Archaeologist Dr. Erin Granger is working on a dig in Caesarea, Israel when an explosion rocks the Masada. The explosion splits Masada and emits a gas that kills all the visitors The explosion reveals an unknown underground chamber. Soon Sergent Jordan Stone is sent to bring Erin to the site to help and try to discover what happened!
First a comment on my March reading. I started the month reading James Lee Burke’s Creole Belle and three non-fiction books. Impeached by David O. Stewart, The Armistad Rebellion by Marcus Rediker and Kofi Anann’s Interventions. I had also gotten out of the library The Blood Gospel by James Rollins and Rebecca Cantrell. By the middle of the month, I had made the most progress on the David Stewart book and minimal progress on the others. About the day before Blood Gospel was due back at the library, I started reading it. No wait, it was actually overdue when I started it! Anyway I was enjoying it, so Creole Belle got set aside! I continued to read Impeached along with The Blood Gospel and managed to finish Impeached at the beginning of this month. It is Book 12 for 2013. I was pleased that I finished the book because it’s the kind of book that I usually start and enjoy and then ,move on to something else, so to finish it is a good thing!
So in Book No 11 for 2013 Treacherous Beauty, the authors Mark Jacobs and Stephen H. Case make the case (no pun intended, well maybe a little) that the subject of the book was the Scarlett O’Hara of the Revolutionary War: “a woman whose survival skills trumped all other values. Had she been a man, she might have been arrested, tried and executed. And she might have become famous. Instead, her role was minimized and she was allowed to recede into the background – with a generous British pension in hand” the Treacherous Beauty is Peggy Shippen, Mrs. Benedict Arnold!
Ok so which of the four people pictured above can you identify? Before I read Book Number 9 for 2013, I could have maybe identified two! The first two are the key players in the book, while persons three and four helped nudge number two along! The first two are William McKinley and Leon Czolgosz, who are The President and the Assassin, respectively, from Scott Miller’s terrific book titled – The President and the Assassin:McKinley, Terror, and the Empire at the Dawn of the American Century. Persons three and four are anarchist Emma Goldman and Albert Parsons. both of whom provided a push to Leon to do the deed!
Ok so how many books is it Ok to read at one time? Right now, I’m reading five! Is that too many? On the fiction side, I’m reading the latest from novel from one of my all time favorite authors James Lee Burke,Creole Belle. He is such a great writer! It takes about two to three pages for me to get sucked back into the world of Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell and New Iberia, Louisiana!
Ok so I’ve written before that I loved Linwood Barclay‘s Zack Walker books and wished that he kept writing them. When I questioned him about that he said that while the books received critical acclaim they just didn’t sell well, then he started writing standalone thrillers and his career took off! While after finishing his latest book Trust Your Eyes, I will never again question his decision and I will eagerly awaiting his next standalone!! For me Trust Your Eyes is the best book he has written yet and I am not alone in the opinion:
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Ok so let me say this right at the beginning of the post. Book No. 7 of 2013 is the third book in the Travis Chase trilogy Deep Sky, by Patrick Lee. If you are going to read this book make sure that you read Books one, The Breech and two Ghost Country first!! Preferably you read them consecutively not like I did reading Book 2 first and then quickly going back and reading Book 1! With that said after finishing the book and having everything wrapped up and explained very nicely I feel like I want to go back and read the series again just so that I can understand everything and even then I might not understand it all! From Patrick Lee’s website:
So,far 2013 has not been a great year, I think that I’ve missed more work both at Target and Lippincott Jacobs this month than I did all last year, as I’ve fought this upper respiratory virus. My wife his been fighting the same virus. Then top that with the loss of the son’s brother-in-law Will, and Peter’s wife’s grandfather and well it hasn’t been a great month to say the least!
I read Death at an Early Age by Jonathan Kozol about 40 years ago, it was a stirring account of his first year as a teacher in the Boston school system working with some of the most disadvantaged students in America. The book won the National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion. It has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe. The book made an impact on me and lead me to change my major to education, however I soon ran away from education and concentrated on Political Science, it wasn’t until several years later I returned to school at the University of Georgia and received my B.S. ED in social science education. But stuff happens and I never taught, I got caught up in life and work and a family and I took the easy path and stayed where I was, but many times I regret the decision not to teach. Anyway throughout the years I kinda stayed away from 
politics and the writing of Jonathan Kozol. I knew he was out there fighting for the poorest of the poor in the South Bronx with books like Amazing Grace and Rachel and Her Children but I never read them. Well when I saw his new book Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America I couldn’t resist and it has become Book 5 of 2013.
