Babylon Berlin - review

Babylon Berlin

by Volker Kutscher

Sandstone Press

Germany, Spring, 1929. Inspector Gereon Rath was a homicide detective in his home town of Cologne, but a shooting in the line of duty led to a newspaper scandal his career couldn’t survive. Thanks to his father’s heavy political and police connections, Rath transferred to Berlin and took up a position in E Section – the Vice squad in the city police HQ on Alexanderplatz. Under the avuncular guidance of Chief Inspector Wolter, Rath begins to find his feet in the vibrant and dangerous city. He also falls in love with ambitious police stenographer Charlotte Ritter.

When a dead Russian dissident somehow crashes a stolen car into the Landwehr Canal, the troubled Rath spies a chance to resume a career in homicide as a member of the crack A Section – but this is Berlin and nothing’s as it appears. Somewhere there’s a hidden fortune in Russian gold. A radical group of Russian exiles, a Berlin crime king, and corrupt cops at the heart of Alexanderplatz all conspire to be the first to find it. Rath must pursue a dangerous course through the illegal nightclubs and Communist neighborhoods of the city if he’s to win the case and get the girl – but a shocking encounter on the streets of Berlin throws everything into doubt.

In Babylon Berlin, Noir detective fiction merges seamlessly into the complex and hedonistic world of pre-Nazi Berlin. Kutscher’s period research, descriptions and realistic, sympathetic characters drive a narrative that’s hard to put down. 

Tiffany Blues

Tiffany Blues

by M J Rose

Atria Books

Jenny Bell is a gifted young artist with a harrowing past making a new life for herself in New York City. She thinks her history will stay buried until her best friend, wealthy socialite Minx Deering, contrives to gain their admittance to the prestigious Tiffany Foundation. An annual eight-week summer event held at Laurelton Hall, the fabulous estate of Louis Comfort Tiffany, the Foundation is a hothouse for artistic talent. Whoever wins the jury's accolade at the end of the term is set for a glittering artistic career.

Even at Laurelton Hall with all its wonders Jenny feels adrift until she meets Oliver Tiffany, the great man's grandson, and falls in love for the first time. Oliver draws Jenny out of herself and away from her serious monochromatic style of art to embrace color as she embraces him. Champagne flows like water and jazz fills the air, but a series of unnerving incidents intimates that someone among the contestants knows of Jenny's past and is using their knowledge to handicap her chances to win the prize. Jenny doesn't know if she can trust Minx any more. Is her best friend back to using opium, an addiction she supposedly kicked? What kind of influence is Minx's boyfriend Edward having on her, and why is he so hostile to Jenny? Events culminate one night into a confrontation that threatens to ruin everything, and only a desperate act of love can avert disaster.

Tiffany Blues is a story as elegantly crafted and as colorful as Tiffany's own artwork. M J Rose brings Jenny, Minx and Oliver to life along with the heady, sometimes desperate lifestyle of the Lost Generation. 

Apollo: The Race To The Moon

Apollo: The Race To The Moon
Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox
Simon and Schuster
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You never know what rare gem you'll find on a old bookshelf. Apollo: The Race To The Moon is one such find. Published in 1989, it's still an excellent history of the Apollo program from its inception to its unfortunate early demise after the return of Apollo 17. For space history nuts like me, it's definitely a must-read. For anyone remotely interested in how the American "space race" began and the politics, organizational challenges and personalities involved, it is well worth it.

The men (and they were mostly white males, alas) who were tasked with fulfilling Kennedy's vision of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely within the decade" were of a different breed. Driven, dedicated, single-minded, innovative, dynamic--you can't come up with enough positive adjectives to describe them. They started with little to nothing and had to invent an organization to build launch, mission and recovery systems to meet a seemingly unreachable goal in a very short period of time. 

We get to know the personalities that have become synonymous with Apollo and the space program--Max Faget, Jim Webb, Joe Shea, Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft, Werner Von Braun, among others. We feel their stress, their fears, their challenges. It was a time period and a place where the objective was more important than any one flight controller, scientist, astronaut, engineer or technician.

The Apollo program was truly  a time of team spirit and self-sacrifice for the good of the whole. Americans will probably never experience such an intense time period  to obtain such a lofty goal ever again.

Filled with fantastic facts, intriguing insights and introspective interviews, Apollo: The Race To The Moon will make you ask the pertinent question Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell once asked: "When are we going back?"

Rating: 4+ sushi rolls

 

A Friend of Mr. Lincoln

A Friend of Mr. Lincoln
Stephen Harrigan
Vintage Books

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Imagine becoming a close personal associate of a world famous, almost god-like, historical personality. This is the intriguing premise of Stephen Harrigan's  A Friend of Mr. Lincoln.

A fictional character, Micajah "Cage" Weatherby, makes the acquaintance of a young and ambitious Illinois assemblyman, Abraham Lincoln. Cage, Lincoln and a group of other Springfield young men share a passion for poetry and discussing the important topics of the day--the Alamo, then the Annexation of Texas; the need for infrastructure improvement such as canals and railroads in the state and how to pay for them, and sometimes even the evils of slavery. Cage, as a published poet with abolitionist leanings, doesn't understand his friend's skirting the issue. He sees Lincoln as two-faced, trying too hard to please everyone so he doesn't risk losing his office or pulling the Whig party down. 

Cage feels Lincoln needs to take a stand on slavery, and he finds himself both surprised and disappointed when Lincoln helps free a captured run-away slave woman in court, yet he also goes on to represent a Kentuckian who insists his Black servants remain slaves and return with him after he manages his land in the free state of Illinois.

Perhaps what causes the most heated conflict between the two men is their respective love lives. Lincoln's heart seems inconsistent to Cage. After losing the love of his life early on, Ann Rutherford, Lincoln doesn't seem able to settle with any of the ladies of Springfield society who want to attach themselves to the up-and-coming lawyer/politician. One in particular, Mary Todd, seems determined to win Lincoln over. Cage and Lincoln's other friends see Mary as a danger to the sanity of their manic-depressive comrade when Lincoln finds himself deeply unhappy after becoming "engaged to be engaged" to the ambitious woman. After rousing Lincoln from a near death depression over the misunderstanding, Cage makes an enemy of Miss Todd and becomes off limits  after Lincoln marries Mary. 

Cage and Lincoln drift apart, but the mutual admiration for the talent and humanity in each other doesn't, even as the years pass and the onset of Civil War brings both men to the same conclusion: slavery must end.

A Friend of Mr. Lincoln evokes a strong sense of being a part of history, of breathing the same air of great men during their formative years. Harrigan does an excellent job of building believable and well-rounded characters, both real and fictional. The settings and details bring the 1830s through 1840s in Springfield, Illinois alive, giving modern readers insights into the customs, culture and politics of the time and place. It is a novel sure to please both history and Lincoln biography lovers alike.

Rating: 3.75 sushi rolls (a good read) 

Killers of the Flower Moon

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
by David Grann
Random House 
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If this book wasn't based on a true life tragedy of epic proportions, you'd swear you were reading a best-selling mystery-thriller it's so engaging. David Grann presents the people and the "culture of killing" that existed in Osage County, Oklahoma during the 1920s. His clear and unblinking style reveals the dark, racist underside of the early petroleum industry, and how far these men were willing to go to make their millions.

We come to know Mollie Burkhardt and her sisters as they are killed off one by one, and we feel her terror and anguish at the knowledge that some person or persons she trusts are exterminating the Osage for their oil headrights.

At one time the richest people in America, the Osage sat on top of the world's then largest oil reserves. From poor ranchers to practically millionaires overnight, the Osage were the envy of the white society that surrounded them. The law took away their rights to handle their own wealth, however. "Guardians" were appointed by federal judges to handle the finances of most Osage, since only whites were seen as "competent." This racist system guaranteed abuses and frauds against the Osage, but the final draw many whites who benefited from the system felt came when the Osage sued successfully to keep their mineral rights, which by the turn of the 20th century meant petroleum deposits.

An Osage couldn't sell or give his or her oil headright to a non-Osage, but if an Osage married a white who became his or her guardian, then he/she could inherit--and sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars--the Osage spouse's headright. Mollie and her sisters were each married (or formerly married) to white husbands. Mollie's older sister Anna was discovered shot in the head from behind. Then Mollie's mother died under mysterious circumstances, suspected to be slow poisoning, and then her younger sister Rita and her husband and maid were blown up along with their newly purchased home. The newly created "Bureau of Investigation" (the precursor to the FBI) under a new young and brash director, J. Edgar Hoover, finally stood up and took notice of the numerous murders of Osage oil headright owners happening in Oklahoma. 

In 1925, Hoover appointed Agent Tom White, a former Texas Ranger, to take charge of the case, which had been terribly mismanaged by earlier agents. White discovered there were many more than just Mollie's family members being murdered--possibly there were hundreds of Osage shot and poisoned in the time period 1915-1930, with many leads pointing to their trusted white guardians and spouses, upstanding members of the community. Sympathetic whites and the henchmen who pulled off the actual killings for their paymasters also met untimely deaths, proving that no one was able to escape the culture of killing once the Oklahoma oil rush began in earnest.

In the wake of the recent actions taken against Native American protestors of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, Killers of the Flower Moon is a must-read book that demonstrates how the rich, predominately white male members of the petroleum industry are not above committing murder to obtain access to the petroleum resources they want. It is riveting true story about an ugly time period in American history that has been covered up for far too long.

Rating: 4+ sushi rolls (a great read)