Tag Archives: genre: non-fiction

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark

authors, non-fiction, true crime August 4, 2020 Leave a comment

I won’t say I’m a true crime obsessive but I will say that it is one of things I do periodically get obsessed with and can’t get off of until I’m literally having nightmares and the rest of my world is suffering from a lack of decent rest. Criminal Minds is one of my favorite shows, I watch endless episodes of the many shows on Investigative Discovery.  I read true crime books and I find myself down the Wikipedia rabbit hole of unsolved murders and missing persons and unidentified remains.

Fortunately, I haven’t completely succumbed to podcasts yet.

Like many people, I find serial killers endlessly fascinating, because they are so completely different than normal people. How can they do the terrible things they do? What are their methods? Their motives? What makes them tick? But it’s hard to study these things. The gruesome nature of the subject matter is the stuff of nightmares, and it’s hard not to feel like a ghoulish voyeur going through crime scene information and notes and message boards and anything you can get your hands on. You begin to worry if you’re like them, if you’re capable of such violence. You begin to relate to the victims. It’s a dark place and can become a very dark obsession that’s hard to pull yourself out of.

This book popped up as recommended for me in 2018, and I think that was around the time they arrested a 70+ year old man for the crimes extensively reported on by Michelle McNamara in her book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer.

McNamara was the wife of well known comedian Patton Oswalt. She was a very talented writer, but she had issues with pills, and she actually died two years before the book was released due to an accidental drug overdose of prescription drugs. Oswalt, investigative journalist Billy Jensen, and crime writer Paul Haynes completed the book from her extensive notes after her death. Most of it was already written and just needed to be organized.

I haven’t read that many true crime books for the simple reason that most of them aren’t very well written. They’re informative and interesting enough but they don’t tell the story very well. The authors writing them are not true storytellers. They’re retired cops or investigative journalists (where storytelling technique isn’t the most important thing), or FBI agents, or in the case of the latest true crime book I read, a sports journalist, or whoever.

Let’s just say that the Truman Capotes don’t come along very often.

Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is the best true crime book I’ve read since In Cold Blood (which I have to revisit because I haven’t read it in years). It was captivating and smart and so completely captured the humanity of the Golden State Killer’s victims. She told their story and explained her investigation into this guy’s identity in such a way that didn’t feel voyeuristic, which is a feeling I sometimes get from true crime books. I didn’t feel like I was prying into the lives of victims in a ghoulish way at the worst moment of their existence, I was learning their names and their lives and they were becoming people I knew who happened to have a terrible thing happen to them, not exhibits who have emotional scars or worse on display for all to see.

This book didn’t lead to a tip that meant the arrest of the Golden State Killer, but it led to enough attention that the case came back into prominence. It couldn’t be ignored. McNamara wrote the book after writing articles on the serial rapist and serial killer she had coined “The Golden State Killer” for Los Angeles Magazine in 2013.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department finally arrested Joseph James DeAngelo on April 24, 2018 and charged him with first degree murder based on DNA evidence, 42 years after his first rape. The statute of limitations had expired for his burglaries and rapes, so he couldn’t be charged with those crimes, but on June 29, 2020 DeAngelo plead guilty to 13 counts of first degree murder with special circumstances and 13 counts of kidnapping in order to avoid the death penalty.

Michelle McNamara has been gone for four years. She didn’t get to see the publication of her book, or see the arrest and guilty plea of a serial killer she was helping to find, or see her daughter grow up.

But this case, this book, ended up being her life’s work. It is good work. It’s a true crime book, but it’s more than that, because true crimes should be about more than just crime, and this book is those extra things. It’s a biography and a memoir – victims, law enforcement, ordinary citizens, the dark side of the American dream. It’s a book about what people can do when they pool resources to find someone who needs to be found. It’s a book about searching for justice.

It’s a true crime book, but it’s a really good true crime book. It’s a true crime book the way true crime books should be written, and if you’re going to read true crime books, you should read I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.

Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002

autobiography, essays, humor, memoir May 30, 2019 Leave a comment

Ah yes, Theft By Finding – my return to David Sedaris.

After 2016 I basically didn’t pay any attention to Sedaris again until last year when I borrowed this audiobook from the library. I actually went to one of his readings for this book, which was highly enjoyable. I had planned to get an autograph but it was Sunday night and I couldn’t wait on the line since I had to work the next day.

This book was essentially diary entries of Sedaris’s from 1977-2002, and he admits he went back and filled in some gaps and made sure everything made sense before putting them out.

I loved these stories. Whether they’re tales of his early work in construction or of his family at the beach, I enjoyed them thoroughly – although not the 9/11 entry so much. To me, that entry, while well written, felt lost to me. I guess we all felt lost then. It brought back too much of that feeling of waiting around with nothing to do, waiting for something to happen that never happens. I hated that feeling. I hated remembering that feeling.

I think what I like most about Sedaris, and maybe he’s done this on purpose, but maybe he hasn’t, is that feeling he invokes of being a passenger and observer in his own life. He is observing, but he also somehow gives the impression that he has zero control over what happens to him. He randomly ends up on the street buying pot in the middle of the night because his roommate was supposed to do it, but he went to go get laid instead, so David had to do it because his roommate talked him into coming. (This isn’t an actual example, but it’s just the kind of thing Sedaris does – things happen to him like he has no choice in it).

Maybe some people find this annoying. Even I do sometimes. But I think part of Sedaris’s appeal to me is that I often feel like a passenger/observer taking part in my own life. There’s all that “Oh, you’re the heroine of your own story” bullshit out there, but really, I’m not fully in control of my own circumstances 90% of the time, and a lot of the time, I feel like everyone else on the stage and I’m the only person in the audience.

I even managed to hook my husband on Sedaris with this book, because I made him listen to portions of it in the car with me when we went places. I’m looking forward to his next batch, which is supposedly a thing that’s happening (supposedly 2003 – present-ish).

Also, “theft by finding” is a real thing. According to Wikipedia:

Theft by finding occurs when someone chances upon an object which seems abandoned and takes possession of the object but fails to take steps to establish whether the object is genuinely abandoned and not merely lost or unattended.

I really like this phrase and idea for some reason.

Theft By Finding was a solid series of essays/diary entries. Any David Sedaris fan will enjoy it.

Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged The Armenian Genocide

history, non-fiction April 18, 2018 Leave a comment

Ah yes, a return to the World War I era, but something only tangentially related to the war itself.

There is a lot of “controversy” surrounding the Armenian Genocide, mostly in that it isn’t recognized as a genocide by most of the world, and the rest of the world has only been recognizing it in increments. Shamefully, the United States does not recognize the Armenian Genocide as a genocide, although 48 states do. Also, the UK and Israel (yeah, Israel, no joke) do not recognize it as a genocide.

From about 1915-1923, the Ottoman Empire, particularly Ottoman Turkey, systematically targeted the Armenian population for physical and cultural extermination. First, they deported the intellectual community leaders (most of whom were eventually murdered) from Constantinople, then removed the able bodied male population by straight massacre and forced labor, and then the deportation of women, children,  infirm and elderly people by forced death marches to and through the Syrian desert. The general consensus is that about 1.5 million Armenians were killed during this time.

Turkey, to this day, either says the numbers were grossly exaggerated or that the these events didn’t take place at all. Yeah, right.

One, and (to me) possibly the biggest, indication of the fact that it was, in fact, a genocide was it was used as a model for later genocides (looking at you, Hitler).

And so, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), from 1920-1922, engaged in an assassination campaign which eliminated Ottoman political and military leaders responsible for the massacres, including the “Number One” (primary target), Talaat Pasha.

Eric Bogosian’s book, Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged The Armenian Genocide, expands extensively on this history lesson. Bogosian starts by explaining that he didn’t feel much connection to his Armenian heritage, partially because it wasn’t talked about much. He went into the fact that his grandfather, usually so mild-mannered and gentle, said things like, “If you see a Turk, shoot him.”

Bogosian then explains the history of the Armenian population of Eastern Europe and within the Ottoman Empire with other communities of the Ottoman Empire, Russia, etc…and explains, basically, how the circumstances for this genocide came about.

Bogosian uses Soghomon Tehlirian as a lens through which to focus the story of the Armenians. Tehlirian lost his family to the genocide, suffered from what sounded like PTSD, and went on to assassinate Talaat Pasha. He was eventually acquitted, because his lawyers successfully put the Ottoman leadership on trial, rather Tehlirian, who described the trauma of seeing his family murdered (although he never actually saw this). He claimed to have dreams of his mother who demanded he avenge her death, and the deaths of his brothers and sisters. Including extended family, Tehlirian lost about 85 members of his family in the genocide.

Operation Nemesis was a really interesting book that I recommend. I learned a lot about a topic that I knew almost nothing about and I got to be disgusted by the fact that my country fails to correctly label a genocide as a genocide. It did a really good job laying out everything for the reader (or, in my case, listener) so that everything was clear.

PS: since only 48 states recognize the Armenian Genocide as a genocide, I looked up which ones didn’t. Anyone who knows or understands the United States at all will not be surprised to know those states are those bastions of education and enlightenment, Alabama and Mississippi.

The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible

history, non-fiction April 12, 2018 Leave a comment

One of my favorite things to do when I’m feeling particularly masochistic is wade into the swamp of current affairs. I try to keep up as best I can, but I find it depressing and frequently tune out due to lack of mental strength. Listening to politicians talk, to me, is particularly exhausting, especially if I don’t subscribe to their ideological worldview and I find most of them to be raging hypocrites. Listening to bullshit cliches and never actually learning real information is both frustrating and infuriating.

And nowhere, nowhere, do you get more cliches with no information than the big highlight events: state of the union, inauguration, presidential debates, etc…

Anyone who has ever paid any attention at all knows that politicians on both sides of the aisle LOVE to invoke our Founding Fathers. It’s their all time favorite thing, and if they can link Jefferson, Adams, Washington, etc…to their causes, they do it.

I hate this invocation, personally. The men who founded our country had the foresight to give us an experimental, amendable (and so far, enduring) system of government but they lived in a world we would barely recognize as modern and would probably think most of our modern conveniences were witchcraft. Older Americans, and quite many younger ones, barely understand how something like television actually works. Do you think our founders would have any informed opinions on the damage Fox News does to our democracy? They’d barely be able to cope with catching up on our technology, let alone render a valuable opinion on its implications for American life.

David Sehat’s The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible takes a look at just why our politicians do that.

It’s a popular myth, one that Sehat debunks thoroughly in The Jefferson Rule, that the political climate at the founding of our country was, somehow, less polarized.  Our most enlightened founders put aside their petty differences to come together and magically come up with a Constitution and system of government and somehow execute this new radical, never before done plan without any conflicts.

Even the newest student of history, one opening his/her first non-high school textbook, knows this is BS. Maybe it was less “polarized” but it was no less contentious. While Washington was unanimously elected twice and called for non-partisanship and warned against faction and political parties, his cabinet was constantly fighting with each other. In particular, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were not so secretly constantly at each other’s throats and tearing each other apart behind each other’s backs. Hamilton favored a stronger central government, Jefferson favored less consolidated power. Washington tended to favor Hamilton and his view, and Jefferson towards the end of his tenure and then after he left the cabinet, worked to undermine Hamilton AND Washington.

It’s important to understand Jefferson’s views (smaller, more limited government, weaker executive branch, etc…) because it’s Jefferson whose views and actions then become the most problematic. While Jefferson preached the glories of small government principles, his acts as President strongly contradict these things. To argue the Louisiana Purchase was anything but an exercise of federal power is to do the most high flying of mental gymnastics. And Jefferson’s protege, James Madison, eventually came around to Hamilton’s thinking on the national bank and strong-armed northern states when America began its first foreign war since the Revolution.

But Jefferson was the first to refer to the principles of the founding as the end all, be all of reasoning. He used phrases like “the true principles of the Revolution” and called his fellow countrymen heretics to “the holy cause of freedom.” He was the first to take “founding principles” and use them to back his own and ideas. It’s still done to this day, the rule of the title being, “Thou Shalt Not Betray Founding Principles.”

Sehat goes on to argue that politicians and ideologues who refer to founding principles are those who can’t make a more rational/contemporary argument for what they believe should be done, and appeal to the warm sentiment the American people feel for their founders and their founding.

Very few politicians of the modern age actively reject the idea of following founding principles. One of the most prominent was Theodore Roosevelt, who in his 1905 inaugural address, said, “Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have outgrown. We now face other perils, the very existence of which it was impossible that they should foresee.”

What is interesting is that this appeal to founding principles fades during and after the Civil War until about the 1920s (this time includes Teddy Roosevelt, as previously mentioned). This, according to Sehat, is because the Civil War rendered the American political landscape a complete disaster and that nobody wanted to touch founding principles. The Constitution was supposed to prevent armed conflict, instead the country went to war over what the Constitution meant.

What I find most interesting is that while the Founding Fathers were incredibly educated, enlightened men for their time and we act as if they had all the answers, they definitely didn’t have all the answers. Part of the brilliance of the Constitution is that  questions of power (federal vs. state, responsibilities not specifically enumerated in the document, etc..) are basically ambiguous and left unanswered. Argument over them is the answer. Things are taken on a case by case basis and we basically duke it out in elections and in courts to come up with answers to questions the Founders left no specific answer to. It’s actually brilliant, allowing the government of the people to change as the governed change. The brilliance of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton is that they planned it that way, even if they were arguing over interpretations of the Constitution before the ink was dry.

The Jefferson Rule was an interesting, intelligent read. Considering the current political environment in the United States, I highly recommend it for anyone interested in better understanding current affairs.

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

history, non-fiction, supernatural April 5, 2018 Leave a comment

This was another book I read in the spirit of Halloween, and it didn’t disappoint!

Colin Dickey’s Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places is full of ghost stories. He takes us to prisons, abandoned mental asylums, old mansions, cemeteries, churches, “Indian burial grounds,” and the like.

There are some stories everyone probably already knows – like the stories of the Winchester house, Amityville, the LaLauries of New Orleans, etc… – are well known. Dickey does jump in to debunk some of these myths and legends. For example, the Winchester House legend – that Sarah Winchester built a house to confuse spirits murdered by her husband’s Winchester rifles after speaking to a medium – is stoked by even the caretakers of the home, but in reality, it just isn’t true. Sarah Winchester had a lot of money and a taste for unusual architecture. She wasn’t any more afraid of ghosts than anyone else in the 1800s.

Aside from jumping into (and in some cases, debunking) well known myths and legends of American culture, Dickey uses ghost stories as a critical lens to explore the American psyche. Ghostland takes a look at why we, as Americans, both use and need ghost stories to explain ourselves to ourselves. A ghost story may white wash history, or try to assuage our consciences about something that happened that we can’t justify. They can be used to calm fears and teach lessons to children.

Dickey says:

“Paying attention to the way ghost stories change through the years — and why those changes are made — can tell us a great deal about how we face our fears and our anxieties. Even when these stories have a basis in fact and history, there’s often significant embellishment and fabrication before they catch on in our imagination, and teasing out these alterations is key to understanding how ghosts shape our relationship to the past.”

I loved this book. Loved it. As someone who has always loved a good ghost story, it was fun reading, in depth, about lots of well known American hauntings. It was fun to listen to their backgrounds and what these stories tell us about ourselves.

Anyone interested in pop culture, hauntings, and history ought to read Ghostland. It’s a lens we don’t look examine ourselves through too often, and well worth a read (or a listen on audiobook, which is how I experienced it).

Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934

non-fiction March 15, 2018 Leave a comment

Back when I was a temp at my job, or back when I was still a clerk with less responsibility, I spent a loooot of time on Wikipedia. For some reason I spent a lot of time reading about organized crime. I think I did this because there was a lot of material and I had a lot of time to kill. I even ended up with a favorite gangster. Plus, it was all very interesting. Culturally, the gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s have always been glorified, by locals and by Hollywood. Hell, this continues to this day. John Gotti is still a hero in his old neighborhood.

So I saw Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934 by Bryan Burrough in the audiobook library, and I was intrigued, because while I’d read a lot about gangsters, I hadn’t read much about law enforcement. I knew that a lot of mob higher ups were hardly ever arrested or convicted and that didn’t really begin until the establishment of the RICO act and the big cases in the 1970s. And considering the kind of attention the FBI has been getting these days, I thought this might be a good time to learn more about its origins.

This all said, I found this book disappointing. I didn’t realize when I checked it out but it was an abridged production, so I didn’t get the whole book, and further, they focused a lot on the gangsters, which you expect, but I felt they left a lot out about the FBI.

Most of the book covered how the FBI came into prominence, but left out a lot of background. They made headlines by killing or capturing members of the midwest’s most notorious outlaw gangs: the Dillinger gang, the Karpis gang, the Barker gang, Baby Face Nelson’s gang, and the Barrow gang, whose most famous (and founding) members were Bonnie & Clyde Barrow. What they didn’t cover much was the origin story: that the Bureau first came into being after the assassination of President McKinley, when now President Theodore Roosevelt wanted more power to monitor “anarchists” believed to be a threat to the United States, how the Departments of Labor and Justice had been keeping records but a new government agency was formed after the assassination, how the Mann Act played into the expanding role of the agency, etc…

In the part of the book I heard, Burrough does document the early power struggle between J. Edgar Hoover and his main rival, and he does go into a lot of what drives Hoover – inferiority complex, jealousy, etc… – but there really isn’t that much about specifics of how the FBI really came to be, and only a minimal amount about the power struggles at the FBI early on until Hoover clearly grabbed power.

The portion of the book chosen to be in the audiobook was mostly the government’s pursuit of the criminal gangs across the midwest, but a lot of it I already knew. I always like hearing about John Dillinger (a bank robber and a gentleman, so the story goes), but there wasn’t much I didn’t know about him either.

Maybe what I’m really looking for is a biography on Hoover? I don’t know. I can’t recommend or not recommend Public Enemies in print. I didn’t read the whole book. I can whole heartedly not recommend the abridged audiobook version to anyone who has even a basic understanding of what went on in the midwest in 1933 and 1934. There just isn’t enough new information, and the whole thing is a waste of time if you have even rudimentary knowledge of the events of that time.

Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story

history, memoir, non-fiction February 4, 2018 Leave a comment

I don’t remember where I picked up Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story. Probably at Barnes & Noble. But I do remember why I picked it up. Our intelligence agencies have been under attack, particularly by Donald Trump, since before he was elected president. And I wanted to have a better idea of what happened at the CIA and got the opportunity.

The author, Jack Devine, worked for the CIA from the 1960s through the 1990s and now runs some kind of “security” company – which sounds like a fancy spy agency, when he describes what his new company does. He says that although he retired in 1999, he could probably have a tail on somebody faster than just about anyone else in the world. I thought this was slightly outlandish, but now I believe him.

Devine started as someone who worked in the CIA equivalent of the mail room and who rose through the ranks to become a high ranking executive. Among other things, he ran covert ops on at least three continents, lived abroad with his wife and children, and knew Aldrich Ames, one of the biggest traitors in the history of the CIA and in modern American history.

The book was fascinating. I read this one. It took me about a month because of wedding planning, but it isn’t a very long book and should be considered a must read of contemporary American history.

Devine recounts for readers how the CIA worked while he was there, and his recipes for “good hunting” – running successful spy operations that endanger as few people as possible while also gathering the most useful possible information from the most reliable sources possible. Devine details how he built relationships with his informants, how the agency operated during his time there, and what he viewed as his and his colleagues’ successes and failures during his career.

Devine also goes into what he believes are problems with the agency now, the biggest being that the emphasis of gathering intelligence has been placed on the backburner and that the CIA is involved in too many paramilitary operations and the jobs that they used to do – meeting people, gathering information and cultivating reliable sources – have been given to the military, who don’t do as good a job because they aren’t trained to do that job. The CIA has also been ensnared bureaucracy and, of late, has been highly politicized.

As interesting as the book was, I had to read it with some grains of salt. Devine worked for the CIA, and still thinks quite highly of it. Everything he says could be lies and considering it’s his legacy, he has plenty of reasons to lie.

That said, I don’t think he’s lying. I think he may sanitize some of the harsher truths and the role he played in some of the stuff that went on, but I don’t think he’s lying outright. I could be entirely wrong, of course, but he strikes me as a man of integrity. He never once calls himself a patriot, but I would call him one. He does call his colleagues patriots, and with few exceptions, thinks very highly of them, even when he disagreed with them either politically or with the actions they chose doing their jobs. It was very refreshing not to hear someone trashing their colleagues left, right, and sideways for attention.

Lastly, some of the good writing in this book is clearly attributed to cowriter Vernon Loeb, who is a professional writer. Props for that.

I highly recommend Good Hunting. Part memoir, part history lesson, I thought it was a well written, highly educational, and very enjoyable read for anyone interested in the inner-workings of the CIA.

The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans

history, non-fiction January 23, 2018 1 Comment

This book was one of my best literary surprises of 2017.

Everyone knows the horror stories that came out of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The mass executions, forced labor, illness, starvation and almost any other torture that can be imagined probably has a home in a Nazi death camp. My own grandfather was in the United States Army and had pictures of liberated prisoners. From what I understand, his unit helped liberate the camps. When he died, my mom told me my grandmother didn’t know what to do with them. She didn’t want to keep them because they were so horrifying, but didn’t have the heart to just get rid of them either. I’ll have to ask my mom what happened with that. I don’t remember.

This story, however, was kind of new to me. As we’ve put World War II further and further behind us, some of the stories have started to fade, and aren’t as well known. I remember vaguely hearing once that the Nazis made things from the human skin of the people they murdered, but it never really stuck in my mind. Maybe I dismissed it as too horrible to be real, or whatever, but The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans dives right in to that particular rumor and turns it inside out.

The book was written by Mark Jacobson, a journalist, who ends up with a lampshade purchased by Skip Henderson for $35. Henderson bought the lampshade in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina from a sidewalk rummage sale in New Orleans. I can’t remember if he actually bought it from self-described neo-nazis, but the lampshade was advertised by the seller as made from victims of the Holocaust.

Henderson, who couldn’t figure out what to do with the lampshade and the idea of having a murdered somebody’s skin in his home made him restless and uneasy, sent the lampshade to Jacobson and basically said, “You’re the investigative journalist, investigate!”

And Jacobson sets out to investigate the lampshade. Genetic testing initially confirmed that the lampshade was made from human skin. Jacobson went on to visit Buchenwald, where such items were supposedly made, Holocaust museums in Jerusalem and Washington DC  (which both refused the lampshade and maintained that items made of human skin were a myth), Holocaust deniers/neo-Nazis, a psychic, the mythology surrounding items supposedly made of human skin, the mythology surrounding the Holocaust, and the black market in which these kinds of taboo items are allegedly bought and sold.

I say allegedly, because in spite of the fact that human skin artifacts were widely reported by prisoners in the death camps, this lampshade is the first grisly artifact of this type to be discovered and subsequently investigated. Most Holocaust museums maintain that objects made of human skin were a legend, some kind of mass hallucination in the mind of desperate prisoners who, with good reason, saw even more exaggerated evil than was really there. Still though, most (contemporary) legends have some roots in historical truths.

I loved this book. First of all, I listened to it, and the narrator, Johnny Heller, really did a great job. I liked his voice, and he did a wonderful job balancing the seriousness of the subject matter with the dark humor Jacobson employs all through his investigations in Poland, Germany, Israel, and the United States. It’s clear Jacobson doesn’t take neo-Nazis seriously, but he does try to get to the bottom of their insanity. And some of the stuff these people say is darkly hilarious except for the fact that they’re serious.

I don’t remember exactly what happened to the lampshade but IIRC, at the time of publication, Jacobson still had it and could sleep at night having done the best he could to get to the truth. Or something of that nature.

So The Lampshade comes highly recommended by me. It was a well researched report on a grisly topic that is significant in not just remembering the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by the Third Reich, but that there is a continued ongoing effort made by good people to put things right in small ways after an unimaginable horror. For all the research about the Holocaust, this book happened because neither Skip Henderson nor Mark Jacobson could live with the idea that a lampshade allegedly made of a Holocaust victim’s skin was in their possession and they made no attempt to do justice by the victim – in this case, the only justice available being to discover the truth and tell the story.

 

The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism

history, non-fiction November 26, 2017 Leave a comment

I’ve always been a fan of the Jews. My parents enrolled me in a Jewish nursery school, I am well versed in Jewish traditions for a non-Jewish person, and if I had to pick an organized religion to belong to, it’d probably be Judaism. I can’t really suspend my disbelief enough to be part of a religion, but if forced by the state or something, I’d be Jewish.

And honestly, what’s not to like about a non-violent group of educated people who mind their own business and like reading and feasting? Nothing. That’s what.

But as we all know, Jews get a lot of flack from…well, most other groups. They’re blamed for everything from the black plague epidemics in the middle ages to the reason Germany was in such bad shape after World War I. (Spoiler alert: neither of these things were the Jews fault.)

Most things Jews are blamed for aren’t their fault, and so, as a sympathetic gentile, I started listening to The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.

I don’t know what I thought I was going to hear, but it wasn’t this.

The book went a lot into historical antisemitism, from the the early days of Christianity through to very recently. The stories from the past, about how Jews were blamed for disappearances, murders, disease during the Middle Ages, and then again during the 20th century where it was believed they were masterminds of a global conspiracy to…I don’t even know what, I was familiar with and understood.

Antisemitism does take a lot of forms and has changed over time, but some of the stuff Goldhagen cites as modern antisemitism I’m not sure is, particularly later stuff. The best example being that policy disagreements with the state of Israel are antisemitic. Sure, a lot of people who oppose Israel’s policies ARE antisemitic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is. There were a lot of blanket statements here I found too broad.

Goldhagen also takes shots at recent scholars but I don’t know enough about them to really form an opinion on whether or not they’re antisemitic. Goldhagen certainly sounds as if they are, but I really don’t know them well enough and his argument is clearly spun to sound like it.

Anyway, some of this stuff was so ridiculous I nearly turned it off (it was an audiobook). I ended up listening all the way through but a lot of it felt like it was a reach and they really could have made a shorter, better book if they’d left some of the later, wilder claims. I believe he was accusing all of Europe and the United States for being antisemitic for…reasons. I’m not denying antisemitism exists, I’ve seen it myself, but this idea that everything is done with antisemitic motivation is over the top.

It also didn’t help the audiobook’s cause that I felt like the person reading it (whose name escapes me now) was practically yelling at me. It sounded more like a political speech than a book, and it went on for hours. Outrage and anger and volume are not really what makes a good audiobook for me.

There was some interesting history in this book. There really was. A lot of the stuff about much earlier antisemitism I didn’t know and was fascinated by its origins, but the whole later part of the book, to me, was a waste of time. I’m sure there are other books on antisemitism out there, and I’d recommend one of those before this one. The last parts of this book felt more like grasping at straws than a lot of enlightening information.

I’d go with a different book.

Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea

history, non-fiction November 25, 2017 Leave a comment

One of my favorite activities is finding out all the gaps in my high school education. I don’t know why I love doing this. It’s usually in a spirit of complaining about all the things Yorktown High School could have just done better. I have a lot of critiques of literally everything about my high school education.

One thing I never understood when I was in US history class was why we skipped learning about the actual wars the country was involved in. We’d study all the way up to the war and skip the war entirely, and move on to the aftermath of the war. Seriously. As 16-17-18 year olds, it made us so angry. The war was the interesting part.

Naturally we spent a lot of time leading up to the Civil War and then immediately skipped the Civil War and moved on to Reconstruction…

…which means I missed this whole thing about Sherman’s March to the Sea and exactly what it entailed. My mom was stunned when she mentioned it and I, having never studied the actual Civil War in any fashion, had no idea what she was talking about.

So when I saw Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea by Noah Andre Trudeau, I figured this might be a good opportunity to catch up on some history I wasn’t all that familiar with.

Well. It kinda worked.

I absorbed a lot of information about the strategy of the Union Army and what Sherman was doing. I ask again, since Sherman effectively conducted the campaign that won the Civil War for the Union, why wasn’t he put on the money?

What I didn’t learn was much of where Sherman went or when.

I listened to this book as an audiobook but I think I probably should have done it as a real book. I assume a real book would have some maps? I have no idea what the geography of Georgia or South Carolina is. I don’t know where the crucial rail lines were. I’m not familiar with the finer points of the terrain down there. The significance of long descriptions of military tactics, movements, and actions that cut off Georgia and South Carolina from the rest of the Confederacy were all lost on me.

It was an interesting book, I think someone getting into Civil War history would really like it. I think someone reading the book would really like it. I don’t recommend the audiobook for beginners though. It was just too hard for me to follow without also checking out a visual guide.