The 2017 Nonfiction Challenge Part III: Heroes and Villains in March

Welcome to March -- the cruelest month? At any rate, in the northern hemisphere, it can be -- a long month, the weather can veer from offering tantalizing glimpses of spring to blizzards. But -- there are always books! And there is lots of time to read big, chunky, non-fiction tomes!

For March, we'll be reading about heroes and villains. Or perhaps people that other folks have dubbed heroes and villains, but that we haven't made a decision about, and want to learn more about. Or people that you're curious about because others consider them to be villains, or heroes, and you want to understand why, even if you don't ever decide to put them in one camp or another because you don't believe in such binary judgments.

So, these can be obvious people (Jesus Christ, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, to Osama bin Laden) or less obvious ones (various political leaders about whom people will have widely divergent opinions.) It can be a group of individuals, some of whom may be heroes and others, villains. I might read a book about Machiavelli, who people like to think of as a bit of a villain because he wrote about Cesare Borgia, in The Prince. Borgia definitely was a villain, but Machiavelli was probably just a man of his time, a Renaissance scholar and statesman. I might also read a book about the literary afterlife of Sherlock Holmes, a fictional hero, and how writers and actors like Benedict Cumberbatch have brought him to life.

Don't forget to drop by to tell us all about the progress you're making with your chosen book(s) and whether you'd recommend that we read it too! (Remember, we'd like to try to reach the magic 150 posts before the end of March...)

What we're reading:







For those who like planning ahead, the rest of the year....

April: Hobbies, Pastimes and Passions
Anything you want. People suggested categories about gardening, cooking, animals, sports, etc. Whatever excites and interests you. See if you can get the rest of us excited, too...

May: History
Pretty self explanatory. One of a few holdovers.

June: The Natural World
Another holdover. Anything about rocks, logs, the sea, the air we breathe, what grows around us, animal life, etc. And the pollution of same...

July: Creators and Creativity
Rather than just a category about the arts, I've broadened this. So, writing, books about books would qualify.

August: I’ve Always Been Curious About….
A catch-all category. If the topic of the book can complete the sentence, you can add it to the challenge.

September: Gods, Demons and Spirits
Religion, spirituality of al kinds; read about the Salem witch trials or animism in West Africa if you want.

October: The World We Live In: Current Affairs
It will be a year after Brexit; a year after Trump's election. What does the world look like? What forces are driving us? Find a book about some of the themes and issues that are at the top of the news by then.

November: Science and Technology
Probably self-explanatory, another holdover.

December: Out of Your Comfort Zone
A nonfiction book that isn't something that you would normally gravitate to, about a subject you'd never normally read about, or that is a "book bullet" you'd never previously heard about from another LT reader.

My target books:

The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes by Zach Dundas: Clearly a hero, albeit a tale of the real life of a fictional hero!

The Exile: The Stunning Inside Story of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Flight by Cathy Scott-Clark: equally obviously, a villain, even an arch-villain.

The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel: a probable group of heroines, simply for breaking all kinds of new ground.

Game of Queens by Sarah Gristwood: I think this will be a mixed bag, simply because some of the 16th century queens seem to have been villainous (think of Catherine de Medici, who organized the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre!) Although I'll be open to having my assumptions challenged and my mind changed.

Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom by Jack Fruchtman: I would define as a hero, certainly. Or at any rate, a personal hero. There are two big chunky biographies of him that I want to read.

Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom has been long on my tbr pile, so I will go with that (despite some ghosting). I have another book by him somewhere too, though won't get both in this month.

I'll ponder about a villain later.

I've requested Dan Jones's The Plantagenets : the warrior kings and queens who made England from the library for March.

I'm planning on Tracy Kidder's book about Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains.

My choice will depend on library hold timings, so I'll report back. I've got a biography of Paul Robeson out already that I'm keen to read, and may well fit to this category.

I have made an early start on Suffragette: My Own Story, the autobiography of Emmeline Pankhurst, definitely a hero for me.

I am also hoping (if I ever get through my February read) to get to The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks. Not so much a hero in her lifetime, but much of modern medicine owes it's development to that cell-line. I'm also wondering if there might not be a kind of villain involved in the story.

I've been meaning to read both for a long time so no more excuses.

I'm reading Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France by Leonie Frieda for March. Actually, I'm reading it right now. I know Catherine is generally viewed as pretty much of a Class A villain, but I think from what I've read so far, that she may not really deserve being classed in with that group. She's just become Regent of France after the death of her first son, Francis II (who was married to Mary Stuart). Really enjoying this one...

>2 Chatterbox: The Glass Universe sounds fascinating, I'd not heard of it.

>8 Fourpawz2: Looks as if we may be overlapping a bit, assuming that I get to the Sarah Gristwood book about 16th century queens! I'm fairly sure that Catherine is one of those queens, and yes, I'm curious to hear about whether her evil acts are deliberate, where there is justification for them, or.... !

I am planning on Heart in the Right Place about a rural doctor here in East Tennessee. I'd also like to squeeze in Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin. Jane Austen really isn't a conventional hero, but she's a hero in my estimation.

My planned reads for March include Open Heart by Elie Wiesel. It looks like a very quick read, a group of short essays or journal entries. Since it is so slim a volume, I will also try to get through Madiba A to Z The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela by Danny Schechter. I have great admiration for both those men and have read other works by or about them. In fact, I have about 4 other books by or about Mandela on my shelves but for now, I will focus on these 2 books. If I can add more for March, I will.

>7 eclecticdodo: - Just fyi, I recently learned that there will be an HBO special based on the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks airing in April, I believe. I found out about it on Book Riot

>12 jessibud2: ooh, thanks. I'll look out for it if/when it makes it's way to the UK.

I'm about a third of the way through Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the dawn of a new America. Even though I live near Baltimore, I didn't really know much about Marshall beyond his time on the Supreme Court.

Getting caught up from other 2017 Threads:

JANUARY > Prizewinner > MARCH: Book One by John Lewis

(2011-2020 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book,
Publishers Weekly Best Comics of 2013,
and Top Ten Graphic Novels of 2013)

FEBRUARY > Voyages of Exploration > About This Life by Barry Lopez

Each of these rates Five Stars, as will MACBETH for MARCH,
both the small Yale University Press 1954 edition,
THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH ($1 from a book sale),

and the Workman Publishing Illustrated Classic MACBETH, The Folio Edition,

along with relevant sections of Raphael Holinshed's
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

I am going to read an old tell all biography I have had on my shelves for a long time. Martha, Inc.: the Incredible Story of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia by Christopher Byron is a biography published back in 2002. It is about the rise of Martha Stewart, a woman who I admire greatly, but who others think is a power hungry witch. Unfortunately, it is about her before her trail and conviction for securities fraud, but I am interested in the book anyway and want to see what the author has to say about Martha.

One of my all-time heroes is Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring.
So I plan on reading On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson by William Souder.

>2 Chatterbox: I read The Glass Universe. Those women were amazing!

>16 benitastrnad: I knew Chris Byron slightly; we overlapped when I was temping and freelancing for the NY Post, where he was a columnist, from about 2003 until 2008 or so. He was smart, but also a big believer in business vs government and regulations, so it would have been interesting to have had his take on the whole securities case, because she was convicted for lying to investigators and for obstruction, rather than actually for insider trading -- and that is something I suspect he would have had problems with. Chris just died in early January.

>17 GerrysBookshelf: Sobel apparently is speaking at the Harvard Observatory later this spring. I'll have to check that out...

I am planning to read Giants: the Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln - which happily - just arrived at my local library. I will start it as soon as I finish Hillbilly Elegy.

I have a mini-collection of Ripper books on my shelves. Maybe it is time that I read one of them, after all, what was Jack the Ripper but a right old villain?

>20 Familyhistorian: One of those consummate villains...

Has everyone made their choices, and prepared their first non-fiction book for March??

I am not 100% sure about March, but as of now I am thinking of reading Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot by Masha Gessen. Will that qualify?

The Plantagenets is on my TBR list, but I'm not sure I can get to it this month. I guess I'll see.

I've decided to go with Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton by Edward Rice, although I have The Black Count on my Kindle and it is very tempting.

Since I will be reading Just Mercy early on in the month in anticipation of seeing the author speak, it may be my read for this month's challenge, as I expect I will find Stevenson to be rather heroic, given his work in the criminal justice system...

I still want to read the book about Paul Farmer, but Just Mercy would kill two birds with one stone :)

>23 banjo123: Absolutely! And you can let us know if you think they are heroes or villains, or fall somewhere in between. Gessen clearly knows which camp she thinks they belong to...

I'm going with Paul Robeson: the artist as revolutionary villified for many years but kind of a hero of mine.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/P/bo23466187.html

>28 charl08: - That one looks interesting!

I think I have already chosen my book, sort of. I had not finished When Christ and His Saints Slept by yesterday, so it goes onto March challenges. It's excellent, but a chunkster, and this has not been a good month for reading.

For those who are interested, it is about the struggle for the English crown, between Henry's daughter, Maude, and cousin, Stephen. Maude's son, Henry II, would later on marry Eleanor of Aquitaine, and they would produce Richard the Lionhearted and Prince/King John.

Fascinating book, does not read like history.

Wait, would this qualify as non-fiction?

I'm planning to read the travel book I didn't complete for last month's challenge. I read a few pages here and there while on vacation in Florida. I'll begin anew because I want to savor the wonderful words of West With the Night. Beryl Markham was the first pilot to cross the Atlantic from west to east which certainly qualifies her as a hero.

Edited because I'm directionally challenged!

>30 fuzzi: - It's a novel, so by definition, fiction.

>30 fuzzi: No, it's a novel... But you could read Alison Weir's bio of Eleanor of Aquitaine? Not sure if there is one of Maude or Stephen. There may be a book about the civil war, although I think most of those books are more academic in nature and focus on specific things (like the role of the big new Norman castles) or figures (like the Beaumont twins) in the war, than on an overview.

>33 Chatterbox: I'll have to wait until I finish my current read, but thanks for the suggestions!

>31 Donna828: - Oh, I read that one (by Markham) several years ago. Such an interesting life and woman!

Being the over-ambitious person I am, I've added two books to my list. One is a biography of Barney Rosset, the editor supremo at Grove Press, who fought censorship and published all kinds of literary greats (a friend of mine worked with him for many years). The other is a kind of group heroes book: about all the crowned heads of Europe and other political leaders who fetched up in England after fleeing their homelands in 1939/1940 -- from Polish and Czech aviators to the King of Norway -- and began leading the resistance to Nazi rule: Last Hope Island. Both are ARCs, the former will be released next week, though.

Pondering...pondering.

>37 laytonwoman3rd: LOL! Well, there's plenty of time -- March is a long month!!

Got one, sitting here, just waiting for me, my latest Early Reviewer book!

Innocent Heroes: Stories of Animals in the First World War by Sigmund Brouwer

I'm going to finally buckle down and finish Halberstam's The Children, which spotlights the young college students who were such an integral part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

>40 rosalita: Oh I like the sound of this one. Wishlisted.

I happened to be passing through this thread and realized I'm planning to read a qualifying book this month: March, Book Three, by and about the civil rights hero John Lewis. It's a graphic not-novel, so it should be a pretty quick read; I read the first two volumes earlier this year.

My current non-fiction read may also turn out to be about a hero: A Hope More Powerful than the Sea. I haven't gotten far enough to see about the heroism yet, but the start of the blurb sounds promising:

Adrift in a frigid sea, no land in sight—just debris from the ship's wreckage and floating corpses all around—nineteen-year-old Doaa Al Zamel floats with a small inflatable water ring around her waist and clutches two children, barely toddlers, to her body. The children had been thrust into Doaa's arms by their drowning relatives, all refugees who boarded a dangerously overcrowded ship bound for Sweden and a new life. For days, Doaa floats, prays, and sings to the babies in her arms. She must stay alive for these children. She must not lose hope.

(I'm not entirely clear about whether everyday heroes are the sort of people intended for this month, but I'll certainly consider her a hero if she saves two toddlers from drowning.)

#26
Stevenson lives in Montgomery, Alabama and is now involved in a lynching project in Alabama. He is trying to identify all the victims of lynching in Alabama and get memorial plaques set in place where they are buried. There is a professor here at UA who is working with him on this project. It has turned out to be a hard task to positively identify the victims and their final resting place. Stevenson is also trying to make Alabamians confront their past. I don't know if he will manage that, but he certainly is going to give it a good try.

Interesting, Benita. Thanks for that! I've started the introduction and hope to get really into the book this evening...

>42 _Zoe_: Everyday heroes certainly count!

I'll catch up on the cover images tomorrow, I hope!

On the everyday hero theme, last month I read How to Survive A Plague, which described the work of the activists on HIV AIDS and their work to get drugs developed and to make those drugs accessible. In places reads like a thriller, and full of people who I think were heroic in their actions.

>45 Chatterbox: Thanks for confirming!

So far, I'd definitely recommend A Hope More Powerful than the Sea; it's very readable and I've learned a lot about Syria. And even if there haven't been any children rescued yet, I'm pretty sure Doaa will end up counting as a hero for various reasons.

Decided I'm not in the mood for the Mandela biog, so will ponder what to read instead.

>47 _Zoe_: I wish that there were a book about the White Helmets, who do rescue work at bombing sites in Syria. Or maybe there is -- does anyone know? I have read magazine articles about them, and about individuals who work for them, and now the documentary about them has won an Oscar, but haven't seen a book. I think there's enough there, in terms of different characters and issues, to make it work. Do you hear that, publishing executives?????

>49 Chatterbox: I don't know of one currently, but I wouldn't be surprised to see one in the next couple of years—it seems like there are lots of books about various aspects of the conflict coming out these days.

Hi all. I've been away from LT for quite a while. It's pretty hard keeping up with my 75 book challenge thread when your drowning in delightful college homework and field work as a geology student. Had to say something about Family Historian's excellent columnar jointing photo from the previous thread. Pretty neat stuff! One of the spots I'd like to visit.

This thread is a great idea. I like the broad topical nature of it, it's open to a wide variety of subjects, yet constrained enough to make you think about it and make a wise choice. I'm planning on reading a biography of Russian WWII general Georgi Zhukov after i finish a long delayed reading of David Brin's Uplift series. I suppose he would count as both a hero and villain, depending of how you look at it. Have to go back and figure how to do the touchstones again. Title in brackets, i believe?

>51 DirtPriest: Hey, good to see you again! Yep, title in square brackets, author in double square brackets.

I'm glad you can join in our group reads! It's a great way to play without the full blown effort of a thread. Your choice is a great one!

>51 DirtPriest: Welcome to the challenge! Zhukov would be a fascinating character to read about... Do hope you'll tackle him and come back and tell us whether it's a good bio. Brilliant generals do fall into that middle ground a lot -- heroic to their men, but perhaps not completely lovable and admirable to civilians?

>26 katiekrug:, >43 benitastrnad:. Thank heavens that March is a long month as i have many books on reserve coming into the library ( as many LTers do I'm sure).
I too have chosen Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson who for me hits the "hero" category BIG TIME and hope that I will be able to finish it by the end of the month.

I've just cracked open Paul Robeson: the artist as revolutionary. The opening pages stress his popularity worldwide and ask the question why he was so vilified on the US: because he argued the US and USSR should continue to work together in the 40s to fight racism as they had fought Hitler. Think there's going to be a lot of life to pack into around 200 pages.

Well, I decided I would start reading about my villain, only to discover that I hadn't correctly downloaded the Osama bin Laden book from NetGalley onto my Kindle and that it was archived as of last week. So it's now inaccessible. ARGHHHHHH.

Finished Catherine de Medici yesterday. Excellent biography with tons of detail. Have decided that Catherine was nowhere near as bad as her reputation. It was the assassination of several leading Huguenots where things got out of hand and thousands of innocents were killed (the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre) that leads one to view her as being evil, I think. She had many good qualities though. She was loyal, a hard worker who loved her husband, Henri II (even though he was completely infatuated by his elderly mistress) and she loved her children fiercely (except for Margot). She loved France as if she'd been born there and she did try for some time to make peace between the Catholic and Protestant zealots of the country. She was a smart woman and a far more capable monarch than any of her three sons who ascended to the throne were. She was not a witch, but likely she did resort to the occasional poisoning.

Reading the FDR biography, Traitor to His Class by H.W. Brands now.

>56 Chatterbox: Yup, I've done that. Feel your pain...

Open Heart by Elie Wiesel. Wiesel was a survivor of Auschwitz, a novelist, journalist, teacher and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He died last year and though it has been many, many years since I read his work, I decided to pick up this very slim volume for this month's selection.

This book was written shortly after his open heart bypass surgery in 2011 and in it, he once again confronts his own mortality and many of the big questions of life that he has been thinking and writing and teaching about all his life. This time, though, he is 82 years old and the perspective has changed. While I have always admired his humanity and his ability to have gratitude and optimism in the face of a world that seems to challenge the very meanings of those concepts, I still have a very difficult time with the *God* aspect of it all. I cannot understand how he can continue to be such a devoutly believing person, in spite of his own personal experiences. Yet, I had a sense that he knows there are no answers to his questions, but he is compelled to continue to ask. There were a few passages that I marked as a valiant attempt to perhaps explain to a non-believer such as myself and the words are, as expected from a man such as Wiesel, eloquent:

"I know - I speak from experience - that even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. That it is possible to feel free inside a prison. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor. That one instant before dying, man is still immortal.

"There it is: I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.

"As a Jew, I believe in the coming of the Messiah. But of course this does not mean that the world will become Jewish; just that it will become more welcoming, more human. I belong, after all, to a generation that has learned that whatever the question, indifference and resignation are not the answer."

That last line rings especially true in my ears these days! And though I doubt I personally can ever be a believer, the last line of this book are words that could be a life lesson for many, and truly needed in the new world of 2017: "I know that eternities ago, the day after the liberation, when some of us had to choose between anger and gratitude, my choice was the right one."

This is why Elie Wiesel is a hero, in my eyes. My next book for this month is another one about Mandela.

I finished reading A Hope More Powerful than the Sea, which I would definitely recommend; I'm satisfied that the protagonist is a hero, and the story of the Syrian refugee crisis is timely and compelling.

This should give me plenty of time to read March: Book 3 later in the month.

I am about a third of the way through with Martha, Inc. and am putting it on the back burner so that I can read a book about Berlin. Berlin Now is proving to be very interesting and a fun read. I was looking through the Rick Steves web site and found a reading list for people going to Germany. I purchased two books about Berlin. Berlin Now came first, so I am reading that one and taking it with me on the plane.

I am about 1/3 of the way through Giants: the Parallel Lives of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. I am super annoyed right now. I believe the author is taking some liberties and making implications for which there is no evidence, and that means we are straying into fictional territory. If he doesn't leave it, then I'm going to apply the "Dorothy Parker" and heave it against the wall.

This Is Not a Novel To Be Tossed Aside Lightly. It Should Be Thrown with Great Force

>62 nittnut: Dare one ask what he is asserting, or would that provoke damage to the tome in question??

>63 Chatterbox: Assertions of homosexual relationships on the part of both men, not evidence based or even a discussion of the possibility, but sly allusions that are just really annoying. Either write a notated chapter on it, or leave it.

A funny little piece of book synchronicity or serendipity or what-have-you:

I was originally going to read Mountains Beyond Mountains for this challenge - about Paul Farmer. But decided to instead read Just Mercy which is by Bryan Stevenson who co-founded the Equal Justice Initiative. I was poking around on the EJI website and discovered that Paul Farmer sits on its Board of Directors!

A friend of mine that I'm staying with in NYC for the next week happened to have a copy of Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson hanging around. He has no idea who it belongs to or how it ended up here -- he thought it belonged to me, but it doesn't -- so I'm going to borrow it and read it after all this book warbling here for this tome! I may even get to it this month -- but that may be a bit ambitious.

I'm about the halfway point in the Sherlock Holmes book right now, but have broken away from it to read the (hero-less/villain-less, but still excellent How to Kill a City by Peter Moskowitz. Maybe the villains would be the gentrifiers that he writes about??

Suz, I heard Stevenson speak last night, and he was amazing. Really inspiring but realistic - I plan to write up some comments about the lecture on my thread in the next day or two. I have about 100 pages left in the book, and it's great, though infuriating. I'd love to chat with you about it some time :)

>67 katiekrug: I'm in NYC now, for the next week, but won't have read it in time to discuss it! And probably won't have that much free time, either... :-( Trying to set up two non-work things. You know, with friends...

Finished the Peter Moskowitz book and it's that rare thing, a five star book...

Oh, I didn't mean imminently! Just the next time we get together over ancient Etruscan dishes ;-)

I think I am going to read Night by Elie Wiesel. Plenty of real life villians there.

I am about to finish Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil. This book doesn't appear to be - but it is about a big villain. Big Data. This book was on the longlist for the National Book Award in 2015 and it is the choice for our College of Education spring book discussion. Reading this book will make you think twice about ever joining any social media internet outlet, or ever making a purchase on-line. It makes being totally off the grid look better and better. And it proves that the system is rigged. Just like the Great Orange Gas Bag claimed. The only problem is that it is rigged to favor people of his ilk and income.

After learning about Big Data, reading about what a villainous Martha Stewart is, will be a calming experience. When I get back to her - that is.

>71 benitastrnad: Oh, that's a good idea for a villain! I have Weapons of Math Destruction in my TBR pile.

>71 benitastrnad:
>72 _Zoe_:
I started reading that and stalled on it, so I should pick it up and start again. It's good, but sometimes lacked a bit of nuance. (There were good reasons for the existence of derivatives, too, which she ignores, but whatever...) I should go back and try again!

I did finish How to Kill a City, in which gentrifiers are the big villains, and it's an excellent book. Definitely a five star read, focusing on four cities: Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco and NYC. Highly recommended.

>73 Chatterbox: I've actually started it too, but didn't get very far before putting it aside. At this point I don't even remember exactly why. I think I wanted more about the philosophy behind why various things were the way they were; I remember at least one point where she said something like, "This wouldn't be allowed in a court of law, so it shouldn't work this way here either!", and there wasn't any historical background on why the legal system worked the way it did or why its approach was best. This challenge is probably a good incentive for me to pick it up again.

#73
I agree that Weapons of Math Destruction is a bit of a polemic but I think that the overall point about who collects this data, why they collect, and how it gets used is important. Especially the why part of that statement.

It could end up like Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas?, in that the author essentially answers the question by about chapter 4 and the rest is just filler. I will know more about WMD when I have finished it completely.

Today I finished reading my choice, Innocent Heroes, a fictionalized account of the use of animals during WWI.

I finished Devil in the Grove. Clearly there were a number of heroes and villains there. First, the four men falsely accused of rape - eventually three were killed and one sentenced to life in prison for the crime of being black men when scapegoats were demanded. Then Thurgood Marshall and his team with the NAACP for the work they were doing in trying to gain civil rights and force justice. The biggest villain, Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall and a wired criminal justice system wouldn't offer justice. And not far behind him, the whites who first tried to lynch the accused, then used the crime to burn out any blacks who were even slightly successful compared to the whites around them.

Good book about an ugly time.

I've started reading Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides which has tarnished heroes, and villains a-plenty. Oh, it's well-written too!

Finished, and left some thoughts on my thread. This was a very good read.

>78 drneutron: This sounds like a gripping read, wishlisted.

I've just started Once Upon a time which looks at the construction of fairy tales, which include heroes and villains...

(arbitration required?)

>59 jessibud2: Great review! On the list it goes.

>71 benitastrnad: Oh, I wanted to read this book, too!

Just finished Dark Romance of Dian Fossey by Harold T.P. Hayes. I thought it was great. I tried to read Gorillas in the Mist a few years ago but couldn't get into it. I'm almost glad now I skipped it and read this instead.

>82 pizzadj2: funny how that works. Some biographies are better than others.

>82 pizzadj2: I loved Farley Mowat's Woman in the Mists when I read it years ago. Long a fan of Fossey, and dear Digit. I shall put the Hayes book on my list.

I've settled on The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh for this month's read. As a backup (or a second read) I've got The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition by Caroline Alexander. Want to enjoy some heroics; there too much villainy I read about daily.

The Children by David Halberstam.

If lesson number one had been that their numbers were not small because their idea was powerful, then lesson number two was about shedding the most powerful of all feelings — the shame of being black in a white nation which had chosen, as it suppressed its black citizens, to create a philosophy of shame and vulnerability among the very people whom it had suppressed and exploited, saying in effect that it was the victim's fault for turning out to be the victim.

The Children is a masterful overview of The Movement, as the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s came to be known. Halberstam astutely focuses on a group of college students in Nashville who formed the backbone of what became the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and pushed the older, more conservative Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) into challenging segregation with direct action, beginning with lunch-counter sit-ins and ending with the bloody March to Montgomery and voter registration drives across the Deep South.

Many of The Movement's most well-known names got their start in the Nashville group — John Lewis, Marion Barry and James Bevel among them. But Halberstam also shines a light on activists who were lesser-known or completely unknown to me, showing how essential they were to the ultimate success of the struggle. He interweaves chapters exploring the backgrounds of each of these disparate characters and how they came to be in Nashville with direct reporting on the actions they took and the reactions of the white establishment. His writing brought home the very real physical danger that they all faced, and the constant indignities and humiliations that were visited upon them simply for daring to think themselves equal to whites:

It was a bitter evening for both of them. One of the waitresses had come over and said that they did not serve niggers, and when they still did not leave, she returned and poured milk on both of them, and when they still did not leave, she returned one more time and poured hot tea on them. Then, as if to top it off, one of the other employees went in the kitchen and returned with a container of Ajax and poured it on both of them. Then the police came and arrested them both. It was a moment when Gloria Johnson felt an overpowering sense of sadness, not about herself, or about the others who were protesting with her, but instead about the city and the country. Here were the two of them, she thought, graduates of an uncommonly good college, now on their way to becoming doctors, trying to order simple meals in what was not a very fancy restaurant, and being abused and then arrested for it. She wept that day, for her country, not for herself.

One of the most valuable takeaways for me from this book is the reminder that African-American culture is not and never has been a monolith. The activists in the book come from a variety of backgrounds, from financially secure to desperately poor, from the Deep South of Mississippi and Alabama to northern cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. By continuing the book beyond the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — really the signature achievement of The Movement — Halberstam shows how black activism experienced a schism of its own, between those whose ultimate goal was full integration into society and those who advocated for black power and separating themselves from whites. As he follows many of the activists from their 20s into their 50s and beyond, he also shows how their time in The Movement affected them all profoundly even as they moved into the next phases of their lives. Many struggled with depression as they tried to find some other cause or pursuit that would mean as much to them as the civil rights struggle had.

Reading this book in 2017, as voting rights are once again under attack across the country (including right here in Iowa) had particular resonance for me. The stories Halberstam tells in The Children filled me with awe at a group of young people who faced incredible danger and violence — not fearlessly like superheroes, but with fearful conviction in the rightness of their cause, like flawed but focused human beings.

I finished Suffragette: My Own Story by Emmeline Pankhurst. It is a fascinating story. She is shamelessly partial and biased in her reporting of events, but I don't think we can ever avoid that, we just have to be aware. She tells the story mainly of the Women's Social and Political Union, a suffragist organisation which she helped lead, and their militancy. The story stops well before women got the vote, really at the point of declaring a pause in campaigning for the outbreak of the First World War. I would have liked to read her opinions of later times, but I will have to look elsewhere. She died a few weeks before women finally got equal rights with men.

Mrs Pankhurst is definitely a hero despite her lawbreaking tactics. Throughout the book she offers a robust defence of militancy as a means to change an unfair system. There are also favourable comparisons of the women's militancy next to much more violent Irish mens militancy of the same period.

I've started reading A History Of Britain In 21 Women as the last book aroused my interest in the rarely recognised women of history. I still hope to get onto The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks too

>86 rosalita: I'm smacking that right onto my wish list. It sounds wonderful. I heard Bree Newsome speak at the conference I attended in San Antonio last week. She provided a fascinating and energizing insider's view of The Movement in its current state. She was an excellent speaker and I learned a lot; The Children would build that out even more.

March has been a banner month for villains of fiction -

MACBETH (here), Kurtz (DailyLit.com), and Ahab (Obama Read)!

To qualify for this NF Challenger, I also read two Raphael Holinshed books:
CHRONICLES OF ENGLAND, SCOTLAND AND IRELAND (2 of 6):
ENGLAND (1 of 12) WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
and
Shakespeare's Holinshed, edited by Richard Hosley.

These were my first Holinshed readings so I was pretty amazed
at how directly William Shakespeare lifted plots and actual wording.

In CHRONICLES, I found a single connection:
when the armies
and people of Kent surround duke William,
they "bear boughs in their hands."

My only addition to the gazillions of reviews of MACBETH
is to join the wife of MACDUFF to ask him why he left his family
behind when he fled himself so safely away...and why Shakespeare
offered no more insight than Holinshed into this mystery...?

>89 EBT1002: Yay!

I hope it is not too late to join in! Linda (laytonwoman3rd) just told me about this challenge. I am going to read Luck and a Lancaster by Harry Yates for the Heroes & Villains challenge. Harry Yates was a hero BTW. He flew for the RAF during WWII, which makes him a hero in my book.

I read The Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed its Way to Basketball Glory by Lydia Reeder. A story about everyday heroes, Sam Babb and the team of girls from rural and small town Oklahoma who built a stellar 1930-31 basketball team.

>92 alcottacre: Never too late! I'll try to update the book images, but I'm struggling with a few things.

I did finish two of my target books for this challenge, though.

The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes by Zach Dundas was a fun read, if slightly slower than I had hoped for. This was, of course, a non-fiction book about the life of a fictional hero, and how he has led a real existence over the century and more since his debut in the pages of the Strand. The author does a good job of looking at how Holmes so rapidly became a phenomenon, how Conan Doyle was met with opprobrium when he killed him off in his encounter with Moriarty, and how the various new iterations came to be. At Sherlock's "birth", he was a modern man, employing scientific techniques of detection (or what Conan Doyle fondly imagined might be such techniques) but reality soon overtook fiction, and by the time the final books and stories were published, Sherlock was a figure of nostalgia, not forward-looking thinking, stuck in a Victorian era of gaslight and hansom cabs even as the automobile became one of his creator's favorite things (to pursue a love affair...) There's lots of fun stuff here about everything from the fan fiction to TV shows (those Mary Russell novels and Benedict Cumberbatch), and Dundas ties it all back to our fascination with Sherlock -- not to mention Watson, reminding us that it's the partnership and the friendship that makes it all work, and that Sherlock Holmes as a solitary detective just wouldn't work. 4 stars.

Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America’s Maverick Publisher and His Battle against Censorship by Michael Rosenthal is a more serious read about someone whom you'd definitely consider to be a hero if you happen to be a big defender of the first amendment and the freedom to publish, but if you happened to be one of his four ex-wives or someone else who became entangled with him in some kind of dispute (he argued with people and yelled at them), you could well view as a villain, even if a talented visionary one. Barney Rosset bought the Grove Press right after WW2 for a few thousand dollars and turned it into an avant-garde publishing house, famously publishing authors like Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, among many others. (He also had a penchant for Victorian erotica, so Grove had a lot of that happening, too.) Rosset saw no reason why books should be banned as obscene, and fought to overturn decades-old laws that made it illegal to read tomes like Lady Chatterley's Lover (he got the first unexpurgated text published in the US) and Tropic of Cancer, which led to a Supreme Court decision that essentially said that anything that had some redeeming artistic value couldn't be censored. My only problem with this is that the book feels like a brisk canter through his life and the US publishing scene, as if I'm getting all the highlights or the bullet points, but missing a lot of the detail and broader context that would have made it a much richer read. The tome itself is only 200 pages long, so that's probably true. I can't point to what's missing -- but then, I don't know enough to say what I might be missing! Just that there was probably room here to incorporate more about the US literary scene in the 1950s through the 1970s, Grove's glory days, and the focus is very, very narrow. It's good, but I suspect the more you know, the more you'll like this. It's crisp and focused and interesting. 4.15 stars.

I am mid-way into Madiba A to Z and am enjoying it. It gives a different perspective on Mandela, through headings such as Athlete, Bully, Comrade, Diplomat, Eloquent, Forgiveness, etc. Each section is 2-4 or 5 pages long and includes narrative, interviews and a few photos sprinkled throughout. I like it but am currently sitting at the hospital with my mother and am not having the quality time to read straight through as the reading time is frequently interrupted. I will certainly finish it on time though, with no problem.

A gentle reminder that in a week's time I'll want to post the April thread, and in order to do that seamlessly, we should have 150 posts on this one. Thank you, and you may now resume your regularly-schedule book chit-chat!

Well, I have 9 days left two books to finish and two books yet to start and finish. Not sure whether I'll get to my heroes and villains choice. Will see. I might actually start it tomorrow, as I don't have to finish one of the other books this month.

Forgot to say, after >82 pizzadj2: 's enthusiasm, I bought The Dark Romance of Dian Fossey, as she has long been a heroine, so will read that.

>96 Chatterbox: no problem!

>94 Chatterbox: Thanks for letting me know, Suz! I will try and get in early on next month's nonfiction thread :)

A book I read last night had both heroes and villians: A Soldier's Sketchbook. While the young man who kept a journal during his time in the trenches of WWI wasn't a hero in the grand sense, he helped rescue others who were buried after bombing raids.

Anyone else notice a WWI trend in Early Reviewers? I've received two recently, A Soldier's Sketchbook and Innocent Heroes...

I'm afraid I'll end up needing to return March: Book Three before I have a chance to read it, but there's still some hope since they'll sometimes override the one-renew limit when there are no holds (which there somehow don't seem to be, despite all the awards that this book has just won). The problem is that I'm in the middle of another long book. Still, I'll get to this one eventually even if it ends up being in April.

>102 fuzzi: YES! The last couple of months very WWI heavy for sure.

I am setting Giants: the Parallel Lives aside for the moment and having a review of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which will work just as well. I am beginning to suspect Mr. Stauffer of a bit of revisionist thinking. Not that autobiographers don't revise as well, but all the same.

Moving the thread count along . . .

I finished my March book Night by Elie Wiesel. For some reason I struggled finding a book I wanted to read for this challenge - not really sure why.

Night was a good book but not what I would call enjoyable read. For the five of you who have not heard of it, Night is Wiesel's description of his experience in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The names of the camps and the Nazi regime have rightly become synonymous with evil and Wiesel explains exactly why.

Wiesel personal description of what happened to himself, his family and the people he knew is heart rending. Equally traumatizing is the devastation that the concentration camps wrought on Wiesel's psyche. He loses his faith and comes to see his father as a burden to his own survival. I was reminded of a statement in another Holocaust memoir (Maus?) to the effect that none of the survivors of the Holocaust were good people - the truly good and compassionate people did not survive and that survival required a level of ruthlessness and selfishness. There were plenty of villains in the book and few heroes.

I had not realized (until I read the Wikipedia page) that Night is not considered completely non-fiction and that some parts of it may have been fictionalized. I am not sure what to make of that. Wiesel referred to the book as his "deposition." The end result is powerful and damning.

I read Night many years ago Erik. Hadn't heard that there was some fictionalisation.

>105 Oberon: I have been wanting to read Night for a long time, Erik. That's a very nice review — good but not an enjoyable read is well put. I think that's what had me dragging my feet, but I need to just pick it up and read it.

I read Night for the first time last year, and agree it was incredibly powerful stuff. I always assume, when reading a "memoir", that there is some authorial license being taken to present a memory as story. After all, I can not look back on even the most significant events of my life and re-create conversations word for word as they happened, or describe the expressions on people's faces, or even necessarily remember what they were wearing, etc. Those details make a good memoir more "readable", if not always strictly factual.

"Courage and honor and pride, and pity and love of justice and of liberty. They all touch the heart, and what the heart holds to becomes the truth, as far as we know truth." William Faulkner

>108 laytonwoman3rd: That's an interesting and important point about the line we draw between memoir and story -- or that the author draws. When it comes to a Holocaust memoir, I rather assume that there is some creative license, if only because it's technically impossible for someone to keep a journal or something to refer back to for details of conversations, etc. On the other hand, others may keep detailed records of conversations or interactions. How does memory affect/distort the truth, and is there a broader kind of emotional truth at the heart of a memoir like this that exists even if the details aren't absolutely faithful to fact, but do point the reader in the direction of that broader truth and are consistent with the facts? As long as they aren't lies or invented out of whole cloth, and there is value to the memoir as a work, I'm prepared to give the author a bit of a pass. When it comes to something like yet another celeb tell all, however...

>102 fuzzi: There's been a resurgence of interest with the WW1 centenary. I've seen a lot of books published in the UK recently too.

>104 nittnut: >110 eclecticdodo: I was thinking that the 100 years ("centenary") of the US entry into WWI might have something to do with an increase in written works on that theme.

I'm not trying to downplay what went on before the US sent troops, not at all. It was all horrible.

Regarding Night, I've been considering finding a copy to read, as I have Dawn on the shelves. I hate reading out of sequence!

I'm on page 562 of my book, Captain Sir Francis Richard Burton. I figured if I read at least 20 pages a day, I would complete it this month, and so I should in 2 to 3 days.

I'm slowly working my way through The Plantagenets and have just finished with Henry II's reign. He's generally remembered for the death of Thomas Beckett and his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, but he was actually a pretty damn good king by the standards of his time: he gained his throne as much through his ability to make peace as to make war, established a strong system of law and the bureaucracy with which to uphold it, and managed to avoid getting drawn into a Crusade.

>114 amanda4242: I've always admired Henry II. Had it not been that his dysfunctional family situation had consequences for the entire country (neither of his sons were good rulers, setting aside all the mythology about Richard, and that's in part to do with his rift with Eleanor and his inability to find a way to share power/authority), leading to rebellions in which his sons played leading roles, I'd say he was a great king. As it was, I'd say he was probably one of the best of the Plantagenets, up there with early Edward IV and the earlier parts of Edward III's reign, aside from his decision to chase after the French crown and bankrupt the country. (Pity about that one...) Few of the Plantagenets were great human beings, or if they were virtuous, they were bad rulers (Henry VI). Some were great military figures and nasty in victory, like Edward I in both Wales and Scotland. Sigh. Almost makes you look fondly on Henry VII. (nope, not Henry VIII, who was demented.)

I'm galloping through The Dark Romance of Dian Fossey. It is years since I read about her, and the book confirms much of what I learnt before, but there are also some things that weren't in the earlier book. It also confirms that as much as I admire her for what she did for the Mountain Gorilla, that she would be quite a difficult person to be around, especially after her years in relative isolation.

I guess this book fits both Heroes/Heroines and Villains, Fossey and her fellow gorilla protectors certainly the former, and the poachers the latter. Although in some senses, it is hard to be totally judgemental of them. We are talking about a world in which there was very little to sustain people, and although I hate what poachers did to the gorillas, mostly, from their perspective, they were just looking after their families. Now in many developing countries, in order to protect the wildlife, many of the local people are given jobs as protectors and paid for their work, which reduces the need to prey on the wildlife, especially where it is already endangered.

>113 ronincats: Hmmm, I think I'm off to seek out a copy of that. As with Fossey, I have read quite a bit about him, but he inspires me enough to want to read more.

>116 Caroline_McElwee: - I have read much about Fossey and completely agree with everything you have said in this post. I have been a huge fan of *Leakey's Angels* and have heard Jane Goodall and Birute Galdikas speak on more than one occasion. It was after Fossey had died, but their work, separately and collectively, has always fascinated me. Goodall remains a big hero of mine.

I've finished Traitor to His Class and found it very interesting - especially the WWII bits. Admittedly I bogged down a bit in the portion that followed FDR's election to the presidency in 1932, but it picked up again almost immediately. My family pretty much thought of him as the devil incarnate, but after reading this biography I have to say he seems, to me, to have been, on balance, one of the great American presidents. That said, I think I should probably seek out some other books about Roosevelt in hopes of discovering other viewpoints in order to find out if my current feeling about him holds true.

I am making good headway on Luck and a Lancaster, an autobiography written by a former RAF officer detailing his experiences as both a flight instructor and pilot during WWII. Yates does not glamorize the war, nor does he get maudlin or oversentimental about mates he lost during the war or people he just never saw again for whatever reason. I like his straightforward manner.

>117 jessibud2: Thanks Shelley. I saw Jane Goodall give a talk some years ago, and credit her with me taking a mature degree in international studies and environment. I've never heard Birute, though I have her book.

>120 Caroline_McElwee: - If I had to make a judgment, I'd say Birute was leaning more toward Fossey in temperament than toward Goodall, but I don't think she was as extreme. I have her book as well. I also have a book called Walking with the Great Apes by Sy Montgomery. It's about the three of them

>121 jessibud2: I read Walking with the Great Apes several years ago and enjoyed it. I hope you do too.

Helping the thread count....

(1) Jane Goodall spoke at my high school when I was there, and spent the day in biology classes with students. She was wonderful, and I've admired her work and her approach since then.

(2) I've already started my book for April, but will wait for that thread to name it, just to spread the posts out ;-)

I was able to renew my book one more time than I'd expected (without even calling to request an override!), so now I'm confident that I'll actually read it. Maybe not before the end of the month, but I'll read it.

I'm inching closer to the end of my book on Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, almost to the end of the chapter on the Arabian Nights with only two short chapters to follow.

Not that you really need to know that, but doing my bit to up the thread count!

I was going to add my current read Anna and the King of Siam to the challenge, but then realized it's not technically non-fiction, but based upon Anna's writings...oh well.

I'm increasingly thinking that the book I'm reading The Warmth of Other suns is about heroes and villains: of the civil rights movement, plus the ordinary people who had to act like heroes to get out of the South.

ETA Plus all those bigots are the villains of course.

>128 charl08: - Oh, I have had my eye on that one for awhile! Thanks for reminding me

>105 Oberon: Interesting thoughts on Night. I read it a few years ago and was really haunted by the way the expereince dehumanized and made it difficult for Wiesel to think of himself as a good person.

There is always some embroidering on the truth of memoir, but I think in Night's case, it was more than usual. I think Wiesel thought of himself as going with emotional, rather than literal, truth. I had read an article once about how much the book changed between the Yiddish and French translations.

Words Will Break Cement: the Passion of Pussy Riot by Masha Gessen

Before reading this book, I had thought that Pussy Riot was a Punk-Rock group. Actually, not so much, they were more a group of anti-Putin arsty-types who were doing kind of artistic political actions around Moscow. They weren't really musicians, and their membership fluctuated. In 2012, five young women fromt he group entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, and performed a punk prayer, beseeching the Mother of God to chase Putin out. This was a protest of the collusion between the Orthodox Church and Putin. Three of the women were arrested and tried, and two sentenced to spend two years remote prison colonies. This incident captured international attention, and brought attention to Putin's regime and issues of art and free speech.

Gessen's book centers on interviews with the women, their families and associates. It is a fascinating story. In my opinion, it shows that a powerful political action can originated from a disparate and oddly focused group of young women. This action brought them to a global stage and to represent something greater than their selves as individuals, as a voice for freedom and creativity.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

This one was read for my RL book-group, one of the members is a huge Maya Angelou fan, and we got into a discussion about a PBS special on her life, leading to the decision to read this book for March. I read it many, many years ago, so a re-read for me.

Confession: I have never been a fan of Maya Angelou's writing. I still am not. This memoir has a tendency to too much detail; to telling instead of showing, and the writing itself is pedestrian. However, I am still very glad for the reread.

I just cannot give enough kudos for the courage it took to write this book back in 1969, to deal directly with sexual abuse and it's after-effects; with racism, segregation, and how it effected her family. Angelou gives us a picture of her life that is honest, very hard, but also full of grace and triumph.

>131 banjo123: Wishlisted! Sounds just up my street. Thanks Rhonda.

>131 banjo123: That's a group of women on whom opinion is very divided as to whether they are heroes or villains! The place they chose for their protest (an Orthodox cathedral) seems to be the catalyst for a lot of folks to put them in the latter category... I still haven't read this book of Gessen's although I relished her Putin bio, didn't like her book about the Boston marathon bombers all that much, and thought her latest, about Stalin's attempt to create a Jewish homeland in the far wastes of Siberia, was quirky and fascinating, if imperfect. So I clearly should read it.

Will be back when the current migraine decides to leave town.

>134 Chatterbox: sorry to hear about the migraine Suze. Hope it passes soon.

>134 Chatterbox: I am putting them as heroes, but with the caveat that heroes can be imperfect.
Hope the migraine gets better!

I'm way behind on reading and challenges, but I've just started listening to the audiobook of Timothy Egan's latest book The Immortal Irishman about Thomas Meagher.

I met Egan last year when he did a talk at a brewery in Missoula as the book came out. Thomas Meagher was Montana's first governor and is pretty much overlooked and disrespected here in this state. The story Egan told about Meagher's life was eye-opening. I had no idea of his heroic adventures in Ireland, Tasmania, and his leadership of the Irish Brigade in the Civil War.



Statue in front of Montana's Capitol which was subscribed and erected by Irish miners who always felt Meagher was an overlooked hero.

DONE!!



Book #43 Captain Sir Richard Burton: The Secret Agent who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and brought the Arabian Nights to the West by Edward Rice (619 pp.)

I've been working on this nonfiction all month; it's been my bathtub book and I knew that if I read at least 20 pages a day, I'd get it finished within the month. This is a hefty biography of the Victorian-era adventurer. It is no one's fault that the most interesting parts occurred when Burton was in India and the Middle East in his younger days. While his African adventures were prodigious, I think he never was able to assimilate and absorb the cultures there and that rendered his exploits more mundane. Very interesting. I see only one more recent biography, and that a joint biography with his wife by an author who sounds like an apologist for Isabel. That one is 944 pages--I think I'll pass.

Oh, and another BOMB (book off my bookshelf) for the year, my only one this month after such a good start. And this one will be deaccessioned--anyone want it?

>137 streamsong: You are prodding me into reading that -- I've got an ARC that I picked up last year. I love Egan's books and writing.

>138 ronincats: I will take it, Roni, if no one else has spoken for it!

just finished The Dark Romance of Dian Fossey which I really enjoyed, don't really have anything to add to >116 Caroline_McElwee: above.

I did watch a couple of the videos on YouTube to enjoy the joy she had in the gorillas, it really was joy. Thanks >82 pizzadj2: for bringing this book to my attention. I ordered another book by Hayes as well, so you brought me a new author too.

>138 ronincats: if you are talking about A Rage to Live, it's a wonderful book about a rich and complicated relationship, and I loved it. But maybe not straight after reading the tome you just read.

Just adding a post to bring us closer to 150...

I will add one too. I have been following and greatly enjoying the book talk here.

I'm going to overrun the month again. I'm nearing the end of A History Of Britain In 21 Women (mostly heroes), and only about a third of the way through The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks (shocking villainy in some of the characters, though largely seen as acceptable in the time).

I've really enjoyed this theme. Susan posted a link to a list of memoirs and bios of women, with stacks that I want to get my hands on. Is it too early to ask for a rerun next year? I want to read Hidden figures of course, and Irena’s Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

http://bookriot.com/2017/03/24/100-biographiesmemoirs-of-remarkable-women/

Ah, in looking over what I finished reading in March, I have another to add to the list, Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill. It was meant for my February book club meeting, but it took me well into March to finish it. Sometimes, when I am reading a book that's not the one I plan to read for a challenge, it escapes me that my current read may also fit. :-)

I've finished The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which was good. It was not that I learned anything very new, but it's a good read. It's a shame we didn't have to read this in school when we studied westward expansion and the civil war. I think his post-slavery life was very interesting and I will be looking for more to read on that soon.

>147 streamsong: How was Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill? Did you like it?

And I'll just make it 150. *grin*

Good heavens! No prodding on my part required!! :-)

OK, the April thread is up and running, ready for early birds.

>149 nittnut: Hi Jenn! Yes, I did like it. I'm pretty backward on British history and especially Churchill's career, so I learned a lot. Clementine did not have the prominent public role that Eleanor Roosevelt did, but influenced Churchill by smoothing things for him socially to further his politics as well as being involved in home front concerns during WWII and aid to Russia before the Iron Curtain slammed down. Several members of the book club had read quite a bit on Churchill, and they gave it thumbs up, too.

I finished my book for this month's topic! Heart in the Right Place is a memoir by the daughter of a family doctor here in the Knoxville area. After her mother's heart attack, the author left her job as an attorney for a Senate committee to run her father's medical practice so he could continue to work. He was the only doctor in a community in one of the rural parts of my county, and many of his patients either didn't have insurance or didn't trust specialists. He charged only what his patients could pay, and he often treated patients for free, or paid for their treatments from his own pocket. (Sometimes the patient would owe him a favor. For instance, he didn't charge a patient who had him X-ray his pet goat to see if his leg was broken, but he later asked this patient to dynamite some tree stumps on his property since the patient worked with dynamite as part of his job.) I loved this book, and it's a fair representation of this area.

I read two heroic stories for the March challenge: The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh and The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition by Caroline Alexander.

 

The Spirit of St. Louis was published in 1953, 26 years after Lindbergh's non-stop flight from NY to Paris. I believe he'd written two previous books about this flight. This book won him the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1954.

Lindbergh begins his story in Fall 1927, as he's flying air mail from St. Louis to Chicago in rebuilt WWI biplanes, in all sorts of weather. When the challenge of making a flight no one has yet accomplished takes hold, he solicits--and receives--more financial support than he expected. He had a well-defined image of the plane he wanted for the flight, and when he couldn't find it, he hired a small manufacturer in San Diego that designed and built it. In only a couple of months. He flew this new plane non-stop to St. Louis, 14 hours, his first night-flight. St. Louis to Long Island was another non-stop.

Then the big challenge. And big success.

Lindbergh packed a lot into this book. The long flight is interspersed with flashbacks to his childhood, his education, his training as a flier, and stories of his days barnstorming the midwest--giving folks their first airplane ride over their hometowns or farms, performing aerobatics, doing deviltry like wing-walking and parachute jumps. By including his flight logs, you learn that in the first few hours of the flight, passing over New England, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, his altitude seldom exceeded 500 feet. He used road maps to help locate landmarks and keep him on course. As he crossed the North Atlantic, in contrast, he soared to as much as 10,000 feet to avoid cloud cover and fog. Over the ocean, he had to rely on compass readings and mental calculations to adjust for estimated wind drift to navigate. The plane's airspeed never topped 110 mph.

Heroics, you learn, are less about surviving daring-do than about careful, through planning, calculating the risks, knowing yourself and what you are capable of. Lindbergh did all that. A single-engine (two or three would simply require more fuel), a solitary pilot (extra bodies are extra weight), a no-frills craft with enormous fuel capacity. Entertaining and informative.

Shackleton and his team in the next post...

I just finished a book by a new hero of mine!



Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit (160 pp.)

Several people have had this book mentioned on their threads and I'm not sure who stimulated my hold on this book from the library, but this woman is one of my new heroes. I'm going to buy this book for my great niece who is 14 and read The Handmaid's Tale in her English class this fall. Solnit's essay on Virginia Woolf was the most outstanding for me, but her ability to take the broad view on women as people and to endure the trolls on the internet are what impressed me overall. Thanks to whoever put this on my horizon--it was an excellent read.

Coincidentally, I just received notice that I won the following book from Early Reviewers for this month:
Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong And the New Research That's Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini

I finished A History Of Britain In 21 Women by Jenni Murray



The women covered are: Boadicea, Queen Elizabeth 1, Aphra Behn, Caroline Herschel, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Mary Somerville, Mary Seacole, Ada Lovelace, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Emmeline Pankhurst, Ethel Smyth, Constance Markievicz, Gwen John, Nancy Astor, Barbara Castle, Margaret Thatcher, Mary Quant, and Nicola Sturgeon.

The author seeks to redress the male dominated balance in most history books and educational curricula. Most of the women are heroes, and even Thatcher has her redeeming features. All the women have broken new ground for the rights of women. Because they are presented in chronological order, the author really does build up a good picture of the history of Britain, but only over the last several hundred years (Boadicea is out on a limb in the first century).

It really was very interesting.

>156 ronincats: I really enjoyed that book too Roni, and you are right, the Woolf essay is stand out. I've read one of her other books too.

I finished both James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time on audio, as well as Madiba A to Z and will try to write up my reviews later tonight. I will be travelling out of town on Thursday and will be attending a book launch event tomorrow evening so my time will be limited but I will try.

>156 ronincats:, I read that late last year, Roni, and loved it. The mansplaining essay was a standout, even though it wasn't about the term, but ended up coining it! She has a precision to her arguments that is wonderful and I kind of see her as an heir to Woolf, when she focuses on literary and related arguments. When she heads off in the direction of politics, I sometimes throw up my hands, as the elegance of the argument sometimes overshadows a lack of knowledge of some of the facts (or she'll start from a POV of what she thinks is the most desired outcome, which can be frustrating, for me as a reader, given my dislike for polemics of any stripe) but on anything non-polemical, I think she's brilliant. A Paradise Built in Hell is fascinating, even if some of it, I fear, is wishful thinking.

Charles Lindbergh could qualify as BOTH Hero and Villain.

>161 m.belljackson: Both hero and villain he was, but this book dealt with his heroics

It still is march so I can still add a book I'm reading, very slowly, but that does fit here very well:

I dream a world: portraits of black women who changed America

>163 EllaTim: I have had that book for many years, and it is precious.

Hi Caroline, I think so too. Beautiful pictures. The interviews/portraits are very interesting, and as the book is a bit older now, there are some women portrayed who are really famous, and deserve to be called heroes, like Rosa Parks.

 

The heroics of the expedition chronicled in The Endurance extended from the expedition leader, Sir Ernest Shackleton, to its lowest-ranking team member (who surely would be Perce Blackborow, a stowaway). Twenty-eight men sailed aboard a wooden-hulled, three-masted steamship, named the Endurance, from the southernmost outpost of civilization--a whaling station on South Georgia Island--toward Antarctica. The intention was to land members of an expeditionary team that would traverse the continent and be picked up by a second ship.

Ah, but the Endurance never made landfall. Two days after leaving port, 7 Dec 1914, near the southern hemisphere's summer solstice, the ship encountered the Antarctic ice pack. Of course, once the Endurance sailed it lost all contact with civilization: no radio communication, no homing pigeons, no semaphore, no smoke signals. No one would be looking for the Endurance, either. The expedition was on its own.

For a month, the ship struggled through the ice, working its way south, closer to its intended landfall. But on 18 Jan 1915 the ice seized the Endurance, never to let her go. For ten months, the Endurance drifted with the ice pack. On 27 Oct 1915, pressure of the ice crushed the ship's hull, forcing all aboard onto the ice. The team did have almost a month to unload and salvage whatever they could; 21 Nov 1915, the ship sank. The next four months were spent on the ice, still drifting. And drifting to an extent that the team, on Shackleton's order, destroyed all the sledge dogs, fit everything they could into the three lifeboats salvaged from the Endurance and sailed to tiny Elephant Island. For the first time in more than a year, the men set their feet on solid ground. But they were far from safe. It would be another four months until they were rescued and returned to civilization.

The remarkable thing was that all 28 men survived. Stuck in perpetual winter from January 1915 through August 1916, sheltering in tents in the open during blizzards with high winds and negative double-digit temps. Everything wet—sleeping bags, clothing, boots. Shackleton selected his team members astutely and kept all hands occupied every day. He earned the respect and admiration of every man. And just as important, the men trusted and respected each other, followed orders, worked to the best of their abilities. Yes, personalities clashed; some guys were difficult, irritable and Shackleton managed to single these fellows out and minimize their contact with their principal antagonists (a tough job in such a confined environment). Together, they survived.

Here's a link to my thread. The book includes more than 150 photos of the expedition taken by Frank Hurley. I've posted a few of them, with the book's captions, here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/250357#5992309

I managed to be within 10 pages of the end of Martha, Inc. by Christopher M. Byron so I am going to go ahead and tell you guys about it. Byron makes Martha Stewart, who is one of my heroines, into a villian. He believes that every thing that is known about Martha Stewart is a lie or at best a half-truth. Martha Stewart has made enemies of all her close friends, and her daughter. Only a few of her family members remain loyal to her.

I am not sure whether to believe this or not. The book is not a screed, and it does tell about the good things that Martha Stewart has done. The author also gives her great credit for her business acumen and her ruthless negotiation powers that allowed her to become so wealthy. He also gives her credit for having the cultural insight that home and do-it-yourself, was going to become part of the lives of millions of people. The sharp business skills and her instincts combined to make her wealthy. The author also gives her credit for always, always polishing her public personification and at one point in the book he tells about Martha sharply reprimanding the CEO of K-Mart telling him that "SHE" was the image of Martha Stewart Omnimedia and K-Mart would not be allowed to tarnish her image without legal and financial consequences. Basically the author believes that Martha Stewart is a control freak. I believe that if she were a man she would be admired for that trait, but since she is a woman she is a controlling b___h.

This book was written before Martha Stewart went to prison and before she rehabilitated her image from that. I would like to read another book about her that is more up-to-date but the author of Martha, Inc doesn't believe that any author will be allowed to write an unfettered biography of her. All-in-all, this was a fascinating look at a woman who became a celebrity, a business mogul, and a cultural icon.

I dragged myself through the rest of Giants: the Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I think the author does a decent job showing the very contradictory attitudes of the politicians of the day, including, occasionally, Abraham Lincoln. Even among abolitionists, there was a definite attitude of superiority and patronage toward black people. What was really interesting was seeing the evolution of Lincoln from someone who did not see blacks as equal to someone who would treat Frederick Douglass as an equal and a valued advisor. The author also does well with his depiction of the life Douglass led as a slave. Even when he had what would have been considered a Kind master, he was not free to worship, to learn, to choose how to use his time, or to keep the money he earned.
On the other hand, Mr. Stauffer is definitely writing with modern day lenses, which color his conclusions. This is not to say that his conclusions are incorrect, but he sometimes sounds a little smug about it, and most annoyingly, he also enters into some rampant speculation about the personal relationships of both Mr. Douglass and Mr. Lincoln. While it may be a fascinating academic exercise to speculate about the meaning of words used, relationships between, and letters written, I felt that this part of the book was self-indulgent and it nearly put me off finishing at all. Overall, it was an OK read, but I think there are better books about Douglass and Lincoln.

> 162 weird_O Charles Lindbergh was a hero to me when I was a kid and so I was happy when one of my 4th grade students chose him for a Wisconsin Historical Person. Though the connection to our state wasn't a lengthy one, she was enthused.

To keep up with her research, I started to collect articles to add to the Lindbergh file and was surprised enough not to believe the first of the latest developments that I read.
It got depressing and yes, I did not add this discovery to her report. Other adults also stayed quiet.

>169 m.belljackson: You mean his three subsidiary families in Austria and Bavaria? Can't dodge DNA evidence.

> 170 weird_O >

No, that had me sad for Anne Morrow Lindbergh and for the kids from all the families.

His sympathy for Nazis is what I'll never comprehend.

With Henry Ford, I could react by never buying a Ford, but with Lindbergh, there is still
this feeling that I'm missing something...feet of clay doesn't begin to cover it.

I have read a few books by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and 4 books by their youngest daughter Reeve (who is a beautiful writer, by the way). Reeve talks about how at odds her father's politics were with the man she knew at home (and with her own beliefs), though being the youngest of their 5 children, she obviously didn't know him in the same ways as her older siblings. I also have a difficult time understanding his political leanings. His wife certainly didn't seem to share them, as far as I could tell.

> 172 jessibud Gifts from the Sea is the only Anne Morrow Lindbergh book I have read and it was filled with deep compassion. Did she know about her husband's other families and political views?
I think they stayed together until his death.

I finished Luck and a Lancaster last night. The book is an excellent telling of one man's experiences during WWII. The author does not skip over the tragedies of the war, the young men lost, or even some of the controversies - the bombing of Le Havre, for instance. One of my favorite sections of the book is close to the end when the author discusses three aspects of a tour, each of which had a 'potentially lethal weakness.' The first aspect is naivety, the second complacency, and the third was staleness, all of which he called 'killers in their own right.' He goes on to say that 'the cruelest was naivety, but the most undeserved was the business of going stale, like old bread.'

I've finally finished The Plantagenets, which I enjoyed. The dynasty wasn't overly burdened with likable people, but they did achieve many great things and leave an indelible mark on the country.

>163 EllaTim: I would note that I hope that these are rolling challenges, so if you're still reading books that fit in here -- or want to pick one up now -- keep on going, and by all means keep this thread going! Those of us who are interested will still be checking in and will keep it alive! The whole idea (given that many non-fiction books can be lengthy or require more than a month to finish given their complexity) is that you should all feel able to keep going, and not have to shift gears abruptly at the end of a month, if you'd rather not. By all means keep going here, even if you line up a book for April's theme to take a look at when you finish. There are no rules, and I'm not going to come after you with heavy weaponry... :-)

#176
I will add that since I have started participating in Suzanne's challenges she has NOT come after me with heavy weaponary, even though it is often taken me months to get through some books.

Suzanne is correct when she says that non-fiction books can be lengthy and complex. This means that they are going to take longer than a month to finish. In the case of these challenges the race is not the object. Just starting and exploring is more important.

I finished Zhukov recently. I don't have much to say about it, really, from a hero or villain standpoint. Zhukov was roughly the equivalent of Eisenhower in rank and power, but with more of a battlefield presence than Ike. He was moved around from trouble spot to problem area by Stalin with a surprising regularity.

He was certainly a hero to the Russian people during and after WWII, and a villain to some of the soviet politicians who feared the army on the grounds that they may some day take over the government. We should probably put him in the hero category here in the United States since he was a major factor in the Russian repulsion of the German forces from Moscow and the ending of the war by the meeting of Allied forces in Berlin. You could argue all day about the German ability to supply itself if they had indeed conquered Moscow and the inevitability of German defeat in the East, though. So it goes, I guess.

Interesting fact wise, he was made a 'non-person' twice after the war. Once by Stalin for usurping Uncle Joe's glory after the victory in Berlin, and again in the late 1950's by Khrushchev. The latter was because of the stereotypical Soviet paranoia Khrushchev had about his hold on power, not so much that Zhukov would steal power, but that some rival would use the aura of Zhukov as leverage to topple Khrushchev. I thought that was an interesting observation by the author worth passing on.

#178
Fascinating. Zhukov is a major general of World War II about who most Americans are unaware. He was a military genius of the first order and there isn't much about him out there. I had hoped that with the fall of the Communist regime in the 1990's that archives would open up and more would be written about it. That didn't happen. I wonder if suppression of his record and abilities is still happening today for the same reasons as it did in the 1950's?

This is just about the pinnacle of English biography for Zhukov, as far as i know. It is an older book that was updated with recently (late 1990's) un-redaction, if that is a word, of the original sources. It's​ always hard to trust Russian official documents. The author made several references to variance in the records, a well as comparing different versions of Zhukov's autobiography for consistency. In fact, the main thrust of the revision of the book was to incorporate as much of the declassified material as possible.

He is definitely overlooked in the more popular general audience histories, which is a shame.

I finished The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

I'm struggling to think today so can't say much about it. However, it is an excellent book, and a story that needs to be told. I was sort of expecting there to be a villain in the story, but the impression I've come away with is more that the system was so broken at the time, and outrageous racism and lack of medical ethics were so common, that those involved simply didn't think about the consequences of their actions. It is appalling to read that her family is in such a poor state in the 21st century, but what is worse is to realise these sorts of situations are commonplace. The legacy of segregation is alive an well.

oops put it in the wrong place....now corrected!

I couldn't think of a hero that I wanted to read about for the challenge but I knew which villain would fit the bill as I have a small collect of books about Jack the Ripper. The Jack the Ripper Whitechapel Murders was about the research that Andy & Sue Parlour have done about this fascinating history. It was one of the better books I have read about this subject.