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Category: Biographies

Review: Hitlerland by Andrew Nagorski

[ 2 ] May 11, 2012

Reviewed by Sophia Chiu

Could you have seen Hitler coming? That is essentially the question Andrew Nagorski puts to Americans living in post-WWI Germany in Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power.

Hitlerland chronicles their impressions on Hitler, his party, and ‘the German people’ from the aftermath of WWI up to the United States entry into WWII, relying mainly on written testimonials of American diplomats and journalists. Some actually met Hitler before and after he came to power. Although not strictly necessary to read Hitlerland, some familiarity with the conditions in Germany between the World Wars will help make sense of the story.

Nagorski focuses on the American reaction to the events they witness, not necessarily detailing the broader context. For example, the Americans knew that Jews were becoming Nazi targets, but this figures mostly as eyewitness accounts of the Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), not a detailed account of what German Jews endured in Nazi Germany. Indeed, one theme is that Americans were somewhat privileged foreigners and only the most astute could foresee the threat that Hitler represented.

Hitlerland is immensely readable. Nagorski gently provides reminders about who the core characters are throughout the text. However, as much as the author wanted to focus on “telling their stories—and whenever possible, letting those stories speak for themselves,” there was a hint of judgment on those who foresaw what was to come and those who could or would not, and those who saw that America needed to become involved and those who wanted to remain isolationists. Perhaps that is unavoidable with the luxury of hindsight.

Nonetheless, Hitlerland gave me a more nuanced view of this moment in history. Although it inspired me to learn more about 1920s Berlin as a vibrant cultural capital, Hitlerland is an enjoyable read more about Americans living and passing through there than about Germany per se.

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Simon & Schuster. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Review: Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden

[ 6 ] May 9, 2012

Reviewed by Alyssa Katanic

“Wow!” “Intense!” Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14 is definitely both, and expertly written. Harden is an experienced journalist who has written for the Washington Post, The New York Times, and has worked as a reporter for PBS Front Line (among many other excellent credentials). He doesn’t leave journalism behind as he develops the story of Shin In Geun, the only known person to have been born in and escaped from North Korea’s toughest political labor camp.

As so many average Americans, I have to admit that I am very “my little corner of the world” focused – but I am nosey! Thus, I love the opportunity to take a look at other cultures via well written books. Sometimes these stories can offer us pictures that are hard to look at, and that makes them all the more important to face. This is true of Escape from Camp 14.

Shin In Geun saw many horrible acts of violence and killings from an early age; in fact, his first memory is that of witnessing an execution at the age of four. Until he escaped in his early twenties, Shin’s life was focused on finding enough food, working to keep out from under the guard’s club, and snitching on fellow prisoners in order to gain favor (aka more food). Being born there, he knew no other life, and sought no other life, until an older man entered the prison and told him of life (and FOOD) on the other side of the fence. Since escaping, it has been very hard for him to adjust to “being human” and gaining emotion and love for self and others.

With Harden’s vast experience and professionalism in getting the story right, Escape from Camp 14 not only tells the story of Shin, but also the story of North Korea. The entire country has become like a prison for its people, and the risks and adapting issues that defectors from North Korea face are immense. Though some scenes may be hard for us to face, Escape from Camp 14, as a whole, is an important look at the lives of those who are living it right now on the other side of this small world.

Rating: ★★★★★ 

Alyssa is a wife and stay at home, homeschooling mother of five, with two boxers, two cats, a soft shelled turtle named after Bob the Builder, and 7 frogs (admittedly a homeschooling project gone froggy). In all her spare time, she loves to read and believes that there is no such thing as having too many books!

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Viking Adult. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Review: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels–A Love Story by Ree Drummond

[ 5 ] March 23, 2012

Reviewed by Amanda Schafer

Ree Drummond is the Pioneer Woman, but she didn’t start out that way. Former vegetarian, Californian, and country club girl, Ree is now a rancher’s wife with her own cooking show and several published books. In this book, Ree invites us into her past as she recounts the incredibly romantic story of how her life began with Marlboro Man. Ree openly tells of all the ways that she made a mess of herself in the black heels she insisted on wearing, but also of the romantic ways that Marlboro Man would always come to her rescue.

When Ree moved back home in order to reprioritize her life before moving on to Chicago, she never expected to fall in love. With a rancher, no less! After casually dating Marlboro Man for a few weeks, fully expecting to continue with her plans to move to Chicago, Ree surprises herself by staying and pursuing the relationship.

During their time together, Ree and Marlboro Man cook for each other, watch sunsets together, and do a lot of passionate necking. And always, after every date or every day together, Marlboro Man calls Ree within just a few minutes of leaving her. They talk and inevitably he chuckles. (The chuckles, we learn, are an important thing to Ree.)

Their dating progresses into an engagement, and the honeymoon that follows seems to be one disaster after another: illness, bad news from home, and then food poisoning. They finally decide to cut the honeymoon short and head home, but the problems at home worsen when Marlboro Man has to make hard decisions about the ranch. Things get tighter and tougher for them as newlyweds, but then they discover that Ree is pregnant! After dealing with horrible morning sickness, working with clothes that no longer fit, and trying to figure out her role on the ranch, Ree gave birth to a baby girl less than a year after they are married.

I love Ree Drummond! ‘Nuff said, right? She’s beautiful, a great cook, and she homeschools her children to boot! My favorite line in Black Heels to Tractor Wheels comes when Ree realizes that she will be married to a rancher and she will have to live on a ranch and do things that ranchers do. She realizes that she’ll likely have several children (perhaps ten or eleven!) and she says, “I’ll have to squat in the garden and give birth while picking my okra.”

I absolutely love Black Heels to Tractor Wheels and would really enjoy seeing another portion of their life chronicled in a novel the way this one was done. It reads like a fairy tale, but is at the same time real and honest, and is one of the best autobiographical books I’ve ever read.

Rating: ★★★★★ 

Amanda lives in Missouri with her engineering husband, two sons, and one daughter. In between homeschooling and keeping up with church activities she loves to read Christian Fiction, Women’s Fiction, and any Chick-Lit. She never goes anywhere without a book to read!

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by William Morrow Paperbacks. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Review: Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography by Susan Cheever

[ 4 ] March 18, 2012

Reviewed by Christen Krumm

Louisa May Alcott has been one of my favorite American authors since I was ten. I loved Little Women and loved The Inheritance even more. As a writer myself, I am always very excited to get the chance to read biographies of other writers and explore their lives. Susan Cheever’s account of the life of this beloved author, while beautifully written, is a tad luke-warm.

Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography begins with the story of how Little Women came to be — out of necessity to feed her family and at the bullying from her publisher. From there, Cheever switches gears and begins the story of Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father. We are thrown little tibbits of Abigail “Abba” Alcott’s, Louisa’s mother, life, however, it seems the main spotlight in these first few chapters, and ultimately the rest of the book, goes to Bronson.

I do understand that biographies, in general, touch on the lives of the parents and other family members in order to show where the subject of the biography came from — and these glimpses give the subject more life then simply just focusing on the subject themselves. However, the author needs to be mindful of the fine line of sharing family life to give their subject life and loosing site of the subject by writing the biography on the family.

Life for Louisa was nothing like what was painted in Little Women. While some critics will argue that Louisa was describing life of the Alcotts when she wrote Little Women, after reading Cheever’s account of her life, I would dare say that Alcotts account of the May family was what she dreamed life to be for her and her sisters. Cheever’s account of Alcott’s life brings light to the almost occult type lifestyle that Bronson desired for his family. It seemed Bronson was a bit of a dreamer and ruled his family with a sad dominance. Life was hard for Abba and her girls with Bronson, the dreamer, in charge. He rarely provided for his family, and often relied on others to pay his debts. I did find it interesting that the Alcotts were close neighbors with the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Thoreaus.

While Cheever has written a beautiful story of the Alcott family, this biography of sorts was just so-so for me. The bi-line “A Personal Biography” was a little strange to me. I am not sure if Cheever meant the bits of personal inflection throughout to be her biography within the story, or if she had something else entirely planned, but it just left me scratching my head. I wish it had a tad bit more of Lousia herself and less about her domineering father and his failed dreams.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

Christen graduated from the University of Arkansas Fort Smith with a BA in English. She’s a coffee drinking stay at home mom by day and a freelance writer/editor by night. She currently resides in Arkansas with her husband and daughter and is excited to welcome a son in August.

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Simon & Schuster. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Review: Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman

[ 3 ] March 1, 2012

Reviewed by Joanne Lakomski

About 2300 years ago, a 20-year old man set off to rule the world.

While reading Philip Freeman’s Alexander the Great, I compared Freeman’s descriptions of Alexander’s life with the current events and cultural norms of my life at 20. If I had been planning to conquer large chunks of the world, technology would have sped my efforts along. Even with satellites and modern communications, with the ability to connect to my minions and to spy upon my foes, my undertaking to conquer the world would have been a massive one.

Instead, at the age of 20, I left college and was living in the mountains of Colorado playing softball for Mike’s Rocky Mountain Liquor. Hmmmm…

The scope of history that encompassed Alexander’s life is fascinating and Freeman provides a strong foundation for knowing the man. His childhood tutor was Aristotle. The great orator Demosthenes was his foil in Athens. Alexander visited Troy seeking the echoes of the Trojan War he had learned about by reading Homer.

The author’s portrayal of Alexander feels plausible to me. There was an intelligence and drive. There was the ability to motivate and lead. And, there was the colossal ego enabling the belief that one could dominate lands and riches and peoples thousands of slowly traveled miles away from home.

Freeman has chosen details that summarize Alexander’s actions while providing some context to contemporary events that influenced Alexander, and, of course, that Alexander influenced. He includes two maps demonstrating Alexander’s travels. They are maps of regions we see regularly on the evening news; the regions still continue to be attractive to conquerors.

Reading Alexander the Great was engaging and fast. The era is one in which I am interested. I am especially appreciative of the detail about Alexander’s father – Philip of Macedonia. There is much less reference material available about him than about his son.

And for me, there is a huge benefit in reading history. It helps me question who we are today compared to yesterday. To reflect upon power and leadership and followership. To wonder, as I did throughout this book, with all of our technology and speed and assumption of sophistication and superiority, could a 20-something today conquer much of the ‘civilized’ world?

Rating: ★★★½☆ 

Joanne is an organization development and human resources professional with a business background living in Ohio. She has lived in Europe, Africa (including her Peace Corps service in South Africa), and arround the United States. She loves to plays volleyball, read, write, and has a cat named Ender.

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Simon & Schuster. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Blog Tour: Late for Tea at the Deer Palace by Tamara Chalabi

[ 6 ] February 27, 2012

Please join Tamara Chalabi, author of Late for Tea at the Deer Palace, as she tours the blogosphere with TLC Book Tours.

Reviewed by Vera Pereskokova (Luxury Reading)

Tamara Chalabi can trace her ancestry through who is who of pre-Saddam Hussein Iraq, to men who socialized with and advised royals and politicians alike. Both her grandfather, Hadi, and her great-grandfather, Abdul Hussein, played important roles in the shaping of the country. Her father, Ahmad Chalabi, spent many years – and often risked his life – as the head of Iraqi National Congress (INC), whose goal was to remove Saddam from power.

Despite her family’s deep set Iraqi roots, Tamara was born in Lebanon, and spend her childhood in Jordan. In 1958, as all chaos erupted and the Iraqi royal family was murdered by the opposition, the Chalabi family became a target due to their political involvement. One by one, they escaped to Britain. They spent the subsequent years moving back to the region and building a life in Lebanon, only to be exiled again after the outbreak of a civil war.

Tamara grew up hearing magical stories about Baghdad from her larger-than-life grandmother, Bibi, and finally arrived on Baghdad’s soil in 2003. Exile was different for everyone – her relatives never felt truly at home anywhere – and her return to the homeland was a realization of their hopes and dreams.

I had a difficult time writing a review for Late for Tea at the Deer Palace given my mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, Late for Tea at the Deer Palace added greatly to my understanding of Iraqi history and I could not help but sympathize with the plight of the Chalabi family and Iraqis in general. Tamara put a lot of work and thought into tracing the history of Iraq from its time under the Ottoman rule, through World War I and II, to overthrow of the royal family, Saddam Hussein’s rise to power and finally the country’s current state. She wove in her family’s stories throughout the book, providing the individuals’ personal experiences during the tumultuous events.

On the other hand, Tamara’s writing was somewhat stiff and very detailed; it’s quite evident that she took effort to include every little story or tidbit she had on hand. I understand that Tamara likely wanted to give readers a very clear understanding of the day to day life in Iraq, but I felt frustrated with the mundane and unimportant facts that were included.The barrage of names alone was overwhelming and while there was a family tree at the front of the book, I wish there was also a list of “characters” for anyone not related to the author. The events were laid out chronologically but there were too many odds and ends and offshoot stories that detracted from the main focus. Tamara’s own experience was only relayed on a few pages interspersed throughout the book and in a small section at the end; I learned everything there was to know about her family, but very little about her…

Everything said, I wish I had a book like Late for Tea at the Deer Palace when I took modern history classes in high school and college – it would have provided a welcome break from dry history textbooks. Tamara paid homage to her family while also providing an interesting look at the creation of Iraq as we know it today, and the events that have shaped the region in past decades. While it was not the easiest book to read, I definitely walked away from it with an improved insight into this country.

Rating: ★★½☆☆ 

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Harper Perennial. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Review: Courtney Comes Clean by Maer Roshan

[ 3 ] February 19, 2012

Reviewed by Joanne Reynolds

Courtney Love seems to be a very intelligent, drugged-out train-wreck. Maer Roshan, founder and editor-in-chief of The Fix, spent about a year with Courtney. In his book, Courtney Comes Clean, Roshan describes her various paranoid behaviors relating to finances, reputation, etc. Courtney Love has been an addict since about the age of 15 and has tried to rehabilitate herself over and over again.

While rehab does work for some people, I don’t get the sense that this will be the story for Courtney. She really appears to be a tragic figure that people will have a tendency to just dish dirt about, as she leaves that door wide open. People just love to read dirt about someone who is so famous, especially if the fame is not flattering.

All of the theories that she is using her marriage and the subsequent suicide of her husband, Kurt Cobain, as the fuel for her celebrity doesn’t really come across in this book. Courtney doesn’t discuss Kurt too much in this particular venture. Her thoughts about people ripping her off of millions of dollars because of her trusting nature and her drug-addled states becomes inherently prevalent throughout the book.

I have to be honest about my non-knowledge of Courtney Love’s music. I have never really heard her art and really only know about the woman through the gossip that I’ve read in magazines.

Courtney Comes Clean doesn’t really get into a whole lot of personal details and there is much supposition on Maer Roshan’s part about her posings. I feel that a lot more research could have been done to either justify Courtney’s proclamations or disprove them. I did not walk away with much more knowledge about the woman that I walked in with. It just wasn’t as detailed a story as it probably could have been, given the time that the author spent with the woman.

Rating: ★★½☆☆ 

Joanne has always been an avid reader and loves the ability to lose herself in someone else’s life for the time that it takes to read about it. She has a huge admiration for authors and the worlds that they create for us. She enjoys reading to her granddaughters and hopes that they take up the love of reading.

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by FSB Associates. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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Review: Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie

[ 12 ] January 31, 2012

Reviewed by Colleen Turner

I remember, like many people I am sure, briefly reading about Catherine the Great and her unique place in Russian history while in school, smashed together with so many other historical figures. But who was she really, and what experiences lead her to become such a dynamic woman and leader? Robert K. Massie does a wonderful job giving us a well rounded, complete history of not only this unique persona but the people, country and world around her from her birth into a German family of minor nobility in 1729 to her death as empress of Russia in 1796.

While it is impossible to discuss all aspects of this rather large tome (the book tips the scales at over 600 pages), it is important to note that the author not only highlights the political, religious and professional aspects of this sovereign but gives us a clear view of who Catherine was as a woman and what shaped her decisions in every avenue of life.

Raised under her mother’s ambitious wings and without much familial affection, Catherine was shuttled off to Russia at fourteen to become the wife of Peter Ulrich of Holstein, the designated heir for the current Empress Elizabeth of Russia. Catherine was excited to escape her unhappy childhood and ambitious for how high her star might rise. What she faced, however, was a man-child of a husband who preferred military toys and humiliation to showing his young bride any love, and an empress who kept her isolated and lonely. She had been brought to Russia for one purpose: to produce an heir to the throne. Since her marriage remained unconsummated for nine years, this was not an easy task.

Catherine sought passion, companionship and happiness with twelve lovers over her lifetime (three of which are believed to have fathered her three children and one of which played a key part in bringing her to the throne) but power struggles, jealousies and an inability to balance her personal life with her role in society made it impossible for Catherine to find the love she had so often sought.

It wasn’t until Empress Elizabeth died and Peter became Emperor in her place that Catherine was able to glimpse how her many years of loneliness and abasement at their hands would come to an end. Her intelligence, humor, grace and compassion endeared her to the nobility, church, military and the vast Russian population, all of whom were angered by the changes made by Peter III, and a coup successfully placed Catherine II on the throne as Empress in her own right. While Catherine’s thirty-four years as Empress faced difficulties such as war, disease, religious conflicts and the horrific issues of serfdom and peasant uprisings, she also worked to establish a world of Enlightenment with improvements in tolerance and justice, medicine, education and the arts. While she refused to rule alongside anyone (including her son and heir) she did establish herself, to the best of her abilities, as a “benevolent despot” and took her role as mother of the Russian people to heart. She loved her adopted people and did her best to leave Russia a better place than she came to at fourteen.

While historical non-fiction can so often come across as dry, boring and riddled with excessive facts not necessary to the key topics of the book, I didn’t find this to be an issue with Catherine the Great. I won’t say for a minute that this is a quick and easy read (there is simply too much information to declare that) but I will say that the book flows well and is organized in a way that never made me feel bogged down in the facts. If you take the time and savor the experience, you should come away from this book feeling satisfied that you thoroughly know one of the greatest women in history.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Colleen lives in Tampa, Florida with her husband, son, their dog Oliver and their fish Finn. When not working or taking care of her family she has her nose stuck in a book (and, let’s face it, often when she is working or taking care of her family as well). Nothing excites her more than discovering a new author to obsess over or a hidden jewel of a book to worship.

Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Random House. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received.

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