Books read January through December 1988
| Author | Golding, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 281 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Maritime |
| When Read | January 1988 |
A continuation of the earlier Rites of Passage, to be followed, if G follows up on the intent of his main character, with yet a third volume.
The ship, still on course for the Antipodes, is "taken aback" and dismasted by a sudden shift in the wind. Then it is beached. Another ship pulls alongside and everyone prepares for a fight. Edmund Talbot cracks his head. The other ship turns out to be English. Edmumd falls in love with a pretty young passenger in the other ship and makes a complete fool of himself.
This, like the first, is an odd book. There is little plot and what there is keeps twisting around. Most oddly of all, the book simply stops abruptly. In a post scriptum, Edmund explains that he locked the manuscript in a barrel so that if the ship sank - which everyone fears, the manuscript might be preserved. He could not continue because he ran out of notebook.
It is hard for me to say why I like Golding so much, though clearly, I am not alone.
I believe the first of Golding's books that I read was his first and still most famous novel, Lord of the Flies. There is no entry in these book notes for it because I read it before I started making the notes in 1974. I've read most of his work and liked all of them, even including those like The Spire and Pincher Martin, that had some aspects that were difficult to like.
There was a follow-on to this novel, Fire Down Below, which I have not yet read. It was his last novel, not counting one published posthumously. However I have a copy and may yet read it before I too am done.
| Author | Thackeray, William Makepeace |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 |
| Copyright Date | 1847-8 |
| Number of Pages | viii + 949 |
| Extras | Edited and with introduction by John Sutherland |
| Extras | notes |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | January 1988 |
Pure and ingenuous Amelia Sedley and shy, worldly wise Rebecca Sharp leave finishing school together. Emmy marries George Osborne a dandy who doesn't love anyone but himself. He is killed at Waterloo before she discovers his real nature and she remains true to his memory for 15 years, spurning the advances of William Dobbin, a far better man. Becky schemes her way from place to place, marrying Rawdon Crawley, a dull but engaging rake who is disinherited after marrying her. But she is expert at sponging off others, leading a high life until Rawdon finally discovers her deceit and leaves her.
In the end, Emmy finally recognizes the worth of "Honest Dob" and marries him. Becky sets herself up as a prosperous widow and does alright too.
I read this book over about a ten month period. It is extraordinarily well written and full of clear sight on all of the most important issues of life and death, and of very clear understanding of the vanities of society. T always faces the issues head on. He never relies on plot tricks to keep things going. When Emmy is finally won over it is because Dobbin has finally had enough and leaves her. She is forced to see things as they are.
There is too much to say on the back of an index card. There are a number of entries in my diary about this book.
To my surprise, searching my diary finds very few notes on Vanity Fair. Most of what I found are just statements about what a great book it is and how I will write more about it later. The best entry is probably July 10, 1987.
It was indeed a great book, one of the greatest that I've read. Numerous scenes remain with me: the preface in which the author opens the curtain to reveal the puppets on the stage; the short wedding, seen from afar, culminating so many pages of misguided courtship; the death of George Osborne, a single sentence ending the main character up to then; William Dobbin's heartbreaking rejections by the silly Amelia; Rawdon Crawley, living by cards, pool, and his wife's craftiness. Thackeray didn't just present us with foolish or brave or interesting people, he understood them.
In one of my diary entries I noted an introduction to the volume in which the editor thought that _Vanity Fair_ was arguably the best book in the English language. I wasn't ready to argue for or against that and am not now, but it is right up there with any group one might put at the top.
| Author | Devlin, Gerald M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 410 |
| Extras | photos, notes, index |
| Extras | Introduction by Napier Crookendon |
| Extras | Forward by William Westmoreland |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Aviation |
| When Read | January 1988 |
A history of American glider operations during World War II with some info on British and German operations as well.
D begins with a short but very fine history of gliding and soaring up to the war, with discussions of Lillienthal, the Wrights, the meets at Wasserkupe, bungee launches, Professor Walter Georgii (first to understand thermal lift), and the Austrian Jew, Robert Kronfeld, who made the first thermal, cross country, and squall line flights.
Wartime flying seemed incredibly dangerous. Pilots flew four ton crates at 500 feet up, across enemy lines, often shot down, tow planes shot down, tow ropes parting in cloud and turbulence - often over water or forest, landing often at night, in completely unfamiliar, half seen fields chosen from a height of only 400 feet, crowded with other gliders, sometimes under fire during the landing while carrying gasoline and ammunition.
Unbelievable!
Only a dozen or so operations used gliders during the war. The gliders themselves were generally write-offs after a battle.
A very respectful history with many names and experiences of individuals.
Having piloted sailplanes and even landed in unfamiliar farmer's fields, it would be easy to fool myself into thinking I know something about what this kind of flying was like. But I never flew a four ton crate filled with ten men or a jeep or a field gun that, if I came to a crashing stop could break its bonds and come crashing through the cockpit from the back while tree trunks or fence posts were crashing through from the front. Nor have I ever flown at night, or been dropped off tow with only 400 feet of altitude in which to make an immediate decision about where to land, how, and in which direction - while sinking at 300 feet a minute and having trouble seeing anything on the ground. It's amazing to think that some of these on the night before D-Day in Normandy actually succeeded in landing men exactly where they were supposed to be.
My hat is off to those guys - the men who piloted the gliders and the soldiers who trusted them with their lives.
| Author | Effinger, Alec |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Arbor House, 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 290 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | February 1988 |
A sort of private detective novel set in the sleazy quarter of an Arab city, sometime in the future - which seems mostly changed by having sex change, face change, body change, and mind change operations.
Marid Audran, some kind of streetwise guy for hire whose whole life is drugs, drinking and women (well, they're women now anyway) gets involved in hunting down a pair of murderers. Against his wishes, he is wired for a plug in personality module, a "moddy" and some microchip add-ons called "daddies", which enhance his powers. He eventually kills both killers but is left under the control of a gangster, abandoned by his friends.
One of the nicest things about this book is its little Arabisms, flower speeches, invocations of the name of Allah. Marid is an unbeliever but he uses it all too.
The use of drugs is like alcohol in The Sun Also Rises. At first I thought, come on, stop it, get your head clear for once so we can think about this. Then when it became clear that nothing good would ever come from any of this, I began to lose interest in that. Eventually, when the characters in a book show no development, one ceases to care.
The writing seemed fresh and original, very readable. The concept of plug in personality was also interesting, as were the Arabisms. But it's not my style of book. It doesn't go where I want it to go.
Looking at Amazon I see glowing reviews from famous SF writers, newspapers, and ordinary Amazon readers. A lot of sophisticated readers loved this book. Perhaps I was overly negative in my reaction to it, or perhaps it's one of those books about which perceptive readers disagree. I don't remember enough to form any new impression at this time.
Working at NIH as a consultant, I would often stop at the Wheaton Library on the way home. I would go to the big book sale room on the lower level and, when that closed at 8 pm, I would go up to the library proper to browse until it closed at 9. The first place I went in the library was the new book shelves, which I perused from one end to the other of fiction, non-fiction, and later, audiobooks. I also went through all of the new books at the Randallstown public library. Because of that, these book notes will often show books published within a year of my reading them. Now that happens less often.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Arbor House, 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 345 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 1988 |
Ex-convict Jack Delaney works driving a hearse for his mortician brother-in-law when he is sent out with a woman who used to be a nun to pick up a live woman from a leper hospital. It turns out that the ex-nun is hiding a young Nicaraguan girl from a Contra colonel who wants to kill her because she slept with him when she had leprosy.
The colonel and his two henchmen, Crispin and Franklin de Dios, a Miskito/black driver and killer, are in New Orleans to raise money for the Contras, but really for themselves. Delaney, the nun, and a couple of other accomplices plan to steal the money from them.
Eventually it is Franklin, strange, taciturn, able to kill or face death with equal equanimity, who decides that the colonel isn't worth serving. He kills the colonel and Crispin, takes the money, gives half to the woman to give to the lepers, and leaves.
Leonard's writing is a cut above most work in this genre. Delaney, the main character, is a bit more complex than we expect, the politics are a bit deeper and more progressive than we expect, and there is an unexpected sympathy for Franklin and other subsidiary characters. Character differentiation is very good.
For all that, it is still a thriller, relying on plot as the motive of the story - and it has limited potential.
Still, Leonard is one of the better of his kind.
I think this was only the second of Elmore Leonard's books that I read. He continued to grow on me and became a favorite author. Marcia liked his books too.
If anyone reads these notes who wasn't around in the 1970's or 80's, the "Contras", were right wing Nicaraguan rebels against the left-wing "Sandinista" government that took power after the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. The Reagan administration in the U.S. gave much illegal support to the right-wing rebels, leading in part to the "Iran-Contra Affair" that was a big scandal in the 80's.
| Author | Tolstoy, Leo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Maude, Louise and Aylmer |
| Publication | New York: Modern Library, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1856 |
| Number of Pages | 68 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1988 |
A story of two counts Turbin, father and son. The father is reckless and impetuous, ready to conquer any woman or fight any man. He stops briefly in the town of K and there attends a ball - making a powerful impression on the townsfolk with his excellent, daring and dashing figure. He also rescues a fellow soldier who has lost all the money entrusted to him to a card sharp. The count simply takes it back by force. He leaves the town, never to return.
Twenty years later the count is long dead from a duel when his son returns to the same town. He is also a count and a Hussar Captain, at the head of a squadron on its way to suppress the Hungarian revolt of 1848.
The young Hussar stops in the house of the very woman romanced by his father, and hopes to romance the daughter. But for all his handsome good looks, she sees him for the shallow, empty person he is.
This is an early Tolstoy story but it has much of the perception that characterizes all his work. Even the minor characters are complex and well realized. The mother, the girl, the two hussars, and at least two or three others, are clearly seen through lucid and precise observation. Small incidents are enough to reveal significant aspects of character.
| Author | Pagen, Denis |
|---|---|
| Publication | State College, PA: Denis Pagen, 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 114 |
| Extras | illustrations by the author |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation |
| When Read | February 1988 |
A short textbook of micrometeorology intended primarily for hang glider pilots. There are good, non-technical explanations of some macro-phenomena and a lot about micro-phenomena - especially in the first several hundred to several thousand feet above the ground.
The short explanations of difficult subjects left me very unsure of my understanding - however there are counterbalancing advantages over a book with very long explanations of theory but great distance from the problems of flying.
I'm still veyr far from a scientific understanding of weather or flight. I'll plow on.
I was never a "natural pilot", the kind of guy who puts on his sailplane the way most of us would put on an old pair of shoes, and goes out to fly with the assured confidence that most of us have when going for a walk. It's the pilots who fly every day, or near to it, who develop that naturalness. Young people did it better than old people, and best of all were the guys who learned to fly in their teens and were still flying in their sixties and seventies.
My strength as a pilot was that I read books like this and I tried to use my head while flying. I'd figure out the wind direction and velocity. I couldn't "feel" the thermals the way some guys could, but I could think out where the rising air was, what was setting it off on the ground, which side of the clouds were expanding, and where the "hot" part of the thermals had to be, so that I often outclimbed guys with more experience and better planes than me. But they were the amateurs. The pros, the contest pilots, the cross country veterans, the old military pilots with thousands of hours in the air - I couldn't outfly them.
Was it the same with computer programming? I wrote better code than some pretty good programmers because I tried to think everything out in advance, write an outline of requirements and design, and model the whole program in pseudocode - all before I began programming. But the real old pros, guys like Bob Kline, seemed to me to settle in to a programming session and write out a top quality program before I finished thinking out my design.
| Author | Lecomber, Brian |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation |
| When Read | March 1988 |
A simple flying novel with very simple characters, a constructed, artificial plot, but with excellent technical exposition of flying.
Keith is a flight instructor at a small airport with a great many hours in the air but no career. He's still teaching students and competing in aerobatic contests when others of his age are making solid careers with the airlines.
The story involves a young man who takes his girlfriend up for a flight and is knocked unconscious by a hemorrhage. The girl is left alone, terrified, in a plane on auto pilot. Keith takes off, finds her, and accompanies her, talking her through a successful series of very simple skills to a final crash landing which the couple lives through. Keith himself burns out his engine and crashes.
There's also a minor sub-plot about an old, ugly, fat man who tries to stop Keith from taking off and who dies after being punched in the stomach. In my opinion it's a distraction.
Excellent flying.
I remember more about this book than my write-up would suggest. If I remember correctly, and I admit that the recollection is very dim, the fat man owned the airplane and was Keith's employer. He didn't want his plane used or risked in a problem that meant nothing to him. Keith punched him in the stomach and took off. Keith's death in the crash at the end was the author's way of resolving an otherwise sticky situation in which Keith would likely have been arrested for assault and battery and would have lost the remains of his shambling career.
As I said, the book was not a literary work of art, but the flying really was very good and much appreciated by a journeyman pilot like myself.
Whenever I board an airplane I think about what would happen if both pilots were incapacitated and a stewardess asked on the public address system if there were any pilots among the passengers. Some pleasant, and also some unpleasant, fantasies can start with thoughts like those.
| Author | Langewiesche, Wolfgang |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1944 |
| Number of Pages | 389 |
| Extras | illustrations, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation |
| When Read | April 1988 |
A very simple primer on basic flying skills emphasizing a few fundamental concepts. Very heavy emphasis is put on angle of attack. The elevators control angle of attack. Angle of attack, and nothing else, determines whether we stall or not.
Main sections are Wings, Some Air Sense, Controls, Basic Maneuvers, Getting Down, Dangers of the Air (by Leighton Collins) and Some More Air Sense.
I didn't write much about this, but I seem to recall that my flying improved after reading it. It was a classic text, very easy to understand, that many thousands of pilots read it. I believed at that time that my mind was a better tool than my perception and physical coordination. It seemed to me that, while practice in the air was necessary, it would be far more efficacious if it were guided by deep understanding. And since practice in the air was hard to get and tremendously time consuming (what with travel to and from the gliderport, assembly and disassembly, club duties, and so on), I could really improve my flying by learning more. This was one of a number of books on flying that I read up to this time.
I sometimes still think about buying a sailplane and re-activating my membership in the Mid-Atlantic Soaring Association, but my inclinations are against it. It's a lot of work and, in my case, a certain amount of airsickness and fear to overcome every Spring as I re-establish my confidence in the air after the long winter layover. Flying was good for me, good for my self-confidence, and a good counterbalance to my easy tendency to sit home and read books, write, and fool with my computer. But that's really a subject for my diary, not for a book review.
The Wikipedia article states that L lived until 2002, when he would have been 95 years old. As of that writing, the book was still in print and had sold 200,000 copies up to 1990.
| Author | Sladek, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Timescape Books, 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1988 |
Subtitled "the education of a young robot" and "vol 1 of Roderick the Robot".
The first part of the book, almost 100 pages, is about the genesis of Roderick the robot in a jerkwater university where a young kid in a back room does all the programming, sticking to it in spite of academic politics, insane CIA killers and other obstacles.
"Book 2" is about Roderick himself, a small robot treated alternately as a vending machine, pet, and crippled child in an iron suit.
Roderick is a vehicle for S to examine different aspects of American society and make the kinds of comments that might come from a person without preconceptions who takes things innocently at face value, thus showing their absurdity. There is a little of Candide or the Good Soldier Schweik in it.
Taken bit by bit, paragraph by paragraph, the writing is amazingly successful. There are brilliantly funny parodies of businessmen, professors, school teachers, psychologists, and cops, and children too. Taken as a whole however the work suffers from the lack of a serious character and from a sameness of the cynical attitude directed at all targets. It becomes tiring. I would like to see Sladek attempt a more rounded work. I think he would be good.
A year later I read Roderick at Random vol 2 of Roderick the Robot. That's the last Sladek I've seen.
| Author | Schultz, Duane |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 335 |
| Extras | index, notes, bibliography, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | World War II; Aviation |
| When Read | May 1988 |
A short biography of Claire Lee Chennault with a more extended history of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), the famous "Flying Tigers".
Chennault was a brilliant fighter pilot and tactician who understood fighter tactics long before anyone else did in any country. He formed the first Army Air Force aerobatic display group and personally led it. However he was also hot tempered, chronically insubordinate, unable to handle bureaucracy or people. He left the army in 1937 and accepted an offer to help Chiang Kai-chek, later persuading the U.S. through the powerful China Lobby, to create the AVG.
He trained the AVG pilots in his tactics and, with only 99 fighters and no spares or replacements, put up a brilliant defense of Burma and South China. They destroyed at least 297 Japanese aircraft, losing only 12 planes in air to air combat. They not only excelled at tactics but also at strategy, building an effective early warning net and shifting planes quickly and secretly to make devastating offensive strikes with tiny forces using patched together planes that would not have been allowed to fly in the U.S. air force.
The book is a straight forward sort of history, written in admiration of the men it portrays.
I have read two more books since this one about Flying Tigers pilots, Roar of the Tiger and God is My Co-pilot, and another book by Martin Caidin The Ragged Rugged Warriors that has a lot about them. My impression is that they were all men with something of the adventurer in them, motivated to some extent by a desire to fly and fight in addition to whatever they thought about Japanese aggression or Chinese suffering. They were out to test themselves and prove themselves.
That's a pretty obvious sort of comment requiring no insight or research to make. I have no proof that it applies to every single one of the pilots. However I'll make and stand by it anyway. As a reader of books like these I have to admit that the adventure and bravado are appealing to me. I was never more than a journeyman pilot and I'm the opposite of adventurous, not to speak of itching to prove myself in a fight, but I can get a bit of safe, vicarious thrill by reading the books.
| Author | Barjavel, Rene |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Markmann, Charles Lam |
| Publication | New York: William Morrow Co., 1971 |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 182 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1988 |
A French scientific team discovers a city beneath the ice in Antarctica. They excavate and discover a kind of time capsule containing two people suspended at absolute zero temperature. The woman is revived and presents a story (in televised brainwaves) of a far advanced society that destoyed itself in a war so destructive that it tilted the earth and moved a temperate continent to the South Pole.
The woman was in love with her husband but had been kidnapped by a scientist for inclusion with him in the capsule. It is only after she kills him and herself that the scientists realize it is her husband and not the scientist whom she killed.
This was touted as the number one best seller in France (originally titled as La Nuit des Temps), but it's hard to see why.
The story is intended as an anti-war polemic and as a support for student revolt that reached a peak the year the novel was originally published in France.
Although written by an older man, the writing is sometimes adolescent. In one sex scene a man's penis is describes as "the sword of his desire." The politics are simple - progressive but not deep. The U.S., Soviet Union, and other developed states are arrayed against the third world. Unconvincing and of very limited interest.
| Author | Howard, Fred |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 530 |
| Extras | photos, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Aviation |
| When Read | June 1988 |
A very readable and sympathetic biography concentrating on the years from 1896, the beginning of the work that led up to the first flight, through Wilbur's death in 1912.
It is an inspiring story about two extraordinarily competent men. Everything they did was rational, efficient, competent. Everything was tested in advance, researched, and proven first in very simple but always well conceived experiments. They made everything themselves, instruments, airframes, engines, launching rails, wind tunnels - everything. Where Langley had spent $79,000 on a machine that crashed in the Potomac, the Wrights spent only $1,000 to develop their machine that flew at Kill Devil Hill.
Howard does not discuss the intense technical detail that occupied the brothers for many years, years of experiment, calculation, technical drawing, refinement. It would be too boring, even for technically minded readers. So we are left with impressions of lives that are perhaps less glamorous, more filled with perspiration rather than inspiration, than they appear in the book.
It was very exciting to read about the invention of flying, but comparatively dull, and ultimately depressing, to read about the patent wars, battles for credit, business strategies, and other mundane concerns that occupied the brothers after 1903.
See diary entries in May/June.
There are no diary entries about this book in May. The ones in June are June 11 and 24. However there is more in the diary entries than here in these book notes.
I was flying sailplanes in 1988 and also working on notes for a project of my own on artificial intelligence, a project that, like most of my projects, petered out later with nothing to show. Both of those activities affected my interest in this book about the Wright Brothers, though most of the discussion of flying was in May.
Six books about flying in the first six months of the year.
| Author | Petievich, Gerald |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Arbor House, 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 271 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 1988 |
This is an unusual police story about two treasury agents whose job is to catch counterfeiters. One is a solid man who tries to do what he's supposed to do. The other, named "Chance", is an adrenalin powered risk taker who constantly pushes past the limits in everything, dragging his partner into one violation after another until finally leading him into a robbery of what they thought was a criminal in order to finance a sting operation which, it turns out, never required the money. The "criminal" they rob is, in fact, an FBI agent working on another case and the FBI closes in on them. Chance, in spite of all claims about sticking by his partner, attempts to sell his loyal partner down the river - but is killed first in a gunfight with his crooked girlfriend/informer/patsy.
In the end it is an older agent, just a few months from retirement and apparently burned out and lazy, who gets his act together using intelligence and professional procedure to catch the crook.
Although all of the characters are simple, there is an authenticity about them, a rawness that is impressive and that holds our attention. It is not deep perception, but accurate even if limited perception of characters whom we do not meet in ordinary life.
"Loose cannon" type characters repel me in real life and I want nothing to do with them. But I find them interesting in literature. Or maybe that's the wrong way to put it. I want my favorite characters, the ones that I care about, to run away from them just as I would want to. But it is more tolerable to read about such people than to live among them.
I have recently finished Sergei Dovlatov's The Suitcase which has such a character in the person of Churilin, Dovlatov's fellow prison camp guard who gets drunk, points a gun at him, hits and badly injures him with a brass belt buckle, and later apologizes and importunes him to help him with his trial - which Dovlatov tries to do! Chance is the wild and dangerous side and Churilin the pathetic and dangerous side of loose cannon type characters. Petievich and Dovlatov each described their men well.
| Author | Benford, Gregory |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 344 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 1988 |
A very hard science SF story set in the years 2056-2065. An interstellar space ship has been sent to a star from which snatches of an old Arthur Godfrey radio transmission have been received. The ship is a converted asteroid with a crew of some 1,500 people and a complete eco-system. They arrive and find an intelligent race living in terrible conditions, watched by a robot "watcher" satellite which just sits above but responds to intrusion by killing a party of earthmen who came aboard.
It turns out that an ancient civilization of machines exists and watches all planets where life can emerge, destroying it, or at least destroying its capacity for interstellar flight. On earth too they have set a chain of circumstances in motion that leads to earth's destruction - largely because the countries of earth respond to the stress of an alien invasion of machine altered human eating sea creatures by launching nuclear war against each other.
B is very intelligent and capable as a writer. His science is thorough and informative. His description of the social life of scientists and their interactions on the communications net is caricatured, but interesting. His main character, aging scientist Nigel Walmsley, is fascinating as a person, even more than as the hero of a story, in which he plays an unheroic role.
There are many negatives in the book. The earth scenes with "skimmers" and "swarmers" are ugly and unconvincing. But it is clearly the work of an unusual and interesting mind.
I remember very well, if not the specific content of this book, then the mood of depression it instilled in me, the reader. I commented about Benford's propensity for depressing, dystopian, pessimistic stories in my notes on Great Sky River. It's very easy to imagine a universe with hostile beings, or beings who decide that we are just vermin, who will discover our transmissions in the radio spectrum and come to sanitize our planet. We ourselves are very far from being able to do such a thing to others, not because we wouldn't, but because we don't have the means and won't, as far as I can tell, in anything like Benford's 21st century time frame.
Perhaps the only things that protect us are the vastness of the universe, the limits of the speed of light, the poor and weak threat that we pose to other stars, and the great difficulty that anyone in our galaxy, never mind other galaxies, would have getting to us. Or maybe not? But since I have no information about the threat and no way to get any information about it, I'll just try to put it out of my mind and think instead about earthly matters.
| Author | Collenette, Eric J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Walker and Co., 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 189 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | July 1988 |
In this one, Ben Grant's submarine is sent north of Russia to find an ice bound freighter supposedly carrying medical supplies but in fact carrying canisters of poison gas which have leaked and driven most of the crew insane. The sub captain is himself very flaky after losing his father in the war. He learns about the gas and wants to kill all Germans with it. A psychic faker has also been brought on board and is influencing the captain. A Russian gunboat follows the sub and is also involved. In the end, the ship sinks in the frozen sea and the sub escapes under the ice.
This book may be slightly better written than the first, though the plot is even more contrived. But we don't read these for good writing. All I demand is technical authenticity, some genuine respect for the characters, a reasonably honest facing of facts, and an ability to write sentences that don't completely collapse. Collenette, like other veterans, makes a fair attempt at achieving these.
There is some part of me that wants to read submarine, flying, and other similar war stories. Unfortunately, as with many other genres, we have to make do with what we can get.
I think I could still make the same statements today that I made in the comments written almost 28 years ago. Today however, with the Internet, I have much more available to me than was the case then. I hope that my grandchildren's generation will have much more still.
| Author | Feininger, Andreas |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 231 |
| Extras | Forward by James L. Enyeart. Photos. |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Photography |
| When Read | September 1988 |
A restrospective collection of Feininger photographs, well printed in large format, with descriptions by Feininger of his life at each period of work.
F strikes me as a man of considerable ego and little patience either for mediocrity or for magazine editors who put short term advertising and cost cutting goals ahead of the long term investment in excellence which he believed could have preserved Life and the other great picture magazines. But he was a very, very talented photographer and his pronouncements must be taken seriously for that reason.
The work is very beautiful. It is a mixture of a small measure of photojournalism with a large measure of pictorialism. I was impressed, for example, with his study of trees. Each is very different yet all are powerful images. I would like to find a copy some day of his Man and Stone.
I am interested in photography. I once most liked photo-journalism but have grown away from it because of its intrusive, aggressive aspects, its requirement for involvement with people. Feininger's is the type of photography I could most easily aspire to.
I could view some of the photos on the web at various websites that sell them, showing them in small size and with watermarks to make them undisplayable. I still think he was a great photographer.
As for aspiring to what he did, I haven't seriously tried to make a good photo in years. It takes a lot of thinking about photography and a lot of serious looking around to make good photos. I used to have some patience for that but not lately.
The comment about photo-journalism vs. pictorialism is one I still think about when I have a camera in my hand. Like most traveling tourists, I take photos of places, often with no people in them at all. I feel the same embarrassment of pointing a camera at another human being and snapping his or her photo that most of us feel when intruding on someone's person and privacy. But when I do that I'm often giving up the most interesting part of any scene - which is the human beings in it.
When I was working as photo editor of the Pitt News, student newspaper of the University of Pittsburgh, I got used to pointing cameras at people and felt little or no embarrassment in doing it. Now, when I realize that I am missing the photos of people, I'm more likely to take photos surreptitiously. I may hold the camera at waist level and pretend that I'm not shooting pictures of people - though as often as not I'll see someone in the resulting photo looking right at my camera with a suspicious expression. If I really want photos of people to work I have to conquer my shyness and embarrassment at violating people's privacy.
| Author | Watkins, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 294 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Battle of the Bulge |
| When Read | October 1988 |
A very impressive novel about a young man, Sebastian Westland, who joins the Waffen SS in 1944, goes through training, and has what remains of his soul chewed up and trampled on in the Battle of the Bulge.
Most of the story deals with training camp, friendships formed with the other 17 year olds, and love affairs with a married woman and a young girl. At the end, he goes into combat. The combat scenes are fierce, gory, and revolting. He discovers in combat that the two non-coms who trained and led his unit have been shooting their own soldiers, including his last living friend, when they find them wounded. He kills one of them and leaves the other to die when he finds him wounded and needing help.
There is a bitter edge to the writing which gets worse as the story develops. There are no overt politics. There is not even a discussion of why the boys joined the SS. All that is taken for granted, as perhaps it was in the real war.
This is an imposing piece of writing. There are passages such as the one containing "Ramke is acquainted with grief", which stand reading and re-reading. I am most impressed and hope for much from this very young writer.
According to the Wikipedia as of today, Watkins has published 17 books, including two non-fiction and six novels written under the pseudonym Sam Eastland. I never read any except for this one. I will try to remember to keep my eyes open for them.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 179 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | October 1988 |
Fifteen delightful short stories, all told by and to the scientists, writers and friends who assemble each Wednesday night at the White Hart pub to drink beer, throw darts, and outdo each other in telling fabulous stories - usually of scientists run amok.
Most of the stories are related by Harry Purvis, a man of considerable scientific knowledge but uncertain background. He tantalizes his listeners with an improbable tidbit and then, when they have given him a beer, relates some story about a scientist he knew, or a screwy invention, or whatever.
Stories include "Silence Please" about a negative sound generator that cancels sound but exploded after absorbing all the energy of an opera; "Big Game Hunt" about manipulation of a giant squid; "Patent Pending" about a machine that records and plays back inner experience; "Armaments Race" about better and better ray guns for the movies, one of which works too well ... and so on.
Clarke's stories are not deep and his characters are little differentiated. But he has mastered a certain kind of pleasant charm and humor together with his always informative expositions of science and his always decent and rational people. His writing is always reliably good and reliably Clarke.
I remember reading a story many years ago without remembering the author's name or the book that it came from, but I'm thinking it was Arthur C. Clarke and this book. In the story, someone invents a method where by a person may go into a kind of stasis in which he is frozen in time, losing all motion and consciousness, but does not age at all during that time. The technique allows a person to set a kind of wake up call so that he snaps out of the trance at a pre-set time. Using the technique, people can pass time, for example on trains or in doctor's waiting rooms, without losing time, i.e., without growing any older.
Uproar ensues when heads of corporations and university lecturers realize that much of their audience that they have required to come to their meetings are actually in a trance.
Sounds like this book, doesn't it?
| Author | Marsh, Ngaio |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 252 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 1988 |
A witty mystery story with Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard. He and his wife Troy, a painter, are invited to New Zealand by Montague Reece, friend and patron of Isabelle Somita, a famous soprano. While he is there, "La Somita" is murdered and he, cut off from all police help by a tremendous storm, must solve the mystery and find the killer.
Although set in New Zealand this is a classic English country house mystery with a full cast of suspicious servants and guests, wealthy arrogant power brokers, prima donnas, ingenues, foreigners, and so on.
The plots of these things are never very satisfying. we know there is a killer. We know he'll be found. The story ends in just one or two pages after the revelation. The revelation itself comes in the form of a confrontation with all of the suspects in one room. So be it.
What makes this acceptable is the wit and charm with which it's written. Although the characters are simple and stereotypic, and although no demands are made on them or us, they do manage to say clever things.
Not a good book. Not a work of literature. But a readable, enjoyable book.
Today I'd probably leave that first sentence out of the last paragraph of my comment. A readable, enjoyable book is good by at least those criteria, even if it's not a work of high literature.
| Author | Hardesty, Von |
|---|---|
| Publication | Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Extras | photos, index, notes, maps, tables, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Aviation |
| When Read | November 1988 |
A history of the Soviet Air Force in World War II, with a brief background on pre-war development.
The air force (VVS) was badly defeated in the first few days of the war. Its equipment and tactics were obsolete, the pilots were undertrained, and everyone was badly demoralized, not only by the blitzkrieg, but also by the Stalinist purges of the leadership. But contrary to both Western and German histories, the VVS did revive and become a very effective force. By 1943 they were regularly beating the Germans in the air - largely by superior numbers but also with continually improving technology, tactics and flying ability.
They were entirely organized for tactical aviation. They never attempted long range bombing and never seriously attempted to destroy the Luftwaffe with deep penetration attacks on airfields and sustained fighter sweeps - as the Americans did. But what they did well - close air support right at the front, air blockades of enemy pockets, night harassment, partisan support - they did very well. And even in pure fighter combat, their weakest skill, they became formidable and effective, producing many aces.
A highly documented and balanced history, but with no personal accounts, which would have livened it up a lot.
| Author | Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Bouis, Antonina W. |
| Publication | New York: Richardson and Steirman, 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 213 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | November 1988 |
Two men working for the Department of Unexplained Events have come up with evidence that some alien beings, the Time Wanderers, are interfering in the course of human civilization, selecting individuals for some unknown purpose. They investigate various odd events and, by a series of deductions and laborious studies, identify a number of people who have been selected. None of those people will talk to them and they disappear when the two (Maxim Kammerer and Toivo Glumov) try to make contact. Maxim Kammerer is the character from Prisoners of Power (q.v.), now 89 years old instead of 20.
When contact is finally made, it transpires that there are no aliens. What has happened is that a new race is developing from humans. These new people, people with qualities only found in one in 100,000, are modifying themselves to become a race of superbeings who are far more advanced and no longer have any real point of contact with, or interest in, humans. Glumov has the ability to make the transformation but doesn't want to. He wants to be a human. Kammerer urges him to do it and report back, but Glumov resists. Finally, some time later, Glumov asks for a meeting with Kammerer but never shows up. Perhaps he has made the transformation and lost interest in humanity.
The book is at times subtle and at times incoherent. The Strugatsky's take it for granted that humans could never understand a higher race. They make no effort to offer us any understanding and so we can't do anything with the claim. Olaf Stapledon made some higher attempts at this theme. So did Clarke in Childhood's End.
The question of whether there is knowledge that is too esoteric for any humans to ever understand is an interesting one that has engaged some philosophers, though I wouldn't know where to look for opinions about it. My own view, formed decades ago, has been that knowledge is not the kind of thing that can ever be too esoteric to understand. There can be knowledge that is too complex to hold in mind at one time, for example the circuit design of a modern microprocessor, the activity of all of the genes in a cell, or the weather patterns of the entire earth at one instant. But I don't think that kind of difficulty qualifies as lack of understanding - even though there may be intelligent beings in the universe, or in our future, for whom such tasks will be manageable. But this is all off topic for this book except to say that the comment I made in 1988 still seems appropriate to me today.
There are two books I was probably thinking about by Stapledon, The Last and First Men and Odd John. Stapledon was not a great writer from the point of view of literary achievement, but he was an outstanding one from the point of view of scientific imagination. The Strugatsky's were no slouches at that either but, when I wrote my comments, I must have thought they had fallen a little short in this book. I don't remember enough about it to refine that opinion.
| Author | Higgins, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 316 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Spy; Thriller |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 1988 |
A World War II spy thriller.
An American army engineer with detailed knowledge of the forthcoming Normandy invasion survives a ship torpedoing and lands on a Channel island held by the Germans. Word reaches London via the underground and two spies are sent to get him out or kill him. One, Harry Martinson is a fluent German speaking ex-Professor of Philosophy disguised as Standartenfuhrer Max Vogel, Colonel in the SS, with a letter of introduction from Hitler himself. The other is a young nurse, born on the island, posing as his French mistress.
Elsewhere, a Jewish cabaret actor, hiding in the army, is chosen by Rommel to portray him in an inspection visit to the island.
They all converge on the island at once. There is various action. They discover each other. Then pseudo Rommel orders a plane and they fly out in a rush with the enemy on their tails. When they land, the Jew is shot by the British, ostensibly in error, but probably to "clear up loose ends."
This is standard fare, acceptably written, acceptably characterized, acceptably plotted, but offering no surprises, no truths, nothing to raise it above the ordinary.
Perhaps there was one truth. The Jew was expendable.
I seemed to recall seeing this book as a movie. Checking on the Internet, it appears that it was indeed made into a movie in 1990.
| Author | Feynman, Richard |
|---|---|
| Author | Leighton, Ralph |
| Publication | New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 255 |
| Extras | photos, index, drawings |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | December 1988 |
"as told to Ralph Leighton"
A collection of stories told by F, several letters from him to his wife Gwenyth, a couple of short pieces about him, a report on his work on the Rogers Commission investigating the space shuttle, and an essay/speech "The Value of Science".
Besides being a brilliant Nobel Prize winning physicist, F was a fascinating human being - a man who lived life fully and intensely. This book is primarily about his approach to life rather than to physics.
F had an uncompromisingly scientific world view. He applied it to all aspects of life. He clearly believed that hard study and systematic thinking could get right answers. But he also believed in the value of doubt and skepticism, the need for an always open mind. It must have been both of those qualities which helped him to his brilliant career.
He writes of his first love and marriage to a terminally ill young woman, of his first interest in science, of his observations in Poland, Greece, Belgium and Japan, adventures at conferences, and so on.
See my diary for more.
It now seems odd to me to have written that "Besides being a brilliant Nobel Prize winning physicist, F was a fascinating human being." Were any of the Nobel Prize winners less than fascinating? Some were undoubtedly more or less flamboyant or extroverted than others. Some were more or less locked into a single interest in life than others. So maybe some were not so fascinating. But F was one of the ones who stood out for his flamboyance and extroversion, his ability to project his personality. He was an interesting man.
It is my loss that I am too poorly educated to understand F's theories of physics. He saw very deeply into the nature of the universe and those of us who were equipped to understand his thinking learned a great deal. But that's the way it is. At my stage of life now, and maybe even back when I read this, there isn't/wasn't the aptitude, time, or I must admit it, the inclination, to learn all that F discovered.
I think this book was a follow-on to Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, a book I happened to read after this one.
Last year I read Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss (q.v.), himself a leading physicist. It gave me a much more serious and, ultimately, more interesting view of Feynman than these popular stories did.