As I mentioned in my previous article, I was able to finish a number of books this summer. This is a continuation of my summaries.
The Women by Kristin Hannah (St. Martins, 2024)
A current best-seller – interesting book about nurses in Vietnam. Hannah does an excellent job of spinning a plot around three nurses who bond in the triage centers and then follow each other’s lives post-war. The Army claimed there were never any women involved in the war, conveniently forgetting the Medical Corps.
The protagonist is my age, but we had different war experiences. She comes from a high-level military family with all its proud fighting history. My two uncles fought in WWII, one fought again in Korea. But Vietnam did not affect our immediate family.
In the early 70s, I was selling computer supplies. Washington University in St. Louis was terrorized by student protesters, and I had to wade through them to get into the computer center. Scott Air Force Base near Belleville, IL was a client. Several times while there, the automatic overhead doors on the computer room came rolling down, locking us in place for hours until an all clear was sounded. Usually this meant that an incoming or outgoing C5 was on the runway. Clark was a major supply depot for Vietnam, and the base to which all dead soldiers returned.
The Women was an informative book for me to relive gruesome details of U.S. diplomatic history. Certainly not our finest hour. For another terrific book about the Vietnam era, read Tree of Smoke by Dennis Johnson.
Trans Atlantic by Colum McCann (Random House, 2014)
A periodic novel set in the U.S. and Ireland, Trans Atlantic follows families of characters who cross the Atlantic for adventure, love, and work. This begins with the first trans-Atlantic plane flight and ends in the mid-20th century. Not a gripping read, but artfully crafted and satisfying.
The Gown by Jennifer Robson (Harper Collins 2019)
A sweet book about the creation of Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding gown. She was then Princess Margaret. Robson used this event to round out a story of London still in the throes of post WWII. I would love to read this book to an 11–13-year-old girl. Such an opportunity to discuss history built around a subject that might be of interest to her.
The story centers around the women who embroidered the dress and the train. This cover illustrates what an incredible undertaking this was. The dress was constructed in three months with 350 women working on it.
The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry (Doubleday, 2024)
A short, simple book of staggering beauty. Barry has the Irish gift for language. The story is a Western set in Butte, Montana 1891 – still the wild west. Barry’s story links Irish immigrants drawn by the silver and copper mines to the Butte environment of poverty, desperation, and aspiration. We have lovers, outlaws, half-breeds, horses, murder, and mayhem. I found myself reading too quickly, then stopping to reread paragraphs to soak up the descriptive beauty. Read it!
Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World by Craig Foster (HarperOne, 2024)
It’s a fascinating book by the producer of the Oscar winning documentary, “My Octopus Friend.” There are so many things to love in the book – the amazing creatures in his sea-world, his life at the tip of South Africa, his extreme endurance training and his body’s natural response to excess stress. Woven through this is a preachiness about the role of man in taming nature and the evil wrought by our development from pristine hunter-gather existence to agriculture, to capitalism, to global warming, etc. Foster is careful to weigh the value of what we have lost against the value of our current conveniences.
His purpose is to convince us to slow down. To open our eyes, and all senses, to the influence nature still plays in our lives – if we let it. And overriding all is the message – before it is too late.
The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischveli (Scribe, 2019)
Coming in at 934 pages, this book is an investment of time. Written like a memoir, the plot spans from the Russian Revolution in 1917 through the 1990s. It details the lives and deaths of a Georgian family. There are seven lives detailed. The eighth life is the surviving teenager.
The Eighth Life reads like a soap opera. It could have been reduced by ¼ and read better. But I enjoy a good soap so stuck with it to the end. There is lots and lots of Russian history – a plus in my mind. And it’s related incidentally, so not off-putting. If you read 50 pages a day, in 19 days you will have it mastered!
The Promise by Damon Galgut (Europa Editions, 2021)
Though winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, I didn’t relish this novel. For starters, in the first chapter, you learn what the promise is, which you know will be ignored, and by the end of the book the promise is kept. So much for the plot hook. Without naming years, the book spans South Africa from the 1950s through the end of apartheid in the 90s, and into the 21st century.
There is plenty of incidental history told through the eyes of a middle-class white family. We follow the oldest child, a boy who deserts the army, and eventually finds himself an unhappy bourgeois land-owner. The second child is a beautiful young woman who thrives on the prosperous white life. The third child is the survivor—remote, imbued with virtue of service to others. She is not only the promise keeper, but the character most likely to cope in the new South Africa.
Let’s Have a Conversation:
Do you have the feeling that your “to read” list will keep growing rather than get smaller? Have you exchanged books with friends or do you prefer to own your copies?