Book Review: "Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History Making Race Around the World" by Matthew Goodman

Midway through this book the thought popped in my head "This would be great for All Lady July 2015!" and then I flip to the cover and the author is a man. Bummer! (I mean, it's fine that he's a man, but there are rules to All Lady July.) But it's okay because I'm excited to share this book with you and now I don't have to wait until next summer!

The setting (to start) is New York City in 1889. Our main characters are two very different types of women who are doing something pretty radical at the time, being journalists.

Nellie Bly is a pretty famous journalist by the time the book starts. She did a ground breaking piece of journalism when she went undercover in an insane asylum to expose the horrible treatment of patients. (Does anyone watch Drunk History? They profiled this story using Laura Dern and it was pretty great. I love that show. Oh my gosh. Here's the (probably) uncensored youtube clip.) She's also worked undercover in a paper box making factory, as a chorus girl, and as a patient in a horrifying city hospital. She was determined to never have to rely on anyone other then herself for income, after becoming impoverished after her father's early death which meant a life of extreme poverty for she and her mother.

16 years before the French novelist Jules Verne took readers around the world in 80 days with his novel of Phineas Fogg's adventure. Nellie says she can do it in 75 days, She pitches it to her bosses at The World, and after a year they agree to send her. She has less than a week to prepare....

The other stare of this show is Elisabeth Bisland. She grew up in genteel poverty in New Orleans before moving to New York. Her journalistic style was very different from Nellie's. Elisabeth wrote a column called "In the Library" where she talked about a great range of books. She and her sister would hold literary chats in the living room of their small New York apartments. When the newspaper she worked for, The Cosmopolitan, heard about Nellie's adventure around the world they decided Elisabeth needed to race her. She had literally one day to prepare. She left 9 hours after Nellie. (Nellie didn't know this "race" with Elisabeth was happening until well into the trip. She basically didn't acknowledge the existence of it at all. She said she only was "racing against time".

They took almost the same route but in opposite directions. Elisabeth first went across the United States by train, then a boat across the Pacific, from Japan to Hong Kong, to Madagascar to (what's now) Yemen, through the Suez Canal, through Italy, to London and then finally back to New York Harbor by boat. Nellie started with the Atlantic ride. Though they never were in contact with each other their boats passed each other in the South China Sea during the third week of December.

There was sea sickness, a terrible pet monkey, a lot of uncomfortable feelings in China, lots of love for Japan, and a lot of running through train stations through Europe. Nellie even gets to meet Jules Verne and his lovely wife at a very brief stop in France!

Am I going to tell you who wins? No. Do they both survive? Yes. (Though the man who captain's the ship the last leg of Elisabeth's journey through the Atlantic was the captain of the ill fated Lusitania.) Will I tell you if it was close or not? I will, and it was close.

In case any book publisher, newspaper magnate, magazine titan or anyone of the like is reading this I would be more than willing to undertake this journey and see how fast it could be done now. I would even do it without airplanes. Find my contact info on the About Me page on the top. Thanks! :)

I thought this book was exciting and fun! I can't believe that I hadn't heard about this race before. I was guessing right up until the end about who would win! I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars!

Banned Book Week post- "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou

When contemplating Banned Books Week I was massively tempted to turn to an old favorite, "Fahrenheit 451". But while perusing a list of banned books I came across "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou. I've actually never read anything that she'd written, and I've been meaning to spend more literary time in the Southern parts of the United States (I've got some Flannery O'Connor coming up in a few months). And it was less than 350 pages. Ding ding, we have a winner.

Here's the reasons that the book is challenged/banned: racism, homosexuality, sexually explicit, offensive language, unsuited to age group.(All the classics).

So we are transported to Stamps, Arkansas where Margueritte (our narrator) lives with her Momma (her grandma), her Uncle Willie, and her brother Bailey Jr. Her parents are separated and live in St Louis and California. They see or hear from them very rarely. Momma runs a general store in the "black side" of town and the kids help her. She runs a tight ship; church is attended, you are kept clean, you do your homework, you don't sass! Both kids are very smart, reading all of the time and doing very well in school. All of this is not to say that life is ideal. There are lynchings, rampant out of control racism aggressive, and snide, holier than thou racism. There is one night where they have to hide Uncle Willie under the floor under a pile of potatoes and onions because there's a group of angry white men out looking for a black man to assault.

They're life changes when they move to St Louis to live with their beautiful and glamorous mother who works as a nurse (along with other things on the side.) But something awful happens and they end up back in Stamps for a short time, before moving to San Fransisco, where there mom has moved. The rest of the book chronicles her and Bailey's adjustments to living in California and the different struggles they face as they get older...

Ready for my Banned Books rant? Here it is.

You know what makes me angry? That it's considered "unsuited for age group". Well, I don't know about you, but any age group that can understand how horrifying it is as a little girl fights to grasp sexual assault visited on her and the feelings that haunt her in the aftermath should read this book and be horrified. Of course it's unsuited for an age group, it's unsuited for everyone because it's horrible and violent and retch worthy. (That probably isn't clear, but I get angry and sad and horrified when there's a little girl who doesn't know that a forced sexual encounter is about to happen and we as readers do.)What I mean to say is sexual assault of a child will be disturbing to a reader at any age.

I was pleasantly surprised by my first walk down Maya Angelou's work (which you might not gather from the above rant, but that's just one component of the overall work). The characters were interesting and complicated. My favorite part of the book was when their one church sister is overwhelmed by spiritual fervor and basically attacks the preacher.(It sounds weird but it was really funny.) 3 out of 5 stars!

Graphic Novel Review: "Harlem Hellfighters" by Max Brooks and Illustrated by Caanan White

I still need to finish the book and write a review for thursdays post so this is going to be a short review! (It's also my Banned Books Week review...)

This was a great graphic novel. I hadn't heard about these brave men, the 369th Infantry before. They were a group of African American and African Puerto Ricans who volunteered to fight in World War I. They were a very diverse group; from the well educated and refined to men who hadn't ever spent any time in school and everything in between. The problems they encountered started almost immediately. One problem was that they weren't given any actual weapons to train with, just broomsticks and the like. (How good does that make your aim? Not good). They didn't receive a loft of training with weapons because the higher ups just intended to use them for manual labor, not for fighting. Also when they were in different cities for training the racism that they encountered from the locals was often incredibly violent. Despite all of this they went to Europe.

They were to fight with the French and not the USA because of race hostility. They spent more time in combat than any other American unit. So these men blew all the expectations of them out of the water.

Also it's written by Max Brooks who wrote World War Z. So Max has some range. And his dad is Mel Brooks, who is awesome. (Not related to anything, just a fact).

Sorry for such a short review, it deserves better.If you have any interest in race relations, World War I, or just like good illustrations I recommend it! 3 out of 5 stars!

Book Review: "Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus" by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

I know what you're thinking. "Wesley, why are you reading a book about RABIES?" and I'd be like "Dear reader, if I had been born with a different brain I would have loved to be a scientist. But instead I have this wonderful brain that remembers Shakespeare, airport codes, and names of books I read years ago, but not the parts of a plant cell or the parts of the brain". So the way I make up for not being a scientist to read books about cholera and smallpox and apparently rabies.

But here's the thing. This book was so interesting! I kept telling my family little interesting tidbits of the book, ignoring their looks that said "oh my gosh, please less talk about mouth frothy animals during brunch".

Let's just real fast talk about what rabies is like for a human sufferer because it's really scary and awful. Rabies is a virus that works it's way through the nervous system and up to the brain. One symptom is hydrophobia; victims are horrified of water, even just drinking water in a glass, and refuse to drink it even if they are horribly dehydrated. The throat spasms, so talking is made difficult, often talking is more like barking gasps. There's hallucinations.There's frothing at the mouth. There's aggression. The most unusual symptom (I thought) is that male victims can "exhibit hyper sexual behavior", including involuntary erections and ejaculation. It takes about a week to die.

So that's what we're dealing with here.

Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, and many other ancient cultures knew about rabies and recorded their thoughts about it. In some of these cultures dogs were revered (like Egypt's Anubis). A Greek names Xenophon wrote extensively about what makes the perfect hound. He even provides a list of "ideal"names for your hound. They include: Spigot, Lance, Eyebright (that's an elf name, like Tolkein elf), Hebe, Tracks, Dash, Bloomer, Much, Riot and Sunbeam.

Neptune, my parent's dog who is over the Rainbow Bridge. Xenophon would have though her head was too wide but we thought that she was beautiful :)

So even if these people loved their hounds, some of them are still going to get rabies eventually. Here are some examples of cures, though there was general consensus that the victim was probably unable to be saved. "Insert into the wound ashes of hairs from the tail of the dog that inflicted the bit" is one, (aka "hair of the dog"). One suggestion was to kill the dog, and rub it's brain on the wound. (I'm sorry, no one is eating anything right now, right?) Let's just say all of the cures were gross, ineffective and potential harmful. Shudder! Victims in the middle ages would have been better off putting their faith in Saint Hubert, the patron saint of hunters and rabies sufferers, then in any of these scary cures.

Obviously in the Middle Ages most people thought that rabid dogs were possessed by demons. (Which, I don't really blame them because rabid dogs are very scary sounding.) Apparently though, in a lot of wood cuts from that time when people are talking about possessed dogs they are almost always portrayed as poodles. Which is hilarious to me. Sorry if you have a demon dog, I mean poodle.

Rapid fire facts:

-Rabies in literature has quite the spread: Old Yeller (sob), To Kill a Mockingbird, The Professor, Beloved,Cujo and more!

-Almost all bites these days come from bats.

-It's (still) pretty rare to survive rabies without getting the need shots very quickly after the bite. Though one successful survival happened at a hospital practically in my backyard here in Wisconsin.

I loved this book. Scary and interesting and full of things I'd never even remotely heard of before. Goodreads and their random recommendations hits a home run for me again, bless their souls. 4 out of 5 stars! If this gives you nightmares feel free to yell at me on twitter or in the comments, I can take it. :)

Bloggiest Wrap Up!

Well it's the end of bloggiesta and I'm pretty proud of myself I must say!

-I have a Goodreads shelf where I thought I'd tag all the books I reviewed on the blog. There's not many books on that shelf so I know I missed a bunch of them. So I'm going to go through and make sure everyone gets tagged that needs to be.   Donezo! I had missed a looooot of them.

-Update the review archive on the blog. Since I haven't done it since LAST Bloggiesta. Also dunezo, but took a long time and I'm pretty sure I still missed a lot. But I'm feeling like it's sufficient.

-Figure out how to set up a Rafflecopter giveaway. The blog is celebrating it's 1 year anniversary and I want to use it for a giveaway. Hooray!  I suck at code and html and all that stuff but this was so easy. Like shockingly easy! Thank you rafflecopter for being the easiest and fastest thing on my list this year! (The blogiversary giveaway is coming October 10th, so then you can all see me in action with it!)

My disappointment was that I managed to list every twitter chat! Argh! I love the twitter chats, so that bummed me out. Next time.

Also it seems like there was good reaction to my Mailchimp challenge so hopefully some people find it useful!

Thanks everyone for all your helpful comments and visits. Be sure to come back tomorrow because I have a really interesting book review for you. It's about rabies. Yeah. I'm officially scared ishless of rabies and you will be too. Come on back  ya'll, haha.

"Stevenson's Treasure" by Mark Wiederanders (HF Virtual Book Tours)

(Throughout the review I'm going to abbreviate Robert Louis Stevenson to RLS because homeboy has a long name and I don't have all day to spell it out 45 times in one review.)

Fanny Osbourne is barely keeping it together. One of her children has died and it's landed her in an asylum in France for "melancholia". The doctor there suggests that she goes to an artist colony nearby where she can find therapy in her painting and spending time with her daughter Belle. She gets more than she bargains for when she meets and falls in love with RLS. He isn't the famous author yet, he's more of a scraggly wanderer with a persistent cough due to a lung condition but the attraction between he and Fanny is swift. There is the complication that she is married, has two kids (one, is closer in age to RLS than Fanny is) and lives in America. She eventually leaves France, assuming that this is the end of her romance. But it is not.

RLS travels across the ocean and then across the United States to join Fanny in California. His doctor tells him before he leaves that the trip will almost certainly kill him. It nearly does. (That could be the subtitle of this book: "Almost everything nearly killed him. The fact he lived to write anything is darn near miraculous"). Fanny is shocked and surprised and thrilled and horrified at his arrival. She had been making a real effort to make a clean break from him and try to mentally leave him behind and now his scraggly blonde face is there.

The rest of the book details what happens next! Should they be together? What about the kids? If she divorces her husband she will be penniless and it's not like RLS is rolling in the dough, so what would they do? What will his family think? Will RLS live long enough to figure any of this out with Fanny since he keeps not eating and getting sick?

There's a kind of curdling moment when RLS sees men setting fire and hacking a part a dead whale carcass. Glad that this book wasn't scratch and sniff!

Here is what kind of grinded my gears about this book (and it really doesn't have anything to do with the book or the writing or anything like that).

-Belle is all concerned her daughter is a "trollop". Uuuuhh can we talk about how you and RLS were running around basically in public in France and in California and kind of flaunted it in front of everyone including the kids? If she is a trollop, who do you think she learned it from? Pot meet kettle, kettle meet pot.

- I had a hard time cheering for any of these characters. Everyone's complicated and messy and that's fine, but I like to have someone to cheer for. Personal preference.

But it was an interesting, easy read that was well paced. If you have an interest in forbidden romance, art, or RLS I definitely recommend it for you!

About the Author

Mark Wiederanders lives in Northern California and writes about the private lives of famous authors. His screenplay about William Shakespeare’s family, “Taming Judith” was a finalist in the Academy of Motion Pictures’ annual screenwriting competition and was optioned by a film company. The idea for his current novel, STEVENSON’S TREASURE hatched during a visit to Carmel, when Mark learned that Robert Louis Stevenson suffered a near-fatal collapse in 1879 while hiking nearby. What was the young, as-yet unknown Scottish writer doing so far from home?

To write the novel that resulted from this question, Mark studied hundreds of historical letters and visited sites near him in Monterey, San Francisco, and Calistoga. Then he followed Stevenson’s footsteps to Europe, lodging at the Stevenson home in Edinburgh followed by a week in the Highlands cottage where RLS wrote TREASURE ISLAND. Mark is also a research psychologist (Ph.D, University of Colorado) who has studied treatment programs for delinquents and the criminally insane. His interests include acting in community theater (recently a Neil Simon play), downhill skiing, golf, and spending time with his wife and three grown children.

Mailchimp, a Newsletter and You!

I'm always excited to host a challenge for Bloggiesta (even though I never have any ideas about what to do, so Suey always to give me a list to pick from, so high maintenance, sorry Suey. Next time I'll come bursting with my own ideas). There was some talk about MailChimp on a Bloggiesta Twitter chat, so here we are talking about Mailchimp and newsletters.

What is Mailchimp?
Mailchimp is a service that helps you "create, send and track newsletters". What's great about it, is that it's free up to 2,000 subscribers! And you don't have to be super web design savvy to make a newsletter, they have pre-made templates you can use.

There is a difference between using a service like Feedburner when subscribers are automatically sent out an email when you have a new blogpost, and newsletter let's you customize your content, it won't just be your latest blogpost.

Do I need a blog newsletter?

Full disclosure: I don't have a blog newsletter. I figured I need to get myself established and maybe after my one year anniversary I'd make one. Now I'm kind of like "whatever I'll make one now!" I'm still deciding, I want to make sure I give people content worth reading!

Here's reason to have a blog newsletter:

*If something apocalyptic happens to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, WordPress, or however else you communicate with your reader you still have their email addresses. That way you can reach them and let them know where to find you once the crisis has passed!

*It's a great place to maybe try something new. Are you a book blog, but now you're thinking you might want to talk about great recipes occasionally? Maybe try it out on your newsletter once and see how it's received before doing it on your blog.

* If you're readers get overwhelmed with social media, the internet or what have you (or they give something up for Lent!) having your content delivered straight to their inbox is a good way to make sure they don't leave your blog behind.

*Extra reach! If you're newsletter is good and noteworthy people will forward it on to people who aren't on your subscriber list, therefore expanding your blog's reach!


Challenge:

 Look at your blog and decide if a newsletter is something that will be beneficial. If you already have a newsletter is there a way to improve it? Check out these tutorials on how to have the best newsletter possible.

*Do you want the option of your reader getting a daily or weekly newsletter? Check out this tutorial from DIY blog Tiny Sidekick.

*Are you more interested in using MailChimp in an RSS feed way?  This tutorial from Blog Ambitions has you covered.

*Want to add a "subscribe here" box for you MailChimp newsletter on your blog? My Crazy Good Life has the tutorial for you!

Book Review: "The Giant's House" by Elizabeth McCracken

Got a bit of an interesting book for you today.

Peggy is a small town librarian in Cape Cod. When the book starts it's 1950 and she's 25 years old. She's unmarried and her life is pretty much wrapped around her work at the library. One day a twelve year old boy comes in with a local elementary school class. She notices him right away, probably because he's twelve and is 6 foot 4 inches tall. His name is James Sweatt and he begins to come into the library frequently. They become friends and she helps him find books on all kinds of topics, including what "people like him do". (Peggy thinks that he's asking what they do occupation-wise, but he's really asking what do they do to stop growing. Spoiler alert: nothing)

He and Peggy grow close over the years, and she becomes basically a part of his family. He lives with his Aunt Caroline and his Uncle Oscar. They are lovely people and welcome Peggy into their family, and appreciate the help and companionship that she provides for James. Their relationship grows and changes over the years but they are each others best friends and extremely important in each other's lives.


At the end of the book James has just turned 20, he is eight feet and 7 inches tall, and weighs 417 pounds.

Elizabeth crafts these really lovely sentences. Here's an example:
"I understood, finally: tourists don't take pictures as souvenirs. They want to assemble a new country to tour after that they outfit with the best parts of the last place...The photographer is native and stranger in his glossy dream city, invisible but significant, as natives and strangers often are"

Another great one is when she's talking about rude patrons who refuse to pay their fines at the library:
"Listen: in my library, as in the Kingdom of Heaven, the rude and busy are not rewarded. We honor manners, patience, good deeds, and grave misfortune only"


I thought that this book would weird me out because of the age difference. It really didn't. The par that weirded me out was the end. Not necessarily the end, but like the ten pages before the last most ten pages, if that makes sense.Its not that I thought that it was bad but it was just like wooooooah. One of my favorite things about the book (at least the edition that I was reading) the book was just a little bit oversized, just like our friend James. The book was 6 inches  by 9.5 inches which was just proportionally weird enough to be noticed and appreciated but not that it made the book uncomfortable to read. I thought that it was clever and I liked it. The only thing gets a high 3 out of 5 stars from me!

Also a library-centric cover to go with it's oversizeness. Adorable.

Bloggiesta to-do list!

Bloggiesta starts on the 18th (officially), but people are already assembling their to do lists. I only have a few things on my list but they are annoyingly time consuming. And they are...

-I have a Goodreads shelf where I thought I'd tag all the books I reviewed on the blog. There's not many books on that shelf so I know I missed a bunch of them. So I'm going to go through and make sure everyone gets tagged that needs to be.

-Update the review archive on the blog. Since I haven't done it since LAST Bloggiesta.

-Figure out how to set up a Rafflecopter giveaway. The blog is celebrating it's 1 year anniversary and I want to use it for a giveaway. Hooray!

I actually wrote a tutorial for Bloggiesta this year about Mailchimp and blog newsletters so if that's something that interests you please keep your eyes peeled for that!

Living Abroad - France

"A Year in the Merde" by Stephen Clarke

Let's just get this out of the way, merde is "shit" in French. So this book is called "a year in the shit", which is kind of hilarious and fitting considering the book is about an Englishman living in France for 2 years and trying to learn how to be a Parisian. And look, we all learned a cuss word in a foreign language today. What a productive day!

One of the things that he has a hard time with is alllll of the dog poop all around Paris. He has to take extreme precautions (aka buying tons and tons of crappy shoes that then he would just throw away when he actually has to walk around the city). Did you know that 650 people go to the hospital a year for slipping on merde? Yeah. That's unpleasant.

He is in Paris because he has been hired by a company that apparently deals exclusively in butchering cows (?) open a series of English style tea rooms. It's Paul's first experience working in a French corporation and there is are several things to get used too. He gets distracted by one beautiful woman in the office almost immediately. He is angered by the slow pace that everyone takes.

His boss put him up in an "all beige" hotel on the outskirts of Paris. He decides he wants to find his own apartment but can barely read the classified ads, which makes for some interesting visits. (One claims that it has a dining area, but really you just put a plank over the claw foot tub that is in the bathroom/kitchen). He asks for advice from an American that he met at a cafe and he said the best way to get in a decent apartment is to "get and move in with a French girlfriend". That isn't an immediate option, but he does move into his boss's daughter's apartment because she has a spare bedroom. Does this sound like a bad idea? Oui, it is. Not just because they almost immediately start having a casual sexual relationship, also because there are some illegal shenanigans a foot. If the apartment hunting and living turned out poorly, imagine how bad it goes when he decides he wants to buy a little cottage in the country.

The book can basically be summed up thusly. (Thusly, that's a word right?)

-His boss is shady, actual his whole job and work situation is shady

-He tries to learn how to act Parisian which involves looking kind of angry and shrugging a lot

-Sexual conquests (because of course, eye roll)

This book was funny. It was a light, easy read. It got a little repetitive and it kind of ends cliffhangery and I want to know what happens with the thing he was about to pursue. I give it a low 3 out of 5 stars.

I'm also linking up here!!!

Book Review: "The Undertaking" by Audrey Magee

I heard some buzz about this book, so I ordered it from my library. It sounded like a book I would read, and I hadn't read any World War II books in awhile (kind of a departure for me), so I thought it was a good pick. The day I picked it up from the library Shannon over at River City Reading posted a favorable review. So that night, with my husband absorbed in pre-season inconsequential football games I stretched out on my couch and laid into it.

I have to say, this book is best read in such conditions: with a full belly, in a warm and safe home, and with a loved one within arms reach. Do not read when feeling : sad, vulnerable, bummed. Because this book will not help those feelings.

Katherina and Peter get married,though they are hundreds of miles apart, and have never met. (And here I thought that a bride and groom in the same room was a necessity for a wedding.) They each have their own motivations, Katherina will get a widow's pension if something happens to Peter, and Peter gets a week's leave from the brutal conditions on the Eastern front.

The time they spend together is short, but memorable. But before long Peter is back in the war and Katherina continues to struggle with her overbearing parents and the struggles of the home front during war time.Her struggles seem to pale in comparison to Peter's horror stories at first, but as the war progresses it gets worse on the home front too.

There are a couple of things that I really liked about this book. There was no sugar coating about how terrible the conditions were during the siege of Stalingrad, and pretty much the whole Eastern front. They were incomprehensibly bad. I liked that it was from German's perspective. So much of the books out there are exclusively from the Allied perspective. I thought it was an interesting writing choice that there are big gaps of time in the narrative where we get to draw our own conclusions about what happens that we aren't told about. Not an easy read but a good read, 3 stars!

Divergent Trilogy Discussion/Thoughts. There are spoilers within!

So more or less, I read the whole Divergent trilogy in rapid succession and now I have questions and thoughts. Please chime in on the comments!!


-When watching the movie with my husband (who hasn't read the book) he was very concerned about Tori (the tattooist). He kept being like "Oh man, she's not going to make it". And I was like "uhh... you're not supposed to care about her that much. She's kind of a peripheral character". And then I'm reading Insurgent miles and miles away in Mexico and I find out she is kind of a big deal, which made me laugh. When I came home I told him that I was sorry, and that he SHOULD have been worried about Tori.

- I liked movie Four better than book Four. (And not just for the Theo James visual, though I have decided that he is quite good looking). I feel like he's more hardened and angry and that stays him longer in the movie then in the book. I feel like in the book that part of him falls away kind of faster than it should, though he doesn't ever shake all of that part of his personality. I guess we'll see what the rest of the movies bring.

-If the La Fleur girl from the Harry Potter movies doesn't play Cara I'm going to say that was a massively missed opportunity. (That's who I was picturing in my head at least!)

-What did you think of what was left out of the movie? How about the eye stabbing?! My sister, who read the book before she saw the movie - a rare occurrence- said she kept waiting for it to happen and it never did. Which makes me curious about the Edward character in the next movies.

-Also I like how they made Eric look in the movie better than how he was described in the book. I kept referring to him as "that skinhead guy". Though I like Jai Courtney in other things.


- So in the last book when Tris dies, does she survive the serum and die of the gunshot? I know that's what they told Four but I felt like I kind of missed something in there.

-Did anyone read the prequel Four stories? Im on the endless waiting list for it from the library.

Statement: I still like The Hunger Games series better (since people seem to think it has to be one or the other for some reason) but I think Four is more interesting than Peeta or Gale,

What are your thoughts on movie vs book (so far?) Is anyone else irritated that they split up a trilogy into four movies to get the most money possible? It irritates me. What's your faction?

And now I leave you with some funny things from pinterest....

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Book Review: "The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Albert Heim" by Nicholas Kulisch and Souad Mekhennet

This book has 2 stories kind of interwoven into one book. One story is the hunt for Albert Heim, who was a doctor at the camp Mauthausen. The second is a more general story about the hunt for Nazi war criminals by different countries after the end of World War II and the incredibly hard work that that entails.

We're going to start with talking about Albert Heim. Albert Heim would be described in different ways by his family members and the people who were hunting him for war crimes, this is often the case.

To his friends and family he was a big, strapping Austrian who was an excellent hockey player and a doctor. They say he was forced into service of the Nazis and served as a medical doctor at a variety of places during the war. They would also say that he was more of a gentle giant and loved children, especially his sons.

The people who hunted him have a different opinion. They agree on the huge Austrian, hockey player, doctor part. Albert Heim never told anyone about serving in Mauthausen. Probably for good reason.

Let's talk about Mauthausen before we talk about the doctor. It wasn't a concentration camp like Auschwitz where most people who were sent there were almost immediately killed. It's "motto" was vernichtung durch arbeit, in English extermination through work. Himmler chose the place for "economic exploitation" aka slave labor. The work was cutting huge pieces of granite from a stone quarry. Then each piece had to be carried up 186 stone steps that were cut into the hillside. The first year more than half of the 16,000 inmates died or were killed. People who stumbled, made any kind of mistake, or paused to rest were often shot on the spot and their bodies dumped over the side of the quarry.

Stairs

Now let's add Albert to this already hellish environment. Before and after the war he was mainly a obstetrician and gynecologist. However at the camp he performed many surgeries not in his field. He is accused of doing completely unnecessary surgeries on healthy inmates. Often slitting open their bellies and handling their organs, while they were awake. One patient he had was a young Jewish boy, who was obviously quite upset. Heim told him that he had to kill him "because the Jews were the reason the war started". He was often seen checking inmates mouths. He was accused of, at least on 2 occasions, killing an inmate, decapitating them, and then boiling their skulls. Two skulls with almost perfect teeth were seen sitting on his desk. Heim's favored way of killing patients, if not through violent,brutal, unnecessary, experimental surgeries was a shot of gasoline directly into the patients heart.

Patients that were nearly always given this fatal shot was what the nazis would describe as "undesirable." In Mauthausen especially they wanted people who could do the hard labor that was forced on them. Anyone who was weak, sick, crippled, or disabled in any way were killed because they were considered worthless. 

Here is a quote from another nazi doctor "Animals that come into the world crippled or otherwise nonviable are killed immediately after birth...It is the right of every state to defend itself against asocial elements, and that includes those unfit to live"

So after the war Dr Heim and others like him need to be found, tired and punished. (Personally I think the justice is too much grace for these people. I think a wall to stand against and a bullet for their brain is what they deserve.)

The hunt for Dr Heim goes all over the world, from Austria, to Chile, to Egypt and back again. I'm not going to tell you if they find him or what happens. That is for you to find out.

The search for Heim and men like him is a daunting task for the few, underfunded people who do the searching. Simon Wiesenthal was one of the most visible Nazi hunters but there were many others. The book details many different tactics and officials used for these searches. I could go into them more and write a longer review but Im bummed from writing that whole section on Mauthausen. You should consider reading this book, it's interesting, it's sad, it's justice trying to be served, 3 stars.

I'm linked up over at:

Buzzfeed has a really interesting interview about the book here.

I received this book in exchange for a honest review from Netgally

Book review: "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa" by Adam Hochschild

So I try to make it a habit to write a review quickly after finishing the book. Reviews are more cohesive, more thoughtful and make considerably more sense.

I did not do this with this (excellent) book so it's not getting as good of a review as it deserves. I'm going strictly off of some notes I jotted off, so there's your disclaimer.Hopefully it's enough for you to be intrigued by the book to pick it up.

King Leopold desperately wanted to expand Belgium's territories. The thing is, there isn't any land to be had in Europe or in a lot of other places, and people were starting to frown on Colonialism in some spots. Leopold decided on Congo. (I can't remember exactly why, something about Stanley who we will get to later). The area of the Congo that he claimed was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. It was 76 times the size of Belgium!!!

As you'd imagine, King Leopold wasn't a sweetie pie. I thought the story of his oldest daughter was particularly sad. She was forced to marry a much older man, and on their wedding night ran screaming into the garden to avoid what she knew was coming. She was miserable and sad in her marriage and began having an affair with a cavalry officer much closer to her own age. She was eventually found out. She was given a choice: remain in the life of privilege with a husband she hated or to be committed to an insane asylum for the rest of her life. She chose the asylum. (So, that's horrifying to think about what her life must have been). Her cavalry officer was eventually able to rescue her from the asylum, and they lived together happily for a short time before he died. Most depressing story eveeeeeeer. I try to focus on the fact they were at least happy for a time.

So Stanley (Henry Morton Stanley) of "Dr Livingstone I presume?" fame was a big old liar. He lied about almost everything. His background, his family life, and lot of his exploring experiences. (He had a pretty terrible childhood so I can understand why he made up some of the stuff. Just saying).

After the notoriety that he gained after the Livingstone incident he was asked to go find a man named Emin Pasha who was in Africa and hadn't been heard from in some time. He had been studying bugs in Africa, and when Stanley found him and insisted that he returned to Europe with him Emin was dismayed. (But if Stanley didn't bring him back he'd look like a failure, so he kind of strong armed the return). Emin was at a reception welcoming him back to "civilization" when he stepped out of a second story window. (His eyesight was terrible, and he thought it was a veranda or an outside door or something. It sounds like something from Looney Tunes. It's ok, he lived!)

This book was full of stories: sad, compelling, interesting. I learned so much from this book, it was embarrassing how little I knew about this area during this time. Absolutely recommended! 4 out of 5 stars!

Review: "Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, 5 Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles into the Darkness" by Neil Swidey

Do NOT read this book if you are claustrophobic, don't like being damp, being underwater, or anything like that. This book will probably make you very anxious! It made me kind of anxious and I'm not any of those things.

Boston's harbor was disgusting, dirty and stomach churning just to look at. The city government decided that this had to change. They designed a tunnel, miles underground and incredibly long to funnel all of the grossness out of the harbor and farther out into the ocean.(Not better for anything involved, but less visually disgusting for the fine people of Boston).

This project is unlike anything else ever attempted. And the commercial welders who work on the project now that there are some risks involved because so much of the technology is new and untested. (They were joking that they could be on the Discovery Channel because of all of the new things happening). Things go well for awhile, but then there is a horrifying accident leaving some divers dead, some traumatized and fingers pointing at who exactly is to blame.

Also commercial diving is super scary and I don't know how any of these wives/girlfriends/parents/kids could function knowing how much danger they could be in at any random job.

I  found the book incredibly technical, which I understand why that is. I however, was more interested in the relationship between the men, the accident and the aftermath.It's also a lot of names to keep straight I'd have to re-read a lot to make sure that I was thinking of the right person.

I recieved this book for free in exchange for an honest review from Blogging for Books