New books added to the Deering Public Library in July
NON FICTION
Energy: a human history by Richard Rhodes, 2018The following is from Goodreads.
Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Richard Rhodes reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time—wood to coal to oil to electricity and beyond.
People have lived and died, businesses have prospered and failed, and nations have risen to world power and declined, all over energy challenges. Ultimately, the history of these challenges tells the story of humanity itself.
Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.
In Energy, Rhodes highlights the successes and failures that led to each breakthrough in energy production; from animal and waterpower to the steam engine, from internal-combustion to the electric motor. He addresses how we learned from such challenges, mastered their transitions, and capitalized on their opportunities. Rhodes also looks at the current energy landscape, with a focus on how wind energy is competing for dominance with cast supplies of coal and natural gas. He also addresses the specter of global warming, and a population hurtling towards ten billion by 2100.
Human beings have confronted the problem of how to draw life from raw material since the beginning of time. Each invention, each discovery, each adaptation brought further challenges, and through such transformations, we arrived at where we are today. In Rhodes’s singular style, Energy details how this knowledge of our history can inform our way tomorrow.
I have added two highly acclaimed books that look at and try to explain the anger, fear and loss that has been experienced by a large part of the white American population. They are fascinating, very readable books that I cannot recommend too highly.
Strangers in their own land by Arlie Russell Hochschild, 2016 (with an afterword by the author from 2018).
In this book the author, a sociologist and self-styled 'Progressive' from Berkeley, develops close relationships with working class white people in Louisiana over a period of time. She tries to explain the paradox of refusing any sort of Federal agency and aid while living in the state that has the second lowest rating in terms of income, pollution, health outcomes and education. She establishes great personal relationships with several Tea Party partisans, and through them attempts to explain this curious paradox of knowing that things are bad but refusing Federal assistance, blindly believing that oil and gas and other industries that dominate in Louisiana will take care of them despite all eidence to the contrary. It is a wreck that I could not take my eyes from, all the worse because we are all drawn into the disaster.
Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, 2016 (with an afterword from the author dated 2018).
from Goodreads:
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.
But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.
A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
FICTION
The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson, 2018
Yes, I know, James Patterson . . . . Actually this one was very well reviewed by the New Yorker and the NY Times, both of which found the novel to be pretty engrossing. Who knows who wrote what. But, who cares? It's summer!
From Goodreads:
President Bill Clinton and bestselling novelist James Patterson have written a spellbinding thriller, The President is Missing.
As the novel opens, a threat looms. Enemies are planning an attack of unprecedented scale on America. Uncertainty and fear grip Washington. There are whispers of cyberterror and espionage and a traitor in the cabinet. The President himself becomes a suspect, and then goes missing...
Set in real time, over the course of three days, The President Is Missing is one of the most dramatic thrillers in decades. And it could all really happen. The President Is Missing is Bill Clinton and James Patterson's totally authentic and spellbinding thriller.
Greeks Bearing Gifts. A Bernie Gunther Novel by Philip Kerr, 2018
Bernie Gunther was a police detective in Hamburg, Germany, during the Nazi years. More often than not he got into trouble with his supervisors because of his dislike of Hitler and his coterie. In the Bernie Gunther series, now numbering 13, Det. Gunther solves crimes, usually murder, that link back to the country's leadership.
Following the war Gunther followed various pursuits, but all involved crime fighting. I have, so far, only read one in the series, Prussian Blue,which was set in 1956 and published in 2017. The story was engrossing and for this reason I jumped when I saw Greek Bearing Gifts in Toadstool Book shop a few weeks ago. I truly enjoyed reading Phiip Kerr, a British author, and look forward to rea ding Greeks Bearing Gifts.
The following is from Goodreads:
Bernie Gunther returns in the thirteenth book in the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling series, perfect for fans of John le Carre and Robert Harris.
1957, Munich. Bernie Gunther's latest move in a long string of varied careers sees him working for an insurance company. It makes a kind of sense: both cops and insurance companies have a vested interest in figuring out when people are lying to them, and Bernie has a lifetime of experience to call on.
Sent to Athens to investigate a claim from a fellow German for a ship that has sunk, Bernie takes an instant dislike to the claimant. When he discovers the ship in question once belonged to a Greek Jew deported to Auschwitz, he is convinced the sinking was no accident but an avenging arson attack. Then the claimant is found dead, shot through both eyes. It's a win for Bernie's employers at least: no one to pay out to even if the claim is genuine. But who is behind the murder, and why?
Strong-armed into helping the Greek police with their investigation, Bernie is once again drawn inexorably back to the dark history of the Second World War, and the deportation of the Jews of Salonika - now Thessaloniki. As Europe seems ready to move on to a more united future with Germany as a partner rather than an enemy, at least one person in Greece is ready neither to forgive nor forget. And, deep down, Bernie thinks they may have a point.
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje, 2018
This new novel fromMichael Ondaatje has received great reviews from all quarters.
The title, Warlight, refers to a hazy, unclear - - dark even - - light and refers to the physical situation that prevailed in Europe many years after the defeat of the Nazis. Essentially the story is one of a son realizing that he never really knew his mother and set in post WW II England.
Here is part of the review from The Washington Post:
On a summer day in postwar London, Nathaniel and Rachel, both teenagers, listen bleakly as their parents announce that they are leaving for Singapore on business, without them. “Neither Rachel nor I said a word,” Nathaniel recalls. “They had rarely spoken to us about their lives. We were used to partial stories.” The reader too is blinkered from the outset, permitted to see only what Ondaatje, a master of concealment, reveals as Nathaniel exhumes his parents’ secrets from the mire of espionage and war. “I know how to fill in a story from a grain of sand or a fragment of discovered truth,” he declares decades later when the ultimate revelation strikes with quiet but lethal force. And “Warlight” is a mosaic of such fragments, so cunningly assembled that the finished pattern seems as inevitable as it is harmonious. What must happen does happen in this elegiac thriller; we just can’t see it coming.
The Overstory by Richard Powers, 2018
I tried to compose a single sentence, or two, that would convey the essence of this book. I failed.
The Overstory is a complex and provocative novel. The nine main (human) characters span hundreds of years -- just like trees.
The Atlantic headlined their review:
The Novel That Asks, ‘What Went Wrong With Mankind?’
Richard Powers’s climate-themed epic, The Overstory, embraces a dark optimism about the fate of humanity.
"People see better what looks like them,” observes the field biologist Patricia Westerford, one of the nine—nine—main characters of Richard Powers’s 12th novel, The Overstory. And trees, Patricia discovers, look like people. They are social creatures, caring for one another, communicating, learning, trading goods and services; despite lacking a brain, trees are “aware.” After borers attack a sugar maple, it emits insecticides that warn its neighbors, which respond by intensifying their own defenses. When the roots of two Douglas firs meet underground, they fuse, joining vascular systems; if one tree gets ill, the other cares for it. The chopping down of a tree causes those surrounding it to weaken, as if in mourning. But Powers’s findings go beyond Dr. Pat’s. In his tree-mad novel, which contains as many species as any North American forest—17 are named on the first page alone—trees speak, sing, experience pain, dream, remember the past, and predict the future. The past and the future, it turns out, are mirror images of each other. Neither contains people.
The Washington Post review called it 'The most exciting book about trees you'll ever read,"
Here is an excerpt from that review:
“The Overstory” moves the way an open field evolves into a thick forest: slowly, then inevitably. For a while, its various stories develop independently, and it’s not apparent that they have anything to do with one another. But have faith in this worldmaker. Powers is working through tree history, not human history, and the effect is like a time-lapse video. Soon enough his disparate characters set out branches that touch and mingle: Before the Civil War, a Norwegian immigrant travels to Iowa and begins homesteading in the largely empty new state. Just after World War II, a young man sails from Shanghai to San Francisco. In the late 1970s, an odd kid from a troubled family gets accepted to college. And a sergeant in the Vietnam War barely escapes death when a 300-year-old banyan catches his body falling from a cargo plane. “He owes his own life to a tree,” Powers writes.
