The Trial of Prisoner 043

by Terry Jastrow

Four Springs Press     2017

256 pages     Fiction

The Shortlist

The Trial of Prisoner 043 fits into the literary genre of alternative history. Jastrow lays out a scenario in which President George W. Bush (43) is prosecuted for war crimes at the United Nation's International Criminal Court more than a decade after the war ostensibly ended. Here is a synopsis of the book from the publisher. By the way, I received the advanced reader's copy from the publicist.

On a glorious autumn morning in St. Andrews, Scotland, former US president George W. Bush approached the first tee of the world-famous Old Course to play a round of golf he would not finish. Unceremoniously abducted off the course by a team of paramilitary commandos, he was transported to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to stand trial for war crimes in connection with the Iraq War. The ICC had spent one year accumulating sufficient evidence to indict George W. Bush as the single person most responsible for the war. Would he be found innocent or guilty, or would something happen to disrupt the pursuit of justice?

Frankly, I struggled through The Trial of Prisoner 043. It starts promisingly with the abduction of Bush off the golf course, ala Tom Clancy, but then it becomes a legal procedural building the case for Bush's war crimes. The trial is played out moment by moment, with both the prosecution and defense calling all the players in the events of the Iraq War, including Condoleeza Rice and General Tommy Franks. I found it all quite tedious, albeit a fascinating topic. Jastrow has scrupulously researched his subject, and he has extensive references at the back of the book. There are many who will find this a fascinating look at what might have—or should have—been. 

Those who will most appreciate The Trial of Prisoner 043 will be of two types: political partisans who believe that justice was not done in the Iraq War and those who enjoy legal procedurals. Many who read the advanced reader's copy of the book felt that the ending was poorly executed. I felt, on the other hand, that the author had boxed himself in with few other choices. You will need to make that decision for yourself.

The book comes out next Tuesday, August 1. Here is the video trailer. Terry Jastrow is a screenwriter, playwright, and producer/director. This is his first novel.

Welcome Home Mama & Boris

by Carey Neesley and Michael Levin

 Readers Digest,     2013

223 pages      Memoir

I was at loose ends today when I picked up Welcome Home Mama and Boris. And my heart was immediately warmed as I became engrossed in this story of dogs, love, grief, and redemption. 

Peter Neesley was serving in Iraq when he found and befriended a mother dog and her pups. Caring for the dogs brought meaning to his tour of duty, and he planned to bring them home with him when he came home. Tragically, he died in his sleep on Christmas morning in 2007 in Baghdad. His sister, Carey, with whom he was very close, made it her mission to bring the two remaining dogs home as a memorial to her brother. This memoir details her efforts and her success in bringing Mama and her pup Boris back to Michigan from Iraq.

Carey describes her bond with her brother with great depth of emotion, and we are touched by the grief, pain and confusion she felt at his death.  She immediately decided that the dogs must come home, and much of the book describes the steps she and her family took to achieve that goal. Of course, they had to fight the bureaucracy every step of the way, but they also had some wonderful things happen because of the media attention they gained by telling their heartwarming story . The story was covered in all the major media outlets including NPR.  

She also mentions the help Senator Carl Levin and the Michigan governor, Jennifer Granholm gave them, as well as a nonprofit that helps soldiers bring their dogs home.

I tutor many Middle Eastern students, particularly Saudi Arabians, and they tell me that there are stray dogs all over the Middle East. Very few people in the Middle East have dogs as pets. Some of my clients are afraid of dogs, primarily because they have so little experience with them. Of course American soldiers will latch on to those dogs; it is a touch of home, and it is very easy to see why they want to bring the dogs home with them. 

Welcome Home Mama and Boris is a touching memoir. It is the kind of book that Readers Digest does particularly well. I can see my teenaged granddaughters really loving it, and I will give it to them to read. I suggest that readers watch the trailer which can be found on YouTube here. Also, there is a nice review of the book in the Huntington WV News. The book is being released this week.

A nice review in the Huntington News: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/70675

The World without You

By Joshua Henkin

New York, Pantheon, 2012

336 pages     Fiction

I read an article recently about people who divorce in their later years. The Wall Street Journal called it “Grey Divorce.” The article said that the more than 600,000 people over the age of 50 divorce every year. For many there is the feeling that “I have to fulfill myself now or I never will.” One researcher calls the reason for grey divorces “complex marital biographies.”

Marilyn and David Frankel in the novel The World without You by Joshua Henkin are in their early 70s when Marilyn decides she wants a divorce. Their family is gathering for the Independence Day holiday and as the novel opens, the couple is trying to decide if they are going to tell their children that they are separating during their weekend together. The reason for the divorce seemingly is Marilyn’s restlessness but we soon discover that the deeper reason is that they had lost their son Leo the year before. Leo had been a journalist and was killed in the Iraq War. Marilyn has spent the year since she lost her son becoming a political activist, attending war protests, writing endless op eds, and hating George Bush. For her, the personal has become political. Marilyn feels that David has not faced his grief, and she is angry with him for being so passive about their son’s death. 

The family is gathering at the family cottage in Massachusetts for a private memorial service. The funeral the year before had been a media circus and they all felt the need to do something more intimate as they raise a gravestone in his memory. 

There are three remaining children Lily, Clarissa and Noelle. Each woman and their spouses have mourned the loss of their brother in their own ways; ways that become obvious as their histories unfold. They are extremely angry at their mother when she announces the separation on the very first evening of the gathering. It is immediately apparent to them that this is all her idea. 

Leo’s widow Thisbe and her young son have flown in from San Francisco for the memorial. Thisbe is feeling guilty because she is beginning to move on in her life after this first horrendous year as a widow, and she feels slightly estranged from her in-law family, although Lily has been one of her best friends. She is the character I identified with the most. Moving on after losing a spouse is a challenge with a lot of guilt attached.

The most interesting character is Noelle, the youngest sister. She had been a rebellious teenager who married a high school friend, and they became Orthodox Jews and moved to Jerusalem. The mother of 4 sons, she returns home to the old rivalries and parental estrangement that caused her to rebel in the first place. She may be the most fully realized of the Frankel sisters and without a doubt the sister who grows the most from the experience of burying her brother.

As the weekend stumbles forward, all the characters are revealed and the story unfolds. The reviewer in the Boston Globe says: “In three days of togetherness, including the memorial and unveiling service, members will harbor secrets, tell lies, and rediscover themselves and one another.”

A simple story? Yes. A story that’s been told before? Yes. But I am not at all sure that I have read a book where the story was told better than this one. I became thoroughly engaged with the story as the family struggles its way through this ghastly weekend—burying their brother and accepting their parent’s divorce at the same time. And for the most part they don’t respond in loving and accepting ways. Even though the narration never flags, the crux of story isn’t in the narration but in the characters.

The reviewer in Commentary magazine says that few authors are as good at characterization as Henkin. He says: “Henkin is not one of the Frankels; he has no stake in the outcome of their disagreements and dysfunction. He has only a good deal of affection for them, and a good deal of pity, and the confidence that his reader will come to feel about them much as he does.” 

In an interview in the Huffington Post, Henkin said that the book was an outgrowth of some thinking he had done about parents losing children. He came to realize that losing a child (no matter what age) was different from losing a spouse. The surviving spouse moves on but the parent never can. I saw that happen in my own life experience. My in-laws were never able to overcome the loss of their son. They became old right before my eyes and it took years off their lives. I, on the other hand, was able to move on and eventually find a new life for myself.

As the weekend ends and the daughters, spouses and children return to their homes, Marilyn and David look at each other and realize that they ultimately don’t want to leave each other; that their history has bound them together in ways that shouldn't be severed; that their love for each other has weathered another challenge, and they are at peace together. In the final scene, David is deciding to ride his bike, something he hasn’t done for a long time. Marilyn goes out to help him. “You have to keep pedaling,” she says. If you come to an obstacle you just steer out of the way.” And then she says, “I won’t let you fall.”

I highly recommend The World without You. It will be on my list of best books for the year.

Here are two good reviews: http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2012/07/21/the-world-without-you-joshua-henkin/p45eCAIhYIIs4vVIhB5QDO/story.html

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/06/19/henkin-world-without-you/

The interview in the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/teddy-wayne/interview-with-joshua-hen_b_1604068.html

Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen
New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2010
562 p.    Fiction

What can I say about the book, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, that hasn’t already been said? I have been worrying about this all week as I was engrossed in this fascinating book. There are more reviews of Freedom than you can possibly imagine. BookMarks magazine counted more reviews for the book than any book in the year 2010—twice as many as the next most reviewed book. It has been called “The book of the Century” and Time magazine put Jonathan Franzen on its cover. What can I say?

First of all, I might say, that it is a very large book, and if there was ever a time to buy a Kindle, this would be it! Some reviewers felt the book was too long; that was not one of my complaints. I enjoyed the read, although I do have to say that I didn’t particularly like the characters. The main characters are the Berglunds, Walter and Patty, and their children Jessica and Joey. They are “the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive every-body so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege.” You may have heard the phrase, “Minnesota nice.” Well, the Berglund’s are Minnesota nice, and ostensibly the book is about what happens when fate befalls them, as fate is wont to do.

It is also about the history of the years following 9/11 through the eyes of one family. It is family as microcosm or microhistory, as one reviewer points out. Of course, the range of characters is larger than these four people, and we are pulled through the years that we have all just experienced through the eyes of the Berglunds and the people around them. As we read about their lives, we come to a sense of how we fared during those years, and about how our lives changed.

When thinking about my future and the future of my family in my years as a happy young wife, I somehow knew that the passionate life I was leading would at some point end—the other shoe would drop, as it were. Well of course, at that point, I had no way of knowing that I would lose my husband to cancer, that I would raise my children on my own, and that I would find a measure of happiness again. The story of the Berglunds evolves in much the same way—initial happiness followed by uncontrolled events, despair, tragedy, and the return to happiness.

Jonathan Franzen says that he has to tell stories through the context of family. In an interview on PBS’ news hour, he says: “Family is how I make sense of the world. I had a very powerful experience of it, these -- these really giant figures in my life. And I was this little kid. And I had two much older brothers and these powerful and often clashing parents. And every novel I have written -- it's been four novels -- I have tried to draw on the energy of those intense family relations to power a book.”

The relationships in Freedom are intense and all-permeating, just as the family relationships are for most of us. When Franzen juxtaposes historical context, evil, fear, greed, passion, and thwarted ambition into the mix of family relationships, the context of his book becomes clear. The book is about freedom and power, hypocrisy and its attendant rhetoric. The comprehensive reviewer in The New York Review of Books suggests: “Freedom operates as a kind of morality play in which all the major players are drawn toward actions they should not perform and objects they either cannot or should not possess.”

There are several subplots swirling around the family drama, including species extinction, mountaintop removal used in West Virginia coal mining, overpopulation, and private-sector subcontracts for the Iraq war. These are upper-middle class educated people, so their concerns, their prejudices, and their politics are liberal. The blogger on the Huffington Post feels that these are not the people through whom the story of the decade should be told--that their need for freedom is rarified and scarcely touched by the events of the decade. However, as Walter noted, ‘The world doesn’t reward ideas or emotions, it rewards integrity and coolness.” As the characters in Freedom struggle with ideas, emotions, integrity and coolness, we are privileged to see Franzen’s take on a world adrift and the people who are adrift in it.

My favorite review is the review in The New York Review of Books:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/his-glory-and-his-curse/

The review in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/books/review/Tanenhaus-t.html

An interview on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec10/franzen_10-12.html

Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love and War

by Annia Ciezadlo


New York, Free Press, 2011

382 pages Memoir

For about twenty years, I taught elementary school with Chafic Khalid, an immigrant from Lebanon. Not only was Chafic one of the best teachers I have ever known, he was also a great cook. He had turned the small office in his classroom into a kitchen, where he prepared his midday meal when the children were out on the playground. Smells of rice and kabob would emanate down the hallway; frequently, he would fill the staff lounge with baklava and Lebanese cookies. Once a week, his students would cook and share political discussions—they were fourth graders and students of the world. My son, who was his student, loved him. Chafic died way too young; the school community still speaks of him with love.

I thought of Chafic on Wednesday, when my daughters and I prepared supper from the recipes at the back of the book Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo. We cooked Kafta (p. 334), which we grilled, Yakjnet Sbanegh (p. 354), tabouleh, raita, hummus and pita, pilaf, and rice pudding. It was a feast. We laughed and cooked and chatted, and then rated our meal. We all liked the Yakjnet Sbanegh the best. The taglieh, a cilantro-garlic paste (p. 341) was so aromatic that the whole house smelled like a Lebanese restaurant. The kafta was also very good. We had a wonderful time.

Day of Honey is not a cookbook, although it has recipes. It is the memoir by an American journalist who joins her Lebanese husband, Mohamad Bazzi, in covering the Iraq war for their respective newspapers. They stop first to spend their honeymoon with Mohamad’s family in Beirut. They then move on to Baghdad where they live in a hotel and cover the war until it becomes too dangerous. They move back to Beirut hoping that things will be more peaceful, but increasing violence there makes life difficult for them as well. For six years, they live at the edge of war and try to carry on normal lives, all the time flirting with death and destruction.

The New York Times reviewer says of the memoir: “It’s a carefully researched tour through the history of Middle Eastern food. It’s filled with adrenalized scenes from war zones, scenes of narrow escapes and clandestine phone calls and frightening cultural misunderstandings.” Food is what ties the whole story together. Ciezadlo recounts what they were eating when they talked to sheikhs and members of the Iraqi parliament. She remembers the streets of Beirut, not by the street name, but by the name of the restaurant that sits on the corner. She seeks out recipes from hosts at dinner parties and farmers at the market.

The more difficult life becomes for them, the more obsessive Ciezadlo becomes about cooking and about food. But living in hotels makes cooking very difficult. She says; “I wanted dinner with friends, and not in a restaurant. I wanted to invite friends over and serve them food—my food, made with my hands.”

In the end, Ciezadlo and her husband returned to the United States where they live in New York City. When she misses Beirut and Baghdad, she cooks a meal and invites people to sit around the table and converse. “Breaking bread was the oldest and best excuse for such an occasion. It was how you created your own tribe, a microcosm of the world you want to live in.”

The New York Times reviewer sums it up: “Her book is among the least political, and most intimate and valuable, to have come out of the Iraq war.” As she says in closing: “Food alone cannot make peace. It is part of war, like everything else. We can break bread with our neighbors one day and kill them the next. Food is just an excuse—an opportunity to get to know your neighbors. When you share it with others, it becomes something more.”

Chafic knew that as he spread good will throughout our school with his baklava and falafel; we knew that last night as we cooked the recipes we had never tried before and served our husbands our creations, using the pita to clean up the very last of the garlic sauce from the spinach stew. Annia Ciezadlo knew that as she bargained with the lady selling green garlic in the Beirut market. Food heals.

Don’t be put off by the nonsensical book jacket with its pretty little girl sitting among the roses; this book is much more significant than the jacket implies. Day of Honey came to me from the publisher, and there are many bloggers publishing their reviews today. I am anxious to see what others thought.

The review in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/books/07book.html

Annia Ciezadlo’s website: http://www.anniaciezadlo.com/

Here is an interview with Annia Ciezadlo: http://www.carahoffman.com/blog.htm?post=770894