Books read January through December 1994
| Author | Follett, Ken |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Signet Books, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 526 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | January 1994 |
A very traditional pot boiler thriller involving the fictional last trans-Atlantic crossing of the Pan American Clipper at the beginning of World War II. We are separately introduced to each of a half dozen characters who will be on the flight, learning what it is that they are flying from or towards. 135 pages into the story, they all take off, freighted with their various concerns.
The main characters are: The Oxenfords, Lord and Lady, with two children Percy and Margaret. Lord Ox is Britain's leading fascist, fleeing arrest. His daughter is a socialist, dreaming of escape from her tyrannical father. Harry Marks is a handsome young jewel thief who falls for Margaret. Diana Lovesey is a beautiful woman leaving her strong but boring husband for a Hollywood screenwriter and Mervyn Lovesey, the husband, follows, boarding with Nancy Lenehan, a Boston shoe manufacturer locked in a corporate struggle with her brother. Others are a German Jewish physicist, a French Zionist millionaire, an FBI agent with a fugitive (also an FBI agent acting as a decoy), a British cop, and an American fascist in league with someone, plotting to take someone off the clipper.
526 pages is too much to summarize in detail. The bad guys take the flight engineer's wife and force him to bring the plane down off the US / Canada border, but they are thwarted and all the boys get all the girls.
There is nothing fancy or literary about this. Not all of it is convincing and none goes much deeper than the traditional formulas. But somehow Follett seems to do it all right - in just the traditionally satisfying way.
It's one of my little guilty pleasures (not really very guilty) to read books like this.
I seem to recall that there was a German submarine that was to meet the plane after it was brought down onto the water by the fascist agents on board. There was some shooting and the sub was driven away or sunk. I believe Lord Ox was killed, or killed himself, at the end.
I see that I only read one book in January of 1994. Looking back through my diary to find out why I see entries about buying our new house that month - which took a lot of time and energy, and some battles with Dan, which also took time and energy.
| Author | Kohn, Hans |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pocket Books, 1964 |
| Number of Pages | 211 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | February 1994 |
This is a brief autobiography by an eminent historian, reflecting on the times through which he lived as much as any personal details of his life. Kohn was born to a German speaking Jewish family in Prague. He was sent to a gymnasium and a university there, graduating with honors, all before 1914. He joined a Zionist youth movement and was influenced by the nationalism which then dominated central Europe. He became an officer in the war and was captured in 1915, spending the rest of the years of war and revolution, through 1920, in Samarkand and Siberia. He came back and then lived for significant periods in Paris, Palestine, and London while publishing a series of books on nationalism and the Middle East. In the 30's he came to live and teach in the U.S. where he worked at Smith College, Harvard, and CCNY, from which he was forcibly retired at age 70 with very little pension. At the time of his writing of this book he was wandering from one temporary post to another, he and his wife having given up their home in New York and given away most of their books and possessions.
K was pretty much a liberal humanist. He was an admirer of Marx and Lenin but held that communism failed to deliver personal liberty or a solution to material needs - and had to fail because it aimed at the impossible and used the wrong means. Of course fascism was much worse. Yet he still speaks of a world revolution in progress during the 20th century. He believes in the spread of democracy, the integration of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, a growth of social mobility, an increase in the level of education - all constitute a progressive social revolution.
A minor book by a strong thinker, an accomplished scholar, and a thoroughly decent and likable man.
I remember nothing at all of this book but I'm glad that I have notes on it. I'm glad that Kohn and his wife got out of Europe ahead of the Holocaust and made it to the United States. Living in the U.S. on a minimal income is still vastly better than dying in a Nazi death camp.
I just edited the small Wikipedia article for Kohn, adding a citation to this book as an autobiography. It was already listed as a historical work.
| Author | Mahfouz, Naguib |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Arabic |
| Translators | Henry, Kristen Walker; al-Warrahi, Nariman Khales Naili |
| Publication | Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 124 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1994 |
Omar, an affluent banker and owner of apartment blocks, goes to his doctor, suffering from depression. The doctor prescribes diet and exercise but Omar longs for a change in life, a new, intense passion to replace his youthful zeal for socialism and love of poetry and his now stale love of a devoted but uninteresting wife. He decides on adultery. After frequenting the cafes where dancers and prostitutes are to be found he takes up with a young dancer, Warda, and moves into an apartment with her, aflame with love. But he can't sustain it. He tries a series of other girls, alienating his devoted wife and daughter and letting his business slide. But nothing helps. after a mystic experience observing the dawn over the pyramids, he gives himself over to mysticism and slides into psychosis.
Meanwhile his university friend who has been in prison for many years for throwing a bomb but who never implicated Omar or Mustapha, another friend, is released. He wants to know why Omar has become bourgeois. Why has he betrayed his ideals? At first Omar is ashamed but then merely bored. He is consumed by his own ennui and obsession. Othman, the zealot, marries Buthayma, Omar's daughter, and goes into hiding at Omar's hideaway. But he is found. The police catch him and shoot Omar. The wound perhaps brings him back to reality. We don't know.
This is a complex political and psychological work of great depth. It was terribly interesting but difficult to understand.
I believe this is the first book I read by Naguib Mahfouz. I read more in the coming months and eventually read Palace Walk. As I write this, I still have Palace of Desire, the second book of the Cairo Trilogy, on my night table, though I haven't picked it up in a couple of years. Still, I am a big fan of Mahfouz.
I wrote on my book card that this book was written in the late 1950's but the Arabic edition was published in 1965.
I have finished Palace of Desire. Only Sugar Street of the great trilogy remains for me to read.
| Author | Carver, Raymond |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 391 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | February 1994 |
37 stories spanning Carver's writing career.
I won't list them but instead talk about them as a single body of work. All of the stories are about people involved, as it says in one of the stories, in "compulsion and error." They all hate their work, they all have serious problems with their relationships, but none are capable of doing anything positive about them. The best they can do is to escape, to bolt, to remarry. Often they do self-destructive things, committed only to making a change, for better or worse doesn't matter. In fact, there is a fatalist attitude of "this is so unbearable that it might just as well be worse.
I sympathized with these people's predicaments but not with their attitudes. As people, they were failures in key respects.
Carver wrote about the same people in the same situations over and over again. The stories became more sophisticated and humane as he grew older. They were better able to tolerate multiple characters and points of view. The earlier ones seemed like one story told over and over, about a limited, nasty sort of person facing disaster.
Still, for all my disgust, I must admit that he was an able and important writer who wrote truthfully about a large percentage of the American people.
Two stories remain with me. Others might come to mind if I read something about them.
One was about a day in the life of a teen aged boy. He seems to have a hard-on for most of the day and masturbates a number of times. He lives in the present as many of us, and perhaps most of us as teenagers, do.
The other story is about a reformed alcoholic. He has stopped drinking. He is living with a lovely woman who treats him very well. They are ensconced in a cabin by a lake in the woods. It is an idyllic existence, just what this man, and perhaps Carver, dreams of. Nothing could be better. Then he gets drunk, treats the woman badly, becomes an unbearable person, and throws it all away, all for no discernible reason. It is as if he is a doomed man and somehow determines that escaping his doom is not his fate and so he gives in and dooms himself.
There is a part of me that understands the protagonist of that story. I understand the desire to throw up my hands and give in to whatever bad is going to happen, the desire to just stop struggling, even if the struggle is the only thing keeping my head above water.
I'm not a strong man. I don't pretend to myself that I will always do the hard thing that I know is right because it is right. But I'm not a stupid man either. I won't stop swimming and sink under the waves just because I'm tired. I'll try to keep holding things together even if I'm getting weary doing it. I'll try to keep a rational count of the advantages and disadvantages of all of the courses of action open to me. That doesn't mean I have no sympathy for Carver's protagonist, but it does mean that I'll always try to think my way out of a situation and not simply yield to impulse.
Carver writes about all of this from the inside. Reading biographical information about him I see that he had severe problems with alcohol and impulse control. It would be easy to judge Carver, but who am I to do it? I too understand the pull of drugs and alcohol. I too have given in to them. I haven't gone as far off the deep end as Carver and his characters have, but I have neither the right nor the inclination to throw stones at them.
There is one sentence from this book that I still retain. A man is living in an apartment with, if I remember correctly, his new wife. She talks to him about getting curtains but is having trouble deciding what to get. The man thinks, "I don't care five cents about curtains."
It was a very small masterpiece of characterization.
There are some extensive notes about Carver in my diary entry of January 14, 1994 and another bit on January 16.
| Author | Palmer, William J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ballantine Books, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 295 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 1994 |
"Being an Account of the Macbeth Murders and the Strange Events Surrounding them." "A Secret Victorian Journal Attributed to Wilkie Collins, Discovered and Edited by William J. Palmer."
An appealing mystery written by a Dickens scholar in the persona of Wilkie Collins, the author whom Palmer portrays (I don't know whether it's accurate or not) as a protege of Charles Dickens.
In the story, Dickens is portrayed as loving to walk the back streets of London at night to observe the life of the city. He brings Collins along as a "thick wristed" companion to help scare off muggers. The famous Dickens is known to all (it is 1851) and even police detective Field of the new Metropolitan Protectives is acquainted with his work.
Dickens and Collins become involved with Field, prostitute Irish Meg, and thief/burglar/roustabout Tally Ho Thompson, in tracking down the murderer of a lawyer connected with Covent Garden Theater and its current production of MacBeth. They discover a club of titled gentlemen who engage in depraved sex and rape with teen aged girls bought from down and out mothers. In the end they save a young girl and beat up some of the gentlemen, but otherwise do nothing to them.
A very well done book both as a mystery story and as historical fiction about Dickens and Victorian England. I enjoyed it.
During these years, working at the National Library of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute's International Cancer Information Center, both in Bethesda Maryland, I regularly visited the Montgomery County Library in Wheaton, and occasionally the one on Democracy Boulevard.
I had a regular routine. Every night that my books were due I left work by 6:30 pm and headed to Wheaton. I first went to the large book sale room in the basement, going through the collection for special finds. When it closed at 8 pm I headed upstairs to the library. I'd spend about 45 minutes going through the hardback books and the rest with the paperback racks, looking for books that were light enough to carry around for reading when I was not at home. Many of those books were mysteries, like this one. Some were science fiction or thrillers. There weren't many non-fiction books among them.
Later, when I bought a car with a cassette tape player, I also borrowed books on tape. It was always a problem for me to complete my work early enough to get to the library in time to cover all of my browsing requirements.
| Author | Mahfouz, Naguib |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Arabic |
| Translators | El Enany, Dr. Rasheed |
| Publication | New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 200 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 1994 |
A story of Othman Bayyumi, entering the civil service as a young man, dedicating his life to his ambition, and eventually achieving, though never actually serving, promotion to Director General of his government agency. all of this takes place in the twentieth century but before the revolution in Egypt in 1952.
Othman has a religious dedication to his goal. He believes that it is his calling to rise in the service, that it is his homage to God to do so. He sacrifices everything else to this ambition, including his early love, and later ones too. He serves his bosses and masters with great devotion but is always pleased when they die off, clearing the way for his promotion. In the end, he achieves his goal but he too is served as he served others. He too becomes old and sick and is put aside by those whom he thought to rule.
This is a beautiful book, full of deep insight and extraordinary language. The conception of Othman, his religious ideology, his monomania, his reactions to every stimulus of every kind, form a remarkably complete and consistent whole. Othman is not a bad man. In certain ways he is a very good man, honest, hard working, productive, full of respect. But one side of him is so overdeveloped that it has destroyed all others. Mahfouz shows us the consequences and what it all amounts to in the end.
I have not done justice to it here. This is a great book.
There are a number of scenes that remain in my memory from this book.
Othman studies English hard and becomes completely fluent and proficient in the language. It is one of the paths he pursues to his end. Others also work hard with great dedication but Othman has added language skill that helps him get ahead. In one scene (if I remember correctly) he is with other young men in his department and distinguishes himself by speaking good English.
Othman gave up the girl that he loved and had little time for other girls that attracted him. Later however, after he had established himself, he needed a wife to lend solidity to his social position. It had to be a wife of the right class and the right image. He arranges a marriage with such a woman but the two never have much in common and have no relationship other than a public formal and private financial one.
The most striking scene, the one that I recall best, is his decision in older age to build a tomb for himself. It is to be a little mausoleum with a room for the coffin that is large enough to enter and stand in, in a cemetery for well to do people. After the breakdown of his health and his forced retirement he has no work to go to and no wife at home that he cares about. He finds himself visiting the tomb every day and sitting in the room. It is the place where he is most at peace.
See also my diary entry of February 27, 1994.
| Author | Paretsky, Sara |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ballantine Books, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 215 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 1994 |
Female private investigator V.I (Victoria) Warshawski is engaged by a man who claims to be a banker whose son at the University of Chicago has been seeing a girl who disappeared. V.I. is hired to find her. She goes to the boy's apartment and finds him dead, with the girl missing. It transpires that it was not the banker at all but the girl's father who hired V.I. Eventually she figures out that the boy, and then his father too, were killed because he knew about an insurance racket worked out between a corrupt union boss (father of the girl) and an insurance company vice-president. She saves all the good guys and gets the bad ones.
The story has many of the flaws common to this genre. V.I.'s interest in money is trivialized. She works "the case" long after everyone stopped paying her. She has a smart mouth that is really uncalled for but exercised anyway against cops who are trying to help and bad guys who will hurt her because of it. She wins in the end by getting the drop on three bad guys with guns, karate chopping one, getting his gun, and shooting another in the knee. Many characters are pretty hard to believe in.
Yet for all its flaws, the writing is smooth and competent and its perspective of a female P.I. is unique. This was the first of what turned into a series.
I won't run out to read another but I may read one one day.
I'm aware of 16 V.I. Warshawski novels extant but the day when I'll read another hasn't yet come. If I do, it would probably be best to find the one that has the best reviews rather than to read the second in the series in any expectation of reading through to the end.
| Author | Sheffield, Charles |
|---|---|
| Publication | Riverdale, NY: Baen Books, 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 261 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 1994 |
In a dystopian future, a sickly baby is born to a drug addicted teenage mother and abandoned in the charity ward of a slum hospital. The baby, named Job Napoleon Salk, is sent to the Cloak House orphanage where he lives his childhood. It turns out that the boy has a genius for languages and uses it to help Father Bonifant, "Mr. Bones", the head of the orphanage, work for more trade and contributions in the polyglot slum community of some future unnamed city, but clearly Washington DC.
Mr. Bones is packed off to a Nebraska toxic and nuclear dump (TANDY) because of his seditious ideas and Job is left to grow up in a corrupt orphanage, on the street, as a drug runner for a brothel, as a caught juvenile delinquent, incarcerated in a house of death. Finally he too is sent off to the TANDY as a spy for one of the rulers. There he discovers a plot to wipe out the earth and another to save it. He takes the secrets out with him, escaping with a lethal radiation dose. But before he dies he releases a genetically engineered virus which will reduce fertility and bring the earth's population under control
This is a book that was difficult to put down. Its hard, ugly future was rather extreme and clearly fictional, but it was fiction that worked. S shows great imagination and considerable social understanding. I will look for more of his books.
I expected this book to reveal Job as a boy with supernatural powers. But, to my relief, it didn't unfold that way. Sheffield took the honest route in his creation of his central character. The boy had a gift, but it wasn't a supernatural gift or even a gift that gave him power over others.
The critical scene in the book occurs when Job, hidden in a room in which two evil men are plotting in an unknown language, must try to decipher what they are saying in order to prevent a terrible plot from coming to fruition. The language turns out to be Romanian. Job does not know it, but knows enough Romance and other related languages that, by intense concentration, he is able to figure it out.
I not only believe that's possible, but knew a woman, Judy Checker, who had such a gift and told me that she pulled off a similar feat, meeting with a Palestinian woman who was fleeing from her husband and whom Judy sheltered. The woman told Judy her whole story in the only language she knew, Arabic, and Judy, who knew nothing about Arabic, says that after three days with the woman she had learned the story.
I don't remember to what the "Dragons" in the title referred. I'm not a fan of fantasy, swords and sorcery, or dragon books that are sometimes, in my view, mislabeled as "science fiction."
| Author | Conrad, Joseph |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bantam Books, 1963 |
| Copyright Date | 1899 |
| Number of Pages | 94 |
| Extras | Introduction by Edward Weeks |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 1994 |
This was included in Three Short Novels by Joseph Conrad.
Becalmed on the Thames on a summer evening, three old friends listen to a tale told by a fourth, a sea captain named Marlowe. As night deepens and no one can see anything aboard except the glow of their pipes, Marlowe tells his story about the time he sought out a job as captain of a river steamer on the upper reaches of the Congo River, working for a company attempting to extract ivory from the natives.
In all his time on the river M sees nothing but sloth, inefficiency, waste, cruelty and incompetence. But he hears about Kurtz, the agent upriver who, working alone and unsupported, has sent more ivory than all other agents combined. M is sent upriver with five company men and a group of hired "cannibals" to find Kurtz and re-establish contact. They find him, near death from fever, in the midst of a tribe of savages whom he has led on savage raids, stealing ivory and killing those who resist. M, who looked to Kurtz to show him the way out of all this company stupidity, is repelled. He prevents Kurtz from escaping back to his tribe of followers and holds him on the boat until he dies, uttering his last words, "the horror, the horror." M returns to Belgium and hands out K's diaries to a journalist and sees his "intended", an attractive young woman who is completely taken in by K and whom M hasn't the desire to disabuse.
There is much very effective narrative here and a fine sense of irony, almost comedy, in Conrad's depiction of the Congo. But to our late 20th century ears (mine and others in our book group) the climax with Kurtz seemed disappointing.
An interesting work with an interesting anti-imperialist point of view for that time.
Reading the Wikipedia articles about Heart of Darkness and about Joseph Conrad, I see much more detail than I captured above about some parts of the novel and less about a few others. The details about the boat being attacked by arrows fired from shore, the company men, called "pilgrims" by Marlowe, firing back with Winchester rifles, the woman on shore who is presumably Kurtz' woman, the problems with the boat in the river - all of these come back to memory.
Apparently neither Conrad nor the critics thought too highly of the novella when it was published, both considering it a minor work. Later however "Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that Heart of Darkness had been analyzed more than any other work of literature that is studied in universities and colleges." It was also famously attacked as a racist work by Chinua Achebe.
Was it a racist work? Yes, certainly, but by today's understanding more than by the standards of 1899 when Conrad's work was actually more sympathetic to black Africans than most writing of the time. It was certainly anti-colonialist. If it was harsh in its treatment of relatively primitive black people, it was no less harsh it its condemnation of the venal, lazy, corrupt, and murderous white men who formed the colonial administration of the Belgian Congo.
When I wrote the above abstract and comment in 1994, and the notes in 2015, I hadn't remembered that I first read this book in 1964. Going back over my records for the 1960's and writing comments after the fact in 2019, I hadn't recalled reading it in 1994. My use of diaries and book notes requires supplementation with computer assisted review (which I can now do to at least some extent.) See the notes dated 1964-07.01. They include some discussion of E.H. Carr's theories (read in 2019 q.v.) about the need to place historical characters in historical context in order to understand them, something that, perhaps, Achebe would have done well to do - though I'm in no position to criticize Achebe, a man who knew and understood far more about Africa than I do, and probably far more than Conrad too.
| Author | Gray, Mike |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: W.W. Norton, 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| When Read | March 1994 |
Harrison Storms was the aeronautical engineer and vice-president of North American Aviation who lead the company's effort to secure and then fulfill the contract with NASA to build the second stage and the command module for the Apollo space mission to the moon.
The magnitude of the effort and the commitment of the individuals involved was astounding. Hundreds of thousands of people worked on the project, building dozens or hundreds of prototypes of each part, testing them, then redesigning to shave a few ounces here or improve the strength there. Many workers lost their wives and families because of their absolute devotion to the project, and not a few suffered heart attacks under the pressure and huge amount of overwork.
Storms was the leader of this effort, setting the pace for the others and assembling one of the most talented teams of engineers ever brought together. He raided every department of his own company and every other company he could to get all the best people.
Gray sides with North American in the many frictions between N.A. and NASA. Too often a zealous NASA official, predisposed to believe that the contractors must be ripping them off, would find fault. The operation was so enormously complex, new, and untested that there was always fault to find. The culmination came after the fire that killed three astronauts during a test. Congress, determined to make political capital from the event by finding and punishing malefactors, followed stupid, self-serving paths to their logical ends and Storms was removed from the project just before its success.
A book like Soul of a New Machine and just as good.
It often happens that someone does really well and winds up being castigated for it. This was a particularly egregious example. Looking back on my own career, I count myself pretty lucky for not having very much of that. Perhaps the closest I came was when I recommended my editor software to use in another project at the National Library of Medicine and was told by a user something along the lines of, "That old, slow, program - never!" They contracted with Bob Kline to write something in a weekend - which was a brilliant piece of, as Rick Holt used to say, "Balls to the wall" effort, but it couldn't compare with the editor I had written over two months and had developed over the years. It turned out that the particular group of users who condemned my program were using a version modified by another guy. He converted one second transactions into 1-2 minute transactions due to his terrible handling of MeSH validation. If that were ripped out it would be very fast.
But I wasn't fired for that and I didn't lose the respect of the people that I worked with directly. Harrison Storms was screwed and fired from the project. Storms died the same year that this book was published. Hopefully, he met the author and at least knew about the book before he died.
There's a significant article about Storms in the Wikipedia with the note that 'Screenwriter Mike Gray profiled Storms in his somewhat controversial 1992 book, Angle of Attack. Publishers Weekly described it as a "swaggering portrait of NASA's Apollo project [which] might well be called Indiana Jones and the Engineering Mission of Destiny."'
| Author | Su Tong |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Duke, Michael S. |
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 99 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1994 |
Nineteen year old Lotus arrives at a household to become "fourth mistress" to 48 year old Chen Zuoqian. She competes with the other three wives and, being younger and pretty, she gets much of the attention of the "old master." However one fourth of an older man is not enough for her, or for the other young wife Coral. She becomes restless and is attracted to the young master, Chen Feipu, but is eventually frustrated at discovering that he is homosexual. Increasingly, she is fascinated by and fearful of an old well where she has been told that two unfaithful wives of past heads of the Chen household have drowned - murder or suicide, she knows not which.
She becomes more and more neurotic. Old Chen leaves her for his first wife Joy, and his scheming second wife Cloud. She hears the call of the well. Then Coral is caught by Cloud in adultery with a doctor from town. Coral is dragged home. During the night Lotus awakens to muffled screams as Coral is taken to the well and thrown in. Lotus screams and screams. She accuses Chen of murder, but he says Coral killed herself. When a new wife, Blossom, arrives, she finds Lotus gone mad, spending her days in the garden, talking to the well, saying that she will not jump. She will not jump into the well.
This is a deep and powerful psychological tale of repression and desire. It was written by a young man of 27, living in Nanjing in the People's Republic. Clearly, he is a man well acquainted with complex sexual drives, jealousies and frustrations. It is a small masterpiece.
I remember this story fairly well. It was pretty frightening. Lotus is at the mercy of her husband and his older wives. She is prey to her own fears. There is no escape from the terror and, possibly, no escape from the well.
The book was originally published under the title Wives and Concubines. The current name derives from the title of a movie based on the book.
| Author | Mahfouz, Naguib |
|---|---|
| Editor | Wahba, Magdi |
| Original Language | Arabic |
| Translators | Islam, Mohammed |
| Publication | New Yourk: Anchor Books, Doublday, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1964 |
| Number of Pages | 133 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1994 |
Saber, a young man who has been supported by his mother, a prostitute and madam, finds all his money gone when his mother returns from five years in jail and almost dead. She tells him that his father was a wealthy man and gives him a name and photograph. Then she dies. With nothing left for him in Alexandria and no money to continue his life of drinking and womanizing he goes to Cairo to search for the father he has never known.
He goes to the Cairo Hotel, owned by an old man Khalil and his beautiful, passionate young wife Karima - whom Saber falls in love with. In searching for his father he also meets Elham, another beautiful young woman who works at the newspaper office. Saber is drawn two ways, by the fire of Karima and the cool breeze of Elham. He makes love to Karima at night and tells lies to Elham each afternoon at lunch. Meanwhile his money is running out.
Karima and Saber plot to kill the old man. If he dies, Karima will own the hotel and all his money. She leads Saber on until he suggests it himself. He kills the man but then goes half crazy with fear of the police and lust for Karima - who stays away - out of fear or because she really doesn't love him and only used him? We don't know for sure.
After the crime Saber tries to drive Elham away, only to find, too late, that she could have saved him, loved him in spite of his past, and gotten money to set him up.
He never finds his father, who turns out to be a wealthy rake and sexual addict, like Saber, but free. Saber is caught and hanged.
This is another of Mahfouz' short, powerful novels of obsession and compulsion, taken to its logical and destructive end.
I remember other Mahfouz stories better than this one, but I do remember that every story I have ever read by him impressed me.
| Author | Shaara, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ballantine Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 355 |
| Extras | Maps by Don Pitcher |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | April 1994 |
A novel tracing four days from June 29 to July 3, 1863 at the battle of Gettysburg. The story is told entirely from the perspective of important commanding officers, including Lee and Longstreet from the South, and Colonels Buford and Chamberlain from the North. There is a feel of authenticity, a sense that we really are privy to something a bit like what must have happened - maybe. Certainly there is historical accuracy.
Longstreet is made out to be the man who foresaw the disaster coming and tried hard to warn Lee against the frontal assaults which had no chance of success. But Lee was adamant. He hoped to strike the final blow which would crumple the Union army and attack Washington, winning the war. He never lacked courage and decisiveness but, for some reason, he had a lapse of the patient waiting and wariness that Longstreet had.
It is terrible how many fine, courageous men died at Gettysburg, including much of the Southern officer corps and leadership. In one of Lee's scenes, S has him reflecting how, many years before as young cadets, all the West Pointers imagined growing old together with only a few losses here and there. They never envisioned the grinding slaughter that would wear most of them away.
Norman Schwarzkopf is quoted saying this is the most authentic battle novel he has read. I don't know what he's read. This one was not the best and badly needed the private soldier's perspective, but good nonetheless.
This is one of the novels that I retain in my memory. It opened with a haunting scene of men arriving on the field and the first shot being fired. I was drawn in and expected much from the book, more than was actually delivered. As I noted, it badly needed the private soldier's perspective. Except for that first scene, there was no such perspective and, as a result, the story was heavy on commanders' arguments and decisions but light on the actual "boots on the ground" as people like to say today.
More than at any other time in the war, I believe that Gettysburg represented the peak of the power of the Confederate States Army. They brought more courageous and experienced men and more equipment to Gettysburg than to any other battle. My own speculative conclusion about Lee's decision was that he thought that a victory at Gettysburg was the now or never chance to win the war. He must have known that the odds were against him but he may also have believed that time was not on the side of the Confederacy. The Union kept coming back with more men, more guns, more ships and trains, more experience, better officers, more of everything. Southern courage and adroitness couldn't hold them off forever. If any army could cross the plain, storm up Seminary Ridge and break the back of the Union Army, the Army of Virginia would have to be it.
Longstreet was right, but if Lee had followed his advice would the war have turned out any different?
Trying to remember the text of the book I have retained one sentence from the very beginning of the book. A Union officer is commenting on Pennsylvania militia forces gathering in front of the rebel soldiers. He says, "Militia won't stop Bob Lee."
| Author | Salinger, J.D. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1959 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 107 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1994 |
In 1942 Buddy Glass gets a three day pass and leaves with his chest taped up after a bout with pleurisy to attend his brother Seymour's wedding in New York. He arrives to find all of the guests gathered but no groom, who has reported that he is too happy to get married that day. Buddy is the only person in the groom's party. He gets into a car with an aunt, the matron of honor, and her officer husband, and an old deaf-mute, tiny, great uncle to go to the bride's house for the lunch / reception. On the way the car is blocked by a parade and the group winds up at the apartment shared by Buddy with Seymour and sister BooBoo to get drinks, cool off, and call ahead.
We never meet Seymour. We know him only through a Taoist story he read, his appearances on a child radio show, his diary, and what we hear about him. He is brilliant, creative, poetic, and also neurotic, foolish and strange.
There is no action in the story and the main character, in a sense it is Seymour, never appears upon the stage. His absurd marriage to a girl who cannot possibly understand him is never explained, only shown as one of the mysteries of his fabulous personality.
And yet, although the main character is difficult to comprehend and many others are strange and oddly formed, I liked the story. The interplay of very straight and very odd, neurotic people is well handled and often delightful. It is a breezy piece of writing with a half deep and half comic text.
Read it with our book group.
What an odd character Salinger was, publishing no books in the 45 years between 1965 and his death in 2010. He will be known forever as a writer of the 1950's.
| Author | Littell, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 302 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | April 1994 |
A small clique of shadowy Washington intelligence insiders, acting without supervision, send a man to Russia to carry out a secret mission. The man, Ben Bassett, works at the embassy in Moscow in a low level role fetching and carrying for a team of American arms control inspectors.
Bassett meets and falls in love with a poetess, Zinaida Zavaskaya, who lives with her old father and young son in a communal apartment. Eventually, we learn that he is there to remove information from the files about "Ironweed", a highly placed Soviet official who is working for the CIA. But the Russians discover the love affair and threaten Aida's son until Bassett reveals all to them. It is Gorbachev himself that all the evidence implicates as Ironweed. Later still we learn that it's all bullshit concocted by cold warriors in the U.S. to discredit reform in the USSR. There are discoveries and revelations, a chase across southern Russia, and an escape from bad guys on all sides aided by a security officer from the U.S. embassy who figures everything out.
What distinguishes this novel is the personality of Aida. Her person, her poetry, her power as a literary character, are marvelous and raise this book from decent spy fiction to very good fiction of any type.
I'm sorry that I have forgotten this book. It would be nice to remember this character who impressed me so at the time.
Littell is one of the really good writers in this genre. He is one of the few who approaches the level of John Le Carre. As with Le Carre, I have been impressed by every book of Littell's that I have read. In this book we have a plot by the CIA to get one of their own people to do something that will cause him to "discover" something that is actually false but he will believe to be true. Being a good spy, he will try to conceal the truth from the Russians. Being good spies on their side, the Russians will consider his eventual confession to be the truth because he tried so hard and so genuinely to conceal it. It is the central motivation of Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
| Author | Wyndham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Carroll and Graf, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1951 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1994 |
Bill Masen wakes up in a hospital bed one morning to find that the whole world has gone blind from watching something like a meteor shower. He wanders London, helping who he can and eventually finds a group of sighted people who have gathered to protect themselves and rebuild society. But two scourges stop them. One is a mysterious plague, the other a deadly man-eating walking plant called a "triffid".
After many years of struggle, Masen, his wife, and a few hundred sighted and blind people settle on the Isle of Wight, killing all the triffids there and beginning a new society.
This is a classic gem of science fiction of the disaster genre. The blindness, the plague, and the triffids all turn out to have been caused by men whose experiments and weapons went awry. The disaster turns everything inside out. People who spend their efforts trying to save communities of blind people often only prolong their inevitable deaths while failing to protect themselves.
All types of people attempt to find their way in this post-apocalyptic world, from rapacious exploiters to doomed religious fools. But those who think and persevere and help each other and work things out, some blind as well as some sighted, survive and prepare a rebirth of mankind.
A wonderful old fashioned read.
I remember a night scene from before the disaster in which Masen is on a farm raising triffids for the market. The triffids are making various clicking noises. An old worker tells Masen that they're really talking tonight. Masen is surprised. Like everyone else, he assumes that the triffids are plants that can move and make noise, but are not truly sentient. It is only after everyone is blind that the triffids have a chance to thrive and get their revenge.
It was marvelously written, a perfect foreshadowing of the story to come.
| Author | Brett, Simon |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books, 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 196 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 1994 |
Unemployed 55 year old actor Charles Paris is engaged by a well to do gay theatrical couple to help them investigate the death of the lover of a cousin of one of them, a flamboyant restaurateur who disappeared after the death of his lover, a French chef at the restaurant. Charles had been the one who discovered the body when he went into an apartment to paint it - he took painting or any other jobs he could get when he was "only resting" between parts. In the end he uncovers facts which the police missed that point to a very well known actor who permanently scared another man years before in order to win a part from him - and was now being blackmailed by the chef.
This is the 10th Charles Paris mystery though it's the first that I've read. It has an engaging style and an engaging cast of characters who are not young, not strong, drink too much, live partly on the dole, have mixed up love lives, but are honest and decent human beings. For all his faults it is still easy to like Paris. He is a man who can be trusted to be honest and decent, to try to do the right thing. The theater plays the same role as the racetrack and stable in Dick Francis novels. We learn about its people and traditions and closed culture while pursuing the mystery.
I liked the book and plan to read more, interspersed with Rex Stout and Dick Francis and perhaps a few other writers in this genre.
| Author | Waltari, Mika |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Finnish |
| Translators | Walford, Naomi |
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1949 |
| Copyright Date | 1945 |
| Number of Pages | 503 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | May 1994 |
An ambitious and, in my opinion, successful historical novel about the disasters that befell Egypt brought about by the idealism of the Pharaoh Akhnaton, related through the autobiography of the physician Sinuhe. Sinuhe is present when the Royal Skull surgeon operates on, and finishes off, the dying old Pharaoh and the young mystic, epileptic visionary Akhnaton ascends the throne. Akhnaton ordains the overthrow of the chief god Ammon and his replacement with Aton, who opposes violence, inequality and injustice and needs no idol. But every attempt at change only brings more violence and injustice as it gradually becomes very clear to all except Akhnaton that the existing violent and unjust order is deeply rooted in the very conditions of life and civilization in Egypt and the rest of the world. All attempts to change it engender violent resistance in the old order, violent opportunism in the new order, violent aggression by external powers - Syrians, Hittites, and Negroes from Kush - who wish to take advantage of Egyptian weakness.
Sinuhe travels the known world - Babylon, Syria, Crete and the land of the Hittites. He falls in love with one bad woman who destroys him and two good ones who die, one because she pledged herself to the God of Crete, and the other because Sinuhe fought for Aton when he should have protected her. He acquires a slave, Kaptah, who becomes the richest man in Egypt, and he learns much about medicine. Finally he poisons Pharaoh at the behest of Eie, the bad priest, and Horemheb, the great general. In their ways they restore the old order and save Egypt, but achieve none of their personal goals in spite of their ascendancy. Sinuhe is banished to house arrest on the Red Sea.
A powerful, sweeping, bitter, but enlightened work of history and art.
There is an ancient Egyptian story of Sinuhe that was apparently an inspiration for Waltari's work.
See also diary entries for 1994-05-12 and 1994-05-30.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 150 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 1994 |
Archie and Nero are engaged by a young woman to find her father who deserted her mother before she was born. The mother had recently died in a hit and run accident (or murder) and young Amy DeNovo discovers a quarter million in cash in her effects, money supposedly from her father, sent $1,000 a month and never spent.
The immediate threads lead to an old retired millionaire ex-banker but in the end it is his ne'er do well illegitimate son who is found both to have fathered the girl and, later, killed her mother.
Nero wolfe figures it all out and even gets the old man to pay him $50,000 for his trouble.
Very standard, which is to say delightfully entertaining, Rex Stout fare. This is one of the late works but perfectly even in quality with the earlier ones.
Read in Cozumel, Mexico.
Checking the Wikipedia, I see that this book won the "Silver Dagger Award" from the Crime Writers Association, naming it as "the best crime novel by a non-British author in 1969." It says that the award was given in January, 1969, so I'm sticking with the 1968 publication date, and possibly doubting the added year in the Wikipedia entry.
| Author | Vance, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 65 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1994 |
Included in Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois. First published in Astounding Science Fiction, July, 1958.
A planet populated by humans descended from a crashed space ship have, over thousands of years, evolved a feudal warring society using swords and sorcery on each other and against the "first folk", primitive but intelligent beings who have been driven into the woods. The sorcery, a compound of hypnotic suggestion, telepathy, telekinesis, and various psychological tricks, has completely replaced science, which isn't done any more. The remaining relics of the space age barely work at all.
Lord Faide wins a great battle against Lord Ballant and is set to become ruler of the planet when the first folk attack and almost destroy him. They are saved by a young sorcerer's apprentice who, contrary to all conventional wisdom, is always experimenting. They make peace and the apprentice, Sam Salazar, begins a new age of science on the planet.
A combination of very good writing, imagination and plot with a hackneyed pedestrian theme, in short, a good example of its type.
This sort of writing is meant to appeal to the imagination and optimism and need for excitement of youth. It can't be taken seriously and falls apart if we try. But I read it while lying in bed with a bad back and physical boredom. It helped.
The "bad back" would have been from the injury sustained in Cozumel, made worse by carrying heavy suitcases and sitting on airplanes. Maybe this kind of book is one that will help get me through future illnesses - should I have them.
| Author | Anderson, Poul |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 27 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1994 |
Included in Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois. First published in Analog, December, 1960.
Captain Rovic leads young Zhean, old Froad, and his sailor crew on the first voyage around the world in their caravel, sponsored by the queen. However in this Columbus story they are on a planet - yet another SF lost world peopled by space travelers from thousands of years before and long lost to the Space Federation.
They arrive in a Polynesian island and find, among the natives, a spaceship and aged spaceman needing only some quicksilver to repair the ship, fly again, and bring all the blessings of advanced Utopian civilization to the planet - and see his wife again.
In the end, Rovic blows up the spaceship, accidentally killing the old man in the process. He does not want to short circuit the development of science and civilization. He wants the great adventure of which his first circumnavigation is a part to continue to its natural conclusion.
Like Jack Vance's Miracle Workers, the first story in this collection, it is all youthful optimism. It is the same theme of castaways re-creating civilization. Smoothly written and exciting, like others of its type, it won't bear analysis.
Read while sick abed - the best time for stories like these.
| Author | Smith, Cordwainer |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1966? |
| Number of Pages | 69 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1994 |
Included in Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois. First published in Galaxy, February, 1965.
Casher O'Neill is hired by the alcoholic administrator of an almost abandoned planet to assassinate a young girl, actually an "underperson" created from a turtle egg, who has some mysterious control over the planet. Like others sent before him, he fails, becoming entranced by her hypnotic power. but she admires his great qualities and gives him some of her own and sends him back to his home planet to free it from military dictatorship.
For exotic characters and imaginative writing, "Smith" probably qualifies as an effective author, but he is also a classic juvenile with characters and themes that only an adolescent could like.
I particularly dislike stories in which a small group of characters or a single hero have superhuman qualities. How can I identify with or care about them? and if, on top of that they casually discuss assassination, then all sympathy is gone.
As always in stories like these, the characters have it both ways. They can be tough and selfish while turning out to be right and fine in the end.
Bah! Humbug!
I don't know how to add anything to that.
| Author | Delany, Samuel R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 56 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1994 |
Included in Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois. First published in Galaxy, February, 1965.
This is the first SF story in this collection not aimed at a youthful audience. Vyne, a space ship mechanic, abandons his children, wife and family group, who are subsequently killed in a war. Years later, at age 42, he is running a repair shop at the Star Pit, a station at the edge of the galaxy from which "goldens" leave for trips to other galaxies which most people cannot visit.
There is a complex story about two children, Ratlit who wants to visit other galaxies, and his friend Allegra, a drug addicted hallucinogenic "projective" who lives on drugs Ratlit procures for her. In the end Allegra dies of drug withdrawal. She had been pregnant and would die of that in her condition anyway. Ratlit commits suicide by voyaging to a far galaxy.
It's all a psychological tale about Vyne's struggle with family connection and obligation, children growing up without parents, dysfunctional families - in an exotic, not very convincing, but not trying to convince, SF future.
There is substance here but also neurosis and self-indulgence. Still, it is interesting and off-beat SF fare.
I don't really remember this story any more. I can tell myself that I do, but I'm not convinced.
Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, first published 38 years after this story, envisions a near future in which people are substantially altered and society is radically changed. Chris Beckett's stories in The Turing Test, published five years after Morgan's, envisions radical changes in humanity. This story however, judging from my abstract of it, envisions a much farther future in which the changes from life in the 1960's are substantially less.
I was about to argue from this that science fiction is growing up. In fact, I think it is growing up, but even in the 1960's there were writers with deeper scientific imaginations. Arthur C. Clarke published Childhood's End in 1953.
Perhaps it's an unfair comparison. Delaney lived a most unconventional life and published novels about most unconventional societies and social relations. This is the only one of his many novels and stories that I've read.
| Author | Aldiss, Brian W. |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 38 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1994 |
Included in Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois. First published in Galaxy, February, 1968.
A story of the near future in which 500 Indian families sign up to move to a huge, sealed apartment building, never to re-emerge. All food and water are free and TV is piped in, but there is no other contact with the outside world. It is an experiment to develop ESP through close human proximity. 25 years later Thomas Dixit is sent in as a spy to find out what is really going on. The community has become severely overpopulated and the life cycle has sped up so that puberty begins at 7 or 8 and senescence in the 20's or so. New social organizations have arisen, new arts of micro scale construction and, indeed, ESP.
Dixit is caught immediately and attacked as a spy and a person attempting to break up a way of life which all of them believe in. Whether that is because they have something special and good, or because they know nothing else and fear change, is the central issue of the story. Dixit is allowed to escape. At a U.N. hearing he argues strenuously for breaking up the complex and re-settling the people. His argument prevails and it is done. We learn nothing more about the fate of the people or their new ESP skills.
This is very far from the adolescent space adventure which dominates SF. It is different in its central ambiguity as well as its unusual theme. I found its science projections - ESP and sped up life cycle, to be disturbingly questionable, but its depiction of the society interesting, even absorbing - if not believable.
Science fiction often presents striking images and ideas that stick in my memory. This novella, or long short story, had a number of them. The television piped into the building was not just ordinary TV. It was manipulated by the experimenters. For example, in one period hard core pornography was piped in in order to encourage sex and overpopulation.
The people in the building had come under the sway of a young man, actually a young teenager, who had developed his powers of ESP and psychological domination beyond those of any other person. This character was neither good nor evil, but he was very, very different from the ordinary humans living in the real world. His existence was perceived by Dixit as strange, disturbing, and potentially dangerous, and Aldiss managed to convey that sense to the reader as well.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Delacorte Press, 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 297 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 1994 |
Bail bondsman Max Cheny is drawn into a relationship with Jackie, a 44 year old airline stewardess working for a bottom rung Caribbean airline, smuggling money into the U.S. for a black American gun runner who sells guns through a Bahamas intermediary to Colombian drug dealers.
The gun dealer gets his guns by house breaking and by killing some Nazis and stealing all their guns. He uses "jack boys", wild young men who steal cars and guns for him and love to shoot and smash things. When they are captured by police, he bails them out and kills them to keep them quiet. He keeps three women, a young black woman who understands nothing, a white woman in her thirties, and a sixty-three year old black woman who is better in bed than either of the others. He is hoping to bring an old prison buddy into his business.
In the end, Jackie outwits the criminal and the police. She gets $500,000 of the bad guy's money without the cops knowing it. They shoot the bad guy. Max divorces his estranged, neurotic art gallery wife and goes off with Jackie.
Leonard creates bad guys: unstable, impulsive, emotion ruled people, unlike those created by any other writer. His good guys are burned out, experienced folk who have almost, but not quite, given up hope of a life apart from the crazies around them.
He always puts it together successfully. It's a formula but an unusual one that, in its own peculiar way, works.
A year or so ago Marcia and I watched the movie "Jackie Brown" on Netflix that was made from this novel. The movie was very well done and has supplanted my memory of the book. In the movie, Jackie is a black woman. Max falls for her. He figures out what she has done and figures out that she has the money. But he doesn't go off with her. He understands that a new life with a new woman and a half million in ill-gotten gains just isn't right for him.
| Author | Gardner, Erle Stanley |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 275 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 1994 |
Perry Mason is in a canoe near the waterside mansion of George Alder, a man whom Perry Mason has been engaged to negotiate against. He sees a young woman swim up to the house, take an evening gown out of a bag, put it on, and go in the house. Soon she comes running out again pursued by a vicious dog. She dives into the water and is almost caught by the dog, but Mason saves her. Later he represents her when she is accused of theft, and again when she is accused of murdering Alder.
In the end he finds the real killer with help from Paul Drake and Della Street.
I read this to see what the original Perry Mason stories were like before Raymond Burr's interpretation of them. They were written simply and professionally with very little concern for character or theme, but careful plotting and a modicum of legal expertise. They're not better or worse than the TV show but Burr's character was more impressive than Gardner's creation.
I liked the TV show. I watched it with my Mom and Dad and Arvin back in the 1950's and 60's when it came out, and again sometime later when it was reprised on TV. It still appears on one of the retro TV stations and I wouldn't mind seeing some more episodes, but I haven't done so.
The story didn't impress me as much as those by Rex Stout. Stout had significantly more character and more humor in his books. Both authors were formula writers who gave us a hero almost like an old friend in a well known and comfortable setting. What really makes such stories work however is not the individual story itself, but its place in a series of similar stories that one can read with a more or less perfect idea of what to expect and what to enjoy.
| Author | Vance, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Tor Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 152 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 1994 |
An earth space ship arrives at the planet Tschai and is promptly destroyed by a missile fired from the planet's surface. Two explorers on the way down have their space boat damaged and crash land. One is killed by inhabitants of the planet. The other watches as men, Charch, and Dirdir fight over his space boat. The Charch win and take it away. The survivor, Adam Reith, is taken away by Barbarian men whom he lives among while he recovers from his injuries.
The planet is dominated by the two advanced, hostile races of Charch and Dirdir, with others present too whom we do not meet. The men came from some Dirdir landings on earth 20,000 years before, and maybe also 70,000 years before, which carried them away as slaves. These men have lived free as Barbarians, or under the domination of others as Charchmen, Dirdirmen, or Wankhmen.
This is really a good example of space opera/adventure of the classic type - humans and aliens battling it out, beautiful girls, mysterious creatures, ancient ruined cities, humans rising in revolt against alien masters. It's all there, told with great gusto and some professional skill and aplomb. It was great fun.
See my notes on Servants of the Wankh later this month (i.e., July, 1994).
| Author | Armah, Ayi Kwei |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Heinemann, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 180 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1994 |
An unnamed man works at a stultifying job, lives in a tenement house, and is married to an incompatible woman whom he doesn't love in Ghana. His real curse however, that which both saves him and makes him suffer, is that he is an honest man. His boyhood friend Joe Khoomson has become a minister in the "socialist" government of Kwame Nkrumah. He lives off the fat of the land in a beautiful house with a chauffeur driven limousine, all from bribes and kickbacks. The man's wife, Oyoe, and his mother-in-law attempt to involve themselves in a fishing boat scheme with Khoomson but they never get any more out of it than a few baskets of fish. In the end, a military coup drives Khoomson into hiding at the man's house. Soldiers come. They escape by squeezing through a hole in a filthy latrine and making it to the fishing boat. Khoomson escapes to another country and the man swims back to resume his unhappy life.
The book is filled with scenes of corruption. It opens with a greedy bus conductor who lives by short changing people and ends with a bus driver passing an army roadblock after paying a bribe. In between are long passages on filthy banisters, open latrines where people wipe their shit on the walls, slimy shower floors, women sucking snot from babies noses, every sort of disgusting, stinking, scene.
From a literary point of view it is too much. But this is a political book, describing a society which is too much. The sordid scenes are in proportion to the sordid society. a very impressive, if depressing book, from both literary and political points of view.
I remember a number of vivid scenes from this book. Early on, the man is walking up steps and reaches for the banister, but it is covered with some sort of putrid garbage that no one should touch. When Khoomson comes to the man's house the man and especially his wife, go all out to produce a dinner that will be acceptable to such an important and wealthy person. They pass the dinner agreeably and Khoomson then asks for directions to the bathroom. The man must explain that there is no bathroom, only a communal latrine outside. Khoomson's good humor slides into an appreciation of the reality of life for his friend. He decides to go home to use the toilet. Later, when Khoomson must slip into the latrine and cover himself with shit, we already know about the aversion and disgust that he, and we the readers, must feel.
In the final scene, our man is back on shore and has caught a public bus to get back home. They come to the army roadblock. He is afraid. Do they know that he was a friend of Khoomson? Is there a list of political enemies the soldiers are looking for? Is he on the list? The soldier looks at the driver and clicks his fingernail against his front teeth. He is making a symbolic request for a bribe - for the bus driver to show his gratitude to the soldier for allowing him to pass on. It is a way of saying that there is nothing new or frightening here. Nkrumah is gone but someone else has taken his place and nothing has changed. Life is what it has been and will continue to be. The man can go home.
I read this book in a book group and everyone had reactions similar to mine. I wrote in my diary (1994-07-31) that this is the most interesting book I had read recently.
| Author | Simon, Roger |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Villard Books, 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 200 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 1994 |
Moses Wine is hired by Alex "The Wiz" Wiznitsky, founder of Tulip Computers, to be head of security. He discovers a plot to steal trade secrets and follows a suspect to Japan where he fights rapacious Japanese industrialists, KGB agents, and a beautiful but insane young woman who hates Americans because her parents died of Leukemia after the atom bomb. In the end, it all turns out to be a plot by a demented ex-CIA agent to trick the KGB into stealing purposely defective chips for their military hardware.
All of Simon's books feel a bit out of control with events slamming against each other and picturesque characters coming out of the woodwork. This one has the added silliness of poorly understood technology (an impossible robot, speech recognition in absurd places, and other failures of technological sense) and none of the relieving interest in China or Israel that we saw in Peking Duck and Raising the Dead.
Readable? Yes. Credible? No. I liked this the least of those I have read.
| Author | Vance, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: TOR Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 134 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 1994 |
In this continuation of City of the Charch, Adam Reith escorts the Flower of Cath back to her home in hopes of a reward from her father that will enable him to build a space boat and return to Earth. On the way, the Flower becomes increasingly despondent, succumbing to a psychotic murder/suicide urge and does herself in - ending one thread of plot kept up faithfully in the previous volume. After a long journey, Reith, the barbarian youth Traz, and Anocho the Dirdirman arrive in Cath and, being rejected by the Flower's father, hatch a plot to steal a spaceship from the Wankh. The plot succeeds but the men in it with Reith cannot control the ship and it crashes in the ocean where the Wankh recover it and capture the crew. They are released when they reveal to the Wankh that their servants, the Wankhmen, have actually been lying to them and exploiting them for years.
This was published as pp. 153-286 of Planet of Adventures.
More space opera good fun. There is absolutely nothing here but the twisty adventure plot. It is a tall tale told straight.
I will wait awhile but I do plan to read the rest some day. Too much at once would wear me out.
I've waited awhile, more than twenty years to be exact, but haven't yet read the rest. I have only vague memories of the book. In spite of the "good fun" comment, there's nothing particularly attractive about the abstract and I have no strong, or even weak, desire to read the rest now. I guess that if I want to read further in a series I ought to say more encouraging things in my write-up of the earlier books.
| Author | Oman, C.W.C. |
|---|---|
| Editor | Beeler, John H. |
| Publication | Ithaca: Cornell Paperbacks, Cornell University Press, 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1885 |
| Number of Pages | 194 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | August 1994 |
This book was written by an undergraduate at Oxford who went on to become the world's leading scholar on this subject. It is remarkably well written and impressively authoritative for such a young scholar.
In 378 AD a Roman army was slaughtered by the Gothic cavalry at the battle of Adrianople, beginning the process of the complete subordination of infantry to mounted troops that culminated in feudal knighthood and a complete disintegration of scientific warfare into armed brawling by individuals acting en masse rather than disciplined armies. Of course the reasons were more social than military and had everything to do with the disappearance of the free citizen soldier and the degeneration first into barbarian horde and then into feudal strong men [I am adding my own interpretation here.]
Counter currents existed, especially among the Byzantines whom O believes have been vastly underrated as a military power, though they too primarily utilized cavalry.
The end of feudalism begins with the fierce Swiss pike and halberd phalanx which, with little armor but great courage and discipline, could destroy any cavalry charge of any strength, and with the English archers at Crecy and Agincourt and later the Spanish sword and buckler men - all heralding a return to discipline, professional officers and free soldiers.
This was an interesting and readable book. I've summarized it very poorly.
I remember this book, but not well enough to summarize it better than I did 20 years ago.
| Author | Forester, C.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pinnacle Books, 1981 |
| Copyright Date | 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 168 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | August 1994 |
A collection of three stories, one unfinished, put together after F's death in 1966.
Hornblower During the Crisis (pp 1-124) is an unfinished novel in which commander Hornblower, just out of the sloop Hotspur, captures French documents in a bold do or die fight and conceives a plan to imitate one to forge an order from Napoleon to the admiral commanding at Ferrul in Spain to order out the fleet to its doom at Trafalgar. H is ordered to lead the expedition to plant the forgery. We have no more, only F's notes on the rest giving an interesting view of F's simple outline of plot and mood and theme, very small but very clear.
Hornblower's Temptation (pp 125-150) has the young ensign H assigned to hang a captured Irish rebel. He carries out his duty even though it nauseates him, and is left with the rebel's last letter to his wife and his trunk full of clothes. He deciphers the letter and discovers a false top in the trunk that reveals a fortune in money plus secret letters to rebels which, if revealed, will send many more to the gallows. He agonizes for weeks and then casts it all overboard, money and letters.
The Last Encounter has H a retired old man living with Lady Barbara when a man claiming to be Napoleon Bonaparte comes to his door in 1848, requesting help in getting to France. At his wife's insistence he helps - to find later that it was Napoleon Bonaparte III. An interesting story and a much appreciated view of H in his later years. The most polished of the three stories and the most serious of them.
Forester's death was a great loss but he left a fine legacy.
It is the last story that I remember best. Hornblower has changed. He's become a rather garrulous old man, perhaps a little cynical and maybe something of a crank. He wonders who this man at his doorstep really is, what claim the man has on his help, and why in the world he should help anyone with the name of his old enemy Napoleon. It is as if, while living peacefully and retired from the affairs of life, his past has come knocking on the door and Hornblower isn't sure he wants anything to do with it.
It's a very interesting conception.
I guess that almost all people who read a lot of books will, like me, read some that are parts of a series. I think I've read all of the Hornblower books, many of the Rex Stout Nero Wolfe books, Scott Turow's Kindle County series, and quite a few others. I tend to think of them as produced according to a formula involving imagination and writing skill, but not necessarily a lot of deep thought.
These stories make clear that that view is inadequate. Writers do evolve tried and true formulas for their series books, and they often stay within the boundaries of those formulas, but not always. In the case of Hornblower, Forester has imagined a living person who grows, as all of us do, from child to man and, not often seen in series books, to old man.
Forester was a serious writer on serious subjects. His novels could be read as war adventures but some of his stories, like The General, and the two shorter stories from this collection, were something else.
| Author | Tolstoy, Leo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Maude, Louise |
| Publication | London: Oxford University Press, 1966 |
| Copyright Date | 1899 |
| Number of Pages | 499 |
| Extras | Introduction by Aylmer Maude |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 1994 |
Prince Dmitry Ivanich Nekhlyndov is called to serve on a jury and finds that the woman on trial is a prostitute accused of murder whom, as a young girl of 16, had been seduced and impregnated by the then irresponsible soldier of 20 or so and launched on her life of degradation. By an accident of wording, the jury's conclusion causes her to be condemned to hard labor although she is innocent. N begins a long and arduous campaign through the legal and prison systems to free her. Along the way he becomes a different man. He meets wrongfully imprisoned people and political prisoners whom he also fights for. He follows them to Siberia, determined to marry her and make his repentance.
In the end, N is transformed. He comes to believe that evil can never be fought with evil, that the whole system of justice is unjust and that it too cannot be overcome by fighting. Only by turning the other cheek and serving others can we save ourselves and our society.
This is as much a political and religious treatise as a novel and has been criticized and dismissed for that - but not by me. It is full of honest, deep and clear writing such as few writers ever achieve. If I cannot agree with its conclusions, I still give it, and Tolstoy, my deepest respect.
The term "Prince" is always confusing to me in the novels of Tsarist Russia - there seemed to be so many princes and princesses. I take it that Dmitry Ivanich was the son of provincial gentry. He lived on an estate and his family would have been among the aristocrats of the province. But I presume that he would not have had any princely political role nor would he have been very rich in the American sense of oil, hedge fund, and software billionaires.
Whatever the character's wealth, as the 20 year old son of the local squire home on leave for the summer, he seemed like a fairy tale prince to the 16 year old serving maid in the home. For him, she was a pretty plaything. He meant her no harm but he devoted no real thought to her or to what the aftereffects of their dalliance might be. For him there were no aftereffects. At the end of his summer vacation he went back to his career and never thought of her again. For her, the vision of love and heaven that he thoughtlessly opened before her was a gateway into the pit of hell.
The conception of the story was brilliant. T shows us people whom we believe to live in different worlds, and then shows us that the damage done so casually by people in the upper sphere to those in the lower one is not abstract and ephemeral. It is concrete and permanent and it is done to real human beings.
This was the last of Tolstoy's major works. I agree that it was not his greatest work but there are relatively few writers for whom their best work could approach this one. Tolstoy's lesser works are still great.
| Author | Karpov, Anatoly |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Bludeau, Todd |
| Publication | New York: Atheneum, 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 232 |
| Extras | photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Chess |
| When Read | August 1994 |
A fascinating memoir of a man who held the world championship for ten years. He learned chess by watching his father play and, by age four, was obsessed with the game, which he quickly discovered he could play easily in his head without requiring a board and pieces. At six he played his first club game. By seven he was even with his father, an advanced amateur. By nine he had to give up playing his father, who no longer provided any competition. At twelve, when he had only just stopped playing fantasy war with the pieces as well as real chess, he was invited as the youngest person up for grand master to Bottvinnik's chess camp where he played all day against the best boys in the USSR and, around midnight, became unbeatable, winning all blitz games against all of them until they passed out at morning.
His professional career included a long rivalry with Victor Korchnoi, an eccentric man of strange principles who battled him for the championships. There is much about Korchnoi (whom Petrosian hated and persecuted) and about Kasparov (whom K thinks is a powerful player but no better than other champions and not very principled.)
His greatest disappointment was not playing Fischer, whom he regards as the purest, most dedicated and committed, and most brilliant player. Only Fischer used no coaches and never played for draws, only wins.
A fascinating look at a powerful, obsessed mind.
I loved this book and thought about it a lot while I was reading it and long afterwards. I was attracted to Karpov's passion, obsession, intensity, and brilliance.
He discovered he could play in his head when his mother finally took the chess set away from him and demanded that he do something else for a while. She went into the other room in their little two room apartment in a grimy Soviet industrial town. Coming back a few minutes later she saw him staring at the wall. Looking in on him again a few times over 45 minutes and still finding him staring at the wall, she finally asked, "Are you playing chess?" Indeed he was.
When he joined the club at age six he played and lost to a thirteen year old boy. He broke into tears - chess meant so much to him.
At Botvinnik's chess camp he said he became unbeatable at midnight. The boys were stimulated by playing all day. By midnight, Karpov was so high on chess that he was flying. All the other boys in the camp would play one side and he would play the other.
Surprisingly, to me, Botvinnik told him he'd never be a champion because he hadn't studied enough and didn't know the opening book. Maybe because I'm not a genius myself it's easier for me to recognize and acknowledge genius in others.
There's lots more I remember about this book. Botvinnik told the boys he was working on a chess computer program that would make human players obsolete - which disturbed all of them. As a mature man, Karpov got into bridge and got so deep that his coach, another grand master, told him he better choose between bridge and chess because he wasn't going to stay a chess champion unless he stopped playing bridge and concentrated harder on chess. Karpov talked about his rivalry with Kasparov and denied all the charges that Kasparov had made about him. There was more about Fischer, more about the chess world, more about physical fitness and chess.
Karpov was an underrated and maligned champion. He was treated as a creation of the Soviet chess industry, not a brilliant human being. He was accused of cheating by Korchnoi - who said the Russians working with Karpov had a hypnotist in the audience attempting to make him lose. Fischer made similar charges.
I can't know anything about that other than that Karpov was accused and he denied the accusations. But whatever the truth of the matter, there's no denying that he was and is a truly great chess player. Maybe he's flawed. Maybe he's just maligned. However, like Lance Armstrong, he is a great competitor and his greatness, like Armstrong's in my opinion, stands apart from any considerations of drugs or Soviet cheating.
I recall a scene in Fred Waitzkin's Mortal Games in which Kasparov and Karpov, who hated each other, played against each other at a tournament. This was not a world championship match. It may have been the invitational tournament at Linares in Spain, or a similar venue. After the game Kasparov stayed and talked to Karpov for 15 minutes or so, analyzing what happened. When they were done, Waitzkin, then part of Kasparov's retinue, told Kasparov that he was surprised that he spent the time after the game with Karpov. He said he thought that Kasparov hated Karpov. Kasparov answered that, yes, he hated Karpov, but Karpov was the only person who could understand what really happened in the game, so what could you do?
| Author | Tarkington, Booth |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Sagamore Press, 1957 |
| Copyright Date | 1918 |
| Number of Pages | 248 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 1994 |
Major Amberson makes a fortune after returning from the Civil War and becomes the most wealthy and important man in his mid-western town. His beautiful daughter Isabel turns down handsome Eugene Morgan after a drunken episode and marries stolid Wilbur Minafer. They have one child, George Amberson Minafer, who is spoiled rotten by mother and grandfather who dote on him and satisfy his every wish and whim. Georgie grows up tall and strong and handsome and a terrible brat. He considers work beneath him and aspires only to be a gentleman and a yachtsman.
As a young man, Georgie falls in love with Morgan's daughter Lucy but she won't marry him because of his lack of interest in work. He resents her father for this, then grows to hate him when he learns that Morgan and Isabel, now widowed, are in love. He demands that his mother choose between them and she chooses Georgie. They have to live in Paris.
But Georgie's life crashes around him. His mother sickens and dies, leaving great hate for G in Morgan's mind. Then the major dies with his whole fortune gone and G is left with $156 and the care of his maiden aunt Fanny. Realizing that he has hurt everyone and made a mess of his life, G takes a job as a nitroglycerin handler to make as much money as he can to pay his aunt's rent.
In the end, G is hit by a car and the Morgans, after soul searching and a quasi mystical experience, take pity and forgive him, re-establishing relations.
This is a wonderfully written Pulitzer Prize winning book about George, the family, and the transformation of a town into an industrial city.
One of the things I greatly admired about Tarkington was that he is not really impressed by wealth and social position. Georgie becomes a worthwhile person after he has lost his money and learns to accept responsibility. Alice Adams, in the other Tarkington book I read before this one, realizes her worth as a human being after she gives up the dream of marrying the society man. T is deeply aware of the privileges and benefits of money and position, but also deeply aware of the real sources of our humanity, which do not depend on these things.
| Author | Brett, Simon |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books, 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 196 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 1994 |
Charles Paris visits an English summer seaside resort and takes in a variety show where comedian Bill Peaky is electrocuted on stage in an apparent accident. The inquest rules it an accidental death but Charles believes it to be murder. He suspects one person after another but is always proven wrong. In the end, elderly comedian Lennie Barber, a great comic whose career has gone nowhere in 30 years and the only man that Charles did not suspect, confesses to Charles while dying of a stroke.
Brett, like Dick Francis with horses, always teaches us something about the theater. In this case he addresses stand-up comedy and shows us a bit of its inner workings.
Bumbling Charles is the same as in other books. Not really working, he's a dilettante living always partly on the dole.
Very predictable writing even if the plot turns this way or that. Yet not unsatisfying. You have to read books like this in the same spirit as comfortable TV weekly mysteries. They tell a story and leave the main character unchanged, ready for the next episode.
| Author | Maugham, W. Somerset |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Sun Dial Press, 1936 |
| Copyright Date | 1897 |
| Number of Pages | 221 |
| Extras | author's preface |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 1994 |
Liza is an 18 year old girl living with her old mother in one room in a house in the working class neighborhood of Lambeth where she works in the local factory. She's very popular in the neighborhood and is pursued by young Tom, a decent, gentle, adoring fellow who just doesn't excite her at all. Then she meets Jim, a big muscular man, twice her age, and with a wife and five children. He also pursues her but roughly and insistently. She finds him exciting and yields to his demands. They have a summer long love affair hidden in far neighborhoods, but their neighbors catch on. Liza is cut by the other women. She gets pregnant. Jim's wife, a stout, strong woman, fights her and beats her severely before Jim arrives and beats his wife almost to death before a neighbor woman intervenes (the men won't.) Liza goes home. Seriously injured, her alcoholic mother gives her liquor to soothe the pain. Liza has a miscarriage, falls into a fever, and dies.
This was Maugham's first book, written when he was a medical student at a hospital serving a neighborhood like Lambeth in London. He gives us all his impressions of the language, the social conventions, the foolish hopes of the young people before marriage, and the sordid reality of bickering and physical assaults afterwards.
This is not a deep or complex book. It is easy reading in spite of the dialect (Yus, Garn, Swap me bob) and the simple, inarticulate characters.
A good first book by a very young man.
| Author | Clancy, Tom |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 656 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | October 1994 |
A Clancy thriller about a covert operation planned at the highest levels of the U.S. government to upset the cocaine cartel and disrupt its trade. A special satellite surveillance system tunes in on cartel cellular phones and derives a wealth of information about who the members are and how they operate. Infantry specialist teams go into Columbia covertly and observe airfields. A fighter pilot intercepts incoming shipments and, if they won't land, shoots them down. The drug lords however have hired former Cuban intelligence colonel Felix Diaz who figures out a lot of what's going on. The druggies then assassinate the head of the FBI and the President resolves to smash them. The already illegal covert operation is made more violent - killing many drug lords. But when Diaz figures it all out he blackmails the U.S. National Security Advisor, Admiral Cutter, who is running the show. He offers him a deal. Cutter helps Diaz rise to head the cartel and Diaz cuts back drug shipments and violence - or else he informs the U.S. press about the illegal operation.
Meanwhile Jack Ryan of the CIA and a bunch of good guys figure all that out too. When Cutter abandons the infantry teams in Columbia, Ryan and the others find and rescue them. Cutter kills himself.
C packs the story with a huge amount of seemingly (I wouldn't have any way of verifying it) authentic technical detail about infantry tactics, planes, Coast Guard cutters, communications, spies, bureaucrats, politicians, druggies, criminals, banks, cops, everything. Characters are thin and the writing merely competent, but C delivers in his area of techno-war, espionage, thriller.
I liked it.
| Author | Boyne, Walter J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 415 |
| Extras | index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 1994 |
A history of the development of air power during World War II from the invasion of Poland to the atom bomb. It is a very broad story with little detail and none of the personal accounts that usually lend interest to books like this.
Boyne is unafraid of controversy. he castigates certain commanders as incompetents and egotists and plainly states which strategies should have been pursued and which not. B ascribes victory in Europe and Asia to U.S. air power. In Asia the case is very clear. American aircraft sank everything the Japanese put on the sea. Then in 1945 they established mastery of the skies over Japan. As in Europe, plans for precision bombing didn't work but firebombing worked even better and the atom bomb finally got the attention of even the most pig-headed militarists.
In Europe the strategic bombing campaign was an expensive failure until the arrival of the Mustang in November, 1943. Then the tables were turned and the Luftwaffe was shot out of the sky. By D-Day the U.S. had established air superiority everywhere. After the invasion new tactics appeared including the first carpet bombing of enemy positions and the first destruction of significant pockets of German forces entirely from the air - like in Iraq.
B ascribes much of the outcome to leadership all the way to the top. When Roosevelt called for production of 50,000 planes it was done. When Hitler did the same it was treated as another raving and German production didn't go into high gear until it was too late. Meanwhile Stalin, in his reckless hunt for saboteurs, was the biggest saboteur of all, destroying his officers, refusing to believe all signs of war, then forcing his air force to be slaughtered in impossible attacks in the first days of the war.
I've read so much about World War II that I no longer remember where I learned any particular facts or broad generalizations. This book was one of the books that contributed to my knowledge.
| Author | Zola, Emile |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Tancock, Leonard |
| Publication | London: Penguin Books, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1892 |
| Number of Pages | 509 |
| Extras | Introduction by Leonard Tancock |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | December 1994 |
This is a novelized account of the events of 1870-71 in France, beginning with the French army's lead up to the disastrous battle of Sedan and ending with the destruction of the Commune and the burning of Paris.
Z follows two soldiers, Jean Macquart, a 39 year old corporal of peasant stock who signs up when his wife dies, and Maurice, a petty bourgeois whose mother and sister scrimped and saved to send him to Paris to study law and live an intellectual but pointless and dissipated life.
The failure at Sedan is presented as a total breakdown of French leadership. Generals with more interest in politics and career than in thinking out the situation marched individual armies back and forth with no plan until each was surrounded and cut off by superior forces, then pounded with artillery into submission. Whole armies surrendered, first at Sedan, then Metz. Z gives long and graphic accounts of their destruction and of the human suffering of wounds, starvation, tiredness, etc. among both soldiers and civilians.
Paris held out against a German siege, its people angry and defiant against the Germans and their own government which created the war and the defeat. When defeatists took over the government and negotiated a surrender, the Parisians rebelled against the government and the terms of surrender. Z depicts them as a mix of fools, idealists and opportunists, with the idealists in the minority. They defied the government in a very rapid escalation of force on each side, each considering the others traitors. The Germans stepped back from the city and allowed a French army in - which attacked with great fury. The Communards set fire to the city, burning whole districts, and the army ruthlessly assassinated men and women accused of being Communards.
It was a tragedy for all.
[Horrible British slang translation.]
One sequence that I still recall from this book had to do with the French soldiers marching back and forth for days and then weeks. Where were they going? Why did they go back to where they were before? What did the crazy generals have in mind? Then, for the first time, they see a few Uhlans, German cavalry, on a faraway ridge, observing them. They don't know it yet but it is the beginning of the end for them. While their generals have been aimless and befuddled, the Germans were maneuvering according to plan and would soon have them surrounded. When the fighting finally comes it is hopeless even before it is begun. Enemy troops and artillery surround them on higher ground. Brave attempts to break out are slaughtered.
The presentation of the Communards was neither romanticized nor demonized. Zola was a principled man but very much a realist as well - which is one of the things that greatly attracts me to him.
| Author | Turow, Scott |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 386 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Law |
| When Read | December 1994 |
In form, this is a mystery novel about a 50 year old lawyer / ex-cop asked by his law firm to investigate the disappearance of one of the firm's junior partners and six million dollars. Mack Malloy, an overweight, divorced, recovering alcoholic living with a grown son that he can't stand has been steadily losing position and income in the firm. He sees this alternately as a chance to redeem himself or to find the money and abscond with it.
It is also an existentialist novel concerned with the meaning of life, the meaning of honesty, and the meaning of writing novels. And it is a manic obsessive novel filled with a furious energy expended in free associating sentences that don't always make sense - at least to this reader who sometimes got lost in the metaphor and angst of the main character's thought process.
In the end, the great surprise is that everything is as it has been portrayed. There is no hidden truth about the characters. The head of the firm, Martin Gold, turns out to be the honest, decent man he was always thought to be. "Brushy" Bruccia, the sexy, ambitious, careerist partner turns out to be just that and not Mack's second love with a heart of gold. She turns him in. And Mack - he takes the money and runs, determined to lead a life of drunkenness and dissipation in the Caribbean with stolen money. It is what he is tempted to do all along and what we, as conventional readers of mysteries about cynical, hard boiled detectives who are really stand-up guys, are not prepared for in spite of all the preparation.
This was the first novel I read by Turow. It made an impression on me and led to reading three more over the next ten years. I was also reading John Grisham in that period and I thought of these two authors as the leading writers of novels about lawyers. Both are cognizant of the seamy side of law practice and write about it, but they have quite different characters and styles.
At the end of this novel, Malloy is on an airplane heading for the Caribbean, Grand Cayman if I remember correctly. He has made off with the six million dollars and is safe from pursuit. The stewardess comes by and asks if he wants something to drink. He orders four of the little bottles of whiskey and lines them up on his seat tray. His world has narrowed down to those little bottles of whiskey and he is smiling and happy.
That's not a typical conclusion to a story, is it?
| Author | Saylor, Steven |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 305 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | December 1994 |
Eight years after the events in Roman Blood Gordianus the Finder is hired by Marcus Crassus to investigate the murder of his cousin Lucius Licinius. Crassus believes that slaves did it and then ran off to join Spartacus in the hills. He plans to kill all of the hundred or so slaves of the household in retribution. Gordianus, with his adopted son, the mute boy Ecco from Roman Blood, believes otherwise and tries to prove it. Eventually he proves that another high born Roman working for Crassus was in league with Licinius in selling arms to Spartacus. He killed Licinius to hush him up. Gordianus exposes him in the nick of time, saving the slaves. Crassus still has them sold off far away and at least one slave of fine character dies in a galley.
S gives us some very interesting pictures of Roman life in a villa on the Bay of Naples, a resort area of fine homes and easy living. We also have a visit to the Sybil, and a very plausible account of what an oracle of the time might have been (a secret organization of women who act out the Sybil using a mixture of drugs, illusions, conspiracy, and true belief.)
There are certainly many contrivances in the story and many concessions to the conventions of mystery writing. But it's still a well done story by a writer with an interesting point of view.
I remember the scene near the end when the slaves are thankful to Gordianus for saving their lives. It's hard to know what the range of attitudes was towards slaves in Rome. Most of the modern fiction writers make the assumption that slaves were despised by free people. Is that true? But that point of view is not acceptable to most civilized people today, so we get characters like Gordianus who have some more acceptable ethics. Were there many such people? Any? There may well be people who know the answer to those questions, but I don't.
I started reading Saylor's major work Roma just recently. I stopped reading because I found it less interesting and convincing than I expected. I may or may not return to it.
I haven't returned to reading Roma and don't expect that I will. Maybe it was too large an enterprise to carry off. Covering a period of too many years with too many characters and too much need to stick to the plan might have been more than fiction can bear. Maybe it got better after I left it. Perhaps moving from the virtual pre-history of Rome to the historical period would have given Saylor more substance to work with. I don't plan to find out. I liked his Gordianus novels better.
| Author | Anderson, Clarence E. "Bud" |
|---|---|
| Author | Hamelin, Joseph P. |
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 302 |
| Extras | photos, bibliography, forward by Chuck Yeager |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Memoir |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | December 1994 |
Early in 1942 20 year old Anderson, who had always wanted to be an Air Corps pilot, finished his required two years of college and joined up to fly fighters. After long training and postings in the U.S. he finally made it to England in early 1944 to fly Mustangs over Europe. He already had over 800 hours in the air and was a good natural pilot. He quickly became an ace, eventually credited with 16-1/4 enemy planes, all but the 1/4 being single seat fighters. He was a close friend of Yeager and a number of other aces.
After the war he became a test pilot, a squadron commander in Korea - too late to see action, and in Vietnam, where he flew F-105 missions. He was forcibly retired after 30 years at age 50 as a Colonel. Then he worked 13 more years for an aircraft manufacturer - but not as a test pilot, being considered too old for that.
In the final scene of the book he and Yeager had been invited, at age 67, to fly two restored Mustangs painted to look like their own WWII planes at an air show. He was old and changed but still felt some of the old magic of flight and freedom in the air. He called the tower for a "gear check" and buzzed the field. Then he did it again. Then he lined up for a landing but at the last minute felt, what the hell, what could they do to him, so he did a victory roll over the field, Yeager following along with his own roll.
Anderson lived the adolescent dream. He souped up cars and drag raced on country roads. He flew all day and drank half the night with his flying buddies. He never aborted a mission, flying with guts and gusto. He went into every combat with confidence in his skill and the taste of victory in his mouth, pursuing his enemies relentlessly.
It was not a life that I could or would emulate but I recognize that America was lucky to have men like him in our time of need.
If I remember correctly, the book opens with the story of his most difficult combat. He got into a dogfight with an excellent German pilot. At one point, unable to shake the German from his tail, he put his plane into a vertical climb with the German following. He knew that neither of them could sustain that for long. They were bleeding off airspeed. If he stalled first he would come within range of the German's guns and be blown out of the sky. But the Mustang turned out to be the better climber and the German fell away.
A lesser pilot would have flown away, shaking and thanking God that he survived that. But not Anderson. He dove down and got on the German's tail, closer and closer until the German had nowhere to go but up. A vertical tail chase began again but Anderson commented, "We already knew where this would end." The German fell away first and Anderson shot him down.
I'm now at the age that Anderson was approaching when he pulled his victory roll at the airshow. I understand what he meant when he referred to changes and to the old magic. I never had the kind of "magic" that he had but I and all of us had a little of it and maybe had it in other areas. It is a good thing to treasure.
The airshow officials must have been surprised when Anderson and Yeager performed their illegal victory rolls over a crowd at the airfield. But they too, as much as me and everyone else, understood what these men had achieved and done for all of us. No charges were filed.