The Lions of Fifth Avenue

The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis   368 pages

There are two bad things about getting a new Fiona Davis book:  1) I’m probably gonna be up all night ‘cause I can’t put it down and 2) I’m going to have at least a year for her next book.

I have been a big fan of Fiona’s work ever since I read her novel, “The Masterpiece.” I’ve read her other works (and loved them all), except “The Address.”  I was saving that to take on an Alaskan Cruise (which the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted).

Like all her novels, at the core of each is a specific New York City building. In “The Masterpiece,” it is Grand Central Station; in “The Chelsea Girls, it is the Chelsea Hotel, in “The Dollhouse,” it is the Barbizon Hotel for Women, and in “The Address,” it is the Dakota Apartment Building.  In this outing, Fiona concentrates on the newly completed New York Public Library (NYPL). Fiona does a fabulous job of providing readers with just the right amount of architectural detail to make readers feel as if they are experie4ncing it first hand; it never gets boring with too many facts.

 Dueling timelines are also one of Fiona’s trademarks. I adore dueling timelines. In this novel, the period is 1913-14 and 1993. At the heart of this novel is also my favorite topic: books!  In 1913, Jack Lyons, who was the superintendent, and his family lived in a seven-room apartment that was housed inside NYPL. That bit fascinates the heck out of me; I wonder what has happened to that space. In the book, in 1993, it is storage.

Jack lives in the apartment with his wife, Laura, and their two children. Laura feels trapped in her marriage, in a life of taking care of her husband, her children and her house. She wants more out of life. Once she is accepted into the Columbia School of Journalism, Laura gets to lead a new exciting life…one where she hardly recognizes herself. Then Jack become the suspect in the theft of several important literary titles, and Laura ultimately becomes on the leading essayist of the 20th century.

In 1993, Sadie has been named the curator of an upcoming exhibit at NYPL. Important literary documents have disappeared. Vanished. Sadie becomes the primary suspect. She, like Jack, becomes the primary suspect.

Each woman, works within her time period to determine what happened to the valuable books and documents…and who is to blame.  I had the mystery of 1993 figured out near the end, before it could be revealed.  The 1913-14 storyline was a surprise.

I adored “The Lions of Fifth Avenue,”  which receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

  

In Our Time

In Our Time by Tom Wolfe, 119 pages

In Our Time collects a number of sketches written or drawn by Tom Wolfe in the years leading up to 1980, with most of the drawings having appeared in the "In Our Time" feature in Harper's magazine.  Together, they present a portrait of America, and especially New York, that is as amusing as it is incisive.

For Wolfe, the hidden significance of the '70s was that it was the decade when the counterculture of the '60s became the culture.  If the '60s witnessed the rise of the young barbarians, the '70s saw their triumph.  Just as importantly, it was when they began, despite their own best efforts, to grow old.

Suspect

The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen, 334 pages

On July 27th, 1996, Richard Jewell, a former sheriff's deputy doing security work during the Olympic Games, noticed a suspicious package under a bench in Atlanta's Centennial Park.  The bomb squad was summoned and Jewell joined his coworkers in attempting to clear people from the area.  Less than half an hour later, the bomb inside the package exploded, killing two people and injuring dozens more.  Within days, the press was reporting, based on leaks from within the FBI, that investigators had determined that Jewell had planted the bomb himself.  Tom Brokaw told millions of Americans that there was "probably" already sufficient evidence to arrest and prosecute Jewell.  Three months later, the FBI officially announced that it had, in fact, never had any real evidence to tie Jewell to the bombing, its focus on him having been driven by their belief that he fit the "profile" of a lone bomber, this despite the fact that the FBI knew early on that he couldn't have carried out the bombing alone.  As Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen report, Richard Jewell's guilt had been a "convenient myth" - it had given the FBI a suspect, the media a story, and the Olympics a chance to move on.  That it had almost destroyed Jewell was a small price to pay.

If their book is a cautionary tale, it is not, however, a polemic.  Alexander and Salwen write in a way that is factual, compelling, and deeply personal, not surprising in that both were tangentially involved in the story and knew many of the players, Alexander as a US Attorney and Salwen as an editor for the Wall Street Journal.  It would be a hard heart indeed which is not moved by their account of the later years of Kathy Scruggs, the reporter who broke the Jewell story, and it is even possible to feel a grudging admiration for Eric Rudolph, the actual bomber, who spent over five years as a fugitive in the Carolina mountains, sleeping in caves and surviving only on what he could catch or scavenge.  Perhaps the greatest insight the book can give is into the direction of the massive power of the federal government and public opinion by ordinary, imperfect people just trying to do their jobs.

Secret Empires

Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends by Peter Schweizer, 225 pages

In 2019, it became front page news that Joe Biden's son, Hunter, had been paid millions of dollars to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, despite having no experience in the energy industry and not speaking Ukrainian, at the same time that his father, then Vice President, had taken charge of US relations with the Ukraine.  Interestingly, Peter Schweizer had already reported the story in this 2018 book, connecting it to other business dealings involving the Bidens, the Kerrys, and the Chinese, Mitch McConnell's in-laws and the Chinese, Rep Danny Rehburg's family and the Mongolians, George W Bush's uncle and the Chinese, the Daley family and the Chinese, the Kushners and Qatar, the Trump sons and Indonesia, and more, establishing an undeniable pattern of attempts by foreign businesses - many of them with strong connections to their own governments - to influence American political figures by channeling substantial amounts of money to their families.  Although, as he points out repeatedly, such behavior by US companies towards the families of foreign leaders is illegal, there are no restrictions in the other direction.

It is worth noting that there are no smoking guns here.  Schweizer charts the flow of cash into the pockets of politically connected individuals, but he cannot prove that this money bought anything - even though it seems naive to believe that it did not.  There is a suggestion of another kind of naivete, however.  In the West, modernity has advanced an ideal of the bloodless, "rational" individual, but the Rest is dominated by more humane, family-centered cultures, hence the clash between the fashionable Western vision of a family as a collection of autonomous individuals and the belief shared throughout much of the non-Western world that all business is ultimately family business.  The author seems to assume that the Western view is both correct and stronger.  At one point, he quotes Chicago dynast Richard J Daley's response to a question about favorable treatment his children allegedly received from the city, "If a man can't put his arms around his sons then what kind of world are we living in?"  Despite Schweizer's intentions, this question resonates throughout the book - is such a world even desirable, much less possible?

Shining Path

The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes by Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna, 355 pages

On Christmas Eve, 1980, a group of rebels invaded the home of a well-off sugar farmer in a remote canyon in the Peruvian Andes.  The guerrillas dragged the landowner to a nearby chapel where they tortured him to death, leaving "Long Live the People's War" spray-painted on a farmhouse wall.  He was the first to die in that war, launched a few months earlier by a sect of Maoist revolutionaries calling themselves the Peruvian Communist Party but invariably referred to in the foreign press by the more romantic name Shining Path.  Their barbaric struggle would drag on for over a decade and leave over 70000 dead, roughly half killed by the Shining Path themselves, the other half split between the regular army and village militias.  

It is difficult to write a history of a guerrilla insurgency, which by its very nature is fluid and avoids decisive battles.  It is even more difficult without reliable sources from within the movement.  Starn and La Serna attempt to overcome these difficulties, and paint a broader picture of Peru in the last decades of the twentieth century, by concentrating on the personal stories of those touched by the conflict, from slum activist Maria Elena Moyano to novelist and presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa to policeman Marco Miyashiro to peasant militiaman Narciso Sulca.  As a result, those who expect either a thorough history or an exploration of the inner workings of the insurrection are likely to be disappointed.  They are unlikely to be bored, or to soon forget some of the unexpected people and places introduced.

Bad Blood

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, 299 pages

It's a familiar story.  A brilliant college student with a revolutionary idea dropped out of school to start her own business and chase her dreams.  Through hard work and pluck, she managed to impress a series of movers and shakers, earning investment dollars for her company and plaudits for herself.  A decade later, the company was worth billions and she was hailed as a role model for a new generation of girls looking to change the world and get rich in the process.  But there's a twist - it was all a sham.  The company's products never actually worked.  The dream was never more than a dream - and marketing.

Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos ("THERApy" and "diagNOSis") in 2003 with the tuition money she saved by dropping out of Stanford.  Wearing a signature black turtleneck in imitation of Steve Jobs, she managed to win the endorsement of influential men and women from Henry Kissinger to Bill Clinton with her promise to revolutionize health care with a new technology that would allow quick, easy, cheap, and mobile blood tests.  By 2014, the company was valued at over $9 billion, and in 2015 Holmes was named "Woman of the Year" by Glamour magazine and listed among the "Most Influential People in the World" by TIME.  Later that same year, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou revealed that Theranos was falsifying its results, conducting standard blood tests and then attributing the results to their devices.  After initial denials and threats of lawsuits, the company slowly walked back nearly all of the claims it had made, before collapsing into bankruptcy amid criminal investigations.  Bad Blood is Carreyrou's book-length account of how things reached that point, and how so many people were fooled, cheated, and, in some cases, endangered.

The most remarkable thing about Bad Blood is how sympathetic Holmes remains.  She is presented as a powerfully driven young woman who desired nothing more than to become a billionaire and help people - or, at least, to be seen to be helping people.  She seems to have genuinely believed that if she just wanted it enough - believed it enough - eventually the devices would work, and the multi-billion dollar business she had founded would thrive.  This spiraled into new age megalomania - at one point, Holmes told employees that they were working on the "best thing humans have ever built" and at another that they were "building a religion."  Carreyrou skillfully weaves the personal stories of Theranos insiders into the bigger picture, creating a rich and compelling narrative.

Justice on Trial

Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino, 306 pages

Anthony Kennedy surprised almost everyone when, in June of 2018, he announced his imminent retirement from the US Supreme Court.  Immediately, both within and without the White House, discussion began concerning his replacement.  President Trump disappointed many diehard conservatives when he announced his nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, widely considered the safe, establishment pick.  What was always certain to be a difficult nomination process soon developed into a circus as protesters sought every opportunity to disrupt the proceedings, then descended even further when Senate Democrats produced a woman who accused Kavanaugh of having assaulted her over three decades ago, on an unknown date in an unknown location.  Despite all of the accuser's named witnesses contradicting her story, the truth of the accusation became an article of faith for many on the left and in the news media, and she was soon joined by others making progressively more improbable allegations, until the proceedings outpaced parody with earnest discussions of the possible sinister meanings of '80s teenage slang.

Milan Kundera wrote, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."  Meanwhile, if he wasn't the first to say it, The Washington Post's Phil Graham at least popularized the idea that "journalism is the first rough draft of history."  By that standard, Justice on Trial is simultaneously vitally important and somewhat deficient.  In the midst of a deliberate if disorganized Orwellian project to rewrite history in order to fit an ideological narrative, the simple recording of facts that defy the narrative is a worthwhile accomplishment.  Hemingway and Severino do more than simply restate facts, however, adding in an entertaining and well-deserved seasoning of snark that, unfortunately, will give their narrow-minded critics all the excuse they need to ignore the book entirely.

Great Revolt

The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics by Salena Zito and Brad Todd, 266 pages

Ever since the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 US Presidential election shocked the world, considerable time and energy has been spent speculating on the possible causes of such a surprising upset, from "whitelash" to interference by the alternately entirely despicable and unquestionably heroic James Comey to Russian orbital mind control lasers.  Journalist Salena Zito and pollster Brad Todd have a more modest explanation - Trump won because he built a winning coalition of voters.  His victory was improbable because his coalition was unconventional, and whether that coalition is sustainable will determine whether 2016 marks a major shift in American politics or is merely an oddity.  Their analysis concludes that the Trump fusion of social conservatism and economic populism is holding strong - forced to choose between the often intemperate Trump and his often intemperate critics in the media, those who sided with Trump in the election continue to side with him.  Indeed, the authors foresee more problems for the Democratic coalition of big government and big business as that party drifts further to the left.

Of course, all such predictions are highly suspect - less than a decade ago, the "coalition of the ascendant" was going to banish Republicans to "wander in the political wilderness" indefinitely.  The real value of The Great Revolt is its combination of hard data and personal interviews profiling the voters who put Trump in the White House.  The result demolishes stereotypes, revealing, not a "basket of deplorables", but ordinary men and women who made more or less informed decisions, the stuff of which - for better or worse - democracy is made.  At a time when, according to polls, 58 percent of Clinton voters would "have a hard time respecting" someone who voted for Trump, while 40 percent of Trump voters feel the same way about Clinton voters, this is not a small thing.

Conspiracy

Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue by Ryan Holiday, 295 pages

In 2007, the website Valleywag, part of the Gawker family of gossip sites, outed Silicon Valley entrepeneur Peter Thiel as gay.  Five years later, Gawker published a "highlight reel" of moments from a sex tape involving Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, and the then-wife of his then-best friend, a tape which had been made by said friend without Bollea's knowledge or consent.  Thiel, through intermediaries, secretly paid for Bollea's lawsuit against the website, a suit which ultimately resulted in a nine-figure judgment and the bankruptcy of Gawker.  Conspiracy is the story of how all this transpired, a story involving a determined, methodical billionaire, a company of brash, arrogant bloggers, and an aging sports entertainment superstar with mountains of baggage.  It's the story of why as well as how, and also the story of what happened after, when the conspiracy to bring down Gawker was revealed and a backlash began as the media came more and more to support Gawker's argument that journalists should be entirely free from any form of responsibility or accountability.

Holiday doesn't dwell on that last part, preferring to quote Machiavelli and ruminate on the nature of conspiracies.  It might have been interesting to contrast this case to the lawsuits resulting from Rolling Stone's false accusations of rape by members of a UVA fraternity and the complicity of the college administration, which unfolded simultaneously with the Hogan-Gawker case but involved an establishment publication and lacked a crusading billionaire.  Likewise, although he speculates as to whether the mainstream media would have been as sympathetic to Brietbart as they were to Gawker, he does not mention the demonstrated lack of sympathy when Matt Drudge was sued by Sidney Blumenthal a decade earlier.  Indeed, while he states that "Champerty - the funding of lawsuits you have no direct interest in - dates back to at least medieval times", he cites no other actual instances, preferring to lament the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

If Holiday seems uninterested in, or blind to, the similarities between this story and other recent legal and journalistic events, he more than makes up for it with his thoroughness telling the story he has chosen to tell.  Remarkably, he was able to secure the cooperation of all of the principals and much of the supporting cast.  One of the major themes of the book is the question of how much empathy a journalist should have with his subjects, and while no definitive answer is given, Holiday himself exhibits considerable empathy and an evident desire to treat his subjects fairly.  At the same time, he keeps the narrative moving forward at a brisk pace, not always easy when dealing with years of interminable legal maneuvers.

Scoop

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, 321 pages

William Boot is not a reporter, rather, he writes the nature column "Lush Places" for the Daily Beast.  It is only through a misunderstanding that he is dispatched to the obscure African nation of Ishmaelia, where the Fascist Blacks are fighting the Communist Reds, except that in this case the Blacks call themselves the Whites and the Reds call themselves the Blacks and there seems to be more fighting among the foreign press corps than among the native people.

Waugh's breezy satire of the self-referential world of the press will not cease to amuse as long as reporters and politicians remain.

Stars So Sweet

Stars So Sweet by Tara Dairman, 278 pages

In the third and final book in the All Four Stars series Gladys is beginning seventh grade in a new school.  Although some of her friends will be there, she is nervous about meeting new people and learning a new routine.  Gladys is also prepared to tell her parents about her freelance job as a restaurant critic but is sidetracked when her aunt, Lydia, surprises her with a visit.  Gladys doesn't know what to do when her editor wants to meet face-to-face.  She is also overwhelmed with requests for help with bake sales for several school clubs.  Despite all of her troubles, Gladys finds that she's enjoying school, her aunt's company, the restaurant reviews and even the bake sales.  If she can figure out how to handle some of the problems, Gladys just might have a great year.  I really loved this series.  It's a little sweet but some parts are hilarious and Gladys is easy to root for.  This is a good pick for elementary and middle school kids who like realistic fiction.

Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription

Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription: Notes & Asides from National Review by William F Buckley Jr, 275 pages

For nearly four decades, National Review ran a regular column titled "Notes & Asides", curated by founder William F Buckley, collecting odds and ends of correspondence to and from the magazine.  The flotsam and jetsam collected in Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription includes a letter from a high school student wanting to know what "to immanetize the eschaton" means, a note from Ted Kennedy correcting the record on his Senate votes, and the announcement of the formation of the National Committee to Horsewhip Drew Pearson*.  Space is also devoted to grammatical questions such as whether Americans insert superfluous prepositions into phrases ("early on", "enter into the fray") and the common origins of the words "heist" and "hoist", as well as dispatches from Buckley's battles with unions representing the printing trades, television and radio artists, and film actors.

There is no disguising the fact that most of what is presented here is less amusing now than it probably was when it was first published.  The running gags sometimes drag and the in-jokes fall flat.  Still, even if not quite "exfoliated daily from angels' wings", Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription contains more wit and amusement than most books.

* - Because of what he said about Shirley Temple Black.**

** - Whatever that was.

Trump and Me

Trump and Me by Mark Singer, 108 pages

Donald Trump has been good to Mark Singer.  Certainly, he called the journalist's 1997 New Yorker profile "a new low".  True, he responded to the piece's reprint in a 2005 collection with the personal message, "Mark, you are a total loser!  And your book (and writings) sucks!", adding the inimitable Trumpian flourish "PS And I hear it is selling badly."  But the Donald's presidential campaign has now allowed Singer to triple-dip on the time that the two spent together as a result of editor Tina Brown's expert matchmaking.

To describe his subject, Singer likes a quote from an anonymous security analyst so well he uses it twice: "Deep down, he wants to be Madonna."  Yet Trump's own comments are just as revelatory: "... the show is 'Trump' and it is sold-out performances everywhere."  "It's always good to do things nice and complicated so that nobody can figure it out."  "Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich."  Singer sees these, no doubt correctly, as expressions "of a single theme: Trump.  Me.  Look."

Too Big To Fail

Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, 539 pages

Too Big To Fail is the definitive journalistic account of the financial crisis of 2008. as seen through the eyes of the bankers and brokers as they tried desperately to find a solution to the problems they themselves had created.  Their efforts range from the almost heroic - in one thirteen hour workday, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was involved in no fewer than sixty-nine phone calls and meetings - to the comic - an AIG vice president hustling through the streets of New York carrying a briefcase stuffed with $14 billion in bonds - to the entirely absurd - several dozen Goldman Sachs traders reacting to the news that the UK had imposed a moratorium on short-selling their company's stock by rising to their feet and singing "The Star-Spangled Banner".  Sorkin, who covered the meltdown for The New York Times, goes into truly impressive, almost overwhelming detail about the events of September 2008.

The book is badly organized at times - Sorkin first tells the story of John Thain's overhaul of the New York Stock Exchange, then his life story up until became CEO of NYSE, and then continues with his later leadership of Merrill Lynch.  This further confuses a narrative already burdened by hundreds of characters and dozens of companies and government agencies.  Sorkin also - whether through journalistic objectivity or simple myopia - seems blind to the absurdity of some of the situations he describes, like AIG's scramble to ensure that the brokers who lost 5 billion dollars of the company's money wouldn't leave for their competitors.  Perspective is easy to lose - Sorkin is so engaging in his description of the titanic struggle to save Wall Street that it is easy to forget that even the failures wound up wealthy far beyond most people's imagining.

Too Big To Fail is a tremendous accomplishment within the limits it sets for itself.  The story of what happened as the 2008 crisis climaxed is covered exhaustively.  How it happened, how it affected ordinary people, and what it ultimately cost is outside its scope - for that, we must turn to books like Madrick's Age of Greed, Stockman's The Great Deformation, or Barofsky's Bailout.  The occasional mention of how the unfolding of the crisis might affect ordinary Americans only serves to underscore how little such concerns matter on the highest levels of our political and economic systems.

All the Truth Is Out

All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid by Matt Bai, 244 pages

In the spring of 1987, the presumptive Democratic nominee for President was the charismatic young Senator from Colorado, Gary Hart, who represented the emergent generation of "New Democrats" later associated with Bill Clinton.  Hart's campaign imploded following media reports that he was having an affair with a model named Donna Rice, reports that the candidate responded to with a combination of self-righteous anger and implausible denial.  There was some self-examination on the part of journalists over how to distinguish the personal from the political - if there was anything to distinguish - but it is Matt Bai's theme that even the most perceptive commentators missed the true significance of the moment, which marked a crucial point in the transition between the more careful traditional journalism and the celebrity infotainment that prevails today.

Although his journalistic recounting of the scandal is solid (he corrects many longstanding misperceptions, such as the belief that the infamous "Monkey Business" photo of Hart and Rice surfaced at the beginning rather than at the end of the scandal), it is undermined somewhat by Bai's attempt to add additional weight to his narrative by exaggerating Hart's gifts - had Hart been elected in '88, it seems, all of the negative events that have happened since, from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to the subprime mortgage crisis, would have been avoided.  This is largely forgivable since the real subject of the book is the press and not Hart, but on one occasion it becomes a jaw-dropping instance of ideological blindness, as Bai breathlessly reports Hart's plan to invite Gorbachev to his inauguration and sign an arms-control deal on the spot, and "possibly the Cold War would have ended right there", as if the Cold War could have been ended by an arms-control agreement that would not have released a single prisoner from the Gulag, permitted a single opposition candidate on the ballot, or removed a single stone from the Berlin Wall.  It is extremely damaging when a figure touted as always ahead of his time seems not to have comprehended the nature of events that happened nearly thirty years ago.

Bai also exaggerates the uniqueness of the Hart scandal - only four years earlier Rep Dan Crane's career had been destroyed by revelations he had a sexual relationship with a Congressional page, and seven years before that Rep Wayne Hays' thirty-seven year career ended when his mistress made their relationship public.  At the time of the latter scandal, The Los Angeles Times reported that "the press' recent preoccupation with sex on Capitol Hill" had replaced the attitude that a "man's drinking or dalliance generally was considered irrelevant and out-of-bounds", and questioned whether "a government official's personal habits and life-style give an insight into the character of the public servant."  "Character", a word Bai suggests is a flimsy pretext for prying into personal lives, was already an issue to which Hart's famous challenge to reporters to "follow me around" was a direct response even though, as Bai makes clear, it did not directly inspire the reporters who broke the story.

While Bai briefly raises the question of whether the traditional journalistic approach, with its cozy relationship between politicians and reporters (Hart did some of his womanizing while rooming with journalistic legend Bob Woodward), wasn't in many ways worse than the more recent adversarial relationship, he does not really address it substantively.  Indeed, the boundaries are not always clear - Hart's friend, journalist Jack Germond, is touted as a paragon of the old school even though he was a regular panelist on The McLaughlin Group, one of the milestones of the ascendant chattering punditry.  In every respect, then, Bai's attempt to cast Hart's downfall as an utterly unprecedented event fails.

In the end, Bai deserves perhaps the highest praise a journalist of his generation can receive - sometimes he tells the truth in spite of himself.  Although he sets out to debunk the myth of Hart as a tragic figure done in by his own hubris, his portrait is that of a man of monumental arrogance - although it was EJ Dionne who compared him to the central figure in Plato's parable of the cave, Hart clearly sees himself in those terms, as an enlightened visionary willing to come down from the mountaintop to give the American people the gift of his leadership.  Hart, however willing he may have been to lead the American people, never seemed to want to give himself to them.  This pride even in defeat almost makes Bai's idolatry sensible - Hart as Coriolanus, the last candidate unwilling to humble himself and wring his hands on television, begging forgiveness from the masses.

Try Not to Breathe

Try Not to Breathe by Holly Seddon
368 Pages
Out February 2016


"Amy Stevenson was the biggest news story of 1995. Only fifteen years old, Amy disappeared walking home from school one day and was found in a coma three days later. Her attacker was never identified and her angelic face was plastered across every paper and nightly news segment.

Fifteen years later, Amy lies in the hospital, surrounded by 90’s Britpop posters, forgotten by the world until reporter Alex Dale stumbles across her while researching a routine story on vegetative patients.

Remembering Amy’s story like it was yesterday, she feels compelled to solve the long-cold case.

The only problem is, Alex is just as lost as Amy—her alcoholism has cost her everything including her marriage and her professional reputation.

In the hopes that finding Amy’s attacker will be her own salvation as well, Alex embarks on a dangerous investigation, suspecting someone close to Amy.

Told in the present by an increasingly fragile Alex and in dream-like flashbacks by Amy as she floats in a fog of memories, dreams, and music from 1995, Try Not to Breathe unfolds layer by layer to a breathtaking conclusion."

I liked how the narrative switched among the characters without losing the reader and maintains the mystery through at least half the book for me.