Books read January through December 2004
| Author | Grisham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Legal |
| When Read | January 2004 |
After some years in a low paid public defender's job, young lawyer Clay Carter stumbles into an odd, senseless murder case. Pursuing it, he comes in contact with a shadowy agent who feeds him money and information with which to sue a giant drug company. suddenly successful and rich on the settlement fees, and still receiving inside information, he sets up his own law firm and becomes a mass tort, class action lawyer. In this process he slides deeper and deeper into greed, materialism, and sleaze, until finally, after seriously screwing his clients, he is brought low by a criminal investigation, a failure of his law firm, and a severe beating by some cement workers whose company and town he ruined by pushing them into bankruptcy - losing all for his clients in the process.
All of Grisham's recent books have similar characters - much less than lovable lawyers who take us into the dregs of the legal profession and discover how ugly it all is. It is possible that G uses his protagonist as a man to like, or possibly not. I detested him throughout. But there's no denying the fascination in G's stories. This is a view of the legal business that we just don't get in the hundreds of Perry Mason like novels.
This first book of 2004 would have been playing on my car tape player as I went to NCI to get radiation treatment for prostate cancer. Books before and after it, stretching back to my diagnosis in mid-2003, would have been read during my turmoil over the diagnosis and treatment. I'm pleased that this doesn't show in the book cards. I was still able, I think, to keep up my reading and my objectivity about the books I read.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2004 |
Alexander Kinlock, a 29 year old Scottish painter, lives in a remote cottage on his uncle's ("himself") estate. Coming home one afternoon he is beaten and robbed by four thugs who are after something he has. It might be a famous Scottish sword hilt given him by his uncle to keep the national historical society folks from seizing it, or it might be a gold cup owned by his stepfather's brewery, given each year in replica as a horse racing trophy.
Called to London by his mother, he finds his stepfather laid low by a heart attack, the brewery looted by its comptroller, who has disappeared, leaving the business teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and his stepfather's daughter and son-in-law fighting to take over the business even though they clearly have the wrong ideas about how to run it. The step-father gives a power of attorney to Alex, who doesn't want it and who has to fight the daughter every step of the way, but he succeeds in keeping things together.
F brings in a typical cast of characters. "Himself" - magisterial and good; the [unreadable on the book card], solid, reliable; an estranged wife running a stable - smart, attractive, too involved with her world of horses as Alex is with his painting, for them to give much to each other; a private eye specializing in disguises; a pompous lawyer working for the stepfather but opposing his decision to bring in Alex.
In the end, it turns out that the lawyer is the real villain. He traps Alex and attempts to torture him for information, but the private eye saves him, the police burst in, and the bad guys are routed.
In this one, F talks with some verisimilitude, about painting, old families, historical societies that take over national treasures but fail to protect them against robbers and pilferers, and about business, and of course, horses. As usual, his characters are simple but attractive and his mystery plot is satisfying.
This is the first time I couldn't read words on the book card. I tried using my 10X hand lens, but I still couldn't make out what I wrote.
| Author | Bowden, Mark |
|---|---|
| Publication | Signet Books, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 486 |
| Extras | index, photos, maps |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Military; Somalia |
| When Read | January 2004 |
Bowden interviewed surviving participants on both sides to produce this striking account of the battle of Mogadishu on October 3-4, 1993. Young American Rangers and older Delta Force soldiers rappelled down out of helicopters to try to capture clan leaders meeting at the behest of clan warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid. The mission was of questionable value because of the difficulties of actually improving the political situation in Somalia by outside military means. But in any case, the military plan went awry when things took too long. A thousand or more armed Somalis began to assemble around the soldiers, and then a Blackhawk helicopter was shot down - causing a huge change of direction as the mission turned into a bloody and unsuccessful rescue operation. The intensity of fighting was very high. The exposure of the Americans, very great. The devastation of Somalis was huge, as might be expected when lightly armed civilians and militia attack a force of professional, heavily armed, highly trained, and air supported soldiers - even if they were almost all inexperienced.
The strength of this book, and it is a great strength, is its intense, raw, and detailed view of fighting at street level, as seen by individual soldiers. It's an eye opener of a story. The movie made of it was a real eye opener with all of the added intensity of powerful video.
This is one of the best accounts of combat I've ever read.
Marcia and I saw the movie made from this in a theater on a cruise ship. We were astonished by the raw power of the film. There were at least half a dozen scenes, and probably more, that would individually have made any war movie a great movie.
The book didn't have the visual, visceral impact of the movie, but everything in the movie was there. It was a great book and a great piece of research and reporting.
| Author | King, Laurie R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2004 |
In 1923 Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes encounter their old friends Ali and Mahmoud Hayr, introduced in O Jerusalem. Upon the death of an elder brother, Mahmoud must return to England to assume the title of Duke of Belleville in his ancestral home of Justice Hall. It transpires that Ali and Mahmoud grew up as upper class English cousins who later chose to live as Arabs, working for British intelligence. They are unhappy back in England and long to return to Palestine but cannot until they can find a new heir to the title and also solve and avenge the murder of the legitimate heir - a young man shot for cowardice on the Western Front because, although he was willing to die himself, he would not order his platoon over the top on an absolutely pointless suicide mission.
It turns out that another cousin, one of two possible competitors for the title, had engineered the boy's demise and used the boy's fine nobility against him to keep him from saving himself.
Mary and Holmes solve the case and Mary goes to Canada, retrieving a young child, the son of the dead heir, now rightful Duke. Mahmoud and Ali kill the murderer and return to Palestine.
King uses this novel to give us some exposure to the highest upper class in England - its privileges, its wealth, its history, and its responsibilities. The story is far fetched and the characters of Ali and Mahmoud rather outrageous - but perfectly in the spirit of the equally outrageous Sherlock Holmes.
K's stories are always fun.
| Author | White, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| When Read | February 2004 |
Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, is studied today by art historians who know or care little about his scientific investigations. In fact however, L was deeply immersed in his attempts to understand and to engineer the natural world. He carried out many experiments and observations, including detailed dissections of almost 30 cadavers - an activity that could have cost him dearly in Catholic Italy had it come to the attention of the Church authorities.
In addition to his superb intelligence, deep curiosity, and thorough going skepticism, L had one skill not common to the early scientists - he could draw. He filled notebooks not only with theories, observations, and speculations, but also with exquisite drawings of the things he observed and the machines he would have liked to build. Fully half of those wonderful notebooks are lost but 7,500 pages are known to still exist.
W is not entirely convincing in calling L a scientist. The notion of science as a systematic investigation into nature, requiring objective observation, evidence, and repeatability, and reducing theory to the minimum supported by the facts, was not yet extant. L's brilliant observations and intuitive insights, his skepticism, and his openness to new ideas, were at least partly scientific in spirit, but not yet fully so. L was a flamboyant, inner-directed genius. He craved social and financial success but frequently antagonized rich and powerful patrons by failing to deliver on his promises. He made great innovations and achievements in engineering as well as art.
This biography, while not attempting to be complete, is a useful addition to those works concentrating exclusively on Leonardo's art.
| Author | L'Amour, Louis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Western |
| When Read | February 2004 |
This is the second in a series of books about the Sacketts, an English family coming to America. It is the second in reading order, the order of events in the Sackett family, but was published after quite a few others describing a later date had already been published.
Barnabas Sackett leaves England around 1601 with a warrant out for his arrest. Accused of stealing missing crown property, he fears that he will never convince anyone that he found no more than a few coins, and so fled the country. He takes over a ship in Nova Scotia by beating her pirate captain in a fight, then sails south to Carolina where he establishes a base on the coast with friends and followers. Finally he settles in the Carolina mountains with wife and children and English and Indian friends.
There are various adventures fighting pirates and Indians. In the end, perhaps in late middle age, he and his lifelong friend are attacked by a party of 12 Indians who have specifically tracked him to measure themselves against the great warrior Sack-Ett. He is finally overwhelmed and killed after putting up a great fight.
L'Amour is a competent writer with a strong belief in the heroic American frontiersman / individualist. His story blends this theme with the family saga genre to create a classic sort of historical romance potboiler. It is popular literature, aimed at a distinctly unliterary audience. And yet, to my surprise, I found the period language to be authentic seeming and sophisticated.
These are books one reads to pass the time. We don't carry away any profound thoughts. But L is good at what he does.
It's always interesting to read reviews on Amazon.com, something I probably wasn't doing much of in 2004. The Amazon review database wasn't as large then, or maybe I hadn't yet discovered it.
For a book like this, many of the readers will judge it based on how much action and adventure there is. One fellow complained that the book was very exciting for the first half then had a boring hundred pages of, they did this and then xxxx was killed by Indians. Then they did that for a while and then yyyy was killed by Indians. I have some recollection of what he was referring to. It was a legitimate criticism, I noticed the problem and thought it was a problem, though I don't recall that it bothered me too much at the time. I may have had more problems with the implausibility and overreaching of the heavy action in the first half.
| Author | Dai Sijie |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Rilke, Ina |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 197 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | February 2004 |
This was originally published in French in 2000.
In 1971, a 17 year old boy and his 18 year old friend Luo are sent to a far backwoods mountain community for political re-education. They live in dirt, shovel shit, eat lousy food, and have nothing to read or do in their bits of spare time. Then they find another city boy has books. He denies it, knowing the books could get him in terrible trouble, but finally they get a volume of Balzac from him, which they read and re-read.
Then they discover the little Chinese seamstress, a beautiful girl of their own age, the daughter of a tailor in the next village. Both boys are in love with her, as are all the local yokels. But Luo wins her by reading Balzac to her. He also makes her pregnant and while he is away, the narrator goes through hell to arrange an illegal abortion for her.
More books are discovered and the boys feast on them, but in true Balzac fashion, in the end, the girl decides her beauty is wasted on such small fry as them and she leaves for the city.
The story is spare but rich in satire and human insight. Dai writes as perhaps Balzac himself might have done. Although the reader is constantly oppressed by this bigoted, narrow minded, cultural revolution society - and fearful that the boys will be discovered and punished even worse than they already have been, there is still some delight to be taken from the story.
I once believed in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. My youthful enthusiasm for it had waned long before this book. But this book helps me to put down any lingering wishful thinking about it.
I don't know if the author's surname is Dai or Sijie. I filed it under Sijie in my book cards but referred to the author in the comment as Dai. I'm going to go with Dai as the surname in this record.
The Cultural Revolution was a big deal among student leftists at the time it was going on. It seemed like a genuine renewal of the revolution, an attempt to keep it from ossifying into a bureaucratic oppressive state in which bureaucrats instead of capitalists oppressed the people. I read sympathetic books about it including Away With All Pests and the Monthly Review issue that was totally devoted to the Cultural Revolution at Beijing University.
Now, book after book is appearing by Chinese authors condemning the Cultural Revolution as a victory of bigotry and mob violence over education and culture, and a political ploy by Mao and many opportunists in the country to seize power from those who held it in the Party, the government, and the educational and economic institutions. I would like to believe that there is at least a little truth to the optimistic view of the event, but I'm certainly not finding any support for that in the literature coming out of Chinese writers, both in China and abroad.
| Author | Leroux, Gaston |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1911 |
| Number of Pages | 242 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | France |
| When Read | March 2004 |
Mutant monster Eric, with a fabulous voice, great ability as an engineer, and the ability to act as a ventriloquist, but with a horrifying personal appearance, lives deep in the cellars of the Paris Opera house. From these he fosters a myth of an "opera ghost" who haunts the opera and can wreck the public image, careers, and finances of singers and managers alike. He uses this myth to extort money and privileges from the managers and uses his voice to lure a young singer into his clutches - posing as "the angel of music" sent by her dead father to teach her to sing at a new, wonderful level.
The young singer is taken in. A fine boy, younger brother to a count, is in love with her and hopes to rescue her, but must go through the terrible cellars with "the Persian", a Persian police official who knows Eric, to save her.
Leroux keeps the reader guessing about Eric's true nature. Perhaps he really is a ghost. It's only at the end that we find he is definitely not, though some of his powers are hard to explain.
The book has all the elements of a popular Gothic adventure / romance. There is mystery, ghostliness, an innocent young girl, a true blue brave and constant young boy, a monstrous antagonist but with sympathetic aspects, a subterranean labyrinth of mystery and horror, a desperate effort to save the girl with last minute twists and turns - it has it all. There is even comedy among the opera managers and chorus girls.
It's hardly a serious work of literature. It can be criticized from many angles. But it's fun to read.
| Author | Freedman, Russell |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Clarion Books, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 150 |
| Extras | photos, index, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Photography; Abraham Lincoln |
| When Read | March 2004 |
This is a lovely little volume of Lincoln's life and political career, well illustrated with wonderful photos of Lincoln and the scenes of his life. It is a short work, skimming the surface with just the main outlines of his life and work. Like most books of its type it has a modern political agenda too, but keeps it simple. It promotes simple tolerance and understanding - an agenda that I wish we all subscribed to.
The photos are reasonably well reproduced though the format of the book is only 7.5 x 9 inches, not a coffee table size. Looking at them, at Lincoln's plain face and sad eyes, is as valuable as reading the text. You can't help searching the countenance of this hero of decency and human rights, looking for the deep humanity that we know is there.
I liked the text too, and the selection of quotes from Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln is one of my heroes. He made many mistakes and had his personal failings, but he was intelligent, humane, and committed to the cause of American democracy. I have read at least seven books about him that I can easily identify in my book notes, and I have read many others about the Civil War or about American history that have extensive information about him.
| Author | Wolff, Tobias |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 195 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2004 |
A scholarship student at a fine private prep school concentrates on literature. It is the specialty of the school and the obsession of many of its students. The boy is from a very ordinary background, lower middle or working class, with no money and no father, even a Jew in his family tree. He is embarrassed by this and hides it from his fellows. He gets along with all of them and has intellectual affinities with some, but forms no close friendships.
Each year a prominent writer visits the school. A writing contest is held and the best stories are sent to the writer. He chooses one and that boy gets to spend an hour with him. When Hemingway agrees to come the student is determined to win but is uninspired. Then he finds a superb story written by a girl in a sister school five years before. For inspiration he begins copying it over and over, making small changes until, unconsciously, he has internalized it and imagines it to be his own. He wins the contest but is discovered and, to his surprise, is expelled for plagiarism and has his acceptance at Columbia withdrawn.
Nothing very terrible happens to him. He joins the army. He goes to an ordinary college. He works at jobs. He becomes a writer and eventually a good writer. He meets the woman who wrote the original story, but she has no interest in him and none in writing.
Near the end of this very subtle and intelligent novel we follow the story of a dean who cannot accept his own role in expelling the boy. He leaves the school but is lost without it and can find no other work. He is eventually rehired as an ordinary teacher - coming home.
W writes beautifully about literature, friendship, teaching, learning, and the life of a very ideal private school. The heart of the novel is the story written by the girl, of which only excerpts and analysis appear. It is brilliantly done.
Wolff appears to be a very well respected writer, albeit one with a relatively small output. Now aged 72, I see only three novels by him listed in the Wikipedia, though there are a number of short story collections and some non-fiction. This is the only one of his books that I've read but if I come across more of his work I may read it. I say that about lots of authors and there isn't time to read all of them, so we'll just have to see if I get to read another.
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 512 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | April 2004 |
In the sequel to Darwin's Radio, SHEVA children have been rounded up and placed in concentration camps. Anthropologist Mitch Rafelson and genetics researcher Kaye Lang have hidden their daughter Stella Nova for 12 years. Tired of hiding, Stella runs away but is caught and sent to a concentration camp for SHEVA children. The children are isolated and treated almost like criminals as unscrupulous politicians and bureaucrats exploit public prejudice, ignorance, and fear to advance their personal careers. Kaye and other scientists fight to learn more about SHEVA and to publicize the truth - that it is not a harmful disease and is not dangerous to the rest of the population. Mitch also battles for his family but is rejected by Kaye.
Gradually, the children evolve a new culture of their own and, as they reach towards adulthood, come to better understand their ordinary human ancestors, and vice versa.
The children are presented as more human like in this sequel, with less superiority than I expected after reading the first book.
Bear, as always, is imaginative, and with a considerable understanding of the science, the sociology, and the politics of his subject. His people are frustrating. They have self defeating qualities that make the reader angry at them - but still sympathetic.
The book ends with no clear vision of the future resolution of the problems it treats. I imagine B is working on a third.
Now 14 years after the publication of Darwin's Radio there is still, to my knowledge, no follow-up novel. Bear has moved on to other topics and other series.
Bear is one of the "hard" science fiction writers, which is my favorite type of SF. I always assumed that he was a scientist or had a science background. However, looking at the biography that he posted on his website (http://www.gregbear.com/pages/gregbearpromo.pdf), I see no evidence that he has a college degree or that he even went to college. Be that as it may, he's definitely no dummy. I like his books.
| Author | Woods, Stuart |
|---|---|
| Author | Howard, Ken |
| Publication | Harper Audio, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Fiction; Politics |
| When Read | April 2004 |
A centrist Georgia Democratic Senator learns that his friend, the Vice President, has Alzheimer's Disease and will not run for President. The Senator decides to go for it. This political thriller tells a story of his run, first for the Democratic nomination, then for the general election. Along the way he battles various Republican dirty tricks, an attempt at blackmail, and a right wing militia murderer who makes several attempts to kill him - all foiled by good luck or by an alert secret service.
The presentation of campaigning, tricks, and secret service protection is shallow but still interesting. It requires a mix of qualities to get elected. One that helps a lot is personal charm - the likability of a candidate, the degree to which he can connect with people (Kerry take care, this may be one area where Bush is stronger.)
Like so many novels, this is one meant for passing the time. It's like our weekly television shows or Hollywood movies - intended to entertain, to hold interest, to take some relatively easy political shots (here against the right), but not to get deep or literary. In all that it succeeds. In short, it is the everyday sort of work of a professional novelist. Perhaps inspiration plays some role, but craft dominates.
I "read" books like this in the car because the selections of audio books at the library are limited. But I'd read another, for the same reason, if it fell into my hands.
I started worrying about Alzheimer's Disease in my 40's, when I learned that my mother had it. Now, at age 71, I'm still functioning pretty well, but my memory is not as good as it was and, if I manage to live another 20 years (not likely I think), I don't know what shape I'll be in at the end. Like the Vice-President in this story, I intend to avoid taking on any serious responsibilities that I don't think I can handle. It was a key factor in my retiring from my work at the National Cancer Institute. I didn't think I was doing as good a job at computer programming as I was accustomed to doing and didn't feel that I was earning my pay. So I did what I had to do.
| Author | Clinton, Hillary Rodham |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 567 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | April 2004 |
Hillary talks informally about her life, from childhood through college, law school, marriage to Bill, life in Arkansas, the years of Bill's Presidency, and ending with her election to the Senate. Her story is somehow simpler and more straightforward than I expected [though the abridgment may have something to do with that - 2012.] She grew up in a secure, conventional, Republican, Midwestern home. She was a "Goldwater Girl" in 1964 and only gradually became more liberal and progressive after that as she attempted to make sense of the inequities she encountered in society. By the time she met Bill she was already an activist on the other side, working on behalf of poor mothers and especially children. She was, and is, a church goer and a believing Christian.
Young Bill, tall, handsome, smart, golden tongued, charming, swept her off her feet. She was deeply in love with him and, although she feels hurt and betrayed, she still is.
She has been an activist and an independent thinker throughout her life. She continued to be so in the White House. She seems less neurotic than I expected. She describes her speeches to Eleanor Roosevelt as mental exercises, not as mystical channeling as reported by some in the press. She was hurt by the relentless and unprincipled personal and political attacks by Ken Starr and the Republicans and attempts to refute them in individual detail - from Whitewater to the White House travel agency, the Paula Jones affair, etc., showing how Starr found no evidence of wrong doing despite years and tens of millions of dollars spent - because there was nothing wrong to find.
I didn't support Hillary in 2008. My initial first choice was John Edwards. I thought that he was the candidate of the poor and downtrodden. I was impressed with his "One America" campaign. When he self-destructed I switched to Joe Biden, who struck me as the most experienced and knowledgeable of all the candidates, and with a solid liberal program. I rejected Obama because his "Time for Change" theme seemed to me to be vacuous and I rejected Hillary because I thought she played a little too much to the center and had what I thought were too hard line foreign policies. But I changed my mind about Obama after hearing his speech on race in Philadelphia. Hillary is still not my first choice. I expect to support someone else in 2016. But she's okay. I'd vote for her over any Republican.
This was an abridged reading of the book. I recorded that on my book card but didn't say why I read it that way. Usually I shun all abridgments and only listen to them accidentally when I fail to notice some tiny statement on the CD cover, sometimes itself covered by a library sticker. Or it may be that I decided to listen to this anyway, feeling that 6 CDs contained enough of what I wanted to learn about the subject.
| Author | Moravec, Hans |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 227 |
| Extras | illustrations index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence |
| When Read | May 2004 |
Tracing the same theme as his earlier Mind Children, M outlines his vision of a future world in which robots inherit the solar system and outer space, and eventually the earth too. He recounts the past progress in his own area of research - robot vision and mobility - and shows that progress has been real, fueled by increasing MIPS (millions of instructions per second) per dollar.
He projects four future generations of AI: 1: 2010, 3,000 MIPS, general purpose perception, manipulation and mobility. 2. 2020, 100K MIPS, accommodative learning. 3. 2030, 3M MIPS (monkey scale) world modeling. 4. 2040 100 M*M*MIPS (human scale) reasoning.
I think his time scales are far too soon, both because software won't be good enough and because hardware won't keep expanding at the recent rate. But his concepts are enlightening and his notion of the inevitability of it all is persuasive.
There is an excellent chapter addressing nine different arguments against AI, and some fascinating notions of the power of detailed simulation when the digitization is done at the atomic scale. However there is another section, a long one, on quantum mechanics and negative time that lost me - both as to its argument and its role in AI. He seems to be arguing for negative time delay in what seemed to me a particularly wild series of speculations.
M is one of my intellectual heroes. He faces the tough questions fearlessly.
My skepticism of the time scales has turned out to be justified. Now in 2012 it doesn't look to me like we have general purpose perception, manipulation and mobility. Nor does it look to me like the later goals are likely to be achieved in the projected time frames, or that we will have 100 million million million instructions per second in 2040. I'm unlikely to live long enough to find out.
Nevertheless, if we slide the time scales even by a factor of 10, it's still the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. We may be around 15 generations from the appearance of AI systems with as much or more intelligence as we have.
Moravec would argue that if they reach our level, they will very quickly exceed our level and leave us way behind. He may be overly optimistic (or is it overly pessimistic) about that too. But again, we can multiply by a factor of ten and still be looking at the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. If we humans took five million years to evolve from ape like intelligence, at 25 years per generation, that's 200,000 generations. Compared to that, we may be talking about 400 years (10 times Moravec's 2000-2040) = 16 human generations, and maybe another 16 generations to get way past it. It's just a drop in the bucket.
Will it happen? Will the AI's replace us, merge with us, or leave us alone and go their own way? And the question of the moment for this one tiny point in space time as I write this is, if my diary and book notes survive into their era, will they read them and preserve them, and what will they think of me?
| Author | Naipaul, V.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2004 |
Willie Chandran, son of a Brahmin intellectual and an untouchable "backward" woman his father married in a period of rebellion and alienation, goes on scholarship to a teachers college in London. He has some success as a student, as a minor journalist, and then as a fiction writer. He meets a Portuguese African woman who admires his work. He goes with her to Mozambique and lives many years on her farm estate as a kept man, socializing in the narrow circle of estate farm people, and later philandering with African girls and then with a friend of his common law wife. When the revolution succeeds in 1975, life goes down hill. Willie realizes he is only half alive, or perhaps has lived half a lifetime, to age 41, doing nothing. He leaves his woman and leaves Mozambique. He finds himself now here, doing nothing, with no place to go and nothing to do. The novel leaves him in his sister's apartment in Johannesburg, telling her his story.
The novel is highly intelligent and literate, full of interesting psychological insights and characterizations. But it is also depressing. The main characters, Willie, and in the first big section of the book, his father, are men with considerable talent and intelligence but no motivation - men who are spectators of their own lives. We read about them with a feeling of wanting to intervene, to push them to say this or do that or not do what they are falling into doing by sheer force of circumstance.
As a writer, Naipaul is in the top rank. As an observer of people and society, he is acute. But his characters are hard to take.
The story of Willie Chandran is continued in Magic Seeds, which I read in June and July of 2006.
A person who writes good novels, one after another, is obviously a person who knows how to work productively and is motivated to do so. He has goals in his life. And yet such a person can write about people who are completely different from him in that respect. Thus Naipaul writes about Chandran and Goncharov writes Oblomov. What is going on here? A lazy man myself, I imagine that Naipaul and Goncharov each probes his own psyche and sees a lazy person inside, a person whom he could be if he didn't force himself to be productive.
That may well be the case, but I suspect that a better explanation would be to look to Aristotle, who said that a pig cannot imagine what it is like to be a man but a man can imagine what it's like to be a pig. The explanation is not completely different from mine, but it puts the emphasis on a different side of the comparison between productive and lazy man, between man and pig.
This was not Naipaul's most appealing book but maybe popular appeal wasn't important to him. A man motivated by money doesn't write books like this. A man motivated by a need to understand does.
I like Naipaul's writing. I too need to understand, even when the knowledge I gain is depressing.
| Author | McMillan, Margaret |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 624 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War I |
| When Read | May 2004 |
This is a relatively thorough political history of the Paris peace conference that ended the first world war, and of the events in many of the European countries immediately after the war. M. gives us enlightening portraits of Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau, and of the conflicting positions among the three statesmen and between them and their own political milieus in the U.S., Britain and France. There is also good coverage of Italy, Austria Hungary, the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Greece, and Turkey. Germany is less well covered and Russia hardly at all. Perhaps to have covered them would have taken the book too deeply into the very large events occurring especially in Russia.
Wilson emerges as a genuine idealist and George and Clemenceau as much less cynical than I would have imagined them to be. Wilson's 14 points were wonderfully idealistic. They captured the imagination and won the support of people throughout central and eastern Europe. But they proved to be too difficult or impossible to apply. "National self-determination", the most famous of the points, was more than problematic in lands where different religions and linguistic communities had lived side by side in a dense checkerboard pattern for hundreds of years. And how could one say to the Italian government, pressed by fascism from within, that the promise of Tirol, for which so many Italians died and which was the only reason Italy entered the war - how could one say to them that the British and French promise is now invalid for idealistic reasons?
A fascinating and well written and researched book.
This is precisely the kind of book for which I wish that I could remember all of the details. In my new method of writing book notes in XML, I would have written more detail. I should have written something in my diary about it but it appears that I did not.
I recall that the Germans who came to the peace conference had studied Wilson's 14 points and were hoping that they could be the basis of a peace agreement. But that didn't work out for them. The French especially, who had suffered so severely in the German invasion, were in the mood for revenge. How could any politician tell the French people that, even though the Germans killed or maimed their fathers, sons, and brothers, destroyed their farms, shelled their cities, and on and on, they were good folks too who also had important rights that we all fought for? It couldn't be done.
Every country had its grievances, its demagogues with ambitions, its military leaders ready to continue the war, and its perceived historical rights that were in conflict with the perceived historical rights of the losers. Idealism was not practical in the real world.
| Author | Parker, Robert B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 2004 |
Sunny Randal, Boston private detective, is hired to guard a best selling romance writer who is being stalked by her psycho/psychiatrist ex-husband Dr. John Melvin. Realizing that the guy is sick and dangerous she decides to go after him. It turns out that he and two friends are serial rapists who have committed murder to cover their tracks. Sunny concocts a rather crazy scheme to catch the guy by becoming a victim and using an untried antidote to counter his date rape drug. But the author insists that this works and the bad guys get beaten up and arrested.
Sometimes the libraries' audio book offerings are very slim and one is reduced to this sort of thing.
The characters are not wholly unattractive and the writing is competent enough, but the plot is contrived and the actions of the characters are pig-headed and improbable. There is a totally unconvincing theme running right through the story of Sunny rejecting help from cops and tough guys because she has to prove to herself that she's a real private eye - a woman who can handle herself without help from a man. Against three psycho-rapist killers? Is this strength, lunacy, or just a contrived motivation by a writer who can't make the story come out the way he wants any other way?
I guess some people liked it. It was, after all, published on tape and in print.
I don't remember much about this book but the comment above does bring back the frustration I felt when reading it.
| Author | Rucker, Rudy |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: EOS, 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 305 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | June 2004 |
In 2054, Phill Gottmer, living with a manic, self-absorbed drug addict, working as a restaurant cook, and making blimp models in his spare time, finds out that his father has been swept into the fourth dimension and, on the same day, meets the lovely Moon born Yoke Stan-Mydol, who becomes the love of his life. He goes to the south seas with her and becomes involved with a group of aliens who live in four dimensions and who eventually give Yoke a device for creating "realware". You pick something you want, say a ton of gold or of TNT, and it materializes it for you. The "alla" is soon in everyone's hands. But instead of creating paradise with it people are soon using it to make weapons, fight ethnic conflicts, and settle old personal scores. It is a disaster for the earth and eventually Phil and Yoke manage to get Om, the ruler of the fourth dimension to eliminate all of the allas.
The story is an outrageous cartoon but, for me, it didn't really matter. What I liked about it was R's wit, his sense of humor, and his concept of the naive, ordinary guy facing the stupendous, colossal, extra-ordinary universe with an undaunted attitude. I also liked the exotic characters, from the "moldies", a sort of artificial life form made of flexible plastic, to the middle-aged hippies and totally naive young people.
His books are fun to read.
Although Rucker writes lots of comedy, he is no slouch. He has a PhD in mathematics. I need to get my hands on a copy of his Mathematicians in Love. It sounds terrific.
| Author | Hunter, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | July 2004 |
Arkansas state trooper Earl Swagger, a former Marine Medal of Honor winner, is recruited by the CIA in 1953 with the public mission of guarding a randy old Arkansas congressman but the secret mission of assassinating the young revolutionary firebrand Fidel Castro. Swagger finds himself the target of corrupt officers, gangsters, pimps, and eventually, his own people. He is protected by an old Russian spy who outwits everyone, including his own corrupt embassy boss. Meyer Lansky and Ernest Hemingway both make brief appearances - L appearing as a wise and crafty gangster who just wants to run his business and get along, and H as an out of control drunkard whom Swagger has to punch when H attempts to force himself on a woman. In the end, S lets Castro go free but has a final shootout with an evil police torturer known as Ojos Bellos because he cuts peoples' eyes, and Frankie the Horsekiller - a dumb mafia gun thug. As in other Hunter novels, there's lots of gunplay and gun interest. Castro, the other historical character in the novel is given a lot of attention. He's portrayed as brave enough in some situations but vain, silly, self-obsessed, and immature.
Hunter is a very good writer. I always liked his movie reviews when he wrote them for the Baltimore Sun. I liked the guy when I met him in an airport taxi one day. But he has more in him than this. Swagger is a John Wayne cartoon. All his characters are cartoons. he is writing formula stuff for the market - presumably making a good living in his niche - straight talking, straight shooting, gun toting, silent he men - against the world. If only he would expand his characters and look at life and think more ...
Well, I do read these things and read to the end.
I think Hunter probably knows quite well what he's writing, who he's writing for, and what limitations he either has in himself or has to observe for his audience. And besides, how many authors would create a character who punches out Ernest Hemingway?
| Author | Lewis, Bernard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Middle East |
| When Read | July 2004 |
Lewis begins with an essay on the Middle East today, how the life and culture of its inhabitants is radically different from that of their grandfathers. Then he takes us back to Roman times - the struggle between Rome and Persia, the independent role of Arab tribes between the two, the sudden growth of Islam, the impact of Turks and Mongols, the Crusades, the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and the decay and defeat of the Ottomans in the face of the new European technological, military and economic power.
Lewis sees Islam as the most democratic of the great western religions. there are no Popes or bishops. The society, though autocratic, puts less emphasis on birth and blood than Western Christian society. Slaves occupied high rank in the Ottoman military and bureaucracy.
The Ottomans recognized four great communities defined by religion, not nationality or language. They were Muslim, Greek, Armenian, and Jew, in that order. But the Muslim culture forbade some trades like banking and activities like printing - causing real economic power to gravitate into the hands of the others after the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution.
There is much too much in this book to summarize on a 3x5 card. It is a well written, intelligent, deeply understood, and thoughtful book. It has much in it of Lewis' long observation, study, and reflection upon his subject. See also my diary.
| Author | Marryat, Frederick, Captain |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1829 |
| Number of Pages | 258 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Maritime |
| When Read | August 2004 |
Mischievous and unscholarly young Frank is sent to the Navy by his gentleman father. There his physical strength, great courage, intelligence, native charm, and easy good nature, win him respect, friendship and, eventually, advancement. Along the way he deals with bullying midshipmen and officers, incompetent, brutal and corrupt captains, battles with French and Americans, totally arbitrary actions by the Admiralty, and occasional postings in foreign ports where he relieves his boredom by trifling with women. He shacks up first with an orphaned and innocent young girl in England who becomes pregnant, and later with a mulatto girl in Jamaica who tries to murder him because of his infidelity. Then he meets a beautiful, well bred girl, daughter of a friend of his father's who first pledges to marry him then rejects him when she finds out about his bastard child. There is a series of deus ex-machina events at the end - his son and the boy's mother conveniently die, conveniently leaving him money. He conveniently wins big at the gambling tables in France. A best friend whom he insulted and almost killed in a duel conveniently comes back to life and his fiance conveniently forgives and marries him.
That's all pretty bad and unacceptable in 20th century writing but, in spite of that, the novel is written with some verve and charm. The author, himself a successful Navy captain, left the service after 14 years when this, his first novel, was published. His accounts of the navy certainly had the ring of authentic experience in them - although there is hardly any of the technical ship handling we find in Hornblower.
This is a kind of 19th century gentleman playboy book - conveniently ending with religion, remorse, forgiveness, and happiness. But I liked it.
I think, though it's hard to be certain without a wider acquaintance with literature than I have, that books aren't written quite this way anymore. There are still lots and lots of books with convenient happy endings. However I think there are two main differences. One is that authors may be at least a little more aware of the problem of plausibility. Not all authors care about that, but I think the majority of authors who have the skills and sophistication that Marryat exhibited do. The other, and more significant difference, is that contemporary authors would be much less cavalier in their treatment of women than Marryat was. I call that more significant because it's not just a change in literary conventions. It's a change in the way people think about gender and about human rights. It's a good change.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Cadfael |
| When Read | August 2004 |
A ten year old boy, a student at the monastery, becomes the nominal Lord of Eyton when his father dies. His grandmother attempts to retrieve him from the school and force him to marry an 18 year old neighbor as part of a land consolidation deal with the girl's father but Father Abbot, the boy's legal guardian, refuses.
Meanwhile, a holy hermit and a young assistant arrive in the neighborhood and are installed in a hermitage in the forest. The pair are very odd. It soon transpires that the young assistant is on the run from a cruel serf master who has pursued him to Shrewsbury, and is then found murdered in the forest. The lad is a likable and likely fellow who wins the heart of the forester's daughter.
In the end, of course, Brother Cadfael figures it all out. The secret past of the hermit is revealed to him. The young assistant is saved. The boy escapes marriage. The grandmother accepts the abbot's decision. And true love conquers. As always, Cadfael's role is more as observer and facilitator than as an actor in the drama.
These stories of murder and violence always have a curious gentleness and peace about them. It is as if wisdom, patience, and love, with the help of a bit of cleverness and resourcefulness, can be counted on to triumph over evil. It is what gives these books their special appeal.
This is the 14th book in the Brother Cadfael series.
| Author | Armstrong, Lance |
|---|---|
| Author | Jenkins, Sally |
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 275 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography; Sports |
| Keywords | Cycling; Lance Armstrong |
| When Read | August 2004 |
Lance relates the story of his life from childhood through his first win in the Tour de France. Raised by his mother with his father abandoning them, he grew up in a working class environment. Uninterested in school or study, he found himself in athletics - biking and running, and loved speed. He was ready to turn pro at age 17. Soon he was racing in Europe. Wild and undisciplined, he lost races because he didn't pace himself and follow his coaches' instructions. But after some years on the circuit he began to learn that winning requires thinking and discipline. Then he got cancer.
The cancer was very, very serious and he was very close to death. His team, Cofidis, decided he was finished and dropped him. Some doctors told him he was finished too. But he went to a sympathetic doctor in Indiana who was in the forefront of testicular cancer research. They gave him surgery and chemotherapy, to the point that he could barely walk. But he completed the treatment, built himself back up and the rest is well known.
The book reveals a very strong character. he came very close to giving up and becoming a bum but he pulled out of that and worked hard instead. He seems to be a very self-centered person. Yet he attracted strong attachments from others. I credit his wife and his excellent friends for doing much to save him. And his mother played a huge role.
The writing in this book is strong and clear, the ideas straightforward and honest. Both Lance and Sally Jenkins seem to have done an excellent job.
I read this book aloud, to Marcia, a few pages each night.
After coming in way at the back, the exasperated coach asks the teenage Lance, "Why did you breakaway so early in the race?" Lance replies, "I felt good." The coach replies, "Everybody felt good!"
My thoughts about Armstrong are complicated. He was a tremendous athlete, probably the best bicycle rider in the world and one of the top athletes of any kind in the world. I say that in spite of the doping discoveries because I believe that all of the top riders were doping. Although I can't prove it, I suspect that if none of them used drugs, Armstrong would still have been the winner. He was tough as nails with the psychological and intellectual strengths needed along with the physical strengths to be a winner.
| Author | Shaw, Irwin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1948 |
| Number of Pages | 689 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 2004 |
Three young men are drawn into World War II. Christian Distl, an Austrian ski instructor, becomes a sergeant in the Wehrmacht, serving under the war loving, cold hearted, Lt. Hardenburg, and eventually becoming a bitter, hate filled killer.
Michael Whiteacre, a successful Broadway and Hollywood writer, vacillates between wanting to believe in something, wanting to share the fate of common soldiers, and wanting to continue his life of easy women and soft living.
Finally, Noah Ackerman, lone, Jewish, without family or education, joins out of a sense of duty, leaving his young Gentile wife to face first the brutal anti-semitism of his company Captain and sergeants, and then the wrath of the Germans.
Noah and Diestl both become highly effective soldiers. N as a man who cares for his comrades and fights bravely against odds, D as a killer who cares no more for his own men than for the enemy.
In the end, Diestl kills Ackerman in one last act of pointless savagery when the war was already over. He tries to kill Michael too but is too cocky and is surprised and killed himself.
Shaw's prose is extraordinarily good. He captures the inner feelings of his characters and the interactions among them in passage after passage - each rewarding multiple readings. He can write effectively about a lonely man in a hotel room, a Broadway party, a farm in Vermont, a battlefield in Africa, a cafe in occupied France, or of a man and woman in a dark room.
The story is a sort of morality tale. Three human beings are sucked into this war. One becomes a saint, one a devil, and one muddles through - bewildered and disturbed, but finding meaning in it all.
Many scenes remain in my memory of this book. Noah Ackerman in a hotel room with his young bride. Noah in boot camp in the army. Relentlessly bullied as Jew, he decides to challenge anyone who thinks he won't fight. Excited by the prospect of hurting him, the top ten bullies in the company accept his challenge. He fights one per week in the boxing ring. One by one they beat him to a pulp but he never gives up and always comes back the next week. The tenth is a big man who wasn't really a bully but was persuaded by the others to fight. Noah beats him. His courage has earned the grudging respect of the bullies and his determination has made them wary of him. They leave him alone.
There are a number of shocking scenes with Christian Diestl. In North Africa his unit surprises and slaughters a British patrol. Lt. Hardenburg orders Christian to shoot the lone British survivor. When Christian does not act, Hardenburg pulls a gun on him but turns it to the Tommy and shoots him instead. Later, when all is lost in Africa, Hardenburg takes a motorcycle, puts Christian on the back, and escapes the coming fiasco, leaving the rest of his men to their fate. In France, Christian's patrol finds an American parachutist stuck, unarmed, and hanging from a tree by his parachute. The American offers to take the Germans' surrender. Christian admires the man's toughness, then shoots him. Later he betrays a long standing comrade who knows the war is lost, informing on him to the Gestapo. At the end, with nothing at all to gain, he kills Noah and goes after Michael, who throws a grenade at him. Surprised, Christian says, "Only an American would throw a grenade." and dies.
In another scene, Noah is on the front line in winter, in France. Michael joins his unit. They are dug in in a line facing a German position where they know there is a concealed machine gun. A trio of rear area wallahs, a lieutenant and two sergeants, drive up in a jeep and ask if the men know where they can get some war souvenirs. The local leader tells them that there are souvenirs in a ditch, down in front of their position. Michael moves to stop them but Noah stops Michael. As the three men move down the slope Noah tells Michael that they are soldiers too and they too have to make a contribution to the war effort. They aren't exempt. The three are killed by the Germans but the Americans now know where the machine gun is sited.
There was a very good movie of this book with Marlon Brando as Christian, Dean Martin as Michael, and Montgomery Clift as Noah. Brando/Diestl is given a more sympathetic part in the movie than in the book.
| Author | Brown, Dan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 597 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | August 2004 |
A respected art historian is murdered in the Louvre museum, leaving behind a cryptic message and a plea to contact an American professor who is visiting Paris. Police captain Fache wants to pin the crime on Prof. Langdon, but police cryptologist Sophie Nevew detects that the clues left by the old historian are coded messages to her, his granddaughter. She leads Langdon out in an escape from the Louvre and in a wild chase to find the Holy Grail.
Yep, that's it. The Holy Grail. Only in this ridiculous story the grail is a collection of ancient documents proving that Jesus was really a man who married Mary Magdalene, who bore him a child. The truth about this earth shaking history has been suppressed by the church but secretly preserved by the Knights Templar and a secret society for a thousand years. And now, if the secret is revealed, Christianity may not survive and the worship of the "sacred feminine" may be restored. Or maybe not.
The other plot elements and exotic characters in this silly story are equally improbable or downright absurd. Worst of all is the irrelevance of the whole story. It only makes sense if you completely reject any scientific world view.
I suppose what upsets me about this book is not its silliness. There are plenty of silly books. But this one was a long term number one best seller. Such is the taste of the American reading public.
Another problem in this book was the way the author manipulated the reader, creating a situation and set of observations that made a wrong conclusion about who the main culprit was inevitable for any person who knew how to read English. Then he adds facts at the end to twist everything around. But I guess this was not a fatal flaw. How can an author kill a book that's already dead?
I had another look at the Amazon reviews for the book. As of this writing there were 5,906 reviews, 50% of which were five star. I looked at 40 or 50 of the critical reviews, of which only a very few were one star. Most were two or three stars. Some condemned the writing style, some the characters, and some the plot. A number said the book was totally unbelievable though only one used the word "silly". I'm more restrained in my criticism of bad writing these days, but the astonishing popularity of this book (maybe it says more about me than about the reading public that I am astonished), brings out my antipathy.
| Author | Philbrick, Nathaniel |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 302 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Sailing |
| When Read | September 2004 |
In 1819 a small Nantucket whaleship left port with a crew of 21 men, including a half dozen black men and a few white sailors hired from the mainland. She was captained by a young 26 year old on his first command, a 22 year old first mate, and had a number of Nantucketers on board. They ran into a severe storm in the Atlantic and waited too long to shorten sail, causing a knockdown and the loss of all her spare whaleboats. Nevertheless, fearing that the crew would abandon her if they went home for repairs, they bought another whaleboat from a salvage ship and headed on around Cape Horn to the newly opened Pacific whaling grounds.
Despite the poor start and some more mishaps, they did fairly well and were filling with oil when, during a hunt, they were rammed twice by a big bull whale who stove in the ship. Rescuing all the supplies they could, the men abandoned the ship and began an incredible 85 day trek over thousands of miles to reach South America. The half dozen survivors of starvation, sunstroke, dehydration and cannibalism arrived in a semi-lunatic condition. The captain, Pollard, applauded for his rescue of some of his men, got another command but, incredibly, lost it too on shoal rocks in the mid Pacific -ending his days as a night watchman back on Nantucket. The whole story was a sensation at the time and was part of Melville's inspiration for Moby Dick.
Philbrick researched his subject in great depth and wrote a very readable, informative, intelligent narrative.
I believe that this book must have been a big seller. It garnered 1,367 Amazon reviews as of this writing. I wouldn't have expected that.
| Author | King, Laurie R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2004 |
Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell come to the aid of the Rev. Baring-Gould, elderly novelist and folklorist who lives at the edge of Dartmoor. They investigate an apparent murder and the scattered sightings of a ghostly carriage and devilish hound, recalling the story of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
A wealthy American and his male secretary now occupy Baskerville Hall. He has modernized it but appears to have tired of the place and is looking for a buyer. He seems nice enough but Holmes and Russell are auspicious. They split up and investigate different sections of the Moor, Russell astride an ill-tempered horse that throws her off a number of times. They meet various old characters and discover a second murder before finally discovering that the American is planning to salt a local stream with bits of gold to start a gold rush / land rush that will multiply the value of the Baskerville estate even as it destroys the natural beauty of the moor with a gold rush.
There is a showdown at the end - a dangerous confrontation in which Russell's quick thinking and bravery save Holmes and defeat the criminals.
As always, King's story is intelligent, readable, and full of interesting historical information.
| Author | Lewis, Cecil |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Collier Books, 1963 |
| Copyright Date | 1936 |
| Number of Pages | 332 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War I |
| When Read | October 2004 |
Going on seventeen years old and keen to fly and fight, Lewis was accepted into the Royal Flying Corps in 1915. Twenty years later he wrote this account of his experiences as a pilot in the war and for a few years thereafter.
As for many very young people, death was never entirely real to him, or at any rate, he never believed he would die. He flew as a reconnaissance pilot, a fighter pilot, a Zeppelin interceptor, an instructor, and again as a fighter pilot - accumulating many hours in the air and becoming thoroughly at home in the cockpit.
From other books I imagined the RFC to be ineptly led and sent out to die foolishly. But L's experience seemed to be of mostly competent and concerned leaders who prepared their men well and led them intelligently.
L was an aggressive fighter but what most distinguishes his writing is his love of flying. G.B. Shaw called him "a thinker, a master of words, and a bit of a poet." His ruminations are interesting - sometimes overly romantic, sometimes a little off the wall, but always interesting.
After the war he flew for Vickers and accepted a job with them training Chinese pilots in the early 20's. He had much to say about the Chinese people, culture, and the city of Peking - all of which were in the early period of a massive transformation under the influence of the West.
I liked the book and found the character eccentric and attractive.
| Author | Mistry, Rohinton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage International, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 603 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2004 |
In 1975, during Indira Gandhi's "Emergency" rule, two poor, low caste tailors make their way to a city to escape rural oppression, find jobs, and make a better life for themselves. Eventually they meet Dina, a 42 year old widow trying to live independently of her wealthy brother, and Manek, a student son of shopkeepers in a mountain town, living as a boarder with Dina. The tailors, 17 year old Omprakash (Om), and his uncle Ishvar, are living in almost unthinkable poverty and degradation in a one room shack that is then demolished by a police force in a cleanup campaign. They wind up sleeping in doorways. They are rounded up and sold as virtual slave laborers and, in the final indignity, they are forcibly sterilized. Om is forcibly castrated at the orders of a vindictive rural tyrant and Ishvar loses his legs and is reduced to living on a tiny wheeled plank.
The four main characters, initially at odds with each other, draw closer together and, for a while, fend off the oppressors - the lady who exports dresses, the landlord and his goondahs, the beggarmaster, and the police, officials, doctors and others in the government. Only Manek breaks out to a seemingly attractive future as a foreign expert in Dubai, but it is Manek in the end, isolated from the suport of the others and unable to bear his alienation and disappointment, who commits suicide.
This is a truly great novel. Although it is full of exotic characters from the legless beggar to Monkeyman, the proof reader, the hair collector, the rent collector, and many others, all of them are imbued with a humanity that is rarely achieved in literature. The scope of the novel is very broad, the language beautiful, the characterization truly amazing, the story compelling, and the understanding of politics and society very deep. It is a depressing book and hard to read because of that. But it is a truly great achievement.
This book belongs among the relative handful of truly great novels.
| Author | Gaskell, Elizabeth |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1853 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2004 |
In a small English country village the local society consists of a half dozen or a few more middle-aged and elderly ladies, all unmarried, or perhaps widowed. Each lives in her own house with a maidservant and amuses herself by visiting the others or being visited by them, for gossip, playing cards, and drinking tea. All are very conscious of their class and station in society, looking reverently upon their betters and condescending to their inferiors - just about everyone else in the town.
The narrator of the story, Mary Smith, is a younger woman from nearby Drumble who often visits her family friends, the Misses Deborah and Matty Jenkyns, the one a rather autocratic leader of the women and the other her very sweet younger sister.
There isn't any real plot in this novel, just a series of episodes of the lives of the Cranford ladies. The behavior of the ladies is conventional, ignorant, comical, ridiculous, but also rather human and somewhat touching. We see all the narrowness and ignorance of these women's lives but we don't really disdain them. They are doing the best they can in their limited, conventional way.
There is some of the feel of Jane Austen in G's writing. There is a fairly deep penetration into these limited social conventions - never reaching towards literary realism or naturalism, but managing to see deeply nevertheless.
This is not really my kind of book but I couldn't help but admire the delicacy and clarity of the writing. The book works well both as a comedy and as a novel of manners.
I think I read this as part of a book group, but I'm not positive of that.
I turned to Amazon to find the number of pages in a print edition of the book and saw half a dozen editions for which one edition reported 112 pages, one 544, and others in between. I know some, like the Penguin Classics edition, include a modern and lengthy introduction. I decided to record the number of pages reported for the Oxford World Classics edition.
| Author | Stone, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Houghton Mifflin, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2004 |
Michael Ahearn, English professor at an obscure northern mid-western college, has little communication with his wife or son and little to live for when he meets Lara Purcell, an exotic, beautiful professor from the Caribbean. He falls into an affair with her, drawn in deeply by her passion, her unconventionality, her exotic difference from his own drifting, pointless, bored life.
Unable to pull out of the relationship, A follows her to the island of St. Trinity where her family owns a hotel and where she is caught up in a world of voodoo and contraband drugs. A blunders through his experience there, surviving a coup, a scuba dive demanded of him by smugglers, a voodoo ritual, and various threats by Colombian gangsters and local putschists. Eventually he arrives back at the college where his wife throws him out and he is left with nothing.
There are lots of symbolic acts, metaphors, and existential wanderings in this short book. Sometimes turgid but never stupid, the writing is forced and the characters made to do things that we don't want them to do - irrational and self-defeating things. The characters are each locked in their separate worlds, not communicating well and pursuing self-defeating goals.
The title comes from the island bay where the voodoo practitioners believe that souls are held in limbo. Lara searches for hers and A seems to lose his in its perilous waters.
| Author | Keats, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott and Co., 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 425 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Philippines; World War II |
| When Read | October 2004 |
This is a true account, but written in a novelistic style, of American and Filipino resistance to the Japanese on the island of Mindanao.
Wendell Fertig, a civilian engineer called up in the emergency and given the rank of Lt. Colonel, organized a few Americans who would not surrender into a resistance unit. Soon he hooked up with a charismatic and brave half Filipino named Morgan who had created a company of guerrillas and needed the legitimacy that Fertig's army rank and U.S. connection gave him. After months of work, Fertig organized a civil government of resistance, suppressed the black market, built a radio, contacted U.S. military authorities, and recruited many Filipino fighters and local Moro and Manobo war lords into an increasingly effective irritant to the Japanese.
Intense efforts were required to orgaize logistics, keep Morgan and other warlords from fighting Fertig and each other, convince MacArthur's headquarters that they knew what they were doing, and keep the brutal Japanese army at bay.
The effort was remarkably successful. Using local resources plus supplies delivered by submarine, they held out against the Japanese garrison which, towards the end, grew to 150,000 men sent to destroy them in advance of the expected American invasion. Fertig's intelligence, honesty, and absolute dedication were instrumental in the success, and his administration was superior to that of the war profiteers and cowards who seized power with American help after the war.
This book was very well written, with great research and understanding.
It is my recollection, these many years after reading the book, that the resistance was never strong enough to confront the Japanese army in battle. They concentrated mainly on preserving themselves and as much of the island and as many of the islanders as possible, free of direct Japanese domination. There were occasional attacks on isolated Japanese patrols, and much more fighting in the way of ambushes and rear guard actions against Japanese patrols sent to round them up. They were very often in danger and on the run, but also successful in keeping significant areas relatively safe and free of Japanese except for significant offensives that drove them out but soon receded again.
I've sometimes wondered to what extent, if any, American experience of partisan warfare in World War II informed the counter-guerrilla operations of the U.S. in Vietnam and now in Afghanistan. I should think that the experience in the Philippines and in Burma and China would be more instructive than the partisan warfare in France. I wonder how often and how realistically the American commanders and policy makers responsible for counter guerrilla warfare really put themselves in the shoes of the people they are fighting and understand their advantages and their point of view.
See also W.E.B. Griffin's novel Behind the Lines, read in 2000. It's about Fertig's resistance on Mindanao, but it takes significant liberties with the history and is written with Griffin's very peculiar point of view on World War II.
| Author | Fast, Howard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1944 |
| Number of Pages | 294 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | October 2004 |
At the end of the Civil War, the slaves on a South Carolina plantation are still farming the land and raising food crops for themselves. The owners that are still alive have disappeared to Charleston and the plantation will be sold for back taxes. The federal occupation authorities call a state constitutional convention and an illiterate but charismatic man, Gideon Jackson, is elected. Trying to learn, trying to be just to blacks and whites, trying to do his best for his people, Gideon gradually educates and transforms himself. He and his people build homes, farms, a school. They buy the land they live on. They forge an alliance with local whites. They elect Gideon to Congress. But the planter class has never accepted them and will never share power with them or the poor whites. When the Union troops finally leave, the planter aristocracy rounds up the worst of the brutal white trash, arms them, supports them, and unleashes them on the uppity niggers, ultimately killing every man, woman and child in the community. How all of this happens, how the blacks rise, how the planters organize, how the mechanisms of the economy, the press, government and "law" are used to destroy them, is the subject and substance of the novel.
This was, and still is, an important book. Written during the days of segregation, before the voting rights act, before the great struggles for civil rights in the 1950's and 60's, this book tried to show that things didn't have to be as they were. They could have been different if only the people of the North had supported the struggle of the southern blacks and poor white allies for democracy and justice. F also shows that the history of Reconstruction as a period of demagogic manipulation of stupid blacks is not the only way to see what happened. He claims a very different historical truth.
Most of the people of the North supported the Union cause in the Civil War, but the liberation of blacks was not their main aim. Many were indifferent to the fate of blacks. Many considered them to be inferior as human beings, to the extent that they thought about them at all. They fought for the integrity of the Union, not for the slaves. It is not surprising that they were indifferent to the re-subjugation of blacks in the South after the war.
In Ian Kershaw's book, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, Kershaw argues that ordinary Germans were antisemitic but not violently so. He argues that the destruction of the Jews was accomplished because of the indifference of the Germans. They had other things, more personal, more close to home, to worry about than the fate of the Jews. So too the situation in the U.S. must have been like that with respect to blacks and still is like that among a large component of the American people. There is some violent anti-black racism, much more milder, non-violent racism, and a large helping of indifference. And so it was another hundred years before the modern civil rights movement began to make serious progress in America.
Fast's book should be read by more people. I doubt if it's much read anymore, but it certainly should be.
The end of this book was heart breaking. Fifty or so black people are trapped in a house, defending themselves against the white Ku Klux Klan types who have surrounded the house and are firing into it with guns and a small cannon. A fine young black man, a truly heroic figure, has escaped the house and made it to the town where he takes a message to the local telegraph office to get help from the U.S. government. The telegrapher takes the youth's dollar and pretends to send the message, but doesn't. The youth heads out and is shot down and killed. The people in the house, good people that we learned about and came to know over the course of the novel, are all shot or burned to death. It was hard to bear.
How many Americans, white or black, know about this sort of thing in our country's history? I give very high marks to Fast for trying to educate them.
| Author | Leon, Donna |
|---|---|
| Publication | BBC Audiobooks America, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2004 |
Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police investigates the death of a student at a private military school. The boy's father was a member of parliament who had issued an honest, revealing report about government corruption and was rumored to be investigating military contracting corruption when he was injured in an assault and his wife wounded in an "accidental" shooting.
Brunetti comes to the conclusion that the boy was killed by the son of a military contractor. He arrests the killer and calls a conference to interrogate the boy in the presence of his father and a great criminal lawyer. The boy then tells a story of an accidental death during a homosexual encounter that might embarrass the dead boy's family. Brunetti almost swallows this fabrication before seeing a hint of its falsehood. He goes to the dead boy's father and explained what he learned. The father was too afraid that more family members would be killed and did not want to pursue it. Brunetti had no hard evidence, an alibi he knew to be false but couldn't refute, no support from the police hierarchy or the victim's father. He dropped the case and let the killer go free.
Leon is a competent writer with a real interest in Venice and Italy. She loves the country and its people but also sees the waste. Her willingness to let a disgusting killer go free at the end and to show an honest, intelligent man beaten and intimidated is unusual in a mystery writer - indicating some independent thinking and literary integrity. The constrictive, corrupt atmosphere and downbeat ending make reading more of a slog than for similar mysteries, but I respect her integrity.
I think I've probably read other books that have addressed the situation of an honest man who submits to a corrupt establishment and acquiesces in a crime like this, but I'm not sure. Maybe some of Stuart Kaminsky's Inspector Rostnikov stories qualify. There are many novels in which a detective allows a person to go free because, although he broke the law, he did it for a righteous reason. That wasn't the case in this book.
Another moral dilemma not totally unlike this is how does one live an honest life in a totalitarian state - the best example being Nazi Germany? Resistance is not only tremendously dangerous, it's futile. Public resistance is nothing other than suicide. Assuming that you are not yourself a target, for example a Jew or a communist, you have to choose between keeping your head down, feigning subservience, and staying out of trouble, or doing all of that plus doing something to save a victim or damage the state. Hiding a Jew in your basement or attic qualifies, so does sabotaging work in a defense plant.
I think about those issues when I think about this book. Was there nothing Brunetti could do? Could he have exacted some private, secret retribution against the criminals? Would that have been the right or the wrong thing to do? I don't recall Brunetti thinking about it, but maybe he should have. Maybe it would have been the right thing for Leon to write about, or maybe it wouldn't. The problem is bigger than one can deal with in a short book note.
| Author | Pelecanos, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | St. Martin's Press, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 276 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2004 |
Nick Stefanos works as a bartender in a seedy Washington DC bar where he serves his regulars and then quietly gets drunk when they leave - lost in alcohol and music. He also takes work as a private investigator when he can get it.
He gets a call from an old high school buddy whom he had traveled with as a young man, drinking, doing drugs, acting wild and free. The old friend wanted his help in locating his wife. The plot became quite complicated. The old friend and a gangster had cooked up a plot to loot $200,000 from the gangster's uncle but the wife took the money and ran. She ran to a brutal hog farmer ex-boyfriend who killed her for the money and maybe just the fun. Then Nick discovers more gangsters with a pizza business who run a gambling joint, burn down rival pizza shops, and happened to kill another of Nick's old friends. Nick finally puts everything together in both cases. He confronts the hog farmer by accident and is almost killed by him but is rescued by a tough cop. Then he joins forces with another tough cop to cleanup the pizza gangsters and kill a crooked cop who shields them. Nick loses his sometime girlfriend, may have made another, and remains in his super-alienated, low class, alcoholic life.
This is an odd book in the noir mystery, anti-hero tradition. It's rather forced in its characterizations, relying heavily on the stereotypes of turned off, tuned out, tough guys, grandfatherly gangster gentlemen, seedy joints with low class but sterling characters, etc. I have been told that P's writing developed a lot after this book. I may read more to find out. Certainly there is promise here.
I don't remember who recommended Pelecanos to me but I'm thinking it had to be Sandy Dwiggins. She's my favorite reader and relater of mystery novels.
I've read eight more Pelecanos novels since this one. I liked most of them quite a bit - which might be deduced from the fact that I read eight of them.
| Author | Smith, Martin Cruz |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 364 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | November 2004 |
Wracked with malaria, out of money, friendless, living in London squalor, mining engineer Jonathan Blair, "Nigger Blair" to the press, takes a job from Bishop Hannay, a director of the Royal Geographic Society and owner of the Hannay Coal Company in Wigan England. Hannay wants him to find out what happened to the local rector who had been engaged to his daughter Charlotte. The rector disappeared the same day as a mine explosion that killed 72 men.
Blair hopes only to finish the job, get his money, and return to Africa where his daughter lives. But he is drawn into the mystery, becoming involved with a "pit girl" named Rose who sorts coal, and her brutal boyfriend who tries to kill Blair by kicking him with brass studded wooden clogs. He goes into the mine. He walks the fields,the streets, the workers houses. He learns of the rector's involvement with Rose, and his desire to share the life of the miners. And finally he discovers the truth.
The foolish rector had gone into the mine and caused the explosion by ignorance of safety procedures. "Rose" was actually Charlotte Hannay. The real Rose had switched places with her so Charlotte could escape the crassness of her upper class life. Bill Jaxon, the brutal boyfriend, is killed - falling down the mineshaft during a fight with Blair.
In the end, Blair and Charlotte run off to Africa leaving Wigan, Hannay, an evil Hannay nephew, and the whole Victorian, capitalist, sexist, exploitative society behind.
Some of Smith's writing is over the top. The story of the rich girl / pit girl is improbable. But it's still a fascinating read. Smith gives us information about mining, English culture in 1872, the suppression of women, and many fascinating topics. As in his other books, Smith writes much more than just mysteries.
| Author | Le Guin, Ursula K. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1987 |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | November 2004 |
Genly Ai, ambassador from the Ekumen of 80 worlds, is on Gethen, a cold planet inhabited by humans of dual gender. Once a month these people randomly become male or female. How such a thing came about, and why there are humans on this planet, is only hinted at.
Ai's attempts to persuade the king of Karhide and his minister Estreven to join the Ekumen ends in failure. Estreven is banished as a traitor. Ai goes to the country where Estreven has sought refuge where, eventually, he is arrested and sent to a forced labor camp where he would soon die. But Estreven saves him and the two make a heroic trek across the frozen north back to Karhide where Estreven is killed but Ai succeeds in forcing the king into an alliance with the Ekumen.
There are many themes in this book: the essence and meaning of gender, selfishness in politics, the moral authority of a single person who stands up for what is right, the ability of two ill-matched people of good will (Ai and Estreven) to come to understand and trust one another, the common human characteristics in many kinds of people, the superiority of trust and cooperation over fear and animosity. Le Guin has much of interest to say about each of them - and does so from inside the story and with sub-stories, myths of the winter planet related in small episodes from time to time.
L is not the sort of hard science SF writer that I am most attracted to. Her interest is more sociological. However she writes with a strong and appealing moral force and her ideas, although they explore pathways I wouldn't ordinarily travel (nor would most of us), are nevertheless interesting.
| Author | Armstrong, Lance |
|---|---|
| Publication | Rodale Inc., 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 196 |
| Genres | Biography; Sports |
| Keywords | Cycling; Lance Armstrong |
| When Read | November 2004 |
Photography by Graham Watson, forward by Robin Williams.
This is a coffee table style picture book with superb, professional color photos by Watson, who was then team photographer both for Motorola, Lance's first team, and U.S. Postal, his current team. Watson is one of the guys on the backs of the motorcycles riding in the races themselves and hanging around the training rides, the travel, the publicity events, the winner's podium, and everywhere else the riders go. All the speed, the danger, the exhaustion, the determination, and the thrill of racing is apparent in these photos.
Lance's account is for the layman racing fan. He says very little about his illness, his marriage, or the other personal matters he discusses in It's Not About the Bike. This book is about his personal triumphs, his efforts, and his many friends in the sport.
For a racing fan or an Armstrong fan it's a delightful read and view.
I never rode in a bike race and never intend to, even for riders my age. However I did do a fair amount of riding at one time in my life (my late 30's.) When we moved to our current house we had a cable TV channel that broadcast the Tour de France and some other races every year and, with my enjoyment of cycling, that got me interested in following racing, especially Lance Armstrong and the Tour. Knowing what is was like to ride hard, up and down hills, over significant distances, gave me a totally different perspective on watching the races on TV. Instead of thinking, "Why are these guys going so slow?" I thought "How is it that these guys manage to go so fast?"
| Author | Ivins, Molly |
|---|---|
| Author | Dubose, Lou |
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| When Read | November 2004 |
Ivins and Dubose write in extensive detail about how Bush has opened up the country to unregulated exploitation of the environment, consumers, workers, and any other resource from which money can be made. They say that Bush is not personally motivated by greed, but he is a complete believer in the premise that unregulated private enterprise is good, taxation is bad, and all regulation is bad. The environmental "superfund" program has been gutted, the EPA ombudsman throttled, the meat packing and other food industries allowed to escape from supervision, taxes cut for the rich, deficits allowed to run wild, minimum wages left to languish at historic low points, and on and on.
They detail the acts and the personalities. They show how all the regulatory agencies have been put in the hands of industry executives and lawyers - setting the foxes to guard the chicken coop. They explain the damage done, the techniques used, and the effects on the victims. Bush's tactics are described as bait and switch. Bush takes credit for everything positive that happened, even if he fought hard against it. His "No child left behind" program is shown up as an attack on education budgets and teacher's unions. His tax policy ruined Texas and is now ruining the nation.
The final section is on Bush's incompetent and often incoherent foreign policy, exposing his trashing of treaties, environmental agreements, alliances, foreign aid programs, etc.
It is a radicalizing, infuriating book. It calls on Americans to wake up and resist this oppressive, exploitative, and incompetent administration.
The balance of political ideology has shifted in this country. In 1964, Barry Goldwater was decisively defeated by Lyndon Johnson. Today, Goldwater's world view, first achieving power in the hands of Ronald Reagan, may be predominant. Class consciousness, never strong in the U.S., is now dead. The ideology of unregulated capitalism holds a majority of white people in the U.S., and now Mitt Romney, possibly the best of the Republican candidates, is running on a platform that is only slightly to the left, if at all, of the most vociferous Tea Party extremists.
Will we ever achieve a stable, progressive consensus in the U.S.? Will we ever evolve a society like Holland or Denmark or Sweden - without significant poverty and with equal education, medical, and other possibilities for all? Who can say? History is ever changing and all we can know for sure, is that the long term future will continue to evolve and change. I get worked up about all of it but I have little more confidence in myself than in those in government who I think are doing the wrong things.
| Author | Balzac, Honore de |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1832 |
| Number of Pages | 90 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories; Comedy |
| When Read | November 2004 |
These are 10 delightful stories set in 16th century Touraine. a boyish young priest is smitten at the sight of a high priced courtesan patronized by his cardinal. The King plays a trick on three misers. A possessive rich man is cuckolded by his fair wife. The young wife of a nobleman pretends to sleep while she is serviced by a young page. A jealous knight sets his closest friend to guard his wife. A jovial and well loved priest tells his housekeeper a story of a raging stallion, then acts it out for and on her.
They are all stories about sex, jealousy, miserliness, caprice, and other human foibles - all told with sparkling wit and humor and the most wonderful economy. B can set an entire scene, a tone, a character, or even two, and a central theme for his story, all in just the opening sentence. The reader is entranced from the very first sentence.
B is no respecter of rank. Kings, cardinals, priests, dukes, rich misers and handsome knights - all are grist for his mill. That cardinals solicit prostitutes, that kings steal the wives of their subjects, and even that local priests sleep with their housekeepers, is merely the backdrop of the stories. It is so taken for granted that it doesn't need to be established. It is automatically assumed. The stories begin with these verities as the understood context for what will happen.
B is a master in so many areas: human observation, language, human nature, satire, plot, and reader satisfaction. Art, idea, perception, and craft all come together in a harmonious whole.
Need I say that I liked these stories?
I don't know if anyone reads these stories today. For that matter, I don't know how many people still read Balzac at all. But they should. His writing is a great treasure of human culture.
See also my notes on the same stories in 2023-06.01.
| Author | Spark, Muriel |
|---|---|
| Publication | Thorndike Press, 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | November 2004 |
In 1974, Lord Lucan, aiming to murder his wife, mistakenly murders the Nanny in the dark, then disappears from sight. He is rumored to be in many places but shows up for real, apparently seeking psychiatric help, in the office of Hildegard Wolf, famous Paris psychiatrist. Soon a second Lucan also appears, also claiming to be the missing lord. Eventually it transpires that one is the real lord, the other a butler working with him to collect money from old friends who keep him alive for the sake of his class. They have come to Wolf to blackmail her. She is in fact the infamous Beate Papperheim, a fraudulent stigmatist who received money in return for her prayers and miracles.
Spark skewers everyone in this comedy - the British upper class, the foolish people who admire them, psychiatrists, religious fanatics and the people who support all of them - the aiders and abettors.
The writing is clear and easy. Much of it is made up of odd, improbable conversation and outrageous behavior. My favorite of these outrages is Wolf's insistence that her clients may not speak but only listen during the first three therapy sessions. It is a reversal in comic form of the Freudian refusal to answer questions or give advice. It places emphasis where the therapist often really feels it, on himself and, while doing no good for the patient, makes him nonetheless fix himself to the psychiatrist and pay good money for bad advice.
The books is breezy and easy. Not a very serious or literary book, it's still a fun read.
| Author | Budiansky, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Viking Penguin, 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 518 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation |
| When Read | November 2004 |
Budiansky recounts the history of air power from the Wright brothers to the Second Gulf War. His emphasis is on Britain and the U.S., especially discussing the history of strategic air power. He studies in considerable depth the almost always false assumptions of the strategic air power advocates - showing how it failed to achieve any of its goals in World War I or II, Korea, or Vietnam. Sustained by unwavering faith in their equipment, methods and special role in world events, the generals sent a hundred thousand airmen to their deaths over occupied Europe for a very poor effect on Germany's war making ability - yet believed to the end and after the end, in spite of all studies establishing the contrary, that they had won the war. Curtis Le May's "bomb them back to the stone age" prescription for Vietnam fared no better. Although the die hards believe to this day that they were held back from winning the war, the truth is that, first, they dropped vastly more bombs on vastly more targets than they initially claimed were required and, second, their massive and costly "Rolling Thunder" operation was essentially irrelevant to the war in the south.
B is very convincing. He shows that, even in the era of smart bombs which finally make precision bombing possible, it is close air support, now often delivered from 30,000 feet with GPS guided bombs, that wins wars, not strategic air power.
I was persuaded when I read the book. Later, reading and participating in the discussions on soc.history.war.world-war-ii, by posters with significantly wider reading than mine, I'm not so sure. Many of them thought that the attacks on oil, transportation, and other strategic targets did cripple Germany - even if it didn't happen until late in the war. Clearly, the nuclear bombing of Japan did end that part of the war - though the strong advocates of strategic bombing seem to believe that it isn't necessary to go that far in order to win.
From what I've read since reading this book, I'm thinking in particular of Robert Mrazek's Kingdom Come and Alfred Price's Battle Over the Reich, Vol 2, 1943-45, the strategic bomber offensive started too early. Until the U.S. gained air superiority over the Reich, the losses were severe and did not justify the gains. The combat commanders knew that, but the top brass, especially Hap Arnold, were convinced that the only smart way to win the war was with strategic bombing. They had to produce results in order to get more government support and to keep resources from being diverted (as Arnold saw it) into other areas, such as MacArthur's thousand heavy bombers for the Pacific. He forced his commanders into flying suicide missions that sometimes produced almost zero results for the high casualties accepted. That, in turn, reminds me of Basil Hart's view that many WWI British and French top commanders were guilty of murdering their own troops and should have been called to account.
I remain open to argument on this, but it seems to me that the strategic bombing offensive was too early, that it was a serious mistake that did more harm than good to the war effort, that bombers should not have flown over areas without powerful fighter support - unless there was a mission against such a high value target that near suicide was acceptable, and that the men and machines lost could have achieved more in other areas. Everything changed in the spring of 1944 when the P-51 Mustang arrived and established air superiority over most of Germany. Until then, we should have put our resources into other areas.
| Author | Barry, Dave |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 287 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Comedy |
| When Read | November 2004 |
A mystery/comedy about a collection of assorted losers who converge on a gambling excursion boat, the Extravaganza of the Seas, off the coast near Miami, in a tropical storm. the ship carries gamblers off shore from Miami and also does mid-ocean transfers of drugs and money.
The losers include Wally, lead guitar for the rock band Johnny and the Contusions, Arnold and Phil from the Beaux Arts Senior Center ("Old Farts Dying Center" they call it), Fay Benton - single mom cocktail waitress and undercover coast Guard agent, and various gangsters, killers, idiots and jerks.
The humor in the novel is slapstick and heavy handed. Every joke is repeated, too often to the point where you can barely stand hearing it again. There is nothing in the least bit subtle about any of it. So I should probably be embarrassed to say that it made me laugh, but it did.
Would I read another? Maybe if I'm depressed someday.
As is often the case with audio books, the narrator is a real master.
| Author | Crichton, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ballantine Books, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 268 |
| Extras | bibliography |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 2004 |
Computer expert Harry Benson suffers brain damage in an accident that leaves him subject to episodes of extreme violence. His doctors plan to implant electrodes in his brain that will be fired by an implanted computer to stimulate positive thoughts when it detects precursor symptoms of a violent fit. His psychiatrist, Janet Ross, opposes the plan. Harry already has a growing psychotic fear that computers will take over the world and she fears that implanting a computer in his body will feed this psychosis.
The predicted events happen. Harry gradually becomes violent, partly in spite of, and partly because of, the implants. He becomes a killer, hunted by the police. He is very clever and evades capture until the end when he returns to the hospital to destroy the central computer there. In the end he is shot dead by Ross - who had tried hard to help him.
This was Crichton's second book published under his own name. The characters are straightforward, the plot simple, but it already shows his talent for meticulous research and plausible extrapolation of technical developments.
It was a fast, easy read, a competent thriller of its type.
The four bit Intel 4004, the world's first computer on a chip, was introduced in 1971, and the 8008 in April, 1972. The 8080, the first microprocessor to be developed into powering a standalone computer, was not introduced until two years later in 1974 (I remember the excitement of those days.) Crichton was certainly on the cusp of understanding of the potential of the new developments. Many others were also speculating about these chips but Crichton was right there with them.
| Author | Martin, Steve |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | December 2004 |
Lonely, neurotic, Daniel Pecan Cambridge lives in his Santa Monica apartment, crippled by restrictions he has placed on himself (never step over a curb - cross streets only where there are opposed driveways, always have exactly 1125 watts of light on, and much more) and living on a monthly disability check plus occasional gifts from his grandmother, who dies, leaving him with no one.
Daniel dreams of three women, Elizabeth the real estate agent he sees across the street, Clarissa, the student social worker who sees him twice a week, and Zandi, the pharmacist at the Rite-Aid, the only store he has figured out how to reach without stepping over a curb. He pursues Elizabeth first but his behavior is hopeless. Then he becomes involved in protecting Clarissa and her toddler son from an abusive husband and develops high hopes for her. But while she loves him as a person she cannot fall in love with him as a man. In the end however, and to his total surprise, Zandi turns out to like him and they wind up together as he gradually overcomes his neuroses.
At first I thought this character was too neurotic and his presentation too artificial and ridiculous. But the character and the story grew on me. Like Zandi, I came to appreciate this guy's real human qualities, his intelligence, his surprising understanding of himself, his genuine concern for others, and his willingness to care for others in spite of his own incapacity. Martin is an excellent writer, full of surprising but nonetheless interesting ideas and with considerable depth both of humanity and of understanding. I'll read anything else he publishes.
| Author | Turow, Scott |
|---|---|
| Publication | books on Tape, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Legal |
| When Read | December 2004 |
Convicted death row inmate Rommy Gandolph draws corporate lawyer Arthur Raven as his court appointed pro-bono lawyer to appeal his death sentence. Rommy seems too scatter brained and harmless to be a murderer but he did confess. Conscientious, hard working, plodding Raven follows all the leads and comes to the conclusion that Rommy really is innocent.
On the other side prosecutor Muriel Wynn and hard charging cop Larry Starczek, who bullied Rommy into confessing ten years before, try to prove that he really is guilty.
The legal/technical aspects of the novel are sophisticated and fascinating and the personalities and side stories - Larry's love for Muriel, Arthur's crush on the discredited former heroin addict judge and his care for his schizophrenic sister - are also solid and absorbing.
It turns out that a dying convict, Erno Erdai, was the real killer and was protecting his only kin, a black nephew who had gotten in trouble over and over again. He confesses to save Rommy but his confession is a mix of truth and lies.
The story is an effective mixture of law, love, ambition, crime, and character. It moves back and forth between the events of the time of the crime and the events of the appeal ten years later.
I wasn't expecting all that much, just another legal / crime thriller. But I got much more than that. The story works well on all of its levels. Turow is a real writer. I had forgotten how good he is.
If I remember the story correctly seven and a half years later, after Arthur wins the appeal, a slick black lawyer moves in, gets Rommy to sign up with him, and launches a wrongful conviction lawsuit to win millions of dollars from the state, including a fat fee for the lawyer. Arthur tries to get Rommy to go with him instead. He's the one that did the work. He's the one who believed in Rommy's innocence. He's the one who won the case. He's the one who has proven his trustworthiness. But Rommy is a simple soul, easily manipulated. Arthur gets no financial reward for all of his efforts. But the love story works out well for him. The former judge who looked upon Arthur as a schlemiel, recognizes something more in him and finds herself, against all expectations, falling in love with him.
I liked that part of the story.
| Author | Cornwell, Bernard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 355 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | December 2004 |
The novel opens with a battle at the English siege of Calais during the Hundred Years War. Afterward, the archer Thomas of Hookton is out on a mission with his first independent command of 50 men. His expressed agenda is to seize the castle in a sleepy town in southern France, pillage the surrounding country, and escape with his loot to his liege lord behind English lines. However his hidden agenda is to find the Holy Grail, Christ's cup, which legend holds has been hidden in the area. Thomas' own father, a "half mad" French priest, was thought to know where it was.
Other characters are the avaricious and foolish old count of Berat, his bully of a nephew - the stupid Jocelyn, an evil priest, a good priest and father abbot, an evil cousin of Thomas who leads troops against him, an evil cardinal who forges a grail cup and kills the forger, a foolish Scottish soldier, and the heretic of the title - a beautiful girl condemned to death and saved by Thomas.
This is the sort of novel I loved at age 13. Today, all I can see in it are its formulaic content, its cardboard characters, its forced romance and forced adventure where no romance or adventure is in the story to be had, and its defective moral tone - twisted to the limit to enable the reader to see a professional pillager as a figure of admiration and reader identification. The capitalization on Dan Brown's Davinci Code doesn't recommend it either.
Cornwell is a popular author with a loyal following. People somehow accept the romances and are excited by the battle scenes. I guess there are still many 13 year old readers.
| Editor | Mitchell, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 2050 BC? |
| Number of Pages | 290 |
| Genres | Unclassified |
| When Read | December 2004 |
The oldest known story in the world comes to us from the shards of an Aramaic cuneiform version found in the rubble of Ashurbanipal's destroyed library. The Sumerian version dates to at least 2000 BC, if not earlier, and relates the mythic adventures and glories of King Gilgamesh of Uruk who may have actually ruled that city around 2700 or 2750 BC.
Gilgamesh, descended partly from the gods, oppresses his people using his godlike strength. But another great wild man, the feral man Enkidor, is sent to him and becomes his friend. The two travel to the great cedar forest and slay its guardian, the monster Humbaba. But later Enkidor sickens and dies, perhaps as a punishment for Humbaba's death. Distraught over the death of his only friend and terrified by the realization of his own mortality, G goes to the end of the earth to find the one man, the Sumerian Noah, who has been granted immortality and to learn the secret from him. His heroic quest is not rewarded with success, but he returns to Uruk a wiser man and with an appreciation of the greatness and the seeming immortality of his city.
The story is unlike any other I know. It is more distant even than the Bible or the mythology of Greece or Scandinavia - though perhaps those myths are closer to Gilgamesh than to us.
Mitchell's reconstruction of the story updates the language and some of the rhetoric and makes some transitions across missing parts of the text. This makes the story readable, but it still feels odd and alien. Two CDs only are devoted to the story. The other two contain Mitchell's interpretation and explanations - which help a great deal to make the story understandable and to show us the universals in this early work.
Gilgamesh doesn't open the past to us but it does show us some early shadows on the wall of our cave of cultural evolution.
I am very interested in the evolution of consciousness and the culture that is built upon it. As far as written records go, Gilgamesh is about as early as we can get. It's a tantalizing glimpse, a small region of murky detail that can be perceived through the fog. I wish I understood more.
| Author | Walker, Blair S |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 2004 |
Baltimore Herald reporter Darryl Billups goes to a crime scene where an old body is discovered in a rented storage shed. Shots are fired, wounding two cops and killing a suspect and bystanders. D attempts to get to the truth of the story but someone is attempting to cover it up by stealing and cremating the body. As D gets closer to the truth he becomes a target. Eventually, he and a beautiful black woman cop figure out most of it but are trapped and almost killed. They escape and call for help but the help that arrives, another detective who was the woman's, partner and acquaintance of D shows up and also tries to kill them.
They survive all and solve the crime, tracing it ultimately to Baltimore's mayor and his brother.
As a crime novel this works reasonably well. It has the added fillip of a quite interesting African American cultural perspective and lots of local Baltimore color. There's nothing important here but it's competently written and delivers on the promise of this genre.
I had only vague memories of this novel, less than I do for most books I read that long ago. The above notes bring some of it back, but not a great deal.
| Author | Haddon, Mark |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 226 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Autism |
| When Read | December 2004 |
Fifteen year old Christopher is autistic. He goes to a "special needs" school and lives at home with his father - his mother having run off with a neighbor. The father has concealed the facts from C, telling him that his mother is dead and intercepting all of her letters to him.
C is interested in, and good at, math and science. he admires Sherlock Holmes. he is motivated by a rigid inner logic that requires him to do things like look for 4 or 5 yellow or black cars in a row and decide whether it will be a good or bad day based on what he finds.
When the neighbor's dog is killed, C goes on a hunt for the killer. Eventually he learns that his father is the killer and cannot be trusted. He makes the boldest move of his life - going to London by train, in spite of enormous psychological difficulties, to find and live with his mother. To everyone's surprise except his, he succeeds. But his mother can't really handle him. She has too many needs of her own. She doesn't understand him as his father does and can't cater to his needs as well. Yet the book ends on a surprisingly optimistic note. C is pleased with himself, has found a way to get along with both parents - albeit on his own psychological terms, and is looking forward to college study and the chance to become a scientist.
The novel is light and easy to read in spite of its difficult subject. The main characters, C, his parents, and a teacher, are extraordinarily well observed. There may not be another novel like it with the inside perspective of an autistic child. We find C hard to take. His rigidity is upsetting. But we learn a lot about hm and come to accept him as a human being.
A very good book.
This wasn't the kind of book I ordinarily read. Psychology isn't my thing, and books about children with problems are even less so. I chafe at situations where a main character is powerless for internal reasons to influence his fate.
Yet I wound up liking this book. Perhaps I learned that Christopher, despite all appearances, was not strictly powerless to influence his fate. It was a learning experience for me as well as for him.
Only recently, and quite by chance, I came across the origination of the title of this book. It comes from the Conan Doyle / Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of Silver Blaze". As quoted in the Wikipedia in the entry for "Silver Blaze":
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
Holmes: "That was the curious incident."