Books read January through December 1998
| Author | Card, Orson Scott |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: TOR, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | xxvi + 324 |
| Extras | Introduction by the author, revised version 1985 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 1998 |
six year old Ender Wiggin has been bred from birth to be commander of the human fleet on its way to the bugger world where it will attempt to destroy the alien buggers before they can launch a third invasion of the solar system. He spends five years in Battle school, playing and then leading a game in which child commander candidates float in a weightless room in a satellite and shoot at each other with ray guns that freeze the suit of the opponent anywhere they hit it. Then he is removed to Commander's School for more in depth computer simulation training directed by famed commander Mazer Rackham. In his final test he leads his subcommanders and small fleet against 200 to one odds but slips through the enemy fleet, regardless of losses, to destroy the enemy home world. Then he is told that this was not a game. He has commanded the real fleet through faster than light communications and destroyed the real bugger home world and all the bugger queens - the only ones who can think and reproduce. The war is won.
Card writes very compellingly. He begins with a scene in which Ender fights a schoolyard bully. Then he goes home to be terrorized by his sociopathic older brother and protected by his loving sister. In Battle School he is forced into isolation and even made to stand alone against older bullies who might kill him if he can't defend himself. He kills two bullies in fights but their deaths are hidden from him. After the war, his older brother gradually takes over the earth while Ender and his sister emigrate to the now deserted bugger planets where Ender finds an egg saved for him to recreate the buggers.
C writes clearly and forcefully with great unity of vision. His long passages on the games are intriguing. His understanding of isolation is very real.
This was a Hugo and Nebula award winner followed by three sequels.
After a long search, I found and read the second book of the series five years later in 2003. I was not as enamored of it and still have not read any more.
| Author | Goldsmith, Oliver |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1766 |
| Number of Pages | 116 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1998 |
The good Dr. Primrose, Vicar of Wakefield, is a happy and prosperous man with a loving wife, six children who adore him, and a comfortable income from his inheritance when his world begins to crumble. His banker absconds with his capital. His eldest son's fiancee's parents withdraw their consent to marry a man who now has no prospects. The Vicar accepts a humbler position in a small cottage in another parish and adjusts to his life. He sends his son to the city to make his own way and the young man disappears.
A rich young squire of the neighborhood begins to court his eldest daughter and, although the Vicar opposes such a mixing of classes, the girl and her mother scheme for a marriage. Then everything falls apart. A poor but honest friend of the family appears to betray them. The girl is seduced into running off - but there is no proof of who took her or where she went. The Vicar goes in search of her but falls ill on the road. He finds her and brings her home but his house burns down. The squire, angry that the Vicar won't surrender his girls, has him imprisoned for non-payment of rent.
It is very much an 18th century farce. In the end, all is restored. The humble are raised and the squire laid low but charitably so. The poor but honest friend is revealed as a powerful baron.
What makes all this work is G's beautiful English and the Vicar's wonderful humanity. Pompous, foolish, vain, he nevertheless always has his heart in the right place. we love the man even while shaking our heads at him and wanting to jab an elbow into him to wake him up to the real world. A delightful book, delightfully narrated by Tull.
| Author | Shaw, George Bernard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Signet Classics, 1960 |
| Copyright Date | 1893 |
| Number of Pages | 85 |
| Extras | "author's apology" |
| Genres | Theater play |
| When Read | January 1998 |
A small group of people gather at an English country house owned by Mrs. Warren. They are Mrs. W, a middle aged business woman whose business is prostitution with houses in Brussels, Budapest and Vienna, her partner Sir George Crofts, a gentleman aesthete named Read, Rev. Samuel Gardner a clergyman who knew (in the carnal sense) Mrs. Warren in her youth, and two young adults, Vivie Warren and Frank Gardner.
Vivie Warren learns about her mother's profession for the first time and is horrified. when she hears the story of her mother's poor and unhappy childhood she is much mollified but becomes angry again at learning that her mother and Crofts are still in the business. She rejects her mother's offer of wealth based on vice. She rejects Croft's offer of marriage, wanting nothing to do with the rich, vulgar, self-satisfied whoremaster. And she rejects young Frank - a frivolous, useless person who is charming but worthless. In the end she has rejected all of them. She is content to make her own way as an insurance actuary and independent woman.
Shaw's play could not be produced for ten years and, when it was, it was criticized as insufficiently critical of prostitution. But of course Shaw, in his clear and socially accurate way, was really far more critical of it and especially of the conditions and the upper class people that produce it, than most approved plays of his time.
This is a good, clear, intelligent play about women and money and what society hides and what foolish things men think about women.
Are we more open about facing unattractive social issues than we were 120 years ago when this play was written? I think we are. The explosion and democratization of media, communications and transportation, the traumatic events of the twentieth century, the breakdown of the traditional upper classes, have all made the Victorian prudery of nineteenth century England and America unsupportable.
Still, we are all embedded in our own culture in ways that are often invisible to us. It would be wonderfully interesting to see what the next century makes of us.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 1998 |
The same characters that appear later in Riding the Rap appear here. Perhaps they are in other books as well. Bookie Harry Arno is setup by the FBI who convince his boss Jimmy "Cap" Caputorto that Harry is skimming on him. Jimmy sends Tommy Bucks, "the Zip" to find the truth and maybe kill Harry. The FBI plan is to get Harry to squeal on Jimmy. But instead he runs to Italy, giving his guard, Marshall Raylan Givens, the slip. Raylan goes after him as does the Zip, a real killer with serious Mafia connections in Italy, and Nicky Testa, a body builder and gangster wannabe who gofers for Jimmy and is despised and ridiculed by the Zip.
Harry is a jerk who does everything wrong but Raylan saves his life anyway, falls for his girlfriend, and goes after the Zip, killing him in a showdown at the end.
These books are all alike but different from all other writers in the genre. One difference is that the characters are driven to act in accordance with their own, often highly neurotic, characters rather than out of the obvious needs of the plot. Harry, Jimmy and Nicky keep screwing up by refusing to look squarely at the situation.
Do we care about these folks? If so, it's certainly not as much as we do about the people in serious literature. If the books were a lot longer they'd be the worse for it. Still, this kind of reading is a powerful diversion. It fills a need. It's a low effort journey, safe and sound, to an exotic world of creeps and crazies - which always comes out right in the end.
Elmore Leonard died this year at age 87. If I counted them correctly, he wrote 50 novels, plus screenplays, short stories, and at least one non-fiction book about writing. His last novel, Raylan, about a character who appears in this novel, was published just last year, when Leonard was 86 years old.
I and his legions of fans thank him for continuing to produce his unique stories right up to the end.
| Author | Hasselbach, Ingo |
|---|---|
| Author | Reiss, Tom |
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 388 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| When Read | February 1998 |
Hasselbach grew up in Communist East Germany, the illegitimate son of a committed communist who became an important broadcaster. The little boy didn't even know who his father was until later in his childhood. His mother married a nasty fellow who beat Ingo and the boy grew up in his grandparents house and on the street. He was bigger than the other kids and he became an accomplished street fighter and bully. In and out of trouble with the law, he went to prison for a year for shouting "The wall must fall" at a political event. In prison he met his first real Nazis and admired their rebelliousness, their unabashed rejection of communism and the government, and their solidarity with each other. Once out he got deeper into the "scene", becoming involved with big shot Nazis like Kuhnen, Kussel, Arnulf Prien, Ekkehard Weil and formed a cell in East Berlin which became a nucleus for hundreds of Neo-Nazis and skinhead allies. They fought the anarchist "Anti Fas" in the street, tormented Turkish, Vietnamese and Gypsy "foreigners", desecrated Jewish cemeteries, stocked up on illegal weapons and even ran candidates in elections.
In the end however he was made to see the stupidity and anti-humanity of the Nazi people and cause. he quit and became an important writer and speaker against Nazism, helping to put his old Kamerads in jail.
I learned a lot about Nazism from this. In its inception it grows on alienation and resentment coupled with ignorance and a desire for revenge against the world. It gets its storm troopers from kids under 18 who are most easily influenced. It is abetted by parochialism, nationalism and racism and ignorance in adults - who are not street fighters but are content to see someone else drive out the Jews, the foreigners, anyone who is not like them.
A good book. See my diary for more.
My notes on this book are in the diary entries for Jan 22 and 28, and Feb 1, 1998.
I have very strong memories of this book. Some of the scenes that stick in my mind include: H's recruitment of troubled young kids by acting like a cool older brother to them; his spitting on an anarchist in the street whom he took to be an easy target, after which the man proceeded to beat him (H) to a pulp; his meetings in Paris with the film maker and his friends - his surprise at seeing a variety of people of different races and nationalities, all highly intelligent, all accomplished, all getting along with each other, and all confused by his racist and fascist attitudes; his growing embarrassment about himself in front of these sophisticated people; his street fights; his running with the hoodlums who had no politics, they just wanted to beat up people and steal; his growing awareness of what he was and what he wanted to be.
I read this long before reading Peter Fritzche's book Life and Death in the Third Reich, which gave me a completely different perspective on who was attracted to Nazism and why. Rogues and gangsters were an important part of Nazism and were the front men who did the street fighting, the pogroms, and ultimately made up many of the concentration camp guards, Gestapo, Einsatzgruppen, etc. But the majority of Nazis were not like that and were attracted to the movement for different, more adult reasons. Ultimately, these people were trapped by Nazism and with the loss of their freedom, and then of their homes, loved ones, and the destruction of their country, learned a lesson in a much more painful way than Hasselbach.
I still regard this as a very important book.
To avoid confusion I should note here that H grew up in the GDR but most of the criminal activity described in the book occurred after the German reunification in 1990.
| Author | Forster, E.M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1914 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1998 |
A boy from a bourgeois family graduates from public (called "private" in the U.S.) school and goes to Cambridge for a university education preparatory to joining his father's old firm as a stockbroker. In Cambridge he meets Durham, a young intellectual. They become good friends in spite of their differences. Durham is smart, studious, the son of a member of the nobility. He reads the classics. He rejects religion. But Maurice is conventional, handsome, mild and blank. Their attraction seems inexplicable until they finally recognize the physical nature of it in the "Greek" manner.
In those days before World War I homosexuality was a crime and an abomination. The two boys fear what they have done and alternate between short periods of happiness and long periods of doubt, fear, and self loathing. Durham changes. He meets a girl and falls in love. He marries her. She has not even heard of sex. They have sex in the dark with clothes on and never discuss it. Yet Durham is content and tries to convince Maurice to change too. But M can't. He sees a doctor who tells him it's in his head and a hypnotist who tries to mesmerize it out of him. But it's no use. He meets a low class gameskeeper on Durham's estate and has a one night stand with him. At the urging of his brother, the man blackmails him but M is too strong for that. In the end the two run away to live together in spite of all law and social convention.
We today have no appreciation of the terror and despair under which homosexuals lived in that era. Their isolation was far worse than today. F was attempting to break out of it himself by imagining that a man could accept himself and be happy in spite of his sexual orientation and maybe even because of it. The ending was forced and unbelievable but the writing, both the craft and the sensibility, are of a very high order. This is an important book in the history of gay rights.
I'm not sure when the copyright was established for this book. We know it was written in 1913-14, revised in 1932 and 1959-60, but not published until 1971, after the author's death Apparently there were two different versions of the ending. I don't know which of the two I read or what the other was like.
Public acceptance of homosexuality has advanced considerably even in the fifteen years since I wrote the notes above. It is a terrible shame that men like Forster underwent such shame and suffering in the past.
| Author | Vargas Llosa, Mario |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Lane, Helen R. |
| Publication | New York: Penguin Books, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 374 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1998 |
An 18 year old Peruvian boy from a large extended family works as a radio news rewrite editor and goes to law school at night. Known by the diminutives Morito and Varguitas, he muddles along in 1950's Peru as an intellectual and the hope of his family. Then he meets Julia, a divorced aunt by marriage, the sister of his uncle' wife. Kidded and babied by her, he begins to pursue her, perhaps more to prove he is a man than for any other reason. But their attraction builds until, near the end, they marry in a madcap elopement that brings his father back from the States, threatening to kill the boy for his foolishness and ingratitude.
Meanwhile Pedro Camacho, a skinny, eccentric Bolivian scriptwriter, is hired to write radio serials and turns out to be a genius at his craft. Each chapter of Varguitas' story alternates with a soap opera story chapter - always different stories, always brilliant but increasingly confused and bizarre. The first of these stories, about a respected doctor who discovers that his nephew has had an incestuous relationship with his own sister, blew me away. The reader doesn't know where the story came from or whether it will continue until further along in the book when three or four stories have been presented and we are sure these are from Camacho's fevered brain. Camacho writes at a furious pace but cannot sustain it. He loses the threads of his stories, mixes up all the characters, and eventually breaks down.
When the brilliant VL writes a comedy it is a brilliant comedy. VL has a wonderfully expansive mind in which all kinds of characters live and breathe and, in spite of all adversities, appears as genuine human beings. We sympathize with everyone. He also gives us a totally different view of writing through the lopsided scriptwriter who reads nothing and cares about nothing but his own creations. And yet he is the best. Compared to him all others merely play at writing.
Very interesting and a great read.
The story opens with chapter one, in which Varguitas introduces his job, his newspaper and meets his Aunt Julia. Then, with no warning that we have left the main story, chapter two begins with "... a famous physician of the city, Dr. Alberto de Quinteros—broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness—opened his eyes in his vast mansion in San Isidro and stretched his limbs."
Dr. de Quinteros is a delightful man, loved by his friends, his family, his patients, and his dog. He in turn loves them all and loves Mozart. We look forward to hearing more from and about this comfortable and charming new character in the story and are puzzled as to when he will reappear in subsequent chapters. It is only later that we realize that the good doctor is a creation, not of Vargas Llosa, or we should say not directly of Vargas Llosa, but of Pedro Camacho, or of Vargas Llosa via Pedro Camacho. Already believing that we are in the presence of a master writer, we now realize that we are in the presence of two master writers, or even more masterly, of a master writer and a master writer once removed.
My introduction to VL was in the mid 1970's with his great masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral. An English translation had just been published and was given a glowing review by the New York Times, whose weekly book supplement I read both for my own gratification and as a part of my job as junior librarian in the Humanities Department at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. It was an astounding book. I followed it with two others that led up to it, The Time of the Hero (how does that title come from "La ciudad y los perros"?) and The Green House. This book, coming eight years after Conversation, is experimental in a whole different way.
I've also read others of VL's books. It's hard to believe that Julia is the last one I read and I have gone 15 years now without reading any more. It is a hole in my reading that I hope to fill.
Checking my records I see that the first book I read by VL was The Time of the Hero, then Conversation in the Cathedral, and then The Green House
| Author | Borges, Jorge Luis |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Portuguese |
| Translators | Giovanni, Thomas di |
| Publication | New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1935 |
| Number of Pages | 112 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | February 1998 |
A collection of "free versions" of old stories together with "Streetcorner Man", B's first story. The initial stories are all about scoundrels in different cultures. There is a man who induces slaves to run away in the old South and then sells them back into slavery. An impostor who looks nothing like a missing rich man is foisted on his French family. a Chinese lady pirate ravishes the coast of China until trapped. A New York gangster toughs it out in the 1920's. Billy the Kid kills recklessly in Arizona. a master of etiquette insults a Japanese nobleman causing his death and bringing revenge from 47 retainers who give up their own lives for justice. A masked Arab magician conquers all until he is unmasked as a leper. These are stories of cultures more than of individuals. They are partially in the style of the culture represented and the criminals are types of those cultures.
This theme is even stronger in the final section entitled "Etcetera." The stories here are lifted from various Medieval (mostly) sources and retold in a most charming antique style.
The stories are all exotic and wild in content but very restrained and civilized in style. Borges turns records of horror into charming moralistic tales. We don't yet see his later fantastic themes but already we can see the tendency, the attraction for the bizarre, for the sharp twist, or the hidden meaning in stories taking place on the edge of human experience. "Sharp" is probably the wrong adjective for the twists in B's stories. Perhaps it's better to say that B reveals a coil beneath the surface of the story, a curve that was there all along but not fully revealed until the end.
Re-reading these notes calls to mind Balzac's Droll Stories, that I read six years after this. Balzac is fresher in my mind.
| Author | Haldeman, Joe |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Avon Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 252 |
| Extras | "Author's Preferred Edition" |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | February 1998 |
In the late 1990's William Mandella is drafted to fight in an interstellar war against the Taurans. He trains on an outpost near a "collapsar", a point from which one may jump to a point elsewhere in the universe. Due to relativistic effects of travel near the speed of light the soldiers who survive a mission may return to human territory tens or hundreds of years after they left, although they only experienced a year or so of life.
After his first battle M returns to an overcrowded earth full of criminals. He hates it and signs up again and is forced to fight again and again, eventually being the only man to fight the entire war over 1,200 years. Returning from the last battle he finds humanity is transformed into a single consciousness very like the Taurans. Human and Tauran finally understand each other and are at peace. M leaves for the planet "Middle Finger" to live with his ancient girlfriend who waited for him by herself traveling at relativistic speed.
This novel won both Hugo and Nebula awards. It is squarely in the tradition of American hard space adventure though it includes some very 70's things like the dystopian view of the world's future and a period when homosexuality became the norm and heterosex was queer.
As is common in this genre you can't probe it too hard without seeing all the flimsiness of the world view. Why does the war occur? Why are there ground troops? What is this consciousness? Why is the world so chaotic? But it is written with the fluid first person style that works well in these novels.
Highly readable. Not too substantial.
Science fiction has been disparaged by some critics as being a complete wasteland. That a book like this won two important awards in the field certainly supports that view. Asimov and Clarke did much better and Lem and the Strugatsky brothers were far above this sort of right leaning military space opera.
Maybe that's too harsh. Haldeman wrote entertainment fiction for a largely adolescent audience. There's nothing wrong with aspiring to do that. We just shouldn't expect too much.
Or maybe it's not too harsh. We should be able to criticize a book without denying the right of the author to write it or his audience to read it. I once mentioned a Robert Heinlein book to a librarian friend (Will Tress) at Pratt Library. The book may have been Starship Troopers. He said, well, the book is alright if you like crypto-fascist science fiction. That sobriquet applies to Haldeman's book too.
| Author | Marsh, Ngaio, 1895-1982 |
|---|---|
| Publication | England: G.K. Hall Audio Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 1998 |
Superintendent Roderick Alleyn goes to Rome on behalf of Interpol to find a drug dealer named Sebastian Mailer. Mailer deals drugs, blackmails, and uses a position as a tour guide as cover and organization for his activities. He has organized a tour of Rome, starting with the Basilica of San Tommaso. The tour includes a Dutch couple, a Baron and Baroness, Lady Bracely and her young drug addicted nephew, a well known English writer, and a young woman who works for his publisher, and a "Major" who turns out to be a criminal, not a retired army man at all.
Mailer disappears in the Basilica and is thought perhaps to have recognized Alleyn and run away. However a body is discovered of a woman formerly married to Mailer, then eventually Mailer himself turns up dead. Various people are suspected, the Italian police run this way and that. The major is implicated and runs for it. He's hit by a truck. The police put the case to rest but Alleyn figures out that the Baron killed Mailer because he blackmailed him over the fact that husband and wife, Baron and Baroness, were also half brother and sister. Alleyn let the matter drop and went home.
Marsh produced a competent product. A description of her work I found on the Internet said she writes a nice novel of manners for about 70 pages, then there is a murder followed by a mundane investigation and wrap up.
Just so.
| Author | Hart, Josephine |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 186 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1998 |
An unnamed man reaches the age of 50 with an apparently perfect life. He had been a doctor and was then a member of Parliament with high standing in the Conservative Party. He is married to the beautiful daughter of a wealthy and prominent gentleman. He has two fine children, Martyn, a journalist and would be author and Sally, a conventional but pretty and intelligent girl who will marry well. Martyn is a very handsome young man who has dallied with many girls but now, surprisingly, has fallen in love with strange and beautiful Anna Barton who is eight years older than he and has a dark past of incestuous love with her brother, who killed himself because they could not be together forever.
The protagonist meets Anna and falls instantly in love. He realizes that his whole life was wasted, his marriage passionless, his aspirations misguided, his real needs unknown and unfulfilled. He begins a furtive love affair with Anna based on intense, tormented sex in back alleys and hideaways. The day before Anna and Martyn's wedding day Martyn discovers them. Shocked, he recoils and falls downstairs, dying.
The protagonist's life is over. His wife leaves him. He resigns his job. He becomes a recluse, waiting to die. Anna moves on to another man.
I could not believe in this life or this love affair. Possibly it is because I am too conventional myself or because I find the disorderly and unexamined character of these lives repulsive. It is not badly written but is most unsatisfying.
This is a story of a man whose life is both unexamined and uncommitted. He has no understanding of his marriage or career or of this woman Anna whom he is so passionately attracted to for reasons he doesn't understand and couldn't explain, and he has no commitment to his wife, his son, or his parliamentary causes or constituents. His life is essentially meaningless. Whatever meaning it has collapses in the face of an equally unexamined, uncommitted and meaningless sexual attraction.
My recollection of the book is very weak. I cannot now say what the stance of the author was in regard to her character. I am now imagining that her intent was to take an objective stance and let the story speak for itself without comment from her. If so, my dissatisfaction with the book should be a comment on the character rather than the author.
Alternatively, perhaps I wanted the author to explain all of this more fully and not just give us this irrational life and say - yes he's intelligent, yes he's competent at getting what he wants, yes he's been well accepted by others, but he's still a fool. Maybe I thought we needed more explanation of that before we could understand how this seemingly solid house was blown down by the wind of a passing sexual fancy.
| Author | Newark, Tim |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 160 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | March 1998 |
This is a brief history of the Germanic, Central Asian, Nordic, and Arab peoples who contended for land and spoils in the land of the Roman Empire between 400 and around 1100 AD.
The Germanic tribes conquered all until the Arabs took North Africa and Spain and incursions by Vikings and the many Turkic peoples conquered the edges of their realms.
A number of interesting facts or theories are presented.
1. "Great invasions" were often by surprisingly small bands of professional warriors, often accompanied by larger numbers of local people who joined with the invaders.
2. The failure to defend Europe was due as much to the venality of local rulers as to the military prowess of the invaders. Local warlords often relished the destruction of their rivals in a neighboring province by Vikings, Avars, Magyars, or whoever. The Emperor at Constantinople often allowed invaders to pillage parts of his empire to punish unruly subjects or to divert them.
3. Military tactics were not always very sophisticated. Germans disdained the bow in spite of its superior value as a weapon.
4. The central Asians - Huns, Alans, Magyars, Pechenegs, Avars, were generally steppe raiders. The Mongols were the first to have a real army and administration. They invaded Europe with a force that was much more Turkic than Mongol - only the leading cadres were actually Mongols.
I always like to read this sort of stuff though it's very shallow in comparison to, say, Marc Bloch.
I started Bloch's book on Feudal Society many years ago but didn't get a chance to finish it. Later I found a copy in a used bookstore and bought it. I have it in my basement. Although I only read 120 pages or so and read it many more years ago this one, I remember it much better. I should return to it.
| Author | Churchill, Winston S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 652 |
| Extras | maps, photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | March 1998 |
Churchill resumes the narrative with his accession to power at the fall of France. Book 1 (each volume appears to be divided into two "books") is about that fall with Britain's half disbelief that this can be happening and half growing realization that they must save themselves. C keeps urging aggressive measures upon the French but they are psychologically already defeated. Their leadership is paralyzed. Their armies, beaten, demoralized and uncoordinated, are incapable of the dramatic action required for defense. The British, after advancing into Belgium according to plan must then fight their way back to the sea and Dunkirk. The division at Calais fights to the end to give them time.
There is a brief period during which the fate of Britain is in doubt but the British organize their defenses as rapidly as possible. Even as the Battle of Britain reaches its height C is already confident that the Nazis cannot invade. He almost hopes they will try so that they can get the beating they deserve.
Then they are alone, under heavy bombardment from the air, but now knowing they will not be overrun and resolved to fight to the end and eventual destruction of Nazi Germany.
Churchill is a man driven back to his island, unable to seriously injure his enemy but refusing to rest passively. He looks for places to fight in Africa, in Egypt, where he can take the offensive even if it's only for small victories against Vichy or the Italians. Finally they bag the Italians at Bardia and Tobruk. If is the first real victory of the war.
Perhaps my strongest memory of this book is the scene in which Churchill gives the order to the division at Calais to fight to the last man to hold the Germans back from Dunkirk.
Hitler and Stalin gave such orders routinely, over and over, throughout the war. They cared nothing for the men they ordered to their deaths. Churchill gave the order with a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes. He hated that he had to give this order but saw it as the only way to save many more men and preserve the army that would defend the country.
Now 73 years after these events, and I think 173 years after the events and beyond, this will still be remembered as Britain's finest hour.
Walter Lord, in his book Miracle of Dunkirk argues that the sacrifice of the British division at Calais didn't actually achieve anything. The reduction of the defense at Calais was done by reserve German forces that were not needed and not used at Dunkirk. However he did not consider that fact to be a criticism of Churchill or the British high command. If I am remembering and interpreting Lord correctly, he thought there was no way for the British to know this. They had reason to believe that they were making the right decision.
| Author | Grisham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 486 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 1998 |
In 1967 Sam Cayhall and Rollie Wedge place a bomb in the office of a Jewish civil rights lawyer in Mississippi. Sam thinks they're going to just blow up the office but Rollie put a time delay on the bomb and it blows up later, killing the lawyer's two little boys. Sam is caught. White racist juries fail to convict him in two trials but when more evidence turns up he is finally convicted and sentenced to death in 1981.
Nine years later in 1990 a young lawyer for the Chicago firm of Karvitz and Bane, which has been defending Cayhall's death appeals pro-bono, asks to be assigned to the case. He reveals that, although he has not seen Cayhall since he was 3 and his name is now Adam Hall, not Cayhall, he is Sam's grandson. They send him to Memphis and Mississippi to fight the appeals.
Adam learns about the Cayhall family's racist past, about Sam's participation in two lynchings and his killing of a black man in a fight. He learns why his father committed suicide. Repelled by the old man's racism and family history he still feels some bond of blood and an antipathy to the death penalty. There are many scenes in the jail on death row and some involvement with the whole legal and physical process of putting a man to death. Adam and his firm attempt every legal and some not very legal efforts to stop the execution but, in the end, Sam is gassed. Rollie Wedge appears a couple of times and we think he will play a role in the story but G drops that thread rather unaccountably.
I think I liked this the best of the Grishams I have read so far. Like all of them it educates the reader in the law. But the main attraction of the book is Sam Cayhall. It is a surprise to feel sympathy for this man but we do feel some. Killer of blacks and Jews, he is still a human being with the inner resources to feel genuine remorse at the end.
I don't personally know anyone like Sam Cayhall. I know some racists but they are not violent people who would physically hurt someone because of his race or religion - though they might not hire the person, live near the person, or befriend the person if they had a choice in the matter.
I have come to believe that violent racism is as much or more about violence as about race. Race enables the violent man (it's usually though not always a man) to focus on a supposed enemy, but at their core these are violent men who hurt people for reasons having much more to do with themselves than with the people they hurt.
Like Adam Hall I can sympathize with Sam Cayhall because I have the capacity to sympathize with people. Sam Cayhall himself lacks that capacity, if not absolutely then at least to a significant degree.
Human beings are complex animals with a wide range of culture and behavior. We know a lot about what people are like but we don't yet know as much as we need to know about how to change them.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 322 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | March 1998 |
Harry Pendel, proprietor of Pendel and Braithwaite tailors in Panama City, is in debt and being squeezed by a government official / gangster, when a young man walks into the shop, reveals his knowledge of Pendel's past, and offers him lucrative work as a spy. Andy Osnard knows that Pendel has spent three years in jail for arson (he took the blame to save his Jewish Uncle Benny) and knows that Braithwaite is a fiction. P made him up and made up the whole history of himself and his firm. With blackmail and bribes, Osnard gets Pendel to spy on the leading citizens and soldiers of Panama who are his clients.
P is a wonderful spy. Hearing nothing of value "as such" he reports instead what his targets would have said had they just happened to say it. No friend of truth himself, Osnard elaborates the stories still further to produce a steady flow of cash from his quasi government / corporate spymasters in London. The two men, stonewalling each other as well as the world, each dig themselves into deeper and deeper holes. Pendel, against his will, must place his wife and his best friend into the stories. Panamanian police thugs get wind of Pendel's moves and pressure the friend, driving him to suicide.
In the end it all blows up in London but the resolution is as fanciful as the story itself. Poor Harry slips deeper into alienation and neurosis in a kind of shell shock of recoil against it all.
The story is a tragic-comedy. Appalled by Harry's deteriorating situation and in great sympathy with him, I still couldn't help but laugh at his shenanigans and London's absurd, self-important response. As always, Le Carre's dream like prose is fabulous. But for me the final and overwhelming effect was tragic, not comic. I am too staid and settled a person to stand a situation like this.
Spying is much in the news these days as Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have each revealed extraordinary secrets of American espionage at home and around the world. It's all serious business and yet I can't help but suspect that there is some of Le Carre in all of it.
Surely the huge apparatus of the U.S. National Security Agency must include ambitious men and women who have built mountains out of molehills in order to advance their careers. However I also suspect that the people so intensively spy on each other, and use lie detector tests on each other, that the opportunities for this sort of farce may be limited in comparison with the world of British espionage described by Le Carre.
Who knows? I don't. I would be a fool to imagine that I have any insight into the real world of American spying.
| Author | Reeman, Douglas |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tiptree, Essex, UK: Arrow Books, 1981 |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 1998 |
Lieutenant Ralph Trewin, recovered from serous wounds incurred during the evacuation of Crete, is assigned to be executive officer of a gunboat at Singapore at the end of November, 1941. he finds a city and a navy still operating under almost peacetime conditions. But all that changes on Dec. 7. He is soon in combat again, running supplies up the Malay Peninsula in the struggle against the encroaching Japanese. The six boats in his squadron are reduced eventually to only two when the island surrenders. He and his semi-blind Captain plan an escape - heading for Australia. After many days of combat and of hide and seek in the islands they get the second boat through with its cargo of women and children and finally escape themselves.
There is a simple, rather childishly conceived love story, a Captain who tels no one he's losing his sight, a cowardly admiral who orders men to their deaths, and a brutal enemy who kills all prisoners.
Yet despite the simplicity of it with all the basic bones of a mass market war/sea/adventure story, one nevertheless senses an honesty and a commitment in Reeman's writing. R cared about his people and about this war. He admired its heroes and despised its cowards. He believed that the long terrible fight down the peninsula in which many good men gave their lives was a fight for home and family and freedom. He pays tribute to those dead men.
Simple as they are, I like his books.
Reeman joined the Royal Navy in 1940 at age 16. According to his website, he served in the North Sea, Arctic, Atlantic, and Mediterranean campaigns in destroyers and torpedo boats. He returned to the navy for the Korean War, worked as a cop and a children's welfare officer. Clearly, he was a believer in the people and events that he wrote about.
He has also written the Richard Bolitho series of many novels under the name Alexander Kent. I read some of them in my 20's and 30's while working at the Pratt Library, which had all of them.
As of this writing, he's still alive. He will be 89 years old this year.
He died on January 23 of this year, aged 92. Farewell Mr. Reeman.
| Author | Van Doren, Carl |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio Books, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1938 |
| Number of Pages | 864 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| When Read | April 1998 |
This is, I believe, the standard biography of the great scientist, businessman, statesman and philosopher. It is rich in detail and in extensive extracts from all his writings in all periods of his life.
I am deeply impressed by all aspects of Franklin's character and intellect. Every experience was, for him, an opportunity to observe, experiment and learn. Electricity, meteorology, chemistry, biology, oceanography - he made original and penetrating observations and proposed intelligent and enlightening theories in every one of them. He taught himself languages, he invented stoves, lightning rods, spectacles, and dozens of useful contraptions.
In politics he was unexcelled. he negotiated equally well with prime ministers, Quakers, tradesmen, Indian chiefs, governors, scientists, legislators, and backwoods farmers. He could put himself in all their places and understand all their points of view. His intelligence, fairness and good will were so obvious to all that he was universally trusted and his opinion universally sought. Honesty was not just good policy with him, it was bound up in the essence of his character. He did what he believed would be right - but without ever being intolerant or unforgiving. He maintained his dignity under attack and his humor and interest in life even in the physical pain and decline of old age. And he continued to grow - evolving a more and more democratic, egalitarian and humane politics right to the end.
A fine book about a very great, very admirable man.
Some fellow in Colonial Philadelphia attempted to get up a subscription to build a hospital (as I recall.) He showed up at Franklin's door, asking to discuss his plan with him. Franklin was surprised but the man told him that he had to talk to him, Franklin, because everywhere he went, every Philadelphian he spoke to, asked, "What does Franklin think of the idea?" He was that kind of man with that kind of reputation among his fellows.
I'll also praise Van Doren here. He was one of our very great biographers.
| Author | Dees, Morris |
|---|---|
| Author | Corcoran, James |
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 254 |
| Extras | index, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| When Read | May 1998 |
The Chief Legal Counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center and its Militia Task Force describes many of the leaders of the "Patriot" movement and their messages and activities. These are twisted, corroded human beings, little Hitlers in the making, who compensate for their failures, their powerlessness, their feeling of helplessness, with hatred and a desire for generalized revenge.
The militia organizations, gun clubs and similar groups are near the top of a hierarchy. At the top are various committed Neo-Nazi Fuhrer wannabes who have pursued power and violence for decades. Reaching down from them is a continuum with badly twisted men like Tim McVeigh at one end and simple right wing fundamentalist radio listening ignoramuses at the other.
Every society has its alienated, disaffected misfits, its haters, its antisocial elements. Given the right experiences I'm sure that many of them could be turned around. Many cannot. So what are we to do? Dees says, and I believe him, that we should at least take away their guns and their militia organizations. We should call the law on them.
Every year Marcia and I send $500 or so to the SPLC. The sent us this book in return and Dees signed it. I'll keep contributing. He's a courageous guy who has survived dozens of threatened and planned assassinations. More power to him.
We still contribute to SPLC. We're up to $1,000 a year now. It's my favorite charity.
They send us their publications. I read each quarterly copy of The Intelligence Report cover to cover. I'm not exactly sure why I read it so closely. The people I'm reading about are, in many cases, psychologically damaged people who are as much a threat to themselves as to anyone else. I think perhaps that what attracts me is the idea that there are people out there fighting against bigotry, not just in an abstract way, not just in an educational way, but also in a direct, personal way aimed at the individual bigots themselves. There's something very satisfying about that.
Last week Marcia and I watched a film made by SPLC called Erasing Hate, about a neo-Nazi skinhead tattooed from head to foot with racist, murderous symbols. Coming to his senses after 16 years in skinhead "crews", he determined to erase the tattoos from face, neck and hands so that he'd be able to get a job and live like an ordinary man. It was a terribly painful process drawn out over 25 sessions and 18 months, but he finally succeeded. I'm happy to think that some of the money that Marcia and I contributed to SPLC may have helped to pay for his redemption.
| Author | McBain, Ed |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 312 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | 87th Precinct |
| When Read | May 1998 |
Detective Carella is called out to investigate the murder of a blind man and, the next day, the blind man's wife. Later a blind woman completely unrelated to the two is murdered and another is attacked and might have been murdered but for a defense by the seeing eye dog.
Carella tracks a long story back to the blind man's service in Vietnam and a false memory of a rape when he was a gang member in Isola (New York really.) It turns out that the dead man, before he was blinded, witnessed the murder of an officer in Vietnam and was blackmailing the chief murderer, then a sergeant and now a Lieutenant Colonel. The Colonel killed him to shut him up, killed his wife when she couldn't produce a copy of the accusatory letter, and killed the unrelated person to cover his tracks.
The police procedure is quite good. So are Carella's reactions to it all. all in all a well done mystery of its type - okay for listening to during a long commute with no better books available.
| Author | Salzman, Mark |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | May 1998 |
After getting his degree in Chinese from Yale in 1982 Salzman took a position as English teacher in a Changsha, China medical school. This book records his adventures there as teacher, tourist, and student of Chines Wu Shu, or martial arts.
with his blond hair and blue eyes S was a center of attention everywhere he went, and he seemed to go everywhere. He spent a couple of days with Yangtse fisher folk. He traveled on a train with just released convects. He studied Wu Shu with China's leading expert and many other experts as well. He studied calligraphy. He met a dying girl, condemned to care for her parents and fell in love for one brief evening.
S is an open human being - open to all of the people and experiences he encountered. He met people on their own terms, and he writes beautifully of it all.
His Wu Shu training was extraordinary. Although he is a pacific person who does not get in fights, he went through extremely rigorous and even dangerous programs of exercise, hardening his hands, training with swords, "pushing hands", and so on with a number of teachers and different styles. There can't be many Americans with the same level of training and skill.
My overall impression of China at that time is of a repressed and bureaucratic society with arrogant petty clerks and arbitrary rules - but with the same number of free spirits as anywhere else, though with less outlet for them.
A very fine book.
A number of scenes remain in my memory from this book. In one, S is invited to the home of some Chinese and asked to bring along his cello. He begins to play for the people, expecting everyone to listen closely. But no one does. They all talk among themselves and appear to ignore him. He is offended and his hosts realize that but can't imagine why.
Recounting his experience in Wu Shu, he speaks of a great Chinese master who can easily defeat him at any time. S attempts to attack the older man by surprise with different kinds of attack from all angles and at unexpected times but the master, seemingly without effort, throws S off and is never himself knocked off his feet.
At the school, he is besieged by students who want to practice their English on him. He is bored to tears by conversing with people at a most primitive level and tries to find every way to avoid the students.
The girl that he falls in love with for a night he meets by surprise on the street, if I remember correctly, and is astonished to hear her speak perfect American English with a perfect American accent. He is much taken with her but she is not free and it is not possible for anything to come of it.
After listening to the CDs of this book I gave them to Marcia and she too found it very absorbing.
| Author | Wilder, Thornton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1928 |
| Copyright Date | 1927 |
| Number of Pages | 235 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | May 1998 |
In 1714, in Peru, an ancient bridge collapses and five people plunge to their deaths. Seeking to find God's intention in this purest act of divine will, brother Juniper investigates the lives of the dead people
Wilder gives us a remarkable vision of five essentially innocent people, each with an emotional problem, a lack, an isolation and alienation from a loved one, and each having just found some hope of resolution and rekindling of life and love before the collapse.
The five are diverse. The Marquesa de Montemayor longs for her treasured daughter but so smothers the young woman with love that the daughter is driven away. Pepita, her 12 year old servant is an orphan, lonely but dedicated to her duty to her mistress. The Abbess of the convent had picked out Pepita to become the next abbess and had sent her away to the Marquesa to strengthen her at the risk of breaking both their hearts. The girl was called back to the abbey when she died. Esteban is a totally isolated man completely dependent upon his twin brother who dies from an infection after a trivial wound. Uncle Pio is a man of literature, of the theater, of classical Spanish. Rejected by the orphan girl whom he trained to be the greatest actress of her time but who has finally rebelled from the demands of art and Uncle Pio's perfectionism, he is given her young sickly son - the two of them finally having something to live for again.
This is a rich, beautiful book. It says nothing about God's intention, only about the loneliness and isolation of human beings and their attempts to find personal salvation in the love of family and the aspiration towards love, truth, art. A great book.
The setting of this Pulitzer Prize winning book surprised me. Why did Wilder choose Peru, 1714, and an Inca rope bridge? Why these unusual characters? I speculate, with good reason I think, that he was a man with a very wide vision of humanity.
Wilder apparently said that the book was created in response to a friendly argument with his father, a strict Calvinist. It is indeed a story that argues well, without being in any way argumentative, against the strict Calvinist view of Brother Juniper that everything that happens happens for a reason and is in accord with God's purpose and His plan.
In transcribing my 1998 book card I saw the hand written publisher's name "Albert and Charles Boni". I wondered if I got that right? It turns out that I did. The Boni brothers were important publishers in the 1920's who brought out the series "Modern Library of the World's Best Classics". Bennet Cerf left their employ, bought the series from them, and started his own publishing corporation "Random House".
I no longer recall where I found this book. Even in 1927, there was another publisher of this title, Grossett and Dunlap. I suspect I found it among my mother's books ... after checking, I think probably not. Figuring that there wasn't likely to be a 1928 edition in the Baltimore County Library, where I was getting most of my books in 1998, I went to look in the stacks in my basement. Sure enough, there it was. The book is marked as Copyright Albert and Charles Boni, 1927, eighth printing, 1928. Looking through it I saw no Ex Libris or similar statement but did find a little stick-on stamp that said "Joseph Horne Co. Book Shop, Pittsburgh".
Joseph Horne Co. was a large downtown Pittsburgh department store. It was still in business when I lived in Pittsburgh from 1964 to 1968. Perhaps they had a used book section of the store, or maybe a separate bookshop. I might have bought the book there, or more likely, I might have bought the book in some shop (maybe or maybe not owned by Joseph Horne Company) in the University of Pittsburgh area in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. However it's not impossible that the book was at Joseph Horne some time in the 20's or 30's, then traveled to Chicago or Baltimore where my mother bought it. I no longer have any memory of where I got it.
Life is full of missing memories. The names of Joseph Horne, and less so Charles and Albert Boni, are still known today, but not widely. They will likely remain in old books and web pages for some centuries, but only as names. Names and events fade quickly. It is in the battle against this sort of amnesia that I write these notes on every book that I read. The memories have no absolute significance that I can imagine, yet they feel important to me. It is as if life is made up of little insignificant moments whose value increases over time and as they fade away.
| Author | Millhauser, Steven |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 293 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | May 1998 |
Martin Dressler, born in 1872 to a German American tobacconist, goes to work as a bell boy, then night clerk, day clerk, and assistant to the manager of a New York hotel. Restless and energetic, he throws himself into his job, then leaves it to start a lunchroom and then a chain of lunch rooms. When the old hotel comes up for sale he buys it, completely refurnishes it, and makes it a success. Then he builds a bigger hotel full of stores and amusements and a still bigger, more radical hotel and finally a hotel so outrageously different and spectacular that it's a financial failure.
In the meantime Martin has married the beautiful but frigid, depressed and perhaps demented Caroline Vernon, passing over her much more talented and personable but not as beautiful sister. It is a cold and useless marriage - giving him nothing. In the end, with his new hotel failing, he throws all his other assets into enjoying its expansiveness a few months longer - and the book ends in a reverie in Central Park.
The story is badly overwritten. The descriptions of the hotels are wholly incredible and run on for page after page. The marriage, while credible, offers us no resolution. There is never any dawning in Martin of what has happened to him and no growth. He gets bigger but not smarter or better adapted.
Still, it's an ambitious book with a literary bent. M gets points for trying hard and for writing chapter endings - all of which have a nice technique - though again over done.
| Author | Bester, Alfred |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vintage Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 258 |
| Extras | Introduction by Neil Gaiman |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1998 |
Gulliver Foyle, sole survivor of an attack, is living in a dark locker of the shattered spaceship Nomad, barely surviving on the last tanks of air and bits of food when the spaceship Vorga approaches, but then ignores his distress signal and goes away. Gully conceives a monumental hatred and desire for revenge. By incredible effort he maneuvers the ship to an asteroid with people on it - people out of touch for 200 years living in an odd primitive culture. They tattoo his face and marry him to a local girl. But he breaks out, steals a ship, and blasts off for earth.
On earth he pursues his revenge. It is a different earth where people "jaunte" up to 1,000 miles by the power of thought alone. Gully is pursued for a lot of reasons. He becomes involved with two women then seems to fall in love with a third, the blind daughter of Presteign of Presteign - only to find in the end that she was commanding the Vorga.
At the final end, Gully discovers his unique power to space jaunte - the first person to reach the stars.
This book is considered a seminal work, one of the great classics of SF. It is competently written with a fast paced plot and grand themes of good and evil and of the capacities of human beings. But it's basically nonsense - leading to an absurd ending. I won't call it drivel but it's lacking in scientific sense and in understanding of society. Its plan for the future and for human progress is simple-minded bullshit.
It's too bad that our "classics" are like this.
I have only a vague recollection of this book. When I plucked the book card out of my card box I was thinking, "oh look, a classic title." The title is still a classic, but I didn't care for it when I read it and I presume I would not if I read it today.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Comedy |
| When Read | June 1998 |
Ex con, ex horse dealer, ex cowboy Ben Tyler is recruited to run a load of guns into Cuba under cover of a load of horses. His ship arrives just after the Maine has blown up. Tyler is swindled by Roland Boudreaux, a rich American landowner in Cuba who was to buy the horses. He's attacked by a supercilious Spanish officer and has to kill him. then he is arrested by the evil Guardia Civil Major Lionel Taballera. Meanwhile Boudreaux's girlfriend Amelia is falling in love with Tyler. She helps break him out of prison and they join the rebels with a scheme to fake Amelia's kidnapping and touch Boudreaux for $40,000. But the rebel chief plans to keep the money for himself so Ben and Amelia and the old revolutionary Victor decide to keep it for themselves.
The book is even more violent than most of L's books. The scenes of Taballera's tortures were sickening and one had a strong desire to see him killed, which he was by the end. As usual, the good guy and the good girl come out okay in the end. They lose the big prize (Victor steals it all) but they get each other and make Boudreaux pay what he owes.
L sticks to the same style and conventions he's always used.
Leonard died a month ago on August 20, 2013 at the age of 87. He would have been 72 when he wrote this. It was not his best book by far. Sometimes he experimented with different settings and themes. In this case it was more of a historical novel than his others - though he did write some wild west stories too.
| Author | Austen, Jane |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1817 |
| Number of Pages | 150 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1998 |
27 year old Anne Eliot, daughter of Sir Walter and sister to the older, cold and snobbish Elizabeth and the younger, self-centered and snobbish Mary, had been persuaded as a girl of 19 to give up an offer from a fine young sea captain because his prospects and family were dim. Now, 8 years later, the man has returned from the wars, rich with prize money and well connected to a wealthy admiral.
Anne still loves him but feels that after she rejected him when he was poor she has no right to approach him now that he is rich. He courts the two Musgrove sisters, nice girls but lacking Anne's fine sensibility. He almost becomes involved with one while society also continues to throw Anne into the arms of her suave and polished but inwardly evil cousin William. But in the end they come to each other and plight their troth, setting out to live happily ever after amidst loving friends and the usual small fortune.
As in all her earlier books, Austen is a master of emotional nuance, of social grace and class, of manner. And as always, the depth of her perception in the niceties of social life amongst the English gentry is matched by shallowness of perception of larger and deeper issues. In fact, the wider world is invisible to her. Knowing that Austen had two naval officers as brothers I wouldn't have imagined that her descriptions of the three sea captains in Persuasion would be as unconvincing as they were.
Still, with Austen you know exactly what you're going to get. She never gives more but she never fails to deliver what she promises.
| Author | Wolfe, Tom |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, 1997 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1998 |
The author of Bonfire of the Vanities describes a sleazy TV feature news production a la 60 Minutes or whatever, tracking down and "ambushing" three soldiers at Fort Bragg, one of whom killed a gay soldier in a fit of rage when he saw him sucking a cock through a hole in a lavatory wall. Irv Durtscher, the Jewish stereotype producer and Mary Carey Brokenborough enact the whole ambush, she with great cool and determination, he with great fear that the soldiers will break through the wall and kill him. they bug the men's booth at a bar, get some evidence on tape, then lure them into an RV in the lot behind the bar to confront them with the evidence in front of hidden cameras. However in the confrontation one of the men is very cool and turns the whole interview into a description of the heroism of the three men under fire in Somalia. But Durtcher twists everything by careful editing. The soldiers are made to look sick and cowardly in the production and he sells it successfully to his Jewish boss.
I have very mixed feelings about this story. As an expose of sleazy TV journalism it's very revealing. As a demonstration of the good as well as evil qualities of ignorant soldiers it has something to offer. But it's a perfect realization of every antisemite's beliefs about slimy, smarmy, clever, cowardly Jews in the media.
Interestingly, Norton, like Mary Carey, does a magnificent acting job but the production of the audiobook stinks with bad music at the wrong times and no end of tape announcements
I searched the net for discussions of Tom Wolfe and antisemitism. I found a number of interesting articles, including one by a staunch admirer of Wolfe's writing who nevertheless had questions about this and a number of other of Wolfe's books. None of the commentators were prepared to say that he is an antisemite because he's acerbic about everyone, not just Jews. But it does appear that "Jewishness" in names, looks, speech, and other characteristics is made very explicit in the attacks on Jews, in ways that may not be so clear in attacks on, say, Baptists or Catholics or New Yorkers per se.
He married a younger woman, Sheila Berger, who is said to have been of Jewish extraction (Wolfe is said to be an atheist and I assume she is too.) They remain together many years later and it is apparently a very good marriage.
Wolfe, of course, dismisses the accusations as ridiculous, but then so do most educated antisemites.
I can't judge him, and if I did it makes no difference to anyone but me. But prejudice and bigotry have many forms and manifestations.
| Author | Trollope, Anthony |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Dover, 1978 |
| Copyright Date | 1882 |
| Number of Pages | 92 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1998 |
Cecilia Holt is betrothed to Sir Francis Geraldine but recognizes that the man is selfish, self-centered and unsuitable for marriage and she breaks it off. Insulted, he lets it be known that he jilted her. She and her mother take a tour of the continent to escape and forget.
On the continent she meets upright, well to do George Western whose fiancee schemed behind his back with the same Sir Francis. He too is touring to escape and forget and gradually is attracted to Cecilia. He tells her his whole story but hers is so similar that it seems awkward for her to tell him hers. So she waits. Gradually their relationship deepens and then they marry. But there is always something that makes it a bad time to tell him of her earlier engagement. Sir Francis sees his opportunity for revenge. Having discovered that Western is still "in the dark", he visits and sends a letter stating that he and Cecilia had been engaged and insinuating that there is still a relationship between them. Mortified, Western leaves her at once, insists on a permanent separation, offers her any money she wants, and flees the country.
Everyone tries to bring them together while Cecilia's erstwhile friend Miss Altafiorla schemes with and against Sir Francis. But western is pig-headed. Finally, after heroic efforts by his sister Lady Grant, he returns to his wife. She takes him back with all possible grace and will hear no word against him.
Trollope writes with precise insights into each of his characters, including minor ones who are made surprisingly believable. He also writes with great precision about the social mores of his time and the roles of men and women in marriage. The insights are all purely Victorian and maybe more interesting today because of that. More clinical than sympathetic, he gives us quite a lot.
The book originally appeared in eight installments in Good Words in 1882. I read it for our book group.
| Author | Kamen, Henry |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 191 |
| Extras | 168 illustrations, 4 maps, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | June 1998 |
Written in the last years of Franco's regime this superficial but broad history surveys the entire written history from the time of the Greek and later Carthaginian and Roman colonies through the Roman Empire, Gothic kingdoms, Arab conquest, Christian re-conquest, the great empire of Charles V and his successors, industrialization, class war, civil war, and life under the modern fascists.
Spain appears to be a country of terrible class divisions and conflicts with a thousand year rule of a powerful elite of noble landowners and clergy and an exploited and oppressed mass of peasants and workers. The virulence of the modern reactionaries whose roots are in the early 19th century, if not long before, is frightening. 600,000 died in the Civil War and it is thought that an equal number were killed in the next year or two by the Fascist victors. yet the great mass of people do not accept the ideas of the fascists or of the church, at least in the cities. Or so the situation stood in the early 1970's according to Kamen.
The book is necessarily superficial. It is short and filled with interesting black and white illustrations which must occupy at least half of the space.
I read this in preparation for our trip to Spain in six months and as an accompaniment to my study of Spanish.
I never did become fluent in Spanish. I'm studying it again now, maybe four or five hours a week at the moment. It's not enough to become fluent but should make it possible for us to get information and answer simple questions on our trip to Mexico planned for next January.
Our trip to Spain was good in its way. See my diary for more about it.
| Author | McEwan, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday, 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 270 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1998 |
In 1955 young Leonard Marnham, an English electronics technician, is hired by his government to work on a joint Anglo American spy venture to dig a tunnel under the West/East Berlin dividing line and tap Russian phone lines. He sets to work. Then he meets the beautiful Maria Eckdorf and falls in love. It is his first love but for her, five years older and already divorced from an abusive ex-Wehrmacht drunkard and bully, it is a fresh start with a sweet innocent man.
We are expecting a spy story. we are expecting her to be a spy and him to be dragged into a web of intrigue. But it plays out differently. Her ex appears one night, found sleeping in their closet. He wakes up and assaults them. There is a murderous fight. Leonard is injured and would be destroyed but Maria hits the bum with a heavy iron object and kills him. They are in trouble. They cut up the body and, in series of nearly impossible to read scenes, Leonard hauls the carcass around in two suitcases, eventually depositing them in the tunnel. He tries to betray the tunnel to the Russians however it turns out that they knew about it from the beginning. Emotionally scarred, Leonard returns to England and learns 30 years later that Maria married an American on the project.
The writing is very effective but unbearably difficult to read. Leonard is too innocent, in too much trouble. It is very hard to take. This book seems like the work of a brilliant but tortured mind.
Looking on Amazon I see that this book was republished by Anchor (sounds like a Doubleday brand) in 1998. As of this writing it has garnered 72 reviews, mostly very positive.
| Author | Pohl, Frederick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 1998 |
At some time in the not too distant future, perhaps 50+ years from now, National Bureau of Investigation agent Dan Danneman is assigned to work undercover, spying on his cousin Pat who runs a space research institute. Pat is planning a trip to the institute's defunct space station, Starlab, where she hopes to find alien technology from recent visitors and get rich from it.
Soon Dan, Pat, a Chinese astronaut and woman chaser, a corrupt Latin American general, and a 90 year old woman astronomer from the Ukraine are off to Starlab. There they are kidnapped by aliens and sent to another world. They escape in the midst of an intergalactic war between the Horch and the Beloved Leaders.
It's all a space opera farce, done with a very heavy hand and only a slim conception of where the story wants to go. P makes it work in a marginal fashion by throwing in lots of action and far out technology. But the characters are all flat and uninteresting with the only exception being the old lady. The absurd, foolish, self-interested pursuits of the characters in the face of man's greatest challenge says much more about Pohl's limitations than about those of Humanity in general.
I am hard up for good tapes to listen to in the car.
I had read one other book by Pohl before this but none since. Each time I found one in my hands at the library I thought, Nah, and put it back on the shelf. Frederick Pohl was a man I could admire. He joined the Young Communist League in 1936 (aged 17) to fight for unions and against racism, leaving it in 1939 when the Nazi-Soviet non-aggreesion pact was signed. He remained interested in progressive politics. He lived to age 93, slowing down a lot but still turning out more material almost right to the end. But his work just didn't appeal to me.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 1998 |
Not quite 18 year old Benedict Juliard is fired from his job as a steeplechase rider and goes to work in his wealthy father's campaign to become a member of Parliament. Ben makes the rounds of speeches and handshakings and door to door canvassing and twice saves his father's life - once covering him from a sniper and once waking him when their building was on fire. Ben specializes in simple honesty and friendliness to all - in the manner of all of F's straight up and straightforward heroes. After the campaign he goes to college, graduates in math, and takes a job as an insurance investigator, working for the company that insures horses.
As Ben's father rises in the party his old enemies re-surface and threaten him again. Ben figures it all out and saves his father's life again - getting seriously wounded in the process.
F's characters are always likable. They're open and straight. The work for their livings. They go more than halfway to meet another person but stand up to bulling and unfairness. Simple as these virtues are, they never fail to attract me.
Francis also always gives us inside info on some business or career. Here, along with F's enduring love of horses, he also gives us his view of politics. It looks Tory to me, but still honest and decent, as you'd expect from Francis. There are some possible digs at the manifest farces in American politics, a tour of 10 Downing Street, and a bit of campaign tradecraft.
| Author | Knowles, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 204 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1998 |
Gene Forrester rooms at the exclusive Devon School in New England with Phineas, the school's greatest athlete and free spirit. Finny is a poor student but he has an extraordinary material grace which is more than physical. He can get away with things that others would never even contemplate. He ignores school rules, he ignores fashion, he speaks to teachers with a disarming frankness and equality that no one dares imitate.
In the summer of their junior/senior year in 1942, with the war looming as their destiny, Gene follows Finny's lead in all things, but also is plagued by jealousy of his friend. The jealousy builds until one day in a tree over the river, while preparing for a dangerous leap, Gene, in a moment of ununderstood impulse, jiggles the branch and his friend falls, shattering his leg and ending his athletic career.
Consumed with guilt and fear, Gene goes back to school in the fall and remains Finny's roommate. Finny does not believe Gene's confession but another boy persecutes Gene and brings out the truth.
In the end, Finny, leaving the climactic meeting in disgust, trips down the stairs, re-breaks his leg, and dies of a rare complication of the surgery to set it.
It is frustrating to watch Gene go wrong and dig a deeper and deeper hole for himself. It is thus an unpleasant book. There's lots of good writing and much appreciation of the lives of bright schoolboys in this artificial life, but there is little to relish in their characters or actions except for those of the doomed Phineas.
I'm somewhat surprised at how popular this book is. It is very well written, but it's a real downer. That second characteristic is not usually a recipe for popularity.
Reviews on Amazon indicate that the book was written for young people, presumably male, who would relate to the problems that Gene faces - especially his guilt. I can see that, though I don't know what message it has for these young men, or if it intends to provide a message, or only a view of the horrible outcomes that can happen in real life.
| Author | Barker, Pat |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War I |
| When Read | July 1998 |
Lieutenant Billy Prior is treated for shell shock in England in 1918 by Dr. William Rivers, psychologist and anthropologist who had lived among the head hunters of Melanesia and has been deeply influenced by the experience. Rivers also treats many others, one a man with hysterical paralysis of the legs and another who sees the ghost of a German prisoner he murdered every day.
Prior is a complex man, a middle class man engaged to a working class girl. He is also bisexual and has been a male prostitute and a nanny boy for his teacher/priest. He goes back to France quite willingly and is killed in the last days of the war leading an assault ordered by the brass which has zero chance of success and is simply the mass suicide/murder of the regiment.
Rivers' story alternates between Melanesia and England. He is the always probing, always questioning, always groping observer of a society that is totally alien form his own. He is after the core, the spiritual heart of the headhunters and the dazed soldiers. He is a man of deep compassion and deep understanding who is at once a savior of men and an agent of the colonial forces in the Pacific and the military in England. His work is deeply conflicted, humanitarian and anti-human at the same time.
This is a highly intelligent book. It is difficult and confusing. Its characters are contradictory and unconventional - weak and strong, cynical and patriotic - all at the same time. But it's a book full of humanity and genuine human spirit.
It is thought that 16 million people died and 20 million were wounded in World War I. I suspect that most of those who died would have been unable to give a coherent account of the meaning of their death, or of why they might, at some time, have willingly participated in it - although many did not.
Barker didn't try to say why anyone should or should not fight in the war. She left that question for the reader to ask and answer for himself, but the question remains at the center of the book.
This was book 3 in the Generation Trilogy. I read book 1 after this and, as of this date, have not read book 2.
I spoke of the "mass suicide/murder of the regiment" as a result of an order to attack that had zero chance of success. This is a feature of almost all wars, exemplified with the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, but it was a special feature of World War I and especially of the British Army in World War I. Basil Liddell Hart, in his History of the First World War (q.v.) considers that Sir Douglas Haig was essentially a mass murderer of British soldiers. See the second paragraph of my abstract for that book.
| Author | Markandaya, Kamala |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Signet Books, Penguin |
| Copyright Date | 1954 |
| Number of Pages | 190 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1998 |
Rukmani, the fourth daughter of a village headman fallen on hard times, is married to tenant farmer Nathan while still a child by western standards. She leaves her family to go live with him in a simple hut he built himself. There the two of them spend thirty years together raising children and facing one calamity after another. Their daughter is married, using every penny they have for dowry and feast, but five years later is brought back because she is barren. Two sons go to work in the local tannery but are forced to leave for Ceylon when the strike they led is crushed. Another is killed for stealing by the tannery thugs. There is too much rain one year and drought another year that results in their youngest child dying of starvation and their daughter prostituting for food for the family. Still they must sell everything of value just to pay the rent. Then they are driven off the land anyway when the tannery buys it from their landlord (whom they've never seen.) They go to a son in a city 100 miles away only to find that he's abandoned his wife and child and disappeared. Nathan and Rukmani are robbed and reduced to breaking stones in a quarry for a living, where Nathan dies. R takes a local boy they have adopted and returns to her village to live with her daughter and youngest living son.
This is a beautiful novel of endurance, love and acceptance amidst a life of poverty and suffering. The man and wife accept all of the bad things that happen to them without ever turning on each other or on their children. They never cease to make plans. They never give up the struggle.
The politics are understated but always present. Their suffering is due to oppression as well as hard luck. Their situation is institutionalized.
A fine book that Tolstoy would have loved. Simple but deep.
As often happens, I picked up this book card without recalling the events of the book. Then I read the card and typed its contents and some of it came back to me. In this case, it was more the feeling, the theme, the loss, than the specific events of the story.
I think the author of this book should be thought of as a kind of hero of the poor and downtrodden. She has made visible the lives led by hundreds of millions of people who have nothing, are exploited, and live continually at the edge of physical catastrophe.
| Author | Sagan, Carl |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | August 1998 |
The famous astronomer wrote a novel about success in the search for extra-terrestrial life. Eleanor Arroway, director of a radiotelescope in the U.S., detects an apparently purposive signal from the Vega star system. Soon telescopes all over the world are focused on the source. In a decode of the signal they find one of the first TV broadcasts - Hitler at the 1936 Olympics. In a deeper decode in a series of derivatives of the signal they find instructions for building a machine. There is a world-wide effort to construct the machine and also world-wide opposition based on religious superstitions and/or on fear that the machine is a device for destroying or dominating the planet. Eventually however five scientists, including Arroway, climb in and turn on the machine.
The five are transported through a system of worm holes to a huge space station at the center of the Galaxy. There each of the five is appeared to by a best loved dead relative who explains to them that intelligent life permeates the universe but is still baffled by the worm holes and by some mathematical surprises left by an earlier and now unknown civilization. They are told that Earth civilization will not be interfered with. They are returned to Earth, to the same time when they left, so that many on Earth do not believe that they ever left. The wormholes are closed.
Obviously, Sagan has no way to guess what extraterrestrial life might be like. What he's doing here is showing us some possibilities - ideas for how to think about these issues and how to pursue contact if and when it comes. He also examines all of the anti-scientific world views of established religions and addresses them rather fearlessly.
Sagan has a perceptive and highly educated mind. He has put great intelligence and scientific method into thinking about issues for which the empirical evidence is slender but interesting. The novel is so-so. The ideas are excellent.
Sagan was a fine thinker. One of the things I particularly admired about him, as indicated in my last comment paragraph, was his ability to find intelligent things to think and say about phenomena for which most people would throw up their hands and say, "We can't say anything about that." I consider myself to be doing something similar when I try to understand the nature of explanation and to look for first principles in things.
The ideas in this book are really quite wild. They are in line with something I read in another of his books wherein he said that the average person who describes abduction by aliens has an image of the aliens that is far less alien than a cockatoo. Sagan could recognize a cockatoo when he saw one, and he understood that if some alien civilization contacted us they would be different from what we expect in ways that are way beyond our common imagination.
| Author | Grisham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 560 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 1998 |
A young man of dubious identity makes every effort and finally succeeds in getting himself selected as a juror in a tobacco trial in Mississippi. a coalition of well heeled product liability lawyers have gotten together to make an all out assault on the tobacco companies, suing for millions in the case of a widow of a man who died of lung cancer. The young man soon begins to manipulate the jury while his girlfriend Marley manipulates Fitch, the sleazy mastermind of bribery, con games, fraud, theft, and every other conceivable form of jury tampering.
They con Fitch into giving them 10 million dollars for a pro-tobacco verdict while moving the jury the other way into a 400 million dollar anti-tobacco verdict. With the 10 million, Marley sells tobacco stocks short and makes 8 million more. She then returns the 10. her motives were pure all along. She did it because both her parents died of lung cancer.
As always, Grisham gives us an inside view of the legal system and of big time, big bucks, litigation. We can't help believing that a lot of it is true. I bet the tobacco companies did tamper with juries and I bet they did use exotic and astonishing techniques like buying the company a juror works for, bribing a boyfriend of one, faking an FBI probe into the husband of one, and so on. Then there are the hidden cameras in the courtroom, the private eyes, the jury consultants who are half psychologist and half con men, conning their employers, and the lawyers, judges, guards, reporters, clerks, stock analysts, etc., each with a different point of view, ambition, and even dress style.
There are problems with G's techniques (see my diary) but also strong points.
I just searched but couldn't find any diary entries about this book. I wonder if I intended to write one and didn't, or if I somehow lost a file.
| Author | Churchill, Winston S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 774 |
| Extras | maps, photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 1998 |
1941 sees a gradually widening war as the Germans take the offensive in the Balkans and in Africa. The blitz continues to pound English cities at night and British attempts to save Greece and Yugoslavia fail with punishing losses in Greece and Crete as small Commonwealth armies fight at the end of a very long supply route around South Africa against powerful mechanized forces led by very able and aggressive German generals.
But the German and Japanese governments, driven by the internal logic of insane racism and megalomania, overreach themselves, first in Russia and then at Pearl Harbor. C remember his first night after Pearl Harbor, "I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful." (p. 512) Always determined, C now became confident that the enemy would eventually be crushed by the immense industrial and human potential of the U.S.A.
Throughout the conflict, C appears to have worked tirelessly as a goad against inertia and inaction and a critic of incompetence and small mindedness. He rails constantly against armies in which most of the men are in non-combat, non-productive tasks and far too much equipment is waiting for parts or repairs. He is always firing off memos like "Why is the 9th division sitting...", "Send me a report tomorrow on what is being done to improve serviceability in ...", "Let me know who is responsible for the ships ..."
Always he is driven to strike a blow. Always he sacrifices one demand after another to build up his army in Egypt, but he cannot prod it into action and when it finally moves it is outsmarted and outmaneuvered by Rommel.
Max Hastings (in Inferno) comments repeatedly on the low quality of British and American generalship but he has very high marks for Churchill's leadership, seeing him not only as an active and energetic leader, but as a genuine believer in the principles that Hitler tramples in the dust, and a man who understands that everyone must work together to defeat the Nazis. He goads and prods his generals and replaces them when he thinks it is necessary but, unlike Hitler, he listens to their advice and he understands that they know many things that he does not.
I read books in part as a way to have a conversation, as it were, with great thinkers of the past. Churchill was one of the great men. He had his flaws but he rose to the occasion and served his people and the people of the entire world well.
Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist and writer, wrote a piece in La Repubblica on 9/12/2013, a left leaning Italian paper. He said, "It's hard to keep facing down Middle East Hitlers when there is no Churchill on the other side."
| Author | Tey, Josephine |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: MacMillan Co., 1959 |
| Copyright Date | 1951 |
| Number of Pages | 204 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 1998 |
Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is laid up in hospital with an injured leg, bored to death and uninspired by the mystery and other novels brought him by his friends. He asks his actress friend to bring him some interesting portraits so that he can indulge his hobby of reading faces. The face that grabs and intrigues him is a photo of a portrait of King Richard II, known in English history as an evil hunchback who murdered his two nephews, the legitimate heirs to the throne.
He begins to research the old crime, not as an historian relying on chronicles, but as a policeman relying on odd bits of circumstantial evidence. What happened to Rev. John Morton, main author of the story attributed to Thomas More after Henry VII killed Richard in 1485? Why and when did all the witnesses and other heirs disappear? Why didn't Henry accuse Richard of this most heinous crime in his bill of attainder against R immediately after seizing power? And on and on.
As a novel the book is competently written but unexceptional. All the characters are as thin as can be including Richard and Henry. The "plot", such as it is, is pretty well complete in the first third of the book and the rest is just mopping up details.
The real question is, Is it true? Did Henry and not Richard do away with the boys?
I can't find the answer either in the Britannica or the World Wide Web, both of which ignore Tey in accounts of Richard III.
Very frustrating.
There is now much more on the net describing the evidence for an and against Tey's assertions, which appear to be based on a book published in 1906 on the topic. It appears that there is no consensus for Tey's view, but no hard consensus against it either.
| Author | Faulkner, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1932 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Racism |
| When Read | August 1998 |
Deeply scarred characters, people who are produced by and profoundly embedded in the tragic history and culture of the deep South, work out their fated destinies of tragedy or despair or hope. The main character is Joe Christmas, a man born out of wedlock to a young white woman and a man who may have had some black blood in him and who was murdered by Joe's crazy grandfather. He grows up first in an orphanage and then in the home of a hard, upright, but religion crazed farmer in Mississippi. He lives by manual labor and by bootlegging and revenges himself on women by seducing them and then revealing that he is really "a nigger", though he hates blacks even more than whites and is completely isolated from both. He begins to sleep with Joanne Burden, an older woman of Northern ancestry and tragic history in the South, who has plans for saving Joe and then later for killing him and herself. But Joe kills her and runs. He is betrayed by his weak partner Lucas Burch / Joe Brown who, when accused by the Sheriff, saves himself with his hole trump, "That's right, accuse the white man and let the nigger go free." Burch is on the run from pregnant Lena Grove, a completely innocent young woman who drifts through life without a care, trusting to luck and kindness to keep her. She in turn is pursued by the man Byron Bunch, a caretaker of sorts whose friend is Gail Hightower, a failed minister obsessed with the Civil War, whose grandfather was shot on a raid on a Southern chicken coop.
This is one of the great novels of all time. I read it 31 years ago and was impressed then as now. F understands his people and place and time in a way that no outsider and perhaps no other insider could. There is a depth and gravity here that touch and impress and hold us.
It is possible to live an intellectual life that is quite isolated from the experience described in Light in August. I have my house, my wife, my computer, and my books. I travel the world with Marcia and see the mountains and forests and seas and plants and animals and cities and people of different lands. But deep, dark and powerful human stories are working themselves out, possibly just hundreds of yards from where I now sit, stories about people who are not like me and who come from backgrounds and families and cultures that are not at all like my own.
Faulkner was a man who could peer into many different lives and understand them at levels beyond my own superficial perception. Most importantly, he could interpret those lives and explain them to others. At one time I considered him America's greatest writer. He died in 1962, just before I became acquainted with his work in college. I considered him a contemporary. Now he is one of our classics.
| Author | Higgins, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 328 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | September 1998 |
An American WWI flying ace, flying for the British Royal Flying Corps, meets and marries a beautiful young German baroness and takes her back to his rich home in the U.S. The man makes no career. He cares for nothing except fast cars and airplanes, not even his wife. he dies in a crash having two twin boys who also care for nothing but flying. With money from their grandfather the mother takes one boy back to Germany where he soon joins the Luftwaffe and becomes one of its greatest aces. The other signs up with the RAF, also becoming a great ace.
When the RAF pilot is shot down in France, Himmler cooks up a plot to send the other back to England posing as his twin in a fake escape. There he is to kill Eisenhower.
It all comes out in the end. The German brother will not commit murder and instead works with the English to rescue his brother, dying in the process.
The story is told as an account by the modern Higgins in his own voice as a secret story he uncovered through a teddy bear named Tarquin that belonged to the family
I can't speak very highly of the book. The writing is pedestrian and a little wooden. The characters are flat and unbelievable stereotypes. The plot is incredible. The techniques used to evoke sympathy for the characters are purely mechanical. Even the flying was disappointing.
I have to like this kind of story subject a lot to enjoy these inadequate books.
Looking through my book cards I see that I have read a number of Higgins' books, all because I am interested in World War II. I didn't really like any of them much. One day I may be in the library and see another Higgins World War II story. I might read the blurb on the dust jacket and forget that I've been disappointed by every one I've read. If I read it, I'll probably regret the waste of time.
| Author | Cellini, Benvenuto |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audiobooks, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1566 |
| Number of Pages | 465 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Renaissance |
| When Read | September 1998 |
Cellini was a goldsmith, sculptor, and anything else he set his mind to become, from Florence, living from 1500-1571. He appears to have begun his memoir at age 58 and concluded abruptly (or perhaps the end is lost?) at age 66.
A man of immense talents - physical, intellectual, artistic, he was also given to intense emotion and hot temper. He killed at least two men, at least one of whom he only meant to humble, in fits of anger and passion. He killed many more as an artillerist defending the palace of the Pope at the siege of Rome. His account of his life and times reminds me most of the Hollywood view of the Wild West. Dukes, princes, archbishops, popes and kings behaved however they pleased. Men carried swords and knives and occasionally fought on the street over stupid taunts and insults. C abused 15 year old girls and beat women and servants who displeased him. And yet the man was a genius at his many arts who easily learned from, mastered, and improved upon every example and technique that he saw. He was apparently a great musician, a crack shot, and a bit of a poet.
The Autobiography was not published until 1740 and only became a big hit in the Romantic age when C's superhuman exploits and defiance of convention were most admired. In fact C is the only one of his contemporaries for whom we have such a detailed biography. We know him best of the "Renaissance men".
This book made a striking impression on me. It opened with a scene of the three year old Benvenuto grabbing a scorpion by its tail and bringing it to his grandfather. His grandfather, outwardly calm, maneuvered the boy into a position from which he could get the scorpion away without either of them being stung.
His father was a professional musician and urged the same career on his son. C was apparently a professional caliber flute player. But Benvenuto rejected music as a career, not because he didn't like playing but because he saw that musicians were poor men but jewelers and goldsmiths were wealthy. He wanted to be wealthy.
During his lifetime many new discoveries were made of Greek and Roman antiquities, sculptures and artifacts of all sorts. C often went to see them and draw inspiration from them. He marveled at how good they were but was perfectly confident that he could do better.
As I recall, hardly anything remains of the many works he created. It would be wonderful to see the jewelry and sculpture that he created and described in the book, but it's gone.
I thought sometimes of my father while reading the book. Like Cellini, Dad was a multi-talented man who could do anything with his hands and his mind. He also had great self-confidence and great physical as well as intellectual strength. He also thought very highly of himself and loved to boast. But there were also many ways in which they were different. My father would never hit a woman and never be unfair or unkind to those beneath him. He was quick to resent an insult and always ready and able to fight, but he never got carried away by anger and never hurt anyone who had not first tried to hurt him.
I have a copy of Cellini's book in my basement. It's part of the 50 volume Harvard Classics series that I inherited from Joe Epstein. I don't know if he ever read any of those books. I imagine he did read some of them. I have also read some, but I don't think I read them from those particular physical volumes.
| Author | Mortimer, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 160 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy; Mystery |
| Keywords | Rumpole |
| When Read | September 1998 |
The redoubtable Horace Rumpole had retired to South Florida with She Who Is To Be Obeyed and was living at the home of his son Nick when he received a letter from Phillida Trant ("the Portia of our Chambers") concerning bloodstains used as evidence in a murder. Feeling bored and hemmed in he sneaks off and catches a budget flight back to London, escaping his boredom and his wife Hilda and living a blissful bachelor existence in his old apartment.
No one is happy to see him. Two new lawyers occupy his old office. There is no room. There are no briefs for him. But he cheerfully ignores all that and manages to get hold of an obscenity case which his young office mate/competitor can't attend to. R takes the high road, making a brilliant speech about freedom and British liberty and then watches the jury send his client to jail for 18 months.
Depressed but not beaten, he is invited by his young competitor Ken to take the lead in the murder case with the bloodstains. The case looks hopeless, the client is resigned to being convicted, and Ken only invite him in to force R back into retirement after another heavy defeat. As a final indignity, Judge ("Mad Bull") Bullingham is presiding.
In the course of time R finds an odd clue relating to a corrupt religious cult he bumped into in Florida and unravels the case, proving his client innocent and sending Ken into depression.
The usual sub plots and side shows abound with Phillida pursuing Ken, Guthrie Featherstone QCMP pursuing Phillida, and Featherstone's wife coming to R to ask him to represent her in a divorce. All good fun.
Listening to these tapes I often broke into big grins. Delightful fare, as always, with Mortimer's Rumpole.
Mortimer is one of those writers who has constructed a limited little world for us within which we can delight in the foibles of a set of familiar characters with an endearing host to guide us. He has enriched the lives of his readers and the viewers of the TV series based on these books.
As I get older I develop additional sympathies with older characters in the fiction that I read. Rumpole appeals to me as an older man, a man whom anyone can treat as a has been if they wish, but he will continue to behave as he has always been, uninterested and unimpressed by the condescension of others. I also find his devotion to Hilda appealing, and his prediliction for Pomeroy's Plonk at the local wine bar which he visits when his blood alcohol level gets dangerously low. And when he quotes Wordsworth, well, I know he's a man after my own heart.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | October 1998 |
British spymaster Tim Crammer is forcibly retired after the end of the cold war. Using inherited wealth he becomes a gentleman farmer, wine grower, country squire, settling down with his beautiful young mistress Emma. but Emma falls in love with Larry, Tim's former double agent, also forcibly retired to an obscure professorship. Larry is dashing, romantic, handsome, careless of money and convention, and committed to various radical causes. Tim half kills Larry for stealing Emma and then Larry and Emma both disappear.
Police and British secret services both discover that Larry stole 36 million pounds in cahoots with his Ingush/Russian spymaster. They assume Tim was in on it and they question him, follow him, harass him, and threaten him. Frantic to find and save Emma, Tim uses all his tradecraft to discover that Larry has stolen the money to give to Ingush separatists in a fit of absurd romanticism - and he has involved himself and Emma in a gun running venture with killer Ossetian gangs after them. Desperate, Tim steals out of England and into Fance to find Emma, who is closed to him, and then Russia and Ingushetia to find Larry. But Larry is dead and Tim, at the end, has taken his role with the Ingush, with all of the danger and none of the romantic commitment or illusions.
This is a very dark book from a great writer. L contrasts the silly but relatively safe game of British intelligence with the totally absurd but deadly serious ethnic/religious politics of post Soviet central Asia where death and suffering are foregone conclusions. Disturbing and full of anguish, the book was, even so, completely engrossing. There is no one like Le Carre.
I see from the Wikipedia that Ingushetia (which I misspelled on the book card), is the tiniest of the old Soviet republics with a population of 412,529 people as of the 2010 census. Here is a paragraph about it.
"Ingushetia is one of Russia's poorest and most restive regions. The ongoing military conflict in neighboring Chechnya has occasionally spilled into Ingushetia, and the republic has been destabilized by corruption, a number of high-profile crimes (including kidnapping and murder of civilians by government security forces), anti-government protests, attacks on soldiers and officers, Russian military excesses and a deteriorating human rights situation."
Le Carre has an unerring eye for the tragically absurd in human affairs.
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1990 |
|---|---|
| Number of Pages | 128 |
| Extras | Commentary by George Guidall |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1998 |
A selection of Norse sagas composed from the 11th - 13th centuries in Iceland and possibly Greenland tell the stories of Norse settlement, first in Iceland then Greenland, and of their voyages to North America, possibly to Baffin Island and Labrador.
These stories were written by Christians but sometimes just recently converted, telling of the pagan times beginning around 860-870 with the settlement of Iceland which was completed in 930. Conversion to Christianity nominally took place in 995. The earlier sagas are very simple becoming richer and more dramatic in the last one.
The Vikings seemed to combine piratical and frontier spirits. They pushed west to find free land and to escape the laws of the Norwegian kings who did not subjugate Iceland and Greenland until the 13th century. They hung onto barren coasts, hunting, fishing, farming, grazing animals, and quarreling among themselves and sometimes "raiding" and "harrying" in Ireland. They kept slaves, they murdered each other and North American Indians, but they also founded the first parliament since ancient times which served as a model for the British Parliament.
At its peak, 3,000 Vikings lived in Greenland, the last miserable remainder driven out by poverty, sickness, and Eskimo attacks sometime around the time of Columbus.
I'm sorry that I didn't write down any of the stories from these sagas. Now, fifteen years later, I don't remember them. That was a failing of the 3x5 inch index card recording system.
Marcia and I visited Iceland on a trans-Atlantic cruise in September of 2015. It was a relatively bleak and barren place where one could easily imagine primitive Norse settlers fishing and raising sheep for their livings. We saw the place where a great meeting was held to establish the first parliament and have photos of it and other places.
| Author | Tsukiyama, Gail |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 211 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1998 |
T, an American writer of half Chinese half Japanese heritage, sets her story in the seaside village of Taruma in Japan in 1938. Young Chinese student Stephen, from a wealthy Hong Kong family, has come to his family's summer home in Taruma to recover from tuberculosis. His father, a Chinese businessman, is living in Kobe with his secret mistress of many years.
In Taruma Steven lives with the family's servant, caretaker, gardener Matsu, a taciturn, strung, kind, quiet man who tends house and garden. Gradually Stephen is admitted into Matsu's world and meets Sachi, a leper in the colony of Yamaguchi in the mountains, a place where lepers live, built in part by Matsu who helps them out and is Sachi's friend and lover. Stephen learns the whole story. Matsu's sister committed suicide after discovering her leprosy. Sachi also tried to commit suicide but couldn't. Matsu saved her and took her to Yamaguchi. From being the beautiful fiancee of Kengo, Sachi became the leper and lover of the humble but worthy Matsu.
There is also a story of Stephen's unsuccessful pursuit of Keiko, and there is the constant background of Japanese aggression in China, pressing ever closer to Hong Kong. But the real story is the deep and abiding love of Matsu and Sachi and of Stephen's acceptance into their private circle of love.
This is a very subtle book, full of the quiet beauty and patience which were among the strengths of Japanese society in the midst of its excesses and failures.
| Author | Krakauer, Jon |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 332 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | October 1998 |
Krakauer wangled an assignment for Outside magazine to climb Mt. Everest under the care of Rob Hall's Adventure Consultants organization. The deal involved a small cash payment plus a large block of free advertising for Hall. K joined a very well organized expedition with excellent guides, a full set of equipment, top Sherpa guides, their own doctor, radios, etc. Yet in spite of all, a half dozen people, including Hall and another superb guide, died when they were caught in a blinding, freezing storm high up the mountain. Several others suffered severe freezing injuries causing permanent disability
Hall and some other guides were heroes, sacrificing their own lives in attempts to save others. Some others, including the leader of a South African expedition and a pair of Japanese climbers were villains, watching others die and doing nothing to save them. Some played both parts - ignoring important rules for their own personal aims, then risking their lives to save others. K himself may, or may not, have been able to help. Exhausted to the point of collapse, he saved himself. My sense is that had he attempted to save others he would have died without saving anyone. But he will never know and lives a deeply troubled life after this experience.
Why people would climb Everest after seeing how dangerous and difficult and punishing it is, I cannot imagine. But I'm sure that some, after reading this book, will be even more determined to try.
K is an excellent reporter. It is all here in the book - cold, hypoxia, exhaustion, danger, people closely observed. From Sherpas to socialites, K works past his own limitations and prejudices to see all of them as individuals.
An important book of its kind.
If I remember correctly, a televised movie was made from this book. Some of the things I remember may be from the movie or may be from the book, though I think I remember which is which.
The book reported that a group of people reached a small plateau but could go no further. They stopped, sat down, fell asleep and froze, except for one man who awoke alive and continued the journey. In the movie this was dramatically played as a man suddenly sits upright from beneath a heap of snow.
The book contained a number of stories of other hikers, not necessarily on the same expedition as Krakauer, but on the mountain at or near the same time. One was a woman who really had no chance to hike on her own to the top but she had a Sherpa ahead of her pulling her on a rope and maybe one behind pushing her. It was a truly crazy aspiration by so many of the climbers, many of whom just assumed that if there were commercial outfits and guides conducting people to the top, it had to be safe and possible for anyone - even though the guides told them otherwise and rejected some people who could pay but could not possibly make it.
My own adventure that came closest to this was our hike along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. I was against it but Marcia really wanted to go. Rereading my diary entry for that (June 16, 2009) is a good caution to myself against any "adventures" of this sort.
| Author | Nabokov, Vladimir |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Nabokov, Dmitri; Nabokov, Vladimir |
| Publication | New York: Phaedra Publishers, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1930 |
| Number of Pages | 114 |
| Extras | Introduction by the author |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1998 |
A young Russian emigre in Berlin in 1924 is working as a tutor and dallying with a married woman when her husband finds out and beats him to a pulp. Humiliated, he shoots himself but survives the attempted suicide. From then on he leads an otherworldly existence as an observer, a spy, an eye, on a man named Smurov who falls in love with a Russian girl, tells her absurd lies, works in a bookstore, and is disappointed in his love - never actually having had the slightest chance.
In the end we learn that the young man, the first person narrator, is actually Smurov himself, seeing himself from the outside as if he were a stranger to himself, only to be understood by spying on Smurov's friends to find out who he was by divining how they saw him.
Nabokov is a man of extraordinary ideas and extraordinary observations - which he expresses in beautiful, clear, elegant language. He also has a fine sense of the ridiculous. His characters are always charming and ridiculous at the same time. And they are troubled by this - needing to take themselves seriously but at the same time being mortified by how ridiculous they appear in the eyes of others. It is a central contradiction driving this story forward, as it did in Pnin.
I must read more. See also my diary (November 1, 1998.)
As of this writing I have read five books by Nabokov, of which this was the third. All five were read between 1996 and 1999. I have one or two more in my basement library including, I think, Pale Fire which I intended to read but never got to. I have read Lolita, his most famous book and Pnin the one of the five that I liked the best.
| Author | McCutcheon, Philip |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 186 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | October 1998 |
Captain Kemp of eastern passenger liner trade has been made Commodore of a convoy from Britain to Canada and back in 1940, in charge of all the merchant vessels from his old liner, now a troopship. They are attacked by aircraft on the way out and U-boats on the trip back. There are many losses and the troopship itself is torpedoed but limps back to Britain with its Canadian regiment intact.
This is not so much a novel as a collection of separate small character studies of the Commodore, an experienced, broad minded but committed man; his assistant, a pompous twit whose main personal problem is loneliness; an alcoholic purser; a philandering subaltern, a nurse caught between them; and a couple of others. None has a dominating role in the story. None undergo any major changes. They are what they are.
If there is a larger story here it is the story of the convoy as a whole. The people are competent or not, broad-minded or not, sober or not. The good ones make it work. They fight the sea and the weather and the Germans. They compensate for the foolishness of the fools. Ultimately, by their small scale and local struggles, they are winning the war.
I liked this book. It's technical. It's authentic. It believes in itself. Although McCutcheon has written his share and more of pot boilers, and though he has not put a great effort into this book, he did live the story himself and it shows.
| Author | Austen, Jane |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1982 |
| Copyright Date | 1818 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1998 |
Unlike most of her heroines Catherine Morland grows up as an intellectually empty girl whose favorite outdoor activity is rolling down hills and who never made very much of music, art or literature. At 17 her favorite pastime is reading the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe. She goes to Bath for the summer with wealthy friends of her not wealthy family and there meets a boorish family of social climbers and the high class family of widowed General Tilney, falling in love with his younger son Henry and befriending daughter Eleanor. They invite her to their ancient home, Northanger Abbey, a place of old rooms and seemingly hidden chambers and chests, just like the castles of Radcliffe's novels. Her childish imagination leads her to dream up a foolish story of the general which consumes about 1/4 of the book but which is all silliness. Still, despite her vacuity and immaturity, Catherine has the fine heart of all of A's young women and she captures the heart and hand of Henry, despite his being her intellectual superior and despite the cruel opposition of the general who condemns her for not being rich - though she turns out to have a respectable patrimony/dowry in the end.
There's a lot here about the Gothic novel and the reading habits of her class. Austen, while poking fun at Radcliffe, seems sympathetic to her fellow writer. She seems not to be a person to condemn popular literature, a field which is also her own.
As always, A is an acute observer of manners and class. One can't help but enjoy her depiction of the concerts and balls and places like the Octagon Room, frequented by the leisured pleasure seekers of Bath. On the other hand the love affair is a bit less convincing than usual and the obligatory statements of the exact finances of her lovebirds always strike a sour note with me.
It was only after reading this that I read a real Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, the very first of the genre and the one that started what became a literary phenomenon.
The history of this book is very odd. It was completed and sold to a publisher for 10 pounds in 1803, but he never printed the book. Henry Austen, Jane's brother, bought it back for the same 10 pounds in 1817, the publisher not realizing that it had been written by the now very popular author. He then published it shortly after Jane's death in the next year, along with Mansfield Park.
| Author | Churchill, Winston S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin |
| Copyright Date | 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 1000 |
| Extras | maps, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 1998 |
Despite America's entry into the war creating the conditions for almost certain victory, 1942 opened with a series of disasters. Rommel continued to outmaneuver the Eighth Army in the desert, Hitler renewed the onslaught on Russia, the U-boats slaughtered shipping off the American coast, and the Japanese ran wild in the south Pacific, taking Malaya, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Burma and the Philippines. The losses at Singapore were particularly shocking as a superior British force was defeated by a much smaller Japanese army but with total control of the air.
Churchill's main concern was the failure to come to grips with the Germans. Throughout all of 1942-43 the combined forces of the UK and US never engaged more than 12 German divisions while the Russians fought 185! Most of the fighting in the west, according to C, was done by the British and Commonwealth forces, not U.S. However in the Pacific it was an entirely American show. And there it was very clear that the U.S. stemmed the tide of Japanese aggression, not with superior forces, but with tremendous courage and intelligent leadership at Midway and later (in Volume 5) at Guadalcanal.
Churchill remains steadfast in his strategic thinking. Europe before Asia. Italy before Germany. Best them in the air. Get in and fight. Don't commit to an invasion of France prematurely.
Naturally, Hitler always can be relied upon to stupidly throw away fine armies in absurd attempts to reinforce lost positions. I hope Hitler suffered during all of this.
I am always heavily influenced by the most recent book that I read. The details and arguments are the freshest in my mind. At the current time that would be Max Hastings' Inferno. Hastings holds that the German army was superior to the British, American and Russian armies - though for different reasons between the western and eastern forces.
In Europe, with some exceptions, the British and Americans produced relatively small infantry forces followed by huge logistical tails. The standard method of fighting was to prepare carefully, bomb and shell the Germans in unimaginable amounts, and then assault them with overwhelming amounts of armor, air, and artillery support along with infantry attacks, attacks which were otherwise not always as sophisticated in their tactics as the Germans employed.
Churchill was undoubtedly right that the Western Allies were not ready to take on Germany in the European heartland of France and Germany in 1942 or '43.
| Author | Kundera, Milan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Asher, Linda |
| Publication | New York: Harper Flamingo, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 168 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 1998 |
Chantal and Jean Marc live together in their Paris apartment, hers actually. She is an advertising executive earning five times what he makes. He was a ski instructor and is a simple fellow, a dropout who didn't study medicine and hasn't done anything serious. he sees himself as just one step away from being a homeless beggar and sees Chantal as a complex person of two sides, a cold aloof advertising executive and a warm lover of him and the world.
Chantal is feeling older and ugly. She has hot flashes. She is four years older than Jean Marc. She thinks that men no longer turn to look at her when she walks past. She is experiencing a mid-life crisis. Then she receives an unsigned note in her mailbox from an admirer who thinks she is beautiful. Her whole attitude changes. More notes arrive. She thinks they come from a man she sees on the subway. Then she thinks they are from a beggar who sits across the street. Finally she realizes they are from Jean Marc.
Now there is a new crisis. She resolves to leave. He resolves to leave. She leaves. He pursues her. She takes a train to London. All there dissolves into a dream. We don't know when the dream began or how much of this story is real. At the end she holds onto him fiercely, afraid even to blink.
The dream device is artificial and disruptive (to me anyway) but K still manages an effective story of love and doubt. It is a very French story, perhaps requiring a Czech to write it. Love is the center of existence but also the difficult proving ground of identity and always a field of self-doubt and doubt about one's lover. My own simple, straight-forward, American marriage seems completely inaccessible to these people. But it is what they long for, love without doubt, with everyone clear about who they are and how they love each other.
I cannot guess whether Kundera would find our marriage to be interesting or boring, successful or deficient. I imagine him to be a man who has had many love affairs, though that may be entirely false. I do see from an interview by Philip Roth in 1980 that he was married at that time, but I don't know how long it lasted or if he had other marriages or affairs outside of marriage. It is his abiding interest in love stories, in the insecurities explored in this novel and the casual love affairs in others like The Unbearable Lightness of Being that make me think so.
Kundera is a great writer, whether on politics, love, or other aspects of life. He should now be about 84 years old. I don't know if he still writes or what his condition is. I wish him the best, whatever that is.
| Author | Jaro, Benita Kane |
|---|---|
| Publication | Sag Harbor, New York: Permanent Press, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 323 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | November 1998 |
Marcus Caelius Rufus, an actual historical figure who lived from 82-48 BC, is the narrator of this novel written in the form of a report to someone on his life and times - really an autobiography which begins each chapter with a notice of being a final report by the Praetor Peregrinus of Rome.
Marcus is a witness to the rise to power of Julius Caesar. He first meets him when Caesar is Pontifex Maximus. Marcus is a hell raising young man about town, living beyond his means, working as a law clerk for Cicero, and looking for powerful patrons like Caesar and Pompey who can put jobs, influence and money in his way. Caesar patronizes him, just as he does hundreds of others, young and old. Marcus becomes a lawyer working on cases which Caesar wants promoted. He does odd jobs. He comes to be seen himself as a man of influence, attracting more cases and more loans to further extend his extravagant life style. Eventually he becomes a general in Caesar's army in Spain in the civil war and is made a Praetor of Rome, though not the leading Praetor. He is also sodomized by Caesar.
Disillusioned, angry, feeling ill-used and betrayed, Marcus promotes radical reforms in Rome and is driven out by Caesar's people. Holed up at Brundisium, he is finally run down and killed.
The literature here is always decent. Some small clumsiness in handling the wooden relationship of Marcus and his father, and in the "final report" writing device is compensated for by some sensitive writing in other areas, and more than compensated for in the fascinating perspective on the degeneration of the Republic and its destruction by a man of no principle and no program but with an outstanding talent for self-promotion and a boundless ambition.
There are so many tragedies in history, so many cases of millions of people harmed by the actions of a single man, so many cases of venerable institutions brought down by men who don't care a fig about anything but themselves. Julius Caesar seems to be a paradigm of such a man, but there are many others, including millions of men who have worked in minor or major positions of responsibility which meant nothing to them.
This was a story of such a man who comes to some realization of what he has done and how he has been "butt fucked" as they say today by another like himself who happened to be smarter and stronger.
See my diary, November 1, 1998.
Since reading this and writing the notes in 2013, I read Caesar, Life of a Colosus by Adrian Goldsworthy in February, 2014. It presents a very positive view of the man in a heavily documented 583 page biography. If I remember Goldsworthy's argument correctly, he believed that the Republic was already dead when Julius Caesar buried it. If Rome was already fated to fall into the hands of a tyrant then, according to Goldsworthy, Julius Caesar was the best of the men in a position to take over.
I don't know what to think about Julius Caesar. Apart from the issue of whether he was a good man or a bad one, I also don't know what to think about the issue of republican democracy vs. empire in 45 BC. Was it possible to have some form of democracy at that time in an area as large as the burgeoning Roman Empire? Was the Roman Republic a democratic government at all? What rights did Roman citizens have, before and after the fall of the Republic? What rights did the non-citizens, far outnumbering the citizens, have? What rights did slaves have? What was the most progressive path forward for the people of Rome? To what extent were answers to any of these questions within the power of any human beings to affect, and to what extent were they simply the consequences of historical materialism?
I don't say that these questions are unanswerable. I say rather that the answers can only be tentative and controversial, and any man like me who wants to know the answers has to be prepared to delve into highly complex and controversial histories, and to always reserve final judgment. It is hard enough to come to firm conclusions about the politics and sociology of current times. Historical analysis is that much harder.
| Author | Weber, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Baen (Simon and Schuster), 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 422 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | November 1998 |
Commander Honor Harrington of the Royal Manticoran Navy is given command of the light cruiser Fearless with an unconventional and inferior armament. she uses it creatively and embarrasses the fleet, for which she and her spaceship are banished to Basilisk Station, a remote star system with an important position in interstellar trade, but otherwise lacking in amenities. However she treats the assignment as a serious one and proceeds to do her duty, cleaning up smuggling and drug trafficking, assisting local police, watching the nefarious activities of the minions of the Peoples Republic of Haven, and winning the respect, cooperation and exemplary performance of her erstwhile recalcitrant crew.
The Havenites have hatched an invasion plot, fomenting a local disturbance with guns and drugs as justification. HH discovers the plot and chases a much larger and more powerful ship in a long running battle very reminiscent of Hornblower in The Captain.
Weber tips his hat to C.S. Forester in his explicit notes. He is, in my view, one of the best of the imitators, capturing much of the spirit of that earlier H.H. (Horatio Hornblower) and of the combination of a fine but imperfect hero, convincing technical detail, long running battles, political intrigue, and so on.
Among space adventure SF novels, this is one of the best I've read. It's pure fluff with nothing whatever to do with any conceivable future, but lots of silly fun.
Since reading this book I read Post Captain written by Patrick O'Brian and published in 1972. Weber owes more to Forester than to O'Brian, but Post Captain also has a story of a captain assigned to command an inferior experimental ship with inferior armament, but with which he defeats a better sailing French privateer. It would seem plausible to believe that Weber has read all of the books in this genre and borrowed from that one too.
| Author | Rawicz, Slavomir |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | November 1998 |
at age 24, Rawicz was called up to his post as a lieutenant in the Polish cavalry to meet the German invaders in 1939. After the defeat he returned to his family's estate near the Russian border where he was promptly arrested by the Russian invaders as a spy. He was educated, from the upper classes, was an officer, and spoke fluent Russian. It was more than enough to convict him.
He was tortured for six months but refused to confess. The he had a surreal, elaborate trial lasting three days with 15 judges and all sorts of hangers on. He was convicted on zero evidence and sentenced to 25 years at hard labor.
The trip to Siberia was a nightmare of freezing cattle cars, inadequate food, and 1,000 miles of forced march in the snow chained with other prisoners to a tow truck. Eventually he arrived at a new camp to be built by the prisoners and run by a decent Red Army officer with a sensitive wife. R got a good job making skis and also repairing the commandant's radio, where he impressed the wife - who helped him plan an escape. Then with other men R went under the wire and over the wall in a blinding snowstorm. They headed south for India, the one direction out which they figured was least likely to be watched.
The trip was incredible. Siberia in the winter, across the fiery Gobi desert in the heat of summer, into Tibet and over the Himalayas in winter, all on foot with homemade clothing and inadequate tools and hardly any food. That four of them made it was due to incredible perseverance plus the wonderful hospitality of poor Tibetans they met on the way.
This incredible story is simply and clearly related in a low key fashion. It is very moving. I'm sure I will remember it for the rest of my life.
R made it to Britain after the war and never saw the other three survivors again. They were a Pole, a Latvian, and an American(!) engineer, all accused of being spies in the stupid, paranoid, Stalinist state. I hope they all found decent lives after their ordeal.
I said in 1998, I would remember this story for the rest of my life. So far, that is what has happened.
I didn't know it at the time, but apparently this book is surrounded by controversy. The Wikipedia states that it was ghost written for Rawicz by Robert Downing. Some others have claimed that the story is untrue. Historical records conflict with each other. One says that he was released by the Soviets and deported to Iran in 1942. One says he was in Palestine - though the Wikipedia article has no citation in support of that and doesn't even say what year he was there. One says a British officer did indeed interview three emaciated men in India who claimed to have escaped from Siberia.
Who knows what the truth is? Rawicz, who was born in 1915 and lived a good long life until 2004, knew. Maybe he had a great trek. Maybe he was just a great story teller. Whatever it is, I'm sure I'll still remember the book for many years to come.
| Author | Morris, Edmund |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 920 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Theodore Roosevelt |
| When Read | December 1998 |
A biography of TR covering childhood to his assumption of the Presidency. The emphasis is on his career. M does not go into the same depth as McCullogh in Mornings on Horseback on TR's childhood and his view of the child is less complete and less family centered than in MOH.
TR was a most unusual and extraordinary man. Even as President of the United States he was reading 500 books a year. As a young assemblyman in Albany he came to breakfast each morning with a huge stack of newspapers and read them all, often while conversing with someone. although he was politically astute, able and willing to compromise with his enemies and leave the side of his friends, he nevertheless seems to have had a very clear and firm conception of right and wrong. He was ambitious but incorruptible.
In spite of all tradition, all opposition, and difficulties which everyone else regarded as insurmountable, he cleaned up the civil service, cleaned the thoroughly corrupt New York City Police Department, and put the Navy on an efficient, aggressive war footing in time for the war with Span.
His courage was legendary - in politics, on the frontier, and in Cuba. The man could not be cowed and could not be diverted from his duty. And his energy, both physical and intellectual, was nothing short of astounding. He could ride a horse for days, speak fluent French and German, recognize any bird by its call, fight a bully in a bar, or read and digest 1,000 pages of testimony in an investigation. Yet he was a curiously rough fellow too, perhaps lacking in some of the graces which men of his education and literary achievement might have been expected to have. He certainly was a larger than life figure and a very great man.
A really excellent biography covering a lot of the questions that interest me.
Unsophisticated people, possibly including a majority or near majority of Americans, divide the political world into heroes and villains. Such are most of the modern day Tea Party supporters who demand uncompromising support of extreme political positions on one side, and many or most of the Occupy Wall Street supporters on the other [though I suppose I must be happy that I can put the Tea Party and Occupy movements on the two extremes instead of the Brown Shirts and the Red Brigades.]
I don't want to make too much of a hero of TR. He was a great man but, like all men, he also made mistakes. Nevertheless, and hopefully without being too unsophisticated when I write this, I still regard him as one of the heroes of American democracy.
| Author | Cowan, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 151 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | December 1998 |
This is a novel in the form of a diary by Fra Mauro, Venetian mapmaker of the Renaissance. Mauro stays in Venice, never leaving the city. All his information comes from travelers, but the tales they tell him have more to do with travels of the spirit than with the geography of rivers and coastlines. There is a tale of a primitive people of Libya who accept both the gods of the Carthaginians and of the Egyptians, and then they are wiped out by the Romans who have no use for a tolerant culture. There is a tale of headhunters, a tale of missionaries, a tale of a Persian poet, a Mohammedan, a Jesuit.
Fra Mauro must somehow accommodate all of these in his map. He feels that no map tells the truth of the world unless it somehow conveys the knowledge of these people. in the end he concludes that it is the geography of his own soul which he is attempting to map.
Cowan brackets the story with a preface and an afterword that tell of his encounter with Mauro's diary in an old library. I presume that this too is fiction. Although there was a Venetian cartographer named Mauro who did produce a great map of the world, it is inconceivable that this is his diary. C appears to have the dates wrong, but more importantly, the "diary" is clearly a 20th century document with a liberal humanist sensibility.
The story is slow and ahistorical. There is nothing in it of geography, cartography or Renaissance religion. As a historical novel it is useless. Yet I liked it. I liked Cowan's gentle regard for people of all types who pursue a life of the spirit. I liked his tolerance, his humanity, and his acceptance of people on their own terms. I liked his attempts to turn mysticism into philosophy which, if not convincing to me, nevertheless shed light on other ways of thinking. See the diary entry for January 3, 1999.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 1998 |
Bank robber Jack Foley escapes from a Florida state prison by cleverly piggy-backing on the escape of some Cuban prisoners. When he reaches the car waiting for him outside, Federal Marshall Karen Sisco happens to be there at the wrong time and tries to arrest him, but Foley and his friend get the drop on her and she and Foley get in the trunk as the friend makes his getaway.
Then, as so often is the case in L's books, an odd but very human thing happens. Foley, nestled against Sisco in the trunk, takes a liking for this tough, cool, good-looking babe. He wonders if he weren't who he is and they had met in a bar or somewhere, would she like him? He makes good his escape but becomes obsessed with this woman who he knows will bust him if he sees her again.
Things get hot in Florida and Foley and Buddy head for Detroit to get in on a big score against a rich ex-con. They are forced to team up with Snoopy, a heartless killer, and his band of deranged henchmen. Karen, figuring it all out, follows to Detroit. The two of them meet in a bar and take a time out. They make love in her room. Then Jack leaves and she is after him again.
In the end they all converge on the rich ex-con's house where attempted rape and murder ensue against the young caretaker and the middle aged maid. Foley and Buddy stop them. He kills Snoopy and Snoopy's deranged brother-in-law. Then Karen finds him. He won't surrender. He invites the cops to kill him. He won't go back to the joint. But Karen shoots him in the leg and arrests him. "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime."
Fine Elmore Leonard. L is a minor master of this sort of thing.
Maybe he's more than a minor master.
| Author | Roosevelt, Theodore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1898 |
| Number of Pages | 136 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Spanish American War |
| When Read | December 1998 |
This is TR's account of the formation, training and war experience of the First Volunteer Cavalry, the only volunteer unit to see action in the Spanish American War. TR turned down command of the regiment because he was not qualified but accepted the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and second in command. He took actual command during the crucial battle and led his and other men in the famous charge up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill - emerging as the hero of the war.
I read this shortly after reading Edmund Morris' biography, which has an account of these events. TR's account is almost modest by comparison.
This really is a history of the unit, not a memoir of the hero's war experience. R is at great pains to describe all the men of the regiment, giving as much attention to the cowboys, Indians, miners, hunters, and lawmen of the West as to the Ivy League athletes of the East who made up almost 1/4 of the men.
The American forces were terribly organized and badly led by the 300 lb. commanding general. It was only the marvelous performance of the U.S. Navy (excellently prepared by TR during his stint as Assistant Secretary of the Navy) and of the troops in the field that carried the day.
TR was an extraordinary man. Brilliant and crude at the same time - a jingoist and a chauvinist and a foolish romantic. But he certainly was the best of leaders. I'd have followed him.
My memory of these events comes from both sources - TR's book and Morris' book. I can't disentangle them at this remove from the reading, but Morris is probably the main source of my recollections.
Roosevelt really was a military hero. He led the charge from the front with revolver in hand. When he reached the top he faced and killed a Spanish soldier. Not every President has done something like that, though he is certainly not the only one who has. That and his battle with the rustlers in the West, and his knocking out the drunk in the saloon who threatened him and others with a gun, show him to be a man of personal courage.
TR's physical courage impresses me but it is only one part of the admiration I have for the man. He was a man of his class and his time. After inviting a black man to dine with his family at the White House he was castigated by the Southern press and did not do it again. Later, perhaps in an attempt to show sensitivity to white feelings or racial superiority, he behaved cruelly and unfairly in handling a grievance of black soldiers in Texas who fought whites in resisting a racist attack. Nevertheless, he stepped outside his class and ahead of his time in promoting conservation and national parks, in mediating union disputes with management, in supporting workers' rights and opposing child labor, and in seeking to build a fairer and better country, not just serve the interests of the class from which he came.
This book also shows that, in spite of the adulation he received, he was no egomaniac. He thought of others as well as himself. In looking back on his war experience in Cuba, I imagine that he considered the shooting of the Spanish soldier to be necessary and right. But I can also imagine (admittedly with no direct evidence) that he regretted that he had to do it.