Books read January through December 1990
| Author | Moorcock, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 373 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | January 1990 |
These are fictional memoirs of Colonel Pyat, a Russian born in 1900 who lives through the revolution and Civil War. An anti-semite who is constantly taken for a Jew and, in fact, may be one, though he believes himself to be the son of a Cossack, "The great Cossack hawk's beak is frequently mistaken in the West for the carrion bill of the vulture."
Pyat grows up in Kiev, then is sent to live with relatives in Odessa, where he learns about sex and cocaine. He is sent to Petersburg for schooling in 1916 and 17, then is involved as a technical expert in various White and Red armies. In the end he is on a ship heading from Odessa to the Mediterranean. Moorcock has written at least one more book picking up on his adventures from there.
The attraction of this book is very much in the fascinating contradictions of its main character. Pyat is anti-semite and Jew, honest and a liar, analytical and self-deceptive, arrogant and willing to see good in others. It is a striking and compelling creation.
I found myself wishing the best for Pyat at the same time as I wanted nothing to do with him.
Moorcock is one of those hyper prolific writers who probably produced this in a front to back ramble through his imagination and sometimes inaccurate historical knowledge of the Russian Revolution.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 214 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 1990 |
Matt Shore, a pilot for a third rate air taxi firm, is engaged to fly some horse people to a race in England. After landing for repairs the plane is blown up by a bomb. Matt, who has a checkered past, is accused of the crime but there is no more evidence against him than any of the others and he continues to fly. Gradually he becomes involved with jockey Colin Ross and falls in love with Colin's sister Nancy. In the end, he exposes an insurance fraud scheme, catches the crook, wins the girl, and is set up in his own air taxi business by a grateful millionaire whose life he saved.
This is a typical Francis novel. Self-reliant but lonely man is drawn into danger and fights back using his wits and his technical skill - in this case flying, in other books horses, accounting, even wine. In the end he wins by courage, intelligence and perseverance. He gets the girl and set up as an independent proprietor of a small business - if he isn't one already.
As with the others, the writing is equal to the task, the technical detail is interesting, the plot is engaging. Always a pleasant read.
| Author | Brown, Captain Eric M. RN |
|---|---|
| Publication | Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 222 |
| Extras | Photos, maps, tables, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | March 1990 |
The world's greatest test pilot - or anyway, England's, compares all of the naval combat aircraft of World War II, almost all of which he has personally flown and tested.
This is a simple, straightforward, low-level technical book - low in the sense that any layman can understand it. It reviews all of the naval campaigns at a superficial level and discusses each plane. The principal feature of the book is the author's comparisons of aircraft types from the point of view of combat against other planes. He tells us, for example, that the early FW-190 was better than the early Spitfire, though the last marks of each were well matched. He liked the Hellcat as the best carrier born fighter, with the Corsair its equal in the sky but lousy in deck landings. He even pits the Mustang against the Spitfire (slight edge to the Spit) and evaluates other theoretical combats.
Good photos and some technical data - but not well organized. The book is essentially conversational and anecdotal.
I called the technical detail "low-level", but then said that meant what is probably more properly called "high-level".
Any reader of World War II aviation books, or any books about military aircraft, always wonders about theoretical matchups. What was the best fighter? What about the Russian fighters? Could the naval fighters have held their own against land based planes in combat? What about the late ground attack fighters like the Tempest and Typhoon? Brown gave more answers to these questions than one ordinarily gets, and his experience gives him some credibility that most writers don't have.
Brown's top picks of the cream of the fighters were the Spitfire, the Mustang, and the FW-190. He like the Spitfire best, but acknowledged that his own affiliation with the Royal Air Force may have biased his choice.
During World War II, Brown flew combat missions and shot down German aircraft, worked as an instructor, and was a test pilot, pioneering new planes and new techniques, for example the first landing of a twin engined aircraft (a Mosquito) on an aircraft carrier.
I just read in the Wikipedia that Brown died only seven days ago, on February 21, 2016, at age 97. With all the rough days and horrific accidents and crashes he went through, he probably never expected to live so long. He must have been one hell of a man.
| Author | Niven, Larry |
|---|---|
| Author | Pournelle, Jerry |
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 475 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | April 1990 |
A celebrated hard science / soft literature SF story of first contact with an alien civilization. One thousand years from now humans have expanded across the galaxy using an instantaneous matter transfer that moves ships between "Alderson points" in space. Rod Blaine, a 23 year old hero, aristocrat, warship captain in the Imperial navy is sent to the "Mote in God's Eye", a small solar system set near a red supergiant where a race of beings called "Moties" have evolved through hundreds of cycles of overbreeding, war, collapse, and rise. They are differentiated into separate species for leadership, fighting, engineering, mediation between enemies, and with subspecies for "watchmaking" - i.e., small scale engineering tasks, farming, and others.
There are various adventures and experiences leading to a discovery by the humans of the dangerous tendency of the Moties to overbreed, and a decision to blockade the system and kill all Moties who leave it.
The book has been well received, probably because of its scientific interest and its professional polish. But it is clearly a pot boiler with formula characters designed to appeal to the 15 year old reader.
I must also admit that it's hard to take seriously a book about lords and ladies in a galactic empire. Have we gotten nowhere since the Magna Carta, or 1776?
I like to record memories that I have retained for these many (now 26) years. I recall that in the story the Moties seemed relatively weak and harmless but they were concealing their warrior species, intending for the warriors to burst out by surprise and kill the humans. The warriors were described as bigger, faster, stronger, and tougher than the other Moties. After discovering them, the human warship sits in space just outside the Alderson point, or somewhere that the Moties must go to in order to escape their system, and aim their weapons at the spot where the Moties must appear. Then, as each Motie ship shows up, the humans blast it to smithereens, leaving no survivors to tell the others back on the Mote what happened so the next group of would be invaders has no more chance than the last one. It was a kind of shooting arcade, fun for the shooters.
As I said in 1990, this was "a pot boiler with formula characters designed to appeal to the 15 year old reader", not high class science fiction.
| Author | Hough, Richard |
|---|---|
| Author | Richards, Denis |
| Publication | New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1989 |
| Number of Pages | xvii, 413 |
| Extras | index, maps, photos, chronology, notes, appendices |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 1990 |
A well documented and seemingly objective history of the great air battle of 1940. It is told mainly from the British point of view but includes some information from German sources and describes the development of the Luftwaffe as well as the RAF throughout the thirties.
The authors discuss the famous personalities and controversies of the day - Leigh Mallory's "big wing", Goering's decision to fly the fighters with the bombers, Churchill's refusal to allow the RAF to be destroyed in France.
Unlike may other writers however, the authors emphasize the role played by ordinary people - mechanics, factory workers, radio operators, coast watchers, and so on. They are animated by a genuine revulsion against Nazism.
At the end of the book there are snatches of interviews with a couple of dozen participants from the British side.
A fine book.
I never get enough of books like this. I'll write more about that in my diary.
| Author | Parkinson, Cyril Northcote |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 191 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | April 1990 |
A story, apparently based on a character created by P.G. Wodehouse, about a professional valet.
Jeeves is an extremely intelligent, self controlled, capable man who, very early in his career, discovered that he wished to be a reserved but highly competent man in a small, limited, and incompetent environment. As a valet to unintelligent men who must, to meet Jeeves' standards, be well dressed and gentlemanly, Jeeves could control certain aspects of their and his life.
The book is a satire on the British upper class. P wishes to show the essential extraneousness of a whole class of people - people who are served by fellows who are more competent than the masters, but the servants too are essentially absurd and extraneous.
It is an amusing story, more a running commentary on upper class foibles than a plot, but quite well done.
I thought I had read some of Parkinson's naval stories in the mid-1970's when I was working at Enoch Pratt Free Library in downtown Baltimore. However I don't see them under his name in my book cards.
I did read one of them in 2014, The Guernseyman. It was okay.
| Author | Olivier, Stefan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Rock, Sigrid; Roloff, Michael |
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1963 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | May 1990 |
The German title is Jedem das Sein.
Oberleutnant Herbert Boysen of the German army is a decorated veteran of many campaigns who is sent to Athens on a rest and recovery assignment. By accident, he discovers a black market and prostitution center which he insists on reporting to headquarters. He does not suspect that his local army commander, Gestapo chief, and other officers are behind the whole operation.
The Gestapo frames him and, with no court martial, he is packed off to a concentration camp where he lives for two years at the mercy of atrocious sadists who kill and torture fine human beings just for fun. Always he is sustained by a dream of revenge against the five officers that sent him to the camp.
After two years he is allowed to volunteer into the Army again where he is quickly captured and spends five more years in a Russian slave labor camp. Finally he returns to Germany. Taking money saved by his father, he buys a construction business and becomes a hard working and wealthy man. Then he hunts down the men and, one by one, takes his revenge. He doesn't kill them. He merely destroys their lives.
His wife rebels at his merciless revenge and his cold blooded attitude. He has never been a man. In the end he realizes that, while his dream of revenge kept him alive in adversity it is destroying him now. He repents and travels to Berlin for a trial to save the life of one of the few decent guards at the camp.
A fine, serious, political book by a man I never heard of.
I have not found any information about Stefan Olivier. As of this writing, there's no entry for him in the Wikipedia. Amazon is offering used books by various sellers but has no information about the author. A Google search was unproductive, at least for the first 30 or so hits.
That's unfortunate. I think he was a good writer. I added a short, positive review of the book to one of the offerings by a non-Amazon seller, but it's unlikely to ever be found or read by anyone.
| Author | Hammett, Dashiell |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1933 |
| Number of Pages | 76 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 1990 |
More a short story than a novel. A woman, running in the night, arrives at the house of a tough, mysterious man named Brazil. He shelters her when a wealthy, brutal man and his hired thug appear to pick her up. Later they return. There is a fight. Brazil disarms them and knocks out the thug, who may be seriously, even fatally, injured. Brazil and the woman, Louise Fischer, run to a friend of Brazil's house - a man who knew him in prison.
The wealthy bastard tells lies to the police. They chase and wound Brazil. They arrest Louise. But in the end, in fact on the very last page, everything comes out right.
Hammet produces archetypes of anti-heroes. They are rough and tough with dark and violent pasts. They know their way around the streets. They are strong and silent.
If such people exist they must be wonderful in the shadow of a lamppost, but it is impossible to imagine such a person living with a wife and children and commuting to work as a programmer.
Ah well, there's life and there's real life.
| Author | Thackeray, William Makepeace |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Dent: Everyman's Library, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1857 |
| Number of Pages | 402 |
| Extras | Introduction by M.R. Ridley |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | May 1990 |
See the entry for the full two volume set in December 1990.
See December 1990.
| Author | Benford, Gregory |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 326 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1990 |
An SF story of a far, far distant future on a planet near the center of the galaxy on which a small band of humans lives as hunted outcasts on a world taken over by a machine civilization. These humans are very different from us in that they have been extensively modified for sensory extensions, wear powerful robotic suits, and carry "aspects", personalities of dead people stored on microchips and embedded in the brain. But they are still impotent in the face of the mechs, who don't ever bother to organize a real hunt for them.
The story is told from the viewpoint of Killeen, a member of the group. They are being herded and controlled, without realizing it, by a mech "Mantis", a supremely intelligent mech who is studying them in a way an artist studies, but each creature, mech and human is so completely alien to the other that there seems to be no possibility of true understanding on either side.
The book is a long drawn out slide into destruction with no hope possible. I read it in spite of its deeply depressing and disturbing story because I was fascinated by B's extraordinary scientific vision. His notions of "aspects" and "sensoria" and mech civilization are so full of possibilities that they fascinate to the end.
In the end, B pulls a deus ex machina with a buried spaceship and an electro-magnetic being of huge power and human origin to save them. I suppose his editor talked him into it since the box that B had placed himself in was so suffocating that he must have feared mass suicide among the readers. Not good for sales.
In the beginning and middle of the story the reader feels some hope. At one point, the group even comes across another band of humans who are on the run from the mechs. But when the true power of the mechs is revealed it seems hopeless and pointless to go on. Only the virtually divine intervention in the end rescues the humans.
Benford has written other books like this. He's a man with a great imagination but also a depressingly dystopian view of the future of humanity. Is he right?
| Author | Michener, James A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1953 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 147 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Korean War |
| When Read | June 1990 |
A simple war story of an admiral, a jet pilot, and a pair of helicopter rescue men. The pilot has basically lost his nerve but summons up his courage anyway for an attack on the bridges at Toko-Ri in North Korea, where he is hit and has to crash land in North Korea. The helicopter men come to save him but the situation is hopeless and they are all killed together.
Michener wanted the people back home, who were absorbed in the frenzy of American materialism which began in earnest after World War II, to appreciate the heroic sacrifices of the men who were fighting in Korea.
No justification is made for the war. M regards that as self-evident.
The story seems very simple and stark. There is little feeling for the interiors of the characters. It's more like a parable.
I read books like this in large measure because they are about flying and about gritty, stimulating adventure. But it is also of interest in the light of the demise of communism. The simple minded anti-communist views of the McCarthy period will no doubt come back and haunt us again.
A movie was made of this story in 1954 with William Holden, Mickey Rooney, Grace Kelley, and other stars. I know I saw it, I think with my father, probably around when it came out. I've probably seen it since then again on TV. I remember a number of scenes from that film quite vividly and it is those images that I remember today. The helicopter descends to Holden but one of the men is killed immediately. Mickey Rooney jumps down into the shell ravine where Holden is and he and Holden fire at the North Koreans, but they are quickly overwhelmed and killed.
The film also made an impact on Ronald Reagan. He quoted from it during his presidency, not realizing that the line he quoted came, not from a true story, but from the film.
I don't know if Michener ever went to Korea. I see nothing about it in the Wikipedia biography of him.
| Author | Feynman, Richard P. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 350 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | June 1990 |
As told to Ralph Leighton, edited by Edward Hutchings.
The Nobel prize winning physicist recounts his adventures as a scientist, a public figure, and a surprisingly ingenuous human being searching for women, for happiness, for new experiences. He taught in Brazil, playing in a slum Carnaval Samba band at night. He learned to break combination locks by laborious practice on exhaustive statistical combinations. He ferried ants from a sugar trail, learning their method of bringing home reports of food. He bought drinks for bar girls and got in a fight in a men's room. He learned to seduce a bar girl by insulting her. He studied Japanese. He read all the high school math books being considered by the state of California, finding errors, half truths, and misunderstanding in all of them - and finding a text book selection procedure that was at best incompetent. He played the drums for a ballet in San Francisco and Paris. He told off the physics establishment in Brazil which only imagined itself to be teaching science. He underwent hypnosis. He spent many sessions in a sensory deprivation tank, searching for hallucinations and in a hot tub searching for sex. He helped build the atom bomb. He danced with deaf people at a deaf people's party. He discovered an unknown law of nature and sent particle physics off in a new direction.
F said that thinking was "a big kick". He was a man capable of becoming intoxicated with the exercise of his brain. But he was, in spite of his extraordinary exuberance, a man of uncompromising rationality.
I'm very glad this book was written.
When I studied philosophy I learned, as a side benefit, that not all the people who love to study philosophy are much like me. Feynman has impressed me with his unique personality. I don't know that many scientists are like him, even the ones who are equally brilliant.
Reading Lawrence Krauss' scientific biography of Feynman I began to have doubts about F's account of his own life. For example, F says some quite surprising things about his efforts to pick up women, saying that women paid no attention to him in bars until he began insulting them. Krauss however says that F was very attractive to women but, although he seemed pretty wild, when he met the woman who would become his second wife, he settled down completely into a monogamous relationshiop - or at least that's the impression I got from Krauss. Whether Krauss knew what he was talking about or not is a separate question.
F was quite self-deprecating in this and his other non-science autobiographical book. He denigrated his musical ability, perhaps appropriately. More importantly however, he wrote as if his mathematical skills were somewhat limited, whereas Krauss called him one of the best and quickest mathematicians who ever lived. From these different books, and from the couple of interviews I've heard of Feynman, my impression is that he was self-deprecating unless challenged. When challenged, all false modesty fell away and he blasted any critic with complete self-assurance.
I have met many excellent computer programmers who take it for granted that their opinions are the correct ones. When you argue with them, they begin with the assumption that they're right and you're wrong. In some cases, after some experience with them, I adopted the same assumption - they're right and I'm wrong - though I would always press my case since I never wanted to take anything having to do with computer programming on the basis of authority. If I had to work on a design, I had to understand why it was right and not just accept it on the say so of a good programmer.
I think Feynman was used to being right and assumed in any interaction that he was right and the other guy was wrong. But my impression was that he did so without any personal animosity or sense that he needed to assert himself over others. I think he was always after the truth.
| Author | Muir, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 188 |
| Extras | Forward by Frederick Turner, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography; Natural history |
| When Read | June 1990 |
First published around the turn of the century from notes made during Muir's first visit to the Sierra mountains around Yosemite in 1869. M went into the mountains with a shepherd and 2,000 sheep. He had few responsibilities, being more of a subsidized scholar than a hired employee. He spent his days observing nature, sketching, and making notes in his diary. This was long before his founding of the Sierra Club or struggle for the first parks.
I know hardly anything of this type of writing. Walden is the closest thing to it that I have read. M is an observer and appreciator of the beauty of nature. Like a museum curator who teaches us to see the technique, the history, the feeling of his paintings, M teaches us to see a light heart in a grasshopper and a sturdy strength in a juniper tree.
When I go outside, I am merely outside. But through M's book I see and feel and am at one with nature in a way that, with my basement computer job and my myopic inner life, I could never achieve on my own.
Although there is no story and hardly any character in the book it does come to a sort of climax. At the end of the summer, with fall storms coming, M makes his deepest penetrations into the remotest parts of the mountains, seeing the wildflowers and trees and rocks which he has pursued from the beginning.
I shall try to always remember the scene of M sleeping on a mossy boulder in the middle of a stream, M climbing precariously to the very edge of the Yosemite falls for a view over the edge, M inhaling clean mountain air amidst 200 foot trees and grand vistas of the valley.
M was a kind of ecstatic intellectual who teaches us the joy and enthusiasm of life.
If I remember correctly, the owner of the sheep didn't trust the shepherd and, in fact, the shepherd turned out to be untrustworthy and Muir had to do some of his work.
A great lover of nature and the outdoors, Muir was no lover of sheep. He saw them as chomping and trampling the wild beauty of the mountains. I think that he hoped, by helping to create the National Parks, to protect the wilderness from sheep as well as from men. We owe a lot to John Muir.
Of the scenes I spoke of trying to always remember, the one I'm sure I remember (as opposed to telling myself that I remember) is his sleeping on the boulder in the middle of the stream.
| Author | Ethell, Jeffrey |
|---|---|
| Author | Price, Alfred |
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 217 |
| Extras | photos, maps, tables, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; Vietnam War |
| When Read | July 1990 |
A history of American Navy and Air force attacks on North Vietnam on the day that Nixon and Kissinger resumed the air offensive in an attempt to force progress at the Paris peace talks.
For those interested in aerial combat the story is very interesting, very well told, full of detail and personal experience reports, and intelligent in its analysis of the effectiveness of people, weapons and tactics, even where the conclusions run counter to received opinion
The bravery, skill and determination of the American pilots was most impressive - as it also was for many of the Vietnamese pilots. The Americans won the day because of their high state of development in every area - weapons, radar, organization, tactics, training. The Vietnamese, in spite of some very good pilots, were outclassed and overwhelmed. I was especially impressed by young pilots with no air combat experience who nevertheless pressed home their attacks and remembered their training their very first time facing enemy planes.
This is one of many books I have read about air combat, most recently Viper Pilot by Daniel Hampden. It's a subject that interests me for a number of reasons.
There are a number of highly competent air forces around the world though I think that they are probably all in the developed "first" world. Even the highly motivated countries, like Vietnam, didn't then, and probably don't now, have the depth of technical and logistical capacity or the breadth of experience to match the U.S. and other developed countries. The U.S. stands out among them though, surprisingly perhaps, Israel may be the closest other country and may even excel over the U.S. in some areas like pilot selection and training.
There are people who would gladly shoot me for saying so, but I supported the other side in the Vietnam War. That doesn't stop me from admiring heroes like John McCain and that poor jerk Randy "Duke" Cunningham. It may not be a big step to also express admiration for Adolf Galland and Werner Molders.
| Author | Gray, A.W. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 200 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 1990 |
An atmospheric sort of crime thriller about an almost albino lawyer, nicknamed "Bino", who becomes the target of two killers who think he's holding evidence against them. The killers had been hired to kill a congressman by a gangster and a society lawyer. They then killed other people who might know about their crime.
The action takes place in a seamy Texas city. The characters are Southwest lowlifes with lots of language and behavior right out of the prisons and off the streets. In the end the killers and the society lawyer are all killed but the real big shots above them stay completely clear and Bino is back in the dumps defending gutter types and making book on the side.
This is the hard edged sort of stuff, like Elmore Leonard. Very good of its type.
Remembering nothing about this book I looked it up on Amazon. There was only one review, written in 2004. "Michael G.", the reviewer, gives a lot of characters names (none of which I remembered or noted in my abstract) and a generally well written review. Interestingly, he too compared Gray to Leonard. His review title was "An entertaining read" and he gave it three stars. I added one vote of appreciation to the three he had garnered in the last eleven years.
| Author | Lem, Stanislaw |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Polish |
| Translators | Kandel, Michael |
| Publication | San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987 |
| Copyright Date | 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 322 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 1990 |
There are two separate stories here. In the first, Angus Parvis, a friend of Pirx, lands on Titan and is told that Pirx was lost in an attempt to rescue two other men from the "great depression". Parvis goes after them in a strider, a giant mechanical man. He too is trapped, his strider damaged and covered over. He enters the "vitrifax" chamber of the strider to be frozen with some future hope of recovery. The story is very typical Lem, scientific brilliance with a tour de force of Titan geography and a Lem hero, alone with his fate.
The second story takes place 100 years later. A man is recovered from vitrifax on a starship heading for a planet upon which the first non-human intelligence has been discovered. We never know if it Pirx or Parvis. Too much of his memory is lost.
There is more technical brilliance. The expedition sends an expedition. It appears to discover a world locked in a slow star wars struggle. They attempt to make contact but are rejected and attacked. Instead of leaving, the humans force contact, causing one disaster after another, and still learning nothing. In the end, Pirx or Parvis, or whoever he is lands and finally finds the "Quintans" in one last fiasco.
I do not believe in the pessimism of this book. I do not believe that people who could navigate the stars to find fellows would cause such a fiasco. It was an unpleasant book. Still, it is Lem.
It is amazing how well I still remember Lem's books. Even when, like this one, they are ambiguous and depressing, they are still memorable.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1960 |
| Number of Pages | 188 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 1990 |
After blundering across a murder, Archie Goodwin goes out to see if he can rustle up a client. Wolfe's bank balance has gotten perilously low and they need money.
The dead man was a wealthy executive who maintained a discreet apartment, lavishly furnished, soundproofed and carefully locked, in a low class neighborhood, just for his many extra-marital affairs. His body is found in a construction hole outside the house. The police don't realize the connection to the house but Archie figures it out and catches women there who return to pick up their belongings.
Wolfe is hired by the man's company to protect their reputation, and by the widow to find the killer, and by others too. In the end they discover that it was not a jealous husband or wife but a business rival that committed the murder.
These books are so consistent, so reliable, so pleasant as examples of their type, that it's hard to say anything new about them.
In my almost 70 years I have never once blundered across a murder, found a lavish apartment in a low class neighborhood, or read about a local murder committed by a wealthy man's business rivals.
Luckily, I am able to relieve the tedium of my existence with books like this one.
| Author | Follett, Ken |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 973 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | August 1990 |
A long historical novel about the building of the first Gothic cathedral in England at "Kingsbridge". I don't know whether it is based on an actual place and time or not.
The main characters of the story are Tom Builder, Prior Phillip, Jack Jackson, Aliena and her brother Richard, Ellen, and the evil William Hamleigh and Bishop Warren Bigod.
Prior Phillip decides to build a cathedral after his old church burns (in a fire set by young Jack Jackson who hoped thereby to get work for his stepfather Tom Builder.) Tom designs a grand church in the accepted style but is killed by William when William raids the town with a band of knights. Evil William lives only for plunder and rape after having stolen the earldom from Aliena and Richard.
Ah well - in the end, Jack learns the Gothic style in France and comes back to finish the church - solving the problem of wind force with the first flying buttresses. William is involved in the plot to kill Thomas Becket and hangs for it. The long civil war finally comes to an end with the accession of Henry II, and so on.
This is one of those competent, informed, but pedestrian books which one reads for the plot and for the serious attempt at describing the events and milieu of the times. It suffers from soap opera characters and dark mysteries to be revealed only at the end.
Again, ah well.
It was a pleasant read and it did indeed stimulate my imagination about those times.
Follett is still alive (he's four years younger than I am) and working. I have read a fair number of his books, eight of them just since 1990, with the last one in 2012. He's one of those competent writers who works very hard, researching, writing, working at his craft. My feeling about him now is as it was then. His work is not great literature and it contains annoying devices and lapses, but he does write about interesting subjects.
| Author | Shute, Nevil |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1951 |
| Number of Pages | 341 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation |
| When Read | August 1990 |
Tom Cutter, a working man's son, quits his job as auto mechanic to work for an "Air Circus", where he starts out as a clown in a car with a half oriental named Connie Shaklin who, unlike the other boys, is very interested in religion. Soon Tom gets a job as a mechanic. He does well and is promoted. In 1943 he's sent out to Cairo as chief mechanic, in charge of maintenance throughout the Mideast. Meanwhile his war bride falls in love with a Polish officer who tells her he's a count, gets her pregnant, and abandons her. She kills herself. Tom cannot face living near her family. He turns down a job, buys a tiny airplane, and opens a charter air service in Bahrain, serving the oil companies. His business grows and prospers, based entirely on Asiatic pilots, mechanics, and workers. Then he meets Connie again and hires him as chief mechanic.
Connie teaches the men to praise God through their work and to see their work as having religious significance. All of the men are attracted and a religious cult following develops around him. As the charter business grows, so does Connie's reputation, influencing mechanics from Cairo to Singapore and earning the respect of the old Sheikh of Bahrain, who goes on a pilgrimage to visit Connie and leaves four million pounds for him - which he cannot use and directs into good works for the Sheikh's people.
In the end Connie dies of leukemia, Tom Cutter continues in the charter business in an ascetic life, and the Sheikh's heir commissions six books of the story of Constantine Shak Lin, of which Cutter's, this book, is the last.
The story starts as a story of a career and is gradually transformed into a story of a more complex calling. Very interesting, very absorbing. There is one scene in which Connie tells the men to reflect for one minute after each job and ask God to put into their hearts the knowledge of whether they have done the job well or ill. A fascinating scene in an intriguing book.
That scene has stayed with me. Tom Cutter goes into the maintenance tent, I don't remember why. There he sees Connie teaching a class to the mechanics about how to do something, performing some complex maintenance on an engine. He stops and listens. He sees the Arab mechanics concentrating intently on Connie's words, making notes as they go. He and we realize that we are seeing something new, something that was not part of the visible book before but something that was growing beneath its surface. This is when the book crosses the threshold of transformation from a book about a growing career, one that I could understand and appreciate from my own career experience, to a book about human spiritual values. It is a magnificent scene that is the central core of the book.
Shute was an unusual writer. Knowledgeable about Eastern religion and philosophy as well as Western life, his books were about educating people and eliciting deeper thought from them as much or more than about entertaining them, though he wrote in a way that was never boring.
I have liked all of the books of his that I have read.
| Author | Hillary, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983 |
| Copyright Date | 1942 |
| Number of Pages | 184 |
| Extras | Foreword by Ernest K. Gann |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 1990 |
H was an upper class British boy at Trinity College, Oxford, living in an atmosphere where athletics meant more than academics and most boys were there only for the degree and the connections to move into ruling class jobs in government or politics later in life. That was in 1939.
When war came, H signed up for the RAF. He had been in a university auxiliary air group. His attitude was very poor. He learned nothing of math or mechanics and saw the war as a chance to increase his fund of personal experience, opposing Hitler because of the Nazi threat to his personal freedom more than out of a desire to save the world.
In those desperate times he was made a fighter pilot and was successful too. He shot down at least a few enemies before he was himself shot down, horribly burned on face and hands.
The next year was spent on a personal odyssey in which he came to a more caring and more quasi-religious outlook on the war and on life. All his friends were dead and, through one visit to the hospital after another, he met hundreds of brave casualties suffering silently for the war effort.
H did not survive the war. Nothing on the book jacket tells us why. Perhaps he died of an infection in one of his hospital stays for reconstructive surgery. Perhaps he was killed in an air raid. Maybe he recovered enough to rejoin the RAF and was killed in the air.
This book is a valuable human record of the man, the times, and the war. I am sorry that H died so young. I grieve for him. I hope it counts for him in some way that he wrote this book and I read it.
There is a good article about Hillary in the Wikipedia. It said that he shot down five German planes confirmed and claimed two more. He pressed home an attack when he should not have and was himself surprised by a top German pilot who shot him down.
He did, in fact, return to the RAF. He "managed to bully himself back into a flying position even though, as it was noted in the officers' mess, he could barely handle a knife and fork." He crashed, killing himself and his radio operator, while piloting a Bristol Blenheim in a night training flight.
| Author | Kartun, Derek |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Walker and Co., 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 348 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | Middle East |
| When Read | September 1990 |
A thriller novel about a Palestinian terrorist group planning to blow up Israel with nuclear bombs stolen from France. The group is led by Prof. Javed Hanif, a historian and anthropologist, with Essat, an Israeli agent and Rasmi Bournawi, an Armenian woman who also works for the KGB but is, in fact, a committed terrorist.
Two high ranking intelligence officers try to track them down. Alfred Baum of the French DST and Shayeh Ben Tov, head of the Arab Affairs branch of the Mossad. Each faces a certain amount of incompetence, vanity, political maneuvering and private purposes among his superiors and colleagues. In the end, it turns out that the theft of the bombs was engineered in part by right wing leadership in the French Army intelligence service which wished to embarrass Israel but disabled the detonators because it didn't want a nuclear catastrophe.
This was a very able procedural type thriller. It lacks the detail of Forsyth's Day of the Jackal but is very good at giving the feel of the political motivations behind the covert action agencies involved.
I would say that the book is generally anti-Arab and anti-French, but also anti-fascist.
This book was published the same year as the beginning of the first Palestinian Intifada, now considered to be from 1987-93. I think there was a change over that period in the world's perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Before then, books like this one, DeMille's By the Rivers of Babylon, Michener's The Source, and many others took sympathy with Israel for granted in the English speaking world.
| Author | Adams, Ansel |
|---|---|
| Author | Alinder, Mary Street |
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Extras | photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Photography |
| When Read | September 1990 |
This New York Graphic Society book is beautifully printed, finished in the year of Adams' death, and contains many of his photographs and an account of his life.
Adams had only an eighth grade education. He was too impatient and uninterested to stay in school. Much of his real education came from his father, and then from a series of piano teachers who prepared him for a career in music. He made his way as a piano teacher and Sierra Club mountain guide, gradually turning professional photographer, concentrating at first entirely on scenics for publication in small volume, expensive art folios sold to wealthy West Coast collectors - though he eventually also did much commercial work.
A devotes much of his book to his friends - Albert Bender, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Edward Weston, Stieglitz, O'Keefe, and others. He writes of his method of "visualization" - the complete pre-visualization of the final print before lifting his camera.
Adams is a very articulate as well as intelligent man. Although he does not analyze his photographs very much, he is very poetic and expressive about nature and about other people. He is also quite politically sophisticated, a staunch advocate of conservation, civil rights, and peace, but prepared to make progress by compromise and conciliation. He supported strong environmental organizations but broke with radicals who refused to make concessions in order to win concessions - thereby halting the progress of their cause. He came under strong attack by radical environmentalists but never let it drive him to the other side. He was a strong voice against Reagan and worked in a personal way for civil rights in the 30's, long before it became acceptable in the upper classes.
Adams was a very good pianist but not quite good enough to make it as a concert artist. That was a disappointment to him.
He had an excellent piano. Maybe his father bought it for him, I don't remember. However a well known concert artist who came to his house once fell in love with the piano and tried hard to convince Adams to sell it, offering a lot of money (I seem to recall a figure of $25,000.) Adams wouldn't sell. He too was in love with that piano.
Adams described one of his early commercial assignments. It was for a bakery company. He was to photograph their raisin bread. The appearance of the bread didn't look right in the black and white photos of the day so the company's advertising director slathered paint on the bread to get the effect that he wanted. Adams was a little shocked by that but he adapted. As I indicated above, he was a principled man but not an inflexible one.
| Author | Townsend, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Extras | index, bibliography, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | September 1990 |
Townsend was a pilot and squadron commandeer during the battle of Britain. He was shot down and wounded but recovered and rejoined his unit when it was converted to night fighting after the German offensive switched to night bombing of the cities.
At first the night defenses were totally unable to stop the Germans. The pilots flew Hurricanes with no AI (airborne intercept) radar and almost no chance of coming to grips with the enemy or shooting him down in the dark even if they did get a fleeting glance. Instead they suffered losses from night landings, radio outages which left them deaf to ground control, their own searchlights and gunners, and German night intruders who hung about their airfields and blasted them at takeoffs and landings. Eventually however they developed effective jamming and decoy systems for enemy navigators and got Beaufighters and Havocs with radar for night interception. By the time the Germans ended the Blitz in May 1941 to prepare for war with Russia, the RAF was beginning to mount an effective defense.
T writes not only about his own experience, but also about the London firefighters, messengers, Civil Defense workers, medical people, and ordinary folk who bore the brunt of the battle and continued their lives under great hardship and danger. If anything, T plays down his own role in an excess of modesty.
Unbeknownst to me, but perhaps known to everyone else, Townsend became the inamorata of Princess Margaret. However, he was a divorced man. For her to marry him would have brought about the condemnation of the Queen and royal family, and her exile from Britain for at least five years (says the Wikipedia author.) She didn't do it. Townsend left the country to live in Belgium and then France until his death in 1995.
I thought I also read Townsend's Duel of Eagles. I'm sure I at least had it out of the library, but I don't see it in my book cards.
| Author | Buchan, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: J.M. Dent, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1915 |
| Number of Pages | 145 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | October 1990 |
A very dated adventure novel about a bored mining engineer who made some money in Africa and has come to England to see what it is like living in the "home" country. He is about to give up and go back to Africa when he meets a strange American who tells him about an assassination conspiracy and is subsequently murdered in the engineer's apartment. Knowing that he has been framed for the murder and that the police will not believe his conspiracy story, he runs for it, planning to find the conspirators himself. There are long chases through Scotland and the north of England during which he finds the conspirators, who turn out to be German spies, and gets help from the highest levels of the government.
The plot is, of course, outrageous, and the book is filled with upper class English rot from that period, including antisemitism, fine English character, nasty foreigners, and so on.
Hitchcock improved on the story when he filmed it, adding a girl, deleting the antisemitism, and ironing out a few of the convolutions in the plot.
I seem to recall reading bibliographies in which this book is cited as a classic spy adventure thriller. I can't help suspecting that the authors of those lists were unduly influenced by Hitchcock rather than Buchan.
I have now completed 25 years of book notes in XML. I have about 17 years remaining to transcribe. I might be able to do it! We'll see.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday, 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 364 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 1990 |
This was a completely new Asimov story, not part of the Foundation or Robot series. Perhaps he was tired of them.
The story takes place several hundred years in the future. Large, fully self-contained space stations have been built, each of which has become an independent, self-sustaining country unto itself. Many of the most capable and intelligent people live in the "settlements" so that, even though 99% of the people remain on earth, the settlements have become more advanced.
One settlement, Rotor, discovers a principle for speed of light travel and discovers a new neighbor red dwarf star, just two light years away but hidden by a dust cloud. They move the whole settlement there, secretly, and attempt to develop their civilization.
In the end they discover that there is an intelligent being made of quadrillions of primitive prokaryote cells on a planet of a planet of the star. The alien makes contact with a fat, homely, fifteen year old girl who has an intelligence that the alien admires.
The novel is populated by the usual Asimov types - intelligent, relatively non-neurotic people who pursue their scientific and personal aims.
I liked this novel less than A's robot books. There is no special interest in this book - no robots, no detailed conception of a future civilization as in Caves of Steel, no "psycho-history" as in the Foundation books. It's standard Asimov story telling, no worse than any others, but without that extra SF zing that makes these books interesting.
I do remember this book.
The idea of a small society of intellectuals outperforming the whole earth in science and technology might have seemed plausible to me at one time and may in fact be possible, but I'm inclined to think otherwise. Intelligence and talent are widely dispersed. A child in Africa, India, China, Siberia, Peru, or the slums of Harlem may have the genius to bring new and important discoveries to light, if only he or she could have access to the required education and environment. Maybe Asimov agreed with that but thought that the "if only" condition in that statement is too far from reach.
There are a lot of books written around super characters - smarter, stronger, handsomer, tougher than anyone else. They encourage the reader to escape into an alternate reality in which he can identify and, alone with his book, become this super person. This book, and many other books written with adolescent main characters, are also about escaping inferiority and isolation, but they present a more believable and attainable character. In this case, the girl doesn't have to be outwardly super. She's super inside in a way that only the super alien can recognize. It's an attractive fantasy.
Having said all that, I have to add that I'm not too confident of my ability to say much that's cogent about a book I read 25 years ago. Let's just say that these notes are about this kind of literature in general and may or may not fit particularly well with Isaac Asimov's book or his intention.
| Author | Harrison, Harry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Toronto: Bantam Books, 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 483 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | November 1990 |
An SF tale which takes as its premise that the dinosaurs did not die out and that a very ancient race of intelligent reptiles has grown up long before the emergence of man. The book is about a first contact and conflict between reptiles and men when an advancing ice age sends both into the same territory.
The reptilian "Yilane" ("Murgu" in the human vocabulary) are conceived as city dwelling, highly social creatures dependent upon an advanced technology of gene manipulation to produce living beings that serve them as cloaks, tools, boats, cameras, microscopes, and so on - though they do not use mechanical devices.
I cannot believe that such a technology is really possible. Certainly the discovery of genetic science cannot be done without a highly developed mechanical culture - at least so it seems to me. But H was such a successful story teller that I forgive him his implausible science.
In the story, nine year old Kerrick is captured by the Yilane in an attack that wipes out his entire clan. They train him to speak their language and keep him for many years until, on another raid on humans, he rebels, attempts to kill Vainte, the leader of the Yilane, and once again joins the humans. They are hunted, fight battles, and eventually burn the Yilane city to reclaim their continent.
The conception of a person who is caught between the two worlds is striking and fascinating. This was the sort of book that has no very deep significance but is very difficult to put down.
No deep significance perhaps, but I remember a great deal of this book: the swimming dinosaur ships, the female oppression of the male reptiles who could only survive a maximum of two matings but were forced into a third, the reptiles fear of fire and the attack on their town by a much smaller number of humans armed with burning torches. It was a book full of vivid imagination.
| Author | Coonts, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 329 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; Vietnam War |
| When Read | November 1990 |
A former A6 Intruder pilot has written a novel about the war. As one might expect, it is strongly motivated by the dissonance between a frightening war in the air over North Vietnam, and the peaceful world outside. He flew through storms of flak and SAM missiles, avoiding death only by a continuous stream of last second violent maneuvers in order to press home night bombing attacks on such targets as "suspected truck parks" in the forest. It is not surprising that thirteen years later he can still write obsessively about the experience and still strive to convey to us something, an exhilaration and a terror, that he must have found difficult to express in words.
In the story, Lieutenant Jake Grafton flies a night mission in which his navigator/radar operator/bombardier is fatally wounded by a lucky bullet from the ground. Over time he plans his own secret raid on Hanoi to get even. He wants to hit Communist Party Headquarters but it's not on their maps. He aims instead at the National Assembly building and scores a near miss. His commanders eventually find out and he faces court martial but is saved by Nixon's decision to launch an all out aerial offensive. They can't sack him for doing what became policy two weeks later.
There is a little romance and a little view of Hong Kong and Ilopango in the Philippines, but the heart of the story is the flying. In the end, he and his new bombardier are shot down and bail out over Laos. They are rescued in a daring attack by American Air Force people. They are badly injured but survive.
The flying recounted in this book is different from any I have previously read about. The men fly with radar eyes, bombing with nothing but a radar vision of the target while dodging streams of bright particles and fine balls that chase them. From a technical point of view, a fascinating book. From a human point of view it was at least authentic.
The Naval Institute Press published a lot of highly specialized books for a specialist audience. Then Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October in 1984 and this book in 1986 greatly increased its sales. It looks like both of those authors have been successfully seduced by more mass market publishers and maybe the days of NIP's glory are over.
More than for the German and Japanese warriors, I sympathize with those Americans who fought in a war that I fought against. Right or wrong, the Americans at least believed that they were fighting for freedom and democracy, and certainly not for conquest and racial superiority - which was never America's goal in Vietnam.
| Author | Thackeray, William Makepeace |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Everymans's Library, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1857 |
| Number of Pages | 812 |
| Extras | Introduction by M.R. Ridley |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | December 1990 |
This large, rambling, serialized novel takes up the story of the Esmond family some years after the death of Henry Esmond. Of the characters in the earlier novel only Beatrix, now old and living entirely for card parties and gossip, is still alive. Esmond had gone to Virginia and established a new Castlewood estate. His daughter married a Warrington, also of noble birth, and bore fraternal twin sons, George and Harry Warrington. This book is their story.
In the first volume Harry comes to England as a prodigal heir, his brother George being believed dead in the French and Indian War. He lives the life of a young lord, losing his money at gambling to his unscrupulous cousin, the Marquis of Castlewood, and being seduced by his much older cousin Maria - who appears first as a scheming adventuress and later as a woman of some character. Then George appears, escaped from the French, and arrives in England. Against the opposition of all sides of his family, George marries Theo Lambert, a woman with no significant inheritance. George and Harry take opposite sides during the Revolution and each becomes a rich man - George inheriting an uncle's title and lands. The last several hundred pages are told from George's own history of the events.
The story is rambling and lacking in focus, but the writing is superb. Every page is filled with something - insight, poignancy, brilliant observation, magnificent language. T can make us see all the folly and vanity in some person or some action and yet, at the same time, fill us with sympathy and love for that person.
This is the third major work of Thackeray's that I have read. Despite its lack of focus, it is not inferior to the others. I hope to read all the rest before I die.
Looking through my diary, I see that I began reading this novel in January, 1990. I read only a few pages a day in amongst many other books, savoring them as I went along. I only finished the first volume (402 pages) on May 17, 1990. Diary entries in January, April and May all show my positive reaction to the book.
Some artists have a natural genius that goes beyond what even a quite talented person can achieve by study and practice alone. I'm thinking for example of Mozart and Beethoven. In the world of writing, I consider Thackeray to be one of those natural geniuses.
I have not read any of his books since The Virginians but I have just now gone to the Gutenberg website and downloaded Barry Lyndon. I'm going to put it on my phone or tablet.
I read The Luck of Barry Lyndon shortly after downloading it from the Gutenberg site.
| Author | Sayers, Dorothy L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1987 |
| Copyright Date | 1927 |
| Number of Pages | 248 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 1990 |
A "Lord Peter Wimsey" mystery. Lord Peter returns to England from a summer in Sardinia to rescue his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, from a murder charge. After many twists and turns in which suspicion is thrown first one way and then another, Lord Peter finds the evidence that proves that the death was a suicide. The Duke's lawyer, Sir Impey Biggs, makes a long statement to the trial convened in the House of Lords (an ordinary civil court is not competent to try a "peer of the realm", a member of one of Britain's "oldest and noblest" families) in which all of the clues are tied together with a complete picture of the events during the critical night, minus the episode of the Duke's adultery - which accounts for what he really did that night.
The idea that a man can be called "my lord", "your lordship", and "your grace", and be treated with deference and special tolerance, and be entitled to money and land and a life of leisure - for nothing at all - is hard to swallow as an unremarked part of the story. but I guess that at the time when the story was written, and for a British audience, this could be done.
This is not to say however that S shows great reverence for the ruling class. She pokes fun at them too. There is indeed a great deal of "whimsy" in the characters and scene.
S is one of those more than competent but less than inspired writers whom we find in the better detective fiction. With full knowledge of what is good and bad in such a distinction, I would call this a pleasant read.
As of this date, this is the only one of Sayers' many books that I have read. Perhaps it's that the whole scene of lords and ladies doesn't appeal to me. Or perhaps it's the bloodless, passionless mysteries. Many of the mystery stories I've read are not as well written as this one but appealed to me more.
| Author | Higgins, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 318 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 1990 |
An uninspired World War II adventure story about a young woman sent to France by a double crossing English spy master whose intent was to have her captured and tortured into revealing false information which she was unwittingly fed. The beautiful young Genevieve Trevaunce makes the trip to her aunt's chateau in France. She admires the handsome German SS Colonel who is in charge of the place, but is arrested by him. Finally, the dashing Americans Craig Osborne and Martin Hare rescue her and she goes off with Osborne in the end for dinner at the savoy.
The dust jacket blurb says "a riveting story of suspense, adventure, and war - Jack Higgins most ambitious novel to date."
I suspect that H must produce something every year to support his household in the Channel Islands. This very lackluster novel has an almost made-for-TV character to it. It will certainly pay some of his bills, but ought to embarrass him thoroughly.
I read this book very fast, almost double my usual reading speed. It was easy to read. It's the third novel by Higgins that I've read. I keep allowing my weakness for the genre to overcome my remembrance of Higgins mediocrity. Maybe I'll remember how insipid this one was for a few more years.
I did remember for a few more years. It was not until 2007 that I succumbed again, and then again in 2010, though I excused that one as being the result of insufficient choices of audiobooks presented at the local library.