Friday Reads - May 1, 2015

Trapped Under the Sea:  One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness by Neil Swidey
4.5 stars



Imagine this scenario, you are asked to go down into a tunnel hundreds of feet below the ocean floor where you must then travel ten miles in the tunnel to a place so remote that rescue teams would not be willing or able to reach you.  Then take away all electric lighting and breathable air.  Those are the circumstances under which five men worked on a task that no one else wanted to tackle.  Superficially, this book should be pretty boring.  This is basically a sewer tunnel under the Boston Harbor that because of bureaucratic errors, was over budget and way over deadline.  What makes this book so compelling is the human face given to these divers who risked their lives to complete the tunnel.  Without this book, I doubt that these divers would have gotten their story told so eloquently and they might have faded into the obscurity of many blue collar workers with high risk positions.   There are instances that the book slows down as it gets bogged down with too many details related to the construction of the tunnel but past that the lead-up to the disaster reads almost like a thriller with so much detail that it feels like the author must have been down in the tunnel with the divers.  This book is interesting, mostly fast-paced and very heartbreaking and a testament to the risks workers take to construct and maintain modern structures.  I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for an honest review.


The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora
Pub. Date -  May 5, 2015
4 stars



This book is really a collection of short, interconnected stories about the denizens of one upper-middle class community and all of the claustrophobia, snobbery and secrets that occupy it.  I think I enjoyed almost every single one of these stories and I felt myself agreeing with and sympathizing with the most unlikely characters.  I really enjoyed piecing together how all of the characters intercepted and found myself paging back through the book often to remind myself of past characters and their familial situation.  There were a couple of strange stories that felt like they didn't quite fit in as well but overall I enjoyed this book more than I have any other collection of stories in recent months.  I received an eGalley of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.