Lady Mary

 I've enjoyed the first two YA historical novels I've read from Lucy Worsley, so Lady Mary was a bit of a letdown. Using a real and well known person rather than a witness to history, Worsley is constrained by the facts of Mary Tudor's adolescence. Watching her parents marriage dissolve and spending years in increasingly desperate isolation just isn't as dramatic as being companion to a volatile Princess Victoria or seeing your friend Catherine become Henry VIII's fifth wife. Like all of Worsley's books it's entertaining, but nothing special. 

A Piece of Justice

 There's a bit of uncanny valley reading books written during my early adulthood. The 1990s are far enough back now that a new book set there would technically be a historical, and I can't help placing myself in the context of the book. Jill Paton Walsh's second mystery, A Piece of Justice was published in 1995, otherwise known as the Time Before Cell Phones, and Imogen Quy, nurse for St. Agatha's College, Cambridge, might have continued her medical studies rather than giving them up for her former fiance if she's been born in the late 60s instead of the mid 50s. Imogen rents rooms in the house she inherited from her parents and one of her boarders takes on the biography of a deceased Cambridge mathematician. One researcher has died and another disappeared and it appears that the widow is behind the crimes. Imogen solves the mystery with a bit of coincidence, a quilt, and a trip to Wales. It's a quick read (under 200 pages), and a good way to spend a cozy afternoon. 

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

 I spent my early years in the Catholic wing of the Religious Left, and when my first grade school closed ended up in the rising Religious Right so I've been less surprised by some of the religious/political developments of the last three decades than most people of my political persuasion. I don't understand it - to me, the Religious Right views religion as based in hate rather than love - but it rarely surprises me. Even when they chose a promiscuous, foul-mouthed, bullying, avaricious con-man who bragged about sexual assault as their political savior, something in the back of my mind said, "Yeah, I get it."

Kristen Kobes DuMez offers a more inside view of this development in American religious practices. As Kevin Kruse did in One Nation, Under God she finds the roots of the movement in the backlash to integration. Her book focuses more on the causes than the results, going back to the early Twentieth Century to show revivalists (like those parodied by Sinclair Lewis) preached muscular Christianity and the condescending protectiveness it brought. From there, Christian sects gravitated towards power rather than mercy, convincing themselves that God wants strength and retribution. They began to follow preachers rather than the actual bible, leading to a surprising ignorance of scripture, and spread their views into all walks of life, particularly the military. DuMez follows different threads in each chapter - home schooling, anti-feminism, fear of societal change, love of violence - but doesn't quite tie everything together. I think that's the point, though. She's telling the origin story of a movement we already know.

Skeleton Keys

 Sometimes my "Hey, that looks interesting" method of book selection misfires. I bought Skeleton Keys thinking it would be anatomical, but instead it was anthropological. Written by a paleontologist, it provides a rough history of the human skeleton and tales of how anthropology has been misused. Not bad, but not what I expected and far from memorable.

Here, Right Matters

 I usually don't read recent or as-it-happened political books (I made an exception for A Higher Ground because James Comey was my Trial Advocacy professor), but reserved Here, Right Matters after hearing  an interview with Alexander Vindman. I remember listening to his testimony and seeing the pictures of him entering the hearing room with his identical twin Eugene, also a Lt. Colonel, in their dress uniforms. He came across as honest and earnest, a professional who was doing his job and doing what he believed was right for his country. 

As a writer, he's engaging and surprisingly funny in the book he wisely made more of a memoir than a political tome. Born in the USSR, his and Eugene's earliest memories are of an abusive foster home where they lived while their mother was in hospice care, and within two years they, along with their father (an engineer), older brother, and maternal grandmother, were refugees in Brooklyn. I don't feel like he exactly glossed over how hard life must have been for his family, but he doesn't dwell on it. He mentions his father's initial job as a manual laborer while he studied for the Civil Service exam and the long days his father worked once he was hired by the water department, but he focuses on the mischief he and Eugene got into as the black sheep of the extended family - daredevils who were intelligent but didn't apply themselves to what didn't interest them and who fed off each others's schemes and energy. He initially joined ROTC to emulate his older brother (Leonid Vindman served in the Army Reserves), but found his passion while serving, first in Korea, then in Afghanistan (where he earned a Purple Heart), and eventually using his language skills as a member of the National Security Council. 

There, in a job usually taken by someone of much higher rank, he sat in on a routine phone call between Donald Trump and the recently elected president of Ukraine. When Trump asked for a "favor," Vindman reported this to the NSC's ethics officer (coincidentally his twin) and through the proper channels. From that point on, he started to experience professional slights, apparently orchestrated from the highest echelons and aided by an office mate with whom he had a mutual dislike and distrust. We know the public side of this story, so other than pointing out that his mid-level position allowed him to avoid recognition until shortly before his hearing, he focuses on how this affected him and his family. His father, like many Russian emigres, was a strong Trump supporter and his daughter, while not old enough to understand the politics was old enough to be affected by the upheaval. Tacitly admitting that his former boss, Dr. Fiona Hill, was right in considering him a bit naive when it comes to politics, he relies on his wife Rachel and his twin (whom he calls his inner voice) to help him realize that his best course is to retire from the Army. Now a free agent (in his words), he's forging a path to continue his service as a civilian.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

 I'm writing this as the Senate is considering a pair of infrastructure bills, one of which focuses on "human infrastructure" - child care, elder care, education, and health benefits. Those vital but intangible benefits have been cut underfunded at least since Ronald Reagan used the budget and tax code as a way to convince the middle and working class that "those people" are getting more than they deserve. That philosophy was supposed to bring an economic windfall that would help everyone, but instead it hollowed out the middle class while enriching the already wealthy. 

Heather McGhee argues in The Sum of Us that it's not tax cuts and lean budgets that "raise all boats" but investment in human infrastructure. The former head of Demos, she begins by covering much of the same ground as Richard Rotstein did in The Color of Law. White families have more wealth, even when you adjust for income, because of the discriminatory housing policies and practices of the mid-20th Century. She traces the resistance to social programs which help everyone to the dismantling of pools and parks when they were required to desegregate in the 1950s and 60s. The next step was to underfunding schools, particularly as cities became less white and white students moved to private schools. Along the way, blatant racism (claiming that non-whites are inherently inferior) was replaced with cultural blame ("they" don't respect education or family or hard work, or whatever excuse seems believable).

McGhee explains how some of the largest current social problems hit the African American community first. Even adjusting for income, non-white students carry considerably more debt than white students, so it became unmanageable a decade before our current crisis - and cuts to higher education and the switch from grants to loans accelerated this process. The housing crash hit everyone - but the history of redlining and the practice (which doesn't fall directly under any laws or regulations) of selling sub-prime rates to non-whites whose credit qualified them for regular loans meant those communities had less equity and a smaller margin for error. But politicians feel they have to dial back any program to ameliorate these problems because "fiscally conservative but socially liberal" constituents won't stand for them. Like my former co-worker who didn't want the state to help Philadelphia's public schools because it might cut the advantage his sons got from living in Delaware County, even if something doesn't harm them (or even helps them), too many people afraid that helping the community as a whole will end up hurting them.

I know this sounds depressing, but The Sum of Us is an optimistic book. McGhee's final chapter describes a trip to Lewiston, Maine. It's the second largest city in the oldest, whitest, and one of the poorest states. Like West Virginia (where Joe Manchin is currently harming his constituents at their request) and post-COVID Alabama they record more deaths than births. Parts of Lewiston, though are thriving thanks to 20 years of immigration, mostly from Africa. McGee shows us a place where refugees have found a new life, and the old residents have benefited as well. An older woman who regretted losing her French Canadian roots reclaimed her language with Francophone African immigrants, a chance meeting between a parolee and a Muslim woman brining halal food to the prison started a friendship and brought him into social activism. The seemingly unlikely coalitions formed in Lewiston worked to expand Medicaid by ballot measure (then Governor Paul LePage rejected expansion multiple times using racial scare terms, even though the number of Mainers who live in poverty is twice the number of non-white resident), and provide hope going forward. These coalitions shouldn't be rare, because studies show that integrated groups solve problems more quickly and creatively. If we only realized that we all benefit when we work together.

The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease

I've read a bit about vaccines in the past few years (and not all of it for my Regulatory Affairs degree). The Vaccine Race is the most complex of the layman's books I've read, covering not just the development of vaccines for rabies and rubella, but the people involved (with their quirks and territorial issues), the techniques used to develop vaccines and their components, the human cost of failed vaccines, intellectual property, fights with bureaucracy (worsened by an NIH official's view of new techniques), aging, medical ethics (and the lack thereof before the mid 1960s) and how one scientist's bad administrative decision effectively stalled his still formidable contributions to the science. Waldman does a reasonable job of integrating all the threads, and wisely chooses to only highlight Leonard Hayflick, whose work in creating the cell line used in many vaccines and other drugs also created the science of aging, and Stanley Plotkin, who developed the measles and rubella vaccines. Still, the enormity of the task means that some sections feel rushed and I wanted to know more about some of the scientists. 

Now May You Weep

 Duncan Kincaid took the lead in the first of Deborah Crombie's mysteries, and now it's time for Gemma James to solve a personal mystery mostly on her own. Her friend Holly has invited her to a cooking weekend in Scotland and still recovering physically and emotionally from her trauma-induced stillbirth, Gemma is glad for the break from home. Once they arrive, Gemma realizes her friend was also using her as cover for her burgeoning affair with old flame Douglas Brodie, a whiskey distiller whose family had a centuries old rivalry with Holly's family. Further complicating matters, Holly's boarding school roommate co-owns the B&B where they're staying and Holly's cousin (who worked for Douglas) is another one of the guests. When Douglas is murdered, everyone at the B&B except Gemma has the motive, opportunity, or both to have committed the crime and, working with the resentful local police and with late help from Duncan, she identifies the culprit. Crombie intersperses the present-day narrative with Holly's ancestor's diary entries so the reader knows more than the detective but not so much that I solved the case more easily than Gemma. There's also a subplot (Duncan's son Kit's grandmother is suing for custody and Kit's putative father in Toronto is remarrying) but it's well integrated, feeling more like the day-to-day pressures Gemma feels as part of a blended family.

The Tintern Treasure

 There's only one more book in Kate Sedley's Roger the Chapman series, and as The Tintern Treasure unfolds, we get an uneasy feeling about Roger's sometime employer, Richard III. There's an undercurrent of gossip about the missing Princes, and Roger hears much of it because the people of Bristol believe his connection with Richard is stronger than it is. Roger is too busy trying to earn a living when he spends the night at Tintern Abbey to care much about political intrigue. Through an attempted robbery of the abbey's rumored treasure and Roger's attempts to contact the father of a dying former fling's baby boy, he once again ends up in the middle of political intrigue, only this time in endangers his family as well. As I read, I thought there were too many plot lines for a coherent mystery but Sedley left a clue here, a casual comment there so that they all converged in an exciting final chapter. I'll miss Roger when I read his final adventure - I've known him for over 25 of my years and about 10 of his - but I can always go back to the beginning.

Sunburn

Laura Lippman calls her work "tart noir" and Sunburn is her most obvious homage to traditional noir. We meet Polly and Adam in a bar when he offers to buy her a drink. She remains cool, and yet we know that they will begin an affair. She's escaping a marriage before her husband can divorce her, and ends up as a waitress in a small town in Delaware. Adam manages to get himself hired as a chef and as you expect, there's more to his story than a simple obsession with a woman he "happened" to meet. Lippman accurately captures the just-before-now mid-90s setting, but the characters are a bit too cool to grab my interest. It's a book where I enjoyed the slowly revealed plot but cared less because the characters were so opaque.

The World in a Grain

 Our world is built on sand. The concrete foundations of our buildings, the roads on which we drive, the computers that control most of our industry - all require sand in some form or another. It's a common substance, and yet the right kinds of sand are running out. Concrete needs rough grains which lock together and the people who mine this sand are cutthroat and occasionally criminal. The ultra-pure silicates needed for glass (particularly lab glass) computers is the same white sand used in the sand traps on luxury golf courses. Vince Beiser livens what could be a dull subject with interviews with people whose lives have been threatened by sand barons and the story of the first mechanized glass factory. 

Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

 We lie constantly, not just to others but to ourselves. Shankar Vedantam's latest book explores how those "polite fictions" happen, and how they can help us, even in the most extreme forms. We may call it tact or politeness when we tell a co-worker or relative, "No, you're not bothering me" or exchange the expected "Such a nice time - must do it again" at the end of a social event that was more chore than joy, because those lies keep society running. I laughed at the passages where Vedantam translated a couple's morning chat and a coach's assessment of his team (particularly the latter as a Philly sports fan) - there are times when we just don't want to know the truth.

Our delusions also benefit us. More optimistic people tend to have better outcomes when seriously ill, and religious people report higher levels of contentment. Vedantam admits that it's hard to control for variables in these cases, particularly with religion which tracks to other protective factors such as community support. As for the patients, I wonder if that optimism allows them endure treatments or leaves them with the energy to take more affirmative steps towards treatment. 

The middle section of the book focuses on a man swindled by the Church of Love, one of many who didn't feel cheated. Donald Lowry set up the CoL (as he called it) to take money from lonely men. He sent out thousands of letters ostensibly from women living in a religious retreat. The men sent "offerings" and when the Postal Inspectors arrested Lowry and he was put on trial, many of his victims protested. Even if the women they'd written to didn't exist, they'd helped them. With vague letters derived from surveys of the men's likes and dislikes, they created relationships (perhaps not unlike those we have with friends we know only through social media) which helped these lonely men feel whole. The victim Vedantam interviewed doesn't see himself as a victim, and I agree. The relationship he had, although not real, gave him solace when he needed it. 

Shake Hands Forever

There's something wrong about the widower's response. Inspector Wexford can't get past Robert Hartnell's odd reaction to his mother's discovery of his wife's strangled corpse. There's no evidence against him; no evidence against anyone for that matter. The house has been completely cleaned, leaving only two handprints, that of the landlord on the inside of a seldom used cupboard and on the bathtub that of a woman with an L-shaped scar on her forefinger. No one in Kingsmarknam knew the Hartnells so who could possibly have a motive? No, Hartnell had to be having an affair and plotted with his lover to kill his wife. 

But there's no evidence and Hartnell complained to Wexford's superior, so he has to investigate on his own time. With the help of his nephew Howard, Mike Burden, informant Ginge Matthews, and a lucky break involving the disappearance of a young woman in a neighboring town, Wexford manages to piece together what happened, including a well supported twist ending. 

When Women Invented Television

 I've always been fascinated by the history of television. In my early teens, I leafed through The Complete Directory to Prime Time Television, 1946-Present (the present being defined as the spring of 1981 - it's strange to realize that my memory encompasses half of the history of organized broadcast television) so many times that the covers fell off and pages frayed. In the years before IMDb (which started as some guy named Colin collecting lists of actors, directors, and writers on rec.arts.movies ca. 1991), it was the only place I knew to get cast lists and broadcast dates for TV shows, plus a short history of the medium. I focused on the shows I knew or had heard of (the shows I watched in prime time or those I watched - or avoided, like Gilligan's Island - in reruns on Channels 17, 29, and 48, and those my parents, born right before the "invention" of network television, talked about), which reinforced the idea that TV had always focused on the WASP suburbanite and women didn't work (and by extension weren't behind the camera, either). Jennifer Keishin Armstrong proves that image was wrong, at least when no one was sure television would be a success. Sadly, three of the four women she profiles are largely forgotten and the fourth is remembered more for her later acting career than her early behind the scenes work.

Irma Phillips invented the soap opera, down to the convoluted storylines and cheesy organ cues. The youngest child of 11, she wanted to be an actress but was told she "didn't have the looks." After a tour of the WGN radio studio, she decided to try writing scripts and the result - a daily visit with four women around their kitchen table - was a hit and created the domestic drama. After a brief, unsuccessful attempt to write movies, Phillips, who never married and adopted and raised two children as a single woman (when a Philadelphia broadcaster adopted as a single woman in the last 1970s it was front page news), created The Guiding Light which ran on radio then television until 2009. She expanded soaps from four women talking about clothes over coffee to the broader family dramas which touched on serious issues. Her protege Agnes Nixon brought the genre further with storylines about racism, abortion, and AIDS woven around the over-the-top antics of Erica Kane. I never liked soap operas (the worst part of chicken pox was two weeks with my recently retired great-aunt who Could Not Miss *All My Children*),  but I have to respect the amount of work involved in putting on a 30 or 60 minute show five days a week and how the serialized nature (albeit a bit toned down) has become a standard trope not only for the prime time soaps of the 80s but more serious fare like St. Elsewhere and Mad Men and shows in-between like Grey's Anatomy. And when Shonda Rimes burst on the scene, she appeared to be the first woman to control a "tv empire."

Hazel Scott was the first African American to host a prime time variety series (Amanda Randolph had hosted a daytime series. A talented and innovative jazz pianist and a civil rights advocate married to Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Scott accepted the job on the DuMont network so she could stop traveling and spend more time with her husband and their young son. Elegantly attired and backed by Max Roach and Charles Mingus, Scott's show expanded from one, to three, then to five nights a week - and was abruptly cancelled because of 'cost.' Granted, the DuMont network was held together with masking tape and crossed fingers, but the real reason was that Scott was "named" in a red-baiting publication. Marriage to a Congressman couldn't save the show of an African-American woman who'd refused to play maids and battled movie directors and executives over the portrayal of other African-American women. She eventually relocated to Paris, divorced Powell, and focused on music. She made a few later on-screen appearances but was essentially erased from the screen by the blacklist.

The blacklist also played a role in Gertrude Berg's diminished role in the cultural history. A lonely child (the only survivor of her parents' seven children), she developed her writing skills at the Catskill resorts she and her parents visited, and when her bad handwriting meant that she had to read her script to the executive interested in The Goldbergs it led to her being cast as matriarch Molly. Berg was the original showrunner, writing scripts and overseeing production as well as finding sponsors once it moved from radio to TV (and inventing product placement with the prominently displayed Sanka can). Beyond that, The Goldbergs were proudly ethnic in a medium about to become blandly WASP. Jake was in the "rag trade," he and Molly had Yiddish accents (although Berg did not), episodes centered on Seders, and they vacationed in the Catskills. It wasn't until the 1970s when network TV reluctantly identified characters as Jewish and then mostly as an afterthought, but one of the top rated shows in the late 40s defied that. 

At least until Phillip Loeb, who played Jake Goldberg, was listed in the same publication as Hazel Scott. He was a long time activist and a frequent performer at Cafe Society, the nightclub where Scott made her name and which featured many left-wing artists. Berg fought for him, but in the end it was the show or Loeb. He continued to collect a salary as long as the show aired, hopping from NBC to CBS and finally to DuMont which stopped transmission a few months later. Berg continued the show in syndication, although  reviews say that the warmth was gone, and eventually reinvented herself as a dramatic actress. Unable to find work or support his disabled son, Loeb committed suicide in 1955 (Zero Mostel - a close friend of Loeb's and another performer at Cafe Society - played a character loosely based on Loeb in The Front).

The final pioneer is Betty White. Yes, that Betty White - Sue Ann Nivens, Rose Nyland, 21st Century pop icon. She's spent most of her career merely in front of the camera but co-created the daytime talk show and spun off the domestic sitcom. According to her memoir, she decided to be a performer after writing and starring in a play for her eighth grade graduation. Four years later, she and a classmate were chosen for a broadcast demonstration. After two short, failed marriages, she was a struggling radio performer when a top DJ asked her to be the co-host of a daily Los Angeles TV show, Hollywood on Television. She chatted, sang, and performed improv skits for 5 1/2 hours a day, six days a week. When her co-host jumped to another station, she became the solo star and spun off the skits into a syndicated sitcom Life with Elizabeth where she hired "the best person for the job" behind the camera including women and African-Americans. In the early 1950s, her talk show was broadcast live nationally, but executive meddling led to its cancellation and no amount of condescending praise for the single woman with no intention of remarrying could end that. We know her because of her on-screen talent (just like Rose is somewhat of a send-up of Sue Ann, the latter was created as a spin on her earlier roles), but her early innovation deserves more recognition.

By now, you're probably asking, "What about Lucille Ball?" Well, we know what Lucy did. She refused to move her popular radio show to TV without her Cuban-born and heavily accented husband. Once they had the show, Lucy and Desi formed a production company, insisted on taping the show (for a smoother final product) and kept the rights to the tapes (inventing second-run syndication). We know that beyond her amazing talent for physical comedy she was a businesswoman who ran Desilu for several years after buying out her ex-husband and green lighted Star Trek shortly before selling the studio to Paramount at a profit. The only part of her story we don't know is that she gave advice to a younger actress/producer in the early 1950s - Betty White.

And Justice There Is None

 Deborah Crombie's seventh Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James novel starts with change. Gemma's been promoted to DI and transferred to Notting Hill so both are breaking in new partners. It's also the Christmas season and they're combining households (prompted by Gemma's pregnancy) in a house in Gemma's new territory so when someone murders the wife of a local antiques dealer, some of the suspects are the detectives' new neighbors and local gossip is part of her investigation. Duncan complicates matters by seeing a link between an unsolved case he worked on two months earlier. Gemma can't see the link (and maybe feels a bit like she can't get out of her former boss's shadow), but the memories of a woman known as Angel who grew up in post-WWII Notting Hill slowly provide clues for the reader. Personally, I like it when I solve the mystery a few pages ahead of the detectives and that's what happened here. Beyond that, And Justice There Is None works as a novel where we see the characters' relationships evolve realistically - mostly in positive ways, but with bumps and awkward situations. It's my favorite in the series so far.

Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow

 Lucy Worsley described the elderly Queen Victoria as a black-clad potato and wonders why she became fascinated with the stodgy icon. Worsley takes 24 days (or, rather, 24 events surrounding specific days) in Victoria's life to flesh out a woman who's often portrayed as a caricature or, conversely, a flat character. Victoria wasn't particularly deep and her upbringing in The System (although not quite as harsh as previously believed) didn't prepare her particularly well to rule a country or lead any semblance of a  normal life yet she led Great Britain for 63 years and created the idea of a Royal Family. 

Although not academic or (probably) particularly intelligent, Victoria was quite media savvy. She knew that her predecessors messy personal lives as well as the revolutionary tendencies of the 19th Century had put her position at risk. Her wedding was a spectacularly successful PR event and the uniform of her widowhood made her a recognizable symbol around whom the country could rally. The deep domesticity she and Albert projected both created and followed the evolving fashion of the rising middle class (although I found myself angry at Albert for using Victoria's repeated pregnancy confinements and ensuing bouts of post-natal depression to make himself more important to the running of the country).  The most interesting chapters, though, involved her meetings with individuals. She admired Florence Nightengale who in turn was disappointed by the rather passive monarch, and Worsley devotes a chapter each to John Brown and Abdul Karim. The day that will stay with me, though, is 21-24 August, 1854, which chronicles the visit of the deposed 15-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh. A boy himself, he's treated as a bit of a pet to the Queen and shown the Koh-i-Noor diamond, once his and now cut and polished to European tastes. 

The Housekeeper's Tale: The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House

Domestic service was the main industry for women in paid work 150 years ago. 100 years ago it was dying out and it's now rare in private homes. The women who worked these difficult and all-consuming jobs rarely left detailed records, so (with one exception) Tessa Boase has to reconstruct their lives from public records and somewhat random items saved by their employers. She profiles five women:

    Dorothy Doar, the rare married woman in the role who lost her position for requesting a few weeks of maternity leave during the high Victorian period

    Sarah Wells, an older woman who'd been in service before marriage and returned as housekeeper to a former dairymaid's cousin who'd inherited both a house and a name (Sarah kept extensive diaries, and her time at Uppark was also recorded by her son Bertie)

    Ellen Peketh, accused of theft by her insecure and unprepared mistress and ended up working as a hotel cook

    Hannah MacKenzie, the cook-housekeeper at a country-house-turned-WWI-hospital forced out in a power struggle (she ended up as the housekeeper to Grace Vanderbilt, a definite case of "falling up")

    Grace Higgins, whose time as housekeeper to Vanessa Bell lasted into the 60s and brought her close to the Bloomberg Set.

Although the stories are personal, we can extrapolate from them to see that the work was backbreaking, tenure was at the whim of the Lady of the House, and even "kindly" mistresses were thoroughly classist. Boase's writing style is a bit dry and but the lives of the women she profiles are far more interesting than their day-to-day routines.

A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

 If you look hard enough, you can find a book on any topic. There may even be a reserve queue at your local library. A Place For Everything's subtitle isn't quite accurate; it's more a history of information systems. Tracing the categorization of knowledge from the origins of writing (while pictographic systems developed in many places, alphabets appeared spontaneously in only three places). When people and ideas didn't travel, we didn't need a universal way to categorize information but with trade and technology, that changed. Scrolls became books (more compact and portable), bookkeeping became more complex, and the alphabet overtook categorization as the dominant way to organize lists. Flanders takes us from ancient crossroads (where trade was conducted in gestures and pictographs) through the internet (where searches and hypertext decrease the importance of alphabetical order), giving the origin stories for the card catalog and office furniture. 

Some Lie and Some Die

Mike Burden tries. As Some Lie and Some Die opens, he's the single parent of two teenagers, not quite ready to admit that they're becoming self-sufficient while cringing at their taste in music. The latter part plays into Ruth Rendell's eighth Inspector Wexford mystery. John Burden's favorite singer, ZenoVedast is the headline act at a music festival just outside Kingsmarkam and when two attendees who'd snuck off for a bit of privacy stumble across a woman's body, Wexford finds himself wondering about the odd relationship among Zeno, the singer's manager, and the manager's wife. Rendell includes her usual twist ending and psychological motive, but as her books become a bit more modern, so do the motives. She also includes her usual middle-class scorn for working-class people, but it's a bit muted here compared to the early books.

Fortune and Glory: Tantalizing Twenty-Seven

 When I read a Stephanie Plum novel, I know what I'm getting. Janet Evanovich will string together funerals, family dinners, car death, Steph's attempts to capture someone who skipped bail on a petty and/or weird crime, donuts, dead bodies, and Lula's over the top fashion sense. Fortune and Glory picks up where Twisted Twenty-Six leaves off. Grandma Mazur, recently widowed after a few hour marriage to one of the Lay-z-Boys, needs Steph's help to find the keys to her late husband's fortune (which may or may not exist). Sounds easy, except there's a gangster with a habit of dismembering those who get in his way also searching for the keys. Evanovich is deep in a rut, but the set pieces still make me laugh and she manages to string them together plausibly, or at least what passes for plausibly in Stephainie's world.

Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, & Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House

 I remember Watergate, but I don't remember Spiro Agnew. Unlike Nixon's crimes, Agnew's were, well, blatant and ordinary. He was a somewhat obscure local official who spent most of his time shaking down developers for bribes. After somehow ending up as the Governor of Maryland, he was picked to be Nixon's 1968 running mate. Like the most recent ex-president, he was crude, combative, and feuded with the press - and a segment of the public loved him for it. Based on the 2018 podcast, Bag Man provide just enough background to explain how, in 1973, we had both a President and Vice-President under investigation for serious crimes. How did we survive the crisis? Three Assistant US Attorneys, Barney Skolnik, Tim Bake, and Ron Liebman, and US Attorney George Beall (the brother of Maryland's then junior Senator) stood up to pressure from Nixon and quietly put together a case that forced Agnew to plead guilty and resign. He didn't go quietly (the last few chapters chronicle months spent slowly winding down his VP office and transitioning to brokering unsavory deals with foreign governments), but he went. He died in 1996, essentially a footnote to history. The attorneys who prosecuted him also escaped fame, each spending several more years working for the Justice Department before moving into private practice (George Beall died in 2017). While Agnew can stay obscure, Beall, Skolnik, Blake, and Liebman deserve to be better known. Their job wasn't glamorous (and parts of the Bag Man are a bit dry because there's only so much you can do to make a financial investigation interesting - trust me, I know), but it's not an exaggeration to say that they may have saved our democracy.

My Name Is Victoria

 Princess Alexandrina Victoria spent her first 18 years trapped in the System. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent devised the plan along with Sir John Conroy. Keep the heir from the public, ostensibly for her safety; strictly control her few contacts; read her diary; and never allow her to be alone. Among the few strictly vetted people she was allowed to know was Victoria Conroy, and the future queen's diary does not snow any affection towards "Miss V." But...what if that was a ruse, that the two Victorias were actually close friends? Lucy Worsley creates an alternate history, in which the volatile royal Victoria sees her friend as an ally rather than a spy, and the advisor's daughter walks a fine line between protecting the princess and giving her father just enough information to keep her position. As with her other YA novel, Maid in the King's Court, Worsley introduces romance, this time with the Saxe-Colburg brothers. We know how that really  ended, but Worsley has a plot twist to keep it interesting (and possibly...no, that would be a spoiler).

A Conspiracy of Violence

 I love Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew mysteries, and had been eying her Thomas Chaloner series for several years before buying the first one. Reading it, I remembered what someone said in an online discussion: it's better to start a series two or three books in because the author and characters have found their footing. Maybe that's why I found A Conspiracy of Violence hard to follow, or maybe it's because I'm less well versed in the Restoration (and less interested in the Stuarts than other English dynasties). 

Thomas Chaloner is a spy in search of a sponsor. Recently returned from Holland with a lover who works as a lady's companion to his puritan neighbor's daughter, he's desperate for work. When someone murders a messenger during an interview with a potential employer, Chaloner sets out to solve the murder and to untangle the conspiracy behind it. The plot was a bit too complicated for its own good, but I enjoyed Gregory's depiction of 1660s London and found Chaloner's company enjoyable. I doubt he'll replace Matthew (that series seems to be winding down), but his first exploit is promising.

American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI

 I loved Quincy as a teen and for years I said that instead of law school, I should have gotten the certifications to run a crime lab. (That is also the wrong answer, by the way - when I realized I didn't like my lab job I should have entered the regulatory affairs program I'm graduating from next month. Better late than never, right?) When I looked through the Free Library of Philadelphia's ebooks, American Sherlock was an automatic pick.

E.O. Heinrich invented forensic science, and his work led to the world where we emphasize expert testimony. More than we should - some techniques such as bite analysis are completely useless and in 2004 a man was executed for the arson murder of his children un unreliable evidence and posthumously cleared of the crime. Even the reliable disciplines of DNA and toxicology are subject to contamination if samples are improperly collected or stored. Still, it's better than eyewitness testimony which is as unreliable as it is compelling

Incorrect eyewitness identification factored into one of Heinrich's cases, the kidnapingand murder of a priest. The priest's housekeeper identified a short, dark, "foreign" man but the kller was a tall Texan Heinrich used psychology and the now-partially discredited science of handwriting analysis to identify an eager witness as the killer. By examining a pair of overalls, he identified the three men who killed a train crew in a botched robbery. His knowledge of chemistry told him that a murder victim wasn't a pioneering chemist but the victim of a con man with a sham lab.

Heinrich also played a role in two high profile hung juries. We may never know how Virginia Rappe developed peritonitis, but her chronic bladder condition is the likely cause. Confusing and conflicting testimony and moral crusades against the then new motion picture industry led to three trials against Roscoe Arbuckle. Heinrich produced physical evidence, including handprints and analyses of smears on a doorjamb, but Arbuckle was eventually acquitted (although never cleared in the public's eyes). The case shows how evidence we trust can be misleading - while clear, well collected fingerprints are identifying, reading a smudged partial print is an art of interpretation and extrapolation.

Walsh begins and ends the book with the death of Allene Lamson and her husband David's trials. Did he beat her to death in the bathtub, did she fall and hit her head, or, improbably, did a stranger slip in while David was doing yard work? Heinrich testified for the defense and sowed enough doubt for an overturned conviction and two hung juries. The science behind his blood splatter work is now questioned, but gave the jury enough doubt to free David Lamson from death row and let him live to become a best selling author.

So what kind of man ws Heinrich? He was driven by OCD and the childhood poverty that led to his father's death by suicide (teenage Heinrich found his father's hanging corpse). This led him to drop out of school and work in a pharmacy where he discovered chemistry. Eventually earning a degree fro Berkley, he transitioned from water treatment to forensics, and from public service to a private lb. always anxious and unsatisfied but always convinced he was right. His OCD may have worked to his advantage in the lab but ld to professional fuels and fraught relationships with the sons he loved (the elder of whom became one of the WWII Monument Men). Walsh does a better job of describing his professional life than integrating his personal life into the narrative (while interesting, the transitions into the personal vignettes are awkward). With that minor exception, I highly recommend American Sherlock.

The Breakers

 I'd put off reading The Breakers because I was afraid that it was the final Sharon McCone novel, leaving only VI Warshawski left of the three godmothers of the female PI. As I read, it felt like a series finale, with Sharon's rumination on her age and career and worries about her failing mother. Sharon wraps these thoughts around the search for her former neighbor, Chelle Curley. We first met Chelle as a hustling teenager, primed to be a millionaire by 30. Now in her early 20s (thanks to some handwaving and retcon), she's a property developer specializing in flipping distressed buildings. The Breakers is a derelict former hotel and night club, and the room where Chelle had been essentially camping during the renovation was decorated with pictures of serial killers. Is there a connection between the macabre decor and Chelle's disappearance? And what secrets are Chelle's parents keeping from Sharon while begging her for help? The Breakers isn't prime McCone, but it was well crafted and entertaining. And it's not the last McCone - after finishing it, I went to Muller's website and found out that there's a new installment due later this year.

The Great Indoors

I'm an incredibly indoorsy person. When lockdown started a year ago this weekend, I thought "This might not be too bad, once I stop panicking over the fact that there's a deadly disease out there. I like being home." A week or two in, I realized that I need more outdoor time than I thought - my evening walks (during the dinner hour so as to minimize contact with others) when it wasn't too wet and raw were not enough. I was shocked to learn that I didn't just need the exercise to burn off my stress, I needed to be outside. Things got better when I started taking regular walks and making sure some of them went through the local parks. The weather's been lousy the last six weeks so I've stopped, and I can't wait until the cold and mud recede enough for me to restart.

The Great Indoors explains how our built environment affects our lives, and how we can improve them. After a few chapters on the generalities of our need for light and nature, Emily Anthes gets into specifics including a tour of a grade school built with natural light, curving surfaces, and setting set to both absorb and encourage fidgeting. That experiment was thwarted by a growing population and shrinking budget which ended up filling in some of the open space but the chapter on adaptive living spaces was more inserting. Focusing on an apartment building for people with autism, I think that several of the adaptations (soundproofing, light levels that can be fine-tuned) could, like some of the physical accessibility advances of the last 30 years, come into general use. Beyond that, The Great Indoors made me think more about my personal environment and how it affects me more than I realize.

A Very British Murder

I've spent my Corona lockdown two ways - playing trivia games and watching history documentaries on YouTube, several of them presented by Lucy Worley. One I haven't watched (yet) is A Very British Murder, which I thought was going to focus on our affection for fictional murders. While she does cover the Golden Age British writers and the pulp novelist who cast a more jaded eye on my favorite genre, most of the book discusses our interest in true crime. Since novel writing isn't very cinematic, I should have expected this, and while I enjoyed the book, I suspect that the series is better.

Shell Game

 And then there was one? 30 years ago, I started reading the three "godmothers" of the female PI novel, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and Sara Paretsky. Grafton died leaving Kinsey Milhone's alphabet unfinished, and Muller appears to have retired along with Sharon McCone. I haven't yet read the final installments in those series, possibly because I don't want them to end.

Sara Paretsky published another VI Warshawski novel in 2020, and I'm beginning to wonder how much longer I'll be reading new installments, and whether it's time for Paretsky and VI to retire. Previous novels did a good job of mixing VI's cases with Paretsky's social conscience, but Shell Game fell flat. Lotte Herschel's grandson is a Canadian grad student in Chicago and involved with the daughter of Middle Eastern poet and dissident. One night he goes missing and at Lotte's request, VI searches for him. This leads to a plot mixing the refugee crisis, art theft, and VI's ex-husband. While exciting, it never quite fit together and there were a few "superhero" moments that just didn't feel right. I enjoyed it, but it's more like the somewhat forgettable early 2000s VI Warshawski novels than her post-2008 renaissance.

Squeeze Me

When I saw Carl Hiaasen on a speaking tour for Razor Girl, he joked that he hoped Florida didn't cause any problems in the 2016 election. Instead, they became the site of the Winter White House. And at a thinly veiled version of Mar a Lago, Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, a member of the wealthy and elderly presidential fan club called the Potussies, gets eaten by a snake during the White Ibis Ball for IBS. The club manager calls in wildlife rangler Edie Armstrong to handle the problem and then hires two incompetent (of course) criminals to remove the body (and snake) from Edie's storage locker. Of course they stop at a strip bar along the way, which leads to the decomposed snake disrupting the FLOTUS's motorcade. As usual, Hiaasen ties several ridiculous side stories together into a well supported plot, but my favorite part of the book was the references to all of the minor charity balls being held "after the pandemic." Partially because "Stars for SARS" sounds funny, but partially because it gives hope that there will be an "after" when life returns to normal. Or as normal as it gets in Hiaasen's Florida.