The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquart

Alistair Urquhart grew up in Aberdeen, Scotland and was enjoying a pretty good life until Hitler declared war on the British. As a 20 year-old he joined the local army regiment, the Gordon Highlanders. He was shipped out to Singapore, where he languished through a boring year shuffling papers and perfecting his ball room dancing.

Then everything changed and what ensued is one of the worst stories I have ever heard. He was captured by the Japanese in 1942 when they invaded Singapore. Forced into slave labor as a POW, he survived 750 days in the jungle working on the notorious “Death Railway” and building the bridge over the River Kwai. During this time over 100,000 men lost their lives and Urquart was very luck not to be among them. Things went from bad to worse when he was transported on a Japanese “hellship,” in a hold where you were unable to move because the men were packed in so tightly. Almost one in three of the POWs on these ships died in the hold. To make matters worse his ship was torpedoed, and nearly everyone on board died, but not Urquhart. He drifted on a make shift raft for five days in the South China Sea, and while others were rescued by the American submarine that sunk them, he was rescued by a Japanese whaling ship and returned to the enemy.

The misfortune does not end here, as he was taken to Japan and forced to work in a mine near Nagasaki. Two months later, he was just ten miles from ground zero when an atomic bomb was dropped knocking him to the ground. In late August 1945, he was freed by the American Navy, and on the way to the boat he drove though radiated dust, which later lead to cancer. At this point the 5' 6" 135 lb Urquart had been reduced to 82 lbs and he looked like a living skeleton after three and a half years as a POW.

The greatest insult of all was that the British government never gave him any compensation nor did they provide medical help for his litany of maladies: cholera, beriberi, dysentery, malaria, and the subsequent cancer from radiation exposure and skin cancer from sun exposure. Despite the constant nightmares and never being able to eat anything but the simplest, blandest foods for the rest of his life, he married and had a happy family. He finally sat down to tell the world his story in 2010. At 91, he still lives in Dundee and spends his time teaching retired people how to use the computer and attends and teaches ballroom dancing.

After reading this book I don't think I can ever complain about anything, ever. He is truly part of the greatest generation.

Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America by Eugene Robinson

Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the Washington Post. I heard an interview with him on NPR's Fresh Air and I immediately went out and bought his new book, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America.

I have to admit I didn't grow up knowing a lot of black Americans, and Portland, Oregon is not exactly a hot bed of racial diversity, so it was very interesting to read the insights of an expert. This is a very easy book to read and there are just enough personal stories scattered among the statistics and facts to keep the pages turning.

In a nutshell, Robinson proposes that there is no longer a unified black America, or any one person, ala Martin Luther King or Jesse Jackson that speaks for black people. He presents a very persuasive case that black America has splintered into four distinct entities. First, there are the transcendent elites such as Oprah, Vernon Jordon, Tiger Woods and the like who are among the most powerful people in the US. There is the fast growing middle class that are attaining the American dream, living in nice neighborhoods, running their own businesses, and sending their kids to good colleges. There are two groups of emerging populations, children of bi-racial marriages such as President Obama, who still see themselves as black, and a huge influx of African immigrants, who's children are going to ivy-league schools at a higher rate than white or Asians. Lastly there are the abandoned, or as my friend J White says, the folks left in the hood.

Robinson does a great job explaining how we got to this splintering, and what it might mean for the country in the long run, but the real tragedy and the area of biggest concern are the abandoned. Why are so many black Americans still stuck in poverty, when all around them others are advancing to the middle class and beyond? What can we do to make a difference? If these questions interest you, you will find this to be a great read.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris

David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers and it is always great to hear him reading one of his stories on NPR, but lately I have felt he was running out of things to talk about. He has pretty much strip-mined his early years and his family for all the good stories and the life of a middle aged gay couple living in France was starting to wear a little thin. Luckily he has now turned to animal stories. Stories that would be benign if told with human characters, but are seriously funny when played out with animals.

The illustrations by Ian Falconer are a great compliment to these short absurdest tales. I won't go into any of them in particular, but I will relay a joke that Sedaris told on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart that conveys the tone of the book.

A man answers the door and notices a snail on the stoop. The snail asks the man, "would you be interested in buy any life insurance?" The man reaches down, picks up the snail and flicks it out into the street. Two years later the man gets a knock on the door. When he answers he sees the snail, who looks up at him and says, "what the hell was that about?"

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

With a title like A Short History of Nearly Everything, you might think that Bill Bryson has bit off more than he can chew, but you will be pleasantly surprised how readable it is. Much of what Bryson covers are things you would have learned in a good undergraduate program, but have forgotten over the years.

The book covers general sciences topics such as chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics. Bryson explores time from the Big Bang to the discovery of quantum mechanics, via evolution and geology, to try to answer big questions like how old is the earth? Where did humans come from? And what are our chances of being around for a while?

Bryson is a great story teller who keeps you interested in some pretty dry topics by weaving in the stories of the people who made the discoveries, such as Edwin Hubble, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. The biggest take away for me as I read this book was how little we actually know about the planet we live on, and how many mistakes we have made in trying to explain it over the years. Another interesting thing is how shaky some of our trusted theories are. For example, no one knows why Denver is a mile high. It has no tectonic plates under it, pushing it up like the mountains do. It is basically a mystery.

If this kind of thing interests you, you will love this book. For me it was a great opportunity to ponder all the things I really should have taken a little more time to think about in college.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

At one point in The Big Short, the author Michael Lewis reflects back on his first book about the financial industry, Lairs Poker, and thinks how innocent the deception seemed then versus what he was trying to get his arms around in 2007. It's a little like the trailer for the new Wall Street movie staring Michael Douglas, where he says, "someone once said, 'greed is good' now it's legal." The 1980's greed of Wall Street in Lairs Poker seems so innocent now, but it is also the genesis of everything that went wrong in the financial meltdown of 2007.

At the end of The Big Short, Lewis has lunch with his old boss at Soloman Brothers, this is the man who took the brokerage public. At one point he seems to admit this was the beginning of the end, when the brokerages stopped gambling their own money and started gambling with the shareholders money. Since they had a lot less to loose, the risks got completely out of control. This book is a little hard to follow if you don't understand the world of big finance. However, Lewis does a great job of walking you through what was happening and you quickly learn that most people who were involved had no clue what was going on either. Here is the bottom line. At some point in the 2000's it became way too easy to get a home loan. Sub-prime hit the basement with lairs loans, where you didn't have to provide any proof that you had a job, and as soon as you got your first loan you could take out the equity on the (raising) house value and buy a second investment property. The banks didn't care because they sold the loans to financial companies like Bear Sterns and Goldman Sacks who sold them off as bonds or the now infamous collateralize debt obligation (CDO). From here on it gets a little complicated, as no one really knows how to value the CDOs, and the ratings companies don't their jobs to protect the consumer, and the house of cards gets ever higher.

Despite the press reports, there are a few smart people that figured out what was going on, and while everyone one else was betting that house prices could only go up, they bet the other side. The best part about this book is that these few smart people are all interesting characters and their stories are amazing. I know this is hard to believe, but you will not want this book to end. It is truly a great read.

Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer

Once again I have to thank my Dad for the book of the month thing he gave me several years ago. I still get books, not every month, but at least five to seven a year. This month I got Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer. It is a compilation of several stories that was also a very popular TV series on the BBC from 1975-1992. Unfortunately I had never heard of Rumpole before, but now I am hooked.

Rumpole is an aging barrister who specializes in criminal cases in London's Old Bailey. First it is important to know what a barrister is, because I didn't. In the Britain most lawyers are solicitors and they are much like what we think of as lawyers in the US. However, when you go to court in Britain, a barrister is the person who works with a solicitor to advocate for you in front of a judge and jury.

Rumpole is quite a colorful barrister who will take any case and who's motto is "never plead guilty." While he loves his wife, she is fondly referred to as "She who must be obeyed," he also spends a lot of time after work in the wine bar talking law. He has a lot of funny stories and has amassed a great history of cases over the years. He is a man of principles, but these principles are more likely to be appreciated by the murderers, safe-crackers and petty thieves he represents than the "learned gentlemen" he works with.

Rumpole of the Bailey is a great look back at the transition England went through in the 70's and 80's as the old upper crust fell gave way to hippies, punks, and yuppies.

Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel by Gary Shteyngart

You would think I would have learned by now that it is Terry Gross' job to make books sound good when she interviews the author on her show Fresh Air. As I was listening, I thought Super Sad True Love Story sounded a little too far fetched for me, but it did not stop me from picking it up at a recent trip to Powell's Books. I am glad I read it, but what others see as great satire, I thought was an author trying way too hard. The line between poignant and absurd is thin and I would rather stay in the side of poignant.

In Gary Shteyngart's futuristic New York, the dollar has been been replaced by the Chinese yuan as the currency of choice, American has been reduced to a one party police state that is always on high security alert, and people are constantly judged by their credit score and their hottness or f-ability rating. Lenny Abramov is the middle-aged protagonist with a good credit score, but an embarrassingly low Male Hotness rating. He has fallen in love with the very young Eunice Park, who's hottness score helps boost Lenny's just by standing next to him. Lenny works for the Post-Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, selling people eternal life, and while he would also like to live for ever, his love for Eunice takes over his ambitions. Just as Lenny seems to be getting things together the US experiences a "rupture" and is taken over by the world's economic powers and split up Berlin style post WW II.

As I said earlier, the book is funny, but Shteyngart takes everything to the extreme. A little more subtlety would have made this book much more readable.

A German Requiem by Philip Kerr

A German Requiem is the final novel in the Bernie Gunther mystery trilogy "Berlin Noir" by Philip Kerr. The three books were published from 1989 to 1991 and the author makes major strides in each book. In A German Requiem, it is 1947 and we find detective Bernie Gunther married and living in Berlin with his new wife, Kristen. Things are not going too well, as he suspects she is having sex with occupying American officers in exchanges for scarce supplies. Berlin is a mess, with people surviving on whatever they can make on the black market, or through prostitution, and the biggest concern is staying out of the way of the Russians.

Gunther is still making a living as a PI, barely, when he gets a case in Vienna investigating the arrest and imprisonment of an old police colleague, Becker, who was a corrupt cop, a ruthless SS man, and is now a smuggler who has been accused of murder. Becker has called on Gunther to help get him out of jail, but there are a hundred plot twists that come our way before that case is resolved. Turns out almost every Nazi except Hitler has faked his death and made their way to Vienna, and most of them are now spying on the Russians for the U.S. army. Gunther not only has to deal with them, but there is a Russian trying to kill him at almost every turn.

Once again Kerr gets our heads spinning with one plot twist after another, but, as in his other novels, it is history that is the most intriguing aspect of this book. Kerr paints an amazingly clear picture of the difficulty of life after the war. While they were defeated, the German people suffered for many years after the war was over, and some might say it was not over until the Berlin wall finally fell. The Russians are a brutal enemy and we can see Kerr begin to paint the path for Gunther to engage in the Cold War.

A Pale Criminal by Phillip Kerr

I just finished the second book in the Berlin Noir series by Phillip Kerr, A Pale Criminal, and there is quite a maturing between it and March Violets, the first book in the series. Private Detective Bernie Gunther is back and he has taken on Bruno Stahlecker, another ex-police officer, as a partner. This is an unfortunate decision for Stahlecker, as he is murdered early in the book on a stake out for what seems like a cut and dry case. Of course with Kerr, nothing is cut and dry. In what turns out to be a huge, ever-escalating case, he is forced back into the Berlin police, and worse, is made a Kommisar in the state Security Service (or the dreaded SS, as they later became know). As Gunther tracks a serial sex murderer he interacts with many of the senior players in the Nazi party and Kerr gives us an amazing insight into life in Berlin as the Second World War is about to break out. Once again this novel is not only a good detective story, it is equally interesting as historical fiction.

March Violets by Philip Kerr

March Violets is Scottish writer Philip Kerr's first novel. It is a detective story set in Nazi Germany during the Olympic games of 1936. Much like Walter Mosley's detective stories, the setting is one of the main characters in this novel. Anti-Semitism is rampant and the SS and Gestapo are already the most feared groups in Germany. You can be sent to a concentration camp for being a Jew, a Gypsy, gay, or just about any other crime the National Socialist German Workers Party deemed you had committed, the only difference is Jews and Gypsy's never came back. Bernhard Gunther is a smart mouthed Private Detective, who is not a member of the Nazi party, but not above a little profiteering. Missing persons are his specialty and in Nazi Germany there are plenty of people disappearing, mostly Jews. While he has sympathy for his clients, he is walking a fine line between making money and being picked up by the SS. When gets hired by a rich industrialist to find out who killed his daughter and return some missing jewels, things get interesting.

March Violets is the name given to late comers in the Nazi party; people who joined after the passage of Hitler's Enabling Act (rendering him dictator) on March 23, 1933. In May, the Nazi Party froze membership. Kerr does a great job of painting a picture of life during this seriously tense time. He has clearly done his research from the Olympics to the street names to the officers ranks. He also has a rye style, with tension breaking wit and a good sense of mystery.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson

I finally got to the last book in Stieg Larsson's trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, which is the finale to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. This is the one book that you have to have read the others to get the most out of it. It picks up right where The Girl Who Played with Fire left off with Lisbeth Salander in the hospital recovering from her gunshot wounds and all the bad guys still alive and kicking. Although she spends the majority of the book confined to a hospital bed, this book has more adventure and intrigue than any of the previous books. It is obvious Larsson is going for a big ending here as he ties up a lot of the loose ends.

I have chronicled Larsson's death and the fallout in a previous review, so I won't go into all that again. Suffice to say it is a shame that another book will not be forthcoming as there is still a lot more that could have been mined out of these characters.

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Played with Fire is the second in a trilogy of books by Stieg Larsson. Unfortunately he died shortly after delivering the manuscripts, so there will only ever be three books, despite his plan to publish 10 or more.

The NY Times recently published a very interesting article about the author, "The Afterlife of Stieg Larsson" which details the fight between his family and his common law wife over the rights to his book. It is actually quite sad, it turns out that Sweden does not recognize common law marriage, despite the fact that no one there gets married, so his "wife" has no legal rights over the published books or an unfinished manuscript. There are also some juicy conspiracy theories that the wife actually wrote or rewrote large parts of the book, because many people just don't believe Larsson was a good enough writer to put this trilogy together.

Here is where I think we confuse good writing with huge book sales. Neither this book nor the first in the trilogy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, is a work of great fiction. They are page turners, they have a captivating plot and interesting characters, but they don't belong on the shelf with Carver and Elmore. They are a great summer read, that probably would never have gotten any noteriety if the author had lived. In fact it took for ever to get them out of Sweden.

So make sure you read Dragon Tattoo before you jump in here, it'll be more rewarding if you know the back story and a few of the characters. That said, there are plenty of new and interesting characters in Fire. Lisbeth Salander, our heroin from the first novel, is implicated in a triple murder and while there was little doubt in my mind that she ever did it, it was a hell of a lot fun finding out who did.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

My holiday reading concluded with another dive into the Nordic thriller genre. This time I tried the best selling novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. This is the first book in a trilogy that are now all available in English.

The underlying theme of this book is violence against women, which seems to be a real problem in Sweden. The book opens with Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist, having just been successfully sued for liable. After his conviction, he takes a break to work on the family history of a very eccentric and rich Swedish industrialist. Along with this assignment he is tasked with finding any new insight he can into a 40 year-old murder case. As you can imagine the book takes a lot of interesting twists and turns with this murder mystery. Then just when you think they story is over, there is a second chapter that circles back to the original libel case.

At almost 600 pages, this book is a page turner. You may loose a lot of sleep trying to get to a good stopping point once you get started. Unfortunately Stieg Larsson died in 2004, shortly after delivering the manuscripts for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, but at least there are two more books to tackle.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato a Vietnam war novel that won the National Book Award for fiction in 1979. I have not read this book, which is strange as I love all books having to do with the Vietnam war and this is one of the best. His follow up novel, The Things They Carried, was on sale at Powell's Books, so I picked it up for my vacation reading.

The Things They Carried is a strange book as it is billed as fiction, but it feels very real when you read it. It is composed of a dozen intertwined, first-person stories of the author's tour of Vietnam, but again it's fiction. Further confusing matters, the narrator in one of the stories makes a distinction between "story truth" and "happening truth." The authors tells us that no war stories are technically true, it's the ones that bring the experience to life without concern for total accuracy that make it easiest for the uninitiated to understand what war is really like. If that was his goal O'Brien does a great job. The mundaness of humping your way from village to village is interspersed with horrific stories of loss and callousness towards the enemy, as well as the difficulty of returning to the real world and letting go.

This is a great book and I look forward to reading Going After Cacciato.

Tinkers by Paul Harding

Tinkers is one of the four books I read on vacation in Kaua'i . None of these books were very long, so it's not that many for a week. I had to take better care of Tinkers as it is a first edition Pulitzer Prize winner, so that meant keeping it in a plastic bag when I was at the beach.

Paul Harding was formerly the drummer for a band called Cold Water Flat. This is Harding's first book, and he wins the Pulitzer. Where do you go from here?

The story is hard to explain, as this book is more about the writing than the plot. George Washington Crosby is a tinker, a man that repairs clocks. As the story begins he lies dying. In his mind he travels through his life, where he is reunited with his father and relives an interesting and painfully impoverished New England youth. Epilepsy and it's effect is the common thread that runs through the family. It is a sad and at the same time heart-warming book. It is great to see that a small book like this get so much notoriety.

The Hollywood Economist by Edward Jay Epstein

If I had to sum up what I learned in this book in a sentence I would say, never invest in a movie.

According to veteran journalist Edward Jay Epstein, the studios stack the deck so that only a very few of the most successful movies actual make money for anyone other than the studios and the actors who get their money up front. If you liked the best selling economics book Freakonomics and you are interested in how Hollywood works, this is the perfect book for you. Epstein pulls back the curtain on a lot of Hollywood myths and amazingly answers the difficult question: How do the studios make their money?

He also answers some other interesting Hollywood questions like:

What does it costs to insure Nicole Kidman’s right knee? Nicole Kidman had become so unreliable (not showing up on time and leaving movies after production has begun) that after an on-set injury her knee was basically un-insurable.

How and why the studios harvest silver from old film prints? The studios have 1000's of old film reels lying around that have a small silver content. Instead of preserving these for history they mined them for the silver when prices shot up in the 90's.

Do stars do their own stunts? If you think actors do their own stunts you are sadly mistaken. Given the amount of insurance it takes to get an actor signed, it is amazing they are allowed to walk around without a protective suit on. They lie about doing their own stunts on Entertainment Tonight to look cool.

Why is Arnold Schwarzenegger considered a contract genius? He gets all his money up front and he (or his agent) understands the difference between net and gross.

Why is Lara Croft: Tomb Raider considered a “masterpiece” of financing? Due to tax breaks and incentives from several states and countries to make their movie there, the studio was able to make this $100 million movie for less than $15 million of their own money.

This is a small taste of the interesting facts you'll enjoy in The Hollywood Economist.

The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo

The Readbreast moves between the last days of WWII on the Eastern front and modern day Oslo, which at times can be a little confusing. Norwegian author Jo Nesbø spins a complex tale of murder, revenge and betrayal. Harry Hole, a recovering alcoholic detective starts the story tracking Sverre Olsen, a vicious neo-Nazi who escaped prosecution on a technicality. The pursuit of Olsen intertwines with the prevention of an assassination. The tricky part is that many of the characters were in WWII, as Norwegians fighting for Hitler on the Eastern front. The two story lines finally collide, when Hole has to stop a man hell-bent on carrying out the deadly plan he hatched half a century ago in the trenches. The book moves along at a great clip, and it can sometimes be hard to remember who is who as we alternate between 1944 and 1998. The tension builds nicely and the conclusion is very satisfying even though it takes quite a bit of explanation.

Food Rules by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is the author of five previous books, including In Defense of Food, and The Omnivore's Dilemma. In the current world of food confusion, he is a guru that cuts through the crap and makes things simple for real people to understand.

Food Rules outlines sixty four rules for eating better. Seems like a lot of rules, but they are not too hard to deal with and I like rules. The rules are split up into three categories. What should I eat? (food). What kind of food should you eat? (mostly plants). And, how should I eat? (not too much). The rules are also well written and easy to remember, like "if its a plant eat it, if it's made in a plant don't eat it." Pollan suggests that you pick a couple of rules from each category and try to implement them. The hardest ones for me are the portion control ones, "don't eat a portion of meat bigger than your fist," and "no seconds." I will be struggling with those ones. There are also some funny ones, that make sense when you think about it, "don't eat any cereal that turns the milk a different color."

If you liked his previous books and you are looking for simple guidelines to eating better this is the book for you.

Cool Hand Luke by Donn Pearce

I think I am the only person in the world who has not seen the movie Cool Hand Luke, so it was with great anticipation that I opened my new book of the month by Donn Pearce. I honestly had no idea what it would be about, I only knew that Luke was played by Paul Newman in the film. The funny thing is, that despite the fact that I knew this, it was not Newman that I was picturing in my head. I think Newman is way too good looking to be Luke. I think he would be more rugged, maybe more Redford or Nick Nolte.

Cool Hand Luke was written in 1965 and was Pearce's first novel. He was a veteran of WW II, a thief and a private detective. He wrote about prison from first hand experience. While he was nominated for an Academy Award for the screen play adaptation of this novel, I have to think a lot of the rhythm and voice of this book would be lost in a movie. It is so very well written that you find yourself cruising through large swaths of the book like a poem. The content however is gritty and dark. A prison chain gang in 1960's Florida is not a friendly place. In fact it is one of the most brutal atmospheres I have every read about. It is so bad that you feel sorry for the convicts despite the terrible crimes they have committed. You are even rooting for them when they try to escape.

While there are good times amongst the convicts, telling stories about the outside, playing music, celebrating the fourth of July, life is mostly hard. They dig ditches and clear weeds every day in the hot, mosquito infested swamps of Florida. If they look at the guards sideways or talk out of turn you spend the night in the box. The regular building is only marginally better. It is hot, the lights are always on and the smell is brutal. It is only the thought of getting out that keeps the men going, despite the fact that life on the outside would not be a lot better for a convicted felon.

SuperFreakenomics by Levitt and Dubner

If, like me, you loved the book Freakenomics, you have been waiting four long years for the follow up SuperFreakenomics. The wait has paid off, SuperFreakenomics gives you more of the witty, pithy economic insight you loved in the first book. Not only is this book well written, it is a lot of fun to read. You literally don't want to put it down when you read the next provocative chapter heading, "How is a street prostitute like a department store Santa?" or "Why should suicide bombers buy life insurance." The insights into why prostitution is cheaper now than at the turn of the century and how to catch a terrorist, are very interesting, but my favorite chapter is, "What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?"

Would you believe a volcano eruption might do more to help stop global warming than anything Al Gore could do? You will after you read this chapter. You'll also get to see all the amazing things that former Microsoft guru Nathan Myhrvold and the genesis at Intellectual Ventures are doing to help geoengineer a solution to climate change.

There is no doubt the authors like to write about controversial topics: global warming, prostitution, but how about saying it's safer to drive home drunk than to walk home drunk? You can hear the MADD folks going ballistic on this one, but the statistics bear it out. If you have some friends over and they have had too much to drink, you are not doing them a favor by taking away their keys and making them walk home. If you want them to get home safely, put them in a cab or get them to spent the night.

If you like social insights like this, you'll love this book. I just hope we don't have to wait another four year for the next book, but if we do, you can keep up with the authors on their Freakenomics blog on NY Times.com.