Five Biblical Portraits by Elie Wiesel

I read Five Biblical Portraits because I'm interested in what Elie Wiesel had to say about the Bible.  I also wanted to find out more about him. I had read his book Night some time ago.  I know that Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor, but can't recall Night. So Five Biblical Portraits is a re-introduction to Elie Wiesel for me. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

                                   

The introduction by Ariel Burger tells us that Wiesel refers to the Holocaust as "the Kingdom of Night" which is poetic and doesn't sound anything like the soul destroying trauma that the Holocaust must have been for survivors.  Yet perhaps Wiesel needed to distance himself from his experience by using a euphemism like "Kingdom of Night". 

 I am a generation removed from the Holocaust, and my parents weren't themselves Holocaust survivors.  So most of my knowledge of the Holocaust comes from classes I have taken or books I've read. 

 In the "Joshua" essay, Wiesel claims that Jews have no tradition of writing songs to celebrate war.  It definitely seems to me that the Song of Deborah  from The Bible is a celebration of  war. Here is the actual text. 

I have to say that I have never been a fan of Saul.  He seems to have been the kind of king who only cared about maintaining his own power.  Wiesel obviously sympathized with him, but I don't find him persuasive.  Wiesel's portrayal of Saul convinced me that he may have been psychologically unstable.

 Wiesel wrote about the massacres at Babi Yar in the "Jeremiah" essay.  I had heard of Babi Yar, but my teachers never taught us where it's located.  I now know it's in Ukraine.

(A search for Babi Yar led me to the website of a Holocaust denier who is definitely a member of the lunatic fringe. I felt I needed mental floss after reading his fulminations.)

I will now get back to what has been written about Babi Yar.  When  author Anatoly Kuznetsov was born in Kiev, it was in the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union no longer exists. Kiev is now the capital of Ukraine.  Kuznetsov wrote a novel called  Babi Yar  that dealt with the massacres. I am hoping to read this novel by a Ukrainian in the not too distant future.    

I have to say that I'm not overly fond of any of the Biblical personages in Five Biblical Portraits.   I will give this book three stars on Goodreads.           

                                   

            

Water Touching Stone: A Mystery Involving Tibetan Religion

 Water Touching Stone by Eliot Pattison is actually a re-read. I rarely re-read books, but the mystery book club that I attend is reading this novel for the June meeting. I read it so long ago that I didn't remember very much about it.  I never reviewed the book. Yet at the time I read it, I remember thinking that it was one of the best books I'd ever read.

                                   

 

This is the second book in a series whose central character is Shan Tao Yun.  I have reviewed  Mandarin Gate (Shan series #7) on an earlier blog here , and Bones of the Earth which is the final book of the Shan series here. 

I was angered to learn from this book that the Chinese had been using Tibet for nuclear testing.  I found an article on the subject at Nuclear Tibet.  It includes the use of prisoners for constructing nuclear facilities.  I am concerned about their exposure to radiation.

Shan must stop the murder of boys which involves finding out why these murders were happening.   I wasn't surprised when the killer's motive was revealed.

There are American archaeologists who turn out to be pivotal characters.  I didn't think that archaeologist Jacob Deacon would have mentioned that "there might be treasure" at his site.  From an archaeological perspective "treasure" is an artifact which belongs in a museum.  This is why museums often sponsor archaeology.

I found this book suspenseful, but I'm not as impressed with it as I was when I read it the first time.  Since I really hadn't remembered the plotline, this wasn't due to familiarity.  It just didn't strike me as remarkable or original, though I did very much like the Tibetan religion aspect.  

                               

 

 

                                

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.