I am sitting here in front of my computer with a pile of six books by my side. The books are the ones I have most recently read, and none of these are books you have recently read. Here goes:

(1) Caught in the Act by Peter Dupre (1988, revised 2002): a memoir by a man who was smuggling families out of Communist Hungary into West Germany, until he was caught and spent seven (I think it was seven) years in a series of just awful Hungarian prisons. The basic lesson I learned from this book? No matter how much money I am offered, it isn’t worth it to try to smuggle families out of Communist Hungary. Do I think you should read this book? Well, if the subject interests you, it’s well written and informative. If it doesn’t interest you, don’t bother.

(2) Poland, a Green Land by Aharon Appelfeld (2005 in Hebrew, 2023 in English). Appelfeld, a Holocaust survivor who taught for many years at Ben Gurion University, and who passed away in 2018 at 85, wrote a number of novels, many set in pre-Nazi Europe. This book tells the story of a contemporary Israeli, an ordinary guy with an ordinary family, who decides to revisit the small village in Poland where his parents had lived before World War II as one of the few Jewish families. The village, located somewhere not too far from Krakow, hasn’t grown at all since the War, and was still living as much in the 20th century as the 21st. It is almost like time travel, especially as he meets and interacts (some quite intimately) with people who remembered his parents. The story itself is a bit far fetched (maybe this is why it took almost 20 years to have the novel translated), but it is a vehicle to look at a small Polish village in 2005 to see how those who live there remembered and reflected on what their lives were like when the Jews lived in the village 60 years earlier. Not a great book, but an interesting one.

(3) Through the Russian Revolution by Albert Rhys Williams (1921). Williams was an American journalist who, until he died in 1962, was a supporter of the Soviet Union (although he greatly disapproved of Stalin and Stalinism), and who was in Russia when the Czarist Russia collapsed and the Soviet Union came into being. It’s just one man’s view of Russia in 1917, but it was someone who was in St. Petersburg (and then took the railroad through Siberia to Vladivostok) and who actually became involved in several incidents where his life was clearly at risk and targeted by all sides.

(4) Snow Goose Chronicles by Olya Samilenko (2015). Samilenko teaches Russian at Goucher College. She wrote this novel, published by a small press. I don’t think it’s the best written novel and doubt it will win any prizes, but it carried me right along. It’s the story of a village in Ukraine which was devastated during the Stalin purges of the 1930s, and of what happened to members of a kulak (farmers who owned their own land) family over decades, including time some spent in the Gulag, and what happened when people returned after years and years to meet up with those they had not seen in decades. Communists, capitalists, peasants, intellectuals, soldiers…..they are all here. I picked the book up by chance; glad I did.

(5) Verdict of Twelve by Raymond Postgate (1940). This is one of my old Penguin mysteries. And what an original format! It’s the story of a murder of a young boy in England by his guardian/aunt (yes, that’s a spoiler), and the motives are money and freedom from responsibility. But that’s not important. What is important is how the book is organized. Three main sections. First, you learn about each of the 12 members of the jury, none of whom are what they might seem to those who select the jurors. Then, you follow the trial of the aunt, witness by witness. Then, you back to the jury, which will eventually vote to convict the aunt, and explore the thinking of each of the members of the jury, showing how their individual (often hidden) backgrounds influence the way they approach the case. It is a fascinating way to look at a trial.

(6) Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond (2019). This is the most substantive of six books. Jared Diamond is a fascinating 87 year old UCLA professor, whose background (as told in the opening chapters of the book) is pretty special. A very bright prodigy who remained very bright throughout his life time, Wikipedia lists his fields as “physiology, biophysics, ornithology, environmental science, history, ecology, geography, evolutionary biology and anthropology”. His examples of “nations in crisis” include Finland in its war with the Soviet Union, the opening of modern Japan, Chile during the time of Pinochet, Indonesia and its independence, Germany after World War II, and Australia when it stopped being totally racist. Each of these chapters if fascinating, although it isn’t clear why he made these particular choices, as he fits them into various categories (which I don’t fully understand). The latter part of the book gives Diamond’s prognosis as to what is going to happen to the world in the short term future (and, I guess, mid-term future, depending on your definitions of the terms). I found this less interesting because, as you might expect, his guesses appear no better than yours or mine. But the first 2/3 of the book get an A from me.

OK, that’s it for today. What am I reading now? I am about 2/3 of the way through James McBride’s Deacon King Kong. McBride really knows how to keep you interested in what he writes, even if the underlying story line really isn’t that interesting at all.