OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout

OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout

This review is not expected to be read.  It’s just to show respect for great writing.  This book flies in the face of much that is standard rhetoric about what not to do.  It is character driven, no matter how damning a description that is.  She ties the story together, but there is little plot.

Elizabeth Strout’s characters are wonderful, alive, real, heart rending.  If you want to know how to develop a character, then this is the textbook.  Her description and pacing are powerful.

There is so little plot, that, I have to admit, I read this book for only an hour at a time, usually only once a week.  I often forgot what I had read the week before.  But the characters, and above all the writing, made this book, not just a favorite, but one that I consider to be amongst the best I have ever read.

Moving Day

By Jonathan Stone 

A Review for Amazon

By Richard S. Trogdon

It is the classic struggle between good and evil.  It is the struggle for power between two men who are similar in many ways.  Both men have fought for their success, have known true hardship, but have responded to their struggles with dramatic and diametrically distanced lives.  For neither man is the struggle about the stolen items.  Stanley Peke, as a child, escaped the Nazis in Poland, came to this country, built a business, married, and raised a family.  His adversary Nick rose from the roughest of slums to build a successful life of crime.  He has built a criminal business that is solid, intelligently constructed and meticulously managed.  

Whether you see this novel as a thriller or a character study may depend on your age.  It will probably be seen as a character study by someone looking forward to the prom, but as a thriller by someone with an AARP card.  I view this book as suspense, not thriller, but I have an AARP card.  If you have lived in the same house for twenty years, are approaching retirement and are dreading that change in life, this story may mirror your fears and even your nightmares.  The younger you are the less of a thriller this book will be.  However, the intense competition between the protagonist and the blind determination of each to prevail, make this a novel that can be enjoyed by most readers. 

The repetitious descriptions of Stanley Peke’s emotions were tiring and, at time, reading became a chore.  If something like this had been submitted to me as a college paper, I would have assumed that the repetition was an effort to meet the required word count.

13 Hours

By Mitchell Zuckoff w/ Annex Security Team

 

A Review for Amazon

“This book documents the last hours of an American diplomatic outpost in one of the most dangerous corners of the globe. Based on exclusive firsthand accounts, it describes the bloody assault, tragic losses, and heroic deeds at the US State Department Special Mission Compound and at a nearby CIA base called the Annex in Benghazi, Libya, from the night of September 11, 2012, into the morning of the next day. It is not about what officials in the United States government knew, said, or did after the attack, or about the ongoing controversy over talking points, electoral politics, and alleged conspiracies and cover-ups. It is not about what happened in hearing rooms of the Capitol, anterooms of the White House, meeting rooms of the State Department, or green rooms of TV talk shows. It is about what happened on the ground, in the streets, and on the rooftops of Benghazi, when bullets flew, buildings burned, and mortars rained. When lives were saved, lost, and forever changed.”  So says Mitchell Zuckoff in “A NOTE TO THE READER”, at the beginning of the book.

 

The book is exciting.  It reads like a novel, except it is all true.  It introduces you to the people who lived and died that day.  It honors them, as it should.  It introduces some reality into a subject that is superficially discussed and manipulated to serve agendas.  It presents a picture of the Arab Spring and the tribal culture that is usually ignored in discussions of our policy in this part of the world.  I loved the book and hope you will read it and find it as meaningful as I did.

 

I found Google Earth to be helpful in reading and understanding this story.  I easily found both the annex and the Diplomatic Compound.  It made it easier to understand the physical and geographical descriptions in the account.  I could find, for instance, the building from which the attackers studied the layout of the compound and, therefore, have a sense of what the observer could see.  It helped.

Hard Choices

By Hillary Rodham Clinton

 

A Review for Amazon

Life is about making choices and my choosing this book was, for me, an unusual choice.  I bought it after reading the bad reviews.  At the time I bought the book, almost all the reviews were negative and had the feel of a “write your congressman campaign”.  Her photo was ridiculed and the fact that it was written in the first person was criticized.  It is a memoir.

 

As I started to write this review, I stopped and read the negative reviews again.  Today I would not buy the book because the negative reviews are now more insightful, which few were before.

 

This book appears to have been written as a cross between a SIX HUNDRED PAGE CAMPAIGN SPEECH and a political platform. You can almost here her voice rise as you read some paragraphs.  I can’t say that this approach is inappropriate, it makes sense to write a book like this when you are running for president and others have done the same thing.  Unfortunately, this is not a good effort.  As one reviewer noted, “it was written by committee”.  After reading the acknowledgements to see who was involved, I was not surprised to see that it was written, largely, by the same people who helped with her speeches. 

 

The first half of the book describes her time on the job and, to me, was a good insight into how the Obama administration functions.  The second half is mostly an issue list of positions for her campaign.  By the time I was 2/3 of the way through, I was tired.  Hillary’s book lists one issue after another that she cares passionately about.  It is a long list and a list to campaign on, I am sure; from human trafficking to working conditions in businesses abroad that do not have to abide by US standards.

 

There were things I liked about the book.  She does make points that are not entirely political.  One statement I have wanted to hear someone make for a long time was important to me.  When Hillary states that, “Most Americans understand that our troops often must be in harm’s way. But the same is also true for our intelligence officers, diplomats, and development experts, as we were tragically reminded during my years at State.”  I found the book no longer tedious, at least for a while.  I have always felt that Americans fail to appreciate the risk that our officials take to work in often-dangerous parts of the world.

 

I do not think this book will help Hillary be elected.  Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan could charm the nation but at least in this book, Hillary did not.  I am afraid that Americans are more likely to select someone because they would make a good senior class president than because they are qualified to perform the demanding task of President. 

Duty:  Memoirs of a Secretary at War

By Robert Gates

A Review for Amazon

“This is a book about my more than four and a half years at war. It is, of course , principally about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where initial victories in both countries were squandered by mistakes, shortsightedness , and conflict in the field as well as in Washington, leading to long, brutal campaigns to avert strategic defeat.”  So begins Robert Gates description of his four years as Secretary of Defense.  While our troops were fighting, dying, and have their bodies blown apart; the other wars; the political, bureaucratic, and diplomatic (and not so diplomatic) wars that were the everyday fight of the Secretary of Defense, are the story that is told.  This book paints picture after picture of the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Gates describes a pentagon that focuses on planning for a hypothetical future war at the expense of those fighting a current one and of both a pentagon and Veteran’s Administration that play a callus lack of concern for those whose bodies have paid the price of war.  This is both a gentle and, at times, a blunt appraisal of how our government functions.  Gates is probably least flattering of Congress.  He states, “I was constantly amazed and infuriated at the hypocrisy of those who most stridently attacked the Defense Department for being inefficient and wasteful but would fight tooth and nail to prevent any reduction in defense activities in their home state or district no matter how inefficient or wasteful.”

            It is also a wonderful insight into foreign affairs.  Gates describes in detail our interactions with governments and their leaders in all of the crises that we all experienced during his over four years as Secretary.  I found his description of the “Arab Spring” insightful.  He states, “Revolutions and their outcomes are usually a surprise (especially to those overthrown) and damnably hard to predict. Experts can write about economic hardship, demographic problems such as a “youth bulge,” pent-up rage, and “prerevolutionary” conditions, but repressive governments often manage such conditions for decades. Thus was the Obama administration— and everyone else in the world (including every Arab government)— surprised by the “Arab Spring,” a revolution that shifted the political tectonic plate of the Middle East.”  His observation that, “the best organized and most ruthless have the advantage in revolutions.” is a maximum we should all have nailed to our brains when we feel supportive of any revolution.  Few revolutions have gone as well as our own, whether it be the Russian revolution, the French revolution, the Chinese revolution or almost any that come to mind. 

His rather candid descriptions of individuals are not harsh but are frank and seldom flattering.  Neither Joe Biden nor Dick Cheney would likely be flattered nor would Russian President Vladimir Putin of whom he said; “I said to some of my colleagues privately that I’d looked into Putin’s eyes and, just as I expected, had seen a stone-cold killer.”

I found the book fascinating and I found the critical reviews surprising.  It is a long book and several reviewers were not happy about that.  One of the problems with e-books is that their length is not obvious as it is in a printed volume where the thickness of the binding can determine whether or not you pull it off the shelf.  It is not difficult reading but there is a lot of information and therefore requires some concentration.  It is not a novel and cannot be read like one.  While the book does not divulge any state secrets and therefore does not provide facts that are not in the public domain, Gates insights and descriptions of how decisions were made should be of interest to any citizen and voter.  It is important to understand how our government functions; otherwise, we might believe anything that someone with a political agenda tells us.

I hope you read the book and enjoy it as much as I did.

Winston Churchill said, "Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricane he will encounter.  The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that, once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."

Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story

By Jack Devine & Vernon Loeb 

A Review for Amazon

THIS IS NOT A NOVEL!  After reading the book and all the reviews, I think the most important thing that any potential reader needs to know is that this is not, and was obviously not intended to compete with  spy novels.  I say this because several of the negative reviews that I have read complain about the book being boring and having no intrigue or drama.  If you are looking for a story that is full of suspense, this is not a book that you will enjoy.  If, on the other hand, you are interested in how our nation collects information and influences events in other countries, this is an excellent choice.  I think you will find this an easy read.  The coauthor, Vernon Loeb, is a professional writer and the book is well written and polished.  While some discussions of this book may make it sound dry, I did not find the first part of this book that way.  The second part of the book, covering his time in private business after he left the CIA, might be more appropriate in a separate book. 

 

 It has been suggested that this is not a book for the average reader.  While I cannot be the judge of that, I do think it is a good book for the average voter.  Many comments that I have read about this book express emotion and a political opinion.  When a citizen chooses to vote, they vote not only for an individual but for the policies, that individual supports.  Understanding how the CIA functions helps us understand how these policies are carried out.  While it was not discussed in this book, a reader might, for instance, come away from reading it contemplating how different the outcome would have been for the interest of the United States if the CIA had carried out the operations in Benghazi, Libya in place of Ambassador Stevens, who was killed.  The ambassador was a high profile and high value target and his killing was a major success for our enemies.  It also had huge political implications in this country.  I think that reading this book will help the average person better understand our involvement in other countries.

 

WARNING!  This book does have an agenda.  I find it to be an excellent example of CIA tradecraft.  As Mr. Devine explains in his book, much of the work of a covert agent is to sell others, individuals and whole populations, on a worldview that enhances the interest of the United States.  He also worked in covert operations and supports the use of covert actions to bring about regime change in foreign countries.  Mr. Devine was stationed in Chile when Allende was overthrown.  When he states that “we did not promote the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende in 1973” he is apparently choosing his words carefully and referring specifically to the CIA.  He was good at his job and he still is.  This book markets Mr. Devine, the CIA, and covert actions well.  That said, it is both a fascinating and informative volume.