Books read January through December 1992
| Author | Melville, Herman |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Modern Library, 1952 |
| Copyright Date | 1846 |
| Number of Pages | 260 |
| Extras | In Selected Writings of Herman Melville pp.455-801 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1992 |
Melville's first novel, based on his own real life experiences, about a young sailor who jumps ship from a badly run whaler and escapes into the interior of Nukuheva in the Marquessan Islands, where he lives in partial captivity among a cannibal tribe, the Typee.
In large measure, the book is an attack on the smug self-satisfaction of the civilized Christian world. M points out again and again the decency of the "savages" and the ignorance, vanity, and sin of the missionaries who come to the Pacific (mainly Hawaii) to civilize them.
Most of the story consists of description - of daily life, food, feasts, hierarchical social relations, architecture, economy, and so on. He never sees any actual cannibalism but has strong hints of it and reports his great fear and despondency among these people as well as his attraction to them.
Parts of the story, especially his love affair with the beautiful nature girl Fayaway, are only hinted at so as not to shock his readers or to appear gross and brutish.
It is a delightful and instructive story. There seems to me to be little of the literary mastery in it which he develops in Moby Dick or the wide ranging philosophy of Mardi. But the inclination is there. We already see a man for whom writing has a purpose and for whom the subjects of his stories are real and important people.
| Author | Howard, James H. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Orion Books, 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 310 |
| Extras | index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | January 1992 |
The son of a missionary doctor in China decided in college in 1938 that he wanted a fling at adventure. He joined the Navy and became a carrier fighter pilot. In 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, he resigned to join the Flying Tigers, arriving in Burma in time for the first clashes with the Japanese and retreating with the Tigers into China for another year of warfare, distinguishing himself as a fighter and attack pilot, and as a steady, reliable man whom Chennault used for organizational as well as combat duty.
When the Air Force took over the air war in China, H resigned and returned to the States. Then he enlisted in the Air Force as a fighter instructor. He went to England as commander of the first Mustang squadron. There he became an ace all over again against the Germans and was the only fighter pilot to win the Medal of Honor - for single handedly standing between a bomber group and 30 enemy fighters, shooting down three and breaking up the whole attack.
After the war he became a successful businessman. It is easy to see why. He was a man of courage, intelligence, leadership, and all around ability.
We owe a lot to James Howard and the men like him.
I recall the story in this book about the defense of the bombers. If I remember correctly, Howard didn't realize how many German fighters he was facing and didn't have time to think about it. He saw that the American bombers were about to be attacked and he interposed his own airplane between them and the Germans. Inside the bombers, crews who were preparing to fight and maybe die, saw him suddenly appear as their savior. They called out to each other and cheered and, when they got back to England, told everyone in authority about what had happened. Howard himself landed his plane and walked to his debriefing without any thought of having done anything heroic or even exceptional. But the bomber crews thought otherwise and he received the Medal of Honor for his action.
In 2008 I read a book by another Flying Tiger, God Is My Co-Pilot by Robert L Scott.
See also my diary entry for January 20, 1992.
| Author | McBain, Ed |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: The Mysterious Press, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 293 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 1992 |
A decently done mystery with an attractive protagonist - 38 year old defense attorney Mathew Hope. This is "a Mathew Hope Novel", one of nine published so far.
The story concerns a wealthy man arrested for killing three Vietnamese who raped his wife. It turns out in the end that the man, Steven Leeds, was framed by his wife and her lover, a tennis pro - who actually committed the murders. The real killer did it to kill the three rapists and satisfy his hatred of "gooks", and to get rid of the man standing between him and the beautiful rich woman.
Other characters include Warren Chambers, private eye and ex-cop from St. Louis, a black man, and a few others.
There is a reasonable amount of atmosphere and a lot of good liberal politics to spice up an essentially routine murder mystery.
I liked the writing, the politics, and the breezy readability of the genre. It is a reasonable alternative to Francis (perhaps not quite as interesting for technical detail) and Leonard (perhaps not quite as colorful.) Characterization is not quite as good as Stout. Ah well - decent all around nonetheless.
McBain's first book, published under the name Evan Hunter, came out in 1952. Forty years later I read this one which, so far as my book cards report, was the first of the at least 118 novels of his that I ever read. He knew how to write an engaging book.
I never read a lot of mysteries. I'm not sure when I started reading them, but clearly it was well before my first tape deck equipped car. Now I mostly read them as audiobooks while driving or doing chores at home.
Between my diary and my book notes I've probably mentioned ten times, but will mention again, that Ed McBain supposedly wrote something like 40 novels over ten years before the first one was finally published. However it was such a huge best seller that the publishers immediately bought the other 39 others that they had previously rejected.
| Author | Coetzee, J.M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 198 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1992 |
A very exceptional piece of writing about an old woman dying of cancer in South Africa who is drawn into the conflict of black and white. She spends her last days alternating between preoccupation with pain and impending death, and ineffectual attempts to help out the rebel son of her black maid. Her only companion in this is a homeless, alcoholic vagrant who slept in her shed and whom she takes into her house.
The novel is in the form of a long letter to her daughter in America, a letter which she is hoping will be posted by Mr. Verceuil, the black vagrant, after her death.
The writing is in clear, efficient prose. Sentences are not very long but there is an unusual richness, a density of meaning, not found in many writers. There are long passages in which every sentence seems to require re-reading. It is as if Coetzee is so full of things to say that they come out in a compressed stream, crowding into every utterance. For a middle aged white man, there is an astonishing insight into the notions of age, sex, race and death which it would not seem possible for such a man to have.
Coetzee is a very important writer, in the very first rank.
I am not alone in thinking him a great writer of the first rank. In 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, I have read nothing else he has written.
| Author | Melville, Herman |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1969 |
| Copyright Date | 1854 |
| Number of Pages | 77 |
| Extras | In Great Short Works of Herman Melville, pp 238-315. Edited and with an introduction by Werner Berthoff |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1992 |
A ship is stopped at a deserted island off Chile to take on water when they see another ship in poor condition, sailing erratically, moving towards the harbor. Captain Amaso Delano of the American ship is rowed over to the stranger to see if she needs assistance. He finds a very strange scene of black slaves and a few white sailors with a captain, Benito Cereno, who seems strained, sickly, out of touch with reality, and alternately considerate and hostile. Delano vacillates back and forth between suspicion of Cereno and sympathy for him. Eventually however, it is revealed that the blacks had revolted and taken the ship, killed most of the whites, and held the others as terrified captives, trying to force them to sail to Africa. Delano's men re-capture the ship and sail in to Chile where a vice-regal court (it is 1799) condemns the slave leaders to death.
The story is told first from Delano's point of view as he continually misinterprets events. It is an almost Gothic tale of horrible allusion followed by innocuous, but not quite convincing, explanation. Then there is the record of the court, explaining all, after the fact, in the formal language of a legal deposition.
It is a powerful tale but an ambiguous one. What is Delano? Is he a racist fool or a benevolent and competent man? Were the slaves justified in their revolt? Should we consider them savage barbarians? What should we make of Babo, Cereno's fawning body servant and actual ring leader of the revolt?
I see this as a story about the evils of slavery - seen as thorough going evils, admitting no heroes, either among whites or blacks.
An unusual and thought provoking story.
In one sense, it's hard to imagine living in a time when slavery was common, but in another sense it's easy. Slavery is still found in many parts of the world, most recently in the lands controlled by ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Institutionalized exploitation and violence are still extremely common. I and my family are isolated from it, living in an advanced country and in financially secure circumstances. I can sit very safely in my room, reading books, writing notes about them, surfing the web, studying Spanish or biology or whatever I like, and putting whatever I don't care to see out of my mind.
Well, maybe not out of my mind. I'm safe but I'm not entirely ignorant.
I read a number of Melville's books before I began making book cards, including Moby Dick, Mardi (does anyone read that excellent book any more?) and Billy Budd, Sailor, and possibly some others that I'm not remembering now. I read them more than 40 years ago.
In the days when I tried to think about who was the greatest American writer, under the influence of my University education where that question was actually discussed, Melville came out on top. It was my professor's choice (I don't recall his name but do recall liking and respecting him), and no doubt the choice of his professors too. He made a strong case for it and my reading of Moby Dick clinched the deal, though Faulkner came close with The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. But now almost fifty years since reading Moby Dick, and twenty-three years since reading this story with no Melville since then, I'm no longer well positioned to argue the case.
| Author | Follett, Ken |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Signet Books, 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 341 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Spy |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 1992 |
A World War II spy thriller. A German-Egyptian man with money, family, and connections in Cairo arrives in Egypt after crossing the desert alone from Rommel's headquarters in Libya. He brings a radio and an English novel, Rebecca, which is used as a code book for his transmissions. He also has a briefcase full of British money which, to his chagrin, turns out to be counterfeit.
The other characters are Major William Vandam who is trying to catch the spy (Alex Wolff), Sonja the belly dancer and sexual degenerate who works with Wolff, and Elene Fontana, the Jewish kept woman who is enlisted to help catch the spy.
This is an excellently done novel of its genre. To be sure, it lacks the depth of character and political insight of Le Carre's novels and the technical detail of Forsyth, but it is a very satisfyingly plotted page turner with attractive good guys and thoroughly despicable bad guys who all get their just deserts in the end.
I do still remember this book, not much to be sure, but something of it. And I do remember liking it.
I note that I didn't write much on the book card. Three fourths of the back side of the card is empty. This must have been around the time I was transitioning to writing more about books. It was a slow transition over a period of years.
I was going to comment that, not only are the writers of my youth now gone, but even those of middle age. I haven't seen a Ken Follett book in years. However it turns out not only that Follett is still alive, but he's younger than I am, having been born in 1949, and he never stopped writing. I just haven't been seeing his books.
Now I see that not only the writers of my old age, but some of those of my middle age are younger than me. I guess the good side of this is that we can count on the writers we enjoy today being around for us for the rest of our lives.
| Author | Harrison, Harry |
|---|---|
| Author | Sheckley, Robert |
| Publication | New ork: Avon Books, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 249 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 1992 |
[Paragraph 3 and 4 from my book card] Bill is a space trooper of high brawn and low brain sent on a suicide mission to the planet Tsuris (from the Yiddish?), where he is captured, has his body taken, becomes part of the Quintiform computer, and is wooed by a Tsurisian girl who assumes various human female bodies to entice him.
Everything is done in slapstick style, filled with absurd rescues approximately every 5 - 10 pages. There are long take offs on Star Trek with Dirk, Splock, the starship Gumption, and the alien historian; and also on Star Wars with Ham Duo and Chewgummatha Kookie.
[Paragraphs 1, 2 and 5] I am interested in finding any books by Robert Sheckley. They are very rare at the libraries. So when I saw this, with Harry Harrison, another writer I have liked, I thought "Why not. The book is falling apart anyway and will be gone in a few months. Better read it while I can." So I did, and in spite of the fact that it was marked as volume 2.
It is a spoof of course, very heavy handed and much overdone, but not completely lacking in intelligence.
It all got boring but it was such light and easy reading that I read to the end. I suspect that writers do this sort of thing in a different frame of mind from their better work.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 185 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 1992 |
Orrie Cather sends Archie with a key to a woman's apartment to retrieve incriminating letters and finds the woman dead. Orrie is arrested for the murder and Nero Wolfe feels an obligation to help free him by, if possible, identifying the real killer.
The girl, who was in love with Orrie and wanted him to marry her, was being supported by a wealthy businessman who kept her for visits a few times per week. However her brother-in-law discovered the identity of the rich man and began blackmailing him. The brother-in-law turns out to be the real killer.
The rich man has offered Wolfe $50,000 to keep his name out of the press. Wolfe succeeds by proving to the police that Orrie Cather couldn't have killed the dead woman and by telling the dead woman's sister that her husband did it. The next day the husband was dead, whether by murder or suicide we don't know. But Wolfe freed his man and got his money.
I see that I made no personal comment on this story. Perhaps I had read enough Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe books that I no longer felt any need to comment, or had nothing new to say.
That's probably still true.
| Author | Johnson, Charles |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Atheneum, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 209 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | March 1992 |
A literary and philosophical tale about a young free black man from Illinois living as a petty thief in New Orleans in 1830. He gets into debt to his landlord, who turns out to be the chief of the black criminals in the city. His girlfriend pays his debts to the gangster on the condition that the gangster gets the boy to marry her. But our hero stows away on a ship instead and wakes up to find himself on a slaver bound for Africa. He begins the "middle passage" to and from Africa.
They arrive, ship slaves, trade goods and a big box which the strange captain insists is a real African Allmussir god.
There is a slave revolt. Much of the crew is killed. Then the ship is sailed towards Africa in the daytime and towards America at night until all are sick and starving and the ship sinks. The hero, Rutherford Calhoun, is picked up with a white cook and three little slave girls by a passenger ship. It transpires that the old girlfriend, the gangster, and his chief thug are all aboard, that the gangster was part owner of the slaver, and that the chief thug finds out and beats the gangster while Rutherford gets the girl.
The story is strange and unbelievable but Johnson's erudition is brilliant and he keeps things moving and interesting in spite of many absurdities. There are many literary and philosophical allusions, all sounding strange in the mouth of a 22 year old thief. An odd combination of intellect and farce, but it worked.
From the first paragraph of the novel, excerpted on Amazon: "Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. In my case, it was a spirited Boston schoolteacher named Isadora Bailey who led me to become a cook aboard the Republic. Both Isadora and my creditors, I should add, who entered into a conspiracy, a trap, a scheme so cunning that my only choices were prison, a brief stay in the stony oubliette of the Spanish Calabozo (or a long one at the bottom of the Mississippi), or marriage, which was, for a man of my temperament, worse than imprisonment - especially if you knew Isadora."
There is a long professional biography of Johnson on the Amazon "Charles Johnson" page copied from Johnson's website at http://www.oxherdingtale.com. He has a PhD in philosophy and, among a host of other awards for many different writings, he won a National Book Award for this novel. He has been a professor, MacArthur fellow, writer for the New York Times, and has many accomplishments.
I don't think I knew any of that when I read the book or, at any rate, I didn't include it in my notes. Perhaps if I weren't constricted by the size of the 3x5 index cards I would have written more about this.
I don't remember what "Allmussir" meant and am not even sure from my handwriting that that is the correct spelling of what I wrote. Looking up a list of African tribes, I didn't find it there.
| Author | Tolstoy, Leo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Maude, Louise and Aylmer |
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, Perennial Library, 1967 |
| Copyright Date | 1895 |
| Number of Pages | 50 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1992 |
Contained in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy
In the 1870's, merchant Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov orders his man Nikita to hitch up a horse to the sleigh for a trip to a landowner some miles away who wants to sell some land. The merchant knows that he can get it for less than half its true value if he gets there tonight, before the merchants from town arrive the next day with better offers. So, with some church money "borrowed" for the purpose, Vasili Andreevich and Nikita head off into the snow storm.
They get lost and drive into a village. They leave, get lost again, and find themselves back in the same village where they are invited in to get warm and stay the night. The peasants there talk about the breakup of their extended family, which is beginning under the impact of the reforms. But the merchant is determined. They set out again into the storm in the twilight. Once again they are lost. They try to stop for the night. Vasili panics, jumps on the horse, and rides away, leaving Nikita to freeze but he gets lost again and winds up back by the sleigh. Now finished, he lies down on top of Nikita, warming him up. In the morning only Nikita is found still alive.
The story is a masterpiece of understanding of the master and the man. T takes us into the mind of Nikita - completely resigned to anything that happens to him - from losing his wife to another man, being cheated of his wages, or freezing to death. He is afraid but accepting of his fate. Vasili is more complex but less honest. He longs to live for his money and position, more than his life, though in the end he does the only right thing left.
Clear, beautiful prose, plot and character.
I remember this story very well and think of it often. At each stage of the story Vasili is warned by the local people not to go off into the storm, but he does it anyway. The attraction of the money is irresistible to him. Nikita knows better but, as I wrote, is resigned to his fate. If he is ordered to freeze to death there is nothing to be done but to freeze to death. As the Borg say on Star Trek, resistance is futile.
This would have been a fine story even if Vasili Andreevich did not save Nikita's life in the end. That he did is what elevates the story to greatness and shows us Tolstoy's greatness as a human being and as a writer. Tolstoy see the scheming, the avarice, the selfishness, and the brutality in the master. But he also sees that even bad men are human beings. They have sparks of humanity and fellow feeling in them and, sometimes, that humanity can emerge.
I don't ordinarily write up individual short stories in my book notes except as parts of a write up of an entire collection. However there are stories like this one and White Nights that I read next, that are important and worth writing up - more so than many of the longer but less inspired works that I routinely write up.
| Author | Dostoevsky, Fyodor |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Garnett, Constance |
| Publication | London: William Heinemann, 1957 |
| Copyright Date | 1848 |
| Number of Pages | 56 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1992 |
This was anthologized in White Nights and Other Stories
An eccentric, dreamy young man in Petersburg lives alone in a shabby rented room. He knows no one and has no friends. His only pastimes are to walk around the city after work, observing people, and to read books. One night he sees a young woman. She is bothered by a man and our hero intervenes, scaring the man away. Incredibly, to him, the girl appreciates his gallantry and starts to talk to him. They meet over several more nights and she tells him her story.
The girl lives with her grandmother in a dreary house where she spends all day sitting, pinned to her grandma's dress. A year before, a young lodger came into the house who took them out occasionally to the opera. She fell in love with him. He had to go to Moscow but promised that, if he could, he would come back for her in one year. The year was up but the man was not there.
The young narrator carried a letter for the girl and consoled her when no reply came. He was in love with her and, gradually, she came to like him - at first only as a brother. Later, when she gave up hope, she spoke of marrying the narrator. They made plans, his life was transformed. He was ecstatic. It was his first and only genuine human contact. He was in love. Him! Ridiculous but true!
Then, suddenly, the other man appears. The girl instantly drops the narrator and flies to her first love. He is crushed. In the end he writes "... a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man's life?"
It's a brilliant story of a neurotic, a dreamer, a ridiculous person, told with great power and imagination.
After reading The Brothers Karamazov (sometime in my early to mid-twenties - I have no book card for it because it was before 1974 when I began writing book cards) Dostoevsky became one of my favorite authors.
Unlike most of the 19th century writers, Dostoevsky was in touch with poor people and out of touch with society. He was different. He was intimately acquainted with neurosis, isolation, and alienation. All of that attracted me to him. I was also attracted by his awareness of, and concern about, the problems of philosophy that were explored in The Brother Karamazov.
White Nights appears to be the last thing I read by him. There are still a few of his writings that I haven't read and I might pick them up sometime.
| Author | Kahn, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Extras | index, maps, photos, diagrams, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 1992 |
A history of the Allied attempts to decipher the German Navy Enigma machine cipher. The Enigma was one of the first machine ciphering systems. It used rotating wheels to conduct electricity through a circuitous path from a typed letter to another letter lit up by a bulb. The first breaks were made by Polish mathematicians who passed their knowledge on to France and Britain. In Britain, Alan Turing and others continued the work, later joined in the U.S. by W.V.O. Quine and others.
Success came from a mixture of cunning tricks, brilliant analysis, occasional lapses in procedure by the Germans, brute force machine trials of keys, and assaults on weather ships and U-Boats to capture code materials. The results were used to route convoys around wolf packs and then, when allied sea power was sufficiently developed, to hunt down and destroy most of the enemy subs.
I was impressed with the tremendous difficulty of actually creating a secure system. There are a huge number of points of attack once your opponents understand your basic methods.
| Author | Vidal, Gore |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 657 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Biographical fiction |
| Keywords | Abraham Lincoln |
| When Read | May 1992 |
A fictionalized account of the years of Lincoln's presidency, from the day he stepped off the train in Washington to his assassination. Vidal traces the lives of a half dozen or so characters besides Lincoln, especially his young secretary John Hay, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase and his daughter Kate, and a fictional young drugstore clerk who later plots with Booth.
Lincoln himself is treated with deep respect and considerable circumspection. V gives us less of the interior life of Lincoln - almost none. Perhaps V felt it was illegitimate to read too much into the mind of such an important person. Perhaps he wanted us to make those judgments on our own.
Lincoln is portrayed as a curious mixture of indecisiveness, bordering on indifference, to what he considered minor matters - the bulk of the running of the government - mixed with a very decisive, but always soft spoken and self-effacing, command of the larger issues. Slavery appears as a minor matter compared to the need for national unity. He is willing to compromise on slavery and subscribes to a "back to Africa" scheme. He is also curiously tolerant of Mary Lincoln's severe neuroses, compulsive buying, and sale of state secrets (for which she is almost dragged into a treason trial.) When it becomes necessary, he moves decisively to protect her and to cover the costs himself. But he never seems to reproach her.
This is top quality Vidal - historically very interesting, delving into the mix of politics and personality, very competently written, though somehow missing the spark of passion and insight and linguistic perfection that marks the best books.
My most recent encounter with Gore Vidal was viewing the film "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia". The film was begun while he was alive and released the year after his death. Although it is a very pro-Vidal film and perhaps not entirely objective, it gave me a sense of the man that supplemented the reading of his books.
One sense it gave me was of his relative intellectual fearlessness. He was perfectly willing to make strong negative judgments of people (see for example The Golden Age.) To me, that makes his careful treatment of Lincoln all the more interesting and seems to confirm my opinion that "Lincoln himself is treated with deep respect and considerable circumspection."
I liked all of Vidal's books. His interests are congruent with mine. He sees human history as important and looks for essential elements of humanity, good and bad, in all of his historical novels.
As I recall it, Lincoln opens with the President elect disembarking unannounced from a train in Washington, after traveling more or less incognito (how could Lincoln fail to be recognized?) and with a single Pinkerton guard to protect him from the Southern sympathizers who had sworn to kill him. It was an interesting choice for how to introduce the man and it initiates us immediately into the difficulties of his position and his response to them.
I still think that Vidal's novels are not the most literary or among the highest achievements of fiction. However they have the very great virtue of being interesting. I read some both before and after this one and may read more (I think there are some I haven't read yet.)
| Author | Davis, Lindsey |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Crown Publishers, 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 258 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | May 1992 |
A mystery story set in first centry AD Rome - written in the American hard boiled detective style by an Englishwoman who has managed to combine her love of classical history and of 20th century popular literature.
The protagonist, Marcus Didius Falco, is a "private informer". He lives in a low rent district on the sixth floor of an apartment building with two rooms and a balcony. "Just enough room for a dog to turn around in." He saves a young rich girl who is pursued by ruffians and winds up in the middle of a plot to steal silver from British silver mines and use the money to overthrow the Emperor. A republican himself, Falco nevertheless is recruited into becoming an agent to find the conspirators - which he eventually does. Along the way he falls in love with a woman above his station - the two disdaining each other all the time until they are madly in love - another classic pop fiction device in a book that's full of them.
The story is simple, commercial, and superficial. It gives us much less about the reality of Rome than I would have liked. Nevertheless, it worked in the same way that other competently done books of this type work. It was, as they say, an acceptable "read".
I've read two more of Davis' Falco books after this one, both obtained as audio books from the libraries. They work well as light entertainment to listen to while driving.
| Author | Guthrie, A.B. (Alfred Bertram) |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1947 |
| Number of Pages | 386 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American frontier |
| When Read | June 1992 |
The story begins in 1830 with Boone Caudill, age 17, beating his abusive father with a club and escaping their Kentucky farm, heading West. He gets in trouble along the way but links up with Jim Denkins, an undertaker's assistant, and the two make it to St. Louis where they sign on to a riverboat expedition up the Missouri bringing Teal Eye, a young Blackfoot daughter of a chief, home to her father, and to trade with the Indians. Along the way Boone and Jim are taught to hunt and fight and live off the land by Dick Summers, the hunter for the expedition. After making it all the way up river, learning and seeing much, the crew is ambushed and massacred. Only the three hunters escape.
The story resumes seven years later. The three men live as fur trappers. Boone has developed into a sullen, dangerous, competent man. He lives for the mountains and the air, beaver and buffalo, wind, snow and stream. He kills a man for threatening Poor Devil, their half crazy Indian companion. Later, Dick leaves and Boone goes to find Teal Eye and win her for his wife. He succeeds.
Two more major episodes ensue. In one, Boone and Jim hire on to mark the trail for an Eastern entrepreneur come to lead wagons to the West. Boone's brother-in-law, Red Horn, sends men to stop them and they are left without horses or provisions in the mountain winter. Boone saves them by heroic efforts. But after that, with no proper grounds, Boone becomes jealous of Jim, believing that Teal Eye may love Jim and that Jim is in fact the father of Boone's red haired, blind child. He sets a trap and, without giving any chance for explanation, kills him. There is a denouement to the story. Boone becomes a bitter, further withdrawn and spoiled man.
Big Sky is beautifully written with a fine blend of intelligent observation of the old West and a convincing interior view of a man who is both heroic and stunted. It gives us an appreciation of a time and place better than any I have seen. It depicts the grandeur and the tragedy of the Western life without romantic sentiment. A very good book.
I remember quite a lot about this book. It had a strong effect on me. Here are some specific scenes that I'll record.
Boone comes to believe that Jim has cuckolded him after talking to some of the Indians. Boone has dark hair. Jim has red hair. The baby has red hair. The Indians assume that Boone allowed Jim to sleep with Teal Eye and when Boone asks why they think that one of them asks in return, "Does the black eagle father the red hawk?"
When Boone sees his best, oldest, and virtually his only friend Jim go into the tepee to wait for him with Teal Eye, Boone follows him in a rage. His only thought is whether to use the pistol or the tomahawk. He pulls his pistol and kills Jim without saying anything or asking anything. It is as if he can't do it fast enough to satisfy himself. Jim is taken entirely by surprise and has no chance even to speak much less to defend himself.
Boone, already a solitary and anti-social man becomes even more isolated. He leaves and heads down the river. On the way he sees a strong man on the bank who calls for anyone on the boat to come and fight him. Boone rushes ashore in a blaze of emotion and pounds the man into the ground, only the intervention of the man's wife keeps Boone from killing him.
When he arrives in civilization, no one knows that he is married. He is introduced to a girl who is impressed by him. I don't remember whether he rapes her or only starts to, but he is unable to enter into a normal relationship.
Boone also sees Dick Summers, the hunter, now an old man, who taught Boone and Jim to live in the wild. Dick inquires after Jim and Boone says, "I kilt Jim." Dick is shocked. Boone is unwilling and probably unable to explain.
I'll mention one more incident that stays with me today, 23 years after I read it. Before the marriage to Teal Eye and the later killing that is the turning point of the book, the mountaineers are starving in a severe winter in the Rockies. There is no game. Boone hikes deep into the mountains and sees a white animal, presumably a mountain goat, unlike any animal he has ever seen before. Killing the goat saves their lives. It was not seemingly in the main line of Boone's development, but it really was. It was a step in the development of his self-reliance, his determination, and his ability to kill to meet his needs.
It was a powerful story about a life that had promise but went terribly wrong.
| Author | Benford, Gregory |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 412 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 1992 |
In the year 1998 a new form of virus has evolved in response to pesticide pollution which is spreading rapidly over the ocean and threatening to destroy much plant life. Society is breaking down. Famine is crushing the third world while very severe disruption has also hit the advanced countries. In England, a scientist is working in one of the few remaining labs to send a tachyon beam signal to the past to prevent the destructive pollution from ever having happened.
The story alternates between 1998 and 1963. In '98, John Renfew works to keep his lab operating in spite of the collapse. Gregory Markham, an American physicist, helps work out the theory while Ian Petersen, World Council member, gets the funds and also seduces all the women.
In '63 Jewish Assistant Professor Gordon Bernstein gets the messages on his nuclear resonance experiment. The Morse code is garbled but must be a message. However all attempts to convince his colleagues lead to scorn and ostracism. One colleague who does believe him thinks it's a message from space. He announces it to the world, leaving Bernstein still more exposed to ridicule. Finally, after a great deal of anguish, loneliness, and hard work, Bernstein discovers the real source of the messages and some of the underlying physics that makes it possible. At that point, unable to bear the time paradox, the "causal loop" splits the universe into two parallel, non-intersecting universes - one of which is saved while the other, the one which will send the message from the future, contains the doomed men who are not saved by their action.
Benford is among the very best SF writers - both as scientist and story teller. I assume he is Jewish. His Jewish characters and ideas are as authentic and convincing as his scientific ones - which are authentic and convincing indeed.
Very well done. A better story then the later Benfords I read.
I recall the pessimism, despair, and desolation of the world that cannot change the past. If I remember the end correctly, the wealthy Ian Petersen holes up in his fortified mansion with his stocks of food, his guards, and his guns to keep out the starving masses. The scientists sit glued to their tachyon beam receivers, listening to the messages of despair from the different universes while, to end on a hopeful and optimistic note, the world that is saved moves into a bright future.
I have read a bit about the "many worlds" and "multiverse" theories, for example Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality. I don't know enough to have an opinion on whether the theory could even possibly be true. This was an early SF novel about the issue. Well, it's not really about the issue, it's a device in a story about a different issue.
This seems to be the one among Benford's books that is most cited. It was a striking story.
| Author | Craig, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Readers Digest Press. E.P. Dutton and Co., 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 457 |
| Extras | Maps (not enough of them), photos, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 1992 |
Craig appears to have read all of the accounts and all of the official histories and records, and interviewed a large number of survivors from both sides, to produce this relatively short, one volume account of the battle. There is more material covering the German side. I suspect that Craig was able to read and speak German but had to work with the Russian material through a translator.
Where Chuikov's book was clearly anti-Nazi and partisan pro-Soviet, Craig's is more neutral. He is certainly on the same side as Chuikov but is more interested in identifying courageous and humane men on both sides. He points out examples of cowardice among the Soviets and seems to rate the average German as more disciplined than the average Soviet - though there are plenty of examples of extraordinary heroism among the Russians.
There is much on the privation and deterioration on the German side.
Stalingrad was a stupendous battle, a turning point in the consciousness of the possibilities for victory and defeat on both sides.
I still don't understand, and perhaps never will, how hundreds of thousands of soldiers can be recruited to go and die for an evil madman like Hitler, and actually fight hard to the end.
I've read so many books about World War II, including a number about Stalingrad, that I can't be sure what I learned from which book. The reference above is to The Battle for Stalingrad by Vasily I. Chuikov, which I read in 1975. In those days I still had access to uncommon books through the Pratt Library. I see that that book is still in the Pratt catalog, in the "Social Science and History Department" of the Central Library - where I found it 40 years ago. Good for them!
Stalingrad is often cited as the turning point of World War II. It wasn't the last great German offensive, that was the next summer at Kursk. However, more than the Battle of Moscow, it was a victory of Soviet planning and strength, perhaps more than a loss to German hubris, over extension and cold weather. After Stalingrad there was a new optimism in the Red Army and a new pessimism in the Wehrmacht. The German soldiers began to wonder if the war would ever end and whether they would make it out alive. Many who had gone along with Hitler finally began to see that the Nazi enterprise could not be a good thing. In a way that's hard to explain, it lifts my spirits to read about it.
| Author | MacDonald, Ross |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 226 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 1992 |
"A Lew Archer Novel".
Another hard-boiled private eye, like Hammet's and Chandler's characters, Archer is hired to find the missing wife of a newspaperman. The convoluted plot includes the movie industry, blackmail, murder, lust, passion, and so on.
For the record (i.e. for review in my old age) Archer searches for Hester Campbell, a beautiful girl diver who hurts herself and, in a low point, marries sports writer George Wall. But she's basically no good. She leaves him and goes back to LA to try to get into movies. She sets up with ex-boxer Manuel Torres and the two of them blackmail movie producer Simon Graff, who believes that his crazy wife Isobel killed his young girlfriend. Graff's security team beats up Archer and Wall, but it is really the old man, Bassett, who did the murder.
Complicated, yes, but quite well written with many very nice touches of characterization:
"I'm looking for a woman."
"What a coincidence. I'm looking for a man. It's just it's just a little early for me. I'm still a teensy bit drunky from last night."
Yawning, she cocked one fist and stretched the other arm straight up over her head. Her breath was a blend of gin and fermenting womanhood. Her bare feet were dirty white.
"Come on in. I won't bite you."
I stepped up into the office. She held herself in the doorway so that I brushed against her from shoulder to knee. She wasn't really interested, just keeping in practice.
I suppose I've grown tolerant of detective fiction. I read it a bit on a regular basis. So writing like this makes for a little zest in it.
I didn't used to read mystery stories at all. Gradually I came to read some and now, although they are only a small part of my total reading, they are a regular part.
I included the above "for the record, for review in my old age." I guess that's where I am now. If there is a next reviewer it might be someone else, or maybe it will be me.
It's possible that 1992 was a transitional year for my book notes. In the early years I recorded my comments, not bothering to abstract the book. In the first place, I didn't forget books after I read them. In the second place, I was focused on recording my reactions. The proportion of the writing that was about me, as opposed to being about the book, was higher. Then I began to realize that I wasn't going to remember all of these books for my whole life and I decided to preserve something of them. Hence comments like "for the record."
| Author | Gogol, Nikolai |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1842 |
| Number of Pages | 135 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | August 1992 |
Taras Bulba is a middle aged Cossack leader in the 17th century. When his two boys return from seminary school in Polish territory he takes them to the "Sitch", the Cossack gathering where all the Zaporozhians gather to drink and carouse and make war. Bulba does his best to stir up some war plan to satisfy his desire to fight and make fighters of his big strong sons. When some Cossacks come in with a tale of oppression, Taras Bulba helps stir them all up, first for a pogrom to kill all the Jews trading at the Sitch, then for a war on Poles and Jews.
In the war, one son, Andrii, falls in love with a Polish girl and joins the other side. Taras simply kills him. The other is captured and tortured to death. Taras launches a crusade to kill all Poles and Jews, even little babies. In the end he is himself run down, caught, and burned alive.
Unless I have somehow missed everything, this is an astonishingly pig-headed, racist, chauvinist, barbaric story by one of the world's great writers. It is well written but the ideas it presents are, in the literal sense of the word, atrocious.
The ideas presented are at about the level of the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. Jews are portrayed as filthy, avaricious to the point of recklessness, obsequious, weak, clever, and insidious - not to mention physically ugly - skinny with long legs, short bodies, freckles, and protruding lips. Gogol actually seems to endorse their destruction and to romanticize the organized barbarity of the Cossacks.
The novel is well written but not at all what I expected from the author of The Overcoat, Dead Souls, and The Inspector General.
I had a very favorable view of Gogol before reading this book. Dead Souls, The Overcoat, and the Danny Kaye movie version of The Inspector General did not prepare me for what I was about to read. Reading Taras Bulba gave me a real shock.
In the original 3x5 index card on which the above was written, the first paragraph of my "comment" field was actually the first paragraph on the card. I moved it because it is very much a comment and not part of an abstract of the book.
Re-reading my notes I had to ask myself if I somehow misinterpreted what I read. Could Gogol have been attacking antisemitism? I am quite sure that the answer is No. I won't say that Gogol exalted the barbarity of the Cossacks, but he gave them a lot more sympathy than he gave the Jews.
In the Wikipedia article on Taras Bulba, not available of course in 1992, there is an acknowledgment of some antisemitism but the author also writes, "... in Taras Bulba, as in Gogol's work generally, his treatment of the Jews is realistic and sometimes sympathetic ..." My jaw drops in amazement at such a false and ridiculous statement. What can be going on in that person's head? I have posted a riposte on the "talk" page for that article. If I hear no objection, I may rewrite that section of the article.
In my collation section I listed the copyright date as 1831, which must have come from the edition I read. The Wikipedia gives 1835 for the first edition and 1842 for a second with substantial changes. The version I read looks like the 1842 version, so I've changed the date to that. Gogol was born in 1809 (again according to the Wikipedia). He would have been only 26 in 1835, but 33 in 1842 - old enough to have reached the age of discretion.
The egregious comment is still in the Wikipedia but I don't feel that I can edit it without re-reading passages in the book. Someone did at least put a [citation needed] statement after the statement that treatment of Jews was sympathetic.
| Author | Levi, Primo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Italian |
| Translators | Woolf, Stuart |
| Publication | New York: Summit Books |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 173 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | August 1992 |
Captured by Fascist militia in December 1943, Levi was sent to Auschwitz where he was made a laborer at Buna, a synthetic rubber plant which never actually went into production. He worked there as a slave until he was freed by the Russians in January 1945. His survival was due to luck, to help from friends, including an Italian civilian worker who gave food to him and his friend, to being given a job in the laboratory at a critical time, to an illness which put him in the hospital just before the end when all who could march were marched out to their deaths, and to his own resourcefulness in stealing, trading, shirking, and staying alive.
Levi did his best to remain a human being throughout the ordeal. he did not do so as well as he would have hoped - but the conditions were impossible. He did witness the hanging of a Jew who had actually blown up a crematorium, a real hero and human being.
The prevailing feelings in the story are of intense suffering - by day and by night. Severe cold, severe hunger, wooden shoes that hurt the feet, rain and snow without winter clothing. The German guards had a million absurd rules such as that it is illegal to pad out their clothing with paper.
A remarkable document. It is very different from Stefan Olivier's Rise Up in Anger. It is more the record of a humanist and of a slave.
The hanging Levi witnessed was performed publicly in front of all of the inmates. They were marched out to witness what would happen to them if they rebelled. Just before he was hanged, the rebel yelled out "Ich bin der letzte", "I am the last". I'm not sure what it meant and don't remember how Levi interpreted it. Perhaps he meant to say that everyone else had given up on resistance to evil, but not him.
Laurent Binet wished that he could record the name of every Czech who helped in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. He wanted to preserve their memory forever (see HHhH. Levi didn't know the name of the man who was hanged but he did preserve something of the memory of the man's deed and of his statement. That is something. I hope that Levi's books and his name will both be preserved forever. He is one of my heroes.
| Author | Deighton, Len |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 571 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Nazism; Germany |
| When Read | August 1992 |
Subtitled "A Novel of a Berlin Family". The story opens with the birth of Harald Winter's second son Pauli, in Vienna, in 1900. Harald is a wealthy Berlin banker with an American wife and a Hungarian Jewish mistress. His older son Peter is studious and intellectual. The younger, Pauli, is not as good at academics but is a fine fellow, eager to please and well liked by all.
Both boys are caught up in the First World War. Peter becomes a Zeppelin officer and, after a crash and wound, a staff officer in the navy. Pauli is a front line stormtroop leader who sees tremendous fighting and dying. After the war Peter goes into his father's business and later marries an American Jew. Pauli joins the Freikorps and then also goes to law school. His biggest, and eventually his only, client is the Nazi Party. Without ever seeming to believe in Nazi bullshit, Pauli is nevertheless more and more deeply involved in Nazism, becoming a real criminal without ever ceasing to be a nice guy. Although Peter works against the Nazis and for the Americans, he helps Pauli escape from Allied arrest after the war and both are killed by American soldiers who hunt them down.
The writing and storytelling in this book are competent but not exceptional. Where it excels is in its picture of decent, educated people who go along with madness, barbarity, savagery. The Nazis are portrayed from the inside. They are not another political party. They are not one political point of view. Rather they are a collection of thugs, killers, and crazies who are in it for personal gain, not ideas. That educated, high class Germans went along with them shows the severity of conditions, the weakness of democratic institutions, and the lack of political education in Germany. But of course, until it actually happened, nobody could believe that the Nazis were truly as bad as they appeared to be.
See diary for August.
One night in the 1930's Pauli Winter gets a call. The Fuhrer wants a new law authorizing the euthanasia of "incurables". Now the chief lawyer for the Party, Pauli is expected to produce a draft of the law. He complains to his friends at dinner (I paraphrase) "Isn't that just like them? If a guy has an incurable pain in the ass, do we shoot him? They never think anything through."
It is a marvelous scene, bringing out the way in which an intelligent man who has never paid attention to the big issues of politics, ethics, or anything else, is drawn into evil without even thinking about it. For Pauli, unlike Peter, life is simple and personal. Goings on in the world around him aren't really his concern except in so far as they directly affect him.
Can all of this be changed? I don't know. I think it can but whether the change can become permanent is an entirely different question. Perhaps it will require changes in human biology - a more and more foreseeable possibility - before there will be really big changes in society. But of course changes in biology can go in any direction. Evolution is neutral with respect to ethics. Ethics is not a factor in survival or natural selection.
I've learned a lot about Nazi Germany since reading this novel, but nothing I've learned makes Deighton's view seem any less cogent to me than it did in 1992.
| Author | de Hartog, Jan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Atheneum, 1966 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 85 |
| Extras | In Call of the Sea. |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 1992 |
Before the Zuider Zee dam was completed in 1931, the Dutch sea hosted a thousand small fishing sailboats. de Hartog tells the story of a ten year old boy, presumably himself, who is kidnapped by the "Black Skipper" of one of the boats to become a "sea mouse", a little boy whose job it is to cook, clean, and perform other duties on one of the boats.
The tale is very charmingly told, of a romantic way of life, hard but, in the eyes of a ten year old, very glorious.
Little Jan is an orphan, living with two other orphans in the care of a widow. One day he sneaks out of the house when he shouldn't and gets his clothes all wet. He stays out late to dry them and is found at night, naked and freezing, by the Black Skipper, who carries him to his boat. There he meets Murk the cat, Bonk the sea boy, and the deckhand, and works with them all week. On Sunday they all go to church where there is a hilarious scene of all the sea mice in the gallery.
After three months the boy is loving the life and wants to grow up on the sea but there is an attack by a Catholic boat and crew and a vicious fight - which terrifies the boy and convinces him to run away. When they land for repairs he is locked in but escapes through the cat's exit and returns home. There he tells the tales of the sea and discovers that he is a born liar, like the liar they hired on the boat to tell stories (a wonderful mermaid story within the story) in exchange for gin.
In an epilogue a man returns to the area years later to find the sea all gone and new settlements with new traditions growing up.
This was a delightful story by a very humane writer capable of seeing the humor and the fineness in all kinds of people.
| Author | Ludlum, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 601 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | September 1992 |
An extraordinarily far-fetched tale, even for Ludlum, about the best American spy and the best Russian spy, both outcast and hunted by their own governments, tracking down a 68 year old conspiracy to take over the world that is coming close to fruition.
In 1911 Guillaume of Matarese, in Corsica, gathers a small group of once rich conspirators and initiates an organization which specializes in murder and terror to achieve political ends. Brandon "Bray" Scofield and Vassili Taleniekov team up to expose and destroy it. They begin by hating each other but the Russian gradually convinces the American of the danger of the conspiracy. After many episodes of comic book style heroic action they find the enemy in Boston and do them all in. Taleniekov is killed but Scofield escapes with the girl to the accolades of his government and retirement as a charter yacht operator in the Caribbean.
L's fast paced juvenile style of writing is silly, manipulative, unbelievable and yet easy to read, hard to put down. Once in a while it fits my mood, but not too often.
So far, 23 years later, Ludlum has still not fitted my mood. I haven't read any more of his books. It looks, however, like he's doing very well without me.
| Author | Faulkner, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books, 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 305 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 1992 |
F's last book, in the form of an old man's reminiscence from 1962 about events that took place when he was a boy of eleven in 1905. Lucius Priest, son of a prominent banking family in Jefferson Mississippi, is left in the care of servants while his parents and grandfather go to a funeral in Mobile. Without ever actually openly planning it, he knows that Boon Hogganbeck, his grandfather's driver and long time family employee, will take his grandfather's new automobile on a trip. He joins him on an illicit trip to Memphis. Ned McCaslin, a black relative of the family and another long time servant, stows away in the back seat. They go to a whore house in Memphis where Boon pursues his lady love, Lucius learns many new things about life and sin, and Ned initiates a complicated venture beginning with an illegal trade of the auto for an illegally held horse, leading to a horse race in nearby Porsham Tennessee.
It's all complicated and very funny and sentimental and didactic and mysterious and ridiculous at the same time, and all told in the most marvelous story telling style as if given verbally and almost in confidence.
I felt that every character had a place and a destiny and a space within which to operate in this society. Those who knew their place and accepted it lived graciously and successfully while those who struggled against it were always brought to heel. Only the landed gentlemen at the top had the true power to dispose over property and people's lives, except perhaps for Ned, who seemed to be the most independent actor and the only one who could successfully manipulate events - stretching the boundaries of his space without being brought to heel.
F writes brilliantly in delightful rolling sentence in rich, complex English into which dialect fits easily and unobtrusively.
Read for a reading group.
My first exposure to William Faulkner was with The Sound and the Fury, read for a college English class. (there is no write up of it here because I didn't start making these book notes until later.) It was a revelation. Also in college I read Light in August another revelation which, between the two novels convinced me that Faulkner was either the very greatest American novelist, or a close second greatest to Herman Melville.
It wasn't long after reading this that I read As I Lay Dying, which gave me some pause, but not too much. Surely it would be a mistake to require that the greatest writers never write any books that I don't like.
The Reivers doesn't have the weight of the other two books I cited but, from any other writer, it would be considered a great work.
This was the book in which Ned trades the car for a racehorse and then wins an important race by bribing the horse with a "sour dean", i.e., a sardine. It was a funny scene in which Ned, seemingly the least of all the characters, outsmarts everyone else by betting on the horse to win and then later to lose, and having full control of the outcome each time.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: W.W. Norton, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 219 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Easy Rawlins |
| When Read | September 1992 |
In 1948 Los Angeles, Ezekial "Easy" Rawlins, a black war veteran, is laid off from his fabricator's job at one of the big airplane factories. With no income and a mortgage payment coming due he accepts $100 from a dangerous looking white man, Dewitt Albright, to find a beautiful white girl who was last seen in a black night club with another dangerous black man.
The story is complicated. The white girl turns out to be of Negro parentage but with very light skin. Easy eventually tracks her down through a trail of murders, harassment from the police, threats, beatings, and a final scene in which all is revealed and Easy's boyhood friend "Mouse", another dangerous killer, saves Easy and gives him a 1/3 share, $10,000, of money stolen by the girl.
The story is in classical mystery style, told in first person. What really sets it apart is that it is by and about a black man. Easy uses black dialect, not as a device for talking to other black folk, but as the way he speaks. It is done naturally and without the artificial toughness of the "private eye" characters of traditional mysteries. The author writes in standard English but handles Easy's speech very well. The characters, both black and white, are interesting. M gives us characters whom ordinary white people will never meet, and he gives us a perspective on all these characters and on the city, work, society - that we in the white world do not see.
I liked it and hope to read more.
This was the very first book I read by Walter Mosley but very far from the last. He rapidly became one of my favorite authors. It appears to be the first book that he published. He was a 38 year old son of a black father and Jewish mother who could not marry because no one would give them a marriage license (see Wikipedia).
I very much liked to read about all of Mosley's characters from Easy Rawlins to Socrates Fortlow, to Fearless Jones, to Ptolemy Grey. The minor characters were equally interesting. I believe Mosley to be one of the great American novelists.
| Author | Walter, Jakob |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday, 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 170 |
| Extras | Edited and with an introduction by Marc Raeff |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | September 1992 |
There are accounts of three campaigns here by a German Westphalian stone mason called up to serve in Napoleon's armies. The last and longest account is of the ordeal to Moscow and back. W was one of the 600,000 who left and only 25,000 who made it back.
Oddly to me, there are no politics in here at all. If Jakob questions whether or why he should serve or kill the "enemy", it is not in this book. He seems to take it for granted that he will do what he is told. He asks no questions. If his account is to be believed, he fights courageously so long as victory is possible. When it is not, as on the march home from Moscow, he does what is necessary to survive. He trusts in God, obeys his officers, and keeps a special lookout for men from his home town and its environs.
The Moscow ordeal involved tremendous suffering and loss even to reach the city. The armies of those days carried little food and clothing and could not move supplies from behind over a thousand miles of dirt road by horse and wagon. What transport was available was devoted to moving cannons and munitions. The army had to live by foraging. So the Russian scorched earth policy made it impossible for them to eat. They starved coming into the city, feasted on the city's supplies, and then starved and froze going home. W survived by expert foraging, by attaching himself to an officer who gave him a horse, by stealing the horse back, or another horse, after it was stolen from him, by forming temporary alliances, by keeping himself in the safest part of the moving horde, and by luck. He arrives home a wreck on the verge of death but recovers to write this account, given to his son who carried it to Kansas where it survived to be published today.
This was said to be the only surviving account of the wars written by an enlisted man. In those days it was mainly officers and "gentlemen" who were literate enough for this sort of work. I wouldn't be surprised however if there were other accounts written and left in attics, perhaps still to be discovered or published.
My recollection of the account is of freezing, starving men, stumbling through the snow, with bands of Cossacks constantly nipping at the edge of the mass, cutting out stragglers and small groups and annihilating them. Walter survived in part by staying in the center of mass that was too strong to be overwhelmed by companies of Cossacks, and in part by defending his coat, his food, his horse, and his relationship to the officer against his own comrades.
I suppose that some men would read an account like this and imagine themselves to be survivors, like Walter. I can only imagine myself, straggling behind, starving and freezing, until my head is smashed in by a Cossack sword or pistol shot. I read a great deal about wars but am very glad that I never had to fight in one.
| Author | Foster, E.M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books, 1920 |
| Copyright Date | 1905 |
| Number of Pages | 184 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1992 |
The widowed daughter in law of a well to do and very class conscious English family goes to Italy with a young woman friend. In a small town there she meets a very young, handsome, but no account Italian man and falls in love with him. Without consulting in-laws or family, and without regard for her eight year old daughter in England, she marries the man. Her brother-in-law Phillip Herrington makes a fruitless trip to Italy only to find the act already done. The Herringtons keep the eight year old and break off contact with the young woman. Two years later, after a very unhappy period, the woman dies in childbirth. Another delegation comes out from England to get the child, only to find that the young Italian loves his son and will not give him up. Harriet Herrington kidnaps the child but he is killed in a carriage accident and everything is a disaster.
Although F was quite young when he wrote this, the story is very sophisticated and functions on many levels. It is an attack on stuffy, English, self-serving, Victorian mores, but without any over sentimentalization of the contrasting Italian culture - whose shortcomings are also exposed. It gradually develops a love interest between Phillip and Caroline, a friend of the family, full of starts and doubts, and compatibilities and explorations, only to crash it hard on the rocks of Caroline's raw, overwhelming physical attraction to the Italian.
The clash of temperaments, values and cultures is used to show strengths and fundamental flaws in each. There is no possible retreat either into English or Italian society. There is only the possibility of understanding both.
A fine book.
I think of Forster as an early 20th century writer, which he was, but he lived on until 1970, dying at the age of 91. I was already 24 years old at that time but had still not read any of his books.
The first book I read was his Aspects of the Novel, which influenced my thinking about books quite a bit. My records indicate that I have still not read A Room with a View or Howard's End, though I've seen excellent Merchant-Ivory versions of each of them. Perhaps there is still time, or perhaps the films have so pervaded my thinking about them that I will not be interested in reading the books.
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Delacorte Press, 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 280 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | October 1992 |
"Guyer", booted out of the CIA during a mass lay off in 1977, operates his own private intelligence operation in New York. With Richard List, a brilliant computer programmer and crippled former CIA mercenary in Laos, and two employees, he operates Metro Data Research. Their specialty is finding doubles for people. They have collected over two million photos, scanned them, and written programs to match characteristics in order to find a double for someone.
He tries to salve his conscience by believing that his doubles will not be hurt and that the things he does are not so bad but, driven by financial need, he accepts a job to find a double for a terrorist wanted by police everywhere and hears that the double is killed to make it look like the terrorist is dead. In deeper and deeper, he contracts to find one of the men in the deal and does find him, then has to go along with killing him. Meanwhile, he and List are turning against each other.
In the end it turns out that Guyer's company is being manipulated by another organization which has determined to take over his business. They in turn are manipulated by the CIA, which has decided to put all of them out of business, first saving the poor shoe salesman who was to double for the terrorist.
Not as brilliant or as historically interesting as Dark Star, and somewhat dubious in the computer technical details, it nevertheless shows some of the depth and penetration of Furst as a writer and as an observer of the underside of the "shadow trade".
I think all of the Alan Furst novels I read after this one were about spies and other people working undercover against the Nazis. He got into a groove with those stories and wrote them over and over, possibly for commercial reasons though I've always imagined that he was, in fact, obsessed with the period and the subject and wrote them almost compulsively.
| Author | Hardy, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: MacMillan, 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1897 |
| Number of Pages | 218 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1992 |
The story opens with Jocelyn Pierston, "a young man of twenty", who returns to his native peninsula on the English Channel to visit his father and there meets his childhood friend Avice Caro. She has always been the girl he liked best, though he never loved her, and when she greets him with open delight and a childish kiss, various things happen and he asks her to marry him. But at the last minute he jilts her for another local girl, Marcia Bencomb, whom he just met but falls completely in love with - and she in turn jilts him.
It turns out that JP has a peculiar problem. He is always falling in and out of love. He has come to characterize this as the "pursuit of the well beloved" who seems to move always from one woman to another, never staying in one body.
As "a young man of forty", Jocelyn, still unmarried, discovers that Avice has died but left a daughter who looks just like her. Now he is in love with the new Avice, but she is an ignorant washerwoman who suffers from the same affliction as Jocelyn. She too is fickle. Further, she has already married a man she can no longer stand. Jocelyn sends her back to her husband.
Finally, as "a young man of sixty", Jocelyn discovers a third Avice and, using his money and his gentlemanly bearing and status, arranges a marriage with the young girl. But she runs off with her own young man - whom she too later wishes to desert.
This is a very intellectual book but about people who live what seem to me to be the strangest and most self-defeating lives. Hardy himself was apparently very unhappy in his marriage. In his Victorian way he presents a story of frustrated desire in a sublimated and false way.
Having a very good marriage myself, I shudder to think what life might have been like if my marriage had been like, say, that of my parents - both good and intelligent people but with what I consider to have been a terrible marriage. The relationships that Hardy is describing are probably worse than that of my parents.
The people in this book are flawed and are the source of their own misery, but there are many things about our lives that are the outcomes of pure chance.
| Author | McBain, Ed |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 331 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | 87th Precinct |
| When Read | November 1992 |
A Catholic priest is savagely stabbed to death in the garden of the church. The police investigate. Detectives Hawes and Carella interview a half dozen characters about the events leading up to the murder, hearing a different story from each. Some are outright liars. Some merely have a different perspective on what happened. They suspect a black drug dealer, then a group of white boys who beat him and who also turn out to have been dealing drugs. There is also a satanist, a pretty secretary who could have been (but wasn't) having an affair with the priest, and a violent vicious parishioner who argued with the priest over money for the church. In the end it turns out to have been a 13 year old girl, president of the CYO (Catholic Youth Organization), who caught the priest in bed with a woman and later killed him out of rage.
A second, completely unrelated plot, concerns the girlfriend of Detective Willis who was once a prostitute who murdered and robbed a brutal pimp in Buenos Aires. Two killers have come to get the money back from her. She tries to buy them off but can't. She decides to kill them and is herself killed in the process. Willis tries desperately to figure it all out and save her and in fact kills off the killers, but he dies too.
This is a better than average work. The characters are interesting and the two plots are absorbing, but there is much more here. There is a penetrating look at the sociology and psychology of the city. The two black kids living by drugs and prostitution, the white kids who take on various guises from racist thugs to upstanding community protectors to drug crazed wild boys, the aging beauty who seduced the priest, the tough prostitute ready to shoot it out with killers, the priest, and the idealistic, religious, nice girl who killed him. All are well done.
| Author | Reich, Robert B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Times Books, Random House, 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 289 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics; Economics; Essays |
| When Read | November 1992 |
A collection of essays, many previously published, on American politics and economics. R is a Harvard professor and advisor to Dukakis and Clinton, a lecturer for public TV, and an all around activist in pursuit of a more enlightened and humane economic policy in the US. He provides many convincing and easily understandable explanations of complex phenomena such as the growing domination of finance and speculation over production, the proliferation of regulation, the role of American companies abroad ("in 1985 American owned corporations sold the Japanese over $53 billion worth of goods that they made in Japan - a sum greater than the American trade deficit with Japan that year...")
Reich is a humane, enlightened man who cares as much about women as men, about third world workers as American workers, and about the quality, spirit, and ethics of society as about its material wealth.
He does not advance simple solutions. In many cases he shows that the problems we face are deeply embedded in out situation and are not going to ve solved. When he does give solutions he is not always convincing. His worst prescription, as far as I can tell, is to actually assist in the transfer of basic industry overseas. I see no way that the huge unskilled and semi-skilled work force in the US is going to be converted to high tech employment. Nor do I see why many underdeveloped countries can't compete perfectly well in high tech manufacturing.
I expect Clinton will not give in to him on that.
I recall one of Reich's essays about the genesis of government regulations. He imagines someone inventing a great vacuum cleaner that works better than others but has the nasty feature of making too much noise. After complaints, a government regulation is promulgated to prevent noise pollution. The manufacturer says their machine isn't noisy. The government tightens its regulations, naming a specific decibel level. The manufacturer tests in a certain background where the level is not reached. Regulators and regulation evaders escalate until a ridiculously complex government regulation requiring testing in a carefully prescribed environment with specific machinery, etc. is enacted. Now a new manufacturer arrives on the scene and looks at this regulation he must conform to. He says "What the hell is this!" and calls his Congressman to complain.
What we really needed was a regulation that said don't make too much noise. But that's impossible, so we get what we get.
Reich is a former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, and now a professor at Berkeley. He was formerly a professor at Harvard, at Brandeis, an editor of the New Republic, and has credentials at the Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other prestigious organizations. He's about six weeks younger than I am.
I haven't read any of his books since this one, but I do watch the video blogs that he produces for MoveOn, the left wing political organization. He draws cartoons on a whiteboard, sped up by fast motion photography, while explaining basic concepts in economics and progressive politics in language that most anyone can understand.
I really admire the guy.
| Author | Flaubert, Gustave |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Jellinek Frank |
| Publication | New York: Serendipity Press, 1967 |
| Copyright Date | 1842 |
| Number of Pages | 164 |
| Extras | Editing and introduction by Francis Steegmuller. |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 1992 |
Written when Flaubert was only 20 (1842 is the date it was written, not really a copyright date) and not published during his lifetime, this is a story of an unbearably sensitive young man's first sexual experience, with a prostitute. The book opens with 50 pages of so of florid descriptions of what seem like manic depressive mood swings. F is never sad, he is stifling in the desert. He is never happy, he is ecstatic with crashing waves and sunbeams. He does not wish for a sexual encounter or even a love affair, but wants a beautiful goddess whom he can shower with diamonds and expire at her feet. What he gets, of course, is the town prostitute, whom he treats as an exotic nymphomaniac beauty who has an extraordinary past and who runs away from town after only one night with our hero, leaving him to pine away and die of unfulfilled love.
This is a surprisingly romantic beginning for the ruthless realist who was to write Madame Bovary and Salambo. It is juvenile and even ridiculous and yet, for all that, it is intelligent, sensitive, and at times brilliant. If it is not a very good book, then it is at least a very interesting one. It has the ability to see and articulate significant truths, which is the hallmark of great writers - one hallmark anyway.
I find it very interesting that Flaubert's roots were in this wild, youthful romanticism. It adds something to him and gives us a fresh perspective on his later pessimism and objectivity.
Read in November, 1992, 150 years after it was written.
Although I have some memory of this book, I have stronger memories of Madame Bovary and Salambo. Thinking of those two novels and re-reading what I wrote in 1992, I wonder if I missed the point of the book. Could the young Flaubert have been writing his story of youthful innocence and exuberance, not in a spirit of romanticism, but in a spirit of cynicism, exposing the foolishness of romanticism/?
I couldn't say one way or another without re-reading the novel, but I trust my 46 year old self to have considered and rejected that view.
I looked for help in the Wikipedia and Amazon reviews, but there was no consideration there of my question and I'm not motivated to track down serious criticism. The book, interesting and well written, was not of consuming interest.
See my diary entries for November 28 and 29, 1992.
| Author | Morrow, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 104 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 1992 |
A quite remarkable SF tale about a man, Jack Sperry, living in Veritas, the city of truth. At age 10, each citizen of Veritas is taken for a "brain burn" in which he is conditioned to always and only tell the truth. As a result, there is no advertising puffery. People drive Plymouth Adequates and drink Donaldson's Drinkable coffee. Shop girls tell the customers that they can buy cheaper down the street and cops belong to the Brutality Squad.
Jack works as an art critic and "deconstructionist". He burns and smashes old classics from the age of lies. Then he learns that his seven year old son Toby, at camp Ditch-the-Kids, has been bitten by a sick rabbit and will die of the incurable Xavier's Plague. When the doctors inform him that there is absolutely no hope he resolves to try "psychoneuroimmunology", willing remission by believing that you will get better. For that he must become a "dissembler", a liar. He discovers the liars' underground movement (literally underground) in Veritas who teach him to lie. Then he gets the boy and attempts to make him well by positive thinking, great gifts, fun times, and the help of all the other dissemblers. But the boy's condition deteriorates and Jack must revert to the truth and tell him he will die. After Toby's death Jack and his wife escape from Veritas and live on a boat in the Caribbean.
This is really an excellent book, one of the best I have read in the SF genre. It is really not in the SF tradition but more a social allegory, like Swift perhaps, but much more complex and interesting in its social ideas. I liked it very much.
If you (whoever you are) read the "notes" elements in reverse order to the titles, you'll see the progression of my thoughts as I convert the 3x5 book cards from paper to XML. After 23 years there are some books that I can hardly remember or not remember at all, and others that made a strong impression that has stayed with me. This book made a strong impression and is still with me.
In one scene, family and friends have gathered at a funeral. They talk about the dead person quite objectively, listing faults and failures very freely. Then, in a conversational (not confessional) tone, a woman says that she's bored and wants to leave.
Morrow teaches his readers about how truth and lies function in society, how lies can be important in smoothing the friction in society, or maybe how they really aren't important and truth, rough as it is, works. The reader has to judge.
I still think it was a fine book.
| Author | Mishima, Yukio |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Japanese |
| Translators | Nathan, John |
| Publication | New York: Wideview/Pengee, G.P. Putnam, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 181 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Japan |
| When Read | December 1992 |
A 34 year old sailor / second mate and a young widow owner of a fashionable clothing store fall in love. He is a simple man with a very limited education but with a deep mystical belief in a destiny that awaits him, and in the confluence of love and death. He goes on another voyage after meeting her but returns and stays to marry and work in the shop.
Noboru, the 13 year old son of the widow has other ideas. He loved the sailor for his silent, strong, rugged individualism but feels betrayed by his willingness to come ashore and become a father and shopkeeper and ordinary civilized man. N belongs to a group of five very bright but perverse boys led by a brilliant lunatic who conceives the idea of killing the sailor as an assertion of their superiority to ordinary mortals and as punishment for the sailor's willingness to be an ordinary man. Just as the sailor imagines that he has given up his formless dream of destiny and love and death, he drinks the drugged tea which will initiate his murder.
This book has all of M's clear, clean prose and aesthetic sensitivity but also his madness. Noboru and his friends have Raskolnikov's ego and conceit but, unlike Dostoevsky's hero, they do not grow out of it.
I like Mishima's beautiful writing and his love of fine, simple, strong men. But his obsession with death is disturbing and sick. It is a paradox.
This book shocked me when I read it. In Crime and Punishment there is a growing consciousness of the nature of crime in the killer and there is deserved punishment. Raskolnikov grows from an egocentric man who thinks that law and morality should not apply to him, to a more mature man who learns to appreciate that he is not superior to others, even to the old woman he despised and murdered.
There isn't much of that in Mishima and it's harder for a man like me to accept the author's indifference to conventional morality and belief that life may have no special worth over death. As a man of science who understands the biology of life, I can take a dispassionate view. However as a self-conscious man who relates to others, I can't take that view.
The main scene from the book that I still remember, perhaps now only vaguely accurate, is of the sailor walking with the boys and sitting in their circle, innocently drinking the tea, and of the boys failure to show any special disturbance or shame at his death.
See my diary entries for December 11 (the main one) and December 29, 1992. This book was chosen by the book group I belonged to at the time and we discussed it.
| Author | Hammett, Dashiell |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1931 |
| Number of Pages | 214 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 1992 |
An unusual noir novel about a very smart man who works as an adviser to a behind the scenes boss of politicians and as a professional gambler. His full name is Ned Beaumont and, in a strange conceit, H never refers to him as "Ned" or "Beaumont" but always by both names.
N.B.'s ally, Paul Madvig, is running the (unnamed) city through a network of elected and appointed officials who are beholden to him. It appears that he is corrupt, making money off city contracts and controlling judges and police. But he is less corrupt than his former protege and new rival Shad O'Rory, who aims to discredit Madvig and take his place. Madvig pursues a Senator's daughter and aspires to higher society - but it doesn't work out. The Senator's son is murdered (N.B. proves at the end that the Senator did it) and Madvig is accused.
In the end, Ned Beaumont unravels it all, sees O'Rory killed, saves Madvig, exposes the Senator, and makes off with the Senator's daughter.
There is a surprising mixture of morality and amorality here. It is never clear where H or NB stand. An odd, interesting, somewhat surprising book.
Twenty-three years after reading this, I have no real memory of this or the next one, the Alistair MacLean thriller. Both of those were among my favorite popular writers but it is their better known books that I remember, not these. The better known books were often made into movies - which undoubtedly places them more deeply in memory.
It's easy, when reading my summary of a book, to convince myself that I remember what I wrote. But in all honesty, it's something of a stretch.
Have I commented on the memory problem before? Undoubtedly, both here and in my diary. I'll undoubtedly comment again. Enough years have passed however that I can't beat myself up for not remembering these after reading a thousand more after them and a thousand or two before. The notes are supposed to help me remember. If they don't, and they can only help if there are enough threads to pick up still remaining, they're still tracks left by my encounter with the books. The tracks aren't in my brain. The pathways there have been overwritten. But they are the product of my brain nonetheless.
Perhaps this is a more fit subject for the diary, but maybe they should be here too, though God knows if I'll ever read them here again. But, as Laurent Binet would say in HHhH, I digress.
| Author | MacLean, Alistair |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 254 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | December 1992 |
A very pure adventure story with all the classic elements, a courageous but sarcastic and self-deprecating hero, a beautiful woman, storms at sea, tricks, counter-tricks, and counter-counter-tricks, and a full complement of bad guys - even a lonely castle on an offshore island.
The hero, Phillip Calvert, is a British Secret Service agent sent to find out who hijacked the steamer Nantesville, carrying eight million pounds in gold. He finds the ship amidst the Western Islands off Scotland and uncovers the bad guys. The adventures include fights on ships on land and undersea, a helicopter search and the shooting down of the helicopter and escape from underwater, and a final ramming of a boathouse from the sea.
All in all silly good fun, done with enough wit to make it completely palatable. I particularly liked the midnight encounter with a billy goat on the enemy held island.
See the diary entry for December 25, 1992.