Books read January through December 1985
| Author | Oliver, Chad |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Crown Publishers, 1984 |
| Copyright Date | 1960 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Extras | Introduction by George Zebrowski. Forward by Isaac Asimov. |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 1985 |
Anthropologist Monte Stewart is asked by the UN to lead an expedition to the ninth planet of Sirius, where intelligent life has been discovered in a very humanoid form. The expedition lands but cannot seem to get through to the "Merdosi". They unknowingly commit a severe social faux pas and their base is attacked. Monte's wife and others are killed. He kills a Merdosi in revenge. After many efforts to control himself as well as to contact them, he finally breaks through and achieves a real communication. A possible basis for friendship is established.
Good for SF, merely acceptable for other genres, O's success lies in his ability to imagine a different, not quite human civilization - as if cultural evolution had taken a different path about a million years BC and evolved a society that uses psychological control of plants and animals instead of tool making.
Oddly, for all his anthropology, I found his concept of earthly politics very unsubtle.
Still, decent SF. Very nice speeches by the aliens. In the end they recognize the superiority of the scientific, materialistic society.
I have no real memory of this book but my write-up puts me in mind of other SF stories in which intelligent beings live without the advanced technology evolving on earth. I'm thinking of Asimov, Greg Bear, and others whose names and titles I don't immediately recall but with stories about, for example using biotechnology but not chemistry, electronics, optics, etc.
Stories like this probably start with a conclusion, a society based on something other than what our societies are based on. Then they work backwards to create a plausible evolution of the current state of affairs and work forward to a meeting with humans who have a contrasting culture.
| Author | Isherwood, Christopher |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 191 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1985 |
A story told entirely in letters and diary entries of two brothers, Oliver, 34, who is about to take his vows as a Hindu monk, and Patrick, 38, a book publishing executive, movie producer and homosexual who comes to Calcutta to persuade him not to do it.
"Olly" is beset by doubts and overwhelmed by emotions caused by is brother's visit. He must deal with his jealousy and hatred of his brother, and his former love for his brother's wife. All these emotions are counter to his goals of personal self-denial. Yet in the end he goes through the vows and becomes a swami - a step that most Western authors could never allow their protagonist to take.
Patrick is also interesting and surprising. Intelligent, crafty but fickle, he is the antithesis of his brother. He is incapable of conviction, resolve, or self-denial. His letters to Oliver, wife Penny, mother, and homosexual lover are almost as if written by four different men - yet their unity of purpose and manipulative content successfully identify their author as the same man. Patrick goes through an apparent transformation from lover of his young California boy to faithful husband - only for us to find that this is a pattern. He betrays his wife and all his lovers every time - professing undying love, then pretending, and convincing himself, that he made no promises and is under no obligation.
A most unconventional book. Well done. Intelligent. Rather unexpected but not inconsistent. Worth reading.
This is the only one of Isherwood's many books that I have read. I recognize his talent but his sensibility is quite different from mine, and that affects my desire to read his books.
| Author | Steinbeck, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1945 |
| Number of Pages | 181 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1985 |
On the waterfront in Monterrey California, a group of social misfits and outcasts survive in a society of their own. They include Doc, a marine biologist who collects plants and animals for sale to laboratories; "Mac and the boys", five middle aged men living together on scavenging, odd jobs, petty theft, and so on; Lee Chong, the Chinese grocer who is "evil balanced and suspended by good"; Dora the madame and her stable of prostitutes; plus assorted others living in boilers or holding parties for cats or otherwise surviving.
It is a beautiful book, full of the joy of humanity - perceived as fellowship and comedy. It is much like Tortilla Flat, but a bit more ambitious. There is some metaphysics in the beginning, some poetry at the end, a wider variety of characters including the intellectual Doc, and a more coherent story. Still, he has "opened the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves" to some degree, presenting vignettes of life on the Row with characters who play no further role in the story, because these people were there and it is the Row and its society which are important, not a specific story about them constructed by the author.
Still, there is a plot, and its a good one too. Mack and the boys plan a party for Doc. He never arrives but they go ahead without him and wreck his house. Later they all recover from the shame and put on another party. This time doing it right. This time with Doc fully understanding and accepting all that will happen - for the love of his fellow souls on the Row.
What I and everyone else love about Steinbeck's books is his ability to sympathize with people who, as I wrote above, are misfits and outcasts, "little" people who live in a society that is structured for the benefit of the big people at the top. The may be "Okies" fleeing farm failure in the Dust Bowl, Mexican pearl divers, or people living marginal lives on the waterfront . Steinbeck treats them as human beings and sees the harm that comes to them as tragic.
At the time that he was writing, California was (maybe it still is) a different culture from the rest of the country. It was known as the land of the gold rush, the Sierra mountains, the giant sequoia forests, of sunshine, and of Hollywood. People lived larger in California. Steinbeck put all that into perspective. His California was still exotic, but no longer larger than life.
| Author | Steichen, Edward |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday and Co., 1963 |
| Copyright Date | |
| Number of Pages | 284 |
| Extras | 249 plates |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Photography |
| When Read | January 1985 |
Steichen's life's work is reviewed here from his first pictures as a printer's apprentice in Milwaukee in 1895 to his last years photographing the shadblow tree behind his home in 1963.
He was clearly a man of high principle. He abandoned a lucrative portrait business in New York because it was his repetitive, conventional portraits that were selling. He volunteered for both World Wars, leaving the Navy after the second one at age 67. Yet he also worked hard for peace, conceiving the famous "Family of Man" exhibition as an effort to bring people together when his other MoMA exhibits on war had failed to reach people.
I didn't care for many of the early pictures. The seemed overly personal, appealing to a very developed but idiosyncratic sensibility. Later, he resolved never to make pictures for galleries again and to do all his work for magazines - to reach more people and to break out of the sterile aestheticism.
His portraits were terrific. He always tried to stimulate his subjects into natural actions and poses - into being themselves. Sometimes that meant shooting them with crossed arms or a thumb on the lip or reclining, but the results had far more life than say a Karsh portrait. Each portrait stood as an individual work - of a person perceived individually and not merely filling in a preset slot in a studio background.
I also respect S's belief in the arts and in artists. He appreciated the work of others. He experimented. He strove for improvement.
See also the diary - especially on experiments in writing.
The main diary entry is January 20, 1985. It's more extensive than this book card entry.
| Author | Shute, Nevil |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Heinemann, 1970 |
| Copyright Date | 1942 |
| Number of Pages | 303 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | January 1985 |
John Sidney Howard, aged 70, loses his son in the war in 1940 and decides to go to France, hoping to recover some sense of life and peace by fishing in the French Alps, where he has loved to vacation before. While there, an English couple from across the border in Switzerland, fearing that Switzerland will be invaded, ask Howard to take their two children back to England with him. He agrees, but the German invasion of France is already progressing far faster than he believed possible. One of the children gets sick on the journey and he is forced to stop over a week in Dijon. Now it is too late. Trains cannot get through. A bus he is on stops and they become refugees on the road. He acquires more children; a 10 year old niece of the hotel maid, a 5 year old boy whose parents are killed on the road, a Dutch boy of completely unknown origin, a Polish Jewish boy whose parents were killed. He also finds a young woman who was his son's lover - who tries to help them all.
In the end they are arrested by the Gestapo. After many threats against him, the Gestapo major produces his own niece, and gives her to Howard to send to an uncle in America. They are helped to England.
The story is very well told. We see an old man, dispirited and looking only for peace and escape, drawn to display fine qualities of patience and courage. The children are very well drawn. The whole story is very uplifting and absorbing.
I liked the humanity of this book. Even the Germans showed humanity, a brave statement from an Englishman writing in 1942. A German army doctor treats the children and helps get everybody able to travel. Howard attempts to live something like a normal life with normal travel arrangements that degrade slowly until he is forced to become a refugee like all the others, but he never loses his sense of responsibility to the children.
The story begins and ends in an English city club. At the beginning, a man enters the club and takes a seat near an elderly fellow who is reclining in his chair and resting. They begin to talk and the old man soon tells the tale of the trip across France. At the end we fade out to the club again and the original narrator reprises his role. It's another layer of humanity and civilization on top of a harsh story. I guess it's a little schmaltzy, but I believe it worked.
I read this book at age 38. I pictured the 70 year old man as elderly, slow moving, a little stooped and with a wrinkled face and hands. And now here I am at age 70. I don't see myself in the way I saw John Sidney Howard. Shute would have been 43 when he wrote the book and he too may have had a young man's view of an old man. Unfortunately, he died just shy of age 61 and never got the chance to find out what age 70 is like.
The last three books I read by Shute were all outstanding, Round the Bend, read in 1990, The Chequer Board, read in 1995, and Trustee from the Toolroom, read in 2011. I really should read more.
I added In the Wet in March of this year. It was good too.
Now, at age 70, almost 71, I have come to believe that I don't see myself as an old man because I don't want to, not because I'm not. Now, particularly, at this moment, laid up in the living room with 24 hour pain from a pinched nerve, losing weight, getting shakier, and unable to walk without a walker, I see myself quite differently from the way I did just a couple of months ago. Changes with age are real. We can postpone them. We can fool ourselves. But life changes whether we like it or not.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 419 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | February 1985 |
Twenty-six years after Naked Sun Asimov has written a third Lije Bailey novel with all the same characters.
Bailey, plainclothes policeman from crowded Earth is invited to the leading Spacer planet Aurora, to find out who killed a humaniform robot, absolve Dr. Han Fastolfe, and bring a political victory to those who wish Earth people to explore and populate the galaxy. He is assisted by Robot Daneel Olivaw, the only other humaniform robot, and Robot Giskard Reventlov, a simpler seeming robot who in fact turns out to be very advanced, a mind reader who has manipulated many of the characters and, for perfectly honorable reasons, is the true killer of the other robot.
Bailey interviews all of the important characters, has a brief love affair with Gladia, the Solarian woman he met in Naked Sun, and solves the problem. In the end he discovers the true role of Giskard and shakes hands with him not as master to robot, but as an equal.
This is a marvelously satisfying story, very difficult to put down and ending most effectively. It appears that the old master is still in the top of his form. I hope he writes 50 more like this.
I have very fond memories of Lije Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw. I have always liked robot stories, not the antagonistic ones of Saberhagen's Berserker stories or the Terminator movies, but the ones that portray robots as intelligent beings to be understood as Kant might have understood them - possessors of rational minds subject, as the best of us humans is (or tries to be) to the rule of reason.
Robots are also attractive because of their potentially eternal life. We can imagine replacing parts as needed, even including central processing units, while preserving mental identity by transferring software and data to the new host. We can also imagine a continuous upgrading of sensors, data, and software, and hence a corresponding upgrading of perceptions, memory and intelligence. The robot is liberated from old age and from the fixed limitations of the initial hardware. If I were offered the alternative of death or transference to a robotic mind and body, it wouldn't take even a heartbeat of time to choose, even knowing that the transference involves death and re-awakening in a truly new form that may not be exactly like me.
Asimov's robots were very endearing. So too were the ones created by his wife, Janet Asimov in her novel, and the ones in the Caliban series by Roger MacBride Allen that were based on Asimov's conceptions.
I remember how much pleasure I felt when I came across this new Asimov robot story in the library, and how much again at discovering Caliban, for which I have yet one more volume still untasted. Thank you Isaac.
| Author | Tolstoy, Leo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Maude, Aylmer |
| Publication | New York: New American Library, 1960 |
| Copyright Date | 1889 |
| Number of Pages | 84 |
| Extras | Afterword by David Magarshack |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1985 |
This is pages 157-240 in The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
The narrator, riding in a train, falls into a discussion on love and marriage with other passengers. All leave but one, a man who has killed his wife and, in a famous trial, been acquitted. They ride all night while the man tells his story.
He was married on a whim - because his wife wore a certain blouse on a certain day. He was sexually attracted to her. She was attracted to his income and position. Yet they never had anything to say to each other and they got in a fight the very first day. They made up with sex but got in more fights, falling into a cycle of bitter, pointless fights leading to total hatred of each other.
After five babies, her doctor tells her not to get pregnant again and shows her how. She regains her looks and figure and begins to attract other men. He becomes insanely jealous and, catching her with another man, kills her.
Much of the story is diatribe against sex and doctors. Yet as T begins to tell the full story of the marriage it is transformed into a psychologically authentic and compelling tale. We see exactly how two people who cannot communicate grow to hate each other. We see all the self-defeating actions and emotions. We see how otherwise intelligent people are trapped by lack of understanding of themselves or of the social conventions which they observe.
A tirade, but still brilliant.
Marcia and I read this book for a book group. I remember that Vickie Porter was in the group and had very strong opinions about the book. Tolstoy raved at length about women who learn to dress, talk, and pose in ways that are completely at odds with their real selves in order to attract eligible men into marriage. The unhappy man who marries one of these women is shocked on the very first day of his married life to find that his wife is not the person he thought she was. Vickie was sure that this was a true and accurate description of marriage customs and thought Tolstoy totally nailed the facts of social conventions. Marcia and I, and others in the group, thought that T had gone overboard in his descriptions, that not too many women were like that, and that men were not as innocent as T made them out to be.
With the benefit of the Wikipedia I have recalled that the murdered wife played the piano to accompany a violinist playing Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata. The killer caught them making love and killed the wife but the violinist escaped. The story was censored in both Russia and the United States and was denounced by no less a personality than Theodore Roosevelt. Here is Tolstoy's own "Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata", published the following year in 1890.
"Let us stop believing that carnal love is high and noble and understand that any end worth our pursuit -- in service of humanity, our homeland, science, art, let alone God -- any end, so long as we may count it worth our pursuit, is not attained by joining ourselves to the objects of our carnal love in marriage or outside it; that, in fact, infatuation and conjunction with the object of our carnal love (whatever the authors of romances and love poems claim to the contrary) will never help our worthwhile pursuits but only hinder them."
| Author | Verne, Jules |
|---|---|
| Editor | Evans, I.O. |
| Publication | London: Arco Publications, 1966 |
| Copyright Date | 1887 |
| Number of Pages | 191 |
| Extras | Introduction by IOE. |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 1985 |
Natalis Delpierre, an illiterate peasant who rose eventually to the rank of Captain in Napoleon's armies, tells the story of his leave in 1792. He went to visit his sister in Germany and was trapped by an impending invasion of France by Prussia and Austria. He, his 40 year old sister, her mistress Mme. Keller, Jean Keller, Keller's fiance, and her grandfather all take flight to France. They are hounded along the way and he and Keller are caught and sentenced to death. They are saved at the last minute and fight at the battle of Valmy to save France.
The book is a simple, patriotic adventure story with cut-out cardboard characters mouthing honorable speeches. The story is very like Nevil Shute's Pied Piper. It has the same desperate-journey-in-time-of-war plot, and the same suspense, but is not nearly as good.
I note that the only Amazon reviewer who wrote about the book so far called it a "suspenseful tale" and a "gripping tale" and gave it five stars.
My first thought on picking up the book card and looking at the title was that Verne has written about aviation - like his Around the World in 80 Days. But that's not the meaning of "flight" in this context.
| Author | Deighton, Len |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 424 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | March 1985 |
A very serious novel about a British raid on a small town in 1943, based on very meticulous research.
A pathfinder plane is shot down short of its target and its marker flares fall on the small town of Altgarten, which is then destroyed by massed waves of bombers during a summer night.
Unlike most books in this genre, Bomber does not focus exclusively on the fighting men. We also see the mayor of the town, an old lady, fire fighters and repairmen, a housekeeper, black marketeer, corrupt official, and many others who are destroyed in the carnage. Some whom we have followed closely are killed by patches of burning phosphorus that eat into their flesh, or by time bombs going off many hours after the raid.
D's greatest heroes are not the gung ho do or die pilots. They are nervous, careful men who hate and fear what they do and want to get out. They are enlisted men, not officers. They are men who have been bullied by the ambitious, opportunist officers and politicians on both sides.
This is the best of D's books I have read so far. There is great attention to detail and real care in the writing.
I wonder if Deighton faced criticism for showing sympathy for the enemy. When the book was published, only 30 years had passed since the German blitz on England. Lots of people must have remembered that and not a few may have thought that the Germans got what they deserved.
Although I rated this as the best of Deighton's books that I had read, I have very hardly any memory of it. I remember much more of Winter, which I read in 1992. It was an excellent book.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 243 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 1985 |
A young Australian horse breeder is recruited by British racing commissioners to find out who is behind an apparent doping of horses. To do so he must masquerade as a low class, dishonest, and weak stable boy, which he does in spite of many humiliations that are involved. Eventually he pieces together all of the facts and discovers the trick - which was not dope at all but rather conditioning the horses to be frightened nearly to death when they hear a dog whistle, and then blowing the whistle in the final stretch to fill the conditioned horse with fear and adrenalin.
Before he can have them arrested an innocent young woman blunders in and gives away the plot and the hero must fight the psychopathic bad guy and his henchman. He kills them in a bloody fight.
Again, the book is very good for its type. F relies on methodical development of the story rather than continuous action, but he holds the plot well and builds suspense to the climax.
The worst note was in the end. The main character returns the payment he received and signs on to the British Secret Service to become a spy. This seems wrong. Was F planning a sequel? Did he intend to launch a career as a spy thriller writer? There is no other reason for such an ending.
| Author | Gardner, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 145 |
| Extras | Forward by Raymond Carver |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Writing |
| When Read | April 1985 |
G writes for "young novelists" in an academic paternal way with advice about mentors and writing clinics and advice from elders and so on. Clearly he is showing his deep roots as a professor and his somewhat simple view that school is the road which writers should take.
All my prejudices aside however, I found G to be insightful, genuinely and seriously concerned both about writers and good writing.
G speaks of the "fictive dream". It is what writers have and inspect when writing. He also speaks of very hard work, dedication, coming back to a piece again and again.
Writing is partly talent and largely work. Furthermore, it is an activity like all others - you do the best you can and be proud when it's good and revise it when it's bad. If you're not Tolstoy then you're not Tolstoy. That doesn't mean that your work is worthless.
I've thought a great deal about the "fictive dream" since learning about the concept from this book. The idea is that the novel comes to life in the writer's mind, assuming a life of its own. The novelist isn't so much creating characters and dialog, he's observing the characters and listening to what they think and say. He's "dreaming" in the sense that he has allowed free reign to subconscious ideas that work out without his having to directly manipulate them.
Is it real? Undoubtedly. Both Gardner and Carver testified to it as the method they use when writing, and both were highly successful writers. Analogous creative "dreaming" must also be present in many composers, improvisational musicians, painters, and other types of artists.
I presume there are other ways to produce art besides the method of allowing the subconscious to speak. My "prejudices" as I described them in 1985, are to think that the greatest artists, the most fluent writers, composers, actors, painters, etc. are fully conscious of what they are doing and do not require a dream state of any type. The reason I think that probably has something to do with my philosophical training and with whatever studying I have done in the sciences. Unless I completely misunderstand the concept, "dreaming" plays little or no role in those kinds of creations. Still, I haven't read enough writings by artists to know whether the kind of fully conscious method of creative work that I am imagining exists in the arts, is more or less common than the dreaming method, or is found more among the better artists or more among the lesser ones. If I had to guess, I'd guess that there are absolutely top notch writers and composers of both types.
For myself, it really doesn't matter whether Gardner is right and most writing is like what he says. I would still have to write the best way for me. I can consider dreaming as a new tool that might help if and when I write fiction (and all I've done in the past is fragments and pieces), but there is no reason for me to consider it as the only tool.
As for Gardner's idea of attending classes, I was resistant to it when I read his book and am still somewhat resistant to it. I doubt if more than a tiny handful of the world's great writers have ever taken a class in creative writing. I can see the benefit of having other people critique one's writing, but I also see some harm in having one's ideas meddled with by others. Perhaps a really good teacher can critique writing without meddling in it. Never having taken a creative writing course, I would have to reserve judgment on the concept.
There are a number of references to Gardner in my diary. There may be more there than in these book notes.
Some time ago I saw an email about good writing by Jim Matthews, an upper level manager at the Office of Communication and Public Liaison at the National Cancer Institute. Jim apparently teaches creative writing at a local college of some kind in addition to his day job. I'm writing from memory here so I'm not quoting his words and might have some of it wrong, but here is what I remember. He wrote about a bond of trust that a writer should establish with his readers. The writer should be honest and forthcoming. He should not manipulate the reader by withholding facts or using images to generate false emotions. I think that Jim would not like the use of deus ex machina to set things right at the end of a story. There are more subtle manipulations that I think also violate Jim's rule, for example, I have often read mystery stories in which the author writes, "Joe knew that Bob couldn't have been a killer." He doesn't specify how Joe knew that and never provided any reason for the reader to dismiss Bob as the culprit in the crime, but the author is guaranteeing, outside the story itself, that the problem of Bob, however much it looks like a problem, can be ignored by the reader. Whether my reader (you? me?) agrees with that is beside the point I wish to make - which is that a good teacher of creative writing, even if he is not that good a writer himself, can nevertheless educate a student to a deeper understanding of his craft. Because of that, and especially in light of the fact that I've never taken a creative writing course, I shouldn't be too condescending about classes in writing.
This book was written by the American John Gardner, not the British writer of James Bond spy thrillers.
| Author | Fowler, Roger |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 287 |
| Extras | index, bibliography, phonetics table |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Linguistics |
| When Read | April 1985 |
A very general introduction to linguistics covering the subject from small units up.
Chapters are: Language, Linguistics [a brief history], Words and their Components, Words within Sentences, Simple Sentences, Transformations, Complex Sentences, Sounds, Learning Language, Language Society and the Individual, Uses of Language.
The main things I learned concerned the possibilities of both semantic and structural decomposition of language, and the concept of transformation of deep structure into surface structure in order to make clear or subtle changes in emphasis or mood.
The notion of decomposing words into semantic features seems directly relevant to AI work (see diary entries [in March?]). Each word is placed within a specific lexical group of related words, each of which are distinguished from the others by their true or false relationship to a common set of features [generally predicates?]
Read while riding the wheel over a very long period. I first picked up this book in 1978, again around '83 or 4, and again now.
At one time I thought about writing an artificial intelligence program. I read various books and articles about the subject and probably read this one for the help it might give me in understanding language analysis by computer programs. I wrote many page of notes on these topics but, of course, never wrote a line of code. The subject still attracts me but, like so much else in computer programming, there are thousands of other programmers working their brains out trying to produce any program that I could write. Besides all of the difficulties of actually writing a useful program (or a useful book), there is the problem of introducing it into a market place that is already well filled by respected writers and totally flooded with newbies like myself who have no credentials and no way to be seen or heard above the hustling mass.
| Author | Lem, Stanislaw |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Polish |
| Translators | Iribane, Louis |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 206 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | April 1985 |
Five stories, starting with Pirx as a student at the Academy and ending much later with Pirx as commander of a ship.
In "The Test" student PIRX tries his first flight, a quick hop around the moon and back, but everything goes wrong. His crib sheet falls under the seat, a fly shorts out his equipment, and he almost crashes on the moon - only to find out it was all a simulation test. In "The Conditioned Reflex" Pirx is sent to the moon to find out why the previous occupants of a remote station died. It turns out that a radar reflection off a post fooled them into thinking a man was in distress and they died looking for him. "On Patrol" is very similar. An equipment malfunction causes two pilots to chase a phantom image into oblivion. Pirx almost does the same but catches himself in time. "The Albatross" is a spaceship exploding in space. Pirx, a passenger on a passing ship is a witness to the failed rescue attempt. Finally, in "Terminus", Pirx is commanding an old cargo vessel which had lost its crew in an accident 16 years before. He discovers that the ship's robot, deranged over the years, is automatically hammering out desperate messages from the trapped and dying men. Pirx recommends that he be scrapped.
Only the first story was funny. The last two were eerie. Lem is grappling seriously with man - Lem's ordinary sort of bumbling hero in spite of himself man - against deep fears and difficult trials. His hero succeeds by girding up his sanity and rationality and courage to force reason out of chaos. Pirx, the man who combines vanity and self contempt, the man who always seems a little behind the others, the man who could never be taken truly seriously - he's the one who muddles through.
This is a poor simplification as a review of a very good book.
The story I remember best from this collection is the first one. Lem creates a remarkable character, Pirx, who somehow manages to both bungle things, like dropping his cheat sheet and having to proceed without it, and yet still display a remarkable ability to deal with things that go wrong. There is nothing of the traditional thriller hero in Pirx. He is not a self-confident superman. He is not experienced at all and much that he must face is entirely new to him. And yet he always copes, not always in the best way, but always in some way.
While he is preparing for his final exam, the trip to the moon that turns out to have been a simulation without the student realizing it, he sees another student entering another spaceship. It is Boerst, the best student in the class, one with whom Pirx feels both rivalry and admiration. At the end of the simulation, Pirx has somehow managed to bring his (simulated) spaceship down on the surface of the moon without killing himself. Then the door opens. Pirx is wildly confused until he finally realizes the whole exam was a simulation. He emerges from the hatch of his spaceship on wobbly legs and see another man emerging from another hatch in terrible shape, wobbling and crying. "It was .. Boerst. He had crashed into the Moon."
There are other great SF writers but Lem stands at the pinnacle, especially if one considers his humorous stories - which are truly unmatched.
| Author | Hughes, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Chatto and Windus, 1964 |
| Copyright Date | 1929 |
| Number of Pages | 284 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | April 1985 |
An English family living in Jamaica around 1860 [?] suffers a collapse of their house in a hurricane and decides to send their five children to school in England to be safe as well as properly educated. The children take passage, together with two other children, on a sailing packet. That ship is in turn stopped by pirates who take the children, though not meaning to keep them, and get stuck with them.
The two chief pirates are Danish seamen fallen on hard times who are comic characters. They never actually hurt anyone and the children live aboard their ship doing almost as they please.
The main character is Emily, ten years old, half child, half savage. She lives on the boat with the most limited consciousness of herself, her surroundings, or the other people. When she is very ill and sleeping in the Captain's bed, the pirates take a ship, tie up the Dutch captain, and leave him with Emily. When he tries to escape Emily, in a panic, kills him with a knife and then swoons. The pirates blame another child. Later, the children are freed and the pirates captured. Emily testifies at the trial, breaking down and screaming when asked about the Dutch captain. As a result, the pirates are hanged. Emily grows up to be a normal young lady.
There is a freakish, Lord of the Flies like character to the book. Hughes has insights into alien childhood which we would not like to believe They are sinister, not in the evil sort of way that Golding's children are, but in their innocence, their simplemindedness, their inability to see reality, their inability to control themselves - all while being very childlike. An odd book, not so much "good" as "interesting".
Here are some rather nice passages from Amazon about the book:
From the Amazon book description: "Richard Hughes' celebrated short novel is a masterpiece of concentrated narrative. Its dreamlike action begins among the decayed plantation houses and overwhelming natural abundance of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, before moving out onto the high seas, as Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of a crew of down-at-the-heel pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood."
And by Claire Dederer: "First published in 1929, A High Wind in Jamaica has been compared to Lord of the Flies in its unflinching portrayal of innocence corrupted, but Richard Hughes is the supreme ironist William Golding never was. He possesses the ability to be one moment thoroughly inside a character's head, and the next outside of it altogether, hilariously commenting."
It is interesting that Ms. Dederer also compares Hughes to Golding, but seems to give higher respect to Hughes. I would have done it the other way around, even if I hadn't known that Golding won the Nobel Prize in 1983.
I seem to recall that I recognized the title before I found the book. I'm guessing that I came across it on a library bookshelf and thought, Hmmm, I've heard of this, I think I'll have a look. The book apparently had some reputation. There may have been something about that reputation on the book jacket. However book jackets didn't always survive 21 years on a library shelf (presumably printed in 1964, read in 1985.) Libraries were still, just, rebinding old books for which the covers were damaged and putting them back on the shelves. I don't think they do that anymore. I can't remember when I've seen what used to be called a "library binding" in the two libraries I now use.
| Author | Forester, C.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 310 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | May 1985 |
Commander George Krause, Captain of USS Keeling, is in charge of a convoy crossing the Atlantic in 1943. For 48 hours he remains on the bridge of his destroyer, directing the three other escorts and the 37 merchant vessels in his charge until he brings them within reach of air cover and reinforcements from England.
Krause is a typical Forester hero, self-deprecating, taciturn, unable to fully understand the people around him, but able to manage the technicalities of the fast developing situation with skill and speed. He successfully destroys two subs and damages a third (maybe sinks it) for the loss of seven cargo vessels and one destroyer.
As expected, F's writing is fast paced and gripping - very hard to put down - and packed with technical detail. The character of Krause, with his religiosity and self-doubt, is nevertheless very attractive.
The entire story is told from Krause's point of view, though in third person. It is punctuated with quotations from the Bible - odd, but interesting and well done.
I loved Forester's books and may have read almost all of them, the last so far in 1994, 22 years ago. They used to be easy to find in the libraries but, as with other books, the new crowd out the old on library shelves. Now they can be procured from the electronic sources so they're all available again. I may read one or two more before I'm done.
Incidentally, early 1943 was pretty much the last period of the U-boat threat in WWII. I think it was by May of that year that the Allies introduced escort carriers, big convoys with large numbers of escorts capable of leaving one or two behind to hunt and sink it when a U-boat was discovered, independent "hunter-killer" anti-submarine groups, "hufff-duff" high frequency radio direction finding, high resolution radars, and other techniques that turned the tables and essentially forced the U-boats out of the Atlantic. They tried to come back later with homing torpedoes, "schnorkels", and high speed subs, but they were never again a major threat. To the Germans this was a disaster. I've read the books produced by their captains and I sympathize with their losses. They were brave and, in many cases, very decent men, enslaved by a misguided patriotism. But I still can't help thinking "Good. Our side put our brains, our science, our manufacturing technology, and our brave men together, and pulverized the bastards."
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 66 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1985 |
A long short story from Clarke's earliest period.
In the 32nd century the world has had little scientific advancement for 500 years. Technology was already so advanced that people felt no more need to improve their material standard of living and art, literature and philosophy are attracting the greatest minds. In this world, one young man, Richard Peyton III, sets out to find the ancient city of Comarre which is hidden in a forbidden zone of Africa. He finds it, befriending a lion on the way. It is a place where mind reading computers are able to read people's deepest desires and fulfill them in perpetual dreams. Peyton tries to wake some of the dreamers but finds them unwilling or unable to return to reality. He narrowly escapes himself. He is trapped by the head robot but saved by the lion. He finds the notebooks left by the creator of Comarre's robots and brings out the technology of robotics and matter transfer to initiate a new Renaissance of science in the world.
The ending is not clear, but not bad. It shows Clarke's universal themes of knowledge and courage to know - back in his earliest work.
Previously published in the August 1949 Thrilling Wonder Stories. Did it thrill? Those were the only markets for SF in those days.
My memory of this story is poor but not, I think, completely gone.
Asimov and Clarke were two of my, and everyone else's, favorite science fiction authors. Asimov had solid, reliable, understandable characters. Whether humans or robots, they were easy to identify with and their motives were clear. Clarke's characters were a little more complicated and subtle, as were his conceptions of the future. Both authors were serious intellectuals for whom the pursuit of science was one of man's very greatest achievements and aims.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, 1982 |
| Copyright Date | 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 223 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1985 |
A's first novel, written in 1949, about a Chicago tailor, Joseph Schwartz, aged 62, who is accidentally transported forward in time. He arrives at a time when Earth is a backwater pariah planet, mostly radioactive, in a great Galactic Empire. The Earth government is planning to contaminate the rest of the Empire with radiation fever, to revolt and take control. At the same time, Bel Arvardan, a famous anthropologist, lands on Earth, hoping to find artifacts to prove that Earth is the original planet of the entire human species.
Schwartz has been "synapsified" in an illegal experiment and made both more intelligent and telepathic. He and Arvardan, together with a physicist (Shekt) and his daughter, thwart the plot and save humanity.
Asimov seems to have begun the themes of his later Foundation series right here. It is interesting what threads tie all his books together.
As with all of A's books, it is a good read.
Asimov wrote in an SF milieu that imagined an expansion of humanity across the galaxy. "Space Opera" was standard in SF, however it was generally with unchanged human beings. His conception of a "synapsified" person seems like a primitive taste of what we call genetic engineering or bio-engineering today and is pervasive in contemporary SF. I think he got away from it in his later books.
I note that Pebble in the Sky and Clarke's The Lion of Comarre were both published in 1949. The two became great competitors in the science fiction market, or at least Clarke so considered them. I also note that in 1985 the great majority of authors I was reading were older than me. I still read a lot of books by older, now dead, authors, as I did then. But now, alas (as they say), people younger than me are filling all of the important posts in our civilization. It happens.
| Author | Fromm, Erich |
|---|---|
| Publication | Greenwich Conn.: Fawcett Premier, 1966 |
| Copyright Date | 1947 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy; Psychology |
| Keywords | Ethics |
| When Read | June 1985 |
F argues for a productive, self-creative approach to life, to values, and to human ethics
He is against relativism because value is real. It is objectively based on human character and needs - particularly the need for full development of the personality through personal growth and productivity. He is against authoritarianism as also denying personal growth and productivity as values, though of course from a different direction.
Much of the psychology seems eccentric and unnecessary. We don't need yet another one-sided, simplistic, classification of personality types (F calls them the Receptive, Exploitative, Hoarding, and Marketing Orientations.)
The analysis of authoritarianism seems very cogent. The authorities attack our individual judgment and will, demanding submission to them. They beat us and terrorize us. Then, in our fear, they offer us security and acceptance if we obey. This security, made extremely important by the climate of fear, also becomes a positive attraction. It warps our minds into a desire to serve the leaders, to embrace their values and even to die for them, as so many Nazis did. They create a society in which the only way to live is to deny one's own and others' humanity - making us incapable of then developing a resistance.
"... freedom is the necessary condition of happiness as well as of virtue; freedom, not in the sense of the ability to make arbitrary choices, and not freedom from necessity, but freedom to realize that which one potentially is, to fulfill the true nature of man according to the laws of his existence. ... the ability to preserve one's integrity against power is the basic condition for morality."
Fromm strikes me was a man with deep intellectual roots and a consuming interest in human personality who faced a mad world, trying his best to make sense of it. Three of his four grandfathers were rabbis, though he himself rejected religion. He was interested in the liberation of human beings but was confronted by Nazism in his native country of Germany, driving him first to Switzerland and then the United States. He also lived and worked in Mexico for a time and then went back to Switzerland in his old age.
Most American professors of psychology in the decades after World War II had American concerns, living in a society of newly expanding expectations of a better life for all. Fromm faced more basic questions about whether we can live at all and make choices for ourselves, or whether we will be oppressed by Nazis, or Stalinists, or others like them.
Being myself a child of the American society of the 1950's and 60's I probably found Fromm's perspective more "eccentric" than someone who had lived his life would have. Perhaps my philosophy would seem overly rationalistic to him, not accounting for the psychological difference between people. Perhaps he would have been right. Marcia has sensitized me, at least to some extent, to the ways in which I am at one end of a psychological spectrum and don't have a good understanding of people, the majority of whom are neither at, nor even near, the end where I am standing.
Is this a note about Fromm or about me? I don't know, maybe both. I hope it's at least partly about Fromm.
| Author | Trifonov, Yuri |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Edwards, Jacqueline; Schneider, Mitchell |
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 267 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1985 |
An excellent novel about an old man who is obsessed with memories of the Revolution and Civil War, and especially about the guilt or innocence of Migulin, the Cossack leader who won the heart of the girl whom the old man had loved.
Pavel Evgrafovich, aged 73, is living in a summer colony on the outskirts of Moscow with his son and daughter-in-law when he receives a letter from Asya, his sweetheart of his adolescent youth. Galya, his wife, has been dead 6 years and now his memory returns to Asya. In passages alternating between then and now Pavel alternately recalls that time of fire and revolution and deals with the small problems of personal and family life in the present.
He recalls massacres by the Whites and unjustified oppression and executions by the Reds. Most of all, he traces the fortunes of Migulin, a dashing leader who constantly issued proclamations without Party approval, disobeyed orders, and in general acted as a romantic revolutionary. Migulin also captured the heart of Asya - who became totally devoted to him, seeing the whole world as either in his camp or against him.
Migulin is always in trouble. Finally, he seems to desert and is arrested. His guilt or innocence is never fully established. He is convicted, then pardoned, then later arrested again on another charge and shot. Only at the very end, after Pavel's death, 52 years later, on the last page, do we learn that Pavel too had said he might be guilty - an act of jealousy for Asya for which Pavel was to pay with his obsession in old age.
The book is beautifully written. Hard and complex, but full of deep understanding of life. Every scene is fashioned with perplexing but true to life images. All emotions are exposed for what they are in fact - yet without harsh judgments about what they mean. No simple answers are given. Both past and present are treated honestly and yet with sympathy. The excesses of both revolution and personal life are made more understandable.
| Author | Ambler, Eric |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 275 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | June 1985 |
Paul Firman is a businessman operating at the very outside edge of the law, making lots of money laundering ill-gotten gains of black marketeers and tax evaders. He is discovered by a Dutch professor who attempts to blackmail him - Explain all to the Professor, for publication with anonymity, or be exposed to the law.
Firman walks a tightrope between confession and lies - attempting to mislead the Prof while giving him enough to get rid of him. But Firman's senior partner, a very strange English educated Pacific islander, attempts to have him killed.
The book is a mystery/thriller, but an interesting and mildly successful one. The hero is in his mid-fifties. He has a history. He has a son who committed suicide. There is character and conscience amidst a morality running off at an angle to that of conventional society.
I liked the book - though only a little interested in its genre and subject matter.
Well written of its kind.
I've only read a couple of Ambler books, this being the last. He was a popular writer and produced some very good screenplays as well as novels, e.g., The Cruel Sea. I may read more.
Converting the book card and writing the above note motivated me to try more Ambler. After writing the notes on August 20, 2016, I read two more books, both from Ambler's early period, Journey into Fear and The Mask of Dimitrious, written in 1940 and 1939 respectively. Ambler changed a lot between then and the time of this book from 1975. He kept up with the times and with what later readers wanted. The earlier books had a very different atmosphere from what I was used to, but I liked them all the same.
| Author | Jackson, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Walker and Co., 1984 |
| Copyright Date | 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 144 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 1985 |
A small, very plainly written story about a young British fighter pilot sent to France during the German invasion. He sees a great deal of action in a very short time, shooting down several Germans and being shot down twice himself. There is a scene with refugees on the road and another in clearing a bombed village that make him hate the enemy - killing an enemy Stuka pilot as he bailed out.
J is a full time aviation writer who knows the technical detail well and clearly cares about the men who fought in the air for his country. As with many other books of this type, the mediocre, almost adolescent literary skill is mitigated by the technical knowledge and concern for the subject. Writers of this type aren't just writing potboilers with juvenile heroes. They are trying to write and recreate the history of people they admire.
There are shlock scenes - a beautiful American woman journalist, a brief meeting with Winston Churchill. The former in particular is very poorly done. But J gets back to his main business quickly.
There are also a few bits from the perspective of a German fighter pilot - one who does not grow as cynical as George Yeoman (quite a name - a sergeant too, no officer crap) - perhaps because he is on the winning side at that time. It belongs in the book even if J can't quite fit it into the story.
| Author | McCormmagh, Russell |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 218 |
| Extras | notes, sources, photos |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Physics |
| When Read | July 1985 |
An account of the last several weeks of the life of a fictional German physicist, Victor Jakob, during the last year of World War I. Jakob's scientific life began before the revolutions introduced by Planck and Einstein. He reflects on the changes, trying to reconcile relativity with his belief in the world ether and trying to find ways to think about quantum mechanics without recourse to statistical abstractions which remove the physical content of physics.
Jakob also meditates on the waste of war and on the arch patriotism and spreading rebellion around him, though he is quite apolitical himself.
There is less physics in the story than I expected. If anything, there is more University/Institute politics and life. Some is very poignant - especially Jakob's reflections on his failure to become a leading light and his gread admiration for those who did. He especially admires the great classical physicists of the last period of classicism, Maxwell, Drude [real?] and others.
The story alternates between narration of Jakob's life and dreams of oppression by Ministry authorities, derision by students, and advancement by colleagues that leaves him behind.
At the end, M has a long section on sources and notes. He offers a view of Jakob's life had he lived beyond 1918 and Jakob's own view of how the story should have been presented. There is much documentation supporting the authenticity of the account.
An unusual combination of fiction, history and psychology of academics, and science
From the Wikipedia: "Paul Karl Ludwig Drude; July 12, 1863 – July 5, 1906) was a German physicist specializing in optics. He wrote a fundamental textbook integrating optics with Maxwell's theories of electromagnetism."
| Author | Sloane, Eugene A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 531 |
| Extras | photos, diagrams, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Sports |
| When Read | July 1985 |
Indeed a complete book.
Chapters on health, safety, buying a bike, fitting, riding, gears, touring and camping, racing, history, accessories, tires, and maintenance.
Also appendices on key to bike parts, dictionary, organizations, supply sources, magazines.
Sloane is something of a fanatic but he's extremely knowledgeable. An older man, touring oriented rather than racing. Very good on the subject.
I would have read this at about the height of my interest in cycling. I was riding my then new Bridgestone T-500 on a 30 mile road course, up and down some significant hills, three times a week. A year later I had my knee operation that was supposed to make my cycling better but in fact ended it.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Signet, New American Library, 1974 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 215 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 1985 |
A passenger tourist vessel that plies a great dust sea on the moon is sucked under by a freak bubble in the dust and buried 15 meters deep. Captain Pat Harris, stewardess Sue Wilkins, and retired Commodore Harsten work with the other 21 passengers to keep everyone alive until help arrives. Eventually they are rescued in the nick of time.
This is a typical tour de force of Clarkeian science packaged in an SF thriller. C pulls one scientific explanation after another to create a totally credible world of low gravity, heat sensors, dry dust - almost like water, and so on. Again, as usual, his characters are those wonderful scientific types.
Each chapter ends with a cliff hanger.
I loved it.
Asimov and Clarke were probably my favorite SF authors. I learned a lot of science ideas from each of their books.
| Author | Ludlum, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Dell Publishing, 1984 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 446 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy; Thriller |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 1985 |
Construction engineer David Spaulding is recruited by American intelligence to fight against the Nazis in WWII. He is sent to Lisbon where he operates a big spy ring, and then is sent to Argentina in a super secret operation to trade industrial diamonds for a high altitude gyroscopic compass.
It turns out that nobody knows about the diamonds except a few Americans. Spaulding finds out and exposes the Americans, kills the Nazis, gets the plans, recaptures the diamonds, and marries the girl.
I may have liked it a little better than The Bourne Identity, but still found it to be essentially pot boiling action for the benefit of jaded and self-indulgent readers. All morals are too conveniently forced, coincidences are too strong, narrow escapes too narrow, etc.
There are pleasures in reading such a book but it would be better if I could read faster.
I read at not much above speaking pace. That does well for me on books that have rich content. I get more out of it than I think the skimmers and speed readers do - though not being a speed reader myself, I can't be certain that's true. But for books like this that are pretty light on content I would do better if I could breeze through them. However now, at age 70, after many failed attempts, I'm not ready to embark on yet another attempt to learn speed reading.
| Author | Cather, Willa |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963 |
| Copyright Date | 1923 |
| Number of Pages | 173 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 1985 |
The story of a younger woman married to an older man. She appears to be a great lady. She is beautiful, lives in a very tastefully decorated house, is married to Captain Daniel Forrester, former railroad builder/contractor, now retired, and is the envy of the town of Sweetwater Colorado. Young Neil Herbert, Judge Pomeroy's nephew, is devoted to her and her husband. Most of the story is told from his perspective.
While seeming a great lady, she has a secret love affair on the side. A turning point comes when a bank in Denver fails and Forrester puts up almost all of his money to protect the depositors - in spite of the other investors weaseling out. The family's circumstances are much reduced. Soon after, Forrester suffers a stroke and begins a gradual decline, confined mostly to house and garden - still a fine gentleman - still keeping her as a lady - until his death. She goes downhill, loses money and respect, and eventually winds up in South America where she marries an English gentleman and becomes a lady again.
The story does not seem as grand as O Pioneers!, Death Comes for the Archbishop, or Shadows on the Rock. Nor is it as personal as The Professor's House The main character is perceived from a distance. Yet it is unmistakably Cather. There is the subtlety and ambiguity of the lady's life. There is the genuine sympathy in the midst of the criticism. Though I do not consider it her "finest achievement" (jacket blurb), I still like it.
It is typical of Cather's sensibilites, I think, to perceive the deep sense of honor and obligation in Captain Forrester and the great sacrifice he has made for others. This character expresses something of C's ideals and also sets Mrs. Forrester's failings in greater perspective. If I remember correctly, my feelings about the lady were very mixed, as C clearly intended them to be.
It was a fine book about character and society.
The Wikipedia article on this book lists the characters but is oddly silent about the bank failure and decline of the Forrester's fortunes.
| Author | Adams, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 478 |
| Genres | Fiction; Fantasy |
| When Read | August 1985 |
I've done it again. I either read a book and never wrote up a book card for it, or I misfiled it somewhere. I couldn't find the card at or near where it should have been filed, nor under "Richard" or "Watership".
This book made an impression on me and, although 31 years have passed, I think I remember it well. It was the story of a colony, or warren, or whatever you call a collection of rabbits living in the wild but forced to leave their home as a result of human action. These rabbits talked to each other the way humans do and Adams made it possible for us to observe and listen in. They dealt with a number of challenges to their survival, most particularly including an attack by another group of rabbits led by a large, powerful, dangerous rabbit whom they finally defeated by courage, intelligence, and the intercession of a farmer's dog whom they were able to entice into the action.
In one of the scenes I remember, the biggest rabbit in the group, a simple but lovable and courageous character, hears his name called and believes it to be the great rabbit in the sky, or whatever, and he comes out saying to the others, "When they call you by name you have to go." I remember when that big fellow blocks the path to the rest of the new warren and fights the big bully, successfully holding him off and forcing him to back down in spite of grievous injuries to himself. I remember that, after the battle, the young rabbits are all deeply respectful of him. And I remember the leader of the rabbits, now in old age, leaving the warren, heading away, abandoning the body he no longer needs in a ditch, and proceeding into the unknown.
It was a moving book and I liked it.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 248 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 1985 |
Andrew Douglas, a partner in Liberty Market Ltd., specialized consultants in dealing with kidnapping, matches wits with an Italian kidnapper in Italy, England, and the U.S. Liberty Market works for families of kidnap victims, acting as advisor, go between on ransoms, photographs of money, etc. They have more expertise than the police and are committed to the client's needs to first, get back the loved one, and second, hold down the ransom to the minimum amount which still makes it profitable for the kidnappers to release their victim.
Three kidnaps take place leading eventually to the nabbing of Andrew himself. But he escapes from a most precarious situation and leads the police back in a successful raid and killing of the kidnapper.
Another very good Francis. Technical, knowledgeable, very authentic feeling, excellent suspense in several passages.
| Author | Dewey, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Beacon Press, 1957 |
| Copyright Date | 1920 |
| Number of Pages | xlvii + 222 |
| Extras | Enlarged edition with a new introduction by the author. |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| When Read | October 1985 |
A short but full blown critique of philosophy in which Dewey advances pragmatism as the next stage, the next advance, which we must make if philosophy is to be useful in our time.
The critique is full blown in that it includes a history of Greek, medieval, modern, and later philosophies. He argues that the advance of science has made the method of pure reason obsolete. We cannot discern ultimate aims or ultimate truths. To try is not only to be foredoomed to failure, but is also to miss those possibilities for success that do exist.
We can in fact make progress - in our understanding of nature, ourselves, knowledge, and good and evil. We do make progress in these areas each time we apply our reason to difficult practical problems and develop effective, satisfactory (an important word) solutions.
D strikes me as a fresh wind. He brings the specific and particular back into philosophy and brings philosophy down to help us with specific and particular problems.
I read the book over a very long period and, because I am so removed from philosophy, I cannot retain much of the specific argument.
Perhaps I will return to Dewey some day. Even if not, a few central concepts will remain with me and inform my thinking.
I left the University of Illinois Philosophy Department, without the PhD degree I was pursuing, in 1973. My failure to get the degree was partly due to what I would now call immaturity, but it had much to do with my political awakening during the Vietnam War and my growing belief that academic philosophy was too academic, too divorced from real life, too abstract, too ignorant of social and historical forces that influence our ideas and our lives. I was alienated from academia and from the academic attitude that prevailed at that time in American university philosophy departments. Hence my writing, twelve years later, that Dewey "struck me as a fresh wind."
If I re-read the book today I might be even more attracted to it because of the deep interest in science, mainly biology and related biochemistry, that I began to develop starting ten years ago in 2006 (see Neill A. Campbell's Biology. Edward O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence strikes me today as a very interesting and at least superficially plausible attempt to apply scientific findings to issues that have traditionally been addressed with no scientific input in academic philosophy. I should go back and look at Dewey again.
I noted three publication dates for this book on my 3x5 book card, 1957, 1948, and 1920. The Library of Congress shows the book being published on each of those dates but adds "Enl. ed. with a new introd. by the author" only to the 1957 edition. However, Dewey died in 1952 (aged 92), so any enlargement and new introduction must have been in the 1948 edition too, unless he wrote it, died, and then his publishers put it together five years later.
Am I still a librarian, or what? See also my notes on The Thin Man, read just after this one.
Readers of these notes might be puzzled by the expression "modern, and later philosophies". "Modern philosophy" is a term that philosophers use to mean the philosophical thought beginning with Rene Descartes in the 16th century
| Author | Hammett, Dashiell |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974 |
| Copyright Date | 1934 |
| Number of Pages | 190 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 1985 |
Nick Charles, former detective, is in New York with his beautiful young wife Nora to drink and party for a few weeks around the Christmas / New Year holiday. He is drawn into a murder mystery which he eventually solves.
All of the charm of this book, and it is charming, is in the dialog. It's fast, snappy, hip in its 30's way. Nick and Nora verbally fence with each other, always moving a step ahead of the reader.
The characters are also well done, very much "characters". There is a lying woman who never tells the truth no matter how many times she's caught, her naive daughter, a son who wants to hear detective stories, a tough cop, a stupid cop, gangsters, and a lawyer who turns out to be the killer.
Perhaps because of its style, or maybe its off beat view of it all, I think I liked this as much as any detective novel. It wasn't a "thriller" but it was a pleasure to read.
I remember being taken aback by the concept of a couple consisting of a man with a younger wife who plan to spend a few weeks drinking and going to parties. Unabashed hedonism, acknowledged and abetted by the author, is not at all common in American fiction, or really in any national fiction that I know. Maybe Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises or Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or The Beautiful and the Damned pushed open a door for this and Hammett walked past those authors and took a comfortable seat in the new room they exposed. Or maybe this kind of literature has been around for a lot longer - since Thackeray or before. Drinking was pretty common in fiction, it was the acceptance of a drunken and hedonistic life with no moralizing about it, not even implicitly, that surprised me.
I note that, although written by an American author, this library book was procured from a British publisher who published it in London. I noted this at the time and wrote "c. Knopf, 1934 (Jan.8)" on the book card in the bibliographic description. The "c." was my way of abbreviating "copyright".
It's conceivable that the book was out of print in the U.S. at the time the library bought it. However it's equally possible that the British publisher had a lower price than the American one. When I was a librarian I bought numbers of books, mainly philosophy and classic literature, from cheaper British or even Indian publishers in order to get the greatest value from our limited book budget. The books took a while to arrive but were cheaper even after shipping than the same titles published in the U.S.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Editor | Clarke, Arthur C. |
| Publication | London: Victor Galancz, 1977 |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | ix + 242 |
| Extras | Introduction by Arthur C. Clarke |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | November 1985 |
An anthology of 11 hard science SF stories, each concerned with a different branch of science. Written from 1927-57.
Good ones included: Robert Heinlein "And He Built a Crooked House" about a 4 dimensional house where every room leads back into itself. James H. Schnitz "Grandpa" - human colonists on an alien planet aide a seemingly harmless lily pad and then find themselves about to be eaten. It turns out that an intelligent creature has attached itself symbiotically and is directing the pad. The hero kills the creature and the lily pad reverts to being a dumb raft. Isaac Asimov, "Not Final" - earth men have contacted life on Jupiter but the Jovians consider all non-Jovians to be vermin. A theoretical scientist discovers "final proof" that the Jovians cannot escape Jupiter even as, at the end, a new earth ship built by a technician without theoretical knowledge, demonstrates the very principle that will allow the Jovians to escape.
Cyril Kornbluth, "The Little Black Bag" has an almost self-operating doctor's bag transported back through time into the hands of a skid row alcoholic doctor. With all his new-found capabilities he becomes a real healer again. However a young, ambitious woman kills him for the money she can make with it. The original makers discover the murder and disable the bag. Jack Vance, "The Potters of Firsk" has a human save some "Me Tuun" people from potters who would kill them for the lime in their bones. He gives the potters a uranium glaze in return for a promise not to kill again.
Other stories are: Murray Leinster "The Wabbler", Theodore Thomas "The Weather Man", Robert Silverberg "The Artifact Business", Philip Latham "The Blindness", Arthur Clarke "Take a Deep Breath, and Julian Huxley "The Tissue Culture King".
Writing up all of the stories filled up the 3x5 index card and left no room for any comment about them. The strongest memory I have of this book was of "The Little Black Bag". There wasn't a lot of imaginative science in it but I seem to recall it as a beautiful story of an older man who thought his life was a failure and there was nothing left for him but alcohol and death. Then he finds the bag and begins to help others, healing people (mostly his bag healing people but he himself becomes more proficient too) who other doctors are unable to cure. He begins to be a proper human being again. I don't remember who the woman was who murdered him for the bag. Was she a nurse?
| Author | Dostoevsky, Fyodor |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Garnett, Constance |
| Publication | New York: Bantam, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1869 |
| Number of Pages | 597 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 1985 |
Lyov Nikolaivitch Myshkin, a "prince", returns to Russia at age 26 after years in a sanitarium in Switzerland where he had been treated for epilepsy and "idiocy". He becomes involved first with a fallen woman, Nastasya Fillipovna, and then with Aglaia Ivanovna Epanchin, daughter of a respectable retired general. In the end he loses both. Aglaia makes a scene at Natasya's, forcing M to take N's part. Then N quite mad, runs away at their wedding to Rogozhin, who murders her. M is left broken in mind, unable to respond, completely withdrawn, once again an idiot.
D has created a truly pure soul. Incapable of deceit, forgiving of everyone, wearing his heart on his sleeve, caring nothing for his own life and future, but only for those around him. He is too pure for the world. He cannot survive in it.
This is not a conventional novel. Most of the writing is extraneous to the plot. Many minor characters have full parts. Many scenes, sketches, and sub-stories exist more for their own sake than for the sake of the main story. Some - the story of the execution, the dinner at the Epanchin's, Ivolgin's tale of Napoleon, Myshkin's proposal - are outstanding vignettes. It is almost like a writer's notebook instead of a novel.
See diary entries in September, October, and November.
A poor novel but great writing.
I think the most interesting entry I wrote was on November 6, 1985. It was deeper than the comment I wrote above.
| Author | Gray, Edwin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Walker and Company, 1985 |
| Copyright Date | 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 220 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Naval |
| When Read | November 1985 |
A World War II submarine adventure story with many technical details but short of plot and with little plausibility.
Lieutenant Commander Hamilton, fresh from other exploits in other books, is given command of an old sub used by the Royal Navy for training anti-submarine warfare crews. He performs several successful mock attacks but also seduces many women - one of whom is his commander's wife. There are a couple of very unappetizing bedroom scenes and a training mission resulting in various improbable events. The lady somehow falls in love with him. The commander goes insane. Hamilton sinks a German Raider ...
Then there is an abrupt change to a new story about an absurd sub-filled-with-explosives attack on an E-boat pen. They carry it off and Hamilton and one man escape to be rescued by the husband, who conveniently dies in the fight.
Too bad. Gray has a good technical knowledge and a feel for authenticity inside the submarine - but nothing to say about the people or the war. It is only in their relation to the boat that the men come alive at all.
Forgotten and presumably quite forgettable.
| Author | Littell, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 252 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | November 1985 |
Charlie Heller, a cryptanalyst for the CIA, wants revenge on three terrorists who killed his girlfriend in Germany. The terrorists are believed to be living in Czechoslovakia but the CIA says it can do nothing to get them. Charlie digs some of the most incriminating CIA cables out of his computer and uses them to blackmail the Company (i.e, the CIA). He gets trained as an assassin and sent across the border - while an intensive CIA search turns up his evidence. The CIA then orders his death but he is already over the border.
There are numerous incidents as Charlie evades the CIA, kills all three terrorists, falls in love, and is allowed to leave so that he can besmirch the CIA with his blackmail - which he does. He also decodes two lines in _The Tempest_ to prove that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's' plays.
Littell is very good. Not as intense as Le Carre (to whom he is continually compared on the dust jacket notes), he still comes closest to Le Carre in his ability to weave a complex but ultimately logical plot, and to create motivation in his characters. I liked Charlie Heller, his girlfriends, and the first girl's father. I despised the CIA bureaucrats who order killings and the killers who carry out those orders.
Technical detail was quite poor. The discussions of computers were terribly ignorant. But that is easy to forgive in an otherwise well written book.
As usual, I can't tell whether I remember any of this or if my reading the notes just makes me think I remember it. I think the latter is most likely.
Reading the abstract above doesn't seem to me to justify the comments that I wrote. Is it credible that a cryptanalyst would demand to be trained as an assassin and sent to Czechoslovakia to kill terrorists? Is it credible that he would blackmail the CIA and that they would try to kill him as soon as they succeeded in obtaining the material he was using for blackmail? And what did I make of the Francis Bacon business back in 1985? Given that my memory of this book is poor to non-existent, I can't say any more. I did say that the plot was "ultimately logical", so maybe it was. I was a mature man of 39 when I read this and I'm inclined to trust myself.
I became a fan of Littell, reading four more of his books, including the very excellent Vicious Circle that I read in 2008 and remember well.
| Author | Saberhagen, Fred |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Tom Dougherty Associates, Pinnacle Books, 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 399 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | November 1985 |
A collection of 11 related stories originally published between 1965 and 1979. They all concern a future in which the human race, spread over many planets, has entered into mortal combat with the Berserkers - a powerful force of machines programmed eons ago by a dead race to eliminate all life.
In spite of the sound of such a theme there are no adventure space opera stories here. The tone is psychological, macabre, bitter. There are no triumphs. Every victory has a bitter price. One feels the terror of having an implacable enemy - subtle, sophisticated, always learning more, always reproducing, impossible to finally destroy.
S creates many rich worlds with vivid scientific and sociological imagination.
Very impressive SF.
Impressive indeed, but terrifying too. In one of the stories a husband and wife live in a beautiful home with a beautiful garden full of statuary. Part way into the story we learn that one of the statues isn't a statue at all. It's a Berserker that has assumed a pose and held it for years and years without moving a millimeter, always watching his prey and planning when he will murder them. I don't remember the outcome of the story but I'm somehow thinking that at the end, the people have still not recognized the danger they are in and the Berserker is still biding its time. It has nothing else to do or worry about. We leave the beautiful and happy couple in their beautiful home, unaware of the disaster that will inevitably overtake them.
I think the term "Berserker" comes from the culture of the Vikings. The Berserkers were big, powerful men who would go berserk on the battlefield, swinging their great battle axes and wading into the enemy, completely regardless of their own lives and safety.
Much of science fiction is optimistic and uplifting but there are authors like Saberhagen who recognize that the universe is completely unconcerned with the fate of humanity and may in fact be more hostile than we can imagine.
If I remember correctly, the illustrations were black and white drawings of scenes from the stories. I seem to recall, for example, that there was a drawing of the house and garden of the story noted above with a larger than life statue in an artistic pose.
| Author | Levi, Primo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Italian |
| Translators | Weaver, William |
| Publication | New York: Summit Books, 1985 |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 349 |
| Extras | Introduction by Irving Howe |
| Extras | author's note, bibliography |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | December 1985 |
A very fine novel by an Auschwitz survivor about a group of Russian and Polish Jews in East Europe who live as partisans, hiding in the forest, robbing the Germans, killing a few when they can. The main character is Mendel, a Russian Jewish watch mender and Red Army artillery man who was cut off behind the German lines. He joins up with another Jewish soldier and finds a group of partisans, but the partisans don't all like Jews and they are advised to join a group of Jews in the depth of the marshes. The Jews are then killed or driven out by the Germans and a small band leaves, eventually to join first another partisan unit, and then another group of Jews. For three years they survive, always moving west, until the front catches up to them in Poland and they follow it on into Germany and Italy. In Germany one is killed in a market and they take revenge by attacking the town hall and killing the ten people inside.
All but one are Zionists of one kind or another. The one who is not has a family and village in Siberia to which he returns. The others meet Palestinian Jews in Italy who do not even speak Yiddish.
There is much beauty in this book. There is love, music, poetry, reflection, Yiddishkeit. At each point where Levi must choose between drama and life, stereotypes and life, oversimplification and life, he unerringly chooses real life. These people - from Gedallah the violin playing leader, to Line, the skinny Zionist girl who consumes men - all are beautifully drawn, rounded, sympathetic.
This book was my introduction to the great Primo Levi, a man whom I came to deeply admire. He was a realist and an idealist, an artist and a scientist, a very fine human being who had been dragged through the worst horror of the twentieth century and came out at the end, still a fine human being.
This particular novel takes place outside the camps, but not out of the range of atrocious Nazi antisemitism. This book is a novel, but like Tec Nachama's non-fiction Defiance there is a great deal of the truth in it. The main task of Levi's partisans is not to kill Germans and win the war, but to stay alive and, if possible, rescue a few more Jews along the way. Their ability to kill Germans is pitiful in comparison with the Germans' ability to kill them. It is all they can do just to keep together and survive. But there is one scene referred to above in which they do get some small portion of the revenge that is due them. They are in Germany at the end of the war. They hear German antisemites sneer at them with denigrating "look who has come back" remarks. A German kills one of them. But the Jews have a couple of hand grenades and some pistols and take their revenge. It is a liberating moment for the Jews and for the readers. It helped me come to closure with the book.
I greatly admired the other books by Levi that I read Survival in Auschwitz which told the true story of Levi's time in the concentration camp, and The Monkey's Wrench. The latter book was about the working life of men who took their unsung jobs seriously and attempted to do good work. I thought that it was marvelous that a man who could write the other two books, could stand aside from that and write about normal life as well.
| Author | Tarkington, Booth |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Grosset and Dunlap |
| Copyright Date | 1921 |
| Number of Pages | 434 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1985 |
A novel about a lower middle class family in which the mother and daughter aspire to be part of the town's upper class. The mother pushes her sick husband to quit his job at the J.A. Lamb Company, where he has worked all his life, to open a glue factory using a formula discovered on Lamb Co. time. The daughter, also supported by the mother, aspires to meet and marry a wealthy, handsome man.
They all try but it comes to naught. Old Lamb ruins Adams' glue business out of spite and the handsome young man finally sees through Alice's wiles and superficial charm and leaves her. First there are disastrous scenes as Alice's brother Walter absconds with money from Lamb Co - where he also works, and as a dinner party for the young man turns into a wreak of overblown efforts. Adams suffers a stroke, the young man is gone forever, Lamb takes some pity on them and buys their factory for enough to get them out of debt, and they continue on a meager income from taking in boarders.
But all is not lost on Alice. She learns from experience. She develops her good qualities, strives to overcome her tendency to aggrandize herself and her family, and enrolls in the local business school - presumably to become a secretary or bookkeeper. In her new maturity she learns that this is an honorable and viable path fo her - not a dead end of old maid life.
Quite a good book. Much dialect. Much feel for social classes represented - and of course a "right" ending.
I remember this as a painful book to read. The family's high social aspirations, driven by Alice's mother's great determination to ascend the social ladder and her great disdain for the people she hoped to leave behind, always seemed fragile, precarious, and deeply unappealing. It was as if Alice and her mother were reaching to the very farthest extreme to which they could reach, their fingers actually touching the man whom they hoped to fool into marrying Alice, only to slide away and leave the man horrified by what almost happened to him.
However I was pleasantly surprised at the end. Alice is not crushed by her defeat. She grows as a person. She comes to understand that a good and happy life are within her reach, not by grasping at a rich man who will hand her the good life, but by making a good life for herself, one that doesn't depend on riches and social position.
I liked the novel a lot and recommended it to others.
| Author | Remarque, Erich Maria |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Mannheim, Ralph |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1964 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 244 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 1985 |
A refugee in Lisbon in 1942 is offered passports and tickets to America if he will only listen to a story by another refugee. He listens. The second man, known only as Josef Schwarz, a name on his forged passport, tells a story of love and fear in flight from the Nazis.
Schwarz had been a refugee from Germany for 5 years when, in 1939, he decided to sneak across the border one more time to see his wife Helen. He finds her in his old apartment and she decides to escape with him. They make it to Switzerland, then to France, where they live on savings and odd jobs since work permits are impossible to get. Helen's brother, Obersturmbahnfuhrer Georg, a bully who brutalized Schwarz in a concentration camp, comes after them.
They are interned by the French. They escape. They make it to Marseille where Schwarz is arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, but talks Georg into going with him to find Helen and then kills Georg and steals his car and passport. They drive to Spain and then Lisbon and make arrangements for America, but Helen, about to die of cancer, commits suicide. Schwarz gives away his money, tickets, and papers and returns to France to fight. He is never found again.
It is a strange and ambiguous love story. Schwarz clings to Helen ever more tightly - she seems both to love him fiercely and to not love him at all. We never know whether she is motivated by disease, fear of death, or what.
The story is well told, very knowledgeable about refugees and Nazis, filled with images and reflections on alienation and oppression. Impressive.
I have just recently read two more books by Remarque, Flotsam and Spark of Life. The first of these, published in 1939, before the war, was also a book about refugees, tracing their paths through many countries that would in turn expel them.
Although Remarque is best known for All Quiet on the Western Front his other, later books are equally good.
| Author | Steinbeck, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Penguin Books, 1983 |
| Copyright Date | 1942 |
| Number of Pages | 188 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1985 |
A coastal coal mining town, presumably in Holland or Denmark, is overrun by Nazis. The occupation troops under a Colonel Lanser settle in to hold the town and keep the coal flowing into Germany. Resistance gradually builds up. Soldiers are killed, rails and bridges and dynamos are sabotaged. The civilized old Mayor Orden and his friend Dr. Winter quietly aid the resistance, getting word to England that dynamite should be parachuted in. It is. Sabotage is intensified. Orden and Winter are arrested. They recall the death of Socrates at the end. They are afraid but proud. They are resigned to die and will not give in.
The story is told from the German side as well. There is an engineer officer who cares only for his projects and is discouraged by continual sabotage. There is a super patriot who always wants to shoot hostages, to take action in spite of Lanser's realization that no action can be effective. There is a young lovesick fool who visits the widow of a miner killed for attacking a German. She kills him with a scissors even though she sympathizes with his pathetic loneliness.
The book is a political polemic, without some of the striking literary values of say Cannery Row. Nevertheless it is fully infused with Steinbeck's understanding of common folk and intellectuals. There are comic treatments of common people, but no real disrespect for them. Most of all, it is full of accurate understanding of the political situation it depicts. S undersands why the Germans can never govern the people they have conquered and how they must always be alien and afraid in the conquered lands.
I like all of Steinbeck.
Steinbeck was active in anti-Nazi writing and, according to the Wikipedia, worked as a war correspondent, actually engaging in some shooting and suffering some wounds and psychological trauma. However the article says this book was about Norway, not Holland or Denmark as I assumed. That makes sense, in part because there was more of a resistance movement in Norway than in the other two countries.
I see that, as of this writing, this book that I read over 30 years ago is the last one of Steinbeck's that I have read. I read most of his oevre but there are a few that I haven't read and maybe I'll have a look at them.