Today I am reviewing The Death Instinct by Jed Rubenfeld for TLC Book Tours. As always, I am provided with a copy of the book for my honest review.

About the book: New York, 1920. World War I is over. But the Roaring Twenties have not yet arrived. Factories are closing, families are losing their homes. Jobless men are forbidden to drink by the new Prohibition laws. The streets of Manhattan teem with seething resentments and inarticulate passions. Wall Street … explodes. It is the most destructive and deadly terrorist attack ever committed on United States soil. Caught in the blast are war veteran Stratham Younger, police detective Jimmy Littlemore, and the beautiful but secretive Colette Rousseau. A mysterious trail of evidence, together with a series of inexplicable attacks on Colette and a secret buried deep in her past, lead the three on a harrowing but thrilling journey from Paris to Prague, from the roof of the world’s tallest skyscraper to the secret underground vaults of the U.S. Treasury, from the Vienna home of Sigmund Freud to the halls of Congress in Washington, D.C.  As the frightening, seemingly disjointed pieces of the puzzle come together, Younger and Littlemore unravel Colette’s secret – and the shocking truth behind the terror in Wall Street.

Set against the backdrop of the devastating Wall Street bombing of September, 1920 – a real historical event that remains unsolved to this day – The Death Instinct expertly blends fact and fiction, killing and passion, suspense and adventure in a page-turning thriller about the hidden depths of our most savage instincts.

My Review: First, let me say that I had no idea that this horrific act of terrorism occurred in the early part of the 20th Century. On September 16, 1920, a bomb exploded on Wall Street. This act of terrorism killed and injured 400 people. To this day, the crime has not been solved. Mr. Rubenfeld uses this event as his starting point in writing this fascinating and compelling historical mystery. Employing a mixture of fictional and real historial characters, the author weaves factual events together with a story line involving a police detective, war veteran, a French woman (who has trained under Marie Curie) and her younger brother.

The mystery is tremendously detailed and Rubenfeld paints a vivid portrait of New York City in 1920, as well as Europe after the end of World War I. The action takes place in the United States as well as the Continent. This terrorist act “remained the most destructive act of terrorism in the United States until the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.” In Rubenfeld’s telling of the story, we see strong similarities between 1920 and now – in the mood of the country and the rush to war.

This book is very well written and extensively researched. We learn about Sigmund Freud, Marie Curie, radium poisoning (fascinating and horrific), the toll of the First World War on soldiers and citizens and corruption among government officials.

I found it hard to care very much about the character of Stratham Younger. He is world weary and cynical about everything, partly due to what he has gone through in WWI; nevertheless, that doesn’t make for a strong protagonist. It keeps him removed in a way that is off-putting. His relationship with Sigmund Freud seemed a bit too contrived and I never really bought it. While these other sections of the plot were interesting, I was most compelled by the effort to solve the bombing led by Detective Littlemore. This, to me, was the heart of the story. My compliments to Mr. Rubenfeld: His writing made this event so riveting that I want to learn more about it.

Rubenfeld has written a complex and absorbing historical mystery. I think you will find it fascinating.

About the Author: Jed Rubenfeld is the author of the international bestseller The Interpretation of Murder. He is a professor at Yale University Law School and is one of the country’s foremost experts on constitutional law. He wrote his undergraduate thesis at Princeton University on Sigmund Freud. He lives in Connecticut with his family.

The Death Instinct is being released this month by Riverhead Books.

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Congratulations to my friend Jim Parsons on winning the Golden Globe for his work on The Big Bang Theory. Jim was my student in San Diego and is also my friend. It couldn’t happen to a nicer, more talented guy.

We’re headed into a day long snow and ice event here in our neck of the woods. I’m hoping the weather predictions turn out to be over-hyped. Send positive thoughts our way!

Today I am reviewing Dear Mrs. Kennedy, The World Shares Its Grief, Letters November 1963 as part of TLC Book Tours. As always, I am provided with a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

About the book:

In the weeks and months following the assassination of her husband, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy received over one million letters. They came from political luminaries such as Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Charles DeGaulle; from Hollywood stars like Lauren Bacall, Vivian Leigh, and Gene Kelly and foreign dignitaries like Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Monaco. Distinguished artists, writers, and well-known society figures – Ezra Pound, Noel Coward, Babe Paley, Langston Hughes, Oleg Cassini, Josephine Baker – offered heartfelt condolences. “Ordinary” citizens of this country and many others wrote as well, as did children, often with the most heartbreaking sincerity.

Dear Mrs. Kennedy: More Than Just a Compendium of Letters

Dear Mrs. Kennedy uses these many voices to tell the unforgettable story of those fateful four days when the world was struck with shock and sadness, presenting a poignant time capsule and a diverse portrait not only of the aftermath of the assassination, but of the Kennedy mystique that continues to captivate the world.

During a decade of writing and publishing books about the Kennedy family, Jay Mulvaney became acquainted with the collection of condolence mail held in the JFK Library in Boston. In 2007 he had the idea to bring together a selection of the very best of these letters into a book that would illuminate both Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy. In a cruel twist of fate, Jay himself died unexpectedly shortly after signing up the book and completing an initial selection of several thousand letters. Experienced writer and book editor Paul De Angelis then took over the task of bringing Jay’s project to fruition.

My review:

I am a member of the generation that remembers exactly where they were when President Kennedy was shot. I will never forget hearing the devastating news from my teacher and then watching the television endlessly for the next several days. It is forever imprinted on my brain. I was just a child but even then I had a sense that our collective innocence was gone forever. The world changed that day. I don’t know if we’ve ever recovered. So it was with great interest that I read this book. Let me just say it: I cannot recommend it highly enough. One of the blurbs on the back says that it is a great book for the bedside table. It’s true. You can read a bit at a time. What the authors do very well is provide the reader with the context of the time, the mood of the nation and what had been happening politically and globally before the assassination. For those less than familiar with the Kennedy family history, that is provided as well.

We read letters from family members, close friends, heads of state, children and adults alike. One letter is from an Eskimo family on a remote island off the coast of Alaska. We read letters from Winston Churchill, a nun who was watching as Kennedy’s car traveled through the streets of Dallas, fellow crew members on PT 109: people from every walk of life wrote to Mrs. Kennedy. Sometimes a letter consists only of a simple sentence or two. We all remember the dignity with which Jacqueline Kennedy carried herself throughout the days after the assassination. I cannot even begin to imagine how these notes from all over the world must have moved her in the weeks and months to follow. I know that I was tremendously moved as I read each letter. I really had a sense of a world citizenry plunged into terrible grief. I found myself contemplating, as I have done so many times in the past, what might have been had President Kennedy lived.

This book is a treasure. I will read it again and again.

About the author:

Paul De Angelis served more than three decades in the book publishing business as Editor, Editorial Director, or Editor-in-Chief of such publishing companies as St. Martin’s Press and E.P. Dutton and Kodansha America. After becoming an independent editor in 1996 he founded Paul De Angelis Book Development, which assists authors, agents, publishers and organizations in turning ideas & manuscripts into books. Since 1997 Paul has edited, contributed to, and co-published the quarterly guide to the Rhinebeck-Red Hook-Hudson area of the mid-Hudson Valley, AboutTown. In the past few years his main writing and research interest has been American culture and politics in its intersection with the wider world.

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The publishers are graciously giving away a copy of this book to one lucky commenter on this post. So, if you are interested, leave a comment and I will pick a winner on Wednesday evening.

Today I am reviewing Outside the Ordinary World by Dori Ostermiller for TLC Book Tours. As always, I am provided with a copy of the book for my honest review.

From the Publisher:

Sylvia Sandon is at a crossroads in her life. A wife and mother of two daughters, she and her city-planner husband are grappling with the escalating renovation of their antique farmhouse—a situation that mirrors the disarray in Sylvia’s life. Facing a failing marriage and a stalled career as an art teacher, Sylvia finds herself suddenly powerless to the allure of Tai Rosen, the father of her most challenging art student. As their passion ignites, Sylvia is forced to examine her past, and the seeds of betrayal that were sown decades earlier by her mother’s secret life.

Eloquently written and deeply thought-provoking, Ostermiller’s OUTSIDE THE ORDINARY WORLD crosses many years and miles—from the California brushfires in the 1970s to New England during the first half of this decade. Raised Seventh Day Adventist, Sylvia must reconcile the conflicting values exhibited by her parents—a mother involved in an extramarital affair and a father who was emotionally distant and abusive—while coming to terms with her own troubling role in her family’s dissolution and father’s tragic death.

While infidelity is a subject often explored in fiction, Ostermiller shines a razor-sharp lens on the gray areas surrounding betrayal, the interplay of religion, and the legacy passed down from one generation to the next. At the same time, she reveals the redemptive power of the human spirit to love, grow, and change despite family history.

My Review:

This is such a well-written book. Weaving together past and present, the author tells a tale of mistakes made by one generation and mistakes repeated by the next generation. Sylvia, the protagonist, is a married mother of two daughters who finds herself having an affair, despite the fact that her mother also had an affair while Sylvia was a child. In her mother’s case, the affair directly involved her daughters and Sylvia was cast in the role of secret-keeper – a role no child should have to play. The irony here is that Sylvia’s secret affair puts her daughter in much the same position. History repeats itself.

Her mother’s strong Seventh Day Adventist faith adds another layer to the story. How does she reconcile this religion with adultery? As Sylvia copes with her own affair and the threat it poses to her marriage and to her children, she must re-visit her past. This involves coming to terms with her father’s downward spiral and eventual death.

So many of us can relate to this story. I’m not speaking of having an affair, but of finding ourselves repeating the behavior of our parents. In many cases, we vow that we will never do something or other the way our parents did. But we do. We are only human. And in doing so, we must confront those choices and either accept them or opt for something different. It forces us to see our parents in a different light. As Sylvia repeats the same pattern of behavior as her mother, she is compelled to see her mother’s choices in a different way. She must also make a choice between her marriage and family and the man with whom she is involved.

Ostermiller writes beautifully. The world she has created and the characters we come to know are all fully realized and compelling. Without giving away the ending, I will say that the reader is left wondering how these characters will fare in the future, given what they’ve been through – much like real life.

About the Author:

Dori Ostermiller was born in Los Angeles, a fifth-generation Californian. In her early 20′s, she abandoned her path as a pre-med student to pursue an MFA in writing at the University of Massachusetts. Since then, her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Bellingham Review, Roanoke Review, Alligator Juniper, Chautauqua Literary Journal and the Massachusetts Review. She is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist’s Grant and a Tobias Wolf Fiction award, and is the founder of Writers in Progress, a literary arts center in Western Massachusetts.

Her debut novel, Outside the Ordinary World, was released by MIRA in August, 2010.  She lives in Northampton, with her husband and two daughters, and is at work on her second novel.

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The publishers have offered a free copy of this book to one lucky commenter on this post. Leave a comment if you are interested and I will pick a winner on Friday evening.