All The Broken Places by John Boyne

All The Broken Places by John Boyne

Read by Kristin Ahterton and Helen Lloyd 

12 hours 42 minutes

Published November 2022 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She doesn’t talk about her escape from Nazi Germany at age 12. She doesn’t talk about the grim post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she doesn’t talk about her father, who was the commandant of one of the Reich’s most notorious extermination camps. 

Then, a new family moves into the apartment below her. In spite of herself, Gretel can’t help but begin a friendship with the little boy, Henry, though his presence brings back memories she would rather forget. One night, she witnesses a disturbing, violent argument between Henry’s beautiful mother and his arrogant father, one that threatens Gretel’s hard-won, self-contained existence. 

All The Broken Places moves back and forth in time between Gretel’s girlhood in Germany to present-day London as a woman whose life has been haunted by the past. Now, Gretel faces a similar crossroads to one she encountered long ago. Back then, she denied her own complicity, but now, faced with a chance to interrogate her guilt, grief and remorse, she can choose to save a young boy. If she does, she will be forced to reveal the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting. This time, she can make a different choice than before—whatever the cost to herself….

My Thoughts: 

I did that thing again, the thing where I don't finish listening to a book before my loan expires and then months later, when I finally get it back again, I can't remember a thing I listened to before and I have to go back aways into the book to refresh my memory. In no time, though, I was once again swept into this book and everything it made me feel. 

In 2006, Boyne wrote the bestseller The Boy In The Striped Pajamas. Readers of that book will recognize the main character in this book. Gretel Fernsby was 12 years old in that first book. Almost 80 years later, she is still living with the guilt of what she did then and what her father (and, by extension, her family) did and stood for. 

Here we are centered on present-day Gretel, but Boyne drops us back in to different times in Gretel's life. First to the time she and her mother spent in Paris, then to the time she spent in Australia, then to her early life with her late husband and son. In all of those places, Gretel is faced with the repercussions of what her father did, of her own feelings about it, of her implicate others who were guilty of heinous acts. But Gretel has been living for a long time with the past buried, in no small part because she keeps so much to herself. But young Henry has brought back the memory of what Gretel did to her brother and she finally sees a way to at least partially redeem herself. 

Like The German Wife, this book left me with mixed feelings about the main character. How much of what happened in those camps is she complicit in? What is her responsibility to those who died and those who suffered? Are we meant to feel sorry for her or should she be punished for what she did (or didn't) do? To be fair, Gretel was a young girl, not able to stop anything. But she could, in later years, have done more and it's hard to forgive her for that. Especially in light of the fact that she seems to feel much greater guilt for what happened to her brother than what happened to the millions of others who died. I wanted her to make things right in some way and here Boyne did not disappoint. 

I definitely recommend the audiobook (although I'm sure it's great in print, as well) and can imagine that this book would give book clubs a lot to talk about. 

The Splendid and The Vile by Erik Larson

The Splendid and The Vile by Erik Larson
Read by John Lee
Published February 2020 by Crown Publishing Group
Source: audiobook checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary: 
On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally—and willing to fight to the end.

In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people “the art of being fearless.” It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it’s also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill’s prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports—some released only recently—Larson provides a new lens on London’s darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents’ wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela’s illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill’s “Secret Circle,” to whom he turns in the hardest moments.

The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today’s political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when, in the face of unrelenting horror, Churchill’s eloquence, courage, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together.


My Thoughts: 
This is essentially the story of Winston Churchill's first year as Great Britain's prime minister, just as World War II really began to take off and Hitler set his sites on England. In a normal life, at a normal time, one year might not amount to much. But this was not, obviously, a normal time. It's no surprise to find, in listening to this book, that Winston Churchill was the right man for Great Britain in a time of war. Despite almost certain destruction (and let's be honest, if the United States had not gotten into the war, Great Britain would almost certainly have fallen), Churchill managed to keep his nation's spirits high. He did it in no small part by being astonishingly calm throughout the bombing of London, often refusing to leave 10 Downing Street during bombing raids. Churchill also seemed to have had an uncanny knowledge of how to get Franklin Roosevelt to step up and help, working behind the scenes to get what he needed long before the U. S. finally came to England's aid.

The Splendid and The Vile is not just a book about Churchill but also those who surrounded him, his family, his aids, the people who helped save England and also, to an extent, the German leaders. It being written by Larson, the book is exceedingly well researched and the stories of everyone involved are woven together so that readers can see the full picture of what Churchill was going through both as Prime Minister and husband and father. Larson does a tremendous job of making readers feel what it must have been like to have lived in England during the bombing and he doesn't spare readers the brutality those bombs wrought. It's not an easy read.

When I pick up a book by Larson, I know I'm going to learn things that you won't find in your history books unless you're a scholar of that time and place. For example, I had no idea that Rudolph Hess had flown a plane to England, believing he might be able to bring England to the negotiating table and thus avoid war on two fronts.

The book includes an epilogue detailing what became of most of the main players in the book. The audiobook also includes, as a bonus, a Christmas speech Churchill gave after the war. I imagine the print book includes photos and I do love photos in history books. But if I'd picked it up in print, I would have missed John Lee's remarkable reading of the book.

Wolf by Herbert J. Stern and Alan A. Winter - Guest Review

Wolf by Herbert J. Stern and Alan A. Winter
Published February 2020 by Skyhorse
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through TLC Book Tours, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
Perhaps no man on Earth is more controversial, more hated, or more studied than Adolf Hitler. His exploits and every move are well-documented, from the time he first became chancellor and then dictator of Germany to starting World War II to the systematic killing of millions of Jews. But how did he achieve power, and what was the makeup of the mind of a man who would deliberately inflict unimaginable horrors on millions of people?

Meet Friedrich Richard, an amnesiac soldier who, in 1918, encounters Hitler in the mental ward at Pasewalk Hospital. Hitler, then a corporal, diagnosed as a psychopath and helpless, suffering from hysterical blindness, introduces himself as Wolf to Friedrich and becomes dependent upon Friedrich for assistance, forming an unbreakable bond between the two men.

Follow Friedich—our protagonist—who interacts with real people, places, and events, through the fifteen-year friendship that witnesses Hitler turn from a quiet painter into a megalomaniacal dictator. Using brand-new historical research to construct a realistic portrait of the evolving Hitler, Wolf will satisfy, by turns, history buffs and fiction fans alike. And as this complex story is masterfully presented, it answers the question of how a nondescript man became the world’s greatest monster.


My Thoughts:
When I was asked to review this book, I thought it sounded like something that might interest me. But I felt like it was even more likely to be something that would interest my husband. Here is his guest review:

I have always been drawn to Germany between the two wars and the reasons Germany and Hitler were able to pull off the massive infrastructure buildup along with the mass psychology Hitler used to motivate and gain the approval of the majority of the German people.  I also tend to enjoy historical fiction, such that from James Michener and the Flashman Chronicles.

This book is also timely as parallels could be made with the megalomanic in office currently who seems enamored and friendly with dictators while some groups seem intent to either empower or quietly watch and do nothing.

I did like the tone of the characters and enjoyed most of the characters including Friedrich.  Some could certainly fault him for being duped into thinking Hitler was a good thing for Germany and getting caught up in the Reich glam despite being warned by many friends or associates.  Of course, due to economic and political circumstances of the time and the fact that the majority of Germany felt the same way, it is believable and we might be forgiving.

I do believe the dual authors did a nice job of showing the development of Hitler and the party, but it did seem a bit too accurately architected by Hitler, where I would guess it was a bit more messy and he lucked out in many instances.

As I was reading, I was not sure how I was meant to feel about Hitler as the authors did not make him seem the monster we have grown to love thorough much of the book outside of his hatred of the Jews, but it could be easy to over do his evil and focus on it to the point of overpowering the book.

I believe this book can appeal to a fairly broad group where one would believe a book about Hitler and WWII might  be more of a guy thing.  Since there are a great deal of strong women involved with Friedrich and others, it weaves a nice pattern of relationships that come and go and circle back again.  This makes it more interesting and easy to read while getting the political, economic and psychological information across without being too dry and monotonous.

That being said as I am a bit attention deficit, I could lose 100 of the 539 pages and be good with it, but it slides along well for a story of this girth.  Definitely an interesting an worthwhile read in my view.

Jeff

For other opinions about this book, check out the full tour here. Thanks to the folks at TLC Book Tours for including us on this tour!

About Herbert J. Stein

Herbert J. Stern, formerly US attorney for the District of New Jersey, who prosecuted the mayors of Newark, Jersey City and Atlantic City, and served as judge of the US District Court for the District of New Jersey, is a trial lawyer. He also served as judge of the United States Court for Berlin. There he presided over a hijacking trial in the occupied American Sector of West Berlin. His book about the case, Judgment in Berlin, won the 1974 Freedom Foundation Award and became a film starring Martin Sheen and Sean Penn. He also wrote Diary of a DA: The True Story of the Prosecutor Who Took on the Mob, Fought Corruption, and Won, as well as the multi-volume legal work Trying Cases to Win.

About Alan A. Winters

Alan A. Winter is the author of four novels, including Island Bluffs, Snowflakes in the Sahara, Someone Else’s Son, and Savior’s Day, which Kirkus selected as a Best Book of 2013. Winter graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in history and has professional degrees from both New York University and Columbia, where he was an associate professor for many years. He edited an award-winning journal and has published more than twenty professional articles. Alan studied creative writing at Columbia’s Graduate School of General Studies. His screenplay, Polly, received honorable mention in the Austin Film Festival, and became the basis for Island Bluffs.

Resistance Women by Jennifer Chiaverini

Resistance Women by Jennifer Chiaverini
Published May 2019 by William Morrow
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher and TLC Book Tours in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
After Wisconsin graduate student Mildred Fish marries brilliant German economist Arvid Harnack, she accompanies him to his German homeland, where a promising future awaits. In the thriving intellectual culture of 1930s Berlin, the newlyweds create a rich new life filled with love, friendships, and rewarding work—but the rise of a malevolent new political faction inexorably changes their fate.

As Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party wield violence and lies to seize power, Mildred, Arvid, and their friends resolve to resist. Mildred gathers intelligence for her American contacts, including Martha Dodd, the vivacious and very modern daughter of the US ambassador. Her German friends, aspiring author Greta Kuckoff and literature student Sara Weitz, risk their lives to collect information from journalists, military officers, and officials within the highest levels of the Nazi regime.

For years, Mildred’s network stealthily fights to bring down the Third Reich from within. But when Nazi radio operatives detect an errant Russian signal, the Harnack resistance cell is exposed, with fatal consequences.

Inspired by actual events, Resistance Women is an enthralling, unforgettable story of ordinary people determined to resist the rise of evil, sacrificing their own lives and liberty to fight injustice and defend the oppressed.

My Thoughts:
Mildred Fish Harnack? She was a  real person, an American living in German with her German husband as Adolf Hitler rose to power. An American who was so upset by what she saw happening that she decided to do something to help those at greatest risk. Greta Kuckoff? Also a real person. As was Martha Dodd (I talked about Martha when I reviewed Erik Larson's In The Garden of Beasts, the story of William Dodd's time as the American ambassador to Germany).

I'm always impressed when an author can weave together the lives of real people and a fictional narrative and Chiaverini is terrific at it. Her books never feel like she's tried to get everything she learned about a subject into a book and the fictional characters always blend so well with the real people she's included. You've heard me say many times that I'm sort of over reading books about World War II. But I keep going back to them because there continue to be new stories to tell. Here, Chiaverini looks at the rise of the Nazis through the eyes of several regular citizens of various backgrounds. In particular, through her characters, she explores the way the citizens of Germany fell under the sway of Hitler and the Nazi party. Chiaverini very much seems to be using this book, too, as a way to make people take a look at what is happening in our country these days. As a cautionary tale, it's scary as hell.

The book is very detailed as Chiaverini follows these women through about ten years, some times too detailed. At almost 600 pages, I did feel that the book could have been trimmed down some without losing any of the details that made us care about these women or any of the history that was so important to the story. It still would have been a frightening book, still a terribly sad book, still a book that tells important stories.

Thanks to the ladies of TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour. For other opinions, check out the full tour.

About Jennifer Chiaverini

Jennifer Chiaverini is the New York Times bestselling author of several acclaimed historical novels and the beloved Elm Creek Quilts series. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, she lives with her husband and two sons in Madison, Wisconsin.

Find out more about Jennifer at her website, and connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

If you're interested in owning a copy of this book. find it at HarperCollins.

The Women In The Castle by Jessica Shattuck

The Women In The Castle by Jessica Shattuck
Published March 2017 by Harper Collins Publishers
Source: bought for my Nook

Publisher's Summary:

Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined.

Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows.

First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister’s wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war.

As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war—each with their own unique share of challenges.

My Thoughts:
I read this with the Omaha Bookworms* last month. It wasn't exactly what any of us had been expecting (maybe because we didn't entirely read through the synopsis); but we all liked the story the book does tell.

This was another one of those books about World War II that surprised me by giving me a view of that war that I've never read about before. Shattuck raises a lot of questions in The Women In The Castle. What of the German people in the aftermath, those who supported the German war machine and those who opposed it? And how do they live with each other after what has happened? And how do people live with the things they've done to survive?

As much as I disliked the Germans for what they did during the war, it's the Russians who really come off as the bad guys here as they literally rape, pillage, and plunder their way across what's left of Germany. I'm not naive enough to believe that American soldiers didn't commit some atrocities as they moved across the lands of the conquered enemies, but the Russians seem to have taken their revenge for what was done to their people by German soldiers and their leaders.

One of the things that grabbed me about this book was how often this piece of history mirrored our current political situation.

"For so long Marianne and Albrecht and many of their friends had known Hitler was a lunatic, a leader whose lowbrow appeal to people's most selfish, self-pitying emotions and ignorance was an embarrassment for their country. They had watched him make a masterwork of scapegoating Jews for Germany's fall from power and persuade his followers that enlightenment, humanity, and tolerance were weaknesses - "Jewish" ideas that led to defeat. They had wrung their hands over his dangerous conflations, his fervor, and his lack of humanity." 

These ladies have stayed with me; a month after reading the book, I'm still thinking about them and their strength and their pain.

*This is a terrific book club selection, with a lot to talk about including the ties to current times, the bonds the women forged, the ways they survived and the truth of the history in the book. We definitely recommend it for other book clubs.

In The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

In The Garden of Beasts; Love, Terror, and An American Family In Hitler's Germany by Erik Larson
Published May 2011 by Crown Publishing Group
Source: this one was a gift from me to my hubby

I've been trying to write my review of this one for two weeks. But, as I so often do when I'm reading nonfiction, I took a mountain of notes. It's been hard to winnow the details down to what you need to know to understand the story of William E. Dodd's tenure as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany. In In The Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson uses Dodd's time in Germany as a way to highlight activity in Germany leading up to the second World War and failure on the part of the American government to grasp what was happening in time to do anything about it.

Dodd was an unlikely choice for such an important position. A college professor, whose life's ambition was to write the definitive trilogy about the American South, Dodd preferred time on his small farm to any thing else. He did have a deep interest in politics and actively pursued a diplomatic post, but hoped for one with very little actual work. Germany was not on his list of choices, although it was a country he had fallen in love with forty years earlier when he studied there. When Franklin Roosevelt, unable to find anyone else to take the ambassadorship in Germany, approached Dodd about the post, Dodd reluctantly agreed.

He was right to be reluctant. His attempts to live within his salary,  his early view of his ambassadorial role as more of an observer and reporter (Dodd hoped he could exert a "moderating influence" over Hitler's government through reason and example), and the belief of the American people that the U.S. should maintain an isolationist stance all made Dodd's job more difficult.

Rudolf Diels

Dodd's daughter, Martha, added to his troubles. Martha had long been interested in being part of the intellectual set; in the U.S. she counted among her friends Thornton Wild, Carl Sandberg and Thomas Wolf. Her interactions with this same type of set in Berlin, however, raised eyebrows, particularly since many of those people were suspected communists. But it was her easy virtue that really made State Department and Nazi Party officials alike take notice. Among her conquests, Martha counted German officers, Gestapo leader Rudolf Diels (a man who was known as the "Prince of Darkness" and didn't mind it), and Boris Winogradov, officially an attache to the Soviet embassy but in reality a spy. At one point, it was even suggested to Martha that it would be a good political move to seduce Adolf Hitler and she agreed. Nothing, however, came of that.

While there were some who sounded the alarm early on (U.S. Consulate, George Messersmith warned that "something fundamental had changed in Germany" when Hitler became Chancellor), Dodd and his family originally arrived in Germany believing only the best. The U.S. Government preferred to believe only the best as well. Roosevelt's first and foremost concern in the early 1930's was the economy and the hope that Germany might one day repay the massive debt left by the first World War made him loathe to rock the boat. Roosevelt was also reluctant to act on behalf of the German Jews because of his concerns about a backlash from the American public. Even the American Jewish population was divided on how to react.

While the world turned a blind eye, the Nazi party instituted a program, "Coordination,"  to bring citizens, government ministries, universities and cultural and social institutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and attitudes. A central element was the insertion into law of "Aryan clause" which effectively banned Jews from government jobs. Hitler and his cohorts also amped up the production of arms and Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations and from a long-running disarmament conference in Geneva. In the spring of 1934, Hitler finally made his move to fully secure his power and to wipe out those opposed to him. By this time, Dodd was strongly warning the U.S. in regard to Hitler's true ambitions and the danger of continued isolationism. His reward? The U.S. government accepted his resignation after the German government turned him out. As ill-equipped and ill-suited as he was to the job, it's impossible not to think what might have happened if anyone had respected Dodd enough to listen to him.

As many German government buildings and other embassies were, the American Embassy was located across the street from the Tiergarten in Berlin, a name which literally translates to "animal garden" or "garden of beasts," hence the reason Larson chose the title of his book.

Trish of Love, Laughter & A Touch of Insanity and I read this one together. She actually listened to it while I had the book in my hands. This is a surprisingly difficult book to keep track of the players in and Trish found it harder than I did which also made it more difficult for her to become invested in the story. I know we both feel that we learned a lot and that Larson did a fine job of giving Dodd a fair shake. But both of us also felt like this one was a lot of work to read and that, as narrow as the topic already was, Larson might have fared better having chosen a tighter focus. Certainly Martha had the more interesting story line and her life would make a fascinating book in and of itself. But William Dodd was clearly meant to be the linchpin of the story and Trish and I concur that he tended to get lost, poor man.