Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics from different genres. Here are the books I read in June 2024. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on MORE TO COME. Enjoy.

---

The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture (2024) by Michelangelo Sabatino is a richly illustrated, deeply researched, and well-crafted source of unending pleasure for the eyes, mind, and soul. Sabatino and his fellow authors Ron Henderson, Hilary Lewis, Scott Mehaffey, and Dietrich Neumann, have produced a work that broadens our perspective while helping undermine the conventional view of the house as merely a formal object sitting on its site as conceived wholly out of the mind of Mies van der Rohe. In the latest of my author interviews on MORE TO COME, Michelangelo graciously agreed to answer my questions about this important new book.

---

The Overstory: A Novel (2018) by Richard Powers is a work that—like all brilliant pieces of fiction—tells us more about reality than we often care to see. This majestic fable is actually an interlocking collection of nine human stories that, in the end, center trees as the main characters. It takes time to understand how these stories might be connected, but Powers begins to drop hints in the very first pages: we should be listening to the trees to truly understand connection. The Overstory changed the way I will see the world. One simply cannot ask more of a piece of literature.

---

Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey (2023) by Robert “Mack” McCormick (and edited by Smithsonian curator John W. Troutman) is the musicologist’s long-awaited biography of Johnson that isn’t, in fact, a biography. As Troutman details in an extensive preface and afterword, this work may not be the book one expects, but as a study of the biographer’s craft and a window into the Delta during Johnson’s brief lifetime, it is one well worth considering.

---

Death at La Fenice (1992) by Donna Leon, the first in the Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery series, is set in the celebrated opera house La Fenice where the world-famous conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, is poisoned between the second and third acts of a performance of La Traviata. In this tight and irresistible work Leon sets themes that will return in her series: the truth can be very hard to discover in this life and justice isn’t always simple and easy. In the end Brunetti finds himself having to balance what happens against the challenges of seeking a just outcome.

---

Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists (2012) by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg is a detailed look at the high-stakes world of art theft. In a swift-moving narrative, Amore, an art security expert, and Mashberg, an investigative journalist, provide the history behind these high-profile crimes while puncturing some of our myths along the way. By and large major art theft is committed by common criminals associated with local crime rings, and in a number of case studies the reader learns how they run the gamut from comical bunglers to cunning and dangerous thieves who will stop at nothing in the commission of their crimes.

---

What’s on the nightstand for July (subject to change at the whims of the reader):

During July, I have decided to focus on five books considering issues facing us in these troubled times. Two writers explore previous points in our history—the months and years just before the American Revolution and the Civil War—that will help me place today’s events in context. I’m also reading about the murderous heart of Putin’s regime and an attempted insurrection in our country by one of Putin’s admirers. And finally, I’m returning to a book on lessons we can learn from the twentieth century about the fight against tyranny.

• Red Notice by Bill Browder
• Revolutionary Summer by Joseph J. Ellis
• The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson
• Unthinkable by Jamie Raskin
• On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

---

NOTE: Click to see the books I read in May of 2024 and to see the books I read in 2023. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

---

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash