White Doves At Morning

With a title like White Doves At Morning, was there any way I could resist picking up the audio version of this James Lee Burke novel as my next book to listen to - especially when it is read by Will Patton? I don't believe there could be a better narrator than Will Patton. He is simply the best.
So, this audio book already had two things going for it, the third was that it is set during the Civil War - one of my all time favourite eras about which to read. This was my first time reading anything by James Lee Burke, but it won't be my last. Next I will delve into his Dave Robicheaux mysteries for which he is well known.  It has been noted that those books are set in the same locale and have some of the same family names as this one. What I found most interesting is that Burke has used his own family's history in the writing of this book. His main character, Willie Burke, was James's great-great uncle and Willie's friend, Robert Perry, was James Burke's great-grandfather. James had family lore and Willie Burke's journals as reference material.

Willie Burke is a young Irishman helping his mother run a boarding house in New Iberia, Louisiana when Fort Sumter is fired upon and the Civil War begins. He and his friend, Jim Stubblefield, join the Confederate Army and face their first test of battle at Shiloh, where Jim is killed.
There are many places where this book was hard to listen to - not only the battle scenes - but the way the slaves were treated. And when the war ends and Willie comes home, he is still fighting the Knights of the White Camellia, whose methods are to rule by daytime intimidation and worse during hooded night-time activities. Burke's writing and Patton's narration make this a compelling book.

John Hart is one of those authors I discovered while traveling and needing a book to read. I liked his writing so much I wanted to read everything he wrote - which, with the finding of a copy of The Last Child at Half-Price Books last month, I have now accomplished - just have to wait for his next book to come out.

A year and a day have passed since twelve year old Alyssa Merrimon was abducted and her twin brother, Johnny, has never felt more alone. His father deserted the family not long after Alyssa's disappearance and his mother has all but vanished into a haze of drinking and drugs. Johnny has spent the year looking in every dark place, hoping to find his sister still alive. When another girl goes missing, Johnny as well as everyone else believes it is the work of the same man. If Johnny can just find this girl, perhaps he will find Alyssa, too.

Hart's book is heart-breaking at the same time it is hopeful. It is a great mystery, full of twists and turns and red herrings, complete with a surprise ending. Of all four of Hart's books, I think this one is my favourite - but they are all good.

Lauren Belfer's A Fierce Radiance is another book that has been on my reading list for a long time - and another book I was lucky to find at Half-Price Books last month. Belfer's first novel, City of Light, which I read some time ago, made me want to go to Niagara Falls. And while this one doesn't make me any more inclined to visit New York City, I enjoyed reading about what the Big Apple was like during WWII.
Fact and fiction blend in this story about the development of penicillin and its importance during the war. I have always been more attuned to this time period than I was to the era in which I grew up, even though I wasn't born until 1943. Reading about it seems like visiting an old acquaintance.

In both her novels, Belfer gives us strong, independent women. Claire Shipley is a 36-year-old, divorced, photo-journalist working for Life Magazine. She is the mother of eight-year-old Charlie and his sister, Emily, who would forever be three years old. When Claire is assigned to cover researchers feverishly working to develop a miraculous new drug at New York City's renowned Rockefeller Institute, she realizes the drug could have saved her daughter's life. Scientists theorized penicillin would prove useful against a wide range of infections, including pneumonia, scarlet fever, meningitis and septicemia - blood poisoning - which Emily had died from after she tripped and skinned her knee on the sidewalk.

In every war before antibiotics, more troops died from infection than from actual wounds on the battlefield which was a prime motivator for the development of penicillin. The government took over control of its testing and denied patents to the pharmaceutical companies for the discovery of how it could be mass produced as well as limiting how much they could charge for it. Merck, Pfizer and the others were ordered to share their findings with one another in order to supply as much penicillin as possible to the armed forces. However, they were allowed to patent and profit from any other antibiotics they developed such as streptomycin, aureomycin and erythromycin.

It is hard to imagine what it was like before antibiotics. I do remember a boss I once had telling me his mother died from infection after an appendectomy and how she could have been saved if it had happened just a few months later - after penicillin became more widely available. I even remember as a young child being extremely upset when I learned a neighbor girl had pneumonia. I thought it was a death sentence - which of course, it wasn't. But I must have heard enough stories about people dying before there was penicillin that I was still worried about her.

Belfer reminds her readers that while penicillin and the antibiotics that followed have changed the lives of virtually every human being the past seventy years, bacterial resistance to antibiotics developed from the beginning. Today, resistance is a major medical problem. Unless new drugs are developed, humanity could easily return to the era when otherwise healthy people died from a scratch on the knee.

I don't know if Belfer has a new book on the horizon, but she is an author I will always be checking on. There was a romance in this book which I didn't touch upon, but one of the things I liked so much about the writing was that at the end of the book there was no "happy ever after". The ever after was left up in the air for the reader to imagine an ending. Great writing.