Will o'the Glen on Books

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...