The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is a challenging book to critique.  The author writes about difficult things, so the topics run bone deep, and are painful.

The book is taut and interesting for about the first fourth of the work, then starts to lose steam.  Marzano-Lesnevich’s prose and technique grow repetitive.  After the half way point, we learn nothing new.  This was a real disappointment.

Marzano-Lesnevich has genuine talent.  It is just not displayed to her full advantage in this work.

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle,

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle, by Dinny McMahon, tells a lot of fascinating stories about China’s economic and social development since opening up in the late 1980s.

A great deal of this book reads like the author dislikes Chinese people, although I think this is just a coincidence of tone generated by the topics he is discussing.  Chinese people come across as buffoons set loose in a capitalist system they don’t understand.  They appear hapless.  But I think this is unfair to the author and to Chinese people.

China is a large and complex country.  Its government is large and complex.  Any examination of how it works will necessarily lead to confusion, both by the author and his readers.

Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books, by Mark Glickman

Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books, by Mark Glickman, is certainly an interesting and important book.  The problem is, Rabbi Glickman gets involved in the big picture at the expense of the little.  

He starts with the purchase of one book that was collected by the Nazis for the use in their anticipated "museum" for exterminated Jewish culture.  This is an exciting premise.  Follow a book.  Follow the owner.  Trace the tragedy.  But he follows many books, or entire libraries, and the intimacy felt in the first pages is gone.

Regardless, this book is worthy to read and important scholarship to understand and remember.

The Last Stone

Anyone who has read Blackhawk Down knows that Mark Bowden is a master at documentary non-fiction.   This is certainly the case for this book, The Last Stone: a masterpiece of criminal interrogation.  Here, Bowden takes on the disappeared of the Lyon sisters from a mall in Maryland in 1975.  The investigation produced dead ends for years, until a group of investigators zeroed in on a young man who approached police a few days after the girl’s disappearance.   He said he witness the abduction. They did not believe him, and sent him away with a stern warning about giving false statements to police.  He was a young man who like to talk.

Thirty-eight years later, the investigators found his statement, and wanted to talk to hi; they found him in a Delaware prison, and he still liked to talk. And talk.  Bowden’s prime source for this book is the hours and hours of taped conversations between the suspect and police.  The suspect really should have taken his right to remain silent, and gotten a lawyer.  But he kept talking until all that remained was the truth, or some form of it.

Ultimately this is a sad story about two little girls kidnapped and horribly abused.  At times it is very difficult to read.  A nightmare.  Bowden is aware to this, but plots a steady course.  The book is about justice… even if it is delayed.

Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem

George Prochnik attempts to cover a lot of ground in Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem.  Prochnik weaves a very intricate biography of Scholem, the modern founder of the academic study of Kabbalah, with his own fraught and harrowing existence in Jerusalem in the 1990s.  This is a very full pot.

The author has a good book in here, but not two  The work is too cluttered.  If he wrote a memoir or autobiography of his challenging life in Jerusalem, we might have had a very good book.  The same applies to his treatment of Scholem.  But mixed together, too many threads are advancing forward unevenly.  The autobiography disappears for long stretches, and when it reappears, we have to remember where we are in his faltering relationship to Judaism, his crumbling marriage, his lack of professional direction.

Prochnik just tried to do too much.  A book with less would have provided far more.

Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph and the Legacy of American Terror

In Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph and the Legacy of American Terror, Maryanne Vollers shows us that the age of terrorism began in American well before 9-11. We tend to forget this.  Eric Rudolph led a campaign of violence against the Olympics, a gay nightclub, and abortion clinics.  His far-right wing politics has become more mainstream in the Age of Trump (although his violence, thankfully, has not).  He was well ahead of the curve on White Christian Paranoia. 

Now state governments whittle away at Roe v Wade to make it harder for clinics that provide abortions to operate.  Current tactics are subtler than pipe bombs.  But we are moving closer to Eric Rudolph’s American.  Mass violence, hatred of LGBT people, condemnation of women’s rights to control their bodies, antisemitism, and rage against  globalism – all this was on the most recent Republican presidential ticket – and Rudolph’s hit list.

Restoring Paradise: Rethinking and Rebuilding Nature in Hawaii

Robert J. Cabin’s Restoring Paradise: Rethinking and Rebuilding Nature in Hawaii details various attempts to preserve and reconstruct various habitats in Hawaii that have been invaded and degraded by alien species.  Cabin tells great stories of the challenges in the field of working toward this goal.  He has a broad mind and is able to communicate with the very diverse group of people working to restore Hawaiian ecosystems.  

He is well aware of irony of people trying to restore a natural environment that humans have destroyed.   Is the successful end product of restoration natural in any sense?  Cabin comes to no firm conclusion.  Restoration, he mulls, may simply be a more exacting form of gardening.

Yet this sentence really encapsulates his ideas:

“Conservation is a kaleidoscope of interacting species, ecosystems, people, and cultures that is fueled by a rich mixture of values, ascetics, science, art, philosophy, ego, and shifting alliances among government agencies, private organizations, special interest groups, local communities, and charismatic individuals.”

Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress

Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress by Joseph Wheelan is truly a presidential biography like no other.  After JQA’s disastrous presidency, he was elected to the House of Representative, and spent seventeen years in that position.  He is one of only three presidents to hold federal office following their presidency (Andrew Johnson in the Senate and William Howard Taft in the Supreme Court).

Wheelan’s book is full of gripping details of how Adams time in congress was anything but a coda to his already long history of public service.  He became a very early advocate of the abolition of slavery, and as he aged, his abolitionist tendencies only firmed.  He was a gadfly to his southern colleagues; he was a brilliant orator with a nearly photographic memory.  He speeches to congress became legend.  In the process, he set the stage for the battles over slavery that would dominate American politics from the Mexican-American War to the Civil War.  He more than once predicted the Civil War.

By the time of his death in 1848, he was a living symbol of the founding generation.  As a young boy he stood with his mother to watch the Battle of Bunker Hill.  He began is career in government when George Washington appointed him Ambassador to the Netherlands in 1794.  He dedicated fifty-four years of near continual service to his country.  Appropriately, he died sitting at his desk in the House.   This symbolism struck  a deep chord in the United States.  The Revolutionary era had passed, and no one knew what would come next.

Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel's Soul

Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel's Soul by Daniel Gordis, part of the excellent Jewish Encounters Series, is an unabashedly pro-Begin biography.  I say this not to disparage the work, but just to let the reader know what he or she will read.  The premise is simple: Begin is a hero of the Jewish people and their state, and Gordis writes his account accordingly.

Begin is an unlikely hero.   But Gordis makes a good case that his accomplishments have been largely unsung, particularly among American Jews.  Ben-Gurion labeled him a fascist and terrorist, but as Prime Minister, he negotiated Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab state, and traded land for that peace.  

Begin was framed by widely varying definitions, most of them negative.  So, perhaps it is time for a book such as this, to tip the scales a bit in the other direction.