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Cute, in very small doses.

Amusing articles about off-beat military inventions from WWII, mostly from Germany. And mostly pretty bloody stupid and wasteful. The author described each, and then speculated on how it might have been used had it actually been put into production.

A short but convoluted book, just the way I like them, coiling back onto itself til you didn't know whether you were coming or going.  

About the first pandemic, when bubonic plague ravaged Europe six centuries before the Black Death.

Eventually. He started out with background. Deep background. In fact, it took more than half of the book before the first flea appeared. A short, but intense, description of the effects of the plague in Constantinople, followed by a great deal of chronological leaps, as he then raced through the following centuries, touching down here and there as the plague reappeared, detailing how it changed history.

The final conclusion was that it was this appearance of the plague that destroyed the Roman Empire and allowed the rise of the nation-states of Medieval Europe. And also permitted the rise of Islam, as the weakened empire was no longer able to contain it.

James Garfield sounds like an exceptional person. It's a shame that he was shot, and so early in his presidency. Think of what he might have been able to achieve otherwise.


The book was divided into two parts - an all too brief biography on Garfield up until the day he was shot, and the horrifying aftermath, with the substandard (even for that day) medical care that did nothing to save him and might even have caused his death.


Several people noticed a similarity with The Devil in the White City, with chapters bouncing between Garfield and Giteau, or Garfield and Alexander Graham Bell, who was desperately working to invent a device to find the bullet. Not that that would have helped Garfield, since it was the doctor-induced infection rather than the bullet that killed him.

I stopped reading science fiction decades ago, tired of sifting the dreck for the few gems to be found. It was refreshing to find that there's still good stuff being written. Well, being written thirty years ago, at least.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, while Ashleigh thought it was the best book this group had yet read. That opinion might have been colored by the fact that she grew up near New Orleans, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. In a house that withstood several floods before finally being condemned as uninhabitable. She felt that Dan Baum had truly captured the sense of the city. I appreciated the structure of the book - the slow arc from Betsy to Katrina, and afterwards, with the despair turning to a resolution to rebuild. I'd never known about the Mardi Gras Indians, and was surprised to realize how segregated New Orleans was.

I loved the vivid writing and the sense of time and place. The island was a character in its own right, described in Bethia's memory like the best of old friends.

Unfortunately, the island was the most interesting character in the book. All of the human characters might as well have been cardboard. Each one was well drawn, but each one was a stock character - the rambling schoolmaster, the eager youth, the scowling killjoy, the noble savage - rather than an entire person.

The research behind the book was impeccable. I felt like Brooks had scoured every scrap of paper from 17th century New England, and had found little about Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, but much about everyday life. And then wrote a mis-titled book. Because it wasn't about Caleb's crossing. He was a peripheral character. It was about Bethia's crossing, and re-crossing, and growth into womanhood.