Books read January through December 1977
| Author | Kemelman, Harry |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 312 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 1977 |
Rabbi David Small of Barnard's Crossing in Massachusetts solves a murder mystery and reacts against the new TM type importations into Judaism.
The whole mystery plot seems out of place in what could have been a serious novel about religion, family life, synagogue, politics, etc., but then that is my own interest. K gives some obviously authentic if romanticized information on his subject. His rejection of mysticism is skimpily but soundly reasoned and his treatment of his Jewish characters is insightful and sympathetic.
Not a serious novel but not too bad for its genre.
I assume "TM type importations into Judaism" has something to do with Transcendental Meditation.
Kemelman's Rabbi series was very popular when I read this one. The appearance of a new one got both librarians and patrons interested. My own interest was in part due to that (What is it that is so popular?) and partly due to my growing up in a very Jewish community. The book was about people that I knew, though now, forty years later, there's significantly less of the American Jewish community in me than there was then.
I read one other Kemelman Rabbi Small book in 2001, but the stories by Rex Stout, George Simenon, Dick Francis, and a number of others were more to my taste in series mystery novels.
| Author | Martin, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 262 |
| Extras | index, photos, diagrams, glossary, etc. |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| When Read | January 1977 |
A superb introduction to all the basic concepts needed to understand what happens when computers communicate over lines. Without using any sophisticated mathematics, M explains all the basic items of equipment and the tradeoffs involved in their use. Subjects include analog and digital signals, switching, line conditioning, modems, multiplexers, concentrators, multidrop lines, terminals, codes, line discipline, processors, programming, etc.
I read this over a several month period.
It is pretty amazing how telecommunication has changed in the 40 years since I read this. I can remember how, in those days, I was working on figuring the cost of a 2400 baud dedicated phone line network to connect all of the Pratt Library branches in Baltimore. It was pretty expensive and would allow only minimal information transfer, like checking patron records and checking books in and out. An online catalog covering all of the city's collections would have been out of the question - for communications reasons as much as for computing requirements and database sizes. Now I have more computing, storage, and communications capability in my house than the entire City of Baltimore had in those days. In fact, my phone might have more than the City had in those days.
| Author | Shivji, Issa G. |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Hunsmann, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 182 |
| Extras | tables, index, charts |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Economics; Politics |
| Keywords | Africa; Tanzania |
| When Read | January 1977 |
Shivji considers Tanzania to be ruled by and for a "bureaucratic bourgeoisie" which is in the process of detaching itself from its weak petty bourgeois origins, but is still subject to international imperialist rule.
The hallmarks of this class are its technocratic approach to development, its bureaucratic approach to administration, its conspicuous consumption (as opposed to the saving characteristic of a free enterprise bourgeoisie), its concentration of economic power in government hands, and its use of state resources for private consumption (parties, cars, "business trips", etc.)
The theory has much merit but raises many questions that S can only partially answer. Why must this class remain tied to imperialism? What is the future of such a class? Is this an implied analysis of the USSR? What is the role of Nyerere? Must there be a revolution to overthrow it?
Nonetheless, it is a stimulating essay in political economy that debunks many myths of bourgeois theory and of rigidified Marxism.
My impression of the government and class structure of the poor countries is that they are dominated by people who are "in it" for themselves. Is this different from what we see in the U.S. or other countries? It's a question that I wish I could answer. I believe that every one of the presidents of the United States that I have lived under had a sincere desire to benefit the country rather than himself. Even those people who were least plausible, for example Trump, Cruz, and Carson in the last election, aren't in it, I think, to make money, though Trump is surely in it for ego gratification. Is it different in the U.S. because we have a rich and economically stable society in which top leadership can expect to live well without having to drink from the public largess? Is that missing in Africa? Maybe that's a big part of the difficulty.
"Nyerere", by the way, is Julius Nyerere, the first leader of Tanzania after its independence. He was thought be many to be honest and intelligent, and by others to just be intelligent. I was always in the former camp but not based on any authoritative information.
| Author | Vassilikos, Vasilis |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Greek |
| Translators | Edwards, Mike |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971 |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 181 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1977 |
A former clerk turned poet and film maker, Lazarus Lazarides, returns to his hometown of Necropolis (where everyone suffers from rigor mortis) to see his ex-girlfriend of three years back. The novel records his thoughts and dreams during this period in a breathlessly told series of very powerful, often photographic or cinematic images.
In his imagination he becomes a cat and sees the rag and bone men conned and beaten at the garbage dump, and is fondled by a petty bourgeois woman who loves cats more than people. He imagines a split in the world. He worries over a misprint in his poem. He plans an escape with her, his unnamed woman.
His ex-girlfriend is a hairdresser. She is happy to see him again and still loves him, but sees that he is still living in his obsessive dreams and images. She won't be a dream. She won't go with him.
V fills the novel not only with his clever, startling and powerful images, but also with much cool self-consciousness. He includes his own summaries of his plot and criticism (very effective at that) in remarks about his character's film and poetry - a la 8-1/2.
This is a terribly well written, unusual, artistic, and socially conscious book.
If I remember correctly, and I think I do, I was reading this book at the public library when one of the other librarians came up to me and asked me what I was reading. I told her that it was a love story between a clerk and a hairdresser. She looked at me with an expression of disdain and said something about how they don't write books like they used to any more. I was at a loss for words and decided to just let it go at that.
| Author | Servadio, Gaia |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Stein and Day, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 316 |
| Extras | index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Crime |
| When Read | January 1977 |
A Marxist history of the Mafia with much information of a uniform sort. So and so killed so and so and got off free, etc., etc. The analysis of the past and future trends are not very deep.
The mafia is not a single organization or even a group of them. It is more of a system of gangsterism in which individual groups are always forming or falling apart while the system persists.
Sicily has always been the backwater fiefdom of foreign powers, Arabs, Normans, Spanish - with each ruling nobility administering its lands through local "gabellote" - overseers. These overseers / stewards organized the work and operated the lords' private thugs to keep order and protect the lords' exploitation. The bourgeois revolutions did not even touch Sicily until around 1860, and there was no tradition of government. All relations were feudal and the lord and his gabellote was the law.
From these gabellote came the mafia. As Sicily absorbed newer forms of social organization, the mafia penetrated them too, while retaining its traditional use of force and murder.
The mafia can never be eliminated from above because it is itself the government and, at its top, is invulnerable - as a class if not as individuals. Only the communists can defeat it.
Isn't it amazing how much more I knew as a young man than I know today? Well, maybe it's true that in Sicily in 1977 only the communists could have overthrown the mafia. I would hope that the FBI and the police are able to overthrow them here - but I don't really know if they have.
I'm sure that there have been many studies, and I bet some of them are entirely correct, that explain why some societies are crime ridden and some aren't. But in spite of all of our knowledge, we're far from being able to reform the crime ridden countries. Maybe the communists with their complete revolutions have been the most successful, for example in China, once ruled by gangsters and warlords. But we've certainly learned that countries ruled by communist parties have not been free of corruption.
| Author | Kundera, Milan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | cz |
| Translators | Kussi, Peter |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974 |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 289 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Czechoslovakia |
| When Read | January 1977 |
An exceptionally fine novel about the development of a young poet, Jaromil, who never succeeds in breaking through the walls of "mirrors" with which he constantly surrounds himself. His mother finds the only fulfillment in her own narrow world in clinging to him and forcing him to cling to her. He grows up convinced of his talent, his exceptionality, his right to subordinate others to his ideas, and of course, with a constant nagging realization of inferiority. He finally denounces his own girlfriend to the police in an act of complete, selfish emotionalism masquerading as high mindedness, responsibility, and maturity.
Kundera's presentation of poetry is almost Platonic. He sees it as self-serving lies made so beautiful as to appear true. He warns against its seductions. Ideas must first and foremost be formed out of objective reality. Those formed out of self-indulgence made palatable by the coating of poetry can only lead to crime and degradation. The lyric poet spinning ideas out of vanity, and the socialist state poet pursuing his career, both end up as fools or criminals or more likely both.
The depth of insight and idea, psychology and philosophy, and the virtuoso self-conscious mastery over the techniques of novelistic time, language, and viewpoint make this a superior book.
I see that I left a critical part out of the abstract I wrote for this book. Jaromil is a successful state poet. He wins a prize for poetry from the state. He was chosen by those for whom poetry meant little and politics meant all and he then made the mistake of believing that his selection really proved that he was a good poet, perhaps the best of his generation. Calling it a "mistake" might not be the right characterization. It was more an assertion of his ego over his judgment. He went on to compound his mistake by, for example, turning in his girlfriend, and by criticizing the writing of other poets who had not been awarded state prizes and who, in fact, were probably better poets than he was.
I've noted a copyright date of 1969. What I wrote on my book card was that it was "written 1969 (no Czech publication.)" I assume the book is available now in the Czech Republic but I can see why Kundera would not have been able to publish it in Czech the year after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
This was the first of Kundera's books that I read.
| Author | Hildebrand, George |
|---|---|
| Author | Porter, Gareth |
| Publication | New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976 |
| Copyright Date | |
| Number of Pages | 124 |
| Extras | chronology, photos, notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Cambodia |
| When Read | January 1977 |
An extensively documented attack on the state Department / bourgeois press version of the events in Cambodia in 1975. The U.S. government spread stories that all the people were forced out of Phnom Penh at gunpoint into a death march to the countryside in order to take revenge against them and institute peasant revolutionism.
In fact however the city was gripped by starvation and epidemic with no food, no medicine, no transport, no employment for the 500,000 residents and 2,500,000 refugees and no prospects for improvement, all caused by U.S. policy (mainly the terror bombing of the countryside and also the total commitment to military confrontation with almost zero concern for civilian conditions.) The people had to be brought out to where the food was, where labor was desperately needed, and where slum epidemics could be dispersed and controlled. No other course was possible.
The authors do not address the question of how the people were forced to move. Nevertheless the rationale they present is far more convincing and better documented than the bourgeois press version.
What I wrote in 1977 doesn't convince me in 2017. There's been a lot more documentation of the horrors of the Pol Pot regime. I don't have enough knowledge to render an informed opinion, but I'm prepared to say that it looks to me now that Hildebrand, Porter, and Sweezy and the other editors of Monthly Review, were taken in. And I was too.
I was pretty disdainful of "the bourgeois press" in those days. I've become a lot more respectful of what we now call "the mainstream media" since then but I don't think the criticisms levied by the left were entirely unfounded.
Cambodia was an incredible tragedy and the root of it still seems to me to have been the U.S. decision to overthrow the government of Norodom Sihanouk, put Lon Nol and the generals in power, and begin bombing and invading North Vietnamese / Viet Cong bases in Cambodia. It was that that enabled Pol Pot's brutal revolutionaries to take power, led to a Vietnamese invasion after the American withdrawal, produced a disaster for Cambodian people, and achieved the exact opposite of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's intent.
Having now read yet another book about modern Cambodia, Cambodia's Curse by Joel Brinkley, I'm now inclining even further away from my approval of this book in 1977. Brinkley's view (q.v.) is that the Cambodian people have been continuously victimized by governments from ancient and medieval times up to the present. He argues that Sihanouk, Lon Nol, Pol Pot, and Hun Sen, the last four main leaders of the Cambodian government, were all essentially kleptocrats. The Cambodian people have been exploited and oppressed by all of them, but Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were the worst. They killed two or three orders of magnitude more people than the others.
Cambodia is near the bottom of the garbage heap of the modern world and the Khmer Rouge made everything worse.
| Author | Wells, H.G. |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Collins, 1959 |
| Copyright Date | 1897 |
| Number of Pages | 223 |
| Extras | bibliography |
| Extras | biography of the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 1977 |
The classic tale of an obsessed scientist caring nothing for the people who stand in his way.
The story opens with the invisible man, wrapped in clothes and bandages, checking in to a seaside village inn where he begins experiments to recover his visibility. Gradually he is discovered and turns against everyone in flight. At the home of an old doctor acquaintance he reveals his full story and his evil designs. There is a fight, a panic, a hunt with turnabouts, and his final death.
An excellently told story. As Frank Wells puts it, H.G. Wells posits one impossible premise, gives it a scientific gloss, and then hurls it into the ordinary world. There are no magic tricks, no suspension of disbelief, no manipulation required. the invisible man's food is visible until digested, also snow, dust, or rain that clings to him. He must travel naked and suffer all the contradictions of a man who cannot join the world of his fellows.
Good story telling. Good science fiction. I liked it more than most current S-F.
The 1933 movie adaptation with Claude Rains is not to be missed. There is a wonderful scene where the invisible man unwraps his bandages, with nothing visible underneath. I saw this on TV long before I read the book.
| Author | Malraux, Andre |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Becker, Stephen |
| Publication | New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976 |
| Copyright Date | 1928 |
| Number of Pages | 198 |
| Extras | Afterword, 1949 |
| Genres | Fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | January 1977 |
A sketchy novel of Canton China just before the march north in 1925-6. The Kuomintang is in control of the city, fighting an economic war against the British, a shooting war against the British paid warlords, and a class struggle within the movement. The narrator comes from France to be a sort of personal secretary to the anarchist Gorine who, with the Bolshevik Borodin, is largely directing the struggle in the city. There is much cruel, cynical, but decisively effective action by the revolutionaries.
Malraux is attracted by the movement and simultaneously repelled by its methods. Like his narrator, he goes along with the irresistible logic and yet does not participate in it.
The afterword is a defense of Gaullism. He attacks American and Russian culture with a special denunciation of Stalinist suppression of truth and disagreement. This piece, though interesting, was obviously thrown in by the American publisher to prevent "misinterpretation" of his motives and Malraux's.
Not yet Man's Fate, not even much of a novel. Just a sketch of political scenes of interest.
When I wrote the comment about the American publisher's inclusion of the Afterword, I was probably thinking of the rise of McCarthyism. It would have been dangerous for a publisher to publish a book that might be perceived as even partly sympathetic to communism in 1949.
This was apparently Malraux's first novel, though he had published other books before it. He had lived in French Indochina but, when he wrote this, he had not yet lived in China.
The action of the novel takes place in 1925, when the Nationalist and Communist parties were still allies. It was published in 1928, after the Nationalists had turned on the Communists, however I don't know what Malraux would have already known of the Nationalist / Communist civil war.
| Author | Quartim, Joao |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Ferbach, David |
| Publication | New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 250 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Economics; Politics |
| Keywords | Brazil |
| When Read | January 1977 |
A Marxist analysis of the events in Brazil.
Quartim divides the bourgeoisie into four sections; the latifundists - the coffee bourgeoisie; the industrialists - the national bourgeoisie; the state organization managers; and the "associated" bourgeoisie (compradors). The existence of a pure military government with no bourgeois parties, or only facades of them, is possible because of the relative preponderance of the imperialists - who need only a streamlined instrument of repression and who dominate the strategic sectors, leaving control of support and infrastructure (transportation, etc.) to parastatels and weaker industry to home grown capitalists. The rape of the economy is enormous.
The Debray-Guevara armed struggles have so far failed while urban warfare is inherently unable to integrate sections of the masses into the revolution (only cadres participate.) What is needed is the all round development of struggle aiming at rural guerrillas who can build an organization for protracted warfare and lead an uprising. The struggle will be very long and difficult with an uncertain future.
[No comments]
The Monthly Review Press was publishing European and third world Marxist authors at this time, most of them Marxist economists who were unknown in the United States. These writers generally had no expressed affiliation with the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, or even Cuba. They didn't identify as Trotskyists or Maoists, or anything else. It was a kind of breath of fresh air in the socialist movement, returning Marxist economics to its independent roots. I subscribed to the magazine for many years. It still exists today and there is an excellent article about it in the Wikipedia.
"Debray-Guevara" is a reference to the French revolutionary philosopher Jules Regis Debray, and the Argentine physician revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The two were both active in Latin American revolutionary movements aimed at establishing a revolution continent-wide. As of this writing, Debray is still alive. Guevara was killed by the CIA in Bolivia in 1967.
"Latifundists" is a reference to the owners of "latifundia", agricultural plantations. In Brazil these might have been growing coffee, sugar, rubber, or other export crops. "Comprador" or "comprador capitalist" is a name used for local managers of international companies, often with some partial ownership, for example, a dealership for American cars or agricultural equipment in Brazil. It was Quartim's view (and that of most Marxist economists) that the dominant economic and political forces in third world countries were always the governments, militaries, and businesses of the first world countries that had such powerful positions in the third world.
The democratically elected government of left-leaning Joao Goulart in Brazil was overthrown in 1964 by a CIA backed military coup that left Brazil under military government for the next 21 years. Most Americans were probably not even aware of the coup and had no understanding of the U.S. role in it, or the terrible repression, torture, and murder of students, labor leaders, and other supporters of the democratic government. The movie The Kiss of the Spider Woman was made much later in 1985 but may give some idea about what Brazil was like.
| Author | Mann, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Lowe-Porter, H.T. |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948 |
| Copyright Date | 1947 |
| Number of Pages | 510 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Music |
| When Read | February 1977 |
Serenus Zeitblom, philologist, humanist, and lifelong friend and admirer of the (fictitious) composer tells the story of Leverkuhn's life. There is much authentic musicality, much authentic theology, all of Mann's marvelously developed sense of the spiritual in human life. The development of L as genius, maestro, and finally madman, is seen as an epitome of the dialectical relationship between great achievement and great personal sacrifice. L himself sees it as a reenactment of the Faust drama. Zeitblom sees it as the working out of a great gift which he personally serves in his humble capacity as friend.
The "biography" is begun in 1943 and ended in 1945. It includes some sympathetic pleas to the German people to understand and repent. The Faust theme is extended to all of Germany as well as to the life of L.
The book is a masterpiece including some tour de force writing as in the comic chapter on Saul Fitelberg, along with the usual Mann depth. M is the most developed human being of any writer I have read. He always unfolds the full meaning of every event and person in the novel in a way that indicates total mastery of the material. Grappling is unnecessary - the articulation being absolutely adequate to the thoughts and feelings engendered by the development of the novel. Narrative detail, reflection on the narration, and sure self-criticism are all presented complete and whole - with nothing left out and nothing unnecessary said.
Reading the cycle of Joseph novels gave me a great appreciation of Mann. He became a favorite author. This is the work by Mann that I read next after finishing the Joseph story.
Parts of the novel were very surprising. There was a long section describing music that, I presume, never existed. However the description went on and on in great detail. I don't know enough about music to know if, in fact, it was a description of actual music from some composer that I was not familiar with. It was detailed enough that I thought that might be the case, but I guessed that it wasn't. I probably guessed wrong. The Wikipedia offers several possible models for the music and also for the composer. But even without the knowledge of music needed to reach a full understanding of the novel I was still mightily impressed by it.
A 510 page novel can't be summarized or appreciated in a short piece like this. I've completely left out the story of the little boy, Nepomuk, whose life and death form a crisis in Leverkuhn's life. It was a very rich novel.
There were three close friends in this story - Adrian Leverkuhn the composer, Serenus Zeitblom his writer friend, and Rudi Schwerdtfeger, principal violinist of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. In one of my favorite scenes, the three friends are in a restaurant when a gypsy violinist makes the rounds of the tables. Rudi asks to borrow the man's violin and then proceeds to astonish him and everyone else with a virtuoso display after which the three friends left the restaurant. I loved it.
| Author | Medvedev, Roy A. |
|---|---|
| Author | Medvedev, Zhores A. |
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Durkin, Andrew R. |
| Publication | New York: Columbia University Press, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 198 |
| Extras | index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | February 1977 |
A history of K's political career from 1953 to 1964.
The Medvedevs write very convincing history, impeccably documented and told from the Russian point of view that is so difficult for outsiders to achieve. As in On Socialist Democracy, the theoretical remarks are naive and uncritical of bourgeois ideas, but theory is kept in the background here.
Khrushchev appears as a well intentioned, sincere politician - devoted to country and party and free of Stalin's neurotic paranoia. However he was an adventurist who continually tried to remake the Soviet economy in big leaps which, by lack of preparation and prior experimentation, led to many serious disasters.
The Medvedevs say that Khrushchev and the other leaders only found out the full extent of Stalinist crimes in the 1953-54 investigations. K then led the Party in rehabilitating millions of prisoners and dismantling the secret and political police. However they did not rehabilitate Trotsky or other early dissidents because they believed in the monolithic party, opposed Trotskyism and were unwilling to attack the foundations of their own power. They also did not bring to justice most of Stalin's and Beria's henchmen.
Economically, the corn program, virgin lands development, dispersal of bureaux from Moscow, youth training programs, party reorganization, etc. all offered hopes of improvements. But by being pushed beyond the practical, or even possible, they wrecked the economy.
The story of Khrushchev's dismissal was quite well done too.
Most of the western scholars who write about the socialist countries start from the assumption that Marx was wrong, that Lenin was wrong, and that socialism was an impossible idea from the beginning. They may have analyzed the history of how things went wrong but they generally have not done so with any examination of how or why things might have gone right.
The Medvedev brothers offered a new light on all of this. They were themselves socialists and they treated the socialist enterprise as plausible. I read their books in the hope of finding out not just what went wrong, but what could have gone right and what might be done right in the future if we try to make a go of it.
So far, forty years later, it doesn't look very promising.
| Author | Kent, Alexander |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | February 1977 |
Bolitho leads five ships in a Mediterranean adventure on the eve of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt.
[No comment.]
Poor old Bonaparte couldn't catch a break when the British Navy was around. I wonder if these books sold in French translation.
| Author | Oz, Amos |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Hebrew |
| Translators | de Lange, Nicholas; Oz, Amos |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 287 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Israel |
| When Read | February 1977 |
A well written first person psychological study of a woman who is unable to find personal satisfaction in her ordinary life - in spite of, or because of, her marriage to a fine, intelligent, decent man. She finally, after ten years of marriage, gives up hope of finding common ground with him and decides to content herself with her daydreams of sexual debasement and violence.
Hannah is a person to whom impressions are all important. She is acutely conscious of shadows, first meetings with people, the weather. She wastes money compulsively. Her husband Michael Gonen is the opposite. Rational, far sighted, planning for the future. He is interested in geology.
She longs for passion, deep unspoken emotional contact. He gives her everything he has. He is sensitive and considerate, he does his best as a lover. He cares for their child. But she remains unsatisfied.
My interpretation is that she is neurotic from the start, unable to find satisfaction because what she is looking for can exist only in fantasy.
In looking at my comment today I suspect that I was offended by Hannah's behavior. What could she want beyond what Michael gave her? Wasn't he just the sort of man that I would aspire to be? It was as if she were rejecting me as well as him. And didn't she choose to marry the guy after all? But personal offense is a poor motive for judging a character or a story - at least in this case where, clearly, no selfish motive pertains to Hannah's behavior. She wasn't nasty to her husband and she made an effort to work things out.
What I most wonder now is how Oz conceived of and wrote this book. Did he know a person like Hannah? If so, how did he learn about her inner thoughts? How did he learn that she had daydreams of sexual debasement and violence? Was she his wife? Was she a lover whom he was unable to fulfill, or perhaps whom he did fulfill but with whom marriage was not a viable possibility - possibly because she was already married to Michael Gonen. These questions apply to all of an author's characters. He is, after all, just one human being and yet he portrays many different human beings in his stories. But for a man to understand a woman's unspoken sexual fantasies would seem to require special insights that a simple monogamous fellow like me would have some difficulty with. I'm thinking that Oz has a lot more in common with, say, Milan Kundera, than with Alan Meyer.
| Author | Vidal, Gore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1964 |
| Number of Pages | 503 |
| Extras | bibliography |
| Genres | Fiction; Biographical fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Roman Empire; Christianity |
| When Read | March 1977 |
A fictional biography of the Emperor Julian 331-363 AD, the last anti-Christian emperor of Rome. It is written in the form of a memoir with diary entries and letters and comments from two scholar friends of Julian's written seventeen years later. He is presented as an intelligent and philosophical man; good hearted, strong, uncorrupted, though he often makes errors, but ridiculously attached to mysticism, omens, ghosts, prophecies and other tricks served up to him by a retinue of priests and magicians. The two philosophers, Priscus and Libanius ridicule this, though Libanius is himself a Mithraist
Vidal writes a well researched and logical history, full of studied details and with sympathy for the characters. On the other hand it is not successful as social psychology. One does not feel either the pull of Christianity or of mysticism. There is little successful evocation of the era, in spite of the wealth of detail. The tone is a bit too chatty, too conversational.
Writing convincing historical novels is increasingly difficult as the distance of the historical period increases. Only a few novelists have, in my opinion anyway, done it really well - Robert Graves, Thomas Mann, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and not a great many others.
Vidal certainly had the brains to do it and was willing to do the research, but perhaps he was too eccentric a man and writer.
However, whether or not Julian achieves its aims of historical authenticity, it was certainly interesting. It raised lots of questions that I would like to have seen answered and it proposed answers that were at least plausible.
| Author | Deutscher, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Oxford University Press, 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 490 |
| Extras | bibliography, photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography; History; Politics |
| Keywords | Soviet Union; Socialism |
| When Read | March 1977 |
A superb continuation of the biography shedding valuable light on the struggles leading to Stalin's acquisition of absolute power. D regards Trotsky as the true continuer of the Marxist tradition, a man who was not only more often right than the others but also more deeply understanding of, and interested in, the needs of mankind at large.
Of special interest are Trotsky's theory of literature - that the history of culture embodies advances for mankind as a whole, as well as of the ruling classes, and hence the traditions should not be scorned, that Marxists must assimilate the past, as Marx and Lenin did, before they can presume to criticize or revolutionize it. D sees the theory of permanent revolution as abstract but real - it was for internationalism and for proletarian leadership of coalitions. In the struggle between right and left D thinks Trotsky and all others were naive about Stalin's role, both sides seeing him as a secondary threat.
Deutscher considers Stalinism a genuine development of Leninism. Suppress the bourgeoisie, suppress other parties, suppress factions - entails suppression of the Party in favor of a single faction and then suppression of even that faction in favor of a single man. At the same time, Trotskyism, the struggle against this, is also a genuine Leninism. Both currents exist in Lenin's work. It is the pressure of isolation, backwardness, and perhaps also the lack of understanding on the opposition's part that led to Stalin's victory.
Trotsky is seen as a remarkable, courageous, unbending fighter.
With the demise of the Soviet Union and the changes that took place in the People's Republic of China the questions about what went wrong in the socialist countries and whether the movement was foredoomed or might have succeeded have become moot. No one takes them seriously any more. However it isn't clear to me that the questions have no useful answers.
In the U.S. there were a number of theories about the failures of socialism, each with it's own little political party. The two largest were the Communist Party USA and the Trotskyist Socialist Worker's Party. However neither those two nor the smaller factions, nor the followers of various different national parties from Cuba to China to Albania to Yugoslavia ever came up with convincing answers to the questions. It may be that there are no answers but I'm still not ready to concede that. I don't think that Deutscher had the answers but he did ask the questions.
| Author | Chandler, Raymond |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945 |
| Copyright Date | 1939 |
| Number of Pages | 277 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 1977 |
Philip Marlowe, private eye, is hired by old general Sternwood to stop a blackmail threat. He goes through murders, racketeering, etc., to win out.
Marlowe is in the Sam Spade mold, though in a few pages, made more real and human. The story is well plotted in a style which became much imitated. Marlowe is a straight arrow, honest and self-respecting and caring more about that than anything else, yet tolerant of weakness and himself finding his own small consolation in drink.
I thought maybe books like this, first published in 1939, were no longer read, but I was wrong. The Amazon records for this book show 569 reviews with what looks like an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars. I'm glad that that is so.
| Author | Carpentier, Alejo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Partridge, Francis |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 308 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 1977 |
A superb political novel of an early 20th century Latin American (Columbian?) dictator. The Head of State, not otherwise named, is a simple, cultured, somewhat engaging personality taken up with French culture, rum, whores, and a desire to be accepted in polite French society. His heart is in Paris though mounting revolts, first by military would be successors and then by the masses leading eventually to his rejection by the bourgeoisie and the U.S, imperialists, force him to stay on in his country. He initiates ever greater repression until finally, after an incredibly brutal reaction to a general strike, the U.S. decides that he is no longer the man to maintain order and he is replaced by a muddle headed democratic sounding professor better able to co-opt dissent. The head of state faces revolt, terrorism, betrayal, communism (personified by "the Student"), World War I, boom, bust, imperialist pressures, the discovery of an ancient mummy, final humiliation - all without a trace of a thought for the good of his country. He is an absolute opportunist, a total creature of circumstance. Not even really a reactionary, he is a man of no political ideals whatsoever. His not unintelligent but totally unconcerned consciousness is a perfect instrument for his own thieving opportunism and, for a time, the rape of his country by imperialism. Eventually, the development of the contradictions of his rule force imperialism to seek a different instrument.
A brilliant portrayal in fluid poetic prose, rich with lush descriptive detail and a kind of understatement using aesthetic and sensory images to reveal a horrifying social reality.
Most chapters begin with a quotation from Descartes.
After reading this book I recommended it to my friend John Blegen, a French scholar. He read it and then pointed out to me that there were passages in the book that were drawn very directly from Marcel Proust. He thought that the mimicking, or parodying of Proust was one of the clear objects of the novel. I hadn't known any of that and yet I still thought it was a great novel. So I guess I can say now that the book functioned brilliantly on critical as well as literary and political levels.
| Author | Balzac, Honore de |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Sedgwick, Jane Minot |
| Publication | New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1954 |
| Copyright Date | 1835 |
| Number of Pages | 328 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1977 |
Eugene de Rastignac, young son of an impoverished noble family is in Paris studying law. He yearns to conquer Parisian "society" and uses his connection to Madame de Beaumont, a relative, to win the favor of Madame de Nucingen and her sister - daughters of Old Goriot, former vermicelli merchant.
The story is a remarkable expose of the false values of high society. Father Goriot is destroyed by his two daughters and their husbands. Eugene has the chance to get rich by a remote control murder. Women prostrate themselves before men who destroy them. Fortunes are consumed in the most trivial and superficial vanities. Marriages become battles for love, money and social position.
This book easily surpasses The Country Doctor as a work of social investigation. It is a straight dissection of what exists rather than a wistful vision of country idylls. Balzac writes with the open moralism which disappears in Zola and the realist literature. His characters personify traits in ways that make them archetypes rather than fully developed people. But there is no drawing back from difficult truths. High society, the bourgeoisie, the police (who spy on, entrap, and attempt to assassinate Vautrin the escaped prisoner for his money) are all pilloried.
The writing is uniformly well constructed, well paced and plotted.
I read The Country Doctor by way of a relatively short and easy introduction to Balzac, but it was only an introduction to Balzac's very early writing. This book was the real thing. Literature and the novel in particular were growing up starting in the 19th century in England, France and Russia. It reached peaks very quickly with Zola and Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Thackeray and Dickens.
| Author | Pope, Dudley |
|---|---|
| Publication | Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 302 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | April 1977 |
Napoleonic era sea adventure. Lieutenant Lord Nicholas Ramage awakes from a blow on the head to find himself in command of a sinking frigate under fire from a French ship of the line. By a bold stratagem he escapes with his remaining crewmen while leaving the wounded to surrender to the care of the French. Then with his trusty American coxswain and six men he carries out his mission of rescuing the beautiful Marchesa di Volterra and the ridiculous Count Pisano. There are challenges to his honor, a trial, Navy politics, love, vindication, and a good sea operation as he commands a cutter in a rescue operation of British seamen stranded on a hostile coast.
Still not C.S. Forester, but Pope is as good a writer as Alexander Kent (i.e., Douglas Reeman). In some ways his concerns are more serious, as with his investigation of Navy politics and procedures, and in some ways even more mushy shlock romance.
A useful substitute for the still unequaled Hornblower series.
| Author | Cather, Willa |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959 |
| Copyright Date | 1927 |
| Number of Pages | 299 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Religion; Christianity |
| When Read | April 1977 |
A novel of Jean-Marie Latour, first Bishop of New Mexico, based on the true story of Bishop Lamy. Latour arrives in 1848 with his life long companion and vicar, Father Joseph Vaillant. They minister to the Mexican and Indian communities over thousands of square miles, traveling hundreds of miles per trip to visit the tiny scattered villages. They soothe the downtrodden, replace the corrupt priests, bring religion to starved souls, and build up the church.
Cather's writing has a pure, sweet quality. There is no plotting, no use of dramatic technique, no manipulation of the story or the reader. She gives us simplicity, humility, logic and, humanity. Episodes in Latour's life and stories he has heard are reproduced without comment. They tell of fine people and scoundrels and are accompanied by Latour's reflections on the people and countryside. Neither episodes nor reflections tend toward any final climax. The meaning of these lives is found in their simple living.
A very beautiful story. I cannot support the religious life described in it, but I can sympathize with it nonetheless.
This struck me as one of those almost perfect novels, one to which nothing need be added and nothing taken away. The characters speak eloquently for themselves. The setting seems almost timeless.
Cather could draw both educated people like the bishop, and simple people like My Antonia and show the common humanity in each of them.
| Author | Plievier, Theodor |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Hood, Stuart |
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1954 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 318 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union; World War II |
| When Read | April 1977 |
This book about the battle for Moscow in 1941 is quite different from Plievier's Stalingrad. There is the same snow, mud, gangrene, bullet and bomb realism, but the roles are reversed. It is an attack on Stalinism. The entire Russian defeat in the first months of the war is portrayed as a succession of mass executions of scapegoats, evacuations or executions of political prisoners, total wastage of human resources, luxurious parties by well heeled NKVD generals, mad scrambles of bureaucrats to run away, self-seeking by Politbureau members, etc. Now it is the German officers who are honorable men with Nazis only among the NCOs. Nazi bestiality is discussed, but not so graphically portrayed except in the opening attack - and even then it is restrained.
Plievier is obviously reacting against his own first book. Either he has experienced a change of sympathy (which is probably the case to a very limited extent), or has evolved far enough from Nazism to no longer be so concerned with it. Now it is Stalinism which he sees as the main threat to humanity.
This is by no means a balanced book. Yet I am not ready to dismiss it either. There was a large NKVD full of gangster types. There was a Gulag. There was panic and revenge against scapegoats. None of this appears in Soviet history yet it must have been a very significant part of the whole affair.
Plievier's Stalingrad was published in 1948, probably written in the years before then. I think the point was still being made to the German people, and Plievier was one of those making it, that Hitler and Nazism had been a horrible fraud that did tremendous harm to Germany. By 1953, the "German Democratic Republic" was established, the Berlin Blockade had taken place, and it was clear to many Germans that, whether or not Hitler had done right in invading the USSR, the USSR was the same kind of corrupt totalitarian state that Nazi Germany had been.
Since reading this book I've read much more about the history of the Soviet Union and numerous books about the war in the East. I have come to the conclusion that it was, to a great extent, a contest between the stupidity of Hitler vs. the stupidity of Stalin. Stalin won for a number of reasons. First, the USSR was larger and had more resources. Second, Hitler oppressed and antagonized the Soviet peoples so intensively that, no matter how much they hated Stalin, they hated Hitler and the Germans more. I think that Hitler would have won if he had marched into the USSR as a liberator instead of as a barbarian conqueror determined to enslave and starve what he regarded as subhuman people. Third, where Hitler was relatively rational at the beginning of the conflict and Stalin was foolish, panicked and making every sort of mistake, by Stalingrad, Stalin could see that he had a good chance to win and he settled down, limiting his mistakes. Hitler on the other hand became more and more panicked, giving in to all of his stupid fantasies of digging in and fighting to the death. Of course Hitler's decision to declare war on the U.S. on December 11, 1941, did not help his cause, though it was probably not until late 1943 that the U.S. became an important force in the war, by which time the Soviets had already won in the East.
Although most of us don't realize it, the battle for Moscow was the longest and deadliest battle of World War II. Seven million soldiers were involved. Two million Russians and a half million Germans were casualties. Some historians, such as Andrew Nagorski, consider it the turning point of the war.
When I read Plievier's books I may have assumed that he had been a soldier in the German army. Not so. He had been forced into the Kaiser's navy in 1914, served at sea in a commerce raider, and became a leader in the naval mutiny in 1918 that was instrumental in overthrowing the Imperial government of Germany. In 1934 he fled Germany, eventually settling in the Soviet Union where he remained until 1947, then fleeing to Switzerland, where he lived until his death in 1955. His knowledge of the war came from his work in the USSR, in part as a member of the Free Germany Committee.
Plievier wrote a third book, Berlin which I have not read. After reading Stalingrad I had planned to read all three but, after reading Moscow, I think I lost my enthusiasm for reading another anti-Soviet book. I think that I would have no difficulty reading it today.
| Author | Calvino, Italo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Italian |
| Translators | Weaver, William |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974 |
| Copyright Date | 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 165 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | April 1977 |
Kublai Khan and Marco Polo sit in a garden, talking, or signing, or imagining that they talk, about cities of the world. Polo describes cities, and desire, and signs, and eyes, and the dead; trading cities, thin cities, continuous cities, hidden cities, each with a woman's name. Kublai aims to possess his empire through these stories and through his atlases and his dreams of cities of which he inquires whether they exist. He seeks the final assimilation of his empty conquest - but it is like his chessboard. Once he has won the king he is left with only a square of wood. Polo reads forests and woodcutters and wives and cities in that square but the Khan cannot remember why he played for it.
The cities are allegorical or merely evocative. They are mythic and in constant dialectical motion. They are all one city and all the alternatives to one city which make the real one possible, the contrasts without which their opposite cannot be characterized. They range over every time and sometimes all times at once contained implicitly within them. There are cities with shards of the past, germs of the future, mirror images, images in the stars, alternating cities, inescapable cities.
Polo and Kublai discuss the meaning of their discussion, providing a continuing thread through the separate chapters.
A remarkable book of social analysis, a study of language and communication, an astonishing flight of the imagination.
We think we know what we mean by words like "book", "novel", and "fiction", but sometimes someone writes something and prints it on pages with covers that look just like the other things that we apply those terms to, but it's not the same kind of thing. It's something else. The catalogers call it fiction and shelve it in the fiction department because they don't know what else to do with it. It's not fact. It's not history or science. It's not a theater play or poetry. So we call it fiction and, when we read it, it expands our ideas about what fiction can be.
I liked this book and I liked Calvino's Mr. Palomar that I read in 2010. By the time I read that second book I already knew that it would not be a conventional novel. I was prepared and ready to enjoy it for what it was.
| Author | Tolstoy, Leo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Carey, W.G. |
| Publication | London: Heinemann, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1896-1904 |
| Number of Pages | 196 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | April 1977 |
This was written over the period 1896-1904. Never completed by Tolstoy, it was published after the author's death.
A story of a warrior chief in the Caucasus in 1852. The Russians were gradually subduing the feudal Asian people of the region by terrorism, division of the local people, destruction of the economy, the use of puppet leaders, in short, all the standard tactics of imperialism. Hadji Murat is a very brave and fine man, but his consciousness is stuck at the level of personal honor. He fights for personal revenge, glory. friendship, etc. When another, higher chief wrongs him he goes over to the Russians and offers to help them. The other chief still holds his family though. Hadji Murat kills some of his Russian Cossack escort and rides away to rescue his family. He is pursued and killed.
The novel is rough. T shades into new passages abruptly and pursues new thoughts. He probably would have reorganized it some before he published it.
Two passages are particularly brilliant and important. One is an almost comic recounting of a Russian raid on an abandoned village - followed by a few brief pages of the same event seen from the other side. The apparent farce turns out to be a cruel tragedy when seen in its full significance. This must be one of the earliest passages to portray the victory of imperialism. The other passage is a hilarious portrayal of Czar Nicholas I, no holds barred.
It seems to me that the range of Tolstoy's perception and understanding was wider and deeper than that of just about any author that I can think of. He was equally at home at a St. Petersburg dinner party (War and Peace, a campaign in the Caucasus (Hadji Murat), a rabbit hunt in the snow (War and Peace), with a young dunce in a peasant household (Alyosha the Pot), or with an unwed mother on trial for murder (Resurrection.) He looked at people and he saw who they were. He didn't just see reflections of himself, or if he did, then he was an extraordinarily multi-faceted genius.
Tolstoy was aware of the events in the south of Russia and the expansion of the Empire at both the very highest and the very lowest levels. He understood what the Russian Empire was and what it meant for the non-Russian peoples who were incorporated into it. He was a deeply intelligent man with a powerful historical vision.
| Author | Voinovich, Vladimir |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Lourie, Richard |
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977 |
| Copyright Date | 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 316 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Comedy |
| Keywords | Soviet Union; World War II |
| When Read | April 1977 |
A tragicomic political satire on Stalinism by an author who cannot publish in the USSR. Chonkin is the lowest, most expendable private in his 1941 Red Army unit. He is sent to guard a disabled airplane and then forgotten. He stays on duty, moves in with Nyura B, the postmistress, and gradually resumes the life of a muzhik. After certain hilarious adventures he is denounced by a vindictive neighbor to the "right place", the NKVD. They come to arrest him but he arrests them and puts them to work on the kolkhoz. Finally, the army intervenes and Chonkin is dragged off, his Nyurka crying after him in the dust.
This is the first Russian novel I have seen to ridicule Stalin by name, to ridicule the entire establishment from agriculture to army. It is incredibly funny and most powerful too. It should be available to the Russian audience but likely will not be.
I remember that in his introduction to the novel, Voinovich apologized for his selection of Chonkin as the hero of his story. He said that he tried to get one of the real war heroes to portray but he was too late. All of the real heroes had already been taken by other authors. Chonkin was the only man left.
I also remember a quotation on the back of the dust jacket of the book. Mstislav Rostropovich, the famous cellist and then conductor of the National Symphony in Washington D.C., wrote that when he read this book he laughed so hard that the fillings in his teeth melted. My own fillings stayed solid, but only just. It was a great read.
| Author | Reeman, Douglas |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Berkeley Medallion Books, G.P. Puntam's Sons, 1973 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 254 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | April 1977 |
WWII sea adventure. Clive Royce, junior lieutenant and second in command of a motor torpedo boat in the North Sea learns about war, heroically torpedoes an enemy ship from his own burning, sinking boat, falls in love with his dead captain's beautiful sister, becomes a skipper himself, and wins the heart of the girl.
The story is naive, naively told. There are one or two patches of good writing but mostly so so. Nevertheless it seems, though all the sentiment, surprisingly sincere. Reeman claims to have lived this story and I can believe it.
Not quite as good as MacLean, not nearly as good as Forester, but much better than that putrid Brian Callison.
A Prayer for the Ship was the first of many novels produced by Reeman under his own name or using the name Alexander Kent. He did indeed live the life described in this book, having joined the Royal Navy at age 16 early in WWII. He was sunk twice, fighting in the North Sea, the Med, and elsewhere. I don't think he married the beautiful sister of his dead captain though.
Reeman died in January of this year, 2017, at the age of 92.
| Author | Cheever, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957 |
| Copyright Date | 1954 |
| Number of Pages | 307 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 1977 |
This is a story of three men, ferryboat captain Leander Wapshot and his two sons Moses and Coverly, and their relationship with women. The women include Sarah, Leander's wife, Honora and Justina - rich cousins, and Betsey and Melissa, the wives of the two young men, all of them moving in worlds of their own imagination and creation. They are strong, self-absorbed, involved in mysterious irrational values. They always get their way. Betsey, Coverly's wife is 50s ennui, small minded, new petty bourgeois. Melissa, Moses' wife is beautiful, irrational, childish. The men must always put up with, adjust to, or work around the irrationalities and strange values of the women.
C writes extremely well. His scenes are natural. The theme is worked out effectively through mundane details - details that always advance the story for all their commonness - a shopping trip, a call by a vacuum cleaner salesman, a bus ride, fishing, a story of an Irish cook. However there is also a penchant for sudden change - Coverly's departure, the fire at Clear Haven, the trip to the South Pacific, Leander's death, the conversion of the ferryboat SS Topaze to a gift shop.
A fine book with many subtleties, but one with a strong subconscious psychologizing tendency. People act from virtually unanalyzable motives.
The book was somewhat anti-female.
This was a complicated book that I have not explained well. I do remember liking the way these essentially unexceptional people leading frustrating lives were nevertheless treated as full human beings, people whom we could not dismiss as caricatures or failures. I seem to recall that Coverly took a job in Florida typing data for the space program into a computer and he fell in love with a far from perfect woman - both of which events might seem to indicate that Coverly was a failure. But his life was not treated that way and Cheever granted him some satisfaction both from his seemingly boring job and his seemingly difficult wife - his "little, little squirrel", if I remember the phrase he used.
My book card noted that the book was published in 1957 but copyrighted in 1954. Usually that means that the copy I read was published on the later date but the first publication was the earlier date. Now however I don't see any evidence of a publication before 1957. Perhaps Cheever finished it in 1954 but didn't publish it, or perhaps I just got it wrong. The book won a National Book Award in 1958.
| Author | Weinberg, Steven |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Basic Books, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 188 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science |
| Keywords | Cosmology |
| When Read | May 1977 |
A Harvard physicist's explanation of modern cosmology. A standard model of the origin of the universe has come to be accepted, for the first time ever, in the last ten years. It is now thought that the universe evolved from an infinitely dense, infinitely hot (or perhaps a high finite state) in infinite space (or in a space of about four light years in circumference) through a succession of thermal equilibrium states which ended after a few minutes in the basic set of particles observed today and after another 700,000 years in the formation of stable atoms. Time began 10-20 billion years ago. It will likely end in a continual cooling process in which all reactions slowly cease.
I learned something about nuclear physics - neutrinos contain 40+% of all energy in the universe although at present temperatures matter is transparent to them. Charge, baryon number, and lepton number are the only absolutely conserved quantities. There may be sub-sub-atomic particles called quarks of which everything else except photons and neutrinos is composed.
Weinberg is brilliant and philosophical. His arguments are very close packed but terribly sophisticated. He concludes with a fine statement of the significance of physics.
The American philosopher and mathematician Willard Van Orman (W.V.O.) Quine talked about our knowledge as primarily concerned with "middle sized, middle distanced" objects. We understand houses and cats, clouds and raindrops, people and ants. Those are the things that we think about in our daily lives. They are what our brains have evolved to deal with. Fortunately for us, we needed to evolve general purpose qualitative and quantitative capabilities that turn out to be extensible to the world beyond our immediate senses, and some of us have used those capabilities to peer deep into the world beyond our senses and to produce theories that give us at least some understanding of what lies beyond. I appreciate the limited but not completely incomprehensible view that Weinberg gives us in this book and his later book on the history of science, and in Brian Greene's book on the inflationary multiverse.
I don't know if the Standard Model that Weinberg and others constructed will continue to hold up into the indefinite future. I suspect that it will in something like the sense that Newtonian physics still holds today. At the limits of size and speed, corrections are required, but we can still make useful and dependable calculations today based on what Newton discovered.
I can't begin to read and understand a small part of the physics that Weinberg understands. Even if I spent the rest of my life studying it, I doubt if I could reach the PhD level. Fortunately for me, there are an unlimited of other interesting things in the world for me to study and my time won't be wasted if I work on them.
| Author | Smith, Hedrick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Quadrangle / The New York Times Book Co., 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 527 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics; Society |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | May 1977 |
[See comment.]
Smith was the New York Times Bureau Chief in Moscow from 1972-74. He is obviously a competent journalist, observant, well-read, probing for information, independent minded, and well organized. He seems entirely honest, intent on reporting both sides of issues, and anti-dogmatic. Thus in spite of his American petit-bourgeois intellectual viewpoint (the book contains only a few pages of information on workers or peasants and concentrates on the life of Russian intellectuals and professional people) his reportage cannot be ignored.
The picture he draws is far from pretty. Total individualism and careerism in the Party, mass disillusionment, suppression of all free culture, interference in the private affairs of citizens, petty corruption, widespread ignorance of basic history, extensive censorship and self-censorship, suppression of news, secret catalogs to closed stacks in libraries, alcoholism, officially condoned anti-semitism, administrative actions against people with no reasons ever given, two sets of money and two sets of stores for ordinary folk and for the privileged stratum, an economy held back by artificial goals and widespread bureaucracy, neo-Stalinism in the saddle.
There is little analysis here and only a partial understanding of the Soviet achievement. I would put a less cynical interpretation on many of his observations. Nevertheless it is obvious that something is rotten in Russia.
When one adopts a strong political point of view it is tremendously tempting to yield to what we today call "confirmation bias". I had the same temptation that others had. I wanted to believe in the Soviet Union, or at least believe that, after Stalin, it would be able to return to, or aspire to, the ideals of socialism. But I could not, not read this book and I could not, not appreciate that it contained much truth. It did not make me give up my ideals but it did introduce additional notes of realism into my thinking.
I have never settled on a clear politics. I remain torn between idealism and realism, but I hope not cynicism. I try to listen to arguments on all sides and recognize that the truth is not simple and the path is never 100% clear.
| Author | Lem, Stanislaw |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Polish |
| Translators | Kandel, Michael |
| Publication | New York: A Continuum Book, Seabury Press, 1976 |
| Copyright Date | 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 275 |
| Extras | Line drawings by Lem |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | May 1977 |
The voyages of Ijon Tichy, written over a 17 year period. There is no space adventure here - it is all social satire or philosophy. In the 13th voyage, Tichy confronts the "fishifiers", a satire on Lysenko and Stalinist voluntarism and suppression of truth. In the 11th it is a planet of men dressed as robots thinking everyone else is a real robot and all speaking archaic language. The longest stories are the 20th, a satire on Tichy as remolder of history with every plan incorporating all the foibles which remolding was to overcome, and the 21st, a magnificent allegory of religion. On the planet Dichotica, biotic revolutions in technology enable men to create or recreate any form of body or psyche whatsoever. Total freedom to be, think, or do anything is achieved. Nothing remains to be done of necessity and the most inane and monstrous pastimes are indulged. The intelligent robots have taken up the ancient religion and preserve the faith, a faith based on no expectations, no knowledge, no hopes, and no rewards. The 25th voyage relates Tichy's family history of madmen and weird stupid geniuses.
Tichy is one of the great characters of fiction, stolid yet flexible, principled yet always ready to humiliate himself to save his skin, intelligent yet stubborn. He can face the greatest absurdities with composure. When he meets himself in time travel he invariably gets in an argument or a fist fight.
The last sentence of the comment, ended because I ran out of room, was about a wonderful story in which Tichy wakes up and goes to the bathroom in his spaceship. He meets a man who looks exactly like himself shaving in front of the mirror. He demands to know what this interloper is doing on his spaceship in his bathroom, shaving in his mirror. The man says, Wait, Hold on, but Tichy is angry and punches the fellow.
The next morning, Tichy wakes up, goes into the bathroom and begins to shave. Suddenly the door opens and a man who looks just like him comes in and demands to know what he's doing on his spaceship, in his bathroom, shaving in his mirror. Tichy says, Wait, Hold on, but the angry fellow walks up and punches him.
This is the kind of story that Lem did better than any other writer I know. To get in a fight with oneself is unusual enough, perhaps unprecedented, but to present the same scene from both sides of the fight, once before we know about it and once after, that's pure Lem.
| Author | Rivera, Jose Eustasio |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | James, Earle k. |
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1935 |
| Copyright Date | 1924 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 1977 |
Cova, a city bred Bogota poet, flees with Alicia, his young girlfriend, to the pampas of east central Columbia. Her parents will not let her marry him because he is not wealthy. He doesn't love her but his pride is too great to allow him to accept the insult and leave her. In the plains they encounter Barrera who is enticing workers down to the jungle rubber forests. B steals Alicia and takes many workers, only to sell them into a hellish slavery of human tropical disease, insects, extreme brutality, debt slavery, and constant robberies.
The novel is interesting not only for its exposure of one of the world's more sickening areas of exploitation, but also for its self-conscious and yet ununderstood expression of Latin American machismo culture. Cova is fiercely jealous of any other man paying attention to Alicia. He pursues her desperately when she scorns him, yet he cares nothing for her as a lover. Cova is always acting impulsively, grandly, romantically, courageously, and yet narrow mindedly, uncaringly, cruelly, and childishly. Rivera expresses this as a poet would; fully and powerfully aware of the nuances of feeling and emotion, truthfully, with great integrity, and yet without understanding the contradictions.
I don't remember why I said that Rivera had a poetic feel for feelings and emotions, but did not understand the contradictions of his main character. I presume it was an accurate comment on his writing. Perhaps this author and this work were influenced as much by 19th century romanticism as by the 20th century realism that infused his treatment of the rubber workers. I was reading Latin American literature at this time and I think I reached back to an earlier period to find this book, perhaps hoping to develop a better sense of the developments that led to the great writers of the 60's and 70's.
See also B. Traven's The Rebellion of the Hanged.
| Author | Rodinson, Maxime |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Perl, Michael |
| Publication | Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 239 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Israel |
| When Read | June 1977 |
An excellent overview of the entire conflict from its early years at the time of Balfour to the Six Day War. R is a French Marxist scholar of middle eastern languages and is Jewish. He gives the best presentation of the Arab view I have seen, and offers an excellent concluding chapter sensitively analyzing the moral issues at stake.
The Arabs had Israel and the Jewish colonization imposed upon them at a time when they had no national government able to defend their interests. They cannot help considering that they had no moral responsibility for the Jewish persecution and hence no responsibility to shoulder the cost of the reparation. All Arabs see Israel as a living legacy of their defeat at the hands of imperialism - which thrust the problem upon them. To make peace and recognize the state of Israel would be to resign themselves for all time to surrender to imperialism - to acknowledge their inferiority - to sell their birthright - to say that their superior numbers and self-righteousness count for nothing against a small but superior foe.
The solution, according to R, is to patch up the best peace possible and wait. Eventually, under conditions of peace, Israel will lose its Zionist fortress character and become a Levantine state.
49 years later, we're still waiting and I can't see that we're any closer to Rodinson's hoped for solution. I think that a key reason is that, in both Israel and in the Arab states, the political forces favor exacerbating the hatreds rather than resolving them. People like Begin, Sharon, Netanyahu, and other right wing Israelis could get more votes by catering to the bigots and fanatics than by opposing them, especially given that the progressive Israelis would never vote for them anyway. So they fanned the flames and won political power. The same is certainly true in Arab states where it is more advantageous to blame the Israelis for all problems than to admit that the Arab governments are corrupt and uninterested in the problems of their people. The politics of ignorance and hatred trump (I use that term advisedly) the politics of understanding and acceptance.
Around the time I was reading this book I was working as a volunteer for the American Friends Service Committee on a project to promote peace in the middle east. For a time at least we were able to bring together a small but diverse group of American Christians and Jews, Blacks and Whites, Israelis, and Palestinians, in an effort to connect with ordinary Americans and with American politicians. We visited offices of Senators and Congressmen. We went to churches and staged debates, typically with me presenting the Israeli point of view and another fellow presenting the Palestinian point of view and then, half way through the debate, we would switch sides, each of us taking the opposite point of view to the one we had. It really shook up the audience who, having formed personal identifications with one of us, usually the one taking the Israeli side, would now have to listen to the person they had decided to respect offer the arguments for the opposite side.
Our real position was, not that one side was wrong and one side right, or even that both were wrong, but that both sides were right. Each had legitimate rights to live in the land of Israel/Palestine. Each side should respect the other and reach an accommodation with them.
I still think that's the right analysis of the situation but we don't seem to be any closer to realizing a solution based upon it than we were when this book was written in 1968.
| Author | Rayner, D.A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 181 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic era |
| When Read | June 1977 |
A fictionalized account of an actual sea fight between His Majesty's frigate San Lorenzo, 38 guns, and a frigate of the French empire Piemontaise, 50, guns in March 1808 off Ceylon. The Piemontaise was a commerce raider stalking an East India convoy and the San Lorenzo a frigate sent to intercept the raider. The fight covered three days of clashes, chases, and maneuvers. In the end, Piemontaise was taken.
The novel is not a literary work. The story is somewhat clumsily told. R has concentrated on producing a technically authentic period piece showing sailing, naval, and psychological details.
A quite successful effort.
Starting at about the age of eight years I began reading sailing books, especially relating to this period, though most were about American ships fighting against the British, the Barbary pirates, or the French privateers that were raiding American commerce in the Caribbean. I aspired to join the Navy when I grew up.
I can still understand pretty well the all of the strategic issues regarding sailing on and off the wind, different types of guns, fighting at different ranges, attacks on hulls vs. masts, different rigs, and so on. Reading this book was a throwback to my 8-12 year old self.
| Author | Cline, Ray S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Washington DC: Acropolis Books, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 294 |
| Extras | photos, charts, list of acronyms, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | June 1977 |
The former deputy director for intelligence of the CIA writes his history of the agency and recommendations for reorganization.
Cline is an intellectual, a scholar even, but this book is 50% great old fellow history, 50% bureaucratese (complete with a battery of organization charts), and 100% apology for the CIA. He only mentions those bad things which the press have already fully exposed, e.g., Bay of Pigs, Castro assassination attempts, Meo army, CHAOS (domestic surveillance), Chile, and the early overthrow of governments in Guatemala and Iran. These he only brings up in order to pooh-pooh them, cast the blame on one crackpot individual (e.g., Howard Hunt), or to point the finger at the president. There is no mention of Phoenix, Greece, the overthrow of Diem, or many others. There is no remorse, no soul searching, not even an intellectual defense of U.S. actions. Communism = dictatorship, the U.S. stands for democracy. Period.
Cline is no idiot. He's not even totally amoral. Part of the explanation for this may be some patriotic defense of the CIA which self-discipline puts in this sanitized form. But one cannot help thinking that this powerful man has simply succumbed to the mystique of ambition and glory. He has blinkers on his soul.
I couldn't have expected anything else from Cline's book. He bought into the whole story of the CIA. He had to in order to have reached the high position he held. Doubts were given up early in the process and any man who showed them anywhere along the way would have been stopped right where he was.
I have read books alongside or after this one that go into some of the details of CIA behavior in Chile where thousands of people were murdered by the coup plotters, in Greece where the "Colonels" killed thousands more, in Iran where the Shah's dictatorship was installed for its 25 year reign of terror, in the Congo where Patrice Lumumba was murdered and the monster Mobutu was brought to power, in Mozambique, Angola, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Brazil, and on and on.
Daniel Ellsberg described the mindset of the American Vietnam War leaders. They came of age in the 1930's. Their political education came from the Munich "Peace Conference" where they saw the British "appease" Hitler, bringing about World War II. Appeasement of totalitarianism was the cardinal sin that they fought against.
It sounded good in its way. The British were wrong. Hitler should have been stopped before he got as far as he did. But this historical analogy of a failed and misguided policy served as a convenient cover for actions that were not in support of democracy and not in opposition to totalitarianism. Democracy was overthrown in Chile, Greece, Iran, Guatemala, and other places and replaced with puppet governments that murdered labor leaders, journalists, civil rights activists, and democrats in order to safeguard American companies and subsidiaries. Under criticism, our leaders gave us the "domino theory" that they had to do what they did or the Soviet Union would soon dominate the world. Sometimes we had to kill some good guys in order to keep the whole world from turning bad.
We have much to answer for and our bad behavior hasn't ended yet.
| Author | Kazantzakis, Nikos |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Greek |
| Translators | Bien, P.A. |
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 506 |
| Extras | Translator's note |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Religion; Christianity |
| When Read | June 1977 |
The story of Christ, told mainly from his point of view. He is seen as a man, neurotic, even psychotic, struggling with the contradiction between body and soul. Jesus wants to join himself to God, to achieve the highest spiritual value. He also wants to join himself to the earth, to women, to Mary Magdalene and Martha and Mary, sisters of Lazarus, to labor, to have children and grandchildren. He wrestles with demons and visions of all sorts and finally, while on the cross, repudiates temptation for the last time and accepts crucifixion.
The beauty of this book lies only partly in its discussion of this struggle. It is an essentially neurotic struggle waged in quite different terms by modern man. But there is an excellent evocation of the ancient mentality. We see why the intellectual could not be a materialist but had to look for hidden meanings behind the chance occurrences of life. We see a society in which God and the supernatural are taken for granted, yet where the disciples can coolly play the odds on reaching the kingdom of heaven.
Judas is the hero. A strong man who cares only to deliver Israel from the Romans and who betrays Christ as a collusion with him because Christ tells him that his crucifixion is necessary as a symbol.
So what was Christ's last temptation? In my reading of the book it was the temptation to be an ordinary man. If I remember correctly, he is hoisted up on the cross but there follows a section of over 100 pages in which he is brought down again and permitted to live. He marries Mary Magdalene. He settles down into a home. He has children. He becomes a well liked man with a family and a community. But then, in the last pages, he awakens on the cross, near death, thankful that he has resisted the temptation. He has given himself to God. He dies triumphant.
I believe that Kazantzakis was a kind of an extremist. I won't call him a religious extremist. I don't know if he actually believed in God, though he did spend some time in a monastery. But I consider him to have been an extremist in his belief in uncompromising devotion to higher values. It's not that he himself was uncompromising. I don't know if he was or wasn't. But he clearly had a deep love and respect for those who were what the great majority of us could never be. All three of the books I read by him The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis, and Zorba the Greek, were books about people like this. Perhaps Christ was the prototype. We might call Francis the epitome. And finally Zorba was the highest in man brought down to earth and shown in a form that anyone might aspire to be.
Writers like Kazantzakis don't write for money. They don't attempt to follow a school, or complete a tradition. They are driven by forces that most of us would never even know existed if we didn't come across their books. As with many other great writers, we can't easily place them in a category or characterize their work by comparing it to that of others. We are certainly richer for having their books to read.
This was the first book that I read by Kazantzakis. Without meaning to say anything at all against it, I'll confess that I liked the other two better, and Zorba best of all. I am not the kind of extremist that Christ and Francis aspired to be.
I wrote in my comment, "We see why the intellectual could not be a materialist but had to look for hidden meanings behind the chance occurrences of life." I had the same thoughts upon reading The Nazarene by Sholem Asch, later that same year of 1977. See my notes attached to that book written in 2017.
I still think that what I wrote in 1977 and forty years later in 2017 are correct, but only in a society in which rationalism is, as yet, undeveloped. At the time of Christ, and even before, there were intellectuals in the Hellenic world who had no need of gods and mystical explanations. It is not clear that Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Eratosthenes, and other Greek scientist/philosophers believed in any form of religion or mysticism. However the Greek and Hellenic intellectuals represented only a small part of the Hellenic world and, while their influence may have extended to some Romans, I doubt that it extended into Jewish society. Even today in the United States, a rationalist worldview is far from universal.
| Author | Nekrasov, Victor |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Vickery, Walter |
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1061 |
| Number of Pages | 183 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | June 1977 |
Kira Georgievna marries Vadim Kudrievtsev, a poet. She is 18, he 20. Soon after, in 1937, he is arrested and sent to a Siberian prison camp for no reason whatever. She is heartbroken but she adjusts. In 1946 she marries Nikolai Ivanovich, a painter and art teacher 20 years her senior. He is a kind, decent, civilized man who teaches her about art and about how to work. She remains youthful and stylish, becomes an accepted sculptress and, at age 41, has an affair with Yurochka, a 22 year old electrician posing for a statue for her. Then Vadim returns. Kira vacillates between the three men, finally learning to at least a small degree that life is not a game and she must manage herself.
Soviet novels always have much beneath the surface, beneath the censorship. This one might be taken as a well done novel about love. But under the circumstances it is also a critique of political complacency. Kira and Nikolai too are people who got along, looked the other way, and lost themselves, one in personal self-indulgence and the other in art. Kira is a shallow person because of it. She has gained less than Vadim.
Quite well written.
I now know what I only surmised in 1977. Nekrasov, fighter in the Red Army, winner of the USSR State Prize for Literature in 1947, member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, became an outspoken and courageous anti-Stalinist shortly after Stalin's death. He was criticized by Khrushchev and Brezhnev and moved to France in 1974. Brezhnev even took away his Soviet citizenship. This book earned him plenty of enmity from the Party.
Russia is not free yet and neither is China. But I continue to hold out hope for both of them.
| Author | Garcia Marquez, Gabriel |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Rabassa, Gregory |
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1976 |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 269 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1977 |
A novel of the life of an ancient dictator told at the discovery of his death in six paragraphs and perhaps 200 sentences. Each chapter-paragraph begins with a statement about the way things were in the house of the dead man when people broke in to see, and quickly slips into a study of a facet of his life, usually centering on a person - his wife, mother, security chief, slum queen, etc. Narrative viewpoint shifts at will, within sentences. Images and metaphors and special locutions develop continuously in beautifully thought out transitions - His great feet, his mother, the American ambassador, the cows, the sea, the three locks and bolts, etc., the use of "of" again and again.
Everything flows in a progressive realization of the essential poverty, self delusion, and total inner emptiness of the dictatorship personified in the dictator. Everything is illusion. It exists only to serve its continued existence and survives only by giving away everything to imperialism.
This novel took seven years to write. It is a true masterpiece of analysis, political exposure, writing craft, and unparalleled literary vision. Garcia Marquez mixes sound, image, emotion, and many other things in a remarkably integrated whole.
Truly outstanding.
I don't see how anyone reading my notes could form much of an image of this novel, but I don't see how anyone could have written anything more enlightening in the space of a 3x5 inch book card - unless they used microprinting.
This was one of those books, like Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral, that is impossible to understand until one is already pretty far advanced through the novel. As a reader, I had to take it on faith that some way through the book things would start to make sense. I had to file away "the great feet of the", and "the cows of", and be patient. Eventually, my patience was rewarded and a great vista opened before me. I saw the picture of a corrupt dictator presiding over a sea of ashes. He had sold the very ocean itself to the Americans, never dreaming that they would actually take it away, but they did, leaving only the sea of ashes. The dictator had ruined his country, ruined his people, and gained nothing of value for himself. Even the innocent young girls in their school uniforms that he delighted in watching from his window were waterfront whores collected and dressed up by one of his security people. All of the dreams were only dreams and the reality was ashes and dust. As I said in my comment in 1977, this was a true masterpiece.
I don't know if many people have read this. The author's One Hundred Years of Solitude is the book that everyone cites as his masterpiece and, if it weren't for this book, One Hundred Years would certainly qualify as the finest creation any author could aspire to.
My interest in the great Latin American writers began in the Humanities Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. I was reading The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review each week as they arrived in the department. I was talking with my friend John Blegen who was also entranced by the great outburst of literary talent from the South. We read Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, and Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State along with Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa. It seemed that a new world of literature had been born and that writing would never be the same.
| Author | Chaix, Marie |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Mathews, Harry |
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1977 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 196 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | France |
| When Read | July 1977 |
A fictionalized account of a true story of a French fascist, Nazi collaborator, and war criminal, told by his daughter. Her father was a chemical engineer incensed by the victory of a communist led strike in his factory. He joined the FPP, a right wing party formed in 1936 to fight communism and the popular front government.
He was an honest, decent man of great ability but was totally dedicated to anti-communism. During the war he acquiesced in anti-semitic and other crimes and atrocities and collaborated with the German army intelligence. At the end he turned against the Germans after they assassinated the leader of the FPP and showed their lack of concern for anything other than the German empire. He was sorry for the crimes - which he himself avoided - at least their more sordid aspects - but not for his political stance.
The novel does not condemn him. It is a saga of the family. C relates details of childhood, family isolation, the drop from relative wealth to relative poverty after the war, the desires of her mother to have her husband home again. It is sensitive on this personal level and not insensitive to the crimes, but it fails to expose the full objective truth. It is a daughter's statement of love and sorrow.
The demands of love and truth are sometimes in conflict with each other. So too the stance of a human being relative to his family and to his society as a whole. People who seem to us to be the epitome of evil may have a tender regard for their families. I can imagine that Marie Chaix lived with those emotional conflicts and felt a deep inner need to bring them to some resolution for herself. She also explained to her readers that the judgment of a person is not simple and we must not jump to conclusions about human beings, even when the case appears to be as clear cut as Nazis vs. French patriots.
The French Popular Party (Parti Populaire Francais) was apparently the most antisemitic and Nazi collaborationist of the French parties. Reading its history in the Wikipedia it's hard to imagine a less appealing political movement. It's founders were Communist Party officials! They accused the Communist Party of not really supporting the workers, but then moved closer to capitalism when that seemed more promising. It's not what I would have expected from an anti-communist chemical engineer. Marie must have really loved her father.
| Author | Charteris, Leslie |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 1977 |
Simon Templar, "the Saint", works for the U.S. government and some unnamed international agency to smash a drug, blackmail, robbery, etc. ring, in New York
C's special quirk seems to be culture with a capital "C". There are big words everywhere and some literary jokes.
The Saint is entirely too perfect and less interesting than Spade or Marlowe, but more sophisticated than they.
The story ends with the Saint needlessly killing all the baddies.
Odd, not well plotted, too secretve about the Saint, rather silly in its romance (with Avalon Dexter.) Its only strongpoint is the verve with which it is written.
In my 20s, one of my favorite TV shows, watched with Marcia on my 12 inch "portable" black and white television, was "The Saint" with Roger Moore. It was a TV show with characters and situations that became familiar and comfortable, as often happened with weekly TV shows. When I discovered the books I thought that I might have found a new collection of comfortable reading, a sort of old friend.
It didn't work out for me. Roger Moore's portrayal of Templar stepped close to the edge of being too heroic, but was infused with humor and charm. However Charteris' Templar was over the edge. If I remember correctly, he was described as being 36 years old, in absolute perfect physical and mental condition, able to beat anyone in a fight, a super-hero as well as a saint. It was too much for me. I didn't read any more.
| Author | Turgenev, Ivan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Garnett, Constance |
| Publication | New York: Modern Library |
| Copyright Date | 1862 |
| Number of Pages | XII + 243 |
| Extras | Introduction by Thomas Seltzer |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | July 1977 |
A poignant, ambivalent story of two student friends, Yevgeny Vasilyev Bazarov, a "nihilist", and Arkady Nikolaitch Kirsanov, much influenced by Bazarov. They stay alternately with Kirsanov's father and older brother Pavel, then with Madame Odintsov, a widow and liberated woman, and then with Bazarov's father.
Young Bazarov is a doctor, a scientist, a man who takes absolutely nothing for granted. He disdains traditional Russian life and considers that what Russia needs most at this time is the absolute destruction of all cherished beliefs and institutions. He is crude, offensive, sometimes cruel, ruthless with himself and others. He alienates his adoring father and liberal brother and encourages his friend to do the same with his own traditional parents. Yet he has great courage and dignity.
At the end, after various love stories and family agonies, and after antagonizing everyone, young Bazarov, contracts an infection while performing an operation and slowly dies, but he never gives way to the least softmindedness or self pity. His approach to everything - love, friendship, hatred, death - is ruthlessly honest.
At the time that this novel was written, Russia was emerging from a very isolated culture into the more general European world. Educated children were rejecting the traditional life of their parents. Some, like Pavel, were looking towards a liberal, Western, future for Russia but radicals like Bazarov went beyond that and saw the destruction of all traditional values as essential.
According to Seltzer this book was hailed by conservatives and attacked by radicals on its appearance, when in fact T meant for the opposite to occur.
It is a book which respects many points of view - Bazarov's is clearly not the least.
This was apparently the first book written in Russian that made an impression on Western European literature. According to the Wikipedia it gained the approval of Flaubert, de Maupassant, and James.
I recall reading Aristophanes' The Clouds and being surprised at how, even among the ancient Greeks, there were fathers who thought that their sons were abandoning traditional culture and going off in new and wrong directions. Generational conflicts were not new in the nineteenth century.
| Author | Kent, Alexander |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons (Berkeley Medallion Edition), 1975 |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 314 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic era |
| When Read | July 1977 |
Bolitho takes the frigate Undine to the Indonesian islands in 1784 to occupy a new outpost of British imperialism. The French are backing a local war lord against them. It is peacetime but English-French rivalry continues unabated.
Much romanticism, some mush in the plot. I seem to be getting used to these since I'm finding them acceptable substitutes for Hornblower.
I added the keywords "Napoleonic era" to this though the action takes place before the French Revolution. But Bolitho will continue into the real era of Napoleon.
| Author | Jiryis, Sabri |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Hebrew |
| Translators | Dobson, Meric |
| Publication | Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 180 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Israel |
| When Read | July 1977 |
A study, originally written in Hebrew by an Israeli Palestinian Arab, of the position of the Israeli government with respect to Arabs within its borders. Topics include the military government (which administers much Arab land, the seizure of Arab owned land, the two major massacres of Arab civilians - Deir Yassin, April 9, 1948 (200+ people), and Kafr Qasim, October 29, 1956 (47 people) - and the treatment of Arabs in society, education, agriculture, labor, and development and services. His findings are documented with references to official Israeli government publications and newspapers.
It is a shocking story, told subjectively to some extent (i.e., the author expresses his outrage) but clearly has a ring of authenticity. There is praise for the Israeli Communists, and a number of other left-wing individuals and groups of Jews
It is obvious that the much touted "improvement" in the condition of Arabs in Israel is purely a by-product of Israeli development. It is, if anything, badly hindered by much official policy.
The first of the massacres referred to above was perpetrated by Irgun and Lehi paramilitary Jewish groups during the 1948 war in an assault on an Arab village. The second was perpetrated by an Israeli border police unit, just before the Sinai War. In both cases, many women and children were killed as well as unarmed men.
These kinds of things aren't supposed to happen. Educated men aren't supposed to take out their anger and frustration by murdering helpless and innocent people who happen to be of the wrong ethnicity. But it does happen. It happened with American troops in Vietnam and it happens regularly around the world.
When I was working on these issues for the AFSC, the most frustrating aspect of it was that, whenever injustices were pointed out, the partisans of the offending side would first deny that the offenses occurred and then retort with the claim that, whatever may have been done was justified because it was nothing compared to what the other side did. Jews did not want to believe, I should say that they refused to believe, that Palestinian Arabs were being oppressed in any way. Palestinians refused to believe that Arabs had threatened the Jews in any way. Each side insisted, often invoking God, that the land belonged to them by right. Each demanded justice. And the longer it goes on, the more that people are hurt, the more hardened and intransigent become the partisans.
This is an incredibly difficult, intractable problem.
| Author | Fedin, Konstantin |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Scammel, Michael |
| Publication | Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975 |
| Copyright Date | 1924 |
| Number of Pages | 415 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | August 1977 |
Andrei Startsov is a Russian student in Germany, interned there throughout the First World War. He falls in love with Marie Urbach who is affianced to the Margrave von zur Muhlen Schonau, sole collector of the paintings of Kurt Wahn, friend of Startsov.
The novel opens at its end. Startsov is killed by Wahn in Petrograd for allowing von Schonau to escape from Russia simply because of his personal needs and his inability to act. The rest takes the story back and brings it forward again.
Startsov is a vacillating intellectual, opposed to the war, supporting the revolution, but unable to make any commitments, unable to "subordinate the ideal to the real." His release of von Schonau, a dangerous counter-revolutionary, was caused by that. So was the mess of his love life - itself a factor in his political life.
The writing is spare but deep. Psychological states are conveyed solely through description of events and of what people saw and subjectively felt. All analysis, both psychological and political is left to the reader. The novel bears all the marks of trauma - re-examination of values, jarring contradictions common to those years.
| Author | Martin, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Extras | index, diagrams, charts, photos, glossary, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| Keywords | Databases |
| When Read | August 1977 |
An introductory text that does not give any of the programming details as in Lefkowitz. Emphasis in on management considerations - What a data base can do, why it is preferable to file systems, what the software looks like to users (but not how it works except in the most elementary sense), how a data base should be implemented.
Topics include data independence, schemas, tree and plex structures, relational data bases, Codasyl, IBM DL/1, query languages, etc.
(More info in office file.)
[No comment.]
I see that we were using the term "data base" instead of the now common "database". 1976 might have been about the last year that "Codasyl" industry standard databases where common. It was totally replaced by relational databases within a very few years.
I read another James Martin book on teleprocessing before this one. He was a popular author with management types, before computing escaped from the mainframe and big corporation computing environments in which commercial computing first evolved.
| Author | Kotlowitz, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | The Boardwalk: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 275 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 1977 |
Teddy Lewin spends two weeks at Atlantic City in the late summer of 1939. He is fourteen. The first week he shares a room with mother Bea and sister Marion. The second is with father Jack, brother Ben and grandfather Barry Levin (the middle letter of the name was changed from 'v' to 'w' by the next generation to assist in assimilation into American society.) They stay at Sloans, an all Jewish hotel where most of the guests are oblivious to the coming storm in Europe.
This is quite a re-creation of Jewish life, early adolescence, family problems, Baltimore Jewish society, etc. It is successful.
K's writing is traditional and straightforward. The pace is even and well sustained. He concentrates effectively on the psychological detail, building reasonably solid characters - though only Teddy is treated in depth. The political issues - fascism, wealth, anti-semitism, assimilation - are ever present but not much commented upon. This is a presentation of its subject rather an an analysis. It is up to the reader to draw the proper conclusions.
An impressive and successful minor work.
I have photos of my grandfather and grandmother and their two daughters (though not their sons) at Atlantic City in what I think were the years from the 1920s and 30s, and more photos of my aunt Alberta and Uncle Max from Miami Beach in the 40s and 50s. Looking at the photos, it hadn't occurred to me that Christians and Jews would have stayed at different hotels. But of course they would. Race, religion and ethnicity were dominating factors in American life and the barriers only came down slowly and gradually.
The issues of the preservation of Jewish identity versus assimilation and of involvement in Europe versus isolationism are in the background of the novel as they were in the background of Jewish American life in those days. Kotlowitz has handled the issues with some subtlety.
| Editor | Harrison, Harry |
|---|---|
| Editor | Aldiss, Brian W. |
| Publication | New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Short stories |
| When Read | August 1977 |
An anthology of some quite poor and a few fairly good stories. The best written is John Updike's "Chaste Planet" - a spoof of sex. A society of asexual beings whose music holds the same meaning as sex for humans discovers public music, musak, and finally impotence, from their contact with humans. Lisa Tuttle's "Changelings" is a well conceived attack on totalitarians and the horrors of children indoctrinated to inform on their parents. Barry Malzberg's "A Galaxy Called Rome" is an ambitious mixtureof criticism, fiction, and philosophy. The story is not well handled but the effort is not entirely unsuccessful.
"End Game" by Joe Haldemann is classic SF - space war, futurism, cloning, love - kind of a treat and decently done. "Thomas M. Disch's "Santa Claus Compromise" is a spoof on the social use of fairy tales to regulate children in the economy. Two very serious young voters discover a Santa Claus suit in the attic and eventually the President himself must intervene to convince the kids that Santa exists and Christmas shopping is still important. The other story of note is Michael Moorcock's "A Dead Singer", Jimi Hendrix comes back and Shaky Mo drives him around until he (Mo) overdoses. A good story of a speed freak. Not really SF.
[No separate comment.]
I started out by saying that the stories were mostly poor, and then went on to say good things about a lot of them.
The one story that remains solidly in my memory is the one by John Updike. The little space aliens would each go into their separate caves and, in secret, play music and undergo rapture. Then they meet humans. They are introduced to public concerts which, for them, is like having sex in public. Then they learn about background music, played in elevators and everywhere. And the result is impotence. Music just doesn't mean much to them anymore.
| Author | Clodfelter, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Branden Press, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 467 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Vietnam War |
| When Read | August 1977 |
An account of Clodfelter's experience in Vietnam and of his romanticization of war.
C always wanted to be a soldier. From early childhood on, all his fantasies involved war - past wars, future wars, counter-factual wars, wars invented to try out various hypotheses. He worked out long running fantasy histories of these wars.
At 17 he joined the army. at 18 he was sent to Vietnam. There he participated in a few skirmishes, many long tramps through the jungle, many atrocities (which increasingly upset him), and was finally wounded on a punji stick. When he returned to the U.S. he joined the anti-war movement. Today he remains a war fantasist but now it is as a guerrilla fighting imperialism. He still yearns for a war to fight in, in spite of his seeing what it involved.
I understand his desires and fantasies well. I don't understand his failure to see those fantasies in a new light and, if necessary, accept them without giving in to them.
A not uninteresting book though too long. It has the most turgid writing I have ever seen. It could serve as a textbook of turgidity.
I said that I understood Clodfelter's desires and fantasies well, and I believe that I do. I grew up watching war movies on TV and reading books about wars and I still read such books. I had elaborate fantasies about the founding of new civilizations, of which military defense (never conquest) was always a component - for example developing a medieval democracy in Normandy and England that resisted the Viking invasions, or an Inca democracy in Peru that resisted the Spanish invasions. Wars were a part of the fantasies but so were building cities, ships, transportation networks, printing presses, universities and libraries. I think what I most like about wars is fully satisfied by reading histories and novels and, when I can get up for it, playing chess or video games. Actually hurting another person doesn't have any real appeal, except in so far as it is part of saving others.
I don't think Clodfelter is unusual in his fascination. Perhaps it is an evolutionary drive to survive over our competitors that is embedded deep in the psyches of human males. Other species have similar needs. Puppies and lion cubs wrestle with each other and practice fighting and domination. It's part of how we are constituted.
Clodfelter is probably a bit younger than I am. He's probably still alive and I bet he still indulges the same fantasies, but I'm hoping that he's come to a deeper understanding of himself and the world. Vietnam was clearly a shock for him. He was terribly young when he went there. I'd be curious to talk to him now and find out what he's made of life.
| Author | Calter, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 143 |
| Genres | Fiction; Computer science |
| When Read | August 1977 |
A collection of problems / exercises for computer programmers embedded in a story full of puns and jokes for programmers.
In the story, Matrix Inverse, CAD (Computer Assisted Detective) is called in by the FBI to find and stop Sebastian Sinusoid, leader of the numeranarchists who are plotting to destroy all computers in the country. A bevy of female programmers, including Priscilla Prime, Tricia Triad, Serena Scalene, Data Read, etc. are electronically hypnotized to assist Sinusoid in his evil deed. But Mat Inverse works out all the problems on his wrist computer to solve the mystery and bungle into preventing the crime.
The problems are good ones but Calter doesn't include the answers - which makes the book difficult for non-student readers. The story is funny enough and just short enough to avoid being too much.
I hadn't yet written my first program as a professional programmer when I read this but I was already in love with computers. I liked this book because it indulged my interest and it gave me new things to think about in programming.
| Author | American Friends Service Committee |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Hill and Wang, 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 126 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Middle East |
| When Read | August 1977 |
An extremely scrupulous and circumspect attempt to analyze the arguments and positions of both sides in the Arab / Israeli dispute and arrive at a fair compromise. It is is the best book I have seen for convincing Americans that the Israeli view is not the sole fount of truth. It bends over so far backward to be fair and is so agonizing in its attempt to understand and appreciate the feelings of those involved that no one could accuse it of partiality.
There is a chapter on background, an examination of positions and attitudes of both sides, suggestions for a settlement, and a copy of the UN Resolution 242.
The main flaw is its very circumspection. It does not dare criticize anyone too harshly or analyze anyone's motives (including the U.S. government on the side of the oil companies) too deeply.
I was working as a volunteer on the AFSC committee for peace in the middle east at this time. AFSC seemed like the organization most committed to achieving peace through compromise.
| Author | Stapledon, Olaf |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931 |
| Number of Pages | 371 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | September 1977 |
An S-F projection of the future of mankind into its ultimate development and end. humanity moves forward and back for two billion years of evolution, catastrophe, achievement, and final death. It produces three great species and fifteen other ones.
Stapledon's purpose is nothing less than to examine the ultimate significance of man in the universe. His highest men achieve brilliant intelligence, stature, culture, science, and social relations. They merge minds and yet retain their individuality. Their highest product is their "awakening" into a single racial mind of all million, million individuals.
Stapledon's conception is closely connected to the Romanticism and Hegelianism of the 19th centry. Our purpose is to "listen to the music of the spheres", "worship the real", actualize beauty in ourselves, to participate in the development of the universe and be its brief but highest product. There are many metaphors from art and religion. They are not inappropriate. It is a bold, moving conception, worked out with a sustained seriousness of purpose and dedication to understanding and achieving its aim - the expression of the significance of life.
The writing is plain but intellectual. This could be a work of philosophical anthropology. Its major flaw is its crass treatment of the current period. Analyses of current events relies wholly on "national character". There is much crude misunderstanding of history and evolution. He is at his best in describing high civilizations of the future.
As I remember it, the book proceeded as a series of human species, each one described as it grew and died and was replaced by the next. Some were noble, for example a species of flying men with wings who, if I remember correctly, didn't achieve anything great but just flying was a wonderful thing for them.
I believe Stapledon was a professor of philosophy in England. I think this book was a working out of ideas he had about the potentialities inherent in human beings - potentialities that he thought might be dry and unconvincing presented as philosophy, but interesting and appealing as fiction.
He wasn't a good writer but he certainly had a powerful intellect and imagination.
| Author | Andreyev, Leonid |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Bernstein, Herman |
| Publication | New York: Illustrated editions co., 1941 |
| Copyright Date | 1908 |
| Number of Pages | 190 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | September 1977 |
A story of the hanging on one day of five political terrorists and two common criminals. The terrorists include Vasily, a man capable of only barely controlling his fear; Sergey, a courageous officer type; Tanya, who cares nothing for herself - only for the other four; Musya, a pure young girl who believes she will live on after death; and Werner, a stoic intellectual who is above feeling sorry for himself. The criminals are a half-wit Estonian who can barely comprehend what is happening to him and is reduced to animal fear, and a bandit murderer who seethes with anger and revolt against his captors.
It is a well done but limited story. Andreev tells us nothing about these people's past lives which shows that any of them have anything to live for. The entire narrative is only conceived with their thoughts about death and behavior in prison. None reflect on the significance of their lives. It is neither fully conscious nor fully developed as a story.
The opening passage on the ridiculous fear of the minister who was the target of the terrorists is a fine caricature of a selfish and small minded man of power faced suddenly with the fact that he too is a mortal and can die.
The author's name is now transliterated as "Andreyev" in the Wikipedia. He was a successful novelist, playwright, and short story writer "considered to be the father of expressionism in Russian Literature."
I was building some depth in my acquaintance with Russian literature.
| Author | Terzani, Tiziano |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Italian |
| Translators | Shepley, John |
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 317 |
| Extras | index, glossary, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; |
| When Read | September 1977 |
T. an Italian journalist who covered the war for four years for Der Spiegel before being kicked out of Vietnam by Thieu's government, slipped back into Saigon on one of the last planes and stayed three mopnths to over the liberation. It is an excellent account full of the determined efforts to see the whole truth, interviews with fascinating men on both sides, well considered judgments, and a real sympathy for Vietnamese patriotism. T is not a communist but has no trouble understanding the class content of the struggle. The North Vietnamese called him a "bourgeois receptive to change".
The panic among Saigonese at the end was total. Society turned into complete anarchy. Collapse was total.
The liberation was surprisingly mild. There were no executions, no recriminations. There was much "hoc tap" - re-education, some voluntary, some forced. The support of the majority was patiently earned and deserved by the new government. The direction of things was changed quickly and well.
The amazing thing is the simple, severe and saintlike virtue of the rank and file communists.
What should we think about a book like this? Were the communists saintlike? Or was Terzani blinded by his sympathy for the revolution? I'm not in a position to know, but I'm prepared to accept T's account now as I was when I read it. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese clearly weren't fighting either for pay or for loot. I'm prepared to believe first, that they were fighting for things they believed in, and second, that were disciplined soldiers. However I wouldn't mind seeing some independent confirmation of T's account.
| Author | Kohout, Pavel |
|---|---|
| Original Language | cz |
| Translators | Page, Alex |
| Publication | New York: George Braziller, 1977 |
| Copyright Date | 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 215 |
| Genres | Fiction; Satire |
| When Read | September 1977 |
"Adam Juracek, Professor of drawing and physical education at the Pedagogical Institute in K., vs. Sir Isaac Newton, Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge, reconstructed from contemporary records and supplemented by most interesting documents by Pavel Kohout." Originally published in Switzerland in 1970.
Adam Juracek, a man of great genius, remarkable single mindedness, and wonderful simplicity, learns to fly by willpower alone. The state, alarmed at this unconventional behavior, moves to suppress him. After being dealt with in turn by bureaucrats, prosecutors, scientists, and a bevy of psychiatrists representing every school, he is finally brainwashed into forgetting everything. At the end he walks into a cafe where everyone is sitting on the ceiling and he almost remembers his great idea.
It is a brilliant book. Academia, the press, clergy, government, police, and psychological authorities, are lampooned equally well. In each we see the foibles of men unable to rise above personal interest and yet sympathetic lost souls for all that.
The "reconstructions" are effective free form pieces with paragraphs dividing in the middle of sentences or even words. The "documents" fit their "sources".
Besides being brilliant, the book was delightful and also very courageous.
I picked it up off the new book shelf at the library and read the page that said that Adam Juracek learned to fly by willpower alone. There was no more explanation. No unknown physical principles were invoked. No special circumstances obtained. No author's apologies were made. He learned to fly by willpower alone. Period. It was pure genius. I was entranced. There was no way I could not read this book.
Every scene was a delight. I don't know how many copies made it back into Czechoslovakia, but if any significant number did, and if the authorities had any intelligence at all, they would have to have been extremely embarrassed to have retaliated against an author who skewered them with such perfect humor and equanimity.
| Author | Wagner, Geoffrey |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 434 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | September 1977 |
A war novel about a group of British tank officers fighting in Africa in 1941-42. All are either killed or maimed. They struggle against the enemy, fear, the desert, and "losing interest".
The writing is unusual. Wagner is a "literary" type. A professor of English, steeped in world and English literature, concerned about poetry. This is an attempt at serious writing. There is an interspersing of stream of consciousness with text. There are allusions, poems, and so on. The language is heavily colloquial. In fact, every paragraph had Britishisms or army slang which I could not penetrate.
In some ways it reminded me of Winged Victory - its theme of psychological transformation and destruction of the ego in war.
A serious book but not an important one. Thee are too many of the author's idiosyncratic problems displayed and worked over.
Again I see my embarrassingly dismissive remarks in the last paragraph of my comment. There was a time when I thought that Tolstoy, Mann, Melville, Dickens, Thackeray, and also Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa were the gods of fiction. Writers not coming up to that standard could be dismissed.
I wasn't actually that bad. I never demanded that every writer have Tolstoy's talent and never thought that only such a superlative writer should be praised. But I do wonder if I wasn't too dismissive in my youth.
I don't remember enough of this book to compare it to Steven Pressfield's excellent Killing Rommel that I read just this year. It would have to be very good indeed to match that book about the war in the desert.
| Author | Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Jacobsen, Helen Saltz |
| Publication | New York: MacMillan, 1977 |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 286 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 1977 |
Maxim Kammerer, 20 year old earthman space explorer of the future, lands on a planet torn by war, fascism, pollution, and ignorance. He has many advanced physical and mental powers far beyond what people have today and a highly civilized outlook. He is a man of the future in the full optimistic sense of Efremov or Stapledon. Yet hs is naive. He has never encountered evil and has to learn to cope with it and understand all the complicated responsibilities of combating it.
There is much good S-F conception and good writing. We see a lot of scenes of difficult moral dilemmas from a plane in which man's very instincts seem more civilized. The S-F conceptions of people controlled by direct sensitivity to radiation propaganda is interesting and a useful device. The writing is smooth and the impression is effective. One is not stopped by implausibilities, bad science, or absurd conceptions of society as in so much S-F.
The ending is unsatisfactory. Maxim discovers that the man he identifies as his chief opponent is really an earthman working in different ways to save the planet. It raises too many questions at the end with no discussion of the answers.
One of the concepts popular in socialist literature of this period was the idea of "the new man". New men were raised under socialism. They were not selfish. They had no desire for wealth and power. Those things were meaningless to them. Their goal was the development of human beings to be the best that they could be. This book was certainly influenced by that idea as the idealist Kammerer attempts to save the people of the planet, as does his chief opponent, who does so with a more realistic and mature plan.
This was the first book I read by the Strugatskys and I later read every other one of theirs that I could find. I had read Efremov's (or Yefremov's) Andromeda before this and these two books together showed me an alternative sort of science fiction that had significant flaws but also significant strengths. I was hooked.
Arkady trained and worked as a translator of English and Japanese. Boris, younger by eight years, studied physics and astronomy and worked as an astronomer and computer engineer. It seems an unusual, but obviously fruitful, pairing.
| Author | Renault, Mary |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pantheon, 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 338 |
| Extras | bibliography |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Ancient world |
| When Read | October 1977 |
A fairly successful novel based on the ancient legnd of Theseus. The story is told by a middle aged Theseus recounting his life from early childhood at his grandfather's court in Troizen; to his journey to see his father, king at Athens; his stopover at Eleusis where he is chosen to kill the old king and replace him as is done every year; his overthrow of the old ways at Eleusis and seizure of real power; his going to Crete as bull boy and his revolt and escape.
The effort is well sustained but not brilliant. There are no sparkling passages of great intensity. Nevertheless there is a thorough concern for detail in language, custom, religious belief, and action, to authentically recreate this period.
The heroic tone, the youghtful superiority of Theseus, the ready escape from entanglements, makes this a book more for young readers than old. It does not lack subtlety, but it doesn't address adult concerns. A first-in-a-series book.
Interesting, serious in its approach to the past.
I am pretty sure that I had some acquaintance with these books in childhood. Maybe I read them. Maybe our teacher, or more likely, our school librarian (or public librarian visiting the school), read parts of them to us. I would have been 12 years old when this was published - just the right age.
| Author | Giraudoux, Jean |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Howard, Richard |
| Publication | New York: Winter House Ltd., 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1936 |
| Number of Pages | 230+ |
| Extras | Translator's note |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1977 |
An extremely subtle book exploring the contradictory personalities a woman displays to two different lovers. Her relationships are based on pure lies, but lies created to serve the demands of her lovers.
She is a very ordinary bourgeoise, yet for Reginald, her high-minded aristocratic lover, she creates a fictitious past of aristocracy, mystery, etc. When she is found out, everything falls apart.
It is a very subtle novel. G explores the question of what it means to present a true self, what is true love, can lies create a higher truth, etc. He is especially successful at analyzing simple ordinary surroundings, a sock, a hat, poses, attitudes, ways of sleeping, dressing to go out, etc. into the psychological characteristics that make these things just what they are rather than some other things - and at understanding the complex ways in which the sight of a sock or a fig newton can evoke emotions in a person.
I've read very few books like this in the years since I left Pratt Library. Where would I get them? If, as is now the case, I could get them from the used book sellers contracting with Amazon, how would I know to get them? And would I want to spend the money for a book that I could not first handle and read some pages before committing?
I could have stayed at Pratt Library. I could even go there today if I were willing to drive, park, and take a bus or subway downtown. It's even possible that I could show my old five year service pin and convince someone to let me roam the closed stacks - possible, but maybe not likely. I haven't tried it.
| Author | Choukri, Mohamed |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Arabic |
| Translators | Bowles, Paul |
| Publication | London: Peter Owen, 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 151 |
| Extras | Introduction by Paul Bowles |
| Extras | glossary |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | October 1977 |
An autobiography of the years from childhood to age 20 of an illiterate son of the Morrocan slums who later, after the time of this book, learned to read and write and eventually became a writer and professor of Arabic.
The book has some of the quality of Manchild in the Promised Land. Choukri's father was a beast who terrorized the family, even beating one son to death. Other siblings died of malnutrition and disease in childhood, only one sister surviving with Mohamed C.
C lived from hand to mouth. He worked as an adolescent in a tavern, in a brick factory, on a farm, but mostly as a street peddler, occasionally finding opportunities for petty crime. He lived in constant danger of being beaten, robbed, raped, exploited, or starved. His only escapes were in alcohol, kif (pot?) and sex - mostly fantasy and masturbation.
An interesting novel. C is only concerned with his own story here, but it reveals much about the society as a whole, especially over 1945-55.
The story of Mohamed Choukri runs together in my mind with the story of Amar, the Arab boy in Bowles' novel The Spider's House. Although the two characters are quite different, they both lived on the street in Tangier, Morocco.
I confess to a very inadequate understanding of the Arab and Muslim worlds. This book helps, but I'm not sure how far it can be generalized beyond Morocco, or how late it can be brought forward in time. I don't think that we in the west have much contact with or knowledge of the real, majority Arab world. I don't believe that ISIS and Al Qaeda represent it. Neither do the Arab nationalists and socialists that led the anti-colonial revolutions but were unable to create westernized societies. We need a deeper contact with these people but I fear that we may still be generations away from establishing it. And they need a deeper contact with us.
| Author | Nizan, Paul |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Stevens, Edmund |
| Publication | New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973 |
| Copyright Date | 1933 |
| Number of Pages | 250 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1977 |
A fictionalized account of the life of Nizan's father. Bloye' is a son of working class parents who has "gotten ahead" by going to school and becoming a railway engineer. He leaves his family, his workmates, his waitress lover behind, marries the daughter of a company official and himself rises, through total devotion to his work, to become head of a large shop with 1,500 men. Then an error in filling a munitions contract during WWI causes his demotion to a backwater supply depot from which he soon retires. It also brings him face to face with the emptiness of his life and the inevitability of meaningless death.
"No profound human end" (p.206) ever animated his actions or his relations with other people. He had thrown over his class, his lover, his contact with things that had significance to him for advancement into a comfortable bourgeois life. Then having achieved it, he found nothing of value. But there was no way to understand why or to retrace his steps or make good his life. He died in bewilderment, emptiness, and fear.
Nizan writes with deep human sympathy, ruthless honesty, and sophisticated understanding - a difficult combination to achieve. Quite an excellent book.
Monthly Review Press was the publishing company created by Paul Sweezy, Leo Huberman, and other distinguished Marxist economics professors, in the U.S. In addition to publishing the Monthly Review, the best Marxist periodical published in the U.S., they also brought unknown writers, mostly of non-fiction, but a few of fiction like Nizan, to the attention of Americans.
| Author | Watson, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 207 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | October 1977 |
A Russian Mars probe crashes in Bolivia and infects some Indians with a mind altering Martian microbe. How their minds are altered is obscure, but two that live lead a new Inca resurgence against the left wing government. There is lots of political inanity leading to the suppression of the revolt but undermining the left as well.
Meanwhile an American space ship lands on Mars where two more men are infected and later die in a sandstorm which wrecks their craft. But first they learn about the new awakening of consciousness and a new form of life.
A pretentious book with poor plot, little political understanding, and some oriental like mysticisms masquerading as philosophy. Watson appears to be a very intelligent fool who takes ramblings for serious thought.
I read it for library review.
Joe and Ian walk into a bar and start drinking. Soon they're exchanging boasts. Joe says, "I'm planning to write a book about Incas." Ian says, "Oh yeah? I'm gonna write a book about Incas infected with Martian microbes". Joe says, "You can't do that, that's totally ridiculous." Ian says, "Oh yeah? Well not only can I write a book about Incas with Martian bugs in their heads, I can put Bolivian communists and American astronauts in it too!". Joe says, "You're crazy, who would publish it?"
Then one of Charles Scribner's Sons walks into the bar.
| Author | Bassett, Ronald |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 264 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | November 1977 |
WWII navy novel. An old British destroyer with one other, a corvette, and two trawlers, escorts four merchant ships to Murmansk which were just a little too late to catch the ill fated convoy.
This looks like a first novel. B lived through similar events and writes with some authenticity, especially in his portrayal of the life of "Lobby" Ludd, boy recruit whose first regular assignment is as a signalman in HMS Virtue. The plotting is inexperienced. The convoy scene breaks off too quickly, and there is a predictable torpedoing in the end.
Since I was writing the book cards only for myself I didn't always write complete sentences. For example the first "sentence" of my abstract has no verb and no subject. But I knew what it meant. It meant just what it said.
PQ 17 was the designation of a convoy that sailed from Iceland to Russia with American and British ships carrying war supplies in July 1942. It was massacred by German aircraft and submarines, losing 24 of 35 merchant ships. It was made famous by Alistair MacLean's HMS Ulysses. MacLean speculated in his book that the Admiralty was using the merchant ships as bait to bring out the German battleship Tirpitz. The ship didn't come out and, when MacLean's book was published, many family members of merchant crewmen who died believed that their husbands and sons were betrayed and sacrificed. They were very upset about it.
I looked up this entry, saw the abstract, and fixed it. Then I read further and got to the notes from 2017. The 2017 notes convinced me not to fix the difficulties in the abstract. I decided to more or less leave the abstract alone. The only change I kept today was to convert the final punctuation mark of the abstract from an ungrammatical comma to a period. I don't know how many entries I've gone back and revised, but I still like the idea of limiting the changes I make as an old man in order to preserve my youth - warts and all.
| Author | Glynn, Daniel R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 207 |
| Extras | bibliography, glossary,index, photos, diagrams |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| When Read | November 1977 |
A good medium level introduction to microprocessors for OEMs and similar users. There are no chapters on binary arithmetic and similar fundamentals, none on rigorous theory, Turing machines, etc., and very little on electronics - hence a useful book for people like me. Throughout the discussion emphasizes following the logic of existing machines and existing / emerging applications. There is relatively little discussion of where the field is headed. Chapters include introduction, systems design, technology (of integrated circuits), survey of microprocessors, operation of the 8080, programming, development systems, applications, and advanced applications (telecommunications and multiprocessors.)
The section on the 8080 was excellent. It discussed architecture, the instruction set (with a full list showing what each instruction does), and how timing works - with the relationship of machine and clock cycles, external events, etc.
A book like this was very exciting to me in 1977. In that year, I could explain in detail the difference between the 8080 and the Z-80 and ensured that my early home computers were Z-80 based to take advantage of the extra instructions and register set. It wasn't just that I thought there were career advantages to understanding these things, there probably weren't. It was that the material was intensely interesting to me. These were exciting devices that did things that had not been done before, and at a cost that everyone could afford.
By the mid-1980s my interest in hardware was waning. I can't remember the last hardware manual that I read. It was probably for the VAX. Is it my age? Is it that I don't expect to live to see or care about the promise of the exciting new technologies of today? Is it that I'm more interested in other things? It's probably a combination of all of those things.
| Author | Asch, Sholem |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Yiddish |
| Translators | Samuel, Maurice |
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1939 |
| Copyright Date | 1939 |
| Number of Pages | 698 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Palestine; Christianity; Judaism |
| When Read | December 1977 |
A young Jewish scholar is hired by the aging anti-semitic Pan Viadomsky to do translations. The Pan is a reincarnation of the Roman Hegemon of Jerusalem, the scholar, of Jochanan, pupil of Rabbi Nicodemon. The story of Christ is recounted by them in three sections, by the Roman, in the testament of Judah Ish Kiriot, and by Jochanan.
This is a Jewish interpretation, steeped in linguistic, political, and religious authenticity. It is perhaps also an appeal to anti-semites for tolerance of Jews.
Jesus (Yeshua) is portrayed straight. There is no interior view. He sees himself as the Messiah. He works minor miracles (mostly healing.) He comforts the poor and the sick. He preaches faith, afterlife, and repentance. There is no supernaturalism anywhere but in the eyes of the beholders.
The book is rich in detail of life, politics, religion, and philosophy. It is much more authentic than Kazantzakis though lacking in emotional pyrotechnics. Even the language of Judah's testament is wonderfully ancient. Judaism, epitomized in Rabbi Nicodeman ben Nicodemon, is enlightened, philosophical, compassionate, and filled with faith.
The oppression of Rome, of slavery (the scenes in Tyre and Zidon), of Herod, and of the high priest and his coterie of Sadducees, is condemned.
I don't know why Asch chose such a strange and unusual way (a story of reincarnation) of introducing his story. It was an odd literary device to use in a book that otherwise dispensed with any appeal to supernatural events. Perhaps he meant to argue that the travail of the Jewish people under Rome has persisted to the present time of the creation of the book.
Too much time has elapsed since reading this book for me to make many comments about it. I mostly remember thinking that it was a great book with a deep and complex spiritual message and a rationalist view of history - without miraculous events. I thought it was not as good as Mann's Joseph tetralogy which, by the way, had an extraordinary introduction to the story and also did without supernatural events, but then a writer can still be great without being as great as Mann. Also, Asch only had 700 pages to tell his tale while Mann had 2,000.
One thing that I do remember liking very much was Asch's appreciation of how intelligence operates in a pre-scientific world. A skeptic approaches the rabbi and says, if I remember correctly, that he finds it difficult to believe in a God that one cannot see or apprehend with any of the senses. The rabbi answers that only a fool would imagine that all of the events of the world can be explained by what we can see and that no more exists besides what is visible.
His answer seemed right to me. Without modern physics how can we explain the movements of the sun and moon? Without modern biology, how can we explain the existence of so much diversity of life? If we believe that an intelligent person of the 21st century should renounce supernatural explanation, than we might see the acceptance of supernaturalism as the intelligent approach in the 1st century - though there are different notions of supernatural belief, some of which would seem to me to more rational than others.
| Author | Kallifatides, Theodore |
|---|---|
| Original Language | se |
| Translators | Teal, Thomas |
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 178 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 1977 |
A novel of a small town in Peloponesus, centering on the period of the German occupation in WWII. The real topic is not the war but the character of the townspeople. They are ignorant, often selfish, filled with absurd ideas about sex, totally apolitical and ridiculously involved in gossip and pettiness. A tiny group of intellectuals - a teacher, a lawyer, and a Jewish communist, are the only ones even attempting to really understand the situation. It is very reminiscent of the film Thanos and Despina and also a little of Zola's Earth
K's father joined the partisans during the war leaving K to fend for himself as a little boy. He wrote this book in Sweden while a refugee from the Junta. He clearly has leftist ideas but no attraction to the Greek Communist Party, which he criticizes for internationalism! - failure to see the nationalistic spirit of the Greeks and take full account of it.
Characters include the mayor who shits on everyone but is obsequious to the Germans, Lolos "the fool" who hands out newspapers at the public toilet and tells stories, the butcher - a great artist with the knife who can only say "it's all in the arm."
An impressive survey of the "idiocy of rural life" showing how far we must go to raise the consciousness of the people.
Certainly in the 1940s there were people in most countries whose intellectual horizon covered only their native village and its immediate surroundings. I think of Garcia Marquez as a master at depicting people like that. Today however, the spread of the Internet and Internet connected cell phones, of television, popular music, movies, clothes, and so on, is, for better or for worse, bringing a universal culture to remote villages in Greece and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Even Africa is succumbing to this culture.
K's book is about the collision of a pre-modern, transitional culture with Nazi imperialism. As expected, the villagers' response was often inappropriate. The few educated people in the village had to deal with Nazis on one side and ignorant villagers on the other. Things were tougher for them than for, say, the members of the French resistance in Paris, or resistance people in Holland, Denmark, Norway, or even Poland. It was a different side of the anti-Nazi resistance movements all around Europe.
| Author | Wohl, Burton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 345 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | December 1977 |
A fictionalized autobiography of Captain John Smith of Virginia fame.
Smith was a commoner with ambitions for adventure, romance, and acceptance as a gentleman. He became a mercenary soldier while still in his teens. He learned fighting, fought in Hungary against the Turks and the Netherlands against the Spanish, was captured by the Turks and made a slave, escaped to Russia, won his decree of being a gentleman, then participated in expeditions to the new world.
This is an adventure story filled with heroic fighting and marathon sex with nymphomaniacs, nuns, rich ladies of England, Russia, and Istanbul, and the pubescent Pocohantas. Still there's a serious criticism of a low level sort against the sloth and greed of all peoples of that time.
Read as review book - an OK potboiler.
I wouldn't have believed it but, apparently, the rough history of Smith is accurate. He did fight in Holland and Hungary, was captured and enslaved by the Turks, did escape to Russia, and was knighted for his heroic services. The Wikipedia doesn't say anything about nymphomaniacs but, who knows? And here I thought the book was pure invention. I don't remember the book at all. Maybe I knew that there was truth to the story when I read it. It's probably just my disbelief in my own write-up that led me to assume that it was all made up.
| Author | Vonnegut, Kurt |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952 |
| Number of Pages | 295 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 1977 |
A novel of a future in which automation has thrown most people out of work, war has forced industry to band together under a single industrial control board, and the country is completely dominated by a caste of manager/engineers who control industry and have set up mechanized controls over society. Paul Proteus, engineer manager of the Ilium Works in Ilium New York is up for a big promotion to Pittsburgh. His wife Anita pushes him hard, but an old friend Ed Finnerty crystallizes Proteus' discontent with a society in which machines control people and all people with less than a very high IQ are assigned to the army or the "Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps" - "Reeks and Wrecks". After some really brilliant passages on cutthroat competition among the elite ("the Meadows" camp for managers where careers are not yet complete is fabulous), Proteus joins Finnerty and others in what turns into a Luddite like rebellion. Much machinery is smashed but the revolt fails and the main conspirators are forced to turn themselves in.
The writing is simple and natural, emphasizing the personal rather than the objective. The social satire is brilliant and right on the mark. Each person is trapped in the limitations of his own personality and consciousness. The weakest part of the book is V's artificial, awkward handling of the revolt. He has little understanding of the nature of conspiracies or of revolutionary processes (though he fully understands that this is spontaneity, not revolution.) He also sees some inevitability in the process of social dehumanization. At any rate, he does not give any clear indication that there is a way out.
A fine book nonetheless.
My comment sounds as if, perhaps, I knew the way out that Vonnegut did not. I guess I've forgotten it.
I read the book, in part, as an extrapolation of where the trends of mechanization and automation were leading. In what was still very much an industrial America, what would the people do if Americans were no longer needed to make things. Today, of course, we are indeed no longer needed to make things. The Chinese do it for us. According to ranker.com the top three occupations in the U.S. are retail sales persons, cashiers, and office clerks. I guess that's better than working for the Reeks and Wrecks - sending (if I remember correctly) 17 men out to change a manhole cover.
This was Vonnegut's first novel. In Palm Sunday he gave it a 'B'. I guess we can only decide on a rating if we know what we are comparing it against. Perhaps it is a fair rating against V's best work, but I thought it was pretty good. According to the very good Wikipedia article on the book, he thought so too.
| Author | Forester, C.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1953 |
| Copyright Date | 1943 |
| Number of Pages | 281 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | December 1977 |
A wartime patriotic novel about the action of a light cruiser in the Mediterranean in defending a Malta convoy against the Italian fleet. Each passage focuses on a crew member, from Captain all the way down to Triggs - the man who will soon be booted out of the Navy as untrainable. Some are career seamen, some dedicated anti-fascists.
As usual, it is a fine sea war technical book with much information about the operation of a ship; guns, engines, compartments, turrets, electricity, etc. The portraits of the men are not badly handled, though there is much too much of the British upper crust condescension in discussing the crew. Even extraordinary crewmen like the AA gunner and the poet are rather shallow by comparison to the Captain and his secretary.
Still - this is fairly good, fast paced Forester sea adventure.
I remember the ship and the crew enduring terrifying combat with enemy planes and ships. In one battle, a gun turret is blown to bits, many men are killed, the damage seems extensive, the seamen are terrified, and then the captain sends a message to the commodore of the convoy reporting that the ship sustained "moderate" damage. It was a kind of teaching moment for the reader saying, "Yes, the ship has been hit and men killed, yes you're terrified by what happened, but the engines are still operating, the ship can be steered and controlled, most of the guns are still able to fire - so the damage is only "moderate" and we're going to stay in the fight."
| Author | Reiter, Bruce Philip, M.D. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 287 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1977 |
A novel of the internship of "Gypsy" in a slum hospital in New York. Almost all the patients are alcoholics or drug addicts. Many are violent, many are crazy. None of them are ever cured of anything, merely put back together for a short period until the next crisis. The staff is mostly selfish and totally hardened against suffering - lab technicians throw away samples, ambulance drivers won't pick people up, x-ray technicians screw up x-rays, guards and cops watch criminals but people get away. Only the doctors are pure - and only the young interns and residents among them. Many private and other physicians are incompetent or uncaring.
It's a humane novel in its expose of conditions. Yet Gypsy himself is arrogant and unconscious of his pushing people around. He is manipulative, demanding, irresponsible, and sometimes ununderstanding of his patients. I don't think Reiter necessarily meant to portray him that way. It's all too unconscious, too left out of any discussion or analysis in the book. I suspect it reflects Reiter's own doctor elitism.
It seems that doctors are like cops. Close contact with suffering and death and their own superior role pushes them towards a certain arrogance. Some resist, some don't.
Reasonably well written book. Reiter is a good writer as well as an honest to god doctor.
Although I had problems with the main character's behavior, or rather with the author's failure to appreciate the nature of the behavior he was portraying, I thought the book was informative.
Was Reiter exaggerating the conditions in the New York slum hospital? Was he writing for effect? Perhaps he was, but he painted a pretty convincing picture of an organization that had turned in on itself and lost interest in the people whose mission it was to serve. I was convinced. I've seen similar behavior in conditions much less stressful than those in the book. It takes some dedication for a person to put himself out day after day for people he doesn't know. And if those people appear to be self-defeating or hopeless, it is especially hard to maintain sympathy for them.
As for the character of Gypsy, I couldn't help wondering about his relationship to the author. Gypsy rode a big, noisy motorcycle at 3 am down residential streets. He had sex with various women in an off-hand manner. He walked through his rounds in the hospital making what seemed to me to be snap judgments - often critical of the work of others, but not of himself. Was he a representation of the author? Was he perhaps a representation of what the author aspired to be? If I had to guess, I'd guess the former just because the characterization was confident and consistent, but of course I have no outside evidence one way or another.
I tried Googling for Bruce Philip Reiter and found listings, all with zero information, about a radiologist in the Bronx. Amazon had a listing for a Spanish translation of his book, Urgencias Sabado Noche, but no listing for the English version or for any other book by him. I guess his book was a one-off, after which he pursued his medical career. I hope he did well, and I hope he became a better doctor than Gypsy.
| Author | Delany, Lawrence |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Thomas V. Crowell Co., 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 237 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | Submarines |
| When Read | December 1977 |
A sick, badly written, ridiculous novel about a gang that hijacks a nuclear missile armed submarine for the most absurd imaginable reasons and finally shoots off the missiles.
I was offended by it.
Read for library review.
To its credit, Pratt Library attempted to buy good books that the librarians did not expect to be popular in addition to popular books that weren't very good (and of course popular books that were good.) On the other hand, Baltimore County Library at that time was loading up on books like this to the exclusion of better stuff.
Sometimes I got to choose books to review, or at least to request them, and sometimes they were assigned to me. This one must have been assigned to me.
| Author | Kunze, Reiner |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Nengroschel, Joachim |
| Publication | New York: George Braziller, 1977 |
| Copyright Date | 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 127 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories; Politics |
| Keywords | East Germany |
| When Read | December 1977 |
A collection of about 45 short pieces, mostly prose, some verse, from an East German writer. Each is a sort of prose poem on the suppression of youth, with some towards the end on the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The writing is quite good and the sincerity so obvious that it is difficult not to take these pieces seriously. K writes of narrow minded bigotry, of youth kicked out of school, futures ruined, people insulted, isolated, vilified, reduced to poverty - all for the most minor acts of non-conformism or the most minor questioning of authority.
The closest analogy I can think of is Southern rural bigotry in the U.S. - though even here it is at least possible to move away. There there is no place to move to, no northern cities to find toleration in.
Subjects include children playing with guns, a young man harassed to keep him away from the World Youth Festival, a rock band forbidden to play when the young people attending the concert could not be provoked into rowdiness, a youth expelled from school and isolated for making a remark about the principal, soldiers invading Czechoslovakia on a diet of lies and pornographic films.
This is socialism? How did it get so bad?
Kunze was fortunate enough to have been kicked out of the GDR (or DDR, or just East Germany) in 1977, the year this book was published. He lived thereafter in West Germany. I have tremendous admiration for his courage in criticizing the East German government and society.
Interestingly, I had friends who went to the World Youth Festivals. One was a pretty savvy fellow who was not taken in. He traveled through the East Bloc on his way to the festival and described Bulgaria to me by asking me to imagine a country ruled by the Mafia. Two other fellows came back starry eyed with all the fine young people they had met. One sang a song that he learned, "The World is Coming to a Start".
Perhaps the height of my own infatuation came after I read the Monthly Review publication of The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University. But already by 1977 I was reading books like this. I still didn't know whether the Soviet dominated states were failures but China, Vietnam and Cuba were not. It took me quite a while to sort things out.
As of this writing, Kunze is still alive and is 84 years old.