Books like Immunity

All of Donna Leon's books are rich with colors and textures of contemporary Venice, including the amazing aromas of elegant sauces and tangy citrus. Death at La Fenice was her very first, with an introduction to Guido Brunetti, a deep and compassionate police detective.

Cerebral detectives with an undercurrent of emotion can be fascinating, and Leon’s Guido Brunetti is one of the best. Like Le Carre’s George Smiley, Brunetti is likable, thoughtful, introspective, and slightly lethargic. While Smiley is distant, Brunetti’s emotions are often on display, in a good way. Add the rich and complex history of Venice, and a startling performance at Teatro La Fenice, and Leon’s first novel, published in 1992, is a wonderful debut.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, nearly 40% of the Hawaii population was Japanese, triggering hasty assumptions by America’s political leaders: collaboration with Japan, possible spies. Federal politicians wanted to incarcerate all Japanese in the islands, and those living on America’s vital west coast. There were rumors of dormant cells coming awake to overcome the Hawaiian islands.

Of more than 150,000 Japanese in Hawaii, only 1,200 were ultimately imprisoned, reflecting powerful community support, and earning empathy from federal decisonmakers. The small number of imprisoned Japanese-Americans in Hawaii was very different from along the west coast, where some 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forcibly removed to internment centers, mostly located in desolate parts of the US.

But not in Hawaii. How did this happen?

Author Tom Coffman, a longtime journalist in the islands, presents fascinating stories about how and why officials chose to respect these longtime productive citizens, and… show more.

The Famous “Lawrence of Arabia” has written his first hand account of his exploits in Syria and Arabia against the Ottoman Turkish Army in WWI—three times. This highly educated British Maverick, did something that no one thought possible when he lived with, and united, the many disparate Bedouin tribes in a common cause against the Ottoman Turks. Operating on General Sir Edmund Allenby’s right flank, Lawrence moved like a desert wind and smashed the railways the Turks relied upon to feed the garrisons in vital outposts like Aquaba, Medina and eventually Damascus. Here is a book that Lawrence completed, then simply threw into the fires of his hearth, being unsatisfied with his work. He then rewrote the entire 660 page tome from memory, and this manuscript was stolen in a train station while he was traveling in England. The book we have today is then his third draft of his… show more.

I love the absolutely authentic atmosphere of this book – the clothes, the music, the booze -- and the exploration of the dark side of the 1920s.

I find some of the characters sympathetic, some repellent, and some impossible to understand, just as in real life. Regardless, I feel that I really get to know them by the end of the book, even if I still don’t understand them. I can’t help but make comparisons with that time period and now, a century later. So much has changed, yet so much remains the same.

I’ll be honest that it can be a depressing read, so I have to be in the right mood for it, but when I am, nothing else will satisfy.

I cannot remember in which of his many short stories I read it, but the great Argentine writer Jorge Borges put into the mouth of one of his inimitable characters a line that has never left me: “I have often begun the study of metaphysics but have always been interrupted by happiness.” Borges was the master of the unexpected, describing situations no one could have foreseen. I have read everything he wrote and read his stories over and over again. 

The ones I like best deal with bravery and cowardice but also with time and how time can change what we think happened in the past out of all recognition. In The Other Death, a man who ran away during a great battle, dying forty years later of natural causes, describes in his delirium how he had fought bravely.

Those who heard him provide this first-hand account to the… show more.

Many an idealistic young law student like me felt that jolt in our spine early on when we saw up in the balcony of that courthouse a sleepy Scout being told, “Stand up, Jean Louise. Your father’s passin’.”

The movie is as faithful to the novel as the medium would allow. The novel is told entirely from Scout’s POV and not only focuses upon the racism of the time and place, but also upon her coming of age as a tomboy and being told to act “As a little girl should.”

The book offers more to those of us for whom the rule of law and not of men is a passion, especially in Finch’s closing: “There is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of Rockefeller, a stupid man the equal of Einstein… That institution, gentlemen, is a court.” 

I had always thought it unfair how the bull in a bullfight was worn down until he was ready to be killed, how the bull had no chance. And then I read Hemingway’s book and learned that fairness had nothing to do with it.

Death is, and was meant to be, a certainty for the bull; danger and the possibility of death are a certainty for the man. How the danger of death is approached made a bullfight, and not just a bullfight, great.

The bravery and the “calm indifference” make the bullfighter worthy of respect. I discovered this book is not really about bullfighting at all; it is about courage and what it means to live and die well.

Dunstan Ramsey is not supposed to be the main character, but the story cannot survive without him.

Ramsey drew my affection during my impressionable thirties. He was modest and kind, and showed an inner strength that was expressed with patience and good humor. He also represented a dramatic figure who was new to me, the obscure hero who stands outside of the spotlight and causes important things to happen.

Ramsey’s story is full and nuanced enough to enrich three complete novels, The Deptford Trilogy, each with its own kind heroes, though not so modest as Ramsey himself.

First, you need to know that I love octopus. They are my favorite citizens of this planet (don't tell my cat!) So of course everyone who knows me recommended this book. I loved the gentle, meandering path that every character took towards the goal. Reading this felt like watching ribbons weave together, slowly and gently, making unexpected connections as the weaving progressed. The bittersweet outcome is... well, that would be telling. Go. Read.

My father, who had spent three years at sea before going to college, used to tell me stories of adventures in the Pacific when I was a small boy, which is perhaps the reason I was drawn to Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad’s story of a failed romantic, a hero in all his youthful dreams who became notorious as a coward and then known everywhere as the truly heroic Lord Jim. 

The story of living with, and then overcoming, my own cowardice was not some made-up tale of the past for me; it was, and it remains, a reminder of things I should have done and did not and what, if anything, I did later to make things right.