The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicles Book 1)

So, the description on Amazon reads like this: "The first novel of the Cazalet Chronicle, this masterpiece in the tradition of Upstairs, Downstairs takes us to the Cazalet household in 1930s England, when the coming war is only a distant cloud on the horizon. Elizabeth Howard paints an irresistible picture of the family's intimate world."

This is, evidently, the first novel of the Cazalet Chronicle, it does take us to the Cazalet household, and war is on the horizon. I'm not sure I'd classify it as a masterpiece, though. My primary quibble with The Light Years is that Howard introduces far too many characters, with insufficient depth for the reader to differentiate one from the other. After 400 pages, I still couldn't consistently remember whether Teddy and Simon were the sons of Edward and Hugh, or the other way around. There are the senior Cazalets, their four grown children, three of whom are married, the children of those three, the sister, mother, and assorted relations of one daughter-in-law, a stable of servants, and assorted friends, colleagues, paramours, and others hangers-on. Oy.

What's more, there was no real story, no plot here. Or, what plot there was moved so slowly that it was difficult to discern and harder yet to follow. Howard records the minutae of their lives, with plenty of dialogue and details, but little action. I felt as if I were reading the blow-by-blow-by-blow of any family, without the author having done me the courtesy of distilling the salient bits. After close and faithful reading for the first half or two-thirds, I admit to heavy skimming of the remainder.

Two stars.

The Last Collection: A Novel of Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel

The Last Collection opens with the receipt of a telegram in 1954 that calls Lily Sutter to return to the Paris she left on the very brink of war. The vast majority of Jeanne Mackin's novels is set on that brink though, in the two years Lily Sutter spends in Paris following the tragic death of her husband. It's Lily's brother, Charlie, who calls her aware from the gray English boarding school where she teaches art classes to posh daughters with significant health challenges...like Marie "Gogo" Schiaparelli, whose childhood bout with polio has marked her gait and her relationship with her famous, fashion-designer mother, Elsa.

It's Charlie, too, who introduces Lily to the aristocratic Madame Bouchard and the world of French fashion, dominated by Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. In Paris, as she becomes a friend and confidante to the two arch-rivals, Lily also re-learns to paint, and to live.

Having previously read both Mademoiselle Chanel (fiction) and Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (non-fiction), I was familiar with Chanel and her rivalry with Schiaparelli. Mackin imparts more color, and also more of Schiaparelli, who largely emerges as the central character. Although Lily is a young widow and Paris is on the brink of a war that will nearly destroy it, to Mackin's credit, The Last Collection is not overly heavy, and manages to feel even hopeful. Certainly, it's a book to be enjoyed by those who love Paris, and all things Parisian.

Four stars.

Another Side of Paradise

The writing is beautiful. Sally Koslow's writing is what hooked me and why I finished, despite so thoroughly disliking both Sheilah Graham and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the main characters in Another Side of Paradise.

Told from Sheilah's perspective, this novel is the story of their nearly-four year romance while Zelda was institutionalized and Scott toiled in Hollywood, earning just enough to stave off his creditors. (The Hollywood period in all its agony and glory is the focus of West of Sunset, which I preferred to Another Side of Paradise because of the former's broader focus.) To say the relationship between Sheilah and Scott was volatile would be an understatement. And so, not surprisingly, their actions are repetitive: they're together happily, Scott goes on a bender, there's an ugly fight and break-up, he begs her forgiveness, she goes back to him. The cycle is broken only by Scott's death. Ugh.

The best of Another Side of Paradise are the other chapters covering Sheilah's life before Hollywood. Born Lily Shiel in an East End slum, her father dies and mothers sends her to an institution for Jewish children. As a teenager, she meets a kindly businessman who helps her create the fiction of Sheilah Graham and sets her on a course to hobnob with the likes of the Mitfords and Randolph Churchill.

In Koslow's telling, Sheilah struggles with the lies she has told and lives in constant fear of being unmasked as a fake and am imposter. This may or may not be true. Presumably she did love Scott Fitzgerald, though God knows it's impossible to understand why. I can but give her the benefit of the doubt and assume it had to do with his writing.

When it comes to a final reckoning, unfortunately, I found both Sheilah and Scott so dislikable, but they detracted from the overall experience, and so, where I would otherwise have said this was a solid 4-star read, I'm concluding with 3 stars and feeling generous. Skip the historical fiction and go for the real stuff: The Cruise of the Rolling Junk should sate any reader looking for a taste of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Three stars.

The Quintland Sisters

The world simply couldn't get enough of the Dionne quintuplets, who were born in rural Ontario on May 28, 1934. Early visitors included the likes of Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, and Amelia Earhart. In fact, three million visitors paid Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie a visit in the first decade of their life: the Dionne quintuplets and their province-built nursery, along with the good doctor, Dr. Dafoe, who was essentially raising them in this fish bowl, brought more than $50 million in tourist dollars into Ontario's coffers. "Quintland" and all things quintuplet became known, surpassed even Niagara Falls as a tourist attraction.

It is this aura of sensationalism that Shelley Wood seeks to capture in The Quintland Sisters. For this fictional account of the quints earliest years, based wholly but not exclusively in fact, Wood creates a nurse's assistant, if you will, in 17-year-old Emma Trimpany, who was present for the birth by way of assisting the midwife and then, as other caregivers come and go, remains at her station for the next five years.

The account of Quintland, the tug-of-war between the Dionnes and Dr. Dafoe, and that intervention by the state is fascinating. Wood's notes at the end describe her research, and it shows. This was a quick read, and an enjoyable one, right up to the end (on both counts). Unfortunately, the absolute end felt to me that it belonged in another book altogether. Without giving away the ending, I can say absolutely that I never I expected it, that I didn't understand it, and that the last 20 or 30 pages seemed entirely extraneous and their inclusion utterly perplexing.

Most of the book would be 4 stars, but when I factor in the ending, I land somewhere between 2 and 3. I enjoyed reading about the Dionnes (I was inspired to do a bit or research of my own after finishing this book), but as a reader, I just can't get behind The Quintland Sisters in its entirety...

The Pursuit of Love

Admittedly, I was drawn to The Pursuit of Love because of the author - I was curious about Nancy Mitford's work, given that I'd read much of her, and a book about her (and her sisters), but nothing by her. Happily, the book lived up to my hopes, and it's a delightful, period "classic" in the same vein as Evelyn Waugh or Irène Némirovsky.

As Amazon notes, "The Pursuit of Love is a classic comedy about growing up and falling in love among the privileged and eccentric." In that sense, the Mitfords are just one in a long line of English aristocrats run amok (the Mountbattens and Carnarvons being others of the same "species"), whose dysfunction makes for entertaining reading, particularly from this distance. Mitford was widely known to have drawn liberally from her own family's quirks in creating her characters, particularly Uncle Matthew, the blustering patriarch; contemporaries mourned the passing of both the real man and the fictional one when David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale died in 1958.

The protagonist of The Pursuit of Love is Linda, the most beautiful and wayward daughter, who has been denied a traditional upbringing, never been to school, and falls for a succession of wildly inappropriate men (at least by her family's standards): first a pompous City man, then a deep red Communist, and finally a French duke whose reputation precedes him.

Still, this is a light, fun read, and I was happy to learn upon its conclusion that this is the first of three novels Mitford wrote with this set of characters. I've already added the others to my reading list.

Five stars. 

The Air You Breathe

I finished this book a couple of weeks ago and have been ruminating on it since, but ultimately, I'm just not a fan.

Dores is a 95-year-old woman, samba royalty of sorts, and the book opens with her reflecting on her life and especially the shadow of her greatest friend and also her rival (in music, love, and life), Graça. Graça, the readers learns (early and often) has been dead going on 70 years. The rest of the book fills in the pieces.

The two women met as girls, when Dores was a kitchen girl and Graça the spoiled only child of a wealthy sugar baron in early 20th century Brazil. Their friendship deepens through a series of shared misadventures and a love for music. Running away to Rio, they build new lives in Lapa, surrounded by a cast of likely (though, I'm sure, only too true to life) characters. Here, their fame grows and their rivalry deepens, as only one of them can fully become a star in the volatile years of dictatorship leading up to World War II.

The Air You Breathe is well-written, and Frances de Pontes Peebles does a remarkable job of capturing the zeitgeist of the era. Unfortunately, I didn't like either Dores or Graça (I actually really, really disliked both of them). While it's a credit to de Pontes Peebles that she created characters who evoked such strong feelings, it meant that reading was a bit of a slog, and I only finished it because, as much as the characters grated on me, I did enjoy reading about the time and place, which nearly jumped off the pages. 

Two stars.

Elegy for Eddie

Elegy for Eddie is another Maisie Dobbs mystery, this one set in 1930s London teeming with costers and the last of the horse-drawn vehicles, which are rapidly losing ground to the fast-rising motorcar. Maisie is in the early(ish) days of her agency, and Elegy for Eddie focuses as much on Maisie, and her finding her place in the world and being comfortable in her own skin, as it does on the mystery of Eddie Pettit’s demise. So.

A group of costers come to Maisie to request that she investigate the “accident” that befell Eddie Pettit, a man whose “simple” mind, coupled with his uncanny talents, would likely see him placed somewhere on the autism spectrum. Maisie investigates, but – unlike other Maisie Dobbs books I’ve read – this one feels rather unsatisfying, both in the resolution of the mystery(ies), as well as the amount of ink devoted to Maisie’s personal life. I realize this is necessary to create the plot elements that allow for a full series, but I’m less interested in Maisie than I am in the “cozy mystery” aspect of Jacqueline Winspear’s work. To that end, I’m not sure how many more Maisie books I will read.

Three stars.

Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History

Fly Girls delves into some of the lesser known aspects of the "Golden Age of Flying" from the late 1920s until Amelia Earhart disappeared on her round-the-world flight a decade later. Specifically author Keith O'Brien revisits the history of women pilots during this era, not only Earhart, but many others whose names have long since faded from the national conscience: Ruth Nichols and Louise Thaden, Ruth Elder and Florence Klingensmith, with plenty of ink devoted as well to that most famous flier, Miss Earhart.

O'Brien does justice to each of these women, and Fly Girls works as a min-biography for a half dozen of the earliest women pilots. More crucially, O'Brien examines the prejudices these early pilots faced, including the rather preposterous regulation against flying immediately before, during, or after menstruation. Unfair, no doubt, but not terrifying. No, the terrifying risks were borne by all pilots, male and female alike, and again and again O'Brien documents the horrifying results of early planes, rudimentary airfields, and nascent navigation.

Frequently these crashes occurred at the National Air Races, an annual exhibition of the finest pilots and fastest planes, and attendance at which often outdrew the World Series. (I lost track of the fatalities somewhere in the middle years.)

Part history of flight, part women's history, Fly Girls is ultimately a look at an entire era - the zeitgeist, the mores, the thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat. In that sense, it serves as a reminder of the sacrifices early pioneers in any discipline must make.

Five stars.

Circling the Sun

I likely would have read this sooner, had I not just finished West with the Night - Beryl Markham's memoirs - when Circling the Sun - Paula McLain's fictional account of Markham - appeared on my radar.

A bit of background first. McLain's The Paris Wife was one of the best books I read in 2011. I loved McLain's writing in general and her treatment of Hadley Richardson in particular. I may have had a similar reaction to McLain's treatment of Markham, too, had I not already read the latter's own memoir.

The writing is certainly there. McLain writes beautiful prose and, as with The Paris Wife, I found myself often stopping to admire her way with words. "I have fought for independence here, and freedom, too. More and more I find they're not at all the same thing," McLain has Markham say at one juncture. Simultaneously obvious and subtle, this sentiment stopped me in my reading tracks to ruminate how concisely McLain captured this thought.

Likewise, when I read in the narrative, "The beautiful rich who hoisted themselves up on vast parcels of land...They had their own rules, or none at all - which could happen when you had too much money and too much time." I again felt compelled to read and re-read and re-read again McLain's lovely prose. (And also to recall the multiple books featuring the well born behaving behaving badly. See White Mischief or My Life as a Mountbatten or Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey should you need any convincing.)

Ultimately, though, I felt that McLain gave Markham short shrift. Markham's life was one of firsts for women, from horse trainer to bush pilot, yet McLain chose to focus on Markham's personal life - failed marriages and extramarital scandals not least of all - which left me with a diminished sense of who Markham was and what she accomplished. And so, even though I don't find particular faults with the book itself, and enjoy and admire McLain's writing, I came away disappointed, feeling that I had read but a very partial account of Markham's life and times.

Two-and-a-half stars. (Caveat: see above. Anyone who hasn't read West with the Night will most likely - and fairly - find this rating overly harsh.)

All the Stars in the Heavens

Adriana Trigiani's All the Stars in the Heavens is the fictitious account of Loretta Young's career and - in particular - romance with Clark Gable, which led to the highly hushed up birth of a daughter, Judy. The first half of the book especially is engaging and page-turning; the late chapters feel slightly more forced, but the book in its entirety certainly evokes Old Hollywood in all of its glory.

If the above paragraph feels slightly ambivalent to you - it is. I actually finished this book well over one week ago, and I've been really struggling with my feelings about it in the interim. The book is very well written. Certainly much of it is well-researched - enough so that I wanted to learn a bit more about Loretta Young. But, and this is an awfully big but, as I was reading more about Young, I learned that in her later years she spoke openly about her relationship with Gable - and characterized their supposed "romance" as date rape. Surely Trigiani came across these same claims in her research, yet it appears she chose to wholly and entirely disregard them in favor of creating a narrative about a failed romance and inventing circumstances that kept Gable and Young perpetually apart, Young pining for Gable until her last days.

This feels wrong to me on so many levels, not least the fact that it diminishes Young's experience, that I'm unable to take an unbiased view toward the work itself. Thus, rather than recommend All the Stars in the Heavens for its sweeping portrayal of glittering Old Hollywood, I would prefer to recommend two other titles in which the golden days of the movie industry are equally well-imagined: The Chaperone and West of Sunset, if you're interested in further reading of the same genre.

The Pastures of Beyond: An Old Cowboy Looks Back at the Old West

Dayton O. Hyde was a Yooper who set off on a freight train west to avoid his mother's wrath (yes, you read that correctly), and never looked back. The Pastures of Beyond is his memoir of an adolescence and young adulthood spent on a sprawling Oregon cattle ranch.

Initially out of his element, but with an unquenchable desire to become a real cowboy, Hyde learned to break colts, rope steer, and even to fight bull. His life on the ranch spanned the years immediately before and after World War II, with the requisite service in Europe, where Hyde landed on Norman beaches just after D-Day. Hyde writes of knowing many of the last true cowboys and Indians, and the first of the true rodeo stars. There can be no question that his life has been a colorful one, or that the West he knew exists no more.

The Pastures of Beyond is an excellent corollary to books about an earlier West, most notably To Hell on a Fast Horse and The Colonel and Little Missie. It's also a fun memoir that has many of the qualities the best memoir writes, James Herriot, Edmund Love, and the Gilbreth siblings among them.

Four stars.

The Truth According to Us

In the midst of the Great Depression, Layla Beck's father, the Honorable Senator from Delaware, cuts her off and she must go on relief. Fortunately for Layla, she has friends in high places and, unlike the millions standing in soup lines, she's able to quickly secure a job as a writer for the Federal Writers' Project. Promptly, she is shuttled off to little Macedonia, West Virginia, a far cry from her previous summer playground, Cape May.

Macedonia is, Layla quickly deduces, a hick town, with little of consequence. (It does not, however, have coal mines, for which is is at least minimally grateful.) Still she must write her book, and she throws herself into the task with gusto. As the weeks pass, her life becomes intertwined with the formerly proud but now fallen Romeyns, in particular shady Felix and his daughters Bird and Willa, as well as Felix's steady but odd siblings, Jottie, Mae, Emmett, and Minerva.

I *loved* the The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, of which Annie Barrows was one of two authors, and I wanted to love this. And I did love parts of it. The names, for example. Jottie. Willa. Bird. Felix. Also, the incorporation of the Federal Writers' Project, and some of the hilarious interactions between author and subject(s). Likewise, The Truth According to Us does a fine job of capturing the prettiness and pettiness of small-town America, and America teetering between the teeth of the Great Depression and the brink of World War II.

In the end, though, I couldn't help but feel a bit...meh. In part, I believe that's because the letter writing device, which worked to so well in Guernsey, seemed trite and tired here. A few pages chopped here and there wouldn't have hurt. The characters, too, felt overdrawn to the point of caricature and Willa, for whom I believe the reader is supposed to have the greatest felling, evoked a combination of contempt and pity from me. Mostly, though, I put that down to the ending, which, without giving anything away, left me disappointed. Barrows, it seemed, was about proving some larger "life lesson" than allowing the story to end as seemed most fitting. Or least as I deemed most fitting.

Cluny Brown

Cluny Brown is an orphan, happy enough to be living with her widowed uncle, a plumber, looking after him and answering his calls. She also happens to fancy a spot of tea at the Ritz and, well, any number of other things that are, shall we say, above her station. This is still England in 1938, after all. And so, hoping to put her in her place once and for all, her uncle packs Cluny off to a Devonshire great house where she is to become a parlor maid.

Cluny Brown does not lack for spirit and her lighthearted hijinx are often amusing. Margery Smith wrote this novel in 1944 and the era suffuses that pages in a way that even the best historical fiction is not able to capture. (In this way, it is similar to The Ladies Paradise or Suite Française.) In fact, it is notable that the characters speak often of the coming war, yet with a somewhat vague sense of what this will mean. Of course, when Cluny Brown was published, the victors had not yet been victorious.

Ultimately, I felt the book was so-so. I may have liked it better had it not been for the ending, which I never foresaw (so points to the author for that bit, at least), and which I didn't quite understand. What bothered me most was that I felt it was entirely out-of-character. That said, there was enough of "jolly old England" between the covers that I couldn't feel too cheated by the characters when the setting itself was so refreshing.

Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

I must admit that, the more of Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938, that I read, the better I began to feel about the world which I inhabit presently. At a time when nary a day passes without headlines proclaiming a bombing or a blast somewhere in the world, it's easy to forget how much worse things could be - how much worse, in fact, they have been.

As Philipp Blom illustrates, for 20 years Europe (and to a somewhat lesser extent, the United States) staggered from one disaster to another. A rough list includes: revolution and civil war (Austria and Spain); Lenin and Stalin and artificial famine and unknowable millions killed in any given year (USSR and Ukraine); genocide (Armenia); the rise of fascism (Italy, most notably), communism (USSR), and Nazism (Germany). That is only Europe. The U.S. saw unprecedented race wars throughout the country; labor wars, particularly in mining; Prohibition, and with it the rise of lawlessness and the likes of Al Capone; and the environmental disaster now popularly known as the Dust Bowl. Also, there was, you know, the Great Depression. Unemployment reached 40 percent in Germany; it was lower in France only because such a large proportion of working age men had been killed in World War I.

So the world was a depressing place. Of course, there were also jazz and flappers and Bright Young Things; Dadaism, surrealism, and Bauhaus architecture; standard physics vs. quantum physics; advances in cinematography and music and women's rights.

Fracture frequently reads more like an academic text than a popular press one. Blom's writing is at its best when he is mining the social issues of the time, whether that is the Great Migration or the 1936 Olympics. I found the discourses on art styles, musical influences, and scientific arguments to drone on a bit, and must admit to skimming more than a few of the sections. Still, this book packs a serious punch, and history junkies in particular should enjoy Blom's thorough overview of the years between the world wars, but which were themselves packed full of conflicts and great and small, collectively setting the stage for not only World War II, but much of the world's strife today.

The Cape Ann

Lark Erhardt is six-years-old in 1938, a young girl struggling to make sense of the grown-up world around her in the midst of a the Great Depression. She lives with her parents in a single room at the train depot, where her father works - steadily, unlike many in small-town Minnesota in this time - but she dreams of the day her family with leave the depot behind and build their own home, a Cape Ann, a dream of a house with hollyhocks and a window seat.

Little Lark is the consummate worrier, principally over her upcoming first confession. She worries, too, about her mama, Arlene, whose constant rows with the hard-gambling Willie hang over the family like a dark cloud. She also must make sense of her Aunt Betty, whose domestic situation is far more precarious than Lark's, and her friend Hilly Stillman, a World War I veteran - and hero - suffering from shell shock two decades on.

Faith Sullivan writes beautifully and brings depth and dimension to every character in the novel. Writing from the perspective of a six-year-old is undoubtedly a challenge; I found it took some getting used to for the reader, but ultimately Sullivan's skill as a writer brings a sense of authenticity to The Cape Ann that many books with an older narrative never achieve.

Three-and-a-half stars.

West of Sunset

Stewart O'Nan's novel chronicles F. Scott Fitzgerald's last years, as he attempts to reclaim his fame and repay his creditors by working as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Out of options, he is grateful for a job that lets him make headway on his bills, among them Scottie's tuition and Zelda's institutionalization fees. In many ways, West of Sunset is the perfect complement to Call Me Zelda, the novel which tells of Zelda's last, lost years in an Asheville asylum.

Beautifully written, it does begin rather slowly, but the deeper the reader falls into the story, the clearer it becomes: O'Nan has captured the essence of Fitzgerald. The man is far removed from the heady days of the Roaring Twenties. No longer on the make, this Fitzgerald is old beyond his years, run down by alcoholism (his own) and madness (his wife's). He is desperate and, often, destitute, torn between the past and the present, obsessed with his failures and resolving to be better. In that sense, he is perfectly human, and brilliantly crafted by O'Nan.

Having made his career out of the ashes of World War I, it seems fitting that the end came just as World War II was heating up. Fitzgerald appears in these pages as the ultimate arbiter of the interwar years.  

West of Sunset is a highly readable work of historical fiction, particularly for those who are familiar with F. Scott and Zelda. Four stars.

The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

James Green sets out to shed light on the history of the labor movement in West Virginia, particularly in the coalfields, but he accomplishes much more than that. What Green does instead - or in addition - is to craft a portrait of the poorest citizens of the poorest state in the years before and then during the Great Depression.

In places, Green's writing affirms long-held stereotypes of the Mountain State. Describing one trial, Green writes, "Deputies traveled deep into the hollows to find potential jurors who were not related to any of the defendants." Nearly every third character is a Hatfield, in one way or another descended from or related to the  Hatfields. And the number of guns, amount of liquor, propensity for violence, and preponderance of barefoot brides and babes do not help the state's case. Also, mining is hard and dirty work.

The Devil Is Here in These Hills, though, is much more than a soliloquy on West Virginia. Green has comprehensively compiled the history of the mine wars, and in many ways, the entire Labor Movement. I am embarrassed to admit, but before reading this book, I knew Mother Jones only as left-leaning journalism site; I had not a clue that the real Mother Jones was a fearsome fighter for the union movement for decades, and throughout the country.

The topic is necessarily narrow, and for that reason may appeal to a somewhat limited audience. Those who do decide to read this should not be disappointed, though, for the characters and events both border on the unbelievable and the book (not unlike Ashes Under Water), sheds light on a forgotten and shameful episode in American history.

Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring

Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring (not to be confused with Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle...) is the history of the Richard Sorge Soviet spy ring that operated in Japan for nearly a decade, from 1933 to 1941. The Sorge ring is credited with providing Stalin some of the most crucial intelligence he received regarding Japan's intentions towards the USSR, leading him to go so far as to remove divisions of troops from Siberia and use them against German forces in the west, possibly turning the tide of the entire war.

That said...

I've been dawdling with Target Tokyo for the better part of six weeks now. The topic (espionage) interest me, as does the time period (immediate pre-war period) and location (Japan). There's no questioning the quality of research Gordon W. Prange has put into this work, and it is well written to boot.

That said...

I'm sorry, but it's just a bit dull. In fact, after six weeks of on-and-off reading, I've only just reached the half-way point, and haven't determined whether I will continue. Prange has included virtually every detail about every individual connected to the ring. As research, it's masterful, but as reading, frankly, it's a bit boring.

The ultimate verdict?

For World War II-era espionage, give me Operation Mincemeat any day of the week.

Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean

Les Standiford's Last Train to Paradise opens aboard the rescue train that was sent to save the World War I veterans who comprised the bulk of the WPA workers laboring in Keys at the height of the Great Depression - in the midst of the most powerful hurricane to ever strike the U.S.

After setting the scene with the rescue train, Standiford moves backward in time, from the last train to traverse the keys, to Henry Flagler's singular determination to lay tracks across the ocean (up to seven miles at a stretch) and ride the first train across the Keys. In many ways, Last Train is as much a biography of Flagler as it is a history of the railroad from Miami to Key West.

Flagler is a fascinating guy: a millionaire many times over from his Standard Oil partnership with Rockefelle, he essentially got bored of the Gilded Age life and essentially created Florida as a destination for the moneyed classes. I learned of him for the first time when I visited St. Augustine a few years ago, but even then wasn't aware of the extent of his role in Florida-as-playground. Gradually, he laid tracks and built resorts from the state's north to its southernmost point, and then across the ocean to Key West. The latter was quite an undertaking, as one would imagine, and is Standiford's focus, from the labor force (Spanish and Cayman Islanders were most preferred), to the engineering tactics that allowed the supports to be sunk into deep waters and shifting sands (German concrete was the secret), to the troubles that beset construction (mostly hurricanes). Indeed, many experts have described Flagler's railroad as an engineering feat on par with the Panama Canal.

Standiford then circles back to the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 with which he began, which would ultimately wipe out most of the middle keys, and Flagler's dream of a railroad along with it.

Although I had no idea Last Train included an account of the storm (in hindsight, this is obvious, I know), I was especially interested in Standiford's recounting of the hurricane, as just a few months ago I read Under a Dark Summer Sky, which is a fictional account of the same storm. For those interested in hurricane reading, the fictional account or Isaac's Storm (Galveston hurricane of 1900), make for a more satisfying read. For a comprehensive history of how a man shaped a state's destiny, it would be hard to beat Last Train.

All Things Wise and Wonderful

All Things Wise and Wonderful is a continuation of the multi-book memoir of James Herriot's time as a veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1930s. In this particular book, the reader learns of Herriot's adventures primarily through the flashbacks he experiences while training as a pilot in World War II. In that sense, All Things Wise and Wonderful captures two storylines - one of the rural life of the Yorkshire Dales and the other an intimate look at the rigors of training in the Armed Services.

My favorite anecdote from the book is when Herriot is sent to a farm along with several other airmen to assist with the fall harvest and ends up delivering a calf. The farmer was more than a little surprised, to say the least!

Wise and Wonderful is not filled with the laugh-out-load hijinx that appear regularly in Herriot's earlier books, but especially in All Creatures Great and Small. It is no less good, though, for being less funny. I have said before that I enjoy Herriot's work not only for exposing me to a time and place I otherwise wouldn't know, but also for the same innocence that makes the Gilbreths and Edmund Love so delightful. In that sense, Wise and Wonderful shines brightly.

Four stars for Dr. Herriot, again and again. I am already looking forward to my next fix, The Lord God Made Them All. Stay tuned (not that the outcome is much in doubt...).