Book Review: We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole

Author: Fintan O’Toole
Title: We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland
Narrator: Aidan Kelly
Publication Info: Highbridge Audio, March 15, 2022
Summary/Review:

Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole takes the Billy Joel approach to the history of his nation by starting with the year of his birth.  In 1958, when O’Toole was born, the republic was lead by conservative veterans of the Irish war for independence who prioritized cultural causes over all else.  The even more conservative Catholic church leaders aimed to make Ireland the model of their form of Christianity.  As a result, Ireland was an economically depressed and isolated nation among the most impoverished in all of Europe facing a crisis of massive emigration.

Coincidentally, the Irish government initiated plans for modernizing Ireland in 1958.  Over the course of O’Toole’s life the country has gone through remarkable change that’s seen the fall of solid institutions and the people of Ireland voting to legalize abortion and same sex marriage.  Part of the change comes from looking to the United States, makers of Western films the Irish saw themselves in leading to the popularity of Country music.  The presidency of John F. Kennedy and his visit to Ireland also stirred a feeling of Irish pride. American investment in tech companies also propped up the success of the Celtic Tiger economy and the inevitable crash of 2008. Looking to Europe also helped as Ireland worked their way through the process of joining what would become the European Union.

But the biggest change is in the Irish people themselves.  One of O’Toole’s recurring themes is the unwillingness to talk about the rot in the system that everyone knew was there.  In politics, the fantastically corrupt taoiseach Charles Haughey’s governed through the 1980s and into the early 90s before scandals finally damaged his party.  The Church would be rocked by learning of the secret families of famed bishops, the abuse and incarceration of children in Christian Brothers Schools and Magdalene Laundries, and worst of all the hierarchy turning a blind eye to priests’ sexual abuse of children. The Troubles broke out in Northern Ireland in 1968 and endured for 30 years adding a daily toll of violence to Irish life.  For generations a united Ireland was the only officially acceptable solution, but decades of violence changed the mind of people to support the peace agreement of 1998 that allows for a gradual reunification if the people of Northern Ireland chose it.

O’Toole observed many of the events he describes in the book from afar as a child and young adult (sometimes just watching on TV).  But as he becomes a journalist he’s often in the thick of things and is a first person witness to the historical changes in Ireland.  While not an autobiography, O’Toole uses his personal experience to enhance the history.  For example, he talks about how his family and community felt in 1972 that the Irish republic wouldn’t inevitably have to fight in a war in the North, which thankfully didn’t come to pass.  They also thought suspension of the unionist government in Stormont that year meant the Troubles were over, which unfortunately also proved to be false.  All told it makes for a fascinating and detailed history of modern Ireland.

Recommended books:

• Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age by Rosemary Mahoney
• The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal 1966-1996 and the Search for Peace by Tim Pat Coogan
• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
• Biting At the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair by Padraig O’Malley

Rating: ****

Book Review: The City Where Dreams Come True by Gulsifat Shahidi

Around the World for a Good Book selection for Tajikistan

Author: Gulsifat Shahidi
Title: The City Where Dreams Come True
Publication Info: Hertforshire Press, 2016
Summary/Review:

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Republic of Tajikstan fell into civil war.  Author Gulsifat Shahidi witnessed the war as a journalist, and tells how it affected the Tajik people in these four short stories.  Each story is narrated by a different member of the same family: Horosho, his granddaughter Nekbaht, her husband Ali and his cousin Shernazar. The stories illustrate the trauma of how the war divided this family but also the hope they have for the future and the love of their country.

Favorite Passages:

“The world is not without good people and it is inherent that I join them at the helm, to bring joy, kindness and happiness to others. And I’ll begin this righteous path with you.”

“If you do not cry over the grief of other humans, Can anyone call you human?”

Rating: ***1/2

Book Review: The Secret History of Bigfoot by John O’Connor

Author: John O’Connor
Title: The Secret History of Bigfoot
Narrator: Matt Godfrey
Publication Info: Tantor Media, 2024
Summary/Review:

When my son was younger, he began an interest in cryptozoology by watching the cable TV show “Finding Bigfoot.”  The show was both entertaining and absurd, as they never actually found a Sasquatch despite the title.  I created my own conspiracy theory that the cast were actually people who just really loved backwoods camping and scammed Animal Planet to pay for all their equipment.

Of course, there are lots of people who believe Bigfoot is real and the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization exists to support their attempts to find evidence to prove the existence of this species.  Author John O’Connor spends time with this people on Squatching expeditions and notes that they are generally good and companionable people despite their unorthodox beliefs.  In fact, O’Connor does a good job of making sure that his book does not tease or exploit the Bigfoot believers.

Instead O’Connor focuses on various issues that contribute to the belief in Bigfoot.  He relates the history of the Bigfoot phenomenon and how it relates to other benign obsessions like UFOs and more dangerous conspiracy theories that have gained currency with the supporters of Donald Trump and Qanon.  Psychological studies that show the flaws of crime witness reports and memory shed some light on why people may believe they’ve spotted a Bigfoot.  O’Connor researches legends of Native Americans regarding Bigfoot-like creatures, but also notes that the Bigfoot phenomenon reflects the fears that white Americans have of nature.  The ideas of leaving civilization behind for the wilderness and solitude are reflected upon by the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Merton.  O’Connor also tells the parallel story of the birding community of how some people who look for the ivory-billed woodpecker, believed to be extinct since the 1940s, are met with ridicule but persist in their search.

I like how O’Connor approaches the topic from so many different angles.  I also like that O’Connor makes his dislike for IPAs and the Yankees known, and just how he integrates his personality into the book.  We may never find Bigfoot, but you can find out a lot about humanity and the enduring popularity of myth by reading this book.

Recommended books:

• Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America by Jon Mooallem
• Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators by William Stolzenburg
• The Thoreau You Don’t Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant by Robert Sullivan
• Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures by Ben Mezrich
• Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz

Rating: ****

Book Review: The Pirate’s Wife by Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos

Author: Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos
Title: The Pirate’s Wife: The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd 
Narrator: Courtney Patterson
Publication Info: Harlequin Audio, 2022
Summary/Review:

There’s a trend of fictional works titled The [name of man’s trade] [female relative], but The Pirate’s Wife is a history of a woman who was the spouse of an actual pirate.  Or a privateer, depending on your point of view.  Sarah Bradley was only 14 when she settled in New York City with her parents and seven years later when she married Captain William Kidd, she had already been married and widowed twice.  Geanacopoulos surmises that while the first marriage was arranged by her father, and the second marriage was out of necessity, Sarah and Kidd shared a passionate love.

But they didn’t get to spend much time together as Kidd was commissioned to sail the Adventure Galley as a privateer with the support of New York Governor Bellomont.  When the rumor that Kidd had turned pirate was spread, his investors turned against him and he was captured in Boston in 1699.  Sarah went to support him and was arrested as well.  Sarah is shown to work to protect her family name and try to prevent the execution of her husband.  However, Kidd would be brought to England and hung in 1701, leaving Sarah a widow yet again.  The rest of her life would require rebuilding her reputation and for their children as well, a difficult task that she achieved.

This is an interesting glimpse of the actions of historical figure who accomplished a lot despite the prejudices against her for being a woman at the time. Geanacopoulos addresses gaps in the historical record by frequently writing “Sarah may have…” which is a good hedge against being historically inaccurate, but becomes a bit of an irritant in her writing style.  Definitely a book worth checking out if you’re interested in women’s history, pirates, and Colonial America.

 Recommended books:

• Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly
• Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore
• The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter T. Leeson

Rating: ***

Book Review: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System by Cynthia Zaitzevsky

Author: Cynthia Zaitzevsky
Title: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System
Publication Info: Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press, 1982.
Summary/Review:

In a coffee-table format and richly illustrated with historic photographs and drawings, Cynthia Zaitzevsky explores the history of Boston’s groundbreaking park systems.  Frederick Law Olmsted, a pioneer of landscape architecture with his design for Central Park, moved to Brookline in the final decades of his life to work with the City of Boston on an elaborate network of parks that became known as the Emerald Necklace.  Zaitzevsky sums up the topographical history of Boston and Olmsted’s biography before moving on to the various segments of the Emerald Necklace (Olmsted had a strict definition of what was and wasn’t a park, considering the Back Bay Fens to be a sanitary improvement while Franklin Park was the only “true” park), as well as other projects Olmsted and company worked on in the area.

Olmsted’s parks survive to this day although often dramatically different forms.  The vision of democracy Olmsted had of the restorative nature of pastoral settings for the people was at odds with actual city residents needs for active sports and recreation.  Zaitzevsky seems disappointed that Olmsted’s vision didn’t survive except in places like Arnold Arboretum, but as a Bostonian with kids I’ve enjoyed many of the adaptive reuses of the parks while still appreciating the Olmstedian landscapes. One quibble with this book is that the author breaks it down in topics rather than chronologically or by park, which means there are chapters about Olmsted’s firm, plans, plants, etc toward the end that I kind of got bored with.  I’d have found it more illuminating to have that information incorporated into the broader narrative of the Emerald Necklace.
 Recommended books:

• A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century by Witold Rybczynski
• Boston: A Topographical History by Walter Muir Whitehill
• Inventing the Charles River by Karl Haglund

Rating: ***1/2

Book Review: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

Around the World for a Good Book Selection for Sri Lanka

Author: Shehan Karunatilaka
Title: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Narrator: Shivantha Wijesinha
Publication Info: HighBridge Audio, 2022
Summary/Review:

Maali Almeida is a photojournalist, a gambler, and a closeted gay man in 1980s Sri Lanka.  The novel begins with his death and his arrival in a state in-between life and the afterlife that is essentially a bureaucratic office space (shades of Beetlejuice).  Maali has seven moons (on week) to settle his affairs on Earth before moving on to a stage of forgetting.  As a war photojournalist he’s taken photos documenting the atrocities of the Sri Lankan Civil War that he desperately wants released to the public so that it might end the violence.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a grim and darkly comic novel that satirizes Sri Lankan politics.  It also relates the life of it’s protagonist in flashback, curiously written in second person so that the reader identifies with Maali.  Not knowing anything about the Sri Lankan Civil is definitely a challenge for me reading this book, although learning new things is one of the purposes of reading.  It’s also a strange and complicated story, but it does make for an interesting story of a specific place and time, with some magical realism for added measure.

Recommended books:

• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
• Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

Rating: ***1/2

Book Review: The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

Author: Daniel James Brown
Title: The Boys in the Boat : Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
Publication Info:  New York : Viking, c2013.
Summary/Review:

In this literary historical narrative, Daniel James Brown tells the story of nine young men who became national heroes during the Great Depression.  They were members of the University of Washington’s eight-oared rowing crew (and the coxswain) who represented the USA at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936.  These student athletes all came from working class backgrounds and they all had to struggle to make their way academically into college as well as spending countless hours practicing on Lake Washington.

Brown offers a background history of all 9 members of the University of Washington crew, but focuses most deeply on Joe Rantz, the poorest of the boys.  Rantz was forced to live on his own by his father and step-mother at the age of 15 and carries the feeling of abandonment to the University of Washington where he’s bullied for being poor.  Through the crew he finds acceptance and a sense of purpose.  The book also talks about the life and career of the team’s no-nonsense coach Al Ulbrickson, who had been a student rower at Washington less than a decade earlier.  The poetic English boat builder George Yeomans Pocock also plays a big part in the story.  Working in the loft of the Washington shell house, Pocock built wooden racing shells that were renown throughout the country, and served as a mentor for young athletes like Rantz,

Starting in 1933, Rantz’s freshman year, Brown details Ulbrickson’s plans to form a crew that could compete in the 1936 Olympics.  Collegiate rowing at the time was an extremely popular spectator sport with national radio coverage.  Despite all the time they spent practicing, there were only two major annual competitions on Washington’s calendar. The first was a race against their archrivals at University of California.  The other was a race on the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie, New York against several elite Eastern universities.  Washington and Cal had only begun challenging the Eastern schools’ supremacy in the 1920s.  In 1936, the Washington crew teams (including JV and Freshmen) swept all of these events before also winning at the US Olympic Trials for the right to represent the country in Berlin.

Throughout the book, Brown offers the parallel story of Aldolf Hitler planning to use the games to show the world that Nazi Germany was a powerful – but -benign – nation.  This included deceiving the US Olympic Committee about the true severity of discrimination against German Jews when the USOC was under pressure from protestors to boycott the games in Berlin.  The final chapters detail the experience of the Washington crew in Germany, including the dramatic final race.  The fact that we know the team will win gold should make it anticlimatic, but since the Washington team had a habit of coming from behind to win races (while facing challenges like a deliriously sick member of the crew) makes the race descriptions exciting.  Even if you know nothing about rowing, Brown describes the tactics and terminology so well that the reader is well-versed in it by the Olympic races.

Recommended books:

• Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
• In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson
• The Games: A Global History of the Olympics by David Goldblatt

Rating: ***

Book Review: The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen

Around the World for a Good Book selection for Denmark

Author: Jussi Adler-Olsen
Title: The Keeper of Lost Causes
Narrator: Erik Davies
Translator: Lisa Hartford
Publication Info: New York : Books on Tape, 2011.
Summary/Review:

Detective Carl Mørck survives a shooting that kills one his partners and paralyzes the others.  A curmudgeon that no one else in the department likes, he finds himself “promoted” to lead the new Division Q funded by a national government initiative to solve cold cases.  His superiors see to it that most of the money earmarked for Division Q goes into the general police funding, while Carl gets a basement office and one assistant, a charming Syrian refugee named Hafez al-Assad.

Carl is drawn to the case of a rising star in the Parliament, Merete Lynggaard, who disappeared on a ferry ride to Berlin.  The police have decided she died by suicide or an accidental fall from the ship, but Carl suspects there’s more to the story.  During Merete’s career in politics she had been very private of her personal life.  Despite the gossip papers efforts to reveal a hidden romance, in reality she spent her off time caring for her younger brother Uffe.  As a child, Merete survived a car crash that killed her parents and cause Uffe to be developmentally disabled and unable to speak.  This crash will play an important part in the story in other ways.  The reality is that she’s been abducted and kept in a pressure chamber for five years by her cruel captors.

Carl is an “old-fashioned” type of detective, and not a very likable character but more pitiable than loathsome.  Assad adds a lot of warmth and humor and is my favorite part of the book.  I found the motivations of the villains to be implausible with no explanation other than they are “crazy” as Adler-Olsen keeps reminding us. But crazy people don’t make compelling antagonists.  The scenes with Merete in captivity are very unsettling and it reads almost like torture porn.  There’s copaganda too, as Carl and Assad are only able to save the day by breaking the rules.  But there is humanity in this story to that keeps it engaging right up to the hopeful, but definitively not happy, ending.

Recommended books:

• Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

Rating: **1/2

Book Review: Call and Response by Gothataone Moeng

Around the World for a Good Book selection for: Botswana

Author: Gothataone Moeng
Title: Call and Response
Narrator: Warona Setshwaelo
Publication Info: Penguin Audio, 2023
Summary/Review:

This debut collection of short stories depict life in contemporary Botswana, typically from the perspective of women and girls.  Many stories are set in the capital and largest city of Gaborone, and contrast the traditional ways of the outlying villages to the modern ways of the big city when young people move there for work. Generational conflict is also a major theme.  The lingering effects of colonialism color the stories, as does ongoing crises like the AIDS epidemic.  The longest story “Early life and education,” follows the life of Lerako, a man raised by extended family after his mother’s unplanned pregnancy, and takes place over many decades paralleling the changes in Botswana at the time.  Moeng is an interesting writer and it will be worth seeing what she publishes next.

Rating: ***

Book Review: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs: Volume 2 by Andrew Hickey

Author: Andrew Hickey
Title: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs: Volume 2: From the Million Dollar Quartet to the Fab Four
Publication Info: Independently published (2021)
Other Books I’ve Read By the Same Author:

• A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs: Volume 1: From Savoy Stompers to Clock Rockers

Summary/Review:

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is my absolute favorite podcast these days.  Andrew Hickey’s research into music is exhaustive and defies the many myths that have arisen about the artists who made it.  The podcast has the advantage of hearing clips of the songs under discussion, but I find that reading the book I catch things I previously missed.  The second volume covers the years 1957 to 1962, essentially the second wave of Rock and Roll.  The common wisdom was that this was a fallow period in rock history when the music business pushed sanitized pop vocalists (typically named Bobby) to the forefront.  But this period also saw the emergence of The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, Brenda Lee, and Roy Orbison, as well as the first girl groups in New York, and the Motown sound in Detroit. Leiber and Stoller had some of their biggest rock hits, and Goffin and King started their illustrious partnership. Not too mention dance trends like “The Twist” and “The Loco-Motion.” The period ends with the first efforts by Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles (who we learn throughout the book were the culmination of many attempts to create a UK rock sound).   I recommend the book and the podcast highly.

Recommended books:
Rating: ****