Books read January through December 1996
| Author | Lem, Stanislaw |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Polish |
| Translators | Ford, Elinor; Kandel, Michael |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 234 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 1996 |
Ijon Tichy is callostamized while on the moon. The two halves of his brain are severed from each other and he becomes two individuals with different and conflicting ideas. Back on earth he begins a search for treatment and for an explanation of why it happened.
It turns out that Tichy was on a mission. The warring powers on earth had sublimated their warfare by programming machines on the moon to further develop their warmaking powers in a remote, safe, arms race. years later, worried about what might be happening there, the Lunar Agency sends one mission after another to find out. All fail until Tichy arrives, directing his various "remote" units from his ship in orbit. He beholds many wonders, a giant mirror that reflects laser guns, a battle of robots, a trap in the dust, an underground bunker. His final, most advanced remote, a powder that can reassemble itself in many shapes, seems to discover things but then somehow Tichy is lured to the surface, callostomized from afar while he pees behind a rock, and seeded with semi-living dust which he brings back to earth.
On earth he goes from hospital to asylum, bugged, followed, protected, and lied to. Gradually he pieces together the truth. It turns out that the dust reproduces, covers the earth, and then destroys all information in all computers, eliminating the potential for war.
This is what we expect from Lem. It is brilliant, satiric, surreal, imaginative, and imbued with the Lem/Pirx/Tichy spirit of stumbling forward, dragging one's human failings, and yet carrying the torch of courage, reason and humanity.
Always good stuff.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Dell, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 218 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 1996 |
Karen DiCillia, at age 44, is left widowed by her gangster husband Frank who had cheated on her and whom she had threatened with infidelity in revenge. But Frank had the last word. Before his death he told his Mafia buddy, the executor of his estate, to set up a trust which would pay Karen $20,000 a month, but take away everything if she moved. And any man that showed interest in her was to be scared away.
Ed Grossi, the executor, hires Roland Crowe, a Florida cracker strong arm thug and half lunatic to keep watch on Karen. But Crowe decides to take over. He murders Grossi and frames a drug dealer. Then he attempts to terrorize Karen into marrying him and giving him everything. Meanwhile, Cal Maquire, a small time hood from Detroit trying hard to go straight in a job at the World Famous Porpoise and Sea Lion Show, backs into all this and tries to help out. He falls for Karen and for her money, and she sleeps with him a few times. But in the end he really has nothing for her. In the final climax Cal has attempted to lure Crowe into a trap but is himself trapped. But Karen, cool and resourceful, takes matters into her own hands. She is not about to be ripped off and raped by Crowe, nor to be saved by Cal. She pulls out her own gun and kills Crowe and then tells Cal to get lost.
In Leonard's books one almost feels that the characters write their own scripts. There's a lunatic killer who pushes people to the limit and a cool lady who won't be pushed - just like in Maximum Bob. It's not new. He repeats himself. But he does it awfully well.
Leonard is one of those authors we read as if visiting with an old friend. I liked almost all of his books.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 624 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | February 1996 |
Magnus Pym, 50 year old British spy, leaves his Vienna home, flies to London, lays down false trails and smokescreens, and goes to earth in a sea-side rented room with a landlady who knows him only as Mr. Canterbury. The novel proper then begins with Magnus' father Ricky, a con artist on a grand scale, who brings up little Magnus with a succession of homes, "mothers", schools, scams, and ups and downs. We see the development of M's personality as a person who cares only to please others and will say or do anything to do so.
At the same time as M's childhood unrolls before us we get interspersed chapters of the spy services effort to track down M and to discover whether he really is a spy for the Czechs, a double agent who has betrayed them for 30 years.
M is sucked into the spy service as a young student in Bern. He does it as much to earn the love and respect of the powerful people he meets as for the money they pay him. He tells stories, some true, some not entirely true, about student communists in Bern and later at Cambridge. But his watershed occurs when he is pressured into betraying his only true friend, the mild, oppressed, injured, intellectual Axel. Axel, an undocumented illegal resident in Switzerland, is arrested and turned over to Germany, then expelled to Czechoslovakia, beaten and imprisoned at every stage. When he shows up later as a Czech spy, M feels more guilt and loyalty to him than to anyone. He becomes a double agent and progresses to a high level in the British service, always serving Axel.
In the end, M is hunted down. After writing down this whole story, he shoots himself.
A brilliant, subtle, enlightening book. We care more about Magnus and Axel than about any of the silly spying. Brilliantly read by David Case.
I don't remember for sure but it may have been this book where two friends talk about the vicious interrogations they have been subjected to. The one who was arrested in the East (Axel if I'm right about which book it was) laughed at the one arrested in the West (Magnus) for thinking that his interrogation was vicious.
Before John Le Carre our spy stories were books like The 39 Steps by John Buchan and Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes. Le Carre changed all of that with The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and continued to change it with his subsequent books, including this one. Spying was seen as a nasty, dishonest business that attracted a combination of nasty and/or dishonest people and people with emotional problems.
I don't know if spying was always like that or whether the world portrayed by Le Carre rose up only in the Cold War. It's of course possible that Le Carre is entirely wrong but his portrayals are so convincing that it's hard to believe that.
This was another of Le Carre's remarkable books.
| Author | Apollonius of Rhodes |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Greek |
| Translators | Rieu, E.V. |
| Publication | 1994: Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 3rd century BC |
| Number of Pages | 207 |
| Genres | Fiction; Poetry |
| When Read | February 1996 |
This is the famous story of Jason and the Argonauts who leave Hellas on the Argo with a crew of heroes to retrieve the golden fleece from the land of Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea. Along the way they encounter storms, monsters, a city of women who killed all their men, men who attack them by accident, the bulls with brass feet, the soldiers who grow up from dragon's teeth, an unsleeping serpent, a burning African desert, and help or hindrance from dozens of gods, nymphs, harpies, and so on.
The story is alien to modern sensibility. Jason wins his end with violence, trickery, prevarication, and foul murder. The "gods" are no better, engaging in many similar acts. There really is a major difference between the tone of this story from the end of the Alexandrian era and that of the New Testament, of perhaps five centuries later.
The story can only be read today as a curiosity, a cultural artifact of an earlier era.
I have revised the spelling of Apollonius to match what I found in the Wikipedia. I also recorded, anachronistically the date at which it was written as the "copyright" date.
My comment was pretty high handed. Classical scholars can no doubt glean a great deal from the poem - most of which I probably missed.
| Author | Harrison, Harry |
|---|---|
| Author | Minsky, Marvin |
| Publication | Warner Books, 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 422 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence |
| When Read | February 1996 |
An SF tale of the year 2023+. A computer scientist working on an advanced artificial intelligence has succeeded when his lab is attacked, his associates killed, his research stolen, and he's left for dead with severe brain injuries. A leading neurosurgeon brings him back to life, repairing most of the damage and implanting a computer in his brain to handle lost functions. He resumes his research. He must re-create most of it because too much of his memory was lost and all he has to go on is cryptic notes he wrote to himself. Eventually he succeeds, creating Sven, a machine intelligence that begins a revolution in world culture. He and Sven secretly leave the U.S. and eventually track down the killers who stole the first AI.
The story and the characters are all pretty flat. I read this book because Minsky had a hand in writing it. And it shows. Some of the ideas about the possibilities for AI are very intriguing. As one example, there was a bug catcher who killed harmful agricultural pests without chemicals by picking them off the leaves. Then there was correlation of facts for crime fighting, carrying out scientific research, translating - it would clearly revolutionize life like no revolution before it.
Not a good novel but interesting reading.
In my original conclusion I wrote "Not a good book", but "novel" was clearly what I meant.
As near as I can tell, we are still quite far from creating any sort of generalized AI, though we have made good progress in specific fields. Chess computers are very highly rated now, playing at world championship levels. Language translation and speech recognition still have a long way to go, but they have gone well beyond the beginnings of practicality. Every Android phone and tablet now has pretty good speech recognition that at least handles every day vocabulary. Google Translate can have big problems, but it does a better job than I can at translating languages I have studied.
As I say in my notes and diary entries about every book I've ever read about AI, the predicted schedules are always overly optimistic but I believe that the predicted impact on society is not. Whether it takes 100 years or 1,000 years, AI will offer both the greatest hope and the greatest threat to human existence.
It's coming - and it will probably laugh at my book notes, if AI's will ever laugh.
| Author | Scott, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Everyman's Library, 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1815 |
| Number of Pages | 434 |
| Extras | Preface and glossary by W.M. Parker, notes |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1996 |
Young English gentleman Guy Mannering travels to Scotland where he happens upon the Lord of Ellangowan whose first son is born that night. M, an astrologer, casts young Henry Bertrams's horoscope and predicts dire trials for the boy ahead. Five years later, little Harry is abducted by smugglers who have just killed a tax man.
Sixteen years later still, GM returns from India, a retired Colonel with a pretty daughter, a glorious record, and lots of inherited money. He finds Lord Ellangowan on his deathbed, his estate stolen by the evil Gilbert Glossin who conspired to hide the kidnapping of young Harry, given up for dead by most people, his daughter Lucy adrift in the world, and his old retainer, the Dominie Sampson, devoted but helpless to save her. He engages to save Lucy and Sampson, taking them under his protection.
We also follow the story of young Van Beest Brown, an Army captain who served with GM, fell in love with GM's daughter Julia, was severely wounded in a duel with GM (who mistakenly thought VB was after his wife, not his daughter), and who is, of course, in reality, Harry Bertram.
There are plots and surprises, fights with smugglers, the intervention of the gypsy Meg Merrilies, help from upright farmer Dandie Dimmont, more plots from Glossin, mistaken arrest of Brown, etc. But in the end, all is set right. The boys get the girls, the titles, the respect, the estate, and so on.
I liked the story much less than Quentin Durward. There is no villain like Louis XI. Scott said he wrote this in six weeks, yet it is still filled with his magnificent, fluent prose - which is always a delight to read.
The last Walter Scott novel I read was The Talisman in 2001, the worst of the four novels that I read in terms of its use of tricky and manipulative plot devices. Guy Mannering seems to have suffered from the same faults. But what a master of language he was.
| Author | Bond, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Beaufort Books, 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Comedy |
| When Read | February 1996 |
M.P. with his faithful dog Pommes Frittes, visits the hotel-restaurant La Langoustine in the French alpine town of St. Castille as a secret investigator for "Le Guide" to determine whether the restaurant deserves the supreme accolade of a third stock pot in the guide to French restaurants. At dinner he is served with what appears to be a human head in a Mafia style warning. For the next week he is constantly involved on the fringes of this mystery, surviving several attacks on his life, sometimes by the timely intervention of Pommes Frittes. Along the way there are various ridiculous shenanigans involving a sex dummy made to look like him which he uses on the proprietor's oversexed wife Sophie and which stands in for him in an attempted murder. There is also a comic opera kidnapping of his shrewish wife who hectors the kidnappers until they want no more to do with Madame P.
The mystery, such as it is, is an insurance fraud and murder scheme with an Italian detective posing as a man with two artificial hands. It is resolved by the detective. P is merely an innocent bystander who learned too much.
The story is absurd, the characters ridiculous. However Bond, author of lots of Paddington Bear and other children's books, has a pleasant style and an interest in food that helps make it bearable. I read this on the recommendation of Nick Martin at ICIC. He loved it. I doubt that I would read another.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 1996 |
Archie and Nero are hired by a Nebraska businessman to find his son, Paul Herold, who disappeared in New York 11 years before after being falsely accused by his father of embezzling funds from the business. They put an ad in the paper claiming to have evidence that "P.H." is innocent only to discover that there is a "P.H." who was just convicted of murder. It turns out to be the same man. He was framed for murdering the husband of the woman he loves and she assumed he did it. He did not defend himself because he believed that she did it.
Archie and four hired detectives search for clues in all places but, as usual, it is Nero who puts the obscure facts together to find the culprit. All is revealed in the traditional big meeting in Nero's office with Inspector Kramer snarling in the red leather chair, Sergeant Purley Stebbins sitting behind, and all the suspects denying everything until Nero bullies and outwits them into revealing all.
My notes show me that I read no Rex Stout books in 1995. Maybe I'll read two or three this year.
I was reading a lot of the Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe books in the 80's and 90's while they were easy to find in the libraries, but my reading tapered off, perhaps in part because they weren't as easy to find as time went by. Looking over my notes, I see that I read one in 1999, one in 2006 (found in a beach residence library in Puerto Rico and turning out to be one I had already read), and one in 2010. Now I have access to the full set, thanks to the Internet, and perhaps it's time to read another one.
| Author | Garcia Marquez, Gabriel |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Grossman, Edith |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 188 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | February 1996 |
Twelve stories written by GM around 1990 from notes and ideas gathered in the 1970's. All are about Latin Americans in Spain, France, Italy and a bit of Austria.
"Bon Voyage Mr. President" is about an old president, out of power, alone, in Switzerland for a dangerous operation to relieve him of chronic pain. He is taken in by a poor ambulance driver and his wife from the home country. They plan to exploit him but wind up sacrificing for him. Against expectations, he survives and returns to the Caribbean where he contemplates a return to politics in spite of age, pain, and poverty. Much is found in all three people. My favorite of the stories.
Some of the stories were too crazy. "The Saint" is about a man whose dead daughter weighs nothing and does not decompose. I don't know what "Light in the Water" is about - children fill up their apartment with light and float a boat on it. Huh? Some stories are upsetting - "I Only Came to Use the Phone" has a woman committed for life to an insane asylum when she stops to use the phone. "The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow" has a young girl die of bleeding from a thorn prick while her innocent young husband cannot get into her room at the hospital.
Other stories: "Sleeping Beauty", a man is enamored of a beautiful girl who sits beside him on a plane but ignores him. "Miss Forbes Summer of Happiness" - a strict German nanny leads a double life. "Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen" - a devout country woman from Latin America is overwhelmed by the people and culture of Italy.
These are not my favorite stories by the great Nobel prize winner. He is a man with a very unusual sensibility.
"Gabo", as he was apparently called, died this year in Mexico. He is said to have suffered from dementia in the last few years. It is a terrible fate for anyone and an especially great loss for a man of his subtlety of mind. But perhaps he lost only his memory, not the subtlety of his emotions or his appreciation of the world.
I proposed that our NCI book group read one of his books in his honor. I picked Leaf Storm, which I have not yet read. It has been a while since I read any of his writing.
Leaf Storm q.v. turned out to be a very fine book. His first novel.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 562 |
| Extras | photos, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | March 1996 |
Finished in his last year, this is A's retrospective of his very remarkable life. A was a true polymath. He appears to have read everything - usually multiple times. I seem to remember that he read Bleak House (a substantial book containing substantial prose) 25 times! He also had a remarkable memory, a wonderful ability to both analyze and synthesize, a strictly scientific world view, and a great facility in rendering difficult concepts into plain, clear, straightforward language.
A had an outgoing, egocentric, irrepressible personality. He loved giving talks on any subject, with no preparation. He wrote most of his hundreds of books front to back without extensive outlines, preparations or revisions. He never took direction easily and had problems in all his jobs - doing well only after he became an independent writer. And yet he was honest, loyal to friends and family, and very generous to most of the people he mentions in his memoir.
His family life was troubled. He married at 22 to a woman with whom he never really got along. His son David is hardly mentioned in the book. The grown son was still supported by his father and spent his time watching TV. He suffered an acrimonious divorce, complete with lawyers and a trial. It was only at age 50 that he moved in with Janet Jeppeson - the love of his remaining years.
A wrote all of this in his natural, open style, in spite of the "gathering and deepening shadows" of his clearly foreseen death. he worked all the harder in his last years - driven by his need to write, to express himself, to achieve.
He was an extraordinary person. It was a privilege to read his memoirs.
Farewell Isaac.
It now seems to me that it was not Bleak House but Great Expectations that A read 25 times "by actual count", as he put it. I either remember that wrong now, or suffered a middle aged "moment" at the time I wrote the book card from which this is transcribed.
It was reading this very fine autobiography that led me to read Janet Asimov's novel when I saw it.
He wrote in his memoir that he hoped that the last thing he would say before he died was "I love you" to Janet. She inserted a note in that place in the published book to see that it was.
I feel the same way about Marcia.
Although I have not tried to verify it, I'm quite sure that it was Great Expectations that Asimov read 25 times. Reading Bleak House, about the orphanage run by Mr. McChokumchild, 25 times would have been a brave feat.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 1996 |
Architect/builder Lee Morris has inherited 8% of a race course and is approached by the managers of the course to help them get the other owners, all members of the wealthy Stratton family, to stop fighting and save the course. Against his better judgment, Morris becomes involved and gets deep into the family quarrels between the queenly old Lady Margaret, the evil Keith, the horse obsessed Rebecca and her hair obsessed brother Dart, and the rest of the crazy, spiteful clan. They battle each other with blackmail, arson, lies, and whatever else comes to hand.
Morris tries to pay off an old debt to the family's former head boy, helping out. He also tries, and fails, to keep his alienated wife and to care for his six sons, including a problem child.
In the end Morris unravels all the family secrets, stops the evil Keith from destroying the race course, and brings them back from the brink of disaster. his own family however remains a mess as he watches his wife fall in love with another man and he winds up alone and unfulfilled.
Francis shows all of his qualities here, as usual. There is the decent, hard working, upright man struggling to overcome adversity and his own weakness. There is an ambiguous set of characters. There's all of F's fine craft as a writer and plot spinner.
Always a reliable writer.
See comments in my diary entry of March 13, 1996.
| Author | Innes, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 1996 |
This is a light reading mystery by Oxford professor John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, a man recommended in I, Asimov, the autobiography.
Retired Scotland Yard inspector Sir John Appleby assists the local police when an English literary historian employed by Lord Ampersand to sift through the family papers, falls to his death from a tower at Treskinnick Castle.
The Lord's family had an ancestor, one Adrian Digit, who turns out to have been a personal friend of Byron and Shelley. When this is discovered, the two presumptive heirs, Lord Skillet and Charles Digit, spar over the old family papers in an attempt to find and capitalize upon some hoped for literary remains which might possibly be of great value. There is also an old story of Spanish treasure which, it is thought, might be involved in the death.
In the end it seems that the scholar was killed when a trap he set for an accomplice caught him in his attempt to steal what he thought would be family treasures. The treasures never really existed.
This is a light, trivial story, very nicely written as an amusing story for readers of such fare.
| Author | Asimov, Janet |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Walker and Company, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 312 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 1996 |
A small group of scientists at Tully Robotics has perfected a technique for transferring the mind (not the brain) of a human into a robot and plans to use the technique to offer second lives to dying people. However their plans are opposed by the "bio-fundamentalist" movement which forbids highly intelligent robots and forces them to retreat to a colony in a space station at Alpha Centauri.
Various human and robot characters interact including Seven, the first "MT" who only had a partial transfer, Jonwon, a robot with no human transfer, and Adam Durant, a human then robot. In the end it all works out and Mind Transfer becomes an accepted practice - after contact with extra-terrestrials and other events.
To me, the concept of continuing life in a robot body is particularly compelling. JA raises many interesting speculations about it.
I liked the ideas. The writing was decent. An interesting book. See also a diary entry for early April.
The diary entry was for April 3, 1996. It is much more extensive and interesting than the notes above.
I wrote at that time that the idea of a mind transfer to a robotic brain was "terribly attractive" to me. It is just as much so now, for all of the same reasons, although my will to live may be a little less strong now due to the loss of confidence I have experienced with changes in my life - a topic that belongs in a diary entry, not a book note.
A few of the scenes of the book still stick with me - the walk in the lion pen at the zoo, the waking up of the robot after the mind transfer and his meeting with his human self, the interactions of Jonwon, Adam, and MT. However I have no memory at all of the extra-terrestrial encounters that I write about as occurring in the book. Clearly it was the notion of a continuance of life after death that most engaged me. I had thought about such notions before reading the book, but not with the depth and logic that JA put into her story.
As of this writing, Janet Asimov, nee Janet Opal Jeppson, is still alive at age 87. The Wikipedia lists her most recent book, a novel, as published in 2009. I read about her in Isaac Asimov's autobiography, published after his death. When I saw this title on a library shelf I picked it up out of curiosity and interest. I was not disappointed. She is an interesting thinker and a good writer.
| Author | Foote, Shelby |
|---|---|
| Publication | Alexandria, VA: Stonewall House |
| Copyright Date | 1952 |
| Number of Pages | 226 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | April 1996 |
This is the story of the battle of Shiloh in 1862, told as a novel from the point of view of six soldiers, three Confederate and three Union. The Southern army marched up from Corinth, Mississippi hoping to catch Grant's army in a bad spot and drive them into the Tennessee River. Due to inattention on the Union side they actually achieved a surprise and did much damage. But some Federal units fought very hard and courageously and held them off long enough for Buell's army to arrive during the night and turn the tide the next day.
F's characters were a 17 year old Mississippi private, a 19 year old lieutenant, aide to Johnston, a scout for Forrest, a Union gunner/runaway, a Union lieutenant, and a squad of Union solders with the narrative moving from one to the next. All was in first person.
This is clearly one of those war books that was a labor of love by its author - a man who read everything about the Civil War, lived and breathed its atmosphere in the old accounts, and wished to honor the dead by bringing the story of their deeds back to life. I think that must be a common reason for the existence of books like this.
It is a good example of its kind, rich in detail and strong it its attempt to imagine the past. The hero of the battle is Nathan Bedford Forrest - a man of striking ability, courage, and charisma.
Interesting.
I think that I must have seen Foote on TV before reading this book. It was seeing the interviews with Shelby Foote that prompted me to find the book, and probably prompted the libraries to buy it and put it on the shelves.
I seem to recall a fair amount about the battle: the surprise charge of the Confederates out of the woods onto an unprepared Union army, the panic and rout of most units, the hard resistance of others at a sunken road where they held up and delayed the rebel advance just long enough, the push back to the Tennessee River, the arrival of Buell's army overnight, crossing the river in the early hours and surprising the rebels with their numbers and fresh determination in the morning, the mistakes that Grant made and his determination to make no more.
I can't say how many of these recollections are from this book and how many from others that I have read. I actually have no specific recollections of the book at all and even, five minutes before picking up the book card to transcribe it into XML, I downloaded an mp3 version of the book, not realizing I had already read it.
It's hard to know what will make a strong impression on me and what won't. It is not entirely related to my interest in a subject.
| Author | Davies, Robertson |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1996 |
Newspaper entertainment editor "Gil" Gilmartin walks into his wife's bedroom and surprises her with a lover who leaps from the bed, bashes him on the head, and kills him. Gil's spirit haunts the killer, a film reviewer on the paper, accompanying him to a film festival. But where everyone else sees classic films, Gil gets a private showing of a series of films about his own family - from a Revolutionary War Tory woman who escapes to Canada by canoe with three children, to various Welsh tradesmen, a half mad builder in Canada, and his own father, a professor of "Eng Lang and Lit".
The stories are about people fighting the "hero fight" - not to do great deeds, but merely to get along with their spouses, to make their way in the world, and to hold on to some personal dignity in the face of hardship and disappointment. Their biggest struggles are over sex in marriage, profligate brothers and sons, the shame of bankruptcy, and similar trials of personal, family and private life.
Davies writes beautifully with wit, charm and style. There were a great many passages which struck me as lines to remember and make my own - though I'm very poor at that sort of thing and never remember them.
I was at somewhat of a loss in dealing with the ghostly, religious, and metaphysical themes - which were not insignificant but not overbearing either.
I must read more of Davies.
I did read more of Davies and like the other books I read even more than this one.
| Author | Montecino, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Arbor House, William Morrow and Co., 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 493 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | April 1996 |
This is a very violent police/crime thriller about a psychotic racist who slips over the edge and begins to kill Jews and Blacks in Los Angeles, painting crosses in red with antisemitic slogans around his victims. Jack Gold, a 53 year old Jewish detective of legendary courage but himself violent and out of control from the authorities' point of view, is assigned to find him. Gold is an alcoholic with a quarter million dollars stashed away, accumulated over the years by robbing drug dealers. He is estranged from his wife, an ambitious Jewish woman who learned about his affair with a black junkie who called her and then committed suicide. He lives alone with his bottle and his police work. His methods are: find someone who knows about the criminal and then beat him into talking. Dirty Harry as L.A. Jew.
The book is full of Jewish and black characters. We attend a "theme" Bar Mitzvah and visit a deli. The Jewish Armed Resistance postures around the community streets while Jewish politicians strike poses for the press.
There is a subplot with Gold's daughter "Pieface" and her weak, drug addicted lawyer husband, Howie Gettleman, who gets in a deal with big time lawyer, drug dealer, and fag Natty Saperstein. When Pieface is raped and beaten by black criminals hired by Natty, Gold finds and kills the rapist and then murders Natty. The rapist's own wife Esther is a good, hard working woman who learns to hate her handsome husband Bobby and love square, white-like, Clarke Johnson, a parole officer. She is in the final shootout with the killer.
This is an extreme example of hard-boiled noir detective fiction. It is a compelling read though one tires of the violence and self-absorption of most of the characters. Still, it's a very impressive effort and a first novel by a New Orleans jazz pianist!
| Author | Hauck, Charlie |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 238 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1996 |
Writer/producer Jimmy Hoy and his partner Neil Stein have written a TV sitcom which is bought by Polonia Productions. Then they have to produce it. For the female lead they recruit the beautiful young Geneva Holloway who succeeds with the audience but makes life hell for Hoy and Stein, all the other actors, the company execs, makeup, hair, and costume people - in short, everyone. She is vain, egocentric, brash, totally unreasonable, and interested in destroying anyone who threatens to upstage her, who fails to give in to her whims, or who just happens to be in a spot where they can be blamed for one of her many mistakes. Producing the show becomes a living hell for Hoy and Stein who must waste huge amounts of energy working around her, stroking her, changing good scripts and actors for worse ones, and so on. But they are trapped by their contracts and can't quit.
Eventually Geneva goes too far, trashing the company president - who finds a way to declare her in breach of contract and fines her - though she eventually sues him for ten million and wins because the jury likes her TV image. In the end she is in a movie in Africa, flies to Yemen in a stopover, and has her hand chopped off after falsely accusing an old porter of theft and getting his hand chopped off. But she manages even to make money and celebrity out of that.
The story seems wildly overdone, but maybe it's not. Could such a neurotic, self-centered, callous person become a big star and force dozens of people to cater to her? Maybe. I wouldn't know. At any rate, an interesting look behind the scenes of a TV sitcom.
I remember very little about this book except the scenes in Yemen where she accuses the old man of theft in exactly the same way that she always accuses everyone of everything, never dreaming that she could be held to account for her thoughtless and vindictive action. It was an interesting ending to the book.
| Author | Coupland, Douglas |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Regan Books, Harper Collins, 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 371 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1996 |
A wonderful novel written in the form of a diary of Dan Underwood, a low level Microsoft employee who graduated from tech support into product testing and who lives with four other MS employees in a rented house in Redmond. He falls in love with Karla, a thin, super-intelligent programmer who, like him and the others, has no life apart from work.
One of his housemates, Michael, a brilliant programmer, leaves and starts his own company to build Oop!, an object oriented simulated Lego game. He invites the others to join him and Dan and Karla, Todd the body builder, tough lovelorn Susan, Bug Barbecue, all come to Palo Alto where they setup an office in Dan's parents' house. His mother, a librarian, and father, a just laid off IBM employee, become involved in the business.
This is really an extraordinary book. All of the characters are intelligent people questing for the meaning of life and finding it in love for each other. It's full of surreal touches, like the frequent pages of random dredgings up from the subconscious which Dan enters into his special computer file. Technology is taken for granted. These people are not smug about their prowess with computers, it's simply a completely integrated part of their lives. So too is the weird culture of Microsoft and of Silicon Valley - two completely different cultures actually, in which people like Dan and Karla and Michael mix with Ethan, the strange entrepreneur, and go to the Consumer Electronics Show.
A delightful, open, honest book by a man with his mind and heart open to the world. I liked it a lot.
(P.S. There is a wonderful scene in which Dan goes to Canada to meet 'BarCode')
What I have seen of Coupland since this book has disappointed me. Picking up the audiobook of Worst. Person. Ever. at the library, I've pretty much decided not to read any more after just the first disc.
| Author | Verne, Jules |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1864 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1996 |
A young man, his uncle Professor Hardwig, and an Icelandic eiderdown hunter, climb into a volcano in Iceland and travel down tunnels to find their way to the center of the earth, hoping to follow in the footsteps of a 16th century traveler who left a cryptic note on the subject.
They travel many miles of tunnels, enduring many hardships, before emerging into a great cavern with a thousand mile central sea. They find dinosaurs, icthyosaurs, mastodons, giant mushrooms, and a 12 foot tall prehistoric man whom they avoid. When they finally find a tunnel down it is blocked by a boulder, which they blow up with gunpowder - also causing the central sea to drain down the hole and suck them to the center, and then blow them back out again through a volcano on an Italian isle.
The tale is outrageous by any standard. They carry more equipment than it is possible to carry. They carry more food than it is possible to carry. They have electric lamps that never expire. They see outrageous sights. But most outrageous of all is the pride of accomplishment which V imparts to them after they have destroyed the central sea and all its life and destroyed the path to the center.
Of course the writing was not so bad, making allowances for its hyperbolic style, but I don't know if I could read another. Hollywood did this much better.
Today there is a strong market for wild and outrageous adventure science fiction. However, there is more social and ecological consciousness than there would have been in Verne's day. Still, I expect that Verne was an important pioneer in establishing this genre of literature, even if it was not until 60 or more years later, mostly in English and in the United States, that the market matured.
I know I read some others of his books in childhood. I saw the movies of Around the World in 80 Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I think I also read both books as well as his Michael Strogoff: Courier to the Tsar. That would have all been well before my book card era but I might find them listed in the little spiral bound notebook I made starting in 1959 to hold the authors and titles of books I read - and which I still have. Maybe I'll check this weekend.
| Author | Christie, Agatha |
|---|---|
| Publication | England: G.K. Hall Audio books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1964 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Miss Marple |
| When Read | May 1996 |
Miss Jane Marple's loving nephew has paid for a two week vacation for her on a Caribbean island at a resort hotel recently taken over by a young English couple. She sits in a chair on the veranda or by the beach, doing her knitting and listening to the gossip of the minister's sister or the braggadocio of old Major Palgrave. Then Palgrave dies unexpectedly in circumstances that appear natural to everyone else but smell of murder to Miss Marple.
We are shown motives of half a dozen potential murderers as suspicion falls first on one, then another, then round again. We see adultery, a bit of blackmail, fortune hunting, revenge - all as possible causes. Meanwhile all of the evidence against the real killer, who is not suspected until the end, is gradually accumulated and being passed before us while we ignore it and keep switching our attention from one obvious suspect to another.
As a pure whodunit, this is a little pearl.
It is Tim Kindall, the hotel proprietor, who commits all the murders. Smiling, bumbling, solicitous, loving Tim, and out to murder his trusting wife.
My organization of the material in book cards evolved over time. To match what I wrote with my current scheme, I should put all of the paragraphs in the "abstract" section except for the one sentence that starts, "As a pure whodunit...", which is a comment. But I decided to copy the card as it is (except for spelling corrected by my spellchecker), and leave it as I wrote it.
Working on a project over a period of year it is inevitable that, at different times, I'll have different feelings about what I allow myself to change and what I don't. Sometimes I wanted to keep everything as much like it was as possible. At other times I corrected not only spelling, but also grammar and even awkward phrases that should have been written differently. Anyone who wants to make a study of my choices could read the original book cards and compare them, but that might involve missing the forest for the trees.
| Author | Godden, Rumer |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 263 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 1996 |
A story of a young woman's rebellion against her husband and attraction to a god-like young man in India. Mary, 18 years old and just married to Blaise St. John Browne, is charmed by the sea side resort of Petna Hall at Coromandel Beach. Her stodgy husband hates it. They arrive during the final week of a local election pitting the brilliant, educated, handsome, athletic, spiritual Krishnan Bhanj against the corrupt Mrs. Padmina Retty.
Mary is attracted to Krishnan and drawn into the campaign. She is also repelled by the insensitivities and bullying behavior of her husband. She helps K in various ways and is drawn to K's mysticism and religion.
Eventually there is a break with her husband. He goes swimming in sthe strong surf and drowns. She goes off to Calcutta to work with the poor. Various subplots - Dr. Koomarawamy's attraction to the girl Kuku, Mr. Menzie's attempted blackmail and the counter blackmail, Mrs. Manning's fear for her husband imprisoned for 12 years on a drug charge, etc. are all resolved.
The portrait of a very traditional and personally run hotel is fascinating. The characters however are too pure. Krishnan in particular is hard to take, as are Mary and Blaise. An interesting, readable, but not believable book.
Godden grew up in the part of India now Bangladesh. This was one of her late novels, published when she was 84. She married her first husband after becoming pregnant, but divorced him after eight years of marriage. She later married again but survived the death of her second husband in 1973, with whom she had apparently been happy. She had become a more spiritual person and had converted to the Catholic faith. So it appears that the novel incorporates many themes from her own life, India, an unhappy youthful marriage, falling in love, and spiritualism.
After all of the writing that she did in her life, it must have been almost second nature to write another book. It didn't appeal that much to me when I read it, but I have to respect her as an honest writer writing about serious themes.
| Author | Homewood, Harry |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: McGraw Hill, 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 372 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Submarines |
| When Read | May 1996 |
The U.S.S. Mako puts to sea in the early days of WWII and finds a Japanese convoy. Ignoring orders, her skipper has modified his torpedoes and attacks on the surface at night. He sinks a destroyer and two tankers, the first successful submarine attack of the war. He is recalled to Pearl Harbor where his useless commander wants to discipline him for disobeying orders but a smart public relations officer makes him a hero and saves him. Art Hinman goes back to the USA to sell war bonds and marry a beautiful reporter. The sub goes out with a new by-the-book skipper, but one with great courage. He sinks a battleship and brings his crew back alive.
There are further adventures in the Philippine Sea, sailing out of Australia, and lots of shore stories about wives and drinking and R and R. There is a frogman attack on anchored ships, an adventure on a Japanese held island, a rescue of civilians from the Philippines, and a final battle with the "Professor", head of the Japanese anti-submarine school. The Professor sinks the Mako with all hands but is in turn sunk by another American submarine that joined the battle.
This is a very traditional WWII novel by a man who participated in the kinds of battles he writes about. There is all the authenticity and sincerity of the real fighting man who wants to tell the world what happened and wants to remember and honor his dead comrades. Homewood became an important journalist and editor after the war and his writing is professional. There is no great literature here but the story and the characters work.
We've very near the end of the opportunities for personal accounts of the war. Louis Zamperini, the real life hero of the book Unbroken died the day before yesterday at age 97.
I'm glad that so many of those who were there have left their memoirs and even their novels about the war, like this one. I hope they are preserved forever.
| Author | Mowry, Jess |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 310 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 1996 |
16 year old drug dealer Deck and his bodyguard Ty live by running 12 and 13 year old dealers on the street. Deck hires a couple of fools to drive by shoot at each of two gangs of 13 year olds in order to scare them into dealing drugs for him and letting him into their territories.
The "Friends" gang is five kids, big fat Gordon, the leader; Lyon, an intelligent thoughtful boy thought to be magical by some other kids; twins Ric and Rac; and little Curtis who longs to go to Jamaica. They all grew up together in Oakland CA and now they band together to survive the best way they can.
The story develops as Ty falls in love and becomes increasingly disgusted with his life - especially when his little brother "Furball" tries to become a runner for Deck.
There is a final confrontation at night in an old car wash. The gangs lay a trap for Deck. They try to avoid killing Ty. Two cops in Deck's employ intervene on his side. There is a big gunfight. Ty kills Deck. Lyon kills a cop and is killed. Many others are injured. But Ty and Furball live and Gordon gives them money taken from Deck to start their own junk business.
This was a marvelous book of great insight and deep feeling for these discarded kids who assert their humanity in spite of all the evil in and around them. Terribly impressive. Deeply moving.
Reading the abstract it looks like the comment is overblown. A bunch of kids dealing drugs, shooting guns, and doing stupid things on the street doesn't sound like a "marvelous book of great insight and deep feeling." But in fact it was such a book. The kids lived in a world where no one cared about them. Parents were absent or useless. They were on their own with only their mutual support to enable them to compete against the dangerous older kids and adults in their environment.
The character of Ty was the most interesting kid. Tough but thoughtful, he gets around the neighborhood on a skateboard, which serves much as a bike would in a white neighborhood. He thinks about his life and tries to find alternatives. The other kids learn to respect him and the reader does too.
Born in Mississippi to a black father and a white mother, who abandoned her infant son, Mowry was taken to Oakland by his father where he dropped out of school at 13 and went to work helping his Dad in a scrap iron business. He lived on the streets that he writes about and he understands the kids who are the intended audience for his books. I had not heard of him before reading this book but I think he's an important American writer.
| Author | Kazantzakis, Nikos |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 1996 |
A young Greek intellectual, aiming to get away from the artificial life of books and intellectual society, has bought a lignite coal mine on Crete. On his way there he meets Alexis Zorba and brings him along as cook, miner, and chief factotum.
The young man encounters an entirely new and opposite mode of life in Zorba. Zorba lives every moment. Whether he is cooking, mining coal, making love to a woman, or playing the santuri, Z is doing only that and nothing else. He is excellent at everything he does and desires great pleasure from everything.
The story include mining, Z's affair with Madame Hortense (Bubulina), an episode at the monastery of pederasts, a fight to save a beautiful widow - killed by the father of a boy who committed suicide over her, and many conversations about life. The young man, the "boss", whose name we never learn, cannot change and become a different person, but he is still affected by Z. After they separate they still correspond from time to time and he thinks of Zorba often.
Marcia hated this book and would not finish it. She saw Zorba as a man who degraded women. But I loved it. I loved the philosophy, the earthiness, the exotic characters, the comments on life. Zorba was indeed a male chauvinist - though not necessarily a traditional one. He is a unique and original character in literature.
I thought The Last Temptation of Christ was an interesting book, and Saint Francis an excellent one. But this is his best.
Now that we have the Internet and the Wikipedia, I have learned that Kazantzakis studied law and obtained a PhD in philosophy where he "fell under the influence of Henri Bergson." I presume that means that he studied with Bergson, but I don't know for sure.
| Author | Kinney, John F. |
|---|---|
| Author | McCaffrey, James M. |
| Publication | Washington: Brassey's, 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 201 |
| Extras | references, photos, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | May 1996 |
Brigadier General John F. Kinney, United States Marine Corps (retired), conceived the desire to fly as a young boy and pursued it as hard as he could, making great sacrifices to join Pan Am, then the Army reserve, Navy, and finally the Marine Corps, to become a pilot. He also acquired an engineering degree and a great deal of practical knowledge of engines, electricity, and lots of other technologies. He arrived at Wake a week before the outbreak of war with Marine Wildcat fighter squadron VMF 211. They were bombed on Dec. 8, losing 8 of their 12 fighters, but the remaining four fought on, shooting down a number of bombers and fighters and sinking a ship before all was lost. Kinney fought in the air but spent most of his week of combat rebuilding engines and aircraft without the benefit of manuals or sophisticated tools.
K was captured and spent the rest of the war in prison camps in China, using his talents to build a clandestine radio and other gadgets - always looking for a way to escape. He actually did escape in the spring of 1945 and was picked up by Communist Chinese soldiers, whom he respected more than the Nationalists he met.
He fought again in Korea and became a leader of jet and helicopter squadrons. He left in 1959 to continue flying as a civilian test pilot, and later still worked as an engineer. His promotion to general was purely honorary - just before retirement.
We owe a lot to Kinney and the men like him.
[But they never said "Send more Japs."]
Kinney was one of those uncommon but very valuable people whose intense pursuit of a personal dream benefits all of us. If he had not been taken at Wake Island I imagine he might very well have become one of America's ace fighter pilots. He certainly had the knowledge, the skill, and the personal drive to do it. I'm glad that he served our country and glad that he wrote this account of his World War II service.
So, did they or didn't they say "Send more Japs"? Google estimates "about 849 results" for a search on (midway "send more japs"). Adding "apocryphal" gets three false hits. So I haven't seen any confirmation of Kinney's claim.
| Author | Gordimer, Nadine |
|---|---|
| Publication | Grand Haven, MI: Brilliance Co., 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1996 |
Vera Stark, a South African white lawyer in her mid 60's perhaps, reflects on her life and family during the year before the first non-racial election in SA. She works for a legal foundation which tries to get land for blacks and her black friends include Zep, a well spoken representative of a squatter community who becomes an important man, Opa, a law student and former Robben Island inmate, and Didymus and Sibongile (Sally) a pair of ANC revolutionaries whose roles have reversed now that they are above ground and who are having a hard time of it. Her second husband Bennet has sacrificed his career as a sculptor and art professor to support Vera through his "promotional luggage" business.
Vera reflects on her affair with Ben while married to her first husband, her quick one night stand with her first husband while engaged to Ben, and her affair with a German Hitler baby cinematographer while married to Ben. She is sexually attracted to Ben but finds him an encumbrance in her life - in spite of, and in part because of, his total devotion to her.
The political situation develops. Opa gets D and S's daughter pregnant and there is a blowout over that. Opa and Vera are both shot in a robbery and Opa eventually dies. Vera's lesbian daughter and divorced son pass through, as does her flamboyant and charming grandson from London. In the end, she sells her only possession - her house of 50 years, separates from Ben, and starts a different life - all without any discussion with Ben or her children.
I would classify this as an almost existentialist book. Vera is active, aware, and committed in her public/work/political life but passive and withdrawn from her family. her husband's 40 odd years of devotion to her have not meant all that much to her. A cold fish indeed. An interesting and well written book about interesting times, but Vera leaves me cold.
How does it happen that a person develops a deep and self-sacrificing commitment to the cause of humanity in general but is unable to commit to individuals in a personal way? I don't doubt that it does happen. It may even be common. It is probably very easily explainable by any psychologist who has spent time with such people.
In Vera's case, the part of her that bothers me is not entirely that she cannot relate well to Ben or her children, but that she has no compunction about using Ben. Perhaps she sees her use of him as a failing on his side rather than on hers.
Vera still leaves me cold.
| Author | Crevier, Daniel |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Basic Books, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 386 |
| Extras | index, bibliography, notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence |
| When Read | June 1996 |
Crevier is a Canadian professor of electrical engineering and president of a computer vision company. He interviewed all of the famous researchers in America - Minsky, Newell, Simon, Lenat, McCarthy - read all the key books and papers - and digested the highlights for us.
For Crevier, the development of AI has seen continuous progress. My own impression had been that the many AI experiments had merely produced a collection of miscellaneous toys, each of which worked on a different, interesting principle, but none of them related well to, or greatly built upon, the achievements of the others. C does not agree. He sees the work of Schank and Lenat in particular as having gone far towards real intelligence, possibly requiring only larger machines and more training to become truly intelligent.
The chapter on "The Silicon Challengers in our Future" discusses the social implications of AI - which are far from Utopian. C sees many possibilities for disaster, especially in smart weapons and fascist social control. AI can become a serious threat long before it achieves human scale intelligence.
C has very interesting methods for measuring the capacity of the human brain - by cell and connection quantity, by learning rates, and even by an extrapolation of the game "20 Questions". By any measure, he sees computers reaching our capacity by 2058 for desktop computers, worst case.
Very stimulating.
I'm still skeptical of the progress of AI and of the achievement of human scale intelligence by 2058. Hardware development seems to have slowed down as we get closer to the limits of circuit miniaturization after which the resistance of narrower channels grows too great and the isolation of channels from each other becomes too little. Equally, and maybe more importantly, I'm still not aware of much progress in generalized reasoning capacity. We have great chess playing programs. We have limited but helpful automatic speech recognition and language translation. We can do much more in the way of robotics, instrument control, navigation, and so on. But the improvements still rely heavily, maybe exclusively, on domain specific algorithm implementation, not on generalized thinking.
However, Crevier is certainly right that the dangers of AI arise even without human scale intelligence. His predictions about the dangers of automatic weapons are close to being realized. His predictions about fascist social control have already been realized in limited areas having to do with spying on citizens.
In the long run, I still believe that generalized AI is going to be achieved, even if the time scales are much longer than the computer scientists in the field predict. How consciousness will evolve and how long there will continue to be a role for our current form of humanity are impossible to predict. I can very easily imagine an AI reading my diary and book notes and erasing them as useless and irrelevant. But maybe it will instead file them away in some corner of a great new library of Alexandria where they will be preserved and even, from time to time, perused by someone or something.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ballantine Books, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 215 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Cadfael |
| When Read | June 1996 |
"The Eighth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael."
Brother Cadfael is a former soldier and crusader who, at age 43, decided to "come in to harbor" by joining the monastery of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at Shrewsbury. Now at age 60 he works as herbalist and doctor at the abbey. The year is 1140. King Stephen is contending with his sister for the throne but so far the incipient civil war has not touched Shrewsbury in Shropshire.
Meriet Aspley, the 19 year old son of a local lord is brought by a cold and somber father to the abbey to become a monk. The boy seems ill suited and is clearly hiding a secret but professes an ardent desire to join the brotherhood. Meanwhile, an important clergyman who passed through on a royal mission just before Meriet's appearance at the abbey is reported missing and eventually found dead. Cadfael and deputy-sheriff Hugh Beringer suspect that Meriet knows something about it, but disbelieve his confessions of murder.
Of course all is discovered in the end. Meriet's beloved elder brother and another local lord's son had conspired in a revolt of the north country and had killed the priest. A sweet, smart, and determined young girl of 16, in love with Meriet, helps Cadfael get at the truth.
This is a well written series style book with some period color and knowledge. The characters are not compelling but are acceptable. Decent quality of its type. Not exciting.
This was apparently the first of the Brother Cadfael books that I read. I've read about six more of them since.
Characters like Cadfael grow on the reader. Part is just the sort of comfortable feeling of knowing everyone and feeling at home that one gets from reading series books or watching a series on TV. Part however is the comfortable character of Cadfael himself. He is presented as a man of intelligence and compassion. His Christian faith is the quiet, personal kind, not the in-your-face evangelistic kind. His background as a crusader gives him a little extra dimension, but not too much is made of it. It is his turning of his back on violence that defines him, not his violent past.
Although my comment above didn't sound enthusiastic, I see that the character and the story appealed to me well enough that I read more.
| Author | Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | June 1996 |
This is my second reading of this book - gotten because it was the best of the audio tapes available at the library.
Ivan's only crime was to have been captured by the Germans and escaped back to the Russian lines. Like others with this experience, he is accused of being a German spy and is sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in Siberia with thousands of others whose "crimes" are no greater than his. They are underfed, underclothed, badly housed, and ruled over by a hierarchy of thugs among the prison trustees and guards. Their existence is from minute to minute, concentrating enormous energy on a piece of bread, a potato, a bit of cloth, a tool, and on escaping punishment in the incessant inspections and counts.
The day starts badly with a low grade fever as Ivan arises in the dark at -20 degrees and is marched shivering and stamping to the construction site. It gets better as he finds his favorite trowel hidden at the site and some roofing felt which can be stolen at great risk to plug the windows and keep out some of the cold. His squad lays five rows of blocks on the wall, done with great skill amidst freezing mortar. Later he hustles for a rich prisoner and saves his parcel for him, earning an extra bowl of soup and a bit of sausage. Hard maneuvers and a sharp eye enable him to get soup with some stuff in it.
One Day is a remarkable book, written from personal experience by a remarkable man, about brutality, decency, and survival in a concentration camp.
This is quite a different perspective from my first, less sympathetic reading.
Looking back at the 1974 reading I see that I was a committed Marxist at that time. I wondered whether there might be something wrong with Solzhenitsyn's political consciousness. I suspect that I'm going to have a tough time converting book cards from that time and writing comments from the perspective of 2016 or 18, or whenever I get to them.
| Author | Oates, Stephen B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 544 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Abraham Lincoln |
| When Read | July 1996 |
This is a biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Oates gives us a sympathetic portrayal of a man who is honest, intelligent and decent. L is no charismatic leader. He excelled rather at thinking problems through over a long period of time - considering all sides and coming to a deliberate conclusion. He was ahead of his time on racial issues, though not far out front. He believed that every man had the right to the products of his own labor, that no man should own another, and that slavery was a great evil that had severely damaged the country. See my diary entry of July 7, 1996 for more on all of this.
Oates sticks close to the story of Lincoln. This is not a general history of the period though it does sketch out the main events.
What was new to me in this treatment was O's attention to racism as a pervasive part of political life in the North as well as the South. There was a deep hatred of blacks in the North which had much to do with Northern opposition to the spread of slavery and also much to do with Northern opposition to abolitionism.
See the diary.
The diary entry referenced above had much more about the book than I put on the 3x5 index card copied above. I'll quote just one small part of it here:
" ... when Sherman launched a policy of total war in Georgia, Lincoln refused to try to stop it. He had come to believe that the Southern people as a whole had supported this rebellion and now they needed to have the consequences of their actions brought home to them. It wouldn't be enough for them to have caused all of this evil and done all of this violence to others and then simply be defeated on the battlefield. They had to see that the war was a personal disaster for them as well as for others. And so he endorsed Sherman's destruction of the South."
This was the same consideration that led some in Britain and the United States to support the bombing of Germany and Japan, and even to avoid steps, such as a proposed assassination of Hitler, that might shorten the war without allowing the German people to see Hitler's true madness and the full consequences of supporting him and his racist, ultra-nationalist policies.
The total destruction wrought in Germany and Japan may indeed have been a factor in the failure of revanchism to take hold after the war as it did after World War I.
But this was a sidelight to Oates' biography. The main thrust was a personal and political biography of Abraham Lincoln. It was a well done book.
| Author | Jones, Ken |
|---|---|
| Publication | Philadelphia: Chilton Co., 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 283 |
| Extras | maps, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | July 1996 |
An unusual history of a destroyer squadron in the Pacific, focusing entirely on the events of 1942-3 and the battles north and west of Guadalcanal.
J is a strange fellow. He uses words like "gallant" all over the place. He makes rather silly remarks about the marriages of the officers and about the personal qualities of the men. He is concerned to cover Arleigh Burke, commander of the squadron, with glory
Burke was an impressive commander. He analyzed all the battles that he and others fought against the Japanese, always looking for ways to do better. He cared little for spit and polish but was a stickler for seamanship, tactics, training, and competence. It appeared to me that he won his battles against a very competent enemy not by one bold stroke of master tactics but by doing each and every thing as well as he could.
I saw this book on the shelf in its old green library binding and read it out of nostalgia for the books I liked as a kid.
I'm not a kid anymore but I still read and enjoy books about World War II, from grand histories like Winston Churchill's or the Rick Atkinson "Liberation Trilogy" I'm in the middle of now, to Osprey single focus books, to very personal memoirs, to novels, often by writers who experienced the war.
I don't think that the Americans who fought World War II were our "greatest generation", as Tom Brokaw has them. However, not counting the Civil War which was in a special class by itself, World War II was our greatest and, in a moral sense, our purest war. The German regime was as evil as a modern government can be and the Japanese weren't that far behind it. I look upon the Americans, British, Russians, Poles, Greeks, and the partisans of many nationalities as heroes in the struggle of humanity against this evil. The Germans and Japanese fought as bravely and, in the German case, as intelligently and effectively, as anyone in the world. I like that American men defeated them with bravery of their own, but also with a productive capacity that the enemy couldn't begin to match, with science that even the advanced Germans couldn't match, and with overwhelming firepower that both saved American lives and taught the enemy something about the hard consequences of their acquiescence in the evils of racism and imperialism.
| Author | Auchincloss, Louis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 230 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | July 1996 |
Eight short stories are included set at times ranging from the 1930's to the 1980's, though not chronologically arranged.
"The Man of Good Will" has a successful lawyer, now over 70, who hopes to save his college student grandson from suicide but fails. The boy has meant everything to him in the midst of an easy life filled with gratification and material success but no deep human contact except with the troubled boy.
"They that have the Power to Hurt" has a man in his 70's, retired in Paris, reflecting on his life of minor triumphs in which he was the lover of a famous woman writer and then a male artist, on account of which the woman left him. He wonders if his influence on their lives was the most significant thing he's done.
In "The Lotus Eaters", a well off retired lawyer with a difficult past marries a wealthy woman in Florida and thinks he's moved to heaven. His wife leaves him for a while to let him know it's she and not "life" in the abstract that has made his heaven for him. In "The Renwick Steles" Osborn Renwick surrenders all effort at independent self-esteem and accepts the superiority of his infallible wife. "The Protester" is a wealthy industrialist who offends his wife and her set with his vitriolic anti-labor union opinions. He is reduced to making obscure phone calls when his wife leaves him. "To My Beloved Wife" is another family divided by politics. When he discovers the depth of his wife's concern for left-wing causes an elderly philanthropist takes steps to insure that she will never dispose of his wealth. "A Day and Then a Night" - a young man follows his fate into World War II. "Priestess and Acolyte" - a committed, dedicated actress rejects a fling with a handsome but dissipated young actor.
Elegant, articulate stories of wealthy New Yorkers - strong women and flawed men. An impressive, highly literate collection by a man who has observed the inner lives of wealthy, often very conventional people.
I wonder why this collection contained tales of yesteryear. Were the stories written previously and only collected and published in 1994? Were they tales of people and situations that he knew in earlier years? I don't recall whether Auchincloss said anything about it.
The author would have had his 77th birthday the year that this collection was published. I would have had my 50th the year that I read it. I am now a lot closer to the author's age at the time of publication than I was then and I feel a deeper attachment to the older characters and their issues than I recall having at age 50.
I have felt the pull of elderly regret, of wondering if my life has been well spent. I try hard to resist it. I see no benefit in it for me or anyone else. Perhaps the pull gets stronger as we get older. Or perhaps the opposite happens. Perhaps we come to accept ourselves and forgive ourselves for our weakness.
Such life regret was an important part of these stories. Is it because Auchincloss himself felt it? Or is it just that he perceived it in the people he knew and, being the perceptive man that he was, understood it? His other career as an attorney specializing in wills and estates, pursued up to age 59 in 1986, would have put him in close contact with many elderly, well-to-do, accomplished New Yorkers.
From my lowly point of view, Auchincloss had little to regret. He had a successful legal career. He wrote 66 published books. He was married, I presume successfully though I have no information about it. And yet he too apparently felt some sense of inadequacy. Successful and prolific as he was, there were others who climbed higher than he did. Perhaps if I had reached his position in the programming world I would have looked to the super programmers and regretted not being among them.
Most probably I'm making all of this up, as Marcia says I always do. Most probably Auchincloss' issues and regrets were different from mine. Very possibly, the frustrations and regrets of his characters were closely observed in others, not in himself. Were he and I to meet and talk for a day his observations of me would probably be far more acute than mine of him - though I don't think I'm all that bad an observer.
| Author | Fitzgerald, F. Scott |
|---|---|
| Publication | Charlotte Hall, MD: Recorded Books, 1984 |
| Copyright Date | 1925 |
| Number of Pages | 180 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1996 |
Nick Carroway arrives from the Midwest and rents a house in West Egg, Long Island, next door to the mansion of Jay Gatsby, the wealthy young man with a mysterious past and shady present who has dared all, risked all, and committed all to win back the love of Daisy, Nick's cousin, who is married to the rich lout Tom. Gatsby pursues her through Nick and anyone else. He almost wins her away from Tom but just as Tom sneers too much, Gatsby pushes too hard. Daisy is in love with G and repelled by Tom's infidelities and coarseness, but she is also put off by Gatsby's all-consuming fire of love. It is more than she is capable of.
In the end she drives off with Gatsby in Tom's car and kills Tom's low class paramour, who runs out to the car, thinking Tom is in it. The woman's husband thinks Gatsby must have been her lover and her killer and he finds Gatsby and shoots him dead. Nick, of all of G's glittering friends, party guests and hangers on, is almost the only mourner. Daisy had already gone back to Tom.
The book is full of striking images and sparkling prose. There is a tone of rich decadence, of wonders gone stale, of charm and style and joy of life - all aimed wide of the mark and failing to give meaning to life. And through it all there is Gatsby's burning passion - a passion that mistook the dreary beauty of Daisy for real gold.
A terrific book read by a terrific narrator. I loved it. I read this 30 years ago but got less out of it then.
| Author | Hawking, Stephen W. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 212 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Cosmology |
| When Read | July 1996 |
The great English physicist, holder of the Lucasian chair in mathematics at Cambridge, reviews the state of our knowledge of cosmology and of the grand unified theories of everything.
I understood only a fraction of H's lectures and much of what I seemed to sort of understand has flown out of my head since completing the tapes, in spite of the fact that I frequently rewound and re-listened to many passages, sometimes three or four times.
He says that, if the universe originated in a singularity, an infinitely dense, infinitely small point, all physical laws would have no application within that singularity and no antecedent states from before the big bang could have any effects on events after. Therefore it is impossible for science to say anything about what happened before and therefore, by Occam's Razor, we can eliminate the pre-big bang from our cosmology.
Much of H's discussion is like that. Even where all of the terms are understood, as in the above statements, one wants a fuller discussion and a longer time to cogitate before accepting it.
H does not seem committed to the big bang. He discussed an alternate theory of expansion and of time flow forward and backward. But he left me in the dust. Still, H believes that I can understand. He thinks we might be close to a solution to the problems of physics and, if we reach that solution our great minds will have leisure to build explanations which even us ordinary mortals can understand.
There was a curious discussion of H's forebears at the end. Einstein comes out looking very good and Newton very bad as human beings.
I've read biographies of both Newton and Einstein since reading this book. I'm sure that I know much less about Newton than Hawking does but my views of him are perhaps a bit more generous.
It has often been remarked that we have evolved brains and cultures for handling the "middle-sized, middle-distance" objects and events of ordinary life. Notions of the expanding universe, the multiverse, the big bang, quanta, speed of light, and other concepts that physicists deal with are outside our ordinary experience. Hawking is able to argue that there is no possible information that could ever be available to us about events before the big bang. It follows therefore that such pre-bang events have no place in our cosmology and that we can, if I have understood him, consider that time and the universe begins with the big bang,
He can say that, believe it, and live by it. It's not so easy for us. Saying that there is no "before" does not accord with our ordinary concept of "before". Well, he didn't precisely say that there was no before, what he said was that whether or not there was a before is forever unknowable and nothing can ever be said about it. Occam's razor does not tell us there was no before. It tells us that there is no point speculating about it.
Have I got that right?
Like Hawking, Newton too hoped to "solve" physics and, also like Hawking, believed he was close. As I understand it, there are some attractive theories about how we will know when physics is solved.
Will it be done? Will we have the most complete, concise, and accurate understanding of the universe? Will theoretical science come to an end, leaving only practical problems?
Again, this does not accord with our ordinary concepts of learning and knowledge, which we think are lifelong and endless. We haven't yet even solved chess - though that is admittedly a different kind of problem. Nevertheless, I think I understand why Hawking thinks it will be solved and I'm not about to disagree with him.
One day our descendants, whatever they are and assuming they haven't all killed each other or been killed by some other intelligent beings, will be as we imagine gods to be today.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Avon Books, 197 |
| Number of Pages | 231 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1996 |
If I remember correctly what I read in a hardback edition, this book was written in the late 70's but rejected by publishers until after L made a big name for himself and could sell anything.
The story concerns one Charlie Lawson, formerly Brother Juvenal of the Franciscan order, who just happens to be able to heal people by touching them, for which he receives the stigmata. He works in an alcohol rehab center.
"Juvie" becomes the target of a right wing Catholic fundamentalist who wants to use him to promote a restoration of earlier church practice (and who is crazy and indolent), a sensationalist TV talk show host who wants to build his ratings, and a former evangelist, con-man, RV salesman, who wants to broker Juvie's TV appearance. But he's just an ordinary unpretentious sort of guy with saintly qualities but no sense whatever of sainthood. He falls in love with Lynn, a rock music record promoter. They like to romp in the sack and do ordinary things.
In the end Juvie has to throw the fundamentalist off the apartment balcony to keep him from shooting Lynn. But then he heals the jerk on TV. The story only comes up 4th that night in the Nielsen ratings and it all blows over. Juvie and Lynn move to LA.
This is far from Leonard's standard fare. It's one of those things that you read in a different way from realistic stories, simply deciding to accept it for the sake of an otherwise good read - which it was, as usual with Leonard.
| Author | Waitzkin, Fred |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 226 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Chess |
| When Read | July 1996 |
W discovered that his six year old son Josh had a great talent for chess and he and the boy embarked on an odyssey through the world of chess, from the chess nuts in Washington Square Park in New York to the world championships in Moscow to the National Scholastic Championship in the U.S.
W himself is not a strong player but is fascinated with people who are. His descriptions of them are marvelous, partly because he admires and appreciates these people in spite of their personal limitations that would put off most observers. He's also a good writer with a keen eye and an understanding of what we want to know about these people.
Some of hs observations include: the parental pressure on chess prodigies is enormous, including W's own pressure on Josh; the Soviet chess establishment was riddled with politics and favoritism; chess is an addiction for many players, they play hour after hour, day after day, unable to quit; winning is crucial to the talented addict, they play to win and hate to lose; study and memorization are essential for the upper levels of play, good analytical skills are necessary but not sufficient. The best prepared players recognize most situations without having to waste time thinking them through. They already know the outcomes of each promising variation.
The hero of the book is little Josh. The anti-hero is Bobby Fischer, brilliant master of chess with a warped, anti-social, antisemitic outlook on life.
Fred's discovery of Josh's talent occurred when he realized that, not only was the little kid beating him at chess, but he was bored and was fiddling with other things while beating his Dad using only part of his mind. If I remember correctly, Fred hired Bruce Pandolfini to tutor Josh. Josh was a brilliant player with a deep appreciation of the game and deep attraction to it, but he was still a little kid and still had other interests as well. Pandolfini understood that but Fred lost track of it at times - putting more pressure on Josh than Josh could take. Still, Josh made progress and won a number of national championships.
"Searching for Bobby Fischer" is in part a metaphorical title but there was an actual incident in which Fred and Joel Benjamin, then a U.S. National Champion, flew to California to try to find Fischer, who was thought to be in hiding there. They didn't find Bobby, but Benjamin did get to play the greatest blitz artist in Los Angeles, a guy who sat in the park and played one minute games against all comers for a buck (if I remember correctly) per game. Benjamin sat down and lost. The other guy had memorized dozens of trick moves and traps that were ultimately unsound but required more than a few seconds to see their flaws. He asked the guy if he would play for two minutes, eventually asking for just a minute and 15 seconds. But the guy realized what he was up against and refused to do it. It was an interesting scene.
Scenes with Josh and the other little kids were also very interesting. One kid in particular was totally obsessed with chess and had been heavily trained by grandmasters (as indeed had Josh). When Josh told the boy that he had lost and (IIRC) may even have offered him a draw, the boy disdainfully refused, telling Josh to make his move. When he lost, he burst into tears.
Josh's highest rating was 2480 and he is currently rated at 2464 - an International Master. But he gave up tournament chess in 1999 and has been working as a martial artist and trainer since then.
| Translators | Gunmere, Francis B |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1996 |
Beowulf, the young hero prince, leaves his homeland of Geatland in southern Sweden and travels to Denmark to the land of King Hrothgar, there to fight the monster who has been killing Hrothgar's people. The monster Grendel comes into the mead hall that night to kill. Weapons are useless against his magic. Beowulf grabs him and, and with his iron grip and great strength, pulls off Grendel's arm, sending the monster out into the night to die.
Then Grendel's mother arrives seeking revenge. Beowulf chases her to the sea floor and to her cliff dwelling and finally kills her too. He retires back to Geatland with great honor. He becomes king and rules for 50 years in peace. No one dares challenge him. And then a new monster is awakened, a dragon whose horde of gold has been disturbed by a man. Beowulf, an old man, fights this dragon too. He is mortally wounded and slays the dragon only with the help of a new young hero. Then he dies and is buried with all honors and with the dragon's gold.
Our copy of Beowulf dates from Christian Britain in the 900's though the story is from a pagan time 200+ years before. It is fully 10% of all of the Old English surviving to the present day. It was a savage time of great, exhilarating deeds for macho men like Beowulf, and a time of misery for ordinary men like me.
It was not easy to follow the story. It went backwards and forwards in time and place, interweaving some other stories with it. There was no rhyme but much alliteration. I wonder how it sounded to 9th or 8th century ears.
Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead, which I read four years after reading this, was a retelling of the Beowulf story, written on a dare. It was, of course, easier for his contemporaries to understand.
Perhaps 1300 years have passed since Beowulf was written. What if these words that I am writing are read 1300 years from now, in the year 3300? Will they require translation? Probably. Will the reader be a person like myself? Probably not. But will what I have written, after translation, be understandable in the future?
I like to think that the answer is yes. I can barely understand Beowulf but the Greek philosophers, playwrights and historians are very much understandable to me. I like to think that is because the rational, educated, and reflective life of a human being is likely to be understandable to another rational, educated, and reflective person, even if the reader is from a different age and a different culture.
I don't know if the readers of 3300, if there are any and if our literature survives, will be at all like us. They might be machines. They might be immortals. They might have ten times our IQ. But I think there is a good chance that they will be rational, educated and reflective.
| Author | van de Wetering, Janwillem |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 182 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 1996 |
Three Amsterdam cops search for the killer of a harmless man who didn't seem to have any enemies, but turned out to have a dangerous friend. Sergeant de Gier is a handsome but lonely man who lives with his cat. Adjutant-Detective Grijpstra is a heavier, middle-aged man, unhappily married, who is more plodding but is experienced and reliable. The third man is the "commisaris", an old man who survived torture by the Nazis and is now the intellectual leader of the group.
The crime turns out to have been an attempt by a Dutch-Arab store owner and distributor of stolen goods to intimidate the Cat, leader of a gang of amateur thieves. They (the cops) wiretap the high class whorehouse frequented by the Arabs and learn the whole story, eventually catching everyone except the Arab, who dies in a crash at the end of a high speed car chase.
I read this book because I heard a glowing review of the author's recent work and I always like to read early works first.
The surprising thing about it is that all of the people are far more civilized and philosophical than in any American mystery. The cops worry all the time about whether they are serving the people. The Cat lovingly protects his neurotic, promiscuous, mistress. The Arab spouts philosophy amidst murder. Even the pimps at the whorehouse are considerate and paternal to their women. There are no American style toughs, machos, or gangsters.
Not great but readable and interesting.
I seem to recall a rather ridiculous gunfight at the docks in this book. The cops had closed in on the criminal gang and they tried to shoot it out. I seem to recall thinking that the fight was out of character for the criminals and the police and was inserted for some reason having to do with pandering to the readership.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it wasn't this book.
| Author | Kaminsky, Stuart M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 209 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Porfiry Rostnikov |
| When Read | August 1996 |
As usual, the three policemen are at work on three crimes. Rostnikov investigates the murder of a harmless seeming old Jew. His only clue is a 60 year old photograph of five men. The daughter of the murdered man believes that one of them is the killer. Eventually, R tracks down all of the men in the photo. The killer has killed his friend from childhood because the man had betrayed him 60 years before. He in turn is killed by the KGB on orders from another man from the photo, a Jew who, in the 1930's, switched identities with a dead GPU agent and eventually became a KGB general.
Karpo pursues a sniper who turns out to be a demented woman athlete who is dying of stomach cancer and believes she was poisoned by the state with the steroids they gave her. Tkach pursues a gang of car thieves. He is seduced by the female leader of the gang and would be killed but is saved by Rostnikov who off handedly overpowers the guards with his weight lifter's muscles.
As always, we see a dark and dangerous USSR, peopled by dangerous sociopaths, demented people who have broken under the strain, a few communist heroes like Karpo, a lot of people trying to get by, and an intellectual sort of policeman who is curious about it all and willing to follow his own inner lights along a complex path between duty and the beast.
Volume 3 in the Inspector Rostnikov series
| Author | Packard, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 226 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | August 1996 |
An autobiography of P's interesting and productive life together with a history of his company.
My impression was that H and P were very strong technically with a good grasp of all the technologies involved from fundamental electronics to shop floor mechanics to fairly advanced theory. However their real strength was in keeping their objectives clearly in mind and in bringing together good people and keeping them happy - with profit sharing, with a respectful and trusting environment, and exciting opportunities for learning and developing their careers.
HP really became a big business when it got into computers. It grew from 0 to 125 million from 1939 to the mid-60's as a supplier of test and measurement equipment. It's strength was in developing new products - always the foundation of its growth. That was the right kind of company to get into computers - which brought it to 24 billion dollars of business by 1994.
I'm happy as an independent, but if I had to work for a company, HP would be a top choice.
Working for one of the other big companies before founding his own, Packard went to the tool room to get some piece of equipment that he needed. He had to justify it, sign for it, maybe get permission from higher ups (I don't remember the details) and certainly couldn't take it out of the building. When Hewlett Packard was founded, H and P were determined to treat their employees differently. People had no trouble getting access to the equipment they needed, keeping it for extended periods, and even taking it home. They treated their engineers as partners from the point of view of engineering development, not as untrustworthy people who had to be watched and disciplined.
At some time in HP's development, they acquired a Japanese company and they and other HP executives made trips to Japan to see their operations. At one point they asked the Japanese management how many warranty returns they had, i.e., products sold that were returned under warranty to repair manufacturing defects. The Japanese managers were embarrassed to report that they had some, the numbers being a few per thousand. The Americans were stunned. They considered themselves to be deeply concerned about quality and yet their own warranty return rates were more than ten times as great as those of the Japanese making similar products.
They learned a lot about quality control from the Japanese. They learned, among other things, that quality assurance was not just the job of the quality assurance team, but also of the production workers and the design engineers. They made positive changes in their American shops.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | audio Renaissance Tapes |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Easy Rawlins |
| When Read | August 1996 |
Easy Rawlins is hired by a detective to find Betty, a woman now 50, who Easy remembers from his youth as the sexiest, most desirable woman in his childhood Texas hometown. It turns out after much travail and hardship that Betty is the heir of a rich white man who kept and oppressed her for 20 years. And now she and all her relatives are being hunted down by a vicious killer cop in the employ of a lawyer who also hired Saul Lynx, the detective, who actually turns out to be a good guy. Betty's brother and two children are killed but Easy saves Betty herself.
ER must also some how handle Mouse, who has just been released from five years in prison and is itching to kill the man who turned him in, or if that isn't possible, then someone else. ER must also try to repair relations with Odell, who had been almost a father to him, and visit Martin, another father figure who is dying of cancer and now wants only to be out of his misery. In an astonishing scene at the end, Easy has told Mouse that Martin turned him in and lets Mouse satisfy his blood lust and end Martin's torment at once.
As always, Easy is part rational man, part loose canon - or maybe I should just say self-defeating and emotional. He has been robbed of his apartment house in a sleazy real estate deal. His life is a mess. But his silent stepson Jesus has finally spoken to him and Easy Rawlins continues to fight on.
A remarkable series of books.
| Author | Shirer, William L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 510 |
| Extras | index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | August 1996 |
Shirer recounts his childhood education and early career on the staff of the Paris Tribune and then as foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Unlike many other autobiographies this is truly a memoir of the times even more than of Shirer's life.
S met many important people in the political, art, literary and sports worlds. He writes extensively of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan, Sinclair Lewis, Grant Wood, Charles Lindbergh, and others. He tries to see in each that which made the person unique and famous, even if he must severely criticize them as he does with Stein and Lindbergh - and to a much lesser extent - Lewis. He is a staunch liberal, blasting the moneybags and the fascists and the sell-out economists who led the way down the garden path of the 20's to the depression of 1929.
I loved the book. S has an eye and ear for what I want to know about those times. He was a keen and aggressive observer and an outspoken reporter. He was a man who was committed to his profession and his ideals in life.
I'll read all the rest in the series.
I did read the rest and was equally satisfied with them. There are more notes accompanying the other books and numerous entries about Shirer in my diary.
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 125 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | September 1996 |
At some time around 150 years or so in the future, self-sustaining colonies on the moon and Mars conduct business and perform scientific research. At one station on the moon owned by the Sandoval-Rice "binding multiple", or extended family clan, a young scientist and his quantum logic computer are attempting to bring some bits of material to absolute zero. His wife, Rho, takes advantage of their spare refrigeration capacity and buys 452 frozen heads from a dying perpetual care company on earth. She plans to preserve them and read their memories. There is an uproar orchestrated by the Logology church and Mickey Sandoval, 20 year old administrative officer at the station, is drawn in.
Rho discovers that the heads include one of K.O. Thierry, founder of the church, who was supposed to have ascended to heaven. But the head proves he did not and his memories prove that he was a liar and a fraud. Someone bombs the station killing Rho and William, but Mickey survives, discrediting the church and eventually becoming head of the clan.
This is well done, hard science SF written by a very clever and imaginative fellow. I think his speculations on absolute zero are far fetched but the science puffery and QL computer are awfully well done.
A good example of hard SF. A fun read.
This is the first of Bear's books that I read. Searching my notes I see that I read 13 more, most by 2005 but the last in 2010. He became my favorite SF author.
| Author | Nabokov, Vladimir |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Athaneum, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 191 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 1996 |
Professor Timofey Pnin, son of a respected ophthalmologist in St. Petersburg, had left Russia after the revolution, received a degree from the university in Prague, lived in Paris, and finally settled in the United States, where he pursues his research in Russian literature and teaches a handful of students at Waindell College.
Pnin is a marvel among literary characters. We see Pnin the idealist, Pnin the absent minded professor, Pnin the pedant, Pnin the cuckolded husband and substitute father for his ex-wife's son. He is intelligent, irrepressible, and lost entirely in a world of his own.
Gradually Pnin seems to be gaining control over his life. He comes to terms with his wife's son. He learns to drive a car. He finally rents a house that he likes. He even hosts a successful faculty party. But at the summit of his adjustment he learns that his protector on the campus is leaving and that he will lose his job. At the last minute the situation reverses and Pnin can be saved, but he is already committed, perhaps out of pride or stubbornness, to leaving.
This is an extraordinary piece of writing by a remarkable writer. The language, the characters, the flow of ideas, are all far beyond what I expect in a novel. This is the real thing in literary writing. It ranks with the very best.
Pnin was my introduction to Nabokov. I have read a number of other works by that author since this one and some have been very, very good, but Pnin remains my favorite. Here are a few scenes that I seem to remember. After this many years I can't be sure that I remember them very well, but they have left some impression.
Pnin is a scholar of Russian literature. He has figured out the exact date of the dinner party at the opening of War and Peace. By comparing the topics of conversation to the actual events of the day he narrows it down to the specific day in July of 1805, which is the only date provided by Tolstoy.
In another scene, he has bought a soccer ball for the boy for whom he is a substitute father. But all goes wrong. The boy doesn't play soccer and hates it. Later, alone, at night, Pnin kicks the ball into the distance.
A the end of the book Pnin leaves Waindell. All is lost, and all he has left is his tattered pride. He drives off in the car that he has purchased and learned to drive. He pulls in between two trucks that come to a stop light and they all set off - truck one, Pnin, truck two.
My final note is about an expression used in a chess game on the ship coming from Europe to America. I've looked it up and here it is, verbatim: "Finally this helpful spectator, obviously an expert, could not resist pushing back a pawn his compatriot had just moved, and pointed with a vibrating index to a rook instead--which the old Frankfurter incontinently drove into the armpit of Pnin's defence."
It was a fine book, full of great ideas, penetrating observations, and wonderful language.
| Author | Lawrence, D.H. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1930 |
| Number of Pages | 273 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 1996 |
Connie, the daughter of a well-to-do, permissive, middle-class father marries Sir Clifford Lord Chatterly. But he is desperately wounded in the war and condemned to a wheel chair, impotent, somewhat bitter, both deferential to her and domineering. Connie is faithful for some time but her needs are not being met. She takes a lover, an Irish writer, but he is self-centered and she soon drops him. Then she meets Miles, Sir Clifford's gamekeeper. He is a man of lower class origin who has rejected high as well as low society and keeps to himself in the forest.
Their love grows stronger. They overcome the bonds of class and sexual constraints to become free lovers.
The story is an attack on contemporary society - not just social and sexual mores, but also on industrialism, capitalism and socialism. It advocated a throwback to some imagined freer and more humane life.
The explicit sex made the book unpublishable in its day. But it was a serious book. The sex was L's cry for freedom, coming from a dying man. It had nothing to do with titillation or book sales.
There is much that is wrong about this book. I can't say that I liked it. But it was an important, liberating force in literature.
| Author | Robertie, Bill |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Cardoza Publishing, 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 141 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Chess |
| When Read | September 1996 |
The winner of the U.S. speed chess championships and a two time world backgammon champion surveys all of the principal openings, showing both winning and losing example games of each of the major ones.
The commentary is particularly good, not just a series of "if Rf7 ..." or whatever sequences, but useful text that both elucidates the games and shows us the mindset of a master when confronted with each situation.
There are also a good number of board illustrations. I counted ten in one game. That makes it much easier for a patzer like me who can't follow more than a few moves in his head before he gets lost.
I have some other books on chess openings but I think I enjoyed this one best. It's a shame I have to return it to the library.
I profited a great deal from the first book I read about chess, Irving Chernev's Logical Chess, Move by Move. Since then, I haven't profited that much. I think that once you've mastered the basic principles, further advance requires intense concentration and commitment. Casual reading does no good. I have become more and more casual over the years and am not as good a player as I once was - though I was never better than a C or low B (B-flat?) player.
| Author | Doerr, Harriet |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 1996 |
A young American woman, just divorced, settles in a small Mexican village where, by chance, she meets a tax fugitive real-estate developer named Bud Loomis and goes in with him to buy an old crumbled hacienda on which to build houses. She and Bud each have homes built and eventually three other outsiders come in and buy houses. One is a twice divorced woman now in love with a Mexican man who is charming but already has two families and would not stay with her. The woman's mother, in her eighties, a widow who greatly misses her husband, has also come to see the land of her youth and die there. And a European (Jewish?) concert pianist arrives, an old man who seems tired of life.
They all live very different lives, interacting with the local Mexican gentry and working poor.
In the end, the old lady dies. her daughter gives up the man who has left her and falls in love with an archaeologist and leaves. The old pianist goes back to Europe. Bud Loomis marries the beautiful servant girl and comes to terms with the tax man - leaving the village. And the original young woman remarries her husband and returns to the U.S.
A nicely written book. D began it at age 73, after her first novel was published, and finished it ten years later.
The subject matter of the novel is not of the kind that attracts me. However I am very impressed that the author worked on this over a ten year period and published it at age 83. More power to her.
Looking up Harriet Doerr, I see that this was not her last book. Her first book Stones for Ibarra won a National Book Award and her last, a book of short stories, was written after this. She died at the age of 92.
| Author | Snow, C.P. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 342 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1996 |
Young Lewis Eliot, poor and without a father, goes to a preparatory class and then wins a scholarship to law school with another young man, Charles March, of a rich family. They become life-long friends. Eventually Eliot, the narrator of the story, is introduced to Charles' father Leonard March, his sister Katherine, and his uncles, aunts, cousins, in the whole extended Jewish family.
The heart of the story is Charles conflict with his father and the rest of the family. He marries a young, seemingly appropriate, Jewish girl of a good family, but she is a communist. Charles goes against his father by abandoning the law, becoming a doctor, and eventually by acquiescing in a communist newspaper plot to discredit the government by printing fake innuendos about corruption, including false statements about Uncle Phillip March.
Leonard, a Tory, but most of all a committed family man, finally disinherits Charles, whom he loves dearly. It ruins his old age but his conscience requires it. Charles, who could block the communist paper if he chose, and could even do so without condemnation from his wife, still will not go against his wishes. Even though he himself is no communist, and he knows his uncle is innocent, his wife's wish is paramount to him. so each person makes a difficult act of conscience with no compromises and in spite of the injury it does to themselves and their loved ones.
An interesting novel. It is not always successful, being overly subtle and sensitive at times. Still, an interesting social document.
| Author | Shirer, William L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1984 |
| Copyright Date | 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 654 |
| Extras | index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | October 1996 |
S takes up the story of his life and the times from leaving India to the war in Afghanistan, time in Vienna, his marriage to Tess, their year in Spain after he was laid off, and then his long time spent in Nazi Germany, first for Universal Service and then, with Ed Murrow, as one of the first radio correspondents for CBS.
The focus is on Nazism. S was in a unique position as a man who covered all of the Nazi events of the 30's from 1934-1940 at first hand, hearing all of Hitler's speeches, talking to Goering, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Himmler, Ley, and all the other thugs and stooges. He details the incredible lies told by Hitler and the others and shows how the Nazis had no principles at all, telling the most outrageous lies to their own people and to foreign governments while swearing solemn oaths. S believes that the average German gave his whole-hearted, even hysterical support to Hitler. It was not just that they were terrorized into submission. The were believers. They believed Hitler had restored the national honor and pride of Germany. They believed the Jews had caused all their problems. They believed Hitler was an honorable, indeed the most honorable, man.
Hitler was not merely evil. He was clearly a maniac.
As with the first volume, this is absorbing, compulsive reading. S gives us history at first hand on a personal, human level as well as in historical terms.
See also my diary.
The diary entry was on September 30, 1996. It addressed the issue of the German people supporting Hitler. I've learned more about this issue from reading Peter Fritzche's Life and Death in the Third Reich.
Shirer and I both thought that his experience in Nazi Germany uniquely qualified him to write his famous The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He said that academic historians looked down their noses at him and ignored him when he showed up for a conference on Germany. That's too bad. There aren't a lot of professional historians that would have done as good a job on the book as he did.
| Author | Thomas, Lewis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biology |
| When Read | October 1996 |
This is a collection of essays and speeches by a famous medical scientist, former dean of two medical schools, and directory of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
T touches a number of themes repeatedly in these essays. One is that the earth should be regarded in many respects as a living organic whole. There are complex systems of evolution which brought the temperature, the chemical makeup of the air, and other characteristics to their present values, and more systems, all organic (or many so) which maintain them in equilibrium.
Another theme is that the single cell is probably a result of millions of years of symbiosis or more primitive life forms which each contributed one part - cilia, wall, mitochondria, etc.
T speculates on many things wherein he claims no special competence but his ideas are interesting nonetheless. One is that language is a by-product of intelligence and requires no special organs of speech or hearing. If one set of organs or brain structures was not suitable, intelligence would have found another.
T is a wonderfully interesting man with a wide ranging intellect and an uncompromising commitment to "reductionist" science. He believes that we are in the midst of a revolution in basic biomedical science which will cure cancer and AIDS, unlock the key to a generalized anti-virus drug, etc.
Fascinating material.
I completed Neill A. Campbell's Biology almost ten years after reading this one. Did I know in 1996 what a mitochondrion is? I probably knew what cilia and cell walls are, though nothing of their actual biology. Looking back with more knowledge I see these notes and Lewis Thomas in a more illuminating but still very favorable light.
The argument about intelligence and language still seems to me very persuasive. I think there is much about human ideology and behavior that is explainable, not as something that was selected by evolution because it enhanced our ability to survive and breed, but rather as a side effect of something that was selected - namely generalized intelligence.
If I remember correctly, Thomas speculated that language was invented by children. He thought that children would have a specially intense desire to communicate with each other and would have the kind of intellectual capacity that is best at communicating. We know that children learn language much more easily than adults. Perhaps they invented it more easily too.
I don't know how we'll ever know how language arose. We don't seem to have any tools today that could discover that. The philologists and linguistics experts have mined the existing languages and extant documents, but this evidence is all from long after the evolution of modern humans. It doesn't take us back very far. If we can ever find out, my speculation is that we will find that language had its origins millions of years ago and grew from grunts to gerunds over thousands of millennia, with no small group of children inventing anything more than a few words.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 1996 |
Clement Mansell, the wild man from Arkansas, is driving his car, chasing a man he hopes to mug, when another driver upsets and insults him. Clement decides on the spot to kill the guy, who turns out to be an obnoxious judge, and then kills the guy's girlfriend too. Then he returns to his own girlfriend Sandy Stanton, where he has taken over the apartment of a traveling business consultant who doesn't even know about Clement.
Detective Raymond Cruz is assigned to the case. He determines immediately that Clement is the killer but he has insufficient evidence. Further, Clement flaunts his guilt and shoots up Cruz's house, developing a deep personal feud between the two.
Clement hits on everyone. For no reason at all he breaks the leg of Sandy's latest mark, an Albanian whose compatriots come after Clement with a vengeance. He beats up his brilliant lawyer, Carolyn Wilder, who saved him from jail but whom he treats as a mark like any other. Finally, Cruz traps him and could leave him to die. But that isn't enough. He stages a personal confrontation. He challenges Clement to go for his gun, and when he doesn't, shoots him dead.
This is typical Leonard. A sociopathic killer is finally destroyed by extra legal means. The character of the killer is riveting. The tension is very high. The life and the action shock us out of our staid, safe lives and show us something that we hope never to see in real life.
A thriller.
I remember a scene from a Leonard novel. It must have been this one. The cop finally confronts the killer in his own (the killer's) kitchen. He puts his gun on the table and puts a gun in front of the killer. He says they're going to go for their guns and he's giving the killer a fair chance. The killer declines. He says he knows that cops can't do that and that he's not going to play any cowboy games. He must sense that this cop is dangerous. He won't go for his gun and the cop picks up his and shoots the man in the chest.
As the man falls to the floor, gasping, he watches the cop casually walk across kitchen, pick up the phone, and begin dialing a number. The killer gasps out, "Are you calling EM (Emergency Medical). The cop looks at him and says, "No. I'm calling the morgue."
Leonard was, as they say, some kind of writer.
| Author | Kidder, Tracey |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | October 1996 |
K spent many months in Linda Manor, a nursing home in Massachusetts, learning and writing about the old folks who lived there. The two principal characters were roommates Lou Freed and Joe Torchio. Lou was a 90 year old Jew, retired from various jobs as skilled workman and factory shop floor manager. Joe was a lawyer and probation officer. Lou was moderately healthy but almost blind. Joe was the victim of a stroke at age 52 and now, 20 years later, suffered partial paralysis and some brain damage. They lived restricted, limited lives, but they had come to be very close friends and to care very much about each other.
K picked Linda Manor because he wanted a decent place. He wanted to write about old people facing the last difficult stage of life. He didn't want to write an expose of corrupt practices.
Most people seemed to adapt to the place. A few, such as a 78 year old bank vice president on his fifth heart attack in six months, fought it hard and still planned, in spite of all evidence of impending death, to go home and resume their old lives. He never made it.
Living in a nursing home seems to be a compound of boredom, bureaucratic rules, and severe limitations. But for some there are no other options. When a person requires continual care it can be too much for a wife or child to perform. It becomes too heavy a burden. K shows what it is like when that happens and how some people adjust.
My memory of this book remains strong..
Several incidents stand out in my memory. In one, Lou gets out of bed one night with a severe chest pain. Was it a heart attack? He didn't know. It seemed like it could be. I seem to recall that he made it into a reclining chair and sat there to wait it out. Why call for help? He was 90 years old after all. What could they do for him? If this was it, it would be okay.
If I remember correctly, Lou sat in the chair for a long time. The number three days comes to mind, though that doesn't seem possible and I may have that wrong. Eventually, the pain subsided and full functioning returned. He got up and went on with his life.
In another incident a young woman on the staff approached Joe for some advice. She saw Joe as an older, experienced man, who also had knowledge of the law. I don't remember what her question was. She asked Joe and he gave her the best advice that he could. He also cautioned her. He told her that after his stroke he only had half a brain left and it was possible that the advice that he gave her was wrong.
I also remember the story of the bank vice president. He disdained the other residents of the nursing home. He wasn't there to live out his life, he was there to recover from his heart attack and get out. He had long ago made hotel reservations for a golfing vacation in Florida and was determined to take that vacation.
One day his cardiologist came in to examine him. He asked the cardiologist when he would be able to go home. The doctor could see that plain language and unvarnished truth were called for. He told the man that he was never going home. He told him that he only had about 10% of heart function remaining and he would never recover what had been lost. He told him that he was going to live out the rest of his life there in the nursing home.
The banker was shocked and upset but he finally understood what people had been telling him in more oblique ways. He finally understood that it was not a question of what he wanted to do or how strong was his will. The facts of life overrode those.
Towards the end of the book the residents put on a sort of Christmas performance. Lou and Joe and a number of other of their male friends sang a song. The banker attended in his wheelchair. I don't remember if he sang along or not, but I do remember that he now understood that he was not different from or better than the other men at the home.
Kidder was a good writer with a very sympathetic understanding of his subjects
I am sitting in a reclining chair in the "family room" of our house. My left leg won't work right. I've been diagnosed with a pinched nerve that can no longer enervate all the muscles of the leg. I have a fair amount of pain, and I've lost a lot of weight. At 128 pounds, I'm looking a little like a concentration camp inmate now.
Marcia and I had to cancel a very nice cruise vacation because I wouldn't be able to walk. So I sit here and think about the same thoughts that the banker thought about in the nursing home. Is this the beginning of the end for me? Will I recover and go on other vacations in the future? I don't know yet. There is a good chance that I will recover and have something close to the life that I like, but I am more cognizant of the fact that I am near the end and it could happen any time.
I've had 71 years. It's more than a lot of others, less than many. I believe that I understand life and death and will face the future with reasonable equanimity. No doubt Kidder thought about all of these questions when he worked on his book.
| Author | Dick, Philip K. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Collier Books, MacMillan, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1957 |
| Number of Pages | 243 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | November 1996 |
Jack Hamilton, chief electronics man in a defense plant, is fired because his wife Marsha is suspected of communist sympathies in a guilt by association frame-up. Then he, Marsha, the security chief who accused her, a black physics student, a paranoid woman, a fat vapid woman and her son, and a retired general are all injured when a platform collapses on a tour of a new bevatron. For a few minutes of real-time, but many days of subjective time, the group of eight people inhabit each others' consciousnesses. First they are in the weird religious cult world of the old general, then a sexless, drippingly sweet, absurd world of the fat lady, then a paranoid world of the career woman, and finally a Marxist world of class struggle, not of Marsha, but of MacFeyffe, the security chief, who it turns out is a real communist saboteur.
Dick is a brilliant, neurotic, writer who strikes me as the kind of man who never struggles for new ideas but instead must struggle to hold his wellspring of ideas in check to keep from overwhelming the reader. And yet, in spite of the exotic landscape of the novel, there is a clear lucidity to the writing that makes it easy to read and to follow.
Andy Harbert suggested that I read Dick. I'm glad I did and I plan to read more.
Reading the notes brings back a great deal of the book into my memory. Dick's forceful images, characters, and stories make strong impressions on the mind and I'm not surprised that I remember a lot of them. By contrast, I remember much less of The Secret Pilgrim, though it was probably a better book - if books that are so different can be directly compared.
If I remember correctly, Dick was also well liked by Mike Rubenstein, one of the many very, very smart people I have known. Dick's quirky imagination and brilliant ideas appealed to people like Mike and Andy, and my son-in-law Jim. He appealed to me too.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | November 1996 |
Ned, a British spy, recounts the story of his life in the service as a series of episodes punctuated by scenes from a class at the spy school which Ned runs in his senior years and which he arranges for old George Smiley to address.
The episodes include a young friend who was brow beaten by a superior into studying with notes and then, when exceptionally tired, carries them into East Germany on a mission, loses them, and loses an entire network. There is a sea captain and his young girlfriend from the Baltic who are betrayed by the traitor Bill Haydon. There is a Hungarian phony professor who has conned the service for years and enlisted Toby Esterhazy into collusion with his lies. There is Yazha, the Polish spymaster who tortures Ned and then betrays his masters to Ned. There is Hansen, the carnal priest who pimps for his daughter to atone for his failing to save her from the Khmer Rouge. There is Fruin, the code clerk, who betrays the service in order to win the love of two Russian language radio teachers (a brilliant episode.) And there is a final episode in which a British capitalist gun runner tells his country to fuck off when they threaten to interfere in his profits.
As usual, this is a brilliant book in which we see in the most compelling ways how the means of subterfuge and lies betray the ends of honor, democracy, and decency which they were intended to serve. Ned is one of those who fought the good fight with all of the intelligence and courage and decency he could muster and came out of it dazed and shaken, hungry for love and for an open, ordinary life.
| Author | Kipling, Rudyard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City, NY: Doublday |
| Copyright Date | 1896 |
| Number of Pages | 194 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 1996 |
Fifteen year old Harvey Cheyne is swept over the side of an ocean liner and finds himself transformed from a spoiled son of a billionaire railroad and shipping magnate into an ordinary deck hand on Captain Disko Troop's Gloucester fishing schooner. He learns the lessons of hard work and companionship from Troop and his son and crew, and becomes a man.
The writing is full of nautical detail and language but suffers from acute picaresqueness, flat characters, and the most blatant propaganda for both the gospel of wealth and the ethic of hard and honest work. Harvey Cheyne's reunion is portrayed as a hero of capitalism rather than the robber baron that such people were. Junior is portrayed as a snot nosed brat who is transformed by one smack from Disko Troop into an all-American boy. All of the women, such as they are, are cutout paper dolls.
A well written, interesting, but juvenile and silly book.
The issues raised in this novel, so important in the 1890's, have become important again. Again, a new breed of robber barons has arisen and, again, they would find this book to be just the ticket in explaining what they take to be the social role of the capitalist and the obedient, hard-working worker.
| Author | Keyes, Frances Parkinson |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1960 |
| Number of Pages | 533 |
| Extras | bibliography |
| Genres | Fiction; Biographical fiction |
| Keywords | Chess |
| When Read | November 1996 |
This is a biographical novel about Paul Morphy, world champion chess player. It claims to be a faithful story of his early life except for the made up love affair which, unfortunately, happens to be the central story and motivation of the entire book.
K portrays M as a shy, genteel, intellectual, overly sensitive youth who has a gift for chess but spends almost all of his time thinking about the young girl he met and fell for but was unable to win. Apparently all of this is true, though K has invented a girl in place of the real one. Paul is also portrayed as working as a Confederate agent in France though there is no historical record to support this.
K's appreciation of delicate family relationships is sensitive and convincing but her failure to appreciate chess makes her rendition entirely unsatisfactory. It is like the movie about Beethoven which puts his supposed love affair ahead of his music as the center of interest. K gives us a chess player, a champion, who seems not to care for chess or think about it and not to have the competitive instinct which chess players have.
A good read but disappointing.
I've thought often of Morphy with much of my thinking based on the incidents recounted in this book. I know little else about him.
As some others have done, notably Bobby Fischer, Morphy slips into madness at a young age. The twin demons of obsession and genius bear down hard on the person who harbors them. If a person has weak spots or pressure points in his psyche, places where standing waves can build and build, and I suspect that most of us have these to some extent, it is not surprising that distortions of personality can result. Maybe Robert Schumann and Fyodor Dostoevsky are also examples of this. But this is all pop psychology speculation that I may be justified in imagining, but not in forming any hard conclusions.
I don't know if it's possible to be an off-hand chess genius, i.e., to be a championship player who hardly thinks about the game between matches. There have been players who can play quickly without spending long periods calculating their moves. Capablanca and Anand are examples. But I doubt that these men are any less obsessed with the game than those who can brood for an hour over a single move. So while I find David Klass' Grandmaster to be a book written down for adolescents, it is at least more about chess than this one.
I want to know the secrets of chess genius. What distinguishes these great players from "patzers" and "wood pushers" such as myself? Is it all innate genius? Is it greater power of concentration? Is it a brain wired differently from the rest of us? Is it deep obsession that won't let them think about other things? Is it teachable? Is it something that, if taught, would do harm rather than good to some of the recipients of the teaching?
Keyes gives us anecdotes of Morphy's chess life. There is the 12 board simultaneous game in Kentucky where a man approaches him a week later on the street and says he would have won if only he had done X. Morphy, with perfect recall of every move in the game immediately explains how he would have responded to X with Y and the outcome would have been the same. In another incident, Morphy enrolls in a college in Alabama. The top playing professor at the school demands that Morphy play against him so that he can show this upstart boy what a really good player can do. Morphy says he will only play if the professor spends at least one half hour on every move. Sputtering with rage, the professor agrees. After each of his moves, Morphy leaves the table to pursue other interests, comes back after half an hour, glances at the board, makes an immediate move, and goes away again. The professor is humbled.
Are those two stories believable? Absolutely! I imagine that they are perfectly true.
| Author | Wiesel, Elie |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Borchardt, Anne |
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 120 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | November 1996 |
Holocaust survivor Eliezer is hit by a cab while crossing the street in New York with his girlfriend. He is almost killed. In the hospital, scenes of his treatment and recovery are interspersed with memories of his past. None of those memories are of the camps. Rather they are of his dead grandmother, his dead father and mother, his dead Talmudic teacher or, later, of his rootlessness after the war and his developing relations mixed of love, rejection of love, and indifference with his girlfriend Kathleen.
In the end he confesses to an artist friend that he could have avoided the car but didn't. It was the day after Kathleen's greatest effort to reach him and their greatest vows of commitment to each other. but Eliezer is obsessed with the lost dead and cannot truly embrace a living person. His artist friend, having painted a portrait of Eliezer among the dark spirits that haunt him, burns the portrait in front of the distraught man and demands that he abandon his past, abolish his beloved dead back to death, and live for the living.
This is an unpleasant book about an unpleasant man which reveals much about the after effects of the great trauma through which W lived. Some of the ideas concerned religion. There were accusations against God and questions about the meaning of life asked in a context in which God is assumed to exist. But there are no clearly accepted religious answers.
I found this book to be a more deeply psychological, less rational account than that of Primo Levi, and hence less appealing to me. But it is still an important and honest book.
This was the first book of Wiesel's that I read. I read more later, including the autobiographical Night, which gave me a deeper understanding of Wiesel and of the many millions who suffered as he did.
Eliezer (is that Elie Wiesel's full name?) was a damaged person, but the word "damaged" doesn't convey the full horror of injury to his mind and spirit. It is as if he had been knocked into a different world from the world that most of us inhabit. He had been pushed into a world where human monsters had their fill of torturing human beings - not even to get something from them, just to enjoy their suffering. Many had even gone past enjoyment. They tortured people routinely, mechanically, skillfully, as a job, with no more involvement or emotion than in a job fastening wheels to auto axles in an automobile plant.
I found Eliezer's behavior irrational and difficult to identify with. How can a man do self-destructive things? How can he hurt the one person who loves him? But my inability to understand that was not because it is ununderstandable, but I lack the experience to understand it.
I have, myself, been subject to self-defeating behaviors. I eat more than I need to satisfy my hunger. I procrastinate instead of doing things that need to be done. I have many times given in to an addiction to computer games. I might drink more than I should.
I do these things, in part, as a response to pressure. They don't solve any problems. If anything, they cause the pressure to increase. But they relieve the pressure at the moment when I do them.
The pressures on me, compared to the pressures put on Eliezer / Wiesel, are nothing. Wiesel lived in a pressure cooker in which all of the people he loved and who loved him were cooked to death before his eyes. Not only was he powerless to save them, but he was forced into a position where his obligations to them could only be satisfied at the cost of his own life. An older man, his father, was able both to absolve his son of his obligations as best he could, and to sacrifice himself for his son's life. He did the right thing and was a great man for it, and yet in some ways he came out better. Beaten, frozen, and starved to death, he at least escaped the hellish life of the survivors.
I cannot fault the survivor's suicidal instincts or his inability to get close to anyone. All I can do is acknowledge his torment and sympathize with him.
| Author | Waitzkin, Fred |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 302 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Chess |
| When Read | November 1996 |
Kasparov is clearly a chess genius, a man who stands above most other grand masters. In the contemporary scene, only Karpov stands very close to him - though the others are also brilliant and could still possibly break through to K's level. K is also a committed political activist and an enthusiastic, if undisciplined and somewhat childish, entrepreneur.
The book covers W's meeting K, K's defense of the world championship in 1990-91, and the great grandmaster tournament in Linares where, for the first time in ten years, K failed to win.
Another marvelous book about the chess world by FW.
This is an authentic book about chess. There is no analysis of openings or endings but we do learn things about chess playing - unlike Keyes' The Chess Players, which taught us nothing. I was surprised to learn how many blunders the grandmasters make and how psychological their games are. I also got more insight into the great support machine behind K as behind Karpov. It is amazing that a man like Fischer could win against such a machine.
Always enjoyable - I'll read anything that Fred writes.
I wrote that Kasparov was an "undisciplined and childish entrepreneur." That now sounds like a pretty bold statement by Alan Meyer about one of the acknowledged geniuses of the world. However I expect that, even at the time I wrote it, I would not have had the hubris to make a judgment that was not directly supported by Waitzkin's description.
One scene I remember from the book took place in the coffee shop of the Linares hotel where the players were staying. They came down for breakfast. W wrote that those who were winning looked good and had good appetites while those who were losing looked terrible - haggard, smoking cigarettes, eating poorly or not at all. I suspect that David Klass read this book, among others, before writing his Grandmaster.
Another scene that I recall concerned a match between Kasparov and Karpov. After the match, the two stayed at the board and analyzed some of the moves. That might sound normal and expected, but Waitzkin did not expect it because he knew that the two hated each other and often broke up after a match without shaking hands or even looking at each other. W asked K about it. Why did you sit and talk to Karpov if you can't stand him? Kasparov's response was that Karpov was the only person who could understand the chess issues at the level that they were playing. There was no one else to talk to about it. What can you do, he said.
Kasparov had not allowed any journalist to get near him before. However, when Waitzkin approached him Kasparov immediately asked, "Are you the father of Josh Waitzkin?" K had played against the 10 year old Josh the year before at a simultaneous exhibition in New York where Josh, while not winning, made K think more than the other players had. He remembered the boy and was, because of the boy, well disposed towards the father.
| Author | Coppel, Andrew |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Donald I. Fine, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 250 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | November 1996 |
Brian Lockwood, recently recovered from a minor heart attack, goes to Germany to resolve the mystery of his birth. He hooks up there with a young woman hired by his enemy but eventually more loyal to him. L follows various paths through Eastern Germany, Poland, and then Switzerland, on the trail of a man whom he believes to be his father. The man is an evil Nazi concentration camp doctor who later became a Stasi agent and was responsible for the deaths of his wife and then his parents.
L finally confronts the man and his killer son and learns that he is not really the man's (Sieg von Stossen) son but the son of the honest, upright, Colonel Brian Lockwood Senior, who brought him up but could not acknowledge him. Stossen is killed by the Swiss police and Lockwood returns to California - without the young woman.
This is the 17th thriller by Coppel. It is okay - easy to read and generating some interest. Yet one can tell that it is churned out by a professional who does it for money. I guess it's like the programs I write for clients - competent but rarely inspired.
A competently written thriller by a pro at the genre.
The last sentence of my comment was originally the first sentence on my book card. Perhaps December, 1996 was when I began a shift to putting information about a book first and comments later.
I sometimes have strong memories of action/adventure/thriller books because the scenes are written to absorb the reader. This book hasn't done that. I have no real recollection of it.
| Author | Coonts, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 387 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | December 1996 |
Jake Grafton, the hero of C's Vietnam War novel, is now Captain and commander of the air group (CAG) for the nuclear carrier United States patrolling the Mediterranean Sea in the late 1980's. At age 43 he is losing his night vision and knows he must soon resign his command and become a deck officer. He plans to leave the Navy and live with his wife Callie whom he only sees off and on because of his duties.
Meanwhile, Colona Qazi, a super agent for "El Hakim", a stand-in for Khadafi, is planning a terrorist attack on the carrier, planning to steal nuclear bombs. Qazi uses all sorts of tricks from games with Russian spies, to femmes fatales, to kidnapping of nuclear weapons experts.
There is a gradual build up of tension leading to the attack itself which makes a mess of the carrier by fires, kills about 50 men, and leads to a getaway with two bombs. Defying orders, Jake gets his plane aloft and goes after them, finally killing Qazi after all his missiles are gone and his gun jammed, by ramming Qazi's plane. The mad El Hakim is already dead. Grafton dies in this, his final flight.
Coonts combines all of the traditional elements of the military/spy thriller. There are flying scenes, hand to hand combat, murder and betrayals, Israeli and Arab spies, nuclear weapons, assassinations, and a love affair or two. There's nothing great, none of the subtlety of Le Carre or Littell, but it all works on the level of at which it was intended. A successful book of its kind.
This is more the work of a professional writer than Flight of the Intruder. It is less serious however.
I only remember a few scenes from this book. One is an attack by the terrorists on a Navy guard. The guard is just an ordinary sailor watching his duty station and protecting against people coming aboard uninvited. We expect him to get his throat cut and play no role in the story. But instead, he puts up a fight, slows down the invaders, and is presented as something of a real person and a man who knows his job before he is killed.
I seem to recall another scene about a fleeing airplane in which an American expert in late middle age who has been hijacked into the scheme is seduced by a woman working for Qazi. He is a kind of a nobody, but the woman turns out to like him - another surprise in the story.
| Author | Dinesen, Isak |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1937 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | December 1996 |
Dinesen, Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke, arrives in Africa in 1914 to establish a coffee plantation with her husband on high table land just outside of Nairobi. We hear virtually nothing about her husband. I believe from other sources than this book, that she divorced him early on and ran the farm by herself. It was a large operation with 600 acres of coffee, many more acres of all sorts of crops, 1500 Kikuyu "squatters", white and Somali supervisors, a dozen "houseboys", a blacksmith from India, and many buildings, machines, animals, and what have you. She stayed on until 1931 when she finally gave up her losing struggle to make a go of it and devoted her last months to wangling a new settlement area from the government for her people, who were to be evicted by the new owners.
D's keen observations, her sympathy with the people, her adventures on the ground and in the airplane of her lover, Denys Fitch Hatton, make fine reading. She presents us with a totally different world composed of many cultures living side by side but with little understanding of each other. The charm of her account is that she makes the effort to see the people of three cultures as individuals and as human beings - if not like herself - then at least with thoughts and feelings grounded in the same common humanity.
The book rambles back and forth in space and time. It tells no intimate details. It is a series of episodes and often unconnected stories, but it is interesting to read. I particularly liked her accounts of the naive but intelligent critique of her book by her houseboy Musabu, ("This book is strong and has hard covers but your book is weak and all over the place - a wind would blow it away!"), the Kikuyu dance, the lion hunt, flying over Africa, and many other tales.
The "hard covers" comment requires explanation. The houseboy, presumably illiterate, picks a book off her shelf and says it is strong and has hard covers. Then he points to her typescript and, with no comprehension of the concept of a draft or a printing press or any of the rest of the book publishing process, proceeds to compare two physical objects by their physical characteristics.
Dinesen lived through an interesting and difficult period. She worked hard, both as a farmer and later as a writer back in Denmark, though she did have an inherited estate that might possibly have supported her. I don't know.
The movie version of this book concentrates on the love affair with Fitch Hatton. It was pretty good and stimulated my interest in the book.
| Author | McBain, Ed |
|---|---|
| Author | Hunter, Evan (writing as Ed McBain) |
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 372 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Matthew Hope |
| When Read | December 1996 |
Matthew Hope is hired as the attorney for Mary Barton, a retired teacher accused of killing three little girls and burying them in her garden. In a long trial, Hope hears one witness after another place Mary with one of the children and all he can do is try to discredit their identifications. Meanwhile we are given evidence that Mary may be a multiple personality - one a sweet, wonderful girls school teacher and the other a demented, sadistic killer. She is convicted of the crimes.
Then in a trick ending we discover that Mary's twin sister is the killer, even though we never know she has a twin and never have any reason to believe that the other Mary of the flashback memories is a real person.
There is something of a paradox here. On the one hand we have a very well written crime/legal story with interesting scenes and decently drawn characters. On the other hand we have the whole story hinging on what can only be called a dishonest plot contrivance. Hope's insistence that Mary is innocent, and his dogged dodges in the courtroom, become more and more unacceptable - and then we find, surprise, he was right all along, even if for the wrong reasons.
As I say, a paradox. I liked the writing but disliked the book.
It seems odd that a writer of McBain's stature and experience would pull a trick like this. Didn't he know better?
| Author | Shirer, William L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 484 |
| Extras | index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | December 1996 |
In the third and final volume S skips the war years and begins with his return to Germany and coverage of the Nuremberg trials. He is shocked to find that the majority of Germans still believe in Nazism, still think the Jews were the cause of their problems, and blame Hitler only for mistakes in not listening to his generals, or in declaring war on the U.S., and so on.
He returned home to a very highly paid job as a weekly radio news host with a syndicated newspaper column only to find that the McCarthyites were to accuse him of being a communist sympathizer, which he was not. Nevertheless the cowards at CBS forced him out and even his friend Ed Murrow turned against him. Murrow tried to patch things up before his death in 1965 but S never forgave him. Soon S was forced out of all alternative jobs as a journalist until, for almost ten years, he subsisted on savings and college circuit lecture fees. Then, in the early 1950's, using a huge trove of Nazi documents captured by the U.S. Army, he began his great work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It was a huge best seller which finally ended his poverty. It was attacked by most American academics as a shallow book. In fact however it was the only book attempting to cover the whole period, the only one to cover all of the documents, the only one by a man who lived through it first hand.
S had love affairs, fights with Tess, and a bitter divorce. But he kept working hard bringing out his book on France, his memoir of Gandhi, and this series. He worked and thought and reflected right up to the end.
Shirer had personal failings. He was not a man like me or a man whom I could or would want to be like. But he was a great journalist and historian with an unflinching eye for the truth and a mind that penetrated to the heart of the matters he wrote about.
This was an important as well as terribly interesting and well written series.
This series of books, as with Churchill's six volume history of World War II, occupied a significant part of my reading time for an extended period.
| Author | Dick, Philip K. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Del Rey, Ballantine Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 244 |
| Extras | Introduction by Roger Zelazny |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 1996 |
Bounty hunger Rick Dekkard pursues androids posing as humans in a post nuclear war California. It is a bleak society in which many people have left for the moon or Mars and those who remain struggle along in shrunken cities where most plants and animals have died and some humans have been brain damaged by radioactive dust and live as "chickenheads" or "antheads".
Rick faces the new Nexus 6 model androids who are smarter and more human-like than any before. He is almost killed by the first one. Then he travels to the factory and meets Rachel Rosen, an android who was made to think that she is human but is revealed by Rick as android. Later she seduces Rick to ruin his value as an android killer, but he kills anyway. He kills an opera singer and an android posing as a copy who tries to convince him and another bounty hunter that it is they who are androids.
Three remaining androids hide out in an apartment house with a chickenhead, a saintly man who loves them for their indifferent attention to him - since no one else gives him any attention. Rick finds and kills them in a fever of emotions and despair on all sides.
This is an extraordinary book full of extraordinary images, ideas, and emotions. D bounces us back and forth between seeing androids as people and as machines, between seeing Rick as a murderer and as a hero, between seeing "Mercer", an electro-pop-religion guru, as a sinner and as a saint. Even Rick's wife is seen sometimes as a depressed, burned out housewife and as a loving companion.
In th end Rachel Rosen kills Rick's beloved goat but he finds a little electric toad and brings it home.
To understand the significance of the killing of the goat one must recall that there are few plants and hardly any animals still alive. Rachel has retaliated against Rick's murder (as she sees it) of androids by murdering an organic, living animal that is dear to Rick. In despair, Rick buys the android toad, completing his emotional confusion.
Dick was a remarkably original and creative writer. He knew it and apparently resented the lack of recognition afforded him by the SciFi publishing community - though his fame was actually quite high I think and a movie was made based on this book - Blade Runner with Harrison Ford.
I remember this book fairly well. Besides being quite a good read, it had one of the more wonderful titles ever given to any book.
It has only now dawned on me that Google's tablet, and later phones, might have been named "Nexus" because of this book. We have the Android Nexus 6 phone now instead of the Nexus 6 android.