What book are you currently reading?

[RomaMater]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_M ... s_S._Grant

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant is an autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th President of the United States, focused mainly on his military career during the Mexican-American War and the American Civil War. Written as Grant was dying of cancer in 1885, the two-volume set was published by Mark Twain shortly after Grant's death.

[Anthea]

[Anthea]

[Piling]

Currently reading England's Lane by Joseph Conolly, a very good book, the kind that makes you turning feverishly the pages, again and again, until the end :

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/o ... lly-review

[Anthea]

He watches. Something terrible has happened in the snowbound village of Kingdom Come, Wyoming. Twelve eerily identical houses stand dark and abandoned. The people who lived in them appear to have vanished, seemingly into thin air. He waits. Maura Isles is driving through the area with a group of friends when they find themselves trapped in a snowstorm. They stumble into the abandoned village to take shelter. But their nightmare has only just begun. They Disappear. Days later, Jane Rizzoli flies to Wyoming to search for her missing friend. A crashed vehicle has been found with four badly burned bodies still inside. Can one of the corpses be Maura's? Jane's hunt for the truth leads her to Kingdom Come. Where the person who was watching Maura now lies waiting for her ...

A truly excellent crime thriller - very difficult to put down

[Anthea]

Currently reading England's Lane by Joseph Conolly, a very good book, the kind that makes you turning feverishly the pages, again and again, until the end :

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/o ... lly-review

After I have read ALL the Tess Gerritsen books I bought I hope to get round to reading "England's Lane"

I and country born and bred and when I first went to London to study nothing had prepared me for what I found there

Anything that gives me an insight into how people used to live in London - without having to read any more books on Sociology - would be very interesting

I found London such a shock that I took my Diploma in Sociology and another in Multi-Cultural Studies - I even studied Multi-Cultural Sex (Education) that included many Study Weekends - I used to tell my friends I was going away for a weekend of sex

[Anthea]

[Anthea]

[Anthea]

Not even the icy temperatures of a typical New England winter can match the bone-chilling scene of carnage discovered in the early morning hours at the chapel of Our Lady of Divine Light. Within the sanctuary walls of the cloistered convent, now stained with blood, lie two nuns- one dead, one critically injured- victims of an unspeakable savage attacker.

The brutal crime appears to be without motive, and the elderly nuns in residence can offer little help in the police investigation. But medical examiner Maura Isles’s autopsy of the dead woman yields a shocking surprise: Twenty-four-year-old Sister Camille, the order’s sole novice, gave birth before she was murdered. Then the disturbing case takes another stunning new turn when another woman is found murdered in an abandoned building, her body mutilated beyond recognition. Together, Isles and homicide detective Jane Rizzoli uncover an ancient horror that connects these terrible slaughters. As long-buried secrets come to light, Maura Isles finds herself drawn inexorably toward the heart of an investigation that strikes closer and closer to home – and toward a dawning revelation about the killer’s identity too shattering to consider.

As spine-tingling as it is mind-jolting, The Sinner showcases Tess Gerritsen in peak form – bringing her intimate knowledge of the dark depths of criminal investigation brilliantly to bear. Beneath the layers of startling insight into the souls of its characters, and the richly wrought depiction of the everyday war between good and evil, beats the unstoppable heart of an irresistible thriller.

[Anthea]

[Anthea]

[Anthea]

Not reading it but hope to obtain a copy soon

[Piling]

Duty
Memoirs of a Secretary at War
By Robert M Gates
About the Book:After serving six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, Robert M. Gates believed that he had left Washington politics behind for good—but when he received the call from the White House in 2006 to help a nation mired in two wars, he answered what he felt was the call of duty.

Forthright and unsparing, Duty is Gates’s behind-the-scenes account of his nearly five years as a Secretary of Defense at war: the battles with Congress, the two presidents he served, the military itself, and the vast Pentagon bureaucracy; his efforts to help George W. Bush turn the tide in Iraq; his role as a guiding (and often dissenting) voice for Barack Obama; and, most importantly, his ardent devotion to and love for American soldiers. Offering unvarnished appraisals of our political leaders, including Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton, Duty tells a powerful and deeply personal story, giving us an unprecedented look at two administrations and the wars that have defined them.

About Robert M Gates: Robert M. Gates served as secretary of defense from 2006 to 2011. He also served as an officer in the United States Air Force and worked for the Central Intelligence Agency before being appointed director of the agency by President George H. W. Bush. He was a member of the National Security Council staff in four administrations and served eight presidents of both political parties. Additionally, Gates has a continuing distinguished record in the private sector and in academia, including currently serving as chancellor of the College of William and Mary. He holds a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University.

Just begun it, very interesting. Since the first moment he met Maliki, he described it as a "major problem" :

"We met first with Prime Minister Noori Al-Maliki, head of the small Dawa Party and a compromise choice for the job precisely because he was seen as weak. He downplayed Iraq’s continuing problems but said there were due to the activities of Baathists and Saddamists who remained in the country and in the government. He seemed out of touch with reality."

During their first travel to Iraq, they halt in Shannon Airport and his team bought whisky, thinking that they could not find it in Baghdad. So, they met the Iraqi President :

We had been treated respectfully and reasonable openly by all we met in, including President Jalal Talabani, who hosted a sumptuous dinner for us featuring a table full of very expensive scotch."

[Piling]

"
As the first rank of domed hills appeared on the horizon, rippling upward from the desert floor in northern Iraq, to culminate in ten-thousand-foot massifs clothed in oak and mountain ash, my Kurdish driver glanced back at the vast piecrust plain, sucked his tongue in contempt, and said, “Arabistan.” Then, looking toward the hills, he murmured, “Kurdistan,” and his face lit up. It was 1986, the pinnacle of Saddam Hussein’s suffocating reign, and yet as soon as we penetrated further into prisonlike valleys and forbidding chasms, the ubiquitous billboard pictures of Saddam Hussein suddenly vanished. So did Iraqi soldiers. Replacing them were Kurdish peshmergas with bandoliers, wearing turbans, baggy trousers, and cummerbunds. According to the political map, we had never left Iraq. But the mountains had declared a limit to Saddam’s rule–a limit overcome by the most extreme of measures.

In the late 1980s, enraged at the freedom that these mountains had over the decades and centuries ultimately granted the Kurds, Saddam launched a full-scale assault on Iraqi Kurdistan–the infamous Al-Anfal campaign– that killed an estimated 100,000 civilians. The mountains were clearly not determinative. But they did serve as the backdrop–the original fact–to this tragic drama. It is because of the mountains that Kurdistan has to a significant extent now effectively seceded from the Iraqi state.

"
— The Revenge of Geography (What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts And the Battle Against Fate), Robert D. Kaplan.

[Piling]

Yesterday, I read all the afternoon L'Ombre du vent (original title : La sombra del viento). in English :




Wonderful, funny, exciting adventures novel. And also an evocation of Spanish War, an implacable judgement about Franco Spain and Spanish Church.

Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.

That's also a book for books lovers.