Books read January through December 2003
| Author | Gorman Ed |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 210 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2003 |
In 1958, 26 year old Sam McCain works as a part-time lawyer, part-time private investigator for the local judge, in a small Iowa town where he grew up and knows everybody. At the behest of the judge he goes out to see former jock and current judge's nephew Kenny Whitney and finds Kenny's wife dead and Kenny about to shoot himself. The local slime bag police chief calls it a murder suicide and resents McCain's suggestion that there is more to it.
In the end it turns out that the girl was murdered by an illegal abortionist who was blackmailing her over aborting a fetus fathered by a black man - a high school football star and friend of Kenny's. Along the way McCain deals with his own sister's pregnancy and attempts to abort, with the police chief's brutality and ignorance, with the black guy's resentment, guilt and self-destructive behavior, and with Judge Whitney's lording it over him. He also copes with his unrequited love of the beautiful and decent Mary who will marry a clod because McCain spurned her.
All of this begins the day after the Buddy Holly plane crash, the day the music died.
Gorman's writing is very fluent and professional and the setting and evocation of Iowa in 1958 is quite charming. There are minor factual flaws - 26 year olds with 8 year old children or six year marriages entered into after college graduation. Perhaps he worked too quickly. All in all it's pleasant fluff, light reading that does what it tries to do.
| Author | Follett, Ken |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Corp., 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | January 2003 |
After exposing a terrorist plot in Paris and causing a Russian spy to be arrested, CIA agent Ellis is abandoned by Jane, the love of his life, who resents that he lied to her and her friends and was not the radical student he pretended to be. She is driven into the arms of Jean Pierre, a young radical doctor who is secretly reporting to the KGB just as Ellis did to the CIA. She marries him and the two go to Afghanistan to treat sick and injured people in the countryside in the midst of the anti-Russian war. But in fact JP is spying on the rebels and reporting their convoy routes to KGB Colonel Anatoly.
Ellis arrives on a mission to forge a bond, cemented by American aid, among three rebel factions. To succeed he must then escape over the mountains via a hard trail with Jane and her daughter (Jane has now learned of JP's betrayal), fleeing Russian search parties and helicopters. In the end, of course, they succeed in escaping.
The novel contains all of the staples of this genre - secret meetings, gun battles, fist fights, romantic guerrillas, ordeals, harrowing treks, and story book sex of the kind that makes men like me wonder if such marathons actually happen. The romance is of the traditional storybook kind. Man loves woman. Woman hates man and tries to hurt him but eventually, after he sacrifices all for her, comes to realize that it is he that she truly loved all along.
It's all done according to ancient literary formulas that, by their very use, limit the height to which such a venture can rise. Still, Follett is a skilled practitioner and he handles the material as competently as most and with some effort to acquire local knowledge and convey some of it to the reader.
This was all done, of course, before Al Qaida and the Taliban altered our view of the Afghan wars.
One of my recollections of this book is that Jean Pierre was portrayed somewhat sympathetically as a man of principle and a doctor who helped people but also unsympathetically as a KGB agent and a competitor to Ellis. If I am remembering that correctly, it was a difficult problem for Follett to solve. But then he also had to solve the problem of the good guy who was a CIA agent lying to the love of his life.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chivers Audio Books, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Cadfael |
| When Read | January 2003 |
Brother Cadfael accompanies Brother Mark on a mission to Wales to pay the respects of the new Norman bishop to the bishops in Wales, and also accompanies young Helleth to meet the new husband her father has arranged for her. While in Wales, Prince Cadwallader, dispossessed brother of the Welsh lord, arrives with a Danish army and fleet from Dublin, determined to win back the lands he lost after betraying his brother in the past.
The Danes kidnap Cadfael and the girl and hold them as hostages while Cadwallader negotiates, alternately betraying everyone on all sides. His supporters attempt to stir up a fight against the Danes to force the Welsh to stand together to reinstate Cadwallader but the plot fails and, ultimately, the Danes are paid off out of C's fortune and leave with minimal bloodshed. Helleth, kidnapped back by her would be husband, has fallen in love with a Dane and escapes with him across the sea.
Like many of Peters' stories, this one is complicated with several mysteries to resolve. Cadfael plays a very passive role here - observer rather than actor. As always, we find a fairly humane and civilized outlook on the middle ages and one in which the authority figures in church and state turn out to be kind and decent men, with all ending as it should.
Would that the Middle Ages were actually like that.
I recently finished Millenium: From Religion to Revolution: How Civilization Has Changed Over a Thousand Years by Ian Mortimer. The author argues that the Catholic church was probably the single most important institution promoting peace in the 11th and 12th centuries. Not a believer himself, and considering religion to be a potential danger today, Mortimer nevertheless has a view of its peace making role in medieval times that, to my mind, seems to be in accord with the views of Ellis Peters.
Peters, by the way, is the nom de plume of Edith Mary Pargeter, used for the Cadfael series and quite a few others of the books published later in her career. She was a prolific author.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Jove Books, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 243 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2003 |
Glassblower Gerard Logan operates a small but very successful shop in a small town in England catering to tourists and anyone else who will buy. One day he goes to a steeplechase to watch his friend Martin Stukely ride. There is an accident. Martin is killed. Then his valet hands Logan a videotape that Martin had said to give him. But the tape is stolen before Logan ever gets to watch it and soon Logan is embroiled with a gang of thugs led by a woman. He gets beaten up a couple of times in efforts to make him tell where the real tape is.
Eventually Logan figures out what is going on. A Doctor Force, one-time cancer researcher, conman, asthmatic, ladies man, and would be killer, has stolen the lab results on important cancer research and erased all other copies. To hide the tape from police searches, he gave it to Martin, who gave it to Logan, but first confused it with something else - and so on.
Logan tricks the bad guys, wins the heart of the young police woman, discovers a bad guy in his own staff, and faces them all in a climactic scene by the furnace in his shop, during which a policeman is killed by the female thug by hitting him with a pipe tipped with molten glass.
This book is very like all of F's others. There is the same character type, same plot line, same focus on an interesting, out of the way profession. I presume this one was written after Mrs. F's death. If so, it demonstrates that, contrary to some opinions, Dick Francis could write books without her.
Not his best work, not his worst. It delivers what we like and expect from Dick Francis.
| Author | Jin, Ha, 1956- |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 308 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 2003 |
Doctor Lin Kong was forced by his parents to marry a woman he did not know and did not love because they needed a faithful and hard-working daughter-in-law to care for them in their old age. Lin marries her and father's a daughter by her, but then goes to work at an army hospital where, for seventeen years, he lives in a room with two other doctors, seeing his wife only ten days a year and never sleeping with her again.
In the early years of his work he falls in love with nurse Mana Wu. But the rigid Victorian rules of conduct prescribed by the Army, the Party, and the hospital, make it impossible for them to live or even be much alone together. So every year Lin attempts to get his wife's consent to a divorce. But she is a smiple woman who cannot conceive of it and so Lin and Mana go on waiting, for the divorce, or for the 17 years to pass after which he can divorce her without her consent. All of them wait and watch as their lives slip away. Mana is raped by a brutal army officer who later becomes a famous capitalist. Lin's daughter grows up. Seventeen years pass.
Lin gets the divorce and marries Mana but their life together is not very happy. The old wife and daughter come to the city. Mana, already somewhat bipolar (my diagnosis, not Ha Jin's), also develops heart disease. The novel ends with Lin in confusion, possibly even waiting to return to his first wife.
This is a depressing story but one told with great insight into personality, family, and society. The repressive social effects of Chinese Puritanism and the contradictions of both communism and capitalism are well revealed. It is a book that I very much liked and yet had to force myself to read.
There are a lot of books like that. Perhaps I should have said that it was a book I very much admired rather than "liked". It is easier to "read" such books as audiobooks than on paper. I'm trapped in the car for an hour and fifteen minutes on each leg of my commute. The narrator proceeds through the story whether I can stand it or not - and so I get to the end. It's not the same as with written books where I always have several before me and can easily switch between them. I could do that with audiobooks too, but I don't.
Looking it up on Amazon I was very surprised to see that there were 391 posted reviews. That's a big number for primarily U.S. readers of a book about China by a Chinese-American author, and especially so for a book like this one that is pretty depressing. Jin was born in China and spent six years (age 13-19) in the People's Liberation Army. Then he studied English and Anglo-American literature and has been in the U.S. since 1989. He's now a professor at Boston University.
Also a little surprisingly to me, I remember the book fairly well. I remember thinking at the time that a single wrong decision, even one made for very good reasons, can result in a depressing and bitter life. I remember thinking that the strictures of Chinese government and society made it all the more difficult to recover. Is it better now in China? My guess is that the answer is, in some ways yes and in other ways no. People may have more personal freedom now, as they did near the end of the story, but it can't always save them.
See also A Free Life.
| Author | Martin, Steve |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Shuster Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 130 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 2003 |
A young single girl in her mid 20's works in the glove department of a department store and lives in a small apartment where she does good artwork but mostly just battles depression and loneliness and talks to her neurotic cats.
She meets a young man in an electronics or video store and sleeps with him, but the guy is an emotional zero. Then she is taken up by an older millionaire, a divorced man who likes her but cannot bring himself to any kind of commitment. He is a decent, honest man who helps her a great deal financially but imagines, probably wrongly, that it is a mistake to fall in love with a young shop girl.
Time passes. The young man, on a spur of the moment idea, persuades his boss to send him on the road with a rock band to maintain their equipment and sell to others. He is a success and also goes through a period of rapid personal growth. He comes back to L.A, meets the shop girl again, and offers her something the millionaire cannot - namely himself. She accepts and they begin a life together.
This is quite a good book, very rich in cultural insight and with good personal insights too. Martin writes as he acts, without inhibition. His characters are psychologically damaged people but they are treated with care and sympathy.
I liked it.
One of main things I liked in this book was Martin's clear respect for people, and another was his unconventionality. It would be easy and tempting for a writer to have the millionaire and the shopgirl marry and live happily ever after, all desires and feelings fulfilled and living a life of luxury. Not only did Martin not take that path, but he developed the character of the video store clerk from a ridiculous nebbish to a person of worth who wins the girl with the one thing, commitment, that the millionaire could not bring himself to offer. Finally, if I remember correctly, he does all this without really denigrating the millionaire or the shopgirl.
I have found in Steve Martin's books (see also The Pleasure of My Company) a depth and seriousness that one might not have expected from the "wild and crazy guy" of his Saturday Night Live performances.
| Author | Oldenbourg, Zoe |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 650 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | March 2003 |
Oldenbourg's account of the crusades covers the period from the first crusaders setting out in 1096 to the period shortly after the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. She says very little about events or conditions in Europe that brought about the Crusades but does give many interesting discussions of the relative natures and roles of religion, politics, greed, and personality in the characters of the chief Christian and Muslim leaders. The mix was quite different in different cases, and although greed and personal ambition were always of critical importance, higher motivations did play significant roles on each side.
O believes that a new nation and a new culture were taking root in Christian Palestine after almost 90 years of Christian rule, but it was wiped out utterly by the Muslim victory.
Most of the leaders on both sides were greedy, ambitious men who sold out the interests of their co-religionists without hesitation. Some were just out and out pirates. The women, during the few occasions when they had power, were just as bad.
Some interesting facts: Christian knights were very tough, winning time and again against superior odds in almost permanent warfare. Richard Coeur de Lion was a tough fighter but a bad and even stupid leader and statesman. Saladin was a Kurdish general working for a Turkish lord before becoming independent. He was probably the most honest and chivalrous of all the leaders though he executed every Templar that he caught. The Knights Templars and Hospitalers, named so for the neighborhoods of their headquarters in Jerusalem, were fearsome warriors dedicated to fighting to the death. Arab culture and Byzantine too were far advanced in comparison to Frankish/European. But the Franks were better masters to their peasants than were the Arab lords.
See diary (March 21, 2003.)
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Dove Audio, 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | March 2003 |
This is a collection of short stories, all about the same man and his friends and his life, all in a sequence. Or maybe we should call it a novel in chapters that happen to be highly self-contained with beginnings and endings that can successfully stand alone.
The central character is Socrates Fortlow, a black man in his late fifties recently released from an Indiana prison after serving 27 years for murdering his girl friend and a boy she was with. Socrates is a man who needs no enemies. His deepest enemy is himself - his anger, his constant desire to hurt someone, and his terrible guilt and self-loathing for what he has done. Penned up like an animal for all those years, Socrates hardly knows how to behave, but he has a keen sense of right and wrong and a deep desire to be, and be treated as, a human being.
In the stories Socrates helps a 12 year old boy who is in trouble in many ways. He fights for, and ultimately wins a job as a delivery man for a supermarket. He sneers at a thief. He chastises a womanizer with a lovely wife who doesn't deserve to be cheated on. He buys illegal drugs to help an old man friend into a gentle decline and death from cancer.
The stories are very powerful, very moving. This flawed, difficult, unlikeable man wins our sympathy and concern. No mystery is required. It is, in a sense, a purer story than the Easy Rawlins stories. It is perhaps his best effort. I liked it very much.
| Author | Stevenson, Robert Louis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1888 |
| Number of Pages | 132 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | England |
| When Read | March 2003 |
Sixteen year old master Richard Shelton at first suspects, and then learns with increasing certainty, that his guardian, Sir Daniel Bracken, has murdered his father and appropriated his fortune. Sir Daniel has also screwed everyone else in the neighborhood and switches sides as the wind blows in the wars between Lancaster and York. A small band of local men have decided to kill him and his chief henchmen with black arrows. Young Dick at first sides with his guardian against them, even killing one. But he changes sides as he learns the truth.
There are all sorts of schemes, battles, narrow escapes, and a childish love affair leading to Dick's marriage to beautiful young Joanna.
The story is extravagant and juvenile. Dick is a bit dumb as well as naive. He wreaks havoc with the lives of innocent people, only gradually becoming aware of the consequences of his actions - but he does become aware.
The most remarkable thing about the novel is the language. I don't know how close it is to authentic 15th century English, but it's a tour de force of archaisms rendered in modern spelling and in a form that is perfectly intelligible to the modern reader.
This book was a favorite of mine when I was about 9 or 10 years old. I read it then as a historical romance and loved the juvenile plot. Reading it now, at age 56, could not rekindle any of those feelings. I've long outgrown them. But it held a few new charms for me, not accessible to the ten year old.
It is an odd book, not very good, yet rendered with surprising linguistic skill.
I don't know if I'd like it more now or not, but my tolerance of others seems to have increased with age.
| Author | Catton, Bruce |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 438 |
| Extras | bibliography, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | March 2003 |
The concluding volume of the trilogy begins on the eve of Grant's assumption of command and carries the story through to the day when Lee's exhausted and starving remnants attempt to breakout to the southwest, only to find that Sheridan has outraced them and all can see that the long struggle is over.
It is generally said that Grant won by fighting a war of attrition, but Catton sees it differently. He always attempted to maneuver, sliding left and south to force Lee to move south or have his flank turned. The brutal trench war that resulted around Petersburg happened partly because Lee countered effectively, and very largely because so many of the generals under Grant were lethargic, stupid, or incompetent. Grant's own men, Sherman and Sheridan, were tough, hard hitting, fast moving, tenacious fighters who always gave as good as they got, and a lot more.
Grant was the general who gave the order to Sheridan - "get South of the enemy and fight them to the death." The Army of the Potomac had never had orders like that before and had never had commanders willing to give them or carry them out. The Confederacy did not just collapse from too many disadvantages. It was finally and decisively beaten by Grant, Sherman and Sheridan.
In his encyclopedic scholarship, his keen intelligence, and his deep human sympathy and understanding, Catton stands at the peak of historians. This has been as good or better than any historical account I've ever read.
Last night I finished Willie Thompson's What Happened To History, a book of historiography, much concerned with the central issue of objectivity and truth in historical accounts.
Many historiographers, starting perhaps in the 1930s and continuing especially in the 1960s and beyond, have doubted the ability of historians to tell an objective, accurate, history that will survive the test of time and the changes that occur in our values and culture. Thompson is on the other side from them, arguing that we can never know the whole truth, we can never have 100% accuracy, we can never completely overcome the prejudices of our particular country, culture and situation, but we can nevertheless establish essentially true accounts of history, supported by not just convincing, but sufficient evidence. I believe that Bruce Catton was an outstanding exemplar of that ability.
Catton was a great historian. He knew his subject intimately and knew the source documents comprehensively. He had even met many old veterans in his youth. Reading his books one cannot help but think, Yes, this must be how it was.
| Author | Maughm, Somerset |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1919 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2003 |
A young writer is drawn into the affairs of Charles Strickland, a 40 year old stockbroker, by his wife, a pleasant patroness of writers, when Strickland abandoned her and his two children and ran to Paris. It turned out that S had not run off with a woman, but rather to paint. He worked feverishly to develop his skill and bring out the images which obsessed him. Always on the verge of starvation, he is rude to everyone, cares nothing for his wife and children, and takes advantage of anyone who will help him for the sake of his painting. An uninspired Dutch painter of pretty but untalented pictures recognizes Strickland's huge talent and saves him from disease and starvation, and then S steals the Dutchman's wife. after he tires of her she kills herself. But S doesn't care.
Eventually S goes to Tahiti where he lives with a native girl and paints, creating great and unrecognized masterpieces there. after his death his fame spreads and the young English writer goes to Tahiti to find out the rest of the story, learning that S died a horrible death of leprosy and his young woman, following his orders, burned the magnificent paintings he had created.
The story is based partly on the life of Gauguin, though it is very much a novel, not a biography. M created a completely fictional character to fit his own interests.
M is telling us that great talent need not to be connected to great humanity, or even to great intelligence. Strickland is a horrible person. Yet his total lack of concern for any human being, even himself, is a part of what enables him to focus on and produce great art.
Maugham is a writer of interesting characters, interesting ideas, and imaginative expression. His men are far more interesting than his women, who come out poorly. But he writes with skill and power.
There are things wrong with this book but I liked it anyway and was much taken with its power.
| Author | Singer, Isaac Bashevis |
|---|---|
| Publication | JCC Audio Books |
| Copyright Date | 1960 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Jews |
| When Read | April 2003 |
Set in the last half of the 19th century, Singer created a story about Yascha Mazur, a magician / entertainer who travels around Poland in his cart with his animals, his accouterments, and his assistant Magda, a Polish girl who is his mistress and helper. He also has a wife in Lublin, a girlfriend who has been abandoned by her husband, a small time thief on the run, and is in love with Amelia, the Polish widow of a professor who lives in Warsaw with her 14 year old daughter, who is entranced by Yascha.
Making promise after promise to all four women, Yascha is in deeper and deeper trouble, unable to make up his mind, unable to follow through on his commitments. Finally, trying to get money to meet his commitment to run off to Italy with Amelia, he bungles a burglary, injures his foot, can no longer do his acrobatics, confesses to and is turned away by Amelia, and goes back to his Warsaw apartment to find the Magda has killed the animals and hung herself.
Feeling like a bungler, a murderer, a faithless sinner, Yascha returns to Lublin and has himself walled up in a stall where he studies Judaism and repents. To his surprise, people now see him as a kind of saint and come to him for advice. The book ends with a letter from Amelia, who also sees him as a reformed and good man.
Bursting with Singer's vitality and humanism, this book is very like his others - about a man torn between women, between faith and skepticism, between tradition and modernism, between his Jewish roots and assimilation. Striving always forward, he finds that he has left behind too much of value. There is an ending and even a decision, but there is no real solution. This is another brilliant IBS book.
This, and The Slave, also read in 2003, were the last books by Singer that I read. It has been nine years. I've probably gone through most of his books. He was one of my very favorite writers.
I recall seeing an interview with him on TV before he died in 1991. He was quite old at the time, in his 80's I think, but he was still a fascinating and impressive man. It is something of a pleasure just to read this book card about him.
Singer appealed to me in a special way, different from every other writer. Part of it was his sympathy for people. He cared very much about his characters and his characters cared very much about each other. Singer could make that very real. He made us care about them too. However, even though his characters truly did care about each other and truly wished each other well, they couldn't help hurting each other. They were driven to it by their passions, their weaknesses, and their neuroses. Yascha knows that his treatment of the women is wrong. He is upset about it. But when he is face to face with one of the women the lies just spring forward from his mouth as if he couldn't help himself. Singer makes us understand this and sympathize with Yascha in spite of it. He teaches us to be critical of our own behavior and to be willing to forgive others.
He also combined a philosophical outlook with a religious obsession that seemed to me to be uniquely his own. His characters are tormented on the one hand by a longing for God, and on the other by nagging doubts about whether God exists. For me, in my personal recollections of Singer's writings, this point is particularly clear in the stories The Spinoza of Market Street, where the protagonist appeals, not to God, but to "Oh mighty Spinoza", and A Friend of Kafka where Kohn after almost freezing to death, finds the key to his apartment building where he dropped it and says, "Now I know that God exists. If not, who is playing with Jacques Kohn?" A masterpiece of, I don't know exactly how to say it, but some kind of literary expression of the dilemma of the God conflicted man.
| Author | Rucker, Rudy |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 301 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | April 2003 |
Silicon Valley product manager Joe Cube tries to get his wife Jena into a romantic mood by showing her the new 3D TV his company is working on when he is approached by Momo, a fourth dimensional person who enhances his body with a third eye and other parts, only visible in the fourth dimension, and enlists him in a business venture to use 4D cell phone antennas to communicate between any two phones, anywhere in 3D space, with no service charge.
It turns out that Earth is in a 3D space wedged between two 4D spaces which might be at war if the buffer were destroyed. Momo and her evil family are using the antennas to take energy out of 3D space, violating the energy conservation law, and destroying the fabric of Spaceland, the 3D earth. Joe has to stop them, win back Jena from engineer Spazz Crotty, who is helping in the cell phone venture, work with the Wackles, 4D "plantimals" from the other side of Spaceland, and save the world.
The story is hilarious. Rucker, a mathematician, computer scientist, and professor, has all sorts of fascinating angles on spatial dimensions. He also has a wonderful ability to create comic characters and to invest them with emotions and reactions that win our sympathy. Joe, Jena, Spazz, Spazz's wife Tulip, and the dot commers and venture capitalists are delightful caricatures. His appreciation of the Silicon Valley culture and the larger American culture are also wonderfully comic.
It was a very enjoyable book. It won't have the impact of the classic Flatland that inspired it, but it's a neat book.
Flatland had the advantage for readers of talking about a subset of their experience instead of a superset, as this novel does. It's harder work to understand it.
| Author | Dickens, Charles |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chivers Audio Books |
| Copyright Date | 1859 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | France; French Revolution |
| When Read | April 2003 |
In this famous novel D tells of the scion of a noble French family who renounces his evil family heritage and lives quietly in England teaching French, and married to the daughter of a French doctor who had been wrongfully imprisoned in the Bastille and is left with a very fragile sanity that cannot always handle stress.
The young man returns to France during the period of the Terror, just after the revolution, to testify on behalf of an old, innocent acquaintance who has appealed to him. But he is himself arrested and, after a trial, release, and re-arrest, sentenced to death. He is saved by the ne'er do well lawyer, Sidney Carton, who is a look alike for him and gets himself executed in his place.
The novel is impressive on many levels. The chapters on pre-revolutionary France, the running down of a child, the rape and murder of a young woman, the injustices done to the doctor, reveal the evil of the ancien regime in the most vivid images and explain the dedication and deep hatred inspired in the revolutionaries. When D then shows the evils and excesses of the revolution, we see them as a consequence of an evil society rather than as the products of an uncouth mob. The mechanisms of the novel, from the opening introduction via a gentle old English businessman to the pretty girl, the ruined old doctor, the lawyer who does much of the work for a pompous and successful man, the pleasant life in London, the servant in the body snatching business, and the stunted Mme. Lafarge, consumed by hatred - all are marvelously well done.
Good politics, good writing, good plot, good character - this is a very good book of its time or ours.
Revolutions are traumatic events. The American revolution was terrible, but mild by comparison with the great class and social revolutions in France in 1789 and 1870, in Russia and in China. There seems to be no straightforward path for ending the violence once it has begun. The radicalism needed to mobilize the people and fight the old regime to the death is not quick to compromise and pacify after it comes to power. Those on the right and many in the center reject every revolution as always worse than what it replaces. But Dickens was smarter than that. He could see some of the complexity of the whole process.
| Author | Reti, Richard |
|---|---|
| Translators | Hart, John |
| Publication | New York: Dover, 1960 |
| Copyright Date | 1923 |
| Number of Pages | 181 |
| Extras | chess games |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Chess |
| When Read | April 2003 |
The original German edition was published in 1923. The English translation was published in 1943, and reprinted by Dover in 1960.
A brilliant leader of the "hypermodern school" in chess, Reti was a great player, a deep thinker about the aesthetics and the principles of the game, a great blindfold player, and a mathematician. His analysis focuses on the great players from Morphy on, showing what inspiration each brought to the game by analyzing two or three games of each. The players include Morphy, Steinitz, Tarrasch, Lasker, some Americans (Blackbourne, Pilsbury, Schlechter), Rubinstein, Capablanca, Alekhine, Breyer, Bogoljubow, and some young masters of his time, including Euwe.
R was a real gentleman. The one game of his own that he includes is a loss. His treatment of the many masters he played against is appreciative and generous. He shows us how these are men of ideas, men who create beautiful games over the board.
I don't know if I learned anything to improve my play. My method of study and of play probably precludes any serious improvement. But I enjoyed the book. I enjoyed thinking about chess in Reti's grand and illuminating way, even if the light goes out when I close the book.
I wonder why I put the three American players in parentheses, and why didn't I include Morphy among them? It's been too long to remember why. It may have just been that I sometimes start a sentence before I know how I will finish it, and that's what emerged on the book card.
I've always wondered if I have the ability to be a good chess player. I can understand the principles of the game well enough, but my "sight of the board" is probably lacking, my ability to calculate ahead is limited, and I sometimes make serious mistakes.
Was I better when I was younger? I presume that I was. The great chess players of history appear to have been at their best from their late teens to, perhaps, their mid-forties. After that, their keenness appears to drop just those few percentage points that are enough to exclude them from top flight competition. Why would I be different? The only difference perhaps is that I may have fallen enough short of my potential that I still have a bit of headroom for improvement up to my new, lower, natural limit.
In any case, after the first couple of books I read that taught me the true principles of chess, especially Logical Chess, Move by Move by Irving Chernev, I don't seem to have gotten a lot of benefit from further reading. I suppose it's another of those regrets that each of us experiences as we get older.
I seem to recall a story about Reti that, in the middle of a tournament, he got an idea about a chess move and stopped playing in order to think about it, not minding that it cost him the game. I'm not sure I'm remembering that correctly, but it was something like that. It's the kind of behavior that we might admire and rail against at the same time. I think, for myself, the admiration outweighs the railing, but it's easy for me to say something like that when commenting on a book and not so easy to approve it in real life.
| Author | Kaminsky, Stuart M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ibooks, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 215 |
| Extras | Afterword by Stuart Kaminsky |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 2003 |
Private detective Toby Peters is hired by Bela Lugosi to track down the author of threatening letters, and by the movie studio to clear William Faulkner from a charge of murder. It is in L.A., in 1942, at the very beginning of the war years. Peters, scraping the bottom of the financial barrel, abused by his police detective older brother but supported by his friends, a midget, an ex-boxer, and a seedy dentist, figures it all out, avoids the schizophrenic vamp, catches the bad people, and winds up at the end back where he started, ready for the next novel.
In his afterword K writes about how he is not writing about the real Hollywood, the real 1940's, or the real private detective business. He is simply having fun, writing about these things as we like to look back on them with nostalgia and romance.
There's nothing serious in this story but, if read in the spirit in which it was written, it's fun to read. apparently the author of the much darker Inspector Rostnikov series needs to release his imagination and unwind with Toby Peters.
More power to him.
| Author | Grisham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Legal |
| When Read | May 2003 |
32 year old anti-trust lawyer Michael Brock, a rising young star at the huge national firm of Drake and Sweeney, is held hostage with eight other lawyers in their conference room by a homeless black man with a gun who is mad about something but is killed by the police before anyone can find out what. The event shakes Brock up and starts him examining his life.
His marriage to a medical resident is failing. They each live only for work. His whole life has been transformed into endless work and ambition. He visits a law clinic where they knew and represented the dead homeless man to get answers and is drawn into the world of the homeless and into street law. Then he discovers that his firm had gotten this homeless man and 16 other people illegally evicted from a building where they lived and paid rent. He finds proof in a file he steals from another lawyer's office. The theft is discovered. He is caught, arrested, and persecuted by the firm, but launches a lawsuit against them on behalf of people they evicted who died in the snow.
As always, G gives us lots of inside dope on lawyers, law firms, courts, and the business side of the law. In this one he also treats of the plight of the homeless and all the laws that are used to harass them because they are poor and on the street.
G's heroes are always a little too fast and loose for me, too ready to cut a corner and tell a lie. But he is a fine story teller and writes about interesting topics. I like these books.
Cutthroat legal practice is common. When two big law firms do it to each other on behalf of two big corporate clients, it's something of a game that the cleverest win. But when it's done to ordinary human beings, like the homeless people in this story, it's an entirely different thing. Then it's part of the exercise of power by those who have it in order to take from the weak what little they have. It's a human story understood world-wide and for all time, but it's a story that the powerful often successfully conceal from us here in America, and elsewhere too. I like that Grisham cares about this problem.
| Author | Cooper, J. California |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday, 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 231 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | May 2003 |
Clora, daughter of a raped southern slave, is herself raped many times and finally commits suicide, becoming a ghost who watches the progress of her four children - Always, Sun, Peach, and little Plum, who is killed beneath a wagon when Always is sold off to yet another rapist "Master of the Land".
Always makes the best of her life as a slave. She attends the mistress, grows her own vegetables, secretly learns to read, and then when she gives birth on the same day as the mistress, she mixes the two children, who both have the same father anyway - giving yet another run to the prince and pauper story told often before. The results are that the little false master grows up to be a rapacious man while the little false white slave grows up to be a nice fellow.
Given its importance in the history of our country, slavery gets only the slightest notice in literature. It is therefore important for books like this to be written. The writing is pretty good. The plot devices, though highly contrived, are not really objectionable. The insights into what it means to be a female slave are striking and memorable. In spite of the small size and narrow scope of the book, its picture of slavery reveals hardship and degradation at depths far beyond where our free, white selves have been likely to look.
For that, I dismiss the hokey plot as insignificant. The book is a good one.
| Author | Maas, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Naval; Submarines |
| When Read | May 2003 |
The story of the sinking of the Squalus in 1939 and "the man behind the greatest submarine rescue in history." Charles "Swede" Momsen was a navy officer working in submarines and then in developing rescue apparatus in a long series of experiments, dangerous dives, and theoretical research, often conducted in the teeth of opposition by a lazy and stupid Navy bureaucracy that sometimes acted for no better reason than jealousy and spite.
When the Squalus went down off the Atlantic coast part of her crew were killed but 33 remained alive - exhausted by bad air, battery fumes, near freezing temperatures, wetness, and bad food. When the Navy finally found them Momsen was called in to direct the rescue. In two days of grueling work and dives by a series of heroic enlisted men divers, they finally setup Momsen's experimental diving bell and, in four harrowing trips, got all the men out. Then they salvaged the sub in an even trickier operation.
Momsen went on to a fine career diving and, after the war, making many contributions until his retirement and death in the 1960's.
Maas met Momsen, admired him greatly, and always wanted to write this book as a tribute to him.
The story was hard to put down. It was about brave men dealing with pressure, fear, the bends, narcosis, cumbersome suits, poor visibility, demanding tasks. My hat is off to them.
After I listened to this book I recommended it to Marcia. She liked it too.
This is one of those books that stays in my memory. I think it was the great tension of the rescue attempts and the enormous pressure on the divers who made the attempts that made the memorable impressions.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Comedy |
| When Read | May 2003 |
A Detroit cop works on the bomb squad, quits for his girlfriend who leaves him anyway, and then goes to sex crimes where, in investigating a rape, he is drawn into the world of a rich, dumb, alcoholic, nincompoop millionaire named Woody, Greta Wine, the girl he raped, Darnell, his ex-Black Panther driver, servant and exploiter, and Robin and Skip, two 60's radicals who have a plot to extort money from Woody by threatening to blow him up.
As usual in a Leonard novel, each character plays his role perfectly, with some adaptability, and always with his own unique point of view. While the cop and Greta are protagonists in the story, and Robin and Skip are the antagonists, it's Darnell and Woody who provide the plot twists and comic drive that moves everything along.
The villains are inimitable Leonard villains. Robin, after her jail time for blowing up an ROTC facility, has made a living writing Gothic romances while Skip works as a special effects explosives expert for the movies. Robin is a scheming, calculating seducer. Skip on the other hand will pull a gun on a drugstore clerk and rob the place because he's irritated. The interaction between the two is wonderful.
Leonard's world is a special place that seems very real, though only he is able to write about it. It's a place in which events careen from one surprise to another, but always with an undeniable logic. I almost think it would be a shame if he spent any of his precious time writing about anything else.
| Author | Momaday, N. Scott |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2003 |
This is a most unusual story, not really in novel form, about a young Indian who returns from World War II to his grandfather's house in the American Southwest. He lives by odd jobs, becomes the lover of a white woman from Los Angeles who came for the medicinal baths, and then murders an albino man who had humiliated him. all his actions, including the murder, seem to occur in a state of semi-consciousness. He is a man who reacts to stimuli but doesn't seem to think about them and rarely talks.
The story resumes some years later after Abel (the Indian) is paroled from jail. He moves to L.A. in 1951 and gets a factory job, living with another Indian. He drinks too much, is sullen, and disregards his roommate and a social worker who try to be his friends. Eventually he offends some criminal thug who beats him half to death and leaves him crippled. He returns to the reservation.
There are many long passages, some spoken by a kind of Indian preacher in LA, some from old Francisco, Abel's grandfather, some from the diary of a long dead priest, and some whose narrator I could not identify. They related Indian history, myth, ritual, and world view. They were intelligent, lyrical passages giving a last voice to a wounded and dying culture. It is a culture which, like Abel, its representative, has become a crippled remnant after a collision with forces it could not understand.
This was a difficult book - shifting narrative point of view and escaping periodically into history and myth. But it is intelligent, interesting, and revealing, a voice that is otherwise not available to us.
This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 and its author, registered at birth as having 7/8ths Amerindian blood, won the National Medal of Arts in 2007. He earned a PhD in English lit from Stanford in 1963 and has taught at a number of very prestigious universities, including teaching American literature at the University of Moscow! Nothing in my notes from 2003 indicate that I knew or cared about any of that when I read the book though I imagine that the Pulitzer must have been recorded on the book jacket. It may even have been a Pulitzer mention on the cover that attracted my attention and induced me to read the book.
Being a professor and growing up in what he described as a "creative household" (in a PBS interview in 2001), with both his parents teaching in an Indian school, he must have put a great deal of thought into the nature of life for American Indians, and in how to present that to the reading public. I seem to recall that I had doubts about that when I read the book. Is a psychologically damaged war veteran who murders a man and slips into "a state of semi-consciousness", as I described him, a good representative of his people? But that's probably the wrong way to think about it. He may be presented, not as a good representative of his people, but a good representative of what has been done to his people. I'll stand by my characterization of it as "intelligent, interesting, and revealing."
| Author | Card, Orson Scott |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Tor Books, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 382 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 2003 |
3,000 years after the bugger war (Ender's Game) another intelligent species is discovered, the "piggies" on the planet Lusitania. A colony of Portuguese speaking Catholics is established there. They live in an electronically walled village and have no contact except through a xenobiologist who is instructed to learn without conveying any info to the piggies, partly so as not to alter their natural evolution, but really to prevent them from becoming a threat to humans. When they kill the man, a young woman who worked with him and loved his son calls for a "speaker for the dead". Ender himself, still alive and only 35 years old because of his many years spent traveling at near light speeds, arrives 22 years later.
Ender, with the aid of an AI companion, unravels the mysteries of piggie life and culture, violates all the laws by contacting them directly and giving them technology, and releases the live Queen - a bugger life form he rescued from the aftermath of the bugger war.
Card's treatment of a human future has nothing to do with the real future and postulates zero change in humanity and human culture. In this he shares the limited perspective of 90% of SF writers and readers. Perhaps we should call this "other world" fiction, not science fiction. Still, he is a very intelligent man with interesting ideas and an ability to express himself naturally and articulately in writing. He is a sympathetic person. There are no demons or villains here, just people, piggies, bugger, and AI, all trying to do the right thing.
The original of this series, Ender's Game, captured my imagination with its very cool three dimensional space game and the six year old Ender who eventually became the world's master at it. I found other books of the series at the library, but five years passed before I found this one, the second of the series. This one did not capture my imagination as the first one did and I have read no more since then.
| Author | Littell, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New Millennium Audio, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 894 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | July 2003 |
L creates a number of characters who join the CIA, the KGB, or both (!) after World War II and follows them through the Kim Philby affair, the Hungarian uprising, the Bay of Pigs, and the attempted coup against Gorbachev. These are flawed heroes: an alcoholic head of the Berlin station who pursues his mission without regard for office politics; an Israeli spy chief, the rabbi, who knows everything; and others. One of the four chief characters is actually a communist spy and another is a double agent - a committed communist who believes he is fighting for the greatness and generosity of the human spirit, only to discover the lies, antisemitism, greed, and brutality of the KGB leadership.
In L's view of events, the spies had a huge impact on the course and outcome of the cold war. Some of the claims have some plausibility. Others don't. L has a great plot at the end to sell dollars using stashed away billions in Russian oil export money to destabilize the American and other economies. The concept seems ludicrous to me and it casts doubt on other stories in the spy drama. torn between disbelief and fear that I am merely too naive, I conclude that both outcomes are correct. I am naive. But I still don't believe a lot of this.
I had once thought of Littell as an American Le Carre. But this book, although readable and containing many interesting observations, places Littell further rather than closer to JLC.
When I said above that "I still don't believe a lot of this", I think I meant, not that I expected that Littell's stories should be true, only that they should be credible, i.e., it would not be impossible for them to be true, the events describe could conceivably have come about. I didn't think that was the case for the dollar flood, and perhaps not for other stories in the book.
I have two more books by Littell since this one and liked them both.
Betrayed again! I thought that, at 12 cassette tapes, I must have been listening to an unabridged book. However I looked up the book's length and found the paperback copy was 894 pages - more than 12 cassettes worth. Tracking it down at audible.com I found two versions of the audiobook, one 41 hours and 22 minutes, and the other 16 hours and 56 minutes. The unabridged version would have required 3.45 hours per cassette to fit on 12 cassettes, so I, all unknowingly because the publishers purposely omit this information on their tape and CD jackets, read the severely abridged version. No wonder so much of the book seemed wrong to me. I have complained about this to the public libraries, or at least to the Baltimore County Public Library which was the worst offender of the libraries I used. They gave me the courtesy of a reply and I think they've moved in the right direction, but they have further to go.
Bah!
| Author | Leckie, Ross |
|---|---|
| Publication | Clipper audio, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 245 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | July 2003 |
In this first person narrative, Hannibal recounts his own story from childhood in Carthage through his early wars in Spain, his 20 year campaign in Italy, his campaigns in Africa, and his final years in the service of eastern kings who were still, just, outside the domination of Rome. H's implacable hatred of Rome is attributed to education by his father and to desire for revenge for their rape and murder of his much loved young wife.
The problem of motivation is poorly solved in this account. By any standards, Hannibal is presented as an extremely brutal and unsympathetic man. His moral outrage against Rome is incongruous and unconvincing. His dedication to Carthage, although not emphasized, is not explained. His treatment of cities and tribes that either support or oppose him is not entirely consistent - though his use of brutality is.
Hannibal's military prowess is more convincingly explained. It appears to be due to maximum preparation and training of the soldiers combined with a great willingness to experiment, a keen situational awareness on the field, and personal courage and energy that serve as examples to the men. Patton and Alexander would have understood and approved.
Books on subjects like these are necessarily speculative. Only a rare and brilliant writer like Graves or Mann can be thoroughly convincing. Leckie does not measure up to the best but he's not the worst. Apart from the history, the unrelenting violence in the plot is oppressive, but probably realistic.
I have read other books that talk about Hannibal before and after this one. Thanks to my notes I know that I read Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World in 2006 and an Osprey book on Cannae in 2008. Possibly in Leckie's, or possibly in the Osprey book, I learned, to my surprise, that the mercenaries in Hannibal's army were better trained, better disciplined, and more battle worthy than the citizen soldiers of Rome during this campaign. Part of the reason is that Hannibal's men were professionals while the Romans were mostly not the professional legions of the Empire, but men brought together to fight this particular campaign, with limited training and probably less than perfect equipment. But ultimately, the depth of resources of the Roman state was too much for Hannibal to overcome, despite his military genius.
| Author | Orbach, Larry |
|---|---|
| Author | Smith, Vivian Orbach |
| Publication | Washington, DC: Compass Press, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 344 |
| Extras | illustrations, map |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | July 2003 |
Larry (Lothar) Orbach was a teenage Jewish boy living with his parents in Berlin when the Nazis began their oppressions. People around them gradually disappeared. When his father was taken, he and his mother executed a daring escape and lived on in Berlin with false identities at the houses of friends. Leaving his mother in good company, O left to live on his own with one or another friend, renegade, conman, or decent person, making money any way he could - gambling at billiards or cards (with a marked deck), carrying coal, living with a lonely woman whose abusive husband was at the front, burglarizing stores, and once conning, terrorizing and ripping off a lonely homosexual, the one thing he did that he most regretted. On August 25, 1944 he was betrayed by a thug whom he had beaten up after the man had mugged him, and by a Jewish renegade. He spent the rest of the war years at Auschwitz and was on the horrifying final march to Buchenwald that I think Elie Wiesel was also on. More dead than alive, he was liberated in April. Going back to Berlin he found his mother, still hiding with friends, and took her to New York where his two brothers lived.
This is an important book, a witness to decency, honesty, courage, and generosity in the midst of cruelty, stupidity, prejudice, and tyranny. I am very glad that O, in his old age, wrote it.
Every book like this, every scrap of evidence, every human witness, needs to be carefully preserved. I have come across, and exchanged views with, a number of Holocaust deniers and defenders of Nazis in, of all places, the Amazon book review pages. All books on the Holocaust seem to attract these people - sometimes hundreds of them. They have to be careful because Amazon will delete their postings if they explicitly promote racism, antisemitism or similar sentiments, so they write very carefully, just as if they were serious investigators who have come across evidence that we supporters of the Jews haven't considered.
I would like all of these people to read accounts like this, or the more famous ones by Elie Wiesel, Victor Frankl, and Primo Levi. But there is no chance of it. They are already certain that all Jews are liars, so what's the point of reading their books? But I keep writing. I never know when someone who doesn't know any better will come across our back and forth arguments - which I always make politely and respectfully in hopes of actually convincing someone. It is awfully discouraging however to find intelligent seeming human beings who continue to believe in Nazism in spite of books like this.
| Author | Wheeler, Richard S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Prince Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 180 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | July 2003 |
In 1849 a party of ten soldiers and two Indian commissioners led by Captain Jedidiah Owen heads up the Missouri River to make treaties with the tribes. They do not return. The American Fur Company is enlisted to send their best engage', Jean Scallant, to find them, but although he visits numerous tribes and numerous of his Indian wives, he can't find them. Then Jed's fiancee, Susannah, against the wishes of her father, also goes upriver on a steamboat under the mocking but surprisingly effective protection of a lieutenant who had been her unsuccessful suitor.
It turns out that all in the treaty party are dead of cholera or scurvy except Jed, who has their last letters and diaries in his haversack. Jed is captured by Coutenay tribesmen who bring him back to health but want him to reveal the white men's secret knowledge of how to make iron, gunpowder, etc., that they believe must be in the papers in the haversack. When that doesn't work out, Jed is expelled. Later beaten and robbed by Blackfeet, he eventually makes it to a fort. Susannah, after her own adventures, meets him, only to discover that he is a changed, distant man who does not love her.
The novel alternately follows three main characters, Jed, Jean, and Susannah. It is full of fascinating detail about the life and times - showing the great gulfs that existed among the various Indian and white cultures. The historical aspects are excellent. The love story is awkward but has good stuff in it too. The adventure story works.
On the whole, I consider this a worthwhile novel. There is some clumsiness in its construction but the author's ideas are worth reading.
| Author | Harris, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Publication | Prince Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 2003 |
FBI trainee Clarice Starling is sent by Behavioral Sciences Division chief Jack Crawford to interview psychiatrist/mass murderer Hannibal Lecter in prison in Baltimore to get his insights into recent killings by a man known to the media as Buffalo Bill. Lecter loves pain. He trades hints, clues and insights about Bill for little sips of stories of Starling's painful orphaned childhood. When a Senator's daughter is taken by Bill, Lecter makes a deal with the vain, small-minded, prison warden to tell all in exchange for favors, then manages a brilliant escape from the new prison he had been moved to.
Meanwhile, Starling disregards her academy exams and keeps doggedly on Bill's trail using all of her intelligence and training and puzzling out the cryptic clues from Lecter, who it turns out knew the killer. While the FBI follows a false trail in Chicago, Starling accidentally walks right into Bill's house, expecting to find a witness there. In a dramatic gun fight in the dark, on Bill's home turf, she kills him and frees the Senator's daughter whom he had been about to kill and skin.
This is one of the best crime/thriller novels I've read. The characters are interesting and well developed. The psychology is convincing and enlightening. The police procedure is authentic seeming and fascinating. There are no easy targets or cheap shots. Even the supporting characters fro hillbilly cops to girl victims to the Senator are portrayed with some subtlety and much sympathy. For all that, it's an exciting read too, hard to put down.
I also saw the movie version of this, probably before reading the book. It was a very good movie and, although necessarily much condensed, I recall that it was a good and faithful rendition of the book.
| Author | Lewis, Bernard |
|---|---|
| Publication | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Islam; Terrorism |
| When Read | August 2003 |
Written after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the eminent scholar and historian of the Arab world gives us an appreciation of what's going on in the Muslim world, why so many people are antagonistic to the U.S. and the West, and what the future is likely to be.
The first thing to understand is that the vast majority of Muslims are desperately poor and the economic situation in the Muslim world has gotten significantly worse relative to the West during the 20th century. The people see Western wealth in movies, TV, magazines, etc., but know that they will never ever share in it. The resentment of this wealth is magnified by the sight of their own westernized elites and by the influence of the West in dominating Mideast oil and other economic activity.
Also very important is the pathological ignorance and mis-education of most people. Their only knowledge is often imparted by clerical obscurantists. Imagine, L says, that the KKK took control of Texas and used all its oil wealth to teach KKK values around the country. This is fostered by tyrannical governments that want people to believe that Israel is the cause of their problems, not anything to do with their own government or society. Hence every Arab knows of the massacre of 700 Palestinians by Israeli allied militia at Sabra and Shatila, but the massacre of 25,000 Syrians by the Syrian army at near the same time went completely unremarked in the Arab press and popular opinion. But the West too is at fault for making cozy deals with the tyrants to serve their own anti-popular ends.
Things will not get better soon and may get much worse.
A well written, knowledgeable book.
| Author | Masefield, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1921 |
| Number of Pages | 132 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | August 2003 |
The novel is set in 1685 when the Duke of Monmouth landed in England in a foolish, disorganized and doomed attempt to overthrow James II. Twelve yar old Martin Hyde, recently orphaned, goes to live with an uncle in London where he engages in various foolish, childish escapades that lead to his blundering into the Duke's conspiracy. Taken on as a messenger he goes to Holland with the conspirators, working as a cabin boy. In Holland he is given a horse and a message. Pursued by a young woman serving James, he escapes, delivers the message, then is sent to England again. He saves the girl's life on the ship and is in turn saved by her when his loyalty to the Duke lands him in trouble and would have led to his being shot for treason.
This is a nicely written, fanciful romance, no doubt intended for teenage readers. There must have been some interest in Monmouth at this time since Sabatini's Mistress Wilding was published in 1910 about the same subject, and with the same view of the Duke and his enterprise.
Martin H is light, easy fare but not offensive or stupid as some such books can be.
| Author | Farago, Ladislas |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Dell Publishing, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 863 |
| Extras | bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 2003 |
A deeply researched, quite objective, and probably definitive biography of George Patton, from childhood through his death after World War II, but mainly concentrating on his role in that war.
P was born to a wealthy, privileged California family. A limited but charming and gregarious man, he found school very hard but struggled through it to realize his single-minded dream of military glory. Accepting his limitations, he believed that he was made for one thing only - military command. To that end, he studied, thought, and prepared with all of the ability and determination he could command. He even went to the 1912 Olympics, placing 5th out of 43 in the pentathlon. His family connections and boyish likability helped him advance. He was with Pershing in Mexico and shot it out with one of Pancho Villa's commanders. In France he was promoted to lead the first American armored unit. Leading from the front, he got out in front of the entire unit and was wounded in the attack.
Between the wars P studied every book and every record of armored combat. By WWII he knew what he wanted to do and how. Where others groped for plans, Patton, the best prepared, would see almost intuitively how to fight a war of constant movement. His action in Africa helped him refine the theories. In Sicily he developed them. In France he put them into practice with fast moving forces that took more territory and killed or captured more Germans than any other Allied armies.
Politically inept and naive, P managed to piss off his superiors and, getting a reputation for wrong moves, he became easy prey for journalists ready to pounce on him. F indicates that P would not have made a good supreme commander, but in his place, he was the best man for his job and might have won the war in 1944 if he were unleashed and supported.
An excellent history and military biography.
One scene I remember from the book was Patton coming to the front of his troops that were stopped at a river, waiting for bridging equipment to arrive. I don't remember his exact words but, wading into the stream, Patton yelled back something like, "This damned sewer is only two feet deep, get moving."
Patton has been criticized as a glory hound, a man who sacrificed his own soldiers to win glory for himself. The charge may well be completely unfair. He said that an army would achieve its objectives and defeat its enemy with fewer casualties by being hyper aggressive than by being cautious. The statistics support him. Measured in amount of land taken from the enemy per American casualty, and the number of enemy casualties and prisoners per American casualty, Patton appears to have had the best record of any Allied commander in the war.
It's true that he was a glory hound. Its true that his politics were primitive. Its true that he was hard to get along with. But I'm grateful to him and very glad that he was on our side, not the enemy's.
| Author | Dibner, Martin |
|---|---|
| Publication | Los Angeles: Pinnacle Books, 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 281 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | September 2003 |
Lieutenant JG Alec Austen serves as a gun captain on the cruiser Atlantis in the North Pacific in the early days of World War II. An artist, working for an ad agency in New York before the war, he is involved with the mistress of his ex-boss, and the story goes back and forth from sea to land as he tries to cope with a seemingly ineffectual but actually okay captain, a couple of psychotic senior officers, his gun crew, the girl ashore, and his aspirations to chuck everything and devote himself to painting for himself alone.
There is a crisis, a battle with the Japanese, the death of his favorite non-com Frenchy Shapiro, a crisis with the girl - but it all comes out in the end.
There is a mix of believable and unbelievable characters and events. Austen himself is an archetype of an overly sympathetic hero - intelligent, brave, kind, handsome, loved by his men - in short a piece of blatant self-indulgence by the author and unscrupulous manipulation of the reader. But surprisingly, the writing isn't bad. There are passages where it works. Even Austen's artiness - completely artificial and unsubstantiated at first - is given some substance by the end.
I read books like this because I like the genre. I tolerate merely competent writing on subjects I'm interested in. This writing is competent.
| Author | McCullough, David G. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 752 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| When Read | September 2003 |
This is a full length biography of our second President, from his boyhood in Baintree, Massachusetts Colony, to his education, marriage, career as a lawyer (he defended the redcoat soldiers who fired on the mob in "the Boston Massacre" - to the detriment of his career), service in the Continental Congress, ambassadorships in France and Holland, then in England after the war, vice presidency, and presidency - up to his death on the 4th of July, 1826, the same day as Jefferson and exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Adams was one of those men most responsible for pushing the colonies into revolt and worked tirelessly in the Congress, on the war committee, and as an ambassador - where his confrontational style clashed with Jefferson's and most especially Franklin's - who regarded him as a fine, honest, intelligent, madman. But his efforts worked well in Holland in securing the first international recognition of the U.S., and perhaps in England as well. As Vice President A was criticized for taking too active a role in the Senate. Mostly, he supported Washington. As President he curbed Hamilton and the radical Federalists who wanted a standing army and war against France. However he signed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts that resulted in the suppression of some of the radical Republican press.
In spite of bitter and personal struggles against Jefferson, Madison and the Republicans, he had been a deep personal friend of J and was so again after J left office in 1808. A suffered personal tragedies in the bad marriage and early death of his daughter, with an alcoholic son, and with another son. However his eldest son, John Quincy, was a shining example of scholarship, hard work and high mindedness, winning the Presidency while his father was still alive.
Although M fails to explain the politics and history of the time, the book succeeds on a personal level in giving us a picture of, and respect for, John, Abigail, and John Quincy Adams.
Marcia and I watched a film biography of Adams which, I believe, was based on this book. It was very well done and we both liked it a lot.
For the sake of readers of these notes who are not familiar with the history, my use of the phrase "radical Republican press" does not have the meaning it would have today, i.e., journalism connected to the radical right wing of the Republican Party. It had the opposite meaning in Adams' time, journalism connected to the radical left wing of the American political spectrum. But then "left wing" is also different in those days from what it is today. I guess you just have to learn the history to understand the events.
This is the first audiobook I listened to on CDs instead of cassette tapes. It must correspond with my purchase of my 2003 Mazda 3, that now belongs to Dan.
| Author | Cannell, Stephen J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Grand Haven, MI: Brilliance Audio, 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2003 |
Los Angeles detective sergeant Shane Sculley sees his longtime childhood friend in a car on the freeway. But the friend supposedly killed himself 18 months before. Despite disbelief from everyone he pursues the matter, uncovering a gang of renegade cops called the Vikings who rob and sometimes murder drug dealers. A sting operation is setup to put Shane into the gang by seeming to murder his own girlfriend. The sham murder goes wrong and appears real. S. escapes with the Vikings and becomes one of them.
Heartbroken and depressed, he slips into suicidal despair while the Vikings embark on a giant drug money laundering deal that takes them into the lair of a sadistic monster in Columbia. But in the end, it turns out that the girlfriend was not killed. She rescues Shane and the bad old sociopathic friend is killed in a shootout. S is grievously wounded but survives to marry the girl and live happily ever after.
Cannell is a more than competent writer capable of putting some real interest in his characters and lots of zip in the plot. But he is also a highly commercial writer who sells out his own story to make everything work out for the best in the end. The biggest sellout is the phony killing of the girl. Written to make Shane and the reader believe in it, told that no bulletproof vest could have saved her, we learn that there was such a secret army vest that did save her. Similarly, when Shane has actually put the gun to his own head, she appears at the lat minute. It's all very well written schlock, absorbing to read but irritating and disappointing as all of the manipulations are revealed.
Oddly, what I remember best about this forgettable book is the bullet proof vest gimmick.
When I bought my 2003 Mazda I paid $200 extra to get a cassette tape player installed along with the default CD player. The libraries were in the process of converting from tape to CD and still had a great many audiobooks on tape. That's why the last audiobook was on CD and this one that I listened to later was on tape.
| Author | Adler, Mortimer |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio Books, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 206 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| When Read | September 2003 |
This book is a surprisingly comprehensive survey of A's philosophy, including metaphysics, ethics, politics and logic. Adler doesn't really even dumb it down. Rather he attempts to find the essential elements and explain them in modern terminology with some modern and some ancient examples. His goal seems to be the straightforward and admirable one of explaining Aristotle. He is not trying to convince us of anything, to extol Aristotle, or to argue for or against A's views - except in so far as making such arguments helps us to understand the great thinker.
When I studied philosophy I thought of Aristotle as perhaps the single greatest philosopher - the one with the most systematic and clearly reasoned insights in the widest range of subjects. I thought of him as having the highest of IQs. Adler's book reminds me of why I thought that.
The great issues of Aristotelian philosophy are not a major part of my life anymore. While I found it interesting to rehash the four causes and the issues of logic, these questions no longer occupy me. It's not that I have moved beyond them, it's rather that I have slipped below them and no longer exert the intellectual effort needed to scale those heights. I wouldn't have as a young man either but for the stimulus and discipline (and freedom from work) of school. It is my loss.
The one aspect of Aristotelian thought that most interest me today is his categories, because of the valuable analysis A provides for artificial intelligence research.
Perhaps I was a little harder on myself in 2003 than I should have been. I don't think a lot about the classical problems of philosophy but I do think my philosophical training still informs my outlook on life and my approach to knowledge, whether in politics, chemistry, history, or wherever.
| Author | Crichton, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Ballantine Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 316 |
| Extras | references |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | October 2003 |
a high tech geological prospecting company, ERTS, sent an expedition into the Congo to search for blue diamonds. They are all killed. Another expedition is arranged led by computer scientist/geologist Karen Ross and white hunter guide Captain Munroe, and including gorilla researcher Peter Elliot and Amy, a gorilla trained by Peter to talk in sign language. They are racing against an (equally) unscrupulous European/Japanese consortium to get to a lost diamond mining city in an apparently uninhabited region of the Congo.
After narrowly avoiding their competitors' traps, civil warfare, and roving cannibals, they find the city but are assaulted by a new species of gorillas, trained 500 years before to kill people, and still passing on the training to each generation. The expedition members narrowly escape by decoding enough language of the apes to communicate with them to stop. There they find the mines but all is buried when the local volcano erupts and the people (with Amy) must run for their lives.
There is a long tradition of novels of deepest jungle expeditions after great riches, against unknown terrors, and all blown up at the end. Crichton wrote his contribution to it as expertly as anyone. He's done extensive research on Africa, apes, computers (not perfect) and all of the technology, politics and history he includes.
The result is not great literature. The characters are acceptable but a little thin. It's all in the plot and the science. But that's okay. It's an exciting read, hard to put down. Crichton delivers exactly what he promises.
Searching my diary from 2003 I see that I was first told about my elevated PSA around June 8, and that I was definitively diagnosed with prostate cancer on October 1. I was pretty depressed about it but I see no evidence of that in the book notes from this period. I continued reading. The number of books I read and the general content was similar to what it was before and after. I believe that is a good thing. Perhaps it indicates that what is important to me personally did not change as a result of cancer, and that the depression I experienced, painful as it was, was not as bad as it could have been.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chivers Audio Books, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 576 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2003 |
British Foreign Service officer Justin Quayle's beautiful young wife is discovered murdered near Lake Turkana in Kenya. The police and foreign office claim she was with a black doctor/lover who is implicated in the death. Two young cops from England investigate and suspect the BBB Corporation of killing her because she discovered that they were hiding ill effects of a new TB drug being marketed and tested by them in Africa. Justin, a decent, kind, somewhat older man, who most loves to putter in his garden, is deeply aggrieved. Gradually he uncovers the threads of BBB's corruption and recreates the research that his wife Tessa had uncovered. Running from the British police and from the thugs of the KVH drug company behind BBB, he puts together evidence to try to reconstruct Tessa's work. It is an act of love and faith and loyalty. The closer he gets to his goal, the harder the pressures put on him. In the end, drawn to the scene of Tessa's murder, feverish and half insane, he is himself murdered at the same spot.
As with so many of Le Carre's novels, this is a brilliant and literary tour de force. complex multi-dimensional characters reveal themselves over time. Radically different people are portrayed, each with deep insight. All the characters express high intelligence. All act uniquely in character.
Justin is a terribly attractive man. Polite, civil, incapable of any discourtesy, educated, well read, multi-lingual, he is a paragon of a civilized man. He is given to us as an innocent, a man who offends no one and does no wrong, but ultimately discovers that, by itself, that is not enough. More is required. More love, more effort, more commitment. And he is not found wanting. He rises to the challenge. Never losing his civility he nevertheless makes the ultimate sacrifice.
The downward spiral of events is depressing. The many chapters on the weak Sandy Woodrow are demoralizing. But for all that, Justin is a beautiful man and The Constant Gardener is a beautiful book.
One of the fascinating aspects of this book was the juxtaposition of the characters of Justin and Tessa, who is seen only in flashbacks and recollections. Justin is a thoroughly good but thoroughly private man. He is essentially content pursuing his private pursuits while doing no harm to anyone else. I understand him. Tessa is a public person. Also thoroughly good, she is compelled to fight injustice, to help others, to defend the weak and to oppose the powerful. Their attraction to each other is real but, in some sense, impossible. Justin is not like Tessa. He's not driven to anything. Sophisticated in many ways, he is also simple. She on the other hand can never participate in his world of private peace and contentment. She will never be at peace.
Although the differences between them are insurmountable, each recognizes the essential goodness of the other. Each accepts that the true goodness is in Tessa's life, not Justin's, but she will not be really angry at him and he, after her murder, can never again be content with his old way of life. His devotion to her grows after her death.
Like all of Le Carre's books, this is a political book about the predation of the rich and powerful upon the poor and powerless. Like all of them, it is about the subversion of justice and democracy in the interests of greed. But it is also an impressive love story.
Like Le Carre himself (I am sure), I identified with Justin. Like him, I can only write about these things. I am no longer the activist that I once was but never liked being.
As must be apparent from these notes written nine years later, the book made an impression on me. Le Carre is one of my favorite writers. I'll note here that the book ended, not at Justin's murder, but at the aftermath in which the crimes are revealed and some justice is done. Le Carre has been saddened and tempered by the world, but not entirely beaten down by it.
| Author | Woodward, Bob |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 376 |
| Extras | index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Politics |
| Keywords | Afghanistan |
| When Read | October 2003 |
A trusted, renowned journalist, well considered for his fairness, objectivity, and thorough research, Woodward was given a great deal of access to George Bush and his "war cabinet" to write this book about the Bush administration's responses to 9-11, 2001 and the attack on Afghanistan.
The "principals", as they were called, were Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, and CIA Director George Tenet. Here are my impressions of them based on W's extensive reporting.
Cheney and Rumsfeld were the hawks. Having no concept of the perceptions of people outside the U.S., they wanted to make maximal use of America's military might, not only to track down the terrorists, but also to set the world to rights - as they saw it. Powell, no dove himself, nevertheless was the only one to take an international perspective. He constantly tried to steer the administration toward coalition building, multi-lateralism, and understanding of long term perspectives. Tenet struck me as a narrower, technical man and sometime CIA bureaucratic opportunist, building the power of his agency during the crisis. Rice seemed to be in the middle, pushing no perspective of her own, but holding closely to the president.
Then there was Bush. Sincere, emotionally involved, driven to do the right thing, he never seemed to me to understand the complexities of the issues, the world governments, or the options available. He wanted to be strong. he wanted to be effective. He wanted to be John Wayne and Winston Churchill. But what he did was squander the sympathy of the world, turn hundreds of millions of people against us, add hugely to the base of Al Qaida recruits, and set us back years.
This book was written before Woodward knew anything about the administration's plans to invade Iraq. The planning was in place but was carefully concealed from the world. In his next book, Plan of Attack, Woodward indicates that he felt deceived by that.
| Author | Patchett, Ann |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 318 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Latin America |
| When Read | October 2003 |
In hopes of attracting an investment from his giant Japanese corporation, a South American government organizes a birthday party for Katsumi Hosokawa and invites his favorite opera diva, Roxanne Coss, to sing. All are gathered at a magnificent party at the Vice President's house when a group of terrorists, 3 "generals" and about 14 teenagers, bursts into the party, intending to capture and make off with the president. But the president isn't there (he couldn't miss his favorite soap opera) and the terrorists tarry too long until the house is surrounded. For months there is a stand-off. Hostages and teenagers all mix and form new social relations. Translator Gen, an aide to Hosokawa, is the indispensable man who can speak to all. He falls in love with teenage terrorist Carla, who wants desperately to learn grammar, writing, and languages. Hosokawa and Roxanne Goss fall in love even though he has a wife and they speak no common language. A Japanese Vice President of the company becomes R.C's accompanist, showing a side of himself that had always been private. The Vice President of the country discovers his vocation as maid and gardener, caring for this lovely state residence. A teenager learns to sing and another to play chess and others to watch television. A Swiss Red Cross worker mediates between terrorists and authorities, trying to talk them into surrender but failing when troops break into the house through a tunnel, shooting all the kids and generals, including those who surrender, and getting Hosokawa by accident when he steps in front of Carla to protect her.
It is an extraordinarily beautiful book with a rich cast of unique, interesting, deeply human characters, subtle comedy, subtle tragedy, wonderful plot and character development, and fine appreciation of persons, nationalities, music, and culture.
A great book.
| Author | Grant, Ulysses Simpson |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1885 |
| Number of Pages | 445 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | October 2003 |
Grant continues his memoir down to the final surrender of the last Confederate holdouts in the South and West after the surrender of the Army of Virginia in the East.
As a general, Grant appears to be intelligent, determined, and very importantly, a good evaluator of men and a steady hand who could handle difficulties and defeats without losing sight of the main lines of what he needed to do. Brilliant leader and tactician that he was, Robert E. Lee could not defeat Grant because Grant understood his advantages, capitalized upon them fully, and refused to panic or become confused as McClellan, Burnside or Hooker had before him. Grant's broad strategy with the Army of the Potomac was to keep Lee fully engaged and unable to maneuver because he had to contend with Grant's relentless pressure and relentless movement to the South. With Lee pinned, the Union could push on elsewhere too - in the West, the Shenandoah, Georgia with Sherman, the North Carolina coast, Mobile, Tennessee, and everywhere. G is accused of being a butcher, a man who won by attrition. I don't agree. That the war turned into attrition was due to Lee's brilliant defense, not Grant's strategy. Grant always looked for bold and fast moves to win. Lee blocked them. Grant's promotions of Sherman and Sheridan were also important contributors to success.
There are snippets of interesting remarks on Lincoln and on slavery, which I will copy into the diary. Grant is a lucid writer. One would not know that he wrote this while dying of cancer in an effort to tell his story and to raise money to care for his wife after his death.
Grant died five days after completing the Memoirs. They were published by Mark Twain, who organized 10,000 men to hawk the memoirs door to door, often in their old army uniforms. He raised $450,000 for Grant's widow, said by a Wikipedia author to be worth ten million in today's money.
| Author | Henry, Will |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 236 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Race and slavery |
| When Read | October 2003 |
Ned Huddleston, a young slave boy, is taken to war by his master, an officer in the Confederate army. He serves as a personal servant, and then as a forager, becoming an expert at stealing food. After the war, free, but with his master dead, he drifts further and further west, barely holding off starvation. Framed by a murderous white man for a crime the white man committed, he is arrested, escapes, kills the white man, and embarks on a life of horse thievery among bands of mainly Mexican outlaws. Finally, having saved enough, he changes his name to Issam Dart, adopts a half white half Indian girl, and settles down to a farmer's life with stolen money to get hm started. When a young white man runs off with the teenage girl, Dart tracks them, finds the girl dead of smallpox, and submits to the boy's imperious white commands to put down his gun and get along.
The novel is very clumsily written. There are factual mistakes, like Ned being unable to read but able to understand Morse code. There are plot mistakes like miraculous escapes from impossible situations. And there are character mistakes, including Ned himself, who does unexpected things that serve the story but don't work as actions that Ned should have performed. The writing, adequate most of the time, is sometimes awkward and contrived, as in the many passages where Henry says "the legend doesn't tell us what Ned thought...", or some similar thing - jarring the reader with a shift from straight novel to simulated history.
As often happens, an author works with inherently interesting material but isn't able to bring it fully to life.
Working through the book card box I came to this one and pulled it out to copy it into machine readable form. I then noticed that the card in front of it was for the same book, read in paper format, in July of 1989, fourteen years before listening to it on tape.
It has happened several times in the past that I filled out a book card only to see that there was another in the box for the same book. There was no note on the 2003 card to tell me if that was the case here, or whether I missed it. I have no memory of the experience in 2003, just as in 2003 I had no memory of reading the book in 1989.
So I turned to my external memory, my diary. Sure enough, there is an entry made on November 9, 2003 noting that I had read the book in 1989 and discovered it while filing the new card in my shoe box.
There were three topics in that diary entry. One was this, one was a discussion of Grant's memoirs, and one was about my cancer treatment, and the pain, discomfort and depression that I experienced at that time.
I think that the bulk of my life would be lost without the diary and the book cards. Certainly the details would be gone.
My notes on Henry's book in 1989 were more favorable than in 2003, but I had some of the same criticisms. I discuss this in the diary entry.
| Author | McCain, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | October 2003 |
Written with the assistance of Mark Salter, this is McCain's tribute to his grandfather, a leading task force commander in the Pacific in World War II, his father, a submarine commander in WWII and later commander of the Pacific fleet with overall charge of the Vietnam War, and with a brief history of his own early naval career and his years in captivity.
As he was in his campaign for President, so also in this slim book, M seems honest and straightforward. He was a poor student and a somewhat self-centered and rebellious young man. He graduated from the Naval Academy with the maximum possible conduct demerits. It was only gradually that he became serious, married, and began to care about larger concerns.
His captivity in North Vietnam was pure hell. Landing in Hanoi with two broken arms and a broken leg, he was given no medical treatment and subjected to beatings, bindings, starving, isolation, heat, flies, infection, and on and on. Eventually, after a particularly brutal four day beating, he signed a confession - of which he is now ashamed. But he never gave information to the enemy and he refused early release, standing by the prisoners rule that only the first captured could consent to be the first released.
It is impossible not to admire and respect this man. I felt that was so in the 2000 presidential campaign and feel even more so now.
It isn't possible to be a politician in the United States, and maybe not anywhere, without making compromises and observing some party discipline. McCain's 2008 campaign did not seem to me to be as uplifting as his 2000 campaign. His recent support for polluters, for the Bush, Romney, Republican tax cuts for the rich, and for some of the anti-immigrant legislation was disappointing. His admission that he didn't know how many houses he owned (it turned out to be seven) was embarrassing. But I'm not prepared to condemn the man. If I condemn him, where will I stop?
| Author | Singer, Isaac Bashevis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Jewish Contemporary Classics, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Poland; Jews |
| When Read | November 2003 |
Jacob, a Jewish Talmudic scholar, loses his wife and children in the Cossack assault on Poland in 1648. captured, he is sold as a slave to a Polish farmer who keeps him tending his animals until, years later, he is ransomed by Jews from his home town. In the meantime however he has fallen in love with Wanda, the farmer's daughter, who has never met an educated, Godly man before. After returning to the Jewish community Jacob can find no peace. He returns to the countryside and runs off with Wanda. They go to a small Jewish community where she, who cannot learn to speak Yiddish without a Polish accent, pretends to be his deaf and dumb wife.
Their new life cannot work. Jacob is drawn to the circle of the landlord and his lascivious wife. Wanda cries out during childbirth, giving herself away. Both Poles and Jews reject them. Wanda dies in childbirth. Jacob is arrested but escapes to Palestine. Years later he returns to visit the grave of Wanda, and dies there.
This is a magnificent novel of love, faith, doubt and fate. Jacob struggles against society and against himself to be a worthy and righteous man. It's a life long struggle, foredoomed from the beginning, but there is no other alternative than to do the best they can, up to the end.
Singer combines a deep spirituality, a great affinity for the ritual and tradition of his religion, an undeniably carnal interest in life, and a nagging torturous, philosophical doubt. His characters, Jew and Gentile alike, are significant human beings. The dilemmas that Jacob faces are those of the highest and most difficult type. One comes away from this novel shaken, stirred and humbled. He is a great writer.
I completed A Mad Desire to Dance by Elie Wiesel just a week or two ago. Wiesel does not have Singer's great warmth and all encompassing humanity, but he does share with him a remarkable comingling of Jewish identity, faith, doubt, hope, and despair. The pain and tragedy of Jewish history has given birth to some remarkable testimonials and great literature.
| Author | Klein. Joe |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 230 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| When Read | November 2003 |
The author of Primary Colors gives his evaluation of the Clinton presidency, focusing especially on Clinton's achievements as a "new Democrat", which Klein thinks were considerable. One was "the end of welfare as we know it." K regards this as a real sea-change which, together with the economic advances of the era, cut welfare rolls in half. It was enacted in the teeth of liberal opposition but recognized, in K's opinion, that people on welfare had to take responsibility for their own lives.
The budget surplus was another great achievement, reversing 40 years of deficit spending. It required great discipline and commitment to achieve.
Clinton was a master politician. In his 1998 State of the Union speech, given in the heat of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he addressed the budget. In four words he crushed the Republican plan to give the money to the rich in tax cuts and force even the radical Republicans like Gingrich to stand and applaud the line. [The line was "First save Social Security."]
Klein is no hero worshiper and no apologist. He flays Clinton for the Lewinsky fiasco. But he also sees in him a man who understood much, worked very hard, and served his country well.
There is also some interesting discussion of the influence of Hillary on Bill (great), the oddities of their relationship (many and complex), and Hillary's own political goals and skills (more liberal, less open, less effective than Bill's.)
An interesting read.
It is seductive to imagine that there was an era of gentlemanly politics in which the men and women of each party spoke of their opponents in polite terms such as "my worthy opponent" as elucidated by Jimmy Carter. It is seductive to imagine that things have gone wrong only recently and that the virulent attacks on Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama are a new phenomenon. But I don't think it's true. Politics has always been a contest of competing interests and ambitions and what we have today looks positively cordial in comparison with what happened in the 1840s and 50's.
| Author | Etienne |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg download |
| Copyright Date | 1920? |
| Number of Pages | 158 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War I; Naval; Submarines |
| When Read | November 2003 |
This undoubted work of fiction is in the form of a diary of Leutnant-Zu-See Karl von Schenk, a German naval officer who serves in the U-Boats, becoming a commander. A haughty aristocrat who looks down on everyone, K servers under two different captains against increasingly fierce and effective British counter measures. When ashore, he falls in love with, and vigorously pursues, Zoe, a beautiful woman who appears to be the mistress of a repulsive infantry officer. After the officer's death, K proposes marriage. Zoe turns him down but offers sex instead. K, an officer and a gentleman, wants her but refuses - determined to win her as his wife.
Not too surprisingly, Zoe turns out to be a spy. A German speaking Pole, she lost her family and home in the German advance east and vowed revenge. K comes in to port one day and finds her under arrest. His efforts to free her nearly lead to his own arrest as well. After she is shot, he returns to the war at sea.
The book is sold "With an Introduction and Explanatory Notes by Etienne."
whoever wrote this either served in a submarine or spent some time with someone who did. The submarine passages are fairly detailed and authentic seeming.
The books is in a transitional style. Not yet influenced by Hemingway and the modern naturalists, it is still not quite Edwardian either. Is it good? Well, it ain't great literachoor. It does have its redeeming features however. It's about all one can get from the Internet at this time on this topic.
There's a lot more available now.
The book is actually available in hardback and paperback as well as a Kindle edition. The Kindle edition is $0.99 and the paperback $3.99, reasonable prices for an out of copyright book I think. The hardback is $23.99. Do people buy it? I got it free on the Gutenberg site. To my surprise, I saw 30 reviews.
| Author | Kanon, Joseph |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2003 |
I did not realize until I finished it that this was an abridged reading of the novel - a bastardization which I detest and probably accounting for some of the discontinuities and other flaws in the narrative.
Jake Geismar, an American journalist, returns to Berlin after the war to cover the Potsdam conference and to find his prewar mistress, the wife of a German mathematician working with Von Braun on the V-2 project. He finds her alive but becomes embroiled in a black market/murder story involving a dead American soldier/gangster, a Russian KGB general, an American vying with the Russian to get the mathematician to his own country, and the mathematician himself, a "good German" who really didn't mean to hurt anyone, just trying to serve his country.
The theme of the novel is the revelation of crimes committed by Germans who never thought of themselves as criminals, and covered up by Americans who never thought of themselves as accomplices. Oddly, Jake is not the most attractive character. He seems rather blundering and not very subtle. But I dare not judge this on the basis of an abridgment of the book. Personally, I liked the jaded but intelligent German ex-cop best, a man who had attempted to protect his Jewish wife and who understood the complexities of the situation.
I suspect this was a good novel rendered only fair by chopping it up.
The page count listed above is for the full, unabridged edition sold in print, as shown at Amazon.
| Author | Hambly, Barbara |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 311 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Race and slavery |
| When Read | December 2003 |
In New Orleans in 1833, Benjamin Janvier, or January, a very dark skinned man 3/4 black, lives as a free man in the house of his mother, supporting himself as a pianist and piano teacher, unable to practice medicine in spite of his training in Paris. When an unscrupulous but beautiful and much sought after octaroon courtesan is murdered at a ball attended by high society men and their mistresses, J, the pianist at the ball, is singled out as a suspect by the police. He must find the real killer in order to clear himself.
The basic plot is absolutely standard mystery fare. What makes it interesting is the unusual historical setting mixing French and crude American whites with slaves and free blacks. There are even a couple of lesbians thrown in, one a German fencing master passing as a man.
H gives us a view of the brutality of men against women and whites against blacks. J must travel to a plantation outside the city where he is at tremendous risk of being kidnapped, having his papers torn up, and being sold as a slave. A woman central to the story, married a pig of a man who took all her money and even her dresses, jewels, and personal possessions, to give to the octaroon courtesan - who looted him and his wife mercilessly.
In the end, of course, J unravels the mystery, saves the innocents, and sees the bad guys killed in a gunfight.
I like some, but not a lot of mysteries. This is one I liked. I found the social relations of 1833 New Orleans to be very interesting and the observations on the life of a marginalized intellectual and other outsiders are also interesting and surprisingly sympathetic, if not perfectly convincing.
I read more mysteries now than I did in 2003. Many are audiobooks. There aren't a large number of choices of audiobooks and a lot of what's available at the libraries are mysteries. But I think I've also broadened my interests with regard to mysteries. There are many fine writers producing them. My ration of science fiction to mystery reading has probably moved more towards mysteries and I suspect there are more good writers (partly because there are so many more writers in total) working in that genre.
| Author | Follett, Ken |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Spy |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | December 2003 |
In June 1941, 18 year old Harald Olufson sees a new German radar station in occupied Denmark. The Germans are wreaking havoc on British bombers and the British are desperate to find out why. Harald knows but doesn't know how to get his information to England. The story follows him, his frivolous older brother Arnie who gives his life for the cause, Arnie's fiancee, an Englishwoman who becomes a spy and is infiltrated back into Denmark, and a Danish detective, Peter, who is a childhood foo of Arnie, Harald, and their family.
Harald photographs the installation but Peter arrests Arnie and there is no longer any way to get the film out of the country. Then H. discovers that his wealthy Jewish friend Tic has an old Hornet Moth airplane on his estate. he repairs it and, after various harrowing experiences, takes off for England with Tic's beautiful sister Karin, with whom he has fallen in love.
The strength of F's plot is built on the character of Peter - a diabolically clever policeman who gets the merest whiff of espionage and unerringly traces it to its source. F does a good job of developing this Nazi collaborator as a highly intelligent and even principled man, but very rigid and with slight regard for human values. He cares for his brain dead (literally) wife and serves his masters, both with strict adherence to his duty. He is finally killed attempting to stop the Hornet taking off.
There is a long, difficult, dangerous flight to England but they (H and K) make it and save the British Bombers.
Follett writes very professionally done thrillers. His characters are attractive. His evil doers are worthy of fear and respect. And he delivers the action and the thrills. It's why we read his books.
Although I don't remember knowing anything about it at the time, I now suspect this book was inspired by the exploits of Tommy Sneum, a flight lieutenant in the Danish Navy who photographed a radar installation for the British and got the film back to Britain by stealing a Hornet biplane and flying it back with a friend. I read about Sneum in The Hornet's Sting by Mark Ryan, published and read by me in 2009. Follett did a perfectly acceptable job of novelization but Ryan gives us the benefit of the true story.
| Author | Shields, Carol |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Audio, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2003 |
A woman writer lives with her doctor husband and two of her three daughters in a small town outside of Ottawa. She has some minor but popular novels and is a translator for a French woman professor, intellectual, and Holocaust survivor. Her life seems to be going perfectly. Her career, her marriage, her relationships with others all seem wonderful. Then her eldest daughter Nora drops out of school, leaves her boyfriend, and becomes a street corner beggar.
Mother Reta is beside herself trying to discover the cause of the disaster and rescue her daughter, but nothing avails. So she continues her life, always hoping but at the edge of despair. Finally the girl breaks down, explains the trauma behind her actions, and comes home.
S is an uncommonly intelligent, sophisticated writer with a powerful analytical mind. A feminist, she reveals anti-female actions in society and shows us a female perspective that educates us all. The other characters in the book are not so well developed as Reta Winters. The novel is related in first person and sticks closely to Reta's perspective, but it still tells us a lot about men and women, mothers and daughters, writing and publishing.
This was not a topic that appealed to me. The writing was not my favored style. The characters were not people I would necessarily choose to know. But the book held me nevertheless by its sheer intelligence.
Reading these notes I remember much of what I wrote about. However I cannot remember now what the daughter's problem was and would like to know. To try to find out, I just did some reading in the Amazon reviews (some of which are much better than mine) and found a very good short biography of Shields at www.carole-shields.com.
I didn't find the answer to my question but I did learn about her many other achievements. I also learned that she was diagnosed with breast cancer before starting this book and died of it just a year or so after finishing it. She left the following admirable paragraph that is quoted at the end of her web biography:
"I've had a lucky life. I've been lucky in friendship and lucky in love. And, having a lot of the big pieces of life: having children, having consuming passions, intellectual passions. That has enormously enriched my life. There are all kinds of things that I know nothing about, but I always had something that consumed me. So I think I've been lucky, and that has given me a sense of happiness."