Andy Warhol by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Timothy Hunt

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I've read many of Vegara's books. This author must be a little demon workhorse to turn out so many of these ebooks. I believe there are like five dozen of them now, and I sure haven't read that many, but I have read quite a few. There has been only one, if I recall correctly, that I have not liked. This one was no exception to the likeability rule.

Andy Warhola, as he was originally, was the child of Slovakian immigrants who was shy and had an artistic leaning from an early age. He finished college and moved quickly to New York where he was able to find work as an illustrator, before he branched out into celebrating the mundane and became a world-famous artist, inspired by the soup cans from which he made his lunch each day.

This book tells a short, sweet, and nicely illustrated (by Hunt) story of his life and work and I commend it.

The First Muslim by Lesley Hazelton

Rating: WARTY!

I am not a religious person. Not when I live in a world the worst of which we've seen in the USA over just the last year, let alone what came before it. It's been a year - and not the first over the last four - where the US's allies must have despaired over the USA, and the US's enemies must have salivated. In times like this in particular, it makes sense to me that too many people are blindly desperate for religion. Indeed, we've seen what amounts to a religious cult created since 2016 in the US, but religion itself makes zero sense to me, and it doesn't matter which religion it is. They're all as bad.

The real problem is that the prospective adherents to a religion fail to actually listen to the teacher of the religion - the founder. Why is that? The founder is pretty much always a white guy isn't it? People of color sometimes do start a religion, but women barely get a look in, and when any of these do, they rarely get far with their endeavor. That ought to make everyone suspicious! But even when the message is delivered directly from the mouth of the founder, the adherents fail to take it to heart and instead of internalizing the message, they become obsessed with blind ritual and mimickry instead of following what's been taught to them.

According to the New Testament, for example, a specific message was taught and it was delivered to the children of the House of Israel. It was never intended to spread beyond those people. Yet when Paul derailed the original message, he perverted it to apply to everyone, and spread it way beyond its intended recipients. Christianity as it's practiced in the world today bears no relation to what was originally taught. Worse, it has been spread not through love and compassion, and through turning the other cheek, but through pograms and burning of heretics. In short, the original message was lost and instead, it became a perversion of what had originally been intended.

Here's another issue with the word being given to humanity: Mohammed was, when his life began, a nobody who no-one expected anything from. He was an orphan who was passed around and adopted by various kinsmen and tribes; he was never expected to become any lind of a leader, so why was he chosen? For that matter, why Abraham? Why Moses? Instead of one of these initially obscure people, why not pick someone who is charismatic and powerful, and who can get the word out everywhere and quickly?

Why was it Abraham instead of Alexander the Great, who was a man controlled a huge amount of territory? Why was it Mohammed instead of, say, Julius Caesar or Ghengis Khan who had access to a far wider territory to spread the word than ever did Mohammed. It makes no sense to me, and it's clearly the reason why so many of these religions fail to take off. For every one of them that comes to world prominence, there are scores upon scores which fail completely or which at best become a niche religion. Once in a while, one will grow and succeed (if you can call it that), such as Christianity did, and later Islam did, but those are the rare exceptions, not the rule, so something is obviously and clearly wrong with this system of dissemination somewhere along the line.

And why are the religions so contradictory? All three major monotheistic religions came out of Middle East roots, yet none of the three can agree on much! If Christianity was better than Judaism - more accurate, more true or whatever its advantage was supposed to be - then why didn't the Judaists adopt it? Why do they still remain Judaists? And if Jesus was the last word, as Christians maintain, then why was Mohammed called to step up? Conversely, if Islam is the last word, why wasn't it adopted by both the Judaists and the Christians? Again, to me, it makes no sense.

There's another way in which this makes no sense, and while there are many fantastical stories in this particular book, I think it's best exemplified in the legend of Mohammed's sojourn in a cave while on his way to Medina. We're told he was chosen as a prophet to spread the true word, yet he was, as usual, rejected by his people and at one point was forced to flee for his life. According to this book he took an unexpected route to throw pursuers off his trail, and he encamped in a cave for a while. So far so good.

These behaviors are smart, and they make perfect sense if you're threatened and have no protection. They make no sense if a god is supposed to have your back. Why did his god make him run? Why didn't his god help - by for example transporting him to his destination instead of leaving him to fend for himself? We see this kind of thing routinely in religious stories - no matter what the religion is. The Bible is full of them.

But this is where this story wandered once more into the fantastical and why I quit reading at this point, because by this time it had seriously begun to feel much less like a biography that I had been seriously interested in reading, and much more like a work of fiction. We're told spiders came by in the hundreds and wove cobwebs over the cave mouth so it looked derelict, and thus he escaped attention. He had a camel to complete the journey and finally settled where the camel gave up the trip and settled down itself. I just don't get why, if his message was so important, he wasn't given more support in getting it out! Why did he pretty much have to do everything himself? And why do we see this same circumstance so often in so many different religion-founding stories?

Most seriously for me though, was that this same kind of question arose when it came to the content of the book. Obviously none of the above quesitosn were addressed, which was a problem for me, but additionally there's clearly a real story of a man's religious experience here, and surrounding that is the inevitable mythology which unfortunately grows up around these events. I don't feel the author did a good job of demarcating the two. There seemed to be far too much speculation, not over events, many of which are recorded and not in dispute, but in imputing people's motivation, and what they 'must have been thinking'.

We can guess at that of course, but we can't know, and it seemed both disingenuous and disrepectful to assume so much. This for me was the core reason why I must reject this biography. All religions have a mythology and some of it is quite beautiful, as was much of it here, but I wanted to understand the man behind the mythology, and I felt like I really didn't get a fair shot at that from this book, which is why I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Kamala and Maya's Big Idea by Meena Harris, Ana Ramírez González

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second of two children's books about Kamal Harris that I read. The author is Kamala (pronounced Kom-a-la) Harris's niece. The book tells the inspiring story of these two girls' struggle to get a children's playground up and running on an empty lot at the apartment complex where they lived.

Despite almost universal apathy by the adults, the two girls were resolute (that's good to be, especially if you're a girl and maybe used to being talked down, dismissed, or diminished). The girls made a plan and stuck to it, and they fought and struggled and made it happen - and there was the playground that all the kids could enjoy. An inspiring story that's true! We're going to need that selfless resolution in the White House to overcome the dire depredations and selfishness left as a legacy by the worst president in US history.

Kamala Harris Rooted in Justice by Nikki Grimes, Laura Freeman

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first of two children's books about Kamal Harris that I read. This one is a biography written nicely for children by Grimes and illustrated elegantly by Freeman. It follows Kamala (that's pronounced Kom-a-la), now vice-president-elect (as of this review) from her childhood, through school, law school, and her various public service jobs up to the point where she became a senator. It's not updated for very recent events - it ends at her run for senator - but it tells an inspiring story and it makes for encouraging reading, and for hope for the USA for the next four years that too many people have become desperate for under the recent cult and dictatorship.

Which President Killed a Man? by James Humes

Rating: WORTHY!

James Humes was a speechwriter for several Republican presidents, and this is a book of trivia regarding presidents, vice-presidents and first ladies as well as first, lasts, and pets, so if you're into that stuff, this is for you. It consists of a number of topic sections, each populated with a set of questions and a short answer for each, consisting of a few lines to a couple of paragraphs. I found parts of it interesting and parts boring, but then I've never had this fascination for historical trivia the way many seem to do. I'm not one who finds appeal in the endless books that seem to come on offer about the civil war, or presidents, or World War Two (why is it never World War One, I wonder?!), so maybe this held less appeal for me than perhaps it does for some.

That said, I commend it if you're into this sort of thing. It was interesting for the most part to read once, but it's a better read, I think, as a bathroom book which you can dip into from time to time than for a 'settle down and read it like a novel' sort of enterprise, so on that basis I commend it as a worthy read. Of course it's not up to date. It was published in 2002, so disappointingly, it has none of the soap opera antics of a recent president, but there's still plenty to amuse and intrigue.

The Lost Girls by DJ Taylor

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a bit of a biography of some young women who hung around with British literary critic Cyril Connolly in the thirties, forties, and fifties. The audiobook is read pretty decently by Clare Corbett, although the introductory part was a pain to put up with, especially since I had no ready way to skip it while driving! Yuk! After that it improved. Subtitled "Love and Literature in Wartime London," the book mostly covers four of these 'girls': Sonia Brownell, Lys Lubbock, Barbara Skelton, and Janetta Woolley, but one that caught my imagination was named Diana Witherby. I don't know what it is, but there's something about that name that really captures my imagination. She was a poet evidently who fractured her pelvis in a car accident when it was hit by a military truck on the blitz-darkened streets of London.

But I digress! These 'lost' girls typically experienced a less-than-satisfactory home life, were in at least one case, orphaned, and had to stand on their own two feet. Although they were shabbily treated by the men they associated with, they also learned to fend for themselves and they were survivors. The sad thing is that they seemed to be universally shallow and pretentious and oriented only toward the high life and living off men. Usually that would be the only option for a girl back then, but these women had skills and talents, and evidently chose not to use them.

Sonia married George Orwell late in his life for no good reason - except maybe to live off his earnings once he was gone. Lys was a fashion model who was later Connolly's mistress-cum-servant. Barbara Skelton was briefly married to British literary critic Cyril Connolly (among others!), and Janetta Woolley seems to be primarily known for abandoning her husband and young child. These women were supposed to be quite the lookers in their time and perhaps by standards of that era they were. To me they seemed quite ordinary - neither lookers nor unattractive - just people, so why they had this reputation I do not know. It seems unfortunate that they were saddled with that sort of a credit when they had other qualities, but perhaps if they truly were as shallow as their looks, they were appropriately pigeon-holed.

If this had been a novel I would have ditched it long before the end and probably quite close to the beginning since the women are so uninspiring and the men worse, but it's a true story of real people and the author has dug deep into stories, letters, diaries and such to bring it all out. He did a good job except in that he seemed to dance around chronologically and confusingly, and at one point was comparing one of the four to a character in a novel. I was driving at the time so I could not concentrate sufficiently to follow properly what was being said, and it became annoying so I skipped that chapter rather than let it confuse me on the drive home! Besides, I was much more interested in their less than selfless motivations and their seriously poor choices, and in the life they led, rather than how they looked. This book certainly delivered on that score!

The lives of these women seemed to pivot around Cyril Connolly who sounds to me, from this book like, as the Brits might say, a complete and utter arse. he was a jerk: a needy under-achiever who took money for writing commissions on which he never delivered, who used women terribly, and who evidently was sufficiently charming with his puerile approach to life that these women took pity on him and let him walk all over them. The bigges tproblem seemed ot be how hihgly-strung these people were, constantly at each others' throats and blindly enterign into shallow and doomed relationships. I'm honestly surprised that no-one actually murdered anyone within this dysfunctional group.

I'd never heard of him before except that his name was in a Monty Python song (Eric the Half a Bee), and now, after this, I'll be fine if I never hear of him ever again. Wikipedia's entry on him has this to say at one point about his immediate post-grad situation: "He struggled to find employment, while his friends and family sought to pay off his extensive debts. In summer he went for his annual stay at Urquhart's chalet in the French Alps, and in the autumn went to Spain and Portugal." So while those suckers are digging around paying for his lifestyle, off he goes to the alps and Portugal on vacation. Dick move, Cyril.

But I do have some ideas for characters now that I can use in novels down the line, so I considered this a worthy read, informative about wartime life in the UK, and about how selfish and spoiled some people were while others were living impoverished because of the war and its aftermath. The US doesn't, I think, quite grasp how dire the situation was in Britain, In the US, and apart, of course, from the appalling loss of life once the US entered the war, life pretty much went on as ever. There were no great shortages, no blitz, and no blackouts in cities. In the UK, with food shortages and rationing that continued long after the war ended, with bombs falling, and then the immense work of rebuilding London afterwards, things were very different. This book delivers some of that, but it also inadvertently contrasts it with how spoiled and unappreciative these people truly were.

She Represents by Caitlin Donohue

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. Strictly speaking we're not supposed to post reviews until 30 days before publication, but since this book has about 20 reviews up already on that execrable monopolizing review site-killing Amazon-owned Goodreads venue, I don't see that my modest one is going to make any difference.

Subtitled "44 Women Who Are Changing Politics . . . and the World" this book did not please me. The title suggested to me that these were women who are making a positive change, yet some of the women featured here have behaved reprehensibly and in my opinion they by no means merit the honor this book seems like it's aiming to bestow. There are other, more deserving women, as other entries in the book show, so why those women are demeaned by being included with some of the less praiseworthy women is a mystery to me and I cannot in good faith support a book which takes this tacky tack.

If the book had been titled "Notorious Women of Politics" that would have been a different matter in terms of including the more reprehensible ones, but then the better women featured here would have been slighted. While everyone has some less than savory traits, there is a limit to how unsavory a person can be before they lose my confidence, and I do not believe that you can include all these stripes in one supposedly uplifting book without abominably misrepresenting the one or outright insulting the other.

The book description makes it plain what the intention supposedly was: "...this book celebrates feminism and female contributions to politics, activism, and communities..." and "Each...has demonstrated her capabilities and strengths in political and community leadership and activism..." And "...rounded out by beautiful color portraits..." was a bit of a stretch. I don't believe this book can achieve the stated goal of inspiring when such poor examples have been set by some of those featured in the book and I cannot in good conscience commend it. There are scores of inspirational, stronger, better, wiser, and more competent and considerate women who would have made fine examples. Why aren't they featured here?

Radical Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Erratum:
"He said that he would soon be was on his way to Coleorton." 'soon be was' is obviously wrong!

Published for the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, this was a tome in which I felt very much at home because I grew up in and around many of the places mentioned here. I can only publish my review on the 210^thanniversary of the poet's youngest son's birth, a child also named William, but that'll do, right?!

While I'm not much of a fan of poetry despite having published a book of verse and short stories myself, I am interested in the creative lives of artists, and also in life as it was lived by people in more primitive times. This book amply fed my interest on both scores. It was exhaustively researched, but not exhausting to read because the author knew when to share his research and when not to flood the reader in a showy, but unhelpful fashion.

Wordsworth was close friends with poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he of "Ancyent Marinere" fame, as well as a contemporary of many other well-known writers, such as Robert Southey, who Wordsworth, in later life, succeeded as poet laureate. The biography covers Wordsworth's entire life, his extensive travel, both in walking tours of England, and Scotland, and in his travels in Europe.

I had no idea he'd been such a rebel in his time, and especially no idea that the British government sent a spy to keep an eye on this radical - something which Wordsworth evidently found amusing. It also covers his close relationship with his sister Dorothy, who herself was no slouch with a pen. She's not the only female writer mentioned and some of those mentioned in passing in this book were interesting enough to me that I'm looking to find some of their material to read.

Call me mercenary, but personally I would have liked to have learned a little more about how Wordsworth paid his way in life. He received a substantial settlement on debt owed his family from the First Earl of Lonsdale, to the tune of some £4,000 which was a substantial sum back then. It ain't exactly chicken feed now! This money permitted Wordsworth to marry, but it didn't seem like it was enough of itself to keep him going throughout his life and permit raising several children.

He earned some money from his writing, but not as much as you might think, not when we learn for example, that when "The Lyrical Ballads was published by Longman and company in May 1807, in an edition of 1,000 copies, 230 of them were remaindered." He obviously did all right for himself, but he was hardly a sell-out artist. In passing, Lonsdale was of the lineage which lent its name to the boxing award - commonly known as the Lonsdale Belt, although it was the fifth Earl - much later in the lineage, who inaugurated the belt, not the one who paid Wordsworth.

Wordsworth did publish other work of course, and later in life he had official 'jobs' to do, which undoubtedly helped him financially, even as his writing star seemed to fade, but I found myself periodically wondering throughout my reading of this, how he could afford to keep moving his household, and to travel so much in Europe. How did he finance it?! Maybe he was very frugal?

That complaint aside though, it was fascinating to read of his adventures in France right in the midst of the revolution, and of his desire to be a journalist until a journalist friend of his was decapitated! He also spent time in Germany, and he engaged in a lot of walking tours in Britain. These stimulated his creative juices and inspired and fed a lot of his poems.

I was rather disturbed to read that "Back in 1803, William had left Mary, recuperating well from the birth of their first child, and gone on a Scottish tour in the company of Dorothy and Coleridge." That seems a bit callous, especially in an era where children died young quite often. Three of Wordsworth's children predeceased he and his wife, and two of those were very young when they died. I guess parental attitudes were different back then, with the female of the pair very much expected to stay home and care for the children while the male did whatever he wanted. I'd confess I'd hoped for more from Wordsworth!

But these are minor questions that crossed my warped and fervid mind as I read this. Overall, I was quite thrilled with it and enjoyed it very much. I commend it as a worthy read.

Greta Thunberg by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Anke Weckmann

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I've adored Greta Thunberg (the 'h' is silent) ever since I first heard about her, and this book tells a fine and inspiring story of the difference a lone young girl can make if she has a cause and some determination.

At the age of fifteen - just two short years ago - and after learning about the sad state of the environment, Greta began a lone vigil outside the Swedish parliament with a sign, 'Skolstrejk för klimatet' (School strike for climate), and her vigil caught on, becoming a major movement.

She reached a point of notoriety where she was able to cross the Atlantic on wind and solar-powered boats (she refuses to fly because of climate impact) and speak to world leaders about how climate change was going to impact hers and future generations.

This book is a great introduction to what one person can do and to what might happen if we all don't do something. I commend it as a worthy read.

Jesse Owens by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Anna Katharina Jansen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Jesse Owens was someone deserving of the sobriquet 'legend' but somehow, he was forgotten far too soon to enjoy it. had he been white, that might not have happened, but had he been white, his blazing trail across the athletic world would carry far less weight than it does.

Something this book doesn't make clear is that his actual name was James Cleveland Owens. He went by 'JC', but when he was inducted into his new school, the person writing down the names didn't understand him and thought he was saying 'Jesse'. The name stayed with him ever since.

He grew up in a large family - ten children, which is far too many for poor parents to support, but had he never been born he could never have made the impact he did. He was notable for his running speed even at an early age, and his gym teacher was so impressed with him that he allowed him special training privileges so he could fit his athletics in alongside his work - work that was necessary to help support his family.

He became renowned in his own lifetime after he set three world records and tied another at the 1935 Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan, something that's been described as "the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport" and which has never been repeated by anyone.

Perhaps his biggest triumph was sticking it to Adolf Hitler at the 1938 Olympics. While the dictator of the Aryan race, who considered black people to be inferior, sat and watched, Owens won four gold medals. Hitler couldn't even take pride in the fact that in an early case of sponsorship, Owens was wearing German running shoes made by the founder of the Adidas athletics-wear company!

This was an intriguing and educational book for young kids, and I commend it fully.

Jean-Michel Basquiat by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Luciana Lozano

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I've read a good many of these mini-biographies for children, and enjoyed nearly all of them. This one is no exception. It tells the story of this renowned American artist of artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent.

Illustrated nicely by Lozano, the book covers the growth of the artist from his early days drawing at the age of four, through his introduction to human anatomy via a book he read when he was sick one time, to his rebels years, and his later collaborations with Andy Warhol. Even someone who died tragically young can have a lasting influence on what comes later.

Waking Up in Eden by Lucinda Fleeson

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a biographical print book that I picked up because it sounded interesting and in the end, by and large, it really was quite engaging. In that respect it did go downhill a little toward the end, but in Hawaii, it's all downhill right? I mean they are volcanic islands after all! There was a bit more personal stuff in here than I cared for, and I certainly didn't need to know about the author's fling with a surfer dude, but aside from that thankfully very brief inter-lewd, the monologue about Hawaii, its history, traditions, exploration, and its flora and fauna were really quiet charming and well-written.

The author was a journalist, but decided to give up that life and move to Hawaii to take on the job of a fund-raiser for a botanical garden which aimed to preserve something of old Hawaii, and to exhibit it for the public. She spent many years there becoming pleasantly habituated to the life (after some initial hiccups), and stayed in the job until her immediate boss died from a heart-attack and her new boss seemed, she writes, more intent upon slashing budgets than pursuing his predecessor's goals.

Frankly I felt the author could have done more in terms of detailing Hawaii's wildlife, plants and animals and how they interlock. She does go into some detail about how tragical has been the human occupation of the islands, and how it has resulted in a massive extinction because of human predation and human-introduced invasive species, such as rats for example, along with feral cows, mongooses (yes, you heard that right), pigs and feral cats and dogs. Hawaii is the shameful world-leader in modern extinctions of plant species for example, where an estimated two plant species go extinct every year which is five hundred times faster than any purely natural rate. This is why some conservationists call Hawaii 'the extinction capital of the world'.

The mongoose was a seriously misguided error. It was introduced because the capitalistic sugar cane producers wanted the rats controlled, but the damage mongooses have done has more than outweighed the few rats they ate, since they prey on whatever takes their fancy and this includes Hawaiian species that have suffered far more greatly than rats ever will. This is what happens when people who are clueless about science are put in charge. Of pretty much anything.

It would have been nice to have more of that kind of overview in place of the unprotected sex on a first date chapter that we got, but that opportunity has gone now. That said though, I did enjoy this book for the most part and consider it a worthy read.

Work It, Girl: Michelle Obama by Caroline Moss

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Part of the "Become a leader like..." series, this book covers Michelle Robinson, lawyer, scholar, activist, and who also happened to become married to the president of a few years back (and before he was president!). She came from quite humble beginnings and was sometimes discouraged from pursuing her dreams, but she refused to let others' opinions dictate what her goals would be or where her sights would be aimed, and she achieved every one of them that she set herself, graduating Princeton and Harvard and working in a law firm before moving into more community-spirited occupations.

She met Barack Obama in that first law firm and traveled with him to the Senate and the White House, despite having some doubts about both places! This book tells a fascinating story and makes it all the more a pity that her aversion to politics will prevent her from running for president. If she did, I do not doubt that she would win hands down without question. I commend this book as a worthy and inspiring read for young chidlren.

Vivienne Westwood by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vergara, Laura Callaghan

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I've enjoyed very many of these young children's biographies about a host of different people, all written by the same author but often with a different artist. In this case it was Callaghan who contributed some beautiful and bright illustrations, in keeping with the subject matter since Westwood is a British fashion designer, who all but single-handedly brought punk and new wave fashions (so-called!) into the mainstream.

I should say right here that I have less than zero respect for the modeling-fashion industrial complex, which is why I like this book. Westwood was very much a rebel and her spirited approach, even though in many ways buying into the shallow and pretentious world of fashion, was to turn things on their head. She also preferred books to fashion magazines, and encouraged a recycling sort of an attitude by suggesting people buy fewer clothes and wear therm more often.

This book tells an interesting and colorful story and I commend it as a worthy read.

Bob Dylan by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vergara, Conrad Roset

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I've enjoyed very many of these young children's biographies about a host of different people, all written by the same author but often with a different artist. In this case it was Roset, whose work was good and very entertaining.

This one talks about folk legend Bob Dylan who unintentionally became the voice of an era as he produced his songs about life and war throughout the sixties and for several decades beyond. I commend it for any young children who are interested in music and making change.

Alan Turing by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vergara, Linzie Hunter

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I've enjoyed very many of these young children's biographies about a host of different people. This one is about computer scientist Alan Turing, who was responsible for breaking the secret of a major German coding machine in World War Two and who was subsequently persecuted for his homosexuality.

Way to thank a war hero, UK! He was, at long last, pardoned, but he should never have been arrested for it in the first place, and the pardon came long years after his suicide. If he'd been hailed as the hero he was and funded, he could have put Britain at the forefront of computing.

This book doesn't pull any punches and tells his story simply and in enough detail for young minds without overdoing it. It's nicely-illustrated by Hunter and is well worth the reading. I commend it. There is one small glitch which hopefully will have been fixed before this goes on sale. At the back of each of these books is a timeline with actual photographs of the subject at different points in their life. This book is no different, but the person featured in the photographs isn't Alan Turing; it's Astrid Lindgren, author of the Pippi Longstocking books! While Turing might well have been amused by this, it really needs to be fixed.

Frida in America by Celia Stahr

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

For a biography with this title, this books spends a lot of time delving into Frida's childhood and teen years, as well as with a couple of trips she took back to Mexico while largely living in the USA, but the subtitle of this volume is "The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist." That time she spent and the experiences she had, whether in the US or in Mexico, or traveling between the two, contributed immensely to the intriguing artist she became.

The bio starts out brightly with Frida and her husband, artist Diego Rivera, traveling to and arriving in San Francisco, but that all comes to a jarring halt as we travel back in time for a history of her life up to this point - which occupies fully a quarter of the narrative - before we get back to her life in the US. For me that wasn't so bad because I find the subject of this biography endlessly fascinating, but others might find themselves irritated when the title so boldly promises a US story and they get sent to Mexico for an extended period! Maybe such readers should learn to be less provincial?!

What did impress me was how well researched this is. I've read a variety of books about Frida Kahlo, but never one that was so delving and so revealing of her inner workings as this one is. It was impressive and truly engrossing for me. Regardless of what it meant before, her art takes on a whole new meaning once you're initiated into the symbolism she employed so often in her work. The story picks up back in the US with Diego's commission, his workaholic approach to his painting as well as his endless philandering and his absurd misgivings over his (at least initially) erroneous belief that his wife was as bad as he was. Far too many men project like that, and poor Frida has to deal with all of this largely by herself.

The book has a wealth of detail about their life both in Mexico and in the US, the people they met, the relationships they formed and the impact they had, as well as the experiences that moved them in return. They were very influential on each other too, each taking cues from the other's work, and expanding or amplifying them in their own art. In a way, their art was a way of talking to each other about topics they perhaps felt uncomfortable discussing face to face.

Frida's initial love-affair with the US was an uneasy one at best, and it quickly turned to disappointment and antagonism the longer she remained there. She missed her family and her homeland greatly which didn't help her state of mind, and her husband was very neglectful of her, focusing on the murals he had arrived in the US to paint, and working insane hours, leaving Frida very much to her own devices. She cultivated her own friends and relationships and worked on her art, showing increasing sophistication and steady improvement over her time in the USA. This books explains all of that and excavates, sometimes a bit too deeply for me!) the meaning, symbolism, and origins of her imagery.

If I have a complaint about this book, it's the same one I would have (and have had!) about any such book where art is discussed in detail, and that is the complete lack of any examples of her art, or any photographs of her which were taken during her travels. Fortunately, with the name 'Frida Kahlo' being so very well-known these days, it's possible to find on the Internet a lot of the pictures discussed in this biography, but it's a nuisance to have to halt reading and go searching for them.

Many images, in particular the photographs that are mentioned, I could not find, which was very frustrating. I don't know if the author's intention is to include the images in a print version and they were simply omitted from the review ebook. I wouldn't blame her for that, because Amazon's crappy Kindle format is renowned for mangling anything that's not plain vanilla text, but if the pictures could have been included in a PDF version of the book made available for review, that would have been truly awesome! It made it rather tedious at times to read a long and detailed description of the art or a photograph without being able to readily view it, or in some cases without being able to see it at all.

That aside, I really enjoyed this book and commend it as a worthy read. But then I'm heavily biased when it comes to Frida Kahlo. She probably the first person I'd visit if I ever managed to get my hands on a time machine! I commend this book as a worthy read for fans of art or of Kahlo.

William Harvey by Thomas Wright

Rating: WORTHY!

Subtitled 'A Life in Circulation" (humor maybe?!) this biography of Harvey, the man who, in Elizabethan times, went against prevailing teaching and realized that blood doesn't ebb and flow in your vessels like an ocean lapping on the beach, but actually circulates. Galen was wrong! Who knew? Galen was a complete clown from what this book reveals of his teachings, but in Elizabethan times, he was a god of medicine and there were professional penalties for straying from what he taught, no matter how absurd it was.

Harvey came from a relatively modest background and rose to great heights. He lived at the same time as Elizabeth the First, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, John Dee, Francis Drake, and Donald Trump (one of those may be fake news). He studied at what was then the center of diversity and education: Padua University.

Language was no barrier because all academics spoke Latin back then no matter which country they hailed from. He kept his head down and studied hard and did well, returning to England to be - eventually - accepted into the world of professional Physicians - such as it was back then. Blood-letting as a cure-all was still in vogue, as it would be for another three hundred years notwithstanding Harvey's discoveries, and his discoveries took time to gain traction since they flew in the face of accepted philosophy.

Those discoveries were made at a high cost to animals which were dissected alive and in great numbers as he demonstrated what he found to be the reality of blood circulation and the heart's purpose being a powerful pump. It turns out that blood was not created in the liver and delivered slowly to the various bodily organs, but was in continuous circulation and revitalized as it went. Parts of this book were hard for me to read as a vegetarian who went into a depression when a pet rat died, but I muddled through it and learned a lot. I commend this as a worthy read.

Baby Feminists by Libby Babbott-Klein, Jessica Walker

Rating: WORTHY!

Written by Babbott-Klein and illustrated by Walker, this book really is just a trip down memory lane, highlighting various feminists and outstanding females of history from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg to activist and assassination survivor Malala Yusafzai, from artist Frida Kahlo to astronaut Mae Jemison, from tennis player Billie Jean King to musician and artist Yoko Ono, and making the point that they were all babies at one point, long before they became known to the rest of us. The adult figure can be lifted up revealing the baby they once were underneath. Baby Frida is adorable with those eyebrows!

No Easy Day by Mark Owen, Matt Bisonette, Kevin Maurer

Rating: WORTHY!

This book proved to be so much better than the previous one I read about SEAL life. This guy, who I shall refer to as Owen (because it's easier to type than Bisonette!) seems far less of a puffed-up, self-aggrandizing boor than the other guy. He's a lot more modest, authentic, and straight-forward in how he tells his story, although it occurs to me, since both of these SEALs had co-writers, that maybe the influence of the co-writer might have something to do with the tone of the book. Who knows? I guess writing is one of the very few things SEALs are not professionally trained for huh? LOL!

It also occurs to me that if more SEALs are going to write books about their life, they're going to have to work on a new opening sequence, because all of the ones I've read so far start out with their stringent training, which is seriously strenuous and very tough, make no mistake, but after reading at least three of these now, the routine is starting to be a bit tedious.

Having said that, I have to grant that this one was different enough though that it wasn't too bad as it happens, because this guy was already a SEAL before he started in on the advanced training to join the Green Team. No book had made that clear to me before. When they want to get into the Green Team, which is the anti-terrorism and hostage rescue unit, they have to step-up to a whole new level of training, and no one cuts them any slack. So even though they're already a SEAL before they start, they can and do wash out of this particular training. That was an eye-opener.

>p>
Note that there really is no SEAL Team Six. There was, when there were only two other SEAL teams! They called it Six to mislead the Soviets as to how many teams there were. Team Six actually got sucked into DEVGRU decades ago, although it's still called six for shorthand, but even that's misleading because there isn't one team (and it doesn't have six members!). Teams vary and fluctuate, and are put together in groups suitable for the mission at hand. Thus the last one mentioned in the book, the infiltration of the compound in Pakistan, comprised of 22 SEALs handpicked as the most experienced from several teams, along with an EOD tech (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), a CIA operative, and a dog! And they still had things go wrong.

I liked the author's informative and reserved (and modest!) style, and I enjoyed the descriptive writing, although I did not appreciate the alt-right take on President Obama, which was entirely uncalled-for. The author talked about his SEAL training in only the first two chapters and by the third, he was in the Middle-East on a mission to secure a dam from being blown-up after the invasion of Iraq. This led into, one after another, other stories of missions, from participating in the rescue of Captain Phillips from Somali pirates, to clearing insurgent-held houses in the Middle East and hunting terrorists in Afghanistan. It culminates in the stealth assault on the bin laden compound in Abbottabad, and the entire book is filled with enough detail to satisfy, without Tom Clancy-fying the fuck out of it, about these these Green Teams do their work, what the equipment they use consists of, what the dangers are, and how things pan out. In short it was perfect for my purposes and I highly commend this book as the best I have so far read on special forces.