What are you reading the week of May 11, 2024?

I got sick mid-week and spent two days in bed, so I'm only about a third of the way through Illia Ponomarenko's I Will Show You How it Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv. Ponomarenko is a gifted journalist who's work I've followed throughout the war. This is a very personal view of life in Kyiv during the run up to the war and the Battle of Kyiv. Ponomarenko takes you along as he walks through the city showing you sights and sounds of a city that he obviously loves very much. You can't help but grow to love the city right along with him.

I've just begun a baseball history, The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff by Thomas Kiernan, about the 1951 National League pennant race between the Dodgers and Giants.

Have just started Conquering the Pacific. Will follow up with The Atlas Complex and The British Pacific Fleet.

Continuing this audio novel via Libby ~

Becoming Madam Secretary
by Stephanie Dray

I'm still reading Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal, but I'm closing in on the end. I'm loving all elements of the story and am looking forward to seeing how everything is resolved.

The Tuscan Child – Rhys Bowen
3***

Bowen uses the ubiquitous dual timeline to tell this story that spans three decades: 1944 to 1973. Joanna finds some papers among her late father’s effects that indicate he had a love affair with a woman in Italy while serving as an RAF pilot in WW2. Sir Hugo’s estate has previously been sold and he’s been living in the gardener’s lodge while teaching art at the school that has purchased the estate. He has very little to leave his daughter, but the love letter she finds references “our beautiful boy.” Could she have a Tuscan half-sibling? Joanna feels compelled to travel to the area where her father’s plane went down to find his lost love, Sofia, and to get answers to what really happened during the war.

This was a fun fast read with some intrigue to go along with the romance. I loved all the references to food (and definitely want to try to re-create some of those regional dishes that featured so prominently). The conclusion seems a little rushed and too pat for my tastes. But I still enjoyed the book.

One Italian Summer – Rebecca Serle
3***

Katy has always been very close to her mother, Carol, and when her mother dies Katy is left feeling alone, abandoned and lost. Who will tell her what restaurant to go to? Who will decorate her house? Who will make holidays special? At her husband’s suggestion, Katy decides to take the trip to Italy she and Carol had planned. Once in Positano, however, Katy comes across a woman SO like her mother, she’s completely caught off guard.

I was fine with this story at the outset, though I thought Katy was very immature for a woman who is thirty. She acted so much like a teenager, voicing a desire to be independent and make her own decisions, but still reliant on her mother to cook, clean, furnish the house, give her permission to go somewhere, etc.

But the tale took a decidedly odd turn about two-thirds of the way through when it’s revealed that Katy has actually time-traveled back to an era when her mother visited the same village. And I felt the ending was pat and rushed.

It held my attention, and it was a relatively fast read. But I’m not sure I’d recommend it.

Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League
Lyndsey D'Arcangelo
3/5 stars
Interesting book about the National Women's Football League and the ups and downs of women playing professional football.

I finished Animal Farm, an allegorical story depicting the deterioration of an egalitarian ideal society. In this story it was the pig's superior intelligence that fed their egos which led to a collapse into a stratified society of haves and have nots. The story was quite obvious with few nuances.

Surely You Can’t Be Serious – David Zucker, Jim Abrahams & Jerry Zucker
3***

Subtitle: The True Story of Airplane!

Yes, I saw the surprise comedy blockbuster movie when it first came out. I remember little about it. I laughed and thought some bits were really hilarious (Mrs Cleaver as the translator!), but I also thought that much of the humor was juvenile and typical of middle-school boys.

This is the creators’ memoir of how they came to think of the parody, and their (often naïve) efforts to get it written, produced, cast, made and distributed.

The format is a series of snippets of interviews / memories of not only the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams, but also of actors, technicians, and support staff who worked on the film, and a variety of famous people who reacted to the movie when they saw it.

The book is full of photos from the movie, occasionally with captions of dialogue from the scene depicted.

The ZAZ team is from a suburb of Milwaukee, and they recently reappeared in our city for the launch of this book. In fact, one of my friends now owns the house in which the Zucker brothers lived through their teen years.

I finished The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff by Thomas Kiernan. This one's more or less for baseball fans only, as it is a history of the famous National League pennant race when the New York Giants made up a 13 1/2 game deficit over the last 6 weeks of the season to catch the Brooklyn Dodgers and force a playoff series that was decided in most dramatic fashion. The second half of the book is comprised of interviews with most of the principle members of that Giants team and many of the conversations get at the dynamics of team sports in general. I am away from home right now, visiting family, and will post a review in the usual spots upon my return.

I've just started Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston. Originally published in 1938, this is Hurston's work of travelogue/anthroplogy I've not read anything of Hurston's except Their Eyes Were Watching God, so I'm very much looking forward to this.

Vanderbilt – Anderson Cooper & Katherine Howe
Book on CD read by Anderson Cooper
3.5***

Subtitle: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

Cooper, the son of “the last Vanderbilt” (Gloria Vanderbilt), and a trained journalist, looks at the family legacy in this work of nonfiction.

There have been many books written about this uber wealthy family of the gilded age. Usually, the books have focused on one or two of the generations from Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt to his children and grandchildren. Cooper tries to encapsulate the history of his family in its entirety.

Unfortunately, there is so much information about the family that we get only glimpses of some of the more colorful members. His focus seems to be on how the Commodore accumulated so much wealth (and why doing so was so all-encompassing for him), and how his descendants managed to squander it all away.

Dysfunctional family with a capital ‘D’! The rich ARE different. He spends some time countering the book (and TV miniseries) made about his mother, Little Gloria, Happy At Last, relating the “true story” behind some of the dramatized scenes.

On the whole, it held my attention, and I learned a few tidbits I hadn’t previously come across.

The text comes with many photos. The ones printed in the center of the book all have captions, but the photos on the front and back cover, and on the front and back endpapers have no captions, so the reader is left to puzzle out who these people might be.

Cooper does a fine job of reading the book. He is, after all, invested in the story.

The new thread is up over here.