Hiding Mengele - Betina Anton

 Sub-title: How a Nazi Network Harbored the Angel of Death

I've long heard that Josef Mengele, the Nazi "Angel of Death" was harbored at the end of his life by a family named Bossert.  This book was written by a Brazilian author who had access to previously un-accessed letters, documents and reports about his escape to South America after WWII where he remained and died in 1979, over 30 years after the end of the war.  It's a detailed factual account constructed from first person accounts, police records and thorough research.  It a horrific account of a cruel, inhuman man and the people who protected him.  I gleaned some tidbits about the last family he was sheltered by, the Bosserts.  They were originally from Austria and had been living in Argentina for several years when they met Mengele.  The book revealed the community of German expats and family who kept his identity a secret when he was being hunted for his war crimes.  A sad, revealing story of the dedication to a belief by a group of people.

Published: 2025  Read: May 2026  Genre: History

Safekeep -Yael van der Wouden

I hated this book.  The main character, Isabel, a bitter, isolated woman living alone in the family home owned by her brother, is despicable.  It takes reading 3/4 of the book to find any redeeming purpose to the story and by that point, I'd lost any interest.  So much for Booker prize nominees.  Not recommended.

Published: 2024  Read: December 2024  Genre: Fiction

The Maniac - Benjamin Labatut

 

What a great start to the new year!  This book weaves the facts of John Von Neumann, an Hungarian polymath who "transformed every field he touched", including game theory, the first programmable computer and pioneering AI.  Reading of his accomplishments and defeats and their impact on humanity is a fascinating travel through science and its giants.  Additionally, the story is told by his family, friends and colleagues, a different way of creating a biography that I enjoyed.  The story provided a humanized picture of a brilliant man and the people in his world.  

At the end, the book describes the use of the AI ideas Von Neumann engendered to create machines that could beat Karpov at Chess and the Le Sedol, the best player at Go - a harbinger of the future.  

Quotes:

[an explanation of how a chess engine works that could be applied to genealogy tree-building] 

" it simply uses its power to calculate and then makes a decision following a complex set of hand-crafted rules laid down by its programmers. Each time its opponent places a piece on a black or white the computer constructs a search tree consisting of every possible future arising from that particular configuration of the board; the tree keeps on growing and branching out till it reaches the end of the game and the computer simply selects between its many limbs the outcomes that it considers most advantageous. With each new move comes a different tree, as the game changes and evolves constantly, but with enough power, the computer can look so far into the future as to remain a step, if not several thousand steps, ahead of any human opponent."

Published: 2023  Read: January 2024  Genre: Historical Fiction

News of Our Loved Ones - Abigail DeWitt

A story of a French family torn apart during WWII, told from the perspective of the different family members.  It was hard to keep track of the different story lines, especially if you don't read the book all at once.  I thought it ended elegantly and enjoyed reading it.

Published:  2018  Read: 2019  Genre: Fiction

A Girl's Guide to Missles - Karen Piper

Sub-title:  Growing Up in America's Secret Desert

This was a fun read. The author grew up in China Lake, a secret, restricted military installation where missiles were built, like the Sidewinder.  It's an other worldly childhood, growing up and working in a town where everyone and everything is shrouded in confidentiality.  Entertaining, chilling and touching.  I got this as an advanced copy at the Nashville Festival of Books 2018.

Quotes:

[talking about the recruitment to Amway by Dick DeVos and the use of religious analogies] "His daughter-in-law, Betsy DeVos, would become US Secretary of Education and push for funding schools that use Accelerated Christian Education in order to 'advance God's Kingdom' ."

[When her sister goes into a coma after childbirth] "My sister held my memories in her brain.  Even though she fought with me about what had or had not happened, without the fighting, no one would even care about those memories, what was true or unture, what was mine and what was hers."

 Published:  2018  Read: October 2018  Genre: Memoir

Pachinko - Min Jin Lee

This book is a history lesson of Koreans who lived in Japan from shortly before WWII through the 1980s.  I had not known they were treated as 2nd class citizens, even those born and raised over multiple generations.  To cover the time frame, the book is over 500 pages and at times dragged on without moving the story forward.  Often chapters would end and jump ahead many years without any transition.  I liked learning about this period but felt it could have been covered in fewer pages.

Published:  2017  Read: September 2018  Genre: Fiction

Someone Not Really Her Mother - Harriet Scott Chessman

This was a quick read, a different style for telling of the fading memory of a mother and the reaction of her daughter and granddaughters.

Hannah is losing her present memory but those of her past in WWII and losing her family become sharper and confused with today. It's hard on her only child, Miranda, and challenging for her two granddaughters just beginning their adult lives.

I think the book could have had much more substance with deeper stories about the daughter and her husband and her relationships with her daughters.  The character development was sketchy and left the reader to fill in the blanks.

Published:  2004  Read: June 2016  Genre: Fiction

The Hummingbird - Stephen Kiernan

Finally, a wonderful read!  It's been a slow year without much sure-fire reads.  This book was very satisfying.

This is the story of a hospice nurse who goes to care for an elderly history professor who is dying of cancer.  Her caring spirit is tested by his sarcastic, negative banter.  When she returns home after work, she must deal with a husband suffering from PTSD after having served in Iraq multiple tours.
She breaks down the barriers built by the professor by reading his unpublished manuscript that describes the bombing of the Oregon coast by a Japanese pilot during WWII and the subsequent relationship of the town and the pilot in the post war aftermath.

Her compassion is absolutely inspiring.  The author lets us know how she feels yet contrasts it with how she reacts, both to the professor and her husband.  There are lessons to be learned here.  Highly recommended read, my pick for best so far this year.

Published: 2015  Read: May 2016  Genre: Fiction

Hitler's Niece - Ron Hansen

I took this book on the plane and back to Salt Lake City, Utah where I attended a genealogical conference.  I was so worn out each evening I hardly read any of it at night and ended up finishing it when I returned home.

The book is based on the facts of the period and actual quotes and known activities of Hitler.  It tells the story of the relationship between him and his half-sister's daughter, Geli, or Angelica.  I found it difficult to read as the evil henchmen surrounding Hitler and the monster himself are described as weird, sad people with inflated egos and strange personal habits instead of the calculating leaders of the genocide of WWII.  I'd not known that his niece died in his home where they lived together, an apparent suicide that the author gives a different twist.  Not recommended.

Published:  1999  Read: February 2016  Genre: Historical Fiction

The Japanese Lover - Isabel Allende

I really like this author.  I loved her biography of her daughter, Paula, and her early books had a mystical quality about them.  The last one I read, Maya's Notebook was a disappointment but I was willing to try again.  I shouldn't have.

The Japanese Lover begins with our heroine, Alma, in an assisted living facility by her own choice, one that dismays her family, undoubtedly part of her motivation.  She befriends one of the workers, Irina, and her grandson, Seth and Irina try to figure out where Alma goes on her frequent excursions from the home.

We're taken back in time as Alma shares her life story with Inna.  She was sent to America to live with relatives during WWII and never saw her birth parents again.  She grows up privileged and loved by her relatives and falls in love with the gardener's son.  The gardener and his family are imprisoned in the Japanese internment camps and the young lovers are separated.  Their love never dies and they stay in touch throughout life but conform to society and never come together.

I don't know if its Allende's translators of the last couple of books, but her prose is flat and repetitive. The story goes off on tangents with characters (Alma's long lost brother) showing up for a few pages then disappearing again.  I was disappointed.


Published: 2015  Read: December 2015  Genre: Fiction

City of Women - David R Gillham

This novel was the suggestion for one of my reading groups for December.  It is a thriller that tells the story of the mostly female population left in Berlin at the end of WWII and how they struggled to survive.

There is a lot of detail on the city of Berlin, impressing me with the research that the author apparently did to be authentic to the time.  It became tedious as the book went on, however.

There was not a character in this book that I really liked.  The main character, Sigrid, is a middle aged woman married to a German soldier with a nasty mother-in-law and suspicious neighbors.  Everyone is reporting and turning on each other.  Sigrid befriends a young woman in her apartment building who turns out is assisting with smuggling Jews out of the country and enlists Sigrid in the effort.  Sigrid is taken in, partly due to her passionate affair she'd had with a Jewish man she meets in a theatre.

Our group had a long discussion on the effects of war and the mentality of a population that would allow the annihilation of a people.  It was instructive to discuss how the economics of Germany after WWI paved the way for the hatred and fear of Hitler's regime. I was impressed with the need to understand history in the long term perspective.  Most of all, I found myself asking, "What would I have done?"  Would I have been brave? Would I have tried to stay uninvolved?  Would I have resisted?

Published: 2012  Read: December 2015  Genre: Historical fiction

All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

This bestseller was chosen for the September pick in one of my book clubs.  It's the story of two young people - a blind girl from Paris, Marie-Laure, who is detained in Saint-Malo, Brittany, France near the end of WWII and Werner, a mechanically gifted German boy swept up in the war.

The introduction advises that the walled city of Saint-Malo was bombed almost to oblivion after the Normandy invasion to root out the last of the German army.  Right away, I'm dreading an entire story that's going to end in a city, and presumably it occupants, being destroyed,  But then, we're taken on a hop scotch of time between the two characters building to...the inevitable meeting and tragedy.

I thoroughly dislike the writing style that goes back and forth each chapter between two stories. It's contrived to keep you reading to get to whichever story you prefer.  The author skips around in time too, making us keep track of multiple vignettes that eventually begin to come together the last 50 or so pages.  It's like reading a mystery or a thriller.

The prose *is* lyrical ...but there's an adverb for every verb and an adjective for every noun,  My greatest complaint is that by writing beautifully the author minimizes the horror of the war. It's as if he paints a wash over the reality and defaults to stereotypes of the besieged French and the cruel Germans so he can write a pretty story.  It's just too touching to have a blind girl lose all she loves and too predictable to have a German boy become a mindless solider that does one heroic gesture.

The book jacket has praise from fellow authors, not critics, a warning in my experience.  Too say the least, I didn't like this one.

To complicate things further, there's a sub-plot of a cursed jewel that Marie-Laure's father is given and a German officer is determined to find.  The officer is a caricature of every Nazi soldier.  That's the problem with all the characters, they are too simple, too flat, too predictable.

If you want to read something about living in Europe during a German occupation and the soldier's on both sides, I'd recommend The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.

Published:  2014  Read: August 2015  Genre: fiction

The Boys in the Boat - Daniel James Brown

This is the story of the young college men from Washington State who won the 1936 Olympic rowing championship held in Germany during Hitler's rise to power.  But only the last 25 or so pages is about that triumphant race near Berlin.  The rest of the book is about the boys themselves; their early lives and exhaustive detail of their rowing training during college.  Their are brief interludes that keep us up to date on what is going on in Germany while they prepare for the race back home in Washington.

I felt the story was way too drawn out with repetitive portrayals of the main rowers.  The book could have easily been half the length.  I appreciate that the author did lots of research but he didn't have to cram every piece of it into the story.

Published:   Read: May 2015  Genre: biography

ISBN: 10-1-59413-775-X