Books read January through December 2000
| Author | London, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1906 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2000 |
The story opens with two Alaskan frontiersmen taking a body by dogsled for shipment home. They are pursued by wolves who become bolder and bolder, luring off and killing dogs, then killing one of the men until the last man, tired almost to death, fighting with flame and torches, is saved by a passing party. Later, a female half wolf half dog, leader of the pack, goes off with a male to mate. The pup White Fang is born. He discovers the world, hunting, fighting, the struggle to eat or be eaten.
Later, White Fang becomes a servant to the Indian Grey Beaver until he is traded to the foul Beauty Smith for whiskey. Smith makes him fight, turning him into a savage dog killer in gambling pits. He wins every fight until a bulldog grabs him by the throat and won't let go no matter what WF does. He would have been killed but he's saved by a decent man who cannot abide such an evil blood sport. The man knocks down Smith and saves WF, taking him away. There follows a long, difficult effort to domesticate WF, to teach him calmness, trust, and love. In the end the man takes WF with him to California where WF saves the man's life and becomes a loyal dog.
I don't know if London gets his canine facts right or not. Clearly he knows a lot about dogs and wild wolves but clearly too he has made up much that no one can know. right or wrong, the story is fascinating and compelling. the struggle for survival, the perspective of a wild animal, and the view of domestication from the dog's side are all absorbing. I liked it.
This is the first novel I've read online, partly on my new handheld Revo computer. More will follow.
This is also one of those vivid stories that sticks in my memory. I remember quite a few details of the initial scene. The she-wolf-dog sneaks in among the huskies and gets fed by the men who don't recognize that she doesn't belong there until it is too late. She lures off male dogs who follow to mate with her and are then eaten by the wolf pack. One of the two men goes crazy, taking the last few bullets he runs after the pack and shoots at them, vainly. The survivor, huddles by a fire with the last two remaining huskies, one on each side. The wolves attack and suddenly the huskies are gone. He didn't see what happened to them. I seem to recall that he has climbed a tree and is cornered when the other party comes by and drives off the wolf pack with guns. The starvation facing the wolf pack was palpable. Their boldness and desperation made very real. The men even more desperate.
Many other scenes in the story were also vivid. WF's treatment in the Indian village is not very good. He is nothing like a pet.
White Fang is the converse of London's other popular story, Call of the Wild. Both books were financially successful, probably London's most lucrative books.
London wrote about these books:
"I have been guilty of writing two animal—two books about dogs. The writing of these two stories, on my part, was in truth a protest against the "humanizing" of animals, of which it seemed to me several "animal writers" had been profoundly guilty. Time and again, and many times, in my narratives, I wrote, speaking of my dog-heroes: "He did not think these things; he merely did them," etc. And I did this repeatedly, to the clogging of my narrative and in violation of my artistic canons; and I did it in order to hammer into the average human understanding that these dog-heroes of mine were not directed by abstract reasoning, but by instinct, sensation, and emotion, and by simple reasoning. Also, I endeavored to make my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the mark set by scientific research, and awoke, one day, to find myself bundled neck and crop into the camp of the nature-fakers". (quoted from the Wikipedia entry for White Fang.)
This write up was my first of the 21st century and one of the last read in the 20th. Now that I'm working backwards through my collection of book cards it is the last of the 21st century and I head boldly into my middle age and relative youth.
| Author | Keegan, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1977 |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | January 2000 |
K recounts the entire battle from the landing all the way through to the invasion of Germany and crushing of the third Reich. Only selected stories are told, focusing on particular fights by particular groups - American paratroopers on D-1, Canadian invaders, Scotsmen thrown into a terrible assault around Caen, Polish troops who sealed the Falaise pocket, Free-French who marched into Paris, and finally, the Germans.
Although the Russians took the brunt of the German onslaught and tore the heart out of the German Army, the Allies in France and Germany with their overwhelming sea, air and armored power, dealt staggering blows to the enemy, killing or capturing huge numbers of Germans and dealing with quite large and well prepared enemy forces. The death blows were dealt by the British and American air forces and by Patton's highly mobile, brilliantly led, Third Army.
I read books like this with a deep sense of gratitude to those who fought and died, and a deep satisfaction that they killed hundreds of thousands of Nazi sons of bitches and tore the master race and its scientific army to shreds. I need to read books like this to counter the effects of books like Hersey's, Levi's, Frankel's, and so on.
I've read enough books about the Normandy campaign that I ought to have a deep knowledge of all of the details. But that's not what I come away with. I forget many of the individual names of commanders and soldiers and dates and places of specific engagements. What I remember are the images that form in my mind - of the landings, the parachute drops, an American battalion standing off a much larger German counter attacking force, Scotsmen being chewed up in the meat grinder at Caen, the destruction of the city by air and artillery causing huge damage to the French and very little to the Germans, the massive aerial bombardment that drove Germans mad just before the American breakout, German reinforcements being decimated from the air before they ever made it to the front, the carnage on the road to Falaise.
Images from books and films combine in my mind. I lose track of what specific book or movie told me what specific story. But I keep reading. I never seem to get enough. It's a compelling story.
| Author | Benford, Gregory |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Avon Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 195 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Young adult |
| When Read | January 2000 |
17 year old Matt Bohles lives with his parents in "the Can", a huge space station orbiting Jupiter. He had left over-crowded, poverty ridden earth with his parents at the age of 8 and hopes never to return. But the space agency on Earth is closing the project for lack of funds and ordering everyone home. Matt also faces the problems of adolescence, a bully, the social rites of boy and girl friends, attraction to a girl, and beginning to assume responsibilities in work.
When a data collector designed by Matt and an older engineer fails, Matt makes a dangerous shuttle trip, against orders, to recover the satellite based sensor. He returns with it on the last wisps of fuel and the lab people find it clogged with extra-terrestrial microbes. This leads to a mission to a Jovian moon where artifacts are found indicating that a spaceship was there and is on its way back. It is a momentous discovery which insures the future of space exploration.
This is a book for adolescents but not without adult interest. The science is excellent - space station, shuttle flight, terraforming Ganymede, and so on are extremely interesting. The psychology is perfectly okay and the character of Matt is appealing. we don't see any of the phenomenal pessimism of the later books.
I presume young Matt is the "old Matt" of the later Against Infinity.
This seems to be the last book I read by Benford. Some of the books were such downers that they were very depressing to read. I know that there's some awful stuff in the future but it's still hard to stand still and allow oneself to be hit over the head with it.
| Author | Hope, Anthony |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg, 1898 |
| Copyright Date | 1894 |
| Number of Pages | 385 |
| Genres | Fiction; Adventure |
| When Read | January 2000 |
In this sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda, three years have passed since Rudolph Rassendyll saved the life of his distant cousin, King Rudolph of Ruritania. Queen Flavia, while trying to be a good wife to the king, cannot forget her true love, the man who played the king. Unable to hold herself back, she writes a letter to R.R. and entrusts it to Count Fritz von Tarlever to take it to him. But Fritz is mugged by Rupert, who intends to use the letter to blackmail the king into letting him return to Ruritania and become a power behind the throne.
Rudolph, Fritz, Colonel Sapt, and a few friends, including Rudolph's English valet, perform one bold feat after another to stop the plot. In the end, the king is killed by Rupert, Rudolph must once again play king, and Rupert is killed after losing a sword fight to Rudolph. Rudolph must choose whether to change identities, stay with his beloved queen and play king - a course urged on him by all, or stick to strict honesty and return to England. He deliberates long and hard and reaches a decision. But before he can announce it he is shot and killed by Rupert's associate assassin. He is buried with full honors as king.
As with many other sequels the charm and romance of the original is no longer fresh. The quality of the writing and the melodrama are not less than in PoZ, but it is hard to be beguiled twice in the same way. Furthermore, the rather priggish rigidity of R's Victorian moral code, always difficult to swallow, becomes even more wearing with time. Still the surprise ending is well done. Having setup an unbearable dilemma, the author leaves R suspended between its horns like an indeterminate electron in a quantum divide, avoiding the pitfalls of either side.
When I started to type up the XML for this book, thirteen years after I read it, I was remembering fondly the ambiance of Ruritania and Zenda. Then I read what I wrote and realized that I was romanticizing my memory of the book. I kind of liked it but wasn't entranced by it as I sort of imagined my memory of it to be. Reading the criticism brings back the reality to me.
As I type up the cards I correct misspellings and bad grammar. It's nice to see that, at my later age, I can still improve upon things that I wrote at a younger age - 53 in this case. However I had to put my glasses on to check what was on the book card before typing what appears at the end of my comment. Had I really written "like an indeterminate electron in a quantum divide"? Yep. That's what I wrote. Well, I'm here to capture my past, not to re-write it. I'll let it stand.
| Author | Sparks, Nicholas |
|---|---|
| Publication | Time Warner Audio Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2000 |
Theresa, a 36 year old Boston columnist, divorcee and mother of a 12 year old boy, finds a message in a bottle on the beach in Cape Cod. It is a love letter from a man named Garrett to his dead wife Catherine. The letter bespeaks a deep and abiding love and touches Theresa very deeply. Persuaded against better judgment to publish the letter, she is sent two more letters and goes to North Carolina to find Garrett.
She meets him but says nothing of her knowledge of the letters. They become involved and fall in love. He battles his demon of guilt and loss of his wife, always holding back. She is undecided. They share a torrid romance which culminates in a moment of decision for each of them. Then he discovers the letters in her drawer and is shocked. He feels that he has been lied to, manipulated and betrayed. They separate but each longs for the other. Finally, he resolves to marry her, but is drowned in a storm while sending his last bottle letter to Catherine from his sailboat.
The story is not unintelligent and the writing is perfectly competent, but the emotions are romantic, sentimental and manipulative. It is a book clearly intended to offer a romanticized view of love and a good cry at the end for undemanding female readers. There is more than a suggestion of spiritualism in the bottle letters and in Garrett's dreams, without ever asserting any such nonsense.
It didn't work for me but I'm sure there is a significant audience for this sort of thing.
I just looked up Sparks in the Wikipedia. He has had a fairy tale sort of life. He was a college track star for Notre Dame and is a devout Catholic. After graduation he had a number of jobs, including waiting tables, telemarketing dental products, and selling drugs for a pharmaceutical company before a literary agent spotted his second, as yet unpublished novel in her agency's slush pile and liked it, offering to represent Sparks. She got him a one million dollar advance on sales and the book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week. More novels and quite a few movies ensued.
So here he is, handsome, rich, athletic, deeply religious, a committed philanthropist, a family man, and an author of runaway best sellers. It's a story right out of one of his novels.
| Author | Weyman, Stanley J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1893 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; France |
| When Read | February 2000 |
The fictional memoirs of Gaston de Bonne, Sieur de Marsac. a down and out 40 year old ex-soldier in the Huguenot cause in 1588. He sends a petition to the court of Henry, King of Navarre, hoping for any kind of commission. He is ridiculed by the court dandies but receives a secret commission to rescue a girl from a house and take her to the Baron de Rosny.
Everything goes wrong. The only help he can recruit are rogues who rob him, steal the token of recognition he must show the girl, and sell him out to his enemies. He gets the girl anyway and takes her first to his mother's house in Blois. There the girl is tricked into the hands of her enemies and de Marsac finds his mother dying and in terror of a criminal priest who has extorted all her money, threatening to denounce her to be burned for a Huguenot.
Many adventures follow. There is a sword fight on the stairs in a dark house, a clandestine meeting with the vacillating king, an arrest, a pursuit into plague stricken territory, a fight with a bully in a tavern, an attempted assassination of the king, and so on. In the end, he wins the hand of the girl and the favor of the king to a happy ever after ending.
Merely describing the swashbuckling plot does not do full justice to the depth and charm of Marsac's character or to the beauty and subtlety of Weyman's prose.
I liked this book very much. W rivals Sabatini and even Graves in his power as a writer and his knowledge of history. I'll read more. See also several diary entries.
Looking up the diary entries, they were fairly interesting. I particularly like the entry I made in 20130204, talking about the significance of history and historical fiction in our lives, as well as about Weyman.
This was the first of Weyman's books that I have read. I think it is still my favorite. There are some excerpts in the three diary entries I made in February 2000 about this book that illustrate why I liked it so much.
Looking back on it, there are a number of scenes that still come to mind. One is the opening. If I remember correctly, Gaston is in the cheapest of rooming houses where he has given up his groom, no longer able to afford even a modestly priced servant. He gets an invitation to the court and shows up in the midst of a court party, wearing his best but still shabby clothes, only to discover that the invitation he received was not from the king but was a joke at his expense - to see if he would actually come and imagine that he has an appointment with the king. He is humiliated but has no choice but to swallow his humiliation and move on.
Another scene I remember is the fight with the bully in the tavern. The bully makes fun of him and tries to goad him into a fight. Gaston tries to stay above the situation but the bully is having none of that and he is forced to defend himself. When he draws his sword and the fight begins a number of thrusts and parries occur before the bully begins to realize that the man he has provoked is not just a down and out poseur. He is a real swordsman and the bully is in real danger of losing his life.
If I am remembering the scene correctly, this is our first introduction to Gaston as a fighter. Until then, we don't know if his talk of being a soldier is bluster or not. The fight serves to give us a deeper appreciation of the man. His image of himself is not a pose. He is the real thing. But he is neither a superman nor a man of supreme self-confidence. He is a man who has courage and ability but has been knocked about by life.
I still look back very fondly on this book.
| Author | Thomas, Ross |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 314 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | February 2000 |
Terrorism expert Booth Stallings is fired from his research job and immediately hired by a cut out figure to escort a Filipino NPA communist guerrilla, with whom Booth soldiered 40 years before against the Japanese, to Hong Kong to pick up five million dollars as a bribe to retire. Ex secret service agent Georgia Blue accompanies him but he picks up three other adventurers / con men to help, Artie Wu, Durant, and "Otherguy" Overby.
The five go to Manilla and eventually to Sebu. they are hounded by the Manilla police, an underworld figure who may be CIA, the 65 year old guerrilla, his 25 year old independent wife, and two real CIA agents. But they outsmart everyone by means of plots within plots until, eventually, they kill the guerrilla and steal the money. In the end it turns out to have been Marcos' money and the mastermind of the whole deal - who double crosses everyone and kills several people, is Georgia Blue. Wu, Durant and Overby (who apparently are all inherited from other RT books) outsmart her, get the money, set her up for jail, and split four million four ways, with one million to the NPA.
The story is wild, the characters improbable, but the writing has a lot of verve. There is the customary, overdone too smart, too tough, characterization, but the characters also do some unexpectedly human things that keep us from writing them off and losing interest.
Thomas is unique and different. He writes within a stilted genre but he has an original streak that makes it all readable.
"NPA" = New People's Army, an armed wing of the Communist Party of the Phillippines. Marcos = Ferdinand Marcos, president and then dictator and "kleptocrat" of the Phillippines.
| Author | Oppenheim, E. Phillips |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1917 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War I |
| When Read | February 2000 |
A man is landed by Zeppelin in England to spy in a little village. He is a Swedish baron whose mother was German and is serving in the German army. He arrives at Lady Cranston's house with a letter of introduction from her brother whom he knew at college. The brother is now a prisoner of war and was starving until the baron saved him. The spy offers Philippa and her to-be sister-in-law Helen the release of the brother in exchange for their aid in fronting for him. thinking that there is absolutely nothing to spy on in the village, they agree.
Meanwhile, Lord and Lady Cranston are at loggerheads over his apparent refusal to fight in the war. In fact he is Britain's foremost mine warfare expert and secretly directs the mining of the coast. He is the target of the spy. Lady C becomes furious with her husband and tries to provoke him by consorting with the spy - but it all comes right in the end.
Le Carre says of Oppenheim that he almost single handedly started World War I. Certainly this is a patriotic book. O was an extremely popular author of 150 books plus numerous short stories, movies, and other materials. Yet who has heard of him today?
The politics, psychology and human relationships in the story are purely conventional, drawing nothing from life. The story itself is, at best, very implausible. The characters are flat. Yet O has the professional fluency of the highly skilled popular writer.
I doubt that I'll read more of him.
| Author | Boyne, Walter J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | February 2000 |
This is a straight-forward history of the war at sea during World War II. B devotes almost as much time to Europe as to the Pacific, with accounts of the war in the Med and the allied landings in Norway, Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France. There are also significant chapters on Nazi sea warfare - not only in submarines, but also in Norway and something I didn't know about, in a massive seaborne evacuation of East Prussia before the Russian advance, when Russian subs sank three transport with 25,000 refugees.
Boyne praises the courage, competence and professionalism of the Japanese Navy and Army but blasts them for horrible cruelty and blasts the Emperor and government for sacrificing so many people to hang on to power for two to three years after the war was lost.
B has no doubt but that the atom bomb was the most humane way to end the war. Not only would millions of Japanese have died by fighting or starvation had the war lasted, but possibly millions of Chinese, Koreans, and other conquered people would have died too. He points out, for example, that 250,000 Chinese were killed in retaliation for Doolittle's raid - a fact little known to anyone outside China.
The U.S. Navy grew not only in size and technology but also in experience and competence over the course of the war. by the end we had a tremendously powerful force - the greatest naval force in world history.
I understand why the victims of aggression, i.e., the Allies, fought so hard in this war, though there were more than enough men who found ways to avoid combat. But why did the Germans and especially the Japanese fight so ferociously? Why did they so readily lay down their lives? I've read answers to this question and they are not unconvincing. Some of them have to do with fighting for close comrades in shared danger rather than for ideals. Some have to do with personal or family honor. Certainly some have to do with accepting and internalizing the false propaganda fed to them. But weren't there Germans and Japanese who asked themselves Why am I trying to kill people who have done no harm to me or to my country? Why am I putting my life on the line for corrupt and/or demented leaders? It's a puzzle.
| Author | Clement, Hal (Henry Clement Stubbs) |
|---|---|
| Publication | Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 179 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 2000 |
This was incorporated in The Essential Hal Clement: Trio for Slide Rule and Typewriter, edited by Mark L Olsen and Anthony R. Lewis, pages 23-201.
An alien detective in pursuit of a killer belonging to his own race crash lands on earth. His body is four pounds of gelatinous matter composed of tiny virus like cells that can flow into a host organism and live as a symbiont. Landing on a small island with synthetic oil farms and tanks, he flows into a 15 or so year old boy. after learning the language and culture, he reveals himself and his mission to the boy. After many false leads they discover that the killer inhabits the boy's father. The boy tricks his father into attempting a rescue in a burning shed. The killer paralyzes the father and attempts to escape the flames but is caught and burned to death by the boy.
The story is terribly well written, supposedly on a dare. C was told that SF and mystery wouldn't mix and he set out to prove otherwise. Characters and themes are simple but attractive. The relationships between "Hunter" and Bob, between Bob and parents, friends, Doctor, teacher, etc., are all decent and upbeat - presenting us a view of life on earth that is optimistic and attractive. And the unusual plot works well. I also liked the later 40's science and culture.
I read this book a long time ago. 40 years or so. I am surprised at how much I remembered - at least of the salient incidents - Bob falling down the stairs when he thinks the strange goings on in his body are symptoms of madness, and the fire at the end.
Well done.
I still recall some of this. Hunter is concerned not to interfere in the boy's life. But when Bob hurts himself falling down the stairs, Hunter uses his own protoplasm (or whatever it is), to stitch together the boy's injuries since he considers himself responsible for the boy's fall. The boy goes to the doctor (where am I dredging this up from?) and the doctor puts antiseptic on the wound. The antiseptic damages Hunter, who recoils from it, opening the wound, surprising the doctor who then must treat a more serious injury than he initially conceived. The fire is very carefully planned between Hunter and Bob. Most of the ideas come from the boy, who wants to save his father from the killer inside him and has a better understanding of his father than Hunter can have. When the killer leaves the father's body, he looks to be a blob of jelly, creeping slowly over the ground. It gives Bob an understanding of what it is that is inside him, but in the end (if I remember correctly), he volunteers himself to be a permanent host for the Hunter.
I also seem to recall scenes of his father in a jeep, his father using a slide rule, and quite good technical explanations by father to son about his work and about scientific matters.
Looking back on this, I think the idea of hosting another consciousness is an extraordinary one that could be explored in a huge variety of ways. Greg Bear has a totally different take on it in Eternity, where a human carefully erects a kind of cage inside his mind and then brings in a Jart consciousness that has been captured and imprisoned for, if I remember correctly, hundreds of years. It all seems to work for a while but the Jart eventually takes over, not for evil purposes, but for non-human Jart purposes.
Clement's own treatment of the problem is pretty well done. He manages to address some of the difficulties in a logical way without getting lost in the complexities - something that would be very easy to do.
I don't recall when I first read this book. I might have been a teenager in high school or even junior high school. I seem to recall that I first discovered science fiction sometime around age 12. I went through all of the books of interest in the school library and in the local public libraries. I found them tremendously absorbing. They played a big role in my life. They satisfied a powerful, if naive, need. "Escape" doesn't seem to me to be the right word for that need. It was more like a need for a larger, grander world. I don't think I needed so much to escape the world I was in, though there certainly were many aspects from which I yearned to escape, rather it was a positive attraction to something else.
I still read, in part, to learn and experience a larger, grander world. I require more than I required as a young teen. I am far more conscious of the author and of the choices and mechanics of writing than I was then. But I'm still a reader and I believe that my reading today is a natural and logical growth of the reading I did then, still impelled by some of the same motivations.
| Author | Brand, Max |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1930 |
| Number of Pages | 232 |
| Genres | Fiction; Western |
| When Read | March 2000 |
Hell raising bully Harry Destry is framed by seeming friend Chester "Chet" Bent and spends six years in federal prison, pined for by young Charlotte "Charley" Dangerfield. He gets out of prison resolved to revenge himself on the 12 "peers" who judged him guilty. Pretending to be a weak and beaten man, he draws in two bullies who aim to murder him but he shoots them instead. Then he wrecks the lives of others by scaring a coward out of town, exposing a crooked politician, and killing two men in self-defense. Finally however he discovers that Chet Bent is the real cause of his problems and goes after him. But Chet is a stronger man than any Harry has faced before. Chet beats him with a gun, then in a fist fight, and Harry only manages to kill him with a lucky shot.
At last Harry learns that he is not the top dog. He has something in common with the weaker men he's bullied all his life. He gives up fighting and revenge and settles down to a quiet life with Charley.
The characters are all straightforward and relatively simple. The scrapes, dodges and narrow escapes are stretched thin, but there's still something to like in this book. there is a fine sense of horseback riding and long chases cross country. The evil Bent is well done - an impressive villain - made large by his murder of an innocent man who owes him money, a murder committed with pathological gusto. There's also a young boy who worships Destry and saves him twice at great cost to himself.
This book feels a lot closer to the real West than later Hollywood fare.
| Author | McBain, Ed |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books, 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 296 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Matthew Hope |
| When Read | March 2000 |
Calusa, Florida attorney Matthew Hope is hired to find a missing husband. Shortly afterward a dead body turns up with the missing man's ID, but it isn't him.
The story moves back and forth between Calusa and new York, where Steve Carella of McBain's 87th Precinct series helps out, and between Hope and his investigators and the culprits in the story. The husband had gone to New York with a young bimbo that both he and his wife had slept with. There they met and befriended an ex-con. The three of them came back to Calusa and planned a heist from the local museum to steal the cup which Socrates drank poison from - or so it was claimed.
The three are fairly inept and their planning goes further awry when the wife discovers them and then when they become involved with more professional thieves. They wind up killing each other and screwing up the plan
McBain is very good at this and maybe getting better - or maybe just experimenting with different things. This one seems to be influenced by Elmore Leonard. There's a lot of emphasis on the perpetrators, not just on Hope and his staff. There's also a strong sense of the foolishness and fancies of these people. we see them as people and not just as criminals.
This is not great literature. It's not even great crime or mystery literature. But it's more than just competent. There are personalities and character development and twisty plots to give us pleasures beyond the lurid crime and punishment.
| Author | Farnol, Jeffrey |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1915 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2000 |
A young Englishman of some undefined, not upper but still leisure class, is in love with Lisbeth, the young ward of Lady Warburton, who does not approve of the young man because of his lack of financial prospects. Young Dick follows Lisbeth to a small country village where he meets the Imp, Lisbeth's nephew, whose life is consumed by make believe games of playing Robin Hood, Blackbeard the Pirate, cowboys and Indians, and so on.
Dick works to undermine a rival's advances, to help and support the Imp, and to win the fair Lisbeth. And in the end, of course, he succeeds, even winning over Lady Warburton.
This is a piece of very light fluff in the English Edwardian style. Odd that it was published in March, 1915, while England's young men were dying in France. or maybe it was not so odd. Maybe this is what a shell shocked nation wanted to read.
Farnol has a very sure touch. Young Dick is a spirited young gentleman. Lisbeth is a blushing ingenue of fair hair and long legs. The Imp is the picture of what a young boy would like to be. Despite its silly theme and total lack of substance, it is a pleasant read.
Also published as Chronicles of the Imp.
I shouldn't be surprised that light entertainment is produced and circulated during times of tragedy. It has ever been so and is so today. Few of the Hollywood movies in the early 40's made any reference to the raging world war. Jane Austen never mentioned the Napoleonic wars that were consuming England at the time of her writing. Few of the Depression era films and books referred to the Depression.
There is depressing and topical material available to anyone who wants it. Most people probably don't, or at least don't want too much of it - even including those who are suffering.
| Author | Lord, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1957 |
| Number of Pages | 241 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 2000 |
This is the story of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It is told by recounting and reconstructing the stories of individual participants, from Japanese pilots to sailors, soldiers, dock workers, and housewives on the ground in Hawaii. When this was written the people were still young and many had vivid memories of the events. Logistical facts - miles, tons, bombs, bullets, casualties, and so on are minimized with an emphasis instead on the human stories. Many of the stories and memories published here have become foundation lore of our history, from "Climb Mount Fukiyama" to "Al, a battleship is turning over."
I think of an air raid as a sudden descent of aircraft, a collection of quick and violent explosions, and then the raiders are gone. But that's not what it was like. The battle lasted three hours. Targets were hit sequentially and methodically. Fighters patrolled areas and descended again and again to strafe soldiers and civilians alike. And even far into the battle there were people who did not comprehend what had happened.
There were American heroes who understood quickly and fought bravely and well. And of course there were many Japanese heroes too, misled and misguided as they were.
I remembered stories from this book but I'm not sure from where or when. I may have read the book in my childhood, though it's not in the list of books I kept since 1959. I may have seen a movie based on it.
I always love these stories of democratic Americans fighting the fascists and imperialists and, in the end, prevailing over them.
These books about the war written in the 1950's and 60's, are the ones that were based on first hand accounts. They had an impact that later works written in 2010 or 2020 or 2030 cannot have. I'm thankful to Walter Lord and people like him who have preserved these stories for posterity.
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Tom Doherty Associates (Tor Books), 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 504 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | April 2000 |
Young mathematician Patricia Vasquez is recruited to go to the "Stone", an asteroid which entered orbit around the Earth and is actually the spaceship Thistledown, created by a future Earth people whose timeline has recrossed that of an older 2004 Earth in what might be one of an infinite number of parallel universes.
While the scientists discover the amazing facts about the Stone, that it comes from Earth's future, and that it is the terminus of a long corridor into "the Way", a pathway through space and time, the Soviet military launches an assault on the Stone and a nuclear war devastates the Earth. At the same time the original builders of Thistledown, a million miles out along the way, have divided into "Naderites" who look to Earth's human past for salvation and "Geshels" who have transformed their bodies and minds and are leaving the biological trappings of humanity behind. And they prepare for a life or death struggle with the Jarts for control of the Way.
Stories of Patricia, the Russians, the Americans, and the advanced humans interact in a remarkably imaginative, hard science vision of possible futures of humanity and of physics.
Bear is a master at this. His writing is competent but not great. His characters are acceptable but still thin. what he excels at is thinking outside the conventional bounds of human experience and seeing exotic but compelling implications of the revolutionary science and technology opening up to us. His vision of the Geshels is wonderful. He is my current favorite among SF writers.
I've liked most of the books Bear wrote but Eon and Eternity are probably my favorites. Some of the others have more carefully developed characters and more personal plots but these two have incredibly bold and imaginative vision. The description of the Way as an apparently infinite exit out the end of the spaceship that has no presence in the physical space outside the ship is bold and imaginative, but something that others might also have been able to write. However the ideas of pathways out into alternative space and time are pretty amazing. The Jarts coming in from the other end of the way are also pretty amazing, especially in their appearance in the second book. Handling all of this in a way that stretches the imagination without breaking it (at least for me) seems to me to be an exceptional achievement.
One of the things I most value in science fiction is a highly developed scientific imagination. If I try to put myself in the place of a 18th or 19th century man trying to envision the 20th or 21st century, I doubt very much that I would envision telephones, computers, automobiles, airplanes, or the Internet. The underlying science, from quantum mechanics to relativity to molecular biology would be unimaginable. So too, I think it is impossible for us in the 21st century to imagine the 22nd, 23rd, or 300th centuries. So we are moving blindly into an unknown future.
That's unsatisfying. I want to know where we're headed. I want to know what I am a part of. I want to be a conscious element in the progress of humanity and not just a blind particle, moving in the direction that invisible forces direct. There's no way to do that. We just don't know enough to even know what we don't know. But good SF authors can help by giving our imaginations material to work on. Bear is one of the good SF authors. Bear, Clarke, Lem, and others at least open our minds to possibilities that we'd never otherwise imagine.
| Author | Eco, Umberto |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 640 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2000 |
Dr. Casaubon, doctor of Philosophy, goes to work with Belbo and Deotilevi at a Milan publishing house which launches a project to publish a series on the occult - designed to sweep in vanity self-financing authors and gullible readers to turn a nice profit. Out of boredom, resentment, and disdain for their occult associates they make up an occult story of ruling the world by telluric currents using secrets revealed in a Renaissance or later era laundry list. but they are taken seriously and become the victims of harassment and murder by their stupid and nasty occult practitioners.
Those are the bare bones of a tour de force of philosophy, philology, and a kind of anthropology of the culture of looking for occult secrets under every bed. E delves deeply into the mysteries of the Knights Templars, the Rosicrucians, and other groups. He reaches down into their most ancient and closely guarded secrets and emerges with ... laundry lists and misunderstandings. He walks a very fine line between serious history and humor, between fear and ridicule, and between telling a novelistic story and ranging freely over disparate themes.
It is a marvelous book, deep and difficult yet uproariously funny, full of absurdity but never itself absurd. E always makes sense and always speaks with an educated, intelligent and thoroughly rational voice.
I interpret the tragic ending to be E's way of telling us that the occult approach to life is not merely absurd and ridiculous, it's nasty, selfish, stupid and evil. This is a comedy but also a serious literary achievement.
| Author | Griffin, W.E.B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 435 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | May 2000 |
The Marines on Bataan and Corregidor are doomed in 1942 but a pilot lieutenant and a tough corporal strike off on their own. They pay some boatmen to take them away, then kill the Filipinos when they find themselves betrayed and setup for murder. Months later they join up with General (really a Lt. Colonel) Wendell Fertig who has setup a guerrilla operation on Mindanao. They contact the outside world by radio and hope for help.
Among U.S. forces there is little support for Fertig. MacArthur is already on record saying that guerrilla ops won't work. The OSS wants in on the operation but mainly for the glory of Colonel Donovan. The Marines and Navy are willing but want to be sure it's real and not a Japanese trick.
A special Marine unit finally goes in by submarine bringing gold, medicines, carbines, radios, and coding equipment. They make contact and establish a liaison. By 1945, 30,000 guerrillas are fighting the Japs.
There is some decently done action in the book but a surprising amount of the story, well more than half, takes place in the offices and officers clubs in Washington, Hawaii and Australia. We see a mix of efficiency, intelligence and good will with cowardice, vanity and bureaucracy. Life is like that and I guess wars are too.
As is often the case in this genre the writing, though competent and professional, is a bit stiff and certainly uninspired. But also as is often the case, the author writes out of some conviction, a desire to tell a story about admirable people who are little known or forgotten - men to whom we all owe a great debt.
This was the first Griffin book that I read and perhaps the one I liked the most. I've also read about Wendell Fertig in another book. See They Fought Alone by John Keats, published in 1963 and read by me in October, 2004. Fertig was still alive when that book was written.
| Author | Grisham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House, 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Legal |
| When Read | May 2000 |
Three judges known to their fellow inmates as "the Brethren" are in a Florida minimum security prison, one for vehicular manslaughter while drunk and the other two for corruption. One of them, a relatively ignorant Southern backwater justice of the peace named Roy Spicer convinces them to run a scam. They put an ad in a gay magazine "Out and About", asking for pen pals, pretending to be a handsome young man in a drug rehab. The actual mailings are handled by their corrupt down and out lawyer who does the mail, banking, and money handling for one third of the take - the take being blackmail if and when they find a wealthy married victim.
Meanwhile in a parallel plot, the head of the CIA believes America will be over matched by a maniac Russian fascist general unless we dramatically increase our defense spending. He chooses Congressman Aaron Lake to run for President, orchestrating gigantic campaign contributions and international incidents to scare the voters into support for Lake's massive defense buildup.
The stories intersect when the Brethren discover that Aaron Lake was one of the people answering their ad. The CIA also discovers it and manages a response - murdering the lawyer and bribing the three judges with $2 million each and a pardon. They go to France but, a year or so later, are visited by the CIA about their new ad in the European edition of Out and About.
As so often is the case with Grisham, the whole plot, including the political side, is so damned plausible it's scary. I fear that the CIA could put a militarist President in office just this way.
Of course the story and the writing are also of a high standard for this genre, as Grisham's works always are. They're always a good read.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pocket Star Books, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 385 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2000 |
The House of Single, nominally an investment banking firm, actually engages in looting the Soviet Union in collaboration with Russian and Georgian corrupt nationals, and then in money laundering for the same clients when they get into drugs.
The son of the house has been shielded from all this. After law school he is brought into the firm and slowly educated into its ways by Tiger Single, his father. He becomes the chief liaison to the Russians but is more and more conflicted between his growing awareness and his love and loyalty for his father. Unable to live with it any longer he walks into the customs police and tells all. They hide him away until, four years later, he is once again dragged into the mess - this time to save his father from a Russian criminal who will kill him. Accompanied by Aggie, a pretty young agent who is falling in love with him and vice versa, he tracks his father to his mother's house, the bank, the Swiss lawyers, and the Russian's home in Istanbul. Finally he flies to Tbilisi where all is retrieved, the father's life saved, the Russian killed by the Georgians he deceived, and Aggie is won.
The story, like so many of Le Carre's, is told in flashbacks. There is a dubious hero with a love and conflict relationship with a still more dubious dad. There is a purely evil villain and a bunch of other people in villainous or virtuous roles with complex and mixed characters. There is revelation of deeper and deeper levels of intrigue and betrayal. In short, it's everything we expect from Le Carre.
Clearly, the end of the cold war has not ended the greed and deception in the human heart nor ended Le Carre's ability to elucidate it.
| Author | Forsyth, Frederick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 544 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2000 |
In this tale of the Gulf War British Special Air Service Major Mike Martin is sent first into Kuwait and then into Iraq. Born in Iraq of British and Indian parents, MM speaks perfect Iraqi accented Arabic and passes easily for a native. Meanwhile his similarly fluent brother Terry, a professor of medieval Arabic studies in England, helps a committee studying Iraqi intentions and transmissions in England.
Mike works first to train and arm resistance fighters in Kuwait city. Then he is sent to Baghdad posing as a gardener at the Russian consul's house. He makes contact with Jericho, an unknown high ranking Iraqi who had approached the Israelis years before to trade information for money. Jericho sells state secrets, including information about a secret atom bomb ready to be launched using the huge canon designed by the murdered Dr. Gerry Bull.
In the end, Martin gets the location of the gun from Jericho and leads a team to destroy it. Meanwhile the Israelis, with a complex plan, seduce a middle aged bank worker and steal the secret of Jericho's identity. They steal all his accumulated money and lure him out of Iraq. He is "The Torturer", head of the secret police. They dump him out of a plane into the ocean.
Forsyth is always a teacher as well as a story teller. He gives us a highly informed view of the Gulf War politics as well as the strategy, technology and craft. I cannot judge whether it is accurate but it is convincing. He argues that the U.S. left Hussein in power because the alternatives would have expanded Iran, brought civil war to Iraq and Kurdistan, and not installed democracy. The threats to Turkey and the Gulf states would have increased. Hussein is characterized as a brutal egomaniac, cunning at staying alive but a fool at understanding or dealing with the West. See diary.
The diary entry referred to is 20000621. The discussion is larger than the one here in these book notes.
It's interesting to look back on all of this in the light of later events, namely the second Gulf War and its aftermath. Forsyth didn't get it all right, but he did get a lot of it right and was prescient about what the future would have held, and did hold, if/when the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein.
| Author | Ford, Ford Madox |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1927 |
| Number of Pages | 226 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2000 |
A well to do, idle American marries a young woman named Florence only to learn that she has heart trouble and their wedding voyage to France somehow leaves her prostrate. He devotes himself to caring for her and protecting her from emotional difficulty in spit of the fact that she sleeps apart from him and has brought a seamy male acquaintance into the house. The husband is the narrator of the story.
They meet the Ashburnhams, Captain Edward and wife Leonora. They are "good people", landed gentry. He is a conscientious soldier, landlord, magistrate and philanthropist, a truly good man. But he and Leonora are incompatible. He is generous and passionate. She is practical, stingy, and cold. He has flings with other women, including Florence, who turned out not to have heart disease at all and who kills herself when her husband begins to discover what a pathetic, limited, deceiving person she is. Then Edward is attracted to a young, naive, convent educated girl and Leonora attempts to push the American onto her instead.
In the end Edward shoots himself, the girl goes mad, Leonora remarries happily, and the American buys the old Ashburnham estate where he comes for the mad girl and does nothing but tell this story.
The tale is told in fits and starts with backtracking and constantly revised narrator's opinions. His perplexity is high and his understanding is slow to develop. He is misused by every other character - all of whom also misuse each other - except for the American, who seems to have no selfishness or perhaps no wit to be selfish.
All in all this is a very fine novel, subtle and deep with much insight into how good people fail themselves and each other, and how the essential personalities of good people can be incompatible and ineffective.
| Author | Ryan, Cornelius |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster, 1987 |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 350 |
| Extras | photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | June 2000 |
Ryan begins his account on the morning of June 4 and ends it on the night of June 6. There is some coverage of the strategies on each side, much less of the weapons and technology. The main body is the reconstruction of significant events via the individual accounts of the people involved - American, British, German, French, and Canadian.
It is amazing how much surprise was achieved. the Germans did not believe the weather was right and, for days afterward, continued to believe that Normandy was only a diversion. By then, what slim chance they had of throwing the Allies into the sea was long gone.
As I have seen in Churchill's and other accounts it appears that the remarkable German Army and its often brilliant professional leadership was so mis-directed by Hitler, especially in his late years of increasing insanity, that what advantages they had - years of preparation and powerful armored units - were wasted.
Ryan interviewed in person or by letter an astounding number of participants. He gives a real feel for the human side of the battle and a genuine appreciation of the sort of ordinary heroism, if we can speak of it that way, of the soldiers.
See also Walter Lord's Day of Infamy for a very similar treatment of Pearl Harbor.
Ryan is one of the great historians of World War II. Two of his books were the basis of great WWII movies, this one and A Bridge Too Far. His work was heavily plagiarized by Stephen Ambrose. I found all of his books to be wonderfully informative and very convincing.
| Author | Hall, James W. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 2000 |
Thorn (first name? last name?), a fishing guide and lure maker in Key Largo Florida, leads a simple happy life that is becoming steadily more complicated by a developing relationship with Monica, the 28 year old art director for the local newspaper. His few friends are people he grew up with. then one of them, a fat man who gave up a chance at college to care for his sick mother, sees all his dolphins murdered and cut up in the dolphin pool that provides his livelihood. Thorn investigates.
The bad guys turn out to be directed by Dr. Bean Wilson Jr., a boyhood friend of Thorn's who lost both legs in Vietnam and is now experimenting with dolphin endorphins to create a pain killer that will ease his terrible phantom limb pain. He is assisted by Pepper Tremayne, a red neck nurse "married" at age 10 to her own father, in love with Bean, and trying desperately to learn the art of cosmetics to turn herself into a lady; a corrupt DEA agent paid by Bean and Trank representing a Vietnamese consortium bankrolling Wilson to get rights to the drug.
Wilson experiments on vets who suffer horrible pain and who know they may be killed by Wilson's experiments but don't care. Wilson also carries a deep, psychotic grudge against Thorn for growing up whole and safe and happy while he, Wilson, grew up tormented and then crippled. He cripples Thorn using an evil trick. It all winds up on a boat where Pepper and Trank, having enough of Wilson, sink the boat and almost escape, but it comes right in the end.
This is really good writing, in the same class as Elmore Leonard. The villains are exotic without being stiff or unbelievable. The action and suspense are sometimes almost unbearable. We care about the people.
Good stuff!
Reading the above it seems to me that I haven't written anything in the abstract that justifies my comment that the writing is really good. The abstract sounds complicated and confused.
I do have some memory of this book, brought back by reading the notes above. I wouldn't remember anything without them. But I can't say whether, looking back, the book was well written. However I trust my reading skills of that time and assume that it was.
I did read another James Hall Thorn book in 2001 but was not so impressed by it. See Mean High Tide.
| Author | Parker, Robert B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 186 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 2000 |
Boston private detective Spenser is hired by the local university to find a valuable manuscript stolen from the library. The prime suspects are the leaders of SCACE, Student Committee Against Capitalist Exploitation. Spenser is led to a young woman, daughter of a rich Boston family, who is the girlfriend of a leader of the group. although the girl won't tell him anything she calls him in the middle of the night for help She is alone, drugged, with the dead body of her boyfriend, and with a pistol used to kill him. For the top police brass its an easy case but S believes her story that two gangsters did the killing and framed her.
He is led through various byways to an intelligent but selfish and childlike English professor who was in a drug distribution scheme with the murdered boy. Along the way, S sleeps with both the girl and her mother! He has run-ins with the cops, is shot, saves the professor's life twice, convinces the prof's long suffering, devoted, mother-like wife to help him and, of course, solves the mystery.
This is all done in traditional American hard boiled detective style. In fact, Parker is himself an English professor specializing in the study of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. He adopts their cynical outlook, attacking the University, the rich upper class father, the radical students, the police (though not the working cops, only the big shots) and even the English Department. A black woman student on the school paper is almost the only one to escape his barbs.
As an imitation it can never become the classic it is modeled on but it is fairly well done, with considerable wit and humor.
| Author | O'Brian, Patrick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 411 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | June 2000 |
Lieutenant Jack Aubrey is promoted and made Master and Commander of His Majesty's brig Sophie operating in the Mediterranean at the start of the Napoleonic wars. He meets a down and out physician at a concert, find a common interest in music and some natural affinity and engages him as ship's surgeon. J.A. and Stephen Maturin, the doctor, then cruise the Med, bringing in quantities of prize money, capturing French and Spanish coastal merchantmen.
There are a number of battle scenes - an attack on a coastal fort, the capture of a much larger Spanish xebec frigate, and a run in with a powerful French squadron that takes the Sophia and soon paroles Jack and his crew to Gibraltar where they watch, but may not participate in, a major battle.
At the end, Jack faces a court martial for his loss of the Sophie but is acquitted and promoted to post captain.
This is the first of the Aubrey/Maturin books. I have been avoiding them since reading Desolation Island twenty years ago. Like D.I, this book, right at the beginning of the series, exhibits O'Brian's mastery of the language, technical detail, and culture of the period. It's an impressive achievement and it gives me more sympathy with the author than I had before. But the characters are still so odd and the story so haphazard that it suffers as a novel. Jack is naive, elemental - perhaps not a bad rendition of a certain type of man. But he hasn't any of the appeal of Hornblower.
These books, flawed as they are, are significant achievements. Yet in spite of their subject - war, sea, adventure, sailing, they aren't my cup of tea.
My son-in-law Jim is a big fan of O'Brian. Under his influence I read a couple more after this one. It is certainly true that the books have excellent technical detail - something that I like in any book and particularly like in sailing and flying stories.
| Author | Van Vogt, A.E. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Nelson Doubleday, 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 2000 |
Nine year old Jommy Cross is orphaned and in hiding after his mother and father are killed by human mobs who hate slans - a mutant race evolved from humans who have higher intelligence, longevity, and telepathic powers. Living as a sneak thief with "Granny", an alcoholic low life who ensnares and exploits him, he gradually grows to maturity, always seeking but failing to find his own kind. However he does meet "tendriless" slans who have no telpathic ability. He discovers that they hate the "true" slans as much as humans do and his life is composed of one flight after another to stay alive.
Jommy does meet Kathleen, another true slan, discovers his father's great hidden inventions in atomic energy, and eventually learns the truth about a subtle and complex manipulation of history by a true slan leader aiming to save slanhood from human and self-destruction.
The story takes place at least 6-700 years, probably over 1,000 years in the future. It has the technological vision of 1940 and the social and cultural outlook of those times. It does not rise much above those limits and it suffers too from a juvenile super-boy against the world theme that detracts from adult appreciation. Still, there is some vision in it and some dramatic successes.
The book was originally published in 1940 in four installments of Astounding Science Fiction. It evokes today the feel of those times and that literature and is interesting and nostalgic to read for that reason.
Reading old science fiction novels is different from reading old novels in other genres. The predictions in the old SF novels, explicit or otherwise, can be seen to have come true or not, and they are mostly not. An author must either be prescient in his vision of the future, or he must write a tale so interesting that its prescience is unimportant. Either way, I think it is the mark of an unusually good writer that his SF stands up to the test of time.
| Author | Ireland, Bernard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins, 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Extras | photos, diagrams, maps, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | July 2000 |
This is a photo history of the war at sea in six chapters: The War against the Germans, War Against the U-Boat, American Submarine War Against Japan, Amphibious Warfare, Aviation at Sea, and Last Days of the Battleship. The point of view is British with the primary emphasis on Europe and the Atlantic, but with good coverage of the American / Japanese war. Although there are more pictures and diagrams of surface warships, the meat of the book, and clearly in the author's view the essence of the struggle, involved submarines, aircraft, and landing craft.
There are no anecdotes, incidents or personal stories. Everything is told from a very high level, looking down on the grand strategies, which is probably the only way to cover the subject and still show so many pictures in 256 pages.
The photos are outstanding and are what makes the book. The text is sloppily edited and contains errors and inconsistencies in the details, for example the same battle is placed in 1943 in the text and 1944 in a caption. Still, the author's opinions are well considered and convincing.
The Allies made many mistakes in the early years of the war. The author believes that the diversion of a few squadrons of the B-24s going to the Pacific into convoy escort would have brought the Atlantic under control much earlier. It took much time and blood to learn all the lessons of carrier, submarine and amphibious warfare. But the lessons were learned and the fascists were overwhelmed with superior skill, technology and numbers and a courage which they didn't imagine the democratic peoples possessed.
The photos here are all unretouched but the holes, spots and scratches enhanced the effect of seeing these reliquary images now 60 years old.
| Author | Wolfe, Tom |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 704 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2000 |
Sixty year old real-estate developer Charlie Croker lives high in Atlanta in a mansion in Buckhead with a 28 year old second wife, a corporate jet, and a plantation where he rides horses, shoots quail, and demonstrates his prowess as a real man. The only problem is that his premier building, Croker concourse, is leaking money. He's deeply in debt, mortgaged to the hilt, and personally responsible. He's going to lose everything to Planners Bank, which has a "workout session" with him to read him the riot act, humiliate him, and demand action.
Meanwhile across the country in Oakland CA, Conrad Hensley is humping frozen food in Croker Global Food's freezer warehouse. He is a fine young man, trapped in a lousy marriage and laid off. when his car is towed from a curb and all kinds of random horrible shit happens to him (I couldn't even bear to listen to it all) he winds up in prison, targeted for rape by Rotto, the leader of the Nordic Bund gang. By accident he gets a book about the Stoic Roman philosophers and becomes a new man. He escapes in an earthquake and winds up in Atlanta as a kind of male nurse to Charlie, recovering from a knee operation.
Charlie is put under pressure by black lawyer Roger White II (Roger Too White) to help Fareek "the Canon" Fanon, Georgia Tech football star accused of rape. Roger and the mayor of Atlanta will get Planners Bank off Charlie's back if he plays ball. In the end, Charlie takes up Stoic philosophy, throws away his money, tells the truth, and becomes a preacher for Zeus and Stoicism
The ending is absurd and a real let down and the book is filled with badly overcooked, overwritten action. But in spite of that it is filled with W's trademark analysis of modern America and his comic cynicism, ridiculing the politically correct and incorrect with equally hilarious ferocity. Quite a book.
The above notes are a good example of why restricting myself to a 3x5 book card was too limiting. I haven't captured anywhere near all of the impressions this book made on me.
The opening scene in the book occurs on Charlie's ranch where he has invited a bunch of guests to a quail hunt, a dinner party, and then to watch his high priced stallion inseminate a mare in an extraordinary scene involving a half dozen or more stable hands who put bales of hay under the mare's belly so she won't be crushed by the big stallion, have another stallion nose around her vagina to get her aroused and ready, lead in the big stallion and literally guide his penis into the mare by hand in order to ensure a proper completion of the act. We know right away that Charlie is indeed a man who is living large.
The workout session scene is another that I remember. The bank employees use the term "cactus" (IIRC) to describe the session. The juice (the bank) is on the inside and the pricks are on the outside. When they see Charlie sweating one of them yells "Saddlebags!", referring to the dark sweat stains under each armpit on each side of his shirt. You feel like, however much you despise Charlie, you despise these bankers even more.
In another scene, before Charlie's total fall from grace, he is invited to an art museum exhibition and fund raising affair. They are exhibiting the work of a gay painter with some very explicit paintings of gay men. While everyone oohs and ahs, Charlie remarks that he doesn't see why there's such a fuss about a painting of cocksuckers. It is a scandalous scene in which, once again, we are impressed by Charlie's genuineness in the midst of his outrageous behavior.
The Conrad Hensley story is juxtaposed against the Charlie Croker story. Conrad is a genuinely nice guy who has really not done anything wrong but winds up in prison anyway. His years of hard manual labor in the food freezer have given him powerful hands and arms. When Rotto, a big bruiser leader of the white prisoners gang tries to intimidate him and then hurt him by squeezing his hand, Conrad wins that struggle and breaks Rotto. Knowing that he is then marked for murder, he takes his chances on escape when the earthquake opens the way.
On the outside, getting a job as home health worker, he comes to see an old couple and discovers that they are being terrorized by a local hoodlum. Conrad waits in the house for the hoodlum to appear and then terrorizes him, saving the old couple.
This is a book with much to say about capitalism, finance, law, prisons, and human nature.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 2000 |
a British government counter-intelligence agent, specializing in interviewing sensitive employee prospects, is invited on a canal boat trip and saves an American from drowning. Against all appearances to the contrary he determines that the seeming accident was actually an attempted murder.
The American is an important friend of the agent's boss. He gets the boss to send the agent to America to look for a missing horse. In America the agent accompanies the boss's lovely teenage daughter, fends off the American's wife, finds the horse on a dude ranch in Colorado, survives an attempted murder, finds and steals back another horse stolen years before, and watches helplessly while an angry killer kills an American insurance investigator and himself in the process.
This is a bit more of a downer than Francis' other books. The protagonist is depressed and considering suicide throughout the story - a psychological twist that F does not handle well. A good man with a family is needlessly killed. The bad guys lose the horses but are not brought to justice. The agent returns to his lonely and depressing London flat.
Still, F is always interesting. His characters always battle to understand the problems and the technicalities and to do the right thing. They are always clear thinking, rational, decent men who I always find easy to sympathize with.
| Author | Burke, James Lee |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 2000 |
Lawyer Billy Bob Holland of Deaf Smith, Texas, defends his under the blanket son Lucas Smothers against a charge of rape and murder while fighting his own demons of memory, violence and regret. The town's lazy and corrupt Sheriff's Department makes no effort to establish the truth, while Billy Bob zeroes in on the disturbed son of a rich man and his coterie of friends and hangers-on as likely suspects. The plot is complicated by Mary Beth Sweeney, a local cop who is really an undercover DEA agent, her stupid and jealous boss, psychotic killer Garland T. Moon, a little Mexican boy whom BB befriends, an honest prosecutor, a female private investigator who works for BB, saves his life and is jealous of Mary Beth, and a corrupt Mexican drug cop who tries to kill BB.
BB talks to his dead friend LQ Navarro's ghost. He and LQ had been Texas Rangers and worked together, shooting up drug gangsters on a clandestine trip over the border - during which LQ saved BB's life in an act of conspicuous bravery, and later BB killed LQ when he accidentally shot him. It is that horrible act that haunts him and led him to become a peaceful (almost) lawyer instead of a cop.
Burke is a strange writer - full of memory and showing complex main characters who battle themselves as well as bad guys and who relate to children and dead great grandfathers (a parallel tale as BB reads from his great grandfather's diary of frontier love and violence and attempts at self control.)
This is very far from ordinary mystery fare. The self-defeating character is maddening but also interesting and sympathetic. It's good stuff.
As of this date, I've read 12 of James Lee Burke's novels. I hope to read more and hope that Burke, almost ten years older than me, remains alive, capable, and interested in writing more. He is much more than just another genre mystery writer.
| Author | King, Laurie R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 347 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2000 |
15 year old Mary Russell lives in rural England with an aunt, her American parents (a Jewish mother) both having died in an accident. On a stroll through the farmlands she meets a man observing bees and immediately deduces what he is doing. The man is Sherlock Holmes, living in semi-retirement in 1915. Holmes, who spends some of his time keeping bees, recognizes in Mary a mind comparable to his own. For the next several years she is constantly at his house, mothered by Mrs. Hudson and trained by Holmes to become a great detective. She goes to University to study theology (!) but participates in several cases with Holmes, eventually getting into great danger. Holmes spirits her away to Palestine for many months on a foreign job to stymie their pursuers. They return and lay a psychological trap for their enemy who turns out to be Mary's ex-math professor, the daughter of Moriarty, Holmes' great Nemesis.
The detection is very much in Conan Doyle's style - based on technical analysis of shards of physical evidence. the psychological aspects of the account are different from, but not less interesting, than Conan Doyle's.
The novel is successful as a mystery, a Holmes series entry, and as a pleasant read.
Laurie King is something of an enigma to me. She is a good writer with a keen mind and wide ranging interests. Judging from the Kate Martinelli series that she wrote, it appears that she may be a lesbian. Or maybe not. Not everyone who writes about homosexual characters has to be homosexual. And what should I make of her interest in Jewish theology, or of the exotic idea of a teenage girl falling in love with a man who is at least in late middle age, or of a supposedly deeply intellectual and introverted man in late middle age falling in love with a relative child?
There is a lot to take on faith in this book and the series that followed it. But, hey, she's not writing War and Peace.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2000 |
Chili Palmer is invited to lunch by music promoter Tommy Athens and watches as Athens is murdered. The whole scene becomes grist for a new movie idea. He meets a young woman singer who wants to be a star, rescues her from Razi a not very together black gangster manager and his 1/4 Samoan bodyguard Elliot Wilhelm. He becomes Linda Moon's manager and proceeds to make her rich and famous. She ditches him but he doesn't care. In the end he's figured out his movie, has all the scenes, characters and settings, and is ready to give it to the screenwriter to write.
Leonard has been carried away a bit by the success of Get Shorty and this sequel has many elements that make it a typical sequel. The main character must survive in the same shape, ready for yet another. The bad guys are too similar - a black gangster with a big bodyguard who really wants to be in the movies.
There is an interview with Leonard at the end of the tapes. He talks about Chili becoming John Travolta and the Hollywood Get Shorty taking over his creation and bending the creator. He writes the way Chili makes movies - setting up situations, placing characters in them, and watching them do whatever they have to do. He also says that he picks characters with flaws and neuroses but who always take themselves perfectly seriously.
It's a winning technique.
There is a song recorded at the end of the tape by a singer just like Linda Moon. It's just what I imagined from the story.
Reading this book card, recalling the book and the interview and the insights that Leonard shares with the readers here, makes me very glad that I write up books in this way. I had some memory that Leonard creates slightly ridiculous characters who take themselves very seriously. I had some memory that I learned this by reading or hearing something from him, but the details were all gone. It's delightful to bring them back.
| Author | Bujold, Lois McMaster |
|---|---|
| Publication | The Reader's Chair, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | September 2000 |
Welding and materials testing expert Leo Graf is sent to a far distant space station to train young workers for Galactek Corporation. He arrives at the "K Project" where 1,000 genetically engineered kids with four arms and no legs have been specially produced for zero gravity permanent living. The founder of the project has died and it is now run by a crude, egotistical, cruel bureaucrat.
Leo begins the training and becomes very attached to the kids but the project is in trouble. an artificial gravity device is invented making the "quaddies" unnecessary. The project is to be shut down, the kids sterilized and sent to a barracks on a remote mining site where they will surely die.
Leo leads a revolt. With the help of a few other legged adults, he and the kids overcome all odds and shove their station into deep space.
I loved this book. Leo is an honest to god welding engineer (Bujold's father was a professor of it.) There is one passage after another of engineering lectures and accomplishments with lots of very convincing technical detail. He's also an ordinary company man - loyal, accepting of higher authority, dedicated to his job. But he's also a decent human being who finds himself called upon to make an extraordinary commitment in order to retain his humanity. There's nothing spectacular in the writing, but what a wonderful perspective and interest it has.
I still remember this book fairly well. An ordinary sort of man is put into a position where he has to acquiesce in the destruction of others. He refuses even at considerable cost to himself.
The scientific and technical aspects were also well done.
| Author | Abraham, Pearl |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2000 |
Young Rachel Benjamin lives in New York State with her mother, a shrewish, dominating woman, her father, a Chasidic rabbi devoted to study, writing a mystical book, and building his own synagogue, and six younger brothers and sisters. She rebels against the medieval culture she lives in. She may not read English books, wear seamless stockings, swim in a bathing suit, touch a man - even her father or grandfather, go to an American school, or even have a radio.
There are small rebellions. She sneaks romance novels home from the library or steals them in bookstores. She buys stockings and a bathing suit. She engages in childish erotic play with her girl friend. But always she is circumscribed and stymied and, at age 17, fearful of her rebelliousness, her parents arrange a marriage to a nice schlemiel who knows nothing of anything but what his father-in-law, the rabbi, tells him.
Rachel runs away and hides in a hotel for 2-3 days. a divorce is arranged. At the end of the novel she is back home, living with her father and mother, but we sense that her quest for independence has been successfully launched and will surely succeed.
At first I was put off by Rachel's essentially adolescent outlook and the childish characteristics of her rebellion - the focus on stockings, the lies and petty theft, the "I hate you and wish you were dead" response to parental errors. But I grew to respect Abraham's characterization as authentic and the growth that Rachel experiences as real. It is ultimately successful both as novel and as sociology. It is also a marvelous portrayal of the medieval character of Chasidic Judaism, a truly stultifying and backward culture.
I loved the scene in this book in which Rachel runs away from her husband. They are on a bus. Her young husband, a nice fellow but of no special interest to Rachel, falls asleep. Rachel quietly gets up and gets off the bus at the next stop, leaving him to sleep on.
| Author | Goss, Pete |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Carroll and Graf, 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 273 |
| Extras | photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Sailing |
| When Read | October 2000 |
Ex Royal Marine Goss is an extremely competent, driven, single handed sailor. He earned his living, such as it was, by teaching sailing, especially in corporate outings where he would train six or so executives in an exercise in both team work and self-reliance. But his passion is solo racing on long ocean races using exotic equipment. He competed in an Atlantic race to the U.S. and in his biggest - the main subject of this account - in the round the world Vendee where he became a hero by saving a French competitor in a terrible storm.
He managed all of this by finding corporate sponsors for all of the expenses, working tirelessly for years to persuade people, and selling his car if necessary to get the last bit.
He has a wife and child. For reasons not clear to me, they have stuck with him throughout his obsessions, his many month absences, his stripping of the family funds, his near death experiences, and his adulation by the rest of the world.
There is no doubt about it. Goss is quite a man.
The account tells the entire experience. It is, if anything, modest in its telling of multi-day repairs in cramped quarters, terrifying storms, self-surgery on his elbow (!), hours at the pump, and so on.
This is another (remember I'm writing these notes backwards in time, "another" refers to the Darnton book below) book that made an impression on me and that I remember. I remember a lot of the above and some things that aren't in that account, such as the great comfort he took in a "nice cuppa" tea.
| Author | Darnton, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2000 |
Paleoanthropologists and former lovers, now academic rivals, Matt Mattison and Susan Arnot are recruited by a prehistoric research institute, actually a CIA front, to go on an expedition to the high Pamir mountains of Tajikistan to find an old professor of theirs and a surviving community of Neanderthals.
They find two communities, one a passive, vegetarian, idyllic group, the other a vicious, hunting group led by a clever, strong killer. Numerous implausible adventures occur in this totally implausible setting. they discover that the Neanderthals have a capacity for remote viewing - a kind of mind reading or seeing through other's eyes. But they do not have language. The CIA wants to learn how the N's do this so they can use it in spying. The scientists teach the good N's to hunt and fight. Then they perform rescues in the cave of the bad N's, using deceit as a weapon - a skill that the N's do not possess which was the cause of their earlier downfall at the hands of Homo Sapiens. In the end, Matt and Susan emerge from the mountains and deny the existence of the Neanderthals.
There is a fair amount of interesting information on primitive hominids. However the story is absurd, the love affair childish and petulant (perhaps like most among Homo Sapiens) and the emotional tone of good guys and bad is quite adolescent. I didn't really dislike reading/listening to it but had hoped for better. But the libraries' choices in audio books are very limited.
I often remember bad books better than good ones. This is a bad book that I remember to a greater degree than its literary value would justify. But even a bad book can have an imagined scene that is very interesting, even when the imagination that produces it is flawed. The scene I remember is the nasty Neanderthal outside his cave, threatening and posturing. Maybe I don't remember it all that well. Was he throwing rocks? I don't remember that. Maybe it's just the ridiculousness of it that I remember.
I've read a number of novels featuring Neanderthals or primitive peoples, including Conan Doyle's The Lost World and S.M. Stirling's The Sky People, both of which, along with this book, use the primitive peoples purely as inferior creatures to be beaten or taken advantage of by real humans. Bjorn Kurten's Dance of the Tiger: A Novel of the Ice Age was better. But no one I've read has matched William Golding's The Inheritors. I don't know how Golding prepared himself to write that book. I wouldn't be surprised if he did no research at all, but just looked into himself and thought about what it would be like to be a man but not exactly a man, intelligent but maybe not exactly in the same way we are. So we may have learned more from his book about Golding than about Neanderthals, but I don't think any of the others that I read were half as plausible or one-fourth as interesting as Golding.
| Author | Brunner, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Del Rey Books, 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 2000 |
This is an SF novel in epic style about an alien civilization with a medieval culture that discovers astronomy. Over the course of "scores of scores" of years the civilization develops, moving up and down, learning and relearning and developing their science and their biotechnology (replete with "haulimals", "recordimals", "neurograps", and many other biological solutions to technical problems.) At a certain level of development, these people learn that their planetary system is being attracted to a globular cluster and that, eventually, their planet will become uninhabitable. The courageous and rational among them work determinedly to develop space travel in order to preserve some part of their race.
The story moves in sections, each following a few people through a few years, then advancing to a new section with new people, tens or hundreds of years later.
The folk are never fully described. we know that they have claws, pads, mantles, pith, tubules, and internal pressure. They emit pheromones with each emotion. They have a "weather sense." Most importantly, they have a tendency to slip into dreams and delusions when starved or stressed. But eventually, they overcome all obstacles, external and internal, and achieve their goal.
Brunner has written a very satisfying book, a nice piece of fiction and a very clear exposition of the need for rationality and the hard struggle that that requires. It is something of a cool book in the sense of standing off slightly from its heroes and allowing bad things to happen to them. It is a book that extols realism.
Of course I have a lot of sympathy with a people (and a writer) who are concerned about the preservation of their history and culture for posterity. It is a principal reason why I write diary entries and why I am converting my book cards into XML. My own insight into this issue is narrower than Brunner's. I'm not thinking about preserving the future of the human race. I take it as a given that we will be transformed or replaced by combinations of genetic and biological engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics, and science and technologies that we have not yet dreamed of. The process may well take off within the next thousand years. In such a development, my genes, and the genes of all of us, are of little account. But our culture, our history, our music and art, our writing, and the films, photos and recordings of us, are of account. I think they will be of interest to our posterity. I'd like them to be preserved forever though I have to admit that the very concept of "forever" is vague and very possibly inaccessible.
It is largely for these kinds of ideas that I read science fiction. We sometimes encounter SF writers who aren't great writers but are very interesting thinkers.
| Author | Honan, Park |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 452 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| When Read | October 2000 |
A long and rambling biography of Austen, tracing numerous byways into stories of family and friends where material of interest was available. Born in 1775 into a poor but well connected clergyman's family, she grew up with only about 18 months of formal education but was nevertheless well educated by her father, her highly intelligent and witty mother, and her literate older brothers who had founded a magazine at Oxford and did much to stimulate and critique her writing.
I think of A as living a narrow, parochial life, cognizant only of the nuances of society and manners around her. But in fact two of her brothers became high ranking admirals and she had much indirect acquaintance with the wider world and the Napoleonic wars.
Her writing was not all she knew. Rather it was a conscious concentration on producing what she knew she could do best - the close, subtly comic examination of country social life.
Austen died of "wasting disease", possibly stomach cancer or tuberculosis of the stomach. It was a long, lingering death with false remissions. She was 43.
I think that I had read all of Austen's novels by the time I read this biography. It was interesting and it expanded my understanding of her as a person well beyond the limits she imposed on her literature.
| Author | Robbins, David L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 512 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 2000 |
R tells the story of the Battle of Stalingrad, concentrating on the story within the larger battle of the battle between the leading Russian sniper, Vassily Zaitsev ("the Hare") and SS Colonel Thorwald, head of the German sniper school in Berlin ("the Headmaster") sent specifically to Stalingrad to kill Zaitsev. Two other major characters are Tanya Chernova, Zatsev's lover, a former partisan and a sniper in his unit, and Nikki, a German corporal assigned to Thorwald and the only completely fictional character of the four.
The Headmaster is a phenomenally good shot. He finally selects a perfectly hidden shooting position from which he kills so many Russians that the Hare has to go after him. Each lays a trap for the other, but Zaitsev's is successful and Thorwald is killed. Tanya is horribly wounded soon after but survives, in part due to Zaitsev's action.
This novel is much better than the average war story. The writing is excellent. The portrayals of close combat, long distance murder, hunger and cold, furious violence, psychological adaptation to trauma in many different ways, are all very convincing. The characters are finely drawn and differentiated, from simple humane Nikki to bitter, violent Tanya, to noble and brave Zaitsev and to intellectual, cowardly Thorwald. Some minor characters like the political officer Danilev are also well done.
R prepared for this by reading 30 books, visiting Stalingrad, and meeting Zaitsev. It is historically accurate except for making Tanya part American - forced on R by his publisher. there is an interesting interview with R on the last tape.
There was a movie made of Zaitsev's battle in Stalingrad, perhaps inspired by this book. In the movie he is sent across the river into Stalingrad under intense German fire. He makes it ashore but has no rifle. He has been given five bullets, all that is available and told to pick up a rifle if one of his comrades dies. Caught in a German area with a Russian journalist who does have an empty rifle, Zaitsev borrows the weapon, loads it with his five bullets, and proceeds to kill five German officers, timing his shots so that shell explosions cover the sound. Deeply impressed, the journalist promotes his career.
I probably remember the movie better than the book. I saw it more recently and it had a cinematic impact that books can't have. But however one learns of it, Zaitsev's story is pretty interesting.
I just looked up Zaitsev, also spelled Zaytsev, in the Wikipedia. The film, made in 2001, was "Enemy at the Gates", "based on part of William Craig's book _Enemy at the Gates_." Zaitsev survived the war and became a textile engineer and then manager of a textile factory in Kiev. He died there in 1991 at age 76.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Clipper Audio, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2000 |
29 year old Tor Kelsey works as an undercover security agent for the British Racing commission even though he has inherited more than enough money to live well without working. but with no family and no avocation he feels the need to occupy himself and be productive, and the work interests him.
He has observed a number of actions by and around Julius Apollo Filmer, a blackmailer, extortionist and hirer of thugs and killers, but there has never been enough evidence to convict him. when Filmer moves to join the Great Transcontinental Mystery Race Train, organized by the Canadian Racing Commission, Tor follows him to prevent trouble. Tor works as a waiter in the dining car watching and learning as the train travels from Toronto to Vancouver with horses, owners, stable lads, and racing fans, and a troupe of actors playing out a mystery for the passengers. along the way they encounter sabotage, blackmail, and intimidation, all instigated by the evil Filmer. The main targets are an immensely rich family with their own private car, a 16 year old daughter, and an emotionally disturbed son who kills himself when he realizes that his actions are destroying the family.
This is consistent, fully developed Francis. The main character relies on basic intelligence, courage, and common human decency to see him through. There is a not very well portrayed love affair, a collection of ordinary people, sympathetically portrayed, an always observant and interested eye for technical detail, and a plot that keeps moving.
I am never dissatisfied by Mr. and Mrs. Francis' books (I recently learned that she had a major hand in them.) I know what to expect and they knew how to deliver it.
After Mrs. Francis died, Dick continued producing good books. I think perhaps his wife's role in the writing was a bit exaggerated.
| Author | Tolstoy, Leo |
|---|---|
| Publication | various |
| Copyright Date | 1868 |
| Number of Pages | various |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | November 2000 |
I read Tolstoy's epic switching between translations and editions from Ann Dunnegan to Constance Garnett, to an anonymous but probably early translation downloaded from the Internet and read on my Revo handheld computer. We read it for our book group over a very long period of months. I had read much of it once before at around age 16 or so but never finished it and remembered little.
It seems pointless to recap the plot of the world's most famous novel. I'll just discuss my reaction to it. It is a magnificent achievement on several levels. The individual scenes of society are incomparable in their penetration from the opening dinner party to the opera, the hunt, the ball, the party at the English club, the gambling, the duel, the initiation into the masons - all are extraordinarily well done. Then there is the remarkable variety and depths of characters from Pierre to Natasha, Andrei to Marya, Count Rostov to Prince (Andrei) Bolkonsky, Helene, Sonia, Anatole, Boris, Dolokhov, Vera, the old Countess, and so many others. There are no false notes, no flat characters. Then there are the great movements and themes of history. Although not always convincing, they are nevertheless always compelling and impossible to ignore. And finally, at the philosophical level there are serious and penetrating essays on religion, freedom and determinism, fate, virtue, sophistication, simplicity, and the meaning of life.
There are a few other works of similar stature. Perhaps Conversation in the Cathedral, or Vanity Fair But War and Peace is surely in the highest group and its uncompromising vision, clarity of expression and depth of thought are remarkable.
See many diary entries for much more detail.
I am now imagining that I read this book the first time, not at age 16, but at age 20 or 21, mainly while commuting by bus and train from Baltimore to Washington for my summer patronage job as junior clerk in the U.S. House of Representatives, where I pasted parts of the bills printed by the Government Printing Office into the Archives of the Congress. I don't know which of my recollections, those in 2000 at age 54 or those of today at age 71, are accurate. I can convince myself of either one.
I do remember that I read most of the book and was within 200 pages, or maybe even 100 pages, of the end. I don't remember why I didn't finish. If I was 20 or 21, it's possible that I had to return the book to the library and go back to college and didn't resume it. Whether I was 16 or 21, I think I was too young to appreciate the book. I read it as a historical novel of the Napoleonic Wars, which was too narrow a reading. I didn't appreciate its greatness. Later, probably after reading Anna Karenina in 1976 at age 30, I began to appreciate Tolstoy's greatness. I also read Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction in 1978, which had much to say about this novel. However, instead of re-reading the book, I decided that I would save it for when I was 50 years old both to be sure that I wouldn't repeat the mistake of being too immature to appreciate the book, and to keep back a treat for more older age.
One more thing I didn't say is that I read this novel for our book group. We read it in parts, over perhaps about four meetings. That cut down the reading load for those who have more limited reading time, and also increased our time for discussion. It is an interesting book and very worth discussing. I'm sorry that my limited human brain is incapable of retaining all of the book and all of our discussion, but at least I have these notes to preserve some of my thoughts and feelings from when I read it.
| Author | Kotzwinkle, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 262 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2000 |
Hard boiled New York private detective Jimmy McShane is hired by the daughter of a murdered antiquities dealer to find the killer. He discovers that the murdered man made off with an ancient Egyptian gold scepter worth millions and suspects that he may have been killed by someone looking for it. In fact however the trail leads in a different direction. A web of sex offenders, molesters of little girls, is at the heart of things.
In the end it turns out that Jimmy's client is a multiple personality. As a loving daughter she hired Jimmy to find the killer. But the real killer is one of her alters, a twin brother who hates the father and an uncle and others for molesting his "sister". Jimmy unravels it all with help from a pretty chiropractor whom he wants to seduce and a computer hacker who digs up information on all the suspects.
The writing is quite good with very nice bits of humor, though the characters are strange, starting with the chiropractor whom Jimmy marries in the end for reasons that seem only to do with sexual attraction since their personalities and personal philosophies have nothing in common.
All the usual conventions are observed. Jimmy is ultra tough and full of wise cracks. He turns down sex with his client. He gives $1,000 to the mother of a molested girl. He makes his own decisions about the law. And the understanding of sex abuse and multiple personality is informed but far from expert. It is competent genre writing, acceptable fare - no more and no less.
| Author | Bradley, Omar N. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1951 |
| Number of Pages | 618 |
| Extras | maps, photos, charts, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 2000 |
Bradley recounts the story of World War II from his perspective as staff officer and then field commander of a corps, an army, and then the entire American group of armies in France from D-Day to the end of the war. He appears to have seen the war as a series of complex problems to solve in strategy, logistics, and personnel administration. I don't think he ever saw it as a life or death struggle because, for him, there seems never to have been any doubts that we would win. The Battle of the Bulge was his only experience of defensive warfare and although he was apprehensive, he remained fully confident of victory.
His judgments of others struck me as follows: Eisenhower - dedicated, capable, but sometimes bending too far backward to accommodate British/American political amity; Montgomery - capable but too egotistical, too careful, too slow; Patton - politically naive, needing some experience in North Africa, but then astonishingly fast, aggressive and effective, a military powerhouse; Courtney Hodges (commander of 1st Army) - none of the flash of Patton but just as effective in his methodical way; Churchill - an amateur who interfered too much but a man of real understanding with a better grasp of the coming world situation than any of the Americans.
The U.S. won the war with overwhelming industrial production in aircraft, ships, tanks, trucks, fuel, and so on. But our men were not deficient. Many officers and soldiers must have surprised the highly trained, disciplined and experienced Wehrmacht. Bradley shows that the U.S. army was up to the task, right to its very top.
I've read many books about the war, many of them after this one. My current view, subject to change, is that the US Army was not as uniformly good as the German Army - though many individual commanders and units were just as good, and some might even have been better than many of the German commanders and units. I think the Allies won because, first, the Russians tore the guts out of the Wehrmacht, second, because the U.S. outproduced all of the Axis powers combined by a large margin, building more planes, tanks, guns, trucks, ships, shells, gasoline, and all other material components of the war, and third, and this is partly an effect of the second, because the U.S. and Britain totally dominated the skies over North Africa and Europe.
I don't know what would have happened if the Russians had capitulated in 1941, or less likely perhaps, if Hitler had not turned east. If 3/4 of the entire Wehrmacht were in France instead of in Russia, would we have been able to invade? Would the war have ended in stalemate - at least until the atom bomb was ready? Would the atom bomb have brought Germany to it's knees - an interesting question. I think there's a good chance that, if we could have won enough control of the airspace over Germany - a big if if Russia were out of the war - then we might have killed Hitler with an A-bomb.
Bradley's high confidence was justified by the experience of the American army in North Africa, to some extent in Italy, and in France. In his battle, victory was close to being assured.
| Author | Crichton, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Recorded Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2000 |
Written on a dare, Crichton set out to prove that he could make the story of Beowulf interesting. The novel is written as a report by Ibn Fadlan, a real historical personage whose writing is used in the first chapters, but who never met the Northmen, to the Caliph of Baghdad upon his return after having been kidnapped by Vikings while on a diplomatic mission in 922. There are also remarks, footnotes, and commentaries by the modern author working with various translations of I.F.'s "manuscript".
The Vikings travel to Scandinavia where they see signs of attacks by the "wendol" or mist monsters, who cut off the heads of their victims and eat the brains. Traveling on to the kingdom of Rothgar they find the town living in fear of wendol attack. Buliwyf (Beowulf) the leader of the band of 12 Viking warriors plus IF, organize a defense, then an attack (which achieves nothing) and a final attack against the mother of the wendol - killing her and dispiriting the tribe. The wendol themselves are thinly disguised Neanderthals, portrayed as strong, hairy, fierce, primitive, and implacable. Buliwyf's heroism vanquishes them at the cost of his own life and he is given a Viking funeral, complete with fair maiden who sleeps with all his friends and then is killed to join him.
This is not Crichton's best work but it shows his ability and flexibility in handling some pretty fanciful, if not outrageous, material. What can one say about an Arab companion of Beowulf, 150 years out of place, and fighting Neanderthals? But Crichton wins his point. It was not an uninteresting or boring read.
[Read 20 years ago but didn't remember!]
Thirteen years after the second reading, I remember the book well enough.
| Author | Arnold, Ken |
|---|---|
| Author | Gosling, James |
| Publication | Reading, MA: Addison Wesley |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 442 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| When Read | December 2000 |
A textbook on fundamentals of Java, complete with exercises, by two computer science gurus, one of whom, Gosling, is a co-author of the language. All the basics of the language are covered, aimed at teaching the language itself. The extended libraries - the abstract window toolkit, java database connectivity, net connectivity, etc., are mentioned only to let the reader know they exist and point him elsewhere for information.
The book is quite nicely done. The level is set for students who understand programming but don't know Java. Although the examples are object oriented, the aim of the book is to teach the language, not O-O design.
I learned a lot from it.
Java is looking very attractive to me. I especially like the way objects are created and handled in such a uniform way, as well as the extreme breadth of functionality in the standard libraries.
I've just started Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckels which seems, so far, to be better at explaining the O-O and other really exemplary qualities of Java, though it seems less useful as a reference (which really isn't needed anyway since the online docs are so thorough.)
I notice that I have only two other books in the the series from 2001-2013 tagged as "Computer science". I've read more than that but must have tagged some in other ways. There are also many that I read parts of but don't read cover to cover, including Eckel's book mentioned above. Those don't get written up.
However, having made the above excuses, I can nevertheless say that I have read far, far less than I should have to keep up in my field. My interests have wandered away from computers I have been very deficient in my reading and studying.
| Author | Trollope, Anthony |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1855 |
| Number of Pages | 206 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2000 |
"The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of ----; let us call it Barchester." So begins the story of the warden of Hiram's Hospital, a small institution supporting twelve elderly men of no means, who are given a very modest living by the Church. Harding lives with his younger daughter Eleanor in a nice house on the hospital grounds where he meets with the men, performs services, and plays the cello for any of them who care to listen to him play.
Harding's life proceeds gently and smoothly for many years until young John Bold launches a lawsuit to reform the hospital, which spends a disproportionate amount on the house of the warden as compared with spending on the 12 pensioners. Bold is a decent man and a suitor of Eleanor Harding, but his conscience requires him to launch this lawsuit. Harding is defended mainly by his son-in-law, Archdeacon Grantly, the husband of Harding's elder daughter Susan. Grantly is a bluff, powerful, and imposing man who regards the lawsuit as ridiculous. But Harding is a mild man with a stricken conscience. He believes that Bold is right and, even though he loves his simple life at the hospital, he resigns his position and becomes the rector of a small parish nearby where he lives a more modest life. Bold goes on to marry Eleanor.
This is one of the most charming and engaging books that I have ever read. One feels sympathy for almost all of the characters, even Bold and Grantly, and most especially for Septimus Harding, a man who would never dream of exploiting his charges and who loved and cared for them, even the ones who took Bold's side in the affair, wrongly assuming that they would be granted a larger allowance if the hospital funds were distributed differently.
Some scenes in the story are unforgettable. In one, a foolish old pensioner, at death's door, is visited by Harding to say goodbye. The old man revives and brightens up, asking if that means that he will be getting another penny per week. In another, Harding has gone to see his barrister Sir Abraham Haphazard. Nervous and shy, having difficulty controlling his emotions, he talks to the barrister and astonishes him by all unconsciously fingering an imaginary cello with his left hand while talking.
I read it with a book group. All of us loved it. See my diary.
I was transcribing the notes for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and went to a page in the diary where I had discussed it. To my surprise, I saw that the same page also (and mainly) discussed The Warden. However I had no record in the XML or the paper index cards for that book that I remembered so fondly. I went back to the Gutenberg site and re-downloaded it, looked up the entry for it in the Wikipedia, and consulted my memory, in which significant parts remained, and wrote the above abstract and comment.
I might offer the book for the NCI book group. I think it will delight everyone.
I did recommend it to the book group and we did read the book. We'll be discussing it tomorrow. See my book notes with date_read = 2018-02.01.
| Author | Pirsig, Robert W. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 540 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | December 2000 |
Pirsig was one of those half mad intellectuals who, obsessed with philosophical speculation, lost himself and went off the deep end into madness, incapacity, hospitalization, and involuntary electric shock treatment. His book begins some years later on a motorcycle in Minnesota, heading for Montana, then Oregon, then LA, with his eleven year old son on the back. He begins his "chatauqua", relating his journey, his difficult interactions with the boy, his thoughts on motorcycle maintenance, and his gradual recovery of his memory of his former self, and his coming to terms with that self.
The extensive philosophical speculations attempt, unsuccessfully in my view, to build a theory of everything based on the concept of "quality". I was put off by this theory at first but gradually came to see past it to the honest and genuine effort behind it and the desperate suffering that P was trying to assuage. An unconventional thinker with little sense of personal office and academic politics, P got in trouble as a teacher of rhetoric and in big trouble as a student - first as a dropout/flunkee, then as a grad student at the University of Chicago where he ran afoul of big egos determined to smash him.
In the end he finds some reconciliation with, and recovery of, his former self, and he finds a fundamental sympathy with his son.
I grew to like this man and to respect him. He is a difficult person but never a selfish or ill-intentioned one. His thinking is not always clear but he faces intellectual problems squarely, believing deeply in the importance of understanding and objectivity - in so far as they can be achieved. Tragically, his son was murdered ten years later by a mugger, but he did have another child late in middle age.
See my diary for more.