A World War II Pilot's Story
By Dennis Okerstrom
Flying their B24J Liberator on a bombing mission over Germany the Bottom's Up (the plane's name) went down. The young crew found themselves in enemy territory. This book tells their story with an interesting twist. Lamar, who is the one the story is about, received a strange email from Croatia asking about his plane that went down in WWII. Over time they come to realize the archeology crew in Croatia has found the remnants of Bottom's Up. Its an excellent story!
Point to note: the crew went to Stalag Luft I, one of the largest POW camps in Germany and relevant to the next book I read.
Book 56
By Erik Larson
Larson takes a specific story of one US diplomat and his family as a means of exposing many details of the Nazi rise to power. Through this narrative many answers to the question "how could this happen" are are explored at the ground level. Driving home the point, you can not underestimate the power of fear. And the strong, deep desire for everything to be ok, for the horrible things you see in front of you to not be long-term but instead a temporary problem. These driving forces led to inexplicable silence on the part of those living in Germany and even abroad. The story also sheds light on the anti-semitism and subsequent apathy playing itself out inside the US.
The brutal and cut throat world of politics the Nazis played laid a foundation for the later atrocities played out against the Jews. Once the stage was set for complete conformity to the regime at the risk of death, there was no sound of reason within the party left to question their authority or their final decisions.
"In this new world, the calling card was the crucial currency. The character of an individual's card reflected the character of the individual, his perception of himself, or how he wanted the world to perceive him. The Nazi leadership invariably had the largest cards with the most imposing titles, usually printed in some bold Teutonic font." page 71
"Fromm added, 'There is nobody among the officials of the National Socialist party who would not cheerfully cut the throat of every other official in order to further his own advancement.'" Page 266
Book 55
By Vasily Grossman
This is an incredible book based on Vasily Grossman's notebooks while embedded with the Russian army in WWII. As the introduction states, "Grossman's uncomfortable honesty was dangerous. If the NKVD secret police had read these notebooks he would have disappeared into the Gulag." Location 197
In the battle of Stalingrad, he was the "longest serving journalist in the embattled city." His style was engaging, "he never wrote anything down during the interview" which "helped Grossman to win people's confidence." Location 209
His article 'The Hell Called Treblinka' is one of his most im[portant essays and an important piece of Holocaust literature. It was quoted at the Nuremberg tribunals.
I loved his courage, dedication and willingness to speak from the soldiers perspective with an unflinching honesty. This was in particularly admirable and difficult in the times of great propaganda and re-editing to slant things in favor of the Russian perspective. This was easier to do when Russia was winning but a very difficult line to walk when the war was not going in their favor.
"Dozens of aerial boats are gliding in the sky, slowly and smoothly, in triangular ranks. They are moving towards us. Dozens, hundreds of people climb over the sides of trucks, jump out of cabins, run towards the forest. Everyone is infected with panic, the running crowd is growing bigger every minute. And then everyone hears the shrill voice of a woman: 'Cowards, cowards, they are just cranes flying over!' Confusion." Page 48
"This poverty, this urban poverty is somehow worse than the village sort. It's deeper and blacker, an all-embracing poverty, deprived even of air and light." Page 50
"Problems for the artillery: battle in a village. Everything has got mixed up. One house is ours, another one is theirs." Page 68
"Throughout the war, the chief obsession of may members of the Red Army was to obtain alcohol or anything which even looked like alcohol." Notes from editors Page 73
"War is an art. WIthin it elements of calculation, cool knowledge and experience are combined with inspiration, change and something completely irrational (battle for Zaliman, Pesochin). These elements are compatible with one another, but sometimes they come into conflict. It's like a musical improvisation which is unthinkable without a brilliant technique." Page 97
"The blue, ash-grey main road. Villages have become the kingdom of women. They drive tractors, guard warehouses and stables, queue for vodka. . . They are coping with an enormous amount of work and send bread, aircraft, weapons and ammunition to the front. They feed us and arm us now." Page 119
"Stalingrad is burned down. I would have to write too much if I wanted to describe it. Stalingrad is burned down. Stalingrad is in ashes. It is dead. People are in basements. Everything is burned out. The hot walls of the buildings are like the bodies of people who have died in the terrible heat and haven't gone cold yet. " Page 125
"That was a terrible dust, the dust of retreat. It ate up the men's faith, it extinguished the warmth of people's hearts, it stood in a murky cloud in front of the eyes of gun crews." Page 130
"Soviet pitilessness more than matched that of the Germans, when it came to forcing their own men into the attack. Stalin's Order No. 227 - 'Not One Step Back' - included the instruction to each army command to organise 'three to five well-armed detachments (up to two hundred men each)' to form a second line to 'combat cowardice' by shooting down any soldier who tried to run away." Page 140
Editor's comment: "The defense of Stalingrad was stiffened by the most terrifying discipline. Some 13,500 soldiers were executed during the five-month battle. Most of these were during the earlier days when many men broke." Page 141
(men were condemned to death if they self-inflicted wounds to get off the battlefield)
"The courage of the young women medical orderlies was respected by everyone. . . . 'We have gone into the attack with our platoon, and crawled side by side with them. We have fed soldiers, given them water, bandaged them under fire. We turned out to be more resilient than the soldiers, we even used to urge them on. Sometimes, trembling at night, we would think: 'oh, if i were at home right now.'" Page 184
Editor's comment: "After the intensity and importance of the battle of Stalingrad, Grossman found it was hard to accept that life moved on it its usual way, that goodbyes could be hurried and casual after such momentous events." Page 203
"The winder sun is shining over mass graves, over handmade tombstones at the places where soldiers had been killed on the axis of the main attack. The dead are sleeping on the heights by the ruins of factory workshops, in gullies and balkas. THey aere sleeping now right where they had been fighting when alive. . . . They are so majstic and matter of fact in their heroism." Page 204
"The gun was reminiscent of a ragged, long-suffering man." Page 235
"Every soldier, every officer and every general of the Red Army who had seen the Ukraine in blood and fire, who had heard the true story of what had been happening in the Ukraine during the two years of German rule, understands to the bottom of their souls that there are only two sacred words left to us. One of them is 'love' the other one is 'revenge.'" Page 248
"There are no Jews in the Ukraine. Nowhere - Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, Yagotin - in none of the cities, hundreds of towns, or thousands of villages will you see the black, tear-filled eyes of little girls; you will not hear the pained voice of an old woman; you will not see the dark face of a hungry baby. All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people has been brutally murdered." Page 250
Editor's comments: "It soon became clear to Grossman that his reports on what was to be known later as the holocaust were unwelcome to the Soviet authorities. The Stalinist line refused to accept any special categories of suffering. All victims of Nazism on Soviet soil had to be defined as 'citizens of the SOviet Union' without qualification. Official reports on atrocities, even those describing corpses wearing the yellow star, avoided any mention of the word Jew. In late 1943, Grossman joined Ilya Ehrenburg on a commission to gather details fo German crimes for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an organization which later attracted the suspicion of the Stalinist authorities. Ehrenburg and Grossman planned that all the material collected should be published in a 'Black Book' but this would be suppressed after the war, partly because of the Stalinist position on Soviet suffering - 'Do Not Divide the Dead' - and partly because the involvement of Ukrainians in the anti-SEmitic persecution was embarrassing for the authorities. The subject of collaboration during the Great Patriotic War was almost entirely suppressed unti after the fall of communism." Page 251
"There's no one left in Kazary to complain, no one to tell, no one to cry. Silence and calm hover over the dead bodies buried under the collapsed fireplaces now overgrown by weeds. This quiet is much more frightening than tears and curses.
Old men and women are dead, as well as craftsmen and professional people: tailors, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewelers, house painters, ironmongers, bookbinders, workers, freight handlers, carpenters, stove-makers, jokers, cabinetmakers, water carriers, millers, bakers, and cooks; also dead are physicians, prothesists, surgeons, gynecologists, scientists - bacteriologists, biochemists, directors of university clinics - teachers of history, algebra, trigonometry. Dead are professors, lecturers and doctors of science engineers and architects. Dead are agronomists, field workers, accountants, clerks, shop assistants, supply agents, secretaries, night watchmen, dead are teachers, dead are babushkas who could knit stockings and make tasty buns, cook bouillon and make strudel with apples and nuts, dead are women who had been faithful to their husbands and frivolous women are dead, too, beautiful girls, and learned students and cheerful schoolgirls, dead are ugly and silly girls, women with hunches, dead are singers, dead are blind and deaf mutes, dead are violinists and pianists, dead are two-year-olds and three-year-olds, dead are eighty-year-old men and women with cataracts on hazy eyes, with cold and transparent fingers and hair that rustled quietly like white paper, dead are newly born babies who had sucked their mothers' breast greedily until their last minute.
This was different from the death of people in war, with weapons in their hands, the deaths of people who had left behind their houses, families, fields, songs, traditions and stories. This was the murder of a great and ancient professional experience, passed from one generation to another in thousands of families of craftsmen and members of the intelligentsia. This was the murder of everyday traditions that grandfathers had passed to their grandchildren, this was the murder of memories, of a mournful song, folk poetry, of life, happy and bitter, this was the destruction of hearths and cemetries, this the death of the nation which ha been living side by side with Ukrainians over hundreds of years. . . " Page 252
Editor's notes: "For him, the greatest shock was to discover the major role which local Ukrainians had played in the horror." Page 254
The two letters he wrote his mother
"There was one kind of complaint and lament that I didn't hear in Poland, only one kind of tears that I didn't see: those of Jews. THere are no Jews in POland. They have all been suffocated, killed, from elders to newly-born babies. Their dead bodies have been burned in furnaces." Page 279
"It is infinitely hard even to read this. The reader must believe me, it is as hard to write it. Someone might ask: 'Why write about this, why remember all that?' It is the writer's duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it." Page 301
"And one feels as if one's heart could stop right now, seized with such sorrow, such grief, that a human being cannot possibly stand it." Page 306
Editor's notes: "Not surprisingly, Grossman himself fount it very hard to stand. He collapsed from nervous exhaustion, stress and nausea on his return to Moscow."
"Vasily Grossman's belief in a 'ruthless truth of war' was cruelly scorned by the Soviet authorities, especially when they attempted to suppress information about the Holocaust." Location 5473
Book 54
By Edward Girardet
"Understanding the lessons of the past is critical for the Western intervention to have any long-lasting positive impact on Afghanistan. Yet experience has convinced me that whether out of political expedience, arrogance or just plain ignorance, too many Western policy makers continually fail to examine the history of this defiant country." Pg 9
"Most critical of all, the Soviet invasion eliminated Afghanistan as a traditional buffer between the USSR and what was once British India." Pg 63
"Pakistan's main foreign policy concern has always been India." Pg 63
"Nor were the SOviets likely to find a coherent people to control. Afghanistan is a linguistic, cultural,and geographic mosaic of highly diverse people - Pushtuns, Nuristanis, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Hazaras, and others - who, traditionally, never like being told what to do by foreigners. Nor do they like being ruled by one another. Every Afghan regards himself as 'King amongst Kings,' with the same right to have his views heeded as any other Afghan, beggar or monarch." Pg 72
"The Soviets, much like Americans over twenty years later, engaged militarily in Afghanistan to impose an external form of government that ran inherently counter to AFghan traditions and beliefs." Pg. 72
"As one Afghan told me, one needs to understand 'a thousand' Afghanistans." Pg 77
"'This means we have to buy back the bullets that we previously captured.' said one commander." Pg 86
"It was an astonishing story. More men were killed in Kerala than the Lidice massacre in Czechoslovakia, where the Nazis slaughtered the entire male population during World War II or My Lai in March 1968 when American troops deliberately killed Vietnamese civilians. According to the Afghanistan Justice Project . . . the Kerala massacre emerged as one of the most vicious human rights violations of the Afghan war." Pg. 91
"Massoud was clearly the 'boss,' friendly, persuasive, and decisive. He commanded respect from all and had an exceptional ability to involve the conservative elders in his decision making. Massoud was both a modernist and a pious Muslim. He sometimes excused himself in the middle of a conversation to pray, peeling off his white-and-black scarf and laying it on the ground facing qiblah, the direction of Mecca. Whenever he worshipped, on a riverbank or a hidden mountain position, Massoud usually let someone else lead in prayer. The others - fighters, farmers, refugees, merchants - would fall in beside him. I watched fascinated as Massoud, caught up in his devotion, would solemnly pray - kneeling and bowing, murmuring 'Allah o Akbar' in unison with the others. Finally, passing his hand over his face, he would climb back on his feet, refreshed. 'Right,' he said, striding over. 'Where were we.?'" Pg 163
"But for me, these people are true human beings. They understand civilization, hospitality. . . An Afghan, even if he dislikes you, will always shake your hand. That is the differeence between them and you. Thisis why this is such an extraordinary country and why this extraordinary people will never be like you." In conversation with Osama bin Laden (unknowingly) Pg 262
"The extremism espoused by bin Laden and other foreign militants represented a form of Islam totally alien to AFghan tradition, culture, and religion. But even with the ousting of the Arabs, their long-term influence was not halted. A significant portion of the hundreds of millions of Arab dollars that jihadists, but also the Saudi government, had poured into the Afghan cause during the 1980's went toward the creation of Koranic schools, clinics, and orphanages in the refugee camps. A whole generation , or two, of Afghans were indoctrinated in the madrassa"
Book 53
By Catherine Fisher
". . . or is it that man contains within himself the seeds of evil? That even if he is placed in a paradise perfectly formed for him he will poison it, slowly, with his own jealousies and desires?" Page 312
I love the key. The cover is beautiful and does justice to the key in the story. I am always enchanted by a beautiful (and magical) key.
Incarceron is imaginative, dark and convincing. The world Fisher creates is thorough and believable. She takes the qualities of her world to their logical conclusion, but also takes full freedom to push that world and not get stuck in imaginary limitations.
The prison reality is bleak, its prisoners so enmeshed in their prison many of them believe it to be reality - a thought provoking theme. A theme explored alongside bravery, friendship, loyalty and justice.
The characters are distinct and rich on their own right, with room to grown and deepen in the next book. The characters all face difficult decisions in the search for what is true and to push themselves beyond the falsities they lived in and are trying to free themselves of. Powerful and important quests for the human search for place and meaning in any world.
Book 52
By David Wise
Fascinating story of US/China espionage complete with beautiful women, torrid love affairs and fascinating details about modern spy agencies. It was very interesting to learn the different methodology that China uses compared to Russia and the US. An important read to anyone interested in world spying operations.
"First, China does not, in most instances, offer money in exchange for information.
Second, China does not accept typical walk-in cases, because of the possibility that 'volunteers' are being dangled as bait by an opposition intelligence service. . . .
Moore's third rule is that China 'collects information from good people, people who don't have financial problems, don't have emotional problems, who are not motivated by revenge, not unsuccessful in their lives. Not someone who is lonely, needs a friend, needs a woman.
China is looking to get good people to do bad things.'" Page 15 - 16
Book 51
By Scott Westerfeld
Yes, I did read Westerfelds books for about a week straight. This one I read in one night.
After the Leviathan series this one was a bit of a let down. The story was a more choppy and required a few major leaps in disbelief. I have a tolerance for suspending disbelief, but this one pushed my threshold a bit (both winding up in the cave!). My disappointment was more around the many points that the story could have been made deeper, the imaginative world pulled together more tightly, which would have taken this book from good to great. It is hard to assess if this was just the birthing pains of the series or a little sloth on the part of the author.
Although the theme is not completely unique, the imaginative idea did engaged me to the point that despite my complaints I will definitely read the rest of the series. I hope the story has had some time to percolate and gets better as it unfolds.
Book 50
