I was an AFS exchange student in 1974/75. Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, was an AFSer in 1973/74. Here is a message from her congratulating AFS to its 75th anniversary.
I would not be the person I am today, not even close, if I had not had the AFS experience, studying one year in an American High School as a teenager. The AFS year was by far the most pivotal experience of my life.
In the winter, some of our red potatoes in the pantry got old and started sprouting, so we planted them in one of our planters. Last month, we had a harvest. It felt great digging with our bare hands into the soft soil and finding the potatoes, one at a time.
Here is a picture of the planter, after we had reseeded it with carrots this time.
The harvest was amazing. We got at least 30 potatoes, a few of them small, but some of them full sized. Here are some of the larger ones:
Then I noticed that each potato had a mark on it. I can’t figure out how this happened. They were not smashed against the planter, and its walls are smooth. There are no features that would cause these repeatable marks. If you don’t see it, look at this one closeup:
The marks are not the result of some tool that we used to get them out of the ground. We used our bare hands for every one of them.
I looked at red potatoes at the store and found no marks on any of them.
Does anyone have any idea what might be causing these marks?
The first human colony on Mars consisted of a number of habitats and 54 colonists. An intense, 6-month-long dust storm covered all the solar panels and destroyed much of the facility. After all contact was lost, and satellite imagery showed much of the facility destroyed, it took several years before a new mission could be launched to investigate what might have happened.
Six astronauts eventually landed nearby and started investigating. What they found was not quite what they expected. In particular, apparently there were survivors. Quickly, however, some of the crew members started getting ill, experienced psychotic episodes and started turning against each other.
Colony One Mars is the first book of a series of six books. I knew that when I picked it up. After reading, I now realize that it’s not really a book, but the first chapter of a long book of six chapters. There is no real resolution, no end, many questions remain unanswered, and yes, you want to pick up the next book. And I guess that is the point.
However, it is just not good enough a story that I want to spend more time on it. This book reminded me of The Object by Joshua T. Calvert, which I reviewed about a year ago, where I said this verbatim:
Without spoiling the book for you, I just have to add that it’s always baffling when there is a space mission where Earth selects its best and brightest to go to meet an alien vessel, and those brilliant super astronauts do really, really stupid things once they are out there on their own. Perhaps that makes for an exciting plot, but for me it’s just distracting. These people are idiots out there, and when I read the story, it does not draw me in. It loses me and I want it to just move on and be done.
The only difference is that the mission does not visit an alien vessel, it visits a derelict colony on Mars, but the mission participants are for the most part cardboard characters with no real personalities. There is a female Ph.D. biologist who is the protagonist. The mission commander and the first officer are both one-dimensional humans who seem to be built just for the simple plot of this book. The author really does not bother to build characters for the entire crew. They are just there to move things along.
There is a commercial faction on Earth who pulls the financial strings of the mission, called COM, which stands for “Colony One Mars.” There are board members who are pure evil, motivated only by money, who are the actual culprits and who use people as expendable pawns in their game of riches.
Interestingly, there is a character named Leon Maximus, who is introduced here:
Leon Maximus, on the other hand, Peter admired. He was motivated by a seemingly sincere desire to advance human civilization. To make it an interplanetary species. To establish a Planet B, as he liked to call it. He was a rare breed indeed. None of this would have been possible if it were not for him and his genius. His company had developed the rocket technology to get the first colonists to Mars. Still, it was a slow tedious process. It was an eight month trip and, with the way the planets orbited each other, a tight two year launch window.
Kilby, Gerald M.. Colony One Mars: Fast Paced Scifi Thriller (Colony Mars Series Book 1) (pp. 80-81). Outer Planet Media. Kindle Edition.
You can move the letters of Leon around and match them to a real person in our time who is obsessed with colonizing Mars.
There are a lot of raving reviews out there about this hard science fiction book and it being a page-turner. Well, I turned the pages all the way through, but it’s really a story that is very contrived and just not all that interesting. If you want a real Mars story, you need to read The Martian, by Andy Weir.
Colony One Mars is the first book of a series, but I won’t read the other five.
Valeria Luiselli is an immigrant from Mexico. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter. Early in her career as a writer, while she was still in the process of seeking her own Green Card, she was hired by the federal immigration court in New York to translate for child asylum seekers. The book was written in the 2014 – 2016 timeframe, before Trump came to office, while the Obama administration was still dealing with the refuge crisis at the southern border of the United States. There is also a postscript dated 2017, just as the book was published, and Trump’s first administration had taken over.
She illustrates, in the words of children as young as three or four years old, up to teenagers, how the American court system handles the crisis. Why are thousands of unaccompanied children arriving at the border, where they are giving themselves up to the immigration authorities? What are their motivations? Why are they here, and what is their fate when they are here?
Tell Me How It Ends is a powerful indictment of the American immigration policy. The children are the victims. Yet, they are the ones whose lives are destroyed before they ever have a chance to grow up. It deals with the source of the problem in the first place, the utter violence and lawlessness in the Central American countries where the children come from, and it all traces right back to American drug use and consumption of drugs coming from Central America, and the thriving arms trade of American weapons back to those countries.
It is ironic to read this book now, eight years after it was first published, while the Trump Administration is applying a radial approach to solving the problem, deporting the most vulnerable and innocent victims of the whole malaise that causes this problem in the first place, demonizing the victims.
As I see it, particularly after reading Tell Me How It Ends, what they are doing now is not going to fix the problem whatsoever. It will just cause immense harm to those families and children affected directly. History will not judge us favorably for these years and these actions under our watch.
The book is only 99 pages long. I read it in hardcopy. I don’t have solutions. But I have a better understanding of why, and I can only fathom the immense damage that is being inflicted on a whole generation of Latin American children.
Tell me how it ends, because I do not know!
Hanna is a 37-year-old woman who lives alone in a German city after World War II. Michael is a 15-year-old school boy. Chance and fate brings the two together. Teenage hormones and puppy love drive the boy, and an erotic affair quickly evolves between the two. They spend a year or so meeting up at her apartment, after her work, and after his school. He reads classic novels out loud for her, then they shower, then they have sex, then they snooze, and then he goes home to his unsuspecting parents and siblings.
One day Hanna disappears without a trace. Michael at first has a difficult time dealing with that, but in time he gets over it. He goes on and eventually becomes a lawyer. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he sees Hanna as a defendant in a trial that he and his classmates are observing. The trial reveals to Michael that Hanna was a guard in a Nazi concentration camp during the war.
The Reader deals with the issue of government atrocities, and to me it was a very timely read. We are at a point in American history where the government seems to trample on its own Constitution, and for the sake of soundbites and news clips arrests its own citizens, apparently without due process, and sends them to offshore hellhole prisons. This situation remind me of what happened in Germany in the 1930 and through 1945. Germany killed over 6 million prisoners, mostly Jews, many of them were German citizens. I’d venture to say that Hitler himself didn’t kill a single person. Somehow he convinced an entire population to do his bidding, and his killing, and thousands of soldiers, guards, and SS troops thought it was okay to commit unspeakable atrocities against their own countrymen. I never understood how this was possible. Yet now, while we’re not killing people, we’re sending innocent people, children who are citizens of our country by birthright, and foreign students with legal visas, to prison camps. Is this a first step?
The Reader tackles this problem. What happens to the emotional life of a person who knows she has committed atrocities and has to live with it? It is a well-crafted novel, a love story of sorts, but difficult and emotional read.
I usually do not review books twice, let alone change my rating, but I am making an exception here with The Ruining Heaven. To explain, I have to backtrack to September 2015, when I first reviewed Hawser, by J Hardy Carroll. I stand by my review at that that time, so I won’t repeat it here, but I am upgrading my rating to four out of four stars.
I came across my review of Hawser by accident, following some comments in my blog, and I found myself in a memory block. While I had read the book, and reviewed it, and corresponded with the author directly about it, I oddly had no memory of the details of the book. Granted, it’s been ten years, but you’d think I’d remember.
Nothing.
So I went to Amazon and tried to find it – but it did not appear to exist. Now I was really puzzled. How is it possible that I read a book, reviewed it, rated it highly, wrote a blog entry, and remembered nothing? And then the book does not seem to exist?
I then searched my emails for the author’s name and wrote to him. He responded within minutes, advised that he had edited the book and republished it under a new name, The Ruining Heaven. Oddly, the book is only available in paperback on Amazon, and since I am not reading hardcopy books anymore, I didn’t want to buy it in that format. Because by now I had decided that I’d have to reread this to figure out how I could possibly forget all about it. The author was kind enough to send me the Kindle version directly, along with two sequels (which I have not read yet).
Why did I forget all about it? It’s a very poignant story, particularly as some of the action takes place in wartime Germany, namely Silesia, where my own father was a child refugee during that exact time. The emotional damage inflicted on him from those experiences are still haunting him today, at age 89, and he keeps retelling the horrors he lived through. Ironically, I finished reading The Ruining Heaven while in a hotel room in Germany just a few days ago, right after having just talked to my father about just those times.
Why did I forget all about it? Two thoughts:
First, when you read as many books as I do, of as many different genres, it’s apparently possible to move on to the next one and erase the previous one. Sometimes, once I write the review, it frees me up to move on. There are only that many grey cells available as I get older, and I need to clear the slate.
Second, the subject matter in the book is highly disturbing. War stories are never pleasant, and this one is crushing on many levels. Just like we tend to forget the hard periods in our lives, the embarrassing moments, the challenging episodes, as a natural block for our sanity, I may have blocked out most of this book just to protect myself and move on to better things.
Either way, The Ruining Heaven is a powerful war story. I thank the author for sending me the book and I highly recommend it, paperback and all.
From the outside it would look as if Kate Whittier was living a dream life in Southern California. Her husband is a successful businessman from an old-money New England family. They have two well-adjusted kids in elementary and middle school. She lives in a gorgeous home in a gated community north of San Diego. Her life revolves around her family and their friends. Taking the kids to soccer practice and games, attending family parties, taking walks along the San Diego beaches.
But Kate feels like an impostor in her own life. She comes from a broken family, and there are enough nightmares in her past that she has hidden her childhood and youth from all her friends and her husband. She thinks they don’t know who she is, the believes she is living a lie, and has been doing that for decades.
When her husband suddenly confesses to a sexual indiscretion, her life comes crashing down, and the lies and deceptions no longer hold up. In a matter of days, her peaceful and successful life unravels into a maelstrom of emotional chaos, confusion and even amnesia. While she is vulnerable and exposed, the demons of her past come knocking, and suddenly there seems to be no way out.
I would not normally pick up this book to read. The cover does not talk to me, and the description on the back is not about a subject I would choose read a novel about. But the paths of books into my life are sometimes mysterious, and I definitely like to pick up material at random just to open my horizon.
My wife is in a book club of about a dozen women. They read a book a month, and then meet and discuss it over dinner at one of their homes. Sometimes I read their book, if it’s the kind that interests me. Last month, they read Anastasia Zadeik’s second book, The Other Side of Nothing. It turns out that one of the members knew the author and invited her to the book club meeting discussing that book. She came, and apparently they had a great meeting, the author posted about it in her Instagram page later, and left some hardcopies of her first novel with them, autographed. When my wife brought one of the copies home, I picked it up and started reading that night on the couch, and — could not put it down.
Blurred Fates is Zadeik’s first novel. I have read and reviewed the first works of other authors, sometimes by their personal invitations. (If you review as many books as I do, sometimes authors send you their books and ask for reviews. I have had a few of those). Blurred Fates stands out among first novels for a number of reasons:
It is impeccably edited. There isn’t a typo, there aren’t any grammatical errors that I noticed.
It is written in the first person present tense, which is unusual. But it also creates a sense of pace and urgency. Everything is happening right in front of the reader. It it hard to write that way, but Zadeik pulls it off effortlessly. I was right there with her all along, inside Kate’s head.
Being in someone’s head, in their thoughts, can be exhausting for the reader. I believe it’s also hard to write that way. But even with those challenges, Kate’s emotional and psychological turmoil never seems unreal. As a reader, you become Kate, and you feel her anguish and terror.
The author did a remarkable job with this novel. I am sure her second one, The Other Side of Nothing, is just as good.
Blurred Fates is a well-structured story about a subject of our times, namely rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence and child abandonment, and the permanent, lifelong psychological trauma that victims have to live with. With that, the author takes on a challenging subject and handles it well.
I also enjoyed her description of Kate’s life in San Diego. I live here, and I felt like I have been at her house and her community. I have driven by the soccer practices that she went to. I have shopped at the Vons and gone to the same Starbucks she is describing. And I have been to the same beaches. Those images and feelings brought it home even more vivid and clear than otherwise. This story played in my neighborhood.
I finished the book last night – I cranked through the last third of the book, and when I closed it and looked up, it was 1:25am. Need I point out: It’s a page turner.
In January 2024, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, attributing the stock market’s record highs to his favorable polling against President Joe Biden. He claimed that investors were optimistic about his potential return to the White House, stating:
THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN, AND THAT WILL DRIVE THE MARKET UP.
Trump also remarked that “everything else is terrible,” referencing inflation and geopolitical concerns. He suggested that the market’s performance was driven by expectations of his victory, despite not providing evidence to support this claim.
During a Fox News town hall on January 10, 2024, Trump asserted that the stock market was rising due to his lead in the polls and warning of a potential crash if he did not win the upcoming election.
Now, in April 2025, following a significant stock market downturn attributed to his administration’s aggressive tariff policies, Donald Trump shifted responsibility again to Joe Biden. Trump now referred to the declining market as the result of a “Biden Overhang,” suggesting that the economic challenges were inherited from the previous administration.
What a bunch of nonsense coming out of our president’s mouth. Let me get this straight. When the market was great, it was his win, even though Biden had been president for over 3 years then. When the market is terrible now, it’s Biden’s fault, even though Trump has been president for more than 3 months, and the DJIA was at 43,487 on January 20, 2025, when Biden’s term ended.
Joe Biden built a great economy. He brought us out of the Covid pandemic, lowered the Trump inflation, his policies brought manufacturing back to America, brought unemployment to historic lows, increased GDP every quarter, created 17 million new jobs and had the stock market at record highs. It took Donald Trump just three months to destroy all of that. And he has the gall to blame Biden for it.
Remember when Trump kept complaining that the economic disaster of 2020, following the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, was Biden’s fault, even though he was president then?
How stupid does he think we are?