To Sleep with the Angels

Author: David Cowan, John Kuenster
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Dee, Ivan R. Publisher, 1998
Pages: 320
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: If burying a child has a special poignancy, the tragedy at a Catholic elementary school in Chicago almost forty years ago was an extraordinary moment of grief. One of the deadliest fires in American history, it took the lives of ninety-two children and three nuns at Our Lady of the Angels School, left many families physically and psychologically scarred for life, and destroyed a close-knit working-class neighborhood. This is the moving story of that fire and its consequences written by two journalists who have been obsessed with the events of that terrible day in December 1958. It is a story of ordinary people caught up in a disaster that shocked the nation. In gripping detail, those who were there—children, teachers, firefighters—describe the fear, desperation, and panic that prevailed in and around the stricken school building on that cold Monday afternoon. But beyond the flames, the story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels became an enigma whose mystery has deepened with time: its cause was never officially explained despite evidence that it had been intentionally set by a troubled student at the school. The fire led to a complete overhaul of fire safety standards for American schools, but it left a community torn apart by grief and anger, and accusations that the Catholic church and city fathers had shielded the truth. Messrs. Cowan and Kuenster have recreated this tragedy in a powerful narrative with all the elements of a first-rate detective story.

Review: Fantastic and heart-wrenching. This is a story that needs to be told. Fortunately some good came out of this tragedy, and children today are safer because of it. What a horrifying event for all involved.

Lincoln's Gamble

Author: Todd Brewster
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: Scribner, 2014
Pages: 368
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: A brilliant, authoritative, and riveting account of the most critical six months in Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, when he penned the Emancipation Proclamation and changed the course of the Civil War.

On July 12, 1862, Abraham Lincoln spoke for the first time of his intention to free the slaves. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, doing precisely that. In between, however, was perhaps the most tumultuous six months of his presidency, an episode during which the sixteenth president fought bitterly with his generals, disappointed his cabinet, and sank into painful bouts of clinical depression. Most surprising, the man who would be remembered as “The Great Emancipator” did not hold firm to his belief in emancipation. He agonized over the decision and was wracked by private doubts almost to the moment when he inked the decree that would change a nation.

Popular myth would have us believe that Lincoln did not suffer from such indecision, that he did what he did through moral resolve; that he had a commanding belief in equality, in the inevitable victory of right over wrong. He worked on drafts of the document for months, locking it in a drawer in the telegraph room of the War department. Ultimately Lincoln chose to act based on his political instincts and knowledge of the war. It was a great gamble, with the future of the Union, of slavery, and of the presidency itself hanging in the balance.

In this compelling narrative, Todd Brewster focuses on these critical six months to ask: was it through will or by accident, intention or coincidence, personal achievement or historical determinism that he freed the slaves? The clock is always ticking in these pages as Lincoln searches for the right moment to enact his proclamation and simultaneously turn the tide of war. Lincoln’s Gamble portrays the president as an imperfect man with an unshakable determination to save a country he believed in, even as the course of the Civil War remained unknown.

Review: Another challenging read, and I usually love books about the Civil War era. There wasn't much I found compelling in this book, and I'm trying to figure out why. Perhaps, it is too narrow of a time period on which to focus. Or maybe, I've just read too much about Lincoln lately.

This felt like a novel I would have been forced to read in History class in college. Rather than an engrossing narrative, this felt like something for academia. Even non-fiction can draw a reader in, but this kept me on the outside looking in for all 368 pages.

Diagnosing Giants

Author: Philip A. Mackowiak
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2013
Pages: 240
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: Could Lincoln have lived? After John Wilkes Booth fired a low-velocity .44 caliber bullet into the back of the president's skull, Lincoln did not perish immediately. Attending doctors cleaned and probed the wound, and actually improved his breathing for a time. Today medical trauma teams help similar victims survive-including Gabby Giffords, whose injury was strikingly like Lincoln's. In Diagnosing Giants, Dr. Philip A. Mackowiak examines the historical record in detail, reconstructing Lincoln's last hours moment by moment to calculate the odds. That leads him to more questions: What if he had lived? What sort of neurological function would he have had? What kind of a Constitutional crisis would have ensued?

Dr. Mackowiak, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, offers a gripping and authoritative account of thirteen patients who took center stage in world history. The result is a new understanding of how the past unfolded, as well as a sweeping survey of the history of medicine. What was the ailment that drove Caligula mad? Why did Stonewall Jackson die after having an arm amputated, when so many other Civil War soldiers survived such operations? As with Lincoln, the author explores the full contest of his subjects' lives and the impact of each case on the course of history, from Tutankhamen, Buddha, and John Paul Jones to Darwin, Lenin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

When an author illuminates the past with state-of-the-art scientific knowledge, readers pay attention. Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic, about the medical malpractice that killed President James A. Garfield, was a New York Times bestseller. And Dr. Mackowiak's previous book, Post-Mortem: Solving History's Greatest Medical Mysteries, won the attention of periodicals as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and New England Journal of Medicine, which pleaded for a sequel. With Diagnosing Giants, he has written one with impeccable expertise and panache.

Review: I found this to be a challenging read, but in thinking about it, the hardest chapters were those for which I didn't really care about the subject (or patient). I flew through the chapters about Stonewall Jackson and Abraham Lincoln because I find them, and their time period, interesting.

It bothers me that the synopsis talks only of Lincoln because that was one short chapter in a long book.

Written by a medical doctor, Diagnosing Giants, assumes the reader has some familiarity in the medical field as far as terminology and diagnoses go. I got the general gist of whatever ailment or illness killed the patient. The details weren't important to me.

Unless you're in a medical profession, reading this cover-to-cover, probably isn't the best use of time. If one of the patients interests you in general, then you might want to read that particular chapter. Being a history buff wasn't enough for me though. It was hard to rate this book for those reasons. 

An Accidental Woman

Author: Barbara Delinsky
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Gallery Books, 2014
Pages: 544
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: Barbara Delinsky brings back Poppy Blake, from her stunning New York Times bestseller Lake News, in this deeply moving novel of life's second chances and the accidents of fate that can set us free....

Lake Henry, New Hampshire, is buzzing over the annual maple syrup harvest--as well as the shocking revelation that longtime resident Heather Malone has been led away by the FBI, which claims the devoted stepmother and businesswoman fled the scene of a fatal accident in California years before. Poppy Blake, her best friend, is determined to prove Heather's innocence, while facing past mistakes of her own: she has never overcome her guilt from the snowmobile accident that killed her partner and left her paralyzed. Playing an unlikely role in both women's lives is investigative journalist Griffin Hughes, whose attraction to Poppy keeps him coming back to Lake Henry, even though he is secretly responsible for drawing the law closer to Heather. To redeem himself, Griffin sets out to solve the mystery surrounding Heather and becomes the key to freeing Poppy from her own regrets and showing her a rich new future.

Review: I'm used to getting sucked into Barbara Delinsky's novels from the first page, and that just didn't happen with this particular book. I stuck with it because I do like this author, but I don't know that I really ever became immersed in, or a part of, Lake Henry.

It wasn't awful so I feel bad giving it a "Do Not Recommend" rating, but there are so many better stories out there, even by this author.