Do you still read?

Reed, Shannon.  Why We Read: On Our Lifelong Love Affair With Books.  Toronto: Hanover 

         Square Press, 2023.  ISBN: 978-1-355-00796-4

Are you a reader?  Do you prefer reading to going to parties?  Do you constantly have a book or two or three that you have with you to read while waiting in line or for your meal to arrive?  If you do, than you are a kindred soul with Shannon Reed and will enjoy the tales she tells in Why We Read.

 

Shannon Reed lays out the arc of her life, especially her life with books and libraries, in short chapters.  Chapters such as "to Get to Go to the Library" or "To Finish a Series" or "Because I Wanted Free Pizza."  A really fun chapter was "Because Someone is Paying You to Teach a Class about Vampires" when Shannon Reed was an adjunct professor really dislikes horror!

Shannon Reed provides interesting quizzes and vignettes between the chapters of her life.  Some of these include "How I Choose a Book: A Thirteen-Step Guide," Signs You Might be a Character in a Popular Children's Book," or "The Five People You Meet When You Work in a Bookstore."  These interesting asides sometimes feel out of step with topics in other chapters, but are fun reads.

So if you like to read or are interested in why others like to read (or both!), pick up a copy of Shannon Reed's Why We Read and settle in for some quality you time!

Food and Stories from an Island!

Wei, Clarissa, and Ivy Chen.  Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation.  New 

         York: Simon Element, 2023.  ISBN: 9781982198978

 

Who does not like browsing cookbooks?  You can view all the possibilities and dream about what you can make and how things will taste.  The best cookbooks provide photos and clear instructions for the reader so that the reader can enjoy all the labor the writers imbued in the title.  And when you are reading a cookbook from a culture not your own, you need context for the recipes which  Clarissa Wei and Ivy Chen provide in Made in Taiwan!

 

Wei and Chen open the book with a history of Taiwan setting the stage for what makes Taiwan cuisine different from Chinese cuisine.  Then Wei and Chen start with the basics -  what is in the Taiwanese pantry so that the reader knows what they need to stock to make the recipes that follow while also providing substitutes.  There are recipes for breakfast, for lunch, for small suppers, and elaborate dinners, not to mention special events.  The authors also include deserts, and  recipes from the indigenous cooks of the islands.  The recipes are nicely illustrated and help provide direction for various complicated recipes.  Scattered through out the recipes are stories that reflect the culture of Taiwan and its food history.  One such story deals with hamburgers for breakfast (Little League baseball) while another talks about how turkey rice became a dish in Taiwan.  The authors do note that the recipes do reflect more Central and Southern Taiwan rather than what is found in Taipei.

If you enjoy browsing recipes or learning about cultures via their food, pick up Made in Taiwan and dig in!

 

Movies and Music!

Patrin, Nate.  The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock'n'Roll to Synthwave.    

        Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023,  ISBN: 9781517913243

How much does the soundtrack of a movie affect your enjoyment of a particular movie?  What about your memory of a movie, does a particular song stick in your head as emblematic of the movie?   That is the question Nate Patrin chose to explore in The Needle and the Lens.

Nate Patrin defines a "needle drop" as using a preexisting song to provide context for the film.  He takes sixteen movies that use songs not written/recorded for the movies and explores the interaction between the movies, the songs, and the audience.  Some of the combinations are very well known - Easy Rider/"The Pusher," The Graduate/"The Sound of Silence ," or American Graffiti/"Do You Want to Dance?"  Others are a bit off the wall (but then I have not seen all of these movies) such as Killer of Sheep/"This Bitter Earth," Blue Velvet/"In Dreams," or Drive/"A Real Hero."  Then there are ones I just had not thought of in this fashion - mainly Apocalypse Now/"The End" and Wayne's World/"Bohemian Rhapsody" that just work well. While individual chapters may be less of a treat, the book as a whole is a good read.

 

Nate Patrin enjoys exploring the intersection of movies and music and sharing his findings with an appreciative audience.  If you think you might be in that crowd, pick up The Needle and the Lens and join the conversation! 

Sunken Sub Sinks Aircraft Carrier!

Moore, Stephen L.  Strike of the Sailfish: Two Sister Submarines and the Sinking of a Japanese 

         Aircraft Carrier.  New York: Dutton Caliber, 2023.  ISBN: 9780593472873

"Down periscope! Dive!  Dive!" is the cry of the submarine's captain as submarine and her crew seek to sink beneath the waves before the enemy spots them.  Many books and movies have this scene.  In Strike of the Sailfish, this scene plays out several times as the Sculpin and the Sailfish search the Pacific Ocean for prey.

 

As the title states, Strike of the Sailfish is the intertwined tale of two submarines - the Squalus and the Sculpin.  The tale starts when the Squalus sank during a test dive in 1939 killing half the crew.  The Sculpin happened to be in the area and helped in rescuing the crew and recovering the boat.  The Squalus was refitted and renamed the Sailfish in May 1940 before getting a new crew and reentering the fleet.  

After United States entered the war, both submarines were sent to the Pacific to attack Japanese shipping.  Each submarine suffered through the teething issues of dud torpedoes, bad warheads, and plan bad luck.  But by 1943, better weapons had arrived and the submarines started coming into their own.  But when the Sculpin attacked a convoy near Truk on November 19, 1943, her luck ran out and she was sunk. Part of the her crew were captured and taken to Truk and then transferred via aircraft carriers to Japan.  But on December 3-4, 1943, the Sailfish as part of a wolfpack attacked this convoy in the midst of a typhoon and sank the aircraft carrier Chuyo. I took three separate attacks to sink it.  George Rocek was the only Sculpin sailor onboard the Chuyo to survive.

Strike of the Sailfish provides a very gritty look at World War II submarine warfare through the lenses of two U.S. submarines and the stories of their crews.  Stephen Moore provides plenty of details of a submariner's life and the plight of submariner POWs alongside the various attacks and other duties the submarines performed.  If you enjoy reading about WW II naval action, pick up this title.  It will not disappoint!

Great War Saboteur Manhunt

Mills, Bill.  Agent of the Iron Cross: The Race to Capture German Saboteur-Assassin Lothar 

        Witzke during World War I.  Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.  ISBN: 

        9781538182086

 

Secret agents, sabotage, planned invasions, codes breaking and double agents are often the stuff of spy stories, but can be found in real life as well.  Agent of the Iron Cross documents Lothar Witzke's story as German agent, running loose in the United States and Mexico from 1915 till his capture and trial in 1918.  

 

At the opening of World War I, Witzke was a midshipman on the German cruiser Dresden and wounded in the final battle with the British Navy off the coast of Chile.  He escaped from the hospital at Valparaiso, Chile, and disguised as a Danish seaman who had lost his papers made his way to San Fransisco.  Consul Bopp employeed Witzke as a courier until he hooked up with Kurt Jahnke and became a saboteur.  He helped plant explosives on merchant ships and with involved in the Black Tom Island and the Mare Island Naval Station explosions.  In 1917, Witzke and Jahnke moved to Mexico to stay in communication with their HQ while continuing their operations.  One such operation involved creating labor unrest at mines in southwestern United States so that local US Army troops would be called out while also having blacks in the South rise up in insurrections followed by the Mexican Army invading and occupying parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and California.  All this mayhem would keep the United States out of the war in Europe.  Fortunately, for the United States there were some competent undercover agents and double agents embedded in the German camp so that this plot could be thwarted.  As part of the plot, Witzke crossed the border into Texas and was arrested, his luggage searched and a code found.  The contents of the coded message played its part in the court-martial trial in convicting Witzke of espionage and sentenced to be hanged.  After judicial review in 1919, the sentence was changed to confinement at hard labor.  In 1919, Witzke and two other prisoners broke out of Fort Sam Houston prison but quickly recaptured and he ended up in Leavenworth for several years until released in 1923.  Witzke moved back to Germany and  joined the Abwehr under Canaris before World War II started.  After the war Witzke served in the Hamburg legislature from 1949-1952.  He died on January 6, 1962.

If you are interested in spies, secret agents, double crosses and feats of daring, pick up a copy of Agents of the Iron Cross and pick up a few little known facts!

 

Pirates in the South Seas!

Thomson, Keith.  Born to be Hanged: The Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates who Raided the 

          South Seas, Rescued a princess, and Stole a Fortune.  New York: Little, Brown & Company, 

         2022.  ISBN: 9780316703611 

Pirates!  Almost everyone's favorite villains/heroes!  But, do we really need another tale of daring do?  Of course we do!  Especially this one where Keith Thomson uses the diaries of various pirates along with court records and other documents to trace out their adventures on land and sea during the reign of Charles II.

In 1680, 300 pirates banded together to rescue a princess of a local tribe from the Spanish.  They used this pretext to go a "pyrating" in the fashion of Captain Morgan across the Darien jungle to attack the city of Panama.  That attack did not quite work out, so they set out to blockade the city until a ransom was given.  Some pirates returned back across the jungle while others decided to hang out in the South Seas and see what treasure they could scrounge up.  But not all pirates were happy with their leaders so a series of mutinies and failed attacks slowly whittled down the pirate band while the Spanish opposition grew.  After finding a decent haul off the Santo Rosario (treasure worth 10,000 pieces of eight) but failed to take the 670 "piggs of metal" (in this case silver worth around a million pieces of eight ) aboard their ship.  But they did get a book with 300+ pages of maps/charts and sailing directions for the South Seas before the Spanish could toss it overboard.  The pirate crew set sail for England going around the tip of South America and barely making to the Nevis in the Caribbean before their ship, the Trinity, fell apart.  The crew split up with several traveling to England where they were put on trial for breaking the peace between Spain and England.  But the fix was in at the Admiralty Court due to the intelligence gained by the "gentlemen pirates." 

If you are interested in true tales of adventure that may have inspired at least one author, pick up a copy of Born to be Hanged by Keith Thomson and be enthralled!

Preston, David.  The Lost Tomb and Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder.  New 

         York: Grand Central Publishing, 2023.  ISBN: 9781538741221

Douglas Preston is half of the duo that writes the Agent Pendergast series (Lee child is the other half). When he is not writing thrillers, Preston writes non-fiction books and articles. This tome is a collection of articles he has written on murders, unexplained deaths, unsolved mysteries, curious crimes, and old bones (those were how he categorized the articles).

 

 Douglas Preston opens with him discovering the murder of a middle school friend who had moved away; another murder explains why he can no longer visit Italy. The unexplained deaths happened in the Himalayas, the Ural Mountains, and Kennewick , Washington. The mysteries involve Oak Island, Sandia Cave (NM), and Hell Creek (MT). The crimes involves a con that was thought impossible by experts, and the ire and blow-back caused by Amanda Knox haters (interesting link back to the 2nd murder story). The final section (Old Bones) discuss the human remains held by museums, the possibility of cannibalism in the American Southwest, and a visit by Preston to KV5 - the "lost" tomb of Ramesses II's sons. All of the articles have updates after the original article and have listed the original publication dates and journals. 

 

If you enjoy the topics or have enjoyed other non-fiction titles by Preston, pick up this book and read!