Zero Fail, The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. Written by Washington Post reporter and three times Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Leonnig.
At times amusing, generally uneasy-making, recently infuriating, this well-researched book starts with the founding of the Secret Service and brings the story up through the failed insurrection against the US Legislature, Constitution and Capitol.
A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles. It takes place entirely within Moscow’s Hotel Metropole, beginning in 1922 and traveling through all the societal changes and major events of the next 3 decades.
The protagonist is a Russian Count whom a Bolshevik tribunal has sentenced to a lifetime of house arrest. Far from dwelling on all he has lost, this preternaturally upbeat man seizes of the pleasures of each day, and takes the reader through a truly grim and dismal period as if it were Dickens’ “the best of times.”
A fascinating trip. I don’t want it to end.
I started reading this but couldn’t stay awake.
