Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

I wanted to read this book because I read "A Gentleman in Moscow" by the author Amor Towles. I loved that book and the writing style of Towles. So, I wanted to read other books by him. They are all runaway best sellers, with "A Gentleman in Moscow" already made into a TV series. The second book I read was "The Lincoln Highway".  Now, I am reading it for the second time and enjoying it a lot more as I catch more references to classics.

The protagonist, eighteen year old Emmett, is just released from a juvenile detention facility after serving his sentence and is driven home by the warden. During the time Emmett was incarcerated his father has passed away after losing his farm in Nebraska to bankruptcy. Emmett just wants to take his Studebaker, his only remaining possession, and his six year old brother Billy, and drive to California to find their mother who had left them after Billy was born. Fate has different plans for him. Unbeknownst to him, two of his friends from the detention facility, Duchess and Woolly, have escaped from the facility by hiding in the warden's trunk. Woolly is from an old-money east-coast family and apparently has a $150K trust fund in cash stashed in his family's summer home in the Adirondacks. Duchess wants to take Woolly to claim that fund so that he can claim part of it. On the way, Duchess wants to take the opportunity to settle a few old scores and pay-off a few debts. Duchess "borrows" the Studebaker and heads to New York with Woolly and now Emmett has to follow them to reclaim the car so he and Billy can head to San Francisco to find his mother according to their original plan.

The story is about Duchess' journey to New York with Woolly in tow along the Lincoln Highway with a few side trips and the chase by Emmett and Billy to try to catch Duchess to reclaim his car. Without the car, Emmett has to try to get to New York by hitching a ride on a freight train and then track down Duchess.

The story is intricately weaved. Each chapter is named for one of the actors and told in first-person from the perspective of that actor. Interesting characters pop up on the way as their lives intersect with Emmett and Billy's on this journey.

While reading this book, I marveled at Towles' imagination to create the scenarios and his power over wordsmithing to bring the reader into the story. By all means, read and enjoy. By the way, I contacted Towles on his web site and he emailed back the next day! (Must be able to afford a secretary after the runaway success of his books. Whether true or not, a personalized email from the author was very appreciated.) Anyway, he informs that The Lincoln Highway is to be made into a movie. Can't wait and will be on my list to see it.

Ahimsa by Supriya Kelkar

Ahimsa is  a is middle-grade novel that I read because my daughter got it for our ten year old grad-daughter. I wanted to see what they were reading and it looked interesting.

The author, Supriya Kelkar, was born and raised in the mid-west where she learned Hindi by watching Bollywood movies and is now an author and a screenwriter in that industry, which is quite remarkable. 

Ahimsa is quite a readable book and it should keep a middle schooler engaged. One problem is that it is sprinkled with Hindi words that might trip up kids who are not familiar with the language or do not have Indian background. The book has a glossary, which is very incomplete. So, if your child is reading the book ask them to make a list of words that they do not know for checking later.

The story takes a few years before India's independence when the "Quit India" movement led by Mahatma Gandhi was in full swing. It centers around ten year old Anju and her mother. Anju has the the prejudices against the "Untouchables" as was common in the society steeped in the caste system in India at that time. With her mother's encouragement Anju learns to appreciate the importance of equality. Anju's mother, a progressive, joins the Quit India movement and gets arrested and the story is primarily about how Anju deals with the aftermath.

It would be helpful to relate some background to the reader before beginning, especially about the cast system in India that is now illegal, Indian history related to the independence movement and the violent aftermath of independence and partition of India and Pakistan. Some of the violence that is described as a part of the riots that ensued and the treatment of "untouchables" is quite jarring. The story would give a taste of the struggle that India went through to gain independence from the British rule and might encourage the child to want to learn more about the history.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

The Sisterhood by Liza Mundy

The subtitle of this book is "The Secret History of the Women at the CIA".  The book jacket says that this is a history of "three generations at the CIA- the women who fought to become operatives, transformed spycraft, and tracked down Osama Bin Laden.

It's a big book with 400 pages and a long section of notes at the end for references. The book makes it clear that historically the CIA was an "old boys club" and women were considered for only secretarial jobs, no matter their capability or qualifications. Since the CIA was formed after WWII, it is not a surprise that women were treated as second class citizens in 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and even after that. It's the 21st century and women are still fighting for their rightful place in society in general. Equal rights for women, although enshrined in law, is far from satisfactory in practice in the society.  But, consistently the CIA used spouses to do spy work for their husbands because the wife's role provided the best cover. However, the wives were not CIA employees and were not on the payroll. However, they were expected to take the risks that entailed. The book makes the point again and again, that CIA was by far the worst agency in the US government in terms of treatment of women. Sometimes the repetitiveness of this point got too frequent for me and I felt like saying, "come on, give me some exciting stories from CIA's files!" Nevertheless, many of the instances of bad behavior of the men towards the women are so terrible that you wonder if these men had any wives, sisters or mothers.

Operational roles were reserved for the men and women were regularly relegated to secretarial jobs like typing pools, data entry and data analysis. Some women successfully fought to get operational jobs and case officer roles for handling foreign assets. But, it was actually the data analyst roles that allowed the women to be on the forefront of predicting events and finding high value targets. In fact, the analysts, that were mostly women, were repeatedly and for years, were warning of potential of coordinated attacks by Osama Bin Laden's ragtag bunch of jihadists. The neocons in the administration, however, could not wrap their heads around the idea that any non-state actors could cause substantial damage to the US. Not only did the neo-con power-players in the administration, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, repeatedly ignore the warnings by the analysts of the potential for danger coming from OBL but they were completely focused on proving that the danger actually resided in Iraq and Iran. The administration repeatedly asked for proof of WMDs and potential of attacks from them, and the analysis repeatedly pointed to the absence of any data that supported these wild theories. But, it is impossible to prove a negative. So, the analysts were ignored and 9/11 happened.

Finally, it was the group of women data analysts who tracked down OBL and this time they were believed and the operation to capture/kill OBL was given the green light based on the analyst's recommendation.

It's a long book and it goes into a lot of detail of retired women from the CIA and also about women still under-cover (with pseudonyms) and the trials they had to survive to get them to be taken seriously. It was a lot of investment of my time to read the whole book. If the subject is of interest to you, by all means, read it.