Books read May 2005 through December 2012
| Author | Fossum, Karin, 1954- |
|---|---|
| Original Language | no |
| Translators | David, Felicity |
| Publication | Vintage, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 324 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2012 |
Inspector Konrad Sejer of the Norwegian police and his assistant Jakob Skarre are called to a small town to look for a missing six year old girl. The girl has been picked up by an odd fellow with Down's Syndrome who lives with his semi-invalid father outside of town, but the man doesn't hurt her, he just likes little girls. He takes her home after he has shown her his bunny rabbits. However on the way home they discover the body of a 15 year old girl on the beach. The rest of the story is the hunt for Annie Hollander's killer.
Suspicion falls on a number of different people: the Down's Syndrome man, Annie's boyfriend Halvor, her mother's first husband Alex Bjork, a rug merchant and his son Magne, and a strange neighbor who likes to spy on the beautiful and athletic Annie through his window. Sejer keeps after all of them, interviewing them again and again, trying to pierce through their silences and secrets.
Two other deaths bear on the story. Halvor's father, an abusive man who terrorized his family might have committed suicide or might have been killed by Halvor, and a hyperactive two year old son of the rug merchant who died of choking on food - a child whose parents could not control him and only his baby sitter Annie could calm.
In the end, in a rather exciting conclusion, Halvor discovers the truth and confronts the rug merchant - a man who killed his own little boy and killed Annie when he realized that she had seen what had happened. Halvor is also beaten almost to death but Sejer figures out the story and has the killer arrested.
This struck me as very standard mystery fare, well conceived and mostly well written. There were passages that seemed forced to me. The Down's Syndrome man seemed like an author's artifact, not authentically presented and having too clear a role in misdirection. The fact that Annie's autopsy revealed a fatal cancer was an odd note. The relationship between Annie and Halvor was important but rather impenetrable. And as in so many standard police procedural mysteries, the police are able to focus on this one case without distraction or any of the routine and bureaucratic activities that must make up a significant portion of a detective's life.
But having said all that, I'll also say that I liked the character of the inspector and his young police assistant. I liked the boy Halvor. I liked the character of Annie and her father. These were all sympathetic people portrayed with sympathy. And I liked the story.
| Author | Goodwin, Doris Kearns |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio, 2005 |
| Extras | Introduction by the author |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | Abraham Lincoln; American Civil War |
| When Read | January 2012 |
Goodwin's political biography begins with Lincoln's victory at the Republican convention in "the Wigwam" convention hall built for the purpose in Chicago in 1860. Senator William Seward of New York was the best known Republican with the most support but, of course had enemies, as did his best known competitors, Salmon Chase of Ohio and Edward Bates of Missouri. Lincoln was everybody's second choice. When he won the nomination, unlike past presidents, he offered the most important cabinet appointments to Seward, Chase, and Bates, and they accepted.
The book is about Lincoln's presidency in general but is mainly focused on his relations with his cabinet, especially Seward and Chase, and about their feelings for him.
Seward, appointed Secretary of State, initially believed that Lincoln was a well meaning back country man without the ability or preparation to be President. He believed that he would have to run the country for Lincoln and proceeded to provide Lincoln with views and often written statements about what he should do about each of the major issues in his administration. Lincoln treated Seward affably enough that Seward was initially misled into thinking that Lincoln was truly out of his depth. But gradually he learned otherwise. Lincoln was actually ahead of Seward, not only in his understanding of the complex problems of national and international affairs, but also in his understanding of politics. He was, in fact, a master politician. Seward eventually came to be Lincoln's greatest friend, admirer and supporter and was a pillar of the administration.
Chase was not so amenable to understanding Lincoln. He was a superb administrator and Secretary of the Treasury, a more important post in those times than today. He played a critical role in raising the money needed to prosecute the war. But he was a vain and ambitious man who always believed that he would be a better president than Lincoln. Three times in the course of his administration he rejected Lincoln's policies and tendered his resignation saying that he couldn't continue under the circumstances. Three times Lincoln mollified him. But the final straw came when Chase used his office and his contacts to campaign for the presidency behind Lincoln's back. He should never have imagined that Lincoln would not discern the truth, but he did. After another clash Chase sent in his resignation, intending to get his way and found, to his great mortification that the resignation was accepted and Lincoln had actually already offered the post of Secretary of the Treasury to another man.
Lincoln's handling of the Sumter affair, relations with the extraordinarily vain General McClellan, Grant, and others, are explored and his patience, persistence, humility, and good will all shine through.
His understanding of black people and sympathy for them developed over the course of the war. He was the first president to invite black men to the White House. He presented them with a plan to resettle blacks in Central America and was surprised to learn that they didn't want to go. They had been born in the United States and their homes were here and this is where they intended to stay. Lincoln did not take this as a rebuff, but as an education. He came to better understand the point of view of the black people and his sympathy for them deepened. His Emancipation Proclamation was certainly more than just a war measure. I believe he knew that this was the right thing to do and he was willing to put himself out in front of many in the nation and the government to do the right thing.
The book ends with the story of the assassination, and the attempted assassination of Seward which resulted in severe injuries to himself and many members of his family and household. At the end, the Grand Army of the Republic, 200,000 strong, were brought to Washington for a march by and review, attended by huge numbers of people. Lincoln however, in Stanton's famous words, now belonged to the ages.
To begin with, the CD reading of this book was abridged. I had no idea about that when I picked it up from the library shelves. I didn't see any mention of it on the CD jacket cover or on the disks themselves. I only found out after the end of the book, on the last track, there was a note that the book was abridged by someone. Looking again I now see fine print that says "Abridged for audio by Jesse Boggs". Checking on Amazon.com I see that the printed book is 944 pages. Obviously, a great deal was left out, certainly more than half and probably two thirds.
My impression of the book as I read it was that it was pretty good but relatively superficial in comparison with Catton's book The Coming Fury, which I have been reading in parallel with this one. Now I realize that such a judgment is premature. I don't know how deeply Goodwin went into her subject.
One thing I do appreciate from Goodwin is her own deep appreciation of Lincoln. Lincoln was a great man. She calls him a "humanitarian", and it's an apt characterization. He was that, and it informed all of his actions, including his relations with his wife, his cabinet, his soldiers, and even his enemies. He understood the politicians he worked with and bore no ill will even to Chase, although he had every reason to do so. He appointed Chase to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court after accepting his resignation from the Treasury Department. In part it was a political move that neutralized Chase and his friends and supporters. But very few men could have made such a move.
He found every excuse he could find to pardon soldiers who had been condemned to death for cowardice. In one story, he was touched by the defense made by a man who said he had as much heart as the next man and wanted to stand and fight, but his legs would just take off and run when the shooting started. That was precisely the kind of story that Lincoln loved. It was a story of guileless humanity.
Having listened to the complete abridgment, I don't expect to go back and read the full volume. Life is short and my remaining time is getting shorter. But I think this was a good book.
| Author | Mann, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Tom Doherty Associates, Tor, 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Steampunk |
| When Read | January 2012 |
Sir Maurice Newbury, employee of the British Museum and agent for Queen Victoria (who is being kept alive in 1901 by medical gadgetry created by a brilliant doctor known as "the Fixer") is asked to investigate the crash of a passenger airship in London. He and his new assistant, the young and lovely Miss Veronica Hobbes, investigate the crash, investigate the recent spate of murders by a "glowing policeman" in a poor neighborhood in London, and run afoul of "revenants", zombies who are rotting from a virus that originated in the far east, feel no pain, but are still barely intact and ravenous for human flesh. Newbury and Hobbes are both on a mission for the queen and are assisting Inspector Charles Bainbridge of Scotland Yard.
In the course of their investigations they visit Chapman and Villiers, the company that builds the airships and also builds robots that are being used to pilot the ships.
It turns out that Villiers, the genius behind the robots, is employing a morgue assistant who is in turn employing a murderer to kill people in the slums and bring in their bodies so that Villiers can implant their brains in his robots. However, it further turns out that some of the brains were infected with the revenant plague. One robot with such a brain implanted went crazy after the incubation period for the virus and brought down the airship.
There's lots of action as Sir Maurice battles the revenants, the murderers, and finally Mr. Chapman, to solve the case, save the fair maiden, and win the day.
It's a silly story of course. The science is all wrong to the extent that one wonders whether the author was even aware that it was wrong. (I'm thinking for example of the fact that the robots are self-powered. When running low on energy they walk around so that the self-winding mechanisms in their chests will wind up and power them for a long time. But, nah, no writer could make that kind of violation of the laws of physics without doing it intentionally, could he?)
The story is not the only problem. The writing is a bit clumsy too. A better writer could have done more with the story.
The only redeeming feature is that the author had an interesting conception, tried hard, and gave us a scene and characters that, in more experienced hands, could have been quite interesting.
Although I complained to myself the whole time I was reading the book, I didn't quit. It was not hard to read.
| Author | Macintyre, Ben, 1963- |
|---|---|
| Publication | Westminster, MD: Books on Tape, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 364 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Spy |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | January 2012 |
Edward Arnold "Eddie" Chapman was a crook who divided his time between robberies, cons, and other money making schemes and adventures with young women, who found him charming and perhaps irresistible. He was not particularly well educated but he was intelligent and a quick learner at everything. He picked up French and German fairly easily. He became a successful safe cracker, learning to use explosives. He drove a car without benefit of a license and in general made a merry career for himself.
1940 found him on a Channel island with a young woman whom he had brought with him from England for a little holiday, hoping to be outside of the view of the police. But he was spotted in a restaurant. Diving out the window he made his way around the island for a few days but there was nowhere to go and he was caught, sentenced for crimes back in England, and put in the local prison. There he was when Germany occupied the island.
Ill fed (by both British and German authorities), bored, needing escape and action, he was eventually recruited by the Germans as a spy for the Abwehr. They took him to France, interrogated him, came to like him, and began training him in radios, explosives, and all kinds of spy and saboteur tradecraft. He learned fast. His background of being in and out of British jails and feeling that the British authorities had abused him, led the Germans to believe that he was not a British patriot and could be hired for money to do what they wanted done. They gave him money, education, good fellowship, and the kind of life he liked to live and he in turn formed personal bonds with a number of Germans whom he came to like and admire. Everyone still believed (this was before Stalingrad) that Germany would win the war.
After many months of training Eddie was parachuted into Britain with instructions to, among other things, sabotage the deHavilland factory where the Mosquito aircraft were built. Upon landing, he immediately turned himself in to the British authorities. Was he a British patriot? Did he think the mission was hopeless? Did he hope to play both sides? It isn't clear from the book and may not even have been 100% clear in Eddie's mind. But in any case, MI-5 eventually came to believe his story and they turned him into a double agent, making broadcasts from England back to France, feeding disinformation to the Abwehr.
Eventually, he had to do more to retain his credibility with the Germans. MI-5 worked with him to stage an elaborate fake sabotage of the deHavilland factory. Even the factory workers thought that a major explosion had taken place and the German air reconnaissance photos appeared to confirm Eddie's story. His standing in both Germany and England rising, the British were able to use him to feed various disinformation items to his Abwehr associates.
Staying in a room and sending occasional radio signals was not Eddie's idea either of a good time or of a tolerable life. He wanted action and adventure and eventually convinced the British that he needed to be sent back to the continent. Realizing that his state of mind was deteriorating, they agreed. The Germans didn't want him to come back and said they could not arrange a submarine pickup so the Brits cooked up a scheme to send him back via Lisbon and Spain. The Germans reeled him in from there, put him through intensive interrogations, and were convinced that he had been loyal to them. He was sent to Norway for further training, then back to France, then once again parachuted into England, where he remained.
It's hard to know exactly what the value of an agent like this was, but the author believes it to have been substantial. He helped the British by planting false information in German hands, by providing inside information on Abwehr personnel, methods and technology and, just by explaining his missions and assignments, enlightening British intelligence about exactly what the Germans most feared and most wanted to know. He also made an important contribution, possibly saving many lives, when he misled the Germans about where V-1 and V-2 missiles were falling, getting them to miss the center of London.
In the end a new British minder was assigned to him that hated him, thought him to be a criminal (which he was) and a double agent (which he probably was not - at least not in the sense that he was truly helping the enemy.) The man turned in one bad report after another and pushed his agency into a position where they could no longer keep Eddie. He was let go at the end of the war but he was not sent back to jail and managed a successful life on the border of society until his death many years later.
At the end of the war he launched a search for the girl he was with on the Channel island just before he was arrested. He was in a restaurant with two pals who were going to help him find her. They asked him what she looked like and he looked around the dining room to try to find a girl who looked like her. Incredibly, there she was, sitting at another table. He took up with her again, although she was only one of at least three, and maybe more, whom he had made promises to and had not kept them.
There is no denying that Eddie was an interesting and likable character and a pretty resourceful and courageous one. Had I been "minding" him, I expect that I would have gone far to help and support him. He was one of those guys that is very sincere in his insincere way, a man who would go to bat for his friends, and who seems to have genuinely loved the woman he was with, whichever woman it was. If he loved them and left them I don't think it was because his professions of love were false, but rather that it was in his nature to fall in love with many women and it was very difficult to be faithful to one when he was away from her. He also made a great contribution to the war effort. Personally, I believe that counts for a lot.
The author writes in his second edition that he got calls from a number of people after the first edition came out claiming to have known Eddie and telling more stories about him. One was a woman who called him, said Eddie was a shit, and hung up.
I suppose that there are many men who would have loved to live the life of Eddie Chapman. I'm not one of them. I don't think I could even have been much of a friend to him. But I still find his life very interesting.
| Author | Wiesel, Elie |
|---|---|
| Translators | Temerson, Catherine |
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | January 2012 |
The main character of this short novel, Yedidyah Wasserman, went to school to study acting. He was unsuccessful as an actor but still loved the theater. He became a theater critic for a New York newspaper and married the aspiring actress he met in acting school.
He is successful as a critic. He understands the points of view of the actors, writers, directors, and audience. He is critical but never nasty or even unkind. He is well liked and his reviews are well read and well received. One day the two reporters for the newspaper who might normally cover legal trials are both unavailable and Yedidyah is sent to cover the trial of Werner Sonderberg, a German student in the US who is accused of murdering his uncle by pushing him off a cliff near the resort where they were staying. Y covers the trial almost as if it were theater and is successful at the task but conflicted about Sonderberg and Y's own role in the proceedings. He also takes a lot of criticism from his wife who fears that he is leaving the theater business and constantly demands that he stop doing this writing and get back to drama review.
Y is a decent, intelligent, well read, family man. He has his wife and two sons whom he loves dearly. He loves his mother and father and brother and his now dead grandfather. However it turns out that his family is not who he thought they were. He is in fact a Holocaust survivor. His real parents were murdered by the Germans. He was saved by the family cleaning woman in Romania and sent by a Jewish organization to the US as a small child where he was adopted by the people who raised him.
His understanding of his situation grows. His need to understand it is stimulated by the facts of the trial. He travels to Romania to meet the woman who saved him but she is now old and demented. He leaves a gift for her. He is at sea. He cannot explain his problems to his wife and she cannot understand his obsession.
The novel is very well written and not so well written, depending on what one focuses on. For me, it was well written. I didn't mind that the Sonderberg trial had problems and a resolution that should have been produced at the beginning instead of the end. I didn't like the development of the husband and wife conflict (I never like such conflicts do I?) and thought that it was kept artificially alive. But in spite of all that, I considered it a deep and interesting book. It was a book about meaning, about family, about history, about religion.
I'm including in the notes below my review written for Amazon.com.
I read the reviews by S. Balmuth and Chaviva G., and I agree with their criticisms. As a novel, the work has the shortcomings that they describe. There are other shortcomings too. The story of Werner Sonderberg does not seem to me to be well integrated into the story of Yedidiyah Wasserman. The resolution of Sonderberg's story, or at least of his murder trial, leaves much to be desired. Surely the salient fact brought in at the end to resolve the trial could and should have been known at the beginning. It is a mistake in the plot. The relationship between Yedidyah and Alika was strained in ways and for reasons that weren't entirely convincing to me. Two intelligent, caring, and committed people could have better managed their difficulties. So we could wish for a novel that had all of the fine qualities of this one that also had more novelistic perfection, a more perfect plot.
Still, in spite of that, I agree with all of the other reviewers that the writing was very good. The philosophical depth was greater than we encounter in most novels. It was a book full of meaning, a book full of caring, a book full of love.
Wiesel doesn't just address important issues of the meaning of life, he addresses them in a personal but enlightening way. He and we cannot answer the big questions but we can clarify them and shed light on them and try to find our way through them in a thoughtful and principled way, and Wiesel does that and shows us one way to do it. It's not a way that will be meaningful to all readers. The problems that Wiesel and his people and his generation faced were starker and fiercer and more frightening than most of us ever encounter. Most of us, to our great fortune, have never faced them. Some of us will have trouble understanding what he is even talking about.
So be it. But for those for whom Wiesel's and his generation's experience are important and meaningful, and I count myself one of them, I think this is a fine little book.
| Author | Catton, Bruce |
|---|---|
| Publication | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 568 |
| Extras | notes, index, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | January 2012 |
This is the first volume of Catton's three volume history of the Civil War. It concentrates mainly on the political situation and the thinking of important politicians and other leaders on the eve of the war, beginning with the Democratic Party convention called in Charleston South Carolina in 1860. It ends with the aftermath of the first battle of Bull Run.
Catton has a deep appreciation of the thinking of those times. The Southern leaders were people who imagined themselves to be champions of liberty and freedom and the true defenders of the United States Constitution against the depredations of Northerners who were determined to overthrow the liberty and property rights of Southern slaveholders. They were extremely self-righteous. To the extent that they thought of the interests of the slaves at all, they were convinced that these people were better off as slaves than as free people.
Catton was particularly good at giving us an understanding of individual leaders. His portraits of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, George McClellan, William Seward, and a host of lesser characters is revealing. But most of all, his portrait of Abraham Lincoln as a highly intelligent and politically sophisticated man, but with some important initial misunderstandings of the depth of Southern intransigence, is very convincing.
The steps leading up to the war seemed surprising. The Southern leaders seemed not to fully understand that their actions were provoking a war. They certainly didn't understand the power of the Northern states, or the fury that they were unleashing. They egged each other on in a stance of no compromise in a manner that reminds me today of the Republican ideological determination to support no new taxes. Consequences did not matter. Ideological purity was the goal. Consequences would take care of themselves. The cause was right, wasn't it? And if the cause was right, it couldn't matter that bothersome facts indicated that their actions might not work out as they had hoped. Things had to work out. After all, their cause was right, absolutely so. They imagined that Southern men were superior to Northern men and that superiority would win the war. They imagined that factory work, city living, highly developed commerce, were weaknesses of the North, not strengths - they impoverished the manhood of the Northern men and made them weak opponents.
When the guns opened up on Fort Sumter the people of Charleston cheered and celebrated. No one (or hardly anyone, I can't remember for sure) was actually killed. It was a party. It was a demonstration. It was a show of resolution. The real awakening only occurred at the battle of Bull Run.
That battle was fought out differently from the way I imagined it. The troops were poorly trained. The officers had no more training or experience than the troops. Men were out of shape. Discipline was poor. The Union army could only advance at about six miles per day. To go faster than that would have required better organization of the troops on the road, better conditioning of the men, better shoes, better discipline to keep men from breaking ranks to get water every time they passed a stream and better provisioning of canteens and water tanks and water to substitute for it.
MacDowell's plan was actually not bad. Had the army at Harpers Ferry been able to achieve what MacDowell thought they would achieve, holding down Johnston's forces in that area, the Union might actually have won. The soldiers were inexperienced. They panicked when confronted with defeat and rout. But they fought bravely too. Their failures to achieve their objectives probably had more to do with the inability of inexperienced officers to lead coordinated attacks than with failure of the men to bravely attack the enemy. The Confederates had a much easier time of it since they only had to defend, not to coordinate forward movements against enemy fire as the Union attempted to do. And they had better leaders. Beauregard, Johnston, Jackson, and others were experienced soldiers.
But apart from the defeat and its powerful effects on both sides, there was also the stark reality of war that was revealed at Bull Run. Men died in large numbers. Horrible wounds were inflicted. The illusions of war were taken from those in the North and perhaps somewhat shaken in the South. A terrible conflict had begun.
I love Catton's books. He is never dry. He knows the statistics and explains them (e.g., more than 90% of all manufacturing was in the Northern states.) He understands the politics and the mentality of the time. He is able to live inside the heads of the important personalities, and some of the ordinary ones too. He makes the history real and understandable in ways that are easily related to our contemporary experience. He understands the gravity of the war and goes way beyond strategy, tactics, and adventure.
I read the Army of the Potomac trilogy and will probably read the other two books of this trilogy as well.
I did read them, finishing the last volume in August 2017.
| Author | Walker, Spike |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | January 2012 |
In 2007 [as I recall, I no longer have the book in front of me and do not currently have access to the Internet], a ship with a cargo of soy beans and an Indian captain and crew were making a great circle route through the northern Pacific to Asia when they developed engine trouble. With engines shut down they were caught in a developing storm pushing them towards a barren and rocky island. The Coast Guard was alerted and plans were laid to send a cutter and two tugs to take the ship under tow and pull her to safety.
In the developing storm, the tow failed. Attempts were made to pass a line to the ship but it was very difficult. Men standing out on the deck of the ship were at risk from the cold, from waves, from blinding, driving snow, and from the difficulties of grasping and handling the thinner lines and thicker cables for the tow. When a line was successfully passed it parted before the tow could be established. Eventually the ships had to give up. They had a small helicopter on board the cutter but it was difficult to launch in the bad weather and too small to carry many crew to safety, so the call went out for a pair of large helicopters to come and rescue the crew.
It turned out that one of the helicopters couldn't make it. A bearing in the rotor transmission failed and the helo would be out of commission for at least two days for repairs. The other took off and the crew made their way through wind and snow to the ship, planning to evacuate the crew. They would lower a basket to the deck, pull up a crewman, then lower again for another, and so on, until they had a full load of nine men. They would then take the men either to the cutter, if transfer operations were safe in the bad weather, or back to Cold Harbor, returning again for two more loads until all 27 men had been evacuated. There was only one problem with the plan. The freighter captain would not allow his crew to abandon ship. He and his engineers continued to work on the engines, determined to restart them and continue the voyage, saving the ship and the cargo. So the rescue copter circled overhead for an hour, watching the ship drift towards destruction, watching the storm build and rescue become more difficult, and burning fuel. The Coast Guard had no authority over the ship and there was nothing they could do but watch.
Eventually, the cutter captain persuaded the freighter captain to release his non-essential crew while he and a small team stayed behind to work on the engines. But now a new problem developed. With much difficulty, the rescue basket was lowered to the deck but no one would get in it. For another hour nothing happened. Finally, a man came out and threw a suitcase into the basket to be hauled up. That was not what the coasties were risking their lives to do but the sailors wouldn't abandon their personal belongings and the helo captain eventually had to agree to allow each man to bring one bag. They filled the helicopter and headed back to Cold Harbor, bringing in the men and refueling.
Meanwhile, against the cutter captain's better judgment, but after many appeals from his men, the cutter launched its small helicopter in an extraordinary operation requiring great skill and perfect timing. The deck was heaving, pitching and rolling far outside the standard launch limits, but they successfully got away. They were about to attempt some more rescues when the big helicopter returned and, acceding to the logic of the situation, they stood off while the big copter took on another load of men. Another load was rescued and the copter returned for the last load.
Conditions grew steadily worse. The freigher was pitching wildly. It had broken its anchor chains in an attempt to slow the ship's leeward progress and it was now just a couple of miles from the rocky shore where everyone would surely die if the ship foundered there. But the Indian crew was now even more unwilling to risk the trip up. The rescue swimmer was sent down from the helicopter to practically throw men into the basket. When he reached the deck he realized what the problem was. The copter was attempting to rise and fall with the ship, huge static electric discharges were occurring between the ship and the basket, the men apparently had nothing but street clothes on, and they were terrified of the rescue. He put one man after another into the basket until only he and the captain were left on the ship. And then the unthinkable happened. Night had fallen. Blinding snow squalls obscured visibility. Waves were crashing over the freigher and lifting it up and down 30 or more feet at a time. The helicopter pilot was fighting to get into a groove, matching speed and height with the ship to make the rescue possible. He didn't see the rogue wave coming. The helo captain saw it and tried to take the copter up but it was too late. A huge wave broke over the ship and was thrown high into the air. Water rose and rose. In a few seconds it reached, then engulfed, the helicopter. Water was sucked into the engine inlets and they flamed out. The pilots could do no more now than guide the falling aircraft into the freezing sea. There was no hope of organized action. The only chance was for every man to attempt his own escape into the water.
The helicopter crewmen had all been trained and practiced a water escape from the aircraft. Still, it was not easy. Lights went out. The craft was at an odd angle. Water poured in. Air ran out. One man burst out and reached the surface, then another, then another. Eventually all three of the remaining crew and two of the Indians made it into the water. From there however there seemed to be little chance of doing anything except freezing and drowning to death in the next few minutes. The coasties at least were wearing better gear. The Indians were in street clothes. Each was isolated from the others. Each made up his mind to die.
Then a basket dropped from the sky and the first man realized that the helicopter from the cutter was still above and on station. One after another the three Coast Guardsman were rescued and one of the Indians, already frozen and seemingly not breathing, was scooped out of the water by brilliant handling of the basket by the crew of the copter. The second Indian spotted on the surface was clearly dead before anyone could rescue him. The group was taken back to Cold Harbor.
The final chapter of the story was the rescue of the Coast Guardsman on the freighter and the freighter captain. When the copter returned, the ship broke in half on the rocks. Water broke over the ship with each wave. The captain was petrified. The cargo masts and booms swept perilously around, threatening to snag the helicopter cable. The pilots were fighting for position and dealing with 70 mph winds and short but total whiteouts from snow squalls. It was not possible to rescue the men from their position. They had to cross the open decks, hanging on for dear life as waves broke over the deck, and make it to the extreme broken end of the part of the ship they were on in order to get a rescue. Incredibly, the young swimmer, a superb athlete, held onto the captain, maneuvered him to the end of the ship, got him into the basket and up, and then made it himself into the basket and away. Eight men had died but all of the rest were rescued.
This was the kind of story that everyone can feel good about, except maybe the freighter captain and his crew who had not made the best decisions about the evacuation. But the Coast Guardsmen on the ships and the helicopters exhibited extraordinary bravery, courage, skill, and fortitude. Their actions were the stuff of legend and one can easily imagine that, in their old age, young Coast Guardsmen will look upon them with reverence and awe and only hope that if they are ever tested they will live up to the standard that these men set.
I loved the book. I'm very glad that the author wrote it.
| Author | Ellroy, James, 1948- |
|---|---|
| Publication | Mysterious Press, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2012 |
In the years just following World War II Officer "Bucky" Bleichart of the Los Angeles police department is a former light heavyweight boxer who meets up with another cop, Lee Blanchard, a former heavyweight boxer, and the two become friends. The brass in the police department recruit the two of them to stage an exhibition fight in order to raise the visibility of the department in the days before an important city budget debate. It's a tough fight. Bucky has arranged to throw the fight in order to make a pile of money on a bet that he can use to pay the nursing home for his demented father, but he gets mad and fights for real. However, he loses anyway and thus wins the money legitimately. As a reward for their effort, the two are made partners in the much sought after Warrants Division.
While in that partnership a horrible murder is committed. A young woman is found mutilated and killed. It's a very public story and many cops are pulled in to work on it, including Bucky and Lee. The girl turns out to have been a wayward kid, foolish, irresponsible, pretty, preyed upon by men, and often in trouble. She appears to be very like Lee Blanchard's own sister, a girl who died in similar circumstances and whom Lee blames himself for not protecting. Lee becomes increasingly obsessed with the case to the point that he is doing wrong, insubordinate, and dangerous things and is in trouble in the department. Bucky first has to cover for him, then restrain him, and finally search for him in Mexico where he disappeared with a pile of money and is found murdered.
The plot is very complex. Clues to the murder are all intertwined with stories about cops, a real estate criminal and his family, a woman who lives with Blanchard but doesn't sleep with him, loves Bleichart, sort of, and appears to have secrets of her own. Everyone has secrets. Everyone has hidden agendas. Everyone has emotional investments that influence their actions as cops, as witnesses, and as accomplices.
Bucky Bleichert is assigned back to regular duties but he never gives up his own obsession with the case of the Black Dahlia. It takes him a couple of years but, working on his own and not always within his authority as a policeman, he gradually uncovers the truth.
This book is intelligent, gritty, deep, and compelling. It was the first in a series of four books about the L.A. police department. I read it after seeing an interview with James Lee Burke (the author of the Dave Robicheaux and other mysteries) in which he said that Ellroy was one of his favorite mystery writers, and also after seeing the movie "L.A. Confidential", based on the third book of the series.
| Author | Roth, Philip |
|---|---|
| Publication | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2012 |
The novel opens with the funeral of an unnamed man, I'll call him X, attended by his brother, his sons, his daughter, an ex-wife, and an ex-mistress. His relations with all of these people were complex and not all of them liked him. Then the book goes back to present the last several years of his life, from his point of view.
X worked as a commercial artist and executive for an advertising agency where he was very successfully earning a good income and the respect of the agency management. He married but his marriage didn't work out and he divorced and remarried. His second wife Phoebe was a treasure but X had a wandering eye. He met a young Danish model with a strong sexual appetite during an ad campaign and carried on an affair with her behind Phoebe's back. When Phoebe found out about it and confronted him, he lied. She left him. He had to somehow justify his behavior to himself and to the world, so he asked the Danish model to marry him, which she did, but it was a failure. She was good in bed but not so good otherwise.
X retired from his job and acquired a place on the New Jersey shore where he intended to devote his life to painting. He did in fact paint and setup an art class, partly in hopes of finding some compatible and artistic friends, but the only friend he found was a woman with terrible and chronic back pain who killed herself not long after X met her.
His life was already a shambles, and then his heart went bad. He had heart surgery and eventually recovered, then had more problems. Then he had still more problems and went in for another surgery with an optimistic frame of mind but he never came out.
The "Everyman" of the story had something to do with his father's jewelry shop, "Everyman's Jewelry Store", but was also, of course, a statement that every man must confront failure, remorse, and mortality in his life.
Roth's character dies at age 75. He is despised by his sons, loved by his selfless daughter, lamented and resented by his ex-wife, and appreciated by his successful older brother Howie, who took care of him all of his life and received very little in return. Roth himself was in his late 70's when Everyman was published. He knew very well what he was writing about. I have no doubt that there is some autobiographical component to the book, though I have no idea whether Roth had multiple wives, cheated on them, or got his comeuppance as a result.
I don't believe that every man has all of the same issues as X. I believe that I myself have done a better job with my family than X did, and that many other people have also done better, though many have also done worse. Roth's or X's difficulties with love and selfishness are not every man's difficulties. But we don't have to take the title literally to see that what Roth has done contains significant insights into the human condition.
I don't "like" Roth's books. I don't "enjoy" reading them. But I get something out of them that I don't find often in other writers.
When I enrolled as a grad student in the Philosophy Department at the University of Illinois, I imagined that other students of philosophy would be a lot like me. After all, we were all philosophical, weren't we? I soon learned that I was wrong. I guess I learned long ago that all of the good authors weren't alike and that not every author with powerful insights into the human condition had rational control of his own condition. Still, it's always at least a little bit of a surprise, or if not exactly a surprise, an uncomfortable feeling, to experience powerful insights about humanity from a man who seems lacking as a human being.
From what I've read in Roth's novels, plus the comments of his second wife Claire Bloom, Roth was and presumably is (he's still alive as far as I know) a neurotic and difficult man - self-absorbed and unpleasant or even nasty to others. However he did have unusual talents.
| Author | Rottman, Gordon L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Osprey, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 96 |
| Extras | photos, maps, paintings, index, bibliography |
| Genres | History |
| Keywords | Military; World War II |
| When Read | February 2012 |
This is a standard Osprey Campaign series with text, photos, maps, etc. It is a simple, superficial work. There are no biographies, no individual stories from on the ground, little discussion of weapons, training, equipment, etc. Unit names on both sides play a big role in the exposition - the 7th Marines did this, the Japanese 64th brigade was positioned here, etc.
The battle was very like what I've read about the other Pacific islands except that, outside of the Philippines, this was the largest of the island campaigns, involving the most troops on each side, the most military and civilian casualties, and the largest loss of ships and aircraft on each side. Okinawa is only 320 miles from the tip of Kyushu, southernmost of the main Japanese home islands. It was taken in order to serve as a base for the invasion of Japan itself. The Japanese fought hard to retain it, losing over 100,000 men and 7,380 aircraft in kamikaze attacks, conventional attacks, and losses on the ground in American raids on home island airfields. American losses included almost 20,000 dead or wounded Marines, 23,000 army soldiers, almost 10,000 sailors, 763 aircraft, 79 ships sunk or damaged beyond any repair, and 325 damaged. About 12,800 Americans were killed. It was an enormous loss for both sides and it presaged a real holocaust for the invasion of Japan.
The forces concentrated against Okinawa were unprecedented. My reading of the scattered information in the book indicates that 1,300 ships, including 33 aircraft carriers were involved! A large number of battleships and cruisers would batter the island. Sophisticated landing ships would run up to the beach and unload trucks and tanks in a chain of ships front ramp to back door of the next leading ship, until the entire chain unloaded through the front ramp of the lead inshore ship. Aircraft pounded the Japanese home island air and sea bases and patrolled all of the waters for hundreds of miles around the island, intercepting most of the Japanese attackers and destroying them before they could reach the American ships. The naval artillery, land based artillery, fighter bombers operating out of carriers, nearby islands, and captured Okinawan airfields, and the vast quantities of munitions sucked out of the entire Pacific and west coast of the US to support the invasion, ensured that the Japanese would endure a rain of fire and explosives. The amazing thing is that they still held out and inflicted heavy American casualties.
Both sides fought with grim determination and sometimes manic fury. Some American Marine units captured hilltop strong points and held them until they were virtually, or actually, wiped out. It was an epic battle.
Reading books like this makes it easier to sympathize with the view that dropping the atom bombs on Japan was the right thing to do. Perhaps the Japanese generals who predicted that Japan could never be taken by invasion were right. Perhaps as many as eight Japanese soldiers were killed on Okinawa for each American soldier, sailor or marine killed. But if the Japanese were truly prepared to loses 10 or 15 million people in fighting the invasion, what would that have meant for the Americans? As I recall, it was estimated that we would lose 200,000 men in an invasion. It looks to me like it would have been more, maybe much, much more..
This was not a big book but I wasn't looking for a big one, just an overview of the battle. I got that.
The American medic, Desmond Doss, won a Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism on Okinawa in an action memorialized in the movie "Hacksaw Ridge". He was the only conscientious objector to ever win such a medal. The movie painted a pretty horrific picture of combat on the island.
| Author | Burke, James Lee |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster Audio, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 688 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2012 |
Texas Sheriff Hackberry Holland discovers the bodies of nine Asian women, machine gunned and buried behind an abandoned church out on the prairie. He calls the FBI and attempts to work with them to solve the case, but they're not cooperative - not telling him much, leaning hard on people that Hack knows to be innocent and uninvolved, and pursuing an agenda of their own to build a case against a Russian mobster in Phoenix Arizona who is involved with people who are involved in the murders.
There are many interesting characters in this book. Deputy Pam Tibbs is in love with Hack but he won't yield to her. He thinks it's inappropriate for him to have an affair with his subordinate, and wrong to tie up a younger woman's future with his 70+ year old self. "Preacher" Jack Collins, the psychotic killer who actually pulled the trigger on the Asian women, is not just a crazy killer, or even a very smart crazy killer. He's a man with an exotic morality of his own, driven by childhood hardships, generous to some women at some times and a stone cold killer of women at others. Some of Collins' younger associates are very well drawn - would be gangsters who don't quite understand what's going on around them but are prepared to betray each other if needed. Iraq war veteran and congenital innocent Pete Flores and his quite tough folk singing girlfriend Vicki Gaddis are on the run from both the FBI and the mobsters, both of whom want Pete as a witness to the murders. Perhaps most interesting is the sleazy Jewish night club owner Nick Dolan and his upright wife Esther who wallops Collins with a frying pan. Dolan wants to change his life, get out of the strip club business, and do the right thing by his wife and children.
There are a number of crisis scenes in the novel. Hack and Pam manage to get the upper hand in most of them. But in the end we don't fully know what happens to Preacher Collins. He is last heard from running down into a deep cave complex. Perhaps he is mortally wounded. Perhaps he is not.
I like all of Burke's work. He writes well. He produces interesting characters. He knows what it means to have a conscience. He knows how to treat difficult cases in complex ways, balancing complex motivations in his characters without giving in to the urge to oversimplify.
Apparently the character of Hackberry Holland first appeared in a 1970 novel and has now been resurrected many years later. I'll have to find and read the earlier book.
Many of the Amazon reader reviewers compared this book to Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men". I've seen the film adaptation of that but haven't (yet) read the book. The comparison seems apt to me.
I had an odd experience reading this book. While Preacher Jack Collins was clearly presented as a dangerous psychopath, he also had a need to win the good will of Holland and made a number of overtures to him. Holland always responded with hostility and disdain. I found it uncomfortable to listen (in the readerly sense) to Holland curse and threaten a man who was trying to be polite and accommodating, a man who refrained from killing Holland when he had the chance. I wondered at the time if the author was playing with his readers' conflicting sensibilities. There was a similar feeling with Pam Tibbs' romantic overtures to Holland. Holland wasn't nasty to her but he wasn't sympathetic either. Burke did a great job of making the reader feel uncomfortable.
As usual, Burke had a wonderful way of describing the barren countryside of the West - a highlight of many of his books.
| Author | Perez-Reverte, Arturo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Soto, Sonia |
| Publication | Harvest Books, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2012 |
Independent rare book finder Lucas Corso is hired to verify the authenticity of a manuscript chapter of Alexandre Dumas' Three Musketeers. He is also to track down the extant copies of a book called The Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadow, a 15th century book about devil worship whose author was burned at the stake. To fulfill these missions he goes from place to place - prepared to learn from others, to steal from them, to trick the widow of a book collector into going to bed with him, and to do whatever it takes to get what he wants - within some reason.
The story moves through Spain, Portugal and France. Corso is apparently pursued by a shadowy figure who almost runs him down in a car and beats him in another scene. He is protected by an equally mysterious beautiful young girl who uses the name "Irene Adler", taken from the Sherlock Holmes story.
The plot is convoluted and confusing. Seemingly mysterious criminals turn out to be practical jokers. A seemingly evil manipulator turns out to be mainly insane. Rare books are destroyed. Book collectors die. Puzzles are solved only to turn out to be irrelevant.
Characters are also confusing. But Corso is rather interesting in spite of it all and his determination to get to the truth drives the story forward.
Perhaps the highlight of this book is what it has to say about the book trade. The details of authentication of manuscripts by paper, handwriting, engravings, bindings, and on and on are quite interesting. The recounting of how Dumas wrote his pot boilers, never forgetting that writing such books was a business as much as an art, but also appreciating the special contribution that Dumas made, was fascinating.
It's a book that celebrates the popular literature of earlier times. Dumas and Sabatini are particularly appreciated. Sentences from those and other similar authors are quoted by one character to another as if he were quoted passages of the Bible or of famous poems.
It's not a great book but it does have Perez-Reverte's engaging style. He aims to join Dumas and Sabatini as a fellow author of popular romance. I think he succeeds.
Wanting to find out if The Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadow was a real book, I searched Google for it. Sure enough, you can buy it from various sources, though I'm pretty sure it was written by someone who liked Perez Reverte's book rather than a mystic devil. I didn't bother to try to find a copy.
I can't remember the last time I read a reference to Sabatini, an author whom I really liked as an 11 year old boy after seeing "Captain Blood" with Errol Flynn on the Channel 13 Late Show on TV. I feel some kinship with Perez Reverte's desire to revive and enjoy the romantic adventure novelists of the 19th century.
| Author | Larsson, Steig, 1954-2004 |
|---|---|
| Original Language | se |
| Translators | Keeland, Reg |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 424 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Sweden |
| When Read | February 2012 |
Financial reporter and partner in the small magazine "Millenium" Mikael Blomkvist has been tried and convicted of libel in publishing an article about Swedish billionaire financier and gangster Wennerstrom. In fact, he had been manipulated by false leads and documents specifically intended to get him to publish the libel and so discredit the actual facts that he had found on Wennerstrom's dishonest dealings. He is sentenced to three months in prison and a fine that will consume most of his savings. He leaves Millenium in the hope that his disgrace will not result in the magazine's demise, but advertisers with faint ties to Wennerstrom's companies are pulling out, circulation is falling, and it doesn't look like the magazine will survive more than a few months.
Then B receives a call from a lawyer representing Henrik Vanger, the retired head of the Vanger group of companies. Vanger offers him a lot of money to, first, write a history of the Vanger family and second, secretly, attempt to find out what happened to then 16 year old Harriet Vanger who disappeared in 1966 and was presumed murdered but no body or murderer was ever found. Vanger also promises to invest money in Millenium and to give B information that will harm Wennerstrom, but only if B first works straight through to the end of the project.
In the course of the early work on the project, B discovers that Vanger ordered a background check on him by the security firm Milton Corporation. He demands a copy of the report and is startled to find that whoever researched him discovered an amazing amount of data about him, including one piece of information that could only have come from his personal computer. He realized that he had been hacked. He tracked down the researcher and met the extraordinary Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. She is a master computer security expert and hacker, has a photographic memory, and is in touch with a network of advanced hackers around the world. B manages to recruit her to work on the project.
B and S eventually discover that Martin Vanger, Henrik's nephew, Martin's brother, and the current CEO of the firm, is a serial killer of women. They learn that Harriet knew about Martin. They learn that she was abused by both Martin and her father and that she killed her father by pushing him under water when he fell off a wharf after chasing and assaulting her in a drunken fit of anger and aggression. Ultimately, they learned that she was not murdered at all but escaped from Sweden, moved to Australia, married a wealthy rancher, and was living as his widow and owner of the ranch and enterprise.
Eventually, after a harrowing experience in which Martin captures and tortures B and B is rescued by S, all is set right. Martin commits suicide. Harriet is found and returns to Sweden. And the story returns to the problem of Wennerstrom. S succeeds in hacking into his personal computer and discovering everything about W's illegitimate enterprises and hidden bank accounts. She provides material to B to destroy W with a special issue of Millenium and a follow on book, and she secretly loots W's bank accounts and exposes him to someone who is tracking him, leading to W's assassination by Columbian drug lords to whom W owed money that he could no longer repay since S had all of his hidden money.
In the end S comes to a new outlook on life. She believes that she has fallen in love with B and can possibly even become something like a normal person. She goes to see him but spots him on the street with his old girl friend. She renounces him and returns to her life as a complete loner and social outcast.
I have not mentioned it above but there is an astonishing part of the novel, realized in shocking scenes in the Swedish movie, in which S is raped by her legal guardian and retaliates by essentially destroying him and putting him under her control. It is one of the important scenes in world literature.
I have explained this book in considerable detail. Anyone reading my abstract who has not read the book may find that I have spoiled it for them - or not, depending on how a reader approaches the book. I saw the movie first and cannot say that the movie spoiled the book for me, even though it was a fairly accurate, if radically condensed, version of the novel.
The reason I wrote it up this way is that the plot is complex. If I re-read this review, something I may or may not ever do, it will bring back to me what the book was about and how it was resolved. I know that I'll forget key details if I haven't written them down.
Larsson wrote three books about the girl with the dragon tatoo, but he died before any of them was published. He was only 50 years old at the time of his death. That is a great shame. He might have had more great books in him, and it is also a great shame that he died before knowing how popular his books would be.
I finished this book on my Pandigital Novel eReader while on board the MV Discovery on our Australian cruise. It was hard to put down.
| Author | Jackson, Julian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oxford University Press, 2003 |
| Number of Pages | xviii + 274 |
| Extras | chronology, maps, photos, bibliography, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 2012 |
Beginning with a fairly short (60 page) overview of the military events of May and June, 1940, Jackson goes on to discuss the nature of the Franco-British alliance, French politics leading up to and into the war, the impact on ordinary people, especially ordinary soldiers, "Causes and Counterfactuals", and "Consequences" of the war.
J is concerned to provide a balanced view. For every thesis he presents, e.g., the French commanders were befuddled, the troops were demoralized, the Third Republic was decadent and corrupt, the German forces were overwhelmingly strong, etc., he also presents arguments on the other side. One might even conclude that he avoids conclusions. If there is a single conclusion he comes to about the cause of the debacle it is that the Germans had a good plan and the French were too slow to recognize what was happening and react to it. The Germans had essentially won the battle before the French fully realized the nature of their attack and what needed to be done to stop it.
He finds plenty of blame to assign all around. French politicians were deeply divided. Leon Blum, the leader of the Popular Front government over the year 1936-7, was truly hated as "a dandy, Jew, Socialist, and bourgeois class traitor" by the bourgeoisie and the right wing elements in society. Some openly spoke of assassinating him and "rather Hitler than Blum" was the watchword of many right wing elements. Under the influence of the depression, which only hit France in 1931, but hit very hard, and his leadership, union membership went from about a million at the beginning of the decade to four million in 1937. The Communist Party went from 10 deputies to 72. The Popular Front came to power when Stalin ordered the communists to work with other parties in an effort to create an anti-fascist bloc capable of opposing Germany. Immediately upon achieving power a wave of 12,000 strikes swept the country aiming at a 40 hour week and better pay and working conditions. The bourgeoisie was deeply alarmed. Capital fled the country, deepening the depression and hastening a financial crisis. Later, just days before the Nazi-Soviet pact that might have justified the action, the center-right government that followed the Popular Front mollified its right wing supporters by launching a massive repression against the left, arresting communists and union leaders, firing union activists from their jobs and imprisoning many of them.
However, according to J, the situation in France was not as impossible as many make it out to be. Blum defied the large pacifist wing of his coalition and instituted a huge re-armament program that was continued by his successors. Paul Reynaud, elected prime minister after the popular but flawed Daladier, institued very high new taxes to pay for it and to suck up the inflationary capital that had flowed in to the country and been created by armament spending. France actually produced more aircraft and tanks in the first months of 1940 than Germany did. There was grumbling, pacifist sentiment and class divisions, but studies show that the great majority of men accepted it as their duty to join the army at the start of the war and initial morale was not really worse than in 1914 - when anti-war sentiment was stronger than many people looking back remembered it to be.
1940 was a seminal year in French history. The defeat brought an authoritarian regime to power that was dedicated to order, worker discipline, anti-semitism, strengthening the army and the old elites of society, and collaboration (their term) with Germany. They took their stance at a time when they were convinced that Germany had won the war and Britain would soon cave in. They had no idea that Germany would lose, their own position would come to be treated as treasonous and they themselves would go on trial. The resistance, symbolized at the top by Charles de Gaulle, would become the heroic story of post war politics.
There is much more in this book, including some very interesting material on French/British relations (there was much misunderstanding on both sides) and the adjustments that France had to make as a result of the losses in the colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria.
I'm not sure that J said enough about Germany in this book. J believed that France could have successfully resisted the German invasion if their military intelligence had been better. He thinks that the French military leadership looked terrible in retrospect, but that in retrospect winners always look effective and losers ineffective. Maybe that's true, though I can think of outstanding exceptions like some of the Confederate generals in the American Civil War, or some of the German generals in WWII.
The material comparisons of numbers of divisions, numbers of tanks, and numbers of aircraft show a French military that was not wholly inferior to the Germans, but the German officer corps was certainly superior, their experience in Poland and Spain critical, their theory and doctrine far more advanced. I don't believe that Blitzkrieg was as much of a retrospective myth as J makes it out to be. He thought it was only weakly developed in France but very effective, while strongly developed in the attack on the USSR but ineffective. In fact, I think it was already well developed in France and was effective in both countries, though it could not carry the day against the huge Soviet Union, especially in light of Hitler's poor military leadership and insane racial policies against the conquered peoples.
In any case, this was a well written, well researched, well balanced book that very much deepened my understanding of the subject.
I am currently in the middle of Upton Sinclair's A World to Win, the seventh volume of his Lanny Budd series that I read as a teenager and am now re-reading. This volume covers the period starting just after the conquest of France in 1940. Sinclair's view of French politics strongly corroborates Jackson's. He too sees France as largely dominated by a small but powerful bourgeoisie that was more afraid of their own workers than of Nazi Germany. They looked to Hitler to save them from communism. In Sinclair's account, they were almost babes in the woods when it came to Hitler - with no idea of how he would rape France and treat its bourgeoisie no better than its workers.
| Author | Sabatini, Rafael |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Hutchinson, 1921 |
| Number of Pages | 241 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Romance |
| When Read | February 2012 |
"Being a narrative excerpted from the chronicles of Urbino during the dominion of the high and mighty Messer Guidobaldo da Montefeltro."
Francesco del Falco, Count of Aquila, cousin to Duke Gian Maria of Babbiano, and a famous condottiero, arrives at a meeting of conspirators. They wish to persuade him to lead a movement to remove the cruel, selfish, and incompetent Gian Maria and install himself as Duke, and they want him to do it soon so as to organize an armed force to resist an expected attempt by Cesare Borgia to attack and conquer Babbiano. Francesco refuses but the conspirators have been tracked and the house is surrounded by armed men. The conspirators break out. Three escape, two are killed, and two others are captured and executed without trial.
Francesco is suspected by the Duke but in fact he is innocent. He has no desire to be Duke. He wants to continue his free and independent life. He advises Gian Maria to appoint him Provost and let him create an army to defend the Duchy, but the Duke doesn't trust him and will not allow it.
Meanwhile, the young, beautiful, devout, and high spirited Monna Valentina, niece of Prince Guidobaldo, ruler of neighboring Urbino, has been pledged to Gian Maria to cement an alliance between the two states who, together with Urbino's other allies, form a force too powerful for the Borgias to overcome. However the lovely Valentina meets wounded Francesco and is entranced by him. She also meets the gross Gian Maria and is repelled. She refused the marriage but is ordered to proceed with it by her uncle. Acting on a suggestion by the viperous Romeo Gonzaga, a fop who would be husband of Valentina in order to get her uncle's favor and financial support, Valentina flees the Court with Gonzaga, her jester, her priest, a few ladies in waiting, and 20 men at arms that Gonzaga has recruited in a bar room via the down and out ruffian Ercole Fortemani. They hole up in the fortress of Roccaleone, where she defies Prince and Duke and when Francesco shows up to help defend the place, successfully holds off any attack.
There are adventures, strategems, betrayals, misunderstandings, and declarations of love. In the end, Francesco wins the hand of Valentina and heads of to his castle at Aquila, Gian Maria is forced to be satisfied with Valentina's younger sister, and Gonzaga is killed by Gian Maria in a fit of rage when Gonzaga's betrayal of the fortress turned out to be a trick in which both men were duped by Francesco.
This is typical Sabatini fare, better I think than The Sea Hawk, not as good as, say, Captain Blood. Characters are quickly cut cardboard. Plot is very predictable. The ending is foreordained. I don't know if it was ever made into a movie, but it looks like it might have been written with Hollywood in mind.
As in The Sea Hawk, the politics of the story are surprisingly regressive. Francesco seeks only to please himself and his enamorata. His interest in defending Babbiano extends only to holding off the Borgias, not to replacing the evil, corrupt and stupid Gian Maria with a decent government. The 15th-16th century (I could look up Cesare Borgia to find out) political scene is accepted as is as the rightful society and polity, presented as such to the 20th century reader.
Books like this work only in so far as the author is able to turn neat phrases and clever interactions between the characters. As it happens, Sabatini was something of a master of that.
I read this shortly after reading The Club Dumas by Perez-Reverte, see above. Sabatini figures in that book along with Dumas and other writers of swashbuckling stories. He is treated by P-R as something of a master of popular literature and such literature is deemed capable of master writing. P-R is not unconvincing, and neither is Sabatini. If I were assigning Amazon stars to the book I might give it two of five for the story, four of five for the quality of the writing, and three overall.
| Author | Matthews, Christopher |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster, 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Extras | photos, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | John Fitzgerald Kennedy |
| When Read | March 2012 |
This is a tribute to Kennedy by Matthews, who appears to be the same age as me and who felt the spell of Kennedy's charisma in his youth, as I did.
Matthews gives a short introduction to Kennedy's childhood. Although born to wealth and privilege, Kennedy had some difficulties in childhood. The first was his health. He had chronic back problems that sometimes incapacitated him and put him on crutches. He had a chronically upset stomach, possibly associated with Addison's Disease (adrenal insufficiency) that was not diagnosed until he grew to adulthood. He was near death a number of times and was administered the last rites three times in his life. To some extent Kennedy may also have suffered by living in the shadow of his older brother who was the heir apparent to the family's, or at least father Joe's, expectations of greatness. Kennedy's mother Rose was distant and uninvolved with the children.
Kennedy went to an exclusive prep school and then to college at Princeton and Harvard. He was something of a maverick and a trouble maker at school. In 1938 he went to Europe to summer with his family and in '39 he spent the summer as secretary to his father's mission as ambassador to the UK. He saw the results of the Munich appeasement and wrote a thesis about it at Harvard which he then published in 1940 as the book, Why England Slept. It condemned Hitler and appeasement but also argued that England was not ready for war and needed time to get ready. The Munich agreement bought some necessary time.
K was a genuine hero in World War II. He risked his own life multiple times to save crewmembers after his PT boat was rammed and sunk. In spite of his serious back problems he went above and beyond what he asked anyone else to do and kept all ten members of the crew alive who survived the initial attack.
Kennedy went into politics as soon as he recovered from his injuries after the war, and his political career is the heart of Matthews' book. As a politician he was quite ruthless. He used his father's money and influence as much as possible - and a lot was possible. He used people as and when he needed them and demanded unquestioning loyalty. He played hardball politics, putting intense pressure on other politicians to endorse and support him, or risk being left behind and out when K won without them. He used Ted Sorenson to write his speeches and to ghost write most of Profiles in Courage. His first political conviction was anti-communism, which he equated to anti-fascism, and he freely red-baited his opponents. He was the only Democratic senator who did not vote to censure Joe McCarthy and he once stormed out of a Harvard meeting in which McCarthy was criticized. It was only later that he began to emphasize liberal policies, after he decided that he needed to win the support of the large liberal constituency of the Democratic Party, the "Stevenson wing" of the party.
The elections for Senate and Presidency are particularly interesting parts of the book. Kennedy appeared to be about as ambitious and determined as it was possible to be. His tactics were pure political hardball. But his running of the presidency was, in Matthews' telling, a very conscientious affair. He really did seem to be determined to make a better world.
The biography is somewhat superficial and subjective but well written and often engaging. M skirts around some of the shadier aspects of K's personality. The womanizing, for example, is stated but totally left alone. Zero details are provided. The hardball politics are superficially described but never really analyzed. There is no reconciliation that I could see of Kennedy's need to dominate with his apparently sincere desire to serve.
Like many people, I would like to be able to sign on to follow in the path of a true leader, a man who could save the country, a man who understood the heart of difficult issues, a man who could be implicitly trusted to do the right and competent thing. I would like to have a man whom I could look up to without reservation. Here in the U.S., some Presidents that I have sometimes seen in that light are Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and Obama. Kennedy has been in and out of that circle too. But in the final analysis I have learned to see men as men, not as saints and maybe not even as sinners. Life is complicated. Nobody can get it all right all of the time. Nobody can live without failures and regrets.
Matthews is a pretty smart man. He's fascinated by Kennedy, but he knows enough not to be a hero worshipper either. His book could have been better and could have been worse.
| Author | Crichton, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 367 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | March 2012 |
Jack Forman was a computer programmer specializing in programming distributed intelligence systems using "swarm" and "evolutionary programming" techniques. He was fired from his job after he discovered that the boss was stealing money from the company. Blacklisted from other employers in the area, he was now a stay at home dad while his wife Julia earned the family income as a vice president for Xymos Industries, a company making nano machines which, Jack was told, were for the purpose of medical imaging.
In fact, the nano particles were being developed for a Defense Department contract that was failing and would bankrupt the company if they did not find a new market as soon as possible. Their fabrication facility in the desert of Nevada was working on it but things have apparently gone very wrong and Jack is hired as a consultant by his old employer to try to help. It turns out they are using a program he wrote called Pred-Prey that uses predator behavior as a model for goal directed intelligence.
The nanoparticles are based on a combination of bacteria and computer technology. They require bacteria for reproduction and parts of their energy conversion, plus computer technology for vision, memory, and swarm behavior. Individually, each particle has only a tiny memory, processing power and intelligence, but they communicate in ways that enable AI to emerge. Sophisticated behavior is not programmed into the particles. It emerges from their coordinated activity in something perhaps like the way it emerges from the coordination of 100 billion or so brain cells in a human.
Naturally, a swarm has gotten loose. It has evolved methods of reproducing outside the factory and is evolving predatory and other behaviors very quickly, showing new behavior in days and even hours.
Jack, with help from the programmer and a biologist at the facility, attempts to battle the swarms. After various hair raising close calls with death, and the actual deaths of several people, Jack and May, the biologist, destroy the swarms with thermite bombs in a cave where they gather for the night. But the battle isn't over. It turns out that Julia and three others at the facility have been taken over by the swarms and are acting as their agents.
There is a final battle at the end with much cliff-hanging and suspense. Jack and May kill the infected people, blow up the plant, and return to California to attempt to disinfect Jack's children and save the world.
There was a lot I liked about this book and a good bit that I didn't like. For me, the technology lessons were a pleasure to read. I didn't know much about distributed intelligence concepts. While I think that the kind of behavior that C posits is in advance, probably quite far in advance, of anything that is likely to be developed in the near future, I nevertheless found a lot of the concepts plausible and well explained. The idea that problems can be solved by programming simple bots and unleashing them to evolve a solution is an intriguing one. It apparently has worked already in some applications and, no doubt, there are many more where it can be applied.
What I disliked was the artificial suspense, often created by having Jack do things that seemed dumb to me. For example, the swarms of nanoparticles can only operate in calm or light winds. Winds above ten mph will blow the swarms apart and they must seek shelter. Jack is outside with a team of four other people when he gets word over his radio that the wind speed is dropping. It's at 12 mph and going lower. Instead of immediately taking his team back to the safety of the sealed fab building, he keeps them out on their task until it is too late and they are cut off. Two are killed, admittedly after panicking and abandoning their safety protocol. Another is almost killed. They are only saved by an unexpected rise in the wind.
There are also some heavy handed foreshadowings. We learn early that there is a problem with a phage, a virus pathogen specific to the bacteria that are part of the swarm. It seemed obvious to me, and should have been obvious to Jack and May, that this could be a weapon against the swarms. But they only think of it near the end.
The whole book is improbable in the extreme but that would be okay with me if C just cut the plot manipulation for purposes of suspense and stuck to a few well defined improbabilities.
He didn't do a bad job. It was an interesting book. I played the last disk in the car while Marcia and I were on our way to the symphony. She hated it as violent, ridiculous, and juvenile. I can't disagree but I like that stuff more than she does.
| Author | McCarthy, Cormac |
|---|---|
| Publication | Alfred A. Knopf, 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 302 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 2012 |
Upon the death of his grandfather, 16 year old John Grady Cole and his year older cousin Lacey Rawlings leave Texas on horseback, crossing the river into Mexico. John Grady's father is divorced from his mother, is sickly and perhaps dying, and the ranch has zero interest for the mother, who sells it. Ranching and riding are the only things that John Grady cares for or ever cared for but there's nothing he can do about it so he leaves for Mexico.
They are joined in Mexico by a kid who is perhaps 13 years old and calls himself John Blevins. He has a beautiful horse and it turns out he's a crack shot with a pistol, but he's childish and difficult to the point of self-destruction. Fearing death by lightning strike in a thunderstorm he removes his clothes, lets his horse go, and hides in the deepest spot he can find, only to find his horse and gun gone when the storm passes. Blevins is a pain in the ass. Lacey wants to abandon him, but John Grady is a responsible caretaker type and he keeps feeding the kid and helping him out. He does it until they discover the current holder of the horse and Blevins stays behind to try to get it back.
John Grady and Lacey move on, stopping eventually at a hacienda where they get work as cowboys. John Grady demonstrates extraordinary skill at breaking and training horses and soon becomes a key man on the ranch, well known to the Hacendado, his aunt, and soon his beautiful seventeen year old daughter.
The inevitable happens. John Grady and the girl wind up in bed together. The aunt saw it coming and the father, when he finds out, is homicidal in his fury. He pays some sort of local police to arrest him. They take him and Rawlings and put them in a truck with Blevins, whom they have caught after he shot the man who had his horse. Driving deep into the desert, they take Blevins out and shoot him and then leave John Grady and Lacey in a horrible prison where they must fight for their lives and where John Grady winds up killing a young cuchillero in a knife fight as the only way to save his own life.
The elderly aunt buys him out of the prison. Deeply scarred, he makes his way back to the ranch, gets his horse, and arranges a meeting with the girl, who tells him they are finished. Her father won't talk to her any more and she cannot go with the boy. He rides out.
In the finale of the book he finds John Blevins horse, and finds the police captain who arrested him and who shot John Blevins. Taking the captain hostage. He is pursued and shot in the leg. He eludes the pursuers and cauterizes the wound with the barrel of a pistol that he shoved into a fire, screaming and almost passing out with the pain, then doing it again on the exit wound. Some riders approach. He doesn't know who they are but they take the captain and let John Grady go. He makes it back to Texas where he is accused of stealing Blevins horse but an honest judge believes his story.
The end finds him much as it did at the beginning. He has no job, no family, no place in the world. But he has come of age, as they like to say in books about books. He is has gone from being a somewhat independent boy to a fully independent man.
I wrote a larger abstract of this book than I normally do so that, if I return to these notes, I will recall all of the parts of the story. It was a story I don't want to forget.
The plot is not very believable but the writing is something to behold. It is mixed English and Spanish with the Spanish usually untranslated but understandable to someone with as little as I have. There are no quotation marks. We have to determine who is speaking by figuring it out from the context. A sentence spoken by one character follows a sentence spoken by another, all in the same paragraph. Punctuation is very sparse. The following is from the book, quotation marks are mine:
"My daddy run off from home when he was fifteen. Otherwise I'd of been born in Alabama."
"You wouldnt of been born at all. What makes you say that? Cause your mama's from San Angelo and he never would of met her. He'd of met somebody. So would she. So? So you wouldnt of been born. I dont see why you say that. I'd of been born somewheres. How? Well why not? If your mama had a baby with her other husband and your daddy had one with his other wife which one would you be? I wouldnt be neither of em. That's right. Rawlins lay watching the stars. After a while he said: I could still be born. I might look different or somethin. If God wanted me to be born I'd be born. And if He didnt you wouldnt. You're makin my goddamn head hurt. I know it. I'm makin my own."
The book is in turn comic, tragic, and mythic. The people are often stereotypes. Just when the reader settles in for a comic romp everything turns deadly serious and we wonder if we misunderstood the intent of the book.
Through it all however are the themes of courage, honesty, self-reliance, concern for others. And then there are the horses. Beautiful, skittish, loved and loving, deeply understood and appreciated by John Grady. They are a constant value, almost a great gift to the boy and to us all.
This book made a significant impression on me. It is an important American novel.
This is the first book I read by McCarthy. Since then I read The Road with the NCI book group. I think the two books had a similar style and treatment - independent, resourceful, courageous men, dealing with life as they found it, surviving in a hostile world. It's a world stripped to bare essentials - no books, no art, no association between people except at a primitive level. It makes me think that McCarthy imagines the world as we see it to be a fragile superstructure over a real world of primitive forces and man against man. Boys who have courage, intelligence, and luck may manage to become men, but it's a hard fight to do so and there is no guarantee of success.
That's not the world I live in, but perhaps McCarthy's vision of life still has some reality to it in the same way that hard scrabble rocks and dirt are real even if, when we see them, they are completely covered with a soft and green coating of grass, bushes, and trees.
| Author | Follett, Ken |
|---|---|
| Publication | Signet, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Extras | Excerpt from Follett novel Hornet Flight. |
| Genres | Fiction; War |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 2012 |
The novel opens in Reims where Dieter Franck, a sophisticated German intelligence officer, at a cafe with his beautiful French mistress outside the local Gestapo headquarters and telephone exchange, blunders into an attack by the resistance movement against the building. The communications center is the main link between German forces in France and in Germany. Destroying it before D-Day will interrupt vital communications just when they are most needed.
The attack is defeated. Most of the resistance people are killed. Three are captured. Only a few escape, including Michel, the local resistance leader, Flick Clairet, his wife and agent from London, and Gilberte, a pretty girl with whom Michel is having an affair.
The rest of the novel revolves around Flick and Dieter. Flick escapes back to London where she persuades the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to launch another attack. Destroying the telephone exchange will interrupt communications just as the D-Day assault lands in France. This time, she proposes an all female team, posing as cleaning women, to perform the attack.
Dieter, working with the stupid and venal local Gestapo chief Weber and his torturer Becker, torture the captured partisans and begin to gradually unravel the local resistance organization. Dieter is convinced they can roll up the entire French resistance if they capture Flick.
Flick meanwhile has no time to assemble and fully train a team of female saboteurs. The few trained women in SOE are already in France or committed to other projects. So she assembles a motley group containing a self-centered aristocrat who is a crack shot, an explosives expert and safe cracker, a convict accused of murder, a male German transvestite communications engineer, and a foolish young lesbian woman who falls under the spell of the aristocrat and eventually causes both of them to be captured and presumably tortured to death.
The story proceeds in cliff hanger fashion. Flick's group gets closer to their target. Dieter gets closer to Flick. The saboteurs discover some of the traps set for them. Dieter lays new traps and captures more people. And so on, right up to the end when what all of us desire occurs - though not without losses.
Follett is good at this kind of writing. He's not great. There are really only two rounded characters in the entire long novel, Flick and Dieter, who are anything other than simple and flat. However, Dieter is well portrayed as something more than the mindless brutes like Weber and Becker. He even has a conscience of sorts and actually cares about his French mistress. Flick also has a bit of depth to her.
Some of the plot elements are not as convincing. Most of all, I didn't fully believe in the story that the building could not have been destroyed by bombing - though admittedly innocent people in the town might have been killed.
All in all, it is standard thriller fare. Nothing great, but still satisfying.
| Author | O'Brian, Patrick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audiobooks |
| Copyright Date | 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | April 2012 |
The second book in the series after Master and Commander opens with Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin captured by a French privateer. They escape in a rather ridiculous and completely unbelievable scheme in which Aubrey wears a bear costume and Maturin pretends to be a bear trainer. They make it back to England to find that peace has been declared. Aubrey, counting on a large prize award, borrows money and rents a big country house where he is pursued by the local unmarried girls, Sophie, the sweet, proper, and good hearted girl, and Diana, the poorer relation with big ambitions. Stephen also falls for Diana. But Jack's prize money doesn't come through and he cannot pay his bills. He goes on the run with a warrant for his arrest for debt, and a fear of ever coming ashore.
He is assigned to command the experimental ship Polycrest, a terrible sailor originally designed to hold a big weapon that failed. But in spite of her awful sea keeping and sailing properties, her weak and leaking construction, and her short range carronades, he manages to pursue and destroy the famous French privateer that captured him before. He is finally made Post Captain, a rank that qualifies him to command a frigate or above and affords him a pension when he retires. He is then assigned to be temporary commander of the frigate Lively in which, at the end of the book, he captures a Spanish treasure galleon and, presumably, will become a rich man.
There is a connected story in this novel but it proceeds in separate and partly self-contained episodes. Action and adventure are not the principal goals of the story. There are scenes where we expect a big fight but the enemy surrenders and other scenes where the focus is on Stephen's bee colony or his night at the opera or his meetings with Sophie or Diana - the former in love with Jack, the latter pursued by both Jack and Stephen and mistreating both of them.
The characters are over the top. Stephen is a naturalist but his bringing a bee colony on board ship is certainly over the top, as is Jack's tolerance of it. Realism in the characters of the two leading actors does not seem to be all that important to O'Brian. What is important is O's remarkable command of the art, the science, and the history of sailing. I thought that some of the scenes in C.S. Forester's Hornblower series were marvelous descriptions of sailing, and indeed they were. They may also have had more of the writer's art in them than O's sailing scenes. But no one I have read has outdone O in his technical knowledge. It's a remarkable work in that respect.
I was never as fully drawn in to the characters as I was with Hornblower. I was never as convinced by them. But I found the book more interesting than the previous one and will probably read another.
| Author | Fick, Nathaniel |
|---|---|
| Publication | Mariner Books, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Iraq; Afghanistan |
| When Read | April 2012 |
After graduating Dartmouth in 1999 Fick, a college athlete and classics major, decided to join the Marine Corps. He wanted to challenge himself and prove himself to himself. This memoir, written just after he left the Corps, recounts his experiences in training, then in Afghanistan, and in the invasion of Iraq.
Fick was determined to become a Marine's Marine, an infantry officer able to lead men in combat. Only one out of six Marine officers were assigned to lead infantry. The rest worked in artillery, logistics, transport, administration, and so on. To be an infantry officer you had to pass every test and show yourself to be physically and mentally among the elite. To do that required reaching an exceptional standard of physical fitness, psychological fitness, and operational skill. Fick achieved it by giving everything to the job. It seems that he addressed every task with a do or die attitude. He memorized his training assignments. He thought hard about every skill he was taught and attempted to apply all of his intellect to solving every problem. He trained hard and faced every task from parachuting to swimming with a determination to succeed. Sent for swim training he was ordered to lift 25 pounds from the bottom of the pool but when he got to the surface he was hit with water from a fire hose, forcing him down. By the third time he passed out and was pulled from the water, but he was still holding the 25 pound weight.
He was on a ship heading across the Pacific when the news arrived about the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. His platoon wound up in Afghanistan where they participated in the early effort to overthrow the Taliban and catch Al Qaeda members. The did very little fighting but did get their first taste of combat
Then came Iraq. Leading a recon platoon that operated more or less independently, mounted on five Humvees with two 50 caliber machine guns and two M19 automatic grenade launchers, his unit ranged around the main force, protecting flanks, going into fedayeen held towns, scouting ahead, and so on. They wound up in a number of firefights and, although their opposing forces were inferior in equipment, training, air, and artillery support, the Marines got pretty good at accomplishing their missions.
The unit fought right through to Baghdad, then continued on occupation duty for a short period before being withdrawn back to Kuwait. Fick was sent back to the U.S. where he was promoted to Captain. However he had had enough. He had done what he set out to do. He could kill, but he was not a killer and didn't want to kill any more. He left the Corps and went back to school. As of this writing he has an MBA from Harvard and an MPA from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He's now a successful man in various organizations.
Fick is a very good writer. One suspects that he's very good at everything he sets his mind to do. He has a great deal of discipline and he appears to have a thoroughgoing intellectual honesty that enables him to face facts squarely and not deceive himself. I expect he will go very far, perhaps as a politician or in some other very public capacity.
After reading the first part of the book I imagined that the Marine Corps was an organization of supermen like Fick, and that any enemy who faced them would be conquered. But the second part of the book, the part that showed Marines in actual combat, wasn't the same. Fick shows us commanders who were vain and foolish, giving orders that violated all military doctrine and would have gotten more men killed if the Iraqis hadn't been so incompetent. Skilled as they were, the FUBAR principle well described in the Second World War still applied.
This was a very interesting book. I read it in part for itself and in part to gain more insight into the world of my father, who was a Marine in WWII.
| Author | Grisham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Law |
| When Read | April 2012 |
I thought I was listening to the entire book - though it seemed short to me. Then, when I got to the end, the narrator mentioned that this was an abridged version. Argghh! I hate when they do that. Every once in a while I fall into that trap.
David Zinc, a young associate at one of Chicago's biggest corporate law firms has had enough. Unable to stand the insane work schedule and the terrorization of the young attorneys in the firm, he impulsively walks out, gets drunk, and shows up at the door of the first law firm he saw advertised - Finley and Figg, a pair of shopworn divorce lawyers and ambulance chasers at a rundown office in southwest Chicago. Impressed by him, they take him in at a salary of $1,000 a month and a share of whatever business he can bring in.
Oscar Finley is a 62 year old who hates his wife of 30 some years but can't afford to divorce her. Wally Figg is a 45 year old, already divorced four times, who is constantly scheming to get new business in any way he can, from advertising no fault divorces at bait and switch prices on the backs of Bingo cards, to advertising on buses.
One day Figg reads about problems with the wildly popular cholesterol drug Krayoxx and calls all the firm's clients to find cases. Working fast, before other lawyers learn about this, he finds and signs up eight people whose spouses or parents died of heart attacks and took Krayoxx. He hooks up with a giant tort firm in Florida that will do the actual work while he just racks up a percentage of the take. Unfortunately, it all goes south when it turns out that the drug is really okay, the tort firm backs out, and Figg is now in Federal court with Zinc, facing Zinc's old law firm's top litigator, hired by the drug's maker to smash them. And smash them they do. Finley has a heart attack and goes to the hospital. Figg, seeing what he's facing and the huge financial losses goes on a drunk bender, and David Zinc, who has never even been in a courtroom before is left to handle the case and do the best he can.
Meanwhile, Figg has been pursuing another case, using his own savings, he has followed up on a child who appears to have been severely brain damaged by a "Nasty Teeth" toy that was painted with lead paint. He eventually discovers that they were made by a Chinese company and sold by another company which was bought by the third largest toy manufacturer in the country. Zinc hits them with a lawsuit threat and gets them to cave in and pay $6.5 million, $1.5M of which goes to Zinc. He splits the money with Finley and Figg, even though he doesn't have to, and transforms the firm. They don't really have it in them to do this and they eventually leave. David starts his own boutique tort firm and begins a big, successful career, starting with secret cases given him by the toy company to torpedo their competitors.
This is the kind of book I most liked from Grisham. It's full of inside insights into the sleaze of law practices - which applies up and down the food chain from the bottom feeders Finley and Figg, to the 600 lawyer downtown law firm hired by sleazy drug companies. I hope to remember what I read here if I ever think about suing anyone or participating in a lawsuit.
| Author | Cussler, Clive |
|---|---|
| Author | Dirgo, Craig |
| Publication | Putnam Berkley Audio, 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 423 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Maritime |
| When Read | April 2012 |
Cussler created the National Underwater and Marine Agency, NUMA, named for the fictional government agency described in his Dirk Pitt novels, to find lost underwater wrecks. His book sales are the biggest source of funds for the group which, at the time of writing this book, had engaged in 159 searches, including 67 successes. This book, a follow on to his first Sea Hunters book describes a number of the searches.
The wrecks include one of La Salle's sailing ships with which he attempted to discover the mouth of the Mississippi River; a Civil War cruiser sunk in Charleston harbor, the ghost ship Mary Celeste, abandoned by her crew that thought she was sinking, the crew was lost but the ship floated on and was salvaged and put back into service; a New York harbor cruise boat, lost to a fire in 1904 in harbor waters with over 1,000 people drowned; the "White Bird" in which Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli died in their attempt to win the Paris-New York non-stop flight prize in 1927; the Carpathian, the ship that rescued the Titanic survivors in 1912 and was sunk by a German submarine in 1918; and the PT-109, John F. Kennedy's torpedo boat, sunk in 1943.
In each story, Cussler first tells the story of the loss of the vessel. These stories are dramatized, often offering purely conjectural versions of events which could not possibly be known and are certainly invented. But they're interesting and, if not accurate, nevertheless give some idea of what the lost souls are likely to have faced in their final hours. Then follows the attempt to find the wreck. Some of the searches are successful. Some are not.
NUMA does not hunt buried treasure, does not salvage anything, and turns over all of its finds to historical societies and museums. They usually get some agreement about what will happen to the wreck before they search for it, in order to insure that there will be a home for the wreck, or more likely just artifacts from it, if the search is successful. Careful steps are taken to hide what they find from treasure hungers. The goals are purely to preserve the history of these people and ships, and to have a lot of fun doing it. Cussler says at the end of the book that he hopes that on his death bed, taking his last few gasps of air, a buxom blond nurse will lean over him and hand him a telephone. It is a call from his banker telling him that his account is overdrawn by $10.
This was a delightful book. Although Cussler doesn't specifically say that he's making stuff up, I didn't mind a bit. His dramatizations are interesting and fun.
Once again, I believe that I've been blindsided by the abridgers. Nothing in the recording I listened to talked about an abridgment, but the reviews on amazon.com talk about hunting for a dirigible, which I didn't have in my edition, and about a Civil War naval battle on the Mississippi. Perhaps the full edition had more information about the dramatization that Cussler engaged in.
Looking it up further, I find reference to an abridged edition.
Once again, Arrrghh.
| Author | Ghosh, Amitav |
|---|---|
| Publication | Grand Haven, MI: Brilliance Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 521 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | May 2012 |
The story opens in 1838 with a ship, the Ibis, carrying prisoners to Madagascar, passing through a storm. A number of the prisoners escape and their stories lead us into the main story of Bahram Modi, an Indian businessman who has made his fortune in the trade transporting opium from India to Canton China.
Bahram came from a respectable but financially ruined family. After marrying the daughter of a wealthy ship builder, he was given the funds to begin and expand his own small trading business. He was wildly successful but was belittled by his brothers-in-law, treated somewhat coolly by his wife, and, when his father-in-law died, began to feel less and less attachment to his wife's family. He had another family in Canton. He formed an attachment to a laundress and cook on a sampan and fathered a child by her. She never moved in with him, but he loved her and their son in a way that went beyond anything he felt for his Indian family. He spent more and more of his time in Canton. When 1838 came around, his father-in-law had died, he had his own ship, and he mortgaged everything he had, raised all of the cash he could borrow, attracted all of the investors that he could attract, and invested all of it in one last, huge, shipment of opium to Canton. When it was sold he would be set for life and could do as he pleased.
But changes were happening in China. The emperor, having hated the opium trade ever since it got big, sent a new commissioner to Canton charged to end it. The commissioner rounded up all of the Chinese engaged in the trade, threatened them, executed one (a man well known to Bahram ever since the Chinese had been a boy running errands for him), and demanded the destruction of all of the opium on the ships in the harbor.
Bahram is unable to sell his opium but cannot take it back to India either, where a bumper crop has caused the price to crash. He is stuck. He throws in his lot with the aggressive and hypocritical Englishmen who are determined to resist the commissioners demands and justify it with loud humbug about free trade and tyranny, but they do not succeed and they all must turn over their cargoes. The British government will backup the Englishmen and eventually force the Chinese to pay for the opium, but it is not clear whether Bahram will be able to participate in this gunboat deal.
A host of minor characters and plots swirl through the book. The most important ones are of the half-Indian half-English painter, Robert Chinnery, who writes letters to the young Paulette Lambert (Puggly dear), a childhood friend, and also the story of Neel, a friend of Ah Fatt, Bahram's Chinese son and Neel's fellow escapee from the Ibis. Chinnery falls in love with a young male Chinese painter in Canton and sees from the outside all of the events that involve Bahram and the whole foreign community of opium traders. Chinnery's entire story is told in the many letters, which are both refreshingly different from the increasingly depressing story of Bahram, and also a little annoying in his expansive exuberance.
This is the second book of a trilogy, the first of which was Sea of Poppies. I haven't read that book but will if I get a chance.
As with The Glass Palace, River of Smoke is a marvel of multiculturalism. The book is filled with Indian and Chinese words and who knows what else, used in ways that are transparent enough to be understood by the English speaking reader. He is wonderful at conveying the sense of a language, from the Chinese who is asked how things are going and answers, "Same same", to various Indian and English expressions. There is even a meeting between Bahram and his Arab/Persian/Egyptian/whatever friend with Napoleon on St. Helena when Bahram was a young man.
I was far into the novel before I realized that "River of Smoke" did not refer to mists on the Pearl River but to the smoking of opium that was the result of the trade on that river.
I liked this book quite a lot. I liked the serious politics that many readers deplored as detracting from the novel. I liked the character of Bahram even while recognizing that he was engaged in an evil trade. It is a marvelous book.
| Author | Isaacson, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster, 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 656 |
| Genres | Biography |
| When Read | May 2012 |
This is the story of Steve Jobs, founder with Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer and author or mid-wife of multiple revolutions in technology and business, including computers (Apple II, MacIntosh, iMac, and following products), animated movies (Toy Story, etc. at Pixar), smart phones (iPhone), music players (iPod), tablet computer (iPad), retail computer stores (Apple stores), and music and book marketing (iTunes).
Born out of wedlock in 1955 to a Michigan woman and a Syrian grad student, he was given away for adoption in California and raised by Paul and Clara Jobs, decent, hard working, people who loved him and raised him well, putting up with his obsessions and shenanigans and doing the best for him that they could. Dropping out of college, he worked with his older, brilliant, nerdy, child-like friend Wozniak to build the Apple and then create a business around it. Woz did the brilliant engineering. Jobs did the brilliant marketing and promotion to turn it into a wildly successful product and company.
Jobs greatest strength was his obsession with product design, and his single minded perfectionism. He had no interest in making more money by selling worse products. Everything had to be as absolutely perfect as he could make it, including the shape and color of the computer cases, the beauty of the circuit board layout - even if the case was sealed and couldn't be opened by the customer. When he built a factory to produce "NeXT" computers, he demanded a spotlessly clean floor and obsessed endlessly on the color of the robots that assembled the systems. He wanted anyone walking into that factory to be tremendously impressed and he himself spent hours just watching his robots make computers (though the factory was a financial failure, it was designed to produce 10,000 machines a month but only 400 a month were sold.)
Another of his obsessions was simplicity. Mp3 players were too complicated, had too many buttons, were too hard to sync with computers, and required too much difficulty in procuring music. Jobs built the iPod that synced seamlessly with the iMac computer and downloaded songs easily from the iTunes store, all without requiring the user to learn command sequences. He even automated the selection of what to play next with the "iPod shuffle", that played random songs from the stored collection rather than requiring the owner to frequently fiddle with his play lists.
Jobs was very much a "black and white kind of guy", as an old friend of mine once called himself. Everything was either great, or it sucked. Every person he worked with was either an 'A' player, or an incompetent. The same people, products, and designs could move from one category to the other based on his mood. He could be a real bastard (in the figurative sense, he was also a "bastard" in the literal sense.) He could treat people badly, go back on his word, negotiate fiercely, and take risks that most mere mortals would have been unable to take. He surrounded himself with what his associates called his "reality distortion field". He attempted to will what he wanted into existence. When his team told him they would be two weeks late getting a product ready he just refused to believe it and had everyone work day and night to meet the deadline, often succeeding in ways that no one but he believed were possible. This stood him in good stead as a product designer and manufacturer but was catastrophic when it came to dealing with some personal problems, especially including his pancreatic cancer.
Jobs was a terrible finicky eater and a vegan. When diagnosed with cancer he refused the operation that might have saved his life in spite of insistent and unwavering advice from top doctors and scientists. He was going to beat the cancer with diet and alternative therapies. Only later, when it spread, did he get the surgery. By then it was too late. He may have gotten the best treatment of any cancer patient in the world, including a complete $100,000 sequencing of his normal genome and the genome of his tumors in order to apply novel targeted therapies. He was probably kept alive for some years longer than would otherwise have been the case, but in the end he succumbed and was killed by it. But he never withdrew from his passion. At his death he was still planning to make a revolution in televisions as he had done for computers and all of the rest.
This was a magnificent biography. Isaacson had complete access to Jobs and to everyone who knew him. Jobs never asked to read the manuscript. He wanted his life to be preserved as it was. He wanted the naked truth to come out. What emerged was not complimentary to Jobs as a man. He could be a real asshole - to his partners, his workers, his girlfriends, his first daughter and to others. He would routinely insult cooks and waiters in restaurants and walk out flaming away about the inedible shit being sold as food. But he was also a powerhouse of productive creativity. He did not engineer the devices. He didn't have the ability to do that. He engineered the user interfaces, the external design, the functionality. At that, he was brilliant - always demanding greater simplicity, greater ease of use, greater integration, and greater visual appeal.
As of this writing, I see 1,407 reviews of this book on Amazon. I understand that the book has been translated into Chinese and many other languages and is a runaway best seller in China and elsewhere. Millions of young people are reading it and resolving to be like Steve Jobs.
The man was phenomenal in his way, and the book is a real phenomenon too.
Would a million Steve Jobs wannabes be a net gain or a net loss for the world? I fear that the result would be 100 successful innovators and entrepreneurs and 999,900 inconsiderate, insufferable, people who would antagonize everyone around them and would probably offer a net zero change in economic productivity with a big negative influence on workplace satisfaction.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Grand Central Publishing, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Cadfael |
| When Read | May 2012 |
In 1137, Prior Robert of the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul in Shrewsbury England, stimulated by the vision and miraculous recovery of young brother Columbanus who claims to have been visited by St. Winifred, determines to bring the saint's bones from Gwytherin in Wales to Shrewsbury for proper veneration at the abbey. Blessed by church and state, he sets off with Columbanus, John, Jerome, Richard, and the herbalist and medic Brother Cadfael, the only person at the abbey who is fluent in Welsh and is therefore needed as an interpreter.
It turns out however that the good folk of Gwytherin aren't eager to give up their saint. It's true that they never venerated her and pretty much ignored her grave, but that doesn't mean that a bunch of high handed Englishmen should come and take her. The local man Rhisiart leads the local people in opposition to the move. Prior Robert's attempt to pressure the man with threats of church and state, followed by an attempt to bribe him, only cause him to dig in his heels and refuse.
Then Rhisiart is murdered. It appears at first that Engelard, a young Englishman working for Rhisiart and pursuing the hand of his daughter Sioned, is responsible, but Cadfael never believes that. He wins the trust of the local people and Sioned. He first proves that Engelard was not the killer, then establishes that Sioned's other suitor, Peredur, who found the body and attempted to direct the blame onto Engelard, was also not the killer. Ultimately he discovers that Columbanus, the seeming sanctimonious fool, the man who appeared to be subject to fits and visions, was the real killer. He hoped to establish holy credentials for himself that would enable him to move up in the church hierarchy.
Engelard fights Columbanus as the friar attempts to get away and inadvertently kills him. Cadfael then switches the bodies, putting Columbanus in the coffin intended for Winifred, and putting Winifred back in her grave. He puts Columbanus' empty clothing on the floor of the shrine, as if he had been taken straight to heaven, which he had publicly prayed to be able to do. He then prevails on Sioned and Engelard to just keep quiet and let everybody think that all is well. So it is done. All is well. Brother John stays in Wales and marries the serving girl Annest. Engelard marries Sioned. Cadfael goes back to his gardening and herbarium.
This is the first of what would eventually become twenty Brother Cadfael stories. Cadfael seems fully formed and in fine fettle.
Ellis Peters, one of the pseudonyms for Edith Pargeter, was a fine writer with a most humane outlook on life and on people. Her books are very easy to like and her character is what we would hope for in a monk, or a doctor, or a friend. I always enjoy her books.
I wrote down the entire plot here. Anyone reading it after I am gone may wish that I hadn't, but that's they're problem, not mine. I have found in going over old book notes that I often left out the ending because I thought my notes might be published some time, but I didn't remember the ending myself.
| Author | Lacey, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Old Saybrook, CT: Tantor Media, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 404 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Terrorism |
| When Read | May 2012 |
Until Juhayman al-Otaybi and his radical Islamist gunmen took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia was making a slow but noticeable transition to the twentieth century. Juhayman and his group that "commanded the good and prohibited evil" successfully changed that. After the shootout with heavy casualties that finally dislodged and killed or captured him and all of his fanatics, the ruling family decided never again to be out-Islamed by radicals from the right. They adopted the policies of oppression of women, suppression of popular culture, restriction of civil rights, and others demanded by the most conservative Wahabi Imams and ideologists. Religious police were given money and free reign to terrorize people on the street. Women were forced out of key teaching positions, television, newspapers and even the driving of cars. Women found on the street unescorted were subject to beatings and persecutions. Religion became the most important subject in the schools and many Saudi college graduates were completely unable to find jobs because their training in Koranic studies did nothing to prepare them for the workforce.
Of course none of this applied to the royal family. They were free to pick up bundles of cash, preempt seats on the national airline from legitimate ticket purchasers, and fly to Europe or the U.S. to engage in shopping, drinking, gambling, whoring, and whatever else pleased them, all at public expense.
It took several more high profile events to shock Saudi Arabia enough that King Abdullah bin Abdulazis Al Saud, who came to power in 1998, could begin to counter this trend. One was a fire in a girls school in 2002 in which religious police barred the doors and beat girls who were emerging from the burning building without proper veils, and blocked firemen from entering. 15 girls burned to death and many more were injured. Another was the Al Qaida bombing attacks inside the country that convinced ordinary citizens that those fine, upstanding and religious young men who attacked the World Trade Center were actually crazy terrorists, not heroes. Still another was a widely publicized case of rape where the raped woman was condemned for having once had a boyfriend before her marriage, which must have had something to do with the rapists' belief that she was a fallen woman who brought this on herself.
The latest king and his appointees, almost all from within the family, have instituted many new policies. A surprising one was a liberal prison administration in which Guantanamo detainees transferred to Saudi Arabia were given comfortable prison quarters, good food, assistance for their families and, when they were released, a car and financial assistance to help them get married. The theory was that comfortable, married men don't engage in Jihad. Poor, sexually frustrated bachelors are the main recruits for extremism. There has also been a new emphasis on religious tolerance, mostly of other tendencies within Islam, but this is still a very new thing in Saudi Arabia.
But there is no mistaking the character or the culture of the country. Girls meet men who they think are decent and caring only to find that the men change completely after the marriage, treating their wives as servants, sexual slaves, and virtual prisoners. Women still find comfort and release in female friends and in lesbianism, expecting little from their husbands. Careers, civil rights, freedom from the tyranny of the religious police, and so on are all still far from ideal. Democracy is still only a dream. Foreign workers still do most of the serious labor, including a lot of the intellectual labor in the economy, and are still treated badly. [I read a story in the news today about women brought to Saudi Arabia for domestic work and winding up raped, pregnant, and sent home, while men are worked to death in the hot sun and sent back in caskets with ridiculous stories that they committed suicide or died some other way.] There is a huge way to go before the kingdom emerges into the modern world and there are many powerful forces opposing that emergence.
Lacey also has much to say about the Saudi-American relationship. He considers that George Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld completely brushed off the advice of the Saudis not to invade Iraq and were surprised at the reaction - which included the removal of American airbases in Saudi Arabia, and the turning of the kingdom to Britain and China to purchase weapons and other goods, including a 40 billion dollar aircraft purchase from Britain that would otherwise have gone to the U.S. Bush tried to repair the damage but wasn't very good at it. We don't know yet how well Obama will do, but he appears to have done much better in the few months he was in office before this book came out.
This is really a fascinating book with much more depth to its investigation than I expected. Lacey has interviewed many key people both in the royal family and among the liberals, "seculars" and critics of it. He lived for some years in the country and worked there as a journalist.
Juhayman al-Otaybi's attack on the Grand Mosque occurred in November, 1979 and he was executed for it in 1980. The reaction of the Saudi rulers to co-opt religious extremism benefited them in the short run but looks like it's going to hurt them in the long run as the madrasas that they financed all over the Islamic world multiply the numbers of ignorant and fanatic fundamentalists who oppose them. U.S. Republicans take note. Cozying up to the Christian right and the gun owners may not have the long term effect that you intend.
| Author | Clement, Hal (Henry Clement Stubbs) |
|---|---|
| Publication | Victor Gollancz SF |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 202 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 2012 |
The planet Mesklin is a huge flattened elipsoid, rotating once every 18 minutes, and generating a gravitational force of 700 G at the poles and 3 G at the equator. A human scientific mission to this planet landed a two billion dollar [sounded like more in 1953 than today] unmanned laboratory at one of the poles to study extreme high gravity physics, but lost contact with it. The scientists want to recover the data from the mission but no human could withstand the gravity. So they have contacted a Mesklinite sea captain named Barlennan, and have arranged for him and his crew to head for the pole to retrieve the information.
The Mesklinites are portrayed as extremely strong and tough creatures, about 15 inches long, with many sucker feet and with crab like pincers. Their ship is a collection of small, independent rafts, bound together with rope, and powered by sails. They have met a human, Lackland, near the equator, where he is able to tolerate the 3 G gravity. He has taught the captain to speak English and provided him with a radio/television receiver transmitter to enable communication as Barlennan and his crew make a fabulous voyage up into the northern hemisphere, across a land barrier, down a long ocean, through hostile nations of rock rollers, canoe people, people with gliders, and then back into the high gravity part of the world and eventually to the south pole where, after many travails and much ingenuity, both human and Mesklin, they succeed in recovering the data. Once it has been actually recovered, Barlennan ups his price, demanding that the humans teach him and those of his crew who can understand, the science that humans have used to do all of these marvelous things that the Mesklinites never dreamed were possible.
As a simple adventure story, this book is not bad, but what really distinguishes it is the science it teaches. At every stage, the humans must figure out weather patterns, sea states, material strengths, the impact of high G, high rotation, low temperature, and other factors that the Mesklinites never dreamed could be understood systematically. They are educated and so are we into, not much of the science itself, but into an understanding of the powers of science, of the essential understandability of the universe.
Clement was a Harvard graduate who became a high school science teacher. He had a good understanding not only of science, but also of the naive view that an intelligent young person, or an intelligent Mesklinite, might have when faced with complex phenomena. The book is a real tribute to science and to the people who study and master it.
I also liked the characters in the book. Barlennan was the main character and Lackland the next most important. Then there were several minor Mesklinite and human characters playing roles. All of them were the kinds of people (if I may call the Mesklinites people) whom one would like to know, and whom one would trust to do hard tasks.
It was an interesting book.
| Author | Harris, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | BBC Audiobooks, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 375 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | May 2005 |
English-American historian Christopher "Fluke" Kelso is in Moscow for a conference on the opening of records to western historians. An old man named Papu Rapava, former guard and driver for Lavrenty Beria, the head of the NKVD, tells him a story about Stalin's notebook, stolen by Beria the night of Stalin's stroke, and buried in a place that only Papu knows about. Unable to resist this story, Kelso pursues it to the house where the notebook was supposedly buried, to the home of Stalinist leader Mamentov, to Papu's daughter the part time prostitute and part time law student Zinaida.
Working with American reporter R.J. O'Brian, a man who exploits Kelso to get a story at any price but who also provides money and resources to pursue the story, the two get the notebook from Zinaida and discover that it was written by a young girl who worked as a maid for Stalin. They drive through night and snow from Moscow to Archangel to try to find the girl. There they learn that she died in childbirth but her son is living somewhere in a forest village a couple of hours away. They track him down and find a latter day Stalin. He looks like his father. He was brought up by a small group of strict NKVD Stalinist believers. He was educated with incessant readings and memorizations of Stalin's works. Like his father he is dangerous, paranoid and crazy.
The modern secret police are on the trail and have sent three Speznaz killers to pick off the younger Stalin and, who knows, probably kill Kelso and O'Brian too. But Stalin is too clever for them and kills all three of the killers. Kelso and O'Brian escape him but find that, without understanding any of the deeper issues, they have actually been pawns of Mamentov, who plans to restore the USSR with the new Stalin at its head. At the end it is only Zinaida, with her father's pistol, who can stop them.
Robert Harris is a remarkable writer, equally at home in British and Russian current events, the ancient Rome of Cicero, and the development of Nazism as in Fatherland. I like all of his books. In this one he manages to cast a lot of light on Russian politics and history, on academic life and conceits, and on journalism, while telling a remarkable edge of the chair story.
| Author | Sakey, Marcus |
|---|---|
| Publication | St. Martin's Press, 2007 |
| Number of Pages | viii, 307 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 2012 |
Danny Carter and his boyhood friend Evan McGann set out to rob a pawnshop in Chicago. Danny is a planner and has it all figured out. But Evan is out of control. He brings a gun. He insists not only on breaking into the office and stealing the money, but going into the shop and looking for drugs that the owner is reputed to sell. He takes too much time and too many risks. The owner walks in on them with a woman and a gun and Evan shoots them both. Danny walks away while Even continues to search for drugs until the cops come and arrest him. He is sentenced to 12 years but doesn't reveal Danny's role. Danny, shaken, decides he's had it with a life of crime. He becomes a construction worker, then a supervisor, and settles down with Karen, a woman with whom he is deeply in love and whom he has promised he will never ever get into "the game" again.
Then Evan gets out on parole after seven years. His very first act is to buy a steak dinner, then go to the bathroom, casually smash an old man's head into the wall, take his wallet, his keys, and his car, buy some stuff with the man's credit cards, then buy a ticket to Florida with the credit card and throws the card and ticket into the trash. He's extremely violent, all muscle and steel wire, and is instinctively cool and ready for anything.
Evan finds Danny, claims that Danny owes him for taking the fall and not talking, demands that Danny help him kidnap Danny's boss' 12 year old son, and threatens to hurt Karen if he doesn't get his way. Danny tries to go to Sean Nolan, a cop that he knew from his old neighborhood, but Nolan doesn't trust Danny and Danny can't tell him the whole story. He walks out and decides he'll do this thing, then he and Evan will be quits and everything will return to normal. He hates it, but he fears for Karen and he's not immune to the thought of getting half of the half million they decided to ask for the boy.
Of course Evan is, if anything, even more out of control than he was when Danny knew him as a childhood friend. Danny makes plan after plan but Evan does what he wants - sometimes planning it, sometimes just making it up as he goes along. At one point he calls the father of the kidnapped kid from a too public phone, because he felt like it. When an unsuspecting fellow walks by the phone and may have heard something, Evan casually follows him out to his car, kills him by smashing him in the throat with his fist with keys between the fingers, and dumps him in the trunk of his car, all while his girl friend watches in shocked horror.
Danny is determined to hold everything together but it is impossible. Karen knows he's up to something. Evan is doing much more than Danny ever bargained for. Danny's resentment of his boss' wealthy lifestyle and casual disregard of the construction workers can no longer justify what is happening. He's got to stop Evan and he determines to do it without the police. He's convinced that Evan will kill the boy and the father, and when he takes Karen, Karen too. Convinced that the cops will barge in and everyone will die, he resolves to give his own life if necessary to make everything right.
There is a final confrontation at the end with everybody present, including Nolan, who has been following Danny.
This book apparently created quite a stir when it was published. My personal view is that it was an excellent mystery/thriller. I felt on the edge of my seat the whole time and often could only read one chapter before I had to stop and do something else to calm down.
Many other readers felt the same way, but some Amazon reviewers felt just the opposite. They regarded Danny as a dumbass who should have understood from the beginning that kidnapping a child wasn't the way to go. They read the book shouting at Danny to not be so stupid. Others thought that the book was completely predictable, the characters completely forced, and the writing boring.
I too found myself shouting at Danny but I was more willing to go along with Sakey. Danny was not an intellectual. Evan was his best friend growing up and the two had a long history together. The life of crime was not alien to Danny. He still had another childhood friend, Patrick (who confronted Evan and was killed by him) who was still living the life of a criminal. Although he was determined to go straight, he was not immune to the appeal of pulling off a big heist and not totally immune to Evan's demands for assistance. So I accepted the characters and the premise, at least to the point of becoming involved in the story.
I may read others of Sakey's books.
| Author | Stockman, James R., Captain, USMC |
|---|---|
| Publication | Historical Section, Division of Public Information, Headquarters U.S. Marine Corps |
| Copyright Date | 1947 |
| Number of Pages | 86 |
| Extras | photos, maps, bibliography, appendices |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | May 2012 |
Transcribed and formatted by Patrick Clancy and posted on the web by the HyperWar Foundation
The short book tells the day by day story of the battle for Tarawa Atoll that took place on November 20-24, 1943. After preliminary air and naval bombardments units of the 2nd Marine Division embarked in amphibious tractors to cross the reefs around Betio island, Tarawa Atoll to land on the beach. They were to be followed by a second wave in boats that were to cross the reef at the moment of highest tide.
The attack did not go as planned. Japanese resistance was very strong, starting at the water's edge. Numbers of the amphibians were disabled or sunk by gunfire or mines. The attack was held up. Boats could not cross the reef. A great many of the men were forced to wade ashore, laden with weapons and equipment, across a clear field of fire, sometimes stepping into deeper spots where some drowned. When they reached the beach there was little cover. Forward progress was measured in yards. For the entire first day and most of the second, there was no protected path to the beaches and all reinforcements and desperately needed supplies were brought in under fire using open boats, wading, and a steadily dwindling number of amphibians. It was not until the second day that any heavy weapons (machine guns, flame throwers, mortars and pack howitzers) could be brought ashore and until then the Marines fought with rifles against much more heavily armed Japanese in much better defended, prepared positions. They were short of water, food, ammunition and medical supplies and had a hard time evacuating casualties.
Gradually, the Marines made progress. After landings on about one third of the northern part of the long and narrow island, they landed late on the second day on the western end. They captured most of the airfield, the main prize on the island and finally opened enough space that men and supplies were able to come in at some places without losses. By the evening of the second day the issue was still in doubt. On the evening of the third day the Japanese launched big counterattacks that depleted their forces, losing over 350 men killed, including some of the best of their remaining troops. They were defeated in the dark often in hand to hand fighting. Marine offensives on the fourth day reduced the major Japanese fortresses still holding out and drove to the eastern end of the island, completing its capture. Almost all of the Japanese fought to the bitter end. In at least one case, they were walled up in their concrete blockhouse by a bulldozer that sealed all of the exits with sand. In others, flamethrowers and satchel charges were used to methodically destroy hard points and underground structures. Days after all organized resistance was destroyed, individual Japanese who survived the battle popped up from hiding to snipe at the Americans.
The battle was won but the costs were a shock to the American people. Almost one thousand Marines were killed and over two thousand more were injured in the capture of a tiny island just six or seven miles long.
Some important mistakes had been made. The preliminary bombardments that were expected to do most of the damage had hardly any effect on the defenders. The 125 amphibian tractors, thought to be more than enough, turned out not to be enough and not to be sufficiently armed and armored. The supply organization was too rigid. Supplies piled up at the end of a pier and in boats bobbing off shore because there were not enough men to unload and distribute them - many of the men assigned to that task having been forced instead to take up weapons and fight the Japanese. Supplies came in in the pre-assigned order so that the most vitally needed material - ammunition and water, sometimes sat in boats waiting for less important supplies ahead of them to be off loaded and cleared.
Many lessons were learned and many men gained important experience. Had this not happened at Tarawa it would have happened somewhere else. The difficulties and losses may have been inevitable.
I found this to be a quite fascinating piece. A lot of it was of the form, L company did this while I company did that, the 2nd battalion moved to the right, the first battalion was held up by the reef and got ashore two hours later, etc. That could be tedious, but it was real. It was an accurate portrayal of what actually happened, not a high level summary that obscured the details. On the other hand, there were no first person accounts - which would have made everything more real and more personal had they been included.
Commanding the men on shore for the first two days was then Colonel David Shoup. I read about him many years later as commandant of the Marine Corps from 1961-63. He was also famous for his later opposition to the Vietnam War. He has been quoted as follows (see the Wikipedia article about him and its references):
"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own -- and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans."
He also protested against American nuclear war plans in 1961 that called for a nuclear attack against China as well as the USSR in the event of nuclear war, even if the Chinese did nothing.
| Author | Fitzgerald, F. Scott |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 1922 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2012 |
The story opens in 1913 with Anthony Patch, the only grandson of the very wealthy Adam "Cross" Patch, a retired multimillionaire who spends his time doing Christian work and donating to temperance and other charities. Anthony's parents are both dead. There are no other heirs for the aging Adam.
Anthony was educated at Harvard. He's an intelligent, well bred fellow with all of the right social graces, but he has no occupation. He lives in his Manhattan apartment on the $7,500 a year brought in by his inheritance. He spends his time with his Harvard friends, Maury Noble and Richard Caramel, and increasingly with Dick's beautiful cousin Gloria Gilbert from Kansas City. They eat dinners at nice restaurants, attend concerts, plays and movies, and drink and dance at night clubs and bars.
Anthony and Gloria fall in love. They marry. Old Adam, feeling some fondness for this boy in spite of the boy's listlessness and lack of ambition, offers his mansion for the wedding and gives them a generous $5,000 wedding gift. The wedding is a society event. Afterward Anthony and Gloria go on a tour of the country, spending months in California.
The war comes. Anthony fails a physical exam to become an officer, but passes the exam to be drafted. He winds up in Georgia. Lonely, he has an extramarital affair with a Georgia girl named Dot. Soon he feels trapped with her and is thankful when his unit is sent to New York, where the war ends and he is demobilized back to Gloria.
Back together in New York, Anthony and Gloria rent a house in the country in Connecticut. They have nothing to do there. They have parties every night. Friends arrive from New York. They drink and dance and drink some more. In the second year of this their drinking, especially Anthony's has become very heavy. Their marriage is strained. Anthony behaves cruelly one night. They still have nothing to do.
Then one night, in the midst of another party, with everyone drunk, there is a knock on the door. It's Adam Patch, come to see his grandson. He looks at the scene of drunkenness, says nothing to them, turns around, and goes home. A few months later Adam is dead and Anthony discovers that Adam has re-written his will. All is left to friends, servants, and mostly, to a charitable foundation to promote temperance, run by his old personal secretary. Anthony and Gloria have nothing at all.
In response, they go into denial. They launch a lawsuit which stretches on through two appeals and almost five years in court. They drink more. They give up the house in Connecticut, then they have to move to a cheaper apartment in New York. They sell bonds to support their life style. Prices rise with inflation. They buy risky bonds to get more income but these fall in value. They sell more bonds at depressed prices to spend the money. They're income continues to fall.
Gloria is obsessed with her appearance. Is her beauty fading? She tries to get into movies through an old beau, the Jew Joe Blokeman, who is in the movie business. She gets a screen test but is considered too old for the part of the ingenue. She declines the offer of a character part.
Anthony goes further downhill. He tries to write popular stories like Dick Caramel, but fails. He tries to write a scholarly article. It is published but brings no money. He drinks. He starts drinking when he gets up in the morning and stays drunk all day. He drinks up all of the cash in his pockets, even if there's nothing in the house to eat. Drunk one night he finds Blokeman and calls him out of a dinner part to try to borrow money from him but instead insults him and calls him a dirty Jew. Blokeman punches him in the face and returns to his party. Anthony is thrown out of the restaurant by the staff. Then one day Dot from Georgia shows up at his door and throws herself at him. Going into a towering, drunken, almost psychotic rage, he assaults her and throws her out. He is found on the floor, gibbering and slobbering.
That same day, the final ruling on their appeal comes through. They won! They now have 30 million dollars.
The last scene takes place on an ocean liner, heading for Italy. Gloria is in her beautiful fur coat. Anthony is in a wheelchair, muttering to himself about how he showed those people.
I don't know why F chose to have them win the lawsuit in the end. I presume it was just to show that money was too late to save them, or at any rate, too late to save Anthony.
This was yet another of those books that I liked very much but didn't enjoy reading. It's a dreary story. We want, as readers, to shake Anthony and Gloria and read them the facts of life, but F is a good enough writer that we know it wouldn't have done much good. F had very deep insights into these people, a real inside understanding of his two characters. I don't know to what extent he can be said to be writing about a whole class. The others in the story, Maury, Richard, Gloria's friends, Blokeman, even Adam Patch, all build some sort of life for themselves. Anthony and Gloria fall below all of them, unable to find any useful occupation or any reason for living.
This is one of those books that left a strong impression on my mind. My book notes about it illustrate to me the great value of writing such notes. Had I been asked to summarize the book without the notes, I would have required some hints to get me started, to locate at least one of the threads of memory in my mind. The written notes provide lots of those threads and each one recalls a memory of reading the material it describes. The notes bring back the verbal and the visual images I had while reading the book.
I guess what I just said about this book is really true for most of the books I've read. There are some for which, even with the notes, I have no memory of the book, but there are many more that would have been lost to me but are recovered and reinforced by reading the old notes. Interestingly, I've tried to interest a few other people in keeping notes on the books they read but I'm not aware of anyone taking my advice. Maybe the young people think, why should I do that? I remember everything. And when I was young I did remember everything. Maybe the older people think, there's no point doing that. It's too late for me.
| Author | Williams, John Edward, 1922-1994 |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage eBooks, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 389 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | June 2012 |
This reprint has an introduction by John McGahern, written in 2002. The novel won the National Book Award for fiction in 1973.
Augustus relates the life of Octavius Caesar, adopted son of Julius Caesar, from his receipt of the news that his adoptive father had been murdered in 44 BC to Octavius' death at age 75 in 13 AD. The novel is composed of letters, produced over a period of time and moving back and forth, first from 44 BC to 13 BC, then with both dates advancing until 14 AD and a final epilogue letter from Philippus of Athens to Lucius Annaeus Seneca in AD 55. The authors of the letters are all men and women who knew Augustus, from the friends of his youth to his rivals for power, to various intellectuals, to his wife and her son Tiberius by a previous marriage, to his daughter Julia whom he banished to a remote island as a way both to punish her for blatantly cuckolding her husband Tiberius and embarrassing Augustus, and protecting her from the wrath of Tiberius. The final long letters, just before the epilogue, are the first and only letters from Octavius himself.
All of the letters are about Augustus. The picture painted by each writer is of a man of very mild disposition, of modest personal desires, but of iron determination to do what he considers to be in the best interest of Rome, including killing men who, from the emperor's point of view, need killing even if, like Cicero, he regards them with admiration and respect.
The stories occupying center stage are of his rival Marcus Antonius, his daughter Julia, and his wife Livia and her son Tiberius. There isn't very much about the policy of the times, the wars on the frontiers, or the final suppression of the Republic. The interest of Rome, as Williams has Augustus perceive it, is simply peace - an end to civil wars and an end to destructive competition for power.
I don't regard this as good history, even to the extent that fiction can portray history. We don't get much of an idea of the big issues of the day, the way of life of life of people of any class, the conflicts and contradictions of Rome vs. the provinces, or even of the life of the intellectuals. Its portrayal of important historical characters - Julius, Augustus, Livia, Tiberius, Marcus Antonius, Cleopatra, Ovid, Horace - are all very restrained. We have no way of knowing if the people were as they are portrayed here, though of course neither we nor Williams have enough historical record to do much more than Williams did.
Nevertheless, the book is engaging and interesting. We are given intelligent letters by intelligent people who were very sensitive to their situation and their relations to the emperor. It seems like something of a privilege to read their correspondence, fictive though it be.
| Author | Wiesel, Elie |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audible, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | June 2012 |
The protagonists of the story are Doriel Waldman, a Holocaust survivor in his sixties and Therese Goldschmidt, a New York psychoanalyst, the daughter of survivors. Doriel comes to her for therapy, having been dismissed by other therapists as incurable, perhaps to cure what he calls his madness, or perhaps to rid himself of his "dybbuk".
Doriel's biography emerges very slowly over the course of therapy. He was a child in Poland, born in 1936, and living in hiding during the war in a Gentile's house in the countryside with his father, younger brother, and older sister. His mother, with her blond hair, has passed for an Aryan Pole and become a leader in the resistance to the Nazis. Both his brother and sister are murdered during the war, in his sister's case betrayed by a Polish collaborator just a week before liberation by the Red Army. When the war is over, the remaining family members, Doriel and his two parents, move to France. But the parents die in an auto accident and Doriel is taken in by his uncle and aunt in Brooklyn, to be raised as an Orthodox Jew.
Upon reaching adulthood, Doriel goes to Israel to study in a Yeshiva. His rabbis, teachers, and friends there have little to do with the 20th century. For them, everything of importance had already happened. Everything of significance had already been written. The life they lead was one of study of the Talmud, learning the wisdom of the past.
It was not enough for Doriel. He did not reject God or the Jewish teachings, but could not embrace them either. He could not become a yeshiva bocher but could not become a modern Israeli either. He was lost and personally isolated from every world that could possibly accept him while being completely alienated from the Gentile world that killed his people and his town, and everyone he knew as a child.
The psychoanalyst constantly digs at his relationship with his mother and with women. Doriel reacts violently (figuratively) against this penetration into his history. "Leave my mother out of this!" he screams. But it turns out that there is a story about his mother. She seems to have had an affair with another resistance fighter during the war, a man who worked and fought with her, a man who saved the family by threatening to kill the Gentile in whose house they hid when the man demanded more money or else he would turn them in, a man whom Doriel hated because he saw him as coming between his father and mother. Later in his life, the resistance fighter's brother, a wealthy bachelor, looked up Doriel and passed on his fortune to him. Doriel was the last survivor of the small community of which he had once been a part. Doriel used the money to pay for his psychoanalysis.
There were stories of women too. Doriel was attracted to several different women in his life but his contact with them was fleeting. He may have briefly become the lover of one of them, I'm not sure of my recollection of that, but of the others, there were only a few brief exchanges of words and looks. After his uncle and aunt die, he has always lived alone.
Doriel always hopes for salvation. He looks up and meets a Jewish poet in France, hoping that the man can save his soul. But the poet can do nothing of the sort. He lacks neither intelligence nor insight into the meaning of life, but there is no salvation for Doriel. What Doriel is looking for does not seem to exist.
Goldschmidt is his last hope. Does she help him? Does he help himself? It is not clear that there is anything to be done but to keep on living and maybe to indulge one's desire to dance.
Wiesel is such a complex personality. He speaks many languages. He is widely read. He is philosophical, deeply so, in the sense that he is concerned to understand the significance of things, the meaning of life, of history, of society, of religion. He is very, very knowledgeable about the Jewish religion and has taken it seriously, but it seems to me that he doesn't know whether or not he believes in God. The existence of God is as much a problem for him - why did God allow all of this evil to happen - as the non-existence of God might be.
I find that Wiesel's novels offer me a completely different way of thinking about big questions. He is an intelligent and rational man, but his childhood oppression by the most irrational and evil of all possible societies has left him suspicious of rationality, alienated from a world in which certain truth can be pursued. He is traumatized. He strives to overcome the trauma but it drags him down. It is not simply a psychological problem but also a historical and philosophical one. It is not just a matter of whether he can overcome madness, but whether there is any possibility of doing so in a mad world.
My upbringing in safe, relatively sane, and bountiful surroundings does not equip me to deal with Doriel or Wiesel. I pursue knowledge by reading philosophy, history, literature, and science. It seems to me that I make progress. But Wiesel calls the very possibility of progress into question.
Is he right? I don't think so. I think progress is real. But how in the world could I convince him of that? Therese Goldschmidt tries to convince Doriel by discovering the source of the demons that torment him, expose them, and eliminate their power. But is she even touching on anything that can help?
Sally Roman posted a review of this book on Amazon arguing that it was a "... pompous, rambling, incoherent, boring piece of self-indulgent tripe... " and giving it one star out of a possible five. As of this writing, at least 8 people agreed with her. I wrote a comment on her review.
I went back and looked up Sally Roman's review and my comment on amazon.com. That's hard to do these days because of the way Amazon obscures all reviews that aren't by a "verified purchaser" (which neither Sally nor I was - my copy came from a library.)
The problem Sally complains about is a problem with all of Wiesel's books. I think it stems from the fact that he is a conflicted and tormented soul and his conflicts and torments all appear in his novels. He's not a writer for everyone. I think that my personal sensitivity to Holocaust victims and survivors gives me a greater sympathy for their writing and enables me to accept things that many readers are repelled by. I'm hardly alone in my acceptance. Wiesel has, after all, many, many readers and they aren't all old Jews (to the extent that I am a Jew) or history buffs like me. However Wiesel is among the perhaps surprisingly large set of very important writers who do not and cannot appeal to most readers.
| Author | Fesperman, Dan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 380 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | June 2012 |
Professor of History Nat Turnbull receives a phone call from the wife of his retired old professor, Gordon Wolfe, saying that Gordon has been arrested. Can he come up to their house in the Adirondacks right away? Nat is then accosted by the FBI who want his help in dealing with Wolfe. Four boxes of intelligence files from World War II have shown up in the old professor's house, the prof was arrested for stealing them, and the FBI wants Nat to help them learn the significance of the files and of what may be missing.
Nat is very ambivalent about his old professor. Once his mentor, Wolfe published a disparaging and unfair review of Nat's first important book, embarrassing himself as well as Nat and souring relations between the two. Nat now attempts to help the old man but the 84 year old prof dies suddenly of a heart attack while in jail. Nat is left with an odd box of mementos from the professor, an idea of what's in the files and a compulsive need to find out what's missing and why, and the attentions of one Berta Heinkel, professor at the Free University of Berlin who has also been pursuing Wolfe and the files for a long time and now wants to team up with Nat.
In parallel with this story, we are taken back to the war years. teen aged Kurt Bauer, heir to the Bauer manufacturing company, falls in love with Liesl Folkerts, a beautiful girl of a good family who is a committed anti-Nazi and is involved with the White Rose resistance group. Kurt doesn't really care one way or another about the Nazis. His family isn't tied to them and would just as well do without them, but they are committed to the fortunes of the firm which, at the moment are tied up in arms manufacturing for the Reich.
The story goes back and forth from the 1940's to the 2000's, each story progressing in turn. Bauer attempts to fool Liesl into believing that he is also a committed anti-Nazi, and fool his parents into believing that he isn't seeing her or having anything to do with the resistance people. Nat Turnbull attempts to get his hands on the story, uncovering more and more, while trying to keep the FBI and Berta each from taking everything he has.
In the end, with help from clues left behind by Wolfe, Nat learns the whole story.
Bauer betrayed the resistance group to the Gestapo in order to gain immunity for his family, himself, and Liesl. It turned out that his family had a Jewish great-great-grandmother, which the Gestapo really didn't care about, but Bauer didn't know that. All of the resistance people were arrested. Bauer and Liesl were eventually released after holding them long enough to avoid suspicion. The others were executed. Gordon Wolfe was an OSS man involved in the case who performed some serious heroics during the war, got the goods on Bauer for current as well as past activities, and held them back from the CIA and FBI because he knew they would suppress the evidence in order to save Bauer, an important arms merchant, from arrest. Berta was an East German child who informed on her grandmother, who turned out to be one of the White Rose people who got away and now was desperate to redeem herself by catching Bauer. Liesl did not die in a bombing raid as long thought by Bauer, but planted her papers on a dead girl and escaped. And so on.
I quite liked this book. It was an interesting mix of history and thriller. Its portrayal of the German and American characters was authentic seeming. Its historian hero was rather convincing, or at least endearing, as intellectual, schlemiel, and hero all in one.
Here are the first two paragraphs from the book:
"THE BIGGEST HAZARD of studying history," Nat Turnbull once told his wife, "is that if you spend too much time looking backward, you’ll be facing the wrong way when the forces of the here and now roll forward to crush you."
As if to prove the point, his wife filed for divorce the following week, catching Nat completely by surprise.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Comedy |
| When Read | June 2012 |
Marshall Raylan Givens is called to a crime scene where a small time hoodlum is found in a bathtub of ice water, missing his kidneys. It turns out that someone knocked him out and extracted his kidneys for sale in the organ donor market - in this case, offering to sell the kidneys back to the hoodlum himself. Raylan figures out very quickly who the muscle men were. They were Dickie and Coover Crowe, dull sons of an old marijuana grower who looks after them in their stupidity. But he needs to figure out who the doctor was that actually did the work and ran the operation.
The trail leads first to a black chauffeur of the old grower. He turns out to be working for a surgery nurse who knows all about how to extract kidneys, even if she couldn't do the more complex and delicate work of sewing them back in. She gets the chauffeur to kill the boys (40 year old men actually) and then catch Raylan to get his kidneys too, but Raylan wakes up enough from the anesthetic that he manages to hold off the operation. The nurse shoots the chauffeur and is in turn shot by Raylan.
That might be the end of a typical Leonard novel but, in this case, it goes on. There is a story about Carol Conlan, a coal mining company public relations spokesperson and completely cynical and amoral murderer of an old man who was shafted by the company and came back with a shotgun. She is in turn killed by the old man's wife, from her nursing home bed, with the shotgun, fired from under the covers.
But we're still not done. A third story involves 23 year old Jackie Nevada, a pretty girl who loves nothing better than to play poker and is now wanted by the law after walking away from a court date after her arrest for gambling and, supposedly, participating in a series of bank robberies pulled off by young women. Raylan finds her and figures out that she's not one of the bank robbers, all three of whom are shot and killed by the man who recruited and controls them but who is in turn taken down by Raylan after coming into a bar, dressed as a woman, and demanding a showdown with Raylan - who had put him in jail years before.
In the end, Raylan and Jackie are in the shower together.
It's all so far over the top that one can't begin to take it seriously, and yet the characters, the old Crowe, his boys, his dumb nephew Dewey, his black housekeeper and once a week bed partner Rita, Boyd Crowder, the old fellow with the shotgun, are all fabulous and the good ones are painted with a touch more believability and independence of action than we are expecting from them. It's also a view of Harlan County Kentucky that, if not really accurate (I wouldn't know if it is or isn't), is certainly colorful and imbued with our conception of what the place ought to be like.
It's a harum scarum story, more like three novellas or long short stories than one novel. Its title was no doubt chosen because it's not really a novel but a collection of Raylan Givens stories.
Whatever we think about that. It still has the magic Leonard touch. At 86 years old he's still got it.
| Author | Rankin, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Minotaur Books, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 271 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 2012 |
Detective Sergeant John Rebus of Edinburgh, Scotland, is pulled along with all of the other available police into searching for a serial killer who is killing young girls. They aren't sexually assaulted, just killed. Hundreds of cops question every conceivable witness, check every ridiculous tip, and investigate every shred of physical evidence, all to no avail.
Meanwhile, in a parallel story, John's brother Michael, a professional hypnotist, is making money as a drug dealer, working for some shadowy figure who threatens him with death if he doesn't follow all orders to the letter. The brother is being investigated by an old veteran newspaper crime reporter who is convinced that John and Michael must be in the drug business together - though in fact John knows nothing about Michael's outside business.
Over the course of the novel Rebus' background is developed. He is divorced with an eleven year old daughter named Samantha. He was once in the British Army. Something happened to him in the Special Air Service that caused him to have a nervous breakdown and to quit the army and join the police. All of this comes together when two events happen. In one, a professor who is good at word games notices that the murdered children have names that, when the initials are put in order, spell out "SAMANTHA". Rebus' own daughter is going to be the final target. The other occurs when Michael hypnotizes John and, in the hypnotic trance, he recalls all of the events of his time in the army. He and another man had been subject to extreme pressure, crossing the line into torture. The army was looking for a man who could go under cover against the IRA and resist any torture to make him talk. Rebus stood against it just barely but successfully. The other man didn't. Upon coming out of the trance Rebus understood that it was the other man who killed the girls and was hunting Samantha.
The usual cliff hanger ending has Rebus and another cop chasing the killer and saving the girl.
This was Ian Rankin's first novel, written when he was a fairly young man. I thought there were mistakes - plot elements that didn't have the obviously intended effect, flaws and contradictions in Rebus' character that didn't work for me, and saving too much explanation for too late in the story. But there was also some talent on display.
I presume that Rankin has gotten better over time. I may read more of these.
| Author | Munro, Colin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Sports Car Press, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 121 |
| Extras | photos, diagrams |
| Genres | History |
| Keywords | Military |
| When Read | June 2012 |
Beginning with the first efforts to setup a regular aviation industry in the early 1920's, this book traces the development of military aviation in the USSR up to the time of writing in 1971.
At first the Soviets relied on copying foreign types, especially engines. They obtained licenses and drawings of foreign engines for local manufacture, then gradually improved upon them and introduced their own ideas. A central design bureau was created but the problems of centralized design and distributed manufacturing were too great. Separate design bureaus were established, each with its own factories and its own chief designers. A centralized naming and numbering system became less important than the design bureau designations, e.g., MiG-1, Yak-3, Tu-22, etc.
The Soviet Union probably had the largest air force in the world in the 1930's and, arguably, some of the most modern types of aircraft. Part of this was undoubtedly Stalin's paranoia (my opinion, not one expressed by Munro), but part was the pressure the Soviets felt from surrounding hostile states and part the vast distances in the country that made it hard to patrol borders or defend them without forces that could move fast. However the Germans outstripped them in the late 1930's so that, by 1941, modern types capable of coping with the Luftwaffe were only just starting production. The early months of the war were fought with weapons that were obsolete compared to German designs, and pilots and commanders who had no experience. Worse, of course, Stalin's purges had destroyed all of the best, most independent minded officers, and Stalin's idiotic leadership at the beginning of the conflict simply threw away all of his best air resources. It was not until 1943 that the Red Air Force began to compete effectively against the Germans, and even then I suspect it was mostly because of the extreme pressure that the British and Americans were exerting against German air defenses in the West that drew off many of Germany's best planes and pilots.
At the end of the war the Russians were surprised by the advanced state of German and allied research into jet engines. Hurrying to catch up, they put several German engines into production using captured plans, factories, and examples. Later, they managed to buy some relatively advanced Rolls Royce engines from Britain (the author seems to have sided with Stalin in considering the Labor government's approval of the sales to have been stupid), and put them into production as the foundation of Russia's jet engine industry. When the MiG-15 appeared over Korea, it was a shock to the U.S. It showed that the Russians could produce a fully competitive, advanced jet fighter when no one in the west really imagined that they could. As of the time of writing, the Soviets were still producing advanced and even elegant aircraft in numbers that were hard for the West to match.
Starting on page 66 and going to the end of the book there is an alphabetically organized catalog of important Russian aircraft types. Each plane has a one page description including estimated size, power and performance specifications, and a photo, plus a one page 3-view drawing of the plane.
Books like this are produced at very low cost and sold at relatively low prices. This one is marked $2.95. There are no credits for the photos or diagrams. Perhaps the author got them all or perhaps copyright usage rights were purchased for all of them in a bunch. Editing was minimal. Occasional misspellings and trivial grammar or typographical errors appeared.
However, the people who create books like this strike me as committed to their subjects. They're cranking out product, but they're not doing it mindlessly or without real interest in the subject matter. Small remarks about each aircraft show, for example, that Monro thought about each plane and was interested in what the designers had done. He showed a similar interest in the designers.
I like this kind of book. It's hard to say what I learn from them. It's partly technical, partly historical.
I have always wanted to like the Soviet Union. The revolutionary workers' state that introduced principles of equality, human rights, and collective good, always seemed to me a great aspiration and a heroic labor of love. That the reality was so different, that it was ruled by a monster in the person of Stalin, that gangsters and bureaucrats appropriated much of the wealth, diminished, but never completely blacked out, the light of admiration I had for it.
When I read books like this I can't help but think of men like Tupolev, who worked for their country in spite of imprisonment and personal attacks against him by the NKVD thugs. There were indeed people to be admired in the Soviet Union but it's a complex problem to work out a consistent attitude towards the country.
| Author | Pelecanos, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 329 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 2012 |
Spero Lucas is a 29 year old Marine veteran of the Iraq War and the battle of Falujah. Out of the service and home now in DC, he works as a private investigator for a lawyer, and as a finder and recoverer of things for people that pay him a fee of 40% of the value of what he finds.
At the opening of the story, he investigates a car theft and joy ride by two black kids whose father, the lawyer's client, is a big marijuana dealer. He discovers physical evidence to prove that one of the cops lied to force a conviction and the lawyer gets the boys off. Their father then hires Spero to find two marijuana packages that disappeared, for which he will get a 40% cut. The dealer and his two 20 year old accomplices would scope out a house where there is no one home during the day, have a FedEx or UPS delivery of the marijuana to that house, and then the two 20 years olds, Tayvon and Edward, would pick it up. But despite arriving five minutes after the delivery trucks, the packages were gone.
Spero makes slow progress. Then a third package is lost and then Tayvon and Edward are murdered. A crooked cop appears to be involved. Spero tracks him down and discovers that his father, known as the Rooster, was a former crooked cop who is now running some kind of operation at a car body shop with the body shop owner, two amateur killers who shot the two boys, and some reluctant help from the cop, who did not know that murder was going to be involved. He had just thought they were going to rip off a drug dealer.
Spero figures most of the situation out. He breaks into the Rooster's house and steals $90,000 that he find there. It's only part of the money that should be there from the sale of the marijuana, but he takes his $36,000 cut and gives the rest to the drug dealer's ex-girlfriend whom he was told to give it to. Then he is accosted by one of the amateur killers holding a knife. He kills the killer. Finally, when an innocent boy is kidnapped in order to entice him into a trap, he breaks into body shop and murders all three of the gangsters. The dying Rooster tells him he stole the $90,000 only to give it back. Spero figures out what that meant and learns that the drug dealer in jail was actually a party to the whole plan to murder his two young accomplices. He talks the lawyer into being ineffective in court and the drug dealer goes to prison.
There are some possible flaws in the story. I never did understand why the marijuana dealer did all this - though it's possible that I just missed it. But the character of Spero is very interesting and the portrayal of all of these people living on or below the borderline of legitimate society is absorbing.
Spero is a jock. He spends hours riding his bike around the city or paddling his kayak in the Potomac, or doing pushups and situps and other exercises. This isn't lip service by an author attempting to convince us that his character is a superman, it's a convincing portrayal of a man for whom physical exercise is a critical part of his life. With his physical presence and his combat skills acquired in the Marine Corps, his winning confrontations with the bad guys are very convincing and believable.
His relations with his mother and brother, and his longing for his dead father, all help to make him into an understandable human being. Spero is white. His brother is black. Both were adopted by a Greek American family who were unable to have more children after their first one. He cares about these people and they care about him. It was because he knew that the gangsters knew of them, and would have no compunctions about using them to get at Spero, that he decided it was not enough to just get the kidnapped boy back. He had to kill the gangsters.
I found the minor characters interesting too. The cop collaborates with Spero. He didn't mean for all of this to happen. He can't go to his own agency because he'd wind up in jail if he did. So he tells Spero what the score is and himself gets the kidnapped boy out and free. There are also beautiful women in the book, all very attracted to the attractive Spero, but the one he likes the best turns him away. When he asks why she tells him. She passed a cafe one night, looked in the window, and saw Spero looking at another woman just the way he looked at her. Spero doesn't really understand. All he can do is get back on his bike and ride.
I don't want to make too much of this book. It's not great literature, but it's better than average and worth reading.
| Author | Hillenbrand, Laura |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Extras | photos, notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 2012 |
Louis Zamperini was an Italian American, born in 1917 in California, who was good at stealing, fighting, playing jokes and pranks, and running like the wind. He sets all the records in high school for the mile run and, although he is not fast enough to beat the older mile champions, he makes the 1936 Olympic team as a 19 year old 5,000 meter runner. Inexperienced and too young, he comes in seventh or eighth, but runs the fastest last lap ever seen in a 5,000 meter run. He continues his training at UCLA, wins the NCAA mile championship with a record breaking time, and goes into training for the 1940 Tokyo Olympics.
Of course those Olympics never came off. Zamperini wound up in the air corps as a bombardier in a B-24 over the Pacific. He saw a number of combat missions early in the war. In 1943 he went out with his crew in a plane that no one trusted in hopes of finding a downed B-25. But they didn't find it. Instead they lost an engine, then made an error, and crashed into the sea, 800 miles from base. Three men made it to the surface, Allen Phillips, the pilot, Louie, and a tail gunner named Mac. They had two inflatable rafts.
The first night, while Louie and Phil slept, Mac ate all of the candy bars that were their only rations. They began to face hunger, and very soon, the small amount of water they had ran out. They actually saw a search plane sent out to find them, fired flares and threw dye in the water, but the plane flew right over them and never saw them. So they continued drifting west, towards Japanese occupied territory, at 40 miles a day, surrounded by sharks. Living on a few fish and birds they caught and whatever rainwater they could trap.
One day, 30+ days into their ordeal they saw another plane and signaled to it. It turned out to be a Japanese bomber. The Japanese made pass after pass, machine gunning the rafts and even dropping a depth bomb that, fortunately, did not explode. Both rafts were riddled and one was destroyed, incredibly, the men were not hit. But the one raft they had left was sinking while sharks lunged over the side to get at them. For 24 hours one man pumped, one man patched the raft, and one man fought the sharks with an oar. They survived.
On the 47th day after the crash, Mac was already dead when the two survivors were picked up by a Japanese patrol boat. The Japanese Navy treated them very well, giving them food and medical care and talking to them in English. But after two days on the boat they were transferred to army jurisdiction on Kwajalein, where they were immediately mistreated and thrown into a primitive jail where they saw the names of nine marines carved into the wall - men who had been inadvertently left behind in the raid on Makin Island the year before, and were taken to Kwajalein, where they were beheaded.
Phillips and Zamperini were beaten, interrogated, and sent on to Japan for more beatings and interrogations, but mostly more beatings. They were separated. Zamperini wound up in Omori prison where he became the special target of the psychopath Mutsuhiro Watanabe, known as the Bird, a man who took special pleasure in beating Louie with a baseball bat, a wooden sword, or the buckle of his belt - beating him in the head, the knees, and all over his body, often until Louie collapsed. Unable to disguise his hatred and disrespect for the Bird, Watanabe was especially interested in hurting him.
Later the Bird left the camp and Louie came back from near death but was then sent on to another camp at Nauetsu. It turned out that the Bird was there and had apparently arranged Louie's transfer in order to continue torturing him. In addition to the beatings, the men were also enslaved, doing hard manual labor 12-18 hours a day, and fed so little food and of such low quality that some of them starved to death. Plenty of red cross packages arrived from the U.S., but they were all stolen by the guards and sold on the black market. Food sent by the Japanese government was also stolen and sold on the black market. Survival therefore depended on the ability of the prisoners to steal food back, which they became good at doing..
From late 1944 on, B-29's ranged the sky over Japan and air battles between Navy fighters and Japanese fighters showed both prisoners and guards that the end was near. The official policy of the government was to kill all the prisoners before the end of the war, and a date of August 22 was set, but the war ended on August 15 and, although it took longer to rescue the prisoners, the guards and their officers did not know what to do and were afraid of what would happen to them. The Bird took off his uniform and disappeared, as did many others. Many were caught and tried. Many were executed and many more sent to prison. But despite a massive police hunt, the Bird was never caught and went free after a general amnesty in 1952. After that he became a successful and wealthy businessman and lived out his life.
Louie and Phil survived. 37% of American prisoners who actually made it to Japan (many more were killed before they could get there), did not survive. They were taken back to the U.S. where Louie attracted many friends, but also slipped into alcoholism, post traumatic stress disorder, abreactions (waking nightmares), sleep disorders and health problems. Louie married but the marriage almost failed as a result of his alcoholism and other problems. He dreamed one night that he was strangling the Bird and woke up with his hands around his wife's neck while she was screaming.
Louie's life was turned around by none other than Billy Graham. His wife made him go to a revival meeting. He resisted. He walked out of one meeting but went to another. Starting to walk out of the second he had an abreaction right as he walked out. Graham called him to the stage. He went. He found God. He quit drinking and smoking. He began working with troubled kids. He gave talks for which he took very little money. He lived a model life, successful and happy. He forgave the Japanese and even the Bird, giving up his former belief that he had to go back to Japan and hunt the man down.
Louie died in his 90's. He was skateboarding to age 80 and skiing to age 90. He was a remarkable man.
Laura Hillenbrand worked for six years on this book. Suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome herself, it was hard work for her. But she did an extremely careful job, interviewing Louie 75 times, and all of the other people she could find who were still alive, as well as poring over all of the documentary sources. It is a fitting book, adequate to its difficult task, and a powerful story.
Last night Marcia and I went to see a movie version of this book directed by Angelina Jolie. It isn't possible to capture an entire 496 page book in a two and a half hour movie, but Jolie and her cast and crew did a more than creditable job of being faithful to the story and conveying the essence of Zamperini's torment and his triumph.
Movies provide vivid audio-visual presentations of scenes that are rendered mainly in the reader's imagination when reading a book. When done well they sometimes have a more dramatic impact than the books they are based on. Three years have passed since I read the book and only one night since I saw the movie, so I can't tell for sure if that was or was not the case for this movie and book. The scene in which the men capture the shark and fight off another one are pretty vivid in the movie. However I think there was one aspect of the movie that taught me more than the book and that was the portrayal of the Bird, the sadistic Japanese psychopath. The Japanese actor and Jolie as director did a brilliant job of portraying a really convincing psychopath. He was alternately soft spoken and brutally violent. He could sound friendly in what appeared to be a sincere way. One felt that his softness and his violence were inextricably intertwined. It was a convincing performance.
| Author | Leckie, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 600 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 2012 |
Leckie describes the great battles of the U.S. Marine Corps in its island hopping campaign across the Pacific. Starting with the long, drawn out battle for Guadalcanal, continuing up the Solomon Island chain, then to Tarawa in the Gilberts, the Carolines, New Britain and New Guinea, Peleliu in the back door to the Philippines, and the big battles on the road to Japan, the Marianas (Guam, Tinian, Saipan), then Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Leckie gives us both the view of the generals and admirals, and the view of the foot soldiers, fighting in deep mud, mosquito and leech infested jungle, and barren rocks as at Peleliu and Iwo where the Japanese were dug into networks of blockhouses, pillboxes, caves, and interconnecting tunnels that enabled them to pop up behind the Marines.
Japanese resistance was fanatical but, for the first half of the war, often stupid. Japanese land, air, and naval commanders routinely reported that bad defeats were great victories. They were believed by their superiors who, if anything, amplified the false reports. As a result, Japanese assaults were made across land, sea and air corridors that were thought to be secured only to find powerful American opposition that cut them to pieces. Equally bad, the Japanese were often determined to die rather than face their loss. This determination was not generally expressed as a fight to the bitter end. Rather, as the odds against them grew and their loss became clear to them, they engaged in suicidal attacks that cost them their remaining strength, and in a great many cases actually committed suicide without even requiring the Marines to shoot them.
That changed as the war dragged on and those Japanese who survived gained some experience, or at least drew upon the experience of those who did not survive. First on Tarawa, then more effectively still on Peleliu, Iwo, and Okinawa, the Japanese learned to fight wholly defensive actions from laboriously and deeply prepared positions. They refused to fire at the ships, knowing that it would give away the positions of their guns and cause them to be destroyed. They limited their battle at the water's edge, knowing that it was often impossible to predict where the Americans would come ashore. They stayed in their central, prepared positions, fighting bitterly and finally pulling back when their positions were overwhelmed, only to retrench in the next prepared defensive line. The Marines had to dig, shoot, burn and blow them out, one hole and one pillbox at a time, closing the holes with bulldozers to prevent more Japanese from emerging later and taking them in the rear.
On the American side there was also much learning and many new weapons. Sherman tanks became key weapons, some equipped with flamethrowers. "Rocket ships" fired huge salvos of rockets against landing beaches. Armed amphibious "amtracs", carried Marines over the reefs, unto and over the beach, and into the island proper. Heavy and medium artillery and mortars provided intense firepower against all Japanese positions. Flame throwers, satchel charges and bazookas provided heavy firepower right at the front lines. The Navy perfected its techniques of shore bombardment and Marine pilots learned to fly close air support, often using the new weapon of napalm, with devastating effects.
In the end, it was always Marines on the ground who fought it out at close range in order to clear out the Japanese and win the islands. Many Army soldiers, "dog faces", also fought well in these battles. Leckie tells the story of each Marine winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor in that war, all of whom performed extraordinary acts of valor, one of the most common of which was falling on a grenade to protect one's buddies. Not many survived.
I read Leckie's earlier book, Helmet for my Pillow, about his own experience in the war. He was a foot soldier who fought on Guadalcanal, New Britain (IIRC) and Peleliu, eventually invalided home after a serious wound. His story is fascinating. This book is much more of a history. Leckie says hardly a word about his own role in the war, but it is clear that his heart was with the infantry.
Leckie also gave a good appreciation of the Japanese. He pointed out the vanity, stupidity, and pig-headedness of some of their leaders, but also gave them great credit for incredible courage and self-sacrifice.
I will relate two stories of Americans and Japanese that I read in this book. One occurred on Guadalcanal. After a terrible night battle, a Marine stood up on the bloody ridge and yelled out curses against Hirohito, Tojo, Yamamoto, and everything and everyone Japanese. Other Marines stood up and joined him. Then a single voice called out from the jungle, "Fuck Babe Ruth!"
The other story was of a smiling Japanese soldier who surrendered after the battle on one of the islands. The American translator assigned to interrogate him asked how come he surrendered when everyone else fought to the death. He answered, "Our commander ordered us to fight to the last man." The translator raised his eyebrows and asked, "Well, then why did you surrender." Then it was the turn of the Japanese to raise his eyebrows and explain, "I am the last man."
| Author | Bowles, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 1954 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 2012 |
Includes an introduction by Francine Prose and a preface by the author written in 1981.
The title of the work comes from a quote from the Koran, reproduced at the start of the book.
"The likeness of those who choose other patrons than Allah is as the likeness of the spider when she taketh unto herself a house, and lo! the frailest of all houses is the spider's house, if they but knew."
An American writer, Stenham, is living in a hotel in the city of Fez, Morocco at the time of the stirrings of Moroccan nationalism in the early 50s that led to the eventual independence of the country from France.
Stenham is uninterested in politics. He has come to Morocco because he sees it as a medieval, Muslim, country, isolated from the world, from progress, from politics, from change. It is as it has always been. Speaking Arabic and French as well as English, he has many acquaintances and some friends of both nationalities, as well as of a wealthy Englishman living for a time in the same hotel. But although he is uninterested in politics and wants nothing to do with it, it is inescapable. The country comes closer and closer to civil war between the French authorities and the Istiqlal, the Arab nationalist movement. Caught between those two forces are the Arab masses whose real allegiance is to Islam and tradition but who are increasingly forced to choose between the French and the Arab nationalists, a choice that the nationalists will always win.
Stenham is also caught in the middle. His allegiance is to neither of the warring parties. Understanding both and rejecting both, Stenham wishes that things could continue as they were.
The other main character of the book is Amar, an illiterate Arab teenager, son of a respected, traditional doctor but unable to study and learn as his father wishes him to do. Amar takes a job as a potter's apprentice, living partly as a boy, partly as a man, with a complete commitment to the faith of his father but also with a keen ability to read people and a streak of independent thought and judgment.
Amar is found and recruited by a local leader of the Istiqlal. Amar wishes that these people would be pure fighters for Islam against "the Nazarenes", but they are not. They drink alcohol. They listen to western music. They read western books.
When Amar and Stenham meet, they are each attracted to the other. Stenham recognizes the authenticity, innocence, and intelligence of Amar while Amar recognizes the reliability of Stenham, his ability to dissociate himself from the French without becoming a member of the Istiqlal. Each represents something valuable in the other's community.
A third character, the American woman Mrs. Polly Burroughs, appears on the scene. Stenham is physically attracted to her but finds her modernizing ideas anathema to his own belief that the Moslems are best off as they were. She is interested in his ideas, and in fact came to Morocco because she read his books (though she doesn't tell him that), but when she meets him she is turned off.
The devastation produced by the French response to Moroccan nationalism is mentioned but not described in detail. Stenham learns that people with no involvement in any politics are being rounded up and tortured. Various auxiliary soldiers, from Tuaregs to black Africans, are sent into the Arab neighborhoods and run riot in the streets, killing, beating, raping, and stealing. The nationalists are thrilled with this behavior. It pushes the non-political and religious Moslems into their camp.
In the end, Stenham and Burroughs leave. Amar hopes to go with them but is left behind. They have nothing for him and, although they have been kind, have no interest in letting him into their lives.
Bowles says in his preface that he is uninterested in politics and had no intention of writing a political book. Had he succeeded in writing the book one year earlier, there would have been nothing of politics in it. But no one can avoid politics in such a situation.
Bowles understands both the French and the Nationalists, but doesn't like or sympathize with either of them. He doesn't understand the Muslims, but does like them, or at least considers them to be living authentic lives.
This is a significant book. The chapters from Amar's point of view are brilliant.
It seems to me that the nationalist revolution against the French had nothing to do with the thinking of Al Qaida or the Taliban. It was not a radical Islamic movement. If anything, it was anti-Islamic, using Islam only as a covering for ideas that were much more in sympathy with nationalism and socialism and integration into the modern world. It is important to understand this and to see the complexity of politics and history in the Middle East.
When I was young, in the 1950's, the time period of this book, "Arab Socialism" was the watchword of the Arab revolt against Britain and France. Gamal Abdel Nasser deposed the Egyptian monarchy, instituted land reform, suppressed Muslim fanatics, nationalized the Suez Canal, and confronted, unsuccessfully, the power of Israel, Britain and France. He was a hero in the Arab world and no doubt an important inspiration to the successful revolutionaries in Algeria, Syria, and Iraq. But it didn't work and it didn't last. The wealthy classes were too powerful, the governments too corruptible, the poor too ignorant, and the educated middle classes too small to sustain democratic government or economic development - whether capitalist or socialist. Perhaps something will happen to improve things, but probably not in my lifetime and maybe not for a long while after that.
| Author | Noon, Jeff |
|---|---|
| Publication | Transworld Publishers, 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 350 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | August 2012 |
This book of 50 interrelated short stories combines an exotic and dystopian near future with a presumably recognizable working class Manchester England. The stories are relatively independent but characters, themes and plots recur, making it something between a short story collection and a novel.
A prologue to the book sets the tone for all of the stories. As a seven or eight year old the toughest kid in the class offers to trade his invisible spy watch for Noon's model of the James Bond Aston Martin sports car. Noon accepts the trade and believes in the watch as the other kid places the invisible watch in his trembling palm. After all the stories have been told, in the epilogue, he finds his invisible watch had gone.
The stories mostly involve young kids from working class families. They are members of little gangs. They steal things. They come from families where stealing is accepted. They discover special feathers that, when placed on the tongue, transport one into a world of wonderful dreams. There are sodas of multiple flavors. The boy who spent his entire youth working on it finally learned to spin the cap exactly right to get the ideal mixture of all six flavors - leading to a wonderful sense of SOLACE, Strawberry Orange Lemon Apple Cola and Elderberry.
I won't try to recount all of the stories. There was something fantastic and, usually, something realistic in each of them. It took a while to get used to the fantastic. I never know whether I'm reading a little extravagance in a story or a prelude to a total fantasy. It takes time to see where the author is going. It takes time to adjust to the fantastic and come to terms with it. Eventually I did come to terms with it and found the book to be creative, very original, rather disorienting, and yet very human.
I don't know how many of these sorts of books I could read without becoming too disoriented. But it was certainly a change of pace from the usual fiction.
| Author | Harris, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Hurst and Blackett |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | August 2012 |
In 1944 a British aircraft is flying from France to England carrying an air commodore with critically important papers about German radar, vital to the war effort. The plane is shot down by a German fighter in the Channel and the four occupants manage to climb out of the sinking plane and into a yellow rubber life raft. They are the pilot, a fine young officer but with a serious injury from the crash; the navigator, a smart educated young man; a gunner, a fierce shopkeeper from a small town who resents the rest of the world but is deeply devoted to the pilot; and the air commodore, a middle aged, professorial, technical, family man who has never done any fighting or flying but is determined to get the papers to England or die trying.
When the plane is overdue the air sea rescue sets out to look for them. Planes and boats go out into the Channel in an increasingly stormy sea. A seaplane lands at a rubber raft and finds, not the crew, but the German pilot who was himself also shot down in the engagement. The plane is damaged in the landing and cannot take off again. It must be towed by one of the boats, though it is eventually lost. Meanwhile the raft drifts closer and closer to German occupied territory in Holland.
Much of the story takes place in an RAF rescue boat crewed by a dozen men, each with his own issues to deal with. The skipper is a young, inexperienced fellow who is wise enough to rely heavily on his flight sergeant an acerbic but highly experienced little man who knows what to do. The engineer has neglected his duty and done a sloppy repair on the engines in the last round of maintenance in hopes of getting home early to see his no good wife, who is on the point of leaving him. An 18 year old medical orderly on his first voyage is seasick the whole time but struggles hard to not be in the way and to try to make himself useful. A big, mild mannered man does a lot of the hard and heroic work.
The boat finds the raft in the early morning as it is approaching the enemy shore. The raft is already under the guns of the shore batteries. The boat slips past the sand bar, picks up the men, exchanges fire with the shore and a German boat that stands between them and England, and makes it out to get the men home.
This is an early book by Harris, not as subtle or literary as some of his later books, especially Light Cavalry Action, but it is full of his trademark deep appreciation of the men who fought for England, and his understanding of the technicalities and the personal experiences of the war.
I have liked all of his books, both literary and not.
| Author | Thompson, Willie |
|---|---|
| Publication | Pluto Press, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 222 |
| Extras | notes, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Historiography |
| When Read | August 2012 |
Thompson discusses the history of historiography, beginning with Leopold von Ranke and continuing through some Hegelian and Marxian concepts, the relativism described by Carl Becker and Charles Beard in the 1930's, and the late 20th century schools of post-modernism and deconstructionism. His primary concern seems to be with the issue of objectivity. Can historians tell the truth about what happened in the past? Is there a single truth about the past? Is there any truth at all about the past.
Leopold Von Ranke, 1795-1886, was a German historian, a member of the ruling class, and a professor at Leipzig. He laid down the foundations of objective history, distinguishing between primary and secondary sources, explaining the difference between published sources that have been tempered by the need to please the public or the censors and archival sources, and insisting that conclusions be based on documentary evidence that any other historian could read and likely come to the same conclusion. It was a major step forward in our understanding of what makes historical writing valid and, to the extent that we may use the word, scientific.
Everyone soon acknowledged the correctness of Rankean principles and yet, in spite of that, historians still fell into opposing camps. British historians believed that all of history led up to the perfection of Victorian and Edwardian England, while Germans, including von Ranke himself, regarded the Prussian constitutional monarchy as the highest expression of civilization. After World War I historians from each country blamed the war on the other countries and each cited extensive documentary sources, different ones to be sure, to justify their positions. After World War II German historians were either silent on the subject of Nazism, or concerned to show that not all of the blame fell upon the German government. After the generation of the Nazis passed, the next generation of German historians were still reluctant to criticize the positions and roles of their teachers in the war so that it took a third generation before academic German history began to adopt the rest of the world's views of the Nazi state.
Becker and Beard in the U.S. were among the first to argue that, while there may be truth in historical writing, it is a truth that is relative to the prevailing culture of the time of writing. New generations will need to re-interpret the past to produce the truth as it relates to their own culture and concerns. Histories written in the two different periods can both be right without being in full agreement with each other, or without considering the same facts as significant.
The post-modern and deconstructionist views, which I did not fully understand, appeared in T's explanation of them to argue that there is no truth at all. We have no access to the world of the past. All we have are stories which are either self-consistent or not and are either elegantly told or not. To the extent that they are consistent and elegant, they are good histories.
Does anyone except relatively fringe academics take such theories seriously? I don't know. Perhaps they do or did. But Thompson takes them seriously, at least for the purpose of explaining why they aren't right. He does not argue that history well written according to Rankean rules is absolutely right or completely right. He argues only that it can tell us truthful things about the past and that, by more and more diligent research, we can continually refine our knowledge of the past. It can never be complete or completely accurate, but it can get better.
Thompson also offers very interesting observations about the work of historians. He describes the problems of archives. The Public Records Office of the United Kingdom, for example, receives only about 5% of the government documents produced in a year. The great majority of those documents are not cataloged but simply stored in boxes. A historian attempting to do research in the archives cannot hope to go through them all, or to make progress by reading randomly. He is highly dependent on the archivist, and on having in his own mind a good idea of what he is looking for and how to find it.
T describes a typical research project. A grad student is writing a paper or a dissertation on the role of women in the coal strikes of the 1960's. There is a list of all of the archives he must look at, from government papers to trade union archives, to newspaper archives, to any personal diaries or memoirs that he can find, possibly by going door to door. Since there are people alive who would have been involved, he has to find ways to find them and convince them to talk to him. Working through the archives, separating the wheat from the chaff, finding the documents and the people, are all very time consuming. He can expect to spend two years on the project and produce one article for a historical review.
T also describes the milieu of academic publishing, the peer review process, the difficulties of running an academic journal. An editor, himself poorly compensated for his work, has to cajole other academics with appropriate experience and credentials into performing peer review work for him. He can't offer money because he hasn't got any. So he's got to find other ways to recruit them and he often has to put up with whatever they do, possibly also publishing papers of their own, in order to keep them on the job. The authors who submit papers are under pressure to write on subjects of interest to the editors and readers and not just write about whatever they like, and they also feel a need to cite papers by their friends. By citing papers by their friends they earn points for those friends in the citation indexes - a factor in academic promotion - and, hopefully, impose obligations on their friends to cite his, the author's, papers when they write. There's no point (says Thompson) calling this a corrupt process. It's the way humans are and the way they work and it has to be accepted.
I think this may be the first book I've read on historiography. Reading any history, I now think more deeply about the process that created it. The effect is the same as reading a book about writing or a book about making movies. It helps to show me the author's perspective or to put me behind the camera, as it were, when I'm watching a movie.
I did what I could to find Thompson by searching the Web. It turns out that he's a professor of history, now in his 70's, and a lifelong member and activist in the British Communist Party. But he's no ideologue. He was quite vociferous in his condemnation of history as practiced in the Soviet Union. He said they had a five year plan for everything, including a plan, designed by politicians, for what the historians were to prove, and when to change what they proved when policy changed.
I got quite a bit out of this book.
| Author | Perez-Reverte, Arturo |
|---|---|
| Translators | Peden, Margaret Sayers |
| Publication | Plume, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | September 2012 |
This English translation of Limpieza de Sangre was made in 2006.
In the second novel in Perez-Reverte's Captain Alatriste series, Alatriste is hired to assist a man and his two sons in rescuing the teenage daughter of the family from a convent in the Madrid of 1623 run by a prominent clergyman cum rapist who treats the young nuns as his personal harem. The plan seems like a good one but it is a trap. The father and one of the brothers of the girl are killed, the other brother escapes with serious wounds, and 13 year old Inigo Balboa, the ward and companion of Alatriste, is captured by the Italian swordsman Gualterio Malatesta from the first novel. Malatesta admires the spirit of the boy but nevertheless turns him over to the Inquisition where he is framed and tormented as a hidden Jew. He is beaten to denounce Alatriste but refuses to betray his friend. Only his young age saves him from being broken on the rack. However the girl, severely tortured to the point of complete loss of will power, testifies as instructed that the boy, whom she never met, is a Jew. Evidence planted on him by a beautiful young girl before his capture confirms it. They will all be taken to the public square for sentencing and an auto-da-fe.
Alatriste, seemingly powerless to intervene, has pledged his loyalty to a powerful minister in the court in return for information that another minister and leader of the inquisition had a Jewish grandmother. The captain uses that information just in time to blackmail the man into saving Inigo's life.
Alatriste is spotted in the crowd. Several agents, led by Malatesta, pursue him into a narrow alley where swords are useless and only one man can fight another with a knife. Malatesta is cut up and Alatriste, with lesser wounds, escapes. Later, Alatriste finds Malatesta's hiding place. He is living in a dingy room with a woman who loves him. His wounds are serious. His situation is so like Alatriste's own that, after some talk and deliberation, Alatriste walks out, leaving Malatesta alive - perhaps to return in a later volume.
Inigo, the narrator of the story, recovers from his ordeal and the bond between soldier and boy is all the stronger.
I thought this was a wonderful story, a swashbuckling historical romance much in the spirit of Sabatini or Weyman and perhaps a bit of Ruiz-Zafon. Perez-Reverte has a light touch. The characters are spare, but not wooden. The language is clear, but not lacking in subtlety.
At least one Amazon reviewer decried the anti-antisemitic theme of the story. He saw it too much as a didactic history lesson and not enough as a novel. For me, of course, this theme was deeply interesting and welcome. There is plenty of literature that glosses over the ugly side of history. I appreciate literature that takes the sunglasses off and looks at the naked truth.
| Author | Davies, Norman |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 592 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | September 2012 |
Davies covers the entire war from the invasion of Poland to the surrender in 1945, and a little beyond into the struggles between the USSR and the West in Greece, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia immediately after the war. But it is an unusual account. He provides a simple overview of the military aspects of the war. Why it's there I'm not sure. Perhaps it is intended to give the reader enough background that he can understand the rest of the book, which is mostly about political, social, and economic aspects of the war. However the overview is oversimplified and, to my inexpert eye, contained technical and other errors.
Much of the book is given over to small essays about specific topics - bankers, journalists, photographers, whatever. In each case Davies seems concerned both to show how this group of people or this topic related to the war as a whole, and to attack other historians for giving inaccurate, Western-centric views.
There are two central themes to the book. The first is that the Soviet Union won the war. He claims that they would have won the war even if Britain had capitulated and the U.S. had stayed out of it. His argument is that the number of divisions deployed by both sides on the Eastern Front made the North African, Italian, and even western front campaigns look small. The landing at Normandy was not really a major battle - not the most important, second most important, all the way down to tenth most important - all of which occurred on the eastern front.
His second major theme is that the Soviet Union was just about as evil as Nazi Germany and the Soviet regime may have killed even more people than the Nazi regime did. He rails against leftist Western academics who speak of the heroic Soviets and ignore or minimize the tremendous crimes that they committed. He considers the allied, and especially the American, failure to recognize Soviet barbarity and failure to do anything about it was a great failing of Allied leadership. Along the way, he argues that the British and Americans also committed serious crimes during the war and should be taken to task for them.
I should think that Davies' positions on the main themes of the book are broadly right. Stalin was a criminal who created a criminal regime. The Soviets did bear the brunt of the fighting and, at great cost to themselves, tore the heart out of the Wehrmacht. Many of his smaller themes were also of interest. But I was disturbed by the lack of factual accuracy, and by his insistent condemnation of Allied leaders and Western historians. One gets the sense that Davies didn't bother looking up facts for many parts of the book. It was sufficient for him to just consult his memory. As a result perhaps, there are numerous factual errors.
The tone of his book indicates that he believes himself to be correcting great wrongs, exposing Soviet apologists and exposing Western oriented historians and popularizers who inflate the roles of British and Americans in winning the war and focus on relatively smaller battles, treating them as if they were war winning turning points. He has a point. Indeed the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Bagration, and Berlin involved far more troops and tanks than the Normandy invasion. But the Normandy invasion was pretty grand in its own right, certainly involving more ships, more planes, more paratroops, and a larger amphibious assault than any previous battle in this or any other war. It led eventually to the destruction of a major German army at Falaise, the liberation of France, and the arrival of very powerful armies on, and across, the German frontier. Similarly, although the allied air campaign fell very, very far short of achieving the objectives that Hap Arnold and his supporters thought it would achieve, it did do great damage to German transport and some other industries, and it tore apart the Luftwaffe, which must have greatly assisted the Red Air Force in achieving air superiority over the eastern front.
What I disliked most was the implication from Davies' book that Roosevelt and the Americans did not prevent the Soviet takeover of eastern Europe, did not stop the Holocaust, and enabled communists to prevail in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. What, precisely, the Americans could have done to stop these things was never stated. Would bombing the tracks to Auschwitz have saved many Jews? We don't know. It might have saved some, or it might not have saved any. Perhaps all the same Jews would have been killed the old fashioned way with bullets, bayonets, and clubs, as half or more of all Holocaust victims were, in fact, killed. Maybe it would have taken longer. Maybe Jewish resistance would have been slightly more effective. But more than a full year passed from the complete destruction of Polish Jewry until the Soviet occupation of Poland - time enough to shoot a lot of people.
And what, precisely, should anyone have done to save Eastern Europe? Should the American army have attacked the Soviets, as Patton wanted to do? Only a man like Patton, with no social and political understanding, could have advocated such a view. Only an ideologue or a war lover could have imagined that the U.S. could win and do so with acceptable casualties. Or did Davies perhaps believe that we should have dropped atom bombs on the Soviets?
The book was interesting. I did learn some things from it. It did greatly reinforce my appreciation of the crimes of Stalin. It did give me a better understanding of the failures of the war to resolve all of the problems of Europe. But it could have been a much better book.
| Author | Segev, Tom |
|---|---|
| Translators | Cohen, Jessica |
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 704 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | September 2012 |
Segev begins his account with conditions in Israel in the mid 1960's. There was a recession and high unemployment. Palestinian infiltration and terrorism had become a gradually increasing problem. Fewer Jews were immigrating into Israel and more were emigrating out. The Israelis aspired to a European, and especially an American, way of life but felt themselves to be far from it. Tensions between Ashkenazi (European) and Mizrahi (Oriental) Jews were significant. They largely lived in different communities with different levels of employment, education, standards of living, and culture. There was considerable pessimism about the future.
Tensions between Arabs and Israelis built up for various reasons on both sides. Palestinian terrorists infiltrated into Israel and attacked civilians. The Israeli army launched an attack into Jordan directed against a Jordanian village that had been used as a staging area by the Palestinians, and many completely innocent Jordanian villagers were killed or had their homes or fields destroyed.
The raid into Jordan was not the only provocation coming from Israel's side. The Israel Defense Force (IDF) encouraged gradual encroachment by Israeli farmers into land in the demilitarized zone in Golan, pushing into Syrian owned lands and daring the Syrians to shoot at them, which they eventually did, allowing the Israelis to launch attacks. A number of Israeli commentators, including IIRC Moshe Dayan, blamed Israel for escalating the tension. Under pressure to support Syria, Nasser moved troops into the Sinai and then closed the straits at Sharm el-Sheik to Israeli shipping. Then he ordered the U.N. forces arrayed along the Egyptian side of the border to leave. To everyone's surprise, probably including Nasser, UN General Secretary U Thant promptly complied. Segev speculates that Dag Hammerskjold, had he still been Secretary General, would have found ways to delay, to negotiate, to offer compromises, and so on, but U Thant immediately withdrew the troops. Since Israel had long refused to accept UN troops on its soil, Israelis and Egyptians now directly confronted each other across the border.
The political situation in Israel became almost intolerable. Newspapers were demanding strong leadership. There was a movement to draft David Ben-Gurion back as Prime Minister to lead a war government - most people not realizing that Ben-Gurion was opposed to the coming war. The Americans believed that Israel was not nearly as threatened as the Israelis imagined and that Israel would win handily in any military confrontation. Lyndon Johnson demanded that Israel not do anything to start a war. The IDF demanded war, saying that the Arabs grew stronger and better prepared every day, and that whoever struck first would have incalculable advantages over their adversary. If Israel struck first the commanders guaranteed victory. If the Arabs struck first, they thought that Israel would win but it would be a hard war with many casualties (as was indeed the 1973 war, see the next book summary below.) Reserve forces had been mobilized and the Israeli people and economy were suffering from the effects. Men were pulled out of jobs and away from families. Transport was commandeered. This state of affairs could not continue forever.
Hawks and doves argued it out in the Israeli Knesset and government. The hawks demanded war now. The doves said, let's wait a few more days. Another few days won't hurt. Let's wait some more days. Let's not do anything until the Americans support us. War can be launched at any time but, once launched, cannot be undone. The world will condemn us if we deliver the first blow.
The war itself is only briefly described and with no technical detail. Having degrees in history and political science, Segev is not a military historian. He mostly describes the feelings of the soldiers and their families at home during the mobilization and the war itself. Then he moves on to the aftermath, mainly regarding the occupation of the West Bank and the annexation of Arab Jerusalem.
At first there was euphoria in Israel. Lands lost in 1948 had been recovered. Many people wanted to keep them. The great majority wanted to keep all of Jerusalem. That became a non-negotiable plank of every politician's platform. Israeli tourists swarmed into the West Bank. But soon the practical problems of occupation began to weigh heavily on Israel. Should the textbooks condemning Israel in Arab schools be removed? They were. Should Jordanian money be used or a new currency be created, or Israeli lira be used? Who should provide ordinary government services to the Arabs, and at what level? What should be done with the Arab town councils and mayors? A bureaucracy was quickly established and grew out of control.
Initially, there was great optimism. Full employment returned. The first television station in Israel was established, making people feel that at last they were going to be like America, with a steadily improving standard of living. But the situation deteriorated. Religious Jewish extremists demanded expulsion of Arabs and expropriation of their lands. Palestinian terrorism resumed, including some particularly vicious attacks on children. Secret attempts were made by the Israeli government to move Palestinians out of the country - to Iraq, to Canada, to South America, to Canada, to any place that might have a use for more laborers, but the effect on the Palestinian population was negligible and the Arab birthrate was dramatically higher than the Israeli. The longed for peace, prosperity, and acceptance by the Arab world was not achieved.
There are many limitations to this book. A big one is that there is almost zero use of sources outside of Israel. There is none at all from the Arab countries and only limited sources from the U.S., focusing entirely on Johnson's government's reaction to the crisis.
There was much criticism of the book in Israel. It was regarded as a revisionist history, looking backward to say that the doves were right, the hawks were wrong, and Israel was, itself, a principal cause, and perhaps the principal cause, rather than a victim of the war.
Most of the book is meticulously documented with letters from Israelis, newspaper articles, diaries, and government documents. It is a very impressive work in that regard. But Segev is willing to take sides and make judgments that are controversial. He supports Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and disparages Moshe Dayan, whom he admires in some ways but regards as an unregenerate egotist who made bad decisions, assumed powers beyond what had been granted by the government, and followed inconsistent policies.
Many Amazon reviewers attacked this book. They regarded Segev as a partisan and a revisionist who twisted history to serve his own preconceived conclusions. I think there may be some truth to that. It's hard for me to say since the preconceptions that I brought to this book are probably close to those of Segev. However my experience of the Israeli situation is that it is a hothouse of fiery emotion and strongly held opinion. Any book that attempted to consider the social and political aspects of that period would be highly contentious to those who disagreed with it.
My own opinion is that this was a very impressive piece of historical description and analysis, covering the war and the situation from an important point of view, and with extensive coverage and documentation, that is not found in most works of history.
| Publication | Hod Hasharon, Israel: Eshel-Dramit, Ltd., 1978 |
|---|---|
| Number of Pages | 82 |
| Extras | photos, maps, illustrations |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | September 2012 |
This short book in a format like that of the Osprey publications covers the war launched by Egypt and Syria, with aid from Iraq, Jordan, and even contingents from Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Morocco, and Pakistan, on the Yom Kippur holiday on October 6, 1973.
The preparations on the Arab side were extraordinary. The USSR had replaced all of the material losses suffered by the Arab side in the 1967 war and added much new and modernized equipment, including MiG-21 and Ilyushin aircraft, T-62 tanks, the latest surface to air missiles, wire guided anti-tank missiles, RPG-7 anti-tank rockets, bridging equipment, and missile boats. This time around, the Arab armies had deep respect for Israel's military might and made preparations accordingly. They knew they could not win an air war, so they equipped their forces with extensive anti-aircraft missiles, guns, and radars - which ultimately brought down about 100 IAF aircraft. Knowing that direct tank battles would be difficult, they equipped and trained their infantry in the use of the Sagger and RPG-7 weapons which proved devastating against Israeli armored attacks. They also laid out careful attack plans, innovative methods of crossing the Suez canal, and trained extensively for the specific tasks and problems confronting them.
The war began with a very innovative Egyptian crossing of the canal and occupation of the east bank, together with a massive, coordinated air, artillery, and armored attack on the Golan Heights by Syria. Because the entire Sinai Peninsula stood between Israel and the Egyptian Army, the IDF concentrated instead on the Syrian invasion. Thin Israeli forces at the border were pushed back or overrun. For the first 48 hours isolated groups of Israeli fighters stood, sometimes to the last man, attempting to block the Syrian advance. The Syrian attack was ferocious and, regardless of heavy casualties, they kept throwing more men, tanks, and planes into the fight, constantly attempting to push the offensive deeper into Israel. However, the Israelis mobilized, brought powerful forces to the front, attacked the SAM sites and anti-aircraft artillery, won back control of the skies, pushed the Syrians out of Israel, and rolled their tanks into Syria, ambushing and wiping out an Iraqi column sent to reinforce the Syrians. The Syrians were spent. The massive number of tanks they had committed were destroyed, usually picked off one by one at long range, and their reserves were exhausted. The Israelis had also had heavy tank losses, but highly efficient repair crews, working around the clock under very difficult conditions, returned many tanks to combat.
With the successful Israeli counter offensive in the north, the Syrians called desperately for an Egyptian offensive to reduce the pressure on them. The Egyptians were wary of launching a new offensive. They had achieved their main goal of occupying both banks of the canal and fortifying their positions on the east bank. Pushing on into the Sinai, relatively far from their base, open to air attack from the IAF and to being flanked or surrounded by the IDF, without the cover of their anti-aircraft umbrella, was dangerous indeed. But the did it, with great bravery, even attempting a helicopter borne commando assault. It was, of course, a disaster.
The Israeli counterattack, when it came, was at first repelled. The Israeli tankers had never faced infantry that were so well armed and trained with light but effective anti-tank weapons. The authors state that the Egyptian infantry fielded an average of 55 anti-tank weapons per kilometer of front. A large number of tanks were lost and the offensive failed. But the Israelis adapted quickly. Firing from long range and sometimes leading with infantry instead of tanks, they greatly reduced their losses.
The second counterattack took better account of the Egyptian capabilities. Following a feint to the north, Ariel Sharon led his forces into an attack between two Egyptian divisions, driving to the banks of the canal, fighting under intensive air attack, artillery fire and strong armor and infantry counterattacks from both flanks, they managed to get some bridging equipment to the canal and throw some tank forces across into the relatively undefended rear. There they swept up and down the bank of the canal, wiping out anti-aircraft installations there and greatly freeing up the IAF for further attacks.
The book ends with a short chapter on the war at sea. The only real battle was a sortie by Israeli missile boats against the Syrian Navy. They successfully sank five Syrian boats for no losses of their own. It was the first guided missile battle between naval forces ever conducted.
Written by Israelis, this book was nevertheless highly complementary to the Arab armies. The Arabs did not just employ huge forces, they also fought with considerable courage, skill and in at least some cases, good leadership. No overall assessment was made of why Israel won. Surely it had much to do with Israeli air superiority, but also much to do with outstanding military effectiveness. The Israelis adapted quickly to changing circumstances and launched powerful attacks in complex situations where the commanders must have had no more than hours to prepare. In several battles, they spotted Arab tank columns on the move and attacked their flanks, wiping out 80 or 90 tanks at a time.
In the final analysis, courage and determination also played a key role. The Israelis pressed home attacks in spite of serious losses and overwhelming odds, finally breaking their enemy's will when, by any objective standard, they should have regarded themselves as beaten.
Before reading this little book, I hadn't realized that the Yom Kippur War was the biggest and most ferocious of the Arab Israeli wars. "The Arabs lost over 2500 tanks, thousands of armored vehicles and guns; over 450 of their aircraft were shot down, many of their pilots killed; tens of thousands of troops were killed, wounded, or captured on both fronts ... The Israelis as well suffered a heavy blow. Over 2500 of their men were killed in action ... the Israeli Armored Corps lost almost half its tank strength, but many of the battered tanks were repaired ... Over 100 IAF aircraft were brought down by the Arab anti-aircraft systems, many with their veteran pilots ..."
It was a ferocious battle. Unlike in the past, the Arabs put everything they had, and everything the USSR could provide to them, into an all or nothing attempt to defeat Israel. They probably understood that they would not conquer Israel, but they probably hoped to establish new facts on the ground that would recover land and honor lost in 1967 in a negotiated peace. In the end, with Israeli forces pushing into Arab countries, the great powers intervened with a negotiated cease-fire, badly needed by the Arabs but probably much welcomed by the Israelis as well.
| Author | Bova, Ben |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2012 |
Jake Ross, assistant professor of astronomy at the state university (state unspecified) is recruited by his old friend and mentor, the head of the local planetarium, to join the senatorial campaign of Frank Tomlinson as science adviser. He is asked to come up with a science based issue that will help Tomlinson beat incumbent Democratic Senator Leeds, who is backed by the teachers and other union groups and turns out to be, in some unspecified way, fronting for the mafia that controls the Indian casinos in the state. His mentor pushes Jake to advance the cause of magneto hydrodynamics (MHD), a technology for efficient power generation using the hypersonic speed of charged plasma particles to induce current in a magnetic field. An MHD research facility at a small town in the country is generating up to 50 megawatts from "the big rig", a fairly small MHD generator that is potentially dangerous and makes a huge amount of noise and so has to be sited in the middle of nowhere.
Jake goes to bed with Amy, who is sleeping with Tomlinson, but falls in love with Glyn, who is sleeping with the MHD project head, who decides that the project head was murdered by the mafia thugs around Leeds. There are confrontations with mobsters, campaign meetings, a final showdown with the mobsters, a Tomlinson victory, and Jake goes to Washington to continue as the new Senator's science adviser.
I've been happy with previous Ben Bova books that I've read but this one was purely and simply the pits. Jake commits to the wealthy Tomlinson and his rich country club friends for no special reason other than Tomlinson and the mentor ask him to. He goes to bed with Amy even though he knows she is using him and is committed to Tomlinson. Ridiculously, he is jealous about her relationship with T, even though Jake himself knows she's using him and knows that he's more attracted to Glynnis anyway.
Glynnis is committed to confronting the mobsters. Does she have a plan? No, none whatsoever. Jake warns her that these guys will kill her and forbids her from talking to them. Does he give her reasons, not really. Does he discuss the issues with her? No. Does he ask her what her plan is? No. All he does is make demands. He and Glynnis are both supposed to be smart people, but they mainly make stupid statements and stupid moves.
In the end, Jake and the chief MHD engineer, who is also in love with Glynnis, drive out to the Senator's rural retreat in a snowstorm to rescue her from the mobsters. There is an absurd fight in which Jake smashes the huge "Monster" with a table lamp, then wrestles "Nacho" Perez and gets his gun away from him - Nacho having failed to shoot Jake while Jake was clubbing Monster three times.
For unknown reasons, Glyn goes with the engineer, another ridiculous and cardboard character, instead of Jake and Jake accepts Tomlinson's offer to go to DC. The whole thing was ridiculous, even the MHD story - which was not fleshed out at all.
After the first CD I considered dropping it but figured it would get better. By the end of third I was still unhappy with it but, as I often (though not always) do, I just continued on and finished.
| Author | Gazzaniga, Michael S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 260 |
| Extras | diagrams notes index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Cognitive science |
| When Read | September 2012 |
This book is based on the Gifford Lectures delivered by Professor Gazzaniga in 2009. G is the director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara and president of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute and has a number of other prestigious posts and honors. Starting in the 1960's, G did seminal research on patients who had been lobotomized. Up to that time it was thought that the lobotomy had no significant effect on brain function but G demonstrated conclusively that there were significant effects. Much of his work consisted in showing things to one eye or the other, but not both and asking patients what they saw and what they made of it. He demonstrated that the right brain, receiving input from the left eye, was able to literally and accurately report what was in the visual field but did a poor job of interpreting it. The left brain, fed by the right eye, was capable of extensive interpretation, including rationalization, but did a poor job of producing an accurate report of what was seen.
These experiments continued over many years and soon also included experiments on patients who had lesions or damage in many other specific areas of the brain, allowing the Professor and his grad students and colleagues to learn much about what the function of many different sections of the brain really is.
It turns out that the brain is not the plastic organ that it was once thought to be. Different parts of the brain have different functions. If a part of the brain is damaged, other parts of the brain may be able to take up some of the functions but, in many cases, they cannot.
The brain has a total of about 86 billion neurons. Of those, 68 billion are in the cerebellum, taking care of motor and autonomic functions. 17 billion are in the various parts of the cortex, handling perception and interpretation. Only one billion are in other functions. Within the 17 billion, we have quite a bit of knowledge of the role of specific structures. Some of those structures are surprisingly small and very localized for the perceived importance of the abilities that they confer upon us. It also turns out that the number of neurons we have is not dramatically larger than that the chimpanzees, our nearest living evolutionary cousins. The extra size of our brains is not packed with a proportionately larger number of neurons, though we do have more in areas critical for rational thought, but with a larger space for connections between neurons. Much of our greater intelligence is therefore based on the complexity of the network rather than the quantity of the nodes.
One of the very interesting things that the neuroscientists learned is that the explanation of why we do things is often quite post hoc. Imaging and other studies show that people very often make a decision in a part of the brain that is not involved in rational thought, with the rational thought catching up around a half second later. I don't know if the interpretation put on that is fully correct, but it does, along with other interesting experiments, show that the brain is very good at making up stories about what could have, should have, or would have happened to explain a decision or other perceived events in the absence of direct evidence. We can justify what we did, but what we did is often not motivated by the justification we give, even though we fully believe that it is. I think this explains quite a lot about human behavior, and I think G would agree.
G wants to weigh in on the philosophical issues of free will and determinism. He even makes "free will" part of the subtitle of his book. He clearly is aware of the philosophical issues and has read some amount of the philosophical texts.
His discussion of these issues does not satisfy me, but he does shed useful light on the subject. To begin with, he explains that, even though the brain is a material object subject to physical laws, the complexity is such that some of its behavior can only be described statistically and, in any case, the complexity is such that it is physically impossible for any computing machine to be large enough to perfectly predict the brain's behavior at the molecular level. He refers to the three body problem (which he gets wrong according to Susan Bassein - and I believe her), and the famous paper asking if the flap of a butterfly wing in Brazil can lead to a tornado in Texas.
His major emphasis in examining determinism is in discussing the impact of social systems on individual human behavior. Humans do not live alone. Living in societies, they create various different cultures, governments, and so on that, in turn, act back upon human behavior. This feedback, as we might call it, do not arise from the laws human molecular biology any more than the rules of motor traffic arise from the specific structure or organization of automobiles.
I'm sure he's right about that but he missed a parallel observation that I think is perhaps more important when we talk about free will, as opposed simply (not a great word here, I know) to non-determinism. What I'm thinking of is the interaction of reason back upon human behavior.
Humans have acquired the power of reason. Our brains are constructed to be able not just to produce post hoc rationalizations for what we have done, but to think out intelligent and consistent guides for behavior. When we follow those guides we are indeed still subject to the laws of molecular biology, but we are accepting guidance from logic as well and in addition to our internal physical needs, just as we accept guidance from society as well and in addition to our internal physical needs. It is precisely there, in our relationship to rationality, that we should look for an understanding of "freedom" and "free will".
Gazzaniga cites Spinoza but perhaps not fully enough. Spinoza said that freedom lies in the acceptance of necessity. It is a paradoxical sounding aphorism but there is an essential truth in it as well.
I started to write a letter to Gazzaniga about this. After I wrote it I re-read it and, as often happens, felt that it was overblown and not altogether to the point. I did not send it and probably never will. It's in a file named "Gazzaniga.txt".
| Author | Deighton, Len |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster |
| Copyright Date | 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 287 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | October 2012 |
An unnamed member of the British security services is tasked with finding a British scientist who has disappeared and believed to have either defected or been kidnapped by the Russians. The "action", such as it is, involves a trip to Lebanon and kidnapping of someone there, then some work back in the UK, a raid on a suspected KGB safe house in London from which everyone has already gone, and a visit to a Pacific island with his boss and his beautiful young assistant to witness a nuclear bomb test.
The action of the story is very confusing. It's very hard to figure out who the characters are and how the events relate to each other. The main character works for, and may be replacing, a boss who shows up to accompany him to the Pacific island. But on the island that boss appears to lead him into a trap where he is arrested by the Americans as a communist spy, beaten, and apparently exchanged to Hungary for two British citizens in Hungarian prisons. In Hungary he is further beaten, starved, and abused in various ways, but he figures out that this is all fishy and manages to escape, finding himself not in Hungary at all but in a house in England where his tormentors appear to be the British secret service.
Once free, and on the run, he eventually discovers that his tormentors are rogue elements of the British secret service with a nefarious plan to brainwash agents into working for them. He is not the only agent who has discovered the plot. The rogues are ultimately arrested and the character restored to his position.
This was a most unusual spy thriller. Intelligent, sardonic, and seemingly skeptical of the presumed verities of British and American patriotism, it turns out to be a bit more conventional in its values at the end. but the story is too tricky. The last 7% of the book is entirely given over to explaining, not always successfully, what happened.
Ultimately, it struck me as a non-credible story. An individual double agent within a security service seems credible to me. A whole gang of double agents, mostly acting because they have been brainwashed, is not credible. So I consider the plot as a failure.
In spite of that, the main character is interesting and engaging and the book was not a bad read.
The genre of spy fiction was developing rapidly when this book appeared. Along with Le Carre's The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, published the same year, it was something of a pioneer for its skepticism.
| Author | Pressfield, Steven |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday Broadway, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | October 2012 |
Matthias, the much younger brother of Alexander's soldiers Philip and Elias, leaves Macedon with a group of new recruits to join the army in Afghanistan. He is a "scuff", what Americans began to call a "grunt" in Vietnam. He travels with young buddies from home, most importantly Lucas, an intelligent and upright young man and with Flag (the Flag Sergeant whom no one dares ask his real name), Tollo, and other veterans whom Matthias and the other scuffs deeply admire and respect.
His assignments are those that would be given to the newest, rawest recruits - caring for horses, cleaning the camp, carrying stuff, and so on, but over time he acquires experience. On a mission to wipe out a village he first baulks at killing a harmless old man, then is forced to it and makes a botch of the job. Later he redeems himself and gradually earns some respect and rank, first as a corporal, then quite a bit later as a sergeant.
The war has several distinct parts. First there is the military part. The troops constantly pursue the Afghan warriors, wherever they are. They use deep strategy and bear great hardships, for example in crossing winter passes in ice and snow, to get troops behind their enemy in order to surround and crush them before they can escape.
A second part of the strategy is to punish the civilian population that supports the warriors. Villages and towns are wiped out. Men are all killed, women and children sold into slavery. When a woman knifes a "Mack" (Macedonian), she and all of the other women are instantly killed. The killing is professional slaughter, much as animals would be killed in a slaughterhouse, without emotion or wasted movement. The soldiers would like the money from selling the slaves but if a woman kills all of the women are deemed to be dangerous and besides, the slave market is getting saturated anyway [Did I just make up that last part? I think it was in the book but perhaps in a little different part.]
None of that really works. Any number of Afghan warriors are killed. Any number of civilians are terrorized. Any number of towns and villages are burnt to the ground. Nothing will stop the Afghans from fighting for their freedom. Suffering and death are normal to them anyway. They mean nothing. Half the country is devastated and half the men are dead, but the war is still not ended.
The third strategy is accommodation. It takes many forms. Afghans are hired into the army. They still hate the Macks. They are unreliable. But while in the army they are not accessible to the rebels.
Tribal conflicts are exploited. Some groups are invited by Alexander into the lands of their ancestral enemies. Even though the Afghans all hate the foreigners, they are unable to fully put aside their own squabbles.
Finally, after pursuing the brilliant Afghan-Persian general Spitamenes to his death and conquering the stronghold of Oxyartes, the most important of the four remaining Afghan chieftains, the Macks capture Oxyartes' beautiful daughter Roxanne. Alexander, as brilliant in diplomacy as in war, does not hold her hostage. Instead he proposes to her father that he marry her, become Oxyartes son-in-law, put Oxyartes onto the throne as Alexander's ruler in Afghanistan, pay a fortune for the girl's hand, and make an end to the war. The other chieftains will also be given titles and honors. Afghanistan will become a nominal part of the empire but continue to be, in reality, free.
In parallel with these events, Matthias deepens his knowledge and forms an attachment to Shinar, an Afghan girl who had been contracted from a mule dealer who ran out of mules and rented girls as pack animals instead. The girls were treated as slaves. Shinar is the only one who talks back and is beaten to within an inch of her life for it. Matthias intervenes, buys the girl, and falls in love with her. She is an admirable person but is an Afghan, worlds apart from the Greeks. Word soon comes to Matthias that she has a brother and cousins and that they will kill her for the shame of allowing herself to be rescued by a foreigner when her brother was unable to do it. In the end, Matthias thinks he has finally made an arrangement to pay off the brother but it is all a ruse to lure him away. The girl, of course, is killed, along with Matthias' infant son.
Matthias and his remaining brother and friends follow Alexander into India.
The novel has much to recommend it. It is well and smoothly written. The details of military life are believable in the sense of what universal military life is like. However the historical authenticity, as in almost all historical novels, raises many questions.
Was the Afghan culture of those days so much like the Afghan culture today - extremely anti-female, fiercely independent, open and honest and decent in some respects while closed, dishonest and despicable in others? Or is Pressfield's book primarily a commentary on the modern day Afghanistan and the modern day Afghan wars? I would guess that the culture of today does indeed have deep roots - much deeper than the Islamic covering that provides the present day gloss for what is really a very ancient culture that was more the cause than the consequence of Islam.
Some of the devices in the story are transparent projections of modern times into the past. Lucas is a kind of conscientious objector who may or may not have existed in those days. Costas is an ancient newspaper reporter embedded in Alexander's army. He writes sanitized stories that he sells back in Greece. Stephanos is a poet and philosopher. Did such men exist? Maybe, maybe not. It is a mistake to imagine that the personalities of today were not very much alive 2,300 years ago, but maybe what is portrayed here goes too far beyond that.
There was a very modern feel to the entire novel. Alexander's army was very like the U.S. Army or Marine Corps. There is good reason to believe in such parallels. We know that there were technical experts, a broad range of ranks, medals, supply corps, reconnaissance units, and so on in the ancient as well as modern armies. We know there were paymasters and enlistments. But what happened to the ancient sensibilities?
There are religious soldiers and officers today. Where was the religion, the supernaturalism, the signs and omens, the superstitions that we know were rife in ancient times? There is none of that in Pressfield's book. The consciousness of Matthias, Lucas, and Stephanos is thoroughly 21st century American. An American grunt would feel right at home.
Do I believe in the book? Yes and no. Parts were convincing and enlightening. Parts were not. Regardless, it was a good effort and a well written book.
| Author | Beevor, Antony |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 2009 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | October 2012 |
Beevor opens his account with the weather reports in the days leading up to the invasion and the hard choices Eisenhower and his generals had to make about when to go. He then recounts the events of the invasion itself - the air landings and diversions on the night before, the landings on each of the beaches, and the intense fighting at the waterfront and inland.
The German defense was very tough. Even second line troops fought well and the several panzer and SS divisions in the area fought with great, sometimes fanatical, determination.
The issue could have been in doubt but several Allied advantages proved decisive. One was Hitler's poor leadership. He persisted in believing that the main landing would be in the Pas de Calais. The allied deception plan was highly successful in fooling him and others, though perhaps Hitler's inexperience with and lack of understanding of sea power made him believe that no other landing place was really very practical (Beevor didn't make this point but I've read it elsewhere.) Hitler held reserves back for too long in anticipation of an invasion at Calais but, in addition, failed to understand that Allied air power would make it impossible for him to bring up reserves later. Finally, Hitler descended further and further into fantasy and wishful thinking - denying the reports from his commanders that they faced overwhelming force, denying the truth given him by his commanders of Frederick the Great's dictum that he who defends everything defends nothing, failing to appreciate that his forces had been ground down to bare subsistence, and insisting that all of the problems were due to timid or even traitorous behavior by his generals.
A second, more concretely decisive Allied advantage was overwhelming air superiority. Thunderbolt and Typhoon fighter bombers ranged the battlefield and the areas near and far behind it at will. Luftwaffe attempts to contest the airspace were met and defeated hundreds of miles from the front. They hardly ever got close enough to fight except in night raids that, as with Allied bombings, sometimes hit their own troops. Fighter bombers, "Jabos" in German parlance, flew patterns over the advancing Allied troops just waiting to be called onto any German position that offered resistance - coming down to treetop level in minutes to pound or strafe it into oblivion.
Movements of panzer divisions that might have taken two days a few months before took up to six weeks. In addition to continuous air strikes, French partisan activity damaged railway bridges, tunnels and tracks and cut telephone lines - all slowing German movements of men, supplies, orders, and information. When all else failed to break German defenses, massive carpet bombings could be effected.
A third advantage was the tremendous flow of supplies pouring over the beaches from England. German artillery was good but they could not match the volume of shells coming from the American guns. Small arms ammunition, food, and gasoline all came ashore in prodigious amounts prompting one German to complain that it had become a rich man's war, and the Americans were rich.
Although the Allied soldiers were highly trained, they were inexperienced. Some American infantry divisions fought very badly, especially at first. Many men cowered in their foxholes and failed to fire their weapons. Other troops, especially tankers and paratroopers but some infantry too, fought with great tenacity and determination.
Beevor continues the story beyond the invasion itself, describing the attacks on Caen, the breakout in Operation Cobra, Patton's rapid end run around the Germans, The German counter-offensive at Mortain and the unexpectedly fierce American resistance to it, followed by the attempted cutoff at the Falaise gap. The story ends with the capture of Paris, something that Eisenhower didn't want to do but which events forced him into supporting.
The impact of the battle on French civilians was severe. More Frenchmen died due to bombing and shelling than British died in the blitz in 1940-41, but the sacrifices made by the French in Normandy paved the way for the very rapid collapse of German arms in the west that resulted in light casualties in the rest of France. After the liberation, the French took their revenge on collaborators, especially the women who engaged in "collaboration horizontal". B contends that a lot of the seeming righteous indignation against these defenseless women was engaged in by people who did nothing whatever to resist the Germans themselves and were puffing up their own anti-German credentials by engaging in this risk-free bullying of the most helpless targets around. Those who wouldn't have dared to face Germans with guns were happy to gang up and beat or spit upon French women.
For the most part, American and British forces were treated as liberators and heroes but some, especially American, troops, behaved very badly - stealing, drinking, and acting like undisciplined louts. Some of this was due to lack of discipline. Some was probably a letting off steam of men who had been under intense combat pressure and terrible living conditions for some months, men who thought they had earned the comforts of the civilian life around them.
As with other historians, Beevor is not very kind to Bernard Law Montgomery. Monty seemed to claim that every decision he made, whether it appeared to work well or fail dramatically, had actually gone exactly according to his plan. In fact, his leadership was mediocre. He did some things well enough and others badly. He might have been tolerated if he weren't so obnoxious. As it was, Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and most of the British staff even up to Churchill, had had enough of him and he came within a hair's breadth of being removed. Only his manufactured reputation as the hero of North Africa, and the perception that removing him would demoralize both troops and civilians at home, kept him in his command.
All in all this is a very impressive account. Beevor reminds me of Cornelius Ryan in his meticulous use of primary sources, his objectivity, his attention to German and French materials as well as to British and American ones, and his interest in material from ordinary fighting men on both sides as well as to the official documents and accounts by leaders.
The book often read as a massive accounting of details, sometimes almost kilometer by kilometer, of the fighting. But that didn't reduce its interest for me. If anything, it enhanced my understanding of the campaign.
One of the trends in World War II history has been to pay more attention to the Eastern Front. In many British and American accounts of the first few decades after the war, the Russian contribution was ignored. The war was won by the Allies in France and Germany, and by the aerial bombardment of Germany.
That view is, of course, false. It was the Russians who stopped the Wehrmacht and turned the tide of battle before the Western Allies got deeply into the fight. Millions of Russians died while British and American soldiers marched up and down hills in Britain and the U.S., training and training, but doing little fighting. Even in North Africa, which the U.S. did not invade until November, 1942, eleven months after Hitler's declaration of war on the U.S., at least in the initial fighting in Tunisia, there were eight or nine American soldiers behind the lines for each one who faced German fire at the front. The Russians did not have that luxury.
But having said all that, we must still give credit to the Allied efforts in France in 1944. The fighting was very fierce. The concentration of powerful German forces, including famous Waffen SS panzer divisions like Leibstandardte Adolf Hitler, Hitler Jugend, Goetz von Berlichingen, and others, with copious armor and artillery, was intense. Allied casualties per kilometer of front were generally much higher than on the Russian front. And as in Russia, quarter was not always given. Very few SS prisoners were taken and the SS didn't take many prisoners either. There were, however, more humane officers and soldiers on both sides.
I liked the book and may read some of Beevor's others.
| Author | Mohamed, Nadifa |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2012 |
Jama, a Somali boy living in Aden with his mother in a corner of a house owned and grudgingly provided to them by his mother's relatives, is growing up on the streets of the city in 1935. His father, an attractive, musical man, left home in Somalia to become a truck driver and has not returned in years. He is thought to be in the Sudan but has not been seen recently..
Jama's mother dies, leaving him her carefully saved stash of 100 rupees. With nothing to hold him in Aden he returns to his native Somalian village where he makes a living at age 14 working in a slaughterhouse. But he yearns to find his father. After a problem in the village where he mistreats a girl he leaves and attempts to reach his father in the Sudan. In Eritrea he goes to work for the Italian army, where he is beaten and mistreated but knows no other way to live. He learns from a clansman that his father is dead. He was killed trying to get home to Jama. He left all of his possessions, an old suitcase and a battered musical instrument, to Jama. Then the war comes. The Italians are beaten by the British with their Indian soldiers. One of Jama's cousins, a happy go lucky boy whom everyone loved, is beaten and tortured to death by three Italian sadists after he steals a petty item from a supply dump. Jama leaves. He makes a living as a musician. He comes to a village where he establishes a trading post and falls in love with Bethlehem, a local girl. They start a farm which is successful, but the whole area is wiped out by locusts. Jama marries the girl but leaves again, hoping to make a fortune in Port Said in Egypt, working on the ships.
After much wandering and various difficulties he gets a British passport and a job as a coal stoker on a ship taking refugee Jews to a concentration camp in Germany after the British stopped them from getting into Palestine. He makes more money than he ever imagined, but fritters it away. Then he hears from a cousin in London that he is a new father. He returns to Africa to be with his wife.
According to the Wikipedia, the author of this novel is a Somali born woman who grew up in London and graduated from Oxford. The story is supposedly based on the life of her father. It is unlike any other story that I have read and gives those of us who live in the West some insight into Somali life. It may be idealized in its way, or maybe not. I wouldn't know. The people are relatively gentle and caring, with a very deep sense of family and clan obligation. Very few of the characters have any sophisticated knowledge of the outside world, though some of them do.
The European world was entirely transformed in the years leading up to the 20th century, but Africa and much of Asia were suddenly thrust into the new reality created in Europe and had a hard adjustment, an adjustment that is still incomplete to this day.
None of us know where all of this is leading. We don't know what will become of the Africans or many others in the poor "underdeveloped" countries. But this book gives us some insight into who at least some of them are, or were 70 years ago. No doubt they have already greatly changed.
| Author | Barnes, Julian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vintage |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2012 |
Graham Hendrick, a 38 year old professor of history, meets Ann, a woman at a cocktail party, starts an affair with her, and leaves Barbara, his nasty, shrewish wife of 15 years for this lovely person who is the opposite of his wife. He gives Barbara everything she wants, the house, the car, custody of their daughter, child support. He asks for nothing. His contact with his daughter is limited and constrained by his wife's nastiness, but he is well rid of the bitch and launched on a new life.
But then something happens. Barbara lies to him and tells him that his daughter's school is featured in a film showing at the cinema and gets him to take her. When he goes there he sees a low budget lousy film but then Ann walks on. She is playing the role of a tramp who meets and seduces an Italian on screen. Of course the girl's school is not featured in the film and the girl herself was told that her father especially wanted her to see this film. It is yet another piece of Barbara's vindictive and irrational nastiness.
Graham knew that Ann was a minor actress in the past. He knew that she was no virgin and had a number of lovers over the years. but he had never seen one before. It bothered him. He went home and asked Ann if she slept with the man. Ann, always truthful, said that yes, she had. Concealing his emotions, Graham later went back to see the film again and again. Then he looked up all of her films and saw all of them. He asked her questions about all of the men in her past life and all of the places she had traveled with any of them. He became obsessively jealous of all of these men. He dreamed terrible, impotent dreams in which they mocked him and mistreated him and told him all of the things they had done with Ann.
Finding no respite from his obsession, he began to confide in his friend Jack Lupton, a writer and rake who suggested to him that he try having an affair or, if he couldn't do that, which he couldn't, try masturbating. Ann tried to help him but she was helpless. He could not overcome his terrible despair. He believed that she was faithful to him now, that she loved him, and that her past affairs shouldn't matter to him just as his past marriage didn't matter to her. But it was to no avail.
The novel descends further and further into Jack's despair until he begins to get the idea that Jack had an affair with Ann - which was indeed true, and that he was having an affair now - which was not true. In a fury of jealous madness he stabbed Jack to death and then, when his wife finally found him at Jack's home, tied her up and then killed himself in front of her.
Having been so impressed by Barnes' Nothing To Be Frightened Of, I have been wanting to read more books by him. This is the first.
I'm still very impressed by him. He is a great writer with a remarkable intelligence, but had I known what I would be in for I would not have chosen to read this book. I can read about terrible things and, in fact, I read many war stories. But I like my stories to be about people who are, if not winning their battle for life, are at least not tripping over themselves and drowning in irrational self-destruction. Graham Hendrick drowned and it was very painful to read.
| Author | Mowat, Farley |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Memoir |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 2012 |
The great Canadian naturalist and environmentalist writer was still a teenaged boy when World War II broke out. He finally managed to join the army and be accepted for officer training - possibly due to some influence of his father's, and burned to go overseas and fight the enemy. He was sent to England with his unit in 1942 and received training in a number of skills, including air to ground coordination and intelligence, before finally landing in Sicily as an infantry platoon commander.
He fought in some serious battles in Sicily and was in the landings in Italy where his Canadian division advanced up the east coast of Italy with the British army. There he saw terrible combat. He was thrust into almost suicidal actions which he survived, often by luck, but saw many of his closest friends and men whom he most admired blown to pieces by enemy shells. One sat against a tree with his legs blown off, reading a book until he died. Another had his face blown off. Another cracked under combat stress and charged the whole German position by himself blazing away with his Tommy gun as he was immediately cut down by hundreds of bullets. Mowat himself reached the limit of his ability to deal with the death and destruction and was sent back with "combat fatigue".
The book is a remarkable story of what the war was like, on the ground, facing an intelligent, experienced, well equipped enemy, and having to follow orders that may or may not have made sense but were, in any case, orders.
One of the phrases that one hears in accounts of warfare is "at all costs". It was used by Hitler and Stalin all the time. It was also used by generals in relatively safe headquarters who sent men into battle. It was also used by regimental, battalion, and company commanders who led their men into battle and paid the cost themselves. But whether necessary or not, and whether issued by men who shared the fate of their soldiers or not, the orders always meant that men were being ordered to be shot to pieces or blown to pieces and to die. Soldierly skill might help them, but not all that much. When they are ordered to charge up the hill into the face of the enemy, their only hope is luck.
Mowat is fairly self deprecating in this book. I suspect that his deprecation is not entirely warranted. He seems to have been given one dangerous and important assignment after another - something that I wouldn't think would have happened unless his superiors had a high regard for his bravery and his ability.
Mowat would probably deny it but it's hard not to see him as one of the heroes of the war. More than many others, he not only risked his life many times and used his brains, he did so in the full understanding of the humanity of his enemy as well as his own side and of the fragile future he faced.
I was very impressed by the book.
| Author | Mahfouz, Naguib |
|---|---|
| Translators | Stock, Raymond |
| Publication | Alfred A. Knopf, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 1939 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | November 2012 |
This is the first novel in a collected edition entitled Three Novels of Ancient Egypt
I skimmed the introduction by Nadine Gordimer and skipped over a lot of it. She gave away the stories, treating them as the classics that they are which, perhaps, the reader has already been over before. But I didn't want that. I picked up this book to read Mahfouz, not Gordimer, and not with Gordimer's eyes but my own.
Khufu, Pharaoh of Egypt, is at the peak of his strength and power and ten years into building the Great Pyramid which will preserve him for eternity when a magician is brought to entertain the court. The magician gains credibility by hypnotizing the commanding general of the army who has derogated him, and is then asked to make a prediction for the future. The magician predicts that a son of the high priest of Ra will be the next Pharaoh, not Khafar, the crown prince, nor any of Khufu's other sons.
Khufu and Khafar rush to the city of Ra and confront the high priest, an honest man who confesses that he has indeed born a son and that his son will indeed become Pharaoh. Khafar kills him and kills the woman and infant that are found in the house. But, unknown to the royals, they are servants. The real mother and child have escaped with another serving woman named Zaya and are in a wagon in the desert. When they are lost at night and desert tribesmen are heard coming closer, Zaya takes the infant and leaves the sleeping mother, heading for Memphis to find her husband who is working on the pyramid.
She arrives at Memphis only to find her husband has died, but she is a very attractive woman and Bisharu, the chief inspector of the Pyramid, is taken with her and brings her into his household, eventually marrying her and adopting her putative son Djedef as his own. The boy grows up in this privileged household, beloved of Zaya and Bisharu and his older brothers who are destined to become a priest and an artist. At age 12, he enters the military academy to become an army officer. Developing quickly as the top student in all areas, he is picked by Khafar to command his personal guard. Then on a hunt gone wrong, Djedef saves Khafar's life. In gratitude and in recognition of his merit, he is placed in command of an expedition to punish the Bedouin raiders in the Sinai. He reduces their fortress, captures all of them to become slaves, but is surprised by a woman who speaks perfect Egyptian. He rescues her and brings her home only to find that she and Zaya recognize each other. She is Djedef's real mother.
Meanwhile Khafar, ambitious, disaffected from his father, demanding to become Pharaoh right now, orders Djedef to hold the army ready and follow his orders explicitly. It is an attempted coup. The coup fails. Djedef and his men save Khufu from his son. Khafar is killed. Djedef, who has fallen in love with the princess Meresankh, is the hero of the hour. The story of his past is revealed and the Pharaoh, in gratitude, in recognition of Djedef's fine qualities, and in acceptance of the dictates of the Gods and fate, names Djedef as his successor. The prophecy is fulfilled and the faithful and deserving Djedef wins the Empire and the hand of the beautiful maiden.
This book was one of Mahfouz' early works. According to the Wikipedia, it was given an original title they translate as Mockery of the Fates. The Wikipedia authors say that the book was the first in a project intended to comprise 30 novels, and was inspired by Sir Walter Scott.
The similarity to Scott and the literature of that time is apparent to me. We have nobility, an innocent child with a deep fate prepared for him even before his birth. There is a beautiful girl thought to be a peasant but in fact a princess. There are feats of daring by the young hero. There is an infant switched at birth, long held secrets, palace treachery, a wise ruler, and a happy ending of the fairy tale sort.
But there's also something different about this book. It seems to me that Mahfouz is experimenting with this material and this style of writing. He knows what he is doing and does it out of literary interest rather than conviction. It's as if this is not a story that Mahfouz believes in, or one that he requires his readers to believe in. It's more an experiment to see how well the English forms translate into Arabic and ancient Egypt.
Maybe that interpretation is just a product of my own desire to attribute deep sophistication to Mahfouz, to find a way to understand this novel without taking it seriously on its face. Perhaps so. Perhaps not.
One difference from the English form of novel is the even emotional tone of the story. There are scenes of some excitement, but they do not seem to be designed to drive the emotions of the reader. The murder of the infant, Djedef's discovery of the beautiful girl, his rescue of Khafar, his reduction of the stronghold of the robbers, none of these are written in what we would call a "cliff hanger" style.
Another difference is in the characterizations. Khafar is the only unsympathetic character in the entire novel and even he is treated with a flat affect and muted description. His evil acts are limited to just two - the murder of the infant and mother, and the planned patricide.
It is not a convincing picture of ancient Egypt, but doesn't really try to be. It is not a convincing characterization of the main characters - from Pharaoh on down to the sons of Bisharu or the idealized beauty of Meresankh. It's as much a fable as it is a historical novel. So it's a different and surprising book, but it is very readable and quite interesting. I liked it.
| Author | Barrett, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | November 2012 |
Gaston Glock ran a small metal fabrication company producing curtain rods and other commodities outside of Vienna when he saw a request for proposals by the Austrian army for a new pistol. Believing that he could do it, he assembled some firearms experts and came up with a wholly new design unlike anything seen before. It made extensive use of plastic in place of steel - conferring lightness and resistance to rust and weather. It used only 37 parts, only one third the number found in contemporary semi-automatic pistols. It had a large, 17 round capacity magazine, more than other pistols. It did away with the safety lever, using a "trigger safety" instead, and had a light, five pound trigger. The gun was highly reliable, quite accurate, relatively light, low maintenance, and cheap to produce. Glock won the Austrian army contract with it in the early 1980's.
Then he introduced the gun in the United States. Teaming with some American salesmen who understood what to do and how to do it, Glock went about conquering police departments all over the country. Today, Glocks arm 2/3 of all police departments in the USA.
Winning police and FBI approval led quickly to dominance of the private gun market. The guns were sold to police at cut rates, often free with trade-ins of existing police revolvers, to gain credibility. Then they were sold with very large markups to the public at large, which bought five times as many of them as the police did.
Americans buy guns in huge numbers. There is an average of one gun in private hands for each person in the US. There was a time when the average buyer was a small town or rural man buying a rifle or shotgun for hunting purposes. Today however, that market has declined and buyers are buying handguns, not for hunting, but for a perceived need for self defense. To that end, the Glock, with its high reliability, hard hitting rounds, and 17 round magazine, is deemed to be perfect. As one woman put it, she was once cornered by six men and pulled out her six shot revolver. The men ran away. But what would she have done if there were seven men? It's a mentality with a strong hold on the gun buyer's imagination.
Barrett's book is partly about the gun but it's mostly about the company, the founder and other high executives, the sales policies, and the interactions of gun makers, gun buyers, the National Rifle Association, and the government. Glock had by far the most powerful and effective sales organization. They brought beautiful erotic dancers to gun shows. They hired R. Lee Ermey to sign autographs and have his photo taken at a gun show. They gave lavish parties with food, liquor, and girls for police chiefs and other big buyers. They ran ads touting "Glock perfection", and gained an almost fanatical following who regarded the Glock as the best gun in the world.
Internally however, there were many stresses. Gaston Glock had been a rather quiet, disciplined, even miserly man before he became a huge multimillionaire. But after that he hung out with Jorg Haider, the Austrian fascist. He pursued girls and ultimately lost his wife of many years. He bought lavish mansions and two corporate jets, while flying off the handle at employees who spent relatively tiny amounts of company money in ways that he thought were unnecessary, for example the telephone receptionist who bought a head set that enabled her to handle calls more efficiently.
Some of the Glock executives were outright crooks. One embezzled fortunes from the company and actually attempted to have Glock murdered by a former wrestler using a rubber hammer intended to kill the man without leaving serious traces - only to have the 70 year old Glock fight the man to a standstill with his fists until the police could arrive. One of the executives worked with Glock to set up a chain of shell companies whose only goal, stretching and almost certainly breaking the law in Barrett's opinion, was to hide profits from US and Austrian taxation.
As of the writing of this book, Glock, aged 82, is still alive and still has a hand in his company, and the Glock pistols still dominate the US law enforcement market and the US private market, perhaps the biggest market for pistols in the world.
Barrett is a writer for the Wall Street Journal. He understands business and understands people. He is not a technical gun expert and doesn't try to be. His main experience with guns seems to be the shooting and training he did with Glocks in the course of writing this book.
Some reviewers on Amazon have written hysterical attacks on the book without having read it. They assume that it's an anti-gun book, and any anti-gun book is, by it's very position, wrong, dangerous and representing the enemy of all decent people.
It turns out that that point of view has a kind of institutional basis. The National Rifle Association has learned over the years that the more frightened people are of the US government, the more convinced they are that there are liberals in every closet just waiting to take away their precious guns, the more they join the NRA and give money to the organization. Stirring up paranoia is therefore excellent business for the NRA, and great business for the gun companies too.
Government attempts to limit gun ownership have probably had the opposite effect. After every scare that the government will clamp down on gun owners, the owners rush to the stores to stock up on yet more guns before the chance to buy disappears. When the government announced plans to limit magazine capacities, the manufacturers went into round the clock, 24 hour a day production of high capacity guns and magazines in order to produce as many as possible before the bans took effect. In Glock's case, they even offered free trades of new Glocks for old ones to American police departments. New guns for the police could be made with high capacity magazines. Old ones taken in trade already had high capacity magazines and were grandfathered under the new law. Once the law was in effect, these used guns could be sold for prices higher than new to buyers who wanted the high capacity.
Although Barrett discusses all of these social issues, he's not an anti-gun writer. He knows that crime has gone down during the period when gun ownership went up. He examines the reasons for it and concludes that gun ownership and crime are independent of each other. Adding more guns does not seem to either increase or decrease crime rates. He also notes that Glocks are not used in crimes. The FBI's analysis of gun usage in crimes lists Smith and Wesson revolvers at the top, then a number of cheap hand guns. Glock's don't even appear on the list.
Barrett also explains the allure of gun ownership. He quotes another writer in describing the remarkable feeling of power one has when he pulls a trigger and a hole is blasted in a target 25, 50 or even hundreds of yards away. He describes the excitement of the "combat shooting" competitions where people draw guns and fire away at targets in simulated crime situations, or cowboy shooters, or snipers who whisper to each other and then fire single shots at targets 600 yards away.
It was an interesting book about an interesting topic.
| Author | Zaloga, Steven J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Osprey |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 52 |
| Extras | photos illustrations bibliography index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 2012 |
This is the standard Osprey treatment of a World War II weapon. It covers the technical developments of the tank, production figures, and deployments to various armed forces and theaters. As always, it is well illustrated and documented. Also as always, there is nothing in the way of first person accounts of the tank in combat, or anything from the people who fought in it.
The only knowledge I had of this tank came from the 1943 Humphrey Bogart movie Sahara. Sergeant Joe Gunn (Bogart) picks up various survivors of the fall of Tobruk and takes them to a desert oasis. The Germans need the water at the oasis and surround the allied soldiers, but can't get in to the water. Bogart offers them water - one canteen in exchange for one rifle. If I remember correctly, Bogart was bluffing because there wasn't any water there. However the Germans shell the place and, when they finally can't stand their thirst any more and approach with their hands in the air, one of the shells had exposed the water and they were able to drink.
Joe Gunn's tank was an M3.
As a ten year old (or whatever I was) watching this movie on the late show I was totally taken with the tank. It had three guns, a big one (75 mm it turns out) in a sponson, a small one (37 mm) in a turret, and a machine gun (.50 cal) in a turret on the turret. How cool was that! The crew could fire three different weapons in three different directions. Why weren't all tanks like that? I thought that if I were fighting those nasty Germans, that's the weapon I'd want to have. I'd give it to them out of all three guns.
After growing up and reading more military history of the war I read that this was a stopgap design that didn't work very well. The most effective weapon, the 75 mm gun, could only be fired over a limited traverse, which required that the entire tank be turned. It was also tall and top heavy, making it a good target, and a little less mobile than the Sherman, which succeeded it.
However, if Zaloga is right, and he's certainly an expert who has written many books about the war and its weapons, the M3 played a critical role at a time when the British had no tanks in the desert that could match Rommel's Panzer III and later IV tanks. The M3 could fight them, and also trade fire with the German anti-tank guns using its 75 mm cannon, which was much heavier than the 2 pounders found in the British Centurion and Crusader tanks. It was a key part of Montgomery's battle with Rommel. It also played a successful combat role in Burma before finally being relegated to modification as a tank destroyer, a prime mover gun tractor, or as a tank recovery vehicle with all combat duty shifting to the more effective M4 Sherman.
| Author | Harris, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1964 |
| Number of Pages | 418 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | November 2012 |
Vardy Cutter, the beautiful illegitimate daughter of George Cutter, an English hustler and a now deceased maid. She is pursued in the hall of a society soiree that she has managed to get invited to by the handsome but pusillanimous Victor Weill. Then Max Cary de Lily, an odd, wiry, one eyed little man arrives, stares down and drives off Victor and introduces himself to Vardy. So begins a love affair between Vardy and Lily, a soldier of fortune returned from fighting in the American Civil War and now employed in the French Army, soon to go to war against Bismarck's Prussia.
The war is a disaster for France, but Lily is one of the very few effective French commanders and rapidly rises to the rank of general and command of a division or even a corps. He fights successfully but the cause is lost. Vardy and her father, still trying to make money by selling medical supplies or anything else he can get to the army, or even to the Prussians, are driven from place to place by the war. She and Lily are married, but he spends little time with her while the fighting lasts. At the end of the war she returns to Paris but the revolution is underway and the army comes back to kill the Communards and Vardy loses her baby in childbirth during the turmoil. Lily is one of the army commanders suppressing the revolt.
Four years later, Lily is a well respected, important and popular general assigned to tour England, Europe and America to bring back ideas for reorganization of the French army. Two newspapermen are deeply involved in his career - Beck, who hopes to turn Lily into a strong conservative leader who will sweep Beck's own party into power, and Victor, who hopes to destroy Lily and get Vardy for himself.
In the end it is Victor who wins. The government comes to see Lily as a threat and trumps up charges against him for various actions in the war, sentencing him to 10 years in prison.
In the end, Vardy goes to meet her husband in prison and the two of them plan an escape, but the book ends there.
There were many surprising things about this book. Why were Victor and Lily so taken with Vardy? Was it just her beauty? She seems to have been an immature and confused young girl with a hardened and self-serving outlook on life. Why did Lily, who despised politics and politicians, allow himself to be so used by Beck? Why did Vardy and Lily have such a strong attachment to each other with such apparently opposite goals in life? Why did Harris end the novel when he did, before the escape attempt and with no obvious path for the two after their escape?
I like Harris as a writer and have been especially impressed with at least one of his books, Light Cavalry Action. But it appears that was his finest one. This book is not bad, but the questions above are still unanswered by the end of the book. It's hard to tell what he meant to do in writing it.
I'm also confused by Harris' political stance. He seems to disdain the Communards, whom he simply calls "communists". He states clearly that they are shot down on the streets and murdered after capture by the army but he treats this as a matter of course, not to be taken too seriously. He treats the essentially Bonapartist aspirations that Beck has for Lily as not unreasonable, just unattainable and perhaps boring. So the political aspects of the book are both muddled and, while not necessarily reactionary, perhaps dismissive of all politics. This is a side of John Harris that I did not see before.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2012 |
In the second book of the Harry Bosch series, Bosch investigates the killing of an informant and is led by another detective to the death of a man who turns out to be a Mexican laborer, and then the apparent suicide of the detective himself who gave Bosch the tip.
The police department management tries to lock Bosch out of the case of the suicide. The death of a cop is politically sensitive in a number of ways and Bosch is a loose cannon as far as they are concerned. But it turns out that the dead cop is associated with both the dead Mexican laborer, the dead informant, and with another cop who found the Mexican laborer, resigned from the department, was tracked down by Bosch, but also turns up dead right under Bosch's nose.
Of course Hieronymous Bosch doesn't follow orders. It's not in his nature. He goes to Mexico and gets involved with a DEA and Mexican militia action against a drug dealer and a company breeding and sterilizing fruit flies for use in reducing the fruit fly population in California agriculture - but also smuggling drugs across the border in the fruit fly containers. After imposing himself on the investigation there, which fails to catch the chief drug kingpin, he crosses back into California and figures out the whole story. The apparent suicide was actually a murder, and Bosch eventually discovers that the murdered man wasn't the cop whom they thought it was. It was the cop's half brother, murdered by the cop, who took his place as drug kingpin. Bosch catches him and kills him when he goes for his gun. Then he goes to the pretend cop's funeral where he blackmails the assistant police chief into leaving him alone, and arranges a liaison with the beautiful, estranged wife of the dead cop.
I have mixed feelings about the Harry Bosch books. The character is too like, say, Sam Spade of the Dashiell Hammet's Maltese Falcon. I don't deny that such men exist - independent, incorruptible, able to see things that others don't, regardless of their own situation. After Bosch kills the crooked cop he leaves the briefcase with $110,000 in the room with the dead man, figuring that anyone who stumbles upon the scene will take the money and run without reporting to the authorities. Connelly doesn't mention that Bosch might have taken $100,000 and left the rest to achieve the same effect, because the real reason for the existence of the money is to show that Bosch is incorruptible - which message would be tarnished if he took some of the money, even if it did nothing to harm anyone. Money means nothing to Bosch.
Well, maybe.
There are an awful lot of places where Bosch ignores authority and even ignores his own promises to others - doing as he pleases to achieve the ends he wants.
I may read more of these. I have access to more in audio form. They are quite well written and easy to read. They just don't feel quite as realistic and even grown up as they are meant to be.
| Author | Hamilton, Tyler |
|---|---|
| Author | Coyle, Daniel |
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | November 2012 |
Tyler Hamilton joined the US Postal Service cycling team in 1995 and raced with Lance Armstrong and the others until 2001. During that time he proved his drive and ability and was admitted to the inner circle of riders whom the team was doping with testosterone and EPO in order to give them the small extra boost required to compete with the other top riders in the world who were also doping. Hamilton was conflicted about taking the drugs. He wanted to win. He wanted to show himself the equal of the elite athletes who were taking the drugs. He wanted to overcome the hard rigors of the sport. But he didn't want to admit to his parents and friends outside of cycling that he was taking drugs. Only his teammates and staff and his wife Haven knew the truth about the drugs.
By 2001 Hamilton had moved up the ladder. He was winning races and even beat Lance in a stage. He believes that that turned Lance against him. He believes that Lance needed to be the undisputed leader and champion of the team and Tyler was uncomfortably close to being able to threaten that position. Feeling threatened and uncomfortable with what he perceived to be Lance's animosity, he left the team, joining CSC for the 2002-2003 seasons. Later, after a tip from Floyd Landis, he became convinced that Lance and had actually tipped off the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) about his doping, though Lance denied it. In 2004 he left CSC to join Phonak for the same reasons, only in reverse, that he left US Postal. He wanted to be the unchallenged leader of CSC but the team brought in another star rider as co-leader and Tyler decided to leave. He signed a two year contract with Phonak for $900,000 per year, and won an Olympic gold medal for the time trial.
Then disaster struck. He had a serious accident that did him some damage and, worst of all, he failed a drug test, in fact two of them. The test was strange. He was accused of having blood in his system that was not his own. He did not do that as far as he knew, and defended himself vigorously, but he had stored up blood with a doping doctor and had it re-injected into himself. It was possible that the doctor, a rather unscrupulous man with an assistant that had some mental problems later diagnosed as dementia, had made a mistake. The transfusion had made him sick, and might have been confused with someone else's. Other than the drug test, there was no way to know.
Hamilton's life was going downhill. He was banned from racing for a time. His wife had had enough of the hard life of living with him and lying to everyone. They divorced. His dog Tugboat, his much loved companion, died. Completing his two year ban from the sport, he went back to the U.S. and rode for Tinkoff Credit Systems team in 2007 and Rock Racing in 2008, but he was no longer riding the famous European races. Getting a little too old for the sport, and facing condemnation from many fans and exclusion from some races, he left bike racing and went into business as a personal trainer.
In 2011 Hamilton had had enough. He went public on the TV show 60 Minutes, confessing his own drug use and implicating others, including Lance Armstrong. He surrendered his Olympic gold medal. He cooperated with federal investigators who were investigating doping in sports. Hardest of all, he admitted to his parents that he had taken dope and lied to them and to the world. Lance condemned him and treated him like an enemy. Confronted by Lance in a restaurant, he half expected to be physically attacked.
Today he is remarried and working as a trainer. His life is simpler. He no longer makes big money but he no longer takes dope and tells lies. He says that he is glad of the change.
This was a fascinating book that turned around my ideas about bike racing, about Lance Armstrong, and about doping.
Lance comes across as a driven man. All of them were. The only way to win races was, first of all, to train with extraordinary intelligence, generally supplied by coaches and sports medicine doctors, and maniacal obsession. Tyler dieted to the point of having skinny arms and a body fat index around 3%. Lance bought a scale and weighed every portion of food that he ate. Both men trained far beyond the point of exhaustion. But other elite racers were doing the same thing. It wasn't enough. It would have been enough if no one took drugs, but when any did it was necessary for all of them to do it.
To say that the drugs "leveled the playing field" is generally, if not precisely true. Each man had his own specific physiology and some benefited more than others. Some may have taken different drugs than others, though the knowledge of what worked and what didn't became pretty general very quickly. Hamilton states that drugs made a difference of a few percent. But in a six hour bike race, every percentage point put one 3.6 minutes behind where a rider would otherwise be. Two or three percent could be the difference between winning a race and finishing back in the peloton. The choice was very stark. If you were a champion level racer, you could either take drugs and compete as a potential champion, or you could spend your career working as a "domestique", serving the champion riders. It was not a sacrifice that a man could easily make after devoting his life to his cycling career and enduring training regimens and races that required unbelievable effort, pain and suffering.
The book is written in first person using Tyler Hamilton's voice. I don't know what Daniel Coyle's contribution was. Presumably he organized the book and edited it, perhaps interviewing Hamilton to elicit the actual text. Although I have not read it, Coyle wrote a book in 2004 about Lance Armstrong's Tour win. He had accompanied Lance through training and the race itself and, presumably, was deceived by Lance about the doping. I wonder if this book had some component of payback for Coyle for having been lied to, just as it may have had some component of payback for Hamilton.
See also my diary entry for 20121201.
| Author | Gibson, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 1986 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Cyberpunk |
| When Read | November 2012 |
In some future time three stories of three separate characters come together. "Turner", a mercenary killer, is hired by Hosaka Corporation to assist in the escape of a scientist from the clutches of one of their commercial rivals, Maas Biolabs. "Marley", a woman working in the art business in Europe is hired by "Virek", a fabulously wealthy plutocrat who lives in a vat of chemicals that are holding his cancer at bay. "Bobby", a 17 year old boy who comes to be known as "Count Zero", lives in a slum from which he is pulled out by a couple of Voodoo characters who need him in their battle to do something or other.
It turns out that the scientist never planned to escape, only to spirit his daughter out of his company's clutches. Turner winds up with the girl and takes her to the "sprawl", a megalopolis from DC to New York or beyond, and into New York. Bobby is also brought to the sprawl, where he and Turner meet in Zimmer's nightclub, fighting Conroy, a supposed Hosaka agent who hired Turner but who is in fact working for Virek. In the battle, Bobby goes into cyberspace via his "deck", where he destroys Virek. Meanwhile Marley goes into space to find the mad genius who invented the biochip that Maas is using to change the world.
Or something like that. I'm not sure what this book was really about.
There were many things I didn't like about this book and few that I did. I didn't like the characters of Turner, Virek, and some others who are superhuman in some undefined way. I didn't like Bobby's total naivete. I didn't like the lack of direction, goals, or foundational principles by any of them. I didn't like the muddled plot. I didn't like the manipulation of producing this or that event and only explaining it later. I didn't like the unexplained phenomena like the Voodoo crap coming from the girl and the Voodoo/Hoodoo folks. I didn't like the muddled science. I didn't like the vague ending.
This is apparently the second book of a series that began with Neuromancer, a book strongly recommended to me by my son-in-law. Perhaps I missed a lot because I didn't read the first book. Or perhaps Jim and I just have completely different tastes in fiction and science fiction.
Looking at the Amazon reviews I see that most people loved the book. One wrote "My favorite cyberpunk novel."
I have tried to read Gibson before without success. I decided that I owed it to Jim and myself to finish one so I picked this because it was available on CD, which is easier to handle when reading something one doesn't like. But I don't expect to be reading any more books by this author.
| Author | Zelazny, Roger |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper |
| Copyright Date | 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 2012 |
This exotic story takes place on a planet inhabited by humans arrived from Earth many generations before and also a local species called Rakasha who manifest as flying spirits of fire and sometimes as physical bodies. The humans are in several groups. At the top are the "gods", people who have taken the names of Hindu gods and live in "Heaven" at the north pole. They have command of very advanced technology that enables them to rule everyone else, and to transfer themselves into new bodies when they grow old (it is never said whether the new bodies are stolen from other humans or somehow created whole as adults.)
The gods are worshiped by ordinary humans who have very little technology and don't even realize that they and the gods are the same species. Later in the story we find out that there are also zombies, ruled and directed by a former god who is a Christian and opposes the Hindus and Buddhists (about which in a moment) and hoping to conquer the world for Christianity.
The central character is Mahasamatman, "Sam", also known by many other names, including Siddhartha and Buddha. He is an "Accelerationist", attempting to bring technology to the masses and depose the gods.
All sorts of events take place leading to a final pair of wars in which the gods are basically deposed, the zombies then defeated, and men are beginning to recover technology for themselves.
The writing is pretty good. The references to Hindu and Buddhist texts are interesting. The interpretation of Hinduism in a technological context is, well, inventive. But I couldn't get past the fundamental absurdity of the whole tale, the childishness of the plot elements, and the adolescent nature of the general enterprise.
I had heard of this book and it was recommended to me. Looking at Amazon reviews I see lots of encomiums: "masterpiece", "a classic", "a great writer", "deep" and even "The best SF novel I have ever read", and "the greatest book I have ever read". And some of these praises are sung in nicely worded reviews by people who are clearly intelligent and articulate. Overall, the 175 reviewers averaged 4+ stars and the number of 5 star review was extraordinary.
To my mind there was a great deal wrong with this book. To begin with I felt myself to be the victim of an arbitrary plot. If the author wanted someone to rise from the dead, he did. If it was necessary to escape a predicament, or fall into one, it happened at the expected time. The plot developed not according to inner logic but according to rather arbitrary controls imposed from outside.
Deus ex machina was the order of the day. The author constantly revealed new powers for his gods and demons. Are the demons overwhelming the gods? Ah well, let's pull out a fire stick, or a death stare, or who knows what. You never get a strong sense of the physics of this universe. It masquerades as a scientific gloss over religious mysticism but the science is barely distinguishable from magic.
The crowning absurdity was the war at the end of the book. Why are these people fighting? Why is anyone following Sam? Why are there arrows and swords and spears when we were introduced to a jet aircraft at the beginning of the book? Why are these "gods" who can easily defeat the demons, who can easily defeat the humans, having such a tough time fighting the humans themselves? What happened to the jet fighters, the fire sticks, the death stares? It's not just that this bears no resemblance to any even imaginable reality, it's also too much like a puppet show.
I give it 4 stars for good writing, 3 stars for imagination, 2 for plot and character, and 1 star for coherence. Since writing a book at all is a tough achievement, let's round up and give it 3 stars overall.
What am I missing?
| Author | Christie, Agatha |
|---|---|
| Publication | BBC Audiobooks |
| Copyright Date | 1937 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 2012 |
Hercule Poirot takes a vacation on the Nile where he meets very young, very rich, Linnet Ridgeway and her new husband Simon Doyle. Poirot had previously seen Doyle at a restaurant in London with another young woman, Jacqueline de Bellefort. It turns out that Doyle abandoned the poor Jacqueline to marry her rich friend Linnet and now Jacqueline shows up on the Nile trip, hounding and threatening Doyle and Linnet. When Linnet is killed, Jacqueline is the prime suspect.
There is a large cast of characters, each of whom acts suspiciously in one way or another. There are a large number of clues, each of which appears to be entirely meaningless in itself or, worse, a misdirection of the real affairs. The responsible parties come to false conclusions but Poirot figures out the true facts.
Finally we learn that Simon Doyle and Jacqueline de Bellefort are still lovers and the marriage of Simon to Linnet was arranged by him and Jacqueline in an attempt to make Simon her heir and then kill her. As they are being led off the boat on the Nile Jacqueline pulls a pistol out of her purse, kills Simon, and then kills herself.
The story is an intricate murder mystery that is of passable interest because of the plot but is much enriched by good writing and interesting characters.
I'm not a big fan of this kind of mystery novel. I read it because it was available at the library and I knew that Christie was a good writer. But it was well done.
| Author | Adiga, Aravind |
|---|---|
| Publication | Free Press |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2012 |
Balram Halawi, born into a poor family in a poor village, is the son of a manual laborer who works himself to death on the orders of his mother and Balram is destined for a similar life, but instead he becomes a driver for Ashok, the wealthy son of the wealthy and powerful local landlord. He competes with the other servants, discovers that the senior driver who lords it over him is a secret Muslim, and blackmails the other two servants into allowing him to become the senior driver. Ashok and his wife "Pinky Madam" take him with them to Delhi where they live in a beautiful apartment while Ashok lives in a dingy room in the deep basement of the building with the other drivers and servants.
Pinky Madam hates life in India and wants to move to New York, where she and Ashok had made a life for themselves until he was called back to India by his family. Ashok too liked it better in New York, but he cannot leave. Ashok's other family members in India think it would be crazy to live in America. Where in America could one find servants like those in India? Where could one live like royalty as one can in India. Pinky will eventually abandon the family and fly back to the U.S.
Humble and self-denigrating as he is, Balram accepts every humiliation and performs every service, looking out for himself but accepting his lot and his station. He is a country boy, uncorrupted by city ways, or at least thought by his employers to be so. One of the other drivers living in the basement with him calls him "Country mouse." But there is a growing tension in Balram between his simple country ethics (which did not preclude his battle with the other servants) and his growing understanding of the essential corruption of his employers, his own family, and of the whole society.
Then one night Pinky Madam drives the car and kills a child on a bicycle. Balram is ordered to sign a statement saying that he was the driver. If it comes to an inquest, Balram will go to prison for a crime that the wealthy family is responsible for. The inquest is avoided. The police are bribed. But Balram was a hair's breadth from disaster.
This tips a balance in Balram's mind. After some time and some planning, he murders Ashok who, together with Pinky, was his one real benefactor in the family, the one person who made some effort, minor though it was, to treat Balram as a human being. Balram steals a large bag full of money that had been entrusted to Ashok by the family to pay major bribes, and goes on the run. He winds up in Mumbai with a new identity and opens a car hire business, providing cars and drivers to businesses to take their employees to and from work. He gets his start by going to the local police station and bribing the local chief to suddenly arrest all of his competitor's drivers for driving without licenses.
The novel is in the form of letters from Balram to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier who had come to visit India in part to learn from the Indian economy. Balram explains to him what Indian entrepreneurship really consists of. It's done in a bitter, ironic style.
From the very beginning of the story we know that the narrator has committed some heinous crime, but we don't yet know what it is. It is only over the course of the novel that both the motive and the crime itself are revealed.
There is much to this novel that isn't conveyed by just relating the plot. Most significantly to me, it describes the social relations of master and servant in a society in which the masters were much, much, more than just employers in the modern American sense and servants were much less than employees. This superior/inferior relationship is reflected in the servant class as well, with the chief servant lording it over the others and a regular barnyard pecking order established. In fact Adiga uses the simile of a rooster coop to describe the lives and conditions of the servants.
The relationship isn't just described, it is acted out by Balram, the man at the bottom, the man who sees and feels all of the indignity and injustice of it.
The Indian economy comes off no better than the society. It is rife with corruption.
When I read a novel I generally develop some identification with the main character. I'd even say that my ability to identify has much to do with my enjoyment of the novel. Most readers are like me in this regard and most all writers understand that. When the novel has a character who is gradually drawn deeper and deeper into trouble, I become more and more uncomfortable. I put myself in the character's shoes and think Do this, Do that, No, don't do that!
In this novel I not only did that, I also put myself in Ashok's shoes and in Balram's shoes facing Ashok. If Balram was going to kill anyone I wanted it to be the asshole head of the family, not Ashok who had made some effort to be a human being. But by the end I had signed off on everyone and become as bitter and disillusioned about justice as Balram himself. Well, maybe not that bitter and disillusioned, but I did move away from my initial sympathies with these people.
As of this writing, Amazon has attracted over 450 reviews. A few that I read by Indians were deeply, even vituperatively, negative. It is certainly not a novel that makes India look good. If a similar novel were written about the United States I might be, if not offended, at least ready to defend at least some aspects of American society.
Or maybe not. The Jungle or The Grapes of Wrath and many other novels have given a negative, bottom up view of American society and I deeply appreciated those books. I appreciated this one too. I thought it was an excellent novel and a great first novel by Adiga.