Books read in May

These are the books that I read in May:

Agnes Grey by Charlotte Bronte

So I was not planning on reading this book at all! Our online library system downloads classic books a bit oddly. Some classics can't be downloaded onto a Kindle for instance. You can only read them in a browser. Last month, I downloaded and read Villette. Unbeknownst to me, Agnes Grey was also downloaded along with Villette. When I saw that Agnes Grey was on my Kindle, I decided to read it. However, I told myself that I would stop reading it if I didn't care for it. I wasn't crazy about Villette but plodded through it.

I liked Agnes Grey better than Villette and it was much shorter than Villette so the time commitment to reading it was not bad at all.

The book revolves around the eponymous character, Agnes Grey. She's from a poor but respectable family. Wanting to help with her family finances, she becomes a governess. She works for two families whose wealth exceeds their common sense and decency... They expect Agnes to improve the behaviors of their impertinent, disrespectful, and poorly behaved children (as well as educate them) without disciplining them. It was an impossible task. One felt so poorly for Agnes! Agnes gets fired from her first post (which proves to be a blessing!) and becomes a governess for two teenage girls, whose mother wants them refined in order to find a wealthy husband. Agnes meets the town's new rector, Mr. Weston, and one of her charges determines to make him fall in love with her (that's her goal for all the men she meets). Well, Mr. Weston, (spoiler alert) is destined to marry our heroine so he's the one man who didn't fall for the young lady's charms. 

I enjoyed the book quite a bit. It was well written as any book by a Bronte is! Lovely prose, wonderful themes of goodness and morality in a person being better than wealth, no profanity, no "adult situations," etc. 

I took pictures of several pages of my Kindle when I found sentences that I like a lot. Here is an example from a page that I took a picture of on my Kindle: it reveals Brone's lovely prose from the book: 

But our wishes are like tinder: the flint and steel of circumstances are continually striking out sparks, which vanish immediately, unless they chance to fall upon the tinder of our wishes; then, they instantly ignite, and the flame of hope is kindled in a moment.

I love that! Here's an exert from another page that I took a picture of: In the book, Agnes is lamenting the effect of spending a lot of time with her vain and worldly teenage charges:

Already, I seemed to feel my intellect deteriorating, my heart petrifying, my soul contracting, and I trembled lest my very moral perceptions should become deadened, my distinctions of right and wrong confounded, and all my better faculties be sunk, at last, beneath the baneful influence of such a mode of life. The gross vapours of earth were gathering around me, and closing in upon my my inward heaven; and thus it was that Mr. Weston rose at length upon me, appearing like the morning star in my horizon, to save me from the fear of utter darkness; and I rejoiced that I had now a subject for contemplation that was above me, not beneath me.

The next three books that I read were all by the same author. You know me, once I find an author that I like, I want to read ALL THE BOOKS by that author. It's just how I am... I am going to talk about the main character in the books rather than give a detailed summary of them. There are many generalities that apply to all three books that I read.

First all of the books are long! I enjoyed that about them because I liked them all a lot. They are not quick reads. They all center around a former NYC cop, John Corey, who had to leave the force after getting shot. John is a funny character. I love his "voice." He's sarcastic at times, not politically correct, and does what he has to do to get the job done. The places and government agencies he describes are all real. He made up the plots/story lines that center around these places but I loved learning about real things and events even though these books are mostly all fiction (some of the events in the books did take place in real life but the story lines in the book regarding John Corey are fiction). There are quite a few books in the series- I did happen to start at book one, Plum Island, and the next two that I read were also in order. Currently, I'm reading the fourth book in the series. It is not necessary to read them in order- they are all stand alone but I do plan to read them in order. 

I did notice that there was a notable difference between the first book in the series (Plum Island) and the following two that I read. The first book contained very little swear words or "adult situations" but the following two books did. I don't know if that was due to a conscious decision to interject more of that or not. 

Plum Island by Nelson DeMille- Takes place on or near Long Island (where the author lives- I learned SO MUCH about the geography of parts of Long Island!) where two young scientists who work on Plum Island are killed. Plum Island is a government research facility of infection diseases. Was the killing related to their work or something else?

Lion's Game by Nelson DeMille- told in a two person point of view- one was of John's and one was a Libyan terrorist whose family was killed in the Libyan air strikes in 1986 and who has vowed revenge on the US for strikes. John is tasked with finding the terrorist whose actions resulted in hundreds of deaths.

Night Fall by Nelson DeMille- the plot is centered around a real life incident and possible coverup (the forward by the author was fascinating). That incident was the 1996 crash of TWA 800. a 747 that exploded off the coast of Long Island. "Experts" in real life and in the book deny the theory of eye witness (on the ground) who saw what looked like a missile (they saw something projecting upward in the sky heading towards the aircraft and shortly after that was the explosion) heading towards the aircraft just before it exploded. In the book, a couple inadvertently filmed themselves on the beach that provides proof of what eyewitnesses saw. 

Here's one small exert from one of the books that may give you an idea of the tone of the books and something of John's character:

My goodness. The guy sounded like my ex-bosses. There must be something about me that brings out the nasties in people. Anyway, I mulled over the contract amendment. Could I be a loyal and cooperative team player? No, but I wanted the job. I realized that Mr. Koenig hadn't demanded that I cease my sarcasm or dull my rapier wit, and I took this as either approval or an oversight on his part. I crossed my finers and said, "Agreed."

"Good." He put out his hand and her shook. He said, "You're on." 

I was going to say, "You won't regret it, sir," but I thought maybe he would, so I just said, "I'll do  my best."

The 1916 Project (nonfiction) by Seth Gruber 

This book was by far the most impactful of any book that I've read this month. The book contains a lot of information that I think everyone needs to know. To do a halfway adequate job of relaying even a small amount of the salient information would require a very long, very in-depth review. My current plan is to summarize a couple of chapters a month. So for this month, I am only going to review the first two chapters. In subsequent months of reviewing books, I will do other chapters. I know that's odd but there's so much that I want to convey from this book and I think this is the best way for me to do so without word/information overload.

From the back cover of the book, 

Do you look around at our country, our culture, and wonder:

"HOW DID WE GET HERE?"

The 1916 Project unearths the how and why of our "progressive" culture shift. In 1916, the founder of Planned Parenthood opened her first clinic that launched America into a direct path from Planned Parenthood to the Nazis to the current Democratic Party.

Along the way, he makes stops in unexpected places, like the offices of Playboy magazine, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and an ancient alter dedicated to the god of Molech. The connections will shock you- perhaps even anger you- but you will not be the same after learning the truth. And if you've ever struggled to articulate your pro-life convictions against the onslaught of woke propaganda, this will help you shatter ever liberal lie you've ever been told.

My review of chapters one and two:

Chapter one details the relationship between Margaret Sanger (the woman who started Planned Parenthood) and other proponents of the eugenics movement including Leon Whitney, Madison Grant, and Adolf Hitler. Eugenics is the belief that certain races are superior to other races and that only those from the superior race should procreate. (All of the proponents of eugenics were white, btw, and believed that Caucasians were superior to other races.)

The man who coined the term "eugenics," Francis Dalton, is considered the father of the modern eugenics movement. He was influenced by his cousin Charles Darwin. who argued in his seminal work, On the Origin of Species... that man as just another animal, a highly evolved one, should use selective breeding and that only the fittest survive.

Sanger was a proponent of eugenics and, as a Marxist, she rejected God and the jedeo-Christian beliefs regarding man being created by God. In 1916, Sanger opened American's first birth control clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, NY. The clinic was the result of Sanger's zeal for Darwinism and eugenics. She chose her clinic to be in Brownsville and not the wealthy enclave where she lived, Greenwich Village, because Brownsville was a poor immigrant community with many residing there whom Sanger viewed as "unfit."

In 1917, Sanger started a magazine that she named The Birth Control Review. Ah, The Birth Control Review- readers one stop shop to read articles arguing for race based policies, forced sterilizations, and the creation of concentration camps on American soil to house undesirables.  In 1920, the magazine published a favorable review of Lothrop Stoddard's book The Rising Tide of color against White World Supremacy. Stoddard was a board member of the American Eugenics Society, a high ranking official in the Massachusetts KKK and in 1921, he became a founding board member for Sanger's American Birth Control League. (Sanger's American Birth Control League name was changed to Planned Parenthood in 1942.)

Stoddard inspired the Nazi term for non-Aryans, untermenshen (under-men) which he used in one of this earlier books. Hans Gunther, in 1934, a German race anthropologist and Nazi intellectual whose work and writings on eugenics won him the Geothe medal for arts and science from Hitler, referred to Stoddard and another man Grant (referenced earlier) as the "spiritual fathers" of Nazi Germany. Stoddard traveled to Germany where Joseph Goebbels gave him special treatment because Stoddard's writings on race were featured in Nazi school textbooks. Stoddard gave a full endorsement of Hitler's sterilization laws (used against sterilizing Jews) and said, "The sterilization law is weeding out the worst strain's in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way." 

(Yikes, that's giving "trust the science" icky vibes, no? See how anyone can twist using the word "science" to try to achieve a political goal??)

Let Stoddard's glowing reviews from leaders in the Nazi regime sink in. He was a founding board member of Sanger's American Birth Control League.

In 1933, Sanger's The Birth Control Review featured an article entitled, "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need" by Ernst Rudin. Oh boy... Rudin was a close friend and advisor to Sanger. Rudin served as Adolf Hitler's director of genetic sterilization and took a prominent role in the establishment of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In the early 1940's Rudin stressed "the value of eliminating young children of inferior quality." He gave lectures on sterilizations and one Josef Mengele regularly attended. 

I'll end this chapter's review quoting the last few sentences of chapter two:

    "The modern progressive movement would not exist if it were not for the unholy trinity of Darwin, Sanger, and Hitler. The first made it fashionable to treat one's neighbor as an animal, the latter showed what that looks like in its most extreme form, and in the middle, Sanger made the twisted gospel of freedom from God palatable to the point that even men and women who call themselves Christians would willingly lay down their babies on the alter of child sacrifice."

If some of the information that I've relayed about Sanger seems like right wing propaganda, misinformation, and/or a conflagration of truth, etc. please refer to Planned Parenthood's website for corroboration of what I've written here (which I got, of course, from The 1916 Project. Planned Parenthood's website contains a decent bit of information about Sanger and her troubling past with endorsing eugenics. Here is a small snippet from the site: "Sanger believed in eugenics- an inherently racist and ableist ideology that labeled certain people unfit to have children. Eugenics is the theory that society can be improved through planned breeding for "desirable traits" like intelligence ... In the early 20th century, eugentic ideas were popular among highly educated, privileged, and mostly white Americans. Sanger pronounced her belief in and alignment with the eugenics movement many times in her writings especially in the scientific journal Birth Control Review."

The Planned Parenthood info section on Sanger fails to mention that Sanger started the magazine and fails to mention the specifics of the "science" used in articles by contributors to the magazine in defense of eugenics. It also failed to show the connection between eugentics and how it was used to further anti-semitism under the Nazi regime (the omissions are understandable from a PR point of view... no one wants its highly profitable non profit associated with leaders whom the Nazi's looked to for inspiration and justification).

You can read Planned Parenthood's information about Sanger here.

That's it for now. I will plan to review chapter three the next time I do a book review.

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