Category Archives: Reviews

Castro!: An Impact Biography

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castroI recently posted a commentary about President Obama’s initiative to normalize relations with Cuba. I noticed this small book by Don E. Beyer at the library and I’m glad I checked it out.  The book quickly gets to the point of explaining Fidel’s origins and how he became the face of revolution in Cuba. The first sentences of the book are, “Fidel Castro is a man at odds with the world. He likes to say he came into it under conditions natural for a guerrilla fighter. He was born on August 13, 1926, as an explosive storm swept over the mountains of the Oriented Province, the wild land that has long served as an incubator of revolution in Cuba.”

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born illegitimate, one of seven children from two mothers. His father, Angel Castro, and his mother, Lina Ruz Gonzalez, were not married until several years after Fidel’s birth.  Fidel’s combative nature was displayed frequently in childhood. He was described as rebellious and combative. His brother Raul described him as dominating every situation. “He challenged the biggest and strongest ones, and when he was beaten, he started it all over again the next day. He would never quit.” As a student he displayed a photographic memory. “In later years, Fidel’s prodigious memory enabled him to give the impression of knowledge and competence where it did not exist.” Spanish Jesuit teachers taught him to admire Spanish Fascists such as Francisco Franco. He later admired Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. “He was described as walking around his school with a copy of Mein Kampf under his arm.”

Fidel began to move into revolutionary politics when he went to Havana in 1945 to study law. He admired the stories of Jose Marti who had become a Cuban independence martyr in 1895 when he was killed fighting with a revolutionary army. Castro “…saw himself as Marti’s spiritual heir.” Continue reading →

The Future of Food Could be Flavorful

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Third PlateDan Barber is a chef concerned about the farm-to-table journey of America’s food. He works with boutique farmers in upstate New York, including the Stone Barn Center for Food and Agriculture – a farm built in the 1930’s in a “Normandy style,” by wealthy philanthropist John D. Rockefeller to “preserve a memory – the place where he sipped warm milk from the lid of the milking jug.” (No matter how nostalgic, Ponderer does not recommend drinking raw milk, more especially the longer it’s been out of the cow.)

Barber is owner and chef at two New York restaurants, Blue Hill in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown (45 minutes from Grand Central Station). I visited his website at Blue Hill Farm.com before reading the book.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns is an elegant restaurant where jackets and ties are preferred for gentlemen. (Apparently fancy restaurants have given up trying to tell women what to wear.) In keeping with the ideal of serving the day’s harvest (and perhaps because of shortages for entree portions), Barber serves “multi-course tastings” for $138 to $198 per person. You’ll be happy to know you can buy Dom Perignon by the glass ($80). Most Americans are unlikely to dine here. But rich or extravagant people serve an important social function. They are the early adopters for things that become everyday benefits – air travel, electric cars, television, ocean cruises – so perhaps they can blaze the trail to better eating. Trends from expensive restaurants can affect the local grocery store, for example, designer pizzas are now available in your frozen food section.

New York is the right place for this venture – judging from my travels in lower upstate New York, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a farmer’s market or stand. Farm-to-table is a popular idea.

This is not a text book. It reads as conversation story-telling. Barber presents interesting stories about growing heritage varieties of crops and rotating crops and livestock to maximize soil fertility. This is not standard organic farming which retains the old American mindset: grow monocultures and serve slabs of meat with a few vegetables. It must be wonderful for a farmer to have the financial support to try these ideas and we meet many such farmers (at least one who, by the way, eats “hulking pork chops” and butters bread so thickly Barber “thought he was joking.”) Continue reading →

America’s Forgotten History – Surprising, Important, and Sometimes Funny

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here is whereHere is Where is a fun read. Andrew Carroll had a file of clippings about events in “America’s great forgotten history.” He was also between jobs and between girlfriends, so he decided to visit the sites of events that have no plaque, no memorial, and may only be known to local historians.

Carroll’s style is conversational. He writes about his problems arranging his trips, contacting people who might know about the sites he is seeking, even his troubles operating the car’s GPS. While he is on the trail of some particular event, he is sometimes distracted by other places he discovers.

Carroll concentrates on little-known events that had an impact on the nation. For example, the first amphibious landing and ground campaign of World War II was on American soil. During the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese plane crashed on Niihau, an outlying Hawaiian island. The pilot survived and the residents seized documents from his cockpit and held the pilot until authorities could arrive. Three residents of Japanese descent tried to help the pilot escape. There was a gun battle and a death before Company M of the 299th Infantry arrived on the island. Americans were “terrified” by the “sudden betrayal of their neighbors” by the three Japanese-Americans. The fact that Company M included loyal Japanese-Americans got lost. This event contributed to the internment of Japanese-Americans.

He also covers some famous Americans who have memorials that may be in the wrong place. Daniel Boone – who did not wear a coonskin cap! He wore a felt Quaker hat with a brim that came in handy shielding his gun barrel during muzzle-loading in rainy weather. A fifteen foot obelisk in Kentucky displays a carving of Boone in a coonskin cap, much to the annoyance of a local historian. He is also “peeved by the last image, of Boone fighting Native Americans… If anything, he was a peacemaker.” But the obelisk gets into the book because it marks one of two Daniel Boone graves. The other is in Missouri. The Missouri gravesite was raided and some bones brought to Kentucky. The original grave contained jumbled remains from several individuals and only some bones were retrieved, so Boone probably lies in both graves. Continue reading →

Farmer Island Magic

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FIM_3D_Cover_341pxFrequent visitors to this web site know that the books reviewed tend to be non-fiction. I’m making an exception this week because I’ve published Farmer Island Magic, the sequel to my 2012 book, Angry Pigs Organized Against Gerbils: The Farmer Island War. Both of those books were crafted based on character and plot suggestions offered by my four grandchildren who are credited as the “Creative Staff and Illustrators.”

Farmer Island Magic begins where Angry Pigs… left off and the truce that ended The Farmer Island War has held without incident. The farm animals, including the intelligent pigs, and their allies, are living peacefully with the gerbils that had been the enemies in the war. There are as yet no humans on the farm, so the animals must work together to plant, tend, and harvest the food for their survival. All appears well, but pigeon scouts and rat spies remain ever vigilant for dangers to the farm. The serenity of life on the farm is broken when a pigeon scout brings troubling news that humans are approaching. He reports that four humans are traveling toward the farm in a covered wagon and that one of them — a young woman — is probably the daughter of the original settlers that first cleared the farm from what was then wilderness. She is traveling with a husband and two children.

The arriving family is surprised to find a prosperous farm with well-tended crops yet no evidence of humans. They also notice many other mysteries, such as the farm pigs appearing intensely alert and watchful when the young farm wife is nearby. Nevertheless, the human family begins to settle into the farm and enjoy the frontier. The animals notice the human adults seem a bit careless with the children, perhaps not realizing there are real dangers on the frontier.

However, everything changes when the children are pursued by a viscous wolf pack and the farm pigs intervene to rescue the children. The humans begin to understand there is something remarkable about the farms pigs that seem to be able to understand what the young farm wife is saying. The family continues to uncover many mystical things about Farmer Island. The farm wife is led to a magic book and a letter from her mother that explains she has inherited powers from an ancient ancestor.

There are more mysteries and excitement ahead. The farm family is threatened by a band of marauders, but they are saved first by the bravery of the pig herd that defends them and then warriors from the Native American village who have been alerted by animals that the family is in danger.

This will be one of the shortest reviews posted on this web site, but I tell you that there are many other adventures and magical events to be enjoyed in Farmer Island Magic. I hope you are intrigued enough to buy the Farmer Island Magic Kindle ebook for $2.99 or the paperback for $9.95 (or even less). We also hope those of you who decide to enjoy the book or ebook will consider posting a favorable review at the Farmer Island Magic webpage at Amazon.com.

The Man Behind the Rosenbergs

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the-man-behindThis is a fascinating book written by retired KGB agent Alexander Feklisov with Sergei Kostin. The book begins with an interesting description of Feklisov’s life in the Soviet Union as a youngster and his eventual acceptance into the INO, or Soviet Foreign Intelligence. He is sent to the United States early in World War II and spends four years sending and receiving messages without being involved in espionage. He is a capable and loyal employee and he eventually enters the world of the “illegals” with the assignment of recruiting spies from the many Americans who sympathized with the Communism and the Soviet cause. I found it interesting that Feklisov ardently defended his contacts as being “anti-fascist activists” and not Communist spies.

Feklisov’s advancement in Soviet intelligence was enhanced by the remarkable fact there were few older agents when he began his training. Feklisov was surprised there “…was only one older officer in our section…” He “…later learned that the Stalinist purges had not spared the intelligence services. The leadership of the INO had been decimated as much as the Red Army by the end of the 1930s.” It is difficult to understand Feklisov’s dedicated loyalty to the Stalinist system after such a revelation.

Feklisov was almost prohibited from receiving a foreign assignment because he wasn’t married. He was told, “How can you recruit any agents if you can’t even recruit a wife?” His immediate supervisor praised his abilities and recommended him for an overseas assignment. He even complimented him with the comment, “If you want my opinion, it’s rather good that he didn’t get married on command. It goes to prove he’s a serious sort of fellow.” That and the fact the NKVD was short of people in the United States led to his assignment in New York as a communication specialist.

He became Alexander Fomin with the code name “Kalistrat” and was assigned to establish a clandestine radio link. The announcement of the Nazi attack on the USSR revealed some attitudes that disturbed Feklisov, or Fomin. Senator Harry Truman announced that Russia should be helped if the Germans were winning or the Germans should be helped if the Russians were winning. “The first prize for bluntness would go to the New York Daily News, which published a cartoon depicting the USSR and Germany as two snakes fighting each other. The caption read, ‘Let’s let them eat each other!’” Feklisov felt Roosevelt was fairer in his assessment. “His attitude toward the USSR in general, now that it was bearing the brunt of the war effort was favorable.” (My reading of history says that FDR’s attitude went far beyond “favorable.) Continue reading →

Spying in America

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spying-in-americaThis book by Michael J. Sulick has the subtitle, “Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War.” Sulick was a former director of the CIA’s clandestine service, and his book describes how “…nations large and small, from Russia and China to Ghana and Ecuador, have stolen the most precious secrets of the United States.” The book describes thirty of the most famous espionage cases. The introduction discusses a subject that continues to be importance:  government monitoring of communications to uncover potential terrorist threats versus freedom from government intrusion into our daily lives. “America’s susceptibility to the threat of espionage…developed, ironically, from the very qualities that catapulted the nation to superpower status and made it a symbol of democracy:  an exceptional geography and a tradition of individual liberties. These attributes shaped American attitudes toward national security and bred both disbelief about the threat of espionage and a distrust of countering it at the expense of these cherished liberties.”

I’ve always had the question as to why U.S. citizens would spy against the country. The author explains that the massive Soviet espionage efforts before and during World War II were assisted by the ravages of the Great Depression. “Americans disillusioned with capitalism were lured by the utopian promises of communism and swelled the ranks of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA)…Communist sympathizers attracted by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies flocked to work in the new administration and willingly supported the Soviet cause by passing government secrets. When irrefutable proof of widespread Soviet espionage eventually surfaced, the highest levels of the US government still refused to believe the senior officials of the Roosevelt administration were Soviet spies.” Many in the liberal media expressed “…a highly suspicious distrust of government efforts to combat spying, viewing them as intrusiveness and even persecution of its citizenry.” The focus often was on what was seen as the excesses of McCarthy instead of the revelations from Chambers and Bentley, two Soviet spies who turned and provided lists of spies in the government. The book accurately describes that much of the media could or would not accept their stories until irrefutable proof became available years later. Continue reading →