ILLEGAL (graphic novel) Written by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin. Illustrated by Giovanni Rigano.

 

Published in 2018 by Sourcebooks Young Readers.

Illegal is the fictional story of two young brothers from Ghana: Ebo and Kwame. While it is fictional, it is based on lots and lots of true stories.

Most Americans are very aware that immigrants/refugees are fleeing from their native countries and arriving at the border of the United States and are not aware that a similar thing is happening in Europe. 

Europe has a similar refugee/immigrant situation. People are fleeing from the wars in Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. There are also refugees fleeing the brutal poverty and political situations in sub-Saharan Africa. Like in the United States, these immigrants/refugees depend on very shady people to move them closer to their goals.

In this story, two young brothers named Ebo and Kwame live in a village in Ghana. They are orphaned and living with a useless, drunken uncle. They have an older sister that has already crossed the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea to look for work but they don't know anything about where she ended up or how it is going. 

Kwame is the older brother and he has decided to sneak away and try to get to Europe. He doesn't want to bring along his little brother because he is concerned about his safety, it will cost twice as much if they both go, and there is a superstition that says only one family member should make the trip at a time because it is so dangerous that it just seems all the more likely that there will be a loss in the family.

Ebo will have none of this. He immediately sets off to find his brother at his first stop - Agadez, Niger. Agadez is a city of a little more than 100,000 and serves as the launch point to try to cross the Sahara Desert.

The Sahara is too big to cross on foot so migrants trying to cross it have to have money to pay unscrupulous smugglers (much like Mexico's infamous coyotes.) This is not cheap.

If a migrant is lucky enough not to be robbed and dumped in the desert they arrive in Libya and pay smugglers for a boat ride across the Mediterranean Sea and try to land in Italy or Sicily. This is also not cheap.

Ebo and Kwame work various menial, under the table manual labor jobs while living on the streets and avoiding the police. Life is cheap, hard, brutal, and dirty - yet no one talks about turning back.

My review:

This is an excellent graphic novel. The parallels with the American refugee crisis are striking and equally heartbreaking. I learned a lot and I enjoyed the easy to follow art work as well.

I rate this graphic novel 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: ILLEGAL - Written by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin. Illustrated by Giovanni Rigano.

FRANCIS of ASSISI (The Great Courses)(audiobook) by William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman

 

Published in 2013 by The Great Courses.
Lectures by William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman.

Duration: 6 hours, 10 minutes.
Unabridged.

The idea behind The Great Courses is a simple one - take a college lecture course given by an expert that knows how to give an interesting lecture and package it up as an audiobook that anyone can listen to.

In the case of this audiobook, there are two college professors that have a great chemistry together and really enjoy a discussion of St. Francis.

Before this audiobook, I knew only the barest of details of St. Francis so I found the entire discussion interesting and informative.

I do have a rather big complaint about the way the information was presented, however. They start with a biography of St. Francis up until the moment when he becomes recognized by the Pope and his movement is up and going. From that moment, they move to a thematic presentation and the listener hears about moments in his life that are not tied to any sort of biography. 

For example, they mention more than once that he participated in a crusade as a bystander and as a person that wanted to reach out to the Muslims that were defending, but there is no coherent narrative to that story that makes it more than just a few random snatches of extremely interesting information and teachings. I do not like the fact that I listened to a six hour audiobook about the life of a person and I do not have a grasp of many of the basics about the life of that person. As a fellow teacher of history, I cannot imagine the thought process that went into that decision.

Fortunately, they provided an interesting list of books or presentations written by other, well-known authors such as W.E.B DuBois and G.K. Chesterton.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found here: FRANCIS of ASSISI (The Great Courses)(audiobook) by William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman.

PRONTO (Raylan Givens #1)(audiobook) by Elmore Leonard

 

Originally published in 1993.
Published by HarperAudio in 2010.
Read by Alexander Adams.
Duration: 5 hours, 54 minutes.
Unabridged.

I am a big fan of the TV series Justified which features a character named Raylan Givens. I stumbled across this audiobook and was pleased to see that Elmore Leonard had done more than create a character for a TV show - he had written a whole series of books about that character.

Synopsis:

Pronto starts out in Miami and is mostly about Harry Arno, a man who runs an illegal bookkeeping operation (just to be clear, he takes illegal bets, he does do illegal accounting). Harry is ready to retire but is unclear how he will extract himself from the organized crime syndicate that "protects" his operation and likes their 50% take. Or...maybe it's less than that. Turns out Harry has been cooking the books for years and has been taking a cut out of the mob boss's cut for years, maybe even decades.

A U.S. Attorney has decided to take down the organized crime boss that Harry reports to. The U.S. Attorney assumes that Harry is basically honest with his organized crime boss and decides to pressure Harry by setting him up to look like he's skimming money from the organized crime boss's cut. The idea is to make the crime boss mad and Harry will run to the U.S. Attorney's office for protection in exchange for testifying in court.

U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens thinks that this is a raw deal so he gives Harry a warning. Harry pretends to go along and agrees to go into hiding if Raylan Givens is the one that takes him in. Raylan agrees and Harry ditches him in an airport and flies away to Italy. The U.S. Attorney decides it wasn't much of a loss, but Raylan can't stand the injury to his pride of having someone in his custody escape so he takes time off of work and goes to Italy to find Harry...

My review:

I was hoping for better. I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5, so it's not horrible - but I was hoping for better. 

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Most of the book is about Harry Arno. The second theme of the book is the American expatriate poet Ezra Pound. Pound had lived in the town that Harry Arno fled to and there are plenty of quotes from his poems and discussions about him throughout the last third of the book. Pound was anti-Semitic and openly supported the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists during World War II. Clearly, Elmore Leonard was interested in Pound and decided to work him into the book.

Unfortunately, this felt more like filler rather than anything that added to the story in any sort of meaningful way and I think it hurt the book quite a bit. I doubt I will be moving on to the second book in the series.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Pronto (Raylan Givens #1) by Elmore Leonard.

BENITO MUSSOLINI: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (World War 2 Biographies) (kindle) by Hourly History

 

Published by Hourly History in 2017.

Mussolini and Hitler in 1937.

Nowadays, Benito Mussolini is best known as Hitler's far lesser partner in the Pact of Steel (signed in 1939), the formal treaty of the Axis Powers. He is often seen as the weaker partner that may very well have drug the entire alliance down due to incompetence. 

But, back when Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, he was seen, by some, as the vanguard of the future of political organization in Europe - a movement called fascism. He was at least begrudgingly admired by people all around the world. 

This is, perhaps, the most balanced of all of the Hourly History biographies. I was mostly interested in a brief look at how Mussolini came to power and what he did once in power. The biography was a little skimpy on Mussolini's years in power before World War II and it won't please students of the war to see how little they discuss of his wartime policies and decisions. That being said, I thought this was a pretty solid short biography. 

I rate this kindle e-book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon here: BENITO MUSSOLINI: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END by Hourly History.

The Genesis Code: A Thriller by John Case

A Thrill Ride

Published in 1997.

This thriller begins in a sleepy Italian village, with the village priest. He is musing over the fact that he constantly hears the same types of sins being confessed in the confessional when a local scientist/doctor comes in for confession. The reader does not know the confession, but we see the reaction: the priest flees the church and goes immediately to one of his connections in the Vatican. Whatever the sin confessed was, it has world-shaking consequences.

This book brings in an ultra-conservative Catholic lay order (their motto could have been "Hey! the Inquisition wasn't all bad!"), a conspiracy to murder whole families and a professional American investigator named Joe Lassiter.

The action is fast-paced and the story is well-written. The author, to his great credit, does not let you know what all the hubbub is about until the characters themselves discover it. In fact, about halfway through the book, you start to wonder if the good guys really are the good guys.

The ending wraps things up a little too well, but it is a very good book. I rate it 5 out of 5 stars.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Genesis Code: A Thriller by John Case.

Reviewed on June 16, 2007.

Mysteries of the Ancient World by National Geographic Society

Okay, but a bit disappointing

Published in 1979 by National Geographic

So, why am I disappointed?

I was hoping for an theme-based work that looked at different mysterious objects, behaviors and cultures of the ancient world across the world and made comparisons and connections between them.

Instead, Mysteries of the Ancient World is a series of unrelated articles that have the look and feel of the National Geographic style. Don't get me wrong - I like the National Geographic style but the book as a whole lacks flow and feels more like a copy of the magazine than a special book. It is not an integrated work and leaves out plenty of big mysteries (Great Zimbabwe, Nazca Lines, Petra, the Olmecs) in favor of smaller mysteries such as the Etruscans and Catal Huyuk.

Topics include:

-The Etruscans
-Ice age cave paintings
-Stonehenge and related Megaliths
-Minoan civilization
-Mycenaean civilization
-Catal Huyuk and Jericho
-Easter Island and the South Pacific Ocean
-Ancient Egypt
-Ancient India

I rate this book 4 out of 5 stars

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Mysteries of the Ancient World.

Reviewed January 8, 2008

The Broker by John Grisham

Fairly boring story, lots of good info on Italian culture, history and cuisine

Published by Random House Audio in 2005.
Read by Michael Beck.
11 hours, 4 minutes.
Unabridged.

The last two thrillers that I have read by John Grisham have been anything but. A couple of years ago I listened to The King of Torts and came away with a great education in class action lawsuits but at the cost of a disappointing story. With The Broker, I came away with a great education in Italian culture, cuisine and great insights into the oft-overlooked city of Bologna, Italy - but it was a thriller with precious few thrills.

The Broker is centers around Joe Blackman, a Washington, D.C. lobbyist that plays fast and loose with all of the rules and revels in throwing his weight all over town. Blackman is approached by Pakistani computer hackers who have discovered and hijacked a set of super high tech spy satellites with a special computer program. They want Blackman to sell it to the highest bidder and soon enough the Israelis, the Saudis, the Chinese and the CIA are all interested. One of Blackman's associates winds up murdered and an FBI probe into Blackman's practices place him in prison.

A portico (covered walkway) in Bologna - I felt the need
to include a picture because Grisham
mentioned them so often.

Suddenly, he is part of a surprise last minute pardon deal by an outgoing president and he is whisked into a witness protection program administered by the CIA in Italy. Blackman is forced to learn a new language and a new culture. Most of the book deals with Blackman's lessons and endless trips to drink espresso in one coffee shop after another in Bologna, Italy. Seriously, at least 2/3 of the book is Italian lessons, lunch at one Italian restaurant after another or visits to Italian cultural sites. I am quite sure the inspiration to write this book was the desire to spend a great deal of time in Italy and still be able to write off every bill as a business expense on Grisham's income taxes.

If you are a fan of Italy, this may very well be your book. If you are a hardcore international spy thriller book fan, don't bother.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Broker.

Reviewed on October 17, 2010.