Book Talk

Someone else’s shoes

One of the best things about working in a library is finding out about things you never knew existed/happened or are currently being explored.

How many of you have ever heard of Fordlandia? In 1927 Henry Ford bought land in the Amazon the size of Delaware. He planned to grow rubber, but also to export an American style city to the jungles of Brazil. Ford tried to impose schedules, time clocks, square dances and mass production, but the result was a tropical boomtown which rejected his Midwestern Puritanism. He saw the jungle as something that had to be dominated. The tragic tale of this project is told in Fordlandia: the Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin.

Napoleon Bonaparte commanded an invincible army, an empire of forty-five million and the richest most advanced country in the world. With that power behind him, he decided to invade Russia, where it was expected that the tsar’s forces would crumble. On the Russian steppes he began to lose his men to typhus, until 100,000 were dead. In The Illustrious Dead: the Terrifying story of how Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army,  Stephan Talty covers not only the Napoleonic wars but the effect on other battles of this war plague.

Many of us are familiar with the story of the death of Socrates by hemlock, but there is, of course, more to the story. In 399 BCE Socrates was put on trial for crimes of impiety and “subverting the young men of the city”. After being found guilty, he was sentenced to death. Although those charges were enough for the death penalty, there was more against him. An atheist, elitist and guru of a weird sect. he gathered political subversives around him, including those who admired Sparta, the enemy of Socrates’ Athens. In Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths, Robin Waterfield shows the political turbulence of the times and its effect on the life of Socrates.

John Dillinger, “Public Enemy No. 1”, was only the third outlaw to receive that title, another being Al Capone. He was a Robin Hood-like hero to thousands of Americans during the Great Depression. A dozen law men lost their lives trying to capture or kill the Dillinger Gang. J. Edgar Hoover, the young director of the F.B.I. was in danger of losing his job because of the agency’s failures. Eliot Gorn brings Dillinger to life in Dillinger’s Wild Ride: the Year that made America’s Public Enemy Number One.

Rocket Men: the Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, by Craig Nelson, is being called by reviewers the definitive book on the subject. As ordinary citizens we see the glory. This book makes you realizes the sheer courage involved in that flight. The launch missile had 6 million parts with a reliability rate of 99.9 percent. That meant as many as 6,000 parts might fail. And did you know that the engineers forgot to put a handle on the outside door?

Unemployment, agricultural consolidation and population drain made the small town of Oelwein, Iowa ripe for the meth epidemic. Cheap, effective, and easy to make, meth became the economic underpinning of Oelwein.  Methland: the Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding explores the magnitude and the tragedy of the problem.

Virginia Cooper
Adult Services Librarian