Will o'the Glen on Books

For folks like me who were alive and into sci-fi movies in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the new book by film writer Chris Nashawaty,   The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982 , will bring a   déjà vu -like rush of memory of that summer, when the movies   E.T., Tron, Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Thing,  and   Mad Max: The Road Warrior   were all released within a searing eight-week period. In the five years before that eventful summer we had had the first two Star Wars movies, Alien, and the rather woeful first Star Trek film, but that fateful eight-week period reshaped the landscape of Hollywood moviemaking in a way that is still being felt now, over 40 years later; indeed, the MCU, the DC movies, X-Men films and the whole tradition of summer blockbusters and multi-film series can trace their beginnings to the Summer of 1982. Within the same timeframe that saw these mov...

Rachel Lance, the biomedical engineer who authored the first book I reviewed here at Will o'the Glen on Books : In The Waves , about the fate of the Confederate States submarine CSS Hunley and its crew after the sinking of the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor on February 17th, 1864; is back with another deeply researched scientific thriller: The Chamber Divers .      The Chamber Divers , by In The Waves  author Rachel Lance is a       true-life scientific  thriller that the reader will find is hard to put down. In The Chamber Divers Dr Lance has jumped forward in time 70+ years from the time of the Hunley to one of the most critical periods in modern history, the Second World War, bringing to light the efforts of a dedicated group of scientists who put their own bodies on the line in support of the Allied effort to conquer fascism. The Chamber Divers draws the reader in with a prologue chapter about the ill-fated Dieppe raid, an infamously fa...

A strong first novel is always an interesting reading experience, and   The God of Endings , by first-time novelist Jacqueline Holland, left me thinking for a good long while after I turned the last page. I thought about the scope of the story I had just read, about all that it had encompassed and the unique take on blood-drinking immortal beings that the author had devised; I also thought about what I felt was missing from the book as it is, places where I was left craving a bit more background, more detail. (Not that that’s a bad thing – a sense of completeness and finality when you finish a good book can be a good thing, but so can a sense of mystery or longing. The little  frisson  of excitement that traces up your spine when you finish a book that leaves you wanting more is a tantalizing sensation.) It has in common with many novels of the genre a protagonist who is introduced into the eternal life unwillingly and who is forced to navigate their way through this stra...

Churchill & Son , by journalist and author Josh Ireland explores a little-examined aspect of the life of Winston Churchill: his relationship with his only son, Randolph. I am not widely read on the subject of Winston Churchill but I have always admired him, mostly for the job he did leading the British Empire in their lonely stand against Nazi Germany in the dark early days of the Second World War. Books such as Candice Millard’s excellent  Hero of the Empire ;  Destination: Casablanca , by Meredith Hindley ;  and  Eight Days at Yalta , by Diana Preston  have shaped what I know of Winston Churchill, and aside from  The Splendid and the Vile , by Erik Larson , which deals closely with the entire Churchill clan during World War II, in the books that I have read about the elder Churchill I have seen relatively sparing mention of his son, Randolph. Churchill & Son  was therefore, revelatory in many ways. I had seen glimpses of Randolph Churchill’s ...

I have been a fan of Timothy Hallinan’s Junior Bender mysteries from the beginning, starting the ride with #1 in the series, Crashed . The sharp wit, crackling dialog, and quirky cast of unique characters drew me in from the first page of that first book, and I have eagerly awaited each new installment since. When the eighth Junior Bender’s novel hit my doorstep I dropped the book I was currently reading like a hot rock and dove back into Timothy Hallinan’s L.A.—and was hit with a couple of surprises right off the bat. Without throwing spoilers into the mix, or at least not too much, after the end of Nighttown I expected that the next Junior Bender adventure would involve L.A.’s favorite burglar-cum-P.I.-to-the-underworld in the task of wresting his girlfriend Ronnie’s son from his New Jersey-mobster father. To my surprise (#1)—followed by the realization that Timothy Hallinan certainly knows his characters and the direction that their stories are going to take them better than I do—i...

Given that   The Murder of Marion Miley   is about the murder of a talented and in her time, well-known, American amateur golfer, I debated whether to place this review in my golf-related blog, Will o'the Glen on Golf, or my book-review blog, Will o'the Glen on Books. Solomon-like, I decided to have it both ways and post it in both. *************************************** Though this book reads like fiction, Marion Miley was a real person, and the broader outline of events described in the book actually happened: 27-year-old Marion and her mother, Elsie, were shot and killed during a late-night break-in and robbery at the Lexington, Kentucky, country club where they shared an upstairs apartment. Marion’s father, Fred Miley, formerly employed at the Lexington Country Club, was still married to her mother, but had taken a job at another golf club, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and lived apart from his wife and daughter. Marion was a well known amateur golfer who competed against, and oft...

Under the Wave at Waimea  was my first Paul Theroux book. I have heard of him over the years, and I may even have seen the movie that was made from his book Mosquito Coast , but had never read any of his work before picking up this book—and honestly, I may think twice about picking up another. A quick synopsis: We meet protagonist Joe Sharkey as a 62-year-old former pro-surfing star, living the good life on Oahu’s North Shore: surfing, drinking, getting high, getting laid, etc. One rainy night, driving home after three beers and a little weed, he hits a homeless drunk who staggers into the road in front of his car. He lies about the circumstances to the police, gets off with no punishment—and then his life starts to spiral out of control. Whether due to karma, bad vibes—what have you—things just start to go wrong, culminating in an incident at Waimea in which Joe experiences a long hold-down after wiping out, and nearly drowns. At this point, the book started to lose me, because it...

Before reading Hitler’s Last Hostages I was vaguely aware of Adolf Hitler’s background as a failed artist, and I had heard of the Führermuseum project. I had also read the excellent book, The Monuments Men , by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter, and I was expecting something that expanded upon the information contained in that book. What I found was very much more than that. The book opens by looking into the discovery of the hoard of looted/stolen artwork that was in the possession of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a notorious Nazi art “dealer”—though Gurlitt senior was in fact just a licensed looter, given carte blanche  by the Third Reich to acquire works of art by coercion, for pennies on the dollar, or by outright theft.  The narrative then shifts to Adolf Hitler’s early life and background in art, other German artists that were active before, during, and after the First World War, and the effects of that war on the world of the arts, and the artists who worked within it—i...

Meredith Hindley’s Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II  succeeds on so many levels that I had trouble deciding where to begin this review. With so much attention having been paid in recent years to WW II action in mainland Europe and the Pacific, especially through feature films and TV mini-series that reach huge audiences ( Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, The Pacific ) it’s gratifying to see the spotlight turned on a lesser-known theater of operations. Casablanca, a port city on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, in the northwest corner of Africa, became an important place in the world in the aftermath of the fall of France, when the French government, and their military forces, capitulated to Nazi Germany, compromising with their conquerors by establishing a collaborationist Fascist government in the south of France in exchange for giving up Paris and the north. Refugees from France, and...

I was hesitant to write a review of  Becoming Duchess Goldblatt , because, in all honesty, I was uncertain that I could do justice to this coruscant jewel of a book, which is equal parts autobiography and the history of a whimsical, but meaningful, social-media phenomenon. For readers who are unaware of the backstory, Duchess Goldblatt is the fictional persona behind a pseudonymous Twitter account, cast as an 80-ish author of world renown, a self-described great beauty, once a resident of the real town of Klein, Texas, and now abiding in the fictional ( and appropriately fanciful ) town of Crooked Path, New York. In real life, however, the mind behind the Duchess is that of a woman, whose real identity is a closely-held secret, who created the Duchess alter-ego as an escape ( dare I say it ) from her life’s unfolding tragedies. Shaped by a dark childhood, with a distant mother who quite frankly disliked her, an ineffectual father whose grounding in a seminary education car...

( On hearing that the second book in the planned Lost Queen  trilogy, The Forgotten Kingdom,  was due to be released in September, I felt that I owed it to the reading public to revisit my review of the first book, The Lost Queen , from January 2019—as a warning. ) A former acquisitions editor at Random House and Penguin before leaving to write her first book, Faery Tale: One Woman’s Search for Enchantment in a Modern World, Signe Pike has, in The Lost Queen , intertwined a storyline with a vague connection to Arthurian legend with a teenage girl’s romantic fantasy of a mystical Celtic queen. The Lost Queen  has been compared to both the Outlander saga and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon , and is supposedly based on historical information positing a 6th-century Brythonic poet/sage who is the basis for the Merlin character of Arthurian legend and the misty legend of a near-mythical queen of the same era. Unfortunately, the book bears a stronger resembla...

World War II history, and particularly the period between the fall of France and the United States’ entry into the war, has always been of great interest to me. Most of my reading on this period has been focused on the Battle of Britain—the quite brief span of time in the late summer/early autumn of 1940 when the men and women of the Royal Air Force fought a desperate battle to prevent the Luftwaffe from achieving air superiority over the English Channel and southern England as a prelude to an invasion of the British Isles. Lately, however, I have been seeking out books that deal with the larger picture of that fateful period of over 2-1/2 years when England and the Commonwealth stood alone against the Fascist tide that had swept across continental Europe. Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile chronicles this crucial period; specifically, the first year of Churchill’s tenure as Prime Minister of England, and the author takes a unique approach, mining the journals and personal dia...

Joseph Wheelan’s new book,  Bloody Okinawa,  a  comprehensive look at the Battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest, most destructive single campaign of World War II,  is a detailed, extensively researched account of the battle for this strategic island, an important stepping stone in the Allies’ march to Japan—but it goes overboard, in my opinion, in the depiction of the more grisly details of the campaign. The bitterly stubborn defense of the island of Okinawa by Japanese forces was prosecuted as a purposefully attritional campaign to give Japan time to prepare the defenses of the home islands, or to force the Allies to the bargaining table before they could get into a position to invade. Japanese soldiers, sailors, airmen, and many Okinawan civilians saw it as their duty to lay down their lives for the Emperor, and to take as many U.S. personnel with them as possible. The incomprehensively brutal fighting, when battlefields became muddy charnelhouses as U.S. Army and Ma...

Faster , by Neal Bascomb, combines narratives on early auto racing and early-20th century European political history into a fascinating and obviously well-researched book about French Grand Prix race driver René Dreyfus, wealthy American race driver and team owner Lucy O'Reilly Schell, and the estimable Delahaye 145 race car with which they triumphed over the formidable W-145 Silver Arrows of the Nazi-government-backed Mercedes-Benz at the season-opening Pau Grand Prix in 1938. After opening with the author's description of being taken for a ride in one of the still-existing Delahay 145s by its wealthy auto-enthusiast owner in March 2019, the book dives into the past. It is a fascinating story, recounting both Dreyfus and Schell’s backgrounds and life in motor racing, with plenty of detail about the other important figures in the story, including German race-car driver Rudi Caracciaola, a star of the Third Reich's propaganda-driven backing of German motor racing. Backed...

The latest effort from the pen of the author of Ice Harvest is a quirky, enjoyable, and puzzling SoCal-noir thriller that will, at the very least, challenge your expectations of the genre. For quirky and puzzling, let’s start with the title, which will be instantly recognized by fans of the Warner Brothers Bugs Bunny cartoons of the 1950s and ’60s (the line was most famously uttered by Bugs in the 1953 Warner Brothers cartoon Bully for Bugs ); but for reasons I cannot fathom, there is no reference to the line in the book, nor to Albuquerque, or even (at a stretch) to Bugs Bunny. For enjoyable one need look no further than Phillips’ prose, and his characters. His observations and dialogue are spot-on, and the characters that inhabit the story are well-realized and original – and therein lies one of the challenges of the story. His protagonist, a lawyer named Douglas Rigby, is pretty hard to like. A philanderer and an embezzler, Rigby is on the brink of financial insolvency and is not...

In the opening decades of the 20th century two basic methods of powered flight—lighter-than-air craft, commonly known as air ships, and heavier-than-air craft, or airplanes—were the technologies competing for the role of prime movers for the air transportation of goods and passengers. Alexander Rose’s new book, Empires of the Sky, to be published on 28 April, 2020, tells the story of this technological duel by examining the rivalry between the main protagonists in the field—the Zeppelin Company of Germany, headed by Hugo Eckener, and Pan American Airways, helmed by the relentless (and ruthless) Juan Terry Trippe. In retrospect, it may seem that heavier-than-air craft—airplanes—were a shoo-in for the job over their lighter-than-air rivals, but in the early years of the 20th century this was not a foregone conclusion. Just as a boat floats because it weighs less than the volume of water it displaces, dirigibles get their lift by using a lighter gas (either hydrogen, in the case of the...

The author of The Boston Massacre: A Family History presents an interesting thesis, that the amount of social interaction between the occupying British troops and American colonists turned the so-called “Boston Massacre” and the later Revolutionary War into “family conflicts”. According to the descriptive blurb, “… the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political. […] When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution. Serena Zabin’s The Boston Massacre delivers an indelible new slant on iconic American Revolutionary history.” In my view, this book fails to live up to its billing, as it never effectively identifies a causal relationship between the personal, social interactions which she describes in great detail, and the actual event – let alone the greater events that followed, and which eventually led to American independence. Ms Zabi...

The Yalta conference, in February 1945, comprised what is probably the most important eight-day period in modern history. The leaders of the three principal nations of the Allied alliance opposing the Axis powers – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin – met in the Black Sea resort city of Yalta to confer on subjects ranging from the conduct of the final campaigns against Nazi Germany to the configuration of Poland post-World War II; they also wrangled over the settlement of many other issues which would arise in the aftermath of the war, effectively shaping the world of the second half of the 20th century, and beyond, in the process. Diana Preston’s account of the conference, and its aftermath, is thoroughly researched and extremely well-written. The book includes vivid descriptions of the environs – the war-ravaged Black Sea resort of Yalta – and the personalities: FDR, ravaged by a multitude of physical ailments and increasingly unwell; Churchill, voluble, ...

Henry Hemming’s Agents of Influence was a real revelation to me, recounting as it does a British effort to bring the United States into World War II that went far beyond anything that I was aware of before reading this book. In addition to documenting the activities of British diplomats and the British intelligence service, MI6; not to mention the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill – to sway the U.S. government and U.S. public opinion in favor of entering the conflict in support of Great Britain, Hemming details the efforts of both the Nazi regime and the American isolationist movement, spearheaded by the “America First” organization and their spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, to keep the United States out of the war. Some might characterize the activities of the U.S.-based office of MI6, led by Canadian William Stephenson, as underhanded, and even duplicitous, but they were fighting a desperate battle to combat misinformation (while spreading a bit themselves, in a good cause) and turn ...