Any regular readers of this blog will know that non-fiction isn't really my thing. Apparently, I need a plot, because the only genre of non-fiction I read on a (semi)regular basis is the memoir. But, because we are gearing up to do some major curriculum revisions in the social studies department at my school, I spent the last month or so reading all the young adult non-fiction I could find pertaining to world history, American history, psychology, government, and even <gasp> economics.

Some of it was definitely not my cup of tea (I'm looking at you, Naked Economics), but I surprised myself by how many of the books I really enjoyed. One, in particular, was The President Had Been Shot by James L. Swanson. It details John F. Kennedy's rise to the presidency, including major events such as the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then gives a detailed, almost minute by minute account of the days leading up to the assassination, and the immediate aftermath.

There has been a rise in the amount of non-fiction aimed specifically at young adults in the last few years, and Swanson definitely understands his target demographic. The book is chock full of photographs, maps, and diagrams, breaking up the information visually and providing support for the reader, both of which have been shown to have a positive impact on the engagement and comprehension of young adult readers. The prose mostly reads like a good story, rather than a list of dates and facts, written in language that is sufficiently academic not to insult the intelligence of young adult readers, but not so academic that it feels stuffy and dry. The subject matter lends itself to a feeling of drama and suspense, despite the fact that we obviously already know how things turned out on that fateful day, and Swanson's writing fosters that feeling, especially once he gets to the events in Dallas just prior to, during, and after the assassination. What was new to me, even as an adult reader, was the descriptions of what happened the day of the assassination in terms of the gathering of evidence and treatment of the crime scene by police, FBI, and Secret Service officers. How so many people botched what was, even on the 1960s, pretty standard investigative protocols is beyond me, even given the extraordinary event that was the assassination of a sitting president.

There are a ton of content connections in the text that could be used as jumping off points for bringing in other material, if this book were to be used in a classroom. It mentions the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis, as stated above, but also the space race, the Berlin Wall, Joseph McCarthy, the Civil Rights movement, and Soviet defections. It is also an opportunity to examine the uniquely tragic history of the Kennedy family in general; Joseph Jr's death in WWII, JFK's assassination, RFK's assassination, Rosemary Kennedy's botched lobotomy, Ted Kennedy's Chappaquiddick scandal, and JFK Jr's plane crash. The book also makes mention of some of the conspiracy theories about the assassination that grew out of the Warren Report, providing a springboard for talking about how historians evaluate evidence and draw conclusions, as well as teaching students how to evaluate whether a source is credible.

I'm definitely not a fan of exclusively using the textbook to teach, well, anything, so if I were teaching US History I could definitely see using this book as one resource for a unit on the 1960s, the Cold War, or the US presidency. I think that it would stimulate not just intellectual curiosity but also the emotions of teenagers, and getting emotions involved is one way to help students retain information. If they can remember how they felt when they read something, the content will stick with them longer. Unless what they felt was bored, which is why I think that using this type of text is a great way for history teachers to increase the engagement level of their students with their content.

And the Mountains Echoed

Like many serious readers, I hate the "what's your favorite book" question.  Neil Gaiman recently said (and I
am shamelessly paraphrasing here) that trying to pick your five favorite books is like trying to decide which five limbs you don't need.  I can tell you books I've loved recently, or books I loved at various stages of my life.  I can tell you I loved a book I forgot I even read if you remind me what it's about!  My "favorite" book is a function of who I am today, and tomorrow that could change.

There are, however, a few books that moved me so profoundly that they are permanently fixed in my "favorites" category.  I prefer to call them "book you should read before you die". One of those books is A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.  It is a true masterpiece, raw and powerful, a master class on creating rich settings and authentic characters.  Now, Hosseini is back with another story about the history and people of Afghanistan.  This time, he explores not just Afghan culture, but how the intersection of Afghan and Western culture affects his characters.

And the Mountains Echoed begins with an Afghan folktale about a father's love for his daughter.  That theme runs throughout the novel, with characters finding these familial relationships tested by poverty and secrets and history.  The book highlights the many ways that families can nurture or hurt each other, and the many sacrifices that we make in an effort to give our children the best possible chance in life.  The narrator changes at different points in the story, as the action moves from the Afghan countryside to Kabul to Europe and America.  The characters are all connected to each other in a delicate web of relationships-parents, children, siblings, spouses.  The plot is intricately crafted, with each section picking up from the one previous in ways that show the interconnectedness of us all.

The most poignant part for me was the relationship between chauffeur Nabi and his rich employer.  Despite the fact that Nabi is the catalyst for one of the most heart-wrenching betrayals in the book, through his story you are able to see his inherent goodness and compassion.  When his employer's wife deserts him after a sudden illness, it is left to Nabi to stay and take care of him, and the relationship that develops shows how deeply Hosseini understands the ties that bind us to the people we love, even outside of blood relations.

Hosseini does his usual good job exposing the inequalities of men and women in Afghan society, in a way that is not politicized or overly dramatic.  Each of the female characters in forced by circumstance to either conform to the gender roles assigned to them, or to escape.  Parwana is bound to her village in order to care for her disabled sister, and lives a desperate life of unfulfilled dreams of love.  Nila Wahdati, spoiled daughter of a wealthy family, writes poems about love, desire, and sex in 1950s Kabul, and is ultimately driven away from her husband and her country to escape the beautiful cage she felt she was living in.  Though she is by no means a sympathetic character, you can't help but feel sad for her desperate attempts to find love and happiness outside of herself, since she never finds it within.  Even the female characters who never lived in Afghanistan, the daughters of the original main characters, struggle to meet the responsibilities that their parents place on them as good Afghan women.  And the Mountains Echoed is not on my "read before you die" list, but it is definitely one of my favorites of the moment.

Those Quirky Swedes!

Our book club pick this past month was The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.  Hailed as a Forrest Gump-like story, the book follows Allan Karlsson, a 100 year old man who decides he's had enough of the old folks home where he lives, and runs away by climbing out his

window and disappearing into the countryside.  What follows is a novel told alternately in flashback and present day.  As Karlsson and the band of misfits he gathers travel around Sweden to avoid a motorcycle gang that is chasing them (Allan stole a suitcase full of money on a whim in a bus station), the author tells us about his very interesting life prior to his arrival in the old folks home.

I will admit that I only got 50% of the way through this book.  Most of the women in my book club either didn't finish it, or reported liking the modern day story much more than the flashbacks.  I's have to agree.  The vision of this elderly man on the run with a petty criminal, an almost-doctor, a retired nurse, and an elephant was pretty amusing.  And the writing style was very quirky.  In truth, the writing style reminded me a bit of Jospeh Heller in Catch-22, only with way less nonsense and absurdity.  Karlsson's character, an explosives expert by trade, managed to get pulled into almost every major political event of the 20th century, from being at Los Alamos during the building of the atomic bomb, to being hired to blow up Winston Churchill after World War II, to having dinner with Truman...and that's as far as I got, because frankly everything that happened to him was so far fetched I was unable to sustain my suspension of disbelief.

I didn't stop reading because I was hating the book, however.  It was more that I found myself completely apathetic about the characters and what happened to them.  I found there to be very little emotional impact in this book, and it made it difficult for me to really care about what happened to any of the characters.  It was mildly amusing, but not enough so that I felt compelled to keep reading.  That said, the book has a four-star rating on Goodreads and Amazon, and it's been a best-seller, so obviously lots of people do like it.  I guess it's just not my cup of tea.

Secret Societies and the Readers Who Love Them

So you may have heard of this author, Dan Brown?  He wrote this relatively successful novel called The Da Vinci Code, all about this professor who chases down ancient conspiracies about Jesus and Mary Magdalene to solve a modern day mystery.  I guess they made a movie about it or something...

Obviously Dan Brown's best-selling novel was more than relatively successful.  Say what you will about Brown's writing, he seemed to have tapped into a part of our cultural consciousness that believes in conspiracies and secret societies and vaguely impossible sounding alchemical magic.  And it's didn't start with Dan Brown, of course.  Indiana Jones was searching for lost artifacts in the jungles of the world at least 20 years before Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code.  I'm not sure why we as a society are so intrigued by the shadowy figures that we somehow fear are secretly running the world...perhaps it helps us make sense of the senseless, you know, like debt ceiling agreements or Donald Trump's hair.

Since every single literary phenomenon apparently needs its clones, there have been plenty of Da Vinci Code copycats.  I've read a few, and liked a few of those, but I had always avoided the novels of one of the more successful ancient mystery/secret society authors to compete with Dan Brown, James Rollins.  Something about his Sigma Force felt too militaristic and male to  be of much interest to me.  After all, I prefer even my mystery/thrillers to have female detectives.  Sexist of me, probably, but that's a topic for another post.

Well, wouldn't you know, Audible.com had a James Rollins book, Map of Bones, available FREE the last time I was looking for something to listen to on a roadtrip.  And who doesn't love free?!?  So, over 13 hours later, I can tell you that my concerns about Sigma Force were unfounded.  I was completely drawn into the world of Gray Pierce, Rachel Verona, and the mystery of the ancient mages they were trying to keep from the Imperial Dragon Court.

Map of Bones begins with a massacre in a church in Cologne, Germany.  Armed men dressed as monks unleash some sort of device that cause people to be electrocuted in their seats.  They also steal the scared relic of the cathedral-the supposed bones of the biblical Magi. Sigma Force is called upon by the Vatican to help them determine exactly who stole the bones and what their plans for them are.  Gray Pierce and his team are sent to the Vatican, and much mayhem ensues.

The upside to this kind of book is that the action is pretty non-stop, and there are lots of twists and turns to keep you engaged along the way.  And actually, there is some character development here, which you don't always find in this kind of action/adventure story.  The downside of this type of story is the enormous amount of historical exposition the author must try to work in around the gun fights, bombs, and car/boat chases.  Like most books of this types I've read, occasionally it felt slightly more like a history text than a novel, but Rollins actually does a decent job of having these little lesson occur in contexts that make sense-not, for instance, while standing over a dead body like one scene in Da Vinci Code.  All in all this was a fun, satisfying use of 13 hours in the car!

Hard Cache, by Charles B. Neff

 When retired police detective Magnus Torval travels to Washington state with his fiance, all that is on his mind is meeting up with friends and marrying the woman of his dreams.  That is, until he stumbled over a dead body while fishing in the wilderness.  After handing the body, and the case, over to the police in tiny Swiftwater, he tries to go about the business of getting married.  But the mystery surrounding the death of a Ukrainian antique dealer, the suspicion around his best friend, a prominent church leader, and the connection of both to a terrible event that happened when the two friends were Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, draw in not only Torval, but the murdered man's son, who is a local policeman, and a young Ukrainian woman who is visiting for the wedding.

This was a perfectly enjoyable, if somewhat awkwardly written, mystery.  The author is a college professor who has also written non-fiction texts, and it shows in his fiction writing.  The dialogue is just a little too clunky, the descriptive paragraphs are a little off-kilter.  That said, the story itself is engaging.  The characters are a unique group of people-you truly get a little bit of everything from this crowd.  I especially enjoyed the way the modern day mystery was tied into the Soviet/Afghan War.  The history of that region became of interest to me when I was following the oppression of women there under the Taliban, and has become increasingly important to me since we are fighting a war over there now.  This book, while fiction, gave me a little more insight than I had before about what it might have been like from the Soviet side of the story.  All in all, this was an enjoyable way to spend a few days.

(This was the first book I was asked to review by a publisher, and I got it for free.  I know there is probably some official FCC language I am supposed to use for that, but I can't find it, so FCC, if you are one of the 50 people who looks at this blog a day, I'm sorry!)

National Treasu...I Mean, The Lost Symbol

I was one of those people that drank the Davinci Code kool-aid.  I loved that book, and watched all of the follow-up shows on History Channel and NatGeo about whether any of the "history" presented  was true.  Like many readers, The Davinci Code was the first Dan Brown book I read, and when I went back and read his earlier books, I assumed that the fact that I wasn't as crazy about them was because they were his earlier works.  Obviously he was peaking with DaVinci Code, and anything that he wrote after was bound to be as amazing.

Well, not so much...I recently completed The Lost Symbol, and while it was enjoyable it didn't have the same draw for me.  The setting of Washington, D.C. was interesting, but not nearly as engaging as the journey across Europe in The DaVinci Code.  For the first half of the book I kept expecting Nic Cage to come in and start talking about something he found in his uncle's attic or something.  While I appreciate that Dan Brown works hard researching all of the history behind his choice of artifacts, rituals, etc...I wonder if there is another way for him to give us that information that to have his main character expound on it during long monolgues...often standing over a dead body or while driving at breakneck speed through some section of DC.  Seems like those might not be the times for a thoughtful discussions of Masonic history.

That said, I still enjoyed it.  The history was fascinating, even if it was often explained at strange points in the story.  The idea of Noetics really grabbed me.  As an atheist I've always said that I see no empirical evidence proving the existence of anything "supernatural".  If something like Noetic science can give me a scientific explanation for what seem like irrational beliefs then that would be something that could profoundly change my life.  I'm not getting on the theist train just yet, but it was interesting enough that I plan to research on my own.  For Dan Brown fans, this book will be enjoyable, I think, if something of a let down.  If you've never read Dan Brown before, start at the beginning-this is not the best representation of his work.

The White, by Deborah Larsen

Like me, you may have heard the stories about the Indian boarding schools that were set up by the federal government in the 19th and 20th Centuries.  The basis for the schools was to take Indian children away from their families and communities and send them to boarding schools, mostly run by religious organizations, for the purpose of "civilizing" them, helping them "find religion", and otherwise causing them to be assimilated into white, Christian culture.  I find this whole episode one of the most shameful things in our history.  Sadly, it was so successful that the Australians did the same thing to aboriginal children in Australia. (As an aside, if you're interested in this topic there is a great movie called Rabbit-Proof Fence that explores the system in Australia).

What I have not heard as much about was the fact that in the early days of America the Indians engaged in similar practices with white children.  Not sending them away to Indian schools en masse, per se, but kidnapping them as retribution for fallen family members.  The White, by Deborah Larsen, is the fictionalized version of the true story of one such child.  During the French and Indian War, Mary Jemison's father moved his family away from the safety of the fortified towns and into the wilderness in Pennsylvania.  An Irishman by birth, prohibited from owning land in his country of origin, Jemison wanted to provide his family with opportunities they would never have had otherwise.  Unfortunately, his zeal for owning his own land came with a steep price.  One day in 1755 a group of Shawnee Indians raided their homestead, killing him, his wife, and most of their children.  The exception was Mary, who at 12 years old was captured by the Indians (and their French brothers in arms).  She was taken away from her family's lands and given to two sisters, members of the Seneca tribe, as restitution for the loss of their brother in battle.  The book chronicles her life from that day until her death in 1833.  During her long life, Mary lived, loved, and worked within the culture of the Seneca Nation.

Larsen does an excellent job of creating a picture of the Seneca culture of that time.  Her writing style is spare, but lyrical.  Alternating between a third person narrator and Mary's own words and thoughts, she provides the reader with an understanding of how Mary, known as Deh-he-wä-mis to the Seneca, came to be a person who walked between two worlds.  Mary married twice, once to a Delaware man and once to another Seneca, and had six children.  She truly was both Seneca and white, traveling between the two worlds with grace.  Throughout it all, she kept her father's dream of owning land alive, finally being granted 10,000 acres along the Genesee River in New York by the government.  While Larsen's writing style may be spare, she did not hold back when it came to describing the good and bad of both the Indians and the whites.  This is no overly sentimental account of the "noble savages"-I came away from this well-researched book feeling as though I had been given a glimpse into the reality that existed as our newly founded country sought to grow.  The truth of it seemed to be that the whites and Indians were able to find ways to coexist peacefully when allowed to do so.  It makes me wonder what would have happened over time if instead of running the Indians off the land we had found a way to work and live with them.

A Story by Nevada About a Girl From Mississippi Going to Florida

I have to admit I am merely a lukewarm fan of Nevada Barr.  Her stories of Ranger Anna Pigeon and the national parks where she works seem to have all of the components that I love in popcorn mysteries, but for some reason I often have a hard time getting into her books.  In her novel, Flashback, she finally gives me something that sucks me in from the beginning-a dose of historical fiction with my mystery.

Ranger Anna Pigeon has served in some of the most beautiful places in the United States as a park ranger for the National Parks Service.  This time she has been sent to a temporary posting at Dry Tortugas National Park, a series of small keys 60 miles east of Key West.  She is there to stand in for the regular superintendent of the park, who has mysteriously had some sort of breakdown.  Turns out, Anna's great-great Aunt Raffia was once a resident of the fort that comprises most of the public parts of the park.  It is through reading her letters that we learn about the fort's most infamous prisoners-Dr. Samuel Mudd and Sam Arnold, two of the men convicted of conspiring to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.  Anna's story and Raffia's story weave together into rather creepy tale of betrayal, divided loyalties, and murder.

The present day mystery involves some very 20th century interests-Cuba, smuggling, and drugs.  The historical mystery reads like a gothic romance-a young girl, Anna's great-great Aunt Tilly, is drawn into the efforts of Dr.Mudd to prove his innocence, and her guardian, Raffia, has to try to protect her sister's virginity and her reputation while protecting herself from an abusive husband. Interesting as the Lincoln back-story is, Barr offers only the flimsiest of connections between it and the present day mystery that Anna is  trying to solve.  That said, both stories, past and present, are well-paced and engaging.  If nothing else, the story made me want to visit the Florida Keys, especially the national park.  The descriptions of hot sun, warm water, and cool ocean breezes sounds especially tempting when I'm reading watching the snow fall during a cold Chicago December.  If you are already an Anna Pigeon fan, I'm sure you'll thoroughly enjoy this book as well.  Of course, if you're an Anna Pigeon fan you probably already did-this is not her latest book.  I still have three more of Barr's books on my shelf...I guess the fact that they are not buring a hole through my shelf tells you more than anything how average I find this series to be.

(P.S.-for some reason my comments are not working.  I'm trying to get someone at blogspot to help me, but so far no luck.  If we're Facebook friends feel free to comment there.  Sorry!)