Books read January through December 2010
| Author | Mailer, Norman |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 477 |
| Genres | Fiction; Biographical fiction |
| Keywords | Hitler |
| When Read | January 2010 |
M's last novel, written at age 84, is an ambitious fictional account of the early life of Adolf Hitler, told by a minor devil who had been assigned by his master to look out for little Adolf and help steer him into the life of evil that Satan has prepared for him.
The unnamed devil, working as an SS official later in Hitler's life, largely recounts the lives of Alois and Klara Hitler. Alois' life as a rising customs official, a womanizer, a beekeeper, and possibly the husband of his own illegitimate daughter who always assumed themselves to uncle and niece. They are not portrayed as bad people. They face difficult trials in their lives and, though not completely compatible they, in M's reconstruction, manage a successful marriage.
We are accustomed to thinking of Adolf Hitler as a monster. M presents him as a little boy, vulnerable, desiring the love of his parents, dealing with bullies and with teachers, schools, siblings, and most of all, his domineering father. We are sympathetic in spite of ourselves. But there is also something missing in him and something present, an egocentrism of an extraordinary sort that should not be there.
Fabulous and realistic at the same time, the novel gives us a point of view on Hitler that we don't see anywhere else. Intended as volume one of a trilogy it would have been a striking achievement if Mailer had lived to write the other two and if they proved as interesting as this one.
There are many books about which I can easily say what I liked or disliked about them. This one is much harder, but I did like it.
In fantasy I imagine going back in time to the town of Hitler's childhood. There is no opportunity to change him, but I have an opportunity to kill him. Do I do it? From a personal, psychological point of view, the answer is, No. How could I kill a child?
From a remote and abstract intellectual and historical point of view, the answer is, Maybe. How can we know what unintended consequences there might have been? Maybe someone worse than Hitler would have arisen in Germany - worse not because he was less of a monster since that seems hard to imagine, but worse because he was cleverer and able to win the wars and establish a long lived Fascist empire. Or maybe someone killed in the war would have been worse. Or maybe the lessons of the war would never have been learned and the long term consequences would have been worse.
However if I put myself in the place of the victims the answer is a clear Yes. I could not go to a single Jewish woman and say, because I cannot kill this monstrous child, your children, your husband, your parents, all of your relatives and friends, all of their children, your rabbi, your teacher, your doctor and on and on, all will have to suffer terribly and die horribly. And when I add in the Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, French, English, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, Americans, and yes even Germans that died because of him I would have to set aside my guilt and my qualms about the child, overcome my anxieties about what might or might not be, and go with the elimination of a known and terrible evil. I would have to kill the child.
This was the first book that I finished in the year 2010. Working backwards, converting my 3x5 index book cards to XML, this is the last book I completed for 2010, and completes the first full year of book notes in XML.
It has been a lot of work and the work is only just begun. The book cards go back to 1974. They will change in content and approach. They will be more like I was 30 or more years ago and less like I am now. But the enterprise has been worth it. I've gained something from reviewing all of these books again. I may not be good at playing the guitar. I may not be good at learning a foreign language. But if I'm good at anything it's writing about the ideas and feelings that are circulating inside my head. I do it in the diary and I do it in these book cards. I'm motivated to continue.
| Author | Westney, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | Amadeus Press, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Music |
| When Read | January 2010 |
Westney, a pianist and professor of music, writes about calling forth musicality in practice and study. His goal (I'm writing this too long after reading the book and may be misremembering) is to have the student build trust and confidence in himself - not to follow a rigid prescription. He wants the student to play with gusto rather than hesitation. Then, most importantly, he wants him to "process" his mistakes, to think about why they occurred and how to overcome them. The goal is not to play so hesitantly and woodenly that every mistake is avoided, but to understand and learn from the mistakes.
Playing music involves multiple skills, analytical, aural, tactile, kinetic. It is the kinetic/experiential skills that I need to develop, the body knowledge of where to move my fingers next and how it all feels. "Feelmagination" is a word that he coins to describe this.
Did reading this book make me a better guitar player? Clearly, the answer is No! I sometimes think that my only hope in that direction is that I'll be struck by lightning and my neurons will be fortuitously re-arranged. Still, Westney gave me a better attitude towards learning the guitar. I have more ways to think about practicing and a little less frustration as a result.
I haven't played the guitar in many months. I guess I got tired of the frustration, the dissonance, and the disappointment of knowing how it should sound and how I made it sound. I tell myself that I'll take it up again and maybe I will, but I have no illusions about where I can go with it.
| Author | Deaver, Jeffrey |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Signet/Penguin, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2010 |
The central character in this police procedural mystery is Lincoln Rhyme, a former head of forensics at the New York City Police Department but now living in a Manhattan apartment as a paraplegic, unable to move any parts of his body except his head and one finger, unable to eat, bathe, defecate, or do almost anything without the assistance of his male nurse Thom.
The story opens with inexperienced policewoman Amelia Sachs at the scene of a gruesome murder. A man and woman, kidnapped by a taxi driver, have disappeared and the man is found buried with only his hand sticking up out of the dirt. A series of murders follows with the police bringing evidence to Rhyme, who helps them find clues and take the next steps.
Rhyme doesn't want to do any of this. What he really wants is for someone to help him kill himself and end the torment of his condition. but he is drawn into the case in spite of himself, taking an active interest in life for the first time since his accident three years before. So the story has multiple tensions to resolve. Will they catch the killer? Will he kill many more victims? Will Rhyme kill himself? Will Amelia help save him and become a respected policewoman?
The forensics are very impressive. Extensive technical research went into the story, which always adds interest for me. And it was successful as an action/thriller.
I've always told myself that if I were permanently crippled in a wheelchair and in constant pain but I still had my wits about me, I'd want to continue to live. Deaver has imagined such a life and come to the same conclusion. There are still things to do, still achievements to achieve, still knowledge to be gained and still, diminished as it is, some life to live.
Of course I can't really know what I would think if I were confronted with the real thing. Life is complicated and, as Lincoln Rhyme discovers, even when you're living it you don't always know what you really want or need to do.
| Author | Mortimer, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | BBC Audiobooks, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | January 2010 |
The Timson family ask Rumpole to defend 12 year old Peter Timson who is threatened with an "ABSO" (anti-social behavior order) for chasing a soccer ball into a more exclusive street where a local lady complains to the authorities about his disturbing the peace. The boy is convicted, much to his own delight, and R works on other cases, defending a nebbish accused of murdering a prostitute and pursuing his own effort to acquire "silk", become a Queen's Counselor (QC) with the aid of the "old Bull", Judge Bullingham, who has befriended Hilda.
In his inimitable way, Rumpole pursues justice and manages to catch its coat-tails. He discovers that the dead prostitute came from Russia and was exploited by a gang headquartered at the very house that lodged a complaint against young Peter Timson - not really because he disturbed the peace but because he was disruptive to their operation. So R solves the case, gets the nebbish off, and ends the persecution of the boy. The QC however eludes him. His pursuing a connection between the traffic in Russian girls and a prominent English official dooms him.
I regard Rumpole as one of the great human beings in world literature and Mortimer as a great contributor to English speaking civilization. I love these books and find much to treasure in them.
| Author | Hughes, Langston |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 180 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Harlem |
| When Read | February 2010 |
Essie Belle Johnson and Laura Reed are two friends living in poverty, on relief, in a run down Harlem tenement. Essie is pure, quiet, simple, God fearing, and passive. She sits for hours at a time doing nothing, just staring into space. Laura is lively, active, street smart, good looking, and attracted to handsome men.
When Laura realizes that the Harlem preachers make big bucks and also realizes that she and Essie both have beautiful singing voices, she proposes that they go down on the street and sing and preach and pass a tambourine around for contributions. Essie sees it as something religious and meaningful and gets into the spirit of it. Her only financial goal is to get enough money to bring her 16 year old daughter up from Virginia and live with her in a nicer apartment.
The act is wildly successful and soon leads to a real church. Essie loves it but Laura is dazzled by the money. She buys clothes, liquor and a Cadillac. She start keeping a wickedly handsome but rotten man who takes her money and runs around with other women. He's also connected to a white gangster who manipulates Laura to read out lucky numbers in church and send ignorant parishioners into the hands of the gangster.
Essie's dream comes true but Laura descends deeper and deeper into frustration, exploitation and intense jealousy regarding her no good man. In the end, Laura kills the man in a fit of rage and tries to pin the crime on Essie, but the cops figure it all out pretty quickly.
This story is almost an icon of life in Harlem. It is full of deep understanding and sympathy. Hughes was a great writer.
When I read this novel I wanted, or at least it now seems to me that I wanted, Essie and Laura to succeed. I wanted Essie not only to bring her daughter to New York, but also to become a little more worldly, to protect herself and her dream from Laura and to protect her 16 year old daughter from Laura's wolfish man. I wanted Laura to be reasonable, to recognize that her man was no good, and to be more content with the great success that she and Essie had. But Hughes was not writing a fairy tale. He was taking a deep look at Harlem, looking warmly at his people and showing their power and strength to the reader, and also looking coolly and objectively at their faults. I can easily imagine that many black readers would squirm while reading the book, and I squirmed too. But I thought it was a truthful book.
| Author | Arnold, James R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Osprey, 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 98 |
| Extras | photos, illustrations, maps, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Vietnam War |
| When Read | February 2010 |
This is a fairly well done Osprey war history with interesting comments about both sides in the campaign.
While the communist forces were beginning to plan the offensive, a high level American conference on the war "could simply not identify anything worthy of being called a strategy" (p.6). The communist side was perhaps less realistic but more focused and with a clearer idea of goals and objectives. Their goal was to spark a general uprising of the South Vietnamese people. Their objectives were to capture the cities.
Up to that point, VC fighters had been very effective. American search and destroy sweeps usually did little more than drive the VC underground and inflict superficial damage on tunnel systems. The VC grew in strength and organization.
The actual offensive was essentially a failure militarily. Planning was extensive but there were no radios, little experience of large scale warfare, no heavy weapons, inadequate leadership cadres. The men fought well but as the days progressed, coordination, supply, movement all broke down. Commanders were killed and men didn't know what to do. The immediate cost was huge losses of the most dedicated VC personnel. Because of that the North had to take over leadership and manpower for the war. But for all that, the political effect was terrific in the U.S. Key opinion makers like Walter Cronkite came to the view that the U.S. effort was going nowhere. A political sea change occurred.
A very interesting and reasonably balanced little account. Well illustrated.
At the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968 I was just starting down the path that would lead me to become a committed opponent of the Vietnam War. I was an undergraduate senior at the University of Pittsburgh. I hadn't yet joined any radical groups and, indeed, the radical groups that became prominent - SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the Coalition for Peace and Justice, were not yet the mass organizations that they would soon become.
I can't reconstruct my own feelings from that time. It was too long ago. But surely Tet was a big factor in my coming to understand that the Vietnamese people and the Viet Cong were not as American propaganda depicted them. It wasn't too long after this that I began to read radical books: Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerrilla War by Wilfred G. Burchett, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal by Howard Zinn, and The Age of Imperialism by Harry Magdoff. The struggle against the war in the United States became a central focus of my life.
| Author | Chabon, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Alternate history; Jews |
| When Read | February 2010 |
FDR once proposed a Jewish refuge in Alaska. This novel postulates that it happened, that Israel was never established, and two million refugee Jews made it to Sitka Alaska after World War II. Now, decades later, with Jewish autonomy about to revert completely and the future of Sitka uncertain, police detective Meyer Landsman is woken up in his run-down hotel by a manager who brings him to a room where another resident, a chess obsessed, drug addicted, wayward son and sometime prospective Messiah, has been murdered.
Landsman and his partner, half Indian half Jew Berko Shemetz, discover a shady conspiracy run by the Verbovers, a Lubovitch style Orthodox sect into Zionism and crime, run by the murdered man's father who is the chief rabbi.
The story is more than a little fantastic. It barely hangs together at all. But the ambiance, the Yiddishkeit, the conception of a lost Yiddish world surviving into the twentieth century, in semi-isolated conditions, and the wonderful language are all marvelous.
The conspiracy is an attempt to re-take the holy land. It is absurd in every one of its aspects from its impossibility of success to its ridiculous means - finding a perfect calf as a symbol from God to stir up the Jews. But if you get past that and just enjoy the other elements of the story, it's well done.
In any case, Chabon is a fine writer.
This book attracted a lot of attention with 695 reviews to date on Amazon. Browsing through some of them I saw a lot of Jewish names but also a lot that were not, including one five star review from a fellow named Abdul. There were a lot of five star reviews and a greater than usual number of one star reviews - and some of those reviewers had Jewish sounding names too.
I think perhaps that many of the one star reviewers disliked it because the book was less serious than they expected. In fact, there were many elements that were ridiculous. Those who liked the book considered those things to be jokes. Those who hated the book thought they were misperceptions, or even sexist or antisemitic attacks on women and Jews. After reading another of Chabon's books (Gentlemen of the Road), I came to find his ridiculousness rather overdone and tiring, pushing me more to negative thinking about the book than I thought while reading it, when I was delighted with all the Yiddishisms.
Well, whatever we say about it, it did exhibit a lot of writing talent and it was unusual and different.
| Author | Smith, Larry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 2010 |
Over a many year period of interest in the battle, Smith collected memoirs and interviews from 22 American participants from pilots to medics, officers, flamethrower men, flag raisers, CBs and a Medal of Honor winner.
The battle must have been about as ferocious as it is was possible to be. The Americans applied overwhelming firepower, drenching the entire island with high explosives and flames and invading with elite soldiers - the US Marines, who fought very hard and with excellent organization and weaponry. The Japanese however had spent many months preparing, using the accumulated knowledge of island warfare, applied by a highly intelligent general (Kurabayashi), and carried out by fanatically dedicated troops who much preferred death to dishonor. Fighting with little food, thirsty to the point of desperation, short of ammunition, living in hot tunnels dug into recently active volcanic land, they nevertheless held together and fought on. Long after it was thought that they were almost all dead, 300 of them burst out of a tunnel near the airfield and killed 44 pilots in a suicide attack.
Most of the men on the US side were very young working class fellows who had enlisted after the war started. Few were professional soldiers. Most just wanted to stay alive. But they performed pretty heroically.
A very well done account, preserving the words of the dying old veterans.
One incident I recall from the book was the discovery of a well by the Marines. They posted men in various places around the well and waited. After nightfall, Japanese soldiers, mad with thirst, came to the well for water and were massacred. The Japanese knew the Americans were there. They knew it was a trap. But they had no choice. They could die trying to get the water or they could die of thirst. The Marines had no compunction about shooting these men down. It was a war of no quarter. No love was lost. It was total war.
Today, each side considers its soldiers on Iwo Jima to have been heroes. I think both sides were right. They were heroes. They were ordinary men thrust into extraordinary circumstances where extraordinary actions were required of them. Most of them seem to have risen to the challenge. There's a lot to say about this, but it's too large a subject for these book notes.
| Author | Gartner, Lloyd P. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oxford University Press, 2001 |
| Number of Pages | xi + 468 |
| Extras | index, glossary, notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Jews |
| When Read | February 2010 |
The professor at Tel Aviv University begins his history in 1650. There were an estimated 1.25 million Jews in the world, down from 8 million (!) in Roman and Persian times. Half lived in the Ottoman Empire. In both Europe and the Middle East, they lived in self-contained and restricted communities.
By 1648 the situation of East European Jews, the largest European Jewish community after the Inquisition destroyed the communities in Spain, became desperate. A Cossack / Ukrainian revolt against Polish rule produced huge massacres. Russians joined in the fighting and massacred more. 90,000 Jews are thought to have died. The Jewish response was religious - Hasidism, mysticism, prayer. Political and national responses were out of the realm of possibility. It was only in the 18th century that the first glimmerings of the Enlightenment reached the Jewish communities and not until Napoleon did the ideas spread.
Jewish communities progressed rapidly, especially in the U.S. but also in Britain and France and seemingly in Germany. In the Russian Empire however the way was blocked and Jews were therefore pushed towards revolution or Zionism. Garner recreates the struggles and the divisions in the Jewish communities of those days, showing the very different responses that sometimes arose. There is limited discussion of the Holocaust, more of the founding and development of Israel.
I read this book over many months, which is not conducive to a coherent picture, but reviewed it anyway for amazon.com because no one else had.
What follows is my Amazon review of the book.
As of this writing, I see that no one has reviewed this book on Amazon, which is unfortunate. The book is worthy of a review. So here is my effort.
Gartner covers the period from about 1650 to 1980. He explores the world events that affected Jewish communities, from the Cossack revolt in the Ukraine and Poland in which perhaps 90,000 Jews lost their lives, to the French Revolution and Jewish emancipation, immigration to America, the rise of German nationalism, Nazism and the Holocaust, and the founding of the state of Israel.
Jewish responses to and participation in these events were quite varied. In the early period they were mainly religious. Participation in the wider world was essentially impossible. Self-defense was impossible. What was possible was withdrawal, mysticism, Hasidism, and a yearning for a Messiah. Gartner covers this in what, to me, was surprising and interesting depth. However, starting in the late 18th century, the first sparks of the European enlightenment reached the Jews of France and Germany and, with the coming of the French Revolution - traditional Jewish life began to undergo radical change - welcomed by some Jews and rejected by others.
Jewish emancipation led to the first integrations into the larger and more cosmopolitan Christian culture, mainly in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. New forms of the religion arose, such as the "Reform" movement that attempted to understand Judaism as a religion in a larger national culture, rather than a separate and self-contained culture. New occupations became possible, especially in business, but also in medicine and the arts and professions. A great awakening of Jewish aspirations occurred. A great increase in population occurred. And new forms of anti-semitism arose, reacting against this.
Gartner writes from a Jewish perspective. He is a professor at Tel Aviv University. He has read and admired Jewish rabbis and writers that are unknown today except to scholars such as himself - people whose interests were far out of the mainstream of European and American history, but who played important roles in their times in Jewish intellectual or religious life. In writing about these people, he teaches us that the story of Jewish life was not entirely written by Napoleon, who was instrumental in emancipating Jews, or Hitler, who sought to kill all of them. Nor was the entire history of Jewish life encompassed in Zionism and the response to the Holocaust.
I liked this book. It's clearly written. It's very well documented with extensive footnotes that include much more detail than just citations and page numbers. It covers a broad spectrum of Jewish history - political, religious, economic, intellectual and cultural. It cites statistics in very useful and enlightening ways. It attempts, on the whole successfully I think, to be objective. It is very sympathetic to the Jewish people but not, I think, antagonistic to anyone else, or blind to the failings of Jewish leaders.
The emphasis is very much on European, and to a lesser extent, American Jewry, with very little about Middle Eastern Jews except for those who came to live in Israel. There is a discussion of the Holocaust, how could any treatment of modern Jewish history ignore it, but it is not the main emphasis of the book. Zionism is also discussed, but it too is not the main emphasis of the book.
I'm not a scholar and have not read much Jewish history. I'm not well prepared to say what a person interested in Jewish history should read. For a history of Zionism, I preferred Walter Laquer's A History of Zionism. For the Holocaust, I think there are many better and deeper books. For discussion of the modern conflicts between Israel and its neighbors, there are also many better books. But this book has a place in a comprehensive understanding of modern Jewish history. It covers a lot of material that is hard to find elsewhere, with an impressive objectivity, organization, and scholarship.
| Author | Lichtenstein, Nelson |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co., 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 311 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Business |
| When Read | February 2010 |
Sam Walton was a very smart, hard working, ambitious man who put together a combination of rural Arkansas/Missouri culture with a strictly and ruthlessly scientific approach to cost cutting retail sales. His innovations included just in time inventory management, big stores on rural lots that drew from wide areas, de-emphasis of brands, limited variety, rapid delivery using in-house trucking, and the most ruthless exploitation of labor from suppliers to cashiers.
As Walmart grew Walton gained more and more leverage over suppliers, driving prices down and eliminating all middlemen. He had no use for wholesalers, jobbers, or sales reps. He told the suppliers what he wanted at what price and offered quantity purchasing that they could not easily walk away from.
Today, almost all of the suppliers are in China or India or Central America, often working in illegal sweatshop conditions using migrants to the cities who do what they're told or starve to death. At home, Walmart loved the rural Southern culture of desperately poor, unemployed and uneducated people who were grateful for crappy jobs and distrustful of unions. Union busting and exploitation have reached new levels of sophistication using accountants, lawyers, ex-cops and spies, and right-wing PR and anti-union consultants.
It would be easy to hate Walmart but now all large retail organizations work the same way.
This was an enlightening and very objective book.
There was a lot in this book that didn't get summarized on my 3x5 index card. L traced the changes in retailing over the years, discussing Sears and the rise of K-Mart. He wrote at length about Walton's path to power, starting as a manager for another company, learning the business, and seeing ways that he could rationalize processes to cut costs and prices and increase profits. At a certain point, he got a stake from his wife's wealthy father and took the plunge into developing his own business.
The techniques for exploiting labor were appalling. Women were put to work for 5-7 years, getting raises each year, then forced out to start over with new hires at minimum wage and no benefits, saving 50% as compared to keeping loyal employees. Walmart discovered that it took only a few weeks to train a new employee so experience didn't mean anything to them. All that mattered was low wages. But employees couldn't be fired or laid off. If they were, Walmart would be responsible for paying additional unemployment taxes. The undesirable people, often the most loyal of those in the workforce, had to be induced to quit. A favorite tactic to achieve that was to move women to a 3pm to midnight shift, ensuring that they never saw their husbands or children, who were working or in school when the women were at home and at home when the women were at work. Although Walmart had a turnover rate as high as anyone in the industry, they paid the very lowest in unemployment taxes.
Walmart was very good at manipulating taxes. They pitted counties against each other to offer tax breaks and infrastructure improvements that would benefit Walmart. They shafted employees. They hired the best accountants and lawyers. Then, of course, their competition drove local retailers out of business, possibly causing a net reduction in jobs.
Their assaults on unions are legendary. They would spend millions on legal and illegal attacks on unions rather than spend one penny in wages or benefits that a union would demand. Both the company and their consultants went beyond good business efficiency. It was a religion with them. Unions were seen as devils come to take away the company's God given right to dispose over its employees. It was rather scary.
Walmart had all of the usual employee problems of retail stores. There was lateness, slacking off, and pilfering. It comes with the territory of low wage employment. But Walmart refused to build in a certain amount of loss, as other companies did. They hired security police, installed hidden cameras, and went after the employees who were not giving a hard and honest day's work. Their practices were successful. Walmart employees tow the line or else. They also did their best to keep their stores in rural areas where low wages, low expectations, anti-union sentiment, Christian values, and atomization were the rule. Attempts to open stores in urban areas were often failures, especially in black areas. The inner city culture was too tough a nut for Walmart to crack, the workers less willing to be bullied by supervisors and less inclined to saluting the Walmart flag and singing the company song.
Today Walmart has expanded around the world. Interestingly, they failed in Germany, where none of the family owned retail chains would sell out to them and where employees would not give up their pro-union sentiment. They also failed in Japan where consumers just weren't interested in buying the cheap products that Walmart specialized in selling.
Alas, as L says, Walmart has introduced a revolution. The other big retailers learned all of the lessons and now operate the same way.
Resistance to Walmart bullying has continued to simmer with the "Our Walmart" employee movement. Negative publicity has also had an impact and I think that more professional managers, less influenced by the long dead (in 1992) Sam Walton, are making more concessions to workers.
| Author | Bowman, Martin |
|---|---|
| Publication | Osprey Publishing, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 80 |
| Extras | photos index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | February 2010 |
This is a simple, shallow, but nicely illustrated review of combat between the big, fast American P-47 fighter and the much smaller and nimbler German BF109.
P-47 Thunderbolts provided escort for American bombers until Mustangs arrived in sufficient numbers, relegating the P-47 to shorter range ground attack. Initially the Germans took a heavy toll of the P-47s but gradually the Americans gained experience and, with the arrival of the P-47D with better speed, altitude, acceleration and visibility, the situation reversed. It was the Germans, with many of their experienced pilots already dead and the new ones lacking fuel for training, who were unable to match the Americans.
I have access to a lot of these Osprey books. They contain a lot of pictures and only a limited amount of text, so they're fast reading. They're just what war techno-junkies want to look at.
It seems self-denigrating to call myself a war techno-junkie. It's something that many people I call friends would find to be strange and maybe a little (or a lot) abhorrent. But, there it is. It's an aspect of my personality (only one aspect mind you and not the most important one by any means) that I cannot honestly disown.
| Author | Masters, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Presidio Press, 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 340 |
| Extras | index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | March 2010 |
Masters, born Peter Arany in Austria, escaped Vienna in 1938 with his mother and sister, his divorced father escaping separately, all of them to England. He was 16 and Jewish.
At the start of the war he and his father were interred as "enemy aliens." Eventually he was able to get out to join the army, but only in an unarmed "Pioneer" labor battalion. In 1943 he was finally selected for advanced commando training in a unit of mostly Jewish native German speakers. They underwent extraordinary physical training, running, mountain climbing, parachuting, hand to hand combat, as well as training in all kinds of weapons. Finally on D-Day he went ashore in Europe and fought on the front lines, usually in reconnaissance right up to the enemy lines, in attacks, and in prisoner interrogations. After a short rest in England his unit was back fighting in the Ardennes, the Rhine crossing, and the conquest of Germany.
Although M was 75 when this book was published it was written with much clarity and insight and a considerable appreciation of the viewpoint of his youth.
I read books like this partly as war/adventure stories but also and particularly as stories of fighting back against evil. I like to read about the oppressed turning on and defeating their oppressors, of Jews shooting Nazis.
A satisfying work.
There are a number of episodes in the book that stick in my memory. In one, one of the English trainers runs up a rock face that all of the men, already well trained themselves, thought was too smooth and steep to be climbed. Then he teaches all of the men to do it. If I remember correctly, this gallant and talented Englishman did not survive the war.
In another episode a German air raid on London finds a naked Masters in bed with a young lady staying in the house where the two of them were temporarily quartered. As the owner of the house rushes upstairs to find out if his guests are okay, Masters managed to procure his machine gun and open the bedroom window, posing as the defender of the young lady and the house.
In another, Masters and a partner advance towards a German position in order to scout it out. They move far slower than a tortoise's pace. Unlike in the movies, maneuvering in the face of the enemy is something to be done with great care and alertness, not bravado. After acquiring some experience, he learns to bring a lot less ammunition with him, figuring that stealth, speed and brains, not lots of shooting, will preserve his life and win the day.
In another, Masters observes an American assault on a German position in Germany near the end of the war. Hoping to see a clever and well planned attack, he actually sees the kind of attack that the Royal Marines characterize as "bash on regardless". Men are killed that need not have been. After the Germans surrender Masters' officer confronts the German sergeant who leads his men out of their position. The officer smashes the German in the face, demanding to know why they killed so many Americans when they knew that the war was lost, that their position was lost, and that they were going to surrender anyway.
There were also a number of episodes where Masters was employed in interrogating Germans. All were surprised at his excellent German. But he shared no sympathy with them. They were his enemies in a way that was perhaps not as personal for most other combatants. In at least one he surprised a German who didn't know he spoke German by confronting him after hearing him make some remark to his pals.
Masters moved to the United States after the war and spent the rest of his life here.
Not a lot had been written in Amazon reviews about this book, so I added the above as a review of my own.
| Author | Hall, Brian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 364 |
| Genres | Fiction; Biographical fiction |
| When Read | March 2010 |
This is a biographical novel about the poet Robert Frost. The style of the novel is quite unusual, 128 chapters ranging in size from a few sentences to a few pages, and ranging back and forth in time and place through California, New England, old England on the eve of World War I, the USSR in 1962, the inaugural address in 1961, Florida, and Frost's final death bed in hospital.
F is presented as a garrulous, difficult man. He cares very much for his wife and children but has little of himself to offer them. He is devoted to his poetry, finding in it a way, not so much of understanding the world but of converting his complex experience into something he can understand - not life itself but words about life.
Many parts of the story are painful to read: his naive and foolish appeal to Khrushchev, his easy treatment of the biographer who misquotes him and brusque treatment of others, his painful ignorance of the needs of his family. But for all of its criticism of Frost the novel nevertheless inspires much admiration for him and gives us new insights into his life and his poetry.
Some Amazon readers greatly disliked this book but it worked for me. I liked the disjointed time. It gave me a sense of a life lived as a whole and not just as a sequence of phases. I liked the development of F's character through the parallel threads of chapters - farm, poetry, family, Russia.
There is a review on Amazon by F's grandson and a good one from the Washington Post.
Apparently the owners of the copyrights on Frost's poetry refused to give Hall permission to use any of it and threatened to sue him if he did. As a result, the book is missing what would have given it much force and backbone. The decision by the owners strikes me as quirky and short sighted, perhaps the kind of thing that Frost himself would have done. Had they granted permission I believe that Hall would have attracted more readers to Frost and also instilled more and more sophisticated sympathy for him among readers.
My review on Amazon follows.
I can't recall reading a book that attracted such opposite reviews by literate people as this one has. Usually one sees the sophisticated, literate reviewers on one side, and those seeking simpler fare on the other, but not so for Hall's novel.
My own reading of the novel is very positive. Anyone who has read far enough in the reviews to reach mine, already knows that the book has 128 chapters that range back and forth in place and time. Written mostly in third person, there are a few passages in second person, addressed from Hall to Frost. These are unusual techniques but I believed they worked. At least they worked for me.
Hall's exposition of Frost's life follows many threads at once - his naive politics, his ineffectual farming, his awkward career of sinecures in academia, his frustrating family life, and through all of these threads, his poetry. Each thread is introduced in early chapters and developed in middle and later ones. We come to understand them not by seeing his life as a sequence of phases, but as a whole composed of antecedents and consequents, each one shedding light on the earlier as well as the later parts of his life.
Frost is presented as a garrulous, difficult man. He cares deeply about his family but doesn't know how to give anything of himself to them. Very serious about his work as a poet, he feels alternately pleased with himself and incredulous that anyone would be pleased with him. He is more than slightly out of joint with the reality around him. He needs to cast his experience into words, not so much in order to understand the world, which he never seems to do very well, but to understand his own feelings.
I don't know anything about Robert Frost. I'm not able to judge whether Hall's view of the man is accurate. But whether it is or is not, it nevertheless gives us deeper and more complex avenues into his poetry. It took a bit of reading to get into this book, but the further I got, the more I liked it. Hall's appreciation of Frost seems superficially critical but, at its core, I believe it is deeply sympathetic and understanding.
If you are reading this review and have not yet read Peter Behrens' review reprinted here by Amazon from the Washington Post, or the poet's grandson's review (see Robert L Frost), I recommend them. I also liked some of the contrary reviews, for example the one by L. Hart.
| Author | Harris, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 330 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | March 2010 |
A Lancaster bomber is shot down over central France, east of Paris. Two men, an educated upper class officer/navigator and a working class farmer gunner with an infantry background, parachute to safety and are taken in by the locals. Plans to get them out via Spain and Portugal fall through and the men decide to stay and wait for the invasion which they know must be coming soon. They work as farm laborers for a young woman whose husband died earlier in the war and each develops a different kind of interest in her. They are also drawn in to training and organizing the locals to attack the Germans once the inevitable German retreat begins.
Neville, the educated young man, comes up with a plan to ambush the Germans while Urquhart "Urq" conducts the training using arms dropped to them by the British. Meanwhile the local German commander makes plans to steal paintings from the local chateau while other German officers play various roles as cynics, Nazis, etc.
In the end, the ambush works, the Germans are killed or captured, and Urq stays on to marry the girl and become a French farmer.
Some effort went into the writing but no special inspiration. It's a fairly pedestrian WWII adventure/pot boiler, done honestly but without much imagination. I read books like this for the content - WWII. And choices for what I can put on the Palm are also limiting.
Harris wrote an earlier book, _Light Cavalry Action_, which I read after this one and which I liked very much. He was a good writer. He could produce interesting work. This book isn't really bad but it's not as good as the earlier one. I guess that when a man makes a commitment to become a writer he must produce in order to keep food on the table. He can't always wait for great inspiration. But if he's honest, as I believe Harris was, he at least tries his best. I'm willing to credit him with having done that.
| Author | bin Laden, Najwa |
|---|---|
| Author | bin Laden, Omar |
| Author | Sasson, Jean |
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 334 |
| Extras | index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | April 2010 |
Najwa grew up in Syria in a family of Yemeni extraction and married her serious, tall, gentle and handsome cousin, Ossama bin Laden, moving with him to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to live under the veil in purdah (isolation) with the man she loved. Soon she was pregnant, then again and again, eleven times altogether, while Ossama took more wives, determined to raise more Muslim children.
Ossama worked in his family's business, making lots of money and going to school. But he became increasingly radical and drawn in to the anti-Russian war in Afghanistan.
Omar is Ossama's fourth son. Although his family was rich, he had little contact with his aloof and increasingly distant father. His family was raised with hardship. Ossama believed in toughening his sons. They were given no toys, no air conditioning, no refrigerator, no processed food. They went to public schools where they were taunted and beaten. Then when Ossama attacked the royal family for inviting Americans and Christian women soldiers (!) to defend against Iraq, they had to leave for Sudan. Eventually they were driven out of there to a life of great hardship in Afghanistan. It was there that Omar, now an older teen and the most responsible son, resolved that he had enough of hate and war and hardship and left with his mother who was still in love with and submissive to her husband.
It's an extraordinary story told straightforwardly, with little flash of professional writing and with much insight into this very dark corner of contemporary reality.
It seemed odd to me at the time and still does now that this book was not read by tens or hundreds of thousands of western readers. Maybe it was but I doubt it. I seem to recall that when Stalin's daughter showed up in the West and wrote a book it was a big deal. Ossama was hardly as important a person as Stalin but he certainly cast a large shadow and, if anything, he was even more elusive than the Russian.
I can only imagine the conflicts in Omar's life. It was clear in the book that, although he rejected his father's violence and fanaticism, he still loved and respected the man. Now that Ossama is dead, Omar must have a new set of feelings about him and about himself.
I have no idea what sort of life Omar actually lives today, who his friends are, whether he is constantly watched by CIA agents, whether he is threatened by Al Qaeda agents, or by free lance Muslim fanatic maniacs, or by cold blooded killers of any conceivable allegiance or none at all. His life is unlikely to be normal. However he has done a great service to all of us by telling the truth about Ossama's and his family's real life. I thank him for that and wish him well.
| Author | Atkins, Ace |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 2010 |
In 1955 real life Tampa Florida, the 70 year old gangster Charlie Wall, then retired and living the life of a loquacious and gregarious alcoholic, is murdered. The presumption is that the killers were hired by the local Mafia, fearing that Wall had revealed, or was about to reveal, mob secrets. But the case was never solved.
Tampa Times reporter L.B. Turner, an occasional drinking buddy of Wall, is assigned to the story and tries to figure it out while also hoping for the attention of a beautiful female reporter from a competing and more successful paper who likes him but is out of LB's league.
Much of the story shifts from LB's first person narrative to third person points of view of the tough and tragic detective Ed Dodge and of a 17 year old Cuban girl, on the run from Batista's police after killing a general who raped her and killed her father.
There is no resolution to the central murder. No one knows for sure who killed Charlie Wall. All of the main characters survive and live on into the new American culture of TV and shopping malls and a loss of the old South and Cuban character of old Tampa. Their stories dwindle off. What is left is a nostalgia for the variegated ethnic culture of the older city and a respect for those characters, especially Ed Dodge and the Cuban girl, who chose to hold onto their principles and live as best the could amidst the corruption.
Atkins is nostalgic without being overly sentimental. The story, most unusual in a crime novel for having no solution, is nevertheless interesting and absorbing. I liked it.
| Author | Mankell, Henning |
|---|---|
| Translators | Segerberg, Erba |
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 2010 |
Kurt Wallander, the aging, somewhat old fashioned and out of place Swedish detective, confronts two young girls, aged 19 and 14, who murdered a taxi driver with a hammer and a knife and easily confessed that they did it for his money. However the story makes no sense and Wallander looks for hidden motives and accessory persons who can explain the savage act.
At almost the same time, a high powered computer consultant drops dead, of natural causes or murder is not clear, and events gradually bring the two deaths closer together. Eventually W uncovers a complex computer terrorist plan cooked up by the consultant and a disgruntled World Bank employee in Angola.
The computer aspects of the story are ignorant and inept. Like Wallander, Mankell does not understand computers and hiding behind W does not make it okay. The launch of a cyber attack from a cash ATM machine in Scania is absurd.
Other aspects of the story are also contrived: a Chinese killer sacrifices his life for the terrorist cause, a plot hatched in Angola, a woman who lures W into a trap on behalf of the terrorist who then kills her, a girl killed in an electrical relay station, and a boy in the gears of a ship's engine. It's all fake as is the intuition that W uses to solve the crime. It's just a pot boiler dressed up in contemporary themes.
Still, I give M some credit for professional writing and convincing police characters - though not enough credit to rescue the book.
This was probably the worst of the Mankell mysteries I have read so far.
| Author | Armstrong, Lance |
|---|---|
| Publication | Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Extras | photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | April 2010 |
This is a photographic chronicle of A's attempt to come back and win the 2009 Tour de France, the race he dominated for seven years. It shows his training, interactions with his team, his fans, his many friends, cancer patients, bike riders, government officials, doctors, trainers, and family.
The photos are marvelous and wonderfully candid, from training shots to pissing in a cup for a drug test. You really feel that you have been invited into the man's life.
The only text in the book is in the captions, with just a very short several page introduction. It's all candid, straight up, self-confident, pure Lance Armstrong.
A is an extraordinary man. More than "merely" one of the world's greatest athletes, he is also a man of intelligence and character with a considerable understanding of himself and of what is important in his life. He loves to win. He pushes himself to the utmost. He makes all the requisite sacrifices and endures all of the requisite pain. And yet he is a man who also cares about other people and makes great efforts on their behalf. He comes across as a man with a powerful ego but not as a self-centered egotist.
Maybe I'm blinded by my admiration of him but I very much liked the book.
We know now that Lance failed to win the race. His own teammate, Alberto Contador, broke discipline and went out ahead to win. Lance was pissed off, as we would expect. Contador was unrepentant, as we would also expect. Professional athletes at the level of Armstrong and Contador are out to win, not to come in second.
At the end, Lance came in 23rd, 39 minutes and 20 seconds behind the leader. He was not in contention, but 147 riders came in behind him. For a man his age it's nothing to be ashamed of. But the dream was over and the career as a professional rider was finished.
I give him credit for trying. Some winners think it's best to leave their sport or their profession as winners. Personally, I think it's better to leave when it is no longer possible to continue. I don't think that means one retires as a loser. On the contrary, one retired after giving it everything one has. It's a good way to characterize a true winner.
In the "we know now" category, since 2012 we've known that Lance used drugs to help him win most of his victories. Should that change the praise that I had for him in my comment when I wrote the above book notes in 2010? Should it change the admiration I still expressed in 2011?
I had done some cycling myself and, when I found I could watch professional cycling on the cable TV I had at one time, I began watching the European bike races and learned about Lance Armstrong. Struggling up hills, zooming down them at high speed with cars just feet in front of and behind me, getting dehydrated in the hot sun, and both exhausted and elated at the end of a hard ride, I appreciated what the pros were doing and got very interested in watching the races and in Lance's career. It was obvious to me that the man was a super athlete with the brains, the discipline, and the determination it took to win along with the physical strength and endurance. I have no doubt that Lance was one of the top riders in the world with or without drugs. I think it very likely that all of the top riders were doping and Lance therefore had a choice. He could do what the others did and take his shot at fame and fortune, or he could give it all up and wind up back in a small town in Texas doing God knows what. I don't like what he did. I don't like that he made so many false denials, usually with the minimum distoritions he could tell ("I'm the most frequently drug tested guy in the world and I've never failed a test"), but when directly confronted he directly lied and he attacked the veracity of those who witnessed his drug use and spoke up about it. I wouldn't do what he did. I think it was necessary to take away his prizes. But I don't have the heart to condemn the man.
| Author | Taiz, Lincoln |
|---|---|
| Author | Zeiger, Eduardo |
| Publication | Sinauer Associates, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 690 |
| Extras | illustrations, photos, references, index |
| Genres | Science |
| Keywords | Biology; Botany |
| When Read | April 2010 |
This is a mid-level text on selected topics in the biology of plants. It assumes you know the basics of biology and plant structure and goes on to discuss topics of particular interest to the authors.
I learned a lot about some topics I've wondered about but never seen explained. How does water get lifted to the top of a tree? By negative water pressure in the top of the tree due to transpiration.
What is the maximum height of a tree? About 120 meters, limited by the physics of water pressure.
How do plant cells grow if they are bounded by cell walls? Enzymes loosen the "glue" holding the cellulose windings to each other and then turgor pressure pushes them apart while new threads are laid down in between and parallel to the existing ones.
How do plants survive freezing? By increasing cytosol density and by expressing proteins that prevent ice nucleation, enabling super cooling down to -40 C, also by withdrawing water into the roots or into the apoplast where freezing does not destroy interior structures of cells. And so on.
All conclusions are well explained and well supported with evidence. The reader gets a good view of practical working science.
There are several hundred associated web pages that I also read.
A well done book, read over a period of many months
I posted a review on Amazon.com.
I would say that the two principal topics of the book that were not extensively covered in more basic books I have read are the physics of water transpiration in plants, and the action of plant hormones. There was very little of the "physiology" I was expecting, such as the structure of wood, or meristems, or flowers. However what it said about the topics it covered was always interesting and always convincing. The authors provided the evidence for alternative views and invited the reader to draw his own conclusions. It was an impressive piece of scientific writing.
My review on Amazon was well received.
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vanguard Press, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 327 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | April 2010 |
Bear envisions a group of FBI agents, some veterans, some just graduated from the FBI course at Quantico, Virginia, trying to tie some odd clues together to understand and stop what looks like it could be a planned bioterror attack. The clues are strange. A truck load of obsolete Epson printers is stopped by a highway patrolman who is killed for doing it. Why? A right wing nutcase on a farm in the West has some of the same printers and lots of yeast. Why the printers? Why yeast? Meanwhile in a parallel story the cop killer in the Epson printer truck incident has sold anthrax to terrorists, telling them it is specific for killing Jews.
The story comes together eventually. The terrorist is an ex-FBI agent who found the infamous anthrax mailer and discovered that this sick young man has created a prion that destroys memory and inserted the gene for it into yeast. He may be aiming to destroy the memories of everyone in the Mideast to end the wars there, or he may perhaps be planning to destroy everyone in the world.
It is, as one reviewer wrote on Amazon, a dismal story. It's also disjointed, somewhat incoherent, and made more dismal by political infighting and turf wars in the homeland security agencies and by personal angst suffered by every character on every side.
This is not Bear's best, either as politics, coherent story, or writing. But it's not too bad. It brings out the possible consequences of our advancing knowledge of genetic engineering. We could very well be headed for disaster.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2009 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Comedy |
| When Read | April 2010 |
Bank robber Jack Foley befriends the rich little Cuban murderer Cundo Rey in prison. Cundo gets his smart lawyer on Jack's case and she gets him out. He heads for a house in Venice CA owned by Cundo. There he meets Dawn Navarro, C's wife, a psychic con artist and, in spite of Cundo's insane jealousy, goes to bed with her while she tries to draw him into a plot to rob Cundo of his millions.
Jack is looking to go straight. He doesn't want to go back to prison. He is drawn to Dawn by lust but is increasingly disturbed by her heartlessness and his own betrayal of his friend and "road dog" (prison buddy) who soon arrives on the scene.
The usual Elmore Leonard plot develops. Dawn (a character from a previous book, as are Jack and Cundo) goes down the slippery slope of selfish betrayals leading almost casually to murder. Cundo is murdered. Jack dances his way through one tight spot after another from a basketball court confrontation with an Aryan brother to a roof ball confrontation with Tico, the half black half Costa Rican young gangster that Dawn has seduced into trying to kill Jack, to dealing with an obsessed FBI agent who is convinced Jack will rob a bank while he, the agent, will make his fame and write a book by catching him.
It's all great fun in the inimitable Elmore Leonard style.
| Author | Rastrenin, Oleg |
|---|---|
| Publication | Osprey Publishing, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 98 |
| Extras | illustrations, photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II; Eastern front |
| When Read | April 2010 |
This little book, in the standard Osprey style, focuses on the airmen and the combat experience of Ilyushin Il-2 ground attack units on the eastern front. Written by a Russian who is obviously proud of, and in deep sympathy with, the men of that era, it nevertheless seems quite objective, candidly explaining the poor tactics, administrative foul-ups, errors in judgment, and poor coordination that dogged the Red Air Force up to and through the battle of Kursk. However it also shows us the growing experience, strength and confidence that eventually resulted in an efficient and effective air arm that inflicted enormous damage on the German invaders.
Restrenin organizes the book first around planes and campaigns of the war in the east and then around the elite "Guards" units and the combat achievements that brought about their elevation from ordinary units to Guards - a process that required some conspicuous heroism and military achievement.
I particularly liked the fact that R. identified individual men, stating their names, sometimes their civilian backgrounds, and their achievements. He is often able to name all the men in group photos - giving human faces to men whom we in the West know nothing about.
| Author | Sudo, Toshio |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster, 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Music |
| When Read | April 2010 |
This is a quite remarkable little book about how to think about playing the guitar by a Japanese American guitar player who absorbed himself in Zen philosophy and applied it to his playing.
I expected not to like this book. Listening for the "sound of one hand clapping" has always seemed more of a pose and a pretension to me than a serious philosophical thought. And indeed Sudo does ask us to do that and to do other things like it that have a clever and portentous sound but seem, to me at least, to lack any meaning. It's clarity and precision that impresses me, not obscure metaphor that can be interpreted any way one wants.
So I came to the book with misgivings but decided to give it a try because my rational scientific outlook just isn't making my brain or my fingers more skilled or musical. To my surprise I was impressed. Sudo's philosophy has heavy helpings of sincerity, humility, openness to learning and to music, persistence and practice. As examples, he said "A beginner cannot play all he hears but he can hear what he plays" - something we don't do all the time.
I liked the book. Sudo's early death from stomach cancer was a loss to us all.
I'm surprised that I wrote the above notes without mentioning that "sudo" is the name of a UNIX/Linux command to execute another command with super user privileges. So says Sudo listen to what you are playing.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Author | Francis, Felix |
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 2010 |
London barrister and amateur steeplechase jockey Geoffrey "Perry" Mason is threatened by a brutal thug whom he defended but whose case he lost. When the conviction is overturned on appeal due to witness intimidation the thug, Julian Trent, confronts Mason at night and beats him with a baseball bat. after that, in a big race that might be Mason's last chance at a huge win before he and his horse are too old, there is a terrible accident and he winds up in a plastic shell body cast. Only then does the main legal case start. Mason is hired by leading jockey Steve Mitchell to defend him against an accusation of murdering the second leading jockey, Scot Barlow. Julian Trent pops up again, threatening to kill Mason's father and girlfriend if he doesn't lose the case.
All the traditional elements of a Dick Francis mystery are here. There's a likable, intelligent and competent protagonist. He mourns the loss of his wife years before but is beginning to fall in love again. His actions are balanced and moderate. He would never assault a bad guy. His situation is becoming increasingly precarious but, maddeningly, he persists in leading a relatively normal life, pursuing normal interests. He really wants to be the normal, competent person he is, but to do that he's got to use all of his knowledge, nerve and skill to out think the criminals who are oppressing him.
Old as he is, Dick Francis continues to do his thing, as competently as ever. I hope he lives to 100 and writes ten more books. But if he doesn't he's still left a trove of good stories for readers to while away the time and enjoy themselves.
| Author | Zaloga, Steven J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Osprey Publishing, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 48 |
| Extras | photos, drawings, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Military technology; World War II |
| When Read | May 2010 |
This is a typical Osprey publication, short, well illustrated with both photos and drawings, very authoritative appearing, written by an author who takes his highly specialized subject quite seriously, in this case producing the first ever commercial monograph on the subject.
In my musings and imaginings about military history and hardware I've always been attracted to weapons that were small, light, and cheap, like the A-4 Skyhawk or Fairey Gnat. I imagine great numbers of such weapons overwhelming forces that have smaller numbers of more sophisticated weapons but many men with no such weapons at all - like Sherman tanks against the Nazi Panther and Tiger. I also imagine poor but virtuous armies [!] taking on powerful enemies by means of clever use of such weapons.
It is not an altogether objective and defensible view. The M8 turns out to have had poorer off road mobility than any tracked vehicle, armament that could not handle a major battle, and armor that could not stand against a main force assault. It was a vehicle for scouting and patrolling. But it looked cool. I still liked it.
| Author | Updike, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Ballantine Books, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2010 |
18 year old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy finishes his last year of high school in New Prospect, New Jersey at a run down school in an almost all black neighborhood. His Egyptian father is long gone. His red-haired Irish descended mother is a nurse's aide at a hospital and part-time painter, making a home for Ahmad as best she can in a small apartment. Ahmad, isolated, alienated, intelligent, friendless, different, alone, has come under the influence of a local imam, Shaikh Rashid, who offers him a fatherly figure and a spiritual life which Ahmad desperately seeks. But Rashid's goal is terrorism and Ahmad is his long term tool. Rashid gets him a job as a truck driver with the Arab owned Excellency Furniture Company, a legitimate business that one of its owners is using in a conspiracy with Rashid.
In parallel with Ahmad's descent into a plot to blow up a truck in the Holland Tunnel, the school guidance counselor, 64 year old Jack Levy, married to fat librarian Beth, tries to get Ahmad to go to college, and also has an affair with his mother.
In his last years Updike seems to me to have become an even greater writer. This was a very complex story to tell. The characters were very acutely observed; Joryleen the black girl who sings in the church choir but whores for her worthless thug boyfriend Tylenol, Rashid the intellectual imam with a bitter but keen outlook on both Islam and America, Levy the intellectual, ineffectual Jewish atheist, the smart, cynical furniture store guy who arranges for Ahmad to get laid before he is killed.
Well written. Important. Literary.
I see that I did not recount enough of the story here to record all of the important plot elements or to spoil it for future readers of these book notes. However, since I'm the most likely future reader and since even the talented Updike is likely to only be read for another generation or two, and this will not be one of his books that survives well into the future (so I predict), I'm going to go ahead and say more, as best as I can recall it from 19 months later.
The young man working in the furniture store, son of one of the owners and nephew of the owner who is a terrorist, is also working for the FBI. Some elements of the plot are known to them. I don't recall however what they planned to do about it.
Jack Levy also learns or figures out the plot and is determined to stop it. He manages to get into Ahmad's truck, already packed with explosives (or did the FBI, unknown to Levi, already remove the explosives?) and go with him into the tunnel. Levy talks to Ahmad the whole time, trying to convince him not to push the button to kill them both and flood the tunnel. We don't know whether he will succeed. Ahmad does not make a verbal choice. But they drive and drive and emerge out the other end of the tunnel without his having activated the detonation. Ahmad, Levy, and many people are saved (if the FBI had not already prevented the explosion) are saved.
Looking back on it, it seems odd that I can't remember whether the explosives are live or not. It would seem to be an important point of the plot. But, there it is. The real point was the saving of Ahmad.
I confess to some sympathy with Levy too. 64 year old Jewish atheist intellectual guidance counselors with a real desire to do good in spite of sometimes doing bad don't appear all that often in literature. It's nice to have one's reflection viewed sympathetically, even if not uncritically, by a great writer. I can also console myself with the thought that even though I am now older than Levy was, he's still aging too. He's keeping me company. Isn't he?
| Author | Turtledove, Harry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | May 2010 |
On April 12, 1864, Nathan Bedford Forrest led a cavalry force in a lightning fast march on Fort Pillow, a fort on the Mississippi River about 40 miles north of Memphis. It was defended by a regiment of about 300 black artillerymen with white officers and another 300 white Tennessee Union cavalry, "Tennessee Tories" in the words of the rebel soldiers who hated them as traitors and as men who had raped and robbed Southern sympathizers in Tennessee.
The battle was one sided. After Major Booth, commander of the blacks and an experienced officer was killed, it became more so.
Forrest asked the fort to surrender and offered to treat all who gave up as prisoners of war - blacks and whites. But they fought on in spite of warnings from Forrest that he could not answer for the consequences.
The fort was overrun and subsequently hundreds of prisoners were massacred. The extent of Forrest's guilt is unclear. He could control his men, he believed, if the fort had surrendered, but not if it fought, killed many rebels, and was overrun by men who hated both blacks who dared to shoot at whites and traitors to their own state.
T writes a plausible novel about all this, filling in known facts with reasonable conjectures and adding personal characters and stories. It is a pro-Union account with special sympathy for the black men who proved their courage and ability in the battle. The portraits of Forrest and Major Bill Bradford of the Union were very interesting.
The CD narrator was poor.
Turtledove included an epilogue in the novel describing an investigation carried out by Northern congressmen. The investigation castigated Forrest and the Confederate troops for murder. My impression of the investigation was that it engaged in some political posturing and grandstanding, and failed to appreciate some of the nuances of the situation and of Forrest's role, at least as presented by Turtledove. But its conclusions were still essentially correct. A massacre had taken place. Men who had already surrendered were killed because of the color of their skin. It was a disgusting act that, to the credit of the Union, was seen as disgusting and inhuman even in those days.
This book was far from a great work of fiction but I appreciate what it tried to do. Historical novelists can sometimes lend flesh to the stories of our forebears that aren't easy to appreciate when read as dry and sparse historical facts. This was a serious and not unsuccessful attempt to do that.
My comment that the narrator was poor was based on the emotional tone that he gave to most of the speech. He found a way of speaking that might possibly be used by an ignorant and limited back country man and then used it over and over and over again for one character after another until I grew thoroughly sick of it. It worked the first time or two it was used. After that it became very grating.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Audio, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 2010 |
Easy Rawlins, now in 1967 after the Watts riots, is hired to find a missing young girl. He finds her on the street, beats up her pimp, and offers her the chance to return to her family. It's a very sensitively handled assignment. Then he is engaged to find Pericles Tarr who may or may not have been murdered by Ray "Mouse" Alexander, who is also missing and missed by his woman, Etta May. But nothing is simple. The Vietnamese child, Easter Dawn, is deposited at Easy's house with no explanation by her killer father, Christmas Black. So Easy must find Christmas too.
The plot is complex. It involves some rogue military men running a drug smuggling ring who are after Christmas, who is not at all easy either to find or to kill. Meanwhile the cops are determined to find and kill Mouse. Bonnie, who was thrown out by Easy in _Cinnamon Kiss_ is getting married and Easy's children Feather and Jesus have refused to shun her, and Pericles Tarr shows up with a bundle of money.
It was a very satisfying Easy Rawlins series sequel. Some say it will be the last. I hope not.
The book was full of the usual fare - racist whites and decent ones, beautiful women who are helpful and accommodating or who are killed as in the "Faith" of the title. Easy remains conflicted, proud, intelligent, sophisticated, yet primitive, all in one.
| Author | Ennos, Roland |
|---|---|
| Publication | Smithsonian Institution Press and the Natural History Museum, London, 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 112 |
| Extras | photos, diagrams, glossary, index, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Botany |
| When Read | June 2010 |
This is a popular book attempting to explain key biological facts about trees, particularly those concerning the mechanics of wooden trunks and of water transport. There is also discussion of tree diversity and evolution.
As a technical book it is hopelessly inadequate. Key concepts regarding cell biology, photosynthesis, mineral use, reproduction, hormones, etc., are all absent. But that is inescapable in a small popular, illustrated book aimed at a general audience. For what it does, which is to introduce readers to the nature of trees rather than to be a broad but superficial field guide, it seems to me to be useful.
I have a terrible time retaining the details of the science books that I read. I've read a considerable amount of botany and relevant molecular biology and biochemistry, but I can't remember many key facts even about trees. I don't know if it's age or just that the subject is deeply detailed and I am far from immersed in it. So I have to read books like this one from time to time to at least try to recover some of the big outlines. Alas, I forget them too.
| Author | Akunin, Boris |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 2010 |
In the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 Russian troops near the Bulgarian town of Plevna were first distracted into a useless maneuver, then rebuffed when they finally assaulted the town after the Turks had reinforced it. This story takes place in the Russian camp among the officers and the Western journalists attached to the army, where the redoubtable Erast Fandorin is working for the secret police, attempting to locate a Turkish spy in the Russian camp.
Unlike the other Akunins I have read, this one adopts the narrative point of view of another person, the aristocratic but liberated young lovely, Varvara Suvurova, who has come to be with her fiance, a young officer in the signals staff.
Fandorin is calm, rather detached, somewhat bemused, and always thinking things out. He eventually finds the spy, saves the battle by conveying vital information to the commanders, and prevents the loss of the whole war by stopping a foolish advance on Istanbul, which might have brought the Western powers in on the side of the Turks. He also saves the young lady's fiance from false charges.
Different from the other Fandorin stories, it was still quite satisfying.
| Author | Schlink, Bernard |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Janeway, Carol Brown |
| Publication | Vintage, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 218 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2010 |
In post-war Germany, fifteen year old Micheal Berg falls ill on the street and is helped home by a woman whose house he is passing. When he recovers, months later, he returns to thank her and is quickly drawn into a sexual relationship with the woman, Hanna Schmidt, a streetcar conductress. Besides sex, the one thing she most likes is for the boy to read books to her.
One day Hanna disappears with no explanation. Michael misses her but has no choice but to get on with his life. Eventually he has other friends and lovers and marries. He next sees Hanna in 1965 when, as a law student, he attends a trial of Nazi SS concentration camp guards. Hanna was among a group that locked Jewish women and girls in a church for the night after a forced march. A random Allied bomb set fire to the church but the doors were never unlocked and all but two of the women die. Hanna, the only one of the women who admits guilt, gets the stiffest punishment and accepts the patently false accusations of the others that she was the ringleader.
It transpires that Hanna is illiterate. Her embarrassment at that fact is the main motivation for a number of bad decisions that led to her downfall. Michael records books and sends the tapes to her in prison.
I found the writing to be sensitive, intelligent and poignant. The love story, odd as it was, was moving. It was not a great love story, or at least not the story of a great love. However it brought the feelings of an adolescent boy alive and carried over into his troubled adulthood. The Holocaust story also had considerable interest.
I have been keying in old book cards in reverse chronological order, working backward from the present. I read this one 16 months ago. When I picked up the card and looked at the title I couldn't recall what it was about. This may be the first book going backward for which that was the case. However reading the card brought it all back to me and I was again able to experience the feelings I had when I read it.
While transcribing, I fixed a number of grammatical mistakes and awkward locutions in the original hand written card.
| Author | Overy, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | W.W. Norton, 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 396 |
| Extras | notes, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | June 2010 |
Unlike many historians, Overy does not consider that Allied victory in WWII was a predictable and foregone conclusion. The most critical theater was the Eastern Front. Germany began that war with a stronger and vastly better armed, trained, and experienced army and air force and a much more powerful economy. By the fall of 1942, Germany also had command of most of the resources and manpower of continental Europe, including most of the most productive agricultural and industrial areas of the USSR. Yet the Russians, with so little to start with and so much of that seized or destroyed, put out almost superhuman efforts in both fighting and production, denying themselves all but the very barest necessities of life, to overcome Germany. The USSR alone outproduced Germany in tanks and aircraft and vastly outproduced them in artillery in every single year of the war. It was the great willingness of the Russian people to do that, and to fight to the death, that doomed Hitler's invasion.
When we add British and especially American production, Germany was severely outclassed and Japan never had a chance.
Again, unlike many historians, Overy believes that British and American bombing was highly important in winning the war. It destroyed German fuel supplies, returning them to a horse drawn army. It absorbed half of the Luftwaffe effort and much of the artillery production. Defeat in the East was greatly aided by these.
Overy also discusses technology, leadership and moral values. All greatly assisted in victory.
An interesting book.
One statistic I remember from the book dealt with motor vehicle production. In 1938, the last year before the war, Germany produced 331,000 vehicles, Italy 71,000, and Japan 26,000. The US alone produced 4.8 million, more than ten times the output of all of the Axis countries combined.
This productivity translated into many other spheres. American manufacturing and construction companies and their engineers, managers, technicians and workers had vastly greater understanding and experience of mass production. They were able to apply their technique to everything from making aircraft and tanks in the Midwest to building harbors and airfields on remote Pacific islands. It was a major part of the victory.
But I personally believe, and I think Overy would agree, that that overwhelming preponderance of material superiority would not have been enough to win if the Russians had not stood up to Hitler. And I believe that the real reason the Russians stood up to him was that Hitler himself had made plain that he regarded them as nothing but dirt beneath his feet. However much people were dissatisfied by the Stalinist regime, they soon saw that Hitler was worse.
Stalin made every sort of mistake. He managed to gut the Red Army before the war, to throw away its best units at the beginning of the war, to lose 2.8 million men in its biggest battle around Moscow, to interfere with his best commanders. But Hitler managed to be worse. And worst of all was his determination to wage his war of annihilation, guaranteeing that the Russian people would hate him and fight to the death.
| Author | Cohen, Adam |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | June 2010 |
Cohen focuses on five members of FDR's cabinet and administration with key roles in determining the direction of his presidency. Ultimately it was always FDR himself who made the major decisions but the five were powerful advocates for two competing positions.
Henry Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, was the key advocate for payments to farmers to not grow crops. The two competing plans to rescue farmers from catastrophically fallen prices were to set a fixed price floor, and to dump our agricultural surplus overseas using Federal subsidies. France Perkins, Secretary of Labor, and Harry Hopkins, who was the first director of the Civil Works Administration, set up the first Federal jobs and relief programs. Raymond Moley, FDR's aide and right hand man, served as a key intermediary but gradually moved to the right as FDR moved left. Finally, Lewis Douglas, scion of a rich mining family and an arch conservative budget cutter was Director of the Budget. He won FDR over to his gruesome "Economy Act" that cut veterans pensions, but the policy was ultimately defeated by Perkins and the others.
There is much interesting personal material about these five as well as much political history. Oddly, the Schlesinger books often pick different key players and Schlesinger does a much better job of understanding the President and the times.
Cohen can't compete with Schlesinger but he has produced a worthwhile book.
I wish I could retain the details of the large history books that I read, but I can't. What I retain are impressions and specific individual stories and scenes - with varying but never perfect accuracy. Looking back on this one a year later I come up with the following:
Wallace, Perkins and Hopkins were the first to recognize and promote the direct payment of subsidies to citizens - either for not growing crops or as part of relief work. Perkins or Hopkins, I forget which, convinced FDR that if you offer coats and shoes to poor people, they will take those articles whether they need them or not. But if you give them money they'll buy exactly what they need and not waste it on stuff they don't need. It is a much more efficient way to provide what was then called "relief" and is now called "welfare". This overcame Roosevelt's fear that giving money to people was encouraging them to be lazy, or at any rate, counterbalanced it.
The struggle for farm relief was a major issue in a time when many more people lived on farms than today. The three extant plans, price fixing, dumping, and payments not to grow crops, each had vociferous proponents. Wallace's payments to not grow crops worked in spite of many expectations that it could not.
FDR did not start out as a liberal in our contemporary understanding of that term. He was seduced by the view of Douglas and others that a balanced budget was necessary to get us out of the depression. His coming around to the opposite view was not based on a new understanding of economic theory. It was based on his determination a) to do something, not nothing as Hoover had done, and b) to help ordinary people and not leave them to their fate, as Hoover had done.
My recollections run together things that I learned from Schlesinger and from Cohen. I can say where some of the things I recall came from, but not all of them.
One important point that came out very strongly in Schlesinger's books and to a significant extent in this one was the limits of a President's power. S made clear that FDR could not order things to be done. He had to convince his people that they should be done and lead them to make the right policy happen. If the people did not believe in the policy, it would not happen no matter that the President wanted it.
I don't know if anyone knows FDR's attitude to black people. I don't know if he was a racist or an antisemite. Certainly Eleanor Roosevelt was a strong believer in civil rights and she tried to prod Franklin in that direction but with at best limited success. His payments to farmers to not grow crops went to mostly white landowners while the burden of not growing crops and not making money was born by mostly black sharecroppers. Although much of the New Deal legislation was color blind, there was no effort to overthrow Jim Crow in the South, an effort that would have cost FDR his powerful Democratic Party allies in the South.
I have still read only two of Schlesinger's books. I may read the third one day.
| Author | Burke, James Lee |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audioworks, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 402 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 2010 |
Detective Dave Robichaux is on vacation with his wife Milly and friend Clete Purcell in the mountains of Montana. He and Clete come across the rich and strange Wellstone brothers, one largely crippled, the other badly burned and married to the pretty Country and Western singer Jamie Sue Stapleton. The brothers have a pair of cheap hoods working for them that make Dave and Clete very suspicious. When a pair of college students are killed D and C suspect the Wellstones but have no proof.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Dale Greenwood, Jamie Sue's guitarist and true love, has nearly murdered Troyce Nix, the brutal prison guard who beats and rapes him. He escaped jail having been held for a crime he did not really commit, and is in Montana looking for Jamie Sue. Troyce Nix, a profoundly dangerous man, is on his trail.
Dave and Clete gradually sort it out while Troyce, meeting a nice girl, gradually becomes a human being. Everybody, Dave, Clete, Troyce, Jimmy Dale, Jamie Sue, and even the Wellstones and their hoods battle their inner demons, with some growing stronger and others destroyed.
Burke's notion of a good man is the tough, maybe alcoholic, experienced, dangerous man who maybe just wants to be left alone. It's a common theme and character in fiction but Burke has his own original and satisfying take on it.
| Author | James, Henry |
|---|---|
| Publication | (Gutenberg) |
| Copyright Date | 1885 |
| Number of Pages | 48 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2010 |
An unmarried woman writes to an unnamed man in the U.S. about some people she has met and befriended in England. A young man, Ambrose Tester, is having an affair with the married Lady Vandeleur, but tries to be discreet about it. His father, knowing nothing of the affair, is upset that his son has not married and produced an heir to the estate. Ambrose, seeing no prospect of ever living with his true love, finally concedes to his father's wishes and proposes to a charming, nice, presentable young girl and all is set for an eventual wedding.
Then, out of the blue, Lord Vandeleur gets sick and dies, leaving his wife free.
Ambrose doesn't know what to do. He wants to break his engagement but hasn't the heart to hurt the girl. So he does nothing. While he procrastinates the situation gets worse. The girl gets closer to her wedding, the families get more committed, Ambrose gets more miserable. He eventually asks Lady Vandeleur to marry him, but she follows the path of duty and refuses.
In the end, Ambrose and Lady V are happy. They have done the right thing. They exult in their goodness. It is only the girl who is, in spite of her marriage, "drooping".
This is another of James' exquisite sensibility stories.
I wonder what I would have made of a story like this in my communist youth. Would I have argued that the material circumstances of these peoples' lives constituted a glaring crime against society, a crime ignored by a writer who has instead lost himself in the frivolous details of personal life?
Probably not. I had tendencies towards that sort of analysis in my mid-twenties, but I don't think that my sensibilities and my appreciation of good literature were ever ruined by them. I was struck by the contrast between the people in, say Jane Austen's novels, and the real life of a class ridden society and a Europe at war that was the essential social reality of that time. I was struck by the lack of appearance of any people in her novels, and later in James', who were not of the class who were the subjects of the novels.
But setting that aside, James (and Austen) were great writers with insights into the society that they wrote about. The insights were social in a way that goes beyond anything in my life, but they appear nonetheless to be accurate and deep.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | BBC Audiobooks, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 1951 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 2010 |
Biron Farrell, a student at the University of Earth, is jarred out of his studies by an apparent radiation bomb in his room and the news that his father, "the Rancher of Widemos" has been killed. This launches him on a trek through the stars to protect himself, to find the facts, and to avenge his father.
The book is full of classic SF themes and characters. Biron falls for a Princess. The two show their love by spiting each other. Her father is the weak, bumbling, nice man who appears to be a tool of the Tyranni, who are out to rule this corner of the galaxy. There are also a quirky uncle with a private little weapon, an intriguer who may be good but turns out to be bad, a rather clever Tyranni, and lots of quite good 1951 era science, very well explained.
It's all written for the juvenile market and far from A's best, but it was a fun read from the very clear and orderly mind of the great writing machine.
This is the kind of book that I would have read, and perhaps did read, when I was 11 to 13 years old and going through every science fiction novel in the school and public libraries. It was classic adolescent escapist fiction. As I grew up I lost my taste for that sort of thing. Now, in my declining years, my taste hasn't changed but my tolerance has increased. I'm more likely to take a book for what it aims to be and not demand that it be more than it aims to be. It enables me to get some enjoyment out of a book like this and to appreciate Asimov's fine mind even in this adolescent story.
| Author | Gurney, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Navigation |
| When Read | July 2010 |
The magnetic compass turns out to be a fickle instrument for marine navigation. "Variance" or "declination" is a measure of the degree to which a compass needle points east or west of true north. "Dip" or "inclination" is a tendency to point down, into the earth or up, away from it. "Deviation" is a local error from the perturbations in the magnetic field due to iron or magnetism near the compass, for example in the iron hull of the ship. Compasses work differently when placed in different places in the ship, both horizontally and vertically.
This book recounts the history of our understanding of the behavior of compasses and of the scientists, engineers and mariners who worked out our knowledge - often in laborious and very difficult steps. It was a history of discovery, continuing right up to the twentieth century.
Not unlike Dava Sobel's _Longitude_.
Before reading this book I imagined that everything that we knew about compasses was learned many hundreds of years ago. After all, it seems to be a simple instrument. I have owned lots of them. You hold it level and it points to magnetic north.
It turns out that the real situation is more complex than that. The shape and construction of the needle, the placement of the compass in the ship and the location of the ship on the surface of the earth, all affect the reading. Different methods of magnetizing the needle produce different results. Different methods of mounting the needle affect the ability of the compass to stabilize on a pitching ship. A failure to account for these problems can, and has, resulted in disastrous accidents and the loss of ships and lives.
As in so many other areas, a small number of truly dedicated individuals account for much of the progress in understanding the science. Some of this work is very laborious and pain staking. One British scientist/officer mapped compass variation at different latitudes and longitudes all over the earth - a valuable but ephemeral endeavor since the passage of a few years can change everything.
| Author | Mahfouz, Naguib |
|---|---|
| Translators | Hutchins, William Maynard; Kenny, Olive E. |
| Publication | Anchor Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 498 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Cairo; Egypt |
| When Read | July 2010 |
al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad is a prosperous middle class shop owner, beloved by his friends and treated as a worthy, albeit tyrannical head of the family by his wife Amina, his daughters Khadiya, the older sharp tongued homely one, and Aisha, the golden haired beauty, and his three sons, dissolute Yasin, earnest and intellectual Fahmy, and young and spirited Kamal.
Leaving his house every night, Ahmad goes to parties for drinks, good humor, music, and liaisons with women. He is the soul of geniality. Returning home, he treats his family as his possession. He is not cruel but he is the sole actor on his domestic stage. All activities must be blessed by him. The women may not leave the house. Marriages of Khadiya, Aisha and Yasin are arranged to suit Ahmad's concept of his own importance.
It is the end of World War I. The people of Cairo are yearning for independence. Fahmy, earnest, idealistic, nationalist, pure, joins the movement against his father's orders. He is killed in a demonstration at the end of the book - leaving al-Sayyid Ahmad bewildered, enraged, and adrift.
Palace Walk is full of rich and subtle details of life in Cairo in 1918 and 19. Each chapter is a small jewel of precisely understood feelings and precisely observed social relationships. It is a great book, the first of the trilogy leading to Mahfouz' Nobel Prize.
See also a comment I made on a negative review on Amazon.com.
I read this book over a long period, typically reading one small chapter of four or five pages in a night. It was not the kind of book that I read fast or run through a large portion in a single sitting. I read quite a few other books between the time I started and finished this one. Each night I might read 20 or 30 pages of a history, a mystery, a science fiction, a current events book. Then I'd enter the world of early twentieth century Cairo, stay a short while, emerge from it, and open my eyes to see my world of 21st century America in a different light.
There are other books that have this same ability to evoke a time and a place and a civilization. Paramount among them is War and Peace. Others include Vanity Fair, Birds Without Wings, Conversation in the Cathedral, and one I am reading now, The Glass Palace. These are books that preserve the past for us in a profound and moving way.
I liked this book very much. I've started the continuation, Sugar Street.
I realized, after not too many pages, that Sugar Street was not Book 2 of the trilogy. I switched to Palace of Desire instead and have since finished it. I still plan to read Sugar Street.
Palace Walk captured my imagination in the very first paragraph. The book begins with Amina, al-Sayid Ahmad's wife, walking through the house, saying little prayers and performing habitual actions to protect her and her home from evil djinn. It is a world and a life that were completely unknown to this American reader. And when her husband comes home that night he introduced me to another world that was completely foreign to me. That foreignness, that distance from me in space, time, and culture, drew me into the book. But what stayed with me after the end was not the foreignness of these people but their familiarity. It seemed at the beginning that no one could be more different from me than Amina and al-Sayid Ahmad. At the end, I felt that I understood them and while their ideas were different from mine, their humanity, their family feelings, their pain, were all very familiar, universal, and understandable. The man whom I detested for his misogyny, his tyranny over his wife and children, his hypocrisy and his unfaithfulness to his wife, was devastated by the death of his son. Fahmy was the hero of the story, the boy whose love of his family, his people, and his country were pure and exemplary, the boy whose ideas were directly opposed to those of his father even as he continued to venerate the man, was, in spite of all appearances, as deeply beloved of his father as any son could be and his loss was a tragedy for the family and the reader as well as himself. It was a very moving story.
| Author | Dawkins, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Free Press, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Biology |
| Keywords | Evolution |
| When Read | July 2010 |
Dawkins, in his acerbic but magnificently clear style, attacks the creationist obscurantists and presents the hard evidence for the theory of evolution. He explains the fossil record, the obvious "mistakes" that show a total lack of intelligent design but are easily explained by evolution, and gives example after example of clear evidence for evolution in the plant and animal kingdoms. He also shows us how to think about evolution from multiple points of view, for example from that of the bee and that of the flower.
Unfortunately, D can't keep himself from sarcasm and worse, I think, cute headings and metaphors. The table of contents is useless for finding anything and, although there is an index, the book is of little value as a reference. After you've read it it is very difficult to find the particular argument or evidence that you'd like to review. Instead it flows as a single argument.
Still, D is always interesting. He is merciless towards the fools and charlatans promoting creationism. His understanding of evolution is deep and multi-layered. This is probably far from the best book on the subject but it is still a rewarding book to read.
I've read a lot of Dawkins' books now and I've learned a lot from each one. He is uncompromising in his insistence on looking squarely at reality and abandoning all considerations about what people wish to be true as opposed to what is true. That makes him a refreshing writer as well as a profoundly interesting one.
D's uncompromising stance must be very difficult for religious believers to take. He has dealt with that problem by writing separate books about religion and evolution. This book on evolution doesn't require a reader to give up religion. The God Delusion does that. However it still uses more condescension than is good in a polemic which aims to win people over.
But then this is D's book, not mine. He has the right to be as acerbic and as condescending as he wants. Perhaps he has a perfect right to tell the truth as he sees it with all of the sugar coating removed.
These are comments that are even more appropriate to The God Delusion. I may make them again there.
| Author | Leckie, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 1957 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Extras | photos, maps |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 2010 |
Leckie enlisted in January, 1942 and was shipped out to land on Guadalcanal. His impressions of the battle were odd, perhaps idiosyncratic. There rarely seemed to be any sense of the larger war, but also not a great deal of sense of the Japanese. The two sides grappled in the smoke and the dark, firing weapons at sounds and flashes and only the next morning seeing the bodies and realizing their victory.
L made many friends in the Corps and each man was known only by his nickname: Hoosier, Chuckler, Runner, Eloquent, the Scholar, and so on. They were young. They were jokers. But they were fighters too who endured bombing, shelling, and night time Banzai attacks, standing their ground and shooting back.
They landed on other islands. L fought again. Eventually he was caught in an artillery barrage and got the wound that ended his war.
Besides the combat and the camaraderie there were interesting stories of officers stealing from enlisted men by arrogantly pulling rank, and men stealing back by stealth, cunning and sometimes sheer brass.
This is not great literature but it is the real thing.
Thinking back on this book from over a year later there are certain scenes that come to mind. I don't really know if I'm recalling them accurately.
The first scene was the first battle that Leckie and his unit engaged in. The Marines were on one bank of a river. The Japanese attacked at night from the other side. L never saw the enemy and, as I recall it, neither did any of his mates. What they saw and heard were flashes, gunshots, and explosions. They fired their weapons across the river, not knowing whether they were hitting anyone or not. When the morning came they were surprised to see many bodies of enemy soldiers. Before then they hadn't known whether they had won the battle or lost it, whether the enemy attack was serious or insignificant. Afterward they believed that they had in fact fought a significant battle and they won it. Their confidence soared. This was what fighting was. They decided that they must have known what to do and done it.
The next night they saw lights in the river. They almost blasted them but decided to hold off. When morning came they found that the "lights" were reflections from the eyes of alligators who had come down the river to feed on the bodies of the Japanese. They left the alligators alone, figuring that any Japs that attempted to swim across the river at night would be attacked by them.
The scene I referred to above about officers stealing from enlisted men had to do with Japanese materials captured by enlisted men and taken by them to their tents. Some officers imperiously commandeered the stuff, not to turn in but to keep as their own personal trophies. You've got a samurai sword? Maybe you fought the samurai to get it? Screw you, hand it over private, it's mine now. Food, liquor, enemy goods, whatever, some of the officers simply ordered the men to hand it over for the officer's use. No payment was offered. It was pretty disgusting and one felt encouraged by the enlisted men's revenge when they found opportunities to take it.
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio, 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 268 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 2010 |
Costa Zannis is a high police official in Salonika in 1940 assigned to handle sensitive cases involving foreign diplomats, important political figures, etc. He is conscientious, patriotic and anti-Nazi.
While working on his assigned cases he takes up a side line helping Jews who are escaping from Germany to make their way through Greece to Turkey. It is difficult but he saves a half dozen or more sent by a Jewish German woman married to a powerful German army officer.
When Italy invades Greece, Zannis is called up but then sent back, partly to work with a Yugoslavian counterpart in resistance planning. He is also manipulated by British intelligence into rescuing a British scientist in occupied France. Finally, he acquires a new lover and, when Germany invades Greece, escapes with her to Turkey, sending his mother and brother on to Alexandria.
The story is not unlike all of Furst's others. It takes place early in the war, before Nazism is checked. Its hero is East European. He is a complex person with a fundamental decency. His personal life is complicated and, in important ways, unsatisfactory. He is middle aged, past the enthusiasm of youth but still doggedly striving for a better world. His eyes are wide open. he sees the near futility of his effort but makes the effort anyway.
I won't say that Furst's repetitive writing of such novels is exciting or entertaining. Let's just say that they have an inner force. Perhaps the same force compels me to read and Furst to write them.
| Author | Schroeder, Karl |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tor Books, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 471 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 2010 |
Meadow Rue Rosebud Cassells escapes from the vicious brutality of her brother on a space station and heads for a colony circling a brown dwarf. On the way, her ship passes what appears to be an asteroid and she claims ownership of it. Later it transpires that it was an apparently uninhabited alien spaceship. Rue goes from penniless refugee to rich resource owner, to penniless refugee again, and then to starship captain. It's a stretch, maybe a muddle. There are a professor and his religious assistant from the Permanence cult, an evil general representing the "Rights Economy" which has outlawed public property and turned everything into a way for wealthy property owners to suck value out of virtually everything.
The story is odd and unconvincing on a number of levels, but in spite of that S is man of ideas. The surface story is adolescent but the science and the conception of alien life from the autotrophs to the creators of the space ship are original and imaginative.
Jim Herndon loaned me this book because he thought I'd be interested in its anti-capitalist politics. It's not a book I would have chosen on my own, but it wasn't a bad read.
| Author | Hesse, Hermann |
|---|---|
| Publication | Old Saybrook, CT: Tandor, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 1922 |
| Number of Pages | 160 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | India; Mysticism |
| When Read | July 2010 |
Siddhartha, son of a Brahmin, intelligent, thoughtful, disciplined, charismatic, tells his father that he must go into the forest and become a "samana", an ascetic religious man, to seek true wisdom. His father is dismayed but cannot stand against S's steadfast desire. S goes and learns to think, to wait, and to fast. It is a great deal, but like the learning in his father's books, it is not enough. He leaves the forest with his childhood friend Govinda and follows the Buddha. Much impressed by Gotama, he nevertheless must find his own path.
After further wandering, S encounters Kamala, the beautiful courtesan. He seduces her with his grace, self-confidence and superior personality and has her introduce him into a life of sensual pleasure. He becomes a wealthy businessman. He drinks, eats, gambles and has sex. Over the years he becomes a dissolute man. But then he rejects that and wanders again. Coming to a river, he joins a simple and humane boatman and begins a simple life, ferrying people across the river and listening to the sound of the river.
His last trial occurs when he encounters his own son, a spoiled child of the dying Kamala. He treats the boy with infinite love and patience but the boy rejects him and runs away, much as S did from his own father, although for different reasons and in a different spirit. S is left by the river, alone but content.
I don't know what to think of this book. The spiritual journey it explores is not one that appeals to me, but I recognize the sincerity of its author. I don't know what its philosophy can offer me although I can see that there is much insight in it.
The philosophy of Siddhartha seems to me to be the antithesis of materialism. Although it is not, on its surface, hostile to science, it seems uninterested in science, not seeing anything of great value in the study of the material world. Its goal of oneness with the universe is to be achieved not by understanding the, to me, fascinating laws of the interactions of electrons and protons, atoms and molecules, but rather by the submergence of consciousness into a mystical emptiness, or maybe it's a mystical fullness. Whatever it is, it isn't an understanding of electrons and protons.
Thousands of years from now our descendants will probably have a pretty complete picture of life and the universe. I expect that they will have expanded beyond our Earth, have attained control over their own construction and perhaps indefinitely postponed their own deaths. Perhaps they will be made more from silicon than from organic molecules, but they will be the true human beings. Homo Sapiens will look to them as the earlier hominids do to us (thus spake Alan.)
If such an advance comes about, will these superior descendants find the ideas of Siddhartha appealing? Will it turn out that the end of scientific advance leaves no more for the mind except to turn to mysticism? I don't think it will but I must confess that I don't understand either mysticism or science well enough to completely rule this out.
Siddhartha is an appealing book, even for a man like me who is neither intellectually nor psychologically inclined towards mysticism. It is appealing for its honesty, its unflinching gaze in the mirror. It is appealing for its modesty. It is appealing for its appreciation and reverence for all humanity and for the universe itself.
It is possible that on the day that I die I will feel comforted by some sense of oneness with life and the universe. Whether that sense will come from Hermann Hesse, or from Richard Dawkins, or from some other source, I cannot say. But if it doesn't come from Hesse, and it probably won't, he and Siddhartha might still recognize what I feel at that time as something akin to their own experience.
| Author | Lynch, John |
|---|---|
| Author | Barrett, Louise |
| Publication | BBC. DK Publishing, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 223 |
| Extras | index, illustrations |
| Extras | forward by Nigel Marvin |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Anthropology |
| Keywords | Evolution |
| When Read | August 2010 |
Produced as a companion book to a BBC TV series that included Walking With Dinosaurs and others, this is a popular, profusely illustrated book about human evolution. It begins 3.5 million years ago and ends with the emergence of Homo Sapiens.
The book is anything but authoritative. The illustrations are mostly photos of Homo Sapiens dressed in elaborate costume to look like earlier hominids. As a result, the photos are both more and less realistic than the more accurate artist conceptions favored in other books. Presumably these photos are from the TV production.
The text is similar. More engaging than more academic books, it offers simplified, controversial, and provocative claims, presented as if they were fact.
Given that, how can it be called a good book? It can't. But it is a wonderful stimulus to the imagination. It gives us useful time lines for major stages in human evolution - though I take them with many grains of salt, and it provides imaginative speculations on what life may have been like for our ancestors.
The history of the emergence of consciousness and intelligence has to be one of the most fascinating topics of speculation and research. As I understand it, there is hardly any useful research available. Nobody would know where to begin, what to observe, and how to go about any of it. So we get books like this one that give us "photos" of early hominids engaging in reconstructions of imagined life.
I guess a serious academic would disdain a book like this as pure speculation and not very sophisticated speculation at that. But I don't know how he could keep himself from at least looking at the pictures. Who wouldn't be entranced to see a troop of Homo Erectus walking back from a hunt with meat draped over their shoulders, or an earlier Hominid peering at us from a dark and hairy face?
| Author | Wilcockson, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Beverly Hills, CA: Phoenix Audio, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Extras | Photos in the print edition |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Sports; Cycling |
| When Read | August 2010 |
W. is a journalist covering cycling and is a long standing acquaintance of Lance Armstrong. In this book he covers Lance's cycling career from his first teenage experiences as a rider and triathlete through his seventh victory in the Tour de France.
Unlike the other books I've read, this is very much a book about cycling. Lance explains his premature breakaway in a race, telling his team director "I felt good." To which the director says "Everybody felt good at that stage." Lance learns that a rider gets two shots, two chances to go all out. After that there's no more in him. He has to learn the absolute best two times to try them. He learns, more than anyone else, to prepare, to study and ride the course, to plan his pace and cadence for every part of the race. He also learns how to ride. His climbing isn't the best so he practices and makes it the best. Same for downhill and for curves. He learns that he gets a bit more power if his feet are closer together so he trains for weeks until the new position and motions are natural. He is a superb athlete, superbly trained and prepared. He becomes the respected leader of his team. Drugs, in spite of continuous accusations and yellow journalism, do not appear to be involved.
The story of his cancer, his marriage, his relationship with Cheryl Crowe, are not fully fleshed out. But his personality as a man and an athlete are made very clear.
There's a lot of fascinating stuff about cycling in this book. I remember his first Tour where he pushes himself beyond his ability and gives out, but refuses to surrender to his weakness. The team doctor visits him in his hotel room after a race and finds him in bed, covered in blankets and clothing, shivering in a hot room, showing classic signs of dehydration. The doctor asks, are you okay Lance? And Lance answers, I'm good! I'll be ready to ride again tomorrow. Of course he wasn't ready and was withdrawn from the race, but not because he gave up.
There's a lot about doping in the book. W. seems to believe that Lance's great record was achieved without drugs - in spite of everyone being determined to pin the charge on him and dig up any evidence of any kind at all. I can't judge as to whether W's case was strong or not. I don't know enough. But it was not unconvincing.
I've never read sports books before but my own trivial experiences with cycling were enough to give me an interest in this sport. I have some sense of what it's like to push yourself, even though I never pushed myself anywhere near the point where the professionals do. I have some sense of the struggles on the hills, the dangers of the downhills, the trickiness of the curves and the management of other riders. It gives me some appreciation of what I'm watching on TV or reading in books like this one.
See Comeback 2.0 (2010-04.04) for my notes on doping written after I learned of Lance's transgression.
| Author | Wang Gang |
|---|---|
| Translators | Merz, Martin; Weizhen Pan, Jane |
| Publication | Penguin Audiobooks, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | China; Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution |
| When Read | August 2010 |
Love Liu, 12 years old at the beginning of the novel and living with his architect parents in Urumqi in Xinjiang Province in the far west of China, writes of his life, his schooling, his friends, and his teachers during the time of the Cultural Revolution.
LL and all of his classmates are in love with their beautiful teacher Ahjitai who teaches them the Uighur language. But she is replaced by the odd, rather elegant, Second Prize Wang, come to teach them English. Sunrise Huang, LL's smart and pretty classmate, begins to master English while Garbage Li, the proletarian son of a garbage man, derides it - though he loves Sunrise Huang.
The story involves all of the elements of adolescence: love, competition, school, battles with parents, seeing the weaknesses of parents for the first time, adoration of teachers - all mixed in with the terrible stresses of a very poor society, strapped by the conflicts, the petty politics and careerism, and the frightening oppressions of the Cultural Revolution.
Trhough it all, the people around LL - Second Prize Wang, Ahjitai, Sunrise Huang, and Garbage Li, show a perseverance, a nobility, and a humanity that teach much to Love Liu.
The book was often depressing. The fine characters had no way to avoid their dooms. But it was ultimately a book of some hope. I liked it.
As I transcribe this from my 3x5 book card, I'm in the midst of a very different novel of the China just after this period, Brothers, by Da Chen. It would be hard to find two more different views of China. Da Chen writes a very interesting story but with thin characters and a cartoonish view of China - portrayed as a power mad society in which any crime is permissible to those with wealth and power.
Wang's novel is more subtle than that. There is much here about the abuse of power but it is more realistic than Da's portrayal. Where Da Chen gives us supermen and women, Wang Gang gives us people with unusual and interesting sensibilities, but no superior gifts or powers with which to develop and project them.
My views of China have evolved a great deal since the days of my own youthful Maoism. It is not just that China is drastically changed. I have changed too. I no longer see the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as the shining path forward to socialism. I no longer see socialism as the solution to capitalism's ills. It's not that I have embraced capitalism. I haven't. It's that I have what I hope is a more complex and realistic view of the problems of society. It's not a view that lends itself to straightforward solutions.
I'll probably have more to say about this when I have finished Da Chen's novel.
I'm just now finishing up The Cowshed by Ji Xianlin. It is another look at the Cultural Revolution, this one by one of the most highly educated, and heavily persecuted, of its victims. It has made me even more opposed to this movement that I fell for in the late 1960's.
| Author | Galloway, Steven |
|---|---|
| Publication | Naxos Audiobooks, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 235 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Bosnian War |
| When Read | August 2010 |
Four people in the city under siege each cope in his or her own way. The symphony's principal cellist goes to the courtyard in front of his apartment and plays a somber piece each day for 22 days, honoring the 22 people killed there in a mortar attack. This part of the story is actually true. The cellist's name is Smailovic.
Three other characters make the rest of the story. Kenan is a well mannered family man who leaves his apartment every few days to fetch water for his family and a cranky old lady who accepts his help, offering no thanks in return. Dragnan is a baker in his 60's (I think) who leaves for work each day to work and bring back bread for the in-laws he is now living with since his own apartment became untenable and his wife and son escaped to Italy. "Arrow" is a young woman sniper who kills enemy snipers who shoot at civilians. She is engaged to defend the cellist from a killer sent by the other side.
The story seems surreal. Ordinary civilians living at home in an ordinary city must risk their lives to cross a street or a bridge, hoping not to be shot. They deal with the terror each day, never coming to terms with it, living in new terror each new day.
Eventually Arrow kills the killer but is then ordered to shoot a harmless old civilian on the other side. She refuses and is hunted down herself. Her own side also harbors bigoted killers.
"Serbian" and "Bosnian" are never mentioned in this book. It aims at a more universal view and reaches it.
I believe that the author of this novel had a number of aims. He especially aimed at finding humanity in the midst of bigotry, brutality, selfishness, and barbarity. The cellist has this humanity all along. He is a man of culture, an intellectual, a person who rejects the insanity around him.
Kenan and Dragnan are more ordinary men. They aren't intellectuals or highly cultured people, but they are decent people. Each risks his life for others as well as himself. Each makes an effort to maintain an ordinary, civilized life. Each tries not to allow himself to be broken by the strain.
Arrow is different. She has responded to the evil by becoming an avenger. But in the end she cannot stand it. She comes to see herself as part of the problem, not the solution. When the criminal Bosnian commander sends his thugs to kill her, she could turn the tables on them and wipe them out. She is much more capable than they are. But, as an act of self-assertion, she decides not to do it. She waits calmly in her apartment as they come up the stairs, burst in, and shoot her.
This final act of self-sacrifice in the name of penance and humanity is totally unconvincing to me. Arrow should have either killed the men and then hunted down their boss, or at the very least, protected herself and escaped. Allowing evil men to kill you does not seem to me to be any kind of moral victory over them. It seems to me to be just throwing away a good life and enabling evil to conquer. No good comes of it. No point is made, either in society or in some abstract spiritual cosmos. It just seems to me to be another senseless death.
I consider it possible that people like Arrow exist - though not for long in situations like the Bosnian War. I grant that violent resistance to evil occasions much evil on the side of the resister. It's hard, for example, not to feel that the mass killing of German and Japanese civilians from the air in World War II was an evil. But it may have been a necessary evil. Just as chemotherapy kills healthy cells along with cancerous ones, the war against fascism killed many innocent people. But as with chemotherapy, it was the only tool available, or at least the only tool that the Allies felt was practical, that could save the patient.
Had Galloway caused Arrow to be killed in an ambush, that would have been tragic and disturbing, but it could be accounted to be realistic. But to kill her as he did seems wrong. For me at least, it did not establish the point I think he wanted to make.
| Author | Zimmerman, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Soho Press, 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Gulf Wars |
| When Read | August 2010 |
Private Toby Durant is stuck in a crumbling outpost in the Iraqi desert manned by only 45 soldiers under the direction of one Lt. Blankenship, who may have some private agenda and whose confidence in D is limited at best.
D just wants to get along, to help his roommate/tentmate and other friends, and to get home to his pregnant girlfriend and marry her. But everything is going wrong. Several men were killed in an ambush. Two prisoners were taken and Toby, who learned a bit of Arabic, is ordered to interview them along with an Iraqi local mechanic and translator who attacks the two as trash belonging to another tribe.
D soon finds himself in trouble. He believes the translator is a spy for people who are going to attack the base, but can't prove it. He assists a child in an abandoned factory but can't convince anyone she's real. He is suspected of being a spy himself because of his trips there. He is manipulated by a Captain of Intelligence into stealing a box from Lt. B., then has it stolen from him.
The story gets weirder and D's position gets worse and worse. His girlfriend has an abortion and leaves him. He can't get her to talk to him on the phone. His friends try to help him and get destroyed in the process. Finally we learn that there is a hidden cache of stolen money behind it all, but D is doomed.
This is the author's first novel. He is a young English professor, not an ex-soldier, who interviewed many soldiers. It is a wonderfully intelligent novel with very sophisticated characters and deep research, but the plot is strained and over done. Still, a fine first novel.
| Author | Marton, Kati |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Hungary; Jews |
| When Read | August 2010 |
The nine Hungarian Jews were Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner (physicists), John von Neumann (mathematics), Robert Capa, Andre Kertez (photojournalists), Alexander Korda and Michael Curtiz (film directors), and Arthur Koestler (writer). All left Hungary in the 1920's or 30's for Germany, France, England or the U.S.
The scientists were at the very top of physics and math and were key figures in the development of nuclear bombs, though they split immediately after the war on whether to continue the research. Von Neumann was a genius by any definition with tremendous knowledge of languages, history, literature and science along with his incomparable mathematical ability. The others were no slouches either.
Among the non-scientists I was particularly interested in Koestler, a former communist and author of Darkness at Noon. Curtiz was a big Hollywood director, famous for Casablanca and all of the Errol Flynn swashbucklers (he called Flynn an anti-actor and a pansy, perhaps to rile him up and make him act.)
Marton left Hungary in 1956 as a child. She married Peter Jennings, the TV news anchor. She's a very good writer with a deep sympathy for these very different men and she has an appreciation of the short lived society in Budapest in which a big crop of Jewish intellectuals grew up, only to have their world destroyed.
Throughout history there have been swirls of culture located first at one time and place and then at another. They arise and they decline or are destroyed. Nostalgic glances are directed backward at them but they cannot be recovered. They were particular to a time and place.
I had not been aware that Budapest, in the pre- and post-World War I period was such a place, but apparently it was. An intellectual culture, and perhaps especially a Jewish intellectual culture, flourished there, only to be cut off and destroyed first by Hungarian and then by German anti-semitism. Hungary may rise again. It may again have a flourishing intellectual culture, but it will not be Jewish again and it will be different in character - perhaps better, perhaps worse.
I am very pleased that people like Marton have done something to preserve our knowledge of this time and place and these people. We cannot reconstitute the past but maybe we can retain our appreciation of it.
| Author | Grey, Zane |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg, 1924 |
| Number of Pages | 136 |
| Genres | Fiction; Western |
| When Read | September 2010 |
The story is about Carly Burch, a wealthy young New York socialite, conveniently orphaned and living with her wise aunt. Carly loved Glenn Kilbourne, a New York man who went off to France in 1918. Grievously wounded, he returns to the U.S. and heads west in hopes that fresh air and hard work will kill or cure him.
It cures him (he gains 70 pounds!) Carly goes west to visit him in hopes of bringing him back to New York. There she meets his hardy friends and passes one test after another of physical and emotional fortitude in hopes of winning him back. But he won't come. She returns to New York without him.
After many months of living what G. regards as the shallow, useless life of a society woman, Carly returns west. She buys a ranch and builds a house. There is a plot twist and misdirection but, in the end, she and Glenn come together.
Grey turns out to be a pretty good writer and a pretty bad thinker. He is in love with the beauty and majesty of the American West but can think of no better future for it than the raising of sheep and hogs and nice crops of American children who will preserve the race from the influx of foreign hordes.
The story is male and national chauvinist. The treatment of the war is downright silly ("We were not going to let the Huns treat you as they treated the French and Belgian girls.") The characters were thin and pompous. It was an ugly book masquerading as a beautiful one.
See my review on Amazon.com, where most readers treated it as a romantic love story.
Finding my review on Amazon will be an exercise in futility. Between the "Verified purchase" program, the large number of editions, many of which have separate sets of reviews, and the fact that I attached my review to an edition that is no longer available on Amazon, I don't think there's any way to find it. I can still see it by looking at the page of reviews written by me, but there is no link to the book from that copy of the review.
For whatever it's worth, I titled my review "Primitive mentality masquerading as love" and gave it two stars "for its beautiful depiction of the west and for it's competent writing. But I think that even that may be generous." The reader's reactions to my review have disappeared but I seem to recall that two out of four or five people who read it thought it was useful.
| Author | Harris, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | William Morrow and Co., 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 283 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | September 2010 |
In the bleak days just before the start of World War II, middle aged civilian Willie Potter publishes a letter criticizing Lt. General Sir Henry Prideaux, DSO, who made his reputation conducting a cavalry charge against the Red Army in 1919. Wounded in the charge, Prideaux had come home after to find himself a hero. He climbed quickly through the ranks and was now in consideration to command a British expeditionary force in the coming war.
Prideaux sues Potter for libel, hires a top lawyer, and has every expectation of clearing his name from Potter's scurrilous charges. The novel is about the trial, going back and forth, sometimes in the courtroom but mostly in the field in Russia in 1919.
Each episode begins with third person witness testimony but soon morphs into straight narration of the events, more flowing and descriptive than testimony could be. We learn that Prideaux was an arrogant fool. More than brave enough, he was nevertheless stupid and hell bent on winning a name for himself as a cavalry commander. Refusing to face any of the facts, he repudiates his effective armored cars. He treats his White Russian allies foolishly. He ignores orders. He throws away the lives of his men. Then he escapes with a cowardly adjutant and an unscrupulous war correspondent who makes him famous and leaves Potter and the remains of his men to make their way out or die - not much caring which.
This is a very good, very serious, very convincing novel in the spirit of C.S. Forester's The General. I liked it very much.
I still recall the atmosphere that Harris created. Cold, clear, Russian nights. White soldiers who are more and more restless, some attracted to the Bolsheviks, some determined not to die, most surly, insubordinate, afraid, looking for chances to escape. White officers, some of them dedicated and capable, more capable than Prideaux but treated by him as incompetents. Potter, intelligent, understanding the real situation, bringing together the cars as the only means of scouting the Reds and of holding them off - but battered by Prideaux, who wants to win with cavalry, not with motors.
I am now reading Basil Liddell Hart's history of the First World War. His judgment of most of the commanders, of all countries, is very harsh. I fear that this book, Forester's, and Hart's are all accurate. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, died because of the stupidity and/or ambition of their commanders. Histories like Hart's tell us the facts about this. Harris' fiction gives us the feeling of what it was all about.
Of the six books I have read by Harris so far, this is much the best. It is very good indeed, especially from a writer from whom I never expected this much.
| Author | Deaver, Jeffrey |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2010 |
Deputy Brynn McKenzie arrives at a house in the woods by a Wisconsin state park where she stumbles upon a murder scene. There are two dead people in the house, a lawyer and her social worker husband, there is a friend of the couple hiding in the woods, and two killers, Hart and Comp, hunting the woman and, soon, the deputy.
One terrible scene follows another. Hart gets the deputy's cell phone and calls her husband to say that everything is okay. Brynn finds Michelle, an apparently spoiled rich girl, and the two run from the killers. But time after time something happens to frustrate their plans and put the killers back on their trail. The chase through the forest drags on endlessly until Brynn's husband comes out, finds her, and turns the tables on the killers. But one has killed the other killer and escaped. The story continues on until he is finally tracked down and killed by his own employers and Michelle is revealed as the real mastermind behind the murders. She too is caught by the police.
Deaver created interesting characters but the story is one manipulation of the reader after another. Nothing is the way it appears. That can work if it's done well, but it's badly over done in this story. We get the feeling, not that the author is revealing underlying truths, but that he's simply lying about the truth in order to surprise us later. The lies don't add up and truth comes too late.
It seems that most of the Amazon reviewers also felt betrayed.
I have mixed feelings about Deaver. I like his sense of character. I like his politics. I like his concern for his people. But he forces his stories to progress the way he wants them to and come out the way he wants them to, rather than following the inner logic of the story itself.
| Author | Harris, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Politics |
| When Read | October 2010 |
An unnamed ghost writer is hired to finish the memoirs of former UK Prime Minister Adam Lang, a stand-in for Tony Blair. He must pick up the work of a previous writer, Mike McAra, who died in a mysterious accident. Writing in first person, the ghost tells of his trip to Martha's Vinyard where Lang is staying and where he has one month, later reduced to two weeks, to complete the memoir. Lang has been charged at the Hague with war crimes in connection with the war on terror and is now in deep trouble. The publisher wants the book immediately, while the story is hot.
As things develop it becomes more and more clear that powerful forces, presumably the CIA, are involved with the project, shadowing the ghost, beating him up once, stealing his email, and probably murdering his predecessor. The ghost eventually comes to the conclusion that the impenetrable Lang is actually a CIA agent - though at the final end (stop reading here if you plan to read the book) it turns out that his wife Ruth is the real agent.
One Amazon reviewer regarded this as a ridiculous and totally unjustified attack on Tony Blair. He's probably right. The story is very implausible, but written so well that we treat it seriously and suspend disbelief.
It's hard to find a sympathetic character in this novel. The ghost/narrator is rather unscrupulous. The Langs are inscrutable. But the writing and ideas are really quite good.
Harris is always an interesting writer. His books about Cicero are very compelling and this book has a lot of the same quality. We are given a larger than life figure who, in the final analysis, is a human being with all of the weaknesses that all of us have.
Marcia also liked this book very much.
| Author | Rabb, Jonathan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Germany |
| When Read | October 2010 |
Detective Nikolai Hoffner, kriminal Kommisar of the Kriminal Polizei (Kripo) in 1919 Berlin, investigates the deaths of a series of women, all found in subway stations that are under construction and all disfigured with intricate carvings on their backs. One of the women is the communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.
Hoffner and his assistant Hans Fichte investigate the crimes, tracking down the killer as a Belgian lunatic. But there is a much deeper mystery concerning how the lunatic got to Berlin, how Rosa was killed, why she is made to look like a victim of the lunatic, why the political police (Polpo) are involved and are trying to sabotage the investigation, and who is behind them.
Hoffner slowly unravels it all. He is helped by a former lover of Rosa, Leo Jogische, and the Jewish gangster, Pim.
H's personal failings, his love affairs, his poor relationship with his wife and fifteen year old son (who is heading into the arms of the fascists), and a number of misjudgments he has made, make his peronal life pretty terrible. And then, because he gets too close to the truth, his long suffering and decent wife is murdered, as is Hans Fichte. But in the end he figures it out. He personally kills the mad Nazi doctor who has organized the crimes and exposes the fascists in the Polpo, allowing the saner Polpo director to defeat them and purge or neutralize them.
The story is quite well done. It is very dark and difficult but worth reading.
I am attracted to books about anti-Nazi activities, but casting such a story in Germany itself is as psychologically stressful as it is satisfying. In this story the honest cop defeats the racist pigs, but we know that just 14 years later, the racist pigs will come to power and sweep away all honest cops.
I wrote that this was a dark and difficult book. The sense of darkness and difficulty easily comes back to mind as I write this nine months later.
| Author | Reeman, Douglas |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Hutchinson, 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 303 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Submarines |
| When Read | October 2010 |
Commander David Jermain, captain of the modern British nuclear attack submarine Temeraire, is ordered to break off his new boat shakedown/break-in/crew training efforts and proceed to Singapore for an urgent, secret mission. His crew includes an ex-brother-in-law, Ian Wolfe, the son of an admiral, Colquhoun, and a crew of seamen, some of whom have agendas of their own.
They arrive in Singapore. Admiral Colquhoun interferes with everything and sees Temeraire as the ticket to keeping a sizable command. But there is trouble. In an exercise with the Americans a Chinese sub appears - though Colquhoun refuses to believe it is there and berates Jermain for failing his mission. Then Temeraire is sent to rescue an American sub that disappeared. There is action, intrigue among the crew, mental illness in Wolfe, interference by the admiral, fights with the Chinese, a love story, and more.
Reeman was good at this sort of thing. He knew submarines and navies reasonably well and concocted an unlikely but not entirely unbelievable story.
I wonder whether the sort of clandestine, undeclared, low level warfare that R. describes actually occurred. I wouldn't be surprised if it did. It was certainly happening in Laos, Cambodia, and elsewhere in Asia in 1967.
| Author | McBain, Ed |
|---|---|
| Author | Hunter, Evan (writing as Ed McBain) |
| Publication | Mass Market Paperbacks, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 217 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2010 |
Just before his death McBain (Evan Hunter) revised this 1958 title in light of his far more developed and experienced writing ability. However it still has the character as well as the plot of a 1950's noir private eye novel.
Matt Cordell, former proprietor of a private detective agency, former New York City homicide detective, is now living on handouts as an alcoholic bowery bum. He had caught his wife in flagrante with another man, beaten the man half to death, had his license taken away, and now wants only to forget his life and his wife. Then he is approached on the street by an old childhood acquaintance, Johnny Bridges, who wants Cordell to find out if Bridges tailoring business partner, Dom Archese, is stealing from the company. C. reluctantly agrees to help a little but winds up in the middle of a murder. Archese is dead. Bridge's initials are writen in blood beside the body. Bridges, then Cordell, are both investigated by the police and C tries to find the real killer. There are two beautiful young women involved, another P.I. who hates C and has him beaten up, and various twists and turns.
Nothing about the story has any real credibility. Cordell is a cardboard detective interacting with one-dimensional cops, women, thugs, etc. Jazz musicians are featured characters, perhaps intended to lend some cool to the main character and the story - or maybe to spice up the sound if this were to be put on TV or the movies. None of it really works. But it has McBain's style. It's overdone and something of a caricature of itself, but it's readable and has the draw that detective stories have.
In the end, after C solves the crime, he goes back to being a bum. McBain may have been a hack, but not a sappy one.
| Author | Coates, Ta-Nehesi Coates |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | October 2010 |
Writing from the perspective of his early 30's, Coates relates the story of his childhood and young adulthood growing up in a neighborhood near Mondawmin in Baltimore and later in the Woodlawn area.
Coates was the only boy he knew with a father in the home. Paul Coates fathered seven children by four women, ran with the Black Panthers, and fought in Vietnam. He was an intellectual, seriously committed both to his children and to his people. He tried hard to bring up his children with discipline and "consciousness". But in spite of his efforts the boys experienced the culture of the streets. Ta-Nehesi was frightened by the macho culture with its ever present threat and violence. Fearing the frequent fights, beatings and humiliations, he nevertheless internalized this culture and did a poor job in school, only awakening when he had the good fortune to be accepted to Howard University in spite of his failures.
The book feels very truthful to me. Coates clearly loves and respects his father and his family. He has a great deal of self-understanding. He appears to have no qualms about self-criticism. His understanding of the inner city culture offers us a view from inside with rare objectivity and insight.
I couldn't understand everything in the book. The language was sometimes completely alien to me. The context, in spite of my Baltimore background, was foreign. But I still appreciated and learned from this book.
Where Mosley's Fortunate Son (read just after this book) uses allegory to bring out the reality of black society in the US, Coates digs into the day to day experience and captures it for us. He opens the book with an event he experienced as a child near downtown Baltimore when a gang of 50 or more young kids swept the streets one day, beating up other kids their age for no other reason than to assert themselves. Coates and his brother ran and were separated. He found a phone and called his father who told him to find an adult and stand next to him while he, Paul, got in the car to pick him up.
I was about to write that this was not the kind of thing that ever happened to me in Baltimore but, thinking back on it, I believe it did. One day in seventh grade in the majority black Garrison Junior High School I was out on the rectangular black top playground surrounded on three sides by a tall chain link fence with the school building on the fourth side. I heard a commotion and looked down the end of the playground to see a line of black kids with arms linked, stretching from one side to the other of the rectangle. They started to run towards the school, sending everyone before them, black and white, in a panic run to get into the school. I ran too and made it. I don't know what happened to anyone who didn't. I don't recall having heard anything about it later on the school public address system or from the teachers. Although it never happened again to my knowledge, it set a tone that did not disappear.
It was a tough school. The black kids were tough. The white kids were tough. The intellectuals were out of place and knew it. I'm glad my family moved to the county the next year.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 313 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 2010 |
Unwed mother Branwyn Beerman gives birth to her poor little black baby with a heart condition. She visits him every day in his hospital isolation tent where she attracts the attention of Dr. Minas Nolan, a well-to-do heart surgeon who lost his wife in childbirth at about the same time that Beerman's baby was born. The two single parents grow together and Branwyn moves in with Minas to become the mother for her sickly Tommy and for the handsome, well favored white child Eric Nolan.
The two boys grow up as brothers, inseparable and devoted to each other. But when they are six Branwyn dies and Tommy's natural father takes Tommy away. He means well, sort of, but cannot really care for the boy. Small and weak, living in a ghetto, Tommy becomes the target of all of the bullies in the neighborhood. He begins to cut school and hang out in his "alley valley" where he grows up alone. But that doesn't last. He becomes a drug delivery boy to survive, barely. He is assaulted, hit in a shoot out with police, sent to reform school where he is raped and bullied, escapes, and lives on the street. Meanwhile Eric becomes a tennis player, gets all the girls, is admired by all, but feels his life to be empty without Tommy.
It is a powerful story of black and white, rich and poor, fortunate and unfortunate. The boys are finally re-united when Eric has already married and had a baby. When a jealous rival kills Eric's wife and attempts to kill the baby Tommy arrives and throws himself on the child, taking the bullets. They then face the world and its problems and monsters together, with Tommy saving Eric yet again in one more desperate act.
The story is schmaltzy, sometimes surreal, sometimes laid on very, very thick. But it worked for me. There was a core of honesty and truth in spite of the hyperbole. I liked it a lot.
This is one of those great many books that are not adequately described or commented upon on the front and back of a three by five index card. I'll add to my short comment above that, thinking back on this book, I still like it a lot. It's a sort of allegory with much about it that is fantastic in the original sense of unbelievable, but there is also a tremendous amount of reality here that, paradoxically perhaps, could not be fully captured in a more realistic tale.
By stretching the story beyond realistic limits Mosley brought together many elements of the black experience that are not found together in any real person's life but nevertheless are all real in our society. As in his other books, he continues to do this in an impressively sympathetic and yet still objective way. He is not anti-white and is not any kind of apologist for the ills of black society. He is an incisive observer but one in whom humanity shines through.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audio Partners, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1954 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2010 |
Nero Wolfe's restaurateur friend Marko has been murdered and his putative daughter has disappeared into an anti-communist resistance movement in Yugoslavia. This rouses Wolfe as never before. Posing as a Wealthy Montenegrin expatriate from the US with his son (Archie Goodwin), W. breaks his rule about not leaving the house and goes to Yugoslavia. He and Archie eventually discover the killer, a police agent, and lure him back to New York to be arrested.
The story is a long stretch in every way and very, very atypical for Stout and Wolfe. Furthermore, almost all of the action is in Italian or Serbo-Croation with the dialog rendered after the fact by Wolfe into English for Archie. Stout actually pulls this off with less awkwardness than one would expect.
This is either the worst of the series or a rather good one that expands the character of Wolfe and his relationship with Archie. I guess it's all in how you look at it. Certainly Stout took risks with this one, thwarting his fans' expectations.
Good for him, I think.
| Author | Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 1969- |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster Audio, 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Islam; Somalia; Holland; Women |
| When Read | November 2010 |
Hirsi Ali is the daughter of a prominent Somali family who grew up mainly in exile in Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya after her father and much of his family and clan fled the country after leading a failed revolt against Mohammed Siad Barre.
She was married off to a Canadian man but she got off the plane in Europe and made her way to Holland where she lied to apply for oppressed refugee status. There in Holland she began her real education, learning about money, love, politics, religion, and the backwardness of the life of the Somali clans - full of violence against women and other clans, mutilation and oppression of women, self defeating clan loyalties, ready lies to the westerners, inability to break free of a stifling religion. She became an atheist, a social work translator, and even a member of parliament. Later, under fire for admitting that she lied to gain refugee status and get government handouts, as all the "refugees" did, she came to the US where she became an author, speaker and thinker for the American Enterprise Institute. More liberal organizations had rejected her applications for employment because of her politically incorrect anti-Islam stance.
Now she lives and works under police guard to protect her from Islamic fanatics who have sworn to kill her. Rejected by her family, ordered to return to Islam by her mother, she stands by her liberation.
This is a revealing and important book from inside Somali Islam with much to teach us about a significant part of the world.
This book is a useful antidote to sentimentalism about alternative cultures. As an atheist myself, I consider all religions to be false. Fundamentalist religion, including most or all of Islam and significant parts of Christianity and Judaism, seem to me to be particularly obnoxious and devoted to error. And yet, like those members of the liberal think tanks that rejected Hirsi Ali's job application, I consider that the attacks on Islam by westerners are unfair to the Muslim peoples.
The situation is complicated. A great many of the attacks on Islam are by religious Christians and Jews. The attacks contain a certain amount of bigotry, often a heaping portion. The people that they attack are often very decent people, not less so than the majority of Christians and Jews. Furthermore, there are complex political issues at stake. Western leaders and intellectuals are anxious not to antagonize the Muslim masses. They don't want to drive Muslim people into the arms of the fanatics. They don't want to put supporters of Western values and culture in the Muslim countries on the defensive and allow them to be driven out of political, educational and cultural life by fanatics who associate them with anti-Muslim, anti-God Westerners. So the Western intellectuals and politicians bend over backwards and look the other way when they can.
I understand that policy. It might be the right one. It is certainly motivated by good intentions. But it leads to hiding from the truth. Hirsi Ali insists on exposing that truth. The Muslim world is rife with hypocrisy, mendacity, oppression of women, and violence. Some of that has as much to do with tribal culture as with Islam, but some is directly embedded in Islam.
If and when I am called upon to defend Muslims and their religion I may still do it. There are times when it is necessary and justified. There may be times when it is necessary even when the justification is shaky. But I mustn't lose sight of the truth. Islam, Christianity and Judaism all contain insupportable and immoral ideas, and Islam, at least in its modern incarnations, is probably the worst of the three.
| Author | Higgins, Jack |
|---|---|
| Author | Patterson, Harry |
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 2010 |
This is a complicated story in which Martin Bormann and another man who looks just like him and has been trained and operated on by a plastic surgeon to more closely resemble Bormann go in two directions. The one we follow in the story may or may not be the real one. We never find out.
The plot is a strange muddle. A half dozen important prisoners, including an American general, a French diplomat and former Olympic skier, a French pianist, and a British lord are either to be exchanged to let Bormann get away, or shot. The camp commandant sends an officer to find and surrender to the Americans and a small detachment of American soldiers in an ambulance arrive at the camp to take charge. Bormann, or whoever he is, has other plans. He recruits a German tank commander hero to lead an assault on the prison camp. There are Finnish ski troops from the SS, a Jewish American corporal and clarinetist, ridiculous orders from the American general, and betrayal by a woman prisoner hoping to protect her husband whom she believes to be held by the Nazis. It's all quite silly and absurd.
There is a dearth of good audio books at the local libraries. I have to take what I can get - often having to choose between a good book on a subject of little interest to me and a bad one on a subject of great interest. This was a bad one.
Harry Patterson and Jack Higgins are the same man, and this book can be found in some editions with Patterson listed as author and in others with Higgins.
| Author | Chabon, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 228 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Jewish Khazars |
| When Read | November 2010 |
Two tenth century Jewish soldier/con artists wend their way into the Jewish kingdom of Khazaria. One is Zelikman, a European Jew with training in Medicine. The other is Amram, a black Abyssinian Jew. They live by staging phony bar fights, pretending to be strangers to each other who insult each other and build up to a big fight in which bets are made and the two make off with the money.
They get involved with a seeming young boy who is heir to the throne, but is actually the real heir's sister. There are Muslim soldiers, elephants, tyrants, Vikings, battles, and so on, all staged in a style that doesn't pretend to be serious or realistic.
Like the The Yiddish Policemen's Union, this is a vehicle for Chabon to work out his love of, and skepticism about, the history of the Jewish people. It's not a very good book but it does have some passages of fine and witty writing.
| Author | Murfett, Malcolm |
|---|---|
| Publication | Routledge, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | xviii + 629 |
| Extras | maps, glossary, bibliography, index |
| Genres | History |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | December 2010 |
Murfett starts with the situation of the powers at the end of World War I. The lessons were not clear. Big capital ships had not been as decisive as expected. Submarines had become very important, as had light anti-sub forces and technologies. The future of air power was clearly going to be important but no one yet knew how. Major efforts by the negotiators of the Washington and Locarno treaties foundered on the determination of the fascist powers to circumvent them and go to war.
M's description of the war itself was very different from my previous reading. M did not see the battle of Midway as the end for Japan. Japanese power was still enormous. In the Atlantic too, M regarded Germany as a formidable foe. US and British victories required great skill and courage. It was not all about massive US productivity and oil supplies. They were huge factors but not completely decisive by themselves.
M also covered many aspects of the war in some depth that others ignore - the Med, the Arctic convoys, the fierce German/Russian battles with small ships in the Black and Baltic Seas.
I cannot retain a great deal from books like this. There is much detail and, although I find it all very interesting, it's pretty far from my experience of daily life. But I enjoy reading it and thinking about it as I read.
Read on my Palm. Copied from a book card (I won't bother noting this in future transcripts since all books from this date backward were on cards
Is it possible that Germany and/or Japan could have won the war at sea? I think it could be argued that Midway was not "the end for Japan". In fact, they fought for more than three more years, so Midway was clearly not "the end". However it seems to me that Japanese hopes for negotiations with the U.S. from a position of strength, always dubious at best, were completely hopeless after Midway. It's conceivable that they could have won at Midway, sinking the American carriers and saving their own. That could easily have added a year to the length of the Pacific War, but I don't see how it could have changed the outcome. And as for the Germans, I don't think they ever had any hope of winning the Battle of the Atlantic. They could have done better than they did but I believe the only result of that would have been to stimulate the British and Americans to do even better than they did - with more ships, more planes, and more new technology. Murfett convinced me that it was a hard and bitter war at sea. Our great material advantages didn't eliminate the need for courage and sacrifice. However I think that both the Japanese and the Germans never had a serious chance for naval victory after the U.S. entered the war.
| Author | Clinch, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Prince Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2010 |
Vernon, Audie and Creed Proctor, raised on a dirt poor farm in upstate New York, live in a crumbling house, sleep together in the same bed, hardly ever see anyone else, and spend their time farming. "Eccentric" only begins to describe them.
The boys were raised by a hard as nails father Lester who loves them and keeps the family together but has no education and little contact with the outside world. Their mother Ruth is a more sympathetic person, but after the father is killed in an accident, she eventually dies of cancer, leaving the now grown men on their own. Only the sister Donna escapes the homestead, going to college and becoming a nurse. The boys, illiterate, innocent, unbathed, stay on the farm.
The story winds back and forth in time. Sometimes it is the 1930's. The brothers are still boys. Audie, slightly retarded perhaps and never fully in command of the situation, falls against a hot stove and is badly burned. But his parents never ever see doctors. They treat him as best they can. The older boy, Vernon, falls through the ice while fishing and almost freezes to death. Again, no doctors are involved and his father rescues him and treats him as best he can. Later it is the 40's, 50's, on up through the 1990's - the story's present.
When the story opens, Vernon is found dead in the communal bed. Authorities get involved and the local cop, Del, suspects that Creed may have murdered Vernon. His interrogations of Creed and Audie produce confusing results that are not inconsistent with murder, but are also not inconsistent with naive, uncomprehending witnesses who have no idea what they are being asked about or how to answer the questions.
The story is told from many points of view - Creed, Del, Donna, Donna's rather nasty husband DeAlton and foolish, selfish son Tom, and the admirable neighbors, Preston and Margaret Hatch.
The story comes to a bad end, due to Tom and DeAlton's attempts to become marijuana growers and gangsters.
I liked this story. Preston Hatch was the only character I could truly identify with, but all of the characters had a depth and interest that kept me absorbed. The story was of the kind that you don't want to let go. You're horrified at what's happening but it's hard to stop reading.
This is my first electronic book "card".
| Author | Turow, Scott |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 817 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2010 |
A car drives into a drug infested neighborhood where "Hardcore" runs his gang. A woman gets out of the car. Hardcore warns her away but she is gunned down by a hopped up kid on a bicycle. A short time later, Nile Eddgar, a probation officer, is arrested and charged with setting up the murder of his father Loyell, who was supposed to be in the car. But his mother June was there instead and was killed.
Nile is brought to trial in front of Judge Sonia "Sunny" Klonsky. A cast of characters from Sonia's past gather from the trial. Seth Weissman, her lover from college days 25 years before is there as a journalist and his old best friend, Hobie Tuttle, a black lawyer, is defending Nile. All of these people shared time in college together, Loyell as a radical professor, June his rather Machiavellian wife, Seth as baby sitter for Nile and radical follower of Loyell, Hobie as Seth's friend cum Black Panther. As the story unfolds we see how this radical past has altered or compromised each of them in chapters that wind back and forth between 1969-70 and 1995-96.
Intertwined in the story is a dark past in which Seth was drawn in, one can only say suckered, by Loyell and especially June, into a plot to extort money from his own Holocaust survivor father, and to misdirect the FBI about who really blew up a lab on the campus. There was a plot within the plot in which Seth appears as both agent and victim.
Hobie figures out more than anyone wanted to know about the real roles of Hardcore, Nile and Loyell in the events leading up to the murder. A powerful, corrupt chief judge attempts to intervene and push Sunny to a desired conclusion but she follows her conscience, aware of how everyone is manipulating her and deciding what she has to do.
Having been in radical campus politics at this very time I felt considerable sympathy and understanding for these people. Turow obviously knows whereof he speaks. His treatment of white and black radicals, lawyers, gangbangers, judges, journalists, cops, all strikes me as remarkably on target. The level of writing is also remarkably high, from the street, punk language of Hardcore and the teenage girl that he directs and that Nile has become silly over, to the sophisticated language of Loyell and Seth, the writing is on target. All of them show what seemed to me to be very convincing emotions about their complicated past, their feelings for each other, and their complex family relationships. I liked this book very much.
I often read Amazon.com reviews before writing my own thoughts about a book I have read. It is particularly valuable in refreshing my memory in cases like this where several months have elapsed between the reading and the writing, but it also gives me a chance to test my reactions against those of others.
There are often some reviewers who have read more deeply than I have and understood more, and many more I think who have read shallowly and understood less. This book brought out quite a few of the latter. The average rating was three stars out of five with many one star reviewers complaining about the length of the book, the digressions into politics and psychology, abandoning what could have been a great murder mystery but instead turned into a tedious political story.
Turow took risks in writing this book. Given his high standing, he wasn't risking his ability to get his books published, but he may have lost some of his fans. I think all of his books are fairly serious but this one was especially so. There aren't so many readers of serious books as there are of rollicking amusements. But I guess when a serious man achieves the success that Turow has achieved, getting extra money becomes less important than fulfilling his desire to write.
Good for him.
| Author | Calvino, Italo |
|---|---|
| Translators | Weaver, William |
| Publication | Mariner Books, 1985 |
| Copyright Date | 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 144 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2010 |
We meet Mr. Palomar on the beach. He is watching the waves come in to the shore. There is a pattern to the waves but Mr. Palomar has to know more than just the pattern. He wants to isolate just one wave and understand it perfectly. He wants to know everything about it and perhaps, working from there, he will be able to expand his understanding to the waves in general and to the ocean.
It doesn't work. He cannot completely isolate one wave from the waves preceding and following it. He cannot focus long enough on a single wave before it breaks up on the shore. At the end of his observation and analysis he is left unsatisfied and in need of other observations and further attempts in his effort to rationalize the world. He turns to a topless young woman on the beach. Now his analysis is not of her but of himself. What should his attitude be? Should he be casual. Should he scan the beach with his eyes not resting on her but moving across her as if she is just another part of the scene and nothing special? Or is that artificial and false? Perhaps he should allow his eyes to rest on her a bit but not too long. At what point would he be doing the right thing or the wrong thing? But, annoyed by his repeated glances and walking back and forth, the woman covers herself and storms off.
The story is repeated over and over, in a cheese shop, in a butcher shop, in a garden, watching birds wheel across the sky, in a zoo, looking at an albino gorilla, in a museum. In each case Mr. Palomar attempts to take in the scene, to analyze it, to place everything into an orderly view of the whole of life. He never fully succeeds but he cannot stop himself from trying.
It is an extraordinary literary and intellectual adventure. Calvino takes the experiences of everyday life and focuses on them closely and deeply, but the result of cranking up the microscope is not more clarity but a greater blur. The more Mr. Palomar attempts to make sense of the world, the more lost he becomes, wandering into areas where events are constantly shifting like the waves and clarity only becomes more elusive the more obstinately Mr. Palomar pursues it.
This is really a wonderful book - original, funny, intelligent, humane. Mr. Palomar's observations are neither stupid nor absurd. He's grappling with observations and rationalizations that make perfect sense. In my reading at least, he seems to me to thinking what I might think if only I were to pursue my thoughts to the depth that Mr. Palomar does. Calvino is showing us a real person. He is pulled out of shape and stretched beyond our own observations, but I found nothing in his musings that failed to strike any chord in myself.
This was a deceptively simple book, but not an easy one. There is no plot and the character development is a very special and unusual kind. It was not a book that could be read compulsively. It had to be taken in small bites, each to be carefully tasted and savored if we are to get the most from it.
I liked it and was most impressed.