Books read January through December 2013
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 255 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | January 2013 |
An Austrian actor who has lived for some years in the U.S. and had a successful movie career comes to Paris in 1938 to work on a film. Frederic Stahl had lived in Vienna and Paris and, as a 16 year old boy, had worked as office boy for the Austro-Hungarian legation in Spain during the first world war. Now in Paris he suddenly finds himself in the cross-hairs of the German community there who, working under direction from Berlin, are recruiting people to "anti-war" and other groups to develop pro-German propaganda.
Stahl doesn't realize at first who these people are but, as their agenda becomes clear to them, he stays away from them. But a German spymaster in a fit of pique in Berlin orders his underling to make Stahl come to a Berlin film festival as a judge or else. At the same time, an American embassy official asks Stahl to go ahead to Berlin and deliver cash to a Russian emigre actress in Berlin who is spying for the U.S. and who knows who else.
There are various happenings. The movie company goes to Morocco for a shoot in the desert and the Hungary for a shoot at a castle and there are encounters with German agents at both places. Then in another trip to Berlin, a miserable hotel employee finds Stahl with the actress and blackmails them but the woman, having none of that, shoots him dead. Stahl recognizes that he is over his head in all of this but doesn't know what to do.
Finally, the film is finished. Stahl escapes from Paris with his new inamorata and heads back to the U.S. where they will both be safe.
This book, like his many others, has the dark mood of the coming European nightmare and, like the others, has a decent hero who resists the Nazis and ultimately escapes from them.
I can't say it's better or worse than the others. They are all similar, all good, all informative and realistic in their portrayal of the politics and the events, all unrealistic in their avoidance of the terrible power of the Nazi state.
I'll probably read more before Furst and I are both done.
| Author | Roberts, Andrew |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Perennial, 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 800 |
| Extras | photos bibliography notes index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | January 2013 |
Roberts covers the entire war, mostly concentrating on the European theater but with some info about the Pacific. His point of view is, to some extent, British. But he lays much emphasis on the Eastern Front and, without depreciating the contribution of the British and Americans, considers that the Russians won the war.
Roberts is a very impressive historian. His judgments on the war are convincing. Some of the ones that I found particularly interesting were, that Germany could well have won the war, that Hitler was a highly intelligent man with a tremendous mind for detail, but a thoroughly self-defeating ideology and image of himself, that Hitler fought to the bitter end because he knew that he would be hung when the war was lost, that Stalin made terrible mistakes but did a much better job than Hitler in the end, that the Western model of democratic government and committee hashing out of military and naval strategy turned out to be superior to one man (mis)management of the war, that the German generals were indeed better military men than Hitler but they all colluded in Hitler's crimes, and that the German army was much the best of all the armies in the war.
One way the Germans could have won would have been to focus on a Mediterranean strategy rather than attack Russia. That's what Manstein and others proposed. Roberts believes that the Germans could have made short work of the British army in Libya and Egypt, taken the Suez canal, and gone on to threaten oil fields as far away as Iraq and Iran. The first part of that is clearly true. Fighting along interior lines from Italy to North Africa, had they committed even a fraction of the forces hurled against Russia, they would have overwhelmed the Eight Army. I don't know if they could have crossed the thousand miles from the Nile to the gulf, but they surely could have raided the oil fields from the air and, who knows, maybe they could have crossed the desert. They went that far and more into the USSR, against much stronger opposition than the British could have put up.
Another way the Germans could have won the war would have been to treat the Ukrainians and Belorussians, and the Russians themselves, with more generosity. The Stalinist regime was not popular and could have been defeated had its own people turned against it.
But Hitler wasn't interested in a war to liberate Russians from Bolshevik rule. He wanted a war of annihilation of German against Slav. He wanted to enslave all of the peoples of the East and steal all of their resources. His policy was closer to Attila or to Genghis Khan than to anyone any Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Yugoslavs, Greeks, or any other people could have accepted. And of course his war against the Jews was sheer lunacy.
The surprises for me about Hitler were that he mastered detail better than any of his commanders, that he read large numbers of books, and that he really did have good ideas about the conduct of the war. His problem was not that he was too dumb or too inexperienced to fight the war. He had a kind of first hand military experience that Roosevelt and Stalin didn't have and that even Churchill may not have had. His problem was that his ego didn't allow him to listen to anyone else. He elevated totally obsequious men, Jodl and Keitel, to the two top positions in the armed forces and constantly screamed at his competent commanders such as Manstein, whom Roberts considers to have been the best general of the war. He became obsessed with his strategy of never retreating, a strategy that worked in specific situations but was a dead loss in most of them. He was obsessed with counter-attacks, a strategy that also worked in certain situations but was a dead loss in others where weak forces were thrown against much stronger forces that tore them to pieces.
I wasn't sure that a general history of the war would be that interesting to me since I have read so many books on more specific subjects, but it turned out that I was absorbed by it and glad to have read it. It is an interesting book.
| Author | Murari, Timeri N. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2013 |
Young Rukhsana lives in Kabul with her dying mother, her 16 year old brother, and an aged caretaker in the year 2000, under the harsh rule of the Taliban. Her father and grandparents were killed when their car hit a land mine and now. Before the Taliban arrived she was a journalist. Educated in India, she had fallen for Neel, a wildlife photographer, but marrying a man outside of her religion and nationality was unthinkable and, besides, she was betrothed to a cousin she had grown up with who was now living in Canada and was expected to send for her.
The Taliban quickly ended her journalistic career and their local leader, Wahidi, a man who shot two adulterers right in front of her, made clear that he knew that she was the author of articles about the treatment of women that were appearing in the Indian press. But even worse than that, Wahidi conceived an attraction for Rukhsana and sent his brother to her house to arrange a marriage. Rokhsana, unable to leave her dying mother to flee the country, lacking the money to do so, but terrified of the living death that marriage to Wahidi would entail, needed a way out.
A way out was found when the Taliban government decided to join the International Cricket Union and send a team to Pakistan to compete. Rokhsana was an accomplished cricket player on a women's team in Delhi. Dressing as a man, she gathered a group of her young cousins together to form a team and coached them to become proficient. Wahidi had promised that there would be a tournament and that the winning team would go to Pakistan, from which they all hoped to escape to separate sanctuaries in Pakistan, India, Australia, or wherever they could go. They worked hard and survived numerous attempts by Wahidi's brother to find Rokhsana, including threats to all of cousins to send them to the stinking prison where they would surely die slow deaths.
In the end, everything works out. The mother dies so that Rokhsana can leave. The cousin in Canada announces that he has married another girl, Neel from India arrives and plays on the team. The team wins, is denied permission to leave, but tricks the Taliban into getting away anyway.
The real question in my mind is, how authentic is this book? Is the Taliban the complete collection of hypocrites, and corrupt thugs that they are made out to be? Are they all bastards who beat people and destroy their property and essentially rape women, and men too, and use religion as a cover for their crimes?
Looking up Murari, I see he is a middle aged Indian man who has never lived in Afghanistan. I had imagined that he was a young Afghan woman who left when the Taliban arrived. He has interviewed Afghans, both in India and in Afghanistan since the Americans threw out the Taliban. However he has not, if his website is giving full information, ever interviewed any Taliban.
All I can do is to store away the impressions I received from this book and suspend judgment about their accuracy. They are said to be based on true stories of Taliban cruelty. I believe that. What I need is to understand whether that is the whole story or not. The hard part is to resolve the seemingly great appeal that the Taliban have to Afghan men and their incredible resiliency against the overwhelming force of the United States. I don't like to picture hypocritical thugs as courageous fighters. But it is not impossible and it's not necessarily true that the fighters are the same as the religious police. And of course it's even possible that they are, but are still savages. The Nazi SS men sometimes fought with fanatical courage on one day and behaved with unbelievable bestiality the next.
The story was well written.
| Author | Hunter, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Pocket Star, Reprint Edition, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 528 |
| Extras | Afterword by the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | February 2013 |
At age 62, retired Marine Sniper Bob Lee Swagger is recruited by the FBI to help in the hunt for another Marine sniper named Ray Cruz who disappeared in Afghanistan after his mission to kill "The Beheader" failed with the death of his spotter and the seeming death of Cruz himself. But Cruz has shown up again years later and appears to be attempting to finish his mission. The problem is that the Beheader is now an American ally being groomed to be the next President of Afghanistan and Cruz has to be stopped.
A team of three exceptionally dangerous mercenaries are attempting to kill Cruz. They were the ones that attempted to kill him in Afghanistan. Paid and receiving directions from some shadowy figure at the other end of a satellite phone, the three have planted an RFID enabled credit card in Swagger's wallet. A CIA satellite tracks the card [Is that possible with RFID? I would have thought that the sensor has to be within a few feet] and tells them where Swagger is and the three gunmen follow him hoping that he will lead them to Cruz, which he does on two occasions, but the tough guys fail to kill Cruz the first time and lose a gunfight to him the second time with one of the three killed by Cruz.
The FBI never does crack the case but Swagger hands them the vital clues and theories time and again. He comes up with theories about where Cruz is, about where the mercenaries will be, about who is directing them, about what needs to be done, and in the end, about a plot to kill the President and top government officials with a hellfire missile aimed at the White House. He does it all with down home homilies and self-deprecation while picking up all sorts of subtle clues that the FBI experts miss.
As always in Hunter's books, there are highly technical descriptions of weapons, in this case including Hellfire guided missiles and Paveway guided bombs and the young drone pilots, often women, who fly the drones and fire the munitions. There are a whole variety of sniper weapons, lovingly described, from a .50 caliber Barrett that can blow a man to pieces from a mile away to various accurized sniper rifles accessorized with various telescopic sights. As always, the gunfights are exuberant descriptions of extreme and concentrated violence, written with great clarity and panache. I don't know of anyone who does it better.
The story itself is absurd. The Beheader is a connoisseur of expensive watches and a seducer of women. But he also has a hidden higher mission in mind. A pair of Muslim intellectuals travel across the country in a van with a Palestinian terrorist shepherding them in a running Laurel and Hardy comedy routine. We only learn their mission to fire their missile at the transponder in the Beheader's watch as he greets the President at the White House at the end. An extremely high level security official turns out to have gone off the deep end and become a Muslim because he has a problem with women getting birth control pills. The remaining two mercenaries go out with guns blazing at cops and FBI in a last bit of fun and glory - the way they always wanted to die. But the chief merc, Mick Bogier, shoots himself rather than Ray Cruz when the end is finally at hand. Then there is the slightly ridiculous infatuation that Swagger has for the beautiful FBI (or is it CIA, I forget) agent Susan Okada who is young enough to be his daughter and, the piece de resistance, the discovery that Ray Cruz is actually the son of Bob Lee Swagger by a Vietnamese woman whom Bob Lee wished to marry but who was conveniently (for the novelist anyway) killed in the Tet offensive.
Hunter lays it on thick and heavy with little jabs at the Obama administration and at government in general. He plays all his cards just right for his audience without ever going over the top and truly offending anyone.
Hunter is a good writer. There's no doubt about it. I thought his movie reviews in the Baltimore Sun were among the best I've ever read, and his writing in these novels shows a very high order of intelligence, wit, and ability. If one tries to take this book seriously, it's a washout. But if it's taken as a piece of wild gun fiction, it's just fun.
I like to think that Hunter is smart enough that he intends for this to be taken as frivolous fare. But who knows. Only Hunter does for sure.
| Author | Tolkien, Simon |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Minotaur Books, 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2013 |
In a prologue in 1944, Colonel Cade, Sergeant Ritter, and Corporal Carson kill some Germans in Normandy, take their guns, and then go to a chateaux where the Rocard family lives. They torture and kill the Rocards in an attempt to get an ancient book and a cross from them, but fail to get the cross. Having shot the Rocards with German guns and apparently without witnesses, they get away free.
The story resumes in 1959. Detective Inspector William Trave arrests Stephen Cade for the murder of his father, the Colonel. Colonel Cade was now living as a wealthy civilian manuscript collector. He employs the thuggish Ritter as a personal factotum, while ignoring his two sons, the adopted Silas and the natural son Stephen, for both of whom Cade has no love at all. Silas learns that his adoptive father was a murderer, and that he plans to disinherit both young men and turn his mansion into a museum for his manuscripts after his death - which may come soon because he was shot and severely wounded by an unknown person in France in 1956, thought to have been Carson.
All of the evidence is against Stephen. Trave comes to believe that the boy is innocent, but he has no proof and the ruthless prosecutor and bloodthirsty judge are easily able to persuade the jury that Stephen is guilty. He is sentenced to hang.
The story of all of these people progresses. Ritter turns out to be a wife abuser. His wife Jeanne had an affair with Silas. Silas was obsessed by Sasha Vigne, a young researcher hired by his father to help him find the location of a famous piece of the true cross, encrusted with jewels, from Charlemagne's court or before. The elder Cade has been murdered at the outset of the story. Carson is murdered by Ritter even before the murder of Cade. Jeanne is furious when she learns that Silas has betrayed her. Ritter is furious when he learns that Jeanne has betrayed him. He kills Jeanne and would kill Silas except that Trave intervenes and shoots Ritter before he can finish off Silas. And all of this is complete less than 2/3 of the way through the novel.
The truth eventually comes out. Stephen's girlfriend Mary Martin is in fact Marie Rocard, daughter of the family murdered by Cade. Sasha is the daughter of a professor destroyed by Cade. Both had reasons to kill Cade and neither really wants Stephen to hang, but they are both determined. Mary is the actual killer and, in the end, she signs a confession so that Stephen can be saved and escapes to Europe.
Detective Inspector Trave, who was the focus of only some of the chapters, not a majority of them, is left at the end feeling some sense of salvation. He mourns the death of his own son in a motorcycle accident some years before. He misses his wife who left him and has taken up with another man. But he is pleased to have saved another boy - Stephen.
This was a competent mystery story with some unusual characteristics. It made a big deal of the "codex", a medieval manuscript that contained a code of some sort that would supposedly lead to the discovery of the hiding place of St. Peter's Cross. Colonel Cade, Sasha Vigne, and Mary Martin are all motivated to find this, each for a somewhat different reason, to the extent that even the relatively moral Sasha and Mary are willing to kill or allow others to die. The cross is in fact discovered at the end by Mary, but nothing is made of it. We don't know whether she sells it, keeps it, pries out the jewels and sells them at a fraction of the value of the whole artifact, or gives it to some place as an important relic. She gets the codex at gunpoint from Sasha, who attempted to get the cross at gunpoint from Mary, but nothing is said about the significance of the codex. They are just devices to advance the plot.
There were problems with the police procedural part of the story as well. A silenced handgun was used to kill Cade. Gun experts would recognize that only a semiautomatic can be silenced but this gun was a revolver. More important from my point of view, although the gun was a major piece of evidence, there was no mention of any police attempt to find out where it came from. Late in the story Trave comes to believe that a key used to lock the door to the room Cade was killed in was a copy, and Trave's young apprentice detective is sent to inquire among all of the locksmiths. Yet no mention is made of the much more obvious inquiries that should have been made about the gun.
The main suspense in the novel is our waiting to see what will happen to Stephen. As the appointed time for his hanging draws near we worry that Trave will not solve the crime in time. He does actually solve it the day before the scheduled hanging, but it is not his solving it that saves Stephen. It is Mary's signed confession, obtained not by Trave from her, but imposed on Trave by her.
It was a book that I found easy to read. I was not bored by it. The characters were sufficiently well developed to be of interest. But the mechanics of the mystery were at a bit of a lower standard than I expected.
Maybe I'll read another of these, maybe not.
| Author | Herman, Arthur |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 2013 |
By 1940 it was obvious to members of the US government that the United States needed to prepare for war. The US Army was tiny compared to the armies of Germany and Japan. There were relatively few airplanes and hardly any tanks. US industry was in a deep depression. Steel production was less than half of what it had been in 1929. Only one company in the US produced aluminum, a vital component of modern aircraft. Production of every necessary war material from ships to bullets and everything in between - rifles, uniforms, trucks, tires, tanks, critical raw materials, machine tools, and every kind of part was inadequate for the needs of a world war.
To correct this problem, Roosevelt called Bernard Baruch, who had coordinated production in World War I. Baruch turned down a job but strongly recommended Bill Knudsen, then President of General Motors and a former President of Chevrolet as previously a top executive and production manager at Ford. Knudsen, a Danish immigrant who worked his way up from the shop floor, knew everything about how to make things and how to get industry working.
Knudsen had no authority and no budget. All he could do was talk to people. But when he talked, people listened. He got lists of requirements from the Army and Navy and then went to friends in industry. At one point he addressed a meeting of the automotive industry executives in Detroit and brought a long list of things that needed making. We need 67,000 machine guns [I don't remember the number, I'm just making up examples here]. My assistant here has diagrams and photos. Who can make them? I know some of you can. (A few hands go up - his assistant writes down the names of the men and companies.) Okay, we need 8.600 compressors for aircraft engines. Who can do that? And so on, going down his list until every piece and part was accounted for with one or more suppliers. He took the list back to Washington and contracts were let.
Knudsen wasn't concerned about war profiteering. He wasn't concerned about low bidding. He was concerned about getting the nations industry in gear for wartime production. And he knew how to do that. He got the government to offer "cost plus" contracts that guaranteed that the producers would make a reasonable profit, even if the cost of production turned out to be higher than expected. He got the government to fund re-tooling and to pay for the building of new factories and shipyards. He convinced the government that businessmen wouldn't go out on a long limb, risking their company's life and their own futures to build an expensive aircraft or ship prototype and a new factory to produce the products unless they had some guarantee that they would actually win contracts, not just submit bids against competitors. Knudsen also believed, correctly according to the author that only big businesses had the depth of engineering and manufacturing expertise to take on big jobs. And he understood that production of big and complex systems like ships and airplanes required a huge tale of parts manufacturing and raw material extraction and production. He worked at getting the entire production landscape working to expand capacity beyond its wildest expectations of what it imagined it could do.
Knudsen is one major personal focus of the book, but not the only one. Henry J. Kaiser is the secondary focus. Kaiser had made his money and built his company in huge construction projects, especially the big hydroelectric dams of the west. When war production began he got first into shipbuilding, industrializing the production of ships in a way that had never been done before, producing Liberty ships, and then "baby flattop" aircraft carriers, in time spans and at rates that were inconceivable before the war and, for that matter, have never been accomplished since.
Both Knudsen and Kaiser, and many other American production specialists, had a deep understanding of mass production. Knudsen said the goal is not fast production but smooth production. Parts must be machined to one ten-thousandth of an inch. If they are, they can go together time after time with no hand fitting of parts. That is the secret of assembly line production and hence the secret of high productivity.
Knudsen saw production, not so much from the point of view of the end user, as from the point of view of the producer. When the US committed to the highest airplane productivity in the world, the manufacturers were stymied by the continuous stream of alterations in the specifications. These alterations were mandatory. They were based on hard won battle experience and made the difference between successful and unsuccessful missions, and between life and death. But they were deadly to mass production. Knudsen solved the problem by setting up ten modification centers. Planes were built to plans at the factories using mass production techniques. Then they were taken to the modification centers where the alterations were applied. It was a war winning strategy that ultimately resulted in the production of 97,000 aircraft in a single year.
In the end, the US outproduced all of the Axis nations combined. If I remember the numbers, it was by a factor of two. If the Russians supplied the blood, it was the Americans that, more than anyone else, supplied the ships, planes, bombs, guns, and bullets that won the war. The Soviet Union, Britain, and Germany all had minor production miracles at one time or another during the war. The Americans had a major production miracle and did it while simultaneously producing far more consumer goods than any other nation. According to the author, American productivity per worker was twice that of Germany and four times that of Japan.
Arthur Herman is an unabashed supporter of big business. He frequently attacks the labor unions and their many strikes as major obstacles to production, while at the same time he defends the high profits of the industrialists as the grease that made the wheels of industry turn and win the war. He goes further to assert that it was precisely because of the profit motive and the mobilization of business using conventional capitalist incentives that the US outproduced everyone else.
This challenges my own prejudices. My inclination is to lay more emphasis on the efforts of the workers while not discrediting the businessmen. But I hadn't thought of the American production superiority in terms of a triumph of capitalism _per se_. Starting from a far lower base, Soviet industry also produced prodigious amounts. In fact if I remember the numbers, by themselves they outproduced the Germans in tanks and aircraft in every single year of the war. They did not have the great depth of production capability of the US, did not produce anything comparable to the astonishingly complex B-29 or the great aircraft carriers or atom bomb, and they certainly did not produce the great cornucopia of consumer goods as the US did. Their efforts were far less successful. But they did outproduce Germany in the most critical weapons systems, and did so from a much smaller base and one that was overrun by the German invasion and had to be moved under extreme conditions to safe areas a thousand miles behind their previous positions..
Well, let's acknowledge the Soviet achievement. But let's also note the magnitude of the American achievement. And it was done without starving workers and making them work 16 hour days. In fact, according to Herman, American wages went up 70% during the war, though he doesn't explain what that figure means or how it was derived (is it total wages paid, average wages per worker per year, or average wages per hour?)
Carping aside I must say that I learned a lot from this book. While I found the author's point of view occasionally irritating, I did not consider the author to be distorting facts to make ideological points. He is a credible historian and a master of his subject.
| Author | Vance, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication | Spatterlight Press, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 115 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | February 2013 |
Many years in the future, a small population of humans have settled on the earth, a planet that had been abandoned by humans thousands of years before. They bring with them populations of slave laborers drawn from alien races deemed to be inferior to humans. These include sturdy peace loving "peasants" who farm the land, beautiful and artistic "thanes" whose breeding is a major aesthetic occupation of the human lords, flying "birds" who grouse and grumble and make wisecracks but ultimately follow human orders, and capable "meks" who handle all technical and production skills.
As the story opens, the meks are in revolt. They have already wiped out some of the "castles" where small populations of a few thousand humans in each live as overlords of the surrounding lands. Eventually, they face Hagedorn, the last castle still standing. The humans cannot face the reality of the situation. Manual labor is beneath them and they won't deign to do it. When they find that the meks have sabotaged their space ships, their radios, and many of their weapons and machines before leaving, the humans can't repair them. There are experts who understand the theory but no one who has experience in production and hardly any who are willing to soil their hands.
The humans continue to pursue their aesthetic and "honorable" pursuits believing their castle to be invulnerable to the meks. By the time they learn otherwise it is too late to save the castle or most of its population, and there is no real will to properly resist anyway.
In the end however, some humans that left the castle work with others who live as nomads or as "Expiationists" living simple lives close to the soil. These attack the meks from behind and slaughter many of them, eventually winning the day and rounding up the survivors.
The humans have learned their lesson. They return the surviving meks to their home worlds and set out to make lives for themselves as working people.
This novella won the Hugo award for best novelette in 1967 and the Nebula for best novella in 1966. It's easy to see why. The characters are stereotyped. The meks have hardly any personality at all, but the conception of a race of humans who combine an overwhelmingly effete and ineffectual aestheticism with a thoroughly brutal and exploitative social organization is remarkable and, in spite of its radical nature, rather convincing. The various scenes of the novella, from the fall of Castle Janeil to Xanten's visit to the space port where he confronts the meks there with sneering superiority were quite interesting and well done and even the humor of the birds who jerk Xanten's chair into the air, carry him to the spaceport, and land hard in hopes of seeing him sprawl to the ground is well done.
It was a short and easy read. There was nothing profound. But I rather liked it.
| Author | Rasmussen, Daniel |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 276 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | March 2013 |
In January 1811, after a long preparation time, a group of slaves on the plantation of Manuel Andry (or Andre) on the German Coast of Louisiana, attacked the main house, wounding Andry, who escaped, and killing his son Gilbert. The slaves then headed for New Orlans, about 40 miles to the south, picking up new recruits along the way and killing another plantation owner.
The principal leader was thought to be Charles Deslondes, the principal black overseer of the Andry plantation, a man who was trusted by the planters but had apparently been nursing his grievances for many years. Two other known leaders were Harry Kenner (owned by Kenner and Henderson), and Kook and Quamana, two men from Africa owned by James Brown.
No one knows the exact number of the revolutionaries. The highest estimates quoted by Rasmussen are 200-500. They were not well armed or organized and faced many obstacles, not the least of which were slaves who betrayed them to the whites out of fear or to curry favor. On the third day of the revolt 80 heavily armed planters who had assembled on the opposite, west bank of the Mississippi crossed over and attacked the slaves. The slaves quickly ran out of ammunition and fled to the swamps. Many were killed and many others captured. In addition to the planters, armed sailors and militia volunteers were also sent north from New Orleans to intercept the slaves, but the slaves were already defeated before they could do much.
The planters quickly setup kangaroo courts, the purpose of which was not provide any due process to the slaves, but to interrogate each one to find out who did what and who the leaders were. Some prisoners implicated many others in an attempt to save themselves. Some refused to say anything, and some freely admitted their own acts but refused to implicate anyone else. Many were tortured and then killed. Their heads were cut off and planted on stakes, including some at the city of New Orleans.
Whatever history exists was produced by the attendees of these "trials", or in the reports by Governor William Claiborne. No records were left by the slaves.
After the revolt was suppressed, much was done to support the planters. More troops were assigned to the defense of New Orleans. New militias were armed and trained. The government compensated the slave owners for losses to their property, including the loss of slaves killed by the owners themselves. So the free whites who did not own slaves subsidized slavery with their taxes.
Books written after the event barely mentioned the revolt or, if they did, described it as a riot by a mob of blacks out for pillage and rape. None of the writers connected the revolt to the successful slave revolt in Haiti 20 years before or, if they did, did so in a way that cast the Haitian revolt as a riot by a mob of blacks, etc. That these men could be thought of as revolutionaries with political aims, was never considered in the histories.
The first histories that took the blacks point of view were produced by Marxists, beginning with Herbert Aptheker who discussed the revolt in a larger history American Negro Slave Revolts in 1943. Since then, more has been written.
Rasmussen concludes his book with a discussion of the aftermath of the revolt, ending with the self emancipation of the slaves of this area in 1862 when Union troops took New Orleans and the surrounding area. He argues that emancipation became an irreversible fact, not when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but when masses of slaves escaped their owners and made their way to the Union lines, and especially when they were accepted into the Union army and proved their worth to the Northern whites and to themselves.
This is not a great book about the revolt but the available sources are so skimpy and one sided that it's hard to see how a better one could have been written. Rasmussen did his best and the work does give us a lot about the conditions of slavery and of American rule in the newly acquired territory of Louisiana.
There are a number of interesting parts of the book that only bear indirectly on the principal subject. One such part was an explanation of the annexation of "West Florida" taken from Spain. Governor Claiborne was instrumental in instigating American settlers in the area now part of Louisiana, Alabama and a bit of Georgia to revolt against the Spanish, declare a republic, and then petition the United States for annexation. The plan was approved by President James Madison but handled in a deniable fashion since it was a clear violation of accepted international law. All of the blame was put on the American settlers, who were then pardoned for what they had done.
There was a relationship of this event ton the slave revolt. In the first place, what militias and troops that were available were in the Spanish areas. In the second, the slave revolt was assumed by many in the government to be instigated by the Spanish - in part out of an inability to believe that black slaves could organize such an insurrection on their own.
I looked at some Wikipedia articles in writing these notes. The most relevant one I found was "1811 German Coast Uprising". It did not mention Aptheker so I added his book to the bibliography at the end.
| Author | Burke, James Lee |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 529 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2013 |
In this, the second of Burke's Sheriff Hackberry Holland novels, the alcoholic Danny Boy Lorca witnesses a murder in the desert and sees another man get away. Holland and Pam Tibbs investigate the scene and go looking for the escapee, who turns out to be the young Noie Barnum, a missile engineer who has worked on Predator drones. Barnum is missing but is pursued by the Mexican coyote Krill and his gang who killed the other man and want Barnum to sell to - the Russian gangster Joseph Sholokhov who wants to sell barnum to Al Qaeda, by Temple Dowling, a one time associate of Sholokhov in the pornography business, and by the FBI, who want to do who knows what to Barnum.
The story is populated with strange characters. Besides Barnum and Lorca and the above mentioned people there is Negrito, a killer who is attached to Krill in spite of Krill's mistreatment of him. Then there is Anton Ling, a Chinese woman with a dark CIA/Vietnam War past who is now a religious person who aides poor "wets" crossing the border for jobs in the US. She is known as Magdalena by the local poor folk and she has helped Barnum. Reverend Cody Daniels is a hardcore loser, beaten up and arrested by Pam Tibbs when he acts up against her, and beaten and eventually murdered by the Russian gangsters. Strangest of all however is Preacher Jack Collins, the man seen running away into a cave and presumed dead in the last novel, Rain Gods.
There is the same guilt and tension in Holland as in the last novel, and the same tension between Pam and him, with Pam both loving and abusing him at the same time and him determined not to become the lover of an employee and a woman who may be less than half his age. Finally, of course, there is a showdown in Mexico in which Jack Collins goes after Sholokhov and Hack and Pam rescue Krill and Anton Ling from Sholokhov's torturers - at the cost of serious injuries to themselves.
Does any of this make sense? I'm not sure. The story is rather wild. The characters, Danny Boy, Ling, Collins, Krill, Negrito, Barnum and Daniels are all over the top, some of them way over. Even Hack and Pam are somewhat over the top. And yet, in spite of all that, I found the book rather compelling.
Burke is a philosophical writer. He's concerned with the big issues of life - meaning, right and wrong, guilt, sin, happiness, character, religion. His vision of the land in Texas is not the limited vision of a man passing through, but the broad vision of a man looking at a landscape of the millennia and the ages - filled with myth and dream. I pay attention to the story but the book would be almost as interesting even without the killers and the mystery. I'd still be absorbed by Hackberry's struggle to be true to his principles, by Pam's struggle to find human happiness, by Daniels' struggle to redeem his worthless life, and by Collins' intelligence and personal honor mixed into his murderous insanity.
Burke, born 10 years before me and aged 74 when this book was published, is acutely aware of the challenges of aging and mortality. His thoughts on the subject are deep and absorbing. We don't know Hackberry's exact age but he is said to be near 80 and he is facing all of these issues on Burke's (and on my) behalf. There is no escaping the final outcome but perhaps it is possible to make the path that leads there meaningful.
Burke's eyes are wide open. He sees the good, the evil, and the ambiguity in our lives. He sees the deep geological past and he peers into the mists of the future. He's a very impressive writer. I like him a lot.
| Author | Stiglitz, Joseph E. |
|---|---|
| Publication | W.W. Norton and Company, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Extras | notes bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Economics |
| When Read | March 2013 |
Stiglitz is a prolific scholar, writer, and man of affairs who has won the Nobel Prize in Economics. He was, for a time, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for Bill Clinton. He was Senior Vice-President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He has had other important posts as well as being a professor at Columbia University in New York. He is an expert on many topics including globalization, government policy, taxes, employment, trade, and of course, the distribution of income and wealth in the US and other countries.
S goes through one facet of the economy after another. He shows that income distribution has gotten steadily worse since Ronald Reagan's presidency. The wealth of the people at the time has multiplied enormously while the middle class has stagnated and the poor have fallen lower and lower. "Upward mobility" is largely a thing of the past. The old countries of Europe, long thought to be bastions of privilege in comparison to the dynamic society of the United States, are now well ahead of us in upward mobility.
A big part of mobility is education, but education has become the province of the wealthy. The price of education has gone up and up. The big state universities and the local community colleges, founded to provide low cost education to the masses, have seen government funds reduced year after year and tuition and fees go up. Now in the aftermath of the crash of 2008, a great many average students will assume a huge college loan debt in order to get an education but will never make enough money to pay for it. Some will find it impossible to get jobs in the field for which they trained. When they do, and they fall behind for some years, no employer will be interested in them. They will be forced into taking lower paid jobs that don't require education and they will not make enough to pay off the tens of thousands in debt that they accumulated.
Student debt played a prominent role in this book and in our society. It is now the second largest category of debt in the US, after mortgages but before auto loans and credit card debt. A change in the bankruptcy laws under Bush made it impossible to discharge the debt via bankruptcy. That gave the lenders additional incentives to loan to students even if they could see that the loans would be little use to the students or the education that was being paid for was bogus.
The worst offenders in exploitation of students are the private schools, presumably like the University of Phoenix. They are very expensive. Only a minority of students ever get a degree from these schools, and only a minority of them get jobs in their fields. The public universities, from which government has been withdrawing funds for years, provide vastly better educations at lower costs. Hundreds of thousand, perhaps millions of students, are now going to start their adult lives deeply in debt and never emerge from it. They are condemned to paying a significant part of their income to the banks year after year after year, with no benefit to themselves.
This pattern exists in medical care too. The cost of medical care is much higher in the U.S. and the outcomes are worse than in the other advanced countries. Medical care distorts our entire economy and even distorts the comparative statistics we use in comparing economies. The "gross domestic product" of our economy includes the medical products and services sold here. But if those services cost two thousand dollars more than in France or Britain or Germany or Sweden, while producing worse outcomes, is it true that our people are each $2,000 richer than the people of those countries because they get $2,000 more worth of medical services? As we say in Spanish, Claro que no.
Stiglitz analyzes mortgages, the derivatives market, insurance, trade, foreign investment, taxes, Social Security, Medicare, political contributions, savings, investments, and many other subjects. He gives special attention to the workings of the financial institutions and writes about the "financialization" of the American economy. He argues that banks are necessary for the economy to work, but what the banks are doing today is doing more harm than good.
He writes a lot about "rent seeking" behavior. That is unproductive economic activity in which someone gets to own something, a piece of land, a mine, a radio frequency, a copyright, a drug patent, and then charge whatever he can get for others to use what he owns. Rent seeking is the highest aspiration of most of the 1%. You can live well, but you can't get rich by working. You can only do that by getting ownership of something that people want.
He writes about how the 1% frames the terms of political discourse. He doesn't quote Marx directly, but his meaning seems well expressed in Marx's famous line, "The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class." He did not cite Mitt Romney directly, but it is clear that many of the ideas that Romney and Gingrich and the other Republican candidates promoted were outright falsehoods - probably stated in good faith by their promoters, but demonstrably false nonetheless. High taxes do not stifle investment. In some cases they promote it. Low minimum wages do not increase employment, they just lower wages. Cutting Social Security and Medicare payments does not save money, it just transfers the costs from the working people to the elderly. In the case of Medicare it substantially increases the costs since people cannot negotiate the cost structures that Medicare can.
S talks a great deal about the "gifts" that government gives to the rich. The provision that Bush passed, that Medicare may not negotiate the cost of drugs, is a 50 billion dollar a year gift to the pharmaceutical industry. Many of our oil, gas, timber, and other natural resource leases are gifts given well below market prices to the industries that lobby and bribe for them. The same is true for radio and TV spectrum. The many tax breaks given to particular industries are gifts to those industries. The lowering of capital gains and dividend taxes, as compared to income taxes on wages, is an outright gift to the wealthy, who are the only ones who benefit from them and who, as a result, pay lower percentage taxes than the upper middle class, sometimes much lower.
The average American lives on wages. His greatest wealth is his home ownership. His retirement depends on Social Security and Medicare. These few areas are the critical areas affecting the quality of life of the vast majority of American citizens. They are all under attack. And the reason for the attacks are to give more gifts to those who already have too much.
I could go on and on but I'll stop here for now. There is more in my diary and in other notes on politics.
I have not read many books about economics. Other than some Marxist tracts, I can't think of anything since Samuelson's textbook that I read in college. So I'm hardly qualified to heap praise on this book, but I'll do so anyway. While I haven't read economics I have read a lot of history and science and philosophy and I know enough to understand when a scholar is thorough and fair, and when he documents all of his claims with credible sources that actually support the conclusions that he draws from them. Stiglitz does all of that.
I found this book inspiring. It made me believe that the truth about the class struggle in the United States can be ascertained. That we can tell whether it's true or not that lowering taxes benefits everyone, whether it's true or not that we have equal opportunity in our country, whether its true or not that the "race to the bottom" that globalization has brought us to is inevitable and whether globalization itself is a positive or negative thing (it's both). S has made me believe that ordinary educated people such as myself can deal with these issues. He's also made me believe that we can have capitalism without having to accept the legitimacy of the unrestrained warfare of the rich against the poor and middle class.
It won't be an easy battle. The 1%, as the Occupy Wall Street movement has taught us to speak of them, own most of the media and most of the politicians and all of the commanding heights in the economy, but the 99% have huge latent strength if only it can be mobilized, if only people can be educated to see the truth.
Reading this book riled me up. I have made lots of notes for a website to be called democracy.org (can't use it, there is one named that already) or maybe educationfordemocracy.org, or whatever, to educate people about the facts. In Stiglitz' style I have conceived this website as a source of objective information. But that's a topic for my diary or elsewhere, not for these book notes.
| Author | Pelecanos, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Little Brown and Company, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 294 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2013 |
Sixteen year old Alex Pappas works in the summers as a delivery boy for his Dad's restaurant, a place selling breakfasts and lunches in the downtown business district of Washington. It is 1972.
Alex has two friends who are a little older than he is, one of whom owns a car. With him in the backseat the other boys decide to drive into Heathrow Heights, a nearby black neighborhood, and rattle the black people who live there. Alex doesn't like it and wants out but is too young and too confused to know what to do. They cruise into the Heights, yell racist epithets, throw a pie at someone, and take off. But they don't know the neighborhood and, instead of getting out, they reach a dead end and have to turn around. They're blocked in. One kid, Peter Whitten, jumps out of the car and runs to safety. One gets out to apologize to the black kids. He yells at Alex to run but Alex is too slow. He is run down, knocked down, and kicked in the eye, leaving him badly scarred and with bad vision in that eye for life. The other boy is shot dead.
The story resumes 35 years later. Alex's father died not long after the incident and Alex, at age 19, takes over the restaurant and has spent his life running it. The boy who ran has become a well connected lawyer. Of the three black kids, James Monroe got 10 years for murder which stretched to 20 when he killed another man in prison in self-defense. Now he's out and working as a mechanic in a beat up one stall garage, drinking beer and repairing cars all day. Ray Monroe, his younger brother, is working as a physical therapist at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Charles Baker, the meanest of the bunch, has been in and out of prison and is nominally working in a hospital but mostly skips out looks for opportunities to make money by threats and strong arm tactics.
They are all, in effect, brought together by Baker. Baker finds and threatens Peter Whitten, trying to blackmail him. But Whitten is far too smart to allow that and he easily rebuffs him and lets him know that he'll be in deep shit if he ever shows up again. Then Baker decides to rip off the local marijuana dealer with the help of a dumb white kid. They get the guy's dope but incur the wrath of higher up dealers who will not stand for that. Finally, he aims to somehow threaten and squeeze Alex, threatening to hurt Alex's family if he doesn't fork over $50,000.
In the end, Alex digs up more truths about the events in 1972. He figures out that it was not James Monroe, but Raymond who shot his friend. The bigger, older, stronger James, believing that Ray had no chance in prison, took the rap for him and went to jail, believing he'd only be there a few years. Baker is murdered by the drug dealers. Alex turns over his restaurant to his older, surviving son (the younger having been killed in Iraq), and sets up James in business with him in a small building that Alex owns, with James doing and supervising the work and Alex and his wife handling the sales and business end.
The ending was a surprise to me. I knew that the drug dealers were very tough and that Charles Baker was way over his head in trying to take over the business, but I thought there would be some final confrontation between Alex and the Monroes and Baker. However the ending was much more logical, if not as customary as one would expect in crime fiction. Baker was a mean, predatory, selfish person who thought everybody owed him something. In his way, he was a tough guy. But he was even more of a danger to himself as he was to anyone else.
What I most liked about this book, as I have liked in other Pelecanos books, is his interest in and sympathy for ordinary people. It's not often that a guy who runs a lunch counter, a physical therapist at a hospital, and an ex-con who repairs old cars for a living and doesn't know how to repair new ones, are the central characters in a novel. But Pelecanos cares about these people. He cares about their marriages, their children, their sense of connection to their parents, and the long standing efforts and sacrifices that they make over many, many years to live decent lives.
There is a scene in which Charles Baker comes to James Monroe's small, dingy apartment and finds James watching a game on TV and drinking a beer. These are James' main pleasures in life. Baker wants Monroe to accompany him to meet with Peter Whitten, just to have a big man with him. Monroe refuses. Baker says they can make some real money. Monroes tells him he's making money. Baker says, what, working like a dog to make just enough for this crappy apartment? Monroe says he's happy with that. He can come and go as he pleases.
Pelecanos gives the reader an appreciation of what's important in life. It's not big bucks. It's not big prestige. It's not even some big standing in the community. It's home. It's family. It's love. It's commitment.
Corny? Sentimental? Maybe. But I liked it.
| Author | Anderson, Kevin J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 310 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Comedy |
| When Read | April 2013 |
Dan Shamble is a zombie private investigator, i.e., a P.I. who is a zombie, not an investigator of zombies - though he can do that too. He has a small agency composed of himself, Cheyenne, his ghost office manager, and Robin, a human lawyer. They practice in the Unnatural Quarter where all of the zombies, ghosts, vampires, gremlins, daemons, and other unnatural beings live.
Shamble works on a number of separate cases in this novel. He and Robin free 100 golems from the control of a necromancer who is exploiting them. He attempts to find the heart and soul sold by a nice zombie to a gremlin shop owner and resold to a mystery buyer. He attempts to find out who burned down the theater constructed by a being calling himself Shakespeare's Ghost, only to discover it was the ghost himself - for insurance fraud and publicity, he sets up protection for the local unnatural brothel, he tries to discover what strange game the Smile Syndicate is playing in its takeover of a number of Unnatural Quarter business, and he works to battle against prejudice and discrimination fomented by Senator Balfour with his Unnatural Acts legislation. Eventually, he solves all of the mysteries and enjoys an evening with Cheyenne of the closest that a zombie and an immaterial ghost can get to a physical relationship.
This book is the second in a series begun with Death Warmed Over. There are characters and references to events that must have been setup and explained there.
The book grew on me as I got further into it. All of the heroes are simple and likable, from Shamble himself to Bill the Golem, McGoo the human cop, Cheyenne, Robin, and others. The humor is repetitive and predictable, but that's okay. The book isn't meant to be Literature and the characters are meant to be anything but realistic. They are meant to feel like old friends, and the author succeeds in that attempt.
There is a passage in the story where Anderson says that ghosts can touch inanimate objects but cannot touch animate ones. "Animate" here is a word intended to cover the ambiguous case of Shamble, who walks around but is dead. So in order for the two former lovers in real life, Shamble and Cheyenne, to hold hands, she puts on a glove. It's kind of a touching scene. Shamble, the narrator of the story says that we readers may not be able to understand how it is that a ghost can touch an inanimate object but not an animate one. His explanation is, "Don't think about it. I don't make the rules.". It was a perfect piece of authorial intervention to short circuit any readers taking all of this in too serious a spirit.
Maybe I'll read others.
| Author | Barnes, Julian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Kingstown, RI: AudioGO, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 163 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2013 |
Tony Webster tells the story of his first girlfriend Veronica, his later wife Margaret, and his friendship formed in high school with Adrian Finn. The story begins in the 1960's and ends more than forty years later when Tony, living alone, receives notice from a solicitor that Veronica's mother died and left him 500 pounds and Adrian Finn's diary. But Tony never gets the diary. Veronica has it and will not give it to him.
Tony had two friends in high school, the three of them were all intelligent fellows who hoped to become professional intellectuals of one sort or another. Then Adrian arrived at their school. He was more intelligent, more thoughtful, more serious, than any of them. He seemed destined for great things. He went to Cambridge to study philosophy and looked likely to become a Professor of same.
Tony met Veronica and dated her for some time. They had the kind of groping, petting sex that teenagers had in those days, but Veronica would never go to bed with him. She took him home to meet her father, mother and brother and Tony was alienated by the father and brother but was treated very well by the mother. Tony imagined that the mother saw Veronica as something of a victimizer and Tony as her latest victim.
Tony introduced Veronica to Adrian and was immediately sorry that he did. Veronica took an interest in him. He broke up with Veronica and, surprisingly, she went to bed with him once after the breakup, but not again. Tony believed that she was lost to Adrian. He sent a letter to Adrian telling him that he and Veronica deserved each other. Later still he learned that Adrian had committed suicide.
The story resumes 40 years later. Tony met and married Margaret. He thought they were very happy together but apparently Margaret had other ideas and left him after 12 years of marriage. They had a daughter who was now grown up and married and had an acceptable relationship with Tony, but not a close one. Tony worked hard and became a professor of history. He dated other women after the end of his marriage and still maintained friendly relations with Margaret, but he never had another serious relationship and grew accustomed to living alone. That's when he learned of the death of Veronica's mother and the willing of the diary to him.
It took much effort for Tony to even get an email address for Veronica. When he did, he pursued her very carefully, trying hard not to offend her. But she was furious at him for reasons he didn't know and would not give him the diary. She met with him twice but, each time, left him with even greater anger, though Tony couldn't figure out why. Then she gave him, not the diary, but a photocopy of the letter that he had written to Adrian 40 years before. The letter was vile and hurtful. Tony had forgotten that he had ever written anything so terrible. He now understood why Veronica hated him, and he feared that he had played a role in Adrian's suicide and in Veronica's unhappy life.
The story ends with a number of surprising revelations that explain everything. Adrian had a son, now an emotionally disturbed man of about 40 living with four other people in a supervised group home. When Tony realizes that the man is Adrian's son, he assumes that Veronica is the mother, but it turns out not to be so. Veronica is his sister. The child was born by Veronica's mother. Perhaps her interest in Tony so many years before, and her leaving him the money and the diary had something to do with her deep need to escape her own marriage and her fixation on Veronica's boyfriends. Perhaps Adrian's son was mentally damaged by being born to a mother well past the usual child bearing age. Perhaps Adrian committed suicide because of this. There's no way to know. Veronica is the person who knows most, but Tony now fully understands that she owes him nothing whatever. When she tells him that she burned the diary, he is in no position to object.
Tony is left at the end with a new and diminished view of himself and of his entire life. He has not made a success of it and any opportunities for redemption are long past.
This is the third of Julian Barnes' books that I have read. He is a writer of deep penetration into emotional and philosophical issues, and a writer with the most precise and sophisticated articulation of complex ideas. He also faces difficult, demeaning, even humiliating life histories with an unblinking stare. He pulls no punches. His characters do wrong and he has them excoriate themselves for it.
The writing is magnificent. I wanted to remember sentence after sentence, thinking to myself: that's great! I need to remember that! But of course I don't remember any of them. I only remember that I wanted to remember them. My mind is good at creating and remembering summaries of experience but very poor at recording verbatim details.
The writing is magnificent, yes, but it's also depressing. I wanted Tony to learn from his mistakes in time to profit from them and make them right. But he doesn't. I wanted him to step back from himself and take an objective view of himself and his situation. But he doesn't, at least not until it's long past the time when correction would have been possible. The story is not as terrible as Before She Met Me, a book about unbearably wrong headed actions by its main character. Unlike Graham Hendrick of that book, also a History professor, Tony Webster does not commit murder and suicide. He doesn't fall into a rat hole of deepening mania.
The novel won the Man Booker Prize for 2011.
| Author | Frank, Pat |
|---|---|
| Author | Harrington, Joseph D. |
| Publication | Paperback Library, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 252 |
| Extras | Foreword by Admiral Jack Fletcher (U.S. Navy, retired) and Yahachi Tanabe (Former Commander, Imperial Japanese Navy) |
| Extras | maps, illustrations, portraits |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 2013 |
After providing some background material on Japanese and American preparations for the war, F and H tell the story of the aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Yorktown, from the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor until the day it was finally sunk by a Japanese submarine in the aftermath of the battle of Midway. Most of the material is from American sources and the recollections of American Navy men, but some is from the Japanese, including excerpts of interviews with the Japanese submarine commander and others.
Both sides opened the war with more battleships than carriers but the U.S. ended with 24 battleships and "more than a hundred" carriers. I seem to recall from another source that the actual count was around 130. The Japanese were better prepared. They had ten carriers to our seven. Their naval aircraft, including dive bombers, fighters, and especially torpedo planes, were faster (dramatically faster in the case of the torpedo planes) and had longer range. Their torpedoes were superior. Their men were better trained and had been allocated far more fuel and ammunition for practice as compared to the American policies of economy in training and supplies before the war. Many of the Japanese had combat experience in China. They were ready and they had a plan.
Yorktown was in Norfolk on December 7, 1941. Its crew was recalled immediately and everything was done to make it ready for sea as quickly as possible. On December 16 they were headed out for the South Pacific via the Panama Canal and San Diego. Many of their weapons were new and untried in combat. Their men included many professional seamen and aviators, but none had fought in combat or knew quite what to expect from the Japanese.
They launched a number of air raids against Japanese Pacific bases. The effects of those raids were mostly negligible although the pilots reported many imaginary successes. Then Admiral Fletcher led the Yorktown and Lexington and the strongest force of cruisers and destroyers available to try to block an expected attack by the Japanese on Port Moresby in New Guinea. The American and Japanese fleets never saw each other, but their aircraft fought in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the first battle in which a Japanese advance had been halted. Yorktown planes sank the light carrier Shoho and damaged the big fleet carrier Shokaku. American losses were also significant. Yorktown was hit by a bomb that did severe damage, and a couple of smaller ships were sunk. But the Japanese convoy headed for Port Moresby turned back and the mission was accomplished.
This was a major learning experience for everyone. Much technical knowledge was gained. The inferiority of some of the American planes was demonstrated. The superiority of radar over visual observation was demonstrated. American torpedoes were revealed to be so non-functional as to be useless for any purpose other than killing the torpedo plane pilots. Most importantly however, the American sailors and pilots went in with a determination to win came away with the experience and confidence to know that they could do it.
Jo Jo Powers told his pilots that he was going to bomb a Japanese carrier if he had to fly right down to the deck to do it.
"Far below, through the clouds and the gunsmoke, they could see the dive bomber piloted by Jo-Jo Powers. It was staggering in its line of flight, taking hit after hit. Both Powers and his radioman, Everett Hill, were wounded, other pilots knew, because Powers had reported his condition by radio. They watched as Powers manhandled his bomber back on course. His plane was now in flames, and he was not much more than 200 feet above Shokaku when he dropped his 1,000-pound bomb. It crashed into Shokaku's flight deck only a second or two before Powers' bomber plunged into the ocean. Powers had kept his promise of the night before and died in doing it. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously."
The Japanese pilots were equally committed and equally courageous, however I think that it must have been a shock to them to discover that the Americans were not the weak and inferior people that Japanese propaganda made them out to be.
The rest of the Yorktown story is the Battle of Midway. Again, both American and Japanese pilots made heroic sacrifices. The Americans ran into the most atrocious luck in which attack after attack failed and airman after airman was shot down and killed until the dive bombers arrived unseen and destroyed three of the four Japanese carriers. F and H describe their arrival as a clearly worked out plan, not the hunches that the movies have made of it. A weather expert told the pilots how to determine wind speed and velocity by looking at the waves. The flight leader believed that the carriers would need to be steaming into the wind. He figured their maximum speed, the furthest point they could reach directly upwind of where they were last sighted in the time it would take the Americans to arrive there. He led his planes to that point and then flew downwind until he found the carriers.
Yorktown survived two Japanese attacks. She was abandoned in the face of heavy damage and fires but re-occupied when she didn't sink. But the Japanese submarine I-168 penetrated her destroyer screen and sank her from close range.
This is one of those books written in the 1960's when many men who had been in the war were writing about it or sharing their stories with writers. Admiral Fletcher, in command of the carriers, wrote the forward to the book. Notes from the Japanese sub captain described the final sinking.
I like reading books like this. I appreciate the great courage and the terrible sacrifices of American and Allied forces in World War II. I appreciate their efforts in all of the battles. Each of those battles and each period of the war has its own special interest for me. In this particular case, I have a special interest in that period right after Pearl Harbor when everything was going wrong for the United States, when Japanese Imperialism was spreading unchecked across Asia and the Pacific, when no one knew whether or how they could be stopped, or how well they themselves, the Americans, would do when faced with the enemy. They did do well. They did stop the Japanese and turn the tide of defeats into the beginnings of victory.
I respect the courage and sacrifice of the Japanese. I even respect the courage and sacrifice of the Germans. But I also recognize an important truth in Chairman Mao's dictum that to die for the people is heavier than Mount Tai, but to die for the fascists and exploiters is lighter than a feather.
| Author | Warren, Robert Penn |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Extras | Essay by Warren in 1974 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2013 |
Jack Burden, PhD in history, journalist, scion of the well off and well connected Burden family, takes a job working for Governor Willie Stark in an unnamed southern state in the 1930's. The state is modeled on Louisiana, and the governor is loosely modeled on Huey Long, though no historical names are used and the action is not identical to what actually happened in the 1930's.
Jack is Willie's Jack of all trades. He handles jobs for Willie where Willie needs someone smart, honest, confidential and trustworthy. Willie can't suborn Jack and doesn't try to. He knows that Jack has a mind of his own. But Willie is a complex and competent man. He's ruthless but he's neither dumb nor actually quite corrupt in the way that he is thought to be. He uses corruption in others but he seems to be genuinely determined to do good things for the overwhelmingly poor people in the state - advancing personal ambitions at the same time.
Jack has many personal demons. He was and is in love with Anne Stanton, the sister of his childhood friend Adam, now a famous doctor. They grew apart and Jack married another woman who was beautiful and sexy but they were very different people and the physical attraction was not enough to keep them together. Jack also has issues with his father, who abandoned the family when Jack was a baby, and his mother, who is an important force in Jack's life.
The personal and political sides of Jack's life continually merge and separate. The big crisis comes for him when he is told by Willie to find any dirt he can find on retired Judge Irwin, an old friend of the Burden family and a man who was like a father to Jack. The judge, a man with a solid reputation for integrity, has refused to back Willie and Willie decides to punish him for it. Jack does find something. He won't turn it over to Willie. He insists on confronting the judge and giving him the opportunity to explain. It is a crisis point in the novel. The judge is made to remember how he got his real start in life, by screwing another man who lost his job, his resources, and ultimately killed himself because of it. A couple of days later the judge kills himself. Jack's mother is in agony. She reveals to Jack that Judge Irwin is actually Jack's real father. From then on Jack's life becomes at the same time more real and more fantastic.
There are many other stories here. Jack has produced a biography of Cass Mastern, a relative who lived and died at the time of the Civil War. It was a significant event in his coming to understand himself.
The other crises happen to Willie. His son Tom, a wild boy who is a state champion quarterback, has his neck broken in a football game. He is permanently paralyzed and eventually dies. Willie and his estranged wife are both devastated. Willie had decided to build a hospital and selected Dr. Adam Stanton to run it. Anne Stanton implores Jack to go to New York and persuade Adam to come back to take on the task. Jack succeeds. But ultimately, Jack, and then Adam, find out that Anne has become Willie's mistress and she was behind Willie's determination to hire Adam and bring him home. When Adam understands what happened, he kills Willie for turning his sister into a whore. Willie's stunted driver and bodyguard Sugar Boy pulls his own gun and kills Adam. Anne, having lost the two men who meant the most to her as a result of her own actions, is devastated.
The novel ends with some resolution of each of the stories. Jack's mother leaves her house to her second husband and goes away to live quietly elsewhere. Willie's wife gives her savings to a young girl who may or may not have been impregnated by Tom in return for the baby. She names the child Willie and sees him as a blessing and consolation for her middle and older age. Jack and Anne marry.
Just relating the plot as above doesn't impart the scope and power of this book. It is a great novel.
Willie Stark is always seen somewhat remotely. He is the central character of the situation in which all of the characters find themselves, although Jack is the central character of the narrative. We often see Willie, not up close, but from Jack's perspective on the periphery of a crowd that Willie is haranguing or from the corner of a room in which Willie is sticking it to some other politician.
Willie is a complex person and a complex politician. He is a populist. Is he a genuine supporter of the poor and downtrodden, or is he using them to satisfy personal ambition? Does he oppose the corrupt, vested interests in the state government and economy because they exploit the people, or does he oppose them because they are his rivals for power? Does he build bridges, universities and hospitals in order to develop and support the people of the state, or does he do it to aggrandize his fame?
The answers to all of these questions appear to be Yes and Yes. In Warren's portrayal, there doesn't seem to me to be any space between these two alternative explanations of motives in Willie's mind, and maybe not in fact. Willie certainly isn't bothered by the dichotomies. His convictions are strong and unshakable. Whatever ethical issues exist, Willie regards them as not meriting his attention.
Willie is a philanderer. He is a man who can and does apply relentless pressure to his rivals. He makes use of corrupt men and keeps them in office in spite of their corruption because they are useful to him and help him achieve his goals. We have doubts about his methods but it is hard to quarrel with his remarkable success. We see clearly that more ethical men could not have achieved nearly as much. We have to ask ourselves the old questions about ends and means and about objective benefits to the people vs. subjective adherence to principle. Willie's success doesn't allow us to dismiss him with easy answers.
Willie's story is fascinating and larger than life but Jack's story is no less interesting. Where Willie is almost a force of nature, Jack is a man of profound feeling and deep reflection. Warren gives us the visions that Jack sees, of Willie, Anne, Judge Irwin, Cass Mastern, and all of the other characters, and the actions that those perceptions prompt him to take. The middle part, the analysis of his perceptions, is not so obviously displayed. Jack may lay down an ultimatum to the Judge. He may drive to California and back. But he won't tell us exactly why.
We aren't meant to have straight answers to the whys of Jack's behavior, or of Willie's or Anne's. There are multiple reasons for what they do and the reasons interpenetrate and twist around each other. To untangle them and present them in hard analysis: 35% this, 40% that, and 25% the other, is not just impossible, it might also confuse the issue that it aims to shed light on by failing to understand the way that the characters' motives drive them this way and that and compound to form a whole that is more than a simple sum of its parts.
Jack is very much a principled man. Even Willie, a man who knows how to bully his venal subordinates and will do so without compunction, knows that Jack is independent minded and not to be pushed around. It is part of the greatness of this book that Willie can understand and accept Jack and use him in the way he needs to do without violating Jack's rules, and Jack and understand and accept Willie without trying to put him in an ethical box. These are not just characters in a book. They are intelligent and self aware human beings.
The more minor characters in the book, Anne and her brother, Sugar Boy, Sadie, and some others, are no less rounded. They are people who have personalities and agendas of their own. They won't be bent by the writer into becoming supporting characters. They are interesting and sometimes dangerous. They gain our respect.
I've written a lot already but I'll wind up with a comment about Jack's love of Anne. If Willie's story is at the center of Jack's professional life, Anne's is at the center of his emotional life.
Warren handles this story with sympathy but also realism. Jack has not simply pined for Anne. He married another woman, a woman perhaps more beautiful than Anne, a woman with whom he had a great sex life, a woman who was not up to Anne's standard but neither was she a cardboard stand-in for someone who serves only to accent Anne's desirability. The failure of their marriage was not due to her rejection of Jack but to Jack's rejection of her. There is no simple story here of a man made free by rejection from a woman who was in any case unworthy of his love.
I didn't expect Jack and Anne to marry at the end. I expected each of them withdraw into wounded isolation, forever regretful of what was and what might have been. I expected Jack's resentment and Anne's guilt to keep them forever apart. But Warren didn't do that. His characters are driven by emotion but they are full human beings who can do what should be done regardless of their failings and misgivings. So I think that ending was the right one.
| Author | Bolano, Roberto |
|---|---|
| Translators | Wimmer, Natasha |
| Publication | Macmillan Audiobooks, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2013 |
The author's correct name is Bolaño with an nyay, but I have spelled it with a plain "n" to avoid indexing and searching issues.
The story opens with young Udo Berger and his beautiful girlfriend Ingeborg staying at a hotel on the Costa Brava in Spain. The hotel is one where Udo stayed as a teenager with his parents ten years before. They have made friends with Hannah and Karl (Charly) another young German couple, and Charly has introduced them to two young Spaniards called the Wolf and the Lamb who like to party and drink with Charly.
Udo doesn't really like Charly but Inge is friends with Hannah and she too like to go out and have a good time. Udo is more interested in staying in the hotel room, working on his article, and thinking about the true passion in his life, the war game "The Third Reich". Udo is the German national champion at war games and this particular game, a strategic simulation of the whole of World War II, is his specialty. He has learned everything about the military side of the war, down to knowing the names of each division with the names of their commanders and their positions and histories in the war. He always plays the German side and has worked out a number of novel and surprising strategies which have often enabled him to win the war game in spite of the Allied numerical and material superiority, and even against sophisticated opponents.
The novel appears to me to follow three main stories. The first is the increasingly self-destructive behavior of Charly, including drunkenness, insulting his hotelier to the point of nearly being thrown out, mistreating his girlfriend Hannah and beating her up, and finally going off on surfboard into water too far from shore and being lost at sea. The second is Udo's attraction to Frau Else, the hotel proprietress. She is married to a dying consumptive and, although she finds Udo attractive and is willing to dally with him and kiss him, she will not sleep with him. She is faithful to her husband. The third story, the most absorbing one to me, is Udo's discovery of El Quemado, "the burned one", a muscular man with severe burn scars on his face and body who sleeps under a pile of paddle boats on the beach and lives by renting them out to tourists during the season. Udo introduces him to the game and they begin to play The Third Reich.
As the novel develops, Charly becomes more and more offensive and then finally disappears. Hannah, who is probably well rid of him, becomes distraught and much time is spent interacting with the Spanish coast guard authorities until his body is finally found. Udo degenerates. He becomes more and more offensive to the hotel staff. He becomes more and more inattentive and even offensive to the beautiful Inge. He becomes more and more importunate with Else. He becomes more and more obsessed with his game with El Quemado, to whom he eventually loses.
In the end it appears that Udo might break down completely, but he doesn't. He has lost his job. His girlfriend has returned home and is becoming more and more estranged. His friendships in Spain have worn very thin, and he is becoming estranged from his best friend in Germany, an old wargamer who lends him money that he cannot really afford to lend and gives him good advice that is ignored. His continual delays in returning home have cost him his job.
However the ending is uneventful. Udo returns home, gets a new job, and resumes his life. Is he a changed man? Probably not. His new job pays a bit more and he continues to play war games, though without Inge to love him.
According to Steven C. Hull, a reviewer on Amazon.com, this was Bolaño's first novel, written in the late 1980's when the author was in his mid-30's. The book was not published until 2010, seven years after Bolaño's death. Hull wrote: "Perhaps Bolano felt the same way about The Third Reich as I do, a book that doesn't quite come together."
I agree that there are problems with the book. We never learn anything about El Quemado. We don't understand why Else dallies with Udo or what she sees in him since he is, or rather attempts to be, domineering towards her and to her staff. We see Udo engaging in self-destructive behavior but don't get a good sense of why, or why he is able to simply return home at the end almost as if nothing happened. It's a puzzling novel.
El Quemado is a quiet but thoughtful man. He is, in some respects, the hero of the novel. Knowing nothing about the game and little about the war, he goes to a library and gets help from Else's husband so that he eventually masters Udo. Although he is apparently physically stronger than any of the other characters, he makes no attempt to dominate anyone and witnesses aggressive behavior with disapproval and sorrow rather than anger.
While Else is away Udo barges in to her bedroom and meets her husband, who is lying in bed, dying of cancer. Udo tells him that El Quemado would have lost but for his, the husband's, help. The husband says no, "El Quemado has gone beyond my advice." Udo wants to know what is going on with El Quemado. Why is he playing so well? What does this mean to him? Then Udo asks:
"Is El Quemado from South America?"
"Warm, warm ..."
"And the burns on his body...?"
"Jackpot!"
And yet we never learn how he was burned or how this may have influenced him in relation to Udo or the game.
Perhaps El Quemado is a political exile from Chile or a country under the sway of one of the other fascistic regimes. Perhaps he was captured and tortured with fire by the fascists. Perhaps he is driven to win this game because he is an anti-fascist and the thought of conquering Nazi Germany by his own efforts and against the opposition of this highly skilled and supremely confident opponent greatly appeals to him. That is the interpretation that makes the most sense to me and it accords with Bolaño's own past as a Chilean, an opponent of Pinochet, and a man who may have been arrested once by the fascists, though the record is not perfectly clear about that. But Bolaño gives us no confirmation of this or any other theory about the burns or El Quemado's drive to win.
One of the interesting aspects of this novel is Udo's own interest in the Third Reich - not just the game, but the history. He says that he is not a Nazi, but does he ever think about the Nazis? Does he realize that these commanders that he has studied so well and maybe idolizes were also criminals, or at the very least, accessories before and after the facts of Nazi crimes?
Why does he play this game? Surely there is the attraction of the game as a game. Surely there is the attraction of playing a war game. I understand those attractions very well and was an avid war gamer after receiving the Avalon Hill Gettysburg game is a Bar Mitzvah present at age 13. I still remember that my cousin Gail was in the room when I unwrapped and she laughed a bit, commenting on the fact that my Bar Mitzvah was a passage to manhood in the Jewish tradition and here someone had give me a game - a toy for children. But I was fascinated from the moment I unwrapped it. It was by far my favorite present and I played it avidly, almost always playing the South because all of my friends insisted on playing the North against me because of the numerical superiority. At the time, it was all one to me which side I played and I even preferred the South for the ability to win even against long odds. I don't remember ever losing.
I think Udo would have had the same attraction as I did and I think Bolaño must have understood that attraction very well. But there was more to it than that. There was some German nationalism in Udo's playing. It seemed to me that he wanted not just to win, but to prove that Germany could have won, that those old soldiers he knew really did have the measure of their opponents and the Wehrmacht really could have taken on the world and defeated it.
I never completely lost my sympathy for Udo during the course of the novel, but I was happy to see El Quemado win. I rejoiced in the details as El Quemado's Russians finally held fast in the East and began their counteroffensive, and as the Americans landed in Britain and joined with the British in beating down the Germans who had invaded in Britain and captured London during Udo's rampage before El Quemado took the full measure of his opponent and his creative strategies.
Udo understands that he has lost well before the end of the game, but like Hitler, he doesn't surrender. He fights on to the bitter end until he is surrounded and crushed in Berlin. Only then does he begin to pick up the threads of his life, finish his failed business with Else, and return home.
This is not a great novel. It is confusing and unsatisfying. But it has some deep and satisfying aspects. It reminds me of some of Dostoevsky's books, written with great talent and some neurosis, poorly put together as novels but containing some inspired and perceptive writing.
I may read some more of his books if and when I find them. I would love to be able to advance far enough in my Spanish to try to read one in the original language, but that is a pretty long shot.
| Author | Guterson, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Westminster, MD: Books on Tape, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2013 |
Neal Countryman, the narrator of the story, runs a high school race and pulls up alongside another boy, John William Barry. They race all the way to the end in a dead heat and then John William pulls ahead just a bit to edge Neal out, though they are not at the front of the race. Seeing kindred spirits in each other they become friends
Neal is a working class boy.
Both go to college but their life choices diverge. Neal completes his education and becomes a high school English teacher. John William drops out and moves into the woods of their home state of Washington, where he lives first in a trailer, and then in a cave that he, with Neal's help, hacks out of the native rock and soil.
Neal is not what I would call a conventional person. He travels Europe on his own. He maintains his friendship with this increasingly isolated man. But he meets a young woman and falls in love with her. They marry. They eventually buy a house. He goes to work in the high school and she goes to work in a real estate office. They have two boys. Their life is reflective and intelligent, but it is still a life that most people would recognize as quite normal and ordinary. The only really extraordinary aspect of it is Neal's frequent hikes into the back country to see his friend John William.
The trips are arduous. It is not enough to park the car at the foot of the trails and hike miles into the woods to the cave. Neal also feels compelled to bring food, vitamins and medications, tools, books, and other supplies to his friend. He tries to convince John William to return with him but the hermit has no use for civilization. He eats the food that is brought. He reads the carefully selected books. But he will not budge from his isolation and will not permit Neal to contact his, John William's, parents and inform them of where he is. John William even prevails upon his friend to drive John William's car and abandon it at the Mexican border so that his parents and any investigators they hire will think that he has disappeared into Mexico. He gives Neal $70,000 (he is very rich after all), which he says he won't need for anything and it finances the trip back from the border and enables the Countrymans to buy their house.
Some years pass. It is winter. The cave is poorly provisioned for it. John William is obviously wasting away and consumed by various physical problems, but still he will not budge and will not permit Neal to tell anyone. Neal even lies to a private investigator sent by John William's father. A blizzard arrives in Washington and Neal is unable to make it to the cave. Several months pass before he can arrive again. He finds John William dead. He rolls his frozen body in the cedar bark mat that John William had woven and leaves him in the cave. If I remember correctly, this is somewhere not far beyond halfway through the novel.
Thirty years go by. Neal is still teaching English. His wife is still working in the real estate office. His boys are grown up. Then Neal is contacted by authorities and by the newspapers. John William's body has been found. A will has also been found. John William had 441 million dollars (if I remember the sum correctly) and willed it all to Neal. Neal is now one of the richest men in the state.
He continues to teach English for a while, but it isn't the same. The students and faculty know about his windfall and treat him differently. He finishes the term but knows it is time to retire. His wife also retires, though they do not substantially alter their lifestyle.
A middle aged woman contacts Neal and tells him that she was John William's girlfriend. Neal is astonished. He knew nothing of this. But the story rings true. She was attracted by John William's strangeness, his intellectuality, his respect for her. Unlike other boys, he did not try to take her to bed. Even when she wanted him to and attempted to seduce him she found him strangely uncomfortable and uninterested in sex. Eventually she left him but now, upon learning the circumstances of his death, wants to make a movie about him with Neal - who is not really interested. Her story is a good part of the novel after John William's death.
Neal has seen John William's mother a couple of times over the thirty years. She is now in an Alzheimer's home. Neal goes to see her but she treats him badly and insists that he leave. She has always something of a bitch and old age and the beginnings of dementia have not sweetened her disposition.
Then he goes to see John William's father. He wants to explain himself, and explain what became of John William and why he did not tell the man about his son much earlier and, finally, to apologize for not giving the man the information that might have saved John William's life.
He finds the old man at his club. It is not yet five o'clock and the old man is waiting impatiently for his first drink of the evening - having promised himself not to drink before then. The old man rejects Neal's apology, telling him that Neal was not responsible for the death, that it was he, the father, if anyone, who was responsible. He then tells the horror story of John William's infancy and neglect by his mother that accounts for so much of John William's otherwise inexplicable behavior.
The mother was determined to train the infant not to cry by ignoring him. She put ear plugs in her ears and attacked her husband any time he wanted to comfort the child. The child cried more and more until he was screaming all day and all night. The husband and father could not stand it. Unable to face down his always furious, always intimidating wife, he took to wearing ear plugs on his own and taking a book and a double martini onto the porch or into the garden to escape the screaming and the fury. In one particularly horrific scene he tries to stand up to her but she shouts him down. You are not going to undo all of the hard effort and sacrifice I have made to get this far by rewarding that child for his screaming! In another scene, the father can't stand it around the house, goes on a drive, and returns to find the child on the way to the hospital. He has been choked by his mother. Again, he attempts to confront her but, again, she absolves herself of all blame and attacks him instead. It is an impossible situation. He hoped that the problem will sort itself out as the boy grows older. However the abuse continued and was merely changed as, for example, she began belittling and demeaning the boy for his wet dreams and treating him as a dirty, petty, insignificant child.
This recounting (together with the ex-girlfriend's tale) occupies most of the last half of the book. Five o'clock comes around. The old man tries to get out of his chair but is unable to do so without the help of the club waiter, who deftly helps the old man to his feet in spite of the old fellow's imprecations and insistence that he do it himself. He hobbles off to the bar while Neal goes home and ponders all that has happened.
This is a most unusual novel. Guterson is a master of subtle emotions. He avoids action and drama. His characters are built up from the events of everyday life, not from dramatic events. The only real action in the story is in the retold story of John William's infancy and the father's inadequacy in the face of the mother's clear mental illness. That story changes everything for us, explaining the unexplained and, for the first time in the story, truly riling us up against someone and giving us someone upon whom to focus blame. We didn't like Mrs. Barry even before we heard the story but when we also find out that she was a child abuser, we feel justified in our even more intense dislike.
The old man is responsible too. But before I throw any stones at him I have to ask what I would have done in his place. Would I have tried to take the child and leave the woman? Would I have left the woman with the child? What exactly would I have done? I'd like to think that I would have done the right thing but, like John William's father and like Neal, I don't like confrontations and I am well prepared to see another person's point of view and blame myself in any confrontational situation.
As for Neal, I cannot find fault with him. He had to balance his perceived obligation to save his friend from himself, and his perceived obligation to support his friend's wishes as to how to conduct his own life. He made the best compromise he could. At considerable sacrifice of himself, he trekked into the woods time after time to care for his friend, to try to keep him alive, to perform backbreaking work for him, and to try to reason with him. But John William had turned his back on the world. He was only interested in Gnostic philosophy.
I sometimes say of a book that I admired it but didn't like reading it. With this one it is harder to characterize my response. I liked the writing. I liked the main character. I liked the sensitive handling of the people, the situations, and the moral dilemmas. It was not a pleasant subject to read about. There was a significant sense of loss and of waste, of life going by without anything happening. But my own life has some of that too and yet I don't feel that I have been a loser for it. I sympathize with and value Neal's relationship with John William, with his wife, with his high school students, with his books, and with his obligations. He has led a private life and unspectacular life but lived it rather well. I would up with some sense that this is a book that addresses the big issues of life and does so with insights that I appreciate.
| Author | Sheckley, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Warner Brothers, 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 180 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 2013 |
"Based on the original screenplay by J. Micahel Stracynski for the television movie Babylon 5."
President John Sheridan (of Babylon 5 I presume) awakes from a dream with a conviction that someone was using his dreams to warn him of a terrible danger to the federation. He directs his spacecraft to the great space station Babylon 5 where he his dreams direct him to meet four others (only three of whom ever appear, the fourth is dead) whose combination of skills will save the universe from hidden enemies long thought to be gone but not gone.
Various adventures occur, ending in the group warning of impending invasion in time to rouse the great fleet from earth which fights off the enemy.
This was a very run of the mill SF novel no doubt written to order by Sheckley to fulfill a contract with Warner Brothers. It has Sheckley's ability, but none of the marvelous inventiveness that he brought to Crompton Divided or Dramocles: An Intergalactic Soap Opera. I read it partly for old times sake, not having read any Sheckly in many years. However there are probably better books available by him.
I presume that Sheckley, like the rest of us, has to eat and care for his wife and his children or grandchildren or his drug habit, or whoever or whatever he is supporting. This is not one of his inspired creations. Maybe he has run out of inspiration. Maybe inspiration remains but doesn't pay the bills. Whatever. He's entitled. I have nothing to say against him.
| Author | Finch, Charles |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 321 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 2013 |
Charles Lenox, a 19h century gentleman living in London in 1866 and taking private investigation cases, is called in by Lady Annabelle Payson to find her missing son, Oxford student George Payson. She had gone to Oxford to visit him. He saw her, asked her to wait a moment while he did something, and then he never returned. Soon a body that appears to be his turns up. Lenox works with the local constabulary to try to figure out what happened and why George was killed.
The story is all related to a pair of murders in India 18 years before. The "September Society", a group of army officers from the same unit, keeps cropping up in the investigation.
Eventually it transpires that George is still alive, that the members of the September Society had attempted to kill him but killed his friend instead, and that they were after his father, long thought to be dead but actually still alive and ready to testify against the Society men who had killed two other officers in India many years before in order to steal some Indian jewels.
This is the second book in a series featuring Charles Lenox. Perhaps more are coming.
The concept of the series is standard mystery fare. Build a comfortable character with a surrounding cast of reliable helpers living in a kind of circumstance that many readers would be pleased to enjoy themselves if they could. Countless mystery novels and TV shows share this premise from Nero Wolfe to James Rockford and Thomas Magnum. It works and Finch does an acceptable job of instantiating it.
I doubt that I would read another of these books on paper or tablet, but if I had nothing better to listen to in the car, it would do.
| Author | Catton, Bruce |
|---|---|
| Publication | Washington Square Press, 1967 |
| Copyright Date | 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 558 |
| Extras | maps photos index bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | May 2013 |
In the continuation of The Coming Fury Catton covers the early part of the war up to the battle of Antietam, and ending with the Emancipation Proclamation.
The coverage is broad rather than deep. The military history is at a high level, covering the campaigns more than the specific battles. The politics are treated similarly. Throughout, the emphasis is not on the details of what happened but on its meaning, on how the war was changing and how the people involved in the war came to convert their earlier, misinformed and misjudged ideas about where the war was going and how it would be fought in the environment of the total war that the conflict became.
The Civil War was not, as I was wont to suppose, a succession of Southern victories, at least in the east, followed by defeats after Gettysburg. On the contrary, after Bull Run there were a succession of Northern victories that made it appear that the South was doomed. Every border state was held by the Union. Grant and Porter took Forts Henry and Donelson with about 14,000 prisoners, a substantial part of the western armies of the South. The US Navy took substantial parts of the Carolina coast, isolating much of the east coast from Europe, threatening to attack any town or city along the long coastline with relative impunity, and pushing Southern governors to try to withhold troops from the Confederate armies in order to keep them home to defend their own states. Then Butler and Farragut took New Orleans, much the largest city in the South, Grant occupied all of western Tennessee and moved into Mississippi, and the Confederate states west of the river were all but cut off from the rest of the Confederacy, and McLellan landed on the Peninsula and began his slow crawl towards Richmond. It looked as if the Southern cause was lost. And then Robert E. Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia and changed everything.
McClellan and his staff, including many of the professional officers of the old army, were unhappy with Lincoln, the Republicans, the abolitionists, Secretary of War Stanton, and the conduct of the war. McClellan practically accused Lincoln of treason, both for allowing the abolition of slavery into the political agenda, and for refusing (in McClellan's mind at least) to adequately support the Army of the Potomac with more and more men and materiel. But in spite of his open contempt of the President, Lincoln kept his eyes firmly on the goal of victory. He does not seem to have been much influenced by criticism and backbiting and did not participate in it himself. He had come to understand what was needed to win the war and he pushed it.
Lincoln understood that the North had resources of men and materiel that could not be matched by the South. He believed that if this superiority was pressed on as many different fronts as possible, there was no way that the South could defend them all. Even the most brillian southern generals could not fight everywhere at once. Victories would be achieved and more and more Southern territory would be conquered, leaving the South with less and less with which to fight.
The theory was right but no matter who he promoted, Lincoln could not find any general like Lee or Jackson, men who knew how to fight, knew how to press advantages, and knew how to carry the fight to the enemy. Burnside and Hooker were aggressive but not as competent as they needed to be and not able to maneuver in the face of masters like Lee, Jackson and Longstreet. McClellan and Meade were just not able to accept risks at all and so wound up losing battles that could have been won but were not won because of fear of losing.
But beyond all that, Lincoln came early to understand that this was a total war and that the end of slavery had to happen for the war to be won. It was a war to the finish and the basis of Southern revolt had to be removed. He wanted to offer to buy the slaves. He calculated that the government could afford to buy and free every slave for about the cost of fighting the war for just three months. But even the unionist slaveholders of the border states wouldn't go for it. There was no choice but to declare the slaves free and to hell with compromise.
Lincoln's cabinet easily convinced him that a proclamation in the absence of a union victory would have the look of desperation. He had to wait and keep waiting as Lee and his lieutenants won victory after victory in Virginia. But when Antietam occurred, bloody and terrible and ambiguous as it was, it was enough and emancipation was proclaimed. Lincoln told his cabinet that he was not asking them to approve it. His mind was made up whatever they advised, and he would proclaim the emancipation as a war measure using his powers as commander in chief of the armed forces no matter what the cabinet or the Congress or anyone else said or did. It had come to that.
The proclamation transformed the war. Compromise was no longer possible. European intervention was no longer possible since neither Britain nor France could join in a crusade for slavery against freedom. Limited war was no longer possible and the South had to give up its illusions of states' rights and adopt conscription and federal force in spite of any opposition by Southern governors or legislatures. America would never return to its antebellum condition. A new America would be forged.
This is, like The Coming Fury, a great history. Perhaps because I had like the first volume so much, I was less excited by this one. But it is still a great history with much insight into the war and the nation.
| Author | Zweig, Stefan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Bell, Anthea |
| Publication | New York: New York Review of Books, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 100 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2013 |
Introduction by Andre Aciman.
The original work was apparently started in 1924, but was revised at some time. The authoritative publication in German appeared in 1987, after the author's death, under the title Widerstand der Wirklichkeit.
The story is about a young man, Ludwig, who goes to work in a chemical industry. He is bright and works very hard. He greatly impresses the owner of the firm who decides to take him on as a personal assistant and brings him into his own home, giving him a nice room and making him almost one of the family.
The young man forms a special attachment to the businessman's wife, a woman his is much younger than her husband. She is also attracted to him and arranges many things in the household for the young man's satisfaction. There are never any improper relation or improper words between them but they each become important in the other's well being.
In 1913 the owner of the company opens a mining subsidiary in Mexico. He needs a reliable, hard working man to run it and chooses his young assistant. The young man can hardly refuse. It is fabulous career opportunity for a man of his years. It is a path upward in a society that has very few paths upward for young people with no special family connections, and in which the distinctions between those in the commanding positions in society and those below are very large. He takes the job. It is only for two years. After that he will return.
But he does not return. The war intervenes. He is stuck in Mexico until the end of the war. As the years go by he marries and starts a family in Mexico. He continues his work as the old owner dies and the parent firm changes hands. He becomes an established and successful businessman. Years continue to pass before he finally has occasion to return to Germany..
When he does so he meets the widow of the old owner. They still have feelings for each other. He tells her all that has happened but confesses that he loves her and would like to be with her. She is ambivalent but feels she cannot deny him after all of these years. She embarks with him on a train journey that will take them to a town where he plans to get a hotel room for the two of them. She becomes increasingly alarmed about the whole thing but is dogged in her determination to do what he wants. He himself becomes more ambivalent and is finally unable to go through with it.
There is a remarkable scene at this point in the story where they disembark from the train and find themselves facing a patriotic demonstration of some unnamed group but presumably Nazi brownshirts and their sympathizers, marching in step, angry expressions, military bearings, holding invisible weapons, acting as if they wanted to do it all over again, to go to war all over again, to destroy everthing all over again - all as one man.
"'Madness,' he exlaimed to himself, in astonishment, faltering. 'Madness! What do they want? Once again, once again!'"
It is a surprising moment in the novel, not part of the story yet not entirely unrelated to it.
In the end Ludwig recalls a poem by Verlaine that they had shared, ending with "Deux spectres cherchent le passe'." "Two spectres walk, still searching for the past." They understand their situation and accept it.
This little novella impressed me with its sensitivity and humanity. Zweig was everything the Nazis hated. Jewish, cosmopolitan, a multi-lingual intellectual, a man born into wealth, a believer in humanity and a rejecter of nationalism, racism and humbug. He ended his life in a double suicide with his wife in Brazil in 1942. No one knows why. He had escaped the Nazis, first to England, then the United States, then Brazil. Some think that the Nazis were, at that moment, at the height of their conquests and Zweig despaired for the future of humanity. If so then it is a tragedy that he did not wait another year to see the real beginning of Nazi defeat and the first rollbacks of those conquests.
This was a quiet sort of book. There are no dramatic events. Feelings are understood but not declared. But they are still strong and deep. I liked it very much.
This book was found among Zweig's papers after his death in 1942. It was published in German in 1976 and recently translated into English.
| Author | Whiting, Charles, 1926-2007 |
|---|---|
| Author | Kessler, Leo |
| Publication | Alesbury, Bucks, England: Futura Publications, 1976 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 152 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | June 2013 |
Presented as based on the memoirs of Kuno von Dodenburg, First Lieutenant in the SS regiment Adolf Hitler Leibstandarte, this novel traces the actions of the second company, SS Assault Batallion Wotan, in their training in the early stages of World War II and their assault on the Belgian fortress Eben Emael at the outset of the attack in the West. Captain Geier ("Vulture" in German), commander of the Second Company, is determined to become a general before the end of the war and has no compunctions whatsoever about doing it over the bodies of anyone who happens to be in his way, including his own men.
At the outset of the book, von Dodenburg is a veteran back from Poland with a wound medal, training his troops for the next campaign. His forces include Second Lieutenant Kurt Schwarz, a nephew of Reinhard Heydrich, Sergeant Major Metzger, and Schulze, the clever NCO who is always ready to do whatever needs to be done. The training is arduous and dangerous. The men are treated like dirt by Schwarz and Metzger and, although von Dodenburg is more respecting of the men, he is no less determined to harden them for combat.
Combat begins with the assault in the west. Paratroopers land on Eben Emael and the second company is ordered to support them. They must fight their way across a river, through a defended town, into the fortress, and down through the tunnels, putting the guns out of action that will otherwise stop the German crossing of the Meuse and invasion of Belgium.
Geier accomplishes this mission by means of fanatical attacks in which every trick is used, including crossing the river in boats loaded with civilians as human shields, sending a tank into a town knowing it will be destroyed but it will force the Belgians to reveal their positions as they attack it.
Schwarz and von Dodenburg command separate platoons. Schwarz, whose uncle (Heydrich) told that they were actually Jews), has become a fanatical Nazi, "combat crazed" and willing to do anything, including assault positions by himself if need be. von Dodenburg is smarter but no less willing to perform acts of derring do as required. Fighting through growing fatigue and horrendous casualties, the company achieves its goals. They reach the fortress, pick up the survivors of the paratroopers, knock out tunnels and cannon, and render the fortress unusable. In the process, 180 of the 200 men of the company are killed or seriously wounded. Only 20 men are left when they are sent to Paris to form an honor guard for Adolf Hitler at the signing of the new armistice. Hitler, with tears in his eyes for their sacrifice, shakes the hand of each man. von Dodenburg, filled with renewed ardor for the new order that they are bringing to Europe under the natural and rightful leadership of the German nation, is resolved to fight on and win the war for Germany and for Hitler. In the end, he is training the replacements, all hand picked volunteers, "giants" of soldiers, for the battles to come.
When I came across this book I didn't know what to expect. Would I find it a book of Nazi propaganda? Would it be like the material written by the neo-Nazis in America or England, simultaneously celebrating and denying the Holocaust, the murders, and the subjugation of nations?
The book opens with some anti-Nazi statements, but even there I didn't know whether to attribute these to Kessler (never mind Dodenburg, the attribution of this book to him strikes me as transparent fiction), or to English publishers who could not abide a pro-Nazi position, even if only to ensure sales of the book in England.
I wound up liking the book. The politics were interesting, even including those of the Nazis, from Geier, the man of intense personal ambition, to Heydrich, an insane lunatic, Schwarz, driven half insane by his uncle's revelation and his own inner conflicts, von Dodenburg, the misguided idealist, and Schulze, the man of no ideals and no illusions but something of a humanitarian, or at least a sympathetic human being, at heart.
The combat was also well done. It is not often one reads about brave, capable, SS troops fighting to the death to achieve their objectives, but there is no doubt that many of them did that.
| Author | Stone, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Mariner Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2013 |
John Converse, working as a war correspondent in Vietnam, picks up a bag of heroin from a woman he knows named Charmian and takes it to Ray Hicks, an ex-Marine working on a supply ship. Hicks will take the bag to California on his ship and give it back to Converse in return for $2,500. Converse will then meet Charmian's contact in California, turn over the dope, collect his pay, and bring home the money to his wife Marge and their child Janey.
That was the plan but it was not what happened.
The drug dealers, the evil Danskin and his half demented stooge Smitty, are waiting for Converse at his apartment, holding his wife and child. Hicks goes there, finds them, beats them up, takes Marge, the dope, and the child, who is dropped off with Marge's friend, and heads off. Converse comes back to the apartment where the dealers are waiting for him to torture him, but he has no idea where Hicks went and can't help them even though they hold his hand and then his head over the kitchen range.
Hicks is resourceful and dangerous, but Converse is a babe in the woods. A CIA agent (Antheil) picks him up and turns him over to the drug dealers again, who are in fear of Antheil and do his bidding.
It's all a mess. The dealers are crazy. Antheil is corrupt, Hicks has gone off the deep end. Marge, already into dilaudid and other drugs, quickly becomes addicted to heroin. Converse, recognizing his naivete and foolishness, is trapped and unable to do anything except what he is told.
The story winds up at the remote, forested, hilltop house of Hicks' old friend and teacher Dieter, a counter culture guru from recent hippie days, now leading a more modest life with his son Kjell, called K-Jell by Hicks. The bad guys find them and close in on the house. Converse and Marge make an escape, largely because the dealers don't really care about them. Dieter tries to throw away the drugs but Hicks kills him. Hicks himself, fighting to the end, makes an attempt to walk out in spite of a serious wound, but dies in the end. Marge had demanded that Converse drive to where they were to meet him but all they find is his dead body and the bag of drugs - which they leave for Antheil and drive off. Antheil picks up the drugs with his corrupt Mexican cop confederate Angel and decides not to pursue the Converses. He heads for Mexico with Angel and plans to meet the beautiful Charmian and take up a new life there.
We hope for a good outcome all the way to the end. I found myself hoping that Hicks would kill the corrupt, sadistic bastards who were pursuing him, but the only person we know for sure that he kills is the blameless and decent Dieter. There is one good outcome. John and Marge Converse have finally escaped their long nightmare and they have learned some life lessons.
This was simultaneously a compelling story and a hard book to read. Converse and Marge are both lost souls. Why has he gone to Vietnam? Is it to cover the war? Is it to get away from his family? He attempts to be a good correspondent in a way but his heart isn't in it and, in any case, Stone gives us very little information about Converse as a correspondent. Why does Marge take so many drugs? Why do they neglect their daughter Janey who seems already to be a damaged child, spending large blocks of time mindlessly rocking on her rocking horse.
I suppose I have no right to demand answers to these questions. Why did I smoke as much pot as I did? People do self-defeating and self-destructive things for reasons that they don't understand. If they did understand, they wouldn't do them. Nevertheless I thought Stone could have said more about the factors that led Converse into taking the chances he did. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just a naive lack of knowledge of the kinds of people involved in the heroin trade, a lack of experience with people who torture and kill as a routine part of their business.
Is this a great book? It did not seem to me to be as great as many Amazon reviewers rated it. Perhaps the downbeat, depressed, anti-heroic tone of the book is what especially appealed to readers. Like Jack Kerouac, Stone is no supporter of illusions of American greatness.
At the end, the bad guys win everything but maybe the Converses also come out with a new understanding of themselves and a new appreciation of each other.
| Author | Hamsun, Knut |
|---|---|
| Original Language | no |
| Translators | Egerton, George |
| Publication | Barnes and Noble, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 1888 |
| Number of Pages | xiv + 172 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2013 |
"With an introduction by Edwin Bjorkman."
An unnamed narrator relates his daily life to the reader. He is an eccentric, one should say astonishing, person who lives by writing articles of all sorts for publication, making tiny sums from each article with which he pays for his food and lodging. But he is not making enough. Gradually, he becomes more and more destitute, having to sell his watch, his waistcoat, and everything else he has. At one point he attempts to sell the old second hand blanket that keeps him from freezing to death at night, and he cuts the buttons off his jacket and attempts to sell them for a couple of pennies with which to buy bread. But he has reached the point where nothing he owns is of the slightest worth to the pawnbrokers. He has nothing of value to sell.
The possibility of starving to death becomes very real. He cannot buy food and goes days at a time with nothing at all to eat. When he gets a bit of money and buys food he often vomits it right up because his digestive system has gone into such arrest that he can't hold much down. Unable to pay the rent on his miserable room, he is forced out and is also in danger of freezing to death, having to sleep out doors until he manages to get a place in a tinker's loft until finally, with a small windfall, he is able to rent a room again - though not for very long.
The narrator struggles not only with hunger, but with his own manias. Holding onto his honor as his last sort of possession, he is as likely to give away any money that comes his way as to hoard it and use it to save himself. At one point, given half a sovereign as he is being thrown out of his lodging, he turns and throws it at his landlady. It is much more than he owes her but he acts on impulse, satisfying his need to show her his honor, his dignity, and his disdain for her without a thought for the future. He immediately regrets what he has done but is unable to see any way to recoup the money and winds up in his usual paroxysm of satisfaction and despair, his "bipolar" (as we say today) manic depression.
The character is treated with kindness by some and disdain by others. Some want nothing to do with him and are even inclined to taunt him. But most people are quite decent to him. Policemen watch him with suspicion but treat him with respect. In one case he has lost the key to his tinker's loft. A policeman advises him to go to the police station and tell them that he is homeless. Desperate and with no other options, he does so. He gives them a false name and says he is a journalist for the main newspaper in town and with a decent place to live who has lost his keys and is in danger of freezing. They give him a bed for the night. In the morning, they call out the names of the homeless people who they have kept and give each one a ticket for a meal. The narrator desperately wants a ticket but the police do not offer him one, having accepted his story that he doesn't need or want any such thing. He sees that he has defeated himself but can't bring himself to lower himself, as he sees it, in front of the police, and he goes out onto the street, starving and near the point of succumbing.
He meets and impresses a young girl. He is filled with absurd hopes about her and is in love with her. She imagines him to be an eccentric but very interesting man, which in a way he is. But when she learns more about him she lets him know that he cannot see her any more. It is a necessary and wise decision which he understands but also is unable to deal with - going back and forth between love and disdain, wanting to impress her with what a good fellow he is and wanting to show her that he disdains her feelings about him. It is she who sent him the half sovereign that he threw at his landlady.
The articles he writes are rather fantastic. There is a drama set in the middle ages about a woman who prostitutes herself, not out of desire or out of need, but out of hatred for the world. There are essays and articles of all types. Some are finished and sold. Some might have been finished if only he could find a warm and light place to continue working on them. Some are torn to bits in frustration.
His life of alternate starvation and very temporary reprieve continues throughout the novel. It is not possible to see any positive end. Although he is conscious of his desperate situation and able to stifle his pride at times, he seems unable to adopt a truly practical approach to his dire situation. To do so would require that he acknowledge his disabilities, ask for help, and humble himself as required. So his overall condition continues to deteriorate until self-rescue seems out of the question and death is only days away.
The ending is rather a surprise. He has talked a couple of times in the past about boarding a ship as his final way out. In the end, that is exactly what he does. There is a Russian sailing barque in the harbor. He approaches the captain and offers himself as a crewman. He says outright that he has no experience whatsoever but offers to do any work at all at any pay. The captain says alright, he will take him on. If it doesn't work out they will part ways in England, the ship's next port of call.
"Out in the fjord I dragged myself up once, wet with fever and exhaustion, and gazed landwards, and bade farewell fo the present to the town - to Christiania, where the windows gleamed so brightly in all the homes."
This was Hamsun's first completed novel and won him worldwide acclaim, leading to his Nobel Prize. Born in 1860, he would have been 30 years old in 1890, when the novel was widely circulated. He was especially popular in Russia and the Soviet Union where, perhaps, his similarity to Dostoevsky would have been much appreciated.
Like many good books, including Robert Stone's book which I completed just before this one, it was a hard book to read. It is always hard for me to read of self-defeating behavior and irrational thoughts, even if they are brilliant in their own peculiar way.
In his introduction, Bjorkman says that Hamsun's characters are always thinly disguised versions of himself. This is not unconvincing in that the person of the brilliant manic depressive is so well presented that it is hard to imagine the author had no inside insight into such a personality. On the other hand, the author had to have had a practical nature in order to finish the book and go on to write many others.
The narrator of the story attracts my sympathy even if I do find him pathetic. This combination of sympathy and pity would mortify him in the extreme, though I presume that it would not mortify Hamsun. It is an effect that he has achieved perfectly.
I believe that this is a book that will stay with me. I will be thinking about his character in the future and I appreciate Hamsun's presentation of him.
| Author | Zieser, Benno |
|---|---|
| Publication | Ballantine Books, 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 152 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 2013 |
This book purports to be a non-fiction account of a Wehrmacht soldier. The author first went to war in a rear area support unit as part of the invasion of the USSR in the fall and winter of 1941. He and his friends drove supply trucks bringing material to the front. Frequently bombed and shelled by the Russians, he and his group of friends volunteered for the front line, believing it was better to be killed fighting the enemy than to be killed by aircraft in the rear with no possibility of fighting back. Of course they went from the frying pan to the fire and things at the front were much worse even than in the rear.
The author fought in many battles, often cowering in shallow trenches with hands over ears and mouths open in hopes of surviving the tremendous concussions of heavy rockets, bombs, and shells, then emerging to see powerful enemy tanks and infantry coming to destroy them. He fought mostly as a machine gunner and, if his account is accurate, he must have killed quite a few Russians.
Towards the end of the book Zieser's unit approaches Stalingrad. By this time, Russian resistance was very strong. The Russian opponents were said to be experienced veterans. They were equipped with modern weapons and seemingly unlimited amounts of ammunition. Russian losses were no longer 10 to 1 as compared to Germans, nor 5 to 1, nor even 2 to 1. Then came the second winter with all of the suffering it entailed (Zieser suffered frostbite and almost lost a foot in the first winter.) Then came the Russian offensive. They were cut off. They hoped without believing that the promises were true, that German armies would break through to them, that new weapons were arriving that would win the battle. But instead they just froze and starved and died up to the end.
After a long spring, summer and fall of heavy fighting, the author wound up in Stalingrad. His friends had been killed off one by one. When the last one was killed, he jumped out of his trench and began spraying the Russian positions with machine gun fire from his hand held gun. He was hit and seriously wounded. Pulled back to an aid station he was evacuated by aircraft on the last page of the book.
The book was a very compelling read and I went through it fairly quickly. One Amazon reviewer claimed that it was a transparent fabrication, a work of fiction, not of biography. He claimed Alexander Werth as the source of that information, though he gave no specific citation. He also insisted that it was an apologia for Nazism - something I didn't see in the book.
The book was written from the point of view of a common soldier who enlisted or was drafted as a very young man, hardly more than a boy. The soldier, Benno Zieser himself, was neither a Nazi nor an anti-Nazi. Like most young soldiers, he assumed that it was his duty to fight for his country - without thinking about whether his country was right or wrong, or what the war was about, or why it was his duty to kill other men. It was only in the course of the fighting that he realized that the treatment of the Russians was barbaric and that the war was not going anywhere. But even then he continued to fight with the same ferocity as before. He was fighting because it was his job, and because he was in a unit of men who were fighting, and because the enemy were killing his friends and trying to kill him and were therefore his personal enemies.
His presentation of the war was not what I expected. He entered the war only in the fall of 1941, but even then, even while massive numbers of Russian prisoners were taken and vast areas conquered, it was still no pushover. Even when the Luftwaffe ruled the skies, Russian bombers would attack them every night and often too in the daytime. And in 1942 the Russian resistance hardened, becoming more capable, better equipped, more experienced and with material forces that equaled those of the Germans.
Zieser and his people were the targets of powerful and relentless artillery attacks and frequent attacks from the air. When the Russians counterattacked they did so with artillery barrages and masses of infantry advancing behind formidable T-34 tanks. Sometimes the Germans resisted successfully. Sometimes they were rescued by the Luftwaffe. But sometimes they were driven back with heavy casualties. This was hardly what Hitler anticipated when he said that it was only necessary for the Wehrmacht to kick in the door and the whole rotten house would collapse. It illustrates what I have read of another German soldier writing home that the battle of France was like maneuvers with live ammunition but Russia was combat. There is no doubt that the German army was very tough and powerful but Hitler had bitten off more than the army could chew.
Except for frequent mention of the maltreatment of Russian prisoners, there was very little here about Nazi atrocities. There is no mention of Jews. There is a description of three Russians, one of them a girl, hanging naked and frozen from a tree, and there are lots of burned or blown up towns. But there is also the story of Seph, a Russian soldier oppressed by Communism who fights savagely in German uniform against his own people, and stories of Russian civilians who aren't necessarily hostile, or at least not openly hostile, to the Germans. None of that is surprising to me. Millions of German soldiers fought bravely, almost to the end, even when all was lost. They couldn't have been as critical of the Nazi regime as we would like them to have been. Like most soldiers, they fought at first because they were patriotic. Then they fought because they were defending their comrades and avenging those of their comrades who had been killed.
The scenes of combat, almost continual in the book, were very convincing to me. War has been described as long periods of boredom interspersed with short but intense periods of fear. This war does not seem to have been like that. It was more like long periods of suffering from heat or cold or marching overlapped with long periods of intense fear. The men died with their heads cut off, their feet blown off, a bullet through the eye, intestines split open or, in one case in the book, a man simply disappears when a heavy shell lands right on him and all that is left is a crater with a smear.
There is a lot to write but I'll leave it at that.
The copy that I read was an OCR conversion of a scan. It had many regular errors, like "theft" substituting for "their", and also many irregular errors. There were apparently also mistranslations of German words into English, for example there is mention of "smoke projectors", which is apparently a literal translation of "nebelwerfer", which was actually the name of a six barreled rocket launcher. I had wondered why "smoke projectors" had appeared in the story. But I was generally able to figure out the meaning.
| Author | Dyson, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Computer science |
| When Read | July 2013 |
Dyson, son of the well known physicist Freeman Dyson, examines the development of the first computer in the United States at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton, together with follow on information about further developments, about the lives of some of the brilliant people who worked on the machine, and about the implications of some of their discoveries in computer science, both then and now.
It is both a brilliant and an idiosyncratic account. Dyson places John Von Neumann at the center of the enterprise. It was his genius that solved many of the individual theoretical problems, and his recognition of genius in others that enabled the project to bring together so many creative minds. Von Neumann is known today as the creator of the stored program "Von Neumann machine". He recognized that it was possible to store both instructions and data as numbers and use a common memory mechanism to represent them. In an era when all electronics were analog and all processes were fuzzy and error prone, it was Von Neumann who created and developed the principle of a reliable machine made from an assembly of unreliable parts. It was Von Neumann too who selected problems to be solved by the computer, ranging from modeling the nuclear reactions in the inside of an atomic bomb, to modeling the weather, to modeling evolutionary processes, to performing the Monte Carlo simulations invented by Stan Ulam, another great mathematician on the project.
We meet many other brilliant men in this book, Kurt Godel, Robert Oppenheimer, Jule Charney, the first man to assert that weather prediction could be based on modeling, not just extrapolating from past conditions, Alan Turing, and many others. Dyson also has special regard for Julian Bigelow, the engineer who could and did make anything work. Bigelow's genius and contribution were recognized by Von Neumann but not by the ivory tower academics of the IAS. To them, engineering was beneath the dignity of academic thought and did not belong at the IAS. When Von Neuman died unexpectedly of cancer the IAS ended the computer project, let go the engineers, and perhaps never again had the same tremendous impact on world intellectual history.
There are many personal stories here. We read about Godel's rescue from Europe by Von Neumann. It was necessary to pull many strings and fight much red tape, both in the United States and in Austria, where Godel had married an Austrian woman, to get him out of Europe and into the U.S. Von Neumann's own fiance, a Hungarian Jew like Von Neumann himself, only escaped the onset of the war by the skin of her teeth, and only at Von Neumann's almost hysterical insistence that she leave right now - which turned out to be the exact right thing to do. There are also stories of Von Neumann's childhood with the communist revolution in Hungary in 1919, of his incredible photographic memory (he could recite books he read years before from memory), his extraordinary mathematical prowess, and his ability to see into the heart of any problem presented to him.
I said that Dyson's account is idiosyncratic. A conventional account of the history of computing would probably focus on a series of inventions, perhaps various types of storage devices, different instruction sets, etc. Dyson mentions the issues but does not explore the technology in any detail. His interest is in the concepts of computing, not so much in the physical structures. Richard Dawkins' idea of the "selfish gene" that uses plants and animals to reproduce their DNA fascinates him. He wonders if computers use humans to in reproduction. He wonders about the nature of the information stores and what might be analogous to consciousness in Google's gigantic databases.
These kinds of speculations are probably carried too far. We could also say that cars and shirts and ears of corn use humans to reproduce themselves, but the similes obscure as much as they reveal. Nevertheless, Dyson's speculations are always interesting, always stimulating. They got me to think about many things that I had not thought about in my many years in the computing field.
The book is not easy to understand. It's not suitable for fast reading. There are passages about people that anyone can read and understand and other passages about the philosophical interpretation of computing that are quite difficult.
I found myself particularly interested in the idea that Von Neumann and his group selected problems to solve. When the first computers were invented, there were some problems assigned, like the generation of firing tables for artillery - the first application of computing, and practically impossible for humans to do on their own when there is any complex combination of propellants and tubes and shell designs. But part of the brilliance of these thinkers is that they came up with ideas that were not even imagined before, like Monte Carlo and like weather prediction, that were not considered to be problems worthy of investigation because there was no way to solve them.
It was certainly an interesting book.
| Author | Hamilton, Edmund |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 74 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 2013 |
Reed Kieran, a 36 year old bachelor scientist, is working in a space station orbiting the earth in 1981 when an accident occurs. He is knocked into space and frozen. For reasons more political than humanitarian, he is preserved in his spacesuit on the possibility that a way will be found to thaw and revive him in the future.
One hundred years later, the future arrives. Kieran finds himself in a spaceship with people taking him to the planet Saka, where a race of humans lives in primitive conditions while an advanced and scientific race of lizards rules the planet. The authorities on earth have ruled that the lizards, the Sakae, are the legitimate authorities on the planet but the people who revived Kieran, a man born and living before there was interstellar travel are determined to lead the humans out of their backwardness to become the masters of Saka, and hope to use Kieran to help them.
In the end Kieran has none of it. He votes, in effect, for the Sakae. They do not engage his human emotions as the humanoids do, but they do engage his reason and he recognizes them as the intelligent species.
When I started this book I thought it was a novel. It's often hard to tell with some ebooks. But it's actually a long short story. But since I started it that way I'll go ahead and write it up as a book. Why not?
This story is from the end of one era of naive science fiction. The science isn't too terrible. It must, of course, allow faster than light travel and it does it with the standard mechanisms of SF, but it does stretch things by more than a little bit to have humanoids and lizards on a planet of another star and in fact to posit humanoid life originating on planets of many stars.
The social character of the story is midway between the 50's and the 60's. It's more politically correct than Tom Godwin's Space Prison, published that same year. The aliens are not nasty fascists and the main character ultimately opposes a human centric chauvinism. However the characters are very thin and don't seem to feel the need to justify what they are saying or doing with each other.
But then after all, it's only a short story. Deep development isn't easy to do and only a single theme can be profitably pursued. Hamilton doesn't actually do a bad job of it.
The story was originally published in the May, 1962 edition of Amazing Stories: Fact and Science Fiction. I seem to recall that I picked it up because I read a favorable comment about it somewhere. I had it on my Nexus 7 and was in the mood for an SF story when I was looking on it for something short to read.
| Author | Perez-Reverte, Arturo |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Plume, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | July 2013 |
This is the third in Perez-Reverte's Captain Diego Alatriste y Tenorio series. Iñigo Balboa, now aged 14, relates the story of his and Alatriste's participation in the siege of Breda in 1625. The armies of Spain, composed partly of Spanish soldiers but also of Dutch, German, and Italian mercenaries, have laid siege to the city of Breda in Holland, where the Hollanders with some British and French allies, are defending in the long running Dutch war of independence for Flanders.
The novel is a collection of episodes: a fight over a whore between Iñigo and a soldier until Alatriste steps in and despatches the soldier who won't back down, a mutiny for back pay and the hanging of two mutineers, mining and countermining under the walls of the city, sniping with an harguebus, a duel to the death of five against five with pistols and swords - some of the winners then shot down by the friends of the losers, dispatching wounded enemies and friends as a mercy to all, a night raid against an advancing Dutch relief force, do or die stands with no quarter given or asked.
Inigo is part of the support forces. With other boys, he carries powder and shot, food and water, to the soldiers. Armed only with a dagger, he too sometimes comes face to face with the enemy and fights as he can.
The soldiers of Spain are half starved, clad partially in rags, unpaid for months, mutinous because of their condition, and yet filled with a bravado and commitment to their "honor" that makes them ready to die for Spain, even knowing that their King and his court are corrupt and are exploiting them.
This is different from the previous two Alatriste books. There is no real story. The episodes are not well connected to each other. The book is essentially a paean to the ancestors of the Spanish people. PR is showing his love for these courageous, honorable men who suffered and died for honor.
Well, maybe they died for their honor, or maybe pride is a also a reasonable word for what motivated them. People do that. Germans, and especially Japanese, did it regularly and in large numbers in World War II. It appears to be a cultural thing. Some countries breed more of this than others. Whatever it is, it's clear that men don't have to believe in their leadership, their "cause", and maybe not even in themselves, in order to do it. They get into a state and a way of life in which fighting to the death is the only thing that defines them as human beings. To think about the alternatives seems unbearably risky to their psyches.
The interactions of instinct and mind, of culture and personality, of experience and nature in war - these are all still poorly understood. Books like this one can document aspects of the phenomenon but don't give us an explanation.
From my own point of view, I appreciate PR's recollection of these long dead men. He is recognizing them and preserving something of their long lost humanity. He is recreating a chapter of human experience so that it won't be lost forever. His juxtaposition of this brutal, bestial warfare with classical Spanish poetry (real or created by PR, I don't know which) is a literary and documentary achievement.
It's not a traditional novel but I think it's a good one, worth reading by people like me who have some sympathy with the past.
| Author | Robinson, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 2013 |
Chief Inspector Alan Banks of Eastvale, Yorkshire, is called to investigate the apparent sex murder of the sixteen year old Deborah Harrison, daughter of wealthy, knighted businessman. A pretty, independent and intelligent girl, her body is found in the local church cemetery where she was apparently waylaid on her way home from the after school chess club at her exclusive private school.
A number of witnesses saw a man in the area. He turns out to be Owen Pierce, a local college English teacher who has the murdered girl's DNA on him and some from him on her. He has no good alibi and is arrested and brought to trial. He insists on his innocence and has a good lawyer who succeeds in showing that there is reasonable doubt that Owen is guilty. He is declared not guilty and released.
Owen's life becomes hell. After six months in jail and a widespread belief that he is guilty but guilt could not be proven, he is fired from his job, his apartment is trashed, his friends desert him, and he becomes something of an alcoholic. Then another girl is killed in just the same way in a town some miles away. Again, Owen has no alibi and is re-arrested, but this time an over eager cop who had arrested him the first time has been following him and knows for a fact that he couldn't have done it. The cop tells Banks and Owen is freed. Owen then goes to visit a woman who lived with him before, lied about him to the police, and strangles her. She doesn't die but Owen doesn't know that and eventually turns himself in as a murderer.
Meanwhile, Banks has figured it all out. The real killer is "Uncle Michael", a middle aged friend of Deborah's father who lusted after the girl and went crazy when she wouldn't give in to him.
In the end, Banks has Michael arrested and he goes off to see Owen. No final resolution is given or really needed at this point. Robinson decides to end the story there.
Re-reading my notes from my 2005 reading of A Necessary End, I find that my feelings about this book are about the same as for that one. There were some artificial plot devices. The evidence against Owen Pierce is constructed to be very convincing when, in fact, it requires some extraordinarily unlikely events for it to such evidence to have accumulated against an innocent man. But other than that, the story is very well done, the characters straightforward but interesting, the fates of the characters unjust but realistic.
I wrote of the earlier book, "Books like this are a pleasure to read." I liked this one too.
| Author | De la Pava, Sergio |
|---|---|
| Publication | University of Chicago Press, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 218 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 2013 |
I posted the following paragraphs to the Amazon reviews page for this novel.
A deeply intuitive female homicide detective, who also happens to be a concert level pianist and professional musicologist, walks into an apartment where a 111 year old man has been found murdered. Already we know that we are not in a conventional novel and we had better be ready to suspend our ordinary expectations as readers.
Some things happen, or maybe just seem to happen, and soon we are in the midst of a play which may or may not have been written by the murdered man. Characters on a stage talk at and past each other facing an undefined but imminent doom while shifting their identities, their alliances with each other, and their plans for the future. The play goes on at some length.
Abruptly, we are in the jungle in Columbia. An armed man is pursuing a group of guerrillas who have kidnapped his wife and daughter. He is bent on freeing the women and revenging himself on the kidnappers. Or maybe the women are already dead and he is merely bent on revenge. He is injured, perhaps mortally. He is confronted by a demon, or maybe it is an angel, or maybe it is a phantasm, or maybe it is his own conscience.
Abruptly we are in a sandwich shop in New York. The proprietor is attracted to a young woman from a nearby law office who comes to eat lunch. He creates a new sandwich to express his deep feelings for the woman. Or maybe not for the woman. Maybe it is his deep feelings for sandwiches that he is expressing.
Scenes shift and alternate. Language describing events transforms into language describing language, and then back again. Characters alternate. Or maybe they don't. Maybe some of these unnamed characters are in fact one and the same at different times and places. Or maybe they are different characters.
Have I described the plot adequately? Have I described the characters? Have I described the writing? I fear that the answer to each of those questions is No, but I don't know how to do any better. As with some other reviewers here, I'm not at all sure that I have understood what I have read. Perhaps there is a simple key that unlocks the whole novel but I am too dense to see and turn it.
The novel is of the type that critics call "experimental", which is to say it does not follow the conventions of story telling. It is very hard to understand. It seems very personal, the product of the author's personal struggles worked out in a way that is most meaningful to him with us, his readers, running after him in hopes that he'll give us more clues about what is going on. But he plows ahead, oblivious of our struggle and our confusion.
I cannot say that I understood the book but, in spite of that, I can say that I admire it. I feel as I might feel if I heard Einstein explain his theory of general relativity. Even without understanding it, I would still be able to tell that it was meaningful and brilliant. I think this book is meaningful and brilliant.
I recommend the book to readers who like language, like uncertainty, like philosophy and don't mind a struggle to understand the whole as long as they can get eye opening tidbits along the way.
| Author | Steinhaur, Olen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Minotaur Books, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 576 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | August 2013 |
Milo Weaver operated as a "Tourist" working for a "Travel Agency". The tourists were field agents for the CIA and the travel agencies were the offices that stood behind them with research preparation, and support of all types.
The story opens with an incident in Venice in which Milo is tracking another CIA agent who has made off with $3,000,000 of government funds intended for a spy project. He and a female agent named Angela Yates close in on the fellow but things goes wrong and Milo is shot. The story picks up six years later. Milo has recovered and is living in New York, working at an agency desk job. He is married to a librarian named Tina that he met at the shooting in Venice and is living with Tina and her daughter Stephanie from a previous marriage.
Then things start to happen. A dying assassin that Milo was tracking comes to the U.S., tells Milo that he was a former CIA agent himself, and then kills himself. Milo is sent to Paris to check up on Angela, whom he is told appears to now be a double agent. Angela is assassinated with poison with Milo being the last person she saw. Milo returns to the states and takes his family to Disney World but then gets a phone call from his boss, Tom Grainger, telling him to go on the run immediately. He flees using money, a false passport he has stashed away, and stolen cars and phones. Janet Simmons of Homeland Security is after him, wanting to arrest him for the murder of the assassin and Angela Yates. He decides that Tom Grainger set him up and goes after him, but another Tourist has been sent by Grainger's boss to kill both Tom and Milo. Tom is killed bug Milo kills the other tourist and escapes.
The story ends in a complex sequence in which Milo is arrested and tortured, he tells almost all the truth but also uses a few carefully planned lies. He gets some true and some false information to Janet Simmons, and the CIA plot unravels. Milo is not guilty and goes free, but his marriage appears to be at an end.
The story sounds improbable and perhaps it is, or maybe it's not. I really wouldn't know. But the writing is good and the construction of the narrative, with much of the story told in dialog between people who each know something, each want something, and are each keeping something back, is very well done - not wholly unlike John Le Carre's novels. The story of Milo and Tina's relationship is also well done and interesting.
I can imagine that there are many people who would want to be spies. They might be after adventure, exotic travel, freedom from workaday routine, or perhaps the imagined training, power, and a life lived above the law that spies like James Bond are presumed to have. Some novels encourage those feelings. Le Carre's do not. Steinhauer's both do and don't.
Personally, I'm with Le Carre. I wouldn't like a life of danger or of lying. I wouldn't want a marriage where I could not speak freely to my wife or where I had to make promises to my wife and child in order to keep them and then break those promises in order to meet my work goals.
All of that aside, The Tourist is a good example of the genre and a pretty well done novel in any genre. I liked it and would read more of Steinhauer's writing.
| Author | Whiting, Charles, 1926-2007 |
|---|---|
| Author | Kessler, Leo |
| Publication | Futura, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 2013 |
Taking up where SS Panzer Batallion left off, the SS Assault Batallion Wotan lands in England as the prelude to an invasion but face a bloody repulse. The receive replacements. They are converted to an armored unit with Mark IV tanks. They train in Belgium where Kuno von Dodenburg has an affair of sorts with a young woman who turns out to be a resistance fighter and is executed after he turns her in. Then they go to Russia where they wind up on the Don in the winter in December 1941. Freezing, outnumbered, decimated, working with equipment that breaks down in the cold. They are driven back by massive Red Army counterattacks but Major Geier, their cynical, opportunistic, but astonishingly courageous leader, vows to reconstitute the battalion and return.
I have learned from the Wikipedia that "Leo Kessler" is one of the pen names of Charles Whiting, an Englishman with a very interesting biography. Lying about his age and joining the British army at age 16, he fought in World War II. Afterward he taught English in Germany, then got degrees in History and German and taught history and military history. However his real career was writing. He is said to have published 350 books, including both fiction and non-fiction. For a long period he published six books a year, describing them as "Bang-bang, thrills and spills." That's clearly what this book is.
The battle scenes seem overwritten to me. In one, the remnants of the battalion are defending the west bank of the frozen Don river when a long line of Russian troops marches on the river, shoulder to shoulder, led by an officer out front with a saber. The Germans hold their fire until the Russians are close, then massacre them with machine guns. There are other similar scenes of suicidal actions by the Russians that cost huge numbers of lives for no benefit.
Did those things happen? Maybe. Maybe not. I would think that even where they happened, they didn't happen by having the soldiers line up shoulder to shoulder. Even in 1941 I would have thought that they'd know better than that.
The German troops fight with great discipline, skill, and considerable fanaticism. From what I have read, especially including the accounts in Max Hastings's book Inferno, this is an accurate characterization, especially for the Waffen SS, and perhaps especially of the Bodyguard Division.
The characters remain thin and predictable. Major Geier is motivated by his obsession to become a general with no concern for human life. Whenever young men appear with no clothes on, he gets excited, but it is a subservient emotion to his ambition for advancement. Von Dodenburg remains the idealist in that strange and absurd way that National Socialists can be idealists. He wishes to assert German superiority over the whole world and has some vague notion that this is good for the world and should be welcomed by its peoples. He cares for and sympathizes with the Belgian nurse and murders the Nazi killer who executed her and is later seen casually shooting young Russian captives. But he essentially raped her at their first meeting, turned her in to the Gestapo when he realized she was in the resistance, and did nothing to save the Russian prisoners after killing the brute who was shooting them.
Lieutenant Schwarze remains the war lover who fights with as much insanity as courage. Sergeant Metzger remains the coward and brute, with the special twist in this episode that he has suffered damage to his "eggs" and is now obsessed with somehow regaining his potency - which he manages via a "gobble", a blow job in the dark with a woman who turns out to be an ancient hag when he sees her in the light. Nothing can ever go right for Metzger. Sergeant Schulze remains the cynical, humane, ex-communist, ex-dockworker, who generally manages to do the right thing.
These books are indeed "Bang, bang, thrills and spills." They are very fast reading, almost a text version of comic books.
Reading the previous book I wondered whether Kessler was a Nazi sympathizer. After reading his short biography and thinking about the contents of these stories, I am inclined to regard him as an opponent of Nazism but a sympathizer with, and admirer of, the German soldiers and German people. He is very far from being an uncritical sympathizer. His treatment of Russians, Belgians, English, and maybe even Jews, though he hasn't shown us any yet, is not a racist treatment.
I may read more of these in the future, in part to "clear the palate" as it were after reading a long, philosophical, or difficult book.
| Author | Boll, Heinrich |
|---|---|
| Translators | Vennewitz, Leila |
| Publication | Melville House, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 148 |
| Extras | Afterward by William T. Vollmann |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 2013 |
A 23 year old German soldier, Andreas, boards a train heading for the Eastern front. It is September, 1943. Those who face reality, including Andreas, understand that the war is lost. He is convinced that he will never even make it to the front but will be killed, probably by partisans, before he gets through Galicia in Poland.
Throughout the journey he measures the time left until the train is to arrive at the station which he believes he will never reach. He forms a friendship with two other soldiers, a sergeant with a stack of Reichsmarks originally saved to pay off his mortgage but which he is now determined to spend, also sensing that this is his last journey, and a young anti-aircraft gunner who was buggered by his sergeant at the front and is as depressed and disillusioned as the other two. The three friends play cards, drink, smoke, go to an expensive Polish restaurant, and visit a high class Polish whorehouse to spend the rest of the money.
Andreas is obsessed with spending his last days properly. A devout Catholic, he spends many hours praying. He prays for the other soldiers. He prays for his brother, a priest. He prays for the Germans, the Poles, the French, the Jews.
He has never had a lover. The great love of his life whom he thinks about every day is a young woman he never met. Fighting near Amiens in France, he saw a girl. His eyes locked with hers for just a fraction of a second. He thought her the loveliest girl, the one who could understand, comfort and love him. Recovering from a wound in France he returned to Amiens and found the spot where he had been when he saw her, but the owner of the field knew nothing of the girl and no one could help him find her.
Most of the novel takes place on one or another train as he travels east but it concludes at the brothel. With no interest in sex, he asks for music. The greedy and disgusting madam sends him to a room with a piano and sends in "the opera singer", a young girl who once studied music. He has no interest at all in sex. However both of them are people living in deeply distressing circumstances and, after some initial distrust on each side and fear on her side, they find themselves attracted to each other in a Platonic way.
The girl, like all of the prostitutes, is an agent of the Polish underground. She sleeps with German soldiers, including a German general, and attempts to learn things from them to pass on to the underground. When the general's car arrives for her, she and the young soldier pool their money to pay the madam to allow them to spend more time together. Then she takes Andreas and his two friends into the general's car and tells the driver to stop in such and such a place where she will drop them off. But the car is attacked and everyone is killed on the way to the last town on the line in which Andreas was convinced he would die.
The story is very dark, very obsessive, very fatalistic. We want there to be some hope but Andreas has none and it does not appear that the other two soldiers have any either. A few soldiers on the train express optimism. One says, "Practically speaking, we've already won the war." A train load of SS troops passes them at a station singing the songs that everyone sang in 1939 and '40. But Andreas knows that they are self-delusional fools. The war is lost and the soldiers are doomed.
He considers walking away from the train at one of the stops, but where would he go? He knows that the military police would catch him and he'd be finished anyway. He sees no option but to continue on to his destined end. Knowing what we know about the situation in September of 1943, we can't have a lot more hope than he has.
Throughout the journey we are presented with the ordinary scenes of a train. It stops at stations. A loudspeaker announces the station. Passengers get on and off. It is not a special purpose troop train and some of the cars have ordinary civilian passengers who are not doomed to die. The men smoke cigarettes. They eat sandwiches. They drink. But all the time the train rolls inexorably east, eventually leaving Germany behind. The Polish towns and countryside are not hospitable to the Germans. Andreas follows its progress on his map, thinking every day and every hour of the shortening of the time remaining to him and the amount of prayer he must still do - about the only thing he thinks is worth doing.
As with so many others, this book falls into the category of books that I much admired but did not enjoy reading. It was a fine and important book.
| Author | MacLean, Alistair |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Sterling, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Western |
| When Read | August 2013 |
A cavalry unit, led by one Colonel Claremont, is at Reese City, about to set out by train for Fort Humboldt where the soldiers are dying of cholera. The train is bringing a specialist in tropical diseases and various medical supplies, as well as Marica Fairchild, the daughter of Colonel Fairchild, the current commander of the fort.
The story opens in the hotel bar at Reese City where one Marshall Pearce breaks up what could soon be the murder of a cheater at a poker game and arrests the cheater, one John Stanton Deakin, on various serious charges listed on a wanted poster he has just received. They all board the train, with Major O'Brian, Governor Fairchild (Marica's uncle, a preacher, and various train crew as well as 80 cavalrymen and their horses.
Things happen. The two coaches carrying the cavalrymen are detached from the train on an uphill, causing them to slide down hill at increasing speed and go over a cliff. The horse cars are detached by Deakin. The telegraph wire back to Reese city is cut. The fireman at the engine apparently falls off the train and is killed.
It turns out that many of the men on the train are criminals. The goods being brought to the fort are not coffins for the cholera victims and medical supplies for the survivors, but new Winchester rifles and ammunition to be given to the Paiute Indians in return for their help in capturing the fort. The goal of the bad guys is to take the gold and silver stored in the fort and make off with it. But, of course, Deakin, who turns out to be a real government agent while Pearce is a criminal (though also a real U.S. marshall) performs massive feats of derring do and wins all with the help of Colonel Claremont and Marica Fairchild.
The story is has some nice elements and, as one would expect from Alastair MacLean, it is fast and easy reading. However the characters are one dimensional, and the plot is improbable to and beyond the point of absurdity.
I read it because of my fond memories of HMS Ulysses, which I read as an adult, and The Guns of Navarone, which was a good movie and, if I remember correctly, a good book. I seem to recall also liking South by Java Head, though I haven't gone back to my book card for it to check.
Amazon reviewers said that this was a good book, one of the last good ones he wrote before he started writing simple pot boilers. But a simple pot boiler is what this is.
HMS Ulysses was his first novel and probably his best. It was a novel written with considerable conviction, I believe it was based on genuine admiration of the men who sailed the Arctic convoys to bring supplies to the USSR against the terrible weather and the fearsome opposition of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. Breakheart Pass had none of that conviction and no characters that we could admire.
| Author | L'Amour, Louis |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 277 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | August 2013 |
This collection was assembled by L'Amour's publishers and Beau L'Amour, his son. The stories are followed by a request from Beau listing dozens of names of people believed to be associated with his father, from or about whom Beau is requesting information to include in a biography he is working on. There is a brief publisher's biography also included at the end.
The stories in the collection are:
"Fighters should be hungry" - A young hobo encounters a couple of tough guys at a campfire and gets in a fight with one who turns out to be an ex-professional boxer with the other man being his ex-manager. The two educate the kid about boxing and train him to take on the regional champ who is a gangster responsible for the boy's father's death.
"It's your move" - an old dockworker is obsessed with checkers and can beat anyone. A young man comes to town who is able to beat the old fellow without effort. He tires of the old man's obsession and hopes to escape from it but the old man won't leave him alone. In the end the two are working together on the docks and the old guy, working a crane, tries to ram a load of cargo into the young fellow - who sees it coming and jumps aside at the last moment.
"Off the mangrove coast" - Four men with a sailboat and a diving suit in southeast Asia go after $50,000 on a sunken ship. The youngest of them, another boxer, is set up to be killed by a shark attack but saves himself and gets back into the boat to find one man killed by a black man who kept the air pump going that allowed the young fellow to live, but who has himself been mortally wounded. The youngster fights the remaining man, a killer, and knocks him overboard to the sharks.
"The cross and the candle" - a tough fellow in a French port knows that one of four men who eats in the same cafe with him was a traitor who betrayed his wife to the Gestapo. The American narrator helps him identify the man, who bolts for the door with the furious husband running out after him.
'The diamond of Jeru" - A roustabout American in New Guinea meets an arrogant American atom bomb scientist and his impressive wife. They engage him to hunt for diamonds, but then the scientist changes his mind and goes with a native fellow instead whom the roustabout believes is in league with Jeru, a local pirate/gangster. The narrator follows the couple upriver and breaks in to Jeru's house, saving the two and beating Jeru in a fight, taking his big diamond and demanding that he go back to his village and live the life of the old man that he is.
"Secrets of Silver Spring" - a white American, a Mexican, and a black man meet and decide to rob a stage coach but, on the way, they find another gang planning to do it and planning to kill all the people. The three break up the gang, come to the aid of the stage, and wind up working for a man on the stage who has come to claim his dead brother's land and buried fortune. The dead brother's murderer in town comes after them but is defeated and killed.
"The unexpected corpse" - a private detective in New York comes to the aid of an old girlfriend who has discovered a body in her apartment.
"The rounds don't matter" - a boxer fights a crooked contender and his crooked promoters.
"Time of terror" - An insurance investigator recognizes a man in a coffee shop whom everyone believed dead. The man also recognizes him. Both realize that this is a crisis, for one to escape and report the non-dead man who must be a killer, and for the other to kill again before he can be reported. The investigator tells the killer that the game is up, his false death is known, and the cops are closing in on him. The killer tries to kill again but finally commits suicide.
These were all tight, well written, tough guy stories. Each has a single narrator, usually but not always the hero of the story. He is an upright man. He may, as the white American in "Secrets of Silver Spring", be willing to rob someone, but not to kill someone except in extreme necessity. The plots are spare, the introductions are tightly focused and effective, and the resolutions complete and conclusive - even where they leave the end unsaid, as when the angry Frenchman leaves the cafe after the Nazi collaborator. There's also some diversity and ingenuity in the settings and plots.
L'Amour was himself a tough guy. As a professional boxer, he won 51 of 59 fights. He knew what it meant to be in a tough fight and knew what it meant to lose as well as to win. He had served on merchant ships and tramps around the world and had been to southeast Asia, to the west coast, to New York, and to the western American lands, the settings for these stories. Although he must have lived a complex and, in the latter half, a socially sophisticated life, he understood the people and the life that he wrote about.
I particularly liked that he did not have his American in New Guinea killing Jeru's pirates or killing Jeru himself. After he bests the old pirate in a fight he tells him to go home and stop hurting people. He killed one pirate and fought for his life, but his goal was to escape, not to kill people. The American who was about to rob the stage was in a similar situation. L'Amour had good guys and bad guys but didn't make his bad guys an excuse for the good guys to do anything at all.
These were good stories. I wouldn't like a steady diet of them. I think they would get tiring. But I liked them.
| Author | Alberts, Bruce |
|---|---|
| Author | Johnson, Alexander |
| Author | Lewis, Julian |
| Author | Raff, Martin |
| Author | Roberts, Keith |
| Author | Walter, Peter |
| Publication | Garland Science, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 1600 |
| Extras | illustrations, micrographs, photographs, tables, charts, glossary, index, a total of 125 pages of extra material |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Biology |
| When Read | August 2013 |
This is the 5th edition, published in 2008. It is 138 pages longer than the 4th edition from 2002 that I completed in September, 2006. It was still, as of its publication, the standard textbook in its field. Its authors all have PhDs from Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, McGill, or Rockefeller and are all big time professors at big time universities and research labs.
This PDF edition includes the last five chapters that were originally only available on the accompanying DVD in the printed edition.
The first reference I see in my diary about this, my second reading of this book, is in the entry for March 8, 2011. It has taken me more than two and a half years to finish. I chose to read this again in part to see the new material, in part because I learned more from it than from any other science book, and in part because I have forgotten more from it than from any other science book and hoped to put more of it into my longer term memory.
That may be a forlorn hope. There is far, far, too much detail in this book for me to remember more than basic concepts. However, perhaps those basic concepts have been reinforced and perhaps a bit more detail will remain.
I couldn't tell how much of the material was new. I had the feeling, in many sections, that I was reading new material that was not in my earlier reading. But it is entirely possible that most or all of it was there but I didn't remember it.
As before, if I remember correctly, I read the entire book while working out on the elliptical trainer in our basement. So I got a workout for my mind and my body at the same time.
| Author | Maupassant, Guy de, 1850-1893 |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1885 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2013 |
Georges Duroy, recently returned from service in the army in Algeria, has come to Paris to make his way in the world, but the best job he can get is as a railway clerk at 1,500 francs a year. Then, by chance, he meets an old army friend, Forestiere, on the street. Forestiere is the editor of a newspaper. He offers Duroy a job as a writer and reporter and F's wife Madeleine helps him to write his first article.
Duroy is attracted to Madeleine and also to her young cousin, Marabelle, with whom he soon strikes up a rocky relationship. He cannot be faithful to any one woman nor can he actually love anyone but himself, though he imagines that he does. His faithlessness and selfishness stem from egotism rather than malevolence.
When Forestiere dies of his consumption, Duroy pursues his wife and eventually marries her. He thinks he is in love with her. He thinks that a woman like her will be good for him. But soon he is seeing Marabelle again. Then he seduces Madame Walter, the prudish wife of the wealthy owner of the newspaper who is enamored of his charm and good looks. She gives in to him but becomes clinging and tiresome. He tires of her very quickly but is attracted to her beautiful younger daughter. In the end he succeeds in divorcing his wife, seducing Mademoiselle Walter and forcing her practical minded father to accede to a marriage with her while the emotional Madame Walter falls apart under the strain.
The book ends with the wedding. Key people in French society have arrived for the ceremony and the reception in Walter's mansion. Duroy, now calling himself George du Roy de Canteleu, is made the new editor of the paper and is a wealthy and influential man. From the steps of the church Duroy sees Marabelle in the audience and wonders when he might go to see her.
The book made a huge impression in France and went through many editions in a very short time. De Maupassant made a lot of money from the sales and bought a yacht which he named "Bel Ami".
The book must have been shocking it its day. This was the era of "social realism" in French literature and men like de Maupassant and Zola were writing about society as it was rather than as it wanted to be.
The power of this book lies partly in the clarity of its vision of French society but especially in its character of Georges Duroy. He is not a classic villain motivated by evil. He is, if anything, an ordinary man lucky enough to be highly attractive to women and willing to use his good looks and charm to his advantage. It is a realistic and compelling portrayal.
| Author | Hastings, Max |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 800 |
| Extras | maps, diagrams, photos, notes, bibliography, index - in printed version |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | September 2013 |
Hastings covers the entire war from the invasion of Poland to the atomic bombing of Japan. His focus is on the human side of the war with copious excerpts from letters and diaries of the period, many or most of them chosen in part because they had not been published before. There are translations of letters from Poles, Germans, Russians, Japanese, and others, as well as the American and British accounts that are often more readily available to English speakers.
Many books write about turning points in the war. Hastings approach to that problem is different from most writers. He considers that Germany had lost the war by December of 1941. The combination of the failure of the Wehrmacht to take Moscow and the entry of the U.S. into the war doomed the Nazi war of conquest. The Russian victory at Moscow, in spite of the terrible disproportion of losses, proved to the Russians, and to perceptive Germans, that Germany did not have the resources to conquer the USSR. If that was not 100% clear, the declaration of war against the United States sealed the deal. Todt, the leading German industrialist, and another man of his stature, met with Hitler in December 1941 and told him this bad news. He asked what they thought he should do and they answered that the only solution was a negotiated peace. I don't know if we know Hitler's response, but he clearly convinced himself that victory was still possible.
As for the Japanese, Hastings believes that they had lost before they started. They never had a chance. They started the war in the expectation that Germany had won in Europe. Perhaps to some extent, like the Italians in 1940, they were eager to get in in time to get a share of the spoils.
All of the Axis partners manifested severe ignorance of the power of their enemies. The Germans, though not the Japanese who knew better after the Kalkin Gul battles, believed that the Soviet Union was rotten, decrepit, and ready to collapse at the first hard blow. Both failed to appreciate the power of the U.S., especially in its production capacity but also in its ability to fight.
None of the Axis partners understood what was required from them in the way of armaments production, of scientific research, or of technical training, most particularly of airplane pilots. Although all of the Axis governments invested heavily in armaments, they failed to appreciate how much the USSR and the US would be able to produce and did not put their economies on a total war footing until after 1942. It probably wouldn't have saved them even if they started in 1939, but they would have done better.
Hastings, in accordance with contemporary views, believes that it was the Russians who really won the war. They took the lion's share of the casualties, absorbed the lion's share of German fighting power, and fought by far the hardest of any of the "allies". Allied material aid helped them but they turned the tide against Germany before all but a trickle of the aid had arrived and the most important categories of materiel, guns, planes, tanks, and munitions, were mostly manufactured by Russians in Russia.
Hastings believes that the "Grand Alliance" was far from what Churchill, and especially Roosevelt, hoped it would be. Stalin lived up to his commitments, for example in Greece and in his attack on Japan at the end of the war (Hastings thinks that Stalin would have done that even without a commitment), but he never felt any alliance with the Western democracies.
A certain amount of the standard history is here. He references the key battles but does not give the details of the fighting. He names the key commanders and evaluates them with considerable candor. He regards Monty, for example, as a competent commander made worse by a gigantic ego, but not as bad as he is portrayed. He regards Douglas MacArthur in the same vein but, if anything, may be more critical of MacA. He thinks the entire MacArthur campaign in New Guinea and the Philippines was a waste of men and resources that contributed nothing to the outcome of the war. He considers the Chinese to have been mostly ineffectual in combat and all of the effort and resources that Roosevelt lavished on them in the hopes of creating a huge ally against Japan to have been misguided. He thinks Churchill was right about not invading France in 1943 but wrong about the Eastern Mediterranean, and considers most of the Italian campaign to have been a tragic waste of life by commanders who were too incompetent to do anything but launch frontal assaults against fortified positions. He says that, by 1944, American troops in Italy were near rebellion, as they were in some other areas of conflict. They well knew that their sacrifices would have near zero impact on winning the war - which was going to be won on the Western front in France, and saw no reason to die for nothing.
This was not the best conventional history of the war. Details of strategy, tactics, weaponry, etc., are not to be found here. However, there is much here that is not found in other books, especially not in general histories of the war.
Hastings' selection of letters and diaries is excellent. He gives us a real sense of the nightmare existence in Poland and Russia under the occupation, of the horrors facing German and Japanese soldiers at the end of the war, and of the citizens of German and Japanese cities that were being bombed by the British and Americans. Life in Britain was not nearly as heavily affected as was life on the continent and life in the U.S. was hardly affected at all. The American diet had (if I remember correctly) 500 more calories per day than the English diet and 1,000 more than in Germany. Serious famines with millions of deaths occurred in the Bengal and perhaps other parts of British India, famines which the British government elected not to relieve since providing the shipping and food to do so would have withdrawn resources from the war effort.
Hastings holds that the best army in the World was German. Their superiority was not just in 1939-41. Even in 1945 the Germans fought with bravery, tenacity, skill and discipline that were found only in elite units of the British and American forces. The Japanese also fought with tremendous bravery, tenacity, and discipline, though their skill was questionable and their leadership was very poor. British and American forces were not particularly good at all except in elite units like Marines and paratroopers, which were a match for anyone, and in highly technical services like the air force, where the Americans had the best technology, the best support, and the best pilots. An Italian officer, meeting Americans after Italy switched sides, wrote that they were not like soldiers at all, but like civilians in uniform.
Many comparisons are made between the American and Russian armies and situations. In the U.S., the war developed at a measured pace. Units sometimes trained in the United States or Britain for as much as two years before entering combat. The "logistical tail" of American and British forces was enormous with huge masses of men safe behind the lines in non-combat roles, not even subject to aerial attack, as were the much smaller logistical units of the German and Russian forces. Everyone had good clothing, plenty to eat, good weapons (for those who needed them) and mechanized transport. They thought nothing of it. It was what they were used to back in the States. To the Germans who saw them march into Germany, it was a revelation, perhaps as much as arriving in Germany was a revelation to the Russians, whose standard of living was lower still.
If I heard the numbers correctly, each American soldier in the Pacific was supported by about 1,000 pounds of supplies for every one pound of supplies available to the Japanese. The numbers are hard to believe but the notion that Americans were vastly better supplied is unquestionably true. For example, something like 100,000 Japanese languished on Rabaul with hardly anything reaching them from Japan for three years, while much of what they had was blown to pieces by American air raiders.
By the end of the war, the Russian commanders were experienced, competent and confident, but they still relied heavily on "mass" to win their battles. Masses of artillery and aircraft would pound the German positions, then masses of tanks and infantry would assault them. They didn't bother with clever tactics. Nobody seems to care if another few thousand Russians died. Operation Bagration in 1944, fought with overwhelming firepower on the Russian side, was probably the first major battle in which more Germans died than Russians.
Meanwhile in the west, it was common for American soldiers to call in massive air and artillery strikes on every German strong point. And yet even so, Americans often suffered more casualties than the Germans. It was a hard war against hard enemies.
My impression of the American side, taken from Hastings, is that the American soldiers were indeed civilians in uniform. They did what they had to do, but they wanted to get back home and resume the life they led before. They didn't hate the Germans very much. They hated the Japanese more due to the Pearl Harbor attack and the racism that was prevalent in the US. But, like men in most armies except the German and Japanese, they were decent to captured enemies and to enemy civilians. Our lack of professionalism in soldiering is perhaps not something we should regret.
| Author | Anderson, Kevin J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Kensington Books, 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | September 2013 |
This is the first book in what has become a series about Dan Chambeaux, aka Dan Shamble, the zombie private eye. Shot in the back of the head while investigating a case, Shamble is dead and buried but, for unknown but not uncommon reasons associated with "The Big Uneasy", he wakes up in his coffin and claws his way out of the grave to return to his office and continue working with his living human partner, Robin Deyer, and his dead ghost girlfriend Cheyenne.
Shamble works on multiple cases in parallel. Mr. Fennerman, an inoffensive, sociable little vampire is being terrorized by spray paint, wooden stakes, and other threats in his basement apartment. A pair of witch sisters used a book of spells that had a misprint. One of the sisters was turned into a pig, and the two of them want damages and reparations. A voluptuous she werewolf wants help breaking a pre-nuptial agreement with her human husband Jekyll, owner of a necroceutical company making cosmetics for "unnaturals". Ramen Ho-Tep, a mummified Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt wants to be treated as a person, not an artifact owned by the museum. And always, Shamble wants to find the people who murdered him and Cheyenne.
Each case is worked out in parallel, but not always successfully. Shamble thinks he has saved the little vampire but the fellow is killed. However he and Robin do succeed in getting reparations for the Wanovich witch sisters, legal rights for Ramen Ho-Tep, and he finds his and Cheyenne's killers. They were radical, anti-unnaturals bigots. At the end, one of is executed for his many crimes but, what else, has come back as a zombie. them is executed for his crimes but,
These books present us with attractive, comfortable heroes and heroines, a progressive and humane social outlook, and delightful comedy, from officer Patrick McGoo's zombie jokes to outrageous characters. It sounds odd to describe a book about zombies, ghosts, vampires, werewolves and so on as attractive, comfortable, humane and comic, but that is part of Anderson's genius as a writer. We like Dan Shamble, Robin Deyer, Cheyenne, and many of the other human and dead characters.
There is another attraction to these books too. The thought of coming back after we die is also wonderfully attractive. Anderson brings his character back in a way that some, including some in the book, would consider to be freakish. Shamble has a hole in his head where a bullet went through. He needs weekly tuneups with embalming fluid and various repairs. He works out at the gym to keep from going into rigor mortis. He lives in a tiny room above the office. But he doesn't treat any of these problems as any kind of terrible curse in his life. He takes them in stride and pursues the important things - his friendships with Robin, Cheyenne and McGoo, and his career of catching villains and bringing them to justice. Reading the books we can't help but think, yes, I could put up with all of that too in order to have a second life - maybe it's even an endless one. Why not?
The writing here is good but unexceptional. The setting and the plots are absurd. The characters are thin. But none of that matters. The ideas are good and the books are fun to read.
| Author | Cussler, Clive |
|---|---|
| Author | Scott, Justin |
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 562 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | September 2013 |
Isaac Bell, rich, young, handsome, strong, smart, skilled, etc., etc., is the chief investigator for the huge Van Dorn Detective Agency in 1908. He is assigned to look into the apparent suicide of a battleship gun designer, partly at the behest of the man's beautiful daughter, who is convinced that her father could not have killed himself. Later it transpires that America's top designers of armor plate, engines, and hulls have all died in a surprising series of apparent accidents. It is too much to believe and Isaac is hot on the trail of a super spy who has recruited a Japanese, a German, a Chinese revolutionary, and a gang of New York Irish gangsters from Hell's Kitchen.
Various improbabilities and a few absurdities follow in an action packed rollick across the country featuring murders, explosions, fights on a train, fights in the streets, fights in a shop, fights in a submarine, and near death experiences. In the end the spy is revealed as Eyes O'Shea, former juvenile delinquent who made his reputation as a criminal with a special eye gouge that he wore on his thumb for gouging out an eye or two from his victims. He had been adopted in his youth by a German gem merchant and secret agent and brought up to be a major criminal and spy.
There's not much to say about Clive Cussler adventure novels. They are fast moving. They give in to every juvenile fantasy of a super hero. Isaac Bell is not only guaranteed to win every fight, he is also guaranteed to have the right credentials in his pocket to open any door, and the right amount of money in his wallet to buy any doorman, cop, cabbie, or whoever he needs to help him at the critical moment. If it were taken seriously it would be total tripe, but it seems to me that Cussler has the grace to be fully aware of the indulgences of his fiction. He also has a progressive sensibility and a sensitivity, for example to the discriminated against Asians in this story. As a result, the reader who likes some substance will find himself frequently bored, but probably not offended.
One of Cussler's specialties is technology and this book delivers in that area. We learn a bit about battleship technology and the great dreadnought race of the early 20th century, when each country worked to build better and better ships capable of blowing their enemies out of the water and seizing complete control of the seas. There's nothing very technical here but we do learn a bit about the significance of guns, armor, turbines, submarines, torpedoes, TNT, and the various measures and countermeasures that consumed the scientists, naval officers, and politicians of that era.
I don't think I could take these books too close together, but this is the fourth that I've read. It has filled me up and I don't think I'll need another for quite a while.
| Author | Lochrie, Alex |
|---|---|
| Publication | Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England: Pen and Sword Military, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Extras | photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | September 2013 |
Lochrie was a dyslexic child who was told by his working class Scottish parents that he was dumb, could never amount to much, and shouldn't try. He was a superb high school athlete and had a talent for art that he wanted to develop. He left home at 17, took various working class jobs, and put himself through art school. Seeing a chance for some adventure, he joined the police force where among many other things, he drew pictures of suspects from victim's descriptions. He also married at age 24, but the marriage didn't work out. He stayed in it for many years and moved to a new city so that his wife could be near her family, but nothing worked. He said that being a cop with odd hours and demands put too much stress on his wife. He became very depressed, separated from his wife, left the police force, and then met a couple of men in the French Foreign Legion. He was 38 years old, right near the age limit of 40, but he passed all of the physical, mental, and psychological tests and they let him in. They even changed his public identity to say he was 28 instead of 38 to give him a better chance in the service.
Legion training was exceptionally tough. Many men were weeded out. Lochrie joined a parachute battalion and made many, many jumps. It seemed that the men were training continuously, jumping continuously, running obstacle courses, and learning continuously. Their barracks were on the second floor of a building but using the stairs was not allowed. They had to go up and down a rope. Walking was not allowed. They ran everywhere. The men became exceptionally fit. Training lasted a couple of years.
The battalion's assignments while Lochrie was a member were in Tchad (Chad in American spelling), in Saudia Arabia, in Tchad again, and in Yugoslavia at the Sarajevo airport. In one of the Tchad assignments the unit discovered caches of American made arms and documents, including what L claimed were American made AK-47s intended to look like Chinese guns. He said little about this but it seemed to me that he did not think the Americans were up to anything good in Tchad.
He did participate in a French-American military exercise with the legion defending a Mediterranean beach and the Americans assaulting it. He was astonished at what he saw. The American assault began with a wave of fighter-bombers that would have wiped everyone out if they were using real bombs, followed by a wave of attack helicopters that sprayed the area with mock machine gun and rocket fire, and then Marine assault landings in about 200 landing craft ranging from hovercraft to amphibians that climbed the beach and headed inland.
The French had nothing like this and he had never seen anything like it. He wasn't convinced that the Americans had the best soldiers in the world, but they sure had an overwhelming mass of heavy equipment. He was in awe of the sheer firepower of what he had seen.
In Africa the Legion imposed its will on dangerous and irresponsible Chadian soldiers and rebels who quickly realized that they were no match for the Legionnaires and they better not go around intimidating people and firing off weapons. In Saudi Arabia, the Legion had trouble finding anyone to fight. The Iraqis were determined to surrender as fast as possible before they could be chewed up and spit out. The air bombardment had already completely defeated them and the invasion was seen as their final doom unless they could find a way to surrender quickly before they were blown up or shot.
But it was Yugoslavia that really got to Lochrie. He had no respect for the UN. "Rules of engagement" kept the UN units from shooting at anyone except in clear self defense. They were ordered to watch as snipers murdered innocent civilians on the street and as artillery and mortar fire from one side or the other blasted into civilian structures. He thought most of the UN related politicians who showed up on the ground were there purely for posturing with no thought of actually doing any good. Many were physical cowards who demanded luxury accommodations (which could not be provided in Sarajevo in town or at the airport) and who fled at the first sign of danger.
His opinion of journalists was little better. He read stories by journalists whom he knew for a fact were miles away from the events they reported, and that contained totally false reports. He thought that the "news" stories were often made up garbage intended to sell papers rather than tell the truth. He believed that sometimes the photographers incited violent acts in order to get sensational pictures that could be sold.
As for the combatants, he had nothing good to say about any of them. The Serbians he met believed that the Muslims invaded their country 500 years before and exploited and oppressed them ever since. Any retribution was well deserved by any Muslim who received it, regardless of who the people were, what they did, or whether they were born under Turkish rule, which hardly any were. The Muslims were ruled over by gangsters who exploited their own people. He and other military experts were convinced, for example, that a mortar attack on an open market in a Muslim area of Sarajevo could only have come from the Muslim side. He thought they did it in order to blame it on the Serbs and believed that the Bosnian Muslims who died simply gave their lives in a good cause.
Lochrie worked as a specialist in this and other assignments - using his artistic skills to work on presentations, photos, reconnaissance, etc., and also used his fluency in French and English to work as a translator. Not long after returning from Sarajevo he decided he was getting too old to keep up with the young men and he retired from the Legion in 1994. He operated an art gallery in Calvi in Corsica for seven years, then moved with his new wife back to Scotland to look after his and her parents.
This was an interesting book by and about a man who is very different from me but is easy for me to respect. He was a good soldier, capable of following orders and respecting his superior officers and maintaining an extraordinary level of competence and esprit de corps. He did what he was told to do but was perfectly capable of independent judgment, doing what he thought needed doing even if it wasn't strictly what he had been told to do.
Several incidents struck me in his account. In one, he and 20 other legionnaires were under escort by a non-commissioned officer while traveling to a place where they would do nothing but be locked up on a base for a weekend. They tricked the sergeant into getting off the train while they all got back on and left him, then headed into Paris for the weekend.
In another incident his small group of legionnaires participated in a French army exercise in which some number of French soldiers had to run a long obstacle course and would be rated by the order in which they arrived at the end. The legionnaires outpaced almost all of the other soldiers, then gathered at the end of the course, got into formation, and crossed the finish line in step as a unit. The officers rating the exercise had never seen anything like it.
Two other stories from Sarajevo were even more impressive. In one, he devised a system for photographing the entire area around the airfield from the observation post on the roof of a building, then creating a detailed map of the area. When Serb snipers began firing at the Legionnaires, the soldiers were able to carefully mark each of their firing positions on the map. When one of their men was severely wounded they had had enough. They systematically poured fire into each of the sniper positions and ended the attacks.
In the other story, he was in an armored car in Sarajevo when he saw a "smartly dressed" woman walk across a street. It was as if she no longer cared whether she lived or died. She was shot by a Serb sniper. Lochrie immediately drove his car beside her, got out under fire, dressed her wound, and lifted her into his armored car to take her to the UN hospital. He radioed for support and another car came up and machine gunned the sniper, hopefully killing him. The woman made it to the hospital but died there.
Lochrie never lost his humanity or his sense of being a man with obligations of service to his fellow human beings.
| Author | Ehrenreich, Barbara, 1941- |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society |
| When Read | September 2013 |
After a discussion with Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's magazine, Ehrenreich decided to go undercover, as it were, and work in low wage unskilled jobs in order to find out how the people who did those jobs worked and live. First a magazine article, and then this book, resulted.
She started off with her used car and a small amount of money. She was not going to live in her nice house or bring any of her nice clothes. She would live off the earnings from whatever jobs she could find. She concealed her work history and PhD in biology and told prospective employers that she had several years of college, was recently divorced, and was re-entering the work force after many years at home. Nobody recognized her name or wondered why such a well spoken and obviously educated woman was applying for jobs as a waitress, housekeeper or store employee.
Her first job was as a waitress in her home town of Key West. Unable to find any housing she could afford on a waitress' salary, she had to move into an efficiency apartment in a house 30 miles away. It didn't take long for her to learn that she had already taken advantage of options that other low wage workers didn't have.
Many of the workers lived 2, 3, or 4 to a small place. Some essentially lived in cars. Some lived in rooms rented by the week at prices that were way beyond the cost of an apartment but had no choice because they had no possibility of saving enough money to pay the two month's rent required for a security deposit and first month in order to get an apartment.
Here are a few of the many things I learned from this book.
It turns out, contrary to E's expectations, low paid workers do not have ways of coping and getting by that we middle class people don't know about. On the contrary. Life is not only harder for them, it's more expensive.
Housing is the biggest problem. Low wage jobs are in shopping and dining areas or other areas where money is to be had and housing is more expensive. They simply can't afford it. Minimum wage today in 2013 is $7.25. With a very few exceptions, it looks to me like the base rate for one bedroom apartments in the poor areas of Baltimore cost about $700/month, or $8,400, plus utilities. It's not much for a pre-tax minimum wage income of $14,500. Adding in utilities and deducting out the basic social security and medicare taxes and we get at least $9,000 out of a maximum of $13,300, or 67% of income just for minimal housing - assuming that the low wage worker can rent an apartment at all, and assuming he can do it in a location from which he can somehow get to his work.
Everything else is also a problem. Health insurance is unaffordable (there's a battle going on over "Obamacare" as we speak) and there is generally no "sick leave" for minimum wage workers. If a worker does leave his job to see a doctor he'll lose wages, may be charged more than an insured person would be charged, and has no savings with which to pay. So the workers ignore health problems and put up with the pain as best they can until the problem goes away or turns into such an emergency that it is no longer bearable and they must throw themselves on the mercy of an emergency room with a problem that might have been easily fixable earlier.
Public support is a thing of the past. "Welfare as we know it" was abolished under Clinton. Public housing is a dim memory in many cities and is totally inadequate to the demand where it still survives. Public transportation is constantly shrinking and becoming more and more expensive. Public education is under severe pressure and public colleges are now beyond the reach of low wage workers and their children. Even food stamps are being cut.
Debt piles on debt. If a low wage worker can get a credit card or a college loan or a "payday" loan, they often have no choice but to go into debt. It is sometimes a choice between utter destitution and near starvation, or assuming a debt that destroys one's future at exorbitant rates of interest. Of course the debt service, always at the absolute maximum interest rates for poor people, just sucks money out of their paychecks and makes them poorer and poorer.
| Author | Whiting, Charles, 1926-2007 |
|---|---|
| Author | Kessler, Leo |
| Publication | Alesbury, Bucks, England: Futura Publications |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 191 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | October 2013 |
The story opens at the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. All of the top generals have been invited to hear Hitler's plan and orders for Operation Citadel, the massive armored attack designed to pinch off the Kursk salient on the Eastern Front. Hitler has scraped together everything that Germany could provide in manpower and equipment to attempt the final conquest of the USSR. Some generals are skeptical but all are deeply impressed by the resources that Hitler has managed to provide - beyond what they though existed in Germany.
Elite SS Assault Battalion Wotan is training in Westphalia. Few veterans have survived their previous assignments and the remaining ones, led by Major Geier, Captain von Dodenburg, Lieutenant Schwarze, and Sergeants Metzger and Schulze, are being brutally trained to prepare them for an even more brutal war.
They are part of the Southern Front that attacks the southern side of the salient. They move ever forward, driven by the ambitious Geier, the stalwart von Dodenburg, and the insane Schwarze. They use all of their considerable courage, discipline and skills to push deeper and deeper until, finally, they have exhausted all resources and are confronted with the counterattack of the massive Soviet reserves. Most of their tanks are destroyed. Most of their men are dead. Geier orders the few survivors to retreat.
In the last part of the novel the battalion, once again restored to strength but with "green beak" farm boys, German Italians, and others whom they would have looked down upon before the war, are now in Italy, facing the Western Allies. Dodenburg arranges his men in a deadly ambush. He watches as a force of relaxed and smiling Americans march straight into his path. He wonders how, no matter how many enemies they kill, there are always so many fresh enemies come to attack Germany. He leaps to the top of his foxhole and screams the order to open fire.
The books in this series by Kessler are simple, even crude, and obviously very quickly written, but they have a compelling force to them. Highly readable, quickly read, they deliver exactly what they promise, an intense description of intense combat with all of the coatings of literature, psychology, politics and philosophy stripped to bare essentials.
I don't have the full series of Kessler's books and doubt if I could find them very easily, but I'm sure I'll read more of the ones I have as interludes in more serious fiction.
When I started this series I wondered if Kessler were a Nazi. I'm inclined to think that he's not. He incorporates Nazi racism, brutality, and fanaticism into his characters, but is uninterested in commenting on those topics. His presentation is focused on combat, not on the other aspects of SS behavior during the war, though he doesn't completely ignore them by any means.
| Author | Krugman, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: WW Norton and Co., 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 204 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Economics; Essays |
| When Read | October 2013 |
K has collected 27 of his essays from the 1990's in this compilation. I read the book over a considerable period of time and did not make notes as I went along so, given my general ignorance of economic theory, I'm sure I've misrepresented some of his views below either because of poor memory for material that is so new to me anyway, or lack of understanding. But plowing ahead anyway, the broad topics are:
"Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" in which he explains the basic economic factors leading to job creation and destruction.
"Right-Wing Wrongs" talks especially about "supply side" economics and the belief that gold should be the standard of all currencies. He shows how these ideas are not just wrong, they are demonstrably and absurdly wrong.
"Globalization and Globaloney" talks about how globalization benefits "underdeveloped" countries, how terrible jobs at terrible wages turn out to actually be a lot better than what the people had before. He does not regard globalization as neutral for the US. It has positive and negative aspects. However, like it or not, it's happening and is going to increase, so we have to get used to it and learn to live with it.
"Delusions of Growth" argues that every economy has objective factors that limit its growth. We can institute policies that help us to maximize growth or policies that harm growth, but we can't institute policies that will enable us to grow beyond the limits imposed by objective economic factors. It isn't going to happen no matter how much we wish it would. Some conservative economists, prominently represented by Felix Rohatyn in the time frame of his essays, thought we should aim to achieve 3.5 to 4 percent growth, numbers that K believed to be objectively impossible.
"The Speculators Ball" has essays on commodity and currency speculations and shows how some attempts to defeat speculation actually encourage it. For example, if you try to peg your currency to some external standard you better be prepared to go all the way and make any sacrifice called for because, if you don't, you've setup a wonderful field for speculation. The best policy is to let your currency float. The speculators can't do much if anything with that.
"Beyond the Market" talks about factors in economics that are not market driven. "Externalities", e.g., allowing resources like air, water, and pollution to be freely exploited by industries, are well known extra-market phenomena. Medical care is, in some ways, independent of market forces. In the essay "Rat Democracy", about rational behavior in politics, shows that the rational rich man will use his money to bend and twist the market, taxation, regulation, etc. in order to maximize his gain at the expense of everyone else. If we expect otherwise we are blowing in the wind.
Paul Krugman is not only a brilliant economist, he's an extraordinarily good writer and teacher. He explains very difficult issues by reference to first principles, which he explains in the most understandable ways. He'll use baby sitting co-ops or hot dog makers to illustrate in a simple way what appear to be otherwise impenetrable forces in the economy.
His rationalism is very thoroughgoing. He calls himself a liberal and is one, but I get no sense that sympathy for poor or working people plays any role whatsoever in his analysis of economic phenomena. Sometimes the facts point in directions that liberals don't like, but K is not deterred by that from facing them squarely and proclaiming them forthrightly. He is first and foremost a scientist of economics and all of his prescriptions are for ways to use the science for the benefit of all, to the extent possible, rather than to deny the science or try to twist its conclusions. Where the facts are such that the rich will get richer in a sane political environment, he makes no effort to deny them. What is, is.
Beyond that, he is a delightful master of language. I can open the book to any page and find wonderful turns of phrase.
"Bells have just started going off in the head of any reader who remembers Econ 1."
"“Efforts to resolve Europe’s banana split have proved fruitless.”
"- the clean little secret of health care — is simple: We actually do get something for our money."
"Homo economicus is not a central pillar of my faith — he is merely a working assumption, albeit one that is extremely useful in many circumstances."
The above are randomly selected by browsing pages. There are many more gems that are as good or better than those. K has a colorful writing and thinking style that shows how much fun he is having thinking about all of these issues. And to think, the man is also a mathematical wizard who won the Nobel Prize for his analysis!
He is certainly impressive. I can see why Clinton and Obama didn't want him in their administrations (never mind Bush and Bush). He's brilliant enough, lucid enough, and overwhelming enough that he would be very hard to bully into taking positions that closely fit the party line - whatever it is at any given time.
| Author | Pelecanos, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2013 |
Recently paroled drug dealer Lorenzo Brown is now working for the Washington DC's Humane Society Law Enforcement team. Basically, it's a couple of guys that respond to reports of inhumane treatment of animals by issuing warnings or citations, demanding changes, and in some cases, confiscating pets. He's good at his job, able to confront people when he has to, but also willing to treat people with respect. And he likes animals. He's kind to all of them, even the ones that are vicious and whom he fully realizes will have to be killed because they are too dangerous to allow around people and too far gone to be redeemed.
Lorenzo's patrol officer is Rachel Lopez. She wants her parolees to succeed and works hard at keeping tabs on them and putting them in touch with people who can give them jobs and help. She thinks Lorenzo is one of the ones who is going to make it, and he is in fact determined to do so. Rachel has a difficult, lonely life of hard work in the daytime followed by heavy drinking and one night stands at night.
The other characters in the story are mostly drug dealers. Lorenzo's old childhood friend, Nigel Johnson, owns a particular neighborhood in the city where his none too bright lieutenant DeEric Brown and the bright but naive kid Michael Butler make pickups and deliveries to the kids on the corners that actually sell the drugs. DeEric makes the dumb mistake of hassling some boys working for Deacon Taylor because he thinks their in Nigel's territory when, in fact, they're not. Deacon sends two of his own henchmen, Melvin Lee and the young psychopath Rico Miller, to follow Brown and Butler and see what's going on. They do. Brown confronts them and "punks" Lee, making hm back down. He didn't mean anything by it, it was just something that people in this business do. But Miller sees it and takes it personally. He goes after the pair of them and shoots both Brown and Butler dead. He also stabs Rachel and leaves her for dead when she discovers him in the apartment owned by Lee, one of her parolees.
Lorenzo figures out what happened with Nigel and decides to go after Miller, but Nigel stops him and does the job himself, killing both Miller and Lee, and then being killed himself by Deacon's main enforcer Griff. Nigel understands that Lorenzo has made it in the straight world. He understands that the eight years Lorenzo spent in prison were largely Nigel's fault. He understands that Lorenzo stood up for him, never giving his name to the cops and he owes a big debt to Lorenzo. And he also knows that his own life is a failure, that he can continue for a while doing what he's doing, but it's not the life he would want for his friends or really even for himself. He keeps Lorenzo out of it.
The police soon figure it all out. They arrest Griff. They get him to turn on Deacon. They arrest Deacon. Four men are dead and two men go to jail, but nothing really changes. The boys on the street continue to sell drugs. New men take over the operations. It is as if the dead and gone were never there.
But Lorenzo is making it in life. He starts dating his grandmother's neighbor Rayne and amuses her small daughter who loves his dog Jasmine, whom she thinks is named Jazz Man. Rachel begins dating a black cop, a decent man she has always liked who helped track down her would be killer. Both Lorenzo and Rachel meet at a meeting of people with alcohol and drug problems. They tell their stories and listen to the stories of pain and redemption of the others.
Illegal drugs dominate the life of this section of the city. The gangsters live sort of a high life, but only sort of one. They drive expensive cars. They give money to their mothers. They have expensive clothes and electronics. But they live in questionable circumstances, they have no savings, and they are always in fear of other drug dealers and the stunted sociopaths and psychopaths that both they and their competitors employ. They know that their lease on life is tenuous and their only and certain way out is death or prison.
Rachel and Lorenzo have rejected that world. They attempt to find meaning in their work, Lorenzo by taking care of animals and Rachel by giving her parolee clients the best chance that she can.
I thought this was, in some ways, a beautiful book. A collection of humble characters, most of them black, all of them from difficult childhoods and circumstances, all of them struggling against their society and their own personal demons to achieve a normal and satisfying life. Ultimately, the two main characters, Lorenzo and Rachel, succeed.
| Author | Kraynak, Cecie |
|---|---|
| Author | Stein, Gail |
| Author | Wald, Susana |
| Author | Langemeier, Jessica |
| Author | Berlitz |
| Publication | Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 664 |
| Extras | index, vocabulary, |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Spanish |
| When Read | November 2013 |
This is a collection of "Dummies" books bound in one volume. I don't know if the full books are included or just extracts from them. The individual sections aren't that large. The sections are: Speaking in Everyday Settings, Grasping Basic grammar Essentials, Mastering More Advanced Grammar Essentials, and Spanish at Work. Some appendices follow on Spanish verbs and dictionaries. The paper edition had a CD attached.
Like all of the "for Dummies" books, the print is large, the margins are wide, and interline space is high. In a more conventionally printed book the whole thing might have easily fit in half the number of pages.
There wasn't a lot here. There were no exercises at all. I guess dummies aren't interested in doing exercises, even if there's no way to learn Spanish without them. Still, the book was useful to me. What books I read may not be as important as that I read books.
My other reading is substantially slowed now by the fact that I am reading Spanish (instead of science) when I exercise, and often at other times of the day.
| Author | MacInnes, Helen |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Titan Books, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 1942 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 2013 |
Immediately after the Dunkirk evacuation, the British intelligence service has discovered that one of its men, Martin Hearne, is the spitting image of a Frenchman named Bertrand Corlay who was evacuated with Hearne from Dunkirk and is recuperating in an English hospital. Hearne speaks excellent French and can handle a Breton accent so it is decided to parachute him back into France to pretend to be Corlay and to find out what the Germans are up to in Brittany.
Hearne spends several weeks with Corlay learning everything about his town, his family, his past, and so on - or almost everything. He is successful in reaching the Corlay homestead and even fools the old housekeeper into believing that he is Corlay. He acts as if his service in the French Army and some shell shock from the war, has changed him and most people accept that. He takes up Corlay's life, working on the farm and going out at night to investigate the airfields that are being built everywhere in the vicinity.
But Corlay didn't tell him everything. He didn't say that he, Corlay, was active in fascist groups, or that he was in love with a beautiful woman named Elise who was leading a fascist group and is actually a German agent. Hearne has to think fast in every situation and act plausibly, gradually coming to understand Corlay's real position in the community and taking advantage of it to work with the Germans and their agents in France.
The Germans are preparing for the invasion of England and also attempting to foment and support a Breton autonomy movement in hopes of creating a pliant little puppet state here and to produce similar ones in other provinces in France. For that reason, they are easy on Corlay. They are taking over houses in the vicinity to billet troops but they leave Corlay's household alone. Hearne, as Corlay, obtains lists of all of the Breton collaborators which he puts into a message to send to England and also eventually gives to a local school teacher and beginning organizer of a resistance movement.
Corlay truly is a fascist, or at any rate, he is so enamored of the beautiful Elise that he becomes a fascist under her spell. He gets a message to her that Hearne is a British spy and Hearne is arrested. He is tortured for several days but the school teacher and a friend break in, kill his guard, and get him out. Eventually he makes it back to England with Anne, the young woman with whom he fell in love. She is shot at the end and, although the author's intent wasn't perfectly clear to me, we think that she will survive.
Wikipedia records that this, her third novel, "was required reading for Allied intelligence agents who were being sent to work with the French resistance against the Nazis."
It is not exactly the sort of book that would be written today. The brutality and violence of the Germans, and especially of the interrogations, would be portrayed more graphically today. Nevertheless MacInnes captures much of the spirit of those times. The Breton villagers mainly expected to be left alone by the Germans. They distrusted anyone not from their specific locality and while that included the Germans, it included everyone else as well. They thought that the war was not entirely their concern. This changed when the Germans began requisitioning food, labor, and housing, all of which they paid for in Occupation Marks - which were probably worthless.
The behavior of the Germans was also well done. Some seemed to be human beings. Some were arrogant and brutal occupiers who saw all Frenchmen as their inferiors. The relations between Germans and French was one in which the occupiers held complete power to make any decision they pleased, with any consequences they pleased, and the French had no appeal and no protection. The costs to the French were much lower at this point in the war than they would become later, but the tendencies were clearly portrayed.
MacInnes became a very popular writer of spy novels. I may read more.
| Author | Burke, James Lee |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Vintage, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2013 |
In this second book of the series, Dave Robicheaux has resigned his place on the New Orleans Police Department and is running a small business on one of the bayous, renting out boats and fishing gear. He has been struggling successfully against his alcoholism and is married to Annie, with whom he is very much in love.
He an Annie are out on a boat one day when a small plane goes down into the water quite near them. Dave immediately dives down to the wreck where he finds a dead man at the controls, another dead man with a tattoo Dave recognizes from Vietnam on his arm, and two dead women, one of whom has held up a five year old child in a tiny air space trapped in the plane. Dave rescues the child and brings her to a hospital on shore. He has reported the crash to the Coast Guard but said nothing about the little girl.
Dave is soon questioned by an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent and informed that there were three people in the plane. He says nothing about the little girl, whom Annie has become attached to, but is suspicious that the fourth person was some sort of combination drug criminal and DEA agent whose body was spirited away be the DEA and his existence denied. Constitutionally unable to leave well enough alone, Dave starts his own investigation and soon runs afoul of some mobsters, the likely boss of whom is his old friend and enemy from school days named Bubba Rocque, a fellow who beat him in the ring in high school and is both a gangster and a hale fellow well met.
Dave's investigation is discovered and a couple of gangsters beat him up. He retaliates by tracking them down and putting the main one in the hospital by smashing his face with a pool queue. They retaliate by sending someone to his house with guns and shooting into his bed. He's not there but Annie is killed.
The damage to Dave's psyche is deep. He falls off the wagon and goes on a long drunk. He goes to see Robin, the whore whom he has spirited out of New Orleans to a job in Florida, and stays with her for a while in Florida and she stays with him for a while in Louisiana. He pulls himself together and applies for a job in the local Sheriff's department, becoming the only real professional detective in the Sheriff's office and using his position, and a tough deputy who helps him, to launch his own investigation into Annie's death.
There are a number of peripheral characters including a pretty good DEA agent named Minos P. Dautrieve, Bubba's seeming bimbo wife with a deep agenda of her own, a Haitian Tonton Macoute named "Toot", a former Vietnam tunnel rat turned contract killer named Victor Romero, a whore whom Dave questions about the mob, rescues from their revenge, and whom he lives with for a few weeks after Annie's death, and the little five year old girl named Alafair who only speaks Spanish.
In the end it turns out that Bubba was not the source of the attacks on Dave. Sending someone else to kill someone that he had a grievance against was not his style. But Bubba's wife was involved and, when Dave clues Bubba in to what is going on, Bubba beats her up and she kills him. The other killers were all killed by each other or, in the case of the tunnel rat, killed by Dave himself.
Dave Robicheaux is a competent, courageous, complex, damaged, and often self-defeating sort of man. Like Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins, he has to do things for compulsive reasons that he can sometimes understand but still not fully control. He's able to bust someone up really bad and able to shoot and kill them if necessary. But he's not a cynical man. He believes in God and the wisdom and goodness of religion. He is, for all of his flaws and all of his tough violence, a humble and spiritual man. He's one of the more interesting people in crime fiction.
The other characters are not as well developed but are still highly interesting. In this book, Bubba Rocque and Minos Dautrieve are such characters. Bubba in particular is almost likable and I kept wondering if Dave shouldn't cut him at least a little slack. But no matter what overtures Bubba makes to him Dave treats Bubba as a criminal, not deserving of respect.
Finally, I'll say that I liked Burke's lyrical descriptions of the New Orleans of his childhood and his adulthood. He has a love of place and a feeling for the people in it.
| Author | Tapper, Jake |
|---|---|
| Publication | Little Brown and Co., 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 704 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | December 2013 |
Tapper tells the story of Combat Output Keating, a U.S. Army fortified camp situated in a deep valley in Nuristan in Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border.
The camp was established as part of what used to be called "nation building", or in Vietnam "winning the hearts and minds of the people." Its first commander worked hard at that and made some headway. He tried to defend the largely indefensible road that led to the practically indefensible camp. He held meetings with the local elders. He worked on projects for them. He managed to direct money to them. He listened to them and did what he could to earn their trust. But American army assignments are always temporary and, at the end of a year, he and his unit were "rotated" out and replaced by a new group with a new commander.
The message to the locals was clear. The Taliban and their allies are here to stay. The Americans are not. Any relationship formed with an American officer will soon dissolve and new Americans will arrive that don't know you, don't trust you, and don't know anything about past arrangements, agreements, and accommodations. New commanders didn't necessarily have much faith in the nation building aspects of their jobs. Some wanted a more "kinetic" approach. They were there to kill "bad guys".
Physically, the camp was in a valley, surrounded by mountains. If someone was observed walking in the mountains, it was hard to tell who he was. Was he a Taliban scout or sniper? Was he a local teenager running an errand for his family? Was he a local teenager running an errand for the Taliban? If the Americans shoot him will they be defending themselves and the local villages or will they be killing a well known and liked person who had done nothing wrong and whose death will create a new list of implacable enemies of the United States?
Tapper documents the fighting in considerable detail. Patrols go out to defend the road, are fired upon while on a narrow road hugging the side of a cliff. There is no choice but to take the hits and drive on as fast as one dares. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't and a Humvee or a truck leaves the road and tumbles down the mountain.
Full scale battles take place in which increasing numbers of Taliban, with increasingly heavy weapons, eventually including sniper rifles, "Dushka" heavy machine guns, mortars and large numbers of rocket propelled grenades as well as AK-47 automatic rifles attack with increasingly sophisticated tactics. The Americans always win and always impose terrific casualties, but they do it with air strikes. Without the overwhelming firepower of the US Air Force, they would be overwhelmed by their enemy on the ground.
Ultimately, after all of the battles, all of the sacrifices, all of the dead men, the high command recognizes that nothing has been achieved and the cost of continuing is too high. They close the base and pull out.
Tapper wrote his book in a neutral way. He did not do a lot in the way of making judgments on the war but the facts spoke very well for themselves. It's hard to see how we can do any good in Afghanistan. We can kill Afghan man. Are they bad guys? From the point of view of Americans who believe in freedom of religion, secular democracy and women's rights, yes, they are bad guys. Some of them may be bad guys by anyone's definition. But what do we really know about them.
Tapper tells us almost nothing about the Afghans. We see a bit of the venal officials and cowardly Afghan army men who are only in the army for a paycheck but haven't the stomach for a fight. How can we change these people with "training"? Training to do what? Will training a man to shoot a rifle who despises you and only wants your paycheck somehow protect the future of democracy in Afghanistan? Will channeling money to corrupt officials who siphon it off to Switzerland help develop the country? Will interfering in age old village rivalries and traditions while shooting the village sons win hearts and minds? Are we kidding ourselves?
Maybe the Taliban will reconquer the country as soon as we leave. I'm sorry about that. I just don't see how we can do anything about it.
| Author | Potter, John Deane |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bantam Books, 1982 |
| Copyright Date | 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 148 |
| Extras | maps, illustrations, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 2013 |
Originally published as Fiasco in 1970.
In February of 1942 three capital ships of the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, made a break from their port of Brest in France to steam through the English Channel and back to German ports. This book is the story of the meticulously planned and competently executed German breakout and the remarkably incompetent British response.
The battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, each with 11 inch guns, and the 8 inch gun heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen were stationed at Brest for the purpose of interrupting shipping in the Atlantic. The Bismark was intended to be part of this potentially very powerful force but it was sunk before it could join with them.
Hitler, a man who freely described himself as a "land animal", saw no point to this deployment. With the Americans joining the war and the American Navy combining with the Royal Navy, plus the increasing power of the Royal Air Force, Hitler saw no future for the ships either at Brest or in the Atlantic. Heavy bombers visited Brest every night and, in spite of intense anti-aircraft fire and smoke screens, it was inevitable that there were lucky hits. Hitler saw it as only a matter of time before the ships were sunk or so badly damaged as to become useless. If they were to be of any use at all, it would be in defending Norway against what Hitler believed would be an eventual British attack. And so he ordered the Navy to bring them back.
Not all Naval officers agreed that the ships could be of no use in the Atlantic but they saw that Hitler's thinking was not completely wrong. Unlike Hitler, they were less contemptuous of the British, but Hitler thought, correctly as it turned out, that a well executed surprise operation would catch the British off guard and avoid a coordinated response.
So the Germans planned everything. There were escort destroyers and torpedo boats. Minesweepers would clear the paths in front of the ships. Squadrons of fighters from Germany would be present to provide continuous air cover. Careful security and deception planning deceived French dockworkers and agents and British radio listeners, radar operators and reconnaissance aircraft. Skillful radar jamming was applied for weeks before the actual breakout, confusing the British about whether they were actually being jammed, or whether there was atmospheric or other disturbances at certain times of the day and certain places that rendered their sets ineffective.
The plan was to leave Brest at night and pass the narrowest part of the channel, the Straits of Dover, in broad daylight. Leaving at night would give them the maximum time to make progress in the Channel before being detected and they decided they would fight their way through the Straits in daylight, hoping that the British would not be fully organized in time to stop them.
This picture of German intelligence, planning, and efficiency was opposed by complacency, confusion, disorganization and error on the British side. Incredible bravery on the part of British air and seamen could not compensate for the mistakes of the higherups and simply resulted in the needless deaths of good men.
To begin with, inefficient air and radar surveillance resulted in a failure to spot the German movement until well after daylight. Then units that had not been adequately prepared were thrown into action with insufficient information or orders. Some air units headed into the Channel without even knowing what they were supposed to be looking for. One small group of six Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers were sent to their doom with insufficient fighter escort against strong Luftwaffe and anti-aircraft defenses to be shot out of the sky with no hits on the ships. Only three of eighteen brave men survived. The enemy suffered no losses.
The next air group to attack comprised a dozen torpedo bombers and a group of horizontal bombers. They were told to rendezvous where the torpedo bombers had been ordered to follow the horizontal bombers into the attack but the horizontal bombers had been ordered to follow the torpedo bombers. One group formed behind the other, then the lead group broke off, flew backward, and formed behind the second group. Then the second group did the same. Totally uncoordinated radio frequencies and types (the ground commanders broadcast in Morse code while the planes were all set up for voice communications), and mistaken radio silences made everything much worse. At one point one of the air groups went to get the secret plans for this eventuality out of the safe only to find that the intelligence officer, the only man who knew the location of the key to the safe, was on 24 hour leave.
A squadron of old destroyers attacked and suffered severe casualties and damage. When the big ships were long past Dover, squadron after squadron of RAF bombers went looking for them but very few found them, fewer got through the fighter defenses, and none scored hits on the ships. The only damage to the ships came from mines, fortuitously laid in the path of the ships by operations that did not know they were coming.
It was, as the British have, a complete cock-up. Coming on the heels of defeats in Norway, France, Greece, Create, and North Africa, it was a trial for the British people. The government and armed forces did their best to whitewash the fiasco. A commission of inquiry found no real fault with any of the services. It was only reports by lower ranking men that told the truth.
As with so many of the books written after the war, this one was written by a man who was on a mission to tell the truth, both about the brave men and the incompetents. He didn't even spare Churchill. He gave credit where it was due to the Germans who planned the operation and to the British air and seamen who sacrificed life and limb in the battle and who were much admired for it by the Germans.
Potter's description of the German admirals and generals was quite as complete as his description of the British. He detailed their personalities, their strengths, and their failings. He explained the complicated planning they performed and highlighted the extent to which they tried to prepare for every eventuality. Their planning was not perfect. They also made mistakes. But they did much better than the British.
He gave a very moving description of the leader of the Swordfish squadron who knew that he was about to die for nothing but did it anyway to follow orders and in the small hope that it was just possible that they might hit a ship.
He was scathing to the higher ups who sent these men to their deaths. The fact that these men refused to acknowledge their failures, whitewashed the whole episode, and often remained in high authority, rightly upset the author. Potter did not go as far as Basil Liddell-Hart, who accused members of the British high command of the murder of their troops, and maybe they weren't as bad as those generals of the first war who had every reason to know that they were sending me to their deaths for absolutely no purpose. But they still at least merited the censure which they never received from official sources.
The battle was directed on the British side from Dover Castle. Marcia and I visited the castle and toured the underground bunkers and the big gun emplacements. We were quite impressed with the place and I was a little shocked to read about how inefficient it was in its communications, observations, gunfire, and command and control. Nevertheless, being there and walking through the tunnels, the castle, and the town gave some experiential reality to the story that I would not have had any other way.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 2013 |
Ex-boxer, ex-criminal, now New York private investigator Leonid McGill is visited by a woman who pays him $12,000 to prevent her husband from killing her. However LM has listened to many lies over the years and investigates the woman as well as the man, discovering that he was not talking to the wife of the man at all but to the wife's sister.
The plot is confusing. The husband turns out to be a very rich person who uses impersonators of his own whom LM must battle through to get to the man himself. He also tracks down the real wife who is in hiding in Baltimore. But he doesn't really know if her husband is a murderer (two previous wives died in suspicious circumstances), or if the woman is in real danger. Then the sister is murdered. Leonid takes her six kids to a safe house
Numerous incidents occur. M finds the brother of the two women, a down and out unwell young man who is being pushed around by drug dealers. M gets in a fight with the two dealers and beats them badly. His short stature belies his great strength and professional fighter's skills and a number of characters in the story start fights with him, which he seems to relish for the twin pleasures of exercising his strength and skill and for surprising and defeating bullies. He attempts to help the brother. He helps his old boxing coach who appears to be dying of cancer but then gains a remission. He helps a young man who works at the boxing gym. He discovers that his favorite son (actually the son of his wife by a previous husband) is running a scam making serious money, and forces the boy out of it before he can get into serious trouble.
In the end, he and a tough guy friend entrap the man who killed the mother of six. His friend is seriously wounded but McGill kills the killer. The other issues in the story are not all resolved.
This is an odd, somewhat disorganized book about yet another Walter Mosley hero - always tough, always smart, always self-reliant, but with personal problems. As with Easy Rawlins, McGill seems to have problems with women. His white wife has affairs with other men. McGill just lives with that.
It was never very clear to me who all of the people were in the story or where it was headed. The interest appeared to be in the journey rather than the destination.