Red Famine

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine / Anne Applebaum, 461 p.

Excellent review of the circumstances and decisions leading up to the famine of 1932-33 that killed just under 4 million.  Stalin feared Ukrainization.  He worried that a deepening interest in Ukrainian culture and language could lead to a political break which would have greatly weakened the USSR and the Revolution, not to mention depriving it of its highly fertile grain-producing breadbasket.  By harshly forcing family farmers (called kulaks if they owned much in the way of land, tools or livestock) onto collectives and wildly ratcheting up harvest expectations, he set the stage for a disaster.  Within the USSR and now Russia, the famine is widely considered the tragic result of inevitable circumstance and the vagaries of Mother Nature.  Applebaum is quite convincing in her argument to the contrary.

The Leavers

The leavers / Lisa Ko, 338 pgs. Read by Emily Woo Zeller

Eleven year old Deming Guo is living in New York City with his mother, her boyfriend, the boyfriend's sister, Vivian and the sister's child, Michael.  Michael is like a brother to him.  One day, his mother goes to work and never comes home.  No one seems to know what happened to her.  After several months, Deming ends up in foster care and is eventually adopted by a couple of college professors in upstate New York.  Deming becomes Daniel.  After years of feeling like he doesn't fit in, he gets some information that may lead him back to his mother.  I enjoyed the book, Deming/Daniel is trying hard to figure out who he is...so are many other characters in the book.  The audio lagged for me at times but overall it was well read by the narrator.