DEAD WAKE, by Erik Larson

Few tales in history are more haunting or more fraught with secrets than that of the final voyage of the Lusitania, which resulted in one of the most colossal tragedies of maritime history.  Author Erik Larsen ushers us aboard the Lusitania, the fastest ship of its day, on its way from America to England, when on May 7, 1915, it was torpedoed by a German submarine 12 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.  It sank in 18 minutes, 1,198 passengers and crew perished.  Only six of the 22 lifeboats were launched, and many passengers drowned because they donned their life-jackets incorrectly.

Once again, Larson demonstrates his expert researching skills and writing abilities -- switching between the hunter and the hunted, his detailed forensic and utterly engrossing account of the Lusitania’s last voyage, highlights that unpredictable shifts in weather, the many small decisions made by the captains of both the luxury liner and U-Boat, a chance fog, the slowing down to get mail, and numerous other circumstances, all converged to placing the liner in precisely the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

In Dead Wake, Larson brings to life a cast of evocative characters on board the Lusitania, including the famed Boston bookseller Charles Luriat who come on board with a priceless copy of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, pioneering female architect Theodate Pope, millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt, and art collector Hugh Lane, who carried sealed tubes containing paintings by Rembrandt and Monet. Apart from the Lusitania, Larson also explores that part of the life of President Woodrow Wilson, who was grieving about the death of his wife, but smitten and captivated by the prospect of new love with Edith Galt, and Winston Churchill, then the first Lord of the Admiralty, who hoped to bring America into the war, and whose ultra-secret spy group failed to convey intelligence that might have saved the liner.

This book is excellent when describing the lethal new technology of early submarine warfare, life inside the U-boats, its cramped quarters, “the reek of three dozen men who never bathed”, and the omnipresent danger. Following his government’s new policy of unrestricted warfare, Captain Schweiger fired a single torpedo into the Lusitania’s hull, blowing a hole the size of a house beneath the liner’s waterline.  Less than a minute later, a second explosion shuddered from deep within the bowels of the Lusitania, and she listed precariously and began to sink immediately. 

Unsettling questions clung to the case in the years that followed. Was the ship somehow allowed to sail into a trap? Why had the British Admiralty failed to provide a military escort? What was the cause of the second explosion? Why did Germany then decide to attack civilian shipping? There remains a mystique about the disaster, with questions that remain unresolved, and may never be.

Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama of the disaster.  Put in context of World War 1, the sinking of the Lusitania altered the course of history by ultimately dragging the U.S. into the conflict, although it was two years later.  I agree with one reviewer who suggested that Larson’s book “practically begs Hollywood blockbuster treatment." — Ken Johnson

p.s. After reading Dead Wake, I mistakenly assumed that the U-Boats were the first submarines.  But, with a little research, I found that the first submarine known to have attacked an enemy ship was the Turtle, piloted by Ezra Lee of the American Continental Army.  He piloted the Turtle under a British flagship, attempting to attach an explosive charge to the bottom of the ship.  He was unable to successfully attach it, so was forced to give up the attempt.  But George Washington personally congratulated Lee on his survival and gave him a job in the secret service.

There were a number of other experiments over the next 80+ years, but during the Civil War, submarine development got kicked up a notch. The most well-known Union sub was the USS Alligator, designed by a Frenchman named Brutus de Villeroi, who listed his occupation as “natural genius”.  The Alligator was lost during a storm, before attacking the Confederates.

But the most famous Civil War sub was built by a Horace Hunley, who egotistically named his boat the Hunley. During a test, however, the Confederate sub flooded and five crew members were drowned. It was salvaged though, and on its second attempt, Hunley failed to pull out of a dive and the sub became stuck in the sea floor.  The crew were unable to open the hatches, and Hunley and all his crew perished. Again, it was salvaged and took its first action against the Union, ramming the USS Housatonic with a torpedo protruding from the front of the sub.  After backing away from the Housatonic, the torpedo was charged, sinking the ship within five minutes.  Thus, the Hunley was the first sub ever to sink an enemy ship, securing its place in naval history. —KJ

Last Bus to Wisdom, by Ivan Doig

Ivan Doig’s last book, appropriately titled Last Bus to Wisdom, is an unpredictable and boisterous road novel.  It brought back many memories of my childhood in western Kansas in the same era.

Donal Cameron is a 11-year old being raised by his grandmother on a Montana Ranch in 1951. But when Gram has to have serious surgery, she decides to ship him off to her sister Kate in Manitowoc, Wisconsin for the summer.

On his way to Wisconsin, Donal first rides the Dog Bus, as he calls the Greyhound, wearing his best rodeo shirt. Along the way, he engages with everyone he sits next to, soliciting literary gems for his cherished autograph book, which he carries everywhere. He has a $5 dollar bill in his pocket and three $10 dollar bills pinned to the inside of his shirt, along with two changes of clothes in a battered wicker suitcase.

During the ride, he lives on a steady diet of Mounds candy bars, receives his first real kiss from a good-natured waitress named Letty, and meets Harv, her boyfriend who is on his way back to jail, handcuffed and accompanied by his stepbrother, a mean-spirited sheriff. Other fellow travelers, who he easily interacts with, include young soldiers off to the Korean War, some nuns, a group of obnoxious boys on their way to summer camp who sang “great, green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts”, a song I haven’t heard since I was a kid.

With his shock of red hair, freckles and gift of gab, Donal carries an arrowhead for luck. But, he just escapes being robbed, and missed his transfer in the Twin Cities. With luck from his Arrowhead, however, he was transported by a good Samaritan who drove him to the next bus stop so he could continue on to Wisconsin.

Upon arriving at Aunt Kate’s, he’s let down when he realizes she is not the famous singer Kate Smith, his bedroom is in the attic, she feeds him soggy cereal, and his main entertainment is playing canasta with his aunt’s friends. She is a manipulative presence who abuses her ‘husband’ Herman and condemns Donal to jigsaw puzzles for recreation. Shortly after arriving his loses his pocket money and feels doomed to a summer of endless boredom.

But Donal hits it off with Uncle Herman, a one-eyed German, who is hen-pecked by Kate. Herman routinely escapes to his greenhouse where he reads novels of the old west. During World War II, Herman was an opponent of Hitler, stowed away on a ship to the US, and lived for decades with Kate as an undocumented alien.

After only a month into Donal’s stay, aunt Kate decides to ship him back to Montana, and an uncertain fate awaits him.  But as it turns out, Donal isn’t traveling solo – Herman has decided to fly the coop, cashes his disability check and joins him on the bus, heading for all manners of adventures. Donal asks him where they will go, and Herman says “Anywhere’s." Just so it is “that away," pointing toward the West.

Wearing new cowboy hats they lope all over, getting into scrapes in Yellowstone National Park, seeing pow-wows and rodeos, getting Jack Kerouac’s signature in the autograph book, encountering swindlers, and evading the law. But as posters start to appear announcing that Herman is an enemy alien wanted by the FBI, the pair find themselves on the run. 

After their money is stolen (again), Donal talks a doctor into providing bus fare to Wisdom, Montana.

The story picks up steam in the final pages, where the unlikely pair bunk with hobos arriving for the hay harvest.  Soon, they are adopted into the itinerant clan and obtain haying jobs.  Fortunately, their travails lead to a happy ending.

Doig does a superb job of bringing this bygone era alive for the reader. His richly drawn characters that move the story at a rollicking pace. I truly enjoyed this memorable book.— Ken Johnson

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

As I write, Arkansas is trying to execute eight men on a calendar of two a day, every other day, for over a week, beginning next Monday, April 17. The state “needs” to kill the men before the medications used in the lethal injections expire. Most of these men have been on death row for over twenty years, and now they are rushed to death because of an expiration date on a drug.

I can hardly bear to think, talk, or read about capital punishment because it feels so fundamentally wrong. So I’m amazed at how Bryan Stevenson could turn a book about death row into truly A Story of Justice and Redemption.

Stevenson is a wonderful storyteller, spotlighting individuals whom he has helped, or tried to help, since he founded the Equal Justice Initiative to defend those often wrongly condemned and trapped in the criminal justice system.

Stevenson gives horrifying numbers for what has happened in that system, to whom it has happened (mainly poor and/or dark skinned people), why it has happened, what it costs – both in terms of dollars and suffering.

He explains where we go wrong when we (with good intentions) personalize victims such as seven year-old Megan Kanka, for whom Megan’s Law is named. He explains the profit motive in incarceration. 

But mainly he shows us people like ourselves, but without affluent white privilege: Walter McMillan, a black man sentenced to die for a murder he patently did not commit; Herbert Richardson, a traumatized young veteran who only meant to scare a pretty young nurse into his arms with a homemade bomb, but killed a child instead; Marsha Colbey, a mother who suffered the sadness of a stillborn child, but was demonized as a murderous parent because she was very poor; and more.

What most impresses me (and puzzled me a little at first) is Stevenson’s calm, steady perseverance: every day he walks into prisons and courthouses where the people in power are not glad to see him. They are not willing to listen, or reconsider, or admit a centimeter of error even in the face of plain and undeniable facts.

How does he keep doing such work day after day, year after year, understaffed and beleaguered by people desperate for his help?

I think his superpower comes from an amazing lack of ego. He never lets the challenges become about him. He kept his focus on others, on their needs. He admits his own brokenness – indeed, he recognizes it as a gateway to grace. And that grace, mingled with intelligence and training, keep him going. 

It sounds so simple, but seems so hard. I’m inspired and instructed and humbled. Just Mercy was a perfect choice for a Lenten read.— Sharelle Moranville

Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance

This book, subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, is exactly that, a memoir.  Hard to think of a memoir written by someone who was only 31 years old when he wrote it! Vance himself confesses the absurdity of this in his introduction where he writes, “I didn’t write this book because I’ve accomplished something extraordinary.  I wrote this book because I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me.  You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.”

And so Vance begins to tell his story. What makes this story compelling is that, while it tells of all the ways in which the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States has left people behind, he is unflinchingly honest about the ways in which many of his people, whom he calls “hillbillies,” have brought about their own demise and their own lack of hope – their lack of care for their children, their sinking into the drug culture, their laziness and lack of any self-awareness.

Vance’s own family has had its difficulties.  As he writes, “I have, to put it mildly, a complex relationship with my parents, one of whom has struggled with addiction for nearly my entire life.”  He himself came close to flunking out of high school: “Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me.  That is the real story of my life, and that is why I wrote this book.  I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it.  I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children.  I want people to understand the American Dream as my family and I encountered it.  I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels.  And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.” 

Vance clearly has a great love for the people about whom he writes, particularly his crazy grandmother and grandfather – and “crazy” is his word, not mine.  This love comes shining through the book even when he sees clearly how the ways in which they act have negative effects on everyone around them. — Jeanie Smith

Run, by Ann Patchett

When I first read Run, I dismissed it as being mediocre, especially by Ann Patchett's standards. But then I kept thinking about it. About the scenes Patchett builds and the characters she creates. When our book club decided to read it, we found much to love about it, much to question, and much to learn. Patchett's standards are, after all, pretty high.

This is a book about how families work and how they don't, about whether we love biological children more or less than adopted. It's about family deception: It starts with a story about a statue of the Virgin Mary that was carved to look like Bernadette's Irish grandmother. It is a flat-out lie—the statue was stolen by her grandfather during a drunken night out—but the family chooses to believe the lie even though they fully know the the truth. The lie, of course, is much lovelier. The mysterious mother figure, Tennessee, is not entirely who she says she is. Father Sullivan is not a saint, and his nephew Sullivan's recent past is a little more murky than he suggests. Doyle tries to manipulate them all and Tip and Teddy do their best to become who they want to be, more or less, although their father's shadow is large and controlling.

Patchett has been criticized for implicit racism in the book—the white family is the ideal, the Black is flawed, and all Black people can run fast. But Kenya is a delightfully authentic little girl and she would clearly choose to be with her mother, in her dark little apartment, surrounded by the love she has always known rather than in the bright and airy Doyle home. Ultimately, she has no choice, and she becomes the family heiress, who inherits the magic statue. The fact that she looks nothing like that version of the Blessed Virgin doesn't even enter into Bernard's decision. So I see a lot of color blindness here, but I can see how that in itself presents a rosy happy-ever-after ending that shrugs off the harsh realities of living with a skin tone a tad too dark to be Irish. — Pat Prijatel

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

(Warning: contains spoilers)

Anthony Doerr’s 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See is a story of survival, courage, sacrifice, suffering, family, friendship, love, and hope. It’s set in France and Germany during WW II.

How many thousands of novels does that thumbnail description fit? (Jaded publishers and others in the business are starting to think of such novels as just another WW II book, which might account for some of the tepid reviews the novel got before it circulated through the wider reading community.)

All the Light We Cannot See is one of the richest, most readable, discussable, and likeable WW II novels ever. Yes. Likeable. A narrative of war and suffering and death becomes a hopeful hymn about family, kindness, potential, magic, love, and mystery.

Doerr brilliantly shows us the specifics in the general: the character so unique and real that the reader can become the character. And thus we can truly cloak ourselves in the potential for individual goodness in the storm of a world gone mad. We learn and are comforted by how we might behave in a similar situation.

In the final analysis, the story belongs to Marie-Laure, the little blind girl with the father who keeps thousands of keys for the National Museum of Natural History and is a gifted woodcarver. In both Paris and Saint-Malo he carves tiny, clever models of their neighborhoods, which Marie-Laure must memorize with her fingertips. Then by counting grates, benches, streets, and tapping her other senses for cues, she must show him she can navigate their neighborhood. He also teaches her to use her cleverness to unlock tiny objects to find the treasures inside. To this reviewer, those incredible miniatures, made in such a rush by a father for his vulnerable six-year old girl as the Germans draw near, are the most unforgettable takeaways of the novel. And as her world is going up in conflagration, Marie-Laure’s fingertips race across the braille dots to open another world, the world of Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea, which she broadcasts as the bombs fall. Marie-Laure, with her blindness, has a huge capacity for the world and human experience.

Then there is Werner, a German boy, whose snowy white hair is almost as much a character marker as Marie-Laure’s blindness. He is an undersized orphan trying to look after his sister and others in the industrial area of Zollverein, Germany. Werner has a preternatural gift for mathematics and radios and, as a result, is spared going into the mines, but is scooped up into the German army where he becomes a radio operator.

Marie-Laure and Werner cross paths when the Allies begin bombing the holdout of Saint-Malo in early August, 1944. During the most intense part of the circular, reiterative narrative, Werner is trapped in the basement of the Hotel of Bees because of a bomb hit. Marie-Laure is trapped not far away in the attic of her uncle’s house with the cursed jewel, The Sea of Flames, in her possession. A mad, dying Nazi stalks the downstairs desperate to get at the jewel, which he believes will save his life.

Thankfully, Doerr lets a long, comforting resolution play out as we see what happens to the survivors of the bombing of Saint-Malo. We see the survivors intermittently as they go about life-after-the-war until 2014 (the novel’s pub date). So vicariously was I participating in this novel, if I should go to Paris this year (fat chance), I would keep an eye out for an elderly blind lady who seems to know where she is going. And I do believe some evil potential, buffeted and stained to look like ordinary sea rock, is always being swished around on the ocean floor waiting to be found and polished.

Doerr expands the literal plot line (this-happens-then-this-happens-then-this-happens) with a richness of inversions, paradoxes, oxymorons, juxtapositions, repetitions, symbols, and motifs that invite the reader to go beyond the storyline. For example:

·      Clearly, a mollusk is not just a mollusk. And what’s with all those birds?
 ·      Before two of the most heart-breaking events of the narrative (the rape and Werner’s death), why are there quasi-Eucharistic events?
 ·      Why is the fabulous diamond, The Sea of Flames, given such an oxymoronic name?
 ·      How can we not see light?
 ·      Why is Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea the message of comfort to all who hear Marie-Laure’s last broadcast? (On the surface, it would seem to be an inversion of the usual message of hope.)
 ·      Why can the story be read pretty effectively backwards?

Doerr’s story has become an earwig. Certain images, characters, events, and themes will always remain in my head. More than any novel I’ve read in years, I felt that I was buried with Werner below the Hotel of Bees. I was in the cold orphanage attic with him when, as a boy, he listened to a faraway voice talking about the nature of light on the radio. I was as hungry as Marie-Laure contemplating opening the last unlabeled can of food in the attic.

As an adult who has read a gazillion novels, I’ve largely lost my childhood ability to be carried away into another world by a story. So thank you, Anthony Doerr, for letting me do that again. —Sharelle Moranville

Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler

Some members of our group found the main character of this book, Maggie Moran, irritating. Others found her endearing. Sort of like real life. And that’s the beauty of Anne Tyler’s novels: They are about the lives we actually live—the mundane, the everyday, the irritating, and the endearing.  

I have loved the Maggie character since I first met her when the book came out in 1989. I loved her as played by Joanna Woodward in the Breathing Lessons movie in 1994. And I loved her when I reread this book in 2016.

Yes, Maggie and other characters in Tyler’s books skew toward odd duck territory, but as I lose myself in their stories, I begin thinking they have more of a handle on things than I do.

And then there’s Ira, Maggie’s husband. Some members of our group thought he was a long-suffering saint for putting up with Maggie. I found him passive aggressive and judgy in 1989 and even more so in 2016. His saving grace was that he was played as kind and compassionate by James Garner in the movie, so obviously Garner—and my feller BBBers—saw something I didn't.

Breathing Lessons was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1989, was a finalist for the 1988 National Book Award, and was Time Magazine’s Book of the Year. Two previous books by Anne Tyler were Pulitzer finalists: The Accidental Tourist in 1986 and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1983.

Like most Tyler novels, Breathing Lessons is character-driven. It’s one day in the lives of Maggie and Ira, who drive to the funeral of Maggie’s best friend’s husband, and then stop to visit their granddaughter, Leroy (pronounced LA roy), who lives with her mother, Fiona, Maggie and Ira’s former daughter-in-law.

It’s one bizarre day, including some laugh-out-loud moments at the funeral, during which friends are asked to sing the love songs they first sung at the dead man’s marriage 28 years ago. Maggie barely remembers the words so she and a friend work out the verses on a coupon Maggie has in her purse. The friend gives the coupon back and, later, Maggie tries to use it when buying groceries, but the clerk reads the love-struck lyrics and, with a red face, hands it back, mortified. There's a hilariously clumsy sex scene, a visit with a waitress at a roadside diner who quickly becomes Maggie's friend, and a vignette with Otis, a man who Maggie and Ira help with a tire problem. But Maggie made up the tire issue to goad Otis because he was driving too slowly, but then she realized he was a sweet and somewhat brittle old man, so she made Ira stop and the tried to help him and ultimately drove him home, and.... Anyway, you get the point about Anne Tyler's characters and the worlds they inhabit.

Through flashbacks and dialogue, we learn about Maggie and Ira’s unlikely and unpromising courtship and Fiona’s marriage to the their son, Jessie, a classic screw-up—just ask his dad. We see Fiona and Maggie bond through childbirth classes, complete with breathing lessons, and we see the young marriage dissolve through immaturity and a series of miscommunications, with all characters playing pivotal roles in the chaos. And we see Fiona flee the family—and the city—multiple times, to try to make some sort of sensible life for herself and her daughter.

This is the story of a marriage, of how people change when they become a couple, about the sacrifices they make for one another and the mixed blessings those sacrifices bring.

Learning how to navigate a marriage, Tyler implies in her title, is like learning to breathe, and every day is a lesson. —Pat Prijatel