I have to admit it – in spite of the poor reviews of this book, I had to have it. I pre-ordered it and received it on my Kindle the day it was released. Then I read it cover-to-cover in just a few days.

Janet Maslin of the New York Times writes:

Although most of “The Rogue” is dated, petty and easily available to anyone with Internet access, Mr. McGinniss used his time in Alaska to chase caustic, unsubstantiated gossip about the Palins, often from unnamed sources like “one resident” and “a friend.”

Nick Gillespie, writing for the Washington Post says:

Despite his intensely close proximity to his subject — McGinniss famously rented the house adjacent to the Palin home while researching his book — he consistently fails to sift through competing versions of the same story for something approximating truth.

David L. Ulin, book critic for the LA Times, writes:

I have no doubt that McGinniss’ view of Palin is accurate: that she is narcissistic, undisciplined and unqualified for public life. Still, I want more than innuendo to make the point.

“Sarah Palin practices politics as lap dance,” he writes, “and we’re the suckers who pay the price.” True enough, perhaps, but like too much of “The Rogue,” this is its own sort of come-on: titillating her detractors while allowing her supporters to disregard everything McGinniss has to say.

So why read this book, when the flaws have been so throroughly covered by some of the most respected reviewers in the country? Perhaps because I live in a politically conservative area, where many people I know have great admiration for Palin, and I was looking for some ammo.

Perhaps because the moment I saw her take the stage at the Republican Convention and call herself a “hockey mom,” I sensed there was something “off” about her, but couldn’t put my finger on it.

I think the reason this book so fascinated me is that, in spite of all the well-merited criticism it has received, someone had to tell a comprehensive version of this side of the Palin story. Making no attempt to be anything but biased against Palin, McGinniss – to me, a credible and talented reported – has exposed the ugly underbelly of a national phenomenon in a logical and sequential manner.

I’m not concerned by the dearth of sources who allowed themselved to be named – there are plenty who do. I’m not concerned by McGinniss’s lack of objectitivity. There are plenty of people who swallow the Palin myth hook, line, and sinker. I’m not even sure that Palin’s story is important any longer, in and of itself, as she seems to be diminishing in importance on the national scene.

What I would really love to see come from this book is a renewed awareness that we all need to be better informed and more saavy consumers of political branding and advertising. We need to look behind the rhetoric and learn who the people are that seek the privilege of leading this country. What McGinniss has done – much as he did in his groundbreaking  book, The Selling of the President – is expose the manipulation involved in the process. It’s up to us to do our homework. As Alexis de Tocqueville so famously said, people get the government they deserve. . . and we deserve better than what is currently being offered.

Grade: C

First published in 1955 and recently re-released by the New York Book Review, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne has been identified by UK’s The Guardian as “one of the 1,000 books you should read in your lifetime.” 

Judith Hearne is a character who, superficially, seems to be an anachronism – a thing of the past. She’s a virginal spinster, well into her 40s, who lives on a small trust from her deceased aunt in Belfast, Ireland. She resides in a boarding house, where she rents a single room. Her only personal adornments in the room are a silver-framed picture of the dead aunt and a “colored oleograph of the Sacred Heart. His place was at the head of the bed, His fingers raised in benediction, His eyes kindly yet accusing.”

I say that she appears to be an anachronism because it might be hard to find a single woman like her today. Today she would probably be employed, certainly not virginal, not likely to keep the Sacred Heart at the head of her bed. But before we write her off, I think you’ll find if you examine her more closely you’ll see that the isolation, the loneliness, the desparation that Ms. Hearne’s experience is not really a thing of the past.

Judith Hearne yearns for only one thing - a human connection, someone who cares about her. The other boarders are indiffierent, the dead aunt was her only living relative, the landlady thoroughly loathesome. At one time Miss Hearne worked part-time at a trade school teaching embroidery. She has a small handful of piano students. Both occupations seem to be dwindling out of her life for reasons that become apparent late in the story, so she seems to have no real purpose.

The only people with whom she has regular social contact is the O’Neill family, the family of a childhood friend, who she visits on Sunday afternoons. This is “the big event of the week”. We learn that she dresses carefully for these visits, rehearses stories that she hopes will interest them, considers the four O’Neill children to be “her nieces and nephews.” Sadly, the O’Neills do not anticipate her visits as enthusiastically. Son Shaun O’Neill sums it up for the family when he announces, just before Miss Hearne’s visit, ” Five minutes, or maybe ten. Let’s say ten minutes at most before the advent of the Great Bore.” Although his mother chastises him, he is saying what they all are thinking.

Into this bleak life appears a man – Mr. James Madden, the brother of the boarding house landlady. Mr. Madden is recently returned to Ireland from America, where he was in “the hotel business” in New York City. Mr. Madden befriends Miss Hearne, and she begins to weave intricate fantasies about him. She imagines them married and returned to America:

He came into the room, late at night, tired after a day at work in his hotel. He took off his jacket and hung it up. He put on his dressing-gown and sat down in his armchair and she went to him prettily, sat on his knee while he told her how things had gone that day. And he kissed her. Or, enraged about some silly thing she had done, he struck out with his great fist and sent her reeling, the brute. But, contrite afterwards, he sank to his knees and begged forgiveness.

Even in her fantasies, Judith Hearne cannot imagine a life in which she’s being treated with affection and respect.

Mr. Madden has his own reasons for encouraging Miss Hearne’s affection, but we soon see him for the brute that Judith Hearne obviously subliminally sensed . Although we know that she’s better off without him, the collapse of their “friendship” is the last straw for her.

Things don’t turn out well in this brutal, heartbreaking story. It would be comforting to think that the world today is a kinder place for the Judith Hearnes among us, and maybe it is. Maybe more doors are open to an unattractive, middle-aged woman, maybe she would have more resources to help her fashion a life that didn’t require dependence even on those who despise her. Those of us with friends, loved ones, interesting work, nice homes should take a moment to be grateful for all we have. I can’t help but suspect that the world is still populted by Judith Hearnes who would trade places with us in a heartbeat.

Grade: A

Last year we all watched the dramatic rescue of the Chilean miners with bated breath, hoping against almost insurmountable odds that the 33 men trapped half a  mile underground could be saved. When they emerged from that mine, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. Now Jonathan Franklin has written a detailed and gripping story of their experience and the efforts it took to rescue them.

For anyone who may have been in a coma in August through October of 2010, a group of 33 copper miners worked at the bottom of the poorly maintained but highly profitable San Jose mine outside of Copiopó, Chile, when the mine caved-in. For 17 days these men, known as “Los 33,” were completely shut off from any contact with the world. With extremely meager food supplies, little potable water, and the dread of losing the battery power on their headlamps, these men forged a bond that helped them survive 69 days underground. Franklin, who covered the story for The Washington Post and UK’s The Guardian, has helped us all understand how they were able to do this.

To get the details of the mine, its history, the technology involved in rescuing the miners, and even some of the photos shot inside the mine during the entrapment, you can read a good summary, along with diagrams, charts, etc., at Wikipedia.com. To get the inside story of how the miners coped, how the rescuers battled the unforeseen obstacles that they faced, and how the families of the miners attempted to support their loved ones, read 33 Men.

This book read like one of the greatest suspense stories I’ve ever encountered. Even though I knew the final outcome, I could hardly pull myself away from it, so caught up in the tension that I often forgot I knew they would all get out alive. A few of the highlights:

• How they survived the first 17 days of fear and uncertainty;
• How they came together as a group, both functionally and spiritually;
• The emotional moment when they realized that they had been located and might be saved;
• How knowledge of the rescue attempt changed the group dynamics, not always for the better;
• The trials and triumphs of the human spirit – for the miners, the rescuers, the families, and the world.

Read this book. You’ll be enlightened, entertained, and inspired.

Grade: A

The finalists for this year’s Man Booker Prize were announced last week. They are:

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape – Random House)
Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side (Faber)
Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books)
Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail)
Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child (Picador – Pan Macmillan)
Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)
Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)
Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus – Random House)

The shortlist of six authors will be announced on Sept. 6, and the winner announced October 18.

So far I’ve only read The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, which I loved. You can read my review at http://2manybooks2littletime.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/the-sisters-brothers-by-patrick-dewitt-had-me-at-hello/

Have you read any of the rest of these? What did you think?

For me, the unreliable narrator always makes for a fascinating read. Make the unreliable narrator the prime suspect of a murder mystery and the plot, as they say, thickens. Take the murder mystery and add intelligent and well-informed writing, making it that most elusive genre – a literary thriller – and you have a real winner. Alice LaPlante’s debut novel, Turn of Mind, is all of the above.

The narrator of this spellbinding story is Dr. Jennifer White, a renowned orthopedic surgeon who specializes in hand surgery. What makes her unreliable is the fact that at age 65, she is in an  advancing stage of Alzheimer’s Disease. What makes her a prime suspect is that the murder victim, Jennifer’s best friend Amanda, was found with four fingers of her right hand surgically amputated.

We are brought into Jennifer’s world, a world that continually shape-shifts, as she tells us this:

Something has happened. You can always tell. You come to and find wreckage: a smashed lamp, a devastated human face that shivers on the verge of being recognizable. Occasionally someone in uniform: a paramedic, a nurse. A hand extended with a pill. Or poised to insert a needle.

The story unfolds mainly through conversations between Jennifer and other characters: her grown children, her caregiver, the detective investigating the crime to name a few. Some of these people are alive. Others are dead, such as her parents, husband, Amanda.

At other times we share Jennifer’s observations of her surroundings, such as the opening paragraph quoted above. These become less and less trustworthy as her disease advances, her ability to understand and interpret her environment deteriorating through the course of the book.

It is through this sometimes distorted view of Jennifer’s life that we learn of the complex relationship she and Amanda shared, one of love but also something darker. It becomes obvious that while Jennifer admires Amanda’s strength, her strong will, her intelligent companionship, there are good reasons not to trust her completely. We have to wonder – and we do – whether a mind that often misinterprets reality can find enough reason for a dedicated and devoted friend and doctor to commit the unthinkable.

What remains intact for Jennifer is her intelligence, her wry humor, her remarkable medical memory. In a  highly dramatic scene between the detective and Jennifer’s daughter, Fiona, Jennifer observes Fiona wringing her hands. Her explanation is this:

Wringing her hands. A rough motion, this grasping and twisting of the metacarpal phalangeal joints, as if trying to extract the ligaments and tendons from under the skin.

We find that throughout her adult life Jennifer has often escaped from hard realities by medically intellectualizing those things that she cannot face.

The mystery itself – who killed Amanda and why – makes this a real page turner. I devoured the book in a day, unable to put it down. But it is LaPlante’s feel for her narrator, her ability to make us love and cheer for the suffering Dr. White, that gives this book its heart.

I really cannot recommend it highly enough.

Grade: A

This novel tells the story of a priest who gets caught in the child molestation accusations in the Catholic church  throughout the past decade. This was almost enough to cause me to pass it over; I don’t enjoy stories in which children are injured or endangered.

However, I happened to read Greg’s review at The New Dork Review of Books and decided to give it a try. I would recommend that you take a look at his review if you’re interested in this book, which is much more complete than mine will be.

While I can’t say that I share all of his enthusiasm for Faith, I agree that the book is an interesting and thought-provoking read, one that deals sensitively with a difficult issue. It is also a good story, one in which I was completely engaged from beginning to end.

My problem with the book is with the author’s decision to tell the story from the point of view of the accused priest’s sister, a device that didn’t work well for me. I’ve tried to understand why this particular narrator was chosen. Sheila, the sister, goes back after the accusation is resolved and reconstructs the events by talking with the people involved. For me, this convoluted way of telling the story got in the way and was a distraction. The narrator had to keep explaining when and how she received the information. Frankly, I simply couldn’t believe that the principal characters in the story would have divulged so much information to the priest, Art’s, sister. She is not portrayed as a particularly warm or empathic person, one to engender such confidences from virtual strangers.  

I think an omniscient narrator – or possibly the use of multiple narrators, which has become popular lately – could have told the story in a more straightforward and believeable manner. It would have improved the story significantly for me.

Having said that, I wouldn’t let this prevent anyone from reading the book – just be prepared to suspend a bit of your own disbelief as you read.

Grade: B

I have to begin with a disclaimer: I am a sucker for books about China. From The Good Earth to Wild Swans and many, many more, the country, its people, and its history just fascinate me. So it’s very possible that I’m going to give Dreams of Joy a better review than it actually deserves, but I’ll strive for objectivity.

This book is a sequel to Lisa See’s earlier Shanghai Girls. Unlike Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love, these books deal with 20th Century Chinese culture, both in China and in Los Angeles. See makes enough references to Shanghai Girls that you can follow Dreams of Joy without having read it, but it will make more sense if you have.

Dreams of Joy begins in the late 1950′s, the early days of Ma0′s regime. Joy is a young woman living in LA’s Chinatown. Her mother escaped from China prior to World War II and has slowly begun the process of enculturation. The family relationships are complicated – her “mother” is really her aunt, her “aunt” is her real mother, her stepfather/stepuncle has just committed suicide – you’ll have to wade your way through this part yourself. 

Joy heads off to the University of Chicago, where she is introduced to the teachings of Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book. It is the early days of China’s Cultural Revolution, prior to The Great Leap Forward. It’s easy for a young girl to be seduced by passionate political rhetoric.

Following an argument with her parents, Joy decides to run away to China and join the revolution. Frankly, this is one aspect of this book that I just couldn’t buy, but Joy had to get to China somehow, and this was the device that got her there.

Once in China, Joy meets up with her real father and accompanies him to a rural village outside of Hangzhou. Her mother follows her to China and on to the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Collective, where Joy has met and fallen in love with a Chinese peasant, Tao. They marry, and it is only then that Joy begins to understand the enormity of her error in coming to China.

By this time, Mao’s Great Leap Forward has begun, the agricultural disaster that led to the Great Famine in the 1960s. Joy and her family are caught up in this historical series of events that comprise the most interesting part of this somewhat melodramatic novel.

See has done tremendous research, and her depiction of the lives of people on the communes is detailed and descriptive. If it appears that she has soft-petaled some of the abuses of the Cultural Revolution, it’s because she has. However, I don’t think her objective was to recount the full sweep of the devastation it brought to the Chinese people, but to focus on a smaller scale: that of a single small collective. She’s done this successfully.

There are many implausible plot twists that you simply have to accept. If you are able to do this, you should find this book interesting and informative if not exactly believable. As Janet Maslin, writing for The New York Times, points out:

Dwarfed by matters of such historical magnitude, Joy seems less and less consequential as “Dreams of Joy” moves toward its ending. And the reader is dragged through the last stages of the plot, the ones that force Joy to come to her senses. “I thought I could use idealism to solve my inner conflicts,” she ultimately realizes, “but in healing my inner conflicts I destroyed my idealism.” “Dreams of Joy” takes a very slow boat to China to arrive at this destination.

Grade: B

Anne Brontë was the youngest and least known of the famous Brontë sisters. She completed only two novels in her lifetime, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

When I wrote my review of Agnes Grey, the critical reviews that I read all pointed to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as her better work. Furthermore, many of those reviews indicated that, had she lived longer, Anne would have been the most successful of the three sisters. This piqued my interest. As I had been underwhelmed with Agnes Grey, I decided to give Anne Brontë another opportunity to impress me.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (TWF) is framed as a letter that protagonist Gilbert Markham writes to his brother-in-law. He tells of the arrival of a new resident in their village, Linden-Car, a beautiful widow named Helen Graham. Helen and her young son have moved into Wildfell Hall, an Edwardian mansion that has stood deserted for many years. Over time Gilbert falls in love with her, but Helen becomes the victim of gossip and slander among the other villagers.

Helen leaves Linden-Car to escape the gossip, but not before giving her diary to Gilbert as a means of explaining her mysterious past and her behavior. The diary tells the tale of Helen as a young woman who is swept up in romantic love and marries Arthur Huntingdon, an alcoholic who becomes an abusive husband. In order to save her son from following in his father’s footsteps, Helen takes the desperate step of running away from Huntingdon and living in hiding under a false name in Linden-Car.

Eventually Helen returns to her husband, who is gravely ill, and nurses him until his death. After several missteps, Gilbert locates her, they reunite, and live happily ever after. This is, after all, a Brontë novel.

This novel is long-winded, preachy, and often tedious to read. Having said that, I found that I began to care about these people and wanted to know how it was all resolved, so I read somewhat eagerly to the end. The preachiness comes, in part, from the Brontës’ own experience with their brother, Branwell, who served as the model for Arthur Huntingdon. In her preface to the second edition of TWF, Anne Brontë writes:

I know that such characters do exist, and if I have warned one rash youth from following in their steps, or prevented one thoughtless girl from falling into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain.

TWF challenged Victorian morals on several levels, and is considered one of the first feminist novels. Helen’s behavior went against the tide of acceptable practice in many ways, but especially in one scene where she slams the bedroom door in her husband’s face following his abusive behavior. One critic at the time pronounced it “utterly unfit to be put into the hands of girls.”

I can’t say that I came to agree with the conclusion that Anne had the potential to be the best or most successful of the Brontë sisters, but I would recommend this book for both its (admittedly limited) literary qualities and its historical value.

Grade: B-

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2011!

We all know the expression, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but in the case of Patrick DeWitt’s new novel, The Sisters Brothers, the cover was what caught my eye. The primative style, the bold red, black and white, the way the cartoon heads of the gunslingers, superimposed upon the full moon, look like a skull – I was intrigued.

And what’s more, I wasn’t disappointed. This book was exactly what the cover promised: mayhem, bloodshed, with a large dash of whimsy and humor.

This is the story of two brothers, Charlie and Eli Sisters, guns-for-hire at the start of the California gold rush. A shady character called The Commodore sends them from Oregon City to The American River in California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warms. The purpose isn’t immediately clear, but the structure of this novel is that of a classic quest journey. The brothers will experience many adventures and undergo significant change as a result of this journey. You, the reader, will enjoy the trip a lot more than they do!

Of the brothers, Charlie (the older brother) is the darker and more violent man. Younger brother, Eli, has a softer heart but is ultimately loyal to his brother. Eli is our narrator throughout the story, which allows us an innocent’s rationalized view of some pretty irrational behavior.

Charlie is appointed the leader of this expedition; sibling history and rivalries punctuate the narrative throughout. In the opening chapter, the brothers were forced to get new horses when their previous horses “had been immolated”. It is typical of Eli to give us this type of detail without further elaboration or emotion.

There is some tension about these horses, which the brothers acquired as partial payment for a job. The problem was the inequity between the two animals – one named “Nimble,” the other “Tub”. The names tell us everything we need to know about the two horses. Charlie, as older brothers will do, commandeerd Nimble and assigned Tub to Eli while Eli recovered from a leg wound. Eli describes Tub as “portly and low-backed and could not travel more than fifty miles a day.”

In order to deal with this horse, Eli tells us:

I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do; and afterward he, Tub, believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.

When Eli continues to complain about Tub, the following conversation takes place:

Charlie, “I’m done talking about your horse, Eli.”

“If you think it will not come up again, you are mistaken.”

“Then I’m done talking about your horse today.”

These exchanges, the way that a lifetime of familiarity shapes interactions between brothers, is one of the charms of this book. The other charm is watching Eli begin to question the life they lead and what impact it has on them.

In one scene, they come across a young boy who has been abandoned in the wilderness by his father. He wants the Sisters to allow him to travel with them, but they refuse. Eli, however, is disturbed and considers

I wished the boy safe travels, but these were empty words, for he was clearly doomed…He stood there weeping and watching us go, while behind him [the boy's horse] entered and collapsed the prospector’s tent, and I thought, Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.

When the brothers finally locate the object of their assignment, Hermann Kermit Warm, we realize that the journey has made subtle changes in both of them. The events that transpire at the climax of the book show us just how markedly they’ve changed. They return to Oregon City very different men than they were when they left.

There is plenty of bloodshed and many grisly scenes, but the warmth and humor in Eli’s narration distances us from it. Not long ago I reviewed another saga of the Old West, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It’s an interesting comparison to see how the desperate events in both of these books lead to such opposite conclusions: complete corruption of the human soul in one, salvation in the other.

I thoroughly enjoyed every page of The Sisters Brothers. It has everything you might want in a summer read: adventure, humor, great characters, and a satisfying ending. I recommend you get yourself a copy real soon!

Grade: A

I must confess that I thought this book had two strikes against it before I began to read it:

1. 1. It was yet another story of the Holocaust, and
2. 2. It was written by Erik Larson who, in my opinion, sometimes ruins a good story by overly pedantic attention to detail.

So why, you might ask, did I even give it a try? Mainly because I’m a sucker for 20th Century US history. Something that’s always troubled me about WWII and, particularly the Holocaust, is why it took us so long to get into it and why we did so little to help European Jews. The reviews I read of this book promised to address these questions.

If you haven’t read or heard about this book, it is essentially the story of William E. Dodd, America’s ambassador to Germany in 1933, Adolph Hitler’s first year in power. A professor of history at the University of Chicago when he was selected by Franklin D. Roosevelt to represent the US in Germany, Dodd had experience in Germany as a student, but no diplomatic experience whatsoever.

Dodd packed up his wife, Maggie, his grown children, Bill and Martha, and sailed to Germany with little idea of what lay ahead for the family. As Larson puts it, they

embarked on a journey of discovery, transformation, and ultimately, deepest heartbreak.

At the time, America was in the midst of the Depression and many Americans held a deeply isolationist opinion. There was fear that allowing Jewish immigrants to come to the United States in large numbers would draw off the few jobs that were available. Many felt that “Nazi oppression of Germany’s Jews was a domestic German affair and thus none of America’s business.

Even within the Jewish community there were divisions, with some Jews frustrated by Roosevelt’s failure to speak out while others feared that protests and boycotts would make life more difficult for those in Germany.

It was against this backdrop that Dodd, a naive and inexperienced academic suddenly thrust into one of the most vicious and divisive regimes in history, entered the scene. Roosevelt had two priorities for Dodd: to ensure that Germany repaid the large debt owed to the US following World War I, and that Dodd do what he could to “protect [German Jews], and whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done.” In other words, Roosevelt’s direction to Dodd was to do whatever he could to straddle the fence, insufficient direction for a new ambassador with no political experience.

What follows is an account of the Germany that Dodd encounters, very different from that he experienced as a student. While initially striving to fulfill Roosevelt’s obscure direction, as his tenure in Berlin progressed Dodd found it more and more difficult. Following what is now called ”The Night of Long Knives” in which Hitler and his SS imprisoned and/or murdered those set against him, Dodd could no longer keep his own opinions to himself.  His attempts to bring forth more overt US interference in German politics earned him powerful enemies in Congress and eventually Dodd was dismissed from his post and returned to the United States.

The story is interesting and insightful, providing the unique perspective of an American citizen and family who lived through and within Germany’s transformation to a fascist state. As a reader, you travel down that road with the Dodds and experience their growing concern, and finally their disgust and terror, at that transformation.

I have to say that my one complaint – and it is an ongoing complaint I have with Larson’s work – is the attention to minutiae so often present in his writing. I will share only one small example here, information that would probably be appropriate in an academic work, but not in a book meant for the general public. This passage introduces “The Night of Long Knives”:

At 2:00 A.M. Saturday, June 30, 1934, Hitler left the Hotel Dreesen and was driven at high speed to the airport, where he boarded a Ju 52 airplane, one of two aircraft ready for his use. He was joined by two adjutants and a senior SA officer whom he trusted, Viktor Lutze. (It was Lutze who had told Hitler about Röhm’s scathing remarks after Hitler’s February 1934 speech to the leaders of the army and SA.) Hitler’s chauffeurs also climbed aboard. The second aircraft contained a squad of armed SS men. Both planes flew to Munich, where they arrived at four thirty in the morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise. One of Hitler’s drivers, Erich Kempka, was struck by the beauty of the morning, and the freshness of the rain-scrubbed air, the grass “sparkling in the morning light.”

See my point?

Grade: B+