The Physicists' Daughter : A World War II Thriller Dealing With Sabotage in a Defense Plant

I have read all the books in the Faye Longchamp mystery series by Mary Anna Evans except for the most recent one, Wrecked.  The Physicist's Daughter is not labeled or marketed as a mystery, but it looks like a thriller from the summary.  Yet I think that Mary Anna Evans is trying to establish herself as a mainstream writer, and leave behind the genre label.  I'm going to call this one as see it, and I see it as a historical thriller.

                                       

I was impressed that protagonist Justine was taught how to weld by her father.  I was also delighted that her mother was the one who taught Justine about physics.  During WWII, Justine was welding for a living but she suspected that someone was sabotaging the defense plant where she was employed. This sabotage was the main focus of the plot.

I would have liked physics to have played an important role in the novel, but I imagine that many readers wouldn't have found that interesting.  Intrigue and secrets are what make books in the thriller genre thrilling.  The Physicists' Daughter certainly had those elements. I would grade this book B.  

                                

 

Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I : The Mother and Daughter Who Changed History

 Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I:  The Mother and Daughter Who Changed History is a joint biography by historian Tracy Borman.  I downloaded it in digital format from Netgalley and read it on my Kindle e-reader. I'd like to thank the publisher for providing me with a copy.

                         

                                                                                                

Before reading this book,  I was a huge fan of Queen Elizabeth I because the theater flourished during her reign. Yet more importantly, she stood against the Catholic powers, Spain and France.  I knew relatively little about Elizabeth's mother, Anne Bolelyn, , and I never thought about Anne's influence over her daughter.

I was interested to learn that Anne had books by women, most notably Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies.  I read in the Wikipedia article on Christine de Pizan here that she thought that Joan of Arc was the fufillment of prophecies by Merlin, the Cumaean Sybil and Saint Bede. She also wrote a poem about Joan which was her last work.  Christine de Pizan didn't live to see Joan imprisoned by the English and burned.  I am sure that if Christine de Pizan had lived later, she would have celebrated the Tudor Queen, Elizabeth.

It's mentioned that "Solomon and the Queen of Sheba" by artist Hans Holbein, was hanging at court during Henry VIII's reign.  I wonder if  Anne identified with the Queen of Sheba, mother of King Solomon.  If so, Anne's equivalent of the wise Solomon was Elizabeth I.

The coronation of King Charles III recently took place.  The author remarks that King Charles is descended from Mary Boleyn, Anne's sister, and that his son, the Prince of Wales, is descended from Mary Boleyn through both his parents.  Elizabeth, however, will always remain the only descendant of Anne Boleyn.

I enjoyed this book and learned a number of things I hadn't known previously.  I will give it a B+ on Goodreads.

                            

This Fight is Our Fight---Elizabeth Warren Reveals How Many Americans Are Financially On The Edge

I was very interested in reading a book by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren especially one about saving the U.S. middle class.  I found this book in a carton on the street.

                                     

Warren reveals that the U.S. pays $153 billion to assist working people who aren't being paid enough to live on.  I had understood that at least some of those workers have more than one employer.  In fact, I know people like that.  Warren points out that we could make every public college free and every preschool if we didn't have to support underpaid workers.  We could also double what we pay for veterans' services, for research and development and for transportation.  Transportation includes roads, bridges and airports as well as mass transit.

I also learned what Glass-Steagall was.  I remembered Warren mentioning it in a speech, but she didn't explain what it did. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was named after its sponsors Senator Carter Glass and Representative Henry Steagall.  It prohibited banks from taking major financial risks if they had federally insured deposits.

 Warren calls Glass-Steagall a way to "help capitalism work for everyone".  Many people think that Elizabeth Warren is a socialist and would be surprised to learn she just wants capitalism to be a fair system that everyone can benefit from if they work hard.

Warren mentions tax cuts that seemed very unwise to me--such as the one that corporations got for investing in foreign businesses and the one that gave corporations a tax cut for having to pay punitive damages for breaking the law.  Tax breaks should be reserved for corporate behavior that the U.S. government wants to encourage.  Can I assume that our government actually wanted businesses to invest overseas and break the law?  

Warren says that college tuition is a tax.  She must believe that all colleges should be supported by government.  I went to a private university for my B.A.  but the graduate school that I attended was at a state university.   I had a combination of loans and scholarships at both schools.   I wonder what colleges would be like if they had no private donors. If government paid for their offerings, would their programs change because of political priorities?  I'm not sure that this would be an improvement.  I also think that Warren wouldn't agree to the government funding of religious colleges and universities.  She seems to support the separation of church and state. 

Warren doesn't think the U.S. government is supporting enough health research.  Only two out of eleven research proposals submitted to the National Institutes of Health get funded.  She says that one in five biochemists are considering leaving the U.S. in order to get their work funded.  So private health related companies such as private health insurance don't fund medical research?  Well, I know they do, but maybe Warren doesn't think they are doing enough. 

Warren tells us that in the 1950's lobbying was very marginal.  A report said lobbies weren't even in contact with Congress.  Yet by 2013 corporations were spending $3.24 billion on lobbyists!

The satiric publication called The Onion recommended that the American people hire lobbyists to get their interests acted on in Congress.  I laughed, but actually there are many public interest organizations that lobby Congress for a variety of causes.  Anyone who is a member of these organizations and/or considers their causes important should feel that their interests are represented by them.  If you don't feel that way, you can always call your congressional representatives and tell them how you feel on issues that are important to you. 

I liked Warren's book and felt that I learned a few things from it that I knew nothing about.  So I'd give it four stars. 

                               

 

 

The Lioness of Boston: A Novel About A Prominent Art Collector

The life of  a late 19th century American woman who married wealthy like Isabella Stewart Gardner was apparently all about parties, international travel and art collecting. I was asked to read and review The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin and was provided with a free copy from the publisher via Edelweiss.

                               

I did like Isabella's insight that "servant life is female life" though that wouldn't have been true for Isabella.  It's the women who couldn't afford servants who had to do all the household labor and cater to the needs of the men in the household.  

Isabella also was critical of Frozen Charlottes which were cake decorations that represented a girl who had frozen to death on Boston Common.  I suppose it could be regarded as a memorial to the poor child, but Isabella knew the upper crust of her day well.  They weren't humane people.  The cake decoration was probably intended to cruelly poke fun at her.  Laughing at those who are less fortunate was a recreation for the privileged.   

Isabella met the female impressionist artist, Berthe de Morisot.  I've heard of Morisot, but this is the first time I'd seen her as a character in a novel.  Yet it seemed that her main role was to introduce Isabella to male impressionists.  Critics called her work "domestic".  Morisot felt affronted by that evaluation.  She didn't paint household scenes.  She had been a nature painter. It's likely that these "critics" hadn't actually seen any of Morisot's work.  They just imagined that a woman painter would necessarily be confined to domestic subjects.  They revealed their contempt for women in general through their denigration of Morisot.

Of the male painters that Isabella encountered,  James McNeill Whistler  seemed the most interesting to me.  Isabella noted that Whistler  had such a clean smock, and called him "as clean as a banker".  Whistler responded cynically that "Bankers are not clean."  This is probably intended as a metaphorical statement about corruption in that profession during the late 19th century.

The artist John Singer Sargent painted Isabella's portrait more than once.  It interested me that he chose to paint her as an old woman.  It also surprised me that Isabella wanted a portrait of herself when she was old.  Most women wouldn't want to gaze at an image of themselves when they were "past their prime" according to the dictates of society.

A lesbian personality of the time, Violet Paget,  told Isabella in this book that everyone is born at the wrong time.  That's not what I've observed.  It seems to me that most people are conventional and definitely suited to their social context.  If that weren't the case, conventional expectations wouldn't exist and no one would be defined as unconventional as Isabella evidently was.

By the way, if this post is reported to Blogger as having "inappropriate" content resulting in a warning being posted by Blogger, I would at least understand why that happened.  There are probably people out there, who don't think I should mention lesbian characters or even acknowledge that lesbians exist.  Yet I do consider such warnings a type of censorship.

In The Lioness of Boston, it's mentioned that Isabella met the poet Robert Browning in 1888 and obtained a lock of his hair.  There is a photo of Browning from that year illustrating his Wikipedia article here and he doesn't appear to have had very much hair at that point in his life.  I would think that he couldn't have spared a lock.

 I was interested to learn that in real life thieves broke into the museum that Isabella established and stole three of the paintings.  I hope that those paintings are eventually found and restored to the collection.

                                

                                     

When We Do Harm: A Physician's Book About Medical Errors

 So far, I've only managed to have two posts per month in 2023.  I'd like be able to do better than that in April.  I won this book through a Goodreads Giveaway and I completely forgot that this was the source of my copy until I looked at the source of my copy on Goodreads.  I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with a copy for review.    I'm sorry that's it's taken me so long to read and review it.                         

                                   

 Dr. Ofri quotes a Harvard study stating that errors were usually the failure of computerized record keeping systems rather than individuals.  It seemed to me that this was much worse because the record keeping systems are pervasive in institutions.

I've read about Ignaz Semmelweis  (1818-1865) elsewhere.  He is credited with being the first to advocate that physicians wash their hands with chlorinated lime solutions before touching patients.  Another pioneer, Joseph Lister (1827-1912) is credited with antiseptic surgery utilizing carbolic acid to sterilize instruments.  Both Semmelweis and Lister are honored today, but during his lifetime Semmelweis was ridiculed.  I found out from Ofri that Semmelweis died tragically of beatings by the guards in a mental institution.

                                      

                                        Photo of Ignaz Semmelweis 1864                                                                              Public Domain

Ofri discusses unnecessary alerts sent by the system.  One example was that drug interactions weren't available for the walker she was prescribing.  It occurs to  me that if doctors had AIs capable of learning, that sort of thing wouldn't happen.  Yet that would be very expensive.  

Ofri also gets very necessary alerts about medications being contraindicated for certain conditions or the need to dose certain medications differently. Unfortunately, Ofri gets so many alerts that are useless to her that she ends up ignoring all of them.  This is a source of medical errors.

In a discussion of medical history, Ofri brings up the possibility that Van Gogh was taking digitalis derived from the foxglove plant.  He painted his doctor holding the bell shaped foxglove flower. (See an article called "Creativity and chronic disease Vincent Van Gogh" from The Western Journal of Medicine here, and an article from the UK Guardian on Van Gogh and digitalis here. 

Below is a public domain image of the Van Gogh painting of Dr. Paul Gachet, Van Gogh's physician, holding foxglove.

                             

 

Toward the end of this book Ofri discussed patients who die from multiple causes with a colleague.  Death certificates only allow for a single cause of death. The colleague thought that death certificates should permit the listing of  a preventable complication that contributed to the death.  This would allow medical errors that hastened death to be included. 

Ofri closes with the famous quote from Hippocrates that the goal of medicine is "at least to do no harm".

I feel that informing us about the frequency of medical errors through When We Do Harm is important and beneficial.  We need to know that the practice of medicine is far from perfect despite the best intentions of medical professionals.

                           

                             

 

                                             

 

                                      

                                     

 

 

                              

Blackwater Falls: Murder in a Colorado Town

 I initially thought of placing this post on Flying High Reviews, my blog for books centering on strong female protagonists.  After due consideration, I realized that Blackwater Falls protagonist  Inaya Rahman could not be characterized as strong though she does have other admirable traits. So this review is appearing on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer. 

Blackwater Falls is the fifth book I've read by Ausma Zehanat Khan.  The first four were in the Rachel Getty/Essa Khattak series.  I reviewed two of them on this blog.   Those reviews can be found here  and here .  Blackwater Falls is the #1 book in its series.  Both series by Khan are mysteries centering on law enforcement protagonists.  It's important to note that the Getty/Khattak series takes place in Canada. So Blackwater Falls is Khan's first novel that is situated in the United States.

                                

When Khan wrote her first series she lived in Canada.  She has moved to Colorado, and has switched the location of the new series along with her place of residence.

 Areesha Adams, a community organizer and civil rights attorney, who is a prominent character in this novel, brings up a case of an unarmed Black man killed by police. 

 I would like to comment that there are numerous examples of police killings of unarmed African American men from all over the United States.  The only thing that might be considered new is that they are receiving more attention in the media.  There is a Wikipedia article on the subject with cases going back to 1870.  The first victim listed was Henry Truman shot by Officer John Whiteside on March 31, 1870 in Philadelphia.  I'm calling this particular incident to my readers' attention because today is the 153rd anniversary of this tragic event.

There is a factory in Blackwater Falls that was raided by ICE.  Many of the workers turned out to be undocumented and were arrested.  They were replaced by Somalis who promptly unionized.   This is where I stand up and cheer.  I am a huge fan of organized labor and the protection of the rights of workers. 

The victim in this novel, Razan, was a high school student who was tested in aerodynamics to see if she qualified for an internship at Apex Dynamics which is a fictional company.  In this novel's fictional context Apex Dynamics is a sub-contractor of Lockheed Martin, a real worldwide aerospace firm.  Razan was chosen for the internship which means that she was miles ahead of me in physics. I accessed a NASA article on aerodynamics because I only had a very vague idea of this field of inquiry.   The science I studied was geology.  I took several college courses in geology, but I doubt I'd ever have qualified for a competitive internship.  I would say that Razan was probably brilliant and that her death was a tragic loss.

 Lieutenant Seif ,who was the boss of protagonist Inaya Rahman, interested me because he was trying to conceal his ethnic background.  Seif's family had been in the United States for five generations.  So he considered himself an American.  I was brought up in a family where  ethnicity was very central.  So I considered Seif's perspective somewhat alien.    

Speaking about alien perspectives, I looked for a coded mosaic because Inaya commented that she thought the mosaic in the local church was in code.  I found a mosaic by the artist Sonia King called Coded Message: Dark Secret.   I don't relate to this as a work of art, but I'm willing to say that I consider it...interesting.

 Finally, I learned from the acknowledgements following the end of  Blackwater Falls that Ausma Zehanat Khan lost her father in the year this novel was published which was 2022.  I was sorry to learn this since I am a fan of this author.

                                  

                      

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is one of two books that I checked out of the library, forgot that I returned them and then purchased on Amazon to replace what I thought was a lost library copy. What can I say?  I guess people like me have helped to make Jeff Bezos a billionaire. But enough about me.  This is an important book.  It's about women's experiences of war worldwide.  The author is journalist Christina Lamb, who also co-authored I Am Malala .

                               

The abduction and rape of women has always been at the root of war.  Lamb mentions that the first history by Herodotus opens with abductions of women by Phoenicians, Greeks and Trojans.   In the modern world we have Boko Haram which actually means that  Western education is forbidden.  Is a conspiracy that is nothing but organized rape superior?  Lamb thinks that Boko Haram is a real life version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.  

 ISIS believes rape is justified if the women aren't Muslims.  So they raped Yazidi women.  The Yazidi are a Kurdish people who believe in God and a Peacock Angel that came down to earth to share its colors.   Their core religion is about beauty.   It seems to me that this is a benevolent faith, and that Yazidi definitely don't deserve to be persecuted.   The Yazidi call the Peacock Angel Melek Tawoos.  This implies to me that the Yazidi language has Semitic vocabulary.  Melech is King in Hebrew.  ISIS thinks that the Peacock Angel is Iblis, who is a Satanic figure in their religion.

Pari Ibrahim is a Yazidi lawyer in the U.S. who founded the Free Yazidi Foundation.  She said she lost 40 relatives to suicide who had been abducted by ISIS.  She also reported that ten Yazidis committed suicide every week.     

It doesn't surprise me that some Yazidi survivors of ISIS abduction were helped to recover by art therapy.  They would probably consider art as  an activity blessed by the Peacock Angel.  Fundamentalists of all stripes tend to hate art as an attempt to rival God as a creator.   I think that any deity worthy of worship would prefer humans to be creative instead of destroyers through war.   

I really like the fictional Yazidistan flag I found on a site called Alternate History uncredited. (See Source of Fictional Flag) If anyone knows who created this flag, please let me know and I will credit the creator.  There is not, and never has been a Yazidistan, but I think it would be wonderful for a nation to love the peacock and focus on beauty.  Here is that image of the fictional Yazidistan flag.

                                  

 Back to the subject of  Our Bodies, Our Battlefields--In Rwanda, during the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutu, there was also massive rape.   According to the UN report on this genocide, almost all Tutsi women who survived had been raped.  Rwanda has made an effort to change since the genocide.  They want the world to know that the membership of the Rwandan Parliament is more than 60% female.  Yet the Rwanda head of state is a male dictator named Paul Kagame.  A Tutsi woman named Diane Rwigara was imprisoned when she tried to run against him, but she was released. Possibly as a result of  U.S. politicians who included Dick Durbin in the Senate and Barbara Lee in the House, calling for Rwigara 's release.  

Rwanda wanted the U.N. to track down and arrest those who committed genocide.  The U.N. has a police force, but its mission is to support member states in ending wars.  The international police force is called Interpol.  (See https://www.interpol.int/ .)  A Rwanda Tribunal was established to prosecute those who committed genocide in Rwanda, but most surviving Tutsis were afraid they would be killed, if they testified.  Ten witnesses were killed.  One woman named Godelieve told Lamb that the person across the street from her was a killer.  She was afraid to testify.  Her husband had testified and was killed.  Godelieve herself had been severely beaten.  There was resistance to adding rape to the charges prosecuted by the Rwanda Tribunal, but it eventually was.  The judge wanted to send a message that rape is a war crime.  

The book moves on to Bosnia.  It's noteworthy that Bosnia has no memorial for rape victims considering that women were held in rape camps. There was a memorial to Russian volunteers who were pro-Serb.  Also, many of the Russian volunteers were rapists. 

I read an article about the rape of Muslim women in Bosnia by Serbs  that appeared in a British newspaper called The Independent.  You can read it here. 

Lamb's Bosnian informant, Bakira, established the Association of Woman Victims. She has 35,000 members with a database that includes date and place of rape, age of girl and ethnic background.  There are Muslim, Croat and Serbian women in the database.  Men who were raped also provided reports to the database.

There was a Bosnia Tribunal established in the Hague.  Judge Mumba told the accused rapists that they had sexually attacked Muslim women because of their religion. He considered this aggravated rape and thought it was more severe than rapes that had happened in previous wars.

Bakira's first rapist was never charged with rape even though 50-60 women testified that he had raped them.  The prosecutor said that he could be convicted more easily for other crimes that he had committed.  Admittedly, these were terrible crimes involving mass killings.  Yet Bakira didn't feel that she had gotten justice.   Was rape regarded as trivial?    Bakira and other woman victims protested outside of the Bosnia Tribunal's offices. Ten women who were raped in the Bosnian war committed suicide.  Others left the country.

It's mentioned that there is a huge bronze statue in Berlin of a Soviet soldier  crushing a swastika with a sword in one hand, and cradling a German girl child in the other.  Many German women call this statue the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist.  The Red Army in WWII raped thousands of women during their march to Berlin.  In Berlin itself, historian Anthony Beever estimated in his book Berlin The Downfall, 1945 that 100,000 women were raped in that city.  Among the World War II rape survivors were Jewish women in concentration camps who had believed that the Soviet army were liberators.

I would like to add that in 2014 Vladimir Putin signed a law that anyone who denigrates the Red Army in WWII can be fined or imprisoned for five years. I think this speaks for itself.

There is a mention of war crimes in Nanjing.  I read The Nanjing Massacre by Honda Katsuichi which didn't focus on rape. See  my review on Goodreads if you're interested at The Nanjing Massacre . 

I wasn't aware of the rapes during the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.  There was an inquiry about the My Lai Massacre that uncovered 20 eyewitness accounts of rape.  Many were gang rape.  None of these rapes were prosecuted.  

It seems likely that any war or other type of conflict was probably used by male soldiers to take advantage of vulnerable civilian women. They probably didn't know or care that this was a war crime.  Nor did they give a thought to the trauma of the women in the aftermath of their heinous acts.  

Christina Lamb did a service for woman survivors by obtaining their stories and letting the world know about these war crimes.  This book was published three years ago.  I wonder if it has had any impact in regard to the prosecution of wartime rape.