On all fronts: the education of a journalist, by Clarissa Ward

I really enjoyed this memoir by journalist Clarissa Ward, currently the chief international correspondent for CNN. She studied comparative literature at Yale University, but was inspired to become a journalist after 9/11. Her first experience in journalism was an unpaid internship with CNN's Moscow office. Following graduation, she was hired by Fox News, then did later stints as a freelancer, and worked for CBS and 60 Minutes. Ward has worked in and reported from many dangerous situations in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Beirut, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Yemen, China, and other places. While I've seen many of her reports on TV, reading about the behind-the-scenes action that allowed her to get close to the action is fascinating. She has had many close calls, including times in which she is in the midst of shelling or has crossed a border illegally. The book closes as she becomes a mother for the first time, and it's clear that being a mother has given her a new perspective on the impact of violence on children and families across the globe.
 

107 days, by Kamala Harris

This is a thoughtful and intimate look at the short presidential run of Kamala Harris in 2024. The chapters are numbered by how many days are left to the election, so it serves as a countdown to the end of the contest. I really enjoyed reading about Kamala's experience and perspective during the run, although it was exhausting just reading about the frenetic activity involved in her presidential contest, including the travel, speaking engagements, policy discussions, and interviews, all while still serving as vice president. I am sympathetic to her perceived slights by the Biden team; she was in a difficult position and they didn't always make it easier. She never really had a chance to sell her vision to the American people, and I believe Joe should never have tried to run for a second term, in spite of everything that he accomplished during his first. This book is well written and has short, snappy chapters that keeps the narrative moving. As an inside look at a presidential run, it works to unveil the mechanisms that keep a campaign moving forward without going into the level of detail that would make it tedious. It's clear that Kamala would have been an exceptional leader, and it's all to0 tragic in comparison with our current president. 
 

Tabula rasa, by Ruth Downie

I really enjoyed this sixth book in Ruth Downie's Medicus series about a doctor in the Roman army in the 2nd century. In this book Gaius and his British wife Tilla are working with a unit that is building Hadrian's wall in the north. Tilla has found some long-lost family members and they plan to hold a wedding ceremony for Gaius and Tilla who got married when they were away in Gaul. But the plans are derailed when Gaius' secretary goes missing, and rumors about a body being hidden in the wall's construction site lead to the kidnapping of a young boy. Gaius and Tilla must both work their connections to try to find out what happened to the secretary, Candidus (who happens to be Gaius' former secretary's nephew), and Branan, the young boy who has been kidnapped and sold into slavery. I like the way this series paints a picture of what life might have been like in Britain under Roman occupation, including details about food, clothing, furniture, medicine, and much more. 
 

Murder in Mesopotamia, by Agatha Christie

The narrator of Murder in Mesopotamia is Nurse Amy Leatherman who has traveled to Mesopotamia to accompany a patient, planning to travel home after she's no longer needed. However, she's asked to assist with the wife of an archaeologist who is excavating a site nearby. The new patient, Louise Leidner, has reported a series of unnerving incidents that have been uncorroborated, leading some of the others in the archaeological team to doubt her truthfulness or mental health. When she turns up murdered, the authorities ask for help from Hercule Poirot who has been traveling nearby, and he works with Nurse Leatherman to find the guilty party. This was a fun mystery narrated by an amusing and perceptive character (her asides about Poirot himself are especially funny).

One thing I noticed in this book, consistent with the previous few Christie books, is the lack of antisemitism, which I had noticed in a number of the early books. One or two had also used slurs against Native Americans, e.g., referring to violent gang members in France as Apache killers. In this book I only noticed one such slur, and it was against Italians. I wonder if given the political climate of Europe in the mid-30s that she found herself unable to have her characters express bigotry against Jews, but found it socially permissible to show bigotry against Italians?

One other funny thing: I don't remember a plane in the book at all; I believe trains and cars were primarily used to get around. So why does the cover have a plane on it?
 

Her hidden genius, by Marie Benedict

This is a very good fictionalized examination of Rosalind Franklin's career as a scientist in 1940s and 1950s England and France. She came from a wealthy family and didn't need to work, but she loved science and chose her work as a scientist over the objections of her parents and other family members. Franklin worked for a period in France, then moved back to London to take a position at Kings College researching the structure of DNA. After nearly two years of dedicated research, her work was stolen and used as the basis for Francis Crick's and James Watson's articles declaring the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they later won the Nobel Prize. Rosalind Franklin's contributions to this discovery were not recognized until after Jame Watson published his memoir in which he denigrated both her work and character, and Franklin's friends made an effort to correct the record. It is now widely acknowledged that it was her work that provided the evidence needed to identify the structure of DNA as a double helix, and this book provides an entertaining albeit infuriating fictionalized history of how all of that came to pass. It took me a while to get into the book, but once going it was hard to put down.
 

Real tigers, by Mick Herron

This is the third novel in the Slow Horses series by Mick Herron. It continues the story of a bunch of exiled MI5 officers who are assigned to Slough House in the expectation that given dull and repetitive work, they will resign and save the service the effort of firing them. Some of them were exiled for costly mistakes they made on the job, one was exiled after someone deliberately sabotaged a training exercise he was leading, and another for simply being disliked. As in the first two books, they're drawn into a major operation when one of their own is kidnapped in order to coerce another agent to steal classified information. When he's caught, it quickly becomes clear that this was only the start of a much larger operation and all of the "slow horses" must work together to figure out who's behind the kidnapping and what's really going on. These books have fast-paced action and snappy dialogue. There's a lot of humor but also intrigue and suspense.