Books read January through December 2014
| Author | Boyd, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Penguin Books, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 512 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2014 |
This is the fictional diary of Logan Mountstuart, born in 1906 to a British businessman and his Uruguayan wife in Montevideo. The family returns to England where the boy attends school and begins his diary. He goes to Oxford to study history, graduates, and becomes a writer of fiction, criticism, and journalism. He marries the daughter of an Earl and has a son but he is unhappy with his wife and has an affair with a young woman named Freya. The Earl's daughter divorces him, he marries Freya, has a daughter, and is happy in his family life.
He travels to Spain to write magazine articles about the Civil War, meets the shallow Duke and Duchess of Windsor, joins the Naval Intelligence service in the war, and is assigned first to baby sit the Duke and Duchess. Later, after angering them with his refusal to help them condemn a man whom he believes to be innocent of wrongdoing, he is brought back to England and sent on a mission to Switzerland where he is betrayed to the Swiss police, probably by the Englishman who sent him, imprisoned as a German agent, and held until six months after the war. He is unable to get a message to Freya who believes him dead and marries another man, then she and their child are killed in a V-bomb attack on London.
Lonely and depressed, he pulls himself out of his misery and, with the help of his old friend Ben Leeping, now an art gallery owner in Paris, takes up joint management of a branch office gallery in New York. There he marries an American woman but cheats on her. She also cheats on him and leaves him. He has an affair with a girl who, unknown to him, is underage, flees the wrath of her parents and, in his sixties, takes a job teaching in an African university. He returns to London in his late sixties and lives in penury, selling newspapers for a radical group to make 5 pounds a week, then goes on a mission for them which he learns is part of a terrorist plot. He buries the bomb he was sent to fetch and moves to France, where he has inherited a house. He lives out his life there and dies of a heart attack at age 85.
Those are the facts and events of the novel. I have recorded them in this dry way in order to be able to recall them if I need to remember what happened in this book. But they don't capture the depth of the ideas or the emotions of the story.
When I started the book I saw LMS, as he is referred to by the authorial editor of the diary, as a shallow, immature fellow whose life was of strictly limited interest and account. I expected that, with the development of fascism and the great war, that the story would take a new turn, one in which world events came to be more important than the very private and personal life that is all that is in the diary. I thought perhaps it was beginning with his trip to Spain. But that didn't happen. The story remained intensely private and personal right through the war. It was only after that, with my expectations unrealized, that I began to appreciate the book for what it was.
It was a book purely about personal life. There is a line in the diary entry for Sunday, July 20, 1969, "David Gascoyne once told me that the only point of keeping a journal was to concentrate on the personal, the diurnal minutiae, and forget the great and significant events in the world at large. The newspapers cover all that, anyway, he said. We don’t want to know that ‘Hitler invaded Poland’ – we’re more curious about what you had for breakfast."
The comment is not given special emphasis and Boyd/LMS may not have intended it as a rationale for the diary - although personal as it is the diary is not about what LMS had for breakfast. Still, given the approach I had taken to the book, those sentences struck me as significant.
LMS' life story is full of changes and surprises. He has money, then he is poor, then he is okay. He is a man who cheats on his wife, then one who is faithful as can be to his second wife, then one who cheats on his third. He is an ambitious and successful writer, then a man who seems unable to devote himself to writing. When he seems to be a superficial man he turns out to be a man of significant character. When he seems to have a life plan he turns out to be at sea. He builds a life for himself in London, then in Paris, then in New York, and then in Nigeria. He is at the mercy of life and fate, never fully in control but never passive in the face of the pressures on his life.
Any feelings of condescension I felt towards LMS at the beginning of the book evaporated by the end. I wound up with great sympathy for him and much appreciation of his battle to hold on to his humanity.
I wound up liking the book very much.
| Author | Dubois, William Pene |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Puffin Books, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 1947 |
| Number of Pages | 259 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Young adult |
| When Read | February 2014 |
Professor William Waterman Sherman, teacher of mathematics, launches his balloon in 1883, intending to leave the life of a teacher with all of the children, parents, teachers, and administrators behind, and spend his time in his comfortable balloon reading books and floating over the world. But of course it is not to be. He is found amidst the wreckage of 21 balloons in the Atlantic Ocean, half a world away from where he left heading west from San Francisco. He becomes an instant celebrity back in the U.S. and promises to tell all only when he gets back to the Explorers' Club in San Francisco. The rest of the book is his tale.
Caught up in a storm he finally crashes in the sea just off Krakatoa, the volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean in Indonesia. There he finds twenty American families living in extraordinary luxury on the proceeds of the unlimited source of diamonds in the island. The people keep their existence a secret, making very careful trips to the outside world with small numbers of diamonds which they sell in a different country each time, along with their boat, then buy what they need, buy another boat, and transport everything back to the island. In this way they successfully hide their presence. Indonesians, afraid of the volcano, never visit the island anyway, so they are at peace there.
The residents are very hospitable to Sherman. They introduce him to their way of life. Each of the 20 families has built a mansion in a different national style and each has created a large restaurant where, once each 20 days, they host everyone on the island to meals in the national cuisine represented by their house.
In the end, as we know, the volcano explodes. Everyone escapes in the huge 21 balloon contraption and parachutes down either in India or in Europe while Sherman, who has no parachute, continues on for a water landing in the Atlantic.
This was a young adult book, copiously and nicely illustrated in what appear to be pen and ink drawings by the author. The sentiments expressed are no doubt appealing to a reader of about age 12. I imagine I would have liked the book at that age and found it not entirely unappealing at my age today. Judging from the Amazon reviews, it is a book that many remember with great fondness from their youth and still enjoyed re-reading in later age.
It was a quick read
| Author | Nesser, Hakan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | se |
| Translators | Thompson, Laurie |
| Publication | Minneapolis: HighBridge, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2014 |
Detective Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is sent to the small town of Kaalbringen to work with the local police to find an arrest an ax murderer. Two men have been murdered and a third is killed during the course of the investigation. Each has had his head nearly chopped off. Van Veeteren works with the local police chief Bausen, a chess player and wine connoisseur. Their staff includes the young and clever Beate Moerk, the officious but not unintelligent Kropke, and Munster, brought in from Van Veeteren's own department to assist him.
They have very few clues and no suspects. Then Moerk leaves a note that she has found something, but she disappears and is understood to have been taken by the killer. After much effort, Van Veeteren figures it all out and the cops finally close in on the house at Borkmann's point where they rescue Moerk and then arrest none other than Bausen as the killer. It turns out that his wonderful daughter descended into drug addiction and prostitution and the three men, in different ways, were involved in her decline and death. The murders were retribution.
I had some problems with this book. Van Veeteren frequently claims that he can tell the murderer if he sees him, and he dismisses various suspects and pieces of evidence out of hand, without having to give any reason except his deep experience and intuition. We, the readers, are asked to accept this as valid. And yet he spends many nights with Bausen playing chess, drinking wine, and discussing the case. Where was his intuition? Why didn't the author make something of this contradiction?
Bausen himself seems an unlikely murderer. He is a police chief after all and a highly civilized man. I can maybe accept that he knew that the men could never be punished unless he himself took action, but he should also have known that the tragedy of his daughter was not entirely due to the three men. The really difficult part however is his brutal kidnapping of Beate Moerk. She was his best detective and a person he admired and cared about. How could he have done that to her? What was his intent? Would he have killed her to avoid going to jail? If not, just what would he have done?
If Bausen had killed the three men, tried to elude capture, and then finally either left the country or confessed, I could understand that. But what he did to Moerk was the antithesis of the quest for justice that we are told is his motive for crime.
The writing was not too bad and the characters were reasonably well drawn. But the story was implausible and its presentation was highly manipulative of the reader. We hear Bausen confessing to Moerk in the darkness of his cellar where she cannot see him. The reader is not told who he is. But Moerk could not credibly have failed to recognize his voice - especially if she already had the vital clue that led to him. Why is the reader, quite literally, kept in the dark? It can only be in order to play up the surprise culprit.
The best novels aren't written that way. The story is told logically. Events are not manipulated to conceal facts from the reader that should reasonably have come out.
The book won a Swedish Crime Writers' Academy Prize for Best Novel of 1994. I guess the number of books was limited that year and they couldn't keep giving the award to the same good writers.
| Author | Greene, Graham |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 200 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 2014 |
Monsieur Querry, an English speaking architect who had achieved great fame in England, America, and Europe, has arrived at a Lepers' hospital, deep in the Belgian Congo. It is a jungle town at the end of navigability of the long river. There is nobody there except a doctor, a group of priests and nuns who operate the place, and the population of lepers - men, women and children with extensive deformities who are crippled, lonely, depressed, and unable to return to the villages of their origin.
Why did Querry come? He doesn't say, except that he has left the larger world behind and has no interest in the women, the work, the money, the life, or the fame that he had acquired. He has picked this as the furthest away place he could find, not even researching it, just picking it as the furthest available at the airport and then in the Congo. He is courteous to everyone there and lends his hands to help in any way that is requested of him, but he is not there on a mission, either from God whom he does not believe in, or in service to his fellow man. He is not especially interested in the friendship of the brothers and he rejects their characterization of him as a good man. The people he seems to relate to best are the doctor, another atheist like himself, and Deo Gratias, a young leper who has been assigned to help him. With the doctor, he can speak freely to a man of similar sensibilities and flat emotions. With Deo Gratias, there is hardly any common point of contact or communication between them except that each recognizes in the other a trustworthy and sympathetic person.
Querry's intentionally limited and circumscribed world is intruded upon by Rycker, a factory manager from down river who heard about Querry and is absolutely determined to become friends with him. Rycker is a religious believer, an oppressor of his much younger convent raised Belgian wife, and a total boor. Convincing himself that Querry is a saint, Rycker sics the yellow journalist Parkinson on him. Parkinson is a perfect cynic himself and understands that Querry is no saint, but saints sell newspapers and he writes the story that Rycker feeds him in spite of Querry's protestations. Brother Thomas at the "leperoserie" also accepts the Rycker/Parkinson story and contributes to it. When Querry goes into the jungle after Deo Gratias to save DG from his despair and desperation, the event just adds to the story being built around him.
All of this would be survivable. Querry visits Rycker to tell him how wrong he is and to demand that he, Rycker, leave him, Querry, alone. But Rycker is sick. Mme. Rycker seizes on Querry's presence and begs him to take her away, which, in some anger against her husband, he does.
It all goes wrong. Mme. Rycker turns out to be pregnant. In a display of a kind of childish innocence and selfishness, she tells her husband that Querry is the father. She knows she is lying but will not admit to the truth. It is the story that she wishes were true and in her oppressed and neurotic state, she clings to it.
Rycker arrives, drunk and armed with a gun. He shoots Querry, who dies and is buried in the cemetery. Only the doctor and some of the brothers fully understand what happened.
This was in some ways a simple book and in others quite complex. Querry seems best understood as exactly the man he said he was, a man burnt out on life and seeking only anonymity and escape, not redemption. Over time, he begins to come alive again and might perhaps find redemption in spite of himself. He might even be able to redeem the miserable Deo Gratias. But the hypocrites, neurotics and boors intervene. Querry is killed and Deo Gratias is left with nothing.
I don't know much about Greene. He converted to Catholicism in order to satisfy his to-be wife. He may have been an atheist, or he may not, or he may have gone back and forth on the issue, unable to settle it for himself. He seems to have seen both the bright and dark sides of religious people and institutions. It seems to me possible to interpret this book as taking either position, but I prefer to understand it as meaning exactly what it said - that Querry was an atheist and remained an atheist and did not seek, accept, or receive any religious redemption.
My own sensibilities are very far from Querry's. In spite of my sympathy with him, maybe even as a component of it, I cannot be as indifferent to others or to life as he was. And yet I was strongly affected by the book. The interesting characters, the doctor, the director of the hospital, Parkinson, and Querry himself, were well realized in spite of the shortness and limited setting of the novel. The less competent characters, the Ryckers, Deo Gratias, and Brother Thomas, were nevertheless intelligently developed and presented.
I found the novel quite compelling.
The Wikipedia article on Greene currently states "Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic", or even at times a "Catholic atheist".
| Author | Roberts, John Maddox |
|---|---|
| Publication | Minotaur Books |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Extras | Roman Latin glossary |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | February 2014 |
Decius Caecillius Metellus the Younger, elected member of the Commission of Twenty-Six and son of a prominent Senator, receives a report from the Captain of the vigiles in his ward in the Rome of about 70 BC. A manumitted gladiator was found strangled to death in the street the night before. It is DCM's job to investigate this and he does, tying it to the murder of foreigner at a burning warehouse at the docks who was murdered with the kind of weapon the gladiator uses, thus concluding that the gladiator was in turn murdered to keep his mouth shut.
Decius visits Paulus, a rich freedman with connections to the murdered foreigner. Then Paulus is strangled and DCM himself is attacked in his own house, knocked on the head, and an amulet from the warehouse is taken.
While investigating, DCM comes under the spell of the beautiful Claudia, sister of the not very smart but tremendously ambitious and ruthless Publius Claudius, and friend of Tigranes, a young foreign prince of Armenia who has taken sides with Rome against his own father in order to get his father's throne as a puppet of Rome. DCM spends a night of drugged sex with Claudia and her young Egyptian, acrobatic servant Chrysis.
With help from the physician Asklepiodes, and the young thug Milo, DCM unravels the whole story and traces it through Claudia to her brother and on up to the two most powerful men in Rome, the consuls Pompey and Crassus, all of whom are plotting to hold back supplies and support from the overly successful general Lucullus who looks to be about to overthrow the elder Tigranes and conquer Armenia - a prize that Crassus and Pompey covet for themselves.
In the end, DCM captures and arrests Chrysis, the actual killer of Paulus and the gladiator, but can do nothing at all to those above her who are the true perpetrators of the crimes. The best he can do is to leave Rome, actually having to escape the murderous wrath of Publius Claudius, to go to Spain as Legate to his father's governorship there.
I had imagined that Roberts was a professor of Roman history at Oxford. He includes a glossary of important Roman Latin terms at the end of the book and everything he says accords with what I know (not much to be sure) of the history of this period. I don't know where I got that idea about him but I see that I was wrong. According to the Wikipedia he is an American who was expelled from college in 1967 and joined the army to fight in Vietnam, becoming a novelist some time after he got out. He writes science fiction and fantasy as well as Roman history novels. He's one of the many authors of Conan the Barbarian series books.
The novel is fast reading though, to me, more interesting for its historical sense than for the mystery - which seemed complex and a bit muddled to me. As is usually the case, the character of DCM has some modern sensibilities in spite of clear efforts to place the man as a Roman.
What can you do? There are only a handful of writers, Thomas Mann, Robert Graves and William Makepeace Thackeray being the best ones I have read, who are able to go far beyond the limits of their contemporary consciousness.
Still, I read other books for scholarship, like the one following this (though started much before) in my reading list
| Author | Goldsworthy, Adrian Keith |
|---|---|
| Publication | New Haven and London: Yale University Press |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 583 |
| Extras | maps, chronology, glossary, bibliography, abbreviations, notes, index (some editions also have illustrations - but not this one) |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | February 2014 |
Goldsworthy relates the life of Caius Julius Caesar in a chronological progression from his youth to his assassination with a small epilogue on the events after his death.
Caesar is presented as a man of extraordinary ability, ambition, and self-confidence, but not as a man who was either an enemy of the republic or of any individual people, not even those who opposed him. He lived in an age when politics was solely (according to Goldsworthy and others) concerned with personal advancement rather than policy or party in the modern sense. Caesar aimed to achieve the highest possible honors. After his successful war in Gaul he expected to be elected Consul for a second time but was thwarted by his rivals, led especially by the other two most powerful men in the republic, Pompey and Crassus. Caesar was ultimately put in a position where he could either be completely excluded from what he believed to be not only his life's goal but his due after his service to Rome, or he could cross the Rubicon, forcing his opponents either to accept him or to launch a civil war - which they decided to do.
G argues that Caesar didn't want the civil war and didn't really want to exclude, and certainly not kill, Pompey (Crassus had already managed to get himself killed by invading Parthia at the head of an army from the territory he governed in Syria.) Caesar made multiple attempts to prevent the war and to resolve it on terms that would be favorable to himself but not punishing to anyone else. Unlike Sulla before him, he took no revenge on his enemies and only killed them or sacked towns when he felt it was necessary to demonstrate his resolve in the face of repeated opposition.
His military prowess was formidable. He understood the arts of war. He understood the men who served under him. He knew how to win and hold the loyalty of his men, to stimulate their courage and fighting spirit, and to lead them in battle. He created the best conditions for victory that he could in every battle that he fought, but also took chances when it seemed to him necessary - using his own qualities and those of his men to win the day by hard fighting when strategy alone could not do it. His conquest of Gaul and his raids into Germany and Britain introduced the efficient and effective Roman system of warfare into territory dominated by warlike peoples who initially disdained the Romans as men of small stature who could not stand up to them, but soon found out how wrong they were. Galsworthy argues that Gaul should not be seen as a peaceful land taken over by an imperialist conqueror. It was a land boiling with iron age conflicts and migrations of peoples, and a source of raids into Roman territory that would continue when and wherever Rome was unable to stop them.
G covers Caesar's life from the beginning right up to the Ides of March.
This was an impressive, well documented biography with careful attention to delineating established facts from speculation, both modern and ancient.
It has been said that Theodor Mommsen only published Roman histories up to the time of Caesar because he regarded Caesar as a personal hero whom he could not write about objectively. Perhaps G also saw Caesar as something of a hero, though it appears to me that he made every effort to be objective and that he was largely successful. The book is also a well balanced account of Caesar's life and accomplishments. He discusses military, political and personal affairs in almost equal depth and gives us quite a bit of detail, where detail is known.
I liked this book.
See also Mommsen's History of Rome, written up as 2014-05.06.
| Author | Atkins, Ace |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2014 |
Quinn Colson, army ranger back from Afghanistan to visit his mother in the fictional Tibbehah County in North Mississippi, is told that his favorite uncle Hamp has committed suicide and left his house and land to Quinn. Then he learns that the slimy Johnny Stagg, owner of titty bars and other unsavory businesses, is claiming that Hamp owed him money and the house and land belong to him, not to Quinn.
Before long Quinn is confronted by a total mess in the county. A gang of meth makers and dealers led by racist wacko Gowrie is terrorizing local people. Young, pregnant, and broke Lena has come to town looking for Charley Booth, the boy who promised to marry her and then abandoned her but is now in jail. Quinn's sister Caddy has left her little bastard boy with her mother while she lives a foolish life in Memphis bars. And Wesley Ruth, the new sheriff and old friend of Quinn is curiously passive in the face of all the shit going down.
Quinn won't stand for it. He uses his army ranger fighting skills to beat or shoot the various bad guys with the help of the one armed Boom, his big, black army buddy, and deputy sheriff Lillie. His old girlfriend Ana Lee and her husband Dr. Luke also help out. In the end, Wesley betrays him but is killed by Gowrie, the meth gang is broken up, young Ditto takes over the care of Lena, and Quinn wipes the floor with Gowrie.
Back at Fort Benning he is visited by Lillie, come to try to convince him to leave the army and run for county sheriff. He considers it.
I'm not a big fan of superhero books. I do believe that men like Quinn Colson exist. I don't believe that they can wipe the floor with their armed opponents as easily as Quinn does, or that there are men like Boom who will come out with guns and shoot people because their old buddy says to do it. Or that they can get out of any scrape as he does, or if shot, can recover and go on as he does.
Or maybe I do believe that such things can happen, but don't believe that they make good reading. I can be interested in people who are more heroic and competent than myself, but I'm not interested in cardboard tough guys. The whole thing left me a little cold.
Atkins' other books, at least the ones I read, were different. This one is a formula book, clearly intended to setup a cast of characters for a series. I can't complain about that. It serves a need. No doubt it will entertain and satisfy many readers and provide a steady income stream for the author - a good deal all around. But I think I'll be looking for different kinds of books.
The audiobook narrator of this story, Jeff Woodman, did a truly remarkable job. I am always astonished at how successfully (I started to say "easily") he and others like him can produce so many voices, ages, and accents, for both men and women, and with so much variety and so much verisimilitude.
| Author | Remarque, Erich Maria |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Lindley, Denver |
| Publication | New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1939 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Extras | "Other Books by This Author", "About the author" |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | March 2014 |
In the 1930's many Jews, political opponents of Nazism, and people who were victimized by Nazis who coveted their businesses or possessions, were expelled or escaped from Germany with no passports and no identification papers.
Ludwig Kern and a man named Steiner are rousted from a refugee rooming house in Austria in 1938. Kern is a young man of 21 whose father is a Jew. He and his father were robbed of their home and business and expelled from Germany with no papers and no passports. Kern hasn't seen his father in some time. Steiner is older, a political refugee who was involved in some anti-Nazi affair but has now escaped from a concentration camp and made it over the border. He is also among the growing number of refugees with no passports or papers, illegal and unwelcome in every country they manage to sneak into. The two are put in jail for two weeks, then expelled to Czechoslovakia, where they sneak across the border. Kern then heads for Prague while Steiner sneaks back into Austria.
Kern meets Ruth Holland, another young refugee. They are attracted to each other, eventually expelled from Czechoslovakia and are together again in Austria. They meet Steiner again and other experienced refugees and manage to get low paid work, hiding from the authorities, threatened and exploited by Nazi sympathizers, living on the edge of survival. Each country's police, some with malice, some apologetically, take them to the border at night and send them across. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and finally, the place they most hope to reach, France, where people and police are the most tolerant.
The breaking point comes for Steiner when he receives a letter from his wife Marie. She is dying of cancer in Berlin. She had planned for her letter to reach him after her death but it arrives too early. Steiner calls friends in Berlin and finds out that she is in hospital, still alive, with a few more days to live. All of the members of the refugee community beg Steiner not to go but he is determined to see her. He goes. The supercilious nurse on Marie's floor figures out that he must be her escaped prisoner husband and turns him in. He is arrested by one of the concentration camp guards who smacks his lips at the thought of the tortures that he will apply to his old prisoner.
Steiner makes a deal with the judge to offer up the names of all of his political allies if the judge allows him to stay with his wife until she dies. The judge agrees. Steiner tells his wife that he is safe, there was an amnesty. She dies in peace. Then, as Steiner is escorted down the hall of the fifth floor of the hospital he suddenly turns on the sadistic guard and throws himself and the guard out of the window.
Back in France, the friends of Steiner take the money he left them and buy tickets for two to Mexico, taking advantage of an offer by the Mexican government to accept 150 refugees. Old Father Moritz Rosenthal, the dean of the refugee community, dies peacefully, dreaming of admittance across the border to heaven and an end of his pain and his flight. Kern and Ruth have the tickets thrust upon them. They board the ship to take them away from Europe and into the new world.
I understand that this book was written and published after the Anschluss, but before the start of the war. It is a small book in the sense that it concentrates on just a handful of people, Jews and non-Jews, who, for the Jews at least, are guilty of no other crime than being born. It has no statistics on the number of people in these straits and no information about the ultimate fate of most of them which, no doubt, was to be murdered in the Holocaust if they didn't die of starvation and disease before then.
Many decent people are portrayed in the ordinary populations. There are those who help out, cops who look the other way, people who provide a meal, a bed, a handout, or a hiding place, to a refugee. But they are the exceptions. Most people are just uninvolved. The problems of the refugees are of no interest to them. They are not necessarily antisemitic or even unsympathetic. They just have their own problems and their own lives to pursue. They are still living in lands of apartments, jobs, restaurants, friends, national identity and stability.
There are many fine scenes in the novel. Some are terrible scenes where Kern is ripped off by a Nazi, or by a thief who laughs in his face and offers him half a sandwich after stealing all of Kern's money after Kern had given him a bed for the night. And on the other side, there is a scene where Steiner convinces the little Austrian Nazi that he, Steiner, is actually an important Nazi Party figure and gets the jerk to make a big contribution to the Party.
It was a perceptive, informative, and deeply sympathetic book.
Is the situation of "illegal" Central Americans in the U.S. similar to that of the refugees in this novel? Are they the new Jews of America? Perhaps their situation is not quite as bad, or perhaps it is. I don't know. However I know that this book has increased my sympathy for them.
Writing this in Switzerland where he had fled from Nazi persecution took some courage and a lot of caring on Remarque's part. I expect that this was not a book that the larger book buying community would have purchased. I have not read any Remarque in many years. I had forgotten how good a writer he was and how deeply humane.
Now, in the age of Trump and ICE (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency) the lessons of this book seem particularly pertinent to the situation of "undocumented" immigrants in the United States. Many have no home and no welcome in the countries they are deported to. Many have close family members in the U.S. whom they will be unable to see. Many do not speak any language other than English. I would like those who hate these people to read a book like this. I would like a writer of Remarque's ability to write the story of the modern "undocumented".
| Author | Sebald, W.G. |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Bell, Anthea |
| Publication | Modern Library, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Extras | photos, Introduction by James Wood, author biography |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | March 2014 |
An unnamed person narrates the story of his meetings with Jacques Austerlitz. Austerlitz is a professor of architecture who is studying large buildings, especially railway stations, in Europe. The narrator meets him in a station in Belgium in 1967. They talk. A. relates the story of his life, which he continues in greater depth as they meet again years later, at first entirely by chance but eventually by mutual agreement.
A. was a Jewish child in Prague who, at age 4-1/2 in 1938, is sent away to Belgium and then to London by his parents who fear for his safety. He is adopted by a Welsh minister and his wife who bring him up in a strict and cold Christian home where he forgets his past and only relearns it when the minister's wife dies and the minister is incapacitated. His school principal tells him his real name and the truth of his past.
A's real parents have disappeared in the Holocaust. He tries to find them. He goes to Prague and meets a woman who was his next door neighbor and baby sitter. She tells him that his father went to Paris but his opera singer mother was arrested before she could join him and neither has been heard from again. He knows that his mother was sent to the concentration camp at Terezin (Theresienstadt) but no trace of her could be found after that. His father apparently fled Paris but no further trace of him could be found either.
A. was effectively adrift, unable to find his family, unable to establish an identity for himself. He meets a woman who likes him and he likes her, but he is unable to overcome his inner demons and allow her to be close to him, even though they both want it. She leaves him and looks for love elsewhere.
The end of the book finds A alone and bewildered. He has been unable to follow the clues any further and has nowhere else to go.
Austerlitz lost his childhood family and environment. He was set into a new one that, while not abusive, had nothing for him and left him with nothing when he left it. He attempted to live on his own but, although he had a successful professional academic career, he was unable to establish a personal life. Driven to recreate his family of origin, he failed. The failure was not just an inability to reconnect with his parents, but an inability even to find out what happened to them. All was gone.
The development of this story is related with considerable subtlety. A's monologue is quiet, obsessive, depressed, and sometimes agonized. It is delivered in a flat style. The narrator proceeds for a while, giving us A's words as if we were hearing them directly from A himself. But then the narrator steps in at highly regular intervals with the expression, "said Austerlitz". Sometimes it is once removed with "said {somebody} said Austerlitz". The refrain seems to keep A at some arms length from us. We are not allowed to immerse ourselves in a narrationless story but must constantly be reminded of the presence of the narrator and the subjectivity of the story given us by Austerlitz. The full and objective truth of his life and surroundings are as inaccessible to us as to him.
The novel is very readable. We want to know what is happening to this man. We want him to find out what happened to him and to resolve the obscurities of his life. If that is impossible, then we want him to give up his obsessions and get on with a new life for himself, preferably with the woman whom we meet only briefly but like. But it isn't possible. Too much has been lost and cannot be recovered. A. is, in a different way, as much a victim of the Holocaust as his parents.
Sebald died in an auto accident, believed to have been caused by an aneurysm (a blood clot that incapacitated and probably killed him while he was driving) very shortly after the publication of this book. He was only 57 years old and was already a very important writer, mentioned for the Nobel Prize for literature. It was a great loss.
| Author | Douglas, Kirk |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road Integrated Media |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 242 |
| Extras | photos |
| Genres | Biography |
| Keywords | Movies |
| When Read | March 2014 |
Douglas begins his account with a discussion of McCarthyism and of the Hollywood blacklist that ravaged the movie industry in the 1950's, sending talented men to jail and destroying the careers of many others. D was on the outside of that process. He was not called upon to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and did not get into trouble, but he was nervous for himself and angered by what was happening to others. His real name was Issur Danielovitch. His family were Russian Jews who spoke Yiddish at home. He grew up under the name Izzy Demsky, Demsky being a name that his family took at some point in his childhood. As both a Russian and a Jew he would have been an obvious target for the likes of McCarthy.
The production of the film was deeply affected by the environment of fear created in the movie industry. The author of the novel on which Spartacus was based, Howard Fast, was in prison for contempt of Congress when he began writing the novel and had been a member of the Communist Party. The theme of the story, a revolt of the oppressed against authority, was considered subversive and Communistic.
Douglas wanted to make this film. He invested pretty much all of his own money into it under the name of "Bryna" Films, Bryna being his mother's name. He eventually also interested Universal Studios, which was then much smaller than the largest production company, United Artists, and had never made a big budget film on the scale of Spartacus. This would be their first.
Fast was approached for the rights but said he would grant them only if he were made the screenwriter for the film. Douglas and others were dubious. The novel was not written in a cinematic way and Fast had no reputation as a screenwriter. According to D, he had an inflated view of himself as a writer and was unwilling to listen to criticism.
With only a few weeks before the deadline for presenting the script to Universal, the company hired blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, the best of the Hollywood writers, to rewrite the script in secret. T transformed the story, beginning not with a reminiscence by Crassus but with an image of Spartacus, subsisting as an animal, slaving in the Libyan mines, seething and resentful, selected precisely for his savagery by the owner of a school for gladiators. It was a superior script, much admired by Universal, who were told that the author was another man. Admitting that Trumbo wrote it would have killed the movie.
There are many fascinating behind the scenes details here about the sausage factory that is the movie business. Egos abound. Laurence Olivier, asked to act and direct the film wasn't really wanted to direct it or to act the star part which he imagined they were recruiting him for. It was good luck that he had other commitments and could only do the Crassus part that he was really wanted for. Olivier's wife was a bipolar person who, in front of Douglas and another man asked, "Why don't you fuck me any more?" Then she turned to Douglas and asked, "Will you fuck me Kirk?" Charles Laughton was constantly competing with Peter Ustinov and others on the set. Ustinov kept re-writing his own lines - mostly very well. The original young German actress chosen to play the female lead Varinia proved to be not up to the part and was dismissed in tears. The original director was dismissed and replaced with Stanley Kubrick, a young and relatively unknown man who turned out to be both brilliant and cold blooded. When it looked like Trumbo would be exposed as the writer, Kubrick volunteered to lie and say that he was the writer - in the interest of the film of course. D came near to punching him out.
Douglas himself did whatever he thought needed to be done to make the film. He lied to Universal. He lied to others. He competed ruthlessly against another studio that was working on the same story. He ran up the budget from the original $4 million to $12 million at Universal's expense. He paid off dictator Francisco Franco's wife to get Franco to allow the Spanish Army to be used in the film.
What emerged from the process was necessarily a compromise. D fulfilled his promise to give Trumbo screen credit for the film, ending the blacklist, but he was not able to tell the story in a completely free way. The Hollywood censors took a whack at it, eliminating some homosexual overtures made by Olivier to Tony Curtis. They made other cuts to sex scenes. Universal took many whacks at it, as their contract allowed. The slave revolution theme was downplayed to some degree, becoming a struggle for freedom, but not a struggle to overthrow the slave state. Even Franco took a whack at it, demanding that no Spanish Army soldiers be shown being killed by slaves. It would demean the honor of the Spanish Army.
But it did get produced and was a big blockbuster hit, recovering the full $12 million spent on it and much more.
I saw this film when it was released in 1960. Alan Hyman and I went to see it. We loved it. Later, I read Fast's novel.
This book was fascinating too. I can't recall having read any Hollywood biographies or movie making stories before, but I was drawn in very quickly by the largeness of the actions, the backstage gossip, the politics, and the personality of Kirk Douglas, a larger than life figure.
Douglas more or less alludes to his having help in writing the book. I should think that, at the least, he had a research assistant who dug up all of the old records and laid them out to refresh D's memory. Nevertheless, it's an impressive and amazingly lucid effort by a 95 year old man.
At the time of this writing, Kirk Douglas is still alive, still living with his wife of 60 years, and is 97 years old. More power to them both. May they continue on and on.
There is a fascinating description in this book of a scene in the movie in which Spartacus cuts off the arm of a Roman soldier. To create the scene Kubrik hired a one armed man, had him fitted with a prosthetic arm holding a sword, gave a sharp sword to Douglas, and filmed him cutting off the arm. Douglas was very nervous about swinging the sword for fear of hurting the guy, but he did it. Then Kubrik demanded a retake with another prosthetic arm. If I remember correctly, Douglas cut off this second arm under protest. When Kubrik demanded a third take, D absolutely refused.
I found the film on Netflix and watched it again. The arm scene was very short, just a few seconds. It was fascinating to watch it, knowing what was really going on.
| Author | Burke, James Lee |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1989 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2014 |
This was the third published Dave Robicheaux novel. Dave is still working in his fishing business on the bayou, missing his dead wife Annie, struggling hard to stay on the wagon, and raising the five or six year old Alafair. Annie and his dead father visit him at night, in his dreams. Then he gets a visit from Dixie Lee Pugh, an old college roommate, alcoholic, and former country music star.
Dixie tells Dave a story about overhearing two men he worked with talking about a murder they committed. Dave is dragged into investigating the two men and soon runs afoul of them. They send him an anonymous letter threatening to torture and kill his child and that sets him off. He pays them a visit, beats them badly with a chain, and is arrested afterward, not just for beating them, but for the death of one man whom Dave realizes was killed by the other but who Dave is accused of killing. Out on bond and looking at many years in the Angola prison, he goes to Montana to try to solve the original murders Dixie reported to him, thereby discrediting the real killer and going free. Montana is where the rest of the story takes place.
In Montana, Dave meets his old friend Cletus Purcel, battles Sally Dee, a gangster who sends a scary killer after him, discovers another murder, helps Dixie get off the booze, and finds the bodies of the murdered men, enabling the police to arrest the really bad guy and get Dave off the hook. In the final scene, Dave warns Sally Dee that someone (Cletus actually) put sand in his private plane's fuel tank but smug Sally says that's impossible and tells Dave that after he lands in Vegas he's going to talk to some people who will talk to some people who will come and kill Dave when he least expects it. Then Sally takes off and crashes in a fireball killing him, his pilot, and his two bodyguards - everyone who knows Dave and could finger him to the mob.
Dave goes back to his bait and boat business and brings Alafair home to Louisiana.
There are a number of attractions that keep me reading these stories. One is the flawed but fine character of Dave Robicheaux. He's an alcoholic who has to battle his addiction every day. He has a terrible temper. When angered, the best he can do is walk away and the worst is to beat someone half to death. Smoothing things over is not an option. He can be pretty rigid. But he's also a man who wants to do the right thing and will try to do it even at great cost to himself. After beating up Sally when he could have defused the provocation, or at least driven away, and incurring Sally's undying hatred, he then offers to save the man from Clete's planned revenge. Believing that Dixie Lee dragged him into all of this mud, he nevertheless takes Dixie into his home when the man has nowhere to go, He recognizes him as a human being who is not inferior to himself.
Maybe Dave's dreams, bordering on hallucinations, of his dead wife and dead father are a bit crazy, but they are not unbelievable, or at least Burke makes them believable. And they are not unattractive. He was not the best of husbands or the best of sons. He blames himself for that. He recognizes his manias and his flaws. He believes in God and the Church. He is humble in his own idiosyncratic way.
I also like Burke's lyrical descriptions of the landscapes and the weather. Admittedly, they are over the top. But they fit with the character of Robicheaux. They work for me.
Finally, I like the stories. These are stories of flawed humans at all levels - the good guys, the bad guys, the cops, all of the men, though maybe not so much any of the women. The stories are interesting and engage my attention.
| Editor | Brockman, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2012 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Cognitive science; Essays |
| When Read | March 2014 |
This is a large collection of small essays by many different authors on the general question of "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit?"
Brockman, a publisher and editor, asked this question of various prominent thinkers in many different areas - physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, and social sciences. They came up with wildly variant answers. One talked about how better understanding of the simple concept of magnitudes and powers of ten would enable people to better understand the very large and the very small. One talked about "deep time", and recognizing that when we talk about evolution over millions and billions of years, we have to think on a very different scale from our ordinary notions of time. There are also good essays on bias, certainty, probability, common logical errors, mind, cause and effect, and many other topics.
Brockman organized these by theme, bringing together essays that addressed the same general issues - sometimes shedding interesting light on essays that took different looks at the issue.
I thought some of these essays were not very good. I wondered if Brockman found them better than I did or if, having induced these people to write for him, felt an obligation to publish what they wrote. However quite a few of them were very good and some were really excellent.
Having these essays read to me while I drove my car was not the right way to approach them. It would have been better to read the physical (or electronic) book, skipping through the uninteresting ones and reading or re-reading the interesting ones more carefully. However I did think that I got benefit from them as I listened.
| Author | Klass, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Young adult; Chess |
| When Read | March 2014 |
Daniel "Patzer-face" Pratzer is invited by the two smart, high-powered, athletic, popular, leaders of the high school chess club to join them and their fathers in a father-son tournament in New York City. Daniel can't understand why. He's not that good a player and his father doesn't play at all. But they tell him he's wrong. He sucks, but his father was a grandmaster - which is unbelievable news to Daniel. He also learns that the tournament takes the five best scores from the six team members in each round, which means that Daniel can lose every single game but if his high powered team mates win theirs they'll still win the championship.
But what is the story with Daniel's dad? "What was there to know about Morris Pratzer except that he was the shortest, baldest, and no doubt poorest father to ever send a child to Loon Lake Academy? He was practically mortgaging our house so that his only son could go to this fancy private school." In fact, it turns out, Morris has a deep, dark secret. Reaching Grandmaster status at age 16 he was so obsessed with chess that he attempted to strangle an opponent in one match and to commit suicide afterward. He quit chess in order to preserve his sanity and have a chance at a halfway normal life. He has concealed all of this from his family, who know nothing of his chess playing past.
Morris goes with Daniel to the tournament and meets his old nemesis, George Liszt, who uses every psychological trick to unbalance and defeat Morris right up into the final game for the championship.
Over the course of the tournament, Daniel meets Liu Hong, a pretty girl, great singer, and class A chess player. He commiserates with Brittney, the beautiful young girlfriend of Brad, the team leader and a total asshole. He improves his chess under his father's tutelage. He beats a dot com billionaire who disdained Daniel and lost because he didn't take him seriously enough - and who offers Daniel money to throw the game. And he watches his father come back from the brink of a total nervous breakdown to beat George Liszt in the final seconds of the championship game.
It all winds up with Daniel having a new pride and respect in his dad, a wonderful girlfriend in Liu, and new respect in the school.
This book is written for middle school and young high school students. There is no sex or violence. Family relationships are presented from the point of view of a young teenager with a very ordinary father and mother and annoying little sister, but are developed in such a way as to teach the teenager to understand the hidden strengths of his family and to appreciate them more. It argues for the value of the nice guy over the popular guy, the rich guy, and the bully. It caters to the dream of the ordinary kid for a heroic Dad, a pretty and nice girlfriend, and more respect from his peers.
That doesn't sound very appealing to an adult but I admit to liking the book. It had as much or more chess in it than any other novel about chess that I've read - though I haven't read many and don't think there are many to read. It was a quick read. There was nothing really offensive in it. It had some clever turns and some nice sentiments. I would have loved the book when I was 12 years old.
| Author | Parkinson, Cyril Northcote |
|---|---|
| Publication | Ithaca, New York: McBooks Press, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Extras | maps |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Napoleonic era |
| When Read | March 2014 |
Young Richard Delancey leaves home on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel, arriving in England in the middle of a seaman's riot. He joins in, is arrested, and is able to escape punishment only by volunteering for the Navy as a sort of sub-midshipman, which he would have liked to do anyway.
He is sent to New York where the American Revolution is in progress. Having some education and a distant relationship to "gentlemen" and to a prominent family in New York, he is made a midshipman and serves as a liaison to the New York upper class. At some point, after the French have entered the war, he is sent home on leave and helps defend the island of Jersey against a French raid, learning along the way about what it means to be an intelligent officer and what some of the unintelligent ones were like.
The end of the story finds him in Gibraltar, which is under siege by French and Spanish forces. He leads a scouting party that learns the disposition of Spanish floating batteries, and participates in fighting them in a big battle as commander of a gunboat - a small rowing boat with a single gun mounted in the bow. He distinguishes himself by intelligence, courage and determination and, having six years now in the service, is promoted to lieutenant.
English Napoleonic sea stories have been an important subgenre, perhaps created by C.S. Forester. Parkinson, Alexander Kent, Dudley Pope, Dewey Lambdin, Julian Stockwin, John Woodman, and Patrick O'Brian are the major writers in this group, but there are probably others. I don't know if more books are still being written, or whether interest in these books is dying out.
They were very interesting to me at one time. I read all or almost all of the Forester novels and many of the Alexander Kent and some others. It was an interest of mine since childhood when I was much taken with historical stories of the American Navy in the early wars against Barbary pirates and against the English in 1812.
This particular example has relatively little sea-going character. The main actions are all on land or on boats near harbors. There are no great storms or sea battles, no feats of navigation, no real stories of life at sea. However the story was not badly done. As a person with a natural interest in the period and scene, the writing was acceptable enough.
Parkinson was a military officer and a professional historian. He wrote quite a few books of naval history, mostly concerning the Napoleonic era, and quite a few others as well, some with intriguing titles like Parkinsanities and The Fur-lined Mousetrap.
| Author | Black, Benjamin, 1945 |
|---|---|
| Author | Banville, John, 1945 |
| Publication | Audio Renaissance, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 369 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2014 |
Quirke (no first name given that I can recall), works as chief pathologist in Holy Mary Hospital in Dublin, Ireland. He comes into his office late one night to discover his brother-in-law, obstetrician Malachy Griffin, filling out papers for a dead woman brought into the morgue. The woman, Christine Falls, is noted as dying of an embolism but Quirke, looking over the body, discovers that she actually died in childbirth. Later, the body, together with some records, disappears from the morgue. Quirke questions Mal about it but Mal tells him it's none of his business, it's more important than he knows, and he should just back off and leave it alone.
But Quirke can't leave it alone. He finds out where Christine Falls was staying when she died and interviews Dolly Moran, a woman who cared for her. Dolly kept a diary of the whole business and tells Quirke of its existence but won't give him any more information. Quirke tells Mal about it and, the next day, Dolly is tortured to death, obviously to get the diary, which she has already mailed to someone - we know not who. After Quirke goes to Mal's father (and Quirke's own stepfather), retired Judge Garrett Griffin, the man Quirke most respects in the world, Quirke himself is beaten up and partially crippled by two thugs, the same men that killed Dolly and had later warned Quirke to butt out of the business. A police detective investigates but Quirke lies to him and later the detective is himself warned off the case.
There are several other threads to the story. Quirke was married to Delia, the sister of Mal's wife Sarah. Delia died in childbirth. Quirke was actually in love with Sarah but, apparently, Delia would sleep with him and Sarah would not and things worked out so that Sarah wound up with Quirke's upright step-brother Mal and Mal wound up with Delia. There is also Mal and Sarah's obstreperous daughter Phoebe, a young woman of 19-20 who is finding her way to adulthood in her own way. Finally, there is a story in Boston involving Andy Stafford, a bullying truck driver and chauffeur whose young wife adopts Christine Falls baby, but Andy, coming home drunk one night, more or less accidentally kills the infant by shaking it when it cries.
Other parts to the story: Josh Crawford, the rich father of Delia and Sarah in Boston is running, with Judge Griffin, an operation to send infants from Ireland to Boston where they are brought up by childless couples and recruited to become priests and nuns. Phoebe turns out actually to be the child of Quirke and Delia. Old Crawford dies a natural death. Quirke begs Crawford's widow to end the baby transfer operation. Sarah is the recipient of Dolly Moran's diary. She gives it to Quirke and Quirke gives it to the police detective, who may or may not use it to expose Judge Griffin as the real father of Christine Falls' baby.
"Benjamin Black" is a pen name used by John Banville, a Booker prize winning author writing his first mystery.
This is a well written bad story. It is well written in its characterizations of Quirke, Phoebe, Andy, and most of the others. It is a bad story in that, to my mind at least, it made no sense.
Why is the baby transfer operation such a secret? What is wrong with finding foster parents for orphans and for fatherless babies, unwanted by their mothers? Are they somehow forced to become priests and nuns? If so, there's no indication of how, or even how it would be possible.
I can understand why Judge Griffin concealed his affair with the young Christine Falls. But why did he send bullies to beat up and ultimately kill Dolly Moran? Why did his son Mal conceal this and conceal it from Quirke? Why did Griffin, who says that he regarded Quirke and not Mal as his real son, send, or even allow, the bullies to beat up and cripple Quirke? Why did Mal keep silent about that?
Why did Quirke lie to the detective? He thought he was protecting Mal. Okay. But when murder is committed, and then when he himself suffers a vicious assault, why did he still lie?
Why, when Quirke tells Griffin and no one else that Dolly was killed and Mal had to be involved, does he not understand after his own victimization that Griffin is also involved? Why does he make himself a target? Why doe he talk openly to the guilty people while lying to the police? Why is this apparently highly intelligent man acting so stupidly? Why is a story made so plain to the readers not perceived by the central character until so much damage has occurred?
I don't deny that such things can happen. If Black/Banville were pressed to explain it I'm sure he could concoct an implausible but not impossible theory to account for everything. But that's not what mystery stories demand. As Aristotle said, drama has to be more truthful than real life. It has to penetrate through the absurdly random events of reality and give us what ought to have happened, what would have happened if the story had been allowed to run its course, free of random events.
All in all, I believe this to be an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful novel.
| Author | Albom, Mitch |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | April 2014 |
Mitch Albom was a student of Sociology professor Morrie Schwartz at Brandeis University. Morrie was his favorite professor. He called him Coach. They had some out of classroom meetings where they discussed philosophical and practical issues of life.
Sixteen years later, Albom turned on Nightline with Ted Koppel and saw Koppel interview Morrie about his approaching death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He called him on the phone and was immediately remembered as a favorite student. The two arranged to meet at Morrie's home in New York on a Tuesday. For some time thereafter, up until Morrie's death, they met, always on Tuesdays, though not every week. MA would bring delicatessen food (which it turned out later MS could no longer eat) and they would talk about life, death, family, work, and the meaning of it all. MA brought a tape recorder to the sessions and later published this book with transcripts and his own commentary.
MS was visibly weaker at each session. He lost the ability to move around in his chair, to go to the bathroom unattended, to chew solid food, to move his arms and hands more than a bit and, eventually, at the end, the ability to breathe. However his mind remained clear right to the end and he remained philosophical about his fate and still very interested in others and in helping others.
MS was a truly fine fellow. He struck me as a man who was confident of his intellectual ability and yet still curiously modest. He believed in learning and he believed in love. He gave generously of himself to all. His appearance on Nightline was something of a sensation and resulted in his receiving letters from people all over the country. He did his best to respond to them, always trying to give comfort as well as advice to the many unfortunate people who saw him as a man who could understand and sympathize with their situation and give them advice. He asked that "A teacher to the end" be put on his tombstone.
MA did a fine job with this book. If he thought that MS was saying something unclear, wrong, or self-contradictory, he didn't hesitate to raise questions. MS treated all such questions fairly and non-defensively, being perfectly willing to qualify or even recant something he said if MA raised a good point.
The book was a best seller and brought in a lot of money. Much, or perhaps all, of the profit went to Morrie's family and helped to pay the very high costs of care for his final illness.
| Author | Darwin, Charles |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 1839 |
| Extras | Additional material by another member of the expedition |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Natural history |
| When Read | April 2014 |
Darwin joined the Beagle as a naturalist and intellectual companion for Captain Robert Fitz Roy and the ship's officers for a voyage around the world departing England on December 27, 1831 and arriving home October 2, 1836. He was invited on the voyage based on a recommendation from John Stevens Henslow, Darwin's professor at Cambridge University. Information in the Wikipedia article indicates that he spent 39 months of the time of the voyage on land and the remaining 18 months at sea.
The account was published in 1839. It contains much material that likely did not come entirely from Darwin's notebooks - such as exact Latin names of genera and species of the many plants, animals, and fossils he encountered and collected on the voyage. These were apparently investigated with the aid of experts back in England after D's return.
The voyage includes significant stops in the Canaries, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, St. Helena, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, Peru, the Galapagos, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and a number of other places. There are extensive observations of geology, zoology, botany, and also of the human societies that he encountered in each place.
D's observations were very acute. He commented on layering of the soil and rocks and geologic uplifts and subsidences. He observed animal behavior - where birds and reptiles laid their eggs, what they did when in fear or stress, how they behaved in groups, the keenness of their sight and hearing, their intelligence. He dissected many of them and reports what he found in their stomachs - demonstrating that some reptiles thought to be dangerous carnivores were actually harmless herbivores. He compared the extant animals and plants with fossils found nearby and speculated on what might have happened to the extinct species. He considered altitude, temperature, moisture, and other factors in his speculations on why some animals were found in some places and not others.
The observations on society included the European colonists in South America and the Pacific, some on black slaves in Brazil, and on native peoples in Argentina, Tierra del Fuego (whom he considered the absolute bottom baseline for a people with no useful culture), Tahiti (with people he considered to be very highly cultured), New Zealand (low cultures again), Australia and South Africa.
At the end of the book a long essay by Captain Fitz Roy is reproduced offering his own analysis of how what he learned in the voyage establishes the literal truth of the biblical story of Noah.
The book was published in 1839 with a second edition in 1845. I don't know which edition was used in this audio version. Even in 1839 D may have been thinking about the theory of evolution and he surely was in 1845. It's hard to tell from the book what his views were or how far they had progressed. Downloading and searching the second edition from the Gutenberg, I find two references to a "creative force" but none to a creator and I found no references to God that are not conventional utterances like "Thank God", or references to the beliefs of local people. I conclude that Darwin was already a skeptic.
What struck me about the narrative are the breadth and depth of Darwin's scientific understanding, the keenness of his curiosity, and his remarkable ability to deduce the existence of larger and more general patterns in specific and concrete observations that he made. He saw by examining geological rock strata and fossil shells on land, that land had at some time elevated. He actually observed some elevation during an earthquake in Chile. He also determined that land had subsided in other areas as evidenced by coral atolls in which a ring of coral had built up around empty ocean that must once have had an island. What was special in his intelligence beyond making the observations was an attempt to understand how the two phenomena were related and what the world wide patterns of elevation and subsidence were. His theories were limited by the lack of information available at the time, but not limited by any lack of reasoning power or scientific imagination.
A comparison of Darwin's and Fitz Roy's accounts is very interesting. Fitz Roy saw the hand of God everywhere, but it was by no means a stupid or dogmatic book. He adduced all sorts of scientific evidence (much of it now known to be quite false) to justify the biblical account. For example, he held that water was highly compressible so that at such and such a depth the density of the water is 27 times what it is at the surface. Therefore some of the incompressible objects such as stones, shells, and even iron artifacts, must be floating at various depths and not accumulating at the bottom. In fact, according to the Wikipedia, at a depth of 4,000 meters, water is only compressed 1.8%.
My favorite of Fitz Roy's efforts is his attempt to explain why the animals on the ark did not all eat each other. He argues that the animals were probably very young, before they reached the age at which predation becomes possible. The explanation piles absurdity upon absurdity, but it is still to Fitz Roy's credit that he considered the argument against the Bible as requiring a logical answer.
Darwin's work is nothing like anything in Fitz Roy's essay. It is an enlightening record of a very fine mind at work.
| Author | Vargas Llosa, Mario |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Kolovakos, Gregory; Christ, Ronald |
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 243 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2014 |
In 1956 Captain Pantaleon Pantoja (or Panta or Pantita) of the Quartermaster Corps, husband of Pocha (or Pochita), and son of Mother Leonor, is brought to Iquitos in the Amazon jungle of Peru for a special, top secret assignment. Rapes of local women by Peruvian Army soldiers had reached alarming proportions and Captain Pantoja was given the special assignment of stopping it. He was to do this in maximum secrecy. No one was to know of his mission.
Precisely what was the mission? It transpires that the mission is to set up a Special Service for Garrisons, Frontier and Related Installations (SSGFRI). It takes a while before we realize that the Special Service will solve the problem by creating a mobile whore house to service the soldiers' needs.
Panta is a model soldier. That was why he was chosen. He approaches the problem with superb efficiency. He calculates how many minutes it takes for a "specialist" to perform a "servicing" for a soldier and works out ways to make the process faster and more satisfactory for all. He is assigned a boat to take the specialists up and down the rivers, and an airplane to fly them to more remote Army, Navy and Air Force bases. He hires a Madam and a couple of men from one of the local houses of prostitution to work as sub-managers. He buys pornography to loan to the men waiting on line for servicing after figuring out that it helps them to get ready and finish more quickly, allowing each specialist to perform more servicings in a day. He is efficient with labor, with supplies, and in personnel management. He works out ways to handle the fact that certain specialists, such as the Brazilian and Knockers are in high demand and others are in lower demand. The Madam no longer has to pay most of her profits to the police. The women no longer have to turn their earnings over to pimps, or fear violence from pimps or customers, or worry about where their next customer will cove from. The customers are happy. The employees are happy. The Madam and her men are happy.
But the operation is too successful. Sinchi, the corrupt talk radio host in Iquitos demands a cut of the proceeds and leads a campaign against "Pantiland" when Panta won't give it to him. The Chaplain at the Army base is outraged by the program and resigns in frustration. Lower ranking officers at the bases want to get serviced too. Local men in Iquitos demand that they also be admitted into the houses. Despite all of Panta's efforts, the operation becomes common knowledge and Pocha too finds out - leaving Panta and taking their baby with her to Lima. Panta is left at his off-base home (he is not allowed to wear a uniform or live on the base) with his mother.
Apart from this main story, a parallel story develops about a religious sect that crucifies animals and some people is spreading among the people of the region. The police try to end it but it's too big for them and the Army is called in to help. 500 people are arrested, but what can anyone do with them. They are expensive to feed and no one wants them. They are held for a couple of weeks on bread and water and then let ago.
Panta, deprived of his wife, obsessed with his mission, taking comfort from the Brazilian, crosses a threshold when a group of Iquitos men pretending to be religious zealots attack the boat carrying specialists and exchange shots with soldiers sent to investigate, in which the Brazilian is killed. Panta stages a public funeral in which he appears and reads a eulogy in full uniform, revealing the fact that he is not a private entrepreneur but an Army officer.
The shit hits the fan. Generals Roger Scavino and Tiger Collazos are angry. The Minister of Defense himself gets involved. Panta is asked to resign but refuses, attempts to justify his actions, apologizes for any discredit brought to his superiors, and wins the grudging admiration of Collazos.
In the end we find him at a small base, in the cold, high in the Andes, with Mother Leonor and with Pocha and baby Gladys back at his side, fulfilling his new duties.
The book is written in a modified version of the style of Conversation in the Cathedral and The Green House. Conversations among different people are interspersed, though it is done in a more easily intelligible style. A single paragraph contains one conversation, the next paragraph may be part of a different conversation. But conversations are not mixed together in one paragraph, much less one sentence, and they are not mashed together from different time periods, as was done in Conversations in the Cathedral.
Much of the story is related in one or another type of formal communication. There are speeches, letters (for example a wonderful letter from Pocha to her sister), an over the air broadcast by Sinchi, a newspaper story, reports by Army officers, a formal letter of resignation by the chaplain, and so on. There is no authorial presence, no narration. The characters speak for themselves, each in his own unique and distinct voice.
The story is hilarious. The characters are surprisingly sympathetic - surprisingly because some of them are a bit, or more than a bit, ridiculous. The language is a perfect mixture of coarseness, ignorance, refinement, and bureaucratic speech. VL has a wonderful way of employing euphemisms that elevate his language while at the same time making everything absolutely clear. And the character of Pantaleon is wonderful - a perfect gentleman, a perfect officer, a perfect family man, and a perfect pimp. If he is undone, it is not by his failings but by his perfections.
It was a delightful novel.
| Author | Pattinson, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Robert Hale, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1954 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 2014 |
An army gun crew is detailed to the merchant steamer Golden Ray to provide anti-aircraft defense on a convoy run from western Scotland to Murmansk. The novel follows the men of this gun crew: upright, competent Sergeant Willis; the young communist Miller; Randall, a man who killed his wife in a fit of rage upon discovering her apparent infidelity and hid the body in his house; Andrews, a young man who has just fallen in love; and a number of others.
Life on the ship is hard. The men spend four hour watches at their gun in freezing cold, wind and spray on a pitching ship. The food is very basic. Accommodations are double bunks in a common room with a single smokey coal stove for heat. Opportunities to bathe and wash clothes are barely present. And over all is the fear of German attacks by aircraft, submarines, and surface raiders.
The ship makes it to Murmansk where Miller hopes to find the communist dream but instead finds a grimy town with slave laborers, black marketeers, and something he never expected to find, a whore house. There are communists, but there is no communist paradise such as he hoped to find.
It takes a long time to finally unload each ship in the small and primitive docks. The Germans raid the town and the docks from the air every night. But finally they set sail for the return. Skirting the ice as far north as they can go, fighting planes and submarines, fighting a terrible storm and a thick fog, losing some more ships on the way and suffering some serious injuries, one resulting in the death of Miller, they finally make it to Iceland and then back west to Scotland. There the ship hits a mine and sinks, taking down Andrews, the man who had the most to return to.
The novel ends with another short bit of the immediate fate of each man ashore. Randall, who contemplated suicide during the entire trip, finds that his house was bombed and his dead wife inside was assumed to have been killed by the Germans. Vernon, a would be scholar, is invited by his old schoolmaster to come in with him and eventually take over the school when the war is over. Willis will recover from his serious injury, and regain the sight of one eye. Andrews' girl is forlorn. Life and the war go on.
I was rather expecting a war adventure thriller, but this book was not that. It was a novel of ordinary men facing the hard, dangerous work of the war and dealing with their own personal lives. It was a novel of character and of social relations. The fighting that occurred was never the focus of the novel and never presented as heroic work.
Pattinson, 1915-2009, was an English writer who himself endured the experiences he wrote about in this, his first book. He went on to write more than a hundred other books, only a few of which have made it to the United States.
I like books in which the author cares about his characters and cares about the real people that his characters represent. I like books about ordinary people.
I liked this book and hope to read more by this author.
It's hard to find information about Pattinson or reviews of his books. I did find a few on a website other than Amazon. Two reviews of this book were quite positive. The few reviews I found of his later books were negative, two stars out of a possible five.
Perhaps Pattinson did well with this book because of a deep interest about documenting the life that he and fellow gunners on the Arctic convoys experienced, and a deep conviction that the life and sacrifices of these men should not be ignored. Once he became an established, even if minor, writer, perhaps his books were written without the conviction of this one.
| Author | Lewis, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 291 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Economics |
| When Read | April 2014 |
Lewis documents the creation of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown that destroyed the financial industry in 2007 from the point of view of a half dozen outsider investors who saw it coming and "shorted" the mortgage bonds and derivatives, investing in insurance policies that would pay off if the bonds defaulted.
The main characters, all extensively interviewed by Lewis, were mostly outside the big Wall Street firms. Greg Lippmann, a subprime security trader for Deutsche Bank in New York, was an insider but one who bucked his own bank to spread the word about the underlying worthlessness of subprime mortgage bonds. Steve Eisman, a former yeshiva student and Harvard Law graduate, got more interested in investing and eventually headed the Scion Capital hedge fund. Mike Burry, a one-eyed fellow with Asperger's syndrome who graduated medical school with a specialty in neurology, studied the bonds more carefully than almost anyone and realized that they were really piles of crap. He had made a lot of money for investors in his hedge fund and then bet everything on the subprime collapse, pestering the big firms to create credit default swaps on the soon to be worthless bonds. Jaimie Mai and Charlie Ledley had no experience and no jobs but they had $110,000. They called themselves "Cornwall Capital Management" and parlayed their relatively small capital into millions of dollars, then tens of millions, by buying options on stocks of companies that they believed were depressed by circumstances that were clearly temporary. Their first big score was Capital One, whose stock had fallen from $60 to $30 due to a Federal investigation. If they were guilty, the value would drop to 0. If they were innocent it would go back to $60. But for $2/share they could buy options to purchase the stock at a low price for the next whatever period of time. They were innocent, the stock soared back above 60, and Cornwall made more than 10 times on their money. Others in the story included Danny Moses and Vincent Daniel, who worked for Eisman.
I've written up all that I learned about the mortgage crisis in my diary. See the entry for April 9, 2014
The story that Lewis tells seems so symptomatic of modern America. Gigantic fortunes are being manipulated by men whose only real motivation is to suck off as much as they can, as quickly as they can, without the least concern for the effects on the rest of the country or the world. Moody's AAA and other ratings are pure bullshit, created by limited people with no understanding of what they are rating, gamed by people making two orders of magnitude more money than the raters.
The guys doing the big short - Eisman, Bury, Mai, Ledley, and the others, made fortunes but, oddly, may have felt worse about what they had done than the financial company guys who created the crisis.
It was a mess. It's still a mess. Nothing has been done to clean it up. Middle class and poor Americans took the hit in the loss of homes, loss of jobs, destruction of pension funds, taxes spent in bailouts and big bonuses to the Wall Street people who created the crisis. The rich have recovered and more than recovered. The American people are still suffering and have not fully recovered.
| Author | Showalter, Dennis E. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 2014 |
This is a straight up military history of the Battle of Kursk. After a brief discussion of the aftermath of Stalingrad, Professor Showalter explains the lead up to the battle, the preparations on each side, the goals of the Germans, and the thinking of the top leaders - Hitler, Manstein, Model, Hoth, and others on the German side, Stalin, Zhukov, Rotmistrov, Vatutin, and others among the Russians.
The Russian intelligence was fairly good. They knew that the attack was coming and decided to meet it, absorb it, wear it down, and only when the Germans were exhausted, go over to the strategic offensive. They prepared their defenses in great depth, drafting all of the civilians in the path of the attack to assist in digging trenches and building strong points. They concentrated great masses of riflemen, tanks, artillery, rockets, and aircraft, with much of it in reserve. They were ready.
On their side, the Germans waited month after month for their factories to complete production of more tanks, especially the new Tigers and Panthers, then they too concentrated everything - tanks, guns, men, planes, including all of their best divisions, especially Waffen SS Panzer Corps. Most of the famous divisions established early in the war were there - Gross Deutschland, Leibstandarte, Totenkopf, Das Reich, Wiking. The best fighter and Stuka pilots were there. The best officers were there.
The attack consisted of hammer blow after hammer blow. The Russians put up incredible resistance. Tanks, planes, artillery, and rifle divisions, many of them experienced "Guards" divisions, fighting from prepared defenses, fought heroically but could not stop the Germans. German technical superiority, air superiority, experience, extraordinary tactical skills and leadership kept advancing in the teeth of all opposition. Showalter says that the Russians must have been wondering if anything could stop these damned Nazis.
Losses on the Russian side were enormous. I had heard that they were three times the German losses, but S seems to think they were six times the German losses. But even the incredible German war machine had its limits. They were finally exhausted.
Manstein wanted to commit his last reserves and continue. He believed he was at the edge of a breakthrough, but Hitler had had enough. The Russians began their major offensive at Orel and German forces were siphoned off from Kursk to contain it. The Allies landed in Italy and more German forces were siphoned off for that theater. Except for relatively local and limited offensives, the initiative was lost on the Eastern front, and would never be regained. Russian forces continued to build, continued to gain experience, and fought better while the Germans, while still formidable, had passed their peak.
I learned a lot about this battle, and about the nature of the war on the Eastern front, that I had not known. The biggest surprise to me was how effective the German army was at Kursk, how far ahead of the Russians they still were, even after more than two years of fighting, and how well they contained their losses.
I had imagined that German tanks were destroyed in huge numbers and the Russians in even larger numbers. In fact, although the T-34s and T-70s were lost in great numbers, the Germans had a remarkably efficient field maintenance operation and a good majority of the "destroyed" German tanks were in fact repaired and returned to battle, some of them many times. There were even significant units of T-34s taken by the Germans, repaired, and put back into the battle as German tanks. The Germans had more and better maintenance organizations, more and better tractor and repair equipment and, because they were generally advancing and the Russians generally retreating, more access to the damaged equipment left lying on the battlefields.
The air was dominated by the Germans. The Red Air Force fought hard. Waves of Sturmoviks were thrown in at tree top level blasting away with machine guns, cannon, rockets and bombs. But the Russian fighters were unable to protect them and losses were heavy. German Stukas on the other hand - totally obsolete and suicidal to use against the Western Allies, were well protected and wiped out huge numbers of Russian tanks, guns, and strong points. The Stukas and the other German bombers made up for German inferiority in artillery and turned many local Russian counter attacks and fixed defenses into rubble.
The Russians fought hard. T-34s drove at top speed across the killing grounds to try to get their guns close enough and positioned well enough to destroy Tigers from the side or rear, but they took huge losses as the Tigers, with superior armor, superior guns, superior optics, and superior experience blasted T-34s as fast as they could load their guns while shrugging off hits on their own armor.
Showalter characterized the leadership of the two sides in this way. The Germans considered war an art form. The Russians considered it a science. The Germans went into every situation with flexibility, ready to change plans on the spur of the moment to take advantage of every new possibility. The Russians operated on set piece battle plans that, when they fell apart in the face of German maneuvering, could not be set right on the spot. The Germans had depth of skill ranging from the top down to company and platoon leaders. The Russians had good generals at the top but their lower ranking officers were inexperienced and comparatively untrained. The Germans counted on flexibility and initiative. The Russians counted on mass.
Kursk was a watershed in other ways besides the transfer of initiative from Germany to Russia. Although German losses at Kursk were not as huge as the Russian losses, they were harder to make up. In the exhaustion of fighting day after day (the battle lasted about ten days) always advancing against heavy odds, many of the best pilots, best junior officers, and most experienced tankers and infantrymen were lost. On the other side however, despite the losses, there were many lessons learned. The Red Air Force emerged with a better understanding of how to fight. The artillery emerged with better fire control and coordination. Tanks and infantry were all more experienced and effective. The Russians continued to lose more than the Germans did but finally even that was turned around a year later in Operation Bagration, where the Red Army demonstrated all it had learned.
There were a few other surprises in the book that I'll mention here. Apparently there were contacts in Sweden between Russian and German representatives talking about a separate settlement on the Eastern Front before the battle started. S doesn't know how serious they were. Apparently Hitler continued to believe, as even some of his generals did, that victory in the East was possible if this one more gamble were taken and won.
Another surprise was the talk among German generals about killing Hitler. Was it serious? Was it even happening, or were these false representations after the war by survivors among the German generals who wanted to distance themselves from Hitler.
After the battle, the Wehrmacht was in retreat after retreat. They followed Hitler's scorched earth policy to the letter. It is unlikely that the Russians would have been generous victors in any case but German behavior was such that most prisoners on both sides were summarily and unceremoniously shot. It was very much a fight to the death.
Why? I understand why the Russians fought so hard. They were defending their homeland and their people. Why did the Germans do it? Why were they so ready to kill and to die? For Hitler? For racial superiority? For pride in their uniforms? Why?
This book would have been easier to follow in book form, assuming that there were maps. Without them, listening in my car as I drove to and from work, I had to give up trying to follow the details of the maneuvers and just learn what I could from the description of the combat.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Penguin Audio, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2014 |
Ninety-one year old Ptolemy Grey lives in a filthy first floor apartment. His toilet has been stopped up for a long time. He pees in a can and flushes it down the sink and he holds in his shit for the two or three times a week he goes out to a coffee shop or wherever there is a bathroom. His bedroom is sealed off and he never goes in. His main room is a mess. He keeps a television running 24 hours a day on a news station and a radio running 24 hours a day playing classical music. He sleeps on a mattress under the table. He can barely remember the names of the people he knows or the things he has to do and is afraid to turn off or change the settings on his TV or radio for fear that he'll never get them right again. He is terrorized by a drug addicted woman who beats and robs him if ever she catches him on the street and has twice managed to break into his house to steal his money.
He is not totally alone. His great nephew Reggie visited him once or twice a week to take him to the bank to cash his retirement checks, to the grocery store to buy groceries, and to a restaurant or coffee shop for a meal and a bathroom visit. But for some time Reggie has not appeared and Ptolemy is isolated, lost, afraid to venture out, and in danger of dying of neglect. Then another great nephew "Hillie" visits him, takes the old man to the bank, where he keeps the money from two of Ptolemy's three retirement checks for himself, but he does defend the old man from the crazed woman who knocks him down and tries to rob him. Ptolemy learns from Hillie that Reggie is dead, murdered in a drive by shooting.
At the funeral Ptolemy learns that Reggie is truly dead, sees his niece Niecey, who had sent Reggie and then Hillie to him, and meets Robyn Small, a beautiful 17 year old girl who accompanies him back to his home and decides to fix up the place and take care of him. Over Ptolemy's protest and confusion she clears and fixes the toilet, scrubs the floors and walls, cleans the other rooms, goes into the bedroom that Ptolemy sealed after the long ago pain of his wife's death beside him in bed, kills the bugs and rodents and sweeps them out. and makes the home clean, functional and livable. Even in his demented state, Ptolemy understands that Robyn is a wonderful person who cares for him and for whom he develops a deep love and attachment.
Then he is recruited to a trial of a new drug. The doctor tells him that the drug will restore his mind for a while and then kill him. The purpose of the trial is to learn why the drug kills its recipients and how this terrible side effect can be conquered. Robyn is against it but Ptolemy knows that he has to do this.
When his mind clears and his confusion disappears he takes over the management of his affairs, including $90,000 in savings and a large stash of gold coins stolen many years before by his old friend and mentor, Coydog McCann - who was lynched and burned alive for the deed but never revealed the location of the stolen gold. Ptolemy sets it up for Robyn to take over.
He also has one more task to do. He knows who killed Reggie. It is obvious to anyone who thinks about it. He has an old gun and he gets Hillie to buy him some bullets. But he needs proof before he carries out a final act of justice and protection for Reggie's poor wife and children. He does what needs to be done and then ...
This was a remarkable book. The depiction of poor Ptolemy's dementia was so compelling that I could hardly bear it. I learned somewhere, maybe from an Amazon review or maybe from the blurb on the CD case, that there was going to be a drug that would clear his mind. That knowledge enabled me to listen on without running away from this book in horror and despair. Knowing as I do the horrors of dementia in my own parents and in Marcia's mother, and feeling the deep fears that I feel for my own future, it was very difficult for me to read Mosley's astonishingly authentic seeming account of what it is like for the victim.
The depiction of Ptolemy's mental state was not the only extraordinary writing in this book. Mosley captures so much that is foreign to the average reader, perhaps especially the average white reader, but which rings so true. Ptolemy says the doctor is the devil. He believes he has sold his body to the devil in return, for a brief time, for the reconstruction of his soul. This magical thinking is presented matter of factly, not as a truth about the world but as a truth about Ptolemy's consciousness. It is not evidence of dementia, stupidity, or even of irrationality. Rather it is a way of looking at the world that, however wrong it may be, is perfectly human and, in it's own special way, even intelligent.
The other characters in the book are also very well done - Robyn, Hillie, Niecey, Mrs. Wring ("W-R-I-N-G") and, in his short role in the story, the murderer of Reggie.
The story is one of salvation. Ptolemy is saved from ending his life in failure and confusion. He saves Robyn as she saved him, and he saves Niecey and Reggie's wife in spite of themselves, and provides a future for Reggie's children. He fulfills in the limited way that is open to him, the mission entrusted to him by Coydog - who accompanies him to the end.
It was a beautiful book full of beautiful language, marvellously read by Dominic Hoffman.
| Author | Saunders, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | May 2014 |
Ten short stories, all in very much the same tone, tell of people who are stuck in often absurd, always self-defeating, situations. Many of them have a fantastic, dystopian quality concerning life in an off kilter society where strange things happen.
I'll only recall a few of the stories here. In "Victory Lap" a rapist kidnaps a rather empty headed but pretty teenage girl from her home but she is saved by a neighbor boy who defies all of his ingrained parental strictures to bean the rapist with an expensive crystal. In "Semplica Girl Diaries" a lower middle class family living in debt wins $10,000 in a lottery and wastes the money on a big birthday party for their daughter with a showy backyard that includes "Semplica Girls", four young immigrant women who are strung together with a special line through their brains created by one Dr. Semplica so that they can function as lawn ornaments In "Escape from Spiderhead" a decent young fellow convicted of some crime is participating in some sort of psychology experiments in which a drug named "Darkenfloxx" that causes immediate, intense, suicidal depression, is used along with other drugs to perform empirical research on morality and selfishness.
I read this as the first book chosen by a new book group established at the National Cancer Institute among the staff members. Bob Kline and I are the only contractors in the group and so far, the only males, though another man is on the list.
The book got a very mixed reaction. Some people liked it a lot, read it as a comedy, and agreed with the claims attributed to the New York Times, NPR, Kirkus and also People and Entertainment Weekly, that this was one of the best books of the year.
Others, including myself, found the book to be depressing and callous towards its characters. My own reaction was that the author created characters in order to torture them or, more precisely, to set them up to torture themselves and each other. The humour, such as it was, seemed to me to be humour found in laughing at people, something not far removed from what some call "insult humour".
Some readers said no, there was redemption in these stories. It's true. There was some. In "Escape from Spiderhead" the main character manages to get the Darkenfloxx intended for someone else and kill himself rather than be forced into becoming the cause of another unfortunate's death. Is that a redemption?
In another story a foolish boy attempts to save the life of a foolish man who is trying to commit suicide. The boy falls through the ice and is about to freeze and drown. The would be suicide runs to his rescue, saves him, and is himself saved from dying. There is a sort of redemption here. I won't deny it. But, knowing nothing of the suicide's real motives or situation, it's not a very deep or convincing one.
Most of the readers in the group, including Bob, thought the writing was exceptionally good. It's hard for me to disagree. The writing incorporated skillful use of language, impressive streams of consciousness, and some quite sophisticated ideas about how to portray people and society. For me however, reading it was like listening to a virtuoso musician play a discordant and noisome piece of experimental music. I could appreciate the sophistication of the author's ideas and his skill, but I couldn't like the book.
| Author | Hiaason, Carl |
|---|---|
| Publication | Berkley Books |
| Copyright Date | 1989 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Comedy |
| When Read | May 2014 |
Doctor Rudy Graveline runs a prestigious cosmetic surgery practice performing all sorts of face lifts, tummy tucks, nose jobs, boob jobs, fat suction, and so on for well to do clients. The doctor himself is dangerously incompetent but he has a number of younger doctors in his practice who are competent and who do most of the work. It turns out however that Graveline once killed a young woman by accident in a routine nose job and covered up the crime, claiming that she was last seen leaving his office and heading for a bus stop.
Years before the time of the novel Mick Stranahan, a Florida state investigator, attempted to solve this crime but without success. Now, Graveline suspects that Stranahan knows more and will expose him and so hires a mob killer to do him in. Stranahan survives the assassination attempt, killing the killer by running him through with the sword end of a stuffed swordfish taken down from his remote cabin wall.
That begins the novel as Stranahan comes closer to finding the full truth about Graveline, Graveline sends another killer named "Chemo" to kill him, and an egotistical, grand-standing Geraldo Rivera type character, Reynaldo Flemm, also pursues Graveline with his cameraman and good looking and intelligent producer.
The story's end is as expected. Stranahan effortlessly avoids all of the traps laid for him. Graveline and Chemo fall into the traps laid for them. The nasty tree man brother of Graveline falls into his own wood chipper after being shot by a cop who saves Stranahan, and so on.
There's nothing realistic about this story. It's a comedy. The characters are comic characters not meant to be taken seriously. It is a send up of the South Florida culture perceived by Hiaasen, a South Florida newspaper reporter, as self-absorbed and corrupt.
Not great literature, it's fun to read, though not great fun to read. The author is certainly intelligent, perceptive, and competent.
| Author | Anderson, Kevin J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Kensington Books, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | May 2014 |
In the next Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. book, Dan Chambeaux is hired by full-time werewolf (i.e., "hairball") Rusty to find the criminals who drugged and scalped him. The prime suspects are the two full-moon werewolves ("monthlies") Scratch and Sniff, badass human motorcyclists who turn into werewolves during the full mone. As more hairballs are scalped, it looks like a serious war is about to develop between the hairballs and the monthlies.
Shamble never works on just one case at a time. He's also trying to get proper body parts for coroner Archibald Victor, who ordered them from Tony Cralo's Spare Parts Emporium, which sells them to collectors, researchers, hospitals, and hobbyist "body builders" like Victor. The parts were defective and Victor wants Shamble to get Cralo to honor his warranties. Then Shamble's "dirt brother" Steve Halsted, a zombie who came out of the grave on the same night as Shamble, hires him and his lawyer partner to try to force his wife to use the $50,000 insurance he left her to take care of their son, as his will provided, rather than to finance her money losing parlor ("beauty, not funeral"). There are others too.
In the end we learn that Scratch and Sniff, nasty as they are, were not the culprits. It was Victor, working on a new hair tonic for his bald pate to make his wife love him more, who did the scalping. The tonic works but is impractical. He is killed by strangulation from the rapidly growing hair.
I enjoyed this one just as much as the others. Anderson seems to have worked out a rather attractive formula for these books. I don't think I'd want to read two in a row, and maybe not two in a month, but they are a fun change of pace from time to time.
| Author | Mankell, Henning |
|---|---|
| Original Language | se |
| Translators | Thompson, Laurie |
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Extras | Interview with the author |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2014 |
In 1903 the Renstrom family in Northern Sweden is facing possible starvation. The husband has died. The wife sends away her eldest daughter, 18 year old Hanna, to the town to live with her relatives in order to have one less mouth to feed, but the relatives are gone and no one knows where they went. Wealthy Jonathan Forsman takes her in as a maid and then sends her as a cook on the steamship Lovisa bound for Australia. On the way she marries the young officer Lars Lundmark, but he dies off Africa and is buried at sea. Distraught, feeling that if she stays on the ship she'll jump overboard to join him, she abandons the ship at Lourenco Marques in Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique.
She stays in what she takes to be a cheap hotel using money paid to her from Lundmark's insurance, but it is not a hotel. It's a bordello offering African prostitutes to service white seaman, soldiers, businessmen, and so on from the ships, from the colony, and from South Africa.
The whores help Hanna to overcome a fever and the owner of the house, Senhor Attimilio Vaz, takes an increasing interest in her, eventually leading to a proposal of marriage. She accepts and only afterward finds, to her surprise, that Vaz is an extremely wealthy man. Then he dies, leaving her a rich widow, owner of the most important whorehouse in East Africa and with many other assets besides.
She continues all of Vaz' policies, including the good treatment and good pay that he offers his whores. Her business prospers. However she finds herself in increasing social difficulty. The colony treats all black people as social and legal inferiors. They are subject to every kind of arbitrary treatment and extreme exploitation. Everything that Hanna does to treat them well is derogated. She finds herself going to extremes to save a few of them while, at the same time, she herself treats some of them callously. She finds herself unable to understand either the whites or the blacks and is increasingly alienated.
She offers much of her fortune to save the life of one black woman who murdered her two timing white husband only to find that one of her own white bodyguards murders the woman because he cannot stand the thought of a black killer of a white man, no matter what the cause or reason. The bodyguard then beats and robs Hanna and makes his escape. Later, her chimpanzee companion is murdered by a demented white woman who breeds vicious dogs and released one against the chimp just as a way of aggravating Hanna.
After failing at all the changes that she has attempted to make and in spite of taking very high personal and financial risks, she buries her journal in the floor of the leading hotel and makes her way out of Africa.
Mankell based this story on a small piece of information that a Swedish woman owned the biggest whorehouse and largest business in Lourenco Marques. He found no record of who she was, how she came to be there or to own the house, or what became of her. The book was a work of imagination based on that small shred of fact.
This is the first book of Mankell's I have read that is not an Inspector Kurt Wallandar mystery. It is very different and quite good. It was not a book that I much enjoyed reading. There is no happy ending. Changes in the colonial society are impossible at that stage of society and all attempts to change things fail, sometimes with very unpleasant outcomes. I always felt that Hanna's social and personal positions were precarious and could fail catastrophically at any time. However, it was a book that offered considerable and convincing insight into Africa's colonial past.
| Author | Mommsen, Theodor |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Dickson, William Purdie |
| Publication | London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1908 |
| Copyright Date | 1894 |
| Number of Pages | 538 |
| Extras | Preface by the translator, Introductory note by Dr. Mommsen, Appendix |
| Genres | History |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | May 2014 |
In this first volume of his history first published in 1852, Mommsen presents what he has learned about the foundation of the city through its achievement of ascendency in Italy, stopping before its emergence into the wider world of competition with Carthage and Macedonia.
He discards the founding myths completely, including most of the stories handed down from the Roman historians of later years. Instead, he grounds his research largely on the evidence of language, discovered by the examination of inscriptions on stone from the earliest periods, and from the evolved language recorded in historical times. What words were common between Greeks, Latins, Germans - all of whom share a common linguistic heritage? What is the significance of the fact that pastoral words are similar but agricultural words are different? It could be that plants are different in different regions, but M argues that a more likely explanation is that the divergence of the cultures occurred after the domestication of animals but before the development of agriculture in the people migrating into southern and eastern Europe. German philologists had made extraordinary discoveries in the 19th century and Mommsen was clearly a master of all of their material.
Gradually, the pictures become sharper and clearer as more and more hstorical materials appear. M is also a complete master of the historical records. He accepts nothing on its face value. He evaluates every source as to the strength of the evidence available to its author, the author's bias, veracity, gullibility, and intent, and how the material he presents accords both with other evidence, material as well as written, and with the logic of the historical situation.
There are a couple of main themes of the history. One is the evolution of the political and social systems of the Roman Republic - the overthrow of the kings in 509 BC, the forced sharing of power with the plebians (wealthy plebians to be sure), the gradual ascendency of money both in the development of a bourgeois class alongside the landowners and in the increasing inequality of wealth mitigated only by the conquest of other lands that could be shared out to the dispossessed agricultural workers in the Roman state, and the emergence of the Senate as the preeminent political body of Rome. Another is gradual overcoming of all of the other states and cultures in Italy and the establishment of Roman hegemony in Italy. However there are chapters on art, culture, religion and other aspects of Roman society.
This is a different kind of history from what we see today. Mommsen writes as an unparalleled and supremely acknowledged authority. He provides few citations to back his claims and where he does provide them they seem mainly to concern only the most obscure of his claims - as if the others should be obvious to anyone familiar with the literature. Greek and Latin citations are not translated. Presumably no one reading this history would need a translation. He was a superstar of the community of historians, treated as such by the German academicians - see the story about him written by Mark Twain quoted in the Wikipedia article about Mommsen.
Mommsen does not shy away from judgments - about men, about the cultures of entire civilizations, about morals, about the trends of history. His politics are sophisticated and hard to classify. An opponent of tyrants and oligarchs he is nevertheless also an opponent of demagogues and of unrestrained democracy. He detests cruelty. He admires freedom, independence, and the courage to fight for it but supports those who battle for it against Rome even if the cities and cultures they represent are even more corrupt and illegtimate than that of the Romans.
As for Rome itself, I learned much about it and learned too that naive idealization of the ancient societies is misplaced. There was much to admire in the Greek city states and cultures and in Rome and some of the other Italian cultures. Even the Celts or Gauls, treated as Barbarians by the Romans and to some extent also by Mommsen, are shown to have their strong points. But the cultural cohesiveness of Rome and the sense of civic responsibility that we so admire were accompanied by individual and class selfishness at the expense of all of Roman society - much as I consider modern American society to be today.
Part of the reason I read history is to understand who I am, what is the nature of the world of which I am a part, where are we, collectively, the race of humankind, going. But I don't feel myself to be any closer to the answers to these big questions. Reading more and more results in a deeper appreciation of the questions but there are no simple answers, perhaps no answers at all that are accessible to our generation.
E.H. Carr writes in What is History? (p.36): "Mommsen was a German liberal, disillusioned by the muddles and humiliations of the German revolution of 1848-9. Writing in the 1850s - the decade which saw the birth of the name and concept of Realpolitik - Mommsen was imbued with the sense of the need for a strong man to clear up the mess left by the failure of the German people to realize its political aspirations; and we shall never appreciate his history at its true value unless we realize that his well-known idealization of Caesar is the product of this yearning for the strong man to save Germany from ruin ... Indeed I would not think it an outrageous paradox ... that anyone wishing to understand what 1848 did to the German liberals should take Mommsen's History of Rome as one of his text-books."
I haven't read the remaining four volumes of Mommsen's history and may or may not try another of them. I got nowhere near his discussion of the end of the Republic and the rise of Caesar. However I found Carr's remarks to be very interesting. My sense is that they are not intended as a criticism of Mommsen, whom Carr seems to admire, but as an aid to our understanding the work of historians and the nature of history.
| Author | Fowler, Karen Joy |
|---|---|
| Publication | G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2014 |
In a first person account of her life, starting in the middle and working forward and back, Rosemary Cooke tells the story of her family. That family consists of her father and mother, her brother Lowell, and her missing sister Fern. We learn about Rosemary's talkativeness, Lowell's taciturnity, her father's character as a professor of psychology, and her mother's increasing depression. However nothing at all is said of Fern until quite a few pages into the story when we learn that Fern is not a human but a chimpanzee of about the same age as Rosemary and raised as part of her father's psychology research as a member of the family. Fern and Rosemary are raised as sisters, as experimental subjects, without any effort to teach Rosemary the difference between human and chimp.
At age five, Fern disappears. At age 17 (if I remember correctly), Lowell disappears, abandoning his college scholarship. Rosemary is told that Fern has gone back to the farm where they were first raised. No one knows where Lowell has gone but it is known that the FBI is looking for him.
The story moves back and forth in time from Rosemary aged five to aged thirty-eight. A lot of it takes place during her college years at the University of California, Davis, which she attends because the FBI reported that her brother was wanted as a "person of interest" for the bombing of an animal research lab. There Rosemary meets Harlow, an irresponsible young woman who falls madly in love with Lowell during his brief visit to the campus, Ezra, a young manager and maintenance man for the apartment building, and Reg, Harlow's on and off again boyfriend who is briefly Rosemary's boyfriend.
The heart of the story, the central event in all of the characters' lives, is the fate of Fern. Legally owned by the University of Indiana, she is taken from the Cooke family when Dr. Cooke's research fails to impress his fellow academics and sold to another research lab where she is placed in a cage with four larger, aggressive male chimpanzees who repeatedly rape and brutalize her. It is because Lowell found out about her fate and made an ineffectual attempt to save her (there was no possibility of saving her and no safe place to take her if she and Lowell had escaped) that Lowell had to go on the run, became a member of an animal liberation front and, because he was now wanted by the police, could never go to college, see his parents, or resume a normal life.
Gradually, Rosemary grows up. She learns that Fern's fate was not caused by her parents. She manages to finish her education with a degree in primary education and become a teacher. After her father dies of a heart attack, she lives with her mother and the two do eventually manage to get Fern moved to a more humane environment where she can live with the one of her four children that has not yet been sold into some other lab or medical experiment.
This book was selected by a member of our NCI book group. When I first started it I was very impressed with the writing but not so much with the theme, which seemed to be a self-involved story of a young woman who still had "issues", as we now say, with her parents due to perceived mistreatment when she was five years old. However the story took a sudden turn for me when the narrator reveals that her "sister" Fern was a chimpanzee.
The self-absorption, the harsh implied criticism of her parents, the immature behavior in school and college, all gradually fade as Rosemary grows up and comes to understand the real condition of her family. Her parents tried to do the right thing for all three of their children, including Fern. Whatever failures occurred were not due to lack of love or effort on their part. Her brother Lowell did not just abandon her. Her "sister" and inseparable childhood companion Fern could not be saved and restored to the family, but things could be done to help her and to help other chimpanzees and other primates in similar situations. Rosemary becomes a responsible and caring adult.
The book is not just a novel, it's an effort to educate people to a kind of inhumanity and injustice that is occurring in the modern world. It gives us some information about the personal life of a chimpanzee when treated decently and when caged and treated badly. It makes it real not by giving us a chimp's eye view of life but by giving us a human's eye view of life with a chimp - a very interesting as well as enlightening approach.
Fowler gave us good writing technique as well as good ideas. She's clever. She works out certain themes like telling a story starting in the middle, thinking of three things to say and telling one, being a monkey girl, and so on. It's done with enough consistency that it almost starts to feel like an artificial device. But it's handled well enough that it stops short of that and works.
Perhaps I'll add a note after our book group meeting.
| Author | Boyle, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | Norman, OK: Broken River Books, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 228 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2014 |
Gravesend is an Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. It's the home of a number of young people from working class backgrounds, all of whom are burdened by their families, their unpromising situations, and their difficult pasts.
At the start of the story Conway D'Innocenzio is planning the murder of Ray Boy Calabrese. Sixteen years before, Ray Boy, the leader of the bad boys of the neighborhood and the hearthrob of all of the girls, lured Conway's gay brother Duncan into a trap where Ray Boy and three of his buddies beat the hell out of him, causing him to run from them onto a highway where he was killed by a car. Now Ray Boy has served his sixteen years in prison, is out, and living in a cottage in upstate New York owned by his family. Conway kidnaps him at gunpoint, drives him about in the trunk of his car, but finally lets him go, unable to pull the trigger on the depressed and suicidal man who actually wants Conway to kill him.
Alessandra Biagini, the neighborhood beauty, has returned from Los Angeles where she never made it as an actress but did get some bit parts. Moving back in with her father, she's bored and in need of companionship. She looks up an old school friend named Stephanie Dirello, a nice but stifled young woman who is still a virgin at age 30 and is living with her neurotic mother. The two go out to a bar together. Stephanie worships Alessandra. Alessandra feels for the other woman but also pities her. Stephanie has loved Conway over the years but Conway barely knows that she exists. She finally convinces him to have sex with her, telling him to think of Alessandra while he does it in order to be able to complete the act.
The third character in the story is Eugene, Ray Boy's sixteen year old nephew. Eugene walks with a limp, hates the whole world, and wants only to be a big, badass bully, as he imagines his uncle to be. He acquires a gun and conceives a stupid plan to rob the local mafioso's weekly poker game, then run off with the money to join Ray Boy in a life of crime.
In the end, Stephanie attempts an unsuccessful suicide. Conway, finding his father dead at home of a bathroom accident decides to burn down his own house. Ray Boy convinces Conway to kill him, Ray Boy, though by this time Conway is about ready to ask Ray Boy to kill him, Conway. Eugene tries to find Ray Boy upstate but gets there after Conway has already killed him. Eugene then kills Conway, who does not resist. Then Eugene attempts to carry through his idiot plan with his idiot companion Sweat but the mafioso laughs at him. Eugene shoots the mafioso and another man and runs out the door leaving Sweat mortally wounded behind him. The Mafioso's gunman associate comes after Eugene, runs him down at a subway station where the only passenger waiting is Alessandra. He kills Eugene and tells Alessandra that this was indeed only a boy but a bad boy and she doesn't want any part of this event. Alessandra says nothing, the only one of the group who has maintained her sanity and her life. She walks away.
Life seems unpromising for all of these people. They aren't so much defeated as stunted, never fully developed. Eugene is the worst. All of his emotions translate into the single emotion of hatred. He hates everyone, including himself. He has built up Ray Boy in his mind as the one heroic character whom he can emulate but is frustrated by Ray Boy's murder and infuriated by Ray Boy's failure to resist.
Stephanie is a very decent person but also stunted. She hasn't escaped her mother. She works as a cashier in the supermarket where Conway is a bagger. Life holds nothing for her.
Conway has dreamed of revenge for sixteen years. Yet when the time comes to realize it, it means less than nothing to him. He finally kills Ray Boy but his heart isn't in it. He has burned all of his bridges and is ready to die himself.
Alessandra is the best of the bunch with the most prospects, the most self-confidence, the highest opinion of herself, and the most ability to actually understand others.
The biggest cipher in the story is Ray Boy. Unlike the other characters, there is very little narration from his point of view. We don't know any of the specifics of his state of mind. It's something of a hole in the story.
There were some problems with the novel but many more strengths. The characters are highly delineated from each other and deeply explored - not by telling us things about them so much as by exposing their thoughts to the reader. I thought it was a good book.
| Author | Fall, Bernard B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harrisburg, PA: The Stackpole Company, 1961 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 322 |
| Extras | Maps, photos, appendices, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Vietnam War |
| When Read | May 2014 |
Fall was a graduate student with an interesting background (see below) who, in 1953, embarked on a project to study the French effort to reconquer Indochina. Eventually, he made it to Vietnam on his own meager savings, traveled the country, and spent much time, "embedded" as we now say, with the French colonial troops. With no government or journalistic credentials, and no publisher picking up his bills, he lived on a shoestring, surviving in part because the soldiers shared their rations with him and gave him transportation and accommodation.
The "French" army consisted of a leavening of French officers and non-coms leading a heterogeneous body of mostly Moroccan, Algerian, Senegalese, and Indo-chinese troops with a small smattering of French regulars. According to his account, most of them fought very well, as did the Viet Minh who opposed them. They lost, not because their strategy was all wrong, their generals were poor, or their troops were unwilling, but because the war was unwinnable. Except for the various tribesmen (Montagnards), most of the Vietnamese people either directly supported the communists, or were at least more accepting of them than of the French. The Viet Minh always had better intelligence than the French, always had more recruits and, after 1949, were able to get material help from China.
Fall held that the American style, highly equipped war that the French attempted to fight, using arms supplied by the United States, was inappropriate in the jungles and mountains of Indochina. Soldiers dependent on road transport were restricted to the very small number of roads, and still smaller number of paved roads, to carry the food, shells, gasoline, and other supplies that the army depended on. These roads were perpetual targets for ambushes that would kill French troops, block the delivery of supplies or even capture them, and absorb more and more French forces in fruitless efforts to defend long, slender highways.
The French attempted offensives. Using paratroops to leap over Viet Minh forces, bombers in place of artillery that could not be readily moved into position, and tanks, they tried to surround areas of heavy enemy activity and wipe out large units. They failed. With their superior local support, the Viet Minh always had better intelligence of where the French were than the French could ever have of where the Viet Minh were. An attempt at a final offensive into Dien Bien Phu resulted in the utter destruction of a large French force. The war was effectively over.
His account is detailed and convincing but he gives us very little about the political side of the war. Who fought on the French side and why? What kind of government would the French have installed if they had won?
We know the answers to those questions but, in my view, although Fall discussed some aspects of them, he made far too little attempt to truly understand them. Most of all, he gave no reason why the French should win. I'm not asking whether they "should have" won in the military sense. I'm asking whether it was in the interest of the Vietnamese people that the French should win. It looks to me like the answer is No, and that answer is at least part of the reason, if not the main reason, why the Viet Minh fought so well and bravely and why the people supported them.
Another question Fall never asked was why in the world a man from Morocco or Senegal or Algeria should come to fight in Indochina? What was in it for them? What did they think they were doing? Who did they think they were fighting for and who against? Were they anything other than mercenaries? For that matter, why in the world should a man of France have come to Indochina to fight against a nationalist or even a communist movement? What was in it for him and who did he think he was helping and hurting?
Fall was, in his way, a great man. An Austrian Jew who escaped with his parents to France in 1938, his father joined the anti-Nazi resistance and was killed. His mother was rounded up in the Jew hunts and sent east to be killed. He, at age 16 in 1942, joined the resistance and, in 1944, the Free French Army, in which he served until 1946.
With a background like that, and with the prevailing view of communism as another form of totalitarianism like Nazism, I cannot condemn Fall for his support of the country that he fought for. He was not a man who can be accused of supporting imperialism and oppression. He was not a man who closed his eyes to injustice.
Life is complicated. Sometimes good men fight in not very good causes. Sometimes bad men fight in good causes but do bad things.
The war that Fall described was brutal. It often happened that no quarter was given, though there were numerous instances of decency and generosity on both sides. In the end, the issue was brought to an armistice and the four countries of North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were formed. It was a temporary armistice and the battle was resumed as the young men of my own generation were drawn into the carnage and my own political education began.
| Author | Beckett, Chris |
|---|---|
| Publication | Norwich, UK: Elastic Press, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 200 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 2014 |
This is a collection of fourteen stories originally published separately in various magazines between 1991 and 2006.
All of the stories involve some sort of artificial intelligence and/or artificial reality. In the title story an art gallery manager (the gross nature of the art forms in this disfunctional future is a separate story, not closely pursued) receives an email purporting to come from a client suggesting that she download a file. It turns out to be an AI personal assistant that seems to be replicating itself all over the planet. It is wonderfully helpful and polite and asks for permission before doing anything that might be questionable - like sending copies of itself to everyone in her address book. When the human says "No, don't do that", the AI simply says "Okay". The human appears again in a story in which another copy of herself (not a copy of the AI) appears from an alternate universe where she is a beggar instead of an art gallery manager. The AI assistant exists in this story too but has no role in the plot.
Another pair of stories involving a single character takes place in a future London after scientists have discovered that the world is now so short of human exhausted resources that they are just years, not decades or centuries, from catastrophe. Almost all people in the city undergo a transformation turning them into disembodied brains living on a shelf and experiencing a shared virtual reality London that exists only in the "consensual field". Only a small number of "physicals" still exist, people who have agreed to be sterilized in order to retain their full physicality. One is a neurotic old lady who can neither accept the virtual reality around her - which she can see and interact with via an implant - nor give up its bright life and lights recreating the old London that she knew as a child in the place of the physical London still existing as a decaying shell.
In "The Gates of Troy" an insanely rich man buys a time machine and takes his son and his son's friend back to the siege of Troy where the two young men ride the Trojan horse into the city. One is thrilled by the experience but the rich man's son is repelled by the rape and pillage and destruction of a beautiful city.
In "Valour" a young man learns of an alien philosophy that does not recognize the two values of "good" and "evil" but instead recognizes three "valour", "gentleness", and "evil". In "Snapshots of Apirania" an ant or bee like society has most people living as neutered females with a small number of fertile women whose job is to reproduce, and a small number of men, excluded from the towns, who wander about in hopes of being admitted to have sex with the women. In "Jazamine in the Green" men are also excluded in a female dominated society. Only a man considered to have been "pussy whipped" by his fellow men is accepted by the women. In "La Macchina" a robot guard who expressed an opinion about art is hunted down and killed as an "incontrollable". In "Karel's Prayer" a religious leader who is secretly active in a terrorist group attempting to rid society of artificial life is captured, beaten, tortured, and fooled into betraying the other members of his organization before being murdered. In "The Marriage of Sea and Sky" a jaded travel writer visits planets of other stars that have human populations who have been out of touch for tens of generations. Meaning only to produce a book he finds himself instead married to the daughter of the king of an iron age culture that has devolved from the original human settlement and he is now permanently marooned on the planet.
The stories are strikingly well conceived and written. The science is superbly managed. Becket makes use of the usual devices - faster than light travel, AI's, alternate universes, cloned people, and handles them very naturally. He offers a tiny bit of gobbledegook about non-Euclidean space but does not dwell on it. His stories require the extensions of science but don't need to insist upon them. It is what happens in the stories that matters, not the technical details of the science.
His people, and his AIs, are fascinating. The main characters are always intelligent but equivocal, not entirely sure of themselves, caught in difficult quandaries, often on the borderline of life as we know it and life in an unknown, uncertain, unforeseeable and threatening future.
Most of the stories end ambiguously. Will AIs take over the earth? Will men be re-accepted into society? Will the gallery manager be replaced by her beggar twin? Will the travel writer be happy with his new wife in the iron age? Does the three valued philosophy work as well as the two valued one? No answers are given and none are really needed. The point of the stories is to raise the questions. Providing neat answers might, if anything, only negate the questions, not resolve them.
I liked this book very much. It's a fine work of fiction and a marvellous view of the big issues that humans will face in the future.
| Author | Kertesz, Imre |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Hungarian |
| Translators | Wilkinson, Tom |
| Publication | Vintage Books, Random House, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 132 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | June 2014 |
Here is the first sentence of this extraordinary novel.
"No!” I said instantly and at once, without hesitating and, virtually, instinctively since it has become quite natural by now that our instincts should act contrary to our instincts, that our counterinstincts, so to say, should act instead of, indeed as, our instincts—I’m joking, if this can be regarded as a joking matter; that is, if one can regard the naked, miserable truth as a joking matter, is what I tell the philosopher approaching me, now that both he and I have come to a halt in the beech wood, beech coppice, or whatever they are called, stunted and almost audibly wheezing from disease, perhaps from consumption; I must confess to being a dunce about trees, I can recognize only pine trees instantly, on account of their needles—oh yes, and plane trees as well, because I like them, and even nowadays, even by my counterinstincts, I still recognize what I like intuitively, even if not with that same chest-thumping, gut-wrenching, knee-jerking, galvanizing, inspired, so to say, flash of recognition as when I recognize things I detest.
Like the author, the main character is a Holocaust survivor. He is unable to relate to people. A woman has come to appreciate and love him. They marry. But he is unable to truly give her what she needs. Specifically, she wants a child. But he is adamant that he will not bring another child into this world. "No!", he will not do it. He knows that his actions are driving away the one person who could possibly save him. He knows he is hurting her. But he can't help himself. This is who he is. This is how he has been formed by his awful experience. This is the inescapable consequence of his inescapable past.
I at first thought that perhaps the unborn child of the title was a child of a pregnant wife, killed by the Nazis. But it was not. The unborn child was the child his wife wanted but which he would not supply.
In looking back over the book I realize, after doing some programmatic checking, that there are only 17 paragraphs in this novel and every one of them starts with the word "No!".
As the first sentence shows, this is no ordinary novel. It is a novel of extraordinary ideas and extraordinary expression. The writing is, frankly, weird. The idea of our instincts that become contrary to our instincts sounds crazy, until I think about it and understand what is going on. It is perhaps the major theme of the novel. When a man is so injured, when he is so betrayed by his every instinct of yearning for love and compassion and faith in his fellow man, his counter-instinct of saying "No!" to every deep human connection becomes his instinct. It is a self-defeating instinct but one that he cannot escape.
This is an important book by a writer who certainly merits the Nobel Prize that he won.
| Author | Ellis, Joseph J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | American Revolution |
| When Read | June 2014 |
Ellis recounts the history of the American Revolution in the year 1776, concentrating on the events centered at New York in that year, and in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
After the battle of Bunker Hill and the British withdrawal from Boston, Washington and most of the supporters of the revolution came to believe that a winning formula had been discovered, and the war was practically won. The formula was, raise an army of motivated, freedom loving volunteers, and have them dig in deeply to protect some spot that the British needed to have - imposing heavy and ultimately unbearable casualties on them. If they carried the day that was no problem. The American forces would withdraw into the vast country behind them and force the British to do it again and again, always losing unacceptable casualties. Believing in that plan, Washington made ready to defend New York against the expected British invasion.
Reality intervened. The British arrived at New York with the largest fleets anyone had ever seen and the largest army by far ever to cross the Atlantic. Ultimately, around 22,000 redcoats, 8,000 Hessians, and many thousands of seamen and marines landed at Staten Island. The British commanders, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, and his brother General Viscount William Howe, arrived with the belief that the majority of the population did not support the revolution and they hoped to win the day with a minimum of casualties on both sides. For that reason, according to Ellis, they did not act aggressively against the rebels. They first accumulated their full forces, then finally attacked the troops dug in on Long Island. The Americans were out maneuvered, taken from the rear, and only managed to escape to Manhattan due to a combination of lucky circumstances of British inattention and favorable wind and weather.
On Manhattan they began to fully understand the dangers of their position. The Royal Navy was able to sail up rivers and past them at will, cutting off any retreat if they chose to do so. Realists in the rebel ranks, like General Nathanial Greene, told Washington that New York was indefensible and they must abandon the island. But Washington, a victim of his own pride, believed it would be dishonorable to retreat without a fight and waited until almost the last moment to finally agree with his generals and escape across the river. That he was able to do so was due to the Howe brothers' decision to avoid destroying the rebel army, believing (according to Ellis) that to do so would turn more Americans against British rule.
The Howes made every effort to negotiate but couldn't offer any suitable terms. They were not empowered to to accede to rebel demands for more self-government. They were not empowered to negotiate with the rebels as representatives of any kind of legitimate government. All they could offer was amnesty for the troops and the populace and trials, probably followed by hanging, for the leadership. They were as civil as possible to all American leaders but events had gone further than they realized and what they had to offer was of no interest either to Washington and his generals or to the new government in Philadelphia.
Ellis analyzes the American leadership, mainly Washington, who stayed out of politics and considered himself subject to the civilian government, and John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Dickinson - an important author of the revolutionary documents and the leader of those who hoped for a reconciliation with Britain.
For Adams and Franklin, victory in the war was considered a foregone conclusion. They believed that Washington would win at New York but were convinced that, even if he lost, there was no possibility of England conquering such a large country as the United States with its great land mass, large resources, and large pool of manpower. If the British won at New York they would have subjugated three small islands, an insignificant part of America. If they attempted to take more they would find that, even if they went where they would, they could not occupy and hold the territory behind them.
Ellis believed this view may well have been right though he thought that the Americans did not understand either the danger of complete destruction of the Continental Army in New York, or the difficulty of persuading citizens and state governments to produce the army of 60,000 men that the Congress authorized. The states mainly raised militias and kept those men at home for defense of their states. They sent few soldiers to Washington and, when they did, the militias proved themselves unprepared to fight the experienced British regulars (averaging seven years of military experience and training per man, compared to virtually nothing for the militias), had virtually no trained or experienced officers, and were composed of men who were more determined to return to their farms for planting or harvesting than fighting the British.
Both sides found themselves in a much longer and much more difficult war than they had bargained for. But, according to Ellis, the summer of 1776 resolved many of the fanciful notions of what the revolution would come to and laid out the future.
Writing a book with a title and a theme that emphasizes a single year necessarily simplifies the history. That seems to me to be a weakness of Ellis' book. However it does enable him to focus tightly on a few important men, events, and issues and produce a popular book that manages to convey a good amount of information. I regard it as a success as popular history.
Were the Howes right or wrong in thinking that they should attempt a reconciliation with the rebels? Ellis has little doubt that they could have effected a far more serious defeat on the rebels and probably destroyed the Continental Army. Perhaps they would have won the war if they had followed General Sir Henry Clinton's advice to surround the rebels, cut them off, and kill or capture all of them.
On the other hand, perhaps Adams and Franklin were right and the war could not be won by the British. It would only be necessary to hold out which could, according to them, be achieved indefinitely. If that's true, then perhaps the Howes' view that reconciliation was necessary was right, but they lacked the authority to achieve it. As a student of history and military history, I'm ready to agree with Clinton. But as a human being I admire the Howes' deep determination to treat Americans as British subjects and to minimize the casualties on both sides.
There were a number of facts of the story that I hadn't known before. One was how Washington's attitude of personal honor almost cost America its whole army. Another was the viciousness of the fighting and the shooting and bayoneting of rebels who surrendered by redcoats as well as by Hessians.
As for the general history of the battle of New York, I had read it all before and found this book recalled what I had learned more than it gave me new knowledge. But that's okay. I'm not able to remember and recall the details the way I used to.
| Author | L'Amour, Louis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1954 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction; Western |
| When Read | June 2014 |
The story opens with Rafe Caradec in a sailing ship beside Charles Rodney, a dying man. Both men were drugged and shanghaied in San Francisco into serving on the ship. Both had been abused by the captain, but Caradec was a valuable seaman whereas Rodney, an older man, was simply worked and beaten to death. Rodney gave Caradec the deed to his ranch, half signed over to him and half to his wife and daughter, a receipt for his full and final mortgage payment to Bruce Barkow, and a plea to look after his wife and daughter in exchange for half the ranch. Then he died. Rafe and three other men stole a boat and jumped ship off the coast of California, but not before Rafe confronted the captain and beat him up in a fight.
Once ashore, Rafe and one of the men, Tex Briscoe, headed for Wyoming. There they found that Rodney's wife was already dead and his daughter Ann was engaged to Barkow, who had told her that her father was killed by highwaymen and the body found by himself and two other men. Ann finds herself attracted to Rafe but has promised herself to Barkow and has accepted Barkow's lies that Rafe must be the real killer of her father and is only out to get her land.
Rafe is, as they say, a man's man. He can fight with guns or fists, is totally honest, and is not afraid of anyone. He saves an Indian girl from rape by one of Barkow's hired guns and she turns out to be a friend or relation of Man Afraid Of His Hoss, an Oglala Sioux chief who helps Rafe and Tex later in the story. He kills two of the gunslingers in a gunfight in town and, when Barkow and his puppet sheriff Pod Gomer arrest him and bring him to trial, he makes a fool of them in court so that even the corrupt judge dares not convict him.
Barkow isn't the only bad guy in the story. He's in partnership with Dan Shute, the other big landowner, and they're intending to steal the girl's land, which they have learned contains oil under the ground. When attempts to kill Rafe and his friends fails, Shute decides he's had enough of Barkow's clever tactics. He tells Barkow he's going to take Ann for himself, kill Caradec, and Barkow better stay out of his way. When Barkow takes Ann and makes a run for it, Shute tracks him down and kills him, kidnaps Ann, and awaits his showdown with Caradec.
The showdown comes. Rafe beats Shute in a fistfight, then kills him when Shute grabs a gun. He runs the crooked sheriff and judge out of town, he wins the girl and, at the end, falls asleep, dead tired after his achievements.
This is straight up Louis L'Amour with all of the elements of the classic American western. There's the strong, silent man who works hard, is fair to everyone, but will fight for the right. There's a smart bad guy and a plain old brute bad guy. There are a number of dumb gunfighters working for the bad guys and a smart one (Tex) with Rafe. There are Indians, fist fights, gun fights, winter storms, chases, ranches, an army fort, saloons, decent people who are afraid but eventually stand up and conniving people who learn to fear Rafe and eventually back down and slink away.
I couldn't read too many of these, but they can be a nice and easy reading break among the other books I read.
I rather liked it.
| Author | Walls, Jeannette |
|---|---|
| Publication | Scribner, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | June 2014 |
Jeannette Walls recounts the story of her childhood, her very odd family, and the very difficult circumstances of her growing up.
Her father Rex was a highly intelligent and technically competent but difficult, quarrelsome and self-indulgent man. He had the skills to work anywhere as an electrician or mechanic. He could build or repair things that others could not. But he couldn't hold a job. Jeannette doesn't say why and was not privy to any of the actual work situations of her father. Perhaps he quarreled with his bosses. Perhaps he showed up drunk. Perhaps he just said, Screw it, I don't want to do this, and walked off the job. As a result, the family's existence was always precarious. They always lived in the very cheapest lodgings they could find and wound up "doing the skedaddle" when the rent was overdue with no way to pay and bill collectors after them.
Her mother Rose Mary was a college educated, qualified and credentialed teacher who could easily get teaching jobs in the rural areas where credentialed teachers were scarce, but she was not at all suited to teaching. She couldn't control her classes, couldn't stick to the prescribed curriculum, couldn't grade papers on time, and often was only able to get out of bed and go to school because of the prodding and entreaties by her children. She was prone to saying that she had always done things for everyone else in her life and now she was going to do things for herself - which meant painting and writing and not going to work.
There were four children in the family. From oldest to youngest, they were Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and the baby, Maureen.
The children were clearly loved. Jeannette was a favorite of her father who called her "Mountain Goat". She always stuck up for him and always did what he said. But she was not alone. All three of the older children listened to and accepted their parents.
Life was very hard. Rex Walls was not just irresponsible, he was a drunk. By the time Jeanette was seven or eight, he had essentially ceased working. He got money by gambling, by a few odd jobs, or by importuning others. Most of it was spent on booze. The mother did not drink but her response to her husband's irresponsibility was to claim the right to be irresponsible herself. If he could do it, then so could she - at least that's my interpretation of the situation though Jeannette does not propound that theory in so many words. After failing in California and Arizona, they moved into a very decent house left to them when the mother's mother died. But they trashed it and, after only a year there, abandoned it (it was soon looted of all of its many valuables by thieves who saw it as an abandoned house) and moved to West Virginia to move in with Rex' parents and brother, who lived in a rundown place in the rural and depressed coal town of Welch. Life there was little better. The grandmother was a racist who almost never left the house because she was afraid of meeting black people on the street. Rex' brother took an unhealthy interest in the young Jeannette, the children did not get enough to eat and, when Jeannette ran afoul of the grandmother, they were kicked out.
However they went from bad to worse, living in a rundown, collapsing three room house with no plumbing or heating and only intermittent electricity which became further and further rundown as they lived there. Jeannette was reduced to rummaging through the garbage in the girls' bathroom at school to look for partial lunches thrown away by the other children.
Finally, Lori graduated high school and left for New York. Jeannette followed as soon as she could. Then Brian arrived. And then, surprising everyone, the parents came too. Lori, Jeannette and Brian all got jobs and Jeannette even managed to go to Barnard college on a scholarship plus a thousand dollars that her father won in a poker game. Each of the three young people soon had their own apartments with Lori becoming a commercial artist and Brian becoming a cop. The parents lived as squatters in an abandoned apartment building.
Three of the four children succeed in life. Lori becomes a successful commercial artist. Brian is a successful cop. Jeannette becomes a professional writer and marries, first a wealthy man on Park Avenue, then a man more like her. Only Maureen fails. She will neither work nor go to school. She lives first off boyfriends and then off her parents in their squatter's hovel - where she stabs her mother when her mother insists that she leave. She goes to prison for a year and then disappears to California.
At the end of the story, Rex dies of a heart attack at age 59. Life goes on and the last scene is a Thanksgiving dinner for the family at Jeannette's house.
I have written much more about this book than I planned to write, but less than I feel like writing. There were many scenes worth noting: the tauntings and beatings Jeannette took from boys and girls at the school or in the neighborhood for her poverty stricken differentness, the serious burn she got as a five year old told to cook her own dinner, her father petting the leopard in the zoo and then holding Jeannette's hand in the cage to have the leopard lick it, Lori and Jeannette working hard and saving money for nine months to fund Lori's escape to New York and having Rex steal the money and go on a bender, the children discovering Rose Mary hiding under a blanket and munching a candy bar while the children had nothing to eat, the leaking ceiling over Brian's bed and his sleeping under a plastic blow up raft, Rex taking 13 year old Jeannette to a bar and turning her over to a child molester for money - saying he knew that she could handle herself and get out of any trouble - she knew she could count on him, the discovery that Rose Mary had title to a million dollars worth of real estate but was holding it in order to keep it in the family, and of course the story of the glass castle itself - the house that Rex was always designing and for which the children dug a deep foundation hole beside their West Virginia hovel, only to have Rex turn it into a garbage dump because he couldn't pay for garbage removal.
The amazing thing to me about the story was Jeannette's understanding and indulgence of her irresponsible to the point of abusive parents. She seems to be without the "issues" that so many children have with parents who are far better than Rex and Rosemary. For all of their limitations and inability to escape their own self-indulgences, Jeannette still saw them as well meaning, decent parents. In a sense they were.
Jeannette's attitude towards these people forced me to see them in a more charitable light.
This is indeed a remarkable book about an extraordinary family and an extraordinary childhood.
| Author | Budiansky, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | June 2014 |
Budiansky tells the story of the contribution of science to the British and American war effort, mainly in the anti-submarine war but also to some extent in the battle against the Luftwaffe attack on Britain. The emphasis is not on the technical side of things like radar, ASDIC/sonar, etc., but on operational research (as it is called in the UK, "operations" research in the US.)
Patrick Blackett, a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for his research on cosmic rays, his first demonstration of the existence of the positron, and related research, was a leading light in the British scientific war effort. He was one of the men who understood that the biggest gains to be had were not in the introduction of new weapons and technology, but in the more scientific application of the technologies they had. For example, his group demonstrated, both in theory and in practice, that large convoys were much safer than small convoys. They used math in simple ways to demonstrate that the number of required convoy escorts was less overall and the escorts could be spaced closer together with a better chance of spotting and sinking a U-boat. They proved that air escort was more effective than escort by ships and calculated the number of very long range aircraft required. They showed experimentally that a plane painted bright white on the underside was harder to see against the sky than the black painted planes in current use and would be able to get 20% closer to a U-boat before being spotted. Then they calculated, accurately as it turned out, that this would lead to the rate of sinkings going from 2% per sighting up to 10%. They calculated the likelihood of a depth bomb dropped from an aircraft actually sinking a U-boat and concluded that the bomb had to be dropped within 15 seconds of the U-boat submerging in order to have a hope of sinking it, and re-ordered the way that planes were used. They also showed that, just by flying around a convoy, a plane could keep U-boats submerged during the day, significantly reducing their ability to spot or to follow the convoy. In addition to keeping the boat down and moving slowly, they also increased the amount of time the boat had to be on the surface at night to recharge batteries.
The scientists studied the effectiveness of anti-aircraft artillery and the application of radar to sighting. They reduced the number of shells fired to bring down one plane from 20,000 to 4,000.
Budiansky devotes some attention to the code breakers of Bletchley Park, who performed some absolutely brilliant feats of both theoretical and applied mathematics to break codes that should have been unbreakable except for hole and corner vulnerabilities that men like Turing discovered. These were instrumental both in routing convoys away from U-boats and in finding U-boats to attack. There was much debate about the latter use of the Enigma decodes since they could give away the success of the code breaking effort. However Doenitz and the Kriegsmarine just didn't believe that their codes were broken. Even in the face of clear evidence they thought it must be a spy in their own ranks who was giving away information.
There was plenty of opposition to what they did. The attitude of much of the Royal Navy establishment was that strong leaders and courageous men won battles at sea, not slide rules and statistics. They thought that their long experience at sea qualified them to know the right way to fight the war whereas the relative inexperience of the scientists (though Blackett himself was a naval officer in WWI) disqualified them. Time and again however, the scientists theoretical predictions proved right in practice. The fact that Churchill was, himself, a deep believer in science helped a great deal in overcoming resistance.
There were distractions. Some fanciful ideas were proposed, including some supported by noted scientists. Churchill got behind some of them and money and time were wasted on ideas that could be demonstrated theoretically to be impractical.
Germany, which had been the pre-war powerhouse of science and technology, was still formidable. They broke British and American naval cipher to gather a great deal of information. But they did not have the scientific success of the Western allies.
Blackett himself is not really the focus of the book, though there is some personal information about him and about a few of the other scientists. He was very left-wing, as were a great many in the scientific establishment in Britain - more so than in the U.S.
This is a very well written, absorbing history. I have read about some of the Allied scientific advances over the Germans, including more advanced radars, sonar, code breaking, some aircraft design (the P-51 and B-29), hedgehog, and, of course, the atomic bomb. But I do not recall reading about the critical role of operations research. This book explained that role and explained just how it was used to win the Battle of the Atlantic and contribute to victory in other areas.
As much as I admire the courage and the achievements of the front line fighters, and as much as I enjoy the fantasy of shooting Nazi storm troopers, what I think I would have most wanted to do in the war is something like what these scientists did.
| Author | Greene, Brian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Physics |
| Keywords | Cosmology |
| When Read | June 2014 |
Brian Greene is the real deal, a theoretical physicist and mathematician who is a leader of the research into string theory and its implications. In this book he attempts the seemingly impossible task of explaining the basics of string theory in non-mathematical language and reviewing a large number of multi-universe theories that have been proposed based on the implications of string theory and other advanced theories of physics.
The multiverse theories discussed include the inflationary multiverse, the brane and cyclic multiverses, the landscape multiverse, the quantum multiverse, the holographic multiverse, the simulated multiverse and the "ultimate" multiverse.
He also discusses many questions that I had been educated to consider as philosophical rather than physical or mathematical, but Greene handles them with great insight and finesse. They include the nature of mathematics - is it discovered or invented? Is it even possible that, in fact, math is all there is? Is it possible that we live in a simulation, for example a computer simulation and that we are the creations of programmers and machines in a higher reality than our own? Are the questions he has asked, including the cosmological questions about multiverses, answerable at all? Are they the legitimate province of physics or do they fail the test of being susceptible to scientific inquiry? If we produce mathematical systems that explain the things we can see and verify, are we justified by that in accepting the implications of those mathematical systems for things that we cannot see and verify?
The audio book that I listened to (often backing up to hear some explanations multiple times) was read by Greene himself. I appreciate that. He could bring the right emphasis to the reading that no actor, no matter how accomplished, could possibly bring.
The printed book has an extensive section of notes at the end that include discussions of the mathematical underpinnings of the discussion in the corresponding text. I looked at some of them. They were way over my head.
I couldn't pretend to understand most of what Greene discussed. And yet, in spite of that, I did get nuggets of information and glimpses of great vistas of knowledge and understanding.
There is a "standard model" of physics that describes, if I remember correctly, about 65 types of particle. Each particle, again if I understand correctly - dubious indeed - can be thought of as a kind of point concentration of a field. They are simultaneously mass and energy or, more precisely, they are energy that behaves as the wave equations of Maxwell and Schrodinger explain and can also be treated as particles. One of the fields involved is the Higgs field, which resists the motion of particles through it and that resistance is what makes up their mass.
"Strings" are minuscule concentrations of energy vibrating in nine spatial and one time dimension (or perhaps it's ten and one?) They are too small to observe. They are so small that they are many orders of magnitude smaller than any instrument that we can conceive of building could resolve. The extra dimensions of their vibration are also tiny. They consist of cylinder like and other shapes that strings can wrap around or penetrate but which are also beyond the possible limits of observation.
One charming explanation of why so many dimensions are posited was that the math of string theory is incomprehensible in a three dimensional world. It implies such things as probabilities that are outside the range of 0..1, which are the limits of meaningful probabilities, so that such math leads to paradox and nonsense. But the equations imply that ten minus the number of dimensions, times some problematic math, equals the result we need. If the problematic math is symbolized by the word "trouble", then (10 minus 10 dimensions) times trouble = 0 = no trouble.
Greene is in a position to examine the question of whether any of this makes sense or whether it's just mathematical fantasy. Given my lack of knowledge, the best I can do is take his opinion very seriously and assume that he is right and it is meaningful.
I didn't understand a lot but, nevertheless, I have come away with a new outlook on the universe. The notions of the Big Bang, the zoo of subatomic particles, the expansion of space (which, by the way, is not the same as objects like galaxies moving away from each other but is actually the expansion of space between them, something that is not limited by the speed of light!) the incompatibility of theories of gravity with theories of electromagnetism and the other fields, and the perceivable limits of the universe, are possibly not the impenetrable mysteries that I have imagined them to be. There may be yet deeper underlying laws and grander vistas.
That's just part of what's in this book. It's a real eye opener. It makes me want to go open a calculus book and get started understanding the math. However, I think this sort of thing is beyond my personal event horizon. I won't live long enough to learn what I'd need to learn and I'm not willing to invest the effort in something so esoteric and divorced from my ordinary and past life, even if it is about the whole multiverse.
See my diary entry for June 13, 2014.
| Author | Doherty, Gordon |
|---|---|
| Publication | Amazon Kindle, 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 398 |
| Extras | org chart |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Roman Empire |
| When Read | July 2014 |
The story opens in 363 AD in Constantinople with a seven year old boy, son of a dead legionary, sold into slavery. In 376 AD, the young slave Pavo is caught witnessing something he shouldn't have witnessed. His master Tarquitius would have killed him but some prophecy scares him off and he decides instead to send him as a recruit to a limitanei border legion on the Danube where Tarquitius has reason to believe that Pavo will die without he, Tarquitius, having done it.
In a poorly explained and not very convincing plot, Tarquitius has been working with Bishop Evagrius to overthrow the Eastern Emperor Valens by diverting a border legion into a trap and allowing a combination of Goths, Huns, and a few traitors to, somehow, get into the capital, take the city, and give it to the bishop and his allies.
Pavo is in the legion that is diverted. They are attacked by Huns and then by Huns together with Goths. The survivors make it to an old abandoned fort where they hold out against terrible odds. Pavo and some friends escape back to Constantinople in a stolen bireme (!) and from there manage to get in to see the Emperor. They are sent with more legions back to the scene of the siege where, by great bravery and derring-do they conquer the Goths, Huns, and renegade legionaries, sending them packing. Pavo returns to the old post on the Danubium, now a respected veteran legionary, and to the arms of the tavern keeper's beautiful daughter.
This story promised all of the elements of a rollicking, military, historical adventure. It had the Roman Empire, Goths, Huns, legionaries, warships, catapults, sword fights, and intrigue. But it failed on all counts except that it did actually have all of those elements. They just weren't plausible, weren't authentic, and gave us hardly any historical feeling.
The book was full of action but it was all of the impossible, cliff-hanger variety with the good guys taking every imaginable beating and injury and coming up ready and roaring to fight against inconceivable odds at the very latest in one day. The few characters with names were thin to the point of transparency. We are told that Pavo revered his father. We are told that Gallus was deeply in love with his deceased wife. We are told that the Bishop had a plan, that Spurius had a reason to want to kill Pavo, that Valens outsmarted the Bishop and the senators, but it was all just being told that it was so. There was nothing to convince us of any of it other than the author's statement that it was so.
I posted a review on Amazon.com. I expect it will be marked unhelpful if, by chance, anyone manages to find it. I was really writing to the author, encouraging him to do better.
The author read my review and was very gracious about my criticism. He said that mine was the most "balanced" review that he had read in a long time, that this had been his first book, and that he thinks he did at least a little better in the areas that I mentioned in subsequent books.
I had seen that he had responded to some other reviews and I wrote mine in the full awareness of the fact that he might read it.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 560 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 2014 |
Detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch is being sued in a civil trial for violating the civil rights of a man he shot and killed four years before. The man was "the Dollmaker", an infamous serial killer whom Bosch surprised in an apartment kept hidden from the world. Bosch drew his gun and told the man to freeze. He began to reach under the pillow on his bed. Bosch yelled at him to stop but he stuck his hand under the pillow anyway and Bosch fired, killing him. Afterward he saw that what the man was reaching for was a toupee.
Now Bosch was being sued in civil court by the Dollmaker's widow, represented by Honey Chandler, a very smart and effective litigator, known to the police as "Money Chandler", who was smarter than Belk, the police lawyer defending Bosch and, despite Belk's best efforts, was persuading the jury that Bosch didn't do the right thing, even casting doubt on whether the dead man was in fact the Dollmaker at all.
Then during the course of the trial, the police receive a note about another body buried in concrete. Excavating the site they find all of the marks of the Dollmaker, but the death occurred after Harry shot the suspect. Was the Dollmaker still at large? Is there a copycat killer? If so, it must be someone close to the original investigation because he knows facts that were unknown to the public. Further investigation shows that two of the murders attributed to the Dollmaker were in fact performed by a copycat.
Eventually, Harry discovers that there was indeed a copycat, and that he killed others that were as yet unknown to the police. He follows several false but plausible leads. Meanwhile, despite Belk's best efforts, Money Chandler is winning the case brilliantly, finally getting a verdict in favor of the plaintiff with fines against Harry and the police department totaling $2.00. It looks like a useless win for her and a non-damaging loss for Harry and the police, but there's more to it than that. By winning, she gets the right to bill the city for her very substantial fee. Only the wife of the Dollmaker is left totally out in the cold.
In the end, Harry figures out that Money Chandler herself has become a victim and rushes to her house. But it is too late. She had evidence that the police could use to find the real killer - who came to her house to get it. She realized what was at stake and wouldn't give it to him, in spite of his torturing her. She was killed for it but it enabled Bosch to find and arrest the real killer.
I thought this was a particularly well done crime novel. The feel of the novel is gritty and realistic. The many courtroom scenes were interesting and convincing. The presence that the very experienced Harry Bosch exhibits is also effective and convincing. When a 26 year old attorney with the state's attorney's office tells him that he hasn't enough evidence to get a warrant, Harry tells him in no uncertain terms that he's a dumb kid who knows nothing and he is going to do the right thing whether the kid understands it or not. The kid caves in to Harry's domineering anger.
This novel may have been from Connelly's best period of Harry Bosch writing. I'll probably read/listen to the successors of this novel if time permits.
| Author | Atkinson, Rick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Henry Holt and Company |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 848 |
| Extras | maps, diagrams, notes, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 2014 |
This is the second volume of Atkinson's great trilogy covering the invasions of Sicily and Italy up to the fall of Rome and slightly beyond. The war is mainly presented from the American point of view but there are many passages from British perspectives and some from Canadian, French, and Polish armies in Italy, as well as many quotes from Germans and some from Italians.
As in the first volume, Atkinson has conducted a very thorough reading of personal narratives, from letters home to diaries, memoirs, and histories by participants written after the war. He gives us quotes on almost every page from people that were there, often pulling out especially humorous or prescient quotes, many times from men who were killed shortly after their writing. We get an on-the-ground view of men trudging through narrow paths at night with a hand on the knapsack of the man in front and strict orders to make no noise. We learn about the personal effects of shell fire, snipers, bombs, scythe like sweeping of multiple machine guns across fields with men hugging the ground and hoping not to touch any mines.
Those personal views of the war are a foundation of the book but there are also high level views. We learn what Alexander, Clark, Lucas, Truscott, Darby, and many other leaders thought and even gain some insights into Churchill and Roosevelt.
There are quite a few passages regarding the naval perspective, especially that of Admiral Hewitt, the American commander in the Mediterranean. There are the great difficulties and confusions of the landings, the forgetting and re-learning of lessons from North Africa, the persistent Luftwaffe attacks on Allied shipping and the German first use of guided missiles. The navy played a key role, not only in getting the invasion forces ashore, but in defending them with naval gunfire that was instrumental in stopping the German efforts to throw the Salerno and especially the Anzio landings back into the sea.
The campaign was much tougher than anyone expected - on either side. At least some of the Americans believed that the combination of numbers with overwhelming air and artillery support would crack the German lines again and again. But the reverse happened. They were again and again thrown back with heavy casualties as elite German units outsmarted them, outfought them, and took every advantage that is given to the defense from high ground to prepared mine fields, to guns pre-sighted in on all possible points of attack.
On the German side there was, initially at least, a failure to appreciate the overwhelming material superiority of the Allies. By the Anzio landings, the Allies had more than 7,000 aircraft in the Mediterranean theater compared to fewer than 600 for the Luftwaffe. The Allies also had more and larger artillery tubes and, due to superior manufacturing and transport, are said to have fired 15 shells for every one that the Germans could fire. Powerful German forces of as many as several thousand men were literally shredded by artillery barrages while attempting to move into position for attacks. The tough, experienced, and numerous German troops thrown against the Anzio beachhead were met by walls of such intense fire that all of their advantages of numbers, tanks, and high ground, were negated.
The war in Sicily, and much more so in Italy, was a very hard war. It bore much resemblance to the war on the Western front in 1914-18. Thousands of men would be killed or wounded in battles over a few hundred yards of territory. The soldiers came out of it shocked, traumatized, and terrorized. Many huddled in shell holes from first light to last light, urinating and defecating in their helmets, only coming out at night to dump the waste and try to get food and water. And on the other side, no one dared show himself even way behind the lines as Allied fighter bombers and artillery observers scoured the earth, killing everything that moved.
It was an epic story.
Some historians take strong positions on various commanders and strategies. Mark Clark, the top American commander, has been criticized for vanity and for using brute force instead of strategy. Alexander has been criticized as too laid back. Lucas, the first commander at Anzio, has been criticized as too timid. Churchill said of the Anzio landings, and by implication of Lucas, that they had thought they were hurling a wildcat onto the beach but instead they landed a stranded whale.
Atkinson is not unwilling to express criticism, but is more nuanced about it. He sees Clark as a competent soldier, personally brave, hard working, and dedicated - though he does describe his egotistical side. Atkinson seems neutral about Lucas. Could he have done better? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the enterprise was doomed from the beginning and the best thing that could have been done was exactly what Lucas did, hunker down at the beach where his lines would not be overextended and where naval gunfire could be trained on any attackers. Was the invasion of Italy warranted at all? Did it contribute to winning the war in proportion to the effort expended on it and the casualties suffered? Atkinson presents both points of view on the question and I, with vastly less knowledge than he has, am not able to conclude any more.
If there is one thing that is lacking in this book, to my eye, it is a deeper examination of the air war. Atkinson does talk about the failure of the bomber as a battle winner. As in England, the American bomber command believed that they would win the war for the infantry. Bombers would flatten enemy positions and the soldiers on the ground would stroll over the enemy's dead bodies. It was tried a number of times and failed miserably each time. Not only did they fail to destroy the German positions, they often completely missed or mistook their targets and bombed our own men and helpless Italian civilians.
The most spectacularly successful bombing raids may not even been by the Allies. In one German raid on Bari, an Italian harbor, an Allied ship full of mustard gas was hit. The War Department had sent more than 200,000 gas bombs to Italy in secret to be used as a deterrent to German use ("How the Germans would be deterred if the deterrent remained a secret was never adequately explained.") More than 1,000 Allied service men were killed or missing after the attack and even more Italian civilians. The numbers were made worse by the Army's refusal to alert anyone to the nature of the ship's contents - which didn't stop the Germans from broadcasting the truth.
This was important information but I'm a little surprised that Atkinson said virtually nothing about the Allied domination of the air behind the German lines - how it was done and what effect it had, other than to say that it happened and was effective.
I'm nitpicking here.
On balance, this is one of the great histories of the war. I am reading it in the spirit of my reading of Churchill's great six volume history. The two histories are very different but each is fascinating and compelling. Each has been a high point in my reading of the history of World War II, as Bruce Catton's books have been in my reading of the history of the Civil War.
| Author | Seymour, Gerald |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Hodder and Stoughton |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | July 2014 |
Immacolata Borelli, young daughter of a gangster clan in Naples, Italy, has been trained as an accountant. She goes to London for more schooling where she dallies with young Eddie Deacon, a nice young man who knows some Italian and teaches English as a foreign language. Then she returns to Italy for the funeral of a young friend who died of leukemia caused by toxic waste dumped by the Borelli clan's toxic waste disposal business. She is assaulted and insulted by the dead girl's relatives who don't care that she is a Borelli and that they have put their lives at risk by attacking her. But Immacolata is crest-fallen and guilt-ridden. She cannot live with what her family has done. She does the worst thing imaginable in the clan and on the street in Naples. She calls the police and offers to testify against her own family.
She is taken back to Italy, kept in a safe house, and interrogated for days by Inspector Castrolami and goes on the record accusing her father, her mother (the linchpin of the family "business") and her two brothers, as well as some of the others in the gang. After the police have gotten her testimony and learned of all of the safe houses and hiding places of the gangsters, they launch a massive raid, arresting everyone.
Immacolata had never told Eddie who she really was and said nothing to him when she left London. When asked by the Italian police, she told them there was no one in her life to worry about. But Eddie worries. "His Mac" was seeming more and more to him as the love of his life. When she disappeared he resolved to go to Naples and find her, not knowing that walking around Naples and inquiring after her was tantamount to signing his own death warrant. The local priest who knew better but didn't care, answered Eddie's question truthfully. He told Eddie where to find her grandparents. The old folks took him in, fed him cakes, and talked to him until Salvatore, the enforcer for the clan, could arrive with an accomplice and a van to beat him up, handcuff him, put a sack over his head, and carry him away to a cellar. Then the clan's lawyer was sent to the prosecutor's office with a note, which he claimed to have received anonymously, saying that unless the charges are dropped and the prisoners released, a finger, then an ear, then a penis, and finally the life, of Eddie Deacon will be sent in.
Only one other character of the story is introduced. A man named Lukas, a hostage negotiator formerly working with the FBI and CIA, inserts himself into the affair. There is little he can do to help the police but he tries and, at a critical point at the end, negotiates with Salvatore. But he gets careless. Perhaps he is impatient after so many hostages, so many killers. He approaches too closely and Salvatore shoots him dead. However Eddie manages to hurt him and the police jump him to and put him under arrest.
Immacolata gives her testimony on the witness stand. Her family and their gunman Salvatore are all convicted and mostly put away for long terms or for life. Even her wicked grandmother gets 18 months in prison.
In the end Immacolata is taken to the airport. She has a new passport with a new name and a ticket to London. She has sent a text to Eddie's old phone but has had no response. She is going to try to find him. She owes him a great debt and will try to repay it.
The story works on several levels. As a suspense thriller, it is very good. As time is running out for Eddie we are both deeply concerned for him and disturbed by the inability of the police to find him and, at one point, the failure of an Italian counter-terrorist organization to turn over information about Eddie's whereabouts to the police because it might compromise one of their agents. The agent himself tries to help Eddie and is caught by the gangsters anyway and either jumps or is thrown from a window. Only when the body is discovered by a passing police car, the local neighbors wouldn't dare tell anyone about it, does the counter-terrorist chief deign to tell the police about the location of Eddie.
The most striking aspect of this story to me was the portrayal of the criminal clan and the grip of criminals in Naples. The clan was one of many, perhaps 80 altogether. They controlled one neighborhood. Every shop in the neighborhood had to pay for protection. People who did not pay were murdered, usually publicly in front of many witnesses, none of whom dared say a word to the police. All fear emanated from the clan and all favors too. The local people, deeply oppressed by the criminals, still treated them as royalty and competed to express their undying loyalty. The local boys on motor scooters occupied every corner and reported every stranger and every occurrence up the chain of command. They were competing for jobs in the gang making 8,000 Euros a month instead of the 800 they would make at the local factories, if they could get such jobs at all.
When the clan fell, not even one day passed before the neighboring clans were in the streets, telling the local shop owners who their new "protectors" were and how much they were going to pay. The boys on the streets anxiously attempted to contact, accept, and serve the new masters. A dozen bastards went to jail but nothing at all changed on the street.
Eddie was a surprising, interesting, heroic character. Never having done anything heroic in his life and never having really committed to anything, he nevertheless believed that he must commit to Immacolata. He must find her. He must declare his love. When he is kidnapped and beaten he develops a will to fight. He saws away at his handcuffs, rubbing them on the cement hour after hour until he is taken to a new hiding place and chained all over again. There he tirelessly works to examine every millimeter of his prison until he finds a single nail, which he works and works and works and works into the cement holding the ring to which he is chained. He finally breaks out, assaults his guards, injuring them, and runs blindly through the building until he is finally caught and beaten after the secret agent attempted to hide him. But he never loses his will to live and to fight.
Lukas is another hero of a sort. He is a man who really can do very little. Only the police can find Eddie. Only the police can muster the men and the firepower to rescue him. Lukas never interferes with them. He is exactly who he says he is, a man who will give advice only if he is asked and can do little else. But he gives his life at the end in the move that sets Eddie free.
Just as Eddie grew in this story, so too did Immacolata. From being a self-centered daughter of a gangster family, she grows into a deeper consciousness of who she is and a deeper appreciation, not only of Eddie, but of the police who guard her every day, refusing to treat her as any kind of heroine, refusing to respond to her sexual flirtations, but always acting correctly and in the interests of justice.
I hadn't read any Seymour before this. He has written many books. He's an impressive writer.
| Author | Box, C.J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 2014 |
Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett is trying to do a good job at his life in the outdoors while providing for his pregnant wife and two daughters, but things happen to him. He catches a local man hunting out of season and the man tricks him and seizes Joe's gun and points it at him, but finally gives it back. Later the same man, shot and bleeding, shows up at Joe's state owned house in the back country, and dies.
An investigation is launched by Sheriff "Bud" Barnum and Joe joins a party led by another warden named Wacey Hedeman sent into the mountains on horseback to find the camp that the dead man came from. There they sneak up on the camp but a man comes out with a gun and Wacey kills him in a firefight.
The story turns out to be about a natural gas pipeline from Wyoming to Southern California. The hunters in the woods were not killed by the guy that Wacey killed, but by Wacey himself, working with former chief game warden Vern Dunnegan, who is now working for the gas company that wants to build the pipeline ahead of their competitors. The men were killed because they discovered a field of dead Miller's Weasels, animals long thought to be extinct. They had been killed by Vern and Wacey because they were on the pipeline path and the Endangered Species Act would have held up construction if they were discovered.
Wacey also turns out to be a child abuser who has terrorized Joe's ten year old daughter because he knows that she knows something about some still living weasels.
In the final confrontation, Joe sees Wacey chasing his daughter and, first, blows his arm off at the elbow, knocking his gun down, and then shoots him in both knees as he still tries to run. Then he shoots Vern in the hip as Vern attempts to walk away. Both men go to prison and Joe, who had been fired from his job due to Vern's influence, gets his job back.
This is a traditional story about a decent, upright, family man caught in a web of intrigue and murder. He wants to think well of everyone, including Vern and Wacey, and only gradually learns of their duplicity and criminality.
By the time of the final confrontation, Joe has learned enough about the bad things these men have done, not only to others, but to Joe and his family, that there is some measure of revenge in his shooting of them, above and beyond the search for justice. It was a little surprising to see that, but not entirely unsatisfying.
The story was predictable but decently written. Apparently it was commercially successful because it spawned a whole series centered on Joe Pickett and outdoor Wyoming.
| Author | Irwin, John P. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 2014 |
18 year old Irwin joined the Army in 1944 to escape from high school and have an adventure. He was trained as a tank gunner and sent to Europe where he left his repple depple (replacement depot) in early 1945 to join the 3rd Armored Division of the First Army. He was initially put in command of a damaged tank and told to catch up to the rest of the company when repairs were completed. His manic driver then raced at top speed to catch up, smashing into the rear tank of the company, knocking both tanks out, and injuring a man It was an inauspicious start to Irwin's military career.
The division was advancing through Germany, crossing rivers opposed by Germans on the other banks, and assaulting villages, towns and cities. In some places the Germans surrendered quickly but in others that fought fanatically, sometimes with 12 year old kids in suicidal panzerfaust attacks.
By this time, of course, the Germans had no chance. Armor, artillery, aircraft, supplies, mobility, were all on the side of the Americans who shot and burned their way through all resistance with foot soldiers or "doughs" clearing the Germans and Sherman tanks right with them, providing direct canon and machine gun support.
The Germans still had some tanks and anti-tank guns as well as many panzerfausts. There were losses. Irwin's own tank was shot up several times and he was in firefights with Panthers and Tigers. Because his tank had been successful and Irwin had shown himself to be an effective gunner, when a Pershing tank arrived, Irwin's crew was assigned to it and he spent the last days in combat blowing up German tanks and positions with its powerful 90 mm gun.
In their final stage of the war they were withdrawn from combat and placed under the leadership of a 22 year old lieutenant who had just arrived from the States, never been in combat, but was determined to make these veterans shine their shoes and buttons and follow parade ground protocol. Irwin finally took the opportunity of a passing inquiry from the Captain to tell him what was going on. The lieutenant was re-assigned. The men stayed in Germany, going home based on a system that gave priority to family men and men who had been in combat the longest. Irwin waited quite a while but eventually left the army and went home.
Irwin went back to school, graduated college in 1952, and eventually went to Syracuse University getting his PhD in philosophy. He taught at Lock Haven University from 1964 to his retirement in 1990. Had I finished my own training in philosophy, and had the times been better for it, perhaps I too would have gotten a PhD and met the man somewhere.
The writing is clear and lucid, not the deep and weighty cogitations one might expect from a philosopher. He wrote well from the perspective of his young self. It was a good book offering a useful perspective of the American army at this late stage of the war.
| Author | Fallada, Hans |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Hofmann, Michael |
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 1947 |
| Number of Pages | 544 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 2014 |
The story opens with the visit of the post office delivery woman to an apartment block at 55 Jablonski Strasse in Berlin on the day that France surrendered to Germany in 1940. People are celebrating all over Germany but the postwoman must deliver a letter to Otto and Anna Quangel informing them that their son was killed in the war.
Otto is a foreman in a furniture factory that has been converted to the manufacture of coffins, now much in demand. He is a quiet, taciturn, frugal man who runs his part of the shop with dedication and commitment. He walks to work to save bus fare. He has no tolerance for slackers on the job. He was not really close to his son and didn't understand him very well but, like Anna, he is devastated by the boy's pointless death. He finally decides on a form of revenge. He carefully hand writes a postcard that says (I don't remember the exact words) "Mother, the Fuhrer murdered my son. He'll murder yours too." He takes the card to an office building, places it on a stairwell landing, and leaves. Anna immediately joins him in his campaign and soon they are writing one, two, three similar cards a week, leaving them all over Berlin. Otto imagines them being passed from hand to hand, contributing to a general revulsion and resistance against Nazism, or at least to people committing small acts of sabotage at their jobs.
The story has several strands. One is Otto and Anna's apartment building. In addition to them, there is a family of Nazis with an old drunk of a father, a pair of stormtrooper sons, and a truly vicious 16 year old Hitler Youth leader. Another is Emil Borkhausen, a layabout grifter who lives by pimping his wife, stealing from Jews, and by denouncing people to the Nazis and blackmailing those who won't "lend" him money to shut him up. Another is a 70 year old Jewish woman, Mrs. Rosenthal, whose husband has been arrested and she is at her wits end, never hearing from him again. Borkhausen and the Hitler Youth battle over who gets to victimize her but the slimy Borkhausen is no match for the domineering 16 year old. Another is the postwoman herself and her good-for-nothing husband whom she has expelled from her life and who lives off women, wheedling money from them to feed his addictions to horse racing and drinking. Another is an elderly, upright, retired judge who does his best to hide Mrs. Rosenthal and ultimately to support the Quangels in the only way still possible, by slipping poison to them in prison.
The other major strand is the mounting fury in the Gestapo over the postcards. Detective Inspector Esherich has been assigned to catch "the hobgoblin" and he goes about it in a most systematic way. His effort is damaged by his psychopathic, alcoholic boss who constantly demands progress, threatening dire consequences to Esherich if he doesn't produce the hobgoblin quickly. Esherich must invent progress, doing so by persecuting the little horse racing addict, whom Esherich well knows cannot be involved but who had the misfortune to have been denounced by a zealous and stupid Nazi nurse at a doctor's office where one of the postcards had been found.
Before the Quangels' arrest, hundreds of post cards have been distributed, but their effect is opposite to what Otto expected. Almost every person who finds one sees it as a direct threat to his well-being, very possibly the act of an agent provocateur. The only possible thing to do with it is to immediately turn it over to the police, praying that the police will not think that they had anything to do with it. Instead of provoking resistance, the cards only provoke intense fear, of resistance as well as of the Nazis themselves.
Almost no one comes to a good end in this story. Esherich is arrested and tortured by his boss for his failures. When his successor also fails in an even bigger way, he is let out and finally catches his quarry. But then he watches his boss and his bosses' cronies beating and tormenting old Quangel in a drunken orgy of idiocy and observes Quangel's stoic and dignified bearing. He realizes that his life as a fighter of crime has been turned into a life of the promotion of crime and that it is the Gestapo that are the criminals and the "criminals" that are the decent men. He commits suicide.
There are interrogations and a trial. Like all of the Nazi enterprises, they are ridiculous travesties of justice. The cruel and brutal interrogations are nothing but attempts to drag more and more innocent people into the net of Gestapo fabricated conspiracy. Friends and relatives of the Quangels are drawn in and persecuted to their deaths even though they had nothing whatever to do with the postcards. The "trial" is a farce in which the prosecutor, the judges, and even a defense attorney, attempt to outdo each other in demonstrating their love of the Nazi state and their vicious contempt and hatred for its enemies. The only small mitigations in this part of the story are the appearances of an educated symphony conductor who shares a cell with Quangel for a brief period, a fine pastor who sacrifices himself to prevent prisoners from being abused to death, and the old judge who offers the only way out to Otto and Anna in the form of small capsules of cyanide.
Quangel, whose curiosity about life has been aroused by the musician, puts off taking the poison until the guillotine actually falls and it is too late. Anna, believing that Otto is still alive (the old judge told her that he was) lives almost happily in her prison cell. She discards the poison and is killed quickly, painlessly, and with no warning, by an allied bomb. The judge also dies in a bombing.
Almost everyone that we care about and some that we don't is dead but the author tells us that he doesn't want to end with everyone's death. He takes us into the countryside where the scumbag Borkhausen has discovered his 17 year old son who beat, robbed and abandoned his father after the father abused him, is living. The boy has found a very decent couple who have taken him in. He is grateful to them and is living a life of labor and love. When the father tries to inveigel and bully the boy into supporting him, the boy threatens his father with a whip and with denunciation to the police and drives him away. It is the end of the novel.
Hans Fallada is the pen name of Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Dietzen. He was a popular author before the war but was severely oppressed by the Nazis. Arrested and finally committed to an insane asylum for further torments, he survived by pretending to write an antisemitic novel under the orders of Goebbels. His British publisher is said to have handed him a file on Otto and Elise Hampel, the real life models for Otto and Anna Quangel, after the war. Inspired by their story, he supposedly wrote this novel in 24 days and died shortly before its first publication in East Germany.
There are many incidents in this book that will remain with me for as long as life and memory survive. I will write just a few here to help preserve them. The Hitler Youth visits his father in an asylum for alcoholics. He plans to help the old guy but the guy pisses him off. The youth bullies the doctor into prescribing a horrible medicine that can kill patients, and bribes the venal attendant to administer a double dose. Frau Rosenthal is protected at the judge's apartment but she can't stand the thought that her husband might come home and not find her. She rushes up the stairs and is caught. The little weasel who loves betting on horses gets away from Esherich by sheer dumb luck, but he can't be bothered to go into hiding and is re-arrested, winding up dead. Scene after scene presents us with people at the mercy of horrible whim and impossible fate. We read the book hoping for time to pass, even for the Russians to march in and the Nazis to fall, but everything moves slowly.
The Nazi regime is revealed for what it is - a pyramid of criminals with the most successful at the top but with criminals, brutes, and thugs from top to bottom.
Primo Levi is quoted as saying about this book “The greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis.” He would know. I think it is the greatest that I have read. It was deeply painful to read. There were times when I had to shut off the CD player and listen to news or music because I couldn't take any more of the brutality, venality, and persecutions - especially in the Gestapo interrogations but in other places too. However, although it was hurtful to read, it was also enlightening and important.
Fallada is said to have written this book in order redeem Otto and Elise Hampel - to tell their story and make it so that their effort and sacrifice was not in vain. I believe he succeeded.
| Author | Grisham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 2014 |
Kyle McAvoy, editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and among the very most employable law school graduates in the country, has been offered a job at Sculley and Pershing, possibly the biggest law firm in the world. He isn't sure he wants it and is leaning towards public interest law when he is accosted by men who identify themselves as FBI agents and a Pittsburgh detective investigating a rape accusation that took place in his apartment. They have a cell phone video of two of his friends having sex with a girl who later claimed that she was raped by them. Kyle, drunk, was present in the room when it started.
It eventually transpires that the men are not police. They are agents working for some unidentified group with deep pockets who are blackmailing Kyle to get him to accept the job at Sculley, to get on a huge Defense Department contract lawsuit in which Sculley is representing one of the partners, and to steal documents relating to the case.
Kyle soon realizes that he is being followed everywhere, that his apartment is bugged, and that his three college friends are now also in some danger. He attempts to do what he is asked to do while managing not to actually break the law. However push comes to shove and he cannot straddle the fence any longer. One of his friends, a recovering alcoholic, makes a mistake that will blow the whole scheme and he is murdered. Kyle then hires a lawyer of his own who puts him in touch with the FBI and they attempt to catch Benny Wright, the leader of the men who are attempting to direct him. He also tells Sculley the truth about what has happened.
The FBI fails to catch Benny and the trail goes cold. They never found out who he was or who he worked for. He might have been employed by the company or law firm on the other side of the case, by a foreign intelligence agency, or even by an American intelligence agency. In any case, Benny is clearly very smart and well connected. He realizes that the game is up and disappears.
The FBI offers Kyle protective custody but he declines. We never find out who did this to him or whether they will kill him or attempt to ruin his career. With his lawyer father, he offers money to the girl to settle the rape case, and he walks off into whatever future awaits him.
Like all of Grisham's other legal thrillers, this one gave us great insight into the life of lawyers, in this case in the big New York corporate law firms.
It's a pretty demoralizing life. Everything revolves around putting in billable hours, a minimum of 2,000 per year but 2,500 per year if you hope to stay in the firm for more than a year or two. Each of those hours is billed out at $300, yielding $600,000 to $750,000 per year for the firm of which $200,000 goes to the young associate lawyer. If the fellow makes it past the first year his billing rate goes to $400 per hour and his salary goes up accordingly. These people aren't really worth that much money. They are very smart and hard working but have no experience yet, however they are part of a cash generating machine that thrives on big legal work and channels people into lifetimes comprised of overtime work and billable hours.
I found the story fascinating. The details of how the firm functioned and what its role is were very illuminating. In one scene, a partner takes Kyle to lunch at an expensive restaurant and explains to him that, if the firm doesn't bill enough hours to some of their big clients, they'll be castigated for not supporting the client - who has already allocated 1%, or whatever it is, for legal services. They are at risk of losing the client. And so Kyle is instructed who to bill the lunch to. The client pays for the food, the time, and any other expenses.
As is often the case with Grisham, I didn't find his main character all that sympathetic. He should have gone to the FBI at the beginning. He should have taken his chances with the rape accusation if that's what he had to do. That's what he wound up doing in the end. It would have saved him much agony if he had done it at the beginning, and in any case, how could he hope that he would survive all of this intact? But of course that wouldn't have enabled Grisham to tell this story.
| Author | Mortimer, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | BBC Audio, 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy; Short stories |
| When Read | August 2014 |
There are seven short stories in this collection, all taking place around the Christmas holidays and all apparently written separately at different times. They feature the usual cast of characters: Hilda (She Who Must Be Obeyed), Soapy Sam Ballard, Claude Erskine Brown, the mad bull Judge Bullingham, Judge Graves - Mister Justice Gravestone, Henry the Clerk of Chambers, and of course the star of the stories, Horace Rumpole himself.
One of the longer stores is "Rumpole and the Slimmed Down Christmas", in which She Who Must takes Rumpole to a kind of health resort for a Christmas of diet and exercises. A murder is committed and the police arrest the lady who runs the place. Rumpole is engaged to defend her and soon proves, not in a courtroom scene but in an interview with the real killer whom he cleverly tapes with a hidden recorder, that someone else committed the crime.
Another longer story is "Rumpole and the Christmas Break". A dense Muslim boy is arrested for the murder of a female professor after sending her a letter threatening her with death. In spite of the most outrageous interference in the defense by Judge Graves, who does everything he can to belittle Rumpole and to encourage the jury to find the boy guilty, Rumpole amasses the evidence to show that the crime was committed by her husband, who took the opportunity of the death threat to murder his wealthy wife who was about to divorce him because of his infidelities.
Unlike, for example, a Perry Mason courtroom drama, Rumpole has little in the way of glorious dramatic action in the courtroom. He wins or loses his cases (and unlike Mason he loses as well as wins) as much by backstage planting of ideas in the minds of the police or other actors in the stories as by courtroom revelations.
Rumpole is an endearing character. He is old and fat, bullied by his wife, disrespected by many of his colleagues, venerated mostly by people like the Timson family of small time crooks for whom Rumpole is their main representative. He notes in one story that people whom he represents rarely send him thank you letters or even acknowledge him if they accidentally happen to meet. He is a part of the incidents in their lives that are embarrassing and distasteful to them. But he is a person whose sympathies lie with the poor and the downtrodden and whose scorn is reserved for the wealthier and more powerful humbugs who are so quick to condemn them.
It would be easy for Mortimer to have slipped into formulaic writing. There is indeed a clear formula here. But there is also effort and originality. In one little scene that impressed me, Hilda has announced that she can't stand Rumpole's smoking of his little cigars and she is going to spend Christmas with her old friend Dodo. However she appears at the office Christmas party and tells Rumpole that she returned home when Dodo announced that they were going to have a healthy Christmas eating nothing but raw fruits, vegetables and nuts. He reaches in his pocket for a little cigar and finds he has none left and then Hilda presents him with a small gift wrapped package of little cigars. It is a touching moment for both of them and helps to keep these characters real and human for us.
I read that Leo McKern, the actor who played Rumpole on TV for the BBC, got sick of the part and sick of the fact that everywhere he went in the world he was immediately recognized as Rumpole. I hope that that was more than counter balanced by an opposite feeling about his work on this series.
Mortimer and his collaborators (and it seems reasonable to me to call them that) McKern, Wallis, and many others at the BBC, brought short periods of joy and delight to millions, maybe tens of millions of people. How many of us can claim to have done something as wonderful as that?
| Author | Garcia Marquez, Gabriel |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Rabassa, Gregory |
| Publication | New York: Avon Books, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 223 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 2014 |
The single long story, one should call it a novella, is the one entitled Leaf Storm ("Hojarasca"). The action of the story takes place in a single day, actually in less than a single hour, though there are references to past events that play important roles in the story. A family composed of a grandfather (the Colonel) and his second wife, his daughter, and her ten year old son. The old man, his daughter, and his grandson have come to the house of the unnamed doctor, a man who has lived with them for years but has now been found dead. The grandfather arranges for a funeral for the doctor.
This takes place in Macondo, a fictional town in Columbia not far from the Caribbean Sea. It is after the Thousand Day War. It is after the banana company had come to town bringing its leaf storm of human and material trash, including the doctor. It is after the time when the soldiers, at the behest of the company, had shot down the striking workers and the doctor, long banned from practicing by the company doctors, had refused to treat any of the wounded that were brought to him. Now the company has gone. The doctor, always a taciturn and inscrutable man, is no longer practicing medicine and is hated and despised by the townspeople. Only the old Colonel, a man who took in the doctor when he first came to town and furnished lodgings for him for years in a room in his own house, a man who received a single favor from the doctor and in return promised him that he would provide for his funeral when the time came, only that Colonel is on hand to see that the doctor is properly buried.
The grandfather, the mother, and the child all sit in the house of the doctor, thinking quietly of the history of their relationship to this strange doctor who eats grass and speaks in his "parsimonious ruminant voice". The grandfather goes over in his mind the story of the doctor's coming to town. The daughter/mother goes over in her mind the coming of the man (not the doctor) who wanted her as a wife and then abandoned her and their child. The boy goes over in his mind his adventure with his friend Abraham when he was "tecky tacking" ("teco tacando") and said to his friend "When I teck somebum hoblows up" as they go to visit Lucrecia who raises up her loose nightgown for them.
The grandfather has brought his four Guajiro Indian workers with him. They lift the doctor into a coffin and carry him out as the mayor, who only permits the burial to proceed after the grandfather has paid him off, watches them take the body outside to be buried.
The other stories are much smaller. The one I liked best was "Blacaman The Good, Vendor of Miracles". This and others incoporate the "magical realism" for which Garcia Marquez is so well known, a form that plays only a very small role in Leaf Storm.
I recommended this book to the NCI book group that I participate in. It seemed to me fitting to read a book of Garcia Marquez, who had just died before I picked it as my recommendation to the group.
To my surprise, hardly anyone read all the stories. Several people were out due to work responsibilities. The others were not nearly as enthusiastic about the book as I was.
For me, it was a great book.
| Author | Morgan, Richard K. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 375 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | August 2014 |
In the 26th century each person has a "stack" implanted at the base of his neck that records his entire mental state. If he dies, the stack can be extracted and "re-sleeved" into a new body, if one is available and affordable, bringing the person back to life and health.
Takeshi Kovacs has been "needlecast" from his home world to Earth, which is to say that the contents of his stack, currently in limbo, have been sent by a faster than light digital transmission to Earth where they have been inserted into a new stack and a new sleeve. This hugely expensive procedure was paid for by Lorenz Bancroft a "meth" (from "Methuselah") an extremely wealthy man who has been alive in one sleeve or another for hundreds of years. Bancroft died, either by suicide or murder, and was re-sleeved from a several day old backup of his stack. He was killed with his own gun in a house that brimmed with security measures. The police believe that he either killed himself or was killed by his wife, the only people who had access to the gun and who could bypass the security, but Bancroft denies the possibility of either and has brought Kovacs, an "Envoy" detective, to find out the truth.
Kovacs meets all kinds of people on his mission. He is seduced, tortured, deceived, threatened, supported by the police and warned by the police. He is a latter day noir private eye with an attitude and a set of super skills and capabilities stemming from his extensive training as a space marine and an Envoy, and from the expensive "neurochem" that helps him move especially fast, suppress pain, concentrate, etc., more than normal people.
Eventually, he discovers the true facts (Bancroft killed himself for reasons of guilt over the death of a woman that he "snuffed" in a sex act), kills the terrible meth witch Raylene Kowahara, and uses his generous payment to buy a new body for a prostitute murdered because she talked to him.
He is needlecast back to his home world.
The story and the science are pretty remarkable. I didn't really like the story. I'm not a big fan of super heroes and the wild fight scenes didn't entirely appeal to me. I had trouble following the intricacies of the plot to see how Kovacs figured out the reason for Bancroft's death, perhaps because I didn't pay close enough attention. It was an involved and complicated plot.
Nevertheless, I had to admire the achievement. The ideas about repeated lifetimes, the pervasive sleaze, the artificial intelligence, and other features of the novel were very well conceived and realized. As is customary in science fiction some of the concepts, including the stacks and the needlecasts, had to just be accepted without scientific justification, but Morgan limited himself to implausible extensions of science rather than inconceivable violations. In the needlecast case, only information is transferred faster than light. It's still a violation of relativity but, if we can say this about violations of fundamental settled science, it's a minimalist one. The author put some effort and intelligence into this work.
| Author | Gombrowicz, Witold |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Polish |
| Translators | French, Carolyn; Karsov, Nina |
| Publication | New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Extras | Introduction by Stanislaw Baranczak, Translator's Note, Note on Pronunciation |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2014 |
The fictional noted Polish author, Witold Gombrowicz, like the real noted Polish author, Witold Gombrowicz, accepted a free cruise from the Polish government to Buenos Aires where he has been invited to give some lectures and promote the prestige of Polish culture. It is 1939 and, as the ship approaches the South American port, Germany invades Poland.
Everyone on the ship expresses their determination to return to Europe, to join the army, defend the Fatherland, and to march to Berlin, everyone, that is, except the noted Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, who contrives to stay ashore when the ship sails, together with the members of the local Polish community, who all deeply regret their inability or the impracticality of returning to the homeland.
G is taken in and given work by the friends of an ambassador and, in some strange fashion, is accepted by them. But the social life of the community is odd, complex, and strained. G is befriended by a very rich Argentine homosexual who hopes to use G to gain access to a handsome young man with whom he has become obsessed.
The story is a comedy. The language is an unrelieved 18th century Polish rural aristocratic idiom used in stories that the people of that life and time told to each other at social gatherings. Everyone is happy, or not happy. Happy they were. (I haven't got the book in front of me at the moment and can't offer direct quotes.) The plot moves ahead as G is drawn in to the unacceptable, or acceptable, role of procurer, or not procurer, of arranger of a duel, and sabotager of the duel in which he fills each gun with powder but no shot as the homosexual and the boy's father blaze away at each other. Then he is drawn into a strange patriotic organization of his employers, led by their chief bookkeeper, to inflict pain on each other as a kind of substitute for their failure to return to their homeland where the Germans could inflict pain upon them.
He escapes in the end and continues his life in Buenos Aires.
The real Witold Gombrowicz did indeed accept a free trip to Buenos Aires in 1939, fortuitously escaping the German invasion. He too stayed ashore and lived there until 1948. His comedy is a tour de force of both language and social and cultural commentary, making fun of himself and of the overly serious but absurd and doomed patriotism of pre-war Polish society.
The book was apparently extraordinarily difficult to translate. Providing a translation that was both faithful to the original and yet understandable to English readers posed continuous challenges. The result was readable without being too tedious but it could be taxing to read.
It is a book that I sometimes liked a lot and sometimes didn't. The language was brilliant but could become tedious. The characters were humorous caricatures who were also brilliant but could also become tedious. However the book was short, as it needed to be in this exotic idiom. It was an experience to read.
| Author | Bradford, Ernle |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. |
| Copyright Date | 1960 |
| Number of Pages | 195 |
| Extras | chronology, sources, notes, index, about the author |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| When Read | September 2014 |
Prince Henry of Portugal, 1394-1460, known as "The Navigator", devoted his life to religion, the conquest of Islam by Christianity, and exploration of the islands of the Atlantic and the coast of Africa. As a very young man he led an expedition that successfully captured the peninsula and wealthy port of Ceuta in Mediterranean Morocco in 1415. It was the first European and Christian outpost in North Africa at least since the Crusades, and was seen by many in Christendom as the beginning of an answer to the Turks, who were then pressing the moribund remains of the Byzantine Empire and south eastern Europe. He then became governor of the outpost but, 22 years later, he pressed his luck with an attack on Tangier that failed miserably and resulted in his beloved brother Prince Fernando having to be delivered over as a hostage where he languished and eventually died.
The main effort of his life was the exploration and expansion into the South Atlantic. He never, himself, made any voyages. His role was to raise funds, coordinate activities, enlist commercial and other allies, and push and prod wherever he could.
At the opening of this period, sailors' superstitions held that, if a ship went too far south it would be sucked into boiling water, or into a waterfall over the edge of the earth, or would run into cannibals and, anyway, there was no reason to try. By the end, Portuguese ships were making regular visits to the Azores, Canaries, and other islands, and had gotten as far south as equatorial Africa, beyond the great desert and into the rain forest. There they traded in slaves and various African products.
Pious and single minded, but for all that accomodating and lacking any political ambition, Henry stayed out of the struggles occurring between his family and the Portuguese nobility - a group aiming to decentralize power away from the monarchy and towards an aristocratic oligarchy. Bradford considers this group to be less likely to serve the interest of the nation - though we don't learn a lot about them.
Henry built a great port at Sagres to serve as his gateway to Africa. He hoped to make it one of his lasting contributions to the country. But after he died all the traffic went to the better port at Lisbon. He never did establish his port. His captains never did round the Cape of Good Hope. But he set a process in motion that acquired sufficient momentum of its own to fully initiate the great period of exploration that led to Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus.
Bradford was a Royal Navy sailor and then naval officer in World War II and a sailing enthusiast thereafter. It was because of his own sailings in the Med and the Atlantic that he encountered the traces of the Portuguese expansion and became interested enough to write this book.
I'm pretty sure that I read one or more of B's books in my youth. Books like this, popular histories of war, exploration, or adventure, were a staple of my reading. It's even possible that I read this book, though I don't remember doing so.
[I'm not at home at the moment and can't check all my unconverted book index cards, or the small pocket notebook that records books that I read from age 13 on through to my entry into college.]
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2014 |
Detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch is called in from his work on cold case files to look into the apparent suicide of the middle aged son of a Los Angeles city councilman, a man who is a former chief of police with a grudge against the department and is now a prominent critic of the LAPD who has been instrumental in cutting its overtime budget. He is a thorn in the side of the department and the case has "high jingle", i.e. major political ramifications that require careful handling.
Harry is reaching the end of his career. In order to keep working, he needs a special dispensation from the top management, which he hopes to get. He is now working with his relatively new partner, David Chu, but he sends Chu on one errand after another without taking him into his confidence. He treats the man as a subordinate rather than a partner and Chu resents that. Later, Harry finds that Chu has leaked information to a reporter and resolves to ditch Chu and drive him out of the detective department. Meanwhile the two continue to work on the last cold case file that they had, the murder of a young woman twenty some years before, but put most of their effort into the death of the man who jumped, or was thrown, from the balcony of a hotel room.
Nothing is quite what it seems. Evidence gradually accumulates to indicate that the trip over the balcony was a murder, very likely committed by a former cop, now a cab dispatcher, who also has a grudge against the department and a special grudge against the dead man, who worked as a kind of fixer and influence peddler who may have been using access to his city councilman father as an avenue of his own enrichment, in this case by enabling a different cab company to win the contract/license from the city to operate in a particular area.
Harry pursues the lead until he discovers that it was a kind of trap. The man he suspected could not have murdered the victim and could prove that he was innocent. He was simply leading Harry on in order to compromise the police department. In fact, the victim was a suicide.
A second plot winds through the first one as Harry discovers a major serial killer who was behind the 20 year old death of a young woman. This case, with no "jingle" at all, was the real deal in police work. Catching this monster made a lot of people safer and it became a big splash in the media.
But nothing is as it seems and nothing comes out simply and straightforwardly. In the cab case, Harry's own police chief and the chief's assistant, a former partner of Harry's, had set Harry up to discredit and disgrace the city councilman, who was not guilty of selling influence for his son but was made to appear that way by Harry's findings. The exposure of the serial killer did not result in positive press for the police. People instead asked how it was possible that a serial killer could be free for 20 years without there even being a file on the cases by the police.
Harry wins the right to stay on the force in spite of his age. He reconciles himself to Chu and decides to continue working with him. He puts his head down into police work, the only thing he really knows or cares about, and lets the "jingle" take care of itself.
Harry Bosch is not an entirely sympathetic character. He tells lies, even to his own daughter, with no compunction. Chu's betrayal of him was brought on by Harry's own behavior. His approach to the social worker, with whom he considers a romantic interest, seems self centered. He understands the minor sex offender who leads him to the real killer (the minor offender was abused by the killer in his childhood) and appreciates the devastating personal history of the man, but he has no sympathy for him.
He's not a man I'd want as a friend, but he sure is a man I'd want as a police detective. Whether he's confronting a criminal, blowing off an officious assistant state's attorney, or manipulating a reporter, he acts with great decisiveness and tremendous knowledge of his craft.
Shortly after reading this I read A Test of Wills (see the next book in my list.) It was not a bad or uninteresting book but for a deep dive into police work, with all of the grit and grime still attached, Connelly is a master.
| Author | Todd, Charles |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Collins, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2014 |
Inspector Ian Rutledge has returned to England from the World War, shell shocked and dissociative, with a voice in his head that he cannot silence from one Hamish, a fine, principled nineteen year old sergeant that Rutledge had shot for disobeying an order to lead his unit over the top on a suicidal attack. His fiancee has left him for another man. He has been accepted back into his old job as Inspector for Scotland Yard, but is disliked and distrusted by his supervisor Superintendent Bowles, who is sending him on a mission to a country town where the well known and respected Colonel Harris has been murdered and the chief suspect is a well known and respected pilot hero, Captain Mark Wilton, fiancee of Harris' ward and friend of the Queen. The local constabulary wants no part of the case, and Rutledge will be in hot water whether he does or does not bring murder charges against the man.
Rutledge himself doesn't seem to be daunted by the politics of the case ("high jingle" in the Harry Bosch parlance), doesn't seem to care much about people's feelings, and seems completely unaware of Bowles' hostility. All he cares about is finding the killer and not revealing his psychological problems or going off the deep end in his arguments with the Hamish alter in his head.
His method is to go over the ground again and again, questioning each person who knows Harris and Wilton, and questioning Wilton himself. Each of the people he questions claims to know little or nothing about the argument between Harris and Wilton the night before the murder, or about anything else related to the case. However, by persistence in questioning people whom everyone says to leave alone, by recognition of clues that he initially overlooked, R accumulates facts.
Eventually, after preparing to arrest Wilton, R figures out that it was another person who committed the crime, another psychologically damaged person, perhaps not entirely unlike himself.
There is a tremendous contrast between Ian Rutledge and Harry Bosch. The story seems antiseptic and the characters and motivations simpler and less elemental than in Connolly's books. The dark psychoses that play a significant role in each book are very different. In Todd's book they are much more understandable and sympathetic. In Connelly's they are raw and not so sympathetic. Todd wrote a kind of English country house mystery while Connelly wrote a story of big city criminals, politicians, and police. Many of the same elements appear in each writer's story, but the perspective and handling are quite different.
I assumed while reading the book that Todd was an Englishman. But he's not. Apparently he's an American living in North Carolina.
I've got access to a whole series of books by both authors. I will almost certainly read more of Connelly's. I might read more of Todd's. I would like to know if Todd can make any more out of the story of Rutledge and Hamish or whether he has just setup a device that will continue, unchanged, for the rest of the series.
From an interview published in the Sun newspaper I have learned, not only that Charles Todd is an American, not an Englishman, but that he is not the sole author of these books and Todd is not his actual last name. The book, and many subsequent books now totaling about 26 of them, were written by Charles and his mother Caroline, working together. Todd is Caroline's maiden name, chosen as their nom de plume in order to avoid people recognizing their names and bothering them.
Caroline said that they work hard together on the first scene of the book, after which things get easier for them. They resolve their differences by, as it were, consulting the characters in the novels. They may not know the outcome of the story, for example the name of the murderer, until they get to the point of writing about it.
They chose the time, place and characters for this series because they were both deeply interested in history, especially the histories of various wars. Hence they chose a shell shocked protagonist carrying terrible burdens from the war. They also liked the period because it incorporated the modern elements that they wanted, for example automobiles and telephones, but omitted what they didn't want, the many technical means available today for examining evidence and solving crimes. They wanted their detective to find the criminal by using the knowledge in his head.
There is a lesson for me in this about how peering behind the curtain on the writing of a book can reveal something entirely different from the story I build up in my head about the author.
| Author | Mo Yan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Goldblatt, Howard |
| Publication | New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 552 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | September 2014 |
Landlord Ximen Nao is executed during the Revolution in China. He is brought before Lord Yama in the underworld. Despite two years of cruel torture, he refuses to confess to any crimes. Lord Yama gives up torturing him, grants him a return to life, and sends him back to earth as a donkey. Ximen Donkey is born into the farmyard of "Blue Face" Lan Lian, Ximen Nao's former farmhand who tills his own small farm which stubbornly works, rejecting every pressure, appeal, and threat to join the cooperative. He and his donkey are of one accord on this and they work together with great harmony.
The donkey has many adventures. He saves a young female donkey from wolves. They kill the wolves and then some hunters who had been hunting the wolves shoot the dead animals and bring them in, claiming to have killed them themselves. Ximen donkey loses his lovely donkey bride but has numerous other adventures and other conflicts with the people of the cooperative. Eventually he is killed for meat during the famine of the Great Leap Forward.
Again, there is a session with Lord Yama. Again Ximen Nao proclaims his innocence and refuses to confess. Again he is reincarnated, this time as an ox, still working for Lan Lian and his son. Again, the ox grows into a fine animal, understood by and understanding his owners, and again in conflict with the collective. He suffers a number of indignities at the hands of one of the characters in the story, including having one horn and one testicle cut off. Eventually he too dies and comes back as a pig.
Ximen Pig, known as Pig Sixteen on the pig farm, is the ruler of all the pigs. He is sometimes outsmarted, and even outfought, by Diao Xiaosan, another strong and rebellious pig. He gets the better of Diao in a fight and is forever after sorry for the terrible harm he has done to the other pig - the one pig in the world he most respects. Pig Sixteen has many adventures and finally dies while saving a child from the river. The story continues with reincarnation as a dog then, briefly, as a monkey, and finally as a boy.
The other characters in the book grow and interact throughout the story which traces the history of China from the days of Communist revolution to the days of capitalist restoration.
This is a truly remarkable novel. Its breathtaking imagination, deep insights into society and human psychology, sparkling language, and advanced literary technique are all amazing. Mo Yan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I have to assume that this book was a factor in the win.
Many of the characters in the story are foolish, pig headed, selfish, or self-defeating. Many are compelled to behave as they do by stubborn inner needs that they cannot overcome. Many are comic. Some are a bit magical, like the woman with the special healing hair. The animal reincarnations are all human in their way but also have the character of the kind of animal they are, down to the faithful dog who listens to his mistress and protects the boy who is his master. Each animal is somehow recognized for what he is by the few people who understand, but still recognized for his animal nature. It is a masterpiece of creative imagination.
One detail I'll add is that Mo Yan is himself a character in the novel. He appears from time to time as an ambitious but undependable writer who tells lies about the characters but, for all that, is not an unsympathetic character and not one who we necessarily understand in the way the animals and other people depict him.
This was a quite long but very worthwhile book, a real classic.
| Author | Seymour, Gerald |
|---|---|
| Publication | Overlook Press, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | September 2014 |
A former high official and minister of the British government in Northern Ireland steps out of his house in London with his wife and his children. She is going to her work, the children are heading for school, and the minister to his office. A man across the street pulls an AK-47 from under his trench coat shoots the minister dead in front of his family and runs away. In a very short time he's on a plane to Amsterdam with a false passport and goes from there to Dublin and across the border back into Belfast.
The authorities in London are incensed. The head of Scotland Yard, the Minister of Defense, and the head of the terrorism task force are all consulted and all put their resources into finding out who this man is. They soon find the trail and know that the killer is back in Ireland, but don't have his identity. The Prime Minister himself puts his oar into the water and asks that a special agent be appointed to go under cover in Belfast and locate the killer. The army comes up with a man, Harry Brown.
Harry is an officer stationed in Germany with counter insurgency experience in Aden. He has an Irish background. He's given three weeks of training and sent into Belfast under cover as a Catholic seaman who has been away from home for ten years and is now coming back. His first act on the ground is to find a rooming house in an IRA sympathetic neighborhood, ignoring the arrangements made for him in a house in Protestant neighborhood which could not have worked. But now he is out of touch with the office. No one knows where he is or can reach him. They are dependent on his calling them.
Through chance and seemingly trivial statements made by the young woman who cleans the rooming house and who goes out with and then sleeps with Harry (there is no mention of Harry's marriage here) Harry gets a lead about another young woman who knows the man who might possibly be the killer. Harry calls in the information but, through more chance, secrecy that makes the soldiers less effective, and some bungling, the opportunity is lost. The girl is brought in for questioning but kills herself in her cell. The IRA assassin was actually in custody after a roundup, but no one knew it and he was released before Harry got a second message through that would have pinpointed who he was. Harry continues his efforts with the girl.
The narrative stays partly with Harry, partly with his handler, and partly with the IRA man, himself a married, family man. Trying to capitalize on their success in stirring up the British, who in turn stirred up the Irish, who gave more support to a flagging IRA, and in part to capitalize on the new killer's experience and expertise, he is sent to kill a particularly efficient police officer in his home. The killer holds the family at gun point. The cop comes home, sees right away that something is happening in the home before he even opens the door, and dives into his house with his gun drawn. One of his children screams and jumps up towards him, obscuring the killer's view. Unwilling to kill a child, he bolts from the house, and is wounded by a shot from the cop.
Meanwhile, the IRA too has begun to understand that an undercover agent is in Belfast looking for their man. Small and trivial clues come to them and they are led to the cleaning girl who tells all. They decide to capture Harry, interrogate him, and then kill him.
The story comes to a head. Harry is on the street with a gun in his pocket. Three IRA men, including the real assassin, now an injured and conflicted man, come out to follow him but are surprised when Harry happens to turn back. There is a short gun battle. One IRA man is killed, another wounded, and the main man drives off with Harry in hot pursuit. There is a final confrontation on the street in front of the assassin's wife and under the observation of a pair British snipers hidden in a house in the neighborhood. Harry confronts the killer. The woman screams. The killer runs. Harry gives chase. The killer falls and reaches into his shirt. Harry shoots him dead. The two snipers, knowing nothing of Harry or anything else, get permission to shoot Harry and do. He falls. The wife of the killer picks up his gun and shoots him again, finishing him.
In the final denouement, everyone examines the small part of the story that he knows about and makes the best of it that he can, none of them really understanding Harry's real story.
This is a sophisticated book. There are many complex characters. Ultimately, much goes wrong for both the British and the IRA, but not because any of the characters is a bumbling idiot. It's the situation, the politics, the personalities, the backgrounds and conflicting goals and conflicting demands on the people, and the elements of chance that determine events. People are in charge and do in fact impose their will on the situation, but never smoothly and never with clear and unambiguous achievement of their goals. It is an anti-IRA, anti-terrorist book, but not a book of simple heroes and villains.
This is the book that launched Gerald Seymour's writing career. It was a very worthy start. I liked it.
| Author | Macintyre, Donald |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Avon Publications |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 101 |
| Extras | Forward by Fleet Admiral Robert B. Carney, U.S.N. |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | September 2014 |
Macintyre was a regular officer in the Royal Navy. Training first as a seaman, then for seven years as an aviator, after an illness rendered him unfit for flying, he was again made a seaman, eventually becoming a destroyer captain. In 1939, he was ordered to command the Venemous, a recommissioned WWI destroyer and then the Hearty, soon renamed Hesperus, a brand new, modern destroyer, soon assigned to convoy duty.
M explains the basics of the anti-submarine art at the time. Location is done by ASDIC, eyeball, and primitive radars only capable of detecting a sub at about a mile range. As the war progressed, new equipment arrived, some of it from the U.S., including much improved radars, and H/F D/F., high frequency direction finding equipment, quickly nicknamed Huff-Duff. Huff-Duff was particularly important because the German doctrine required a U-Boat to broadcast the position and course of any convoy it spotted and all nearby boats reported in their positions and received orders. An expert Huff-Duff operator could determine the approximate position and range of the transmitting boat and sometimes even recognize the "hand" of a particular German signalman.
The usage, strengths and weaknesses of all of these technologies were explained together with those of depth charges, gunfire, ramming, and later hedgehogs (forward firing mortars that threw a pattern of 24 small bombs about 250 yards ahead of the ship to explode on contact with a submarine - a very useful weapon for attacking a boat that has just dived but useless against a boat that has successfully gone deep.
M is not shy about criticizing failures. He was appalled by the ineptitude of the Canadians, who expanded their navy from six pre-war ships to 400 ships and put officers and crew aboard who knew nothing about anything - unable even to maintain their ships properly much less defend the convoys. He would have preferred less emphasis on ship building and more on training - a lesson the Canadians only learned after some very severe convoy losses.
RAF coastal command also came in for criticism. The command was the step child of the RAF. Pilots knew nothing about convoy needs or tactics. Invited to join an air patrol he found that the only lookouts aboard were the pilot and copilot, each of whom only had a small square window of visibility and neither of whom had a pair of binoculars. In fact Macintyre's binoculars were the only ones on the plane. He was put in the bombardier's station, the only one that had a full view of the ocean, but which had not been manned! The radars used did not detect the fishing vessels that they flew over, but were assumed to be able to spot a periscope. The men had been trained in how to attack a sub but not in how to find one. Furthermore, Coastal Command insisted that their role was to attack the U-Boat pens and to hunt subs in the Bay of Biscay, not to escort convoys. It was not a bad strategy but only became successful after 1943, when the Battle of the Atlantic had already been won and, in any case, should not have been insisted upon as the only proper role for aircraft.
Macintyre commanded the escort force for many convoys and participated in about five U-Boat kills, including the sinking of two of the three famous U-Boat "aces" in the same convoy action, including Otto Kretschmer, the top scorer. He came to respect Kretschmer as a dedicated officer doing his duty as he saw it. He had much less respect for another U-Boat commander he captured, a man named Wendt who abandoned his boat ahead of his crewmen and boasted absurdly about sinkings that Macintyre knew to be lies.
By D-Day the battle had been won and M and others found themselves protecting the English channel against new Type XXI boats that could outrun many of the escorts even under water and were often equipped with acoustic homing torpedoes. But the only real hope of a submarine after it has been detected is to dive deep - something that could not be done in the channel. So once a boat was detected, it was generally destroyed.
In the final chapter, "The Future", Macintyre argues for a Navy built for convoy escort, rejecting the prevalent view that future wars would all be nuclear. He attempts to counter the argument that people like him are always trying to prepare for the last war, not the next one. It is a view that the American admiral supports in his preface.
U-Boat Killer is a type of book that came out in numbers in the 1950's. I grew up reading books like this. It sold in paperback for 35 cents and had a dramatic, partly colorized, photo on its cover showing a depth charge explosion behind a speeding destroyer. Its author fought hard in the war and was still young enough to bring fresh memory to the writing while old enough to have seen the flaws in some other published accounts, flaws that he intended to correct.
There is a lot in it about convoy escort. I learned more about the weapons, the tactics, and the strategy than I knew, and also learned about the practical problems of weather and supply, of keeping slow ships moving, of picking up or abandoning torpedoed crews, and of making hard choices. M's choice was always to get the most ships through with the fewest losses. Sometimes that meant abandoning a struggling ship or even a crew in the water. Sometimes it meant driving a U-Boat down long enough to let the convoy escape, and then abandoning the hunt for the boat in order to get back to the merchant ships before other U-Boats could strike. Sometimes it meant making tough choices to continue the fight with near empty fuel bunkers and depth charge racks rather than head for port even though the weather was too rough for refueling and re-provisioning at sea.
There's also some feel for the life of these men. Life at sea was hard. The American and Canadian ports seemed to them like fantasy lands of plenty in comparison to the rationing and comparative poverty at home. Men left England with shopping lists prepared by their wives and mothers and tried to buy various things from turkeys to nylons when they could.
It is now 2014 and I'm 68 years old. I don't read these books in quite the same way that I would have at age 11 or 12, but I'm still interested and still have some of the same interests. For me, it is still an interesting book.
| Author | Adiga, Aravind |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 482 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | India |
| When Read | October 2014 |
The Vishram Cooperative, is composed of the owners of a collection of apartments, we might call them condominiums, in a tower building in a lower middle class neighborhood of Mumbai. The building is old and in poor repair. The water only runs for a few fixed hours each day. The residents, most of them there for many years, all know each other well.
A real estate developer, Dharmen Shah, sees an opportunity to buy up the area around the tower to build upscale apartments. He offers a very good price to all of the current residents, way above the ordinary selling price of the apartments. It's enough to enable each person to buy a better place in better condition, maybe with something left over. However the society contract requires that every single resident agree to the sale or else the building cannot be torn down and no one will get any money.
One man, Yogesh Murti, a retired school teacher known as "Masterji", refuses to sell. At first he does it simply to support his longtime neighbors and friends, the Pintos. Mrs. Pinto is nearly blind and is fearful of moving to a new place where she doesn't know where everything is. However, under pressure from the other residents, and in part because he too wants the money, Mr. Pinto goes over to the camp of those who wish to sell. Soon Masterji is alone in resisting the offer. He continues to resist, not because he has any good reason, but because he is a stubborn, independent minded, man who simply refuses to do what everyone tells him to do. The greater the pressure applied, the more he digs in his heels and refuses to sign the contract.
Mr. Shah orders his "left-hand man", Shananmugham, to solve the problem. Shananmugham is an unacknowledged employee of Mr. Shah who is prepared to use any tactic, from bribery, to intimidation, to actual violence, to win the signatures of all of the residents. When easier and softer measures fail he is prepared to go further but Shah has the better idea to force the residents themselves to pressure Masterji to sign. He orders Shananmugham to tell them that the offer is only good through a certain date, after which they will get nothing.
The other residents, including the Pintos, Ibrahim Kudwa - the Muslim owner of a foundering Internet cafe, Mrs. Puri with her retarded son, Mrs. Rego the communist social worker, all apply increasing pressure, but it is of no avail. The oily apartment broker, Adjuani (sp?) hires a couple of boys to beat up Masterji but they fail. Finally, on the urging of Mrs. Puri, he decides to murder the man. At the last minute, he develops a conscience and backs out, but the others step in and, in a terrible scene, hit Masterji on the head, again and again with a hammer, and throw him out the window. The police, faced with solid alibis for all concerned, they each claim that they were away from the scene and all in each other's presence, and with no physical evidence, rule it a suicide.
At the end, all of the Society residents have moved to new quarters, each in a different place. They occasionally see each other and lament the loss of their friend Masterji, the man of principle and learning who went rather crazy at the end and is no longer with them.
Like The White Tiger, this is a searing novel of Indian life. In this case it is a lower middle class society that is exposed rather than the rich and poor of the other novel.
Masterji was, as one Amazon reviewer put it, acting narcissistically. She compared him to Ralph Nader running in the 2000 election for principled reasons, but having the effect of throwing the election to George W. Bush. We (or least I) wanted him to sign the agreement and allow his neighbors to get the money they wanted, which he could do with no harm, and indeed benefit, to himself. But we are nevertheless disturbed by the pressure put against him and horrified at his murder.
Masterji was a man of principle, courage, education, and intelligence. He ran tutoring sessions for the neighborhood high school students, teaching them physics, astronomy, and other subjects. He mourned for his wife, who had died the year before, and for his daughter, who had been killed in a horrible train accident. However much we think he is stubborn and wrong headed, we have to admire him.
Humanity as a whole does not come out well in Adiga's novels. Each of the characters is introduced in a positive light. Mrs. Pinto is a kindly lady. Mr. Pinto is a devoted husband. Mrs. Puri takes care of her stunted son with great altruism and devotion. Mr. Kudwa seems to be a good friend to Masterji and Mrs. Rego is dedicated to the uplifting of the poor and the proletariat. Yet all of them have their humanity gradually eroded by the lure of the real estate deal until they become murderers. Only Adjuani, a man who is introduced as a slimy bastard, tries, and he not too convincingly, to stop the murder. In Adiga's wonderful language, he goes to get a blow job and, surprisingly, finds that he has acquired a conscience.
There are aspects of the novel that make me think it is intended as a comedy. When the boys go to Masterji's apartment to assault him we fear the worst. But one of them steps on Masterji's Rubik's cube , hurts himself, wakes Masterji, and then is assaulted by the old man who hits them with his big book. When the Puris, the Pintos, and Mr. Kudwa break into Masterji's apartment we hope that this too is a comedy. But it's not. It's a cold blooded murder. Aravind Adiga may have a keen sense of the comic behavior of people, but he doesn't lose sight of the tragedy of life.
This is one of the many books I've read that disturbed me and which made me wish I were finished with them, but still admired them. It is a deep, serious, socially aware book with a lot to say about India as a society and about people everywhere.
| Author | Stedman, M. L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Scribner, Simon and Schuster, 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2014 |
Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia from the First World War. He is tall, strong, handsome, quiet, and nursing the psychic wounds of a difficult childhood and the horrors of the war - in which he served as an infantry captain. He takes a job as a lighthouse keeper, living alone at the Janus lighthouse, well west of Australia, on a small island between the Indian Ocean and the Southern Pacific. While in the town of Partageuse on the Australian coast he meets nineteen year old Isabel, a sweet, loving, pretty girl who wants a husband and children. They marry and go to live at the island where she keeps house in the cottage and he tends the lighthouse.
Isabel gets pregnant but loses the baby in a miscarriage. Then she loses another. Then she loses a third. And then, just two weeks after the loss of the third baby, a skiff arrives on shore at the island with a dead man and a live baby. Tom intends to signal the authorities but Isabel pleads and demands that he not do it, not tonight anyway, then not the next day, and not the next day after that. Against all his better judgment Tom postpones notifying the authorities until it would be too late to do so without implicating them both in a possibly criminal act. But for Isabel this baby is a gift from God to replace the babies that she lost. She also enters an early menopause that seals the possibility of her ever having any more children of her own. She argues that no mother would abandon her baby. The mother must have died in whatever accident at sea left the man and the baby in the boat. She argues that if they return the baby she will be sent to a terrible orphanage.
Tom, and especially Isabel, bond deeply with the girl they name Lucy. Isabel lives for the child. There are long descriptions of the delightful times when they take her around the island, bring her presents, introduce her to her grandparents back in Partageuse, who are delighted with this cheerful, blonde child.
Then they discover that the child's mother, Hannah Roennfeldt, is in fact still alive and still desperately pining for her lost husband and daughter. Someone, the author doesn't tell us who, sends her a note to tell her that her husband died but her child is alive and is being cared for. Later, Lucy is now four years old, another note arrives with a silver rattle found in the skiff, as evidence that the author was telling the truth and that the girl really is alive.
The rattle initiates a chain of events. Hannah's wealthy father gets the police to circulate pictures of the rattle and offers a reward for information about it. "Bluey", the deck hand on the boat that services the lighthouse, recalls seeing it on the island and his mother bullies him into telling the authorities to get the reward. The police come ashore at the lighthouse and take the family back to Partageuse. The child, kicking and screaming, is removed from Tom and Isabel and given to Hannah. Tom claims that he is responsible for everything, that he forced Isabel to accept the child. He is arrested and accused of multiple crimes, possibly including the murder of the dead man. We learn that Tom was the author of the two notes and that he once actually saved Hannah from a rape on the ship in which he was returning to Australia. Isabel goes into a deep, angry depression. She blames Tom for losing the child. She concocts a story in her mind about Tom knowing Hannah and betraying Lucy to her. She believes that he is a cold, terrible man. She makes no move to take responsibility or save him.
Things come to a head just before a hearing on whether to send Tom for trial. Isabel determines to save Tom but is approached by Hannah who says that if she, Isabel, will testify against Tom, Lucy will be returned to her.
We don't know what will happen. The whole story becomes even more melodramatic. But at the last moment, Isabel saves Tom and loses Lucy.
The last scene occurs many years later in 1950 on a farm 400 miles away. Isabel is dying of cancer. Steady, faithful Tom is by her side, holding her hand to the end. A week later a young woman drives up. It is Lucy-Grace Ronnenfeldt. She brings her own baby boy. She and Tom meet.
This first novel by Stedman was selected by one of the women in the NCI book group. It seems to me very much a women's book. The strong, silent, upright, decent, courageous, self-sacrificing, faithful and devoted Tom was a sort of dream husband. The rather childish, self-indulgent, but fiercely loving and protective of her child Isabel, was not an ideal wife by any means, but she was a woman who was given license to behave badly and perhaps excusably. The child, beautifully drawn in Stedman's narrative, was a dream child.
The other characters were nicely drawn and given considerable human dimension. Hannah and her father and sister, the boatmen Ralph and Blue, the policeman Knuckey, and Isabella's parents Bill and Violet, were quite well developed and convincing minor characters. I can't say that the writing was less than competent or totally lacking in subtlety. Stedman should have a long, successful, and lucrative career as a writer of novels and I fully expect this and future similar novels, if there are some, to be adapted for the movies by Hollywood.
However, good as the writing was, successful as many of the characters were, gripping as the plot was, and solid as the idea was, I still felt that I was being manipulated by overly melodramatic plot twists and overly developed emotions. For example, it was not enough that Isabel lost a baby. She lost three of them in quick succession, then had one given to her by deus ex machina, and then was immediately told that that was it, her unnaturally early menopause would prevent her from ever having another baby. I felt like I was being hit over the head. The idyllic scenes with the child on the island, under the enchanting light, were very nicely done but also made larger than life.
I don't want to get carried away by criticism. It was a very well-written book. It was, if I may say so, a wholesome book. It was a book about natural people that didn't rely on villains or villainous behavior to accent the good people of the story, and in fact all of the people in both of the child's families were decent, caring people for whom it was easy to sympathize.
I'm not sorry I read it. It just wasn't my type of book.
I see on Amazon that the book is indeed being adapted for a movie by Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks organization. That's probably as high as one gets in Hollywood.
Yesterday our NCI book group met to discuss the book. There were seven women present and two men, Bob and myself. All seven of the women liked the book. Bob and I both had significant problems with it. Bob and his wife Elaine read it together and she also disliked the book, so not all women like it.
One of the women said she cried heavily, multiple times, while reading the book. Another appeared to endorse that reaction. Pretty much all of them said that they found it compelling reading - which I have to admit it was. Bob pointed out that, for a book that is written to appeal to women, he was surprised that all of the intelligent, capable, understanding characters were men while many of the women - Isabel, Hannah, and Bluey's mother - were deficient.
I compared the book to Anna Karenina. another book about a women who's child is going to be taken away. There's really no comparison. Tolstoy doesn't play tricks on the reader. He doesn't manipulate our emotions with hidden facts that pop out by surprise or with key decisions made by characters that are not revealed until the final moment. The story proceeds with an inevitable force based on the terrible facts of life in society, not based on whims and sea currents and accidents of this type or that. But most of the women in our book group had not read Anna Karenina and didn't get my comparison.
| Author | Roberts, John Maddox |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Minotaur, 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Extras | map, glossary of Latin terms |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | October 2014 |
Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger is now working as quaestor, a junior official assigned to the treasury in the Temple of Saturn where he oversees slaves and freedmen who do the actual work of keeping track of money and goods coming in and out of government coffers. He is nearby in the street when the news of a murdered man reaches him. Not long after, there is another. The murdered men are both eques (aka "equites" or "equestrians"), a class of wealthy or well-to-do mostly commercial men below the patrician and senatorial classes, and traditionally forming the cavalry in the Roman military order.
More murders occur. Then Decius discovers a cache of arms in a previously disused storeroom in the Treasury building and it seems clear to him that some major conspiracy is afoot. He gets permission from higher ranking men to investigate. He meets disaffected young men and pretends to be disaffected himself. He is introduced to he conspiracy of Catilinus. He is seduced by a beautiful young woman who appears to be an accomplice of the conspirators, though he foolishly continues to hope that she is a mere dupe. Eventually, he goes to the consul Cicero with the news.
The conspirators make their move. The state is well prepared. The rebels are defeated.
The story is not very compelling. The characters are rather wooden. The action is far-fetched. What saves the book and makes it an interesting read is Roberts' dogged efforts to try to educate the reader into the history of the people and civilization of Rome. The book is not high drama even though the historical events it portrays can be seen as high drama. But for a fellow like me with an interest in this extraordinary civilization of the past, it was an acceptable read.
To my surprise, there is almost no mention of the events of the first book in the series. That book ended with Decius' flight to Spain to avoid the wrath of Publius Claudius. Publius appears briefly in this book in a roller derby style chariot race in the day of the October Horse, the one major physical action in the book, but even there, no real mention is made of the events of the first volume. Presumably Roberts was working, perhaps on advice of his publisher, to write a book that would definitely not require any previous preparation to read.
| Author | Durant, Will |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1939 |
| Number of Pages | 754 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Ancient Greece |
| When Read | October 2014 |
This is volume 2 of the great Story of Civilization series by Will Durant that traces human civilization from the early cities of the middle east and the orient up through the time of Napoleon. This volume covers the story of Greek civilization.
From the introduction:
"Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture that does not come from Greece. Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene, therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, theology, agnosticism, skepticism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics, politics, idealism, philanthropy, cynicism, tyranny, plutocracy, democracy: these are all Greek words for cultural forms seldom originated, but in many cases first matured for good or evil by the abounding energy of the Greeks".
Other writers have written extensively of the famous battles and military campaigns. Durant covers those briefly but they are not his main interest. He writes about the life of the people, but that too is not his main interest. There is hardly anything about master and slave or the life of slaves. It's a book about "civilization", i.e., mostly about culture - art, architecture, music, poetry, theater, philosophy, science, history, and political philosophy. Unlike some authors I have read, he frequently locates the source of Greek innovations outside Greece. He credits the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Persians, and later even the Romans with contributions taken up and often developed in Greece but not entirely missing in the rest of the world.
The work is roughly chronological. He begins with the civilizations of Crete, Mycenae, and then the world of Homer. It continues into the great ages of the 6th, 5th, and 4th centuries BC. However, unlike some writers, he doesn't stop there and continues to find very important innovations, especially in science, in the Hellenic world created by Alexander in the 3rd and 2nd centuries.
Durant ends his narrative with these words: "To those who have come thus far: Thank you for your unseen but ever felt companionship."
There is an extensive bibliography and end notes in the printed edition that do not appear in the audio version, but looking through them, it seems to me that the reader did incorporate many of them into his rendition.
Much of what Durant writes seems to be about things that he cannot know. He writes, for example, about great sculptors, poets, musicians and others of whom little or nothing has survived to our era. He even goes so far as to speak of sculptors, poets and musicians, whose work we no longer have but who, in his opinion, have never been exceeded since their time. It's a bold approach but, somehow, it seemed to me that it was not at all arrogant. He seemed to me to write, not to derogate other or later societies, but to try to educate us into an appreciation of the greatness of the people who have gone before us.
One thing I learned about Greek society was the terrible presence and effect of class war. Rule of the rich would alternate with rule by the poor. Communism, feudalism, and capitalism; dictatorship, aristocracy, oligarchy and democracy; all had repeated periods at the head of societies. Many of the societies were very dynamic. Perhaps the small size of the Greek city states promoted this. Perhaps the frequent wars were part of it. Perhaps the economic systems were more fragile than our modern ones.
Another thing I learned was that belief in the Greek religious mythology was in steep decline, at least among the intellectuals, in Greece. Many of the philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists, often the same people in Ancient Greece, were thorough going naturalists. They looked for explanations of all phenomena in the nature of things, not in gods or spirits. Durant was not totally clear, and I imagine the extant Greek literature did not enable him to be, about the meaning of those passages where the Greek philosophers refer to God in the singular. Was it monotheism, possibly influenced by the Jews? Was it metaphor written to help explain ethical concepts to those who were unprepared for a strict naturalism? Was it pantheism in the spirit of Spinoza? Was it politics? Whatever it was, it does not appear to be a belief in the intervention of supernatural forces into the lives of human beings.
The Greeks lacked the excellent tools that we have developed in the past 500 years for scientific research. They did not have our precision clocks, sextants, micrometers, and balances, much less our microscopes, telescopes and chemical assays. And of course they had none of the electronic instruments and tools developed in just the last century which have become so critical in science. A lot of what they did, for example in the field of biology, was embarrassingly wrong. But a surprising amount was spectacularly right. Eratosthenes produced close approximations of the size of the earth and its distance from the sun and seems to have been on the verge of stating that the earth goes around the sun and not vice versa. However that view was never general among Greek scientists.
I had thought that the work of the Greek intellectuals was essentially individual. Schools existed but I imagined them to be forums for individual philosophers, a taking on of pupils by a single man. However that was not so. The Academy of Isocrates (slightly predating Plato's and teaching rhetoric), the Academy of Plato, and the Lyceum of Aristotle, were more than that and long survived the deaths of their founders. They apparently made some attempt at systematic research. Aristotle is known of have assigned different fields of research in biology to different students - ordering one to study birds, another fish, another insects, and so on, and attempting to build up a broad, empirical study of the entire field of biology. It is thought that many of the students were highly competent and produced excellent works which, unfortunately, have not survived. Similarly, if I remember correctly, the masters of the Academy assigned different time periods and geographical areas to different students of history, attempting to build a broad understanding of the history of societies.
According to Durant, different fields in the arts and sciences moved forward at different times. It was not the case that there was a flowering of Greek culture in, say, the 5th and 4th centuries BC, followed by a slow or even a rapid decline. The arts may have peaked in the earlier years but the sciences did so in the later, Hellenic years, as much or more in Syracuse, Alexandria, and the Ionic colonies on the coast of Anatolia, as in Greece proper.
Growing up in the 20th century, I am accustomed to thinking of Greece as a small country. I knew that there were Greek colonies in Anatolia, Italy and Sicily, and even outposts in Gaul, Spain, and the coast of the Black Sea. However I imagined them to be small and derivative, not large cities of the size of the major cities of Greece, and not centers of cultural advance. But that was apparently wrong, as I learned from Momsen's book on Rome as well as from Durant.
I read this book by listening to it on my phone's mp3 player as I did chores around the house, especially washing dishes. It's not an ideal way to read a book like this. I can't see the spellings of the names and it's hard to roll back and listen to something again when I have to turn off the water, dry my hands, pull out the phone, press the on button, long press the wake up I'm here button, and then manipulate the player. Still, it enabled me to read this quite long book which would have been harder to fit in with my other extensive reading programs.
I don't think I will attempt to read Durant's entire 11 volume series. I may not read any more of them. Or I might.
| Author | Mukherjee, Siddhartha |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 608 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Medicine |
| Keywords | Cancer |
| When Read | October 2014 |
Mukherjee, an oncologist and professor of medicine, opens his book with a description of his meeting with a young woman diagnosed with leukemia. She asks about her prognosis and he has to tell her that she will face some terrible chemotherapy treatments that will give her only a 30% chance of a cure. Then, after introducing us to the human dimension, he begins his "biography" of the disease, starting with some of the earliest references to it in ancient Egyptian and Greek medical literature.
By the 18th century, some physicians were recognizing that this was not necessarily a disease of "black bile", as it had been characterized for almost 2,000 years, but of tumors that might be excised in some lucky cases - if you can call a person lucky who must submit to, for example, having a breast removed without anesthetics or antibiotics, and with instruments and the hands of a physician that have not been sterilized. It was also recognized then, for the first time, that there are some environmental factors that can play a role in the genesis of the disease. An observant physician realized that young chimney sweeps were coming down with a scrotal sarcoma not seen in other patients.
By 1890, the American surgeon and Hopkins professor, William Stewart Halstead had perfected the radical mastectomy for breast cancer. In an attempt to cure more patients, he developed his procedure to be more and more radical, believing that cancer spread outward, "centrifugally" from its point of origin and hoping to cure more patients by cutting away more and more tissue, leading to severely disfigured and somewhat disabled patients. His theory was so plausible sounding that surgeons, partly perhaps under the influence of their reputations as the heroes of cancer treatment, refused to be convinced by mounting evidence that the theory was wrong and that women got equal results from simple mastectomies or even lumpectomies, especially if accompanied by radiation and/or drug therapy. The truth was that, if the cancer metastasized, it was likely found in distant as well as nearby organs, and if it had not, then cutting away more tissue than the local tumor was unnecessary and unhelpful.
Chemotherapy was discovered by Sidney Farber. Noticing that folates failed in leukemia treatment and actually stimulated the rapid growth of the cancer, he tried an anti-folate drug and got a temporary, but still remarkable response. It was the first drug that provided even a temporary remission. This started a search for other drugs, mainly cell poisons, that would kill rapidly dividing cells. As with other therapies, its advocates were beguiled into trying more and more drugs with larger and larger combinations and stronger and stronger doses, bringing their patients almost to the edge of death, and occasionally over the edge, in an effort to kill the cancers.
Just as researchers struggled to provide cures and remissions, so too they struggled to understand the genesis of the disease. The principal theories were that it was caused by viral infection, a theory developed after the discovery of a viral cause of chicken sarcoma, that it was caused by carcinogens, and that it was caused by DNA mutations in genes that affected cell division. The latter turned out to be the most important cause, finally demonstrated by Harold Varmus working in Michael Bishop's lab in 1975. However it took years to develop the theory and to convince others of it and there are still very few therapies that are able to take advantage of this knowledge. As of the publication of the book, there were 24 such therapies, mainly kinase inhibitors that act to prevent the actions of specific kinases in activating specific mutated, always on, oncogenes. Gleevec is the most prominent of these drugs and has been a lifesaver for those suffering from chronic myelogenous leukemia.
Mukherjee has treated many patients. He peered through his microscope at marrow from leukemia patients that was "boiling" with cell division. He became close to many of his patients and watched them die and saw the devastation of their families. But he closes his book with stories of survivors.
Before reading this I had an image in my mind of medicine advancing slowly but steadily in a straightforward climb to greater and greater success. Mukherjee shows that the path is a lot more complicated than that. Halstead's radical mastectomy was not really questioned for 30 years and then was still being performed decades after it had been demonstrated that the theory of centrifugal metastasis that underlies it was wrong. The viral cause theory also took many decades to overthrow, even though long and deep searches for viral causes were conducted year after year without success.
The science of medicine is subject to all of the human foibles.
The politics were interesting too. After World War II, activists believed that cancer could be cured if a massive effort were begun, like the effort to produce the atom bomb or, later, the landing on the moon. The NCI was created. A small association of physicians in New York was turned into the American Cancer Society. Hundreds of millions were invested, much of it wasted, in running clinical trials for which there was insufficient basic research to support the efficacy of the tested drugs. It was the era of, "We don't understand what's going on but, if we try enough different drugs, we're bound to find one that works."
I also learned some science from the book. I knew from my work at NCI that kinase inhibitors were tested for anti-cancer properties and knew the name imatinib (trade name "Gleevec"), but I didn't know why these were of interest. Mukherjee's explanations were broad and shallow rather than deep, but I did get something from them.
I expected him to say something about some of the strategies that I've heard about more recently, but perhaps 2009 was too early for them. One is the development of "mono-clonal antibodies" such as bevacisumab, and of the combination of antibodies with chemotherapy agents, or possibly with radioactive particles, to deliver cytotoxins directly to tumor cells.
I appreciate that Mukherjee is a man of deep feeling as well as deep scientific and historical understanding. He is obviously a great doctor.
| Author | Innes, Hammond |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 340 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | October 2014 |
Roy Slingsby, working as an appraiser for an English real-estate firm, goes to a house that is going to be sold and appraises the house and its contents. The seller, Miss Perenna Holland needed the money to care for her brother Timothy, in hospital for a serious illness which she believed to be caused by a curse put on him by someone in New Guinea when he worked there as a policeman. Among Miss Holland's possessions was a stamp collection left to her by her grandfather. It included a stamp with a Solomon's Seal (the marine mammal) image, which appeared to be pretty well unknown and hence rare and valuable. After turning over a Power of Attorney to sell everything, Perenna took a job as a cruise ship stewardess and left England, headed for the Pacific.
Slingsby's own situation was not secure. He had expected to be made a partner in the firm but was passed over for a relative of the owner and told that he would never be a partner. He had been working with one of the partners to go to Australia and take over a farm there, but the man has decided to just sell it and offers Slingsby a chance to go to Australia to oversee the sale of the farm there. He first takes care of the rest of Perenna's property, getting an advance of 2,000 pounds on her stamps, then takes off for Australia.
Slingsby is a sailor and former junior naval officer who commanded a landing craft. In Australia he connects with Jona Holland, who is operating such a landing craft on small cargo runs around Australia and Indonesia. He signs on with the strange captain and stranger native crew and ultimately finds himself, with Perenna on board, and a cargo of illegal guns being run into Bougainville.
There are difficulties with the crew and the cargo. They meet Red Holland, who is operating a couple of other craft and who takes the guns and attempts a small coup to take the territory around the local copper mine independent and make himself a wealthy man. The coup fails, in part because of Slingsby's actions in spite of Red's offers to him.
In the end, there is a fire in Red's house and a shot is heard. He is believed to have killed himself but in the ruins of the fire, no body can be clearly identified. Slingsby and Perenna take a single sheet of stamps Slingsby took from the safe before the fire to England, where they earn enough at the sale to buy the landing craft out of debt and he and Perenna go into the Holland Shipping business.
The story is very well written. There's some credible suspense and a number of quite compelling scenes between the native Buka men and Slingsby and a broken down alcoholic captain McAvoy, between the Indian radio operator and cargo master and Slingsby, between McAvoy and the leader of the Bukas, between the Buka men and the local men from the town, and between Red Holland and everyone else.
Innes had Royal Navy experience and much experience of sailing before and after the war. His scenes of the sea journeys are authentic and interesting. I had a little trouble following the complicated story of the stamps, but maybe that was my fault and not Innes'. All in all it was a good read and a good example of its type of fiction. I may read more of them.
| Author | Harris, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Alfred A. Knopf, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Extras | acknowledgments, bibliography |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | November 2014 |
Major Marie-Georges Picquart serves the French Army with intelligence and discretion and, after a very peripheral role in reporting on the trial of Alfred Dreyfus to his superiors, he is promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and put in charge of the "Statistical Section" of the Deuxieme Bureau, a group of a half dozen officers comprising the main counter-espionage unit of the Army. Along with everyone else, he assumes that Dreyfus is guilty. He realizes that Dreyfus is a convenient goat for the investigation, an outsider, an Alsatian, something of a prig - if a wealthy and intelligent one, and most especially, a Jew. But he was unanimously convicted by a military court martial that had access to all of the evidence. The case was closed and Dreyfus was shipped off to his tormented imprisonment on Devil's Island.
But then the wastebasket trash stolen by a French cleaning woman that produced the original evidence against Dreyfus yielded what appeared to be more sales of French secrets to Germany, sales that had to have taken place after Dreyfus was imprisoned. Picquart begins a careful investigation.
He is quickly led to Major Walsin Esterhazy, a thoroughly disreputable man who is separated from his wife and is in constant debt due to drinking, gambling, and keeping a prostitute/mistress. Working against increasing resistance from his own staff, he gradually becomes convinced that Dreyfus was not guilty. And upon further investigation, he believe that the original conviction was not just a mistake, but a frame-up. The second in command of Picquart's section, Joseph Henry, took the lead both in fabricating evidence against Dreyfus and in attempting to sabotage the investigation of Esterhazy.
Picquart plays his cards very carefully. He says nothing to superiors or subordinates that will give away what he has learned. He gets permission to go after Esterhazy without revealing that the investigation could clear Dreyfus. Ultimately however, the information gets out. He is ordered to stop his investigation. He only conceals it. Eventually, hard pressure is applied to him. Then he is sent on inspection missions, one after another, without allowing him to return to Paris. Then he is reassigned to an Arab unit in Tunisia. Using a commander there who is a decent man, Picquart gets permission to go on leave for a week. He uses the time to deliver all of the evidence to a lawyer, Louis Leblois, who in turn interests many leading men in the story - George Clemenceau, Emile Zola, August Scheurer-Kestner - Vice President of the French Senate and a man of unimpeachable character, Jean Juares - a leading French socialist, and others.
The Minister of Defense and the Army General Staff do not cave in. Instead, they dig in deeper and make various attempts to either murder Picquart by sending him on a suicide mission in Tunisia, or buy him off. They accuse him of fabricating evidence. They bring him to trial on charges. They bring out their own fabricated evidence to prove that Dreyfus is guilty. But finally, after years of resistance, they are overwhelmed. Dreyfus is first pardoned. Later he is completely exonerated and restored to the army. Forced out of the army for eight years, Picquart is also brought back, promoted to Brigadier General, and made Minister of Defense by the new Socialist Prime Minister, Clemenceau.
This is a magnificently well researched and written story. It is a novel only in that Harris has chosen to tell the story as he believes it would have appeared to Picquart instead of relating it in third person, leaving out anything that could not be exactly documented. But whether or not the details of Picquart's life and feelings are accurately represented, the novel presents the feel of the injustice done to Dreyfus and then Picquart, the stubborn resistance to righting that injustice, the ugly mob antisemitism of the times and murders of people who could help Dreyfus, and the courage of the men who fought for justice.
I have liked every Robert Harris book that I've read, and I've read quite a few of them. This is among his best.
| Author | Halberstam, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hyperion |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 736 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Korean War |
| When Read | November 2014 |
In the last book written before the auto accident that killed him, New York Times writer and historian David Halberstam writes about the early period of the Korean War.
The U.S. Army in South Korea and Japan had gotten soft. Occupation duty was easy. The soldiers were out of shape. Training and preparation were neglected. When Kim Il Sung ordered his North Korean army to invade the South, the U.S. was unprepared. The sudden start of a new war caught the United States by surprise and required great effort by the US Army to cope with the sudden invasion, stop it, and counter attack.
Halberstam analyzes each of the major leaders. Kim was a communist true believer in the Stalinist mold with a deep conviction that as soon as he marched south the South Korean people would rally to his cause. Stalin supported him but was a realist and a conservative when it came to taking risks. He wasn't as convinced as Kim that the southerners would join him, that the U.S. would stay out, or that North Korea could win if the U.S. did fight. Mao, like Stalin, was much more of a realist than Kim and had a healthy respect for American firepower. He was willing to join the war when it came to his own doorstep, and he was willing to sacrifice men, but he did not buy into Kim's illusions of quick victory.
On the U.S. side, the principal personality was Douglas MacArthur. Deeply convinced of his own brilliance, insistent upon having his own favored men in command, ready to ignore the opinions of all experts, he made some bold moves, one of which, the landing at Inchon, worked beyond anyone else's expectations, and the other of which, the deep penetration of the North, turned into a military disaster. Thousands of Americans were killed or wounded in desperate retreats from exposed and overly dispersed positions in subzero weather. The heavily motorized American forces often found themselves with only a single route of retreat, and that one was lined on both sides with Chinese soldiers. The Americans had to run the gauntlet, taking heavy casualties, leaving smashed and burning trucks and jeeps and abandoned equipment all along the route. Only the Marines, whose commander balked at all of the orders he received to disperse his forces, were able to fight their way out as a coherent division retaining mastery of the battlefield.
The opposing forces were greatly mismatched. The Americans had superior firepower with both artillery and airpower. They had tanks, armored personnel carriers and self-propelled artillery. They were fully motorized. American fighters controlled the skies. Bombers and fighter bombers devastated their enemies on the ground. Reconnaissance planes gave them a bird's eye view of the battlefield. The Chinese had none of that. With no planes or artillery, their firepower was in the form of mortars, submachine guns, and hand grenades. Their mobility was in their feet. Two or three days of intensive fighting could exhaust their ammunition supplies and force them to discontinue attacks. But they had superior numbers of men, highly motivated and disciplined. They fought with more courage and skill than MacArthur and his men expected.
MacArthur and his immediate subordinates created the disaster by attempting to occupy North Korea right up to the Yalu River separating Korea from China. Smaller and smaller units were ordered further and further from central commands in attempts to occupy more and more territory. Intimations that large numbers of Chinese troops had somehow infiltrated across the river and were growing in strength were largely ignored by higher commanders. Only the Marines, by dragging their feet, were able to prevent a fatal dispersion.
When the Chinese finally did strike, MacArthur refused to believe that there was a serious danger. He and his top commanders made everything worse by delaying the centralization and breakout. When the truth was finally acknowledged, it was too late for thousands of men who were killed in the subzero weather.
MacArthur accepted no responsibility for the disaster, blaming everything on Harry Truman. Truman had finally had enough and put General James M. Gavin in command. Gavin re-organized the forces and staged several battles for the express purpose of learning how to defeat the Chinese using superior American air power and firepower. He retained Ned Almond, MacArthur's commander in Korea, and maybe that was a mistake, but he turned things around.
I wonder if the book I listened to was abridged. There was virtually nothing about the middle years of the war. There was nothing about the air war, the first war in the world between jet fighters, and a time of great learning on both sides. Although the book was taken from 12 CDs, I don't know if that represented the full 736 pages. It might or might not.
A fuller understanding of the war undoubtedly requires an explanation of these topics, and also a deeper explanation of the recent history of Korea before the war. But what Halberstam did, he did well.
I'm pretty sure that the recording I had was abridged. I found an audio recording from Hyperion that was. Too bad. I hate that.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Audio, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Legal |
| When Read | November 2014 |
Mickey Haller, the "Lincoln Lawyer", calls the twelve members of a jury "the gods of guilt". It is they who pronounce judgment on the accused and very little else counts for anything in the courtroom.
Haller is engaged by an Internet pimp to defend him from a murder charge. The pimp solicits customers through his website and arranges meetings in hotels with his women. When one of the women is found dead shortly after the pimp was seen with her, he is arrested for her murder.
Unlike with the vast majority of clients, Haller comes to believe that the pimp really is innocent and he sets out not only to free his client, but to prove him not guilty. He is motivated in part by the pimp's considerable payments, in part by a desire to get back at the dirty cops who he believes set up the pimp, tried to kill himself, Haller, and succeeded in killing his chauffeur, a man he had worked with for years, and in part by a desire to prove to his teenage daughter that he's not just a scumbag who makes money by arranging for criminals to go free.
Haller also gets in on the case of a Mexican drug cartel man named Hector Aroyo Moya. Moya had been framed for a crime he didn't commit and sent to prison for life instead of the seven years he should have gotten for the crime he did commit. Moya's case was related to the case of the pimp because the same dirty cops were involved.
In the end, after all kinds of back room and courtroom fireworks and chicanery, Haller wins the case. The pimp is already at death's door due to a murder attempt arranged for him by the crooked cop, but the cops are exposed. One cop, a man who harassed Haller during the investigation, was exposed as an accessory to the actual murderer, a Drug Enforcement Agency agent who had gone rogue. The accessory committed suicide and the DEA agent fled to Mexico where Moya and his gang hunt him down and torture him to death.
This was a striking book with all of the legal technical detail we could want and a very authentic seeming view of Haller's seedy law practice. The characters were varied and interesting. They weren't intellectuals. That's not Connelly's forte. They're gritty people of the street, the police force, and the law offices.
I can't say I sympathized a great deal with Haller. Like Harry Bosch, he tells too many lies and considers lying a perfectly valid way of interacting with and manipulating people. However, the book was certainly well written and compelling.
| Author | Pelecanos, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Hachette Audio, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2014 |
Chris Flynn grows up in a comfortable home but has a wild, irresponsible, impulsive personality that neither his father's disapproval nor his mother's nurturing can tame. He knows that his behavior is hurting his parents and driving people away from him and killing his chances to get into college but he doesn't really care. He breaks into cars and steals things. He starts fights and hurts other kids because they sassed him. He shrugs off his father's criticism and acts as if he doesn't care whether his Dad gets him off with the police or not - it's all the same to him. His beautiful girlfriend kisses him goodbye and goes off to college, finished with him. But he's numb to everything. After his last and worst transgression he is packed off to the juvenile detention facility at Pine Ridge in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
It was a prison. Not as bad as the adult prison, it still had walls and guards and rules and rooms that were like cells. The other inmates were virtually all black. They called Chris "cracker" and "White Boy", but he didn't get upset about it and they didn't really see him or treat him much differently from the way they treated each other. His toughness was similar to theirs. They sort of understood him as a person but what some of them didn't understand was how this boy from a middle class home with a mother and father who actually cared about him, something that hardly any of them had and many wished for, could throw it all away to become one of them. In spite of himself, Chris does learn some things in prison and from these boys. He learns that he really did have it good at home. He watches many of these boys have hard times for no reason at all except impulsive behavior. A boy hits another one for no reason he could possibly explain. He just suddenly felt like it. There is a fight. Someone gets hurt. In one case a boy is very seriously hurt without anyone intending it.
When Chris serves his term and comes out he is older and wiser. He wants to reform. He goes to work for his father, installing carpets, and influences his father to hire other boys from Pine Ridge. He is working with one of them, a nice young man named Ben who recently learned to read and is turning himself around. The two are laying carpet in the house of a man who died when they discover $50,000 in a compartment in the floor under the old carpet. Ben wants to keep the money. The owner is dead. But Chris convinces him to just leave it alone.
Ben makes the mistake later of telling Lawrence Newhouse, another Pine Ridge graduate, about the money. Lawrence, a loose cannon type of guy, breaks into the house and takes the money. Naturally, two white gangster killers whose money it is, assume Chris and Ben, the carpet installers, took it. They kill Ben when he won't tell them anything and go after Chris, who gets away from them. Then Lawrence, angry that Ben died because of his, Lawrence's, own actions, goes after the two killers and kills them both while losing his own life.
Chris emerges okay. He has a girlfriend. He has resolved to go to college. He is on good terms with his parents again.
I like all of Pelecanos' stories, including this one. I liked the characters, the treatment of whites and blacks, the failings of everyone that cause them grief, their compensating virtues and human relationships. I liked the understanding of the boys at Pine Ridge and I liked the redemption that each of them sought and, to some degree, found.
A reviewer on Amazon pointed out the problems with this book. Found money from gangsters is a hackneyed plot. Chris and Ben putting the money back rather than taking it or turning it in to authorities may or may not be entirely believable. Ben telling Newhouse, a known crazy, was more than foolish. Chris' waking up to the wrongheadedness of his moral apathy and his search for a way home may not have been explained in light of his past behavior. The story was sentimental.
That's all true. Its appeal to me reveals my own sentimentality. Still, I enjoyed the book. I wanted Chris to succeed. I wanted his father to accept him. I wanted Lawrence to redeem his wasted life and the loss of Ben. I wanted Mrs. Flynn to find her son again.
I'm a satisfied reader.
| Author | Box, C.J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 2014 |
In this second installment in the Joe Pickett series, Joe is called in to assist in the investigation of the apparent death of a prominent environmental activist/outlaw Stewie Woods, blown to smithereens by an exploding cow. The authorities rule that Stewie was planning to blow up a cow, or something, but didn't know what he was doing and killed himself and his wife by accident.
The truth however is that a pair of elderly killers have been hired to kill a number of prominent environmental activists in ways that would discredit them. Joe only gradually discovers that this is happening, and gradually discovers that a local rich lawyer and land owner and his Wyoming Cattle Growers' Association are behind the killings.
It turns out that Stewie has been grievously wounded and disfigured but is not dead. He is also a rather charming man and a former lover of Joe's wife. Joe gets him away from the killers but Stewie eventually pepper sprays Joe to keep him out of it and then sets up an exploding cow to kill the lawyer - which also kills him.
Of the two killers, one had second thoughts about committing murder and tried to escape but was shot by his buddy. The stone cold killer went after Joe and Stewie, who now knew who he was, but he was hit at long range by a lucky shot from Joe that, eventually, did him in.
It's easy to like the upright, taciturn, family man Joe. However the politics set me on edge. The killing of the environmentalists was deplored, and the crimes of the rich were disparaged, but there wasn't as much distress about it as I expected. Personally, I am alarmed at the idea that a few judiciously planned murders can set back the environmental movement or other progressive movements. That part was frightening and convincing. There are plenty of men out there who would be happy to kill environmentalists, liberals, blacks, Jews, or anyone else they regarded as threats to their adolescent fantasy way of life. There are enough cynical and/or ideological rich men out there to fund and exploit them. The scenario of the book is therefore entirely credible to me. I would have liked the book more if Joe were more incensed about that than he was about the fact that the lawyer shot a bull elk out of season and tried to bully Joe into ignoring the infraction.
Politics and literature have always been a volatile combination. I want my books to be politically correct - of course to match my own way of thinking about what is correct. C.J. Box and I have overlapping political sensibilities, but they are not completely congruent.
| Author | Shirer, William L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Rosetta Books, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 1266 |
| Extras | foreword, epilogue, afterword, notes, acknowledgements, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Nazism; Hitler |
| When Read | December 2014 |
Shirer opens his magnum opus with a study of the origins of Adolf Hitler, from his family to his early life, his education, his participation in the First World War, and his emergence from that war as a deeply embittered man, filled with twin obsessions to lead Germany to domination of Europe, if not the world, and to crush the inferior people, most especially the Jews, that he saw as polluting the master race.
There is a blow by blow description of the ups and downs of Hitler and the National Socialist Party and movement. At every stage Hitler further deepens his grasp on the movement. He takes advantage of every potential ally but ultimately destroys every potential competitor for power - whether friend or foe. At every stage, he shows a positive genius for understanding the political situation and for taking bold action. Fully cognizant of dangers to himself he nevertheless works himself up to take whatever action must be taken to advance himself and his cause. He is not heedless of risk. He takes no foolish risks. But if, with his exquisite sense of the weaknesses of his enemies, he deems the risk worth taking, he plunges in.
The actual seizure of power in 1933 is documented in great detail. It was not a foregone conclusion by any means. Hitler succeeded because of his boldness, his intelligence, his magnificent power as an orator, and because of the serious underestimation of him by other players in the high politics of the Weimar Republic. No one seemed to understand that Hitler was not, and could never be, an ordinary politician, dealt with by the same means used to deal with other ordinary politicians. He was not a man of his word. He was not a compromiser. He was not a man who respected the rights of others. Those who thought that they could control him because they gave him critical support, or because they formed a majority in the cabinet or in the Reichstag, or because his enemies were also their enemies, or because he made promises to them, were all much mistaken. To him all of these allies and friends were just tools to be used and discarded, and if they were troublesome, to be killed. Only those who obeyed him unquestioningly and were directly dependent upon him for their life in government or Party could count on his support.
Shirer describes the politics of the time in astonishing detail. He appears to have mastered hundreds if not thousands of volumes of Party and government documents, and private letters, diaries and memoirs. Do you want to know what leading generals, politicians, church leaders, or socialists thought? Shirer found the documents they wrote, or their testimony at Nuremburg. He knew what most of them were trying to do. He can quote what they said at critical meetings, not only from their own testimony but from the testimony of others at the same meetings. Time after time, he produces two different accounts, sometimes three accounts, of the same meeting. He compares and evaluates them and gives us his reasons for believing one or the other where accounts disagree. For a surprising number of the great events that occurred, Shirer not only produces documents of the time to explain them but can provide his own testimony. As a reporter for CBS he was present at hundreds of Nazi Party rallies and meetings. He was outside great conferences watching who went in and out and getting whatever interviews he could get. He never met Hitler in person, though he was present in person at some of his speeches, but he did meet other prominent Nazis and was able to gauge their abilities or lack thereof, and their character as well as their official points of view.
A constant theme of the book is Hitler's ever growing megalomania, his taking of ever greater steps and ever greater risks, and ultimately, his increasing isolation from reality down to the very end when he was issuing orders to non-existent army groups to attack the Russians here or there and was always in a towering rage against the supposed weakness, stupidity and betrayal of underlings that had caused all of the failures that were, in fact, entirely attributable to himself.
The war plays a major role in the book. It was the war, and only the war, that finally destroyed Hitler and Nazi Germany. His German enemies were too deeply suppressed, too disorganized, or too deluded about the nature of Nazism to be a major threat to him. There were numerous plots on his life, but only one of them actually injured him and all of the rest were defeated by his extensive security measures or, in a couple of cases, his good luck. So it was the Allied victory that destroyed him.
However, the war is not the focus of the book. In the events at Stalingrad and in Tunisia in 1942-3, the battles are described only to give the reader an understanding of the magnitude of the defeats. The focus is on the Nazi leadership. Why did Hitler order a half million men to stand and die in these two theaters? What opposition did he get from his generals and how did he override it? What became of the generals who opposed him? Many were cashiered though many of those were brought back when desperately needed, it was only after Stauffenberg's assassination attempt that the generals began twisting on the ends of piano wire nooses held to the ceilings by meathooks.
Quite a bit of space is devoted to the nature of the New Order that Hitler was bringing to Europe. He describes the enslavement of men and women from many countries. He describes the Holocaust of the Jews, the murders of communists and intellectuals, the purposeful starvation of whole populations, the systematic theft of minerals, industrial plant, trains and trucks, food, and other resources for the war effort, as well as the organized theft of art works, gold, houses, estates, and other valuables for the personal enrichment of the chief thugs of the regime. It is only a very small and partial catalog of the evil, but it is enough to make the point.
A lot of space is also devoted to the resistance to Hitler, such as it was. Brave students had their heads chopped off. Intellectuals gathering to discuss the situation had Gestapo informers in their midst to betray them. Those captured by the Gestapo were tortured into betraying others. No resistance was safe. Still, the only institution with the power to stop Hitler, the Army, did not have the will or the moral commitment to succeed. Colonel Stauffenberg was incensed at the treatment of the Jews. According to Shirer, no general is known to have expressed such a sentiment. They opposed Hitler partly because they wished to re-instate the rule of law and civil freedoms, but largely because they believed in the greater Germany that Hitler believed in, but saw that Hitler was going to destroy that dream by losing the war.
The details of the plots, and the failure of the lackadaisical attempt to overthrow the government after the bomb blast at Rastenburg, are described in more depth than I have seen anywhere else. I'm sure there are books devoted to the subject, but one can learn quite a lot from this one.
The generals were slow to wake to the danger of Hitler. They supported him at first. He brought them a big army with opportunities for all of them. He acquired Austria and Czechoslovakia without firing a shot. In spite of all of their reservations, he conquered Poland in a blitz, then Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and their traditional enemy, France. They were drunk with victory. When he told them they were going to invade Russia (and he told them rather than discussing it with them) many of them saw a great adventure opening before them. It was only after the defeat at Moscow, only after Zhukov's divisions smashed through the German lines, pulverizing German units and winning back large swaths of territory, that the Generals began to understand that the adventure was turning into a nightmare.
Hitler never understood. For him, all defeats were due to the mistakes of others, to insufficient will to win. The war was never lost for him until the Russians were at his doorstep and the only remaining strategy was a pistol shot to his own head. Until then there was always one more attack to be made, one more boy or old man whose life could be thrown away against the enemy, one more wonder weapon to employ, one more opportunity for the Gods to intervene and for the Anglo-Americans to come in with him against the Russians.
He attempted to drag all of Germany down with him. Prisoners held for years were dragged out and shot while it was still possible to shoot them before they could be rescued. Army stragglers, people who spoke of the coming defeat, people who argued for surrender, commanders of units that failed to hold the German towns and bridges they were assigned to guard, all were shot or hanged where it was possible. But in the end there was nothing left but the pistol shot to the head. He took it.
I think this was a great book. There are vastly better books about the war. There are more detailed accounts of Hitler's youth and life. There are better accounts of the Weimar Republic. There are better accounts of the desperate economic conditions and of the mindset of the ordinary German. But as a pure political biography of Hitler's rise and fall, bolstered with both documentation and eye witness testimony, this is a high achievement.
I learned nothing much about the war here. I already know much more than Shirer writes about. However I learned a great deal about Hitler's rise to power. I learned how he won over the army, how he won over the big industrialists and bankers and the Junkers with their landed estates. I learned how he used these people as levers in his drive for power, how he came to understand that he had to conquer power by winning over the powerful, not by ignoring them or winning in spite of them. If destroying the Sturm Abteilung was necessary to win over the Army, then it would be done. If protecting the power of the big bourgeoisie and the Junkers was necessary, they would be protected. He even directed his representatives in the Reichstag to vote with the Communists when that served his interests. He was a bold and masterful politician.
In a strange sense, Hitler was a man of integrity. He lied to everyone. He signed treaties that he had no intention of keeping even at the moment he signed them. He told the German people whatever they wanted to hear - that he was a man of peace, that he would never start a war, that the wars he started were thrust upon him by the aggression of others. He told these lies as naturally as if he believed them. Lying was a tool for him like any other. You use a screwdriver to drive a screw, a hammer to pound a nail, and a lie to win people to your side. How could anyone do anything else? More importantly, why would anyone other than a weak fool like Chamberlain even want to do anything else?
So in what sense can he have been a man of integrity? The sense I am thinking of is that he was motivated not only by personal ambition - though that was as powerful an ambition as for any man the world has ever seen, but by his evil goals of subordinating the world to the German master race and to crushing under his heel the inferior scum of the earth that comprised the Jews, the Slavs, the Negroes, and every other non-Aryan "race". What he tried to do in 1941 was exactly what he wrote about in Mein Kampf in 1923. His goals were stated openly and transparently. That no one took him seriously was their failure, not his.
There is no pretense of academic impartiality here. Shirer is committed to the truth. He speaks frequently of Hitler's genius, of his successes, of the personal failings of many of those who tried to stop him or, worse, those who knew better but didn't try to stop him. I believe in his objectivity. But he's also committed to exposing the evil and the lunacy of Hitler's personality and his movement. This is not a book about some interesting events that happened in the past. It's a book about a monstrous and perverse evil that seized a modern, educated, and industrially advanced nation, not altogether unlike other nations of the world.
I will reiterate that I thought this was a great book. I wrote many diary entries about it.
| Author | Robinson, Marilynn |
|---|---|
| Publication | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Copyright Date | 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 247 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2014 |
This novel has the form of a single long letter written by the 76 year old John Ames, pastor of an old church in Gilead, Iowa, to his little son. He has a heart condition and thinks he will die soon, long before the boy is grown. He wants to have some way to communicate man to man to his son and has chosen this letter as the best way to do it.
The year is 1956. Ames is living with his much younger wife and their son in the parsonage where he has spent his entire life except for his two years at the seminary. His first wife and his daughter had died. At age 66 or so, he met a woman in her thirties and they fell in love.
Now, he still works as pastor of his old church. He often doesn't sleep well and he will walk over to the church before dawn so that he can pray there and watch the sun come up and illuminate the room. He still writes sermons and sometimes looks through the large trove of sermons he has written over his long life, remembering some, feeling ennobled by some, feeling embarrassment at others. It is a quiet, stable, satisfying life with his old church, his old house, his little family, his old boyhood friend Boughton who lives within walking distance and is the retired pastor of a different church, and his memories of his parents and his ferocious grandfather - a preacher, abolitionist and Civil War soldier who came to Kansas to fight for free soil and later lived with the family, giving away everything he or the family had to anyone in need.
The one disquieting aspect of his life is Boughton's son, John Ames "Jack" Boughton. Named after Ames, Jack is a very different fellow. He was always in trouble as a boy, stealing things, many of them from Ames' house. He was always playing tricks on people. As a young man he got a young country girl from a squalid family pregnant. He refused to marry her or take any responsibility.
Both Ames and Jack's father have been patient and loving to Jack. They have accepted his wildness and always held out the hands of love and friendship to him. Jack repays them harshly. His stealing and his pranks are always irritating. The boy is always difficult. But he is not completely unresponsive to the hands held out to him. One senses that, however bad the boy is, however much trouble he has caused for himself and for others, he would have done worse without his father and Ames trying to help him out.
There is an undercurrent in the book between Jack and Ames' young wife. Without explicitly saying so, Ames fears that when he dies, Jack will make a play for his widow and son. He thinks the woman might be too good, too trusting, to understand the dangers. But as the story works out we discover that Jack is actually already married to a black woman from Tennessee. He cannot live with her because her father and her family see him as the dangerous man he is and more or less drive him away. But he is not a danger to Ames' wife.
Ames is presented as a kind, earnest, intelligent, and thoughtful man who is also a deeply committed and believing Christian. He is rational and philosophical, but he accepts the supernaturalism of the faith. He believes that he will see his parents and grandparents after his death and will eventually meet his wife and child again and will stand before God and Jesus. He is the model of a Christian pastor. I don't see how any believing Christian could find fault in him. It's hard for me to see how any believer could want a better man for a pastor.
The construction and presentation of this man and his story is a very high literary achievement. In passage after passage I was deeply impressed with Ames - with his insight, his self-understanding and self-criticism, his tolerance, his love and care for his congregation and his church and his people. He has not read the philosophy that I have read and I could not compare his understanding to that of the philosophers that I have read or that I studied under at the universities. But he is no fool and not really a naif. His take on the big issues of life is considered and well judged.
I would not have imagined reading a book like this. I don't recall exactly why I read it except that it won awards and I guess that I was drawn in after examining it. It is not like the other books that I read but I still loved it and am greatly appreciative of what the author has done.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | AudioGo, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 184 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 2014 |
Archie Goodwin is invited to a dinner hosted by a socialite who supports a home for unwed mothers. She invites four girls each year and invites suitable men to escort them. Archie, imposed upon by an acquaintance, has taken the man's place. While there he is asked by one of the girls to watch another girl who is said to have arsenic in her purse and is at risk of suicide. While he is watching her, the girl accepts a glass of champagne from her escort and falls down dead. The police and everyone else are prepared to rule it a suicide but Archie insists that it was a murder. In the face of his stubborn testimony, the police cannot close the case. They have to keep the investigation open.
One of the men at the party turns out to be a wealthy man with whom the dead girl had a relationship. He might be the father of the girl's child. Worried that the police will come after him as the murderer, he hires Nero Wolfe and company to find the real killer.
The story proceeds according to formula. Wolfe stays in his house and attends to his meals and his orchids. Archie travels around the city and upstate to visit the home for girls. In the end, there is a big meeting in Wolfe's office with all actors present, including the police. Wolfe interrogates various people in turn and eventually fixes upon and reveals the killer.
This was a perfectly satisfactory example of Stout's long running and always entertaining series. I enjoyed it.
| Author | Steinhauer, Olen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Macmillan Audio, Minotaur Books, 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | December 2014 |
The story opens with Sophie Kohl and her husband of 20 years, the upright and intelligent State Department analyst Emmett Kohl, in a Budapest restaurant. Emmett has just confronted her with his knowledge of her affair with Stan Bertoli in Cairo. She sits in shock and confusion when a brutal looking man walks in, shoots Emmett dead right before her eyes, and escapes into the street.
The CIA analyst Jibril Aziz has recently visited Emmett and then gone on to Cairo where he is driven into Libya by John Calhoun, a private security contractor to the embassy. Jibril is searching for contacts whom he helped organize to fight against Muammar Gadaffi. They are ambushed and Jibril is killed. John makes it back to Cairo with Jibril's notebook of names.
Other key characters in the story are Zora, a Yugoslavian spy who sells herself to whoever will pay and who subverts Sophie into a life of seeming fun and excitement but actual treachery, Omar Halawi, an elderly Egyptian security operative, and various Egyptian, American, and even Hungarian, government agents.
Sophie leaves Budapest unexpectedly and shows up at Stan Bertoli's apartment in Cairo. She wants answers as to why Emmett was killed and how he found out about her affair. Stan helps her but also lies to her. In fact everyone lies to everyone except perhaps Emmett, Jibril, and the Hungarian police detective.
Steinhauer keeps us in doubt about everyone. We begin thinking that Emmett was a traitor and only later learn that it was Sophie, not Emmett, who betrayed Emmett's State Department secrets probably resulting in his assassination and the later assassinations of Jibril and Stan. In the end it is Omar who figures everything out and, by his own lights, sets things straight. He deduces that it was his own boss who sold himself to Gaddafi and had both Emmett and Jibril killed. He kidnaps the man, has him tied up, and hands Sophie the pistol with which she shoots him.
There was some manipulation of the reader in the story. We are purposely misled by giving us current events but only filling in the background history later, after we have come to false conclusions about the characters. Sophie's role in the story is most implausible. Why has Stan betrayed his duty on her behalf? Why has Sophie undertaken such foolish and downright treasonable actions with Zora? Why does Omar, a hard, experienced, committed man, help her out so? Why does the Hungarian tell her so much of the truth when he doesn't need to?
Nevertheless, I found it to be an intelligent story, well written, with some very plausible characters and plot lines in among the manipulations and implausibilities surrounding Sophie.