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