Books read January through December 2009
| Author | Mascetta, Joseph A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Barron's, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 475 |
| Extras | problems, solutions, diagrams, charts, glossary, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science |
| When Read | January 2009 |
First published as How to Prepare for College Board Achievement Tests: Chemistry in 1969, the book is designed to review high school chemistry and prepare a student for the test. The author, a high school teacher, stays tightly focused on that objective.
This could have been a very good book. Mascetta has managed to explain some difficult concepts using remarkably compact language. Although I have (so far) only worked a few of the problems, they were good ones.
The book is not suitable as a textbook. The explanations are just too compact. But as a review and refresher it was very well organized and written.
The biggest problem with it, really inexcusable in a 4th edition, is that it was poorly edited. I found errors in numerous equations and problems. Another high school chem teacher, or a grad student, or even an upper level chemistry undergrad, could have found and fixed almost all of these errors in two weeks.
Most of the errors were obvious but there were a few cases where I wasn't sure whether I or the book was right. That makes things difficult.
I think I have a reasonable mastery of chemistry at a high school level, with some understanding of concepts that would only be taught at a college level. I certainly don't have the knowledge that an undergraduate chemistry major would have.
Chemistry is difficult. That's why I read this book. I have tried to read, and made some progress, in Pauling's text, in Oxtoby's, and in another very good general chemistry book. The problem for me is that, to really master the subject, one must spend hundreds of hours on math drills. It's not that I'm bad at it, it's that I will never be a working chemist and don't need those skills. I just need the concepts. But, unfortunately, the concepts themselves are mathematical. It's a problem for me. Modern science is intensely mathematical and there's no really easy way around it, despite the title of this book.
| Author | Rickenbacker, Eddie, 1890-1973 |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Frederick A Stokes Co. |
| Copyright Date | 1919 |
| Number of Pages | 371 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War I |
| When Read | January 2009 |
Rickenbacker recounts his experiences as a fighter pilot from his first day of combat, March 6, 1918, until the armistice on Nov. 11. Nothing outside that period is included.
R was the real deal, an ace of aces. He is acknowledged to have shot down 26 aircraft in his eight months at the front, but there were a number of other unconfirmed kills. Some of his victories were against top German pilots, including one in which he was attacked by four "red nosed Fokkers." In a hair raising dogfight he shot one down then chased the other three back into Germany, catching and killing one 100 feet over the ground while every German with a rifle fired at him. They were members of Germany's most elite "Richtofen" squadron.
That he survived was a testament both to his skill and his luck. In many cases bullets missed him by inches. In others he made it back to his own side out of gas, or out of oil with a seized engine, or with half the fabric gone from a wing surface, or with most of a propeller blade shot off.
He was an incredible flyer, a determined fighter, and still a good leader and a chivalrous man in a way that still survived in the first World War but not as much in the second.
See the diary entry for January 5, 2009 for more about him.
| Author | de Bernieres, Louis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Westminster, MD: Books on Tape |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2009 |
A stifled, depressed, English pharmaceutical salesman named Chris goes through the motions of earning a living and supporting his cold, distant, parasitic wife, "the great white loaf." His daughter is grown and lives far away and Chris is now lonely and despondent. Then he sees a woman who appears to be a street walker. On a whim, and out of desperation, he approaches her. But she is not what she seems. Her name is Roza. She is the daughter of a former Yugoslav communist partisan and is living illegally in a condemned house in a rundown neighborhood.
The two become interested in each other. Chris visits Roza regularly and she tells him stories about her life. Compared to Chris' life, Roza's was exotic, dangerous, intense, and rich. He is entranced and she finds great satisfaction in pouring out these stories and soaking up his wonder and sympathy.
We read this story hoping for a successful match up of two lovers. Perhaps Chris will finally find love and passion. Perhaps Roza will finally find love and safety. But it doesn't happen. Chris gets drunk and makes a total ass of himself. Roza reacts as if she has finally seen the true, underlying, brutal personality of Chris and is repelled by him. She leaves England. Chris spends years hoping to see her again, but all is lost. He faces his end with nothing but longing, bitterness, and loneliness.
This is not so ambitious as Birds Without Wings or Corelli's Mandolin but, of course, is very well written. It's depressing though - one of those books to admire without enjoying.
| Author | Rambaud, Patrick |
|---|---|
| Translators | Hobson, Will |
| Publication | Grove Press, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 313 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | January 2009 |
This novel is about the battle at Aspern Essling fought on May 21-23, 1809, in and around a village on the Danube River just north of Vienna in Austria Hungary. Napoleon's forces crossed a single, vulnerable bridge over the river and were confronted by the Austrian army under Prince Charles on the other side. Napoleon would likely have won the battle if he had been able to maintain the bridge. But the Austrians floated increasingly large objects down the swollen river, disrupting the bridge and preventing ammunition and reinforcements from reaching the army. The French and their allies were forced to withdraw. The Austrian prince did not follow up. Napoleon stayed in Austria and six weeks later he defeated Charles at the battle of Wagram.
The characters in the novel are all French, a colonel on the staff, several generals, Napoleon himself, and an intellectual civilian who works for the army and stays in Vienna. Two common soldiers, a brutal sergeant and a young peasant, give the soldier's eye view of the battle.
This novel won the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Academie Francaise, and the Prix Goncourt, but it didn't convince me. I thought all of the characters were stereotyped caricatures. The overall action was apparently well researched but the individual scenes were sketchy and unconvincing. I didn't believe in the brutal rapist sergeant killing himself, the generals hating each other in the face of the enemy, or in Napoleon himself, portrayed as a kind of successful buffoon.
Perhaps French literature was at a low ebb that year and prizes were being awarded to something less than top drawer books.
| Author | Sobel, Dava |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Walker and Company, 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| When Read | January 2009 |
In 1714 Parliament passed the Longitude Act, offering 20,000 pounds to anyone who could reliably determine the longitude of a ship at sea. Apart from various crackpot theories, huge numbers of which were sent in to win the prize, there were two basic approaches to the problem. One could determine longitude by reference to the relative positions of the moon and the stars, or one could compare the solar noon time against the time on an accurate clock set at a known longitude.
Neither method was practical in 1714. The accurate observations of moon and star positions were not yet charted, the complex math had yet to be worked out, and no clock could keep accurate time on a moving ship with changing temperature and humidity.
The scientists strongly favored the astronomical approach because it works anywhere, even if the clock fails. But clocks had the advantage of simplicity in calculation and observation and, if really accurate, could provide more accuracy than shipboard astronomical observation could.
Clock maker John Harrison took up the challenge and with decades of hard work, solved the problems. The official board hated his approach and threw every obstacle in his way until he grew old and died. But he was eventually awarded a partial prize and, eventually, his son got the rest.
There is no technical detail in this book, which is a shame, but there were good explanations of the problems, the people, and the politics.
It would appear that telling longitude by the stars would be the superior way to do it, requiring no carefully constructed clock. However the calculations, not refined until 1837, are pretty daunting. The U.S. Naval Academy stopped requiring its students to learn the 22 step mathematical equations in 1998. Now they get a GPS reading or, if necessary (which it should never be), they make the sextant observations and feed the numbers into a computer program that does the 22 steps.
We ordinary consumers take a huge amount of absolutely essential technology completely for granted.
| Author | Fairbairn, Captain William Ewart |
|---|---|
| Author | Sykes, Captain Eric Anthony |
| Publication | Paladin Press, distributed by the U.S. Marine Corps, 1942 |
| Number of Pages | 96 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | January 2009 |
Fairbairn was a legendary police captain in the International quarter (I think) in Shanghai. He and Sykes are known to have survived "over two hundred incidents where violent close combat occurred with oriental criminal elements." The book was written for the benefit of police officers and administrators and for British soldiers in World War II.
F held that shooting at paper targets at a range is not a useful form of training. Gunfights with pistols happen very fast and at very close range. The winner is not usually the guy who aims most accurately but rather the guy who gets off the first shot.
For plainclothes detective work F thought that most shooting is from only a couple of yards away, up to maybe four yards. For that he favored a snub nosed .45 caliber revolver with the front of the trigger guard cut away. For uniformed police he favored a semi-auto for its larger magazine, higher rate of fire, and quick reload. He saw no real advantage to heavy, slow bullets and found that a high speed 9 mm sometimes did much more damage than a .45.
F trained men to draw fast, grip the gun very tightly (because it's what you'll do in an emergency anyway) and fire immediately from the hip, one-handed, without aiming. If a cop can hit a man that way at four yards he has a good chance to win a fight. It can happen in the dark, after running when out of breath, and because he sees a quick movement of the criminal's hand.
It's quite a book by quite a man.
There are various books by firearms instructors but it's hard to know which of them have actual experience of shooting to live. Fairbairn however was the real deal. He wrote an interesting book.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Prince Frederick, MD: Hachette Audio, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2009 |
Detective Harry Bosch of the LAPD Open Unsolved Crimes Unit is working again on the murder of a young woman named Marie Gesto when cops in Echo Park pick up a man by pure serendipity with a chopped up body in his van. The killer, Raynard Waits, eventually confesses to a slew of crimes, including Gesto. Bosch is made to look foolish and malicious for his dogged hounding of another man whom he believes to be the killer. Prosecutor Rick O'Shea, running for D.A., takes Bosch, his young woman partner, a lawyer, and another cop on an expedition with Waits to dig up Gesto's body. They find it, then Waits makes his move, killing one cop, badly wounding another, and escaping.
Bosch, with the help of an FBI profiler who was and becomes again his lover, tracks Waits. he is removed from the case but disobeys orders. He is convinced that O'Shea setup the whole thing.
In the end, Bosch, in a move of almost suicidal simple mindedness, goes into a cave after Waits and shoots him. But he ain't done. He wants O'Shea. After pursuing and pissing off the man he finally learns that O'Shea is clean and it is his own Captain who betrayed him.
I couldn't like Bosch. I couldn't approve of his methods or his manias. It interfered with my enjoyment. But it was still an impressive book.
There is a mystery literature and movie tradition in the United States of portraying cops who break legal rules and work on hunches to catch bad guys who would go free if the bureaucrats and time servers just follow the law and do everything by the book. Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, Bruce Willis in the Die Hard series, and many others are examples of this style. It fills a need in the reader or movie viewer to identify with a really tough guy who is able to let it all hang out and express his violent emotions - all with the ultimate sanction of being right.
Connelly's Harry Bosch has one foot in this tradition and one foot out of it. Bosch breaks the rules to go after the bad guys. He catches people that might not otherwise be caught. He shoots men that might otherwise just go to prison. But, contrary to the tradition, he also sometimes goes after innocent people, plays wrong, sometimes fatally wrong, hunches and doesn't always do the right thing.
I'm not sure what to make of it all. As I said three years ago when I wrote up the book card for this book, Bosch's style interfered with my enjoyment of the story but it was still an impressive book.
Connelly is a talented writer.
Here's another possible explanation of why people like the tough cop who plays hunches rather than following the rules. Lots of people, possibly a majority of people, like to play hunches themselves. We've seen cancer patients, even Steve Jobs(!), say, "I've got a feeling that if I eat a macrobiotic diet it will cure my cancer." For some of these people, their attachment to hunches is emotional and powerful. For others its a substitute for attempting difficult intellectual efforts. For some its both.
On the other hand, I've seen outstanding computer programmers who dismiss one design in favor of another, or chess players who dismiss one move in favor of another, based mainly on past experience. It's an intellectual shortcut to a quick solution rather than an exhibition of emotion or laziness. Let Harry Bosch be an object lesson to them of how things can go wrong.
| Author | Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 669 |
| Extras | index, notes, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Economic depression |
| When Read | January 2009 |
Volume 2 of The Age of Roosevelt is as good as volume 1. S tells the history of the first several years of Roosevelt's administration. Faced with a completely unprecedented crisis with the economy in total ruins, the President was determined to try things. He had no idea what would work. Nobody did. But he was unwilling to let capitalism just run its course as the bankrupt Republicans demanded.
S is a man who understood the deep complexities of the people and the times. He did not see Roosevelt as any kind of genius. The President was fallible and he had both personal and intellectual failings. But he was an effective leader, a man who motivated the people in his government, pointed them in the right directions, and encouraged them to rise above themselves. He was probably as good a man as America had for the job.
There are tremendous lessons in this book for our time and our crisis. The stupidity, cupidity, arrogance, and vituperation of the Republican Party and the rich jerks who ruled it were as they are now. R. said one of his main tasks was to keep the rich from committing suicide with stupid policies.
A great history by a great historian.
Looking at the Wikipedia entry for Schlesinger I see that, in addition to his most impressive academic and scholarly achievements, he also had a social life that included friendships with many presidents, politicians, and leading intellectuals of every kind. My impression of his books was that he read everything, he talked to everyone, he knew the temper of the times from every angle.
He was indeed a great historian and a great intellectual by any measure.
| Author | Weyman, Stanley J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1898 |
| Number of Pages | 248 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; England |
| When Read | February 2009 |
Sir George Soane, a young man about town with nothing better to do than drink and gamble away his inheritance, finds himself at Oxford around 1770 where he happens upon a beautiful young woman named Julia. With no thought other than to chase a petticoat he becomes involved in something far more complex and dangerous, affecting her interest as well as his own.
Then comes the first twist one finds in romantic stories of this kind. The girl is discovered to be the legitimate heir to Sir George's fortune. He doesn't know it but she does and the tables are turned. He becomes more and more in love with the girl and she with him. Then everything goes to hell as a young rake hell has her kidnapped. She thinks George is responsible. He pursues her. She falls into the clutches of another impoverished, noble bully and reprobate, and adventures abound.
A Gentleman of France is still my favorite Weyman story but this one is pretty good. It's light, swashbuckling romance but with nicely drawn characters such as the villainous young rakes, the imposing Lady Dunborough, the importunate but ultimately honest lawyer Mr. Fishwick, and the weak and obsequious Oxford scholar Mr. Thommason.
It's a fun read.
One of Weyman's strengths as a writer was his ability to manage ambiguous characters. In this novel, Soane, Fishwick, Thommason, and others are ambiguous. They aren't all good but they aren't all bad either. We readers don't know what they're going to do, not because we've been told too little, but because we've been told too much. We've seen that they have the capability to do well and ill and we can't be sure which one they'll choose. This lends an additional spice to his stories.
I imagine that very few readers know about Weyman today. As far as I know, there's no publishing house advertising his out of copyright books. But with the expansion of e-book publishing and the availability of books like this for free via Gutenberg or other sources, I think there will continue to be an audience for him for years, decades, and I think, centuries to come. For anyone reading my notes about this, I definitely recommend that you download a copy of A Gentleman of France and experience a delightful treat. Then try some of the others.
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 2009 |
French colonel Jean-Francois Mercier is a military attache at the French embassy in Warsaw in 1937. He works with French and Polish agencies to gather military information about Germany, some of it from a small time engineer at a German industrial arms plant who comes frequently to Warsaw to spend time with a woman he has been setup with, and to get away from his wife. Mercier also has occasional contact with two Soviet Jewish agents who spy on Nazis while also fearing for their own lives from the NKVD.
The German spy gets nervous and the Gestapo get on to him. They arrange a kidnapping in Warsaw but Mercier breaks it up, saves the man, and spirits him away. The Germans plot revenge and send sadistic killers to get him but he foils them too. He also falls in love for the first time since the death of his wife.
Furst specializes in minor heroes, men of small power but large heart who recognize the evil of Nazism and struggle against it bravely. Unlike real life, F's heroes manage to win their small victories, or at least stay alive. This makes the novels tolerable and readable in the period of deepest totalitarian despair that seems to draw F to write. He is like Kazantzakis' Saint Francis, drawn not just to the people who suffer, but to those who suffer in the deepest pit.
As in all his novels, there is little real violence and no violent realism. The enemy is a dark force partly concealed behind a curtain. We do not see the bleeding wounds or the bodies in the street. He is an ideosyncratic writer, a kind of specialist, but always a man for whom I have genuine sympathy.
| Author | Dawkins, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oxford E-Books, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 236 |
| Extras | photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biology |
| Keywords | Evolution |
| When Read | February 2009 |
This is a second, revised edition of a book originally published in 1976.
Dawkins makes a case for seeing DNA sequences as the object of natural selection. He is agnostic about the exact definition of a gene. He recognizes the issues created by exons and introns and other peculiarities of DNA, but he argues that the gene, defined as a coherent sequence of base pairs that replicate together, is what is ultimately selected by evolution. Selection acts directly on organisms as a whole, but it is only their genes that are replicated and passed on.
Some of the interesting discussion concerns how genes evolve in the context of other genes. Genes for sharp teeth are helpful to a predator but harmful to an herbivore, and vice versa for genes for grinding teeth. So the individual gene is not selected absolutely. It's selected for a particular environment. But the definition of that environment is fluid.
I also liked his concept of an "extended phenotype". The beaver's dam, the mouse hole, the bee's hive, etc., are the expression of genes and should be seen in the same light as teeth and wings and feathers.
All in all this was a very stimulating book. Dawkins is a man who makes no compromises. He insists on looking at things as they are regardless of any discomfort that we get from the sight. He's always interesting to read.
There are lots of philosphical issues here. I think that some are probably important and others may only reduce to arguments about what we should call phenomena that everyone actually understands in the same way.
Is the beaver's dam selected for? Is it the behavior in creating the dam that is selected for? Is it the beaver's teeth, muscles, and cognitive power employed in the dam building that are selected for? How do we decide? Is there a right answer and a wrong one or are these just different ways of describing the same right answer?
The "environment" of a gene, as Dawkins calls it, might reintroduce the entire organism and even beyond. The gene by itself is of no use without the machinery for transcription and translation, the promoters and repressors, the signals and signal transduction mechanisms, the cellular environment that produces the substrates upon which the products of gene expression work, and on and on. Where do we draw the line and say this is the gene and that's the organism?
I'm not saying that we can't draw any lines or that we can't locate key events on one side or the other of them. That would be to throw our hands in the air and act as if there's nothing to be learned by analysis, when in fact there is much to be learned. I don't regard Dawkins' approach as fruitless, or a waste of time, or as a method of analysis that doesn't make sense. I'm just saying that we have to be careful not to get carried away with an overly simple analysis. As Einstein said, we want to be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Too much time has passed for me to evaluate D's arguments again. I've written much more in my diary. See the entry for February 4, 2009.
| Author | Jin, Ha, 1956- |
|---|---|
| Publication | BBC Audiobooks, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 672 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 2009 |
Chinese political science student Nan Wu drops out of grad school in the U.S. after expressing subversive thoughts about the Chinese government after the massacre at Tienanmen Square. China revoked his passport but he was not yet a U.S. citizen. He works as a security guard to support his wife Pingping and son Taotao. But what he really wants to do is write poetry.
He becomes, for short periods, an editor for a Chinese publication in New York, earning almost nothing, and then an assistant cook in a Chinese restaurant, where he learns to cook. He and Pingping then buy a Chinese restaurant in Atlanta and slave away, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, year after year, to pay for their house and become safe and secure.
It sort of works but Nan Wu is an unsettled man. He is unsatisfied with his poems. He is unsure of his identity. He knows he has a wonderful wife but can't get his first love, the selfish and manipulative Beina, out of his mind. He is faithful to his wife but is uninterested in her, even though she loves him completely. He is at odds with his growing son.
This book is very personal. It's about a man with an eccentric personality. It works out issues about family, love, patriotism and literature from an unabashedly personal perspective.
It's not a great book and is concerned with far from universal themes. Its plot is mundane. There are no great transformations, or perhaps there are but they are subtle ones. But I liked it. I very much liked the collection of Nan Wu's poems at the end, shedding much light on the story.
The poems at the end were a revelation to me. They were good. They explained what Nan Wu was thinking in the various episodes that were in the main story but not fully commented on except in the poems. They gave life and credibility to the description of him as a poet.
Perhaps the hardest thing for me to read in the book was Nan Wu's inability to relate to the decent and loving Pingping and to Taotao and his attraction to the viper Beina. Reading it is like reading about a drug addict who turns from a good life to embrace disgusting drugs. It happens. Many people are like that. Some may even be hard working and some may be poets, but it's hard for me to relate to without becoming angry at the character, and maybe a little at the author.
That may be my problem, not a problem in the book, but it felt like a problem in the book and an argument could be made that it is. But of course the whole issue here is that we have a man for whom reasoned argument is not the basis of his outlook on the world, and no one can deny that there are a great many people like that. So perhaps that makes it my problem again. The author's unwillingness to take a stand against Nan Wu's behavior is undoubtedly true to his intent.
| Author | Cussler, Clive |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bantam Books, 1983 |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 270 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 2009 |
This is the first "Dirk Pitt" novel. Pitt is an oceanographer, adventurer, naval officer, spy, Senator's son, and ladies man, a typical comic book superhero.
While walking on the beach in Hawaii Pitt discovers a message capsule from the lost super submarine Starbuck. The naval authorities, anxious to recover the sub, are eventually forced to commission Pitt to devise and lead a recovery plan against the evil malefactors who are responsible for its loss. The result is a combination high tech thriller and juvenile adventure story of derring do, beautiful women, underwater fights, aircraft, submarines, and the fate of hundreds of people.
It sounds pretty ridiculous and it is. However Cussler writes with enough verve, humor, and self consciousness that the effect is more that of a light pastry full of empty but tasty calories than of the flat and tasteless pancake that it might otherwise have been. I found myself wanting to finish it - something that I often don't want to do with this kind of fare.
| Author | Renfrew, Colin |
|---|---|
| Publication | Modern Library, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | xiii + 219 |
| Extras | illustrations bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Anthropology |
| Keywords | Stonehenge |
| When Read | March 2009 |
Renfrew begins his short book with a review of the history of prehistory, i.e., a review of goals, methods, and conclusions of the generations of archaeologists working before radio carbon dating settled once and for all the accurate dating of archaeological remains.
Archeology was mostly concerned with the societies uncovered by digging until it was revolutionized by V.Gordon Childe, the first man to concentrate on the big questions about why humans developed, why civilization evolved, and what did the great prehistoric civilizations have in common. He wanted to understand the universal forces driving human development and, if there were such, what common features did they impose on humanity.
R is especially interested in the question of why did fully modern humans exist for so many millennia with hardly any social development and then, suddenly, give rise to the neolithic agricultural revolution. He doesn't really answer that question but he does shed light on it.
One key point he makes is that advance in material culture should not be thought of purely as a reflection of society, but also as a creator of it. Stonehenge is thought to have incorporated 30 million person hours of work. It required the participation of all of southern England - forging a much larger ethnic association and identity than had existed before.
R also talks about "trajectories" of development. They are not all the same. Most early civilizations had strong religious and class hierarchies. The Indus valley seemingly did not.
A very thought provoking book.
There is an extended discussion of Renfrew in my diary entry for February 28, 2009. It was written before I finished the book but it has more to say than I wrote above and it says it more thoughtfully.
I often make small edits when I copy a hand written book card to an XML file. The edits are usually spelling and grammar corrections, the former often revealed by the Emacs/UNIX spell checker. But for this entry I had to fix some mangled sentences and revise some language. I seem to recall that I wrote this book card too long after reading the book and wrote rather carelessly, mostly to get it written rather than to get it right.
Renfrew's book, or at least the subject and the ideas that he is attempting to address, is important. Humanity has burst over the earth in an incredibly short period of time. I read somewhere, perhaps in Renfrew, that there were no more than about 8 million people before the neolithic revolution. Now, 12,000 or so years later, there are almost 1,000 times that many. We have spread to every continent, taken over every kind of tropic or temperate land mass, raped the earth, the minerals beneath the earth, and in the seas, to tear out and consume nature's bounty. We have wiped out at least one quarter of the species on earth and will inevitably and unstoppably wipe out another quarter, probably before one hundred years are out. We have even changed the climate. And equally importantly I think but in an opposite direction, we have created extraordinary science, technology, art, and society - complex and ambiguous as it is. And it has all been done in the blink of an eye of evolutionary time.
It really does require explanation.
| Author | Antenori, Frank |
|---|---|
| Author | Halberstadt, Hans |
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Military; Iraq |
| When Read | March 2009 |
Trained as a medic, Antenori became the lead sergeant of an Army Special Forces A Team, a small unit (around 11 men) of elite professionals, all of whom were experts at every weapon and were cross trained on everything from medic to machine gunner, radio operator, missile operator, driver, and so on. They went to northern Iraq in the 2003 U.S. invasion and wound up confronting an Iraqi division equipped with tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers and infantry, with just a few A teams in specially modified Humvees but with Javelin missiles that could destroy tanks and anything else at ranges up to several miles. The also had air support that put 2,000 pound bombs on any spot they wished.
The battle was no contest. It was a massacre. With more motivation, skill and leadership the Iraqis could have killed a lot of the Americans, but as it was, they achieved nothing and got slaughtered themselves. Had the Iraqis simply been able to handle their artillery more professionally the outcome would have been very different.
I gained an appreciation of the gulf that exists between professional soldiers with advanced weapons and non-professionals with lesser weapons. Highly motivated Mujaheddin would have performed much better than the totally unmotivated Iraqi Army, but they still would have been slaughtered in any conventional battle.
It was interesting to see how different Special Forces are from regular Army, even in the egalitarian relations of officers and men.
Ten thousand Iraqis were beaten by 30 or 40 American soldiers in the Iraq War. Now, an estimated 25,000 Taliban are successfully defying 100,000 western troops and 200,000 Afghan government troops. Technology and training are important and absolutely decisive in some conflicts, but they aren't the whole story, as the Taliban have demonstrated.
The "battle" these men fought in northern Iraq was against 10,000 Iraqis armed with tanks and artillery as well as small arms. However the Americans were armed with computer controlled "Javelin" guided missiles, and laser pointers that could be used to target smart bombs. If they aimed a missile at a tank miles away and fired, the missile's camera would lock a picture of the target into its aiming system and follow the tank as it moved until, perhaps 30 seconds after the firing, it would hit the tank and obliterate it. For closer in targets and for infantry, they would point a laser at the target and call for a bomb. A plane, possibly flying out of sight, would drop a 2,000 pound bomb which would home in on the laser illuminated spot and kill everything for hundreds of yards around. A few Iraqis got close enough to be shot by rifle or machine guns but most of them, seeing what was happening, ran away, often shot down as they ran.
I don't know if this even qualifies as a "battle". By Antenori's account, the American soldiers were pleased at what they had achieved. An American woman reporter who witnessed the event was sickened by it and tried to stop the soldiers from shooting down the Iraqis who were running away, but the soldiers considered killing the enemy to be their mission. It was what they trained for. Antenori told her that the Iraqis could have thrown their hands up and surrendered but they didn't and so the soldiers was justified in shooting them. They ignored her.
| Author | Manchette, Jean Patrick |
|---|---|
| Translators | Nicholson-Smith, Donald |
| Publication | City Lights Books, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 134 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2009 |
Salesman Georges Gerfaut travels the Paris ring road late one night and stops at a car crash to take the victim to the hospital, then quickly drives away again without leaving his name and without even realizing that the injured man had been shot and that he, Gerfaut, had actually witnessed a murder.
The two killers attempt to tie up loose ends by murdering Gerfaut but they botch the job. G, now realizing that someone wants to kill him, but not knowing why, simply abandons his wife and children with no explanation and runs. There are more attempts. Gerfaut hides in the woods with an old hunter. He has an affair with the hunter's daughter. He is tracked down again and kills the remaining killer in a gunfight. Then he returns to Paris, determines that the cause of all his misery is a Latin American military bastard living out his retirement in France. He finds the bastard and kills him.
The story is austere, existential, exotic, bizarre, darkly humorous. In the end, after a year and a half away, Gerfaut simply goes home and claims not to remember a thing. He sticks to that story and resumes his old life.
This is not like other murder mystery thrillers. It's an original. It's not a great book but it sure is an interesting one.
Three years later I still recall this book fairly well, at least after reading the notes above. It must have made an impression. Of course I would have nothing without those notes. When I read the notes, the particulars described therein come back to me. They must be somewhere in my brain but only the notes can release them.
| Author | Hawking, Stephen W. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New Millenium Audio, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 136 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science |
| Keywords | Physics; Cosmology |
| When Read | March 2009 |
These very brief popular lectures describe some of the main issues in cosmology - What was the Big Bang? How much can we know about it? Is it possible to learn anything about what happened before it? What are black holes? What can they teach us about "singularities" and does that information relate to the singularity origin of the Big Bang?
H exercises his sense of humor - poking fun at some of his intellectual adversaries, though not naming them. He also discusses some philosophical implications of physics such as the question of whether a "big crunch" will run the second law of thermodynamics backwards and, if it does, will we remember the future instead of the past? He takes the psychological arguments about what we can know and how we are able to think about things more seriously than I expected.
As in his other popular works, there is no math. Since all of the arguments for all of the positions are mathematical, the reader, even if he is competent to do the math (which I am not) cannot possibly draw his own conclusions. But Hawking understands that the general reader cannot possibly understand the math so we just have to take H's word for what it tells us.
I read books like this with no real hope of understanding. At best I can increase my recognition of the salient issues.
Not surprisingly, I remember nothing at all of Hawking's arguments. The above notes are all I have. I don't think that cosmology and nuclear physics are going to ever be part of my intellectual arsenal. I'm having enough trouble mastering the fundamentals of chemistry needed for the molecular biology that I study.
I see that in my original write up I made no comment on the fact that Hawking himself was the reader of this audio book.
| Author | Clapton, Eric |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 345 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Music |
| When Read | March 2009 |
This is an abridged edition. Had I known, I wouldn't have borrowed it from the library. I hate reading something less than what the author wrote and published, but it often happens that the publisher hides the fact of the abridgment and sometimes the library places one of its bar code or other stickers over the spot where it might be revealed.
E.C. offers his autobiography from his childhood to 2007. He was an illegitimate child raised to believe that his grandparents were his parents, only to discover the truth at age seven (if I remember correctly.) He was unhappy and rebellious. Although brought up in a working class home and enjoying physical labor, his real loves were music and art. He went to art school but didn't do all of the work and was forced out. However he became very serious about music.
He was in many different bands. Most fell apart due to the centrifugal focus of musicians, each following his own trajectory. Then heroin became a big deal in his life and, when he finally beat it, alcohol took over. He spent years barely able to function on stage and producing music that he was far from proud of later. A succession of gorgeous women fell in love with him but he could not be faithful to any of them. He pursued George Harrison's beautiful wife for years but, when she finally succumbed, he cheated on her too. He was really out of control.
Eventually, in the late 1980's, he got it together, cleaned himself up, joined A.A., and married a woman and settled down.
He always lived in the artificial world of a rock star - money, women, celebrity - but he took many years to learn to handle it. Still, his candor, his recognition of his own failings, and his deep appreciation of other musicians are redeeming qualities.
It was an interesting book.
Who hasn't dreamed of being a rock star? However for me, it's not the money or women I dream about, it's something else. Part of it is the music. That was certainly even more a motivation for Clapton than for a man like me who has only a tiny fraction of his talent. But the other thing I'd like to do is to impress my friends. It's not as meaningful to stand in front of an audience of people I don't know as to stand in front of some friends and play.
So, should I practice to become a rock star?
| Author | Chandler, Raymond |
|---|---|
| Publication | Internet download, 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 379 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2009 |
Philip Marlowe, the Los Angeles private detective introduced in earlier novels, meets Terry Lennox, a man with big scars on his face, a rich and loose wife, and a drinking problem. M forms some attachment to Lennox over time. Then one day Lennox shows up at M's house, begging a ride to Mexico. M helps him and soon after is arrested for helping a murderer to escape.
In a seemingly separate case M turns down a commission from New York publisher Howard Spencer to babysit writer Roger Wade through his drunkenness, depression and writer's block, but he does fetch Wade from a drunk tank run by a down at the heels doctor and his maniac ward and bring him home to his beautiful but distant wife Eileen.
After much to and fro M discovers that Lennox's suicide is a fake, Wade's suicide was actually murder, and Eileen killed both Mrs. Lennox and Wade.
I had a lot of problems with the character of Marlowe. He is too good to do paid work. He rejects all jobs as unsuitable or not worth payment or beneath him. Yet he is nasty to almost everyone. He is hard boiled to a point past being human. The casual bigotry against Mexicans was also offensive to my more modern sensibility and probably should have been offensive in 1953.
Chandler does make interesting anti-establishment political comments and interesting comments on the nature of popular writing.
| Author | Cornish, Nik |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brassey's, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Extras | index maps photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Military; World War II; Soviet Union |
| When Read | March 2009 |
C begins his account after the battle at Stalingrad. The German Army and government threw everything they had into rebuilding their forces, from thousands of new tanks and airplanes to huge numbers of new draftees. Everything was mobilized in order to make a huge push in a final effort to regain the initiative in the East and knock Russia out of the war.
The first task was to stop the Russian offensive. Manstein and others did that brilliantly, using deep knowledge and great skill to defeat the blunt force Russia could mobilize against them. Then they decided to make their effort at Kursk.
The battle was unprecedented in scope with more men, tanks, guns and planes than anything before. Both sides fought furiously with great courage and determination. The Germans had experience, technology, skill and talent. The Russians had numbers and determination and were growing in experience and skill.
In the end, despite massive 3 to 1 casualties in favor of Germany, the Russians stopped and turned back the enemy and broke his ability to recover. They followed up with a succession of hard, fast, unceasing blows that never allowed the Germans to rest or recoup their losses. Germany was doomed.
Most of the text is a blow by blow account. There isn't a lot of eyewitness narrative, though there is some, and there are many excerpts from reports. There is good discussion of strategy, not enough about the air battle, but outstanding photos.
See my diary for more - March 25 and 30, 2009.
Since reading this book I read a book entitled The Greatest Battle about the German offensive against Moscow. It claimed that the battle for Moscow was larger than Kursk or Stalingrad.
Comparisons like these depend on definitions of terms. The struggle for Moscow lasted a very long time whereas Kursk took place in a much shorter, probably with more condensed violence. But in any case, leaving aside the comparatives, there is no doubt that the battles on the Eastern front - Moscow, Stalingrad, Crimea, Kursk, Bagration, Berlin, and others were all on a pretty massive scale. We don't know what would have happened if the Russians had been beaten and forced into a separate peace. We owe a lot, not to Stalin I think, but to the tough Russian soldiers and airmen who gave their lives in such frightful numbers to win the war.
| Author | Kershaw, Alex |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Naval; Submarines; World War II |
| When Read | March 2009 |
In October 1944 the most successful American submarine, the Tang, was sunk in the Formosa Strait by her own runaway torpedo. Nine men survived by being blown off the bridge or by escaping through a hatch and making it to the surface. K tells the story of their last patrol, the sinking, the harrowing escapes which only a few survived, and the cruel mistreatment they suffered at the hands of sadistic Japanese prison guards who would eventually have killed all of them if the war had gone on longer.
It was a great story of mostly ordinary men who rose to the occasion to fight the Japanese, save themselves and what shipmates they could, and stand up to enemy brutality.
Kershaw writes these books with great love for the men. I am very glad that he has been able to interview WWII survivors and write his books in time, before the last of them died and the stories were lost forever.
One of my personal obsessions, possibly a little ridiculous and likely to fail anyway in its intended outcome, is to preserve who I am by writing a diary and keeping these book notes. Kershaw, and other writers and biographers like him, are doing the same thing for others. The attempt strikes a chord in me.
| Author | Davis, Lindsey |
|---|---|
| Publication | BBC Audiobooks, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Roman Empire |
| When Read | April 2009 |
Marcus Didius Falco is commissioned by the Imperial government to find Veleda, a German woman leader of anti-Roman rule, who has been arrested and sent to Rome but has escaped after the murder of a nobleman in the house where she was staying. Falco and Valeda both know that she was secretly scheduled for a public execution and F owes her a debt for a time in a previous novel when she saved F and his brother-in-law Justinius, who fell in love with her. Still, he tries to capture her but also tries to find out if she really is a murderess - hoping to save her life if she is not.
All of this occurs in Rome around the festival of Saturnalia, when the whole city goes a little nuts. Falco searches for the woman, engages the help of some legionaries and of Petro and his Vigiles, and matches wits with his rival, the chief spy Anacrites.
Davis' view of Rome as an East End of London, replete with all of the characters and slang from such a place, is not really convincing but it's full of spirit and it does force us to consider that Rome was, after all, a living city with people of all kinds. There is, for example, an interesting take on Roman doctors here of every kind. Davis has Falco more or less taking all of them seriously, but also with grains of salt - not unlike the way we take them today.
| Author | Gordon, Deborah |
|---|---|
| Publication | The Free Press, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 182 |
| Extras | index bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biology |
| When Read | April 2009 |
Unable to locate E.O. Wilson's books on ants at the public library, I did find this little book and was intrigued by the title.
A professor of entomology at Stanford, Gordon does field work every summer at the same place in the Arizona/New Mexico desert, studying the behavior and the life cycles of harvester ant colonies. She reports such info as: Each colony is established by a single queen who was fertilized once and then continues to produce eggs for up to 20 years. Colony behavior changes over that time from weak to aggressive, to stable, and matures at about five years, with 12,000 - 20,000 individual ants, each playing one of four roles - forager, midden workers (moving waste) nest maintenance, and patrollers. No king or queen gives orders. The ants just do what needs to be done, sensing from each other what roles are already occupied and where more work is needed.
Gordon and her colleagues and students carry out incredibly painstaking work - digging up colonies, counting ants by the ten thousands, painting marks on ants and following them, disturbing colonies in careful ways and observing what happens - all in desert heat and sun. It's impressive work.
I still don't have a good understanding of ants. What I need is more physiology, more context of other insects and insect societies, maybe some evolutionary theory. But it was an interesting book.
The social insects pose a number of challenges to our understanding of evolution. Why do they engage in something like what we call altruistic behavior? How are behaviors affecting tens of thousands of sterile individuals passed down from a single queen ant?
One explanation often given for all of this is that the colony is the organism, not the individual ant. I think that, in a sense, that's right, but it can be stated in a more easily understood way. The behavior of all of the ants is almost entirely genetically determined. They don't learn much. The queens that survive are the ones that pass on the most useful behaviors, i.e., most useful to the survival and reproduction of the queen. Self-preservation of a worker ant is of no benefit to the queen except in cases where it enables her to produce more surviving offspring. The workers, and the queen too, are all pre-programmed in their DNA to go out and do their duty, and the best DNA wins.
Ants are said to be the most successful multi-cellular animal on the planet. They're very interesting little critters.
| Author | Wilson, Edward O. |
|---|---|
| Publication | new Millenium Audio, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Biology; Ecology |
| When Read | April 2009 |
Wilson opens with a hypothetical discussion with Thoreau about the area of Walden Pond and soon proceeds to a survey of the current state of the world's ecology.
It is a bleak assessment. The losses already suffered are severe and irreversible on any human time scale, and the pace of destruction is accelerating. The loss of species, the loss of habitat, the spread of humans into every nook and cranny of the earth, the severe and growing overpopulation, the consumption of the last remains of nature's bounty - all these are carefully and objectively cataloged by the great naturalist. Very soon now our unsustainable practices will crash and large portions of the earth's human population will descend into more misery, dragging what remains of nature with them.
Wilson faces the hard issues. He says that by devastating all wildlife the earth can support 10 billion people. By devastating all wildlife and reducing most humans to abject poverty it can support 16 billion. Best estimates now are that population might level off just below 10 billion. There are a few bright spots. The brightest is that we now know that educated women want fewer children. There are also some useful projects underway to preserve things. But it's a rear guard action. All we can do is slow and limit the destruction, not stop it.
It seems clear to me three years after reading this that Wilson's analysis was right on target, that nothing has changed, and that we are heading for the disaster that he predicts. Even a person with the intelligence, good will, and power of President Obama can't stop it, or even slow it down very much, or even successfully educate people into an understanding of what is coming. The average man remains almost as ignorant of the issues as he did 20 years ago, though he may be more informed than say 50 years ago.
People will wake up to the dangers after they are upon us. It will be too late then to save all of the species and all of the environment that have been destroyed. Probably the best we can hope for is that it will not be too late to preserve a modestly decent standard of living in the advanced countries, and to protect islands of nature in natural parks and reserves. But there will still be great suffering and some countries of the third world will descend further into hell.
I am now listening to a set of Teaching Company lectures on basic economics. I'm hoping to better understand globalization and world trade, tax policy, environmental policy, the importance of manufacturing, and other subjects, and how they affect American inequality and the future of ordinary people in the U.S. and elsewhere.
The lecturer, Robert Whaples, surveyed American economists in 2005 and reported that "Almost half (49%) forecast an economic growth rate over the next 60 years that is equal to or greater than that of the past 60 years. This prediction implies that average inflation-adjusted incomes in the U.S. will approximately triple in the next 60 years." Not one expected an economic decline in the next decade (the decade that included the big recession of 2008.) All expected every region of the earth to experience major economic growth except sub-Saharan Africa.
What is going on here? Who is right? I can't dismiss either Wilson or Whaples. I don't have the knowledge to do so. All of my instincts side with Wilson but I know very well that the instincts of the uneducated (I'm certainly uneducated in economics) are useless as a guide to the future. I understand Wilson's argument. I'm hoping to learn enough to understand the argument on the other side.
| Author | Stockwin, Julian |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Scribners, 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 254 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | April 2009 |
Thomas Kydd, a young English wig maker from a coastal town at the start of what would become the Napoleonic Wars, is grabbed by a press gang and hauled aboard an old warship to serve as a lubber on menial tasks. He meets an old seaman who convinces him that life at sea is not so bad, but it is important to be a real seaman, an able bodied seaman who goes aloft to work the sails. That is the way to achievement and self respect.
Kydd is persuaded. He battles his fear of the sailing tops and gradually begins to learn the trades of sail handling, gunnery, and other skills.
Gradually, Stockwin moves from hs development of Kydd as a man and a sailor into the typical adventures of novelistic sea life. There is a sea battle. Kydd goes ashore in the abortive British attempt to land a Royalist French force in revolutionary France. Kydd is falsely accused of insubordination and flogged for it. Then he deserts into a provision boat, hides there, and seizes the boat back from French privateers who captured it, redeeming himself and moving to a frigate as a reward by a captain who knows that K is in danger from a sadistic officer on his own ship.
The adventures are overblown. The secondary characters of Reggie, the intellectual gentleman seaman, and the mutinous sailor are overdone. There are flaws in the plot and in some of the characters (or perhaps most of them.) But the seamanship is excellent and the below decks and aloft perspective badly needed in this genre.
I happen to be reading Patrick O'Brian's Post Captain as I write this. O'Brian has a lot of technical seamanship and terminology but, like most authors of historical and military or naval fiction, he adopts the point of view of the Captain almost exclusively. I see again, as I noted in my comment above, that Stockwin's great contribution to this literature is his adopting of the point of view of the common seaman - if Kydd can be called "common".
| Author | Budz, Mark |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 372 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 2009 |
In a not too distant but dystopian future, Rigo, the child of a low class Hispanic household in L.A., has moved up from the impoverished barrio of his youth and is working in a company that genetically engineers plants. He leads a small team of gardener technicians who care for the plants - large, warm blooded organisms designed to meet the needs of space travelers.
Rigo tries to be a good man. He is conscientious at work. He does what he can to help his aging, ailing mother, still living in her old apartment in the old, dangerous neighborhood. He cares too for his beautiful girlfriend Anthea, who works in child care. But it all falls apart for him when he is recruited into a space project where he has been selected because he is expendable, and when Anthea starts to care for a small child who has biological agents in him that make him some kind of enemy of the state.
The future world is bleak. People are divided into "clades" by genetic engineering that forces them to stay within restrictions of cast and territory by making them allergic to other locations. Implanted "information assistants" connect them to an Internet but also have personalities and neuroses of their own. Pharmaceutical companies play with lives for profit. Global warming has wiped out most species and left the earth poor and bleak, devastated by an "ecocaust".
The plot is complex and hard to follow. Some characters are not who they seem to be. The resolution of the story seems forced. But Budz has talent, intelligence, and imagination. There are many interesting ideas.
This is Budz' first novel. It is one of those books, often found in "hard" science fiction, in which the literary skill of the author is not as developed as the scientific imagination. Budz would have benefited from a critique by Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke. Be that as it may, I like to read books by intelligent authors. Budz is one of them.
| Author | Bronte, Charlotte |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg Internet download |
| Copyright Date | 1857 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2009 |
William Crimsworth, son of a businessman and a gentlewoman, both deceased, comes of age upon graduating at a boarding school. He is offered a career in the clergy by his mother's brother, who treats him coldly. C. rejects the offer and forgoes further relations with the man. Instead he applies to his older bother, a successful businessman, for a job. But his older brother turns out to be even worse than his uncle. He eventually escapes to Belgium where he takes a job teaching English, first in a boy's school and then also in the girl's school next door, where he meets and comes to love the orphaned sewing teacher Frances Henri.
Crimsworth is a remarkably unlikeable character. He treats everyone coldly. He is quick to recognize an insult and slow to recognize any offer of friendship. If he even once feels that someone has done anything wrong he is finished with that person forever.
The book offers a remarkably negative view of young women. The boys are not described at all, but the girls are treated as brazen, stupid creatures who are to be cut down to size and ruled with an iron fist. Prejudice against Catholics also abounds.
The love story is unconvincing by modern standards but speaks volumes about Bronte's own repressed sexuality. The story is both conventional and unconventional, or anti-conventional. The image of Frances falling in love with a man who will rule her is pretty disturbing to modern sensibility.
See also my diary.
I should have added more about the conclusion of the story in my abstract. Perhaps I didn't because I had written so much in my diary.
Charles marries Frances after an agonizing (for the reader as well as the characters) series of pregnant silences in which each character refuses to make plain his or her feelings and Charles would have instantly rejected Frances if she had. They move to England where they open a new school - one which I believe that I would have hated had I been a student there. They then lead a perfectly conventional life.
There is a brief note in my diary entry for April 20, 2009, saying that I found the story interesting and subtle and praising the author.
There is a much more extensive writeup on May 15, 2009 (my 63rd birthday) with about a page and a half of analysis. I concluded there that there is a personality disorder in the author.
Life and writing are complex things. A person can have great difficulty with life but be a great writer. Well, Bronte wasn't necessarily a great writer, but she was a good one. It was her skills at living that are in question - as reflected in her writing.
The copyright date on this book is 1857, two years after Charlotte's death at age 38. I seem to recall that, when I read it, I assumed that it was a late work in which Bronte had become more rigid as she approached middle age. In fact however, it is an early work, her first novel. It was rejected by publishers and so did not appear until much later. I am pleased to learn that this was written before Jane Eyre rather than after it, and that Bronte's skill as a writer developed rather than regressed.
Bronte was the last alive of six children born to her parents. All of her talented siblings died before her and she died at the very untimely age of 38.
| Author | Zaloga, Steven J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Osprey Publishing, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 81 |
| Extras | index, photos, maps, artwork |
| Genres | History |
| Keywords | Military; World War II |
| When Read | May 2009 |
Digital art by Jim Laurier, Howard Gerrard.
Osprey books are quite specialized. Written for aficionados of military history, they are short, tightly focused, and tightly edited, but they try hard for both technical and historical accuracy. This one is part of a series contrasting two opponents in war, in this case the German Panther tank and the American M4 "Sherman" that fought many skirmishes and small scale battles during the German offensive in the Ardennes in 1944.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Panther was an all around superior tank, worth five Shermans, but the author disagrees. The Panther had a superior gun and superior armor. However it was relatively unreliable and hard to maintain. Where the Shermans were 90% active, Panthers had 50% or more disabled. Their service life was way lower, repairs were much harder, and fuel capacity and efficiency were lower so that many had to be abandoned on the battlefield due to breakdowns or running out of gas. They also had poorer radios and optics, slower traverse, fewer machine guns, and were harder to operate.
In the end it wasn't the best battlefield implement that won. It was numbers, reliability, crew training, fuel reserves, and tactical advantages. Studies after the war showed that the tank that shot first, almost always from concealed positions, won the battle.
Since reading this book I have read Belton Cooper's Death Traps. Cooper was an engineering officer whose job was keeping Shermans running, often by cleaning out the brains, blood and body parts of dead crew, repainting the insides, and putting in a new crew.
He wasn't a fan of the Sherman, as witnessed by the title of his book. It's easy to see that there are many different perspectives on an issue like this.
| Author | White, Ronald C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 816 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | Abraham Lincoln |
| When Read | May 2009 |
White recounts the personal and political life of Abraham Lincoln from his youth to his death. About half the book is devoted to his years as President.
Lincoln was a profoundly decent man. He made many mistakes. He had his weaknesses. But he cared about his country and his fellow men. Although he was full of personal ambition it was always an ambition to be respected for his achievements. It was always to be a man who earned respect. He was effective as a lawyer, as a politician, and as a President. The more people knew him, the more they liked and respected him.
One quality of Lincoln's that White clearly elucidates is his deep thoughtfulness. He analyzed issues from all angles. He made notes to himself that he kept in his desk drawer or in his hat. He avoided jumping to conclusions. He considered and respected the views of his opponents, even the secessionists. But he was also able, at the end of the analysis, to take a firm and principled stand.
He was a great man. My admiration for him was only increased by this careful and well researched biography. A relatively unknown, uneducated, self-taught man, he rose to the occasion to lead us through our greatest crisis.
This was a fine book about a fine man.
A simple search of the "keywords" elements in my book notes shows that I've read six books about Lincoln. There are other books about the Civil War or about slavery that also have a lot to say about him. I love the man.
When I was a boy I was at the apartment of my grandfather, Isidore Meyer, when I came across a diary. I opened it at random and found an entry in which my grandfather, a man whose education only extended to the fifth grade, wrote of his admiration for Lincoln and his aspiration to live as Lincoln lived. I don't know what happened to that diary. I don't know if anyone has it or if it was lost forever. My own diary is probably doomed to the same fate. I wish I had Isidore's diary today.
| Author | Cornwell, Bernard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Collins, 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 333 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | June 2009 |
Ten year old Uhtred is the second son of a noble Saxon of the northeastern English coast in the time of Alfred the Great. Danes come from across the sea. His brother is killed. Then his father is killed. He is captured and becomes, at first, a slave, and then a favored retainer, and finally a virtual adopted son of the Dane Ragnar. He learns to fight and become a half Dane, half Englishman. Eventually he chooses the side of Alfred and becomes a war leader in Alfred's forces - fighting to defend Wessex but keeping his eye always on the Englishman who has usurped Uhtred's ancestral home.
The story is simple and rather adolescent. Like Cornwell's other books it glories in war and in personal fighting strength. The politics and social commentary are meant to be accurate and informative, but don't succeed.
Still, what can I say? I love historical adventure. This book isn't what I crave but the pickings are slim. There aren't enough Shellabargers, Weymans, or Sabatinis to go around, much less Robert Graves or, to reach very high, Thomas Mann or Leo Tolstoy.
I don't promise not to read the next book in this series. I'll see how the mood strikes me.
I was at the library about a year ago and the mood struck me. I got the next book in the series, took it home, and began to read. But it wouldn't do. I gave up after 30 or 40 pages.
| Author | Cussler, Clive |
|---|---|
| Publication | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2009 |
In C's second Dirk Pitt novel, but apparently the first one published, Pitt and his sidekick Al Giordino are flying a PBY Catalina into an American airbase on a Greek island and find themselves in the midst of an air attack on the base being conducted by a replica World War I biplane fighter. They manage to drive off the attacker and land. Pitt soon finds himself with a beautiful young woman who takes him to the villa of her evil uncle Bruno.
There are a variety of absurd adventures: a fight with a killer dog, a fight with a giant Greek agent who later turns out to be in the pay of Bruno, an attack by the biplane on a research ship and the plane's destruction via an exploding weather balloon, and an underwater invasion of Bruno's drug smuggling lair.
This may be a later edition. It references Pacific Vortex, which had been written but not yet published, at least according to the Wikipedia. It's a little more sophisticated and slightly less improbable (well, a lot less) than Vortex, but it's still pretty crude. I'm curious to see if the later books are much better, as a Wikipedia author contends.
Books like this are fairly quick reading, even when they're 384 pages. They're kind of fun, like junk food, but only good when taken in small doses between more satisfying meals.
A series of videos was made of this book, or inspired by this book, that is available on Netflix. Should I watch them? I don't think I can inflict them on Marcia. Maybe I'll try a few minutes and see what they are like.
| Author | Stone, Joel |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Europa Editions, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 147 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Israel |
| When Read | June 2009 |
Published after Stone's death in 2007, this novel is written as a narrative of a 60 year old retired Israeli security service man who has been asked by a math professor friend to follow his attractive wife whom he believes is unfaithful to him.
Levin finds that the woman does indeed appear to be meeting a lover, an art history professor at the same university as her husband. He follows them around and becomes intrigued by the woman. Then the art historian is killed in what looks like a terrorist attack.
The woman, lying about their relationship, comes to Levin and asks him to investigate the death of her cousin. Soon he has a relationship with her. Then the jealous husband comes to believe his wife is cheating on him again and asks Levin again to find the man. The events are spiraling out of control as Levin lies to each of the two spouses, unable to bring himself to break off with the woman, face the man's hatred, or resolve his own dilemma.
There is no resolution. In the last scene of the book Levin visits his demented father in an Alzheimer's home, thinking of a mercy killing. But he does not do it. None of life's tragedies have quick and easy solutions, or any solutions at all
This is a tightly written, intelligent novel with perceptive insights into Israeli society as well as the personal tragedies. Stone was an impressive writer who died too young.
| Author | Tannenbaum, Frank, 1893-1969 |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Beacon Press, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 128 |
| Extras | Introduction by Franklin W. Knight, copyright 1992 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | July 2009 |
Tannenbaum, born in Poland and arriving in New York at a young age, was a professor of history at Columbia University from 1936. Politically liberal, he had worked as a community organizer in New York and, in 1927, for the "revolutionary" government of Mexico.
This small book is an analysis of two different kinds of slave society - the Afro-American type instituted in the U.S. and parts of the West Indies, and the Latin American type seen throughout Central and South America, but most especially in Cuba and Brasil.
The Latin type acknowledged the humanity of the slave, admitted him to the Catholic Church, and gave him a possible path to freedom. He was a slave, subject to the abuses that slaves suffered, but he had some rights in law and some chance of legal redress.
The U.S. type slave was property. His humanity was not acknowledged. He was owned in the same way that a horse or a dog was owned. His wife and his children were not acknowledged as his. They belonged to the master. Freedom for such a creature was intolerable to the masters. It was nearly impossible to attain and extremely difficult to keep. Most states did not even allow a freed slave to stay in the state.
T. was writing both history and sociology. He elucidated the comparative histories of two slave societies and thereby explained the status of black people in each society in his day. His study is filled with facts, figures, and trenchant observations.
I learned a lot.
I am currently reading Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America. I'm only about 38% through the book but, so far, there is nothing in it that gives the slightest credibility to Tannenbaum's account. In case after case Galeano describes the laws protecting slaves, serfs, workers of all types, as pure fiction. It makes me suspect that Tannenbaum's research was based on legal documents rather than on the ground investigation. Galeano's claim that these kinds of laws were completely ignored seems more credible.
Galeano went further and showed how most of the people who were not legally slaves in the latifunidias, the rubber forests, the mines, and so on were slaves in reality. They were paid below starvation wages. Their pay was in scrip, not legal tender, and could only be spent at the company store at double market prices. They were in perpetual debt, falsified by the owners if they wished since the written records were all in the hands of the owners and the workers couldn't read anyway. If they attempted to run away they would be hunted down, with help from army and police if needed, and turned over to the owners for punishment by torture or execution. If all of that wasn't slavery, I don't know what was.
I have no independent way to evaluate the claims of either man, but Galeano's have more, shall I say, surface credibility. Knowing as I do the incredible oppression imposed on the working class in Latin America, it's now hard for me to credit Tannenbaum's account of the institutions. I don't think he was trying to justify anything that happened in Latin America. On the contrary. I think his real aim was to expose the inhumanity of slavery in the United States. However he appears to have unwittingly set up a false comparison to do it.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Audio, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 2009 |
Mickey Haller of The Lincoln Lawyer inherits a bunch of cases when a colleague has been murdered and H. was named in the man's papers as an associate and successor. He has not practiced since he was shot in the previous novel. He is just coming off an addiction to pain killers and, as usual, his personal life is a mess.
The biggest of his new cases, a financial bonanza, is the defense of Walter Elliot, a movie moghul accused of murdering his wife and her lover. H needs time but Elliot insists on a speedy trial. H eventually concludes that it's because Elliot has bribed someone, possibly a juror. However, H comes to believe that, in spite of the odds against it, his client is actually innocent. He mounts a very effective defense that doesn't rely on the bribe.
Meanwhile, detective Harry Bosch is investigating the murder of the first lawyer and sets up Haller as bait while scaring him into going along.
Connelly is really one of the best at this sort of thing. His characters are complex, flawed, competent, believable. His plots look bizarre on the surface but then turn out to be surprising and also believable. What seemd straight forward can turn out to be crooked. What seemed far fetched is well explained. He drags the reader along on a path to believing in the improbable and then shows how the twists and turns are actually smokescreens for the obvious.
I don't read a great many mysteries but of the writers I do read, Connelly (and Elmore Leonard) is (are) among the best.
| Author | Shutt, Timothy B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2004 |
| Genres | History |
| When Read | July 2009 |
"Produced by the Modern Scholar."
Professor Shutt of Kenyon College recorded these 14 lectures on the three groups of wars that he regards as critical in the development of western culture.
The lectures are very well done. He gives us many facts and many insights on both the men and the events of those times. He's an enthusiast, which may or may not be ideal in a scholar, but it makes for a good lecturer.
Some of the decisive outcomes, according to S, have to do with the role of the individual citizen, the meaning of citizenship, and the nature and content of patriotism.
I reserve judgment on all of that. It's hard to know what changes there would be in western culture if the Persians or Carthaginians had won, or if the Athenians had taken Syracusa and won the war against Sparta.
But leaving all that aside, S's explanations of the battles and the men were fascinating.
| Author | Ryan, Mark |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 386 |
| Extras | photos index |
| Genres | History; Biography |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 2009 |
"The amazing untold story of World War II spy Thomas Sneum." Tommy Sneum was a flight lieutenant in the Danish Navy. Unable to fight because Denmark surrendered immediately, S looked for ways to get into the war. Traveling to Sweden, he appeared at the British embassy and volunteered to fly for the RAF. But a man there persuaded him instead to become a spy in Denmark.
He returned home with cameras and risked his life to photograph a radar installation. Then he and a friend took an old Hornet biplane and flew it to England, refueling by having Tommy walk out on the wing with a fuel hose. Against all odds, they made it to England where the Brits treated them as German spies and ruined the film when they bungled the processing. Finally convinced he was really their man, they sent him back to Denmark, but he was the pawn of an intelligence organization that was losing a bureaucratic turf war with another British organization. He was also saddled with a dangerously cowardly man as a radio operator.
It is an extraordinary tale. S was the first to learn of the Heisenberg atom bomb efforts and the first to initiate contact with Niels Bohr to check it out. In the process he befriended German officers, seduced a hundred women, recruited an electronics/radio genius, crossed the ice to Sweden, and braved arrests and incarcerations in both Sweden and Britain. But he survived and lived his exotic life right up to 2007, telling his tale to Mark Ryan.
| Author | Ondaatje, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 273 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2009 |
The plot of this novel, such as it is, involves perhaps five main characters whose interconnections are tenuous and, in some cases, in one direction only. Chris and Anna are raised as sisters by a widowed father who also raises "Coop", a child of murdered neighbors. When the father discovers Coop and Anna having sex he goes berserk and beats Coop almost to death. Coop and Anna separately run away and never see each other or Claire again.
An almost separate story has Coop becoming a professional gambler who is again beaten almost to death for refusing to join a criminal gang. In yet another separate story Anna moves to France to work on a biography of the writer Lucien Segura and has an affair with Rafael, who knew Segura as a child. And finally, occupying a significant part of the book, is the tragic life of Segura and his illiterate but passionate neighbors.
This is an intensely personal work. The sense perceptions of the characters, the colors and sounds, the memories, are all as important, or maybe more important, than what happens to them. Their terrible isolation, their pain, the violence done to them, their alienation, are all at the center of the novel. Plot resolution does not occur at all. Ondaatje just doesn't care how things "turn out" for his characters. It is their feelings, often highly dissociated, that he cares about.
This is a brilliant, disturbing, unsatisfying work, written, it seems, for the author rather than the reader.
I read this book because I had previously read The English Patient. The earlier book was both brilliant and personal to the point that it was difficult for readers to understand and make sense of it. I was hoping to get the same brilliance but with less peculiar obscurity. In that I was disappointed. Ondaatje refuses to be a novelist in the conventional sense.
There is a really excellent review of the book on Amazon by Roger Brunyate, currently displayed as the first review in the list. He includes striking excerpts from Ondaatje's prose that clearly show O's remarkable, poetic, literary imagination. I'm quite sure that Brunyate is right about the quality of the writing in this book, and I do appreciate it, but I was looking to read a novel - which this book is not. My own psychological outlook depends to a great degree on order and logic, not free flowing color and form. This was a great book, but not a great book for me.
| Author | Hedges, Christopher |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Public Affairs, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 211 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Bosnian War |
| When Read | July 2009 |
New York Times war correspondent and former Harvard theology student Chris Hedges covered Bosnia, Kosovo, El Salvador, Gaza, Argentina, and other conflicts at very close range. He saw the violence, the ethnic cleansing, the conversion of ordinary people into murderers and murdered, and the conversion of peaceful communities into warring factions divided by false distinctions created by opportunist politicians/gangsters.
But this is not just a book about the horrors and absurdities of war. H. sees that people are divided by war but also brought together. They feel, in a strong emotional way, that they are part of something bigger than anything else in their lives. Their brothers in arms are their true brothers. Their cause is their true cause. Their sacrifices are more meaningful than the minor affairs of ordinary life.
And of course there is a flip side to this. Their enemies are their true enemies - evil, worthless, deserving to die.
Hedges is a deeply moral man but not a simple minded one. He sees the complexities in the conflicts. He sees the distortion of truth on both sides. He is able to choose a side when necessary without losing sight of the moral failures of his chosen side.
A very good book - deeply grounded in real experience.
The complexities and ambiguities of war on the ground are mirrored in complexities and ambiguities of war seen from above, by policy makers and commanders. But where simple soldiers and civilians at ground level get overwhelmed and driven to simplistic understanding, Presidents, Prime Ministers and Commanders in Chief must resist the pressures to do that. I'm thinking for example of the decisions to bomb Germany and Japan in World War II, the decision to try to stop the communist insurgency in South Vietnam, the decision to fight in Afghanistan and the decision by Obama, a man who obviously hates Bush's wars, to engage in a "surge" and to pursue the war in Afghanistan.
Even with all the benefit of expert advice, unparalleled sources of information, and long experience, it's hard to get it right.
| Author | Military Intelligence Service |
|---|---|
| Publication | U.S. Department of War, 1942-11-25 |
| Number of Pages | xi + 112 |
| Extras | maps illustrations photos diagrams tables |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Military; World War II |
| When Read | July 2009 |
The unnamed authors of this monograph wrote it to prepare American army officers for war in North Africa. It is a comprehensive overview of what to expect and what lessons have been learned. There is a description of each kind of artillery piece used by British, Germans and Italians with ranges, weights of shells, mobility, and how they are employed. Each side's tactics are described, how guns are sited in emplacements, how they are dispersed, when and how they are moved, how camouflage and smoke are used, and so on. there is a good explanation of radio signaling.
A key lesson drilled home in each section is that desert warfare is fluid. Attacks can come as easily from the sides and rear as from the front. Guns have to sited to fire in any direction. Trucks and tractors have to be ready to move quickly - though firing while on trucks has not proven to be successful.
I read odd stuff. Other people must read it too, or I wouldn't have found this on the Internet. But I was not disappointed. I came away with new knowledge and with respect for the military intelligence authors.
I read another monograph like this, written a little later in the war, giving instructions to low ranking officers on how to keep their men properly deployed, how to move them, how to deal with enemy aircraft, what men should be doing at all times, and so on. Like this one, it appeared to condense real battle experience into readable and useful form.
I wonder who the authors were. Were they British officers with long experience in the desert? Were they American officers who had been detailed to the British 8th Army in Egypt? They couldn't have gotten all of their experience in the American Army in Operation Torch. The invasion of North Africa didn't even begin until November 8, 1942, and no really significant encounters with the Germans occurred until after this booklet was published. It's possible that they had no experience at all but were very good at interviewing their British counterparts, or reading British field manuals. Whatever it was they did, I'm impressed.
It must be tempting for the author of any piece of writing to show off his expertise and make a big deal of himself. I don't think the author or authors of this material did that. I think they were motivated to try to save the lives of American soldiers and defeat the enemy. They're probably dead by now though if they were very young at the time one of them might be a nonagenarian somewhere who can still open his eyes and look around. If so, or even if not, my hat is off to them. I think it's possible that there are Americans alive today who are the children and grandchildren of soldiers who survived the war because of the advice their fathers or grandfathers got in this little booklet.
| Author | Krugman, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | W.W. Norton, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Economics |
| When Read | August 2009 |
The great Nobel Prize winning economist has updated his 1999 book, explaining in very simple but very lucid terms some of the key issues in the various economic crises of the 1980's and 90's in Mexico, Thailand, Argentina, South Korea and Japan, and the mortgage and banking crises in the U.S. in 2008.
Although he has done a remarkable job of explaining the events, I find that I can't keep the explanations in my head. The problem for me is that, while I think I ought to understand these things, I'm not really interested in them.
By "depression economics" I think he means that the current recession is driven by the reduction of demand. "Supply siders" whom K ridicules, believe that demand is infinite and it is supply that regulates the economy. But K argues that we have not learned how to completely control the demand failures problem and our much vaunted but insubstantial ability to control the business cycle isn't really there.
K is particularly helpful in explaining currency trading, manipulation, and speculation, the "shadow" banking system, the damage done by the world bank, and many other issues.
He's always a pleasure to listen to or read.
I first encountered K on the Sunday morning TV talk shows. He was a regular on one of them - I think it must have been the one hosted by George Stephanopoulos. Krugman and George Will were the liberal and conservative commentators who were on most of the shows together with a couple of others. From there I began reading his columns in the New York Times "Opinion" section.
I don't know nearly enough to fully appreciate his technical arguments. He always convinces me, but what do I know? Nevertheless, I trust him. Unlike so many other economists, he clearly recognizes the role of private interest and the modern gospel of wealth in American policy. He isn't taken in by the bullshit arguments that attempt to equate the interests of the poor and middle class in the U.S. with the interests of the rich.
I suppose it really doesn't matter that I'm not an expert in these matters. No one is going to consult me. I won't be making any policy. And I think I know enough to know who to vote for, or at least who not to vote for. Krugman is a big help.
| Author | Bova, Ben |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tor Science Fiction, 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | August 2009 |
This is book 3 in Bova's Asteroid Wars series.
Saito Yamagata, brought back from cold storage to advise his son on the running of their corporation, hires mercenaries to destroy spaceships of both Humphries Space Systems and Astro Manufacturing, making it look like each is attacking the other. His goal is to get the two big players to destroy each other and then pick up all the business for himself.
Meanwhile, Amanda Cunningham, married to Martin Humphries in the deal to save Lars Fuch's life, gives birth to a son and then dies of drug overdoses complicating her delivery. Fuchs sneaks onto the moon and almost succeeds in killing Humphries in revenge. Pancho Lane discovers the Yamagata plot. Dorik Harbin hunts Fuchs. The story continues.
This is all in the tradition of hard SF space opera. There's nothing great about it. There are no vistas of new understandings of either science or humanity. It's the basic cowboy story told in the future rather than the past.
But I still like them. They're breezy reads with satisfying plots.
| Author | Deaver, Jeffrey |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Nazism |
| When Read | August 2009 |
Paul Schuman, a "button man" (contract killer) for the mob, is arrested by the FBI and offered a deal. he can assassinate a top Nazi official and get a pardon for his crimes plus $10,000, or he can go to trial for murder. He chooses the assassination and is sent to Berlin as a sports writer covering the 1936 Olympics. There he meets Otto, a petty criminal who helps him out and he begins stalking his prey while, at the same time, an extremely capable "Kripo" (criminal police) inspector closes in on him.
There are many interesting twists and turns in the plot and a number of cliff hangers and satisfying action scenes. It's a competently done thriller with some commonplace weaknesses and some unusual strengths.
The weaknesses are in the characters of the good guys. Paul is a killer who only kills bad people. It's the traditional dime novel solution to the problem of creating a tough killer who enables the reader to fantasize about being a big bad ass, while also being a moral person. Otto is just as bad.
But on the other side the depiction of the Nazis is very impressive. Although their evil thuggery is laid out uncommonly well, they are not entirely one dimensional. From Hitler on down to the street thugs of the SA we get people with some reality to them.
An interesting read.
| Author | Follett, Ken |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 2009 |
German spy "Die Nadel" has been living in England since before the war. A few weeks before D-Day he discovers the Allied deception plot to mislead the Germans into believing that the invasion will be at Calais. The spy, Henry Faber, is smart, professional, courageous, totally committed, and ruthless. He kills only when necessary but he does it efficiently and without remorse.
As he makes his way across the country for a rendezvous with a U-boat, two other stories are intertwined. Professor Godliman and Inspector Bloggs track him across the country, always 24 hours behind, while Lucy and David Rose live out their unhappy marriage on Storm Island, off the Scottish coast, where Faber hopes to meet the U-boat. David is an ex-RAF pilot who lost his legs in a drunken drive on his wedding night, never saw combat, and is now withdrawn and bitter, living in a remote house on an almost uninhabited island, herding sheep in his jeep and wheelchair, while his frustrated young wife Lucy despairs of recovering him.
Faber arrives on the island more dead than alive but recovers, sees the situation, makes love to Lucy, kills David in a desperate fight, kills the old shepherd on the island, then battles it out with Lucy in a very tense and satisfying ending.
This was Follett's breakthrough best seller. It was made into a really excellent movie. It's one of the finest examples of a real thriller.
The character of Faber was played by Donald Sutherland in the movie. He was wonderfully convincing as an appealing, interesting, intelligent man who was also a stone cold killer. In fact, all of the actors were outstanding. When I saw the CD collection on the library shelf I remembered how much I liked the movie and so got the book.
| Author | Hunt, Samantha |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Fiction; Biography |
| When Read | August 2009 |
24 year old Luisa Dewell works as a chambermaid in a huge New York hotel where 86 year old Nikola Tesla has a room. It is 1943, the year of Tesla's death.
The story mixes biography (of Tesla), fantasy, romance, and much poignancy - for Tesla's lost recognition and opportunities, for Luisa's father Walter's lost love for his dead wife, for the pigeons that Tesla has built a fantasy world around, for Walter's friend Azor who works tirelessly to build a time machine, and on and on.
It is an inventive and imaginative story. it begins with people in straitened circumstances but focuses on the rich inner lives that each of them leads, so we don't feel too much the burden of their poverty.
Tesla and Azor each work on impossible inventions. Hunt treats these ambiguously. Maybe they're impossible but maybe they aren't. It's a confusing (to me) position to take because I like to know where an author stands on the key questions of reality and fiction. I don't like deniable adventures into fantasy - "Oh but I didn't actually say this happened." H gets closer to that than I like.
The book is not very deep but not shallow either. The characters are all likable. It is a pleasant read.
| Author | Zaloga, Steven J. |
|---|---|
| Author | Ford, Ken |
| Author | Badsey, Stephen |
| Publication | Osprey, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Extras | index, maps, photos, bibliography |
| Genres | History |
| Keywords | Military; World War II |
| When Read | August 2009 |
This hard cover, beautifully printed coffee table compilation of four previous Osprey books covers the single day of June 6th with great breadth and some depth. We learn about the exact composition of each wave of landing craft to hit the shore, and the specific placement of guns and fortifications opposing them. There are details of individual intense micro battles on each beach. There are hourly accounts of how long this particular German position held out, how long that one, and what tactics finally defeated it.
Coverage of British, American, and Canadian armies seems equally good and the Germans are well covered too.
Here are some of the things I learned:
Omaha Beach was a particularly brutal landing but none of them were easy. All four beaches were hotly contested.
German commanders lacked the resources for a successful defense. The one place where they broke through and drove tanks down to the beach could not be supported, in part because the reserves they had were committed in places where Allied breakthroughs would have occurred without them.
All of the armies performed very well. Many American soldiers had never seen combat and not a few other Allied troops. But they fought very hard and courageously. The same is true for the Germans and, surprisingly, even some of the "Eastern" troops - Baltic or Ukrainian - fought well.
There is no wide context in the book. There is little discussion of weapons. Commanders are named but not analyzed in depth. But what it covers it covers very well and with excellent photos, maps and graphics.
| Author | Crowley, Roger |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Extras | illustrations, maps, index, bibliography |
| Genres | History |
| When Read | September 2009 |
The Ottoman Empire had expanded into the Balkans and had drawn all of North Africa into its sphere of influence. Like it or not, it had become a Mediterranean power and it was hampered and stung by Christian outposts such as that of the Knights of St. John at Rhodes, hard up against the Anatolian shore. Tiring of the unremitting attacks and piracy from Rhodes, the great Sultan landed there in 1521 and opened a struggle that lasted 50 years through the great, unsuccessful siege of Malta (the Knights again) in 1565 and the climactic battle at Lepanto in 1571. Two ascendant empires, Turkey and Spain, neither focused on the Med or really wishing war there, were drawn into a long running struggle that had to be won if for no other reason than to clear out the pirates and slave raiders of the other side. (Huge numbers of European Christians were captured and sold into slavery in Africa.)
The book describes the principal leaders and battles of this war, focusing on Malta at the center of the book. Based on Turkish as well as Christian sources, the author gives us an appreciation of the great strengths of each side. On the Turks it was, partly, the ability to command the resources of the empire in a way that Phillip of Spain could not readily do.
This was the sort of book I read and loved as a young teen. I still like books like this.
After reading this book I attempted to identify the book I read as a youngster about the siege of Malta. I believe that I wrote about this in my diary.
The book I read as a teenager was probably The Great Siege: Malta 1565 by Ernle Bradford. I may have read others of his books too. He had served in the Royal Navy, had lived on Malta, and wrote dozens of popular naval histories.
| Author | Friedman, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Publication | MacMillan Audio, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Current events |
| When Read | September 2009 |
New York Times writer Friedman talks about how the earth is becoming hot (global warming), flat (huge rising middle classes in China, India and some other countries), and overpopulated (crowded). The confluence of these three developments is putting a strain on earth's natural resources that cannot be sustained and will end in a slow motion train wreck for many of the people of the earth and discomfort at least for all. The loss of species, of natural forest, depleted wells and mines are all hurting us. The development of economies by easy exploitation of free resources is coming to an end. One by one the free resources are disappearing and some of our quality of life will disappear with each one.
F reviews the evidence for all of this and proposes solutions. These include new regulations designed to channel capitalist investment and creative technology into sustainable activities and a new "energy Internet" that will connect all devices and optimize energy uses. He shows how current Bush policy encourages people to "be as dumb as they want to be" (like the absurdity of "drill baby drill".)
This is an important book. It addresses big questions. It provides intelligent answers that work with our strengths instead of just condemning our current leadership. It is having a serious impact.
I'm not sure what I was smoking when I wrote that this book is having a serious impact. Even now, with a liberal Democrat in the White House, it's hard to see any serious effort toward planning for the coming failures of our unsustainable economy.
I credit Friedman for trying. If I had tried to write this book I would have been screaming about what was going wrong but not offering the concrete, practical programs that F offered. To his credit, F put a lot of his research into finding out what could be done, all within the framework of modern American capitalism. Either because he is not a revolutionary, or because he knows full well that revolution isn't going to happen (which is a pretty good reason for even those who might be revolutionaries to not be), F tried hard to concentrate on practical programs implementable within the current American system. I think he was hoping that policy makers would read his book and get ideas for what to do, and voters would read his book and build support for those ideas.
So far, it hasn't worked. I doubt if F believed it would work. People of good will attempt to work towards the common good even if they know that the chances of success are small. But he's made a contribution. He has had some impact on me. No doubt he's had some impact on others. It's not much but it has to be better than nothing.
Although I'm not a prophet I think I can predict the broad outlines of what will happen. Our unsustainable economy will begin to fail. It probably has already but the train wreck is still just in the form of unsettling vibrations in the passenger cars. It is part and parcel of a smaller but perhaps more visible train wreck in the American economy as jobs are exported overseas. There will be responses based on market conditions. Fossil fuel based energy will become very expensive and alternatives will be developed. Conservation will begin. Use of renewable sources of raw materials will begin to replace the use of scarce minerals. Because we will have started too late, the strains and losses will be severe. Economies that have planned better for this - especially in Europe and Japan but maybe also in China, will suffer much less strain and continue their high standard of living. The standard in the United States will sink and we will fall from the top of the world's economies to somewhere in the middle of the advanced economy group. As energy, transportation, heating, food, and other costs go way up, millions of Americans will be pushed into poverty. Politics will be polarized. The cost of living will go way up. Old people on fixed incomes and poor people and people pushed out of their jobs will all suffer inordinately. The wealthy class will of course continue to live it up, though more of them might be in gated communities than now.
It won't be pretty but our course will change. The unsustainable economy will give way to a sustainable one. There's no option. It's just a question of whether it happens in an orderly way with moderate pain, spread fairly, or an unplanned and disorderly way with severe pain for many. Friedman is trying to lead us onto the first path.
"Drill baby drill" was a 2008 Republican campaign slogan, especially associated with the ignoramus vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. It was a plan to get us out of the fossil fuel shortage by digging up and burning more of what's left.
There appears to have been a second edition of this book released a year later in 2009. I don't know what the changes were.
| Author | Engel, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2006 |
| Genres | History |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | September 2009 |
Professor Engel delivers 14 lectures on the Holocaust, starting with conditions in Germany in the 30's, the development of anti-semitism quite gradually from an attempt to exclude Jews from society to a plan to murder them, an explanation of how it was actually done, how the Jews attempted to resist, outcomes in different European countries (98% of Danish Jews survived and Romanian, Italian and French Jews mostly survived), the response of the Allies, and more.
there was no plan to murder the Jews until 1941. And then it started independently in parts of the USSR where Nazi governors expropriated and killed Jews because there weren't enough resources for everyone and the Jews were the most despised population. Modern industrial infrastructure (railroads, gas chambers) was used to kill Jews but about half were killed the old fashioned way by face to face shooting. Some of the most primitive towns in Poland and elsewhere wholeheartedly pitched in with the killing of their own neighbors whom they had lived among for generations.
The main effort by Jewish communities was to stall, to delay, to cooperate and collaborate, to put off the killing in hopes that the Allies would win in time. It didn't work, but of course neither did armed resistance. Meanwhile the Allies did nothing. They believed, perhaps rightly, that quick victory was the best way to help, though one could wish for some smaller actions.
This is a superb work of historical analysis. I learned a great deal that I didn't know before. A really excellent work.
I'm currently reading Ian Kershaw's _Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution_. Kershaw presents a more technically accomplished history, sifting vast quantities of evidence and considering very nuanced alternative interpretations of it. But his book is composed of essays written for historians, not popular lectures for the general public. I can't think of anything of a broad nature that I'm learning from Kershaw that contradicts anything I recall from Engel.
| Author | Harris, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | October 2009 |
Mathematician Tom Jericho has been brought back to Bletchley Park in early 1943 to help break the German "Shark" code used to coordinate U-Boat attacks in the Atlantic. J is something of a nervous wreck, recovering from his last successful effort and from his obsession with the beautiful Claire Romilly who had taken him up at Bletchley only to drop him for a succession of lovers.
Tom works on the code, fights with his bureaucratic boss, and pursues Claire, who has disappeared. He gets evidence that Claire may actually be a German spy and enlists Claire's erstwhile roommate to help him track down the facts of a suppressed message stream from the Eastern front which appears to be at the center of a conspiracy.
Tom pushes to the limit, dodging police, stealing secrets, decoding messages that have nothing to do with Shark, and working on Shark at the same time. Eventually he works everything out - a suppression of the truth about a Russian massacre of Poles, a real spy, and Claire's true role as a counter-espionage agent. And he solves Shark.
This is well written but is not Harris' best. The cryptography is thin and the plot a bit hammered into place. But it was a good read.
Read on my Palm.
| Author | de Bernieres, Louis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chivers Audio Books, 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 437 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | October 2009 |
The sleepy Greek Adriatic island of Cephalonia is home to Dr. Iannis and his precocious daughter Pellagia, the fisherman Mandras who loves her, the strongman Velisarious, Father Arsenio, and other colorful characters. Then the Italians attack Greece, the Germans rescue the Italians, and the island is occupied by a mixed Italian and German garrison, including one Captain Corelli, a fine fellow ho plays the mandolin, organizes a choral group among his soldiers, is billeted in Dr. Iannis' house, and falls in love with the beautiful, spirited young Pellagia.
The story is rich in character and human emotion. Except for the Germans, who are mostly criminal beasts, the Greeks and Italians are all decent people, trying to get along.
Stories are told from a number of points of view. We follow Carlo, an Italian strongman and homosexual, Correlli, Iannis, Pellagia, Mandras, and Arsenio. Most of them come to grief. The barbaric Germans kill them. Mandras becomes a corrupt communist. Corelli and Pellagia survive but are separated by a tragic misunderstanding.
This is a brilliant work of fiction, history, and humanism though in my (and Marcia's) view, the ending is marred by the failure of Correlli to reveal himself to Pellagia until they have both grown old. A tragedy based on historical necessity is one thing, but when it's based on the author's caprice it feels wrong and manipulative.
Still, it is an extraordinary and wonderful novel.
I suspect that this is de Berniere's best known novel - perhaps in large measure because a movie was made of it. I hope that more people will also eventually read _Birds Without Wings_ which is, if anything, an even better novel than this one.
I did not note in my abstract, but should have if I had more room on the book card, that Corelli and his men were attacked by the Germans after Italy switched sides to the Allies in 1943. It appeared that all of the Italians were killed but Carlo moved in front of Corelli and took the bullets meant for him. Corelli was able to slip away, but did not return and tell Pellagia that he survived until many years later. That was the basis of my comment.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 512 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2009 |
Tommy Brue, inheritor and proprietor of a small bank, now located in Hamburg, is approached by Annabel, a volunteer immigration lawyer on behalf of her client, Issa Karpov, bastard son of a now dead Russian general and a Chechen girl taken by him in the war in Chechnya. Issa is the heir to a fortune in illicit funds stashed by his father in Brue's bank when the bank was controlled by Brue's father.
Issa is a Muslim. Although in his early 20's and a veteran of Russian and Turkish prisons and tortures, he is childlike in his aspirations to be a doctor, to give away his father's ill-gotten wealth to Muslim charities, in his comical wooing of the vastly more sophisticated Anabel, and in his faith in Brue, who actually tries to save him but really can do nothing. Meanwhile, German security police are tracking Issa and then all of the others on the theory that Issa is a Muslim terrorist. Within the security service one faction wants to leave Issa alone and use him to watch others but, in the end, the other faction triumphs. The hapless Turkish family that took Issa in is denounced to Turkish security and arrested when they go back to Turkey for a wedding. Issa and a Muslim scholar whom Issa has been tricked into giving money to are both turned over to American thugs who brutally kidnap them off the street in an "extraordinary rendition", never to be seen again.
As always, Le Carre digs into the sordid workings of "security" services where politics and personal ambition trump justice and even national security. Many on Amazon.com think this is one of L's weaker books. Maybe it is, but if so, his weaker books are stronger than almost everyone else's books in this genre.
There aren't a lot of other writers, and I can't think of any that are of the stature of Le Carre, who are writing about the evils of the "war on terror". Maybe it isn't the way L presents it. Maybe there's more subtle appreciation of right and wrong. Maybe there are people in "Homeland Security" who are finely attuned to protecting the rights of the innocent, and for that matter, the guilty. But L certainly makes a convincing case.
| Author | Bennett, Roman |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bloomsburg, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 273 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2009 |
Russian psychiatrist Otto Spethmann is brought a new patient, chess player Avrom Chilowiez Rosenthal, by another patient, violinist R. M. Kopelzon. Rosenthal is about to enter the 1914 chess tournament in St. Petersburg but he is a total neurotic basket case. K wants S to fix him up for the tournament. Shortly thereafter a policeman questions S about a murder he knows nothing about, then questions S's 18 year old daughter over S's strenuous objection, then sends two goons to search his office where they take the file on Rosenthal.
The story is complex. S tries to pull strings to get the detective off his back but finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into intrigues involving police, Okhrana secret police, communists, provocateurs, Poles, Jews, German sympathizers, old murders, new murders, and a game of chess between himself and Kopelzon.
Despite all of this complexity, Bennett writes with considerable logic and clarity. There are no overblown emotional or dramatic scenes. The story doesn't seem to need them. It proceeds in something like the chess game except that Spethmann, instead of forcing K into Zugzwang as he does in the game, is gradually being forced himself into a position, by the police, by the Okhrana, by the father of a woman he has fallen in love with, and by the strong will and political naivete of his daughter, in Zugzwang. His every move will make things worse but not moving is impossible
I liked the book.
| Author | Schneider, Helga |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone audio, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | October 2009 |
S was four years old when her mother abandoned her, her little brother, and their father, to follow her true calling to be an SS member and concentration camp guard where she could indulge in all of the pleasures of SS camaraderie together with the inimitable satisfaction of torturing Jews and killing them.
S had only seen her mother once since those days. It made her sick. But then she received a letter from a friend of her mother telling her that the old woman was in an assisted living residence in Vienna and hadn't much time left. Against all her inclinations S went to visit her mother. The old woman was alone. She was well cared for but bitter, nasty, needy, and whining. Repelled and fascinated at the same time, S pressed the old monster for details of her wartime experiences - feeding her small amounts of attention in return for confessions.
The confessions were monstrous and it was both sickening to listen to them and disorienting to have them spill out from this distressed and pitiable old woman who claimed our sympathy.
The story is true. The events occurred in 1998. I presume that the old criminal is dead now. She probably died peacefully amongst people who were assiduous in caring for her in spite of her garrulity ad nastiness. Her victims died more than 50 years ago. The old bitch survived and prospered.
The account is really extraordinary. It's an important addition to the history and literature of the Holocaust. It's also a deeply perceived psychological account.
Two years after reading the book the scene that most sticks in my mind was a "confession" by the old bitch to her elderly daughter about her confrontation with the wife of a German Jewish businessman at Auschwitz. The woman had apparently been acquainted with the SS guard when both lived in Berlin. Or maybe they weren't acquainted but the distressed Jewess appealed to her as a fellow German and Berliner.
The SS guard merely sneered at the Jewess and drove her away. In telling the story to her daughter she announced with satisfaction, "Oh I made them spit blood."
The author of this book was a fine person. She married an Italian man and lived her life in Italy. She was revolted by the life of her mother - and only partly so because her mother abandoned her as a small child. She recognized the essential evil in her mother and detested it. Is the life of Helga Schneider sufficient compensation for the life of her monstrous mother? Can we balance one against the other and say that, on balance there is a fine person of significant gravitas and on the other a moral infant with the worth of a feather? I don't know. I would like to believe that we can.
But of course it's all the same in the scale of the universe. There is no God in our image to judge us and elevate our fine people to some absolute value. From the point of view of the universe, all of us, me, Helga, and her mother, are all just worms. But I refuse to be limited by that absolute indifference. To me, these things matter. Helga Schneider is a fine person who has made something valuable of her life. Her mother was a shit who did nothing but stink up the earth.
| Author | Bova, Ben |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tom Daugherty Associates, Tor Books, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 396 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 2009 |
This fourth novel in the Asteroid Wars series focuses on new characters with little to do with Humphries, Pancho Land or Lars Fuchs. Dorik Harbin, the drug crazed mercenary soldier for Humphries, destroys the big asteroid space station, killing everyone inside, then attacks on old ore freighter belonging to the Zaccharias family, crippling it, sending it spinning off into space.
Victor Zacharias, father of two teens, attempts to divert Harbin in a separate module to allow his wife, son Theo, and daughter Angela to escape. All four survive but Victor loses them and spends years searching, finally stealing a ship to look for them.
Young Theo works like a dog to repair the ship, keep them all alive, and bring them back, but scavengers find them, plan to steal the ship, rape the women and then kill them all. There are complex maneuverings as Victor appears in his stolen ship and Harbin, now a cyborg priest renamed "Dorn", appears on a mission of penance after having been shown the light during contact with an alien artifact.
The book is not what I was expecting as a finale to the series. It allows the tensions setup in the other books to peter out without resolution. It might have been better as a stand-alone novel, not billed as a finale. Nevertheless I rather liked it. The characters of Dorn, Elverda the sculptress, the Zacharius', Volker the scavenger, etc., were all nicely done.
| Author | Sabatini, Rafael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1915 |
| Number of Pages | 307 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | November 2009 |
Sir Oliver Trevillian, fresh from successful privateering, has returned to his ancestral estate in Elizabethan England where he lives with his young half-brother Lionel and pursues the love of his beautiful young neighbor, Rosamund Godolphin, the niece of the solid Sir John Killegrew. Rosamund's brother, a drunken hothead, detests Sir Oliver and insults him gravely. Later that night Peter is found dead and everyone assumes Oliver killed him, but in fact it was Lionel who killed him and Oliver must conceal the facts to protect his brother.
Lionel however is weak. He arranges for Oliver to be kidnapped and sold into slavery so that O will get the blame for the murder and L will inherit the estate and the affections of Rosamund.
O is first taken by Spaniards and made a galley slave. Then, in a battle with Barbary pirates, he breaks his chains and fights like a demon against the Spanish. He is accepted as a pirate, converts to Islam and, by his valor and strength and seaman's skill, becomes the notorious pirate Captain Sakr-al-Bakr, the Sea Hawk.
Eventually, Rosamund, Lionel and Sir John fall into his power. Then to save R, he places himself under Sir John's power. But his innocence (after all he only killed Spaniards and Italians) is finally established and he returns to England to live happily ever after, rich and with Rosamund.
The book is written in Sabatini's outrageous style - highly conventional and juvenile, and yet it is almost anti-Christian. Still it was a best seller and a Hollywood movie in both silent and sound versions.
S's writing is unacceptable in large doses and certainly written for the market, yet it has his trademark intelligence and skill. He was a favorite of mine at age 10.
One night when I was around age ten I was on the sofa in our house on Kennison Avenue, watching our black and white TV. It must have been on a Friday or Saturday night because I was allowed to stay up late, which I could not do on a school night. Mom and Dad must have been home with me since, if it was just Arvin and I, I would probably have locked myself in the bathroom to keep myself safe from his tormenting me. Mom wouldn't have been watching this show. It was probably Dad and me, maybe Arvin too, in the den downstairs. The Late Show came on. It was a weekly late movie, usually grade B stuff from twenty years before in the 1930's. They played Captain Blood with Errol Flynn.
This was a big deal for me. It became my favorite movie. It had sailing ships, fighting with swords and cannons, a dashing Captain and a devoted crew, injustice and revenge, pirates and Englishmen and Spaniards. It was a ten year old's delight. After watching it I found the book in the public library and read it and then read a sequel that I also found in the library.
It's only been more recently that I encountered Sabatini again. I found a copy of one or two of his books in the Montgomery County Library used book sale. I found versions on the Gutenberg free book site. And now, the biggest surprise, I found this recent audio recording at the library. Who would have thought that there was still enough interest to invest in an audio recording?
The Sea Hawk was not very good. The plot was ridiculous on its face. The moral stance was odd, if not downright contradictory. I hope that Captain Blood was better, though if it wasn't, I can't blame my ten year old self for not recognizing that. But Sabatini improved. I think Blood probably was better and Scaramouche much better.
| Author | Updike, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 2009 |
79 year old painter Hope Chafetz opens her home to web journalist Kathryn D'Angelo, a young woman who interviews Hope about her three famous husbands, artist Zack McCoy (based on Jackson Pollock), artist Guy Holloway (Andy Warhol?), and a businessman. For one long day the two review Hope's life as she speaks, and reminisces internally, about the artists, art, her role in the art world, marriage, children, and life in general.
There are no other characters and in fact only Hope has a significant role. She is between revealing too little and too much, between truth and aspiration, between love and appreciation for her husbands, and resentment of their self-centeredness.
The book struck me as truly brilliant. Its appreciation of American art in the 1940's and 50's seemed to me to very deep, very insightful. Its appreciation of the nature of aging was equally good, and its handling of marriage and family, especially in the difficult, heartbreaking relationship between Hope and the daughter who rejects and despises her for no reason Hope can fathom, are extraordinary.
This is far from a conventional novel. It is a personal statement by Updike, in the form of a novel, of ideas that meant a lot to him. Many years have passed since I last read Updike. I can't say if this novel surpasses his earlier work. However if he produced nothing else, this alone would be a worthy contribution to literature.
I think John Updike is one of the great American writers. Before reading this book I had no idea that he was a sophisticated connoisseur of art, but it didn't surprise me to find that he was.
Looking on Amazon I see that reader reviews were very mixed. I'm not surprised. This wasn't the kind of book that most readers are looking for. Out of respect for Updike I posted a reply to the "Top critical review" written fourteen years ago. Why not? I'm retired after all.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2009 |
Tony Paradiso, a well off 84 year old retired trial lawyer, lives in his mansion in Detroit with Montez Taylor, his black chauffeur and gopher, and one other man who is his cook and valet. He also has frequent visits from his kept call girl, Chloe Robinette. One night Chloe convinces her Victoria's Secret model roommate, Kelly Barr, to come with her. While Kelly is upstairs, two killers break in and shoot "Mr. Paradise" and Chloe. Montez threatens Kelly into pretending that she is Chloe because he wants her to open a safe deposit box in Chloe's name.
Frank Delia is the homicide detective assigned to the case. He figures it all out quickly but needs to do more work to ID the two hit men and to get all the evidence he needs against them and Montez. He also finds himself falling for Kelley who has more looks and money than any women he has known.
Leonard keeps knocking them out. The formula is old now but the over the top characters never cease to be amusing and the ambiguous ethics and surprising resolutions always strike a fresh note.
I guess Leonard will never be called a great writer but he's certainly a consistently entertaining and popular one.
"Consistently entertaining and popular" is exactly what many of us crave, if not as a steady diet, then at least as a frequent desert.
| Author | Harris, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 305 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Rome; Cicero |
| When Read | November 2009 |
Tiro, personal secretary to and slave of Cicero, Roman lawyer and politician, relates the story of his master from the vantage point of old age.
Cicero is a "new man" from the provinces who makes a name for himself with oratory, brains and prodigious effort, aiming to become a consul of Rome, a position he finally achieves in 64 BC, at the end of the novel. Along the way he prosecutes a corrupt and mass murdering official, battles entrenched interests, places himself in the employ of Pompey the Great and then, at great risk, crosses him, and meets all the important people in Rome from Pompey and Caesar on down.
H does an impressive job of historical explication while still crafting believable characters and scenes. He brings Cicero and all of Rome to life. I might still rate Robert Graves _I Claudius_ a bit higher but Imperium is still first rate historical fiction. There is genuine appreciation of Cicero here but no starry eyed adulation. We see the poisoned politics that he was drawn into in spite of his high ideals.
The use of Tiro, an actual historical figure, as narrator is inspired and successful.
A very good work.
This was the first volume in a planned trilogy. Since I read this, the second volume came out and I read that too.
Harris has a real talent for historical and political fiction. All of his books have been excellent. He is attuned to the nuances of politics, the compromises, the falsities, the vanities, and the dishonesties that he seems to believe must accompany even the most high minded politician. His presentation of these is so convincing that it's hard not to credit him with telling the truth. But I don't think he is a cynic, or at least I think he might not be. He has a healthy respect for truth and honesty and perhaps a point of view that holds that we must do what we can even if it is predestined to fall short of what we hope for.
| Author | Kinzer, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 296 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Iran |
| When Read | December 2009 |
K gives us a brief history of Iran leading up to the complete domination of the government and economy by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the government of the UK, and the struggle against it led by the incorruptible Mohammed Mossadegh and Mossadegh's subsequent downfall in a despicable CIA coup organized by Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's grandson.
The later Shahs of Iran were interested only in personal pleasures. They willingly sold everything in the country to the British for paltry sums to pay for their own pleasures. Mossadegh became a leader of opposition forces that eventually came to power and demanded a fair return for their oil and fair treatment for workers then laboring under virtual slavery. The British refused every compromise and insisted that the oil was theirs to do with as they pleased. Truman and Dean Acheson did their best to promote a compromise and to prevent British military intervention. But when Eisenhower arrived, John Foster Dulles at State and his brother Allen at the CIA won Ike over to believing that the country was going Communist. He allowed them to loose KR, who bribed military, religious and underworld gang leaders to overthrow Mossadegh and install the weak and controllable Shah in full power.
K documents the whole process and sees it as the ultimate cause of the Islamic Revolution and many problems for the Middle East and the U.S. today.
A good book.
3x5 book cards are too small to include all that should be written about a book. This particular book was a revelation to me. The tricks used to subvert the legitimate and democratically elected government of Iran were truly beneath contempt. It's amazing to me that a man like Roosevelt could engage in them. He went so far as to accuse the Iranians of being inhospitable to him and his wife, knowing that this would deeply embarrass Mossadegh and lead him to taking foolish actions to protect Roosevelt. The petty gangsters, corrupt Imams, corrupt generals, and others that Roosevelt handed baskets of money to were disgusting scum.
Kinzer gives the impression that Ike was pulled into this almost against his will. The Dulles brothers insisted that it was this or the Soviets would seize Iran. It was a time when Ike and most other Americans were ready to believe such a thing. However it's only barely conceivable that the Dulles brothers believed it. More likely, they were engaging in great power "real-politik" and saw the Communist menace as the path to reaching American goals.
It would be wonderful to have a country I could believe in, but I don't. The United States is flawed like all other countries - better than many, not as good as a few, and possibly heading downhill.
Sigh.
| Author | Cooper, Belton Y. |
|---|---|
| Publication | 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 189 |
| Extras | maps, photos |
| Extras | foreword by Stephen E. Ambrose |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Military; World War II |
| When Read | December 2009 |
Cooper was a lieutenant in the 3rd Armored Division working in maintenance, repairing Sherman tanks. He describes the incredible maintenance effort and organization required to keep hundreds of tanks operating, repairing breakdowns and combat damage, from automotive, chassis and armament repairs, to cleaning out brains, blood and body parts of shredded soldiers.
C believed that the M4 was far inferior to German Panther and Tiger tanks and took many losses, including many unnecessary deaths, due to inferior guns and armor and poor mobility due to too narrow tank treads. Hence the title "Death Traps." On the other hand I can't imagine that the Germans had anything like the maintenance and supply tail of the Americans which kept our armored units near full strength in spite of horrific losses. Our biggest shortfall was not tanks. We got them repaired or replaced in record time. It was trained personnel. At some point, infantrymen were put into tanks, given just a few days training, and thrown into combat. The original division had three years training but the combat soldiers (fortunately not the maintenance men) were soon knocked out.
This is a very intelligent, informative look at a part of the war that most of us know little or nothing about.
Not long ago a question was asked in the Usenet group soc.history.war.world-war-ii. on the topic "salvageability of M4's after being hit." I thought this would be an opportunity for me to weigh in with what I had learned from Cooper's book and also recommend it to everyone in the group. It turned out, of course, that everyone had read it. This is a book that is well known to the aficionados.
I learned from a book on the battle of Kursk (see Armor and Blood), first that the Wehrmacht had a very good maintenance and support organization. I don't know if it was as good as the American one, but it was not deficient. And second, I learned that tanks are not usually badly damaged in combat, rather it's that the crews are killed. An advancing army (German at Kursk and before, American in Normandy and later), loses relatively few tanks because they are mostly recovered and repaired after the army's advance in the battle. The retreating side however loses all damaged tanks because it is the enemy that finds them on the battlefield.
It's easy to second guess military officers and historians. It's not so easy to get one's guesses right.
| Author | McBain, Ed |
|---|---|
| Publication | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 2009 |
This is the first 87th Precinct novel. It introduces Detective Steve Carella who tries to discover who is killing detectives from the 87th precinct.
McBain paints a gritty scene in 1940's-50's style. Cops and citizens sweat and suffer in a hot, steamy summer, without air conditioning. The story opens on a detective approached from behind and shot dead. When it happens again, it appears that a mad cop hater is prowling the streets. Everyone who might hate cops, everyone known to have a .45, everyone who might have a grudge, is dragged in, interrogated, leaned on. But there is no progress.
A third cop dies. Only Carella keeps pursuing the idea that it might not be a psychopath.
Eventually the killer visits Carella's deaf girl friend. He is in her apartment but the girl finds a way to warn Carella when she sees the knob turn on her apartment door. C comes in with his gun drawn and drops the killer. It turns out that the killer was a fool, seduced by the third victim's wife, who wanted her husband dead and had the other two killed to mislead the police into believing it wasn't a nasty wife but rather a psychopathic cop hater who committed the murders.
McBain shows a mature and effective style in his first published novel, or is it just his first published 87th precinct novel? He was a master of the elements of an American police novel.
I seem to recall an interview in which McBain said that he wrote 40 novels over ten years before one was finally accepted by a publisher and published. That novel became a best seller. Immediately, the 39 novels that no one would publish before were in high demand. It is an interesting comment on how wrong the publishers were about their own business and their own clients.
Here is some biography from the Wikipedia.
"Evan Hunter (October 15, 1926 - July 6, 2005) was an American author and screenwriter. Born Salvatore Albert Lombino, he legally adopted the name Evan Hunter in 1952. While successful and well-known as Evan Hunter, he was even better known as Ed McBain, a name he used for most of his crime fiction, beginning in 1956."
I haven't tried to count them, but there look to be about 140 novels shown in his bibliography on www.edmcbain.com. A pretty prolific guy.