Review of “Gifts of War” by Mackenzie Ford

This story begins with the Christmas Truce of 1914, when all along the Western Front of WWI, soldiers on both sides laid down their arms and fraternized in No Man’s Land in between the trenches of the Allies and the Axis.

During this truce, Henry “Hal” Montgomery, a 23-year-old second lieutenant in the British Army, was given a photo by a German soldier of similar rank, Wilhelm Wetzlar. Wilhelm asked Hal to deliver the photo to his fiancé, known as Sam, back in England. He knew his own mail wouldn’t get through, and wanted Sam to know he was alive and thinking of her.

A short time later Hal suffered a groin injury and was permanently removed from the front. He got reassigned to intelligence work coincidentally close to where Sam lived. When Hal went to give the photo to Sam he decided he wanted her for himself; he neglected to tell her he met her fiancé and proceeded to try and take her away from him. He also discovered what Wilhelm himself did not know, that Sam and Wilhelm had a baby. Hal, impotent from his injuries, also wanted this baby for his own.

Over the war years, Hal stayed with Sam and convinced her to love him in return. The boy “Will” came to love Hal as well. But when the war ended, Hal was afraid Wilhelm might still be alive. …

Evaluation: I notice that other reviewers on Library Thing liked this book a great deal. I did not. I loathed Hal for his betrayal, his lust, and his deceitful manipulation. Sam had some despicable traits as well. Ironically, only Wilhelm comes off well in this novel, but he is mostly a missing presence. It was difficult for me to like a book in which I couldn’t stand the main characters. But I do want to emphasize that I may be alone in this opinion.

Rating: 2/5

For a more positive rating, see the reviews at:

Pudgy Penguin Perusals

Scarpettajunkie’s Blog

Review of “Thanks for the Memories” by Cecelia Ahern

Thanks for the Memories is another “Sleepless in Seattle” type of story, but set in Dublin, so it has an Irish flavor to it. Joyce Conway falls down the stairs and loses the baby she is carrying. This is the final blow for her marriage to Conor, since the possibility of a child was all that was holding it together. It also means that, after her hospitalization, she cannot bring herself to go back to her house where she had a nursery set up. She moves in with her dad, a very likeable old Irish guy who pretends to be a bit more addled than he actually is.

There is another way in which Joyce’s life changes. While she was in the hospital, she needed a transfusion of blood. At the same time, Justin Hitchcock, a divorced American who is guest lecturing in Dublin on art and architecture, is talked into donating blood, and his blood goes to Joyce.

As Joyce recovers from her accident, she finds that she suddenly has acquired knowledge and memories that aren’t her own and can’t be explained. Since the story of Joyce and Justin are told in parallel, the reader can see that the two lives are now entangled; Joyce even gets achy after Justin works out at the gym.

Some of the transferring that goes on from Justin’s life to Joyce’s is just plain silly. It seemed to me to be an interesting idea that was just taken way too far. On the positive side, Joyce’s dad is absolutely delightful, and the relationship he has with his daughter is endearing.

Evaluation: If you can overlook the excesses of the Justin and Joyce story and focus on the other parts of the book, it’s quite a rewarding read. I enjoyed it in spite of itself! 3.5/5

Review of “The Scarecrow” by Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly, a former reporter who once worked at the Los Angeles Times, manages to insert a paean to newspapers in general and to the Times in particular into this serial killer suspense novel.

The protagonist, Jack McEvoy, works at the L.A. Times. Unfortunately, he just got a layoff notice (the 99th of 100 reporters to have received one) as part of the paper’s last-ditch effort to save itself from bankruptcy. When his boss asks him to stay around for two weeks and train his replacement, he decides to go out in classy style with a great story about conditions in the ghetto leading to crime. He focuses on a recent murder in which a stripper was found tortured to death and left in her own car trunk. A fingerprint was found leading to a ghetto youth who was arrested for the crime, in spite of his protestations that he was innocent.

His young trainee, Angela Cook, wants to take the byline from him, and does some extra background research on trunk murders. The information she unearths indicates that the boy may have been set up to take the fall by a serial killer. Soon Jack and his old partner from the FBI, Rachel Walling, are on the trail.

The serial killer is quite techno-savvy, and Jack is not. This allows the author to interject riffs on how newspapers used to operate, versus the internet-driven products of today. Although Jack is prepared to leave gracefully, neither the protagonist nor the author can help feeling a sense of loss over what newspapers used to be.

Rating: This is a suspenseful book that will keep you, if not on the edge of your seat, very close to it. I liked the bittersweet encomium to newspapers too. It isn’t overdone, and also serves to provide those emotional resting spaces when you recover from one roller coaster dip before going up another. Good summer read. 3.5/5

July 6, 1944 – Jackie Robinson Refuses to Move to the Back of the Bus

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. But on July 6, 1944, Lieutenant Jack Roosevelt (“Jackie”) Robinson also refused to move to the back of the bus, and he received a court martial.

Jackie Robinson in military uniform, 1945

Jackie Robinson, later to become famous as the first black to integrate major league baseball in modern times, was assigned to Camp Hood near Waco, Texas during World War II. Camp Hood had a bad reputation among blacks, not only because of the segregation on the post but also because of the depth of racism in the neighboring towns.

On July 6, 1944, Robinson was riding a bus on the base and sitting next to a fellow officer’s light-skinned wife. The driver instructed Robinson to move to a seat farther back. Robinson argued with him, and when he got off at his stop, the bus dispatcher joined in the altercation. A crowd formed and military policemen arrived. The MPs took Robinson into the station. John Vernon, an archivist at the National Archives (Prologue, Spring 2008), tells what happened next:

“…when they arrived at the station to meet with the camp’s assistant provost marshal, a white MP ran up to the vehicle and excitedly inquired if they had ‘the nigger lieutenant’ with them. The utterance of this unexpected and especially offensive racial epithet served to set Robinson off and he threatened ‘to break in two’ anyone, whatever their rank or status, who employed that word.” Robinson continued to show “disrespect” and received a court martial.

Robinson contacted the NAACP and sought publicity from the Negro press. He also wrote to the War Department. The white press picked up on the situation as Robinson was a well-known athlete from his days at UCLA. (In his time at UCLA, Robinson won a national championship in track and field, two consecutive conference scoring titles as a basketball player, was an honorable mention All-American in football, and also played a little baseball.) Higher ups were worried about this “political dynamite.”

Jackie Robinson at UCLA

At the court martial trial, Robinson’s commanding officer gave a glowing report on his character. His army-appointed defense attorney pointed out inconsistencies in witnesses’ accounts. The attorney also suggested that Robinson’s assertiveness was a legitimate expression of resentment given the racially hostile environment. Ultimately, the court acquitted Robinson of all charges.

While what happened to Robinson was not unique, the outcome of the conflict was unusual. It would more than another decade before blacks were free to sit where they chose on the bus.

For more information on Jackie Robinson, see my post here. See more details on his army service in the Prologue article, here.

For information on Rosa Parks and the boycott that followed her brave refusal in 1955, see my post here.

July 6, 1957 – Althea Gibson Becomes the First African American to win Wimbledon

Althea Gibson,born in 1927 in South Carolina, grew up in the Harlem section of New York City. Gibson’s athletic ability set her apart from her peers, and she drew more attention to herself when she won the Police Athletic League and Parks Department paddle tennis competitions. The recreation director and musician Buddy Walker recognized her talent, purchased rackets, and took her to the Harlem River Tennis Courts. Shortly thereafter, the noted Harlem Cosmopolitan Tennis Club took up a collection to provide Gibson with a membership and tennis lessons.

Gibson’s big break occurred when two African American physicians offered her a home, secondary schooling, tennis instruction, and the encouragement and financial support to realize her potential. Gibson lived with the one family in Wilmington, North Carolina during the school year and spent the summer perfecting her tennis game on the other’s backyard tennis court in Lynchburg, Virginia. She went on to win the all-black American Tennis Association (ATA) women’s singles ten years in a row (1947 – 1956), establishing herself as the best black woman tennis player.

In 1950, while in her first year as a basketball and tennis scholarship student at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, she reached the finals before being defeated. But she was not invited to any national tournaments on segregated facilities until tennis champion Alice Marble declared in American Lawn Tennis magazine, “[Gibson] is not being judged by the yardstick of ability but by the fact that her pigmentation is somewhat different.” Largely owing to Marble’s influence, the invitations started coming in, and she entered Wimbledon in 1951, becoming the first African American to play there. She advanced to the quarterfinals before losing. Gibson’s tennis game continued to mature. In 1956, she won sixteen of the eighteen international tournaments in which she was a participant, one of which was a Grand Slam event, the French Open. With this win, Gibson became the first black person to win a major singles tennis title.

Gibson with Darlene Hard in 1957

Seven years after breaking the color barrier in 1950, she established herself as champion by winning both Wimbledon and the U.S. championship in both 1957 and 1958. In 1959 she retired from amateur tennis, played exhibition tennis, appeared in movies, recorded an album, and published her biography, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody.

In 1964 she became a professional golfer. Gibson was the first black woman to hold an LPGA player’s card, thus breaking the color barrier in two of the most socially elite sports. Often she was the first woman of color to compete for championships on private golf courses. She married in 1965.

Althea Gibson could drive over 300 yards

In later years, Gibson served as a professional tennis teacher and coach as well as the program director for a racquet club and athletic commissioner for the state of New Jersey. In 1994, Gibson suffered a stroke that left her confined to her home. She died in 2003 in her home city of East Orange, New Jersey.

Among Althea Gibson’s many honors were the Associated Press Woman Athlete of the Year (1957 – 1958), National Tennis Hall of Fame (1971), Black Athletes Hall of Fame, International Tennis Hall of Fame (1971), and the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame (1980). Gibson served as an inspiration for others such as Zina Garrison, Venus Williams, and Serena Williams. The way was paved for black men, too. Arthur Ashe felt that Gibson set the stage for his own later triumphs on the court.

[Sources include Judith Jenkins George on Althea Gibson in Black Women in America, Second Edition].

Giveaway of “Star Gazing” by Linda Gillard

Thanks to the generosity of the author, I have an autographed copy of Star Gazing to give away. See my review here. I loved this book; the plot is innovative, the dialogue is clever, and it’s sweetly romantic to boot! I gave it a 5/5 rating!

To enter this contest do any of the following:

1. Leave a comment on this post. You must include an email address in at least one of your comments. If I can’t find a way to contact you I will draw another winner. (1 entry)

2. Blog about this giveaway. (Posting the giveaway on your sidebar is also acceptable.) Leave a separate comment with a link to your post. (1 entry)

3. Subscribe to my rss feed, and/or follow me on Google Reader (current subscribers are eligible too). Leave a separate comment for this. (1 entry)

4. Tweet this post on Twitter. Leave me a separate comment with your twitter user name. (1 entry)

5. Stumble this blog, digg it, or technorati fave it. Leave a separate comment. (1 entry)

There are a lot of ways to enter (maximum of five entries), but you must LEAVE A SEPARATE COMMENT for each one or they will not count. I will be using random.org to pick the winners from the comments.

This contest is open to entries from the U.S., U.K., and Canada only. The deadline for entry is midnight, July 16th. I will draw and post the winners’ names on July 17th.

Sunday Salon – Do You Visualize Your Book’s Characters When You Read About Them?

If a book has been made into a movie, I find it is impossible to read the next book in the series without visualizing those same stars. But what about new books? Do you need to create a visual for the character while you read? If so, who are your models?

One source I have for my visualizations is the cover art. If protagonists have been drawn on the cover, I will tend to imagine them that way. If a “role” in a book reminds me of a role in a movie, I might imagine the protagonist as that movie star.

It turns out authors are no different. Linda Gillard sent me some pictures of her characters to show me what she was visualizing as she was writing. If you look at a few of these male heros, you’ll see why her books have so much appeal!

This is what Linda had to say about the process of character visualization:

You might be interested to know that I tend to work from photos when I’m writing. Photos of anyone, it’s just the look of the person that matters. … Attached are pictures of my ideas of Marianne and Keir from my book Star Gazing. I wonder if they are anything like yours?” …

Linda attached pictures of several possibilities to represent Marianne. I show one of them, below.

Nell Newman

In the early days I was stuck with Star Gazing and couldn’t visualise the hero, Keir. (This was probably something to do with the fact that my heroine never sees him because she’s blind.) … The book was limping along with an enigmatic gap where Keir should be until one day I saw a photo in a magazine of Gerard Butler displaying the exact blend of virility and vulnerability that I’d envisaged for Keir. Once I’d discovered him, the book practically wrote itself. :-)

This is the role model she used in her head for the character of Keir in Star Gazing:

Scottish actor Gerard Butler

I arrived at this method because when I was writing Emotional Geology [Linda's first book], I kept visualising myself as Rose because, like her, I make quilts and have a troubled mental health history (though there the resemblance ends). I’d made Rose look very different from me in the book but I couldn’t really see her, and that was inhibiting my writing, so I looked through magazines until I found a photo of someone who looked like my idea of Rose. The character took off then. She was no longer me.

The male hero in Emotional Geology is named Calum. This is the picture Linda sent to show me how she was visualizing him.

British classical pianist Paul Lewis

What about you? Do you see stars :–) when you read books?!!

[Be sure to see my giveaway of Linda Gillard's Star Gazing on the accompanying post today!]

July 4, 1776 – The Declaration of Independence is Adopted by the American Colonies

The Fourth of July commemoriates the date of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain by the American colonies in 1776.

Although many students learn that this is the great document that proclaimed the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all, the reality is more complicated.

Thomas Jefferson, who penned the document, meant this right to apply to white property-holding men. It was a document understood by all at the time to exclude women, children, slaves, blacks, and other “inferior” races.

As Stephen Douglas, when debating Abraham Lincoln, argued in 1858:

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that document, he was the owner, and so continued until his death, of a large number of slaves. Did he intend to say in that Declaration that his negro slaves, which he held and treated as property, were created his equals by divine law, and that he was violating the law of God every day of his life by holding them as slaves? It must be borne in mind that when that Declaration was put forth, every one of the thirteen colonies were slaveholding colonies, and every man who signed that instrument represented a slaveholding constituency. Recollect, also, that no one of them emancipated his slaves, much less put them on an equality with himself, after he signed the Declaration. On the contrary, they all continued to hold their negroes as slaves during the Revolutionary War. Now, do you believe—are you willing to have it said—that every man who signed the Declaration of Independence declared the negro his equal, and then was hypocrite enough to continue to hold him as a slave in violation of what he believed to be the divine law?”

(Stephen Douglas, speaking at Galesburg, IL, October 7, 1858)

Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, contended that the Founders “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence. …” In other words, the purpose of law is to establish normative standards, and act as a bridge, from that which is, to that which ought to be. This philosophy was reified in the Declaration of Independence.

Lincoln’s brilliant co-optation of the words used by the Founders – his insistence that this country live up to the words that comprise the compact agreed to in 1787, was a stroke of lawyerly genius that could not be gainsaid by the South. Henry L. Gates, Jr., writing in Lincoln on Race and Slavery, opined that this re-interpretation was “the most radical thing that Abraham Lincoln did.”

Today, most Americans believe in the elevated meaning that Lincoln gave to the Declaration. As Lincoln said in Peoria in 1854, if we re-adopt the Declaration along with practices and policies that harmonize with the plain meaning of the words set forth in the document,. … “If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.“

This Fourth of July, the document we celebrate is the one written by Jefferson, but translated by Lincoln, and thus is truly a document that guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all human beings in the United States. We still struggle with putting its fine intentions into practice, but the blueprint it outlines is one of which the country can be proud.

July 3, 1863 – Pickett’s Charge: The High Watermark of the Confederacy

The Battle of Gettysburg began on July 1, 1863 and was basically over by the evening of July 3. Union Major General George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac was confronted by Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the small town close to the Maryland/Pennsylvania border. Fighting was intense, but on that last day, July 3, Union troops successfully repelled a massive advance on Cemetery Ridge by the Confederates which came to be known as “Pickett’s Charge.” General Longstreet argued with General Lee about the advisability of the charge, but Lee insisted.

As the Library of Congress “American Memory” site reports: “During the attack, only one Confederate brigade temporarily reached the top of the ridge—afterwards called the high watermark of the Confederacy—led by Brigadier General Lewis Armistead who, just before being shot, yelled, ‘Give them cold steel, boys!’” Ironically, the Union troops that fatally wounded Armistead were under the command of his old friend, Winfield S. Hancock. Per his dying wishes, General Longstreet delivered Armistead’s Bible and other personal effects to General Hancock’s wife, Almira. It was truly a war of brother against brother.

The view from Cemetary Ridge

Pickett’s Charge ultimately proved disastrous for the Confederates, with casualties approaching 60 percent. As a consequence, Confederate General Robert E. Lee was forced to retreat and ultimately abandon his attempt to reach Washington, D.C. via Pennsylvania.

On July 4, the same day that the Vicksburg garrison surrendered to Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Lee reformed his lines into a defensive position, hoping that Meade would attack. The cautious Union commander, however, decided against the risk, a decision for which he would later be criticized. A few skirmishes accomplished nothing but adding to the casualty list. By mid-afternoon, the firing at Gettysburg had essentially stopped, and both armies began to collect their remaining wounded and bury some of the dead.

On July 5, in a driving rain, the bulk of the Army of Northern Virginia marched out of Gettysburg. The Confederates headed back to Virginia, and the invasion of the North was over.

The entire battle yielded the largest number of casualties in the Civil War: some 28,000 Confederates and 23,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded. A National Cemetery was dedicated there in November, 1863, at which time President Lincoln paid tribute to the Union soldiers’ sacrifice in the Gettysburg Address.

Review of “Boneman’s Daughters” by Ted Dekker

A guy made psycho by his mother who then commits serial killings out of anger for the love he never had, and moreover who is obsessed with the beauty of his own body – wait, where have I heard this before? Oh yes, “The Red Dragon.” (”The Red Dragon, in case you don’t know, is the first story in the Hannibal Lecter saga, taking place before the events in “The Silence of the Lambs,” and after Lecter’s original capture and incarceration.) This particular rendition of the “Mom-Made-Me-A-Serial-Killer And Isn’t My Body Beautiful?” story has as its protagonist “The Bone Man,” or Satan, as he doesn’t mind being addressed. And to complete the Christian imagery, we also have various Fathers against whom the Bone Man has a beef; crucifixion imagery; and a priest-cum-psychologist to interpret the whole thing.

The Bone Man has been collecting young girls, trying to convince each she should be his perfect daughter, but alas, the image of his mommy intervenes and off he goes, breaking every bone. But one girl is different: his latest abduction, Bethany. And her father, Ryan, is different too. He is willing to lose his own life to save Bethany’s. Ryan was captured in Iraq, and had been forced to observe first-hand the pain of an Iraqi father who lost his children to “collateral damage.” Ryan watched him kill other children in retaliation, even as the man sobbed. This is important for both Ryan and the author, one gathers: Ryan learns a lot about parental love and sacrifice, and the reader is reminded that not all the casualties in Iraq are soldiers.

It’s not as gory as it sounds, although it is plenty unpleasant, and most of the characters besides Ryan and Bethany are portrayed in a fairly one-dimensional manner. There is not much literary value here, but a fair amount of suspense. And the book plays an interesting role in delivering a political message about Iraq that you almost miss, being caught up in the chase. In short, it is a decent choice for the beach or the airline, but maybe not as an addition to your Great Books shelf.

Rating: 3/5

For a different take, check out a sampling of other reviews:

Bermudaonion’s Weblog

The Novel Bookworm

Book Chatter and Other Stuff

Drey’s Library

A Bookworm’s World

Life In The Thumb