The Barn by Wright Thompson

The Barn by Wright Thompson is an important nonfiction book subtitled A Secrete History of a Murder in Mississippi. Thompson recounts the killing of barely fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in August 1955, covering the historical conditions that led to the murder, the events around it, and what happened after, up to present day.

It's an often-repeated idea, but those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Just as the last remaining people who fought in WWII are dying, with it so important that we remember the evil that was attempted to be perpetrated by the Nazis, it is also crucial that we remember the racial injustices that precipitated Emmett's murder to try to prevent them today and in the future.

Emmett came from Chicago to Mississippi to stay with his great uncle Moses Wright and cousins Simeon Wright and Wheeler Parker. Emmett was in a store with a woman, Carolyn Bryant, behind the counter and what likely occurred is he handed her money for a transaction, touching her hand in the process, rather than putting the money on the counter. She took offense and angrily followed him out of the store, and Emmett then whistled at her. For the rest of her life, Bryant would repeat an impossible to have happened lie of what Emmett said and did to her in the store.

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam came to Moses Wright's house and demanded to take Emmett, J.W. with a gun drawn, ready to shoot anyone who would resist. Willie Reed saw a pickup truck go by with Emmett in the back, and later heard him crying out while being beaten in Leslie Milam's barn on the property he rented within the thirty-six-square-mile grid Township 22 North, Range 4 West. Emmett had a broken skull, broken wrist, and broken femur, and then was shot and killed, with his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River.

Willie Reed testified to what he saw, and then was sprinted out of Mississippi at night. He went back to a month later to testify to a grand jury, and immediately left the state again. Wheeler Parker and Moses Wright also had to leave Mississippi as it was too dangerous to stay. During the trial of Bryant and Milam, the defense argued in from of Emmett's mom, Mamie Till-Mosbley, that it it wasn't him that had died, he was fine, and this was all a conspiracy cooked up by the NAACP. Bryant and Milam were acquitted by a jury of their neighbors and extended family, with at least six other people that were likely at the site of the murder never charged. 

Thompson delves into the conditions that led to the killing with no legal consequences. He covers a history of slavery, segregation, and the Mississippi Delta land that cotton has been farmed on. At this time of the Emmett's murder, politicians in Mississippi were working to prevent the May 1955 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to integrate public schools from taking effect locally. It wasn't until 1969 that a federal judge demanded that Mississippi comply with the ruling, and when Clarksdale, MS public schools reopened after Christmas break, 574 of the 585 white students had changed schools, going to segregated academies. 

Emmett would have recently turned eighty-year-old, and places like the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, MS and the Till Institute in Chicago work to keep his memory alive, just as this excellent book does.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63 by Stephen King is a fascinating work of fiction about someone travelling back in time to try to stop the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

Thirty-five-year-old Jake Epping goes through a portal that takes him to 1958 and takes the name George Amberson, living first in Maine (including the town of Derry, where It was set). In Maine, he attempted to prevent a young girl from being paralyzed by a straw bullet, and save the lives of a mother and three of her children, all murdered in their home. He then went to Florida and finally Texas (both Dallas / Fort Worth and the 1,200 person town of Jodie). While in Jodie, he met and fell in love with Sadie, a fellow teacher at the high school.

During his years living in the past, Amberson found it to be obdurate, it didn't want to be changed. As he would attempt to do things that would alter history, roadblocks would present themselves and have to be overcome. Also, changes made to the past would cause a butterfly effect, begetting other changes.

He went through the portal several times, with each new trip to the past resetting history, cancelling out any changes he caused during previous time travel. It was a compelling book and the ramifications of what might have happened had Kennedy lived are fascinating to consider, and written about by King in the postscript.

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, author of The Midnight Library, is a novel about a math teacher in the U.K. who is gifted a home in Ibiza and, without anything else in her life after the death of her husband and long-ago passing of her child, goes to the Mediterranean island.

It's a story of mystical things, with powers and an unexplainable lifeform in the ocean, and new beginnings as the main character navigates the world she finds herself in and attempts to make a difference in it.

Burn Book by Kara Swisher

Burn Book by Kara Swisher from early 2024 is a an interesting nonfiction account of the journalist's years covering tech and the people in it. The book is subtitled A Tech Love Story and in it, Swisher provides anecdotes of her time with people like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg and her late husband Dave Goldberg, Jeff Bezos, Bob Iger, and Elon Musk. 

While she writes fondly of some of her subjects, including Goldberg and Jobs, Swisher covers how many others as they become wealthy and famous go from normal to just plain weird. As people would accumulate power, they too often would become aggrieved, developing a victim complex. All the while there would be large amounts of self-congratulation and getting rich while trumpeting how it not about the money, but about changing the world. 

On Zuckerberg Swisher notes his lack of concern about the consequences of his actions, as if it's ok for him to just learn on the fly, with no repercussions. She describes him as carelessly dangerous and writes about "the expensive education of Mark Zuckerberg."

In terms of her own biography, Swisher covers attending college at Georgetown, then journalism school at Columbia. At thirty-four years old, she moved to California to cover tech for the Wall Street Journal. She and Walt Mossberg put on the All Things Digital, later renamed Code, conferences, interviewing tech luminaries. It's definitely an interesting read that she provides with the book.

The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski

The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski is a work of nonfiction that covers the stories of Nazi hunters who in the decades after WWII sought to bring to justice people who committed war crimes on behalf of Germany.

It wasn't a coordinated effort to find and prosecute former Nazis, there were different people trying to do different things in different ways, not always agreeing with one another. Some people wanted to simply move on after the war, and focus on things like the threat from the Soviet Union, but others kept in the public eye the effort to locate, identify, and prosecute or remove from positions of power former Nazis. 

Nazi hunters like Fritz Bauer, Eli Rosenbaum, Beate and Serge Karlsfeld, Simon Wiesenthal, and the Mossad agents who captured Adolf Eichmann in South America in 1960 and brought him back to Israel for trial didn't want to just forget the past. 

Justice wasn't attainable given the atrocities committed, but people should remember what Hitler attempted to do, and almost succeeded at. The horrific nature of the crimes should never be marginalized or forgotten so books like this are important.

A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko

A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko is an excellent work of nonfiction subtitled The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon. It's fascinating reading about a beautiful area, one that Fedarko was introduced to when he at eleven years old was given by his father a book The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher about his 1963 Grand Canyon hike.

In 2015, Fedarko and his friend and colleague Pete McBride set out on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon. There's not a trail for the trip and at the time, only ten people had done a thru-hike of the canyon, and only another roughly dozen had done the complete hike in pieces, what Fedarko and McBride intended. The trip begins at Lee's Ferry and ends at the Grand Wash Cliffs to the west and Fedarko and McBride started in the company of high-qualified Rich Rudow and three other accomplished hikers. Rudow and his three fellow travelers had a planned 57-day itinerary, spanning some 700 miles, with a route was often well above the river, and below the top of the canyon, traveling among the various rock strata or layers in the canyon. The idea was that Fedarko and McBride would complete a section over twelve days, the others would continue on, and then the two would return later to do additional sections. 

Fedarko and McBride didn't know what they were doing and set out with packs twenty pounds heavier than the experienced hikers, with weight a critically important variable in backpacking. The group had to tunnel through hedges and hop across boulder fields. McBride at one point was beset by a dangerous heat-related imbalance of sodium in his bloodstream, one that caused him to suffer a series of muscle cramps, making his abdomen look as if something moving through it. The two cut their trip short, quitting the section roughly halfway through. Their plans then rebooted after Rich reached out to friends and asked if they would help the pair compete their hike, properly prepared this time. It was interesting reading of how Fedarko, McBride, and their new companions (joined by Rich) would hike with the Colorado River far below, containing rafters guiding through the canyon, floating with the occasional stop to hike a short trail. 

Also in the book is the history of the tribes in the canyon, and development efforts, such as an intended cable-driven tramway from the top of the canyon to the river, effectively ruining the tribes ancestral lands, and helicopter alley towards the end of the canyon. It's a great travelogue story and an interesting read.

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn is a work of historical fiction that tells the story of three English female code breakers at Bletchley Park during World War II. 

The characters of Beth, Osla, and Mab are well-written by Quinn and cover a fascinating piece of history. The three women come from vastly different circumstances and are brought together at Bletchley Park in a story that involves heroism, tragedy, and a traitor that they must try to uncover. It's a long book, but an interesting tale set at a place critical to the war effort.

The Exchange by John Grisham

The Exchange by John Grisham is a highly entertaining novel that picks up the lives of Mitch and Abby McDeere fifteen years after The Firm by Grisham. 

In The Exchange, Mitch is a partner in a New York law firm and goes to Libya on a case he's assigned. When an associate from the firm gets kidnapped, the novel then goes into the attempts to get her released, with the large role played by Mitch and Abby. It's a fast-paced read and very enjoyable.

Watchers by Dean Koontz

Watchers by Dean Koontz is a really great work of fiction about Einstein, a dog with extreme intelligence that was created in a lab for military use, the people who come into the arc of his life, and the also lab-created monster, the Outsider, intent on killing Einstein and wrecking havoc along the way.

The lead human characters in the book are Travis Cornell, who becomes Einstein's owner; Nora Devon, who meets and then marries Cornell; Vince Nasco, a hired killer; the authorities searching for Einstein and the Outsider; and the lawyer and the veterinarian who assist Travis and Nora.

Watchers is richly written, a really enjoyable read, and noted by Koontz as one of his favorite to write, and perhaps the book of his that fans most often bring up to him.

The Future by Naomi Alderman

The Future by Naomi Alderman is a novel that covers an apocalyptic scenario with entertaining writing.

Alderman features three tech billionaires in Zimri Nommik, Ellen Bywater and Lenk Sketlish, as well as Martha Einkorn, Sketlish’s right-hand woman at his company, Fantail. The other central character is Lai Zhen, a former refugee turned survival-tech influencer who connected briefly in a relationship with Einkorn.

The plot has many twists and turns and can be confusing at times, but is interesting.

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham is subtitled A True Story of Heroism and Disaster of the Edge of Space and details the history of the space shuttle program and 1986 Challenger disaster.

The shuttle, with Columbia in 1981 the first launch, was pitched as something that would go into space like regular plane flights, with trips on a roughly weekly basis. Higginbotham covers the bureaucracy of NASA decision making and how the desire to move forward with shuttle launches despite raised safety concerns led to the death of the seven astronauts, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.

There's detail about shuttle booster contractor Thiokol and the O-rings that led to the disaster. Thiokol engineer Roger Boisjoly was one of those concerned about the cold weather and impact it would have on the O-rings. The cold hindered the ability of the rings to seal a gap, allowing hot gas to shoot past. This was raised in an evening meeting prior to launch, but Larry Mulloy from NASA pushed Thiokol to change its don't launch recommendation. Thiokol was hoping to not have the booster contract go out to bid and a "management decision" changed it to a launch recommendation.

Video of the Challenger launch shows the O-rings going, with a black puff of smoke prior to the explosion and NASA Public Affairs Officer Steve Nesbitt, announcing to the crowd "obviously a major malfunction."

The initial investigation led by NASA was looking at virtually everything except for the cold weather and decision to launch in it despite warnings. Allan McDonald from Thiokol spoke up in a meeting and noted the objections raised by Boisjoly and others, with this new information causing the investigation to go to being not one of technical, but human failure. It came out that the recommendation had been to not launch below 53 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature at launch was 29 degrees. Caltech professor and physicist Richard Feynman conducted an impromptu experiment during a commission meeting, showing how O-rings lost their resiliency in cold water. Feynman published an appendix F report, one where he was very critical of NASA and those involved, both pressuring the launch to occur and disregarding warnings about the O-rings.

It also came out that evidence suggested that at least one member of the crew remained alive the entire time the capsule plummeted from the sky to the surface of the Atlantic, and the end of the book covers the shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. A piece of foam insulation breaking off during ascent, smashing a hole through the heat shield, leading to the shuttle breaking apart during reentry. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that many of the lessons of the Challenger disaster had gone unheeded.

Fire Weather by John Vaillant

Fire Weather by John Vaillant is a compelling work of nonfiction subtitled A True Story From a Hotter World. Vaillant writes about the May 3, 2016 fire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, a community of 88,000 people. 

There had been a fire burning outside of town and at an 11:00AM news conference on the 3rd, people were told to go about their lives, but be prepared. Shortly after the press conference, the weather-aided fire reached a point known as "crossover," with it in the tree canopies. The wildfire manager was giving an interview on air at 12:30, which he hustled out of when he saw how the smoke had changed. By 2:05, the first neighborhood evacuation order came and by 2:30, the fire was in the neighborhoods and streets. By 7:00, the entire city was under a mandatory evacuation order. 

Vaillant makes the statement about what people expected the fire to do of "it happens every year. which was true until it wasn't." People couldn't consider events they weren't familiar with. The worst-case scenario wasn't really the worst case, rather it was the worst case they knew about happening previously. Mention was made in the book of Nassim Taleb and his book The Black Swan, as well as the Lucretius Problem, where people have trouble imaging and assimilating things outside their personal experience. Vaillant references how the 9/11 Commission Report noted that the most important failures was one of imagination. 

Covered in the book are two people that were able to picture the worst-case scenario. Father and son firefighter Jamie and Ryan Coutts from the small town of Slave Lake had five years before seen more than a third of the houses in their town burned down in a matter of hours. They had a much more accurate view of what the fire could and likely would do than Fort McMurray officials, and they knew traditional firefighting methods wouldn't work. Entire houses were being consumed in three minutes during the peak flashover stage of the fire. What worked in combatting the fire was to see how quickly it spreading through a neighborhood, and then take down a house five houses in front of the fire, pushing it into its own basement, making it so there no fuel when the fire got there. Only by destroying a house would they have a chance of saving others. 

Incredibly, it seems there were no fatalities in the fire, but the city was closed for a month, with residents allowed back in early June. Nearly 100,000 people were forced to flee in what remains the largest single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire. More than 2,500 homes and other structures were destroyed, and 2,300 square miles of forest burned. The Fort McMurray Fire became the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, and burned for months, with it not being declared fully extinguished until August of the following year. Its behavior was entirely new, with towering pyrocumulus clouds, those usually seen over volcanoes, formed over the fire. There's also solid content about the town of Fort McMurray, oil industry in Alberta, and the impact of climate change on fires, the increased numbers of them globally and their behavior and impact. Covered are the fire tornados in Canberra, Australia in 2003, and then in 2018 in Redding, CA. 

The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides is a solid book subtitled Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. The book jacket notes how it an examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration and Sides covers the trip Cook started in London on July 12, 1776, then his death two and a half years later on Hawaii.

The main point of the voyage was for Cook, leading the Resolution and the Discovery, captained by Charles Clerke, in a search for a Northwest Passage, something that would enable ships to sail from London to the Pacific over the pole, a hypothetical route much shorter than going around Africa. The expedition went around the Cape of Good Hope, then stopped in the Kerguelen Islands in the Southern Indian Ocean, Tasmania, New Zealand, and Tahiti (where a Tahitian, Mai, who had gone to England, was dropped off). The two ships than happened across Hawaii, and after reaching the Pacific coast, went up through the northwest, not going into the Columbia River Bar, then British Columbia, and Alaska, where Cook in 1778 explored Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet as he searched for a way over the top of North America back to England. He continued north around Alaska and was stymied by the ice pack, and chose to return to Hawaii for the winter, rather than stay in Russia.

Cook's plan was to return to Alaska early the following year and continue searching for the elusive, and nonexistent, Northwest Passage. Returning to Hawaii culminated in his death, though, and it was fascinating reading how his arrival there fulfilled a prophecy, with how he arrived in the middle of an extended period of ceremony locals were having to welcome their God, Lono, including Cook coming into the harbor in the exact direction Lono was foretold to come from. The story of his death is an interesting one as while he was first feted as a perceived God, the locals began to realize he likely wasn't Lono. They expected him to not be there after the duration of the ceremony ended, and then when Cook and his men left for Alaska, they ran into trouble with the ship and returned, not something expected of an infallible God. A small boat from one of the vessels was taken by locals, and Cook formed a plan to kidnap the local chief until it was returned, leading to his murder. 

The ships returned to Russia and left word of Cook's death to travel across the continent to England. Then the two vessels arrived in London October 7, 1780, 1,548 days after departure. It's a good book from Sides, an interesting travelogue with great history told well.

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live by Paul Kix

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live by Paul Kix is an excellent work of nonfiction subtitled Ten Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America. Kix starts the book talking about what it was like for he and his wife Sonya as an interracial couple with kids in 2020, when George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, MN by Police Officer Derek Chauvin. Kix focuses on a pivotal place and period of time in 1963, where the events in Birmingham, AL helped bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and provides fascinating reading of the inflection points that triggered events happening. 

In January 1963, leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) met in Savannah, GA. Participants including Wyatt Walker, Fred Shuttleworth, James Bevel, and Martin Luther King Jr. met to plan a campaign to end segregation in the city of Birmingham, led by Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor. The SCLC had suffered a defeat in an effort in Albany, GA, where police recognized the need to not be seeing being brutal to blacks, neutralizing any public story. SCLC leaders intended to model the nonviolence shown by Ghandi, and shock America into changing. They planned a four-stage effort, starting with sit-ins at businesses, and then a boycott of the downtown business district by black citizens. The third stage was to be a protest march, and fourth much larger marches that would come from people seeing the brutality suffered by protestors and joining them en masse. The plan was contingent upon white people heaping abuse, and black people taking it and not fighting back.

The ten-week campaign started out known as Project X, for X marking the spot of confrontation, and transitioned into Project C, for confrontation. Money was needed for the effort and covered in the book is famous people like Harry Belafonte trying to raise for the cause, and Fred Shuttlesworth at a fundraiser in New York uttered the line the book title came from, with this helping raise $475K that night for the campaign. Things got off to a slow start, without a huge amount of support from the black community in Birmingham, as to be involved was to risk their livelihoods, freedom, and safety. The SCLC needed to antagonize Bull Connor and others in position of white power in order to have images of brutality captured and broadcast by the press. At first Connor was holding back, but then he resorted to violence, unleashing police dogs on marchers, leading to the famous photograph from May 3 of a police dog appearing to lunge at a young black man, Walter Gadsen. 

An injunction was issued saying that the black community couldn’t march or they would go to jail, and while daunting, this proved to be a trigger helping the effort be successful. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a march, was arrested, and wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail, which would become famous as a rallying cry for the cause. Then there was an outreach to black youth in Birmingham, enlisting them to march, and in one day, 973 children were arrested and jailed. The news showed the arrests and attacks on black marchers, with fire hoses spraying down children. This garnered national attention, including from Bobby and John F. Kennedy in the White House, and in Birmingham, some numbers of firefighters became unwilling to spray black children for simply marching and singing.  On May 6 there had been over 4,000 arrests, 2,500 of them children. Eventually the city of Birmingham backed down from some of its racist actions, and the brokering of segregation in the city then spread to other cities. As the eventual Civil Rights Act of 1964 was being put together, Kennedy himself said to black leaders, “but for Birmingham, we wouldn’t be here today.” 

The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson

The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson is a really good work of nonfiction subtitled A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. Larson delves into the period prior to the war and the specific events at Fort Sumter, on an island in the harbor just off the shores of Charleston, SC. 

It's fascinating how Larson takes a large event and then focuses on a specific thing that helped bring it about. The lobbing of munitions at U.S. military personal at Fort Sumter by forces of South Carolina, who had announced a succession from the Union, could be considered a powder keg prior to the blast that was the Civil War, which would kill 750,000 Americans. 

Lincoln won the presidential election on Nov 6, 1860, enraging southerners who felt that Lincoln wanted to end slavery, taking away the forced labor that harvested their cotton. The results of the election triggered people to align themselves with either the government of the U.S. or those who wanted to continue slavery. South Carolina led the charge to succeed, holding first a session of the legislature on Nov 10 about whether to leave the Union, and then a succession convention at the start of January. Mississippi then joined in succeeding on Jan 9, again due to slavery. 

 The certification of Electoral College votes was Feb 13, and leading up to it, there was concern that there would be disruption from people who didn't want Lincoln in office, and inauguration was Mar 4, with there rumors of planned assassination attempts on Lincoln while on the way to Washington. The outgoing president, James Buchanan, had hoped that Lincoln would be defeated in the presidential race, as he simply wanted to harmony before leaving his responsibilities. Lincoln's speeches leading up to his assuming office were critical as people wanted to know what he would do both about slavery and the states wanting out of the Union.

During this time, Major Robert Anderson in South Carolina consolidated U.S. forces from other forts around Charleston Harbor into Fort Sumter, an action viewed as an affront by those in Charleston as the state declared itself outside the government. South Carolina began making preparations to attack the fort if Anderson wouldn't abandon and hand it over to them. When Lincoln was sworn into office, Anderson had been at Fort Sumter some three months and he others there had dwindling provisions  and not a great deal of guidance, much less timely guidance, coming to them from Washington. Confederate President Jefferson Davis wanted to be done with the American flag flying from Fort Sumter in view of Charleston and on the April 12, 1861 day that artillery was lobbed at Fort Sumter, Anderson had been there for 113 days. The bombardment caused a fire, compelling Anderson to surrender the fort and evacuate with his men. 

Many people in the South thought this was all a grand adventure, one that would be over quickly, but Lincoln responded by calling for troops to assemble to reassert the authority of U.S. law, and the war commenced. Four years later the U.S. retook Fort Sumter, with the Civil War killing a full third of the 60,000 men in the state who fought. Also, the war brought what southerners feared, the end of slavery cost South Carolina planters some three hundred million dollars in human capital. Larson does a great job in the book of detailing this specific place and event at the start of a conflict that wound up killing a quarter of a million people, and all the sliding door moments that led up to the Civil War.