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Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus

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Garmus’s enormously popular book was this month’s choice for two of my book clubs. In early 1960s U.S., Elizabeth Zott is the host of a hit cooking show, but it’s not just any cooking show and she’s not just any woman. She’s actually a research chemist, though her scientific career has been stymied in ways that you can imagine a woman trying to succeed in a scientific field at that time would encounter. Or today, for that matter.

Having lost her job at the research institute, she takes the television job in order to support herself and her daughter. She approaches cooking as chemistry, e.g., “combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride,” an approach her female audience loves. They start studying chemistry textbooks and begin to find their voices.

If this sounds like a fairy tale, well, that’s what it is. Enjoyable: hilarious in parts, horrible and sad in others. It’s a fast read. And unrealistic, of course.

The idea of chemistry and cooking as a path to empowerment for women has its merits. Many women of the time were undereducated, including my mother who was denied her dream of going to college like her brother because her parents didn’t see any point to it.

However, women should think twice about emulating Zott’s path to success. Stubbornly sticking to your guns, telling misogynistic men who have power over you just what you think about them don’t always work in real life. You can’t count on rousting the misogynists by standing your ground. Force of will is not enough.

And don’t hope to become a champion rower on your first attempt by studying physics.

The many anachronisms contribute to the unreality of the tale. As one of my book club friends noted, Zott is like a modern-day woman transplanted into the repressive, pre-second-wave-feminism period. Plus there were several factual anachronisms, such as talking about defunding the police.

Another factor in the fairy tale atmosphere are all the coincidences. People keep turning up and returning and just happening to be right there when needed for the plot. Zott just happens to be gorgeous but doesn’t care or even notice that she is. She just happens to meet the perfect partner for her who—surprise—adores her back AND is a famous chemist. She has no degrees but is one of the most brilliant chemists in the world just from self-study. I could go on.

I wanted to like this book more. I did like it, once I accepted that it was a fantasy, despite some gruesome scenes. However, as a woman who worked in a male-dominated STEM field through the last quarter of the 20th century and well into the 21st, I had hoped for a more realistic picture of how to deal with the problems involved. Just snapping your fingers and having the magic happen isn’t really useful.

However, the misogyny itself is not a fairy tale, so I hope this story helps young people see how things were back then, and in some ways still are today, whether they want to believe it or not. I hope, too, that this story acts as a corrective to the rosy, nostalgic picture of the 1950s and 1960s being pushed by the radical right.

If nothing else, I hope it encourages young women to go into STEM fields. Yes, there’s still prejudice against women, but it’s also easy to demonstrate real, irrefutable competence.

If you’ve read this novel, what did you think about it?

Living Diversity: Poems, by Lynn Martin

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Reading this chapbook is like opening a collection of letters from a friend. (Full disclosure: The author is actually a friend of mine.) They are full of the kind of sharing I most look forward to: Here are my experiences and my subsequent insights; how about you?

In one poem we get memories of childhood, the sounds of skipping rope and rhyming chants summoning the flavor of those days. Then comes the twist of the adult looking back, which aligns with our own shift in perspective from nostalgia to knowledge.

We learn about the author’s assembled family: a combination of adopted and birth children, all beloved. Within this family, a braid of Filipino, African, and Caucasian ancestries, love reigns. More children, in their diversity, touch on the author’s life: climbing a tree, riding a bicycle in wide, persistent circles. Her poems find what they have in common.

She brings a listening ear and open heart to every encounter, such as the one where she is giving away condoms to a group to help stem the surge of AIDS and instead gives us their stories, their fears and illnesses.

Her fresh take on the father leaving for war in 1941, and the resulting loss of home and friends for the second-grader left behind, brings alive the sense of exile from your own life that so many children and adults felt during the COVID pandemic. Yet there’s humor too: She titles the poem “Even Napoleon had a place to go.”

In persona poems, Martin inhabits various young characters, effectively bringing their voices into print. And in some she captures their music, as in “Babydyke Rapper” which begins “Jeans halfway down my ass / T-shirt belly button short.”

This is a fun and heartfelt collection that will set you thinking and perhaps listening more carefully. That’s how it was for you? It was much the same for me.

Are you reading poetry these days? What are some poems that have touched you?

The Midcoast, by Adam White

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This debut novel takes place in Damariscotta, a small town on the coast of Maine. Andrew grew up there and has recently returned to teach at the high school. As the story opens, he and his family come to a reception for the Amherst women’s lacrosse team at the home of Ed and Steph Thatch.

As a teenager Andrew had worked for Ed at the Lobster Pound and is surprised by the lobsterman’s rise in the world, wealthy enough now to own this huge estate and to send his daughter to Amherst. Andrew had briefly met Steph as a teen and is equally surprised to find her practically running the town.

During the party, Andrew wanders through the Thatches’ house and notices some photos of a burned car with two bodies in it. An hour later, state police cruisers arrive. The rest of the story becomes Andrew’s attempt to learn how Ed and Steph got to this point, exploring his own memories, researching archives, and interviewing people involved.

Opening a story with the last scene is a technique that’s fine for an episode of a television drama. In a novel, though, I believe there are subtler and more interesting ways to create suspense. Still, there is much to like in this book.

Although the story moves around in time—delving into Andrew’s past and what he can reconstruct of Ed and Steph’s, skipping forward into the present where Andrew is considering writing a book about the couple—I had no trouble following it. The author does a good job with creating logical transitions and grounding each new scene in time and place.

Ed and Steph’s progress from blue-collar to the most powerful couple in town, from trailer to mansion, has larger resonances, something I always appreciate in a story. Ambition and the corruption that often accompanies it fill today’s headlines. Their story also reflects the changes Steph brings to the town to turn it into a tourist destination, creating what some natives find a false image.

The author actually grew up in Damariscotta, now living in Boston with his wife and son, so he is able to bring a wonderful level of detail to his depiction of the town and its people. I wonder, though, how the people who live there feel about the book, especially those who are portrayed as corrupt or sycophantic.

The story of a wealthy man with a possibly shady past narrated by a neighbor, naturally brings to mind The Great Gatsby. That’s setting a high bar for yourself as a writer! For me, Ed and Steph don’t measure up to Gatsby and Daisy. The Thatches seem like ordinary people, so I didn’t quite buy their epic devotion to each other, Ed’s seeming invulnerability, or Andrew’s obsession with them. More character development would have helped.

Still, the story kept me interested through to the end. Living now in a small New England town myself, I was especially intrigued by the workings of Damariscotta, such as the power mechanisms, the class conflicts, and the peculiar attitude toward those who return after leaving.

With elements of mystery and thriller, this book is solidly in the general fiction category. It’s an enjoyable first novel, and I look forward to seeing the author’s next book.

What novel have you read set in Maine?

A Charmed Circle, by Anna Kavan

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I’ve long been a fan of Kavan’s work, ever since a copy of her second novel leapt off the shelves and into my hands due to its title: Let Me Alone.

At last! I thought. Someone who speaks my language.

This, her first novel, published in 1929, is the story of an English family whose life has become so enclosed as to become toxic. A modern town, loud with trams and lorries and motorcycles, has grown up around their walled home, an old vicarage. What is a refuge for the parents—Dr. Deane who has ceased to practice and spends his days among his books and autocratic Mrs. Deane whose only friends are two elderly sisters who live outside of town—has become a prison for the three children, who are now young adults.

At the beginning of the story, Ronald, the spoiled, feckless son, has gone off to London to work and is much envied by the lively, independent Beryl, while her older sister Olive has become a melancholy mouse. Beryl no sooner decides to ask her brother to help her escape to London than she finds he’s returning home, bored with having to earn a living.

At the same time, two young men enter the family’s closed sphere: a sculptor whom Ronald met in London comes for a weekend and the nephew of the two elderly sisters who has come to the area to take up farming. Between them, they offer opportunities for the sisters and raise the stakes for any potential escape.

It is the language in this psychological novel that intrigues me: precise, cool, and brusque. Kavan’s Spartan prose style contrasts with the stuffy, ornate atmosphere of the vicarage, thus increasing the tension around the family. It also sets the reader up for the different sort of life Beryl might discover in London.

Slipping out of the grasp of a controlling parent is a theme that always interests me. The post-war period of the 1920s, like the 1960s, was a time when women were doing the same with society’s expectations for them. As they try to assert their independence, both Beryl and Olive continue to surprise throughout this story.

Their father insists that they—and the rest of the family—will always fail, saying:

There is some defect in us all, some flaw, some canker of the soul that holds us back from fruition. Life is too hard for us. We yearn and struggle and rebel, but in the end we are always vanquished because of that obscure disability. We cannot succeed because we are not free. Some inhibition, some fatal limitation, binds us, from which we can never escape.

Kavan’s prose is unusual in that it is forthright in this way. She plumbs the motives of the characters, their feelings and unspoken words and then tells us straight out. Using an omniscient point of view, she inhabits the characters in turn, giving the reader a full picture of their psychological states and the reasons for their actions.

While I usually prefer a single point of view and more subtlety in fiction, I found this story refreshing. I also felt confident that I was in good hands with this author and surprised by her skill in this first novel. In her later novels, Kavan moves from this realism to a more experimental style.

If you’re looking for something a little different, I recommend this book. Its breezy style and brief chapters make it almost fly by. And it’s hard not to care about these characters as they try to assert the freedom to be themselves.

Do you enjoy a novel more when you identify with one of the characters?

Lessons, by Ian McEwan

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The story begins in May 1986 with 37-year-old Roland Baines worrying about how the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster might harm his infant son in their London home. Sleepless, he remembers being 14, at boarding school, and the experience that changed his life.

McEwan’s latest novel gives us that life. All of it. The novel clocks in at 448 pages, which is way too long to spend in the company of someone who is not particularly interesting. I would have abandoned it early on if it hadn’t been my book club’s choice for the month.

Some in the book club found Roland boring, and most of us considered him passive, someone who drifts through life, reluctant to make a commitment. The few decisions he does make are self-destructive, twisting his future away from achievement and accomplishment into the morass of surviving on low-level dead-end jobs.

When we meet him in 1986 he still thinks of himself as—potentially—a professional poet, but is working as a tennis instructor and piano player in a lounge, while caring for his son. “How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life,” he thinks.

The story skips around in time, too much so according to some in my book club who found the narrative hard to follow. We learn that his German-born wife left him to bring up their newborn son as a single parent while she goes off to become the successful writer he aspired to be. Far from resenting her, milquetoast Roland thinks she did the right thing because her novels are so good.

My book club discussed the idea that not everyone does great things; there are ordinary people who just deal with their circumstances and go on. There have been many great novels about such people. This is not one of them. It’s too long-winded, and the main character too dull.

Roland’s passivity leads to a reluctance to commit himself: to a career, a partner, a skill. The only commitment that doesn’t waver is to his son. That is the best thing I can say about Roland. He changes the diapers, takes him to the playground, does the laundry and cooking. Not a small job, of course, but are we supposed to think him extraordinary because he does what women everywhere do to no applause?

The book is set in motion, in a sense, by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Convinced he is about to die, young Roland makes a choice that turns out to be disastrous for his future. Throughout the story, the events of his life are tied to events in the larger world. He is present for the fall of the Berlin Wall. We see how he is affected by the Suez Canal crisis, the attack on the World Trade Center, Margaret Thatcher’s reign, Brexit, and finally the Covid pandemic.

Having Roland be a microcosm of an entire generation—the privileged one that enjoyed the post-war boom and surge in educational opportunities—feels insulting. The author comes across as a chiding teacher, saying that we Boomers, like Roland, have never lived up to our potential. Well, perhaps we haven’t, but we are not all such failures.

My book club has read several of McEwan’s books. We agree that his writing is excellent, but unfortunately his characters too often are not interesting and even unpleasant. Also, as here, female characters are not developed well. From Roland’s predatory piano teacher to his narcissistic ex-wife to his Earth Mother girlfriend, they are one-note characters. Of course, in this case we are seeing them through Roland’s eyes, which perhaps says more about him.

As a writer I was most interested in how the author brilliantly integrates current events into the story. They are not tacked to add context, but function fully as part of Roland’s story. I find much to admire in McEwan’s writing and have loved some of his books. This one needed an editor.

Have you read a novel that failed to live up to its potential? Where do you think it went off course?

This Earth, This Body, by Arlene Iris Distler

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This new collection of poems embodies a way of being in this world. Bursting with generosity of spirit, Distler’s poems call us to appreciate even the smallest of joys and to have courage in dark times. (Full disclosure: The author is a friend and colleague of mine). She reminds us of “Rain . . . beating jazz on my roof” and of the “imperfect fruit” of an old apple tree near where a loved one’s ashes are scattered.

Distler does not shy away from the big questions, starting with a brilliant poem entitled “Remember dying.” Upon the untimely death of her husband, Distler must find a way to comprehend that eternal mystery.

We are not this flesh we call ourselves . . .
this seeming solid self only the sounding bell.

Yet the world’s beauty is ours
to bear, and the austere does not call.

Her poems call to all our senses and all our philosophies, urging us to grasp life and to let it go.

She explores the uses of memory. There are poems about a childhood charm bracelet, an old yearbook, and a grandmother, only now seeing that the elderly woman may have been lost in “the long ago passage/between old world and new.” In one poem Distler revisits the early home shared with her husband, “where the seeds of my children were sown/among clover and high grass.” With powerful imagery she reveals what remains:

there’s only a burnt and bruised shell
yellow jackets in the cellar hole
chimney the only thing standing.
And the sky, as usual
brooding and hallowed.

The New England landscape is here, with its stone walls, blueberries, and pond peepers. In her hands, the natural world with its splendor and cruelty yields startling insights such as this when an owl “haughty as ice” seems to speak:

. . . Remember your nest
that spot you tend with bits of wood,
tufts of straw, feathers
you pluck from your breast.

There are sacrifices we make and stands we take. We experience love and loss, and—if we’re lucky—learn to see with new eyes. This collection brings together the moments of human experience in poems that surprise us on every page.

Whose poetry are you reading these days?

Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle

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Memoirs come in many different forms. Some tell a chronological story, while others center around a theme. Some experiment with different structures. First published in 1972, this first in a series of memoirs by the author of A Wrinkle in Time and other beloved stories is more of a meditation, inviting us to explore with her, follow her thoughts, and see where they take us.

In the process, L’Engle gives us the kaleidoscope of her life at 51: spouse, parent, writer, teacher, choir director, member of communities large and small.

Many of her reflections are about writing in general, and specifically writing for children. She’s forthright about her years of rejections and how she felt about them. Invited to teach, she maintains that writing cannot be taught, but you can teach particular tools. Of course, she learns as much as she teaches, classroom discussions leading to new ideas.

She also defends children’s literature: its enduring appeal, its benefits for children and adults, and its literary quality.

L’Engle notes that “the concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline.” In those moments, we are not conscious of ourselves, not self-conscious. She goes on to say: “Detachment and involvement: The artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.”

At one point she says that “An author is responsible for his characters in much the same way that a parent is for his children, or a teacher for his students.” I think she means a moral responsibility, but it is still a concept that I’ve been turning over in my mind.

She speaks of her family’s years in New York City, and even more the years at Crosswicks, their rambling summer home in a small Connecticut town where at times four generations of her family live under one roof. There is much about community, and the peculiar interrelationship of people in such a small village, such as being suspicious of newcomers but still turning out to help them when they are in need.

Her portrait of the U.S. in the 1960s—the time period of this memoir—sometimes distracted me, sending my mind off into my own memories of those years. Hearing how someone the age of my parents viewed the happenings of that turbulent time sent me back to my own memories, turning them into new patterns.

She doesn’t shy away from the big subjects, such as faith, marriage, family, what might constitute a meaningful life. Still, it is her thoughts on writing that most resonate for me.

I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the “superconscious” has already shown me in a story or poem. Facing this does help to eradicate do-it-yourself hubris from an artist’s attitude towards his painting or music or writing. My characters pull me, push me, take me further than I want to go, fling open doors to rooms I don’t want to enter, throw me out into interstellar space, and all this long before my mind is ready for it.

The title comes from her need to retreat sometimes to her “circle of quiet,” a particular place at Crosswicks. We all need such a place, one where we can be our true selves. If you want a rest from the trauma Olympics of many memoirs on the market, try these reflections from a writer whose work you may know very well.

Do you have a “circle of quiet,” a place that is peculiarly your own?

Pattern of Lies, by Charles Todd

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Bess Crawford, a nursing sister on the frontlines in France near the end of the Great War, returns on leave to England to find a different kind of war being waged. Stuck in Canterbury when the London train is cancelled and all the hotels full, she runs into a former patient, Maj. Mark Ashton, who invites her to stay with him and his parents at their home in nearby Cranbourne.

What she finds is that the tiny village has turned against the Ashtons, particularly John’s father Philip. The Ashton Powder Mill, once the largest employer around and a place where workers were treated particularly well, had blown up two years previously, an explosion followed by a devastating fire, killing over a hundred men.

The Army investigated, fearing sabotage, but declared it an unfortunate accident. Due to the war, the need for gunpowder was overwhelming, and the mill had been commandeered by the Army. Despite Philip’s warnings, the new masters had the mill working flat out to meet the demand, with extra shifts and new workers brought in.

Now the villagers have become convinced that Philip Ashton is responsible for the disaster. Bess is shocked by the retaliatory actions they have taken: tearing down walls, releasing animals, spitting at anyone associated with the Ashtons, even setting fire to their house.

Given the suddenness of the accusation and its wide spread, Bess comes to believe that someone is behind the rumors, someone angry with Philip Ashton or the Ashton family. Unfortunately, the only witness to the fire is a local man now serving at the front in France who refuses to request leave to come back and make a statement.

There is almost nothing more terrifying to me than this kind of hysteria. We see it today with the firehose of misinformation. We have seen it before: Lillian Hellman described it chillingly in The Children’s Hour and Arthur Miller in The Crucible. It is almost impossible to defend oneself as rumors spread.

This mystery, seventh in the Bess Crawford series, though the first one I’ve read, is absorbing. There are plenty of twists and turns, and plenty of clues. Best of all, we get Bess’s impressions of England and France during wartime. Her duties vary from working at the front itself, escorting patients to hospital in the backlines in an ambulance under fire, and caring for patients as they are shipped back to England.

The latter gives her plenty of opportunity to visit the Ashtons, as she must pass through Canterbury, and pursue her own investigation while offering support to the family. The other characters are memorable due to the nuance with which they are rendered. I especially liked that the authors (Charles Todd is the pseudonym for mother and son Caroline and Charles Todd) avoids the standard romantic subplot.

The time period increased my enjoyment of this book. I’ve long been fascinated by the Great War, aka WWI, which changed everything for the Western world. Empires ended, colonies gained freedom, global power shifted, and the irresponsible slaughter not only decimated populations and economies but destroyed the ideal that it was glorious to die for your country. As Wilfred Owen put it: If you could have experienced what he did in the trenches

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Do you read historical fiction? Do you have a favorite time period?

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

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The story opens with the infamous Nellie Coker, owner of a string of nightclubs in 1926 London, being released from Holloway Prison at dawn. Many of the toffs and high-ranking politicians who revel at her clubs and who conspired with her in evading police scrutiny are present, a bit bedraggled by their long night dancing and drinking, to celebrate Nellie’s release, along with “the usual riffraff and rubberneckers.”

Nellie immediately has to buckle down and defend her empire from several threats.

Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, on loan to Bow Street to “root out corruption,” is one of those threats, though he is hampered by the distrust of his new colleagues, the distraction of a string of drownings of young girls, and his own ineffectual nature. He is unhappily married to a mentally ill woman; he’s not really sure why he married her except that he prevented her from jumping off a bridge.

With characteristic humor, Atkinson vividly depicts the London club scene of the time. The aftermath of the Great War is everywhere in this story, from wartime reminiscences of the doorman to the difference between men who had gone to war and those who had not. Even the reckless abandon of 1920s London is blamed on a reaction to the war.

The criminal elements are mostly played for laughs. This bumbling cast of villains reinforces Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil. Writers don’t come off much better. Frobisher’s articles requested by John Bull are never published because they are not sensational enough. Ramsey Coker wants to be a best-selling author, but is too lazy to actually write.

Atkinson has done her research on this period. However, this novel illustrates the danger of too much research. I found it an unsatisfying story of uninteresting characters.

It also illustrates the danger of using real people and their lives for a story. Real people the author only knows from reading about them don’t necessarily make for interesting characters. There’s too little detail, nothing that makes them stand out. Frobisher, “influenced” by real-life Superintendent Robert Fabian and Nellie Coker, based on the real “queen of Soho’s clubland” Kate Meyrick, never quite come to life in this story.

Nellie’s obnoxious brood seem like empty caricatures put in place for plot purposes. The two 14-year-old girls who run away to London are stock characters. There’s a prostitute with a heart of gold, two policemen on the take, a strict battleax running a hotel for women, and so on.

Only the third protagonist, fictional Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian who has come to London in search of the two lost girls, steps off the page, displaying real emotion and unexpected competencies. A nurse during the war, she is more than equal to London’s recklessness.

The other danger of using real lives is that they rarely fit into the kind of narrative arc readers expect. Here, plot threads are abandoned without being resolved; story questions are not answered; important events are random happenings rather than growing organically out of the characters and the plot. True, a couple of threads and questions are dispatched, but too much is left unresolved for there to be a satisfactory ending.

I had to wonder why I should care about these characters and their lives when the author seemed to care so little that she would just abruptly abandon them.

Just like real life, you might say. True. And it is somewhat interesting as an experiment. Atkinson is not alone among authors questioning whether standard story structures adequately represent our lives in this world. I appreciate her willingness to tinker with the balance between reality and story. Still, it was too insubstantial a story to satisfy me.

Have you read an historical novel that includes real people as characters? What did you think of it?

A Spy Among Friends, by Ben Macintyre

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I thought I knew a lot about Kim Philby, the infamous Third Man of Cold War-era Britain. In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two of Philby’s friends from university, were exposed as Russian spies, but were tipped off in time to escape to the USSR. At the time, and for years afterward, there were rumors of a third spy, a mole in England’s security service.

Macintyre’s astonishing account of Philby’s life, how he operated as a spy, and especially how he continued to escape detection until 1963, shows me how much more there is to the story. With penetrating insight, voluminous research, and access to newly opened files, Macintyre has fashioned an absorbing nonfictional narrative that helps us understand the man himself and the milieu in which he operated.

The title refers to E. M. Forster’s famous statement: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Forster spoke for a certain segment of English society. A generation later, it is the key to Philby’s choices: He gave his first loyalty to his true friends, the four schoolmates who, together with him, became known as the Cambridge spies.

Many people believed themselves to be Philby’s friends; however, extracts from his writings show what he really thought of them, even as he pretended to value them. Philby beguiled everyone he met.

The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was ‘charm,’ that intoxicating, beguiling, and occasionally lethal English quality. Philby could inspire and convey affection with such ease that few ever noticed they were being charmed. Male and female, old and young, rich and poor, Kim enveloped them all. He looked out at the world with alert, gentle blue eyes from under an unruly forelock. His manners were exceptional: he was always the first to offer you a drink, to ask after your sick mother and remember your children’s names. He loved to laugh, and he loved to drink – and to listen, with deep sincerity and rapt curiosity.

He was “the right sort,” a member of the tribe of Eton-educated, cricket-loving Englishmen who populated MI6—and other institutions—in class-conscious England. For such a person there was no need to inquire into their references, their past, or even their competence.

Part of what makes this book so fascinating is Macintyre’s portrayal of the competing cultures in the nascent security organisations of the time: MI6’s old-boy bonhomie, MI5’s mistrust of their rival’s upper-class blindness, the newly-formed CIA’s respect for their predecessor.

No one was more taken in than Nicholas Elliot, also of MI6. Over the thirty years that the two men worked and socialised together, Elliot never suspected that everything he shared with Philby went straight to the KGB. When the evidence finally mounted to a point in 1963 where MI6 could no longer deny the truth, they sent Elliot to debrief the man he had considered his best friend.

Using the transcript of that conversation, Macintyre fashions a stunning conclusion to this book, decoding the seemingly innocuous dialogue. A lengthy afterword by John le Carré includes his own memories of Elliot and the other players.

Subtitled Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, this is a story that shows the human impact of these political intrigues. James Angleton, head of counter-intelligence for the CIA, also counted Philby as a friend. Macintyre’s description of the effect of Philby’s betrayal on Angleton stands in contrast to the Great Game, the name for the 19th century rivalry between Britain and Russia. Coincidentally, the term was popularised by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, also the source of Harold Adrian Russell Philby’s nickname.

By immersing us in the moves and countermoves of individuals during the Cold War, Macintyre helps us see how it can come to seem like a game, and how it can become an addiction for men like Philby, Elliot, and Angleton. Then he shows us how the game plays out. Brilliant.

What nonfiction books have you read that are as absorbing as a novel?