Books read January through December 1997
| Author | Gaines, Ernest J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1997 |
A young man calling himself Robert X appears in the small Louisiana city of St. Adrienne. He turns out to be a long lost illegitimate son of Phillip Martin, the head of the local black church and civil rights organization. They recognize each other at a party at Martin's house. M faints with surprise and shock and the memory of past wrongs he inflicted on the boy's mother and on other women and children before he got religion, 15 years before. Now M is married and has a young family.
He tells no one about the boy but tries to see him privately. But the boy is cold and angry. He learns that the boy has a gun. Then the boy is arrested and Martin makes a deal with the police chief. He'll call off a labor / civil rights demonstration if the chief will let the boy go. The rest of the civil rights committee is outraged and fires him as its chairman, but Martin sticks to his position. He is bitter that they've replaced him after all his years of service. He goes to Baton Rouge to find his old friend from hell-raising days, Chipo Simon, to get the story on the boy and his mother. Chipo reluctantly tells him that they fell on terrible hard times and the boy is a bit loony as a result. Then worse news arrives. The boy has killed himself.
Martin is ready to return to a life of drinking and whoring, but his friends stop him and his wife confronts him. He must be a man and start again.
The story is dragged out and only Martin's character is developed. Much is left unresolved. But there is a serious attempt to portray black community life in this time and place and the pressure on and between black men and their friends, their sons, and their wives. It's a serious book, not badly done.
| Author | Bao Ninh |
|---|---|
| Editor | Palmos, Frank |
| Original Language | vi |
| Translators | Phan Thanh Hao |
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 233 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Vietnam War |
| When Read | January 1997 |
Young Kien leaves his beautiful girlfriend Phoung at age 17 in 1965 to go off to war. He experiences horrible bombings, battles, wounds, starvation, illness, and killing until he finally returns, the only man of his unit to have survived. He is obsessed with his war experiences, with the loss of all of his friends, with the loss of Phoung and her descent into a series of lovers whom she cares nothing about. He becomes a writer and works feverishly on his novel, trying to write it all out of himself.
There is only a fragmented story line in this novel. Like Kien's memories, it roams back and forth in place and time, only at the end settling into any sort of coherent narrative of the story of young Kien and Phoung's journey into war - he to kill a Vietnamese sailor who raped Phoung, and she to be raped and lost.
Bao is one of only ten survivors from his regiment of 500. His account of the war is not what I expected. It seems that many American accounts of the war were truer than I had believed. Some ARVN forces did fight bravely. Many bombing and artillery attacks were effective. The incredibly high casualties reported to be inflicted on the North Vietnames did occur. And the men of the North who fought through all of that, who suffered and died in their hundreds of thousands, they were subject to the same doubt and despair suffered by our own young men.
A difficult, not always coherent book, but with much substance.
Novels about Vietnam are less common than those about World War II and novels from the North Vietnamese perspective are very rare, at least in the U.S. This is the only one I've ever seen. It made a strong impression on me at the time.
One other book that comes to mind written from the other side of the war was by the Australian communist journalist Wilfred Burchett, Vietnam: Inside Story of a Guerrilla War. It was full of stories of Viet Cong outwitting Americans. For example, Burchett said that one or two snipers would approach an American "firebase" at night and occasionally fire rounds into the base. The Americans would be up all night ready to repulse an attack and would occasionally let off a "mad minute" where everyone fired weapons in all directions - to the amusement of the one or two well dug in snipers.
Stories like that and films of American jets dropping bombs on the jungle with no visible targets all gave me an impression of a canny, well hidden, elusive force that suffered far fewer real casualties than the American "body counts" reported. But Bao's book offered nothing like that. It portrayed a hard slog against overwhelmingly superior forces in which almost all of the casualties were on the Vietnamese side. It was an eye opener.
| Author | Chopin, Kate |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1987 |
| Copyright Date | 1899 |
| Number of Pages | 128 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1997 |
Mrs. Edna Pontellier, married with two children, finds her life to be boring and stultifying. Married to a caring but totally conventional New Orleans stockbroker she spends her life in pointless and repetitive rounds of social gatherings, summer beach vacations, conspicuous consumption, and so on. During a summer at the beach she is attracted to a young man but he, sensing and fearing their mutual attraction, flees to Mexico.
Edna begins to awaken to the possibility of life on her own, without the demands of convention. She does not so much leave her husband as ignore him. She listens to music. She paints. She consorts with people of suspect reputation. She drifts further and further from family and society.
Finally her young man returns from Mexico. They almost come to each other but he pulls back, believing that his love will ruin her. Edna is lost. In a dream like reverie, she swims out to sea, further and further until she can swim no longer.
Edna's "awakening" seems to be emotional rather than intellectual. She asserts her independence by living free of convention, but she never talks out her situation with her husband, her would be lover, or her female friends. However it's difficult for me, a child of the 60's and onward, to fully understand the limits women faced 100 years ago. Although the book seems tame today it was radical in its day and injured the reputation of its author.
An interesting period book.
Movements for social liberation probably all start in what seems in more liberated times to be tame ways. The early writings of women, blacks, and Jews, especially from the nineteenth century when overall social conventions seemed stricter and more conventional, had this character. But now, trying to look back at The Awakening with a more nineteenth century perspective, it does indeed seem like a pretty radical, and rather revolutionary, book.c
| Author | Hersey, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961 |
| Copyright Date | 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 632 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Holocaust; Warsaw ghetto |
| When Read | January 1997 |
This is the story of the Warsaw Ghetto told via a fictional diary of Noach Levinson, a member of the Judenrat, or Jewish Council, and self-appointed archivist who is obsessed with recording and preserving every scrap of information, every account of every person and every event, so that it shall not be lost in the coming Holocaust. The cast of characters includes dilettante and musician Dolek Berson; the Apts - Rachel, Mordechai, David, Halinka, and their jeweler father who escapes, leaving them behind; a Jewish policeman; a communist; a socialist Bund leader; and many others.
H's people are heartbreakingly real. They have all the weaknesses and virtues of real people and their fate means a tremendous amount to us.
I was deeply affected by this novel. It is an outstanding example of the literature of the Holocaust, written by an American, of all people. In H's account, the Jews constantly struggle to maintain a normal life with everyday interests and concerns. But the Ghetto wall is like the wall of a pressure cooker. More people are crowded in and the fire is turned up hotter and hotter. Surreal events crowd in on each other. a crazy German boy walks through some days counting out and shooting every 18th person he meets. The Jews are taxed for everything. There is even a tax to pay for damage to freight cars used to carry them to Treblinka. The Germans are diabolical in the way that they cajole, beat, and kill the Jews. They turn Jew against Jew. They lie about everything. They engage in a war, as Noach Levinson says, of anti-humanity against humanity.
The Jews emerge as the heroes of this book, not because they are great fighters. In fact they are very poor fighters. But they are real human beings. That is their greatness.
See also my diary for January and February.
There's some good things in the diary entries. See January 23 and February 5, 1997.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 1997 |
Wealthy young Rhodesian Alan York tends his father's business in London several days a week and devotes the rest of his time to steeplechase racing. Then he sees his best friend and top jockey killed when a gang of criminals pulls a wire across the track to trip the leading race horse. Alan investigates, putting pressure on the crooks until they give themselves away by trying to kill him. The leader of the gang turns out to be the kindly Uncle George of his girlfriend.
This early Francis contains a number of false notes in both plot and character. The idea of a gang of corrupt taxi drivers is very strange and that they would all participate in a murder because their boss says so, while taking direction over the radio, is verging on absurd. Still, there is Francis' fine horse and racing scenes - always attractive.
I have always imagined that people in stable societies are not quickly and easily induced to commit murder. I have imagined that even dishonest people, robbers, race fixers, whatever, are not so ready to go out and kill, and this would be especially so for people who are out of their teens and twenties, have stable jobs driving taxis or whatever, may have families, and have gotten used to life.
Francis never focused much on the criminals in his stories. The focus was always on the narrator, a decent, competent man possessing no special powers beyond intelligence and strength of character.
| Author | Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1759 |
| Number of Pages | 112 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1997 |
Candide grow up under the tutelage of Dr. Pangloss, the greatest of German philosophers in the best of all possible worlds, but is literally booted out of Baron Von Thunder-ten-Tronckh's household after he is caught kissing the fair Cunegande (I had to lookup the spelling of all of these names.) He goes through one terrible adventure after another. He is shanghaied into the Bulgarian army, beaten almost to death for desertion, forced to fight in an absurd and rapacious war, and escapes to Holland. There he meets Pangloss who tells him of the destruction of the household by Bulgarians. Then he's off to Lisbon where Pangloss is hanged and Jews are burned. Then he kills a rich Jew and the Grand Inquisitor, who had been fighting over Cunegande, and he flees with her to Buenos Aires, and from there to Paraguay, to the lost city of El Dorado, where he is given huge amounts of gold and jewels, then back to Europe - cheated and robbed from one end to the other.
At last he winds up in Turkey, surrounded by old friends, married to the now ugly Cunegande, bereft of riches, but cultivating his own garden and getting along.
Voltaire attacks nationalism, religion, royalty, nobility, urban sophistication, and every other aspect of the then brutal and hypocritical society. This is no delicate intellectual piece but a heavy handed smashing of sacred cows.
It was hard to listen to the litany of brutalities on and on for hour after hour, but it was interesting nevertheless.
Nowadays, between Amazon and the Wikipedia, it is no longer necessary to write abstracts of the books, at least not for well known books like this one. But I find my own abstracts of some interest. See my diary of this same date for more on this.
| Author | Ondaatje, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vintage Books, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 1997 |
A severely burned man, brought by Arabs to an English army post in North Africa, winds up in a villa in Italy in 1945, where he is cared for by Hana, a 20 year old Canadian nurse who has had her fill of the war and will not move when the hospital unit leaves the villa to follow the army north. The two of them living in the ruined Villa San Girolamo are joined by two others, David Caravaggio, an Italian/Canadian thief who had been employed by the Allies as an agent and who had his thumbs cut off by the Germans, and Kirpal Singh (Kip), a Sikh British Army sapper who specializes in defusing bombs and mines. Hana tries to forget the war and the death of her father by listening to the English patient's stories and by an affair with Kip. Kip indulges his love of technology and tries to come to terms with the many deaths he has seen and with the good and bad in the colonial masters of India. Carravaggio indulges his morphine addiction, pursues a fatherly relationship with Hana, and tries to unmask the EP as Almasy, a Hungarian who worked for the Germans. And the EP himself does nothing but reminisce about his tragic love affair in the desert which resulted in the death of his lover because he was unable to bring help for her.
This is a strange book, far more concerned with poetic themes and character than with plot. It is beautifully written and full of poetic images. The characters are mostly incomprehensible to me. They are exotic. The are pedantic intellectuals. They are obsessed with details of stories. Their motivations are to forget and to lose themselves.
In the end there is a passage from 15 years later. Kip is a married doctor in India who ignores Hana's letters from Canada and has found a place and a peace for himself.
This is a literary and intelligent book that goes off at right angles to my interests. I doubt that I will read more by this author.
I did, in fact, read another book by this author, Divisidero, read in 2009. It was another very complicated, difficult, unsatisfying book.
| Author | Adams, Scott |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Extras | cartoons |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | February 1997 |
A gives his satyric commentary on life at the lower professional levels of big corporations. Dilbert, Wally, Tina and others deal with the lunatic stupidities of the pointy haired boss and his superiors while Dogbert, Catbert, and Ratbert give the outsiders' view. We are treated to Adams' text, reprints of Dilbert cartoons, and lots of emails from employees of companies with Dilbert like environments.
This is a book that can't be read straight through. It's too much. Heavy satire only works in small doses - like comic strips in a newspaper.
Is it possible that people really are this stupid and self-serving? It hasn't seemed so to me. Is it because Adams is wrong or because I look at the best in people and he looks at the worst?
To my surprise, Adams includes a chapter at the end in which he gives his serious recommendations for how to avoid the management craziness which he perceived at his employers. The ideas are worth reading. I hope that management schools assign this book alongside the drivel that often passes for management theory and as an antidote to it.
Workplace management is still something of a mystery to me. The best managers I ever worked for are probably the ones I work for now from Sapient Government Services, and from the National Cancer Institute's Office of Communications and Public Liaison (previously Office of Communications and Education, previously Cancer Information Products and Services, previously International Cancer Information Center, previously I don't know what.) The Sapient people actually have a method to their management and, while it involves demanding much of people, does not actually force them to work unpaid hours, as most of the other driven management I've worked for did. I work unpaid hours for my own reasons.
I still enjoy Dilbert very much. Much of what Adams writes is not peculiar to manager/employee relations and I particularly like his cartoon that Wally begins with "I like to have opinions", "But not informed opinions." I keep a copy clipped from the newspaper on my desk.
| Author | Roth, Philip |
|---|---|
| Publication | Providence, RI: Dove Audio, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 1997 |
Morris "Mickey" Sabbath, at age 64, confronts the wreckage of his life. He is obsessed with sex but his nymphomaniac mistress Drinka has died of cancer at age 52. His alcoholic wife has dried out, gone into therapy, and has had enough of his cruelty and philandering. He pines for his brother, killed 50 years before in a B-25 shot down over the Philippines. He was evicted from his job at a community college for having sex with a student. He can no longer work at his vocation of puppeteer because of arthritis in his fingers. He talks to the ghost of his mother.
Mickey's sexual obsessions are in a class by themselves in mainstream literature. He cares for nothing else. Easily offended himself, he casually uses the people around him with no concern for their feelings or their privacy. He is a sort of free spirit, but only a sort of one. He is also a prisoner of his obsessions with sex, with brother Morty, and with lost youth.
In the end he steals $10,000 from a rich friend and flees to the Jersey shore where he buys a cemetery plot near his family and plans to kill himself. But he doesn't. He returns home to find his wife in bed with another woman. He visits Drinka's grave and is apprehended by her cop son. But he lives on.
Roth shows himself in this book as a brilliant writer with odd obsessions and limited appeal. Still, the level of articulation and especially the sophistication of the ideas, are very high. a very powerful and also ambiguous book. See my diary for more.
The diary entries are for February 28 and March 5, 1997. Both entries are quite extensive with much more comment material than is included above. There's lots of other stuff in those entries too.
| Author | Crutcher, Chris |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Recorded Books, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | March 1997 |
Here are six short stories about high school age boys, each of whom has to deal with some personal problems and succeeds by making tough choices and doing the right thing. all of the boys are athletes of one kind or another. A big, fat boy, the biggest in the school, has two gay dads and two gay moms. He gets setup as homecoming king to dance with a beautiful girl he's worshiped for years. He succeeds despite his awkwardness. A wrestler whose father is a brute challenges his father to wrestle in front of the school. The boy wins. His father can't handle it but the boy does. A boy loses both parents and younger brother in a boating accident and learns to forgive another boy who was responsible. Another wrestler is maneuvered into wrestling against a girl. The two of them work out an act to relieve their embarrassment. In the final story, a boy who cleans a saloon each morning finds a gay young man hired to work with him and the guy is dying of AIDS. He must overcome his small Montana town prejudices to reach out to this fellow.
The writing is heavy handed and didactic. The kids use flowery language that no one really would use in real life. They always go against convention and criticism to do what's right. And yet these are upbeat stories of confused but sound and attractive, easy-to-like kids.
Crutcher is a child and family counselor and must have been either an athlete or coach.
Not bad, it won American Library Association and School Library Journal awards.
| Author | Tuchman, Barbara |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | American Revolution |
| When Read | March 1997 |
A limited history of the American Revolutionary War, concentrating on foreign involvement by France and Holland and on the British mistakes and lapses which led up to their defeat at Yorktown. The title refers to a salute given by the guns of the Dutch fort at St. Eustatius in the Caribbean to an American ship, the Andrew Doria. It was the first recognition of the U.S. flag by a foreign power.
Tuchman's approach is very flip and not necessarily convincing. Her discussion of sailing ships - which proceeds at some length - is uninformed and often downright prejudiced and wrong. It makes me doubtful about the rest of her history
Tuchman's view appears at some times to be that the American cause was lost and was only saved by the decisive intervention of France - both with money and material - and with the winning forces at Yorktown. This was aided by a complete failure of nerve and leadership by the British during the summer and fall of 1781. But at other times she describes the war as unwinnable for the British in much the same way that the Vietnam War was unwinnable by the Americans. There must have been Englishmen, like George II, who believed that England didn't lose but was stabbed in the back by men like William Pitt, who opposed the war and succeeded in preventing further appropriations for it.
Very few leaders come off well in T's estimation but, of those, George Washington is presented as towering over the rest.
This was Tuchman's last book, published the year before she died at age 77.
| Author | Dick, Philip K. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ace Books, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 249 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 1997 |
In an alternative future it is 1962 and the fascists won World War II. Russia collapsed, Rommel took Egypt, the Luftwaffe concentrated on the RAF instead of London and knocked out England, the Japanese caught our carriers at Pearl Harbor, and so today the U.S. is divided with only a band of independent neutral states left in the Rockies. The East is all German. The Pacific coast is dominated by the Japanese.
The main character, Phil Frink (nee Fink) is a Jewish fabricator of fake antiques for sale to Japanese collectors. H longs for a legitimate business and for his estranged wife who is living with an Italian truck driver who is a secret Nazi assassin using her to get at the man in the high castle, a writer who has exposed Nazi plans in a popular novel.
Dick portrays the Nazis as dangerous wild animals clawing at each other for power and devastating the whole world. The Japanese however are portrayed as highly civilized, decent, artistic, humane people who, for example, refuse to turn over Jews to the Nazis. But the Nazis are hatching a secret plan to drop atom bombs on Japan. They cannot co-exist with anyone, even half a world away.
This is said to be Dick's finest novel. It struck me as good but not great. The book cannot be read only as a novel. I can't help but think of it as alternative history - which must be read and criticized from historical as much as literary perspectives. I accept D's view of Nazism but not of Japanese militarism. Nor can I believe in a Nazi dominated world without intense resistance.
I stand by the historical criticisms made in 1997.
| Author | Dickens, Charles |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1987 |
| Copyright Date | 1837 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 1997 |
A baby is born to an unknown, unnamed, dying woman in a workhouse and is named Oliver Twist. he grows up a ward of the parish, half starved, ill treated, sold as an apprentice at an early age, and finally rebelling and running away at age 11 (I think) to London. There he falls into the clutches of Fagin, a corrupt old Jew who runs a ring of pickpockets and is in league with housebreakers, thieves and dealers in stolen merchandise. Oliver escapes them too and is taken in by a kindly old man who turns out to have known his mother. Then he is recaptured and then escapes again to a household of fine country people. In the end he is revealed as the brother of a man who cheated him of his inheritance and, although most of it is gone, the bad guys are hanged in the end and Oliver goes to live with good and decent people.
This is Dickens' second novel. After the much less coherent Pickwick Papers it established him as a popular writer. There is much to admire in the way of satire, sharp characterization and D's wonderful facility at getting at our sympathies. However there is much less to admire than in Great Expectations. There are none of GE's subtleties. Nowhere do we see anything like the revelations of deeper character as in the old criminal or shallower as in the old rich lady or in Pip himself.
| Author | Shellabarger, Samuel |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 377 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | April 1997 |
Dashing young Blaise de Lavellier comes home to his father's house in the south of France to find his father and brother committed to a conspiracy of the Duke of Burgundy against Francis, King of France. Blaise casts his lot with the king, in part because of his oath and in part because he sees the greater good of a united France in spite of the fact that the Duke has been wronged and that the Duke is personally a better man than the King.
Serving the King's minister, Blaise fights, spirits the beautiful English "milady" Ann Russell out of France, and then is tricked by her into a mistake which gets him arrested and condemned to torture and death. Blaise escapes the evil torturer, kills him, and redeems himself by serving as a spy and secret guard for the King - where he finally saves the King's life in a daring fight at the end, also saving and winning Ann by a bold and cunning lie which forces the King to do the right thing.
As with Captain From Castile, S has produced a classic historical romance in much the same spirit as Walter Scott. The hero is a fine young fellow who suffers from inexperience but never from wrong intentions. The villains are wicked and most capable and intelligent. A nice piece of adventure with some good history thrown in.
Shellabarger, Costain and Sabatini were among the writers that most appealed to me at a certain age, perhaps from about age 10 to 14. I probably learned about them from the Hollywood "swashbucklers" made of Costain's and Sabatini's novels. Captain Blood with Errol Flynn was my very favorite, viewed in black and white on "The Late Show", the late night TV movie series that my parents let me stay up and watch on Friday nights. My father would watch with me. It was my favorite time of the week.
I exhausted all three of the Pratt libraries within walking distance to get all of the books by those authors and read them avidly. There was no computerized catalog in those days and I had no real idea of the central library downtown that had all of the books by these men, including some that I had not seen.
I continued reading these books at long intervals in my maturity, partly to re-experience the excitement of my youth. It didn't always work but I was not entirely disappointed.
Captain From Castile appeals to me more than this book does. I read it earlier than this one but remember more of it. The subject matter - the conquest of Mexico and the clash of two civilizations, both evil in their ways - was grander than the subject of this book. Shellabarger was a professor of history at Harvard. He knew whereof he wrote.
I tried to talk Robin into reading Shellabarger at one time but she encountered a sexist statement in the early part of "Captain", and refused to read further. Maybe one day I'll suggest it to Elaine or Jocelyn.
Will anyone read these notes after my death? Will any of those readers be people who weren't part of my family or who didn't know them? If so, then be it known that Robin is my daughter, elder sister of my son Dan, and mother of my granddaughters Elaine and Jocelyn.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 1997 |
Young English/French oboist Charlotte Rossignol is told that her archaeologist uncle, Dr. Alan Morris, has disappeared. She goes to the scene of his last excavations at the Roman city of Aurae Phisla on the Welsh border and soon becomes involved with several archaeologists, an attempted murder, and an actual murder. Detective chief Inspector George Felse eventually solves the case with the help of a young detective of the art fraud department of Scotland Yard who keeps getting bashed on the head but manages to find his way out of an underground Roman heating system in spite of his disastrous situation.
In the end we find that the young wife of the old archaeologist at the site - a seeming simple chatterbox and later a seeming neurotic - turns out to have masterminded everything, not by planning but by bold and absolutely ruthless manipulation of everyone.
This is not an exciting work of fiction or mystery. it is typical, intelligent English mystery fare - competently done but not exceptional in any way.
One minor point that bothered me was that this professional oboe player never practiced or even thought about music - it was a transparent fiction.
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1906 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 1997 |
Strong young Jurgis Rutkus brings his family from Lithuania to the U.S. and on to Chicago where they have been lured by advertisements for workers. They find that the conditions are horrible and all prices high, but they set to work in the meat packing industry in high hopes for the future. Gradually however everything is taken from them. There are speedups, wage cuts, injuries, and illness. They are lured into buying a house with lots of hidden charges and, when they finally cannot make a payment, the house is taken and they have no equity. Jurgis' wife is raped and later dies of exhaustion. His son drowns in a deep hole in their street. His sister becomes a prostitute. he himself becomes a hobo, then a petty criminal and factotum for the bosses - helping to break a strike and to hoodwink the workers for the ward-heelers.
But then, going into a meeting just to escape the cold, he hears a Socialist speaker and his life is transformed. He dedicates himself to the Socialist Party and the peaceful revolution which he, and Sinclair, believe will come. The last chapters of the book are full of optimism and a panegyric for the Socialist cause.
I could hardly bring myself to listen each day to the dreadful story of oppression, degradation, and despair. At the end I was prepared to believe that only socialism could solve the problem. But then life is not like art and America did not move in that direction.
A striking and important book. It taught me a great deal about the history of American capitalism and its resisters.
At the opening of this book Jurgis is young, strong, self-confident, and condescending to the other workers who don't have his strength and ability. When the crowd of unemployed men appears at the gates of the meat packing plant, Jurgis does not need to jostle for a place. The straw bosses spot him easily enough as one of the strong and able men and call him into the plant.
By the end, everything has changed. Jurgis is old before his time, injured, starved, suffering, and weakened by illness. He is one of the men in the crowd who knows he will be passed over for the young and strong ones. We, the readers, have gained a new perspective.
The story of Jurgis' house is particularly disturbing. It is tiny and cheaply and shoddily built in a development of identical houses, without paved streets, water, or other services. The family works hard to make it livable. They live in it for years, paying every month. But then when they miss a payment they find that the fine print in their mortgage states that they own nothing until they have paid everything. They have no equity in the house and are summarily evicted. Years of what they thought were savings have been shown to be a mirage.
While the condition of the workers is the main point of this book, it is also an expose of the meat packing industry. It would be hard to eat any meat produced by that industry after reading this book about how it is made. Sinclair wrote later that he aimed to hit the American people in the heart with this book but wound up hitting them in the stomach.
The United States has not entirely left this sordid world behind. The condition of migrant workers and Central American immigrants is still appalling. Sympathy for them is still lacking. Much of the worst type of exploitation has simply been subcontracted, often to workers in China, India, Ecuador or Mexico where American corporations reap the profits of super-exploitation while hiding their responsibility behind arms-length subcontracting agreements.
Will things improve? Not of their own accord they won't. It will take a huge effort and a major political awakening in the face of powerful, well financed, expertly managed opposition that can lie, confuse the public, co-opt the politicians and some of the media, and put up a resistance many, many times stronger than the numbers of beneficiaries of their policies would suggest.
| Author | Hays, David |
|---|---|
| Author | Hays, Daniel |
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 227 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | May 1997 |
David, the senior Hays, took a sabbatical from his job as Director of the National Theater for the Deaf for a sailing trip down the Pacific coast of South America, around Cape Horn, and back with his 25 year old son. They each kept diaries intended for publication and, ten years later, they published them.
Both men had practically grown up on sailboats and in do-it- yourself building projects. They bought a bare hull and built the boat in and on it in two years of intensive evening and weekend work. Then Daniel sailed it to Jamaica. His father joined him and they went through the Panama Canal, out to Galapagos, the Easter Island, the Horn, the Falklands, Montevideo (where David had to fly back) and Daniel brought it home to Connecticut.
I found both men interesting and was sympathetic to both. They had very different personalities and perspectives. They wrestled with the father-son relationship. The wrote, especially Daniel (who spoke of his hiring a whore and buying a dirty magazine as freely as of his handling of the steering gear), with considerable candor.
For the older man this was the fulfillment of a life long dream. For the younger it seemed partly to be an adventure and partly a gift he gave to his father. It was the younger who became, very naturally, the captain of their 25 foot boat.
A good sea faring story and a good story of generations.
They were Jews too!
I seem to recall an incident where they bought a boatload (is it fair of me to say that?) of bananas. They all ripened at once and the men felt they had to eat them - making themselves sick.
If I were doing this today I'd probably outfit myself with GPS, satellite phone, and methods for getting up to date weather forecasts. It would be easier to do today than it was then, though I suppose the sailing and seamanship would be just the same.
| Author | Reed, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1982 |
| Copyright Date | 1919 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Soviet Union; Russian Revolution |
| When Read | May 1997 |
Reed was in Russia just before and during the critical days of the October Revolution when Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviki broke with all the other "socialist" parties except the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and seized power. If Reed is correct, the great majority of workers, soldiers and poor peasants were on the side of the revolution and saw it as the only way to achieve their three main aims - land, bread, peace. The other parties, while paying lip service to socialism, had refused to seize the land or the factories and refused to make peace. Lenin saw them as so deeply compromised and co-opted as to be nothing more than bourgeois liberal democrats.
Although the workers supported the coup, all of the intellectuals, all the way down to petty bank clerks and telephone operators, opposed it and attempted to sandbag or sabotage it. As a result, everything was hard. Cooperation had to be coerced. The really hard work was not the seizure of power but the organization of government and society.
Lenin and Trotsky emerge as solid rocks of revolutionary commitment. It was their unwavering dedication and single-mindedness that carried the day. Interestingly, Stalin's name appears twice in the account, among the second tier of leaders.
Reed's account is partisan but objective. He interviewed everyone, left and right, high and low, and reports their words as they spoke them. He was a most impressive journalist.
I found myself sympathetic to both sides here. The Bolsheviks served the needs of the people but ended prospects for democracy.
I don't know what the current thinking is about the possible fates of the Russian Revolution. Was Stalin or someone like him inevitable? I think not but, in spite of any theories of historical determinism, I'm not ready to believe that anyone can know.
Supposing that Stalin did not succeed in seizing power, what would the fate of the revolution have been? Would it have evolved into a capitalist system, as it has done in the last quarter century, but earlier? Would it have evolved into a genuinely socialist democracy? Maybe, but I'm no longer a believer in such evolutions. The class struggle for wealth and power seems never to have ended in any of the societies that flirted with the ideas of Karl Marx. That doesn't make me want to throw up my hands and let the rich take everything, but it bends my aspirations more towards reform than towards revolution.
History is still young. Civilization is only a few thousand years old. Civilization in the scientific age is only a few hundred years old. Civilization in the age of industry, technology, and the complete human conquest of the earth is only in its infancy. The answers to my questions will only emerge in the millennia to come.
Reed died in 1920 (on the day of my mother's fourth birthday.) He wasn't alive long enough even to see whether the experiment would survive its birth pangs.
| Author | Ozick, Cynthia |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 144 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1997 |
Lars Andemening, Monday book reviewer for a Stockholm newspaper, is convinced he is the son of a murdered Polish writer. He has no evidence for this except that he knows he was rescued from Poland as an infant at about the time that the Nazis were killing all the Jews, and he sees in his face and feels in his heart an affinitiy with the dead man. Lars is a partisan for all sorts of deep, bleak, philosophical, unpopular writers from Eastern Europe, dredging up the work, reviewing for the papers, trying hard to keep his literary heroes alive in the minds of the reading public. His own life is lived in the margins of all this. His wife and child have left him. He lives in a bare apartment without phone or even typewriter. His employer does not even provide a cubicle for him. His fellow journalists regard him with amusement or even contempt.
Then, in the midst of this barren life, a lost manuscript of The Messiah, his putative father's last masterpiece, appears in the hands of a woman claiming to be a daughter of the master, sent to him by an old lady who runs a bookshop. All of Lars' emotions are thrown into an uproar. He is upset by the possibility of a sister - one with more claim on the father than he has, and a manuscript which is a kind of finish to his searchings and longings. He doesn't believe in any of it. He exposes the "sister", the old woman, and her husband as a pack of forgers. Then he gives up his hermitic life, begins to review popular novels, becomes a success at the paper, and learns to be a plain human being again.
Ozick is a brilliant writer with a deep commitment to literature and a penetrating comprehension of the literary mind - or at least some kinds of it. She is in a class with Nabokov. Her writing is at once funny and poignant. Really fine stuff.
The notion of a man attempting to rescue the memory of now dead people is a very appealing one. That they are dead writers makes the notion even more appealing because there is something concrete to rescue, namely their writings - which stands a real chance of resurrecting something real and personal of these people. That they are dead Jews, killed by Nazi swine precisely in order to eradicate all memory of them, makes the notion that much more appealing. That I too will soon be a dead writer in need of rescue, though not a writer of books, at least of diaries and book notes, makes the whole enterprise irresistible.
But Ozick was one smart cookie. In the end, the book reviewer of Stockholm gets on with his life and leaves the dead to their death.
Ah, woe is me. I have been undone.
In truth I have only the haziest recollection of this book. I'm not sure that the sentiments I express in the above note have much to do with the book, or only with the abstract and the comments I made about it.
| Author | Tyler, Anne |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 339 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1997 |
Flighty, optimistic, meddling Maggie Moran and her stolid pessimistic husband Ira drive up to Pennsylvania from Baltimore to attend the funeral of the husband of Maggie's oldest friend. Maggie's hidden agenda on the trip is to detour on the way home and fetch her daughter-in-law Fiona and grandchild and bring them home for a reconciliation with her wayward son Jesse. Maggie believes that the young people must still love each other and if they could only get over their foolish pride they could become a family again. So she manipulates, tells white lies, cajoles, and brings them together. However Ira throws cold water over it all by telling bald truths and Jesse and Fiona each storm out.
Maggie's story is painful to read. It is always clear that her meddling and manipulating are creating false hopes that will certainly not come to a good end. The most painful episode is when she yells at a slow driver that his wheel is falling off - only to find out that he is an ancient black man who believes her and won't drive the car - becoming Maggie and Ira's responsibility.
Ira's story is less well developed. He gave up college in order to support his neurotic invalid father and sisters and has done it ever since. Ira and Maggie are both good people in their different ways, with a deep commitment to each other. The biggest surprise is that I liked Maggie in spite of her irrationality.
Well written, sometimes silly and slapstick, but ultimately interesting.
| Author | Churchill, Winston S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1930 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | June 1997 |
Born into the highest society, WC's father was Lord Randolph Churchill, a Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, who introduced his son to all of the leading figures in English government, military and society. He was sent to Harrow where he hated Greek, Latin and math but loved literature and history. thinking him too dumb for more intellectual pursuits, he was then sent to Sandhurst where he was trained as a cavalry officer and became a top polo player and fencer.
He pursued a vigorous military career, pulling every string to get himself sent as officer, observer, or correspondent, to every scene of action. He was in Cuba to observe the revolt against Spain. He was in India for fighting in the mountain tribes. He was with Kitchener in the Sudan and Bulwer in South Africa for the fight with the Boers. He discovered a great interest in history, reading Gibbon and MacCauley and found his own talent as a writer - sending dispatches to London papers and writing a book about the River War in the Sudan. He left the army and ran unsuccessfully for Parliament. Then he was off to the Boer War as correspondent.
He was a genuine hero in the Boer War - saving a train of wounded men, getting captured, escaping, fighting again as a volunteer, making himself known to all the people of his country. When he ran again for Parliament he was elected easily. As a Tory MP he larned that he must support his Party but his inclinations, and some of his votes, were to the left of the Party ("left" is his word.)
Churchill was a remarkable man and a delightful writer - witty, articulate, large minded, personable, intelligent, observant, and fair. He exposes his own flaws and foolishness freely without being either defensive or hypercritical. He was generous to others without being fawning or refusing to see their flaws.
I loved this book and must read more. I read his History of the English Speaking Peoples as a child. Maybe it's time to read it again.
Churchill was and is loved by millions in Britain and the United States and hated by millions more in India and other former British colonies. I believe that he had all the fine traits that I complimented him for in my comment in 1997 and yet he was also a self-described monarchist and imperialist. He opposed Indian independence. He never fully understood the point of view of the colonized peoples and was in fact prejudiced, condescending, and hostile towards them. His understanding of the British working class was also limited. He lost the election in 1945 as the British people, although deeply appreciating his efforts on Britain's behalf, rejected his leadership in peacetime.
There were some amazing descriptions of C's military adventures that I remember in this book. He performed a daring escape from Boer captivity and made his way through a thousand miles of African territory to get to a British embassy. In India, he was surrounded by six rebel hill people and emptied his revolver at them without hitting anyone. Then he drew his sword. The Indians, being honorable men, stepped back and put forward a single one of their men with his own sword for a straight up, fair fight. Churchill won and the rest of the Indians let him go. Finally, he participated in an honest to God cavalry charge and battle with Kitchener in the Sudan.
My view, which I will hold until someone convinces me otherwise, is that Churchill was the right man at the right time to rally his country and much else of the world against Hitler. For that, he has my admiration and my gratitude.
| Author | Christie, Agatha |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 264 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 1997 |
Christie's classic mystery, originally published as And Then There Were None, brings ten people to Indian Island off the coast of England by way of mysterious invitations from a man named U.N. Owen ("unknown"). They think they are there as guests but soon discover that they are all to be murdered, one by one, in fulfillment of the nursery rhyme of Ten Little Indians.
Each of the ten is responsible for a death in the past. Each is safely beyond the law but bears a moral responsibility anyway. At the end, all suspecting each other, a young woman shoots the other survivor whom she figures must be the killer and then hangs herself. Months later the police find an explanation left by the killer, an old judge who was dying anyway and decided to take some killers with him. He misdirected everyone, faked his own death, and then, unsuspected, was able to finish the others and himself.
The novel is truer and better than the film version - which had a young man and woman, innocent of any wrongdoing, escape at the end. In the novel there are no escapes - not from the moral ambiguities, the mounting tension and mistrust, or the inexorable fate. For an English country house mystery there is an unusual buildup of psychological tension and atmosphere.
Very well done. It's the best Christie I have read.
| Author | Delderfield, R. F. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 383 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | June 1997 |
Young Gabriel is recruited into Napoleon's army in 1809 in time for the last great conquest in Austria. He is assigned to a unit of seven voltigeurs led by Sergeant Jean Ticquet. The seven fight in Austria, then in the terrible Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal where some are killed and the others captured and carried to England. Eventually they escape back to France for the campaign in Russia and then, with more losses to the hard and relentless fighting in Germany before Napoleon's abdication. One by one they marry young Nicholette, the cantiniere who follows the army and chooses a new man after each is killed. Finally, Gabriel and Jean are all that's left and Jean, conscious of the fact that his whole life is in the army and with Bonaparte, fights to the death at Waterloo. Gabriel survives and lives to old age - lonely and empty without his comrades.
I found this novel to be unusually satisfying as a picture of the wars of that time. The comradeship, the fierce loyalty only to one's own during the retreat from Moscow, the guerrilla war and burned villages of Spain. Hunger, danger, honor and ambiguity are all displayed.
Why did they fight so hard? Why were they so loyal to Napoleon? The answers are shown to lie not in politics but in the way war and hardship shapes men and makes them ill-suited for anything else.
A good book.
The questions I raise in the comment, and the answer that I give, probably apply to all wars. Soldiers bond with their comrades and identify with their country. The big issues of kings and emperors, communism and fascism, democracy and dictatorship, fade before those two factors. Exceptionally strong leaders, and Napoleon was one of them, also command the loyalty of their men.
This book was written in 1949, a time when all Britons would be conscious of the experience of World War II. The notion of a conqueror of Europe would have been most recently influenced by Hitler. Their notion of French military power would most recently have been influenced by the collapse of France in 1940. It seems like an odd time for a British author to have written this book. However, Napoleonic history was an interest of Delderfield's, possibly dating from before the war.
| Author | McCullough, David G. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Theodore Roosevelt |
| When Read | July 1997 |
This is a biography of Teddy Roosevelt's early years and of his family.
Theodore Roosevelt Sr., age 22, married Southern belle Matti Bullock, 18, in Savannah and brought her home to New York City. His very successful father made all of his sons wealthy and Theo spent his time in raising and caring for his sickly children and devoting himself to public service. The family, with four children, was extremely close and even, as we say today, enmeshed. Teddy, suffering from chronic asthma, upset stomach and weak eyes, couldn't have had a better, more caring family. He grew up with a strong sense of duty and personal commitment to courage, honor, family, and 100% effort, along with the vanities and privileges of great wealth. He was a tremendous practitioner of exercise and built up his weak body into a strong one by his own efforts.
Although he must have appeared to be ridiculous with his airs, his flowery speech, his high flown sentiments - he was a man of great worth, oblivious to the absurd appearance he made and committed to doing what he believed to be right. He was also a man of prodigious energy, often reading two books a night on top of everything else.
There can't have been many others like him.
I think I have read three biographies of TR, of which this is one. I don't remember the exact count or the authors and titles, but will find out if and when I've finished converting all of my old book cards to searchable XML.
The episodes from these books run together in my mind. I don't recall specifically where each of them came from but I remember quite a lot about Roosevelt. He was a man of extraordinary ability, extraordinary character, and particularly unusual for a politician, a man of extraordinary physical courage. He had the limitations that all of us have. While being ahead of his time in many ways, he was not always far ahead of his time and, like every successful politician, he made compromises that he wished he didn't have to make. However, I wish we had more Presidents like him.
| Author | Heilbroner, Robert L. |
|---|---|
| Author | Kintrea, Frank |
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1990 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | July 1997 |
There are three essays here originally published in American Heritage, "Carnegie" and "Rockefeller" by Heilbroner, and "The Great Vanderbilt Will Battle" (two cassettes) by Kintrea.
The surprising thing to me about these stories is the depiction of the three great financiers of steel, oil, and railroads as quite limited and even ignorant men. Rockefeller is described as an excellent bookkeeper, a man whose specialty was squeezing costs, squeezing customers, and squeezing competitors. At one point, one of his henchmen extracted a shipping price of ten cents / ton for Standard Oil, 35 cents for all of their competitors, and 25 cents back to S.O. for each ton their competitors shipped!
Carnegie was a bold fellow who worked like a dog and took risks. He did actually give away 90% of what he made - making him the most attractive of the group.
The Vanderbilt will battle was the biggest trial of its day. He left 95% of the money to one son, giving mere small fortunes to each of his six daughters and his other, wastrel son. They fought it in court with a huge display of bullshit artists, private detectives, famous lawyers, and so on - but lost. This account by K reads like an OJ Simpson trial.
The age of the robber barons is coming upon us again. My diary is a better place to discuss this than here but I wonder, when these essays were written, if the authors thought that we had put all of this into our past and moved beyond it.
If anyone were to read this a hundred years from today they might ask, I know who Vanderbilt was, who was OJ Simpson?
| Author | Krakauer, Jon |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Villard, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 207 |
| Extras | photos (a couple), maps (endleaf) |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | July 1997 |
In 1992 24 year old Christopher McCandless, from a successful professional family in Maryland, went into the wilds of Alaska to live off the land. He got stranded by a swollen river, got sick eating some seeds, became incapacitated, and starved to death.
Krakauer is an outdoor writer, climber, hiker, etc., who felt a great sympathy for this highly intelligent but hopelessly romantic and rigid young man. He too has experienced the call of the wild and the challenge of the Alaskan frontier. Obsessed with the story, he traced CM's tracks and wrote this book about him.
I have not felt the emotions that M and K felt. I have never been so attracted to the wilderness (in fact I dislike it) and to me - a challenge is met by careful preparation with extensive advice and backup plans. So all of this is a bit incomprehensible to me. I also find it hard, as a 51 year old, to sympathize with CM's harsh judgment and punishment of his parents - who seem to always have done their best for him. Finally, CM's philosophy of hermitic self-reliance and inability to see value in other lifestyles seems very narrow and immature.
I read this for our book group. It was a well written book with some scenes it in it that impress themselves on the imagination, and some good insights into one type of person. But it's not my thing.
Here are a number of the scenes that I recall:
Before his Alaska adventure, CM took a kayak on a long journey into the Sea of Cortez off the coast of Baja California. As in Alaska, he was purposely unprepared. He did not die of course but Krakauer thinks that he took terrible risks without even being fully aware of how terrible they were. His survival was, in K's opinion, due to good luck.
CM did not prepare for the Alaska trip. He did not bring suitable gear. He had not studied the terrain. He actually didn't want to do those things, somehow believing that they would ruin his experience. He hiked into an area without even having suitable maps. Hitchhiking into the state, he accepted a ride from a local man. They talked and the local man cautioned him against his plan. He offered to help CM get some suitable information and equipment. But CM wasn't really interested.
Hiking into the wilderness he came to an old, abandoned school bus. I don't recall how it got there, though I presume that there must have been a road, even if later abandoned and overgrown. He used the bus for shelter - which was fortuitous for him. However he required a lot more luck than that to survive. He died because of two causes, both easily preventable. He read that a certain plant was edible but did not read enough to understand that it was only edible at a certain state of maturity. Before that, it contained toxins that laid him low. More critically perhaps, he hiked into the area before the spring snow melt caused the land he was on to be isolated by high rivers and flooded terrain. With no equipment to cross the water and sick besides, he laid down in the bus. Unable to forage for food and hence unable to eat he became weaker and weaker until he died.
He might have been a fine fellow if you got to know him. I wouldn't know. But he behaved like a fool.
| Author | Benford, Gregory |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Timescape Books, Simon and Schuster, 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 215 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 1997 |
13 year old Manuel, born on Ganymede, the moon of Jupiter goes out with a party of men led by his father and including wise man Old Matt to hunt mutant animals - changed versions of bio-engineered animals released by people to terraform the planet. They also hunt the Aleph, a huge alien being or machine which lives in the ground and punches through earth and ice from time to time in complete disregard of men. Several years later Matt and Manuel figure out a way to kill the Aleph - which they do. It stays dead for another eight years or so and then seems to come back after the errors of terraforming cause severe earthquakes, volcanoes and ice melts.
As always, B's scientific imagination is striking and illuminating. The descriptions of Ganymede, future technology, and the Aleph, an object within which physical law is constantly transformed, are worth reading. Also as always, the people are conceived in an anti-social way. People are often dumb, self-centered, foolish, and prone to worse and worse behavior as the social units get larger.
Again as always from B, a strange, irritating, depressing, but interesting book.
It is interesting that the very next book I read was about the Rwandan Holocaust. After reading that, it's hard to challenge Benford's view of people as "often dumb, self-centered, foolish, and prone to worse and worse behavior as the social units get larger."
Perhaps it's the exotic scenes and ideas in science fiction that cause novels like this to persist in my memory. I pictured the Aleph as something about the size of a small skyscraper. Whether it was a mechanical life form or purely an automatic machine is never determined. It is killed (by carrying a nuclear bomb inside it) because it tears up the surface of the planet (or moon if that's the better term), randomly destroying homes and property. However at the end of the novel the humans begin to believe that the Aleph plays a role in stabilizing the planet, not just tearing it up. By damaging it, the human colony subjected itself to far worse dangers.
This morality tale of hubris and the limits of human understanding is a recurring theme of Benford's. It's irritating. We want to read his interesting writing but get some relief from his obsessive pessimism. But perhaps he can no more give up his pessimism than Graham Greene could give up his private agonies or any of a thousand other writers could give up the inner demons that drive them to write.
See also my comments on Benford's Great Sky River, read in May of 1990, and perhaps Jupiter Project which features a boy named Matt, who may be the adolescent Old Matt of this story.
| Author | Keane, Fergal |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Viking, 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 197 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Current events |
| When Read | July 1997 |
K traveled into Rwanda in 1994, behind the forces of the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front. He interviewed numerous Tutsi survivors, then left Rwanda, visited a refugee camp run by killers in Tanzania, and re-entered Rwanda to see the government side, before finally leaving with a convoy of Tutsi children leaving under partial UN escort.
The dimensions of the massacre are as large as anything since World War II. Hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered, with special emphasis placed on killing children. It was all highly organized by the government who distributed lists of Tutsis and Hutu "moderates" to be murdered and organized, armed, and incited the Interahamwe militias who, backed by army and police whenever there was opposition, carried out the massacres. It was done because the government, under military pressure from the RPF and diplomatic pressure from the international community to share power, did not want to lose any of their lucrative opportunities for graft and corruption which were the inner essences of the government. Better to commit mass murder than lose a few bucks. so they did, abetted by Zaire and the Mitterand government in France.
A remarkable case of greed propelling evil.
If the Ordinary Men written about by Christopher Browning, all of them literate and at least moderately educated, most of them mature family men, could be induced to commit mass murder of children, what could we expect of uneducated Africans growing up in a primitive culture?
Sometimes I burn out on Holocaust stories. Sometimes I place myself outside of society and outside of the specific events of history. I think about human life as a river of DNA (Richard Dawkins' metaphor) and a river of constantly growing knowledge and invention. From that point of view, there is great progress, even phenomenal progress, and the deaths of millions by violence is no more significant than the deaths of millions by old age, or the deaths of chickens and cows, bluebirds and crows, shrimp and lobsters, even bacteria. It is a refuge from the reeling horror of actual life. Fortunately I think, there is no way I can stay in that state for very long. The horror and suffering are too real to be ignored.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 338 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 1997 |
Chip Ganz, deadbeat son of a well to do but senile old lady, owes $16,500 to a retiring gambler and bookmaker who has hired a psychopath named Bobby Deo (Deo Gracias) to collect. But Deo is persuaded by Ganz and his black gunman/partner Lewis Lewis to kidnap the bookmaker instead. Ganz has read all the books on hostages in Beirut and has elaborate theories about isolating and blindfolding them until they'll pay any amount to get free.
Meanwhile U.S. Marshall Raylan is a sort of boyfriend of a woman who was once a girlfriend of the kidnapped man. As a favor, he looks into the bookie's disappearance and gradually unravels everything. In the end, Lewis kills Bobby, the hostage is freed and kills Lewis. Raylan arrests Chip, and he goes to bed with Reverend Dawn - the psychic, card reader and fortune teller involved in the whole mess.
Leonard delivers the goods, as always. But one thing I miss in his books is a solid, well meaning, decent, hardworking sort of fellow such as one finds at the center of each Dick Francis thriller. As fascinating as Leonard's characters are, I always tire of them by the end. Even the good ones aren't people that I want to know.
My judgment in the comment is probably too harsh. I continued reading Leonard's books after this and I'm not sure that a Dick Francis hero has any place in them.
| Author | Greene, Graham |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 1997 |
In a revolutionary state in southern Mexico all churches have been destroyed and all priests have been forced to leave or renounce their views, or else they are shot. Only one is left. He is an older man and a fallen priest. He is a drunkard. He has a daughter begotten in a moment of weakness and fornication. He is bored by the pious, by confessions, by the ignorance and the importunities of the faithful. But this weak man, this "whiskey priest" is the last one. he moves from village to village, hiding and praying and drinking and hearing confessions and cursing himself for his flaws and his foolish pride that keeps him at this thankless and dangerous task.
In the end he makes it over the border to safety but is lured back by an evil man who is known to be an informer. The informer tells him that a bandit is dying and requested a priest. The priest knows it is a trap but goes anyway. He is taken to jail. He suffers and is scared out of his wits. No one will come to hear his confession. He is shot. In the last scene a new priest shows up in town, looking for a hideout.
This is a very moving book. Its hero is full of warts. Greene does not ignore them. He does not absolve the man of them. But he shows how even a weak man can serve a higher calling and sometimes, in some situations and in ones which really count, rise above his weakness.
The religious sensibility is strong but not dogmatic, never supernatural, never cloying. The book has a serious purpose. It is propaganda but in a high sense. I liked it and learned from it.
I have just recently completed Greene's A Burnt Out Case. Published fifteen years later, it is about (I almost wrote "it explores", but thought better of it) somewhat similar themes of worthlessness, redemption, and Catholicism, but from the point of view of a layman and atheist.
Maybe Greene was apologizing for religion in this book. Maybe not. It's all in how you read it. A Burnt Out Case seems to me to have less of that, but I can imagine a religious reading of it too.
| Author | Levi, Primo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Italian |
| Translators | Weaver, William |
| Publication | New York: Summit Books, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 173 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | August 1997 |
This book is a long conversation between a rigger (a man who builds bridges, cranes and other iron structures) named Libertino Faussone, and the author, a paint chemist emerging as a writer. Foussone relates stories of jobs he did in Africa, Alaska, India and Russia. They are stories about work, about plans gone wrong, clients who got mad, difficult projects, feats of intelligent effort, and the people who do this kind of work. Towards the end Levi relates a story of his own of a tin can enamel that sometimes failed and a burst of insight into the problem which saves the contract and the company after much sweat and anxiety.
The book is about the triumphs and failures, the emotional highs and lows in what most of us think of as mundane technical work. For that alone it is a solid achievement. But it's also a subtle exploration of the working class mentality in Faussone and the intellectual mentality in Levi, and how two highly intelligent men differ in this regard. Faussone's stories have a bluster, an egotism, and a tendency towards generalization which Levi captures beautifully and subtly, Faussone is not a simple egotist, and which he sets off effectively by telling his own paint story.
At the end, Levi states that Faussone is a fictional composite of several people he has known.
Levi writes with a purpose. His aim is to record the lives and the events of life which slip past us, unremarked, but which are part of the stuff of life and should be noticed and understood. He stands in a high rank among intelligent, self-conscious writers.
Levi is, of course, known for his Holocaust novel and testimonial, both of which I had read before this book. When I read it I recall being very pleased that Levi, in spite of the horror inflicted upon him, was able to return to his life as a chemist and write about other things besides the long nightmare of his life.
I have no illusions that he was able to free himself from that nightmare. I don't see how that would have been possible. I certainly wouldn't have been able to do it and the biographical materials about him suggest that he didn't do it. Because of that, I consider this book, a book with no reference to the Holocaust, a book about work and life, as a powerful assertion by Levi of his humanity and the humanity of others in spite of everything that the bastards did to him.
The Nazi bastards did terrible harm but they did not win.
| Author | Bledsoe, Marvin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 282 |
| Extras | photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Military; Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | August 1997 |
Bledsoe enlisted immediately after Pearl Harbor. He received his basic and advanced training and was assigned to a P-47 Thunderbolt unit for final training. On the eve of his departure for Europe an ear problem was discovered and he was held back and sent to Luke Field in Arizona as an instructor. He found a bureaucratic organization dedicated to paper documentation rather than real training. His resistance and outspokenness caused him to get double duty and intensive flying experience, but did not break his spirit. He refused to pass unprepared students and was finally shipped to England where he flew his first mission right after D-Day. He flew his required 270 combat hours in a record five months. He also set a record for locomotives destroyed (85) and did tremendous damage to the Germans - mostly in highly dangerous ground attack missions that killed a high percentage of his squadron mates. he found most American pilots to be under trained in critical low-level flying and instrument flight. Some died as a result. A few men in his squad were cowards who hung back and lied about it, but most fought bravely and well.
I read Robert Johnson's Thunderbolt 22 years ago. I still remember a scene from it in which Johnson describes his killing of a good German pilot in a parachute - to save more Americans. Bledsoe also buzzed a pilot in a chute but waved to him and let him live. I respect both of them and admire their courage and their contribution to the victory.
This is a good book of its type, apolitical as they all are but with good personal, historical and technical material.
And now, 39 years later, I still remember that scene in Johnson's book. No doubt it will stay with me. Johnson had fought a tough dogfight and just barely won, damaging the German plane to the point that the German pilot was forced to bailout. Johnson, one of the best fighter pilots in the Army Air Force, knew that this German would shoot down Americans if he lived. He therefore decided to kill the helpless man rather than allow him to fly again and kill Americans. I don't know if I could have done that. For that matter, I don't know that I could have been a fighter pilot or much of a soldier at all. But I still respect his decision and I respect his willingness to tell the tale in his autobiography.
Because Bledsoe fought his war mainly as a ground attack pilot, and Johnson mainly (if I remember correctly) as a bomber escort pilot, Bledsoe would likely have killed many more men than Johnson. It is likely that both of them killed some very brave and very decent men, men with wives and children. It is an odd contradiction in my character that my favorite toys as a child were my toy soldiers, sometimes just represented by bottle caps or match sticks, and books about war have been among my lifelong reading favorites, and yet I am a notably peaceful, unaggressive, and unwarlike person.
| Author | Sagan, Carl |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Corp., 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 429 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science |
| When Read | August 1997 |
Sagan is among the best of all educators in that he not only teaches us facts and theory, but also, and very unusually, he teaches us what is important. Part of the book is devoted to promulgating an anti-parochial and somewhat masked anti-religious view of the universe. He didn't need to convince me of that. But the rest had to do with explaining how things are in the solar system and its surroundings, what the chances are for intelligent life elsewhere, how to proceed with space exploration, whether and when to send humans into space, and how we can expect the earth to change as a result of our unsound ecological practices.
One remarkable thing about the book is that Sagan is always showing us rational and quantitative ways to think about events completely outside our experience. These events include ecological changes (global warming, depletion of the ozone, and nuclear winter - all life threatening), collision with an asteroid (also life threatening and virtually certain to happen every so many years), and contact with intelligent life (life affirming and likely in a few hundred to thousand years according to Sagan.)
I gained a much greater appreciation for the glories of robot space exploration, for the way understanding other planets improves our understanding of the earth, for the solar system as a real system with much, much more in it than a star and nine planets, and for how to think about all the problems, not only of astronomy, but of (as Sagan puts it) our human future in space.
When I read Sagan's book my first thoughts were that he was going to indulge in pure speculation about matters like life outside of earth. I was surprised to find that his speculations had nothing in common with guessing or wishful thinking. He was able to show how tiny bits of reasonably reliable evidence could be used to build up consistent theories that fit the facts better than the alternatives did.
This form of thinking is critical to the work of astronomers, astrophysicists, quantum chemists and physicists, molecular biologists, and other scientists who study phenomena that cannot be directly observed and can sometimes only be observed for vanishingly small times (for example in the study of the nuclear physics of unstable isotopes), or vanishingly small amounts (for example neutrino collectors deep underground), or on the basis of events that are just barely above the level of background noise (for example some observations of stars), and in other cases. It was an eye opener for me and heightened my admiration for the work of scientists and deepened my appreciation of the distance that logic and observation can take us in understanding the universe.
Sagan died at the young age of 62, just two years after this book was published. It was a great loss for everyone. He would have been deeply involved and affected by the great discoveries that have occurred since his death and would undoubtedly have been a great teacher, explaining these discoveries to the rest of us.
| Author | Ransom, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1881 |
| Number of Pages | 147 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | August 1997 |
Ransom, a 20 year old sergeant in a Michigan cavalry regiment, was captured in East Tennessee in November, 1863. He was sent first to Belle Isle prison just outside Richmond, which he imagined to be a terrible place. Then when the good citizens of Richmond became too fearful of a Yankee prison revolt, he was shipped with most of the others to the hell hole at Andersonville where prisoners were killed wholesale by bad water, starvation, disease, bad food, heat, murderous guards, and equally murderous prisoners organized into what we might today call a mafia and were then called "raiders." Fearing a prison revolt, the stupid and inhumane commandant finally allowed the decent prisoners to organize themselves, receive clubs as arms, and have it out with the raiders, whom they fought, arrested and tried, hanging six of the worst.
With a population of 25-30,000, 100-200 men died every day! At the worst point, one half of the inmates died in a single month. Finally, with Union troops closing in, the well prisoners were dispersed. R was sent to Savannah where he was treated very decently and was able to come back from the brink of death. As the Federals approached Savannah, R was moved several more times, escaping twice, the second time making it to Union lines.
Ransom survived by determination, good sense, good spirits, and a deep concern for his fellows which was reciprocated. It was his friends, at the last, who kept him alive.
This is a simple diary, kept by a very young but intelligent and courageous man. It is a testament of humanity surviving evil and ignorance.
The original edition apparently included drawings by Ransom. I'm sorry I didn't see them. I just looked for his book on the Gutenberg site, but it wasn't there.
| Author | Freedman, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 214 |
| Extras | index, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Cognitive science |
| When Read | August 1997 |
Freedman, a popular science writer for Discover magazine, gives a brief survey of work in AI and then moves on to what he regards as a more promising field - the artificial life or natural intelligence movement in research. He shows how Minsky's early criticisms of neural networks - "perceptrons" as the precursors were called, partially missed the mark. He then goes on to discuss the further development of neural nets, growing biological computing cells, the construction of RNA in the laboratory, and the integration of electronic and biological components. He reviews current research in the US and Japan along these lines.
Personally, I am not convinced. If our attempts to analyze intelligence have been inadequate, and if nature evolved the brain without analysis, it doesn't follow that we will succeed by abjuring analysis and expecting our systems to self-organize. Evolution has produced crickets as well as men.
F gives a lengthy and opaque explanation of Roger Penrose's criticism of AI. It has something to do with intelligence being dependent on non-local quantum effects. But only the flimsiest evidence is offered for this essentially obscurantist argument.
Gung Ho I say for neural networks, but I'm not ready to give up the quest for an analysis and simulation of intelligence.
I can't really say that my views have changed or not changed since reading this book. I spend much less time thinking about AI today than I did in 1997 and I'm probably not as well equipped to argue the issues now as I was then.
I do recall the Penrose controversy. It was my sense at the time that P was trying to overcome the problem of free will and determinism. It was argued by some AI critics that in order to be truly intelligent a thinker had to be free to arrive at conclusions without being bound by deterministic laws. The AI advocates responded that human beings are hardly free of deterministic laws and we are intelligent. Therefore the logic of determinism can't preclude intelligent behavior.
Penrose, a man of immense learning and intelligence whom I criticize with some sense that if I think he's making a mistake I am probably misunderstanding him, tried to work around the argument by claiming that humans do not operate in accordance with deterministic laws of nature. Why not? How do we circumvent them? Well, you see there are these sub-sub-sub microscopic events occurring in our neurons that manifest in macroscopic brain events.
It smacks of sophistry to me. By analogy, it would seem to imply that we could make our intelligent machines smarter by introducing noise into the electronics. Perhaps the noisy circuits would make illogical but fortuitous decisions sometimes. Perhaps the odd event of this type would appear to be a stroke of genius. But I don't really think so. If it were the case that random events were a key part of intelligence than why are some people more intelligent than others? Why do some thinkers come up with one good idea after another?
The whole theory seems forced to me. The "quantum" part of quantum randomness takes place on an extraordinarily small scale. The randomness consequently aggregates the quanta on a very large scale. It does indeed appear to be true that events on the quantum scale are indeterminate as well as unpredictable. I accept the word of the quantum theorists like Penrose on that. But we know that huge numbers of random events, when taken together, operate collectively in highly deterministic and predictable ways. The behavior of a molecule of a gas may be unpredictable. The behavior of a large volume of gas is highly predictable.
It's odd that that seems to be the one area of this book that still resonates with me almost 17 years later. Perhaps I came across this argument elsewhere besides this particular book.
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Tor Books, 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 350 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | September 1997 |
Around the year 2052 the U.S. has become an entertainment society in which "Yox", a type of TV which also taps directly into the nervous system, distributes professionally done pornography to the masses (for huge fees) and people are "therapied" by having nano-robots injected to control stress and thymic or pathic disturbances. Meanwhile an elite group of investors have built a huge pyramid in Green Idaho, the last conservative, gun toting, anti-therapy state where they plan to ride out the coming social breakdown - which it transpires that they are about to induce by releasing viruses to damage the nano-therapy machines. Main characters are Jack Giffey, a mind altered guerrilla sent to destroy the pyramid; Jonathan, a decent husband who is drawn into the elite group when his wife rejects him; Mary Choy, a therapied Seattle police woman drawn into the conflict; Alice, a Yox porn star; Jill, an AI, and Roddy, a radically different sort of AI who breaks into and subverts other computer systems and is destroyed, but not before he changes Jill.
This all sounds confusing and is. Bear fills the book with 2052 words and slang which one must come to understand mainly by context. The rapid switch between seemingly unrelated characters and events makes for tough reading in the first half until it starts to come together. But for all that it's a brilliant book with a powerful vision of the future and a remarkable grasp of trends in biology, computer science, communications and social development.
I rate it very high.
I remember more of the tone and feeling of this book than of the details, though the above abstract does bring it back to me. The feeling was one of a very advanced but very unnerving society. There was an aircraft that some of the characters used to fly to Idaho. Instead of a fixed wing it had malleable wing that assumed different forms for different conditions. It was not a "swing-wing" aircraft but one in which the thickness, shape and planform all varied in a continuous, life-like fashion.
The AIs (artificial intelligences) in the story were key players and had the ominous, unstated, potential to take over the world. I do not recall it being an optimistic book.
| Author | Howarth, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | September 1997 |
H describes the events in England, Normandy and Norway from the death of Edward the Confessor in December, 1065, to William's conquest. England had been at peace for two generations with only small Welsh and Scottish border raids to occupy the 2,000 or so professional "house carls" of the new King Harold. The rest of the country had no experience of war, no military training to speak of, and no idea of the horror that was about to descend on them from two directions at once.
William was a professional soldier who knew nothing but war. When he found that his illegal claim to the throne of England had been rejected his pride was at stake and he began preparations for invasion. He started out wanting to be King. But in order to assemble an army he had to promise loot and plunder, recruit all the available professional killers, and bribe the Pope to make it a holy war. Even then he would never have won but for the dumb luck of Harald Hardrada's berserker Viking invasion from Norway which drew off and depleted the English forces.
I hadn't realized what an incredible disaster the Norman invasion was for the people of England. 200,000 Normans eventually settled in England, stealing all the land, appropriating everything, killing and looting. Productivity did not recover in 50 years. Had the English understood and had Harold lived to organize them, the Normans would never have conquered. There were only about 6,000 in the original force. It is incredible that they destroyed a great nation. It was almost like Pizarro or Cortez.
An interesting book.
Those of us who have trained ourselves in the school of historical materialism like to think that the big issues of history are decided, not by individual men, but by relatively impersonal forces created by the social relations of production. And then we look at Harold, William, and Harald Hardrada (Harald Sigurdssen, the Hardrada or "hard ruler") and scratch our heads. Would England be different if Harold had prevailed and William was killed instead? Maybe? Or maybe the differences would have had a limited effect. Perhaps the differences would have been ironed out over a century or three and the subsequent history would have been almost the same, though our vocabulary would be a little different.
We have made great progress since 1066, haven't we?
| Author | Mortimer, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 205 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy; Mystery; Short stories |
| Keywords | Rumpole |
| When Read | September 1997 |
These may have been the first Rumpole stories. I don't know. They are: "Rumpole and the Man of God" - a clergyman pretends to have shoplifted to protect his kleptomaniac sister. "Rumpole and the Showfolk" - a good actress acts innocent after killing her drunken, philandering husband. R gets her off and then realizes what he has done. "Rumpole and the Fascist Beast" - with a Pakistani student / colleague, R defends a Britain First leader who is really a clumsy fool, manipulated by a more clever man in his party. "Rumpole and the Case of Identity" - R discovers that his client was framed by an avuncular figure who was after the young man's wife. He also tries to shield his philandering head of chambers, Guthrie Featherstone, QCMP. "Rumpole and the Course of True Love" - R's old drinking buddy George Frobisher is on the bench but fails to follow R's lead as he always did in the past. "Rumpole and the Age of Retirement" - everyone conspires to retire R and send him and Hilda to Baltimore to live with his son, but R confounds them. He simply does not play along. And also he frees an elderly Timson framed by a nephew to forcibly retire him from his career fencing stolen goods.
I've seen some of these on TV. They are fascinating because of the garrulous, vain, yet humble and engaging character of Rumpole, the ambiguous view of the law, and the intermixture of courtroom (more comedy than drama) and personal and petty career life.
Some of the story series that I read in books or watch on TV have engaging characters that the reader/viewer comes to feel comfortable with and enjoys having on TV in his living room, on the speakers of his car audio player, or in the books he keeps by his bedside. The Rumpole series is one of these. However, more than many others, there is also some deeper satisfaction to be gained from the Rumpole stories and character. I like and even admire Rumpole as a human being.
If we measure the value of a man's life by the utilitarian principle of multiplying the good done to an individual by the number of individuals for whom good has been done, John Mortimer has led a very valuable life.
| Author | Pearce, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 184 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Historical fiction |
| When Read | September 1997 |
Captain Gareth Cadwallader Owen is Mamur Zapt, a kind of police commissioner, for the British colonial power in Egypt. The time is not mentioned or I missed it, but I presume it is around the turn of the century. He becomes involved in a case in which a dead dog is left at the tomb of a Coptic Christian as an insult to the Coptic community. The Muslim who left it, a Zikh religious fanatic who practices self-mutilation at the Zikh festivals, is murdered by a Copt and a chain of Muslim/Coptic incidents begins, fanned by two fanatic leaders, which threatens to break out in rioting. Owen, working with his Greek detective Georgikas and his other men, discovers the political plot behind it all and derails the leaders to stop the violence. It was an attempt by a Copt fanatic to fund Muslim extremists to stir up trouble to keep the Khedive (the playboy king) from appointing a Coptic prime minister who would pacify the situation. Owen comes up with a counter plan to bribe the Khedive with a "loan" and blackmail the leaders of the factions. He also balances his relationship with his Egyptian paramour Zeinab with a nice girl, suitable for marriage, Miss Postlethwaite from England.
A passable, not too believable, mystery in the easy-to-take English style with some interesting but not very deep local color. It's hard to find great books on tape at the libraries.
| Author | Vargas Llosa, Mario |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Lame, Helen |
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 149 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 1997 |
Forty year old Lucrezia hopes that her stepson, a cherubic pre-teen, will love her now that she has married Don Rigoberto. But she gets much more than she hoped for. Alfonso, little "Foncho" or "Fonchito", arouses her ardor and becomes an erotic fixation for her.
All the while we think that Alfonso is fixated on her. We cannot tell if his love for her is innocent or not. Always when she is on the point of rebuking him she yields to his sweet innocence, his pure childish love, until eventually she has gone too far and becomes sexually involved with the boy. She makes love wildly with the boy each day and his father at night, until the day of reckoning.
Foncho writes what is ostensibly a school essay describing the whole affair and hands it to his father to correct. Don Rigoberto is shocked, overcome, devastated, and depressed. He kicks out his wife and lives on alone with the boy. In the last scene the maid Justicia confronts the boy and scolds him, demanding to know why he did it. The boy protests his innocence with tears until she comes to confront him. Then he grabs her and says, I did it for you Justita, and laughs with delight.
All of VL's remarkable craft is in here. He paints his large canvas as a series of miniatures in unexpected places. Much of the development of Don Rigoberto's character is described in his nightly ritual - on the toilet, washing his face, brushing his teeth, clipping his nose hairs. It is remarkably expressive. He alternates chapters with stories about paintings which are reproduced in the book. The inventive, erotic stories of the paintings give a mythic quality to the whole. In all it is an intriguing, unusual, beautiful and evil book - from the master.
Picking up the book card today and looking at the title I could not remember what it was about. But reading the card brought it back. VL's books tend to stay in one's memory.
| Author | Joyce, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1914 |
| Number of Pages | 152 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | October 1997 |
In these famous stories Joyce gives us stunted, trapped, frustrated souls bound by their narrow Irish upbringing into tight boxes from which they cannot escape. Some are unrelentingly depressing like "Evaline" about a girl who cannot tear herself loose from a hurtful father and stifling job to follow her lover to Buenos Aires, and "The Boarding House", about a man trapped into marriage, and "Counterparts" about a drunken clerk who, treated badly on the job, beats his little son to relieve himself. "A Painful Case" starts out better as a lonely man meets a married but lonely woman. But in the end he clings to his loneliness, rejects and chastises the woman, and sees her die broken hearted and alone. "Clay" is at least about a cheerful and enduring person. "Ivey Day in the Committee Room" is about politics. It is not all stifling personal frustration but at least contains some intimation of a greater life, embodied in a political poem about Parnell - very moving.
"The Dead" is the most ambitious piece. We follow a well meaning intellectual who alternately feels good and bad about himself at a party given by his aunts. He carves the Christmas goose and delivers the speech and feels hurt, or angry, or puzzled by turns at the criticisms leveled against him by a young nationalist girl. In the end he sees in his own wife his salvation, his love, his safe harbor, and his hopes for a mutual passion - but is dashed when he discovers that she pines for a dead boy who loved her before him.
Sometimes heavy, always gloomy and depressed, these stories are nevertheless deeply observed and powerfully, sometimes poetically, written. This is "Literature". [I've read many before.]
I don't recall how the bracketed note got there at the end. I may have added it as an after thought after writing the book card, or maybe added it much later.
| Author | Barth, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1967 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 189 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1997 |
This edition was published in 1988 as The Floating Opera and the End of the Road. The End of the Road was originally published in 1958 and a revised version published in 1967.
Ex grad student and mental paralytic Jake Horner is spotted in a bus station by an unconventional Negro doctor who specialized in treating paralysis. When he is spotted the next morning on the same bench, the doctor approaches him and induces him to begin treatment. As part of the treatment he takes a job as a teacher of prescriptive grammar in an Eastern Shore college. There he is befriended by super-rationalist Joe Morgan and his dominated wife Rennie. Jake and Rennie are often thrown together. In a moment of weakness they make love. Furious, Joe forces Rennie to pursue the affair. Eventually she becomes completely distraught. When she learns she is pregnant she vows to kill herself or get an abortion. Joe turns a cold shoulder. Desperate, Jake gets the doctor to do the abortion, but Rennie dies. Joe is fired from his job. Jake quits and follows the doctor.
The story is a tour de force of brilliant logic, comedy, and articulation. Joe is a rationalist who insists on cold logic over all. Rennie is a weak sort, driven by Joe and admiring him while being afraid of him. The doctor cares nothing for truth, only for therapy, prescribing a wonderful mixture of behavioral and cognitive therapies, and Jake is the man in the middle - perfectly intelligent, able to see all points of view, but bouncing from one position to another.
The characters are cartoons but cartoons as Shakespeare might have drawn them. I will write down, so as to remember them the principles of Sinistrality, Antecedence, and Alphabetical Priority as guides to choices, and the role of Laocoon. Barth is one of our great writers.
And of course now, 15 years later, I have totally forgotten what role Sinistrality (left-handedness), Antecedence and Alphabetical Priority played in the story, or what was the role of Laocoon. Searching the diary didn't get me any more notes about it. (See my diary entry "20131222".)
Marcia and I went to a public conference at Hopkins in which Barth, invited for his entertainment value, spoke. Famous cognitive scientists, including one Nobel Prize winner, gave talks about their research. Barth gave an uproarious talk that pissed off a few of the more serious scientists but was loved by everyone else.
I ought, before I die, to look into Giles Goat Boy, said at one time to be his masterpiece.
| Author | Dickey, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 275 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | October 1997 |
In March 1945 a young tail gunner in a B-29 is shot down over Tokyo. He hides in a sewer, then escapes during the great fire bombing of the city the next night. As a boy the fellow had lived and developed in the Alaskan wilderness. He believes that if he can make it to the snowy north island of Japan he will be okay. By a combination of survival craft and murder he makes it and lives there for some time. In the end, a party of soldiers finds and shoots him.
This is an exotic and disturbing story. It is narrated in first person using a quasi poetic style filled with expressions like - "it was almost X, but not X", or "I was the fisher marten", or "It hurt but it was good." The narrator is as involved in internal feelings and states as he is in the struggle to survive.
One particularly disturbing aspect is the many murders that are carried out. In one, the hero is spotted by an old woman. He kills her just because she saw him. But then he cuts off her head and places it on a waterwheel. Why? What is this about? In another murder he fights an old samurai and eventually kills him. Then he hunts the man's wife and kills her, and then he skins the man to get bones to make bone needles. Later he kills a tribesman of some kind (Ainu?) whose life he had saved and whose tribe had, in return, saved his life. He kills him because the man was cruel to a bear cub.
Perhaps sociopathic is a better word than exotic. I wouldn't want to live with Dickey.
I have noted before (in later book descriptions that have earlier in time "notes" elements), that it is often not the best books that leave the longest lasting impressions on me. This book, because of its disturbing character rather than its literary, rational, or human qualities, has left many impressions that are still alive. I recall the fight with the samurai, the hunting down of his wife, the bone needles, and some other pretty awful parts. I thought about the book for some time after finishing it but never came to any positive conclusions about it.
I thought at the end that the soldiers who killed the hero may have been Russian, not Japanese. I have since learned more about the Russian invasion of the northernmost islands right at the end of the war and think that they were indeed Russians. The author's failure to make this clear, except to people who already knew about the relatively unknown Russian offensive in 1945, is another aspect of the strangeness of this novel. It makes me wonder what other events in the novel had some more obscure significance than appeared on the surface. We are, of course, given no explanation of why he was killed rather than taken prisoner.
At the end the character dies. He has not saved himself except for a short period, and has killed a number of innocent people. What's it all about? Is it some kind of existentialism? The book didn't seem attractive enough to make an effort to find out.
| Editor | Stork, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Extras | index, photos, bibliography |
| Extras | Forward by Arthur C. Clarke |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| When Read | October 1997 |
This is a collection of essays by leading computer scientists in AI, including Minsky on AI in general and his experience as a consultant to Kubrick, director of the film 2001; Murray Campbell of Deep Blue fame on chess; Joseph P. Olive on speech synthesis; Raymond Kurzweil on speech recognition, Azriel Rosenfeld (professor and rabbi!) on machine vision; Stork on speech (lip reading); Roger Schank on story telling; Daniel Dennett on moral responsibility.
The authors all saw 2001 many years ago and must have reviewed it carefully before writing their essays because they stick to some serious analysis of the film.
Clearly we are far from the general purpose human like intelligence of Hal (the AI in the film 2001) but we've made some real progress. What we're likely to see is gradual progress in machine aided activities of many sorts from speech and language recognition to vision to all sorts of problem solving.
I am not expecting breakthroughs but rather a gradual accretion of expert techniques. Perhaps over time this gradual quantitative development will constitute a qualitative change.
Stork is to be commended for rounding up such a bright galaxy of experts and getting each of them to contribute - though in two cases it is only via interviews.
I don't remember enough of this book to comment on it but I can comment on my comments.
Obviously, we cannot predict the course of development of new science and technology in areas where our experience is extremely limited. In my comment 15 years ago I said that I expected a gradual accretion of technique rather than a breakthrough. Now, I'm not even as specific as that vague generalization. I think breakthroughs are possible. I think it possible that some new breakthrough will occur in our technology that leads to rapid development of research, much as DNA amplification, gene sequencing, imaging of complex molecules, computer modeling of molecules, and similar very basic technological breakthroughs in molecular biology have led to an explosion of knowledge in that field.
The AI skeptics remain skeptical but I have seen nothing in the last 15 years to indicate that we have reached a dead end. On the contrary, judging from what I see in the Google web and Android applications, it appears to me that great strides have been made in speech recognition and machine translation. We are a long, long way from general purpose intelligence but there is a near infinite amount of time ahead of us and what seems like a long, long way is the blink of an eye in the history of the universe, the earth, or even of humanity.
| Author | Michener, James A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1997 |
Major Starr of the U.S. Army is called to testify before Congress about his illegal activities in Central America. In preparation he recounts for his lawyer and his wife the history of his prominent family which includes a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the Constitutional Convention, a Supreme Court judge, a Confederate General, a female fighter for the enfranchisement of women, and his own self.
The story is stilted and unconvincing, the character rather wooden, the history rather shallow and distant from difficult issues. In the end Starr decides he will not hide behind his uniform, his medals, or his illustrious family but will tell the truth and take the consequences - though we are never told what he did or given any opportunity to judge whether it was right or wrong.
At the end, as an appendix, Michener includes a complete copy of the Constitution and its amendments.
This book is intended as a history lesson I guess, but it falls far short - teaching us very little about the Constitution, its framers, or the battles over the democratic principles it embodies. It is an ineffectual effort of Michener's late years.
In 1997, at age 51, I must have still been able to unselfconsciously speak of an ineffectual effort of late years. Now the phrase sticks in my throat.
| Author | Grisham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | November 1997 |
Lawyer Patrick Lanigan fakes his own death and absconds with $90 million belonging to his law firm and one of their clients. The book opens four years later when, tracked down to his hideaway in Brazil, he is kidnapped and tortured by a team of private investigators hired by the man who was robbed and by two insurance companies that had to pay out claims because of him. He cannot tell them where the money is because he doesn't know. He has given it all to his Brazilian lawyer/lover to hide. She initiates their pre-planned steps in the event of his capture, bringing in the FBI, who save his life and arrest him for taking the money and possible murder, bringing him back to Mississippi to stand trial.
Lanigan has planned everything and manipulates everyone successfully. He exposes the law firm for its complicity with the client in defrauding the government of the $90M. he exposes a Senator. He gets the insurance companies out. He convinces the Feds that they must drop the charges against him and he is left with $20M in interest he got on the money after returning the $90M + 3%. He proves that the body in the car in his fake death was a man already dead of natural causes. He works out everything and gets away Scott free - but then finds that his lover, who went through the ringer and gave up everything to help him, had had enough. She takes the money and disappears using all the tricks he taught her. He is left alone, with nothing.
Very well done suspense thriller with excellent law firm stuff and Grisham's famous twisted ending. Well done. Well executed.
See, if only he had a woman like mine he wouldn't have had to worry about her running off and leaving him in the lurch. But then a woman like mine would not have fallen for a man like him, would she?
| Author | Tolstoy, Leo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | McDuff, David |
| Publication | London: Penguin Classics, 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 78 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 1997 |
This novella was published posthumously in The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
A school boy is refused a loan by his father and needing six rubles to pay a debt, collaborates with a friend who forges a 2.50 government coupon to read 12.50 and passes it in a shop. A whole train of evil is set in motion. The shop owner passes it to a muzhik. The muzhik is arrested for forgery and fingers the shop owner, who denies everything and bribes his yard man to testify for him. The muzhik hurts someone else, who hurts someone else, and so on, for a long chain of increasing evil until Stepan Pelageyushkin, peasant turned murderer, stands in front of the meek and good woman who says "don't kill me, think what you are doing to your soul." He kills her anyway but then is haunted by guilt. After his arrest he is taught the Christian values in the Gospels by another prisoner and finds relief. He learns to read. he becomes a model Christian and prisoner and spreads a chain of goodness which, like the chain of evil emanating from the forged coupon, spreads outward and touches many lives.
The story is simple and tightly constructed. All of the characters are given roughly equal treatment. There is no main character, no special protagonist or hero. There is no extraneous action, no love affair (at least none at the center of the story), no revenge taken, no poetic justice. The values are plain and simple and presented with the kind of force that only Tolstoy can impart.
Do I believe in this story? No. It is the reaction of an extremely decent man to an evil society but it offers no real prospect for political reform. The claims of good and evil, while real, are not so strong as in the story. Or maybe they are. Who am I to know?
I have not determined the date that Tolstoy wrote this story but someone on the net said it was his last novella. Perhaps it was already the 20th century when it was written.
Later in his life Tolstoy seems to have lost interest in the historical movements and social mores of society. He was focused on the moral life of the individual human being. We get the great novel Resurrection and stories like Master and Man, Alyosha the Pot, and The Forged Coupon. I have never felt that this reflected a diminution of his art or his interest. It was more like a purification, a stripping away of the inessential to focus on that which, to his mind, was the most essential aspect of life. Any diminution was counterbalanced by a magnification of that which Tolstoy took to be of universal significance.
He was a great writer in both phases, if we can so distinguish them, of his writing life.
| Author | Woolf, Virginia |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1928 |
| Number of Pages | 333 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 1997 |
In 1588 young nobleman Orlando, living in a house with 365 rooms, interested in poetry, is presented to the Queen. He becomes a young man. He falls in love with a Russian princess and has a fairy tale affair with her in the midst of England's coldest winter. But she is false to him and leaves him. There are surreal scenes of King James' court on the frozen Thames with an old beggar woman clearly seen frozen 20 feet below. Leaving England he goes as an ambassador to Constantinople where, after a sleeping sickness he wakes up as a woman! Returning to England she resumes life as an heiress, pursuing Literature.
Time passes. It is the 18th century, then the 19th. She marries a man who is always off to round Cape Horn and has a child who disappears from the story. It is the 20th century.
To say this is an odd book, or better a strange book, understates the case. Yet it is very well written and full of marvelous observations on English history, society, love, and of course the differences between the sexes. I guess the only way to take it is as a satire delivered with an air of - I can write any way I choose and you can read it or not as you please.
This is an early shot in the battle for women's liberation and a statement about the vanity of literature. Most interesting and even in many ways enjoyable. Marvelously read by Rosenblatt.
One of the interesting and surprising things about this novel is that Woolf offers no more explanation for Orlando's longevity than for his/her sex change. It just happened and that's that. In one scene, in the 20th century if I recall correctly, she is walking down the street when she happens to encounter a 16th century friend coming the other way. They greet each other, talk for a bit, and then walk on. What a delightful fantasy that is.
| Author | Kaminsky, Stuart M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 216 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 1997 |
Chicago detectives Abe Lieberman and Bill Hanrahan are asked by a prostitute to protect her from a killer but Hanrahan, watching her apartment from the street, does not see anything until it's too late and she's already murdered. It turns out in the end that the whore and her sister, a police lieutenant's wife, had planned to murder a man who knew they had killed a pimp many years before in Texas. but the man, who was blackmailing them, turned the tables and killed the woman instead. After Hanrahan is shot Lieberman puts it all together and confronts the killer, shooting him dead when the man attempts to kill him.
There is an attempt to set a scene of the Jewish community in an old neighborhood in Chicago. Rabbi Weiss is trying to get money to move the synagogue to the suburbs. The Alter Cockers meet each day for coffee in Maish Lieberman's deli. Abe's daughter has separated from her gentile husband and there are family scenes and grandchildren.
It works reasonably well though I was less impressed than I was by Kaminsky's Rostnikov stories - which had more personalities in them together with the tension and decay of the dying Soviet Union.
| Author | Nabokov, Vladimir |
|---|---|
| Publication | Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1959 |
| Copyright Date | 1941 |
| Number of Pages | 205 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 1997 |
An unnamed Russian emigre, living in France since 1922, attempts to reconstruct the life of his half brother, Sebastian Knight, after K's death in 1936. K has taken the surname of his English mother, completed his education in England after the revolution in Russia, and become an English language novelist. The brother engages in a long quest for witnesses and material for his biography. But those who will talk know little and those who know much, including the two women in K's life, will not talk. so much of what the brother has to say and think about K's life comes from quotations and analysis of K's books.
K is a novelist for whom the form of literature is a part of the content. He writes about writing and about art as he writes about other subjects. The passages of K's writing presented to us are convincing. Nabokov speaks through K in a quite different and yet still brilliant way.
This was Nabokov's first novel in English, claimed to have been written in a bathroom in Paris in 1938. It does not seem to me as brilliant, as beautiful, or as perfectly constructed as Pnin but it is still suffused with N's wonderful intelligence and articulation. It shows us N's great depth, his ability to see nuances, his insight into the motivations and tribulations of a writer.
Nabokov is one of those writers whom I should read in depth.
I have read more since this book.
| Author | Heinlein, Robert A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ace Books, 1987 |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | November 1997 |
Juan "Johnnie" Rico, graduates high school and, on a whim, ignores his rich parents wishes and joins the Mobile Infantry to become a "Cap Trooper", a guy who exits a spaceship in a capsule and parachutes down to fight on a planet using a powered suit and a variety of flames, missiles, and mini atom bombs. He goes through training and boot camp that weed out nine out of ten men, leaving only the elite fighters. He goes through several drops, then to Officer Candidate School, and fights in the "Bug War" against insect like aliens who are in a life or death struggle with humans.
The book is a beautiful example of its type. Tough heroes led by grizzled all-knowing sergeants and dedicated superior officers fight for humanity and the honor of the service - with a subtext, or perhaps it's a supertext, of Heinlein's philosophy: Crime is caused by unspanked children. Only veterans should be allowed to vote. All wars are caused by population pressure. And this philosophy can be proved valid by "mathematically verifiable moral reasons", which of course are never produced.
The writing is very professional. Heinlein pushes every button that a 13 year old boy has. I would have loved this at that age - though I would have been bored by the philosophy and read through it to get to the good parts - fights with the bugs.
This is now a big movie. I read it because of that, but mainly because a programmer friend told me that this was the best book he ever read and decided him on a career in the Navy.
Scary, isn't it?
The programmer is named in my November 26, 1997 diary entry - which has more interesting things in it than my reaction to this book.
| Author | White, Theodore H. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books, 1981 |
| Copyright Date | 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 720 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Autobiography |
| When Read | November 1997 |
A journalistic memoir of White's life and career, beginning with his birth in Boston's Jewish ghetto in 1915 and going through to the immediate aftermath of Kennedy's assassination in 1963. White went to Harvard on a scholarship and, for largely accidental reasons, majored in Chinese language. He got mostly symbolic credentials as a journalist and went on a tour of Asia where his excellent reporting got him real work as a journalist. He covered the war in China from 1938 to '45 and was friendly with Chou and Mao, Stilwell, MacArthur, and many other key people. He also, unlike other reporters, visited the areas of real famine and war, seeing and reporting the horrors first hand. Upon his return he, like Shirer and many others, was attacked and defamed by the McCarthyites. However by a combination of skill and luck he stayed fully employed and was not badly hurt. He spent most of the critical years in Europe pursuing the story of peace and reconstruction. Then he returned and devoted himself to political reporting, including his famous Making of the President books.
White struck me as an honest man who faced issues head on. His comments on the emerging race problems in the US are frank and accurate. He believed in political leadership. He was a big fan of Kennedy, Jean Monet, perhaps Averell Harriman, even the Chinese communists - though they felt he betrayed them, but they never understood that his respect for them was not a commitment to communism.
Not as good as Shirer's books, but still good.
I read this book in an attempt to recreate for myself the fine things that I found in William Shirer's three volume autobiography / history. I noted that I liked Shirer better. But I did like this one too and did get a lot from it that was similar to what I got from Shirer. See my diary entry for September 28, 1997
| Author | Joyce, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1912 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Religion; Catholicism |
| When Read | December 1997 |
A story of the spiritual development of a boy growing to young manhood in Ireland before the turn of the century. He is brought up in Catholic schools where his good education is mixed with the most horrifying imaginable depictions of the torments of hell and with some of the usual admixtures of authoritarian excess among rather sick men whose job it is to lord it over children.
When I first read this book in my freshman English class at age 18 I was powerfully impressed with its anti-religious and highly aesthetic ideology. Now, 31 years later, the impression is much less. I believe that I take the anti-religious ideas for granted and am mainly depressed by the long passage on hell. I have trouble imagining that anyone could take that lunacy seriously - though I know that many did and many still do. I found the deep quilt over sexuality and the gradual outgrowing of that guilt similarly primitive, and the aesthetic philosophy at the end overblown. In short, it struck me as a book for adolescents written by a man who had a tough time of his own adolescence and required too many years to get over it.
This is a harsh judgment which probably reflects more upon me than upon what is really a very well written, fairly deep, and probably ground breaking book. Although the subjects are treated more circumspectly than in books published 50 years later, Joyce does at least mention teenage lust, onanism, and the guilt and difficulty of the poor sods brought up in religion.
Today, at age 67, I have still not read Ulysses. I started it more than once but gave up each time. It is a hole in my literary education which, along with the hole for Proust, may never be filled.
| Author | Churchill, Winston S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1974 |
| Copyright Date | 1948 |
| Number of Pages | 711 |
| Extras | maps, photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 1997 |
Covering the period from the early 30's to the start of his administration in Britain on the eve of the fall of France, Churchill gives us a political as well as military history of the war with a strong focus on the events in Britain.
From the very first, Churchill recognized Hitler as a great danger and a sort of maniac genius. As an MP he argued constantly for British re-armament and for forceful action against Nazi violations of the Treaty of Versailles and their aggressions against other countries. He was no idealist. He opposed intervention in Spain, not only because he thought it would do no good, but also because he opposed communism and saw little to choose between communism and fascism. Yet when Germany grew strong he advocated an alliance with Stalin as the only hope for stopping them.
Britain was in love with peace. Pacifism and disarmament were the policies of the Labour Party and were acceded to in considerable degree by Liberals and Tories. Churchill was an outcast from power in his own party because of his strident views - which is why, when war came, the people saw him as one of the few men untainted by appeasement.
Churchill's characterizations of chamberlain, Mussolini, Daladier, Benes and others are very interesting, but his characterization of Hitler is brilliant (see my diary and page 10 in the book.)
This is a combined memoir and history and is all the more interesting for combining the two. Its faults as a history are more than compensated for by its interest as a memoir by one of the leading participants in the events.
I started this book in June, 1997. As with the other volumes in the series, I kept it by my bedside and read a few pages each night, when there was time. I read many other books in the meantime.
I finished the last volume in December, 1999, two and a half years after starting the first one. The series was an important event in my reading history. I thought about the war and about Churchill almost every day. I still read many books about the war and still think a lot about Churchill.
In some ways he is an unlikely hero for me. I am a liberal social democrat and former communist. He was a constitutional monarchist and an imperialist in the classical meaning of the term, a staunch defender of the British Empire with its enforced dominion over so many countries and peoples in Asia and Africa. But he was also a brave and intelligent man, an indomitable foe of Hitler and Nazism, a defender of Poland, of France, of Greece, and of many other countries and peoples, and a generous victor. More than any other statesman that comes to mind, he was also an important writer who left us this valuable history of the war and other valuable books.
My comments on this book in my diary are found in the June 18, December 2, and December 18 entries in 1997. I'll reproduce here the excerpt I copied in from page 10 and included in my December 2 diary entry.
"...Thereafter the mighty forces were adrift; the void was open, and into that void after a pause there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast - Corporal Hitler."