Book Reviews

Dubbed the “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” the Special Operations Executive “found the search for a new type of rule-breaking recruit capable of ‘absolute secrecy’ and ‘fanatical enthusiasm’ rough going. Dyed-in-the-wool military types, with their concern for what they termed ‘ethics’ had to be kept away, as indeed did most of His Majesty’s ministers. A Cabinet colleague excluded the devout Anglo-Catholic foreign secretary Lord Halifax from SOE meetings, for instance, because he did not have what it took to ‘make a gangster.’”

 from A Woman of No Importance

“I live here. And every time I drive to the coast, I see towns that are not long from now going to be under water from the next tsunami…The Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and the tsunami that’ll come with it will be virtually identical to the one in 2004 in Sumatra. It’ll dwarf 1906 (San Francisco). And Katrina. It’ll be many dozens of Katrinas all at once. Coastal towns from northern California to Canada will be virtually wiped out…It’s a little hard to go to the beach and just hang out there and enjoy it.”

Chris Goldfinger, marine geologist at Oregon State University, from Cascadia’s Fault

The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles…Tea was comfort and history; above all, it was English. As long as there was tea, there was England.

      from The Splendid and the Vile

I am standing in the hospital watching babies emerge from my wife like a circus act. First out is a boy, dark-haired and calm, the size of an owl. He is immediately commandeered by a nurse who whisks him off for a bath and a stint in what appears to be a tiny tanning bed. Now, says the doctor, reaching around inside my wife while he talks, here’s the other one, and he hauls out another boy. This one is light-haired and not calm; he grabs for a nurse’s scissors and won’t let go and they have to pry his fingers off and the nurse looks accusingly at me for some reason and I want to say hey, I don’t even know the guy, but I don’t say anything, being overwhelmed with new roommates and tears and astonishment at people emerging from my wife one after another…

              from One Long River of Song

    Louhi hesitated. “You must know my business by now.”
    “A boarding house.”
    Louhi laughed. Ilmari looked at her quizzically.
    “I finance whorehouses and saloons.”
    He blinked.
    Louhi could have been reading his mind. “(My daughter) has nothing to be ashamed of. I own the whorehouse. If you have trouble with it, now is the time to know.”
    “I am a strong Evangelical Lutheran.”
    “So are most of my customers.”

                from Deep River

Anne (Dudley) had smashed the Anti’s trusty rationale—that women did not have the right to vote because they were not required to bear arms in warfare—with her poignant reply: “Yes, but women bear armies.” And even the bitterest Anti solon had to admire Anne’s sangfroid when that bomb was tossed through the window while she addressed a suffrage meeting in 1913. “Is that an anti-suffrage bomb?” she asked calmly, peering over the podium, pausing only a few beats. It didn’t explode, so she continued on with her speech.

                from The Woman’s Hour

By 1915, (a Congressional) committee had drafted a bill providing for universal medical coverage. “No other social movement in modern economic development is so pregnant with benefit to the public,” wrote the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. “At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without compulsory health insurance,” the Yale economist Irving Fisher pointed out in 1916. It would maintain that unenviable distinction for a century.

                                  from These Truths

If you really wanted to understand what was happening in a Kwakiutl village or an Inuit camp, you had to try as hard as possible to divest yourself of the opinions common to the environment in which you were born. You had to struggle to follow new trains of thought and new logic, to grab on to new emotions…Otherwise you couldn’t claim to understand anything at all. You were simply staring at your own biases, reflected back at you in the mirror of someone else’s culture.

                from Gods of the Upper Air

The question of what to read next is the best prelude to even more important ones, like who to be, and how to live…A good book is the opposite of a selfie; the right book at the right time can expand our lives in the way love does, making us more thoughtful, more generous, more brave, more alert to the world’s wonders and more pained by its inequities, more wise, more kind.

 from 1000 Books to Read Before You Die