The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson

 Beatrice Nash has recently lost her father and has moved to a small town in Sussex in 1914.  She has a small inheritance, but it is held in trust, so she is trying to be independant by working as a Latin teacher.  The town has a complex social structure, and Beatrice is befriended by one of the leading women, Agatha Kent, and by her two nephews, Hugh and Daniel.  It is a beautiful summer, but there are rumblings about war with the Kaiser.  When Belgium falls, the whole town is caught up in a patriotic frenzie, but it slowly and inexerably gives way to the grim realities of living with war. As things spiral out of control, both Beatrice and Agatha put asside social convention to follow their hearts, with mixed results.

I picked this book because it was written by the same author as Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, which I loved. I ended up really likeing this one as well.  Not only is Simonson a brilliant word crafter, but she has such a delicate touch with characters and relationships.  She does a good job of balancing the heart wrenching realities with light hearted jabs at small town social wrangling. The story unfolds like a rose bud, a little at a time until it reaches full bloom. This is another historical fiction that I will be recommending to a lot of friends. (2016, 512 p.) 

Great Courses: Augustine: Philosopher and Saint by Phillip Cary

 Saint Augustine is now considered one of the theological fathers of the Catholic Church, but he didn't start out that way.  As a youth he was trained as a philosopher and rhetorician, and for a time he followed the heretical sect of the Manicheans. In twelve lectures, the author discusses Augustine's life and theology, and the impact he had on modern Christian thought. His lectures are based on the major writings of the Saint, including the Confessions, On Christian Doctrine, and the The City of God.  Cary emphasizes how Augustine adapted the teachings of the Neoplatonists to Christian theology.

Of course, having been a humanities major focusing on the middle ages, I had heard of Augustine, but listening to this lecture series, I realized how little I really knew about him and his teachings.  Professor Cary gives interesting and rather animated lectures and seems to be well informed on his topic. I enjoyed listening to the lectures, but I didn't gain a lot of respect for Augustine.  He really does seem to have ignored much of what we know about God and Christ from the Bible, and instead tried to God into the philosophies popular at the time in Rome. Augustine was clearly brilliant, but, in my opinion, misguided. 

(1998, 6 hrs)

The Fix by David Baldacci

 Amos Decker, Alex, and the other members of their FBI team are living in Washington DC.  One day as Amos is walking to the Hoover Building, he sees a man shoot a woman right in front of him. At first it seems like the man and the woman have no connection.  The man is a respected owner of a company that does government contracts.  The woman is a teacher at a catholic school and visits a hospice as a volunteer. As Decker's team digs deeper into the mystery they learn that not everything, or everyone, are as they seem. As Decker uses his amazing memory and the rest of the teem use their unique abilities, to get to the root of the case, people keep showing up who want to kill them.

This is the third in the Memory Man series.  I really like this series.  It is intellectual, and Decker is an interesting character. Alex is also a good character, and the new character introduced in this book, Harper Brown, also has promise. There is action, but it isn't all action.  There are enough clues that the reader can try to figure things out, but the ending isn't totally predictable.  As I have said about this series before, I am glad it doesn't have some of the more distasteful elements you find in other "thriller" type mysteries. (2017, 434 p)

The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

The jungle at the interior of Honduras are said to be some of the most dangerous and most inhospitable in the world.  For centuries, Hondurans have retold a legend of a Ciudad Blanco, or White City, in the middle of the jungle area, and for decades different explorers and scientists have tried to locate ruins in the region, without much success.  Then in 2012, a new technology, lidar, gave proof that there were ruins under the dense canopy of the jungle.  A team of scientists and explorers undertook an expedition to find and study the site, with startling results. 

This is fairly sensationalized nonfiction about a modern day explorers. It was very interesting and written in an engaging style.  Preston captures the contrasts of the thrill of seeing a completely unspoiled jungle environment, with the terror of being surrounded by animals and insects that could kill you with one bite. The end of the book took an unexpected turn.  (spoiler alert) with a discussion about the role contagious diseases have played in world history, and specifically, in the devastation of populations of indigenous peoples of the Americas. I knew that great numbers of natives were killed by small pox and other diseases but I had no idea how many. It was interesting to have him end with dire predictions that the world could face another global pandemic like the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. Of course this was written before 2020.  Um. Been there. Done that. (2017, 448 p.)

P.S.

I was a little bit delighted with how this tied in with the last Charlie Thorne book I read.  I didn't realize the Charlie Thorne book was based on a real legend.

Still the One by Susan May Warren

 Megan Carter is a wedding planner in her home town of Deep Haven.  Cole Barrett used to visit his grandfather in Deep Haven each summer, and Megan and Cole were childhood friends.  Tragedy struck Cole's family and sent him into the foster care system and then into the Army.  When Cole, having finished his tour of duty, returns to Deep Haven to settle his grandfather's affairs he doesn't plan to stay for long.  Then he see Megan again. She is now a single mom, still wounded that her son's father didn't want to stay and help raise their son.  Neither Cole or Megan think that renewing their childhood relationship would work, but both are inexplicably drawn to each other against their best intentions.

I am always on the lookout for new source for good clean romance.  I hadn't read anything from this author before so I thought I would give her a try.  There were some things I liked.  I thought Cole's voice was very charming.  He sounded, in my head, like I would imagine a handsome x-Army Ranger would sound.  The host of secondary characters were also decent, making Deep Haven seem like an inviting Halmark-movie-type setting. The weakness of the book was the pacing.  Ugh! it was so slow.  I kept thinking, "come on, we need something to happen here."  I almost didn't finish the book.  Finally, I skipped an entire hour of the recording and jumped to the last 1/2 to see how it would end.  I found, by doing that, that I didn't actually miss any important plot points. So maybe Ms. Warren isn't going on my favorite Christian romance writers list.   (248 p. 2021)

The Merchant and the Rogue by Sarah Eden

 Vera Sorokina is a political refugee from Russia and helps run a printing shop owned by her father.  Brogan Donnelly is a writer of Penny Dreadfuls and is part of the secret Dread Penny Society that tries to help the less fortunate people in London.  When Brogan is sent by the Dread Master on a secret mission to discover a plot against the Russian ambasador, he takes a job as a man-of-all-work in Vera's shop.  She is impressed by his kindness and charmed by his quick smile, but concerned at the scars on his knuckles that suggest he has been in more than his share of fist fights. As time goes on Brogan's interest in Vera becomes a conflict of interest in he search to discover if her father is part of the plot against the ambassador.  Meanwhile, an unknown entity is extorting money from the merchants in Vera's neighborhood, and Brogan wants to help, but doesn't know how.

Here is another in the Dread Penny Society series.  I enjoyed it, but have to admit that the books in this series are starting to all sound alike. I guess it would be normal for an author to use the same turn of phrase and discriptors in all their books. The heroines and heroes have very similar personalities, and  they have been fighting against the same crime lord in all the books. I think I just read them too close to each other and would have enjoyed this one a little more if I had waited a few months. There is one more in the series, and the summary sounds pretty good, but I think I will wait a while before I read it. (368 p. 2021)

The Higgs Boson and Beyond by Great Courses

 In 2012 the CERN scientists announced that a Higgs Boson had been created in the Large Hadron Collider. At the time I wondered what it was all about.  This week, in the mood for some nonfiction, I happened on this Great Courses offering about the Higgs Boson and checked it out on Libby.  The course has 12 1/2 hour lectures by Sean Carroll that cover some basic physics, the history of the Higgs Boson, and where physicists want to go from here.  It assumes about a high-school level of physics understanding and covers the current (as of the creation of the lectures) state of the wave theory of elementary particles and how the Higgs Boson is similar and different from other bosons.  It was a good level for me, though I did occasionally get lost in lingo.  I was happy to get updated on current physical science, since I hadn't had a class in it in 30 years. The lecturer is engaging and not at all condescending even though he seems to be a leader in the field.  I talked about the course enough to my husband who got an undergraduate degree in physics, that he put it on hold.  Not all the "Great Courses" offerings are well done, but many are, including this one.  I am glad so many are now available on Libby. (2013, 6 hours 20 minutes)

Lost Girl by Chanda Hahn

 Wendy doesn't remember her early childhood, but is plagued by nightmares of drowning and loss. She also see shadows that other people don't see.  Peter is a member of a group of children and teens who were genetically altered in a science experiment gone wrong.  Peter's group has the task to hunt down the shadow creatures Wendy can see. When Peter and Wendy come together, sparks fly, and both begin to see that their destiny's were intertwined long ago.

I decided I hadn't read a YA novel in a long time, and this one came highly recommended.  I was a little leery since the last Peter Pan remake I read wasn't that great.  This one turned out to be much better.  I thought Ms Hahn did a great job with both Peter's and Tinkerbell's personalities, and also with working in a lot of details from the original book into the new setting.  Wendy is pretty emotional--in love one minute, in despair the next--but that is kind of how it is with YA heroines. It is the first in the series, and I am not sure I will read the rest, but I might, (which is pretty high praise for me when it comes to YA).  (320 p. 2016)

The Pioneers by David McCullough

 After the Revolutionary War, the Treaty of Paris gave the United States the Northwest Territory, a large fertile area east of the Ohio River. A group of New England men formed a society with the purpose of settling the new area in an organized and profitable manner.  This book follows the lives of some of the earliest settlers as they struggle to set up a civilization in the wild terrain, and then grow that settlement into thriving communities.

I have read and enjoyed David McCullough's histories before.  This one was well researched and engaging as his other books have been.  As I read about how the settlement struggled with starvation the first few years, but slowly got a foothold in a new land, I couldn't help but think of my own ancestors who went through the same process, a couple of decades later, in Utah. McCullough ends the book with excepts from the obituaries and tributes given about the men that were the focus of his narrative. He talks about how there were no greater "Christian Gentlemen" to be found than these men.  As I read that, I suddenly realized that this book was written almost entirely from a white male perspective.  There was some mention that the native peoples who were driven out of their ancestral homes by the settlers, but in the end, McCullough portrayed the relief of the main characters when the natives were finally driven to land north and would no longer be a bother. There was very little said about the contribution of women, except in how they had lots of children and supported their husbands.  There were scattered mentions of people of color, but none were the main focus of any sizable part of the book. It reads like a book published 30 years ago and I was a little surprised when I saw that the publish date was so recent.  (352 p., 2019)