Winter Reading

Oh, long neglected blog! You're still useful to collect my reading lists, don't worry. I've been reading (and enjoying) a lot more non-fiction lately.

The Last Time I Saw You, by Elizabeth Berg. Fluff about middle aged women (and a few men) going to a 40th high school reunion. I am embarrassed to admit that I picked up this book thinking it was by a different author. Readable but not my cup of tea. But I finished it!

A Friend of the Family, by Lauren Grodstein. A thoroughly depressing story about a physician father who is more ambitious for his son than his son is ambitious for himself. The son falls for the daughter of a family friend who is thoroughly messed up, provoking the father to actions everyone regrets. While all this is going on, the father is dealing with a malpractice lawsuit that he certainly bears some responsibility for, along with feeling guilty. Gosh, I am depressed reading my summary. Still, if a good depressing book is the medicine you need to feel better abut your own life, this book will perk you right up.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, by Allison Hoover Bartlett. A real-life story about a guy who is so obsessed with owning rare books that he steals them. Bartlett does a great job getting inside the head of book thief John Gilkey and the strange world of rare book dealers. The detective work involved in actually connecting Gilkey to many missing books across the country, but particularly here in the SF bay area was also fascinating. Fun read and highly recommended.

The Big Burn, by Timothy Egan. Egan also wrote The Worst Hard Time, which I enjoyed. This non-fiction book covers the huge fire that consumed much of the American west in 1910. The fire itself is framed by the background on the Fire Service and the role of Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot in founding it and establishing our national forest system against long odds. Good story and great history.

The Last Season, by Eric Blehm. More non-fiction. When veteran back-country ranger Randy Morgenson ends up missing in Sequoia National Park, it sets off a massive man-hunt. The hunt is intertwined with Morgenson's life story, including being raised in Yosemite, and teaches you about the special kind of dedication it takes to be a seasonal ranger in the remote back-country. I liked the book, but the details of Morgenson's life beyond the ranger-ness of it, while no doubt essential to a complete picture, whipsawed too much between the mundane and sublime for a consistently good read.

A Gate at the Stairs, by Laurie Moore. I enjoyed this quirky and surprisingly complex book about a student who finds a job babysitting for a couple and their adopted child. The couple are downright strange, the surprising reason for which comes out during and is central to the story. There is a 9/11 connection (I seem to be finding these in books more often these days) as that event occurs during the story. Interesting characters and storyline.


Where Men Win Glory, by Jon Krakauer. Has Krakauer written any bad books? No, but he sure wrote a boring one here. I was hoping that this non-fiction account of the Pat Tilman story would focus on what happened in the field and in the coverup and politics surrounding it. And there was some of that. Unfortunately, I had to learn about Pat's grade school and high school experience in such glorious detail that I was worn out by the time any bullets were fired.

Fordlandia, by Greg Grandin. Henry Ford was certainly a fascinating person who left a deep footprint on the world. Turns out Ford built an entire town in the Amazon jungle in order to harvest rubber. For reasons you will learn about in this non-fiction book, it was an amazing failure. Along the way, you can learn about the complex person Ford was, the company he built, unions he fought, and the conflict between his vision for society and the reality of his automobile legacy.

The Big Short, by Michael Lewis. Keeping with my tradition of reading at least one book about history-changing current events (Enron, global warming, 9/11, etc), I settled on this book about the great financial meltdown. It was highly entertaining and enlightening. Lewis follows several key figures in the financial world who recognized what was going on, as bad loans were made and then repackaged to be sold and re-sold in misleadingly solid form by greedy Wall Street powerhouses. I felt guilty rooting for these guys, who literally created ways to make the risky bet of "shorting" the big boys pushing the bad paper. Lewis succeeds in producing a highly readable story that makes a nearly impenetrable maze of financial chicanery understandable.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan. The author of my favorite Vietnam war history, A Bright Shining Lie, turns his sights on the cold war and the ICBM program that was central to it. Terrific story! Sheehan weaves the history together with the human story of the ICBM program in the person of Bernard Schriever, who was the Air Force mover who made it happen. I could have used a little less time on the bureaucratic infighting, but clearly there could have been no mutually assured destruction without quite a bit of that going on. I wonder if being a child of the cold war and a professional participant in some form myself from 1974 to 1990 or so made this story more interesting to me than it will be to others, but I hope you'll give it a try.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta Lacks died of cancer in 1951, but her cancer cells live on today and have been used to help produce the polio vaccine along with many advances in gene mapping, virology, and elsewhere. Her family knew nothing about it until years later. Skloot does a lot of detective work on Henrietta and her family, and works hard to earn their trust that she will tell Henrietta's story and not exploit them. That process is part of the story, along with the understandable details of the science associated with the cells. I was a little concerned this was going to be a sob story about exploitation, but it really was not. The family story was actually interesting, and it served to highlight the often complete disconnect between the world of science and those who are on the receiving end of its efforts.