Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

David Quammen is a fine science writer and, in this book, has done absolutely heroic feats of research in order to discuss zoonotic diseases and the possibility of the next big outbreak or pandemic. Opportunity is the key. Many viruses and bacteria have evolved to live in their animal hosts without harm or mortal danger, but when humans push into the environments where these hosts live, they become opportunistic new hosts and the consequences are often not so benign.
Quammen provides both historical and current facts about many of the major outbreaks we have seen and heard so much about in the media (SARS, bird flu, etc). He interviews experts and often accompanies them into essentially "hot zones" where outbreaks are current or have recently occurred. For six years he traveled from Australia to China, to India, to Bangladesh, to many parts of Africa--all to talk to the people in the field trying to find out where these potential killers live and how they are passed to humans. In only one instance does this book, in my opinion, falter. He tells a possible but totally fictionalized tale about one fisherman to speculate on how the AIDS virus moved from remote African villages to more populous towns. What is most astounding in this section on HIV/AIDS is the current theory that the virus spread to pandemic levels because of well-intentioned, but unsanitary innoculation campaigns in the early to mid-1900's. Really a fascinating book and worth the read.

End Games

Anyone who watched the 3-episode BBC production of "Zen" starring Rufus Sewell will know why I felt compelled to grab this book from the shelf in a used book store. English born author Michael Dibdin wrote 11 novels starring Venetian detective Aurelio Zen and this was his last, published posthumously, as Dibdin died in 2007 in Seattle. Aurelio is that rare breed of detective who has not been corrupted by the system and seeks to find the guilty party, regardless of where it leads. His lack of political survival instinct means that, in this novel, he has been shunted off to serve as acting chief of police in the remote town of Calabria in southern Italy until the incumbent recovers from an accidental and self-imposed gunshot wound.
An American, who it turns out was actually born to a wealthy Calabrian family, is beheaded in gruesome fashion and the locals are keeping mute about what they know. Ostensibly an advance agent for a film company seeking a shooting locale, the dead man's murder was a mistake. The film company isn't really looking for good scenery but for buried treasure, and the deceased wasn't really the heir of the despised landowners. But everybody has something at stake and everyone is lying to Zen. He has to wade through distrust of the police, greed, and pure drug-fueled craziness to sort this one out.
The characters are superbly rendered, the setting is richly if unsentimentally placed at our feet, and the obstacles are all too believable. I feel inspired to revisit the BBC series and find the rest of the books to read.

Mink River

I won't pretend to be as talented as author Brian Doyle, but to give you a flavor of the book, I will alter my approach a bit. Lyrical. Tedious. Microscopic view. Unusual perspectives. Enticing. Provocative. Occasionally exhausting. Dense. Beautiful. Whimsical. Philosophical. Magical. Heartbreaking. Satisfying. Rich. Consume in small doses. Braided.
Characters primarily reflect either First Nations heritage (No Horses, Worried Man, Cedar, Maple Head) or Irish (Owen, Declan, Grace, Red Hugh). A coastal town in the Pacific Northwest where fishing and logging are in rapid decline. Every being has a story, including Moses the crow, whose caretaker, a nun, dies early on. Every being tells their own story, including the river. People are compassionate, evil, wise, a little mad, foolish--but ultimately engaging each and every one. The Department of Public Works is run by Cedar and Worried Man who have taken the department's role to new heights--now being concerned with the well-being of all people and places in the town. There are simply too many stories that weave in and out to try and summarize. So read it for yourself.

We have Always Lived in the Castle

Some time back, some person put arsenic in the sugar bowl at dinner and now the whole family is dead except for Uncle Julian, an invalid, who eats very little sugar; Constance, who eats no sugar; and Mary Katherine (aka Merricat), who was sent to her room without supper for misbehaving that fateful night. Constance was the one who was tried for the multiple murders, but she was not convicted. Now the three of them continue to live in the family home, shut away from the resentful and mean-spirited villagers except for Merricat's twice weekly trip to the grocery store. The other wealthy families--for they had money and live in a mansion--occasionally come to call, but otherwise, they are totally isolated. When Cousin Charles shows up, the balance--such as it is--is upset and things begin to go quickly awry. A fire is started by someone in the house, then the fire department puts it out. But the villagers take the opportunity to rampage through the house breaking everything they find. Uncle Julian dies of a heart attack in the melee. Only Constance and Merricat are left. What are they to do?  One of the survivors is the poisoner, but the two nevertheless vow to go on. A totally strange book by Shirley Jackson, who also wrote The Haunting of Hill House. Apparently this has also been performed on stage.

The Bookman's Tale

This novel by Charlie Lovett starts with a mystery and escalates into a thriller. Antiquarian book dealer Peter Byerly has recently lost his beloved wife Amanda to brain cancer. With her, it also feels he has lost his interest in everything else. The book alternates between three time periods and perspectives: the early history of a particular book, the Pandosto, which runs from Shakespeare's time up until present day England; the mid-1980's when Peter met Amanda at college and their subsequent five years of marriage, mostly in America; and present day (mid-1990's) in England. Peter wanders into a used book store and finds tucked into a book a watercolor painting that so eerily resembles his dead wife, he becomes obsessed with finding out who painted it and who the subject of the painting was. In the process he hooks up with Victorian art expert, Liz, and starts to uncover an elaborate plot fueled by generations of enmity between the two families, the Gardners and the Aldersons. At the heart of this story is a book, Pandosto, with margin notes that, if genuine, could settle once and for all whether or not Shakespeare was the real author of all those famous plays. Well written with a great storyline and well-developed characters. A little bit of supernatural in the form of Amanda's ghost keeping an eye on Peter. Well worth the read, especially for those interested in book collecting, Shakespeare, or English literary history in general. A good amount of research went into making this historically accurate--up to a point--which is all summarized in the "Author's Note" at the end.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

I did not finish this book by Matt Bell. I would characterize it as magical realism, not a favorite genre of mine to start with, but again I was enticed by glowing reviews. There is too much despair, too little storyline for me here. The description is well crafted. A man and a woman marry, move away from their family and friends to an isolated plot of land. He builds a house and they try to start a family. But time after time, she miscarries. Eventually, her ability to sing things into existence is put to full use as she creates a child. But he knows of the deception--that this being is not the result of their physical union and he begins to destroy the natural world around them while she places a threatening 2nd moon in the sky above. You can read more extended reviews in the New York Times, and at NPR, among others.

How the Light Gets In

After the ending of The Beautiful Mystery, it was ALL I could do not to turn to the last page and see how this installment of the Inspector Gamache series by Louise Penny was going to turn out. But I resisted.  And she kept me on the edge of my seat (figuratively speaking since I mostly read in bed before going to sleep) the entire time, uncertain as to whether Gamache would emerge victorious or go down in flames. The situation looks dire. Francoeur has dismantled the homicide division that Gamache worked for decades to build and has installed every ne'er do well he can round up from the Surete to undermine Gamache's credibility and effectiveness. Although there is a murder mystery that threads through the book, involving the death of the last of a world famous set of quintuplets, the real story here has to do with what evil plot Francoeur is hatching and why it involves destroying both Gamache and Jean-Guy. A former member of Gamache's team, Yvette Nichol, makes a reappearance, and Isabel Lacoste helps hold the whole thing together as Gamache pursues a deadly strategy of deception and double-cross with Francoeur and his minions.  For me, much of the tension came from the apparent contrast between Gamache's integrity and honesty, and how such a person could possibly go up against people who are incredibly dishonest and destructive.
As with previous installments, the town of Three Pines with the attendant cast of characters--including Rosa the duck--provides not only a compelling setting but its own distinctive emotional color as events unfold. There's not a wasted word, not a superfluous character, and this one kept me up nights, drawn on by the lovely prose, the characters that you want to meet on the street, and the compulsion to find out what is going on. If you haven't read the previous books in the series, do yourself a favor and start from the beginning rather than diving in with this one. When I finished, it made me want to go back and re-read the whole series!

Blackout

This author, Connie Willis, has won several prestigious science fiction awards (Hugo, Nebula). So, her bona fides, along with a positive reviews from several sources including this lengthy one in the Washington Post, and an intriguing story line, persuaded me to dive into this incredibly overlong (500 pages) and tedious book. I have never worked so hard to get to such a disappointing ending. We begin in the year 2060, in Oxford, England, when time travel has been perfected and historians routinely travel back to various periods of time to make observations and do their research more directly than is possible through today's documentary methods. But we already have hints that things are starting to go awry as the schedules for several people are being re-arranged at the last minute, creating all sorts of problems with getting the historians properly prepared with background information, appropriate costuming, and even the relevant language skills for their assignment. Three characters, Eileen, Polly, and Mike, all end up in various parts of WWII-era Britain (London in the Blitz, the rescue of soldiers from Dunkirk, the countryside evacuation of children) unable to get back to present time. They eventually manage to track down one another in hopes that the others have an effective "drop" to return to Oxford, but there the story ends. It turns out that All Clear, the sequel, is really just the second half of the present book. Based on this review from The Guardian, I am unlikely to pursue another trudge through overly detailed and not very interesting day to day meanderings in order to find out if they make it back. While I love sci-fi and historical novels, this one left me mostly bored and tired.

The Art Forger

Based on the actual--still unsolved-- theft of several famous paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, which in fact included several by Degas, this is a fictionalized and romanticized account of what happens when one of the Degas paintings (a fictitious one) resurfaces. Claire Roth is a talented painter who has made the all too common mistake of falling for her famous and married art teacher, Isaac Cullion. Three years ago, when he was having a "painter's block" she painted a picture for him to help him meet a deadline for a viewing by an agent from MoMA. The picture she painted, fortunately or unfortunately, became the keystone for their accepting his work for a special showing and was ultimately purchased by them; yet he refused to admit that he hadn't painted it. When Isaac dumped Claire, she tried to set the record straight and became persona non grata in the art world; now no one will touch her work. She has become labelled as "The Great Pretender." She works making custom reproductions for a company called Reproductions.com and is a certified Degas specialist. When the owner of a famous Boston gallery comes to her with an offer for her own show at his gallery if she will make a copy of the missing Degas from the Gardner heist, she is eventually persuaded by his claim that he will return the original to the museum itself. As she works with the painting, though, she comes to realize that it is not a real Degas but a clever forgery that had been hanging in the Gardner all these years. No one is going to want to hear that, any more than the experts at MoMA wanted to hear that they had been fooled into buying a painting by a graduate student instead of the well-know professor. We see what we want to see. Author B.A. Shapiro has done detailed research that will tell you the nitty gritty details of how to forge a painting if you have the talent, as well as the struggles facing unknown artists.

Crazy Enough

We went to see a Pink Martini concert here in Bend recently. There has been such a glut of tell-all memoirs about people's miserable lives in the last few years and I really have no interest in reading them; I am generally not a consumer of celebrity gossip and not interested in their private lives.  But when this woman, Storm Large, had the temerity to step into the giant shoes of China Forbes as the lead vocalist for Pink Martini and, according to bandleader Thomas Loudermilk, save their bacon by learning 10 songs in 5 languages in 6 days, AND to do a one-woman show about her life and then write a bookabout herself that won an Oregon book award, well.... I admit my curiosity was piqued. BTW, she was amazing and I was totally won over with her renditions of Pink Martini's songs and totally entertained with her sassy banter and torchy presentations of their Latin numbers.
But maybe you don't want to read this book. Sometimes you just want to maintain the illusion, and after reading this book, that just is not possible. While you have to admire the tenacity and guts and talent that it took to overcome the incredibly destructive -- both active and passive--parents she had, one sort of wishes one didn't know how she almost destroyed herself in the process. I am not sure I can ever hear her sing again without being reminded of all the pain behind it, although she absolutely soars above that when she sings. She has in every way lived up to her name, larger than life, leaving detritus in her stormy wake. She doesn't think well of us in the audience generally, and you can't really blame her, given the experiences she has had, but it does change things. That sharp edge to her banter just takes on a different significance. But do go see her sing. She is magnificent!