Book 7: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

When I started reading this book, I worried that I might not be able to follow all of it because my knowledge of the Troubles in Northern Ireland was so limited (along with my general knowledge of Irish independence and history). It starts with a pretty narrow focus on one disappeared woman and a few key individuals who played major roles in the IRA in the late sixties and seventies, and gradually broadens the scope, until by the end of the book I wanted to go back to the beginning and reread it immediately, because now I actually had the context I needed for understanding everything. 

This isn't a criticism at all; it's actually one of my favorite things about the book and the way that it builds a world for someone who came in with practically no political understanding of how the Good Friday Agreement came to be and how contentious it was, and how impossible a conflict between neighborhoods and streets can be to navigate, no matter what your religion or position. It's also a murder mystery, and the final third of the novel has a series of reveals that I truly didn't know where they could possibly land. 

I started reading this in the fall and continued into the winter in part because there's a miniseries dramatizing the book, which I wanted to watch after I had read this, and I'm really glad I experienced the narratives in that order. The show is also very good, but I think that my experience of watching the show was deepened significantly by having read the book first. The story itself is highly compelling, but the structure the book gives the story is so effective and so impressive, and I'm already tempted to do a full reread. It's my favorite kind of narrative nonfiction.

Grade: A 

Book 49: The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

I saw this book mentioned on a goodreads newsletter about eight months ago, I think, and immediately put it on hold at the library. I had been wanting to read a book about the Blitz ever since reading Blackout and All Clear, which I enjoyed but also found myself lacking the historical grounding to really understand what was happening to Britain at that stage of the war.

When I started the book, my impression for some reason had been that it was a look at the Blitz from the point of view of a Londoner, but in fact it's actually a telling of Churchill's first year as Prime Minister, from May of 1940 until the following spring. It relies on the diaries of one of his private secretaries and his daughter, Mary, as well as correspondence between Churchill and many other major players in the war, including Roosevelt. I found the framing to be very effective, and an extremely detailed and yet readable first read on a historical event that I knew relatively little about. The last couple of years I have been deliberately attempting to fill in a lot of the blanks I have in my understanding of history, both through historical fiction and then through popular history books, and it's making me revisit other pieces of media that I didn't fully understand because I lacked the necessary context. If you're at all interested in a book that explores how the Blitz began, what England did (and didn't do) in response, America's involvement in the war prior to Pearl Harbor, and how the Blitz ended, I highly recommend reading this.

Grade: A

Book 36: Foursome by Carolyn Burke

This is a biography that I picked up on a whim when I saw it at the library, and I'm not mad I read it, but I am sort of mad at what it ended up being. It's a book about the relationships between Georgia O'Keeffe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and art collector, and Paul Strand and Rebecca Salsbury, who were colleagues of theirs and also artists. I really enjoyed the time period explored (1900-1930s New York, primarily) and I discovered that there was a lot about O'Keeffe's biography before she went to the Southwest that I didn't particularly know. But it's this odd book that reads much older to me than it is; it was published in 2019, and yet there is so much in the way of "contemporary readers might think this suggests lesbianism or gayness or various other things but we assure you: no" commentary that I barely felt like I knew what I was reading. This is especially true when out of the four the person with the greatest modern fame is by far O'Keeffe, and so there was a certain confusion for me in terms of why this wasn't solely focused on her, or perhaps her and her husband, who played a major role in her career as an artist. I enjoyed learning more about some of the figures and times in this book, but not the actual thrust of this book, on the whole.

Grade: B

Book 30: The Plantagenets by Dan Jones

It took me a solid year to read this book - I kept taking it out of the library and not managing to read it before it was due again, and then putting it back on hold. But I finally made it all the way through. I realized that I knew of the Plantagenets as a concept but had very little actual knowledge of them beyond the version of Richard II that Shakespeare told, King Richard the Lionhearted and King John via Robin Hood tellings, and Kings Edward I and Edward II via Braveheart, which whew. So it was great to read an actual history of these kings, even if on occasion it leaned a bit harder into "I know people think these kings were gay but probably they weren't" than I prefer in my popular history, given that there wasn't a lot of evidence for the assertion that certain figures weren't gay, either. Also, I had been hoping for more on the women of the era, although of course it did include a fair amount of information about Eleanor of Aquitaine. 

On the whole I thought this was a very good overview of the ruling family that spanned hundreds of years and hundreds of miles, but I do now want to read more about individual reigns in this period in order to get a bit deeper on it all. For a starting place on this era in English history, however, I think it's a great choice. 

Grade: A

Book 18: The Women Who Wrote the War by Nancy Caldwell Sorel

This book examines the experiences and the reporting of women newspaper and magazine correspondents who covered World War II across the globe. It's a topic I had never really considered or thought about before reading the book, even though women entered many work forces during the war while so many men were off fighting, so it made perfect sense once I started reading it that war correspondent would be another kind of job women would step into. Journalism and nonfiction writing was also a field that women had begun entering during the 1920's when cultural expectations of a woman's role in the world had started to shift, and that meant there were experienced women journalists who were ready and able to fight for the opportunity to go cover the biggest stories of the times when war broke out.

The main difficulty with a book like this is just how broad a story it is. The book covers dozens of women working over a decade and in numerous locations, and at times it ends up feeling like a recitation of facts about what happened when without enough of a coherent thru-line. It would often highlight a writer doing work in Poland in 1938 and then return to her ten chapters and five years later working in England, and it was difficult at times to keep the stories straight or feel connected to any of the women as individuals. I also found it frustrating how every woman was described physically, and the attention given to their romantic lives. It wasn't irrelevant, since often they were traveling with their husbands who were also journalists, or had left husbands behind who were often quite unenthusiastic about having a woman correspondent for a wife, but it felt like a shorthand that was used to differentiate the women, rather than their work. I understand why the book was written in a chronological format, but I think it might have been a better book if it had focused on fewer women and gone further in-depth with each of them individually, rather than trying to give a broad overview of everything at once. Basically, this book attempts to be a biography of about thirty women all at once, while also giving an overview of the war as a whole, and it ends up feeling slightly shallow and disjointed as a result.

Still, I'm really glad that I read the book. While I do think that attempting to cover so many women weakens the overall narrative, it did a great job of making clear just how wide-ranging and far-flung the war (and therefore the people covering the war) was. Most of the books or movies I've read or watched about WWII are understandably narrower in scope, but that makes it easy not to appreciate what it really meant that the entire world was at war. This book definitely made me want to read more in-depth history books about specific events and locations that are only touched on in this one, and the depiction of just one of the roles that women played during that time was also very interesting and worth exploring.

Grade: B

Book 72: Our Endangered Values by Jimmy Carter

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter wrote this book in 2005 in response to the Religious Right and neoconservatives taking over the government post-9/11 and destroying our moral standing in the world, both home and abroad. It was a fascinating book to read right now, because it's easy in 2016 to think of Donald Trump as being a nightmare unlike any we've ever faced before. While I do think that's true, it's not like GWB and Cheney were good guys, and we shouldn't forget that fact.

It was also really interesting because Carter and I have similar views on most major issues, but we approach them from different angles. A lot of this book deals with how his religious beliefs as a born again Evangelical Christian inform and shape his political views, and it's a remarkably sharp retort to all those who insist that deeply held religious faith is incompatible with liberal politics. If anything, he makes a compelling argument that liberal policies are the natural result of religious moral values, with the emphasis on helping the poor and caring for our earth. His path to those political views doesn't match mine, but it's still instructive to see how different people can arrive at the same conclusion for different reasons.

The other thing that this book reminded me of is why it has taken so much work and effort to repair what was damaged during the GWB years, and exactly why it's so important to keep pressing forward and to do what we can to ensure that government is actually functional and works for people and their lives. I'm happy to have read this book now rather than back in 2005, but I'm also incredibly aware that we're at another huge juncture in our country's history.

Grade: A

Book 61: Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

This is a biography of Shakespeare that was written as part of a collection of short biographies of historical figures--it is just under two hundred pages long. It might seem odd that such a short work about the most famous playwright in the world could be satisfying or even remotely complete, but of course what we don't know about Shakespeare's life far outweighs what we actually do.

As a result, this book is as much a history of the time period Shakespeare lived during, the methods various historians have used to discover and verify what we do know about Shakespeare the man (and the methods many frauds used), and the history of theatres in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Bill Bryson is a writer ideally suited to this kind of work; he brings the same wit and clarity and beautiful turn of phrase ("Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context": I don't know if I've ever read a better summation of what we know and don't know about Shakespeare) to Shakespeare that he's brought to travel and science in his other books. This manages to be a book that would be incredibly readable and informative for someone who doesn't know much about Shakespeare while also being immensely satisfying for someone with a deeper knowledge of his background and works.

This was just one of those books that I enjoyed reading so much, from beginning to end, and it's another one of those books that I've owned for so long I don't even remember when or how I acquired it. I'm so glad I finally got around to reading it now as a result of this challenge. Also, it was pretty interesting to read it while in the middle of reading the Lymond Chronicles, since those are set about ten or twenty years before Shakespeare was born. Having a lot of unexpected feelings about the 16th Century right now.

Grade: A

Book 54: Thirteen Days by Robert F. Kennedy

Obviously one of the best kinds of books to read during turbulent times is an historical account of two weeks when the world danced with disaster. I'm being only somewhat sarcastic by saying that, honestly; in a lot of ways I find it deeply reassuring in a certain fatalistic way to remember that the world has always been on a knife's edge, and ever thinking that it's not is the dream. However, October 1962 certainly was a crucial time in the history and even sheer existence of humanity.

The construction of this book is fascinating. The central document itself was written as a memoir by RFK four or five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it is a fairly straightforward narrative of how JFK made the decisions he did and the rationale behind those choices. He also really drives home that in the moment, none of them knew that they would succeed in averting nuclear war. It's so easy to examine history through the lens of what we know will happen, and to forget that of course no result or outcome is actually inevitable.

In addition to RFK's writings and the relevant primary sources (including the correspondence between JFK and Khrushchev), there is both a foreward written in the late 1990s by a RFK biographer, and an analysis of RFK's writings from the early 1970s. The shift in our understanding and interpretation of the actions taken, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declassification of certain documents, is readily apparent in the two commentaries on RFK's memoirs. I'm glad I read this book both because it expanded my understanding of the U.S.'s relationship with and to the USSR (a topic which feels more relevant to the future by the day) and because it's a compelling reminder that history is constantly being revised, for better and for worse.

Grade: A