Books read February through December 1975
| Author | Golovko, Admiral Arseni G. |
|---|---|
| Editor | Mansergh, Sir Aubrey |
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Broomfield, Peter |
| Publication | London: Putnam, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1960 |
| Number of Pages | 239 |
| Extras | Introduction by the editor, Sir Aubrey Mansergh |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II; Eastern front |
| When Read | February 1975 |
The memoirs of the war time commander of the Soviet Arctic fleet, defending the northern sea route from England and the U.S.
A staunch communist, raised and educated by the Party, Golovko was of the generation that built socialism in the USSR and was keenly aware of his obligations to carry on the work of his revolutionary forebears.
His outlook is not so much class as Party. The highest honor is to die for Party and motherland.
Noteworthy features are: strong emphasis on the power of men with high ideals, no matter how technically sophisticated is the enemy - many pages are devoted to exploits of heroes; total mistrust and aversion to capitalist allies - though he gives high credit to individual allied fighters; a very surprisingly unquestioning attitude to reports of victories by his subordinates.
How are we to distinguish serious history from self-serving puffery? It's a problem in all memoirs, and perhaps especially so in a country where pressures on the individual are as high as they were in the USSR. To survive Stalin's purges and make it to the top of the fleet required iron discipline and devotion to the Party.
I thought more highly of Chuikov's book, read shortly after this one.
I have read accounts of the Russian convoys over the North Cape by British sailors as well as MacLean's HMS Ulysses and other books and formed a negative opinion of the Soviet attitude to those who were risking their lives trying to help them in the war against Germany. I understand that the Russians believed that they were doing the vast majority of the bleeding and dying to win the war. But my impression was that the rank and file Russian soldiers, sailors, and airmen were not antagonistic to the western Allies. Rather it was men like Golovko, more attuned to the paranoia of Stalin and his killers in the NKVD, who made things hard for British sailors in the northern waters and American airmen landing on Russian airfields.
Did Golovko have a choice? Yes, I imagine he did. But the choice was not made in 1942. It would have been made in the 1920's or 30's when he committed himself to unquestioning Party discipline. Of course he was not alone in making that choice and those who chose otherwise, and even many of those who made the same choice, were purged from the top ranks. At any rate, that's the opinion of this armchair historian and dilletante who has no inside view of the reality of Golovko's situation.
Most of the Russian fighting in the north was in the form of submarine forays into the Baltic Sea, where they did a lot of damage to the Germans, especially late in the war. They did provide air cover for the Allied convoys coming to Murmansk, but only in the last leg of the voyages. To my knowledge, they never ventured out into the North Cape to help protect against German aircraft and U-boats. Whether that was because they didn't have the capability, or because they wouldn't use it, I don't know.
| Author | Graves, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1934 |
| Number of Pages | 427 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Historical fiction; Biographical fiction |
| Keywords | Roman Empire |
| When Read | February 1975 |
"From the autobiography of Tiberius Claudius born B.C. 10 murdered and deified A.D. 54." The "inside" story of the first three Roman Emperors by the fourth, Clau Clau Claudius, historian, stammerer, fluke inheritor of the throne.
A truly literary book. Although the approach is very much through personalities and gossipy material and larger issues are ignored (though not completely), Graves' style is superb. A very conscious and self-conscious understanding of just how language should be used for clarity, consistency, charm.
I don't remember how I found this book. I'm thinking that it was recommended to me by the old librarian in the Humanities Department whose name escapes me at the moment.
It was a great book. As historical fiction, I can't think of any work that produced such a convincing reproduction of language, behavior, and culture of an era so different from that of the writer. Most historical novels by American writers portray modern Americans but wearing togas and swords and spouting Latin epigrams. Reading them is a little like watching 1950's Hollywood epics featuring actors and actresses in 1950's hairstyles. Graves had a deep familiarity with Greek and Roman language, culture, and history and he convinces the reader that there really is a lot of ancient Rome in his book.
I watched the BBC TV series when it came out a year or so after I read this book, and I read the continuation of the book, Claudius the God and his Wife Messalina (q.v.) ten years later.
| Author | Chuikov, Vasili I. |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Silver, Harold |
| Publication | New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964 |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 364 |
| Extras | photos, maps |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Eastern front |
| When Read | March 1975 |
A very sound and critical history by the commander of the 62nd Army. It includes a history of the battle, explanations of tactics, the role of various individuals, honest appraisals of mistakes and cowardice, the role of the Party, women, citizens, and different branches of the service.
As in other military writings by communists the emphasis is on man over material. Courage, intelligence, experience, innovation, communist spirit, are the keys to success.
Chuikov comes across as a better student of history and military affairs than Golovko. He carefully addresses each important aspect of the events without being too involved in one or another.
A very instructive book, obviously written for the young Russian officer at least as much as for the general public. (Note: there is no mention of Stalin, much of Khrushchev.)
The 62nd Army was the unit of the Red Army that had been assigned to defend the city. Their job was hold some territory in the city at all costs, drawing more and more German troops into the city where they would eventually be cut off and surrounded. It was very much a do or die, or even do and die, operation in which thousands of troops were ferried across the Volga River into the meat grinder of the city.
My recollection is that Chuikov began his narrative in the summer of 1942. German troops were advancing over the plains between the Dnieper and the Volga, heading toward Stalingrad. C had been assigned to oppose them. He hadn't fought the Germans before but had heard about how competent and overpowering they were. He went to the front and studied the advancing enemy, looking at these advancing supermen to see their vaunted "perfect coordination of wheel and shell." He saw infantry, tanks, artillery, and aircraft all working in a coordinated manner, pounding the Red Army opposition and advancing steadily. But he didn't see any supermen. He was convinced that he and his men could fight these invaders with coordinated tactics of their own. He continued his army's fighting withdrawal, giving ground but never panicking, never caving in, and gradually stiffening the opposition as they reached the outskirts, and then the center, and finally the last ground by the riverbank in the city of Stalingrad. Despite attack after attack with tremendous poundings from artillery, aircraft, tanks, and superior numbers of infantry, his men held on and fought for each inch of ground, sometimes with Germans holding one floor of a building and Russians on another, both sides fighting to the death.
Chuikov and his men held enough of the city that the encirclement worked and a great defeat was inflicted on the Wehrmacht. They continued fighting straight through to 1945 and Chuikov and the 62nd Army were in at the final battle in Berlin.
| Author | Singer, Loren |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 228 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | Sailing |
| When Read | April 1975 |
A bored, middle-aged lawyer whose only love is yachting allows the CIA to use his participation in a yacht race as cover for a sabotage attack on a radical Caribbean country. In return he gets the money to overhaul his boat and enter the big race.
Political issues are present but ignored. Criticism of the sell out of principle never gets to the stage of discussing those principles. Instead Singer gives us liberal skepticism, disenchantment with life, and individualism capable of finding some companionship but little else. Nevertheless the book does not lack some measure of penetration into personal motivation and of intellectual integrity.
Good technical sea/sailing narrative.
| Author | Ginnott, Haim G. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Avon Books, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 252 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | April 1975 |
Ginott, Professor of Psychology, discusses how parents can treat children with love and respect. Understanding, concern, interest in, receptiveness to, etc., are what is required.
Undoubtedly the correct approach.
Robin would have been two years old when I read this. I wanted to be a good parent. I thought that both my parents and Marcia's parents were excellent parents. We were lucky. Marcia and I tried hard to be excellent parents too and I like to think that we succeeded. I know that Robin and Jim are excellent parents for our grandchildren. I think we've had a good family from the point of view of child rearing.
In reviewing these notes again it occurred to me that Marcia and I saw Haim Ginnot (born Hiam G. Ginzburg) on television on the Johnny Carson show. He told a wonderful story of a visit to an Eskimo village in Alaska where he gave a child a little toy flute. The other children all clamored for flutes as well. He explained that he only had the one but they weren't satisfied. So he individually addressed each child and said in a most sincere voice, "I WISH I could give you a flute." He said each child wanted him to say that and was satisfied with the attention he received. He was a lovely man with a deep understanding of children and I'm sure that it was the memory of that TV show that prompted me to borrow the book when I saw it in the library. He died, at age 51, the year before I read the book.
| Author | Perfilyev, Marat Nikolaevich |
|---|---|
| Editor | Mankovsky, B.S. |
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Bratov, A. |
| Publication | Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971? |
| Number of Pages | 207 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | April 1975 |
A fairly effective polemic in many respects. P relies heavily on sociological statistics and survey results to refute bourgeois claims about the anti-democratic character of Soviet legislatures, Party and Komsomol organizations, trade unions, etc. He cites very encouraging survey results on the moral character and aspirations of youth. There is also some theoretical discussion of the meaning of one party democracy, democratic centralism, the withering of the state, and some circumspect discussion of Stalinism.
The principal defect was the failure to analyze, in concrete detail and with concrete examples drawn from life, the course of some actual decisions and ideological struggles.
The Communist Party of the USA still operated a little bookstore about two blocks away from the Pratt Library where I worked at that time in downtown Baltimore. I occasionally went over there on my lunch hour to browse their selections. I think that's where I found and bought this as a cheap paperback book.
When I read the book I took it seriously. It was a counter to the stories I read in American books and newspapers about the anti-democratic character of the USSR. I don't take it as seriously anymore. I don't have a lot of confidence in the "sociological statistics" or the "survey" data on which the positive claims are based. I've read too much since then.
There was no copyright date in the book and not even a full author's name, just a last name and first initial. A Google search turned up a bibliographic record from the National Library of Australia that furnished the full name and the names of the editor and translator. However even with the author's full name I could not find anything about him on the Internet other than that he wrote this book.
As I get older it seems that I know less and less or, more accurately, I am less and less confident that what I think I know is objectively true. I don't think that I should completely repudiate Perfilyev. He was a political writer with a dominating ideological outlook that probably limited his ability to appreciate views that were outside Marxist ideology, and a position in the world that certainly must have limited his ability to criticize his own Party and government. But he was no Nazi. His political ideology would have included a concern for the common man, a rejection of racism and nationalism, and a belief in equality among humans. I think books like his should not just be tossed out as biased and therefore false. If he's still alive and active, I'd love to meet him today and ask him about all of these issues.
Incredibly, I just now discovered that someone has scanned this book and the full text is available online (https://ia800406.us.archive.org). Looking at it anew I see that it was not at all like a western political treatise. In addition to, or in spite of, whatever it has to say about its subject, its style tells us a lot about the nature of scholarship in the USSR in 1970.
| Author | Achebe, Chinua |
|---|---|
| Publication | Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett Publications |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Nigeria |
| When Read | April 1975 |
A story of Ibo village life in turn of the century Nigeria. Okonkwo, strong man and brave warrior of the village, rebels against the coming of the whites and ends up committing suicide.
A fascinating inside portrait of primitive life. 2/3 of the book sets the stage, describing with sympathy, dispassionate accuracy, and beauty, the simple charm of the barbarian village, and the ignorance, superstition, and horror of it. One or two white missionaries and governors and their native soldiers and adherents easily undermine and overthrow the whole culture and social organization. Okonkwo tries to rouse his clansmen to resistance but is forced into individual action, humiliation, despair, and suicide.
Achebe makes very real the inferiority of the barbarian social organization in the face of even the dregs of Imperialism.
I read the book again forty years later in April, 2015 with the NCI book group. My notes on the second reading accord with these and add more.
| Author | Macauley, Neill |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 319 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Nicaragua |
| When Read | April 1975 |
A professor of history and former soldier with Castro who "broke with the Cuban revolutionary government over the issue of communism, which I could never accept", writes of the Nicaraguan guerrilla war of 1927-33. He combines an astute understanding of military tactics with a casual disinterest in politics to produce a book that grasps the mechanics while missing the dynamics of revolutionary war. There is not a word about the interests of the Nicaraguan masses.
Sandino emerges as a muddleheaded idealist dreamer with a populist and nationalist base, but no program Still, he was a great patriot. Personal messianism and the combination of circumstances brought him to the fore.
The old antagonists still live in Nicaragua and throughout Latin America and Sandinismo is still a powerful force.
I don't remember how I found and why I read this book. The Sandinistas of the FSLN did not depose Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza until 1979, four years after I read this, and the "Iran/Contra" affair had not yet started and been exposed. I was probably just following up on my interest in the Cuban revolution and the politics of Latin America. Certainly there were lots of other Latin American events, from the coup against Joao Goulart in Brazil in 1964 (before my radicalization), to the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 (by which time I was quite radicalized by the Vietnam War.)
| Author | Carter, Rubin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 339 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | April 1975 |
The autobiography of the prize fighter who spent most of his life in jail from age 11 on, almost always on phony frame up charges.
The cause of his misery is racism, lack of understanding of the forces controlling his life, and his own personal "hurricane" driving him into furious and devastating attacks on those who wrong him.
The story is monstrous and my heart goes out to him. At the same time though I find it too foreign and strange to truly understand what it's like to be like him or to know what I can learn from him.
As I recall, when Carter was six year old he went down to the basement of his house and found an older neighborhood kid stealing coal from their bin. He attacked the boy and discovered his true calling. He liked fighting and beating people up. It was a calling that got him in a ton of trouble, starting at age 11 when he was sent to reform school, and where he was delighted to be confronted by the school bully who had organized all the tough kids to rule the school. Carter "cocked him a Sunday", a "sneak punch" as he described it, knocked the kid out, and proceeded to deal with the rest when they got mad.
He spent time in the army, where he had a momentous fight with a drill instructor who he said was the toughest guy he ever fought. He got out and became a professional fighter, eventually becoming a contender for the middleweight championship.
He and another guy were accused of murdering three men in a bar. Did they do it? He and the other guy said no and gave a lot of reasons why the charge was bogus. The police produced two witnesses who said Carter and the other guy were the killers. There was a second trial that also convicted him and a third at which the state dropped the charges. He had spent 19 years in prison.
I'm not in a position to say whether or not he was guilty. I just did a little research. The Wikipedia article about Carter draws no conclusions but brings out evidence on both sides. Clicking on another link led me to a "Daily Stormer" (the leading Neo-Nazi website in the U.S., if not the world) article that argued quite articulately and persuasively, that Carter was guilty. Of course the Stormer article omitted references to the evidence on Carter's side. It said that Carter was guilty and it was only because of his anti-white Jewish supporters that he was eventually released.
I think my comment from 1975 still applies. Carter was a difficult, dangerous man, but an interesting one.
| Author | Zola, Emile |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Lindsay, Ann |
| Publication | London: Elek Books, 1954 |
| Copyright Date | 1886 |
| Number of Pages | 430 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | France |
| When Read | April 1975 |
An old peasant, Fouan, divides his land among his three children and lives in turn with each, but suffers at each of their hands and is finally murdered by one of his sons and the son's wife. Jean Macquart (a member of the family appearing throughout the 20 novel Rougon-Macquart series of novels), a decent farm laborer, is entangled in the sordid village life and finally defeated by it.
The novel is a powerful, realist portrayal of the greed, idiocy, sordidness, and frustration of rural life. There is a fine sensitivity to the deep instincts bred into each class of villager, from peasant to bourgeois farmer, and a good sense of the material and historical bases of the village.
All in all an important masterpiece. Zola rips away all the sentimental tripe with which the 19th century French bourgeois society invested its view of the countryside.
My recollection of this novel is that, in the beginning, we see what appears on the surface to be a loving family headed by an elderly farmer who cares for his children. To help them out, he divides his land among them, establishing each with an independent homestead. Instead of his supporting them, he gives them the means to support themselves and intends for them to support him. It all seems like the kind of family concern that we assume will work out well for everyone.
Gradually however, the minor strains of family life expose deeper strains and a deeper selfishness that underlies the surface family love. Old Fouan moves in with his daughter and son-in-law but finds himself resented. He moves in with a ne-er do well son and is unhappy there. Finally he moves to his second son and daughter-in-law - who turn out to be a real pair of criminals who ultimately murder him (and for other reasons, Jean Macquart's wife too.)
In the end, as often happens in Zola's novels, we are sickened by the whole story. If we had illusions about rural life, they are crushed.
If I remember correctly there is a scene in this novel in which a pair of farm animals (cattle? pigs? horses? I don't remember) are having sex in front of a young girl whose responsibility is to see that they are fed. The scene was shocking to the Victorian sensibilities of the time and, I seem to recall, got the book banned in the United Kingdom.
| Author | Meltzer, Milton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 279 |
| Extras | illustrations, songs |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Mexican War; Young adult |
| When Read | April 1975 |
A young adult history of the Mexican War with illustrations, songs, etc., of the period.
Meltzer has produced one of his usual biting, anti-racist, pro-labor, muckraking histories with a simple, straightforward style and myth debunking content. The major weakness is in deep analysis of causes.
Most of Meltzer's 100+ books were written for children or young adults. They were easy to read but very adult, I think, in their focus on teaching tolerance and sympathy for the oppressed and bringing out aspects of history that were not well covered by other popular histories. I think it's notable that this and at least some others of his books were published by Alfred A. Knopf, a publisher noted for only accepting high quality material. Other books I read in 1975 published by Knopf including works by Thomas Mann and Emile Zola.
| Author | Nordhoff, Charles |
|---|---|
| Author | Hall, Norman |
| Publication | Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1960 |
| Copyright Date | 1932 |
| Number of Pages | 379 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval |
| When Read | April 1975 |
[No abstract]
Nordhoff and Hall have an unselfconsciously elitist outlook that must have fitted nicely with that of the turn of the 19th century naval officer. Money, command, privilege, and the now easily seen to be idiotic concepts of chivalry, honor, and chauvinism came as easily to N and H as to the people they represent in the novel.
They portray the mutiny as justified but nevertheless unjustifiable. The psychological portrayals of all characters are realistic in some respects but in the last analysis, unsympathetic and amoral by any proletarian standard.
I don't think I meant to say that chivalry and honor are idiotic concepts, rather that Nordhoff and Hall's version of those concepts was idiotic. However I would now say that "idiotic" is not the right term. Our concepts of morality evolve with our changing society. The versions of morality that N and H subscribed to were different from what many, though not all of us, would subscribe to many years later. I'm sure that many ideas that seem reasonable to me now will be deemed to be wrong, and perhaps even idiotic, fifty or one hundred years from now.
According to the Wikipedia, the relative guilt of William Bligh and Fletcher Christian is in dispute at this time and it is not clear whether the mutineers were justified in their mutiny. It's hard for me to imagine that Royal Navy sailors in 1789, knowing the severity of condemnation and punishment for mutiny, would have mutinied without some good cause. And it's not hard to imagine that some good cause was present - given the well known history of horrific oppression of the sailors in those days and the general mutinies affecting several dozen ships just eight years later in 1797. Still, if the facts are in doubt, as they appear to be, I am obligated to reserve judgment.
The edition of this book that I read was marked as the 51st printing! The book is still in print in both hardback and paperback as well as electronic editions.
| Author | Norris, Frank |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, Inc., 1971 |
| Copyright Date | 1900 |
| Number of Pages | 458 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 1975 |
A very movingly told story, in epic style, of the struggle between ranchers and railroads in California - ending in the total degradation and destruction of the ranchers.
The story includes the full gamut of social and economic reportage plus a good first hand account of the early machine age in agriculture. It is all very strongly motivated by Zola.
Norris' perception is acute but his own stance is always vacillating and unsure of itself. He makes many retreats into the ambivalence and Hamletesque incapacitation of Presley the poet protagonist, the mysticism of Vanamee the shepherd, and the pantheism of growing wheat. In his last scene he resigns himself to all evil and says that it is the wheat, and not the struggle which produced it, that is of final importance. Given his experience of disaster plus lack of ideology, no other resolution is possible for him.
In my experience, the term "rancher" meant an operator of a cattle ranch. However in this time and place it referred to wheat farmers who farmed land leased from the railroad. The story is about a railroad that went to sell the land at prices above the original values, taking into account the improvements made by the farmers. The farmers did the work and spent the money to improve the land. The railroad / landlord aimed to appropriate all of that value.
When I grew up I was taught that the era of the "robber barons" ended in the 20th century, in part as a result of a rising consciousness of the American people brought about by the "muckrakers", journalists and writers like Norris who exposed the ways in which the rich and powerful exploited the weaker elements in American society. We need people like Norris today.
| Author | Medvedev, Roy A. |
|---|---|
| Editor | Joravsky, David |
| Editor | Haupt, Georges |
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Taylor, Colleen |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 566 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | May 1975 |
A comprehensive analysis of Stalinism concentrating on Stalin's violations of legality in wholesale arrests, tortures, and executions of innocent people. The documentation is overwhelming. The point of view is Marxist. Liberal errors are present but minor. M gives very useful explanations. The mixture of great uplift of the masses with suppression and degradation of the Party helped to stifle resistance. Party members felt helpless without upper Party leaders to appeal to for redress, and felt fatalistic about their own roles. Believing in the basic course of the Party and unwilling to give support to imperialism or the class enemies at home, they were unable to take a stand against Stalin. To resist would be to undermine socialism. Hence paralysis.
Stalin is made out to be cruel, antisemitic, power hungry, and completely lacking in deep communist convictions.
A very important book. It argues convincingly that the question of Stalinism is the principal contradiction of Eastern Europe.
This was a ground breaking book. Stalinism had been attacked in the West by both anti-socialist and pro-socialist writers. But I don't think that it had ever been attacked in an open publication from within the East Bloc. It was one thing for Khrushchev to address a closed meeting of the Communist Party Congress in what became known as his "secret speech". It was something very different for a book to be written and published (admittedly in the West) by an ordinary Soviet citizen scholar still living in the USSR. Medvedev was expelled from the Communist Party in 1969, but was readmitted to it and became an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev. As of this writing, Roy Medvedev and his twin brother Zhores are still both alive at age 91. Roy still lives in Russia.
| Author | Vargas Llosa, Mario |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Kemp, Lysander |
| Publication | New York: Grove Press, 1966 |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 409 |
| Genres | Fiction; Experimental fiction |
| Keywords | Peru |
| When Read | May 1975 |
An impressive first novel by a 26 year old Peruvian, it is about the Leoncio Prado military school and several disaffected students there. Alberto "the Poet" who seems the sensitive soul and "Jaguar", the boy who terrorizes everyone, are each revealed to be much more complex than appears. Hero becomes anti-hero and vice versa as all the absurd hypocrisy and childishness of the military school are revealed.
The story is well developed and the style exceptionally sophisticated. Much stream of consciousness, rapid time change, and a revelation at the end as an anonymous character - always presumed to be Alberto (by me anyway) is revealed as the Jaguar.
Vargas Llosa wrote a series of three books, each more complex and experimental in style than the last. The Time of the Hero was followed by The Green House and then Conversation in the Cathedral. I wondered if the last named book achieved everything that he wanted to achieve in his experiments and left him with no more experiments to do. His later books were all written in more conventional prose, though they were hardly ordinary books and did not lack for innovation.
Over the course of this book I assumed that Alberto was the intellectual who commented on the story and the Jaguar was an elemental young man whose passions were unrestrained and who dominated others. At the end we discover that it is the Jaguar who has been giving us the intellectual account of the story. Selfishness and dishonesty came from the Poet, not from the boy who appeared to be the wild animal. That this worked is a testament to VL's ability to weave complex threads through the story that still made perfect sense under the revelation and reinterpretation.
Like his other early works, this was not an easy book to read, but also like the others, the effort was rewarded. I was impressed enough to want to go on to read Conversation.
The Spanish title of this book is La ciudad y los perros, "The city and the dogs."
| Author | Zola, Emile |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Ellis, Havelock |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948 |
| Copyright Date | 1884 |
| Number of Pages | 472 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | France |
| When Read | May 1975 |
One of the earliest novels of proletarian class struggle. Etienne, former engine driver, finds work in the coal mines and lives with the Maheus. He becomes a leader of a four month strike, finally ending in failure and mine disaster. He emerges as a hardened and ambitious revolutionary.
Zola's insights are savagely honest and his investigations are sufficient to give convincing pictures of lower class family life and life in the mines. The novel is jam packed with action, striking images (e.g., the horse in the mine), senseless violence, and mindless sex.
As always in Zola, people's motives are mixed and impure. Revolutionary zeal is inseparably combined with personal ambition, conscious analysis with blind rage and revenge. Zola writes from the standpoint of the petty bourgeois revolutionary. He correctly locates the source of the rottenness he finds in the proletariat and he ruthlessly exposes the hypocrisy, selfishness, and small mindedness of the bourgeoisie. But he does not have the profound sympathy for man found in Gorky.
Zola has been described as the creator of social realism, the description of society as it really is, not as we hope or imagine it to be. Each of his books addresses a different aspect of French society as he found it. This is the only one I've read that was about an industrial working class, and it was a real eye opener for the people of that day and for our day too. Where Gorky was passionate, sympathetic, and perhaps romantic, Zola was dispassionate, analytic, and ruthless in his realism.
| Author | Han Suyin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 126 |
| Extras | Bound in Two Loves |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1975 |
A French planter, his wife, his doctor, and a Cambodian woman and her poet son meet in the house of a Cambodian "astrologer" to dig out the truth about Sylvie / Devi / Moen, the planter's sister.
There is no action, only a working out of past hatreds, loves, and recriminations - much like an Albee play.
[No comment]
| Author | Mann, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Trask, Willard R. |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 141 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1975 |
A story of a 50 year old refined German widow, psychologically depressed by the onset of menopause, who falls in love with a handsome 24 year old American. Her life, and that of her 29 year old spinster daughter, are delicately balanced and rationalized. They must find a way to come to terms with this unlooked for and irrational passion.
Mann handles his characters so delicately and makes them so civilized and refined that the actual working out of the love affair, even in the restrained form it takes, is a real shock.
In a world of jaded aesthetic responses and overdone commercial art, Mann's writing awakens the sensibilities. The Black Swan is in a world of its own.
Reading my comment written so many years ago makes me think about Death in Venice. That was another book about an unconventional and socially unacceptable passion that was cloaked in a veneer of civilized conventionality. So too, Doctor Faustus had the story of a passion of a man for a boy, written in conventional and polite language. Mann was no stranger to delicate treatment of suppressed, unconventional passion.
| Author | Gorky, Maxim |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Wettlin, Margaret |
| Publication | New York: Collier Books, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1907 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Extras | Forward by Avrahm Yarmolinsky |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | June 1975 |
[No abstract]
Gorky must be the first author to truly write from the working class point of view. His characters are not intellectuals in workers clothes, but actual working people (of course there are intellectuals too.) Yet these people do not suffer by comparison to anyone. They are upright, honest, creative, courageous, deeply decent people. And capable of very deep understanding based on both study and practice.
The story of Pavel and Pelagea Nilovna Vlassov is an inspiring one. It is a story of awakening consciousness leading always to revolutionary action. There is no posing, no debilitating fatalism, no alienated aloofness. The heroes and heroines are committed to doing something and standing up to events.
An able beginning to the proletarian movement in literature. The classic of revolution.
Clearly, I was primed and ready to read and appreciate this novel. However, looking back on it, I won't say that I was wrong in thinking that Gorky's book represented a new approach in literature. There were certainly books about working class people before Mother. Zola, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and many others wrote sympathetically about them, but I think there was always a sense that the writer and the reader were not a part of them. We could like and sympathize with Huckleberry Finn, but could we take him seriously as a person, as a friend? I think Gorky really did bring a new attitude to working class people in his writing. However, see also my comments on Zola's Germinal.
| Author | Sakai, Saburo |
|---|---|
| Author | Caidin, Martin |
| Author | Saito, Fred |
| Publication | New York: Ballantine, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1957 |
| Number of Pages | 270 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | June 1975 |
These are the war memoirs of Japan's greatest fighter ace to survive the war.
Sakai reveals, quite unconsciously, the ridiculous social relations of prewar Japan. "Face" is everything. To people above, one behaves with abject groveling humility, to those below with arrogant bullying contempt.
After hearing all the American legends of aerial invincibility in the Pacific, it is rather surprising to learn that there were a half dozen or more Japanese pilots with over 50 kills each.
The general picture presented is one of a highly polished air force without much manpower, material, or technological reserves against an exact opposite force which grows stronger and more capable each minute. No matter how smart they were, the Japanese kept getting smashed by ever stronger and better handled forces.
This book attracted a great many American readers. It opened a window into the previously opaque world of the Japanese armed forces, in this case, the air arm of the Imperial Navy. Before the war, Japanese navy pilots received long and very strict training. They were an elite force. Not long after war began with the U.S., everything changed. The new requirement for planes and pilots far exceeded the Japanese capability to supply them. Without enough training planes, fuel, or instructors, the new pilots were sent into combat with far less preparation than men like Sakai had had, and far less than the Americans. As I recall, Japanese pilots were being sent into combat after as little as 30 hours of training in the air, fighting against Americans with 600 hours.
Sakai shot down dozens of planes, mostly American, Australian and some Dutch. He suffered some horrific injuries, including the loss of an eye, having to navigate and fly four hours over water with one eye, tremendous pain, and blood streaming down his face, in order to make it back to his island airbase. It was a year before he got back into combat, by which time the air war had been decided and Sakai fought on, with one eye, against overwhelming odds, until the end of the war.
It seems to have been the nature of air war on all sides that a small number of extraordinary pilots accounted for a large number of their side's victories. That was especially so on the German and Japanese sides (and perhaps also among the Russians earlier in the war) because, heavily outnumbered, their best pilots accumulated huge amounts of vital combat experience while their average pilots got shot down. No American pilots ran up as many victories as the others because they were rotated in and out of combat, a luxury the other countries didn't have, and they often flew without meeting any enemy planes, while their opponents met American planes on most of their flights.
| Author | Meeropol, Robert |
|---|---|
| Author | Meeropol, Michael |
| Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 419 |
| Extras | notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography; History; Politics |
| When Read | July 1975 |
The book begins with a collection of letters by the Rosenbergs, selected and with commentary by Michael, the older son of the Rosenbergs. The R's come through as highly educated, altruistic, politically conscious people. Their letters are fine documents in both deep political understanding and great humanity.
Robert's section on his own political development is interesting and honest, though not as disciplined as Michael's work.
The final section by Michael is a surprisingly well sustained attempt to persuade the liberal readers of the book to see both the Rosenberg case and the general American situation in radical terms. Michael's work is admirably disciplined. There is a review of left analysis done without rhetoric and phrase mongering - much in the spirit of the Rosenbergs themselves, though openly socialist in accordance with Michael's position that independent left activity is essential.
Michael and Robert were aged 7 and 3 when their parents were arrested. They grew up believing that Julius and Ethel were innocent and were framed by the government. In the 1960s, they began working to exonerate their parents and I recall receiving letters over a period of some years from the organization they created to re-open the case. It was a cause celebre of the left and I, of course, supported them.
The consensus today, based especially on information from formerly closed files in Russia, seems to be that they were guilty, or at least Julius was, but that they did not receive fair trials and were convicted of, and punished for, crimes that went beyond what they actually did.
The boys grew up in an environment that was quite different from that of most other people. They remain active today in progressive causes and in efforts to publish what they believe to be the truth about their parents.
| Author | Werner, Herbert A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 329 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II; Submarines |
| When Read | July 1975 |
A personal account by a U-boat captain. He gives much dramatic information on the submarine service. Most of Werner's service was during the period of Anglo-American supremacy at sea in which 8 out of 10 boats were destroyed before they could complete a single mission.
Werner is much like Rudel and Saburo Sakai in his self-confidence born of high training, ability, and experience, and in his complete arrogance and elitism. His personal qualities make him the perfect Nazi militarist in spite of his own disdain for politics. He fought for "honor", glory, country, and the personal satisfaction of command, the hunt, and the kill. Believing in the possibility of German victory right up to March 1945, he planned a U-boat escape to Argentina, then actually escaped his internment in a French prison after the war. Today he lives in the U.S.
The Wikipedia has a long article about this book, recapping each of the boats and patrols in which Werner served. It also notes that a number of experts who have read the book claim that it contains a lot of fiction and/or stories of other U-boats that Werner appropriated as his own. I knew nothing about any of that controversy when I read it.
This was probably the first book I read by a German submariner. Whether or not all the incidents described really happened, or really happened to Werner and not someone else, I learned a fair amount about what it must have been like to serve in a German submarine. If I remember correctly, the Germans faced continually worsening odds but kept believing that new weapons in the works would restore their supremacy at sea. These weapons, as I recall them, were the schnorchel that enabled them to stay submerged all the time running on diesels instead of batteries, the acoustic homing torpedo that could hit an allied ship from a good distance without the tricky problem of aiming, and the new Type 23 boats designed for high underwater speed. But of course the Allies also kept developing new anti-submarine weapons and tactics and the Germans were never able to recover.
I believe that it was in this book that I read an account of Werner in command of a sub with a new, inexperienced executive officer whom he kept browbeating because of his mistakes. It was not an attractive picture of the officer or of Werner.
Werner came to the United States in 1957 and became an American citizen. I listed no translator for this book and suspect he wrote it in English. He died in 2013 at the age of 92.
| Author | Tolstoy, Alexey |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Shebunina, Tatiana |
| Publication | New York: MacMillan, 1959 |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 768 |
| Genres | Fiction; Biographical fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | July 1975 |
A fictionalized biography of Peter the Great up to the capture of Narva in the Swedish wars. The book appears not to have been finished.
Peter is presented as progressive, at first slavishly subservient to European culture. He advances the monarchy and the merchants, creates an effective army, and draws men of ability from Russia and Europe regardless of their birth. for the peasantry it is just more taxes, more wars, and more exploitation.
Tolstoy died of cancer in 1945. This book was published posthumously in 1946.
The parallels between Peter and Stalin are never explicit, but they are clear. Tolstoy treats the work as purely historical and dispassionate, but it speaks somewhat to the conditions of the USSR in the 30's and 40's.
It is surprising that class relationships and the working class point of view are not stressed beyond what is ncessary to prevent a distorted picture of Peter. There is no truly peasant or proletarian protagonist in the novel.
In my imagination, the Russians who most strongly supported Stalin believed that he was a strong leader. Ruthlessness was an acceptable characteristic for a strong leader. No one else, they thought, could have industrialized Russia, organized all the people to sacrifice themselves to build the economy and repel the Nazis, and won the war. I can easily imagine such people would also have admired Peter the First.
Tolstoy was a distant relative of the great writer Leo Tolstoy. He had a complicated national life. Born in 1883 in Tsarist Russia, he joined the White Guards in the Civil War and fled to Paris and later Berlin. However, partly under the influence of prominent pro-Soviet writers and artists like Gorky and Mayakovsky, he changed his mind about the revolution and also felt a strong longing to live in Russia again. He returned and led a successful life as a Soviet writer.
I was reading a lot of Russian and Soviet literature at the time and, additionally, was intrigued by the author's name. I was unable to find out anything significant about him but I did like the book. It was not as great as the works of his famous relative, but it was a congenial subject for me.
| Author | Bulgakov, Mikhail |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Glenny, Michael |
| Publication | New York: McGraw Hill, 1971 |
| Copyright Date | 1924 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Extras | Epilogue by Victor Nekrasov |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | July 1975 |
The Turbin family, two brothers and a sister, watch their petty bourgeois lives collapse in the revolution in Kiev. They futilely join the White Guards out of ignorance of politics and disdain for the rabble, but are betrayed by the Germans and their puppet Ukraine government in which just about all of the officials and White officers care only for their own skins.
Bulgakov moves easily from personal introspection by a character to straight narrative, to snatches of dialogue in a crowd, to sweeping description of subjective moods in a whole city. A powerful writer with a gift of great clarity and a penchant for the dream life of his characters.
I remember thinking that Bulgakov wrote sparkling prose. It was clear, clean, lucid, a joy to read. Perhaps translator Michael Glenny deserves some credit for this. I went on to read two other books by Bulgakov but never got around to his magnum opus, The Master and Margarita. But I do plan to read that this year.
Bulgakov created a stage play, The Day of the Turbins from this novel. It was panned by the Soviet critics but then Stalin went to the theater and announced that he liked the play. The critics all quickly fell over each other in their rush to praise the play.
| Author | Jacobs, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 155 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Israel |
| When Read | July 1975 |
Jacobs is an old independent socialist, Jewish to the extent of feeling an affinity for other Jews and for the state of Israel. Working for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in 1969, he attempted to arrange a meeting between Zionist Israeli and Palestinian left individuals to find common ground. He hoped that leftists of both sides would have enough common ground in socialism, internationalism, and humanism. A conference of sorts eventually did take place. What emerged was an absolute commitment by all Israelis to a Zionist state, and an absolute rejection of this by all Arabs. The Arab left commitment to Jewish cultural autonomy and Jewish national rights in Palestine was insufficient for the Israelis.
Jewish fear of genocide was not unfounded, nor were Arab fears of Zionist imperialism. The leftists of both sides were irreconcilable. The great mass in the middle on each side were so much more so. Misunderstanding and lack of concern for each other were rife. No solution is in sight.
This book was particularly discouraging. It called to mind the situation of the Second International in 1914. The labor organizations of Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia were all committed to international workers' solidarity, or thought they were. But when the war started each national group went home to its own country and supported the war against all others. Only very small groups, like Lenin's, insisted on resistance to the war.
I think that very few Jews were willing to admit to their Jewish friends and neighbors that they had doubts about the Zionist project of Jewish nationalism. Even fewer Arabs, were willing to say that Jewish nationalism had any legitimacy whatsoever. Identity politics trumps ideological politics. The problem remains intractable. If I were either an Israeli or a Palestinian I would seriously consider emigrating to Europe or America.
I read this book as part of my self-education for work with the American Friends Service Committee on Peace in the Middle East.
| Author | London, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: MacMillan Co., 1957 |
| Copyright Date | 1908 |
| Number of Pages | 381 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 1975 |
Martin Eden, an ignorant sailor of 21 with a powerful mind and body is exposed to an upper class family with wealth, refinement, beauty, and culture. He resolves to improve and make something of himself. He eventually becomes a writer, frenziedly working himself to the top, only to be equally unhappy with the life there. He commits suicide.
London is very impressive here on a number of levels. The social realism in depicting both classes is excellent. L is not romantic about working class life while still scathingly denouncing bourgeois hollowness and hypocrisy. Eden's intellectual awakening is most impressive as he builds a coherent and integrated world view.
In one passage, one of London's characters sums up Eden's defeat which will lead to suicide. He is not socially committed. He has no higher value beyond himself and his intellectualism. London's own position between the poles of individualism and socialism is ambiguous.
I liked a lot of London's books but this is the one that I thought was his best. It is considered to be a highly autobiographical novel. The journey of Martin Eden from working class roustabout to intellectual is one that London himself made - working in all sorts of jobs but angling to get an education. Like Eden, London was also physically very strong and tough. I picture him as like my father in that regard, also a very tough and intelligent man who had little education.
Jack London was an atheist, a socialist, an accumulator of 15,000 books, and he looked like my father. How could I not like the man?
Marcia and I are watching an Italian movie production of London's book. Made in 2019, it takes place in Italy instead of the United States and it presents an ambiguous time period that is clearly later than the 1908 date of publication or the even earlier period in which the story takes place. It is, of course, impossible to render a 381 page story in a two hour movie, and I found the leading actor to look less like London than my father looked, but it was still interesting and engaging. London was an interesting character. The movie seemed to me to try to honor the intent of London's novel.
| Author | Canaway, W.H. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Indianapolis, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 189 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 1975 |
A young British unemployed poet, living in Southern California, goes off on a raft to cross the Pacific. He lands on an island inhabited by an old Japanese soldier who thinks he is dead and in hell. Sustained by a mystical relationship to a beautiful seashell, the two men create a new raft and make it to the Philippines. There they reject the money and fame they so eagerly sought.
This is a novel about a person adrift in every sense of the word. Canaway manages some good writing but does not succeed in either bringing his character ashore to a discovery of values, or in satisfactorily explaining the loss of purpose in the first place. The mystery of the shell and the friendship of the two men is not a sufficient solution to the problem posed in the novel.
Some novels strike me as having a clear purpose, perhaps a story that the author believes is important, or a theme or character that he wishes to explore. Others leave me confused as to what the author intended to do. This was one of the latter type. It doesn't necessarily mean that the author was confused. The confusion, or the failure to see the purpose in the novel, could be entirely in the reader's mind.
Nowadays I tend to be more charitable to authors and am more likely to see a novel that didn't appeal to me as as at least some kind of achievement. Similarly, when I was a young computer programmer I was disdainful of what I thought were poorly designed or written programs. As I got older, my tolerance increased and, if the programmer met the requirements and got his program working reliably, I gave him some credit for that even if it didn't work they way I would have wanted it to.
| Author | Caidin, Martin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Hawthorn Books, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 243 |
| Extras | illustrations, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Soviet Union |
| When Read | August 1975 |
The battle of Kursk in WWII by one of those military historians interested in the struggle and drama but basically indifferent to the issues involved.
He errs in placing more importance on Kursk than Stalingrad, and he accepts too much of the German psychological view of the Russian solider - i.e., a racist view. Nevertheless the book clearly shows the superiority of Russian leadership, industrial capacity, industrial design (in tanks and some aircraft), intelligence services (five generals and five other German officers were Russian agents) at this stage of the war.
I am aware of three strongly argued views of the turning point of the war. They are, respectively, the Russian victories at the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. I still lean mostly towards Stalingrad but I can understand why some historians might pick one of the others. I don't think anyone picks any of the battles fought by the British and Americans as decisive turning points. Most of the western victories were achieved after Stalingrad and involved smaller German armies.
Hitler, of course, was unable to recognize any of these battles as turning points. As the war progressed and the tide turned, he retreated into fantasy, apparently believing with his conscious mind that Germany was going to win, or at least defend itself, all the way into the spring of 1945.
One interesting fact that I learned about the battle of Kursk, though not from this book, was that, in a tank battle, and Kursk was the largest tank battle in history, the side moving forward loses fewer tanks, perhaps many fewer, than the side that is retreating. The reason is that tanks are rarely destroyed. They are disabled and their crews killed. When an army is moving forward, the maintenance men remove the burned and dismembered parts of bodies from the stopped tanks, clean out the blood and tissues, repair the tanks, and put them back in service. However the retreating side necessarily leaves its stopped tanks on the battlefield, where they may be repaired or completely destroyed by the advancing side, at their discretion. There is a book about this process, Death Traps by the American tank maintenance officer Belton Y. Cooper.
| Author | Broderick, Walter J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 370 |
| Extras | bibliography, index, photos, map |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | Columbia |
| When Read | August 1975 |
This is the story of the famous Colombian priest killed with the ELN (Army of National Liberation) in 1966. Told from a Marxist viewpoint with reliable history of the broadest outlines of Colombian politics. Broderick's analysis lacks any depth however and his accounts of obviously unknowable events together with only a shallow portrait of Torres all make for a very limited work.
Torres is most impressive. A true humanist with the intellectual and moral integrity to follow his convictions to the bitter end. Not much of a theoretician, he nevertheless was able to keep the essence of the situation always in sight. an inspiration to his peasant and worker followers.
This is a good example of the kind of book I rarely or never read anymore. One reason is that I don't work at the downtown library where books like this were readily available. Another is that my interests in history and politics have changed and I read different books instead. Also, with the Internet, there is much more access to information on subjects like this without needing to find books.
As of this writing, Broderick appears to still be alive, living in Colombia. He'll be 82 this year.
| Author | Sihanouk, Norodom |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Burchett, Wilfrid |
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Extras | illustrations, chronology |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Cambodia |
| When Read | August 1975 |
Sihanouk recounts the tireless efforts of the U.S. government, first to push Cambodia from its neutrality, then to overthrow Sihanouk. It includes much material on Sihanouk's political counterattacks, the coup, the subversion of the Cambodian economy, relations with Moscow and Peking, the character of the RGNUC, and the early stages of the guerrilla war.
Sihanouk displays great candor, honesty, patriotism, and moral courage. Despite his old fashioned Buddhist mentality, he is an admirable person and a great asset to the progressive forces of Cambodia and South East Asia.
Sihanouk was very popular with the Cambodian people but a thorn in the side of all of the powers. France, Japan (during WWII), France again, North Vietnam, the U.S., China, and the various factions inside Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge to Lon Nol and the generals, all attempted to use him. He bent for all of them but never quite broke for any of them. He kept Cambodia neutral and out of the wars, which was an amazing feat for a small country with no military strength and surrounded by warring powers. In some ways, he was the consummate "inscrutable oriental", getting what he wanted for his people but without offending anyone, at least not to the breaking point. He was much admired by many people around the world, including me. When I saw this book, I decided to read it and learn more.
Wilfrid Burchett was an Australian journalist and a communist. He was one of the few, if not the only, western (counting Australia as western) journalists who traveled with the Viet Cong in South Vietnam during the war. This book was narrated to Burchett by Sihanouk, presumably in China or North Korea, to which he fled after the American sponsored coup in 1970. I don't know what language Sihanouk and Burchett used to communicate with each other. It might have been Chinese. I guessed French because S would surely have learned it during the French occupation and it was also a common language for English speaking students to study in school.
"RGNUC" = Royal Government of the National Union of Kampuchea - an organization led by Sihanouk.
| Author | Johnson, Robert S. |
|---|---|
| Author | Caidin, Martin |
| Publication | New York: Rinehart and Company, 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 305 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | September 1975 |
An interesting contrast with the German, Japanese, and Russian memoirs. The Russians are fiercely committed, patriotic, and political. They see things in a large social historical context (not so much Golovko.) The Germans and Japanese are fiercely chauvinistic. The American is quite apolitical - absorbed only in the joy of flying and fighting. He never mentions the causes, purpose, or progress of the war. This must be partly due to the fact that the war never touches his own native soil. It is therefore a shock, and a reminder, when he methodically executes his most skillful German opponent parachuting from his crippled plane. The war is not a game.
Very good flying description in Caidin's smooth hand supporting Johnson's thoughts and words. The description of the training program is excellent.
Johnson began working after school at age 8, saving money that he used at age 12 to pay for flying lessons. He was one of those guys who grew up hoping and preparing for the actual life he led in the Army Air Force.
His first combat mission was in April of 1943, about as early as any American fighter missions flown from England. His last mission was in May of 1944, before the Normandy landings, which meant all of his flights in P-47 Thunderbolts were fighter missions, not ground attack missions. He was, for a time, the leading American ace in Europe.
There is a Wikipedia article about him that contains a considerable amount of information but, interestingly, does not appear to mention his execution of the German pilot in the parachute. I give him credit for having the honesty and courage to say what he did in his book.
Johnson had a long career as a test pilot and engineer after the war. Martin Caidin was a professional aviation and military writer who wrote a number of books on WWII. He also served as a writing assistant for Saburo Sakai, one of the leading Japanese aces to survive the war.
I see that I didn't explain Johnson's execution of the German pilot. Johnson had a very difficult dogfight with a highly capable German pilot. When he finally managed to severely damage the enemy plane, forcing its pilot to bailout, he thought about the consequences of the German surviving. The German was too good. If he survived he'd likely be back in the air, probably by the next day, shooting down Americans. If Johnson allowed him to live he would be responsible for the likely deaths of multiple American pilots. So he killed the defenseless enemy pilot.
I was shocked when I read the account. I had recently read Saburo Sakai's account told to Martin Caidin of his long battle with an American whom Sakai clearly admired as a courageous and highly skilled pilot. He could see that the American's plane was doomed and the pilot was seriously wounded and unable to keep up the fight. The American had given up aerobatic gyrations and counter attacks against the Japanese Zero from his inferior and damaged P-40 fighter. He flew straight and level. Surprised, Sakai flew up next to the P-40 and peered into the cockpit. The American waved to Sakai as he prepared to bailout. Sakai couldn't bring himself to execute the brave American. He waved back and watched the American make a successful landing on an American (I think) held island. If a Japanese, raised to believe in the racial and cultural superiority of his people, behaved like that, surely an American would and should too, or so I thought.
In the end however, I concluded that Johnson did the right thing. The lives of his comrades and the cause he was fighting for were more important than his personal honor. He was also right, and even courageous, to tell the truth in his memoir about the incident.
So what did that mean for my opinion of Sakai? Was he wrong to allow his American adversary to survive? The answer to that question that I arrived at was, No, Sakai did the right thing because Japan was fighting for the wrong reasons. I could congratulate a German soldier for deserting to the Allies and helping them win the war but condemn an American for deserting to the Germans and helping them. I could do that because, although I recognize that values are cultural, historical, and relative, there are also values that are objectively and independently valuable, or at least more objectively and independently valuable, than values that are more culturally determined. I wasn't 100% satisfied with that answer but, after my years of serious study of philosophy and ethics, I had already come to accept that ethical questions don't all have black or white answers.
| Author | Gaines, Steven S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 238 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Religion |
| When Read | September 1975 |
A biography of Marjoe Gortner, child evangelist, then carnival barker, shoe salesman, musician, once again evangelist, and then - the story isn't finished yet.
The book reveals the hucksterism of evangelism and the moral degeneracy it breeds in its showiest practitioners. Evangelism is absolutely inseparable, at least as Marjoe presents it, from ignorance, prejudice, idiocy, and reaction. It cannot be reformed.
Marjoe himself is an interesting character - a marvel of showmanship and talent. The book ends before Marjoe makes any real commitment to a better life, but he has at least repudiated the old one.
I read this book after seeing the movie of the same name. It was a fascinating movie in which Marjoe, playing himself, roused up the small town and rural evangelicals with his rousing technique, sucking money out of them. But by then he had some scruples and he actually tried to preach Christianity without exploitation, but with relatively little success. The preachers who put him on their stages, and the audiences too, wanted the old evangelical story spinner.
Marjoe was badly exploited as a child, mainly by his parents, who (and I don't remember him saying this in the book, though I might have forgotten) would punish him by mock drownings because they didn't want to put any bruises on him.
I have to admit that this book confirms every bias I have against evangelical Christianity. However, in this case, and in spite of my strong emotions regarding the idiocy and evil of this kind of religion, I don't think I'm wrong, and I think Marjoe's experience really does confirm my opinion.
| Author | Mann, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Lowe-Porter, H.T. |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934 |
| Number of Pages | 428 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Joseph |
| When Read | September 1975 |
Primarily the story of Jacob, son of Isaac, father of Joseph. Mann gives us a whole new picture of the meaning of myth, ego, time, change, etc., in ancient times. The spiritual man sees his own personality as extended from, and in a sense identical with, his namesake ancestors. His myths are not just legends of the past, but his own personal history, and the archetypes for his present and future life.
Each segment is incredibly rich. The introduction on time coulisse and beginnings, the mystical character of Joseph at the well, the experience at Beth El, the seven year wait, Rachel, Laban, Esau, and others, the tying together of Egyptian, Hebrew, Babylonian, and even Greek myth.
A true masterpiece.
I seem to recall that the introduction to this book was 57 pages long (though I may be misremembering the length.) It began at an oasis in the desert in the ancient middle east. A man was there, Jacob. Mann begins to tell us about this man, about what he was like and about how he differed from those whom we know today, about his own perception of himself and his past. By the end of the chapter we are no longer sitting in our chairs in the present. We are at the oasis. We feel the desert wind. We have left the present behind and are back in the past. I don't think I've ever read anything else like it.
With a title of "Joseph and his Brothers", I expected the story to be about Joseph, but it was not. It was about Jacob, the father of Joseph. Mann takes us through the struggle with Esau and, especially, with his father-in-law and his beloved Rachel.
I went on to read the rest of the volumes of the Joseph story. They constitute a remarkable novel.
| Author | Barthes, Roland |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Lavers, Annette; Smith, Colin |
| Publication | New York: Hill and Wang, 1967 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 88 |
| Extras | Preface by Susan Sontag |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Literature |
| When Read | September 1975 |
Barthes concentrates on the development of literary style and especially the consciousness of competing styles and stylism in the course of the development of classes in society. Style becomes a problem after 1848 when the bourgeois writer ceases to be able to blithely present his ideas without regard for the contradictions and limitations of bourgeois society. Craftsmanship arises - petit bourgeois concern for "literariness" in literature, i.e., a stylistic announcement that THIS is art. And literature comes to an impasse of having its content subordinated to its conventions of literariness. - the solution to which is blank writing, white writing, writing degree zero, writing without style - exemplified (according to Barthes) in Camus.
An early book, very difficult and often confused. Without J.B.'s interpretation I would not have understood this much.
"J.B." would have been John Blegen, another librarian at Pratt, but one with a PhD in French literature. He's the fellow who introduced me to Barthes and a number of other important writers.
Here are two quotes from Wikipedia articles on "structuralism" and "semiotics", two fields in which Roland Barthes was highly influential.
"Semiotics ... is the study of meaning-making, the study of sign processes and meaningful communication. This includes the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.
"... structuralism is the methodology that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel."
When I read things like this I find myself thinking, "Okay, now give me some examples so I can understand what you're talking about." However I have the feeling that the further we get from abstract theory and the closer we get to concrete examples, the less appeal the theory has and the more contentious become its concrete applications.
This reminds me of a lecture I heard by Dr. David Shwayder, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois. He had invited me along with some other students and professors to his home where he was going to tell us some of his ideas. At one point I stopped him and asked, "Professor Shwayder, can you give me an example?" I was hoping he would say something like "a house", but I was prepared in case he said something more like "a cat". But his example was "a sentence". That left me to ponder what I had learned and what I had missed in his explanation.
Abstraction is a powerful intellectual technique that enables us to reduce complex problems to simpler components. It is, for example, an excellent way to make computer programs generalizable and maintainable by replacing multiple bits of specialized logic with a smaller program that can be made to do many things by tables of rules. But when doing philosophy, sociology, or literary analysis, its easy to go off into obscurity.
| Author | Lem, Stanislaw |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Ackerman, Wendayne |
| Publication | New York: Seabury Press, 1973 |
| Copyright Date | 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 183 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | September 1975 |
The spaceship Invincible lands on a planet to search for the crew of the Condor, which failed to return. They find a species of simple but unusual automaton evolved from machinery surviving a supernova nearby.
A good space adventure with sophisticated discussions of evolution, geology, mineralogy, and some other sciences. Lem's satiric glance at the foibles of scientists is present though not fully developed.
Measured against other SF it's quite good - fast paced, scientific, psychological, well plotted. However it's not yet vintage Lem.
As I recall, the protagonist lands his ship on the planet and goes outside to investigate, looking for the survivors of the Condor. He finds a kind of mechanical insect life that devolved from more advanced machinery on the planet. The bugs swarm around his space suit and helmet and almost kill him with electromagnetic fields. He makes it back to the Invincible, which is resistant to the fields.
Coming from Lem, this was relatively conventional science fiction. The science was carefully considered. There was space travel and contact with an alien species. It didn't have the free ranging imagination and comedy that he developed in his later work.
This was the second book by Lem that I read, after Solaris. I wrote that it was translated from German. I presume that he wrote it in Polish but and that the German was itself a translation, but I don't know why that would have been done. Lem was not yet a popular author and perhaps this was the low budget way to publish the book in the U.S.
| Author | Tokes, Rudolf L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 292 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Hungary |
| When Read | October 1975 |
Published by Praeger for the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace.
Another Hoover/Praeger study, probably funded secretly by the CIA. Tokes is a very poor historian and the only real value of the book is its mass of documented detail. He fails to analyze the socio-economic background, the social forces at work, the character of the counter revolutionary forces, etc. Instead he treats the whole subject as a study of the tactics of "an elite group" of revolutionaries in an explosive situation.
I was impressed with the successes of the revolution given the backward conditions and undeveloped state of the CP, which was not founded on Leninist lines until after the October revolution in Russia, and then by Hungarian prisoners of war in Russia who had to return to their country and win leadership of the movement in a few months.
From 1917 at least until the breakup of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China toward capitalism, all historical events of this kind were seen through the lens of anti-communism. For that reason various allied armies invaded the USSR to support the Whites in the civil war, the fascist militias were encouraged to overthrow the Reds in Berlin, and the Hungarian revolution was crushed by a combination of French, Romanian, and I think Czech and Yugoslav forces.
I can only imagine what it would have been like to be a Hungarian in those days. I'd have supported the revolution and wound up having to acquiesce, or even participate, in the Red Terror against the foes of the regime. Then I would have been attacked myself by the White terror that followed.
We who live in the United States have been pretty lucky. Maybe only the Swedes and the Swiss have been luckier.
| Author | Cordell, Alexander |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday and Co., 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | October 1975 |
"A novel of the long march." A medical student, progressive son of a local landlord official, flees the police and winds up with the Red Army. He and his girlfriend, who turns out to be his half sister, make the long march, suffering every conceivable hardship along the way.
A professionally written historical romance intertwining a rather artificial love story with dramatic events. It is not unsuccessful though neither is it literary.
Cordell's politics seem to vacillate between grudging but genuine respect for communism (or better, communists) and the longing for the unfettered individualism of the intellectual.
I found one website that claimed that Cordell, born in Ceylon in 1914, was "educated mainly in China". He might have been there as a student during the period of the Long March, though his writing was mainly about Wales and I presume that his time in China was either in Hong Kong or in the British enclave in Shanghai.
| Author | Fishman, William J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 318 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Jews |
| When Read | October 1975 |
Sympathetic factual account of conditions in the Russian "Pale of Settlement" east end ghetto of London and the development of the Jewish anarchist movement in London. Leading figures were Aron Lieberman, 1844-1880 and Rudolph Rocker, 1873-1958, a non-Jew who took up the cause of oppressed Jewry and strove for the liberation of all workers of any race or religious background.
Fishman does not discuss theory in any depth and his background material is not always sufficient. Still, he has done a very readable and creditable job. His sympathies are clear.
He shows that anarchism, for all its limitations, has not always been ultra-left. The Arbeter Frainters fought capitalism, religion, imperialist war, and convention in the Jewish community. Their influence died after 1914 due to the pulls of Anglicization, Zionism, and the new attraction of Communism after 1917.
The book was originally published under the title East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914.
Anyone reading a lot of my book notes will see a lot of left-wing writing, either by authors I have read or by me, and a disproportionate amount of writing by or about Jews. For the record, I am Jewish only in the ethnic sense. I was brought up as a Jew and given a Sunday school Jewish education, but I have been a convinced atheist since the age of 16 and have no attraction to any religion. I am also an internationalist. I have some sympathy for Zionism but equal sympathy, I think, for Palestinian nationalism, and for pretty much the same reasons. In both cases, the sympathy is for the people, not the movements. I understand their desire to have a national homeland and a national identity, like almost all of the other people in the world. I understand the suffering they have undergone as a result of being oppressed by other nations. However I think the long term solution is internationalism rather than nationalism.
I have tried to educate myself about all of these issues and, surely because of my background, upbringing, and family, I have taken a closer interest in Jews than most non-Jews are likely to do.
| Author | Silverberg, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 229 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 1975 |
Lew Nichols, probability theorist and professional trend forecaster, hitches his fortune to the rising mayor of New York, Paul Quinn, in 1995. He then discovers a man who can actually see into the future and develops the capacity himself. He somehow comes to grips with fatalism.
The theme is too paradoxical to work, though Silverberg's literary skill is better than average. His view of future society is, of course, totally inadequate and wrong-headed.
Silverberg was one of the big sellers in science fiction in the 1950's and 60's. He was incredibly prolific, like Asimov, and is said to have written a quarter million words per month at his peak. He's still alive and 82 years old but said he will not write any more fiction.
This is the only book I have in my notes that is attributed to him although there is another that he wrote in collaboration with Asimov. I'm sorry that I didn't write more about this book, at least to the extent of writing down what it was that I thought was his view of future society and why it was inadequate and wrong-headed.
| Author | Galland, Adolf |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Savill, Mervyn |
| Publication | New York: Ballantine Books, 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1954 |
| Number of Pages | 280 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | October 1975 |
Galland was a young veteran fighter ace promoted ultimately to general of the fighter arm in accordance with Hitler's policy of raising proven young combat leaders to high command. His principal roles were, first in the Battle of Britain, and then in the air defense against the Western Allies' bombing offensive. He seems to have an excellent grasp of the problems - the primary importance of air superiority, technical excellence, highly specialized training for each pilot role, the maintenance of reserves, etc., though like most commanders, he seems unsympathetic to needs outside his own realm of responsibility. He is most critical of Hitler for the emphasis on bomber over fighter, the hindrance of new weapon development and expanded production and pilot training in the blitzkrieg years, the not-a-step-back policy in Africa, the unwillingness to attack bomber bases in England, and the continual commitment of air defense reserves to already lost ground battles where they could do no good.
Galland is surprisingly modest, both about his activity as an ace and as a commander. There are no heroic flying descriptions.
I've read quite a few books by WWII pilots, American, German, and British and even one by a Japanese ace (Saburo Sakai). Not surprisingly, these men had a lot in common. They grew up in the early days of aviation. They looked at airplanes in their childhood and conceived a burning desire to fly. They took to the air as if it were their natural element. They tried very hard to kill each other, or at least shoot each other down, but after the war they often became friends and recognized themselves in each other.
When I read the books by the British and American pilots I thought about their contribution to the war against Nazism, fascism, and imperialism and when I read the books by the Germans and Japanese I couldn't help but think about their fighting for the wrong side. But when I read how the British and American pilots whose lives were on the line made friends with Galland and other German and Japanese pilots, I found myself cutting them some slack. I suspected that many of the American pilots, had they happened to have been born German or Japanese, would have happily joined their respective air forces and fought against the very things that they swore to defend as Americans.
Do I understand all this? In a way, yes. Human beings are only rational animals up to a point. There are many aspects to being a human and not all of them fit easily into our notions of what we ought to be.
| Author | Dostoevsky, Fyodor |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Garnett, Constance |
| Publication | New York: Fanklin Watts, Inc., 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1866 |
| Number of Pages | 754 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | November 1975 |
[No abstract]
What could I say about Dostoevsky that has not already been said much better? It was difficult to read very much without stopping to reflect. I am struck by his great sympathy, his deep spirituality, his penetration into character and motives, his philosophical concerns.
His literary genius matches his profound humanity. The novel developed at an excellent pace, each new scene carrying the understanding farther and deeper. The dialogue was strinkingly good. One feels the tension of waiting for characters to say things, feeling dominance pass back and forth, hearing dialogue that strikes so well at the heart of things even while leaving much unsaid. His mixture of passionate feeling and cool reflection is astonishing. It points to a unity of thought and feeling that ideas alone do not convey to us. The dream sequences, the imagery, the powerful establishment of mood, and the amazing synthesis of writer and character, literature and life, consciousness and self-consciousness - all outstanding.
At the time I read this book and wrote the above notes I thought that I would never forget the famous novel and so had no need of an abstract. So far, I have been right. I remember it very well.
I thought The Brothers Karamazov was D's most philosophical book but Crime and Punishment was his most successful novel. He brought all of the elements of fiction together, plot, character, the gradual development of ideas, the gradual realization of what had happened and what it meant, in a harmonious whole - something that I think he did better than in any others of his books. It was a great work of art.
| Author | Goulet, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 216 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 1975 |
"Oh", a gorilla, lives with his father Macro, a linguist and his wife, and their demented Vietnam veteran deaf mute helper where he is participating in a language training experiment. Oh becomes an accomplished thinker and conversationalist in American sign language, even a philosopher of sorts. But everyine is too absorbed in his own hangups to really care about Oh. Eventually the project is sabotaged, everyone turns against Oh, and after several attempted murders he is sent to a zoo.
There are lots of intelligent barbs against academia in particular and society and humanity in general. However the allegorical device of the thinking gorilla does not work well with the downbeat pessimism. Oh's sweet innocence is a device for exposing man's true bestiality. Very well written but completely unacceptable as serious social commentary.
Looking at the first sentence of my abstract, I can read it as saying that Macro was a gorilla and a linguist, or that Macro was a gorilla and another member of the household was a human linguist, or even that Oh was a gorilla but he considered the human linguist and his wife to be his parents. I believe the correct interpretation was the second one. Macro was a gorilla. The linguist and his wife were humans.
At the time I read the book research had recently been published about experiments teaching sign language to gorillas and chimpanzees. A gorilla named Koko, born in 1971, was trained in a modified American Sign Language starting at the age of 1. By 2015, at age 44, she is said to have learned more than 1,000 words, about the same size vocabulary as a three year old human..
I was fascinated by that experiment. Ludwig Wittgenstein had famously said that if a lion could speak, we couldn't understand him. His theory was that human and leonine consciousness were too different from each other for the two species to communicate. I don't know if that's true about humans and lions but Koko appeared to show that it's not true for humans and gorillas.
I thought then and now that that the experiment with Koko had a wonderful outcome. I would like to think that reality is, in important respects, independent of consciousness - in spite of the admittedly brilliant work of Wittgenstein and of Immanuel Kant. That two and two is four, that bananas grow on trees, and that we animals can look at each other and recognize each other as living beings, seems to me to be part of an independent reality forming a ground of communication for any animals (or AI robots for that matter) that doesn't depend on the chemistry of our consciousness.
I know that I am digressing, but I'm sure that I was thinking about these questions when I read this book.
| Author | Vargas Llosa, Mario |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Rabassa, Gregory |
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1975 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 601 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Experimental fiction; Peru |
| When Read | November 1975 |
An exotic sort of novel tied together by threads of conversation between Santiago Zavala, self-disinherited son of a wealthy family - turned student communist - turned cynical newspaperman, and Ambrosio, chauffeur and homosexual lover of Zavala's father - chauffeur for the minister of security - furtive husband of the maid Amalia - and killer of the elder Zavala's blackmailer. Characters include Cayo "Shithead" Bermudez, Amalia the servant, Trifulcio the old black petty criminal and father of Ambrosio, Queta the whore, and others.
Threads of conversation interleave with other threads from years back. One speaker simultaneously answers two questions posed ten years apart. Dialogue, description, inner consciousness, and impressionistic narrative all merge into single paragraphs and even sentences. The story is told not from beginning to end, but from all sides converging to a middle. Yet Vargas Llosa pulls it off successfully, even poetically.
Not a Marxist book, it is nonetheless a devastating critique of Latin American society with strong class consciousness. It exposes particularly well the contradictions within the Peruvian ruling class and the bankruptcy of its culture.
First, a little more about the content and structure of the novel. Santiago returns home one night and is told by his wife that their dog was taken away by a dog catcher. He goes to the city pound to retrieve the dog and finds that the dog catcher is an old former servant of his father's family. The two repair to a bar named "The Cathedral" to have a drink and talk over old times. At some point in the conversation a new voice enters. The conversation continues and then one of the originals drops out, another new voice comes in. With no explanation the reader must intuit that there are different voices talking not only about different subjects, but in different years. The entire novel is this conversation of many people at many times.
Even when we learn the name of a person, like Cayo Bermudez, it's only later that we realize that he is the same person that others call Shithead, and also the same person who is the Minister of Interior. It's only about two-thirds of the way through the novel (about 400 pages in!) that I began to feel that I really understood who all the characters were, what times they lived in, how they are related to each other, and what the true scope of this conversation is - the life and society of Peru. And when I finally understood what it was all about, I was bowled over. This was an important book, a book that revealed the inner life of a failed society.
I read a lot of books, but there are some authors and some books that stand out. Among the classics, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville, and Thackeray come to mind. Among the moderns, Mann, Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, Mahfouz, Munoz Molina, de Bernieres, and others. I won't try to think of all of them. These are just ones I have been thinking about or reading recently and who happened to appear in my mind. I don't believe there is some category of writers that we can call "great" and pick and choose exactly who fits in that category. Greatness is not like that. It's not a hard and fast kind of thing with clear criteria and consensus rules. But I do believe that some writers are truly exceptional and that Mario Vargas Llosa is one of them. His books are deeply structured and filled with astonishingly perceptive content. And of all of his many great books, this one strikes me as his masterpiece.
If I remember correctly, this book was featured on the front page of The New York Review of Books, a weekly review magazine in newspaper format that we subscribed to at the Pratt Library Humanities Department where I was working. I read it and the New York Times Book Review section every week. After reading the review I went down to the fiction department on the first floor (Humanities was on the third floor) and got the book as soon as it became available.
| Author | Golding, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Faber and Faber, 1970 |
| Copyright Date | 1964 |
| Number of Pages | 223 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Middle Ages |
| When Read | November 1975 |
Jocelyn, dean of a cathedral in medieval England, is obsessed with the desire to add a 400 foot spire to the church. He drives everyone to the task by the force of his vision and by any other means necessary. The builders, led by Roger Mason, have never undertaken such a feat before. New problems are encountered, new solutions created, but in the end the spire is unsound. When Jocelyn finally dies, obsessed by his spire, his sins, his private visions of angels and devils, and the knowledge of his own mediocrity and single mindedness, there does not seem much chance of the spire's surviving.
A narrow book which makes no attempt to uncover the interesting and difficult to understand relations between church and society. Instead, Golding offers us Jocelyn's private vision - a view of the cathedral as the material realization of the ideas of the Bible, some good insights into the significance of the great height, and the view from the spire, and a little of private religion.
There are a number of good passages but the novel is not altogether successful. Too little attempted, too much opaque imagery.
Golding was a great writer, deserving of his Nobel Prize. I loved a number of his books, but this one didn't work for me. Maybe, with only a single significant character, I needed something in that character to identify with but didn't find it.
| Author | Fast, Howard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 337 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Biographical fiction |
| When Read | November 1975 |
A fictionalized biography of John Peter Altgeld, 1893-1897 governor of Illinois. He pardoned anarchists unjustly accused of the Haymarket bombings as well as many other illegally convicted labor leaders. He became the Democratic Party chairman to defeat Grover Cleveland, a lackey of Capital, but lost the convention to William Jennings Bryan.
A politically astute book timed as an attack on McCarthyism. Fast gives clear and unambiguous portraits of labor's heroes - Debs, Spies, Parsons, and of its enemies - T. Roosevelt, Cleveland, most other politicians, all major newspaper editors, etc. Particularly nice portraits of the people in the middle - from Bryan, a stupid opportunist without a glimmer of understanding of society, to Altgeld - a deeply honest and just man limited by his background as a capitalist, but a right thinking person nonetheless.
Fast is not a great writer. Literary qualities are only fair. But this is a valuable and thoughtful book.
From this distance in time, over 41 years, I can no longer evaluate the statements I made about the people I discussed above. Did Fast consider Teddy Roosevelt to be an enemy of labor and Bryan to be a stupid opportunist with no understanding of society, or did I incorrectly interpret him to be saying that? My guess is that Fast meant what he said and that it wasn't hard for him to convince me.
I've read quite a lot about about Teddy Roosevelt since then and I think that men like TR took the world as they found it. He was born into a wealthy family in a class divided society. He was educated at Harvard, traveled in Europe, and was a member of the upper class. My judgment of him is that he considered the class divisions of society to be perfectly natural and the roles of capital and labor to be as they should be. Does that mean that he was a natural enemy of labor? I don't think so and, in fact, his anti-trust efforts and his arbitration in the coal miners' strike indicate a sympathy for both consumers and workers. He considered himself to have responsibilities that went along with his privileges. As for Bryan, his behavior in the Scopes "monkey trial" makes him appear to be something less than a scientifically minded intellectual. More than that I need not conclude here.
At the time that Altgeld was governor of Illinois there were Americans, Altgeld was one of them, who were ahead of mainstream society in appreciating the injustices of capitalist society. However not all of those who lagged behind, assuming that Altgeld was right, should be considered to be the enemies of working people.
| Author | Whimbey, Arthur |
|---|---|
| Publication | Dutton |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 215 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science |
| Keywords | Education |
| When Read | November 1975 |
I couldn't find this book in my book cards or machine readable files so I'm copying in a lightly edited abstract and comment written for a review of the book I posted on amazon.com's website on May 6, 2002. I gave the book five stars, as did all of the three other reviewers. I chose 1975-11-07 as the date_read because, according to Amazon, the book was published in 1975 and I would have seen it in my job as librarian at the Enoch Pratt Central Library.
It's been many years since I read this, but I was much impressed at the time. I no longer have a copy so I hope I'm remembering the facts correctly.
Whimbey, a professor of psychology, ran a special school in California for 10-11 year olds who seemed to be getting nowhere in the public schools and who had IQ scores around 85. He concentrated on drilling the students in three principles of thought:
1. Have a reason for everything you say. (Low IQ people do not.)
2. Think long enough about a problem to solve it. (Low IQ people often limited their effort to no more than 5 seconds of thought. Many problems simply require more than that.)
3. Consider all the information available before making a judgment. (Low IQ people jumped to conclusions based on the first observations they made.)
What most impressed me about Whimbey's approach was that he was attempting to develop intelligence in general, i.e., reasoning ability. This was not just about reading better or doing better arithmetic. He claimed that, after one school year of intensive drilling in these basic principles, the average child went from an IQ of 85 to an IQ of 115, and the change was permanent! The children were able to do better, because they could think more effectively, in all subjects.
The book explains his program for inculcating these principles.
Being optimistic, or at least hopeful, about the future of humanity, I found this book gave me renewed hope. Whimbey argues very convincingly that the ordinary human brain is a pretty good instrument for thinking. What is needed is not more geniuses, though genius is always a wonderful thing, but better training of all of us ordinary folk, in order to build a more intelligent community. He backs up his argument with real results achieved with real children.
I heartily recommend this book to any teacher or anyone else who wants to develop general intellectual ability, not just teach specific skills. And I hope that all teachers will try to do that.
(24 people found this helpful as of 2023-03-06.)
I can elaborate on the Amazon review above.
Many low IQ people will simply guess at an answer, or maybe have a "hunch" that they present. If the teacher then asks, "Why do you say that", the student often says, "Just tell me if I'm right or wrong." Whimbey's instructions to the graduate students who worked with the kids was - refuse to answer. Demand that the child comes up with a reason, and the reason can't be "I have a hunch", or "I flipped a coin." The child gets no credit for his answer and no relief from the requirement that he give a thoughtful answer if he can't come up with a relevant reason for it.
Many low IQ people have never developed an ability to concentrate on a problem in order to solve it. I wouldn't claim that such people are unable to concentrate at all. If a problem simply requires more concentration than the five or ten or however many seconds they will tolerate, they just give up and say the problem is beyond their ability to solve. I don't recall Whimbey saying this, but perhaps they might concentrate hard on why they are treated badly by someone or how they should play a particular game, but intellectual problems might be off the table for them if they require concentrated thought.
As for Whimbey's third goal, he argued that it was common for low IQ people to seize on the first relevant fact that is presented to them and not dig any deeper to examine other bits of reason and evidence that bear upon the problem they are trying to solve. They leap to conclusions.
If I remember correctly, Whimbey's school was paid for by the California education department as a one year experiment. Teachers were recruited from the university graduate schools and were typically assigned (again if I remember correctly) four students each. Students were recruited from the public schools from among students of age 10 or 11 who had no brain damage and whose school failures were judged to be amenable to teaching.
I don't understand why Whimbey's experience and his book didn't have more impact. Did any public schools begin teaching the three principles? Was there follow-up to see if the kids in the study retained their progress as adults? I don't know.
| Author | Buchheim, Lothar-Gunther |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Lindley, Denver and Helen |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 463 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II; Submarines |
| When Read | December 1975 |
A novel of submarine warfare in 1941 by a leading publisher of art books and former U-boat officer. Much exacting and highly authentic detail of subs, crew life, combat, depth charges, air attack, and death at sea.
Buchheim is a competent writer and succeeds in conveying the reality of a most horrifying life. He is particularly good at depicting the mentality of the crew and the psychology of living with sudden death without romantic illusion. Unlike Werner, he shows sympathy for the British repugnance at Nazism and realism rather than arrogance or paternalism toward enlisted men.
The book suffers for its lack of penetration into civilian political and social life and background of its characters. It is an excellent novel of its type - comparable to Winged Victory. Not as good as All Quiet on the Western Front - not nearly as deep.
I've read quite a few books by submariners, both German and American and I think there was a Briton in there too. Buchheim was probably the most sophisticated writer of the group. I read the book after having seen the very excellent movie that was made from it.
There was a big difference between the books by the Americans and the Germans. The Americans started out apprehensive but became more optimistic and self-confident over the course of the war. With the Germans it was the opposite. 3/4ths of the German submariners died in the war.
| Author | Gogol, Nikolai |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Guerney, Bernard Guilbert |
| Publication | New York: Modern Library, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1842 |
| Number of Pages | 549 |
| Extras | "Thoroughly revised with additional new material" |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | December 1975 |
A masterpiece of social satire. Chichikov buys deeds to dead serfs to mortgage as if they were alive. He travels through the countryside meeting every species of incredible Russian aristocrat from Nozdrev the obsessive compulsive liar, to Manilov the absurd idealist, to Hlobuev the ridiculous ne'er do well, the gossip, the fop, the bored young man, the super successful farmer, the demented miser, etc. Each character is created as a pure type. The comedy is of the broadest sort - very advanced in style and social content.
This edition contains what is known of the previously unpublished volumes 2 and 3.
[No comment]
There was a very nice introduction to the book in which the writer offers to "slow down" a scene from the book to enable the reader to better appreciate it. In the scene a landowner grabs a dog by the skin of its neck and holds it out to a serf/servant who carries the dog away, cradling it in his arms. The significance of the passage was the way that Gogol, in a minor, offhand, side description that is beside the main subject of the scene nevertheless indicates the difference between the landlord and the serf.
After reading this book and the long story The Overcoat and forming a very positive opinion of Gogol's deep humanity, I was surprised and shocked to read Taras Bulba and encounter his racism and antisemitism.
| Author | Gorky, Maxim |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Budberg, Moura |
| Publication | New York: Doubleday, 1971 |
| Copyright Date | 1907 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | December 1975 |
A story of a nebbishy orphan, pushed around and taken advantage of all his life, who finally becomes a political spy and provocateur for the Czarist police. He is weak willed, escapist, totally ignorant of any knowledge of any sphere of life. As a bookseller's helper he gradually becomes enmeshed in the world of the police due to the bookseller's police activity. Finally he is goaded, bullied and cajoled into becoming a spy himself. He, like the others, turns in friends and betrays people out of fear, cowardice, ignorance, and spite.
The spies are incredibly ignorant and riddled with sick, disturbed individuals. None has any coherent ideology and they harbor hodgepodges of peasant, Czarist, bourgeois, religious, and even revolutionary ideas. They become psychologically and financially dependent on the existence of revolutionaries. They even respect the revolutionaries more than themselves while, at the same time, spiting them for their nobility and fineness of character.
Yevsey Klimkov (the useless man) ultimately cannot live with himself and commits suicide under the wheels of a train.
[No comment]
The book was banned in Tsarist Russia and first published in Berlin. It is my understanding that, by the time that the Bolshevik revolution occurred, Gorky was the most respected of the revolutionary writers. Gorky was certainly an independent minded man. Perhaps his reputation protected him from the Stalinist purges, or perhaps it didn't. He died at age 68 in 1936 at the height of the purges. I don't think anyone knows if the NKVD played any role in his death.
| Author | Forester, C.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1937 |
| Number of Pages | 324 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | December 1975 |
The first of the Hornblower stories. Captain Hornblower of the frigate Lydia sails to the Pacific to foment revolt against the Spanish. He captures a ship and turns it over to the rebels, then under new orders has to go out and sink it again. There's a sea battle, a refitting on a deserted island, a woman, a crazy rebel, etc., all in all a rather well done piece of romantic sea adventure - done with careful attention to authenticity and a nice touch of humor.
Forester is much less obnoxious than Nordhoff and Hall in Mutiny on the Bounty. Hornblower is in many ways an attractive character with enough self-ridicule to prevent us from over identifying with the idiocy of the image of the gentleman hero.
I liked it in the same way as I would like a good late show sea story - and in fact I did see this as a late show sea story once with Gregory Peck as Hornblower.
Having read all of the subsequent Hornblower stories I built up in my mind a strong image of this first progenitor but I see that my write-up is restrained. I wrote that it was "less obnoxious" than the Nordhoff and Hall book. However I did like the book and perhaps I allowed Gregory Peck's performance to creep into my image of Hornblower.
| Author | Becker, Jurek |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Kornfield, Melvin |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975 |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 266 |
| Extras | Preface by Melvin Kornfield (translator) |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | December 1975 |
Jacob, a former restaurateur, is living in a Polish ghetto in World War II. He overhears a German broadcast and tells war news to Misha, who works with him loading German trains for his daily food. In desperation, to keep Misha from a rash act, he says he has a radio - something strictly forbidden to Jews. Soon everyone comes to hiim for news and he invents lies of Russian progress in order to keep people's spirits up. There is a love story and a child too.
This is a book about kind, gentle, ordinary, nice people who try to keep up their ordinary life in the face of total disaster. There is no armed or even passive resistance, only the hope that each person can squeeze through by remaining small enough not to be noticed. In the end they are all deported to the camps.
Finely and sensitively written. The author, speaking through an unnamed narrator, comments successfully and unaffectedly on the course of the book, alternative endings, tense transitions, point of view changes, and so on. An excellent first novel by a Polish born TV, film, and cabaret writer living in East Berlin.
I remember looking at this book on the library new book shelf and being interested by it. It was a small book with an intriguing title. It was about the Holocaust, something that I read a lot about. And most unusually, it was written by an East Berliner. I wanted to know if and how that would affect the approach to the story.
It turned out that the book did not seem any different from a book that would have been written by a Western writer. The fact that it came from the other side of the Berlin Wall made it a little more exotic however and gave me hope that people on the other side were a lot like us - even the Jews.
The Holocaust, of course, ended badly and the book did not escape that ending. But I liked it anyway. It was a book infused with humanity.