The Alice Network by Kate Quinn ***

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn tells the story of two women racked by guilt and self-loathing. Evelyn Gardiner was recruited to be a spy in 1915, where she was brutalized and tortured. She survived, but lived out her life with guilt, refusing the medals she was awarded. Charlotte St. Clair lost her brother to PTSD and suicide. She lost track of her cousin Rose who was in France. In 1947, Eve and Charlie band together to return to France to chase their respective demons. I did not feel that their redemption was a sufficient reward for all the brutality and evil they faced.

If you do not want to read an extended torture session, skip chapter 30. However, if you do not want to read about evil and brutality, you might skip the entire book.

The book alternated between Eve’s ordeal in 1915, and the two women traveling through France in 1947 driven by young Finn Kilgore in his Lagonda LG6, financed by Charlie hacking her grandmother’s pearls. The 1915 thread included the deprivations of war, psychological abuse, and torture. The pain in 1947 was mostly guilt.

Eve represented women who didn’t accept the sexism of 1915. “Eve thought. I don’t want a husband, I don’t want babies, I don’t want a parlor rug and a wedding band. … There was a war on; she wanted to fight.”

Charlie was a privileged teen who got pregnant in college. “He probably talked to the other boys in his fraternity, because I started getting dates all of a sudden. I went ahead and screwed them too.” She was also obsessed with her brother who committed suicide after returning from World War II, and her cousin Rose who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France. In 1947, Charlie was motivated by visions of her lost cousin Rose. “Because you followed a ghost all the way from Southampton, Rose whispered. Because you are a little bit crazy.”

The book contains many observations of sexism in 1915 and 1947, but the sexism has little relevance to the plot.

Charlie is good at math. “1947 was hell for any girl who would rather work calculus problems than read Vogue.” Finn called Charlie a “wee little adding machine.” This also had little relevance to the plot. Random mathematical metaphors were sprinkled throughout the book, as were random references to Charlie’s evolving pregnancy.

All the women were trapped by gender stereotypes.

In the author’s note, the reader learns that much of the book’s details are based on history. This research does not redeem the book.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Eve’s redemptions: Eve is abused and tortured as a spy and abandoned to spend her life with guilt and despair. She refused her medals, “The Médaille de Guerre, the Croix de Guerre with palm, the Croix de la Légion d’Honneur . . . the Order of the British Empire.” “Who cared about praise when the failures were so much bigger than the victories? That miracle chance in ’15 to kill the Kaiser—failed. Stopping the assault on Verdun—failed. Keeping the network together after Lili’s arrest—failed.” Eve’s redemption followed this pattern of insufficient victories. [She shot her torturer and learned that her guilt was based on lies.]

Charlie’s redemption: Charlie’s travels through France in 1947, accompanied by the troubled Eve, were a pleasant vacation compared to Eve’s 1915 ordeal. In the end, she released her obsessions, married Eve’s driver, Finn Kilgore, and kept the baby.

For no apparent reason, Eve became a big game hunter.

 “As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.”

Check out https://amzn.to/2SpaDMN to see my books.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for book recommendations. 

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus *****

Lessons in Chemistry by BonnieGarmus is set in a time (pre-Civil Rights Act of 1964) when the police might ask a rape victim, “Would you like to make a statement of regret [for defending yourself]?” A time when a woman might be fired for becoming pregnant. A time when any woman was assumed to be a secretary and available. Elizabeth Zott is a scientist, a chemist. All this and more happened to her but she was never defeated and (no surprise) victorious in the end. A humorous celebration of intelligent, independent, and strong women.

Elizabeth Zott and Calvin Evans work at the Hastings Research Institute in Commons, California, “Commons is beautiful. Best weather in the world.” He is a world-renowned chemist (Nobel Prize nominee). She is a chemist without a PhD. They are both exploited by the incompetent Donatti, head of Chemistry. They fall in love and don’t get married, but she becomes pregnant and has a daughter (named Mad). Imagine everything that might happen bad to a single, unwed, atheist, female scientist in the 1950s. That is Elizabeth Zott.

Her daughter is an early reader. “[She] had been reading since age three and, now, at age five, was already through most of Dickens.” They have a dog, Six-thirty, who knows over 500 words and is smarter than most of the male characters in the book.

Some interesting quotes:

“You have a lot of nerve,” Donatti said. “You know very well women do not continue to work when pregnant. But you—you’re not only with child, you’re unwed. It’s disgraceful.” “Pregnancy is a normal condition. It is not disgraceful. It is how every human being starts.”

When a strange man touched her pregnant belly…

“Remove your hand,” she said, “or live to regret it.” “Bada bada bada!” he sang, thumping her stomach like a bongo drum. “Bada bada boom,” she rejoined, swinging her handbag directly into his crotch, the impact of which was compounded by a heavy stone mortar she’d picked up earlier that day from Chemical Supply. The man gasped, then doubled over in pain.

Elizabeth’s response to another man preparing to rape her…

She shook her head in wonder. She had no idea why men believed women found male genitalia impressive or scary. She bent over and reached into her bag. “I know who I am!” he shouted thickly, thrusting himself at her. “The question is, who the hell do you think you are?” “I’m Elizabeth Zott,” she said calmly, withdrawing a freshly sharpened fourteen-inch chef’s knife. But she wasn’t sure he’d heard. He’d fainted dead away.

“As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.”

Check out https://amzn.to/2SpaDMN to see my books.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for book recommendations.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin *****

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin “is a novel about work” and “is equally about love.” The work is the development of video games. The Love is Sam and Sadie who knew each other before college but really got together in Cambridge. She went to MIT and he went to Harvard. Theirs is a creative, collaborative love – no sex. They design and develop extraordinary video games together. The third person is Marx, the producer. Together the three of them founded a very successful company, Unfair Games. Marx and Sam are in Love. Marx and Sadie are in Love. If you love video games or Love, you’ll love this book.

Some quotes about love:

"Friendship,” Marx said, “is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.”

“I agree. And what? Your grandfather owns a Donkey Kong machine? That is so cool! I love those old machines. What kind of restaurant is it?”

“It’s a pizza place,” Sam said.

“What? I love pizza! It’s my favorite food on earth. Can you eat all the pizza you want for free?”

Sam nodded while expertly annihilating two ducks.

“That’s, like, my dream. You’re living my actual dream.

“I’m making a game!” Sam rambled on about Ichigo and Sadie, and Anders, who was not a gamer, looked at him blankly, but kindly. “It seems, my friend, you have found love?”

“Anders, you talk about love more than any mathematician I know.”

[Zoe] loved nothing so much as going outside, stripping, and playing by herself. Her mother had once discovered her this way behind their house and had made Zoe see a therapist. (The therapist determined that Zoe had the healthiest body image of any teenage girl he’d ever met.)

“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”

“Love you, Sammy,” Dong Hyun said.

“I love you, too, Grandpa.”

For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do.

Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not?

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is equally about love.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.”

Check out https://amzn.to/2SpaDMN to see my books.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for book recommendations. 

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah ****

Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism … in the gulf between cultures and continents." Afterlives is about Ilyas Hassan, his sister Afiya, and Hamza, starting with World War I and going through to World War II. The Africans live their lives in peace except when European wars are fought in Africa where they are killed in great numbers to settle European conflicts. The history of the first half of the twentieth century as told from East Africa.

Both Ilyas and Hamza are German Schutztruppe askari during World War I. Hamza returns to marry Ilyas’ sister Afiya. They have a child, Ilyas Junior. Hamza searches for the missing Ilyas Senior. The book chronicles life with the juxtaposition between European violence, contempt, prejudice, and brutality, and the quotidian life of the Africans when left to themselves.

While the Europeans are interested in maintaining their prestige and class hierarchy, the Africans are gossiping and making small talk. Among the Schutztruppe askari, the German officers abuse the askari, but the askari are exempt from menial labor. Those tasks belong to the carrier ranks. In the town, Africans improve their lot by marriage and learning skills, such as bookkeeping, trading, and carpentry. The Africans invest in boats and machinery, while the Europeans only fight.

Much is made of the ability to read and write.

African aspiration: “He thought he would look for [a mosque], to have a wash and for the company. In so many places he had traveled there were no mosques, and he missed them, not for prayers but for the sense of being one of the many.”

European aspiration: “Make it what they called A White Man’s Country, … to remove all Indians and only allow Europeans but keep the Africans as laborers and servants, with a sprinkling of some savage pastoralists in a reserve for spectacle.”

“As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.”

Check out https://amzn.to/2SpaDMN to see my books.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for book recommendations. 

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder ****

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder is a hagiography of Paul Farmer, the founder and driving force behind Partners in Health (PIH). Paul Farmer and PIH began in Haiti with the objective of providing free universal health care. From www.pih.org – “Dr. Paul Farmer (1959-2022) co-founded Partners In Health based on the belief that everyone deserves quality health care. Paul cared for the sick, trained generations of clinicians, and transformed health care policies–saving millions of lives and inspiring a movement toward global health equity.”

Paul Farmer built hospitals where conventional wisdom said they would be unsustainable and not cost-effective. He staffed them with local people that he trained. In one year they had two million patient interactions. A similar patient load in the U.S. might have a budget of over one billion dollars. The budget in Haiti was sixteen million!

His public health philosophy included water treatment, nutritional support, and building houses, in addition to medical healthcare.

Before Dr. Farmer, the conventional wisdom was to cure ordinary TB and provide hospice care for those with multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB. Dr. Farmer pushed his philosophy that no life is worth less than another. He drove down the cost of treating MDR and changed the WHO recommendation. He did the same for AIDS.

“As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.”

Check out https://amzn.to/2SpaDMN to see my books.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for book recommendations.