Showing posts with label historical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label historical. Show all posts

May 11, 2024

Sunday Salon: What I'm Reading and Watching

 What I'm Reading


Happy Mother's Day! 

There are lots of concerned mothers in this book that I'm now reading


The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia by Juliet Grames ( July 23, 2024), Knopf, NetGalley

Book description:  Set in Calabria, 1960. One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling—by turns funny and moving—novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy.

Enjoying: The historical info on the region of Calabria in Southern Italy, fluid writing by the author, an intriguing story of a lost/missing boy from years past,  atmospheric descriptions of a small and isolated Italian village, its inhabitants, and their lives. 

I hope to finish The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia by Juliet Grames before going on to the myriad of saved ebooks on my list. 


What I reviewed



The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani

Publication July 2, 2024; Soho Crime

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tokyo, 1979. An intriguing mobster/yakuza novel about Shindo, a brawny woman kidnapped and forced to be the bodyguard of the mob boss's daughter. Shindo nevertheless grows to become friends with her ward, Shoko, who is tougher than she appears. The world of violence and revenge they endure from then on is portrayed well in spite of all the gore.

The story jumps without warning at the end to decades in the future. It's a surprise but, nevertheless, gratifying to see the women surviving the hyper masculine world they lived in.


What I watched/am watching

For May, which celebrates Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, I am continuing watching Asian dramas on TV. These include the ever popular Kdramas, Jdramas, Cdramas, and even a Vietnamese drama I just discovered. The Last Wife. a period piece set in the Nguyen dynasty in Vietnam, is about a reluctant third wife whose life is changed when she meets her childhood lover again by chance

I've also just finished Special Ops: Lioness a TV series starring  Nicole Kidman, about CIA agents who send a tough young woman undercover to befriend the daughter of their Middle Eastern target. I did enjoy this action thriller series though it's shorter than others.

What are you reading/watching this week? 

Memes: The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated BookreviewerAlso, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves       



Mar 4, 2018

Sunday Salon: Historical Novel and Two Mysteries

Sold on a Monday
Sold on a Monday by Kristina McMorris
Publication: August 28, 2018, Sourcebooks Landmark

From New York Times bestselling author Kristina McMorris comes another unforgettable novel inspired by a stunning piece of history.

2 CHILDREN FOR SALE

The scrawled sign, peddling young siblings on a farmhouse porch, captures the desperation sweeping the country in 1931. It’s an era of breadlines, bank runs, and impossible choices. 

Two people who discover this story today set out to right a wrongdoing and mend a fractured family, at the risk of everything they value. 
 (publisher)

Thanks to Netgalley and the author, I have a copy to review and am eager to read this amazing novel!

Other reading: 
Just One Evil Act (Inspector Lynley, #18)
Just One Evil Act by Elizabeth George
Published October 15, 2013: Dutton
Genre: mystery, police procedural
I have discovered the Inspector Lynley series and am really enjoying it, especially since this one, the #18th, is set in Tuscany as well as London. It involves the kidnapping of a child by her mother, who takes her to Italy, where she again goes missing. Lynley is sent to Tuscany to facilitate the case for both parents. 



Also on my ereader:

The Perfect Nanny
The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani
Publication: January 9, 2018; Penguin
As the couple and the new nanny become more dependent on each other, jealousy, resentment, and frustrations mount, shattering the idyllic tableau. (publisher)
I would love to get my hands on the French original, which won the Prix Goncourt in 2016 and was nominated for two other French awards. 

What books are you reading this week?
The Sunday Post  hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer,  It's Monday, What Are You Reading? by Book Date., and Mailbox Monday.

Mar 2, 2018

Book Beginning: DISPLACED by Stephan Abarbanell

Displaced


Displaced by Stephan Abarbanell
Published November 7, 2017; Harper
Genre: historical thriller
British-occupied Palestine, 1946: Elderly writer Elias Lind isn’t convinced by reports that his scientist brother, Raphael, died in a concentration camp. Too frail to search for Raphael himself, Elias persuades a contact in the Jewish resistance to send someone in his place.

Book beginning:
Dusk was already beginning to fall when the bus came to a standstill in a dip between Deir Ayub and Bab el-Wad. The driver struck the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, jumped up from his seat and grabbed a canister of water. He threw open the bonnet of the Dodge and tried to unscrew the hissing radiator with a handkerchief wrapped around his hand. None of the passengers on board said a word The fanning of newspapers and the chirping of crickets were the only sounds that broke the silence. Flies had found their way in through the open door, along with the heat that peeled away from the ground on June days. 

Page 56:
'....A postcard came from Berlin for my birthday, unsigned. But I knew his handwriting. A few weeks later, it was leaked that his last article was published under my name.'

What new books are you reading this weekend? 
Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader

Dec 5, 2012

Guest Post: Karen Fisher-Alaniz, author of Breaking the Code

       Breaking the Code: A Daughter's Journey into Her Father's Secret War
       Published November 1, 2012; Sourcebooks
       Genre: memoir

"Scraps of Paper, and Eggs Benedict: The Unlikely Journey of a Memoir"
by Karen Fisher-Alaniz

Snippets of a life. Questions written on scraps of paper. A father with a photographic memory, who couldn’t remember. Breakfast at Mr. Ed’s diner every week. That’s how our journey began.

My father, a WWII veteran, started having nightmares and flashbacks at the age of 81. When he gave me more than 400-pages of letters he wrote during the war, I knew there was far more to the story than he’d ever told.

I took the letters home and started to read. I was immersed in a time and place that was unfamiliar to me. My father was stationed on Oahu, Hawaii during the war. His service to his country began in 1944. He’d told the stories so many times, but the stories he told gave me no reason to suspect he’d experienced any kind of trauma, or that he’d done something so critical to the war effort, that he’d been told he’d be shot if he ever revealed it.

But over the months, that rolled into years, that’s the story I heard. All I wanted was to help my father. I wanted to take the nightmares away. So, each night, I read a handful of letters. I wrote questions down on whatever was handy; the back of a bill, a receipt from the grocery store, a scrap of paper. When we met on Wednesday’s for breakfast, I took out the motley bunch of papers and asked the questions on them. Over eggs Benedict, my father began telling his story. Often haltingly, he shared tiny pieces of the puzzle. And what I learned about my father was unbelievable. My sweet, humble father, who’d taught me to ride a bike, was a top secret code breaker!

Trained to copy the code, based in the Japanese, Katakana, my father wasn’t sitting in an office as he’d told me so many times. He was in the middle of battle, in submarines and on ships off of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. My father was a hero. But it was this work that also laid the foundation for the greatest trauma of his life, and the reason he started having symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder more than 50-years after the war.

Once I’d heard the story, I set out to do research. I searched books, old magazines, and the internet. Every road lead to a dead end. There was very little information on this group of code breakers. In fact, I didn’t find any at all. And that lead me in a different direction; the military itself. I sent for my father’s military records. He was terribly disappointed when the records didn’t mention anything about his top secret service. But he wasn’t surprised. He’d was told that records would not be kept; the men involved would not carry records with them, for fear of being captured or discovered. Still, my father wanted nothing more than a simple confirmation of some kind; a note in his file, the name of a ship or submarine. But there was nothing like that. So, again I turned to the military.

I left messages on reunion group websites, and frequented WWII and military forums, where I asked questions and made connections. I knew that somewhere, somehow, there had to be information. When a retired, 26-year Naval Intelligence officer offered to help, I was ecstatic and so was my dad. He helped me to send for Dad’s records a second and third time, each time honing in on what exactly we were looking for. And that’s what did it.

I received a request from the military to sign something for information that was not kept with his regular military records. I was so excited. I just knew this was it. I waited a few more weeks. Finally, I received a thick package in the mail. I looked for words like Katakana, and code breaker, but there was nothing that specific. When I relayed this to the officer helping me, he said that sometimes it’s hard for a civilian to know how to read military records.

I sent a copy to the Naval Intelligence Officer, who took his time looking at them. When he got back to me, he said that instead of looking for the key words, as I had done, he looked at the timeline and the locations, and training. But he also took note of things that were not there, but should have been, like the names of the ships he was on. His conclusion was this; my father was where he was, when he said he was there. There were blanks in his records, or sparse information, when it wouldn’t make sense to leave it out. The only logical conclusion, he said, was that my father was working in Naval Intelligence, doing top secret work.

The information wasn’t as specific as I’d hoped, but it was an answer. My father was pleased. So was I. What started as scraps of paper changed to something else. First, I wanted to simply transcribe my father’s letters so that each of my children could have a copy. But curiosity got the best of me. When I started writing the story between the lines, my father’s story really started to take shape. And when a fellow writer encouraged me to write about what this journey meant to me too, a memoir was born.

Our journey began more than 10-years ago.  The book changed and grew, as we made our journey toward truth. And our father-daughter relationship changed and grew too. When someone tells you their story, it is a sacred trust they are putting in you. You can’t help but be changed by that honor.

Note: Since our journey began, more information (but still not a lot) is available about the role of code breakers who broke the Japanese, Katakana. My father is 91 now and likely the only surviving member of his five-person code-breaking team. As far as we know, this is the only book that tells the first-person story of their heroic service. I’m humbled and honored to have been a part of it.

For a chance to win a double-signed copy of the book, visit the author's website,  http://www.storymatters2.com/

Thanks to the author and WOW- Women on Writing for providing this guest post. 

Sunday Salon: Letting Go of September by Sandra J. Jackson

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