I have spent the last several weeks in Japan leading a group of undergraduates on a study abroad program. It's been an amazing experience and great for both personal and professional development. It's been less great for reading (and blogging). I did manage a couple of books, though, the first of which is The Boilerplate Rhino. I have my dear friend Clio to thank for introducing me to the world of David Quammen a few years ago. (She was also responsible, in college, for introducing me to my husband, so she's clearly a great lady to know!)

David Quammen is a nature writer. Sometimes the thinks he writes about are fascinating and sometimes they are, excuse, less exciting than watching grass grow. Boilerplate Rhino, which is a collection of essays written for his monthly during his time at Outside magazine, has some of each. His account of the perfect durian fruit is fascinating, for example, as is his essay on the original boilerplate rhino. On the other hand, if I'm being perfectly honest (always my goal), I didn't even manage to read time-and-motion study in its entirety (and these are not especially long essays). From bat watching on Guam to speculating on the owl's absence of a penis (all owls, not a particular owl) to luminescent beetles the size of a human finger the essays run in terms of topics.

Even when the subject seems less than entirely interesting, though, Quammen can always be counted on for his beautiful prose. He describes military jets as "smearing the sky with carbon" during take-off and notes succinctly in an essay about Henry Thoreau that "the human reality is always more complicated than anything that can be put down on paper." Quammen is a writer's writer, a man whose every word seems to be carefully considered before appearing in print. I have loved each book of his I have read (The Song of the Dodo and Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, in addition to Boilerplate Rhino) and am looking forward to my next Quammen pick, just as soon as I read the other 20-odd books on my list.

4 stars.

Fever

A lesson: there used to be (and in some parts of the world, still are) innumerable dread diseases in the throes of which one regularly might die. For example, there was tuberculosis (aka consumption), there was yellow fever, and there was typhoid fever. Fever is the story of Typhoid Mary, the Irish cook who was the first asymptomatic typhoid fever carrier identified by U.S. health authorities.

Essentially, Mary Mallon left illness - and death - in her wake, with outbreaks at virtually (literally?) every home where she was hired. Once the authorities caught on, she was arrested and confined to Brother Island - a leper colony of one, except the leper carried typhoid. After doctors determined she was only a danger to society when she cooked, she was released with the agreement that she would never cook again. This lady loved cooking so much, though, that she couldn't keep her promise. (I know, I don't get it either.) You see where this is headed - more jobs, more outbreaks, until she was caught again and and sent back to Brother Island where she lived for the next 20-odd years, until she died as a rather old woman of pneumonia.

As for Fever by Mary Beth Keane. I liked it. A lot. It's similar in style and tone to Doc (which I linked to in the first paragraph), or even to Paris Wife. My one complaint, and it's relatively minor, is that unlike Paris Wife and Doc which seem to have been researched within an inch of their lives, it's hard to know where fact end and fiction begins with Fever. I read an interview with Keane where she talked about her mind being piqued because of the lack of first-person accounts about the case, so I knew going in that it was more a work of fiction than the others, but still I wanted to know what degree of truth there was to Mary's relationship with Alfred Briehof, whether she had ever worked for the Kirkenbauer family (she did work for the Bowens, another of the families mentioned in the book), and some of the other minor characters.

Keane has done a great job of building a complex and nuanced character in Mary Mallon. While the exact degree of truth versus fiction may be impossible to know, she was undoubtedly a complicated woman, probably not wishing typhoid on anyone, but certainly not taking the preventative measures necessary to prevent spreading it. I ended up feeling like she got what was coming to her, but they certainly were different times.

I should not that, having read about Hetty Green immediately before reading about Mary Mallon, I was fascinated at the contrast between Hetty Green's New York and that of Mary Mallon. Considering those differences was very interesting.

The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age

I've never heard of Hetty Green, but she was once the richest woman in America. Born into an old whaling family, she inherited a fortune, then grew it dollar by dollar by investing in railroads, real estate, and more than a few municipalities - at one point, she was New York City's largest lender. (She also owned an entire town near Chicago, which I find fascinating.) Fiercely independent, she threw her husband out of the house after he gambled with - and lost - some of her money in a stock market crash. It is telling that in an age when she should have been Mrs. Edward Green, she was Mrs. Hetty Green - and more often than not he was known as Hetty Green's husband.

As Janet Wallach frequently makes her reader understand, Hetty Green's life and accomplishments are all the more amazing given that she died several years before women could even vote. Not that Hetty was a suffragette - she wasn't, not by a long shot. She openly scorned high society, intimating that the famously miserable Duchess of Marlborough, aka Consuelo Vanderbilt, had gotten what she deserved for marrying a Duke for his title. (From the sounds of it, Hetty Green was not an easy woman to like. She called her son's girlfriend Miss Harlot and her disdain for the woman was such that he did not marry her after his mother was cold in her grave.)

The Richest Woman in America is first and foremost a biography of Hetty Green. In many ways it is also a biography of the growing pains - and often death - of this nation's railways; railroads always formed a sizable portion of Hetty's portfolio and she studied every facet of them, buying, selling, trading and consolidating, but always with an eye to how the rails were increasingly the backbone of the country.