Catherine the Great, Portrait of a Woman

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by Robert K. Massie, 2011, Random House, New York

This book is extremely well-written and researched.  I felt that I really understood the woman and also gleaned a tremendous amount of Russian and European history from reading it.

While I was reading the book, I was thinking about how much better written it was than was Cleopatra, A Life, by Stacy Schiff which I read last year.  Mr. Massie’s sentences were well constructed using very simple structure while Ms. Schiff seemed to stick various phrases in odd places in her sentences.  In addition, Mr. Massie let the story tell itself while Ms. Schiff tried to interject her own odd sense of humor into the story at every opportunity she had.  The result is that reading Catherine made me dislike Cleopatra even more than I had previously.

The persons in the book were sometimes a bit difficult to track due to the complexity of the relationships, but the author manages to keep the reader on track and make it interesting.  The amount of detail about Catherine’s various affairs (there were twelve of them), also made it a bit overwhelming.  Nevertheless, the book is well worth the effort to read. four stars

One Second After

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by William R. Forstchen, 2009, A Tom Doherty Associates Book, New York

This book is about a nuclear detonation and the effects of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that emanated from that detonation. It is clear from this book that the impact of such an explosion would be far more devastating than the actual explosion or the subsequent radioactive fallout.  This book present the case of what would happen in stark detail.  The book is set in a small town in North Carolina and focuses on the inhabitants’ struggle to survive in a world without electricity or any of the other electronics that we depend upon in our society.

While the book makes a compelling case that something should be done to harden our defenses against such an attack, it also was not a great read.  The story focuses on one individual in the town and how the situation affects him and his family.  I would have preferred a more exciting portrayal of what happened in this very altered situation. 2 1/2 stars

Freedom

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by Jonathan Franzen, Audiobook Read by David LeDoux, 2010, MacMillan Audio, New York

This book was very disappointing.  The author attempted to provide a treatise on individual freedom and where it leads, but, instead, managed only a sad portrayal of some pretty unlikable, dysfunctional individuals.  It was difficult form me to connect to any of the characters in this novel, particularly in the first half of the book.  Then, when they suddenly seemed to become more likable in the second half, I was at a loss to understand how they manged to undergo the transformation.  While each of the characters struggled to deal with their various afflictions, the basic message seemed to get lost.  Is freedom a good thing or a bad thing?  Is too much freedom good or bad?  What are the consequences?  All of this seems to get lost as most of the characters, through no effort  or fault of their own, seem to overcome all their shortcomings and end up in pretty good situations by the end of the novel.

If all of these individuals lived next door to me all my life, I am not sure I would make any effort to get to know them.  They all seemed to be just stereotypes rather than real, interesting individuals. 2 stars

River of Doubt, Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey

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by Candice Millard, 2005, Anchor Books, New York

I was not aware that Theodore Roosevelt, after his defeat in the 1912 presidential election, had embarked on a dangerous journey of exploration in the Amazon.  Having braved some somewhat less dangerous canoe trips in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota in my younger days, I was amazed at the hardships that Roosevelt and his group encountered.  On the trips I went on, we had all the best equipment, packed professionally by outfitters who knew what they were doing (with the possible exception of one trip where the new owners of the outfitting company gave us sleeping bags that were much too light for the season).  It is clear from this book that the persons planning Roosevelt’s trip had no idea what they were doing.  Also, this particular route had never been explored before and the individuals who were in charge didn’t have a good idea of what they were going to encounter.  Furthering the difficulties was the fact that the command of the trip was split between two individuals who had widely differing views of what they wanted to accomplish.  It is a wonder that they survived.

Despite the differences of my relatively safe excursions into the wilderness and Roosevelt’s journey, I found I could identify with some of the stresses that being isolated in a remote area creates.  I found myself reading just to find out what kinds of dangers were lurking around the next bend of the river.

Despite some dry passages where the author is describing the various insects and flora of the jungle, the book is very readable and tells a compelling story.  It is well done. four stars

The Big Short, Inside the Doomsday Machine

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by Michael Lewis, 2010, W. W. Norton & Company, New York

This book is about the the subprime meltdown and the individuals who bet that these securities would default.  Lewis does an excellent job of capturing the character and personalities of the individuals involved and what caused them to go against the conventional wisdom of the time.

The book is well written and a quick read, although the language is a bit rough.

As in the case of many other books written about poor business practices in our most vaunted firms, it causes one to wonder just how smart the smartest of us actually are.  Maybe what it takes to run a large company well is just a bit of common sense and integrigy, both of which seem to be sorely lacking.  Reading about the actions of those individuals who caused this mess makes me really angry.  They should all be poor and in jail after what they did to the American people and the economy.

four stars

Wild Bill Donovan, The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage

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by Douglas Waller, 2011, Free Press, New York

This looked like a pretty good book as the subject sounded pretty interesting.  On the plus side, the book did have a lot of information about what went on behind the scenes in World War II.  On the downside, for a biography, I didn’t feel as if I really knew Bill Donovan after reading the book.  The author provides a really good accounting of his actions and deeds, but I felt he somehow came up short in revealing the real person behind all of it.  The narrative also left me cold as it was primarily a chronological accounting of all the things that Bill Donovan did.  While Waller tried to provide a picture of Donovan through his relationships with members of his family, he just doesn’t seem to project the person well.

The bottom line is that the author managed to make what should have been a fascinating story very dull. 2 1/2 stars

With Wings Like Eagles, A History of the Battle of Britain

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by Michael Korda, 2009, Harper, New York

This was a pretty interesting book, but only because I didn’t know much about this campaign.  Missing was a sense of the hardships that the pilots and crew went through as well as the impacts on the ground.  Korda attempts to give a sense of this but his descriptions seem to fall short.  Also, the book tends to be repetitive in places.

On the plus side, the book seems to be well researched and factual.  It’s too bad that it didn’t capture my imagination a bit more. 3 stars

Cutting for Stone

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by Abraham Verghese, 2009, First Vintage Books / Random House, New York

This is an excellent book.  It combines a pretty good plot with interesting characters and intertwines a great deal of medical knowledge (without getting in the way of the plot and the characters).  Verghese is a good writer who can hold the reader’s attention.

One thing I liked about the book is that new developments were often unexpected but were introduced in a way that made them seem very plausible.four stars

A Question of Belief (Commissario Brunetti Book 19)

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A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery by Donna Leon, Audiobook narrated by David Colacci, 2010, BBC Audiobooks America

This was my first Guido Brunetti mystery.  It was interesting primarily because the setting was in Venice and the author does a great job of capturing the ambiance of the city.  Unfortunately, the story was extremely slow.  Each scene is described with a great deal of detail and this causes the story to unfold very slowly.  Also, the narrator’s normal voice is very slow and tends to bog the story down even more (his dialogue voices are much better than his narrator voice).  There actually wasn’t much to this mystery.  I liked the characters and the setting but I just wish there had been more to it. 2 1/2 stars

Room: A Novel

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by Emma Donoghue, 2010, Audiobook read by Michal Friedman, Ellen Archer and Robert Petkoff, Hachette Audio

This was very interesting to listen to.  The voices were very realistic and the way the story was written made it believable.

My only criticism is that I felt the work was unfinished.  I think at least one additional chapter could have made it more complete.  Maybe the chapter or chapters would have fast forwarded fifteen years or so to view some of the longer-term after-effects of Jack’s and his mother’s incarceration.  Also, how did Jack and his mother accomplish some sort of separation after living together so closely for such an extended period?  These questions made it feel unfinished to me. 3 1/2 stars