THE YEAR IN BOOKS. 2023

It was a good year for books. The best of the bunch are reviewed below. 

♥♥♥ The Beak of the Finch (Jonathan Weiner, 1994; winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction). 

How rigorous science and dogged persistence showed that evolution is going on daily right under your nose. 

The whole of evolution hangs on the tension between genes (DNA) and the environment, each powerful and ever-changing. Genetic change owes to inevitable, random, and irreversible errors (mutations) in the replication of DNA, which codes for every feature of anatomy and physiology. These errors produce inheritable changes of form and function, which may hinder or enhance the survival chances of the organism—be it elephant, eel, or E. coli—in its struggle to survive.

Weiner introduces us to Peter and Rosemary Grant, Princeton professors who studied finches on Daphne Major, a tiny, uninhabited Galapagos Island with a harsh desert environment. Galapagos wildlife is not wild—they have no fear of humans—which made it possible for the Grants to capture, tag and measure every feature of every one of the ~1000 finches on the island and follow them year-to-year, a task repeated six months a year for twenty years. 

They showed that year-to-year environmental change can create stress such that a small change in the anatomy of the finches’ beak can make a big difference in who lives and who dies. Some examples:

• A drought might give survival advantage to a plant with thicker, tougher seed husks, which are more difficult for finches to crack open. In this environment a finch luckily gifted with a thicker, sharper beak by random DNA mutation survives to reproduce. The others perish.
• Between 1977 and 1992 Mozambique was roiled by civil war, an environmental, non-genetic change.  Both sides poached tusked elephants for ivory to fund their war effort. Ninety percent of the herd perished.  Before the war less than 20% of females were naturally tuskless. After the war 50% of females were born tuskless and the percent of female births went from 50% to nearly 70%. Tusklessness had conferred favored survival status, an uncommon example of the absence of a feature conferring survival advantage. 
• Crop pesticides and antibiotics have the same problem—it’s called resistance. The resistant pests or bacteria survive. There is no such thing as an antibiotic or pesticide for which, over time, will not evolve.

♥A Taste for Poison  (Neal Bradbury, 2021) 

Innovative ways to kill family and friends.

An anthology of murder by poisoning. Each of eleven chapters is devoted to a certain poison, e.g., arsenic.  Among the most interesting is polonium, a radioactive metal discovered by Madame Curie and named after her birthplace, Poland. Ore with polonium contains but 100 micrograms per ton—about the size of a dust mote, but fatal. It is hard to detect because it emits short-range alpha rays that damage nearby cells but are too weak to reach detectors. Polonium renders every cell in the body dead or dysfunctional. Only one nation produces plutonium—Russia. In 2006 Russian KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko was murdered by spiking his tea with polonium, a dose a million times the fatal amount. 

♥ Jackie Public, Private, Secret  (J. Randy Taraborrelli, 2023) 

A serious biography, complete with abundant resources and citations.

Dianne urged me to read it. I was skeptical, imagining a breathless, gossipy tell-all. Not so. It was informative and absorbing.

♥♥♥ Horse  (Geraldine Brooks, 2022. Winner of the 2006 fiction Pulitzer Prize for March.) 

 The writing is seductive.  I’m not enamored of horses, but in her hands they and the people who love them acquire a new dimension. I loved it.

The story centers on the real Civil War era racehorse, Lexington, and his fictional young slave groom, Jarret. There are three other story lines. The contemporary one follows Jess, a bone expert devoting her expertise to the assembly of Lexington’s skeleton for display at the Smithsonian. The second is Theo, a Nigerian-American writing his art history PhD thesis on American equestrian art, who stumbles upon a lost painting of Lexington. Jess and Theo develop a relationship. The third, set in the 1950’s, offers a peek into the life of painter Jackson Pollock and art dealer Martha Jackson, who has a personal and professional interest in a painting of Lexington. 

♥♥ Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin (Andrew Weiss, Brian Brown, 2022) 

How Putin got to be Russia’s top dog. 

Weiss is an astute observer of Russia and high level consultant to Federal agencies.  Brown is an acclaimed comic artist and illustrator. Their collaboration is a nifty combination of entertainment and sober analysis, brimming with you-can’t-make-this-up tidbits.

The comic book of my youth is now a “graphic novel,” which makes this a “graphic biography” of Vladimir Putin. As a young man Putin idolized Russian fictional TV and movie hero Max Otto von Stierlitz, the Russian equivalent of James Bond. As his regime was falling apart Boris Yeltsin went looking for an appealing candidate to run in the next Presidential election. Opinion surveys revealed that no one could match the appeal of the imaginary Stierlitz. Putin had modeled his life on Stierlitz and got the nod.

♥♥ Beyond Measure The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants  (James Vincent, 2023)  

A delightful surprise, chock full of interesting stuff.

• It is no accident that ruler can mean a measuring tool or a tyrant. He rules who controls weights and measures.  
• How did the mile become 5280 ft.? A mile is eight furlongs (660 ft.)—the length of a furrow an oxen could plow before needing to rest. 
• Why 24 hours in a day? The pharaonic Egyptians divided day into ten hours and the night into twelve (based on star movement). Later they added an hour for dusk and another for dawn. Voila! Twenty-four hours. The Babylonians later gave us 60 minute hours, 60 second minutes, and the 360º circle.
• The standard measure of length in the Chinese Jin Dynasty (266–420 CE) was the lülü, the length of a musical pitch pipe cut from bamboo to produce the exact note the ruler demanded. 

I’ve loved little factoids like these since childhood when Mother played knowledge games with me. “What’s the northernmost point in the USA?,” she might ask. Now it’s Point Barrow, Alaska, but back then it was the north shore of  Lake of the Woods, Minnesota. Or she might ask me to the name of the capital of North Dakota (Bismarck). I still enjoy it.

♥♥ An Immense World  How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around US (Ed Yong, 2022).

Animals don’t experience the world the way we do.

Humans have seven senses, the usual five plus proprioception, the ability to sense the position of body parts without looking, and equlibrium, the ability to be in control when moving. Lose proprioception in your feet (e.g., diabetic neuropathy) and you can’t sense if your big toe is pointing up or down or if your foot is on the accelerator or the brake.  Gymnastics (and walking) is all about equilibrium—bodies flipping and flying but always in control. The animal kingdom have evolved senses beyond ours: 

• Salmon “smell” the molecular content of runoff water flowing into the stream at the site of their birth. After time at sea, they return home by swimming up the gradient of smell until they find home the location of strongest smell.
• Echolocation  (e. g., sonar) is detection and navigation by sensing echoes of self-produced ultra-sonic sound. Bats navigate and catch flying insects by sonar alone. Dolphins echolocate objects and are able to see inside like medical ultrasound. Daniel Kish (b. 1966) lost both eyes to cancer at age 13 months and taught himself to echolocate using tongue clicks. His ability defies imagination.

Animals have added two other senses: electric and magnetic. Some fishes generate an electric field to navigate. Despite never having flown, much less migrated, Australian bogong moths use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate from their scorching birthplace to cool caves 600 miles away where they spend the summer and then return home.  Yong is humorous and his writing is beautifully composed. He eschews scientific jargon except for the word umwelt (German, environment), a term sensory scientists use to describe the unique perceptual bubble sentient creatures inhabit, e. g., when I take Pancho for a walk my umwelt is dominated by sight and sound, his by smell. Our worlds are different.

♥♥♥ Sapiens  A Brief History of Humankind  (Yuval Noah Harari, 2015)

 A lesson in the power of beliefs. 

An absorbing account of world history encompassing cosmology, evolution, history, science, religion, and other aspects of our time on the planet. It’s an easy read. Hariri leads us step by step through the three revolutions of human existence: 

• The cognitive (~70,000 ya), when our big brain generated language, enabling us to dominate competing species. 
• The agricultural (~10,000 BC), which freed us from the yoke of hunting and gathering, yielding time for cultural development.
• The scientific (~ 1600 AD), led by Newton’s and Galileo’s demonstration of the power of the scientific method.

Harari posits that history pivots on beliefs (fictions, myths, imagined realities) into which he lumps religion, corporations, states, political parties, currencies, and every other mode of shared belief and cooperation. 

♥♥  Confederates in the Attic, Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War  (Richard Horwitz, 1998)  

A treat from beginning to end, a surprise or a grin on virtually every page. 

Horwitz’s spare style, wry humor and non-judgmental manner perfectly fit his task of digging into the rich Dixie ore running beneath the granite surface of the South. Like it or not, the South is different—it’s a place; North, East, and West are merely directions. 

 ♥♥ The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, the Roosevelts, and the Harrimans: A story of Love and War (Catherine Grace Katz, 2020)  

Meticulously researched and as entertaining as history gets, 

Katz offers humor and heartbreak as she gives us a daughter’s-eye view of the uber-consequential February 1945 WWII summit in Crimea among Churchill (daughter Sarah), FDR (Anna), US Soviet Ambassador Averill Harriman (Kathy, fluent in Russian) and Stalin (who brought not daughter Svetlana but henchmen Beria and Molotov). The US also brought Alger Hiss, a top State Department official who was also a Soviet spy. Stalin thoroughly outmaneuvered the failing US President—he would be dead in two months—who thought he could charm Stalin. Churchill was not fooled but powerless to alter the tide of events. The three young women, acting more or less as unofficial chiefs of staff for their fathers, mixed thoroughly with delegates, giving their fathers a woman’s view of the humanity involved in the diplomatic disaster that sentenced Eastern Europe to fifty years of communist tyranny.

♥♥ The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Murder and Mutiny (David Grann, 2023.

Think Lord of the Flies meets The Caine Mutiny.

In 1740 The HMS Wager sailed from England for Cape Horn on a mission to seize a treasure-filled Spanish galleon. The Wager wrecked on an island off the coast of Patagonia. Marooned for months and starving, the crew broke into two warring groups. The larger group built a flimsy craft, abandoned the smaller group, sailed back around the Cape, and made landfall on the coast of Brazil. They cast themselves as heroic resisters of a mutiny.  Six months later, however, three survivors from the other group washed up on the coast of Chile telling a very different story. The Brazil group were not heroes, but mutineers. Charge and countercharges boiled—betrayal, torture, tyranny, and murder directed by a senior officer and his henchmen. Both groups made their way back to England, where the Admiralty convened a court of inquiry to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were high—those found guilty would hang. 

♥♥♥ Killers of the Flower Moon  The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Davin Grann, 2017) 

One more episode in our shameful treatment of American Indians. Another page turner by Mr. Grann

After oil was discovered beneath their flat, dry land in the 1920s, the richest people (per capita) in the world were the ~2000 members of the Osage Indian Nation in Northeast Oklahoma. They lived in big homes, wore fashionable clothing, took European vacations, and otherwise behaved as the wealthy do. This did not sit well with local whites or the Federal government, which considered the Osage savages not fit to manage their assets and appointed locals as “guardians” for them who cheated and murdered them for their wealth. The Osage mortality rate began to rise. Some deaths were clearly criminal (bombing, gunshot), others uncertain, e.g., “wasting disease” to explain probable poisoning.  Local law enforcement was overwhelmed. As the death toll reached twenty-four, the new FBI and J. Edgar Hoover dispatched an agent who put together a team that exposed the conspiracy.  Grann revisits the episode and uncovers new evidence, which shows that the murders began in about 1910 and lasted into the 1930s. The number of murders is larger than suspected heretofore. It’s a page turner. 

♥♥♥ Lessons in Chemistry (Bonnie Garmus, 2022) 

My book of the year.  A delight! Astutely perceptive. Funny. Laced with indelible characters.  Not a mean-spirited sentence in this treasure about a 1960s “liberated woman.”

Meet Elizabeth Zott, brilliant, beautiful, a chemist and the only woman on the faculty of a research institute. She dismisses 1960s conventional expectations about women as if they didn’t exist—she’s a doer, not a complainer.  Pregnant by the sole faculty male who admires her work, she’s living with him but refuses to marry, convention be damned. He dies suddenly and she is fired by the Dean, who stole and published her research work under his name. To support herself and Madeline, her new daughter, she turns her kitchen into  chemistry lab and secretly consults with male faculty about their research. A TV producer meets her and thinks her good looks and confident manner would be right for a cooking show. Blithely ignoring cue cards and other conventions, table salt becomes sodium chloride, vinegar acetic acid, etc. Her show becomes a sensation. 

I especially enjoyed the precocious “Mad” Madeline Zott because she is a child charmingly evocative of a family I know with an incredibly talented daughter whom I will dub Miss Z in honor of Madeline Zott. Here’s a scene. Miss Z is very young. Dad is teaching her the alphabet. She picks up quickly. Mixing a bit of history with an alphabet lesson for A-L-A-M-O, dad gives her a ceramic replica of the Alamo and asks Miss Z to spell Alamo. Miss Z looks carefully at the object and says “T.” No,” dad says, “try again.” Miss Z looks again and says “T.” Disappointed, Dad looks at the back of the ceramic Alamo and finds it reads The Alamo. Some good Alamo moments in this book.

♥♥♥ A Fever in the Heartland The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (Timothy Egan, 2023. Egan also wrote The Worst Hard Time about the great Dust Bowl in the Texas Panhandle, one of my all-time favorites. With Fever he’s done it again.)

The second rise of the KKK began in the early 1920s (my mother was a preteen farm girl in the early 20s and experienced a white-robed Klan visit at a Bowie, Texas church service). Espousing hatred for Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants, the Klan spread from its rebirth in Indiana to other Heartland states and at its peak reached both coasts. The man responsible was D. C. Stephenson, a charismatic charlatan with a life story that changed with each telling. A chameleon liar and pitchman, his message spread quickly from pulpits and town squares, infecting judges, senators, governors, prosecutors, and professionals who proudly proclaimed their allegiance. Stephenson was especially harsh with women, partying with the elites until they assaulted Madge Oherholtzer, a gentle girl who refused to cave in to his demand that she retract her claim that he had been sexually abused.  Her deathbed testimony brought down the Klan.

♥♥ The First Conspiracy The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington (Brad Meltzer, 2018)

I always assumed the story about a plot to assassinate General Washington was a campfire tale. Not so. It was a cold reality that reached high into Loyalist circles and Washington’s personal guard corps.

Drawing from previously undisclosed documents and personal accounts, Meltzer  exposes a conspiracy promoted by the British which reached Washington’s Life Guards, the hand-picked corps vested with ensuring the General’s safety.

One of Meltzer’s talents is his ability to inject flesh and blood reality into the characters. We get a glimpse into the lives and personalities of the key players, from Thomas Hickey, a member of the Continental Army and the Life Guards, the leader of the plot, to Washington himself. Hickey was caught by civilians and handed over to the Continental Army, which convened a court martial to try him. He was found guilty and hanged.  

♥ Going Infinite The Rise and Fall of A New Tycoon (Michael Lewis, 2023.  Lewis is a master teller of Wall Street tales—The Big Short, Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, etc). 

The hijinks of Samuel Bankman-Fried, recently found guilty of fraud for the FTX bitcoin scheme. 

SBF is so weird, the situations so outlandish, I don’t have room to tell even one story because it requires too much explaining.  Lewis focuses on his strange ways in the rise and fall of his bitcoin empire, FTX. A plump, rumpled, distracted young man obsessed with playing computer games most of his waking hours, his gambit into bitcoins succeeds in making him more billions of real dollars faster than anyone ever before. The ephemeral nature of bitcoins, the billions of dollars flashing across computer screens, and the frenzied pace of trading combine to erase the weight of reality—this is real money, the stuff you use to buy groceries.

♥ Enough (Cassidy Hutchinson, 2023) 

The disillusionment of a 24 year old Trump White House staffer. Formerly a true believer. Very well written.  

Hutchison came to public notice for her testimony before the Congressional January 6^th Committee. Raised by a hard-working mom and a volatile, alienated father who distrusted government, doctors,  hospitals police and other institutions, she gained survival skills that served her well in her role as “chief of staff” for Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, a lofty position for one so young (age 24). A perfectionist, she excelled at school, always over-prepared. A chance visit to Washington left a strong impression and she developed an avid interest in government, politics, and public service. She carefully researched the candidates in 2016 and attended a Trump rally where she felt a euphoric connection with the crowd.  She voted for Trump; it was her first vote. The main theme of her story is her disillusionment with The White House from Trump on down and the slow recovery of her moral compass. Lots of “Can you believe it” moments. It’s a page turner.

♥ ♥ River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal, in the Search for the Source of the Nile (Candace Millard, 2023)  I loved her River of Doubt about Teddy Roosevelt’s near-fatal floating of Brazil’s Rio Duvida and her Hero of the Empire about TR’s Boer War escapades in South Africa. This is another good one.

Napoleon’s adventures in Egypt (1798–1801) ignited in Victorian London an abiding interest in  the Nile River. The Royal Geographic Society became obsessed with finding the source, which lay somewhere in sub-Saharan East Africa. The Society chose Richard Frances Burton to lead an expedition to find it.

Burton was a British explorer, prolific writer, soldier, scholar (he translated the Kama Sutra) and diplomat. Famed for his travels and extraordinary knowledge of cultures, he spoke twenty nine languages, and seemingly knew no fear. Knowing it was punishable by death for a non-Muslim to enter Mecca, he made a successful pilgrimage with a group of the faithful using fluent Arabic and deep cultural understanding.

 Burton took the assignment but while traveling took in John Hanning Speke, a young British soldier, whom he  did not know. Speke proved himself able but their relationship turned sour. They jointly and separately made several expeditions, suffering terrible illnesses and wounds. Speke claimed the source was Lake Victoria, but Burton scoffed at Speke’s survey data, saying it required the Nile to run uphill. A bitter dispute simmered. Speke agreed to a public debate with Burton but regretted it, realizing he had no chance of matching wits with Burton. Immediately before the event Speke died of a blast from his own shotgun while hunting. Circumstances were such that it could have been accidental or suicide.   

  

From July 24, 1989 to December 6, 1994