”Had years in power made him forget the effort actually required to capture it? Twelve months ago, he could have been president of the Unit
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”Had years in power made him forget the effort actually required to capture it? Twelve months ago, he could have been president of the United States for a third term. Now, if he wanted to reclaim that power, he would have to persuade the Republican bosses to dump a compliant president in favor of a notorious renegade who had been an unpredictable pain in their backsides for more than a decade. Teddy might have been the only American politician with the force of character to broker a European peace, redress the atrocities in the Congo, and cope with the myriad challenges of this new century. But if he wanted to regain the position necessary to implement those worthy goals, he needed to make up his mind and do what was necessary.”
Not running for president for a third term was probably one of the worst decisions of Teddy’s life. He regretted his magnanimous reassurance to the American people almost immediately after making it. He felt that Washington, by stepping down after two terms, provided the template for all those who followed after him. What could he possibly do with the rest of his life that would rival the challenges of the presidency? This conundrum weighed heavily on his mind. Even as he sought distraction in Africa, he was a rudderless ship, destination unknown.
Franklin D. Roosevelt learned from the mistakes of his cousin and would not lay down the reins of power until mortality dictated otherwise.
I love it when a book gives me another perspective on history that I haven’t considered before. I’ve never really thought, What if Teddy had kept the presidency instead of giving it to his handpicked and ineffectual replacement, Howard Taft? What ripples would have happened? As Taft placidly watched Germany build up its military presence, would a word of caution from Teddy to the kaiser have given the ambitious German leader pause in his quest for world domination? If WW1 had never happened, then WW2 wouldn’t have happened, and maybe the 20th century wouldn’t have been the bloodiest century in history. With Roosevelt’s thirst for military conquest, it is hard to equate the idea that he might have proven to be the world’s most important peace maker, but even he would not have wanted to see a world engulfed in flames. There is no honor in wars of this magnitude...only slaughter.
Could Teddy have appeased Germany’s need for territorial expansion by giving Germany the Congo? In some ways, the poor Congolese would have been exchanging one white oppressor for another, but the genocide being perpetrated by King Leopold of Belgium would have stopped. I would like to believe that Germany, before Hitler, would not have been so intent on brutalizing the Africans as the Belgium dictator. When we talk of Stalin and Hitler, we should always include the name...Leopold.
James A. Ross seems to feel that Teddy would have saved millions of lives, and after giving it some thought, I agree with him. When Teddy said something, everyone, including the leaders of ambitious countries would have to listen. They would not listen to Taft or believe that the fat man could be bellicose enough to actually intercede in anything going on overseas. He was too busy doing the bidding of the oligarchy. Though the faces behind the scenes pulling the strings have changed today, the intent is the same. The oligarchy in 1909 was composed of filthy-rich men, like J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, who didn’t want to ever see Roosevelt back in power or, better yet, never on American soil again.
Roosevelt’s trust-busting efforts had attempted to level the playing field, and for greedy people like J. P. Morgan, business equality felt like inequality.
So Roosevelt decided to take a hunting trip to Africa. He wanted to spend a year avoiding the press and putting himself back together mentally. An adventure in Africa acquiring animal specimens for the Smithsonian seemed a bully way to feel relevant again. Lurking about his safari was a reporter named Maggie Dunn who was intent on getting newsworthy quotes from Teddy, but also wanted to do some real reporting on the situation in the Congo. She had a history with Teddy, and Teddy’s handlers were intent on keeping her as far away from the ex-president as possible. To add another layer of spice, she worked for the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst who had political ambitions of his own.
If you are thinking to yourself that this book is all about male hubris, an easy assumption with any book that features Theodore Roosevelt, you would be wrong. Maggie Dunn was a fully developed character, an amazing feminist who was well aware that being as good was never good enough. She had to be much better than the men she competed with. Even in the wilds of Africa, caught between bandits and an unforgiving terrain, she proved her mettle as well as her intelligence and her survival skills. She could traverse the hallways of political intrigue even as she navigated the byways of the steaming jungle. She quickly became my favorite character and was the driving force to reveal the nefarious plots coming from America and the killers who were going to make sure any ambitions that Theodore Roosevelt had to return to American politics remained buried in Africa.
”There is a warning to the modern world, as well, in Hannibal’s life. It is that warfare need not be a vast conflict of technological skills and accum”There is a warning to the modern world, as well, in Hannibal’s life. It is that warfare need not be a vast conflict of technological skills and accumulation of weapons of destruction. Regardless of its mechanisms, war remains an equation of human beings, and their minds. It has never ceased to be an art, in which a supreme artist may appear out of a pass of the Alps to prevail over money- and man- and weapon-power. No amount of stock-piling of things can offset a superiority in minds. In 219 the Roman state was prepared for war in the usual manner; the Carthaginian was not. ‘Of all that befell both the Romans and the Carthaginians the cause was one man and one mind--Hannibal’s.’”
Hannibal is considered one of the greatest military strategists of all time. Most people think of him as the man who brought war elephants over the Alps. It is generally considered nearly impossible to bring armies over the Alps, but bringing elephants certainly adds an extra romantic flair to the endeavor. Some might know of his genius at the Battle of Cannae, where he destroyed a Roman army composed of 50,000 men with losses below 6,000 for himself. Men love to be covered in glory, but they also love to live through the experience, so it is easy to understand why Hannibal’s men loved him. It isn’t that he outfought the Romans, although that was the end result. It is more important and the key to his success against them that he outthought them.
The thing about the Romans is that they are never really satisfied and never really defeated. The Carthaginians concede to them several times leading up to the Punic Wars, but each time the Romans come back and want more. They come up with pretenses to start wars so that they can shake the African nation down for more money or for more territory. So they have the option to capitulate, as the Etruscans did and many other nations, or eventually risk annihilation. Living peacefully with an agreed upon border between themselves and Rome is always a temporary thing. The Romans fought three Punic Wars with Carthage and win all three wars. They lose battles, big battles, and when Hannibal comes across the Alps and spends 14 years harassing them in their own backyard, they discover the meaning of psychological warfare.
”The Carthaginians fought for their own preservation and the sovereignty of Africa, the Romans for supremacy and world dominion.”--Polybius
The Romans are famous for taking the best of other cultures and incorporating those aspects into their own. They learn from their opponents in war. They refine their tactics, and losses are just learning experiences. They are tenacious, and really, their whole culture revolves around war and the spoils that it provides Rome. The Roman citizens will quickly become bored if there isn’t a war going on somewhere, though Hannibal breathing down the very neck of Rome itself is a bit too real for even the most bloody-minded of Romans.
Scipio Africanus keeps insisting that the way to get Hannibal out of Rome is to attack Carthage. He is right. Once Scipio starts burning his way across Hannibal’s homeland, the Carthaginians recall their greatest warrior home. What is interesting is that we are really talking about a David and Goliath story. There are 700,000 Carthaginians and 6,000,000 Romans; and yet, somehow Hannibal nearly brings them to their knees. Why doesn’t Hannibal take Rome? He certainly could have. Would the Roman Empire have ever existed past 200 BC if he had?
Hannibal declares all of his men, from the generals to the lowliest slaves, free men. He inspires loyalty in a motley group of disenfranchised men from all nationalities. ”It is one of the most fantastic facts of Hannibal’s career that he arrived in Italy with forces of Spaniards and Africans, and departed with Bruttians and Gauls, for the most part, with many Roman deserters.” If he had shared with Alexander the Great the grand ambition to rule the world, he might very well have done it. He’d have found more men to join him wherever he marched.
When Hannibal returns to Carthage in 203BC, it is the first time he has been on African soil in 34 years. As a boy, his father, Hamilcar Barca, had taken him with him to Spain in search of new lands for Carthage to replace what they had lost to Rome. They wanted to find lands with riches beyond the reach of Rome, and Hamilcar was successful. Silver and many other precious resources flowed back to Carthage. It is from Spain that Hannibal launches his march into Italy. Only when Carthage is in danger of being destroyed does he finally return home.
Hannibal was defeated in the much anticipated head to head confrontation with Scipio. There were some circumstances that worked against him. Because of the havoc Scipio was wrecking in his homeland he felt compelled to engage Scipio before he was ready, before all of his allies are gathered. The problem was that he didn’t know which, if any, of the allies of Carthage would respond to the call for help or when they would come. As it turned out, if he had waited even 24 hours he would have had enough troops to nearly match the Roman numbers. Hannibal’s other problem was that he was facing, quite possibly, the finest general that Rome ever produced. I wonder what would have happened if, instead of embarking for home, Hannibal had taken a page out of Scipio’s battle plan and had attacked Rome? Would Scipio have been forced to bring his army back to defend the very heart of the homeland?
Scipio later became frustrated with the politics of Rome and exiled himself to his country estate, never to return. Hannibal spent the rest of his life on the run, hounded by Rome. Rome refused to forget about the boogie man of Carthage and would not rest until he was destroyed. In one of those odd historical parallels, both Scipio and Hannibal died in 183 BC.
Harold Lamb was one of many writers who were quite popular in their day but have since been practically forgotten by readers. For me, he brings Hannibal vividly to life, and though the dust jacket art lead me to believe that this is historical fiction, it is most assuredly a serious work of nonfiction. Lamb was famous for the wonderful pace with which he told a story. He wasn’t just relating facts. He was really doing his best to introduce the reader to the subject of whatever book he chooses to write. I’ve read about Hannibal before, in many other books, but I’ve never come away from any book, except this one, where I felt like I really understood the man and his motivations.
”’From the info we have so far the virus kills between forty-eight and seventy-two hours after infection, and its R naught number is 16-20.’
Marchiori”’From the info we have so far the virus kills between forty-eight and seventy-two hours after infection, and its R naught number is 16-20.’
Marchiori’s brows knitted. ‘R naught?’
‘Basic reproduction number. It shows how many people a single infected individual can contaminate. Basically how fast it spreads.’
‘And I’m assuming this is a bad number.’
‘Well, if you think back in 1918--when they didn’t have all the highways and skyways to travel on in a matter of hours from one part of the planet to the other--there was a worldwide outbreak of the swine flu that killed nearly fifty million people, and the R naught number was 1.4-2.8, then yes, I’d say it’s beyond bad. Probably closer to end-of-the-world plague, rotting corpses in the streets, death of civilization as we know it.’”
This isn’t a virus you can run from. If let loose on the world, it will eventually find every nook and cranny of the earth, every mountain cabin, island retreat, and Arctic station. Even the rich who cocoon themselves from the world will find themselves equally susceptible. Possibly it could reach them when their maid brings their 5 o’clock martini sprinkled with a sneeze she could not contain as she plunked a fat green olive in the vodka.
So the point is, you can’t hide from it.
The only solution is to stop it before it can jump on a horse of the apocalypse and ride across the curve of the Earth with the scythe of death flung wide.
Of course, you might be fine.
Maybe.
If you have a very special gene, the G Gene. Which if you say it really fast, it sounds a bit like the ratcheting of a shotgun or the ringing of a sale on an old fashioned cash register. The Cha-ching of the G Gene.
Who would develop a dangerous virus like this? The Americans, the Russians, the Israelis, Muslim terrorists? Or how about Marvin, the chubby pimple faced twenty-seven year old, living in his mom’s basement, a proud member of the involuntary celibate group INCEL (yes, it really does exist.), who dug out the chemistry set that Uncle Ted gave him for his twelfth birthday and began experimenting on the neighborhood cats and his nieces and nephews until he had the superbug that would separate the population chaff from the plump kernels.
That boy was just never quite right, but no, it wasn’t Marvin, nor was it any of the other potential government/terrorists entities who might be looking for a break-glass-only-in-case-of-emergence Z solution to world domination.
It is something much more insidious, a billionaire who knows he has the G Gene with immunity from the virus. He is deluded and arrogant enough to believe that he is Thanos, about to save the world from overpopulation inspired starvation. ( I never really thought of Thanos as an environmentalist until Infinity Wars. Batshit crazy environmentalist, but still technically a Planet First kind of guy.)
Yes, Von Eckstein is a super villain, and who do you call when you need to fight a super villain? Well, I call Bond, James Bond, with a shaken not stirred martini cocktail in hand, ready to point him to the epicenter of this fiendish plot in a bunker in Verona.
Wait? What? Verona? The home of Romeo and Juliet? The center of passion and unrequited love? It can’t be. It is such an endearingly cute, damn town. How could something so horrible be created in such a place? It is dastardly clever, in my opinion, to hide something hideous among the lovely architecture and beaming tourist trade.
So the author, Diane May, does not call Bond, but she does bring in the American Alexander O’Neal, who works for some agency so secret that I wonder if he even knows really who he works for, and my favorite character of the book Verona Police Detective Livio Marchiori. I do have hopes that he will prove to be a replacement for my beloved Italian Detective Aurelio Zen, created by Michael Dibdon. (If you have not seen the trilogy called Zen starring Rufus Sewell, give it a look. It is fantastic.)
Now Marchiori is plagued by more than the threat of a life changing/ending superbug. He has a new partner who is more annoying than useful at this point. He has an American dark ops agent who is frankly out of control. He has a woman he must protect because she inadvertently stumbled into the virus plot who also seems intent on self-destruction. He has a crazed psycho killer who seems to be able to use hypnosis to induce people to kill themselves.
WTF?
”I can’t control it, she realized and a crushing wave of panic stormed over her. He was controlling her, controlling her own brain, telling her body what to do. It felt as though two entities lived inside her skull. Hers and his. A dark presence that she just couldn’t fight against.”
I give that a double *shiver*.
This is the perfect book for a long plane ride, or an afternoon on the beach. It pairs well with a chilled white wine or with a more robust merlot. Smoke them if you got them, but I wouldn’t recommend a funny cigarette of the “joint” variety as the natural paranoia induced by such a repast could be increased exponentially by the treacherous weavings of this insidious plot. I did dance with the book a few times, but when I did finally settle into the cadence of the writing I finished it in a single afternoon. There are original concepts, Q-esque gadgets, and a plot that will keep the pages turning. There is a hit the brakes with both feet plot twist that may leave even the most jaded among us feeling good about humanity. Oh yes, and there is unrequited love. How could a novel largely set in Verona be written without a dash of love?
Diane May lives in Verona and after plying her with all the charm I possess I convinced her to let me fly to Verona to sit down with her for an interview. (Some of this statement is a lie.)
Jeffrey Keeten: Excuse the pun, but where/when/how did this "germ" of an idea of a plot come together for you? What got you started writing?
Diane May: What got me started writing was Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun. I read it when I was 13 years old and loved it so much that I didn’t want it to end. So when it inevitably did, I decided to continue the story because I couldn’t bear the thought of having to leave the amazing world he had created. I soon discovered that my words didn’t seem to hold the same magical power though, as my characters seemed adamant on remaining lifeless stick figures and they didn’t jump off the page the way his did. But I kept at it, I read and wrote, I even won writing contests in school (because my literature teacher made me write stories when she discovered I was good at this), but I never actually considered writing for readers. I only wanted to write for myself, to create worlds and characters and, more often than not, I would do this in my mind without even putting it down on paper. Until one day when my husband found a novel I had written while I was at university and he loved it so much that I started writing for him. He’s always been an avid reader, just like me, and from that moment on he also became my critic, editor and motivator. And… the rest is history. As for the idea for this story… well, I’ve always been fascinated by two things: genetics and the universe. I watch documentaries and Ted Talks about them, and one day, after watching an amazing BBC documentary about genetic engineering, I started picturing in my mind the scenario in Evo, more specifically the part at the end. And then I did some research and found out that we’re actually not that far from this scenario and that there are already scientists who are officially working on extending our current lifespan. And then I started thinking about illegal genetic experiments and what happens when we play with things that are beyond our understanding. Because no matter how much medicine has advanced, we still don’t understand how a tiny change in our DNA will affect human evolution in the long run. And so Evo was born.
Jeffrey Keeten: I could tell you are a military brat because you are very comfortable with your descriptions of weapons and military/spy gadgets. I particularly liked the cell phone sized gadget that messed with cameras for 60 seconds. I could use one of those walking around in the States given all the camera lens trained on us wherever we go. Can you share a bit of your background while being a military family? Did the government move you around a bit?
Diane May: Yes, it did… a lot. The first time it happened I was eight years old and I cried and cried because I didn’t want to leave my friends. The second time it happened I was eleven and I promised myself I would never make friends again. And so I started reading more – I was already in love with reading – and never left the house, except when I had to go to school or my mum told me to take out the garbage. My parents got worried because I would read between one and three books a day, depending on the length of the book, and I completely refused to go out and make friends. But I was happy because books never left you and they were portals to magical, wonderful worlds. However, there’s much more to life as a military brat than just the pain of constantly making friends and then losing them. I lived on military bases at times, I became interested in guns and military technology, I even learnt the Morse Code when I was 15 and most of my friends were either like me or soldiers… And you know what’s interesting? That even now as an adult who hasn’t lived on a military base for over twenty years, I still see army as a home and men and women in uniform as completely trustworthy.
The gadget you mention is purely my invention, as is the black bag O’Neal uses to destroy evidence during his mission in Moscow. And by the way, if the army is interested in making them they can go right ahead and do it, I hereby give them permission. :))
JK: You take us to America and also give us a peek of Transylvania. Have you had a chance to visit the other places besides Verona that are featured in your novel?
DM: Actually, I was born in Transylvania and I still go back there every few years. I also visited Germany and other countries in Europe, but I’ve never been to Africa. Sibiu, the city I mention in Transylvania, is the city I was born in and it’s close to Dracula’s Castle, which I visit quite often as Dracula is my uncle and he can get really grumpy if I don’t go and see him. Kidding! But here’s an interesting fact about me: I was born at two am on a full moon night in a town shrouded in a fog so dense that it looked like an impenetrable gray wall, and wolves were howling in the dark forest at the edge of the town. There was a terrible wind that night and when I came into the world and cried, like all babies do, a gust of wind opened the window and swept through the room so violently that the small white blanket the nurse was about to cover me with flew out of her hands and into the darkness outside, never to be found again. My grandma crossed herself and told my mom to always keep a crucifix by my head in the cot so the strigoi (vampires) can’t take me.
Vampires apart, Transylvania is an amazing place with breathtaking scenery, superb cities (see Sibiu, Brasov, Sighisoara), delicious food and wonderful people.
JK: You mentioned to me when we were corresponding about your book that you worked as a Juliet secretary which I found fascinating. Could you explain to my friends and followers what that job is exactly?
DM: If you’ve seen the movie Letters to Juliet, you might remember this quote: “There is a place in Verona where people who suffer can leave a message to ask Juliet for help.” That place is called Juliet Club, it’s real and it receives tens of thousands of letters and emails every year from people from all over the world. The story of the Dear Juliet letters started in the 1930s when Ettore Solimani, Juliet’s Tomb keeper, began gathering the letters people left at her grave. Moved by their stories and wanting to help them, he started replying and signed as Juliet’s Secretary and, in doing so, created this decades-old tradition. Now there’s an army of volunteers who do this, and although you’d be tempted to think that since we’re living in a highly technological era the number of emails the Club receives far exceeds that of the letters written by hand, the truth is that when writing about the matters of the heart people still prefer to use good old-fashioned pen and paper. When you’re there and you see all those letters written in so many different languages and coming from the four corners of the Earth, as Shakespeare would say, you understand that the one thing all human beings have in common, no matter their age, nationality and social status, is the need to love and be loved. Some write because they seek advice, others need hope and reassurance that they will sooner or later find their soulmate, and a few just want to say thank you for having met the one they want to spend the rest of their lives with. When you sit down at that table, open a letter and start reading it you fully understand why Ettore Solimani couldn’t throw them away and felt compelled to write back. Reading something which comes straight from the heart and soul of another human being is so powerful and so moving that it tears down all your walls and defenses and settles in your heart, and you find yourself unable to ignore it; it becomes your problem, your priority. And the answer you send back has a piece of your heart in it. What Juliet’s Secretaries do is not just simply answer letters, but send out hope; hope that time and obstacles don’t matter, that one day we will meet the one we’re destined to be with for the rest of our lives.
JK: One of your villains, the enhanced ability Hypnotist, was a guy that the X-Men might find themselves fighting, yet the way you presented his abilities it seemed so plausible. I can't think of anything more frightening than having someone who can control our actions and be able to take over our minds. Did/do you have nightmares about this guy?
DM: Ah, this is a tough question. When I first started thinking about him, picturing what he does and how he does it I tried to look at it clinically, like a scientist merely observing what happens in an experiment. This helped me to become somewhat immune to him, but writing those scenes still sent shivers down my spine and made my heart beat faster. The very idea of hypnosis scares me because we don’t fully understand how the mind works, yet we are arrogant enough to claim we can control it. Believe it or not, what gave me nightmares while writing the book was not his ability to take over our minds, but the reasons behind it, the thirst to kill and the fact that he’s completely devoid of any positive human emotions. And when I wrote the scene where you find out why he is the way he is, you know what kept me up at night? The fact that I could understand him, I could actually see that tortured little boy shedding his humanity and crossing over to the dark side. And I felt sorry for him.
JK: So what are you working on next? Is this a first of a series or do you intend to write stand alone novels?
DM: When I wrote Evo I intended it to be a stand alone novel but after receiving reviews and messages where people told me how they loved Livio Marchiori, the homicide detective in the book, and how they would like to meet him again, I’m now thinking about writing a series with him as the main character. I already have some ideas in mind so that’s definitely a possibility, but the book I am currently working on is another stand alone novel, a crime thriller called Till Death Do Us Part. And trust me when I say it, there’s a new serial killer in town and he's looking forward to meeting you. ;)
JK: Yes! I’m so glad to hear that you will be bringing Livio Marchiori even more to life in a future novel!
”Almost every day began like that, robbed of clarity by a night of searing dreams. It was easier waking up in the war. Any war. At least I knew where ”Almost every day began like that, robbed of clarity by a night of searing dreams. It was easier waking up in the war. Any war. At least I knew where I was then.”
Maximilian McLean has a problem. He makes a decision that goes against his orders. He lets a target live. A woman who does not fit the profile he has been given, but she has seen his face, so by protocol she is supposed to die anyway.
He lets her live because he doesn’t want to knowingly kill an innocent person. He has been trained to kill without question, so his handlers in London are suddenly wondering if he has outlived his usefulness, which means they can promote him or kill him. There seems to be some disagreement on which course is the best action.
They send him to one of the most dangerous spots on the planet...Sierra Leone. A man he respects as the consummate soldier and assassin has returned from Sierra Leone a change man, broken and scared. ”Sonny Boy had been deeply disturbed, actually driven mad by something he’d encountered in-country. For days I had wondered what that something could have been. After shining my torch on the face of the dead squaddie outside Kabala I felt one step closer to finding out. A face frozen in mortal terror like that was not just uncommon: in my experience it was unique.”
So if he discovers the truth and manages to survive whatever foul incarnation is out in the jungles of Africa, will London let him live, or will they get him with a lights out bullet to the brain?
Who is the professor?
What are the Russian Spetsnaz doing out in the jungle?
How are the CIA connected?
How can the girl he let go possibly be connected to what is going on in Sierra Leone? ”No good deed goes unpunished.”
Can someone give Max a list of everyone trying to kill him? The list is getting too long and convoluted to figure out without a large white board with arrows and lines connecting the dots.
So he has the professor in the sight of his scope. ”My heart all but stopped, the beat so slow. I am tethered to the bullet, my mind filled with single certainty. The man is already dead even though the shot is not yet taken. The target’s name has already been written in the Book of the Dead.”
Except, well, the professor isn’t who he expects him to be. In fact, he isn’t expected to know him at all. The list of madmen he personally knows is rather short because most of them are dead soon after meeting him. There is hell, and then there is dousing the walls of hell with kerosene. Things are getting too hot, even for a man with his skill set. They are creating creatures that can upset the hierarchy of man. They are something uncategorized in the animal kingdom, except in the pages of genre fiction.
”The nearer they got, the more manifest their hideousness. Every muscle strained, bulged, as if fit to burst, embossed with veins that stood out like tramlines riding across sinew. Their eyes were wild and rolled back, so that their irises vanished into a blur of white-eyed horror. And their mouths--wide open, lips pulled taut--sent forth waves of ululating screeches.”
Every decision Max McLean has ever made in his life seems to be rippling forward to land on his ass while he is in the middle of the most horrendous set of circumstances that no amount of training could have prepared him for.
If he can survive those things in the jungle and make his way back to civilisation, will civilisation have already decided that he isn’t much better than those things in the jungle?
Heart pounding action, with more than a few tingles of apprehension that always happen to me when speculative fiction borders on the possible. The writing style of James Brabazon seems stilted to me in the first few pages, but it soon becomes apparent that the style fits the nature of the book, and the rocket speed with which the plot sweeps me along shortly has me completely immersed in asking why, what, who, where, and how? I know the when; it happens right now in the pool of light from my reading lamp.
I want to thank Rafa Ashraf and Berkley Publishing for supplying me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
”The Congo in Leopold’s mind was not the one of starving porters, raped hostages, emaciated rubber slaves, and severed hands. It was the empire of his”The Congo in Leopold’s mind was not the one of starving porters, raped hostages, emaciated rubber slaves, and severed hands. It was the empire of his dreams, with gigantic trees, exotic animals, and inhabitants grateful for his wise rule. Instead of going there, Leopold brought the Congo—that Congo, the theatrical production of his imagination—to himself.”
Belgium was simply not big enough for the future king. ”When he thought about the throne that would be his, he was openly exasperated. ‘Petit pays, petits gens’ (small country, small people), he once said of Belgium.” He watched as countries like Holland, Great Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Germany were colonizing Africa and other exotic isles and becoming rich off the plunder. In the 1880s, he saw his chance and claimed the lands of the Congo. He did this without any kind of referandum from his people. He knew what was best for Belgium. ”Most Belgians had paid little attention to their king’s flurry of African diplomacy, but once it was over they began to realize, with surprise, that his new colony was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. It was one thirteenth of the African continent, more than seventy-six times the size of Belgium itself.”
They had no idea the level of atrocities that would be perpetrated in the name of Belgium.
I’ve always thought of Leopold II as a 2nd tier genocidal maniac. I’d always reserved the 1st tier for Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, but after reading this book and hearing the estimated number 10 million associated with the deaths in the Congo, I have officially moved Leopold II to the 1st tier genocidal maniac. So why don’t we know more about Leopold II? Why don’t we see him as the genocidal maniac that we associate with the names Hitler and Stalin?
Could it be because he was killing black people?
Another factor is the way Leopold worked tirelessly to convince people he was a great humanitarian. He found people who would help support him in this endeavor and paid them to write reports that were favorable to his reputation in Africa. He worked equally tirelessly to squash those who came back from the Congo with the lists of atrocities they had witnessed while in Africa.
The biggest thorn in Leopold’s voluminous backside turned out to be a British shipping clerk named Edmund Morel, who noticed the amount of goods coming from the Congo that were being traded or sold at prices that would not support a living wage in the Congo. The math did not add up. The only way that Leopold could be selling goods this cheaply was if they were being acquired through slave labor. Morel went on to found a paper that continued to expose Leopold’s criminal activities in the Congo. Morel hammered away at him for the rest of his life. Additionally, Roger Casement was an Irish man who risked life and limb to obtain evidence that directly refuted the rosy picture that Leopold was selling Europe. There were also two American black men, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, who did everything they could to expose Leopold’s monstrosities to the world. There were many other people who tried their best to stop what was happening, unchecked, in the Congo.
The problem was that Europe and the United States wanted to believe Leopold.
The most famous book of celebrated author Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness was set in the real Leopold’s Congo. The famous character of Kurtz was based on a man Conrad met in the Congo.
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Should I chase butterflies today or should I lob off a few heads?
”One prototype for Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz: Léon Rom. This swashbuckling officer was known for displaying a row of severed African heads around his garden. He also wrote a book on African customs, painted portraits and landscapes, and collected butterflies.”
Léon Rom was a civilized, well educated man. So how does decorating your garden with severed African heads equate with butterfly collecting and painting portraits and landscapes?
Leopold flooded the Congo with the right sort of men. Mercenaries capable of chopping off hands, raping uncooperating women, murdering men, women, and children, and lashing men who didn’t bring enough rubber back from the jungle with ”the chicotte—a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged corkscrew strip.”
The strip this would cut off a man’s back, buttock, and legs would leave deep, permanent scars if the man was lucky, or in many cases unlucky, enough to live. *shudder*
White men felt free of all law in the Congo. “We have liberty, independence, and life with wide horizons. Here you are free and not a mere slave of society. . . . Here one is everything!” So to live as free as one would like, one must enslave others? These men had harems, money, and status, something they could never achieve working as clerks or plumbers in Europe. In the Congo, they were warlords.
They killed so many Congolese that they feared not having enough slaves to maintain the plundering of the Congo. “‘We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear,’ fretfully declared the permanent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium that year. ‘So that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert.’” It reminds me of hunters who hunted species to extinction and then bemoaned the fact that they couldn’t hunt those animals anymore. At no point did they think to themselves, maybe we are killing these animals faster than they can reproduce.
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So why cut off the hands? It seems counterproductive when you need these men to work. Every bullet had to be accounted for with Leopold’s mercenaries, so if a man used a bullet to kill game, he had to have an African hand to account for that bullet. Every African hand was then turned in for a reward. It is too sick to comprehend.
Every country in Africa has tales of horror and outrage at the hands of European colonizers. I do believe that what happened in the Congo was by far the worst atrocities on a native population in Africa. The sad part of it is that most of us don’t know anything about it. I knew some, but I didn’t know enough. The “cake” that was Africa was cut up into portions and served to the white European countries as casually as if they were discussing the fates of Africans at a garden party with their children playing at their feet and their wives bringing them slices of the Congo, Nigeria, Kenya, Algeria, South Africa, and Senegal with which they could gorge themselves.
Adam Hochschild had a difficult time getting this book published. It was as if the ghost of Leopold was still haunting and suppressing the truth. This is a brilliant and important book that exposes the truth of the Congo and the complicity which every “civilized” country played in allowing such atrocities to occur.
”After her family was murdered, she didn’t speak for a month Maman tells her, although it felt longer. She stayed in her bedroom, listening to the rus”After her family was murdered, she didn’t speak for a month Maman tells her, although it felt longer. She stayed in her bedroom, listening to the rustle of the pines in the forest that seemed to cry for her; the fear had drained her of tears. Most of the people in her village were dead. It was being alive, not the deaths, that was somehow shocking. Her existence seemed to be an accident of fate, her life spent waiting in this room in Lillian’s home, this room that was not hers. She was paralyzed, for the inevitable correction.”
The inevitable correction, when the universe finally realizes that she is still alive. It doesn’t have to be a boy with a machete and a wild look in his eyes. It could be a Biblical bolt of lightning from the sky, or maybe she just falls down dead as if her life string has been plucked.
It is hard to live when being alive feels like an offense against the natural order. When being alive feels like a mistake, as if the angel of death just missed scooping her off the earth by a fraction of inches. The swoop of the scythe makes a sound of displaced air as it...misses her.
Nobody escapes this life without losses, but for most of us it is a slow trickle spaced out over decades, so the burden grows, and we can adjust to the weight even though we feel whittled down, weaker, exposed, moved up in line to be the next one to be taken. We are the only species on Earth who knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that we will die. As children we are barely aware of that inevitability, but as we age that awareness grows steadily to the point that we have to even start preparing for it.
For Nadine, a lifetime of loss is crunched into two minutes of madness.
During the Rwandan genocide, a million people, most of them of the Tutsi tribe, were massacred in a matter of a 100 days. 10,000 people a day. Rape has always been an unfortunate part of war, but in the Rwandan genocide it was used as an act of war. It was an insidious tactic to instill fear and make sure that even the survivors were left forever scarred.
This story is not about the genocide, but about the ability of people to grieve and find the scattered pieces of themselves so that they can forge a path to a new life. It is the story of three women. I’ve already introduced you to Nadine. Let me give you an idea of the woman Lillian Carlson. She is an activist in the United States. When Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated, she is disillusioned with her ability to make a difference. She finds that she can make a difference in the lives of orphans in Rwanda. She takes in as many as she can and even more than she should have, but when children have no one she chooses to be their someone.
The third woman is Rachel Shepherd, who is searching for her father. He disappeared when she was a child. With some amateur sleuthing and the benefit of the internet, she traces him to Kwizera, the place of hope built by Lillian in Rwanda. Henry ties these three women together. He knew Lillian in Atlanta and never forgot her. He is the perfect father for Rachel, attentive, fun, and always as interested in her as he is interesting for her. He proves to be the same great substitute father for Nadine when he comes to Rwanda to find Lillian again.
He proves to be an enigma for all three women. He is amazing, and then he just disappears. He is a famous photographer, and maybe, just maybe, he sees things too clearly through the aperture of his camera.
How about this for a snapshot of Kwizera? ”The backyard, if you can call it that, is more of the same, a slash of red dirt and scrubby bushes with some kind of irrigation ditch tricking down the center like a tear. But it’s not totally hopeless. There’s a tall stack of lumber to one side, a rusty green tractor that may or may not work, and an assortment of shovels and rakes splayed on the ground. Two monkeys sit atop the tractor, examining a purple gardening glove. One flicks his tongue at it like a child might test the flavor of a lollipop.”
To some, all they see is desolation in that scene, but for me, all I see is a chance to make paradise.
Jennifer Haupt spent a month in Rwanda interviewing victims of the genocide. She was there as a journalist, but came home with a story that she felt compelled to tell. It is a novel, but like many novels nothing in this book is untrue. We must tell the stories to try to keep the dangerous fallacies of the past from becoming the future. I came away from this book thinking about how life continues after tragedy. I thought about how important it is for survivors to continue to live for those who perished. I thought about how hard it is to find a path when the universe feels so arbitrarily brutal. This book is about finding a place beyond grief and about gathering those around you who need you as much you need them and discovering together a path that will raise you all up together.
I want to thank Jennifer Haupt and Central Avenue Publishing for sending me an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.
”A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child has to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own”A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child has to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization.”
When a real estate agent turns up missing, Kurt Wallander of the Ystad Swedish police catches the case along with most of the department. They have a general idea of where she went missing, but they have few clues as to what has caused her disappearance. She and her husband are very religious, and Wallander finds himself thinking ”what it feels like to believe in God.”
As we learn more about Wallander, we realize there are good reasons why he is estranged from his ex-wife, his daughter, and his father. We also start to understand the frustrations that the other cops have working with him. He is bloody brilliant most of the time between those other moments of complete befuddlement. He has a single minded purpose in tracking down a missing woman, a killer, or solving a puzzle of a crime. If I were missing, I’d want Kurt Wallander trying to find me. He devotes himself so exclusively to a case that he has little time for those around him, or eating, or sleeping. He makes these leaps in logic that baffle his fellow police officers, but what they don’t realize is that while they are...having a life...Wallander is still ticking over the aspects of the case.
Wallander makes a breakthrough in the case, and this is one of those moments when time is of the essence, and he takes the day off to be with his daughter. He is trying to do the right thing, attempting to completely divorce himself from the case to pay attention to his daughter, but it turns into a missed opportunity. I, too, was frustrated with Wallander at this point.
They find the severed finger of a black man at the scene where they believe the real estate agent went missing. This turns out to be a digit that once belonged to Victor Mabatha of South Africa. This book came out in 1993 in Sweden and 1998 in an English translation, so apartheid was still fresh in everyone’s mind. During the course of the plot, Wallander and Mabatha intersect, and Victor gives this impassioned explanation for why he is the way he is, which is the quote I chose to lead this review with.
So a missing person case becomes a nonsensical international case somehow involving a planned assassination in South Africa. Why are these people in Sweden? Henning Mankill adds some additional spice to the plot with a demented, immoral Russian named Konovalenko. He runs the sole of his boot down the face of a person he just killed to close their eyes. Somehow that made me shudder more than the actual killing of the person. Maybe because we all deserve some semblance of reverence in death.
I would be a very considerate serial killer.
I found it interesting that Mankill takes us from the mind of Wallander to the political musings of several politicians in South Africa. We start to discover the extent of the conspiracy. The question is, can Wallander put the pieces together in time to obstruct a world tragedy?
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That looks like the face of a man who put two and two together and got sixteen.
I hope most of you have had the chance to watch the spot on performance by Kenneth Branagh in the 12 episode BBC TV series. They scrambled the order of the books, which required some changes to the backstory, but not enough to bother me. I have a set of the Wallander books and plan to read them all. I set them aside to watch the TV series, which does break a half a dozen Keeten reading rules, but certainly seeing the TV episode of this book did not detract from my reading enjoyment. A story well told can be experienced many times with new insights with each retelling.
”Up in this air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Her”Up in this air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.”
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Karen Blixen in 1913. Her whole life was before her.
When Karen Blixen married her second cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in 1914 and followed along as a devoted wife should to help him run a coffee plantation in Kenya, I’m sure she had an idea of what her life was to be, but the story of our lives generally deviates from the perceptions our youthful fancies conceive. Her marriage was in shambles. Her husband proved a poor manager of the farm, and his sexual indiscretions had left her with a parting gift of a case of syphilis. She let him live, which was touch and go, booted him off the farm, and took over the management of the Kenyan farming enterprise.
Baroness Blixen kept her title though.
Most people would have, given the nature of these events, thrown in the towel and made their way back to Denmark, battered and bruised and hoped that people had short memories of them ever being gone, but Blixen was made of sterner stuff. She decided she was going to turn this series of unfortunate events into a triumph, and for a decade and a half she did just that.
She created an oasis for her friends to visit. ”To the great wanderers amongst my friends, the farm owed its charm, I believe, to the fact that it was stationary and remained the same whenever they came to it. They had been over vast countries and had raised and broken their tents in many places, now they were pleased to round my drive that was steadfast as the orbit of a star. They liked to be met by familiar faces, and I had the same servants all the time that I was in Africa. I had been on the farm longing to get away, and they came back to it longing for books and linen sheets, and the cool atmosphere in a big shuttered room.”
I can imagine the thrill that they must have felt when they first spotted the red roof of her house and knew that they were about to step out of Africa and back into Europe for an evening of discourse, food, and wine.
She collected an eclectic group of friends, mostly lost Europeans who escaped to Africa from something or came in search of themselves. None made a bigger impression on her than Denys Finch Hatton (played by Robert Redford in the movie). ”He would have cut a figure in any age, for he was an athlete, a musician, a lover of art and a fine sportsman. He did cut a figure in his own age, but he did not quite fit in anywhere. His friends in England always wanted him to come back, they wrote out plans and schemes for a career for him there, but Africa was keeping him.”
I certainly understand the dilemma of being a person out of time. I believe I’ve been born into one of the most boring eras ever in the history of the world. Fortunately for me, I have the ability to time travel and escape this world at will by simply opening the pages of a book. By the way, I’ve just returned from an expedition to a coffee plantation circa 1925 in Kenya where I drank wine with Baroness Blixen, listened to the lions roar, and luxuriated in the stillness that follows on the heels of such a proclamation of dominance.
There is the moment when Blixen witnessed giraffes being loaded on a ship to be sent to Hamburg. ”They could only just have room to stand in the narrow case. The world had suddenly shrunk, changed and closed around them.
They could not know or imagine the degradation to which they were sailing. For they were proud and innocent creatures, gentle amblers of the great plains; they had not the least knowledge of captivity, cold, stench, smoke, and mange, nor of the terrible boredom in the world in which nothing is ever happening.”
Will they dream of their country? Do I wish that they can? Or do I hope they forget the freedom they once had?
I’ve been to several zoos in my lifetime, and someone will have to hold a very large gun to my head to ever have me set foot in one again. When I go to a zoo, I don’t see the majestic animals or their beautiful fur or the pretty colors of their plumage. All I see is a deadness in their eyes, an accusation of, how can you do this to me? How can you let these smelly, noisy creatures mock me, yell at me, rattle my cage, and stare at me when they should be bowing their heads in reverence?
So do you free the giraffes and watch them gallop away? Do you shoot them in their alien looking heads so they die free? Or do you do what we all generally do in such circumstances, which is to watch them be hauled away in chains? We think about the sadness of it and then move our thoughts on to something else.
Blixen experienced the typical problems that afflict farmers everywhere, which is Mother Nature not cooperating.
Drought.
”One year the long rains failed.
That is a terrible, tremendous experience, and the farmer who has lived through it will never forget it. Years afterwards, away from Africa, in the wet climate of a Northern country, he will start up at night, at the sound of a sudden shower of rain, and cry, ‘At last, at last.’”
My father is a farmer, and though I’ve never seen him do a jig, there was one year, after months of drought, that a gully washer appeared over the horizon and dropped four inches of precious rain on us. His smile looked like he was capable of just about any expression of joy, even dancing, in that moment when the first drops began to fall.
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Karen Blixen showing some of the elegance her visitors in Kenya must have enjoyed.
Drought, grasshopper plague, and being situated too high in altitude for coffee beans to grow as well as they should, all contributed to the final demise of the Blixen Kenyan farm. In 1931, the place was sold, and she moved back to Denmark. There was probably relief for a while from the stress and strain of the daily trials and tribulations of keeping a farm in working order, but I’m sure, within a matter of months and maybe even weeks, she felt the loss of her home as astutely as those giraffes missed their home from their cage in Hamburg. The only way she could return to it was to write about it. With pen in hand, her blood could move a bit more briskly about her body, her hands could remember the labor, and her mind could sift back through those conversations she had with the people she cared the most about. Highly Recommended!
”Being alone in an aeroplane for even a short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your ow”Being alone in an aeroplane for even a short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind---such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.”
Beryl Markham was the first person to fly solo over the Atlantic from England to North America. She was also the first woman to fly solo East to West. She made it to the coast of Nova Scotia by the skin of her teeth. Ice had clogged the air intake to her last fuel tank, greatly reducing the amount of fuel getting to the carburetor. The Vega Gull’s engine kept dying. She kept nursing it back to life until finally the coast appears. She crash landed without killing herself and put herself in the record books.
She grew up in Kenya and always wanted to do what the boys were doing. She had a native boy who was a close friend. This association allowed her to learn the ways of the tribe. She has to be one of the few white girls from that period of time or any period of time who was allowed to go on hunts with the men.
”So there are many Africas. There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa--and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else’s, but likely to be haughtily disagreed with by all those who believe in some other Africa.”
There are a lot of factors in how people experience a place. As travellers, it might rain the whole time you are somewhere, or you might have one rude experience with a waiter (Paris and I should have knocked the bastard on his doughy fat ass), or you might be experiencing the final days of a doomed love affair. On the other hand, the weather might be sunny and breezy, or you might have an amazing hour with a knowledgeable art curator, or you might find new love. All of those factors can certainly color our perceptions of a place. When you live anywhere for an extended period of time, like Beryl did in Kenya, you have a better chance of experiencing a true Kenya.
But then there is a difference growing up an English privileged rose who has horses and all that her heart desires compared to say a young black Kenyan woman who might have a completely different experience growing up in Africa. Beryl made one generalization about a local tribe that smacked of the imperial colonial view of a local population.
"But physically the Kikuyu are the least impressive of all. It may be because they are primarily agriculturists and generations of looking to the earth for the livelihood have dulled what fire there might once have been in their eyes and what will to excel might have been in their hearts. They have lost inspiration for beauty. They are a hardworking people from the viewpoint of Empire, a docile and therefore a useful people. Their character is constant, even strong, but it is lustreless. "
I have a friend who happens to be a Kenyan from the Kikuyu tribe. I shared this quote with her, and she had a few opinions about the description
”The wench!! (that was my favorite) yet another ignorant white-privileged bourgeois colonial story which paints a pretty picture of the land but knows next to jack shit about the locals. Only what they saw in passing. I would gladly tell the dead colonial to stick to horses and planes. But really? We lost our spark because of the earth? We killed for that land. We shed blood and tears for it. Most of it white... And we continue to struggle for it. To buy our own to raise our children on. And what did she mean lost our spark? We don't have diamond eyes. Or wear contacts. Or have eyes that shine like the ocean blue eyes of a Victorian damsel who wouldn’t know dust if it drowned them... See? And my thoughts are a lot less polite.”Mwanamali Mari
Yes, I know I’m a pot stirrer. I probably missed my calling as a journalist. Of course, all of us know that, when we make a generalized statement about a culture or a people, we leave ourselves susceptible to criticism. The point is during this period of time, in the pre-world war two era especially, books are rife with irritatingly simplistic, condescending statements about native population. This was the only one I caught. Mwanamali, reading this book, might catch even more than the one that I did, but in her defense, Beryl did love many native Kenyans that she met and worked with over the decades of her life.
Her father experienced some financial difficulties due to a lack of rain...something, being the son of a farmer, that I’m very familiar with. Beryl, as a teenager, became a horse trainer and did well. It was a boy’s club, of course, so it took longer than it should for her to get the business she deserved, but then Beryl was not unfamiliar with being at a disadvantage from the moment she came out of the womb...a girl. There was this great moment in the book where a filly called Wise Child, that Beryl had resurrected from the dead, races against the top stallion in the racing world at the time. She did such a great job setting the scene and then describing the race that I felt like I was as invested in the outcome of that race as Beryl. I had tears in my eyes.
Markham is a lyrical writer whether she is describing horses, planes, landscape or even the process of writing. ”Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it. I sit in a labyrinth of solitude jabbing at its bulwarks with the point of a pen--jabbing, jabbing.”
I did have a moment of real doubt when Beryl took a job flying big game hunters into the wilds of Kenya to shoot elephants. The money was really good, but there is something soulless about shooting elephants. She even said, ”It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of the preposterous things that men do.” You may not pull the trigger, but if you are helping these hunters find their prey via an airplane, you are as responsible for the death of the elephant as the men who fire the bullet. She had some wonderful, inspiring descriptions of how smart the elephants were and how many times they would fool the hunters. Those stories confirmed me in my belief that elephants are intelligent sacred animals and should be left in peace. So why do some people feel so driven to hunt these beautiful animals or put themselves in other death defying situations? One of the Kenyan guides remarked to Markham: ”White men pay for danger--we poor cannot afford it.”
It kind of makes it all sound fake. Men trying to prove themselves in manufactured situations.
I did have some issues with Beryl, but I also found her to be a groundbreaker and certainly a woman whom other women can look up to. She took on men toe to toe and proved she could compete with them whether it be on the horse track, in the air, or in the bedroom. She was friends with Karen Blixen, better known by her pen name of Isak Dinesen. She was such good friends with her that she even shared a man with her by the name of Denys Finch Hatton, an adventurer and hunter. The interesting thing about this book is that her love life has been carefully kept off screen. Markham was notorious for her marriages and her affairs. She was attractive to men, and she was attracted to men. Her love life fits with the way she lived her whole life as free as any man and more so than most.
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