Marion Lane and the Deadly Rose

Marion Lane and the Deadly Rose (Book 2 in a series) by T. A. Willberg 304 pages

Back in 2020, when I reviewed the first book in this series (“Marion Lane and the Midnight Murders,” I stated that it was interesting enough to keep me reading, but that I wouldn’t read any more in the series. Ah, the power of receiving a free Advanced Reader’s Copy in the mail!

London 1959. The Cold War is in full swing. Far below the city streets are a series of secret tunnels and passages, shifting doors and hallways, gadgets of all kinds and the home of Miss Brickett’s Investigations & Inquiries. They are a group of researchers, spies, agents that take on the cases that Scotland Yard cannot solve.

Scotland Yard is stumped once again. Someone is murdering Londoners and leaving a special image with each one: a rose branded onto the body. Newspapers have nicknamed the killer “The Florist.”

Marion Lane is now in her second year with the agency. As the agency begins to be involved, Marion begins receiving off notes about the new recruits, that one of them cannot be trusted. This distracts her from The Florist Case, especially when another second-year is murdered. This murder casts speculation and distrust among the other employees of Miss Brickett’s.

I disliked this novel more than I did the first one. I felt like I was in “Get Smart” episode. It tried to be serious, but the result was far-fetched. “Marion Lane and the Deadly Rose” receives 1 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

Battle of Bretton Woods

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil, 348 pages

In July of 1944, even as American and British troops fought side-by-side through the hedgerows of Normandy, representatives of the two governments squared off against each other in a resort hotel overlooking the small town of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.  They were gathered there, along with over 700 delegates from 42 other nations, to begin to construct a postwar international economic system.   Attention was centered on Lord John Maynard Keynes, the most famous economist in the world and the head of the British delegation.  As a result of the war the United Kingdom was "mortgaged to America", a situation their delegation was eager to mitigate or escape.  The US delegation, meanwhile, saw the British Empire as a potential postwar rival, and would pursue an economic strategy designed to promote its dismemberment and assure postwar American dominance.  The architect of this American strategy was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, who organized and manipulated the conference, and who was also, unbeknownst to both his American and British peers, a Soviet agent.

Although the story of what happened at Bretton Woods - how it both succeeded and failed - is doubtlessly an important one, it mostly takes the form of interminable committee meetings and memoranda exchanges in which the most abstruse minutiae of international finance are discussed.  Somehow, Steil finds enough interest in the characters and enough humor in the proceedings to keep the reader awake despite these handicaps.

Symphony For The City Of The Dead

Symphony For TheCity Of The Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich And The Siege Of Leningrad, 456 pages

"National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson delivers a brilliant and riveting account of the Siege of Leningrad and the role played by Russian composer Shostakovich and his Leningrad Symphony. In September 1941, Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history--almost three years of bombardment and starvation that culminated in the harsh winter of 1943--1944. More than a million citizens perished. Survivors recall corpses littering the frozen streets, their relatives having neither the means nor the strength to bury them. Residents burned books, furniture, and floorboards to keep warm; they ate family pets and--eventually--one another to stay alive. Trapped between the Nazi invading force and the Soviet government itself was composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who would write a symphony that roused, rallied, eulogized, and commemorated his fellow citizens--the Leningrad Symphony, which came to occupy a surprising place of prominence in the eventual Allied victory. This is the true story of a city under siege: the triumph of bravery and defiance in the face of terrifying odds. It is also a look at the power--and layered meaning--of music in beleaguered lives. Symphony for the City of the Dead is a masterwork thrillingly told and impeccably researched by National Book Award--winning author M. T. Anderson." This was hard to read because of the subject matter.  Anderson doesn't stint on writing about the hardships the people of Leningrad endured or on the brutality of Stalin's government.  However, it was well written and Anderson makes the subject matter fascinating, even in the midst of the horror.  I would definitely recommend this to history buffs.

Spies in the Vatican

Spies in the Vatican: The Soviet Union's Cold War Against the Catholic Church by John Koehler, 273 pages

Virtually from the moment of its birth, the Soviet Union sought the end of religion amongst its people and throughout the world.  When mass murder failed, the Soviets began a campaign of infiltration and subversion.  Although the Catholic Church was targeted from the outset, when the Second World War left the USSR in control of puppet states throughout Eastern Europe the neutralization of the Church became an even higher priority.  The record of this shadow war waged by the Soviets and their proxies against the Church is the subject of John Koehler's Spies in the Vatican.

Although the book briefly summarizes earlier periods, the bulk concerns the pontificate of St John Paul II and his connection with the Solidarity movement, including, most explosively, possible Soviet involvement in the assassination attempt against the Pope in 1981.  Unfortunately, Spies in the Vatican lacks any kind of cohesion.  The book reads like "random moments in the history of Warsaw Pact espionage" rather than a thorough history of communist subversion of the Catholic Church.  This slipshod approach is aggravated by numerous textual errors - "seize fire", "assassimate", "Let sleeping dogs die".  At the same time, Koehler demonstrates considerable expertise concerning the history, organization, and records of various intelligence agencies, especially the East German Stasi, and he writes with unwavering moral clarity.

Fall of the Berlin Wall

The Fall of the Berlin Wall by William F Buckley Jr, 192 pages

This book could more accurately be titled "The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall".  Buckley briefly explains the nature of the post-war Allied settlement and the development of a - seemingly permanently - divided city.  The construction of the Wall itself and the crisis which followed (the only time, Buckley claims, that American and Soviet tanks actually had their guns trained on one another) is covered more thoroughly, followed by discussion of attempts to circumvent the barrier or to come to terms with it.  Finally, there is a broad overview of the events leading up to the moment when, anti-climatically, the East German government announced in a routine press conference that the Wall was irrelevant, and the epochal repercussions of that announcement.

There isn't any special insight here - it is neither a detailed history of the fall of the Wall (The Collapse) nor an insider's eyewitness account of the events of 1989 (The Magic Lantern), but there is a solid overview of the history of one of the world's most infamous structures.  Throughout, the author allows the mere fact of the Wall to speak eloquently of the nature of the regime that built it.  Buckley's talents as a storyteller make the tale readable and compelling.

Collapse

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall by Mary Elise Sarotte, 184 pages

In 1989, change swept Eastern Europe.  In Poland and Hungary, competitive elections were held, breaking the Communist monopoly on power.  Unlike other popular uprisings in Warsaw Pact countries during the post-War period, this time the Soviet Union did not use military force to prop up its puppets.  Yet some regimes stood firm against the mounting tide of unrest - none more so than Erich Honecker's hard-line government in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which only encouraged tens of thousands of East Germans to make their way to the West through Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

The GDR was unique in many ways.  It had the most comprehensive secret police force in the world (one Stasi agent for every 180 citizens, vs one KGB agent for every 600 Soviet citizens).  It shared a long border with a neighboring nation with which it shared a common language, history, and culture, and where many citizens had friends and family.  Finally, it had in its midst an outpost of the West in the form of West Berlin, surrounded on all sides by the Berlin Wall to prevent East Germans from escaping to the West.  The Wall stood as the ultimate symbol of Communist oppression, the Iron Curtain incarnate in concrete and barbed wire.

Then, in the course of a few hours on November 9, the unthinkable happened.  The Collapse tells the story of how, through a combination of popular determination, official uncertainty, and bureaucratic bungling, the Wall became obsolete in the blink of an eye.  Above all, it shows how this might not have happened, except for the complete failure of moral conviction on the part of the regime.

Last Man in Russia

The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation by Oliver Bullough, 255 pages

This is the story of Russian Orthodox priest and dissident Fr Dmitry Dudko, the story of twenty-first century Russia, and the story of author Bullough's quest through the latter to understand the former.  Or maybe it's the other way around.

Today's Russia faces a declining population, staggering levels of governmental corruption, and epidemic rates of alcoholism.  The origins of this situation lie in the nation's seventy year experience of communism, which sought to crush the Church, the family, and the individual human spirit.  Fr Dmitry fought against the state on all these levels, becoming one of the leaders of the Russian spiritual revival of the seventies.  He fought for community and communion, for faith and trust.  He did so even though the hierarchy of his own church had been suborned by the communist government.  He fought against enemies of flesh and blood as well as against principalities and powers.

This description may suggest an inspirational story of one man's triumph over a totalitarian state.  The story of Fr Dmitry, however, is a tragedy, and his tragedy is Russia's.  Bullough does an incredible job of telling the story of a man and his country, and the suffering, horror, and betrayal they shared.

The World's Most Orphaned Nation

"... The World's Most Orphaned Nation" by Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty, 111 pages

Joseph Mindszenty was ordained a priest in 1915.  He was briefly imprisoned during the Hungarian revolutions that followed the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the First World War.  He was ordained Bishop of Veszprem in 1944, only to be imprisoned after a German-backed coup brought the fascist Arrow Cross party to power that same year.  After the end of the Second World War, he became Archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of Hungary, and was named a Cardinal by Pope Pius XII.  In 1948 he was arrested by the Soviet-backed communist government, and tortured into confessing to a litany of crimes including conspiring with the US to start a third World War and plotting to crown Otto von Habsburg as King of Hungary.  When the puppet government lost power in 1956, Cardinal Mindszenty was freed, but during the Soviet invasion and occupation which followed he was forced to take refuge in the American embassy in Budapest.  For 15 years he was unable to set foot outside the embassy, lest he be arrested by the waiting secret police.

In 1962, this book was published by an American relative of the Cardinal, collecting selections from his speeches, sermons, and writings.  There are some quite powerful passages, such as the account of his ordination of ten priests in a fascist prison in 1944 - Mindszenty relates that the candidates had to share a single candle, a single surplice, and a single cassock, but each had his own assigned prison guard.  It is interesting to hear voices raised against the deportation of Jews in 1944 also oppose the deportation of ethnic Germans in 1946.  Unfortunately there is little in the way of introduction for the individual pieces that make up this patchwork book, so that it is difficult to tell when and under what circumstances a sermon was given or a pastoral letter issued, which rather dulls their effect overall.

Great reading for anyone interested in the aftermath of World War II, resistance to tyranny, or human rights in general.