Sarah Chorn's Blog, page 20

Review | Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia – Christina Thompson

About the Book 

A blend of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester’s Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know. 

For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history.

How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonize these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.

For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration with the drama of discovery in a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world.

384 pages (hardcover)
Published on March 12, 2019
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This book was a library loan.

When I was an undergrad, my big project before I got my degree was grant writing, specifically for the local Polynesian community. It took a really long time, and while I learned a lot about the local Polynesian community, I also learned that grant writing is not a thing I want to do with my future. 

Shocking, I know. 

This, however, is the great summation of my knowledge of Polynesia. My husband, the other day, asked why I was reading about Polynesia, is it for book research? “No,” I said. “I’m just reading about it because I know absolutely nothing about this region of the world and I figure, why not change that?” 

So, reading this book was really something I dove into with very little previous knowledge or understanding. It was very much an impulse read and wow, did it really paint a brand new picture of all things Pacific. 

Sea People starts out with a bit of information about the earliest explorers. Now, this might be your favorite part of the book, but I quickly realized I was here more for the whole, “where did the first Polynesian people come from” question rather than the adventures and wonder of Captain Cook. That being said, while I was pretty set to grit my teeth and pull myself through this section of the book, I quickly found myself fascinated. 

The Pacific Ocean is absolutely huge (I didn’t realize just how big it was until I read this book, too) and due to that vast size, and its location and all that fun stuff, it was really the last unexplored part of the world. Most people who went into the Pacific, had no idea just what they were in store for. It’s vast size, with no real land other than tiny islands here or there, which would be really, really easy to miss if you’re in the wrong place, and those trade winds that make the whole place either impossible to navigate, or only navigable through certain areas. This all worked together to really this region of the world very difficult nut to crack.  

The early explorers, though, took a good swing at it, and Thompson takes readers through the most important discoveries at the start of this book, ending with Captain Cook, who was really the first person to cover all of Polynesia, and had the ability (along with some Polynesians who traveled with him) to map out all of the islands he saw, in concert with what the Polynesians knew from their own travels, and oral histories, which was really groundbreaking. 

From this point, the book moves on to early theories about Polynesia, what people assumed about where the Polynesian people come from as a whole, in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. This part was really interesting, to see where these theories came from, and how other things, like language, were worked into it all.

The language part was particularly interesting to me. Captain Cook, took a man from Tahiti to New Zealand. The Maori were about to attack Captain Cook and this man from Tahiti spoke to them in his native language (he’d never been that far south, or met anyone who was Maori before—it was a first contact) and, shock upon shock, the Maori understood what the Tahitian was saying, word for word. This stopped any potential attack, and this man acted as an intermediary with trade deals and the like, and kept things relatively peaceful. 

And that story, right there, was when I knew I was hooked. The subtitle of this book is “the Puzzle of Polynesia” and I really had no idea what a puzzle it really is until I read this book. How on earth is it possible for a Tahitian man to speak the same language as the Maori in New Zealand, when neither party had ever met before? Well, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, really.

Thompson boils it down, and examines the roots of theories, and why they came into being in the first place. The evolution of thought in this particular area was not only interesting, but it helped give a lot of current information some background and backbone. A lot of early theories were given a very “European” spin, and some things, like language, weren’t really understood until more recently, when linguists started figuring out language families and the like. 

That being said, a lot of Polynesia remains a mystery. Some of the most popular theories, that the early Polynesian people came down from areas in southeastern Asia, island hopping, or they traveled across the land bridge, walked down to California or points of South America and set off from there, are still being picked at today. Though modern times allows for things like DNA testing and carbon dating, which has solved quite a few puzzles, like the range of time when the islands were likely first populated. 

Mixed in with all this is a brand new way of seeing the world. Immersed in Polynesia, with stories and cultural tidbits, Thompson does a great job at introducing her reader to a new way of seeing the world, and a new respect for the sea, and the islands that speckle it. There’s great beauty in these pages, and a lot of almost mystical wonder and respect, not only for the Polynesian people, but for the ocean itself, the sky so far above, and the islands and people as a whole. 

I didn’t know much about Polynesia before going into this book, but I have a very healthy curiosity about it now. One of the last places explored, one of the last places populated, it’s a part of the world that is so vibrant and misunderstood, or just not understood at all, and that’s part of its allure. It really is a puzzle, and I think there is a lot there that will never be known. I found this entire book to be one of the most fascinating, gripping sagas of human history that I’ve read in a while. It left me with as many questions as I had answers. 

4/5 stars

Review | Surfacing – Kathleen Jamie

About the Book

In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup’ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressively preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. In precise, luminous prose, Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted. 

256 pages (paperback)
Published on September 24, 2019
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This book was a library loan.

Recently, I was in the mood to read something a bit different. Something about somewhere I’ve never been, a place I’ve never heard of. I wanted to read a book written with lush language, evocative prose. I wanted, basically, to go on a journey. 

I came across this book randomly. In fact, I was wandering around Amazon, and I happened upon it. I noticed the author has won some awards for her essays and poetry, and I knew this was exactly what I was looking for. I was lucky enough to discover my library had a copy of the book, so I put it on hold and, here we are. 

Surfacing is not a long book. I usually read tomes that clock in at over 500 pages, so this particular book really only took me a day or so to read, but what a day it was. 

Surfacing is essentially two long essays connected by theme of erosion, of environmental change, of a merging of the past and the present. Mixed into this, are a few shorter essays that give readers a more visceral, personal eye view of some of these places and issues that Kathleen Jamie experiences. All in all, she weaves these bits of narrative and personal history together to create a lush tapestry for readers to engage with. Not only is she discussing archeological sites that are hundreds, if not thousands of years old, but she’s also telling the human story of how these places resonate with people today.

It was quite an interesting read, and another take on archeology and human history that I’ve never really experienced before. Honestly, I’m not even sure what genre this would be. Part travelogue, part personal story, part modern-day journalism, Jamie manages to weave all these different parts together to create a book that just completely swept me away. 

The first essay she writes is also the longest one, and probably the one that interested me the most. Jamie traveled up to Alaska, and spent a bit of time in a Yup’ik village called Quinhagak, only accessible by airplane. This town, far out in the hinterlands of the far north, is home to a few hundred souls. Near the town is an archeological dig that has been attracting numerous wandering souls over the years, from National Geographic photographers and writers, to people like Kathleen Jamie, who are a different sort of reporter altogether. 

The archeological dig is five hundred years old, excavating the native population who lived in that area so long ago. In many ways, this dig is helping strengthen the roots of the residents who still live in that village, who have blood, family, and cultural ties to those who came before. Due to erosion, however, everything is changing. The Yup’ik village has to move, as the land under their homes keeps slipping away as the permafrost melts, and the archeological site is also at risk. In a lot of ways, it’s a race against time. 

However, the link between an ancient hunter-gatherer civilization and modern-day life is explored here, and as layers of dirt are moved, and objects are found, Kathleen Jamie not only discusses those ephemeral ties that bind yesteryear to the present, but also what connects the people to the land. The relationship between modern convenience, modern struggles, the vast and ever-changing landscape, and the results of things like global warming, on the lives of those today. Echoes of the past are still very present in the people who live in the surrounding area, and with a very thoughtful, lyrical approach, Jamie slowly studies all of these threads in this essay. By the end of it, I felt like I’d been up in Alaska, in this Yup’ik village, living with these people and learning how to approach the land, and history in a brand new way. 

I will also say, the more intimate glimpse into how melting permafrost is directly impacting the lives of people, and their security really gave me a new respect and understanding for just how catastrophic global warming really is. It’s easy to ignore it, where I live. Sure, the summers are hot and we’ve got some amazing inversions in the winter, but otherwise, global warming is a thing that happens to other people. However, Jamie really does touch on the subject in a very deft way, and I felt incredibly moved by just how profoundly this is being felt by some people, and just how life-altering it really is.

In one part of this essay, a woman had to have her entire house moved, because the land under it was slipping away. The winter was too warm, and so there was no hunting of the sort that they traditionally do to get them through the winter because, for example, the caribou never came far enough down the mountains. And while this archeological dig is very much connecting a current people to their distant roots, I often felt like they were one group of people living in two very different worlds, because the reality of life five hundred years ago must have been so dramatically different than now, with melting permafrost, altered animal migration patterns due to warmer winters, overfishing concerns and the like, which are fundamentally impacting the way of life of so many.

The second essay in the book takes place on an island, just off the coast of Scotland, where erosion of sand dunes has exposed a very well preserved Neolithic community. This essay is a bit shorter than the Alaska one, and I’m not sure why it didn’t grip me quite as much as the first (though it was probably just because I found the stint in Alaska so interesting, I kind of had a book hangover from reading it) but it was still really fascinating. In this essay, Jamie spends some time on this archeological dig. This particular group of archeologists, working on the Links of Noltland, are facing an imminent funding problem, and so the entire dig is at risk (from a google search, I think I read the government continued funding this dig). 

Jamie explores the relationship between these paleolithic ancient farmers to the land they lived on, and dives into the relationship between people, to the wilderness. In doing this, she also explores the idea of time, and how, thin that connection is, between the present and the past. As though diving beneath layers of soil to discover what lay beneath, somehow helps us peel back layers of time, so we might not only understand our ancestors, and how they lived, but also understand different ways of loving the planet on which we reside. 

Ultimately, Surfacing tells the story of Kathleen Jamie on a few different archeological digs, and while it’s interesting to see where she’s been and what she’s been doing, there’s a deeper message in this book, and it really hit home for me. Here, are two very different places, studying two groups of extremely different groups of ancient people, and yet both of these sites are facing the same issues: erosion, and how it will, given time, erase and completely destroy these places and in so doing, our connection to them. Nature is a force that will not bargain with humanity, and in in this book, Jamie left me with the profound need to not only understand what we are doing to this world we live on, but what it would be like if we started loving our planet again. If we redefined our relationship with the wild. If we examined our past, and perhaps internalized some of these messages that have echoed through so many layers of time.

Told with a poet’s love for language, and an eye for the environment, Surfacing might be a short book, but it packed quite a punch. It will be resonating through me for quite a while.

5/5 breathtaking stars

Review | The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century – Thant Myint-U

About the Book

Precariously positioned between China and India, Burma’s population has suffered dictatorship, natural disaster, and the dark legacies of colonial rule. But when decades of military dictatorship finally ended and internationally beloved Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from long years of house arrest, hopes soared. World leaders such as Barack Obama ushered in waves of international support. Progress seemed inevitable.

As historian, former diplomat, and presidential advisor, Thant Myint-U saw the cracks forming. In this insider’s diagnosis of a country at a breaking point, he dissects how a singularly predatory economic system, fast-rising inequality, disintegrating state institutions, the impact of new social media, the rise of China next door, climate change, and deep-seated feelings around race, religion, and national identity all came together to challenge the incipient democracy. Interracial violence soared and a horrific exodus of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees fixed international attention. Myint-U explains how and why this happened, and details an unsettling prognosis for the future.

Burma is today a fragile stage for nearly all the world’s problems. Are democracy and an economy that genuinely serves all its people possible in Burma? In clear and urgent prose, Myint-U explores this question—a concern not just for the Burmese but for the rest of the world—warning of the possible collapse of this nation of 55 million while suggesting a fresh agenda for change.

301 pages (kindle)
Published on November 12, 2019
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I have a fascination with other places. Specifically other places I know nearly nothing about. The less I know about it, the more interested I tend to be. Burma/Myanmar is absolutely that kind of foreign local for me. I know where it is on a map. I know it has a very harsh, military rule, and I know the bullet points of the recent Rohingya genocide. Also, Aung San Suu Kyi. As for people in the West, I’m pretty sure I knew basically the same amount of information about this region of the world as most other people around me. Not much. Not enough. Just the vaguest details. 

I stumbled upon this book when I was trolling Amazon, and I instantly knew I had to read it. The Hidden History of Burma might give you the impression, from the title, that it is about secrets, and covered up things that the author is just bringing to light, breaking news style, but that’s really not it at all. In this respect, it’s considered a “hidden history” because it’s just so unknown by the larger world. As I’ve said above, how many of us really know much about this region of the world? In so many ways, this country has been cut off from the rest of the world, and so there is very little known about it. This book makes a dedicated effort to change that fact. 

Thant Myint-U has worked with UN peacekeeping missions in several countries in the world, and has a personal tie with Burma, as that’s where his family hails from. In this book, he shows his knack for distilling complex topics into easily digestible bits of information. His personal connection to Burma also gives this book a more intimate flavor. While this is a scholarly work in a lot of respects, the author manages to keep it from feeling like you’re reading a work of academia, and his personal experiences and insights give everything he covers a far more human perspective than you’d get from, say, some Western scholar who has studied enough about the region to write a book, but had never actually been there. 

In fact, when I started reading this book, it was late at night and I (I know this will sound horrible) thought to myself, “Well, this book will certainly put me to sleep, so it’s perfect to read right now.” The truth is, after thinking that very thought, I was awake for nearly four more hours telling myself, “One more chapter. I swear to God, just one more chapter and I’ll go to sleep.” That’s the thing about this book: It sneaks up on you. You start reading it, and before you realize what’s happening you’re so sucked into the drama and the history, the captivating writing, and the personal connection that you just can’t stop reading. 

It helps that Burma is such an unknown country, full of people I know so very little about. For example, I was ignorant to the fact that Burma, a country sitting between the two powers of India and China, was once also a colony of Britain once upon a time. What, perhaps, interested me the most about this was how so many of the issues faced today, seem to find their roots in this colonial relationship with Britain. Britain, as it happened, seemed to divide Burma up largely along racial lines, and that legacy still lives in the country today, and is still very much a part of so many of the issues and insecurity so many Burmese people face. 

I also did not know how ancient this particular civilization was, nor did I know about the kingdoms that rose and fell, the wars, the strength, education, and so much more. Everything changed when the English came, as it was wont to do, but before that, the civilization stretched back a long, long time, and while it had many different shapes and forms, it was, in every way, a power in that region of the world. 

The situation in Burma is fluid and quickly moving and there are a lot of things that impact what is happening over there. The economic situation is precarious at best. A lot of problems, the Rohingya issue, for example, find their roots in the colonial days, which modern times hasn’t quite managed to get away from. In a lot of ways, I felt like Burma is a land with one foot in the past, and one in the future, and hasn’t quite managed to find their balance straddling that particular line. 

It is the people who end up paying for all of this. Poverty is widespread and rampant. A lot of the money that was spent on education was cut off, and funneled into the military, so the education is lacking, if it exists at all in some regions. Depending on where you are, and who you are, you may or may not be incredibly oppressed, or face very real danger for being part of a certain ethnic group. There is a push for modernization, but so many of the problems the Burmese face have their roots in issues involving race and identity, that spring forth from those good old colonial days, and until those issues are dealt with, I fear that Burma will never be able to reform in the way so many wish. 

“Burmese nationalists would blame the British for following a divide-and-rule policy. The truth was that the British took over a mixed and ever-changing political landscape and fixed boundaries to suit themselves. But by administering areas differently, they set up the fault lines around memory, identity, and aspiration that have vexed all attempts so far at nation-building.”

What, perhaps, surprised me the most was part of the book, early on, where the author spoke about economic sanctions. He tells a story about a hurricane that blew through an area of the country. It was catastrophic. No one was prepared for it, and a whole lot of people died. Due to the political situation, Burma was party to some of the most heavy-handed economic sanctions in the world. This meant that once the hurricane blew through, and people were trying to pick up the pieces of their lives, they could get almost no help from anyone, because every bit of aid offered to the country turned into a huge political flexion of willpower. I’d never really thought of it like that. I’d never really thought of the human price paid for the sanctions that other countries have to deal with. 

Another aspect of the book that keeps ringing in my head is just how dramatic an impact colonialism had on Burma, and, through extension, all of the other countries that fell (or still fall, in some cases) under the fist of a power so far away. So many of the issues faced by Burma may or may not have existed in one form or another long before the English came a-calling, but it was certainly made worse after they appeared. Colonialism drew lines in the sand, divided a society that had been in place for a long, long time, and made distinctions between race and identity the foundation upon which the modern Burma struggles. 

This sort of division is in every aspect of life. An example of this would be an 1824 (harkening back to those Colonial days I mention) law that divides those considered “native” to Burma (as in, those who had family living there before 1824 were “native”) while everyone who had arrived after 1824 are largely considered “guests” to the region, and thus, have very little actual power or say in anything that happens in the country in which they reside, regardless of how long they’d lived there. And that’s no small amount of people. A whole lot of migrants from, for example, India, came over to Burma after 1824 due to work and financial opportunities offered there that they didn’t have in their native country. They put down roots, and stayed.  

‘The late 20th-century military regime would make 1824 the cut-off date in determining who belonged in Burma and who did not, whose ancestors were “natives” and whose came as a result of foreign occupation and therefore were, at best, “guests.”‘

I don’t know what the future holds for Burma, but I do know that it is a fascinating, multi-layered country full of a diverse tapestry of people. An ancient civilization still bucking the echoes of colonialism, with a government that seems only capable of forward motion as long as it has an equal amount of repression. There has been a strive, recently, for democracy in Burma, and with an increasingly connected world via the internet, I do have hope that the young people will answer the call that so many Burmese have been offering up for a better, more just, more equal future. 

Things are changing. 

In many ways, I feel like this book was written as much for the people of Burma so to educate the rest of the world about the plight of the Burmese. It was richly informative, well-written, and nuanced. Thant Myint-U weaves together a stunning three-dimensional tapestry of a nation that so many of us know not nearly enough about. Captivating and informative, this book really made a profound impact on me.

5/5 stars

Update | Book Stuff

Well, I figure it’s time I sit down and lay down an update for those of you who are interested. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about my own books. I am TERRIBLE at self-promotion.

As you may or may not know, Of Honey and Wildfires dropped in April, and it’s going well. It’s taking a bit of time to get its feet off the ground, but I expect that with everything I write. Anyway, here’s the obligatory awful looking promotional thing I made for this book.

Now, for future projects:

I think I have enough of An Elegy for Hope written to be able to say that I have a baby book on my hands. I hit 30k words this weekend, which is just past the point of no return for me (it takes me about a thousand tries to land the start of a book.)

An Elegy for Hope had me stumped for a long time, which is, as it happens, why Of Honey and Wildfires was written. I was completely and absolutely lost as to how to approach the second book in my Bloodlands Trilogy (starting with Seraphina’s Lament). I figured the best way to get a bead on how to approach this second book in the trilogy was to actually step away from it completely, and immerse myself in something radically different. Give my brain some time to breathe, and puzzle over this in the background while I did other things.

Ultimately, this ended up delaying the book, but I do think, now that I’m writing it, this was a smart move on my part. Now, I feel like I have a direction. I have my entry point down (which, as I’ve said before, is the hardest part for me to write) and I’m feeling really good about where it is and where it’s going. This is not something I could have said a few months ago, or even a year ago. I was so frustrated about a year ago, I was honestly about ready to give up on the trilogy as a whole. Now, my time away has refreshed me, and I am all sorts of energized and really enjoying revisiting this world.

As always, it’s not typical. I decided that since I have a weird habit of bucking norms and trends, why stop now? So An Elegy for Hope is starting out at a different point than I’d expected, but I think it’s necessary, and, as luck would have it, I’ve got the third book, A Requiem for Fate, mapped out in my mind as well. I’m trying to be smart with this third one, and making notes as plot points come to me so I don’t forget anything. Hopefully this will help me write the next book with less of a delay.

Glass Rhapsody is my other work in progress. Since both books I’m working on are so dramatically different, I’m writing them both at the same time, switching from one to the other, depending on my mood.

My original intention with Glass Rhapsody (set in the same world as Of Honey and Wildfires) was to have it be a standalone book set in the same world, with the magic system basically being the only thing binding the two, but that’s really not how it’s ending up.

I’m a pantser, and this is both why these surprises keep happening, and why puzzles like An Elegy for Hope land in my lap. I do not plan anything before I write. I have a vague idea, and then when I sit down, the idea either unfolds or it doesn’t. With An Elegy for Hope, the idea was there, but I couldn’t ever find the right approach to it (until now), and now the story is flowing. With Glass Rhapsody, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted the book to do, but when I sat down to write it, everything I’d wanted to write was basically turned on its head, and I spent about three days going, “Where the hell did that come from and what do I do with it?”

There is some unfinished business between Arlen, Cassandra, and Elroy, and apparently my brain decided that this book was the place for this unfinished business to be… finished. So, while we have brand new characters in this one, the thread that binds this book to the last book is a bit more than just the magic system. Elroy McGlover has a point of view, and Shine Company plays a big role. The world is a bit larger and a bit more complex and diverse, and still full of corporate interest and “shine” tycoons. It’s a whole lot of fun to write, and I’m really enjoying weaving these stories together. I’m also enjoying expanding the world. I’m adding a bit of the Industrial Revolution and my own version of “Manifest Destiny” to this one, which has been a whole lot of fun to research, and is also fertile ground for the direction this book is going.

So, that’s the other thing happening.

My biggest issue with Glass Rhapsody right now is that I obviously need to think of a title for the series (I have a third book in this series in idea form right now, too) since this world is huge, and the magic system is great and I’m having so much fun playing with both.

Lest you’re like “wow, that’s a lot, what else is going on?”

I’ve got another book heretofore unnamed, stewing in my hindbrain, which I’m guessing I’ll attack somewhere after An Elegy for Hope and Glass Rhapsody. It’s a completely different world unlike anything I’ve created before, largely dealing with hunter-gatherer groups of uh… well, I’ll leave it there. Go Paleolithic or go home, I guess.

When I start writing it, and get past my “point of no return”, I’ll let you know.

So, the TL/DR version of all of this is, I’m hoping to have two books to drop on you people very soon, maybe by the end of the year if I bust my butt, but more likely, probably January/February. My hope is to have both Glass Rhapsody and An Elegy for Hope ready to drop at nearly the same time. We’ll see how that works… but that’s my goal for now.

Review | Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America – Debbie Cenziper

About the Book

The gripping story of a team of Nazi hunters at the U.S. Department of Justice as they raced against time to expose members of a brutal SS killing force who disappeared in America after World War Two.

In 1990, in a drafty basement archive in Prague, two American historians made a startling discovery: a Nazi roster from 1945 that no Western investigator had ever seen. The long-forgotten document, containing more than 700 names, helped unravel the details behind the most lethal killing operation in World War Two. 

In the tiny Polish village of Trawniki, the SS set up a school for mass murder and then recruited a roving army of foot soldiers, 5,000 men strong, to help annihilate the Jewish population of occupied Poland. After the war, some of these men vanished, making their way to the U.S. and blending into communities across America. Though they participated in some of the most unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust, “Trawniki Men” spent years hiding in plain sight, their terrible secrets intact.

In a story spanning seven decades, Citizen 865 chronicles the harrowing wartime journeys of two Jewish orphans from occupied Poland who outran the men of Trawniki and settled in the United States, only to learn that some of their one-time captors had followed. A tenacious team of prosecutors and historians pursued these men and, up against the forces of time and political opposition, battled to the present day to remove them from U.S. soil. 

Through insider accounts and research in four countries, this urgent and powerful narrative provides a front row seat to the dramatic turn of events that allowed a small group of American Nazi hunters to hold murderous men accountable for their crimes decades after the war’s end.

320 pages (kindle)
Published on November 12, 2019
Buy the book

This book was a library loan.

What first pulled me in about this book, was the fact that it’s about a group of individuals in World War II that operated largely in Eastern Europe, whom I have never heard of. This is no small thing, because I’ve spent just a ridiculous chunk of the past (mumble-mumble) years researching all things Eastern Europe, and the less known aspects of World War II that impacted regions like Poland and Ukraine so dramatically. 

I’m not saying I know everything, but generally if it’s weird and less known, either I or one of my readers have probably hunted it out and sent it to me. 

So, I’ve never heard of the Trawniki men, nor have I heard of their training facility in an old sugar factory in Trawniki, Poland. Nor did I know what they have done. I will say, tangentially, I have watched a Netflix Documentary The Devil Next Door on one of the men who was actually trained at this facility, and was thought to perhaps be Ivan the Terrible, but was then proven not to be (though he did work at such camps as Sobibor and the like). He is mentioned in this book, so there was a thread of familiarity there, for me.

Citizen 865 is kind of an odd book. In one way, it had a target, and it hit it. It told the story of the Trawniki Men. How they came to be, and what their purpose is, and the overwhelming effort and determination it took to discover the truth of that organization, what they had done, who they were, and how they functioned.

The book is written in a third person narrative style, so it does read more like a novel than anything else. This will benefit readers who aren’t fans of dry nonfiction books. It does make the reading of it feel less like work. That being said, the author is very clear that the dialogue has been pieced together by years of research and interviews, or at times, assumed based on the research she had available to her. However, there’s still guesswork going on there, and that should be noted. This, perhaps, is a good jumping off point for further research on the Trawniki men, but if you’re using it as the foundation upon which your research rests, perhaps take into consideration that there has been some guesswork done on some of the dialogue, specifically portions that are told more like a story, such as the story of Feliks at the start of the book. 

That small point aside, Citizen 865 is really an eye-opening tale about a really dark, horrible corner of World War II that I never had encountered before. Most Trawniki men were Soviet prisoners of war. They could speak the languages in Eastern Europe, which is something that the German soldiers could not do. They understood the lay of the land, the local culture and the like, which made them invaluable. Furthermore, the trade was generally a good one on their part. In exchange for working for the Reich, they went to a training camp to learn how to do what they needed to do, and were given German citizenship and payment, complete with vacation time in exchange. Scooping up ex-POWs who had nothing to lose and everything to gain, was a stroke of genius that seems to pepper various parts of the Nazi plan throughout World War II. Here were men who had all the anger and disillusionment a person could ask for, all they needed was a gun.

Anyway.

The Trawniki men were, in my mind, the guys who did all the stuff no one else really wanted to do. Foot soldiers of the Final Solution, they were part and party to some of the most gruesome parts of the Eastern Front of the war, like the uprising the Warsaw Ghetto, and spent time in numerous kill sites, as well as being assigned to kill the Jews that were rounded up and brought to forests to be murdered. They were often rough, brutal, angry, and dangerous to be around, disenfranchised men who had nothing to hold on to outside of this organization that seemed to, in a way, give them some semblance of life back. A lot of this book centers around the town of Lublin, Poland, which was the site of one of the largest mass killings of Jews in the entire war, and it was the Trawniki men who were party to that brutality. 

Citizen 865 is a Ukrainian man named Jakob Reimer, who lied about his wartime activities and ended up gaining US citizenship in the 1950s. He lived and worked in the states, got married, had a family, settled down. It wasn’t until the Iron Curtain fell, and a bevy of evidence was made available to the west (at which point the US Department of Justice created the OSI) that he, and others like him, were eventually discovered. It took a lot of work and diligent effort on the part of those assigned to hunt down Nazi collaborators in the US to find the eventual truth of the secretive Trawniki men, and one Jakob Reimer. It’s an ugly story, and perhaps it is made even uglier because of the sheer brutality of the work these individuals were part and party to. 

On a personal level, I have a very hard time understanding how anyone could be part of something like that, and then how they could ever imagine living a “normal life” afterwards would be possible. It is horrifying to think that so many Nazi collaborators have hidden themselves all over the world. They got to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, move somewhere different, and create entirely new people and life stories for themselves, while behind them, they leave nothing but a trail of bodies, unanswered questions, and blood. The brevity of it steals the breath from my lungs.

And often, while justice is a long time coming, it comes due to a diligent group of individuals who refuse to give up the search for answers, for truth, for the men like Jakob Reimer, who were party to unbelievable crimes against humanity. The heroes of this dark tale are the paper pushers. The clue hunters. The office workers. The diligent. The dedicated.

This book is told in a few chunks. It opens up with the story of two survivors of Lublin, and then moves into the eventual creation of OSI, and the trials that were involved with hunting down Nazis hidden in America. Interviews are covered, where the dialogue is verbatim from what was given at that interview, and then it moves back to World War II, Lublin, and the like. The story of Feliks is probably the part of the book that stood out to me the most, likely because I don’t really feel like it fit in with anything else. It’s interesting, and I’m glad I read it, but I think I was expecting it to be the thread that the narrative curled around, and it really wasn’t. While the human impact given through that particular story hit me pretty hard, I’m not honestly sure if it added anything to the overarching story of the Trawniki men as a whole. 

The truth is, there is a whole lot of World War II that we will likely never really know. Lots of evidence was buried. People who lived through it have, in all likelihood, died of old age, or nearly are there. Lots of things were destroyed when the Reich fell. It’s through the hard, painstaking work of survivors, descendants, dedicated historians and justice workers that stories of men such as these, and the training camps and methodology behind their organization can come to light. 

Citizen 865 is one of those books that is hard to read, but necessary, and it likely touches on a part of World War II that even a whole lot of World War II buffs don’t know much about. It is important that we understand not just what happened, but why it happened. It’s important that we act as a witness, so stories continue being told. So people remain unforgotten. So we can examine the dark underbelly of humanity, and refuse to ever go back. 

4/5 stars

Review | Gangster Warlords: Drugs Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America – Ioan Grillo

About the Book

In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps five hundred body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil’s biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit-men to gun down forty-one police officers and prison guards in two days. In southern Mexico, a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies.

A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part CEO, part terrorist, and part rock star, unleashing guerrilla attacks, strong-arming governments, and taking over much of the world’s trade in narcotics, guns, and humans. What they do affects you now–from the gas in your car, to the gold in your jewelry, to the tens of thousands of Latin Americans calling for refugee status in the U.S. Gangster Warlords is the first definitive account of the crime wars now wracking Central and South America and the Caribbean, regions largely abandoned by the U.S. after the Cold War. Author of the critically acclaimed El Narco, Ioan Grillo has covered Latin America since 2001 and gained access to every level of the cartel chain of command in what he calls the new battlefields of the Americas. Moving between militia-controlled ghettos and the halls of top policy-makers, Grillo provides a disturbing new understanding of a war that has spiraled out of control–one that people across the political spectrum need to confront now.

359 pages (kindle)
Published on January 19, 2016
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I think part of the problem with the world today is that we all know a lot of stuff but we don’t really understand the things we know. What I mean by this is, I know there is an issue with immigration and people flocking to the Southern border of the United States. I know that countries below the US have problems I can’t even wrap my head around, and I know it takes a certain kind of desperation I’ve never felt, to uproot an entire family and move them somewhere you’ve never been, and travel fueled by a vague hope that maybe up there, things will be different. 

I know the facts. 

I do not understand.

And I think this book, Gangster Warlords, really is my first big step in trying to understand the dynamics in areas that I know the talking points about, on a much more in depth, human level. Ioan Grillo is an investigative journalist who has been reporting largely on the drug trade in Latin America since 2001. He knows his way around the industry, and has a birds eye view of the conflicts that so many of us just don’t. He’s watched this new kind of criminal rise up, and he’s watched them transform the social and political landscape of various Latin American countries. He knows how to write about all of this in a way that some bumbkin like myself can understand it, and not just understand it, but internalize it in a way I might not otherwise be able to.

Grillo focuses on a few different regions, namely Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala, Brazil, and some others. Each of these areas is run a bit differently, but what binds the narrative together, really, is the business that drives them all: drugs. Specifically, cheap drugs that make a big profit once they make it north of the border, into the United States, where prices skyrocket. What goes for a dollar in a favela in Brazil, for example, will sell for $250 in New York. There are numerous factors that gave rise to this new kind of criminal organization, which he details nicely in the book.

“But as we look back on the last two decades, we can identify clear causes of the new conflicts. The collapse of military dictatorships and guerrilla armies left stockpiles of weapons and soldiers searching for a new payroll. Emerging democracies are plagued by weakness and corruption. A key element is the failure to build working justice systems. International policy focused on markets and elections but missed this third crucial element in making functional democracies: the rule of law. The omission has cost many lives.”

Essentially, these drug cartels and the wars they start and the turf they claim are all in on the business, so rather than just your typical criminal, you have an entire criminal class that has risen up and meshed CEO and gangster warlord together into this toxic stew that is tearing apart an entire region of the world, and leaving a bloody swath of destruction and sadness behind. Ultimately, this book shows the truth that there are no winners in war, regardless of what reasons that war is fought for.

The dynamic, however, was interesting to me, as many of these organizations have learned how to survive, or at least coexist, with the people who live on the land they claim as theirs. For example, in favelas in Brazil, the cartels will pay for things like roads, and electricity, protection and the like. In exchange, the people who live in their favela will not turn them over to the police when the police come knocking, and similar exchanges happen all over. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. The negative is that just about everyone takes part in the drugs. They are cheap and everywhere, and since there’s very few opportunities and you have to leave the favela to get a decent education and what have you, a lot of people end up working for the cartel/gang/whatever that is lording over their particular area, and most of them have seen firefights by the time they are in their teens. There aren’t enough opportunities elsewhere to make the easy money they find with the home crew worth the risk.

And with all this back and forth of loyalty and, in some cases, fear, it’s hard for officials to fight these criminals. Cartels, in essence, become their own law and their own police force. Their own mini-nations within nations and they can be nearly impossible to crack. How do you fight something that has become systemic? As the author succinctly puts it: 

“This creates another paradox of Latin America’s crime wars. Prisons are meant to stop gangsters from committing crimes. But they became their headquarters.”

There are also manifestos, where entire criminal organizations have books and pamphlets written detailing the rules and style of their particular organization. A sort of criminal code of ethics, if you will. This manifesto is often what attracts young people to the industry. It gives them a sense of belonging, a feel like they exist in an organization that has rules and stipulations, that has a code of conduct. In exchange, they are always busy doing something, they make lots of money, and they can basically get high whenever they want. 

This, of course, is not standard across all lines. Some organizations have no interest in maintaining roads, or protecting people. Some are more prone to marching people out to the middle of a field and dumping their bodies in a mysterious ditch somewhere. There are entire swaths cut across some areas, full of unnamed bodies. Parents who saw their children marched out for no real reason, knowing that they’d never see them again. The list of the missing, especially along certain cartel territories in Mexico, Honduras, el Salvatore and the like, are long indeed. 

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, has been known as the murder capital of the world, and there’s a reason for that. For a long time, it was where a war was taking place. There are other regions of Mexico where cartels have gone to war, and lots of people died. The reason I point this out is because, to my mind, I haven’t ever really thought of this as an actual war. Violent? Battles? Gang fights? Sure, but I never really conceptualized any of this as a “war” in my head. However, with the way Gallo describes the scene, all it’s lacking is the official declaration. If these hotspots were declared war zones, the entire way people could help sort these issues out would change. It would give nations power that they do not currently have. So why don’t they? Well, there are reasons for that, too.

There are intricacies, and parts of the social equation that I’d never really thought about before. For example, how does one fully combat these drug issues, when drugs make so much money for people who would likely not have anything without them? How do you keep people from running drugs, when the United States is the biggest buyer, and we pay so much for what they offer? It’s a problem that goes both ways, and there are no easy solutions, because without demand, there would be no reason to supply. 

“Between the dawn of the new millennium and 2010, more than a million people across Latin America and the Caribbean were murdered. It’s a cocaine-fueled holocaust.”

What surprised me, mostly, was just how imbedded into the social structure of certain regions these organizations have become. In some areas, everyone is involved in some way, even if it’s just tangentially, because it’s literally impossible not to be connected somehow, and often, the only way to get away from all of it, is by running, which can put you in very real danger. Kids get conscripted as young as possible, which will keep parents in place. The government can be taking a piece of the pie. Loyalty may be a fraught topic, but sometimes it’s easier to just keep your head down and hope no one notices you. 

Gallo’s reporting is really state of the art, and he goes out on a whole lot of limbs and risks everything to get the interviews he gets. Sometimes they are with people who refuse to be identified, but in a few cases he sits down with the head guy of huge organizations, and interviews them about how they operate. Or he’ll talk to assassins, or just kids manning the proverbial gate. Just about anyone, and while I bet it was an absolutely terrifying thing to do, it paid off because it gives readers an insider’s view of a topic that is so complex, and so multilayered and deep. I felt, by the time I ended this book, that nothing is what it seems. While this is a dark subject, and it often portrays dark deeds, it really does a great job at showing just how much I don’t understand, and how little I actually know. 

I don’t have a clue.

We like to boil down immigration into good and bad, but this book shows that so much of what is pushing people north, is the very thing they are trying to get away from, and it’s all over up here, too. There are no easy answers, and there are none presented in these pages. The fact is, the cartels would not exist without the drugs the United States buys from them. I don’t have any solutions, but I did leave this book with a new understanding of just how two-sided this issue is. I fundamentally believe that we need more in-depth journalism like this to reach into the American consciousness. 

5/5 stars

Review | Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein – Bradley J. Edwards

About the Book

This is the definitive story of the case against Jeffrey Epstein and the corrupt system that supported him, told in thrilling detail by the lawyer who has represented Epstein’s victims for more than a decade.

In June 2008, Florida-based victims’ rights attorney Bradley J. Edwards was thirty-two years old and had just started his own law firm when a young woman named Courtney Wild came to see him. She told a shocking story of having been sexually coerced at the age of fourteen by a wealthy man in Palm Beach named Jeffrey Epstein. Edwards, who had never heard of Epstein, had no idea that this moment would change the course of his life. Over the next ten years, Edwards devoted himself to bringing Epstein to justice, and came close to losing everything in the process. Edwards tracked down and represented more than twenty of Epstein’s victims, and shined a light on his network of contacts and friends, among them Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.

Edwards gives his riveting, blow-by-blow account of battling Epstein on behalf of his clients, and provides stunning details never shared before. He explains how he followed Epstein’s criminal enterprise from Florida, to New York, to Europe, to a Caribbean island, and, in the process, became the one person Epstein most feared could take him down. Epstein and his cadre of high-priced lawyers were able to manipulate the FBI and the Justice Department, but, despite making threats and attempting schemes straight out of a spy movie, Epstein couldn’t stop Edwards, his small team of committed lawyers and, most of all, the victims, who were dead-set on seeing their abuser finally put behind bars.

This is the definitive account of the Epstein saga, personally told by the gutsy lawyer who took on one of the most brazen sexual criminals in the history of the US, and exposed the corrupt system that let him get away with it for far too long.

400 pages (kindle)
Published on March 31, 2020
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This book was a library loan. Yay libraries!

I’m not a big fan of courtroom drama. I mean, it is interesting and all, but it’s just never my bag of oats. I don’t really find lawyer-speak that captivating, or the like. I’m not someone who is all, “Yes! Let’s watch Law and Order SVU!” It’s just not part of who I am. 

However, I recently watched a documentary about Jeffrey Epstein on Netflix, and I was wandering through my library’s online audiobook selection and saw this one. I decided to jump on it. To be honest, dear reader, I didn’t expect to make it past the first chapter. I just honestly did not think it would be interesting enough to keep my attention (re: I don’t find lawyer-ing that interesting). 

I actually ended up blazing through this book, and while it is horrifying, and it is written by some lawyers about lawyer-ing, it is also a very captivating inside perspective in what it took to get someone as powerful as Jeffrey Epstein behind bars. While I did know some of these details, about 90% of this book came as a huge surprise to me. 

First, I will say that the writing is really easy to sink into. It’s workman-style prose, but I don’t think anything else would be fitting. Nothing is jazzed up or pretty in this book (again, I don’t think that would be fitting). This is all very matter-of-fact, here’s what happened. Like I said, I don’t think anything else would be right. This is a very complex topic, and a very difficult one, full of emotional triggers, and absolutely overwhelmed by victims. So, for the tone of the book, I think the tone and style was right. 

Furthermore, the author never gets overly bogged down in lawyer jargon, which is one big thing that keeps me away from fully appreciating lawyer things. Like, I get that the job is wonderful and all you lawyers are fantastic and all this, but I just find that so often the interesting bits of the story are flooded by information that is important for the career but not as much for the reader. I didn’t get that here. Edwards fills in information and gives background where needed, but he doesn’t go overboard, and there were only two or three times I kind of tuned out due to this sort of thing, which is a record for me. 

Okay, so that’s out of the way. Let’s talk meat and potatoes, here.

Jeffrey Epstein was very, very wealthy and very, very connected and very, very powerful and taking him down was nothing short of an odyssey that spanned years, and so many countless hours. When Bradley Edwards was asked to represent Courtney Wild, he had no idea who she was and had never heard the name “Jeffrey Epstein”. From that point on, however, his world seemed to circle around Epstein as they played a cat and mouse game. Epstein used everything he had at his disposal to make bringing him to trial as difficult as possible for Edwards. From frivolous lawsuits, to potential bankruptcy, to hiring private investigators to trail Edwards and threaten his family, to really anything else you can think of, Epstein did it. However, there was always some weird respect that Epstein held for Edwards. It was a chess game, and I think Epstein probably liked the fact that Edwards was a person who played against him, and wasn’t cowed by his power. 

On Edwards’ part, having to deal with all this stuff, as well as life in general (for example, one of the firms he worked for went belly up because the dude running it was a con man), must have aged him a million years. I cannot imagine the number of ulcers I would have if I was him. I was also really amazed by how many hours and hours and hours of research went into researching these women, gathering evidence, creating a case. Bringing readers through the process of gathering information, talking to victims and witnesses, and some of the trials they faced in doing that (people were terrified to speak out, as you could likely imagine, and many were being trailed and threatened by Epstein’s people, so they felt very unsafe) was a test all on its own. 

Edwards does go into a bit of how Epstein operated here, how he lured girls with massages, had them bring others with them, and the people who worked for him in various capacities. He gives some victim stories, which are hard to read. Often, the women he preyed on were already beat up by life by the time he got them, and he knew just how to groom them to be and do what he wanted. He knew how to make them feel special. While Edwards never glorifies victim stories, I will frankly say that there were one or two of them that made me have to step away from the book for a day or two just to process what I’d read before I could move on. 

There were also moments when I felt like I was reading a book about someone who lived on a different planet. For example, Epstein spent some time in the Florida correctional system, and it ended up being less a stint in jail and more of a vacation for him. He left every day, had meetings with people, had his own office in town, and an email address set up. People would fly him in girls, and the like. Then his sentence was done, and he left to go to his private island so he can talk to some IT guys about making an app that would help people like him find young girls without the cops finding out about it, and you know, that really took my breath away because wow… who does that? 

Well, Epstein, obviously, but still. 

And that’s really where Edwards came in handy for me. It was less about the courtroom drama and the legalese that went into getting Epstein, and more about how well this lawyer did with taking someone like Epstein and distilling him a bit. For example, I watched that Netflix documentary, and it was interesting, but I never really felt like I understood how he mentally maneuvered his way into thinking that any of this was okay. Sure, the guy was a sociopath, but still. However, Edwards kind of broke it down. In a few places of the book, he explained that to Epstein, there was nothing wrong with his attraction to girls, rather he saw it as a problem with the law. As long as women were capable of breeding, they should be given the option to entertain situations where such a thing was possible, and if they don’t, isn’t that a problem with the law holding back nature, rather than a problem with him raping and molesting underage girls? 

The mental gymnastics there makes me blood curdle, but once it was explained that way, I understood a lot of Epstein and his sick, twisted, perverse, monied self. Edwards also spoke a bit about the “cult of Epstein” and how he groomed women into his way of thinking, and how long it took to graduate between various levels of his organization, from first massage, to traveling with him on international flights. He also spoke a bit about the people who were commonly attached to Epstein, like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Harvey Weinstein and the like. It’s quite a long list. I think the man was connected to just about everyone, and he cultivated those connections, likely as a way to both threaten others (“I can destroy you. I know everybody.”) and a way to further his own business aims. 

The one thing this book does not do, is talk about how Epstein got his money, or really what he did as a businessman/philanthropist that kept his coffers so full. He also does not speak much on what happened to his enablers, like Ghislaine Maxwell, after it all went down. She’s probably hiding in some hole somewhere, but in my mind, that woman is just as guilty as Epstein, and I think it’s damn near criminal that she’s not accessible/found/able to be brought on trial because she deserves it, as the facilitator who was often responsible for recruiting underage girls.

He does talk a bit about what happened to some of the victims after, and I daresay that life has not been easy on any of them, nor would I expect it to be. Some of them have found ways to move through this to the other side, and some haven’t. What, perhaps, haunts me the most is that there will likely never be a true accounting of just how many girls Epstein abused, nor will there ever be any true knowledge of just how wide his network was. Money and connections covered up his crimes for years upon years, and he was quite a world traveler, so I have a feeling that as horrifying as this is, it really is only the surface. Furthermore, I keep coming back to something I said earlier in this review: I feel like I read a book about someone who lives on another planet. This man was able to buy and maneuver his way out of just about every situation you could think of. Ultimately, that fact right there left me with the absolutely haunting thought, I wonder just how many other Jeffrey Epsteins there really are? 

And I wonder if there are enough Bradley Edwards to catch them all. 

So, very good book, but it did not leave me feeling resolved, and it did not leave me satisfied. Instead, while I’m glad I read it, I cannot stop thinking about Epstein’s victims, both the known and unknown, and I can’t stop wondering just how many other people in the world there are like him. 

And where is Ghislaine Maxwell? 

4/5 stars

Review | Cradle of Sea and Soil – Bernie Anés Paz

About the Book

The Primordial Wound has festered with corruption since the birth of the world. The island tribes have warred against its spawn for just as long—and they are losing.

Burdened by the same spiritual affliction that drove the first Halfborn insane, Colibrí lives in exile with little more than her warrior oaths and her son. But when Colibrí discovers corrupted land hidden away by sorcery, those same oaths drive her to find answers in an effort to protect the very people who fear her.

Narune dreams of earning enough glory to show that he and his mother Colibrí are nothing like the Halfborn that came before them. Becoming a mystic will give him the strength he needs, but first, Narune will need to prove himself worthy in a trial of skill and honor.

Together, Colibrí and Narune must learn to become the champions their people need—and face the curse threatening to scour away their spirits with fury.

350 pages (kindle)
Published on June 23, 2020
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I edited this book. 

I’ve tried to write this review a few times, and each time I just fail. There are a few reasons for this. First, I edited this book, so I’m pretty attached to it. I’ve got a personal connection that is hard for me to see around, and I have a hard time talking about stuff that I’m personally attached to like this. It isn’t easy. Secondly, I loved this book so much, I have had just a holy hell of a time distilling all the reasons it is so amazing. 

As I’ve said, this book is one I’ve edited, and so this isn’t really a review. I am not coming here as an unbiased reader. I am very much biased, because I loved this book, I worked on it, and I want it to do well. Take that into consideration before you read on. 

Cradle of Sea and Soil is one of those multilayered tapestries that just ticks off all my boxes. First, with have Colibrí and Narune, mother and son. The story is told from both of their perspectives, mother and son. Colibri is a single mother. Both her and her son are outcasts, exiles, lowly regarded for what they are—Halfborn. Humans with animal/plant traits. In Narune and Colibri, it manifests with ears and tails. In another character in the book, she grows flowers and etc. It’s really freaking cool. However, the fact that they are Halfborn makes them a danger. Things happened long, long ago that hang over everyone who is born this way, and so all Halfborn are reduced to a life of poverty and exile, if they are not forced to sacrifice their own halfborn children.

So, we’ve got social stratification going on, and lots and lots of deeply rooted prejudice that has been worked into the bedrock of the society that has been crafted for this book. Added into that is Narune’s coming-of-age story as he fights for his place in his world as a man, and to bring honor to his mother’s name. And then there is his mother, who is doing everything she can to keep everything, and everyone she loves protected as the world comes fraying apart at the edges. More about that later. 

The relationship between Narune and his mother was probably one of my favorite parts of the book, purely because it’s just so incredibly rare that relationships between family members are examined in this way. Not a relationship where various parties are overwhelming and hard to deal with, but relationships where there is love, so strong and realistic that I could honestly feel it through the pages. And this expands out. Narune has two friends that he spends a lot of the book with, and the intimacy and emotional pull I felt there as well was just as vivid and real as everything else in the book. I honestly can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I’ve read a book with realistic family and friend relationships, and how rarely I actually find that in fantasy, but here is one, and it’s kisses fingers magnifique. 

The plot of the book circles around this idea of the Primordial Wound, basically a wound in the fabric of the world that births all sorts of unholy beasties and basically slowly kills the land. The war between the islanders and the primordial wound has been going on for ages upon ages, but now, they are losing. The leader of the islanders is trying to find outside help, but getting very little serious offers of aid, so largely they are isolated, alone, and fighting for the future of the world and, more immediately, their islands. There are battles fought, and they are so well realizes and well written, you’ll feel like you’re on the edge of your seat, living through them. The reason behind why things are happening the way they are came as a bit of a surprise to me, which is saying something because I’m pretty hard to surprise these days (I read too much). 

There is a lot of action and intensity here, and since Bernie is playing on a few different levels, not all of it comes in the form of pitched battles and lots of wounds and sweating. No, a lot of the action happens on more personal levels, as well. There are misunderstandings, rifts in friendships, typical growing pains between a mother who wants to keep her son safe and young, and the son who wants to prove his adulthood for his mother and blaze his own trail. There’s also some really interesting, subtle magic (literally) that takes place between mother and child in the way of coercion, which can be used both for good, and almost as an abuse. And there’s ways friends can share memories by touching skin and whatnot. It all adds to a really multitextured tapestry that always has something going on, no matter what. Basically, the action isn’t always where you expect it to be. 

I want to talk a bit about the world building, because this is a Caribbean styled world, written from someone who is from that region of the world. I absolutely love OwnVoices, and this book is absolutely that. Bernie has written a lot of what he knows into this book to create the world. I often found small details, like the coqui frogs that fill the book actually exist in the real world, and his uncle can’t fall asleep without hearing them, interesting because it’s just something that, no matter how much I read about a place, I never would have added. So, his personal experience with this region, his personal connection to it, really floods the book. Furthermore, he takes some inventive liberties and has filled his jungle paradise with some creatures that are just surreal and so awesome I wish I’d thought of them first, like plants that actually wander around hunting people, and wolves made out of moss. Tree lords, and root roads, and just so many cool things. I literally spent about 75% of this book just soaking in his genius because oh my god, this world building is incredible. 

I also want to give a shoutout to the diversity. There is a lot of LGBTQ+ in this book, and it’s done in such a good way, from the m/m fathers mentioned, to the polyamorous relationships, and just about everything else. A lot of the time, people seem to try to make their books diverse in this way, and then they sort of hang up flashing lights and say, “Look at all my diverse characters” but this book isn’t like that. In this book, diversity exists because it exists, and no one blinks twice at it because it’s just part of the world in which they belong. I do have to admit, on a personal note, that I get tired of carrying the prejudices of our own world into secondary worlds, and while sometimes that needs to be done, I do always find it extremely refreshing when a character can have two dads and literally no one in the world says a word about it because it’s fine, normal, and not worth mentioning. 

And then, as if there isn’t enough here that I’m praising, the prose is absolutely superb. Bernie has a way with knowing when to slip into poetry, which I love, and knowing when he needs to use his words like a hammer. He has real skill with knowing how to use words to set an atmosphere, and how to paint a picture that is so vivid his world and the people and events that transpire here breathe with their own air, and seem more real than the world around me. 

Okay, so now that I’ve gone on quite an impressive tangent, I really want all of you to read this book. It’s full of action and adventure, part coming of age story, part stay true to yourself story. Mix in some OwnVoices, and some LGBTQ+ representation and we’ve got one of the best epic fantasy books I’ve read in a long, long, long time here. It deserves all the praise, and I really hope it does as well as I think it deserves to. 

The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul – Eleanor Herman

About the Book

The story of poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns, and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family’s spoons, tried on their underpants and tested their chamber pots.

Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications, and filthy living conditions. Women wore makeup made with mercury and lead. Men rubbed turds on their bald spots. Physicians prescribed mercury enemas, arsenic skin cream, drinks of lead filings, and potions of human fat and skull, fresh from the executioner. The most gorgeous palaces were little better than filthy latrines. Gazing at gorgeous portraits of centuries past, we don’t see what lies beneath the royal robes and the stench of unwashed bodies; the lice feasting on private parts; and worms nesting in the intestines.

In The Royal Art of Poison, Eleanor Herman combines her unique access to royal archives with cutting-edge forensic discoveries to tell the true story of Europe’s glittering palaces: one of medical bafflement, poisonous cosmetics, ever-present excrement, festering natural illness, and, sometimes, murder.

304 pages (hardcover) 
June 12, 2018
Buy the book 

This book was both an Audible purchase and a library loan.

I keep coming back to this book. I read this a while ago, and then I read it again. I’ve done it once via audiobook and once as a library loan, and I’ve loved it both times. I mean, it’s a book about poisoning. How could you possibly go wrong? 

You should have a strong stomach before you read this book. Not because of all the gross deaths or whatever else you might assume, rather, from all the disgusting hygiene practices that are discussed. I had no idea, for example, that Henry VIII had a poop house, or that it took a veritable bevy of servants to care for the place, or that if you didn’t feel like it, peeing in the corner of basically any room in a castle was perfectly fine, thank you very much. 

Seriously, half the time when I was reading this book, I was amazed that humanity managed to survive this long. 

Throughout much of history, the ruling classes have been absolutely paranoid about poisoning. They’ve done a lot of things to try to avoid being poisoned, like hiring tasters, or religiously guarding who is able to get close to them, and various other means. While some poisonings actually did happen, by and large it seems like most of these people were actually unknowingly poisoning themselves. 

Hygiene wasn’t really a thing, and if it was, it was usually scoffed at. People did not bathe or cleanse themselves properly. Food was often not cooked the whole way through. People seemed to go, “why walk all the way to the bathroom when there’s a perfectly good place to poop right here, six feet from where I’m eating dinner surrounded by all these people?” Then there are other things, like bugs (fleas, etc.) that carried viruses and makeup. Often women would rub powders and face creams with arsenic on them all over their faces. There was a big trend for a long time with men rubbing mercury on their hats. Some face creams had urine in them. Lots of medicines and preventatives that people took back in the day had extremely dangerous and harmful ingredients in them. 

The means to avoid being poisoned were also very interesting. Royals would hire servants to try on their clothes before they wore them. They’d test out antidotes on prisoners. They’d have people taste their food, lick their spoons and forks for them, and even test their chamber pots. It doesn’t take someone well-versed in the germ theory to see how all of this could very easily be spreading a contagion from one person, to another, and back again. If you get COVID-19 and lick my spoon, I’ll get it, too. However, people didn’t know that back then, so through the very act of trying to save themselves a miserable poisoning and death, they were increasing, dramatically, their risk of dying from something as mundane as the flu their servant isn’t aware they have yet. 

Often, people would die mysteriously, and so it would be considered a poisoning, while in truth it was anything but. Herman does some amazing research here, and forensics has come a long way. She flits her way through history, telling common hygiene and personal practices, and then the story of how this person died. What was supposed at the time, and what actually happened based on what evidence we currently have. Through research, she debunks some stories of poisoning entirely, and others, she confirms. I honestly found myself to be less interested in the stories of poisoning themselves (and there were some, and they were quite fascinating… seriously, people get creative when they kill), and more interested by the life and times, I guess you could say. 

And it isn’t all just about back in the day. She does move forward and talk about Nazis, Russian state ordered disappearances and deaths, and even the poisoning of Kim Jong-Un’s brother. However, while these topics are covered, the focus is more on older history, and some of the figures that are covered are quite grand in their own right, like Napoleon Bonaparte, and even Mozart, and serve as sort of mini-history focal points, where you get not only the rundown of the person being discussed, but also the life and common practices in the time in which they lived. 

The truth is often far more complex than anyone was often led to believe, and while yes, some people did get poisoned, the fact of the matter is that, throughout history, people have often been shortening their own lives by various means. Herman exposes a lot of these common practices, and uses forensic evidence to get to the heart of a lot of these stories. Her quick wit, and stunning depth of her research combine to make this book a compulsive read. The topic is interesting, and her handling of it, and the long sprawl of history she takes her readers through, is handled quite well, with an easy pace through an impressive sprawl of history, never getting overly bogged down in any one point of the book. 

As a writer, this book gave me a ton of ideas. As an editor, it has helped me scrutinize the books I work on that involve power and poison, hygiene and the like, in a more realistic light.

This book isn’t for everyone. Like I’ve said, I left it wondering how humanity has managed to survived as long as we have. There are a lot of stories of cruelty to animals, and other people here. There’s a lot of discussion of poor hygiene practices that will likely revolt you. It shocked and amazed me, but I seem to have a very high threshold for what I can and cannot handle. If you don’t, however, and stories of people pooping in public places, for example, makes your stomach roll, you might want to skip this book. For me, I was shocked and entertained, and I loved it. 

5/5 stars

Review | Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria – Sam Dagher

About the Book

From a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist specializing in the Middle East, this groundbreaking account of the Syrian Civil War reveals the never-before-published true story of a 21st-century humanitarian disaster.

In spring 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned to his friend and army commander, Manaf Tlass, for advice about how to respond to Arab Spring-inspired protests. Tlass pushed for conciliation but Assad decided to crush the uprising — an act which would catapult the country into an eight-year long war, killing almost half a million and fueling terrorism and a global refugee crisis.

Assad or We Burn the Country examines Syria’s tragedy through the generational saga of the Assad and Tlass families, once deeply intertwined and now estranged in Bashar’s bloody quest to preserve his father’s inheritance. By drawing on his own reporting experience in Damascus and exclusive interviews with Tlass, Dagher takes readers within palace walls to reveal the family behind the destruction of a country and the chaos of an entire region.

Dagher shows how one of the world’s most vicious police states came to be and explains how a regional conflict extended globally, engulfing the Middle East and pitting the United States and Russia against one another. 

Timely, propulsive, and expertly reported, Assad or We Burn the Country is the definitive account of this global crisis, going far beyond the news story that has dominated headlines for years.

485 pages (kindle) 
Published on May 28, 2019
Buy the book 

There are a lot of times when I see things happening in the Middle East and I just get completely overwhelmed. It seems like there are so many factions, and factions of factions, and such a long, rich history and all these people… it’s just a lot. So, while I want to understand the roots of (insert conflict here) I have a hard time actually doing it. This is all made worse because I generally feel like every book or article I really read seems to, at its core, have some sort of political bend. I usually end up giving up. 

Now, I will say off the bat that this book is not very friendly to the Assad family. The people who were interviewed were defectors, and/or witnesses to events that transpired. None of them, as far as I’m aware, are currently standing in the arena going, “WOO! GO ASSAD GO!” This book is very critical. Recently I had a discussion with someone who lives in Jordan (so not a Syrian) who said that he thought people were far too critical of Assad, that while he is ruthless, look at all these good things he’s done, and then he listed off these progressive reforms and all that. To which I gesticulate wildly at, “but he gassed his own people” and then… well, the conversation goes in circles. So there is that side, too, and that’s not extensively examined in this book. 

However, this honestly is one of the most comprehensive breakdowns of a Middle Eastern dynasty and numerous crises that I’ve read in a while. 

Assad, or We Burn the country is not just about Bashar. Rather, this book starts out with his father, Hafez, who wrested control of the country away from numerous other powers vying for it and then managed to keep his power through coup attempts and various social and military unrest. He was a brutal man (he literally wiped a city off the map, for example, killing thousands upon thousands of people in the 1980’s), who kept an iron fist wrapped tightly around what he considered his own, borrowing ideas from other governments to create his own uniquely Syrian system. He borrowed ideas from the Nazi Youth, for example, to create his own weird kid’s club where they basically sang songs about how wonderful he was and wore special clothes. He liked the idea of the Stassi, the Russian arm of the KGB that operated in occupied Germany, and from that he formed the Mukhabarat, or the Syrian state police that have just a shocking amount of oversight and control over the Syrian people. He liked a lot of Ba’ath party ideas, so as Sadam was rising up in Iraq, Hafez watched with interest and borrowed some of his ideas as well. 

While Hafez was interesting, Bashar was really the one who captivated me. Perhaps this is because I don’t remember Hafez at all. It’s also because Bashar was the second son, and he was pretty content to be left alone to become an eye doctor in London while his dad forgot he existed (They weren’t close.). However, after his brother died in a car accident, Syria turned its attention to this second son who was meant to inherit. At first, there was a lot of hope hanging on Bashar. He was westernized and therefore enlightened (or so people thought) and he would certainly come to Syria and change things for the better. He would be the young breath of fresh air the country needed, and perhaps for a time, that was the case. He even married a woman who had spent her entire life living in the United Kingdom. How much more modernized could a person possibly get? A lot of hope was hung on Bashar’s shoulders. However, the book follows his path, from London, to Syria. His quest to fill his brother’s shoes, to become the ruler of this country, and the various things that caused him to move from the hope of the Syria, to… what he is now. 

There were a whole lot of things I wasn’t aware of before this book, but perhaps that connection between Syria and the United States was one of the most surprising. I had no idea the regime had been supported by the United States for so long. I also had no idea that the Syrian government had their fingers in so many different pies. For example, Bassel, the older brother that would have inherited if he hadn’t died in a car accident, had hundreds of millions of dollars stashed in bank accounts all over Europe, from money he made by funding some of the drug trade, and by having a corner on the illegal archeology and relics market coming out of Lebanon, and this was, by and large, just something that people in the Assad family did. So, punish people for drug trafficking, while also making money from the same market they are criminalizing. It is, for all intents and purposes, a very lucrative way to live.

Dagher was the last journalist kicked out of Syria in 2014, and so he has a lot of perspective about how the Arab Spring impacted the country, how vying political forces from other countries (read, Russia, Iran, United States) had a hand in what happened next, and how it all played out. How Bashar reacted when he saw his power was being threatened. Once Ghaddafi was toppled, Bashar tightened his hold on his own country, and became almost paranoid that the same would happen to him, so he flexed his iron fist and did what daddy did: He retained control, no matter how hard he had to work to do so. Gaddafi laid out the playbook for dictators in the region, and Assad watched, very closely, to see what he had to do to keep control of his country. And we all know the results. 

Gaddafi laid out in no uncertain terms what Arab leaders must do if they wished to overcome what he called a conspiracy by traitors and foreign enemies. Notwithstanding his cartoonish persona, Gaddafi’s words were a precise roadmap for any dictator determined to stay in power at any cost: spread lies to sow confusion and manipulate the narrative, kill to illustrate the cost of defiance, and stoke paranoia to drive a wedge between people and make them fight each other. Keep the conflict going even if it means destroying the country: either the leader stays or the country burns.

One thing that makes Syria so complex, at least in my mind, is how many outside forces there are playing on the battleground of that particular country, and Dagher breaks it all down nicly. He is even handed with just about everyone, from Obama’s rather clumsy response to Syria’s civil war, to Trump’s callous and sudden removal of support and protection from the Kurds. Then there’s the Russian and Iranian interests, and how the removal of the United States from this particular region gave Putin a massive toehold in the Middle East, making him a huge powerbroker in the region. A lot of this stuff was very complex before, hard for me to understand, hard for me to outline on my mental map, but Dagher made it easy to digest. 

The Syrian civil war was horrible, and brutal, but due to so many things, the winners were less Syria and more everyone but the west. Russia now has a huge amount of power and influence in the Middle East, and also used the conflict to test hundreds of weapons in the region. Turkey also made peace with Bashar, and now, with the loss of US protection, they were able to root out the Kurds in Ankara like they’d always wanted. There’s also Hezbollah, which is the arm of Iran. They have close ties with the Assad regime (Truthfully, Syria has always cultivated their contacts in Lebanon, but I think the civil war has strengthened them) and works as a flexed muscle to threaten the power of Saudi Arabia, their arch nemesis in the region. Now that just about the world has given up trying to overthrow Bashar, and the United States is seen as unreliable at best. The Assad regime has weathered quite an impressive storm and come out the other side stronger, in a lot of ways, and far more sure of their place in the world. Hafez would likely be very proud of what his son has accomplished.

And yet.

And yet.

There are still people, like the person I spoke to in Joran, who cry out, “But look at all the progress and reforms Bashar has done for the Syrian people! Look at all the good his regime has accomplished!”

This book is captivating. Part memoir, part historical study, this is the most comprehensive breakdown I’ve read of a very complex struggle in the region. If you’re one of those people interested in foreign events, foreign policy, or even if you’re wondering how the Assad family remain in power despite everything that has been lined up against them, this might be the best book currently on the market to read. Dagher has a bird’s eye view of the conflicts, and the regime, and a knack for breaking down complex issues into relevant and easy to understand bites. 

5/5 stars