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Showing posts from May, 2020

Curious Toys by Elizabeth Hand *** (of 4)

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At its best, Curious Toys  captures Chicago in 1915. It's a city of Polish, Italian, German, and Irish immigrants alongside a handful of African Americans. The characters in this carefully researched murder mystery are largely from the wrong side of the tracks. The story's chief protagonist, Pin Mafucci is a 14-year-old girl, whose single mother dresses Pin as a boy for her protection. Together they live in a shack on the edge of the Riverview Amusement park where Gina Mafucci tells gypsy fortunes and Pin runs the grounds with a pack of boys. The shouts of carnival barkers, squeals of roller coasters, shrieks of haunted houses, blaring signs for freak shows, and syrupy smell of cotton candy mixed with spilt beer are all fused amongst crowds of families wilting beneath a Chicago summer. Inside Hellgate -- a frightening river ride with cobwebbed skeletons illuminated by unpredictable flashpots -- Pin discovers a young girl who has been murdered and left to float among the passing

Midnight in Chernobyl *** (of 4)

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Chernyobyl has entered the global lexicon as a stand-in for the planet's most devastating public nuclear disaster. The USSR was deep in the throes of a Cold War competition for global supremacy in science, technology, politics, power, and armaments, but built upon an impossible economic model. Compounding its economic failures to produce what Soviets actually needed in the quantities they needed them was a historical system of politics that relied upon sycophancy, falsification, and placation of superiors. The result was the construction of a nuclear power plant with serious design flaws because underlings were loathe to report errors to superiors. Combine a faulty power plant, a government hellbent on proving its nuclear mettle on the global stage, and the inevitability of a combination of tiny, impossible to imagine human errors and the suspense of Chernobyl is laid bare. When the explosion of Reactor 4 finally occurred in October 1986, the scale of the explosion was so unpredict

Blowout by Rachel Maddow **** (of 4)

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Since its earliest commercial success in Drakes Well, Pennsylvania, just 30 miles from where I live, the oil and gas industry has created enormous wealth and in its wake, environmental havoc and maldistribution of power. The "Oil Curse," well known to economists, is the process by which the export of oil and gas is traded for the import of petro-dollars which nearly always end up in corruption rather than development. Blowout  begins with a blatant case of big money going bad. Equatorial Guinea, for example, has exported such vast quantities of oil that its megalomaniacal autocratic leaders have enriched themselves beyond anyone's wildest ability to fathom. And yet, over the course of several decades of profligacy by the royal family, every measure of human development in Equatorial Guinea has fallen. Education, literacy rates, individual income, availability of drinking water, and health care have all declined. Oil spills and contaminated ecosystems abound. Case number t

The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff **** (of 4)

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In June 1940 Winston Churchill ordered the creation of Special Operations Executive (SOE) for the purpose of sabotaging Nazi operations in occupied portions of France. Among SOE's operatives were Britain's first women in combat. The Lost Girls of Paris  describes the wartime lives of some of these women from their first days as young recruits, through their training, and finally to their secret missions in occupied France. Violette Szabo ,  re-created in  The Lost Girls of Paris  as Marie,  was a British citizen, who as a single mother of a toddler, agreed to parachute into France. Violette Szabo recovering from an ankle injury suffered during parachute training, 1944.  Marie, like Violette, operated a secret radio transmitter under the noses of the Nazis and assisted in blowing up a bridge that would have been vital to German forces responding to the imminent D-Day invasion. What Pam Jenoff does so well is capture the danger, tension, isolation, bravery, and nerve required

The Song of the Jade Lilly ** (of 4)

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Alexandra is a hard-driving commodities trader who uses her transfer from London to Shanghai to search for (love and) the history of her mother. Alexandra was raised in Australia by her loving grandparents after her parents were killed in a car crash. Alex's grandparents survived World War II in China when no other country in the world would accept Jewish emigres fleeing Austria and Germany. Thus, Alexandra's mother is Chinese, having been "adopted" under mysterious circumstances while Alexandra's grandparents were surviving Japanese occupation of Shanghai. Yes, the plot is convoluted. The characters, unfortunately, are stereotypes. Because Alexandra is of Chinese descent, she, like her mother, are good at math. Alexandra's grandparents are saints, absent any bad habits or negative features, and bursting with nothing but love and encouragement. Alexandra finds a love life within days of landing in Shanghai with a man with a strong chest, a musky smell, and