Books read January through December 1999
| Author | Scott, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Signet Classic, New American Library, 1964 |
| Copyright Date | 1814 |
| Number of Pages | 574 |
| Extras | notes, bibliography |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | January 1999 |
Includes Afterward and additional notes by Edgar Johnson. The first chapters were apparently written in 1805 and I see copyright dates from 1814 and 1829.
Young Edward Waverley, nephew and heir of the baronet Sir Everard Waverley, is sent to join the army in Scotland in 1745, in part to get him away from the Jacobite influence of Sir Everard and his household and put him, an important scion of a leading family, securely in the government camp. But in Scotland he visits old Baron Bradwardine and meets the "Vich Ian Vor", Fergus MacIvor, chieftain of the MacIvor highland clan and a principal backer of the Chevalier, Charles Eduard Stuart, pretender to the throne. Due to ill luck and schemes against him by highwayman Donald Bane Lane, Waverley is thrown into the Jacobite rebellion when Charles lands in Scotland and leads a doomed insurrection against George. After many adventures, W redeems himself with the English victors, weds the beautiful Rose Bradwardine, rescues the old Baron, and inherits the huge fortune. Fergus MacIvor is beheaded.
The romance of young Waverley is a vehicle for presenting some history of the politics and insurrection of that time together with a quite astonishingly erudite display of old Scottish highland culture and of the full range of European culture, including Latin and French, up to that time. Scott bases all the scenes of his tale on actual events documented in the records and/or related to him by eye witnesses. As a historian, scholar, linguist and ethnologist, S stands far above the ordinary historical romancer.
As a popular writer, Scott is too erudite here. There are passages on every page that demonstrate the author's intellectual virtuosity at the expense of clear narrative and dramatic action. But we can nevertheless still see the powerful talent for story telling which will bear finer fruit in the later novels.
I regard Scott as one of the finest masters of the English language and of its expression in novelistic form. This first novel is an explosion of talent, not yet regulated but full of great promise.
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: VGSF, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 221 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 1999 |
This book contains three connected SF novellas, two of which had been separately published in 1978 and 1981.
After a great revulsion against and shrinking of the major religions, Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam, the remaining adherents leave Earth and settle on a planet called "God Does Battle", where they construct 150+ great, self-sustaining, living cities in which to live. But after a few hundred years the cities' religious programming backfires against the humans. The cities declare all the humans to be sinners, cast them out, and refuse to re-admit them. The story begins 1,000 years later. Humans are just beginning to emerge from barbarism while cities are breaking down and dying.
In the three sections, Joshua, an incomplete man, goes to a city and discovers that he is really a city part, an automaton. The Reah, a Muslim woman, enters a city and gives it a new purpose, to save children. And in the third novella, a simulacrum of the original city architect, Robert Kahn, returns to check up on things and finds the world turned upside down. he tries to restore his original purpose but is thwarted and stymied. In the end, all cities are dead and the humans begin to reconstruct civilization.
There are many problems with this classic Bear story. Neither the cities nor the human cultures are more than cartoons. But the imaginative sweep is pretty wide and glittering. I found little to like in the plot or the characters and found the millennialism hard to take. And yet B's stories always make you think and keep you reading. This one was less depressing than some of his others.
| Author | Tevis, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 209 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | February 1999 |
In the late 20th century a being from the planet Anthea (Mars?) arrives on Earth masquerading as a human. Using advanced Anthean technology and his super intelligent mind he begins quickly amassing a fortune which he invests in developing a space ship intended to retrieve the last 300 surviving Antheans and bring them to earth - saving them from the barren, dead, dry, burned out world which is all that is left after their nuclear wars.
His project is doomed. He has the brains and gets the money but he is closely watched by the FBI which has thoroughly penetrated his organization. They learn everything. They arrest him and, by accident, blind him with their medical experiments and tests. Eventually they release him, broken, dispirited, alcoholic, blind.
This is a remarkable book, unlike any other SF that I've read. It's about profound isolation and alienation, about doomed dreams, about desperate chances that never had a chance and left the alien, one Thomas J. Newton, in deepest despair. It's also about the attempts of a brilliant individual to change the course of history only to find that history's motive power and society's powerful institutions are far stronger than he imagined and treat his brilliant attack as a mere pinprick.
The tapes were often hard to listen to. It was painful to follow Newton's path. But this is a very successful book and a standout among SF novels.
The scene I especially remember from this book is the one where he is blinded. He is tied to a chair. The FBI doctor is about to examine his eyes with a bright light. Newton tells the doctor that his eyes are different from humans and cannot stand the light. The doctor thinks he knows better, pooh-poohs the objection and examines him anyway in spite of the begging and crying - blinding Newton in the process. Evil was not required. Ignorance and hubris sufficed.
I believe there was a movie made of this novel. I'm thinking that Christopher Walken played the alien, but I don't see anything in a quick Google search.
The movie was released in 1976, starring David Bowie, not Christopher Walken.
| Author | Aleichem, Sholem (Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich) |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Yiddish |
| Translators | Shevrin, Aliza |
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's sons, 1985 |
| Copyright Date | 1886 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Extras | Translator's introduction |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1999 |
Yosele Solovey, son of Shmulik the Cantor, sings in a beautiful voice and aspires to become a Cantor himself. In his poverty stricken household in the poverty stricken ghetto town of Mazepevka, living with his schlemiel father and harsh stepmother, there is no opportunity even to learn to read music. but Esther, the young girl next door, meets a man from a larger town where a famous Cantor lives and prevails upon him to take Yosele away for training. There, for three years, he gets a more extensive musical education. He is snapped up by a traveling sort of Cantorial impresario and travels for three more years. But first he returns home and reaches an unspoken but full understanding with Esther, who is becoming a lovely young woman.
On the road, Y gradually falls into lax ways. He stops writing home. He loses his high religious spirit. Then, in three days of foolish entrancement, he allows himself to be trapped and married to a rich and beautiful young widow whose only real emotions are selfishness and lust for Yosele.
Esther hears of the marriage and, despondent, allows herself to be engaged and married to a well to do middle aged money lender with nothing to offer but his money.
In the end Yosele returns too late. Esther is married and sinks into despair while Yosele goes mad and becomes an object of pity who sings wild and beautiful songs and speaks gibberish.
The story of the faithful girl next door jilted for a glittering but false woman is very old and perhaps trite. But the passages on Cantorial singing are very good and the representation of Yiddish culture is something that would be lost were it not for a few books like this.
The writer writes from inside this culture, not explaining very much. The translator, working 100 years later, was already unable to understand many words and scenes. The old Yiddish, full of warmth and despair, is gone and the last few souls who remember it are at the ends of their lives.
I have no record of any other books written by Sholem Aleichem in my book cards. The wonderful article about him in the Wikipedia, also with a wonderful photograph, says he published 40 volumes of work and wrote in Russian and Hebrew as well as Yiddish. Some of these works have been published in English and it looks like most of those are still available from Amazon. The Gutenberg project has one collection of stories Jewish Children at this time. Although he died almost 100 years ago, it seems that Sholem Aleichem, and many writers before him, have lived long enough that the revolution in information management may have given them a long extended life.
I seem to recall that the translator, working with a Yiddish institution in New York, drew upon a small group of very old native Yiddish speakers for help with the translation. The speakers remembered different words, phrases and idiomatic expressions, so she had to make the rounds from one to another in order to get everything she needed. Today, 28 years later, the book might not be perfectly translatable.
There can't have been very many books published in Yiddish, certainly not very many novels. There are probably still some native Yiddish speakers living in New York or Tel Aviv or a few other places, but not so many. In 20 or 30 years I presume that there won't be any.
I grew up hearing Yiddish but not speaking it. My mother and grandmother spoke it to each other. My grandfather, whom I did not know, spoke it as his native language, not being as comfortable in English, and my mother grew up with it as the language of the household. There was an old lady living with my grandmother, known as Chanky (with a guttural ch) or Hanky, who would teach me words. She'd touch my nose and say "naseleh" and touch my forehead and say "keppeleh". As a well behaved little six year old I would always be polite, patient and respectful, but I would try to slip past her bed without her noticing me if I could.
I don't recall now who Chanky was. She may have been my grandmother Bessie's aunt. She might have been a teenager or a young woman when Sholem Aleichem wrote his book.
There was another book by this author in my notes. I may have missed it because I (or the publishers of the books) spelled Sholem as Sholom in the other one, The Storm. I noted another name for the author of that book was Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich. I think it was not uncommon for children to be given both Yiddish and Hebrew names (I was given both an English and a Hebrew name) though, in this case, it is my understanding that the Hebrew name was chosen by the author, not his parents.
| Author | Andrić, Evo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | sh |
| Translators | Edwards, Lovett F. |
| Publication | University of Chicago Press, 1977 |
| Copyright Date | 1945 |
| Number of Pages | 314 |
| Extras | Introduction by William H. McNeill |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | February 1999 |
About 1566 the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire ordered that a stone bridge be built over the Drina River at Visgrad in Bosnia. after five years of incredible sacrifices and labors, a beautiful, unchanging bridge is completed which serves the town and is a grand, silent backdrop for 350 years of the life of the town until its partial destruction by retreating Austrians in 1914.
Each chapter in the novel tells of a different time and different people whose life is by the bridge. There are stories of the builders, of the survivors of great floods, of Muslims, Serbians, Croats and Jews. There is the young bride who jumps from the bridge and the half crazed drunk who dances along its railing. There is the young intellectual Serb in love with himself and the old Turkish shopkeeper, Alihodja, who struggles for a sane understanding of life amidst all the fervent and bloodthirsty nationalisms.
Reading this gives some insight into the bloody Bosnia of the 1990's, of the deep divisions and animosities among the Muslims, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats - and also of the ignorance of a people only recently brought into modern Europe.
The book won the Nobel Prize for its author. It is indeed a deep book, a book of uncommon historical and social understanding and with a very high literary quality. Interesting individuals, deeply steeped in place and time, are faithfully drawn and developed.
I read this mainly in Spain.
This was a great book. As with any book I read many years ago, I mostly remember a few individual scenes and overall impressions rather than remembering details.
One scene I remember had to do with workers working on the bridge in slave conditions. One of them rebelled, if I remember correctly, and was impaled. A spear pole was rammed up his anus and driven through him in such a way that he did not die immediately. Then the pole was brought upright for everyone to watch him die.
Did I remember that correctly? I don't know, but I think it was something like that.
I would have gotten this book at one of the public libraries which were about my only source of books in those days. I'm guessing that the University of Chicago Press reprinted it, and the library procured it during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, though perhaps it was in the library all along since its author was awarded the Nobel Prize.
I have no recollection of having read this in Spain and was surprised to see that in my notes. I can, of course, manufacture such a "recollection" without too much trouble.
| Author | Moravec, Hans |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 214 |
| Extras | index, diagrams, bibliography, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence |
| When Read | February 1999 |
Moravec, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of robotics, argues very persuasively that "culture", which is to say knowledge and intelligence, will soon break free of the bonds of human bodies and brains and will move to various types of self-replicating machines. From there it will expand rapidly, developing faster and better machinery and vastly improved knowledge. It will leap to the planets and stars. He devotes considerable effort to determining just how much memory and processing power is required by comparing the human retina, a well understood neural net, with machine equivalents and to predicting when it will be achieved by comparing dozens of computers over time. He also speculates wildly and brilliantly, if also absurdly, on "the outer limits of computation."
He is certainly wrong in his time frames. By his reckoning we should have seen commodity general purpose robots in 1998. Like many AI experts, he seems to allow his enthusiasm to master his judgment. But I believe he must be right in his general predictions. How can AI fail to develop (assuming no nuclear style catastrophe)? How can it fail to outstrip us? This seems inevitable and M's ideas on it, including some fascinating ideas about mind transference to machines, show some of the issues our descendants can expect to face.
M sees all this as positive. It is the next stage of evolution. If it leaves us behind like the dinosaurs, so be it. What follows will be better. If he's right (and Kant is right), it may be more ethical in a way too.
See also my diary.
There are diary entries for 1999-01-08, 1999-01-17, 1999-02-20, and 1999-12-20 mentioning Moravec. He made a big impression on me.
See also my book notes on Moravec's 1999 book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.
I've thought a lot about artificial intelligence. When I first got interested in computer programming I kept a notebook of ideas for AI programs. I read books about it. I was interested in AI and robotics science fiction, for example from Asimov and Bear. I read SF now about it and, in fact, am in the middle of the Asimov inspired Robot City series. The subject appeals to me for reasons having to do with my work in philosophy, my work with computers, my interest in evolutionary biology, and my desire to understand my place and the place of my contemporary humans in the future of humanity and of intelligence, consciousness, and self-consciousness in general.
The progress of AI research is much slower than its practitioners have projected, but the developments are orders of magnitude faster than the biological evolution of intelligence. Whenever I think about the problem I wind up with the same conclusions, that AI is inevitable and that we really don't know what it's implications will be. I won't find out and maybe my children and grandchildren won't, but I believe that change is coming and our descendants will see it.
My mention of Kant in the comment field above is a reference to his Categorical Imperative - his belief that a truly rational being will understand that the worth of all rational beings is essentially the same. Therefore, it makes no sense to hurt or exploit other rational beings, i.e., people. To hurt someone else is to hurt someone whose value is the same as yours. It is to hurt yourself. Hence morality is rational. If robots are rational and Kant is right, they will not wish to harm us or each other. It's an attractive theory but it seems to be clearly at odds with evolution by natural selection.
| Author | Austen, Jane |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, MD: Recorded Books, 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1813 |
| Number of Pages | 428 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1999 |
The Bennet household of man, wife and five unwed daughters faces the tricks and difficulties of love and marriage. Mr. Bennet is intellectual but indolent and withdrawn. His shallow and self-centered wife is an embarrassment and a torment to him and the two eldest girls - Jane, a beautiful saintly girl who cannot think ill of anyone, and Eliza, sharp and self-possessed and with deep feelings. The middle girl Mary is "accomplished" in reading and music but dull and insensitive while the youngest, Lydia and Kitty, care for nothing but dresses and balls and young men in uniforms.
Jane falls in love with the amiable young Mr. Bingley and Eliza, the heroine, attracts the proud and haughty Mr. Darcy. Lizzie rejects Darcy but he comes to realize the error of his pride and arrogance and makes a sincere and humble approach to her. She learns of his good deeds - forcing the cad William to marry Lydia after he seduced her, treating her embarrassing family with respect, bringing Bingley back to Jane, and standing up to his overbearing aunt, the Lady Catherine de Bourgh. They are engaged in the end.
Austen wrote this at 20, her first novel, though not published until after another success. It would be a fine achievement for a writer of any age and experience. It's full of the close observation of manners and polite society, and the beautifully expressive language that characterizes all of her work. It sets the pattern for all in character, plot, theme and ending - the genteel and intelligent girl's worth finally wins the solid man of wealth and character. All the Austen flaws are here - class consciousness, triviality, ignorance of the wider world; and also all the Austen charms.
Pride and Prejudice was one of Robin's favorite books. She read a lot of 19th century literature by women writers when she lived at home. I think her favorite was Jane Eyre, but I think Pride and Prejudice was next. It took a while for me to realize that she was onto something very good. I liked Jane Eyre too.
| Author | Yoshimura, Akira |
|---|---|
| Publication | Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 209 |
| Extras | photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 1999 |
This is a "technohistory" of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter covering its design, development, testing, manufacturing and deployment. The Zero was designed to meet what was thought to be an impossible spec. But it succeeded and, at its introduction, was the most advanced carrier fighter and one of the most advanced fighters of any type anywhere in the world. It was a complete shock and surprise to American and British air forces in spite of warnings from Claire Chennault who had seen it in China. The western authorities did not believe Japan had the ability to design and manufacture advanced aircraft. The manufacturing was truly primitive by Western standards. Ox carts were used to carry planes to the field for assembly! At the very peak of production only 145 Zeros were produced in a month, and in the last month of the war they managed to produce only six.
The author is very disturbing in his ideas about the war. He says things like "international tensions were increasing" (not Japanese aggression was increasing, "supplies from the U.S., Britain and Russia kept the Chinese from making peace" (not that outrageous Japanese demands prevented peace), and "American embargoes made war virtually certain", (not that Japanese aggression brought on American embargoes.) These are not exact quotes but they are about right.
His account of the battles is also different from ours. He has the Japanese winning in all fair fights but being overwhelmed by American numbers and industrial capacity. I can only shake my head in wonder at the narrow minded fools that started the war.
As I recall, the oxcarts were used, not because trucks and fuel were totally unavailable, though their availability was strictly limited, but because the narrow, rutted roads and low bridges leading from the urban factories to the airfields for assembly were impassible at any speed above the pace of an ox without shaking the machinery to pieces. But having said this, that doesn't make the Japanese look any better prepared for the ridiculous ambition they held to defeat the United States.
Since reading this book I've read a lot more about industrial production in the major combatants and its effects on the outcome of the war. Learning more about it, I don't entirely discount the German and Japanese beliefs that superior courage and fanaticism would win battles for them against material odds. It sometimes did. But all the Axis powers seriously underestimated the task before them.
Still, as the Zero showed, the Axis powers were not devoid of highly intelligent engineers and technicians.
While looking in my diary for notes on a different book, I see that I also wrote extensively about this one. See the entry for 2013-02-20.
| Author | Davies, Robertson |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1981 |
| Copyright Date | 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 252 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 1999 |
This is a life story of Dunstable Ramsey, born in the small Ontario town of Deptford at the end of the 19th century into an upright Presbyterian family. He gets in a snowball fight that changes his life. Percy "Boy" Staunton throws one. DR ducks and it hits Mary Dempster, the Baptist preacher's wife, knocking her silly and inducing labor. A chain of events leads to Dunny regarding the simple Mary as a saint and her son Paul as a friend - who runs away as a child and becomes a circus magician.
The story is very complex. Ramsey becomes a WWI hero and loses a leg. he becomes a history teacher in a boys' school. He publishes books on saints. His friend Boy Staunton becomes very rich and guides Ramsey into good investments. Ramsey cares for the aging Mary and then finds Paul, who has become a famous magician and hypnotist under a new name.
There are many complications, many women, travels, old priests, books, career moves, freaks, all in all a story that is too complicated, too rich in character, and too metaphysical to summarize on a 3x5 card.
I very much liked the book. I liked the decent and philosophical Ramsey. I liked the comments on morality, religion, war, small town life, love, personality, wealth. It's a very rich book.
Fifth Business is the first in a trilogy. I expect to read the others.
At one time I perceived the 3x5 card size limitation as a benefit rather than a deficit. It enforced a uniform size on my book notes and kept me from agonizing too long over one book card. Now however I think I would like to have more notes about Davies' interesting book and my reactions to it.
Marcia also read and very much liked this book.
| Author | Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biology |
| When Read | March 1999 |
What do dogs want? What do they do when they are away from people? Thomas, an anthropologist, attempted to answer these questions by following and observing her many dogs, putting in 100,000 dog hours of observation where watching 2-N dogs one hour counted as 2-N hours of dog observation. She also observed a family of wild wolves on Baffin Island in Canada.
T records many surprising facts and incidents. There is a dog that shares an ice cream cone with her husband, taking polite alternating licks. There is the love affair of Misha and Maria, with Misha's offering to Maria of vomit to feed her pups and his taking her on his voyages. There ere five dogs that lie down to eat. There was the secret den dug by her dogs under the woodpile and carefully concealed from all. There was Fatima, the sick old dog who went off to the woods to die and was never found, and another who chose to die in the company of the other dogs in his pack. There were Misha's voyages, covering hundreds of square miles, briefly visiting each dog in his path.
What do dogs want? They want the companionship of other dogs. They want a composed, comfortable, well established social order. They like to play when young. They like to sit at peace and observe the world.
I picked this up on a whim and am glad I did. It's a remarkable work.
Surprisingly, I have a lot of memories of this little book. It made a significant impression on me. It's not common for a writer to attempt to explicate the consciousness of a different species. Or if it is, it's not something I have come across before. I found it to be truly interesting.
Perhaps Thomas cast all of her thoughts about dogs into human terms, anthropomorphizing her report on dogs. But what else could she do? How would she explain to us what dogs want if she couldn't put the case in terms of what we want?
| Author | Cornwell, Patricia D. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 1999 |
Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner for the state of Virginia, performs autopsies and examinations of murder victims and also of people executed for crimes. She examines Ronnie Joe Waddell, a big, dumb, young man, executed for brutally murdering a TV anchor woman after breaking into her house. But after the execution people start turning up dead in copycat killings and Waddell's fingerprints are found at a crime scene. When Kay's own assistant is murdered Kay herself is treated as a suspect.
Eventually it is discovered that a complex plot involving a prison warden, a guard, and a psychopath had been hatched to do a dirty little deed for the governor of Virginia. It included switching fingerprints in the state police computer and corrupting two of Kay's employees. But no one had reckoned on the point man being a true psychopathic killer who murders all his confederates and others besides.
In the end all is unraveled but, although the killer is identified, he's not caught. Perhaps it is a setup for another novel.
The writing here is quite good and is filled with technical and procedural detail of medical, police and legal matters - adding considerable interest to an otherwise contrived and improbable plot. All the characters are straightforward, relatively one dimensional people, each with a simple role. But they are not badly described and handled.
There's nothing great here but it held my interest while driving to work. I'd listen to another.
| Author | Qud, Yusuf Al |
|---|---|
| Translators | Kenney, Olive; Kenney, Lorne; Tingley, Christopher |
| Publication | New York: Interlink Books, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 1999 |
The umda (rural landlord and boss) of a small village in the Nile Delta in Egypt receives a call up notice for his son to be sent to the army. Seeking to keep the worthless boy out of the army he consults a fixer/broker whereby comes up with a plan whereby another boy in the village is substituted for his son. The other boy, a fine, intelligent son of a dirt poor tenant farmer and night watchman, switches identities in return for some small but vital help to his father and goes off to war, where he is killed.
The story is told in first person from successive points of view, starting with the umda, the fixer, the night watchman, an army friend of the dead boy, an army officer assigned to take the body home, and a local police official who investigates the accusations against the umda until he is finally stopped by a very rich and powerful official who does not reveal his name or office but is absolutely in a position to command. The two boys themselves never speak in the novel and are known only through the eyes of the others.
There is a light but sure and absolutely convincing touch to all of the characterizations. The people and the corrupt social order are deeply understood. The power of that social order, its capacity for holding on to privilege, are revealed rather than asserted. No one has to say what is going on, who holds the high cards, or who will hold the bag. It's all painfully clear.
After Nasser's death, the gentry and the bourgeoisie, as they might be called in the west, came back with a vengeance, undoing the land reform in a single stroke, and of course keeping their sons out of harms way.
This is a brilliant gem of a book.
I shouldn't let this book pass without some reflection. It was a view into a society in which millions of people lived in Egypt and was perhaps similar to other societies in the middle east (and maybe elsewhere) with hundreds of millions more. We in the West have a great and increasing inequality of wealth but we still have some basic equal human rights, or at least we think we do. The conditions described in this book seem very alien to us (or at least to me.) It was something of an eye opener. If I were asked a set of questions about the actions and injustices described in the book, I think I could have guessed the right answers even without having read it. However it wouldn't have been real to me. I wouldn't have felt the pain of the father whose son was killed on behalf of another, worse, and far less deserving boy. I wouldn't have felt the resignation that the oppressed people felt. I wouldn't have understood the overwhelming power, the ease of application, and the anonymity of the forces that suppressed the inquiry into the injustice that occurred. This book made it all much more real, much more understandable from the perspective of the people who suffered.
I searched Google for information, finding that the more common transliteration of the author's name is Yusuf al-Qa'id, or Muhammed Yusuf al-Qa'id. books.google.com returns an entry for him in volume 2 of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, published in 1998. The entry mentions at least seven books by this author, of which two were translated into English, including this one. The author grew up and lived in Egypt and fought in the 1967 and 1973 wars. This book was banned in Egypt, indicating to me that the authorities considered the book to contain dangerous truths. I would not be surprised to learn that it was based on a true story.
The author was born in 1944. He'd be 73 this year. Perhaps he is still alive and has written many more than the seven books identified in the encyclopedia.
| Author | Shaffer, Peter |
|---|---|
| Editor | Richards, Stanley |
| Publication | Doubleday, 1970 |
| Copyright Date | 1964 |
| Number of Pages | 523-622 |
| Genres | Theater play; Historical fiction |
| When Read | March 1999 |
Francisco Pizarro conquers Peru with a band of adventurers, priests, and roustabouts.
The central topic of the play is the promise that P makes to the young Inca, Atahualpa, to free him if and when he fills the room with gold. The various parties in the expedition each have their own point of view. Coronado, cavalier and gentleman, believes a promise is a promise and must be fulfilled. The emissary of the king of Spain, and the old priest and chief robbers, are all for killing the Inca. A young priest, an intellectual, takes a hard view on theological/humanitarian grounds that don't seem humanitarian to us at all, while a young boy who relates the story as an old ex-conquistador is torn between his belief in truth and honor and his reverence for Pizarro - who tells him outright that his loyalty is misplaced.
P himself has no good motive for killing the Inca but does it anyway - almost as a test of the Inca's faith and his own, half hoping against hope that the sun god will save the young man as the Inca himself believes.
A fine play about politics, religion, ethics, age, and all the big themes of the world.
As a boy I was very interested in the conquest of Mexico and Peru and read the books on the subject by the American historian William H. Prescott in the 1840's. I'm guessing I was somewhere between twelve and fifteen years old. That wonderful institution, the Enoch Pratt Free Library came through for me even then.
As far as I can remember from what I know of the conquest, Shaffer's account of the ordeal of the Inca was historically accurate. The author is the same Peter Shaffer who wrote Amadeus.
| Author | Queen, Ellery (Frederick Dannay, Manfred B. Lee) |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chivers Sound Library, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 316 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 1999 |
Ellery Queen, mystery writer, is brought into a case by his father, a New York city detective inspector. One by one, three cousins of the York family of York Square have been murdered. The signs eventually indicate that the gardener/handyman, Walt, killed them under the direction of some evil genius. But all efforts to identify the brains behind it fail.
In the end we learn that Walt, a stunted, half demented man, has a split personality. In his other persona he writes letters to himself. He writes as God. Then he receives the letters as Walt.
The style of this novel is English country house mystery but set in New York City with an insane killer. It seemed like an odd juxtaposition to me but I guess Dannay and Lee grew up in a very different New York.
It's light fare but with the spice of craxy Walt, creepy Walt, calm, slow, languid, psychotic Walt.
Not bad.
"Ellery Queen" was a pen name used by Dannay and Lee for their Perry Mason novels. "Dannay" and "Lee", in turn, were pen names for Daniel Nathan and Emmanuel Benjamin Lepovsky. "Alan Meyer" is a pen name for ... oh, never mind.
| Author | Harrison, Harry |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Tor, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 470 |
| Extras | Illustrations by Bill Sanderson |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | April 1999 |
In the year 865 a Viking king is washed ashore in England in a storm where he is captured and killed in a snake pit. His four sons, the Ragnarssons, raise an army to avenge him and land on the English coast, pillaging and murdering. Shef, an English slave, son of a noblewoman raped by a Viking, fights the Vikings, then joins them. He is a visionary through whom the Norse Gods speak in his dreams. he becomes the leader of a mixed band of Viking and English who combine the best qualities of each to develop a new civilization based on learning and freedom.
Although properly belonging to the genre of "alternate history", the book is billed as SF, no doubt to seduce HH's SF fans.
There's lots of violence here but it is not convincing as history. The characters are too thin, the culture too thin, and the story too thin. The events are entirely unbelievable, from the impossible battle scenes won by mobile catapults and women recruits to the transparently evil churchmen and enlightened "Waymen" of the Norse beliefs.
Harrison is a pro. His stock in trade is a fast moving story with lots of action and a little spice of mysticism. He handles the action well even if the actors are made of cardboard and the events are fantasy. Let's call it a well done example of a very mediocre book.
The story ends by stopping in its tracks. No doubt the sequels were already half complete. But I doubt that I'll bother with them.
So far I have not bothered with any sequels, nor indeed with any books by Harrison. As of today, this is still the last book of Harrison's that I have read.
| Author | Stoker, Bram |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1897 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Horror |
| When Read | April 1999 |
After countless movies and popularizations it would seem unnecessary to recount the story but, for the record: Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania as a member of an English law firm representing the count. There he is introduced to all the horrors of the Vampire and barely escapes with life and sanity. Meanwhile the count has arrived in England where he destroys Lucy Westenra. A group of her friends and their friends learn the secret and set out to kill the vampire. Lead by Abraham Van Helsing, the Harkers, a doctor, an English lord, and an American adventurer chase the Count all the way back to his castle and destroy him.
Dracula was a much better book than I expected. Victorian to its core, and based on a scientific impossibility, actually a whole set of them, it nevertheless succeeds magnificently in building a sense of drama and horror and in attracting sympathy for its characters.
The story is told entirely in letters and journals, mainly from the viewpoints of Harker, his wife Mina, and the young doctor, director of an insane asylum. Stoker brings these people into knowledge of the evil they are facing a little behind the reader and we are always thinking - No! Don't do that! Don't leave the window open! Don't go alone into the room! But for all that, it never feels too heavy handed. The leading characters retain enough complexity and interest that they never become simple objects in the plot.
I say all these good things because this is a style of book, based on an impossible premise, that I did not expect to like.
As with many books that I "read" in audio versions, I got some of the spellings of names wrong in my book cards. Now, with Amazon, the Wikipedia, and other Internet sources, I can check these and get the correct spellings, for example for "Westenra".
| Author | Churchill, Winston S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1951 |
| Number of Pages | 653 |
| Extras | maps, photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 1999 |
Persisting in their Mediterranean strategy, the Anglo-American allies invaded Sicily and then Italy. But they ran into very stubborn and intelligently planned German resistance. Churchill favored a still stronger Mediterranean strategy. He wanted more landing craft in the Med and wanted to take advantage of Italian capitulation to grab the islands off the Turkish coast that had been garrisoned by Italians. But the Americans did not support this and British attempts on their own were defeated when they couldn't supply the landing craft or air support needed.
As always, C seemed to pursue the chimera of Turkish entry into the war. This seemed hopeless to me but not to C. Roosevelt on the other hand pursued his own chimera of an invasion of Burma to link up with Chiang Kai-chek to strengthen China - a dream Churchill never believed in.
In spite of continually growing strength the Allies continued to be engaged only on the narrow Italian front. The Americans were impatient to get into France and fight but Churchill was against it. Knowing the power of the German army, C wanted to build up more powerful forces before landing in France. He wanted more use of air and naval forces in the Med with landings in more places, outflanking the Germans and beating them.
Despite disagreements from the top down, both British and Americans were committed to working together in comradeship and cooperation. They did. The volume ends on the eve of June 6, 1944.
I'm currently reading Max Hastings' Inferno, a very different sort of history of the war. I've read many histories of WWII and many of them, including Hastings' book, are excellent. Unlike Churchill, Hastings ranges up and down the ladder from accounts of people at the top, Churchill being among the most prominent, to accounts of people at the very bottom facing the most gruesome aspects of the war.
Churchill wasn't the right man to write an account like Hastings, but his account is absolutely invaluable, not only as a reflection on the war, but as a primary source document explaining the thinking of one of the most important actors.
One of Hastings' insights, or maybe I should say "claims", is that the Axis powers had lost the war by December of 1941. Stopped in front of Moscow, they failed to overcome the Soviet Union and the most perceptive of the Nazi economic leaders understood that they would never have the resources to do so. And with the American entry into the war, it was guaranteed that the Allied powers would overwhelm the Axis with material superiority. As for the Japanese, H thinks they were finished before they started.
Roosevelt and Churchill didn't have that perspective. They were optimistic and determined, but they weren't convinced of victory until after Midway in the Pacific and Stalingrad in Europe, over a full year later.
It's hard to know what the correct perspective is. With the benefit of hindsight, and with some reservations, Hastings seems right. But I think Churchill probably had as clear a perspective as anyone at the time. He too thought that the Japanese were finished before they started. He said of Pearl Harbor that, when he learned of it, he slept the sleep of the saved. He also said that he knew that the Americans would grind the Japanese to powder. But while he was convinced that the Germans would not defeat Britain, he was not as sanguine about the ability of the Allies to defeat Germany.
Churchill's history was a great one.
I have come to believe that Hitler might have won the war had he decided to invade the USSR as a liberator, turning Belarus and the Ukraine into client but independent states, instead of as a conqueror bent on enslaving all of the "untermenschen" to the east. The British and Americans might then have had to rely on the atom bomb to win, not an attractive, or even a guaranteed, solution.
| Author | Rhodes, Elisha Hunt |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 248 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | April 1999 |
Rhodes enlisted as a narrow chested slope shouldered private in the Second Rhode Island Volunteers in 1861 and came out in 1865 at age 23(!) as Colonel of the regiment. He fought in every major battle: Bull Run, the Peninsula, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Antietam, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Sheridan's campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, Petersburg, and Appomattox.
He was an astonishingly cheerful man. Tired, wet, cold, hungry, just back from a horrible fight, he'd say, "well, it's all for the union and I'm happy to do my share." He must have been intelligent, dutiful, courageous, and a great example to the other men because he moved steadily through the ranks - corporal, sergeant, second lieutenant, first lieutenant, captain, major, lieutenant colonel. He even turned down his first promotion from second lieutenant to captain, believing that a senior first lieutenant had priority.
As a youngster, R had faith in his superiors and always assumed they knew what they were doing. But even he expressed frustration at the series of defeats and lost opportunities of 1861-3. He felt the great differences that Grant and Sheridan made and knew that they would beat the rebels and win the war.
The Civil War was very different from America's later wars. it was longer, with higher casualties, with more men coming up from the ranks and a different spirit of democracy in the volunteer units. And the enemy was more like us.
R survived and thrived and was proud to have freed the slaves, saved the Union, and seen it from beginning to end.
Rhodes became a successful businessman after the war. He was commander of the Rhode Island State Militia. He married and lived with his wife until his death in 1917. The diary and letters were published by his great grandson - who did us all a service in publishing them.
| Author | Nabokov, Vladimir |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 317 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 1999 |
Humbert Humbert, son of a Swiss French hotelier and minor scholar of French literature, is fixated on his early adolescent love affair, never consummated, with another 13 year old. He tries to recapture that lost love as an adult with thin, youthful looking women, but without success. In his early forties, abandoned by his wife, he goes to America to live in a rented room and work on his book.
There he meets Charlotte Haze and her 12 year old "nymphet" daughter Dolores - Lo, Lola, Lolita, Dolly. Captivated by her, he marries her mother. When the mother is run over by a car just after discovering H's perfidy, he has Lolita to himself. He drives with her across the country, from motel to motel, abusing her and trying to tie her to him with baubles, movies, and cheap amusements.
Eventually Lolita disappears with another child molester that has pursued them. Although he searches for her it is in vain. Some years later he gets a letter from 17 year old pregnant Lolita and finds her again, living with a nice young working class man. He gives her all he has and then tracks down Quilty, the other molester, whom he murders in a comic gruesome scene, and is arrested.
In its expressive power, its fabulous articulation, its acute observation, this is one of the great books of the English or any other language. It is a masterpiece and a tour de force. Yet it is also a depressing book of intellect and emotion channeled into miserable, misanthropic wrong turns and dark alleys of life. Hugely over developed in his intellect, terribly underdeveloped in his emotions, HH is a disaster to himself and to everyone he meets. He is aware of that. He regrets it. But he is a prisoner of his neurosis.
Nabokov has written a great and, in its way, an honest book. but it is a sad book offering nothing that the reader can feel good about.
I suggested to Marcia that she read this book. I think she listened to the first tape and then quit. She spends her working life with the victims of child sexual abuse and she found this portrayal of an abuser intolerable to read.
Looking back at the book from 14 years later, the brilliant writing that impressed me so much at the time has faded in my memory. What remains strongly imprinted is the child abuse.
I'm sure that I have read other books that offer a brilliant interpretation of a sordid life, but this one stands out. Its literary brilliance contrasts so strongly with its sordid content that the reader is simultaneously dazzled and disoriented. Conflicting feelings of admiration and repulsion seem impossible to reconcile.
Nabokov apparently considered this to be the best of his books. I suspect that he felt that way as much because of this dissonance as because of the brilliance of his writing. If his aim was to shock and overpower the reader, to disorient him, to confuse him, to stand above him and laugh at the dilemma that he created in the readers mind, he succeeded.
My personal favorite of Nabokov's works is Pnin - a book of similar literary brilliance and incredible observation, but without the child abuse.
| Author | Goldsmith, Donald |
|---|---|
| Author | Libbon, Robert |
| Publication | New York: Byron Preiss Multimedia Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 216 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Biography |
| When Read | May 1999 |
A short, easy, popular biography of Einstein which tries to explain in very simple terms his theories of special and general relativity, the photoelectric effect, and some of his other contributions to physics.
Einstein rebelled against the strict discipline of German schooling and believed himself, quite rightly, to be smarter than his teachers. He left with his family for Italy and Switzerland where he renounced his German citizenship and entered a Swiss college. He became involved with a female physics student. She bore, and gave away, a child by him. They married against the will of his family. He went to work as a private teacher, then as a patent examiner, while always studying and thinking about math and physics.
In 1905, at age 26, he published four papers. Each was a revolution in its field. They established him as the world's leading scientist. He became famous and sought after. In 1916 he published his general theory. In 1920 he assumed a professorship in Berlin but left in 1932 as the Nazis began to oppress people like him. As a Jew, a pacifist, a man who opposed World War I and who had renounced German citizenship, Einstein was a special target of the Nazis. He moved to the U.S. and continued to work on a Grand Unified Theory, but without success. He brilliantly and persistently opposed the indeterminism of quantum mechanics - which left him in a backwater of physics from the mid-1920's to the end of his life.
A brilliant, humane, decent genius. Some say that the general theory of relativity might still be unknown if Einstein hadn't discovered it.
The book is shallow and repetitive but very accessible. It gives at least a glimmer of Einstein's views and of their import. Haven't tried the CD yet.
I have since read Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universes, a much better biography. Besides learning much more about the man and his work I learned that my abstract above gave the false impression that Einstein immediately became famous and sought after in 1905. It still took some years for him to be recognized.
Einstein was a great hero of the human race. He greatly deepened our understanding of reality and showed the way forward as a great human being.
I'm now in the middle of another audiobook about Einstein's work, The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity by Pedro G. Ferreira. Like the others, it's a popular work. So far, other than E = mc^2, there has not been a single equation in the book. I'll never have a real understanding of what he achieved because I don't have the math skills, or the aptitude, or enough years of life left, to master what I need to know for real understanding.
Some years ago, on a trip with Marcia, Lynn Epstein (Marcia's sister), and Susan Bassein (Lynn's partner), I asked Susan to explain the concept of general relativity to me. Susan had been a professor of mathematics, with a PhD from Princeton, before she retired. She explained the central arguments in a non-technical way. It seemed to me that I was following along successfully, but as soon as she stopped speaking, the slippage began. After about five minutes I believed I had lost it. I didn't have the heart to ask her to go through the whole thing again, or the confidence that, if she did, I'd be able to retain it any longer than I did the first time. So I read these popular works. I console myself with the knowledge that people smarter and better prepared than me have also had trouble with the concepts.
| Author | Maas, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 316 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 1999 |
Fearing the coming communist takeover of his headquarters in Hong Kong, Y.K. Deng, leader of a centuries old criminal brotherhood, plans to move his operation to New York and finance it with a huge five ton shipment of pure "China White" heroin.
As a young man in Shanghai, Deng's capitalist family was massacred in an attack by Communist workers from their factory. Deng became a killer, killing first the rebel workers. The he became an enforcer for the brotherhood, working his way to the top and working with the CIA during the Vietnam War to smuggle heroin and fight communism.
In New York his lawyer, son of a CIA man who worked with Deng, sees more and more evidence of Deng's criminal nature. He works with a female FBI agent (there is of course a love story between them) to unravel everything and destroy the heroin in a big shootout with Chinese youth gang leader Unicorn Frankie Chin.
The characters are very simple and the story has many typical elements of this crime/thriller genre. But it is all done with satisfying professional competence and the many details of Chinese criminal associations and culture a lot of exotic interest.
We are, of course, gratified at the ending in which good old Americans figure out and defeat the plans of the super-intelligent and super-violent gangsters.
| Author | Gillingham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 286 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | May 1999 |
From about 1453-1487 the English crown was disputed by the Tudors of the House of Lancaster and the House of York. G considers the problem arose because of the weakness and mental illness of Henry VI whose unfairness, favoritism, and bad policies alienated and antagonized the most powerful noble in England, Richard of York, a man who was descended of English kings. Much of England developed in peace and prosperity throughout the period, but it was punctuated by short campaigns and bloody battles between the noble contenders. Edward the IV, a bold, intelligent king, eventually won all for York but then died unexpectedly at age 40 and his unscrupulous brother, Richard III, succeeded in antagonizing enough of the nobility that Henry Tudor, the seventh, won an unlikely campaign and resolved the issue to the apparent satisfaction of all.
These dynastic wars, fought for power and profit, played out amidst the dynastic intrigues of French, Bretons, Burgundians, and Scotts, seem like terrible indicators of the true nature of late feudal society - selfish, unconcerned with country or people, and violent.
England is portrayed as very different from continental Europe. It was generally more peaceful and orderly. The wars did not involve castles and sieges and the laying waste of the countryside, as the 100 Years War did. Yet the land was also less cultured, judging for example by the numbers of printers and books.
An interesting period, as all are.
There's a significant element of randomness in determining what books I will read. Some are non-fiction books about current events or current problems or projects that I am working on. Some are novels by authors that I've heard a lot about or that I've liked in the past. Some are determined for me by a book group or a work related assignment. And some are books that are related to general areas of interest for me, history in this case, that just happened to catch my eye.
As a child, maybe somewhere around ten years old, I read Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses. I'm sure that it was the Great Illustrated Classics edition, intended for young readers. I loved those books and can still see what the covers looked like. Now, 43 years after reading Gillingham's book, and 60+ years since reading Stevenson's, I'm thinking that I walked past a library shelf in 1974 that had Gillingham's book and thought, "Now I can find out the background of The Black Arrow."
| Author | Singer, Isaac Bashevis |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Yiddish |
| Translators | Sherman, Joseph |
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1957 |
| Number of Pages | 548 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 1999 |
The Yiddish version of this novel appeared in The Forward in 1957-8
Hertz Grein, a New York stock broker in 1947, unhappy with his wife and restless with his mistress, is at Boris Makaver's house for dinner when Boris' daughter Anna makes a declaration of love to him. Hertz leaves his family, Anna leaves her husband Stanislav Luria, and the two of them run off to Florida. Of course it doesn't work and instead of resolving his problem Hertz is now torn three ways instead of two.
All of the characters in this extraordinary book are transplanted Polish Jews, cut off from their culture and their roots, reeling from the horror of the Holocaust, unable to revive their faith or their religion but at sea without it. Hertz desperately wants to believe but can't quite manage it. Boris clings stubbornly to the full orthodox ritual but watches his world crumble around him. His second wife Frieda, a pious and scholarly Rabbi's widow, gets pregnant in her 40's but gives birth to a Mongoloid child. Dr. Margolin, brilliant, rationalistic, cynical, brings back his gentile wife and daughter who had left him for a Nazi. Professor Shrage, famed psychic researcher, cowers in doubt and darkness in the home of an old woman dentist who tries to snare him with a staged seance. Ann Makaver leaves her depressed husband Luria to his heart attack and goes to Hertz and then to her self-centered actor first husband Yasha Kotik. Communist Hermann Makaver goes to Russia and disappears into the maw of the beast. Esther, the mistress, leaves Hertz for a rich old widower, then goes back to him. They run away to Vermont or Maine where she is bored to death and hyper neurotic.
This is a very deep novel, full of comedy and sadness, philosophy, religion, physical longing, and spiritual longing. Its people are all spiritual wanderers. They seem to have escaped from the Holocaust but, in fact, only their shells escaped. Their souls a trapped and tortured.
A truly great book.
although I have not read him in a long time, Singer remains one of my favorite authors. Nabokov, whom I admire enormously, paled on me (see below). Singer never did.
| Author | Hansen, Ron |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 1999 |
Atticus Cody, 67 year old well-to-do rancher, has two sons, a successful businessman and state legislator and a ne-er do well younger son, now 40, who has been an artist of sorts and been in mental institutions but has never gotten his life together or settled down anywhere.
Atticus receives a phone call from Mexico saying that his son has committed suicide at a seaside resort town. He heads off to Mexico to recover the body. While there he sees various things that don't make sense. He concludes that his son was murdered and begins piecing together all the clues. In the end it transpires that his son is not dead at all. A man who looked like him was murdered by mistake and the son is lying low so that neither the killer (an outraged Mexican boy whose girlfriend was run over by younger Cody) nor the police will know he's still alive. The young Cody is haunted by having killed his own mother in an auto accident and is now reliving the experience.
Not a bad mystery. It has some Mexican/Spanish interest and some psychological interest. As I get older I also appreciate more elderly protagonists and other characters.
There are so few taped books available at the libraries that I take what I can get.
So now I am the exact age of Atticus Cody. I still look for role models in literature that will show me people of my age and older whom I can respect and feel good about.
| Author | Nabokov, Vladimir |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: McGraw Hill, 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 104 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1999 |
Hugh Person, an editorial assistant for a New York publisher, visits Switzerland at age 40, recalling an earlier visit with his professor father when he met Armande, a lithe, athletic, empty headed beauty with whom he fell in love and married. The story, such as it is, traces Person's clumsy, frustrating efforts to woo Armande and his marriage to her. There is also a sort of sub plot involving "R", Person's employer's leading novelist, an old roue who is the only person who can understand Person's literary and sexual aspirations.
In a wierd twist, Person strangles his wife while unconscious in a dream. Eight years later he returns to the same town and hotel in Switzerland - where he burns to death in a fire.
The title refers to material objects which carry memories of years of events, but this theme is not consistently pursued.
On the one hand we have Nabokov's erudition, his multi-lingual expressiveness, his amazing vocabulary and power of articulation. But on the other we see his hatred of women, his disdain for everyone, his division of the world into clumsy intellectuals, beautiful athletes, and human cows - the majority of the people.
Why was this book written? The story is totally unbelievable and ridiculous. The characters are absurd. The elitist snobbery is tiresome and offensive. And yet no one can write like him. It's certainly a contradiction.
As of this writing, Transparent Things is the last book I have read by Nabokov. I had fallen in love with the author after reading Pninn. Perhaps I fell out of love with him after reading this book.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Prism, 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 345 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Non-fiction; Essays |
| When Read | June 1999 |
15 stories and 38 essays from Dr. Asimov's final decade. Most of these appeared in his magazine and are here collected in their first hard cover edition. The title story, "Gold", is about a writer of successful but not classic books offering $100,000 in gold to a famous producer of "compu-dramas" to create a compu-drama of one of his works and thus make his work immortal
The work is obviously "The Gods Themselves", an Asimov novel of a world with beings in three sexes - rational, emotional, and parental, although it is not named that. Perhaps A regarded it as one of his best, and least recognized, works.
The essays are about the nature, craft, and business of science fiction. He talks about robots, women, religion, what it means to invent a universe, elements of writing - plot, metaphor, ideas, suspense, and so on. We learn that A wrote one draft and exactly one revision of each work. He never used outlines. He could write a fair number of things well, but knew his limits. He reveals that all of his famous predictions were random stabs, not seriously thought out prognostications.
Through it all A informs his writing with humor, intelligence, honesty, and clarity. He is a delight to read. His mind is straightforward and open. One never feels that there is some deeply hidden psychological force at work. What you see is what you get. I wasn't disappointed with a single story or essay.
Asimov died in 1992. Much of his work is still in print and, with increasing use of electronic publishing and paper publishing on-demand, I'm sure that most or all of it will be available for many, many years to come. There may even be new compilations such as this one, and I am sure there will be new books written by living authors that, like the Robot City series, are based on themes and premises that Asimov invented.
| Author | Rendell, Ruth |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1999 |
This novel traces the childhood and maturation of two damaged young people. Teddy Brex is the son of two people who function only at the most basic, mindless level. They completely neglect him and he grows up disturbed and anti-social. Handsome and intelligent, he is sought after by girls but is indifferent to them, pursuing beautiful objects and avoiding people. He lives in a squalor which he cannot stand. When his parents die he is left in the ugly, dirty, smoky house with his alcoholic plumber uncle, whom he kills and stuffs in the trunk of his uncle's 1959 Edsel.
Francine Hill, at age 7, is in her house when her mother is murdered. She loses the power of speech for months and is treated by child therapist Julia - who eventually marries Francine's widowed father. Her problem is the opposite of Teddy's. Where Teddy is neglected, Francine is over-protected. Julia becomes pathologically obsessed with controlling and protecting Francine. She harms Francine by smothering her.
When Francine and Teddy meet she is attracted to his loneliness, artiness, and difference. He is attracted to her purity and beauty. But they have nothing at all in common and talk past each other.
Teddy kills again - a wealthy woman in a beautiful home. Then he kills Julia. He seals his uncle and the woman in a basement but, to our great relief, falls in and is himself sealed in to die. The unsuspecting Francine is saved.
This is a very dark novel. Rendell is a master at presenting damaged, deformed, incomplete people. All of her characterizations, including the minor players, are effective and convincing. But the book is depressing. It's one that I admire but do not like.
I don't remember where but I think I read a review of Rendell's work, calling her one of the great writers that people should read. I don't know that I can dispute that judgment. She was a powerful writer and a keen observer of the bizarre in human behavior. But it was too bizarre for me. I haven't read any more of her books since this one - though it's possible that I just picked the wrong one of her works to read and that others would be more to my taste.
| Author | Shirer, William L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 179 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | June 1999 |
This is a very brief political biography of Hitler which also describes the salient facts in German history and in the history of World War II for the general reader who has limited knowledge of the events.
S concentrates on making a relatively small number of political points and pursuing them through the narrative. A main theme is Hitler's complete lack of morals. Lying was almost a creed with him. Every political and foreign policy move he made was surrounded by a bodyguard of lies, the bigger the better. From simple verbal lies to elaborate enactments replete with bodies of men murdered for the occasion, Hitler systematically covered every act with the most extensive network of lies he could manufacture. There was also a systematic brutality, aimed first of course at Jews but secondly at all non-Germans, and thirdly even at his own staunchest supporters. He condemned a half million soldiers at Stalingrad and then Tunisia without shedding a tear or saying a word on behalf of these martyrs to Nazism. And finally there was his growing madness and his retreat into delusion.
The German people loved him. Not all of them, but a majority came to endorse him, to worship him and to die for him.
Shirer does not pretend to academic objectivity. He writes as a partisan, a man who has seen the evil with his own eyes and uses his wit and typewriter to fight it as effectively as he can. He fears the vampire even in the grave and seeks to drive a stake through its rotten heart.
I like his clear, direct, informed writing and I admire the man behind it.
This is the last of the books by Shirer that I read. His three volume Twentieth Century Journey was a major event in my reading life - equivalent in its way to the six volume history of World War II by Churchill.
I recall that Shirer was shunned by the academic community. He showed up at a conference on World War II but was neither invited to speak nor listened to by anyone. The fact that he had lived in Berlin right up into 1940, that he personally knew many of the Nazi leaders, and that he studied and reported all of that at first hand, cut no ice with them. They were more impressed by a historian who had studied voting patterns in a block in some city, but had less expertise in the history of Nazi Germany as a whole, and certainly no personal experience of the matters.
I know that I at least read excerpts from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was a boy, living at home with my parents. I don't recall how old I was or whether I read the book from front to back. However I may read it again if life and time permits. I do remember liking it very much, even at my young age.
I did read more Shirer since writing the above note. I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 2014. I wrote a great many notes and diary entries about it (q.v.) and so will say no more here.
| Author | L'Amour, Louis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bantam Books, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 150 |
| Genres | Fiction; Western |
| When Read | July 1999 |
Trace Jordan is on the run after killing Bob Sutton of the Sutton Bayless organization. Members of the group had killed his partner and stolen their horses and TJ had gone back for them. Now he was wounded, weak, and being tracked by a large gang with an ace tracker guiding them.
TJ finds a good hideout with water and grass and collapses there. A Mexican woman, Maria Christina, finds him and tends his wounds and brings him food. The men after him find her and stake out the small homestead where she lives with her mother and two brothers, sure that she's hiding Jordan.
There's another chase through the desert. The chasers differentiate into decent men and out and out killers. There are several gunfights, a couple of fights with Apaches that steal Maria Christina, and a final showdown where TJ kills two of his pursuers and wounds a decent one, the new head of the ranch, who is prepared to make peace with him. TJ and Maria Christina take that one through Apache territory to safety. Treating her somewhat like a horse ("Just ain't halter broke", he said gently, "but you'll do.") TJ wins MC.
I have seen Louis L'Amour's stories on library shelves for years. I decided to read one when I learned that they are about the only novels my brother Arvin reads. They are written to a formula. There is a strong, silent, honest man who is dangerous when wronged. A proud, passionate woman with hot Spanish blood is his match. The bad guys are a mix of bad men and men merely determined to have their way.
It is a fast and compelling read but combining only the simplest elements of a simple story.
If I am remembering the right story, Jordan is chased by five men over the desert. They eventually catch up to him and he knows he can no longer elude them, so he turns back and waits for them. They arrive and confront him. He says something like "Howdy boys" and faces them with his gun in his holster. Words are exchanged and Jordan makes it clear that if he is going to be shot, some others are going to be shot too. Three of the men decide that this is not their fight. They are hired men. They have nothing against Jordan and don't really want either to shoot him or be shot by him. They turn around and leave. The other two go for their guns but Jordan shoots them both. At any rate, that's how I remember the scene. My "abstract" notes above were contemporary with my reading of the book and may be more accurate.
I remember liking that scene because the five men chasing Jordan became more real than they had been up to that point in the story and the confrontation put things on a more personal, man to man level than they had been.
However, for all of the skill that L'Amour put into his books, they are still potboilers. They follow a formula also followed in thousands of westerns, kung fu, and karate movies, and "thrillers" of various types.
| Author | Pym, Barbara |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 218 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1999 |
Letty, Marcia, Edwin and Norman are four elderly office workers doing unskilled work of some unspecified sort for a large company which is keeping their backwater office open just until these four retire. Each lives alone, two in "bed sitters" and two in houses. Although one was once married they have no close relatives and, with the possible exception of Edwin's priest, Father G., they have no close friends.
Letty lives in a house which has been sold to a Nigerian preacher. Feeling out of place, she visits her old friend in the country with whom she planned to retire, only to find the old friend engaged to be married. She engages a room with old Mrs. Pope.
Marcia, retired in her musty house, retreats into madness, counting milk bottles and plastic bags. She eats nothing and eventually collapses, possibly of starvation, possibly of cancer. The others draw a bit closer. There are changes in their lives, but it would be hard to call them developments.
Pym writes with a steady, even hand. There are no emotional highs and the lows are within strict bounds. The picture is painted by accretion, one pale spot after another, until the pastel scene is complete. It's an unexciting book. We develop only a mild sympathy for Letty and Edwin, while feeling nothing for Norman and repulsion for Marcia - at least that was my reaction. It's an admirably accurate book. I appreciated it without having found anything especially to enjoy.
There are a number of scenes that made a strong impression on me and which I recall in this book. I don't recall the specifics of the writing, but I recall the ideas.
In one scene, mad Marcia visits one of the others (Letty?) to whom she had lent a bottle of milk, or maybe it was just a milk bottle with something else in it. The empty bottle was not returned and Marcia came to claim it. She treated Letty, if that's who it was, with some anger, as if Letty were trying to steal this milk bottle from her. It had become important to Marcia to count, and account for, all of the large number of milk bottles in her possession. It is in this scene that we, and the other characters in the book, come to understand that Marcia has gone over the edge.
Another scene is Letty's feeling of anger and betrayal over her old friend's engagement to a man. Not happy about her friend's good fortune, she felt instead that she had been deeply hurt by it.
The last scene I can recall is Edwin's visit to his church where he does something, I don't remember what, as part of the church activity in the community. Churches don't mean too much to most people any more but Edwin is nevertheless actually engaged with other people - something that none of the other three have managed to be able to do.
I seem to recall that I read this as part of a book group with Marcia, John and Christine Bonn, and Dave McLaughry and Susan Petrie. I seem also to recall that we were all struck similarly by the book.
| Author | Estleman, Loren D. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 178 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | July 1999 |
This is a fictionalized treatment of the trial of Jack McCall for shooting Wild Bill Hickock from behind in a bar while Hickock was playing cards. The story is even more in the tradition of courtroom dramas than westerns. A hard driving prosecutor and his aging mentor and adviser are up against an eloquent defense attorney who knows every courtroom trick, teamed with a morose but encyclopedic minded man who knows all the law and all the precedents
While the courtroom drama plays out with flashy witnesses like Buffalo Bill Cody, two dangerous desperadoes break into the home of the prosecutor's lady friend and take the household hostage. A tough sheriff and a sharpshooting assassin take them out.
McCall is convicted and hung.
There's nothing special about this book. It's well done. It keeps moving. It's colorful. But it's not very real.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Cadfael |
| When Read | July 1999 |
Brother Cadfael is sent to another monastery to tend to a horribly wounded monk who seems half out of his mind. He also participates in a search for two young people, aged 13 and 17, the son and daughter of a dead nobleman, wards of an uncle who has chosen the side of the Empress over King Stephen and is thus a political enemy of the established order in the civil war.
It is a time of disorder. The civil war has given cover to a strong bandit gang which is ravaging the countryside. Three plots interweave: the search for the two children, the search for the bandits, and the search for the man who killed a beautiful young nun and left her in a freezing stream to be encased in a block of ice.
We assume all along that the bandits were the killers of the nun. But in fact it was a young nobleman - a coward and a rapist who had been betrothed to the missing girl until she discovered his true character and escaped from him.
In the end the bandits are besieged and destroyed in their fortress and the rapist killer is exposed and arrested. The two young people are found and sent home - saved by a young squire in the service of their uncle - a fine, honorable, courageous young man who is revealed to Cadfael, and only to Cadfael, as his own son by a relationship he formed in the Levant while on Crusade.
These limited historical mystery tales are quite satisfying, not only for their plots, but for their medieval language and thought and for the gentle and spiritual character of Cadfael - a man of deeper feeling than many mystery heroes.
| Author | Moore, Brian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Sterling Audio, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1999 |
In 1988 a 70 year old Frenchman, a former Nazi collaborator who has been shielded all these years by highly placed ex-collaborators in the Catholic Church and in the government and police, thwarts a would be assassin. He gets the drop on the man, kills him, and finds a note saying that he, Pierre Boissard, was killed by a Jewish commando unit in revenge for his murder of 14 Jews.
Boissard runs and even kills a second assassin sent after him. He seems like a reformed sinner trying to stay alive, but gradually we learn that he is not reformed. He's a primitive man with an ugly past who is being sheltered by dangerous fascist thugs who care only for their own hides, and by ignorant and misguided clergy who have not advanced mentally beyond the 18th century.
Nothing is at it seems. B's would be killers are not Jews at all. They are hired professionals, recruited by top police and ex-police and government officials who want an end to trials of collaborators and who see B as a threat, both as a symbol and a witness. A judge and a gendarme almost catch B but his "friends" help him out and then kill him, leaving him in an alley with the misleading Jewish statement pinned to his chest.
This is a very dark book but it cuts through all the bullshit, all the self-serving lies, and reveals the fundamental stink of corruption in church and state and in the hearts of fascists. I wish many people would read it.
It is now more than 68 years since the end of the war. The last of the heroes and villains and the ordinary folk who are neither one but were swept up in the war, are now in old age. No doubt more and more people in the world see the war and the scourge of Nazism as a dim historical event. But heroism and villainy have not died out and maybe not even changed very much. We are all advancing into a brave new world of advanced technology with all of the baggage we have always carried. The remarkable story of the human race, unique among all of the animals of earth, continues into its uncertain future.
I'll follow it for a little while more and continue to write about it. Others who are more perceptive than I are continuing. I don't know where we are going but I hope that the history of where we have been will go with us and be preserved.
| Author | Theroux, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | Dove Audio, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | July 1999 |
The cover says this is a novel but it reads like an autobiography, filled with real names and titles and events. The story begins with Theroux's summer at a leper colony far from civilization in Malawi. He is pursued by a somewhat older (38) Canadian nurse but rejects her to pursue an African teenager. Then there is an episode in Malaysia where a wealthy American Vietnam War profiteer employs him to teach him poetry. He is married by then and has two sons. Next is an episode in London - a number of them - where he lives for 15 years, becoming a well known and financially successful writer.
His marriage withers under the twin stressors of his long absences to travel and write travel books, and his infidelities, both casual and prolonged.
T is a highly intelligent, hghly articulate, wonderfully well read man. He is a gifted and accomplished writer. Yet he is also something of a boor. He makes no excuses for his shabby and offhand treatment of his wife. He destroys his marriage - devastating himself as well as her. He is apparently estranged from his sons but seems unable to talk about it. He falls, not in love but in lust, with the most childishly egocentric women, needy greedy women who seem much less interesting than his wife. He tells lies.
He does not strike me as selfish. He can be very generous and forgiving of others. He is politically progressive. But there seem to be limits to his understanding of life. There are impulsive forces within him that he accurately observes but cannot fully understand or control.
I was not always sympathetic and was sometimes repelled by his account. But he does engage our interest. He is very human.
See also my diary.
The diary entry was from July 21, 1999. It talks about a lot of the things that are wrong with Theroux from my point of view.
| Author | Keillor, Garrison |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 152 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | July 1999 |
This is a delightful spoof on Jesse Ventura, the new Reform Party governor of Minnesota. It is in the first person, told as a rapid paced verbal account to the ghost writer, Garrison Keillor, with whom Jimmy occasionally spars.
Jimmy is portrayed as the illegitimate son of upper class parents given to a marginal comic working class family to raise. He becomes a strong man, then a Navy "Walrus". He fights in Vietnam, picking up a former Viet Cong as a sidekick and then nemesis. He finds his true calling in professional wrestling, which he develops from a sideshow to a huge, multimillion dollar extravaganza. And then finally he is recruited by the Ethical Party to run for governor. Believing in the common man, he still cannot be a Democrat because they want people to eat vegetables and stifle themselves. Believing in individualism, he still can't be a Republican because they want to grab everything for themselves and downsize everyone else.
The book is an incredible hoot, a real scream. It was so funny I didn't believe K could sustain it, but he did.
I've heard that Ventura was highly offended by this book. I suppose it's hard for him not to be. And yet I didn't get such a bad opinion of him from it. Jimmy comes across as an outrageous but not unlikeable character. In a way, Jimmy's charm is one of the greatest achievements of the story. It's what elevates the book above other cultural satires.
Well done Garrison!
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 1999 |
In 1963 Easy Rawlins has worked for two years as the janitorial superintendent at the Sojourner Truth Junior High School. He is off the street, working an honest job and taking care of his two adopted children, Jesus and Feather, when a murdered man is discovered in the schoolyard. Easy is sucked into the investigation and the list of suspects.
That morning he had been seduced by a sexy teacher, the sister-in-law of the victim. She had given him her beloved little dog to take care of, a dog that took an instant dislike to him, shit in his house on his bed, and attacked and bit him in the midst of a fight for his life with a gangster.
It eventually transpires that the teacher's husband was smuggling heroin with his brother, using the teacher and her airline stewardess girlfriend as unwitting mules. When the stewardess discovers what's going on and resists, everything starts to go wrong. Over the course of the story the husband is killed, the teacher is killed in Easy's car. The stewardess is almost killed, and Mouse, who is a reformed man working as a night janitor for Easy, appears to be mortally wounded saving Easy's life.
All the usual elements are here. Easy pokes his nose into other people's business and allows himself to be drawn in. He even pushes himself in. Never trusting the cops or being trusted by them, he tells them lies and refuses to help them. He is beaten by gangsters, threatened by the police, accused of theft by his boss, lied to by women, and bitten by the dog. But he struggles on.
I read Mosley because he expands my understanding of humanity. His characters aren't at all like me or my friends. They all do things I wouldn't do and don't approve of. Yet they have a dignity, a decency, and a humanity which, different from mine as it is, is still not to be denied.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1983 |
| Copyright Date | 1937 |
| Number of Pages | 200 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 1999 |
Wealthy young Sylvia Raffray is ordered by her concerned guardian to get out of the detective business she is financing. But the guardian, E.P. Storrs, gives a job to Sylvia's partner Dol Bonner anyway. Dol goes to Storrs house to help him expose and discredit a mystic chiseler who has sunk his claws into Storrs ignorant and totally befuddled wife. But when she arrives she discovers Storrs' body, murdered in the garden behind his country estate.
Various detections and deductions follow and another murder. The police are clueless but Dol figures it all out and finds the psychotic neighbor, a man engaged to Sylvia who killed Storrs when S learned of his psychosis and planned to tell Sylvia.
This is 1930's country house stuff, much like what the English were churning out at the time, but with Stout's American style humor and dialog. It was written three years after the first Nero Wolfe novel. Apparently Stout hadn't yet settled into his lifelong career as the writer of Nero Wolfe / Archie Goodwin stories.
This is fluff, but intelligent fluff and even a little ahead of its time for having a female protagonist written by a male author.
I like Rex Stout and I like reading the fiction of 60 years ago.
| Author | Reinfeld, Fred |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy |
| Copyright Date | 1952 |
| Number of Pages | 302 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Chess |
| When Read | August 1999 |
The American grandmaster has written chess biographies of seven world champions up to 1946. They were Adolf Anderssen, Paul Morphy, Wilhelm Steinitz, Emmanuel Lasker, Jose Raoul Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, and Max Euwe. Only three, Anderssen, Lasker and Euwe, had successful careers outside of chess. all three were mathematicians. Lasker also studied philosophy and Anderssen also taught German literature. Steinitz and Lasker were theoreticians of chess. Alekhine was an obsessed mono-maniac. Morphy hated himself for being a "mere" chess player and renounced the game. Capa was a natural who shunned study and theory and won brilliantly on instinct and insight. Had he Alekhine's drive and Steinitz' passion for theory he would have been our greatest master, but R gives that title to Alekhine, who went crazy and died before age 60. Capa also died young, at 53, though R speaks of this as old. He claims that we all decline by our 40's and yet Lasker played a great tournament at age 67, almost winning in a field of great masters.
R reprints and annotates two games of each champion. I replayed each of them and was impressed and edified by their brilliance. It was a considerable pleasure to work through these games with the guiding help of Reinfeld. all of the games were won by brilliant sacrifices which showed the genius of the players. None depended on gross mistakes of their opponents. I am only sorry he did not include a few games of positional battle along with the brilliant attacks.
Fred Reinfeld was a great American player who was once rated sixth in the US (all info from the Wikipedia) and won games against many great champions including Sammy Reshevsky, Reuben Fine, and Frank Marshall. He is probably the most prolific of the authors of chess books and possibly the only one, in the U.S. at least, who supported himself with writing about chess. I seem to recall that, in addition to his books, he had a "Chess Corner" or similarly named column in the newspapers that I read as a boy.
I've heard him disparaged. The great majority of his books were written for chess novices and mediocre players such as myself. But the disparagement is entirely unfair and mostly came from people who I'm sure could not have beaten him in a chess game. He wrote for the people who are the largest buyers of chess books and he did a great job.
I liked this book in particular. A fellow like me won't necessarily profit from reading chess books, especially at my age. But I do like to read about the people, those truly extraordinary minds who played chess at the grand master level.
| Author | Waltari, Mika |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Finnish |
| Translators | Walford, Naomi |
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1951 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 438 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | August 1999 |
Mikael Karvajalka, with his giant brother Andy and his dog Rael, set out for the Holy Land in 1527 to atone for their sins, but their ship is captured by Muslim pirates. The two convert to Islam and become slaves together with the beautiful Guilia, a woman with one blue and one brown eye, with whom Mikael has fallen hopelessly in love.
M's intelligence and Andy's strength win them higher and higher responsibilities. M marries the lying, worthless, petty, greedy, Guilia and becomes the slave of the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, the one high official who is truly honest and incorruptible, but who is eventually brought down and destroyed by the Sultana, a woman of limitless greed and cruelty.
Mikael and Andy are present at the siege of Vienna, the sack of Tunis, the invasion of Persia, and M wins a fine house for Giulia in Istanbul while she dallies with a lover, steals all of M's money, and dabbles in Seraglio harem politics. In the end the Sultana kills the Grand Vizier and then Giulia, but Mikael is saved by the Sultan.
The story is romantic nonsense. The events of M's career are overblown and verging on, or crossing into, the outrageous. And yet the essential historical theme of the corruption of a society based on individual power and greed, the impossibility of being an honest statesman, is very well handled, as is the quite effective Oriental/Islamic color of the writing and the story.
I liked it.
| Author | Byrd, Max |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Biographical fiction |
| When Read | August 1999 |
A novel about Andrew Jackson and a (fictional?) biographer named David Chase. Chase is hired by a Boston businessman, publisher, and abolitionist to dig up dirt on Jackson and his wife Rachel to be published before the 1828 election. But the more he learns the more sympathetic Chase becomes.
The story alternates between chapters on Chase - his love affair with an ambitious, anti-Jackson woman who is more concerned about herself than about Chase or the country, and his pursuit of the Jackson story - and chapters from the biography itself, covering Jackson's youth in the Revolution, his love for another man's wife, his campaign against the Creek Indians, and his defense against all odds of the city of New Orleans. There is also material on his fight with Thomas Hart Benton [the politician, not the later painter] that left a bullet in his arm, and his tender love for Rachel, who is portrayed as a simple, homely, but loving wife.
Jackson's personal qualities are strongly represented - courage, decisiveness, dedication, intelligence. But we learn nothing of his politics or of the great issues of the 1828 campaign. Indeed, the crux of the novel is a gossipy story of Rachel's possible affair with a man before Jackson married her.
This novel is of minor interest for what it says about Jackson but is very disappointing for what it fails to say. It is competent fiction, very amateurish history, and too filled with uninteresting human interest which feels manufactured to keep the story moving.
| Author | Burke, James Lee |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 1999 |
Detective Lieutenant Dave Robicheaux of the New Iberia, Louisiana Police Department tries to find someone who has killed a couple of young prostitutes. along the way he becomes entangled with an alcoholic movie actor Elrod Sykes, and old boyhood baseball teammate, Julie Balboni, who is now a gangster, the corpse of a black man lynched 35 years before, and the hallucination of Confederate General John Bell Hood and a ragtag group of dead Confederate soldiers who appear to R when he is fed LSD, hit on the head, or just day dreaming.
The writing and the story have much to recommend them. There is a pretty widely diverse group of characters who, if not fully rounded, are at least able to act their parts. There is a thoroughly well realized Louisiana setting of old vice, squalor, black/white conflict and small town Babbitry. There is an exclusive atmosphere of connected crimes which R can't seem to put together until the end. And then there are the Confederate dead. They play a role in the story which I can't take seriously but which Burke doesn't allow us to put aside. He throws in little pieces of ghostly effects which are absurd but ... there they are. It's almost like Garcia Marquez though not so completely up front.
I'll read more if the occasion arises. I didn't terribly like the character, the setting, the violent themes, or the ghost story, and yet it was a compelling read.
The occasion has arisen, six more times as of this writing. I have come to like Burke's books quite a bit. He writes about large, existential themes. His main characters, Dave Robicheaux and his sidekick Clete Purcell, Hackberry Holland and his deputy Pam Tibbs, are strong people but with inner weaknesses that they must always strive to overcome but can never fully conquer. His sense of place and his lyrical description thereof, whether of New Orleans, or the mountains of Montana, or the Texas and Mexico desert, are richly evocative.
Burke would have been 57 years old when this book was published and I would have been 47 that year. Now he is 77 and his recent writing is infused with knowledge of growing old and facing death. His thinking about this theme is valuable reading to me, a man who is only a short decade behind him. I hope he writes many more books before he leaves us. I will probably read at least some of them.
| Author | Stevenson, Robert Louis III |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 291 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | September 1999 |
Stevenson, a descendant of the famous adventure writer and a highly experienced deep sea diver, has produced an adventure thriller mixing wreck diving, an arms dealer/smuggler, and presidential politics.
Two expert divers are hired by ex-Nazi now arms dealer Gerhardt to pull one billion dollars in gold from the wreck of a World War I cruiser. Gerhardt plans to use the money to finance a deal to sell a Russian nuclear bomb to Saddam Hussein. Gerhardt's adopted daughter has learned of his evil ways and betrayed him to the CIA who are in contact with the two divers and are directing them as they put together evidence for an arrest. But Gerhardt blackmails the President, who in turn is manipulated by his self-serving national security adviser. They plot to betray the two divers / agents and let Gerhardt go free.
The good guys win in the end. Good CIA men unravel the plot of the evil National Security Adviser and expose the President. There is lots of shooting and violence of all kinds on the arms dealer's yacht before all the bad guys are killed and the two good guys get away with the girl.
This is a readable adventure thriller with good technical diving info but very wooden, predictable, unrealistic characters, an unbelievable plot, and no sense of style.
Ah well, he appears to have tried hard. Maybe if he re-reads Treasure Island ...
| Author | Hope, Anthony |
|---|---|
| Publication | Stirling Audio, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1894 |
| Number of Pages | 142 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 1999 |
Rudolf Rassendyll, a young unemployed English gentleman of leisure, has inherited the Elphberg appearance and red hair acquired through an illicit liaison with a prince of Ruritania, about six generations before. R visits Ruritania privately and meets the Prince, who invites him to a dinner and alcoholic binge. The Prince is drugged that night and R is drafted by Colonel Sapt to stand in his place at the next day's coronation.
For three months R is king of Ruritania, winning the love of Princess Flavia and escaping the murderous scheme of Black Michael, the real king's brother, who has the real king in a cell in the castle of Zenda.
There are feats of derring-do as R, Sapt, and others penetrate the castle, rescue the king, and fight the wild young nobleman Rupert of Hentzau. In the end, the king is saved and Michael is killed. Rudolph quietly returns to England and only a few in Rurtania know the real truth. Flavia, in spite of her undying love of R, marries the king, fulfilling her royal obligation.
The story is Romantic and Victorian, full of silly sentimental notions that were probably hard to credit even in its day. But it's also delightful. Read for what it is, a piece of romantic escapism, it's a lot of fun. The author, Anthony Hope Hawkins, was knighted in 1919. There is a sequel, available for download on the Net, which I'll probably read.
And I did read it. See Rupert of Hentzau.
| Author | Tagore, Rabindranath |
|---|---|
| Original Language | bn |
| Translators | Haq, Kaiser |
| Publication | Oxford UK, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1916 |
| Number of Pages | 80 |
| Extras | glossary |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 1999 |
A story of four people and love, morality and religion. "Uncle" is an atheist who makes a point of high principle, charity, and selflessness, in part as an example against the hypocritical believers who mouth religion but practice materialism, sexism, callousness and selfishness. His nephew, the brilliant, handsome, deep Sachi, also practices atheism while his uncle is alive but, to everyone's surprise, follows a guru swami after his death. Damini is a beautiful girl who is a ward of the swami and is in love with Saci but is a down to earth person who sees no value in the swami and Sachi's pursuit of religious ecstasy. And finally there is Sribilash, an intellectual, a friend of Sachi, who follows Sachi's lead first into atheism and then into religious mysticism. But he is not suited to it. He is in love with Damini. In the end, Damini finally opens her eyes to see that Sachi would always reject her in favor of his lonely spiritual pursuit but Sribiliash is a fine man whom she can be happy with. She marries Sribilash but she is already sick and dies not long after.
T appears to be criticizing Sachi's inner absorption, whether it takes the form of atheism or religion. but the message is not clear to me. To some extent it is a love triangle handled with some subtlety. It is also a criticism of religious hypocrisy and a request for people to open their eyes and see the world, not just abstractions and ideological or mystical visions.
This book is different from western novels and is interesting in its differentness.
I seem to recall that when I read this novella I was attracted to it by the fame of Tagore, a Nobel Prize winner, but concerned that I wouldn't understand it. It came from a country and a culture that I knew nothing about. I thought that the content might be difficult for a 20th century, then almost 21st century, westerner to understand. However I didn't feel any special problems reading it. I was surprised, for example, to see that atheism was presented in the book, not as something to be condemned, but as something to be considered. The philosophical debates were in terms that made rational sense to me, not like, for example, the Indian mysticism of Hesse's Siddhartha - which I assumed to be on the western edge, if I can put it that way, of eastern mysticism.
| Author | Austen, Jane |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1984 |
| Copyright Date | 1811 |
| Number of Pages | 429 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1999 |
Three sisters marry, one to Sir Thomas, a great and wealthy lord, master of the beautiful Mansfield Park; one to a clergyman who has the living at MP; and one to a poor and slovenly dock master by the sea. As an act of charity, the two older sisters bring the eldest child of the poor family, ten year old Fanny Price, to Mansfield Park. She grows up to be a painfully shy and self effacing young woman, accepting her lot as poor relation and conceiving a secret love for Edmund, the younger son of the house, training as a clergyman. E is the only child of the house to have proper values, high intelligence, and sincere regard for and recognition of the virtues of Fanny.
The family becomes involved with another well born family - the brother of whom wins and then abandons each of Fanny's two beautiful but frivolous cousins, only to fix his eye and charms on the unconquerable Fanny while his sister beguiles Edmund. There are trials and mistakes. Edmund imagines that the sister is a better person than she is while Fanny is roundly castigated for turning down a proposal from above her station. But all shallow characters are exposed in the end and Edmund and Fanny marry.
I have conflicting feelings about all of Austen's books. her acute faculty for observation and social nuances is remarkable. The delicacy of her sensibility reveals things that us ordinary folks don't see. But she is also a prig. Her sense of social class, propriety, the place of women, are all very backward and conventional. Her attachment to the clergy as the only decent occupation for a young man and being a clergyman's wife for a young woman, are nothing short of hypocritical given her lack of any exposition of clerical duty or life and the lack of any well married older couple in her books or her own life. Still, I knew exactly what to expect and was not disappointed.
I think this was the last of the Jane Austen books for me to read. She only published six of them. It was not my favorite.
The character of Fanny Price was so painfully prudish and withdrawn from life that, from a contemporary point of view she seemed almost mentally ill. She would not participate in the amateur theatrics organized by her cousins because they were, what, frivolous? Indeed they were. Of course in a generation or two before 1811, reading novels might also have been considered frivolous.
See the diary entry for September 25, 1999.
| Author | Hunter, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bantam Books, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 569 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | October 1999 |
Famed Vietnam era Marine marksman and sniper Bob Lee Swagger lives alone with his dog and his guns in rural Arkansas, determined never to kill again and never to mix in the world. He is recruited by a shadow agency which needs his help to find a Russian sniper who wounded him in Nam and killed his best friend, and is now expected to kill the President. Bob "the Nailer" figures out the best place and angle for an assassination, but it is all a setup. The archbishop of El Salvador is assassinated next to the President and Bob is shot as a patsy by the agents. Incredibly, he survives, escapes, enlists Nick Memphis, an honest FBI agent who keeps taking the fall for his superior's screw-ups and fights back.
By the end, Bob has wiped out a Salvadoran general and most of his top soldiers who had been involved in a massacre, and then traps and kills the rogue agents. He is captured by the FBI. The head FBI agent, a self-serving asshole, attempts to bribe and force Nick to testify and charges Swagger with murder. But S has an ace up his sleeve and exposes all.
The story dips into the ridiculous at many points and the characters are as flat and stereotyped as can be. And yet Hunter's marvelous writing skill engrosses the reader and pulls him on. H also learned a great deal about long range shooting and includes lots of technical detail. This was a lousy book but a great read, perhaps disproving Duke Ellington's aphorism, "If it sounds good it is good."
I've continued reading Hunter's books from time to time. My reaction continues to be pretty much the same. The books are unrealistic and unconvincing. The characters are caricatures. But for a person who likes this sort of thing, they are fun reading.
| Author | Weber, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Baen Books, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 422 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 1999 |
Honor Harrington commands a flotilla with a light cruiser, destroyer, and her own heavy cruiser Fearless to defend the planet Grayson in the Yeltsin star system where a culture of sexist, religious believers is under threat from the even more extreme fundamentalist Christians of Masada, a splinter faction from the original Grayson colonists who have invited in the People's Republic of Haven to give them starships with which to conquer or destroy Grayson.
Unaware of the immediate danger and upset by her sexist treatment she takes three ships away on convoy escort. She returns to find her fourth ship destroyed, her admiral/ambassador killed, and the Masadans on the loose. She and her treecat kill a bunch of assassins at a dinner party, then she fights several space battles and one land action on an asteroid, driving out or destroying all the Masadans. The "Peeps" (for Peoples' Republic of Haven) have problems with the Masadan fanaticism, foolishness, sexism and inhumanity and do not support their allies - even fighting a losing battle with them over control of a starship.
The action, science, social relations and future history are all marvelously realized. Weber comes as close to re-creating the values of C.S. Forester as any writer I've read. It isn't great literature. Its aims are limited and means circumscribed. But it's delightful popular reading.
I read a historical war/adventure thriller by Gordon Doherty The Legionary and wrote a review for Amazon. Doherty wrote a comment on my review in which he essentially said that he understood that there were problems with his book, but he wasn't trying to be a great writer, he just wanted to be another David Weber.
I read this book after being told by my daughter Robin that she liked Weber's books. I agree with her.
| Author | Peters, Elizabeth (Barbara Matz) |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 576 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 1999 |
Amelia Peabody and her husband Professor Emerson, together with their son Ramses and foster children Nephret and David, battle evil tomb robbers, ignorant amateur archaeologists who ruin a great discovery, and the gentleman bandit and black market antiquities dealer Sethos.
The plot is a ridiculous pot boiler. The bad guys always miss their shots and it is impossible to take them seriously. The family characters seem to spend more time fighting each other in order to each take all the danger and responsibility upon themselves than they do working together. It is impossible to take them seriously either. As the tenth book in a series, it reeks of formulaic writing and giving the readers exactly what they've come to expect.
The author has a PhD in Egyptology. She began writing to make money and escape the boredom of young motherhood. But while she has produced potboilers, she at least gets a lot of the human values right and she uses them with and intelligence with some good effect.
The book concludes with an interview with Peters and Rosenblatt.
Rosenblatt is nothing short of astonishing. After reading the entire book in high class British English with admixtures of Arabic and exaggerated American accents, she conducted the interview in very standard, perfectly natural, American English. And her male impersonations are so good that it's very hard to believe a woman is reading.
| Author | MacDonald, Ross |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audio Partners, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 1999 |
Private detective Lew Archer meets a young woman on the beach rescuing a bird from an oil spill. She hitches a ride with him back to L.A, then steals a bottle of sleeping pills from his bathroom and disappears. Archer goes out to find her and gets himself hired by her pharmacist husband. Soon he is led to the girl's family, the wealthy Lennoxes, owners of the spewing oil well and keepers of dark secrets, about a murder and a fire on a Navy ship off Okinawa in 1945.
Suspicion falls on the girl herself and then on her old boyfriend Harold, a ne'er-do-well blackmailer with a deep grudge against her father, then on her father - until we finally learn that her mother is the killer.
The story is very well done - lean and spare with well delineated, nicely drawn characters. Archer goes after the truth like a bloodhound on the scent, following up old paths and old mysteries, always adding more facts, more motives, more bits of background to the story. The pieces seem irrelevant until they accumulate enough weight for us to see the story emerging.
This is not a narration but rather a radio play with sound effects and a cast of 36 actors plus sound effects, music, etc. Some big names (Ed Asner, Stacey Keach, and others participated. Interesting.
| Author | Barker, Pat |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War I |
| When Read | November 1999 |
Psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers receives Siegfried Sassoon as a "patient" at Craiglockhart military mental hospital after Sassoon published a powerful anti-war manifesto. The military prefers to see S as a decorated hero gone loony than as a court martial case. Rivers works to convince him of the need to follow orders and continue the war. He also treats other cases: a man paralyzed by hysteria, a man who cannot hold down food, many who suffer from nightmares and waking hallucinations. Wilfrid Owen, another wartime poet, is there and Robert Graves, a friend of Sassoon, visits and manipulates both Sassoon and the military to prevent a court martial.
Later, Rivers changes to another job in London where he meets another medical authority who treats hysterics, with surprising success, by brutally torturing them in long electroshock sessions of alternating bullying and shock.
This is an earlier book in the same series and with the same characters (Rivers and Billy Prior) who appear later in The Ghost Road.
Barker has a deep understanding of post-traumatic stress, as we now call it, and of the complex issues for both therapist and patient in psychological treatment. She also has a high regard for the men who made these terrible sacrifices, now almost forgotten, so many years ago. Interestingly, had the cassette jacket not referred to Barker as "she", I would not have imagined that a woman wrote these books.
Humane, intelligent, and fully cognizant of the conflicts and ambiguities of the subject matter, this is a well done book.
Barker, like Alan Furst in his particular way, seems to have a deep obsession with her subject matter. She writes about the horrors of war, but not about the actual, visible violence. There is very little in her books about men at the front, though I seem to recall a scene from this or another of her books (or was it in Robert Graves?) of men assaulting the German lines at the end of the war - throwing their lives away in a war that was finished.
Her obsession is with the damage that the war did to the men's psyches. She makes no overt statements about the justification or lack thereof for the war. She doesn't even overtly support Sassoon and Owen. I don't know why. Perhaps she believes that the situation speaks for itself. Perhaps she believes that the issue of the war is long past. Perhaps she considers that her role as writer is to say what happened, not to comment on it or inject herself into the story. Perhaps she thinks that others have already written about those more social and historical issues and she needs to focus on certain kinds of personal issues that were a major part of the human experience but have not been adequately documented and explored.
Whatever is the case, she does a good job of bringing to light and documenting for the future one of the deep human costs of the war.
| Author | Trollope, Joanna |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 261 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 1999 |
A boys' choir in the English cathedral town of Aldminster preserves a 400 year old tradition of sacred music. But the rector of the cathedral needs money for building repairs and so plans to dismantle the choir, saving enough to pay for a new roof and lighting. The church community quickly divides into factions for and against the choir.
For the choir are 10 year old Henry Ashworth, his mother, and Leo Beckford, organist, choir-master, and lover of Mrs. Ashworth. The outspoken school headmaster, distracted by his wife who has left him for the Nth time, is also fighting for it. On the other side is dean Hugh "Huffo" Cavendish, the rector, a man who cannot handle his children or wife and has become rather embittered about it all.
There are various intermingled stories here. The headmaster and his wife try to find each other in spite of her need to leave him from time to time. Leo and Mrs. Ashworth come to an understanding while she dumps her selfish, two-timing husband. Frank Ashworth, Henry's grandfather, tries to uphold his old socialist principles in a new city council. Ianthe Cavendish, the dean's daughter, pursues Leo and tries to make a business in rock music publishing. Nicholas Elliot, former choir boy and now unemployed, joins the business and convinces Ianthe and her producer to make a record with Leo and little Henry. Against all expectations, it's a hit and saves the choir.
This is a pleasant, nicely done book, very much in the spirit of Anthony Trollope.
I "read" it on cassette tape but haven't got the tape and publication data in front of me and so used the printed book details above.
| Author | Coonts, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 408 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | November 1999 |
The leader of a Colombian drug cartel is extradited to the U.S. and unleashes a reign of terror in an attempt to prevent his trial. Two types of terror are employed. a professional hunter turned assassin is hired to kill President Bush, the Attorney General, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and some others, and dozens of poor, unemployed Colombians are hired for suicide attacks - the money going to their starving families (an absurd, unbelievable plot device.) In a side plot, a revolution in Cuba deposes the hated communists and produces a Cuban general with iron clad evidence against the drug lord.
The story follows several main characters. The assassin plans his killings and prepares hideouts. A young Washington Post reporter covers the Cuban revolution and the drug war. Captain Jake Grafton of previous Coonts books coordinates a Pentagon anti-drug unit. A defense lawyer for the drug lord battles his own wife's drug addiction and a growing self-revulsion. Toad Tarkington, Grafton's sidekick, assists in the battle. A black cop works undercover for the FBI against a local DC drug lord and must eventually battle it out and kill him. Even Danny the Dweeb Quayle plays a role, standing in for Bush during Bush's convalescence.
C makes a lot of telling points about the damage that drugs do to our society - from violence to corruption of high officials and banks to personal tragedies among users and their families. He's also effective in describing the assassin, both as a man and as a professional killer. The Cuban and Colombian stories are really absurd and the characters all oversimplified but, hey, it's standard thriller fare.
| Author | Proulx, E. Annie |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1999 |
Quoyle, an overweight, underego loser, lives in a small New York town, eking out a living writing useless stories for a semi-bankrupt local paper. He marries Petal, a woman who gives her favors to every man in reach. She soon detests him and is later killed in an auto accident with her lover leaving him with two small children. So he takes his kids and moves with his closet lesbian aunt to a small town in Newfoundland where the aunt has inherited a house on a bleak and empty point on the coast.
Quoyle gets a job with the local paper where he writes up car accidents and shipping news. The paper specializes in accidents, sex abuse, crime, and foreign disasters rewritten from radio news. He becomes a friend of the fine local folk, Jack Bugget, editor and fisherman, his son and daughter-in-law, the other two reporters - an odd fellow who knows the history of everything and an Englishman stranded by damage to his sailboat - and Wavey, a nice woman of Q's age who, like him, was married to a spouse who betrayed her and mocked her.
Gradually, amongst good people, Q puts his life together. He becomes a better reporter and an editor. He does right by his children. He develops real friends. He finds that love with a woman can develop mutual concern and respect. It doesn't require abasement and pain. He becomes a new man.
Q's life in New York is perhaps over satirized, but the novel is rich in sympathy and understanding for ordinary folk who care about each other and try to do the right thing. The picture of Newfoundland is also delightful with its picaresque scenes, people and language ("Jesus Cockadoodle Christ!") Marcia and I both liked this book very much.
Quoyle bought a terrible boat that everyone told him was not seaworthy, but the price was right and he bought it anyway. It sank and left him swimming in the ocean, gradually dying of hypothermia and almost drowned when Jack Bugget happens by in his own boat and utters the wonderful exclamation cited above. Jack pulls him in and saves his life. Later Jack appears to die of a heart attack or stroke, I forget exactly what, but pops up out of his coffin with a suitable Cockadoodle expression.
The novel was recommended to my by Sandy Dwiggins, a great reader and a friend of mine at the National Cancer Institute, After reading it I thought this Annie Proulx was a very fine writer and I should read more of her books. Later I found Accordion Crimes, about a series of people who own an accordion that brings each of them terrible luck.
That novel was bad. The author committed crime after crime against the characters in her book, making each one suffer cruelly. It was like the beginning of The Shipping News where Quoyle is so severely mistreated, but continued on for year after year and character after character. It began to feel like a crime against the reader. I had to put it down in disgust and have not read any of Proulx's books since then.
I've now waited more than 13 years for an opportunity to say Jesus Cockadoodle Christ but the occasion has either not yet arrived, or I wasn't suitably prepared. But I remember it. Perhaps one day when I appear to be done and gone I will pop up out of my box and say it, beaming all around.
| Author | Jewett, Sarah Orne |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1896 |
| Number of Pages | 78 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1999 |
A middle aged writer spends the summer at Dunnet Landing on the coast of Maine, boarding at the house of Almira Todd, a widow in her 60's who lives by gathering and selling herbs and taking in a boarder. The book is a collection of character sketches of the elderly people she meets in Dunnet.
There is Almiry herself; her old mother Mrs. Blackett who lives offshore on Green Island with her bashful 60 year old son William; Captain Littlepage, a retired sea captain "on the lee shore of age" with a strange tale of an arctic city of the dead; Mrs. Fosdick, an old friend of Almiry; and Elijah Tilley, an old fisherman who spends the winter knitting socks for sale and who keeps his cottage in perfect condition in memory of his wife who died eight years before and whom he sorely misses. there is also a story of the now dead Joanna who, jilted by her fiancee, went to live a hermit's life on bleak Shell Heap Island.
J tells these tales with great sympathy and love for these simple people. It is an idealized romantic view of fine, homey folk with neat cottages and small sailboats (about which J seems very knowledgeable.) It is a pleasant book, very easy to read, full of characters who are very easy to like. J apparently wrote it as a tribute to what she perceived as an idyllic and vanishing way of life. It is only a record of summer and pleasant life. Winter, storms at sea, hard times - aren't in this book. but it's good that someone documented the fine things, that someone preserved for us what was sweet and lovely, even if it's only a one-sided summertime view.
Jewett would have been 47 years old when this book was published. She was living with another woman, a widow and writer named Annie Fields, who some critics have suggested may possibly have been her lover (ain't Wikipedia a treasure house of biographical notes?) She was a keen observer of people whom others would not know or notice.
In twelve more days I will be 67 years old. Being that age, looking backward, looking into a limited future, I may have a different view of the scenes and people of this novel than I had at age 53 in 1999. I ask myself, How long will Almiry be able to keep up her boarding house? How long will she be able to collect herbs? What will Elijah Tilley do if and when he can no longer see to knit socks? Will he grieve for the rest of his life? I know I would.
Wanting to know when I first started reading ebooks I did a search for "pdb" in the "format" field or "bytes" as a field name of my book notes. This was the first one. It may have been the first book I read on a Palm Pilot.
I don't make a note of bytes anymore because it's no longer a good indicator of the size of a book. Ebooks are no longer stored as text files. The new files may be more or less compressed, contain more or less markup, embedded fonts, and varying numbers and sizes of images, so that one book may be represented in multiple ebooks of quite different sizes.
This may not have been the first ebook that I read. I see in my diary that I downloaded a book from the Gutenberg site in October, 1999, before this book, and read part of it on my laptop. This one may have been the first one I read on a Palm. If so, I'm surprised that I say anything to that effect on the book card.
| Author | Crichton, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1999 |
Casey singleton, vice-president of Norton Aircraft, is put in charge of the Incident Response Team tasked to discover why a Norton N-22 wide body jet went out of control over the Pacific, injuring 50 passengers and killing several.
The story takes us through all of the many pressures on the manufacturers. Foreign customers want "offsets", i.e., assembly in their own countries, especially of the wing which is full of proprietary technology. the union opposes offsets and launches job actions and violence. The airlines want to blame accidents on the plane, especially if their maintenance or piloting is at fault, and the manufacturers dare not criticize their own customers. News media stars, with no understanding of aircraft or the industry, circle like vultures, hoping for a big media moment as they publicly defame a perfectly safe airplane and wipe out an old company for the sake of a 12 minute TV segment. And finally, there are company executives struggling for power and willing to sink the company future to get it now.
Singleton eventually determines the cause of the incident and foils the egotistical news vultures and the bastard assistant CEO who set her up to take the blame for everything.
The writing is generally competent but not impressive. The characters are simple. Some pieces of the plot are hard to believe. The social relations are oversimplified. But the technical story - of the plane, the world of airlines and manufacturing - is marvelous. Poor literature. Fine informational writing.
I seem to recall that this book was based on a real aircraft whose future was destroyed by a "60 Minutes" TV special that claimed it was unsafe. For some reason I'm thinking that it was the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar wide body jet. I also have a vague recollection that a door blew off a passenger jet while in flight and this was the fodder for a sensationalist TV show. Even though the safety record of the plane was better than average, passengers were afraid of it and airlines stopped ordering it.
I've probably misremembered everything. It was a long time ago. Lockheed did in fact exit the passenger aircraft business when sales of the L-1011 proved disappointing. But maybe that had to happen anyway. Airplanes have become so big, so expensive, so incredibly high tech, so hugely capital intensive, that it's hard for the world to support any more than the two companies still standing in the large jet business, Boeing and Airbus.
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Tor Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 471 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 1999 |
A prequel to Eon, which I have not yet read.
Olmy, a young soldier of Thistledown, is assigned to use "The Way", some sort of extra-spatial shortcut in space, to go to Lamarckia, an Earth like world where 4,000 religious followers of Able Lenk have illegally migrated and created a colony which rejects the advanced technology of Thistledown. He encounters a world of "ecoi", continent sized life organizations composed of unknown central quasi-intelligent entities directing millions of "scions" in a complex ecology.
Amidst this, over a period of 35 years (5 years on Thistledown), the settlers have evolved struggling farms and towns and have devolved into conflict and war - long banished from human society. Olmy's mission is to observe, return, and report. But return is impossible. He participates in a sailing exploration. After ship wreck he is taken to one of the continents where Brion, the local ruler, has established contact with the ecos and is trading knowledge for food and minerals while his soldiers attack other settlements. Brion teaches the ecos about chlorophyll. It is a fatal mistake which upsets the balance in the ecology and causes the ecoi to transform their million years old life systems. Eventually Thistledown reopens a connection to Lamarkia and rescues 90 year old Olmy, who is restored in a new body. All the settlers willing to return are brought back.
Bear's conceptions are very grand, very humane, tolerably consistent, and always interesting. Presumably Eon deals with the huge hollowed out asteroid Thistledown in its journey through space and its war over the Way with the Jarts. Bear has become one of my favorite SF authors.
I'm confused today about why this is called a prequel. I thought that the asteroid containing Thistledown and the entrance to the Way was discovered in the book Eon. But it is presumed to exist here. However the whole timeline is malleable since Thistledown was made by people of the future, so maybe this event occurs in the future before the people of the past discover the asteroid.
Of course we can't understand this. Time travel, like faster than light travel, is one of those things that modern science says is impossible. However it tremendously expands the scope of science fiction, so much so that SF would be seriously limited without these violations of known scientific law and a big chunk of the literature would have to be thrown out if we disallow them.
Bear handles these conundrums well. He breaks the scientific law, but after he's broken it he handles the ramifications with considerable intelligence. It's not just that everything is just like we know it but Joe Explorer can travel through time. Bear has time loops and portals. He gives us glimpses into multiple time dimensions. My favorite of all is the scene (in Eternity I think it was) where the Jart who has taken over the mind of his human host is suddenly humbled by a confrontation with a human from the future whom the Jart immediately recognizes as a member of "descendant command". Bear is smart enough to present that to us and then smarter still in letting it go there and leaving it to us to figure out what that might mean.
| Author | Davies, Robertson |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Penguin Books, 1987 |
| Copyright Date | 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 310 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1999 |
The story begun in Fifth Business continues with David Staunton, son of Boy Staunton, going to Europe to seek psychoanalytic help concerning his alcohol consumption and the unresolved problems in his relationship with his dead father and with others, as well as in his own image of himself.
Most of the book consists of his sessions with Dr. Johanna Von Haller, interspersed with his extended narrative concerning key parts of his life - examined and written down so as to prepare himself for analysis. The sessions are brilliantly done. Davies gives us an intelligent Jungian analyst analyzing a highly intelligent man. There are revelations, reactions and resistance. But there are no cheap shots either at the analyst or the patient. The complex relationship between father and son is gradually made understandable. Davey's long held childish beliefs and disappointments are put into perspective and he is gradually freed from the severe judgments he has rendered against himself and from misguided notions about other people in his life - his nurse Netty, sister Caroline, and Jewish girlfriend Judy Wolff. He reaches a more mature and balanced outlook.
At the end he visits a resort in Switzerland and there meets Dunstan Ramsey, Magnus Eisengrim, and the woman behind them. He deals with these people and handles Eisengrim's involvement in Boy's death with a detachment and perspective he could not have achieved before.
Davies is deep. He works with a cast of very unusual and very complex characters. He makes us believe in their intelligence and sophistication, and their differences. Not many writers could pull it off.
| Author | Churchill, Winston S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 683 |
| Extras | maps, photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 1999 |
"Theme of the Volume: How the Great Democracies Triumphed and so Were able to Resume the Follies Which Had so Nearly Cost Them Their Life.
Opening with the D-Day invasion of France and ending with his departure from office, just before the atom bomb was dropped, C gives us the political history of the last year of the war. Hitler is no longer a player in international affairs. There isn't the slightest interest in talking to him. The Allies will only hang him, and only accept unconditional surrender.
It appears to me that while the Russians slog it out in the east and the British in Italy and the low countries, the Americans move at blitzkrieg speed, cutting off and destroying whole German armies in France and then in Germany. Patton is barely mentioned but perhaps he was the genius behind it.
The real focus of the narrative is on the coming cold War. C is frantic to stop the Russians from creating police states in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and especially Poland. And he is constantly confounded by American appeasement of Stalin and refusal to place post-war priorities above the final crushing of the enemy, which C regarded as inevitable anyway. Britain went to war to save Poland and then had to watch its subjugation by the Soviets after victory. He was determined not to allow the communists to take Greece by minority revolt, and he stopped it with British troops, against the opinion of British and American left and liberal people. I was one of those but C's account gave me a new view of the matter.
This was the last volume of an account which I read over a 2-1/2 year period, a few pages a night, before going to sleep. It is the end of a significant period in my reading life.
Churchill's account was not the most objective, the most detailed, or the most accurate of all of the histories of the war. But neither was it the work of a self-serving politician aiming just to justify his own actions. It was a serious attempt at objective history. It was also very much a primary source document, telling us the thoughts of one of the most important leaders and decision makers in the war, explaining why he made the decisions that he made, and giving us his highly informed and deeply engaged perspective on the world situation at each stage of the conflict.
The last paragraph that I wrote in 1999 remains relevant today. Reading this series of six books was a significant event. It was akin to my reading and ongoing second reading of Molecular Biology of the Cell, though it was also very different too. But each of those involved thousands of pages of material read in small doses over a long time, retaining my interest over the entire period.
The historians of today consider that Roosevelt intentionally marginalized and even, to a limited extent, ridiculed Churchill in the last years of the war in an attempt to win Stalin over to his side. By all accounts that I recall, Churchill was hurt by this. He believed that Stalin was an evil man with whom they had to deal in order to defeat a more dangerous evil. He wanted Roosevelt to stand with him against Stalin, believing that they could win a better peace if they stood up to Stalin than if they coddled him. As he put it, he wanted to shake hands with Stalin as far to the east as possible.
Could the Western Allies have saved East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary? There's no way to know. Roosevelt apparently either did not believe it could be done, or else did not believe that the American public would stand for the additional casualties and the threat of another war that might ensue from a strong anti-Soviet policy. Possibly he even judged that he could charm Stalin into working with him - something that Churchill understood could not be done.
The post war situation was complicated. Yugoslavia saved itself from Russian domination. Czechoslovakia seems to have gone along with the Russians, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were overrun by the Red Army with no real possibility of western intervention. Maybe something could have been done in East Germany if the U.S. and Britain got to Berlin before the Russians, or even at the same time. Maybe something could have been done in Czechoslovakia if American forces penetrated deeper into the country. It's probably impossible to know. However if even one country could have been saved, and if that country were to develop a democratic government and not a fascist one, then it might have been worth another 100,000 or 200,000 British and American casualties in place of the even larger number of Russian casualties that were otherwise lost. Maybe. How does one measure the life of a man, or a hundred thousand men, against the relative freedom of a foreign country? How does one measure the life of an American against the life of a Russian or a Briton or a German? It's a quandary that has faced us at least since World War I and faces us still in the Middle East and will face us again in the future - most immediately today in Syria. There are no easy answers, though that doesn't mean that there are no right answers.
Churchill was a great man. He was a man of high intelligence, personal courage, and deep commitment to his principles and ideals. He was both an idealist, willing to fight on in the face of tremendous odds, and a realist, understanding that in order to win he needed to temper his military ambitions and seek every ally that could be had, even if it were the devil himself. At the time of Britain's greatest peril, he proved to be the right man to lead the country. His great history stands as one of the great histories that we have.
| Author | Kurzweil, Ray |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Penguin, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 388 |
| Extras | index, bibliography, web links, notes, diagrams |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence |
| When Read | December 1999 |
Kurzweil, a great engineer, designer, promoter, and polymath with more practical experience in artificial intelligence than most writers, analyzes the current trends in computerized AI and makes predictions for the next 100 years. He foresees not only a rise in AI, but a merge of human and artificial consciousness as humans adopt more electrical computer assistance and programs become more sophisticated and take on the memories of humans. Within 100 years he expects the majority of conscious beings to not be tied to a single physical host.
Interestingly, he recognizes neural nets, genetic algorithms and recursive search as the three techniques of AI. He makes little mention of traditional symbol processing - though he does speak of the publishing and transfer of complete knowledge structures that, when loaded, impose no training requirement on the learner.
K's timetables seem very optimistic (or perhaps pessimistic if one sees all this as a very bad thing) and he misses what I believe are some critical issues. But his analysis is always worth reading and full of enlightening ideas. One big issue he seems to have missed is whether and in what sense there will be individuals at all in this silicon future.
This is the first book I've read with a "webography" in addition to a bibliography. It seems to be a big hit.
I think it's still too early to make any more judgments about the accuracy of K's predictions except to say that I still think he's too optimistic about timetables.
I don't think as much about AI as I used to. It may be part of a general reduction of my interest in computer science, or perhaps due to the increase in my interest in biochemistry and molecular biology. Perhaps getting more interested in how we work as intelligent machines at the physical level has preempted some of the interest I had in abstract intelligence.
It's still a fascinating subject and will get more so as time goes by. I still believe, with Kurzweil, that we stand at the precipice of an extraordinary revolution in the development of life and of intelligence that will make the future not at all like the past. The sudden (measured in evolutionary time) explosion of the human population and its even more sudden acquisition of deep scientific knowledge is going to change everything, really everything.
| Author | Trollope, Joanna |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 299 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1999 |
Two families have lived across from each other for many years, raising their children together. Fergus, a meticulous decorator and antiques expert, lives with Gina and their daughter Sophie in a beautifully restored old house while Laverne and his wife live across the road in the "Bee House", an ancient building restored as a hotel. Fergus suddenly leaves his wife after years of bickering and moves to London, leaving Gina an emotional wreck and Sophie feeling lost and betrayed. Sophie turns to her grandmother Vi who suffers her own loss when elderly Dan, the man she loves, suffers a heart attack and dies.
Gina becomes involved with Laverne, throwing the other family, with their three sons into turmoil. But Laverne's wife eventually comes to the decision that she still loves her husband. She shows him that she is a better, more stable woman than Gina and he returns to her. Sophie, and to a lesser extent the boys, do some fast growing up.
Trollope is good at this stuff. she is sensitive to nuances in interpersonal dynamics and she has a feel for the problems and the outlooks of the different ages and sexes. I wouldn't normally be reading her books. They aren't my "thing". But the selection of audio tapes at the libraries is very limited, so I listen to them. I'm not sorry. they are well done in their limited domestic sphere.
Joanna Trollope is said to be a fifth generation niece of Anthony Trollope, the famous Victorian era novelist.
This is the last book I recorded for the twentieth century.