Books read January through December 2001
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 441 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 2001 |
Humans trapped in the Rama spacecraft in Rama II leave the solar system and travel to a near star where they are contacted by a representative of the Ramans and ordered to participate in a plan to carry 2,000 humans from earth in a refurbished craft setup in a design to support the humans in comfort.
In the first half, Nicole des Jardin, Richard Wakefield, Michael O'Toole, and the children they bear on the craft, cope with each other and with the complexities of their environment. In the second half they deal with the human society established on Rama (the ship) which includes many criminals selected to meet the Raman demand for a real cross section.
The criminals eventually prevail - overwhelming government and establishing a mafia style rule. They trash the environment, murder the best people, and break through habitat walls to find and destroy other species living on Rama. The Ramans do not interfere. By the end, Wakefield is in hiding with some eggs of the destroyed aliens and Nicole has arisen from her last night to face execution. The story is left hanging, ready for a fourth book.
This human society on Rama is, unfortunately, rather believable. If an alien supercivilization awaits us they indeed find us in a similar condition. As always, the science is superb and the conception of aliens and of alien technology are terribly interesting and intelligent. We can't know whether they are realistic, but they certainly do provide believable extrapolations of the science and technology of today.
As in Rama II, I have to believe that Lee has added some character to Clarke's people. The collaboration between them has worked wonderfully well.
I seem to recall, but maybe it is only seeming, that when the demands were made for humans to be given to the Ramans the selection of criminals was made as much to get rid of them as to satisfy the demand. This is perhaps like what the Cubans did when the U.S. decided that it would accept any people who left Cuba. The Cuban government said, Okay, if that's what you want, all of these people would like to leave, and they opened the jails.
| Author | Makine, Andrei |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2001 |
Fourteen year old Alyosha lives in Siberia with his aunt and his friends, the crippled Utkin and the tough Samurai, in the Brezhnev era. Their little village is on the taiga by the river Olyay, which flows into the Amur. The three friends dream of a larger life than the world of snow, of freezing cold, of lonely women and rough drunken men. they get their first glimpse of that other world in a movie of Jean Paul Belmondo. They see it 17 times, memorizing every nuance. Then see another Belmondo film too which makes it to the cinema in a town 19 miles away that they hike to on snowshoes.
Alyosha longs for a woman, for freedom, for a wide western world. The three break into a boxcar and, by accident, travel to the Pacific coast where they play at being sophisticated men. Alyosha has a brief encounter with a prostitute. He bathes in the steam bath with Samurai. He looks longingly at the windows of the trans-Siberia train, always hoping for a glimpse of a real woman of the west.
This is a very literary work. It is all about culture and politics and life, seen from the viewpoint of a young boy standing at the edge of one world and looking for a path to another. The writing is very fine, the characters very absorbing, the picture of life in an almost dead society is quite striking. It puts me in mind of Willa Cather. But where C writes about life emerging and flourishing on the prairie, M writes about life emerging and escaping from the taiga.
A most interesting book.
As I recall, the Belmondo film that the boys watch over and over is a James Bond type spy thriller. I can appreciate that such films had a tremendous appeal to fourteen year old boys. How much more would it have been to fourteen year old boys in Siberia who had never seen anything like anything in the movie.
| Author | McMurtry, Larry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | January 2001 |
The famous popular author read essays on culture by the German Walter Benjamin while sitting in the Dairy Queen in Archer City Texas and used them as the occasion for his "Reflections at Sixty and Beyond", much as Robert Pirsig used motorcycle maintenance.
He spends a lot of time reflecting on his passion for book collecting, which eventually became one of the larger used books businesses in the U.S. He didn't like teaching. It wasn't for him and it interfered with his writing. Perhaps because it used a different part of his mind, book buying and selling did not interfere and became his sideline, and sometimes his main line, throughout his career.
This is not a literary autobiography. He says very little about his writing and he says nothing about his wives or lovers. He talks instead about the west, old and new, and about the book business, old and new.
I learned that the best "book scouts" aren't necessarily readers and may be quite ignorant about literature. Surprisingly, to me anyway, he also claims that quite a few writers do not read!
M's father was a small time cattleman. Knowledgeable and hard working, he put his entire life into his dream of being a rancher - never getting out of debt, never saving any money, and having it all crumble at his death. M knew the lives of cowboys and knew that the life was not for him.
It seems he did okay.
| Author | Davies, Robertson |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin books, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1951 |
| Number of Pages | 248 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2001 |
This is the first volume of the Salterton Trilogy.
An amateur theatrical group is producing Shakespeare's The Tempest as a "pastoral", in the open air, in the garden of Mr. Webster, a wealthy citizen of Salterton, a small Canadian city. 18 year old Griselda and 14 year old Freddy (a girl) Webster have parts, as does English Professor Vambrace, his daughter Pearl, Bonnie Susan "The torso", and Hector Mackilwraith, a 40 year old bachelor math teacher who falls in love with Griselda, who is also being pursued by the rake Lt. Roger Tassett, and the young intellectual Solly Bridgetower, who lives with his demanding, widowed mother. Music will be provided by the poor, talented, cynical and irresponsible Humphrey Cobbler. Valentine Rich, a professional actress and director who works in New York, will direct the play.
There are numerous comic foibles, many of them just this side of cheap slapstick, but all enriched by a marvelous overlay of wit and an undercurrent of sympathy for these people - who are treated roughly but without malice and with an appreciation of their essential humanity.
Everything leads up to the night of the first performances. Each character suffers his or her personal crisis, of which the worst is poor Mackilwraith's who finds himself spurned, lost, and suicidal. Fortunately, his attempt to hang himself fails and the book ends on a note of compassion as Griselda kisses him and he recognizes that it was all a foolish romance.
It is a delightful, intelligent book, full of the fine promise which Davies brings to maturity in his later work.
I imagine that I wrote down the names of all of the characters in hopes that the names would bring back the faces, as it were. It didn't work. My recollection of the book is not very strong. But I do have some recollection of it and do remember liking all of Davies books.
| Author | Wiesel, Elie |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Rodway, Stella |
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 120 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | January 2001 |
The Jews of Wiesel's town in Hungarian Transylvania survived until the spring of 1944, protected by Hungary's alliance with Germany. Then a coup installed a German puppet regime and the deportations began. Believing that the war was almost over, that nobody could be as evil as the Germans were reputed to be, and that the stories of genocide were wild paranoid tales, the people sat tight, did nothing, and were easily sucked into the Holocaust. 14 year old Wiesel was taken with his father, mother and three sisters. The women disappeared in the first day at Auschwitz and he lived with his father until his father's murder by starvation, exhaustion and beatings just three months before their liberation by the Americans at Buchenwald - to which they had been force marched and transported when the Russians arrived at the gates of Auschwitz.
I already knew the story of this horror from Victor Frankel, Primo Levi, and other writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish. W added one more witness, one more testimony, to the indictment. His stories included the cattle car train ride with screaming mad woman, the mechanized beatings performed with no emotion, the genuinely absurd German bureaucracy which "selected" people for death and yet ran an infirmary, the extraction of the gold teeth, the kindly looking Capo who beat W's father for 10 days until W gave up his gold crown, the savage beating W received after he saw a Capo fucking a woman, the boy who ran ahead of his rabbi father in hopes that the father would fall behind in the final march and no longer be a burden to him. The boy who stole his father's last piece of bread and then was himself beaten to death for it, the boy who played Beethoven's violin concerto on his last night of the death march and was found dead in the morning beside a smashed violin.
I cried many times over this book.
I can hardly keep from crying just reading over these notes.
The Hitler mania that produced the war and the death camps is incomprehensible to me. What did he imagine that he was doing? What did his followers see in this? What extraordinary defect in the human soul produces these horrors? Is that defect in me too? If some of us have cured that defect in ourselves, could it not be cured in everyone else? How? When?
It is difficult to fathom the depths of trauma and despair of the Holocaust. Wiesel is one of those who manages to do it. I don't think that his success has much to do with research into history. It's research into himself and research into the meaning of life and the meaning of meaning that is his great achievement.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1914 |
| Number of Pages | 248 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2001 |
This is an early work by Stout written in the late 19th century adventure, exploration, romance style of H. Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle's Lost World.
Wealthy Paul Lamar of New York city meets the indescribably beautiful Desiree Le Mire, a dancer who has turned all heads in Europe and used and abused any number of rich and titled suitors. When Paul's 22 year old brother Harry meets her he is smitten and runs away with her. Paul tracks them down in Colorado and squires them around in hopes that Desiree will tire of Harry and leave the boy alone. He engages a yacht in San Francisco and they head down the coast, stopping in Peru, where Desiree tires of wowing all the men and demands a trip up the Andes mountains.
In the mountains their guide leads them past a Cave of Death with admonitions not to go near. Desiree of course runs in and the men, of course, run after. They fall into a hole leading to an underground river which carries them to the land of a lost Inca king and his followers who live in caves and caverns and dine on prehistoric fish from the waters.
There are no Inca characters. Not one says a single word. There is an old king and a few thousand interchangeable people. The story is full of wild fights, escapes, battles with monsters, derring-do and balderdash. Oddly, the principal physical facts are utterly wrong since S has his people seeing dimly in the dark (in fact they should not see at all) and the Incas never talk, when in fact sound should be a major part of their lives.
I read this out of curiosity. I like the Nero Wolfe novels and was curious to see a work from 20 years before the first Wolfe. It was a real puppy.
Sometimes I recall a lousy book well and a good book poorly. This one I recall fairly well. It may be because it was so outrageously bad. Or maybe it was because I read it on the Palm. Or maybe it was because the contrast between this work and Stout's mature work is so great. Or maybe Stout was a good enough writer that, even his very bad books, had a way of taking hold. I don't know, though I suspect it was the first reason.
There are other sources of electronic books today but at that time the Gutenberg website was almost the only source and, because of the Draconian copyright laws in the U.S., written to support the rent seeking behavior of the publishers in disregard of readers and authors ("rent seeking" is a concept I learned from the Joseph Stiglitz book I am reading at the moment, and which I now apply a lot), there are no modern books available from that source. This book by Rex Stout was at least linked to a more modern author, one who was alive until 1975. When I came across the book in the Gutenberg catalog I immediately downloaded it.
I looked up the book on Amazon in order to find out the number of print pages, but thinking that there wouldn't be any edition in print. I was wrong. It is in print, published by "CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform", an on demand publishing program for self-publishing, now owned by Amazon. There are sixty reviews! Most readers were disappointed. I think it attracted so many because there are millions of fans of Stout's Nero Wolfe series. Unfortunately, many of them may have paid Amazon's list price of $12.95 for a book that is free on Gutenberg.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Author | Lee, Gentry |
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 466 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 2001 |
Nicole escapes on the night before her scheduled execution with the aid of two new miature robots built by Richard Wakefield. She is joined by her daughter Billie, son Patrick, Max and Eopnine, Nai, and Turner in the old island of New York in the cylindrical sea. The humans then make contact with the octo-spiders who turn out to be a highly advanced race living in the northern hemi-cyliner of Rama. Nakamura and his thugs discover New York and the octos and begin a war to liquidate them. The octos retaliate, killing all humans over 40 with germ warfare. Finally, to prevent total destruction, the Ramans interfere and put all the humans to sleep. They wake up at another Raman node where the xenophobes are separated out, sterilized, and sent away on another ship to live out their lives and die in space.
Is Rama revealed? Not really. We never learn who the Ramans are or where they came from. The religious man, Michael O'Toole, reappears with a robot Saint Michael who has explained to him the meaning of life and the universe. It is a creation of God who is attempting by empirical means to discover a path to complete and ultimate harmony. When Nicole asks her own Raman robot guide whether this is true the guide says that it could be. He doesn't know.
There is a final scene before Nicole's death where she is shown an animated model of the development of intelligent life in our corner of the galaxy. It is a remarkable scene, impressive in its grand conception of consciousness in the Milky Way.
It is unreasonable for us to expect an author to solve the grand questions of life. Clarke and Lee can't do it. But the scope of their attempt, the brightness of the light they cast upon the problems, the expansiveness of their vision of higher intelligence, are all terribly impressive. High marks for this whole series. See also my diary entries.
The diary entry that I found, January 29, is an extended speculation on the Clarke's Raman animated model of the development of intelligent life. I didn't find anything else.
This is, as far as I know, the last book in the Rama series of four, all of which I read.
| Author | Colbron, Grace Isabel |
|---|---|
| Author | Groner, Augusta |
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Number of Pages | 44 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2001 |
"Being an Account of Some Adventures in the Professional Experience of a member of the Imperial Austrian Police"
Detective Joseph Muller is forced out of Vienna and is working in a small town, in spite of his extraordinary gift as a policeman, because of his penchant for following his own lights and ignoring the political and legal decisions of his superiors. He is called in on a case of a dead man found with a bullet in his chest in a locked room. Combining a small amount of evidence with excellent deduction and some leaps of intuition, he concentrates on a local nobleman whom he believes was being cuckolded by his wife and the murdered man. Wearing a pedlar's disguise, he makes his way into the nobleman's home where he blackmails the servants into telling him all the rest he needs to know. With this knowledge he confronts the nobleman and gets him to reveal all. However he sympathizes with the murderer's motive and action. Rather than arrest him on the spot he gives him time to return home and shoot himself to avoid the disgrace of a trial.
I'm not sure when this was written. I suspect that it appeared in the 1890's, capitalizing on the success of Sherlock Holmes in detection and perhaps The Prisoner of Zenda in central European intrigue. It is interesting today primarily as a period piece. It's treatment of the servants, its implied justification of murder as a solution to romantic betrayal, and its old Imperial social hierarchy are far out of step with turn of the 21st century American ideas. But it wasn't at all a bad read. There's something to be said for modern readers taking a taste of popular fiction of the past and not restricting themselves to the few surviving classics.
Searching the Internet, I failed to find any publication date for this book, though it is available in the public domain and was probably published sometime between before 1923. I found skimpy evidence that Colbron lived from 1869-1948 and Groner from 1859-1929. So perhaps this book was indeed published in the 1890s as I surmised from the text. I did find dates on two other books by Colbron, one 1917 and one 1923, but I can't be sure that they were the dates of the first editions.
Wait, here's more. According to a blog post by Anja de Jager, Groner invented the character of Joseph Muller in a series of books published from 1897 to the early 1920's. She used the pen name "Auguste" instead of Augusta in her published books. I know less still about Colbron or their collaboration.
In another note on manybooks.net, "SensualPoet" dates the publication as 1910 and cites reviews from that year in the New York Times and the Saturday Review of Books.
| Author | Kemelman, Harry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1964 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2001 |
In this novel, the first in what would become a series, young Rabbi David Small is completing his first year as the rabbi of an upscale Conservative Jewish congregation in a Massachusetts town. an intelligent, bookish man with no sense of temple politics, he is on the verge of being voted out of his job by the executive committee when a young woman is found dead in his car and he is a possible suspect.
The local Irish Catholic police chief soon comes to respect the rabbi and shares details of the investigation with him. K leads us first to a Jewish car salesman and then to a sleazy Italian night club owner before Rabbi Small eventually establishes that it was the local beat cop who actually killed the girl. Chief Lanigan makes the arrest offstage. The rabbi's supporters win over the committee and all ends satisfactorily.
Oddly, Small is not an attractive character. He is rather insensitive to others and is wrapped up in his world of Talmud studies. On the other hand there is a fair amount of Jewish religion interest in the book. The mystery aspects are adequately, but not well handled. The misdirection is heavy handed and the killer turns out not even to be a character in the book.
It has been many years since I read one of these books and may be many more before I read another. What I liked best about it was the remembrance of a 1960's suburban Jewish community which it partially called to mind.
My parents moved to Kennison Avenue in a partly Jewish neighborhood in 1954, then to Willow Glen Drive in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in 1959. All of my friends in that neighborhood were Jewish. My Dad joined a Jewish country club (Chestnut Ridge Country Club) and I joined AZA, a high school Jewish fraternity. Our junior high school, Sudbrook, and our high school, Milford Mill, were about half Jewish and half Christian, and all white (today they are both mostly black.) I was bar mitzvahed and confirmed at the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation. It is that neighborhood and those clubs and schools and that synagogue that I recalled in reading Kemelman's book.
I'm pretty sure that that community still exists and still contains a somewhat self-contained American Jewish culture, though it has probably moved further northwest since those days. However I have no contact with it at all. Our house on Rockridge Road was in a neighborhood that had many Jews, but not as many as the other neighborhoods, and our present house, where we have lived since 1993, is in a neighborhood with very few other Jews that I know about, though there may be some somewhere. So Kemelman brought it all back.
| Author | Weyman, Stanley J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1894 |
| Number of Pages | 228 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; France |
| When Read | February 2001 |
Reckless, dissolute swordsman Gil de Bereault goads a brash young Englishman into a duel at a card game in a Paris salon. Even though the boy generously returns his sword when G slips, G stabs him anyway and with everyone's hatred directed at him, is arrested by Cardinal Richelieu's guards. The cardinal condemns him for dueling but then offers him one chance at life. If he goes on a dangerous mission to arrest a rebel nobleman in the south, he can redeem himself and escape hanging.
G travels south and reaches the nobleman's home, occupied by his wife and sister, a sinister deaf and dumb servant, and several other servants. He tricks the women into trusting him, then betrays them in several cycles, all the while developing a conscience and coming to the realization that he is dealing with people who live to higher standards of morality, trust and generosity than he has known. It transforms him. Although he arrests the nobleman and conducts him part way to Paris, he lets him go and continues alone to report to the Cardinal for hanging. However the cardinal has been appealed to by the sister. He is at a turning point in his career. In a precarious political situation, deserted by his sycophantic supporters, he is impressed with G's courage and honesty and by the appeal of the woman. he releases G into her arms and sends him south to live with her.
We aren't given the exact date of the events. It is perhaps in the 1630's.
It is hard to identify with G. From the very first, when he stabs the English boy, we see him as a cruel, self-centered man, far less worthy than the people he is sent to betray and arrest. W builds effectively on this tension between our natural sympathy for the narrator of a story, a man whose perspective we share, and our furor at what he is doing. His awakening to a better life is slow and torturous and the outcome always seems in doubt. We fear the Cardinal's revenge if he takes the path we want him to take. But of course there is the fairy tale ending required by this genre of historical romance.
It is an interesting book, relying on character, not swordplay for its interest.
Looking at the Gutenberg site today I was surprised by the small number of downloads of Weyman's books. The most popular was less than a hundred downloads - which is not many for a website serving free literature to, what, millions of readers? Perhaps Weyman will be rediscovered some day. Perhaps the popularity of ebook readers will result in new readers being introduced to Weyman. I didn't count them, but on our last Caribbean cruise it seemed to me that the number of ebook readers was not far short of the number of people reading paper books. And these were mostly older people - though, perhaps for the first time, I began to feel that there were probably more people who were younger than Marcia and I than older.
A Gentleman of France is still my favorite Weyman novel of the four that I have read.
| Author | King, Laurie R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2001 |
Mary Russell reaches the age of majority and inherits the wealth left to her. Through a college friend she becomes involved with a woman preacher who has set up a temple to liberate women, but something is wrong about the temple and the preacher. Several prominent wealthy young women have died in mysterious accidents, leaving money to the church. Russell exposes herself and her new wealth to draw the killers onto her, and she succeeds.
She is kidnapped, held in a cellar, and injected with heroin day after day until Sherlock Holmes finally finds her and breaks in with the police. Then they hunt the man who organized it, finally tracking him down. He is a killer and drug dealer with a way with women. He had married the woman preacher and was using her without her knowledge. Holmes fights him to the death, leaving him on a burning boat which explodes.
Then Homes, near 60, and Russell, 21, confess their love for each other. In the end they are married.
King does all this remarkably well. Her books are just as much novels of character as of crime. Holmes and Russell are different, complex, interesting people - easy to admire and care about. I like them.
The book is also about women's rights. Every chapter begins with a quotation about men and women - most pretty shocking by modern standards. But this is a side interest. Russell's life is not defined by her sex or her politics but by her character and her intellect and her growing feeling for Holmes.
I like these books very much.
| Author | Kors, Alan |
|---|---|
| Author | Dalton, Dennis |
| Author | Sugrue, Michael |
| Author | Staloff, Darren |
| Publication | Springfield, VA: The Teaching Company, 1996 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | February 2001 |
Twelve lectures on epistemology, political theory, moral philosophy and social science covering Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Burke, and bits of La Metrie and others. The four professors had various quirks in their speaking styles which I am unused to in hearing books read by professional actors, but they seemed very sound on their subjects and surprisingly good at summarizing major works in a short time, e.g., the Critique of Pure Reason in one lecture! - Yet informative and useful.
The style of presentation was more historical than I remember from my own academic training in philosophy - which tended to read books entirely out of the context of the social / historical / material milieu. Perhaps the field is broadening, or maybe these professors have social science backgrounds.
I gained much new understanding of English politics from Locke, Hume, and Burke, saw the religious aspects of Berkeley's and even Kant's epistemology, and the atheistic aspects of Hume. I relearned and recalled the basic epistemology of those times. All in all, an edifying experience.
Although the Enlightenment only enlightened a section of the educated classes - themselves a small minority, its ideas and effects were powerful and lasting. The American revolutionaries, especially Jefferson, were deeply impressed with the ideas of Locke. Hume threw dogmatic religion into the trash can. Montesquieu began the analysis of society in an objective even though flawed way, and La Metrie summed up admirably the full absurdity of the supernaturalists, dualists, etc.
Good stuff. See also my diary for further comment.
I checked the diary. There are several short paragraphs written on February 9, 2001. They don't add a lot to the above but are relevant.
| Author | Childers, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Publication | The Teaching Company, 2008 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 2001 |
Professor Childers emphasizes the political and social aspects of the events more than the military. He is particularly enlightening in explaining the political moods in Germany, where no allied troops had invaded and where the people had not been told that the spring 1918 offensive in the west had been smashed and rolled back. They saw the armistice as a bolt from the blue. The army hadn't been defeated, it was the Jewish, socialist, Bolshevik, liberal, republican revolutionaries who had overthrown the Kaiser and stabbed Germany in the back.
The victors drew different conclusions. To the English and French people, nothing could have been as bad as the war. anything and everything should have been done to prevent it. Men like Chamberlain believed this in their bones and had made it their irreversible political creed. They were easy marks for Hitler.
Hitler never wanted war in the west. He wanted the east. He wanted to kill Jews, Bolsheviks, Slavs, "Asiatics". When he turned east in 1941 it was to fight the war he really wanted. It was to be a race war from the very beginning. No quarter given or asked. Just kill. He expected the war to last one summer, especially after he saw how badly the Russians fought against the Finns. He was greatly mistaken.
The lectures are necessarily superficial. The invasion of Norway gets two sentences. There is nothing about the bombing of Rotterdam, of Eban Emael, of Churchill's rise to power, of the fiascoes in Greece and Crete. He says little about the tactics of blitzkrieg - the coordination of wheel, wing and shell, the use of airborne forces, the evolution of fighter tactics. There is nothing about Spain, the Condor Legion, etc. For the amateur historian of the war (me) there is little new here and much left out. But the insights on politics and international affairs are still useful to me and I just always like books on the subject.
| Author | Bellow, Saul |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Penguin Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 118 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 2001 |
Introduction by Cynthia Ozick.
Tommy Wilhelm, nee Wilhelm Adler, is living in a hotel in Manhattan, the same hotel where his 80 year old widower father lives. Now in his forties he has abandoned his wife in the Bronx for unspecified reasons, quit his sales job in a huff when his company gave half his territory to the owner's nephew, and has invested his last $700 in an extremely risky commodities future speculation with a strange man calling himself Dr. Tankin, who appears to be intelligent and on one level, well intentioned, but who is a compulsive liar. The entire short book traces one day when the commodities speculation evaporates, his wife demands more money, his hotel bill is due, and his father, a retired doctor, refuses to help him. Abandoned by all, having nothing left and no relationships to build upon, he happens upon a funeral and joins the service in the chapel. There he breaks down and cries and cries.
This is a powerfully written book. It is simple. There are only a few characters. But it paints a very dramatic portrait of a lonely man who has always lived too impulsively, too foolishly, and has reached the end of his rope. It is very like Death of a Salesman in its 1950's concept of a man who attempts to put on a brave front but is desperate beneath. There is much keen observation of interior states and attitudes. The character of Dr. Tankin is brilliant.
Wilhelm is certainly not like me. Like his father, I see "Willie" as an overgrown child who has made wrong choices at every turn and gets what anyone could have predicted he would get. My sympathy is colored by disapproval of the man. But for all that, I am not unsympathetic. I feel for Bellow's poor, sad creature and wish him well.
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 399 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 2001 |
In the sequel to Eon, the Naderite faction of the humans in the Way has returned to Thistledown from which they assist the "Old Natives" in recovering from the nuclear war that devastated the earth. They debate re-opening the Way. Pavel Mirsky returns from the Geshel colony which blew through the Jarts and reached the end of time. Now a member of the Final Mind, he has returned to convince the humans to destroy the Way. At first he does not succeed but after a near disaster, when the Way is opened only to allow in a Jart attack, do the people agree to its destruction.
Several sub-stories are developed. Olmy ingests a 500 year old captured Jart into his mind and is eventually defeated and overwhelmed by it. Patricia Vasquez dies on the planet Gaia leaving the clavicle, the key to the Way, to her granddaughter Rhita who finds a gate only to have the Jarts come through and assimilate the entire planet; and Garry Lanier, now an old man, contemplates a natural death in an age when death has become unnecessary.
In the end the Way is destroyed, the Jarts accept the commands of the Final Mind and free Rhita. Patricia's life is restored and Olmy settles on Trimble with the Frants.
It sounds like total space opera when retold as plot, but it's not. It's a tour de force of speculation about the nature of intelligence, space, time, humanity, duty, and other large questions of physics and of life. Only a few other authors, Clarke, Stapledon, maybe a few others, have attempted to think seriously on this scale. As a novel, the book has its limits and may not be as effective as the later Slant, but as a speculation and a work of futuristic imagination it is a marvel.
Shortly after reading this book I recommended the series to Bob Kline, a man of great intelligence and high sensibility. He thoroughly disliked it. I didn't really have a chance to discuss it with him in any depth. I don't now remember if he gave me any reasons and don't recall his wanting to discuss it, but I do remember that he found nothing attractive.
Books of this type have a special appeal to me. Part of the appeal is my desire to think big, to think about the evolution of the universe and of sapience in the broadest terms. Bear does that in spades. Another part is my belief that whatever the future of the universe may be, it is extremely unlikely that it will be composed of humans of the twentieth century type, any more than it will be composed of Australopithecus. We are living in a transitional era, on the cusp of extraordinary changes that I believe will occur starting in well less than one thousand years - truly the blink of an eye in the history of life or the universe.
I can't live in that future universe. Unlike the Garry Lanier character of this novel, I don't have a choice about whether to die of old age or not. My doom is sealed. I won't live to see the massive changes that I predict will happen. But I still want to know what they will be. I can't know it. Nobody can. But it's terribly interesting to me when I read the speculations of a highly intelligent and articulate person who has put a lot of time into imagining what such a future could be like.
It was also a good novel. Sometime near the end, Olmy meets Mirsky. Mirsky instantly recognizes the Jart intelligence inside Olmy's brain and addresses him directly. The Jart instantly recognizes that Mirsky is not just another human, but is a representative of "Descendant Command" the beings of the far future who have conquered space and time and know the truth of everything. The Jart accepts Mirsky's commands and we see the future of the human race no longer as doomed to subjugation by the Jarts. It is an optimistic ending that makes us feel much better about the future.
| Author | Walpole, Horace |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1765 |
| Number of Pages | 112 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 2001 |
Manfred, Prince of Otranto, plans to marry his son to Princess Isabella but the boy is killed on his wedding day by a supernatural event - a giant metal helmet falls on him from nowhere. Determined to see his line succeed him and now foiled by the loss of his only son, he demands that his wife Hippolite divorce him and the young Isabella marry him. Meanwhile young Theodore, claiming to be a peasant, helps Isabella to escape and is in turn helped by Matilda, Manfred's daughter.
The story careens wildly through twists and turns of character, revelations of identity, supernatural interventions of the ghost of the rightful Prince of Otranto, young love, old love, captures and escapes, and the final death of Matilda, killed by Manfred himself in an accidental attack. Theodore, the true rightful heir to the principality, marries Isabella and "with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.
This is considered the first Gothic novel, a genre achieving great popularity in England. It had at least 115 editions up to the latest that I saw.
In a preface to the second edition, Walpole said that he wanted to combine the supernaturalism and the mystery of the ancient tales with the naturalism of modern stories - taking the best elements of both. It is a combination that never appealed to me but it certain was popular with the reading public.
I imagine that most of the people reading this book today, such as they are, are doing it as I did, for the historical interest. But supernaturalism and fantasy are hardly dead. They continue to support a large number of authors, some of whom are even rather inventive and others of whom are escaping into their own personal fantasies.
| Author | Childers, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Publication | The Teaching Company, 1996 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | March 2001 |
In the middle and concluding sections of his history Childers covers the rest of the war with primary emphasis on the United States and on America's struggles in the war.
The social changes wrought by the war were more significant in the U.S. than I had realized. They included: pulling us out of the depression, bringing married women into the work force, allowing blacks to get relatively high paying blue collar jobs for the first time, and bringing millions of young soldiers into contact with a much wider country and world than they otherwise would have been exposed to.
I was surprised to learn that, at its peak, the U.S. Army was smaller than the German army and only slightly larger than the Japanese. It was Russia that supplied the real manpower for victory, although it is possible that the Russians might not have won if the U.S. and Britain were out of the war.
Germany did not even fully mobilize until 1944. Hitler planned to fight a short war. He told his generals that if they kick in the door, the whole rotten house will collapse in Russia. When that didn't happen he still tried to win using slave labor instead of full mobilization. His output in the early years was actually less than England's for critical material such as aircraft. But in spite of all, his Nazi race war ideas turned the whole world against him. Russian soldiers fought like maniacs and taught the Germans a lesson on what real combat was all about.
Another social change brought about by the war that I did not record here, though Childers may have mentioned it in his lectures, was a big migration of people from rural and especially Southern areas to urban areas where war industries were located. Over a million of these people were black.
I commented above that the Russians taught the Germans a lesson on what real combat was all about. I remember an excerpt from a letter by a German soldier in the first year of the Russian campaign. I think I got it from Childers' lecture. The young German soldier wrote home about encountering fanatical resistance from some Russian units and a night attack by Russian cavalry that swept through his camp and killed a bunch of men at great risks to themselves. He said that the invasion of France was like maneuvers with live ammunition, but the invasion of Russia was real combat.
I've read many good histories of the war. This is not the best but it's not a bad one.
| Author | Wright, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1944 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | April 2001 |
This is Wright's autobiographical account of his youth in Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee and his young manhood in Memphis and Chicago. Born in 1908 into a poor black family, his situation became desperate when his father abandoned the family for another woman. He spent some months in a horrible orphanage without enough to eat, then his mother took her two boys to live with her sister in Arkansas but had to leave there when her sister's husband was murdered by white men who coveted his liquor business.
From then on they lived mostly with his Grandpa, a Civil War veteran who could never collect veteran's benefits because of a clerical error in his records, his Granny, a devoutly fundamentalist religious fanatic, and various other aunts and uncles, some of whom regarded it as their right to beat Richard just because they felt he disrespected them.
Over top of all of this - the beatings, perpetual malnutrition, mind destroying religion, and a macho street culture in which he always had to fight - over all of it was the oppression of the whites. Many whites felt free to lie, to cheat, assault and terrorize blacks and Richard, who never properly assimilated the feeling of inferiority demanded of him, had many conflicts and took many blows. Finally, with only four years of formal education but many years of reading from clandestinely borrowed books, he stole money to go north, eventually landing in Chicago, where he became a communist.
The second part of the book, rejected by publishers during W's lifetime, is about his experience in Chicago and in the Communist Party - from which he was eventually alienated and by which he was very badly treated. However, even after being reviled as a Trotskyite and many other things, he remained convinced that the Communists alone were color blind and understood the desperate condition of the lowest classes.
This was a truly remarkable and important book. I wish every white American read it.
I recall a scene which must have come from this book about a black elevator operator in an office building. He puts on a jive, dumb nigger act and gets white men to give him quarters, in return for which they get to kick him in the ass. When the white man gets off the elevator and its just him and the author, he resumes his real persona - full of contempt for the laughing white jerk who paid and kicked him.
The incident spoke volumes about race relations in the South, and perhaps to some extent in the United States in general. The progress of the United States, now living under a black President, has been enormous. But there is still much to be achieved and a better understanding of our past will help people to understand the importance of achieving it.
| Author | King, Laurie R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 342 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 2001 |
King's first published novel is about 28 year old San Francisco detective Kate Martinelli who is called upon, largely for public relations reasons because she is a woman, to assist in the investigation of three murdered children. She and senior detective Al Hawkin soon discover that local resident Vaun Adams, a very famous painter under another name, spent nine years in prison for murdering a child.
After researching Vaun's past they soon discover a much better suspect, a former high school boyfriend known for drug dealing and cruelty. But they can't find him anywhere. Their only hope is to lay a trap. They catch him in the end but not before he shoots Kate's lover.
The story is told with some sensitivity and much intelligence. Characterization is okay but not well developed. Vaun is remote. Hawkin is competent and aloof. But no one is completely flat. One of the bigger surprises, at least to me, and surely intended by King, is that Kate is a lesbian. her partner is introduced only as "Lee" and all references to gender are concealed. Then later we learn that Lee is a woman and the full story of their love affair is introduced. It's clearly an attempt at manipulation. Win the reader's sympathy. Pique our interest in a possible romance with Al Hawkin. Then when we have accepted and identified with Kate, reveal her sexual preference.
That didn't work for me. The lesbianism is fine. The surprise out of the closet felt like lack of trust in the reader and lack of forthrightness in the author. Well, it is after all a first novel. I like her mind and her writing.
| Author | Unsworth, Barry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Clipper Audio, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2001 |
Reclusive, neurotic, obsessive-compulsive Charles Cleasby has found in the life of Lord Horatio Nelson his only connection to the world, his only way of dealing with life. His mother abandoned the family while he was still a child, his brother grew up and out, and finally, his domineering father died leaving Charles the house - which Charles soon turns into a shrine to Nelson. He has all the books, cabinets full of memorabilia, and a pool table in the basement covered with glass and ship models with which Charles lovingly recreates each of Nelson's battles, blow by blow, hour by hour, on the exact anniversary of each event.
Now he is writing a new biography and has engaged Miss Lily as secretary to type his work into her computer. but he faces three problems. First, there is his growing attraction to Lily and her 12 year old son, an attraction pulling him out of himself but one which he can neither understand nor fruitfully pursue. Second there is Lily's opposing views on Nelson. She sees him as a bloody tyrant at sea, a bully to his wife and a braggart. And finally there is a terrible incident in Nelson's career when he seems to have given assurances to the Republican rebels in Naples but then, when they gave over their fortresses, he saw them imprisoned and slaughtered. He wants desperately to prove Nelson's innocence in the affair but only sinks deeper into psychosis when he fails. In the end he goes to Naples, becomes severely paranoid, and murders a young boy whom he confuses with the young Nelson.
This is really a brilliant book with great historical insight and appreciation. But it is difficult to read the disturbing mental illness which eventually consumes and destroys the character.
Looking at Amazon website I see that Unsworth is a prolific author who has attracted many positive reviews, from some sophisticated readers.
| Author | Altman, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | May 2001 |
A female spy sent by Germany to the U.S. in 1933 kills a young woman, assumes her identity, and marries a Princeton professor. Then years later he is working on the atom bomb project. She steals a number of secrets and heads for Germany by way of England, leaving a trail of bodies on the way.
In a parallel story, Professor Harris Winterbottom, an elderly Englishman, is recruited to be a double agent. But he has an agenda of his own. he hopes to go to Germany and win the release of his wife from Dachau.
The stories intertwine in England in a big scene of a shootout and fight at a coastal lighthouse. Winterbottom makes it to Germany where he lands in the middle of a fight between Himmler and Canaris (head of the Abwehr) and is sent back to England with his wife.
The story is readable only if you can ignore at least one new absurdity in each section of the book. The Nazi spy kills bunches of armed and trained and alert guards using a knife or her bare hands. Winterbottom is told secrets by the British which he had absolutely no need to know - then allowed to go to Germany. Canaris sends W back as an emissary to England. None of this is remotely plausible.
It seems odd to me that this freshman author was able to get this book published.
Again, facing the limits of finding anything worth reading in the small selection of audio books at the libraries.
As of today, Amazon is advertising its very last copy of the first edition of this book. There was a review by a "verified purchaser" on January 30, 2017, so perhaps they'll sell this copy. Predictably, at least when one goes through the trouble of getting past the Verified Purchase reviewers to see all of them, there were lots of one star reviews by people who were offended by the stupidity of the plot. Also predictably, there were lots of five star reviews by people who were entranced by it, one reviewer even saying it was "one of the best espionage novels I've ever read."
There were 102 reviews of this abominable novel. 47% gave it five stars. The author has ten novels currently in print at Amazon and is said by Amazon to have sold a quarter million books world-wide. I expect that number was produced some time ago and is higher than that now.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 2001 |
"Father" Terry Dunn lives in Rwanda, hearing confessions and saying Mass once in a while. He had just arrived and was actually in the church when the Interahamwe entered it and massacred 47 people before his eyes. Five years later he sees one of the killers who is planning to kill again. Using his one armed housekeeper/mistress' pistol, he kills four murderers and immediately leaves for the U.S. where he is a fugitive from a cigarette smuggling charge.
Back in Detroit he lives in his brother's house and takes up with Debbie Dewey, a young woman just out of jail for hitting her ex-boyfriend with a car after he stole her money. Now Randy, the boyfriend is a successful restaurateur and Terry and Debbie have a plan to shake him down. The initial plan is replaced by a more complicated one when the mob muscles in on Randy. Eventually, with mob collaboration, they make off with $250,000 of Randy's money. Dazzled by the money, Debbie decides to cheat Terry out of his share but he outwits her, grabs the whole amount, and heads back to Rwanda and his one armed mistress.
The African setting is new and different for Leonard but he handles it reasonably well. And of course his American racketeers are wonderful, from Johnny Pajonny, the cigarette smuggler, to Vito the enforcer and Mutt, the bar bouncer and wannabe contract hit man. This is not Leonard's best work but it's not bad. The biggest problem is Terry - a man we can't quite sympathize with, not even as much as, say Chili Palmer. But the historical interest, like in his Cuba Libre, adds something to the genre.
| Author | Hugo, Victor |
|---|---|
| Translators | Bair, Lowell |
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1831 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2001 |
Hugo introduces a number of inhabitants of 15th century Paris, none of whom is exactly what he appears to be. A priest/intellectual appears to be a decent man. He has raised his baby brother, now a 16 year old, ne-er do well student playboy, doing his best for him. He also raised Quasimodo, the abandoned hunchback child of gypsies whom no one else would care for. Now Quasimodo is the bell ringer for the Cathedral of Notre Dame and is deaf from the bells. The priest falls madly, hopelessly, absurdly in love with a 16 year old gypsy dancer. But she has fallen in love with the worthless, handsome Captain Phoebus - who rescued her one night from the priest and his hunchback assistant who had kidnapped her. There is also a mad woman living in a cell off the public square, driven mad when gypsies kidnapped her baby 15 years before. She is determined upon revenge against the little gypsy dancer - only to discover, too late, that the girl is actually her daughter.
The events of the story are overblown and rather fantastic. The characters verge on being cartoons. And yet the story and the characters have a remarkable power to grip us. We desperately want the little gypsy girl to escape. We want Quasimodo to be recognized as the fundamentally decent man that he is. We want the priest to be stopped and the Captain to be exposed to little Esmeralda as the shallow and uninteresting man that he is. But all comes to a bad end.
When I started this book I found it a bit tedious and boring. But as it developed I became more and more engrossed - not only in the characters and the plot, but even in the long descriptions of Parisian architecture or in the caricatures of government and medieval church society, science and justice. This really is a classic book.
| Author | Grisham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 608 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2001 |
Law student Rudy Baylor is finishing his last semester at the University of Memphis, studying for his bar exams and tending bar at night to try to pay his bills. He has a job waiting for him at a second rate but reputable law firm and is assisting old Mrs. Black in her fight with an insurance company that refused payment for a bone marrow transplant that would have saved the life of her dying son. Then the rug is pulled out from under him. His law firm is bought by a big firm and his job offer disappears. He brings the Black case to another firm but they try to steal the case and shaft him out of the horrible job he had wangled from them.
At the end of his rope, he winds up in the firm of Lyman "Bruiser" Stone, a petty mobster and an ambulance chaser who sends him out to a hospital each day to try to recruit victims of car accidents.
The Bruiser is investigated by the FBI and flees the country. With Bruiser's paralegal Deck, Rudy goes into business as an independent and concentrates on the Black case.
Most of the rest of the story is Rudy's great battle with the Great Benefit Insurance Company - a company of crooks whose real business is denying any all claims, no matter how valid. He gets a great judge and gets help from another lawyer in another state who is also suing Great Benefit. He exposes the bastards, makes a laughing stock of their high priced lawyers, and wins $50 million, but never collects because the owners loot the company and leave the country.
There is a rather adolescent subplot as Rudy falls in love with a beautiful 19 year old battered spouse, kills her husband in self-defense, hides the evidence, and quits the law to run away with her and teach high school history. It's a little slap happy but good comic fun.
The notion of an insurance company that never pays seemed far fetched but I ran into one, or rather Dan did. When he was 17 or so, he had an old used car that was hit by another driver. The insurance company offered a number of obvious lies and excuses for why they would not pay, though I did get the money by filing a complaint with the Maryland Insurance Commission. I guess the amount of the claim, around $2,000, wasn't enough to drive them to loot the company and move abroad. Grisham has a real talent for telling true stories that no on would imagine were true - at least no one as naive as me.
If I remember correctly, I was relieved at the end when Rudy took up a career as a history teacher. I could have done that myself and considered it from time to time.
| Author | Esquivel, Laura |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | June 2001 |
Tita de la Garza, born in the kitchen in early 20th century Mexico, crying amidst the vapors of the onions, grows up as the youngest of three daughters, cruelly chosen by her mother, Mama Elena, to never marry. She must stay home and serve her mother. She falls in love with Pedro but her mother forbids the marriage. Pedro, still in love with Tita, marries her sister Rosaura in order to secretly be near Tita.
The family passes through the revolution. Sister Gertrudis runs off with a rebel, becomes a prostitute, then a rebel officer. Pedro and Rosaura have a child. There are deaths and catastrophes. Through it all, Mama Elena's tyranny grows worse and worse and Tita retreats further into her only outlet for her suppressed love and passion - cooking.
Each chapter begins with a recipe. Each major event involves a major meal, often with magical after effects caused, for example, by the mixing of Tita's tears in the food.
Tita has a nervous breakdown and is brought back to health by John Brown, an American doctor who is in love with her. She deeply admires and respects John and agrees to marry him, but her passion is still Pedro. She and Pedro are consumed, literally, by their burning lust for each other and die in a conflagration kindled by their desire.
This is a very unusual book, full of earthy sentiment and emotion and rendered quite exotic by both the cooking and the magical events. It is a mythic tale, very absorbing and very satisfying. Its simplicity is part of its attraction. Although it's not my type of story (frustrated love, cooking, parental oppression), I still liked it.
The book was written in Spanish in 1990 and translated into English in 1992. It was very popular and I can see why.
Literature of this type is much more common in Latin America than in the U.S. We have fantasy novels aimed at adolescents and their grown up counterparts. The Latin Americans write an entirely different type of fantastic literature - exemplified especially in Garcia Marquez and Borges. It's a literature that challenges the reader but is very rewarding to the reader who works at it.
| Author | Lukacs, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audiobooks, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | June 2001 |
Lukacs argues that the period from May 24-29, 1940, was the most critical period in the history of World War II. It was the time, according to L, that Hitler came closest to winning the war.
When Chamberlain's government collapsed on May 10 at the onset of the German invasion of France, King George wanted to ask his good friend Lord Halifax to form a government. Halifax, understanding that he didn't have the makings of a great leader, demurred and Churchill became Prime Minister. But as the crisis deepened in France, Halifax, Chamberlain, Lloyd George, and other key leaders felt it was time to make overtures to Hitler and see what could be done to make peace. Churchill, alone among the top leadership with a real understanding of both Hitler and the world and national situation, fought desperately to rally the people and the government to fight on. It was in this period, culminating in Dunkirk which helped bolster Churchill's position, that he consolidated his power and led his country to a full commitment to the struggle.
I was already a great admirer of Churchill but this book strongly reinforced my views. It was Churchill who took the most principled stand. It was Churchill who understood that even if they could not beat the Nazis they could hold out against them and save the British Empire from becoming a weak vassal state of the Germans. It was Churchill who understood better than anyone else what the consequences of a Nazi victory would be.
I came across Lukacs' name in Deborah Lipstadt's book History on Trial. It turns out that he too was a target of the Holocaust denier David Irving. He had written a history book that was on the verge of publication but Irving threatened to sue his publisher if the book came out. Unlike Lipstadt's publisher, Lukacs' backed down and it took a couple of years more before Lukacs was able to publish his book. I don't know if he had to do any rewriting to get it published.
Nazism isn't dead. Churchill was one of our great warriors against it, but I give Lukacs some latter day credit as well.
One of the great questions of historical studies is the degree to which momentous changes in the course of history depend on very small and slender events. I used to think that historical materialism ruled out such changes. I thought that the underlying material conditions of the world determined the changes that would occur. Now I no longer think in such deterministic terms. I'm still a historical materialist but I now believe that a combination of material conditions, "voluntarism" (the Marxist term for conscious but free decisions made by human beings), and pure chance are all factors in historical outcomes. Most large scale changes occur for material reasons, but Lukacs' story of Halifax and Churchill was pretty compelling. If either man had a different personality or made different decisions, it is indeed possible that World War II would have come out differently. How differently, I can't say. I have no doubt that Hitler would have invaded the USSR. He did it even though Britain was still in the war and would unquestionably have done it if they were out ("voluntarism" again.) So it's possible that, without Britain in the war, and without Britain as a base for an Allied invasion and an aerial bombardment campaign, the U.S. might not have been able to effectively participate in the war.
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | June 2001 |
Astronomers detect that a moon of Jupiter has disappeared. Then a big artificial mound is discovered in the Western part of the U.S., and another in Australia. Strange robots emerge and appear at first to be delightful ambassadors of an advanced civilization but soon prove to be liars and frauds, the advance harbingers of planet destroying neutronium masses which have penetrated the earth and are gradually destroying it. Numerous scientists collect different evidence proving the dangers but, in the first place, nothing can be done to stop the catastrophe and in the second, many people, even including the President of the United States, see this as a punishment, the forge of God, against which resistance is sinful as well as futile
Meanwhile another group of self-replicating robots, sent by the "benefactors", fight the machines and gather up a few thousand individuals most worth saving. They cannot save more. These people are taken from the Earth, put to sleep, and awakened many years later on a terraformed Mars to continue human civilization - with all the books, music, etc. that could be saved.
As is so often the case with Bear, the scientific imagination is breathtaking and the logic of the story, in spite of its great leap from our mundane reality, is very compelling.
It takes some intellectual and literary courage to write a story which ends in the utter destruction of the Earth and the death of all but one millionth of humanity. But Bear has the courage and makes a success of it.
Bear's books always make an impression on me. I remember more of this book than I do of the very excellent The Moviegoer, which I read shortly after this and also 20 years before. He writes about big issues, not just big for the individual, but big for all of society and human, and one might even say, galactic history
There was a follow-on to this book, Anvil of Stars, which I read the same years as this and also liked.
| Author | Fast, Howard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Inc., 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 290 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2001 |
67 years after writing his first novel, Fast is still churning them out.
A former State department official who ordered the murders of the Salvadoran Jesuit priests is now living as a semi-retired investment banker in a mansion in Greenwich Connecticut. He has a beautiful "trophy wife", a younger woman (age 40) who had been abused all her life and married Richard Castle to save herself. Now she serves him as best she can but she is beginning to see herself as a person, under the influence of a Catholic nun who was a witness to the murders and was raped herself.
A Jew in the neighborhood is writing a novel about how the complacent, seemingly decent citizens of a quiet, well off town like Greenwich are all in fact accessories to murder in El Salvador.
Meanwhile a newspaper has gotten on Castle's track, which could also lead them to a congressman and another official. The congressman murders Castle to silence him. The official tries to murder the congressman but they wind up killing each other. The FBI hushes it all up.
There are also small subplots of Castle's arrogant, sociopathic son and an innocent plumber's daughter, a black cook, the Jewish writer and his photographer wife, and several others.
Fast still writes well. His political acumen, sometimes heavy-handed, is nevertheless still aimed in the right, or I should say "left" direction. There's not a lot of analysis or insight here but it's not a dumb book and if it paints the bad guys as really bad, it is probably quite accurate. They are murderers after all!
Bad guys beware. Those Jewish writers living down the street are on to you. Fast is not the only one.
| Author | Smith, Martin Cruz |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 329 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 2001 |
Russian police detective Arkady Renko, depressed and suicidal over the death of his wife due to medical error, flies to Cuba to investigate on his own the disappearance of an old comrade. There he kills a Cuban police provocateur in self defense, is beaten by another, and gets involved with a black woman detective who is honest and committed, but has some strange Santaria beliefs.
He discovers first a plot to defraud Russia of $20 million on a sugar contract and, eventually, a plot to kill Castro. But it turns out in the end that Castro's own people setup the assassination plot in order to lure in and destroy disaffected elements in the army.
The view of Cuba here is very negative. Smith describes serious poverty, rampant prostitution condoned by corrupt police, a complex black market economy, informers, punishment of family members of an anti-Castro person, brutal police, and primitive religious superstition. There is nothing here of the "New Men" Cuban communism set out to create. There are only selfish and embittered men of the past.
Smith is a remarkable writer of this sort of thing. He is absorbed in the dark reality of communist society - under the veneer. He goes for the details of how human beings react in and to such societies. He avoids superficial platitudes. He shows us his vision rather than just expounding his ideology.
His books are depressing but well worth reading.
| Author | Percy, Walker |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2001 |
29 yearold Binn Bolling lives in suburban New Orleans where he works as a stock broker, spending his time pursuing his secretaries, making money, and going to the movies. No event in his life seems to give him any deep meaning and he is quite content to live on the surface of life - or at least seems to be content. However, since his war wound in Korea, he has sometimes felt himself to be on a "search" for a deeper truth, perhaps for God.
His severely depressed cousin Kate, who was enamored of him in childhood, now comes to depend on him for emotional support. He gives it to her and is in love with her in spite of, or perhaps because of, her neediness. he takes Kate with him on a business trip to Chicago. They are intimate after a fashion and to the extent that Kate is capable of it. When they return, Binn's aunt, Kate's stepmother, gives him hell for it. He accepts all responsibility and doesn't defend himself but proceeds to marry Kate.
This is a marvelously well written book. Percy manages to keep all of the people, events, and dialog on a seemingly superficial level while actually delving quite deep. He manages to write about the meaning of life while talking about movies, girls, cars, stocks, and what not.
The meaning that emerges is not one I can identify with. Serving a neurotic cousin is not a life I would choose or exalt but the book is interesting and well done.
Read it 20 years ago but forgot!
Looking back at the review I wrote in 1981, I like the older one better. Besides being better written (and in better handwriting), it mentions an ending in which Binn goes to medical school at the end. Why didn't I write that in 2001? Did I deem it unimportant? Was the audiobook version of the novel abridged? It is a mystery to me now.
| Author | Scott, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1825 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | July 2001 |
Sir Kenneth, riding through the desert on a mission to the Hermit of Engadde on behalf of the Christian chiefs of the third crusade, meets an Arab knight. They fight, each in his own style, to a standstill, then agree to a truce and travel together in mutual respect if not friendship. They meet the hermit and also see the Lady Edith Plantagenet, cousin of King Richard the Lionheart, whom Kenneth adores from afar. Then Kenneth returns to the Christian camp with an Arab doctor sent by Saladin to cure Richard with a magic talisman. Richard recovers from a long illness and resumes command, but the Christian host has already given up and intrigues to abandon the crusade.
Kenneth is given a charge of honor to defend the King's standard. He is tricked into leaving his post, is condemned, is saved by the Arab physician, returns disguised as a black slave, saves Richard, regains his honor, fights the evil Count, stands revealed as the heir to the throne of Scotland, wins the Lady Edith, etc., etc.
The story is absurd and full of the worst effects of the popular fiction of the time - noblemen concealed as poor knights, Saladin concealed as knight, then physician, King Richard full of unreal strength, Lady Edith a true lady, and so on. I really disliked the ending. And yet the language is pure and beautiful Walter Scott - like no one else can write it. Almost every paragraph is a gem of lovely sentences. It's a delightful read.
Scott wrote many books, many of which are more serious and interesting than this one.
| Author | Clancy, Tom |
|---|---|
| Author | Horner, Chuck |
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 564 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Vietnam War; Gulf War; Aviation |
| When Read | July 2001 |
Horner entered the Air Force in the 1950's to become a fighter pilot and fought in Vietnam as a "Thud driver" (pilot of an F-105 fighter bomber), and then as one of the early Wild Weasels (anti-radar and air defense attackers.) He became a squadron commander, a wing commander, an important liaison in the Mideast, and then commander of all air forces in the Gulf War.
He describes the many failures in Vietnam and the many failings in the peacetime Air Force of the late 70's. He was one of the commanders that helped turn things around in the 80's, driving out the self-serving bureaucrats who lied about results and made life easy for themselves - whether they were squadron commanders sending in phony reports or maintenance sergeants who laid around the shop instead of hustling to keep the planes in shape.
In Desert Storm he worked hard to carry the war to Iraq, to get all allies working together and give full credit to the brave pilots in all of them; to make maximum use of our technological advantages; and to let the pilots and squadron commanders fight the war with their own ideas, despite tremendous temptation to intervene every day.
His assessments of the other top leaders is interesting. Bush: a man who understood the dangers and responsibilities. Powell: very smart, very political. Schwarzkopf: driven, domineering, effective, but also vain. Saddam: cunning but completely out of his depth.
H himself was a deeply religious man but not parochial or intolerant. He led the first war that was truly won from the air.
I recall a scene, I think it was in this book, where a fellow from Washington comes out to Saudi Arabia and presents a plan to win the war with strategic bombing. It's the same plan that was employed in World War II over Germany, where it failed to win the war. Schwarzkopf and Horner threw him out.
It's interesting that I wrote that this was the first war won from the air. It now seems to me to be too simple a statement. The war in France in 1944 was won on the ground, but it was total Allied domination of the air that made it possible. The war against Japan was finished by the two atomic bombs, which made invasion unnecessary. There was horrific fighting in the island campaigns but the final and heaviest blow was against Japan from the air. It was that blow that finished them off long before they were ready to surrender. One might also make a case for airpower as decisive in the Israeli victory in 1967. However it is true that in the first Gulf War, the Iraqis were fully beaten before a single allied soldier crossed the border into Kuwait or Iraq.
| Author | King, Laurie R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 2001 |
The third book in the Mary Russell, Sherlock Holmes series begins with the arrival at Holmes' house of an elderly woman anthropologist bringing a wooden box with an ancient scroll inside which appears to be a letter from Mary Magdalene to her sister, written just before the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans. The old lady is killed by a car the next day and Holmes' house is ransacked. Holmes and Russell find clear evidence of murder and eventually settle on two likely suspects - a violently anti-feminist retired army colonel who was incensed to find out that the association he supported had been financing a female anthropologist, and who might also object to an ancient letter which establishes the importance of a woman among Jesus' disciples, and a half-mad sister of the anthropologist with her thuggish grandson who might kill for the inheritance.
The less interesting villains - sister and grandson, turn out to be the killers. It is an unusual resolution for a fictional mystery because the culprits are not super smart, fiendishly evil, or even particularly interesting. The colonel was a far more interesting suspect.
As always with King, there is a lot of interesting commentary on society and plenty of very Conan Doyle like detection. The Holmes/Russell marriage remains puzzling and a bit alien, but that's a problem you just have to live with to enjoy these books.
| Author | Russell, Mary Doria |
|---|---|
| Publication | Columbine, New York: Fawcett, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 408 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | August 2001 |
Radio signals from space are intercepted on Earth and traced to a planet of a nearby star. While governments dawdle, the Jesuits organize a private expedition to the planet Rakkat. They send Emilio Sandoz, priest and linguist extraordinaire, several scientists, a computer expert, a musician, and an artist. Many are Catholic priests but two of the scientists are married and the computer expert is a Jewess who grew up in a war zone as an orphan and child prostitute, later to become a sort of indentured slave of a man who paid for her education and rents her out to do computer work.
The story proceeds on two parallel lines. In one, starting in 2019, the discovery is made, the expedition organized, and the people go to Rakkat. In the other, Sandoz, the sole survivor, physically and psychologically mutilated, is debriefed in 2060 by the Society of Jesus.
On Rakkat the people discover two races, a vegetarian, sweet, idyllic group called Runa, and a carnivorous race, the Jana'ata, who live by cultivating and dominating and even eating the Runa. Unprepared for the horror of Jana'ata culture and behavior, the people are shocked, exploited, and killed. Sandoz is turned into a sex slave, raped by Jana'ata men until he is finally found and sent home by a second expedition.
The heart of the book is an examination of religion in the light of these circumstances and events. There are a few religious and philosophical arguments - never pursued in depth. It is mostly done in dramatic style as befits a novel. It is intelligent, well written, and concerned with very big questions. Its point of view is deeply ethical but not as clearly rational in the way that an atheist like me requires.
| Author | Hall, James W. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 371 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 2001 |
Beach lover Thorn is fishing with his girlfriend Darcy, diving for lobsters, when he turns around from catching a fish to find her drowned. His buddy, ex-cop Sugarman, finds evidence that Darcy was murdered by someone who held her underwater until she drowned. He and Sugarman go looking for the killer, finding trails to Ray Murtha, an ex-mobster now running a liquor store in Key Largo, and Hardin Winston, a weird ex-CIA assassin who lives with his weird daughter Sylvie on a fish farm, raising tilapia, a fast reproducing fish capable of crowding out other species, but not much in demand because it isn't red - a color that the U.S. fish market wants in new fish.
Sylvie runs around seducing men and recruiting them to kill her father, whom she describes as a monster, which he is. However in the end it turns out that H.W. needs victims to keep in shape and Sylvie is just recruiting victims for him. Sylvie is a killer herself and, in fact, killed Darcy when Darcy began to unravel the story.
The story is ridiculously improbable and filled with nauseatingly graphic violence. Still, it is powerfully written and quite gripping. The minor characters, Sugar and Darcy, are the most attractive ones, and Darcy is killed early on. Sylvie, and to a lesser extent Murtha, are repulsive but compellingly drawn. Winston just seems impossible to me.
There are some interesting twists and subplots.
As with the later Hall/Thorn novel, Thorn and others are beaten and mangled unmercifully. It's a formula that shocks but gets old fast.
I recall an episode from the novel where we are introduced to Sylvie and then to her father. She talks to a big UPS delivery man in a bar and tells him that her father is a monster who hurts her all the time. The UPS man makes a delivery to her home, intending to meet and kill her father, who doesn't know about the man's intention. But the father reacts very quickly to the UPS guy's actions and kills him before he can be hurt. He then congratulates his daughter for setting up such a wonderful surprise for him.
Maybe he wasn't really a UPS driver but was just pretending to be one. I don't remember for sure.
The scene was truly absurd.
| Author | Gutman, Israel |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 328 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 2001 |
Although he lived and fought in the Ghetto, G has produced a remarkably objective and historical account. He begins with the Jewish community in Poland at the outset of independence in 1919. There is a great flowering of Jewish culture, education, urbanization, and politics in the early years of the Polish Republic but it is gradually depressed and reduced through the harsh period of the depression and rise of anti-semitism. Then comes the war and the gradual tightening of the German vice on the Jewish community - squeezing and squeezing with ever increasing oppression, robbery, sadism, murder, and finally mass murder.
Politically divided along socialist/capitalist, and Zionist/non-Zionist lines, the community was abandoned by the Jewish leaders who fled east during the war - many of them disappearing into NKVD or later Nazi hands and never re-appearing. The older, established leadership that remained, what there was of it, favored appeasement and holding a low profile in hopes squeaking by until the Nazi defeat. The masses agreed. But who could imagine the Nazis' real aims? It didn't seem possible. Only when the unthinkable became self-evident did the young Jews organize to fight. A total of perhaps 700 young people, armed mainly with pistols, fought for over a month until almost all were crushed. But they fought hard and courageously, determined not to win, they knew there was no chance of that, but to die as human beings and to take as many Nazis with them as possible. No one fought harder or better than they.
There is much German and Polish as well as Jewish material here. See also my diary.
Two nights ago Marcia and I watched the German movie Sophie Scholl about the young woman and her brother and friend who were caught delivering anti-Nazi leaflets in 1943, condemned in a parody of a trial, and executed by beheading. For the last week or two I've been listening to a new and excellent history of WWII on my mp3 player (it will show up in the 2012 or 2013 notes.) The war, the Holocaust, and all of the related history will never cease to be a topic of great importance to me.
Gutman, who died at age 90 just four years ago, became a professor of history in Israel and testified at Adolf Eichmann's trial. It appears to me that he specialized in studying and documenting the world that he grew up in, suffered in, and was destroyed by the Nazis. Perhaps he dedicated his life to preserving the memory of those who did not survive. If so, he did a fine job of it, one that I appreciate.
The diary entry, a long and significant one, was for August 8, 2001
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books, 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 434 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | September 2001 |
After the destruction of Earth (see The Forge of God) a group of children are sent out in a "Benefactor" space ship controlled by a robot intelligence ("the Moms") to find and destroy the planetary system from which the planet Earth killing weapons had been launched. Martin, son of Arthur Gordon of Forge, is the current leader. They find and investigate one of three candidate star systems. They are attacked, suffer heavy damage, but make the star supernova.
The survivors unite with another benefactor ship carrying complex snake like creatures who also survived an attack. The combined forces investigate another system with extremely advanced defenses. The inhabitants claim ignorance and innocence. Whoever launched the planet killers is long gone they say. While Martin is negotiating Hans, the new "Pan" (leader), against the wishes of the snake people, Martin, and almost half the humans, launches an attack which, after a hard fight, wipes out the system. Then the snake people discover more planet killing machines. The system Hans destroyed was indeed guilty.
This is another powerful, hard SF treat from Bear and is also full of complex and fascinating human relationships. Bear is a man who understands not only the endless possibilities of scientific research and technological development, but also the possibilities for human development. He is among the very best SF writers. I hope he writes many more.
I remember this book very well. It made a strong impression on me.
One of the imaginative concepts in this book, typical of Bear, was that the space ship was made largely of "fake matter". This never explained substance provided room for the people but contributed little to the mass of the ship, enabling it to achieve high interstellar speeds. Another imaginative concept was the snake like aliens. Each alien was composed of around 20 (I don't remember the exact number) of snake like units that wrapped around each other to form the complete alien creature. When the humans and aliens met, one of the aliens separated into its subunits and began to crawl onto one of the humans. The human panicked and killed one of the subunits. In fact, no harm had been intended by the alien and the interspecies incident required much effort to repair. Still another concept was "momerath", a technique of mathematical analysis taught to the humans by the "moms" that had never been known on earth. There were many other fascinating scenes and concepts that I still remember and could document here in order to avoid forgetting them, and forget them I almost surely will but, after all, these are book notes and not a reprise of the whole book.
| Author | Lightman, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 179 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2001 |
Not a conventional novel, this is a collection of short vignettes, each about four pages long, and titled with a date from the spring of 1905. Each vignette is nominally a dream by Einstein of a different exotic vision of time. In each dream the people of Berne relate to the world in a different way because the nature of time is different. In one, time is extended by living at high altitude, or by having a moving house, or by catching a certain kind of bird. Or time may run differently in different towns. Or all that will happen in the future is foretold. Or all of life is fixed forever in a single embarrassing incident.
Each little story is based on an absurd premise about time but the stories are not about physics (though Lightman is an MIT physicist.) They are about people. The people generally have no names. What they have is passions, fears, desires - all transformed in some way, or maybe burned in different directions, by the differences in times.
Oddly, Einstein himself appears in three non-dream vignettes. He is always an aloof, drained, figure. He is tired by his work and his dreams.
I'm having trouble describing and characterizing this little book. It's not like anything else I've read. It shines with intelligence, with sympathy, and with charming scenes of people and places.
Rushdie compares it to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. It is many years since I read that. The comparison is right even if not exact.
I hope Lightman writes more books.
He has written more books, lots and lots of them. I'll have to look for them.
| Author | Catton, Bruce |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday and Co., 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1951 |
| Number of Pages | 363 |
| Extras | maps, bibliography, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | September 2001 |
This is a history of the Army under George B. McClellan's command. It opens with the sad state of the army after McClellan was removed the first time and Pope made a mess of things, then takes us back to the Peninsula campaign, which M somehow convinced himself he had won, and carries through to Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the war, a day when the army distinguished itself by its courage and hard fighting, but its generals, on up to McClellan himself, seemed to operate in a fog of hesitation and misunderstanding that reduced what could have been a decisive victory to a bloody stalemate.
Catton is a wonderful writer and historian. He seems to have read everything and understood everything. He seems fair to everyone and, when he condemns McClellan or Hooker or another officer, it is not because he fails to see their good points but because he concludes that their good points were not enough.
His writing is lyrical. He gives us something of the temper of the times and of the men. He recalls his own boyhood in rural Michigan, hearing the stories of the old grey headed veterans, now long dead. He writes for them as well as for us - to preserve their memory and to enrich our memory with the story of what they did.
This is volume one of a trilogy. I saw all three volumes in a used bookstore for $6.00. I remembered reading Catton in my own pre-teen years and immediately bought the books to recover a bit of my own childhood. In fact, I got much more. I have started volume 2, reading a few pages at a time, as I read Churchill. It is an enriching experience.
| Author | Ho, Minfong |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2001 |
17 year old peasant girl Jinda lives in a rural Thai village with her father, grandmother, older sister, younger brother, and sister's baby in 1976 when four university students from Bangkok walk into the village and ask to stay and live and work with the villagers. One is a medical student with a kit of supplies who treats the villagers for free and helps many in spite of the opposition of the village healer - a witch doctor who works with bullshit and spells. Another is Ned, a polite but charismatic young man who talks to the farmers about the 50% harvest rent they pay even though the new laws don't require it. He inspires a rent revolt.
The father is jailed on a trumped up charge. The sister goes off to live with the sleazy rent collector who eventually kicks her out, destitute and pregnant. Jinda goes to Bangkok to find Ned and participate in a demonstration which she hopes will free her father.
There is a coup. The demonstrators are attacked and massacred. Jinda escapes and returns to the village. When Ned appears, on the run and headed to join the communist guerrillas, she almost runs off with him. But she decides that her real life and family are in the village. She stays.
This is a simple story, simply told, but with much sympathy and much political understanding. It is reminiscent of Gorky but it concludes with an affirmation of personal rather than political life. The author was a teacher in those days who became a communist guerrilla for four years until she eventually parted ways with a rigid discipline that finally seemed too inflexible and too fallible for her. She worked and fought with many peasant communists, always feeling an unbridgeable gulf between them. This book is her attempt to understand and interpret the peasant world view.
There are many kinds of literature from many kinds of authors about many kinds of subjects. This kind of literature and this kind of author are particularly worthy of admiration. We learn important things about the real world from books like this.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 190 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Cadfael |
| When Read | September 2001 |
Pilgrims are gathering at Shrewsbury for a festival of the local saint and Brother Cadfael and the other monks prepare to receive them. Among the crowd are a small band of miscreants come to work the crowd, first as pickpockets, then as crooked gamblers, and when chased away, as highwaymen outside the village. Also arrived are a strange pair of seeming friends, one with a heavy iron cross on a thong that cuts into his neck, and bare feet, the other accompanying the first and refusing to leave his side in spite of the attraction of a pretty local girl who is obviously enamored of him.
It turns out that the bare foot pilgrim is doing penance for a murder and his "friend" is there to kill him if he even for one moment dons shoes or removes the cross from his neck. Cadfael's son Olivier, introduced in an earlier book, also appears as an emissary of the Empress Maud who is attempting to take the throne from King Stephen but is making a mess of it.
Cadfael is the first to figure everything out, leading to the revelation of the identities of the two pilgrims, the capture of the highwaymen, the discharge of the murderer without a new murder, and the marriage of the boy and girl. And to top it off, the saint works a miracle, healing the lame brother of the pretty girl.
The Cadfael stories sometimes involve twisty plots that don't work all that well but the characters of Cadfael, Hugh the Sheriff, the father superior, and others are always appealing in a simple, homey and humane way. These are people who make us feel comfortable and content. It's one of the things I like about Peters.
| Author | Jeffries, Roderick [Jeffrey Ashford] |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 184 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2001 |
"An Inspector Alvarez novel."
Alvarez is a police inspector in Majorca, the Spanish Mediterranean island frequented by British vacationers, retirees, and others longing for a quiet life in the sun.
We are introduced to a wealthy but not well like Briton, a man who inherited money from a dead wife, who now wants to be accepted by the other members of the ex-patriot community. His only real friend is a female cousin confined to a wheelchair who lives with her husband in a small house owned by the wealthy man and loaned to them for free. He also has a half-brother with whom he quarrels, and a female house guest who accepted his offer of hospitality, not realizing that he wanted her to sleep with him. Finally there is an ex-girlfriend, a sweet young Majorcan girl, innocent and now pregnant. Her brothers hate the man for seducing her. When the wealthy man is murdered Alvarez finds clues leading to everyone but eventually discovers that the husband of the wheelchair bound woman is the real killer. Unwilling to leave her bereft, he confronts the killer but then suppresses the evidence.
Presumably this is part of a series of books that allow the author to continue his residence in Majorca. I read it because we are planning to vacation there in a few months. It is competent but uninspired with thin characters, manufactured plot, unremarkable dialog, and a general sense of having been written to pay the bills.
| Author | Sagan, Carl |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 457 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | October 2001 |
As the most prominent astronomer in the public eye, Sagan has often been accosted with the alien abduction hysteria. Being deeply concerned not only with science but also with scientific education and the frightening lack of rationality in popular culture, S made a serious investigation into the phenomenon to try to understand its social, psychological and historical roots, and to relate it to other similar social phenomena such as fear of witchcraft, quack medicine, channeling, etc.
Apparently, millions of Americans believe in alien abduction. There are therapists who specialize in treating abductees. Clearly, a large number of people who claim to have been abducted actually believe their own stories. They may in fact be suffering from severe nightmares, post-traumatic stress, remembered childhood sexual abuse, or various psychological problems, but they think they were abducted.
S shows very nicely how poor these stories are in imagination, how clearly they have been influenced by the abduction culture, and how patently false they are. He talks about why people believe in them - because of child abuse, or confusion of reality with fantasy or dream, or to draw attention to themselves, or to feel important.
Sagan's thoroughgoing rationalism and scientific outlook are no more than I would expect from him. What surprised and instructed me however was his effort to reach out to these people. He does not scorn or ridicule them. He treats them, along with the great majority of less than scientific people in the U.S. and the world as responding to real needs and in need of real help. I believe his goal is to educate them and, even more, to educate his co-believers to work harder to understand and educate them.
S is a wonderful writer with a wonderful mind.
One of my favorite passages from this book was the one where he argued that the typical description of aliens provided by self-described abductees looks like a Hollywood alien - white humanoid bodies with big eyes and heads, etc. He considers such a creature to be far less alien to humans than, say, a cockatoo.
| Author | Torvalds, Linus |
|---|---|
| Author | Diamond, David |
| Publication | New York: Harper Business, 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 262 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | October 2001 |
"The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary." The creator of Linux recounts his early years leading up to and during his creation of the free operating system. He also gives us his philosophy of life: "Survival, social order, entertainment" - the three goals pursued by all people in their order of importance.
Well, maybe it's not the most impressive philosophy, but Linus is a surprisingly impressive person. That he is a highly knowledgeable and sophisticated programmer is a given. But he is also a man with considerable self-knowledge, remarkable candor, and a firm sense of what is important - a sense that does not place either wealth or ego at the center of his existence. Even after he became famous and had the opportunity to become rich, he seems to have stayed close to the values he adopted before.
He is no saint. He is not a self-sacrificing person. But he is committed to keeping Linux free, open source, and out of the clutches of any one man or organization. He maintains his leadership of the Linux movement by earning it on a continuing basis. He bears up very well in the inevitable comparison to men like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. His arguments for the benefits of open source are strong and effective.
I take it that Linus talked to David Diamond who then wrote everything up. DD also has interesting passages written in his own voice, much of it shedding light on how Linus appears, acts, and thinks as seen from an outside perspective.
Among the culture heroes of the computer age it is the champions of open source who are most significant to me. Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Rasmus Lerdorf and many others who are mostly unknown but who have given us great software, not for the money, but for the fun of it and for the respect that they earn from the people whom they respect.
There are some in the open source community about whom I have ambiguous feelings. I'm thinking of Richard Stallman, a great programmer who has given a huge amount to the community but has an odd sexist streak and an abrasive personality.
| Author | Junger, Sebastian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | October 2001 |
In October 1991 one of the worst storms of the century occurred in the North Atlantic off New England. The 72 foot sword fishing boat Andrea Gail disappeared with her crew of six. A number of other boats foundered, a National Guard rescue helicopter went into the sea, and a series of heroic rescues were attempted and sometimes effected.
This non-fiction work explores the events related to the storm. It reconstructs the lives of the Captain and some of the crew of the Andrea Gail, makes educated guesses about what they experienced in the storm and how they died, and gives good accounts of several Coast Guard and National Guard rescues attempted in unbelievable and unprecedented conditions of 100 mile per hour winds and 110 foot seas.
The life of a commercial fisherman is about as hard and dangerous as it gets. They may go to sea for a month at a time, working 16-20 hours a day, seven days a week. They work on heaving boats handling power driven lines studded with sharp hooks. They can be punctured through hand, foot or face and dragged underwater in seconds, days away from any medical help. They make good money, then blow it on booze and foolishness between trips. It is a very tough life.
The fishermen and the coast Guards who go out to rescue them are very tough men.
An interesting, informative, well written book.
I remember quite a bit of this book. Junger imagines most of the crew of the Andrea Gail in their quarters on the night of the storm. There is nothing for them to do to protect the ship that has not already been done, so they watch a videotape and horse around, attempting to create a less threatening reality inside the boat in order to calm their fears. It made me think of the night that Marcia, Robin, Dan, and I spent in our RV at a roadside pull off in Kansas waiting while the worst thunderstorms I have ever seen battered the RV and the other cars and trucks in the pull off. To keep our spirits up we began playing Boggle in the back. It worked. It relieved the tension to a considerable degree. I had a real fear that the RV would be blown over and wrecked and that we could be injured or killed. But there wasn't a thing we could do to prevent it. So we played Boggle.
One of the boats described in the book was a sailing yacht owned by a wealthy man with, IIRC, his wife and daughter aboard. Unlike for the fisherman, there was no economic imperative driving him to go out sailing in the storm but he was foolish enough to believe that the storm would not be bad and he would be alright. He was not. His boat was sunk, but the Coast Guard men saved him at the risk of their own lives. I had a lot less sympathy for him than for the fishermen.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Author | Baxter, Stephen |
| Publication | Grand Haven, MI: Brilliance Corporation, 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 2001 |
In the 2030's, media mogul Hiram Patterson sponsors and controls research and development of a new technology that can open a direct link via a "worm hole" to another place, and eventually, to another time. The development results in the creation of "worm cams" something like cameras that can be positioned at any spot anywhere, without having to be there or put anything there, by bending space in tiny regions and sending signals back to a receiver.
Starting with this premise, C and B spin out a history of the technology and its rapidly developing revolution in society. It eliminates privacy. It exposes all secrets and all criminal behaviors. It creates and destroys major industries. It alters politics and culture. Once it is developed to be able to see into the past, it turns us all into obsessives - watching history and watching the replaying of critical moments in our own lives.
There is a conventional story to it. Hiram destroys lives, including his own sons and former wives, and cheerfully overthrows long established social organization for the sole purpose of enriching himself. His son Bobby has been biologically and electronically manipulated. His son's lover Kate is framed for a crime that Hiram committed, and so on.
But the star of this show is the worm cam and the extraordinary scientific imagination of Clarke and Baxter - both in conceiving the technology and in extrapolating its uses and its effects.
55 years after Clarke's first important published essays, he remains a creative and interesting thinker and writer.
This book made an impression on me and I still remember scenes from it. It was not a conventional story of time or space travel. No one travels and no one interferes with, or can interfere with, the past. But in spite of that, the elimination of secrets and historical mysteries has a profound effect on individuals and society. As I recall, people spend much of their time spying on the sexual encounters of others. Girls watch boys masturbate and vice versa. People turn out all of the lights when having sex and couple in total darkness to avoid being seen by the worm cams - though that only protects the privacy of the future encounters, not those of their or others' pasts.
At the end of the story (if I am remembering correctly and not confusing this with another book), two scientists go back in time for thousands and then millions of years, watching the evolution of men and mammals before them and all of life. It was a book of ideas.
I used to read a lot of Arthur C. Clarke's books but it appears that this is the last that I've read as of this date. Clarke was still alive when I read this. He died at age 90 in Sri Lanka in 2008. He was accused of pedophilia by the London tabloid "Sunday Mirror", which said that he moved to Sri Lanka in order to get away from accusers and have easy access to little boys. But he denied the charge and was cleared by the Sri Lankan police when the Mirror refused to produce any evidence.
I'd hate to think he was a child abuser. I liked his books.
| Author | Norwich, John Julius |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Byzantine Empire |
| When Read | November 2001 |
Norwich, a former British diplomat and a member of the House of Lords, wrote a three volume history and then condensed it into this one, thick volume. Working at a necessarily high and superficial level, he recounts the political history of Byzantium, concentrating on the activities of the emperors from Constantine to the final fall of the city to the Turks in 1453.
Unfortunately there is absolutely nothing else here. We have nothing at all about economy, agriculture, science, art, literature, social relations, town and country, education, or anything else that might help us understand the subject. Furthermore N adopts a surprisingly Byzantine chauvinist point of view. Revolts against the Empire and defeats in battle are all regarded at least as unfortunate if not worse for the history civilization.
The history of the emperors is an almost unbroken chain of crimes against potential rivals for the throne. Even young children are apt to be blinded and/or have their tongues cut out, or are simply murdered. A number of emperors exhibited high qualities of statesmanship, care of the people, and generalship of the army. But far too many were more effective at attaining power than in exercising it for the good of the empire.
The last stand of the dying city in 1453, a hundred years past having any true independence, appeared to be a heroic stand against odds of ten or twelve to one.
This was an interesting if not a deep book.
See also the diary.
The diary entry is extensive and quite critical of the book. It's dated November 3, 2001.
| Author | Haien, Jeannette |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Perennial, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 145 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 2001 |
Father Declan administers the last rites to Kevin and stays on to comfort Kevin's wife Enda and to hear from her the story of her life. Enda extracts a promise from him to perform the service for Kevin and then reveals that he was not really her husband but rather her brother. D is scandalized and wants immediately to demand full confession and penance and to not bury Kevin as her husband. But Enda holds him to his promise, insists that he listen with an open mind, and says she will tell him nothing if he just wants to accuse and condemn. Deeply curious and surprisingly attracted to Enda, he accedes and she begins her story.
She tells a story of two abused children, shut in in a remote farm house by a widower father who locks them in the attic without food, water or heat while he goes to town to drink. Although they are only teenagers they escape and walk to a different part of Ireland where they pose as husband and wife to get jobs as farmhand and kitchen maid. They work hard and are well appreciated but eventually leave to find a cottage by the sea in what became Declan's village. They settled and lived there 40 years as man and wife, though giving up sex, which had only occurred when they were lonely and on the run.
Father Declan hears this story and contemplates it during a long day fishing in the rain. The he returns and visits Enda, partly to give her some fish, but mostly because she has become a close and dear friend.
The story is told with great warmth and sympathy. It is a simple story of very attractive people (all three) with rather complex personalities living in very simple and limited surrounding - perhaps like Willa Cather's people. Haien, a concert pianist (!) has done a fine job.
I remember liking this book, or at least I tell myself that I do. Who knows what is memory and what is reconstruction or even complete imagination based on reading the notes. One day neuroscience will tell us the answers to questions like that. In the meantime, I'm glad I have my book notes.
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ballantine Books, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 538 |
| Extras | glossary |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | November 2001 |
Three scientists, Mitch Rafelson, an anthropologist who can't get a job because he was accused of stealing bones, Kaye Lang, a top microbiologist, and Christopher Dicken, an NIH virologist, have all come onto the track of a new retro-viral like strain in human DNA which appears either to be an ancient disease, the majority view, or an evolutionary mechanism which is about to alter the human race.
The NIH treats the problem as an epidemic disease requiring abortion of SHEVA fetuses, quarantine of "infected" individuals, and other draconian measures. This seems to be necessary in the face of widespread "infections"; huge numbers of strange two stage pregnancies, still births and odd babies; and mass hysteria, riots, and even assassination of the president.
Mitch and Kaye, in defiance of the mainstream view, believe this is a new evolutionary event. Kaye quits the NIH task force in protest, becomes pregnant, and runs off with Mitch. The baby is born alive and is indeed a new species with intelligence well beyond that of normal humans.
Unlike Bear's other books, this one takes place entirely in the present. If it weren't for B's background and his speculative approach to biology, this book might not be called science fiction at all.
The science, if not impeccable, is very carefully researched and, where it goes off into improbability, it is accompanied by extensive and interesting justification. The politics, and especially the politics of science, are very revealing. Even the knowledge of the NIH campus is accurate.
This book is less satisfying from an SF point of view than B's other books. It doesn't give us any glimpse into the future. But his scientific imagination and his writing ability just get better.
I don't expect future changes in the human genome to be the result of mutation and natural selection. With 7 billion people on earth, the chance of any important variation being spread through and dominating the population are, supposedly, reduced. Furthermore and much more importantly, natural selection is no longer the main driver of human change. Genetic engineering is vastly more likely to operate. Unlike random variation, engineering can produce specific, intelligently designed (!) changes in which random chance plays no part. When that happens, no one knows what the consequences will be.
| Author | Hammond, N.G.L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 248 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Ancient world; Alexander the Great |
| When Read | November 2001 |
Born in 356 BC, Alexander was acclaimed king by the Macedonian army when his father, Philip, was assassinated on the eve of his planned invasion of Asia Minor. With Philip gone and an 18 year old on the throne several neighbors broke their alliance with Macedonia and attacked. Alexander responded with incredible competence and speed. In a lightning campaign he invaded Illyria, then Thrace, then Greece, winning decisive victories with tiny losses - soon uniting Greece under his leadership. He then crossed the Hellespont with 37,000 troops and launched a spectacular campaign, defeating superior forces at every turn.
After the final defeat of Persia he invaded and conquered Afghanistan and Pakistan. He won every battle against every conceivable enemy fighting with every weapon and military style. he defeated mounted Scythian archers, Indian elephants, walled cities, island fortresses, mountain strongholds. And always he not only planned and directed the battles, he also fought in the spearhead, suffering as many wounds as his bravest soldiers.
His civil policy was also extraordinary. He built roads and cities everywhere. He moved nomad barter economies forward into agriculture, towns, and commercial money based economies - with a great expansion of wealth. He also preserved local government and customs and protected all his subjects, even executing Macedonian soldiers en masse who had raped and pillaged Persian towns.
It's hard to make a hero out of a conqueror but Alexander really seems to be a special case. Had he lived, the author believes he certainly would have succeeded in his planned march against Carthage and Spain and then very likely Italy and Rome.
See also the diary.
I've read more about Alexander since reading this book. He was a fascinating character and an extraordinary phenomenon in the history of the world. However I can't say that I understand him or that anyone today has enough information to understand him. His diaries are lost and the accounts of the men who knew him are lost. All we have are secondary or tertiary sources and precious few of them.
| Author | Spark, Muriel |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 160 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2001 |
63 year old film director Tom Richards falls off a crane and wakes up in a hospital with serious injuries. During his gradual recovery he slowly resumes his life of film writing and directing, philandering with the female stars, arguing with the financial backers, and whining about the dearth of decent people nowadays, convinced that the great playwrights, actors and directors of bygone days would have come to see him and given him unlimited sympathy during his convalescence.
Tom and his second wife Claire, a wealthy American heiress, lead separate but fairly amicable lives, each with their own lovers and their own interests. What holds them together is their strange, bitchy, entirely self-centered, 25 year old daughter Marigold. Both of Tom's daughters, the beautiful Cora by his first wife, and the nasty Marigold, seem unlucky at love. Both have been deserted by their husbands.
Other than a general exposition of Tom's rather exotic lifestyle and comic personal relationships, the action of the story concerns Marigold's disappearance and a possible murder attempt on Tom. We, but not Tom, learn in the end that Marigold did indeed attempt to murder him.
This is an odd story with an odder, rather sudden and unresolved ending, but it held my interest. Even having almost nothing in common with these people and finding their lives to be full of petty and self-defeating behavior, I was nevertheless attracted to their humanity, their vulnerability, their striving after something - even if they were never sure what it was.
Spark is an effective novelist of manners - not in the Jane Austen sense but in a real sense of her own. She writes about people and subjects far from most conscious literary interests, yet she holds my attention and I care about her characters.
| Author | King, Laurie R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 2001 |
Following a thread drawn from an earlier novel, K goes back a few years to tell a story about Sherlock Homes and Mary Russell in Palestine where they had gone in early 1919 to escape a murderer and to carry out a mission for Mycroft Holmes, a powerful but shadowy force in the British secret service. In Palestine they track down a killer of British agents. Working with two Arab brothers who scorn Holmes and Russell but gradually begin to respect them, they eventually uncover a plot by a former Turkish police torturer to destabilize the region by blowing up the Dome of the Rock while General Allenby and all of the top Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders are there. They foil the plot at the last minute, trap the Turk, who commits suicide, and then find and kill the high ranking British officer who had been masterminding the plot.
K puts much effort into understanding the two Arab brothers and makes them very central to the story. She attempts to bring out both the fine qualities of their culture - courage, loyalty, courtesy, loquaciousness, and the not so fine ones - male chauvinism, some cruelty - although she shows cruelty in the British as well.
There is an interview with the author on the last tape. King, like so many writers, is entirely self-taught and inner directed. She had written three novels before the first was published. She appears to be a voracious reader. She studied theology in school, but I like her anyway :)
| Author | Bank, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Free Press, 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 287 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | December 2001 |
Bank, a Wall Street Journal reporter, appears to have had considerable access to many top Microsoft people including Gates, Ballmer, Jim Allchin, Brad Silverberg, and numerous others. He argues that the company has faced a key dilemma throughout its recent history. It has had to choose between the embrace of open standards and interoperability, and the promotion of interlocking proprietary systems that make it difficult for customers to use software from any other vendor. The "Internet doves" in the former group were led by Brad Silverberg. The "Windows hawks" in the latter, winning group, were led by Bill Gates and secondarily by Jim Allchin. The concept of hawk and dove here is relative. Even the doves were loyal Microsoft employees dedicated to crushing the competition. But they were more convinced that the goal could be reached by competing solely on the merits of their software. The hawks believed that the monopoly advantage conferred by Windows had to be extended and exploited to its fullest potential - forcing customers to use MS software by not allowing other programs to properly interoperate with it.
MS seemed to concentrate on one opponent at a time: Borland, Word Perfect, Novell, Netscape. Netscape was seen as a huge threat because they promoted a browser within which a user might spend most of his time, a kind of new OS shell. If it reached that goal, the underlying OS would be irrelevant. So Netscape had to be destroyed. The next big push for the hawks is .NET and what Gates calls Windows dial tone, or Wintone, aiming a fee to Microsoft for everything that happens on the net.
Bank explains some of the economic pressures inside MS, one of them being the heavy use of stock options to hold down salaries - which requires a steady advance in share price. The victory of the hawks was inevitable. There is no way to make 40-50% profit margins except by monopoly domination. But it is a loss for customers and for staff who are burning to create great software and are stymied and disillusioned by the company.
A very interesting book, not completely unsympathetic to Gates.
Companies rise and fall as do other institutions. Some of the most impressive modern monopolies, AT&T, IBM, General Motors, Standard Oil, are all still rich and powerful companies but they no longer dominate world commerce as they once did. It seems inevitable that the same will happen to Microsoft.
Microsoft's position today looks dramatically weaker than it did in 2001 when this book was written. Apple and Google each now have higher total stock values. Microsoft continues to dominate the desktop but the desktop is becoming less and less important as applications migrate to phones, tablets, and the "cloud", all areas that Microsoft attempted to conquer but without success. The era of the $200 software package produced by a large company is being replaced with the era of the 99 cent "app" written by a lone genius, or the free, open-source program written by a community of geniuses. It's looking today like Microsoft will not crash and burn, will not be buried by a competitor in the same "space" (as everyone now says), or be broken up by a government anti-trust suit. It looks like, for the medium term future, they will continue on as they have, growing much more slowly than in the past and maybe even shrinking slowly to become a large but more ordinary company, one that must listen to customers and compete on the merits of their work instead of driving everyone in the direction that favors Microsoft.
| Author | Haldeman, Joe |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 186 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 2001 |
"Tamer" Jacque Lefevre trains as a kind of astronaut, using a newly discovered physical principle to instantaneously project humans to a distance of 10-100 or so light years, from which position they are instantaneously translated back, minutes to hours later.
An apparently hostile race of highly advanced beings are discovered. They attack humans and appear ready to wipe out humanity. Because of complicated circumstances, only Jacque can communicate with them. He does and eventually secures peace.
I read this book over 14 years ago - only discovered when scanning my old book cards. I was pretty annoyed with it then but am more charitable now. It is fluff. It is thoroughly and relentlessly adolescent. But in spite of that I can see at least some of the reason for its Nebula award. Haldeman puts out a compelling story, a simple but not really unattractive character, and a fluent writing style.
The earlier criticisms are still justified but Haldeman knew he was not writing "Literature" and shouldn't be villified simply because he chose to write something less lofty.
Maybe I'm getting more tolerant as I age.
I am more tolerant. Nowadays I'm also less self-confident, which adds to my tolerance. However, upon re-reading the old notes, and without having just read the book and just written it up, I find the older notes from 1987 to be rather more informative and compelling.
I've made a note on the 1987 book card referring to this note here.