Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

Mark Adams's Turn Right at Machu Picchu is one of the funniest travel volumes I've read, so I was excited to see his most recent work, Tip of the Iceberg on the library's bookshelf. In it, Adams sets out for Alaska, largely retracing the steps of the 1899 expedition organized and financed by railroad tycoon Edward Harriman that put Alaska on the map as a destination. Like any good researcher, Adams also makes several additional visits, speaking with experts in a variety of fields and creating a picture of the contours of life in Alaska and the unique challenges facing it.

In comparison to Machu Picchu, this work suffers. It's simply not as funny or as dramatic as Adams's rendering of either his own experience hiking the Inca Trail or those of the Bingham expedition or the Spaniards. That's not to say that Tip of the Iceberg isn't a fine book - it just needs to be appreciate for it's own merits, rather than compared to Adams's earlier work. And what Tip of the Iceberg does well is crystallize the myriad issues facing Alaska today, from the biggie - climate change - to conversations around land use, native rights, and balanced budgets. This is very much a snapshot of the zeitgeist of America in the MAGA era, while also providing historical detail on the "discovery" of Alaska's wilds a century-plus ago.

That's not to say Tip of the Iceberg is without humor. Adams's encounter with a couple of bear cubs, his journeys by ferry, and encounters with numerous quirky locals, provide plenty of entertainment. The harder questions posed, always subtly, but just there - under the tip of the iceberg - are more reminiscent of Chesapeake Requiem than Machu Picchu.

Four stars.

Summer of '49

The cover says this is "the story of a magnificent season - and the battle royal between Joe DiMaggio's Yankees and Ted Williams's Red Sox for the heart of a nation." Halberstam captures much more than a baseball season between the covers, though. He captures an entire zeitgeist and draws the reader back to the age of players who had fought in an actual war. He also brings to life each of the players, so that they are not merely the athletes of the era, but varied and interesting human beings. This is perhaps best illustrated when Halberstam relays the anecdote of the notoriously intelligent and well-spoken Dom DiMaggio, little brother of Joe, shouting at an umpire, "I have never witnessed such incompetence in all my life!"

Unlike Halberstam's The Fifties, Summer of '49 is brisk and lively. There can be no doubt that his passion fueled this work. In that way, it is similar to The Boys of Summer, the major events of which took place just three or four years after the Yankees and Red Sox battled it out. I am not a particular fan of baseball (I'd barely seen more than two games before meeting my husband in college), but I've now read several books that track the progression of baseball from the very early days (Saint Louis, 1883) to the height of the Ruth-Gehrig mania (New York, 1927), to the post-war evolution of the game from radio and day games to television and night games. Summer of '49 just might be the best of them, though.

Five stars.

China Rich Girlfriend

I wasn't initially planning to read China Rich Girlfriend. Late last year I read - and enjoyed - Kevin Kwan's hit Crazy Rich Asians, but still felt like one volume was enough. I was looking for a fun, light, fairly mindless read for a recent trip, though, and my mind kept drifting back to Kwan's characters and, as luck would have it, CRG was available at the library.

China Rich Girlfriend is a sequel to Crazy Rich Asians, but set a couple of years later, with virtually none of the action in Singapore. These facts work to its advantage, as does the fact that Kwan does not devote precious pages to retelling the previous story (one of my chief complaints with Once a Midwife, for example.) He rightly puts the responsibility on the reader to know the backstory. If anything, Kwan rounds out his characters more in this second book, particularly by focusing on storylines other than those revolving around Nick and Rachel, whose wedding opens the book. (My favorite was probably the Bernard and Kitty storyline, which is sheer madness, but amused me all the same.)

Although the premise of the book and its title is that there is Crazy Rich and then there's China Rich, I think a more accurate delineation is not around the value of the fortune, but the ways is which money is flaunted...or how one perceives others to be flaunting it. Toward the end, Kwan even slips in a bit of sly social commentary on the state of wealth in a China where the uber-rich build "green" havens for themselves, while owning the factories that spew the pollution unto others. This would, presumably, be in contrast to Singapore, where the environment is a national priority and the safety net is very, very real.

Once a Midwife

Once a Midwife is the sequel to Patricia Harman's fantastic The Midwife of Hope River, and on it's own merits, it would be a more-than-fine read. It does pale a bit in comparison to the original work, though. But, first:

Once a Midwife jumps ahead from the early days of the Great Depression to the early days of World War II and finds Patience and Daniel long-married and with a houseful of children, some born to them and some adopted through the hardships of 1930s life in West Virginia. In the run-up to Pearl Harbor, both Patience and Daniel are staunchly isolationist and anti-war, but when Pearl Harbor is attacked and Hitler's madness becomes clearer, a wedge grows between them as Patience tries to reconcile the man she believed Daniel to be with the man he has become.

Ultimately, the relationship between them, and Daniel's continued refusal to register with the selective service, is the main plot. And it's not a bad plot, but it's not what I was expecting, either. I better enjoyed the first book, with its focus on Patience and her work as a midwife and the patients themselves than I did their domestic discord. What's more, in writing the conflict as she did, I felt Harman did a disservice to Patience. Specifically, we see Patience worrying, constantly, over the threat of Daniel going to jail, and what that will mean for her and the children and their little farm.

I don't doubt she would have worried, but give the steely empathy Patience showed repeatedly in the first book, and sporadically throughout this sequel, it would have felt more authentic to me had she reflected more on the parallels of their situation and that of every other family where the husband, son, father, brother was being sent to fight. Patience reflects repeatedly on the difficulties of being apart, but given the broader circumstances of the time, this rang a bit hollow for me.

Sequels are rarely, in my experience, as good as the original (I'm looking at you, This Side of Glory and Heaven and Hell), and this one isn't bad. But if the first book was five stars, this one is three-and-a-half or four.

In This Grave Hour: A Maisie Dobbs Novel

I have been in need of some serious escapism these past few weeks and when I was much younger, Agatha Christie was my go-to for escapism reading. I decided to stick with the same genre this time, and dove into Jacqueline Winspear's In this Grave Hour, the second Maisie Dobbs novel I've read (and liked - really liked!). Although the circumstances are heavy - Maisie hires onto her latest murder case on the very day England declares war on Germany - there's nothing too heavy or heady about this book.

So. The Belgian Embassy hires private investigator Maisie following the death of a Belgian refugee from "the last war," who has lived quietly and worked hard right up until he was robbed and murdered in broad daylight, but with no witnesses. Having no leads and diminishing resources (the toll of the nascent war, already), Scotland Yard has given the case short shrift, but the Embassy wants answers...before there is another murder. (Which, c'mon, this being a murder mystery, you know there's going to be.)

I'm realizing belatedly that, unlike Agatha Christie novels which had virtually no continuation of plot themes from one mystery to the next, Winspear has seemingly constructed a series, and what struck me initially as similarities between elements of the plot in both books is actually a continuation of the story. As I will undoubtedly work my way through more of Maisie, I'll have to remember that for the future!

Four stars.

Operation Columba: The Secret Pigeon Service - The Untold Story of World War II Resistance in Europe

Gordon Corera, a BBC correspondent, happened upon a trove of World War II-era files that detailed a relatively unknown pigeon service that relied on the homing ability of the birds to carry messages from occupied Europe back to Britain. Operation Columba is the result of his find, and subsequent research.

Essentially, the British security (espionage) services, devised a plan to drop pigeons into Europe and then request those who found the birds to complete surveys about the German occupation, clarity of BBC reception, and a host of other factors and then release the pigeons for the return to Britain.If only it were that easy. The bird might not survive the initial drop, or might be turned into the Germans, or might be devoured by the starving populace, or might become a hawk's dinner on the return flight to Britain. And even if it made it, the intelligence might be worthless, or might have fallen out along the way, or, or, or. Yet, one of these messages returned such a trove of intelligence as to be shown to Churchill himself.

I found the most troublesome aspect of the history to be the hope that it inspired in the Belgians, particular those whose christened themselves the Leopold Vindictive, which simply could not be realized. As Corera explains, it wasn't as simple as being able to deliver a pigeon on command (see the reasons above!), but the Belgians could not know that and some risked - and lost - everything in a desperate bid to contact London. Whether the British had considered such possibilities is unknown and unknowable, but I couldn't help but feel that to a certain extent the British were "using" those in occupied Europe, even if their intentions were noble.

Operation Columba: The Secret Pigeon Service is not at all a bad book. It simply suffers from being of the exact same genre as The Winter Fortress and, in comparison, pales a bit. The action wasn't quite as fast, and the intrigue wasn't quite as high.

 Three stars.

The Midwife of Hope River: A Novel of an American Midwife

In The Midwife of Hope River, Patricia Harman gives readers the story of fictional, Depression-er midwife Patience Murphy, who has arrived in the hills and hollers of West Virginia shortly before the market crashes and the mines begin to close. Quietly and steadily, Patience delivers babies across the hardscrabble region, where the ravages of man and mother nature are never far. (Jenny Lee has nothing on Patience Murphy...or the actual women who performed the acts Harman has ascribed to her fictional protagonist!)

Patience is the star of the book, along with her apprentice Bitsy and the local veterinarian, Daniel Hester, but Harman does a masterful job of incorporating the history of the miners' struggles, such that part of Midwife read like pages from The Devil Is Here in These Hills. The books reads easily, and quickly, with each chapter essentially the story of one more birth, though the entire story is woven together into a delightful whole.

Aspects of it reminded me of The Truth According to Us, with its tales of Depression-era life in tiny towns tucked into the mountains. Between the two, I found The Midwife of Hope River to be the richer read, and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, Once a Midwife.

Five stars.