Books read January through December 2006
| Author | Keneally, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Publication | Melbourne, Australia: Bolinda Audio Books, 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Iraq |
| When Read | January 2006 |
Alan Sheriff is a writer in an unnamed country that is obviously Iraq. Agonized by the death of his wife, he buries his latest, greatest novel in her coffin and destroys all other copies. Then he is called to a meeting with the Great Uncle (Saddam Hussein) who has chosen Sheriff to write a great novel under Uncle's name in exactly 30 days in order to show the misery and unfairness of sanctions to the world. S can only do it by digging up his wife's coffin, which he finally does. He satisfies the tyrant, after which he effects a harrowing escape in an oil barrel on a barge and becomes a displaced person in a camp in Greece.
K has given all of the characters English names, which unsettles the reader, and practically forces him to see Iraqis as real, ordinary, often middle class and professional people. His expose of how ordinary decent people can be caught up in the presence of tyranny is brilliant - showing how nice people chose to support Saddam, not only out of fear, but also out of ambition and hope of reward. His portrayal of Uncle as a man who speaks quietly but cannot be denied, and of very civil but dangerous "overguards", the tyrant's personal body guard, are brilliant. His handling of the death of Sheriff's wife, his relations with the half demented Mrs. Carter, mother of a dead soldier, and with the lovely and tragic Susan James, are all original and impressive, even if they are devastating.
This is a novel that one can't like, but can admire and be quite absorbed in. It is a very original piece of writing.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2006 |
Young Carlos Webster grows up on his father's Oklahoma Pecan farm in the 1920's. When he shoots a cattle rustler at age 15 he's picked out by a U.S. marshal as a future recruit. Soon Carl develops a reputation as a fearless marshal who faces the meanest, most dangerous killers, demands their surrenders, and says, "If I have to draw my weapon I'll shoot to kill."
The story follows Carl, his cool, wannabe gangster moll girlfriend, a flashy but highly competent writer for True Detective magazine, a number of crooks, cops, and hookers, and Jack Belmont - the rotten son of an oil well owner who tries to blackmail his own father, then kidnaps his father's mistress - and who becomes a somewhat incompetent crook but a highly dangerous cold-blooded killer.
As always, Leonard's characters are delightful. They take themselves dead seriously no matter how ridiculous they are and the intermix of suspense and comedy that is unique to Leonard drives the story forward and makes the reader unable to put it down.
Unlike so many authors, L gives his characters parents and shows his people in ordinary or maybe extraordinary situations that reveal the essence of their characters every bit as much as the gunfights and stratagems that are the high points of the plot.
Carl, with the help of his girl, gets his man.
| Author | Campbell, Neill A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Benjamin Cummings Publishing Company, 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 1206 |
| Extras | illustrations, microphotos, appendices, glossary, index, CD |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biology |
| When Read | January 2006 |
This standard textbook for a two semester college course surveys the entire subject from the atomic scale chemistry of water to the planetary scale ecology of the earth. The major units are "The Chemistry of Life", "The Cell", "The Gene", "Mechanisms of Evolution", "The Evolutionary History of Biological Diversity", "Plants", "Animals", and "Ecology".
The book is outstanding. It has a very logical organization, very lucid and clear explanations, superb illustrations, and an almost uncanny ability to explicitly raise and answer questions that are implied in the previous explanations. I read every word, studied it seriously, took and checked all of the quizzes, and generally worked diligently to learn the material over a one year period. I've learned a great deal.
I think I started with the 5th edition that I bought for $3.00 at a used book store. I switched to the later ones when copies showed up in the store, typically also for $3.00. The changes were minimal.
This book is the real starting point of my efforts to learn some serious science. I am continuing on and making good progress.
It looks like I started studying about seven years ago. I've learned quite a lot since then. This book provided an excellent foundation.
This book was something of a life changing experience for me. I have been a philosophical materialist for many decades but I never thought much about the relationship between life and physical science. I assumed that there was a lot that just wasn't known. However Campbell showed me that, while that's true, there is a huge amount of information about the physical nature of life that IS known, much more than I imagined. I was especially taken with the knowledge that we have about how the activities of all life - metabolism, growth, reproduction, evolution, interaction with the environment, thinking, and so on - are all explainable in terms of ordinary biochemical reactions that can be understood and demonstrated in laboratories, outside of physical cells. It's not just that we believe this for philosophical reasons (we have no evidence of any supernatural or "spiritual" effects in living organisms), we also have very good evidence about most of the specifics of how it all works. We know, for example, not only the structure of DNA, but the specific chemical reactions involved in extracting DNA segments from chromosomes, in transcribing the genetic code into RNA, and in translating the RNA into proteins, and we know the functions of the proteins as molecular machines in the cells. We know the enzymes that catalyze these reactions, and the specific mechanisms that call forth and regulate the production of particular proteins. We know exactly how DNA is replicated and how a cell divides to produce two daughter cells that are copies of each other, and how and why those two cells can differentiate from one another to form the basis of the development of a complete human being, or an elephant, or an oak tree, or an ant, from an original single fertilized cell. I was fascinated by the construction of life from non-living matter. I was amazed to see how there is a continuum reaching from matter which is unquestionably non-living to matter that is unquestionably alive, with a multitude of steps in between, none of which involves a qualitative change from what went before. Rather there are small changes here and there, this evolved, then that evolved, and the sum of these specific, quantitative changes, changes that may sometimes have been by the addition of this functional group to that molecule to make a slightly different molecule that had new properties that, in sum, made a qualitative change in the organism's development on the way to higher and higher and more sophisticated life forms. There are gaps in our knowledge but there are no mysteries. We understand what kinds of things must fill those gaps. We understand the laws of chemistry and thermodynamics that govern them.
It took about 200 pages before I reached a threshold of understanding and a paradigm shift in my own thinking about the nature of life. When that happened, I continued reading, avidly absorbing all I could. Later I went on to read other books in both chemistry and biology leading to reading the great Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et. al. I have retained much more of that knowledge than I imagined that I could. It has become a central and integral part of my thinking about life, humanity, and the world.
| Author | Yourcenar, Margueritte |
|---|---|
| Translators | Frick, Grace |
| Publication | New York: Modern Library, 1984 |
| Copyright Date | 1954 |
| Number of Pages | 347 |
| Extras | bibliography, photos, "Reflections on the Composition..." |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | January 2006 |
In the year or two before his death, the emperor Hadrian writes a memoir to his chosen successor. He writes of his love for a young Greek boy who sacrificed himself in a ritual prescribed by an Egyptian magician so that his years could be added to those of the emperor. The image of this boy in his beauty, youth, and simplicity, haunts him. He writes of his restlessness, his inability to settle in Rome, his need to visit all parts of the empire - to see all, to work everywhere, to be involved in administration. He writes of his total estrangement from his wife. He writes of the schemes and manipulations of his rivals whom he eventually kills, but without rancor and without revenge on their families. He writes of his growing weariness and weakness and his acceptance of death.
Y wrote this book over a period of two decades - abandoning and even destroying it and then returning to it and rewriting it. She appears to have read ALL of the classical sources and stood ready to justify everything she wrote as a plausible interpretation of Hadrian's interior life.
The writing is quite deep. There is no drama, no action, no dialog, just a first person narrative - more of thoughts and reflections than of events. It's a pretty remarkable book.
I read it upon the recommendation of a young Frenchman who visited from the French National Cancer Institute.
I can't remember the Frenchman's name who recommended this. Bob and I went to dinner with two Frenchmen and some NCI people (Michael Arluk? Margaret Beckwith?, was Mike Rubenstein still alive and with us?). I think the older man, perhaps in his 50's, may have been a cancer expert who had taken up informatics. I seem to recall that the younger one, about 30, was a computer person. We talked about politics and the recent riots in Paris. I asked if the issue was race and nationality or class. Both men said, without hesitation, that it was a class conflict. The proper interpretation of the riots was clearly a matter of extreme importance to politically active French citizens, which these men clearly were.
We got to discussing French literature. I mentioned the authors that I have read, but they were almost all nineteenth century. The young man said that I had to read some twentieth century work. I asked him who he would recommend and this was the book he came up with at the top of his list. I don't remember who else he may have mentioned.
I liked the two men we met and would love to talk to them again to find out more about current politics in France and also to discuss literature. It was my impression that they were pleased to meet an American who was interested in literature and progressive politics as well as computers.
| Author | Keegan, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audiobooks, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | War |
| When Read | January 2006 |
K, a military historian and instructor at Sandhurst, the British military academy, writes about what it would have been like to be a soldier in the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. Never a soldier himself, K nevertheless is deeply interested in the on-the-ground, face-to-face view of fighting, whether with bows and swords, muskets and bayonets, or machine guns and artillery. I don't know if he gets it right, but he certainly provides convincing amounts of evidence coupled with an encyclopedic knowledge of the literature and a deep respect for the soldiers that lived through these battles.
He discusses motivation - what makes a man stand up to enemy fire, and how it really differs in different times and places. Religion was a factor at Agincourt but not at Waterloo. Drink was a factor in both. At the Somme, community spirit, patriotism, and the "Pals" brigades of fellows with common backgrounds played a role.
In addition to considerable insight into swordplay, horses, gunshots, etc., he also has really interesting comments on military historians and their histories. He shows up many strengths and weaknesses, treating his forebears with both criticism and respect.
A very interesting, ideosyncratic, intellectual book. I don't believe everything K says, especially his conclusions about the future of warfare. But he is never not worth reading.
| Author | Roth, Philip |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 391 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Alternate history |
| When Read | February 2006 |
In 1940, Charles Lindbergh is swept into office as President of the U.S. on an isolationist platform with an unspoken but clear and threatening antisemitic message. Seven year old Philip Roth lives with family - an insurance salesman father, housewife mother, precocious artist older brother, and others in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey.
Gradually the screws tighten on the Jews. It starts with small things that gradually build up. The Jewish response, including a 1944 presidential campaign of the loud, abrasive Walter Winchell and his assassination, is convincingly imagined. There are collaborators, and resisters. There are the great mass of Jews who try to lie low and hope this will not build to a Nazi-like state. But it gets close. Lindy himself disappears and an attempted coup almost leads to a fascist state.
This is a remarkably well conceived and quite frightening alternate history. Everything goes to hell very gradually. The pressures build up slowly. The strain accumulates slowly. The people fight each other in their frustration, anger and fear. Every negative incident and program has an alternate, non-antisemitic explanation. Every move towards disaster looks like a small step that might not destroy the community. It is only when we are well down the road that we realize how far we have traveled.
I never thought of World War II as that much of a near thing. Nazi Germany created too many enemies. But an isolationist, fascist friendly U.S. would have made an enormous and frightful difference.
It's only more recently that I have come to see World War II as a near thing. I now think that Hitler had it in his power to win. If he had treated the Soviet peoples magnanimously, I believe that he would have won in the east. If he had not declared war on the U.S. and had instead made diplomatic efforts to neutralize us, he might have kept us out of the war for another year, maybe even long enough to have forced Britain to the bargaining table.
How would a pro-Nazi regime have played out in the U.S.? Roth gives us a scenario for it - both for how it could have taken power through the candidacy of Charles Lindbergh, and how it could have gradually isolated the Jews. I can imagine going to work and being told that my services were no longer needed. Antisemitic epithets wouldn't need to be invoked. I'd just be told that I was redundant and let go. Marcia's clients could begin dropping out, perhaps without explanation. Our children or grandchildren could be humiliated in school and blocked from entering colleges. No brownshirts or Nuremberg laws would be required.
It was a pretty frightening story.
See diary for February 19, 2006.
| Author | Dumas, Alexandre (pere) |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1850 |
| Number of Pages | 226 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | February 2006 |
In 17th century Holland the DeWitt brothers are arrested by their political enemy and killed by a mob. Before they die, one of them sends a message for safe keeping to his completely naive and innocuous nephew, Cornelius van Baerle, whose only interest in life, and that a real passion, is growing tulips.
Both Cornelius and his poorer neighbor are obsessed with breeding a pure black tulip, winning the prize for it, and becoming famous and honored among tulip fanciers. The neighbor, realizing that C will win the prize, betrays him to the police, accusing him of felonious contact with his disgraced uncle.
C is arrested and sent to prison. There he meets the beautiful Rosa, daughter of the jailer - a wicked, drunkard brute of a man. He teaches her to read and write and to care for the bulb he has saved. Although the evil neighbor is still after him and suspects all, Rosa saves the day.
The story is simple and the characters equally so. The young lovers are pure and sweet. The jailer is loutish. The neighbor and the prince who persecuted the Dewitts are evil and sly. Yet for all that, the tale has great charm and is a pleasure to read.
I enjoyed it.
Having recently read The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, I better appreciate the place of Dumas in the world of fiction and in the hearts of his readers - even quite sophisticated readers like Perez-Reverte. It gives me a little more permission to enjoy books like this. :)
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 237 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 2006 |
Serebin, a Russian emigre writer of part Jewish extraction, works for the British secret service in a difficult and near suicidal scheme to sink five barge loads of heavy equipment in a narrow Danube channel in order to block shipment of Romanian oil to Germany in 1940-41.
The story takes place mainly in Romania, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Bulgaria, and in Paris. There is a dark feel to everything. Romania is in off and on civil war between the right wing government and the lunatic fascist Iron Guard. The government finally invites in the Nazis to save them from the Iron Guard ultra-Nazis. A coup in Yugoslavia brings the country to a different doom fighting Germany from the doom of collaboration with Germany that otherwise awaited it.
F weaves his character through this dark descent into the darkest and gloomiest period of WWII. There is no open horror. we never witness the Gestapo torture chambers. We see only the edges of the Iron Guard's atrocities. We see no bombing of cities or murders of Jews. It's all there as a backdrop, a cesspit yawning beneath Serebin if he makes one mistake. But he carries off his assignments by the skin of his teeth and survives.
Furst must feel the same feelings that I have about Nazism, totalitarianism, and civilization at war with ascendant barbarism. I feel a great affinity for his people and his work.
See diary for February 19, 2006.
There aren't many Western writers of fiction who write about the Balkans. Besides Furst, the only one of my acquaintance that comes to mind is Eric Ambler. I like Furst in part for his interest in shedding light on this seeming dark area of Europe. It's a part of his general interest in the darkness and shadows of the period just before and at the start of WWII, when the threats of Nazism, fascism, and Stalinist communism were all at their highest.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 150 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2006 |
See my notes from 1989.
The last Nero Wolfe story I read was almost seven years ago. The libraries seem to have discarded all of them by now - at least the ones I visit. So when I saw this one on a bookshelf in the library of the apartment tower where we stayed in Puerto Rico, I picked it up and read it as if finding an old friend.
I was halfway through before I realized that I had read this one before. But it didn't really matter. I finished it again, enjoying it in the same way I enjoy watching re-runs of old TV and movie favorites.
I last read this book in 1989. I liked it then. I liked it again. My sentiments about it are exactly what they were then, almost 17 years ago.
I've gotten older and am starting the downhill part of life. But Archie and Nero and Fritz and Saul, Fred and Orrie, and all the others, are forever as they were, ready to entertain another generation of readers. I hope the next generation can still find these books.
| Author | Follett, Ken |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 486 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | February 2006 |
Toni Gallo, chief security officer for a biomedical research firm in Scotland, is attracted to the owner, chief scientist and widower, Stanly Oxenford. He is also attracted to her, though his grown children are a bit of an obstacle to him.
His most problematic child is Kit, a compulsive gambler who is a computer engineer and designer of the lab's security systems. Kit had been fired for stealing from the company, is now deeply in debt to criminals, is in fear for his life, and has agreed to help the crooks break into the lab. He thinks they will steal medicine, but they are actually after the deadly Medoba virus to sell to a terrorist.
They break in, hurt some people, steal the virus, and head out into a terrible snowstorm on Christmas eve. Kit, weak, jealous fool - takes them to his father's house to steal an SUV. But they are snowed in. They threaten the family. Toni arrives and fights them. Eventually she overcomes the criminals, marries the boss, and lives happily ever after.
The suspense in this thriller is competently done. The good guys are appealing. The bad guys are wicked. Science and technology are acceptably well done - with holes in the deeper spots. All in all, it's a typical Follett thriller - readable and enjoyable.
| Author | Christie, Agatha |
|---|---|
| Publication | Landmark Audiobooks, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1948? |
| Number of Pages | 122 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2006 |
The five stories collected here are "The Witness for the Prosecution", "The Mystery of the Blue Jar", "The Red Signal", "S.O.S", and "The Fourth Man".
The title story is a true classic. A foreign actress, the lover of a handsome, engaging and innocent seeming young man on trial for murder, sets up a false story within a false story - making it appear that she is trying to frame her boyfriend, and then having her reputation and her testimony so impeached that he is declared not guilty and gets off. But he really is guilty. The story became A.C's most successful, becoming a long running play and several movies.
"Blue Jar" was my second favorite story. A very eerie set of events convinces a simple young man that, perhaps, the spirit of a murdered woman is trying to speak to him. Only at the very end do we learn that he is the victim of a hoax, a confidence game set up to use him as a pawn in a robbery.
Others of the stories have similar themes of supernaturalism that turns out to be ordinary malfeasance.
Dame Agatha was a great writer of her day. neither literary nor philosophical, she was nevertheless highly intelligent and with a wonderful ability to spring traps on the reader.
When I listen to an audiobook I like to record a page count for comparison to other books. That's hard to get right because different editions of a work are not only printed differently, for example on different size pages or with different fonts, but may also have different content. Several different short story collections, with different stories included, feature Witness as the title story on the cover. There may also be introductions, interviews, or other content that varies from edition to edition. It's also the case that Amazon is not necessarily a reliable source for page counts, though it's easy to use. Cataloging isn't a high priority for them. Reader beware.
| Author | Harris, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chivers Sound Library, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2006 |
FBI agent Will Graham has retired to Florida, living with his new wife and stepson, fixing diesel engines, and hoping to forget the psychopaths he hunted for the FBI and the injuries he got apprehending Hannibal Lecter. But Jack Crawford begs and browbeats him into using his uncanny ability to view a crime scene and intuit the mind of the killer to help find the "Tooth Fairy", later known as the "Red Dragon", a man who killed and mutilated two complete, ordinary families.
The story alternates, mostly between Graham and Dolarhyde, the psycho, but with some scenes of Crawford, sensationalist journalist Freddie Lowndes, and a nice blind girl who is attracted to D without realizing what a monster he is.
The depiction of the killer is extraordinarily good. He is highly intelligent and logical and sickly irrational at the same time. We fear and loathe him and yet we understand him, understand the sources of his pain and insanity, and so we can't help feeling some degree of sympathy with him. All of the other characters from Graham to the despicable but still understandable Freddie, and all the minor characters too, are expertly characterized.
The police procedural parts of the story, and the psychological parts too, are superbly well done - as good as H's later Silence of the Lambs. The plot and pacing are well done. Only the ending seemed jarring to me. It made reasonable sense and had plenty of cinematic shock value, but it was abrupt and not as literarily satisfying as the rest of the book. It required lots of post climax explanation.
Harris is THE master of the psycho police thriller.
| Author | Matta, Michael |
|---|---|
| Author | Wilbrakam, Antony C. |
| Publication | Menlo Park CA: Benjamin Cummings Publishing, 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 838 |
| Extras | index, glossary, illustrations, formulas |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Chemistry |
| When Read | March 2006 |
This is an entry level chemistry book for non-majors (i.e., non-chemistry majors) in the nursing and allied health fields. It surveys all of the basics including the periodic table, bonds, acids and bases, carbon compounds and functional groups, important biological molecules, and the most important biochemical processes in human biology.
I read it in order to get as much as I could, in as few pages as I could (838!) to give me the indispensable background for more biology, especially cell biology. I read it fairly fast - finished in two months, but I did study it carefully, skipped nothing, and tried hard to understand everything.
This is certainly not the best book of its type. The theory was too thin, explanation too shallow. Illustrations were skimpy though not badly chosen.
I did learn a lot and cannot complain of inaccuracies - though I'm not sure I would have recognized any that were there. I'll need to read more chemistry over time.
I bought the book for about two bucks at a used book store.
It turned out that the book served its purpose. When I read Molecular Biology of the Cell, the material I learned in this book enabled me to understand what was going on.
| Author | Grass, Gunter |
|---|---|
| Translators | Winston, Krishna |
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 252 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | April 2006 |
Journalist Paul Pokriefke's pregnant young mother, Tula, was on the German "Strength Through Joy" ocean liner Wilhelm Gustloff with 9,000 other refugees fleeing the eastern front when it was torpedoed by a Russian submarine. Tula was rescued by a gunboat and gave birth to Paul that night.
Paul has an undistinguished career, a failed marriage ending in divorce, and a teenage son who is close to his grandmother but wants nothing to do with his father.
While working on a story about the Gustloff, Paul discovers a website devoted to the ship, the petty Nazi functionary for whom it was named, and the murder of that functionary in Switzerland by a Jew. Fascinated by the fanatical, intelligent, intensely logical and simultaneously irrational content of the site, and especially of the intense, often bitter, and yet sometimes friendly chat between its neo-Nazi webmaster and a seeming Jew, Paul is horrified to learn that it is his own son, Conrad, who is the Nazi.
Then Connie murders David, the seeming Jew, who turns out to just be a Gentile student who hates Nazism. Paul tries to help. He attends the trial. He is helpless - unable to help his son, unable to really reach him, unable to understand him.
This is a brilliant book, very rich in historical understanding and in presenting the complex ideas and characters of modern Germany. G's seemingly endless detail about the ship, the Russian captain, the people on board, Gustloff, his killer, and on and on all seems distracting and pointless at first but builds into a powerful and complex image of history that tells far more than any summary treatment.
A small but great work of a great writer.
I have, myself, engaged in Internet based dialogues with racists and neo-Nazis. I don't recall ever convincing one that he is wrong, that blacks and Jews are not his enemies, or that the Holocaust really did happen. Some of these people are quite intelligent, as indeed was Adolf Hitler, but their beliefs seem almost hard wired into their brains. The closest I've ever come to making an impact with irrefutable arguments only resulted in my opponent dropping out of the conversation, never admitting he was wrong. There's a lot in my diary about all this.
I applaud Grass for taking on this very difficult, often completely intractable problem.
On August 12 of this year a "Unite the Right" march and rally occurred near the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. A journalist named Elle Reeve, working for "Vice News" interviewed a number of the neo-Nazi and other racist leaders involved in the movement. The interviews were broadcast on CNN, Public Television, and probably other venues and can be found on YouTube. They were absolutely fascinating interviews and were a tribute to both the courage and the intelligence of Ms. Reeve. They showed men using the most logical seeming arguments to promote the most irrational and hate filled views. These men talked to Reeve as perhaps Conrad talked to his supposed Jewish interlocutor in Crabwalk. I think that Grass understood the people he wrote about, and understood the extreme difficulty of getting through to any of them in spite of their seeming intelligence.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 2006 |
Movie star Edward Lincoln is asked by his dying godmother to visit South Africa and find out why the fine race horses she owns are all losing their races. Arriving in the Apartheid state, "Linc" becomes involved in a round of visits to the races, the trainer's, the house of his rich godmother's gold mine owning relations, a gold mine, the Krueger National Park, and various movie publicity spots where his film company's sweaty local representative tries to push him into places where he refuses to go.
Three attempts are made to kill him. On the third one, handcuffed to a car steering wheel at the end of a dusty track in the Park, Linc figures out that the would be killer is an American, a young, handsome, likable fellow who stands to inherit a pile of money from Linc's godmother.
This is classic Dick Francis, written as he was breaking away from his pure jockey books. The hero is a decent, honest, intelligent, clever, and resourceful man, but no kind of superhero. Like all of F's characters, he's a man we can identify with - his movie star career not withstanding.
The minor characters in this, as in many of F's books, are thin and sometimes overly caricatured. If the camera man said "dear boy" one more time, the irritation of it would - well - it already crossed the threshold.
This was not his best book, but it is reliable Francis writing.
One of the things I think Francis does well is research. When he writes about an airplane pilot, a liquor store owner, an accountant, or a person with some other occupation (not to mention horse racing), he studies his intended subject and writes knowledgeably about it. I presume that, in this case, he traveled in South Africa sometime before or during the writing of this book and gathered facts directly. I can imagine that he conceives a novel and then goes to gather the facts or, more likely I think, he learns about something, gets interested, and decides that this new knowledge can be the basis of a new novel. Then he intensifies his learning and gets enough to write his story.
| Author | Doctorow, Corey |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | April 2006 |
This is a very brash but rather juvenile SF novel about a 100+ year old man with a physical age near 40 and a mental age of about 15. Julius lives in a future in which people need not die. They perform periodic backups of the contents of their brains and can, at any time, discard their current bodies and load up a new one, of any age or type they wish. They also have permanently implanted network communications that allow them to perform any act of communication, lookup, storage, etc., at any time, silently. Since there are no longer any shortages, money has ceased to exist and only reputation counts for anything. A person will "ping" another's "Whuffie", to determine that reputation and act towards him accordingly.
Julius and his friend and his girlfriend work at the Hall of the Presidents in Disneyland in Orlando, where they are attempting to maintain a physical presentation in the face of a new technology promoted by a competing team that aims to implant marvelous experiences directly into peoples' heads. J is thus a traditionalist aiming to preserve the past in this great, famous, cultural institution. He fights against the other team using dirty tricks. He antagonizes all of his friends. he behaves petulantly and childishly, but in the end is vindicated.
Perhaps this book would have appealed to me at age 15, but it didn't at age 59. I read it for the change of pace of reading something less than 100 years old on my Palm - for which I can usually only find out of copyright books. It was not badly written but the main character repelled me in a book where the main character, speaking in first person, is the core of the book.
Doctorow placed this book in the public domain, enabling the Gutenberg organization to offer it for free download from their website. The book wasn't all that good but it was still a nice thing to do.
| Author | Collins, Larry |
|---|---|
| Author | LaPierre, Dominique |
| Publication | Avon Books, 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 596 |
| Extras | photos, index, acknowledgments, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | India |
| When Read | May 2006 |
This excellent history covers the period of one year leading up to Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948, with a short epilogue. Meticulously researched and written with sympathy and respect for all of the people involved the authors clearly consider Gandhi to have been the man who both made independence happen and did the most to defuse the ethnic violence that consumed the region.
Gandhi was the only national leader who completely rejected the division between India and Pakistan. Yet he was blamed for it by the Hindu fascists who killed him for it. G showed saint like courage, forbearance, tolerance and wisdom, even while leading a strange, eccentric life. Next to him, Nehru seemed the greatest of the Indian leaders while Jinnah, the alcohol drinking, cigarette smoking tubercular founder of Pakistan showed great strength and unshakable determination in the service of a worthless cause, even to him, who knew he would die shortly after founding the state.
The British did remarkably well, due in large measure to the decisive role played by Lord Louis Mountbatten. L.M., the last Viceroy, set up situations where leaders in both Britain and India had no choice but to accept the difficult steps that L.M. knew had to be carried out. In the end, he was hailed by Indians as well as Brits as a great leader.
What can one say about the horrible violence that occurred? Rape, murder, robbery, expropriation, were common, systematic, and widespread. The lowest mentality took hold. It was a great tragedy for India and a great triumph for Gandhi that he often stopped it.
A very fine history - well written, well documented, functioning on both historical and personal levels. an excellent book.
See diary for February 19, 2006.
| Author | de Bernieres, Louis |
|---|---|
| Publication | books on Tape, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 576 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Turkey |
| When Read | May 2006 |
In the small village of Eskihbace in southwestern Anatolia, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews, all lived together in a centuries old culture at the beginning of the 20th century. The local Imam, Hamid Abdul Hodja, landlord Rustam Bey, Iskander the potter, Isa, the Hodja's wife, and the young boys known by the names of the birds whose songs they play on their flutes, Karatavuk and Memetchik, live the lives of their ancestors. a beautiful young Christian girl is in love with the Muslim goatherd Ibrahim. Rustem Bay condemns his faithless and foolish young wife, who winds up a prostitute, and buys a mistress in Istanbul who turns out to be, in very surprising ways, a love match for him. She, Leyla Hanim holds him at bay for months, then arranges an evening of love with a huge feast and with turtles with candles on their backs.
Meanwhile, Kemal Ataturk is learning about what is right and wrong with the Turkish state and army. The empire goes from crisis to crisis. Then a foolish "young Turk" prime minister forces the empire into the First World War - which becomes a disaster for all of Anatolia, and for the people of Eskihbace. The young boys are sucked into the war and into the maelstrom of Gallipoli and the horrors of civil war and the war of independence against the Greek invaders. Armenians are torn from their homes and killed by Kurdish thugs. Christian "Greeks" (who speak no Greek) and Muslim "Turks" (who speak no Turkish) from Greece are expelled to alien lands.
This is a truly great novel, on a par with other great epics. It reminds me most, not in style or substance but in breadth and depth, of War and Peace. Its history is fascinating and revealing. Its characters are as wonderful. Its human stories are individually and collectively simply great. I will long remember this great book.
I have indeed long remembered it. De Bernieres succeeded in producing a sympathetic view of the kind of culture that we in the United States would consider primitive. However, while it was both comic and tragic, I don't think that it was condescending.
There wasn't the same gritty social realism found in Orhan Pamuk's A Strangeness in My Mind. De Bernieres's book was more epic, more lyrical. It was concerned with small people caught up in grand themes of change in Turkey in its transformation from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic. Pamuk's book was also about small people caught up in large changes in Turkey, but the changes were more impersonal. There was nothing grand or glorious about them. They were both great books, each in its own way.
| Author | Caidin, Martin |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bantam Books, 1985 |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 366 |
| Extras | illustrations, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | May 2006 |
The air war against Imperial Japan began in the 1930's in China. Italians fought with little effect and left. Then Americans recruited by China, and Russians sent by Stalin, fought with some surprising successes and many dismal disasters against the Japanese Army air force and, especially, the invincible pilots and Zero fighters of the Navy.
The Japanese swept everyone from the sky. Then at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Malaya, and elsewhere, their superbly trained, experienced and skilled and equipped pilots massacred unprepared American and British air groups who fought with great determination but outmoded tactics and with obsolete equipment.
But they were learning. The best learner was Claire Chennault whose Flying Tigers defied all odds to rack up incredible victories. And always and everywhere, American forces surprised the Japanese with their great determination, bravery, growing skill, and continually improving equipment and supplies.
Caidin, a very knowledgeable historian, a man who knew the pilots on both sides and a man who understood and appreciated what the conditions were like on the ground and in the air, has attempted to document the efforts and sacrifices of these small bands of men who resisted the Japanese juggernaut at the darkest and most difficult period of the war.
I am always interested in this kind of history.
I recall a number of interesting episodes in this book, at least I think they were from this book. Some were of the war in China where Chennault planned missions for his pilots that maximized all possible advantages against the Japanese, for example by figuring out how and where to attack bombers apart from their fighter escorts and how to surprise them. At least one of the Russian operations against the Japanese in 1938 was also highly successful and gave the Japanese a bloody nose.
After Pearl Harbor, small American bomber squadrons in New Guinea (IIRC) attacked Japanese bases at Rabaul and elsewhere against tremendous odds. Similarly, on Guadalcanal, small American fighter squadrons took to the air from terrible mud airstrips with the most primitive support facilities and fought against very experienced, well organized, and superior strength Japanese squadrons. Against the odds, some pilots were successful and became aces.
The final chapter was "The Other Midway". Before the American carrier attacks, horizontal bomber missions were launched from Pearl Harbor. They were a total failure with almost all of the planes shot down without scoring a hit on the Japanese carriers. But the American pilots pressed home their attacks very bravely.
This was the period when things looked pretty bleak in the Pacific. American losses in the Philippines had been enormous. Attempts to fight back had not yet proven successful. Men and equipment that might have made a difference were being held back for the war in Europe. But, after and in spite of the British fiasco in Malaya and Singapore, the Americans and the other Allies gave the Japanese unexpectedly determined and successful resistance.
Stories of American successes later in the war, when we had many more men, more experience, and overwhelmingly superior material force are interesting and inspiring. Even at the end, World War II was never a war where American soldiers could sit in safety and wait for bombers and artillery to defeat the enemy. However I find the stories of the beginning of the war, when British, Americans, Australians, Russians, and others fought against tremendous odds, to have a special meaning for me.
| Author | Hijuelos, Oscar |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Audio, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 342 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Music; Cuba |
| When Read | May 2006 |
Israel Levis, aged beyond his years, wasted by a German concentration camp, returns to Cuba in 1947 and we learn his story. Born to a loving family of a prominent Havana doctor, young Israel finds his life's passion in music. He becomes an accomplished pianist at a young age and is soon writing his own music - popular songs, light operas, serious music. Big and fat, he is a real gentleman - courtly, a devout Catholic, and yet also fun loving, a frequent visitor to the bars, brothels, and restaurants in Havana.
At age 32 he meets the newly orphaned Rita Vallardes who, at 16, displays great talent as a singer and musician. He takes her under his wing, paying for her education and paving the way for her in the world of music. They fall in love but, even when she is older, he cannot believe that a woman as fine and beautiful could or should love a fat, older bachelor and he rebuffs her advances, always behaving as an uncle rather than a lover.
When the Machado dictatorship becomes overwhelmingly oppressive, Israel moves to Paris and makes a place for himself as the leader of a very popular Cuban ensemble - composing, performing, and conducting, and leading a lively life. His 1928 song, Rosas Puras, becomes an international hit.
When the Germans take Paris in 1940 Israel cannot believe such men will stay long. But they do, and they brand him a Jew because of his name, eventually deporting him to Buchenwald. He survives and returns to Havana, but does not live long. His death is mourned by Rita and everyone.
Israel is a very fine character - intelligent, sympathetic, sensitive, generous, and talented. He is self-deprecating but has a great taste for life. He is a man we admire and also like. The tragedy of his failure to connect with Rita, and his failure to flee the Nazis, are both a bit forced and hard to take, but the novel is still a small gem of a character study. I liked it very much.
At the time that I read the book I felt that Hijuelos was overdoing Israel's unwillingness to court or marry Rita. Surely, a man of his intelligence and sensitivity would understand not only that she loved him, but also that her life without him was headed in the wrong direction - taking up with men who were not good for her. I also wondered at his failure to flee from France when the Nazis arrived since he had been in Germany and knew what they were like.
Now, I don't know. Even very intelligent and sensitive people make life choices that don't work out and don't accord with reality. Maybe it is only with the benefit of hindsight that I see how bad his choices were. I can't really say.
This is an important issue for the novel. The best novels, at least the best ones that see themselves as realistic novels, present us with a convincing, authentic, view of life, one in which we feel we are reading something that could happen, maybe even must happen. We expect the characters to move independently, as it were, not be manipulated as puppets by the author.
However, no matter how we come down on this issue, there is no denying that this was a good novel. The character of Israel Levis is one whom we would have been very pleased to know.
| Author | James, Henry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books, 1978 |
| Copyright Date | 1897 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2006 |
Young Fleda Vetch, a girl without money or prospects, living on small sums from her father and on the hospitality of friends and her sister, is discovered by the widow Mrs. Gereth to be a girl of rare taste and discernment. Mrs. G introduces her to Poynton, G's house, full of the most marvelous "things" that G and her husband have collected over their entire lives. Fleda is astounded by the beauty and taste of the collection and Mrs. G is thrilled to have finally found a kindred spirit who, alone among all her acquaintances, can truly appreciate her life's work.
Mrs G's son Owen has inherited Poynton upon his father's death and to Mrs. G's dismay is about to marry Mona Brigstock, a pretty and high spirited girl but with an appetite for control that conflicts with Mrs. G's and with no taste at all. Mona and Mrs. G are soon locked in combat over the spoils of Poynton, with Owen in the middle and Fleda, who is falling in love in a cautiously reciprocated way with Owen, being used as a cat's paw by Mrs. G.
James' handling of the emotions, the tastes, and the delicate sensitivities of Fleda are exquisite. Her subtle and sophisticated response to the handsome, noble, and clear and simple Owen is masterfully done. The force of Mrs. G's intelligence and personal domination are striking. James has created, or perhaps we should say observed, a rare, delicate, and elevated world. He has shown us its brilliance. And by the end he has also shown us its devastating futility.
This is one of the many short novels by James that establish his great stature as "The Master."
| Author | Winters, Dick, Major |
|---|---|
| Author | Kingseed, Cole C., Colonel |
| Publication | New York: Berkeley Caliber / Penguin, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Extras | photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | May 2006 |
In his old age, with almost all of his Easy company, 502 parachute Infantry Regiment comrades gone, but with his mind still clear and sharp, Dick Winters has taken this last opportunity to tell the story of their now famous exploits in his own words. The story was first told by Steven Ambrose, then made popular by the super TV mini-series, Band of Brothers.
Winters was a handsome, athletic, intelligent young man, pulled from the ranks to become a "90 day wonder". He grew very quickly into a tough, resolute, efficient combat commander. He led his men from the front and pulled the trigger on more than his share of Germans. He was also a straight arrow who neither drank nor smoked nor went out looking for women. In his time in England he billeted with a Christian family and loved to go to church with them on Sundays. And, oh yes, he was a killer.
It was interesting to read his own story in his own words. He was nothing like me, but I deeply admire him and am thankful that we had men like him on our side. Had I been in his position I could only have hoped to do as well as he did. We owe him a lot.
I read this book after watching the TV series, which was excellent, one of the best World War II movies I have ever seen. Winters was the central figure in that series. Rising from Lieutenant to Captain to Major in command of a battalion in France and Germany. He dealt with a ridiculous company commander in training who treated everyone terribly but was incompetent himself, and then he dealt with the Germans. He was one of those men that all armies eventually developed - experienced, tough, smart, dangerous. He protected his men and he blasted the enemy.
There are a couple of things he said in the book that I specifically remember. One was that he and his officers always carried M1 Garand rifles because they had so much firepower, and before going into action they carefully sighted in the rifles. Obviously, he was a man who intended to shoot Germans. He wasn't just carrying a carbine or a pistol for personal protection.
| Author | Littell, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Prince Frederick, MD: Audio Partners, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | June 2006 |
Retired CIA agent Martin Odum is living above a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn and working as a private detective when he is hired by a Russian woman to find her orthodox Jewish sister's husband so that she can get a proper divorce. Warned away by his former CIA boss, he takes the job anyway and pursues leads in Israel, London, Prague, and various states of the former Soviet Union.
The real eccentricity in this book is that Odum has multiple personalities, "legends" concocted for him by the CIA as cover stories that he learned to absorb until they became his real life. He was an IRA explosives expert named Dante Pippin, a historian of the Civil War and sniper assassin named Lincoln Dittman, and a Polish/Russian gangster. We see all of these characters in action via flashbacks to Russia, Uruguay, Lebanon, and elsewhere, and neither we nor Odum quite know which is the real man.
The story takes various wild, implausible and downright fantastic turns, ending with Odum discovering the secrets of Russian gangsters and CIA manipulators who have destroyed Russia's economy by supporting gangsters. Odum uncovers all, assassinates the baddest bad guys, blackmails the CIA, and runs off with the beautiful girl.
This is not Littell's best book. But like all of his books, it contains many elements of interest and some good writing.
| Author | Buckley, Christopher |
|---|---|
| Publication | Santa Ana, CA: Books on Tape, 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Middle East |
| When Read | June 2006 |
Angered by the ruthless persecution of the young wife of Prince Bawad, ambassador from Wasabia, State Department functionary Florence Farfarletti, herself once married to a Wasabian male chauvinist, leaves her job to work for a shadowy character interested in Arab women's liberation. With major funding and help from a slick, unscrupulous P.R. man, a gay former State Department colleague, and a former CIA field man, she creates a TV station in Matar (pronounced "mutter"), a liberal Gulf kingdom, broadcasting into Wasabia and the rest of the Arab world.
The TV shows are hilarious send ups of the royal families, the religious police, and other sacred cows, plus real news. They become huge hits.
Soon all the reactionaries, opportunists, and the French foreign service scheme and then succeed in overthrowing the king of Matar and create a religious theocratic state. It's a terrible oppressive mess that doesn't work for its rulers and is horrible for the people.
Florence and the CIA man fight it from underground and against all odds, win, only to discover at the end that their real employer was a banking consortium.
The book is outrageous but wonderfully funny. It must be very offensive to the Saudi royals, as it should be.
A delightful read.
Matar ("mutter") is, of course, a stand-in for Qatar ("cutter") and Wasabia stands for Saudi Arabia.
| Author | Nafisi, Azar |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Iran |
| When Read | June 2006 |
Educated largely in the U.S., Nafisi became a professor of English literature. Returning to Iran after the Islamic revolution, she was prepared to join in the building of a new, revolutionary society, not as a political person, but as an English professor. But life and work became increasingly difficult as hard line Islamists violently suppressed socialists, liberals and any persons of the wrong, i.e. female, sex. Teaching became harder and harder. The schools demanded head scarves. Proctors assailed women. Administrators begged or bullied for more conformity. Unable to stand it forever, N eventually quit and lived at home where, for a several year period in the 90's, she held English lit sessions as a book group in her house for seven women.
Nafisi is a brilliant observer of the women of society and of literature. Her analyses of Nabokov, Austen, Fitzgerald, and others showed me many sides of those authors that I had not seen. Her observations of the brutality of the religious police, the mentalities of men and women, the home front in the long war with Iraq, the waves of repression and liberalization, the conflicts within families, all this teaches us much about Iran and the Islamic Republic.
This is an important book, a vital document of contemporary history. It is also very well written, personally appealing, and deeply absorbing.
I'm currently listening to a book about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where Islamism is also a problem and where women are also severely oppressed. Marx called religion the opiate of the masses. Sometimes it seems more like a cancer.
| Author | Parker, Robert B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 305 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 2006 |
"Hawk", a hard as nails private detective, is hired to protect a client. The client is murdered and Hawk himself badly wounded. As he recovers, he vows revenge and his friend Spenser, hero and narrator of the Spenser and Hawk mysteries, is 100% behind him. They uncover a corrupt mayor, a gang of Ukrainian extortionists and killers, corrupt cops behind the mayor, and a black gangster sitting on the sidelines, trying to help the worthless, white, would be mobster, with whom his unfortunate daughter has fallen in love.
Meanwhile, S and H's gorgeous, brilliant, accomplished girlfriends wonder why these two strong, silent types (especially Hawk) can't open up to them and can't let go of this dangerous situation.
It all ends in violent confrontations and revenge, as expected.
The above precis sounds pretty awful but there's more to the writing than the abysmal story and wooden characters would indicate. Parker is bright. His intelligence comes through. There are passages of good writing, good observation, and psychological insight.
All in all this is a pot boiler, suitable for fast reading when in that kind of mood.
| Author | Naipaul, V.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2006 |
After leaving his useless life and listless marriage in Mozambique (Half a Life) Willie Chandran joins his radical sister in Berlin. She convinces him that he is a truly useless person who can only redeem himself by joining the communist guerrillas in rural India. He does that, becoming first a courier, then an ordinary foot soldier in the most futile movement one can imagine. Living for years in the jungle, shooting no one but peasants and other communists who have somehow betrayed the movement, Willie becomes totally disillusioned and gives himself up to the authorities. They discover that he killed a man and imprison him in spite of an amnesty - which only applies to guerrillas who have not committed crimes.
He lives in prison, shunning other political prisoners in spite of their better treatment until he is eventually released after a major effort by his contrite sister and an English publisher who had published Willie's book so many years before.
He moves into the publisher's house, gets an easy job, seduces the publisher's wife, and finds a new, much easier way to lead a useless, futile life.
N's observations of the Indian revolutionaries are brilliant and devastating. I doubt that he has lived that life himself, but I think he must have known people who have. His perceptions of bourgeois society are also interesting, though not as much so. Despite the difficult and depressing themes, its inability to find any clear path to redemption, it is an absorbing book. I learned little from Willie but much from Naipaul.
I see that some critics trashed this book, considering it to be full of foolish left wing politics. The Bookmarks Magazine review on Amazon concludes: "In the end, one hopes the unlikable characters, implausible plotting, and general fog of pessimism are what doom this book, not critical disappointment in Naipaul."
The Publisher's Weekly review was much better.
| Author | Fiennes, Ranulf |
|---|---|
| Publication | Clipper Audio, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 338 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | July 2006 |
Antarctic explorer Fiennes claims to have discovered a manuscript in Antarctica written by one Derek Jacobs, a Canadian social worker turned Nazi hunter. The book is Derek's manuscript.
D.J. left Germany as a young child who remembered nothing of his German past. When the aunt who raised him developed cancer she finally told Derek about his past as a Jewish child - actually from a Christian family but with one Jewish parent. The family is hounded and hunted, some of them killed or raped by the local butcher's son and his gang of Nazi thugs. Although they hide out successfully for most of the war, they are caught again at the end.
Learning the story of his life, DJ dedicates himself to finding the butcher's son - who became a Stasi agent after the war and a prominent neo-Nazi later.
There are episodes in Rwanda during the massacre, in Germany during and after the war, in Canada, and on a sailboat voyage to Antarctica with a Nazi crew and an American con man who has conned the Nazis into a search for gold.
Only a tiny percentage of racial killers, whether Nazi or Rwandan, were ever brought to justice. It was left to the survivors to hunt down the few that they could catch.
I don't know if there really was a manuscript or whether Fiennes made it all up. As literature, it is competent and professional. As social history it is more than that. Made up or not, it is a very fine achievement.
Searching for information about this book on the web I find the much repeated statement that F released this book as fiction because he couldn't provide documentary evidence for it, but that the story was true.
I don't know if this book is fiction or not but I've decided to classify it as non-fiction. There is an epilogue in which the author and a German student track down one of the war criminals living in Austria. The man clams up, as one would expect from one of the Nazi bastards when he is finally exposed.
Fiennes is a big-time athlete explorer, mountain climber, and general adventurer, as well as a writer. His work looks like fiction to me and I almost changed my classification, but I'll leave it alone for now.
| Author | Angell, Marcia |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 319 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | August 2006 |
Former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Angell analyzes the economic, scientific, medical and political aspects of what became the richest and most powerful industry in the U.S. Ten top U.S. drug companies made more profit than all of the rest of the Fortune 500 companies in 2002. They use that profit, not for research, but for marketing. New drug research has declined. The great bulk of research funds are spent on developing "me too" drugs for cholesterol reduction, blood pressure reduction, SSRI's for depression, heartburn easing, and E.D. That's where the money is.
Much of the funds claimed to be spent on research, and all of the funds spent on "education" are actually for marketing. "Phase 4" trials are conducted mainly to recruit new patients for drugs they will take for the rest of their lives. Doctors are paid in cash and gifts. Politicians get the same. Medical schools, journals, and research organizations are all suborned, or attempted to be so.
The number one thing we can do to change things is to change the approval process so that a drug must be better than existing drugs, or at least equal, to be approved. We can also rationalize the distorted patent laws that allow enormous profits on legal technicalities used to extend patent protection beyond the intent of Congress.
Every American should read this book.
Eight years after the publication of this book, I don't see any effect. Are any Congressmen or Senators cognizant of its message? Has there been any new regulation? The mantra that private enterprise will cure all ills seems to be as firmly established in the American political psyche as it ever was. It seems that things may have to get worse, maybe a lot worse, before they get better. And there is no guarantee that people will wake up even if things get worse. The stronger the forces of private capital become, the more money they pour into influencing public opinion and politics. There is a tidal wave of pro-corporate propaganda washing over the TV airwaves and the forecast calls for even higher waves in the future.
Five more years have passed. There is still no new regulation. Drugs that work well aren't advertised. They don't need to be. Every doctor quickly learns that these drugs can save his patients. So the airwaves are saturated with advertisements for drugs that kind-of sort-of help. A bill to allow drugs to be imported at lower prices from Canada was defeated with the help of liberal Democratic Senators like Cory Booker, a top recipient of drug company "campaign contributions." He said he couldn't vote for a bill that provided no protection against dangerous substandard or counterfeit drugs. And the cost of medical care goes up and up and up and up.
I'm not totally discouraged. The Republican failure to repeal Obamacare shows that people are starting to wake up. In the next election cycle I expect to see more Democratic politicians supporting the policies of Bernie Sanders. Some will be opportunists but some will be serious. Maybe the next ten years will show progress.
| Author | Beaton, M.C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Clipper Audio, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 151 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 2006 |
Scottish constable Hamish MacBeth is disturbed first by his promotion to sergeant and the assignment of a young constable to work under him and live with him at the station, and second by the arrival of a handsome young man with a foul mouthed girlfriend, no particular occupation, and a fatal attractiveness to the foolish middle aged women of the town. Hamish harasses the traveling man but can't drive him out of town.
Later, after a number of petty crimes in town, the visitor is found murdered. Regional police homicide detectives come in but it is Hamish who solves the crime, uncovers the foolishness of the women who fell for him, and manages to rid himself of his unwanted assistant, who marries a girl whose heart he won with his housekeeping habits and skills and moves into her family's restaurant business.
This is part of a series of English, or in this case Scottish, country mysteries. It was short, readable, and mildly amusing. More credit than that I cannot give it.
| Author | Battles, Matthew |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Libraries |
| When Read | August 2006 |
Battles, a Harvard University librarian, recounts the history of libraries from Sumerian times to the present. It is far more a social history than a technical one. He describes the roles libraries have played from ancient times - as ornaments of the rich and powerful, as historical archives, and as great intellectual achievements.
He give much space to destroyers of libraries - both real and probably apocryphal, such as the Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi who purportedly aimed to destroy all history before himself, or the Arab prince who may not in fact have burned the library at Alexandria.
Fascists get the beating they deserve form B who condemns the Nazis and Serb nationalists for wanton, deliberate, purely malevolent destruction of libraries and much else that meant nothing to brutes.
There is a wonderful section on Melville Dewey - his services to libraries and his aims, partly forgotten today, to economize on all aspects of practical work. He promoted women in libraries because he wanted cheaper and more subservient librarians - not because he was a women's liberationist.
An interesting, literate, intelligent, and well informed and informative book.
I grew up in Baltimore, loving libraries and going regularly to two of the three, and irregularly to the furthest one, of all of the public libraries within walking distance from my house. Time and again I went to those libraries and scanned through all the books on the non-fiction shelves in the sections of interest to me. Then I stated at 'A' in the fiction section and read the shelves all the way through to 'Z', selecting all the books I could carry the one to three miles back home. When I failed to become a professor of philosophy I became a librarian at the downtown central building of the library system that enchanted me as a boy. So this book attracted me.
One of my fantasies over the years is that one day some archaeologist traveling through the desert in Egypt will spot a curious mark on the ground, dig down, and find the full contents of the great Library of Alexandria, still intact, buried in the desert sand, to preserve it from the barbarians. What wouldn't we give for that?
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Easy Rawlins |
| When Read | August 2006 |
In the mid 1960's, Easy Rawlins' six year old child Feather is dying of a rare blood disease. His only hope of saving her is to pay $35,000 to a Swiss clinic. Mouse offers to cut him in on an armored car robbery but he chooses instead to try an investigative job for Robert E. Lee, a San Francisco detective who needs a black P.I. to trace a black woman in L.A.
Easy uncovers an old Nazi deal, a couple of murders, layers of double cross, hidden evidence of old crimes, and a very interesting set of characters, including denizens of Haight Ashbury living lives that quite surprise and mystify Easy.
As always, Mosley handles race relations very well. Both white and black people have all the human characteristics from courage to cowardice, honor, dishonor, love, hate, intelligence and foolishness.
Also, as always, Easy himself is an enigmatic, self-destructive person who cannot seem to manage a relationship with a woman, a straightforward approach to an employer, or a suppression of his stubborn ego, even when he has everything to lose by his stubbornness. It is these qualities that give these books an edge that other mysteries don't have.
I wrote a review of this book for Amazon that is a little longer and, perhaps, more useful than the one above. It will probably be hard to find now that Amazon hides all reviews from people like me who find their books in libraries and used book stores rather than buying them from Amazon, but at the time, 9 of 10 people marked the review as "helpful". (Sigh.)
| Author | Grisham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Law |
| When Read | September 2006 |
Power broker/lobbyist/lawyer/asshole Joel Backman is imprisoned for 20 years for attempting to broker super secret satellite access software to the highest bidder. He goes without a fight, partly to protect himself from foreign intelligence agencies that would like to grill and kill him, and partly to save his innocent son and not so innocent partners from further troubles.
After only six years, the CIA gets the outgoing President to pardon him so that he can be whisked off to Italy and setup for assassination. The CIA wants to find out who will kill him. They install him in Bologna and assign teachers to teach him Italian and European style, ostensibly so he can blend in. He works very hard at it and makes great progress, but just as the CIA betrays him, he makes his own break - to Switzerland, then New York, then DC. He evades all the tough guys and takes a path out.
The story is rather ridiculous. I could not believe in the plot or in the CIA or other intelligence agents G. portrays. It was all a cartoon caricature as G confesses in an interview after the reading. He says he knows nothing about spies and made it all up - some chutzpah, eh?
But he does know about Bologna Italy, about trying to learn Italian, and about how to write a page turning story. For all of my criticism, I enjoy most of his books, including this one.
| Author | Alberts, Bruce |
|---|---|
| Author | Johnson, Alexander |
| Author | Lewis, Julian |
| Author | Raff, Martin |
| Author | Roberts, Keith |
| Author | Walter, Peter |
| Publication | Garland Science, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 1462 |
| Extras | illustrations, diagrams, photos, tables, glossary, index, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biology; Molecular biology |
| When Read | September 2006 |
The standard textbook of molecular biology, covering the entire field.
Reading this book is my greatest accomplishment so far in my attempt to acquire a scientific education. It is the standard introduction to its subject, covering each area to a moderate depth. The book is very well written, edited, illustrated, and produced. The subject is well explained though I was surprised at how little biochemistry was required to understand it. My simple, introductory General, Organic and Biochemistry was about enough.
I hope I have retained as much as 10% of what I read. It is hopeless for me to try to remember the names and actions of specific proteins and pathways, but I do hope to retain broad concepts.
I read this book hard! I read many, many paragraphs twice and many three or more times. I never moved on until I believed that I understood the material. But even so, it is more than I can keep.
I have not stopped after reading this book. I will continue, while I am able, to learn what I can.
I read Lehninger Biochemistry after reading this, and a number of other books, but this is the book that I learned the most from. I'm now a bit over half way through a reading of the 2008 edition. I'm relearning material that I forgot and picking up some new stuff that has been added since the 4th edition.
I don't know if I'll ever read another edition. I didn't plan on reading the 5th, but I learned so much more from it than from any other science book that I believed that I could learn more by re-reading this than by reading anything else.
| Author | Parker, Robert B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Western |
| When Read | September 2006 |
Tall, strong, silent Everett Hitch happens upon Marshall Virgil Cole who is facing a mob of miscreants. Hitch backs him up and the two become buddies, working together as lawmen. Years later they are hired to save the town of Appaloosa from rancher/gangster Randall Bragg. They defy all odds to arrest him, then track him down after his escape, and then fight it out with three professional gunfighters and, separately, a number of Indians.
Cole, a man even more dangerous and silent than Hitch, hooks up with a fickle woman who always trawls for the baddest guy around. When Bragg returns and begins to use legitimate tricks to retake the town, the woman begins to dally with him. Hitch, purely out of loyalty to his friend, insults Bragg, forces him to fight, and shoots him dead - then rides off alone into the sunset.
This is all done in the spare, abstract style of Parker's Spenser (Hitch) and Hawk (Cole) stories. Dangerous stand-up guys don't talk, they shoot. Parker is certainly a pro at writing this kind of story and he manages to create some tension in the matching of deadly Cole with the treacherous woman Mrs. French. But in the final analysis, it boils down to Parker's over simplified world of simple men and simple values.
It's exciting in its way. It is both familiar and exotic. But you can only take so much of it and there's no afterglow of satisfaction at the end.
| Author | Greenberg, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | The Teaching Company, 2000 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography; Music |
| When Read | October 2006 |
Until listening to these tapes I thought of Haydn as a sort of pedestrian Mozart - a hard working musician to be sure, but without Mozart's glittering imagination. That may even have been a view that Haydn himself would have endorsed. But it is not fair to him. He was a man who toiled for years and years, for decades, mastering his instrument - the small symphony orchestra. He learned as much or more than any of his contemporaries.
Rising from a humble background, growing up in a Dickensian like boys choir, struggling for years in shabby rooms or corners of rooms to support himself, finally winning some position and recognition only to be trapped into marriage with a woman who hated music and treated him horribly, he nevertheless remained a man of sympathy and humanity as well as a truly great musician.
Greenberg is a marvelous, engaging, over-the-top lecturer who makes the old masters understandable to musical neophytes like me.
I listen to Haydn's works with more understanding and appreciation now, and I have an image of a real human being to associate with the music.
After listening to these lectures I listened to a lot of Haydn's music over the years and appreciated it much more. Some of his work, like the London Symphony, seem to me to be obviously great. Even I can hear it. But I listened more carefully to a lot of his other music, some of which was perhaps aimed at more musically sophisticated listeners than myself, and got more from those pieces than I previously did.
| Author | Weiner, Jonathan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 332 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biology |
| Keywords | Evolution |
| When Read | October 2006 |
Concentrating initially on the investigation of Galapagos ground finches conducted over more than two decades by Peter and Rosemary Grant, Weiner elucidates very convincing evidence for the thesis that evolution and natural selection can be directly observed. It is not just the fossil record or the statistical correlations of genomes by molecular biology that prove the validity of evolutionary theory. we can directly observe the process in action by looking at organisms such as birds, fish, protozoa, and bacteria, which have short enough life cycles that we can see the changes between generations.
W's book is much more than an argument for the theory of evolution. It's also a very illuminating view of the techniques of advanced field biology. The work done by the Grants and others is very difficult, tedious and long term, but it's also very, very careful and very scientific. They tagged every finch on the island and observed its fate. They periodically screened square meters of earth and classified and counted every seed. They counted every chick and measured it and learned which ones lived and which died.
This was a remarkably appealing, informative, and lucid book giving a popular view of a difficult and rather obscure subject.
This is a good book for people with little background in science to give them an appreciation of the theory of evolution and the nature of some kinds of research into the subject.
Darwin himself observed artificial selection, for example, in pigeons. Pigeon fanciers bred new varieties that looked nothing like their ancestors in just (IIRC) a dozen generations. The Grants, as Weiner explained, observed and documented significant changes in the beaks of finches in which long spells of dry weather would kill off most of the finches while selecting for those with short, powerful beaks capable of cracking the hard seeds that were all the available food for the birds under those conditions. With a few seasons of rain, finches with long, slender beaks, well suited for picking insects out of the environment, came to predominate. Weiner went on to explain similar observations with other species that had nothing to do with artificial breeding and much to do, for example, with the arrival of new predators in an environment.
I think the kind of evidence that Weiner documents tells us more about finches and fishes, but really only illustrates what we already knew about evolution. Still, we need simple illustrations for people who don't understand or believe in the science. By explaining how field work in biology is done, the book also teaches the new reader of this kind of material how careful and exacting it is and has to be. It is important for people to understand that off hand remarks don't cut it in science. It is necessary to nail down the details.
Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for this book.
| Author | Wilson, Edward O. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harvard University Belknap Press, 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 424 |
| Extras | notes, illustrations, glossary, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biology |
| Keywords | Evolution; Ecology |
| When Read | October 2006 |
Entomologist, general naturalist, and Harvard professor Wilson writes about species diversity around the world. He explains how species spread using the example of Krakatoa, the Indonesian island wiped out by a volcano. He explains recolonization, diversification, and discusses the unknown but huge numbers of species that exist. a bucket scraped along the ocean bottom anywhere in the world is pretty sure to come up with some species that have never been named and cataloged.
This diversity is very fragile. Species that required tens of millions of years to evolve can be lost forever in just a decade or two of habitat destruction such as is occurring all over the world. W describes the calculations for habitat areas that can be used to predict viability. The results are quite depressing.
W is not just a doomsayer. He discusses the pros and cons of various attempts to save diversity - zoos (very ineffective), seed banks (better, but many seeds need specific fungal or insect organisms which are lost) and reserved parks (best perhaps.) But his strongest support is for ways to enable indigenous people to profit from habitat and species preservation. He gives many illustrations of how to make that work and why it offers far more long term benefit than the slash and burn techniques used today.
This is an informative, readable, practical book.
It's hard to be optimistic, or even mildly pessimistic about the future of the earth. Humans are on a direct path to consumption and destruction of the common heritage of the earth, from "fossil fuels", to minerals, to habitat, to species. When I was a boy there were many parts of the earth that were still only partly known and colonized by humans. Now it's the whole earth, or at least the whole dry land part of the earth with significant degradation of the ocean underway as well. I guess Wilson and people like him would go crazy if they just focused on the losses. So he focuses on the small islands of preservation that can be achieved. I guess I have to do that too if I don't want to go crazy thinking about the future.
| Author | Pears, Iain |
|---|---|
| Publication | Berkeley Books, 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 735 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2006 |
This very unusual historical mystery is composed of four books by four fictional authors writing about the series of events surrounding an apparent murder in 1663 for which a young woman is hanged. Each observer/chronicler has a radically different point of view, and only the last one is able to fit the pieces together and make sense of the mystery.
The first observer is the most sympathetic. He presents himself as an Italian merchant's son and physician in England on business. He is honest, open, and decent. The second is a maniac obsessed with exonerating his dead father. The third is a famous mathematician who believes the Italian is a soldier and assassin. And finally there is the historian, decent and kind, if stuffy. He is the one who shows who the Italian really is (a priest) and what the real events were leading to the death of the Oxford don, and in the affairs of state pursued nefariously by all the characters either as actors or as pawns. He also discovers the real nature of the pretty girl who is hanged for killing the don - though she is really a blameless religious mystic.
This book is deeply plotted indeed, but the execution is equal to the plan. The characters are well differentiated and well developed. The story is almost incomprehensible unless one pursues it to the end. But that aspect is tolerable. There is enough along the way to keep us heading there.
| Author | Greenberg, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | The Teaching Company, 2002 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Music |
| When Read | October 2006 |
This is another of Greenberg's absolutely wonderful musical biographies.
Liszt's father was a small manager and part-time clarinetist working for the Esterhazys, the same of Haydn repute. Transferred to a backwater town with no musical life he languished in despair until the miracle of his son's great talent became apparent. Selling all they owned, the family moved to Vienna to get an education for little Franz. But they ran out of money and, despite free lessons from great musicians, had to go on the road to earn a living from concertizing. L only had one year of musical training. But his talent was colossal and one year was enough.
L's life was larger, more passionate, more exotic, more elevated, and more depressed than that of most of us. His father died while L was still a teenager. He developed religious mania. He became involved with neurotic women who, in two cases attempted to destroy him and in one went off the deep end herself and withdrew from him. He became a fervent Hungarian patriot, though he spoke no Hungarian. He lived well but gave away most of his money. He sponsored young musicians, including Wagner, whom he came to intensely dislike. His children suffered tragedy.
His music was sometimes uneven. Striving for the heights, he sometimes, but not always, fell short. And who else could put the score of a never before seen symphony upside down on the piano and transcribe and play it on the fly while giving running commentary on the music?
Hidden away at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, at Google in Mountain View, California, and working more in the open like the authors of Emacs, PHP and Python, or less well known, grep, flex and bison, I believe that there are computer programmers with something like the genius of our great composers, or at least of our almost great ones, who have a genius that is not unlike that of the musicians. You can't turn their keyboards or their listings upside down and expect them to use them, but you can add arbitrarily complex APIs and interfaces, and arbitrarily obscure bugs, and watch them wade right through the chaff, discard the irrelevancies, zero in on the problems, and elegantly solve them. I personally never made it into the front ranks of those programmers but I was pleased to be able to work in the back of the second violin section and saw away at the tunes placed before me.
| Author | Akunin, Boris |
|---|---|
| Translators | Bromfield, Andrew |
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | October 2006 |
Collegiate assessor Erast Fandorin arrives in Moscow with his Japanese servant Masa in 1882. His first night there sees a murder of his old friend, General Michael Sobolev, Russia's Achilles, a great war hero who appears to have had a heart attack in the arms of a night club singer and high class prostitute.
Fandorin does not believe the heart attack theory and pursues his inquiries with the woman, with a German agent, with a gang of criminals, with the head of state security in Moscow, always being blocked from a breakthrough in the case, often by the death of a key suspect or witness.
About halfway through the novel a new story begins of a bitter, cold blooded sociopathic killer, Achimas, known also as Klonov, who is a more than worthy antagonist for the intelligent and dangerous Fandorin. Achimas is given plenty of background from a brutalized childhood to a life of selfishness, revenge, and perfection of his criminal skills.
There are fights with karate and with guns. There is a horse drawn carriage chase, a criminals' bar, disguises, poisons, duels, an underground chamber of horrors, in short, every element of such stories is present. It's all very good fun.
My first reaction to Fandorin was negative. He is too smart, strong, fast, and experienced - a superman. But Akunin does not take him too seriously and has created a good foil for him in Achimas. The book is a pleasant, fun, not very serious but competently and intelligently written series mystery.
This is the first of the Boris Akunin / Erast Fandorin novels that I read. I have since read a couple more. Among the very limited audio book fare available at the libraries, this author's novels are among the readable ones.
| Author | Kassiri, Katrin |
|---|---|
| Author | Safarnejad, Reza |
| Publication | Baltimore: Publish America, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 159 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Iran |
| When Read | November 2006 |
Katrin is the daughter of a Baha'i family that lived a pleasant western style (within Iranian limits) middle class life under the Shah. But religious pressures brought many problems. Her intolerant father drove Katrin's older sister to a desperate suicide attempt that wasn't meant to work but did when he and one of her hypocritical chauvinist brothers refused to acknowledge her desire to marry a Muslim boy. The family was devastated.
After the revolution, her father was dismissed from government work. She, as a Baha'i was barred from the universities, and the family situation deteriorated. However the family was relatively non-political and, maybe for that reason, did not suffer as the young woman in Reading Lolita in Tehran did. Still, Katrin wanted to go to college and with no prospects in Iran, she and her sister made a dangerous illegal crossing to Pakistan and there, after many delays and finally some good luck, she made it to the U.S.
Her photo shows that she is a beautiful woman and she suffered the usual difficulties of beautiful women - problems with men. She fell in love with various handsome men who pursued her and vice versa but finally, after some fickleness on her part and some on the part of the men, she married the very solid as well as good looking Reza Safarnejad.
Reza is my current nominal supervisor at the National Cancer Institute. He is an open, honest, earnest fellow whom I like very much.
Reza still works for Lockheed-Martin. After LM lost the contract at NCI he went with the new contractor but quickly found himself out of their management loop. They had their own (highly competent) managers and their own way of doing things and Reza didn't seem to fit in. He went back to LM. The last time I heard from him he was managing a contract at the National Library of Medicine working on bioinformatics. He called me to see if I was interested in work. I was. I would love to work in that field. But I would have had to leave NCI where I've worked for 20 years. They wouldn't take me part-time. Ah well ...
I believe that Reza and Katrin have a couple of children who might be teenagers by now. I wish them all well.
| Author | Creasy, Edward, Sir |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1851 |
| Number of Pages | 242 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Military |
| When Read | November 2006 |
The author was Sir Edward Creasy, M.A., identified in the text as "Late Chief Justice of Ceylon".
The fifteen battles are Marathon 490 BC, Syracuse 413 BC, Arbela 331 BC, Metaurus 207 BC, Arminius over the legions 9 AD, Chalons 451, Tours 732, Hastings 1066, Orleans (Joan) 1429, Spanish Armada 1588, Blenheim 1704, Poltava 1709, Saratoga 1777, Valmy 1792, Waterloo 1815.
Some of the selections were a surprise to me, but very logical by C's reasoning. Cannae is left out but Metaurus, where Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal was defeated and killed is included because it ended the hope of Carthaginian victory in Italy. In 9 AD Arminius' defeat of Varus in Germany ended the hope of Roman conquest across the Rhine. At Poltava Russia defeated Sweden and began its advance to become a major European power, seen in mid-19th century as Britain's greatest threat and rival.
Creasy is marvelously well read, literate and articulate. He is a man of hs times with some of the limitations and prejudices of his time, but he is no fool. His language is beautiful, his sympathy for human beings on both sides is evident. His perceptions of the political and historical significance of each battle is always worth reading.
Surprisingly perhaps, the strictly military aspects of the battles are present, but not emphasized. This book is not a history of the development of strategy, tactics, weaponry, or warfare. It is a history of the role of key battles in the shaping of modern civilization. It still reads well today.
I just read an Amazon review of this book by a very literate fellow who castigated Creasy for adding very little of his own, and for seeing everything through such thick Victorian Christian lenses that everything is distorted. He gave it one star out of five possibles for quality.
For myself, I take the historicity of various writers for granted and do not find it objectionable. One of the French philosophers (Bergson?) said that we are historical beings beyond the depths of our own understanding. A hundred and fifty years from now, people will laugh at us too. But there is an important kernel of universality in the writings of people of all ages. Some of this is due to our all being members of the same species and sharing the same machinery of thought and feeling. I believe, though of course I can't provide any evidence for this, that some is also due to certain universals that all rational beings are likely to share.
I don't have any objection to Creasy's Victorianism. I think I can see past that and translate, when necessary, into my own framework of thought.
If Creasy were writing today, would any of the modern battles go into his list? How about Gettysburg, Midway, or Stalingrad? Sometimes it seems that the outcome of a war is inevitable even if a critical battle went the other way. That may have been true for the battles I named above, or maybe not. We'll never know for sure. Other times I'm pretty sure that a battle was decisive. Hastings seems like a good example to me.
I went back to Amazon to look again at the review I criticized but couldn't find it. Perhaps it was a review of a different edition that didn't get collected by Amazon's computer. Perhaps it was deleted by the author. Or perhaps it was a glitch.
| Author | Kershaw, Alex |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 301 |
| Extras | photos, index, notes, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | December 2006 |
Eight American pilots made it to England by different paths and joined the RAF in time to fly during the Battle of Britain. One, the famous, wealthy, Olympic bobsled champion, husband of a socialite beauty, joins a unit of upper class Englishmen and becomes a popular favorite. He is badly burned and dies, a hero used by the English government to try to stimulate sympathy in the U.S.
The flying is very difficult. The German pilots are first class killers and many RAF pilots fall to their guns. By the end of the war, only one of the eight was still alive. Most were killed in sweeps over France.
Kershaw is a good writer. He recreates the people and the times from letters, diaries, battle reports and interviews with survivors. we get a feel for these men motivated by a complex of personal and political motives. Most of them were adventurers spoiling for a fight. They got it, and they gave as good as they got.
| Author | Feynman, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Popular science |
| When Read | December 2006 |
This is a collection of miscellaneous essays and lectures by Feynman from various periods of his career. Some are personal as in the other books that I read, but some were lectures at scientific conferences covering technical subjects such as his theory of the limits in computing machinery due to energy loss, and extension of those limits by using reversible computations to recapture the energy expended on them. I didn't understand that one. It was over my head, but I found it intriguing just to try to understand.
F is the genuine article, not just as a physicist but as a broad thinker about all topics that he took up. He has not read all of the philosophy that, for example, I have read. But I would be wrong if I dismissed his philosophical reasoning and speculation as naive and ill considered. It is not. To at least some extent, his lack of background is compensated for by the penetration of his insights and by the absolute intellectual honesty of his approach to problems.
To "the pleasure of finding things out" we can add "the pleasure of listening to Feynman think."
F is very clear that, to him, life is about learning. His mind races on every topic, sucking in information and generating experimental tests and wonderful syntheses of his experience. He is a great inspiration.
| Author | Lehninger, Albert L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Menlo Park, CA: W.A. Benjamin Inc., 1973 |
| Copyright Date | 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 245 |
| Extras | illustrations, micrographs, photos, tables, diagrams, formulas, references, glossary, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Biochemistry |
| When Read | December 2006 |
Lehninger, Director of the Department of Physiological Chemistry at Johns Hopkins Medical School, was a pioneer in research into energy management in the cell. He was one of the discoverers of the association of mitochondria and the oxidative phosphorylation of ATP.
The book is about the generation and use of energy in cells. It covers energy flow, thermodynamics, ATP, photosynthesis, biosynthesis, active transport, and physical motion. His explanations are clear and lucid. I particularly liked his explanation of free energy, the uses of energy (there are just three categories: biosynthesis of molecules, active transport against gradients, and muscle movement) and his clear explanations of the coupling of exergonic to endergonic reactions to make the overall reaction exergonic.
The book is no longer up to date. We know much now that L couldn't have known in 1971, but the book is still relevant and useful.
I found this book at the Wheaton Library book sale. I knew nothing about Lehninger but read the chapter on high energy bonds and learned enough that it seemed worth $2 to read more. The sales person, deciding the book was quite old, only charged me $1. It was a dollar well spent.
I've written an extensive review and posted it on Amazon.com.
This book stimulated me to read Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry in 2008. That book, and Molecular Biology of the Cell contained more current information about biochemistry than did this book. There were places in this book where the author said it is not known whether X or Y is the cause of Z, but by the time the later books were published is was known and definite answers were available. However, and very importantly I think, I don't recall Lehninger claiming that anything was true that was later proved false, or vice versa. Everything I learned in the earlier book was still believed to be true. I think that's a testament to the way that careful science proceeds and how dependable it is as a method of discovering knowledge. As I wrote in my Amazon review:
"The author only says something is true if the evidence supporting it was strong. Where something was not well known, the author was very clear about saying so and, where speculation was indulged in, it was also clear that he was speculating. You won't learn the latest results in molecular biology from it, but I think it can be read without fear of absorbing false theories."