Deported Colonel a.k.a. Gringo Cabron by Laura Jeannette Gau Stone

This book is meant to be a historical account by a woman who lived in Panama with her family during the reign of tyrannical dictator, Manuel Noriega. She refers to herself in this book as Jenny. The author’s actual name is Laura Jeanette Gau Stone. She is married to United States Army Colonel, Charles Stone. He was the American liaison to the Panama government in the 1980s. The United States at that time had initially been friendly to Noriega and his government until the Americans under President George Bush decided to use military force to remove Noriega from office.

The time period of this book was during the Noriega regime 1983 – 1989. The focus is mostly on Jenny and Chico (the nickname for Colonel Stone) as well as their their family which consists of three daughters. The story is written like a novel but it appears to be the true account of their life. We see how the Doberman (the Panama’s government version of the Nazi storm troopers) have no hesitation in arresting anyone, beating them or taking them off to prison where they can be tortured and killed. Yet the people tried to live a normal life working, sending their kids to school, and going to church. Periodically, there would be protests by groups of people who would try to hold peaceful demonstrations wearing symbolic white shirts. They were called the “Crusaders”. It seems as if the people were hopelessly naïve as Doberman and other designated government troops would frequently charge in and injure and arrest the protesters squashing their attempts at self-expression and opposition. Two of Jenny and Chico’s children at one point were arrested in such activities but fortunately,Chico was able to get them released although their car was destroyed. Chico gradually undergoes a metamorphosis in this thinking from being a loyal soldier who did not initially accept the inhumanities of the oppressive government that he was advising. He eventually was exiled to the United States while his family continued to live in Panama.

The book serves the purpose of educating the readers such as myself about the oppressive lives that the people in Panama had to live during this time. It showed how people could endure such oppression that they could not control and persevered to raise their children with an awareness of the situation but yet some semblance of normality. The gradual revelation of Colonel Stone in realizing the tyrannical nature of the Noriega regime probably is similar to the realization by the U.S. government that they could no longer support that dictator. Noriega was captured during the overthrow of his government and now has spent more than 20 years in prisons, in the United States and Panama.

As revealing and as enlightening as this book has been to me, it has little merit as a good read. While the author’s style is perky, it is quite repetitious. It does not provide the interesting background details that a Doris Kearns, or a Robert McCullough or other author of important historical events would have given. Nor does it have an intriguing plot that makes you not want to put it down that a good historical novel might have. While it is written as a  historical novel and  it is supposed to be the true account of the author’s real experiences. However most of the time, it seems more like a diary where the everyday boring details have not been removed.

Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

By: Michael B. Oren

The author is the former Ambassador from Israel to the United States who served 2009-2013 and currently is a member of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament.

Oren’s journey to this position as Israel’s representative to the United States and the man who was one of the key advisers to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began when he was growing up in a Jewish family in West Orange, New Jersey. He was bullied then as a child and experienced antisemitism at a young age. At the age of 15, in 1970, Oren visited Israel with a Zionist group where he met Yitzhak Rabin in an encounter which he describes as a life changing event.

He went on to complete college at Columbia and received a master’s degree. He then immigrated to Israel in 1979. He came back to the United States to get a PhD at Princeton. He was married in 1982 to an American woman who also made Aliyah. They went on to have three children.

Oren’s commitment to Israel was more than an intellectual and emotional one. He joined the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) and served as a paratrooper in the 1982 war and saw serious combat. He then worked with the underground in the Soviet Union and was arrested by the KGB. During the Persian Gulf War he was the Israeli liaison to the United States Sixth Fleet. In the 1980s and 1990s, he taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at the university in Tel Aviv. He served in various positions in the Israeli government, and in 2006, was a visiting professor at Harvard and at Yale.

Oren has written numerous articles and a few important books including New York Times listed best selling books titled Faith and Fantasy, the history of America’s involvement in the Middle East and Six Days of War, an historical account of the Six Day War. He also wrote two novels.

So in 2009, when Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister appointmented Oren as Ambassador, he was already a seasoned government advisor as well as a respected historian. He considered himself a dual citizen of Israel and the United States. If fact, he described a very painful moment when he had to give up his US citizenship in order to become Israeli Ambassador to the United States. He vividly described his emotions seeing his passport voided.

Mr. Oren obviously must have kept a very complete diary as he goes on to document his life for the next four years in great detail. The reader has the feeling that the author is reliving the experience moment to moment, telephone call to cellphone call, car ride to plane ride, and so many very personal meetings. He essentially takes the reader up to the door of the Oval Office in the White House as he steps back to sit with the other most senior advisers as President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu hold their personal meetings. There are so many stories of this four-year period which essentially chronicles the delicate situation in the Middle East and the interaction between Israel and the United States.

I came away from this book feeling that Oren was a very loyal Israeli who still loves America. I thought that despite at times his critical view of some of the actions of the United States, he sincerely believed that his first country would always have Israel’s back.

As Oren currently serves in the Knesset, it would not surprise me if he did not someday move up and become part of the top leadership in Israel. This could lead to another important book to allow historians and people like us to gain further insight into the relationship between these two great allies.

The Rent Collector by Camron Wright

In the past year, I have read various novels about countries, cultures and life experiences that were immensely different than anything that I knew about. This included the fate of orphan children who were shipped throughout the United States, the plight of Mexican immigrants in this country, the difficulties that the Jews and France experienced during World War II, the bizarre life of living in North Korea, the American-Indians living in this country during the 17th century. This novel presented still another perspective of which I was unfamiliar and did not fully appreciate. That is living on a gigantic garbage dump in modern day Cambodia where a person might live with his family in a shack with a tarp as a doorway and no electricity. On top of that, the families would eek out a bare subsistence by picking through the smoldering garbage piles to find any items that they could sell for a small amount of money to buy food which was mostly rice, so their families could survive until the next day. While the details of the story were fiction, the characters in the book were real and there were actual photographs of them at the end of the book.

Yet the novel was much more than a revelation of how some people might live today in Cambodia or the historical and political circumstances behind this travesty. Camron Wright has told a story that reflects the potential humanity that can exist in any life circumstances. He focuses on the tradition for literature to convey meaning, love and hope throughout the ages in a multitude of cultures.

One of the main characters in the book is the story teller of this novel, Sang Ly. We meet her as a married woman with a small sick child who was trying to survive in this horrendous environment. The other main character is Sopeap Sin or the rent collector, a seemingly mean old woman who collects the rent from these poor people who live in the immediate area surrounding this gigantic garbage dump. We learned that she has a poignant and complicated history. Among the many facets of her background is that she has great knowledge of literature. She accepts Sang Ly’s invitation to teach her to read and the plot takes off from there. On one hand, this is a simple beautiful story and yet on the other hand, it is as complicated as the hidden meaning of great literature and the secrets of our dreams deep in our hearts.

A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena By Anthony Marra

Despite universal raves about this book, I found it, at best, a very well written depressing book about a piece of Russian history I know very little about and still am not very motivated to study further. It does however capture the inhumanity that existed in the late 20th and early 21st Century and in this case focuses this damning searchlight on the Russian Government and a subset of its people. Such disregard for people who are of a different origin obviously is not exclusive with the ethnic group involved in this book. Sadly, we see similar antagonistic behavior in the United States if you scan today’s headlines although not acted out on the widespread scale that we found in the pages of this novel.

The centerpiece of this book is a small village in Chechnya. History tells us that the Russian Federation invaded this country in the 1990s to prevent it from leaving the Soviet Union. We follow a handful of characters throughout this book. One is eight-year-old Havaa who flees with a neighbor after the “Feds” killed her father and burnt her home down. The neighbor is a doctor who asks the surgeon of a nearby hospital to take the girl in if he will work helping out at the hospital. Fleeing refugees seem to be the most common patients at this hospital and they appear to either die or have amputations of their limbs from injuries, frequently with dental floss for suturing, since the hospital is chronically short on supplies. The new doctor is also short on medical skills but is a good artist. So he draws portraits of the deceased patients, which get hung in the local town as more or less death notices and memorials to them.

While the tone of this review may seem flippant, that was not the mood of the book. The author clearly tries to convey the caring that the people had for each other. Refugees roaming from one city to another were given rooms to stay overnight by local residents although they could only pay a symbolic pittance. On the other hand we are given graphic descriptions of how a person can be tortured by the government and how someone could ultimately become an informer who turns in just about all his friends. We also learn what a father might do when he learns that his son is such an informer.

The time span of this book is relatively short but it is greatly expanded by the author’s use of flashbacks. Mr. Marra has a way with words and metaphors that is captivating but the characters are somewhat in the shadows. One of the tests I give myself to see if a book has made a distinct impression on me is to see if in my mind I could cast a movie with known actors and actresses. In this case they didn’t stand out enough for me to do it.

SEASON OF THE WITCH BY DAVID TALBOT

If you have ever lived in San Francisco (as I did for one year in 1965) or perhaps visited the city and have fallen under its magical spell then this book is for you. This is especially true if your connection occurred between the 20-year period of 1965 to 1985. This may also apply if you identify with the social movements or news events that originated or were closely connected to The City by the Bay.

Here is a partial list of the fascinating people, places and events that were described in great detail in this very interesting book:

Haight-Ashbury, giving birth to the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Human Be In, the Hippy Revolution, Summer Of Love.

Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Runaway Children, Beatnik Society, Free Clinic, rock concerts, and Bill Graham.

San Francisco Chronicle, Herb Caen, Mobey Grape, Openly Gay Community, The Cockettes, Finnochios, STD, LSD, CIA, Susan Atkins, Charles Manson, Sharon Tate, Hell’s Angels, Rolling Stones, and Mick Jagger.

Joseph L. Alioto, Good Earth, Vincent Hallinan, SLA (Symbinese Liberation Army), Cinque, Bill Harris, Patty Hearst, Zebra Murders, Zodiac Serial Killer, Asian Law Caucus. Margo St. James, Hookers Liberation, Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey.

George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Dianne Feinstein, Willie Brown, People’s Temple, Jim Jones, Jonestown, Guyana, Dan White , assassinations at City Hall, Edward DeBartolo, Joe Montana, Bill Walsh, HIV and the AIDS epidemic.

Although this book leaves at the end of the AIDS epidemic, we know this is just 20 years of a small but important part of the history of this great city. David Talbot, in my opinion, has earned the title of Story Teller Supreme for San Francisco. He told it like it was and what a story it has been and continues to be.

At the conclusion of this book, we are also treated to a section with photographs of some of the important players in the history of this great city that were described. These photos and the narration that accompanies, each one of them are a special dessert to the great meal this book has been.

Review of Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper

Guest review written by Leo  age 11 1/2

Out of My Mind is about an 11-year-old girl named Melody who has Cerebral palsy.

“I can’t walk. I can’t talk. I can’t feed myself or take myself to the bathroom. Big bummer,” she tells us on page 1. Because Melody can’t speak, many people assume she isn’t smart. In fact, Melody’s brain works like anyone else’s. She is exceptionally smart, clever and a trivia expert.

At school, Melody is in a special education class, where she doesn’t learn much most years. Then, the school starts an inclusion program where all the kids in Melody’s class get to participate in a “normal” class once in awhile. Melody is really excited about this, but when the class starts, a couple of kids aren’t very nice to her, and some of the others ignore her. But one girl named Rose sits next to Melody, and they become friends. Melody likes having a friend, yet sometimes she still feels left out. The inclusion program is a little frustrating for Melody because when she knows the answer to a question (which is a lot of the time) she can’t say it. Through all the challenges Melody is still glad to be part of it because she gets to learn so much more than she did before.

The rest of the book shows how Melody sees the world. It shows the relationship between Melody and her parents and family. Also, the book shows how Melody’s next-door-neighbor, Mrs. V. pushes Melody to do the “unspeakable.”Out of My Mind talks about the many stereotypes and assumptions people make about someone who has Cerebral palsy.

I definitely recommend this book if you want to read something completely different. It really shows the way someone who has a disability or many challenges feels, and how they conquer those challengesOut of My Mind is like no other book I’ve read; it makes me realize that there are so many things in life that are far more complicated than we think,

Out of My Mind is the winner of the 2015 Wildwood Medal

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

Dr. Don Tillman is a professor of genetics in Australia where the book is set. It is his voice that tells the story. It does not take long to realize that it is probably the voice of a person with Asperger’s Syndrome. Don, while obviously quite brilliant, lacks the ability to socialize and empathize with other people. At least so it seems. His only real friends are Gene, a faculty member in the Psychology Department and his wife, Claudia, who is a clinical psychologist. They have an open marriage as Gene attempts to have sex with a wide variety of women from all over the world (putting pins in a map marking each conquest). Gene and Claudia are loyal friends of Don and do their best to advise him how to get along with people.

Don undertakes two projects, which allows the reader to learn about how he thinks as well as getting some insight into human nature. The first is The Wife Project. For this, Don makes a questionnaire of all the characteristics he believes he would want in a wife. With the help of Gene, he is able to distribute this questionnaire to a wide variety of women. Factors that are evaluated are things such as smoking, drinking, eating habits, body mass index (BMI) and many others. No one really measures up to score very high in this questionnaire in Don’s quest to meet his life partner. Don does meet Rosie through Gene, who although she does not meet the criteria set out in the questionnaire but with whom he does develop a friendly relationship. Rosie was initially believed by Don to be a bartender but turns out to be a PhD student working in a bar to earn extra money.

It is with Rosie that he develops a second project known as The Father’s Project. It seems that Rosie was unhappy with the man who was known to be her stepfather because he did not deliver on his promises including a childhood hope to go to Disneyland. Her mother died when Rosie was a young girl and things that her mother told her before she died gave her reason to believe that her biological father was actually someone in her mother’s medical school graduating class and had impregnated her at the time of a reunion celebration. There was a picture of all the attendees at this celebration and Rosie and Don embarked upon The Father’s Project where they attempted to track down all these men and surreptitiously obtain samples for DNA analysis, which Don as a genetics professor could do in his laboratory.

Readers of this book blog as well as my psychiatry blog and movie blog would have noted that I have written about the not so uncommon quest to connect with an unknown biological relative, after many years and sometimes a lifetime of no contact with them and no knowledge who that person may be. ( see psychiatry blog about this subject  ) This theme also shows up in movies ( see movie blog about this subject which will links to several movies ) and books as well as this one and in clinical cases as illustrated in my psychiatry blog. As Don and Rosie team up with The Father’s Project, we appreciate how Don intensifies an interest with Rosie. He begins to question many of his assumptions about relationships and his own feeling.

No matter how well a person may fit, the diagnostic criteria for an entity whether it be a narcissistic personality, bipolar disorder, major depression, Asperger’s syndrome or any other entity, there are human qualities that affect the ability for everyone to care for another person, fall in love and have an ability to change. This interesting delightful and enlightening story clearly makes this point.

I understand there is a sequel book by this author, titled The Rosie Effect as well as a movie currently being made. If you like this book as I did, you probably will want to check these out.

Between 1854 and 1925, there were regular train excursion transporting more than 200,000 orphans from the East Coast to the Midwest in search of people who would take in these orphans. There would be posters displayed in small towns announcing the impending visits of this train with orphans available for adoption. Couples who wanted a child because they could not have one, or because they wished to make an addition to their family, or perhaps because they needed workers to help in the field or their business, would come to the train station to check out the orphan children. These children may have been abandoned because of poverty or the death of both parents. Sometimes, there were dire circumstances of how the parents died, such as we learned about in one of the characters in the book where most of her family was killed in a terrible fire in New York City and there was no one to care for her. There was an organization that kept custody of the children until they could find a suitable person or family who would care for them. Unfortunately, for some of the children, they would end up in indentured slavery. Many were forced to work in the farm fields or do menial tasks such as spending many hours as seamstresses. The expectation that these children would be sent to school was often not followed by the people who took custody of them.

This novel follows a few orphan children who were on one of these orphan trains and tells the story of happened to them. It is quite difficult to view these experiences through the eyes of the orphan children. We see how a child would feel being on display for acceptance or rejection. This story also looks at the powerful, perhaps universal need to search out or locate a biological parent or child that through various circumstances has had no contact with their biological relatives. The desire to meet that person and maintain a bond with them is very powerful and has complicated psychological and perhaps biological determinants. I have written about this topic elsewhere.( click here to see article)

The author, Christine Baker Kline has done her homework and studied the history of the real orphan trains and read many of the writings of the riders of these trains who were now in their ninth or tenth decade of life. Through her interesting and well constructed story, she has enlightened us about an important piece of history as well as providing insight into human relationships.

THE BOYS IN THE BOAT by Daniel James Brown

Daniel James Brown is an author who describes himself as someone who writes narrative non-fiction which brings compelling historical events to life. That is exactly what he does in The Boys in the Boat. To most contemporary Americans, competitive rowing is not high on the list of sporting events to follow. Even if you have heard about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, you might only think of Jessie Owens, the black track star , who won a gold medal in the face of Hitler proclaiming his master race ideas. However, there is another story that you should know about those Olympic games .

This book tells the story of nine young men from the University of Washington who had an amazing journey that also took them to the 1936 Berlin Olympics to win a gold medal. It is about much more than their Olympic triumph. It is about what they needed to overcome and how they learned to work together in a manner which transcended the teamwork required for other sports. These young men came from farms, logging towns, and other difficult backgrounds. They struggled to get to the University of Washington and then to earn a spot on the rowing team. It is also a story about their coach, Al Ulbrickson and how he coached them and treated them as individuals and as a team. It is also about George Pocock, a boat-builder who not only built the rowing shell for the University of Washington team but also for most collegiate teams throughout the country. Pocock grew up in England and intimately understood rowing from his experience with the boats on the famous Thames River. It was his wisdom and support which sustained the University of Washington team almost as much as their esteemed coach.

Mr. Brown, the author, became interested in this subject when he had a discussion with a neighbor who was the daughter of one of these rowers. He ultimately met her father, Joe Rantz, a few years before he died. He heard this story firsthand and was able to review various documents and diaries not only of this man but of the other members of the rowing team as he was introduced to their families. The result is a book which reads like a page turning novel with events and insights into the people about whom the book was based.

There is a parallel story, which the author chooses to chronicle and which adds to the significance of the triumph of the University of Washington team at the 1936 Olympics. That is the events going on in Germany as Adolf Hitler came to power and began to oppress and ultimately murder the German Jews and others. The temporary easing up by Hitler of his cold-blooded extermination plans in order to deceive the world at his showcase Olympics, was clearly spelled out in this book.

I found the author’s discussion of the German filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, quite interesting and revealing. She was given carte blanche by Hitler to film the Olympics from every angle in order to showcase Hitler’s Germany in a glorious positive image for the entire world. She worked extremely closely with Hitler and Goebbels (the Nazi Propaganda Minister) and may have been literally in bed with them. She filmed all the athletes from the best angles, sometimes from specially built trenches so she could show the marching Germans from an upward looking view. Interestingly enough, after the American team from the University of Washington won their gold medal (in a most exciting well-described come from behind victory), she was given permission to bring her cameras into the University of Washington’s boat for a special ride with them. The results can be seen in a well-preserved video of a preliminary heat won by Germany and the final won by the US for the gold medal  (see YouTube video-English  version or German  narration version  ) where she intermixes cuts of long views of the race with close ups of the rowers. Riefenstahl subsequently tried to distance herself from her close association with Hitler after the war ( see interview with Riefenstabhl). No matter what her culpability in Hitler’s propaganda show, the wonderful video of these nine men, whose self-determination, hard work, and comradeship, was very well done and will allow future generations to enjoy watching their accomplishment.

One reviewer in Publishers Weekly called this book a Nautical Chariots of Fire, which seems a very apt description. It is also rumored that the Weinstein Brothers have optioned this book for a movie which may be soon available as you read this review. I am sure it will be an exciting film but this book alone captures a vivid picture of the Boys In The Boat that you will not forget.

The Harder They Come by T.C. Boyle

In this novel by T.C. Boyle, we are presented with a handful of people who fall on a spectrum in regard to their feelings about the United States. They are the hardworking guys who feel that the Mexicans among them are up to no good and are probably drug dealers who should be arrested. They are also people represented by one woman who feels that the US Government has made life too restrictive and that they shouldn’t be required to register their cars, get a driver’s license, and follow other laws which they believe abridge their rights. Then there was one character who has gone renegade and acts as if he still is one of the early American settlers who is battling various Indian tribes and feels that everyone is against him. This character is clearly psychotic and has lost touch with reality. Perhaps this is the point that the author is trying to make about such political views. He seems to be saying that any extreme repudiation of our form of government is “crazy” and unrealistic.

Boyle’s writing style in this book matches his hard-assed defiant view that is presented in it. It sounds like John Wayne at his toughest,  continually talking and narrating a book. It begins to feel unrealistic as nobody we know talks in this tone all the time.

The only other book which I read by this prolific author was Tortilla Curtain. In that book, he conveyed an empathetic, understanding of the undocumented Mexicans who had come across the border into California as well as the other Californians who were trying to respond to them. In this more recent book, it was more difficult to identify with the “oppressed citizens” who felt that their rights were being taken away from them. The writing style mentioned above while intense and engaging made this reader feel that he was up against a dangerous enemy which was an uncomfortable experience. It may be that that was the point of this book.

There is another dynamic here that is really quite powerful and poignant. That is the relationship between Adam, the psychotic young man who runs amuck, and his father Sten who had been a Vietnam marine. Early in the book, we see an incident where Sten and his wife are on a tour in Costa Rica where there are threatened by some thugs with a gun and a knife who want to rob them. Sten grabs one of the would-be attackers from behind and kills him in a chokehold as the others flee. This becomes a salient moment for Sten as he has to deal with the adulation he gets from the public as well his own guilt feelings. This incident also provides the readers with an insight into his mind and the struggle that he has within himself as he sees his own son developed into a dangerous threat to society. The murderous rage behavior that we see periodically in the newspapers (i.e. the suicidal pilot who brought down a plane load of innocent people) is reminiscent of these kind of feelings. How often do we contemplate the dynamics of the family of that man and the struggle that the parents must have in coming to grips with this child’s action. Boyle hits us with such insights as the beat of his writing reverberates in our minds.