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.

                           

                             

 

                                             

 

                                      

                                     

 

 

                              

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.