Sleeping With The Enemy : Coco Chanel's Secret War
by Hal Vaughan

Here we go again with a book that is purported to be better than what was written before and yet is much less. I couldn't wait to get it and then, I couldn't wait to finish the damn thing.
Author, Hal Vaughan, writes about Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel's collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. His writing is plodding and interminably boring. There's so much dense detail with much of it repeated again and again. Not much of what Chanel exactly did for the SS is actually revealed so you don't really learn anything about her treachery.
There are better works written about Coco Chanel one of which I reviewed in my book-a-holics blog.
Sleeping With the Enemy was a big disappointment.
Not recommended.

Seven Seasons In Siena : My Quixotic Quest For Acceptance Among Tuscany's Proudest People
by Robert Rodi

Ugh, this book is horrendous. After only ten pages, I gave up.
The author goes to Siena, Italy, and tries to gain admittance and acceptance at this horseracing club (the jockeys ride bareback). Doesn't sound that interesting, does it? Ho hum. Who cares?
The most annoying aspect of his writing is the amount of similes he uses for every paragraph. I guess he didn't have enough information so he needed filler.
Not recommended.

Wendy And The Lost Boys : The Uncommon Life Of Wendy Wasserstein
by Julie Salamon

Wendy Wasserstein is the first woman playwright to have won a Tony Award. She also won the Pulitzer Prize. Though I never read anything that she wrote, I knew of her work. I was hoping that this biography about her would open her up to me. Unfortunately it did not fulfill my expectations. I lasted only seventy-seven pages. The writing is dry and plodding and it seemed as if the author just lifted everything from Wasserstein's writings. I was bored to say the least.
Not recommended.

Turn Right At Machu Picchu : Rediscovering The Lost City One Step At A Time
by Mark Adams

I should be congratulated for finishing this book (last night I considered stopping with forty more pages to go). But, no, I slogged through it all.
The premise is that Mark Adams, who has spent his career editing travel and adventure magazines, decides to follow the path of explorer Hiram Bingham III by going to Peru and retracing his path to Machu Picchu.
I didn't find the tale to be compelling, exciting, superb, amazing, entertaining as other reviewers apparently did. For me, there were too many details that were confusing especially with all of the different similiar-sounding names of cities.
Everything became tedious and downright boring.
Adams wrote a book called Mr. America in 2010 (reviewed in my book-a-holics blog) and that was superb. Too bad that he couldn't sustain that great writing with Machu Picchu.
Not recommended.

The Memory Of All That : George Gershwin, Kay Swift, And My Family's Legacy Of Infidelities
by Katharine Weber

What started out to be a promising book deteriorated after ninety-five pages and I stopped reading. The author spent an inordinate amount of time writing about her father who was a louse in being both a husband and a parent. It went on and on and became old soon enough. Katharine Weber's grandmother (Kay Swift) was supposed to have had a ten-year affair with George Gershwin while she was married to James Paul Warburg and that might have been interesting if the chapter about Weber's father had been abbreviated. There's also endless name-dropping. Ho hum.
Not recommended.

Paris To The Past : Traveling Through French History By Train
by Ina Caro

If you have trouble falling asleep at night, get a copy of Paris to the Past and in no time at all you will be dreaming.
Ina Caro is an authority on medieval and modern French history and travels to France quite often with her husband. She has an idea of taking one-day train trips from central Paris to see the churches and cathedrals that are en route and they will do it in chronological order, historically. The two of them begin with the twelfth century and end with the nineteenth century.
Sound interesting? I thought so and the first couple of chapters were. It began to bog down when the immense amount of details became too overwhelming and boring. The writing is dry.
If you're a scholar of medieval French history, this is probably the book for you. For the rest of us, there's better travel books with abbreviated histories.
Not recommended.

Sex On The Moon : The Amazing Story Behind The Most Audacious Heist In History
by Ben Mezrich

Before the book even begins, when the author says that settings, descriptions, names, and histories have been changed to protect identities, we are in trouble. (The irony of this statement is that you can google Sex On The Moon and come up with the original names and just about everything else.) He has also re-created dialogue from conversations that took place ten years prior. Not a good sign.
So, here is this college student, Thad Roberts, who decides that he wants to be an astronaut and walk on Mars. He is accepted as a NASA co-op and works in a life sciences lab. It's not enough for him because he wants to be that shining star and starts doing daring things that could bring him to the cusp of trouble. Then he gets the idea of stealing moon rocks from every Apollo landing.
For an incredibly gifted young man, he was a total idiot and definitely had problems. I didn't finish the book reading up to Chapter 17. The writing is so juvenile (much foul language) and there is no depth. Reviewers have gushed that it's the most audacious heist in history but that is false. There were many others (some reviewed in my book-a-holics blog) where the culprits were never caught.
Don't bother with this one.
Not recommended.