In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson

This book has been on my list so long that I don’t recall how specifically it got there. I know that I love to learn from history and found intriguing a book about what it was like to live in Nazi Germany as Hitler and the Nazis consolidated power. I picked this up now due to the political situation here in the US.

Shortly after the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt named an erudite professor at the University of Chicago as the ambassador to Germany. He was not the president’s first choice, or even his second choice. He was way down the line as no one else seemed to want the job. In July of 1933 Professor Dodd and his wife, son, and daughter, all moved to Berlin. This book follows their experience of living under Hitler as violence against Jews and foreigners rose there, culminating in the Night of the Long Knives that started on June 30, 1934. It is as much about the private life of his daughter Martha as it is about his experience as ambassador. As such, it is a very interesting look inside the social as well as the political world within Nazi Germany.

This is a remarkable book about what it was like to experience first hand the rise of Nazi power in Germany. It is astounding how willing everyone was to look away and make excuses, both foreign and domestic. The US government was myopically interested in getting bond payments on WWI debt. Europe was intent on avoiding another devastating war. With today’s political world rhyming so closely with the 1930s, there is a lot to learn from the history in this book.

My rating: 4.5/5

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by TImothy Snyder

I don’t recall how this book came to my attention. I normally write down what prompted me to add a book to my list. Unfortunately, I did not do that for this book. Still, I know exactly why I decided to read this book now. Due to the authoritarian bent of our incoming president, I was looking for some comfort and answers on how to respond.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a collection of twenty essays for what to do in the face of growing authoritarianism in a country. No current politician or political party is mentioned. The points made are all based on historical experiences of countries with despotism. A few of the points most relevant today are “Do not obey in advance” as this gives the regime power without even being challenged, “Make eye contact and small talk” because this builds community across political divides and humanizes the other, and “Be calm when the unthinkable happens” in order to respond in a rational way that can actually make a difference.

The writing here is short and pithy. The book packs a lot into its only 128 pages. I felt that the writing was a bit slow in the first few chapters, but by the latter half of the book the points and their historical support had me nodding along in full agreement. I highly recommend this book for our times. It just might lower levels of panic while encouraging the fortitude required to prevent a slide into a state that no one really wants.

My rating: 5/5

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book Two by Emil Ferris

As soon as I finished My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book One this past June, I put its sequel on hold at my library. It took until earlier this month for me to get my turn to read it. Like book one, it grabbed me right away. I tore through it in two days.

It continues the story of Karen started in book one. She continues to struggle with her own identity as a “monster” who doesn’t fit in. At the same time, she is coming to terms with a revelation about her brother from the end of the previous book. With a new friend, she continues to look into the mysterious death of a woman in the building who cared deeply for her.

As was the first book, this is in part a very challenging holocaust story. At the same time it is a coming of age story of a young gay girl. It is very touching and emotionally evocative in the way it deals with othering. The art is amazing and is a well-realized tool in the author’s storytelling.

My rating: 4.5/5

Breath by James Nestor

I heard the author of this book interviewed on the People I (Mostly) Admire podcast. I heard a lot of amazing and seemingly outlandish claims about breathing. But the interviewer is someone I trust who had tried the things discussed. He was amazed at his results, so I decided to read the book myself.

The text tells the author’s journey of discovery. He suffered from pulmonary issues himself and sought out ways to improve his life. The journey took over ten years. He starts with an experiment that he did with a friend and colleague with lab results measured by Stanford University. They both got a long series of tests. Then they plugged their noses for ten full days so they could only breath through their mouths. For those ten days they ate and exercised to a precise schedule so they could reproduce the same activities when they were breathing through their noses for the following ten days. They got all the same tests at the end of the first ten days and at the end of the full twenty days. They had all sorts of issues when breathing through their mouths that simply went away when they started breathing through their noses. These included higher blood pressure, snoring, and mild sleep apnea. The rest of the book explores the author’s research on what affects breathing and how to breathe to improve health.

I was astounded by what this book uncovered! I am looking forward to putting much of it into practice myself. I already find myself keeping my mouth closed and breathing through my nose as much as I can. There is an appendix with breathing exercises as well as a link to videos that also show how they are done. The only quibbles I have are that due to the excellent structure for telling about all he learned, the author’s storytelling arcs are a bit confusing at times. He had to jump around a bit in his timeline to intelligently gather the details for the book. And there isn’t a coherent single description for what a reader should do with this information. The author isn’t a physician, so this is likely on purpose. He does support all that he presents, though, with scientific studies from doctors and other scientists. I am looking forward to building a breathing practice that I expect will help me to stay as healthy as I can as I age.

My rating: 4.5/5

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

I had heard of this book through many channels. The one that got me to pick it up was a review by Ian Mond in Locus magazine. There he described it as “the sort of novel you fall into, only to come up for breath to eat and sleep.” It has an element of time travel and the exploration of how people from the past might deal with the shock of coming to the future. Sounded like a great book for me.

In a near future UK, the government has discovered time travel. Unsure as to what might happen to time travelers, they have brought forward from the past five people who history shows as either dead or missing. Each of these people is assigned to a “bridge” who helps them adjust to the dramatic change in their lives. The main characters are one of these people from the past and his bridge. As the story progresses, some things begin to appear to not be what they are at first glance and the time travelers and their bridges start to band together to figure things out.

Unfortunately, this book did not live up to the billing. I found it rather easy to put down. In fact, I almost stopped reading it halfway through. The metaphors feel forced. I found the writing clumsy and stilted with only a rare moment or two where it shined and pulled me in, enveloping me in a feeling and communicating something deeply. And there were numerous references to things in the UK that someone not immersed in that culture would not understand. Worst of all, the conclusion fell flat. The author seems to think she has said something profound in this story that just wasn’t there for me. I should have listened to my instinct and left this one unfinished.

My rating: 2/5

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

This one has been on my list to read for almost a year. What put it there was an incredible review by Cory Doctorow. I finally pulled it from my pile when my book club selected it to read in November, our indigenous fiction month.

It is set in an alternate 1920s where much of the western US was never completely subsumed by the United States. The central action takes place in the state of Cahokia covering parts of modern day Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The capital is also called Cahokia. The protagonist is an orphan giant of a man whose heritage is part black, part indigenous. He is a murder detective for the Cahokia Police Department. As the book opens, he and his partner have been called to the scene of a grizzly murder at the top of a skyscraper. The body has been mutilated in the style of an Aztec sacrifice. In a racially divided city, this sets the city on edge and puts pressure on the mayor and the police to solve the crime fast.

This novel has everything—politics, history, racial tension and conflict, mystery, plot twists, romance. I kind of feel like the grandfather in The Princess Bride. Seriously, this is one of my favorite books I’ve read. I most appreciate books that explore deep issues of what it means to be human, and I found it in this book at every turn. It deals with but gives no easy answers for questions like these:

What do I do when there seem to be no good choices to make?
Where is the boundary friendship and doing the right thing?
Where do I belong? Who am I?
Is it okay to break the law in service to a higher sense of law?

To top it off, the writing is evocative. I felt immersed in the noir detective world of prohibition politics in a Midwestern state governed by natives who never gave up governing their own land. This book has it all. Truly a masterwork.

My rating: 5/5

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

After finishing my previous audiobook, I looked for another Hugo award-winning novel that was available to borrow without a wait. I ended up borrowing this one. It was published on the tenth anniversary of the original. The text of this audiobook is that favored by the author. It is somewhat longer than the original with some minor changes, as the author explains in his “Note on the Text” in the front of the book.

Shadow, a man just getting out of prison, is approached and offered a job working for a man named Wednesday. He is to be his driver and errand boy. At first he declines. After a tragedy in his life, with nothing else going on, he agrees. The book is largely the story of their relationship. As you can probably guess from the book’s title, Wednesday is a god. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide which one. The story follows the two as a war brews between the old gods and the new gods.

I really enjoyed the storytelling in this book. The audiobook is a full cast production and really brings the story to life. Shadow struggles with meaning in his life and his relationships. I really appreciate stories that explore aspects of the human condition. Interestingly, even the gods seem to struggle with that. The writing isn’t in any sense what I would call literary. That said, it does get out of the way and let the story sing.

My rating: 4/5

Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant

I’ve heard about this book many times in the year since it was first published. I think I first read about it when Cory Doctorow reviewed it on his blog. But the most recent time it came to my attention and that finally nudged me to pick it up was Austin Kleon’s weekly Friday post on Substack. With all that is going on in the world with technology in general and AI in particular, I felt it was time to read this. In fact, I should have read it much sooner.

If anyone has heard the term “Luddite”, it was most likely used as a slur to refer to someone who doesn’t like technology and is vehemently against its adoption. This is a slander against the original Luddites. The book sets out to correct this mistaken myth about them and also to show how we can learn from them how to resist technology when it is bad for workers and for humans in general. The Luddites did not hate technology. They embraced it when it improved not only business but also their lives, both at work and at home. They began to resist when new machines became a danger to both. They took action to destroy those machines when their government would do nothing to protect them or their children against that negative present and future. Interestingly, they never set out to harm any individual, with a single exception.

The author definitely has a thesis that he sets out to prove. This is no neutral history. That said, his case is supremely persuasive. The background politics seem to rhyme with what is happening now, especially with the attitude of big business toward technology as an unmitigated good and the treatment of anyone who resists those technologies as ignorant fools fighting against the future. Ultimately, this is the story of power over others. It made me wonder why one small group of people is so unwilling to share the financial rewards of technology with the very workers who make that improvement possible? My entire life I have seen economic systems that represent capital (capitalism) and labor (socialism/communism) at war with one another. Is there no system that we can design that honors the value brought to economies by *both* capital *and* labor? This book creates the fertile ground on which we may one day find an answer to that question.

My rating: 5/5

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon

I recently started listening to audiobooks while working on projects around the house. My first one was finishing a book I started listening to on a recent trip. Then I went looking for something new to listen to. At the beginning of this year I had briefly toyed with the idea of reading Hugo Award winning novels this year, so I searched for one of the those. This book was the first I came across that was immediately available to borrow from my library.

It is not science fiction in the traditional sense. There are no aliens or spaceships. It does not take place in the far future or on another planet. It is more of a detective story that takes place in a speculative alternate history. In this version of history, Israel was destroyed shortly after its founding and Jews found a temporary “home” in a district in Alaska that the US carved out from among Indian land in Alaska. Sixty years later, this district in Sitka is still intact but was never made permanent. Now it is looking like there will be a reversion back to the natives, leaving the Jews there with no place to go.

That’s the background. The story itself revolves around a murder (naturally) that takes place in the same fleabag hotel where the main character lives. He is a detective for the Sitka police, and he is a complete mess. He is divorced with no kids and no self-respect. His partner is his half-Indian, half-Jewish cousin who was more or less raised as his brother. Together they investigate this murder even after they are told to leave it alone. Of course, they begin to uncover things that others in powerful places want left alone.

The writing is absolutely brilliant. It is filled with down-to-earth but often odd metaphors that evoke feelings and imagery that could be achieved in no other way. The audiobook reader is incredible with the voices and accents, really bringing the story to life. There are subplots that touch on different aspects of the human condition and how everyday people struggle with them. It is an amazing work of fiction that deserves all the awards it received.

My rating: 4.5/5

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

When I reached out to the adult services librarian at my local public library recently, he invited me to join a book club that just had an opening for a new member. This club meets every other month. They each read a different book on a theme and then tell the group about the book at the next meeting. For the meeting I attended, they all read a book published the year they were born. Gretchen, the woman sitting next to me, read this book, originally published in 1935. She spoke so well of it that I immediately picked it up and read it.

The author‘s wife was a newspaper reporter in Munich in 1931 as Hitler was rising polically. She interviewed Hitler and saw him for what he was—a petty, dangerous tyrant. In 1934 after describing him in part as “the very prototype of the little man”, she found the Gestapo politely but insistingly inviting her to leave the Fatherland. Back in the USA, many people told the author and his wife that she was overreacting. At least such things could not happen here the US. The author did not agree and wrote this book as an illustration of that.

The book is the story of an inexperienced politician who rises to power through populist tactics. He gains the Democratic nomination for president in 1936 by promising to make everyone financially secure in the midst of the Great Depression. Naturally, he goes on to win. He immediately becomes a dictator and begins to target his enemies. The main character is a newspaper editor in Vermont who only very slowly comes to see the danger of the candidate and then new president and eventually starts speaking against him. You can guess at what follows.

The plot and the storytelling do not reflect the best of this author. But that isn’t the point. Instead the author seeks to show how easy it could be for Americans to fall for a petty tyrant who is wiling to give us what we think we want. And even the people who know better don’t believe it enough to do something until it is too late. In this he succeeds admirably. Some of the things he writes could be right out of today’s news in our politically divided country. That makes this book particularly haunting and perhaps particularly important to read right now, almost eighty-nine years after it was published.

My rating: 3.5/5