Books read January through December 2002
| Author | Herman, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Avon Books, 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 468 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2002 |
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Mike Stewart has a failed marriage, a failed relationship with his father, an old fighter jock who greatly admires his fighter pilot son but not his Pentagon bureaucrat son, and a job at the Pentagon working for an asshole specializing in stealing credit and assigning blame. Mike is an expert in petroleum allocation and, purely by chance, sends a survey to oil companies which appears, with other accidental circumstances, to indicate that he knows about a huge new oil field offshore of Cuba.
Young, beautiful L.J. Ellis runs an oil company that is aiming to exploit that field. The oil company's hired security firm tries to kill Mike twice and gets him framed for murder. To get out, he goes to Cuba, gets the documents he needs to prove his innocence, gets shot, is rescued by his father's friend in an old BAC Lightning, and gets home to win the hand of Jane, a plain but solid girl, and to gain the respect of his father.
The story is shot through with implausibilities, absurd outcomes, and outrageous characters. But for me it's all redeemed by the character of Mike Stewart, a nebishy guy whom one can actually sympathize with. It's all potboiler fluff, but readable in spite of that.
| Author | Wharton, Edith |
|---|---|
| Publication | Auburn, CA: Audio Partners, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1905 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2002 |
Beautiful 29 year old Lily Bart was raised by a rich father and a socialite mother to be a socialite herself but, at age 19, her father lost his fortune and her father and mother died soon after. Lily lived with an old aunt who saw to her needs while she moved from salon to salon, flirting with rich young men, playing bridge (and losing money she could not afford to lose) and making herself useful to society hostesses.
Lily befuddles and conquers the perfect man - extremely rich, rather stupid, easily manipulated, but she pulls back from the abyss, unable to face a life with him even though she continues to tell herself that it is what she wants.
When Lily gets in financial trouble she allows a friend's husband to "invest for her." In fact, he is giving her his own money in return for hoped for favors. Lily is naive and innocent but the social world condemns her. Later a ruthless "friend" lies about Lily, accusing her of seducing her husband when in fact it was the "friend" who was the real adulteress. But Lilly's reputation is ruined. She is disinherited when the old aunt dies. Going from off-center positions to more and more remote social situations, she eventually finds herself working as a factory girl in a hat shop. Refusing to take advantage of some unethical opportunities, she winds up dead of an overdose of sleeping pills.
Wharton indicts the high society of her day - hypocritical, cruel, obsessed with money, arrogant, and ignorant. Poor Lily knows in her bones yet she cannot break free of her attraction to and dependence upon the society that destroys her. A snob herself, she is broken and defeated by snobbery.
This is an effective and insightful look at the very richest slice of society from the inside, maybe too far inside. It leaves one gasping for air.
I am not especially aware of the very rich in the United States. Perhaps the social class that Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald understood and condemned is not as prominent today as it was then. Or more likely, it's just not as visible in the same way as it was then. Do the Walmart heirs behave as the socialites did in this novel? Do the Koch brothers behave that way? What about Bill Gates? What about Mitt Romney? Or am I looking in the wrong place, at "new money" instead of "old money"? Perhaps the nouveau riche are still trying as hard as their earlier namesakes did to get into the best clubs, the best schools, the best neighborhoods, and so on. Perhaps they too spend their lives in salons. Or maybe not. I'm the last person who would know.
I notice that the book was read by Eleanor Bron. She was the actress who played the waitress whom Dudley Moore pursued in the movie Bedazzled. She never became a big star but has apparently had a long and successful career.
| Author | Nigam, Sanjay |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 223 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2002 |
Sonalal, a snake charmer, earns his living entertaining tourists for tips outside a famous tomb in Delhi. One day everything is perfect. His music is at its best. His old snake dances beautifully. The tourists are pouring out coins. He goes on and on until the tired snake, pushed past its endurance, bites him. Sona, surprised and enraged, seizes the snake and bites it in two. Photographers capture the moment and Sona becomes a national celebrity.
But his life is a mess. Drinking and whoring have driven his wife and two fine sons to despise him. And now he adds the new guilt of having killed Jamu, his snake of 15 years, almost his own son. Feeling guilty, depressed, devoid of meaning in his life, he begins to search for the answer to his problems in magic, in love for Reena the prostitute, and in doctors who treat him for impotence and for his neurotic tongue biting. Doctor Seth, a strange, brilliant, almost lunatic old man, and Dr. Basru, a scientific fellow, each treat him in their own ways.
In the end, much time passes. Sonalal catches a new snake and resumes charming. But there is no redemption for him. He never sees that the answer was right in front of him in his wife and children who could have accepted him back in spite of all if he had let them. But he can't see it and grows old in pursuit of some secret of life which is not to be found.
Comedy is laid on thickly but with a surprisingly sensitive touch. Most of it works well. Nigam succeeds in a key goal of making every character from the shrewish wife, seductive Reena, crazy Dr. Seth, and several minor street magicians and charmers - into a human being for whom we have sympathy. It's a fine first novel.
| Author | Trollope, Anthony |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1857 |
| Number of Pages | 528 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 2002 |
This is the continuation of the story told in The Warden. Dr. Bold is dead. The old bishop, lifelong friend of Dr. Harding, dies. A new bishop, Dr. Proudie and his domineering wife and scheming chaplain arrive at Barchester and a struggle for power ensues. Rev. Slope, the chaplain, plots to become the ecclesiastical power in Barchester by maneuvering people beholden to him into each open placement, by dominating the bishop, by marrying the widow Eleanor Bold and her 1200 pounds a year and, when the old Dean of the Cathedral dies, by replacing him. Opposing him is the indomitable archbishop Grantly, Harding's son-in-law, and Harding and all the established members of the church.
Slope is eventually undone but not before he makes a lot of mischief. Eleanor, who tries to be decent and fair to him, is supposed by the Grantly's and many others to be in love with him. They are hard on her but, out of pride, she refuses to disabuse them of their error. In fact she is love with the new preacher brought in by Grantly, a decent, honest, scholarly fellow, Mr. Arabin. Two other wonderful characters spice up the story. La Senora Neroni, a stunningly beautiful English woman crippled by her Italian battering husband, whose only remaining pleasure is teasing men - Slope mainly, and her brother Bertie, a likable ne'er do well who is urged on to marry Eleanor as a way of securing his future but who is not mean enough to do it.
Of course it all comes right in the end. Harding is offered a great post but steers it to Arabin instead, who becomes his son-in-law.
I liked this book but thought The Warden was even better with its focus on the estimable Dr. Harding. T tells us there will be no tricks in his book. He tells us up front that Eleanor will not marry Slope or Bertie. But he does use some tricks. Still, it is marvelous writing. The passages on Slope, Neroni, Mr. and Mrs. Quiverfull, and Mrs. Proudie are all miniature masterpieces.
| Author | Crichton, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 512 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 2002 |
A private company run by an arrogant and immature physics wunderkind discovers a technique for sending people and objects into the past in parallel universes by destroying their bodies and sending them as an information stream through a worm hole where they are reconstructed in the alternate universe at the other end. [This is preposterous perhaps but C does quite a good job with the speculative physics and engineering.]
The company sponsored a research dig in France at a 14th century site where a professor leads a team of students and professionals in what the company plans to exploit as a tourist attraction. The researchers don't know about any of this and are both flabbergasted and intrigued when they begin to figure it out. The professor gets involved, goes back, and is trapped in the 14th century in the middle of a local war. Three other researchers go back to save him and are soon caught up in the events. They become involved in the fighting, they rescue women, they blow a castle, and so on.
The story is intended as combination historical novel, science fiction, swashbuckler, and history lesson. It succeeds only modestly on any of these projects, but is not an abject failure at any of them. The characters are rather thin, the action rather too far fetched, while at the same time often feeling mechanical and uninspired - sort of like - hmm, what do I (Crichton) have to write here next?
Nevertheless it's hard for me to completely resist a story about physics and history and medieval romance. Crichton may not be a great writer but he's into interesting things.
Some books that aren't so good stick in my memory better than some better books. I remember this one.
| Author | Bergen, Peter L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: The Free Press, 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 284 |
| Extras | maps, notes, index, online |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Terrorism |
| When Read | March 2002 |
This should have been titled "Outside the World ..." Bergen never gets inside and gives us only a superficial look at who the terrorists are and why they are committed to the path they are on.
There is no true, worldwide terrorist organization, rather there is a very loose confederation of organizations, each of which may wax or wane, may become more or less violent, may confederate more or less closely with others, as circumstances change. Partly because of his money, and partly through the power of his personal reputation, bin Laden has become a figurehead and a unifying force. He is a terrorist and does participate in planning strategy, but it appears that people below him have tactical control.
As one might expect, the terrorist organization is riddled with neurotic, unstable men. Many are brave and dedicated, but not a few are misfits who find in violent action, or maybe just talk about violent action, the solution to their personal problems of alienation and self-loathing [my interpretation anyway], and these people create weak spots and points of attack.
I read this book to try to get a better understanding of the enemies of the U.S. Unfortunately however, I'm still very much in the dark. There is nothing here about the social and cultural background of these men and I have not learned why they hate us so or what hope or what opportunities exist for progress and conciliation.
I haven't read many books since this one about Islam or terrorism. Surely the best in terms of giving me an inside view of bin Laden and his people was the one by his son Omar, Growing Up bin Laden.
At the end of my 2002 comment I wondered about conciliation. Since then I have come to believe that no conciliation is possible with men like bin Laden. Probably all that we can do is send our best men to hunt them down and kill them. They are dangerous, intolerant, unreasonable, fanatics who have no compunction in killing us. We need to kill them before they can. We should always do it with compunction, but we should do it. Be that as it may, we still need to find ways to reach out to the masses of supporters of the terrorists. These are not fanatics. They are disgruntled, generally poverty stricken, people with poor lives and no hope of better ones. They attack us not out of philosophical or religious principles but out of sheer frustration, general anger, and a desire to revenge themselves upon someone. They can't all be killed or cowed and they aren't going away.
I've read more books about terrorism and added the keyword "Terrorism" to their descriptions.
One issue that seems more critical to me now than before is the problem of Islamic fundamentalism and superstition. If Muslims are taught, and believe, that every word of the Quran is true, then it becomes easy for the terrorists to find passages that state that unbelievers must be killed or tolerated only in subservient positions. All kinds of Muslim intolerance of other Muslims is also justified, such as the oppression of women, the imposition of beards, the ban on music, the repression of Shia, and on and on. Thus there is a fundamental contradiction between our belief in religious freedom and our growing realization that many religions, certainly all of the "Abrahamic" religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), have books and believers that are totally intolerant of other religions or even other sects of their own religions. In order to confront this problem properly I think we have to become, not anti-Muslim, but anti-intolerance. That position will put us in conflict with some Christian and Jewish sects and believers as well as Muslims - a problem that few in the United States like to face.
| Author | Ryan, Cornelius |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Popular Library, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 670 |
| Extras | index, maps, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 2002 |
Ryan has meticulously researched and described the airborne assault by British and American paratroopers, and some Poles too, into Holland in September 1944. The goal was to seize a series of bridges ahead of a ground advance by Montgomery, culminating in the seizure of the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem, 64 miles in advance of the British army. The American 82nd and 101st divisions were assigned the intermediate targets while British forces, later reinforced with Polish troops, were to seize Arnhem.
The soldiers involved were elite troops, highly trained, very tough, courageous, and determined. But in spite of that the operation was a fiasco.
Allied intelligence completely ignored reports from Dutch resistance fighters that two German armored divisions had moved into the area. Radio communications were untested and broke down at Arnhem with disastrous results. The ground attack was lackadaisical and was launched along a "one tank front", going up a road with soft ground on either side that could not support tanks. Air support stayed mostly on the ground with the RAF unwilling to take off from fogged in airfields. The Brits at Arnhem were eventually overwhelmed and only a small fraction escaped.
Ryan's account is superb. He interviewed everyone - British American, Polish, Dutch, and German. He tracked down every surviving communication, report, and weather report. He was able to give authoritative, documented answers to almost all open questions and contradictory accounts. It is a wonderful book - always focused on the fine men, always appreciative of their sacrifice. It is a book written out of love and respect.
Although is focus is on what happened rather than on blame, Monty comes out very low in Ryan's esteem.
I've now seen two movies about this campaign. One was a fine Hollywood style movie with famous actors and impressive effects and sets. It is one of my favorite war movies along with another film version of one of Ryan's books, D-Day. I've seen both of those several times and may watch them several times more before I'm done. The other movie was a little, low budget British film made at the end of the war. It was not a great film but had the very unusual technique of using actual British survivors of the battle as actors in the film. Compared to the professional actors they didn't do very well but it was something to see them and realize that these guys were the real deal.
I only read one book in April, 2002. One reason was that it was a long book but the other is that we took our trip to Turkey in that month. I don't think I did any reading on that trip.
I commented in 2002 above about Ryan's thoroughgoing professionalism in researching and writing this book. I still admire him as one of the best of the World War II historians. I'm now reading Anthony Beevor's book about the Normandy campaign in 1944 and I am finding him to be another excellent historian. Both men pass the tests of objectivity and thoroughgoing research that Leopold von Ranke first elucidated and that I learned about from my recent reading of Willie Thompson's book What Happened to History.
| Author | Vidal, Gore |
|---|---|
| Publication | BDD Audio, Random House, 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2002 |
Still writing good books, Vidal gives us his account of the centers of American power in Washington with a bit on culture in New York, through the eyes of the fictional Caroline Sanders, publisher and actress, and her nephew Peter Sanford, during the years from 1939-54. Franklin Roosevelt and his chief minion Harry Hopkins are central characters. FDR is seen as the leading master of American politics - understanding better than anyone what is possible and what is not. We also meet Wendell Wilkie, Henry Wallace, Harry Hopkins, and Harry S. Truman.
Vidal respects Truman as a strong, effective politician but considers him ignorant of international affairs and foolhardy, if not downright stupid, in unleashing the cold war and creating the conditions in which McCarthy flourished. V is interested in conspiracy theories. He sees FDR as almost, possibly, inviting Japanese attacks as the only way to get the U.S. into the war. He sees all the American leaders as imperialists, establishing an American empire and seeing themselves as deserving of it.
V is still an excellent writer. Catty and chatty, he is nevertheless a man of ideas, a man with a deep sense of history and of the importance of historical understanding. He is also a sophisticated writer. He writes with a uniform level of precision and articulation that, because it lacks high drama, appears simpler than it is. He writes in an even, level emotional tone but, if you slow it down and listen to the language, you find it is quite good.
V appears himself as a character in the novel. Thirty some years after the close of the story, he and Peter Sanford meet to discuss the history and the novel. I thought it worked.
Vidal died just this year at age 86. The Golden Age was his last novel but he wrote a play and seven or eight books after it was completed. I read a number of his other novels including Julian, Burr, Creation and Lincoln. The one about Lincoln was my favorite, but I don't know if I've finished reading him or not. If I live as long as he did, and retain my wits as well as he, perhaps I'll read some more..
The theory that Roosevelt invited a Japanese attack has been circulated, probably since the day after Pearl Harbor. It comes from Roosevelt haters, from isolationists, from fascist sympathizers (more properly characterized as Nazi sympathizers than as sympathizers with Japanese imperialism), and from conspiracy theorists. I wouldn't place Vidal in any of those camps however, based on what I think I know, I don't believe that FDR invited a Japanese attack. He tolerated a lot of crap from the Japanese Empire, made what I thought were moderate and negotiable demands seeking to end naked Japanese aggression in China, and would (I think) have prepared better if he expected a sneak attack from Japan. But perhaps I'm making too much of the hints in Vidal's book.
| Author | Edgeworth, Maria |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1806 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2002 |
Supposedly the first Irish novel, this story by an Anglo-Irish writer is a comedy of the fallen nobility of Ireland. The lords of the Rackrent estate live by squeezing peasants dry in a perpetual war of landlord and tenants, and by marrying rich English women who may or may not actually produce any money for them. Innocent wastrels all, they spend what money they have, and much that they don't have, on liquor, gambling, parties, and horses. Yet they think of themselves as sound, honorable men who wouldn't dream of doing a dishonorable thing. One of them is elected to parliament by sending buckets of earth from his land to supporters from other precincts who scatter some dirt on their floors and claim to live on the land of his precinct when they vote. In honorable fashion, he knows his commitment is to vote against his conscience in favor of the interests of those to whom he sold out.
One of the wives is "a Jewish" whom he locks in her room and badgers for her jewels until she finally dies. Another is a wastrel as good as her lord whom he actually comes to love in his fashion.
In the end, a smart accountant/lawyer gets full control of what remains of the estate and kicks out the last of the Rackrents, who then dies of too much alcohol in a drinking bet.
The story is nicely told through the eyes of old Thady, the last and most faithful of the family servants. Innocent in his own servant class way, he is well suited to presenting the foibles of the family in back-handed complimentary fashion. He tells us all the awful things they do as if they are fine, traditional behaviors.
This was a short book which would have become tedious if it were longer, but was quite nicely done as it was.
| Author | Tolkien, J.R.R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1954 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Fiction; Fantasy |
| When Read | May 2002 |
This is the first volume, comprising books 1 and 2 of The Lord of the Ring, the result of T's decision in 1937 to begin a "really long story" in mythic style and with much exuberance in invented tales, characters, and languages.
The old hobbit Bilbo Baggins, who came into possession of an evil magic ring in the earlier novel The Hobbit, leaves the Shire and, at the insistence of Gandalf the wizard, gives the ring to his nephew Frodo who leaves the Shire with it in the company of three hobbit companions (Samwise his gardener/servant, and cousins Merry and Pippin) for the elf capital at Rivendale. Pursued by "black riders" and other perils, they get much help at critical times and win through. But at Rivendale a council of peoples decides they must go on, into the heart of evil Mordor to cast the ring into the volcano there, the only way to destroy it and permeanently ensure that it stays out of the hands of the evil Sauron. The four hobbits plus two men (Aragorn/Strider and Boromir), an elf (Legolus), a dwarf (Gimle) and Gandalf set off.
There are many incredible adventures in the mountains, the mines of Mourig, forests good and bad, rivers, plains, etc. They meet elves, orcs, and men. They fight orcs and trolls and some nameless monster who appears to kill and be killed by Gandalf. Finally they reach a turning point. Boromir attempts to seize the ring but fails and Frodo heads off by himself with Samwise to continue to Mordor.
This book is a cult classic, deeply appealing to young people especially, who escape with it into a realm of adventure, magic, honor, great deeds, and romantic characters. It is also deeply infused with T's fine humanity and decency, seen to best advantage in his humble, half-size, simple hobbits. I am not a fan of this genre. I am put off by the magic, the lore and legend, the tedium, and the predictability. But Tolkien has some appeal nevertheless.
I type up the XML versions of the notes for these old readings in reverse order to how I read them. This first book of the series made the biggest impression on me and I think my write up of it is the best.
| Author | Tolkien, J.R.R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Fantasy |
| When Read | May 2002 |
After Frodo and Samwise leave, Orcs close in and kill Boromir and capture Merry and Pippin. Under strict orders from the traitor wizard Saruman, the Orcs attempt to bring the two hobbits back to him alive. Aragorn, Legolus and Gimle pursue into the kingdom of Rohan, where the Roherian cavalry attack and kill the Orcs and M and P escape into the forest managed by Treebeard, the ent. All the forces line up and there is a great battle in which a huge army of Orcs and nasty men attack Rohan but are eventually destroyed by the Roherim plus Ent allies. They go to Isengard and destroy the holdings of Sarumon, leaving him penned up and helpless in his tower with only Worm Tongue, the Rohan traitor, for company.
In Book 2 we follow Frodo and Samwise in their attempt to get into Mordor. They capture the strange creature Golomb who has followed them for months to try to get back the ring, which he held for 500 years. They meet Faromir, brother of Boromir, also a brave captain but with more wisdom and self-control. Then Golomb leads them to a high mountain tunnel pass and betrays them to a spider creature which stings Frodo and paralyzes him before Samwise drives her off. S, thinking F is dead, takes the ring to complete the mission but then sees Orcs take up F and show that he is alive. S follows them into Mordor.
Book 3 was quite different from 1 and 2 with its giant battle and great events. Our sense of the importance, strength and power of men in Middle Earth is reinforced. But the quiet, homey, English virtues of the hobbits - their loyalty, decency, and effort to do the right thing, continue to shine.
Tolkien apparently denied that these books were an allegory of England vs. the Nazis but it's not hard to read them that way.
I remember quite a bit of this and the other Tolkien books, ten years after reading them. Part of this may have been the reinforcement of watching the animated movies. Part was surely the intensity of the stories.
| Author | Maupassant, Guy de, 1850-1893 |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | May 2002 |
These stories were extracted from a complete set to match a paperback collection read by our book group.
"Boule de Suif" is a stunning story of wealthy refugees in a carriage attempting to escape the Prussians. Only a young prostitute among them had the forethought to bring food and, despite their arrogance and disdain of her, she fed them. Then they are trapped in a town by a German officer who will not let them leave unless she goes to bed with him. She refuses but the others cajole her into doing it. She's enraged and ashamed but she sacrifices for the others. But when they all leave their arrogance and disdain are even worse and they will not share any food with her.
"The Piece of String" is about an old man castigated for a petty crime he did not in fact commit. "Mademoiselle Fifi" is the nickname of a disgusting Prussian officer who insults, humiliates, and physically assaults a young Jewish prostitute. In a fit of anger and patriotism she kills him and escapes out a window. Hidden by the priest she lives and becomes a respectable woman. "Miss Harriet" is a fine story of a pious middle aged English woman who falls in love with a French painter who pursued her friendship, never imagining that she would fall in love with him much less commit suicide when she discovered him with the servant girl at the inn. "Friend Patience" is about a chance meeting with an old college chum who enchants his friend with wealth and sleaze. "Uncle Jules is a man who left home and was the hope of his family until he was discovered 10 years later, a near derelict. Also "The Diamond Necklace" and "Farewell".
M writes of savages in morning coats, of people trapped by convention as much as by poverty, of whores who are morally superior to the polite society that shuns them. He was part of the great movement of social realism and if his stories seem predictable today it is because his innovations have been much copied and are well understood.
He wrote with considerable insight into the mind of a limited or trapped person and he applies no sugar coating, whether his subject be barons, nuns, or for that matter, old peasants.
I liked this work.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Jove Books, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 261 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 2002 |
BBC weatherman Perry Stuart is offered a chance to fly into a hurricane with his private pilot co-worker Kris Ironside. The plane and the financing are all provided free by a collection of wealthy British and American businessmen with hidden motives that Perry is unable to fathom. They are required to land on a tiny Caribbean island as part of the mission to look for something they don't find. They then fly into the storm, which is too much for Kris' amateur piloting skills. The plane is lost. The men are separated in the water and Perry winds up back on Trox island where he survives for some weeks and discovers a safe full of secret papers.
In the end it turns out that bad guys are selling nuclear materials.
The usual Francis trademarks are there. There are horse owners and trainers and a sick horse. There's a pretty girl to be won. There's an old grandmother - a fine person in a wheel chair who cares about our hero. There are death defying adventures and severe difficulties that bring our hero down but, against his deep resistance, they cannot overcome him.
This is not his best book. Some of the events and motivations are hard to reconcile with each other. Perhaps this one was done without Mrs. Francis, or during a period of her illness. Still, there is the usual straight up, right thinking, hard working hero to identify with. As always, he's the kind of man whom we can look in the eye and trust, a man who would paint his own portrait straight on with no shifty glances to the side.
I always find F readable.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Audio, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 2002 |
High diver Dennis Lenahan lives by putting on shows. He gets a booking a the Tishomingo Lodge and Casino in Mississippi where he witnesses a murder from 80 feet up on his dive platform. The killers, a pair of low life thugs who run a local drug gang, would kill him too but the lodge PR man sees them and talks them out of it. Then Robert Taylor arrives from Detroit with is own gang of drug pushers. Robert is very cool, black, smart, and has the real control of the gang although his nominal boss, a dumb brutal white gangster thinks he's in charge.
There is an investigation of the murder, a big Civil War battle reenactment, local folk who are into the Civil War or into the bar, drugs, hotel, or pre-fabricated home businesses, and all sorts of Leonardesque characters and scenes.
In the end there is a showdown at the Civil War battle when the Detroit and local drug gangs plan to have it out. But the locals are so stupid they kill each other in fights over personal matters and leave the Detroiters marveling.
Dennis saves Robert's life but turns down his offer of the local drug business, instead choosing to go off with the widow of the dead local Dixie Mafia boss.
L keeps cranking them out. This is every bit as good as his others. He retains his ability to show people as people - dumb caricatures in some ways, but full of the private, human feelings of anyone else - even if they are mobsters. That's not the right characterization but it's in the right direction. I always like L.
| Author | Tolkien, J.R.R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Fiction; Fantasy |
| When Read | May 2002 |
In the last volume of the Lord of the Rings Sauron sends his army to Gondor where it is defeated by the men of Gondor and the horsemen of Rohan with a last minute decisive attack by Aragorn coming up river by ship with an army from the coast. A small army then heads for Mordor itself, knowing they are not enough to win but hoping to distract Sauron from Frodo's destruction of the ring. We then follow the final travail of Frodo and Sam as they go thorough terrible struggle and privation to the volcano. At the last minute, Frodo fails but Golomb seizes him, bites of his finger to get his precious ring, but falls over the edge. Sauron is defeated immediately and with less description or explanation than seems warranted. But the book doesn't end. The four hobbits return to the Shire and have one final fight with the traitor wizard Saruman. They overthrow him and restore peace and prosperity. Out of place now, Frodo goes off with Bilbo and the elves while Sam, Merry, and Pippin stay and prosper.
I liked these books more than I expected to but am still a bit perplexed at the cult following they have acquired. a highly intelligent 43 year old friend of mine has read them 8 times. Another of similar age and ability attended the movie in costume! Both are unmarried men. T's world of middle earth has struck a chord in adventure, escapism, charm, whimsy, and intelligence that resonates very well, perhaps best in intelligent, lonely, isolated people.
There must be hundreds of published imitations and, for each of them, another hundred unpublished ones, sometimes written as labors of love without hope of publication. Perhaps it's like Dan and I watching the Battle of Britain, or my home made war games at age 14.
Life is complicated. The major currents of human civilization proceed without much reference to our individual lives or much input from us. Escape, whether in fantasy, military history (my own favorite), music, television, sports, or whatever, is appealing. As I approach the end of my life I look back on the innocent escapism of my youth and wonder if there is solace to be gained there.
I'm not a young boy any more. The things that appealed to me then still appeal, but in different ways and with different accompaniments of thought and feeling.
I don't claim to understand all of these things but I have some sense of them. Tolkien didn't appeal to me the way he does for my friends, but I understand their attraction.
Here are a few facts to accompany my notes from five years ago.
I remember the name of the highly intelligent 43 year old, but not the name of the fellow who attended the movie in costume. Or maybe it's the other way around. I'm not sure. But I won't reveal the name here. He's a fellow I like and respect and I don't want to use his name in a context where I might seem to be making fun of him. I don't remember the name of the other fellow at this time though it's always possible it will come to me again.
"My homemade war games" refers to board games that I made as a young teen that were based on concepts like the Avalon-Hill game "Gettysburg" that I received as a Bar Mitzvah present at age 13. I created a paper map with land and sea squares. The advanced A-H games used hexagons but I don't remember making maps like that. I think the hexagons appeared after I had grown up a bit more. I think I played my homemade games a few times with other kids in the neighborhood but mostly I just played both sides myself.
As for the popularity of Tolkien and the limits of my own appreciation of him - I think it's due to limits in my ability to escape into fantasy. I can enjoy fantasy but I can't set aside my realization that the fantasy is unreal. That realization is always present, always standing between me and the wizards, elves, orcs, and fantastic events of the stories. Whether that realization is somehow embedded in my genetic character or whether it's something I've acquired in my studies of philosophy, history, and other things, I can't say, but it's there.
Another problem with fantasy is that the author can do anything he likes. In particular, he can invoke supernatural magic at any time to make things happen the way he wants them to happen. Magic is an invitation to the "deus ex machina" problem in writing. Tolkien and other good fantasy writers are or were conscious of this problem and knew to avoid it, but it remains a problem. Reading any story I find myself thinking about plausibility. Adding magic makes the plausibility problem worse.
As of this writing, there are 20,586 Amazon review of the Lord of the Rings. 82% gave five star reviews. One reviewer called it "Possibly the best book ever written by mankind." I can't agree with that, but The books must be among the most popular ever written.
| Author | Ambrose, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio, 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 299 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | June 2002 |
With an introduction by the author.
Immediately upon America's entry into the war, thousands of young men volunteered for the Army Air Force. Most were sent home because they had no planes to fly and facilities for training. They were not called up for another year. But when they were, they got very thorough training and arrived in Italy in 1944 to fly B-24's against Germans in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Eastern Europe. One of them was George MacGovern, an intellectual, religious, conscientious young man of 22, just married, who flew 35 missions including many really tough ones.
The conditions were very severe. Some men could not wear parachutes at their cramped stations, or get out without help. There was no toilet and taking one's pants down at minus 50 degrees was extremely dangerous. Missions could last 12 hours and many times the long route home was flown with damage and casualties. some jerks loved to kill but most of the men felt bad about all the civilian damage that they caused. MacGovern did very well and won the Silver Star for heroism.
Ambrose has plagiarized many of his books and been called on it. His specialty is not history or research, but popularization, for which he has made some big bucks. But he is good at what he does. He knows the questions the layman wants to ask.
The story I remember best from this book was from George MacGovern. He was unable to drop at least one of his bombs over the target. The bomb release mechanism wouldn't work. On his way back to base he tried again and the bomb(s) fell away. To his horror, he saw them land on an Austrian farm house, completely obliterating it. Years later he was in Austria and spoke to an audience, relating the story. A man came up to him and said that it was his house that was destroyed. He had always wondered why. However, no one was home at the time. No one died. MacGovern was greatly relieved.
| Author | Wilde, Oscar |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1891 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | June 2002 |
A palm reader at Lady Windermere's party tells young Lord Arthur that he is destined to commit murder. Shaken, but resolute and upright, he decides to postpone his coming marriage and kill someone first so this won't be hanging over his and his bride's heads. He chooses a dear old aunt and buys poison but she dies a natural death. so he picks a deacon uncle and buys a bomb, but the bomb is a bust. Finally, at a loss for what to do and despondent, he spots the palm reader at the edge of the Thames and throws him in.
In "The Canterville Ghost" an American family buys a haunted house. The ghost tries to scare them but they torment him instead, defeating him but finally helping him to his rest.
Both these stories start with an absurd premise treated as a matter of fact and proceed to hilariously logical consequences.
"The Sphinx Without a Secret" is a much less successful story of a mysterious seeming woman who really has no mystery. She just likes to pretend that she does. "The Model Millionaire" has a penniless young man giving his last sovereigns to a seeming bum who is in fact a millionaire and who rewards him with the 10,000 pounds he needs to marry. It is predictable.
But "The Portrait of W.H." is very different. Not a comedy at all, it's a piece of interwoven story and Shakespeare criticism presenting a case that Shakespeare himself, the lion of British culture, may have been homosexual. It is a striking piece, reaching right through convention to present a passionate, intelligent, and unashamed picture of forbidden love. Its boldness and defiance are breathtaking for the repressed society in which it was written. It speaks volumes for W's courage and his power of both social and literary criticism.
[No separate comment]
| Author | Byatt, A.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 305 |
| Extras | drawings, photos |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2002 |
Lit. Crit. grad student Phineas K. Nanson, having had enough of school, quits. On a suggestion from a friendly professor, he begins a biography of a biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes, a man [fictional I presume, but I haven't checked] who has written deeply researched biographies of [fictional] Elmer Bole and has extensive notes on naturalists Linnaeus and Galton, and on the playwright Henrik Ibsen.
P finds little material and he cannot be sure of the status of what he does find. Did SDS die in the Maelstrom, a Norwegian whirlpool? did he know more than he said about his subjects? Why did he make such strange index card notes and what is the correct ordering and relationship between the cards?
P takes a job at a strange travel agency named "Puck's Girdle" run by two gay men who arrange strange trips for strange people, perhaps pedophiles, though perhaps not. He becomes involved with Vera Alphage, a niece of SDS who is a radiology technician and collects x-rays of people's bones, and also with Fulla Biefeld, a Swwdish entomologist. He worries about a strange man who stalks him at Puck's Girdle.
Byatt is pursuing quirky interests and quirky characters here and working at different levels - the life of Phineas, of SDS, of his subjects, and also at different levels within each of these. The writing is highly intelligent and very fluent. She moves between levels effortlessly. She refuses to stick to a conventional story and openly discusses the problem of how to end this narrative since no resolution of issues seems possible. It is both easy to read and difficult to think about. It is clearly written by an interesting person.
This is the only one of Byatt's many books that I have thus far. I know that she's highly regarded and I liked this book, but I seem to recall starting another of her's and giving up on it.
| Author | Coffey, Frank |
|---|---|
| Author | Layden, Joseph |
| Publication | Los Angelos: General Publishing Group, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Extras | photos, illustrations, index, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | July 2002 |
A delightful coffee table style book published as "the companion to the PBS Special." The narrative is very broad, covering many topics: economics, style, marketing, business and competition, personalities, labor troubles, and the politics of automobile making - from the paving of America to the conspiracy to destroy street cars, to the backward steps in fuel efficiency. The text is quite progressive, pointing out the many warts in the industry and the negative impact of giant auto companies on American life.
There is no technical information. The book is solely about the social, economic, and political aspects of automobiles.
Some new facts learned: Ford made Model T's from 1912-27, 15 million of them. Henry Ford blocked all attempts to change the car until GM overwhelmed them with annual styling changes and a broad line of sizes, styles, colors, options, and costs. A thug named Harry Bennet ran Ford's security services, committing various violent crimes and almost took over the company until Henry Ford II finally ousted him. GM, Esso and Firestone formed National City Lines to destroy the urban streetcar. They bought companies, replaced the cars with buses, ran down the companies, then sold them back to the cities. Convicted of conspiracy, they were fined $5,000. The Beetle was the first car to outsell the Model T. In 1996, gas mileage was back down to 1980 levels.
It's a rough and dangerous industry but has produced 100 years of beautiful cars, beautifully illustrated in this book.
In the 1920's and 30's the American auto industry out produced the entire rest of the world and outproduced Germany, Italy, and Japan by about 9 to 1. In the 1940's the industry led the U.S. war production of tanks, trucks, jeeps, and airplanes to worldwide victory. In the 1950's the auto industry produced lavish designs with convertibles, station wagons, two-tone paint, chrome, and tail fins. And in 2009, two of the three major companies would have gone bankrupt and disappeared without a government bailout.
It's a mistake to be nostalgic for a past filled with labor suppression, racism, rural and urban poverty, and many other ills, but it's also true that "progress" is neither smooth nor certain and we don't know where the future will take us.
| Author | Keillor, Garrison |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2002 |
14 year old Gary finds his niche in school and town life by writing. The twin bullies at the school like him because they love his fart and booger stories. The newspaper pays him to write about the Lake Wobegone Whippets, the town baseball team, when their regular writer leaves. His cousin Kate, a little older girl who dates the Whippets new young pitcher, likes him because he idolizes her and covers for her escapades in school and with this handsome boy from the wrong side of the tracks.
Gary finds himself in the middle of all warring factions. His schlemiel of a father berates him but grudgingly accepts that the does an excellent job caring for the lawn. His mother loves him but wishes he were more of a Christian. His uncle Sugar gives him a great gift, a typewriter, but wants him to keep an eye on Kate and warn him if the pitcher comes around. The local rock band leader, a totally dissipated fellow, treats him like a young colleague. Gary basically finds a way to get along with everyone, except perhaps his prissy Christian sister whom he manages to outmaneuver at all critical junctures.
K's stories have a lot of caricature and crudity in them. They don't aspire to be "Literature". His hero (presumably his younger self) reads pornography - though not entirely free of guilt as he does so, cringes before the bullies, and lies shamelessly to protect himself from parents, teachers, and older sister. But for all that, he's an interesting character finding the more interesting pathways he can find through the pieties and perversities of small town life.
K is always funny and enjoyable to read.
| Author | Hardy, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Publication | Ashland, OR: Blackstone Audio, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1895 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2002 |
The story opens on the 10 year old orphan, Jude Fawley, as he helps the schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, pack his few belongings and leave for Christminster and the University. Jude, with no friends, no family except an old aunt who grudgingly cares for him, and no prospects, hopes that he too can go to Christminster, get an education, and enter the ministry. He works as a stonemason apprentice and then journeyman while studying Latin each night.
When he's finally ready to try for Christminster he is ambushed by Arabella, a young girl he dallies with, who claims pregnancy and so forces him to marry her. The marriage is a disaster. She is coarse and not very bright. She ridicules his books and his aspirations. Eventually she leaves him and goes to Australia. Jude goes to Christminster but cannot get in to the university, which has no place for a man from the working class. But he meets his cousin Sue Bridehead, a pretty, intelligent, unconventional girl, and falls in love.
Phillotson reappears in the story and works with Sue, falling for her also and proposing to her. She accepts before she really understands Jude, then goes through with the marriage, but she is sexually frigid and is repelled by Phillotson even though he is a kind, decent intelligent man.
It all ends tragically. Sue leaves Phillotson for Jude. She bears him children but they die - killed by Jude's son with Arabella. She goes off the deep end and returns to Phillotson. Jude dies of pneumonia and despair.
This is an important book with an important message about the love and marriage relationships in Victorian England. And Jude is an important character, condemned not by evil people but by stifling convention. See my diary for more.
The diary entries are more extensive than these notes.
Marcia and I are different people with different needs and desires. We do have much in common in our values and in our upbringing, but the real power in our marriage is probably the commitment that we have each made to the other - not just a commitment to stay together, but a commitment to understand each other, to work for the best interests of the other, and to do our best to make each other happy - finding our own happiness in doing so.
These were not options for the people in Hardy's novels. That they were not is partly because of the personalities involved, partly because of the failures of understanding of themselves, and partly because of social conventions that stood in the way of full understanding and full communication.
| Author | Catton, Bruce |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday and Co., 1952 |
| Number of Pages | 389 |
| Extras | maps, bibliography, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | July 2002 |
After Antietam Burnsides takes command and leads the army into the horror at Fredericksburg where men are sent again and again to charge an impregnable position. Then Hooker leads the army into the disaster at Chancellorsville where an inferior Confederate Army divides and attacks from two sides, rolling up the line and leaving the indecisive and befuddled Union leadership clueless and robbed of all nerve. In between was the "mud march" where the army left its winter quarters and marched to nowhere and back in weeks of cold rain and mud. Then Hooker was replaced by the competent but over cautious Meade. In an attempt to end the war, Lee crossed the Potomac and marched into Pennsylvania. Meade followed, staying between Lee and Washington until Lee finally turned south, the two armies colliding at Gettysburg. That battle, the bloodiest in American history, is described in some detail including its long drawn out aftermath of burial parties and trainload after trainload of wounded. The story ends at the dedication of the cemetery when, after a long speech by a professional speech maker, Abraham Lincoln moved to the podium and began to speak.
Catton's love of the ordinary soldier and his respect for the Confederates is clear and strong along with his dismay at the terrible losses caused by vain, indecisive, befuddled Union generals.
In addition to the war itself, C covers some of the pro and anti-war politics and the remarkable take off in the Northern economy in the very teeth of the war. The North could fight the South, raise and supply a large army, and still develop and expand its industry, all at the same time. That the South lasted as long as it did was due only to the brilliance of Southern arms and the incompetence of Northern leadership.
One more volume remains.
I have since finished the series and also read Catton's The Coming Fury, an excellent book about the events immediately leading up to the war. I have the next two books in that series and may read them yet.
After The Coming Fury came Terrible Swift Sword, which I read in 2013. Still to come is Never Call Retreat. I intend to read it. Catton is among the authors, and his books are among the series, that I tremendously admire and that I read with great appreciation. They are not just amusements for me and not just educational experiences. They make me feel that I am present, standing beside the authors, observing history as it is made.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hampton, NH: Chivers Sound Library, 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 2002 |
Mild bookish Paris Minton is minding his tiny secondhand bookshop in 1950's L.A. when beautiful Elana Love walks in looking for assistance, followed by her brutish boyfriend Leon, who beats the crap out of Paris, looking for Elana. Over the course of the next day he is robbed, his car is stolen, and his store is burned down. With nothing left he takes his last $500 and gets his friend Fearless Jones out of jail and asks him to help find his car and the people who did this to him and to get the money they are after.
Fearless is a kind hearted, polite, courteous, but simple man who can fight anyone and knows no fear. With no real thought for himself, he takes risks and gets in trouble in ways that any sensible man would avoid. When he and Paris visit the house of an old Jewish accountant said to be involved and find him half dead on the floor, Fearless unhesitatingly promises to care for this perfect stranger's wife, and does it too.
The story involves a Jewish collaborator with the Nazis who made off with millions in stolen art treasures. Israeli agents are tracking him and a mixed gang of black thugs and white lawyers are working for him. In the end, Paris figures it all out, but not before a lovely old Jewish woman is killed by her duped son-in-law, and some phony black clergy get involved and one of them killed.
This is very much in the spirit of the Easy Rawlins mysteries with some of the same feeling for the black community and its white antagonists in the 1950's. Fearless is only a cartoon character. Paris is the one with real feelings.
Mosley has covered this ground before. The Jewish elements are new. The rest is maybe not perfectly up to the earlier stories, but not bad at all.
| Author | King, Laurie R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 339 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 2002 |
Kate Martinelli and Al Hawkin are on the trail of what appears to be a vigilante who is killing men who have beaten their wives or are rapists or pedophiles. Two separate groups are suspected. The "Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement" have been tormenting and publicly humiliating offenders but they might not be responsible for the murders. Kate's good friend, militant lesbian feminist Roz Hall keeps turning up as a potential suspect. She has spoken out against offenders, led demonstrations against one, and is tangentially linked to a website that publishes names, address, and phone numbers of offenders in the style of the anti-abortion website.
In the end, Roz is shown not to be the murderer. The actual killers are a lawyer working for battered women and her secretary, a former victim herself. but Roz' activity was not helpful and her attack on a simple minded Indian man for bride burning provided cover for the actual murderers, who murdered the girl and her husband for his inheritance.
This is the fourth Martinelli mystery. I missed the middle two and read this because I found it on tape, but had to return it before I finished and so finished it in print.
This one is much more open than the first about gay and lesbian culture and would discomfort people who have a problem with that. However there is no graphic sex and an absolute respect both for heterosexuals and for the law.
| Author | Kincaid, Jamaica |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 81 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | August 2002 |
Ms. Kincaid describes the corrupt mess made of the little island of Antigua by colonial slave masters, neo-colonial exploiters, ugly American tourists, and corrupt officials. With no kind words for anyone, she makes the island look very uninviting for anyone who might visit. If you come, expect to find polluted water, raw sewage in the ocean, and the contempt of the local people. But lest you feel good about staying away, you should still understand that your standard of living is paid for by the exploitation of third world people.
Some of the irrationalities of the Antiguan economy are bizarre. No unleaded gas is available on the island and roads are barely maintained, so a steady flow of new cars are required to replace the ones ruined by leaded gas and potholes. The existence of a Minister of Culture, who is also Minister of Tourism and Sport, guarantees that there will be no culture. The library, damaged by an earthquake in 1974, was still not repaired and existed as a second floor above a rundown cement brick dry goods store.
She concludes "... once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being and all that adds up to. So too with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings." She is egalitarian in her disappointment. We're all disappointing. She herself has renounced the whole mess and moved to Vermont.
[No separate comment]
I don't know whether what I wrote qualifies as abstract or as comment, so I put it all under abstract.
When I compare modern society to Roman society - probably my favorite and perhaps most apropos historical comparison - I see many improvements and many failures to improve. I'm thankful that I live now and not in Rome, but I know that if I lived in Rome I would be thankful that I didn't live in a "barbarian" or stone age culture. Nevertheless, I envy those of our successors who, if humanity is lucky, will live in a much evolved society of the far future.
| Author | Sweetman, Bill |
|---|---|
| Publication | MBI Publishing, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 8-65 |
| Extras | photos, drawings, specifications |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Military |
| When Read | August 2002 |
Originally published separately, this small book about the A-10 is collected with others in the series to appear as a collection - with a very small update for the Gulf War.
This is probably the best book I've read about an airplane. Sweetman strikes exactly the right balance in weighing what he can assume the reader already understands and what needs to be explained. and his explanations are superb. He gives the reader the real reasons for all of the design decisions and design compromises. He explains beautifully the interaction between the aircraft designers, weapons designers, engine designers, military strategists with their assessment of the need and role of the airplane, and even the manufacturers, planners and politicians.
I learned a great deal about how a plane can be designed for an exact role - in this case tank busting, and how changes are made to accommodate changing requirements and lessons learned from experience with the real airplane.
I'm interested in the A-10 because it strikes me as a low cost close support airplane that fills a critical role in a novel, economical, and altogether ingenious way.
"Close air support" has been a contentious problem in the American air forces at least since the days of World War II. The Marine Corps believed in the concept and wanted specialized planes for the purpose. The U.S. Army Air Force, after 1947 just the U.S. Air Force, believed only in strategic bombing and fighters. Close air support would be handled by fighters, e.g., the P-47 Thunderbolt in WWII, and the F-4 and F-105 in Vietnam. The A-10 is an exception to that policy and has been highly contentious.
A-10's were made by Fairchild in Hagerstown, Maryland. Each time the Air Force proposed doing away with the plane, our Maryland Congressmen and Senators went to work lobbying for keeping it. An Air National Guard unit in Maryland or Pennsylvania, I'm not sure which, was equipped with them and I used to see them flying overhead all the time when I was out at the gliderport in Frederick.
| Author | Haruf, Kent |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 301 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 2002 |
In the small town of Holt, Colorado, in the high plains, a small community works out its strains, problems and tensions. The story is told in a series of chapters, each following one or another of Tom Guthrie, a high school teacher, Ike and Bobby, his 10 and 11 year old boys, Victoria Roubideaux, a pregnant 17 year old, and the McPheron brothers, a pair of old bachelor cattle ranchers who take in Victoria when her mother casts her out and her high school teacher, Maggie Jones, can no longer keep her. Tom's wife Ella is depressed and unhappy. She abandons the family and goes to live with her sister in Denver. Victoria's young man, a lout, carries her off to Denver and sets up housekeeping with her, but he's still a lout and she leaves him to return to the McPherons. Guthrie has to deal with his estranged wife and with another young lout, a student in his class whom G is flunking because he won't work, but who has loutish parents that make trouble for Tom while the boy harasses Ike and Bobby.
The story is beautifully told. The characters: Tom, Victoria, the McPherons, Ike and Bobby, and Maggie are people that we respect and like and care very much about. There is a kind of spare landscape, spare community, and spare language that lets the essential humanity of these people stand out clearly and brightly.
There are no final resolutions of anything. Tom and Maggie do get together but the louts remain and Victoria is still pregnant and with a limited future. But the fine folk continue their lives and continue to survive like rugged plants in an otherwise barren landscape.
This was a very, very fine book.
| Author | Eszterhas, Joe |
|---|---|
| Publication | Beverly Hills, CA: New Millennium Audio, 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2002 |
Hollywood screenwriter Eszterhas has written a very unusual combination of personal narrative and odd fiction. In his own voice he talks about his pleasure at seeing Bill Clinton win the presidency. Then he begins a series of long sections in the voices of various real historical people, interspersed with his own narratives. The people are Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, Richard Nixon, Bob Dole, Al Gore, John McCain, James Carville, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Each narrative is either in the form of a monologue or a phone conversation. The presentations are truly remarkable. Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp are amazingly convincing. I wondered if these were verbatim Tripp recordings of their phone conversations. The presentations of Nixon, Clinton and the others were amazing too. Clinton refers to Lewinsky as "a piece of cake - doesn't she understand that?"
The book works terrifically well on an emotional level. It gives some plausible insights into Bill, Hillary and Monica. It makes the Bill/Monica relationship into much less and somewhat more than we imagined it, with Bill finding release in her and Monica imagining that she was in love.
There are no real politics in the book. That is a weakness and, I hope, a failure of authenticity. It's all about sex, personality, ego, ambition, and frustration. I tell myself that's only Hollywood, not real American government. I think I'm right. Aren't I?
In answer to the last question above, I still think I'm right. We're in another election season now. Personal egos are certainly involved. In Mitt Romney's case, I can't tell what he stands for or truly believes in. Paul Ryan is a mystery to me too - though it's possible that Romney and Ryan believe in exactly what they say they believe in and it just seems false to me because the beliefs are so outrageous. But I have no doubt that Obama and Biden are dead serious about politics.
Looking up Joe Eszterhas I came across an article on the CNN website from April 13, 2012. Eszterhas had been hired by Warner Brothers to write a screenplay for a movie about Judah Maccabee that would star, or be directed by, Mel Gibson. CNN said a letter from E to G complained that "Mel Gibson frequently spews 'looney, rancid' anti-Semitism, has talked about killing his former girlfriend, and is prone to hate-filled diatribes slamming everyone from John Lennon to Walter Cronkite."
Eszterhas seems to be quite a guy.
| Author | Kawabata, Yasunari |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 147 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Japan |
| When Read | September 2002 |
Kikuji, a young man of unspecified occupation, attends a tea ceremony hosted by Chikako, his dead father's temporary mistress. There he meets "the Imamura girl", a pretty girl whom Chikako wants to match with Kikuji. She wears a scarf with a thousand cranes on it. He also meets Mrs. Ota, a more long term mistress of his father, and her daughter Fumiko.
Kikuji is entangled with Chikako who constantly tries to manipulate him, and Mrs. Ota, with whom he falls into an affair. he rejects Chikako's interference in his life and ignores her match making. But he cannot bring order to his life. Mrs. Ota commits suicide. Fumiko disappears for a while. Chikako lies to him, telling him that both Fumiko and the Imamura girl are now married. He never learns whether this is true about Imamura, but Fumiko appears before him, still unmarried.
There is little action in this novel. Instead there is mystery and guilt, tradition and heritage, old transgressions by the elder generation now haunting the lives of the younger Kikuji and Fumiko.
There are many visual scenes - ranging from the oft considered birthmark on Chikako's breast to the quality of a sunset, to the trace of red on the rim of a tea bowl, which may or may not be an unwashable stain of lipstick. Some of these scenes contain very poignant images - presented very succinctly but effectively.
I am an eclectic reader and have found great value in many very different kinds of books. This book was one I might never have found but for a need to find something different and short for our book group. I'm glad I did find it.
Japanese fiction, at least the books that I have read, mainly from the 1950s and 60s, is different from what I'm used to in Western fiction. There is less emphasis on action, more on subtle feeling. This book was particularly like that. I'm having trouble thinking of a Western writer who could have written it. Perhaps Proust might have written something like this, though I don't have enough experience of Proust to say.
| Author | Cunningham, Noble |
|---|---|
| Publication | Charlotte Hall: Recorded Books, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Thomas Jefferson |
| When Read | September 2002 |
This is a biography of Thomas Jefferson in a straightforward account of his life and works.
The basic facts are here. We learn that he was a very hard worker, a serious intellectual, and a man who was deeply committed to the principles of republican democracy. As a young lawyer J defended one or more slaves who argued for their freedom. As a legislator and war-time governor of Virginia, he advocated three years of free childhood education at public expense, with higher education for a select few poor students who excelled at their studies. He fought primogeniture and entailment of land as practices that supported aristocracy. As ambassador to France he saw the coming French revolution and endorsed it. He brought home ideas, notes, plants, books, anything that could help the Americas. He served as Washington's first Secretary of State, favoring revolutionary France over England (backed by Hamilton.) He founded the first American political party to fight for democracy against the aristocracy of wealth of Hamilton and the Federalists. He argued for, but failed, in his efforts to gradually eliminate slavery and to extend suffrage. As President, he eliminated the alien and sedition laws, negotiated for Louisiana, kept the U.S. out of the war, suppressed the Barbary pirates, built the first navy - against all his instincts for disarmament, sent Lewis and Clark to the Pacific, and aimed always to expand a small farm based democracy. He spent only his own money on social affairs and refused medals, ribbons, and fancy uniforms. He founded a great university. He rejected established religion and embraced philosophic deism.
Cunningham's biography leaves much to be desired. It gives us little of the inner man or the key philosophies. But it is adequate.
| Author | Sienkiewicz, Henrik |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1895 |
| Number of Pages | 418 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Roman Empire |
| When Read | September 2002 |
Marcus Vinicius, a young patrician and soldier, returns to Rome in the time of Nero. He meets and is smitten with desire for young Lygia, a beautiful girl, daughter of a barbarian king, kept in Rome as a hostage but growing up as the virtual daughter of an old general and his Christian wife Pomponia. With his uncle, the wealthy "arbiter elegantium" Petronius, he hatches plans to abduct her. But his plans are thwarted, partly by the arbitrary whims of Nero and his jealous wife, and partly by the efforts of Ursus, the giant bodyguard who protects Lygia on the orders of her father.
As the story develops, Vinicius gradually learns to become a genuine human being. His desire is transformed into love. His egotism is transformed into selflessness. Over the long course of the novel he comes very gradually, and very believably, to embrace Christianity under the influence of Peter and Paul. Meanwhile Nero degenerates from egomania to psychosis - burning Rome, killing patricians, persecuting Christians in a cowardly attempt to redirect the blame for the fire onto a defenseless people.
S maintains a wonderful balance - producing a deep appreciation for the early Christian movement without sanctifying all of the Christians and without either endorsing or ignoring the supernaturalist claims of Christianity. His depiction of Nero and the utter and absolute degeneracy of the Roman state is superb. His characterization of Petronius, a man who is too intellectual to embrace Christianity, too intellectually honest and courageous to give in to Nero, and is yet a Roman from head to toe - is wonderful. This is one of the great historical novels.
I'll mark this book as the completion of ten years of entry or conversion of book notes into XML.
| Author | White, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Biography |
| When Read | October 2002 |
Born in 1642 into a rustic farm family, Newton had a difficult childhood. His father died when he was an infant. His mother married a well-to-do clergyman who insisted on Isaac living elsewhere. He had a country education with no training at all in mathematics. Against the wishes of his mother, who wanted him to supervise the farm, he went to Cambridge as a poor student and quickly distinguished himself by hard work and brilliant ideas. In two years he went from mathematical ignoramus to a leading position and the discoverer of new concepts.
Solitary, private, and almost paranoid, N worked night and day on his research in physics. More than any other scientist, he mastered deep mathematical analysis in combination with extensive, thorough, and exacting empirical research. He developed new modes of analysis and constructed his own superior instruments - such as the first practical reflector telescope - with his own hands. His discoveries included the calculus, the law of universal gravitation, the laws of thermodynamics, and the particle theory of light. He found no evidence of the "aether" and so could not accept the aether wave theory. In fact his experiments showed that an aether was not present.
In older age he entered politics and government, becoming an MP, then director of the mint - which he overhauled and made work efficiently and honestly. He dominated the Royal Society and punished those intellectuals such as Leibniz whom he believed (incorrectly it is now thought) had plagiarized from him or not given him proper respect - though he was generous and independent minded.
There is much more to say about this very important man.
A pretty good, non-technical, biography.
Here are a few things I remember about Newton, ten years after reading the book.
In Newton's first course in geometry at Cambridge he was given a poor grade by his professor. Believing himself to be a genius and shocked at the poor grade, he was further surprised to discover that the professors all understood geometry better than he did. It was the stimulus he needed to stop relying on his quick intelligence and buckle down to take the subject really seriously and to study it as diligently as he could.
Newton apparently believed that he had solved the problems of the physics of matter, and made a great deal of progress on understanding light. It was his intention, as with Einstein, Hawking, and other 20th and 21st century physicists, to develop a "theory of everything" that would tie together and explain all of the physical phenomena in the world.
According to White, Newton was a closet alchemist. He performed solitary and sometimes dangerous experiments in his lab, away from others' eyes, in an effort to transmute metals and do other things that we now know to be impossible - at least by chemical means. He apparently also had some strange religious views. It is these things that suggested to White that "the last sorcerer" was an appropriate subtitle for a Newton biography. Perhaps Newton was the last great scientist to take such ideas seriously.
Newton's experimental techniques were far beyond those of anyone else. He performed experiments that others could not perform because they didn't know how, or because they didn't have the precision equipment that Newton constructed for himself, or simply because they didn't have his dogged patience and determination. As his reputation grew, he also enlisted others to help in experiment and observation. The most important of these was the Royal Astronomer at Greenwich, who regularly sent highly accurate observations of the stars and planets to Newton, and accepted Newton's ideas for what to observe and when.
I don't remember exactly why Newton left scientific research. It may have been a combination of believing that he had solved the main problems, belief that he could make a greater contribution now in government, and perhaps the ego gratification he hoped to receive, and did receive, in a more public life.
As director of the mint, Newton introduced both organization and technology to make the mint work efficiently. He abolished the graft that permeated the department and its former chiefs. He also went to work on counterfeiters, making it much harder to counterfeit coinage, and much easier to spot counterfeit coin. His agents arrested many counterfeiters and he saw them hung or imprisoned. He showed them no mercy. His impact on government finances was very significant.
I don't imagine that Newton would have thought much of me, and I doubt that I would have found him very companionable, I'm not sure anyone did. But I certainly admire the man as one of the greatest of heroes of the development of science and the human intellect.
I just finished Steven Weinberg's To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. Weinberg's chapter on Newton is the culmination of his study and sheds light on both the meaning and the process of Newton's great discoveries that White just did not have. See the comments on that book.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Coward McCann |
| Copyright Date | 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | October 2002 |
[No abstract, see 1979-06.02 notes.]
The summary I wrote 23 years ago still seems accurate to me, so I'll only add some later impressions on this, my second reading, done for our book group.
Knowing the outcome in advance made it possible for me to concentrate more on the mechanics of the story's construction. it seemed to me very tight, very accurately written in the sense that the chess masters use "accuracy". All of the actions contribute to the final outcome. All of the dialogs give us the essential perspectives of the characters. Each character has his distinct personality and distinct capacity - whether for analysis, friendship, deception, courage, or disdain.
It is an economical book. No scene seems to have been played over long, although each seemed long enough. The greatest economy of all is at the end when the deep horror of the British plan is fully understood and when, in just one page, it is rejected.
This was not Le Carre's deepest or strongest book. But any other author in this genre would have been deeply gratified had he produced it.
My first reading of the book was in 1979. I found it while perusing the fiction stacks in the basement of Pratt Central Library in the last year that I worked there. It was an important book to me at the time. A few years from now, fate willing, I will type up the book card I wrote at that time.
The transcription of the 1979 notes are done. See the extensive notes element I added for my recent thoughts on this novel.
| Author | Sabatini, Rafael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1910 |
| Number of Pages | 465 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | October 2002 |
Country gentleman Anthony Wilding woos Ruth Westmacott who spurns him while her weak, pampered brother Dick taunts him and tries to break up any relationship for fear that Ruth, heir to the estate, will not continue to indulge him.
It is 1685. The Protestant Duke of Monmouth, a foolish, indecisive man, makes his misguided effort to seize the throne from Catholic King James. Wilding is committed to the Duke's cause. He works as a secret agent, attempting to win support from important people and preventing an assassination of the Duke. But the Duke is stupid, his advisers are vain, arrogant and cowardly, and they throw away what opportunities they have. Meanwhile Ruth marries Wilding to prevent him from killing her brother in a duel. But she is cold to him and regards him as hateful for having forced her. Still, over the course of the novel she comes to admire him more and more, eventually coming to love him. After the Duke's final military fiasco, Wilding blackmails a key Royalist official who had secretly gone over to the Duke when he thought the Duke would win. Wilding gets an affidavit from him that he, Wilding, and his close friend, were Royalist agents all along.
Not as good as Scaramouche but quite good nevertheless, Mistress Wilding has all the elements we expect from Sabatini - romance, adventure, a dashing brave man, a pretty girl, quite good writing. Scaramouche had more, but MW has enough.
I had thought that Sabatini was lost to modern readers but he isn't. Many of his books are still in print and the rest are available free on the Gutenberg and other websites. Kindle editions are available free from Amazon. He was praised in Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas. I am still occasionally reading his books
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 420 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 2002 |
On the eve of the binary millennium (2048 AD), Mary Choy, human transform and L.A. Police Dept. officer, is called in to help investigate the murder of eight young people by poet Emmanuel Goldsmith. She is sent to Hispaniola, run by Colonel Sir John Yardley, to find EG. However EG has been kidnapped by the rich father of a murdered girl and given to famed psychologist Martin Burke, inventor of nano-machines that can transform a brain into a therapied state, to investigate.
Four stories proceed in parallel. Mary C goes on her wild goose chase into the dark world run by Colonel Sir; MB begins a horrifying journey into "the country" of EG's mind from which he emerges with deep psychic damage; Jill, an AI on earth simulating the behavior of AXIS, an AI sent to a near star, begins to achieve full self-consciousness; and Richard Fettle, poet and protege of EG, completes his own journey to mental health.
MC and Jill reappear in Slant, written seven years later, which I read without knowing it was a sequel of sorts.
Bear's complex books are always full of very interesting ideas. Perhaps more than any other writer, he explores the progress of consciousness and the possibilities of its development in different directions - from AI, bioengineering, psychic manipulation (but not in the supernatural sense), and even by plain old evolution (as in Darwin's Radio.) His writing in this period was difficult. He used future slang without explanation, forcing the reader to learn from context. He has complex plots and parallel plots. But the reader is always rewarded with deeply interesting ideas.
It's nearly impossible for anyone to predict the future, even if, as in this case, the selected future year isn't too far in the future. We readers of science fiction must accept the fact that we are not reading predictions and evaluate the material from the standpoint, not of its accuracy and perhaps not even of its plausibility, but rather of its internal consistency and the sophistication of its scientific imagination. Bear does very well on those counts.
| Author | Talbot, Frederick A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1915 |
| Number of Pages | 152 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War I |
| When Read | October 2002 |
This book was published early in the war before the major developments in air combat, bombing, strafing, etc., that occurred later. It is a kind of moment of frozen time describing the earliest uses of aircraft in war and the developing experiences and ideas concerning them.
T believed, correctly as it turned out, that dirigibles would turn out to be poor combat machines. However he covered them extensively because of the hype surrounding the Zeppelin at that time.
The book is not highly technical and has almost no information about individual airplane types. But it does have very interesting information about reconnaissance, anti-aircraft gunnery, defense against air attack, bombing, the use of radios (difficult due to short range, weight, 1-300 foot trailing antennae, and the problem of hearing over engine and wind noise), flying over water and off the water, and more.
T still had the pre-war conceits about British, German (brave but not smart), French (dashing and individualistic) character - all looking silly and dumb today. These ideas date the book as much as the limited aerial experience.
Only someone like me with an interest in this sort of thing would like this book. But for me it was of interest on two levels. First of all it was interesting for its subject, and secondly for its highly dated point of view - giving an insight into the times as well as the subject.
I wrote a review for Amazon.com. The review I wrote for them is longer and better than this one.
Since I wrote my review in 2002, six other people reviewed the book, all in 2013 and 2014. It appears that the availability of the free Kindle edition (copied from Gutenberg?) attracted some readers. I note that all of the other reviewers are described as "Verified purchasers" of the free Kindle version while I am described as an unverified owner of a paperback edition, even though I explicitly said that I downloaded the book from Gutenberg. I presume that the characterization of my copy was done by a computer program that didn't read my review but noted that, at the date that I posted the review, a paperback edition was available but no Kindle edition was available.
| Author | Morris, Edmund |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 784 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Theodore Roosevelt |
| When Read | October 2002 |
Picking up the story begun in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, M begins with TR's trek down the mountain on the evening of his notification of McKinley's death. Although he moves to reassure Republican business conservatives, TR soon becomes his own man, moving beyond McKinley, especially on anti-trust and corporate responsibility issues. His ingenuousness, high spirits, and remarkable physical activity caused many to misjudge him, missing his powerful intellect, keen political sense, and encyclopedic knowledge. By his heroic background, his willingness to fight entrenched interest, and his ability to appeal to people, he became the most popular president up to that time.
TR was an unabashed elitist yet he still had many great progressive achievements including anti-trust legislation and executive action on conservation, doubling the number of national parks and creating the national forest system, supporting some collective bargaining rights, treating blacks better than previous presidents (though not by current standards.) In foreign policy he arbitrated an end to the Russo-Japanese war in very difficult negotiations, separated Panama from Columbia (or rather allowed it to separate and then protected it) to begin the canal, and built the Great White Fleet. And through it all he still read his 500 books a year, some in French or German, and played tennis, boxed, climbed, hiked, rowed, and every other physical activity one can imagine.
Morris has written a very convincing and readable biography.
I believe that I first read a biography of Theodore Roosevelt when I was in high school. If I remember correctly, I then read a second one. Later, when I became a Marxist, Roosevelt no longer appealed to me in the same way. Today, and ten years ago when I read this, my politics are much more pragmatic and less ideological. I again see Roosevelt as a great president. He didn't revolutionize society and certainly didn't want to. He wouldn't even recognize some of my political goals as worthwhile. He was no social leveler. But he did achieve a lot. He probably achieved more of worth than a man like myself might have achieved even with my more advanced (if that's what it is) social conscience.
| Author | Balzac, Honore de |
|---|---|
| Translators | Bell, Clara |
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1836 |
| Number of Pages | 30 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | October 2002 |
The Paris surgeon Bianchon recounts the story of one of his mentors, Desplein, a surgeon of great genius who left no treatise and made no permanent contributions to science but who, in his time, was one of the greatest practitioners. One day Bianchon sees Desplein, a well known atheist, emerging from a mass at a local church. Surprised, he notes the date and time and sees him again one year later doing the same. Eventually he pries the story of Desplein's attendance from him.
D was so poor as a student that he could not heat his room or feed himself. In the depths of his misery a miserable water carrier shared everything he had with D and kept him alive. Auvergnat, the water carrier, even spent the money he had been saving for a horse to ease his terrible load. Later, when A became ill, D rushed to him and saved his life. Then he treated for free all of the poor wretches whom A knew and sent to him. Finally, upon A's death, D fulfilled his last request to have a mass said for him four times a year which he, D, dutifully attended.
The story is simple. a man is grateful to another who shared his pittance with him in a time of great need. But Balzac makes us feel the story. He makes us understand that poverty isn't just a matter of penny pinching and numbers. It's grinding pain and cold and hunger and significant risk of death. B understands that the worlds of the bourgeois and the middle class float on a sea of misery.
The book is very short. It is more a short story than a novel, but it is a fine piece of writing with many deep perceptions and a real social conscience.
I tried to find the publication date of this story but didn't succeed.
Two days ago I read an essay on the web, written in 2005 by John Scalzi, about what it means to be poor. It was a collection of one or two sentence statements of the form, "Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away." It's followed by many hundreds of additional comments by people with more illustrations of poverty. Mitt Romney could benefit from reading Balzac and Scalzi.
Web resources are much amplified as compared to when I wrote the original notes in 2002. According to the online "Cumming's Study Guides" the story was published in La Chronique de Paris in January, 1836, and again in The Human Comedy in 1844.
I don't normally write-up individual short stories in my book notes and, in fact, I don't read a lot of them apart from short story collections. However this was a particularly good story by a particularly important author and so I wrote it up.
| Author | Graves, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | ISIS Audio Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1957 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography; Autobiography |
| When Read | November 2002 |
Graves prepared this autobiography at the end of the 1920's, while still a young man. His caring but straight arrow parents sent him to an upper class "public" (i.e., "private" in U.S. parlance) school they could ill afford - where he got a decent education in the stilted, homosexual, snobbish, cruel, British boarding school culture. Then he spent several years in World War I at the western front, being blasted, shot, gassed, and mistreated by his British commanders and German enemies alike. His war experience is the heart of the book. Although not as powerful as say, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, this is still a very graphic and informative account of the war as seen from the trenches by a young officer with a pistol in his hand.
He went through a long convalescence at the end of the war. He married a young woman and had four children. They operated a store for a while. Then he supported them with his pension and his poorly paid writing. But she wasn't happy and the marriage broke up. He left England for Majorca, saying goodbye to country, marriage, war - and all that.
There is a post script at the end from the 1950's.
Graves is one of my favorite writers. He was a man of very great erudition - in history, languages, literature, and the classics. His novels, especially the two Claudius novels and Count Belisarius were favorites of mine. This too is a fine, humane, honest and perceptive work.
| Author | Bates, H.E. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1947 |
| Number of Pages | 308 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | November 2002 |
A British pilot in Burma has become depressed, anti-social, and perhaps suicidal after years of war and the death of his young wife in a London bombing. Now he is hostile to his tent mate and young navigator and is beginning to be distrusted by everyone. Then he meets a beautiful young Burmese girl and his outlook begins to improve. he tries to help her family and her village. he engages with them and with his unit doctor and a Scottish missionary nurse who are treating the villagers, especially after a Japanese bombing wreaks havoc when it misses the airfield and hits the village instead.
Still in an unstable state the pilot, Forrester, takes his navigator and staff officer tent mate on a routine trip but they have engine trouble and crash in the jungle. The boy's legs are burned. F carries the boy on his back and the three try to hike out. after a horrifying trek in great heat, hunger, and thirst, the staff officer shoots himself but the other two survive and make it back. F finds the girl waiting for him.
This is a very 40's English story. It's not entirely convincing. Some of the characters are flat and all are overly stereotyped from the silent beauty to the shrill nurses with hearts of gold, to Forrester himself - the man of mystery and deep inner wounds who is brought back to life by the love of an innocent girl and the need to save a courageous young boy.
B is a competent, professional writer but the story is somewhat contrived, without the author's real personal commitment.
Bob Kline recommended this book and loaned it to me.
I asked Bob why he recommended this. He said it was because of my interest in flying. There wasn't much in the way of flying in the book, and none from a real pilot's perspective. Ah well...
I read another of Bates' books, Fair Stood the Wind for France in 2016. It too was a book about British fliers in World War II. It too was not a book about flying. The Wikipedia article about Bates says "During World War II he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories." This novel was published in 1947 and Fair Stood ... was published during the war, in 1944, while he was presumably still in the service. His non-pilot association with the RAF may account for his output of novels and stories about fliers that are not really about flying.
| Author | Coupland, Douglas |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 2002 |
Susan Colgate, former child beauty queen, soap opera actress, and wife of a homosexual rock star, meets John Johnson, film director and son of a wealthy Delaware family on the wrong side. Each is alienated, alone, and unfulfilled. Each has chucked it all, she walking away from a plane crash and living anonymously for a year with a former TV announcer and mail fraud perpetrator, and he bumming on the road for a year as an unknown, eating out of garbage cans and getting horribly sick and waking in the hospital to the sound of Susan's voice on a TV re-run.
There is a strange love story between them, and the love hate story between Susan and her mother - who pushed her into the dog show like beauty pageant business. There's lots of inside observations on beauty pageants, on Hollywood silliness, but nothing very substantial. In the end, everyone is reconciled.
C attempted to write a hip, clever, insider's book. He's a good writer and a clever guy, but the book is only partly successful. The characters are artificial, the love affair is contrived, and the hip, insider's view is written more for effect than to shed real light on a world that is concealed from most of us.
Unfortunately, the libraries have only a limited collection of books on tape.
| Author | Grant, Ulysses Simpson |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1885 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography; Autobiography |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | November 2002 |
Published in 1885-6 as almost the last thing he did before his death, Grant begins his autobiography with his first ancestor to reach American shores in Massachusetts in 1630. The story continues to cover his early education, West Point, his disappointed desire to become a math instructor at the college, his Mexican War experience, his business life prior to 1861, and his entry into the army again in 1861. It then recounts his fighting career through the capture of Vicksburg. Although there is some information here about his civilian life, it is primarily a military biography concentrating most on the Mexican and Civil Wars.
Grant wrote very well. The style is straightforward, clear, correct, and informative. As an important person in the events, and one whose opinion counts for a lot, he tries to be fair and objective, but he has strong opinions and doesn't hesitate to voice them. He rates some generals very high and others he effectively damns simply by saying that so and so did not have his confidence or should not have been in command. He believes that the war could have been won had his recommendations to follow up Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg been followed. He believed in taking the offensive and hitting hard while the enemy was reeling from defeats but the higher ups did not agree. He was the first Union general to live off the Southern land and break with conventional supply lines.
I do not credit his account with 100% accuracy or objectivity. He was not, and did not try to be, a professional historian. But the book is readable, credible, and highly interesting to a buff such as myself.
I read the second volume in June of 2003, and also read some books by Catton that year.
In my childhood I read many books about the Civil War and World War II, probably concentrating more on the Civil War. In adulthood, that emphasis switched. But I remain very interested in the Civil War - the military history, the causes, the people, and other things.
| Author | Cisneros, Sandra |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 110 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 2002 |
This is a collection of very short, 1-3 page vignettes of the life of a young girl in a poor Mexican neighborhood in Chicago. The girl, her parents, and her younger sister live on the third floor of a building. They play in the streets with other Chicana girls. They are excited by part ownership of a bike. They talk about the older girls. As they grow up themselves, they face the difficulties of dealing with boys and with men in an environment that is not safe and middle class, with parents who don't necessarily understand them and certainly don't have enlightened, liberated attitudes. They see young girls in the process of becoming tramps or, worse, wives of brutal and domineering men. The girl herself, working hard to understand all of this and always reading books, does not succumb to the boys. She stays independent and grows strong and stays true to her dream of a house of her own.
The writing is very simple but full of imaginative metaphors and fresh observations. Without writing any analysis at all, just by writing the impressions of a young girl, the author lays out a very authentic and pretty insightful view of this community.
I liked the people. I liked the author's treatment of the people - her sympathy and her understanding. I liked the writing.
This book is easily accessible to young people and is apparently a favorite among young teens. But it appeals to this aging man too.
| Author | Attanasio, A.A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 203 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 2002 |
Charles Ontis had his head frozen after his death in the 20th century and awakens a thousand years later to be exploited by "Lewdists" who use his unmodified archaic brain to play and enjoy sex fantasies. Then he is taken by members of the non-Abelian Guage cult to teach physics to children, and then by a cruel member of "the Commonality" who embeds him in an asteroid mining machine.
"Mr. Charlie", as he is known, cobbles together a radio and puts out a cry for help. The deep space asteroid mining robot, equipped with "counter-parameter" programming that makes him interested in and sympathetic to humans, recruits a girl, "Jumper Nili", and the two of them rescue Charles from another mining company that also heard his call and came to "salvage" him - killing the other group's own dangerous robot in order to get Charles out.
They go to Mars and hope to make it to the city state of Solis - which they get to after great trials and adventures. There with the assistance of a man later revealed to be of the "Mast", an advanced branch of humanity that lives apart and interferes only when they feel the need in human in robot affairs. In the end, they make Munk the robot into a man and Charles into a robot.
The story is quite wild. The conception of the future is not especially scientific, though certainly not un- or anti-scientific. But the imagination, the interest in all kinds of consciousness, the fabulous collection of characters, and the terribly interesting and unfettered, unconventional view of the future - together with sparkling, clear and inventive prose - make this a delightful book. The main character is Munk the robot, and a wonderful character he is.
I had never heard of Attanasio before picking up this book. I'll look for more.
I never did look for more, but I see that I have found some among my digital collection. I'll have to take the next step of downloading one into my ebook reader.
| Author | Nasser, Sylvia |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audiobooks, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| When Read | December 2002 |
This is a biography of John Nash, a mathematician who made a seminal contribution to game theory and important contributions in other areas and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Nash was a bona fide genius with a PhD from Princeton and an assistant professorship at MIT. But he was personally self-centered, arrogant, and obnoxious. He kept a woman in Boston and had a child by her but refused to acknowledge the child, marry the woman, or provide any support to either one. He married a beautiful girl, intelligent and socially sophisticated, but did not treat her all that well. Then in 1959 he became paranoid schizophrenic, hearing voices, finding private messages to him in the New York times front page, writing letters to world leaders, attempting to renounce his citizenship, and failing to work. Life became hell for him and his wife. He experienced involuntary hospitalizations and horrible insulin shock treatments. And yet, amazingly, over a 30 year period, he pulled himself together and experienced a real remission. His Nobel prize seemed to be a big factor in helping him out. And today he works and manages to live with his ex-wife and his own schizophrenic son.
The book is quite different from the very moving film made of his life which dramatizes his delusions as spy paranoia and omits altogether his illegitimate child, his divorce, and his anti-Americanism, making his remission into a self directed effort which the book was far less clear and probably more realistic about.
For all of his character failings and his delusions, Nash's genius was indeed beautiful in a way that only a tiny handful of people can attain. I am very pleased that a writer saw this and wrote down his story for us. It is an intelligent, objective, and worthwhile effort.
I saw the movie and then read the book. The book had far more information and, as recorded above, struck me as more likely to be telling a fuller and more objective story. Yet looking back on it from ten years later it is the scenes of the movie that have stuck in my mind.
Those scenes were striking: his first inspiration about game theory made among a number of young male grad students competing for the attention of a small number of females (or was it vice versa?); his room full of magazine clippings pasted on the wall; his first effort to return to sanity in the library; his questioning of whether a man come to tell him about his Nobel Prize was real or a figment of imagination. Images have power that are hard to realize purely in words.
The story that I tell myself about John Nash is that in spite of all illusions and delusions, if we hold onto a kernel of rationality it can be relied upon to anchor us to the real world. I do not have schizophrenia but I do feel that my mental condition will come under increasing assault from the problems of aging and maybe from Alzheimer's. But I plan to struggle and I do struggle to retain my sanity and my intellectual powers. It is a battle that Nash fought and that John von Neumann fought at the end of his life, and it's a battle that I intend to fight to the bitter end.
I said in my comments ten years ago that I was glad that Sylvia Nash wrote this story. In the history of humanity, and I'm inclined to say in the history of mind, Nash's life was an exemplary event. We need biographies like this.
| Author | Robertson, John T. |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Trojan Publications |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 162 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | December 2002 |
A group of intrepid seamen man His Majesty's Ship Gargoyle, a World War II corvette, in action in the North Atlantic, off the coast of Norway, and on a Malta convoy.
I picked this up in a discard pile at the Wheaton Library book sale and read it because it's about a topic of interest to me. But the writing is as bad as any I have ever seen in print. The characters are cartoons. The action is contrived and sometimes absurd. The writing is flat out terrible - full of the most sentimental tripe one can imagine. Interestingly, even the book binding is bad, with some pages out of order.
I've written more about this in my diary, with some excerpts.
The diary entries are from August. Either I started the book in August, put it down, and finished it in December, or finished it in August or September but forgot to write it up. At any rate, the dates are listed below
| Author | Douglas, John |
|---|---|
| Author | Olshaker, Mark |
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 397 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | December 2002 |
After a stint in the army as a recreation specialist combined with college (after nearly flunking out his first time through) and grad school in psychology, Douglas joined the FBI. He was a gung ho "blue flamer" working on a bank robber detail where he developed a technique to profile what banks were hit. Then he strengthened some banks and weakened others to serve as bait, catching many more robbers than before.
Then he joined the fledgling "Behavioral Sciences" ("BS") unit in Quantico VA and began a big project to extensively interview serial killers in prison to learn who they are and why they did it. He tried hard to get inside the minds of killer and victim and to understand and "profile" the killer by examining the details of the crime. He became the greatest expert at this. His profiles were instrumental in finding many killers and in getting them to confess, or convincing juries of their guilt. He helped write the standard textbook on these crimes.
D learned that once they have killed, these people have crossed a line, deeply gratifying their fantasies - which compels them to kill again. They return to the crime scene or the grave of the victim and keep photos, clothing, or other mementos to relive the crime in their minds. They inject themselves into the investigation and are often police buffs. They generally kill only within their own race. They can be analyzed into organized or disorganized personalities, weak or strong (the weak are blitz killers and/or kill only very weak, helpless women.) They often have speech impediments or features that they believe repel women. He learned to predict what kind of person to look for, what age, even what kind of car they drive, and how to best them in an interrogation.
A revolting subject but a fascinating book.