wahistorian's Reviews (506)

Adam Dalgleish visits his aunt Jane in a Suffolk writers’ colony, pondering next steps in his relationship with the woman he’s been seeing. As a poet-detective, Dalgleish has special insight into Jane’s neighbors: critics, playwrights, novelists, and one typist who works off and on for all them. When mystery writer Maurice Seton turns up dead in his boat, with his hands severed—exactly a plot point offered to him by one of his writer friends—Dalgleish tasks himself with shadowing the investigation of local inspector Reckless rather than deciding on next steps with Deborah. This novel has a cast of quirky characters, a wild coastal setting, and an exciting climax. A few too many characters make it a bit of a muddle, but still enjoyable.

A comprehensive look at the nuclear dangers of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, by the leading scholar of Russian nuclear history. The cavalier attitude toward nuclear danger, even in spite of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, is shocking. 

Carlson’s book traces the extraordinary visit of USSR Nikita Khrushchev to the U.S. in 1959. The book begins with K and Nixon’s “kitchen debate” in Moscow, and concludes with Khrushchev’s ignominious end in the Soviet Union. In between he and his family spend three weeks touring the U.S. from DC to NYC to Iowa and San Francisco, alternately bragging about the superior Russian people and industry and quietly marveling at American ingenuity. Carlson captures with a comic touch the mercurial Russian leader, a stolid Eisenhower, and the pushy, prickly Richard Nixon. Highlights include K’s friendship with farmer Bob Garst and the invitation to view the filming of ‘Can Can,’ a movie he thought was “pornography.” Well-researched using sources from both sides. All in all, a very entertaining episode in Cold War history. 

Reminiscent of Raymond Chandler, this novel features an unnamed detective sergeant in the London Metropolitan Police’s Department of Unexplained Deaths. The book opens with the discovery of a writer who has been brutally murdered, and it rockets on from there, as the DS investigates the crime. He almost comes to inhabit the life of the victim, Charles Staniland, as he listens to taped narrations about his life, his estranged family, and his obsession with the cruel and beautiful prostitute Barbara. Raymond’s writing style is noir but poetic, with a sympathy that makes the seamy side of London life more human. 

I don’t always understand exactly what Marcus is saying about American music, but his breadth and depth of knowledge is indisputable. The essay “Elvis Presliad” is a serious assessment of what was unique and even experimental about The King, and read with the chapter on Robert Johnson, provides insight into the continuum of Southern blues. 

A first novel that traces the remarkable friendship between two young indigenous Canadians, Ezzy and Grey, and their quest to restore some balance to nature by relocating bison to urban parks in Edmonton. Ezzy and Grey take turns narrating chapters, in a tone that is matter-of-fact, yet sometimes heartbreaking in its casualness. A beautiful story, and I’ll look forward to Kerr’s development as a novelist. 

Francine Prose traces her relationship as a young writer in San Francisco with Anthony Russo, the co-conspirator with Daniel Ellsberg in the release of the Pentagon Papers that exposed government duplicity in regard to the Vietnam War. Prose captured the scattered and confused qualities of the mid-1970s, when the idealism of the 1960s has waned but nothing has yet replaced it. Traditions of friendship, love, and loyalty had been overturned, and people were making it us as they went along, sometimes with hurtful results. Falling in something like love with Russo, Prose finds herself experiencing a sort of vertigo and she uses Alfred Hitchcock’s film throughout as a metaphor for what she felt in this period. The Russo she describes is damaged, but somewhat indestructible, despite a prison term, mental illness, and the lasting paranoia from contact with truly diabolical government forces. Prose only alludes to the current administration, but one can only imagine what sort of destruction and damage will be left behind by this government. A fascinating, at times heartbreaking story, although Prose may not be the best reader of her work. 

Imagine a world in which nothing is everything and numerous people are willing to kill to get their hands on it. Supervillain John Milton Bradley Sill recruits mathematician Wala Kitu to help him find and steal the nothing contained inside Fort Knox. Along the way, Sill can’t resist demonstrating to Kitu, his one-legged dog Trigo, and his close friend Eigen vector the perks of his vast evil empire; and when he revealed. An interesting satire that muses on the nature of our obeisance to authority.

Stephen Marche published this book in 2022, before Trump’s re-election to a second term, but the experience of the first term—with its anger, disrespect, and constant questioning—is very much present in his catalog of ways in which the United States might come to blows. The book is based in case studies developed by other scholars, which makes its tone of inevitability even more infuriating. Of course the country is coming apart, he asserts, nothing lasts forever after all, and the only question is how violent and devastating it will be to the populace. His policy prescriptions are few: a new constitutional Congress and the vague recommendation that Americans stop assuming someone else will take care of our disunity. He ends on a hopeful note, one that seems out of keeping with the rest of the book, and perhaps it is necessary to overstate the case to get the reader’s attention. But it is tough going at a moment of extreme anxiety about the possibility of authoritarianism, a possibility he doesn’t really consider.

Not to publisher: no index?! 

The basis for Francois Truffaut’s film, this novel is brimming with bohemian characters up to no good. In each section another man is murdered by a mysterious woman—the murders are linked, but the woman always has a different appearance, a different m.o., yet always seems to have an uncanny knowledge of her intended victim. The effect is unsettling; sometimes you think you know who the killer is, and sometimes there are more than one suspect. Unfortunately, Woolrich tacked an impossible twist onto an interesting ending, one that really damaged the overall effect. Still, I enjoyed the sort of “cross section of society” effect.