The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory

This is the story of Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn, and her sister, Mary. Gregory takes known dates and events and weaves a rather gripping story around what might have happened to cause these to occur. So even though the ending wasn't in question, the journey was quite fun.

While amusing, the portrayal of Anne seemed inconsistent. At the outset she is clever and witty, plotting with her family to advance their station in life. When she catches Henry's eye she becomes conniving and ruthless and helps to oust a sitting queen, and when she becomes queen herself she turns into an outright shrew, shrill and unpleasant. The well-known adage "power corrupts" could be an explanation, but the intelligence shown early seems to fade with Anne becoming a caricature of the megalomaniac queen.

The writing style is straightforward, with a minimum of flowery romance-speak—something I appreciated. A bit long, but the action moves quickly enough it doesn't feel like a 650+ book. More entertainment than biography, this makes me want to read a more factual account of the time. Certainly kept my interest, and well worth the time it took to read.

First Sentence:

I could hear a roll of muffled drums.

A Chain of Thunder, by Jeff Shaara

This book tells the story of the Campaign for Vicksburg during the Civil War. I've visited the National Military Park there a couple of times and always find it both fascinating and moving. Shaara does a good job of providing varying frames of reference from both sides of the battle, generals and enlisted men alike. There are several maps throughout giving a feel for the movement of troops, which is nicely juxtaposed with the southern civilian viewpoints who were only told their position was impregnable and chose to believe it.

This is clearly a well-researched novel, with detail after detail about the quality of life as well as the military strategies. I was surprised to find that anti-vaxxers were not a recent idiocy but were alive and well in the 19th century. "It amazed Bauer that so many in the town, and in the army, had responded instead with outcries against the vaccinations that seemed born of nothing more than superstition." With all this detail, though, there is a surprising lack of what life was like for the slaves in Vicksburg—none of the narrators were Black. When white civilians during the siege were reduced to eating dogs and rats, what the slaves ate isn't stated. Considering this was a war over slavery, this lack of insight hurts the overall narrative.

It was strange reading a novel about the Civil War during a time where it feels our country is splintering along similar political lines, if not physical ones this time. On the North side Grant and Sherman fought to hold the United States together. On the South, Pemberton fought out of loyalty to his Virginia-born wife rather than dedication to the Confederacy. The Northern soldiers fought for duty, the Southern desperate to maintain their way of life. Both sides are depicted fairly nobly, and the institutional racism at the root of the conflict isn't a part of the story. Makes you wonder how the raging racists running Washington will be depicted in literature a century from now.

First Sentence:

The ball was a glorious affair, the Confederate officers in their finest gray, adorned with plumed hats and sashes at their waists.

Tarzan of the Apes: The First Three Novels, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Any character that remains popular for over a century has something unique to offer. Tarzan could easily be called the first superhero: he possesses extraordinary strength, stamina, speed, agility, healing, and intelligence—basically Captain America without needing the Super Soldier Serum. Tarzan can speak with apes, kill gorillas, lions, and crocodiles with his bare hands, and his senses of hearing and smell rival those of bats and bears. His skill handling animals is also remarkable; at one point Tarzan trains a group of apes to man oars and sail through the Atlantic Ocean. There isn't much depth to these books (the volume I read collects the first three of twenty-four) but they are thoroughly entertaining pulp novels.

Both set and written in the early twentieth century, the style of writing suffers from what we expect today. Plots are melodramatic and driven by coincidence after coincidence, the characters are thin and one-dimensional, and the rampant negative stereotyping exposes the widespread sexism and racism common in the period. Despite all this, there is an undeniable charm to these stories and it is easy to see why they remain in favor today. Escapist and fun, the Tarzan books are a wonderful set of adventures.

First Sentence from Tarzan of the Apes:

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.

First Sentence from The Return of Tarzan:

"Magnifique!" ejaculated the Countess de Coude, beneath her breath.

First Sentence from The Beasts of Tarzan:

"The entire affair is shrouded in mystery," said D'Arnot.

Chicago, by David Mamet

Mamet is known for his dialogue (Alec Baldwin's monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross is maybe the best 7 minutes of film in existence) where characters often interrupt to finish each other's sentences, punctuated with obscenities. Chicago lives up to this reputation, filled with mobsters, whores, and reporters in a post-WWI era Windy City. Sadly, the writing overshadows the plot with the result feeling more like a badly edited short story stretched out to novel-length.

Nothing really happens in the first half of the book, and then another third has the "hero" trying to drink himself to death. The conversations are quite good and occasionally insightful ("Why do we lie? To obtain something from our listener.") and the individual scenes often are as well (I especially liked the discussion of why you shouldn't carry a gun or a flashlight when cracking a safe) but they are only tenuously connected and thinly strung together. It almost feels like a series of vignettes featuring Chicago, but the characters and settings don't change enough to pull this off. If you like the glib pen of Mamet this may hold your interest, but if you are looking for a gritty tale of mobsters during prohibition maybe check out Dennis Lehane's Live by Night instead.

First Sentence:

Parlow and Mike sat quiet in the duck blind.

The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead

Set in the American South of the 1960s, this is a book with Jim Crow at its heart. Racism and unfairness saturate each page, coupled with sadness and misery, cruelty and inequity. Amazingly, the spirit of the main two boys keeps the story from becoming depressing, and in fact, was quite an engaging and even uplifting read.

Based loosely on the real-world Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in Florida that was violently abusive to its charges for virtually all of the 111 years it was open, The Nickel Boys tells the story of Elwood Curtis and his friend Turner. While violent, the dignity and dedication to survival the boys possess prevail over the casual racism shown by not just the craven staff, but the rest of the world in general. "They had whipped Elwood. But he took the whipping and he was still here. There was nothing they could do that white people hadn't done to black people before, were not doing at this moment in Montgomery and Baton Rouge, in broad daylight on a city street outside Woolworths." (Sadly, racism hasn't been vanquished in the decades since segregation fell out of favor, but simply driven underground until the recent rise of the alt-right and its seeming embrace by the Republican Party. It is hard not to read this book and see the parallels to what is happening today in migrant detention camps.)

The surprisingly short book is broken into three parts: the first two parts are presented sequentially and in a straightforward manner, but the third starts jumping backwards and forwards in time causing the narrative to be a bit hard to follow. This change in style makes sense once reaching the epilogue, but until then the chapter breaks can be a bit jarring. Entertaining seems an odd word to use for such a bleak plot, but I did truly enjoy reading this thought provoking novel.

First Sentence:

Elwood received the best gift of his life on Christmas Day 1962, even if the ideas it put in his head were his undoing.

The Atomic City Girls, by Janet Beard

During WWII, Oak Ridge was established as one of the main sites of the Manhattan Project. The facility was sprawling, springing up in a largely unpopulated area seeming overnight to house and employ 30,000 workers—almost none of whom had any idea what they were trying to build. This little-known setting serves as the backdrop for several (barely) intertwining stories of life, love, and growing up.

Despite the title, the narrative largely follows only four people, two women and two men: Sam, a Jewish physicist who is a key player in developing the bomb, June, a high-school graduate finding her way in the world, Cici, a gold digger searching for a husband, and Joe, an African American construction worker. Sam and June are the main focus, falling into an affair fairly quickly. Joe has the most interesting arc, with the horrible treatment of blacks at the time and the varying attitudes of everyone ranging from hostility to acceptance. Cici does have her own storyline, but largely serves as a foil to June, going from friend to enemy fairly dramatically.

While the plots are thin and characters are largely one-dimensional, the setting is what makes this a pretty good read. There are actual photos interspersed of Oak Ridge at the time which really helps set the mood. While reading I found myself going to the web and looking up stories and information about the plant; I probably spent as much time doing that as reading the novel! If you are looking for an historical fiction tale that sheds light on a new era this is a solid (if pedestrian) choice.

First Sentence:

The news that June's grandfather was being evicted had come from her older sister Mary, who worked in town at Langham's Drug Store.

The Last Sheriff in Texas, by James P. McCollom

This book chronicles the changes the state of Texas underwent after WWII, moving from mostly rural to mostly urban, and seeing the cowboy fade from a real profession to a role in the movies. Sheriff Vail Ennis of Bee County was a violent, uncompromising man with a flair for violence—he shot and killed eight men while in office between 1944 and 1952. Johnny Barnhart was raised in Bee County, but while attending the University of Texas uncovered a passion for civil rights that set him apart from his conservative neighbors. These two icons clashed during the election of 1952, forcing citizens to choose between frontier justice and law and order, changing Texas politics forever.

The story is told primarily via interviews and reminiscences with a healthy amount of historical context thrown in for good measure. I found it to be compelling (if very repetitive), although I can easily see how someone that isn't familiar with life on the Texas Costal Plain might find it slow and meandering. The book is part true crime, part political history, part biography, and part memoir resulting in a style that is a bit offbeat. On one page there will be a excerpt from a newspaper article, and on the next conversational dialogue from people long since dead. I found this see-sawing between fact and fabrication hard to get used to at first, but eventually settled down and enjoyed the story.

First Sentence:

The man who shot the sheriff was Roy Hines, thirty-four, ex-con, a grifter on his way from Oklahoma to Mexico.

Four Hours of Fury, by James Fenelon

Operation VARSITY was the largest single-day airborne drop in history, and Four Hours of Fury tells the story. I've read about Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the war in the Pacific, but hadn't ever heard of this operation which was the first push into Nazi Germany, signalling the end of WWII. Fenelon does an amazing job; facts and maps abound, but the focus on the combatants (enlisted and officers on both sides of the battle) keeps the story humanized. He has an amazing knack to toss in a sentence that seems amusing or light-hearted at first, but after more thought is covering the horrors of war. "Instructors reminded them that on an actual jump, if they didn't feel the opening shock of their chute by 4,000, they had the rest of their lives to deploy their reserve." The last sentence is flat-out heart-wrenching, capturing what every wife must have felt when getting a death notice: "There would be no fifth wedding anniversary celebration." Well-written, informative, and hard to put down—not a combination of traits I often ascribe to a history book, but they apply to Four Hours of Fury in spades.

First Sentence:

Three months before they dropped into Germany, the troopers of the 17th Airborne entered combat for the first time in a manner entirely different from how they'd been trained.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

With the musical Hamilton making it to Austin this year I decided to read the book that inspired it before attending. A hefty tome—731 pages of narrative alone—but I managed to finish the day of the show. Very glad I did this; several friends said the show was hard to follow in places (especially around the actor playing Lafayette and Jefferson; his accent was thick and made him hard to understand even having heard the music before) but I was continually rewarded with recognition of where the songs matched the book. I found the musical to be excellent, and the book as well.

Other than Hamilton being the main author of The Federalist Papers, his visage being on the $10 bill, and his death as a result of a duel with the sitting Vice President at the time, my knowledge of the Founding Father was light on details. It is amazing to see how what he accomplished in only six years as the Secretary of the Treasury still affects us today. He fought for a strong central government and standing military led by the executive branch and for closer ties to Britian. He founded the US Mint, the first national bank, the Coast Guard, and the New York Post. His strong difference of opinion with Thomas Jefferson (who believed in strong state governments and a largely agrarian society) effectively created the political party system that still dominates politics now. Finally, Hamilton also was the first major American politican involved in a sex scandal, which in all likelihood prevented him from becoming President.

One quote that stuck with me: "[Hamilton] viewed 'hypocrisy and treachery' as 'the most successful commodities in the political market. It seems to the be the destined lot of nations to mistake their foes for their friends, their flatterers for their faithful servants." In our current era of amoral politicians, fake news, and idiological echo chambers this still rings true 226 years later. Hamilton was truly an impressive individual.

First Sentence:

Alexander Hamilton claimed Nevis in the British West Indies as his birthplace, although no surviving records substantiate this.

The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough

Wilbur and Orville Wright are two men that exemplify what it means to be an American inventor. At a time where most of the world thought heavier-than-air flight was a fool's errand at best, they took their lives in their hands in order to conquer the skies. Neither had a college degree, but Wilbur was a genius and Orville was one of the best mechanical minds of his age. By close examination of birds, careful reading of the work of fellow scientists, and daredevil experimentation they were the first people that safely flew a powered aircraft.

McCullough is an excellent writer and does a great job of telling the story of the brothers lives and their quest. They kept their aircraft and experiments largely private, so even after their initial successes most of the world remained skeptical. After finally holding public demonstrations in Europe and the US proving their accomplishments, the brothers became global heroes. Ironically, their flights to show the world were some of the last they ever made. Wilbur died of typhoid fever less than five years later, and Orville spent the remainder of his life fighting patent infringements and lawsuits. Despite this less than audacious end, the brothers names and accomplishments live on today, with possibly the coolest tribute being the fact that when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, he carried a swatch of muslin from the wing of the brother's 1903 Flyer.

First Sentence:

In as strong a photograph as any taken of the brothers together, they sit side by side on the back porch steps of the Wright family home on a small side street on the west end of Dayton, Ohio.

The B Side, by Ben Yagoda

My mother loves the theater and my father loved movies, so I grew up with the sounds of Broadway and Hollywood in the house. I'm as familiar with the music of Cole Porter, George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington as I am Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The B Side traces American song craft in the early 20^th century, including the rise of ASCAP and BMI, the payola scandal, and the shift in prestige from writers to performers. It is sometimes difficult to read a book about music; words are for the eyes, but melody is for the ears (and both nurture the soul). This story often contains long lists of titles, such as "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)," "I Got Rhythm," "Always," "Stormy Weather," "They Can't Take That Away from Me," "You're the Top," "Sophisticated Lady," "Swinging on a Star," and "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." I find it virtually impossible to see these names and not pause to hear the tune in my head, making this a very long read, albeit an enjoyable one.

One critique is that the author clearly has a distain for rock-and-roll that often seems arrogant. In places this comes across as broad overstatements such as "the pop music of every era offended and mystified the older generation;" while more true than not, I'm certainly an exception as are many of my friends. In other places, the sentiment is imperiously haughty: "But it isn't possible for [songwriters such as Willie Nelson, Brian Wilson, Smokey Robinson, or Paul McCartney] to write a standard—or, as Keith Jarrett found out, it is possible, but really hard." I believe "Yesterday" and "The Tracks of My Tears" are every bit as good as "Night and Day" or "Puttin' on the Ritz." Yagoda's point is that in his opinion rock is less musically and lyrically sophisticated than a standard, but he seems to have deliberately forgotten that beauty is in the eye of the beholder—or in this case, the ear...

First Sentence:

While not quite on the level of a Richard Rodgers, a Cole Porter or an Irving Berlin, Arthur Schwartz was certainly in the top echelon of American songwriters.

A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster

I sometimes find it easier to relate to pure fantasy or science-fiction novels than I do those set in the Victorian or Edwardian eras. People are very concerned with their status and appearances, and class warfare is subtle but real. Sexism is rampant, and as always, puzzling. "It was not that ladies were inferior to men, it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves." The plot here is largely driven by a young woman raised in this world, but awakening to modern modes of thought and behavior. She starts the novel on a well-chaperoned trip to Italy, but a chance encounter with a free-thinker starts her on a journey that leads to a tough decision: expression versus repression, ardor versus apathy, life versus lethargy. Not my favorite novel, but an illuminating look at an opaque world.

First Sentence:

"The signora had no business to do it," said Miss Bartlett, "no business at all."

Mr. Hornaday's War, by Stefan Bechtel

I had no idea who William Hornaday was before reading this book. Turns out not only did he found the National Zoo and run the Bronx Zoo, but he was basically the father of the modern conservation movement as well. Hornaday spent his early life traveling the world collecting (and hunting) animal specimens while becoming one of the leading taxidermists in the country. Taxidermy led him to realize that the American Bison had been virtually made extinct; this realization is what pushed him into the forefront of wildlife conservation. His tenacity in the face of hunters, the gun and feather lobbies, and the general apathy of the public led to the first strong national laws protecting animals being passed, and preventing the extinction of the bison and the fur seal.

The author is clearly sympathetic to the cause of wildlife preservation; the tone is one of condemnation towards those not firmly in favor of the conservation movement. He uses terms like "waking up" to describe joining the movement, and calls those not involved the enemy. Hornaday clearly held these opinions, but the same phrases and attitude pervade the narrative even when not quoting Hornaday directly. The biased writing didn't harm the story or make things any less interesting, but I did find it a bit jarring at times. Still, overall this was a well-researched biography about a very interesting man.

First Sentence:

On the fair spring morning of May 6, 1886, an intense-looking young gentleman with eyes that burned like meteors and a jet-black beard vaulted up the stairs of a Pennsylvania Railroad westbound train, which was steaming at the platform in Union Station, near downtown Washington, D.C.

Hell and Good Company, by Richard Rhodes

Before reading Hell and Good Company pretty much all I could have told you about the Spanish Civil War was that it occurred between World Wars I and II and Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls based on his experiences there. Rhodes only lightly touches the military and political aspects of the war, instead concentrating on the innovations that were made real during this time. I was shocked to discover that frontline blood donations weren't commonplace before Spain, and the practice of sealing open wounds and compound fractures with plaster to keep them clean and immobile finally gained medical acceptance at this time, too. Hard to believe that before the late 1930's a broken leg was usually amputated on the battlefield in order to save the soldier. Military tactics also saw a lot of advancement during this time; air power truly came into its own, resulting sadly in prominent, purposeful civilian targets and the first war with a city bombed into literal rubble.

Rhodes has a sophisticated writing style; readable, but with an impressive (and occasionally off-putting) vocabulary: "In pursuing a latter-day, reverse reconquista he was less a fascist than an aggrandized martinet." One chapter in particular I found difficult to finish; the author discusses the creation of Picasso's Guernica, explaining in excruciating detail how the painting changed with each small step in the artistic process. Oddly, there isn't a rendering of the entire finished work included, so much of the included minutia was severely lacking in context. This literary wandering was an anomaly, though, and the book itself was both engrossing and appealing, and I recommend it to anyone interested in this time in history.

First Sentence:

Barcelona, 25 July 1936: In the glare of Spanish summer, the first witnesses to the igniting civil war are leaving to tell the world.

The People's Republic of Amnesia, by Louisa Lim

My first trip to Beijing was in the summer of 1988. China immediately captured my attention; I encountered a world unlike anything I'd seen, beautiful and oppressive at the same time. Almost exactly one year later, the Tiananmen Square Massacre took place and captured the attention of the world. Now, nearly thirty years later, Louisa Lim takes a look at the fading legacy of the rebellion.

For me, this was an unforgettable moment in time, in league with the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion or 9/11. The image of an ordinary man standing in front of a column of tanks is as powerful a picture as I've ever seen, and recognized virtually everywhere as the iconic moment of the event. In China, however, only 15% of university students in Beijing recognized it, due to the government systematically blocking and censoring any information related to the event. This sad fact is from where Lim draws her title: The People's Republic of Amnesia.

The author does a great job of interviewing many people about the incident, from mothers of survivors to soldiers that were there, from students at the time to students of today. These varied viewpoints give an in-depth look at both the event then and how it is remembered now—or not remembered as the case may be. In particular, the chapter on Chengdu and the oppressive events that took place there in the same timeframe was eye-opening. It would have been a truly captivating read if I could have shook the feeling that Lim continually patted herself on the back, congratulating herself on writing such a significant book. She may be correct in its momentousness, but the self-aggrandizing tone was irritating to no end. This is an important book, and gives a view into not only Tiananmen, but into the current Chinese government as well. The tone is annoying, but well worth forcing yourself to finish.

First Sentence:

Plumes of smoke from fires frame the Gate of Heavenly Peace, as soldiers pile the students' possessions to burn them.

Paris: The Novel, by Edward Rutherfurd

This is the history of Paris told through they eyes of six fictional families between 1261 and 1968. The types of families are well chosen to give a cross section of society through history: the de Cygnes are aristocrats and royalists, the Le Sourds are socialists and revolutionaries, the Gascons are craftsmen and laborers, the Renards are Protestants, the Blanchards are Catholics, and the Jacobs are Jewish. These characters are injected into and around a huge number of important events, such as the Paris Commune and the Terror, the construction of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, the Avignon Papacy, Vichy France, the Dreyfus Affair and the rocky history of Jews in France, and Catholicism versus Protestantism and the Edicts of Nantes and Fointainbleau. Each chapter is set in a different era but they don't appear in chronological order, instead bouncing from 1875 to 1462 to 1907 and so on. As the narrative follows the same families through successive generations this can be somewhat confusing at times, especially as some use the same given names over and over—for example, there are three separate Roland de Cygnes that take the stage in various eras. This drawback is minor though, and doesn't dramatically detract from what is overall a compelling and illuminating story.

First Sentence:

Paris.

Shakespeare's Pub, by Pete Brown

Pete Brown truly understands the appeal of a pub. Not just the camaraderie when sitting on a stool with a beer, but the security blanket aspect they can project in absentia as well. "We take pubs for granted. We think they'll always be there when we need them, unchanging, just how we left them. And if we don't visit them for weeks, months, or years, and we come back and find them changed, we're outraged. If we come back and find them closed, we berate all the other people who should have come here more often and kept them in business." This innate understanding of our relationship colors every word of Shakespeare's Pub for the better.

I enjoy hanging out at my local pub, but I certainly couldn't write over 300 pages about its history. Of course, B. B. Rover's hasn't been around for over six centuries, either. The George Inn at the foot of London Bridge is so old that the actual opening date is lost to the dusty past, but Brown does an entertaining job of sleuthing and maintains that it goes back to at least the 1380s. "If you are writing a history of anything, it makes sense to start that history with the date the damn thing was first built, invented, born or otherwise hurled into existence." He then proceeds to cover the entire history of the inn and southern London through the present day. This time period covers the rise of live theater (Shakespeare's Globe Theater was nearby), popular literature (Dickens used the George as a setting for Little Dorrit), and the entire stagecoach era (the George is the last remaining coaching inn in London). Pop culture references are used throughout (the TARDIS is used as a literary device to occasionally change the time period) and the footnotes often had me in stitches. This is the first of Pete Brown's books I've read but it certainly won't be the last.

First Sentence:

A century and a half, or thereabouts, after the last stagecoach thundered under the arch and out of its yard, the George Inn can be reached easily via the number 149 bus.

George Washington's Secret Six, by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger

This is a pretty interesting book about the Culper Spy Ring which was active in New York during the American Revolution. I didn't know much about the ring other than through pop culture references in Y: The Last Man and White Collar and quite enjoyed learning more about it, and the major impact on the war the spies brought about. The biggest (but not only) coup the ring accomplished was providing key intelligence that eventually prevented Benedict Arnold from turning West Point over to the British. Truly fascinating.

This is an easy read, with short chapters and just over 200 pages written at maybe a middle-school level. There is a lot of dialog here, capturing conversations between characters that couldn't possibly be known today, making this an odd blend of fiction and non-fiction. Overall this certainly gets a thumbs up as a basic introduction to the Culper Ring, and a good set of references in the back for digging in further.

First Sentence:

The execution of Nathan Hale on September 22, 1776, was the lowest point in a month of low points for General George Washington.

Jackdaws, by Ken Follett

Set in World War II in the week before D-Day, this is an uneven espionage story about an all-female group of Allied saboteurs. Only two characters—the main heroine, Flick, and the main villain, Dieter—get any degree of depth; the rest are cardboard cutouts that fill a role: the ditzy aristocrat, the gutsy gypsy, the perceptive boyfriend, the sadistic torturer, the dense Gestapo Major, and so on. The action takes place over ten days (minus a short afterward that gives the happy ending), and during that time Flick shows an unbelievable array of traits: loving, faithful wife that suddenly takes a new lover, heartless leader yet compassionate trainer, and stalwart soldier to cold-blooded executioner. A quick read and a rollicking story, but shallow characterization and an over-accelerated plot keep this from being memorable.

First Sentence:

One minute before the explosion, the square at Sainte-Cécile was at peace.

The Path Between the Seas, by David McCullough

Before reading The Path Between the Seas I knew very little about the Panama Canal other than the location, that the French started the project and failed, and it is the source of one of my favorite jokes in Arsenic and Old Lace: crazy Uncle Teddy "digging the canal" in the basement. I've always wanted to take a trip through the canal and I like reading histories, so I've been looking forward to this book for a while. As usual, McCullough doesn't disappoint.

It took nearly 45 years to build the canal, starting in 1870. There were several competing routes, but the French decided on Panama as the best place to make the cut. They had just successfully completed the Suez Canal and were considered the natural choice for bridging the Americas. Unfortunately as it turns out, digging across a desert at sea level does not take the same skills or technology as bridging a mountainous jungle region in the tropics. The death rate was astonishing in the early days. "Of every one hundred new arrivals at least twenty died, and of those who survived, only about twenty were were physically strong enough to do any real work." In about a decade, the estimates are as many as twenty-two thousand died. Disease was the main killer, as the world had yet to discover that mosquitoes carried malaria and yellow fever; in fact, the cause was so misunderstood that the legs of hospital beds were all placed in shallow bowls of water to protect against ants. If patients didn't have a serious disease when they entered the hospital, the odds were enormous they would before they left. The death toll was only one of several problems the French faced, though; poor engineering plans and irresponsible financing combined to guarantee the failure of the French effort. The only realistic remaining nation that could accomplish the feat was the U.S.A.

America didn't simply come in, pick up where France left off, and finish the canal, though. The US wanted a route across Nicaragua, and instead of a canal had wild plans such as hoisting ships out of the water and hauling them across Mexico on railroad cars. Obviously this isn't what eventually happened, but the story of what did is utterly compelling. Panama declaring independence from Columbia is just one of the momentous events of the era, and even knowing how it all ends I had a hard time putting the book down. As with all of McCullough's books, this is thoroughly researched, well-written, and highly recommended.

First Sentence:

The letter, several pages in length and signed by Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson, was aggressed to Commander Thomas O. Selfridge.