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Book Reviews


The Hunger Angel. Herta Müller (translated by Philip Boehm), Metropolitan Books, 2012, $26.00, hard cover, 290pp, 9780805093018

The fact that this book's German title, Atemschaukel, translates as something like "Breath Swing," while the British edition is titled Everything I Possess I carry With Me, and the American edition is called The Hunger Angel, says something about the elusiveness of this grim, hallucinatory, plotless and introspective novel. Much of it reads like the ravings of a lunatic: which is certainly intentional because the protagonist, a German youth imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp in the 1940s, is driven mad by bunger. The 'hunger angel' of the title is a kind of ghostly presence—the personification of starvation—that, waking or sleeping, haunts the narrator and all of his maimed and broken fellow prisoners. (It is based on the reminiscences of a number of survivors including the author's mother.) A brief quotation will give the flavor: "And the hunger angel flies as well. He is in the coal, in the heart-shovel, in your joints. He knows that nothing warms the whole body more than the very shoveling that that wears it down...We weren't sure whether there was one hunger angel for all of us or each one had his own..." If this is your cup of tea, there are 290 pages of it. Needless to say, it helped earn Muller the Nobel Prize for literature. Let us hope, at least, that Steven Spielberg never makes a movie of it.

[Reproduced with permission from Historical Novels Review]


Sacred Treason. James Forrester, Sourcebooks, 2012, $14.99, trade pb, 462pp, 9781402272660

This is the first volume in a proposed trilogy of political thrillers set in Elizabethan England. The protagonist, William Harley, although a Catholic under a fanatically Protestant regime, holds an honorable position in the state as Clarenceux King of Arms. This precarious balancing act is upset one night when a Catholic acquaintance, Henry Machyn, entrusts a secret chronicle to him. Machyn is soon afterward tortured to death by the "Queen's spymaster," the implacable Francis Walsingham. The chronicle, it turns out, conceals a coded message which points at evidence that Elizabeth was not fathered by Henry VIII and therefore has no claim to the throne. Harley and Machyn's widow Rebecca flee London with Walsingham's brutal henchmen hot on their heels. Through a series of grueling days and nights, with one narrow escape after another, Harley and Rebecca are inevitably drawn to one another. It all ends in a rousing chase and a duel in which Harley, a gentle, peaceful man, finds his back to the wall.

I discovered only after finishing the book that Forrester is the pen name of Ian Mortimer, a scholar of English history, whose delightful Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England I reviewed here some two years ago. He writes well and fills the novel's background with lots of convincing period detail. The book concludes with quite a scholarly author's note. The Machyn Chronicle is a real document, which one can view online, although the handwriting, I found, is all but indecipherable. I recommend the novel and look forward to its sequel. (One complaint: the paperback copy I was given completely fell apart before I was halfway through it. Hopefully, the publisher will correct this defect.)

[Reproduced with permission from Historical Novels Review]


Every Man For Himself. Beryl Bainbridge, Europa, 2012, $16.00, paper, 208pp, 978-1-60945-076-2

This is a fictionalized account of the sinking of the Titanic, originally published in 1996 and now reissued, as have been so many other books on the subject, to coincide with the centenary of the disaster. Beryl Bainbridge was a distinguished writer and this book either won, or was a finalist for, a number of prestigious awards. It is with some diffidence, then, that I confess that I didn't like it. The book is nine-tenths over before the ship hits the iceberg and I found myself increasingly impatient with the convoluted relationships of a cast of fictitious characters whom I could neither believe in nor care about—despite the fact that they are all doomed but don't know it. The first-person narrator is a callow young American who is born and raised in poverty until it is discovered somehow that he is related to millionaire J. P. Morgan. His fellow passengers include a caricatured Jewish tailor, an international man of mystery, an opera diva with a dark past, and a number of interchangeable bright young things. How much more interesting were the real passengers—the Astors, Strauses, and Gugenheims—who here only flit through the background! And when the catastrophe does finally occur, the narrative is, to my ear anyway, surprisingly flat. This is, in my humble opinion, a book to forget about the Night to Remember.

[Reproduced with permission from Historical Novels Review]


Memoirs of a Breton Peasant. Jean-Marie Déguignet (translated from the French by Linda Asher), Seven Stories Press, 2004, $19.95, pbk, 431 pp, 978-1-60980-346-9

In the 1970's, a handwritten manuscript of some four thousand pages (of which only a small portion was previously known) came to light in the city of Quimper, Brittany. They constitute the memoirs of a remarkable man: Jean-Marie Déguignet (1834-1905). The present translation is a tightly edited version of that manuscript. This peasant, born in abject poverty and raised amid the ignorance and superstition (his words) of rural Breton society, grew into a self-educated, questioning, free-thinking, anti-clerical, misogynistic, socialist cynic who was successively a beggar, cowherd, soldier, traveler, farmer, insurance salesman, shopkeeper, outcast, and, finally, derelict. How he happened to take such a different path from his peasant countrymen, he himself ascribed to having been kicked in the head by a horse at the age of nine! Whatever the cause, this intelligent, angry man, who never missed an opportunity to denounce a priest or a politician (or an in-law), has left us a fascinating account of a truly unique personal story. I would like to have known him.

[Reproduced with permission from Historical Novels Review]


A Spark of Death. Bernadette Pajer, Poisoned Pen Press, 2011, $14.95, pb, 210 pp, 9781590589076

Pajer's debut novel, the first in a proposed series, introduces us to an unlikely sleuth. Benjamin Bradshaw is a professor of electrical engineering in turn-of-the-century Seattle—a time when electricity was still an exciting, and potentially lethal, novelty. Bradshaw's colleague, an insufferably arrogant pedant, is found electrocuted inside the Faraday Cage of an Electrical Machine and the police think Bradshaw did it. The professor must find the real killer (a disgruntled student? a neglected wife? an anarchist?) while coping with the pain of his wife's recent suicide and opening his heart to a new possible love interest in the person of Missouri, a charming young lady who appears on his porch one day. The setting is nicely evoked, the electrical theory seems to make sense (though I'm no expert), and Bradshaw emerges as a sympathetic, if rather stiff, protagonist. I look forward to his further adventures.

[Reproduced with permission from Historical Novels Review]


Among the Wonderful. Stacy Carlson, Steerforth Press, 2011, $24.99, hard cover, 464 pp, 978-1-58642-184-7

This beautifully written literary novel takes us inside the strange, claustrophobic world of P. T. Barnum's Museum of Wonders--that is, strange animals and even stranger humans—in 1840s New York. Carlson unfolds the stories of her two protagonists—an eight foot tall giantess and an elderly taxidermist—in alternating sections, which read almost like separate interleaved novellas because she chooses not to bring the two together at all until the surprising and moving climax. An equally odd choice is that Barnum, himself, is almost entirely absent from the book (and when he does finally appear is rather one-dimensional). The taxidermist, Emile Guillaudeu, is an unhappy widower who has devoted his life and skills to rendering nature and making it comprehensible to ordinary folk. But he finds, to his dismay, that his devotion to science is scorned by the crassly exhibitionistic Barnum. However, the novel really belongs to Ana, who speaks to us in the first person. Loathing herself and those who pay to gawk at her, in constant pain, and living under the shadow of an early death, she is, nevertheless, insightful, good-hearted, full of dark humor, and, at the end, selflessly heroic. This novel explores the antitheses of reality and illusion, normal and abnormal, spectator and spectacle. It will give readers much to think about and leave them with indelible impressions of a (thankfully) vanished world.

[Reproduced with permission from Historical Novels Review]


In the Garden of Beasts. Erik Larson, Crown, 2011, $26.00, hb, 448 pp, 978-0-307-40884-6

"Once, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart of Hitler's Berlin." So begins Erik Larson's biographical study of William Dodd, U. S. ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1936, and his flamboyant, impulsive daughter Martha.

Dodd was Roosevelt's fifth choice for the post and ill-suited to it. A mild-mannered history professor raised in a poor Southern family, he lacked the wealth, the pedigree, and the political connections of his State Department colleagues. (He also lacked their bent toward anti-Semitism and isolationism.) They eventually brought him down.

But the real interest in this book is Martha. An attractive twenty-four year old, she was ready for adventure, and Berlin thrilled her. Larson (The Devil in the White City) vividly evokes the city's glitter, excitement, and spreading violence. Martha plunged into a whirlwind of parties, night life, and astonishingly risky love affairs: first with Gestapo chief Rudolph Diels and then, as her enthusiasm for the Nazis cooled, with a handsome Russian NKVD agent. To all of this her overworked father remained oblivious. Dodd died in 1940, all but forgotten on his little Appalachian farm. Martha lived until 1990, an exile in Prague, a woman without a country.

Both as political history and as a study in human nature Larson's book is well worth reading.

[Reproduced with permission from Historical Novels Review]


Cleopatra's Daughter. Michelle Moran, Crown, 2009, $25.00 US, $29.95 Can, hb, 488 pp, 978-0-30740912-6

In 30 BC, after the defeat and suicide of Antony and Cleopatra, their twin children, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, then about twelve years old, were taken to Rome as captives by Octavian (the future emperor Augustus). The boy thereafter disappears from history. Selene, the heroine of this novel, was raised in Augustus's household and was eventually married off to Juba, the client king of Mauretania. And that is about all we know. Out of these scant materials, Moran has attempted a fictional biography. The novel, however, is a disappointment.

We are asked to believe, for example, that the young Selene has such a prodigious gift for architectural drawing that she is taken on as an assistant by the great Vitruvius, with whom she helps design the Pantheon (!). Then there is the love triangle, involving Selene with Augustus's bitchy daughter Julia and his handsome nephew Marcellus, in what reads like an offering from Gossip Girls, except that here raging hormones are reduced to limp and repetitious dialogue. (There is a lot of shopping.)

Add to this, a subplot in which a mysterious Robin Hood-like figure, calling himself the Red Eagle, darts about the city freeing slaves. It won't be giving away too much to say that his identity, when revealed, is historically preposterous.

The novel is further marred by misinformation and errors in Latin. To mention only a few examples: Selene did not have the blood of Alexander the Great in her veins; her shock at Roman infanticide is uncalled for (the practice was just as common in Hellenistic Egypt); actum, the word used repeatedly for the Red Eagle's proclamations, does not have this meaning (the correct word is libellus); the celebratory shout at Roman weddings was Thalassio, not thalassa (a Greek word meaning 'sea'); and finally—students of Latin be prepared to wince—'pleb' is not the singular of plebs.

All this could be forgiven if the story itself were compelling enough. It isn't.

[Reproduced with permission from Historical Novels Review]


SPQR XII: Oracle Of The Dead. John Maddox Roberts, St. Martin's Minotaur, 2008, $24.95/ $27.95 Can., hb, 240 pp, 9780312380939

In this, the twelfth of Roberts' Roman mystery series featuring his sleuth Decius Caecilius Metellus, Italy is on the brink of civil war. Decius, who is serving his year as praetor (judge), decides to escape the tensions of Rome and tour the resort towns of Campania, doing a little judging and a lot of relaxing. But Campania too is in a ferment of political and ethnic strife. This comes to a head when the priests of a local temple of Apollo are found murdered and suspicion falls on the black-robed priestesses of Hecate, who utter prophecies to the credulous peasantry in a Stygian chamber beneath the temple. As Decius investigates, the bodies pile up and he too narrowly escapes death.

Roberts serves up a large helping of historical background (sometimes, one feels, almost too much) and is very informative about the curiosa of Roman religion. The plot is well-paced and neatly resolved. For this reader, the book is marred only by dialogue that that strikes the ear as rather too modern and slangy.

[Reproduced with permission from Historical Novels Review]


In the Grip of the Minotaur

Farnham Bishop and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur. Black Dog Books, $19.95, pb 194 pp. ISBN 978-1-928-61998-7

The story is set in the Bronze Age Mediterranean, where king Minos rules the sea with his fleet and terrorizes his enemies with the threat of feeding them to the Minotaur. Troy, ruled by the pusillanimous king Dardanus, is a tributary state on the edge of the Cretan empire. Into this world sails Ragnarr, prince of the Swedish Goths, on a trading mission to Troy. Ragnarr is big, blond, handsome, chivalrous, and fearless in battle -- a precursor to Conan the Barbarian with a dash of Sir Galahad. As the story progresses, he is loved by two beautiful princesses - the winsome Ilia of Troy and the proud, headstrong Ariadne of Knossos. Entanglements ensue, with Ragnarr always struggling to do the right thing by both ladies. The story culminates with the Goths burning, Knossos to the ground (while being careful not to "dishonor" the women).

The book is a charming antique. Written by two young Americans who were Harvard roommates, and first serialized in 1916 in the pulp magazine Adventure, it belongs to the same era of perfervid prose as the Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the African adventures of H. Rider Haggard. A quote will give the flavor (Valgerd, Ragnarr's second in command, speaks): "I will endure it no more!" He cried fiercely. "For two days our lord has not been with us, and here we bide shut in like salmon in a weir, not knowing what they do to him. Mayhap these dogs have slain him and even now shout in triumph over his corpse! Force the door! Snatch up whatso ye find! We will avenge our master or die, taking some of these devils with us!"

They don't write them like that anymore. I smiled all the way through.

[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]


Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

Daniel Okrent, Scribner, 2010, $30 (Can, $34.99), hb, 468 pp, 978-0-7432-7702-0

When Wayne B. Wheeler died in 1927, an obituary in the Washington Post stated, "No other private citizen of the United States has left such an impress upon national history." Wayne who? Well, Mr. Willard was for a decade the chief lobbyist for the Anti-Saloon League and, indeed, politicians quaked whenever this small, unprepossessing man entered the room.

But Wheeler is not the only prohibition-era titan to have utterly vanished from our national memory. There was Frances Willard, "immortal founder" of the Women's Christian Temperance Union; there was Mabel Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney General for Prohibition Enforcement, whom Daniel Okrent in this fascinating new history calls "without question the most powerful woman in the nation." And there was Izzy Einstein, star prohibition agent who made over four thousand bootlegger arrests. (Eliot Ness of Untouchables fame was a pipsqueak.)

Okrent, in lively ironic prose, presents a detailed analysis of the interplay of class, ethnicity, and religion that made, and then unmade, the eighteenth amendment to Constitution. The reader will learn why German brewers and Jewish distillers failed to unite against the forces of temperance. And why prohibition was supported simultaneously by northern progressives and the Ku Klux Klan. The book is filled with jaw-dropping facts. How, for example, the loophole which allowed for the production and sale of sacramental wine to Catholic bishops and Jewish rabbis was turned into a gigantic swindle. And one could go on and on. For anyone with an interest in American history Last Call is a must read.

[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]


Daughters of Gaia: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Bella Vivante, University of Oklahoma Press, 2008, $19.95, papberback, 232 pp, ISBN 978-0-806-13992-0

The study of women in antiquity has already seen a great deal of important scholarship. In this book, the author undertakes a sweeping synthesis in a very small compass. She examines women's lives in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome in a time span ranging from the Neolithic to the fifth century AD. The book is organized by topic: goddesses, women's religious rituals, daily life, health and medicine, the economic bases of women's lives, women rulers, women warriors, women philosophers, and women poets. The book's central theme is to 'accentuate the features that empowered women'. The treatment is necessarily compressed and a feeling of breathless hurry is unavoidable. Still Vivante manages to convey a great deal of information with clarity.

For this reader, the most interesting chapter is Health and Medicine. Here Vivante draws heavily on the fascinating "Gynecology" of Soranus of Ephesus (who objected to the prevailing theory that the womb wanders like a restless animal). Also enlightening is her discussion of woman philosophers ranging from Pythagoras' wife to the 'pagan martyr' Hypatia, an Alexandrian mathematician who was lynched by a Christian mob. For those wishing to go deeper into the subject, there is a useful bibliography.

[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]


Eye of the Red Tsar

Sam Eastland, Bantam Books, 2010, $25 hardback, $15 paperback, 288 pp, ISBN 978-0-553-80781-3

This debut novel of intrigue centers on the execution of Tsar Nicholas and his family by the Bolsheviks in 1918. The hero is Pekkala, a stoical Finn with unbending principles and a photographic memory, who, prior to the revolution, is chosen by the tsar to be his chief counter-terrorist agent under the sobriquet "The Emerald Eye." The story unfolds in two parallel narratives. One is a series of flashbacks recounting Pekkala's rise and fall (after the revolution the Soviets send him to a Siberian labor camp where he is tortured by a young Commissar Stalin). The second narrative finds him released from the camp and enlisted by the Soviet secret police to help them discover what really happened to the Romanovs and their fabled treasure. Unfortunately, the novel's solution requires some major rewrites of history. The author's version of the execution diverges widely from all the known evidence; "historical" characters are freely invented while real figures such as Yakov Yurovsky, who commanded the firing squad, or Pavel Medvedev, who later wrote an account of his participation, are never mentioned. If read uncritically, the novel is passable and Pekkala holds promise as an interesting character in subsequent installments, but factual errors and improbabilities were too much for this reviewer's taste.

[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]


Homer & Langley

E. L. Doctorow, Random House, 2009, USA $26.00, Canada $32.00, hardback, 208 pp, ISBN 978-1-4000-6494-6

For a review suited to this journal, it is well to begin by pointing out that the novel is not, and does not claim to be, an entirely factual biography of the Collyer brothers, who lived out their lives in a dark and decaying New York mansion surrounded by 130 tons of junk and old newspapers. (Interested readers may consult Wikipedia and other Google citations for the authentic background. For instance, the brothers, in fact, died in 1947 although Doctorow has them living on into the 1970s.)

But departures from fact should deter no one from relishing this fascinating meditation on the human condition. The story is narrated by Homer, the blind brother—appropriately a blind singer of tales, although his canvas is not epic but miniature. Through his words, we see the two young men, popular and sociable in the beginning, gradually retreat into eccentricity, reclusiveness, misanthropy, turning their parents' luxurious home into a rat's nest, a lonely fortress, and ultimately into a tomb.

Homer and Langley have been diagnosed posthumously as victims of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but Doctorow invests their condition with the trappings of a cockeyed philosophy. Thus, Langley collects newspapers by the ton in an effort to reduce all the world's news items to their Platonic forms, which he will publish in a universal newspaper valid for all time. And Homer's narrative voice, ever tolerant, sensitive, and affectionate, works a kind of magic on this craziness, drawing us into their solipsistic world until the abnormal begins to seem eerily normal.

Unlike the author's Ragtime or The March, this small book tells a very small story, but one that is wonderfully imagined, deeply felt, and wise.

[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]


Roman Diary

Richard Platt and David Parkins, Candlewick, 2009, $18.99 US, $21.00 Canada, hardback, 64 pp, ISBN 9780763634803

The subtitle of this illustrated children's book is 'The Journal of Iliona of Mytilini, Who Was Captured and Sold as a Slave in Rome, AD 107." The intended audience is pre-teen and, considering that, the book is rather daring. Roman slavery was not pretty—in fact, Roman society was not pretty—but the author resists the temptation to entirely gloss over the unpleasant bits. Iliona , a Greek girl of about twelve, and her little brother Apollo are purchased by a Roman senator and separated, Apollo being sent to the country villa to perform grueling farm labor, while Iliona is kept as a girl-of-all-work in the family's townhouse.

Over the next months she experiences Rome's delights (the baths, a splendid triumphal procession) and its depravities. Taken to the arena, she is swept up by the excitement of gladiatorial combat, "but when the show ended, I felt ashamed." Taken to see a pantomime (a kind of Roman burlesque), "When some of the women in the cast took off their clothes, I covered my eyes." At home she is, momentarily, a victim of sexual abuse. The eldest son, a rough soldier, pinches her bottom and, when she protests, warns her, "...you are just a slave girl and I can do whatever I like." Strong stuff for a kid's book. Eventually, due to her pluck and good heart, Iliona wins freedom for herself and her brother—although 'freedom' in a Roman context means that they are still bound by duty to their former owner.

Young readers will learn a great deal about Roman daily life both from the text and from Parkins's superb illustrations. An appendix offers additional information on the Roman army, technology, religion, and other matters.

[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]


The Cosgrove Report: Being the Private Inquiry of a Pinkerton Detective into the Death of President Lincoln

G. J. A. O'Toole, Grove Press, 2009, $14.95, paperback, 464 pp, ISBN 9780802144072

Originally published in 1979 and now reissued to coincide with the Lincoln bicentennial, the novel purports to be a manuscript written by one Nicholas Cosgrove, Pinkerton agent. In 1868, Cosgrove is assigned to determine whether John Wilkes Booth escaped from the burning farmhouse in Maryland and still lives. His report, having lain concealed for a century, now falls into the hands of private detective Michael Croft, whose job is to verify and annotate it.

Writing in a grandiloquent High Victorian style, Cosgrove tells a tale of switched identities, doctored documents, and bitter feuding within the White House as he pursues the elusive Booth. Historical characters, such as President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Alan Pinkerton, and many others make their appearance to either aid or thwart Cosgrove in his mission. And Cosgrove himself is an ambiguous figure with seemingly no family, friends, or worldly attachments. It all ends with a duel and a fatal balloon chase—or does it? One final plot twist turns the whole tale on its head. 'Croft's' annotations, like the footnotes in George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels, are, in this reviewer's opinion, the best part of the book. With impressive scholarship and sharp wit, O'Toole lays bare for the non-specialist the real and persistent mysteries that still surround the trial of the Lincoln assassins. Altogether, highly entertaining and highly informative.

[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]


Wobble to Death

Peter Lovesey, Soho, 2008, $14.00, paperback, 234 pp, ISBN 9781569475232

It is a cold November morning in 1879 and a dozen 'pedestrians' in silk drawers and white tights gather at the Agricultural Hall in Islington, a structure so vast that it contains its own fog. The occasion is a 'wobble'—a grueling six-day marathon race. This is the setting of Peter Lovesey's first Victorian mystery, now reissued.

The competitors are rough working-class types except for Captain Chadwick, ex Guards officer and the favorite to win, and Mostyn-Smith, a puny self-styled doctor who arrives for the contest with a trunk full of mysterious potions. The race is only in its second day when Captain Chadwick's strongest competitor, Charles Darrell, dies of strychnine poisoning. Enter Detective Sergeant Cribb and his partner, the stolid Constable Thackeray. As Cribb sifts the evidence, the footsore contestants, fewer each day, slog on toward the finish line.

Lovesey, an expert in Victorian sports arcana, guides the plot with a deft touch and plenty of period atmosphere. Readers who have not yet made his acquaintance will find him a delightful companion.

[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]


The Detective Wore Silk Drawers

Peter Lovesey, Soho, 2008, $14.00, paperback, 218 pp, ISBN 9781569475249

The second of Peter Lovesey's Victorian mysteries (now reissued) plunges Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackery into the underworld of bare-knuckled pugilism. In 1880, fighting with "the raw 'uns" has been outlawed in England for a decade, yet matches in out-of-the-way locales still draw huge crowds. When the headless body of a man with scarred knuckles washes up on the Thames Embankment, Cribb recruits a young policeman, Henry Jago, to pose as one of these midnight pugilists. But young Henry, good-looking, fit, earnest and callow, is no match for the seductive, sadistic Mrs. Vibart, who manages a stable of brutal fighters on her estate. And when Mrs. V. is herself found brutally murdered in her bed, the evidence points to, of all people, Henry. Will Sergeant Cribb crack the case—and hopefully before the unfortunate Henry is beaten senseless in the ring? Read on.

Like all the Sergeant Cribb mysteries, this one is deftly plotted, lightly ironic, and full of the color of Victorian sport.

[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]


The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel

Maureen Lindley, Bloomsbury, 2008, $14.00 US, $17.50 Canada, paperback, 288 pp, ISBN 9781596917033

In 1914, at the age of eight years, I was caught spying on my father Prince Su as he made love to a fourteen-year-old girl." This is the opening sentence of a remarkable novel: the fictionalized account of a real life Chinese princess who became a Japanese spy in the 1930s and 40s and finally died by the executioner's sword in a Chinese prison camp.

Banished to Japan for her childish indiscretion, she finds herself trapped in the loveless household of Baron Kawashima, a powerful and ruthless man who rapes her repeatedly. Her response to this is not the expected one. She enjoys the rough sex and, far from seeing herself as a victim, she learns to use her beauty as a weapon. Throughout her life, sex will be a tool of her trade as well as an anodyne for the depressions and nightmares that haunt her. She also develops an early taste for opium, alcohol, and male dress—not wanting to be a man but to enjoy a man's freedom and power. The ruling passion of her life, however, is Japan. She admires Japanese strength while she despises Chinese weakness. And her youthful predilection for spying will now be employed in Japan's interest. The requirements of her masters will send her to Mongolia, Manchuria, Shanghai, and Peking—always living the high life and leaving behind a string of lovers. But her own heart is broken too, and her depressions become deeper. Her motto had always been: "We are all animals and to survive well should be each individual's aim." But when Japan is defeated and her own life is in ruins, one supremely selfless act redeems her.

It is Eastern Jewel's self-knowledge and complete honesty that rescue her story from sordid tragedy. Lindley's writing is subtle and sensitive and every page shines a light into some dark corner of human nature.

[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]


The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England

Ian Mortimer, Simon & Schuster, 2008, $26, hardback, 342 pp, ISBN 978-1-4391-1289-2

If I were going to write a novel set in Medieval England this book would be my bible. Mortimer packs an amazing amount of information into 340 pages (enhanced by sixteen full color plates). While he covers all the areas we expect in a "daily life" book, he goes well beyond them. He lays bare the social structure (far more complex than the idealized Three Estates), demographics (the median age was only twenty-one), mentalities—such things as sense of humor, attitudes towards women, violence, and credulity. The author's tone throughout is genial: he addresses the reader—the putative time-traveler—as "you" ("You would be crazy to engage a fourteenth century man in combat and have a chance of surviving. Most of them are much stronger than you."). Mortimer's focus is on the fourteenth century and, although this is the century that Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror called "calamitous," the picture that he paints is not absolutely bleak. These were men and women who, even in the face of plague, famine, and peasant revolt, could still sing and dance and compose some of the finest poetry in our language. In fact, much of what we know about the age comes from Chaucer. And anyone who is planning to read or re-read the Canterbury Tales could find no better companion than this wonderful book.

[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]


Pariah

Dave Zeltserman, Serpent's Tail, 2009, 256 pages, Paperback original, $14.95. ISBN 978-1-84668-643-6

There are novels that invite us to inhabit the mind of an amoral sociopath. (The Ripley stories of Patricia Highsmith are an excellent example.) Pariah, Dave Zeltzerman's latest crime novel, asks us to make ourselves at home inside the skin of one Kyle Nevin. Not everyone will feel comfortable there. Kyle is an Irish-American gangster from Boston's 'Southie.' His CV includes bank robbery, vicious beatings, prodigious drinking, a vocabulary limited to four-letter words, and the torture and murder of children—for none of which he feels a shred of guilt. The story is told through his first-person point of view.

We meet Kyle as he returns to Boston after an eight-year prison stretch for bank robbery and we learn that he was set up for the fall by Red Mahoney, the erstwhile leader of the gang in which Kyle was an enforcer. Red, it turns out, had betrayed his own men to the FBI in return for favors and is now hiding out somewhere in Europe. Kyle has sworn to track the 'rat-bastard' down and kill him. The plot is, of course, reminiscent of the career of Whitey Bulger, chief of Boston's notorious Winter Hill Gang. Kyle Nevin, himself, bears a passing resemblance to Bulger hit man, Kevin Weeks.

Kyle easily slips back into his old life—drinking vast quantities of Guinness and Bushmills at his local bar, where he is idolized; shacking up with a slumming nymphomaniac named Nola; and beating people to a pulp for the occasional snide remark. But Kyle needs money to track down Mahoney and so concocts a plan to kidnap the young son of a well-to-do suburban family. To help him he has to enlist his younger brother, Danny, a former thug who is now going straight and liking it. Kyle succeeds in winning Danny reluctantly back into 'the game.' But the kidnapping goes horribly wrong and it is Danny who suffers the consequences.

At this point the plot takes an unexpected turn. Kyle, having beaten the kidnapping rap, is invited by a New York publisher to write a novel, using a character similar to himself, as if he had done the crime. (Are we meant to think of O. J. Simpson's short-lived If I Did It?) The rest of the story follows this thread, indulging along the way in every writer's fantasy of being a best-selling novelist with a million-dollar publicity campaign and a spot on Oprah. But, alas, Kyle just can't catch a break and the conclusion is, not surprisingly, a blood-soaked catastrophe.

Zeltserman's style is unadorned but effective. However, whether or not one wants to spend a couple of days inside his hero's head, each reader must decide for himself.

[Reproduced with permission from ForeWord Magazine]


The Last Crusaders: The Hundred Year Battle for the Center of the World

Barnaby Rogerson, Overlook Press, Hardcover $35 (Canada $43.50). 512 pp, ISBN 978-1-59029-286-9

The world of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was shaped by two powerful forces: religion and gunpowder—a devastating combination. In The Last Crusaders Barnaby Rogerson paints a vivid canvas, sweeping in scope and full of memorable detail, of the hundred and fifty year struggle between the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires for control of the Mediterranean.

The period from 1450 to 1590 changed the face of world history. It saw the creation of the first great nation states—Spain, Portugal, Austria, Turkey, and the countries of North Africa. The boundaries drawn then remain the national, cultural, linguistic and religious boundaries today. The author's purpose is to explain the "last great tectonic shift" in the balance of power in the Old World. "We should all hear these stories at least once," he writes, "if we are to have any understanding of our modern age."

Readers will indeed be struck by the similarities to our own day. Like the atom bombing of Hiroshima, the destruction of Constantinople by Turkish artillery in 1453 sent a shock wave around the world (the Turks' biggest gun could throw a 1200 lb. granite ball over a mile) and launched a ruinously expensive arms race. Cannons were the ICBMs of their day and there ensued a race among the great nations to forge as many as they could. Skilled weapons makers (many of them Jews expelled from Spain in 1492) were in high demand and often willing to work for the highest bidder. And, like uranium today, sources of saltpeter, an ingredient of gunpowder, were bitterly fought over. Terror, too, became a legitimate weapon of war. No captive city escaped savage pillaging and rape. Both sides routinely practiced impaling, dismemberment, flaying alive, enslavement or forced conversion of whole populations.

Against this background, we meet the great figures of the age: the intellectual Prince Henry the Navigator, the cunning and ruthless Ferdinand of Spain, the chivalrous Charles V, and the legendary sultans, Mehmet the Conqueror and Suleyman the Magnificent. But the minor actors are equally compelling—secret agents, pirate captains, and turncoats and traitors of every stripe. In colorful vignettes, we rub shoulders with Turkish Janissaries, Genoese mercenaries, Portuguese explorers, Moroccan corsairs, and galley slaves of every nation. The author is especially good at narrating in gripping, and often grisly, detail the great sieges and battles that punctuated this struggle.

The book is furnished with excellent maps, a useful chronological chart, numerous illustrations, and a very full bibliography. The writing is engaging and vivid, never pedantic. Any history buff will find this book a pleasure.

[Reproduced with permission from ForeWord Magazine]