Hearts of Darkness by Jana Monroe

 

When Jana Monroe was growing up all she wanted to do was right the wrongs of the world. This desire led her to become one of the few female police officers in Long Beach, California. A few years later, she applied for and got accepted into the FBI where she made a mark as one of only a few women in a male-dominated world. She worked cases in New Mexico and Florida before starting training with the FBI's world-renowned Behaviorial Science Unit. With the BSU, she consulted on more than 850 homicide cases, profiling serial killers and helping to catch murderers. She even coached Jodie Foster on her role as Clarice Starling in the movie The Silence of the Lambs.

Her biography, Hearts of Darkness, was my nonfiction read for this month, and it's such a compelling book! Monroe chronicles her time in the FBI with both honesty and humor. And her writing feels very conversational as she relates her most memorable cases and experiences. And she certainly saw the worst of humanity in her job. But she never stopped working to make a difference. Her resilience and intelligence shines through on every page. She's a remarkable woman. And this book is a mix of memoir and true crime that I found very interesting. 4/5 stars.

Happy Reading!

Last the best!

I read several good nonfiction books this year:  It's All A Game: The History of Board Games From Monopoly to Settlers of Catan, Obsessive Genius (about Marie Curie), 1776, Educated, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and The Lost City of the Monkey God. But The Operator by Robert O'Neill is by far the best.

It's a fascinating chronicle, not just of O'Neill's personal journey from Butte, Montana to being a key member of the SEAL team that found and killed Osama bin Laden, but of the Navy SEALS themselves. No wonder these men are so remarkable: their training, teamwork, and "never quit" attitudes are unmatched. They're the ones called in to do the things no one else can do. And after reading this book, I respect them and their valor, unflinching sacrifices, and mad skills even more.

"I would learn that in a gunfight the combination of adrenaline, muscle memory, and super-human focus leaves no psychic space for fear. I wasn't shutting it out. There was just no room for it."

O'Neill himself enlisted in the Navy in 1995, became a SEAL in 1996, and participated in more than 400 combat missions between then and 2012, including the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates and firing the shots that killed bin Laden. But he'd probably tell you he's no hero; he was just doing his job--being a Navy SEAL.

"...we were always joking around and high spirited. We were on a mission we believed in, doing something very few in the world could do as well as we could. And we had absolute faith in and love for everyone on our team. When we called each other brothers, we meant it."

This is such a great read! I loved it.

Happy Reading!

Got Words?

I bought my first thesaurus from a Scholastic book order when I was in third grade. A paperback version of Roget's Thesaurus with a red cover and 572 pages. I still have it. The pages have yellowed and the well-worn cover is tattered and taped; in fact, it's practically falling apart it's been used so much, but even though I bought a newer copy of Roget's Super Thesaurus a few years ago, I just can't seem to get rid of my old one. It feels like an old friend. Every time I've needed to find just the right word, my little red thesaurus has come through for me. But I have to admit that in all the years I've owned my thesaurus, I have never once wondered about the man who created it.

The Man Who Made Lists by Joshua Kendall is a fascinating biography about Peter Mark Roget, the creator of my little red thesaurus. From childhood, Roget loved to classify and order things:  plants, animals, systems, and words. It's how he coped with life's messy chaos, and his own loneliness and anxiety. Extremely intelligent, Roget became a physician, practiced medicine, was a popular lecturer, wrote several scholarly papers on optics, electricity, chemistry, physiology, and even the slide rule. And he kept lists of words. A lifetime of words that, in 1852, he published as Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. He was 73. He continued to "tinker with" his masterpiece until his death in 1869, overseeing the publication of twenty-eight editions in his lifetime alone. What an amazing legacy. I, for one, don't know what I would do without mine.

About this wonderful book of words, Peter Mark Roget wrote:

"We seek in vain the words we need...The appropriate terms, notwithstanding our utmost efforts, cannot be conjured up at will. Like 'spirits from the vasty deep', they come not when we call; and we are driven to the employment of a set of words and phrases either too general or too limited, too strong or too feeble, which suit not the occasion, which hit not the mark we aim at."

"In every process of reasoning, language enters as an essential element. Words are the instruments by which we form all our abstractions, but which we fashion and embody our ideas, and by which we are enabled to glide along a series of premises and conclusions... It is on this ground that the present work founds a claim to utility."

Happy Reading!