rocketjk's 2023 reading travels

I've had fun charting my travels the last thirteen years. 2022's reading brought me to only 14 countries, including the U.S., and 11 states within the U.S.

I didn't really do much globe trotting last year. A big part of that has been my ongoing project of reading from a rather long list of books about African American History and the history of racism in America. So a large percentage of my reading fell into the "U.S. non-state specific" category. There were also a few "non-country specific" books.

As always, I don't select my reading to purposefully "travel" in any particular way. Rather, I just have fun seeing where my more random reading choices take me! I'll be writing at greater length about each book on my 2022 50-Book Challenge thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/347158. Finally, while I do add every book I read to my list in this top post, I only add individual posts to describe books that are, at least tangentially, to do with the general theme of the group.

ALTERNATE WORLDS
Husaquahr
The River of Dancing Gods by Jack L. Chalker

NON-COUNTRY SPECIFIC
Show - The Magazine of the Performing Arts, January 1962
The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle (fairy tales)
Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
The Missouri Review - Volume 21 Number 2: Men edited by Morgan Speer

AFRICA
Sudan
Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas

ASIA
Vietnam
Sappers in the Wire: The Life and Death of Firebase Mary Ann by Keith William Nolan (military history)

CENTRAL AMERICA
El Salvador
The Massacre at El Mazote by Mark Danner (history)

EUROPE
England
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Call for the Dead by John le Carre
Mapp and Lucia by E.F. Benson
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey (memoir)

France
The Other Side of Silence by Philip Kerr
Intrigue in Paris by Sterling Noel

Germany
The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr

Ireland
Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty (short stories)

Poland
The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Russia
Mission to Moscow by Joseph E. Davies (memoir)

Ukraine
Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan

Wales
On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin

MIDDLE EAST
Egypt
Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery

Palestine
Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between by Laila M. El-Haddad (memoir)

NORTH AMERICA
The United States
Non-State Specific
The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known by Dean Acheson
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild
Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America: A Biography by William E. Gienapp
Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott
An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America by Andrew Young (memoir)
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (short stories - reread)
No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones
Good for a Laugh: A New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life by Bill Madden (biography)
The Trackers by Charles Frazier
Out of the Red by Red Smith (sports columns)
Unseen: Unpublished Black History from the New York Times Photo Archives by Darcy Eveleigh, Dana Canedy, Damien Cave, and Rachel L. Swarns
Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Good Fight by Shirley Chisholm (memoir)
Great Sports Stories edited by Herman L. Masin (short stories)
An Old Guy Who Feels Good by Worden McDonald (memoir)

Arizona
Hunting Badger by Tony Hillerman

California
Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys by Steven Gaines (biography)

Florida
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

Kentucky
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Louisiana
Those Other People by Mary King O'Donnell

Maryland
How Sleeps the Beast by Don Tracy

Massachusetts
Three Thirds of a Ghost by Timothy Fuller

Mississippi
Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson (biography)
The Devil's Punchbowl by Greg Iles
Natchez Burning by Greg Iles

SOUTH AMERICA
Non-Country Specific
Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil by James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz

Brazil
Enigmas of Spring by Joao Almino

My first book of 2023 was The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer. We are in Poland in the early 20th century. Poland is still part of the Russian Empire rather than independent, and the Czar is still on his throne in Moscow. Occasional revolutions against the occupiers rock Poland, but for the most part the Poles live life resigned to dealing with their Russian occupiers, who seem to intrude on their lives on a daily basis very little. Yasha Mazur lives in the Eastern Polish city of Lublin. In fact, he is known as the Magician of Lublin. He is a master of slight of hand, hypnotism and acrobatics. Cards, both marked and unmarked, fly from his fingers. Never a lock has he been confronted with that he could not spring open in a few seconds. He is known, in fact as The Magician of Lublin, and his name is known around the countryside and as far as the great city of Warsaw. Tasha things himself an honest man. Although he is pals with the members of the thieves brotherhood in Lublin, who clamor at him to join their ranks ("With your skills, you could skim the cream right off the top!"), Yasha refuses to use his talents for crime. Monogamy, however, is another issue. Yasha has a loving wife, Esther, who waits patiently at home for him during his long performing road trips, even knowing that he has mistresses along his route. Yasha has a mistress in Lublin and has been having a longterm affair with his young performance assistant. Most alluring of all is the beautiful widow in Warsaw, Emilia. Professionally, Yasha should be at the top of the world. He is held back only by the fact that he is a Jew in Poland. Though he is well known, the very best theaters are closed to him, and the fees his manager is able to obtain for him are well below what his status should be bringing. Emelia is the well-meaning temptress. In Western Europe, or even in America, she tells Yasha, such antisemitism is no longer paramount, especially if he were to convert. Yasha must forsake Esther once and for all, run off to France or England with Emelia and her teenage daughter, where, once he has converted, they will be married. The problem is that it will all take money that neither of them have. Yasha believes in God, and identifies as a Jew, but has very little use for the trappings of Orthodox Judaism. Until, that is, he wanders into a synagogue a couple of times during the story and finds himself moved by the fervent belief of the worshippers, whose prayers remind him of his childhood in his father's house, where religion was all encompassing.

So here are the questions of practice and morality that Singer sets up for us in the early pages of this exhilarating blast of a novel, utilizing his standard whirlwind style of prose that crams details into each setting that serves to drop his readers straight into the maelstrom of daily life on the streets of urban Poland and in the minds of his characters.

Here are my favorite two lines in the book (especially the second):

"He stood staring at a spot on the door latch, feeling hemmed in on all sides by uncanny forces. Behind him the silence rustled and snorted."

Singer skillfully sets up these choices for Yasha, the choices that must be made between fame and love and pleasure on the one side and loyalty, self-respect and morality on the other. As always with Singer, this book was written in Yiddish. The English translation was by Elaine Gottleib and Isaac B. Singer's nephew, Joseph Singer.

Well I finally got out of the United States for the first time since my very first book of the year, reading The Lady from Zagreb, the 10th book in Philip Kerr's excellent Bernie Gunther. Gunther is a policeman/investigator in Nazi-era Germany. Although he hates the Nazi, he keeps getting pulled into one task after another at the behest of the Party's highest figures. Bernie spends a lot of time during this story in both Croatia and Switzerland, but the storyline does center in Germany, so that's where I'm counting this enjoyable novel for the purposes of this thread.

I finished Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between by Laila M. El-Haddad. The book is a memoir told in blog posts of El-Haddid's experiences, and those of her family and neighbors, living in Gaza during the Israeli occupation (even after the Israeli technical withdrawal) during the 2000s. I've listed it above under Palestine.

I finished Spring Sowing, a short story collection was published in 1926 by Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty. The stories are almost all "naturalist" (I don't know if that's a real term) in style. Some of the stories depict small town/rural Irish life of the era, and some actually see the world through the eyes of animals: a cow in a fever over the loss of her calf, a young seagull learning to fly, a rabbit being chased by a young boy and his hunting dog. The human-centric stories show us events like a humorous hoax perpetrated by one villager over his neighbors over a so-called treasure, group of villagers waiting anxiously on shore, hoping against hope that their friends, sons, husbands will return from the days' fishing expedition despite a fierce, unexpected storm that has suddenly blown their way, snipers on opposite roofs--and opposite sides--during the 1916 Easter Uprising. The two best stories are the collection's first and last. The opening title story shows us the first day of married life of a young farming couple. Clearly in love and exulting on their strength and energy for the day's tasks, the day passes wonderfully. And yet we are clued into the lifetime's worth of repetition and labor awaiting the two. The final story, "Going Into Exile," brings us the moving tale of a loving farming family whose two oldest children are about to depart, probably forever, for America. For the most part beautifully and simply written, in this collection O'Flaherty has provided us a vivid, humorous and affection (if occasionally melancholy) picture of life in rural Ireland during the early 20th century.

I finished Bruce Chatwin's On the Black Hill, which is about two-thirds an historical novel, as it follows a Welsh farming family, and particularly a pair of twin brothers, from the turn of the 20th century into the 1980s. Lovely writing with lots of acute insight into human nature, but also the psychological dangers of living too insular a life. I found it to be a very enjoyable book in many ways, but not a relaxing novel.

I just finished I finished Mission to Moscow, Joseph E. Davies' memoir, sort of, of his two years (1936 through 1938) as U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. I say "sort of" because the book is not a narrative but a series of journal and diary entries as well as many of Davies' official reports and correspondences with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, President Roosevelt, and other government officials. There is quite a bit of repetition, as sometimes, for example, a report to Hull is immediately followed by a very similar report to Roosevelt. That said, the accumulation of information and insights that Davies provides ends up being pretty interesting for someone (like me) with an interest in the events of this era. Davies was in Moscow, and part of the inner diplomatic circle, during the purge trials and the run-up to World War Two. Interestingly, this book was published in October 1941, just 6 weeks or so before Pearl Harbor.

I've posted a longer review on my Club Read thread.

I finished The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The opening setting is the remote rural mountains of southern Poland in the late 17th Century in the years immediately following the Chmielnicki (often spelled Khmelnytsky) Uprising, an invasion by Cossack forces in rebellion against Polish domination. In Jewish history, these events are known as the Chmielnicki Massacres, as the Cossack forces, aided often by the Poles themselves, perpetrated widespread and massive pogroms. Whole villages were essentially obliterated. Our protagonist, Jacob, is a survivor of one such attack on his native village, Josefov. His wife and three children, he believes, have been murdered, but instead of being killed himself, Jacob is captured and sold into slavery to Jan Bzik, a farmer in remote mountain town. Escape into the mountains, whose ways are unknown to him, means certain death, and the villages have sworn to kill Jacob on sight if he is spotted on the wrong side of the river that borders Bzik's land.

For five years Jacob spends his winters in a high mountain cabin tending to Bzik's cattle. His only source of food and water is what is brought up the mountain to him daily by Bzik's daughter, Wanda. Far from Jewish community and the holy books he loves, Jacob strives to maintain a pious Jewish life as best he can, and that include resisting the strong physical attraction that Jacob and Wanda feel for each other. Jacob would surely be excommunicated by the rabbis for cohabitating with a Gentile, and either or both of the two could be burned alive by the Church. Marriage is out of the question. Well, but as we know, such temptation cannot be resisted forever, and certainly not in fiction. And so our tale is launched. The Slave was first published in 1962 and allegorical references to the Holocaust are impossible to ignore. Highly recommended

Just finished Enigmas of Spring by João Almino (translated from the Portuguese by Rhett McNeil). Enigmas of Spring was first published in 2015. Majnun, a young man (early 20s) lives with (and is supported by) his grandparents in the Brazilian federal capital, Brasília. He has no job and has failed university entrance exams. He greatly respects and is somewhat envious of this grandparents, who have led lives of accomplishment and action, but Majnun himself is a dreamer, and the greater part of his human interactions are anonymous, taking place online. Majnun's great obsessions are Laila, a married woman with whom he's had a brief, platonic, affair, and Moorish Spain, an era he idolizes as one of Moslem tolerance towards Christians and Jews, though a professor he meets through his grandfather insists on clueing him in to the fact that the truth was much more complicated and nowhere as rosy as he supposes. The bottom line is that Majnun is mostly living in his own head. He has intellectual promise, but stupefied by all the possible options open to him, seems incapable of spurring himself to action. Instead, he spins self-referential fantasies about the things he might do, the causes he might fight for. He is endlessly chewing away at writing a novella about the Spain of his fantasies. All of this we get in the very early stages of the story.

Almino skillfully portrays Majnun as an example of that cohort of his generation that has been pulled down--or jumped--into the whirlpool we now call social media (I don't recall Almino using that term). Causes and plans emphasized one day disintegrate and swirl out of sight to be replaced by something else the next. The possibilities seem endless, but Majnun cannot rouse himself to pursue any. In short, he is waiting for life to happen to him.

The writing in this book I found quite good, and as a cautionary tale about the intellectual dangers of the age, I found it very effective. Majnun is a character that we believe, but it is often unpleasant to be in his head, and it frequently became frustrating for me to listen to his endless imaginings about the various futures that may or may not open up for him, at the same time understanding that this is Almino's point. There is a particularly unpleasant (though brief) scene about two-thirds of the way through that it is not possible to forgive Majnun for. But again, I don't think that Almino means us to. The novel is thoughtful and Almino's treatment is nuanced and deft most of the time. And because at only 194 pages, one need not stay in Majnun's reality too long, and because, perhaps paradoxically, we do come to care about where Almino is going to take him in the end, I recommend the book to anyone interested in the themes it explores.

I finished the very good novel Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas, a writer who was born in Sudan and grew up in the U.S. The novel is about Saraaya, a small town in the middle of Sudan, more or less on the front line between the two sides of the country's intermittent but long lasting civil war that ended up splitting the country in two. We see the town, and fear the possibility of coming conflict, through the eyes of five disperate but intertwined characters. Alex, a young American NGO employee has come to the village with the assignment to create updated maps of the area, which haven't been revised since before the English colonizers left the area. The job is almost impossible, however, as the topography of the region changes with the seasons--rainy and dry--and global warming has wrecked havoc with even these haphazard patterns. Living with him in his small compound are Dana, a young Sudanese-American filmmaker trying to document the lives of the villagers while she simultaneously perfects her craft, William, a Nilot who is hired as Alex's translator, Layla, a young nomad woman who works as cook, and Mustafa, a 12-year-old dynamo who is William's gofer and all-round helper who dreams of escape to the national capital, Khartoum. We see the impending peril through the eyes of these five characters, with their varied perspectives, hopes and troubles. Abbas' powers of observation and description are acute. Her sentence- and paragraph-level writing are gorgeous. Her characters are believable, as are their interactions with each other. So even while the plotting is somewhat slow in the first half, the book was still enjoyable for me. In the meantime, the descriptions of the village, the lifestyle and concerns of its people, the historical and environmental forces that have shaped it all are nothing short of admirable. So I very much recommend the book.

My first trip to England this year comes via Daniel Defoe's classic, Moll Flanders. Lower class life in early 18th century London was a tough go, all right, and Newgate Prison was a horrible place to land. But the novel is really a story of a tough-minded woman who survives on her own terms despite a dizzying series of setbacks and misfortunes.

I finished The Other Side of Silence, the 11th entry in Philip Kerr's wonderful Bernie Gunther historical noir series. Gunther started out the series as a homicide detective in Nazi-era (but pre-war) Berlin. Being a Nazi-hater in 1935 Berlin was bound to bring our pal Bernie some problems, and of course it did by the fistful. The Other Side of Silence finds Gunther out the other end of the war with even more cynicism to go along with his battered conscience. Now it is the mid-50s and he is working as a concierge in a decent but not great hotel on the French Riviera. Kerr was never shy about mixing well-known real life figures into Gunther's adventures and travails. This time we meet Somerset Maugham, who is living in the same town and is being blackmailed. It's not long before the British Secret Service are in town, too, and what we have is a Cold War conundrum. This isn't among the very best books in this series, but even good-not-great Bernie Gunther is still a lot of fun in the reading. Sadly, Kerr died a few years back, but I still have three Bernie Gunther books to go. I include the book here because Kerr was from Scotland.

I've just read Call for the Dead, John le Carré's first published novel and the first book of his famous George Smiley series. Although the story is about spies and espionage, it's essentially a murder mystery. It's a good first novel, I think, though nowhere near the quality of le Carré's (and Smiley's) subsequent novels, though already the writing style, I thought, was quite enjoyable. English Foreign Office employee Samuel Fennan, whom Smiley has recently interviewed about a letter the office has received questioning Fennan's loyalty. And although Smiley assures Fennan at the end of the interview that he hasn't anything to worry about, Fennan commits suicide the next day. And when Smiley goes to Fennan's house the next day to talk to his widow, he feels that things are not adding up. Well, they wouldn't, would they? I thought it was good fun and a nice brisk read. I'm now interested in continuing on in the series.

I finished Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery (translated from the French by Thomas W. Cushing). The pocket biography of Cossery on the front page of my NYRB edition of Proud Beggars tells us, "Albert Cossery (1913-2008) was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek Orthodox Syrian descent who settled in Paris at the end of the Second World War and lived there for the rest of his life." Proud Beggars, first published in 1955, brings us the tale of three men living in a poor section of Cairo. The narrative revolves around three friends who have more or less chosen their impoverished status, their sarcastic views of the "bastards and thieves" who control societies power structure and the joy they find in the small details of humanity and urban life. When a young prostitute is murdered in nearby brothel in what appears to be a motiveless crime, into the picture comes police inspector Nour El Dine who feels in the solving of such crimes and punishment of their perpetrators not any compassion for the victims but instead a maintenance of order, a defense of the status quo. Our three heroes take him on gleefully as a worthy if not particularly threatening adversary. And Nour El Dine has his own dissatisfactions and doubts. Although the book is written in French by an author living in Paris, I'm counting this as a reading trip to Egypt due to the narrative's location in Cairo, which is also the location of Cossery's birth.

I've recently finished Sappers in the Wire: The Life and Death of Firebase Mary Ann by Keith William Nolan. Sappers in the Wire is a detailed historical account of an American military debacle. It was late in the Vietnam War, the spring of 1971, and the U.S. was gradually disengaging. The moral of the soldiers still on the ground was understandably low. Belief that there was any real purpose to what they were doing was scarce, and nobody wanted to die in a purposeless war. Firebase Mary Ann was a fortified encampment on the top of a hill in the jungle in the northern part of South Vietnam, put there to allow the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces to try to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines into the country. The solders were still going on dangerous patrols in the surrounding jungle, inflicting and receiving casualties. But up on their firebase refuge, they felt safe, and between this feeling of safety and the enlisted soldiers' low morale, it became very difficult for the officers to impose security protocol standards. One night, after a confusion-inducing mortar attack, Viet Cong soldiers snuck past the camp's guards and ran through the camp tossing grenades into bunkers and shooting soldiers who tried to escape the explosions. Thirty U.S. soldiers were killed and 82 were seriously wounded.

The battle, especially when word of the lax security came out, became a scandal within and without of the Army. The Army conducted a thorough investigation of the battle (which Nolan describes in the book's final chapters) and the failings that led up to it, interviewing every surviving soldier in depth, and Nolan was able to access these testimonies. He also conducted phone interviews with dozens of soldiers willing to talk to him. Between the official testimonies and these interviews, Nolan was able to construct a minute-by-minute account of the terrifying action, and he does so, extremely effectively. He also does a very good job of putting the event in context.

I finished the pulp thriller, Intrigue in Paris by Sterling Noel. A couple of years after World War 2, American merchant marine Wright Hughey is sitting in an outdoor cafe in Marseilles (France, of course), waiting out a tugboat strike, when he is mistaken for a local criminal by some other criminals. intrigue ensues! Although the plot of this romp becomes steadily less plausible as it goes along, nevertheless it is a good time for readers who go in for this sort of thing. Noel was a pretty writer, the action scenes themselves are believable and never get out of hand, and overall the action is understated rather than lurid. I looked up Noel, and it turns out he wrote several of these thrillers and a couple of science fiction works as well. The book was originally published with the title "Storm over Paris." There is even a 1956 English movie based on the book, called "House of Secrets:" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Secrets_(1956_film) (Warning: if you look at this web page, don't read the plot synopsis, as it contains spoilers for the book. That's if you think you will ever read the book, of course.)

I've recently finished Mapp and Lucia the fourth book in E.F.Benson's series of the same name about a pair of upper middle-class busybodies ruling the social sets of their respective small English towns between the World Wars. In this fourth novel (which has also sometimes been published with the title Make Way for Lucia), the two finally come together, and things do not go smoothly. The series is a set of hilarious comedy of manners, quite enjoyable if one goes in for this sort of gentle (most of the time) satire.

I finished Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil by James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz. This is a textbook, the major part of the reading for the course I audited at Columbia University this semester, Latin American Civilization I: (Early Latin America, 16th-18th centuries), taught by an excellent lecturer, Catarina Pizzigoni. The book was first published in the 1980s, and is what we think of as a traditional history textbook: very dense and more than a little dry. But when considered with the course lectures and the supplemental readings we were assigned, Early Latin America provides a fairly comprehensive and, for me at least, quite illuminating look at the more than 300 years of Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule in Mexico and Central and South America. I wouldn't recommend this for leisure reading, but as a textbook for an interesting course with a terrific professor, it filled the bill just fine.

I finished an very much enjoyed Voroshilovgrad an hallucinatory novel by Ukrainian novelist and poet Serhij Zhadan. The book was written several years before the Russian invasion of the country. And yet, the book is rife with a feeling of the precariousness of the Ukrainian state in the post-Soviet era. Our protagonist Herman has a steady if somewhat shady job in a large city. But he gets a call from an old friend that his brother has suddenly disappeared, presumably to Amersterdam, urging Herman to come out to his home town and "take care of business" in his brother's absence. The "business" turns out to be a small but profitable gas station on the outskirts of the town, located on Ukraine's eastern steppes, now known as Luhansk but formerly known, during the Soviet Era, as Voroshilovgrad. The station is under seige from mysterious forces who want to force Herman to sell it, perhaps (although exact reasons remain obscure) because there is natural gas to be found in the area. There is barely a character in the story who is not mysterious and rough around the edges. Stories of the past are always blurred by secrets and mythology. The representatives from the federal government who make periodic appearances are more likely to be gangsters than legitimate government officials. Or else they're both. Travels across the empty stretches of this country are always hazardous. The people Herman runs into could be from anywhere, and the sights that pass before his eyes, especially at sundown and after dark, swirl into hallucinations and dreams.

Often, reading this novel is like stepping through thin ice and falling into a dream. But the sense of time and place is solid, and the current of hope and compassion carried me along. Highly recommended.

I finished The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner. In December 1981, during the fierce civil war in El Salvador, members of an elite strike force of the Salvadoran Army arrived at the village of El Mazote in a mountainous section of the country mostly controlled by leftist rebel forces and proceeded to murder somewhere around 800 villagers: men, women and children in the most horrible ways imaginable. The point was to demonstrate to the surrounding areas that the consequences of supporting for the rebels could be dire, even though even the most cursory investigation of El Mazote would have shown the army leaders that these villagers were doing their best to have nothing to do with either the rebels or the government's armed forces. Cruelty and viciousness was the point.

New Yorker reporter Mark Danner does an excellent job of setting up the background of the atrocity, geopolitically and internally. And then, using survivor testimony as well as the testimony of those few soldiers who were willing to talk to Danner anonymously, he walks readers step by step and atrocity by atrocity through that horrible afternoon. Danner's subtitle for his book is "A Parable of the Cold War," and he does a very good job of setting up the pressure put on Congressmen, including Democrats who should have known better, not to cut funding and thus be responsible to "losing" El Salvador to Communism, especially coming so soon after the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Although the term is never used in the book, "plausible deniability" was the dominant paradigm as far as the U.S. administration was concerned. Reports of the massacre, or of the horrifying number killed "could not be confirmed." Danner's writing is clear and concise, and his reporting (the book is an expanded version of his writing for the New Yorker) is excellent.

Well, we come to the end of 2023, and I'll wrap up this thread with the report that I this year I read books pertaining to/taking place in 15 countries, including the U.S., and 8 different U.S. states. Also, a few non-country specific books and a whole bunch of non-state specific U.S.-based books.

This will be the last such thread I will post here in Reading Globally. I've been doing this for several years, and it seems like back when I began the tradition there were at least a few other members keeping individual threads here. Now it seems I'm the only one, and I've come to feel that I'm just cluttering up the group's thread page. So instead, I'll manage a "Where I've Been Reading" post on my individual thread in Club Read. I feel like that's more appropriate at this point. I'll be continuing to post the books I read in appropriate threads here in Reading Globally, though, and I look forward to seeing how all the challenges and discussions go this year, as always. All the best!

On the off chance that anyone's interested, I'll post the link to my Club Read 2024 thread:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/356203