A Red Boyhood

Growing Up Under Stalin

Anatole Konstantin

"The terror did not bypass the NKVD, either. The new chief, Yezhov, began exterminating Iagoda's men, who knew too much; now the old torturers were tortured by new torturers and the old executioners were executed by new executioners. They were so terrorized that, as I read later, sometimes, upon hearing a knock at their office door, they jumped out of the window or put a bullet through their heads." Page 16 

"While I admired America in spite of such propaganda, an aricle in the newspaper made me wonder about some of its leaders. Accoring to this article, the American vice president, Henry Wallace, and the president of the Far Eastern Institute, Owen Lattimore, traveled in Siberia and visited a Gulag concentration camp. Upon returning to the United States, they reported that these Gulag camps were actually rehabilitation centers whose inmates were healthy, well-fed, slept in clean beds with white sheets, and worked with great enthusiasm. One of them, I believe it was Hentry Wallace, said that he had the privilege of shaking the hadn==nd of the greatest industrialist in the wold, the head of the For Eastern Gulag!

I had assumed that most educated people in the world knew from hisotr about the Potemkin villages, but these two obviously did not. Potemkin was chief minister to Catherine the Great. To prevent her from seeing how people really lived, he buildt properous-looking houses along the highway that he know she would travel but these houses were only facades, with nothign behind the front walls." Pages 151-152

"As far as we were concerned, from a practical point of view, the only difference between the Communists and the Nazis was that the Nazi's killed innocent people because of their ethnic affiliation, while the Communists killed innocent people because of political class affiliations, real or imaginary." Page 179

Book 62

Ashes to Dust

Yrsa Sigurdardottir

An Icelandic crime thriller with an excellent story line. Sigurdardottir writes an engaging, well told crime story. The setting and history is fascinating as well. If you like crime fiction, you should read this book!

Book 61

A Discovery of Witches

By Deborah Harkness
Book club book #2This story is about a woman who tries to deny the fact that she is a witch and unexpected consequences result as she is forced to reckon with her own power and the blossoming relationship with, you guessed it, a vampire. Harkness tells a compelling story of discovery as the main characters search to discover why their species are dying out and why their relationship seems to be at the heart of that quest. It took me awhile to warm up to this book because it reminded me of The Historian and yet it didn't have the tight and beautifully woven story that that book had. The suspension of disbelief required in the beginning of the first book was maddening. The many inconsistencies throughout the book were frustrating (some continued even into the second book, although the writing and the story became much more cohesive in the second book). Some of these inconsistencies or loose ends were quite blatant, I was surprised at the editing stage they weren't tied up a bit cleaner.My biggest critique of the first book is that the author told you things without showing them to you. So you really had to believe the storyteller and be willing to follow her despite the fact that what she was telling you was not always evidenced in the story itself. On page 228 I made the note that the author tells you they are in love but you really don't see a lot of evidence of it and she tells you vampires and witches hate each other but all the interactions you see are cordial. I read the book despite these distractions, and also bought the second book. So I definitely think it is a book worth reading. And its always neat to see writers become better as they write more. "Somewhere in the center of my soul, a rusty chain began to unwind. It freed itself, link by link, from where it had rested unobserved, waiting for him. My hands, which had been balled up and pressed against his chest, unfurled with it. The chain continued to drop, to an unfathomable depth where there was nothing but darkness and Matthew. At last it snapped to its full length, anchoring me to a vampire. Despite the manuscript, despite the fact that my hands contained enough voltage to run a microwave, and despite the photograph, as long as I was connected to him, I was safe." Page 195"Humans can convince themselves up is down and black is white. It's their special gift." Page 142Book 59 and 60

The Last Mission of the Wham Bam Boys

Courage, Tragedy and Justice in World War II

By Gregory A. Freeman

This is an important, challenging story about the crew of a downed bomber behind German lines. They went down just after a particularly devastating bombing campaign which left their town in shambles, and left most families with at least one member injured or dead. Their response to the young men came from this loss; but regardless of the circumstances it was extreme and brutal. Ending in the deaths of most of them.

But the story doesn't end with this brutal act. These murders were investigated in the system of justice which would later become the Nuremberg trials, the perpetrators were uncovered and those who were found guilty were brought to justice.

"The debate over the bombing strategies would continue past the end of the war, even as the numbers of the dead were still being tallied. . . .The crews flying those missions, most of them young men straight out of high school, were not responsible for debating the merits of their orders, and they rarely questioned them. They flew where they were told to fly and dropped their bombs on the targets they were assigned, trusting that their work was part of the larger effort to shorten the war and defeat an unquestionably evil enemy." pg 40

"The threads of the Russelsheim murders continued spreading for years. Everyone involved with the murders and the trials would find that that terrible day would stay with them forever, an event that changed their lives and how they saw their fellow man."

Book 58

German Boy

A Child at War
By Wolfgang W.E. Samuel

I bought this book while visiting the Air & Space Museum in Washington DC. I bought it from the author. It is his story of survival as a child of 10 - 15 at the end of WWII in Germany. It is an amazing story of childhood, piecing together life amid a brutal war and the devastating aftermath of war which left German's people in starvation, poverty, displaced from their homes, and with little work available to them. 

His story starts in the town right outside of the prison where downed pilots and their crew went, which was the setting of the last book I read. 

"I thought about what I had read in the newspaper, about what happened to German women when they were captured by Russian soldiers. Awful things. I didn't know what rape was, but it had to be terrible the way they wrote about it in the newspaper and spoke of it on the radio. I didn't want my mother to be raped. She was all I had to hold on to, besides Ingrid, my sister. I felt a dull ache rise within me, as if a cold hand were squeezing my insides. Maybe I was hungry. That had to be it. It was my empty stomach that gave me that odd feeling. I couldn't remember when I had last eaten. Maybe it wasn't hunger I felt. Maybe I was afraid of dying." Pg. 3

Book 57