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The E-Reader: Reviews of E-books

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The E-Reader: Reviews of E-books

The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang

By Josh Dean

(The Atavist; $2.99)

Earlier this month came the news that director Ruben Fleischer and actor Miles Teller have signed on for a film based on Josh Dean’s long-form article “The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang,” and it’s little wonder, given how irresistible the story is. For nearly a decade stretching from the late 1970s into the 1980s, Stephen Reid, Paddy Mitchell and Lionel Wright robbed more than 100 banks in the United States and Canada of more than $10 million. They caught the public imagination “as modern-day folk heroes” in part for their inventive and frequent prison breaks but mostly for their “ruthlessly efficient heists.” The FBI dubbed them “The Stopwatch Gang” because Reid would wear a large stopwatch around his neck to time the group’s robberies.

Dean separates myth from fact in this highly entertaining guilty pleasure. Based mostly on interviews with the now-64-year-old Reid, who will be eligible for release from day parole in August, Dean tracks the gang from Canada to Florida, California, Oregon, Washington state, Arizona, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, the Philippines and many places in between. It was only a matter of time before the police would close in, or before Hollywood would come calling.

13 Men

By Sonia Faleiro

(Deca; $2.99)

Since 2012, when a medical student was gang-raped on a Delhi bus and died of her injuries, international attention has turned to an epidemic in India, a country where a woman reports a rape every 30 minutes. Sonia Faleiro’s harrowing investigation focuses on another high-profile case, from early last year, when a 20-year-old woman named Baby was allegedly gang-raped by 13 local leaders in Subalpur, a poor, remote village in West Bengal. Baby’s story became newsworthy because, Faleiro writes, “it played into Indian stereotypes about ignorant tribals and their brutal system of justice.”

Baby had angered her fellow villagers by dressing in a way they considered provocative, owning a mobile phone, and using that phone to be in contact with a married man who was the ultimate outsider, both a non-tribal and a Muslim. In the midst of her rape, one of her attackers tells her, “We are doing this to teach you.” But unlike in years past, their brutal act would not go unpunished. Stories like “13 Men,” though extremely distressing to read, make a vital contribution to changing attitudes in India and around the world about crimes against women.

The Girl in the Photo

By Gaspar González

(Amazon Digital Services; $2.99)

In 2010, Gaspar González, who had been a journalist for over a decade, finally began looking into a piece of family history that had long fascinated him but he’d never pursued. He’d had a brother, Nelson, who was killed in Vietnam in 1968, six weeks before González was born, and he grew up under the weight of his family’s immeasurable loss. He used to join his mother for weekly visits to Nelson’s grave, and for 20 years beginning at age 14, he carried a picture in his wallet of Nelson and an unknown young woman at a high school dance. “The photo made me feel Nelson was somehow close by,” González writes. “It was my way of taking him places he might have dreamed of going, but never got the chance.”

He asks the question “Who was the girl?” and embarks on a quest. A newspaper article yields a key clue, about a fixture in the Hartford community named Marilda who had been valedictorian of Nelson’s class. González interviews soldiers and others who knew his brother before he works up the courage to contact Marilda. In this extraordinary and moving memoir, the long-anticipated meeting is well worth the wait.

Bad Books

By Clare Needham

(Ploughshares Solos; $2.99)

Sophia, the protagonist of this beautifully written but unevenly paced novella from the outstanding Ploughshares Solos series, is bored with her life and “scornful of [her] studies” in a Princeton doctoral program. So when a famous, aging medievalist, Monsieur Vinson, invites her to live with him and his wife outside of Avignon and help organize his father’s papers, she hops a plane to France for the summer.

The food, the wine, the languorous days and the sensory pleasures of the provinces provide a welcome distraction from the dissertation that she’s been putting off. And just as her adviser begins e-mailing her about deadlines, her research into the Vinson family starts to get interesting. The scholar’s father, Charles-Louis, was a Vichy collaborator and Nazi sympathizer, and Sophia discovers his diary, which has the potential to be inflammatory. But it turns out that “the life of Charles-Louis is simple ... stripped down to essentials: family, food, the luxury to enjoy both.” This is a letdown, especially after the slow buildup to the diary’s discovery. As if to compensate for the too-leisurely progress of events, Needham whips up a dramatic ending involving the Vinsons’ property that borders on deus ex machina.

Porter Shreve’s fourth novel, “The End of the Book,” was published last year. E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com
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