Books read January through December 1979
| Author | Treece, Henry |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1952 |
| Number of Pages | 312 |
| Extras | Note on the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Britain; Rome |
| When Read | January 1979 |
The first book recorded in the little notebook from 1960 was T's The Great Captains - a continuation of the interests of Dark Island. I still remember it. It had much the same flavor as this.
Dark Island is about the collapse of Celtic civilization under the impact of Rome. Gwyndoc is cousin to Caradoc, "the badger", last king of the Belgai. The book is about their barbaric social relationships - complete personal loyalty of tribesmen to king, tribal superiority over all others, the elitism of rank, and a life of a continuous series of oaths, rituals, and violence.
Gwyndoc is present at the fatal battle at Camulodunum and follows vhis lord into retreat and exile in Wales. There is treachery, struggle with local pre-Celtic people of an even lower order of civilization, and then flight to another local chieftain. Eventually Gwyndoc is enslaved and brutalized. He escapes, avenges himself, and is eventually killed.
T captures the life and death of Celtic society in a rather convincing way. It is uneven but not bad. Great Captains is in turn the demise of Rome in Britain and the resurgence of barbarism.
The Battle of Camulodunum was a victory of native British tribes over the Roman army in 60 or 61 AD during Boudica's revolt. It was, of course followed by Roman victories.
This is the sort of historical, military, adventure story that I thrived on as a boy - as did millions of others since these kinds of books were very popular.
It's been a long time and I don't feel like looking it up at this time but I seem to recall that The Great Captains incorporated the Arthurian legend into its story - just the thing for my 13 year old self.
| Author | Pynchon, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Publication | Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 183 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1979 |
Oedipa Maas is appointed co-executor of a former lover's large estate. She goes to San Narciso to look into it and uncovers a weird illegal postal system operated by the "Trystero". She is drawn deeper and deeper in investing her whole sanity in discovering and understanding this Trystero. Many facts are uncovered but the final resolution - if there is one - occurs after the end of the book.
Oedipa is alone, adrift. All of the other characters are archetypes, responding only to their own inner compulsions. none have time for her compulsion. Perhaps she became like then in the end - one-sided, unbalanced, losing different aspects of her personality into one obsession.
The goals of this novel are obscure to me. It is a critique of California society - with many neat and clear observations which are connected to, but not in, the story. I don't understand it very well though.
The writing is more than just good. It is imaginative, daring, and literate. But what does it mean?
I was not the only reader confused by this book. I chose to read it because Pynchon's name kept popping up in sophisticated book review venues and this book was short and was supposed to be one of his best. I think he was indeed a talented writer but the book didn't appeal to me and I never read another of his books. I'm not planning to run out and get one now either.
| Editor | Knight, Damon |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 332 |
| Extras | Introduction, bibliography |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | February 1979 |
Ten very good classical American S-F stories - mostly from the 1940's. All are serious and all are relatively well written.
"Brightside Crossing" by Alan Nourse is the classic man against a challenge - crossing the hot, bright side of Mercury on the ground. Serious science meticulously done and a fair treatment of adventuring spirits. "Nightfall" by Asimov is about a parallel society somewhere else which has six suns and experiences full darkness only once every 2,500 years during an eclipse. The people go mad with fear and burn down society in their eagerness for light. A small band of courageous scientists discover the approaching eclipse and attempt to preserve knowledge and free their fear of the dark.
"Happy Ending" by Harry Kuttner is a little gem of plot turnabouts in which the story is told from the end to the middle and then to the beginning - which completely invalidates the reader's interpretation of the middle and the end. The apparent happy ending turns sad indeed.
I haven't read a better collection of its type.
I actually remember "Brightside Crossing" and "Nightfall" surprisingly well, though I probably read "Nightfall" more than once.
It looks like I have read maybe three science fiction anthologies, i.e., collections of stories by multiple authors, in the last three decades, although I used to read them in the 70's into the early 80's. I don't know why my choices changes changed.
| Author | Stockwell, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 285 |
| Extras | photos, map, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Africa |
| When Read | February 1979 |
S was chief of the CIA's Angola Task Force during the civil war there in 1975-6. There were numbers of officials above him, but he was at least privy to the major moves and participated all the way up to the "40 committee". He became disgruntled over the incompetence and venality in the CIA rather than because of a more general critique of American policy. Nevertheless his perceptions are insightful and revealing and have a ring of honesty to them.
The Angolan operation was conceived at first as a way of harassing the USSR. There was little deep understanding of African realities. The CIA sent money, weapons, transport, advisers, mercenaries, and covert political agents to support FNLA and UNITA. FNLA especially was a completely hollow organization with little support and self-serving leadership. Much aid was funneled through Mobutu of Zaire, who was 100% corrupt. Congress was lied to, foreign agents were paid to lobby the U.S. government and public, money was spent badly, many lives were lost.
The main source of the MPLA victory? 1. No support by the U.S. public for intervention. 2. Full support by the Cubans (hence their openness and our clandestinity.) 3. Superior MPLA leadership, etc.
Stockwell's political vision is very limited but the expose' is most interesting.
Like many left wing radicals in the U.S. at that time, I followed the anti-colonial movements around the world. Apart from the war in Southeast Asia, the big battles were in Africa - Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, the Congo, South Africa, and other places. This book confirmed our beliefs that the United States was not playing a progressive role in Africa. It was doing the opposite.
| Author | Leontiev, Konstantin |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Reavy, George |
| Publication | New York: Wybright and Talley, 1969 |
| Copyright Date | 1881 |
| Number of Pages | xxii + 250 |
| Extras | Introduction and notes by George Ivask |
| Extras | glossary, bibliography, chronology |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | February 1979 |
An unfinished novel about Ladnev, secretary at the Russian consulate in Adrianople in Thrace, alter ego of Leontiev. Ladnev is attracted to Maria Antoniadi, Russian wife of a Greek merchant. He wrestles with his conscience over the propriety and morality of pursuing the woman. He also copes with the local politics, mixed admiration and anger with his boss, the consul Bogatreyev, and his fluctuating moods of depression and contentment in his oriental environment.
The attraction of this book is Leontiev's frank exploration of his own unconventional consciousness. L is an unabashed elitist and egoist (not egotist), deeply interested in himself and with values based alternately on aesthetic sensibility and religious conviction. While never doubting his own right to be his own judge, he still wavers in deciding what criteria to use.
L writes as if the contemplation of oriental landscapes and Bulgarian peasants is fully worthwhile as a permanent occupation - if only it didn't grow boring.
It is a unique consciousness, not often so well presented in literature.
This is another of the deeply introspective 19th century Russian authors, concerned with the inner soul of man (see my notes on Gogol's The Overcoat.) This is an odd book and not the kind of novel I could read in steady doses, but it is different and stimulates the reader to new ways of thinking about life. I think that Russian literature is second to none.
| Author | Forester, C.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 194 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic Wars; Hornblower |
| When Read | February 1979 |
Hornblower leads a small squadron - one 74, two sloops, two bomb ketches, and a cutter, into the Baltic. There are no sea actions. Most of the action centers on the defense of Riga during the French invasion of Russia in 1812.
The writing is closer in time and style to the first series written only a few years before. There is considerable development in Hornblower's character - he ages and mellows significantly.
I don't know what I meant by the "first series". Perhaps it was that the first of the Hornblower books was published in 1937 and the last in 1967, so this one in 1945 was closer to the first books.
I guess that, having read and written up so many Hornblower novels, and perhaps having come to see them as completely regular and understood reading fare, I didn't see a need to write much about them.
| Author | Gogol, Nikolai |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Magarshack, David |
| Publication | London: Merlin Press, 1964 |
| Copyright Date | 1842 |
| Number of Pages | 64 |
| Extras | Decorations by John Edward Craig |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | March 1979 |
Akaky Akakyevich Bashmakin, 400 ruble per year copyist in a St. Petersburg government office, finds his only interest in life is copying documents. He has no friends, family, or other interests, capabilities, or even amusements. When his overcoat finally gives up the ghost B orders a new one from a tailor - costing him everything he can afford. The beautiful new coat is stolen., B traverses the bureaucracy for help and finally dies of cold and anxiety. His oppressors are haunted by his image.
A masterly little morality story. Each character is a type - drawn to the point of caricature - played out to the limit. It's simple and sentimental, but also logical and filled with humanity.
People used to talk about the "Russian soul" in 19th century literature, and I think it was justified talk. Gogol and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Goncharov (Oblomov), Leontiev (The Egyptian Dove) wrote about humble and/or deeply introverted people in ways that I don't recall in American, English, or French literature. Bashmakin (or Bashmachkin in another transliteration I've seen) was totally absorbed in aspects of life that were trivial to the people in his office or in the police or bureaucracy whom he went to for help. He brought the reader down, as it were, into a lower form of life and then showed us that it was human too, and maybe not so different from us as we imagine it to be.
I read Dead Souls before this, a book I liked very much, and Taras Bulba after, a book that offended me with its antisemitism.
| Author | Greenberg, Selma |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 242 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society |
| When Read | March 1979 |
A conversational sort of book by a professor of education which exposes the great breadth of the problem of sexism in child rearing. G does not go into any one topic in depth, working instead to provide a wide overview of the great many areas in which discrimination is practiced against female children - to the detriment of both boys and girls.
I was shocked at how obvious many of G's observations were once she stated them and yet how little I had penetrated into them before. Examples include: "penis envy" - really envy of male privilege - just as black children prefer white dolls, succumbing to the desire for white skin privilege, not white skin; the stultifying character of dolls, doll play, and playing house; the importance of athletics in developing not only health but also aggressiveness and self-confidence; etc.
Robin would have been six years old when I read this. I don't really remember the book and don't know if it changed the way Marcia and I treated her. Looking at the comment above now, I want to ask how much of that was justified and how it was justified.
| Author | Deutscher, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Oxford University Press, 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 543 |
| Extras | bibliography, photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography; History; Politics |
| Keywords | Soviet Union; Socialism |
| When Read | March 1979 |
The final volume - the chronicle of Trotsky's heroic struggle in the midst of defeat - and of his tragedy.
The bourgeois historian is often concerned to show the man's personal nature in a biography (I should not be so glib about bourgeois!) Here however it is important, for T was a magnificent person. Intelligent, honest, generous, courageous, totally committed to the oppressed and exploited of the world. He was what all socialists should be. His story is a lesson and an inspiration.
D analyzes both the politics and the psychology of T with an insight and an articulateness that are nothing short of brilliant. Like T he is able to criticize and praise at the same time. He sees and exposes Trotsky's faults and failures with no loss of his vision of the greatness of the man.
Of Trotsky himself, I feel too overwhelmed to know what to say. He was able to steel himself to anything, from the destruction of his children to the intellectual attacks on the basis of all his thought and action. He always served the truth and the world's oppressed.
I have read a number of long biographical works. One I particularly liked was William Shirer's three volume autobiography. However I believe that this trilogy is the best political biography I have ever read. The issues were very complex. Deutscher was one of the few people with the understanding of both capitalist and socialist politics, the political experience, the knowledge of history, the language skills, the sympathy with the subject, the political commitment, and the objectivity in spite of that sympathy and that commitment, to produce this work. It was a great achievement.
| Author | Stone, I.F. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 260 |
| Extras | reprint of the 1946 edition with a new preface and essay "the Other Zionism" by the author |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Politics |
| Keywords | Israel |
| When Read | March 1979 |
Stone traveled to Europe - first to Poland, then to Czechoslovakia, Austria, France, Italy, the Mediterranean and Palestine, all moving with Jews in illegal border crossings.
These were the survivors - concentration camp inmates, people who had fled to Russia and come back to find everything gone and anti-semitism still rampant, Red Army men, partisans, collaborators, many communists, bits and pieces of families.
The case for Zionism is a powerful one. What else was there for these people? Where could they go to be themselves - Jews - openly, without shame, without fear, without prejudice? Whom could they trust? The need was very great.
S himself has been condemned and ostracized for his stance favoring the "other Zionism" - an anti-chauvinist call for a binational state in Palestine.
There is some Utopianism in his views, but the ethical concerns are completely right.
All in all a very moving book - the illegal crossings, the ship with a living hell in the hold. The many socialist pioneers - and the many religious rightists. A very truthful and useful piece of reporting.
Isidor Feinstein Stone, short, half blind and peering through thick glasses, was a hero of journalism and of human rights. This, and I think a piece on the Korean War and maybe some writing about Vietnam in his weekly news magazine, were all that I have read from him, but I greatly respected him.
| Author | Lancaster, F. Wilfrid |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 222 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Information science |
| When Read | March 1979 |
A thorough survey of all aspects of IR systems with emphasis on evaluation of systems.
L clearly explains the theoretical concepts underlying the construction of index vocabularies and search files and mechanisms - at a relatively high level. He then goes somewhat deeper into performance criteria for system as a whole, language retrieval mechanisms and searching behavior, and offers techniques for discovering different types of errors and performance problems.
Always clear and distinct and very practical.
See 5x8 card file for more info.
Lancaster taught at the University of Illinois School of Library and Information Science when I was there in 1973-4. He was one of my professors and he even included some material I wrote in one of his books with a footnote to me - my first and last academic publication. He was an odd, interesting man, intellectually very self-confident, as many professors are, but not unjustifiably so.
There was a short period when I decided that my 3x5 cards were inadequate for recording information from technical books. I kept a file of 5x8 cards. I haven't seen them in years and years but I suspect they can be found in a box in the closet in my office. At some point I ought to look at them and see if there's anything worth capturing in machine readable form. Now and since February 2011 (if I've got that right), using XML, I have removed the text size limit imposed by the 3x5 cards. Long before that, I removed it further by putting additional notes, sometimes quite extensive, in my diary for special books about which I wanted to write more than seemed appropriate even in the XML. All of that supplanted the 5x8 cards.
| Author | Hesse, Hermann |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Creighton, Basil; Mileck, Joseph; Frenz, Horst |
| Publication | Holt Rinehart Winston, 1969 |
| Copyright Date | 1927 |
| Number of Pages | xxxiii + 218 |
| Extras | Introduction by Joseph Mileck |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1979 |
A very superior novel of man reaching for an elevated view of life and unable to come to terms with the meaninglessness of life's activities - meaningless from the elevated and intellectual point of view. Harry Haller sees his manhood in his appreciation of Mozart and Goethe, his wolfhood in his total derision of himself and those around him. He is exposed to the world of the saxophone and the foxtrot, the love of young women, and the intoxication of drugs. He learns humility and acceptance of that which he always regarded as base and trivial. He is not relieved of his contradictions. They continue to exist, but he learns to bridge them with sympathy and laughter.
The novel is experimental in form - a story within a dream, within a story, within a story. Beautifully written and serious. One of the best attempts to grapple with such major issues.
I deeply regret that I cannot keep all of the great books I have read present in my mind. They slip away and, in not too many years, will be gone absolutely. However I am grateful to my younger self for having made these book notes, simple and brief as they are, recording at least a few of my impressions of my exposure to the mind of Hermann Hesse and so many other people whom I could never meet but whose thoughts I was privileged to be able to read. It is my desire that, after I am gone, others may encounter me, or what was me, or what's left of me, as I have encountered those who came before me. It is my hope that they will find some pleasure and satisfaction in what they find, as I have before them.
| Author | Deighton, Len |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Jonathan Cape, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Extras | photos, drawings, charts, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | April 1979 |
An attempt at a factual account intended to set the record straight about what happened and why and what positive or negative roles were played by the various participants.
D supports Hugh Dowding, Chief of Fighter Command and Keith Park, his main field commander, against Leigh-Mallory and Douglas Bader (the paraplegic squadron leader), the advocates of "big wing" tactics. He also has little good to say about Churchill.
I hadn't realized how controversial all the issues were, nor how many people played disreputable roles - cowardly, incompetent, demoralized, alongside the heroes.
D rates the Germans as better pilots and middle level commanders, the English had the best harmony between industry, science, and military. All the aircraft were good enough, the Bf-109 would have excelled with stronger wings and more fuel. Spitfire was about equal. But Hurricanes had equally good records in spite of poorer performance.
When I read books like this I generally fell under the influence of the authors, taking their arguments as valid and their points of view as the right ones. If they said this or that commander was right and this other one was wrong, I'd read their argument, be unaware of any argument on the other side unless they told me what it was, and so accepted their conclusions. It's taken me a long time to come to a more cautious approach to history.
I don't know if Dowding was right and Leigh-Mallory was wrong, though Deighton is certainly not the first or last to come to that conclusion. I don't know to what extent the disagreements were motivated by pride and unjustified self-confidence. I think those were factors but I'm fully prepared to say that, of those commanders mentioned, all were true believers in their strategies and not motivated by ambitions for rank and power. I think the same about Hap Arnold and the men of the U.S. Army Air Force who fought to starve all fronts in Europe, the Atlantic, and the Pacific, of all aircraft of all types, in order to win the war with heavy daylight bombers over Germany.
I don't think that either Dowding or Leigh-Mallory, Britain or the U.S., Churchill or Roosevelt, had all the right on their side, but neither do I think that the balance struck was an optimal one. The issues are difficult, the evidence unclear, but too many lives were at stake to just say that we'll adopt a compromise position. Sometimes compromise was needed, as for example to ensure that the Allies would work harmoniously together, but it was always desirable to go the last mile to work out the true facts and the best strategies.
Deighton's comment about German military competence and British (and American) science and industry were enlightening. No matter what I read I am impressed with what good soldiers the Germans were. I think they really did have the best army in the world, at least until it all began to come apart in 1943. What a shame that such a people should fall under the domination of such a pack of thugs, gangsters, and lunatics. But that's all a question far beyond the boundaries of this book.
| Author | Goncourt, Edmond and Jules |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Grove Press, 1955 |
| Copyright Date | 1865 |
| Number of Pages | 105 |
| Extras | Introduction by Martin Turnell |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1979 |
Germinie Lacerteux is a country girl. Her parents die. She works as a servant in a bar, then for a "depilatress", and finally, after much physical abuse, suffering, hunger, etc., gets a job as maid to old Mademoiselle de Varandeuil - who has an introductory chapter on her own sad life. Germinie loves Mlle but is a sucker for men. She loves young Jupillon past all reason, contracts severe debts, has a child who dies, suffers the worst indignities and degradations, and eventually dies of an illness contracted while standing in the rain in jealous fury over Jupillon's indiscretion.
Throughout, her one pure devotion is to Mlle, from whom she takes the utmost pains to hide everything. After her death, Mlle learns all and is furious, but loves Germinie anyway and prays at her common, unmarked grave.
The novel is an attempt at realism. Characters are obviously drawn from life and all scenes and actions are created for authenticity. It is to shock the complacent and mannered literary world. All in all I consider it a success, a serious and effective, if sometimes crude evocation of lower class life and female suffering.
I'd have to do some checking to get the sequences right, but I have read a number of books, starting perhaps with Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, through to de Maupassant, and Zola, that came to be called "realist" and that portrayed women in ways that no one would have dared in Victorian England or in the U.S. This was surely one of them. The books were all dark, all concerned to expose a kind of economic, social, and sexual corruption at the heart of French society. I appreciated all of them and saw them, with help from literary critics, as very important developments in the history of fiction.
| Author | Crichton, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 266 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | April 1979 |
Master "cracksman" Edward Pierce develops and executes a plan to rob a train of 12,000 pounds in gold for the Crimean army payroll in 1855. A "screwman" (lock picking expert), "snakesman" (second story man), etc. are involved.
Like so many mystery stories, this tale would come off better as a movie than as a novel. The characters have no past, no future, no other side to their lives than those required to advance the plot.
In addition to the plot - which is fairly hairy and quite well adapted to movie thriller formulas (movies can use flesh and blood actors to flesh out weak characters), there is also a lot of interesting tidbits of Victorian language and mores, including a huge amount of underworld slang.
This was the first book I read written by Michael Crichton. So far, I have read eight others, one of them twice. The book was indeed made into a movie, and in the same year, 1979, that I read it. Sean Connery played the hero of the story, indeed making up for any deficiencies in the writing by dint of good acting. Crighton was good at writing action scenes that worked in both his books and the movies made from them. He was more versatile, I think, than Frank Herbert, the wildly popular author whose famous book I read right after this one, and was able to produce multiple best sellers on multiple topics, something that, as far as I know, Herbert didn't do as well.
| Author | Herbert, Frank |
|---|---|
| Publication | Berkeley Publishing Co. |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 535 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1979 |
SF romance of Paul Atreides/Usul/Muad D'ib, ducal heir and messiah to the Fremen sand dwellers of Arrakis, etc., etc.
The book starts off as a strong story bringing together SF with the medieval romance, a la Walter Scott, of Dukes and heirs, poison and sword play. It became an extremely popular cult novel.
Although the writing is competent the story soured on me. Its message of mysticism, individualism of the crude super fighting man sort, and its pessimism and backward looking view of the future, together with a stagnant style, left me very flat.
I didn't have much to say about this "extremely popular cult novel", but I actually remember it surprisingly well. One scene after another comes back to mind, much more clearly than for the great majority of books I read so long ago.
What does that say about the quality of the book? Or alternatively, what does it say about me? I think the book remains in my memory because, in spite of the crude, adolescent, and mystic world view of the novel, the scenes were quite striking, the big dinner at the Duke's palace where all of the guests were given unlimited amounts of water - the most precious commodity on the planet - water condensed from the trace amounts in the atmosphere. The fight in the house of Atreides when the killers come and the faithful bodyguard protects Paul with his life. The fight among the Fremen at the hidden water reservoir where the Fremen fighter believes Paul is just playing with him to humiliate him. The appearance of the giant sand worms. I don't know if I've got all of these right. It was, after all, 38 years ago.
Thinking about the vividness of the scenes I have a better appreciation of why this book was a cult classic, why it became the progenitor of a series of books and movies, and why so many people were into it. Great litchrachur it ain't. But the author had an extraordinary and unusual talent.
| Author | Herr, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 260 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Vietnam War |
| When Read | May 1979 |
A highly subjective account of the experience of Vietnam by a war correspondent who seems to be enveloped in the beat of rock and roll, the casual life of helicoptering from place to place, drinking and smoking, and the thrill of physical danger, nearness to death, and supercharged emotions.
It's not that he's an apologist for war or a patriot. His writing has a sympathy for the soldiers and a disgust with the armchair death merchants and to-hell-with-everyone-else glory hunters. It's exceptionally good writing too, full of unexpected words and psychological self-penetrations. I was most impressed.
But what a low level comprehension of the war - all phenomenon, no understanding. He says (p. 226) "We all had roughly the same position on the war: we were in it and that was a position", and later "There were more apolitically radical, wigged out crazies running around ... turning on and tripping out on the war."
Hardly a word about the Vietnamese, all references to the V.C. are psychologically "them vs. us." A hippie in Nam.
I can't condemn him - he's merely a fool, not an evil man. A man unable to rise above his emotions - in spite of all his insights. Uninterested in history, only in impressionism.
I'm a little embarrassed by the word "fool" in my conclusion, but maybe only a little. I didn't fight in the war but I certainly fought against it, and I tried hard to do it with knowledge and understanding. I read a fair number of books about it. I even subscribed to an English language Viet Cong newspaper (called In the Shadow of the American Embassy), written to explain the VC point of view to Americans. Maybe I was a fool. Maybe I allowed myself to be duped. However I still don't think so. I still don't see how it was in American or Vietnamese interest to install a right wing military dictatorship in South Vietnam, committed to the defense of the 3,000 wealthy, Vietnamese Catholic (I mention their religion not to denigrate Catholics, but to indicate their identification with French colonialism and their distance from their own people) landowners against their own tenant farmers. I still see it as a knee jerk anti-communist position that harmed the interests of both peoples and led to the deaths of many hundreds of thousands, including more than 50,000 Americans, and the maiming of even more.
You don't agree Michael Herr? Fine. Maybe I was wrong. But surely it was an issue. Surely the right and wrong of the war was something that should have been high priority to ferret out in a visit there. Surely there should have been some focus on that in your time in country, in your research about the place, and in the book you wrote about it. I apologize if all that was in your book and I missed it. I know you were young. But I was young too. When I read your book I was 33 years old and had time to reflect. I came to have more respect for Henry Kissinger and to appreciate the difficult positions of Lyndon Johnson and Robert MacNamara better than I had when I was young.
I'm ranting. It's an issue that had a huge emotional burden for me in the years from 1967 to 1975. I'll let it go now.
I'll rant just a bit more. One of the things I did during the war was talk to returning soldiers - some of whom enrolled at the University of Illinois when I was there and wound up in one or another of my classes when I taught philosophy. I talked to them at length. One thing I learned was that there was a very big difference between the average soldier who never learned Vietnamese, and the couple I met who learned the language and spoke to the people. To those soldiers the Vietnamese were people like themselves. To the others the Vietnamese were strange, un-understandable people. One guy told me that the old women were bent over because the Vietnamese weren't smart enough to put long handles on their brooms and they got bent over from years of sweeping the floors of their hooches with short handled brooms. One told me that he was amazed that men were prostituting their wives to the soldiers. When I told him that those men weren't husbands, they were pimps who called themselves husbands, he said, "Hmph, I never thought of that."
Herr wasn't one of the unsophisticated, uneducated kids, like the tellers of the broom and husband stories, but he wasn't the kind of observer that a journalist ought to be.
| Author | Joss, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 235 |
| Extras | drawings, maps, diagrams |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; Soaring |
| When Read | May 1979 |
A flying novel by an almost pure type of individualist/conservative/ignoramus.
The hero is a Marine pilot Vietnam vet who watched his friend of 20 years die in the last bombing run of the war. He visits the friend's home and there falls in love with the sister and fills the friend's place as pilot for a record attempt for height and distance in a sailplane. The action of the novel shifts, usually successfully, through three plots; the record flight, the last combat mission - a total disaster, and the hero's attempts to make the girl understand and accept him.
The novel works. The flying is reasonably described and technically extremely informative (Joss is an aviation writer.) The plots come together and the tension of the record flight and combat are brought to high pitch. What fails is the incredibly maudlin sentiment and homespun take-it-from-the-Marines philosophy. He opposes women's lib, talks constantly of a real man and real women in the silliest terms (A real man drives a clever car, not a flashy one. A real woman doesn't demand an erection every time she makes love!) He really lets it all hang out.
I have nothing against clever cars and, for sure, nothing against sex without erections - though I wouldn't have known anything about that in 1979. But it surely was the aviation that led me to this book and aviation with sailplanes no less! There aren't many novels about that!
| Editor | Knight, Damon |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 299 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | May 1979 |
Eight stories. Two by Zelazny of which "He Who Shapes" is well written but badly ended. A psychiatrist who creates telepathic images for his clients is taken over by a woman who succeeds in projecting her own images into him - but there is no motive for it.
"The Saliva Tree" is the best. A Brian Aldiss novella set in the time of H.G. Wells, about invisible beings from space who land and take over a farm - raising crops, animals, and people for consumption. It's both a good story - horrible, effective, and yet funny in its way, and a spoof on H.G. Wells. Aldiss and Zelazny are both effective writers.
"Becalmed in Hell" by Larry Niven is more classic. It's space adventure with a human and a cyborg - part human and part machine. Quite good.
The worst is "Doors of his Face, Lamps of his Mouth" - very poor space opera by Zelazny, and "Drowned Giant" - well written but offensive story of a giant man washed up dead on a beach and dismembered by curiosity seekers.
"Balanced Ecology" by James H. Schmitz is a good story too.
No more room.
[No more comments.]
I was reading more science fiction, including many more SF short story anthologies, in those days.
| Author | Grant, Joan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Brothers, 1937 |
| Number of Pages | 382 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Ancient Egypt |
| When Read | June 1979 |
An unusual but not very good story of a woman Pharaoh Priest in the First Dynasty of ancient Egypt. Its oddness lies in its being a first person account of a complete mystic. However it accepts such mysticism absolutely at face value. Seers see, telepaths do their thing, and all dreams of a true priest not only turn out to be true, but are even under the control of the dreamer! Thus we have at best a bald statement of the religious beliefs of Egypt (though absurdly embellished with the dream visits to Peru and China) - no attempt at useful interpretation.
The view of Egypt is also outrageously sentimental. It is turned into an Olympian fairy land where all people love to pay their taxes, all priests are "true", state money is spent on old age homes for the poor, "looking girls" link the country in a telepathic network, brain surgery and malaria medicines are known, and on and on. Not a word about slavery or the real meaning of power.
I read this for its subject content, because I thought an obscure woman author might be an interesting discovery, and because I was tricked by a dust jacket which talked of the great authenticity of this story.
I didn't remember a thing about this title until I read the notes on dreams of Peru (which, by the way, did not contain the Incan Empire until much later than the time of this book), and the "looking girls" running a telepathic telegraph service for the country. It really was a silly and self-indulgent book but, hey, she probably had a good time writing it and no doubt plenty of readers loved it. I just fear that neither the author, nor too many of the readers, understood that it was silly.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Coward-McCann, 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | June 1979 |
A British spy, Alec Leamas, is made to appear to be a defector in order to entrap Mundt, the sadistic chief of East German counter-intelligence. In fact he is really being manipulated to entrap the Jew, Fiedler, Mundt's second in command. Fiedler is honest, intelligent, and about to discover that Mundt is really a traitor and agent for the British.
All the bad guys win - British intelligence, Mundt. The good ones, Fiedler and Leamas' innocent young girl friend (an English Communist Jew), as well as Leamas himself, are killed. Leamas dies in a gesture for the dead girl - his coming in from the cold of isolation and intrigue.
This is the best novel of its type that I have read. The full meaning of the intrigue, manipulation, exploitation, and individual tragedy of espionage adventurism are brought out clearly.
I read this book again in 2002, converted the book card to XML in 2012 and then wrote. "A few years from now, fate willing, I will type up the book card I wrote at that time." Fate was willing and now, here I am, typing up that first book card.
I've searched my machine readable diary from 2002 and 2012. My diary from 1979 is not yet machine readable so I haven't searched it. I haven't found anything about the book so I'll say a little more about it here.
After reading this book I concluded that I had never read a spy novel before. This, it seemed to me, was the real thing. Spying wasn't about clever thinking and derring-do. No doubt there is a lot of that. At its core, at least in this book, it is deception, deception aimed not only at the enemy, but at the people of one's own side, in the service of some end that may not justify the means.
Leamas, an expendable man re-recruited for one more mission, is told that his mission is to eliminate Mundt, but never to reveal that that is his mission. In fact, the real plan was to betray Leamas to the East Germans, have them torture him, have him resist until it was not physically or psychologically possible for him to resist any further, and then reveal what he thought was the truth. British headquarters counted on his courage and resistance to convince the Germans that he really was withholding the truth and then, when the admission finally came after impossible pain, to believe it. Then Mundt was able to demonstrate to his superiors that he was in fact a patriot and Fiedler was the traitor. It was Fiedler, not Mundt, who was tortured and killed. The corrupt Mundt continued as a double agent who really worked neither for the British nor the Germans, but for himself. The use of Leamas, the cooperation between Mundt and Leamas' controller, and even the fact that Fiedler was a Jew, were all used to win this dubious battle. The innocent young woman counted for zero in the British calculations and could be expended without a shred of sympathy for her. There was an escape setup for Leamas, whether it was because they felt they owed him something, or just because the morale of the service required that members be protected, is not clear to me, at least not now over all these years.
The novel stripped away the veneer of patriotism and evil, of good guys and bad guys, that is, or at least was, the staple of American spy fiction. It constructs a plot out of layers upon layers of deception and double cross. It leaves the reader feeling empty and sick, but with a much deeper understanding of what is at stake in the world of espionage. It changed my expectations for this type of fiction and, I think, changed the consciousness of many of the writers who, themselves, learned much more about their own craft from Le Carre.
| Author | Oz, Amos |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Hebrew |
| Translators | de Lange, Nicholas; Oz, Amos |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973 |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 309 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Israel |
| When Read | June 1979 |
O's first novel, about the life of a Kibbutz. Reuven Harish, a poet whose wife has left him, has an affair of sorts with Broka Berger, whose husband Ezra the truck driver has an encounter with Noga Harish, 16 year old daughter of Reuven. Other characters are Herbert Segal, idealist, collectivist, intellectual; Grisha Isarov, the ex-captain; Fruma Rominov, the gossip; and her horse face son Rami Rimon - who marries Noga. There are a number of others too - Zechariah/Siegfried Berger is a wealthy, oily sort of man interfering from outside.
O's touch is sometimes heavy but always perceptive and sympathetic. The gossips and nags also feel warm breezes and suffer inner pains. As in the later book, My Michael, there are women with incomprehensible desires and men with logical but futile outlooks. There are no real "achievements", no demonstrable changes. The meaning of the village, its enduring triumph, is its far from perfect but ultimately satisfying love of one for another.
There is some clumsy writing, awkward handling of narrator and perspective, but the work is full of talent and the gift of understanding that makes literature worthwhile.
I always cringe a bit when I read one of my comments in which I criticize a fine and talented writer as "heavy", "clumsy", or anything of the sort. Who am I to say that of someone else? But I may still make such comments today and I think they are important in recording my reactions to the writing and, I hope, something about the writing itself. However I do want it understood that such criticisms are not meant to denigrate the author's ability or the quality of his writing.
| Author | Mitford, Jessica |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 333 |
| Extras | photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | June 1979 |
"Decca" Mitford's autobiography - covering her first commitment to socialism during the Spanish Civil War, her marriage to cousin communist Esmond Romilly, his death and her subsequent marriage to American Jewish communist lawyer Bob Trenhaft, and her long career as a member of the CPUSA.
M was a real communist, doing drudge work year after year, going door to door, facing danger and hostility of racist mobs and KKK style police, being stabbed in the back by the FBI, called out by HUAC. She had the happy warrior style of Craig McD, stimulated by the challenge. When she had money she gave it to the cause.
She stayed in until 1959 or so, after Hungary, the secret speech, and the mass exodus from the Party - staying on until she felt the organization was just too moribund to go on. Yet throughout she maintained a high sense of humor, a deep dedication to the individuals who were the ultimate beneficiaries of the Party's work, and a complete lack of dogmatism (or at least a fairly open mind.)
Also some material on the American Way of Death, her big best seller.
A good book by a most admirable person.
For the record, for those who are younger than I and don't know my own biography: Everyone must know "KKK" and "FBI". "HUAC" was the "House Un-American Activities Committee" led by alcoholic, opportunist (I can't even call him "right wing" since I'm not sure he cared a whit about politics except as they affected himself), Senator Joseph MacCarthy. "Craig McD" was my late friend Craig McDonough, who received his PhD in economics from the University of Illinois while I was there and who was a real character. "Hungary" refers to the Russian led invasion of Hungary in November, 1956 to suppress the Hungarian revolt against the Russian imposed communist government there. The "secret speech" was a report by Nikita Khrushchev "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" to the 20th Congress of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union in February, 1956. Khrushchev publicly criticized Stalin and Stalinism for the first time in the USSR and, when the contents leaked out to the world, communists everywhere were emboldened to criticize Stalinism in their own countries and in the USSR. The "mass exodus from the Party" refers to the many communists in the U.S. and Europe who left their respective communist parties after 1956, believing that the communist leadership in the USSR had betrayed the people it claimed to care about. A very similar thing happened in 1939 on the announcement of the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact.
It's easy for us liberals (I haven't thought of myself as a communist since my student days) to scorn American communists as starry eyed dupes and fools, but I don't feel that way about them. The ones I've met had courage and conviction. They argued, not entirely without reason, that the liberals who expected the opportunists of the Democratic Party to solve America's ills were the dupes and fools.
I can't say that I've never been duped or fooled myself, but I try to learn from the experiences, keep my eyes wide open, and refuse to slip entirely (I can't claim that I haven't slipped at all, or even mostly) into the escape of private life.
In the spirit of explaining things I'll add that the title A Fine Old Conflict was young Mitford's mis-hearing of the line of the communist anthem, Internationale. The real line is "Tis the final conflict". "Final" became "Fine Old".
| Author | Beach, Edward L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 372 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II; Submarines |
| When Read | July 1979 |
A first rate submarine thriller by the author of Run Silent Run Deep - full of technical detail in great depth. Commander "Rich" Richardson takes his submarine into the East China Sea as part of a wolfpack commanded by an erratic commodore who later dies of a brain tumor. There are many involved setups to intercept and attack the convoys.
The story is improbable in its events - too much happens, a capture by a Japanese maniac, an incredible ramming and boarding rescue, etc. But all the details seem highly authentic down to the broken hydraulic system and the torpedo data computer. The writing is fully adequate and the sympathy for the seamen, Japanese as well as Americans, is authentic.
In comparison with the German books by Bucheim, Werner, Ott, the most noteworthy fact is that the Japanese were pushovers compared to the British and Americans. The American boat regularly broke radio silence, used radar almost recklessly, encountered relatively weak air and sea defenses, and rarely faced a really determined enemy.
Beach gives the best technical info of all the writers. He's not as good as Bucheim, but better than the others at pure writing.
Like the German submariners, Beach was the real deal. He served on several subs in several different capacities during the war and won ten decorations for gallantry. Later, he was made commander of a nuclear submarine.
By 1943, the Americans in the Pacific had become the hunters. At the same time, the Germans in the Atlantic had become the hunted. My impression of both nationalities is that the men in each service had similar characteristic - courageous, smart, technical, committed. It's possible that men in each group were infected with the racism that was common in those days - much worse in Germany of course. However, unless they were dissembling, which is always a question, I didn't get the impression that they were that kind of men. I think they saw their country's enemies as seamen like themselves and, while thrilled by sinking enemy ships, were not gratified by killing the seamen and would be just as happy if the enemy seamen survived.
| Editor | Dann, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 239 |
| Extras | Introduction by Isaac Asimov |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | Jews |
| When Read | July 1979 |
Thirteen short stories written by different authors, many with Christian pseudonyms, from 1939 to 1974. Some are poor, others make obnoxious use of Jewish/Yiddish stereotypes. Several are very good.
The best was: "The Jewbird" by Bernard Malamed - a Jewish talking crow flies into an apartment and attempts to carve out or insinuate a home for himself. He is regarded as an unwelcome house guest by the man of the house and is eventually destroyed. "Unto the Fourth Generation" by Asimov is a fine, sentimental story of the shade of an old Jew come to meet and bless his great grandson, an American New Yorker. "Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay" by Robert Sheckley is a delightful story of a model city with an artificial consciousness which tries so hard to serve and intrudes so much - a "Jewish mother" though there is no ethnic allusion, that its inhabitants all leave. There is also one of I.B. Singer's strange tales of the supernatural - good in the Singer way.
[No separate comments.]
I had never thought of "Jewish science fiction" before reading this collection and probably never thought about it afterward. I never thought that, in addition to the writers with Jewish names of known Jewish affiliations, there might be others who were using Christian pseudonyms. Basically, I had never really thought of religion in the context of science fiction any more than in the context of mysteries, thrillers, or romances.
When people speak of a "Jewish" story they aren't generally speaking of any kind of story about religion anyway. They're speaking of ethnicity. In those days they would have been speaking about Yiddishkeit and the language and culture that the eastern European Jews brought to the United States, mostly in the years of open immigration before 1920. Today, there can't be more than a relative handful of very old native Yiddish speakers here in the U.S. or anywhere else, not even is Israel. The culture is changing to an American culture, or sometimes to an Orthodox Jewish and Hebrew culture, or sometimes to an Israeli culture, but not an east European culture. I think the culture of these stories is still understood only in a relatively superficial and historical way by people like me who saw it as children, and by people the age of my children who heard about it from their parents and grandparents. I don't expect my grandchildren to know much about it unless the get interested and read books about it - not something I would expect them to want to do.
| Author | Silone, Ignazio |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Italian |
| Translators | Gwenda, David; Mosbacher, Eric |
| Publication | London: Jonathan Cape, 1948 |
| Copyright Date | 1934 |
| Number of Pages | 191 |
| Genres | Fiction; Society; Politics |
| Keywords | Fascism |
| When Read | July 1979 |
A novel of a tiny village, Fontamara, in Fascist Italy. Fascism has turned the many small and competing conspiracies against the peasants into one big unified one. An old man and woman and their son, one voice really, tell the story of the oppression, ruination and final destruction of the village.
The peasants are swindled out of their water, their electricity, their right to work in other districts. Their women are raped. Their "spokesmen" - lawyers appointed for them - help to destroy them. One very strong peasant, Bernardo Viola, finally pushed to the wall, is educated by a revolutionary. He is tortured to death in prison but his story inspires the other peasants to write and distribute a news[pare? paper? the book card seemed to say "pare"] "What are we to do?". The fascists come and kill everyone they can find. A few escape. What are they to do.
The novel portrays fascism as petty pig avarice, pig brutality, a regime of tiny men, unconscious men, men completely absorbed in themselves. one can see not only Italy but Latin America in it too. The characters, though mostly caricatured, are like Vargas Llosa's in Conversation in the Cathedral.
This is committed literature. S himself apparently rewrote it in the 1950's to take some of the commitment out and revert to "Universals". But I respect it as it stands. Impressive and full of impact.
Freedom, democracy, and universal rights are precious but fragile things. They have only existed in some places and times and can be threatened and destroyed by people who care nothing about them. As I write this I am in the middle of the fifth book of Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series, written by another man, like Silone, who used his deep understanding of society, his human feelings, and his writer's skill, to fight against the fascists and Nazis who cared nothing for human beings.
The world is a better place for having had Ignazio Silone upon it, and for all those like him.
| Author | Lem, Stanislaw |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978 |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 179 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1979 |
A retired American astronaut, never named, is involved in an investigation of what appears to be a series of bizarre crimes in which the victims are murdered by drugs that induce suicidal madness. In the end they are discovered, by chance, to have been chance accidents.
Lem is more restrained than in his SF but still himself. There are details of human foible (did I forget to turn out the lights in the car?), some wild settings and events (the Rome airport security system and the two second fight with the Japanese terrorist) as abstract discussion or two - mocking academia, and a Tichy type hero who always attempts to do the rational thing in an apparently irrational world.
Not Lem's finest but even his second best is better than most writers' work.
It appears that when I wrote this I was young enough that I still remembered everything, or thought that I did, and that I would for the future. I do still remember Ion Tichy, the wonderful hero of a number of Lem's books. I don't remember the incidents of the lights in the car, the Rome airport, or the Japanese terrorist.
It is interesting to me to think about what changes and what stays the same in my book notes and my diary.
| Editor | Bova, Ben |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 159 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | July 1979 |
Three novellas, SF.
"Gypsy", Poul Anderson, 1949. Very dated story of a group of lost earth people who settle on a beautiful earth-like planet but some cannot adjust. They yearn for deep space and ultimately return to the ship. The space adventures which draw theme on are silly cowboy things.
"And then there were none", Erik Frank Russell, 1951. More serious sociological story in a light vein. A space ship from earth lands on a remote colony to establish earth control over a bunch of Utopians who set up their own society 300 years before. The society is founded on primitive individualism - every person does what he wants and gets from others only in return for what he gives them. All authority is resisted with total civil disobedience. The crew is subverted and the ship leaves in defeat. A nice and funny story, but not to be taken seriously.
"Profession", Isaac Asimov, 1959. The best of the three. A young man lives in a society where education is imparted by electrical stimulation of the brain - a one minute process. He wants to be a computer programmer but is declared uneducable - unfit for any profession - and sent to a house for the feeble minded. The young man's demoralization is quite nicely drawn and one understands and feels for him. In the end though it turns out he has been selected for special unprogrammed creative thought.
[No separate comments.]
On the one hand, books like this are intended to earn more money, using the name of a popular writer as editor in order to recycle old stories. I presume that Bova did indeed have something to do with the selection of the stories and perhaps wrote introductions that I didn't mention here. Undoubtedly, he would have been paid for the work.
But in addition to the commercial considerations, books like this are an opportunity for SF writers and publishers to recirculate what they consider to be good stories, to keep them from just withering away. I hope that was a consideration. If it was, I think that is commendable.
| Author | Simon, Roger |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 255 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | July 1979 |
Moses Wine, 33 year old ex-radical private detective, is wanted by his aunt, "responsible person" Sonya Lieberman, to join U.S. China Friendship Study Tour Number 5. The tour includes a mixture of armchair radicals and real ones. A crime is committed - a Han dynasty gold duck is stolen, and the Americans are accused. It turns out that the real villains are a Chinese tour guide and his accomplices - a set of "bad elements" who hang around listening to old rock and roll records and an American CIA agent in the group.
A thoroughly enjoyable book. Simon criticizes everyone for whom criticism is due, Americans and Chinese alike. He enjoys his individualism and refuses to give it up, yet understand that his radicalism has degenerated into "copping attitudes at cocktail parties" and contributing to liberal causes. He is ashamed and unashamed at the same time.
The politics are serious, there is a brief, charming love affair, the characterization is very good. The plot is ridiculously far fetched but so nicely handled that it doesn't matter.
I enjoyed this as much or more than any other mystery.
By the time I read this, my ideas about China had already evolved beyond my infatuation with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but I was still fascinated by China (and still am.) I was hoping that this book would be the start of a series of American Jewish detective in China stories but, alas, Simon had other plans. However I did read more of Simon's Moses Wine books.
It occurs to me that Moses Wine and I must have both been born in 1946 since each of us was 33 years old when I read this book.
| Author | Endo, Shusako |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Japanese |
| Translators | Johnston, William |
| Publication | New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 294 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Japan |
| When Read | July 1979 |
In 1639 a Portuguese priest, Sebastian Rodriguez, and his co-priest Garpe, go to Japan. They aim to carry on an underground apostolate in the face of severe persecution, and also to discover the truth about their old teacher who was said to have apostasized under torture.
Rodriguez arrives and works for several months before being betrayed by his Judas like follower. But he is not tortured. Rather he is forced to witness the torture and death of Christians who will die unless he apostasizes. And after each act of apostasy he is forced into another and greater one. The silence is the silence of God, who never intervenes.
An unusual and obscure book. It is a record of hope and suffering, perhaps based on fact, leading nowhere, only to silence. There is no resolution or revelation for the priest. The inevitable silence persists for thirty years until his death.
Clearly and simply written, with sensitivity to the religious mission of the priest. There is some insight given but, as for the priest, so for the reader, no real resolution, only the silence.
| Author | Boyd, Alexander |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Stein and Day, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 259 |
| Extras | glossary, photos, diagrams, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; Soviet Union |
| When Read | August 1979 |
A superficial history concentrating heavily on a simple recounting of who commanded what air army or department when, and who replaced whom. The major events are merely sketched. There are no in depth analyses of personalities, aircraft, battles, or causes of victory or defeat.
Given the number and quality of Soviet machines from 1943 on, the shortcomings of the Red Air Force, especially its failure to develop a powerful and effective fighter arm and sweep the Germans from the skies (as the Americans did in the West) is hard to understand. B offers no useful explanation except that the fighter pilots lacked initiative and self-confidence - and too often - courage. Yet the shturmovik arm was outstanding and pressed home its attacks in the face of severe opposition. High praise too for the little U-2 night bombers.
I would like to have seen some personal accounts and some study of training and tactics, but there were none.
Airplanes, history, communists versus Nazis, sounds like just the sort of book I would have liked, then and now, but it fell pretty far short.
| Author | Warren, Robert Penn |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 310 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | August 1979 |
Adam Rosenzweig, a Bavarian Jew with a crippled left foot, leaves his homeland to fight for freedom in the Civil War. He hopes to liberate humanity, vindicate his father who spent years in prison after his own fight in 1848, and to discover the truth about being a human being.
He is kept out of the army by his foot and the ill will of a sailor. He lands in New York in the midst of a race riot, is taken in by a rich Jew, saved by a black army deserter, works as a sutler, almost stays with a young about-to-be widow, and eventually kills a rebel.
Everyone in the book is moved by primitive, self-centered desires and primitive altruism. Where they do things not for themselves, but for their pride or their fellow men, they do it blindly, stubbornly, and angrily. Always they are angry at Adam's abstract idealism and quiet, courteous, intellectual ways. Ultimately - only after he kills, Adam learns to accept these people as they are, to love them in their backwardness and their error for "what they have endured."
A very American book in its focus on the common man and its psychological naturalism. There is some of the same feeling as in Anderson, Gardner, and others of the movement of history through ordinary folk. A good book.
I just read an Amazon review by Sarah Martinez in 2012. She called attention to the writing style and poetic language of Warren, noting that she had trouble keeping track of the story but "I LOVE the idea of laying down a code that only people who are really paying attention will tune into..."
I don't know whether I missed all that or just didn't think it was as important as the, admittedly, difficult to follow story. I'm guessing I missed it.
| Author | Gerson, Menachem |
|---|---|
| Publication | Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath and Co., 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 142 |
| Extras | index, tables, references |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society |
| Keywords | Israel |
| When Read | August 1979 |
A kibbutz professor of education discusses problems in the title and presents the results of research by his and other groups.
The situation of women is not as good as one would expect. They are liberated from economic dependence on husbands, unequal pay (there is no pay) and continuous child rearing. However they continue to occupy the low prestige positions and have low power in committee work. G recommends independent women's organization and quotas for women in responsible jobs - however this is still a minority view.
G is an ardent advocate of kibbutz socialism. He wants to reform the kibbutz movement in order to achieve its collectivist goals rather than abandon it or attack it. Yet he tries to be totally objective about its faults.
Interesting to read about kibbutz ideology - especially about voluntarism, democracy, free atmospheres for children, and small community collectivism as paths to a socialist ideal. There is much useful experience in the kibbutz - even if it is not a path to revolution.
I don't see anything in my notes from 1979 about the stress and partial disintegration in the kibbutz movement that was well underway at the time the book was written. I don't remember whether Gerson wrote about that but I wasn't particularly interested in that problem, or whether he did not write about it, perhaps because he didn't want to be an apologist for kibbutz problems or a partisan in the political struggles, but rather a worker in repairing some of the social problems that had emerged in the movement.
Amazon still lists this book as available used from third parties, however there is no author biography, no reviews and no other books listed by Gerson. Google wasn't helpful either, nor was the Wikipedia. These notes are all that I have.
| Author | Dunmore, Spencer |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Company, 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 218 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 1979 |
A story of a single flight to Berlin and back by a British Lancaster four engined night bomber. The crew is developed just enough to make each character human - an aspiring painter, a socialist worker whose best job is the air force one, a young virgin boy, a philanderer, and so on.
They are bedeviled by a German Ju88 night fighter pilot whose parents had just been killed in an air raid. The fight is long and grisly. Each plane is gradually more and more disabled and more of the crews are killed or wounded. The British pilot and crew fly and fight expertly, eventually making it back, three of them still alive. The German, his crew dead, loses all sense of his own life and pursues all the way to England, hoping to ram the tail (his guns empty.) He is tricked and shot down.
Lots of good technical description, fair psychology, quite absorbing.
It's surprising, even to me, that a man like myself who is averse to war and would have a tough time in the armed forces, in or out of combat, likes these books, but I do. I still remember and like this one.
| Author | Gorky, Maxim |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Wetlin, Margaret |
| Publication | London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1956 |
| Copyright Date | 1923 |
| Number of Pages | 264 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | August 1979 |
Foma, son of Ignat Gordeyev, wealthy Volga riverboat merchant, grows up to continue the family business founded by his father. He is not good at school but is strong, handsome, and high spirited. After his father's death he is guided by his godfather, Yakov Mayakin.
Foma is not satisfied as a merchant. He finds no fulfillment in it, no glory in the work, no enjoyment in the smug, corrupt society of the merchants, no satisfaction in the wealth. He drinks heavily, whores, squanders his wealth, insults the other merchants, and spends his time with other wastrels and outcasts. There is a continued conflict with his godfather - who eventually has him committed to an asylum and takes his wealth. He gets out and lives on as a drunkard in an outbuilding let him by Lyuba Mayakin, his godfather's daughter and once intended wife.
Foma is a lost soul. There is no way out - not in the comradeship of other workingmen - because he is not a worker, nor in rising above his situation through understanding. He feels deeply but cannot find any avenue of action.
The conclusion is unsatisfying. Foma should not be so weak. The strength of the book is its vignettes - the first girl, the party in the woods, Lyuba's romanticism, etc. - heavily drawn but insightful.
The book was originally published in 1901 but the version I read was revised and published in 1923. I don't know what the changes were. Gorky was a revolutionary socialist and also a very independent minded man. I'm sure his social and political ideas evolved over the period from before the revolution of 1905 to the period after the revolution of 1917 and following civil war. Since politics were an important part of his writing, perhaps they were the motivation for the changes. I really don't know.
I have seen claims that Gorky was a toady to Stalin and the Communist Party. From reading about him in the Wikipedia, it's hard to see him in that simple way.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Gnome Press, 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 253 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | August 1979 |
A collection of stories of the progress of robot development, written from 1940 onward and separately published, but with many common characters and a single thread. The robots range from Robbie, the first nursemaid robot, through "the machines", tremendous computers that run the entire world economy, replacing men as the planners of human life (or perhaps replacing the blind forces of social life.
Asimov's vision is powerful and occasionally profound. He has no description of robot consciousness which is worth anything and his models of robot behavior are all too anthropomorphic (though often with tongue in cheek.) His greatest vision is in understanding the great potential of robotics and the social changes it will tend to bring about - regardless of any regulation of its use.
He's also a good story teller - as always. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, even though I couldn't help taking it seriously.
As far as I know, this was the beginning of Asimov's writing about robots, a subject for which he became quite famous. I don't remember if the three laws of robotics were in this book or not, but I seem to remember that there was a roboticist named Susan something and that in one story, entitled "Liar!" she accuses a robot of telling lies and de-activates it. As I recall, the robot was compromised by a need to tell humans whatever they wanted to hear in order to please them and, perhaps, not to harm them. If the three laws had not been formulated yet it would still seem that Asimov was already thinking about the issues that underlie them.
Asimov would have been about 20 years old when Robbie was written.
What did I mean in 1979 when I wrote: "I thoroughly enjoyed the book, even though I couldn't help taking it seriously?" Did I mean that I did or did not take it seriously? The "even though" seems to imply that I did not take it seriously, but the text says that I did take it seriously. This is why, nowadays, I try to carefully review what I write before I file it or send it away.
| Author | Forster, E.M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1952 |
| Copyright Date | 1924 |
| Number of Pages | 322 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | India |
| When Read | September 1979 |
Mrs. Moore, elderly mother of colonial administrator Ronny Heaslop, brings young Adela Quested to India to marry her son. Miss Quested, seeking to see the real India, makes friends with Dr. Aziz. He takes her on an outing to the caves of Marabar where she is deluded by heat or anxiety or something, into imagining that Aziz tried to assault her. Aziz is tried, there is a great polarization of the two societies, she admits her error, and he goes free. Middle aged English headmaster Cyril Fielding takes sides with Aziz and earns the enmity of the English community. Yet at the end he and Aziz are not able to bridge the gulf of ruling class and subject class to cement their friendship.
The novel is an expose' of the psychological dynamics of colonialism. It shows in a very thorough way how racism pervades the colonial mentality - how it arises out of the need of the administrators to pull together and hold down the natives, how it infects and poisons all social, economic, and political relations between the two groups, how it does not require any pre-existing anti-social mentality to develop itself, and how it requires a very firm and secure personality to overcome it. The conclusion, that there is no true common ground between ruler and ruled, is inescapable. First we must eliminate colonial domination - then we can meet as equals.
A beautifully written, subtle book. Forster handles many characters without losing any of his sociological insight into their personalities.
I thought this was a great book and still do. It was way ahead of its time. I imagine that it was instrumental in stirring up and supporting the growth of anti-imperialist sentiment in the UK and elsewhere. But it wasn't just its humane and progressive politics that made it great. It was also a great work of literature, getting inside the minds of decent people like Adela Quested to show how racism, prejudice, and fear of others are not just the domain of primitive and brutal people. They are a natural outgrowth of the unequal relations that colonial systems necessarily create.
| Author | Leakey, Richard E. |
|---|---|
| Author | Lewin, Roger. |
| Publication | Garden City: Anchor Press, 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 298 |
| Extras | index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Anthropology |
| Keywords | Evolution |
| When Read | October 1979 |
A popular account of human evolution including reports on new findings by Leakey at Lake Turkana in East Africa. The book discusses such major problems as the origin of intelligence, the development of language, the beginnings of differentiation of culture in different regions, pre-human economy, sex, and social organization. It relies on fossil evidence, primate animal studies, and some investigations into the most primitive cultures in existence today.
The authors regard the principal driving force in the evolution of modern humanity to be social cooperation - based especially on food sharing. No other animals share food as humans do - except for some very primitive things. Sharing as an adaptation requires social organization - and especially social cohesiveness, the feeling of mutual regard and interest. The very high importance of human sexuality relative to other primates is seen as a kind of social cement, as is the development of altruism, trust, distrust, and many other social capacities not needed if sharing and cooperation were not important.
A useful book, strongly anti Dart/Lorenz/Ardrey.
I don't remember this book, which is a shame because I'm still very interested in the questions of human evolution raised in the first paragraph of my abstract.
I read Ardrey's African Genesis as a teenager and was much taken with it. I may have also read his The Territorial Imperative (I may have a record of it if I did.) It stimulated me to think about where we came from and to want to know more. Reading Campbell's Biology in 2006 got me started in an entirely new direction on these questions, working to understand the chemical and biological basis of our lives rather than the functional and cultural aspects of evolution. This is one of many topics which I am thankful that we have as much knowledge of as we do, but long for more and for more time to study it.
| Author | Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Nakhimovsky, Alice Stone and Alexander |
| Publication | New York: MacMillan, 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 234 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 1979 |
An unusual SF story which, judging from the apparent ages of the characters and the references to their participation in WWII, must take place in the mid 1960s. Victor Banev, nationally known writer in an unspecified country, lives in a resort town where, since a sanatorium for the "slimies" has been built nearby, it always rains. It turns out that the slimies are some sort of new breed who are on their way to taking over the world - making it a place of reason and culture instead of drunkenness, debauchery, selfishness,and exploitation. But there is no place for the adult humans in their new world. Only the children may enter.
This odd plot is only a backdrop for Banev's development. He is intelligent, courageous, upright, a friend to all worthy men and a foe to all scoundrels, and also an alcoholic, a lazy man, vain and dissipated. He is fascinated by the coming new order. He assists in its birth - and yet he knows he can never be part of it or give up his established and all too human way of life.
The odd plot may keep this book from reaching a wide audience. Nevertheless it has that excellent and intelligent mix of philosophy, earthiness, humor, and political satire that marks so much of the best Russian literature. The characters, from Teddy the bartender to Golem the communist and the drunken doctor -, are marvelous caricatures. The setting - a rainy resort - is a perfect backdrop for the real and the ridiculous. The politics - in which the country is obviously Russia and yet specifically not Russia - perfectly match the conditions for political satire in the USSR.
I liked it very much.
I can think of a number of books about a more developed and intelligent race of humans growing up in the midst of the rest of us and, perhaps, displacing us. Olaf Stapledon's Odd John and maybe his The Last and First Men, Greg Bear's Eon trilogy and Darwin's Radio series, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, and many others. There are books about our "brain children", i.e. robots and AIs displacing us. That's not exactly a new race of humans, but can be thought of as developing, if not evolving, from us. Some of these stories are optimistic and some are not, but it takes a writer of some courage to attempt these since, especially the pessimistic ones, are bound to make readers uncomfortable. Most of the Strugatsky books were optimistic. This one, not so much.
| Author | MacLean, Alistair |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and co., 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 254 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | October 1979 |
WWII adventure story with a full complement of heroes, spies, innocents, villains, diamonds, secret plans, submarines, exotic islands, desperate stratagems failed and then retrieved by even more desperate stratagems. An elderly British spy escapes Singapore on the last ship out. The ship is sunk but survivors are rescued by the crew of a British tanker, whose first officer becomes the hero of the story.
MacLean is successful at this genre. His characters are simple but just adequate to their roles. The plots are crazily convoluted - and quite beyond credibility - but are pursued with some consistency and sustained suspense.
The non-whites are, at best, supporting actors. There is one Eurasian beauty (3 parts white), and the faithful Borneo villagers. The Japanese are simply devils incarnate - clever, fanatical, unbelievably cruel. Just the right foils for MacLean's black and white story.
I liked MacLean's WWII stories better than the Cold War spy stories that seemed to me more commercial and written with less passion. The best of them was HMS Ulysses, followed, I think, by The Guns of Navarone. This South by Java Head wasn't a terrific novel, but I liked reading it.
In my comment I made it sound like MacLean might be exaggerating when he portrayed the Japanese as devils incarnate. However I've read more about the Pacific war and the war in China since then and it's not hard to see them, at least their officer class and the orders, training, and discipline they imposed on the men, in pretty black terms. The Japanese justifiably accused the West of racism, but their own brand of racism was even more cruel and severe, not too much better than that of the Nazis, though there were plenty of fine German and Japanese individuals.
| Author | Tarsis, Valeriy |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Jones, Thomas; Alger, David |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963 |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 230 |
| Genres | Fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | October 1979 |
Two very good novellas of alienation, philosophical reflection, and political protest by a Russian who was confined in a mental hospital after the publication of these stories in England.
The Bluebottle is about a rebellious philosopher who writes a book of social criticism. He is talked to, patronized, ostracized, sent to the people for re-education, but never listened to. It is an indictment of bureaucracy, false democracy, Stalinism, Khruschev ("Apostolov" in the story) and all the lies, hypocrisy, and exploitation of the USSR.
Red and Black is very subtle. A professor of French literature marries a much younger, beautiful woman. He loves her passionately and loves life - even though he sees all the flaws - both in her and in life. His work as a professor, giving lectures for 600 rubles a month, seems quite meaningless. His scholarship no longer important except for himself. His real knowledge - of life, of beauty, of the hypocrisy of academic and Soviet life - are of no interest to anyone around him - the other members of his class. Ultimately he discovers that his wife never loved him. He swims out to sea.
Yoan Bluefly and Korneliy Abrikov are their names.
Tarsis is a sensitive writer - alive, outrageous where he needs to be, conscious of his limited role and impending death. These are moving stories - depressing and yet uplifting.
I don't know where I got this book and others like it. It probably came from the downtown central Enoch Pratt Free Library, where I used to work. I don't know if I learned about the writer and then looked for the book, or whether I happened across the book and was intrigued by the blurb or the author biography on its dust jacket.
Now that we have the Wikipedia I have found that Tarsis was born in Kiev in the Ukraine in 1906. He joined the Communist Party and worked as a translator from Ukrainian to Russian as well as a writer. Although disillusioned in the 1930's he stayed in the Party, fought in the war, was wounded twice, and only left the Party in 1960. Publication of the The Bluebottle in England resulted in his arrest and commitment to a mental hospital, a standard, and very cruel, kind of punishment that the Communists instituted in the 60's and 70's.
He did make it out of the USSR in 1966, worked in England and the U.S. and settled in Switzerland where he died in 1983.
| Author | Golding, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 183 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | November 1979 |
A first person narrative of Oliver, a young man about to go off to Oxford in the 1930's from his provincial village of Stillbourne. He would like to be a musician but follows his parents practical advice and studies chemistry, perhaps to become a doctor.
The first half is a novel of adolescence; puppy love for an older but actually quite shallow woman, seduction of the village tart, competition with the snob next door. Then there is an awakening of consciousness during a midsemester visit where all is seen from the beginning adult outlook where parents are mere humans and goddesses reduced to size. Finally there is a reflection upon a visit in middle age - this time reaching back into childhood to understand the relationship and life of himself, Miss Clara Cisely "Bounce" Dawlish (his music teacher), and Henry Williams, mechanic and later small businessman. This is an unusual and quite tender study of an old maid.
A beautifully written book. It concerns the feelings of very ordinary people in very ordinary life - but with no trace of scorn. Oliver fails to pursue his avocation, fails to understand the needs of his girl Evie Babbacombe. She fails to assert herself. Miss Dawlish fails to win Henry and become a woman. Yet their failing is cause only for sympathy, not scorn.
The writing is full of insight and psychological depth. A fine example of Golding's always good work.
I remember nothing of this book by one of my favorite authors, and my write-up above doesn't bring anything back to mind. Maybe it's not a good write-up.
| Author | Mailer, Norman |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Reinhart and Co., 1948 |
| Number of Pages | 721 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 1979 |
A group of American soldiers in the South Pacific in World War II fight in the jungle and on a lonely patrol far from the main theater. Each man is presented as an individual, complete with civilian past, childhood, family at home, and his own attitude to the war, the army, and the other men. They include Sam Croft, a war lover; Martinez, a Mexican scout; Red Valsen, a skeptical loner; Gallegher, a Boston slum bigot; Polack, a sharpie from New York; Roth, a Jewish milquetoast intellectual; Wilson, a southern happy-go-lucky; Goldstein, a Jewish family man; Ridges, a southern dirt farmer; and Hearn a college graduate well-to-do officer. There is also Cummings, a general.
Each man is dealt with exactly the same way, a 15-20 page "time machine" recapitulation of his past life, a few chapters of his experiences on the island. With half the characters the story could have been done in a little over half the space. The plot structure is thin and there is a sort of logical but literarily uninteresting denouement as the patrol fails, some men are killed and it all proved nothing.
Still, it is a good book for several reasons. Most importantly, M succeds in conveying the meanness and smallnes of these American lives without losing touch with their essential humanity. He gives authentic portraits of ordinary men. He is psychologically and politically quite insightful and revealing.
The writing is not bad. There are passages in which the language is out of control and awkward, but many in which it is very expressive and articulate. He was very young here. I'll have to read his later work.
This was Mailer's first novel, based to some extent on his own experience in the Pacific during the war. The war story is quite interesting. As I recall it, the invasion is stalemated. The Japanese have built a defense line that the Americans have been unable to break through. The general sends a patrol out hoping to find a route to attack the Japanese from behind, but the patrol is stopped by the enemy and gets nowhere. Meanwhile, the general comes up with a plan to land a force behind the Japanese by sea. He goes off to get his forces together leaving a major in charge. The major discovers that the Japanese are sick, starving, and out of ammunition. He sends his men forward and rolls over them but the general is upset that he may not get credit for his amphibious landing, so he goes ahead with it. It's a story of personal ambition taking precedence over the needs of the war.
I write all this partly because it was part of the book that I didn't cover in my old notes, and partly as an exercise of my memory. It's what stuck with me, though some of the personal material is still with me too.
My recollection of this book is perhaps a little more favorable than my comment above.
| Author | Doyle, Arthur Conan |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: John Murray, 1966 |
| Copyright Date | 1912 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 1979 |
A rather nice turn of the century adventure story in charming Victorian style. Ed Malone, spurred by the desire to win his lady through some feat of heroism, joins an expedition of two crank professors and a gentleman adventurer to find a lost prehistoric plateau in the Amazon jungle. They find dinosaurs, ape men, treachery, battle, marvels, narrow escapes, and brave adventures.
There is a nice mix of the logical and the fantastic. D never strays from the course of offering plausible explanations for every happening. And there is some marvelous satire. The meetings with the young lady, the uproarious scientific gatherings where thundering egos crash into each other, the petulant banter of the two professors, the scene of confrontation between newsman and professor at Challenger's house - leading later to Challenger smashing his phone into its receiver. All are treasures of humor and satire.
The story shows the good and bad of Doyle's age. There is subtlety and cleverness - and also white supremacy of a sort, killing of animals for trophies, a struggle with and destruction of the ape men.
I liked it more than A Study in Scarlet. I'll read more Doyle.
One thing I liked about this book was the juxtaposition of Challenger and Summerlee, two brilliant scholars, each with personality quirks and flaws that conflicted with those of the other. Doyle creates super intellectual characters, not least Sherlock Holmes, but still sees their human flaws.
| Author | Aldiss, Brian W. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | December 1979 |
Fourteen SF stories, most quite macabre, some very good. They include the title story about a film director who contracts a parasitic worm. He is pursuing a woman who has fascinated him for years when the worm causes a sudden attack that he mistakes for an emotional breakdown. "Super toys last all summer long" is about an emotionally disturbed child who turns out to be a robot, lost in a partly malfunctioning little boy world - strikingly done. There are several India stories "Orgy of the living and the dying", "The circulation of the blood...", "...and the stagnation of the heart" - about Western wealth among Indian super poverty. "The village swindler" is an Indian willing to sell his heart to a sick Westerner and is accused of being a swindler by the local bourgeois because he is sick and his heart must be worth less than the small amount he has asked for it. There are immortality stories too, including one of millions of years in the future when no one remembers their childhood or where they came from. There is an interview with the still living Hitler in "Swastika", and a short talk with a robot spaceship setting off to explore the universe in "Working the Spaceship yards".
A is sometimes experimental, difficult, obscure. But he is always serious - usually dead serious. Most of the stories concern people absorbed in personal concerns on the one hand, and in the deteriorating state of society on the other. They are unable to give themselves over to the former and unable to do anything about the latter. They are lost in this paradox.
Some very good thinking and some very good writing in all the pessimism.
The one story from this collection that I remember without any prompting, and I remember it vividly, is "The village swindler". The heart patient is staying with well-to-do friends in India. The poverty stricken man cannot feed his family. When he learns of the Westerner's need for a heart transplant he offers his own life for the money to save his family. A young woman in the well-to-do family disdains this untouchable dog and tells the Westerner that he's a swindler. It's hard to think of a more callous and disgusting attitude, deeply embedded in the consciousness of the upper classes.
Reviewing these books read 37+ years ago I am frequently motivated to read more by authors that I once admired and since lost touch with. The last Brian Aldiss book I read was in 1994. Aldiss is apparently still alive at age 91 and has published an SF novel at least as recently as 2013.
Life is so short and there are so many fine books.
| Author | Yehoshua, Avraham B. |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Hebrew |
| Translators | Arad, Miriam; Shrier, Pauline |
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 165 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | Israel |
| When Read | December 1979 |
Three stories of civilians affected by war and the military.
The title story is about an elderly teacher of high school biblical subjects whose son just returned from America with an American wife and child and is drafted into the army. The old man receives notice of his son's death and reports to the morgue only to find out it is not his son's body. The son is still alive, but the old man is deeply disturbed by the incident.
In "Missile Base 612" a college lecturer is sent to a small outpost to lecture to the troops. No one shows, no one cares, no one understands him. He returns to his estranged wife to continue his futile life.
"The Lost Commander" leads his men on an exercise into the desert where they all go to sleep. A higher officer appears and puts them through a week of hellish drills and then leaves. They all go back to sleep afterward.
The protagonists of all three stories are isolates. In the first two they are intellectuals for whom their work has lost any intrinsic significance it had and remains only as a poor instrument to attempt to reach others. In the last, the men are past caring and seek only to sleep.
The writing is good - descriptive, full of psychological hints and moments, moving well.
I remember these very vaguely but I do recall liking Yehoshua, though I've never read any more. I would like to read more of him and of Amos Oz.
| Editor | Ashley, Mike |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 207 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | December 1979 |
Nine very fine SF stories ranging from 1938 to 1974 with a useful preface and introduction by Ashley sketching in the history of robots in literature. Especially impressive were Harry Harrison's "The Velvet Glove" about an unemployed robot exploited first by vicious gangsters and then by the police. In the end he begins reading subversive literature from an emancipation group. "That Thou Art Mindful of Him" is another Asimovian positronic robot story where two particularly able robots decide that they are human and that the three laws of robotics protect them over the inferior humans. They set in motion a chain of events which will, in many years, lead to robot ascendency. Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" is a dialect story of a slightly defective home computer/terminal that digs into the central data "tanks" and provides free information and advice to all users on all subjects. With privacy destroyed and all types of difficult questions answered such as how to rob banks, do away with spouses, etc., chaos results. Clifford Simak's "I am Crying All Inside" is another dialect story inpired, like so many others, by the old South. A society of reject humans served by obsolete robots lumbers on in stagnation.
All the stories are excellent. Most stress first rate story telling over scientific prediction. None have a sophisticated insight into what an electronic consciousness might actually be like. Other stories included are: Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy", Brian Aldiss' "Who Can Replace a Man", and L. Sprague de Camp's "Internal combustion" (a charming robo tragicomedy.)
I like robot stories. I don't think we'll meet intelligent aliens from another star system any time soon, but I think we might meet intelligent robots here on earth within one or two hundred years. It will be a tremendous challenge for us when we do, but also a tremendous opportunity. Unfortunately I think there are likely to be more ways to do things wrong than right and the consequences for humans, and maybe for any intelligent life on earth, could be severe.