"A Study in Scarlet" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1887)

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It's like someone made half the shows on the BBC into a book!

Honestly, where would modern story telling be without Sherlock Holmes? There would be no Law & Order TV series, no CSI, or Monk, or Psych. There would be no Dick Tracy, no Murder She Wrote, no Columbo. The world would have been deprived of Alex Cross novels, there would be no Sue Grafton or John Grisham. I mean, no Pink Panther? I don't think any one wants to live in that world.

This is the first book ever featuring Sherlock Holmes. This was the first time you'd read a Holmes book before (which is pretty embarrassing) and it was also the first eBook you'd ever read from beginning to end (which is not so embarrassing). Generally, you are not a fan of eBooks, not because of the format, but because the lack of a real physical copy prevents you from proudly displaying the fact that you've read the book where everyone can see it. Like big game hunters with the heads of their kills, you enjoy showing off the spine of your most prized conquests to anyone who happens to enter your home. Your friend Mark calls this obsession "book porn," and it's not one of your most attractive habits.

You were waiting in a line some damn place a month or so ago, and found yourself without a book to pass the time. You panicked for a moment, but suddenly you remembered that your trusty iPhone has dozens of free copies of works that are old enough for their trademarks to have lapsed into the public domain. You promptly opened to "A Study in Scarlet" and started reading it right there in line. The book proved enjoyable enough that you've been reading it in random lines ever since.

The first half (and some of the second half) of the book is written in the first person, something you'd never realized in all the years you'd heard cultural references to Sherlock Holmes. It is written from the perspective of Dr. John Watson, a veteran who was wounded at the Battle of Maiwand during the war in Afghanistan. (No, the OTHER war in Afghanistan. This one was England's second war there, the most recent is their fourth or fifth there, depending on how you count them.) After recovering from his wounds, Dr. Watson returns home to London and is very clearly frustrated in his attempts to integrate back into the civilian world. In today's society Dr. Watson would have been quickly diagnosed with PTSD but in 19th century England, he would have been expected to keep a stiff upper lip and carry on, something he proves decidedly unable to do. He quickly finds himself out of motivation, out of money, and in need of a room mate to alleviate the financial burden of simply paying rent.

Enter Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes is busy tinkering away in the laboratory of St. Bartholomew's hospital (Barts is still, to this day, the oldest hospital in London) when he and Dr. Watson are introduced to each other by a mutual friend who knows that both are searching for a room mate. Holmes has found a nice place at 221B Baker street that he can't really afford. Even though Watson has been warned of Holmes' oddness and eccentricities, he finds his new friend to be the perfect remedy for his own shiftless inactivity and agrees to the arrangement. Their introductions were so charming as to be worthy of being quoted at length.

After deciding they should room together Sherlock begins, "Let me see -- what are my other shortcomings? I get in the dumps at times, and don't open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I'll soon be right. What have you to confess now? It's just as well for two fellows to know the worst of one another before they begin to live together."

I laughed at this cross-examination. "I keep a bull pup," I said, "and I object to rows because my nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy. I have another set of vices when I'm well, but those are the principal ones at present."

You loved this moment because it got to the core of their relationship so well. Each member of this legendary duo brings out the essential honesty in the other, enabling them to quickly get to the essence of the business at hand. They cut to the quick from the first moment they meet. This relationship serves them well in their ensuing adventure. Holmes is known by two of the inspectors at Scotland Yard (Lestrade and  Gregson) for his observational brilliance and is quickly brought on as a consultant to help them investigate a mysterious murder, and then another one, both of which he promptly solves.

And then the whole story line changes!

Suddenly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle pulls you from England to a far away desert in the American Southwest. Gone is the foggy urban London setting with which you have become so familiar, gone is Dr. Watson's charming first person perspective, and gone is Sherlock Holmes' insightful, almost unbelievable analysis. The back-story to the crime Holmes has just solved is layed out for you, and it evens gets a Later Day Saints twist. Brigham Young himself makes an appearance! The explanation and justification for the previously mysterious murders soon becomes clear and Watson's voice returns to give a charming end to the story.

What struck you about the book was how easily accessible the language and writing style was to a 35 year old, 21st century American suburbanite. Conan Doyle knew his material well enough to impart Holmes with a healthy dose of brilliance, but he also knew to keep his hero's behavior odd enough to always keep Holmes feeling human. Holmes is obtuse at times, and dismissive. He can be remarkably helpful one moment, but frustratingly tight lipped the next. You were swept right along with Dr. Watson (and millions of other readers over the last 130 years) and became an instant fan of this Sherlock Holmes character.

Luckily the BBC has a new and phenomenal series called Sherlock based on the Holmes stories, and all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works are loaded onto your iPhone so there are plenty of adventures to be had with Watson and Holmes. This will be fun. The game is afoot!

On to the next book!

"Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" by Seth Grahame-Smith (2010)

Wait... Lincoln was a what?

This is a work of fiction (obviously) but it reads like non-fiction. You started this blog with a non-fiction book that read like fiction, so it is fitting that you flipped that notion over and read a book like this with such a ridiculous premise. A few years ago Seth Grahame-Smith, starting a trend in the world of fiction, wrote "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies". You haven't read any of the other titles in this over-the-top genre, but you did find the notion of a world where Abraham Lincoln (your son's namesake) stalks vampires and wields his axe with a thirst for vengeance to be too absurdly enjoyable to pass up. Plus, you wanted to have at least one negative review on this blog.

But here's the thing... you ended up liking "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter."

The format is interesting, with its mix of third person narrative interspersed with Abraham Lincoln's first person "secret" uncovered personal diaries. Revelation follows revelation and you soon find that the greatest vampire hunter in the history of the United States was also its greatest president.

Yes, the premise is preposterous, and yes, turning a man revered in American history into a vengeful blood-soaked vampire killer boarders on blasphemy, but that's kind of what is so intriguing about the book.

It's fun to shake up preconceptions. It's good to challenge truth.

One of the things that you liked so much about the book was how difficult it was to discern where the history ended and the fiction began. Sure, once old Honest Abe's axe blade is smashing some vampire's brains out, you're clearly in the fiction part, but how did he get to that battle from from his job in the Illinois Legislature? At what point does Lincoln step out of the real world and into the fantasy? Grahame-Smith makes it hard to tell!

Of course, the author has plenty of opportunity for embellishment provided by the realities of the 19th century. People who lived along side Abraham Lincoln died all the time, and the causes were not always exactly crystal clear. Disease, poisonings, murder.. until a good way into the 20th century, death was everywhere, claiming the young and healthy as well as the old and infirm. The cause of all these deaths all too often remained shrouded in mystery.

Lincoln's grandfather was murdered in 1786 by Shawnee indians while working his fields, but how do we know that those indians weren't really murderous vampires? The killers were never caught. Abraham Lincoln really did suffer from recurring and vivid nightmares, who's to say they weren't a sort of PTSD echo of his exploits combating the undead? There is no way of knowing for sure. Lincoln and Stephen Douglas really were lifelong rivals, they both courted Mary Todd, and they both ran for US Senate and for President. And when he was defeated in the 1860 election by his old rival, Douglas really did go on a tour of the border states warning of the dangers of secession, and he really did die suddenly after that tour. Who knows if he really was killed by the very vampires he had once befriended? These fantastical plot points are easy to smile at and dismiss, but they cleave so well to established history that they become hard to separate from the lore of Lincoln.

This surprised you and also brought up a question in your mind. Isn't the mythology of Abraham Lincoln a bit of fantasy even without the vampires? No man could really have been as incredible as the 16th President of the United States has been made out to be. Not really. No real human being could ever live up to the legendary status that Lincoln occupies in the minds of so many. Surely some of the stories we cherish aren't true either. Undoubtedly Lincoln was a flawed man who was not truly larger than life. You know this. And yet you still named your son after him.

"Abraham Lincoln: Vampire hunter" reminded you of a central tenant of the human experience. We choose the stories we decide are important. Luke Skywalker doesn't exist any more than Lincoln's vampires, but that doesn't mean Luke's story isn't meaningful. Just because a story isn't true, doesn't mean it can't teach you something. Sometimes we tell made up stories to illuminate meaningful truths, and the truth told in this preposterous book, the overarching theme, is that slavery was one of the purest forms of evil.

It is tempting sometimes to encapsulate American slavery as a historical anomaly, something long-dead people experienced centuries ago, something that has no bearing on our society today. It is easier sometimes to attempt to gloss over the horrors of this despicable practice and argue about "states' rights" or to get caught up in an argument that ignores the evil in our past. This book makes no such attempt.

In this alternate universe, slavery enables vampires. The two are caught up together in an almost parasitical relationship. Evil feeding evil. Vampires avoid hiding their true nature, become slave owners and perversely grow their own meals. In a twisted, fantasy world, a brilliant clarity emerges. If slave owners had really done this, if they had really feasted on their slaves, no one would have known, and only a few would have cared. After all, what you did with your "property" was your business. And in a sense, by building a society and an economy upon the backs of the oppressed, by enriching themselves through the forced misery of others, isn't that what slave owners really did anyway?

Early in the book, a young Abraham Lincoln witnesses an atrocity perpetuated on a few newly purchased slaves, and realizes that his fight against vampires will never be over unless slavery is ended. The real Lincoln was motivated by logic and compassion for his fellow Americans to fight against the institution of slavery, but Grahame-Smith's Lincoln is fueled by a fanatical drive to defeat another evil as well. Highlighting how pernicious human enslavement was by equating it with the supernatural exploits of the blood-thirsty undead clarified for you, more than ever before, how destructive and wicked slavery truly was. After finishing the book you thanked God and Abraham Lincoln that such evil is gone from America now.

Sometimes the silliest books can remind you of the most important truths.

On to the next book!

"At Home" by Bill Bryson (2010)

If history without context is empty, then this book is bursting at the seams. It's nothing BUT context.

Bill Bryson wrote two of your favorite non-fiction books, "Mother Tongue" and "A Short History of Nearly Everything." His wit and wry observations always keep you laughing through any subject matter and add a level of charm to his work that you don't usually find in the non-fiction section of book stores. "At Home" doesn't disappoint. It is wonderfully readable.

In "At Home," Bryson decided to discover the answers to all sorts of little questions that arose as he walked through his charming little home in the English country side. He realized quite suddenly one day that history is really just "masses of people doing ordinary things." He also realized that no one had ever really written a history book about those ordinary things, so he decided to write one himself.

Each chapter is named after a room in the house although sometimes the connection between the room and the subject matter is a bit arbitrary, as in the chapter about the study, which is mostly about the shocking number of critters we humans live alongside. But this random connection between places and subject matter is part of the fun of the book. You never know where history will take you, and you never know where Bryson's imagination and insatiable curiosity will take you either. One moment your are deep in the details of the life of servants in the Victorian England, and the next you are pondering the clothing and tools found on a prehistoric mummified corpse found frozen in the Alps.

One of the things you loved about "At Home," and about most of Bryson's books, is how easy it is to pick up and read. The book has a loose enough narrative arc that you could really just pick it up and read any page at random and find some new fascinating thing to go annoy your endlessly patient wife with.

As with many other non-fiction books you were tempted to dog ear every other page to mark some random fact you wanted to remember. This blog is supposed to be a reminder to you of what you've read and what you don't want to forget, but with a book as filled with so many shocking facts about the most seemingly mundane things, there is the temptation to just make a list of the hundreds of points you want to remember. But that would be a pretty boring blog.

What is not boring is how rich the subject of human history really is. What "At Home" reminded you of is the same realization that Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" evokes, the realization that history isn't just what important men and big governments have done over the years. History is what all of us do every day. All of us, from the Queen of England down to the lowest scullery maid, are all part of the same story.

Above all, "At Home" has a quality to it that you found familiar... Wonder. Bryson is fascinated by the most seemingly inconsequential things, and his curiosity echoes your own wonder at how endlessly interesting the world is. Everything and everyone has a story and they are all constantly irresistible to both Bryson and to you.

As far as listing the most fascinating parts of the book, there is no way to fit them all into one blog post. A word of advice, hold on to this book. You'll want to read it again.

On to the next book!

"The Fault in Our Stars" By John Green (2012)

You picked this one up at book store last week, and couldn't put it back down. That's usually a good sign.

 John Green again. You DID say that you were probably going to read all of his books pretty soon. You've already reviewed "An Abundance of Katherines," so don't buy it again (this is a problem area for you). "The Fault in Our Stars is Green's newest novel. The narrator and main character is Hazel, and Hazel has cancer. Hazel is sixteen and she has terminal cancer. The fact that you don't want to give away spoilers is going to make this review tough to write, but it's pretty safe to remind you that you cried many a tear while reading this book. You liked the book a lot, but you kind of cried your ass off.

One of the great things about novels is the variety in how they are written. Each novel can have a very different voice and style. History books pretty much have to be written in the third person, but the authors of novels can play around with their style and crawl inside people's heads. George R.R. Martin writes each chapter in the "Games of Thrones" series (A Song of Fire and Ice) from a different person's point of view, though not with a First Person voice. Suzanne Collins wrote The "Hunger Games" series in First Person, Present Tense, which you found made putting her books down very difficult. "The Fault in Our Stars" is also First Person, though not Present Tense. This style of writing feels very intimate, like Hazel is talking to herself almost, and you get to choose to either eavesdrop on her inner monologue, or actually get to become her inside the pages of the book. There have been many examples of Young Adult fiction where a female author writes from a male character's perspective (think "Harry Potter") but this is the first you've heard of a male writing as a female. John Green pulls this off beautifully. How a goofy, 30-something, computer-nerd, dad can convincingly write from the point of view of a 16-year old female cancer patient is truly a testament to the human capacity for imagination and empathy. But he does it well, and Hazel is believable and intelligent and very likeable. As with all good writing, the novelty of the style soon falls away and all you are left with is a wonderfully rich and compelling character, someone you would want to spend time with.

As the story unfolds, it reveals an unflinching look into the life of a young cancer patient, a young woman who is struggling with her mortality while fighting to keep her sense of humor. Hazel is matter of fact about her diagnosis, but she does on occasion reach out to one of her old (pre-cancer) friends, Kaitlyn, for advice, but really to grasp a lifeline back to the world of being a teenager without a death sentence hanging over her head. Hazel often drops pearls of wisdom that resonated with you, and several quotes stood out. Whether or not they come from Hazel herself, they are all filtered through her perception.

"I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?"

"Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin."

“That's the thing about pain...it demands to be felt.”

“My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.”

That last quote is from Augustus Waters. Hazel meets Augustus early on in the story at a Cancer survivor support group meeting, and they get along like gangbusters. She falls in love with him pretty quickly, but not before you did. Augustus is funny, irreverent, smart, and endlessly hopeful. "The Fault in Our Stars" is about the relationship between Hazel and Augustus, how they are changed by it and how they learn to be grateful for the limited time that they know they have together. The couple spur each other on to more and more irreverent reactions to the walking-on-eggshells behavior that people tend to fall into around sick and handicapped kids (Augustus lost a leg to cancer). Some of the funniest moments in the book are when they console their friends who are going through their own dignity-stripping adventures in their fight against cancer. Evidently, no John Green novel is complete until the characters take a trip to somewhere, because these moments of great honesty and humor bring the couple closer and also inspire them to take a once in a lifetime trip together.

In fact, almost everything they do might be described as "once in a lifetime." Death is a guarantee in this book. You knew, as soon as you read the first page, that not everyone was going to make it to the last one. But that is one of the points of the book. These kids know that Death could be just around the next corner, so they feel like they need to drink in every moment, laugh at every opportunity, and suffer very little in the way of bullshit. But Death is a guarantee for all of us, not just those who are diagnosed with some fatal disease. After all, Life itself is a communicable disease, and it's 100% fatal. So shouldn't we all be behaving like Hazel and Gus? Shouldn't we all seek answers to our questions with an urgency motivated by the knowledge that if we wait too long, we may never get the answer? Shouldn't we all love deeply enough that we won't regret it on our death beds? Shouldn't we all remember that guarding ourselves from pain is ultimately a foolish and destructive act? Pain and loss make us who we are, and we only have a short time to figure out who that is.

But, even so, what gives "The Fault in Our Stars" its poignancy is that Death just feels wrong here. The people in the book are kids! They are supposed to feel invincible not fleeting, eternal not ephemeral. Sure the Sword of Damocles hangs over us all, you get that, but it feels wrong when it involves children.

You were almost done with the book (which means you were doing a lot of crying) on the day that news reports began rolling in that the unthinkable had happened in Newtown, Connecticut. A sick gunman had entered an elementary school and murdered 20 First Grade children along with six adult teachers and administrators. No novel can make that disaster make any sense. No message from a fictional dying child can explain to you why very real monsters exist in the world or why they sometimes go after very real children. But "The Fault in Our Stars" did encourage you to remember to value every moment that you have with your kids and to love them fiercely. Hopefully you and they will live long and happy lives together, but there are no guarantees, and the temporary nature of our lives is what gives them such immediacy and such importance. Love is what matters the most, because love is able to give us, to quote Hazel, "Forever within the numbered days." And for that forever we, like Hazel, should be very grateful.

On to the next book!

"The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)

Ah, Bilbo Baggins of The Shire, one of your oldest and dearest friends. This one really never gets old.

 You tried to count up the number of times you've read this book before writing this review but you couldn't even guess. In case you have forgotten (but you probably never will) this was the first real book you ever read on your own, forever ensuring your solid status as a nerd and also igniting your deep and life-long love affair with the wonder and magic of books. You were five or six when you first read "The Hobbit" and you've never really gotten over it. Naturally, you read this book to both of your boys on their first days of life. You didn't really need to review this one to remember certain details, you've got it all memorized. You wanted to read it one more time right now, because the movie by Peter Jackson comes out in a day or two and this was your last chance to read it without someone else's imagination fighting for primacy in your head. "The Lord of the Rings" movies were almost everything you had hoped they would be, but you've always been a little bit sad that you don't remember what Frodo looked like in your mind before Elijah Wood's face replaced him in there. So, once more:

"Far over misty mountains cold

To dungeons deep and caverns old 

We must away, ere break of day,

To find our long-forgotten gold." 

The thing that strikes you every time you read Tolkien's work is how phenomenal the writing really is. Even though this book is written with children in mind much more than most of his other works, Tolkien's writing is still outstanding. His best passages aren't descriptions of landscapes or events, but of how those places and trials make the characters feel. When Bilbo and his party cross the river and head up into the valley of Rivendell, Tolkien is able in a few short paragraphs to put you in Bilbo's mind:

"Bilbo never forgot the way they slithered and slipped in the dusk down the steep zig-zag path into the secret valley of Rivendell. The air grew warmer as they got lower, and the smell of pine trees made him drowsy, so that every now and again he nodded and nearly fell off, or bumped his nose on the pony's neck. Their spirits rose as they went down and down. The trees changed to beech and oak, and there was a comfortable feeling in the twilight... "Hmmm! it smells like elves!" thought Bilbo, and he looked up at the stars. They were burning bright and blue. Just then there came a burst of song like laughter in the trees..."

He doesn't describe the scenery or the action particularly impressive detail, but his writing somehow lifts your spirit and makes you feel renewed and enchanted just as Bilbo is feeling those same things. It is extraordinary and it is that quality that keeps bringing you back to these well-worn pages. The book doesn't make you believe in magic. It IS magic.

 One day, while you were in the middle of reading the book, as you and your family drove to the store, you were describing this magical quality of Tolkien's writing to Liz. From the back seat, your seven year old son asked if he too could start reading the book. Of course, as soon as y'all got back home, you gave Nico the better of the two copies you own, and he sat down and started reading it that instant. It's only been a few days, and he is almost half way through. This entire book review blog project has been worth it just for that experience alone. Nothing makes you more proud or hopeful than to see one of your children immersed in one of your favorite worlds. Making nerds is SO much fun!

 As we've already established, you don't really need a review to cover any plot points. Bilbo starts off as a comfortable little hobbit in his warmly domestic hole in the side of a hill, he is immediately ripped from his life of comfort and food and pipe smoking into an adventure that he never imagined. On his way to reclaim stolen dwavish treasures from a Lonely Mountain he meets trolls and elves, a shape-shifter and a creature named Gollum (I wonder if he proves important in a later story?). He fights goblins and giant spiders, he holds court with kings and warriors, and matches wits with a dragon. You're never going to forget those moments, but what you do often forget are some of the lessons that come from these familiar pages. Tolkien weaves subtle morality lessons throughout the book. This time around, maybe because you had this review in mind, you were struck by those lessons more than any other time you've read "The Hobbit".

Perhaps the most over-arching message of the book is that there is always more than there appears, so never underestimate people. Gandalf is always telling Bilbo there is more about him than anyone expects. The wizard saw the promise inherent in Bilbo and expected great things from him, but the dwarves saw in him only a small and pitiable disappointment. You've noticed that both situations are great motivators in life. When someone you respect fully believes in you, you find that you can do the great things they imagine, but when strangers or adversaries predict your failure, when they try to doom you to mediocrity, you are also often inspired to achieve surprising feats of greatness. And sometimes, you yourself are you own adversary. The adventuresome Tookish part of Bilbo (from his mother) is always surprising his homey respectable Baggins part. One of the greatest joys in life is when you, like Bilbo, are able to surprise yourself.

Once you have surprised yourself, you often feel like a new person. As he prepares to enter the secret passageway in the side of the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo quips to the dwarves, "Perhaps I have begun to trust my luck more than I used to in the old days." And then Tolkien interrupts to define the old days, "-he meant last spring before he left his own house, but it seemed like centuries ago-". You love that illustration of how much someone can change in a very short amount of time. Like when you get married. Like when you have a child. Like when you have a child with Down syndrome. At some point we all go through life-changing adventures (for lack of a better word) and it is important to stop and take a moment to realize that we are no longer who we once were. Some times you really can think of your life from just a few months ago as "The Old Days". Tolkien reminded you of that and you enjoyed taking a moment to marvel at how far you yourself have come.

But what is the point of all these adventures? Of all this personal growth? Tolkien isn't arrogant enough to guess, but he does promise that there is a point. As Bilbo emerges from the long terror of the forest of Mirkwood, he has overcome a great deal. He and his friends have lost the trail, they are starving, and they are attacked and captured... twice! Bilbo's path to this point in the story has taken twists and turns that neither he nor the very wisest sages could have possibly foreseen. But what Bilbo never discovers, yet Tolkien tells you in the text, is that this twisted path was the only way Bilbo could have gotten to where he needed to be. All other paths lead to ruin and failure. The eastern exit of the forest was in such disrepair that he would never have made it to the Lonely Mountain or Smaug. Had Bilbo followed the path that wizards and elf lords had suggested, the story would have ended in disaster. But somehow the adventure continued. The story didn't end in disaster.

There is powerful hope in this revelation. This hope reminded you why you love this book so much. "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" have one underlying theme, someone is taking care of us all. We are in good hands. Someone is writing our story too, and it does not end in tragedy. No matter how long the journey there and back again takes us, no matter how many battles are fought or how many struggles the characters have to overcome, there is always the underlying truth that everything will be all right in the end, that Good can be trusted to overcome Evil. Light is stronger than the Darkness. We must each do our best and we must fight for what we believe is worth fighting for, but we must never lose hope that our story ends well.

But your favorite moment in the book was not until just before Bilbo heads to his first meeting with Smaug. Bilbo stops at the bottom of the tunnel leading into the heart of the Lonely Mountain. He is surrounded by vapors and oppressed by heat and his ears are filled with the terrifying sounds of a huge monster breathing in its sleep somewhere nearby. Just before Bilbo steps from the tunnel into the lair of the dragon Tolkien says that, "Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel, alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait." Doing great things is not really where bravery and honor lie. It's deciding to do them that makes heroes. In some ways, stepping out on a stage in the first place is more amazing than delivering a perfect performance. This small moment reminded you, not only to allow yourself to be brave, but to recognize the bravery in others all around you every day. The bravery it took for your cousin to join the Marines, or for your other cousin to come out of the closet. The bravery of your wife telling her story of sexual abuse online for other victims to read and take solace in, or of your niece to decide to keep her baby when she is still so young.  The bravery of your friend in singing in front of people on Sunday mornings, or the bravery of strangers who smile at you in the grocery store when they would rather crawl under a blanket and cry. Every day, whether you know it or not, you are surrounded by heroes who have fought their greatest battles alone in darkened doorways.

This is why you love to read. This is why no movie, however great, will ever compare to a good book. Tolkien gives you hope, he restores your sense of wonder and joy. He encourages your love of your fellow human beings.

Yes, you love this book because it was the first one you ever read. But the more you read it, the more you realize that you may also love it because it is one of the best you will ever read.

On to the next book!

"The Gun" by C.J. Chivers (2010)

Guns don't kill people. People kill people... 

Bullshit.

This is a book about the history of the AK-47 assault rifle. But it is also a book, as any good book is, about much more. An author can't really tell the story of the AK-47 without also telling the history of modern warfare. So Chivers does just that. In four fascinating chapters he quickly and thoroughly took you over the bloody fields of the American Civil War where Gatling guns were first used, then through the insanity of World War One where Maxim machine guns shocked the world with their grim efficiency, and past the battlefields of WWII where assault rifles were born. After this history lesson, Chivers launches into a masterful and painstakingly detailed chronicle of the life of the most recognizable gun on Earth.

C.J. Chivers is a war correspondent for the New York Times, but before that he was a Marine who served in the first Gulf War in Iraq. He has reported for the Times from war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and Libya. You are convinced that Chivers, along with people like Simon Klingert and Richard Engel, is one of the finest war correspondents in the business. The man knows war and he writes like he does. It came as no surprise to you that the prologue for "The Gun" was written in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

This is a book written by an unflinching warrior about modern warfare. Chivers pulls no punches nor does he hide from hard truths. War is Hell, and the AK-47 made war even more hellacious.

After hundreds of thousands of young men were sent marching abreast into the certain death of barrages of machine gun fire in World War One (21,000 British men died in one day in the battle of The Somme), modern military tactics were forced to change. WWII saw those tactics mature into what you think of as modern warfare today, soldiers in camouflage using available cover and terrain to advance under a blanket of supporting heavy machine gun fire in order to eliminate enemy positions from fairly close range. Most of the soldiers in WWII were perfecting these tactics using either single shot long-range rifles or submachine guns firing short-range pistol rounds. Towards the end of the war the Germans developed a machine gun that combined the automatic fire of the submachine gun with the range and stopping power of the rifle. The sturmgewehr (or "assault rifle") was born. Individual soldiers now had the possibility of pouring accurate heavy-caliber fire onto targets at ranges of a few hundred yards. Germany lost the war (even though they had much better weapons than the Allies) and Russian soldiers brought home examples of this sturmgewehr. Recognizing the potential of such weapons in the inevitable future conflicts with Western nations, Russian arms makers began a contest to develop their own assault rifle.

Two years after the Great Patriotic War ended (you've always loved what Russians call WWII) a design was chosen. It was 1947, and the automatic rifle's designer was named Kalashnikov. The gun was designated the Avtomat Kalashnikova, the automatic by Kalashnikov. Thus, the name AK-47 was born. It was sturdy, easy to use, and extraordinarily reliable. The oversize parts of the machinery fit together loosely (as opposed to the tight, technical fit of Western weapons) and this loose fit helped the gun to effectively knock dirt and carbon build up out of the chamber as it fired. The AK-47 is almost a self-cleaning weapon. The Soviet Union immediately put the Kalashnikov into mass production.

Everything in the book after this moment reminded you of the story of The Golem of Prague. Jewish tradition tells of a rabbi who created a simple, mindless creature from clay to defend the Jews of Prague from attacks by the Holy Roman Emperor. The rabbi unleashed the Golem on the world and it destroyed the enemies of the Jews only to turn on them and eventually its own creator. This is the same story repeated again and again in human culture. It is the story of Frankenstein's monster terrorizing the population, of Darth Vader turning on The Emperor, of Sauron being defeated by the Ring of Power. It is a warning. It is the story of the AK-47.

Kalashnikov believed that he and his colleagues were creating a weapon that would be used to defend the Soviet Union, the Motherland; a weapon that peasants could use to rise up against the bourgeoisie, a weapon that an untrained farmer could use to overthrow his capitalist oppressor, a weapon that would sweep the imperialistic western world into the ash heap of history. He had created a powerful tool, and one of the most reliable guns in modern history. He could never have dreamed that his invention would be used against his own countrymen as often as it would be used by them. He could never have imagined a world where children took up his weapon to murder children at the whim of mad-men-turned-warlords in the jungles of Africa.

The USSR was eager to share the new technology with its allies throughout Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Soon Kalashnikov factories were spouting up all over the world. The weapon was on track to proliferate like no other gun in human history.

Almost as soon as the AK-47 was used in combat it was adopted by revolutionaries and enemies of the USSR. The day after a failed attempt by Russian forces to put down a growing rebellion in Hungary in 1956, photographers snapped pictures of rebels on the streets of Budapest brandishing the now iconic assault rifles. The rebels had taken the Kalashnikov's from the bodies of slain soldiers or had picked them up when surprised troops had dropped them in a mad dash to retreat to safety.  One day after its introduction to warfare, the Kalashnikov had already become the symbol of the revolutionary, of the insurgent. Even though these particular revolutionaries were eventually defeated, a powerful symbol was born.

Kalashnikov had dreamed that his gun would be used to bolster the freedom movements of people throughout the world, but on the streets of Budapest, rather than being a tool for liberation "It made its debut smashing freedom movements." And in putting down the popular national uprising in Hungary in '56, the AK-47 might have made the difference. Had it not been for the soviet soldiers' new massed fire capabilities, it is conceivable that the rebels could have held out and a symbol of resistance to the mighty USSR might have been ignited a mere decade after the Cold War began. But they couldn't answer the new increase in firepower, the Russians were just too well armed. The Kalashnikov was beginning to change modern warfare. As the Soviet emissaries reported back to Moscow, "To (the rebels') solitary shots we replied with salvos."

Thirty five years after that day, the USSR would no longer exist, but the world would be awash in millions of AK-47's. The mentality of the Cold War and the war machine of the Soviet Union ensured that this weapon would be produced in quantities numbering in the millions and in dozens of countries across the globe, from China to Cuba. Caches of thousands of Kalashnikov's were stored throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East in preparation for a Third World War. When the Soviet Union collapsed, these caches were raided and the guns were spread to every corner of every hot spot and armed dispute on Earth.

Ironically, the United States soon became the number one purchaser of the Kalashnikov as it struggled to arm freedom fighters in Afghanistan. Most ironically, in the Soviet Union's last days, it was kicked out of Afghanistan by these religious militant freedom fighters wielding none other than Kalashnikov's assault rifles.

AK's are found in every conflict around the globe, often on both side of the battlefield. They are used in crimes, and insurgencies, and revolutions. Kalashnikov's are reliable, easy to use, and pack a serious punch. As Chivers says at the beginning of the book, "When Kalashnikovs show up in the hands of mobs, it is time to leave." Because AK-47's do one thing and they do it very well: They kill people. In fact, if you count up all of the people killed by all of the high-tech aircraft and submarines and nuclear missiles the USSR went bankrupt building, the number looks puny compared to how many humans have had their lives ended by the most recognizable weapon in the world.

The lesson was clear to you as you read "The Gun". Beware the things you create and let loose in the world. Like the Golem, they tend to free themselves from your control. And all too often, they turn on their masters.

One story haunted you the most from the book's last pages. Karzan Mahmoud was the driver for the Prime Minister of Iraq in 2002. He was gunned down and crippled by would-be assassins wielding AK-47's. In a letter to the author he mused what he would ask Mr. Kalashnikov if they ever met, "Why did you make this machine? You don't like living people? Why not make something to help people, not make them dead? I'm wondering... how about if you tried it on yourself, one bullet into your feet before sending it out to the market. Might that have changed your mind?"

You wished that all those who wage wars, and design weapons, far from the front lines would take Mahmoud's advice. "Why not make something to help people?"

On to the next book!

But first... a chart! The AK-47 is the one at the top. All of the others are variations on Kalashnikov's original design:

Milled receiver AKS, stock folded · Original stamped receiver AK47 · Milled receiver AK47 · AKMS · AK74 · SVD sniper rifle · Hungarian AMD65 · Yugoslavian M70B · East German MPIK.M · Yugoslavian M85 "Krinkov" SMG · South African R4 · Finnish Valmet M76 

"Red Star Rogue" by Kenneth Sewell with Clint Richmond (2005)

A Cold War mystery and the stuff of nightmares. Non-fiction is always crazier than fiction.

This is a war book. Even though we call the war "Cold", implying there were no real casualties, it was a real war and a lot of people died. This is also a mystery book. On May 7th, 1968 a Soviet submarine sank somewhere in the Pacific ocean taking 98 sailors to the bottom with it. That submarine was called K-129. For years afterwards, the United States government obsessed over gleaning every possible scrap of intelligence from the wreckage. It is clear something tragic happened aboard, but what?

In "Red Star Rogue" Kenneth Sewell makes the case that the unthinkable happened. He argues the the submarine was overtaken over by a rogue crew who attempted to launch a nuclear weapon against the United States in order to start World War III. Your reaction to this statement was simple:

DAMN!

In 400 pages, Sewell lays out an argument that you found pretty convincing, that the world came to the brink of nuclear war without the consent of any of the leaders of any of the Super Powers. The book moves from a charmingly written (if a bit long) personal history of K-129's captain and executive officer, into a detailed chronicle of the tragedy. Sewell draws on interviews with people in the espionage community, and guys who worked on the ships that were gathering the Top-Secret intelligence on the wreck, as well as his own first-hand experiences on board a US submarine. He gives a reasoned and rock-solid analysis of geo-political motivations before and after the sinking, and he exposes official documents that prove the government of the United States lied time and time again about what the truth really was.

Here is Sewell's case: US tracking hydrophones ( sensitive underwater microphones) tracked K-129 from her home port to the exact location where she sank (that location is still Top-Secret). There are audio recordings of the explosions that sank her, and of the sub then sinking into the crushing depths of the Pacific Ocean. A US spy satellite above recorded exactly what it was designed to record, the flash of a missile launch in the exact location and at the exact time that the hydrophones placed the K-129 disaster. Since no missile was recorded launching from the site and into the air, Sewell concludes that the missile exploded upon launch and caused the sinking of the submarine and the deaths of 98 Soviet sailors.

And here's where everything gets crazy. K-129 didn't need to surface to launch her missiles, and her missiles' range was far greater than the 350 miles from her target that Sewell places her. So here is the big question of the book. If K-129 was supposed to launch a nuclear missile at Hawaii to destroy Pearl Harbor and Honolulu, why not launch all three of her missiles from father away and from underwater, and why not have all the other submarines and bombers and ICBM's in the Soviet arsenal attack the US at the same time?

Sewell's answer is the craziest part of the book. He argues that the only logical conclusion is that a secret cabal within the Soviet Union, headed by members of the KGB and without the knowledge of Soviet Premier Brezhnev, ordered a small cadre of Special Forces warriors to seize control the K-129, imprison the officer corps of the boat, sever communications with Soviet Fleet Command, and then launch one missile at Pearl Harbor to make it look like China had attacked. The plotters in the Soviet Union would wait for the US and China to then destroy one another. In the nuclear wake of WW III, this cabal plotted for their nation to wade into the power vacuum and establish themselves as the sole dominant Super Power on Earth.

Sewell speculates that the warhead's fail safe mechanism engaged, as it was designed to do when ordered to launch without proper authorization, and the subsequent explosion destroyed the submarine.

But Sewell's argument isn't as crazy as it sounded to you at first. He frames the whole theory in a historical context. When K-129 sank, it was only 6 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, 4 years after the US escalation into Vietnam, and a few months after the North Koreans had hijacked an American surveillance ship (the US Pueblo) letting Soviet espionage experts crawl all over her. International tensions between the US and the USSR were so high in 1968, that almost everyone agrees that the Russians, thinking the Americans had sunk K-129, retaliated by sinking the US Scorpion attack sub, killing 99 sailors. This act of war was widely believed by (and seemed completely reasonable to) analysts on either side of the Iron Curtain. This act of lunacy almost made sense when you put yourself in the shoes of the Russians.

And this was something you really enjoyed. Part of what made "Red Star Rogue" so fascinating was that it gave you the opportunity to place yourself in the mind of your nation's opponent circa 1968 (even though you weren't born yet). Viewing America from Russia's point of view, an America weary of war and in the midst of a cultural revolution, colored the 1960's differently for you for the first time. Instead of seeing that decade as a historical turning point in the story of America's cultural evolution, you were able to see how an external adversary could have seen it as the perfect opportunity to take advantage of an enemy who appeared to be on the ropes.

The relationship between The USSR and China had quickly soured over the course of the 1960's to the point where soldiers of both countries were clashing along their border with shocking regularity and with body counts in the hundreds. For the Soviets, China had suddenly gone from a potential ally to an alarmingly nearby enemy with a massive military freshly armed with nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union had even helped China develop some of those weapons and had given them submarines with which to deliver them... submarines which were identical to K-129 and which could only launch their limited range missiles from the surface of the ocean. And because China had provided Russia with the uranium in many of their warheads, any nuclear weapons fired from K-129 would carry the same radioactive signature as a Chinese weapon. Framing China as the nation who picked a nuclear fight with the united States was almost too easy.

This theory reminded you of Professor John Mearsheimer's theory of "Offensive Realism", that whenever possible, Great Powers will try to secure their influence by playing one adversarial power off a third, allowing the two adversaries to destroy one another while the Great Power survives. In addition, the conspiracy theory of a hawkish cabal inside the government of the Soviet Union didn't sound quite so far-fetched when you remembered how Generals LeMay and Taylor tried their damnedest to get JFK to start a nuclear war over Cuba in October of 1962.

The Soviet missile's one megaton warhead was about 100 times the size of the 12.5 kiloton bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima 23 years earlier and was more than enough to destroy the American naval base at Pearl Harbor and incinerate the half million residents of the city of Honolulu. This attack would certainly have drawn a swift and devastating nuclear response from the United States. The cabal inside the Soviet government made sure that their military was not at alert at all so that the US would see that the USSR was not preparing for a war and therefore couldn't be responsible for a first strike. The theory goes that US leaders would have turned to the only other nuclear armed enemy on Earth and begun a nuclear retaliation against China.

Sewell spends the rest of the book piling up a mountain of evidence to back up his claim. Just before the K-129 sailed, eleven extra men were brought on board the already cramped submarine. The identities of these men remain mysteries. After the ship sank, the US government sent spy subs into the depths and used the first deep sea remote control subs to photograph the wreckage and collect evidence to explain what had occurred. They even enlisted the help of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes who built a gigantic recovery ship to bring the entire Soviet sub to the surface where US espionage personnel were free to investigate what had happened. These analysts came to one conclusion, K-129 had sunk in the act of firing one of their nuclear missiles.

Once the alleged knowledge of a failed launch had been learned by the new American president, Richard Nixon, he took it to the Soviet premier Brezhnev who immediately cleaned house of all the alleged conspirators and removed control of the USSR's nuclear weapons from the hands of the KGB. Nixon then engaged in his own brand of "Offensive Realism" and took the information to the Chinese. Suddenly after hundreds of years of China being closed to the West, they opened relationship with the Nixon administration and cooled to the Soviets even more than before.

The list of evidence just kept piling up higher and higher, each bit more remarkable than the last. But here is the thing....

You didn't believe it.

You weren't convinced.

That bothered you. Why didn't you believe this? This author was much smarter than you, he had done exhaustive research, he had experience in submarines, he did interviews with people who saw the wreckage with their own eyes, he laid out a logical and intelligent theory that you were unable to argue against. And yet... you still weren't convinced.

Why?!

And the you realized.... it wasn't that you didn't believe it, it was that you didn't want to believe it.

The only thing that saved the world from full on, no holds barred, nuclear war, was a mechanical fail safe. If Sewell is right, these men didn't come close to launching a nuclear weapon against the US... they launched one. They hit the button! And the US knew the submarine had come from a Russian port. Unbeknownst to the secret Russian cabal, the US had tracked K-129 all the way to the exact spot where it sank. So the gamble wouldn't have worked. The US wouldn't have attacked China. The US would have attacked Russia, and Russia would have responded in full. There is no time to investigate complex motivations of your aggressor or the sordid details of a conspiracy theory when there are missiles in the air heading for your country.

World War III would have happened. Society, as we know it, would have ceased to exist on March 7th, 1968. The nightmare would have become reality, if not for a piece of mechanical gadgetry.

You like to think that the reason that humans have not wiped ourselves out is a result of our common decency, a mark of our inherent goodness, and a byproduct of our sense of self-preservation. Sewell's theory undermines your hopes for the world, it shakes your faith in humanity as a whole. But then you remembered one small fact hidden in the piles of evidence.

Sewell reveals that declassified documents divulge that, early in his presidency, LBJ had secretly given the Soviets access to American designed Top-Secret fail safe technology for their missiles. These fail safes would detonate the conventional explosives in the warhead without setting off a nuclear blast if the missile did not receive the correct authorization codes to fire. Soviet leaders would have kept this knowledge secret too, and if any sub commander ever went rogue and tried to fire a missile without authorization, his boat would have been destroyed and sunk... exactly what happened to K-129.

President Johnson believed that both sides of the Cold War needed to have some guarantee that if it came to nuclear war, at least it wouldn't be accidental.... So he shared secret technology with his sworn enemy. This act of faith in his enemy, and selfless protection of the people of the world was what saved us from war on that day in 1968.

You finished the book and one quote kept playing over and over in your head. A quote from the movie "Thirteen Days". Kevin Costner plays the character Kenny O'Donnell, a top aide to President Kennedy. During the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, O'Donell is shown sitting forlornly on his home staircase. When his wife sees him, she rushes to his side asking what is wrong.

"If the sun comes up tomorrow," he says, "It is only because of men of good will."

The sun came up after that day, and it came up after March 7th, 1968 too.

Maybe your faith in humanity is not so shaken after all...

On to the next book!