"The Girls of Atomic City"

The Girls of Atomic City (Denise Kiernan)



I had high hopes for this book, but I didn't make it past page 40; despite the fascinating story it's attempting to tell, the book is undone by two flaws. The smaller is that the author jumps around too much, attempting to juggle 8 women's lives; limiting the book to 2 or 3 would have been a big help.
But in the end I'm not sure this would have made any difference as what what really dooms the book is the author's inexcusable over-writing. In Kiernan's world, coal can't just be burned; instead the energy inside "could be released in dreamy blue flame and bestow its power on its liberators". The entire book is written like this, and it becomes incredibly annoying extremely quickly. The passage that finally drove me to give up is the author describing someone's hair:

She wore her dark brown hair parted on the left, undulating tousles washing past her prominent cheeks, ebbing again at her gymnast's shoulders, before landing with a final bounce at the top of a spine that exhibited the kind of impeccable posture grown out of a lifetime of grooming and horseback riding.

If you made it through that whole disaster of a sentence without gagging a little bit you're a stronger reader than me. Or as the author might write: The reader's eyes washed past the horribly overdone prose, his interest ebbing at the tiring text, before his desire to continue to read the book landed with a final thud as he tossed the book in the donation pile.
Take a pass on this one.



Grade: F

"No Picnic"

No Picnic (Julian Thompson)

A personal history of the Falkland Islands conflict from the commander of the English forces there. I enjoyed this book well enough, but the author assumes familiarity with the conflict; I strongly recommend reading something like The Battle for the Falklands first or you'll be totally lost. This book is much shorter than that one, and I might recommend reading this one right after it as a nice little chaser.

Grade: C+

Mastering the West: Rome and Carthage at War (Dexter Hoyos)

On reflection, my assessment of Carthage Must Be Destroyed has cooled; Luckily, my second attempt at the material was this book, which I quite enjoyed. This one covers covers the dispute between Rome and Carthage starting with the Mamertines in Sicily asking both cities for help down through Carthage being razed to the ground (spoiler alert). Parts of the military history can be slightly dry, but that's really my only complaint; in general this is an excellent history of the entire conflict.

Grade: A-

The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil (Stephen Collins)

Okay, I'm going to admit it: I read this book because of the title. You can probably guess what it's about from the cover; our hero Dave's boring life is disrupted when he grows a gigantic beard that is evil. Actually, I'm not sure the beard really is evil; it seems more like an agent of chaos disrupting the boring, dysfunctional society that Dave lives in. Either way, I enjoyed reading this; it's a quick little read, but the art is great. I might recommend getting it out of the library since you can finish it in under an hour, but otherwise I don't have a bad word to say.

Grade: B+

"Fall of Giants"

Fall of Giants (Ken Follett)

I made it 300 pages into this before giving up. This is a historical novel about a bunch of different families starting just before World War I, and it turned into a real slog rather quickly. I couldn't put down a different Follett book, The Pillars of the Earth, and I really feel the difference is a simple one: Pillars of the Earth has one, single overarching narrative thread that may touch many people and subplots, but keeps everything tied together; Fall of Giants is missing this, and is instead very, very loosely woven from five or six threads that barely rub up against each other. Almost every character's thread is interesting, but jumping away from them to dive into another, almost totally unrelated one kills all the momentum, and eventually makes the book a chore to read. I'd recommend taking a pass on this one.

Grade: C-

"Commie Girl in the O.C."

Commie Girl in the O.C. (Rebecca Schoenkopf)

Commie Girl in the O.C. begs many questions: Why am I reading Commie Girl in the O.C.? Why do I own Commie Girl in the O.C.? I wish I could answer these questions, but I can't. The mystery surrounding Commie Girl in the O.C. is, I'm afraid, more interesting than the book itself, which mostly reads like a series of newspaper columns or short blog posts from somewhere in the 2000s, and which I quickly found myself putting down to read The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America (review possibly forthcoming). I don't recommend Commie Girl in the O.C.; even at under $7 from Amazon, it's just not worth the extensional crisis.

Grade: D

"The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish"

The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish: My Life in Churchill's School of Spies (Noreen Riols)

I'm really torn about this book; the author's story working in SOE during World War II is very interesting, but the book really seems to need a good editor. The raw material of the author's story is fascinating and she has a great voice, but it reads like a tape recorder was put in front of her and she told a bunch of interesting stories; I think the book could be vastly improved if it was set in chronological order, or at least had a stronger main narrative. As it is it's like spending an afternoon hearing the author reminisce, and while that's no bad thing, in its current form I ended up reading it in an afternoon and then forgetting most of it.

Grade: B