The Land Beyond the Sea

I love Sharon Kay Penman's sprawling novels which combine medieval politics with the love stories between intelligent and strong willed characters. She was meticulous in her research, but the dearth of personal history (and for women, even royal women, sparse records in general) gave her the freedom to create complex and believable personal interactions.

The Land Beyond the Sea refers to Jerusalem in the late 12th Century. The novel opens with Almaric rejecting his wife Agnes in order to succeed his brother as King of Jerusalem and barring her from contact with their two children. Almaric's reign is short and he's soon succeeded by his 13-year-old son Baldwin, known as the Leper King.

Today, leprosy is a treatable bacterial infection but 900 years ago, it was a certain death, so we know Baldwin's life will be short (he died at age 24) and Penman doesn't shy away from showing his physical decline. Intelligent and strong willed, he learns to fight left handed (his right arm experiencing the earliest nerve damage) and control horses with his legs alone and he surrounds himself with good advisors. Still, he knows that as he becomes more infirm his kingdom will dissolve into chaos. He's right, and I found the hundred or so pages after Baldwin's death to be less compelling than the story of his reign. Penman shifts focus to his stepmother Maria and her second husband Balian (the main romance in the novel) and her daughter/Baldwin's half-sister Isabella and their attempts to stabilize the kingdom. Without Baldwin there's no heart and Penman probably should have ended the book with his funeral.

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

 I love Mary Roach's books. She combines scientific reporting and respect for researchers and technicians with the sensibilities of the best 5th grade gross out humor. Fuzz:When Nature Breaks the Law covers killer trees, rampaging elephants, marauding bears (committing both property and personal crimes), thieving monkeys, Easter-disrupting gulls, and other wildlife disruptors. Always funny, Roach doesn't have quite as much room for humor with her non-human subjects (and to be honest, I'm not particularly interested in wildlife). Still, I laughed while I learned - or rather, laughed while my "stay away from wild things" attitude was confirmed.

The Dark Heart of Venice

 Looking back over my reviews, I see that I've been reading Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily books since 2010, and that they've been enjoyable but a bit uneven throughout the series. The Dark Heart of Florence is one of the lesser series entries - entertaining, but the main mystery is a bit obvious. It opens with Emily overhearing one of her husband Colin's fellow operatives suggesting that he and Emily go to Florence both so he can investigate a crime and to get away from an unknown threat. Once ensconced in his daughter's villa (inherited from her mother, another spy and Colin's long-ago lover), they find a dead body. Emily and her friend Cecile (a French woman of a certain age and with an interest in attractive, intelligent men) investigate both this crime and an apparent cypher written on the walls of the villa. As she's done with most of her books, Alexander also tells a story set further in the past - here, a woman who lived in the villa in the late Fifteenth Century. All three threads come together in a somewhat obvious and slightly forced conclusion. Enjoyable but not particularly memorable, The Dark Heart of Venus is worth reading for the atmosphere and for Cecile, but otherwise mediocre.

Lady in the Lake

Laura Lippman is a master at creating compelling but not quite likable protagonists and using shifting timelines and POV. Lady in the Lake utilizes these methods, but isn't quite as satisfying as her other novels. One night in 1968, Madeline Schwartz's husband invites a new tennis buddy to dinner - a local TV anchor with whom Madeline had one date in high school. That night inspires Maddy to leave her comfortable life and follow her teenage dream of becoming a reporter. Well, a housewife in her late 30s with no experience or degree isn't going to get a reporting job but she does manage to get hired as a columnist's assistant. From there, she branches out into investigating the murders of a local tween and of a woman whose body was found in a lake a few months earlier. 

On the surface, it's a standard historical mystery but Lippman focuses more on the characters than the mystery which makes for a interesting but somewhat disjointed novel wrapped around an unsatisfying mystery. After every chapter narrated by Maddy we get a chapter narrated by someone with whom she interacted - the columnist, the only woman on the paper's reporting staff, the African American cop with whom she's begun an affair, the woman who would become Tess Monaghan's mother, the murdered woman's young son - and occasional chapters from the dead woman's ghost. While interesting, it never quite flowed. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't quite up to Lippman's standards.

Real Lace

 Real Lace was not what I expected. It's by a social historian and I expected an explanation of how Irish Catholic immigrants rose in society as a group. Instead, it's the gossipy tale of a handful of intermarried families who created their own society because the established upper crust saw them as arrivistes. Birmingham doesn't do anything to dispute that; the Donnelleys  and Cuddihys and Butlers come across as stereotypes - brawling, charming drinkers who see no need to educate daughters (and educate sons only enough to advance in business). I was expecting something more along the lines of the late-1990s PBS series The Irish in America which focused on the broader diaspora who, rather than being in the society pages, went from laborers to professionals in two or three generations and by design rather than by chance.

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe

 We've moved away from the traditional depiction of the early Middle Ages as a time of ignorance and brutality labeled the Dark Ages. Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry's book gives an overview of how wrong the earlier interpretation was. The fall of the Roman Empire led to communication breakdowns but not to the loss of knowledge which continued to flourish all around the former Empire (just without the sort of coordination that previously existed). Cities like Ravenna were crossroads with polyglot and tolerant cultures and amazing works of art. Further north and west, the Vikings were nothing like their current image but were an adaptable group - conquering, farming, fishing, or acting as mercenaries according to what was called for, and as fastidious as was possible before indoor plumbing. The authors also show how the Islamic empire, which stretched into parts of Europe, continued to advance learning and was known even before the Crusades. The Bright Ages is a good primer on the era, well written and accessible.

American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump

I've mentioned before that I prefer retrospective rather than current political analysis, and usually from historians rather than reporters. Reporters give the what; historians give the why and how and often paths to the future. Although he's a reporter, Tim Alberta's American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump is a long view of the years from 2008 through 2018, understandably focusing on the time from the 2016 Presidential campaign onward. Looking back, I once again wondered whether Trump could have been stopped or whether he was inevitable. 

Alberta starts with the election President Obama and then moves to the election of the ungovernable and uninterested in governing Tea Party faction of the Republican party. Those chapters highlight the infighting among party factions and told the origin stories of current power players (as well as reminding us of once prominent rabble rousers who have faded into the background). Alberta picks immigration as a theme for this section of the book, showing how politicians on both sides of the aisle considered it an important issue even if they differed on the mechanics.

Once Donald Trump came on the scene, that went by the wayside. His anti-immigrant populism made any neutral let alone positive commentary on immigrants anathema. But when he came down the escalator in 2015, could anyone have imagined him not only becoming President but remaking an entire party in his bellicose and bigoted image? I'd like to say I had a hint (when he declared I was on a project with three guys who all thought he'd be a good president and wondering why anyone would be liberal...ignoring the fact that they were siting with a single, professional, graduate-educate, 40-something woman who chose to live inside a city), but I never thought it was likely. And that may have been the problem with his primary challengers. None of them thought he could possibly win and, combined with his unusual strategy, failed to cut him off. Alberta also mentions miscalculations by Hillary Clinton and her campaign, but doesn't mention misogyny as a potential contributory factor.

Once Trump was in the White House, the rest of the Republican party saw the hold he had on a pivotal segment of the population and (for the most part) cravenly became Trump supporters. We can say it started with white Evangelicals flocking to his campaign (attracted by power rather than theology as outlined in Kristen Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne), but as Alberta points out in his epilogue, even politicians like Paul Ryan, who retired rather than continue working with Trump and who think of themselves as different, are forever branded as Trump Republicans.

Alberta's book ends in January 2019 and came out later that year so we don't see the impeachment trials, the electoral defeat, or the insurrection. Or the how Trump is inexplicably the front-runner in the 2024 primaries. And this is why, although I found Alberta's book interesting and thought-provoking, I still prefer a historian's view. He added the why and how to the what, but no hints as to how to fix the problem.