The Paris Architect

Amidst World War II, work has dried up for architect Lucien Bernard when a wealthy factory owner approaches him with a commission - and a catch. In short order, Lucien finds himself designing factories for the Germans and secret hiding places for the Resistance. His wife, unaware of Lucien's work hiding Jews, labels him an architectural Mephistopheles, but ultimately Lucien must come to grips with the personal nature of the work he is doing - and the lives he is saving.

Charles Belfoure's The Paris Architect is beautifully written, with so many story threads all of which ultimately tie together perfectly. Moreover, this is a page turner. At times it feels more like a thriller - action, suspense, and so much hanging in the balance - than historical fiction. Belfoure's characters are multidimensional and inherently human. I truly cannot think of a single complaint or criticism, unless it's that I wasn't ready for the book to end.

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

Paul Theroux might just be a little crazy. I suspected as much when he paddled around the Pacific, but his voyage from Egypt to South Africa by way of such stable and well-governed states as Sudan and Zimbabwe convinced me. In fairness, Theroux meandered through Africa circa 2000, when most of these countries were relatively safer than they are today. Still, he was shot at, robbed, and shaken down - this last so many times that I lost count.

The overriding emotion of Dark Star Safari is disappointment veering into disillusionment. Time-and-again Theroux - who spent years in Africa in the 60s - is shocked to discover the sorry state of affairs in each of the country he visits. Roads are non-existent, poverty is of the barefoot variety, and corruption is rampant. The root cause of Africa's problems, Theroux believes, is aid. The international aid community has allowed Africa to become helpless - why fill potholes when you can wait for someone else to do it for you? Perhaps more surprising is that many Africans agree with him. I know little about Africa and less about aid, but the arguments Theroux puts forward are certainly convincing.

Dark Star Safari is the third Theroux non-fiction I've read (after Paddling the Pacific and Riding the Iron Rooster) and I am hard pressed to rank them. He conceives of interesting voyages, certainly, but there is often something self-righteous about the tone, the author too present, his actions too consciously recorded, that I find off-putting. I've added his newest release (Deep South, which came out just last month) to my reading list, but not as a high priority on the list.

2.5 stars.

Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence

In July 1916, New Jersey experienced "one of the most remarkable series of shark attacks in world history," this according to the Austrlian surgeon and shark attack expert Dr. Sir Victor Coppleson. (In fact, the 1916 attacks would serve as the inspiration for Jaws more than half-a-century later.)

It is these events, stretching from Beach Haven north to Spring Lake and Matawan, that Michael Capuzzo reconstructs in Close to Shore. Capuzzo painstakingly reconstructs the last summer before the U.S. entered World War I, focusing on the individuals, as well as the broader context of the era. He also, and most impressively, reconstructs the movements and even the psychology of the "rogue shark" that killed four and injured two others, one seriously.

Close to Shore was a quick and interesting read. I knew nothing about these 100-year-old shark attacks (and why should I?), but Capuzzo does an equally good job of educating readers about shark species, life cycles, and motives. The ichthyology research is even more impressive than the history research.

Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868

Essentially, with Capital Dames, Cokie Roberts sets out to prove the maxim that "behind every great man, there is a great woman." (Also to  prove that some great women - such as Clara Barton - didn't need a man to lead the way.) Which is all to say that Roberts devotes some 500 pages to examining the contributions, the influences, and often the day-to-day existence of women during the Civil War. Primarily prestigious women - wives of senators and cabinet ministers, generals and presidents (yes, both Mary Lincoln and Varina Davis feature prominently). Roberts does mention the notorious Rose Greenhow, and she devotes quite a bit of copy to Elizabeth (Lizzie) Keckley.

Because these were women of power and influence, or what passed for such in the days before women could vote, Roberts research was aided by the existence of private letters and diaries, the likes of which ordinary women could not or did not write, and future generations, to say nothing of government archivists, did not save. Of course, contemporary newspapers devoted quite a bit of ink to many of these women, and women such as Barton and Greenhow certainly appeared in government records.

Roberts includes a number of photos of the women, the caption of one which is, "Elizabeth Blair Lee knew every politician from Andrew Jackson on, and wrote clever letters chronicling wartime life in Washington..." When I read this caption, I was able to put my finger on my criticism of Capital Dames: Roberts tells her reader, rather than shows the reader, about the clever letters. Not once does a full letter appear in this book, and rarely more than a sentence or two at a time. In this way, it's difficult to get a real sense of the women as individuals, and they all begin to run together. Not until the last chapter - set during Reconstruction - did I feel like their true voices began to emerge.

Final verdict: I would have liked a little more Mary Chestnut's Diary and a little less Empire of Mud.

State by State

I am sad to say that State by State is one of the most disappointing books I have read in a long time. It's not that it was bad. It wasn't, per se. It's just that individually and collectively these essays failed to do justice to the America I know.

I love this country. I don't mean that in a chest-beating-flag-waving-patriotic-fervor sort of way. I mean the land - the incomparable experience of cresting a hill in northern New Mexico at sunset, or hiking the California Coastal trail on a cloudless fall day, or the sweet and sticky taste of homemade pecan pie in the Deep South. These are things I love about America, and by-and-large they were completely and utterly absent.

The Arkansas essay, for example, was about bumper stickers. From 1991. This tells me nothing about the state, which is doubly disappointing as it's one of the few states I haven't ever visited. Oregon and Vermont consisted of comic strips, the font too small to read on my Nook, even if I'd cared to. (I didn't - I was interested in essays, not art.) Many of the actual essays consisted of an author's trip down memory lane, typically back to the 1960s or 1970s. That would be fine, had I wanted to know what the state was like 40 years ago. State by State is not a memoir, though, or at least it shouldn't be. A few of the essays do capture the essence of the state - the North Carolina essay on the proper way to eat barbecue springs to mind. Illinois was excellent.

It is as though nearly all of the authors were thinking what William T. Vollman actually penned in his "California" opening: "...mass culture, with its big box warehouses of the landscape, language, and mind itself, has already destroyed so many differences between states that there is less to say..." In some ways, this is inarguably true. But in so many other ways, this attitude gives short shrift to the entire idea, which was to, essentially, update the 1930s WPA guides. Reading Sir Edward Robert Sullivan's Rambles and Scrambles in North and South America, particularly the North American rambles, is more pleasurable, more educational, and in many ways more accurate and telling, even 150+ years later.

All Creatures Great and Small

All Creatures Great and Small is the first of three books that comprise James Herriot's memoirs of his time as a country vet in Yorkshire, circa 1930. A few months ago I read the second book, All Things Bright and Beautiful, loved it, and decided I really needed to read Creatures (and the third book, All Things Wise and Wonderful, which is still on my list).

Creatures begins with Herriot newly qualified from veterinary school and seeking a position - no small feat in Depression-era England. He finds one, as an assistant to the somewhat temperamental and slightly scatterbrained Siegfried Farnon, in the far north of England. His adventures in these early years and memorable; many of them are also side-splitting in their retelling. I noted of Bright and Beautiful: Herriot creates a sense of time and place, so that the reader is quite certain that Herriot's adventures could only have happened when and where they did. Many are sweet, some are laugh-out-loud funny, and all are tinged with a heavy dose of nostalgia.

So it is with Creatures (although this first book is even funnier than the one that follows, I believe). This is another lovely book, which should appeal to readers of all stripes. I very much anticipate including it on my year-end, "best of" list.

Four great, bright stars.

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

I was somewhat dubious as to whether an 80-year-old story about rowing could capture and hold my attention. I shouldn't have been: one of the more memorable books I read in the past year was The Great Match Race, which is about horse racing, for heaven's sake. Moreover, throughout Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown, like Match Race author Eisenberg, does a commendable of providing the larger context. The hardship of life is never far from the athletes' - or reader's - mind: these were the years in the heart of the Depression, the years of Hoovervilles and Okies - the term "Dust Bowl" was coined in the middle of the boys' rowing career, in 1935.

What Brown does exceptionally well is select one of the boys, Joe Rantz, and make Boys in the Boat, as much a biography of Rantz - whose story is amazing and inspiring - as a retelling of the quest for Olympic gold. Rantz is the heart and soul of the book; the hardships he faced and the genial way in which he faced - and overcame - them is such that the reader is drawn in immediately. I couldn't help but be sympathetic to the lonely, and ultimately abandoned, boy determined to make something of his life despite extraordinarily long odds. I was rooting for Joe long before I was rooting for the rest of his boat mates.

If there's any criticism of Boys in the Boat, it would be that the sections on 1930s Nazi Germany in the build up to the Olympics sometimes feel forced. Unlike the Deparession-era hardships which are woven neatly throughout the entire story, events in Germany are recounted in separate sections. This is probably necessary, as the rise of anti-semitism and embrace of the Olympic movement as propaganda cannot be woven into the protagonists' lives, but it does break up the flow of the Joe Rantz-University of Washington crew story.

This is a minor criticism, though, and all-in-all, The Boys in the Boat is an outstanding read. Four stars.