Ah, summer. Some readers head to fluff, others head to big, long, challenging reads because summer offers unbroken stretches and quiet at the beach, by the pool, on a dock.
Here are three deep reads I can recommend.
Jon Krakauer’s Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (2015). Krakauer is the ace reporter and storyteller who has given us Into the Wild, Into Thin Air and Under the Banner of Heaven, each an unsettling, deeply researched read.
Same goes for Missoula, which details four years in this Montana college town, when young women who’d been raped by football players and other students forced police, the state’s attorney and university leaders to take action. An absorbing read.
Joby Warrick’s Black Flags: The Rise of Isis reads like a thriller, but it’s the true story of the missteps by Presidents Bush and Obama that led to the powerful rise of al-Zarqawi.
Freed from prison in 1999, the radicalized Zarqawi aimed to create an Islamist caliphate throughout the Middle East; his terror attacks included suicide bombings and beheadings. A 2006 airstrike killed Zarqawi, but his organization lives on: when the Syrian civil war began in 2011, Zarqawi’s followers stepped in, raising the black flags of ISIS. Most interesting to me was Al-Quaeda’s initial rebuff of Zarqawi, whose leaders considered him a thug. A must read.
And finally, fact-based fiction: Jonathan Lee’s High Dive, which imagines three people forever changed by the 1984 bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England. The target was then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; the long-delay-timer bomb was the master work of the Irish Republican Army, then fighting for independence from England.
Lee’s magnificent story unfolds the lives of IRA bomb expert Dan, hotel manager Moose, and teenage daughter Freya. We come to know the hotel’s every day workings, the life and times of Moose (a champion diver), his motherless daughter and her teen friends, Dan’s IRA initiation and fraught home life in Belfast.
At times I thought this book too long, but now that I’ve finished I wouldn’t know where to cut. I savored this read.
Happy summer, happy reading.