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--> Nonfiction First to fight THE FLYING TIGERS: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War against Japan By Sam Kleiner 239 pp. Viking Reviewed by Diane Diekman Three years before the United States entered World War II, American pilots were already flying in a covert operation to defend China against Japan. Retired U.S. Army pilot Claire Chennault organized and led the group officially designated the American Volunteer Group (AVG)—better known as the Flying Tigers. The Flying Tigers is an excellent portrayal of this short-lived unit. It also provides a biography of Chennault, concluding with his death in 1958. Author Sam Kleiner has done a masterful job of research and storytelling. Now an attorney in New York City, he grew up in a family that nurtured his love of history; his grandfather regaled him with stories of navigating a B-25 in the Pacific during World War II. The book opens with a scene in which the news of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl H...

Non-Fiction Perhaps not so impossible POWER IN NUMBERS: The Rebel Women of Mathematics By Talithia Williams, PhD 224 pp. Race Point Publishing Reviewed by Diane Diekman Talithia Williams wrote Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics to give back. It fulfills her dream of making participation in mathematical sciences a reality for more women, by showcasing these role models and thanking mentors such as the ones who helped her. Williams was a high school student when her math teacher told her she should major in math in college. “It was the first time an older white man affirmed my intellectual ability,” she writes. “Even though I never saw myself as a mathematician, he saw me as one. The conversation changed me. It changed my life.” She went on to earn a master’s degree in math at Howard University and a PhD in statistics at Rice University, where she was the only female and the only African-American in her class. Power in Numbers tells the stories of female mat...

Nonfiction A warrior’s closeted heart FBI GIRL: HOW I LEARNED TO CRACK MY FATHER’S CODE . . . WITH LOVE By Maura Conlon-McIvor 306 pp. Resource Publications Reviewed by Diane Diekman FBI Girl: How I Learned To Crack My Father’s Code . . . With Love is the coming-of-age memoir of Maura Conlon-McIvor. Originally published in 2004, it is being reissued in softcover and as an audiobook. The story was adapted for the stage at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. The press release promised a Nancy-Drew-type murder mystery in real life, with a little-brother sidekick and an FBI father. This reviewer’s expectations were high. Joe Conlon is a career FBI agent who moved his family from New York City to Los Angeles, where he and his wife raise their five children in the late 1960s. Seemingly unable to show feelings of love, he interacts with his children mainly through his passion for baseball. The memoir is written in present tense, through the voice of fourth-grader Maura, the second eldest c...

Nonfiction The sun looked like the moon PRAIRIE FIRES: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder By Caroline Fraser 515 pp. Metropolitan Books Reviewed by Diane Diekman Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder recently won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. And deservedly so. Caroline Fraser did a masterful job of researching and describing both the life and the times of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fraser writes in the introduction that Wilder’s life was “a story that needs to be fully told, in its historical context, as she lived it.” That is exactly what Prairie Fires does. Wilder became world famous through her Little House books, written in the 1930s about her childhood as a pioneer girl and a teacher in one-room schools on the South Dakota prairie. With the editorial assistance of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, she produced an eight-volume series of children’s fiction based on fact. Wilder died at age ninety, in 1957, at the time I was beginning t...