Wine and War: the French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure by Don and Petie Kladstrup.- 2002 - 334 Pages

 

Wine and War: the French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure by Don and Petie Kladstrup.- 2002 - 334 Pages 

Very  soon after  France surrendered to the Nazis, in May of 1940, the Germans made it their goal to appropriate France's  wine.  Wine was a  important part of daily French life and the vast vineyards supported much of the population.  Top Nazis officials fancied themselves experts on wine.

 As the war went on the Germans soon required all wine to sold to Germans, served in restaurants only open to Germans.  Vineyard workers were conscripted to work in Germany.  Vital horses were taken.

Vineyard owners began to seek ways to hide their products. 

They hid their most prized wines immediately, knowing that the Germans would take them and, more importantly, not appreciate them. They built walls in their cellars, closing in the wines behind them, and had their children collect spiders so they'd spin webs to make the wall look older. Dust from old carpets were collected to put on cheap bottles to make them appear rare.

These are the true stories of vignerons who sheltered Jewish refugees in their cellars and of winemakers who risked their lives to aid the resistance. They made chemicals in secret laboratories to fuel the resistance and fled from the Gestapo when arrests became imminent.

There were treacheries too, as some of the nation's winemakers supported the Vichy regime, or the Germans themselves, and collaborated.

Don and Petie Kladstrup are former journalists who have written extensively about wine and France for numerous publications. Don, a winner of three Emmys and numerous other awards, was a foreign correspondent for ABC and CBS television news. Petie, an Overseas Press Club winner, was a newspaper journalist and more recently protocol officer for the U.S. ambassador to UNESCO. The Kladstrups divide their time between Paris and Normandy

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - 2022- 791 Pages

 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - 2022- 791 Pages 

Demon Copperhead is set in western Virginia in the Appalacians.  It is the story of an orphan growing up in the midst of the opiod epidemic.  Kingsolver modeled it meticulously on another novel about an orphan, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.  Dickens would be proud.

A New York Times "Ten Best Books of 2022 * An Oprah's Book Club Selection * An Instant New York Times Bestseller *

 An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller * A #1 Washington Post Bestseller

"Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient." —Beth Macy, author of Dopesick

From the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero's unforgettable journey to maturity

Told my Damon (he his given a nickname of Damon), his unwed teenage mother gives birth to him in her trailer.

Kingsolver shows us the impact of the coal mines, the stripping of the forests,  the exploration of Appalacia going back two hundred years.  The only jobs are as coal miners, the schools are terrible, the health care worse and the foster system is a cruel joke.  

Purdue Pharmaceutical company has decided this would be the perfect place to market a pain killer, oxytocin which ends up furthering the destruction of the community.  Doctors get free trips for prescribing it.  Once you start on it, you are made miserable once the impact wears down.

We follow Demon through his relationship with a very abusive stepfather, the death of his mother, his time in foster care, his friendships and romances.  Football is every thing in his town and he becomes a star player.  Death and addiction rule until they don't thanks to the resliance of Damon and some help.  

You will love the ending. Like a Dickens novel, every chapter wants you waiting to find out what happens next.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of nine bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, Prodigal Summer, and The Poisonwood Bible, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. With her husband and daughters she authored the influential Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2000 was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia.

Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley - 2024 - 233 Pages

 Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley - 2024 - 233 Pages

"The human race finds itself again under threat of a rising global fascist movement. In the United States, democracy is under attack by an authoritarian movement that has found fertile ground among the country’s conservative politicians and voters, but similar movements have found homes in the hearts and minds of people all across the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, we must go back to extract lessons from our past.

Democracy requires a common understanding of reality, a shared view of what has happened, that informs ordinary citizens’ decisions about what should happen, now and in the future. Authoritarians target this shared understanding, seeking to separate us from our own history to destroy our self-understanding and leave us unmoored, resentful, and confused. By setting us against each other, authoritarians represent themselves as the sole solution.

In authoritarian countries, critical examination of those nations’ history and traditions is discouraged if not an outright danger to those who do it. And it is no accident that local and global institutions of education have become a battleground, the authoritarian right’s tip of the spear, where learning and efforts to upend a hierarchal status quo can be put to end by coercion and threats of violence. Democracies entrust schools and universities to preserve a common memory of positive change, generated by protests, social movements, and rebellions. The authoritarian right must erase this history, and, along with it, the very practice of critical inquiry that has so often been the engine of future progress.

In Erasing History, Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality. And he shows that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities—places, he explains, that democratic societies across the world are now ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway.

Deeply informed and urgently needed, Erasing History is a global call to action for those who wish to preserve democracy—in America and abroad—before it is too late." From the publisher 

Jason Stanley employs details from the rise of Nazism in Germany to explain how authoritarians systematically destroy the knowledge of history, seeking to convince people they are aiming at restoring a period in which times were much better. They accuse one segment of society as out to destroy the country. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews, in India now it is Muslims, in America immigrants. Authoritarians universally vilify the LGTBQ in their societies, insist women should be first of all wives and breeders. In Russia, a totally authoritarianism culture, one man is the great leader.

In America the history of slavery was for generations taught as not harmful to the slaves. Some school text books said slaves were better off in America. In India, the role of Muslims in Indian history is not taught in schools, in Russia historical truths involving the past independence of the Ukraine have been transformed into the notion that it was always part of Russia.

In America absurdities are used to hide the genocide inflicted on Native Americans by Europeans. The American founding fathers are treated like saints. These things require a take over of how schools teach history.

  In the United States Stanley details how the governor of Florida as done all he can to turn schools into parrots for the views of trump and his sycophants.  

There is so much of great value in this book.  Sadly those supporters of authoritarians world wide, especially in America will not read this or probably any other book.

"I am the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. I am also an honorary professor at the Kyiv School of Economics, where I use my salary to support the Come Back Alive Foundation.

Before coming to Yale in 2013, I was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. I have also been a Professor at the University of Michigan (2000-4) and Cornell University (1995-2000). My PhD was earned in 1995 at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT (Robert Stalnaker, chair), and I received my BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990.

My first book is Knowledge and Practical Interests published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. It was the winner of the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize. My second book, Language in Context, also OUP, was published in 2007. This is a collection of my papers in semantics published between 2000 and 2007 on the topic of linguistic communication and context. My third book, Know How, was published in 2011, also with OUP. My fourth book, How Propaganda Works, was published by Princeton University Press in May, 2015. It was the winner of the 2016 PROSE award for the subject area of philosophy. The proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Prison Policy Initiative. My fifth book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Penguin Random House, 2018).

My last book, published in November, 2023, is The Politics of Language, co-authored with David Beaver, with Princeton University Press .  My newest book is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, published in September, 2024 with One Signal Publishers, a division of Simon and Schuster." 

Everyone Who is Gone is Here : the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer.-2024 -544 Pages

 Everyone Who is Gone is Here : the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer.-2024 -544 Pages

I am very glad to begin October with Jonathan Blitzer's incredibly informative book.

"National Bestseller • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024 • A Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Longlist Finalist 

“What an incredibly thorough documentation of the causes of the immigration crisis, the discussions that have been going on through multiple administrations.” —Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

“Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is sure to take its place as one of the definitive accounts of the U.S. and Central American immigration puzzle. . . . Hopefully, those with the power to change things will listen.” —Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post

An epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer"

Everything said by trump and his sycophants about immigration is false, much of it deliberate lies designed to terrify white Americans about millions of murders, gangsters and pet Eaters who are out to destroy America. As Blitzer explains elegantly Gangs in El Salvador,  Honduras and Guatemala originally developed when American authorities deported immigrants arrested for a crime of any kind.

Blitzer focues a lot  on El Salvador (I have been to Guatemala).  

 . . . "What could be a complex story is a stunning epic woven around the lives of four individuals seeking sanctuary from the death squads and murderous gangs that at different times dominated their homelands . . . While at times this is implicitly an indictment of the sometime short-termism and cynicism of Washington’s foreign, security and immigration policy, this is a novelistic account rather than a tract, and his tale is beautifully told. All four characters, whose lives he has followed over many years, linger in the reader’s mind.” —Financial Times  

Everyone Who is Gone is Here : the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer will become a classic.  I thank Jonathan Blitzer for this beautiful heartbreaking and heartwarming work.

Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has won a National Award for Education Reporting as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award, and was a 2021 Emerson Fellow at New America. He lives with his family in New York City.

The Reading Life Review - September 2024.

 The Reading Life Review - September 2024. 

In September I posted on two novels, a short story by Carol Shields as well as two novels.

Septemper Nonfiction 

1. The River of Doubt : Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.—2006 -  an amazing book, combining a vivid description of the Amazon, an arduous journey with details about American political history.

2. River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon by Buddy Levy -2011  a fascinating exciting account of the first voyage by Europeans to transverse the Amazon

3.Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin - 2024 - 432 Pages

4. Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver - 2003

September Novels

1.  Long Island by Colm Tóibín- 2024- A sequel to his Brooklyn 

2.  The Keeper of Hidden Books by Madeline Martin -2023 -413 pages 

September Short Stories

1. "Block Out" by Carol Shields - 2004

Home Countries of September Authors

1. USA- 5

2. Canada-1

3. Ireland- 1

Blog Stats 

As of today our posts have been viewed 8,012,930  times

In September we received  70,600 Pages views

Top Home Countries of September blog visitors 

1. Hong Kong

2. USA 

3. Singapore 

4. India

5. Philippines 

6. UK 

7. Netherlands 

8. Indonesia 

9. France

10. Germany 

The most viewed posts were on S. E. Asian short stories 

"Block Out" - A Shorf Story by Carol Shields - 17 Pages - Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

 Buriedinprint.com 

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all.

"Blocked Out " is the 31th short story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted.

The story centers on a middle aged married couple from Ontario on a trip to Portugal. The man is a commercially successful writer of comic novels. For years prior to the death of his wife his current wife was his editor, loving him and his work.  

"THE WRITER MEERSHANK, vacationing in Portugal with his wife-cum-editor, Maybelle Spritz, became blocked. The two of them spent their first morning there exploring the coastal city of Porto, which is an airy gemlike city that, as Maybelle complained, had been severely underrated—given one lousy star in the Michelin Guide, that was all. This was plain crazy, a single star for a dozen broad sun-splashed terraces, for countless baroque churches, for the elegant iron bridges, and the lazy smoky river lined with pungent fishing boats and dark bars. Ridiculous! She was indignant. She slapped the green guidebook hard against her long thigh. Coming to Portugal had been her idea. She was the one who had thought of flight, of leaving the Ontario winter behind, who had persuaded and cajoled and weakened her husband, Meershank, and she was determined to unearth treasures for him hour by hour. Now this insult, this chintzy rating, a gorgeous city awarded one grudging star. “And just listen,” Maybelle said to Meershank, stopping in the middle of a steep, winding cobbled street to consult the despised guide. “We’re supposed to ‘note the gaily colored laundry flapping overhead.’ Laundry! I ask you. Never mind this incredible architecture all around us, we’re asked to gape at mended laundry"

Another marvelous story.

Long Island by Colm Toibin - 2024 - 304 Pages

 Long Island by Colm Toibin - 2024 - 304 Pages

OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * “Stunning.” —People * “Dazzling yet devastating...Tóibín is simply one of the world’s best living literary writers.” —The Boston Globe * “Momentous and hugely affecting.” —The Wall Street Journal *

From the beloved, critically acclaimed, bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving novel featuring Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work in twenty years.

Long Island is the 16th work by Colm Toibin upon which I have posted.

Long Island is a sequel to his novel Brooklyn.   Brooklyn is set in the 1950s.  It is about a young Irish woman, Eilis, who moves from rural Ireland to Brooklyn in hopes of  making a better life.

Eilis gets a job working in a big store and lives in a boarding house owned by an Irish woman and all of the other tenants are Irish women also. 

Eilis meets a man, a kind decent one but he Italian, not Irish. She goes to night school. Brooklyn is very much about the immigrant experience. It is about longing for home and the consequences of emigration on those who are left behind.  

Long Island jumps ahead twenty years.  Eilis Lacey is, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis is now forty with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, 

A man arrives at her door one day with such shocking news that Ellis feels a need to go back to Ireland to get away from her husband. 

The occasion is the 80th birthday of her mother. She takes her two teenage children with her.  

Lacy reconnects with her best friend and an old flame who owns a popular pub.

COLM TÓIBÍN is the author of eleven novels, including The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. He was also awarded the Bodley Medal and the Würth Prize for European Literature. SimonandSchuster.com

The Keeper of Hidden Books by Madeline Martin -2023 -413 pages

 The Keeper of Hidden Books  by Madeline Martin -2023 -413 pages

This is the third novel by Madeline Martin I have had the extreme pleasure of reading.

In December of 2021 I read The Last Bookstore in London by Madeline Martin, set in London during the Blitz years of World War Two. I loved this deeply moving vivid account of the impact of Germany's bombing of London on a small Bookstore.

Last year I read her The Libraian Spy set during World War Two in Paris as well as Lyon and Lisbon. Paris is occupied by the Germans. Portugal is neutral but in danger of being invaded. People come from all over Europe to Lisbon hoping to get a visa to go to America

The Keeper of Hiden Books is set primarily in Warsaw during World War Two.  Like her other books, much of the plot action centers around the

 work of the Central characters in a library. 

Poland was the first country taken over by Nazi Germany. The Germans did all they could to destroy the culture of Poland, banning and destroying many of the books in the libraries of Warsaw.   

"The Keeper of Hidden Books is yet another expertly researched and inspiring work of historical fiction from Madeline Martin. As Zofia Nowak and her young friends fight for their fellow Polish and Jewish citizens during the horrific German occupation, they witness again and again the power of friendship and literature in even the darkest times. With her direct, brave and thoughtful manner (so wonderfully reminiscent of Jo March), loyalty and love for her Jewish best friend, and touching first love with a fellow resistance fighter, Zofia is destined to capture readers' hearts everywhere--rarely have I loved or admired a character more. A heart-pounding, illuminating, and very important addition to the canon of WWII fiction."–Natalie Jenner, bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls

I found myself caring deeply about some of people in The Keeper of Hidden Books.  Others, including all the Germans I hated.  Martin vividly brings to cinematic immediacy the way life in Warsaw keeps getting worse for the Poles and especially anyone Jewish.  

I do not want to give away much of the plot other than to say at times I was scared for the Central characters and at times elated.  I admit to enjoying death scenes of Germans and especially one collaborator.  OK and I howled over the way two tyrannical German female librarians died.

I loved this book.  Martin includes an account of her research and Warsaw history.

"Madeline Martin is a New York Times, USA Today, Publisher’s Weekly, and internationally bestselling author of historical fiction and historical romance with books that have been translated into over twenty-five different languages.

She lives in sunny Florida with her two daughters (known collectively as the minions), two incredibly spoiled cats and a man so wonderful he’s been dubbed Mr. Awesome. She is a die-hard history lover who will happily lose herself in research any day. When she’s not writing, researching or ‘moming’, you can find her spending time with her family at Disney or sneaking a couple spoonfuls of Nutella while laughing over cat videos. She also loves to travel, attributing her fascination with history to having spent most of her childhood as an Army brat in Germany." From the author's website.

The River of Doubt : Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.—2006 - 408 Pages

 

The River of Doubt : Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.—2006 - is an amazing book, combining a vivid description of the Amazon, an arduous journey with details about American political history.

"NATIONAL BESTSELLER • At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait—the bestselling author of River of the Gods brings us the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.

“A rich, dramatic tale that ranges from the personal to the literally earth-shaking.” —The New York Times

The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.

After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.

Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.

From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt’s life, here is Candice Millard’s dazzling debut." From the publisher,Anchor Books 

About 25 years ago I did a photographic trip on the Amazon, based out of Iquitos, Peru, the largest city in the world not accessible by road.  From this experience I developed an interest in the Amazon.  I am so glad I found this book  via Libby.  Millard made me feel I was along on the voyage.  I learned a lot about Theodore Roosevelt’s life and his family.  His son Kermit was on the trip.

CANDICE MILLARD is a former writer and editor at National Geographic magazine and New York Times bestselling author. She lives in Kansas City.

River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon by Buddy Levy -2011

River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon by Buddy Levy -2011 is a fascinating exciting account of the first voyage by Europeans to transverse the Amazon.  Years ago I made a photographic expedition the Amazon.  I saw pink dolphins, Indigenous villages, and much more,  My trip began in Iquitos, Peru, the biggest city in the world with no access by road. I am very glad I came upon Buddy Levy's fascinating book while browsing in Libby.

"From the acclaimed author of Conquistador comes this thrilling account of one of history’s greatest adventures of discovery. With cinematic immediacy and meticulous attention to historical detail, here is the true story of a legendary sixteenth-century explorer and his death-defying navigation of the Amazon—river of darkness, pathway to gold.

In 1541, the brutal conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro and his well-born lieutenant Francisco Orellana set off from Quito in search of La Canela, South America’s rumored Land of Cinnamon, and the fabled El Dorado, “the golden man.” Driving an enormous retinue of mercenaries, enslaved natives, horses, hunting dogs, and other animals across the Andes, they watched their proud expedition begin to disintegrate even before they descended into the nightmarish jungle, following the course of a powerful river. Soon hopelessly lost in the swampy labyrinth, their numbers diminishing daily through disease, starvation, and Indian attacks, Pizarro and Orellana made a fateful decision to separate. While Pizarro eventually returned home barefoot and in rags, Orellana and fifty-seven men, in a few fragile craft, continued downriver into the unknown reaches of the mighty Amazon, serenaded by native war drums and the eerie cries of exotic predators. Theirs would be the greater glory.

 

Interweaving eyewitness accounts of the quest with newly uncovered details, Buddy Levy reconstructs the seminal journey that has electrified adventurers ever since, as Orellana became the first European to navigate and explore the entire length of the world’s largest river. Levy gives a long-overdue account of the native populations—some peaceful and welcoming, offering sustenance and life-saving guidance, others ferociously hostile, subjecting the invaders to gauntlets of unremitting attack and intimations of terrifying rituals. And here is the Amazon itself, a powerful presence whose every twist and turn held the promise of new wonders both natural and man-made, as well as the ever-present risk of death—a river that would hold Orellana in its irresistible embrace to the end of his life.

Overflowing with violence and beauty, nobility and tragedy, River of Darkness is both riveting history and a breathtaking adventure that will sweep readers along on an epic voyage unlike any other." From Batam Books, the publisher 

The first European to ever set foot in the Amazon was Francisco de Orellana, a cousin of famous conquistador Francisco Pizarro. On a joint expedition with Pizarro's brother in 1541, de Orellana set off from Quito in search of the mythical El Dorado, a city allegedly overflowing with gold and riches 

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Amazon, European exploring and exploitation of the area.

In the elegant epilogue Levy details the on going degradation of the region in search of profit as well as efforts to safeguard this precious resource.

"Buddy Levy is the author of nine books and his work has been featured or reviewed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Kirkus Book Reviews, Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, The Daily Beast, The A.V. Club and Library Journal. He was the co-star, for 25 episodes, on HISTORY Channel’s hit docuseries Brad Meltzer’s DECODED, which aired to an average of 1.7 million weekly viewers and is still airing as reruns today. In 2018 he was an on-camera expert on the 4-part TV Series THE FRONTIERSMEN: The Men Who Built America (HISTORY, Executive Producer Leonardo Di Caprio).

Levy’s most recent book is Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue (St. Martin’s Press, 2025)-- https://bit.ly/RealmOfIceAndSky. His other books include Empire of Ice & Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk (St. Martin’s Press, December 2022), winner of the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award. His 2019 book Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition (St. Martin’s Press), won the 2020 National Outdoor Book Award and the 2020 Banff Mountain Book Award in Adventure History.

Levy is also the co-author of the National Bestseller No Barriers: A Blind Man’s Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon (with Erik Weihenmayer; Thomas Dunne Books, 2017); GERONIMO: Leadership Lessons of An American Warrior (co-authored with Coach Mike Leach, Simon & Schuster, 2014) and River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana and the Deadly First Voyage Through the Amazon (Diversion Books, 2011, 2022). His other books include the critically acclaimed and Amazon #1 Bestseller Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs (Bantam Dell, 2008), which he is currently developing for a television series; American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (Putnam, 2005, Berkley Books, 2006); and Echoes On Rimrock: In Pursuit of the Chukar Partridge (Pruett, 1998). His books have been published in ten languages.

Levy was a contributing writer on the 2018 documentary film The Weight of Water. The film was based in part on the book No Barriers, which Levy co-authored with blind adventurer Erik Weihenmayer. The film premiered at the 2018 Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prize and the Best Mountain Film Award. It has since won The People’s Choice Award for Best Documentary at the 2018 Denver Film Festival; Best Sport and Adventure Film at the 2018 Mendi Bilbao Film Festival; and Audience Choice Award at the 2019 Waimea Ocean Film Festival.

As a freelance journalist he has covered adventure sports and lifestyle/travel subjects around the world, including working with TV impresario Mark Burnett on numerous Eco-Challenges, and other adventure expeditions in Argentina, Borneo, Europe, Greenland, Morocco, and the Philippines. His interests are wide-ranging: discovery and

adventure, the mountain men, arctic exploration travail, clashes of empires and civilizations, conspiracy theories, and riveting human stories of survival." From the author's website.

Mel u

The Reading Life

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin - 2024 - 432 Pages

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin - 2024 - 432 Pages

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin is an incredibly interesting beautifully written account of the amazing linguistic diversity of New York City with native speakers of over 800 languages in resident, many of the languages are Endangered.

"Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities, from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to villages on the other side of the world, to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. He explores the languages themselves, from rare sounds to sentence-long words to bits of grammar that encode entirely different worldviews.

Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, and a hundred others living in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (“the place where we get bows”), has just one native speaker, along with a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and Yiddish, braided alongside Perlin’s own complicated family legacy.

On the 100th anniversary of a notorious anti-immigration law that closed America’s doors for decades and the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of “killer languages” like English and Spanish. At the same time, Language City celebrates the profound linguistic diversity of a single city and the joy of tuning into this unprecedented Babel." From the publisher Grove Press

New immigrants arriving New York City are caught in extensial delima.  The want to Preserve their cultural identity, make sure their children know their heritage language while having to learn English to thrive in New York City.  Perlin shows how numerous communities of language Speakers develop communities.  

" I am a linguist, writer, and translator from New York City - 

My book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York is now out with Grove in the US and the UK.

As a linguist, I serve as co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, where since 2013 I have overseen research projects focused on language documentation, mapping, policy, and public programming. Himalayan languages are a focus – for my PhD, I created a trilingual dictionary, a corpus of recordings, and a descriptive grammar of Trung, an endangered language of southwest China, based on several years of fieldwork. I also teach linguistics at Columbia. 

As a writer, I have written on language, labor, and China for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Harper's, among other places, and I published a book on unpaid work and youth economics (Intern Nation). I have given talks to students, scholars, employers, career counselors, union members, activists, and politicians at venues as different as the Googleplex, the UK Parliament, and the Economic Policy Institute, as well as universities and colleges across America. TV and radio appearances have been on MSNBC, CBS, Fox, BBC, and NPR, among others. 

As a translator, I work primarily from Chinese into English. I translated Liao Yiwu's Bullets and Opium (2019) and Chen Guangcheng's The Barefoot Lawyer (2015). I have recorded two Yiddish-language video series for The Forward and translated essays, stories, and poems as a National Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow.

I have a BA from Stanford, an M.Phil. from Cambridge, and an MA from the University of London (SOAS), the last two thanks to the British people as a Marshall Scholar. My PhD in Linguistics is from the University of Bern in Switzerland. I was a 2023 New Arizona Fellow at New America.

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin talks about the anti-immigration attitude of many Americans, exposing the hateful history and deep racism from which this is  derived.

The Reading Life Review- August 2024 - Future Hopes

 

The Reading Life Review- August 2024

Novels Featured in August

1. School for Love - by Olivia Manning

2. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride- 2023

3. Faithful by Alice Hoffman- 2016

4. Speedboat by Renata Adler- 1976

5. Yellowface by R.K Kuang - 2023

6. The Poppy War by R.K Kuang - 2018

Nonfiction Featured in August

1. Olivia Manning: A Woman at War by Deirdre David- 2013 - 

2. Provence 1970 by Luke Barr- 2016 - 226 Pages

3. I Am A Filipino and This is How I Cook by Nicole Ponseca and Miguel Trinidad - 2019 - 423 Pages

4. Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters - 2017 - 320 Pages

5. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend- 2023

The Short stories Featured in August were four works by Carol Shields 

I also posted upon three science fiction movies from the 1950s

Blog Stats

There are as of today our posts have been viewed 8,012,930 times.

There are currently 4600 posts on The Reading Life 

Home Countries of August Visitors

1. Hong Kong

2.Singapore

3. United States

4. India

5. Philippines

6. Russia

7.Canada

8.Brazil

9.Finland

10. France

The most viewed posts are on short stories 

Eight August authors are Americans, one is English and one Canadian.

 Only two are deceased. 

Eight were featured for the first time in August,  Three are men.

Future Hopes and Plans

I plan to read both of Olivia Manning's trilogies, more short stories by Carol Shields and will continue my attempted read through of Alice Hoffman.  I will read selected nonfiction as well as works related to Jewish history and culture,

Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver - 2003

 Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver - 2003

This is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in the Holocaust and the history of Jewish Life in Berlin.  Silver goes back to about 1350 when a restricted number of Jewish families were allowed to settle in Berkin, processing to periods when Jews were welcomed. By about 1940  over half of the economic productivity in Berkin was generated by the activity of Jews. (Silva goes into details on who was seen as a Jew by the Nazis and explains his own use of terminology.)  As German antisemitism grew worse some how a Jewish Hospital with almost all Jewish Doctors and staff survived, Some employees were saved by being married to Christians and for a while from being World War One Veterans.  They began to see family members deported to death camps.

The Germans actually sent Jewscto the hospital to be treated and once they recovered they sent them to death camps.  The hospital used to treat everyone.  If you could not pay you were welcomed.  Then they were told they could treat only Jews so they lost a large percentage of their paying customers.  Food rations were cut but still the hospital stayed open.

"Dan Silver, a lawyer and former general counsel to the CIA, tells the astonishing story of Berlin's Jewish Hospital during WWII. For decades before the Nazis seized power in Germany, the hospital had served Berlin's Jews as their principal medical resource. At the war's end, it was still functioning, delivering what medical care it could and sheltering a large percentage of the city's few remaining Jews. Silver asks how a Jewish institution, located in the capital city of a regime dedicated above all to obliterating the Jews, could possibly have survived. To answer this question, Silver has gathered the available documentary evidence and interviewed the handful of hospital staffers still alive. According to these sources, the institution's survival hinged on an amalgam of factors, including sheer, blind luck and bureaucratic infighting among Nazi organizations. As Silver explains, the Nazis' bizarre system for classifying persons of partly Jewish ancestry played a role as well, since some hospital personnel with mixed ancestry were not treated with the same implacable hostility as full Jews were. Silver acknowledges where gaps in the evidence make certainty impossible, as in assessing Dr. Walter Lustig, the hospital's chief during the war years. Lustig may have been a betrayer and collaborator, as some staffers think, or he may have manipulated the system as best he could to save at least some Jews from destruction. The balanced analysis of Dr. Lustig's record typifies the author's careful use of evidence throughout this absorbing book." From Amazon

Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver greatly expanded my knowledge of Holocaust and Jewish history.

Faithful by Alice Hoffman - 2016 - 288 Pages

 

Faithful by Alice Hoffman - 2016 - 288 Pages

Alice Hoffman works I have so far read:

The Marriage of Opposites- 2015

"Everything My Mother Taught Me" - 2016

"The Book Store Sisters" -2022

The Foretelling - 2006

"Conjure" - 2014

Aquamarine- 2001

The Ice Queen - 2006

Property Of -1977

Skylight- 2007

The Invisible Hour 2023

Rules of Magic- 2017

Practical Magic - 1997

Faithful- 2016

" From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate.

Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt.

What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.

Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap.

Alice Hoffman’s “trademark alchemy” (USA TODAY) and her ability to write about the “delicate balance between the everyday world and the extraordinary” (WBUR) make this an unforgettable story. With beautifully crafted prose, Alice Hoffman spins hope from heartbreak in this profoundly moving novel." From Simon and Schuster

The Bookish Libra has a marvelous review 

I love the work of Alice Hoffman and hope to eventually read all of her works.  

As I read Faithful I did so from my perspective as the father of three daughters in their 20s.  I could not but think how negatively I would have reacted to two of the three men Shelby was involved with. In one case of an ex-convict covered with tattoos I would have been totally wrong,  

Shelby has a hard time bonding with people.  Her shaved head does not help.  She steals dogs and a cat and provides them with a loving home.  

We follow Shelby as she evolves into a less inward bound person.  I found the ending very gratifying after much previous pain for Shelby.  There are lots of interesting side encounters throughout Faithful.

Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including Magic Lessons: The Prequel to Practical Magic, The World That We Knew, The Rules of Magic, The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, The Book of Magic, The Red Garden, the Oprah’s Book Club selection Here on Earth, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, and The Dovekeepers. She lives near Boston.

School for Love by Olivia Manning. - 1951- Introduction by Jane Smiley 2009

School for Love by Olivia Manning - 1951

OLIVIA MANNING (1908–1980) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Her father, Oliver, was a penniless British sailor who rose to become a naval commander, and her mother, Olivia, had a prosperous Anglo-Irish background. Manning trained as a painter at the Portsmouth School of Art, then moved to London and turned to writing. She published her first novel under her own name in 1938 (she had published several potboilers in a local paper under the name Jacob Morrow while a teenager). The next year she married R. D. “Reggie” Smith, and the couple moved to Romania, where Smith was employed by the British Council. In World War II, the couple fled before the Nazi advance, first to Greece and then to Jerusalem, where they lived until the end of the war. Manning wrote several novels during the 1950s, but her first real success as a novelist was The Great Fortune (1960), the first of six books concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two volumes, The Balkan Trilogy (available as an NYRB Classic) and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as The Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later." From The New York Review of Books. Publisher of School for Love 

School for Love is a very powerful exquisitely rendered work of art. It also has by far the best portrayal of a Siamese Cat in a literary work ever. (Sadly I cannot find her book on Burmese and Siamese cats on Amazon.)

This novel centers on Felix, a British boy whose mother has just died. Felix and his mother lived in Baghdad back when Iraq was a British colony, so Felix, whose father is also deceased, has to make a long journey home by ship at a time when berths on ships are reserved for service members, diplomats, and others who are directly working to bring the second world war to a close. He has a sort-of aunt in Jerusalem named Miss Bohun, and she offers to take him in while he waits for a place on the ship. Miss Bohun was an orphan herself and was taken in by Felix’s paternal grandparents, so she grew up with Felix’s father, as a foster-sibling. Felix has never met Miss Bohun before, but he has heard his mother grumbling about her. Felix who seems about thirteen, is first and foremost a lonely, grieving child who desperately needs love. One might think that Miss Bohun, an orphan herself, would be sympathetic to Felix’s feelings, but you would be wrong.


There is a lot of drama involving the other casts in the house.


It soon becomes clear – to the reader at least – that Miss Bohun is a manipulative monster, a rather absurd and disillusioned creature who considers herself a paragon of virtue when in fact she is anything but. She appears to have taken over the running of the house from its former occupant, the Polish refugee, Frau Leszno. Having been relegated to the position of Miss Bohun’s cook/housekeeper, Frau Leszno is currently residing in the servants’ quarters, a reversal of fortunes she deeply resents. In this scene, Miss Bohun tells Felix how she came to live at the house, clearly implying that she was doing Frau Leszno a huge favour by taking control of the situation. Or, if one looks at it another way, Miss Bohun saw an opportunity for personal gain which she seized without a moment’s hesitation. Felix falls in love with Faro, the resident Siamese cat.


You can decide for yourself if Miss Bohun knocks a pregnant war widow boarding in the house down the stairs, causing her a miscarriage, because of jealousy over others in the house liking her.


The close of School of Love really an amazing partially happy ending.


"Read today, it seems a work of uncanny prescience. The grave concerns of our own age—religious fanaticism, passionate competing territorial claims—are here in embryo, set into the precisely rendered, everyday texture of an era that has vanished. The alien British feel that Du Bois complained of in 1956 was not, in fact, cultural—it is a characteristic of Manning’s unique vision and style, her cool way of dissecting her world and her experience, in which even the most pitiable or terrifying circumstances are worthy of interested and detailed scrutiny." From Jane Smiley's introduction

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride - 2023- 512 Pages

 

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride - 2023- 512 Pages

YouTube has numerous very well done videos focusing on this book.

I was totally drawn into the lives of the characters in The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store from the intriguing open to the beautiful close.

"From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird." From the publisher 

Pottstown, Pennslyvania in the 1930s is a very diverse divided community with African Americans who still look on South Carolina or Georgia as home, immigrants from Jewish communities in Europe and white people who pretend their ancestors came over on the Mayflower.  I really appreciated how McBride showed us the difference between various Jewish immigrant communities, from Romanians, Hungarian,  Russian to the want to be a "real white person" arrogant Germans.  Many of the white people look down on African Americans and are not crazy for immigrants.

At points the novel is heartbreaking,  at other times (especially during the concerts) it is tremendous fun and the ending is so beautiful and moving. 

James McBride is the author of the New York Times–bestselling Oprah’s Book Club selection Deacon King Kong, the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, the American classic The Color of Water, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, the story collection Five-Carat Soul, and Kill ’Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal and an accomplished musician, McBride is also a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.

I hope to read all of his novels and his memoir.