Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in May 2026

 

History Nation:  A Citizen's Guide to the History of the United States.  David Hanna.  Morris & Essex Books, 2024.  357 pages.  

David Hanna has written an excellent and concise overview/review of American history, just in time for America's semiquincentennial, and I'm extremely jealous.  Hanna is a high school history teacher and author, and he's basically written up his class curriculum.  It feels like his curriculum and mine were very similar.  Here, he's told America's story, albeit in broad strokes, the good, the bad, and the ugly, using the "city on a hill" theme as bookends, from John Winthrop's use of the phrase in 1630's "A Model of Christian Charity" to Ronald Reagan's invocation of the phrase throughout his political career.  He connects events and ideas across time and makes them incredibly accessible.  It is a progressive and inclusive historical summary, but it's much more balanced and objective than Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, a book that some reviewers have compared it to.  If you're interested in celebrating "America250" with a solid review that will encourage thinking about America's story and how it should be studied and taught, this is a great book for you.

Author Talk

Democracy:  A Case Study.  David A. Moss.  Belknap Press, 2019.  784 pages.

David A. Moss is a business administration professor at Harvard, and a proponent of the Harvard Business School Case Study Method of classroom discussion.  He designed a course in which he applied those principles to the study of history and began training secondary and college history teachers to use it in their classrooms.  The idea is to begin with an objective summary of a case and break it down in an open student-led discussion of 5 questions:  1.  Define the problem, 2. What is the context?, 3. What key facts must be considered?, 4.  What alternatives are available to decision makers?, 5.  Finally, as the decision makers at the time of the case, what action should we take?  In this book, Moss has selected 19 cases that represent challenges to democracy in American history, some you're familiar with and some you're not.  The case is left open-ended to allow contemplation or discussion, but the outcome of each event is discussed in an appendix.  The whole point of this book is to encourage discussion.  As we are becoming more and more anxious about the state of our country and the rising divisions and tensions that threaten us and our ideals and discourage constructive debate, discussion of these cases in classrooms, book clubs, friends groups, etc. is a powerful antidote.  I'm engaged with it as part of a lifelong learning class, and I thoroughly enjoy the thoughtful and respectful discussion of history and politics that I haven't been able to enjoy for twenty years or more. The structure of the book allows a facilitator to pick a few of the cases to study as a group (My group is only doing 4 cases together.   The facilitator does the classes at other times with other groups and picks other cases.), but be sure to include Moss' introduction and conclusion as well, because they contain great insights.  This is another fantastic book for America's semiquincentennial, and I highly suggest it as a group read.

A Podcast episode reviewing the case and book

Bringing Down the Colonel:  A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "Powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington.  Patricia Miller.  Sarah Crichton Books, 2018.  384 pages.  

I can summarize this book in three words:  Men are pigs.  And those three words are a major slander against pigs everywhere.  It's 1894, and Madeline Pollard does the unthinkable, she files a breach of promise lawsuit against the popular and powerful Kentucky Congressman William Breckinridge, alleging that the pair had begun a decade-long affair when she was a teen, despite the thirty year age gap and the fact that he was married.  That affair, she charged, had led to multiple pregnancies, and, when Breckinridge's wife died, he promised to marry Pollard before abruptly marrying another woman, leaving her abandoned and broken.  Shockingly, she won, and the case captured America's attention and mobilized Kentucky's women to enter the political world for the first time, ending Breckinridge's political career.  However, much of the book is a history of the cultural and legal abuse suffered by women in the 19th century.  The double standard applied to the genders was staggering.  A woman who had premarital sex was considered to be irredeemably "ruined" for the rest of her life while there were no negative consequences for men.  A woman who had the temerity to work in any mixed-gender environment or exercised any sort of social independence was widely considered to be automatically sexually available.  In the South, society conformed to the old English aristocratic patriarchal idea that every woman in a man's household was his to do with as he pleased, whether she was an indentured servant, slave, wife, or relative.  Rape was impossible to prosecute because prevailing legal opinion held that a woman could only be penetrated if she was willing.  "Doctors" wrote medical textbooks arguing that education caused women's internal organs to dry up and to fail, creating chronic invalids and early deaths.  Thousands of babies conceived out of wedlock were murdered, dumped, and abandoned.  The author creates a quite vivid, disturbing, and enraging context for the society that was shaken when Madeline Pollard defied the status quo and took her stand, becoming an unlikely women's rights crusader and icon.

2012 movie trailer

The Great Gatsby.  F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.  208 pages.  

For years, I believed that I didn't like The Great Gatsby.  Maybe because in ninth grade I couldn't relate to the fast, alcohol and jazz drenched, social world, but then again, more than forty years later, I still can't relate. I mean, invited to parties?  What's that like?  However, in the past couple of weeks, I've come across multiple references to it and figured that the universe was telling me that it was time for a re-read.  Now I see why it's remained a touchstone in American culture for a century.  This time, I enjoyed it.  It's such a classic, quintessentially American story and so incredibly modern for a novel published over a hundred years ago.  Just to refresh your memory: The Great Gatsby follows narrator Nick Carraway as he becomes entangled with the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, who throws lavish parties in hopes of rekindling his past romance with Daisy Buchanan. As Gatsby pursues this dream, tensions with Daisy’s husband Tom Buchanan lead to betrayal, tragedy, and ultimately Gatsby’s downfall.  My enjoyment may have been heightened by the fact that I listened to the audiobook version read superbly by actor Tim Robbins.

Author Talk

Circe.  Madeline Miller.  Little, Brown and Company, 2018.  400 pages.  

I'm a big fan of modern retellings of myths, if they are well done, Stephen Fry's latest books for example.  This book got all the buzz and lots of acclaim when it was published, and, although it took me a minute to get into it, and the language is sometimes a little overwrought, I found it to be successful and entertaining.  Circe, a daughter of the Titan and sun god Helios, feels weak and powerless by comparison and just doesn't fit in too well amongst the gods, constantly struggling to find her niche.  She discovers that niche in pharmakeia, the art of using herbs, potions, poisons, and drugs to perform transportations and other magic.  Soon, that ability and the great skill which she develops are seen as a threat to Zeus and the other Olympians, and Zeus forces Helios to banish Circe to a deserted island for the rest of eternity.  Despite being banished, Circe manages to cross paths with many of the famous characters in Greek mythology like the Minotaur, Scylla, Daedalus, Icarus, Ariadne, Hermes, Athena, Jason, Medea, and, of course, Odysseus.  The result is a great story told from a fresh, new feminist perspective.

Author Talk

Paradox.  Douglas Preston and Aletheia Preston.  Forge Books, 2026.  352 pages.  Book 2 of 2, Cash and Colcord series.

I took a little action thriller detour for the newest book by one of my favorite thriller authors, Douglas Preston.  For this one, he teamed with his daughter, "a reformed lawyer and prosecutor turned thriller author," to continue a series he began with Extinction, starring Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Frankie Cash and local Sheriff Jim Colcord.  That book set up a "Jurassic Park"-type resort in the Colorado mountains where scientists had brought extinct megafauna mammals back to life with, of course, dangerous unintended consequences.  Specifically, in this case, the scientists went the extra mile and re-created murderous Neanderthals.  Now, sometime later, with the "Neanders" still hiding in the mountains, Cash and Colcord are called in for a strange murder.  A reclusive, schizophrenic hermit is found ritualistically tortured and murdered in his cabin.  Meanwhile, a holy relic in Rome is inexplicably defaced.  As Cash and Colcord investigate,  they discover not only a connection between the two, but also have to deal with more murders, intrusive press, violent protesters for and against the "Neanders," UFO/UAP researchers, and a fanatical secret society.  It's another fast-moving and thought-provoking page-turner, consistently Preston.  

A Persistent Echo.  Brian Kaufman.  Black Rose Writing, 2023.  225 pages.

This was one of those books that I discovered through a Facebook ad, and it seemed interesting.  It's 1897, and August Simms, an old man who has lived an adventurous life of exploration, returns to Rhome, Texas to die.  Fifteen years earlier in Rhome, Simms had experienced two great personal tragedies, events that have haunted Simms ever since.  He's also drawn back to Rhome by newspaper reports of mysterious flying machine sightings in the area, and he's always up for a mystery.  As he collects eyewitness accounts of the UFOs, he discovers that tensions are still roiling just under the surface, both tensions going back to that 1882 lynching and more current tensions arising from the rapidly evolving economic, social, and technological climate of the turn of the 20th century.  The book has lots of very strong reviews, but it didn't quite live up to that mark for me.  I would give it 3 or 3.5 stars out of 5, but maybe my rating is marred by the fact that I listened to the audiobook version and found the narration to be extremely poor.  It was so poor that I thought that it was maybe the author reading, and I was shocked to find that it is done by a professional narrator and actor.   He was so numbingly monotone that it made me think that even I could have a career in narration.

Author Talk

Ten Caesars:  Roman Emperors From Augustus to Constantine.  Barry Strauss.  Simon & Schuster, 2019.  432 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.  

Barry Strauss has written a history of the Roman Empire, nearly four centuries, told through the lives of ten emperors:  Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Diocletian and Constantine.  A while back, social media informed us that men think of ancient Rome constantly, and it must be true because social media said so.  I am not one of those men.  Nevertheless, this book is an easily accessible general history of the Roman Empire and an examination of its legacy still felt today. 

1945.  Robert Conroy.  Random House, 2007.  432 pages.  

Hours before Japanese Emperor Hirohito made the announcement of Japan's surrender to end World War II, a group of military officers staged a failed coup, intending to kidnap the Emperor and to prevent the surrender.  They wanted to follow the way of the bushido, fighting until either victory or death; surrender for them was never an option.  Fortunately, the coup collapsed rather quickly, but what if it had succeeded?  That's the premise of Robert Conroy's alternate history, 1945, and it allows him to explore a lot of very interesting questions.  Would the US have used more atomic bombs?  How many more American and Japanese casualties would have occurred and how long would it have taken to conquer Japan?  How would the American public respond to the continued death and devastation and what would be the effects on the home front?  What would happen to the relationship among the Big Three Allies?  What would the new post-war world look like?  Here, Conroy creates a comprehensive novel addressing all of these questions, using a number of characters, both fictional and historical. The real life characters and events are portrayed in a manner that reveal thorough research, and the speculation is sound.  It all makes a great story.  This was my first discovery of Robert Conroy's work which seems to be mostly alternate history.  It reminds me of Herman Wouk and Ken Follett, two of my all-time favorite historical fiction authors, and I will definitely explore more of his work.

2002 Movie Trailer

The Quiet American.  Graham Greene.  William Heinemann, 1955. 208 pages.

Another classic read, and there are many parallels between this book and another classic, The Great Gatsby.  Both are popular and critically acclaimed short novels that masterfully capture the zeitgeist of their decades, the 1920s and the 1950s - the decadence and the turmoil.  Both stories are told by jaded and cynical narrators and revolve around idealistic men who are secretly leading double lives, and there's a love triangle in each book.  Both books offer commentaries on the American psyche, particularly the "American Dream" and the idea of American exceptionalism.  Both books remain incredibly fresh and modern decades after their publication.  In The Quiet American, the narrator is British reporter Thomas Fowler, in Vietnam to cover the futile French effort to restore colonial control, and the idealistic young American leading the double life is Alden Pyle, a US Aid representative/CIA agent who is secretly coordinating with unsavory characters to carry out his own agenda, resulting in even more death and destruction.  Their personal conflict arises because they both love - or is it desire to own? - the same young Vietnamese woman named Phuong.  When Pyle is murdered, French colonial police lackadaisically investigate, and Fowler relates the story of their relationship against the violent backdrop of the Vietnamese war for independence, with daily explosions in Saigon and other cities and pitched battles in the countryside.  Beyond the human story, this is most definitely an anti-war and anti-imperialism novel, and its message is incredibly relevant today.  Published in 1955, it's amazing how insightful and prescient a British novelist was about America's upcoming war in Vietnam.  And yes, both books reflect the sexism and racism of their time, perhaps making them problematic for some sensitive readers.  

The Kaiser's Web.  Steve Berry.  Minotaur Books, 2021.  432 pages.  Book 16 of 20 in Cotton Malone series.

This is another entry in the Cotton Malone history thriller series by Steve Berry.  Retired Justice Department Special Agent Malone and his lover Cassiopeia Vitt are back in action, solving a historical mystery and preventing a world shattering tragedy, this time at the behest of former US President Danny Daniels who enlists them to assist his friend, the German Chancellor, as she attempts to thwart a takeover by a right-wing extremist.  The twist: is the said extremist possibly the son of escaped Nazi war criminal Martin Bormann or even the son of Hitler himself?  Everything is typical Berry, lots of action, twists, turns, and betrayals.  With only one or two exceptions, each Malone adventure is pretty consistently entertaining.  

Podcast interview

American Rambler:  Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed.  Isaac Fitzgerald.  Knopf, 2026.  352 pages.  

I'm only just realizing that "white trash memoir" is a literary subgenre.  I'm aware of many of the titles and authors associated with it, but I haven't really read any of the big ones.  When I chose this book, I wasn't really aware that it is an example.  I was intrigued by the subject matter, the search for the man behind the Johnny Appleseed myth, and the "tracing his footsteps across contemporary America" format.  I might not have picked it up had I known more about Fitzgerald.  He had a rough childhood, including long homeless stretches and emotional, if not physical, violence.  His parents had psychological issues.  He is/was a heavy drinker and drug user.  At almost 40 years old, he had never owned a car or signed a lease, spending his life sleeping out in the open or on somebody's couch or floor.  He freely admits that he has no compunction whatsoever about accepting handouts.  And he's not the brightest bulb.  For example, he actually planned to float down the Allegheny River on a cheap inflatable raft from Walmart, and, in one episode, he spent half of a baseball game rooting for the wrong team.  I wouldn't necessarily want to hang out with him, but that's just me.  I'm not typically drawn to Jack Kerouac types. All that being said, I actually enjoyed the book.  The meat of the story, of course the myth of Johnny Appleseed, real name John Chapman.  In the minds of many, Appleseed is an American legend like Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, the subject of many fantastic tall tales, but he was very much a real man with an incredible real life.  Unfortunately, the myth has become greater than the man, clouding his place in American history.  Fitzgerald dispels those myths and does a good job of developing a picture of the real man.  Along the way he has great interactions with average Americans and offers great insights into the American psyche. Of the three genres attempted here - history, memoir, and travelogue - history is maybe the least successful, but I did learn a bit more about Appleseed and discovered a few people connected to his story that I want to learn more about, and Fitzgerald's thoughts and ruminations on the subject of history and legend and the often very fine differences between the two are interesting. 

Author interview

The Hooligans of Kandahar:  Not All War Stories Are Heroic.  Joseph Kassabian.  TCK Publishing, 2022.  257 pages.

There's a long list of books that document the insanity of war, too long to list here.  And yet humans have always done it and, it seems, will always continue to do it.  We've all heard the famous quote "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results."  (Incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, the quote is actually much more recent.)  This book documents an Afghanistan deployment of a squad of soldiers who took their nickname "The Hooligans" to heart and forged the bonds that only soldiers experiencing combat together can forge, forever sharing the life and death moments of their deployment and the lifelong damages that they will carry after deployment.  Joseph Kassabian was a 21 year old team leader in that squad; he had joined the army at 17.  He and his squad are deployed to Kandahar, the birthplace and stronghold of the Taliban, tasked with training and supporting the corrupt and often Taliban-sympathetic Afghan police who are just as likely to torture and execute their neighbors as Taliban fighters are.  Think "Animal House" meets "MASH," but hard "R' or even "NC-17" rated, the book is funny, sad, and infuriating all at once, an honest and unflinching look at the horrors of war that is a great addition to the shelves of war stories.  It made for a very fitting Memorial Day weekend read.  

Author Interview

The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel:  Romanovs, Revolutionaries, and the Forgotten Titan Who Fueled the World.  Douglas Brunt.  Atria Books, 2026.  368 pages.

Most people know of the Nobel prizes  awarded each autumn in various fields of human achievement.  Some know a little about Alfred Nobel, the inventor and industrialist who funded the awards in his will at least partly to assuage his guilt over profiting from manufacturing explosives.  However, very few people are aware that the Nobels were a dominant, perhaps the most dominant, industrialist family in Europe, on par with, and often going head to head against the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds.  The real driving force behind the Nobel wealth and power was actually Alfred's nephew Emanuel.  He also is most responsible for the ensuring that the Nobel prizes exist.  As the executor of his uncle's will, he was pressured by Alfred's heirs, and even the King of Sweden, to disregard the prizes, but Emanuel stood firm and created and served as the chief steward of the Nobel Prize and his uncle's legacy for the rest of his life.  Emanuel was a visionary who built the largest oil industry in Russia and in Europe and amassed a huge fortune, while making powerful connections within the Russian bureaucracy and royal family, but he was not a "robber baron" in the American mold.  Workers in Nobel industries were among the happiest, most loyal,  and best taken care of in the world. Of course, all of that changed with World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the ensuing civil war.  When it was all over, Emanuel was no longer an industrial titan, and he was relegated to being even less than a footnote in history.  This excellent biography is extremely interesting and informative, and it offers at least some of the illumination that Nobel deserves.  

Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in November 2025

 

Author Talk

Ring Shout.  P. Djeli Clark.  Tor Nightfire, 2025 (paperback, originally 2020).  192 pages.

If you liked the movie "Sinners," or other horror films by directors like Ryan Coogler and Jordan Peele, then this is the book for you.  It's horror, fantasy, and history all wrapped in one virtually non-stop action package.  The setting is 1922 in Macon and Stone Mountain Georgia.  The Ku Klux Klan has been reborn following the release of the movie "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915.  As black veterans returned from World War I and started standing up for their civil rights in Jim Crow America, the Klan mobilized and ramped up violence in response.  The Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, and a spike in lynchings are just some of the events referenced in this book.  In Clark's re-imagining, the KKK actually consists of two factions, the Klan, comprising the average American racists, and the Ku Kluxes who are actually demonic monsters created and fed by hate and who only exist by stirring and escalating hate.  A small band of women forms for the purpose of destroying the Ku Kluxes.  There's Maryse, armed with a magical sword gifted to her by three spiritual aunties who appear to her in visions, Sadie, a sharpshooter, and Chef, who disguised herself as a man and fought as a Harlem Hellfighter in WWI.  They're aided by Maryse's spiritual advisor Nana Jean and Molly, a self-taught Choctaw scientist and engineer who devises weapons and strategies along with her female apprentices, and Emma, a German Jewish social revolutionary communist.  Following some skirmishes and a major Klux attack on a juke joint in Macon, everybody heads to Stone Mountain, the site where the Klan was reborn and the first crosses were burned, for the final apocalyptic, the-fate-of-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance battle.   Clark blends history and horror with Gullah, African, and Caribbean folklore and delivers a very creative and original read and a great ride from beginning to end.

The Invisible Spy:  The Untold True Story of an NFL Player Turned Spy and His Role in America's Covert WWII Operations.  Thomas Maier.  Hanover Square Press, 2025.  480 pages.

During WWII, American comic books, movies, radio shows, and propaganda convinced Americans that Axis spies and saboteurs were at large throughout the country and carrying out diabolical missions.   And as far as Germans were involved that premise was more correct than they knew.  What Americans didn't know, until quite recently, was that there were as many, if not more, British and Russian spies, agents of our allies, at work in the United States.  During the late 1930s and the war itself, the British acted with impunity, employing hundreds of agents, including future literary figures like Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl, who operated out of an office on the 36th floor of Rockefeller Center in New York City.  The British spy operation had the full support of President Roosevelt and reported directly to Prime Minister Churchill and his trusted subordinates.  They investigated and shared information with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, planted disinformation and propaganda in American media, and actively carried out their own missions on American soil to further British war aims.  British expats in Hollywood like Cary Grant, Noel Coward,  and Alfred Hitchcock contributed helpful information gathered on the west coast and at New York cocktail parties.  The man who served as the bridge between British and American intelligence was Ernest Cuneo, a first generation Italian-American who had been a standout football player at Columbia University and in the earliest days of the NFL, the late 1920s - the kind of player who played for the entire sixty minutes of regulation play, both offense and defense, often for as little as $50 per game.  He was instrumental in making the connection between the established and professional British espionage organizations and the brash, upstart (sometimes reckless) American OSS founded by "Wild Bill" Donovan, the forerunner of the CIA.  He had personal and professional connections to the two biggest media figures of the time, Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, read and listened to by tens of millions of Americans weekly, and he became a master manipulator of the press. He and Fleming became extremely close and life-long friends.  Bits of Cuneo are sprinkled throughout Fleming's James Bond novels, inspired by their collaboration at Rockefeller Center.  All the while, he remained invisible and kept his pivotal role largely unknown, not only during the war but throughout his life.  This book is really thorough and fascinating look at his incredible life and at the world of WWII espionage.

Author talk

Midnight Burning.  Paul Levine.  Blank Slate Press, 2025.  374 pages.  Book 1 of Einstein-Chaplin Thriller series.

It's 1937 Hollywood, and two of the most famous men in the world, Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein - geniuses at the top of their respective fields, are close friends living privileged lives, but the events of the world soon intrude and shake their world.  As Europe begins its descent into war, Chaplin is in the process of creating "The Great Dictator," his political magnum opus, his one-man frontal assault on Adolf Hitler and fascism, his biting satire and personal attack against the Fuhrer.  Meanwhile, the Silver Shirts, the West Coast fascist paramilitary thugs, just one of multiple pro-Hitler groups operating throughout the country, make plans to prevent its completion.   With support and encouragement from Berlin, the Silver Shirts' plan goes beyond that, however, to include murders of dozens of top Hollywood movers and shakers who are either Jewish or anti-fascists and to light the fuse for a fascist coup to overthrow the American government.  When Chaplin and Einstein accidentally uncover the plot, they realize that the movement has deep roots in California law enforcement and the FBI, so it's up to them to leap into action to thwart the evil plot.  The result is a super, action-packed, buddy action thriller, based on real historical facts and including lots of cameos from real people including Douglas Fairbanks, Bob Hope, Bugsy Siegel, William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Goebbels, and Charles Lindbergh, along with Georgia Ann Robinson, the first black female police officer in Los Angeles.  It all works to make a really great story.  This book is billed as the first of an Einstein-Chaplin thriller series, and I would definitely read more.  (And it led me to go back and watch "The Great Dictator" again, also highly recommended.)

Circle of Days.  Ken Follett.  Grand Central Publishing, 2025.  704 pages. Thanks to Grand Central Publishing for the review copy.

Without a doubt, Ken Follett is a master of historical fiction.  His Kingsbridge and Century series are unmatched.  Each tells a thrilling story with incredible characters, and each is a virtual self-contained history class, the former a course on the Middle Ages and the latter a comprehensive survey of the 20th century.  For years, I've looked forward to new Follett novels.  Circle of Days is a major disappointment, chiefly because IT'S TOO DAMNED LONG!  Don't get me wrong, the other books are physically very long, but they don't feel like it.  Circle drags.  It is incredibly slow-paced.  The plot seems to cover decades and decades in the lives of a few main characters and three different communities, farmers, herders, and hunter-gatherers who normally live separate lives but come together a few times a year at the site of Stonehenge for religious rituals. They work, they have sex (Follett is still one of the worst writers to have ever written a sex scene.), and they fight every few years.  Then, the cycle repeats.  Eventually --- in the last quarter of the book at most --- they build the stone structure that stands today.  It gets 3 out of 5 stars because it's Follett, but if you haven't read Follett before, don't start here; start with Kingsbridge or Century.

Stars of Alabama.  Sean Dietrich.  Thomas Nelson, 2019.  352 pages.  

Sean Dietrich, also known as Sean of the South, is a columnist, storyteller, novelist, and folk music historian and performer with a large following who focuses on the South.  I've seen some of his writings from time to time shared on social media, but I'd never really read any of his novels before. He will be a featured author at the Savannah Book Festival in February 2026, so we decided to read one of his earlier works and chose Stars.  Stars is a story about the importance of "found family" and enduring hope. It begins in the depths of the Great Depression and continues over the next two decades, weaving together three stories.  Coot is a former child preacher abused and exploited by an evil revival circuit preacher.  Marigold is a struggling teenaged girl who finds security keeping house in a brothel and discovers that she has a real faith healing gift.  Vern and Paul are middle-aged migrant workers who discover an infant baby girl abandoned in the woods and then a stranded mother and her children, eventually raising the children as their own.  Their lives converge at a huge revival in Mobile.  I imagine that this will be the only Sean Dietrich novel that I ever reader, just not my cup of tea at all.  Again, too damn long and slow.  Mawkish. Hallmark movie-ish.  Overly descriptive and sentimental and manipulative. I can see why he's popular.  It's like a Thomas Kincaid painting in historical fiction form.  Too much.

The 14th Colony.  Steve Berry.  Macmillan, 2016.  480 pages.  Book 11 of 20 in Cotton Malone series.

Cotton Malone, the retired Justice Department special agent who became a rare and old books dealer in Copenhagen, saves the world again in this 11th adventure.  In this case, he races the clock to thwart the plot of former KGB agent Aleksandr Zorin, an unreconstructed Soviet hardliner who has nursed an intense hatred for the United States and resentment of its role in the downfall of the Soviet Union for decades. Zorkin's plan? To use suitcase nuclear explosive devices secretly planted in the US in the mid 1980s to blow Washington DC on inauguration day, counting on the blast to devastate the federal government and to plunge the country into chaos.  It seems that the 20th and 25th amendments to the Constitution and the 1947 presidential succession act are all flawed, omitting important legal details and specificity that have the potential to reduce the country to complete and fatal weakness and collapse.  While the flaws have been noted over the years, Congress has never taken action to close the loopholes.  All of that would be triggered by eliminating both the outgoing and incoming executive branches in one fell swoop on inauguration day when all of the players are conveniently located in one place --- sitting ducks. This Malone thriller reads differently than the previous volumes.  The historical mystery at the center of the story is not really explained until about halfway into the book, very late for a Malone book.  The whole idea of the "14th colony," the hypothetical plans to invade Canada devised by the Society of the Cincinnati, seems like a superfluous red herring.  The mandatory violent shootout in a church or temple, a feature of every Malone book that usually occurs in the early chapters, doesn't occur here until the climax, and it's a bare-hands fight with no guns (when there was no good reason not to use a gun).  Another Malone book hallmark is at least one character flipping the switch and enacting a major surprise betrayal; that betrayal comes very late here, during the climax.  Overall, not the most satisfying Malone book, but still Malone, and, as usual, I learned new things, this time about the real-life origins and history of the Society of the Cincinnati and the technical flaws in the presidential succession act.  It seems like this book's purpose may have been more about developing the characters and their relationships than about the mystery itself.

North of Havana.  Randy Wayne White.  G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1997.  241 pages.  Book 5 of 28 in Doc Ford series.

Marion "Doc" Ford, the former secret agent who retired to become a full time marine biologist on Sanibel Island, Florida, is just trying to live his life when he is dragged back into international intrigue.  His buddy Tomlinson is in trouble.  He's sailed his boat/home into Cuban territorial waters, and he finds himself and his companion under arrest and threatened with the permanent seizure of his boat, and possibly worse, unless Ford goes to Havana with cash to bribe officials and gain their release.  That presents a couple of problems:  1) it's the 1990s, and American travel to Cuba, especially with American cash, is highly illegal and potentially dangerous, and 2) Ford has a history in Cuba as an agent that makes it extremely dangerous for him personally to ever return to the island.  But, his friend is in trouble, and Doc accepts the mission, accompanied, against his preferences, by his female friend/lover(?)/fitness trainer, the pro tennis player and golfer Dewey.  Once they locate Tomlinson, they find themselves enmeshed in both a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro and a search for a lost treasure, including the long-missing remains of Christopher Columbus.  The result is a solid, short Doc Ford thriller that does have historic connections.  The reader learns about Cuban revolutionary history and the situation in the 1990s, the attitudes of Cubans and Cuban refugees toward each other, and the speculation about what was going to happen once Castro lost power or died.  (Of course, as we have seen, absolutely none of that speculation came to fruition.)

Author talk

The Martians:  The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.  David Baron.  Liveright, 2025.  336 pages.

The 1890s were an unsettled decade.  (I feel like I write that about nearly every decade, come to think of it.)  Radical socialists and anarchists used riots, bombings, and assassinations to further their political aims across both Europe and the United States.  The United States fell into a deep economic depression in 1893 that lead to unemployment, hardships, and desperation.  The labor movement was gaining steam, and robber barons and management responded harshly, and violent clashes between strikers and strike-breakers ensued.  Women began agitating for political rights and attempting to crack through long-established barriers in occupations, science, and the arts.  Fanning the flames of unrest, the "Yellow Press" proliferated and spread the wildest, most sensationalized stories, usually by twisting facts or excluding them altogether, in order to sell newspapers.  (I know:  it was such a wild and unbelievable time.)  Naturally, all of this made for fertile ground for a crazy mass delusion to take hold in popular culture.  (Again, such an incredibly foreign time to us currently.)  In this case, two astronomers, one Italian and one French, independently theorized that Mars, seen from the Earth, displayed evidence of intelligent life, specifically "canals" (a mis-translation of the Italian word for "channels").  American amateur astronomer Percival Lowell became the leader in the movement to prove life on Mars and maybe even to establish contact with Martians.  Brilliant scientist and engineer Nikola Tesla even hopped on board.  For the next couple of decades, basically up to the outbreak of WWI, the scientific world was embroiled in debates and arguments, and the average Joes, Giuseppes, and Jacques, imagined all sorts of ramifications of the discovery of, and contact with life, on Mars.  This book is a really fun and enlightening look at the whole episode in our history, and the ramifications that are still with us today, specifically the inspiration for many 20th century scientists and for the whole genre of science fiction.

Address Unknown.  Kathrine Kressman Taylor.  Ecco, 2021.  (originally published in 1938) 96 pages.

Originally published in 1938 in Story magazine, Address Unknown  is actually a short story or novella. However, its impact and its genius, both then and now, are very much inversely proportional to its length.  It was written by Kathrine Kressman Taylor and published  under the name Kressman Taylor, chosen to come across as more masculine, because publishers thought the subject was too dark and heavy for a female author.  The subject? The rise of Nazism and its insidious infection of seemingly civilized, intelligent, cultured, and reasonable people - a warning to Americans about how such a thing could happen.  When published, the story became an immediate sensation, published and republished in other magazines and eventually published as a bestselling book.   It was translated into several languages and printed across Europe, achieving the same interest there --- that is until the war started and the Nazis occupied more and more of Europe and immediately banned the work.  It is an epistolary work, written totally in the form of letters exchanged between two long-time friends and business partners in a San Francisco art gallery who consider themselves brothers, one a German-born Jew who remains in San Francisco to run the gallery while the other, a German Gentile, returns to Munich to live with his family in 1932.  The latter, with his American wealth, quickly becomes a big man in town, and he and his family soon fall head over heels into idolization of this young upstart politician named Adolf Hitler who is restoring pride and patriotic fervor to the long-suffering German nation.  The letters document the resulting collapse of the friendship - formerly brotherhood -- in a brutally heart-wrenching manner.  Even if you strip away the prescient warning against political extremism that still resonates today, Address Unknown is one of the most powerful pieces of fiction writing - and epistolary fiction - that I've ever read.  

Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in August 2025

 

Author profile

Sanibel Flats.  Randy Wayne White.  Minotaur, 1990.  397 pages.  Book 1 of 28 in Doc Ford series.

I began another iconic "Florida Man" series.  These are the adventures of Marion "Doc" Ford who retires from life as a special government agent to live a quiet life in a rustic house on stilts on Florida's Sanibel Island.  Also a real marine biologist (the doctorate ), he plans to collect, process, and sell marine life specimens and drink beer.  However, we all know that no government agent can ever really retire, at least in the world of fiction,  and they often get dragged into more, and more dangerous, situations than in their careers.  Doc Ford is no different.

In this case, an old high school buddy is murdered, and his eight-year-old son is kidnapped, held prisoner by the sadistic leader of a guerilla army in the process of revolution in a fictional Central American country, a country that Ford had spent a lot of time in as an agent.  With another buddy named Tomlinson, Ford heads to Masagua to rescue the boy and get to the bottom of why his high school buddy died.  There's a nod to history as Mayan culture and artifacts figure into the plot, but almost all of that is purely fictional.  It's a good adventure story, with the expected twists and turns, and it's different from the other series that I enjoy by Tim Dorsey and Carl Hiaasen.  It's a straight adventure mystery, without the satire and humor.  I'll be reading more in the series. 

The Stingray Shuffle.  Tim Dorsey.  William Morrow, 2003.  320 pages.  Book 5 of 26 in Serge Storms series.

Serge Storms continues his history-filled Florida odyssey in this fifth book of the series.  Like other Serge books, there is a huge cast of characters, some new some recurring, including various gangs - in this case, Russian, Jamaican, Italian, and a couple of Caribbean and South American cocaine cartels, along with a book club and a group of z-list Reno nightclub entertainers.  Like Serge, they're all involved, some unwittingly, in the ongoing search for a briefcase filled with five million dollars.  However, there are some differences as well.  Serge actually leaves Florida, for New York City of all places! And Serge doesn't really play vigilante in this book.  

The historical theme of this book is railroad history in Florida and the huge role that railroads played in developing Florida.  (Ironically - if I am using that word correctly - I'm realizing that I almost never see, let alone cross a railroad track in Florida these days.)  The climax takes place aboard an Amtrak train from NYC to Miami during a special murder mystery interactive trip.  As usual, chaos and hilarity result. In this book, the reader can see that Dorsey is still developing the Serge character and story formula that we know and love.  We get more of a view into Serge's past and internal psychological battles; he struggles with himself more than in later books.  Also, his traveling buddy Lenny is almost totally irrelevant.  I forgot he existed for most of the book.  His later companion, Coleman, is much more involved and interesting, far more developed and fleshed out.  Not one of my favorites in the series.

CBS Sunday Morning

Desi Arnaz:  The Man Who Invented Television.  Todd S. Purdum.  Simon & Schuster, 2025.  368 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the free copy to read and review.

Desi Arnaz died prematurely at age 69, before earning his due.  Only in recent decades have books and documentaries cited his innate genius when it came to the entertainment business and specifically television production.  Yet, his great genius was balanced, even overwhelmed, by his many deep flaws, flaws that deeply scarred his life and reputation.  Given extraordinary access to previously unshared family documents by Lucie Arnaz, author Todd S. Purdum has succeeded in telling his full life story, the good and the bad.  After his family was forced to flee political upheaval in Cuba in the mid-1930s and relocate to Miami, the teenaged Desi embarked on a career as musician and singer, and he was generally regarded as mediocre in both talents, but his good looks and great work ethic quickly paved his way to the stage and to minor roles in Hollywood, where he met the woman that would forever change his life, Lucille Ball.  Their marriage was always volatile, to say the least, as he was never able to "forsake all others," blaming his constant patronage of prostitutes on his Latin heritage, and as he eventually fell deeper and deeper into alcoholism.  However, professionally they were America's golden couple, with tens of millions of tv viewers regularly tuning in to "I Love Lucy."   As the producer of the show, he brought innovations to television production and the business behind it that forever changed the industry and dominated the industry, revolutionary changes that are only now being matched by the still-evolving streaming models of in-home entertainment.  The book finally gives him the recognition that he deserves but doesn't gloss over the negatives.  It's a great read for any fans.   

YouTube documentary

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies. Paul Fischer.  Simon & Schuster, 2022.  416 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the free book to read and review.

Like me, have you lived your life thinking that motion pictures were invented by Thomas Edison or the Lumiere brothers? Well, you're wrong, and I taught it wrong all those years.  The real inventor of motion pictures was Louis Le Prince, a Frenchman who lived and worked primarily in Leeds, UK and New York City, who made his first films in 1887 and 1888.  Why doesn't he get the credit?  Because, before he could complete the legal processes of obtaining patents and properly introduce his invention to the world, he disappeared without a trace.  In 1890, Le Prince went to Dijon, France to visit his brother and settle his recently deceased mother's estate.  After a few days there, he was to take the train to Paris and then Calais, catch the ferry to England for a little work, and then sail home to his wife and children in New York.  His brother saw him off at the station, and Poof!  Neither he nor his luggage were ever seen again. His wife didn't know for sure that he was missing until several months later, and he was finally declared legally dead 7 years later. In 1893, Thomas Edison started promoting his new motion pictures invention, and the illustrations and patent application descriptions looked and sounded very much like Le Prince's work, leading Le Prince's wife to believe that Edison had at least stolen her husband's work and at worst may even have had her husband murdered.  I must admit here that I am firmly in the anti-Edison camp, and any assertion that he was a murderer on top of being one of the most horrible Americans in history is going to pique my interest.

You know the meme "That meeting should have been an email"? This book should have been an article or a short YouTube documentary.  The overwhelming majority of the book is a tedious slog through detailed descriptions of cameras and techniques and legal actions.  Very little of the book is about Le Prince and the mystery of his disappearance, but Fischer does finally present a logical, but still shocking, theory about what happened.  If you're tech-y or legalistic, you'll enjoy.  If not, skip this book and read The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel by Douglas Brunt, a very similar story about a disappearing inventor, instead.

 

The Heat Islands.  Randy Wayne White.  Minotaur, 1992.  276 pages.  #2 of 28 in Doc Ford series.

Marion "Doc" Ford is just an average marine biologist and former National Security Agent who wants to live the bachelor life in his stilt house in Dinkins Bay of Sanibel Island and study the tarpons, sharks and other marine life, supporting himself by selling collecting, preparing, and selling lab specimens for schools and labs.  However, any reader of crime fiction/thrillers knows that no secret agent has ever actually retired to a quiet life.  Sure enough, Doc is minding his own business when a crooked Florida developer (I don't think there's any other kind.) turns up dead, and one of Doc's marina buddies, quiet and unassuming fishing guide Jeth Nicoles is arrested for his murder.  Although Jeth seems resigned to being convicted for the crime, Doc is sure that he is innocent and sets out to prove it.  It's a solid "Florida Man" crime novel with mystery, action, and quirky characters that make South Florida different.

Author talk

How To Sell A Haunted House.  Grady Hendrix.  Berkley, 2023.  432 pages.  

Looking at some time sitting in a waiting room, I wanted a physical book to read, so I grabbed this off a shelf.  Grady Hendrix is an expert in the horror genre, specializing in the cheesiest horror fiction of the 1960s and 1970s.  His nonfiction book, Paperbacks From Hell, is a hilarious and enlightening history of popular culture through the lens of horror.  In each of his own novels, Hendrix selects a sub-genre and incorporates all of the defining characteristics of that sub-genre to tell a thrilling scary story full of humor.  In this case, obviously, the sub-genre is haunted houses.  Estranged siblings Louise and Mark suddenly lose their parents in a car  accident, leaving them to dispose of the family home.  Uncomfortably brought together by the tragedy, they quickly become enmeshed in deep, dark family secrets that threaten not only their lives and sanity, but the life and sanity of Louise's 5-year old daughter.  The house and its contents fight the planned disposal.  As the tagline says, "some houses don't want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them."  It's a fun-scary read that ticks all the boxes of the haunted house sub-genre.  On another level, I can also see why this book connected with so many people.  If you've ever dealt with family issues - who hasn't? - or disposed of your parents' property - a huge chunk of your life - this book will stir thoughts and feelings.  

The Lincoln Myth.  Steve Berry.  Ballantine Books, 2014.  448 pages.  Book #9 of 20, Cotton Malone series.

Cotton Malone, the retired US Justice Department Special Agent turned rare book dealer in Copenhagen, is dragged back into action by his former boss.  All he wants to do is sell books, but old friends, his old boss, and/or the US President are constantly calling on Malone, and his dreams of a quiet retirement go up in smoke.  Every few months, some shadowy, evil organization is out to either take over the world or make lots of money or both by using some historical object or secret, and Cotton has to travel around the world to thwart the evil scheme.  In this case, a radical group of Mormons is out to lead a secessionist movement in the US, and the historical mystery revolves around a rumored secret agreement between Abraham Lincoln and Brigham Young that involves a document dating back to the Constitutional Convention.  If it exists, that document would rip the United States apart and upend American history as we think we know it. 

It's the standard Cotton Malone formula:  lots of action, shootouts in historic places, and betrayals.  As usual, somebody asks Cotton how he got his name, and Cotton doesn't answer. We also meet Agent Luke Daniels, the President's nephew and a younger version of Cotton Malone whom Berry has spun off into his own book series.  Naturally, Luke and Cotton clash from the beginning because they are so much alike.  Formulaic, but comfortable and intriguing.  I like the characters and the action, and the books are full of real history.  The history inspires Berry to create the mystery, and he always explains his inspiration and separates fact from fiction in his notes at the end of the book.  The stories are fun adventures, and they always appeal to history lovers who, like myself, are love the "What if?" questions that make history fun.

The Man Who Invented Florida.  Randy Wayne White.  St. Martin's Press, 1993.  294 pages.  Book #3 of 28 in Doc Ford series.

In this entry in the Doc Ford series, readers learn quite a bit about Marian "Doc" Ford's background.  There he is, living in his stilt house in Sanibel Florida, collecting marine specimens and running his scientific supply house, when, out of the blue, he finds himself tied up with his uncle Tucker Gatrell, the man who raised him from age 10 to 16, following the deaths of his parents.  He hasn't seen or had anything to do with his uncle in years, but his uncle needs his help.  Gatrell has lived quite a life, a life that parallels Florida's 20th century history.  He was a fishing guide for important politicians, celebrities and businessmen and a cowboy and rancher who takes credit for many events that shaped Florida, from railroad construction to amusement parks.  He's a professional schemer, whom some might even call con-man.  Now, he's discovered a "real" Fountain of Youth on his undeveloped property, but the state is threatening to quash his entrepreneurial dreams by seizing his land for a park.  Sounds simple, but White manages to throw in kidnapping, archaeology, and the origins of "The Orange Blossom Special," one of the classic songs in bluegrass history. The story climaxes in a huge chaotic mess that reminds me of the resolutions of Tim Dorsey's books.  The world of Florida Man fiction writers seems very incestuous, and they're obviously fans of each other's work, often referencing each others writing.  I could see Tim Dorsey being inspired by the ending of this book.  

"The Dig"  trailer

The Dig.  John Preston.  Other Press, 2016 (Original: Viking, 2007).  272 pages.

In 1939, as Britain braced for entry into World War II, Mrs. Edith Pretty, a widow who owned a farm at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, hired a modest, unassuming, self-taught archaeologist named Basil Brown to excavate the mounds that existed on her property.  The result was one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made in the UK:  one of the mounds was a royal burial mound that included an approximately 90-foot long boat and numerous other Anglo-Saxon artifacts dating back to the early 7th century.  John Preston delivers the fictionalized story of the next three months as professionals from the British Museum and other institutions shove Brown aside (robbing him of the credit that he deserves for several decades) and change the lives of all involved, as well as the understanding of British history.  Today, visitors to the British Museum in London and museums at Sutton Hoo can view the artifacts and reconstructions of artifacts on display.  This book was the basis for a recent Netflix movie of the same name.  It's interesting but slow-moving, like many British period pieces.

Coconut Cowboy.  Tim Dorsey.  William Morrow, 2016.  336 pages.  Book 19 of 26 in Serge Storms series.

Serge Storms is back for another chaotic and crazy history-filled Florida road trip.  This time, Serge and his buddy Coleman trade in their usual muscle car ride for a chopper motorcycle with a sidecar because Serge's  obsession of the moment is the iconic '60s cult classic "Easy Rider." Serge's plan is to finish the epic journey that was cut short in the film by the murder of the lead characters and to take a nostalgic ride back to the simpler times of the late 1960s, discovering modern-day hippie music and culture gatherings and quiet small town Florida life.  Of course, it's Serge's journey, so they make side trips through the panhandle and recent Florida history and Homosassa to see sites of Tom Petty's youth and to meet the most famous resident of the Homosassa Springs State Park, Lu the hippo, a retired movie animal star who resided there from the 1960s until his death in June 2025.  And, of course, Serge is in vigilante mode and much woe befalls road ragers, rude rich jerks, corrupt small town bosses, and Miami drug dealers who cross his path or threaten his friends.  This was an especially fun Serge adventure.

December 6.  Martin Cruz Smith.  Simon & Schuster, 2002. 352 pages.

Novelist Martin Cruz Smith died in July. I had read a few of his Arkady Renko novels, and I decided to go back through his works and read something else.  I discovered December 6.  It's set in ultra-nationalist and ultra-militarist Tokyo in 1941, with flashbacks.  The main character is Harry Niles, the son of American missionaries. Never having even visited the United States and living with an uncle while his parents work in the field, Harry is as Japanese as he can be.  As a child he runs with a group of Japanese kids in the streets exploring the ins and outs of a seamier side of Tokyo, the dance halls and theaters, learning to become a scam artist and con man.  After a brief time in the US when he goes to work for a movie studio, he returns to Tokyo.  As a foreigner, a gaijin, who spent time in Japanese-occupied China and has contacts within the Japanese government, he draws the attention of the police and military.  His contacts lead him to discover the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor.  Now, he attempts to plant disinformation  amongst the Japanese officials and to alert American officials, as he makes plans to leave Japan before the war with the US begins.  His efforts are complicated by his childhood friends, his Japanese lover, and a Japanese military officer out for revenge.  It's a really good story and a quick read.  If you like the Arkady Renko series  or the historical noir works of James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, or Walter Mosley, for example, I think you'll enjoy this one.

Book talk by author

There There.  Tommy Orange.  Knopf, 2018.  304 pages.  

This novel has gotten a huge amount of attention since its publication, and reviewers have raved about it.  I was moved to pick it up after I saw an Instagram book influencer ( @vestcody ) call it a modern day Canterbury Tales and include it in a list of modern replacements for classics commonly taught in high school.  I read it in two sittings, and I was blown away.  It definitely deserves the hype, and I look forward to reading Orange's follow-up.

There There  absolutely lives up to the Canterbury  comparison, in both structure and quality, and it will be hailed as a classic for years to come.  Chaucer's Canterbury, generally considered unfinished, introduces some thirty characters, pilgrims on their way to visit the shrine to Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, but only 24 tales were completed. In There There, a dozen "Urban Indians" in Oakland, California all have their seemingly disparate lives converge at the Big Oakland Powwow, a huge annual event that draws indigenous dancers, vendors, and attendees from throughout the Americas.  Each character has his or her own issues, arising from drugs, alcohol, domestic abuse, and other issues centering on identity that are found throughout the Native American community.  Their lives all intersect on that fateful day at the Powwow.  As author James Baldwin wrote, "People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them."  Orange captures that sentiment perfectly.  I recommend this book to all readers.  

Constituent Service: A Third District Story.  John Scalzi.  Audible original. 2024.  2 hours 30 minutes. (AI generated image)

Bonus non-history read of the month.  Another fun sci-fi listen from John Scalzi.   I enjoy funny and clever sci-fi like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the British TV series Red Dwarf, and I'm glad to have discovered John Scalzi.  

Amazon blurb:  "The aliens are here ... and they want municipal services!

Ashley Perrin is fresh out of college and starting a job as a community liaison for the Third District–the city’s only sector with more alien residents than humans. Ashley’s barely found where the paper clips are kept when she’s beset with constituent complaints–from too much noise at the Annual Lupidian Celebration Parade to a trip-and-fall chicken to a very particular type of alien hornet that threatens the very city itself.

And if that’s not terrifying enough, Ashley is next up at the office karaoke night.

It's Parks and Recreation meets the Federation of Planets...."